no results found: a review of biographical information about award-winning children’s book authors in subscription and free resources – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 1 may laura soito and sarah r. kostelecky /1 comments no results found: a review of biographical information about award-winning children’s book authors in subscription and free resources in brief prompted by recent discussions of diversity and representation in children’s literature, this study evaluates resources recommended to students for author study assignments in children’s/young adult literature courses at one university. striving to provide research materials that reflect the communities and experiences of students at the university of new mexico—a hispanic serving research university in a majority minority state—we were curious to see if information about children’s book authors from diverse backgrounds was available in free and subscription sources typically taught during one-shot instruction sessions. to identify strengths and gaps in the content provided by several resources, we examined coverage of authors who have recently received awards that recognize indigenous authors and authors of color and/or authors who portray characters from a variety of backgrounds. while this study reviews only a sample of available author information, it can provide some knowledge regarding the depth and breadth (or lack thereof) of content available from these resources, which may help librarians responsible for children’s literature when sharing resource recommendations with their communities. by laura soito and sarah r. kostelecky introduction as librarians, we strive to meet the information needs of our communities and provide materials that are relevant to our users. however, this can be a challenge when users are searching for children’s literature, considering the documented lack of diversity and representation within children’s materials. librarians responsible for children’s literature collections (at both public and academic libraries) must take the time to seek out materials written and illustrated by people who reflect the diversity of backgrounds and experiences of the communities they serve. at the university of new mexico (unm), providing access to a variety of children’s books is a priority. unm is one of a dozen universities that are both carnegie classified research one and hispanic-serving institutions (the university of new mexico, n.d.-a) and is located in albuquerque, the biggest city in the majority-minority state (new mexico department of health, 2019; us census bureau public information office, 2012). after hispanic/latino students, who comprise 42% of the student population, native american students are the 2nd largest ethnic group on campus at 5% (the university of new mexico office of institutional analytics, 2019, p.14)—unsurprising as the state is home to 23 tribal nations. the college of education is one of the largest colleges on campus (the university of new mexico office of institutional analytics, 2019) and multiple sections of the children’s literature course required for the bachelor of science in education in elementary education are offered each semester (the university of new mexico, n.d.-b). children’s literature collection development and use as a result of the number of students studying children’s literature, kostelecky, the education librarian, spends a great deal of time managing the collection and providing instruction in its use. to include a variety of materials in the collection, one strategy employed is the use of an approval plan to purchase award-winning and honor books. those winning well-known awards (newbery, caldecott, coretta scott king) and less publicized awards (american indian youth literature award, schneider family book award) are purchased. additional titles are added to the collection via patron requests and through traditional collection development activities by the education librarian (e.g., reading book reviews, best of lists). instruction in use of the collection for unm’s children’s literature course involves one session in the library where students are working on assignments to 1) locate books based on a theme and 2) find information about books and authors. working from the unm libguide for children’s literature, students follow along on their own computers and search the library catalog and subject specific databases including children’s literature comprehensive database (clcd), ebsco’s education research complete, and something about the author online [sata]). the different types of content available (book reviews, literary criticism, classroom studies) and uses of these resources are discussed. the session ends with hands-on searching time using databases and a visit to the children’s section. one specific assignment students receive in the unm course is an author study. this involves researching a student’s chosen author, including the individual’s inspiration for writing, their background, and similar information. author studies can be part of the curriculum for students studying children’s literature in k-12 and higher education settings (elliott & dupuis, 2002; fox, 2006; jenkins, 2006; jenkins & white, 2007, 2007; kennedy, 2012; meacham, meacham, kirkland-holmes, & han, 2017; moses, ogden, & kelly, 2015). to assist students searching for information about authors, instructors and librarians try to direct students to useful and high quality resources with this type of content. but which sources currently available will contain this information? based on kostelecky’s experience, when students select more well-known authors, the library’s databases are sufficient for discovering author information. yet these same resources were inconsistent in coverage of authors from non-dominant identities and indigenous authors and authors of color. when looking for authors to highlight as examples during one-shot library sessions, kostelecky had difficulty finding information across all sources about some authors she wanted to highlight (e.g. nicola yoon, francisco x. stork). because the library included little to no information about these authors , what other sources could be recommended? if unm libraries purchase materials that are not useful to support students in these courses, should their subscriptions be continued? these questions and experiences led us to conduct an initial exploration of the availability of author information found in both subscription and free resources. the author search list was built from recent award-winning authors from a variety of children’s and young adult literature awards and honor books. we hoped to gain an understanding of the strengths and gaps of different resources which include content about children’s book authors, paying particular attention to coverage of indigenous authors and authors of color. while this study is only a sample, we believe it can provide useful information and highlight the strengths and gaps in commonly-used sources for researching children’s literature. literature review while the focus of this literature review is not centered on issues of diversity and representation in children’s literature, we recognize these issues as part of the context within which libraries function and support their users. the annually updated data on published children’s books about or written by indigenous people and people of color from the cooperative children’s book center presents a good snapshot of the current publishing landscape. of the 3,703 titles the organization reviewed in 2018, 778 or 21% were authored by indigenous people and people of color and 1014 or 27% were about latinx, african/african-american, asian pacific american and american indian/first nations people total (cooperative children’s book center, n.d.). this organization also recognized the contributions small and independent publishers made in 2018 towards increasing the numbers of diverse books available. though the numbers of books by and about indigenous people and people of color have generally increased since 2012, these numbers still could be improved upon as they do not currently reflect the diversity found in the u.s. overall (maya & matthew, 2019). supporting diversity in children’s literature this continued lack of diversity in published materials has resulted in concerted efforts by individuals and organizations to highlight and make visible quality literature for children and young adults which represent the experiences of people across a range of ethnicities, backgrounds and cultures. for example, we need diverse books (wndb) is a nonprofit organization started in 2014 (charles, 2017) that works to award and publish books by and about people of color. in addition to their book award, wndb provides mentorships for authors, offers an app to help readers find books and edited a published anthology in partnership with a major publisher (we need diverse books, 2017). there is also the blog american indians in children’s literature by nambé pueblo scholar debbie reese which is a useful source to find recommended books by and about native american/first nations/indigenous peoples. reese thoroughly reviews and evaluates titles considering stereotypical imagery, misinformation and missed opportunities to share information about the history and culture of indigenous people. these examples are just two of many resources that bring visibility to diverse literature for young people. selection and knowledge of diverse children’s books while there are many resources to utilize to discover multicultural children’s books and quality children’s books overall, some studies have identified pitfalls that still limit teachers and librarians in choosing books to share with young readers. one recent study (fullerton et al., 2018) analyzed picture book recommendations made by professors and librarians knowledgeable about children’s literature for use in a new public library storytime space. the researchers analyzed the books chosen by the “expert groups” (as they term them), identifying characteristics of the recommended books and searching for patterns among the rationales for their selections. they found the award-winning status was a prominent factor in book selection for both expert groups (fullerton et al., 2018, p. 88). looking at ethnicity of the book authors among the title selections, 86% of the books librarians and 67% of the books professors chose were by white authors. respectively, 20% and 39% of their chosen books featured main characters representing children or adults of color. (fullerton et al., 2018, pp. 85-86). interestingly, no books featuring lgbt characters or representing characters with disabilities were chosen. both groups, librarians and professors, acknowledged the positive influence of awards, reviews and multicultural representation had on their book choices. this article emphasizes the important role librarians can play in recommending books to users. the study also illustrates why it is necessary for both librarians and professors to actively select and recommend books by and about underrepresented groups because people may not necessarily choose those materials without the conscious effort. in a 2012 survey of preservice and inservice early childhood educators in tennessee, brinson found most participants were unable to identify children’s books with non-white characters (2012, p. 30). the author asked respondents to name two book titles featuring characters representing african-american, latino-american, asian-american and native american ethnicities respectively, and they were unable to do so. while brinson attributes the educators’ inability to identify diverse books to lack of preparation and exposure to multicultural literature as part of their coursework, it is not clear from the survey if this was the reasoning given by the respondents. however, it is still disheartening to be presented with the study results—that some educators working directly with young children are lacking basic awareness of diverse children’s literature. evaluating sources librarians and educators supporting patrons in any setting regularly evaluate a variety of resources to connect people with the most useful information. there are many options available to users researching children’s and young adult literature broadly. in the book children’s literature in action: a librarian’s guide, vardell (2014) identifies sources such as something about the author, google, youtube, contemporary literary criticism, contemporary authors, dictionary of literary biography, society of children’s book writers and illustrators (scbwi), teachingbooks.net, and justonemorebook.com. kruger (2012) conducted a content analysis to identify which subscription databases were accessible by school libraries across the country, categorizing databases by subjects including language arts. the resources available in the most number of states for this subject were novelist in 12 states and gale books and authors in seven states, with ebsco literary reference center in six states surveyed (2012, p. 13). in a more general comparison of author biography reference sources, soules (2012) compared coverage among two established library resources, biography reference bank and contemporary authors online, with wikipedia and other web resources. her findings show wikipedia as the most current resource among the databases studied; it deals better with variant forms of names than the commercial databases, and the core content was found to be similar among resources, even though, as one would expect, each resource provided something unique. wikipedia and the other web resources had a distinct advantage in being easily findable and free, whereas library databases may be less visible and available to users. methods this study compares availability of information about recent award-winning children’s book authors within commonly used or recommended children’s literature reference sources. the selection of award-winning authors to create our search list is based on multiple factors. first, unm library’s approval plan only includes award-winning (and some honor) book purchases; therefore, our library owns all the award-winning titles used for this study. because award book lists are often recommended to students as a strategy to find quality titles, our approval plans support students by providing local access. additionally, we thought there might be a higher likelihood of finding indigenous authors and authors of color within the database sources if they had won an award; we hypothesized that more press and visibility from the recognition potentially would mean more content about them. also, we chose to focus on award winners, assuming content providers would prioritize developing information about them as well. the 11 awards we included in this study are the: american indian youth literature award – american library association (ala) affiliate american indian library association (aila). honors writing and illustrations by and about native americans and indigenous peoples of north america. biennial. américas award for children’s & ya literature – consortium of latin american studies programs. awards authors, illustrators and publishers who produce quality children’s and young adult books that portray latin america, the caribbean, or latinos in the united states. annual. asian pacific american award for literature – ala affiliate asian/pacific american librarians association (apala). awards work about asian/pacific americans and their heritage based on literary and artistic merit. annual. boston globe–horn book awards – horn book editor selected panel. honors children’s/young adult literature published in the united states. annual. coretta scott king book awards – ala’s ethnic & multicultural information exchange round table (emiert). honors books demonstrating an appreciation of african american culture and universal human values. annual. mildred l. batchelder award – ala’s association for library service to children (alsc). honors books originating in a country other than the u.s. and in a language other than english and translated into english for publication in the u.s. during the preceding year. annual. newbery medal – alsc. awarded to author of the most distinguished children’s literature published in the united states. annual. pura belpré award – ala affiliate reforma (the national association to promote library and information services to latinos and the spanish-speaking) and alsc. awards a latino/latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth. annual. schneider family book award – ala. honors author or illustrator for book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences. annual. stonewall – mike morgan & larry romans children’s & young adult literature award – ala’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender round table (glbtrt). awards english language books that have exceptional merit relating to the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender experience. annual. tomás rivera book award – texas state university’s college of education. honors authors and illustrators who create literature that depicts the mexican american experience. annual. for each award, names of authors, editors, and illustrators of award-winning books were collected from the awards website for the years 2013-2018. from this resulting list, six authors were identified as having won multiple awards and five the same award in more than one year (one author had received both multiple awards and the same awards more than once). results associated with these authors have been deduplicated in the overall and award-specific counts. we identified the sources to search based on our ability to access subscription resources as well as prior studies which searched for content using these same databases. we conducted author and illustrator name searches in late december 2018 using these reference sources: something about the author online (sata) is a gale subscription database which presents biographical and autobiographical information about authors and illustrators for children and young adults. beginning as a print resource in 1971, sata now totals more than 300 volumes and is available both online and in print (“something about the author online,” n.d.). sata is an established reference source for libraries and was specifically recommended in booklist for academic libraries that serve education and literature programs. (bunch, 2009). novelist is a subscription database with the primary purpose of supporting librarians with reader’s advisory service. it is a division of the ebsco company and counts 25 librarians among its staff (ebsco website). this study used novelist k-8 plus which offers reading lists and book reviews specifically for kindergarten to 8th-grade children (ebsco website). this resource was accessed via the albuquerque public library as unm libraries do not have a subscription, but the database is available to the community at large using a current public library card. goodreads is a website which describes itself as “the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations” (goodreads website). created in 2007 by husband and wife otis and elizabeth khuri chandler (website), the site was eventually acquired by amazon. goodreads is a well-known social media platform where users keep track of books they have read, discuss books and find book recommendations. a useful feature of the site relevant to users looking for author information are the author-created blogs and q&a with site readers, though not every author utilizes these tools. wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, with crowd-sourced content that has grown to over 5.8 million articles in english wikipedia alone. since its inception in 2001, it has grown to become one of the most accessed sites on the internet (“wikipedia,” 2019). there are nearly 15,000 articles associated with wikiproject children’s literature, which is an effort to improve coverage of children’s and young-adult literature on wikipedia. to evaluate the presence of authors in sata, author names were referenced against the most recent index at time of data collection (volume 334) and searched in the online interface. for novelist, author names were searched using the “author” dropdown search box option. to search goodreads we used the default keyword search box using the author’s name, which results in a list of books associated with that name. if the author’s name was listed, we clicked on their name, which led to an author page with some information. goodreads authors were considered present if their profile contained more than their name, a title list, and metadata related to goodreads membership. while some authors use blog and q&a features, these were not considered as part of the profile. the first pass of wikipedia searching was conducted using links from the articles pertaining to these children’s book awards. authors not found were then searched using the standard english wikipedia search. all authors were also searched in wikidata, a related free, crowd-sourced knowledge base, which provided verification of the english wikipedia search results and helped to identify the presence of wikipedia articles in languages other than english. in addition, each author was searched in google using the insert link feature in googlesheets. the nature of the top result was noted, and if the top result was not applicable to the author in question or duplicated by a source already considered in our study, a standard google search was performed to identify the next available hit from the first page of results. results overall, most award winners were found to have some biographical information available in the selected sources, though coverage varied by author. of the 142 winners of the selected 2013-2018 awards, 126 (89%) were found to have coverage in at least one source, with 53 (37%) having coverage in all of the selected sources. see fig. 1. figure 1: reference source frequency combinations. the dark blue box represents authors found in all four of the sources, while the lightest blue represents authors found in none of the resources. resources are represented by s= something about the author, n=novelist, g=goodreads, w=english wikipedia. frequency counts for each combination follows resource abbreviations. figure 1:reference source frequency combinations. full description of figure 1. coverage varied both by award and resource. see fig. 2. authors were overall most likely to be present in goodreads, with 140 (99%) of authors having a goodreads profile and 107 (75%) of these profiles having more content than just names and title lists. authors were least likely to be found in english wikipedia with 79 (56%) authors having articles. recent winners of the batchelder award were notably not found in english wikipedia; however six of eight of the winners of this award had articles in other language editions. overall, all winners of the newbery medal were found in all sources, while winners of the american indian youth literature award were most commonly omitted, with coverage ranging from 13-42% by source. figure 2: proportion of 2013-2018 award winners present in selected biographical reference sources. award and sources with highest proportion of coverage are displayed in blue, while pairs with the lowest coverage are displayed in red. goodreads data represents entries containing more than minimal content. proportion of 2013-2018 award winners present in selected biographical reference sources award something about the author novelist goodreads english wikipedia american indian youth literature award 13% 29% 25% 42% américas award for children’s & ya literature 82% 73% 91% 45% asian pacific american award for literature 68% 77% 77% 36% boston globe–horn book awards 79% 84% 84% 79% coretta scott king 67% 67% 100% 100% mildred l. batchelder award 75% 88% 63% 0% newbery medal 100% 100% 100% 100% pura belpré award 86% 86% 86% 71% schneider family book award 82% 82% 100% 68% stonewall – mike morgan & larry romans children’s & young adult literature award 70% 70% 100% 80% tomás rivera book award 62% 69% 69% 46% all awards 64% 70% 75% 56% using general google searches, it was possible to locate information about most authors. searches most commonly returned a personal website (107), followed by sites provided by publishers, agents, or employers (11). some searches returned other people, social media accounts, news articles, or cultural organization websites (such as from poetryfoundation.org) as the top results. overall, four authors were not readily found by name using a google search. considering depth of content, sata and wikipedia articles tended to be the most detailed, while novelist and goodreads were more likely to present brief facts with little to no narrative. sata entries were consistently organized, with each article typically including sections with personal information, address, career, memberships, awards or honors, and a bibliography. most articles contained a sidelights section with a contextual description of the author’s life and works. in addition, sata presented readers with a list of biographical and critical sources. some articles contained photos of the authors or illustrations related to their work, or were followed by autobiographical narratives. novelist content focused on a description of works or writing style that could be helpful for reader’s advisory, such as when searching by theme or genre. the author entries frequently contained information about the author themselves (gender, ethnicity, and nationality) and characteristics of their works (i.e. tone, writing style, character portrayal). of the authors with novelist entries, only one quarter had narrative descriptions. the information available in goodreads entries was not consistent from one author to the next, with some entries containing no more than minimal name and title list information, to basic facts such as birthday, nationality, place of residence, a website, or social media handle, or a more detailed narrative description of the author and their works. like sata, wikipedia articles were usually more detailed and contained citations to external sources for more information. article headers and content were not necessarily consistent but usually included information related to the author’s life (early life, personal life, education, career), awards/honors, and works. some authors’ pages contained information about other careers, or information related to advocacy efforts, controversy, or censorship issues. infoboxes in some articles summarize basic facts, such as birthdate, nationality, education, notable works, awards, or official website. articles also provide links to authority control databases such as the library of congress name authority file and virtual international authority file. discussion highlight multiple sources based on this initial study, a good strategy for librarians supporting students researching children’s book authors includes instruction highlighting a variety of resources, both subscription and freely available, and the benefits and gaps of each. libraries provide valuable information through subscription resources and often primarily direct users to them rather than to freely available sources, understandably, as we want to increase usage and justify their ever increasing purchase prices. yet reviewing the results of the searches we conducted, these are not always the most relevant or useful sources for some types of information and content, like indigenous author information. this reinforces the importance of emphasizing to students the use of multiple sources to gather information, especially for content about underrepresented people and communities. while our study is exploratory, we found that goodreads contained some content about almost all the authors; it is a source that would be useful for librarians to share with students for similar research. while wikipedia often seems to rise to the top of results when searching for topics in daily life, here it was the least likely to have information about this particular set of children’s book authors. this is perhaps not surprising, given notability guidelines on wikipedia that indicate need for secondary sources and our findings that content in these sources may also be lacking. considering our initial results, library instructors may focus on activities where students navigate free and subscription resources and discuss the information needs each type may satisfy, thus applying the searching as strategic exploration frame from the framework for information literacy for higher education. promoting the use of multiple sources could also bridge the transition between research as a student (when subscription databases are readily available) and research as a community member (since accessing paid content often requires travel/authentication/awareness of source). acknowledging this access divide with students may surface new opportunities for them to learn research strategies and practice information evaluation across a range of sources with the benefit of librarian support. discussion and activities to highlight this issue can introduce larger concepts of costs of information and ways information is controlled. help to close gaps our findings illustrate the varying impact of these book awards. the newbery medal is the most publicized and well known award which often translates into increased sales of the winning book and longer book circulation over time for winning authors (kidd, 2007). this notability likely accounts for the 100% coverage of the newbery-winning authors across all of our searched resources. yet newbery books are often critiqued for the lack of diverse authors honored (yokota, 2011) though there has been some slight improvement in the last two years (hertzel, 2018; italie 2019). ideally, all book awards would receive similar publicity and information resources provide broader coverage of all authors. libraries as organizations can work to improve visibility of a diverse range of children’s book authors and their publications. for instance, subject database and approval plan content gaps can be highlighted to vendors, clearly giving the message that content reflective of our diverse communities is required if our purchases are to continue. this is a way to leverage our organizational purchasing power to advocate for specific content development. individuals also have openings in which they can contribute information for others to use. we can see that many authors have been featured in sata multiple times, and both goodreads and wikipedia provide opportunities for users to improve content. goodreads users with 50 books in their libraries can apply for librarian status to edit book and author data, and goodreads authors are able to edit their own profile content. the author q&a and blog features on goodreads, while not formally part of an author’s profile, provide opportunities for students to connect with authors and dig deeper into the context of their writing. readers of wikipedia are encouraged to click the edit button at the top of articles to contribute content. in addition, course instructors and librarians can develop assignments to engage students in contributing to wikipedia. as examples related to children’s literature courses, students have worked on adding or improving articles about authors, banned books, and children’s book characters. wiki education provides a wealth of resources to support teaching with wikipedia, including training materials, an assignment dashboard, and consultation. in our experiences, students have often found wikipedia assignments to be more meaningful than simply writing a paper to be read by their course instructor. moving beyond wikipedia, allison-cassin and scott have recently shown how the related wikimedia platform for structured data, wikidata, can be leveraged to improve access to information about local musicians and indigenous peoples and culture. wikidata is fast becoming a top source for linked open data and can be incorporated into other platforms, such as library catalogs, to support discovery and connection (allison-cassin & scott, 2018; smith-yoshimura, 2018). projects like these provide inspiration for anyone to improve the quality and availability of information about children’s book authors. conclusion if libraries want to help students connect to a diverse range of authors and their works, they should not only consider what is included in library collections (print and digital), but also the resources that facilitate these connections. the study results make clear that finding information about authors often involves searching multiple resources. even authors who have been recognized for their work via a book award can have limited content available about them across multiple reference sources. as we move forward, it is important to remember that information sources are not static and that we have opportunities not only to advocate for better coverage, but also to contribute incrementally to crowdsourced resources. acknowledgements we greatly appreciate the time and effort given to improve this work by our peer-reviewer michelle martin, internal reviewer amy koester and publishing editor ian beilin. thank you all for sharing your thoughts 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(2012). the status of statewide subscription databases. school library research, 15, 1–23. maya & matthew. (2019). children’s books as a radical act. retrieved april 8, 2019, from reflection press/school of the free mind website: http://www.reflectionpress.com/childrens-books-radicalact/ meacham, s., meacham, s., kirkland-holmes, g., & han, m. (2017). preschoolers’ author-illustrator study of donald crews. the reading teacher, 70(6), 741–746. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1579 moses, l., ogden, m., & kelly, l. b. (2015). facilitating meaningful discussion groups in the primary grades. reading teacher, 69(2), 233–237. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1392 new mexico department of health. (2019, january 31). health indicator report of new mexico population – race/ethnicity. retrieved april 9, 2019, from new mexico department of health, indicator-based information system for public health web website: https://ibis.health.state.nm.us/indicator/view/nmpopdemoraceth.nm_us.html smith-yoshimura, k. (2018, august 6). the rise of wikidata as a linked data source. retrieved march 25, 2019, from hanging together website: http://hangingtogether.org/?p=6775 soules, a. (2012). where’s the bio? databases, wikipedia, and the web. new library world, 113(1/2), 77–89. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074801211199068 the university of new mexico. (n.d.-a). the programs. retrieved march 7, 2019, from http://www.unm.edu/welcome/about/programs.html the university of new mexico. (n.d.-b). unm catalog 2018-2019. retrieved march 22, 2019, from http://catalog.unm.edu/catalogs/2018-2019/colleges/education/teach-ed-ed-lead-policy/undergraduate-program.html the university of new mexico office of institutional analytics. (2019). the university of new mexico spring 2019 official enrollment report. retrieved from http://oia.unm.edu/facts-and-figures/oer-spring-2019.pdf us census bureau public information office. (2012, may 17). most children younger than age 1 are minorities, census bureau reports. retrieved april 9, 2019, from united states census bureau website: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population/cb12-90.html vardell, s. m. (2014). children’s literature in action: a librarian’s guide (2nd ed.). retrieved from http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=5301673 we need diverse books. (2017, april 28). our programs. retrieved march 21, 2019, from we need diverse books website: https://diversebooks.org/our-programs/ yokota, j. (2011). awards in literature for children and adolescents. in s. a. wolf (ed.), handbook of research on children’s and young adult literature. new york, ny: routledge. appendix full description of figure 1 4 sources 53 authors were found in something about the author, novelist, goodreads, and english wikipedia 3 sources 21 authors were found in something about the author, novelist, and goodreads 6 authors were found in something about the author, goodreads, and english wikipedia 6 authors were found in novelist, goodreads, and english wikipedia 2 authors were found in something about the author, novelist, and english wikipedia 2 sources 7 authors were found in novelist and goodreads 7 authors were found in goodreads and english wikipedia 4 authors were found in something about the author and goodreads 3 authors were found in something about the author and novelist 1 author was found in novelist and english wikipedia 1 source 7 authors were found in novelist 4 authors were found in english wikipedia 3 authors were found in goodreads 2 authors were found in something about the author 0 sources 16 authors were found in zero sources return to figure 01 caption. preparing early career librarians for leadership and management: a feminist critique normalize negotiation! learning to negotiate salaries and improve compensation outcomes to transform library culture 1 response pingback : wikiconference north america 2019: reliability hanging together this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct racing to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy: but who are we leaving behind? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 22 aug april hathcock /4 comments racing to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy: but who are we leaving behind? in brief scholarly communication has tremendous potential to help build and sustain a democratic society. nevertheless, in our race to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy, it is important to examine this work through the critical lens of broader librarian professional values—with particular attention to democracy itself, access, and diversity—to ensure that we are building systems that lead to true democracy for all. using the feminist theory of intersectionality as inspiration, this paper builds on the talk i delivered as the vision keynote speaker for the 2017 nasig conference and examines the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy through the critical lens of librarian professional values, taking a close look at the ways in which these values intersect and interact to help ensure the race to the crossroads leaves no one behind.   introduction at the 2017 annual meeting of the north american serials interest group (nasig) held in indianapolis, indiana, home of the indy 500, the theme centered on “racing to the crossroads” with a particular emphasis on scholarly communication and access to scholarly materials. indeed, it seems that work in scholarly communication is racing to a crossroads. there have been any number of developments in open access, publishing, digital scholarship, cross-institutional and international collaboration, and so much more. academic libraries are increasingly becoming involved in in-house publishing efforts, as well as collaborating with content providers to provide new tools and services to researchers at all points of the research lifecycle (library publishing coalition, 2017; pooley, 2017). academic libraries are also playing increasingly vital roles in supporting all levels of institutional research: from brainstorming to literature reviews, to data collection and analysis, to drafting, to publication submission and self-archiving. as academia races to the crossroads of scholarly communication, libraries are clearly proving essential to this forward motion. nonetheless, with all this racing, it is important to pause and reflect, “who is being left behind?” this reflection on who is being excluded from the forward motion in scholarly communication is of particular interest when considering where we are racing—to the crossroads—which brings to mind intersections of participation and identity.  in fact, this reflection on intersections and exclusion is required if we are to examine the race in light of the role scholarly communication plays in promoting democracy and democratic involvement. intersectionality, democracy, and professional values in reflecting on crossroads and the intersection of democracy and scholarly communication, the theoretical framework of intersectionality naturally comes to mind. intersectionality is a critical theory, developed by legal scholar and black feminist kimberlé crenshaw, in which identity is viewed as a matrix of both oppression and domination (crenshaw, 1991; dhamoon, 2011). any single individual is comprised, not of a single identity, but of a multitude of identities that carry their own privileges and oppressions. for instance, a person can be white and have race privilege, but also be working-class and bear the oppression of a classist, capitalist system. intersectionality is a useful framework in which to examine library and information science work, particularly as it relates to the relationship between scholarly communication and democracy. when examining the race to the crossroads, intersectionality encourages us to think intentionally about intersections of identity and reflect on who is not participating in the race or who is being held up in traffic. one way to guide this intersectional examination of the race is through the lens of our professional values, as expressed by the american library association (ala) in its core values of librarianship. this document, meant to be a codification of the “essential set of core values that define, inform, and guide our professional practice,” includes a set of concepts deeply relevant to a critical examination of our race to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy (ala, 2004). these values—which include democracy itself, as well as access, diversity, education and lifelong learning, intellectual freedom, the public good, and social responsibility (ala, 2004)—are themselves interconnected and embody intersectionality. it is not possible to pursue one without also seeking to pursue the others. for example, diversity cannot exist without a commitment to social responsibility and the public good, as systemic exclusion and oppression exist fundamentally within our society to impede the democratic inclusion of marginalized groups. likewise, intellectual freedom and the ability to participate in the democratic process are meaningless without access because one can never fully engage with knowledge unless they have access to it. in so many ways, these vital professional values intersect in the race to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy. in this article, i will pay particular attention to the intersections of democracy, access, and diversity, as they are of particular relevance to the practice and potentialities of scholarly communication work. intersections with the value of democracy there are many ways to examine how democracy, as a core value of librarianship and main thoroughfare in the intersection with scholarly communication, interacts with other values to ensure that no one is left behind in the race to the crossroads. it is important to note, however, that in looking at democracy as a value, we must be careful to start with true democracy for all, and not the democracy typically reserved for wealthy, literate, landowning white men that has been the foundation of american and other western forms of democracy for centuries. if we are to take account for those left behind in the race to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy, we must engage in reflection that has veritable, inclusive democracy as its foundation. as mentioned earlier, democracy intersects with intellectual freedom, as people need social, political, and physical agency to acquire knowledge in order to be able to engage meaningfully in the democratic process. in a related way, democracy intersects with the values of education and lifelong learning. individuals must have access (another core value) to education and educational content in order to exercise intellectual freedom and engage in the self-determination of democracy. essentially, developing and providing this educational content is a core function of scholarly communication work. there are many examples of scholarly communication facilitating the democratization of research and allowing more people, both within and outside the academy, to engage with subjects of enquiry. scielo, an open access portal for scholarly publishing based in brazil with ties throughout latin america and beyond, has stood at the forefront of providing free and open access to knowledge. likewise, african journals online (ajol), “the world’s largest online library of peer-reviewed, african-published scholarly journals,” helps to ensure access to knowledge created on the african continent (ajol, 2018). both the wellcome trust, based in the united kingdom, and the gates foundation, based in the united states, have recently released new public publishing portals, allowing researchers to showcase work, from failed experiments and null results to preprints of work housed in toll-access publications (wellcome trust, 2016; mundel, 2017). within the field of library and information science (lis), the new library and information science scholarship archive (lissa) joins the long-standing and internationally renowned elis as a place for depositing open versions of lis scholarship for public access. with these efforts and many more to provide public access to research, the democratization of research is becoming more and more of a reality. in addition to empowering more democratic research, scholarly communication is enabling intersections of education and lifelong learning with the public good, yet another core value. open educational resource (oer) initiatives are taking off at institutions across north america and around the world (sparc, 2017; open education consortium, n.d.). in some institutions, public education is becoming a priority in an attempt to bridge the “town versus gown” gap and bring more inclusivity to the academy. at the city university of new york (cuny), chief librarian, polly thistlethwaite, and sociology professor, jessie daniels, created justpublics@365, a series of open courses and workshops designed to bring the work of academia out to the surrounding community and vice versa (daniels & thistlethwaite, 2014). the courses included professors, formally enrolled cuny students, local activists and community organizers, journalists, and community members, all gathered together to learn digital skills and the ways those skills intersect in the various work they all do; but more important, the course, characterized as a “participatory, open, online course” allowed participants to create and curate knowledge and contribute back to the scholarly and public conversation (daniels & thistlethwaite, 2014, p.4). as daniels and thistlethwaite (2016) note, “being a scholar in the digital era means connection to the larger social world . . . it is now possible for scholars to connect their politically committed work to the world beyond the academy in ways that aim to make a difference” (p. 4). through their work, daniels, thistlethwaite, and the staff at cuny are making strides to include more voices and perspectives in academia to ensure that no one is left behind as they race to the crossroads of digital scholarship and learning. finally, democracy and access jointly intersect with intellectual freedom and social responsibility in ways to ensure that fewer and fewer are marginalized or left behind in the race to the crossroads. in its “rights, action, and social responsibility” initiative, the german publisher degruyter partnered with a number of university presses—including columbia, the university of toronto, harvard, princeton, and the university of hawaii—to provide open access through the end of 2017 to more than 500 books and journal articles on key topics, such as constitutional history, climate change, truth and ethics, and immigration (fallon, 2017). director of the degruyter publishing partner program, steve fallon (2017), writes, “broadening access to this scholarship enables more people to address these issues in an informed manner: it helps us . . . to understand the struggles of all members of society.” real democracy happens when everyone is able to gather at the intersection on equitable footing to learn about and discuss key issues; scholarly communication projects like those at degruyter, cuny, the wellcome trust, and the gates foundation help to broaden the scope of democracy as a thoroughfare for intersecting with other core library values. intersections with the value of access if democracy is the main thoroughfare of the intersecting crossroads, then access is a key side street that both intersects with and enables democracy and other core values. indeed, access generally, and open access in particular, are hallmarks of scholarly communication work and the role it plays in building a democratic society. questions of access are also essential to engaging in self-reflection, as a profession and a society, on issues of exclusion—that is, in recognizing who has access to participate in democracy, in scholarly publishing, in public discourse, and who does not. librarian and historian robert darnton (2012) notes, “the history of libraries has a dark side. far from demonstrating uninterrupted democratization in access to knowledge, it sometimes illustrates the opposite: ‘knock and it shall be closed’” (p. 2). as discussed earlier, access is essential to the value of intellectual freedom, as individuals cannot engage with knowledge unless they have access to it. access also, along with democracy, intersects with the public good and social responsibility. the public cannot enjoy the fruits of the democratic process without access to the knowledge on which that process is based. projects like justpublics@365 at cuny or the “rights, action, and social responsibility” initiative at degruyter are meaningless without public access for everyone to engage with the relevant learning and research. this access becomes even more crucial when the knowledge material in question has been created by members of marginalized communities, who often do not have access to the ivory towers and research bastions in which their content may be locked. access is vital to true democracy that provides equitably to all, a democracy that goes beyond the systemic oppression and exclusion that marks modern western democratic principles. in addition to intersecting with the public good and social responsibility, open access can also enable democracy through the promotion of diversity. it is important to note, however, that open access only has the potential to amplify diverse voices and perspectives but does not do so automatically without intentional action to dismantle systems of exclusion (hathcock, 2016). as charlotte roh (2016) writes in her article on library publishing and diversity, “library publishing [via open access] allows new voices to find their way into the disciplinary conversations, reach new audiences, both academic and public, and impact existing and emerging fields of scholarship and practice in a transformative way” (p. 83). one example of this potential broadening effect of access is a recent mellon grant to the university of arizona press to republish out-of-print indigenous and latinx studies texts as open access monographs (university of arizona libraries, 2017). this mellon grant of $73,000 to open up such foundational cultural texts comes at a time when the state of arizona recently lost an ongoing legal battle over its attempt to ban ethnic studies from k through 12 public schools (university of arizona libraries, 2017; harris, 2017). as university of arizona libraries’ dean shan sutton explains, “i hope that by promoting a deeper understanding of how our shared history influences our world today, we can be a catalyst for broader recognition of how diverse communities and cultures are a foundation of the american experience” (university of arizona libraries, 2017). similarly, the u.s. library of congress, newly under the direction of carla hayden, pursues work on its national digital initiatives to “expand the use of” and access to the american cultural patrimony curated and preserved in its collections (library of congress, n.d.). both the library of congress and the university of arizona libraries are intentionally and conscientiously working to improve access to materials so that no one is left behind in the race to the crossroads of democracy. nevertheless, it is important, when examining the value of access, to bear in mind that true access involves so much more than posting material online. as daniels and thistlethwaite (2016) acknowledge, “the conditions that constrain attention to some ideas and support attention for others cannot be addressed with technology alone; they require social and political adjustments” (p. 118). in the realm of open data, software developer and educator jer thorp posits five criteria for the designation of truly open data. thorp (2016) argues that data are not open merely because they are posted online for free, public access, that what we have now is largely no more than “open-ish data, openesque data at best.” to create data that are “actually open,” they should also be made accessible in other key ways, such as making them available in multiple languages or providing understandable documentation, to avoid shutting some users out of access (thorp, 2016). in the realm of open educational resources, educators and open pedagogy leaders robin derosa and maha bali both advocate the importance of acknowledging and correcting for the digital divide when providing open resources to students (derosa, 2017, “costs and access”; bali, 2017). they note that those most in need of open educational resources may not have the technological skills or infrastructure to access it. with this consideration in mind, the foundation for learning equality works to bring open educational resources to countries and regions lacking the infrastructure to access these resources on their own. similarly, the wikimedia foundation (2018) and the swiss open source company kiwix are working to provide global offline access to wikipedia and other wikimedia sites. it is through the critical work of the foundation for learning equality, derosa and bali, thorp, wikimedia, and others that inequities in access can be dismantled to ensure true democratic participation for all. intersections with the value of diversity one other key side street in the crossroads between scholarly communication and democracy is the core value of diversity. in many ways, diversity exists as the most important and pressing value in the race to the crossroads of democracy and scholarly communication. diversity forces us to take a critical look at our tools, practices, services, and other values to address that vital question asked at the beginning of this article, “who is being left behind?” following the path of diversity as a core value also encourages us to reflect on other related questions, essential to ensuring true democracy and access to information for all: whose voices are being heard? who is privileged with access? who is at the forefront of democracy? who benefits most from the “public good” or “lifelong education”? in essence, the value of diversity interacts with and empowers work both within and through all of the other core values of our profession. addressing issues of diversity demands that we engage with key reflective questions like the ones above, lest we end up with exclusionary products and practices that privilege democratic participation of some over others. a particularly unfortunate example of this lack of reflective interrogation in the race to scholarly communication lies in a recent special black lives matter issue of the journal of political philosophy that failed to include a single black contributing author, or any author of color for that matter (goldhill, 2017). the all-white journal issue, which focused on issues of importance to black communities and other communities of color, was merely one of a long line of issues that solely featured the voices and perspectives of white philosophers (goldhill, 2017). in their race to participate in an ongoing social discussion, the editors of the journal of political philosophy never stopped to question who was being left behind or whose voices were being excluded. likewise, on a more global scale, similar failures to engage in critical interrogation of diversity issues surfaces in the ways scientific citations are indexed and cataloged. in his map scaling the continents of the world based on citations indexed in clarivate analytic’s web of science, a widely recognized science citation index, juan pablo alperin (2011) strikingly demonstrates how the work of certain world regions is privileged over that of others (image 1). image 1. scaled map of the world based on location of web of science authors by juan pablo alperin using cartodb.   asia and africa, the two most populous continents on the planet, are mere slivers of their representative sizes, whereas north america and europe are highly enlarged with the number of their representative citations. the scientific work being done on the asian and african continents are largely underrepresented in web of science, while publishing priority is given to the work of north american and european researchers. these examples demonstrate the ill-effects of failing to account for diversity in the race to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy. these acts of erasing marginalized knowledge from the scholarly record not only affect the nature of research and knowledge today but provide very skewed dominant narratives to knowledge seekers of the future. nonetheless, there are ways to intentionally bring diversity into the intersectional mix. for example, the mellon foundation recently awarded over half a million dollars to the association of american university presses (aaup), along with the presses at the massachusetts institute of technology (mit), university of washington, duke university, and the university of georgia, to develop diversity residencies for members of underrepresented groups interested in working in academic publishing (association of american university presses, 2016). this mellon grant to diversify scholarly publishing comes at a time when it could not be needed more; as alice meadows noted at the 2015 meeting of the society for scholarly publishing (ssp), “there’s a problem with racial diversity overall in terms of representation. there’s a teeny tiny number of ethnic minorities working in scholarly publishing; it’s terrible” (cochran et al., 2015). similar diversity programs exist in lis with the aim of bringing more members from underrepresented communities into the profession, including programs such as the association of research libraries’ (arl) and society of american archivists’ (saa) mosaic program,  the ala spectrum scholarship program, and the association of college and research libraries (acrl) diversity alliance. on a more global scale, organizations like force11 are working to build a scholarly commons, a group of communities unified by a set of principles geared toward building more open and accessible scholarship, with a particular focus on ensuring that the commons represents a global and inclusive collective of scholarly communities (force11, 2017). each of these efforts to promote diversity in the race to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy help to build a more representative scholarly community in the service of true democracy. essentially, racing to the intersection means nothing if, when we arrive, we see only the same faces. moving forward scholarly communications has tremendous potential to help build and sustain a democratic society. nevertheless, in our race to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy, it is essential that we engage critically with our professional values—with particular attention to democracy itself, access, and diversity—to ensure that we are building systems that lead to true democracy for all. our goal should be to build what archival scholars michelle caswell, ricardo punzalan, and t-kay sangwand (2017) describe as “real democracy,” where power is distributed more equitably, where white supremacy and patriarchy and heteronormativity and other forms of oppression are named and challenged, where different worlds and different ways of being in those worlds are acknowledged and imagined and enacted” (p.6). thus, the race forward to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy should inevitably involve frequent “rest stops” for critical introspection and reflection, stops to lend transportation (perhaps public transportation) to those left behind or to clear away roadblocks for others, and even detours into new and unexpected areas. as library dean lareese hall (2017) notes, “it is in the places of intersection that real change and magic happen” (para. 10).   i’d like to extend heartfelt thanks to my internal reviewer, sofia leung, my external reviewer, megan wacha, and my publishing editor, annie pho, for your friendship, solidarity, and work in making this article so much stronger than i could’ve made it on my own. you are amazing, powerful women who make my “race” so much smoother.   references african journals online. (2018). african journals online: home. retrieved from https://www.ajol.info. american library association. (2004). core values of librarianship. chicago, il: author. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/corevalues. alperin, j. p. (2011). [interactive web-based map]. world scaled by number of documents in web of science by authors living there. retrieved from http://jalperin.github.io/d3-cartogram/. american association of university presses. (2016). aaup member presses to launch diversity fellowship [press release]. retrieved from http://www.aaupnet.org/news-a-publications/news/1395-aaup-member-presses-to-launch-diversity-fellowship. bali, m. (2017, april 5). keynote: maha bali – hiding in the open [video file]. retrieved from https://oer17.oerconf.org/sessions/keynote-maha-bali/#gref. caswell, m., punzalan, r., & sangwand, t. (2017). critical archival studies: an introduction [editors’ note]. journal of critical library and information studies 1(2), 1-8. http://dx.doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.50. cochran, a., mcnamara, s., michael, a., tissenbaum, m., meadows, a., & kane, l. (2015, may 29). mind the gap: addressing the need for more women leaders in scholarly publishing [video file]. retrieved from https:// youtu.be/sds0lwz7lnu. crenshaw, k. (1991). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, 43(6), 1241-1299. daniels, j., & thistlethwaite, p. (2016). being a scholar in the digital era: transforming scholarly practice for the public good. chicago, il: policy press. daniels, j., & thistlethwaite, p. (2014). engaging academics and reimagining scholarly communication for the public good. new york, ny: the graduate center at cuny. retrieved from http://library.gc.cuny.edu/themify/wp-content/uploads/jp365%20report%20final%20031014.pdf. darnton, r. (2012). digitize, democratize: libraries and the future of books. columbia journal of law & arts 36(1), 1-19. derosa, r. (2017, january 22). extreme makeover: pedagogy edition [blog post]. actualham: the professional hub for robin derosa. retrieved from https://robinderosa.net/higher-ed/extreme-makeover-pedagogy-edition/ dhamoon, r. k. (2011). considerations on mainstreaming intersectionality. political research quarterly 64(1), 230-243. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1065912910379227. fallon, s. (2017). rights, action, and social responsibility. retrieved from https://www.degruyter.com/page/1419. finnell, j., & hall, l. (2017, march 8). nothing tweetable: a conversation or how to “librarian” at the end of times. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/nothing-tweetable-a-conversation-or-how-to-librarian-at-the-end-of-times. force11. (2017). wp1: self critique. retrieved from https://www.force11.org/group/scholarly-commons-working-group/wp1-self-critique. goldhill, o. (2017, may 27). philosophers published a “black lives matter” series written entirely by white professors. quartz. retrieved from https://qz.com/992782/philosophers-published-a-black-lives-matter-series-written-entirely-by-white-professors. harris, t. (2017, august 23). arizona ban on ethnic studies unconstitutional: u.s. judge. reuters. retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-arizona-education/arizona-ban-on-ethnic-studies-unconstitutional-u-s-judge-iduskcn1b32de. hathcock, a. (2016, october 6). open access keynote [video file]. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_7sxnw-5dq. library of congress. (n.d.). national digital initiatives. retrieved from http://digitalpreservation.gov/ndi. library publishing coalition. (2017). library publishing directory. atlanta, ga: author. retrieved from https://www.librarypublishing.org/resources/directory/lpd2017. mundel, t. (2017, march 24). another step forward in making scientific data available for everyone [blog post]. medium. retrieved from https://medium.com/@trevormundel/another-step-forward-in-making-scientific-data-available-for-everyone-febe9bcf8e7e. open education consortium. (n.d.). about the open education consortium. retrieved from http://www.oeconsortium.org/about-oec. pooley, j. (2017, august 15). scholarly communications shouldn’t just be open, but non-profit too [blog post]. the london school of economics and political science impact blog. retrieved from http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/08/15/scholarly-communications-shouldnt-just-be-open-but-non-profit-too. roh, c. (2016). library publishing and diversity values: changing scholarly publishing through policy and scholarly communication education. c&rl news 77(2), 82-85. retrieved from http://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/9446/10680. sparc. (2017). open education. retrieved from https://sparcopen.org/open-education. thorp, j. (2016, october 5). open for who? [blog post.] medium. retrieved from https://medium.com/memo-random/open-for-who-ce698a8de79c. university of arizona libraries. (2017, april 10). grant supports creation of open access humanities books. ua news. retrieved from https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/grant-supports-creation-open-access-humanities-books. wellcome trust. (2016, july 6). wellcome to launch bold publishing initiative [press release]. retrieved from https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/wellcome-launch-bold-publishing-initiative. wikimedia foundation. (2018, july 18). wikimedia foundation and kiwix partner to grow offline access to wikipedia [blog post]. wikimedia blog. retrieved from https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/07/18/wikimedia-foundation-and-kiwix-partner-to-grow-offline-access-to-wikipedia/. access, democracy, diversity, intersectionality, professional ethics, scholarly communication editorial: update to lead pipe submission guidelines beyond saints, spies and salespeople: new analogies for library liaison programmes 4 responses pingback : racing to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy: but who are we leaving behind? – the idealis pingback : racing to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy: but who are we leaving behind? – in the library with the lead pipe – scholarly communication at scale pingback : the scoop: open access week 2018: ensuring open access is equitable and inclusive | atla newsletter pingback : reading that inspired me in 2018 – krista mccracken this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct they can and they should and it’s both and: the role of undergraduate peer mentors in the reference conversation – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 26 dec hailley fargo /2 comments they can and they should and it’s both and: the role of undergraduate peer mentors in the reference conversation in brief: academic libraries hire and train student employees to answer reference questions which can result in high-impact employment experiences for these students. by employing students in this role, opportunities are created for peer-to-peer learning and for a learning community to develop among the student employees. however, not everyone supports this practice. some believe undergraduates lack the expertise to handle reference questions; others express a fear of “missing out” on consultations, assuming student employees will not make a referral. this article expands on brett b. bodemer’s 2014 article, “they can and they should: undergraduates providing peer reference and instruction.” the author discusses why undergraduates can and should provide reference assistance and how in these situations, it’s both and. undergraduates can receive help from both their peers and librarians; it’s not a dichotomy or either-or situation. this article reflects on the practice of peer-to-peer reference services, offers counters to critiques against this type of student employment, and provides insight on the opportunities available when librarians believe in both and. by hailley m. fargo introduction we call them consultants. navigators. mentors. assistants. coaches. educators. leaders. these are some of the titles we give the students we employ in academic libraries; these titles convey a sense of expertise and leadership that our students bring to their positions. the way we name our student employees signal the ways we believe undergraduate students contribute to the library and the university’s mission through their work. it is common for academic libraries to employ students and for some, the library may employ the highest number of students across campus. our student employees help run, maintain, and support the library. regardless of their role, student employees are a crucial cog in academic libraries. as student engagement experiences and high-impact practices continue to gain popularity as the “gem” of an undergraduate’s college journey, student employment in the library has great potential to provide students with the skills they need to succeed, academically and professionally. librarianship has discussed how to set up meaningful student employee programs (see guerrero & corey, 2004; o’kelly, garrison, merry, & torreano, 2015; becker-redd, lee, & skelton, 2018). more recently, a group of librarians (mitola, rinto, & pattni, 2018) looked at this literature to see how student employment in the library matched up with the characteristics of high-impact practices, as defined by the association of american colleges & universities (aac&u) and george kuh (2008). if libraries can build student employment programs that use characteristics of high-impact practices, we have a chance to become leaders in this area of student engagement. as we think about how to build student employment opportunities, creating a peer-to-peer service becomes one option. in reconsidering what student employment can look like in the libraries, we also are reconsidering what reference can look like in an academic library. we know that reference continues to change as we strive to find new and innovative ways to reach our users. librarianship has devoted a fair amount of time and space in our scholarship to discuss the evolution of reference services. in the early 2000s, articles were written on the decline of reference questions asked in academic libraries, and there was a move towards shifting librarians off the reference desk, to allow librarians to focus on instruction, outreach, and liaison duties (faix, 2014). the discussion around the future of reference went as far as author scott carlson (2007) saying reference desks will no longer exist by 2012. in 2018, reference desks still exist, and academic libraries have tried all sorts of ways to handle reference — one desk, no desk, many desks, desks with paraprofessional staff, desks with students, consultations models, and roving reference just to name a few. based on the institution, size of staff, and funding, reference services can look different and often will evolve over time as the institution and staff change. today, we still conduct reference conversations1 with our users, but we are also thinking about how to staff these desks from different angles, including using undergraduates to provide foundational help during the research process. in this article, i expand on brett b. bodemer’s 2014 article where he stated that, done correctly, undergraduates can and should provide reference services to their peers. not only can and should undergraduates provide reference service in academic libraries, but in thinking about this opportunity, we have to understand how employing undergraduate students creates a both and situation in assisting users with research. in the reference landscape, undergraduates seeking reference help can receive this help from both their peers and librarians. reference does not have to be a dichotomy or either-or situation with our students. instead, we can view this as an opportunity to leverage peer-to-peer services, contribute to meaningful student employment experiences, extend our reach, and strengthen our reference services. overview and history of peer-to-peer services in academic libraries over time, we have asked our student employees to be the “face” of the library. this might mean they are the first employee users see when entering the building and help create first impressions for what the library can do (brenza, kowalsky, & brush, 2015). or, student employees might be involved with outreach initiatives and assist with marketing the library (barnes, 2017). we ask students for their insight on advisory boards and help us steer the library in new directions. in asking our student employees to take on more responsibilities and help advocate and promote the library, we must ensure their experiences working in the library extend beyond directional and clerical duties. peer-to-peer services have emerged as one way to empower our student employees in becoming stronger researchers, library users, and peer teachers. a common way to view peer-to-peer services is through the peer-assisted learning (pal) framework. pal is a space in “which students can manage their own learning experiences by exploring, practicing, and questioning their understanding of issues and topics with a well-trained peer, untethered from the hierarchy inherent in formal instruction environments or in working with professional librarians and staff” (o’kelly, garrison, merry, & torreano, 2015). in thinking about this learning space, it is important to know that pal is grounded in lev vygotsky’s concept of “zone of proximal development.” when a novice student researcher is working with a more experienced peer-mentor, both students “stretch” to meet each other in the middle. both the peer-mentor and the learner benefit from the interaction because both are asked to learn something new in order to create new knowledge, together. more broadly, scholars topping and ehly (2001) believe that pal is a group of strategies that all carry these key values: those students that are helping their peers, also learn something in the interaction this interaction always compliments, never supplements, professional teaching both the mentor and learner gain new knowledge through the interaction all learners should have access to pal peer mentors should be trained and assessed by professional teachers, who work with mentors throughout their time assisting learners academia has embraced pal in a variety of ways, as seen through the various type of peer-mentor groups that exist on campuses. some of these groups include writing tutors/consultants and tutors/mentors for a discipline or a class. over time, libraries began building programs around the pal framework. as erin rinto, john watts, and rosan mitola say in their introduction to peer-assisted learning in academic libraries, pal gives “librarians…the chance to intentionally design and implement experiences that meet the criteria of these highly effective educational practices and create meaningful opportunities for students to learn from and with one another” (2017, p. 14). many libraries have already embraced pal, from the 14 case studies featured in peer-assisted learning in academic libraries to other recently published case studies (faix et. al, 2010; wallis, 2017; meyer & torreano, 2017; bianco & o’hatnick, 2017). these case studies provide valuable insight into how to set up these programs, as well as the potential obstacles and benefits to consider. critiques some colleagues worry about employing students in this peer-to-peer reference role. in this section, i expand on some of the common critiques given by librarians and library employees when considering or deploying a peer-to-peer model of reference support. in drawing out these critiques, i offer a counter to them, which could be used when advocating for our student employees in this model. the critiques i will explore are: the fear of “missing” out, quality assurance issues, and loss of professionalism when transferring some reference responsibilities to undergraduate students. these three critiques are interconnected and i will do my best to tease them out, while also including commentary on how peer-to-peer reference models can be setup to support the both and. fear of “missing” out a top critique from librarians is concern over “missing out” on referrals and an opportunity to connect with an undergraduate student. this critique seems to come from a lack of trust or confidence in our student’s ability to answer research related questions and efficiently use library resources, but also some anxiety about being replaced with undergraduate students. peer-to-peer services should never be created to be in lieu of, or to replace subject librarians. the role of peer-to-peer services is to complement subject librarians and also fill out the reference services landscape. by supporting and growing peer-to-peer services, we give our patrons another option for research support — a student employee who might have taken the class the student is seeking help in, a student employee who better understands the experience of being a student at the institution, or a student employee that can vouch for and recommend library services and support, like subject librarians. sometimes that peer-to-peer recommendation goes farther than a faculty member or librarian suggesting to their students to set up an appointment or “use the library.” we also know that librarians are “missing out” on reference conversations on a regular basis. in work done by project information literacy, students who encounter obstacles throughout the research process are more likely to seek help from their peers, instead of a librarian (head & eisenberg, 2010). in this situation, having well-trained peer leaders can be instrumental in bridging this gap and helping students find and understand the information they need. in addition, undergraduate students do not always run on a “traditional” 9-5, monday-friday schedule. student learning happens when they are situated to put what they have learned into practice — the “right” time to be situated happens at all hours of the day (bell, 2000). libraries, in employing students to provide reference at various times throughout the day, help these situated learners by meeting students when they are ready to learn. previous experience as an evening reference & instruction librarian confirmed that students need help finding information at a variety of times, and usually not during “daylight” hours (fargo, 2017). librarians are not always available when students need help finding information. instead of these students fending for themselves, having peer-to-peer reference support, outside of the 9-5 schedule, allows for our students to still receive high-quality help. again, the both and situation arises — perhaps a student will receive after-hours help from their peer and due to a positive interaction from this situation, they might be more likely to seek out a subject librarian for help on their next research project. or, even if this satisfied student seeks out their peer again, the well-trained peer mentor will know when it is appropriate to pass this student along to the subject librarian for more extensive research help. in order to make these situations happen, we have to spend time training our student employees and helping them locate that sweet spot for a referral. without this intentionality, we fall into the second critique — a decline in quality. decline in quality related to fear of missing out, some suggest that there is a decline in the quality of service provided by peers during a reference conversation. one way to ease this fear is to provide extensive, in-depth, and continual training for our student employees in peer-to-peer roles. in almost every article written about building a pal program or training students to provide reference help, the authors discuss the importance of good training. rinto, watts, and mitola (2017) mention this in their introduction saying “…it is essential that students are well-prepared for the demands of their position and are able to deliver high-quality learning experiences to their peers” (p. 10). without well-planned and continual training for student employees, quality of interactions will undoubtedly suffer. from personal experience in building a peer-to-peer reference program, along with best practices mentioned in the literature, it takes about 15-20 hours of on-boarding, paired with regular staff meetings to share ideas, talk through previous reference conversations, and bring in library colleagues from various departments to provide additional training. as we train our students, we should do our best to use real-life reference examples, attempting to get as close as we can to an actual peer-to-peer interaction. when we fabricate examples, including fictional database names or articles, we signal to students that we do not take their role in the reference landscape seriously and this can lead to a decrease in quality of service. if we believe that our student employees are collaborators and part of our community, then we should use examples that we have seen previously. another way to ensure quality of service is to create a set of learning outcomes for the peer-to-peer program, which helps inform training and assessment. the assessment piece can be a way to quell concerns about quality of service and also garner buy-in from colleagues. having a clear, internal communication plan about what success looks like for this program can also help get colleagues excited. at penn state, our peer research consultants (prcs) took a “final” test after their initial onboarding. this “test” asked them to answer a reference question with a supervisor sitting in on the conversation. the prcs were graded on a rubric that used the program’s learning outcomes to guide evaluation. beyond onboarding, staff meetings, and a “final” test, many programs also ask student employees to reflect on a regular basis, such as after a reference conversation in order to help the student better understand their role helping their peers (courtney & otto, 2017). these reflections also provide insight to the supervisors about the types of questions being asked and any challenges their student employees might be facing. in creating the training program for peer-to-peer services, coordinators should think strategically about how to communicate with other librarians and staff. this communication could include learning outcomes, training outlines, and assessment. providing clear documentation can help ease fear around quality of work while also inviting colleagues to participate in training the student employees. these colleagues could be guest speakers at staff meetings or could drop in to introduce themselves to the student employees. having an open dialogue with librarians, staff, and student employees creates an environment where everyone’s voice is heard and ensures quality service can be provided by all parties. another important element of training is deciding what a referral process will look like. referrals can be sticky to handle and each library makes decisions about how a peer mentor/leader will make a referral. at michigan state university, their peer research assistants do not have a formal referral mechanism but are encouraged to share subject librarian information with the students they are helping (marcyk & oberdick, 2017); hope college spends a good chunk of their training defining what a referred question will look like, and positioned the reference desk near the office of librarians that would handle the referrals (hronchek & bishop, 2017). regardless of the process, there should be clear communication over what a referral will look like so that all parties know the expectations. the procedure for referrals will inevitably change over time and future iterations will be able to accommodate what is learned through trial and error. finally, in thinking about quality of service, there is something to be said around expertise. just like we value a librarian’s subject or functional expertise, we should also value our students’ expertise and the experiential knowledge they bring into their role as peer mentors/leaders. they know how to be a student at your institution and this expertise should be celebrated the same way we value subject and functional expertise. just like we speak the language of library and information science, our students speak the language of their peers and this can be incredibly powerful. lee burdette williams (2011) said it best, there is no aspect of the collegiate experience…that cannot benefit from the involvement of a peer who explains, in language often more accessible, a difficult concept. a peer can talk with students…in ways even the knowledgeable professionals cannot. a peer will use communication tools, media, and language that may seem foreign to those of us even a decade older (p. 99). as we create the training for our students, we need to make sure we are preparing them to succeed in their position. in this preparation, we also trust our students to rise to the occasion in providing the best service they can to their peers. through professionalizing their role, we can show them their expertise is valued and this trust can help ensure quality of their service to all users. often, our peer mentors will teach us as librarians about new ways we can discuss the research process to our students. as we think about ways to professionalize the students’ role in the library, the final critique we arrive at is the loss of professionalism for our jobs as librarians. loss of professionalism when deciding to implement a peer-to-peer service in the libraries, some might discuss their anxieties or fears around a loss of professionalism if this service model shift occurs. if undergraduate students are able to handle reference questions, outsiders might assume that librarians are no longer needed, or you do not need as many librarians to staff a library. this is an incorrect assumption, as having a peer-to-peer service requires the dedication, time, and resources of one or more librarians to assist with hiring, training, supervision, and evaluation of the peer mentors. as lee burdette williams states, “peer educators should never be seen as a stopgap measure to save money. they cannot replace competently and committed professionals who have spent years learning and re-learning their craft, any more than teaching assistants can replace competent and committed faculty” (2011, p. 98). competent and committed professionals are needed to help build and maintain this program and train students to do their best work. not only does it take a large amount of time to build a program, but sustaining a peer-reference program requires a considerable amount of time from the coordinator(s) of the program. our student employees should not be duplicating the efforts made by librarians; their role is to extend our reference landscape and set up our both and situation. by extending hours of available help and raising awareness about library resources through the student perspective, our users are in a better position to receive help from both their peers and librarians. in some ways, being asked to create a peer-to-peer model of reference support is a way to utilize and leverage our expertise around providing reference services. alison faix (2014) says that “peer reference itself can be seen as another form of teaching, on where librarians first teach the reference student assistants, who then go on to help other students in their roles as peer information literacy tutors” (p. 307-8). just like we know the benefits of undergraduates being asked to articulate a process and lead their peer to new knowledge (zone of proximal development), we ourselves are challenged to do something similar when building a new peer-to-peer service. in creating a peer-to-peer program, we are helping to build a community of practice for a wide range of library employees. this new community gives everyone involved the chance to talk about reference, the research process, and their practice of providing support in the library. in some cases, our student employees might challenge or push us to rethink how we answer reference questions and together, we will reach new knowledge and insight. for example, many of the ways i think about providing reference and supporting students in providing reference came from a community of practice between the student employees and myself working in my library. we need this community of practice and by collaborating and having dialogue with our student employees, we are strengthening our reference landscape. all of this work helps support a student-centered library and ensure our students are getting the help they need. in thinking about professionalism and peer-to-peer reference programs, this reference landscape might be impacted by issues around labor and neoliberalism in higher education. for libraries that are a part of a union, there might be stipulations or requirements for what is allowed to be done by librarians versus student assistants. by asking students to perform reference responsibilities, some might see this as a way of deprofessionalizing the field and breaking the expected rules around who gets to do and be paid for what type of labor. in these situations, it can be helpful to return to the idea of both and, and be intentional about how labor is divided and valued. it is important to be critical and conscientious of these ideas when considering peer-to-peer reference programs; there are not a one-size fits all model for this. luckily, much of the current literature on these programs are published as case studies, which can examine an institutional and library context, and show how they built a program within that context. at the same time, academic libraries are faced with shrinking budgets and unfilled staff lines, fewer librarians for increasing enrollments, and new strategic positions that ask librarians to step outside of the traditional library setting to do their jobs. all of this contributes to less time to spend on a reference desk answering questions that may or may not fully utilize the skills librarians bring to that desk. it is in these situations that leveraging student labor in a meaningful way — through intentional and continual training that provides transferable skills, frequent interactions with library staff, and regular feedback to ensure success — can be a way to deal with these pressures within higher education. however, when implementing this, we should make sure the core motivation to creating these student services extends beyond labor and is centered on the benefits the library can provide through employment to our peer mentors. the experience, skills, and learning that can happen with our peer mentors should drive us forward because those are the experiences the library should be advocating and supporting. conclusion and next steps to take action in supporting a peer-assisted learning approach, we have to be intentional about how we create, train, and assess student employees. this intentionality can help us move away from student employment in the library being transactional and instead, become a transferable experience (mitola, rinto, & pattni, 2018). to make this transformation, we must take our student employees seriously and see them as collaborators and one piece of the larger reference conversation landscape. in viewing this larger landscape, we have to remember that students can help us reach more of our patrons and these situations will always be both and. to create these meaningful employment opportunities, we must commit time to set up the training, provide the necessary scaffolding to give our students the skills they need to participate in a reference conversation and communicate our progress with all our colleagues, who might be removed from the day-to-day work of our student employees. what can drive us forward is knowing that if we are able to take the characteristics of high-impact practices — time that the student has to devote to their job, regular interactions with faculty and peers, space to receive formal and informal feedback, opportunities to establish connections to the campus and broader communities, diversity integrated all training, and projects that provide transferable skills to those who participate (kuh, 2008) — and embed these characteristics in our employment opportunities, we can be leaders at our institutions. well-constructed library employment can be a way for our students to not only learn more about the library, but also increase their own research skills (allen, 2014; mccoy, 2011), gain transferable skills, experiences around leadership, time management, and working with others towards a common goal (charles, lotts, & todorinova, 2017; melilli, mitola, & hunsaker, 2016; & beltman & schaeben, 2012). coordinators should think strategically about what long-term assessment can look like for their program in order to be able to document and share how student employees use these skills in positions after the library. as with most new programs, building a peer-reference service means that you will inevitably get some pushback from someone. this pushback comes from a variety of places, including some of the fears and anxieties mentioned earlier. it is important to address these concerns in order to cultivate buy-in and create an environment where student employees can thrive in the library. at the same time, these concerns, sometimes from a vocal minority, can cause coordinators to lose momentum on these programs. throughout the process, coordinators should be strategic about what assessment to put into place and collecting reflections from their student employees as the program evolves. some of the most powerful and meaningful justification for these programs can come from the students themselves (fargo, salvati, & sanchez tejada, 2018). patricia iannuzzi said in her forward to peer-assisted learning in academic libraries, “peer learning experiences provide a pathway for libraries to expand their teaching and learning mission…” (2017, p. xii). we have the opportunity to open up these pathways, reach our users, and prepare our student employees for their future careers. we need to take our student employees seriously and understand not only their role as peer mentors but also their role in helping us to make the library a better place. thank you to annie pho, denisse solis, and rosan mitola for their feedback, insight, and help in writing this article. additional thanks to chelsea heinbach who is always a great sounding board in talking through new ideas (and the proposal for this article). finally, i’d like to thank all the student employees i’ve had the chance to work with at the university of illinois and at penn state, especially the original peer research consultants (jackie, sarah, vik, luz, and kelly) — your enthusiasm, big ideas, and spunk is what makes me jazzed about advocating for meaningful student employment experiences and helps me to know that i’m on the right track. references allen, s. (2014). towards a conceptual map of academic libraries’ role in student retention. the christian librarian, 57(1), 7-19. retrieved from https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/tcl/vol57/iss1/3/ barnes, j.m. (2017). student to student marketing & engagement: a case study of the university of nebraska-lincoln libraries peer guides. in s. arnold-garza & c. tomlinson (eds.), student lead the library: the importance of student contributions to the academic library, (pp. 129-146). chicago, il: association of college & research libraries. becker-redd, k., lee, k., & skelton, c. (2018). training student workers for cross-departmental success in an academic library: a new model. journal of library administration, 58(2), 153-165, doi: 10.1080/01930826.2017.1412711 bell, s.j. (2000). creating learning libraries in support of seamless learning cultures. college & undergraduate libraries, 6(2), 45-58. doi:10.1300/j106v06n02_05 beltman, s. & schaeben, m. (2012). institution-wide peer mentoring: benefits for mentors. the international journal of the first-year in higher education, 3(2), 33-44, doi: 10.5204/intjfyhe.v3i2.124 bianco, k. & o’hatnick, j. (2017). aligning values, demonstrating value: peer educator programs in the library. in s. arnold-garza & c. tomlinson (eds.), student lead the library: the importance of student contributions to the academic library, (pp. 57-73). chicago, il: association of college & research libraries. brenza, a., kowalsky, m., & brush, d. (2015). perceptions of students working as library reference assistants at a university library. reference services review, 43(4), 722-736. doi:10.1108/rsr-05-2015-0026 carlson, s. (2007). are reference desks dying out? chronicle of higher education, 53(33), a37-a39. charles, l.h., lotts, m., & todorinova, l. (2017). a survey of the value of library employment to the undergraduate experience. journal of library administration, 57(1), 1-6, doi: 10.1080/01930826.2016.1251248 courtney, m., & otto, k. (2017). the learning commons research assistance program at indiana university libraries. in e. rinto, j. watts, & r. mitola (eds.), peer-assisted learning in academic libraries, (pp. 147-164). santa barbara, ca: library juice press. fargo, h. (2017). reference after 5 pm: a reference librarian’s experience working atypical hours at a large research library. pennsylvania libraries: research & practice, 5(2), 87-95. doi 10.5195/palrap.2017.144 fargo, h., salvati, c., sanchez tejada, l. (2018). setting up a successful peer research service: penn state librarians and students on what works best [webinar]. in credo infolit learning community. retrieved from http://blog.credoreference.com/infolit-learning-community-setting-up-a-successful-peer-to-peer-research-service faix, a.i., bates, m.h., hartman, l.a., hughes, j.h., schacher, c.n., elliot, b.j., & woods, a.d. (2010). peer reference redefined: new uses for undergraduate students. reference services review, 38(1), 90-107. doi: 10.1108/00907321011020752 faix, a. (2014). peer reference revisited: evolution of a peer-reference model. reference services review, 42(2), 305-319. doi: 10.1108/rsr-07-2013-0039 guerrero, t.s. & corey, k.m. (2004). training and retraining student employees: a case study at purdue university calumet. journal of access services, 1(4), 97-102, doi: 10.1300/j204v01n04_08 head, a.j., & eisenberg, m.b. (2010). truth be told: how college students evaluate and use information in the digital age. retrieved from http://www.projectinfolit.org/uploads/2/7/5/4/27541717/pil_fall2010_survey_fullreport1.pdf hronchek, j. & bishop, r. (2017). undergraduate research assistants at hope college. in e. rinto, j. watts, & r. mitola (eds.), peer-assisted learning in academic libraries, (pp. 191-205). santa barbara, ca: library juice press. kuh, g. (2008). high-impact education practices: what they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. washington, dc: association of american colleges & universities. marcyk, e.r., & oberdick, b. (2017). the peer research assistants at the michigan state university libraries. in e. rinto, j. watts, & r. mitola (eds.), peer-assisted learning in academic libraries, (pp. 165-178). santa barbara, ca: library juice press. mccoy, e.h. (2011). academic performance among student library employees: how library employment impacts grade point average and perception of success. the christian librarian, 54(1), 3-12. retrieved from https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/tcl/vol54/iss1/3/ melilli, a., mitola, r., & hunsaker, a. (2016). contributing to the library student employee experience: perceptions of a student development program. the journal of academic librarianship, 42(4), 430-437, doi: 10.1016/j.acalib.2016.04.005 meyer, k., & torreano, j. (2017). the front face of library services: how student employees lead the library at grand valley state university. in s. arnold-garza & c. tomlinson (eds.), student lead the library: the importance of student contributions to the academic library, (pp. 39-56). chicago, il: association of college & research libraries. mitola, r., rinto, e., & pattni, e. (2018). student employment as a high-impact practice in academic libraries: a systematic review. the journal of academic librarianship, 44(3), 352-373, doi: 10.1016/j.acalib.2018.03.005 o’kelly, m., garrison, j., merry, b., & torreano, j. (2015). building a peer-learning service for students in an academic library. portal: libraries and the academy, 15(1), 163-182, doi:10.1353/pla.2015.0000 rinto, e., watts, j., & mitola, r., eds. (2017). peer-assisted learning in academic libraries. santa barbara, ca: libraries unlimited. topping, k.j., & ehly, s.w. (2001). peer assisted learning: a framework for consultation. journal of education and psychological consultation, 12(2), 113-132. doi:10.1207.s1532768xjepc1202_03 wallis, l, (2017). information on my own: peer reference and feminist pedagogy. in m.t. accardi (ed.), the feminist reference desk: concepts, critiques, and conversations, (pp. 189-204). sacramento, ca: library juice press. williams, l.b. (2011). the future of peer education: broadening the landscape and assessing the benefits. new directions for student services, 133, 97-99. doi:10.1002/ss.388 in this paper, i’ll use “reference conversation” instead of the traditional, reference interview. i believe that reference interview is limiting, especially in peer-to-peer spaces. reference conversation is meant to more fully encompass and capture what happens when answering a reference question — a conversation ensues where both parties benefit and learn something new. [↩] college students, high impact practices, peer-assisted learning, peer-to-peer services, reference services, student employment extending our reach: using day camps at academic library makerspaces to include homeschoolers transformative praxis – building spaces for indigenous self-determination in libraries and archives 2 responses pingback : student workers: what do they owe us, and what do we owe them? – acrlog pingback : supporting the other side – acrlog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct stop the snobbery! why you’re wrong about community colleges and don’t even know it – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 30 may kim leeder /32 comments stop the snobbery! why you’re wrong about community colleges and don’t even know it photo by flickr user washtenaw community college (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by kim leeder several weeks ago i attended my first community college commencement. despite my staff status, i was pleased to be invited to sit among the faculty behind the stage. from this vantage point i was able to watch the ceremony and play a small role in it (faculty, please stand; faculty, please sit) while reflecting upon the conclusion of my first year as a community college librarian. i watched the joyful antics of our students, their families, and the pride in the faces of our faculty and realized truly, for the first time, that our college’s focus on student learning is not just a catch phrase. it is real, and it has helped to change the lives of nearly seven hundred people this year. this was, to say the least, a transformative year for me. i will admit now that i felt some trepidation last summer in altering my career path from university to community college libraries. it wasn’t because i would now have to drive fifteen miles to work instead of biking two. i didn’t mind a commute. and it wasn’t because this particular community college was only two years old and has not yet been accredited by our regional association, the northwest commission on colleges and universities. i was willing to bet on the success of this new institution and was excited about participating in its creation. instead, the cause of my concern was something that most, if not all, of you will understand intuitively. the position i was interviewing for was a spectacular opportunity in terms of challenge and responsibility, and it allowed me to leap the typical years-of-experience requirements for a director-level role. it should have been a no-brainer, but at the time i had to ask myself the question: was it a step up or down? my name is kim leeder and i am a recovering snob. there, i said it. i might mention, in my defense, that i had never even visited a community college before (seriously? snob). or that i only knew a few people who had attended a community college and had not talked to them about their experiences (why wasn’t i interested? snob). or that i was simply a product of a society that devalues the critical role that community colleges play in higher education, such as in the current nbc show, community (better, but still a snob). the truth was that my ignorance was complete: until this position was posted and a friend brought it to my attention, i had not even thought about community colleges other than as the place you go for school when you can’t succeed at a four-year institution. shall we say it together? s-n-o-b. rather than continue wearing my snobbish hairshirt, i’d like to use the remainder of this article to share some of the inspiring truths i’ve learned about community colleges in the past year. some of them may sound familiar, but i encourage you to pay attention because chances are you haven’t really listened before. for most people, something gets lost in the translation. what i’ve discovered is that when my colleagues and i try to share our enthusiasm about our work, our four-year peers just don’t really “get it.” in “what graduate students want to know about community colleges, part 2,” rob jenkins observes, “professors at four-year institutions, and especially at research universities, do look down on faculty members at two-year colleges. it’s very easy for search committees to pigeonhole candidates with community-college experience as not worthy of serious consideration.” to their ears, our joys sound like rationalizations for our underachievements. community colleges are often described as uniquely american institutions, or “people’s colleges,” in that they provide an education to everyone without prejudice. as gail o. mellow and cynthia heelan write in minding the dream, “[they are] committed to trying to create success for all manner of students who enter [their] doors…. it might be argued that community colleges are the single point of effective education for thousands of poorly educated poor kids” (10). high school dropouts, military veterans, laid-off workers, single mothers, immigrants, others facing unique personal or social challenges: all are welcome at a community college. the success mellow and heelan mention can look a wide variety of ways, too, from job training and professional certificates to transfer to a four-year institution. in this article, i offer you a glimpse of the community college lifestyle as you may not have seen it before. and for my community college colleagues out there, i hope you think i’ve done it justice. your responses are invited at the end of this article, so please weigh in. it’s all about the students a wonderful thing about community colleges is the fact that they are entirely focused on students and student learning. while faculty and staff have advanced degrees and many pursue research projects and professional service activities, the whole emphasis of our work is the students, their needs, and how to support them. for faculty, this translates into teaching loads that would be considered heavy at a four-year institution, but without research and service requirements. with faculty teaching more, class sizes stay small and students get face time with their professor instead of a graduate student assistant. for librarians, this focus on student learning means expanding our basic information literacy instruction efforts without any need to address upper-division or graduate course content. considering the fact that many instruction librarians prize their upper-level instruction, this might sound like a deterrent to prospective community college librarians. however, based on my experience, the opposite is true: although i have taught more introductory information literacy in the past year than in prior years, i have also enjoyed it more than ever before. the reason for this? i’d like to say that i’m just creative enough to keep it fresh. but the true answer is: it’s the students. the university english composition courses i’ve taught for in the past, for example, have been full of traditional students more focused on texting their friends about the evening’s festivities than on learning about research. the community college english composition courses i’ve taught for, although identical in every other way to their university counterparts (and created so for transfer purposes), are different. the students are different: they’re talkative and engaged. they ask questions. they challenge me to explain why they shouldn’t just use wikipedia when it has cited references and doesn’t that make it reliable? they debate and they argue. it’s delightful. there are a number of reasons why community college students are different. the simplest explanation is that they have had to work harder to get to college. many of them have overcome significant obstacles to attend school, from family obligations to financial challenges. more than half are first-generation college students. as a result they are more motivated to get the benefit of the time and money they’re investing in their education than the average four-year college student. it’s also worth mentioning that community college students also differ widely from each other, so any effort to speak about their overall characteristics must be acknowledged as a generalization. after a year of teaching information literacy in the community college environment, i now feel a little sorry for my university colleagues who are still stuck wrestling students off facebook. where before i felt burdened by so many lower-division instruction sessions and looked forward to the upper-level courses, my viewpoint has rotated one hundred and eighty degrees. when i can count on my class presentation turning into a real conversation about information with curious students, teaching basic information literacy becomes great fun. dumb and dumber (or not) don’t be fooled by the stereotypes: community college students are the intellectual equals of their four-year counterparts. those students who have the luck, privilege, or excessive motivation to complete a bachelor’s degree program immediately after high school are only a subset of those who have the brains and desire to succeed in college. many intelligent high school students choose or are forced to take other paths due to family, economic, language, or other challenges. mellow and heelan assert: it is essential that america begins to understand the college experience of the majority of its students in context. that context must consider the number of students, especially minority and urban students, who don’t complete high school in their teens, the number of well-schooled and middle-class students who enter but do not complete their studies in four-year colleges, and ultimately the impact of any educational advancement at any level as the united states moves into the future…. the issue is not who is in college, but who should be in college (8-9). for the students described by mellow and heelan, who comprise nearly half of all undergraduates in the united states, community colleges step in to fill the gap. community colleges are the most democratic of all educational institutions, providing an affordable and accessible education to anyone motivated enough to pursue it. this mission means that community colleges make higher education available to those who are academically accomplished as well as those without much, if any, academic background. as walter benn michaels demonstrates in the trouble with diversity that sat scores, for one, correlate to annual family income, there are socioeconomic implications as well as academic ones (98). the community college mission results in a student body that tends to be wonderfully diverse in every demographic, including age, race, ethnicity, class, physical ability, veteran status, and more. in “the myth of inferiority,” t. allen culpepper asserts that students in general are “more alike than different” regardless of what type of institution they attend. having taught at a variety of different types of colleges and universities, he has encountered poorly prepared and academically gifted students in his classes regardless of the institution. culpepper admits that the proportion of poorly to well-prepared students tends to differ between institutional types, but the range of student preparation and ability is a constant across the board. this diversity of students and academic programs translates into libraries in a variety of ways. in reference it means understanding that many students come into our colleges who still need to learn basic study and computer skills as well as critical information literacy concepts. brand new to academia, these students may not even know where to start when they have questions. the best community college librarians cultivate an open, patient demeanor to help students feel comfortable asking those “stupid” questions and learning the ropes. on the collection development side, librarians use their knowledge of their unique student body to select accessible–but not overly simplified–materials that address the wide mix of academic, professional, technical, basic skills, esl, and community education programs that their institution may offer. there’s no ph.d. in team possibly the most pleasant surprise to be unearthed in the move from university life to community college life is the remarkable collegiality of faculty and staff at the latter. many faculty and staff members at community colleges hold ph.d.s, but research degrees are considered to be more in the realm of recreational activities rather than job requirements. with the competitive element of a more “rigorous” institution allowed to fall away, faculty and staff become more relaxed, more open, and frankly more fun to work with. individuals are judged, if they are judged at all, based on their teaching and service to the college, not external achievements. no workplace is perfect, of course, but overall at a community college you’ll find that everyone is on the same team. as described earlier in this article, community college staff and faculty are there for the students first, and this emphasis brings everyone together in wonderful ways. when it comes to hiring, community colleges are able to prioritize not just academic credentials, but personality and “fit” in ways that four-year institutions don’t have the luxury of doing. rather than seeking out the candidate with the most academic credentials, community college search committees look for those with the most teaching experience, the most sincere focus on the students, and the best understanding of what community colleges do. rob jenkins in part 1 of his chronicle of higher education duo sees a dark side to this in that sometimes a search committee made up of master’s level faculty will hesitate to hire a candidate with a ph.d. due to a fear of “ph.d. snobbery.” jenkins may be somewhat jaded himself; my own reading is that search committees may be concerned, with good reason, that an individual who has attained a ph.d. may have a research agenda that is incompatible with the teaching focus of a community college. indeed, arthur m. cohen and florence b. brawer agree in the american community college, as they note, “most doctorate holders have been prepared as researchers, not teachers, and…they expect fewer teaching hours and higher salaries” (86). this circumstance in hiring can be reframed as an emphasis on collegiality that allows community college hiring committees to select the most talented and sympathetic candidates without regard for their level of educational attainment beyond the master’s. as jenkins explains, “the truth is, at most two-year colleges, your most impressive credential will be your teaching experience, not your degree.” this holds true for librarians as well. while the master’s-ph.d. tension doesn’t generally translate to librarianship, the student focus is universal. those interviewing for librarian positions at community colleges should not be surprised if hiring committees are less interested in their publications and research plans than in their on-the-ground work with students, their expressed understanding of the community college mission, and their approachable energy and enthusiasm. the heart of the issue is: tell us about your work with students, your great ideas for making the library better for them, and how you’ll partner well with faculty. that’s what matters most at a community college library. conclusion if you look down on community colleges, consciously or unconsciously, you may be surprised to learn that community colleges don’t look up at you. faculty, staff, and students are proud of their colleges and their accomplishments. an associate’s degree may seem like a small thing to some, but when an individual has overcome all odds to complete a two-year degree, you can bet they’ll be proud – in fact, just as proud as the faculty and staff will be of them. my particular institution doesn’t even have sports teams, but we wear our logo items with pride, knowing that we’re contributing to and supporting something bigger than ourselves. one of the best things about community colleges is that they make an impact. this was evident at my college’s commencement: the stories of our students’ achievements and the obstacles they had overcome made me feel that i was truly doing work that was helping to make other people’s lives better. according to most estimates, about half of all community college students require some developmental coursework to prepare them for undergraduate study. without community colleges to provide such students with a bridge to further study or careers, they would have very little opportunity to advance. mark blankenship, in “is community college really college?,” notes, “community colleges are not only enrolling students, but also helping them to become upwardly mobile for the first time.” community colleges offer every citizen the opportunity to become more informed and to improve their life, in whatever ways they define that improvement, through education. it is completely egalitarian and completely inspiring. rob jenkins (part 1) ends his article with the question, “what’s it like working at a community college?” if you think it’s somehow a career compromise, think again. jenkins answers this way: [a]ll i can say is: i wouldn’t trade careers with anybody. i enjoy the work that i do, i like my students and colleagues, i believe that i’ve been able to make a difference in people’s lives, i’ve found it relatively easy to maintain an acceptable balance between work and life, and i’ve been able to make a decent living. what more can anyone ask from a career? after my first year as a community college librarian, i find jenkins understated. perhaps the shine will fade and the honeymoon will come to an end, but for me the shift from university to community college has been enlightening, inspiring, and fun. my institution boasts warm, collaborative staff and faculty, interesting and committed students, and a creative, agile environment that is more focused on student success than institutional bureaucracy. if the other community colleges in this nation are even half as wonderful as places to work, the rest of you are just plain missing out. warm thanks to ellie collier, erin dorney, micah vandegrift, and eric phetteplace for their thoughtful feedback that helped to shape this article. academic libraries, college students, community colleges, faculty, information literacy, librarianship, libraries, teaching what we talk about when we talk about brangelina an interview with paul ford and gina trapani 32 responses ann faulkner 2012–05–30 at 1:14 pm what a wonderful affirmation of my experience of nearly 40 years ago this article is. coming from a university to a community college to teach i felt i had come home to a place where students weren’t the adversaries; the whole community worked together so that everyone could succeed. what exciting places community colleges are. i’m so glad to see that, even though i’ve retired, things are humming along nicely in the community college ranks! ruth salter 2012–05–30 at 2:40 pm kim, this is beautiful. i’m so glad you’re enjoying cwi. i taught at a small community college for two years, experiencing many of the same joys you described. thank you for telling it like it is. :) mary 2012–05–30 at 2:54 pm i was also a community college snob! i went to a four year college and a very good library school. i took some spanish classes at our community college a few years ago, thinking it would be an easy a. after all, i have advanced degrees. was i ever wrong! i had some of the best teachers ever, and worked very hard. i have a great deal of respect for community colleges now. thanks for an interesting post! lynda 2012–05–30 at 2:57 pm great article and thanks for writing this. one of the nc community colleges, central piedmont comm college, has been an innovator in information literacy in part because of their strong focus on students, as you mention. they also put on a mean one-day conference: http://www.cpcc.edu/library/shareacademy dlb 2012–05–30 at 3:18 pm i worked for 3 years on a collocated campus with both 4 yr and cc institutions; i’ve since moved to a 4yr liberal arts college. i miss my community college students and non-traditional students the most – they brought such an appreciation of their opportunities and focus to what they did. some of the best students a librarian could ever ask for! susan seifried 2012–05–30 at 4:57 pm no snobbery from me: as someone who started their academic career as a returning adult at a community college, i could not be prouder to return as a librarian. i can seriously say that i could not have gone as far with out the solid support and instruction i received in those years. i am super thrilled to be paying forward the enthusiasm and encouragement to these students, and supporting them in whatever endeavors they choose. nora bird 2012–05–31 at 7:57 am i just finished teaching an lis program class focused on community college librarianship and thank you for affirming what i and my co-instructor said to the students repeatedly. you and interested readers might want to read another article by jennifer arnold (“the community college conundrum: workforce issues in community college libraries.” library trends 59, no. 1–2 (summer/fall 2010): 220–236). micah vandegrift 2012–05–31 at 10:48 am nora, thanks for sharing that article. i was going to join the discussion here and ask what exactly the lis programs are doing to prepare a workforce for community college librarianship, so i am very glad to hear you’ve had the opportunity to teach that class. might i inquire what program you taught it with? further, are there a different set of skills required for serving a community college patron that are dissimilar from academic librarianship? does this issue of snobbery extend to the ever-present “public librarian v. academic librarian” debates in our field? are we all really willing to accept that everything is better and more collegial at a community college? just stoking the fire here… ;) nora bird 2012–06–03 at 7:24 am wonderful questions micah. i teach at the university of north carolina at greensboro (a smaller unc campus). i would say that the skills are not different but you use a much broader range of skills then you would at a four-year college (unless it is very small). when i worked at a community college i did reference, instruction, collection development, systems administration, and some cataloging. and the clientele are different – there are some people who think that community colleges are more like public libraries than college libraries but another part of the mix is that they are like school libraries. yes, there is the feeling that community college students are the great horde, but they are motivated to succeed and that is refreshing. ellie 2012–06–05 at 12:38 pm seconding the ‘broader’ more than different. the things i’ve noticed most are: *breadth of job description – at both of my cc jobs i’ve done reference, instruction, collection development, website, assessment, and decisions regarding our databases *amount of attention, patience and emotional involvement regarding students – i’m allowed (and expected) to walk away from the desk to help students (in the stacks, at their computer, wherever) and i think it does take a slightly different set of skills to be able to help a student who is struggling with something we tend to consider ‘basic’ than it does to help a phd student with higher level research. i call on my information therapist hat more in my cc jobs than i have in other positions. kate williams 2012–06–05 at 3:58 pm ms. bird!! i was in your class at uncg!! i am library director at a technical college in georgia now and i love it! i would agree that we use a broad range of skills here and while we all have primary responsibilities, we all end up doing everything at some point–which i love. also, i feel that we get to have more personal relationships with students here than i experienced at the large university libraries. our students are definitely a mix of ages, experience and skill level but that keeps it interesting. when we see someone graduate that has overcome either personal or educational difficulties its really exciting. of course, its not perfect and there are challenges that we face that are different from other types of higher ed libraries. so far the biggest difficulty for me has been that many things (research, conferences, products) are geared toward larger 4 year schools with more money to throw around and it can be hard to find materials that support technical programs on the level that we require. anyway, loved the article! kelly 2012–06–07 at 9:25 am jumping in late, but it actually seems to me that community college libraries often blur the line between a public library and an academic library. even though the community college i work at now is across the street from the public library, we often get community members (many alumni, but not all) who come in to do research, use our computers, or ask reference questions. i love community colleges because of the wide range of patrons i encounter – high school students, recent working high school grads, second career students, professionals looking for further training, students looking to gain transfer credit to the big universities nearby, and students returning to school after looooong breaks. they each present unique issues and challenges that keep my job interesting and extremely rewarding. red wassenich 2012–05–31 at 11:30 am i have been a librarian for 28 years at austin (tx) community college and there have been multiple studies of how our students who transfer to the univ. of texas have done. consistently they have a higher completion rate than “native” ut students who began there as freshmen. olivia 2012–05–31 at 11:36 am thanks for writing, this is a nicely upbeat post. it’s great to hear from another community college librarian! a couple of points i’d like to add to: “for faculty, this translates into teaching loads that would be considered heavy at a four-year institution, but without research and service requirements. with faculty teaching more, class sizes stay small and students get face time with their professor instead of a graduate student assistant.” — if you dig around in ipeds ( http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ ), i think you’ll find numbers showing that the majority of faculty teaching at community colleges are adjuncts (i.e. part-time contract workers). the impact of this could be an entire post itself, and while it doesn’t diminish the point that students do get face-time with professors, it does mean that the professors can be there for one semester and gone the next, and unfortunately they are often not treated as full members of the college community. this is changing — there are efforts to retain adjunct faculty and include them in more of the college community, but presently not all community college students have access to full-time, long-term faculty members and the accompanying knowledge base they provide. “many faculty and staff members at community colleges hold ph.d.s, but research degrees are considered to be more in the realm of recreational activities rather than job requirements.” — i’d say this varies considerably by discipline and institution. at least at the college where i work, a terminal degree (=phd except in fine arts) is expected at least for promotion, and to rise to the level of a dean it is a requirement. rick 2012–05–31 at 11:58 am kim, great post and insights. i worked briefly at a community college and was very impressed with the student centered approach. they was more emphasis on student success and getting students the tools they need. their tutoring program was robust and was the main draw for library use. many community colleges are also leaders in assessment. in libraries, we often talk the talk about being student-centered but many community colleges walk the walk better than we do. rob 2012–05–31 at 1:25 pm this is a great piece, kim. maybe you’re right–maybe i am just a little jaded after 25 years. but your fresh viewpoint gives me renewed enthusiasm for the work we do. thanks for writing this, and thanks for the multiple plugs. best wishes, rob jenkins anthea taylor 2012–05–31 at 9:59 pm this is fantastic kim – thank-you. i have been working in an australian tafe (equivalent of the community college)as the institute librarian for the past 2.5 years having come from an executive position in a large regional library, and i love it. there are so many parts of your article that i could relate to and feel you have captured my thoughts. your article is also very timely as my tafe is in victoria and the victorian state government recently announced a $290 million cut to tafes across the state commencing in july 2012. thanks again :) pingback : love friday: june 1st « love library nicole forsythe 2012–06–01 at 11:41 am i’m also finishing my first year as a full-time community college librarian, and much of this rings true for me. i also want to underscore olivia’s comments about adjunct faculty, a very important point and a big part of cc life. thanks for a great post and your enthusiasm for our important work! pingback : the rewards of ccs | view from beyond the stacks ken 2012–06–04 at 6:09 pm this was just what i needed! i’m about to leave my university library position for one with a community college. reactions have ranged from hearty congratulations to wide-eyed disbelief that i’d make such a choice. thanks for renewing my enthusiasm for the world i’m about to enter! akilah 2012–06–05 at 11:20 am great post! who in their ‘right mind’ would forsake the convenience of urban life after 20 years for the isolation of community college in a tiny town? that would be me! the truth is: i am committed to people and see my move to a small community college library in se new mexico as a wonderful challenge of service, personal and professional growth! i have never thought of the community college or its students nor faculty as ‘less than’ but i have gotten that feeling from others would do not share my sense of adventure and service. i have many opportunities to teach, to lead, to mentor and to serve. i love working as the director of a small cc! how refreshing!!! ellie 2012–06–05 at 12:41 pm kim – i told you when you pitched this topic that it made my heart sing and the full article does even more so. and look at all our fellow cc librarians commenting here! thanks for articulating this for us. pingback : nine month anniversary | digital carrie leann 2012–06–08 at 5:50 pm when i moved from a 4 year liberal arts college (9 years) and a state flagship university (9 years) to a community college, i too found students who want to learn, want to explore, and make connections. it’s a great place to be. the professors want to teach and are open to partnerships. student learning is a priority and the opportunities for librarians to support that learning are amazing. shinylib 2012–06–13 at 11:25 am i’m amazed that i somehow missed you making the leap to cc work. fantastic! thanks for shining a little light into all we do. community college libraries are about as “real” an academic environment as it gets – real struggles to pay for college, real value for the education received, real attention to doing more with less (for librarians and students), real goal-driven, real(ly) aspirational and inspirational. friday 2012–06–16 at 3:46 pm i recently moved from a graduate-only school to community college and love love love it. the student focus blew me away at the interview and continues to be the best part of the job. i am a cc graduate and am so glad to be back amongst “my people”. :-) minavilly 2012–06–27 at 2:13 pm thank you for posting this. i went to a community college after high school because i couldn’t afford a four year university. my school was five minutes from my home and allowed me to have half of my undergraduate education paid for by scholarships (thank you bright futures for paying for 100% of aa degrees even if you were only awarded a 75% scholarship). as a result my student loan debt is quite low compared to some of my friends. i’m now half way done with my mlis and am proud to tell people i started at a community college. no matter what they say i feel it is the best thing for students who are unsure of themselves, or don’t have the finances to go to a four year university right off. ailya rose 2012–07–26 at 2:30 pm take everything you wrote about community colleges, multiply the sense of snoobery by 10, and apply that to those of of us who work in for_profit educational settings. that is how we feel when we go to conferences, interact with acadmic librarians and the like. for us, it is even more about the student. kenny strawn 2012–08–20 at 11:22 am this article is 100% agreeable material. but beyond that, it’s an eye-opener to the fact that the stereotypes of community colleges exist in the first place! being a saddleback student, i find it interesting that so many fellow students are excited about transferring instead of enjoying their saddleback life just as well. there’s plenty of stuff to do at community colleges that most people don’t even think about. here in california, many community colleges not only have awesome educational programs and get stuff done at an amazing rate while keeping class sizes fairly small, but they also compete against each other in the many athletic and kinesiology programs offered, which makes school not only educational but also fun. plus, the community college i go to (once again, saddleback) also has its very own radio station (ksbr)! it’s mostly jazz and what not, but it’s listened to throughout southern california, and i wouldn’t be surprised to hear some of my friends who play guitar, sax, and other instruments in the jazz combos there end up on that station. comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct “that’s how we do things around here”: organizational culture (and change) in libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 22 aug jason martin /7 comments “that’s how we do things around here”: organizational culture (and change) in libraries in the library with the lead pipe welcomes a guest article by jason martin, head of public services at stetson university. jason holds an ed.d. in educational leadership and joins us to share his knowledge of organization culture and change. “ritual coffee roasters” photo flickr user by kenn wilson (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) by jason martin introduction a position opens on an important campus committee, and the provost would like someone from the library to fill the position. or a library staff member with over thirty years of service to the library is retiring, and her supervisor decides to throw a party for her. or a student comes to the reference desk with a complex question just before 5:00 p.m. on a friday. how the librarians and library staff respond to these scenarios, the way a campus committee position is filled, the amount of effort put forth in planning and attendance at a party, and the willingness of a librarian to stay late to help a student, are dictated by the organizational culture of the library. what the library values as an organization builds and shapes this culture which in turn molds and prescribes members’ actions. culture can impede or facilitate change, unite or divide members, and cause the library to achieve or fail at its mission. for these reasons, organizational culture is an important concept for librarians to understand. an organization is a collection of groups working to achieve goals and objectives through the use of a codified set of policies and procedures. more than that, an organization is a small society in which individuals come together and agree to adhere by the rules, practices, and accepted forms of behavior of the society/organization. from this agreement, daily interactions amongst its members, and the organization’s external environment, history, and mission comes organizational culture. organizational culture is a set of shared values, norms, and beliefs that are learned and all-encompassing. the learning of culture can occur through formal training programs within the organization as well as through informal means such as stories told during the morning coffee break and advice given in the hallways between meetings. maybe the most common way to learn about and understand organizational culture is through the expression, “that’s how we do things around here.” although it might be just as common to learn about an organization’s culture through that statement’s converse: “that’s not what we do around here.” culture shapes the beliefs of organizational members and creates bonds that unite them. it is a force that acts upon individuals, obligating them to make choices based on cultural norms and expectations. culture both causes and predicts member behavior and gives meaning and value to organizational life. organizational culture is created over a period of time, and while it is durable and long-lasting, it can also change, albeit slowly, over time. organizational culture is not a “one size fits all” concept. no “correct,” “proper,” or “standard” organizational culture exists; culture is derived from the history of the organization and, in order to be considered healthy, must allow the organization to achieve its mission. since the external environment plays an important part in the success and failure of an organization, the culture must also allow the organization to relate and adapt to the surrounding community. an academic library whose culture values service over scholarship will have difficulty operating on a campus which values scholarship above all else. the stronger the culture the more integrated the beliefs and values systems are in the organization. if a culture has too many values, no clear values, or chaotic rituals, then the culture is weak and the organization in trouble. an organization with a weak culture is short-sighted, inwardly focused, divided, and suffers from low morale. an organization with a strong culture will find it easier to remain steady and united during difficult times. while an organization’s structure, work flow, and mission are easy to identify, study, and understand, organizational culture falls outside the rational realm of organizational study. culture must be examined in a different way, namely through the examination of cultural artifacts like rites and rituals. rites and rituals every year on the day before fall classes start at a small, southern liberal arts college, the students, their families, and faculty gather to meet each other, talk about the achievements of alumni, and discuss the exciting possibilities of the semester ahead. at a specified time all the faculty gather at one end of the campus and walk dressed in full academic regalia to the other end of campus while the students and their families look on. convocations are typical at most universities before the start of the academic year, but the processional at this college has some special meanings. the one-on-one, face-to-face interaction with the students and faculty demonstrates the college’s commitment to students and the importance it places on teaching over all other aspects of the faculty member’s job. the processional across campus connects modern day students and faculty with the history of higher education, as the faculty’s academic robes harken back to the robes worn in medieval universities. this is a ritual. and in this ritual, just like every other ritual, the members of the organization actively participate to fortify the values of the organization and put them on display for the audience to see. rites and rituals are an integral part of an organization’s culture. a ritual generally contributes to the operating procedure of an organization, but it also has a symbolic role which embodies the values of the organization. rites and rituals are so important because they reinforce the values of an organization through the active participation of the organization’s members. rituals are pre-planned events of varying formality, social, public, and have both manifest and latent purposes. the manifest purpose of the ritual generally contributes to the workings of the organization and helps the organization achieve its mission and accomplish its daily tasks. the latent purpose is where the celebration of the sacred occurs. rituals create order and community and can be used to both instill new values into the culture and change the organization’s culture. understanding what is and is not a ritual in an organization can be difficult. types of rites and rituals pertinent to libraries include “rites of enhancement,” “rites of renewal,” “rites of integration,” and “rites of initiation.” rites of enhancement elevate the standing of a librarian in the organization such as through promotion within the library’s hierarchy and tenure in the university. organizational development, training, and continuing education are rites of renewal, whereby the library as a whole is strengthened and renewed. a rite of renewal may also reinforce the power and authority of those in charge. rites of integration may be the most popular rite within the library: this ritual involves bringing various groups in the library together for the purposes of forming a community. a library-wide party where all the librarians and library staff celebrate as a group some important event (the end of the semester, holidays, birthdays, etc.) is a rite of integration. some libraries may also make use of “rites of initiation” whereby a librarian is not a member of the culture until she passes certain tests or participates in specific rites. a library faculty meeting is a public, preplanned event guided by set rules and procedures. its manifest purpose is for librarians to discuss faculty governance, but its latent purpose could involve rites of integration, enhancement, and even initiation. the american library association’s midwinter and annual conferences are large-scale, multi-type rituals in which librarians come together for the manifest purpose of continuing education and strengthening the profession but also to network, socialize with old friends, and immerse themselves in the professional culture. rites and rituals are an expression and important artifact of organizational culture. they have greater influence on a culture than other symbols because they require active participation by the organization’s members. they reinforce and perpetuate accepted cultural values and norms and delineate participants’ roles within the existing social structure. in these ways they help maintain an organization. rituals create order because they occur at regular intervals, adhere to established practices and procedures, and draw upon the organization’s past. when an organization’s members are brought together in a ritual, they are united emotionally and their energy is focused upon that which is sacred: the values the organization and its culture embrace and hold dear. in this way rituals create community in an organization. through the order, community, meaning, and inspiration created by rites and rituals, transformation occurs. through the power of rituals non-members become members of the culture; conflict within the organization is turned to peace; and those who were once scared of change now embrace it. managing rites and rituals those studying an organization’s culture must be able to understand the differences between the manifest and latent aspects of a ritual. a weekly reporting meeting of department heads and administrators has a clear manifest purpose: to communicate to all mid-level and upper administrators what is happening in each department. while it might seem inefficient or boring, the meeting’s purpose should be clear to any observer; however, the meeting’s latent purpose might be a rite of renewal where the director attempts to correct, or give the appearance of correcting, the problem of poor communication in the library or reinforce her power in the library. just as important as understanding the latent aspects of a ritual is to correctly interpret that aspect of a ritual. proper interpretation of a symbol requires a deep understanding of the culture which is gained after spending time studying the organization and speaking with its members. in order to effectively manage a library, administrators need to recognize what purpose(s) a ritual holds in the library. a party in a library is used to celebrate a certain event but also to bring everyone together to foster a sense of integration and community. if a director decides to cancel the end-of-the-semester parties in order to save money, then she is likely to decrease morale and the sense of community in the library while angering many library employees. managers must also be comfortable with the using symbolism and engaging in ceremonial behavior. rites and rituals, at their core, are performance. therefore, to effectively communicate a ritual’s meaning, a manager must have a flair for the dramatic and pinch of the theatric in her personality. using rites and rituals to facilitate change change is difficult because change brings with it a sense of the unknown and the unpredictable. in his famous “law day” speech, jimmy carter tells of being a small boy on his parents’ farm collecting rocks to propel with his sling shot. he had both hands filled with smooth rocks when his mother announced she had just finished baking cookies and offered him one. he was perplexed and stood still trying to decide what he should do. to take the cookie meant putting down the rocks he had worked so hard to collect. finally it dawned on him a fresh-baked cookie was more valuable than those rocks he was holding. carter placed the rocks on the ground and ate one of his mother’s cookies. he used this story to illustrate how hard change can be. people grow so comfortable with what they have, they find it extremely difficult, even impossible, to give it up for something new, even if they know it is better than what they currently have. library administrators can use rites and rituals to help alleviate some of the unpredictability that occurs during change. because rituals create order in an organization, they can be used to anchor the organization while it weathers the storms of change. rites and rituals provide certainty in uncertain times; they are the unchanging things in an organization undergoing change. they can also be used as opportunities for people to come together to learn about and celebrate their achievements as they undergo organizational change. they provide a safe zone where people can ask questions and share their worries. a director of large community college library made good use of ritual when the library changed its integrated library system (ils). switching to a new ils is always difficult because on top of all the work that must be completed before the switch can happen, everyone must learn a new system and set of procedures. some library employees might even have to learn a new job. so in order to make the transition easier, every friday morning the library director brought coffee and bagels to the staff lounge. this time spent consuming bagels and coffee was used to socialize with co-workers and talk about weekend plans. this weekly also made the director available to everyone in the library and gave the librarians and library staff a chance to informally ask questions about the upcoming switch. this simple ritual gave those in the library a constant around which they could focus their week: no matter what else happened during the week this meeting took place on friday mornings. once the new ils was fully functional, the library held a retirement party for the old ils. everyone who worked in the library came together to bid farewell to the old system and to celebrate their accomplishments. using rites and rituals to change culture changing an organization’s culture is a formidable task as those within the culture have been socialized to accept its norms and may find it hard to unlearn behavior. oft times when a leader tries to change the culture, the leader loses out to the entrenched way of doing things, especially when the change is attempted in a top-down, autocratic manner. a strong organizational culture makes for a better-functioning organization; however, a strong culture is by nature conservative. organizational culture is largely rooted in the past, so those within the library may not want to let go of a past on which they possess such a strong grip. on the other hand, a weak culture is less effective than a strong culture and therefore easier to change, but even a weak culture has its adherents and those who are just not willing to give up what they know.  as was stated earlier, rites and rituals express culture by celebrating the values an organization holds sacred, so if a library were to modify its rituals, then it could change its culture. popular rituals are difficult, if not impossible, to stop, so a library director may have better luck in trying to alter rituals instead. the key would be to incorporate those values the library wishes to honor in its rituals. let’s say a library leader wanted to honor the long-serving librarians and library staff. doing so would help the library connect better with its past and value the loyalty and long-term contributions of those employees. she could set aside some time in the library’s annual year-end party (making sure to consult with the organizing committee so as not to give the appearance of autocratic control) to recognize long-serving library employees. during the party every librarian and library staff member who has worked for a certain number of years could be given a pin and asked to share an early memory of the library. after a few years this ceremony will have an established place at the party, and as these values are celebrated and rewarded they will be learned and become part of the organizational culture. a library administration can also create new rituals that emphasize desired values. this is more challenging as a new ritual does not yet have popular support and may be perceived as the administration trying to have too much control of the library. at a large, research university, a new library dean, however, has had success with this approach. she took over from an autocratic, top-down dean who gave no decision making power to anyone in the library. as a result, very few librarians or library staff had the courage or ability to suggest innovations and follow through on their ideas. the new dean, who has an exact opposite approach to leadership, wanted a way to build a more “bottom-up” culture where library employees felt free to bring new ideas to the administration, make decisions, and then own those decisions. she also wanted a way to improve the lack of professional development and on-going training in the library, especially among the staff. she killed two birds with one stone by creating a “professional training day.” each year the library is closed for a day so the entire the library can attend the day-long training retreat. the librarians and library staff decide the topic of the training. the dean simply announces the day the library will be closed for training, and those working in the library plan the event. this has helped the librarians and library staff work together and make decisions about their workplace. not only does everyone get a day of professional development training to improve their skills, but the new bottom-up decision making process is spreading to other areas of the library as well. creating cultural change is no small task, but with the right patience and care and a certain appreciation for symbolic action, a library administrator can create this change. the library director who navigated her library through a change in the ils actually bought the old system a gold watch (well, gold in color at least) to signify the system’s retirement and honor it for its service to the library. that is a having a flair for symbolic action. conclusion rites and rituals are a powerful tool of organizational culture. they require members of the organization to participate in a performance that reinforces the norms of the culture. rituals can take many different forms and serve various purposes. most rituals have a manifest purpose which contributes to the functioning of the organization, but the real importance of rituals lies in their latent purpose and what values are being celebrated. library administrators must understand these latent purposes in order to understand the library’s culture and the ritual itself. proper understanding of rituals and ceremonial behavior can help a library director better manage change within the library and even change the culture itself. what rites, rituals, and ceremonies occur in your library? what do you think these rituals accomplish? what values do they celebrate? please share your stories in the comments section below.   thanks to kelly blessinger and kim leeder for their feedback on prior drafts of this article. references bell, c. (1997). ritual: perspectives and dimensions. oxford: oxford university press. bell, c. (1992). ritual theory, ritual practice. oxford: oxford university press. bolman. l.g & deal, t.e. (2003). reframing organizations: artistry, choice, and leadership. san francisco: jossey-bass. carter, j. (1974). a message on justice. available from: http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/documents/law.pdf collins, r. (2004). interaction ritual chains. princeton, nj: princeton university press. dacin, m., munir, k., & tracey, p. (2010). formal dining at cambridge colleges: linking ritual performance and institutional maintenance. academy of management journal, 53(6), 1393-1418. driver, t.f. (1991). the magic of ritual: our need for liberating rites that transform our lives and our communities. san francisco: harper. martin, m. j. (2011). in the process of becoming: the organizational culture of the metropolitan academic library. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of central florida, orlando, fl. available at etd.fcla.edu/cf/cfe0003585/martin_michael_j_201105_edd.pdf schein, e. h. (2004). organizational culture and leadership. san francisco: jossey-bass. trice, h. m., & beyer, j. m. (1984). studying organizational cultures through rites and ceremonials. academy of management review, 9(4), 653-669.   change, organizational culture, organizations, ritual what do we do and why do we do it? and the survey says… 7 responses stevenb 2012–08–22 at 8:55 pm thought you’d definitely list george kuh’s classic work in this area, the invisible tapestry. kuh’s work is specific to higher education. like your essay, he talks about the importance of understanding the culture of the institution, and as a leader, working within the culture to create change that is likely to be accepted and adopted. [kuh gave examples of institutions where change that defied the culture failed] shifting to a culture where staff are empowered to share their ideas and work for change would definitely set a tone for managing change. my next “leading from the library” column (due out on 8/23) will discuss leading organizational change. http://lj.libraryjournal.com/category/opinion/leading-from-the-library/ jason martin 2012–08–23 at 7:36 am although i did not reference kuh & whitt in this post, i am very familiar with their work and cited them extensively in my dissertation. thanks for taking the time to read and comment. paul lai 2012–08–23 at 1:28 pm i think discussions of organizational culture are important, but i also wonder if they don’t sometimes obscure some of the more fundamental issues of workplace politics and the basic conditions of labor (getting all marxist here). i come from a cultural studies background, and there are many camps in that field that try hard to explore the structures of power that enable or inhibit cultural expressions though many people on the outside see cultural studies work as merely frivolous attention to epiphenomena. can we connect questions of organizational culture, rites and rituals, and institutional change back to some of these other issues—funding cuts, staff layoffs, micromanagement of employees, etc.? jason martin 2012–08–24 at 8:25 am i think things like funding cuts and layoffs are better suited to studies of organizational climate. and who wields the power and authority in an organization? does a library director limit the cultural expression of those in the organization? or does the culture limit what the director can and can not do? katherine simpson 2012–09–24 at 8:34 am the anthropology of the workplace is complex, and culture is only one part of it. i agree that it’s important and often overlooked, and that rituals can sustain and reinforce culture (good and bad), but i’d be wary of missing the forest for the trees. all kinds of things “mold and prescribe members’ actions”, such as economics, individual personalities, and the goals of the organization, both stated and unstated. i wonder – does a weak and unhealthy culture precede lack of organizational focus, or does the lack of organizational focus precede a weak culture? jason martin 2012–09–25 at 10:44 am great question. a lack of focus, direction, and vision causes weak cultures, not the other way around. of course an organization can have a weak culture for many reasons other than lack of vision, but i think this is a big cause. pingback : change management « jisc hike project this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct me and you and everything we know: information behavior in library workplaces – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 26 feb elizabeth galoozis /4 comments me and you and everything we know: information behavior in library workplaces “teamwork will get you there” photo by flickr user dr. case (cc by-nc 2.0) in brief as librarians, we claim to uphold the principles of open access, equitable and unbiased service, intellectual freedom, and lifelong learning. how can we better integrate these principles into our workplaces? this article is an exploration of information behaviors and structures in library workplaces, particularly the behaviors of withholding and sharing information, and the effect they have on service to patrons and overall quality of the work environment. by elizabeth galoozis introduction: definitions and questions as librarians, we are familiar with information as the currency of our work. information studies scholar marcia bates proposes that the word “information” covers “all instances where people interact with their environment in any such way that leaves some impression on them – that is, adds to or changes their knowledge store” (2010). every day, we see information adding to or changing patrons’ knowledge stores as they discover a new author, narrow a database search, or use company information to prepare for a job interview. we may not think in the same way about the information that makes up our workplaces and workplace behaviors, whether that means cataloging a film, teaching a workshop, or creating a schedule. while we are aware that information is organized, used, and sought in the workplace, we do not always take the same care with it as we do with outward-facing collections of information. throughout this article, i will apply different theories of information behavior1 (both individual and organizational) to library workplaces, whether they are made up of 5 or 500 people. the outcomes of these behaviors are often at cross-purposes with a library’s mission, particularly when it comes to populations with more limited access to information, like new librarians and paraprofessionals. i will describe some models and approaches that actively promote information sharing and clarity that can be applied in library workplaces. i’d like to start with donald case’s definition of information behavior (from an information science perspective) as not just active information seeking but also “the totality of unintentional or passive behaviors (such as glimpsing or encountering information), as well as purposive behaviors that do not involve seeking, such as actively avoiding information” (2002). the vast majority of information behavior studies, if they apply to libraries, have been done on users, not on library staff. but we, too, engage in information behaviors, both individual and institutional. the latter, at its most successful, is expressed by social anthropologist jean lave and educational theorist wenger as a “community of practice.” marcia bates points out that information scientists are interested not inherently in a social hierarchy (as sociologists are), but in the way that hierarchy “impedes or promotes the transfer of information” (2010). what are we doing in our library workplaces, among ourselves as staff, to facilitate the successful transfer of information? what are we doing to block it?  a number of researchers in information sharing have concluded that information does not “‘speak for itself’ but requires negotiation concerning its meaning and context” (talja and hansen, 2006). what are a workplace and a workday, if not a set of negotiations of the meaning and context of information? information cultures the information cultures of library workplaces do not always follow a principle we espouse as a profession: easy and democratic access to reliable, stable, and clear sources of information. it’s an ideal we strive for more with users than with each other. like our users, we must derive meaning and purpose from a vast sea of information surrounding us. some systematic filtering of information is necessary, of course, for us to be able to do our daily work. but surely that can exist within an environment where information is accessible to those who wish to gain access to it. (this may be more of a challenge in privately-funded libraries than in publicly-funded libraries, where more documentation is legally required.) librarians martha mautino and michael lorenzen characterize communication and information as forms of power, equating restricted access to information to a “loss of status.” whether it’s election-related information, consumer information, or the mechanics of database searching, one of the most gratifying aspects of librarianship is empowering users with information. our colleagues deserve the same. how information is constructed, documented, and disseminated is crucial to how functional a library workplace is. one way researchers define an environment where information behavior takes place is as an “information culture.”  chun wei choo, et al., in their case study of the use of information by employees at a canadian law firm, define it this way: “by information culture we mean the socially transmitted patterns of behaviors and values about the significance and use of information in an organization” (2006). the key words in this definition are “socially transmitted.” rules and resources may be organizationally articulated, or reside in unconscious social and other power structures. in her ethnographic studies of information-seeking behavior, elfreda chatman introduced the concept of the information “small world” where “insiders see their codes of behavior as normative, routine, and as fitting shared meanings, [but] outsiders to the group cannot relate, because they do not share the same social meanings” (fulton, 2005). for example, it may be common for departments within a library to share the minutes of their meetings, or to keep them private. a technical services department may have no idea what a reference department’s priorities are, and vice versa, though their processes and priorities have direct effects on each other – because the social code of behavior is to keep information within the small world of the department. choo, et al. use knowledge management research to identify two different organizational strategies: codification, in which knowledge is codified, stored, and disseminated through formal channels, and personalization, in which knowledge is shared through social networks, conversations, and other informal means (2006). i posit that in libraries, the first strategy is usually true for collections of outward-facing information, and the second for internal workplace knowledge, which may reside in silos so sturdily built that they resist even the most sensible demolishing. the distinction between outwardand inward-facing knowledge is, however, eroding a little more quickly, as open access, accountability, and social media engagement grow, which has forced some information cultures to become more open. paula singer and jeri hurley (2005), writing to librarians in the context of professional advice, divide valuable knowledge into two categories: explicit and tacit. explicit information is able to be “documented, archived, and codified” – though it is important to note that not all explicit information undergoes these processes. tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is defined as “know-how contained in employees’ heads.” tacit knowledge is more subjective. take, for example, a librarian who finds a mistake on a library web page. different librarians might approach this problem differently, depending upon their relationships with individual staff members, and their understandings of who wields power, who is in charge of what, and who has the knowledge to get something done. in some libraries, explicit knowledge has become tacit. what may seem like a codifiable piece of explicit knowledge is intimately wrapped up in social networks and relationships, as well as perceptions of others’ willingness to both share and accept information. singer and hurley acknowledge that the very value of knowledge may prevent individuals from sharing it: “in many cases employees are being asked to surrender their knowledge and experience – the very traits that make them valuable as individuals” (2005). the word surrender is emotionally charged. there is an element of surrender and trust that comes with transparency – we must trust that the others in our workplace are sharing what they know as well. parts and sums much of the research combining information behavior and library or information science has focused on systems. in information scientist pauline atherton’s view, this inhibited understanding of “the more substantive and more difficult aspects of our world of information science, namely the human being who is processing information” (quoted in garvey, 1979). there is some more recent research, however, about the factors (both systematic and individual) that influence individual information behavior. for example, bates identified the frequently-demonstrated dominance of the “principle of least effort” in information seeking (2010).2 and sanna talja argues that researchers in most fields prefer informal sources and channels if available (2002). in many cases, the principle of least effort may cause people to avoid information seeking altogether, especially if the source of that information is closed off, hostile, or made inaccessible by other human or technological means. people may make do with what they have at hand, can google, or find out from those they trust, rather than risk vulnerability or alienation with a source known to be difficult in one way or another.  emotion is inextricably linked to information behavior, and, more obviously, to social behavior. an array of information behaviors (seeking, withholding, sharing) are related to emotional behaviors such as stress and self-concept. even the solo librarian is part of a professional network, and a larger organization, and must rely upon others and other sources of information in order to do her job. christina courtright, writing about thomas wilson’s model of information behavior, refers to what he calls the “feedback loop” of “learning over time” (2007). this learning, according to courtright, always takes place in relation to an individual’s perception of both risk and reward, and of self-efficacy.  imagine a library employee faced with a required task, a low sense of self-efficacy, and a high risk for information-seeking; for instance, a student employee at an academic library working at the desk late at night, with a supervisor who has in the past refused to answer this student’s questions because she thinks he should remember what she verbally told him during training a month ago. a patron comes to the desk wanting to extend a loan on a reserve item until morning; the student is unsure of the permissions and process. were there adequate documentation (an online document, for example, of policies and procedures), or were the supervisor more willing to share information, the “risk” element would be taken out of the equation, as well as, perhaps, the student’s low sense of self-efficacy. the thinking and actions this student might go through in such a situation have been described by elfreda chatman as “self-protective behavior” (hersberger, 2005). chatman identified four characteristics of such behaviors: secrecy, deception, risk-taking, and situational relevance. in this example, the student employee must choose between the risk of asking his secrecy-wielding supervisor what to do, or deception of both supervisor and patron by bluffing and risking a solution which may be incorrect. either choice ultimately has a negative effect both on service to patrons and on the student worker himself. thomas davenport, in his book information ecology, discusses what happens when a system lets down individuals from the system’s very inception: if employees “don’t feel their interests have been adequately represented in deliberations over information, they’ll develop their own sources of information and subvert the…structure” (1997). when employees don’t trust their own system, they create workarounds, back doors, and “go-to” people they ask when they are afraid to approach those who may actually be more knowledgeable on the subject. davenport found, in his studies of organizations, that the many reasons individuals engage in non-sharing behavior boil down to distrust: of either the individual’s own ability, or of what others would do with the information. above all, davenport found that information is often “hoarded to preserve the importance and unique contribution of its creator or current owner.” individuals may perceive that their value to an organization is based solely on their knowledge, and if that knowledge is shared, there is no need to keep the individual around. people must trust that their value also resides in their abilities to grow and adapt, and to acquire new knowledge. at many libraries, categories of information are associated with people rather than departments, locations, or workflows. this can be embodied when a person takes on, or is assigned, the role of gatekeeper of information. take, for example, a library that has undergone an ils migration, where some data about lost and overdue books did not migrate correctly. this data is maintained by the supervisor at the main branch in the form of printouts. the supervisor considers himself the only person who can consult and understand the information. not only do the staff at the other branches have to call the main branch to resolve problems with patron accounts, but if the supervisor is not there, the patron must return when he is in. this supervisor displays distrust of the abilities of his colleagues. perhaps he also feels that exclusive ownership of this knowledge and how to interpret it makes him a valuable employee. this person is acting as a gatekeeper. while there are of course advantages to funneling specialized requests or questions through one person, there are distinct disadvantages. when one person controls a cache of information – whether procedures, passwords, policies, or even the names of other gatekeepers – so much more rests upon the relationship between the gatekeeper and the information seeker. and that knowledge may be lost if the gatekeeper leaves. elfreda chatman found that such self-protective behavior ultimately results in a negative effect on individuals’ “access to useful or helpful information.” one concept i’ve only glanced on is power, and how it fits into concepts of information behavior. marcia bates and many others point out that in most studies of information behavior, people prefer to get their information from other human beings if possible (2010). however, power structures can stymie this preference. just as those with more social capital get ahead in the larger world, the same is true in the library workplace; they are, as articulated in sociologist nan lin’s theory of social capital, “more likely to be in a position to encounter useful information either directly or by proxy” (johnson, 2005). in particular, the formation of in-groups in library workplaces that privilege or withhold information works against the free flow of information.  (while in-groups and out-groups based on larger societal categories such as race and gender are critically important factors, that is a subject for a whole other article.)3 these groups may be demarcated by departmental divisions, the length of time employees have been working at a library, social groups formed around interests, or “professional” versus “paraprofessional.” this last divide is a sore point at many libraries, and many have written and spoken about it.4 some libraries have deliberately blurred these lines as they blend services across departments.  it may seem a meaningless distinction what we call ourselves, particularly when patrons are generally unaware of titles, and just want help from the person at the desk or on the other end of the phone. but chatman found that “[h]ow you are classified determines both your access to information and your ability to use it” (2000). this is not just true for those of us with clearance classifications in government jobs. the titles we give individual library staff members and their departments affect how information is shared and accessed. a special collections “paraprofessional” with an interest in the theory behind archival arrangement may not have the time or encouragement built into her job to learn and advance. paraprofessionals are often not invited to meetings where policies that will affect them are crafted. the mls and other advanced degrees are keys that unlock information. i am personally grateful for everything i learned in my master’s program, and i think professional library science education has value. i think, however, a more nuanced progression in professional development, a blend of on-the-job learning and formal education, would open conduits and allow practical and theoretical information to flow more freely in all directions. we can all learn from each other, but we must all be willing to teach and learn. communication researcher j. david johnson writes that individuals’ own perceptions of information politics can affect their behavior: “for many individuals it does not make much sense to learn more about things over which they have no control, so the powerless tend not to seek information” (2009). active information sharing by those with power can counteract this tendency. davenport, writing from a corporate perspective, identifies three types of information behaviors that improve an information environment: “sharing, handling overload, and dealing with multiple meanings” (1997). the first of these behaviors, sharing, is part of what information scientists madhu reddy and b.j. jansen describe as “collaborative information behavior,” or cib (2008). people are more likely to move from individual information behavior (including withholding, selectively disseminating, or using secrecy or deception) to cib when certain triggers occur. these include fragmented information resources, lack of domain expertise, and complexity of information need. in other words, when the situation is pressing enough, people will share rather than hoard. in theory, for example, enough database problems during a weekend or vacation will force an systems librarian who has kept problem-solving processes to herself to share them with other employees. while that is an example of an individual, one-time behavior conducted under duress, in an ideal world, similar situations would trigger the creation of more open, transparent, and flexible information environments. lisa lister, writing specifically about library workplaces, notes that “workplace structure itself can foster collegiality or its antithesis, competition and turf guarding” (2003). she observes that library workplaces, in theory, should lend themselves to collegiality and open sharing of information, because of the profession’s more “circular and participatory” and less “pyramidal and autocratic” nature. libraries tend to have, and are trending toward, flat structures. it is more crucial than ever to use these structures to create more transparent, open, and flexible information environments. such models not only improve the flow of information, but also embody the principles and values of the library profession. open access means both we don’t have to look far for models of more open information environments. the impact of the open access movement on the library universe – its implications for publishing, copyright, and access – is well-documented. many librarians have enthusiastically embraced the principles of open access when it comes to collections decisions, or working with faculty on publishing agreements. how many of us, however, have applied these principles to our own workplaces? the budapest open access initiative includes this key principle of open access: “removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge” (2002). replace “rich” and “poor” with “information rich” and “information poor,” and “humanity” with “library staff,” and this sounds to me like an ideal directive for information sharing in the library workplace. library and information science scholar kevin rioux describes a set of behaviors he refers to as “information acquiring-and-sharing,” which focuses not on information seeking but on how available an individual makes his or her own information base to others with information needs  – a concept directly in line with the principles of open access (2005). when undertaking information acquiring-and-sharing, an individual actively stores and recalls others’ existing and potential information needs, makes associations with information she has acquired, and shares the information. in other words, she removes barriers to access. in order to be successful at both seeking and sharing information, individuals must be aware of other people’s information needs and sharing behaviors. this crucial act of sharing can happen in either direction. librarians maria anna jankowska and linnea marshall (2003) suggest sharing information via joint meetings between departments whose information behaviors might clash. in a very specific example, lisa lister suggests that what she calls “fugitive” information useful to public services librarians (e.g., phone numbers for referrals) be clearly documented, rather than relying on individual librarians’ memory or informal sharing (2003), which privileges particular librarians and their social networks. in choo et al.’s study of a canadian law firm (2006), employees were surveyed about the information environment in their workplace. some of the statements with which employees were asked to indicate their agreement were: knowledge and information in my organization is available and organized to make it easy to find what i need. information about good work practices, lessons learned, and knowledgeable persons is easy to find in my organization. my organization makes use of information technology to facilitate knowledge and information sharing. these are all statements on which librarians might easily agree if we were launching an online, open-access journal, but perhaps not on library workplaces’ own internal organization of information. this applies particularly to the last statement. how many of us are using paper files or outdated computer programs to store information about instruction strategies, acquisition processes, or community contacts? libraries should take advantage of more inexpensive, open technologies and invest in training existing and new employees (where, of course, they are able to do so under staffing and financial constraints). one of the goals of open access is to make research and other scholarly work more accessible in pre-publication stages, in order to benefit from the collaborative nature of the internet.  a number of barriers exist to implementing this approach in library workplaces. communication researcher william garvey identified that scientists participate in a public culture of communication, but a private culture of research (1979). while the scientific research environment may have changed, libraries have been slow to break down the “private culture” of our own workplaces, instead privileging information to make ourselves as individuals seem more valuable.  cross-functionality and collaboration can begin to clear the logjam of what sociologists marc smith and howard t. welser call the “collective action dilemma” – when “actors seek a collective outcome, yet each actor’s narrow self-interest rewards her or him for not contributing to that group goal” (2005).  for example, working alone, a reference librarian’s knowledge of an arcane trick to produce good catalog results is an asset to him. working in a cross-functional catalog team with a technical services librarian could force the librarian to explain how he uses the catalog and spur improvements to the system. though it may rob the reference librarian of some “special” knowledge, the user has been served better through the pressure of others on a cross-functional team.5 open access thrives on the idea of the community of practice, a model enacted in some library organizations, but certainly not all. in true communities of practice, people share goals, interests, and a common language; they work with the same information, tools, and technologies. while the latter half of that description may be a tall order for specialized library functions and libraries with shrinking budgets, the former should be feasible in library workplaces. goals, interests, and a common language: all of these can be summarized in a mission and accomplished by attendant goals, directives, and processes. how can we get disparate groups within library workplaces to agree upon a common language and to share information using it? martha mautino and michael lorenzen, quoting business professor phillip clampitt, offer concrete suggestions, both structural — writing interdepartmental agreements, tracking organizational processes, creating cross-functional teams — and behavioral – inclusive brainstorming sessions, show and tell at all-staff meetings (2003). all of these efforts can go a long way toward increasing access to information at all stages of creation and implementation, and to creating a common language and goals among library staff. it’s already happening to some extent – sharing among libraries is strong at conferences and on social media – but robust, open-access-style repositories of knowledge in library workplaces would be powerful. the new librarian and the principles of the profession in a study of janitors with information needs, elfreda chatman found that they “believed that, if their supervisors or even neighbours or friends knew some problems that they were having, they would take advantage of them by using this information against them” (2000). in other studies, people did not want to be viewed as less capable than others and therefore did not seek information. this can be a particularly prevalent problem for new librarians in their first professional positions. they may be expected to jump in and learn as they go along —and without a supportive or clear structure of both human and documented information sources, they may revert to self-protective behavior. those new to the profession or to a particular workplace are singularly positioned to benefit the most from an open and well-structured information environment, or to improve a closed and poorly structured one. library literature abounds with advice to new librarians (whether to the profession or a workplace).  both julie todaro (2007) and natalie baur (2012), writing separately in the ala-apa newsletter library worklife, suggest responsibilities for the new employee, including: learning the library’s hierarchy, culture, and expectations, seeking out materials and documents, and introducing oneself to everyone (not just to those who may seem strategically advantageous). rebecca k. miller brings the responsibilities of both sides together: “through accurate job descriptions and well-developed communications, a library organization can…communicate realistic expectations, making sure that new librarians come into an organization with a clear idea of what the organization expects and how the new librarian can work to meet those expectations” (2013). a new person coming into a library workplace may have ideas about workplace information culture from a previous position or from library school, but she must also learn the ways information is socially transmitted in her new workplace. if those ways are unnecessarily complicated (whether intentionally or unintentionally), it is more difficult for the new person to do her job. perhaps members of a department have “always” taken vacation on a seniority basis, and when a new person is granted vacation on a first-come, first-served basis, there may be unspoken resentment. the new person is unaware of both the custom and the senior employees’ resentment; the senior employees and manager have not shared their custom with the new person. down the line, when that new person needs information, that resentment may affect the senior employees’ willingness to share it. and no one will know why because it has not been communicated. had the policy been documented in the first place, it would have been less of a problem. todaro places responsibility equally on the new person and the organization to seek out and to provide information, respectively. as she points out, however, “much ‘common knowledge’ is known to all but new employees” (2007). this common knowledge includes methods of communication, and the accepted processes of retrieving and using content from common sources of information. one common source of information, as i previously discussed, is an established mission. maria anna jankowska and linnea marshall describe an organization without a mission this way: “beliefs may be promulgated among the members through their own personal communications among themselves….the quantity, quality, and inclusiveness of these personal communications contribute to, or detract from, a unified organizational vision” (2003). a poorly conceived or written mission statement is, of course, just as harmful as no mission at all. but constructed carefully from both top down (larger institutional mission) and bottom up (employees’ tasks and services), they can inform everything in a workplace, including procedures and policies governing information behavior. clearly-written missions and goals can address three important, positive types of information behavior identified by davenport:  sharing information, handling information overload, and dealing with multiple meanings. a collaboratively written and agreed-upon set of goals and directions for a library makes information public (sharing), distills it (overload), and asks everyone to agree on a common language (multiple meanings). this may all sound obvious, but there are plenty of libraries that do not address these three behaviors, that do not have unified goals or even a mission statement. and in those libraries, as jankowska and marshall point out, lateral communications – which often occur in the context of social relationships and not in an open community of practice – govern the day-to-day tasks and, ultimately, long-term direction of that library. as lisa lister writes, “our library culture and organizational structure can either foster or hinder the participatory ideals that contribute to our collegiality.” the ala’s code of ethics (2008) provides principles to accomplish the former – to foster information sharing and clear, open channels of communication, through library organizational and information culture. three of the eight principles under the code of ethics are: we provide the highest level of service to all library users through appropriate and usefully organized resources; equitable service policies; equitable access; and accurate, unbiased, and courteous responses to all requests. we distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources. we strive for excellence in the profession by maintaining and enhancing our own knowledge and skills, by encouraging the professional development of co-workers, and by fostering the aspirations of potential members of the profession. all three of these principles can be applied when interacting with fellow library staff as well as when serving users; employees should have equitable access to accurate information that affects their jobs. reddy and jansen argue that collaborative information behavior can only take place where there is “trust, awareness, and coordination” (2008). all three of these factors are reflected in the ala’s code of ethics: we must trust that personal beliefs will not hinder coworkers from sharing information, maintain awareness of our own knowledge, and employ coordination through actively sharing information to foster others’ professional development. when information is shared among all individuals in a library workplace – especially from those with power to those with less power – we ultimately provide better service, and the principles of our profession are enacted. many thanks to ellie collier as my in the library with the lead pipe editor for excellent help in shaping this article, and to caro pinto as both external editor and stellar colleague. thanks are also due to katy aronoff, macee damon, hope houston, and matt van sleet, for thought-provoking conversations and for encouraging me to write. references american library association. (2008, january 22). code of ethics of the american library association. retrieved from  http://www.ala.org/aboutala/governance/policymanual/updatedpolicymanual/section2/40corevalues bates, m. j. (2010). information behavior. in m.j. bates & m. n. maack (eds), encyclopedia of library and information sciences (3rd ed.). retrieved from http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/information-behavior.html baur, n. (2012, july). the ten commandments of the new professional. library worklife. retrieved from http://ala-apa.org/newsletter/2007/08/16/ten-dos-and-donts-for-your-first-ten-days-of-work/ budapest open access initiative. (2002, 14 february). retrieved from http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read case, d.o. (2002). looking for information: a survey of research on information seeking, needs, and behavior. boston: academic press. chatman, e. a. (2000). framing social life in theory and research. the new review of information behaviour research, 1, 3–17. choo, c. w., furness, c. f., paquette, s., van den berg, h., detlor, b., bergeron, p., & heaton, l.  (2006). working with information: information management and culture in a professional services organization. journal of information science 32(6), 491-510. courtright, c. (2007). context in information behavior research. annual review of information science and technology, 41, 273-306. davenport, t.h., with l. prusak. (1997). information ecology: mastering the information and knowledge environment. oxford: oxford university press. fulton, c. chatman’s life in the round. (2005). in k. e. fisher, s. erdelez, & l. mckechnie (eds.), theories of  information behavior (pp. 79-82). medford, nj: information today, inc. garvey, w.d. (1979). communication, the essence of science: facilitating information exchange among librarians, scientists, engineers, and students. elmsford, ny: pergamon press. hersberger, j. (2005). chatman’s information poverty. in k. e. fisher, s. erdelez, & l. mckechnie (eds.), theories of  information behavior (pp. 75-78). medford, nj: information today, inc. jankowska, m. a., & l. marshall. (2003). in mabry, c.h. (ed.), cooperative reference: social interaction in the workplace (pp. 131-144). new york: the haworth press. johnson, c.a. (2005). nan lin’s theory of social capital. in k. e. fisher, s. erdelez, & l. mckechnie (eds.), theories of information behavior (pp. 323-327). medford, nj: information today, inc. johnson, j.d. (2009). information regulation in work-life : applying the comprehensive model of information seeking to organizational networks. in t. afifi & w. afifi (eds.), uncertainty information management, and disclosure decision: theories and applications (pp. 182-200). new york: routledge. lister, l. f. (2003). reference service in the context of library culture and collegiality: tools for keeping librarians on the same (fast flipping) pages. in mabry, c.h. (ed.), cooperative reference: social interaction in the workplace (pp. 33-39). new york: the haworth press, 2003. mautino, m., & lorenzen, m. (2013). interdepartmental communication in academic libraries. in k. blessinger & p. hrycaj (eds.), workplace culture in academic libraries: the early 21st century (pp. 203-217). oxford: chandos publishing. miller, r. k. (2013). helping new librarians find success and satisfaction in the academic library. in k. blessinger & p. hrycaj (eds.), workplace culture in academic libraries: the early 21st century (pp. 81-95). oxford: chandos publishing. reddy, m.c. & jansen, b.j. (2008). a model for understanding collaborative information behavior in context: a study of two healthcare teams. information processing & management 44, 256-273. rioux, k. (2005). information acquiring-and-sharing. in k. e. fisher, s. erdelez, & l. mckechnie (eds.), theories of information behavior (pp. 169-173). medford, nj: information today, inc. singer, p. m., & hurley, j. e. (2005, june). the importance of knowledge management today. library worklife. retrieved from http://ala-apa.org/newsletter/2005/06/17/the-importance-of-knowledgemanagement-today/ smith, m., & welser, h. t. (2005). collective action dilemma. in k. e. fisher, s. erdelez, & l. mckechnie (eds.), theories of information behavior (pp. 95-98). medford, nj: information today, inc. talja, s. (2002). information sharing in academic communities: types and levels of collaboration in information seeking and use. new review of information behavior research, 3(1), 143-159. talja, s., and hansen, p. (2006). information sharing. in a. spink & c. cole (eds.), new directions in human behavior (pp. 113-134). new york: springer. todaro, j. (2007, august). ten dos and don’ts for your first ten days of work. library worklife. retrieved from http://ala-apa.org/newsletter/2007/08/16/ten-dos-and-donts-for-your-first-ten-days-of-work/ wilson, t. d. (1999). models in information behaviour research. journal of documentation 55(3), 249-270. further reading chen, x., ma, j., jin, j., & fosh, p. (2013). information privacy, gender differences, and intrinsic motivation in the workplace. international journal of information management, 33(6), 917-926. karsten, m.f. (2006). gender, race, and ethnicity in the workplace: issues and challenges for today’s organizations. westport, ct: praeger publishers. richards, d., & busch, p. (2013). knowing-doing gaps in ict: gender and culture. vine: the journal of information & knowledge management systems 43(3), 264-295. sewall, b. b., & alarid, t. (2013). managing the access services desk: utilizing layered levels of staff skills. journal of access services 10(1), 6-13. somerville, m. m., huston, m. e., and mirjamdotter, a. (2005.) building on what we know: staff development in the digital age. the electronic library 23(4): 480-491. wilson, t. d. (2010, february/march). fifty years of information behavior research. asis&t bulletin. retrieved from http://www.asis.org/bulletin/feb-10/febmar10_wilson.html   unless noted, researchers come from an information studies or information science background. [↩] this concept will sound familiar in terms of students to anyone who has kept up with project information literacy (http://projectinfolit.org). [↩] see, for instance, in further reading: chen et al. 2013, richards and busch 2013, and karsten 2006. [↩] see, for example, rachel applegate’s 2010 article in library trends, “clarifying jurisdiction in the library workforce” – http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/v059/59.1-2.applegate.html [↩] many librarians have written articles on cross-training staff at, or combining, various public services desks (reference, circulation, technology help, writing help); bethany sewell and theresa alarid’s 2013 article in journal of access services is a recent example. [↩] information behavior, library workplaces, organizational culture, professional development librarian as poet / poet as librarian state of the pipe 4 responses paul 2014–02–27 at 11:29 am this is an outstanding article. i’m a relatively new librarian at my university, and information just doesn’t get shared here, which is baffling. i feel like everyone here needs to read this. pingback : being and formulating – february link love mandy 2014–03–14 at 1:10 pm insightful analysis of library workplace culture! i am a km student and working in library. it is quite obvious that the departmental divisions is always hinder information flow as in people’s mind they will think “this is not important to others”. “these groups may be demarcated by departmental divisions, the length of time employees have been working at a library, social groups formed around interests, or “professional” versus “paraprofessional.” also, i feel the same for myself (no excuse for my own laziness) that i am just assistant not professional staff and i have no obligation to share with senior staff or i feel passive to acquire new information. pingback : infobib » bibliothekarisches informationsverhalten this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct are we walking the talk? a snapshot of how academic lis journals are (or aren’t) enacting disciplinary values – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2022 19 jan rachel borchardt, symphony bruce, amanda click and charlotte roh /1 comments are we walking the talk? a snapshot of how academic lis journals are (or aren’t) enacting disciplinary values by rachel borchardt, symphony bruce, amanda click, and charlotte roh in brief  the academic library field claims to value social responsibility, open access, equity, diversity, and inclusion (edi). but academic library journal practices do not always reflect these values. this article describes a mixed-method study designed to operationalize and measure these values in practice. we found that many of the journals we examined have open access policies and practices but fall short in providing for accessibility and ensuring edi in their publication processes. in short, library journals are not meeting the ideals that our own field has defined.   introduction there is a great deal of discussion about our disciplinary values in the library and information science (lis) field. we prioritize values like access to information, diversity and democracy, and lifelong learning and social responsibility (american library association, 2019). librarians urge our professor colleagues to publish their scholarship in open access journals and teach with open educational resources. we form diversity committees and inclusive reading groups. we talk about pushing back on the systems (e.g., scholarly publishing) and institutions (e.g., universities) that perpetuate inequity. there are many ways to explore whether the lis field is living up to these ideals; this multi-method study focuses on these values in lis scholarly communications, particularly academic librarianship journals. it attempts to summarize the general state of academic library journals, including trends in publishers, indexing, and metrics. in addition, it explores whether these journals are demonstrating a commitment to the values of the lis profession, namely open access and equity, diversity, and inclusion (edi).1  our research questions are as follows: what is the general state of academic library journals, including trends in publishers, indexing, and metrics?  are the core academic library journals demonstrating a commitment to the values of the lis profession, namely openness, inclusion, and equity?  literature review the lis scholarly landscape the research that explores the state of the lis scholarly landscape often focuses on bibliometrics. for example, sin (2011) investigated the relationship between international coauthorship and citation impact. walters and wilder (2015) explored “the contributions of particular disciplines, countries, and academic departments” to the lis literature. bibliographic analysis of specific journals is popular, including library management journal (singh & chander, 2014), jasist (bar-ilan, 2012), and journal of documentation (tsay & shu, 2011).  another common theme is lis research content analysis. kim and jeong (2006) analyzed the development and use of theory in lis research. a recent paper summarized research topics and methods across 50 years of lis research (järvelin & vakkari, 2021). onyancha (2018) used author-supplied keywords to map the evolution of lis research.  only a few attempts have been made to identify and/or evaluate the lis journal corpus. as nixon observed in 2014, “in library and information science (lis) there is no professionally accepted tiered or ranked list of journals in the united states,” which “creates a dilemma for librarian-authors who wish to expand the literature in librarianship, write about successful programs, or report on research findings” (p. 66). she proposes a methodology that takes into account expert opinions, circulation and acceptance rates, impact factors, and h-indexes. in 2005, nisonger and davis replicated a 1985 study by kohl and davis that identified and ranked 71 lis journals by surveying lis program deans and association of college & research libraries (acrl) library directors. the resulting list demonstrates a “hierarchy of prestige” that is based on the perceptions of a small, albeit knowledgeable, number of people in the lis field at that time. edi & the professional values of academic librarians  recent documents published by acrl, a division of the american library association (ala) and the professional association for academic librarians, clearly encourage a commitment to edi. the acrl plan for excellence includes seven core organizational values, one of which is equity, diversity, and inclusion. the original document, approved in 2011, included simply diversity. the first version to replace diversity with equity, diversity, and inclusion was approved in november 2018. following an ala task force report in 2017, equity, diversity, and inclusion recommendations were approved for implementation in february 2018, which led to the inclusion of edi in the ala policy manual. in 2019, acrl published an updated scholarly communications research agenda. this report, open and equitable scholarly communications: creating a more inclusive future, calls for the scholarly communications and research environment to be more open, inclusive, and equitable and defines these concepts:   open… refers to removing barriers to access and encouraging use and reuse, especially of the tools of production of scholarly content and of the outputs of that work. inclusive… refers to (1) creating opportunities for greater participation in systems, institutions, and processes involved in creating, sharing, and consuming research; (2) removing barriers that can hinder such participation; and (3) actively encouraging and welcoming people to participate, particularly those whose voices have often been marginalized. equitable… refers to ensuring that systems, institutions, and processes function in a way that gives everyone what they need in order to successfully participate (acrl, 2019b). in a statement updated in 2019 and focused specifically on open access, acrl recommends that “academic librarians publish in open access venues, deposit in open repositories, and make openly accessible all products across the lifecycle of their scholarly and research activity, including articles, research data, monographs, presentations, digital scholarship, grant documentation, and grey literature.” in addition, the organization urges “librarians who are editors, reviewers, authors, grantees, or digital scholars should advocate open models of creation and dissemination with publishers, funding agencies, and project or program managers” (acrl, 2019a).  open access in lis  open access (oa) is “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment” (sparc, n.d.). in 2016 ollé castellà, lópez-borrull, & abadal surveyed the editors of 212 lis journals indexed in scopus and the web of knowledge. while only 10% of the journals in the sample were fully oa at the time, the respondents believed that oa funded via institutional support would become the most common model in the short term. a 2016 article examined the open access status of five ala division peer reviewed journals. three of the five were fully oa, providing “unrestricted access to published content” (hall, arnold-garza, gong, & shorish, 2016, p. 659). the fourth was reportedly transitioning from a green to gold oa model (although it does not appear to have done so yet), and the fifth had no plans to adopt an oa model (see the defining openness, equity, and inclusion practices section under method section for definitions of oa types).  mercer (2011) found that 49% of articles written by academic librarians and appearing in lisa in 2008 were available oa. authors in the study categorized as other (e.g., public librarians, lis faculty) published oa 37% of the time. in a more recent survey of academic librarians, 50% of respondents indicated that they considered open access status when selecting a journal for publication. however, only 6% named oa as their top consideration, and many expressed concern about funding for article processing charges (apcs)2 and promotion and tenure expectations (neville & crampsie, 2019).  journals’ open data policies and practice have also been examined in several disciplines, including library and information science (lis). jackson studied the strength, level of detail, and compliance with open data policies in over 200 lis journals and found that the strongest open data policies were created by independent publishers, with commercial publishers having more uniform but relatively weaker, vaguer, and less comprehensive policies in place, including many instances where lis journals chose to adopt weaker policies from an available range of policies made available from the commercial publisher (2021). inclusion & equity in publishing the committee on publication ethics (cope) is a non-profit that provides a variety of support for publication ethics, including guidance on a variety of topics such as transparency and open access (n.d.). they recently surveyed members regarding edi and publication ethics to help identify areas of priority for support. in 2021, cope hosted an edi-focused webinar for its members and released updated, freely-available guidance regarding diversification of editorial boards. cope membership is voluntary but has over 13,000 members, primarily individual publishers. in 2018, the library publishing coalition released an ethical framework for library publishing, a document designed to center publishing practices around library values. each section of the framework includes an introduction, scope statement, existing resources, and recommendations. practical recommendations in the section on diversity, equity, and inclusion, include: create a diversity statement for the publishing program or point to the library’s diversity statement; educate graduate students and faculty on systemic biases in academic publishing and strategies to dismantle barriers; provide access to your publications to diverse audiences through direct promotion in diverse communities and open or reduced cost to access content (library publishing coalition, 2018).  the coalition for diversity and inclusion in scholarly communications (c4disc) was founded in 2019 in order to address issues around diversity, equity, and inclusion by trade and professional associations that represent organizations and individuals working in scholarly communications. its work thus far includes a joint statement of principles, two anti-racist toolkits, and several webinar workshops. involvement is tiered, with formal members, sponsoring partners, and individual donors.  charlotte roh, who is a co-author of this article, has written extensively on the lack of diversity in scholarly publishing, librarianship, and academia in general. her work has been cited broadly in the last few years in the publishing industry. in an early c&rl news scholarly communications column, she observed: as librarians who are engaging more directly with scholarly publishing, we must ask ourselves: are we perpetuating the biases and power structures of traditional scholarly publishing? or are we using library publishing to interrogate, educate, and establish more equitable models of scholarly communication? as librarians, we can be explicit about inequalities in scholarly publishing. we can take action to avoid reproducing them in our unique roles as publishers, scholarly communication experts, and information literacy providers (roh, 2016, p. 85). inefuku and roh (2016) argue that librarians can play an important role in advocating for social justice and diversity in scholarly communications. libraries can host and publish new journals that specifically include marginalized voices, in an effort to disrupt traditional academic publishing. as journal authors, editors, and reviewers, librarians can push for open access policies and editorial board diversity. and librarians can educate and advocate, cultivating “an open access-oriented mind-set in the next generation of scholars” and addressing information access disparities.   research metrics and academic librarianship in november 2020, the acrl executive board approved the acrl framework for impactful scholarship and metrics, which establishes a suggested framework for the evaluation of academic librarian scholarship (borchardt et al., 2020). this framework includes a variety of article-level metrics, including not only citations as an indicator of scholarly impact but also downloads, views, shares, mentions, and comments as potential indicators of practitioner impact. librarians wishing to use this framework to demonstrate the impact of their scholarly output need access to these metrics, many of which are typically provided directly from publishers. method our study design involved a collection and analysis of content from several sources, including academic library journal websites, followed by a survey of journal editors. prior to data collection, we compiled a comprehensive list of relevant journals and operationalized the concepts of open, equitable, and inclusive principles. in the first stage of the study, we collected non-exhaustive information about inclusive and equitable practices from each journal’s website but did not seek additional information from sources such as social media or journal editorials. in the second stage, we sent a survey to all journal editors, asking them to elaborate on relevant practices and policies.  journal selection the goal of this study was to analyze the state of academic library journals, with a focus on the edi values of the subfield. unfortunately, there is no universally agreed upon corpus of scholarly journals for the academic library field. we considered building a journal list using nixon’s (2014) methodology for ranking lis journals, or nisonger and davis’s (2005) ranking of journals based on the perceptions of arl library directors and lis deans. however, we determined that san jose state university’s lis publications wiki (n.d.) offered a more inclusive set of journals. the wiki’s inclusion criteria is not published. the list is global in scale but not comprehensive. regardless of these limitations, other scholarly communications researchers have also found this wiki to be an appropriate and thorough resource (vandegrift & bowley, 2014). we began with the wiki’s journal list and applied the inclusion and exclusion criteria in table 1. table 1. inclusion and exclusion criteria for journals selected for this study. inclusion criteria exclusion criteria scholarly journal not scholarly (e.g., trade publication) peer reviewed not peer reviewed academic library focus, demonstrated by any but not necessarily all of the following: academic librarians are a primary, but not necessarily exclusive, audience publication is owned by acrl academic librarianship is in the title primary focus is something other than academic libraries (e.g. information science, public libraries) issue(s) published in the last 12 months no issue published in the last 12 months one title, journal of librarianship and scholarly communication, was manually added to the list. the final list of 78 journals is included in appendix a. defining openness, inclusion, and equity practices based on the 2019 acrl open and equitable scholarly communications report’s definitions of open, inclusive, and equitable, we developed a checklist of practices and policies that demonstrate an ongoing commitment to these practices, as shown in table 2. open access categories were defined as gold, green, platinum, hybrid, and bronze, based on commonly used criteria (“open access,” 2021).  table 2. open, inclusive, and equitable practices checklist of questions for journal practice. characteristic definition demonstrated in journals open “removing barriers to access and encouraging use and reuse, especially of the tools of production of scholarly content and of the outputs of that work.” does the journal offer oa publishing options? what type? does the journal encourage the open sharing of data?  does the journal apply creative commons licenses and/or confer ownership to the author(s) by default? inclusive “(1) creating opportunities for greater participation in systems, institutions, and processes involved in creating, sharing, and consuming research; (2) removing barriers that can hinder such participation; and (3) actively encouraging and welcoming people to participate, particularly those whose voices have often been marginalized.” does the journal actively and continuously recruit reviewers or editors from underrepresented groups? does the journal actively and continuously encourage authors from underrepresented groups to submit manuscripts? does the journal waive publishing fees for demonstrated need? does the journal demonstrate flexibility in accepted research processes and scholarly output format? does the journal ensure that the journal website is accessible for all users (e.g., ada compliant, all article formats compatible with assistive technology)? does the journal ensure that the journal backend is accessible for all reviewers, authors, and editors (e.g., wcag compliant)? does the journal provide professional development for journal workers to ensure inclusive practices (e.g., anti-bias training)? does the journal author guidelines encourage inclusive language (e.g., they/them) and variety of writing styles? equitable “ensuring that systems, institutions, and processes function in a way that gives everyone what they need in order to successfully participate.” does the journal provide additional assistance to authors (e.g., language support, proofreading, mentoring, alternate contacts in case of problems)? does the journal formally recognize the work of everyone who has contributed to scholarly output (e.g., open peer review, crediting contributors such as research assistants)? does the journal pay editors, authors, and/or reviewers for their labor? database data collection we used ulrich’s periodicals directory to collect indexing information for the journals and cabell’s to collect acceptance rate information. open access status data was collected from both cabell’s and publisher websites because cabell’s only lists one open access category per journal. unpaywall data collection we contacted unpaywall to ask them for repository data for all journals included in our study for the past three years. this included repository rates > 0% for several journals that we had not identified as being green journals. we excluded one journal with a 0% repository rate that we had not classified as green but otherwise assumed that repository rates for these journals were due to either incomplete access to data or university mandates overriding journal-level green oa policies. journal website data collection statements, policies, or other documentation of open, equitable, and/or inclusive practices were collected from each journal’s website, as well as available metrics for individual articles. interpretation of information, such as how a policy journal website demonstrated open, inclusive, and/or equitable practice, was generally conducted by one individual member of the research team at a time, with two team members consulting as needed for unusual or unclear situations. in the case of oa classification and copyright, sometimes journal websites clearly stated that articles had creative commons licensing or similar licensing but did not clearly state that authors could publish their work in repositories. if the repository allowance was not clear — e.g., “we allow authors to self-archive their publications freely on the web” (marketing libraries journal) — we did not categorize the journal as green unless the journal editor’s survey response clarified the green oa policy.  survey data collection a survey asking about the demonstrated open, equitable, and inclusive practices in table 2 was sent to editors, editors-in-chief, and/or editorial boards for all 78 journals. we received 40 responses from 38 journals for an overall response rate of 48.7%.  openness, inclusion, and equity analysis information collected from journal websites were combined with survey results to categorize the openness, equity, and inclusion practices for all journals. in most cases, survey responses were taken at face value but in a few cases were replaced with data from other sources when available. for example, a journal self-reported as gold oa, but neither their website, cabell’s, or sherpa-romeo showed evidence of gold status and/or apc charges. survey comments were analyzed for common trends, including practices not originally part of the survey multiple-choice responses. the survey instrument and anonymized data are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5744702.v1. findings we collected data from 78 journal websites and received survey responses from 38 of those journals. the mixed-methods design represents our effort to ensure accuracy. we felt an obligation to accurately represent the efforts of these publications during a time in which organizations are attempting to enact change around edi. however, because the field is in a time of transition, these results may not align exactly with the current state of journal policy and practice at time of publication. for example, between the beginning and end of data collection, communications in information literacy unveiled their new statement of values, which addresses oa and edi issues. college & research libraries has recently adopted and will soon implement a data policy. the canadian journal of academic librarianship is developing a name change policy, which supports inclusivity for transgender researchers by allowing for “rapid and discreet author name changes to be made on digital editions of published works” (depaul, 2021). thus, these results could more accurately be labeled a “snapshot.” publishers for sake of simplicity, we only aggregated for-profit publishers in figure 6, as the non-profit publishers/hosting platforms for the majority of journals vary widely. among for-profit publishers, taylor & francis is by far the most common, publishing nearly ¼ of the journals (19 of 78), followed by emerald which published seven of the journals.  figure 1. prevalence of journal publishers. accessible equivalent of this chart as a list. indexing and journal-level metrics as demonstrated in figure 2, indexing of the academic librarianship literature is varied and inconsistent, with no single database including more than 70% of the journals in the study. notably, 13% of the journals are not indexed by any lis databases (or web of science / scopus), according to ulrich’s. this demonstrates somewhat of a disconnect between the more traditional ways in which a journal is acknowledged within academia — in this case, indexing — and the corpus of the academic library field. this disconnect became even more apparent when we considered two databases responsible for journal-level metrics, web of science (owned by clarivate, who produces journal impact factors) and scopus (owned by elsevier, who produce citescore and whose data is also used to tabulate scimago journal rank or sjr). in fact, while 48% of the journals studied are included in web of science, only 18 of them (22.7%) have impact factors, ranging from 0 to 3.18. the average impact factor for these 18 academic library journals is 1.39. this demonstrates the dearth of journal-level metrics for academic librarianship and is one of many arguments against the use of journal-level metrics for meaningful evaluation of academic librarian scholarship, which are demonstrably limited in their ability to serve as a proxy for the larger concepts of quality and impact for scholarly publications (borchardt et al., 2020; davies et al., 2021). figure 2. percentage of journal titles indexed by database. accessible equivalent of this chart as a list. acceptance rate is another commonly-used journal-level metric. cabell’s has reported acceptance rates for 43 of the 78 journals. of those with acceptance rates reported in cabell’s, the average rate was 46.2%, with a standard deviation of 17.4%. we believe that these rates are self-reported, as the range of acceptance rates was quite high, with “5-10%” reported as the lowest rate for catholic library world. however, this metric was in conflict with information given to us by the catholic library world editor in the survey. on reaching out to the editor, she thought that whoever had reported that information had probably reversed the percentage and that a rate of 90-95% was more reasonable, given her experience. article-level metrics article-level metrics are provided for 67.9% of the journals in the study. citations were the most common (though citation counts provided by a publisher will vary according to the source from which citations are drawn), as shown in figure 8. downloads and page views, perhaps the most useful unique indicators, are included in less than one-third of the journals. altmetric and plumx, two companies who collate a variety of “alternative metrics”, are also represented. some of the metrics are a reflection of the journal’s platform, as comments, refbacks, and pingbacks are all more commonly associated with blogging platforms but can provide unique qualitative insight into the engagement with a particular article. the 32.1% of journals with no article-level metrics indicates significant room for improvement, as article-level metrics are key for academic librarians wishing to demonstrate the scholarly and practitioner impact of their publications. figure 3. prevalence of article-level metrics. accessible equivalent of this chart as a list. openness looking at open access categories (figure 1), green oa is by far the most common form of open access, followed by platinum and hybrid, which account for the vast majority of journals in our dataset. four journals, or 5.1% of those studied, are bronze, indicating that only some content is openly accessible, and no open options were found for one journal. as expected, every journal providing hybrid publications was hosted by a major (for-profit) publisher. we can conclude from these results that open access is an accepted norm in academic library scholarship. since open access to information is a platform espoused by major library associations, this is both not a surprise and also gratifying to see how librarianship is, in this area, practicing what it preaches. in the case of the journal of creative library practice, the editor explains: we created this journal in order to promote and experiment with open access publishing — publishing articles on acceptance rather than bundling into issue, being open-minded about citation styles, and allowing for open peer review if wanted. we also wanted to validate the open sharing of practice in library and information science, given the nature of our field in which most practitioners don’t have the luxury of time and resources for large research projects. however, it should be noted that journal-level embrace of open access policies does not necessarily translate into author-level compliance with the green oa practice of making publications and/or preprints available. unpaywall’s data reported a 15.3% average rate of repository deposit for the published articles, with a 10.6% average rate of deposit for preprint versions of publications. this shows that authors also bear responsibility for ensuring that they are contributing to the equitable practice of making publications accessible to all when possible. according to the respondents, on the question of copyright and creative commons licensing (figure 2), authors retain copyright at just under half of the journals studied. the journal retains copyright at 17.7% of journals. the “sometimes” copyright retention is usually associated with hybrid journals, where authors presumably retain copyright but pay to have their article published open access. finally, no easily-discernible copyright or creative commons information was available for 6.3% of journals. nearly half of the journals studied do not have any explicit policies in place on data sharing (figure 3). several journal editors provided more complicated responses: two journals indicated that they did not regularly deal with data and thus the answer was not applicable; one indicated that they were in the process of adopting such a policy; and three noted that they encourage data sharing, although they do not have specific policies in place. for example, the journal of librarianship and scholarly communication stated, “we encourage data sharing, but do not require it. we provide suggestions for places to store the data.”  figure 4. prevalence of open access options. accessible equivalent of this chart as a list. figure 5. status of copyright ownership and creative commons licensing. accessible equivalent of this chart as a list. figure 6. status of open data sharing policies. accessible equivalent of this chart as a list. does your journal have policies in place to encourage the open sharing of data? no 48.7%, yes 43.6%, n/a 2.6%, encouraged 3.8%, in process 1.3% inclusivity in order to investigate inclusive journal practices, we asked survey respondents whether they engaged in any of the following eight examples: actively and continuously recruits reviewers or editors from underrepresented groups actively and continuously encourages authors from underrepresented groups to submit manuscripts waives publishing fees for demonstrated need demonstrates flexibility in accepted research processes and scholarly output format ensures that the journal website is accessible for all users (e.g., ada compliant, all article formats compatible with assistive technology) ensures that the journal backend is accessible for all reviewers, authors, and editors (e.g., wcag compliant) provides professional development for journal workers to ensure inclusive practices (e.g., anti-bias training) author guidelines encourage inclusive language (e.g., they/them) and variety of writing styles the prevalence of these practices is included, in the order listed above, in figure 4. the most common practices dealt with recruiting reviewers, editors, and/or authors from underrepresented groups and flexibility with the research processes and scholarly output format. the least common practice was providing edi professional development opportunities for journal workers (e.g., anti-bias training). five respondents indicated that their journals waived publishing fees, but upon further scrutiny, we believe that these responses were given in error. the waiving of article processing charges (apcs) is associated with gold oa, an oa format that did not appear in this dataset, and we are unaware of any other mandatory fees for authors (as opposed to voluntary, as in the case of hybrid publications). these responses have been removed from the dataset.  in our survey, all the respondents with the exception of one indicated that they did have inclusive practices in place. however, the content analysis of journal websites showed no evidence of these inclusive practices for more than half of the journals (see figure 4). this suggests that respondents think they have committed to inclusive practices that were not visible on their website, which makes it difficult to ascertain the veracity of their responses. figure 7. prevalence of inclusive practices. accessible equivalent of this chart as a list. some participants noted specific examples of inclusive practices, including those focused on language, peer-review, and other policies. library philosophy and practice “embraces the concept of world englishes and international english, and welcomes well-written articles in any variety of academic english.” the canadian journal of academic librarianship notes that their “internal style guide encourages inclusive language and in particular, language that is inclusive of indigenous peoples and knowledges.” the name change policy for the marketing libraries journal states that: if authors wish to change their names following publication, we will update the manuscript with the name changes and/or pronoun changes, with no legal documentation required. upon receiving the name change request, we will update all metadata, published content, and associated records under our control to reflect the requested name change. further, we respect the privacy and discretion in an author’s request for a name change. to protect the author’s privacy, we will not publish a correction notice to the paper, and we will not notify co-authors of the change. inclusive peer review practices included open and flexible peer review, tailored to the wishes of the authors and reviewers (journal of radical librarianship), and specialized reviewers for authors who speak english as an additional language (communications in information literacy).  equity we asked about three categories of equity practice in our survey: provides additional assistance to authors (e.g., language support, proofreading, mentoring, alternate contacts in case of problems) formally recognizes the work of everyone who has contributed to scholarly output (e.g., open peer review, crediting contributors such as research assistants) pays editors, authors, and/or reviewers for their labor equitable practices were less prevalent than other values measured, with the majority of journals not having any demonstrable or self-reported equitable practices. of these practices, payment was particularly low, with just 10.3% of journals reporting financial compensation for editors, authors, and/or reviewers. however, it’s worth noting that payment is not common practice in academic publishing. the editorial board of lead pipe has had multiple discussions about providing payment but has “always chosen to remain independent of sponsors or other types of fundraising.” one journal editor who is paid a small stipend reports regularly using this money to pay a specialized editor “to help international authors with language support and proofreading.” this is a unique situation for two reasons: first that the editor is receiving payment in the first place, which is not typical, and second that this editor is using their own money to pay for a special editor. presumably this is an individual decision rather than a policy one, so we don’t know whether this practice would continue. since none of the journals mentioned payment for labor on their websites, all of the compensation data was collected via survey responses.  many journals outlined standards for establishment of authorship, as well as standards for including other non-author support in acknowledgments, but few provided a structure such as credit, the taxonomy for contributor roles. peer review practices varied widely across journals, including the ways that reviewers are credited or acknowledged. some journals publicly thank reviewers in editorials; others provide formal letters of support for those seeking tenure and/or promotion. a number have registered for publons, a platform that tracks peer review and editing work, so that their reviewers can more easily quantify and demonstrate their labor.  figure 8. prevalence of equitable practices. accessible equivalent of this chart as a list. discussion emerging best practices there was a correlation between the journals that demonstrated the highest levels of open, inclusive, and equitable practices and those that had a more independent publishing platform, increasing the likelihood that they were truly working towards a less harmful experience for readers, authors, reviewers, and editors alike. these journals generally do not have to answer to commercial publishers with policies that could be prioritized over the possible will or interest of the editorial board. in this section, we would like to highlight some of the journals that demonstrate emerging best inclusive and equitable practices, based on the self-reported survey data. when interested librarians respond to the journal of the canadian health libraries association’s calls for new editors, they are required to include an edi statement that describes relevant experience and training. this journal also includes the following language in their author guidelines: “authors submitting to the journal must strive to use language that is free of bias and avoid perpetuating prejudicial beliefs or demeaning attitudes in their writing. please consult the apa guidelines and recommendations available for bias-free language.” the style guide for weave: journal of library user experience contains an inclusive language section that covers using pronouns, writing about disability, and avoiding harmful language. calls for editors and board members explicitly encourage applications from the bipoc community, people with disabilities, and people who identify as lgbtqia+. the journal’s dialog box, a feature that expands the concept of the book review, specifically invites content outside of traditional scholarly formats. more than half of in the library with the lead pipe board members are women of color, an intentional shift. this journal stands out in our dataset for not only engaging in the majority of inclusive and equitable practices listed in the survey, but also codifying their commitment with language, policies, and procedures. in addition to the options listed on the survey instrument, the editors’ responses indicate a culture of care: “…during the pandemic we collectively took steps to address our own mental health and decided to pause submissions for three months.”    communications in information literacy has made recent strides in inclusive and equitable practice and policy. their recently published statement of values addresses authors’ ownership of their work, edi and social justice, and “practicing care in our relationships with authors, peer reviewers, readers, and colleagues.” journal editors developed a new policy on inclusive language, with input from the transgender and non-binary library community. in addition, they make a concerted effort to engage the international scholarly community via targeted outreach with organizations like ifla and specialized manuscript reviewers for articles written by authors who speak english as an additional language.  room for improvement we see similar trends across many of the values-based practices we measured: there is a lot of room for improvement. overall, we found no inclusive practices for 51% of journals and no equitable practices for 57%. some survey responses made clear that journal policies were outside editorial control. as one observed, “many of our policies are dictated by our publisher, so we (as editors) don’t really get the option of doing things unless we bring it up.” notably, a few editors referred us to their publisher as the owner of diversity policies, eschewing responsibility and knowledge. we found this “passing of the buck” particularly troubling. many large publishers have announced edi initiatives, whether performative or sincere. for example, taylor & francis includes edi as a “corporate responsibility,” but it seems that these types of efforts are regularly operationalized at the journal level. with only 9% of journals reporting professional development opportunities such as bias training, there is little to no evidence of real change for scholars who might be experiencing structural and individual barriers. this may be particularly true for scholars with disabilities, since only 14% of survey respondents replied that they ensure that the backend is accessible for reviewers, authors, and editors. while this may be due to a lack of knowledge from the editors who completed the survey, one summed up the situation nicely, saying “the backend is barely usable for me, so i hope it is at least [ada/wcag] compliant.” the decision of where to host content is one with far-reaching implications, and it is concerning that more than 40% of the journals in our study are hosted with a for-profit publisher, and therefore captive to commercial priorities that can be at odds with library values. starting with the open access status of these journals, we noted the strong and enduring impact publishers have had on both setting and limiting the degree to which our collective values are embodied in our journals. as one respondent noted, “as an editor, the things i can do are limited by the choice of publisher for our journal. we’ve gone through a publisher change recently, and that limited our open access options (but increased the support we are able to provide for authors of accepted work).” journals held by traditional, for-profit publishers are more likely to have more restrictive open access options and are bound to publisher policies, and the editor’s quote hints at some of the complicated trade-offs involved with choosing a journal’s publisher. these findings are consistent with jackson’s findings that commercial publishers had weaker overall open data policies (2021). even for journal editors who stated in our survey that they have inclusive and equitable practices in place, many could not provide documentation for that work, indicating that much of this is done editorial board to editorial board and is not codified. one editor shared with us that they “don’t have good enough written policies and procedures; we rely too much on the ongoing knowledge and goodwill of editors. this needs to be improved.” documenting and codifying practices are likely some of the best actions towards creating more open, accessible, equitable, and inclusive publishing environments for library journals, as this would help hold editors accountable for the experiences authors have with them. the problem that we heard many times from editors was that they wanted to make changes but did not have the time, funding, or support from their publisher to do so. while for some, these may be excuses for not taking on necessary change, for others, these are legitimate barriers.  for example, the author guidelines for one journal advise that “editors and reviewers often judge misspellings, typos, and grammatical errors harshly; they can undermine a good first impression. such flaws raise concern about the overall quality of the submission and the meticulousness of the author. use your software’s spell check, but remember that it will not catch every error. review your manuscript carefully.” while at first glance this seems like practical advice rather than a legitimate barrier, this tells us that language is being explicitly tied to the quality of the content. the authors and editors are not receiving proper training on the politics of academic english and its biases.  similarly, in the survey responses one journal confirmed that “any training for journal workers (on the publisher end) is on the publisher. we have not provided formal training for reviewers, though we have done some reviewer mentorship and advising.” it is clear that thoughtful training is missing from the process, which is unfortunate since so many careers rely on the outcomes.  it’s difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about the less visible practices because the extent to which journals are enacting policies or encouraging practice is still relatively unknown. but if we extrapolate from the survey responses received, it’s reasonable to assume that some journals have taken some action, while others have done little or have only made performative declarations without the necessary accompanying actions to transform or improve practice. for example, nearly half of survey respondents claimed to actively and continuously recruit reviewers or editors from underrepresented groups, but this does not necessarily speak to the actual success of these recruitment efforts, since a cursory glance at the current demographics of most library journal editorial boards shows a lack of representative diversity. we made a conscious decision not to include special issues on edi topics in this study as evidence of inclusive practices because it would be difficult to claim that a special issue is evidence of lasting change. in the past year alone, we witnessed the harm that is caused when journals and their editors take on “diversity topics” without proper internal training and culture shift, when five black librarians decided to pull an editorial from the journal of the medical library association (jmla) after the copy editor made changes to soften the message of their piece on anti-blackness in librarianship. we commend the bravery of these librarians for speaking up and initiating discussions of the meaningful incorporation of inclusive journal practice, even as we note that two of the librarians have since left the profession and wonder about the prevalence of similar experiences that have caused harm and contributed to toxicity in librarianship.  what is clear from our evaluation of journals’ current, established, and stated policies and practices, is that most academic library journals are not prepared for or capable of creating truly equitable and inclusive scholarly experiences, outside of open access (which has its own acknowledged edi issues). the focus on edi issues in the scholarly communications industry at the highest level represents one of the most likely opportunities for large-scale change within the traditional academic publishing model, but it is ultimately up to motivated individuals and groups to commit to meaningful rather than performative change. this over-reliance on small-scale commitments is heavily influenced by the degree to which journal workers are supported for their work — as our survey indicates, payment for work is not a widely-accepted norm, which means that a journal worker’s commitment can only be as strong as their internal motivation or acknowledgement or reward for their labor that may exist at their institution.  future research our methodology relied heavily on the information that was available to us, through licensed resources, journal websites, and voluntary survey responses, but we know that there is still a lot we do not know about how well journals are able to successfully implement sustainable open, equitable, and inclusive practices. one source of information that would create a more accurate picture is that of researcher experience. this idea builds on kaetrena davis kendrick’s work on twitter to gather information about journals that others “perceived had reviewers who were constructive, measured, thoughtful, mentoring-minded & positive in their feedback” (2021). we propose building a database that could include the stated and self-reported practices we have collected, along with the lived experiences of researchers, both positive and negative, as they engage with these practices as potential authors, reviewers, editors, or other journal workers. such a resource would not only help establish the degree to which journals have incorporated open, equitable, and inclusive practice, but also help researchers choose publications with which they would like to establish or continue relationships. on a larger scale, a database that can help identify edi practice in journals could be used as an evaluation tool using a value-based model entirely separate from, or perhaps complementary to, the citation-based journal metrics like impact factor that commonly form the basis of research evaluation. however, misuse, credibility, gamification, performative rather than meaningful adoption, and threats of retaliation are concerns that exist even if edi practice becomes a commonly accepted measure that academic institutions and journals adopt for the purposes of research evaluation. as the “shitty media men” list has demonstrated, the collection of information that has the potential to damage reputations is not always suitable for public consumption (donegan, 2018). ultimately, these measures are all attempts to drive change. the end goal is full incorporation and embodiment of meaningful open, inclusive, and equitable practice as the norm in academic journals. but what does achieving this goal actually look like? the practices explored in this study are steps along the road to open, inclusive and equitable journals but not necessarily the end state. for example, sustained attempts to improve editorial diversity are important for inclusive excellence in scholarly publishing. but realistically, diversity in editorial boards is only the first step toward incorporation of meaningful inclusive practice, since diverse perspectives can and should call attention to bias in journal policy and practice. without follow-up, diverse editorial boards may simply lead to tokenization and exhaustion. future research might consider what an “end game” for incorporation of open, inclusive, and equitable practice looks like — it likely will focus on sustainable practice rather than one-time initiatives and shared understanding of values in addition to demographic diversity.  conclusion capitalism is bullshit (chan, 2019; mcmillan cottom, 2020; horgan, 2019), and our journals cannot adequately support our values given the current journal financial models and weak institutional incentives for the scholars who support journal infrastructure. until these systems change, we can reasonably expect publishers like taylor & francis to continue dictating the values of academic librarianship literature. changing or evolving the values and practices of a journal requires time, care, and investment; a major commitment is necessary for success. journal reputation, citation-based journal metrics (e.g., impact factor), and rank/tenure/promotion expectations all serve to support and reinforce existing power structures within many journals and represent major barriers to operationalization of these values as well. exclusion through manuscript rejection, unnecessarily strict adherence to writing structure and language, and bias in peer review are all hallmarks of traditional scholarly publications and even serve to enhance the reputation of a journal. while these dynamics are in place, meaningful change will be difficult to enact in many journals that pride themselves on their ‘rigor’. however, academic librarians can advocate for change in many ways, including: pushing for new policies and procedures at the journal level publishing with journals that are in line with our stated values increasing awareness by discussing these issues with colleagues and peers working to update tenure/promotion/rank guidance to prioritize journal work and to value and prioritize journals who embody our values.  for example, rachel, with the co-authors’ permissions, has adapted this survey instrument into a “checklist for evaluating dei practices of journals.” she developed this document for a faculty committee focused on incorporating edi principles into scholarly evaluation in the promotion and tenure process. acrl has published a statement of support for open access publication, but similar support for other equitable and inclusive practices would likely galvanize current publishing practice. our survey provides a kind of framework for the translation of ideals into meaningful practice, one that we hope more journals will consider and integrate. scholarly communications ideals and library values matter only if we are moving toward them. library journals and the broader academic publishing industry must incorporate open, inclusive, and equitable policies and practices in order to move away from systemic oppression and toward a more representative knowledge landscape.  acknowledgments we are grateful to richard orr, jason priem, and heather piwowar at unpaywall for providing us with the green oa repository and preprint data for the journals in our study. thank you to ikumi crocoll and ian beilin, in the library with the lead pipe editors, and yasmeen shorish, peer reviewer, for your insightful comments. your expert feedback made this a much stronger paper. references american library association [ala]. (2019). core values of librarianship. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/corevalues association of college & research libraries [acrl]. (2019a). acrl policy statement on open access to scholarship by academic librarians. https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/openaccess   association of college and research libraries [acrl]. (2019b). open and equitable scholarly communications: creating a more inclusive future. prepared by n. maron and r. kennison with p. bracke, n. hall, i. gilman, k. malenfant, c. roh, and y. shorish. chicago, il: association of college and research libraries. https://doi.org/10.5860/acrl.1 bar-ilan, j. (2012). jasist 2001–2010. bulletin of the american society for information science and technology, 38, 24-28. https://doi.org/10.1002/bult.2012.1720380607  borchardt, r., bivens-tatum, w., boruff-jones, p., chin roemer, r., chodock, t., degroote, s., … & matthews, j. (2020). acrl framework for impactful scholarship and metrics. https://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/standards/impactful_scholarship.pdf chan, l. (2019, april 30). platform capitalism and the governance of knowledge infrastructure [keynote presentation]. digital initiative symposium, san diego, ca, united states. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2656601  committee on publication ethics [cope]. (n.d.) guidelines. retrieved october 20, 2021 from https://publicationethics.org/guidance/guidelines  davies, s. w., putnam, h. m., ainsworth, t., baum, j. k., bove, c. b., crosby, s. c., … & bates, a. e. (2021). promoting inclusive metrics of success and impact to dismantle a discriminatory reward system in science. plos biology, 19(6), e3001282. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.300128 depaul, a. (2021, july 21). scientific publishers expedite name changes for authors. nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02014-7  donegan, m. (2018, january 10). i started the media men list – my name is moira donegan. the cut. https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/moira-donegan-i-started-the-media-men-list.html hall, n., arnold-garza, s., gong, r., & shorish, y. (2016). leading by example? ala division publications, open access, and sustainability. college & research libraries, 77(5), 654–667. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.77.5.654  horgan, j. (2019, february 18). revolt against the rich. scientific american blog network. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/revolt-against-the-rich/  inefuku, h., & roh, c. (2016). agents of diversity and social justice: librarians and scholarly communication. in k. smith & k. a. dickson (eds.), open access and the future of scholarly communication: policy and infrastructure (pp. 107-127). rowman and littlefield. jackson, b. (2021). open data policies among library and information science journals. publications, 9(2), 25. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9020025 järvelin, k., & vakkari, p. (2021). lis research across 50 years: content analysis of journal articles. journal of documentation, ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd-03-2021-0062   kendrick, k. d. [@kaetrena]. (2021, august 12). would you share with me journals that you perceived had reviewers who were constructive, measured, thoughtful, mentoring-minded & positive in their feedback? [tweet]. twitter. https://twitter.com/kaetrena/status/1425817950930542594  kim, s. j., & jeong, d. y. (2006). an analysis of the development and use of theory in library and information science research articles. library & information science research, 28(4), 548-562. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2006.03.018   kohl, d. f., & davis, c. h. (1985). ratings of journals by arl library directors and deans of library and information science schools. college & research libraries 46(1), 40–47. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl_46_01_40  library publishing coalition. (2018). an ethical framework for library publishing. https://librarypublishing.org/resources/ethical-framework/  mcmillan cottom, t. (2020). where platform capitalism and racial capitalism meet: the sociology of race and racism in the digital society. sociology of race and ethnicity, 6(4), 441–449. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649220949473 mercer, h. (2011). almost halfway there: an analysis of the open access behaviors of academic librarians. college & research libraries, 72(5), 443-453. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-167  neville, t., & crampsie, c. (2019). from journal selection to open access: practices among academic librarian scholars. portal: libraries and the academy, 19(4), 591–613. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2019.0037  nisonger, t. e., & davis, c. h. (2005). the perception of library and information science journals by lis education deans and arl library directors: a replication of the kohl–davis study. college & research libraries, 66(4), 341–377. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.66.4.341  nixon, j. m. (2014). core journals in library and information science: developing a methodology for ranking lis journals. college & research libraries, 75(1), 66-90. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl12-387  ollé castellà, c., lópez‐borrull, a., & abadal, e. (2016). the challenges facing library and information science journals: editors’ opinions. learned publishing, 29(2), 89-94. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1016   onyancha, o. b. (2018). forty-five years of lis research evolution, 1971–2015: an informetrics study of the author-supplied keywords. publishing research quarterly, 34(3), 456-470. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-018-9590-3   open access. (2021, october 1). in wikipedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=open_access&oldid=1047593461  roh, c. (2016). library publishing and diversity values: changing scholarly publishing through policy and scholarly communication education. college & research libraries news, 77(2), 82-85. https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/9446/10680  san jose state university school of information. (n.d.) lis publications wiki – lis scholarly journals. retrieved august 7, 2020 from https://ischoolwikis.sjsu.edu/lispublications/wiki/lis-scholarly-journals/  sin, s. c. j. (2011). international coauthorship and citation impact: a bibliometric study of six lis journals, 1980–2008. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 62(9), 1770-1783. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21572  singh, k. p., & chander, h. (2014). publication trends in library and information science: a bibliometric analysis of library management journal. library management, 35(3), 134–149. https://doi.org/10.1108/lm-05-2013-0039   scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition [sparc]. (n.d.). open access. retrieved october 7, 2021, from https://sparcopen.org/open-access/  tsay, m., & shu, z. (2011). journal bibliometric analysis: a case study on the journal of documentation. journal of documentation, 67(5), 806–822. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220411111164682  vandegrift, m., & bowley, c. (2014). librarian, heal thyself: a scholarly communication analysis of lis journals. in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/healthyself/  walters, w. h., & wilder, e. i. (2016). disciplinary, national, and departmental contributions to the literature of library and information science, 2007–2012. journal of the association for information science and technology, 67(6), 1487-1506. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23448  appendix a – all journals included in the study american archivist, the archival science canadian journal of academic librarianship canadian journal of information and library science cataloging & classification quarterly catholic library world collaborative librarianship collection and curation collection management college & undergraduate libraries college and research libraries communications in information literacy education libraries evidence based library and information practice georgia library quarterly global knowledge, memory and communication health information and libraries journal ifla journal in the library with a lead pipe information discovery and delivery information technology and libraries international information & library review international journal of librarianship international journal of library science issues in science and technology librarianship italian journal of library, archives and information science journal of academic librarianship journal of archival organization journal of creative library practice, the journal of critical library and information studies journal of documentation journal of education for library and information science journal of electronic resources in medical libraries journal of electronic resources librarianship journal of escience librarianship journal of information literacy journal of intellectual freedom & privacy journal of interlibrary loan, document delivery & electronic reserve journal of librarianship and scholarly communication journal of library & information services in distance learning journal of library administration journal of library and information science journal of library metadata journal of new librarianship journal of radical librarianship journal of research on libraries and young adults journal of the australian library and information association journal of the canadian health libraries association journal of the medical library association journal of web librarianship judaica librarianship law library journal library & information history library & information science research library and information research library hi tech library management library philosophy and practice (lpp) library quarterly, the library resources & technical services library trends libres: library and information science research e-journal libri: international journal of libraries and information studies marketing libraries journal medical reference services quarterly new review of academic librarianship notes: the quarterly journal of the music library association partnership: the canadian journal of library and information practice and research pennsylvania libraries: research and practice portal: libraries and the academy practical academic librarianship public services quarterly reference & user services quarterly reference services review serials librarian, the technical services quarterly urban library journal weave: journal of library user experience (weave ux) accessible equivalents figure 1 as a list journal publisher prevalence: non-profit 59% taylor & francis 24.4% emerald 9% elsevier 3.8% de gruyter 1.3% litwin books 1.3% sage 1.3% springer 1.3% wiley 1.3% return to figure 1 caption. figure 2 as a list percentage of journal titles indexed by database: lista 67.2% lisa 65.4% liss 62.8% llis 62.8% scopus 52.6% web of science 47.4% proquest library science 37.2% proquest l&is 35.9% gale is&l 10.3% no indexing 12.8% return to figure 2 caption. figure 3 as a list availability of article-level metrics and measures: citations 44.9% altmetric 41% downloads 32.1% page views 29.5% plumx 12.8% refbacks 3.8% comments 2.6% accesses 1.3% pingbacks 1.3% none of these 32.1% return to figure 3 caption. figure 4 as a list does this journal offer open access options? green 71.8% platinum 47.4% hybrid 42.3% bronze 5.1% none 1.3% return to figure 4 caption. figure 5 as a list do authors retain copyright and/or does the journal use a cc-by license? yes 47.4% no 17.9% sometimes 28.2% unclear 6.4% return to figure 5 caption. figure 6 as a list does your journal have policies in place to encourage the open sharing of data? no 48.7% yes 43.6% n/a 2.6% encouraged 3.8% in process 1.3% return to figure 6 caption. figure 7 as a list percent of journals with demonstrated or self-reported inclusive practices: actively and continuously recruits reviewers or editors from underrepresented groups 42.3% actively and continuously encourages authors from underrepresented groups to submit manuscripts 34.6% demonstrates flexibility in accepted research processes and scholarly output format 33.3% ensures that the journal website is accessible for all users (e.g., ada compliant, all article formats compatible with assistive technology) 19.2% ensures that the journal backend is accessible for all reviewers, authors, and editors (e.g., wcag compliant) 14.1% provides professional development for journal workers to ensure inclusive practices (e.g., anti-bias training) 9.0% author guidelines encourage inclusive language (e.g., they/them) and variety of writing styles 23.1% none of these, according to website evidence 51.3% return to figure 7 caption. figure 8 as a list prevalence of equitable practices: percent of journals with demonstrated or self-reported equitable practices: provides additional assistance to authors (e.g., language support, proofreading, mentoring, alternate contacts in case of problems) 41% formally recognizes then work of everyone who has contributed to scholarly output (e.g., open peer review, crediting contributors such as research assistants) 17.9% pays editors, authors, and/or reviewers for their labor 10.3% none of these 57.7% return to figure 8 caption. footnotes the association of college & research libraries (acrl) plan for excellence directly addresses open access, equity, diversity, and inclusion. [↩] apcs are any fees charged to authors related to publication — in this context, it refers to the fee charged by journals to make the authors’ research freely available and accessible via open access. [↩] accessibility, dei, diversity, equity, inclusion, lis, open access, open publishing, scholarly publishing new year, new cycles, new platform conspiratorial thinking in academic libraries: implications for change management and leadership 1 response mh 2022–01–19 at 2:16 pm reply it’s funny– i published my first peer-reviewed article last year. we submitted first to an oa journal because, of course, we wanted to be practicing what we were preaching. we got rejected, so we submitted and published in the journal of academic librarianship…. it’s just like the screenshot of the article in nature, titled “the growing inaccessibility of science,” with access options including renting or purchasing from $8.99…. leave a reply cancel reply save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct equitable but not diverse: universal design for learning is not enough – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2021 26 may amanda roth and dominique turnbow /0 comments equitable but not diverse: universal design for learning is not enough by amanda roth, gayatri singh (posthumous), and dominique turnbow in brief information literacy instruction is increasingly being delivered online, particularly through the use of learning objects. the development practice for creating learning objects often uses the universal design for learning (udl) framework to meet needs for inclusivity. however, missing from this framework is the lens of diversity. this article calls out the need to include practices in learning object development that goes beyond udl so that learning objects are inclusive from the lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. looking at transferable techniques used in in-person instruction, we suggest guidelines to fill the inclusivity gap in learning object creation. introduction in response to the disruption of the in-person learning environment, many teaching librarians are moving information literacy instruction to the asynchronous learning environment. in place of the traditional classroom, learners frequently engage with information literacy concepts through online learning objects. online learning objects are defined as “any digital resource that can be reused to support learning.”1 in this mode of instruction, universal design for learning (udl) is employed to address inclusivity via equitable access. while udl aims to enhance inclusivity in terms of access by providing multiple modes of interacting with relevant content and it is technically accessible, it stops there. inclusive design is “design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference.”2 the question as to how we create learning objects that support all aspects of equity, diversity, and inclusion (edi) has yet to be explored. the gap in our practice one can find best practices for creating learning objects that focus on learning outcomes, user engagement, usability and design, and evaluation in the literature.3 when examining diversity in online learning, there remains a heavy focus on diverse learner populations and methods to incorporate different learning styles as a means to support learning for a wide range of individuals.4 in recognizing that it benefits all learners to have content presented in multiple formats, udl’s framework relies heavily on providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and action or expression, to create a universal learning experience. this focus is evident in the udl guideline principle of representation. for example, the udl representation guideline checklist  by the west virginia department of education (n.d.) considers the following: perception: content should not be dependent on a single sense like sight, hearing, movement, or touch. language and symbols: create a shared language by clarifying vocabulary or symbols and provide non-text based ways of communicating like illustrations or graphics. comprehension: provide background knowledge or bridge new concepts by organizing content effectively, highlight key elements, or provide prompts for cognitive processing.  in this case, representation is not linked to the representation of different ethnicities, genders, ages, social or economic classes, ability, etc., but rather how content is represented. as an offshoot of universal design (ud), originally an architectural movement to address needs relating to ability, udl in practice has followed ud’s example to address a need to interact with instructional materials from an ability perspective. udl has normalized the learning experience in learning environments by supporting the idea that designing lesson materials that offer access through multiple modalities and expression creates an inclusive experience for all.5 the udl checklist of multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement is particularly apt at normalizing learning into considerations of content delivery. it overlooks marginalized experiences and disenfranchised voices – including giving a voice to disability, an aspect of edi.6 the udl principle of engagement does include guidelines that support providing culturally relevant content as a means to increase student-centered relevancy and value for an individual learner. it is included in the context of optimizing leaner interest. however, inclusivity and diversity within this guideline is at best a passive byproduct instead of  the primary goal. learning object design guidelines that encompass inclusionary design principles and nurture diversity in a culturally responsive way7 have yet to be explored for the learning object format. additionally, an examination of the library instruction for diverse populations bibliography by the instruction section of the association of college and research libraries (n.d.) includes literature on various populations in classroom settings, but very little if none discuss learning objects. when fostering edi in online spaces, accessibility is the framework by which learning object developers work. clossen and proces’ examination of library tutorials focuses on captions, screen audio coordination, link context, length, headings, and alternative text.8 the body of knowledge for learning object development focuses on the importance of and technical aspects of building accessible learning objects when speaking about inclusion. these efforts meet the needs of equitable access. still, they do not touch upon inclusivity by creating an online environment where learners from minority or marginalized backgrounds can see themselves reflected in the learning experience.  the importance of creating inclusive instructional environments for learners is indicative of the vast amount of literature devoted to the topic. inclusivity shapes the value of self, promotes participation and access, and influences the desire to contribute.9 pendell and schroeder discuss bringing culturally responsive teaching into the classroom. this method “incorporates a multiplicity of students’ cultures and lived experiences into their education, improving their classroom engagement, content relevancy, and fostering diverse perspectives.”10 theories and practices in instructional design theories follow suit. instructional design processes like addie (analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation) and sam (successive approximation model) incorporate learner assessment into the early stages of the design process by identifying learner characteristics and taking account of the learners’ previous knowledge and experience.11 both keller’s arcs model of motivation12 and gagné’s nine events of instruction13 speak to the necessity of gaining your learner’s attention to ensure reception and engagement with the material. design thinking 14 offers methods that designers can use to empathize with learners. despite recognized practices of considering learner populations’ characteristics, prior knowledge, and experiences, many learning objects ignore edi in their design and development. given the importance of edi in teaching and learning and the shift to the online environment, the conversation needs to pivot to include asynchronous online learning environments and learning objects. we must acknowledge this overlooked area in our instruction practices. our guidelines there are resources in the literature that provide practical techniques to aid teaching librarians in creating inclusive in-person instruction. some of these techniques are transferable to the design and development of learning objects. these include: provide culturally relevant examples (images, topics, authors, etc.) to all learners – not just the majority.15 create a space where diverse experiences and knowledge is valued.16 provide a choice as to how learners will interact with content.17 with these in mind, we drew on our collective experience as teaching librarians, designers, and technologists to create guidelines for inclusive learning object development. relevant topics and examples as with in-person instruction, the examples used in online instruction can create an inclusive learning environment. even if an object’s learning outcome is not something one might classify as “diversity” content, the example or topic choices within the learning object can subtly express the value of different viewpoints. for example, if the learning object goal is to teach learners how to create a citation in a specific style, the citation examples used in the object can be selected based on authors of color. in practice, you could accomplish this by providing an example of a general citation format followed by an example centering the voice of black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc) as seen in the table below. apa book chapter format general guidelines author, a. a., & author, b. b. (year of publication). title of chapter. in e. e. editor & f. f. editor (eds.), title of work: capital letter also for subtitle (pp. pages of chapter). publisher. doi (if available) example citation amorao, a.s. (2018). writing against patriarchal philippine nationalism: angela manalang gloria’s “revolt from hymen”. in: chin g., mohd daud k. (eds) the southeast asian woman writes back. asia in transition, vol 6. springer, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7065-5_2 represent diverse experiences with scenario-based learning scenario-based learning uses realistic case-studies to create learner-centered learning.18 it is a widespread technique in e-learning and object development. scenarios may be used to aid storytelling and decision making or be used in checking a learner’s knowledge of learned material. if incorporated into a learning object, scenarios should include relatable learner experiences. special attention to how scenarios incorporate a minority experience is essential. for example, using a scenario as a self-knowledge check that features a first-year student experience might look like the following: ramona is writing a research paper about mexican-american health disparities and is unsure where to start when looking at the library’s website. as a first-generation college student who lives at home and commutes to campus, there is no one to ask at home. her assignment requires her to locate peer-reviewed journal articles. based on the information provided earlier in the tutorial about the difference between a catalog and a database, select the resource from the multiple-choice options that would best help ramona with her research. universal design use the principles of universal design to provide multiple ways of engaging with learning object content to help sustain motivation and to provide choices for how learners interact with relevant content. include audio, visual, and kinesthetic modes of representation, where applicable, as a means for interaction and active learning. most learning objects, by default, have text elements. in applying universal design for learning, look for ways in which other modes of communication might be effective. in practice, we’ve created a video to tell the “story of research” for a chemistry lab class. the story explains how a chemical experiment in a lab becomes an everyday product used by millions. the video used storytelling as a mode of communication to place learners within the shared community of chemistry researchers. it also provided a break from the otherwise text-based content.  teacher/student representation  when using characters to represent teachers or learners, provide multiple representations. include details related to diverse races and ethnicity and consider characteristics related to ability, body size, gender, and authority positions. pay attention to the order that characters of color are presented. be careful to avoid tokenism. character makeup should have diverse representation. if adding names and audio tracks for different characters, consider name choice, the sound of the voice, and character vocabulary. for example, we will often use a ta as a narrator instead of faculty to shrink the power gap between the traditional teacher and student role. language the language used in the object scripts and text displayed is a subtle but effective means of creating an environment of inclusivity. multimedia principles suggest that a conversational style of speaking and use of firstand second-person pronouns generate a feeling of personalization.19 person-centered language  and inclusive pronouns should be used. this includes using words such as “i,” “we,” “you,” and “yours.” for example, a script using firstand second-person language might include, “in this tutorial, you will explore the definition of plagiarism and recognize plagiarism when you see it.” person-centered language and inclusive pronouns in a script could look like “review the scenario in which renita, a medical student at the top of her class, tries to save time on a paper by copying and pasting information from an article. once you review the details of the scenario, decide whether or not you think they plagiarized by answering yes or no.” feedback provide authentic feedback that acknowledges and supports diverse learners. this means rethinking the default feedback template provided by software that offers correct/incorrect feedback based on if-then logic. this dualistic mode of communication reinforces pro-western views that emphasize individualized mastery and achievement.20 feedback should strive to acknowledge the way learners create meaning within their existing cultural schemas. feedback messaging could recognize alternative ways of thinking and use existing schemas to create new understanding. feedback that meets this guideline for an “incorrect” answer within a plagiarism tutorial could be: answer: the use of paraphrase and citation is a strategy to prevent plagiarism. in some cultures repeating the ideas of scholars in a paper is a sign of respect and it is a universally acceptable practice not to cite the ideas of scholars because the value of their words is culturally accepted. in the united states and at uc san diego, the practice is to use paraphrases or quotations and a cited reference to distinguish the ideas of scholars from your own. this practice will help you prevent violations of the ucsd policy of integrity of scholarship and identify for your reader the words of the scholars you may be referencing and your own valued ideas.  accessibility web content accessibility guidelines (wcag) aim to create a “shared standard for web content” that removes barriers for individuals who may be ability challenged.21 learning objects should be built to meet wcag 2.0 guidelines at an aa level. inclusivity relating to accessibility goes beyond technical requirements. this means addressing the user experience of those who use assistive technology. for example, relying on visual markers to indicate a multiple choice question ignores the experience of the visually impaired. as a screen reader reads through text on a screen the learner might not realize that the content reflects an activity in the multiple-choice format. providing an introduction statement that states that you will be asked to answer three multiple-choice questions in the following section, introduces all learners to the activity.   by incorporating these guidelines into learning object design and development, we hope to change our learning object design and development practices to reflect our profession’s edi principles. in practice: a tutorial example to test our guidelines with learners, we designed and evaluated a tutorial that incorporated the guidelines we crafted. institutional background the university of california, san diego (ucsd) library serves a large and ethnically diverse student body. according to the uc san diego office of institutional research (2020), the student characteristics of our 39,576 students are: african american 3.0% american indian 0.4% asian/asian american 37.1% chicano/latino 20.8% international citizen 17% native hawaiian/pacific islander 0.2% white 19% undeclared/missing 2.5% due to large student enrollment at the university and limited librarian resources, it is necessary to provide some information literacy instruction through online learning objects. preventing plagiarism tutorial the plagiarism tutorial is built using storyline 360 and consists of three modules (define, prevent, cite) in which learners can test out of the material before proceeding. it uses a teaching assistant, maya as a narrator, who walks learners through the test-out procedures and welcomes them to the tutorial content if they cannot test out. maya, depicted in image 1, is not representative of the librarian who created the object. using vyond, an animation tool, maya’s physical characteristics include being of average build and having brown skin, brown eyes, and dark brown hair. maya’s features look traditionally female, and her name was a call out to latin or asian cultures. she uses firstand second-person pronouns to address the learner throughout the object. she is the first character introduced to the learner. she describes herself as a teaching assistant to be less of an authority figure. (image 1: maya) other aspects of the learning object that include characters include scenario-based learning exercises. student characters describe a writing scenario, and the learner determines if the student in the scenario plagiarized. of the characters depicted in image 2, one is a thin asian male wearing a preppy dress style that is masculine. one character is white with an androgynous dress but leans toward a female presentation, and the other character is a white female who is larger in size. character attributes were limited to what was available within the third-party software.  (image 2: scenario student characters) each student character has a unique voice, narrated by library staff volunteers. for example, in this tutorial an asian staff member voiced the asian character in the tutorial. if possible, ask bipoc colleagues to voice bipoc representations. the inclusion of bipoc voices in the development of a learning object enhances the quality of personalization in the learning experience. characters were referred to as the student instead of using binary pronouns. in hindsight, we should have specifically used a mixture of pronouns to acknowledge various gender identities.  the examples used to explain plagiarism concepts were carefully considered. for example, the tutorial includes a common knowledge activity that asks the learner to identify whether a statement is common knowledge. the initial example stated, in your paper, you reference the attack on pearl harbor as being the trigger for the united states to join world war ii officially.  in reviewing the tutorial, there was concern that this common knowledge example is united states-centric, especially to the number of international students enrolled at the university. although the evaluative data showed that most learners knew the united states-centric answer to this question, the statement was changed to, in your paper, you write that penicillin is commonly used to fight infections. this change in example creates a more inclusive learning experience by removing a historical reference point that does not consider the emotional impact held by other world views.  the accessibility design of the learning object used a two-step process. first, the object was developed to meet wcag 2.0 guidelines from a technical perspective. once those guidelines were in place, a student worker from the campus’ office of students with disabilities was consulted to work through the tutorial from a user perspective. this second step that included elements of participatory design in the object development resulted in the understanding that although a learning object is technically accessible, it could still result in a poor learning experience for those using assistive devices. adjustments to content presentation and script after this meeting resulted in universal improvements for all. for example, a text introduction replaced a video introduction of the narrator.  evaluation to determine how well the guidelines attended to our learners’ inclusive experience, we created an anonymous survey that captured 6,918 responses over eighteen months (january 2019-june 2020). learners were asked to answer the following questions at the end of the tutorial. learners did not get credit for completing the plagiarism tutorial until they answered these questions. their responses were not linked to identifiable data. i noticed the diversity of characters in this tutorial (y/n) in this module, you were introduced to the following characters. which character’s appearance did you most identify with? (multiple choice) what features in character appearance would you like to see? (fill-in) do you like having characters with diverse appearances? (y/n) the module included a question about common knowledge. was the example, “with the attack on pearl harbor, the us officially joined wwii” a common knowledge fact that you already knew? (y/n) learners noticed the diversity of characters. we weren’t surprised to learn that most of the learners (87%) noticed the diversity of characters in the tutorial. this means that they would also notice the lack of diversity of characters. it confirms the idea that the way the characters look does matter to learners.  many learners did not identify with any of the characters. perhaps the reason the learners noticed the diversity of characters is because nearly half of learners  (nearly 42%) did not identify with them. while this was disappointing, it is useful feedback as we think about making learning objects more diverse and inclusive. of those that identified with the characters, 17% percent of learners identified with the narrator, 9% identified with the white androgynously dressed female, 25% identified with the male asian character, and 6% with the white female character. some learners wanted to see many characteristics represented. respondents were given a text box to type in any characteristics they wanted to see represented in the library’s learning objects. we asked “what features in the character’s appearance would you like to see?” 19% of the 3,062 respondents stated no preference or that they didn’t care about character features. another 10% indicated no or none. the word cloud noted in image 3 below illustrates the most popular terms provided by learners to describe the characteristics they would like to see.  (image 3: word cloud response) some standout terminology includes skin, hair, black, dark, curly, diversity, africa, gender, and hispanic. we observed that the terms didn’t represent the statistical breakdown of the demographics on the campus in some cases. for example, the terms “black” and “africa” were used more than terms like “hispanic” and “latino.” ucsd has more chicano/latino students (20.8%) than african american students (3.0%). this suggests an opportunity for more research into understanding if learners simply want to see themselves represented or multiple groups/ethnicities/cultures represented. an alternative interpretation may be that when learners think about diversity, they think specifically of black/african representations rather than a more holistic viewpoint. additionally, the large number of “don’t care” or “______” could indicate that while learners like seeing diverse characters, they don’t necessarily care how they are represented. it could also suggest that they are not invested in providing feedback and didn’t want to answer the question.  most learners liked seeing a diversity of characters represented. learners overwhelmingly (94%) like to see a diversity of characters represented in the tutorials.  most learners knew the u.s. history common knowledge reference. ucsd has a growing international student population. we were curious to know if typical common knowledge references (e.g., event that marked the united states entering wwii) would resonate with learners that may not have studied in the u.s. before college. the majority of learners reported knowing this fact (86%). a limitation is that responses relied on self-reporting for this question because there isn’t a way to confirm if learners really knew the answer or were wary of admitting they didn’t know it in the anonymous survey. the survey also did not ask learners how they identified themselves, so we do not know how many of the respondents represented the university’s international student population.  the results clearly illustrate that learners value diverse characters in learning objects. they notice which groups are represented. however, we need to learn more about how learners identify and include that representation in learning objects to make them more inclusive. our next steps in our practice, we plan to continue to gather feedback from learners to improve the edi of the library’s learning objects. we will add a question that captures the demographics of the respondents so that we can compare specific learner demographics with what they want to see more of (e.g. more characters that look like themselves or those that look different). we will undertake a systematic review of the library’s learning objects to identify ways to incorporate more diverse examples and apply our best practices, especially in the areas associated with topic and example choice. staying up to date with the university’s growing student population will also become a priority as student growth may include a change in student demographics. in addition, we will continue to refine the edi requirements to the evaluation checklist of instructional software and image packages representing student characterizations so that we are financially supporting companies that invest in edi. we will also use software feature requests to add our voice to a growing call to include more diverse student characterizations in elearning authoring tools. the preventing plagiarism tutorial provided us with an opportunity to use our guidelines and learn more about the mechanics of developing more inclusive learning objects. in the process, we learned that small changes have a significant impact. we also learned that there is much more work to be done. while inclusive design is our immediate goal, there is also work relating to design justice for consideration. we plan to actively include marginalized stakeholder voices (e.g. students, librarians, faculty) in the planning process. we will adopt a small moves/big moves framework22 where we attend to immediate changes that promote inclusive design and keep an eye toward big moves that strive to incorporate design justice into our workflows.  moving beyond universal design in learning putting edi principles into practice begins in the design phase of the learning object. collier compels the practice of  inclusive design and design justice in higher education.23 “inclusive design emphasizes the contribution that understanding user diversity makes to informing these decisions, and thus to including as many people as possible.”24 while udl focuses on equal opportunity and technical accessibility, inclusive design “celebrates difference and focuses on designs that allow for diversity to thrive.”25 within higher education (and certainly when designing and developing information literacy learning objects) this can be accomplished in the design phase by including diverse stakeholders as part of the team that makes decisions as they relate to the content, instructional examples, and feedback provided to learners. in addition to being inclusive, our design decisions must be just. design justice centers people with marginalized experiences in the design process to address design choices that affect them.26 it urges educators to consider who is exploited and marginalized in the design decisions and questions who even gets to make the design decisions in the first place and why.  at uc san diego, we have practiced inclusive design in the following ways:  incorporating design thinking27 into our design practices. the methods offered by this framework facilitate our understanding of our learners’ experience with using the library’s services and collections. this is where we see the biggest opportunities to incorporate the goals of design justice.  including diversity questions in our learning object evaluation forms to help us understand what resonates with our learners and how we could improve connecting with them through our design decisions about character appearance, examples used, etc.  proactively purchasing instructional software or image packages that include teachers’ and learners’ representations. we have added a diversity and inclusion checklist as part of the software review before purchasing.  while we have made some progress incorporating inclusive design in our practices there is more work to do. we recognize the constraints of the learning object format. while best practices in creating culturally responsive online learning offer ways in which to best utilize the online classroom environment to create inclusive learning communities, those techniques aren’t as readily available within the learning object mode of delivery (e.g. discussion boards or collaborative group work).28 thus, we plan to explore incorporating more learner-led participatory design into the workflow. in doing so we hope our learners can help us build upon our existing inclusive learning practices with an eye toward incorporating the goals of design justice.  conclusion our goal is to start a conversation about how diversity and inclusion practices can extend to creating learning objects. in doing so, we hope to begin to fill the gap in the literature so that designers of learning objects can have a reference point for their work in the future. as teaching librarians move information literacy instruction into the online learning environment via learning objects, the importance of extending edi principles can not be overstated. the messages that we send through our design choices impact our learners in a variety of different ways and become even more important when the teacher and learner are unseen participants in the learning process. each design choice is an opportunity to send a message of inclusion to learners.  choosing culturally relevant topics that speak to a diverse student body sends a message that student experience and interests are important. representing bipoc voices in learning object examples conveys to learners that diverse voices are welcomed and heard. going beyond multiple modes of delivery to ensure that tutorials consider ability beyond technical requirements as part of the edi experience creates inclusivity for an often forgotten group. using inclusive pronouns and language that is person-centred lets learners know they are respected and seen for the holistic person they are. providing culturally responsive feedback acknowledges and respects existing knowledge. by adding an edi lens to the universal design for learning framework for learning object creation, we begin to take steps that create inclusive online learning. this reflection ultimately improves learner motivation and investment in the learning process.  acknowledgments we would like to posthumously recognize gayatri singh for participating in our work to create more diverse and inclusive learning objects. her work in equity, diversity, and inclusion is a guiding light that influences us as we strive to create inclusive learning environments. we would also like to thank our colleagues in the library, academic integrity office, and office of students with disabilities at uc san diego for their input and feedback throughout the design and development processes of the plagiarism tutorial. finally, we also wish to thank the publishing editor of the submitted article, ian beilin, and peer reviewers, nicole cooke, and sylvia page for their thoughtful feedback.  references acrl is instruction for diverse populations committee. (n.d). library instruction for diverse populations bibliography. https://acrl.ala.org/is/library-instruction-for-diverse-populations-bibliography/ allen, m.w. & sites, r.a. (2012). leaving addie for sam: an agile model or developing the best learning experiences. american society for training development. blummer, b., & kritskaya, o. (2009). best practices for creating an online tutorial: a literature review. journal of web librarianship, 3(3), 199-216. doi:10.1080/19322900903050799 branch, r. m. (2009). instructional design: the addie approach. springer chávez, a. f., longerbeam, s. d., & white, j. l. (2016). teaching across cultural strengths: a guide to balancing integrated and individuated cultural frameworks in college teaching. stylus publishing llc.  clark, r. c., & mayer, r. e. (2011). e-learning and the science of instruction: proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. pfeiffer. clark, r. c., & mayer, r. e. (2013). scenario-based e-learning: evidence-based guidelines for online workforce learning. john riley & sons. clossen, a., & proces, p. (2017). rating the accessibility of library tutorials from leading research universities. portal: libraries and the academy, 17(4), 803-825. doi: 10.1353/pla.2017.0047 collier, a. (2020, october 26). inclusive design and design justice: strategies to shape our classes and communities. educause review. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/10/inclusive-design-and-design-justice-strategies-to-shape-our-classes-and-communities#fn9 dam, r. & siang, t. (2019). what is design thinking and why is it so popular?. interaction design foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/what-is-design-thinking-and-why-is-it-so-popular  design justice network. (n.d.). https://designjustice.org/  dolmage, j. t. (2017). academic ableism: disability and higher education. university of michigan press. gagne, r., m. (1985). the conditions of learning and theory of instruction. (4th ed.). rinehart & winston. grassian, e. & kaplowtiz, j. (2009). information literacy instruction: theory and practice. new york: neal-schuman publishers. hamraie, a. (2017). building access: universal design and the politics of disability. university of minnesota press. henry, s. l. (2018). web content accessibility guidelines (wcag) overview. w3c. www.w3.org/wai/standards-guidelines/wcag/ holmes, k. (2018). mismatch: how inclusion shapes design. the mit press. https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4137/mismatchhow-inclusion-shapes-design inclusive design research center (n.d.).what is inclusive design? https://legacy.idrc.ocadu.ca/resources/idrc-online/49-articles-and-papers/443-whatisinclusivedesign keller, j. m. (2010). motivational design for learning and performance. the arcs model approach. springer. mestre, l. 2009. “culturally responsive instruction for teacher-librarians.” teacher librarian 36 (3): 8-12. pendell, k., & schroeder, r. (2017). librarians as campus partners: supporting culturally responsive and inclusive curriculum. college & research libraries news, 78(8), 414-414. doi:10.5860/crln.78.8.414 richards, h. brown, a. f. & forde, t. b. addressing diversity in schools: culturally responsive pedagogy. teaching exceptional children, 36(3), 64. https://bcpskenwoodhs.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/59216594/addressingdiversity.pdf  smith, d. r. & ayers, d. f. (2006). culturally responsive pedagogy and online learning: implications for the globalized community college. community college journal of research and practice, 30(5-6), 401-415. doi:10.1080/10668920500442125 university of california, san diego institutional research. (2020). uc san diego undergraduate enrollment by diversity. retrieved from https://ir.ucsd.edu/undergrad/publications/4-5studprof.pdf .  webb, k., & hoover, j. (2015). universal design for learning (udl) in the academic library: a methodology for mapping multiple means of representation in library tutorials. college & research libraries, 76(4), 537-553. doi: 10.5860/crl.76.4.537 west virginia department of education. (n.d.). udl guidelines checklist. https://wvde.state.wv.us/osp/udl/7.%20udl%20guidelines%20checklist.pdf “what is inclusive design,” inclusive design research centre (website), n.d., accessed april 10, 2020. http://www.inclusivedesigntoolkit.com/whatis/whatis.html  wiley, d. a., (2000) “connecting learning objects to instructional design theory: a definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy,” in the instructional use of learning objects: online version, ed. retrieved from http://reusability.org/read/chapters/wiley.doc woodley, x., hernandez, c. m., parra, j. l. & negash, v. (2017). celebrating difference: best practices in culturally responsive teaching online. tech trends 61(2), doi:10.1007/s11528-017-0207-z yale poorvu center for teaching and learning. (2017). learning styles as a myth. retrieved from https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/learningstylesmyth. appendices image text descriptions image 1: maya text description maya is a female cartoon caricature of average height and weight. she has brown skin, brown shoulder length hair and brown eyes. maya is wearing a purple sleeveless top, orange skirt, black flats. image 2: senario student characters three cartoon caricatures of students. the first could be considered female of average height and weight. the character has black chin length hair with purple streaks, wide set blue eyes, and light skin. they are wearing a white sleeveless top under a black vest with red pants and black shoes.  the second caricature could be considered male of average build with brown hair, smaller set black eyes, and light skin. they are wearing a white long sleeve shirt, rolled at the sleeves under a light grey vest, bowtie, brown pants and black shoes. the third caricature could be considered female of larger build with redish hair, brown eyes, and light skin. they are wearing red glasses, a pendant necklace, green top, jeans, and white shoes. image 3: word cloud response text asian, hair, color, dark, black, skin, female, eyes, disability, brown, hijab, variety, white, latin, glasses, clothes, guy, blonde, hispanic, people of color, girl. wiley, 2000, p. 7 [↩] inclusive design research center, n.d., para. 1 [↩] blummer & kritskaya, 2009 [↩] webb & hoover, 2015 [↩] dolmage, 2017 [↩] dolmage, 2017; hamraie, 2017 [↩] richards, brown, forde, 2007 [↩] clossen & proces, 2017 [↩] homes, 2018 [↩] pendell & schroeder, 2017, p. 414 [↩] branch, 2009; allen & sites,  2012 [↩] keller, 2019 [↩] gagné, 1985 [↩] dam & siang, 2019 [↩] mestre, 2009 [↩] chavez, longerbeam, white, 2016 [↩] grassian & kaplowitz, 2009 [↩] clark & mayer, 2013 [↩] clark and mayer, 2011 [↩] smith & ayers, 2006 [↩] henry, 2018 [↩] collier, 2020 [↩] collier, 2020 [↩] “what is inclusive design,” n.d. [↩] collier, 2020 [↩] design justice network (n.d) [↩] dam & siang, 2019 [↩] woodley, hernandez, parra & negash, 2017 [↩] ethical financial stewardship: one library’s examination of vendors’ business practices service ceiling: the high cost of professional development for academic librarians leave a reply cancel reply save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct making it work: surviving as a librarian employed in another field – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 6 mar alyssa vincent /24 comments making it work: surviving as a librarian employed in another field in brief: on average, it takes approximately five months for lis graduates to find a library job, according to library journal’s 2012 placements and salaries survey (matta 2012). this time frame represents the experience of 34% of 2011 graduates, but stories of monthsor year-long job searches are common (weak 2012). while some can afford to wait or get by with part-time work, others cannot, so they begin to look outside the lis field for opportunities. this article identifies effective strategies for maintaining connections to the library world while employed in a seemingly unrelated field and draws on interviews, research, and the author’s personal experience to illuminate these strategies. photo from seattle municipal archives (cc by 2.0) by alyssa vincent a familiar story i began my job search in earnest approximately three months before i graduated from library school. realizing that the job market would be competitive, i applied to both professional and paraprofessional positions, but to no avail. i graduated and moved back to my hometown, taking advantage of my parents’ offer of free housing, but eager to begin the professional career that i had been confident would start shortly after graduation. i was lucky that one of my rejections came with an offer for a part-time, paraprofessional job staffing the reference desk of a mid-sized university library. thankful for the experience i would gain, i eagerly accepted the job and found that the position reignited my passion for reference. i was excited to have discovered my niche: i was a reference librarian. however, even as i steered my full-time job search towards reference and instruction jobs, i grew increasingly discouraged. i knew that i couldn’t support myself only working part-time, so i began applying to non-lis positions. it took two months of persistence, but i was able to land a communications job at a nearby university. since my undergraduate degree was in print journalism, it was related to my interests. however, i didn’t go to library school because i wanted to continue working as a freelance writer and editor! i went to library school because instead of telling people’s stories as a journalist, i wanted to empower them to find the information that they could use to tell their own stories. i accepted people’s congratulations about my new position while fighting back the nagging feeling that i was a fraud. i felt like i was giving up on my dream, even though accepting this job didn’t mean i would stop looking for a librarian position. as a person fortunate enough to have both a supportive family and a part-time library job, i still felt that i should be taking advantage of that support to gain more direct lis experience, even if it meant more personal struggles. something had to come through eventually, right? in the end though, my impending student loan payments, lack of healthcare, and desire for stability won out over the waiting game. does my story sound familiar? many new librarians get caught in the catch-22 of needing experience to get a job, but unable to gain that experience for some reason or another. perhaps part-time lis work wasn’t fiscally possible, so you couldn’t build your resume sufficiently to get an interview for a full-time position. maybe you couldn’t wait six to nine months to hear back from your dream academic library, or discovered that the public libraries in your area hadn’t hired new employees in years. for whatever reason, you just couldn’t get a job in a library. you’re not alone: library journal’s 2012 placements and salaries survey reports that 18.3% of job placements in 2011 were outside lis in the private industry, nonprofits, and the fields of law, retail, and finance (matta 2012). the good news for those of us stuck in lis “unemployment” is that even if you take a job outside of the field, you can still find your way back. your mls degree can be put to use in a variety of research, customer service, and marketing positions, and all of those fields can provide you with skills that will prepare you for future library work. this article is about how to make that happen. taking a job outside lis imagine that after months of futile searching for a librarian position, and then any position at all, you finally get a job offer. as is the case with any hiring scenario, it’s important to think carefully about how a job will benefit your resume before accepting it. it’s tempting to take the first job offer you receive, especially if you’ve been rejected many times before, but you won’t be helping your long-term professional goals if you take the a position that’s the wrong fit. there are several factors to take into consideration beyond wages and benefits. will the position allow you to refine your current skills or, better yet, grow in an area where you don’t have much experience? if you’re considering taking a job as a receptionist, it’s likely that you won’t just answer phones. you’ll be the face and voice that people associate with the organization, giving you an opportunity to hone your customer service skills. jessica olin, director of the robert h. parker library at wesley college, recently wrote on her blog letters to a young librarian about how her past experience as a waitress has made her a better librarian: with a customer who had never been to my restaurant, but who was obviously there for a special occasion, i acted one way. with a family of regulars who had been coming to that restaurant longer than i’d been alive, i acted another… similarly, with a first generation college student in his/her first semester of college, i act one way. with a graduate student who just needs help refining a search strategy, i act another. on the surface, it may not seem like a non-lis position has anything to offer the career you are trying to forge, but drawing connections is a matter of both perspective and practice. if you want to be a reference librarian but your current data entry position doesn’t offer you much interaction with the public, think about how you’re increasing your efficiency and furthering your attention to detail. while it can be challenging to repackage your skills in cover letter, the effort won’t go unrewarded. it may just take longer than you would like to see that reward. career-relevant activities you don’t have to be working in a library to do work that’s related to librarianship. making plans, goals, and timelines to build related skills will allow you to regain some control over your career direction. it might seem like more work to formulate plans for your current job while simultaneously continuing your lis job hunt, but focusing on the beneficial aspects of your current position will enable you to get the most out of the experience—and help you translate that work to future positions. britta barrett, a 2012 mls graduate, had no plans on quitting her office administration job at experience music project (emp) in seattle to focus on securing a library job, but she realized that she could add a project to her duties that would expand her skill set while helping her employer. the museum boasts a library, but as barrett explains, “it has been over a decade since the museum has had full time mls librarians on staff and there is no indication that will change in the future” (b. barrett, personal communication, february 4, 2013). still, she proposed a practicum for academic credit on top of her daily administrative duties, which included conducting a needs analysis, weeding, physically moving materials to a new location, creating a strategic plan, and training and supervising four new cataloging interns. while emp has not hired her as a librarian, they were so impressed by her work that they’ve officially added librarian duties to her current position and compensated her for the increased workload. whether or not your employer rewards your hard work and initiative monetarily, this sort of approach to non-library work offers a variety of opportunities. finding ways to bring your career into your day job can benefit your job search: alan m. saks and jelena zikic (2009) write that “career-relevant activities were positively related to job search self-efficacy and job search clarity. job seekers who spent more time in both environmental and self career exploration…reported higher job search self-efficacy” (125). of course, career-relevant activities may encompass a whole variety of things. maybe it means reading lis blogs on a daily basis or volunteering twice a month at a library. however you look at it, by committing to continuous professional development, you’ll actually improve the way you feel about your job search. strategic networking although you may feel a pressing need to seek out opportunities to meet people who can help your job search, your focused professional development strategy should translate to any networking you may want to do as well. networking is a way to get something you want, but it has to be a journey in and of itself. if i go to an event for the sheer purpose of chance networking rather than because i’m interested in the event itself, i walk away disappointed. for me, it makes the most sense to seek out events and opportunities that revolve around reference and instruction so that i can stay up-to-date on what local university and college libraries are doing to engage users. if i can meet someone who’s doing that work at an event, great! if not, i’m still learning about an area of librarianship that’s exciting to me and that i want to continue learning about. instead of assuming that each person you meet could be your ticket to a great library job, a better approach is to attend events and talk with people you find interesting. ultimately, networking is about developing and fostering relationships, and if you try to build a relationship based on something you want, you’re not likely to get very far. emily cable, a 2012 mls graduate and full-time restaurant manager, observes: [w]hile it is good to meet a lot people in the field, i have found it has been really helpful to form better acquaintances with a smaller number of librarians that you really like. i know a handful of librarians that i meet up with about once a month socially. there is a little bit of shop talk that happens, but it is primarily social. it is through this group that i set up both my practicum and my impending volunteer work/internship with oregon health and sciences university library” (e. cable, personal communication, february 2, 2013). to find your own groove, think about strategic networking. an article from the harvard business review defines strategic networking as “figuring out future priorities and challenges [and] getting stakeholder support for them” (43). in that light, what are you doing when you’re networking if not figuring out future priorities (your career) and getting stakeholder support for them (by gaining contacts in the library field)? erica findley, a 2008 mls graduate and digital resources and metadata librarian at pacific university, explains her experience working post-graduation as a temporary workforce management coordinator for netflix and volunteering at oregon health & science university (ohsu): during the time i worked at netflix, i was volunteering at the oregon health & science university writing data for their digital collections. i did this for about 2-4 hours per week (on weeknights) until july 2010. i began the internship through a lot of serendipity (read: networking). i was working as an intern on another project at ohsu for someone that interviewed me for another library position; i think in early 2007. i kept in touch with the person and became involved in their project when they moved to ohsu. i started my volunteering in digital collections by hearing about the need for help through word of mouth. findley continued volunteering while working a temporary, non-mls staff position at pacific university, which kept being extended. eventually, a new mls position was created, and findley stepped into that role in july 2010 with digital collections experience under her belt (e. findley, personal communication, february 13, 2013). this story reminds me that networking is not a numbers game. it’s about finding people who you click with and keeping up with them and their work. while i was attending presentations and conferences during library school, i would tell myself that i had to speak with a specific number of people before i left. i meant for this to be an antidote to my shyness, but it turned networking into a competition rather than an engaging experience. i’ve since scrapped that idea, and feel much more at ease with my professional social network. fitting it all in continuous professional development? taking on additional projects without compensation? networking? who has time for all that?  when you’re employed, it can be difficult to carve out time to ruminate on goals and tackle extracurricular activities. but if you don’t know what you want, you certainly won’t be able to take the steps to get it. also, it’ll be good practice for your future career. many librarians exceed their forty hours a week with professional development and volunteer projects even when they are employed in a library. first things first, though. what kind of time are you willing to dedicate to professional development? evenings? weekends? a couple of days a month? depending on the demands of your current job and your personal life, the answer will vary. your time commitment will likely dictate the kind of activities you can engage in. if weekends are out of the question, then conferences may not be the best opportunities for you. if you’re willing to dedicate some evenings to pursuing your passion, you may be able to teach a computer class at your local public library. remember: becoming a librarian or information specialist is your dream career. the extra work is worth it. of course, as many of you know, even volunteer opportunities in libraries can be difficult to come by. as in all things, flexibility is key. try to look at your interests from all possible angles. you may want to be a children’s librarian, but if your local libraries are fully staffed, why not take the elements of children’s librarianship and try to find an organization that works with children and education? as kat tkacik (2012) explains in library journal, if there’s a waiting list for volunteers at the library, look for other organizations promoting literacy and education. and don’t forget social services. many shelters and soup kitchens include a computer or two—volunteer your expertise and help a neighbor navigate the job listings on craigslist. on the other hand, if your search is so successful that you find yourself flooded with volunteer opportunities and projects, remember that working yourself into the ground won’t help you succeed. in case you need further advice on doling out the big n-o, check out emily ford’s (2009) in the library with the lead pipe article on the subject. personally i find that if i take on more than a couple of projects outside of work at a time, i’m less than pleasant to my friends and family. have i taken on more than i should have in the past? of course. am i proud of that? not anymore. to take on projects beyond my capacity does not help my career, nor does it help the organization i’m volunteering with. working hard also means knowing your limits, and not worrying that those limits will keep you from getting a job you love. continuing your search while maintaining your sanity google “job seeking while employed” and you’ll find plenty of blog posts and news stories about the importance of not searching while on the clock or on a work computer. you may think you work in an easygoing environment, but no supervisor will condone job hunting while they are paying you. in addition to limiting your job search to your lunch hour, evenings, and weekends, make sure you keep your hunt manageable. nothing says “i’m living a balanced life” like working and then rushing home to check thirty job boards while eating a lean cuisine. while i have found interesting jobs via a one-off search on indeed.com (warning: searching “library” yields loads of nanny postings from parents that are desperate for you to take their children to the library), you will have more luck focusing on curated sources like i need a library job, ala joblist, or state library association job boards. you are in a stage of life that requires some relaxation time, too, so find a way to carve out time for yourself. maybe that means you don’t look for jobs on the weekends, or that tuesday nights are your crafting/cooking/doing absolutely nothing nights. thea evenstad, a 2012 mls graduate and program assistant at a children’s science museum, explains: graduate school and the job search have made my life feel lopsided. i think self-care is an important part of the job search and that it’s too easy to feel down with the dramatic highs and lows of the cycle of job applications, interviews, and rejections. i don’t feel guilty enjoying a weekend at the beach with my partner, knowing that i might move to another state soon for a librarian position (t. evenstad, personal communication, february 11, 2013). the calm you gain from that time off will assuage any anxiety you may feel about not looking for a new job or professionally developing yourself during that period of time. leslie a. perlow and jessica l. porter conducted a study in which they found that by challenging the idea that  a person must always be available and ready to work, people were more likely to take time off,  and their work improved as a result (104). since you’re working and trying to find another job, be sure to relax and build in breaks for yourself. you’ve earned them! conclusion i’m several months into my communications position, and i’ve developed web design, project management, and interpersonal skills that i know will help me when i’m on a future committee that’s redesigning a library website, implementing tools to better track reference interactions, or fostering relationships with faculty members. i spend about thirty minutes several evenings a week checking three lis job boards and perusing the employment pages of a couple of local university libraries. i continue to apply for positions, but am pickier than when i was unemployed, and i’ve had several phone interviews in the past month. i believe that’s because i’m only writing cover letters for positions i’m truly passionate about. in addition to my job search, i’ve managed to create a small but mighty professional network, which includes a librarian that i’m working with to help develop the children’s literature collection at his institution. i’ve never participated in collection development before, and i love every aspect of it, from physically surveying the current collection to figure out what gaps exist to identifying the best children’s awards to draw materials from. i’m thrilled that i’ve been invited to help draft the collection development policy for this particular collection, and feel that the professional writing i do in my current position will serve this project well. if, like me, you’re working outside the field, remind yourself that lis skills aren’t solely developed and utilized within a library. your day job — whether you’re working in retail, acting as an office administrator, or waiting tables — is providing you not only with a paycheck but with professional qualities that a library will be lucky to have. it might feel overwhelming at times to work while trying to find another job and pursuing professional development opportunities, but that dedication will benefit you throughout your entire career, not just your job search process. it’ll take time and it’ll take a lot of patience, but if you persist, good things will happen. at least that’s what conan o’brien and i believe (glamourbombtv 2010). if you ever feel like you’re the only one balancing your future career with your day job, know that you’re not, and reach out! whether on twitter, in these comments, or with your former classmates, you’ll be surprised how many people will respond with “i’m going through the same thing, let’s talk” or “yup, that was me last year, and this is what i did.” if you’ve been or are currently in a similar situation, i’d love to hear your strategies for making the most out of your current or past jobs and how you balance job searching with employment. please share them in the comments below. thanks to kim leeder and heather martin for their thoughtful edits and comments as reviewers; additional thanks to britta, emily, erica, and thea for their time and personal contributions to the article. references ford, e. (2009). how do you say no? in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/how-do-you-say-no/. glamourbombtv. (2010, jan. 5). conan o’brien takes a bow [video file]. retrieved from http://youtu.be/dxohez1zlms. ibarra, h., & hunter, m. (2007). how leaders create and use networks. harvard business review, 85(1), 40-47. matta, s.l. (2012, october 15). a job by any other name: lj’s placements and salaries survey 2012. library journal. retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/10/placements-and-salaries/2012-survey/a-job-by-any-other-name-ljs-placements-salaries-survey-2012/. olin, j. (2013, february 5). could i show you the wine list?, or, how waitressing made me a better librarian. letters to a young librarian. retrieved from http://letterstoayounglibrarian.blogspot.com/2013/02/could-i-show-you-wine-list-or-how.html. perlow, l.a., & porter, j.l. (2009). making time off predictable — and required. harvard business review, 87(10), 102-109. saks, a.m., & zikic, j. (2009). job search and social cognitive theory: the role of career-relevant activities. journal of vocational behavior, 74(1), 117-127. tkacik, k. (2012, june 4). the class of twentysomething: degreed and jobless. library journal. retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/06/opinion/backtalk/the-class-of-twentysomething-degreed-and-jobless-backtalk/. weak, e. (2012, sept. 14). further questions: how long did it take to get your first library job? hiring librarians. retrieved from http://hiringlibrarians.com/2012/09/14/further-questions-how-long-did-it-take-to-get-your-first-library-job/. career, interviewing, job searching, librarianship, networking, new librarians, professional development aaron swartz building a community of readers: social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries 24 responses libraryfeed 2013–03–06 at 7:22 am making it work: surviving as a librarian employed in another field http://t.co/dcudwqzucf infopeep 2013–03–06 at 7:28 am in the library, with the lead pipe: making it work: surviving as a librarian employed in another field http://t.co/eg9k9c27bz kiersten bryant 2013–03–06 at 4:16 pm great article alyssa! i’m in a similar situation myself, and i love hearing your experience, advice and tips! i work full-time at an outdoor apparel company in a quality assurance position, a job i had before and during my time in the mlis program at san jose state university. since i graduated in december and now have more free time, i have made it a goal to stay relevant in the lis field while job searching. i look for opportunities that i can do virtually because i also have a toddler aged daughter to take care of. currently i volunteer as a head editor for inalj.com (thanks for the inalj mention above!), which keeps me involved and complements my own job searching activities. on the work-front i’ve recently had a lucky break because my director has been put in charge of developing a fabric library for the company i work for. he knows that i have my mlis so he asked if i would be interested in helping him with the project in a consultant capacity. of course i said yes! it’s extra work on top of my own work, but since it’s something i enjoy doing and am passionate about so i don’t mind at all. there’s also a chance it could develop into a full-time fabric library position so that is a bonus! but, if for some reason he can’t get the funding for the librarian position, then at least i will have gained more hands-on library-related skills and i can put the experience on my resume. having a full-time job does give me less time and energy to spend writing personalized cover letters, customizing resumes, and filling out long, detailed online applications, but if i see i job i’m really excited about then the motivation finds me! if any of your readers are looking for virtual volunteer work then i recommend volunteering for inalj! naomi needs more volunteers, and it’s another place you can build a network and community with other lis peeps! alyssa vincent 2013–03–06 at 5:05 pm kiersten, it’s great to hear that you’ve got an opportunity to build your lis skills in your current job (with the possibility of that extra work becoming a full-time job)! i think you illustrate that when it comes to volunteering, it really is about customizing your experience–whether that means you’re doing work virtually to be able to care for your family or that you physically volunteer at library if you work from home. thanks for the inalj volunteering suggestion! jill 2013–03–06 at 5:13 pm i had worked for quite a few years in paraprofessional library roles before finally finishing my mls. the year i did, i was laid off from my job. it was sort of good timing, because i had severance pay to give me a cushion to find the new dream job. unfortunately, the market is just not there for loads of library jobs. through networking (the best way to find a job!) i was able to land a job with an information vendor. it is not a librarian position, however i do work with librarians to develop and improve information products. it has been so much more rewarding than i could have imagined, and i can’t stress enough to those in my position to look outside the box. i use my research and reference skills every day, when working with the product developers, as well as the customers. library school taught me so much more than how to catalog a book….thank goodness!!! anonymous to protect my job search 2013–03–06 at 5:27 pm i appreciate your view and i had the same positive outlook a few months back…. 1) you are preaching to the choir. we, as librarians, know that our job skills cross over. it seems that hr and hiring employers don’t. each application has come back with a rejection note stating “not enough experience”. i have 20 years work experience in nonprofits, customer service, and administrative/office responsibilities (i worked full-time through undergrad and grad). i have an mlis, an undergrad in lit, volunteered at a library throughout my grad program, and held leadership roles in several organizations. still unemployed 22 months after grad. 2) i did eventually get a job offer 5 months after i originally applied for the job. i would have taken it in a heart beat, but the cost of moving in to a new town was so outrageous (the electric company wanted a $300 deposit because i was from out of the area, plus 1st/last and cleaning deposit, plus drive cost). i had been living off a part-time job for so long that my savings and money ran out. so, for now i am staying put, living in my car, and hoping for the best. best of luck to the aspiring librarians out there! mary jo 2013–03–06 at 7:29 pm as a library director and former hr manager for a public library, i can attest that there are a number of non-library skills we look for when hiring. customer service experience is a priority when hiring anyone who will work at a public desk or run programs. teaching experience of any kind is a plus. because we cater to a lot of families, we love to see experience working with children. in this time of growing e-gadgets, your proficiency in using them shows not only technical ability but also your preparedness to stay abreast of the latest “thing.” some positions require graphics experience and others require some website experience. finally, we have a lot of volunteers, and we love to hire staff who have experience supervising and motivating volunteers. our latest hire is a teacher who went back for her mlis, and the one before that had spent a number of years organizing volunteers to run book fairs for elementary schools. neither had library experience. make sure your cover letter emphasizes those skills you have developed in other fields that cross over, as a hirer reading dozens of resumes could miss the connection. alyssa vincent 2013–03–06 at 8:07 pm mary jo, thanks for chiming in. when i started my job search, i “tailored” my cover letters to positions by referencing specific aspects of the job postings or of the institution itself, but i assumed that i didn’t need to draw more connections than that. the hirer would just “get” my letter and resume. i now know that it’s not the hirer’s job to connect the dots of my resume, and my cover letter writing has improved as a result. anonymous to protect my job search 2013–03–06 at 9:39 pm i would argue that it is the hiring managers job to make those connections. we taylor our letters and resumes to address the needs of the job but the hiring manager is supposed to be skilled at connecting the dots – that’s why they are in that position! i do recognize that there are many, many qualified applicants applying to the very same positions that i am. it’s a hard choice for the hiring department to make after being flooded with resumes from many talented people. i’ve also been reading a lot about job search skills to update my knowledge on applying and hiring (that’s how i ended up reading this post). there is so much contradiction – some say be specific others say be a generalist; some say call for a follow up, but often there is no way to follow up on e-apps; some say they read cover letters, others ignore them. many suggest asking why you were not qualified or what you might do better on the next resume/application but this usually results in a canned answer or no response. i presume it is due to fear of repercussions if the hiring manager tells you the truth about your resume. mary jo 2013–03–07 at 2:34 pm anonymous, i can hear your frustration, and i can only speak from my own experience, so i don’t know how helpful i can be. yes, a skilled hiring manager will connect dots, but they read a lot of resumes, and many hiring managers in libraries are librarians without a specific hr background – so maybe less skilled than you would hope. the easier you make their job, the better. there is a lot of conflicting information out there, because of course different hiring managers look for different things. our library district is small (25 employees), so perhaps that allows us to be more flexible than a larger institution. i can tell you i was always impressed with a follow-up, but i did not think negatively if someone did not follow up. i cannot imagine not reading a cover letter – i always want the extra information. for me, a hint of humor somewhere is always a plus, though not required. one time an applicant who did not get an interview asked for a review of her resume, and i sent her several paragraphs worth of information that i thought might be helpful. here is one of the best pieces of advice i ever read for the job seeker: the purpose of a resume/cover letter is to get an interview. the purpose of an interview is to get a job. my process as a hiring manager was this: 1. identify skills/experience required for the job. 2. identify talents that would be an asset for the job – buckingham and coffman’s first, break all the rules has a great discussion on this. 3. screen resumes for skills/experience, conduct phone interviews and reference checks to help refine the list to the best matches, then conduct in-person interviews with the best 3-4 candidates to assess talents. best wishes in your job search! emily ford 2013–03–08 at 10:26 pm thanks for writing this thoughtful article, alyssa. we’ve had a number of other employment related articles here at lead pipe that might be worth mentioning in comments if other readers haven’t seen them. your article is a nice complement to what we have already published. what not to do when applying for library jobs rising through the ranks: on upward mobility in librarianship lead pipe on professional development struggling to juggle: part-time temporary work in libraries alyssa vincent 2013–03–09 at 3:13 pm thanks for linking to these articles, emily. pingback : event – webinar: librarianship as an “avocational vocation” – advice for new professionals metro | stephanie l. gross, mslis anonymous 2013–03–14 at 12:38 pm you all need 1 person to believe in you. i got lucky with that but i also had parents who were willing to support me financially until i landed a job. luckily it only took 3 months after graduation when i found a lot of part time work in different libraries. it still took 3 years of experience in those different libraries before i found full time work. now being on the other side – the hiring side – i can’t stress enough how much my colleagues talk about experience. i realize now that i did the right thing even though waiting 3 years for a full time job was tough and i often considered leaving librarianship and going into law, social work or accounting. even if it’s just 1 day (5 hours) a week, find an internship or volunteer gig in a type of library you want to work for. don’t snub your nose at any position or offer – it may not be the harvard of your town, but people are always watching – if you do well, if you’re likable, other opportunities will present themselves. a down pour starts with one drop of rain. keep up your chin, all of these experiences, while not fun, will build character and add to your story which you will be sharing and even grateful for some day. alyssa vincent 2013–03–14 at 3:36 pm anon, you make a great point about building character. even though it would have been great to graduate, move to my desired city, and immediately step into a full-time librarian position, i know that my employment/volunteering situation is not only increasing my skill set, but is also forcing me to be patient and gain some perspective. anonymous 2013–03–17 at 7:04 pm it is great to volunteer or work part time jobs and build experience and to make connections. however, keep in mind that 8 hours per week for 52 weeks of volunteer time only equals 416 hours of experience. that’s equivalent to about 2.5 months of full-time experience. so how many years would one need to volunteer at 8-15 hours a week to gain the 3-5 years experience employers require?? do the math. i am not being cynical; many applications ask for the exact amount of experience time and specify that pt work will be calculated and prorated. during grad school i volunteered, worked half time in a library, worked half time at another job, and came out near the top of my class. if that isn’t enough experience coming out of an mls, what is? as for working a part time job until the dream job comes through… great idea, if i could get a part time library job i would have done so by now. i am more than happy to work a pt library job (and fill in with another pt job or volunteer work to build more experience). but, even the pt jobs and the few paid internships are asking for extensive experience. so, unless there is a magic formula i am missing – it doesn’t add up. who are these hiring managers expecting someone coming out of a two year program to have 3-5 years experience??? or are these job descriptions really designed to just hire who you already have in mind?! additionally, not everyone has parents or other relatives/friends with money to fall back on. there is no ‘home’ to run back to for some of us. i would love to hear suggestions on where to work (other than a library) to build these 3-5 years of experience in library work so that i can eventually join the ranks of the elite and work in a library. alyssa vincent 2013–03–17 at 8:52 pm i don’t think you’re being cynical. volunteering for a few hours a week does not add up to 3-5 years of library experience. however, i’ve seen more job descriptions with slightly more flexible understandings of library experience. mary jo made a great point in the comments that her public library recently hired two employees who did not have library experience, but rather had experience with organizing volunteers and in teaching. plenty of job postings are firm on the phrase “library experience,” but i’ve seen several–particularly paraprofessional postings–that ask for “public service experience” or “web development experience.” these are skills that can be developed outside the walls of a library in retail settings, restaurants, administrative offices, etc. if you’re interested in a more entrepreneurial route, i think andy woodworth does a great job addressing that near the end of this blog post: http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/reader-mail-unemployment-in-libraryland/ it sounds like you gained a lot of experience and worked hard while in library school, and i can understand your frustration that you are somehow still “unqualified” for certain library jobs. all i can say is that there is no magic formula. what i’m finding helpful is volunteering with a library on a really enjoyable project outside of my full-time/non-library work, commiserating with friends going through their own job searches, and continuing to write cover letters for positions i feel qualified for. best of luck with your job search. mary jo 2013–03–18 at 3:07 pm some suggestions of where to work/volunteer: 1. small libraries – they often have small budgets, so they need volunteers more. they also have smaller staffs, so will notice your contribution more. while you are there, look for needs that are not being met and offer a solution. create a project and see it through. then you will have more than volunteer hours to show on your resume, you will have accomplishments. 2. libraries where you would like to work – i was very intentional about where i did my practicum – the library where i wanted to work got 120+ hours of excellent free labor from me in a condensed time frame. while i was there, i did extra things like attending the staff meetings and the board meetings because i wanted to learn as much as i could. i interviewed the library director and the department heads to learn about their areas of responsibility. when i applied for a job, they knew who i was, they were aware of my work ethic and strengths, and they knew i understood how they operated. they knew i would be a good fit. 3. librarian organizations – join a roundtable at your state’s library association. you can network with other librarians who can suggest to their employers that you would be an excellent hire. be active; make sure people know who you are; do things that make a difference. 4. school libraries or classrooms – they are educational settings and they are full of kids. 5. any management position – management is not an easy skill to learn, few people come to it naturally, and a lot of librarians want no part of it. if you manage retail (customer service) in a store where customers need educating (computer store? book store? health care store?), you are answering reference questions. make sure your cover letter points this out. i think if i was applying to a library that was really strict about what experience was considered acceptable, i would be a bit worried about how much i would enjoy working there. rigid work environments are often not friendly to innovation or employee needs (though if it is a city or county library where the hr department is centralized, you might just be being screened by non-library people). pingback : beginning the job search | elizabeth reynolds pingback : grasping at a grasp of project management | the girl works pingback : the web is made of links, or i know where you came from | hiring librarians pingback : looking for a library job? » public libraries online helenhajnoczky 2015–04–20 at 1:20 am some reassuring words and tips for people in the midst of a long search for a library job http://t.co/0ruxqlow2n http://t.co/ch8lp6cbyd chaudierebooks 2015–04–20 at 11:30 am rt @helenhajnoczky: some reassuring words and tips for people in the midst of a long search for a library job http://t.co/0ruxqlow2n http:/… this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct new year, new cycles, new platform – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2021 31 dec editorial board /0 comments new year, new cycles, new platform update from the in the library with the lead pipe editorial board in 2022, we will be refreshing, upgrading, and relaunching on a new platform and with new cycles for article submission and publication. to get ready for these big changes, we will pause submissions on january 15, 2022 at 11:59pm hawaii standard time. (that means january 16, 2022 at 1:59am pacific, 4:59am eastern, and 9:59am greenwich mean time.) accepted articles submitted by this deadline will continue to be published on a rolling basis while we move to the new platform. beginning in late spring 2022, we will again accept new submissions. instead of accepting rolling submissions, we’ll move to a more structured cycle of three submission windows a year. in the library with the lead pipe‘s editorial board has a longstanding practice of transparently documenting our journal’s procedures and any changes. we’re making these upcoming changes in order to streamline our editorial processes, making them more sustainable for both editors and authors. we’re very excited that the new platform will provide additional features. watch this space for updates and news about our relaunch and publication timelines! news, publication schedule, submission schedule, update source evaluation: supporting undergraduate student research development are we walking the talk? a snapshot of how academic lis journals are (or aren’t) enacting disciplinary values leave a reply cancel reply save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct librarian as poet / poet as librarian – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 12 feb erin dorney /13 comments librarian as poet / poet as librarian in brief: through interviews with three poets who also work in libraries, this article explores the benefits and challenges of these overlapping roles, reflecting on commonalities in the two communities. “magnetic cliche 1” photo by flickr user kfergos (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) by erin dorney introduction i am a librarian and a poet who has tried to keep those two roles separate. as a library school student and in the early years of my career as an academic librarian, i felt that i had to keep my creative writing under wraps—that it could undermine my professionalism. however, as i become more confident and skilled in both arenas, i have begun to realize that my writing has always influenced my experience as a librarian, and that my librarian training has impacted my life as a poet. as i learn how to embrace these intersections, i have grown curious about how others are combining (or keeping separate) their multiple literary lives. this lead pipe article will explore some of the benefits and challenges of these overlapping roles through interviews with three poets who also work in libraries, reflecting on commonalities in the two communities. for the purposes of this article, i define a librarian as anyone who has worked in a library in some capacity (including lis students and individuals who do not hold master’s degrees). the definition of poet is even looser—if you think you might be one, you are. poet librarians poets as librarians are not a new phenomenon. audre lorde was a librarian at the mount vernon public library from 1961 to 1963 and at new york city’s town school library from 1966 to 1968. argentine author jorge luis borges frequently included libraries in his writing, echoing his experience of working as a municipal librarian at the miguel cane branch library in buenos aires from 1937 to 1946. another well-known poet librarian of the past is philip larkin. larkin worked at the wellington public library in england from 1943 to 1946, then switching to a career in academic libraries (university college library; queen’s university library in belfast; and university of hull). ever since i worked with librarian erinn batykefer on editing the library as incubator lead pipe article i knew that she was a poet. batykefer’s first poetry collection, allegheny, monongahela (red hen press 2009), won the benjamin saltman poetry prize. i’ve seen librarian colleen harris’s name pop up many times on the women’s poetry listserv (wom-po, one of the few remaining listservs to which i still subscribe). as my worlds began to collide more frequently, i started a twitter list of librarians who also do creative writing. additional lists of both dead and living poet librarians exist at leaves of bark. are there an equal number of painter librarians as there are poet librarians? photographer librarians? why are the roles of artist/creator and librarian frequently embodied by the same person? my “lofty” answer to this is that being surrounded by an array of ideas and other peoples’ creations makes one want to create in turn. almost every item in our libraries was written by someone who did whatever he or she had to do in order to get that item published and then convince someone to spend actual money on it. that boost alone, seeing tangible evidence day in and day out that creating is valuable, would be enough of a correlation between the two roles for me. some poet librarians are able to mesh their two worlds even more closely, such as jessica smith’s erasure series exact resemblance, recently published in la vague journal. the poems were created by whiting out words from animal camouflage, a book that was weeded from smith’s own indian springs school library collection. below are just three accounts of poets working simultaneously on library careers and poetry projects, with their thoughts on the cross-pollination of these roles. patrick williams associate librarian, subject specialist for english, communication & rhetorical studies, & linguistics at syracuse university libraries. ba, university of north carolina at greensboro;  msis & phd, the university of texas at austin. williams has been writing poetry longer than he has been working as a librarian, even though creative writing temporarily moved to the margins while he delved into academia. “…i’m fairly certain it’s the same set of impulses that drew me to both,” he said in our interview. research for his doctoral project on the online social lives of poets and fiction writers revived him as an active writer and in january of 2014 williams launched really system, a journal of poetry and extensible poetics. “i started it for a number of reasons, the foremost of which being a hope that it would help me to find a community of other poets with similar ideas, questions, and aesthetic interests,” he said. through really system, williams is interested in remixing, recombining, and remaking the text of published poems into new things. some of his experiments can be seen at labs.reallysystem.com, evoking a digital poetry/digital humanities sandbox. williams’ poem “new telegraphy” which appeared in word riot last summer, will likely resonate with anyone who’s been to library school. regarding the balance and interaction between being a librarian and being a poet, williams had this to say: “i feel very fortunate to have found myself in a library position where poetry is very relevant to my work every day. syracuse university has very strong english and writing programs, and it is a delight to support the faculty and students in those programs in my reference and instruction activities. many of my most productive talks and connections with people happen at readings and other literary events. the writing community around here has been quite welcoming to me. my interest in poetry also impacts my work in the projects i choose to work on— i’m so pleased to be involved in making videos of su’s raymond carver reading series available via surface, our online repository; i am excited to support small presses and independent poetry publishers in my collection development work; i make an effort to promote poetry as a visible part of our library community by making poetry books and journals (as well as our incredible poetry-related special collections) a part of any class, event, or interaction i can. this year i’m organizing a reading series for undergraduates in april and working with sound beat (our audio archive’s radio program) to commemorate national poetry month. writing-wise, i’m inspired by things i see, read, and experience every day at work in the library. we encounter so much interesting description and compression in our work, i can’t help but be influenced but the sound of library language. i feel like i’m editing the word “index” out of just about every poem i write. i also think the history of lis has some terribly poetic stories and characters. paul otlet, for example. i’ll write about him someday.” really system will be published quarterly online, with a print edition each year. “i am fascinated by the tension between print and digital and have been feeling a strong unresolved pull toward doing diy publishing projects this millennium. maybe that’s just straight-up 90s nostalgia, but i’m also really inspired by contemporary things like p-queue out of the poetics program at suny buffalo, and ugly duckling presse’s 6×6 magazine, and want to explore what forms a print version of really system can take,” he said. anne haines web content specialist, discovery & research services department at indiana university bloomington libraries. ba & mls, iu bloomington. when i inquired about the intersectionality between haines’ work as a poet and as a professional library staff member, her initial reaction was that they have nothing to do with one another. digging deeper, the influence each role plays on the other became more apparent. “a few years ago i applied for (and was awarded) an individual artist grant through the indiana arts commission. i had the opportunity to sit in on the panel and listen to the comments about each application, which was incredibly interesting; by comparison with a lot of the other applications, i realized that i’d done a really good job of including an assessment piece that talked about how i would measure the success (or lack thereof) of the various activities funded by my grant. this seemed like a no-brainer to me as i completed the application, but afterwards i realized that was because of what i’d learned about project management at work. librarians think about assessment a lot; poets don’t necessarily! also, it occurs to me that the biggest thing poets and librarians have in common is curiosity. as a poet, i try to be awake and aware and to pick up on small details, and then dive deeper; the image of a gecko might occur to me as being somehow evocative, and then i would want to explore and learn about geckos – what kinds are there, what do they eat, do they appear in any mythology, is there a specialized vocabulary that applies to the study of geckos? you always want to gather more information than you actually use in the poem; if all geckos are green, you probably don’t want to say “the gecko was green” in your poem but if some geckos are orange, the greenness might be a detail of interest… related to that, it occurs to me that the good old-fashioned reference interview is a lot like revision, or maybe more accurately, like workshopping a poem. in both cases, you have to look at what you have in front of you (the poem, the reference question) and interrogate it, make it give up some deeper levels; you can’t assume that the question being asked is really the question that needs an answer. what is this poem really about – the rainbow that you saw on your way home, or the fact that you were on your way home after hearing some terrible news and you were desperate for some sign of hope and were lucky enough to look up and spot the rainbow? what is the reference question really about – does the patron need “a book about african history” which is what they asked for, or can you ask them a few questions and find out that they really needed biographical information about nelson mandela but couldn’t remember his name?” haines, who has been writing poetry since she was ten years old, sees differences between her two roles as well. “library work is, i think, inherently collaborative (or should be),” she said, while many poets are “inherently fairly solitary beasts… i like being able to embrace both ways of working, so the duality works for me. also, working in a library pays a heck of a lot better than being a poet. (sad, i know!).” melissa eleftherion carr digital archivist & project manager, poetry center chapbook exchange at san francisco state university. mlis, san jose state university; mfa, mills college. carr, who recently completed her mlis, just launched the poetry center chapbook exchange, a project which grew from a seed in her brain as a library student. the project is an open-access community-curated repository developed for writers to convene, correspond, and collaborate using the poets calling card or “currency” of the chapbook. chapbooks are small books, often 25 pages or less, published by small presses or by writers themselves in a diy fashion (poets & writers). “the model for the chapbook exchange was catalyzed by the need to invigorate poetry collections in public libraries and was expanded to include extant poetry communities,” she said, adding that the site is a “prototype of what we hope will be a lively and vital cooperative space for poets to practice the continuum of reading and writing in the creative process.” carr’s own writing, particularly her 2013 chapbook huminsect (dancing girl press), bears the mark of libraries. “the concept for huminsect originated with the construction of my mfa thesis while at mills where i also spent a lot of time writing at the fw olin library. my thesis was titled from granite to the oyster and sought to examine morphological and sociological relationships between myriad genera including humans, insects, plants, and sea creatures as well as the interstellar. i can also see it as an early pre-librarian attempt at taxonomic classification,” she said. on the topic of balancing her many roles, carr (like many writers) feels like she’s not writing enough. “to further complicate things, i am not a paid library worker; the pc chapbook exchange is a labor of love. while applying for librarian positions, i also have a f/t office job, and am a mother (as well as a wife, a room parent, etc),” she said. however, carr has embraced the idea of fragments as a legitimate form: “i tend to write in short bursts that i may later piece together. i’m also particularly fond of postcard poems. there seems to be a continuous need to compartmentalize in order to feel on top of things. so, fragments.” any librarian familiar with the constant email and juggling of multiple “hats” in our profession can surely relate. conclusion through interviewing these poet librarians and reflecting on my own experiences, the relationship between the two roles has become clearer. both the poet and the librarian rely on curiosity—on questioning, exploring, and learning to make sense of the world around them. in both there is an inherent tension between print and digital, with poets moving beyond the page to test the boundaries of literature (see john mortara’s small creatures / wide field, dan waber’s a kiss, and anything on internet poetry) while librarians fight their way through ebook lending issues, big five publishers, and serving a range of users who expect wifi and the latest print edition of the new york times’ best sellers. another commonality between poets and librarians is the necessity of working in solitude and in collaboration with others. librarians work individually in order to ensure that the library as a whole functions properly, meeting user needs while building a sustainable organization. although poets often write alone, the process of collaboration emerges through workshopping with other writers, making decisions with editors about chapbooks or full length collections, and even identifying and networking with potential publishers. in a recent anthology call, poet librarians sommer browning (head of electronic access & discovery services at auraria library) and christina davis (curator of the woodberry poetry room at harvard university) seek to illuminate this hybrid career, asking for: “…experimental essays, creative meditations, non-fiction accounts, and lyrical explorations that challenge, redefine, and/or widen our perspective on subjects related to libraries and librarianship: from abstractions such as silence, knowledge, questioning, solitude, information, access, truth, organization, preservation, alphabetical order, digitization, and memory to such concretenesses as bookshelves, archives, mildew, the patriot act, scholars, pencils, catalogs…” the anthology also welcomes pieces that celebrate or elaborate upon poet-librarians of the past. “so often poets strive to be teachers, but some of us don’t. some of us are drawn to librarianship to be close to the book, the word, the silence, the self-directed study,” said browning. “i think there is a lot of room for poetry in librarianship and i know some of my fellow poet librarians think this too,” she added. upon reflection i have realized that my work as a librarian not only intersects with, but strengthens my work as a poet and vice versa. about six months ago i co-founded an organization called the triangle, which hosts and promotes literary events in southcentral pennsylvania. this project is not connected to my work as a librarian in any official capacity, but i find myself borrowing many of the skills i have learned (and honed) through librarianship to improve the organization, including graphic design, event planning, data organization and management, web design, and research. the librarian community i have built up over the years provides a solid network of individuals who support literacy and an appreciation for the arts at the grassroots level. my poetry strengths seep out at work as well. i know how to think creatively—how to push myself outside the box of negativity in the same way i use writing exercises to move beyond writers block. i consider problems from multiple perspectives. i want to explore a whole bunch of wild ideas out in order to find the one that works—the one that resonates and has a lasting impact. this is what writers do in the pages of their notebook and their hundreds of google docs. this is the type of creative problem solving, outside-the-box thinking that will help libraries remain vibrant and sustainable. it is my hope that the networks between poet librarians will grow, helping us to collaborate while supporting each other through the (equally stressful?) process of writing and librarianship. for the librarians reading this article who do not engage in creative writing, kudos for making it this far. i have this to say to you: try it. you never know what voices will emerge—what kinds of answers you will find. many thanks to anne haines, patrick williams, melissa eleftherion carr, jessica smith, and sommer browning for allowing me to interview them. thanks to christophe casamassima and lead pipers hugh rundle and emily ford for edits, comments, and thought provoking questions regarding this article. references and further readings “audre lorde” the poetry foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/audre-lorde carr, melissa eleftherion. “crowdsourcing content to promote community and collection development in public libraries” journal of electronic resources librarianship, vol. 25, iss. 4, 2013. “jorge luis borges” the poetry foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jorge-luis-borges library as incubator posts tagged with “creative writing” http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?tag=creative-writing “philip larkin” the poetry foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/philip-larkin “publishing your book” poets & writers, http://www.pw.org/content/publishing_book#q-a_09 rosenstein, alan h. “physicians under stress” american academy of orthopaedic surgeons/american association of orthopaedic surgeons, april 2010 http://www.aaos.org/news/aaosnow/apr10/managing7.asp smith, jessica. “erasures in la vague” looktouchblog, february 9, 2014 http://looktouch.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/erasures-in-la-vague/ smith, jessica. “poetry and libraries: a report on contemporary collection methods” boog city, iss. 80, 2013. http://www.boogcity.com/boogpdfs/bc80.pdf williams, james patrick. “social presence, interaction, and participation in asynchronous creative writing workshops” dissertation, university of texas, 2011 http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/etd-ut-2011-12-4504?show=full häuserkämpfe: an inside look at researching in diy archives me and you and everything we know: information behavior in library workplaces 13 responses pingback : poet-librarianship « subclass z pingback : in the library with the lead pipe on poet-librarians | looktouchblog greg bem 2014–02–15 at 9:22 am i can’t express how awesome i found this article. i’m primarily a poet, grad student at the uw ischool and will have my mlis in june. poetry is all over the place. you should check out the tradition of poets in libraries in hungary . . . http://www.amazon.com/the-colonnade-teeth-modern-hungarian/dp/1852243317 . . . this collection has a lot of amazing preand post-war poets fitting that category. additionally, i think that john wieners worked in the boston public library or harvard as an archivist. anyway! there should be a regular meetup for such folks that love the bond between libraries and poetics. oh, also, your twitter list didn’t load! erin dorney 2014–02–17 at 9:37 am hi greg – thanks for letting me know about the twitter list issue, i just updated it. i think a librarian poet meetup would be fantastic! maybe in conjunction with a larger conference. greg bem 2014–02–17 at 6:44 pm yes to the larger conference idea! but which one? i feel like any sense of the poetic would be completely corroded at something as massive as ala. maybe there’s a more humble space? pingback : librarature roundup | the leems bean pingback : we contain multitudes: a song of our anne | redux pingback : february link love | tombrarian pingback : research & scholarship » blog archive » williams published stewart c baker 2014–03–13 at 5:02 pm excellent! i’m also a poet (and fiction writer) in addition to my librarian hat. pingback : star-gazing: learning from blogging librarians of merit | readingadults pingback : sunday artist, monday librarian: erin dorney | e.tches.ca jshhnn 2015–04–24 at 9:59 pm spent a good portion of the day continuing to daydream about an anthology of poetry by librarian-poets. see also: http://t.co/w96zbmoitj this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct what do we do and why do we do it? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 8 aug emily ford /40 comments what do we do and why do we do it? in brief: the library community should develop a philosophy of librarianship. in order to do so the community should engage in a dialogue about what we do and why we do it. our history with the idea of a philosophy of librarianship is long, yet the library community hasn’t resolved the problem of what that philosophy (or philosophies) should be. engaging in a reflective and philosophically-based practice of librarianship (a praxis of librarianship), one that frames decision-making and library work with the question: “what we do and why we do it?” will enable the library community to have successful conversations with those they serve. as a result, librarians will be invited to participate in important community decision-making efforts, and be able to further impact communities. photo by pedro cambra from barcelona, spain (dscn2010) (cc by 2.0)  via wikimedia commons by emily ford introduction it was a big deal. school librarians, in particular, were furious. when the new york times published the article, wasting time is new divide in digital era, listservs, blogs, facebook, and twitter lit up with librarians’ wrath. there was outcry and anger and hurt. the news was out that the federal communications commission (fcc) was going to spend $200 million dollars to create a “digital literacy corps” in the form of a project called connect2compete. media specialist fran bullington (2012) posted the following on her blog, informania: “looks like the fcc has no idea that our schools have a ready-made “digital literacy corps” in place. chairman julius genachowski was quoted in the article.  he recognizes the importance of digital literacy, but he is ill-informed. he does not know that there are already trained professionals in many schools who work, against great odds at times, to train our students and who volunteer to teach parents these skills. let’s not let him claim ignorance before spending this money.” unfortunately, discussions such as this are not unique. librarians are constantly explaining what they do (and what they can do) to their communities.1 discussions similar to those surrounding the fcc debacle present themselves in small communities, within institutions, county and city governments. librarians are absent from the table during important discussions when their expertise could be used. it’s possible that librarians don’t put themselves at the table, or institutions like the fcc don’t think to invite librarians to participate. in the end the result is the same. librarians have lower visibility and powerful decisions are made without librarians. these decisions could be improved with librarian input from the get go. more and more, public discussions regarding libraries and librarians have surfaced into the public sphere. each time there is a ballot measure, each time budgets are slashed, each time librarians lose jobs, the library community must articulate its value, to prove that it is worth current investment, and to fight for greater financial and social investments in the future. the cuts keep happening in institutional, city, and county budgets. libraries and schools lose valuable professionals, or are made to deal with budgets that have gone from bad to worse. in this environment, libraries, librarians, and their advocates are faced with tracking, documenting, substantiating, and articulating their value. value has been a hot topic for libraries for a while. in 2010, acrl published lis professor megan oakleaf’s study the value of academic libraries, which outlined recommendations for academic libraries and librarians to further perceptions of value. these recommendations, by and large, focus on gathering data via assessment to track and show evidence of academic libraries’ value to their communities. similarly, the american library association’s council recently passed a resolution in support of school libraries. typical of value statements and documents, the resolution discusses evidence that school libraries and librarians have positive effects on student learning. for school librarians in beaverton, oregon, this resolution and the numerous discussions with the school board did not work; every teacher librarian has been cut from the district. another example of value failing was published in working together: evolving value for academic libraries, a sage study released in june that “found no systematic evidence of the value of academic libraries for teaching and research staff” (creaser & spezi, 2012, p. 1). despite the talk about value and impact, despite the resolutions and reports, jobs are getting cut, the fcc is working on connect2compete with some (but in many people’s opinions not enough) involvement by libraries, and librarians, and library advocates are left to assert what we do and what impacts we make until we are blue in the face. either we are too busy ‘articulating our value’ to ourselves and not enough to external stakeholders, or our messages aren’t compelling enough to get results. my aim here is not to contribute to the groundswell of victim rhetoric that surrounds the de-funding and de-professionalization of librarianship. instead, i aim to shine a light on what i think is happening. namely, we haven’t yet sussed out the philosophy behind what it is that we do. our conversations aren’t working because our language isn’t working. our language isn’t working because our day-to-day thinking isn’t working. we should be engaging in a different conversation with ourselves and our community of library workers. we should individually and collectively reflect on the question: what do we do and why do we do it? when we’re able to successfully engage in this dialogue we will be able to transform our practice of librarianship into a praxis2 of librarianship. as a result, our conversations with external stakeholders will include deeper meaning and will have greater impact on our communities. in the rest of this article i will discuss historical and current conversations regarding what we do and why we do it. then i will discuss our problems with language and make a case for how and why librarians should develop a praxis of librarianship. a philosophy of librarianship so how did we get to this crossroads? we currently communicate with our communities in a rapidly evolving information landscape. this landscape further necessitates our external conversations to focus on what librarians bring to their communities and the impacts we have on them. despite the current tenor of these conversations, our internal dialogue regarding the philosophy of librarianship (i.e. what do we do and why do we do it) is not new. it goes back to the early 1900s, and possibly earlier.3 in 1934, james periam danton published “a plea for a philosophy of librarianship” in the library quarterly, in which the author asks that librarians engage in philosophical exercise to the end of creating a philosophy of life and subsequently, a philosophy of librarianship. many of danton’s readers, and certainly lead pipe readers, may argue that s.r. ranganathan’s five laws of library science addresses a philosophy of librarianship. however, danton dismisses this seminal work: “but this treatise, as stimulating and interesting as it undoubtedly is, does not attempt to define the functions of library activity on any other basis than that of present-day good library service; the discussion is not an open-minded enquiry into the validity of functions and activities. most of it is, furthermore, limited to public-library work.” (p. 532) danton concludes that any philosophy of librarianship should and must be “derived from the predominating ideals of that society. consequently, before a library philosophy can be formulated, there must be an understanding and recognition of the ideals and purposes of the society into which that philosophy must fit” (p. 547). although danton did not himself offer any concrete philosophy, he asserted that any philosophy of librarianship would be a social philosophy that ties the library to its roots in democratic society. this conversation has continued throughout the library quarterly’s publication history. more recently, in the late 1990s, another conversation regarding philosophy emerged. in his article, “we don’t need a philosophy of library and information science: we’re confused enough already,” jim zwadlo (1997) addressed contemporary lis literature in which positivism and reductionism were framed as a troublesome foundations for and practices of library science methods. in response, gary radford and john budd (1997) reflected on zwadlo’s assertions, concluding their comments with:  “…we loudly advocate that we do need a philosophy of library and information science; we are not confused enough!” (p. 321). zwadlo (1998) responded, slinging around concepts of positivism and epistemology. “do radford and budd want to replace positivism with another philosophy? or do they want us to see all philosophies as useful, as all having something to offer? perhaps we are quibbling over the term ‘alternative’ and do not really disagree” (p. 115). even ten years later (in 2008), when dr. robert labaree (head of the usc von kleinsmid center library for international and public affairs) and ross scimeca (head of the usc hoose philosophy library) published “the philosophical problem of truth in librarianship” the discussion continued. right on the heels of this publication, in 2009, came library juice press’s release of andre cossette’s 1976 french essay,  humanism and libraries: an essay on the philosophy of librarianship. in his introduction, translator, publisher and librarian rory litwin addresses potential reader questions such as “why should american librarians be interested in a philosophical treatment of the foundations of the profession…?” (p. ix). litwin explains: “sound ideas about what librarianship is and what its goals are permit us to claim a degree of autonomy in institutions where we might otherwise serve as mere functionaries rather than as the professionals we are. without a philosophical foundation, we lack a basis for making decisions regarding how to change our institutions in response to external forces, with the potential result that we do not play the role that we should in decision-making.” (p. ix-x). this explanation mirrors the arguments outlined by danton, cossette, budd, labaree and scimeca. at the risk of overgeneralizing, each of these authors point to philosophy as a practice that allows for external recognition of the library’s role in society and institutions, strengthens the esteem of librarians and the profession, and encourages a reflective and intentional practice of librarianship. despite this 80+ year old conversation, and the seeming agreement as to why and how a philosophy of librarianship would serve the profession, librarians and librarianship do not coalesce around a philosophy of librarianship. and perhaps this is not without good reason. our librarian identity crises we continue to struggle with the philosophy of librarianship in the 21st century even though the idea permeates our profession’s history. in the recent past, numerous individual librarians have written to grapple with what we do and who we are.  a good example is lane wilkinson, an academic librarian with a master’s in philosophy, who asked (and answered) whether librarians were experts in a two-part blog post series over at sense and reference. in the day and age when technological advancement has challenged how we perceive what librarians do, we seem to be asking: what is a librarian?4 one of the problems that we face when it comes to finding a philosophy of librarianship, and likewise articulating our impact to communities, is that the umbrella of librarianship is gigantic. librarian. when you begin to think about it, the word doesn’t mean anything, because it means too many things. librarians are teachers and collectors and advocates and searchers and researchers and… sound familiar? in 2010 in the library with the lead pipe published a slew of articles that discussed what we do. in june 2010 kim leeder, fellow co-founder, editor, and author for lead pipe was searching for her identity and the “real work” of librarianship. following kim’s article, char booth, librarian, blogger, and author, argued that librarians are shapeshifters who can show up opportunistically to be on the periphery of communities and conversations, and i lamented losing my librarian mojo. in contrast to booth, cossette argued that librarians should frame themselves outside of the paradigm of our overarching institutions. he did not see librarians as educators or teachers, nor did he see them as scientists, but simply as librarians. furthering his argument, he points to the need for “librarian” to be defined and for the purpose or aim of libraries to be outlined. in 2009 john blyberg, cindi trainor, and kathryn greenhill (all three library workers and bloggers) composed and endorsed the darien statements on the library and librarians. these statements are an attempt to get at the bigger picture identity of the library and librarians; a potential answer to the question, “what do we do and what do we value?” the statements outline the purpose of the library, in addition to outlining the role of the librarian within that purpose. like cossette, the darien statements point to the possible (and arguably, inherent) tension between libraries and the institutions or organizations in which they may be housed, although they do not go so far as to assert that the library is the same with or without an institution. “individual libraries serve the mission of their parent institution or governing body, but the purpose of the library overrides that mission when the two come into conflict.” moreover, the darien statements aptly outline the purpose of the library, and separates the roles that libraries and librarians play in this paradigm. there is certainly no lack of evidence that librarians are grappling with these questions. another example is david rothman’s 2011 manifesto, common sense librarianship, wherein he discusses some basic qualities of information professionals. “the most important qualities an information professional can possess are adaptability, resourcefulness, a habit of looking for better/easier/more efficient ways to do things, creativity, and a love for solving problems.” further, rothman states that librarians should: “…adapt rather than perish” and “information professionals should be champions of clarity and concision who find accessible ways to describe complex topics.” most recently, r. david lankes, lis professor and library futurist, published the atlas of new librarianship (2011) wherein he created a knowledge map of the profession, placing the mission of librarians at the center. “the mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities” (p. 13). lankes argues that it is not a building that makes a library a library, but it is a librarian that makes a library. “i have long contended that a room full of books is simply a closet but that an empty room with a librarian in it is a library” (p. 16). lankes’ mission and resulting worldview of new librarianship enables librarians to create new social compacts with their communities, lankes argues. it is these social compacts (that communities support librarians as long as librarians hold up their part of the bargain: to improve society by facilitating knowledge creation in their communities) that enable librarians and libraries to have meaningful conversations about the impacts and value they bring to their communities. while cossette offers definitions and aims for librarianship, contemporary works such as the darien statements and the atlas of new librarianship are more applicable for a current understanding and introspective practices of librarianship. as evidenced by this handful of examples, the library profession is lacking consistent thinking and messaging about what it is that we do and who we are. some definitions such as the darien statements spell out the mission of both the library and librarians, whereas others are concerned mostly with the librarian. it’s a language problem: value vs. philosophy the language problems don’t end or begin with questions of the librarian. there exists a complex disconnect in language between libraries, librarians, and librarianship. this becomes further complicated when we discuss the value of libraries and librarians. one need only think back to conversations about “articulating value” and be reminded of documents such as the value of academic libraries report or ala resolution i mentioned earlier. we’ve been trying for so long to discuss our value that the philosophy of librarianship hasn’t entered into discussions about our impact on communities. we struggle with the difference between value and philosophy, so i think it is important to analyze, ever briefly, the differences. a basic philological investigation helps. the oxford english dictionary offers a good definition of philosophy: “the study of the general principles of a particular subject, phenomenon, or field of inquiry” (oed online, 2012). definitions of “value,” on the other hand, discusses the worth, sum, or merit of work. it is inherently quantifiable, assessable, and deliverable. whereas, “values,” (with an s) insinuates “principles or moral standards.” naturally, questions of philosophy delve deeper into meaning than the question of what value libraries bring to communities and what are librarianship’s shared principles. rather, the word “philosophy” implies that one engages in introspection, quiet study, and open discourse. it is about periodically examining why it is that we do what we do. similar to this measurable vs. questioning stance, cossette examines measurable science versus the introspective philosophy. basing his questioning in danton’s claims, cossette approaches this question as science vs. philosophy (p. 7). he stresses that where science answers the “how,” philosophy answers the “why.” why librarians? in the value of academic libraries megan oakleaf (2010) suggests that librarians “…need to collect new and different data” (p. 95) in addition to gathering existing data. she further develops this argument, showcasing how librarians might capture new data using existing products or developing new data collection products (pp. 95-96). in essence, the document itself points to how academic libraries and the librarians within them support their institutions. any philosophical question framed in the document, returns to the question of how, rather than why. concluding the report’s short section on “societal contribution” oakleaf writes: “academic library contributions to society have not been widely identified or researched. however, once librarians know more about how they contribute to the primary areas of institutional missions—learning, research, and service—they can use the lessons they learn to assess the societal value of those contributions.” (p. 56). oakleaf herself shows our weakness—the lack of research or identification of our societal contributions. in essence, she demonstrates that the “why” hasn’t been adequately addressed. this tension between the how and why is difficult. while funders may want to hear numbers and facts, would not a story about why we loan materials, teach digital literacy skills, or facilitate conversations in communities not have the same effect? how can we enhance the numbers with more robust language that speaks to why we do what we do? it’s a language problem: messaging and catchphrases librarians don’t have a catchphrase, or not a good one, anyway. doctors abide by the hippocratic oath: “first do no harm.” police officers “protect and serve.” these are universally identifiable phrases affiliated with the identity, purpose, and underlying philosophy of two very disparate professions. these are oaths or statements of practice, which are discrete and recognizable by the public at large. herein lays the problem for librarians. what succinct and meaningful phrase do we have that will resonate with the public at large? it’s not for lack of attempt, however. cossette outlined the following: “librarianship is the art and science of the acquisition, preservation, organization, and retrieval of written and audiovisual records with the aim of assuring a maximum of information access for the human community.” (p. 33). but i can’t imagine that this definition resonates with anyone outside of librarianship. similarly, values statements such as the ala office of intellectual freedom’s core values of librarianship, the darien statements, ala’s library bill of rights, ala’s motto: “the best reading, for the largest number, at the least cost,”5 and other ‘why librarians are important’ documents have not been able to make meaning for the public at large of librarians’ purpose and role in society. we’re good at talking to one another and knowing what each other is saying. we have terms like information literacy, resource description, and information retrieval. but we can’t expect the general public to have a clue what any of those aforementioned phrases mean. i don’t know that there is a good motto. at best, the catchphrases and mottos that we can craft are nebulous in meaning. at the 2012 annual oregon library association conference, a colleague and i led a book discussion of cossette’s work. in the discussion we tried to define a mission or motto for librarianship. here’s what we came up with: “librarians are facilitating for everyone the lifelong development and experience of human knowledge, culture, and discourse” (participants of humanism & libraries: a book discussion, personal communication, april 27, 2012). so how do we get the language to work? how do we work toward cohesive, clear, and succinct messaging to the public? i don’t think we can yet. we haven’t collectively been doing enough of the work to get there. before we can begin to craft meaningful statements, we will need to continue to engage with the study of our profession philosophically. we will need to understand our personal practice of librarianship so that we can, in turn, translate it into meaningful conversations with our communities. librarianship is a multi-faceted profession zwadlo was right, we are incredibly confused. he asserted that confusion could be harnessed as a useful way to get things done—that confusion can aid librarians in creative thinking and problem solving. and i’m not sure that, despite many authors who are in agreement regarding the need for a philosophy, coming up with one unified philosophy of librarianship will ultimately serve the profession. the fact is the breadth of librarianship is so vast that one unified philosophy couldn’t possibly capture the enormity of impact we bring our communities. our umbrella is just too big and our communities too diverse. cossette also points to the vast array of work librarians perform, from serving within elementary and higher educational institutions, to public libraries, archives, and preservation of human knowledge.6 so if finding and agreeing upon one unified philosophy of librarianship poses so many challenges, what can we do instead? photo by flickr user gerald stolk (cc by-nc 2.0) from practice to praxis instead of searching for a unified philosophy of librarianship, we should move from having a practice of librarianship to a praxis of librarianship. in our long history of debate regarding a philosophy of librarianship, there are common threads in the discussion. from danton in 1934 to lankes in 2011 it is clear that librarianship should be a reflective and intentional practice. “the philosophy of librarianship, then, is the theoretical integration of library practice as a unity, the encompassing understanding of the meaning of the profession. through a method that is at once critical and reflective, it attempts to form a synthetic whole out of the disparate facets of librarianship to better direct its application.” (cossette, p. 9).  to cultivate praxis is to remain curious about our practice and engage with it. it is to want to know internally and externally what is changing and what is steadfast in our profession. it is to think critically about our greater purpose and current goals when we make decisions. praxis brings philosophical underpinnings to our daily routines and professional decision-making. on a day-to-day level moving from practice to praxis will mean a shift in thinking. for example, during discussions and decision-making processes we may consider moving from one vendor to another. in practice we may choose to partner with a vendor whose pricing better reflects our budgetary constraints. in praxis, we may choose to partner with a vendor whose mission better aligns with our own, despite higher pricing. this seems simple enough. however, praxis manifests in the process of decision-making, not in the end result. to come to this decision, this fictional team of librarians had to weigh their options through a critical lens. they did not ask themselves, “what is our budgetary bottom line?” instead, they asked themselves, “how will this decision/vendor align with our mission and goals?” had these librarians not critically engaged with why they do what they do, they most likely would have partnered with a vendor with lower pricing. when every library worker engages daily with the question, “what do i do and why do i do it?” we will be better situated to have meaningful conversations with one another. we will be able to better articulate amongst ourselves our goals and our missions. we will have a deeper understanding of the societal benefit we provide and we will better position ourselves when external conversations occur. maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to find common ground for a motto or phrase that perfectly identifies what it is that we do and why we do it. a praxis of librarianship should be a daily and meditative exercise interwoven with our reference work, collection development, programming, teaching, and research. it is a way of being. conclusion so why is the fcc putting so much money toward a digital literacy corps without enough involvement from the library community? because we don’t have the tradition of being engaged in a philosophical praxis of librarianship. having a habit of thinking deeply and critically about what it is that we do and why we do it, on a large scale, would enable and empower us to create good language and hopefully, in turn, to influence on a large scale the perception and understanding of librarians’ value to and impact on society. repeatedly explaining librarians’ functions in society is a death march. according to lankes, “over time, functional views don’t and can’t capture the dynamic nature of the world. what’s more, they tend to lead to stagnation and the inability to adapt” (p. 21). instead of having conversations about librarians’ function and value, we should have conversations about the why. why we do what we do. why, from a philosophical viewpoint, our work matters. a first step in responding to any “crisis” or challenge in the profession—such as the fcc’s project that only nominally notices librarians; the issue of ebooks that brett bonfield, lead pipe co-founder and author so wonderfully discussed in the ebook cargo cult; the elimination of budgets and jobs and de-professionalization that occurs with retirements—is to engage in a praxis of librarianship. as lankes (2011) argues “…the very definition of our field, its perception, and its ultimate effect are in the hands of librarians–our hands” (p. 1). all library workers should be engaged in a praxis of librarianship. and it’s never too late to start. the heavy lifting for this has already been done. lankes’s atlas, the darien statements, articles written by scholars in librarianship in the 1930s through to today, have lent themselves to a rich discourse on philosophy. if you haven’t engaged with philosophy, if your library practice hasn’t crossed the bridge from practice to praxis, read the darien statements. read the atlas of new librarianship. begin your praxis of librarianship from these standpoints. and begin to reflect. every day. thank yous go out to: kathryn greenhill, nathan mealey, and john jackson for their incredible input and ability to ask provocative questions. additional thanks to lead pipers erin dorney and eric frierson for feedback on this post; and thanks to brett bonfield, kim leeder, and ellie collier, who listened to me ramble about this topic while trying to gather my thoughts. references american library association. (2012). resolution that school libraries and librarians are critical to educational success. american library association. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/aboutala/sites/ala.org.aboutala/files/content/governance/council/council_documents/2012an_council_docus/cd_41_school_libresolution.pdf american library association. (1996). library bill of rights | american library association. library bill of rights. retrieved july 18, 2012, from http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/ american library association office of intellectual freedom (2004). core values of librarianship. retrieved july 22, 2012 from http://www.ala.org/offices/oif/statementspols/corevaluesstatement/corevalues bonfield, b. (2012). the ebook cargo cult. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved july 22, 2012 from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/the-ebook-cargo-cult booth, c. (2010). librarians as ______________: shapeshifting at the periphery. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved august 3, 2012 from: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/librarians-as-__________-shapeshifting-at-the-periphery/ bullington, f. (2012). calling school librarians to action! another attempt to undermine our jobs « informania. iformania. retrieved july 13, 2012, from http://informania.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/calling-school-librarians-to-action-another-attempt-to-undermine-our-jobs/ cossette, a. (2009). humanism and libraries: an essay on the philosophy of librarianship. (r. litwin, trans.). duluth, minn: library juice press. (original work published in 1976). creaser, c., & spezi, v. (2012). working together: evolving value for academic libraries. retrieved august 3, 2012 from http://libraryvalue.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/ndm-5709-lisu-final-report_web.pdf danton, j. p. (1934). plea for a philosophy of librarianship. the library quarterly, 4(4), 527-551. ford, e. (2010). tryin’ to get my mojo workin’. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved august 3, 2012 from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/tryin-to-get-my-mojo-workin/ lankes, r. d. (2011). the atlas of new librarianship. cambridge, mass: mit press. labaree, r. v., & scimeca, r. (2008). the philosophical problem of truth in librarianship. library quarterly (1), 43-70. leeder, k. (2010). my maverick bar: a search for identity and the “real work” of librarianship. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved august 3, 2012 from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/my-maverick-bar-a-search-for-identity-and-the-%e2%80%9creal-work%e2%80%9d-of-librarianship/ oakleaf, m. (2010). the value of academic libraries: a comprehensive research review and report. retrieved august 3, 2012 from http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_report.pdf owen, w. (2012, june 5). beaverton school district adopts 2012-13 budget in emotional, packed meeting. the oregonian. portland. retrieved fromhttp://www.oregonlive.com/beaverton/index.ssf/2012/06/beaverton_school_district_adop.html philosophy, n. (2012). oed online. retrieved july 30, 2012 from http://www.oed.com/view/entry/142505?rskey=ssq0by&result=1&isadvanced=false praxis, n.(2012). oed online. retrieved july 30, 2012 from http://www.oed.com/view/entry/149425?redirectedfrom=praxis radford, g. p., & budd, j. m. (1997). we do need a philosophy of library and information science — we’re not confused enough: a response to zwadlo. the library quarterly, 67(3), 315–321. richtel, m. (2012, may 29). new “digital divide” seen in wasting time online – nytimes.com. new york times. new york. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/us/new-digital-divide-seen-in-wasting-time-online.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all rothman, d. (2011). common sense librarianship: an ordered list manifesto. health information | geekery. retrieved july 16, 2012, from http://davidrothman.net/2011/03/02/common-sense-librarianship-an-ordered-list-manifesto/ wilkinson, l. (2012a). what are “experts” anyway? sense and reference. retrieved august 3, 2012, from http://senseandreference.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/what-are-experts-anyway/ wilkinson, l. (2012b). librarians are experts on testimony. sense and reference. retrieved august 3, 2012, from http://senseandreference.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/librarians-are-experts-on-testimony/ zwadlo, j. (1997). we don’t need a philosophy of library and information science: we’re confused enough already. the library quarterly, 67(2), 103–121. zwadlo, j. (1998). comment. library quarterly, 68(1), 114-117. university of chicago press. among numerous examples see: sass, r.k. (2002). marketing the worth of your library. library journal. retrieved august 3, 2012 from: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/ca220888.html [↩] the oxford english dictionary defines praxis as: “b. conscious, willed action, esp. (in marxist and neo-marxist thought) that through which theory or philosophy is transformed into practical social activity; the synthesis of theory and practice seen as a basis for or condition of political and economic change. also: an instance of this; the application of a theory or philosophy to a practical political, social, etc., activity or programme.” (oed online, 2012). [↩] while this may seem quite recent, remember that the first library school was created by melvil dewey in the late 1800s. prior to this time, librarianship was a learned craft, with no one unified curriculum. ala began accrediting schools of library science in 1925. [↩] and as one of my peer-reviewers asked: “or, is a librarian still a librarian?” [↩] <rant>this motto is terrible! is all that ala, librarians, and libraries do in support of reading?</rant> [↩] see humanism & libraries chapter 4, “the ultimate aims of libraries” for this discussion. [↩] academic libraries, librarianship, philosophy, praxis, value dynamic duo: the web developer and the public services librarian “that’s how we do things around here”: organizational culture (and change) in libraries 40 responses pingback : libraries and public service « hack library school emily 2012–08–08 at 9:54 am totally interesting conversation, emily! i’m not sure we need a unified theory as much as we need a unified agreement that we ought to *have* some theories, and an acknowledgement that our work comes out of those theories whether we know it/make it explicit to ourselves or not. for instruction folks, i think heidi jacobs writes great stuff about the importance of reflective practice, and her chapter on wikipedia in critical library instruction: theories and methods is a good example of how practice is influenced by theory–if you think truth emerges only out of conflict and is temporary and contextual, you might teach reference research differently than someone who believes it’s possible to find the right answer. emily ford 2012–08–08 at 10:24 pm wow, thanks, emily. lankes points to some theories that are really interesting in the atlas of new librarianship–specifically conversation theory. that, in itself is interesting in that it can talk about how we interact externally and internally. thanks for recommending the chapter by heidi jacobs, i’m going to go check it out. kenley neufeld 2012–08–08 at 11:02 am great conversation and exploration (as usual from lead). thank you for the effort bringing the varied thought together on this idea of philosophy. in your conclusion, i was struck by the line repeatedly explaining librarians’ functions in society is a death march. . it leaves me pondering and wishing i explore further. emily ford 2012–08–08 at 10:25 pm thanks, kenley. what exactly struck you about that sentence? as i think about it now, i’m wondering if it’s too negative. i guess i was trying to get out that we need to be flexible about our function. kenley neufeld 2012–08–14 at 11:19 pm i think we spend too much time trying to explain ourselves rather than just being who we are. if we do our very best and demonstrate value (i do on my campus) then i hardly ever have to explain myself or the functions of a librarian. michele 2012–08–08 at 11:09 am great piece! thanks for writing this! i actually do think many librarians are engaged in a philosophical praxis of librarianship. however, it comes in the form of blogs, websites, etc. where the conversation has not been centralized. we have the ability to state our thoughts and opinions to the world and to each other about the things that we deal with on a day to day basis. having personal platforms allows us to wax poetic, as well as philosophical, about librarianship; reading presentations and stories online of librarians in real-time gives me this impression – and i gobble it up! the downside is that i need to search for it if i’m not already subscribed to a blog or following someone. having these conversation centralized, or organized (we are librarians after all), might naturally create what could become the updated philosophy of librarianship. (i have absolutely no idea how this could even be possible, given the amount of library-related information out there, so this is more of a comment than a question!) emily ford 2012–08–08 at 10:28 pm this is a really interesting perspective, michele. i think you are right, that many people are engaged in a praxis of librarianship. i guess i wonder if we’re talking to each other about it enough. as you point out, we can put our thoughts out there, but how do we know there will be a response? or adoption? or further ideas created? thanks for chiming in. pingback : library juice » emily ford on library philosophy audrey 2012–08–08 at 2:41 pm i wanted to share an article – libraries build autonomy: a philosophical perspective on the social role of libraries and librarians (http://unllib.unl.edu/lpp/barbakoff.htm) disclaimer – i’m the author. i wrote on this topic in 2010, suggesting a particular philosophical perspective for libraries – namely, the building of autonomy in our patrons. (it’s a little philosophy-nerdy, just a warning!) i don’t mean to self-promote – i just wanted to share that there are more of us thinking about this issue, and hopefully provide an example or spark some ideas for others who want to construct their own argument for a particular philosophy of librarianship. emily ford 2012–08–08 at 10:38 pm audrey, i’m so glad you shared this. i’m still absorbing your ideas. i like the idea of autonomy, and i especially like that you are borrowing from feminist tradition, but i am still not quite sure how i feel about seeing myself as a “caretaker.” to me that sounds too paternalistic/maternalistic of a view. i also want to engage more with the idea of librarianship being tied to a “moral” stance. that is also a loaded term. and for me, not loaded in a good way. i’m going to chew on these ideas that you’ve proposed. autonomy definitely gets mentioned by cossette and others, but they certainly don’t approach it in the same way that you do. thanks for sharing– this is really good stuff that i’m going to be thinking about for weeks to come. audrey 2012–08–10 at 2:21 am thanks! i see where you’re coming from on the vocabulary choices. mostly, i used them because that’s the vocabulary being used in the literature i was reading/citing. i did mean caretaker simply as “one who provides care”, though it’s hard to say that in any way in our culture without some wonky connotations. (so interesting what that says about us …) as for “moral” – i mean that to be read as “something that generates an ‘ought'” rather than “something mitt romney would say.” but i don’t think it messes up the argument much just to say “philosophical” instead of “moral”. i really enjoyed your article and am glad to see other people thinking about this issue!! erica findley 2012–08–08 at 5:21 pm thanks for writing this! when i think of why we do what we do, i can’t but help to think about when i decided to become a librarian. i know this isn’t semantically perfect, but i came up with it before library school, before a library job, and before i knew any library jargon. i became a librarian so that i could contribute to people’s life in a positive way by helping them connect with information they needed. i remind myself of this all the time when i see bad news for libraries/librarians. emily ford 2012–08–08 at 10:41 pm me, too, erica. i bring myself back to these thoughts with regularity. i guess i’ve had some interactions in the past with individuals who didn’t really have compelling reasons to go to library school (and i’m not saying they should have). this kind of reflection about the mission/vision/philosophy/praxis of librarianship could certainly be better reflected in lis education. but i digress… stevenb 2012–08–08 at 9:43 pm hi emily. i’ll just add two things to a good conversation. i have found the book start with why to be of some help in understanding the importance of putting the why before the what or how of what you do. i tried to share some of my thoughts about it in this column http://bit.ly/rvk6y6 – on the need to perhaps understand and express your personal why – before you can move on the why of the profession – and the connection between the two. not exactly a statement of philosophy, but more of a reflection on why academic librarians are passionate about their work (or should be) – http://bit.ly/netwnh – i was trying to articulate more of a personal philosophy on the why of academic librarianship – mostly about building relationships and making a difference in them. emily ford 2012–08–08 at 11:01 pm thanks for sharing all of these, steven. and to what you said in the lj column about the why, i say, “yes!” and to passion i say, “yes!” i love that so many people have already articulated their whys and that we are coming together to talk about it. maybe i wrote the wrong article. maybe i should have written an article that, instead of calling for praxis of librarianship, called for the identification or creation of a platform for us all to share these ideas. (see michele’s comment above where where mentioned that she thought we were already doing this, but finding out what others think can be time consuming and is not centralized.) finally, your two articles have made me think more seriously about following up today’s article with one entitled “my praxis of librarianship,” wherein i ruminate about my why. thanks again, steven, for commenting and sharing your own thoughts. (and i’ll definitely be borrowing start with why from my library.) jonesy 2012–08–09 at 8:49 am problems with this approach: 1. it assumes no change over time. 2. it assumes perfect information is obtained by a tiny subset of humanity. 3. it makes no provision for cultural diversity. 5. it makes no provision for evolutionary change. 4. it disregards the pragmatics of resource extraction and constraints. i know it’s unsatisfying to think of yourself as functionary, but that is our essence, as it is the essence of any institution that serves humanity – government, religion, education; all must bow before the will of the people. that is our philosophy: to do what our patrons demand. whether they be a political body of the public, a single wealthy donor, or an organization requiring support for whatever their larger mission. emily ford 2012–08–09 at 1:19 pm i’m so glad that you brought up these four points, jonesy. i’d like to address them with some thoughts and questions. on your first point, “it assumes no change over time,” i heartily disagree. in fact, a previous draft of this article included a thought: “philosophies are bound to change over time. as libraries and librarianship rapidly change, so, too, will philosophies of library science.” one of my peer reviewers was really intrigued by this statement, and wanted to hear more. there would be no possible way for librarians to remain librarians, should they not be adaptable, flexible, and able to have their praxis of librarianship evolve over time. your second point, i’m not sure what you mean by “perfect information.” can you clarify what that means? third, i think that there is definite room for cultural diversity. after all, i did not argue that we find one philosophy of librarianship. instead, i argued that we, individually, should come into a praxis– and in this sense praxis is individualized. however, what it also implies, is that by having a praxis, that we will also have conversations and engage in discourse with one another about individual praxis. in this flexibility, i can see where there is a lot of room for librarianship to engage with an array of cultures. regarding your fourth point, i hope that you could please explain a little more what you mean about resource extraction. and to your fifth, see my response to your first. i completely disagree that our philosophy is to do as our patrons demand. it seems quite a cynical view that librarians do what patrons demand. this has never been my personal take as to what it means and why i am a librarian. my stance is more related to feminism and social justice. to complicate your assertions, i think you may also consider your points in terms of language. there is a difference between “library” and “librarian.” while i could see an argument that libraries are functionaries, i disagree that librarians are mere functionaries in society. i cannot support a view that librarians and librarianship are functionaries. praxis is not an action taken by a library, it is a process undertaken by a librarian or library worker, which informs the manifestation of their work, librarianship. thank you for your challenging comments. they really got me thinking. i hope that you can further explain some of your points. lori 2012–08–09 at 9:54 am in library school dr. david kaiser taught me that the role of libraries is to “acquire, organize, preserve, and deliver the human record.” that philosophy has always served me quite well. emily ford 2012–08–09 at 1:22 pm thanks for pointing to this, lori. that is a very functional view of libraries. as you will see in my response to the previous commentor, jonesy, there is a difference in language and meaning between “library,” “librarian,” and “librarianship.” in the way that you have adopted the role of the library as your philosophy, it does not pay tribute to you as the librarian or the embodiment of your work, librarianship. if you agree that libraries are different from librarians are different from librarianship, what would be your philosophy of librarianship? ed summers 2012–08–09 at 10:18 am thanks for this overview, i hadn’t heard of the darien statements and the atlas of new librarianship before, and am now going to check them out. i’m a librarian and have had a bit of a philosophical bent at times. so it was nice to see these two streams cross in your post. i think it’s seductive to think that there could be a unifying philosophy of librarianship, and that it could be summarized quickly. “the mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities” is probably one of the better ones i’ve ever seen. but like you said it’s more worth our while to focus on practice (or praxis) than seeking a precise notion of what librarianship is, and expecting it to help. for me, this is where i have found the work of pragmatist philosophers like richard rorty really helpful. for the pragmatists, the intrinsic truth of something like librarianship is less important than what librarians do, and whether it is useful. rorty specifically talks quite a bit about how this focus on the useful is intrinsically tied to social hope, which i think is an undercurrent to a lot of work that librarians do. there has been some writing by hjørland and sundin on the topic of pragmatism and theories of librarianship. rorty’s philosophy and social hope was the gateway drug for me. i imagine there are lots of other ways into it. pragmatism has very american roots, and i’m an american, so it kind of speaks to me on that level too. you said: naturally, questions of philosophy delve deeper into meaning than the question of what value libraries bring to communities and what are librarianship’s shared principles. rather, the word “philosophy” implies that one engages in introspection, quiet study, and open discourse. it is about periodically examining why it is that we do what we do. what i get from the pragmatists is that philosophical questions about what libraries necessarily need to be grounded in the value that they bring — there is nothing more important. if the fcc doesn’t realize that libraries are helping educate people in how to use digital media, we need to show them how we are doing those things. this is absolutely about thinking about what we do, and measuring the effects of what we do, and making what we do better. giving the fcc an elevator pitch of what libraries are so they remember us, or delving into the truth of libraries isn’t going to help the cause of libraries. emily ford 2012–08–09 at 1:27 pm i’ll have to read rorty’s work. have you read the labaree and scimeca article? they take a historicist view of truth in librarianship. i’m going to have to read the things you mention next to the labaree and scimeca and see what i think. here’s the citation: labaree, r. v., & scimeca, r. (2008). the philosophical problem of truth in librarianship. library quarterly (1), 43-70. thanks for commenting. m. bear 2012–08–09 at 12:31 pm this is a very interesting article. :) the position of justification and advocacy of libraries to local communities is a bit different than the advocacy of related to what went down with the fcc. in the former the individual library has to express itself to a local community and in the latter the question of advocacy of professional domain best expressed collectively via our professional organization. in my view, it is fair to say that independent library blog writers seem to better at demonstrating credibility of the professional domain than our professional organization. this blog post is a fine example as are many other library related blogs and projects. our ethics trace out expectations of ethical behavior and i’m not too sure how developing a larger philosophical system beyond that would help. i think this is mostly because the profession is in something of spiral of de-professionalization which not only robs us of our credibility but also seems to also subtract something substantive of our professional presence that goes beyond the return of investment in our communities. by that i mean that we are respected in our communities be they academic or public, it when we look internally at ourselves we see problems of de-professionalization which is a separate issue of when other larger organizations looks at our organizational representation and fail to see the substance of what we do. the reason we aren’t at the table isn’t for a lack of a systematic philosophical pretext. we aren’t there because we don’t have any institutional authority/political clout…or lots of money. what little institutional authority we have is derived from ala and what little political clout we have comes from the prestige of working with a library. we can’t complain too much about a digital corps teaching people how to use computers instead of librarians because it is cheaper when libraries are the ones de-professionalizing the profession…even ala plays with lssi. internally we lost some ethical authority by having patron circulation move from something you needed a warrant to see to something companies can use to aggregate data, if there is a professional crisis it is one of self-definition in a world where we are forced to compromise our ethics to participate. lane wilkinson 2012–08–09 at 10:19 pm thanks for linking to my blog; it’s an honor to be included in your post! personally, i’m not really interested in why we do what we do because i actually think we have a pretty good handle on it; most librarians agree more than disagree when it comes to professional values and purpose. the darien statements, lankes’s mission, rothman’s common sense…all just variations on a theme: we help people get to the information they want and/or need for some purpose. but, there are better and worse ways of realizing our values, so i’m more interested in how we do what we do. how should we organize information? how do patrons acquire knowledge? what is information in the first place? and so on. so, for example, i can agree with lankes on a philosophy of librarianship: we facilitate knowledge creation. but the “how” of knowledge creation is a different sort of philosophy entirely. (i follow analytic philosophy, but there are also structuralists, constructionists, marxists, and more.) in short, i think we need both the value-oriented “philosophy of librarianship” that you discuss, as well as we need to apply the methodologies and concepts of formal philosophy to librarianship. to me, this means that we need to apply the concepts, theories, and methods of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and value-theory to figure out how best to meet our purpose as librarians. a philosophy of librarianship is a worthwhile pursuit, but so is the pursuit of formal philosophy within librarianship. [also, in response to the last comment, labaree and scimeca’s historicist theory of truth is incompatible with any philosophy of librarianship that includes knowledge or information as core concepts. and as to rorty, i’ll recommend objectivity, relativism, and truth. just keep in mind that rorty is a pariah in most philosophical circles. even the pragmatists want nothing to do with him.] emily ford 2012–08–16 at 4:32 pm thanks, lane, for chiming in. it’s interesting to me that you are focused on the “how” yet we both seem to be on the same page, or at least we’re in the same chapter. i guess i would answer the “how” with praxis. if our “how” is informed by praxis, not a rote or mechanized act, then i think we’re doing it right. it’s going to take me some time to digest the philosophy of librarianship vs. formal philosophy within librarianship– an interesting idea that i want to play with some more. thanks for helping me think more about these issues! steve 2012–08–10 at 10:38 am cossette’s explanation of librarianship philosophy is pure rhetoric. our philosophy was explained by people like madison and carnegie. president madison is quoted as stating; “a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” ( not why?, but why! libraries are needed) carnegie finished off the librarianship philosophy completely when he stated; “there is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the free public library,….” if providing free access to information is not philosophy enough for librarians, maybe they need to stop staring at their reflection and start working in a library with real people who have real needs that thousands of librarians satisfy every day. emily ford 2012–08–16 at 4:33 pm thanks for chiming in, steve. do madison and carnegie cut it any more? i’m not convinced. pingback : weekly link rounduplone star librarian | lone star librarian pingback : why libraries are needed! – revisited | 21st century library blog jim a 2012–08–14 at 9:29 am i think mottos have to be even shorter and punchier to be effective. something like “securing knowledge to enable learning.” or maybe “…to enable wisdom,” i’m somewhat ambivalent about which one sounds better. emily ford 2012–08–16 at 4:35 pm i’m a fan of “radical, militant librarian” myself. :) but seriously, it’s a huge failing that ala has a motto on its web site that only discusses “reading.” we do so. much. more. james 2012–08–17 at 6:34 pm to be honest, our biggest problem is that we spend too much time talking to each other, and not enough time talking to those outside the profession. we also tend to talk and talk endlessly instead of eventually doing something, which is why we’re still stuck with things like marc records and dewey. pingback : keeping the end in mind (also: public libraries and cross-country travel) | chasing reference rebecca 2012–09–10 at 1:38 pm perhaps one of the best discussions i’ve read about the historical purpose/philosophy of librarianship is todd honma’s treatment of it in his article “trippin’ over the color line: the invisibility of race in library and information studies.” i see so much of his article that feeds directly in this much-needed conversation about praxis, and i’d recommend reading it – particularly the “library ontologies and the construction of whiteness” section. i believe that portion of the article speaks to the issue of “cultural diversity” that commenter jonesy touches upon above. it’s available here: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nj0w1mp. emily ford 2012–09–18 at 8:42 pm thanks, rebecca, for the tip. this is going on my “to read” list. pingback : living our values | information wants to be free rachel 2012–09–24 at 2:37 pm yes, i have taken some wording from above, but what about motto: “libraries/librarians facilitating the engagement and preservation of knowledge.” pingback : why we do what we do | peer to peer review pingback : library juice » academic libraries, information literacy, and the value of our values pingback : new how to discover your perfect value proposition – stephen's lighthouse this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct we’re gonna geek this mother out – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 5 aug ross singer /29 comments we’re gonna geek this mother out “what to do with the waterfront” photo by flickr user mulmatsherm (cc by-sa 2.0) by ross singer i am not much of a book reader.  i have a home computer.  it has a working internet connection.  any interest i have in genealogy or local history could probably be exceeded serendipitously by talking to family or neighbors and by wandering around the city.  as a family, we do not watch many movies.  i cannot seem to pay attention to audiobooks.  our taxes are complicated enough that i use software to figure them out. what i am saying is that i am not the target market of public libraries.  despite that, i am completely intrigued by them. i worked for many years as a technologist in academic libraries.  they were all large research institutions with big collections, budgets and staff.  i was also not the target market for them either (at least not after i graduated), but i understood the principal demographics of their constituencies and their expectation of the library.  i witnessed the shift in the academic library from book depository to it shop (whether or not all academic librarians agree on this assessment).  when the university library stopped being “the place where the books are” it began to lose some of its identity and many began trying to create “social spaces” within the library (presentation rooms, coffee shops, information commons, etc.).  the primary purpose of these endeavors, however, seemed to be mainly to help market the library as the information hub of the institution.  since the information is available mainly via technology, and the technology makes the information fungible, it became necessary to reinforce the library’s importance to the community. if this seems complicated, well, that is because it is.  the future of the academic library is in little jeopardy, really, because its role and utility within the larger organization is pretty well defined and not easily replicated by some other group or service. this is not to say (by any stretch of the imagination) that academic libraries are satisfactorily meeting the needs of their “customers”.  not by a long shot.  however, if the academic library is increasingly becoming a technology organization then many of the academic library’s problems are technological problems, theoretically with technological solutions.  the majority of these problems are at the intersection of “the way we have always done things” and “where do we go from here”.  that is, these are technology problems that are enveloped in a sticky skein of sociopolitical issues.  if the interminable committee meetings were ever to wear down that outer skin, it might just be possible to make some real progress.  the library technologist’s hope springs eternal. the public library, on the other hand, appears to be roughly the inverse.  it is a primarily social service that has clumsily tacked technology designed for academic libraries to the top.  any argument for the merits of library applications pretty much breaks down when applied to the public library.  the audience is different and their needs are different.  while, without a doubt, enabling research is within the scope of the public library, in reality the vast majority of transactions there are far more modest.  the public that the library serves, largely underwhelmed by our complicated bibliographic search tools, instead uses amazon.com, a technology company that has quite cleverly tapped into social activities (lists, “people who bought x also bought y,” etc.) to pitch their products.  most importantly, the packaging is slick and effortless. it is a shame—especially considering how interesting, fun, and rewarding the projects would be —how little public libraries seem to be able to execute their technology.  not that technology is ignored, indeed my local library employs a vast array of applications to try to aid its users.  but this comes across as a hodge-podge: many different interfaces, none of them terribly satisfying and not in sync with each other.  this is not exclusive to my library, of course, nor is it uncommon in an academic library setting.  it would also be fairly easily remedied by some technical expertise, cooperation, and a little bit of vision. whereas the academic library is likely not in jeopardy, the public library is subject to far more fickle decision makers.  if the primary benefactors of the service, middle class tax payers, see no benefits resulting from the library’s existence, it may find itself subject to political pressure.  this is a population that, on the whole, is pretty wowed by style and convenience which tend not to be libraries’ strong suit. know your audience my wife, selena, is a steadfast supporter of the public library.  she had an awakening about five years ago after shelling out tons of money to amazon for books she read only once. “oh my god, they’ve got all these books.  for free!” at this point, we had been married for about four years and i had been working in a library for about ten.  it is not like i hadn’t brought up the possibility of the public library before, but i had no defense for her complaints about the catalog’s interface (sirsidynix’s ibistro).  it took her requiring her high school students to get a library card to see the merits of the library and ever since she has been a devoted advocate. that does not mean that she still doesn’t have her complaints.  they are legitimate gripes and, thankfully, almost completely technical.  her issues are: there is no simple way for her to find the intersection of discovering new things that might be interesting to her and what the library has. the library interfaces are crude, unforgiving and provide little that is useful for the casual reader. two-plus month waits for the most popular and current titles in the collection is counterproductive and fosters the notion that libraries are irrelevant or out of touch. the third point is not exactly technical, i realize, but it has an effect on the library as a whole.  this will not stop me from offering a technical suggestion that might help. tell me what i want there are several opportunities in the library for serendipitous discovery:  the children’s book room, the returned book cart, the new books shelf, maybe a staff picks list.   it has not, historically, been the forte of the library catalog.  one of amazon’s many strengths lies in its recommendations and groupings.  simply by being me and doing what i do, amazon finds and presents me with things i might be interested in based on how other people with profiles like me shop.  while the recommendations are generally hit and miss, it made me aware of many things (especially music) that i would have had no way of discovering before. there are various reasons that the library is reluctant to start creating profile based services for its borrowers:  usa patriot act style privacy concerns, population sizes that are too small to produce meaningful recommendations, etc.  u.s. libraries should pay close attention to the uk’s mosaic project, however, a jisc-funded initiative to harvest and mine circulation data with the intention of providing recommendations based on borrower usage.  assuming concerns surrounding the differences in privacy rights can be met, this could really begin to pave the way forward for such services. in the meantime, there are tangible ways to provide less targeted, although still meaningful, recommendations:  best seller, award, and book club lists.  best sellers’ lists are, of course, a very rough metric of what is currently popular across america and, in the case of some lists, targeted at particular demographics  (the new york times, essence magazine, evangelical christian publisher association, powell’s bookstore, independent mystery booksellers association, etc.).  while best sellers lists give no context of the actual content (outside, possibly of fiction or non-fiction) and certainly are no barometer to the quality of the work, they do at least provide a list of books that are currently popular, which might be all the discovery some users need, especially the specialty lists. when i checked my local public library for access to their collection based on best sellers lists, i was rather surprised to find that they did not have any.  this seemed so simple and such an easy win for them, that i thought i would mock something up so they could use it.  the new york times has opened their best sellers lists and book and movie reviews through their api service making it very simple to create a set of interfaces based on their best sellers to the library catalog.  unfortunately, this proved to be harder than i originally had hoped because the library catalog has no machine readable interface.  there is no easy way to provide mashups to my library.  this is not terribly surprising; the same was true for atlanta-fulton county public library’s catalog.  this is a terrible shame.  if the library is unable to provide the resources to create interesting and vibrant technological services, they really should do everything in their power to facilitate these services being created by members of their community.  this is exactly how ann arbor district library cultivated its “super patron”, ed vielmetti.  ironically, the aadl already had a strong technological base and probably needed to depend less on their constituents than other libraries.  i suppose this stands to reason, though, what with the rich getting richer and whatnot. quasi-tangential rant the issue of completely closed systems resonates with me especially hard.  for the last two years, i have been working on a project to build a specification to provide access to library data, via the atom publishing protocol, called jangle.  i was my employer’s representative to work on the digital library federation’s integrated library system and discovery interface api.  this year, my work has primarily been split between trying to herd jangle along and trying to find opportunities to expose library data and services as linked data.  i also wrote a book chapter on possible ways to make your library data more accessible for mashing up.  sadly, all of this is an exercise in futility if libraries have no machine readable accessible means to provide their data.  this lack of openness is a major setback to libraries and the potential services they can offer their users. the worst of the best sellers while i was trying to figure out a new plan of attack for implementing something like this, i did find that best sellers lists are not uncommon in public libraries; a cursory scan found them at atlanta-fulton public library, knox county (tn) public library and the nashville public library among several others.  the afpl and knox county pl both had them integrated directly into their opacs.  both use sirsidynix powered opacs:  the afpl uses ibistro and knox county uses rooms.  nashville public library uses booksite.com, a third-party service that compiles lists and tries to emulate the look and feel of the original library website. they all suck. the problem with booksite.com is that it, apparently, has no way to check the host library to see if the selection is even in the collection, much less if it is available or when it will be.  this requires the user to click on the link, initiate a catalog session, see if the item exists, check the availability, click the back button, find the next item of interest, click on the link, enter the catalog, etc.  while this may not seem terrible, every time they follow a link for an item that does not exist or is not available diminishes their confidence that they will ever find something available.  let us not forget, also, that our opacs tend to be horribly slow at initiating or reallocating sessions.  all of this just adds to a frustrating user experience.  this is another example of where a lack of apis hamstrings third-party developers:  despite the intentions of the library to provide a better experience by purchasing subscriptions to products like booksite, the end result is still awkward. one would then think that incorporating these lists directly into the opac would be an improvement. unfortunately, this is not really the case.  while item availability is shown (assuming the item is even held), the display is just an ugly, opac title list view.  understandably, practically any title that appears on a best sellers list is more than likely going to be checked out (and will probably have a wait).  from a user’s perspective, though, this offers very little as a “discovery interface.” “gee, thanks for showing me a list of books that i cannot get access to for at least a month.” photo by flickr user inkcow (cc by 2.0) quite a few of the the entries were fairly misleading as well.  they provided hope for the user that the title might actually be available, but required going to the full title screen (similar to booksite.com), only to see that all of the copies are, in fact, unavailable; they just have some status set that the opac cannot recognize as “available” or “unavailable.” what is unacceptable here is that the poor user is presented with a list of 15 dead ends.  if the library is unable to provide any of these particular titles, what can it offer the borrower that might be related or relevant?  each of these books represents a possible avenue of interest into the collection.  they also define a particular point of interest in the collective national consciousness that can be utilized to present other works held by the library that may not be new, but could be just as much of interest to the user.  the “traditional” library avenues of providing similarity tend to be fairly weak substitutes when it comes to this.  dewey decimal classification (common to the majority of public libraries), which provides the “shelf browse,” is completely ineffective in the case of fiction works for anything other than finding other titles by the same author or another writer with the same last name.  browsing on subject headings is also a rather blunt tool.  “”, “female friendship fiction.”, “african american women fiction.”.  none of these, individually, captures the essence of why a particular book is on a particular best sellers list.  the marc 65x field is unable to capture timbre.  and this is huge area where the public library is failing the public. an obvious market opportunity there are products and projects that begin to address this disparity between what the casual user wants and expects and how the library catalog has evolved (or not) for the web.  bibliocommons’ business model is to provide this social context layer over the collection by facilitating and aggregating circulation data, reviews, lists, and other means to allow library users to directly influence the relationships between works.  sopac could be considered an open source alternative to bibliocommons; it is a suite of components featuring a public interface built atop the popular floss content management system drupal.  one of the pieces, insurge, is intended to provide a means to share this social data between the various implementations:  reviews, ratings, and recommendations.  the design of insurge theoretically allows it to work independently of sopac, the drupal module, although, in practice, this has yet to happen.  both of these are complete opac replacements, relegating the integrated library management system to its rightful place as an inventory control system. at the other end of the spectrum is librarything for libraries, which takes the incredibly pragmatic approach of integrating into the existing vendor-supplied opac interface.  like the other two, it leverages the much broader librarything community to help enhance the local collection.  of the three currently available options, it, by far, provides the richest and most comprehensive social enrichment because the community already exists.  the others have to build this community and the content from scratch.  one has to wonder, really, how syndetics has sold a single subscription since ltfl was released:  librarything gives everything a syndetics subscription could, plus gives the user relevant alternatives from their own library’s collection. that being said, ltfl also shares the same limitation as syndetics (or any other “shoehorned in the opac” enrichment package):  the opac is still there.  this content, these tags, the ratings:  none of these are available to the searcher until she has already found something.  queries do not include this community supplied content, there is no spellcheck, results cannot be sorted by rating.  if public libraries are to stay relevant, these interfaces have to be dropped.  the future of the ilms itself is a different matter entirely, though its usefulness as an inventory control system is out of scope here.  this is just about the opac. it’s the relationships, stupid i strongly believe that the future of the public library collection interface has to be tied into some kind of content management system.  i am unable to find any hard statistics to back this up, but i do not think it is much of a stretch of the imagination to say that a vast amount of library circulation is casual, popular reading.  just walk into any branch and browse the collection; the overwhelming majority is not research material.  while certainly there are lots of archival, local history, reference, and research items at any public library, can any one of them, honestly, say that these types of activity make up the majority of what cardholders want, need, or expect to do there?  why, then, are the interfaces optimized to perform these tasks, arguably, at the expense of the majority?  of course, sophisticated information retrieval still needs to be supported—the line between “hobby” and “research” can be blurry—but perhaps it does not need to be the primary function of the public interface.  the social nature of the library as place and collection need to be merged. the concept of cms as opac is not new or original (or exclusively useful to public libraries):  as previously mentioned, sopac is a drupal module, as is the mellon foundation-funded extensiblecatalog (xc) project.  scriblio is a plugin for the wordpress blogging platform.  several years ago, i was working on a project to build a catalog using the daisy cms as a back end.  even sirsidynix’s rooms was an attempt to merge the content and collection, albeit with the aesthetic of a traditional web opac, the speed of federated search engine and the general user experience of a root canal.  at a certain point, a library collection grows to a size that it cannot feasibly be dynamic and fresh using only the catalogers as the sole editors of the content.  there is a growing need for “marginalia,” independent of the marc record, to tie the individual items within the library to each other, to events, to groups, to anything.  the separation between the “catalog” and the general information about the library makes no sense. in the absence of suggestion, there is always search… besides the integration of general content, collection, and public contribution, the single most important improvement needed for the public interface is search.  it is amazing and somewhat appalling how, despite our claims that our systems are designed as being highly advanced information retrieval tools, they fail utterly at retrieving information.  my local public library recently deployed the federated search product webfeat, undoubtedly in a well intentioned attempt to help their users navigate the various silos of information that inconveniently require searching individually:  the catalog, the audiobooks, the photograph collection, and the various databases they subscribe to.  it is also, by the gentlest assessment possible, a complete train wreck of a user experience.  besides being slower than the stock catalog interface, it does a terrible job at searching.  it is understandable that the library would want to highlight and improve access to their database collection (as well as have a unified search interface for their “general collection”), but it does not seem likely that a borrower looking for something by nora roberts to take with them to the beach cares much about results from infotrac onefile.  requiring said borrower to enter their library card number before they can search just lessens the experience even more. another requirement the library places on the searcher, that they must be an excellent or informed speller, is also unfortunate.  as i try out these interfaces, there are two searches i try so i can see how effective they are in aiding the hapless searcher.  the searches are “olive kitteredge” and “jody picoult.”  it is depressing how unhelpful our search interfaces are. for “olive kitteredge,” an understandable misspelling of olive kitteridge, the pulitzer prize winning best selling book, i got: knox county’s sirsidynix rooms gave me a did you mean “olive skittered”.  olive skittered also produced zero results. atlanta-fulton county’s sirsidynix ibistro gave me no recommendations, just zero hits and placed me in a browse index.  “olive kitteridge” did not appear within ten pages forward or back. nashville public library’s iii millennium catalog gave no recommendation, just zero hits and returned me to the search form. darien public library’s sopac gave me no recommendations, no results. chattanooga-hamilton county’s webfeat search gave the recommendation “olive kittredge” and no results.  “olive kittredge” also produced zero results. seattle public library’s horizon opac displayed “did you mean: olive kitteridge?”  success, at last.  this is not a stock horizon feature, howeve. other horizon libraries just gave zero results, zero recommendations. oakville public library’s bibliocommons presented: “did you mean olive kitteridge (1 result)?”.  another satisfied customer. collingswood public library’s scriblio catalog not only tried to autosuggest the proper spelling as i was typing in the search box, despite submitting my search with the misspelled title, olive kitteridge was still the fourth result. seattle public library getting it right. photo by flickr user inkcow c/o scriblio’s autosuggest to the rescue. photo by flickr user inkcow c/o “jody picoult” seems a perfectly reasonable misspelling of the multiple best selling novelist and author of my sister’s keeper, which was recently adapted to film.  in the same order: knox county’s rooms gave no spelling recommendations and placed me in a browse search.  “jodi picoult” did not appear anywhere forwards or backward. afpl’s ibistro timed out my session, gave me no results and placed me a browse index.  “jodi picoult” did not appear forwards or back. nashville pl’s catalog:  “no entries found”.  return to search form. sopac:  no results, no recommendation. webfeat:  “did you mean: jody picounit”.  jody picounit, unsurprisingly, returned zero results.  webfeat did not give a recommendation for alternatives to “jody picounit”. seattle public library, despite passing the olive kitteridge test, returned one result:  super searcher, author, scribe:  successful authors share their internet research secrets by loraine page.  a content note includes the string “jody picoult” (presumably a misspelling of the author in the marc record?).  no suggestions or recommendations are given. bibliocommons, again, aced this:  “did you mean jodi picoult (29 results)?” collingswood’s scriblio did not provide a correction in the autosuggest, but a jodi picoult book appeared as the second result, averting user frustration (and also providing a teachable moment on the author’s name). complete! don’t you feel completely satisfied? photo by flickr user inkcow c/o my library still has no jody picounit. photo by flicker user inkcow c/o these are not edge cases.  these are searches for current best sellers and a pulitzer prize winner and both of them are only off by one letter.  of the sixteen searches, eleven of them ended in failure.  while not comprehensive, these were eight libraries chosen mostly at random.  for all of the current fixation in faceted and graphical search results (and to be fair, queens borough public library’s aquabrowser implementation passed the picoult test and provided “kitteridge” in its similarity graph), none of these bells and whistles matter one whit if the search interface cannot even help the user past the search screen.  amazon not only presented the correct “did you mean” suggestions, it also provided relevant search results with these bad searches. photo by flickr user inkcow c/o ebb, meet flow of course, correcting a search for “jennifer wiener” to jennifer weiner is irrelevant if the book the borrower is interested in will not be available for 89 days, as the knox county public library was displaying last week for best friends forever (as of this writing, the new york times #1 best seller for hardcover fiction).  that is nearly three months.  forget summer reading, you will be lucky to get this book before the winter solstice.  while i am normally extremely supportive of large, cooperative borrowing consortiums, such as georgia’s pines, the advantages of such a system, regardless of the size and scale, still completely break down when it comes to such enormous spikes of popularity.  it does not matter how many copies are in the system if everywhere from metropolises to backwaters has a run on the same title.  this is not exclusive to best sellers, of course, consider titles on school curricula or summer reading lists.  backlogs are bad for credibility. popularity, however, is fleeting.  it is unreasonable for an underfunded library system to exhaust its limited collection development budget purchasing dozens of copies of the new hot thing which tomorrow may not circulate again ever (consider james frey’s a million little pieces).  for cases such as this, rather than borrowing from other libraries that have nothing to give, it makes more sense to borrow from the public.  many of these most popular titles are best sellers, after all, and “best seller” by its very meaning implies that a lot of people own that book.  once read and passed around to your circle of friends, what do you do with this book?  for these very popular, highly circulating titles, it makes sense to create a system that allows book owners in the community to donate their copy.  once a particular title passes some predefined threshold (two holds for every copy, as an arbitrary example), provide a link in the best sellers list to encourage people to give the library their copy.  links to this page would need to be present elsewhere, too:  after all, the person that owns the book wouldn’t be looking for it on the library website since they already own it.  advertise on the library website.  have an announcement on the local npr affiliate.  post the list of books the library wants to have donated near drop boxes. the donor would be given a tax write off based on the value of their book on the open market.  when the popularity spike diminishes, the library could either return the book to the original owner or, perhaps, register itself as an amazon affiliate (as an example, i am not sure of the legalities or practicalities of this, nor is this an endorsement for amazon.com) and sell the used copies with the proceeds going back to the library like any friends of the library book sale.  the tax write off (as well as satisfaction of performing a public good) would probably be more desirable to many potential donors than going through the process of selling the book themselves. the medium is the message what all of this points to is that public libraries need to place as high of an importance on the technology that they do on the social and physical aspects of their organization.  a lot of effort goes into speaker series, story time, game nights, and movie nights.  a lot of planning.  a lot of investment.  if that investment is not given, nobody will come to them.  the web presence is no different.  if the web tools are an afterthought, a haphazard, sloppy collection of off-the-shelf tools that neither help the user achieve their goals nor captures their interest, the public will write the library off.  just as a speakers series is a combination public service and library marketing tool, the web site must be more so, as it is more public than any event. at the same time, the library should not have to break the bank investing in the most cutting edge and expensive technology (or worse, break the bank with the run of the mill, dreadful applications currently pitched to them).  many of these issues could quite easily be addressed simply by hiring a competent and creative developer.  by pooling these development resources, even more ambitious accomplishments can be achieved.  georgia pines (despite oclc’s marketing department’s claims) built the first truly “web scale” ilms simply because they had a need and were willing to devote the resources towards building it.  joe lucia, the university librarian at villanova made an intriguing and provocative statement on the ngc4lib mailing list two years ago with this: “what if, in the u.s., 50 arl libraries, 20 large public libraries, 20 medium-sized academic libraries, and 20 oberlin group libraries anted up one full-time technology position for collaborative open source development. that’s 110 developers working on library applications with robust, quickly-implemented current web technology…. instead of being technology followers, i venture to say that libraries might once again become leaders….” he was speaking in this case of academic libraries (he mentions 20 public libraries, but i remain unconvinced that the average public library has all that much in common with its academic counterpart), but it is not too difficult imagine this in the context of public libraries.  there are, after all, nearly three times as many public library systems in the united states as there are academic libraries.  surely, collectively, they could figure out how to fund such an endeavor to provide a truly powerful development team committed solely to the technology needs of public libraries. if added to this was an infrastructure and environment that cultivated an opportunity to harvest the contributions of “super patrons” and “citizen developers,” as well as graphic designers, usability and accessibility experts, entire services could be provided by the constituency just as bibliocommons, librarything, or sopac solicits content.  one of the many distractions i had while writing this article came from a desire that i had to not just complain about my public library, but actually build some alternatives that could be contributed back to them.  however, as i mentioned previously, there is no machine readable access to their collection for me to build upon.  in order to write something interesting and, hopefully, useful, i first had to write a crawler to harvest their catalog.  i have yet to gain the nerve to actually run it; there is no robots.txt file, but it still seems rude and underhanded.  it is also ridiculous that i have to resort to such tactics just to sketch out some proofs-of-concept. if all three tiers of this ecosystem were to become a reality (cooperative development team, local developer resources, and a public contribution network), the library would be well-placed to remain relevant for many years in the community’s consciousness.  it is difficult to see if the initiative or vision is available to establish such an environment, however.  significant improvement would be rather easy to accomplish.  all it would take is a little imagination and some commitment. maybe i should just start my crawler and see what happens. thanks to:  brett bonfield for not only convincing me to write this article, but also tirelessly reviewing it and for guiding this along even when i was getting flaky.  also thanks to dan chudnov for reviewing it and helping me find a better focus, even if he agreed with only about half of what i wrote.  lastly, i’d like to thank my wife, selena, without whom i would have had no inspiration, ideas, or “research subjects.” bestsellers, public libraries, technology, usability w-e-b-s-i-t-e, find out what it means to me sense of self: embracing your teacher identity 29 responses rachel 2009–08–06 at 9:36 am great post, really enjoyed reading it and has given me lots of ideas. but rubbish title! jeff scott 2009–08–06 at 10:58 am coming from a public library background, this article doesn’t bring anything new to the table. we are a multi-faceted community resource that is just as valued as any academic library. there are some communities that do not value their local public library, but those communities are in the minority. if you look at the track record of these communities, you would probably find that they make other poor decisions. many public libraries don’t have the resources to provide a copy to anyone who wants the latest best-seller. (if you read the latest unshelved, they answer that question. “if we did that, all we would have is 10,000 copies of vampire novels and nothing else.”) many libraries use third party services since many cannot afford and don’t have the know-how to develop these things on their own. amazon is king of the bookselling world and they have defeated or subdued most of their competitors with their knowledge, algorithms, and now their weight. it’s old hat to make the comparison, you aren’t the first, but to put in it’s proper context you wouldn’t compare amazon to libraries. we both have books, but we play different roles. (also, the service is bookletters not booksite.com. it’s a common mistake.) the real problem isn’t the technology interface. the real problem is getting people into the library to learn, read and explore. people don’t drill down and explore the world around them, or even themselves. they are just satisfied with what is put before them without question. how do we change that? ross singer 2009–08–06 at 11:14 am jeff, i think in some ways you are reinforcing my point. a powerful, dynamic and (most importantly) useful web presence has a secondary effect of being a powerful, dynamic and useful marketing tool. you are right, people are not going to just go down to the library, therefore it is important to also engage them on their terms and convince them it’s worth their while to come in. what i am trying to say is that the quality of collections and services don’t matter if the audience has no idea that they exist. the onus is then on the public libraries to realize that the web services are as much a priority as the physical services and should be committed to accordingly. libraries, public as well as academic, are increasingly becoming technology organizations: academic libraries just seem to be quicker to acknowledge this. trista smith 2009–08–06 at 12:56 pm thanks for the great post! i’ve always hated our opac but could never adequately articulate why… it never does what i want!! but, in this article you have articulated for me why are catalogs are so bad. one example: i am working on genre lists and wanted, for my own personal use, to create a link in my word document so i could see the availability of the item with one click, but ibistro won’t let me do that. i just get an error message. but, there does seem to be hope because you pointed out at least two opacs that were helpful. my favorite thing in the article: your succinct list of the three things our users want but don’t have! jeff scott 2009–08–06 at 1:09 pm ross, thanks for the response. this is what i think a catalog entry should look like: http://books.google.com/books?id=u6cihsfrseqc it’s true everyone else is going to get their book information from another source, then see if it is available at their local library. a library is almost never the front runner on informing someone for a new book. others have more marketing power than we do. our advantage is we offer the same book for free. better websites are needed, but it is only one tool. i also have to say that the article comes off as a little condescending to public libraries. peggy 2009–08–06 at 3:25 pm the unforgiving nature of spelling in current opacs is a true pain for librarians as well as for the public. i do believe that the software will evolve to allow for corrections but i fear the cost. as to the lack of copies and long wait periods, maine along with a number of other geographic units has established a statewide interlibrary borrowing program which regularly cuts the waiting period significantly for new titles. unfortunately the delivery company quit so that system is on hiatus but it is expected to be up and running within the month. libraries are not yet at the ideal stage of being able to supplyu everybook to every reader but we have come a long way since the dreaded card catalog. jc 2009–08–06 at 4:21 pm boy do i wish we had the it staff to develop an opac that would be user friendly in this way. as is, unfortunately, we don’t even have a full time staff member to work on the library’s website (this is for the city keep in mind), and budget cuts have eliminated any future hiring. i think it is somewhat unrealistic to assume that public libraries aren’t making the changes because we don’t want to, but these things cost money and we don’t even have the funds to hire an outside web designing company. unfortunately as more people need libraries, money is being taken away from library service. frankly, i’m just happy they haven’t shut down my branch. drweb 2009–08–06 at 4:22 pm ross, thoughtful, full of your taking-things-to-task for what really is needed.. like spell-checking in library catalogs, how long have we needed that? i have some hopes for the new worldcat local and worldcat.org, but their recent cataloging policy (re-use) snafu makes me leery of their vision at the top. public libraries need help with technology, and the vendors in the community aren’t doing the job; maybe the ole project will save us :)… keep writing! drweb brett 2009–08–07 at 4:09 am i’m a systems librarian (i speak geek, but don’t program) and i”m running into many of these issues with our opac. i’d like to note in there though, that there is a machine readable interface for library catalogs, you can make queries over z39.5 on almost all library catalogs. the yaz client is the most common foundation on which those machine interfaces are built. ross singer 2009–08–07 at 6:52 am brett, our opacs are a fairly universal struggle. z39.50 access is not a given, however. while it’s basically ubiquitous in the academic setting (since it’s a requirement for things like endnote), z39.50 servers appear far less often (i would wager that they are the exception rather than the rule). many vendors charge extra for the z39.50 server and, as far as i can tell, carlweb (which is what my public library uses) has no option for a z39.50 server at all. there are probably others that have them, but do not make the service active beyond their firewall. so, in fact, many public libraries truly do not have a machine readable interface. drweb, unfortunately, worldcat local (university of washington’s implementation) also fares pretty badly on the spelling test. the ole project will definitely provide machine readable interfaces, but who knows when, nor how relevant they will be to public libraries. that being said, i wouldn’t be surprised to see some of their recommendations find their way into evergreen. jc, my intention here isn’t blame the victim: i completely understand the reality of the financial situation public libraries are placed in. there is a point, however, where this becomes a “death spiral”: the library, unable to implement anything on their own, continues to have its budget slashed because the perception of its value wanes. for these cases, it’s even more important to have machine readable access (even z39.50 would be a start), so there is at least the possibility of soliciting new services from volunteers in the community. peggy, i’m interested that maine is able to (mostly) keep up with the demand. do you know the typical trends in how this is compensated? that is, do the rural libraries tend to subsidize the suburban and urban ones until the popularity wanes? pines doesn’t seem to say when a particular title will be available (at least, not that i noticed), so i can’t really use them as a comparison. i agree, though, that large (regional, statewide, etc.) interlibrary lending consortiums would solve a lot a problems (and if it solves this one, then i can see almost zero downside). trista, thank my wife for the list. derik badman 2009–08–07 at 7:26 am z39.50 is not a great way to get data: rather limiting, slow, and a pain to build queries with. derik badman 2009–08–15 at 6:32 pm just testing threaded commenting… derik badman 2009–08–15 at 6:32 pm and even more threading. amy ranger 2009–08–07 at 3:47 pm catalogers at one institution may use a consistent style in original cataloging, but across institutions: i doubt it. yes, there are standards, but cataloging is as much art as science. no two librarians will catalog something the same way; no cataloger will accept the work of another; and (generally) no cataloger will accept her own work 6 months later. so while i love a lot of what you’re saying, and i understand many of the issues, i don’t know that this will ever be possible given the current technologies. frankly, we’d need something like one database to rule them all. aside from that, there’s something that bookstores offer which i wish libraries would do (but if they do, i have not seen it): it’s called “hand-selling”. as in, having a staff member who knows the stock and the customers well enough to be able to put the two together, successfully, time after time. independent book shops do it all the time. libraries? i don’t know. thanks for the thoughtful piece, ross. pingback : hotstuff 2.0 » blog archive » word of the day: “depository” karl ericson 2009–08–10 at 11:29 am thanks so much for this thought provoking post. for me the most interesting thing is the quote from joe lucia and your extrapolation on that. this is exactly the kind of “crowdsourcing” that libraries of all types need, because we all know that we can’t do it on our own and haven’t we become experts at sharing knowledge and resources? well, it would be absolutely brilliant and could arguably become necessary for us all to contribute to such a project in order to compete in a shrinking market. the.effing.librarian 2009–08–11 at 4:09 am this article inspired my totally awesome library catalog here. the.effing.librarian 2009–08–11 at 4:11 am sorry, didn’t close the quote, here ross singer 2009–08–13 at 9:23 pm karl, i, too, find the joe lucia quote intriguing and am a little disappointed that it has (so far) not really gotten any legs (although, to a degree, the ole project is based — in a smaller scale with a smaller scope — on this sort of model). for many years, i have fantasized about starting a library analog to the apache foundation: cherry picking a dozen or so of the most talented developers in the library, building a few open source applications and helping incubate others (as well as contribute to them). i am probably not the ideal person to run such an organization: far too disorganized, far too impolitic, but a person can dream, right? if said organization created the infrastructure to foster the sort of community supplied development that i described in the article, well — the sky’s the limit. jonathan rochkind 2009–08–19 at 4:45 pm can i work for you please? seriously, that’s exactly what’s needed. convince mellon to fund it, get roy or someone to be the director, i’m on board in a heartbeat. steve thomas 2009–08–17 at 8:06 am the quote from joe lucia mirrors a comment of my own about the same time (no, really!) — which i’m sure says more about the zeitgeist than any prescience on my part. interestingly, a team of 110 developers would actually dwarf the development team in most (all?) of the current ilms vendors — there’s a reason they are so slow to respond to enhancement requests. the wonder to me is, that given the oft-mentioned cooperative leanings of librarians, they have, largely, not yet embraced open source development. excellent post, by the way. peter schoenberg 2009–08–17 at 12:51 pm one key point about bibliocommons is that it includes a fully integrated my account feature. it is not just a search tool, it is the complete user experience. we are moving from ibistro to bibliocommons in the next few weeks. our customers will get: – dramatically more relevant results (+spell checking) – facets for narrowing results – tagging, rating, reviewing, adding videos – building lists, sharing lists – fully integrated my account (which really facilitates the rating and reviewing of stuff you have out or have recently returned) at this point bibliocommons give the integrated experience of a vendor’s product (like ibistro). search results like endecca or aquabrowser well thought out web 2.0 interactivity shared user content from multiple libraries – the necessary critical mass to build activity that generates activity. i am not aware of anything else in the market that brings all these pieces together. peter edmonton public library peter bailey 2009–08–17 at 4:42 pm are you keeping syndetics or other enhanced content when you go with bibliocommons? book covers and reviews are the best thing we’ve done with the catalogue for patrons imho. bc content seemed pretty thin last time i looked (yes, only oakville pl is live though?) brett bonfield 2009–08–17 at 1:07 pm steve, many of us who think of ourselves as enlightened look at lucia’s quote and think, “wouldn’t it be great if every library director were like joe lucia? wouldn’t it be great if they all got it?” but maybe some of our assumptions are backward. for one thing, while directors seem to keep paying for proprietary software, they keep hiring programmers who embrace open source and open standards, even on the job. so it’s certainly possible that directors, in general, are agnostic and pragmatic when it comes to software licensing, and, all things being equal, they may even favor open source. it’s also possible that software companies are slow to respond to requests not because they aren’t big enough — not because they have fewer than lucia’s 110 programmers — but because they’re too big (and bureaucratic). i tend to get really good customer service from new start ups, even though many of them have just one to three programmers. the key to getting good customer service and useful enhancements is making these requests to the right start ups with the right programmers. and i think that’s where libraries may be failing. we might well be following the wrong model. we’re doing agile development in a pseudo-corporate environment and holding out hope for lucia’s 110 programmers. which very well could be exactly the wrong way to get out of the situation we’re in. we should be looking at paul graham’s ycombinator (here’s a nice audio intro to ycombinator, with plenty of links to more) or the google summer of code model — small, talented, inexpensive, lightly supervised, and unencumbered (by job or life responsibilities) programming teams who are encouraged to take risks. the keys to ycombinator and summer of code are evaluation, volume, and incentives. we have the programmers available to evaluate applicants: code4lib folks have the knowledge and drive, and they excel at making well informed, democratic decisions. volume is a question of money, though funding perhaps 20-30 small teams per year would cost a lot less than hiring 110 full-time programmers. the issue may be incentives, though being given an opportunity to create interesting software for libraries seems to be enough incentive for many outstanding programmers. the prestige of being part of a library-funded, competitive ycombinator/summer of code-like program may well be enough to attract talented, hard-working programming teams from around the world who want an opportunity to prove themselves as coders, and help libraries in the process. jonathan rochkind 2009–08–19 at 2:41 pm excellent essay. haven’t gotten all the way through it yet myself, but on this topic: “# there is no simple way for her to find the intersection of discovering new things that might be interesting to her and what the library has.” i have a vision of combining an (enhanced) version of the libx toolbar, with my umlaut link resolver software (which in turn uses both your local library systems and services like worldcat), to _add_ information about availability in your specific library to amazon (and other pages). you could definitely add a link to get such information (oh, i’ve found a book i want, does my library have it? or if not can i ill it from my library?) to an amazon page. you could probably add the info directly on the page too. this is totally do-able, the building blocks are there, i think i could do it in a month or less of work (that’s a month or less of work on top of all my other usual software custodial duties!). but even once done, the software you’d have to maintain/deploy locally might be too much for a public library, sadly. dave 2009–08–19 at 2:54 pm these terrible opacs are the single biggest problem in public libraries today. seriously. nearly every project i’ve worked on has been negatively impacted by the limitations of sirsi’s product. nearly every complaint we get about our website is really a complaint about a sirsi shortcoming that we have no control over. you see our users frequently “confuse” the web catalog and the website proper. that’s because almost everyone visits us online in order to search for materials. this should tell us that a a good catalog is much more important than a great web page. so many libraries roll out these shiny new websites, but as soon as you search for a book, you’re dumped into some god-awful interface. thanks for outlining the problem so well. i see a lot of challenges ahead in implementing a solution, notably technological expertise among staff. but developments like biblio, sopac and koha are encouraging as they achieve more traction. toby 2009–08–28 at 4:44 pm our creative and highly competent systems librarian took a stab at fixing the flaws in the spl catalog… take a look now with the misspelled search: jody picoult. more “did you mean options”. this is true for any search that yields one result or only one page or less of results. thanks! pingback : an article of interest « the cataloguing librarian kyle cook 2009–10–02 at 1:07 pm excellent suggestions. the criticism leveled at nashville public library’s booksite lists is accurate. these lists are compiled independent of the library’s holdings, so some items in the lists cannot be located in the library’s catalog because they are unowned. this is a big problem that should be corrected with a better technical solution that removes these titles from the list to begin with. however, the majority of the books in these lists are connected directly to the items available in the library catalog with the “find in the library” link. so, in most cases this service is helpful. still, it is not ideal, and does not approach the better bibliographic advisory services offered at amazon.com. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct extending our reach: using day camps at academic library makerspaces to include homeschoolers – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 12 dec laura baker /1 comments extending our reach: using day camps at academic library makerspaces to include homeschoolers in brief   the makerspace at abilene christian university has been operational since 2015. it is unusual in that it is an academic space at a private university that offers equal service privileges to both the campus and the community. in an attempt to encourage a maker mindset within our broader region, we began offering a series of day camps for elementary and middle school students. to our surprise and delight, the homeschool community became our biggest group of participants. what started as serendipity is now a conscious awareness of this group of patrons. in this article, i outline how our camps are structured, what we discovered about the special needs and interests of homeschool families, and how we incorporate this knowledge into outreach and camp activities. i also share how we evaluate the camps for impact not only upon campers but also within the larger goals of the library and university. introduction makerspaces, also known as fablabs or hackerspaces, are a growing area of service for libraries. makerspaces are places that combine tools, technology, and expertise to let people create physical and sometimes digital objects. initially found mostly in engineering departments, makerspaces have grown internationally to encompass all disciplines and ages (lou & peek, 2016), placing them well within the mission scope of academic, school, and public libraries. central to the ethos of makerspaces is the idea of community. makerspaces allow individuals from all ages, experience levels, and backgrounds to come together and collaborate in a shared space. in his formative essay, dale dougherty, founder of the maker movement, suggests that the ability of makerspaces to transform education is that they offer anyone a “chance to participate in communities of makers of all ages by sharing your work and expertise. making can be a compelling social experience, built around relationships” (dougherty, 2013, p. 9). the library at abilene christian university (acu) seeks to encourage this educational transformation through its own makerspace, which we call the maker lab. first opened in 2015, the acu library maker lab is an academic makerspace that is open to all areas of the campus as well as to the public. in an attempt to grow the maker mindset both in our community and among our campus families, we decided to host a series of children’s and youth day camps called maker academy. to our surprise and delight, the homeschool community became our biggest group of participants. what started as serendipity is now a conscious awareness of this group of patrons. this article will outline how our camps are structured, what we discovered about the special needs and interests of homeschool families, and how we incorporate this knowledge into outreach and camp activities. we will also share how we evaluate the camps for impact not only upon campers but also within the larger goals of the library and university. literature review college preparedness and overall learning is a concern that academic librarians share with their colleagues in public and school libraries, so involving the kindergarten to 12th grade (k-12) population at universities is not unheard of even though it may not be commonplace (tvaruzka, 2009). the university of nevada began holding workshops for teachers of k-12 students to familiarize them with college research assignments and to help them infuse age-appropriate library skills into their own assignments. they expanded the program to involve middle school students to introduce them to the support and services a college library can provide (godbey, fawley, goodman, & wainscott, 2015). at the university of south alabama, librarians conduct summer enrichment programs to enhance the research literacy of high school students who are preparing for health careers (rossini, burnham, & wright, 2013). although they may not work extensively with children and teens, libraries of higher education do reach out to younger people. camps and summer experiences are a different environment from formal classes, and necessarily require different activities and teaching techniques suitable to the age of the campers. academic libraries vary in the degree to which they are directly involved with k-12 summer activities. many offer tours and scavenger hunts for children on campus as part of other events (north carolina state university, n.d.; university of michigan, 2017; washington state university libraries, 2018). others interact with academic camps hosted by different departments to do a session on research skills, often with a more informal and problem-oriented approach. ohio university librarians, for example, developed interactive ways of introducing high school engineering students to their discipline’s literature and the role it plays in developing new products (huge, houdek, & saines, 2002), and a team of librarians at carnegie mellon expanded their roles to work with middle school girls pursuing engineering (beck, berard, baker, & george, 2010). each example offers a good description of adapting traditional library content, and teaching brief research workshops for youths. the literature has fewer examples of extended camps that involve the library for the entirety of the camp experience. temple university library in philadelphia involves high school students in a summer intensive initiative to do community mapping and thus build knowledge of geographic information systems (gis) coding (masucci, organ, & wiig, 2016). in a collaborative model, the university of st. thomas partners with st. paul public library to host a five-session series for middle school students to implement laser cutting, circuitry, and basic engineering design skills (haugh, lang, thomas, monson, & besser, 2016). virginia commonwealth university library works with its school of engineering to offer extensive research instruction appropriate for youths participating in a campus camp where they design and prototype their own inventions (arendt, hargraves, & roseberry, 2017). in these examples, the library is more of a full partner and host of the camp experience, although they typically share the work with other units. with respect to homeschool students, a surprisingly small body of literature addresses the educational needs of the audiences the library serves as opposed to the programs the library offers. by far, any information regarding library service to homeschoolers is from a public library perspective. this paucity of articles, especially of recent publication, suggests a gap in the literature, the majority of articles discuss the interests of families who homeschool and the implications upon library programming and collections (blankenship, 2008; johnson, 2012; shinn, 2008). paradise talks about the need to have child-friendly environments, especially with computer accessibility, that accommodate families and children working for extended sessions (2008). others have observations about communication and outreach, noting that families who homeschool tend to connect with each other at the community level, making it imperative that the library utilize these dialog channels to reach out to members (hilyard, 2008; willingham, 2008). particularly relevant to those planning educational activities is an article on creating successful programs for children in homeschools and the need to include hands-on learning (mishler, 2013). although these sources have a public library orientation, they provide useful suggestions for other librarians from libraries experienced in working with homeschooled youths, especially to those librarians in higher education, who may be less familiar with this age group. brief history of the acu library maker lab abilene christian university is a private university located in abilene, tx. with an enrollment of just under 5,000 students, acu falls within the carnegie classifications as a “masters colleges and universities: larger programs” institution. there is one library on campus that serves all disciplines. the maker lab is an 8,000 square foot space within the library. it was established in 2013 with funding from the university provost’s office and the library’s own budget. it has many of the tools typically found in makerspaces: 3d printers, a laser cutter, vinyl cutter, sewing machines and fiber arts supplies, power tools and hand tools for woodworking, and electronics workbenches. it is staffed by a full-time lab manager, a librarian who divides her time between the maker lab and the regular reference and instructional services within the library, and a cadre of student workers who supply a total of 132 student hours a week, monday through saturday. most of what the maker lab offers is free. there is no membership fee or charge for tool usage or machine time. we do charge for some materials, like 3d printer filament, sign vinyl, or large sheets of plywood. the full list of materials and their prices are available via the maker lab store1. makers are welcome to bring their own materials if they want something other than what is already on the premises. we maintain a fairly robust “scrap pile” of leftover and donated material, and these are free. we have found that having materials on hand, particularly free scrap, is a good way to encourage newcomers to try something and helps overcome initial barriers to getting started. a significant distinction of the acu library maker lab is that it is completely open to all individuals regardless of whether they are affiliated with the university. this policy was a deliberate decision from the space’s inception. the acu library as a whole has a rich tradition of serving anyone who is in the building and of collaborating with other libraries of all types in the area. the maker lab continues that tradition. even the computers in the maker lab do not require a special university login. the space is designed to be as convenient as possible for all makers to use. maker academy since its opening, the maker lab has enjoyed a healthy yet somewhat narrow use among our institution’s population. we wanted to build upon our user base and encourage a maker mindset among other groups. this desire was the inspiration for maker academy. maker academy is a series of day camps for kids. we first offered it in the summer of 2014 and have continued every summer since then, refining the program each year. we presently have three camps: one for children in 4th and 5th grade, and two middle school camps for youths in 6th through 8th grades. each camp lasts three days and goes from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. we charge $100 per maker. this fee covers all making supplies, lunch and snacks for each day, and a camp t-shirt. we host the camps as outreach, not a profit-making activity. we do not make money from the camps. we cap registration at 20 makers per camp because that is the maximum our space and staff can accommodate. maker academy introduces kids to tinkering and learning through making. from activities like building catapults, kites, and go-carts, they learn science principles as well as prototyping and fabrication skills. they might learn soldering and basic circuitry to wire a lamp or make an arduino robot – a small microcontroller or simplified circuit board designed to operate mechanical devices. they experiment with various pieces of graphics software to create their own t-shirt designs or decorations for their projects. each activity fosters curiosity, problem solving, and creativity. activities change each summer to give makers a new experience each time. we initially advertised the camps to those we thought would be our primary audience, namely children of faculty and youth in local schools. we made posters, sent email blasts, wrote campus newsletter articles, posted on blogs, and advertised on the library’s web page. we talked with many colleagues personally. we sent out fliers and emails to public elementary and middle schools in the area. then we eagerly waited to see who would enroll. for the first set of camps, only 12 kids registered. it was a very disappointing turnout for all the effort we expended. we distributed more emails and more reminders, but they made little difference. the turnaround occurred when a parent who homeschooled heard about the camps through a source unknown to us, and volunteered to share the news on the local homeschool listserv. within one day, all the camps filled up and overflowed to a waitlist. we were overwhelmed and amazed. we realized that we had unintentionally overlooked a significant portion of our community and sphere of influence. we needed to focus more on the homeschool community  and how we could include them, not only in our marketing, but as a planned audience in our programming. but first, we needed to know more about this population. characteristics of homeschoolers and library implications we wanted to understand the needs of those who homeschool and how the library could speak to those needs. we found helpful published information that we mentioned earlier in this article, but most of what we learned came from speaking with parents, observing the kids, and getting feedback along the way. over time, we noted several characteristics of local homeschool families that inform how we structure our outreach and services. homeschoolers are a tight community with a culture of sharing. those who homeschool often do so because they can choose their own curriculum and approach to education. there is no national group that oversees homeschool education. because of homeschooling’s independent nature, there is no single association to which homeschool families will belong and from whom the library can get a convenient list of members in its area. while there are broad-based companies that offer customized curriculum guides, homeschooling tends to be organized around multiple state or regional groups and small co-ops for common interests. it is incumbent upon the library to identify these groups in order to reach members. the local homeschool groups not only connect members but they also foster information sharing. since there is no central governing agency, families share news among themselves about homeschooling. the regional groups provide a loose organization in which the sharing takes place. if the library can identify the local homeschool groups, it can become part of the resources that will be shared with others. homeschool groups have specialized but very effective communication channels. parents exchange information, curriculum ideas, and expertise via email lists. local chapters will announce education activities that support independent learning. these listservs and announcements often constitute the main vehicle of support for homeschooling families, so they are very active and very efficient (turner, 2016). more importantly, they also tend to lie outside a library’s traditional outreach channels. when the parent who homeschooled posted the news about our maker academy, all it took was one initial email for most of the local homeschool community to know about the camps and to respond. it was a very effective means of communication. to use it, however, we had to get on the email list. we realized that our usual outreach channels were not as widespread as we thought, and we needed to expand our reach to draw in this special yet substantial portion of our community. homeschoolers are anxious for innovation and meaningful educational opportunities. surveys indicate that dissatisfaction with academic instruction at traditional schools is the second highest reason families decide to homeschool (mcquiggan & megra, 2017). the same survey goes on to report that 39 percent of homeschool families rank a desire for nontraditional instruction as “important.” real world, personalized learning is valued by many who practice homeschooling. this is good news for libraries because innovative learning is very much what makerspaces are all about. nearly every activity in our maker academy involves hands-on learning with a direct tie to real world skills. for example, students participate in making their camp t-shirts and learn about screen printing and vinyl cutting. they learn how a basic circuit works and put that knowledge into practice by wiring their own custom-made lamps. especially effective are activities that build upon recently acquired skills and that naturally scaffold up to more advanced knowledge. we frequently will start beginners with a “learn to solder” project where they connect leds to a battery to make a wearable badge that lights up. soldering, we explain, is the basis of many electronic projects. then we introduce a switch where they can turn the light on and off. next they solder multiple switches to connect a speaker to amplify music from a cell phone. learning by doing lets young makers build their knowledge in ways that are effective, practical, and that both they and their parents can appreciate. homeschool families, like anyone else, appreciate free tools they can use at home and shared resources they can use at libraries. when asked where they get educational material, over 70 percent of homeschool families cite free content on websites and material from the public library as their main sources of curriculum material (redford, battle, & bielick, 2016). they are looking for tools that are easily accessible and affordable yet provide quality education. this creates a rich opportunity for the library to teach with open source/open access tools. it is the nature of makerspaces, and increasingly of libraries, to embrace and even favor open source and open access. although many of the high-tech machines in a makerspace are expensive, they run using open source software that anyone with a computer can download for free. we promote these tools in maker academy. we take the classes to our computer lab and introduce them to design programs like inkscape for graphics and tinkercad for 3d design. we tell them and their parents that this software is free and that they can use these tools at home and then come to the library to print their designs on a laser cutter or on a 3d printer. this opens enormous possibilities and leverages the library-community relationship. it creates opportunities to maintain contact as homeschool families come back after camp to use the library. many homeschool families look for opportunities for their children to engage socially and to work as part of a team. researchers define socialization differently, and the answer to the question of what it means to be properly socialized is a highly personal one. however, there is some general consensus that socialization involves a common set of abilities:  (a) functional life skills that enable people to operate successfully in the “real” world; (b) social skills including the ability to listen, to interact, and to develop a strong sense of identity and values; and (c) a sense of civic engagement, or of being willing and able to give back to society (kunzman, 2016; neuman & guterman, 2017). homeschool parents are aware of the need to avoid isolationism, and they actively seek opportunities that provide socialization experiences in ways that conventional schools may not. they want their children to respect others, to develop a sense of teamwork, and to get along with people of diverse backgrounds. they use a variety of resources outside the family to provide these opportunities (medlin, 2013). to respond to the need for social enabling, we deliberately schedule maker academy activities that facilitate these softer skills. makers may work on individual projects, helping each other as needed, but they also have group projects that they develop collaboratively. they may divide into groups to make gravity powered go-carts where they have to share design decisions, take turns using tools, and agree on a team name and logo. sometimes they construct individual paper roller coasters, but then they combine their individual models into one big camp model. simply having a camp experience lets participants take part in positive social interactions, while group activities encourage them to practice brainstorming, collaboration, and consensus-building skills. as a further way to inject social skills, we incorporate a grand show and tell on the last day of camp. we invite friends and families to see the final results of what their children have been doing. makers show what they have made, explain how they made it, and what they learned along the way. they often will take their parents on a tour of the maker lab, explaining in detail how the machines work and how they used them. we serve refreshments, and there is lots of interaction. the whole event serves to clinch the camp experience for everyone. a fun presentation time completes the creative cycle for makers by allowing them to share their results and practice answering questions publicly. parents see evidence of the broader, holistic social skills beyond just the technical learning. evaluation evaluation is an important yet often challenging part of every library initiative. it is especially crucial for a nontraditional service like makerspaces and youth day camps since university administration may question the expenditure of time and effort on a population not directly affiliated with the institution. gibson and dixon (2011) offer a framework that libraries can use for assessing the impact of various programs. it is particularly relevant in that it stresses degree of engagement rather than only the metrics of attendance and popularity as indicators of success. outreach effectiveness effectiveness encompasses not only how many people a program reached but also the depth of outreach. were we effective in reaching people in terms of numbers, and how wide a net did we cast? were we inclusive? our original outreach to faculty families and public schools was not very effective. it garnered only 12 responses for our three maker camps. it was not until we serendipitously discovered the additional segment of the homeschool community that our outreach became more effective. we went from 12 campers that we had to go to great lengths to recruit to registration that now fills up within the first day, plus a waitlist. the key for us was learning about the homeschool segment of our community, and how they communicate. our typical outreach channels were too narrow; they excluded this significant community. we had to broaden our promotional methods to include more than we had been doing. we learned an important lesson. at the start of any new marketing initiative, we now try to ask ourselves, “what groups are we missing because we are defining our user base too narrowly?” proof of educational benefit proof of educational benefit is especially important for academic libraries. academic libraries are, at their heart, educational institutions. their mission is tied to learning. while gate counts and program attendance can indicate popularity, the deeper question we have to answer is whether or not anyone learned anything worthwhile. fortunately, educational evidence is fairly easy for something like maker academy. the objects the campers make serve as proof of what they learned. campers make t-shirts, build catapults, assemble speakers powered by a raspberry pi, create robotic drawing machines from a small motor, and make many other things. parents see these objects displayed in the show and tell at the close of camp, the children can explain how their creations work, and they can take their projects home. these objects are physical evidence of learning. paper roller coaster activity and whiteboard showing lessons learned from the project. from acu maker academy 2017. we have also discovered that sometimes we have to make other types of learning a little more evident. a paper roller coaster might seem like a fun construction activity, but there are some important principles of speed and motion, not to mention principles of life, that kids learn from it. asking young makers to articulate what they discovered and then writing these on a whiteboard uncovers the deeper learning behind the activity (image 1). consider these examples from what young makers in our 2017 maker academy said they learned: mistakes are fixable. collaboration = better ideas. heavy goes slow. light goes fast. tape is good. tape is bad. keep trying. test your ideas. for parents, we call the completed projects and accompanying responses “what the kids made” and “what they learned.” for university administrators, we use the pedagogical terms of “learning artifacts” and “reflective practice.” each audience has its own jargon, but no matter the terminology, it is proof of learning strategic positioning according to gibson and dixon (2011), strategic positioning involves factors like increasing the attractiveness of the library as a partner, developing friends and allies, and increasing the quality of relationships. it implies taking conscious steps that will put the library in a good place in the future. with noticeable growth of homeschooling  (ray, 2018), it is likely that a significant portion of future college students will come from a homeschool environment. colleges and universities would benefit by cultivating relationships with this market segment. library programming, particularly that which involves creating something, can play a part in recruiting (scalfani & shedd, 2015). at acu, maker academy brings many people to campus who would not otherwise come. it introduces them to the layout of the buildings. it gets them inside the library where they see the environment, meet the librarians, and hopefully learn that the campus is not totally closed off to them. inviting them here early encourages them to think favorably about higher education, and possibly the library’s parent institution, as part of their future. making friends with external constituencies, demonstrating how the university is a partner for success, and aiding in recruiting are all forms of social capital that administrators value. long-term learning outcomes outcomes refer to changed behaviors or attitudes that program participants exhibit as a result of the program. we see program outcomes in the form of voluntary extra involvement in the maker lab. this comes from homeschool co-ops who want to bring their group in for a tour and a hands-on activity. it also comes from a homeschool robotics group that designs robotic parts with the open source software they learned in maker academy and visits in person to print the parts using our 3d printers. a particularly significant outcome indicator is when we host a maker festival and some of the young maker academy graduates volunteer to exhibit new things they have made or to teach a workshop on a skill they have learned in the makerspace (image 2). going from student to teacher is a powerful outcome. acu library makerfest 2017 final thoughts using maker day camps as an outreach tool has been a very successful program for us. we learned some important lessons about our users as well as about our own practices. but these lessons are not only for us. they can speak to other libraries as well. libraries of all types seek to serve others. whether providing storytime in a public library, curriculum resources for a school, or research help for a paper or dissertation, we all seek to connect our services with others’ needs. serving our patrons starts with an awareness of them. it may be that other libraries, like ours, tend to define our patron base too narrowly. we use more effort to look in the same places using the same outreach tools and fail to realize who we might be missing in the process. for acu, that group was homeschoolers. simply asking the question, “who are we missing?” is a good reminder for all of us to look more widely and inclusively at those we can reach. secondly, we in libraries can realize that we have more to offer than we may think. pedagogical research has long advocated for participatory learning, social engagement, reflective inquiry, and technology blended with traditional methods. libraries offer these things, and they are a natural match for homeschool families. hands-on activities, group learning, and teaching with open source tools are what libraries do, and makerspaces are innately geared to many of the forms of teaching and learning that educational reform is calling for. libraries can confidently come forward to show how we demonstrate solutions and learning outcomes, and we can be leaders in reaching new markets beyond the people already on campus. incorporating families who school at home into the library’s larger community is first a matter of communication rather than one of program content. many of the needs and interests of homeschool families are similar to those in mainstream education. hilyard notes, “the only real challenge libraries face in serving homeschooling families is reaching them.” (2008, p. 18). ten years later, this initial challenge remains the same today. plugging into the already existent local listservs and co-ops is imperative and transformed our effectiveness in reaching those around us. part of thinking beyond the immediate college-age population is thinking more inclusively of special interest segments of a library’s external community. for us, this special interest was those who homeschool. parents, children, and—in the future—teachers and homeschool co-ops are all part of our expanded patron base. we remind ourselves that sometimes success depends less on fishing in the same spot but on how wide we cast our nets. acknowledgements my gratitude goes out to sarah naper, external reviewer for this article, and to amy koester, internal reviewer. you gave extensively of your time and experience, and you encouraged me to go deeper by your questions. not only this article but this librarian is better because of your involvement. thanks, too, to kellee warren whose work as publishing editor guided me through the publication process, further polished the article, and kept me focused along the way. to darren wilson and my other colleagues in the acu library maker lab, thanks for your work every day and for making learning fun. references arendt, j., hargraves, r. s. h., & roseberry, m. i. 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(2009). warning: children in the library! welcoming children and families into the academic library. education libraries, 32(2), 21–26. university of michigan. (2017). k-12 summer academic opportunities. retrieved may 17, 2018, from https://ceo.umich.edu/k-12-summer-academic-opportunities/ washington state university libraries. (2018). library instruction: k-12 connections. retrieved may 17, 2018, from http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/library-instruction/k12-connections willingham, t. (2008). libraries and homeschoolers: our shared common ground. knowledge quest, 37(1), 58–63. acu maker lab store at http://blogs.acu.edu/makerlab/store/ [↩] academic libraries, day camps, homeschoolers, makerspaces “i remember…”: a written-reflection program for student library workers they can and they should and it’s both and: the role of undergraduate peer mentors in the reference conversation 1 response celia 2018–12–12 at 11:40 am as a formerly homeschooled kid who’s now a college librarian… love it! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct and we’re back! – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 11 feb editorial board /0 comments and we’re back! by editorial board the in the library with the lead pipe board has been investigating the hacked/malware warnings related to the site and are pleased to report we’re in the clear! many thanks to @librarieshacked, who was able to pinpoint obfuscated code on the site. we’ve removed that and have passed the subsequent google review. google currently still lists a warning, which we’re assuming is the “this may take a few hours” but we’re continuing to monitor. our host @ibiblio is also reporting similar problems with some of their other wordpress instances. of note, they are “working to deploy software and configuration tools that will help us better isolate ibiblio-hosted collections from each other so that problems like this have lower impact in the future.” thanks to everyone who reported the issue to us! the lead pipe board the quest for diversity in library staffing: from awareness to action change in publication schedule this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct preparing early career librarians for leadership and management: a feminist critique – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 17 apr camille thomas, elia trucks and h.b. kouns /1 comments preparing early career librarians for leadership and management: a feminist critique in brief this article explores the opportunities and challenges that early career librarians face when advancing their careers, desired qualities for leaders or managers of all career stages, and how early career librarians can develop those qualities. our survey asked librarians at all career stages to share their sentiments, experiences, and perceptions of leadership and management. through our feminist critique, we explore the relationships to power that support imbalances in the profession and discuss best practices such as mentoring, individualized support, and self-advocacy. these practices will be of use to early career librarians, as well as supervisors and mentors looking to support other librarians. by camille thomas, elia trucks, and h.b. kouns introduction as early career academic librarians, we have had many conversations about what leadership and management look like in our lives and found that our experiences were not well-represented in lis literature. much of the research on leadership and management focuses on current experiences of those who already moved into leadership roles after decades of experience, not the process for moving into such positions. we are a research team comprised of early career librarians who are cisgender women, including a woman of color and a queer white woman. holly (h.b. kouns) and camille (thomas) have experience with leadership, management and mentoring. elia (trucks) wants to lead from within her position and ensure equity in development opportunities. our research questions were: what are opportunities and challenges for early career librarians interested in management as libraries evolve? have we seen any progress on the calls to action regarding diversity, training, mentoring, and opportunities? literature review we started this study by looking for existing research specifically focused on how early career librarians navigated their experiences with leadership and management. we interpreted early career to include librarians with fewer than 10 years of experience, including pre-mlis and paraprofessional experience. leadership “is concerned with direction setting, with novelty and is essentially linked to change, movement and persuasion” (grint, jones, & holt, 2017). training and demographics the initial source of formal training for most library managers comes from management classes in mlis programs (rooney, 2010). outside of the mlis, leadership and management institutes, trainings, and workshops are meant to help librarians develop leadership skills. the american library association (ala) alone highlights over 20 different programs which offer self-assessment of participants’ skills and expose participants to leadership theories (herold, 2014; “library leadership training resources,” 2008). hines (2019) examined 17 library leadership institutes that reinforce the existing power structures of traditional leadership training and did not incorporate the values championed by ala such as access, democracy, and social responsibility. moreover, the requirements to attend retain exclusive barriers for marginalized professionals who may not be gainfully employed, able to take time off, or considered worthy of support, leaving middle managers of color and interim directors of color with even fewer opportunities to gain relevant experience before moving into senior leadership roles (irwin & devries, 2019; bugg, 2016). as the profession ages, librarians move up through the ranks of leadership and management by filling positions vacated by retirees. however, the delayed retirement of late career librarians especially affects women and people of color (poc) in the profession. representation in academic librarianship has become more equitable for white women, from the male-dominated leadership landscape of the 1970s to greater advances between the 1980s and the 2000s (delong, 2013). despite these advances in the number of women in leadership positions, there are still many areas where women have more experience yet make less pay (morris, 2019). however, administrative job prospects look even bleaker for librarians of color than for white women since it is typical for librarians to learn leadership and management practices on the job only after moving into the role (ly, 2015; rooney, 2010). while there are efforts in the profession (particularly within the association of research libraries (arl)) to recruit diverse students and employees into librarianship, there is not as much emphasis on retention and advancement. some librarians of color also see the amount and type of experience required for entry level positions as a barrier, as it reinforces homogeneity in libraries (chou & pho, 2017). this is evident in the demographics of university libraries which are 85% white and 15% minority. according to the annual salary statistics published by arl (morris, 2019), the overall makeup of people working in arl libraries is 63% female and 36% male, and statistics for leadership in those libraries (directors, associate directors, heads of branches, etc.) is relatively proportionate. out of those, 109 are directors of arl libraries, of which 10 identify as people of color. (morris, 2019). qualities & skills historically, masculine-coded, agency-based leadership qualities such as “assertion, self-confidence and ambition” have been associated with successful leaders in north america (richmond, 2017). however, as more women and millennials or gen xers are in positions of power (phillips, 2014), valued leadership qualities have begun to include communal, feminine-coded traits like “empathy, interpersonal relationships, openness, and cooperation” (martin, 2018). they continue, “[baby] boomers, gen xers, and millennials all [want] a leader who [is] competent, forward-looking, inspiring, caring, loyal, determined, and honest” (martin, 2018). feminist scholars address the implicit associations of certain skills such as shared power, recognizing privilege, building partnerships, and self-advocacy, combining attributes of communal and agency-based skills (higgins, 2017; askey & askey, 2017; fleming & mcbride, 2017) with specific identity performance, rather than effectiveness or value (richmond, 2017). hierarchical power structures have traditionally consolidated both leadership and management roles and thus, librarians needed to gain recognition through years of experience with both to advance. leaders focus on high-level initiatives and managers focus on granular initiatives, therefore the skills that are needed to be effective in each role are different. the most valued leadership qualities include creativity, vision, and commitment, while the most valued management qualities include dedication, communication, and caring for colleagues and subordinates (phillips, 2014; young, powell, & hernon, 2003; aslam, 2018; “leadership and management competencies,” 2016; martin, 2018; stewart, 2017). as a result, many mid-career and late-career librarians “drift” into leadership positions because they are believed to have gained the necessary skills through years of experience with a variety of projects, personnel, and institutional developments (ly, 2015; bugg, 2016). those who experience “leadership by drift” are appointed, usually without much self-reflection or choice (ly, 2015). for example, library leaders are most often appointed as an interim leader, and 80% of those interim leaders are then hired without any outside recruitment (irwin & devries, 2019). this led us to believe that “drifting” was the primary path librarians could take into leadership positions. in contrast, there are few accounts of librarians who actively sought leadership and management positions. pearl ly’s (2015) trajectory from interim to permanent dean included earning a phd, participating in leadership training programs, and peer-mentoring from other administrators. ly always intended to move into a leadership or management position, an intention of ambition which stands out from many other librarians, and serves as evidence of how ambition can accelerate the process of acquiring skills and training. ambitious librarians forgo the long timeline of traditional “drift” (usually predicated on being appointed into positions after decades of demonstrating skills). the topic of ambition has many nuances and challenges, especially in light of the hegemonic representation of who traditionally becomes a leader in librarianship. a respondent in chou and pho’s 2017 study shared an experience in which a latina woman’s ambition to be a branch manager within five years was scoffed at by a hiring committee and she was not hired in the end. the respondent believed the candidate was seen as aggressive, but did not believe the committee would have had the same impression of a white male. unlike ly’s case, responses in bugg’s 2016 survey of people of color in middle management positions show alternative paths to leadership. respondents reported having the skills and desire for the work described in a position that had leadership and management responsibilities, but not necessarily the ambition to move up. many respondents participated in preparatory activities (such as leadership training, doctoral degrees, career coaching, etc.) but only one expressed desire to move from middle management to senior leadership. they cited reasons for not wanting to advance such as the elimination of tenure, dissonance with personal values, and lack of motivation. this led us to wonder if there is a discrepancy between the skills needed and the skills valued. challenges once in positions with leadership and management responsibilities, librarians with ambition face different challenges. 32% of interim library leaders had fewer than five years of leadership and residency at their institutions when they were appointed to interim positions (irwin & devries, 2019). several noted colleagues having difficulty accepting them as leaders, especially when length of service was not a criterion for appointment. chou and pho (2017) note common experiences in which female librarians of color were more likely to have their intelligence, qualifications, and authority questioned. early career librarians in the study attributed perceived incompetence to looking young in addition to being a person of color and a woman. women of color managers often experienced patrons who did not believe they were the person in charge. similarly, bugg (2016) found that many librarians of color felt apprehension about moving into senior leadership positions due to lack of exposure to senior leadership networks and incompatible organizational values. before advancement, librarians were trained in both leadership and management externally. afterwards, they discovered less access to and support for opportunities, such as lobbying for department needs, not feeling supported by senior leadership during difficult decisions, and lack of exposure to or not receiving opportunities. additionally, alternative types of leadership are not valued by traditional career advancement. phillips (2014) highlights the “transformational leadership” type, which focuses on progressing organizational change, as the type of leadership commonly discussed in librarianship. in this style, collaboration among librarians is championed by the profession, as it is seen as necessary for progress. however, there is dissonance between valuing collaboration and recognizing demonstrations of leadership skills in collaborative work. this can be seen in the servant leadership style, currently popular in libraries (richmond, 2017). douglas and gadsby’s 2017 study of instruction coordinators shows this imbalance. instruction coordinators do a great deal of feminized “relational” work—supporting, helping, collaborating—and yet they are not given authority or power to make substantial change. additionally, librarians of color often find themselves taking on undervalued “diversity work” in collaborations, piling explaining concepts and lived experiences to white colleagues on top of the work itself (chou & pho, 2017). there is very little recognition for those who are not in positions of authority or do not formally supervise others, but make substantial contributions to the collaborative work. likewise, someone may lead within their position, but never manage others. the work is valued as work, but not in terms of leadership. methods we chose a mixed method approach to cross examine the multiple complex factors that are involved in varied experiences with leadership and management over time. for our primary method, we used constructivist grounded theory (cgt), which supports the open-ended collection and analysis of data. unlike grounded theory, we co-constructed theory by taking multiple perspectives and the positioning of researchers and participants into account. we applied an existing theory based on reoccuring themes from the data. cgt does not assume theories are discovered and uses existing theories where they apply (strauss & corbin, 1997; charmaz, 2006). within cgt, we used a constant comparison to direct our analysis. constant comparison is a method of grounded theory in which data is compared against existing findings throughout the data analysis period. as we constructed theory from the results, we applied feminist theory, which is a method of analysis that examines the relationships between gender and power, and how structures reinforce the oppression of women (tyson, 2006). we also looked closely at the historical factors that inform current practices. our feminist critique is informed by intersectionality, as defined by kimberlé crenshaw (1990), which explores how people with multiple intersecting identities beyond gender, such as race and ethnicity, queerness, and disability, experience overlapping oppressive power structures. we created a survey to explore the perceptions and lived experiences of library professionals related to leadership and management. this includes librarians with mlis degrees, paraprofessionals, and students in order to capture the perspectives of newly minted librarians, managers of new librarians, and those interested in mentoring or supporting new librarians. we sent the survey to multiple ala email listservs (groups for new members of ala, new members of leadership groups, general leadership, reference, assessment, college and university libraries, diversity and inclusion, technology and scholarly communication) to gather responses. the survey included questions on skills, attributes, and participants’ experiences. we provided a list of skills based on the literature and asked participants to rate their importance. we deliberately designed the survey so that participants would share their own thoughts and values first, without being primed by our list of skills. we analyzed the data based on the career experience of the respondents. we categorized librarians with 0-6 years of experience as “early career.” those with 7-15 years we categorized as “mid-career,” and those with 16+ years as “late career.” these determinations are based on the association of college and research libraries (acrl) criteria for travel scholarships to the biennial conference (one of the few career level distinctions we found from a professional organization). we included preand post-mlis work in determining experience. this differs from the acrl definition, where they measure based on post-mlis experience. we wanted to capture all experiences that contribute to how professionals acquire skills during the early stages of their careers. we also asked participants to report degrees earned. our survey did not involve questions about tenure, but we did note any mention of the influence of tenure. when we analyzed the data, instead of creating categories before coding responses, we created categories based on prominent themes in the data. additionally, we used voyant, an open-source text analysis tool, to track frequently used words, examine phrases, and measure sentiment. with voyant, we determined the most popular qualities in leaders and managers. we also used it to determine the most common themes from qualitative responses. limitations we sent our survey to ala-affiliated listservs, which excluded librarians who do not subscribe to those services. we did not ask for a lot of demographic information, including age, race or ethnicity, or type of library in which participants work. according to the literature available at the time we designed the survey, professionals had varying positive, neutral and negative perspectives on how identity affected their paths to leadership. we wanted to give participants an opportunity to address these issues and included a question specifically about whether they encountered challenges related to their identities. as we designed our instrument, we did not design them with feminist critique or intersectionality specifically in mind. we realized after completion of the survey that “cis or trans woman” and “cis or trans man” may be more accurate labels than the options we provided, such as “woman or trans woman.” we also did not ask for participants’ age or list age as a challenge related to identity. when we presented preliminary data at the ala annual conference in june 2018, we consolidated midand late career responses. we realized it was important to separate these responses in the results of this paper, as they are distinctly different career levels. results we recorded 373 responses to the survey. after eliminating responses with less than a 22% completion rate, we had 270 complete responses. background and demographics the results of the survey included a high percentage of respondents with greater than six years of experience. we wanted a wide range of perspectives, including those who were able to reflect on how their early experiences shaped the rest of their career. this skew prompted us to filter responses (particularly qualitative ones) based on early career (0-6 years), mid-career (7-15 years), and late career (16+ years) to analyze specific perspectives. participants gave information about their years of experience (n = 270). the majority of respondents had 16 years of experience or more (36%). the second largest experience range was 7-10 years (20%). 26% of respondents were early career professionals, with an experience range of 0-6 years. educational backgrounds among early and midto late-career professionals had no difference in proportion, although two early career respondents noted they were currently completing a bachelors or masters degree in library science. figure 1. respondents’ years of experience in libraries, including pre-mlis experience. representation and challenges related to identities respondents (n = 270) were 80% cisgender women or trans women and 15% cisgender men or trans men; 1% identified as non binary, 1% preferred not to answer and 0.37% identified as other. some qualitative responses included mentions of harassment, microaggressions, or bias related to gender: “one time i was treated particularly unfairly during an internal interviewing situation in which [i] accepted the position but was offered considerably less money that a male counterpart. i had to prepare for negotiation and [speak] out about this inequity. i expressed my concern to my male supervisor / department head and, great as he was, he was not helpful for me because he was particularly conflict averse (although awesome in a lot of other ways).” “the concerns i’ve faced with regard to these issues haven’t come from fellow employees, but from library patrons, who have occasionally been sexually explicit or harassing towards me and other female employees (non-white employees have faced similar problems, but being white i have not directly faced that problem myself)…” identities by career stage while we did not ask for demographic information regarding race, sexual identity, or ability, we did want to gather information about whether respondents faced challenges related to these identities. figure 2. percentage of respondents at different career stages who reported experiencing challenges related to identity identity early career [0-6 yrs] (n=42) mid career [7-15 yrs] (n=52) late career [16+ yrs] (n=39 ) response rate (n=182) gender 45.23% (n=19) 76.92% (n=40) 22.44% (n=11) 48.35% (n=88) race or ethnicity 14.28% (n=6) 25.00% (n=13) 8.16% (n=4) 18.68% (n=34) gender expression 4.76% (n=2) 5.76% (n=3) 0.00% (n=0) 2.75% (n=5) sexual identity 7.14% (n=3) 5.76% (n=3) 0.00% (n=0) 3.30% (n=6) accessibility/disability 11.90% (n=5) 3.84% (n=2) 4.08% (n=2) 9.89% (n=18) other experiences intersecting with any of the above or additional issues 16.66% (n=7) 19.23% (n=10) 44.89% (n=22) 17.03% (n=31) the most common challenges participants faced in relation to their identities included gender, race or ethnicity, and accessibility or disability concerns. respondents often faced challenges related to their ability: “i have a hearing disability. i often need technical support for meeting in ensuring that i can hear everyone. it doesn’t always work out.” “i had health issues come up, that included significant exhaustion, brain fog, and executive function issues (along with other symptoms). my boss at the time handled it very badly – he kept pushing me to take on more tasks (in my first year in a new position), did not communicate options to me for leave/additional support (or refer me to the person in the campus structure who managed that for staff), and shamed me for making a necessary specialists appointment. i ended up having my contract not reviewed and was out of work for a year.” “mental illness, stigma” others faced challenges due to their age, race, or social class: “when i was younger, people under my leadership would sometimes become angry about a perceived lack of experience in comparison to them…. i believe that i have often had to overcome quite a bit of disrespect as a woman of color in our field. underneath others’ leadership, i have found less support from managers as i grow older and more experienced. aging leadership clearly see me as a threat to their positions, and have cut me off from professional opportunities. administrators sometimes shut down committees when the team selects me as a leader. this has happened to me 4 times in my current organization.” “[h]onest conversations about race and social class. i was told to tone down my pride about coming from a working class background and being from the south. learning to hide this identity has helped me connect with academic librarians, who are mostly from upper social classes.” some face challenges that are intersectional, including homophobic remarks, crossing personal boundaries (or as the respondent says, “lines i can draw”), and sexist behaviors: “[my coworker] tells on people and i’m uncomfortable working with her. she is very conservative and the other day she asked me what i thought of gay couples raising children… i would like to work out with someone the lines i can draw. having an older tentured male professors ask me to make coffee for them for an irb meeting. they didn’t realize i was a professor (junior), and was there for the meeting. i was shocked and while thinking of a response, they realized their error.” there were few responses to gender expression and sexual identity challenges that participants faced, but it is important to note identities which may be marginalized within gender issues. participants were able to select multiple identities to indicate intersectionality in challenges. it is beyond the scope of this paper to list all of the intersections of identities that exist, but in the data, the most common combinations of intersectional identities included gender and gender expression; gender, race or ethnicity, and sexual expression; gender and accessibility; and gender, race and accessibility. comparison of direct reports in highest supervisory role we asked librarians how many direct reports they supervised in their highest supervisory role. more than half of surveyed early career librarians had direct reports. this is higher than expected and highlights the fact that early career librarians are in fact moving into leadership and management roles. midand late career professionals had greater numbers of direct reports, with 27% having more than 10 subordinates and only 13% having none. late career librarians supervise more than either other group, which is in line with our expectations. additionally, 90% of men who completed the survey were supervisors, but only 76% of women were supervisors. figure 3. number of direct reports by respondent career stage and gender identity career stage gender 0 direct reports 1-5 direct reports 5-10 direct reports 10+ direct reports total responses early career men 1 4 1 1 7 women 33 20 7 5 65 non-binary 0 0 0 0 0 mid career men 2 8 3 2 15 women 16 38 16 17 87 non-binary 0 2 0 0 2 late career men 1 4 4 12 21 women 1 16 28 20 65 non-binary 1 0 0 0 1 we did not include “prefer not to answer” and “other” in these tables due to lack of responses. leadership and management attributes in an open-ended question, we asked participants what skills and qualities ideal leaders and managers possessed and to rate their value. these were the most commonly written values, qualities, and attributes: leader: vision (170); ability/able (125); communication (83); good (used an adjective describing excellence or competence) (46); communication (33); skills (33); visionary (33) manager: ability (67); good (57); skills (56); communication (52); staff (44) participants included words such as ability, good, skills, or staff, which were not in our prompted list of valued skills. skills from the literature that were not valued by our participants (either in the open-ended questions or the value question) included commitment, influence, negotiation, problem solving, dedication, caring, and assertiveness. traits valued for leaders across all career stages were vision, ability/able (in this context also meaning competency or execution), good, and communication. early career librarians valued additional traits such as listening, generating ideas, and thinking about the big picture. midand late career librarians valued other traits such as a focus on people, work, and organization (both organizational knowledge and being organized). librarians valued skills, communication, work, and organization in managers across all career stages. early career librarians valued teams (presumably both teamwork and the existence of teams) in addition to shared ideal traits. few people marked any of the qualities “not at all important” and all except for one category, development, were 0% of the total answers. possessed skills we asked participants to rate the extent to which they feel they already possessed leadership and management qualities. most librarians feel a strong sense of integrity and commitment is needed for leadership, but feel less strongly about their influence or negotiation skills. overall, librarians feel positively about their leadership skills, with only a handful saying they “totally disagree” about any particular skill. this dedication to integrity is reflected in the responses as well. librarians who felt their supervisor trusted them or acted ethically were more positive in their responses: “experience under a public library director who served with grace and integrity. taught me how to deal with a board of supervisor who were all men.” “i reported to an aul who repeatedly lied to me about important issues. one example: she told me she took a diversity proposal i spent weeks developing to the dean, who (aul said) did not support it. i found out from the dean that she had not brought him the proposal. (this is just one example.) i realized i could not trust her integrity. my reaction was to request to go back to a non-supervisory position. the library lost one of its few minority senior managers (me). i did not have the tools to effectively deal with this situation.” figure 4. respondents’ perceptions of whether they possess specific leadership qualities.   however, librarians are in less agreement over their management skills. librarians did not rate any of these skills as highly as they did for leadership skills. librarians feel they have dedication, care for colleagues and subordinates, and problem solving skills. on the other hand, few believed that they possessed assertiveness, development, organization and delegation needed for management. the skills and attributes that librarians rated highly are correlated with caring and empathy, which are represented in the responses as well: “i had a boss who was very open to hearing from his staff, and i told him that i didn’t like how he treated one of my colleagues; i felt as though he was disrespectful to her, and he listened to me and actually improved his actions towards her from then on. i appreciated that he cared enough to listen and change his actions.” figure 5. respondents’ perceptions of whether they possess specific management qualities.   generally, responses were positive across career stages. early career respondents have fewer “totally agree” responses. additionally, communication was a choice in both questions, and librarians rated themselves differently. 36% said they totally agree that they have leadership-communication, but only 12% said the same for their management-communication. communication was a challenge expressed in almost every section of the survey. participants rated themselves poorly for their communication proficiency and wrote in open-ended questions about experiences they had with others. these two examples show a positive and a negative experience with supervisors: “i had a manager who made a point to always stand up for her subordinates. if they were wrong, she would take them aside and personally talk to them about how the situation could have been handled better, rather than berating them in front of the public or co-workers. this lead to improved confidence, particularly in tough situations with public service.” “on the negative side i’ve had supervisors who have failed to communicate information that later became public and caused problems in the library…. previously, i worked with a leader who actively refused to advocate for the library and it cost us resources (laptops and other tech that i didn’t even know we had access to. i learned about it via gossip with other librarians and staff.)” we asked participants to share when they have received feedback about these leadership and management skills to see if they actually possess them. a few paraprofessional respondents noted they did not receive feedback about leadership or management attributes because they did not have the same formal review processes as professionals. this is notable because it shows a gap in support between librarians with their mlis and those in libraries who do not have the degree. generally, feedback mechanisms were informal and came from supervisors and colleagues. another common theme was that respondents felt frustrated about the feedback they receive from supervisors. unspecific feedback, no feedback at all, or informal feedback that does not reflect the formal review were major points of frustration. below is an example from a respondent who prefers specific, constructive feedback that reflects the supervisor’s understanding of the value of their work: “i receive generic “thank you for the good work” emails from my supervisor regularly, though i don’t think she has a good idea of the work i do, or of its value to my team” one major issue that surfaces in this statement is that the supervisor may not understand their work, and does not give appropriate or helpful feedback because they cannot. this shows how miscommunication may be indicative of deeper issues, but we can only speculate because the respondent did not elaborate. support, challenges and role models several questions on the survey were dedicated to feedback, support structures, and leaders who made an impression on them. many reported additional types of resources for support in the “other” field. these included webinars, funding for professional development, informal peer mentoring, defunct mentoring programs, leadership training external to libraries. more people reported access to support for leadership training (28%) than formal mentoring (20%) or peer mentoring (18%). this is reflected in many of the qualitative responses, in which respondents note support for acquiring skills, but lack of support for navigating specific situations. institutional support figure 6. proportion of respondents who received different types of leadership and management support, by career stage type early career (n=60) mid career (n=105) late career (n=105) total (n=270) formal mentorship 25.00% (n=15) 19.04% (n=20) 18.09% (n=19) 20.00% (n=54) leadership training 18.33% (n=11) 32.38% (n=34) 29.52% (n=31) 28.14% (n=76) peer mentorship 18.33% (n=11) 17.14% (n=18) 20.00% (n=21) 18.51% (n=50) none 33.33% (n=20) 21.90% (n=23) 15.23% (n=16) 21.85% (n=59) other 5.00% (n=3) 9.52% (n=10) 17.14% (n=18) 11.48% (n=31) participants were able to select multiple options for types of support as well as topics that support covered. if someone indicated two types of support, it was counted in both categories. the following were dual forms of support indicated by early career librarians: formal mentorship and peer mentoring, leadership training and peer mentoring, as well as formal mentoring and leadership training. other forms of support included funding or opportunities for external professional development (continued education, human resources, conferences, webinars, etc.), informal mentoring, training or mentoring for new or select “rockstar” librarians, and lack of support at the senior leadership level. topics of support participants shared multiple areas of institutional support they received (n =147). across all career stages, respondents received the most support for librarianship (or job function) (65.98%). late career librarians received the most support for training (early 25.00%; mid 23.07%; late 38.33%). fundraising was the area with the lowest amount of support across all career stages (3.4%), which aligns with the literature. write-in topics of support from early career librarians included promotion and tenure, general orientation to the library and institution, teaching, institutional assessment, mentoring and leadership and professional development. some listed “none,” or no support. overall, participants were moderately satisfied with the support they received. there were few extreme responses (either extremely satisfied (11.56%) or dissatisfied (7.54%)), with the majority marked moderately satisfied (33.17%). yet, we found dissatisfaction in some of the open ended answers. this could be because priorities vary by organization. for example, academic librarians on the tenure track would need more support for publishing than public librarians. our questions about support focused on organizational support, but many respondents wrote about interpersonal support they received (or did not receive) from supervisors, mentors, or senior leaders in the organization. many of these respondents were looking for emotional support to trust their own decisions rather than wanting their supervisor/mentor to make a decision for them. they did not have legitimacy or did not trust their own power to make certain decisions, and needed backup for making hard choices. support is critical, as shown by one of the responses: “i have needed support primarily in two areas: negotiating for budget and dealing with difficult personnel issues. in the first case, i needed political support from my administrator: how to build coalitions and be persuasive in order to accomplish my goal. in the second, i needed organizational support from my administrator: how to operate within the personnel system to solve the problem.” discussion and analysis in terms of our research question, we found that many opportunities and challenges have arisen as libraries evolve. support for rising leaders requires librarians to recognize their own power to advocate for themselves and to use that power to create a supportive environment for others. since librarianship is a feminized profession, we used the lens of feminist critique to analyze the results of our study when speaking of power. we focused on historicism in feminist theory, to explore how the history of leadership in librarianship impacts current practices. furthermore, it is important to analyze the study through a feminist lens informed by intersectionality as we seek to interrogate the profession’s claims to value diversity, inclusion, and equity, despite the lack of changes in the power structure to promote equity. this way, we can take a more accurate look at the progress in addressing calls to action. white women are now more proportionately represented in leadership, a trend reflected in our data and the literature. yet there is still contention about who holds power based on how we associate leadership with certain behaviors and identities. representation is the first step to equity, but more work needs to be done to shift power from those who have historically held it. our research undercuts existing assumptions that librarianship is more egalitarian because we are less male dominated, that women leaders are inherently feminist leaders, and that more diverse representation will mean inclusive practices. additionally, the number of early career librarians in supervisory roles was much higher that we hypothesized. when we designed our study, we were looking at career support as a barrier to preparation for leadership and management, but as we read through the responses, the frequency of experiences pointed to systemic issues. issues related to race, sexual expression, and other marginalized identities are impacting a lot of early career librarians, but we did not realize to what extent. a great deal of the literature that influenced our original study focused on the individual methods of professional development, disassociated from systems of power that maintain the status quo and keep power in a small number of hands. poc in management positions from bugg’s 2016 study reported a range of perceptions about identity as helpful, hindering, or neutral to gaining leadership positions and varying levels of ambition. originally, we thought lack of ambition was an intrinsic motivation, but our analysis revealed that there are external factors as well. the feminist lens helped us look at the larger picture regarding how our organizational structures and individual institutions uphold systematic oppression (e.g., classism, racism, sexism). we need to examine our relationships to and support of oppressive structures not just in the field at large but within individual libraries. members of marginalized groups, especially people of color and those who identify as lgbtqia, experience hidden workloads, microaggressions, early burnout and lower retention. they have less access to and support for opportunities within their work and leadership roles than their counterparts. the profession can change this by implementing institutional policies for conduct and intervention, prioritizing retention, and incorporating anti-oppression practices into support systems and decision-making. librarianship has documented issues with retention for librarians of color (bugg, 2016; chou & pho, 2017), which directly relates to the lack of people of color represented in leadership positions. many of the managers from bugg’s 2016 study received opportunities to gain leadership skills through professional development but felt a lack of support within their libraries. librarians need to reevaluate and account for the impact of barriers for marginalized in our assessments of how leadership potential is demonstrated, how leaders are retained, and the value of diverse perspectives. for librarians who aspire to leadership, there can be a disconnect between learning which skills are important, recognizing those skills in yourself, and discovering the methods to obtain those skills. the majority of these “skills” are hard to capture with concrete measurements because they are personal qualities. skills like organization may be acquired, but qualities such as integrity are characteristics. we did not distinguish these in our survey, and neither did our respondents. we wanted to observe respondents’ perceptions of the concepts, and we anticipated they would use skills and qualities interchangeably. professionals may enter librarianship with varying individual skills or qualities, and access to learning opportunities or training may vary. we found this can create difficulties for librarians to self-assess, demonstrate abilities, and request feedback, which are major ways for librarians to recognize the skills they need to grow. this hinders progress, as self-advocacy is an important part of demonstrating leadership ability. librarians across career stages generally agreed on what they value in leaders and managers. communication, integrity, and commitment were important qualities to participants. however, it was evident from open-ended responses that these values were not implemented well by some leaders. this aligns with a feminist critique of librarianship that points out how we fall short of what we say and do within organizations, despite aspirational values of transparency, community building, empowering others, and information sharing (yousefi, 2017). this dissonance can be seen in the responses regarding communication: it is one of the most important identified traits of both leaders and managers, yet many participants rated their own leadership-communication more positively and management-communication more negatively. many of the traits we desire in leaders have both masculine and feminine coding and may be perceived differently based on the leader’s background (richmond, 2017). attaching identities like gender, race, age, and ability to who can and cannot embody or perform leadership traits is a reflection of our relationships to power, however conscious or unconscious. figure 7. beyonce says, “i’m not bossy. i’m the boss.”   historically, librarianship has perpetuated hierarchical power structures in which leaders were white men. women—more specifically, white women—were targeted as the ideal professionals to carry out orderly tasks and support researchers through care. the overemphasis of care, moral attachment and service that we currently glorify in librarianship (ettarh, 2017) continues to perpetuate historical structures in which power is consolidated in few hands (higgins, 2017; richmond, 2017). the primary way librarians demonstrate power or influence is through long-term experience or accelerated accomplishments. this reinforces the need for a feminist framework, as mentioned earlier, for shared power in which librarians recognize privilege, cultivate interdependent partnerships rather than serve, and advocate for themselves to address this imbalance of power. creating organizations that are supportive, evolving, and inclusive requires that librarians take action to correct these imbalances. in the survey, we noticed an interesting pattern that librarians valued care-related qualities and believed they also possess these qualities. this aligns with the concept of the ethic of care, which prioritizes interpersonal relationships as moral virtue (higgins, 2017). however, librarians placed less value on qualities related to influence such as assertiveness, negotiation, and delegation, and did not believe they possessed them. this discrepancy and aversion to risk may be influenced by servant leadership. this leadership style implies power is derived from moral standing but requires the leader to relinquish some amount of power in order to “deserve” the position, a starting place not historically afforded to marginalized groups. higgins (2017) asserts that skills and qualities shown to be effective and valued in leaders should be championed over likability or collegiality, as it unnecessarily disadvantages women in leadership positions. we need to reevaluate whether supporting librarians who exhibit perceived moral care leads to effective leadership. we categorized librarians based on how they did or did not demonstrate influence and leadership skills or qualities. “experienced” librarians, generally midto late career, gained power through relational and organizational influence. “rockstar” librarians, often early or mid-career, gained a sense of power through ambition, influence through common vision, accomplishments and accelerated responsibility. if positions of servant leadership are deserved based on these paths, those with hidden potential may be at a disadvantage. we labeled librarians with potential but little experience as in “the middle.” they are still developing experience or ambition, may feel disempowered by leaders, and struggle with imposter syndrome when demonstrating achievements. librarians in the middle differ from underperformers or novices in the profession. new competencies (e.g. emerging service areas) and pre-mlis experiences create opportunities for librarians to be new but not novices. if we are to support librarians of color who may fall in “the middle,” we must consider cultural competencies and precarious situations that librarians of color navigate as demonstrations of leadership, rather than continue to undervalue the complexities of their experiences. respondents of this study revealed examples of lack of support as well as self-disempowerment. members of marginalized groups can fall in the middle because they may not have been conditioned to recognize opportunities nor develop leadership skills due to associations of leaders who typify traditional ideals. they may also internalize disempowerment from leaders, colleagues, or external systems of oppression to avoid making themselves highly visible and therefore subject to discrimination through self-advocacy. some of these challenges surface because of risk aversion, which supports and continues oppressive structures, a false sense of neutrality, and paths of least resistance. conclusion though new values and additional representation in leadership indicate progress within missions and goals, libraries continue to “replicate libraries of the past instead of looking to the needs of library users and workers of the future” (askey & askey, 2017). we still build and recognize leaders based on traditional methods and values. there are few mechanisms for people rising up in the profession to demonstrate their abilities outside of experience or taking initiative. most of the focus in library literature has been on who current leaders are and what experience they have shown, not how they get to be leaders. yet, it is necessary to tailor support to each individual librarian and their challenges. some practices that support scaffolding (which ultimately lowers barriers to mobility) include clear, constructive, and specific feedback; clearly communicating vision; recognizing individuals’ strengths and weaknesses; helping others recognize their strengths and opportunities; and allowing ongoing, iterative development rather than perpetuating a culture of reactionism and perfectionism. it is especially important to create spaces for open dialogue that includes honest and supportive conversations about identity, given that people with marginalized identities experience the harmful effects disproportionately. as we move away from traditional work and traditional ideas of leadership, those who currently hold positions must examine their relationship to power by using it to effectively create a legacy for the future. early career librarians who may take on positions of power now or later must also examine their relationship to power through self-advocacy. it is a cultural shift that requires work from individuals, organizations, and the profession at large. if we are to prepare the next generations of librarians to lead among rapid changes to librarianship, we must intentionally revise relationships to power, scaffold new paths for those with potential to advance, and create inclusive organizational structures going forward. acknowledgements we would like to thank our editor amy koester, and our reviewers sofia leung and ali versluis for supporting the journey of this complex article. your insights, observations, and additional readings helped make this article much richer. we also want to thank ryan litsey and denisse solis for advising us on the framework of our findings. references askey, d. & askey, j. (2017). one library, two cultures. feminists among us : resistance and advocacy in library leadership. s. lew and b. yousefi (eds.). sacramento: library juice press. aslam, m. (2018). perceptions of leadership and skills development in academic libraries. library philosophy and practice. retrieved november 5, 2018, from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/1724/ birsel, a. (2015). design the life you love: a step-by-step guide to building a meaningful future. berkeley: ten speed press. bugg, k. (2016). the perceptions of people of color in academic libraries concerning the relationship between retention and advancement as middle managers. journal of library administration. retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01930826.2015.1105076 charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory : a practical guide through qualitative analysis. london: sage publications. chou, r. l., & pho, a. 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(2017). addressing psychosocial factors with library mentoring. portal: libraries and the academy, 17(1), 51–69. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2017.0004 faulkner, a. (2016). teaching a new dog old tricks: supervising veteran staff as an early career librarian. library leadership and management. retrieved from https://journals.tdl.org/llm/index.php/llm/article/view/7206 fleming, r. & mcbride, k. (2017). how we speak, how we think, what we do: leading intersectional feminist conversations in libraries. feminists among us : resistance and advocacy in library leadership. s. lew and b. yousefi (eds.). sacramento: library juice press. grint, k., jones, o. s., & holt, c. (2017). “what is leadership: person, result, position, purpose or process, or all or none of these?” the routledge companion to leadership. storey, j., hartley j., denis, j. l., hart, p., & ulrich, d. (eds.) new york: routledge. harris-keith, c. s. 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(2010). the current state of middle management preparation, training, and development in academic libraries. the journal of academic librarianship, 36(5), 383–393. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2010.06.002 silva, e., & galbraith, q. (2018). salary negotiation patterns between women and men in academic libraries. college & research libraries. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.0.0.%25p stewart, c. (2017). what we talk about when we talk about leadership: a review of research on library leadership in the 21st century. library leadership & management, 32(1). retrieved from https://journals.tdl.org/llm/index.php/llm/article/view/7218 strauss, a. l., & corbin, j. m. (1997). grounded theory in practice. thousand oaks: sage publications. tyson, l. (2014). critical theory today: a user-friendly guide. new york: routledge. wilder, s. (2017). delayed retirements and the youth movement among arl library professionals. association of research libraries. 9. young, a. p., powell, r. r., & hernon, p. (2003). attributes for the next generation of library directors, 8. yousefi, b. (2017). on the disparity between what we say and what we do in libraries. feminists among us : resistance and advocacy in library leadership. s. lew and b. yousefi (eds.). sacramento: library juice press. appendix a: survey questions demographics 1. are you a man or trans man woman or trans woman nonbinary prefer not to answer other [text entry] 2. how long have you worked in libraries? less than 1 year 1-3 years 4-6 years 7-10 years 11-15 years 16+ years 3. select degree(s) earned. please list any subjects besides library science in the “other” field. [tick box] high school associate bachelor master mlis (or equivalent) doctoral vocational other________ (text entry) 4. on average, how many people have reported directly to you in your highest supervisory position? 0 1-5 5-10 10+ leadership and management attributes 5. what are the qualities of an ideal leader? text entry 6. what are the qualities of an ideal manager? text entry 7. how important are these qualities of leadership? (likert scale – rate very important to not important at all) vision creativity commitment motivation communication integrity negotiation influence 8. rate the extent to which you feel you already have these leadership qualities. (likert scale – rate totally agree to don’t agree at all) vision creativity commitment motivation communication integrity negotiation influence 9. how important are these qualities of management? (likert scale – rate very important to not important at all) dedication communication caring for colleagues and subordinates problem solving assertiveness development organization delegation 10. rate the extent to which you feel you already have these management qualities. (likert scale – rate totally agree to don’t agree at all) dedication communication caring for colleagues and subordinates problem solving assertiveness development organization delegation demonstration of attributes 11. please provide any feedback you have received from a supervisor, mentor, or peer that you demonstrate these qualities. include how this feedback was expressed (in a formal review, in a meeting, informally). text entry 12. have you faced challenges regarding the following: (yes or no checkboxes) gender race or ethnicity gender expression sexual identity accessibility/ disability concerns other experiences intersecting with any of the above or additional issues 13. describe a situation you have encountered in which you needed support or preparation. what kind of support or preparation was needed and did you receive it? answer as a leader/manager or as an employee. text entry 14. describe an experience you’ve had being led that made an impression on you and your work. text entry mentorship 15. what support does your institution provide? choose from below or add your own: formal mentorship leadership training peer mentorship none other [text entry] 16. rate how satisfied you feel with this support. likert scale – rate very satisfied to very dissatisfied 17. does this support focus on any specific area, check all that apply. librarianship publishing research training service fundraising other [text entry] appendix b: additional data visualization figure 8. respondents’ perceptions of the importance of specific leadership qualities”. figure 9. respondents’ perceptions of the importance of specific management qualities”. figure 10. chart listing experienced and ambitious librarians at the top, “the middle” representing librarians who show potential in the center, and brand new and underperforming librarians at the bottom”. early career, leadership, management, mentorship intersubjectivity and ghostly library labor no results found: a review of biographical information about award-winning children’s book authors in subscription and free resources 1 response pingback : info 203 and then some | hi-rise olancha this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct towards a critical assessment practice – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 31 oct ebony magnus, jackie belanger and maggie faber /0 comments towards a critical assessment practice “we worry about disclosing data, but often do not consider the implications of creating data.” -jeffrey alan johnson (2018, p. vi) “a critical assessment practice starts with mindfulness.” -sonia deluca fernández (2015, p. 5) in brief this article explores how librarians might meaningfully engage critical perspectives to interrogate the structures of power and methodologies that both motivate and facilitate assessment work in academic libraries. the authors aim to expand the current discussion of assessment in order to recognize and more effectively address issues of inclusion and inequality in this work. the article considers critical approaches employed in lis, student affairs assessment, institutional and educational research, feminist and indigenous methods, and critical data studies, and draws on questions posed by these fields to imagine what inclusive assessment practices might look like for our own institutional contexts and to engage librarians in nuanced critical discussions about every stage of the assessment cycle. by ebony magnus, maggie faber, and jackie belanger introduction the authors of this article each came to their questions about library assessment, and what it might mean to be a critical assessment practitioner, through their individual experiences, positions, and identities. we want to share two stories illustrating our paths into this work. we do this not only to foreground how our own identities are connected to the questions we ask, but also to highlight some of the challenges that lie at the intersection of academic library assessment and critical librarianship. ebony: i am a woman of color. my racialized identity is not a prerequisite of my interest in critical discourse; in fact, growing up as a light-skinned, mixed race person i was, for some time, blissfully unaware (even when others were not) of my difference from the majority white populations around me. i have been fortunate to participate in lis scholarship and training programs designed and reserved for people from traditionally underrepresented groups. through these programs, i learned about the extent of the overrepresentation of dominant identities in this field, and its impact on library workers and library patrons from marginalized communities. yet, i kept this knowledge at a remove from my work in library assessment—a specialization i was drawn to because of the perception that it is grounded in evidence (and who can argue with evidence?). over time, however, my consciousness as a person occupying certain margins has come up against my seemingly depoliticized assessment work and acknowledging my own privilege and agency in it. i increasingly feel the irresponsibility of not making explicit the systemic forces that underpin decision-making in libraries and post-secondary institutions. no single event or epiphany occurred; but i would be remiss if i did not acknowledge that this sense of personal-professional tension gained momentum in the last 3-4 years (during which i was living in the united states before returning to canada). jackie and maggie: we attended an in-house professional development session focused on inclusive practices in libraries. at the session, participants were asked to consider how they might bring a critical perspective to a variety of areas, including reference, spaces, and collections. participants were then prompted to consider how they might assess efforts to make library services, spaces, and resources more inclusive. what was striking in this conversation was that assessment and data gathering about students were treated in largely instrumental terms, consistently positioned—and not by us, the assessment librarians—as neutral, somehow outside of the questions about power, privilege, and inequity that shape all our work. this is not a critique of those colleagues (many of whom are engaged in critical librarianship and deeply committed to social justice in libraries): instead, this caused us to reflect on the misalignment between our values and the assessment practices and attitudes we had helped to foster, intentionally or not, in our own library’s culture. as white, middle-class, cisgender women, we had begun to think about critical practice around particular issues, such as how we recruit and represent student voices in our work, but had not felt the urgency to recognize and communicate how every aspect of our assessment work (and how we framed that work to ourselves and colleagues) was shaped by our identities, experiences, and institutional positions. in conversation about our experiences, we discovered that we were grappling with similar tensions in our work and searching for ways to align our practices more fully and authentically with a commitment to equity, inclusion, and social justice. we are passionate about the possibilities assessment can offer in enabling libraries to support students and faculty; yet we understand that our assessment work is often deeply problematic in its alignment with a neoliberal culture of accountability and consumerism in higher education.1 while we find the critiques of assessment (such as the privileging of quantitative approaches) compelling, many often discuss assessment in ways that could be more nuanced and reflective of the complex questions we wrestle with in undertaking this work. we feel expectations from our colleagues, institutions, and profession to engage in practical assessments that result in demonstrable improvements for our students and faculty, yet often struggle to balance these expectations with the need to interrogate our practices and explore our own—and others’—unquestioned assumptions about assessment. this article explores these tensions and how a critical lens can be brought to library assessment. it represents our efforts to engage in a reflective and intentional practice, heeding emily ford’s call to consider “what do we do and why do we do it?” (ford, 2012). we don’t claim to have answers, or to have implemented all of these ideas in our day-to-day work. instead, we draw upon scholarship in lis, student affairs assessment, institutional and educational research, feminist and indigenous methods, and critical data studies to pose questions that help us imagine how we might do our work in different ways. in line with selinda berg’s recent work calling on librarians engaged in quantitative research and those involved in critical librarianship to explore ways they might partner productively in working towards greater social justice, we hope that this article can act as a “request for future conversations” (berg, 2018, p. 234). in posing our questions, we hope to center critical approaches more firmly in assessment work and to contribute the perspective of assessment practitioners to conversations about assessment in critical librarianship. we begin by framing our discussion in terms of recent critiques of library assessment and some responses to those critiques. we then explore how we might bring a critical approach to all aspects of the assessment cycle: from how we formulate questions, select methods, analyze and communicate data, to how we make decisions. we close by offering a series of questions we have been using to reflect upon assessment activities at our own institutions. critiques & responses the term “assessment” in higher education (and thus academic libraries) is often used to indicate a wide range of activities with varying purposes, stakeholders, and approaches, such as accountability, demonstrating value and impact, and improvement. as wall, hursh, and rogers note, “there is no common definition for assessment in higher education. rather, any definition grows out of social context. for some, assessment is about examining student learning, for others, examining programs, and still others, determining institutional effectiveness” (wall, hursh, & rodgers, 2014, p. 6). the literature on library assessment also points to the myriad activities that are often bundled under the broad term “assessment” (hufford, 2010) and the complexity of motivations for undertaking library assessments (doucette, 2017). much of this literature focuses on “practical” aspects of assessment (to use one of the themes from both the library assessment conference and the 2017 canadian library assessment workshop)—such as discussions of specific methods, techniques or studies—rather than engaging a critical perspective focused on recognizing and challenging systems of power and privilege that pervade assessment work (garcia, 2015; nicholson, 2017). with the publication of the value of academic libraries report in 2010, a dominant strand of discussion about library assessment, and much activity, has centered on one aspect of this work: how libraries can demonstrate their value and impact to a variety of institutional stakeholders such as students, faculty, administrators, and employers. meredith farkas notes the tendency within library discourse around assessment to conflate value research and assessment generally in the wake of the value report (farkas, 2013, p. 5; see also nicholson, 2017, p. 2-3; gardner & halpern, 2016, p. 42). farkas argues that assessment is primarily about improvement, while demonstrating value is focused on accountability and largely underpinned by quantitative approaches centered on elements such as showing correlations between use of the library and student success (farkas, 2013, p. 4). critical responses to this particular strand of assessment focused on value (and the measures and approaches it is seen to privilege) highlight how it functions to institutionalize “neoliberal ideology within librarianship” (seale, 2013, p. 42), with the push to demonstrate library value “normaliz[ing] corporate value” and “capitalist language” in higher education and academic libraries (nicholson, 2017, p. 3 & 4). as nicholson notes, quoting eisenhower and smith, “in the current climate of accountability and austerity, libraries have become veritably ‘obsessed with quantitative assessment, student satisfaction, outcomes, and consumerist attitudes towards learning’” (nicholson, 2015, p. 331). libraries’ reliance on surveys generally, and on widely used assessment tools such as the service quality survey libqual in particular, reinforce the notion that library assessment often focuses heavily on quantitative tools designed largely for accountability, to answer questions of “how many” and “how often” rather than “why” (halpern, easker, jackson, & bouquin, 2015), and to gauge “perceptions of customer service” that position library patrons as consumers (lilburn, 2017, p. 101). an over-emphasis on assessment for immediate improvement and “practical” assessment are also critiqued for often adopting the language and mindset of the market: in this model, students become customers or consumers whose individual, immediate needs must be satisfied in order to retain library market value in an increasingly competitive educational landscape (quinn, 2000; nicholson, 2015 & 2017; fister, 2012). there is a significant strand of scholarship engaged with exploring alternatives to this version of assessment, with works posing and responding to questions similar to karen nicholson’s: “how might we engage critically with quality assurance and assessment to better align them with our professional values and the academic mission of the university?” (2017, p. 3). a key theme of recent work in this area focuses on critical library pedagogy and information literacy assessment (accardi, 2010 & 2013; gardner & halpern, 2016; gammons, 2016). these authors argue against reducing student learning assessment to simple quantitative measures and seek ways to engage in assessments that disrupt “traditional power relationships between student and teacher” and “privilege student voices and expose oppressive dominant culture so that society can be transformed” (accardi, 2013, p. 79). the emphasis on alternative approaches to understanding the complexity of student learning is echoed in library assessment more broadly in calls for the use of qualitative methods such as ethnography, which can provide an “antidote for the problematic reliance in higher education (including libraries) on analytics and quantitative measures of institutional effectiveness,” as well as assessment approaches that are often focused solely on short-term data-gathering projects and immediate improvements (lanclos & asher, 2016, p. 2). lanclos and asher call for a “fully engaged ethnography, wherein libraries can actually be thought about and experienced differently, not just be re-arranged” (p. 2). these critiques and responses are important and necessary. we agree with many of them, even while we acknowledge that they sometimes do not fully engage with the complexity of assessment work as we recognize it, which involves multiple decisions about the purposes of assessment, the questions we ask, the methods we choose, the user communities we engage with (and how we engage with them), the ways we analyse and use data, and the choices we make as a result of the assessment. this article aims to address this complexity by bringing a critical perspective to various aspects of the assessment cycle. our focus here is on assessment as a set of practices that help libraries to understand and engage meaningfully with our diverse user communities. lilburn calls for additional work to explore how other assessment methods beyond customer satisfaction surveys “might provide information that is more helpful and more meaningful to the work of librarians and to the advancement of the library as an academic unit devoted not to customers, but to students, scholars, researchers, and citizens” (2017, p. 104-05). we argue that it is not just “other forms of assessment” that might be valuable—or a shift to alternative methods or how those methods are deployed—but that we must interrogate all aspects of assessment in order to begin to imagine what critical assessment might look like. critical assessment practitioners and scholars in the areas of student affairs assessment and institutional research (ir) have explored in depth what it means to practice assessment in ways that are attentive to power dynamics and questions of equity and inclusivity. one thread in ir, for example, focuses on what it means to be a “quantitative criticalist” and whether it is possible to bring the critical theoretical perspectives largely seen in qualitative research to bear productively on the quantitative work of ir professionals (stage & wells, 2014, p. 2). being a quantitative criticalist involves using “data to represent educational processes and outcomes on a large scale to reveal inequities and to identify social or institutional perpetuation of systematic inequities” and questioning “the models, measures, and analytic practices of quantitative research in order to offer competing models, measures, and analytic practices that better describe experiences of those who have not been adequately represented” (stage, 2007, p.10). since this concept was proposed by stage in 2007, it has been taken up in two subsequent volumes of new directions for institutional research in 2014 and 2015, attesting to the robustness of the discussions on the topic. critical assessment in the student affairs field has been articulated along two strands: the first, similar to the quantitative criticalist work proposed by stage, explores how assessment might be mobilized for a social justice and equity agenda; the second, related strand brings a critical theoretical lens to various assessment practices (deluca fernández, 2015). writing in the journal research & practice in assessment, wall, hursh, and rodgers (2014) propose an “alternative conceptualization of assessment as an ethical, value-based social practice for the public good” (p. 5). explicitly acknowledging assessment as a social and political act enables a move towards critical assessment, which “expose[s] and address[es] power, privilege, and structures” and “makes explicit the assumptions and intentions” underlying assessment choices (deluca fernández, 2015, p. 5). for deluca fernández, as well as wall, hursh, and rodgers, assessment is framed as inquiry, reflection, and “mindfulness” about our own positions in relation to assessment work and the interests served by any assessment activity. every aspect of the assessment cycle must be scrutinized and reflected on: “in order for assessment to be critical, practitioners must adopt an equity orientation when approaching each phase of the assessment cycle by considering positionality, agency, methodological diversity, and analysis” (heiser, prince, & levy, 2017, p. 4). as assessment practitioners, we are called upon to consider how our power and privilege shape every aspect of our work. in the following sections, we explore various aspects of the assessment process through this critical lens. in all the stages, considerations of our own positionality in relation to our work, as well as how we collaborate with students and faculty as partners in assessment, is essential. furthermore, we “must identify and make clear [our] position relative to the work to be done. … an ethical practice of assessment asks those engaged in assessment to identify whose interests are being served in conducting a particular assessment process” (wall, hursh, & rodgers, 2014, p. 12). in other words, critical assessment asks us to reflect continually on the question “by whom and for whom?” (mcarthur, 2016, p. 978). defining purposes, asking questions, & recruiting participants the assessment cycle is typically depicted as a continuous loop without a definitive beginning or end. in practice, however, the decision to take on a project in the first place precedes our entry into this framework. in considering a project, practitioners may ask why it is necessary, what questions we hope to answer, and who we expect to be involved. we may consider the potential impact of a project on user populations, particularly around issues like survey fatigue and over-surveillance of particular groups. a more fully developed critical practice would extend these questions into an exploration of our own biases and those of our institutions and how they influence all stages of the assessment cycle. critical practice asks us to explicitly acknowledge the individual and institutional agendas that precede the matching of question to method—who decides that an assessment project is needed in the first place, and why—as these perspectives influence the way in which a particular method may be deployed and the possible outcomes it may produce. surfacing the interests driving the decision to undertake an assessment project can also enable us to be aware of how assessments can be mobilized to justify a decision that has already been made, what hinchliffe calls “decision-based evidence-making” as opposed to evidence-based decision-making (2016, p. 13). even library workers attuned to critical practice can pursue questions that, while well-intentioned, risk unintended consequences for users. an overemphasis on studying students who already experience library anxiety or feel alienated by the library environment, for example, has the potential to reinscribe marginalization and feelings of otherness without care or meaningful change. as hurtado (2015) puts it, “[i]t is not enough to demonstrate differences and inequality—we have plenty of studies that show disparities….but many of these studies fail to engender changes in society or higher education” (p. 290). taking action based on the information we gather, an important way to respect the time and contribution of our participants, is even more crucial in relation to voices usually relegated to the margins: “despite reports of how detrimental such disparities are to the larger social good, we can only conclude that the normative culture is invested in these inequalities in ways that complicate change” (hurtado, 2015, p. 290). involving users and stakeholders in project design or question formation is one way of fostering a broader sense of inclusion in the work we do. as heiser, prince, and levy (2017) suggest, “inviting additional voices to discuss assessment processes such as determining what to measure, which questions to ask, what methods to use, and how to analyze and report findings can address positionality and subjectivity as well as give agency to stakeholders” (p. 5). as we discuss in more depth in later sections, involving students and faculty as partners in the process “recognizes the agency of participants” (heiser, prince, & levy, 2017, p. 6), although we acknowledge that this must be done in ways that do not simply shift the burden of labor onto these partners. similarly, inclusive recruitment methods ensure that, when participant collaboration is undertaken, it occurs from (or at least aspires to) an equitable stance. the authors often use sampling and recruitment methods that appear deceptively neutral (survey sampling based on year in school to get a “representative” sample of the student population) or use convenience samples for smaller-scale, targeted projects. a more critically reflective assessment practice suggests we interrogate how these approaches exclude many of our students and faculty. in their recent conference presentation “how white is your ux practice?” larose and barron (2017) discuss a number of strategies for recruitment and research design in user experience research that meaningfully includes diverse voices and experiences. they call for addressing the “role of unconscious bias in selecting participants”: “for example, with the grabbing-students-who-happen-to-be-around method of recruitment, there is a high chance your unconscious bias is influencing who you pick. this way of recruiting users can be quick and easy but it creates an exclusive structure where your users from marginalized groups are at a disadvantage” (p. 27). it is not simply our own unconscious biases that shape who we select as participants; it is also that our assessments can operate in an echo chamber shaped by white cultural norms and values that largely include only those who are already connected with the library. for example, our space assessments at the university of washington libraries (including paper surveys handed out to patrons entering the library, space counts, and observations) are intended to improve spaces for our students and faculty, yet draw entirely on those who are already in, and likely most comfortable in, those spaces. brook, ellenwood, and lazzaro (2015) explore in detail how university and library spaces reinforce institutional and individual power “invariably connected to a normative (male, able-bodied, upwardly mobile) whiteness” (p. 256) and exclude those whose cultures and ways of working do not fit into white cultural norms. if our assessments of library spaces simply focus on improving what is already there, and hear only from those who are in those spaces already, we doubly exclude many of our patrons. a critical approach to space assessment, with the aim of creating spaces that are more responsive to the needs of many communities, requires us to move beyond the privileged space of the library itself to learn about the “communities that should be served by [library] spaces—what their needs, histories, and experiences are—and including them in decision-making processes over library spaces” (brook, ellenwood, & lazzaro, 2015, p. 261). this involves not just more intentional recruitment (reaching out to student organizations representing a broad spectrum of identities, for example), but also asking if we might engage with students in the spaces in which they are comfortable and feel most empowered. methods & data gathering building on those reflections about why a project might be undertaken, how questions are formed, and who is involved, critical practices can be brought to bear on the selection and implementation of research methods. it is understood in library assessment that responsible practitioners choose a methodology based on the questions they intend to explore. however, heiser, prince, and levy (2017) point to a different mindset when oriented to goals of social justice. rather than looking for the “right” type of data to “best” answer the question, they suggest “practitioners operating from an equity orientation pose questions such as: will this method reinforce a power dynamic? does this method work for this population (e.g., survey or storytelling)? what additional method would provide a more comprehensive narrative around a program or service?” (p. 7). to understand why methods might or might not work for a population and the power dynamics at play requires attention to the often complex histories of those methods. practitioners can reflect on the meanings and contexts of the methods they choose, who those methods might include or exclude, and explore ways to use methods in more critical ways. due to their prominence in library assessment, we will focus on examples relating to the context of survey and ethnographic methodologies and imagine ways in which methods might be enacted more critically. we will also discuss participatory design, which provides valuable perspectives on more inclusive approaches to assessment. survey methods as we noted above, surveys saturate the library assessment and lis landscape (halpern, easker, jackson, & bouquin, 2015). their widespread adoption is not hard to understand: as we have found in our own work, they can be deceptively easy to design, create, and distribute using free software and can be used to gather large data sets on a range of topics. however, the instrument itself does not provide neutral insight on the topic it addresses—nor is it necessarily harmless to the communities from which it extracts data. survey methods are “root[ed] in the tradition of positivism, which embraces the pursuit of knowledge that is objective and value free” (miner, jayaratne, pesonen, & zurbrügg, 2012, p. 241). the notion that surveys produce objective data sets disregards the researcher’s positionality and influence: researchers decide what to ask, how to ask it, and, in many cases, what answers to provide. the experience the researcher or assessment practitioner brings to the subject frames the way in which the respondent expresses their own experience. this condition can limit the capacity of the respondent to be “counted” in a way that honors their identity, especially if there is a significant difference in the identities of researcher and subject. this section explores one aspect of survey methodology relating to demographic categories as an example of the ways we might ask critical questions as we employ these methods in library assessment. the demographics of participants—in terms of both recruitment and the questions on the survey instrument itself—can be lightning rods for questions about inclusivity and representation. a critical lens on sampling and recruitment asks us to move beyond “representative” sampling to a broader and more inclusive approach to address inequities in our assessments. there is a significant body of literature on demographic factors affecting survey response or non-response: these factors include access to the internet (for web surveys), age, race, socioeconomic status, and gender (fan & yan, 2010). in surveys of the general population, women, white people, and those who are affluent and have higher levels of education are more likely to respond (porter & whitcomb, 2005, pp. 132-33). some of the same demographics hold true for student populations, with women and white students more likely to respond to surveys. in their study of non-response rates of college students, porter and whitcomb (2005) add that students with higher gpas are also more likely to respond, while those on financial aid are less likely to do so (p. 144). if we add considerations of ability (are our web surveys truly accessible?), time (students with families or multiple jobs or non-tenured faculty), and language (international students and those whose first language is not english) we must acknowledge that our library surveys are probably providing a deeply skewed understanding of our users and their needs. a library survey methodology focused on addressing inequities in library services, spaces, and resources would move beyond reliance on a “representative” sample and develop strategies to actively recruit students less likely to respond, possibly using snowball sampling or other peer-to-peer models for various communities. in asking survey questions about the demographics of participants, d’ignazio and klein (2016) ask us to “rethink binaries” (p. 2), to use “strategies premised on multiplicity rather than binaries, and acknowledge the limits of any binaristic view” (p. 2). they challenge us to “inquire how the processes associated with data collection and classification…might be made to better account for a range of multiple and fluid categories” (p. 2). our own conversations about participant demographics demonstrate just how challenging this can be. during the development of the capal/acbap2 2018 census of canadian academic librarians, the working group responsible for its design, distribution, and analysis spent hours discussing how to frame questions about gender, race and ethnicity, and indigenous descent. the working group’s commitment to inclusion and respect for the identities of respondents was challenged by the logistics of question design that would produce clean, well-formatted data. in an attempt to both reconfigure the gender binary and avoid reinscribing an implied difference between “normal” (i.e., “male” and “female”) and “other,” the census provided six possible responses for gender, including “prefer not to say” and an optional text box. for the race and ethnicity question, however, the working group relied on sub-categories associated with the canadian government’s legal definition of “visible minority”.3 while the group understood that the rigidity of these categories can feel exclusionary to some, the widespread social and political acceptance of the legal terms protected the group from making difficult decisions about which identities to include or exclude. the canadian government similarly defines “aboriginal peoples” or “indigenous peoples”;4 yet the group chose in this case to consult with multiple indigenous librarians and experts in indigenous studies to ensure they did not alienate respondents in the responses they offered to the question of indigenous descent.5 none of these options—custom or open-ended fields, legally entrenched categories, or community-derived responses—can account for all the “multiple and fluid” identities of participants. however, we would suggest that critical practice does not involve landing on the perfect survey question to avoid these complexities. instead, the conversation itself—particularly asking how the data will be used to work toward identity-affirming goals or as a precaution against discrimination—is part of that critical practice. as critical assessment practitioners, we are also conscious of asking ourselves whether we need to collect demographic data at all unless it will be used to “reveal inequities” (to return to stage’s conception of quantitative criticalism) and inform change. as practitioners and survey designers, we face a constant push and pull between a desire for simplicity and the responsibility we feel to recognize the complexity of variegated identities. effective survey design in and of itself is challenging, as evidenced by the many books and articles that cover what questions to ask and how to ask them. critically interrogating each question and concept adds to the challenge, and yet “asking different questions and being explicit and unambiguous about the purpose of the research are two small steps toward beginning discussions…to shift from quantitative research efforts towards a more critical quantitative approach” (berg, 2018, p. 230). ethnographic methods ethnography is often framed as a solution to library assessment’s preoccupation with quantitative data, such as that derived from surveys, because of its potential to “[reveal] connections, meaning, and patterns” (lanclos & asher, 2016, p. 5). ethnographic research methods do not seek to produce generalizable results, but rather highlight the richness and specificity of communities and allow multiple narratives to surface. yet historically, ethnography has exhibited a problematic dichotomy in which the ethnographer’s authority in defining a culture is, at times, given more weight than members of the culture being studied, leading to potential appropriation and harm to the community. critical ethnography acknowledges the positionality of the researcher and calls upon the researcher to leverage their position precisely to emphasize and disrupt the imbalance between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” research and evidence. it centers the community and attends closely to the purpose to which the research is put. thomas (1993) describes critical ethnography as “conventional ethnography with a political purpose” (p. 4) and says “[c]ritical ethnographers describe, analyze, and open to scrutiny otherwise hidden agendas, power centers, and assumptions that inhibit, repress, and constrain. critical scholarship requires that commonsense assumptions be questioned” (p. 2-3). indigenous scholars similarly argue for the denaturalization of imperialist methodologies by interrogating the reification of western research that simultaneously acknowledges the existence of non-western worldviews and represents them back to the west as inferior and static (tuhiwai-smith, 1999, p. 48). in discussing indigenous research, gaudry (2011) asks the researcher to reframe this relationship as research with and for indigenous peoples as opposed to research on indigenous peoples (p. 134). it is not our intention to draw a comparison between indigenous communities (at the center of gaudry’s work) and the sum of students and faculty at the center of our library assessment work. we acknowledge the different (though sometimes overlapping) structures of privilege and power at play in these distinct contexts. but we find value in gaudry’s definition of insurgent research as a means of directing the researcher’s responsibility toward the community and the recognition that participants should be respected as experts in their own experiences. we have begun to explore in our own work ways in which we might engage in assessments informed by a more critical ethnographic approach—with and for our patrons in ways that honor their experiences and expertise. at the university of washington, we asked two student employees to take responsibility for qualitative observations during many of our mixed-methods space assessment projects. we provided them with training in observation and ethnographic methods and asked them to carry out the project themselves; they determined where and when to conduct the observations and what kinds of behavior to record; they developed their own codebook and synthesized and drafted recommendations based on the observations and their own experiences as students. we are conscious that neither they nor we ourselves are anthropologists or experts in ethnography. nevertheless, in our tentative experiment with critical qualitative methods, we endeavored to empower students themselves to define, scope, and carry out the project as a substantive contribution to the broader space assessment project. their observations were contextualized by the space counts and survey results we gather through other methods, but, in an effort to preserve the authenticity of their observations, their recommendations were incorporated into our reports and discussions with little modification. however, we are also aware that this approach is limited in terms of its adherence to critical principles. we employ these students, which imposes a particular power dynamic, and we worked with them for several months or years prior to this project. their understanding of what behavior to report and how it might be used is invariably shaped by our own understandings and the way we have trained them and asked them to complete projects over the duration of their employment with us. while our exploratory efforts to use qualitative methods such as ethnography in critical ways have been imperfect, our attempts to understand and address the complex histories of the methods we use will continue. gaining a better understanding of critical ethnography and indigenous responses to ethnographic methods can open up important questions about the power dynamics inherent in our assessment practices. without a critical consideration of the potential of ethnographic methods to reproduce inequitable relationships and reinforce dominant ways of understanding the world, we risk producing “clever description, based not on the needs of the researched but instead on the needs of the researcher” (thomas, 2010, p. 480). in this, we echo lanclos and asher’s call for careful application of ethnographic methods, not only to avoid the “ethnographish” approaches to assessment they critique but also to avoid replicating the harmful framing and exploitation in ethnography’s history. participatory design in addition to taking a more critical lens to our use of surveys and ethnographic methods, we have also begun to explore user experience approaches such as participatory design for their potential to help us move towards a more thoughtful and inclusive assessment practice. participatory design is not a singular method, but rather “a socially-active, politically-conscious, values-driven approach to co-creation” (young & brownotter, 2018, p. 2). principles of participatory design foreground the subject as collaborator, expert, and primary stakeholder. as a practice, it is gaining ground in library assessment, and combines indigenous research methods’ focus on power dynamics with critical ethnography’s focus on political change by highlighting the “imbalance of knowledge and power where it exists, and working toward a more just balance” (young & brownotter, 2018, p. 2). however, “there is a critical difference between going through the empty ritual of participation and having the real power needed to affect the outcome of the process” (sanoff, 2014, p. 590). as we have argued throughout this article, it is important not simply to adopt participatory design as an alternative approach, but to reflect on how the method is used, by whom, and for whom. in conducting a participatory design project out of convenience, one author found her own lack of critical reflection limited the generative potential of the work. in a project at michigan state university, one of the authors worked with students (not employed by the libraries) to conduct a space study of an under-utilized study area in the main library (colbert, dallaire, richardson, & turner, 2015). though the collaboration was participatory in nature, with the students independently selecting a mixed-methods approach which involved conducting interviews, observing the space in use, and asking other students to draw their ideal study space, library staff narrowly focused their efforts, asking the students to answer the question “how can we design a space that is attractive and comfortable, while also encouraging active use and student success?” inadvertently, this question preempted the recommendations the students might have made by foregrounding prior notions of comfort, aesthetic appeal, and the intent for the space to remain a public study area. on reflection, we now ask how the students might have conceived of the space and their relationship to/in it had staff not guided them to a predetermined outcome. the primary motivation in engaging the students was to complete a project staff would not otherwise have had time to do. we understood the basics of participatory research, but were unaware of the social or political roots. while the project was ultimately a positive experience for the students, we did not thoroughly consider the imbalance of authority and transparency in the working relationship. this example illustrates the importance of critical reflection even when enacting the most liberatory of research practices, in order to move into meaningful co-creation. data analysis, decision-making, & communication we have so far considered elements of the assessment cycle such as question formulation, participant recruitment, and methodological choices. we turn now to how we might view data analysis and interpretation, and the decision-making processes we use to take action on that data, through a critical lens. a critical perspective on data analysis relies on a perception of data not as objective truth but as subjective, situated, constructed, partial, and political. understanding the limits of data stretches beyond understanding the limits of a particular method or data collection technique. in “data humanism,” lupi pushes for a greater understanding of data itself, saying “numbers are always a placeholder for something else.” lupi says: “data represents life. it is a snapshot of the world in the same way that a picture captures a small moment in time…failing to represent these limitations and nuance and blindly putting numbers in a chart is like reviewing a movie by analyzing the chemical properties of the cellulose on which it was recorded” (lupi, 2017, p. 2). in a set of guidelines for enacting critical data principles, d’ignazio and klein (2016) draw on feminist theory, which “seeks to challenge claims of objectivity, neutrality, and universalism” (p. 2). rather than reporting from a “view from nowhere,” they encourage analysis and designs that “facilitate pathways to multiple truths” (p. 2). specifically, their call to “explicitly valorize marginal perspectives” echoes berg’s to “examine the outliers.” berg (2018) explains that: descriptive statistics frequently focus on the qualities of the majority and report the average responses. we can understand more holistically the populations libraries support and serve by delving into and trying to understand those outside the majority, because the outliers are no less important despite their smaller numbers. in fact, increasing our understanding of the commonalities, qualities, and needs of the outliers will facilitate our abilities to better reach those who are often overlooked, underserved, and disregarded. (p. 231) d’ignazio and klein (2016) push further, calling for a “two-way relation between subject and object of knowledge” (p. 3). in a recent ithaka s+r report on student success, researchers asked students to provide their own definitions of the term (wolff-eisenberg & braddlee, 2018). like “library value,” demonstrating “student success” is a goal in much of library (and higher education) assessment. rarely, however, is student success defined by students themselves; instead it is usually understood as the attainment of certain institutional metrics or benchmarks. inviting library users into projects as experts as well as participants, and relying on their interpretation and recommendations to guide data analysis, “strengthen[s] core assessment practices and advance[s] equity efforts by centering the lived experiences of populations typically left at the margins by examining how meaning is assigned to data and employing collaborative approaches to analysis and reporting” (heiser, prince, & levy, 2017, p. 9). this model allows participants to act as authorities themselves and to exert control over the narrative and decisions. young and brownotter (2018) demonstrate this ethos in their description of a project that, through several rounds of storytelling, collaboration, and co-creation between library staff and native american students, produced “a seven-part poster series and social media campaign in support of [the] university’s native american population” (p. 9). beyond the creation of the campaign, the students also recommended where and when the materials should be displayed physically and digitally. quoting hudson (2017), young and brownotter note that “‘to be included in a space is not necessarily to have agency within that space.’ to be present is not the same as to participate.” (p. 7). enabling users to make these decisions requires us to “relinquish the notion of total control over space and instead empower students, faculty, and community members to take ownership of academic libraries and use them as sites of social justice” (brook, ellenwood, & lazzaro, 2015, p. 261). sharing data analysis and decision-making power with library users does not negate the need for practitioner mindfulness. assessment practitioners should interrogate their own positionality and power in relation to the data and in relation to those they ask to participate in the analysis. heiser, prince, and levy (2017) ask assessment practitioners to consider “how do one’s identities or lived experiences influence data analysis? do institutional values and norms influence data processing? who are the findings serving?” (p. 9). d’ignazio and klein observe that answering these questions requires us to interrogate the values that structure the analysis in the first place and to observe the impact of previous projects—closing a different sort of assessment loop. they ask “when do values often assumed to be a social good, such as ‘choice,’ ‘openness,’ or ‘access’ result in disempowerment instead?” (p. 3; see also johnson, 2014). while meaningful and substantive collaboration has been a recurring theme throughout this article, it is particularly resonant in regards to data analysis, which tends to limit the voices and perspectives to a limited number of experts. bringing in the voices of the population under inquiry, particularly as part of the sense-making and analysis process, and creating opportunities for them to make decisions about the kinds of actions to be taken in response help embody some of the critical data principles recommended by d’ignazio and klein. conclusion & questions throughout this article, we have attempted to pose questions about various aspects of our assessment work in order to imagine what a more critical assessment practice might look like. these questions are drawn from a diverse set of fields and practices, including lis, student affairs assessment, institutional and educational research, feminist and indigenous methods, and critical data studies. this work has enabled us to develop a series of questions we are exploring in intentional and transparent ways (to ourselves, our colleagues, our students and faculty, and our profession) as we undertake assessment: how do our own identities, institutional positions, and perspectives shape our work? what is the purpose of the assessment, who decides what to assess, and who benefits from the work? how can we more intentionally recruit library patrons to participate in assessments, and whose voices are privileged in our recruitment practices? how do we avoiding essentializing communities at the margins? what are the histories and contexts of the methods we choose, and how do these shape our work? do these methods risk alienating or silencing other voices? what is considered “evidence” and who decides? are we engaging participants in meaningful discussions about privacy and who owns their data and empowering them to make decisions about how their data will be used, and by whom? how are we analyzing, interpreting, communicating, and acting on our data? are we engaged in data analysis and interpretation as a collaborative and social practice? (wall, hursh, & rodgers, 2014). are we doing our work in ways that enable power sharing and engagement with user communities at all stages of the process, from question formulation and data analysis, to decision-making? as our examples show, this work is complicated and requires considerable thought and effort. we recognize that there are substantive barriers to engaging in this reflective practice (time, resources, institutional pressures). the tensions we discussed at the start of the article are unresolved, but asking these questions has enabled us to consider how our own emphasis on the expedient and practical may have prevented us from asking important questions about how power and privilege shape “everyday” academic library assessment work. posing these questions does not dismantle the structures of power within which we work, but we hope that by imagining different ways to do our work, we begin to open the door to more widespread critical assessment practice. acknowledgments the authors would like to thank jenna nobs and michelle may (former university of washington assessment student employees) for their contributions and insights as we explored new ways of working. the authors would also like to thank maurini strub, maura seale, ian beilin, steve hiller, and reed garber-pearson for their valuable feedback on this article. references accardi, m. (2013). feminist pedagogy for library instruction (gender and sexuality in information studies feminist pedagogy for library instruction). sacramento, ca: library juice press. accardi, m. (2010). teaching against the grain: critical assessment in the library classroom. in accardi, m., drabinski, e., & kumbier, a., eds. critical library instruction : theories and methods. duluth, mn: library juice press. association of college and research libraries (2010). value of academic libraries: a comprehensive research review and report. researched by megan oakleaf. chicago, il: association of college and research libraries. retrieved from: http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_report.pdf berg, s. (2018). quantitative researchers, critical librarians: potential allies in pursuit of a socially just praxis. in k. nicholson & m. seale, the politics of theory and the practice of critical librarianship, pp. 225-35. sacramento, ca: library juice press. retrieved from https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/leddylibrarypub/52. brook, f., ellenwood, d., & lazzaro, a. (2015). in pursuit of antiracist social justice: denaturalizing whiteness in the academic library. library trends, 64(2), 246-284. busch, l. (2017). knowledge for sale : the neoliberal takeover of higher education (infrastructures series). cambridge, ma: mit press. colbert, d., dallaire, e., richardson, m., & turner, k. (2015). 3w library redesign: results report [internal report]. east lansing, mi: michigan state university libraries. crown-indigenous relations and northern affairs canada. (2017). indigenous peoples and communities. retrieved from https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100013785/1529102490303. accessed 8 september 2018. d’ignazio, c. & klein, l. (2016). feminist data visualization. published in the proceedings from the workshop on visualization for the digital humanities at ieee vis conference 2016. retrieved from: http://www.kanarinka.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ieee_feminist_data_visualization.pdf. deluca fernández, s. (2015) critical assessment. webinar delivered for student affairs assessment leaders (saal) structured conversations series. december 9, 2015. retrieved from: http://studentaffairsassessment.org/files/documents/saal-sc-critical-assessment-sdf-9-dec-2015-final.pdf. denzin, n. & giardina, m., eds. (2017). qualitative inquiry in neoliberal times. new york: routledge. doucette, l. (2017). acknowledging the political, economic, and values-based motivators of assessment work: an analysis of publications on academic library assessment. in baughman, s., hiller, s., monroe, k. & pappalardo, a., eds. proceedings of the 2016 library assessment conference. washington, d.c.: association of research libraries. retrieved from: http://old.libraryassessment.org/bm~doc/proceedings-2016.pdf. eisenhower, c. & smith, d. (2010). the library as stuck place: critical pedagogy in the corporate university. in accardi, m., drabinski, e., & kumbier, a, eds. critical library instruction: theories and methods. duluth, mn: library juice press. fan, w., & yan, z. (2010). factors affecting response rates of the web survey: a systematic review. computers in human behavior, 26(2), 132-139. farkas, m. (2013). accountability vs. improvement: seeking balance in the value of academic libraries initiative. ola quarterly, 19(1), 4-7. retrieved from: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/ulib_fac/74/. fister, b. (2012). the self-centered library: a paradox. library babel fish, retrieved from: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/self-centered-library-paradox. ford, e. (2012). what do we do and why do we do it? in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/what-do-we-do-and-why-do-we-do-it/. gammons, r. (2016). incorporating critically conscious assessment into a large-scale information literacy program. in pagowsky, n., & mcelroy, k., eds. critical library pedagogy handbook. volume 2, lesson plans. chicago, il: association of college and research libraries, pp. 235-240. garcia, k. (2015). keeping up with … critical librarianship. association of college & research libraries. retrieved from: http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/critlib. gardner, c.c., & halpern, r. (2016). at odds with assessment: bring a critical educator within the academy. in n. pagowsky and k. mcelroy, eds. critical library pedagogy handbook. volume 1. chicago, il: association of college and research libraries, pp. 41-51. gaudry, a.j.p. (2011). insurgent research. wicazo sa review, 26(1), 113-136. doi: 10.5749/wicazosareview.26.1.0113 giroux, h., & cohen, r. (2014). neoliberalism’s war on higher education. chicago, il: haymarket books. halpern, r. eaker, c., jackson, j. & bouquin, d. (march 2015). #ditchthesurvey: expanding methodological diversity in lis research. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/ditchthesurvey-expanding-methodological-diversity-in-lis-research/. harvey, d. (2005). a brief history of neoliberalism. oxford ; new york: oxford university press. heiser, c., prince, c., & levy, j. d. (2017). examining critical theory as a framework to advance equity through student affairs assessment. the journal of student affairs inquiry, 2(1), 1-15. hinchliffe, l.j. (2016). sensemaking for decisionmaking [keynote address]. 2016 library assessment conference. arlington, va. hudson, d. j. (2017). on “diversity” as anti-racism in library and information studies: a critique. journal of critical library and information studies, 1(1). retrieved from http://libraryjuicepress.com/journals/index.php/jclis/article/view/6. hufford, j. r. (2013). a review of the literature on assessment in academic and research libraries, 2005 to august 2011. portal: libraries and the academy, 13(1), 5-35. hurtado, s. (2015). the transformative paradigm: principles and challenges. in martínez-alemán, a., pusser, b, & bensimon, e.m. (eds.) critical approaches to the study of higher education: a practical introduction. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, pp. 285-307. johnson, j. a. (2018). toward information justice: technology, politics, and policy for data in higher education administration. san antonio, tx: springer. johnson, j. a. (2014). from open data to information justice. ethics and information technology, 16(4), 263-274. lanclos, d., & asher, a. d. (2016). ‘ethnographish’: the state of ethnography in libraries. weave: journal of library user experience, 1(5). retrieved from: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/weave/12535642.0001.503?view=text;rgn=main. larose, k. and barron, s. (2017). how white is your ux practice?: inclusion and diversity in critical ux research. user experience in libraries: yearbook 2017. createspace independent publishing platform, 23-33. lilburn, j. (2017). ideology and audit culture: standardized service quality surveys in the academic library. portal: libraries and the academy, 17(1), 91-110. lupi, g. (2017). data humanism: the revolutionary future of data visualization. printmag, 30 jan 2017. retrieved from: http://www.printmag.com/information-design/data-humanism-future-of-data-visualization/. mcarthur, j. (2016). assessment for social justice: the role of assessment in achieving social justice. assessment & evaluation in higher education, 41(7), 967-981. miner, k., jayaratne, t., pesonen, a. & zurbrügg, l. (2012). using survey research as a quantitative method for feminist social change. in hesse-biber, s.n. (ed.) handbook of feminist research: theory and praxis (pp. 237-263). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications ltd. doi: 10.4135/9781483384740 nicholson, k. p. (2017). the “value agenda”: negotiating a path between compliance and critical practice [keynote address]. canadian libraries assessment workshop (claw). university of victoria, october 26, 2017. nicholson, k. p. (2015). the mcdonaldization of academic libraries and the values of transformational change. college & research libraries acrl, 76(3), 328-338. porter, s. r., & whitcomb, m. e. (2005). non-response in student surveys: the role of demographics, engagement and personality. research in higher education, 46(2), 127-152. quinn, b. (2000). the mcdonaldization of academic libraries? college & research libraries, 61(3), 248-261. revitt, e. (2016). putting the who in the canadian academic librarian community: capal census. open shelf. retrieved from http://open-shelf.ca/161001-ocula-capal-academic-librarian-census/. accessed: 8 august 2018. revitt, e., shrader, a., & kaufman, a. (2016). 2016 census of canadian academic librarians user guide and results summary. canadian association of professional academic librarians. retrieved from https://capalibrarians.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/census_summary_and_user_guide_december_16_2016.pdf. accessed: 30 september 2018. sanoff, h. (2014). participatory design programming. in coghlan, d., & brydon-miller, m. (eds). the sage encyclopedia of action research (vols. 1-2). london, uk: sage publications ltd. doi: 10.4135/9781446294406. saunders, d. b. (2015). they do not buy it: exploring the extent to which entering first-year students view themselves as customers. journal of marketing for higher education, 25(1), 5-28. saunders, d. b. (2010). neoliberal ideology and public higher education in the united states. journal for critical education policy studies, 8(1), 41-77. seale, m. (2013). the neoliberal library. in information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis, l. gregory & s. higgins, eds. (pp. 39-61). sacramento, ca: library juice press. stage, f. k. (2007). answering critical questions using quantitative data. new directions for institutional research, 133, 5-16. stage, f. k., & wells, r. s. (2014). critical quantitative inquiry in context. new directions for institutional research, 158, 1-7. statistics canada. (2016). visible minority of person. government of canada. retrieved from http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p3var.pl?function=deci&id=257515. thomas, j. (2010). toward a critical ethnography: a re-examination of the chicago legacy. in atkinson, p., & delamont, s. (eds.), sage qualitative research methods (pp. 478-490). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications ltd. doi: 10.4135/9780857028211. thomas, j. (1993). doing critical ethnography. newbury park, ca: sage publications ltd. doi: 10.4135/9781412983945. tuhiwai smith, l. (1999). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. new york, ny: palgrave. wall, a. f., hursh, d., & rodgers iii, j. w. (2014). assessment for whom: repositioning higher education assessment as an ethical and value-focused social practice. research & practice in assessment, 9, 5-17. wolff-eisenberg, c., & braddlee. (2018). amplifying student voices: the community college libraries and academic support for student success project. ithaka s+r. retrieved from http://www.sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/sr_report_amplifying_student_voices_cclass-_08132018.pdf. young, s., & brownotter, c. (2018). towards a more just library: participatory design with native american students. weave: journal of library user experience, 1(9). retrieved from: https://osf.io/preprints/lissa/7jmtg/. harvey summarizes neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2005, p. 2). in the context of higher education, this manifests itself in a focus on revenue generation and efficiency (saunders, 2010, p. 43) and is underpinned by an emphasis on “market-like competition—among institutions, scientists, scholars, and students” (busch, 2017, p. 1), with a concomitant focus on audits, rankings, and quantitative performance measurements such as student test scores or metrics of faculty productivity (busch, 2017; denzin & giardina, 2017). as giroux and others note, this view of higher education positions students as consumers or customers and faculty as “providers of a saleable commodity such as a credential or a set of workplace skills” (giroux & cohen, 2014, p. 16; saunders, 2010 & 2015). [↩] canadian association of professional academic librarians/association canadienne des bibliothécaires académiques professionnels [↩] see http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p3var.pl?function=deci&id=257515 [↩] see crown-indigenous relations and northern affairs canada, 2017 [↩] for more information on the census as a whole – including consultation and testing during its creation and its underlying goals of advocacy and policy development – see revitt, 2016 and revitt, schrader, & kaufman, 2016. [↩] assessment, critical assessment, critical methods, library assessment bridging the relationship gap: using social network theories to inform library services for graduate students “i remember…”: a written-reflection program for student library workers this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: introductions all around – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 30 dec editorial board, ian beilin, ellie collier, erin dorney, bethany radcliffe, annie pho, ryan randall and cecily walker /3 comments editorial: introductions all around in brief: over the past year, the editorial board has experienced some changes (yay, growing pains!). in this group post, current board members introduce themselves and talk about the types of articles they’d love to see submitted in 2016. we also thank all of our emeritus board members for their hard work shaping in the library with the lead pipe into what it is today. by editorial board, ian beilin, ellie collier, erin dorney, bethany messersmith, annie pho, ryan randall, and cecily walker ian beilin earlier this year i became the humanities research services librarian at columbia university. not long after that, i joined the lead pipe editorial board. i’m also a very part-time adjunct professor of modern european history. when not working, i’m usually parenting my toddler, which includes much time spent in central park’s playgrounds, fields, and woods (yes, woods!). and as much of my time as possible is spent listening to music (and seeing it performed, when i get the chance). not long before joining the board, i had the opportunity to publish an article in lead pipe. working with the editors and experiencing the journal’s open peer review process made me want to make a more long-term contribution. i’m really proud to have joined a journal that has published so much important scholarship. i’ve observed how lead pipe‘s articles resonate in libraryland through twitter, at conferences, in meetings at work, and in informal conversations. in particular, i think lead pipe has had a keen eye for publishing research that ties library issues to broader issues that affect all other aspects of our lives. while several of us on the editorial board are academic librarians, and several articles since i’ve joined have tended to focus on the world of academic libraries, i’d like to see more non-academic librarians of all kinds submit articles, especially ones with a focus on social justice issues. another group that i would like see submit more articles is catalogers and systems librarians (both academic and non-academic). since i’ve begun interacting with catalogers on a daily basis, i’ve acquired a newfound appreciation and interest in the work that they do, both in their day-to-day work as catalogers, but also as scholars. i believe their perspectives are important for non-catalogers to have, and my own work as a subject, reference, and instruction librarian has been informed by their insights in many ways.   ellie collier after almost ten years in reference and instruction in academic libraries i’ve made the jump vendor-side. i’m currently a discovery services engineer for ebsco along with former lead pipe board member eric frierson. it’s an amazing, supportive team of people with interesting and challenging work. i’m fairly ecstatic. i’m still an avid board, card, and video gamer, though the avid has shrunk a bit with the addition of a toddler to my life. i’ve moved several times and have settled back in pennsylvania, near family, but not near much of anything else, which does pain my city-girl heart just a bit. i’ve been with lead pipe since its inception and it’s been ridiculously satisfying to see it grow and evolve over the years. my current interests, and thus what i’d love to see articles on, include: critical code studies, interesting approaches to or collaborations around digital collections, and approaches to information literacy that focus on students as individuals with their own goals and agency. i’d also love to see us publish more from public libraries, including topics like storytime and other programming for little ones or partnerships with other public services. and more from systems and cataloging library workers, including interesting workflow solutions, partnerships across their communities or within their libraries, or critiques of classification systems—maybe even an intro to/history of type of thing. lastly, i’d love to see us publishing profiles of library workers who have inspired you, along the lines of a more in depth wednesday geek woman.   erin dorney like ellie, i too have made a jump away from working in academic libraries. this summer i moved from pennsylvania to minnesota so that my partner could start grad school. i’m currently self employed as a freelance writer and editor (with a dash of web and social media thrown in), working from home or sometimes a local coworking space. it’s nice to have some distance from libraries, and i think that room has impacted my work on the lead pipe board. i find myself more drawn to the “publisher” aspects of our journal (soliciting and seeking out authors, admin tasks, formatting, our vision and presentation, etc.). i review articles with a different set of eyes now that i am a few steps removed from the inner-workings of things like ala, office/organization politics, frameworks and standards, and patrons/users. i’m staying connected with the library community at large through my social media networks and by working with library-related groups like influx, library juice press, and lead pipe. but it’s definitely kind of fun to go into my local public library or my partner’s academic library and just use it. some of the topics i’d love to see submissions on include: stuff about library school/lis education (pros, cons, exposés, a hypothetical program plan filled with class descriptions that would have been more relevant to your lived experience in the workforce), signage/wayfinding (audits, getting buy-in, rebranding, a minimalist approach), library renovations (love those before and after photos), interviews (two awesome people interviewing each other, a public services library worker interviewing a technical services library worker about “how the other half lives”, a library student interviewing a professor, a library worker interviewing an author or publisher), ux, writing (publishing for tenure, publishing for free, content creation plans for library websites, the state of library blogging 5 years later) and anything experimental or creative. like many of my board members, i also want to see more diversity in the voices that we publish (so send us your ideas!).   bethany messersmith i’m the information literacy librarian at southwest baptist university. in my spare time, i drink exorbitant amounts of tea, thrift, and dabble in interior design. i joined the editorial board this spring because i believe in the journal and wanted to take on a new professional challenge. since i’m relatively new to lead pipe, i haven’t edited an article in its entirety yet. however, i’ve enjoyed reviewing submissions to our journal and being part of the monthly editorial board meetings. i’m looking forward to our upcoming web site renovation. some articles i’d love to see submitted to lead pipe in 2016 include: original thoughts on library marketing plans/follow-up assessment of the initiatives advanced in those plans, successful marketing to distance learners/graduate-level students, new and innovative ways to approach information literacy beyond the standard framework discussion, and approaches to wayfinding in libraries (especially as it pertains to signage initiatives). i like that lead pipe receives submissions on diverse subjects and i think discussion of the topics above would allow us to branch out even more and therefore broaden our readership. so, let the submission process begin!   annie pho i’m an undergraduate experience librarian at the university of illinois at chicago. i keep myself pretty busy at work; but when i’m not in a library, i really enjoy riding my bike (even in winter), reading, and exploring. i’ve been on the board for about a year now and i have learned so much about the editing and writing process. this experience has been invaluable, especially as i am ramping up for a major research project next year. the articles i’ve edited and reviewed in 2015 have been really diverse! from april hathcock’s article white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis to tom keegan and kelly mcelroy’s archives alive!: librarian-faculty collaboration and an alternative to the five-page paper to the latest article by margot hanson and lee adams say what? exploring “the most interesting place in the city” – the comments section of online news articles, the topics have covered so many different aspects of the profession. it’s what i love the most about working on lead pipe, i get exposure to a variety of different projects and research. for the upcoming year, i’d love to see more articles related to critical/radical librarianship. critical archival practices, critical pedagogy, feminist research, issues related to diversity in lis—all of these topics are interesting to me and i’d be happy to work with any potential authors on these.   ryan randall i’m the instruction and outreach librarian at the college of western idaho, a community college serving the greater boise area. before librarianship, i was an adjunct instructor for a number of lower-division humanities and freshman writing courses. i’ve recently joined the lead pipe board and am excited about what our web site might look like after the upcoming renovations. outside of libraries, i enjoy exploring cities, hiking trails, local record stores, coffee shops, and thrift stores. the potential for open educational resources matters deeply to community college students, so i particularly appreciated a critical take on oer practices: interrogating commercialization, colonialism, and content. i’d like to see more articles that examine how lis professionals and researchers make meaning, such as #ditchthesurvey: expanding methodological diversity in lis research. the virtual panel for why diversity matters: a roundtable discussion on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship was an article i particularly enjoyed both because of its questions and recommendations for diversity as well as its alternative authorship model. i’d also love to see more articles written by public librarians and systems librarians, as well as k-12 librarians and community college librarians. as far as topics go, how does what we do in libraries connect to larger social and cultural issues? how does what we do in libraries—from how we conduct outreach programs or makerspace tutorials to how we catalog our materials—promote particular understandings of the world? how can we encourage curiosity or forward the idea of libraries as spaces for change and development? i’d also look forward to more articles critically engaging with the history of libraries or lis.   cecily walker i’m the systems project librarian at vancouver public library in vancouver, canada. before that, i served as the assistant manager for community digital initiatives (digital humanities) and elearning, and as the assistant manager for websites and online engagement at the same institution. i joined the editorial board because i was excited about what seemed to me a groundswell of heartfelt, deeply thoughtful writing around lis and social justice that i was seeing in the field. i thought that by volunteering to serve on the editorial board of lead pipe i’d be able to play a role in ensuring this kind of scholarship would always have a platform. some articles i’d like to see published in the coming year are “how the sausage gets made” articles, particularly those written by people who made the move into library technology from other lis fields. i think that there is a greater opportunity for “non-technical” people to become involved in website and systems projects at many different levels. having seen this first-hand, i’m excited about the avenues that could open up for librarians in more traditional fields who are interested in technology. i’d also like to see more articles about reshaping lis study so that it moves us toward a more community-centered service model that features close collaboration and consultation with community partners. lastly, i’d like to see more think-pieces from people who are underrepresented in lis who not only discuss what their day-to-day realities are, but who offer solutions, support, and hope to other underrepresented minorities who are interested in library work.   the editorial board would like to recognize and thank all of our emeritus board members, including derik badman, brett bonfield, hilary davis, leigh anne focareta, emily ford, eric frierson, gretchen kolderup, lindsey rae, kim reed, hugh rundle, coral sheldon-hess, and micah vandegrift. editorial, introductions, meet the board say what? exploring “the most interesting place in the city” – the comments section of online news articles the quest for diversity in library staffing: from awareness to action 3 responses emily ford 2015–12–30 at 5:22 pm <3 to you all. thanks for your work and contributions. i hope to submit something in 2016. pingback : latest library links 8th january 2016 | latest library links pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » change in publication schedule this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct what are libraries for? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 20 apr hugh mcguire /48 comments what are libraries for? in the library with the lead pipe welcomes guest author hugh mcguire, the founder of librivox.org, the world’s most prolific publisher of audiobooks (all read by volunteers); iambik audio, a commercial audiobook publisher built on a model similar to librivox; and pressbooks, a simple digital book-production tool. hugh served on the board (2002-2010) of the atwater library, a small community library, and the last remaining mechanics institute in canada. the kindle gazer, after lilla cabot perry by flickr user mike licht, notionscapital.com (cc-by 2.0) by hugh mcguire ebooks will become the dominant form of casual reading for adults at some point in the future1. when this happens, community and public libraries will face a major existential crisis, because a fundamental (perhaps the fundamental) function of community libraries—lending print books—will no longer be a fundamental demand from the community. libraries that do not adjust will find their services increasingly irrelevant to the populations they serve. if ebooks will become dominant, and if community libraries have, to date, structured their existence around a dying function (lending print books), then how will libraries remain relevant in the future? to find an answer to this conundrum, it’s important to try to understand the reason for a library’s existence, rather than focus on the things a library does. how you do something does not define why you exist i’d like to propose a loose definition of what libraries are for, which comes out of something of a trope: that the central problem for big institutions when the environment around them is changing (as it is for libraries with the arrival of ebooks) is that they falsely assume that how they do things defines why they exist. in fact, the inverse relationship should dominate what they do: why they exist should define how they do things. put another way, institutions must understand what they are for in order to properly understand how they should be, especially when the foundations upon which they were built are changing. (with the caveat that knowing what one ought to do is very different from being able to make the changes required). this is the challenge now for any institution that deals in information: book stores, music labels, the movie business, public broadcasters, schools and universities, and certainly libraries. that is, they have defined their existence by various functions they perform within a given information ecosystem, one that is changing completely as digital comes to dominate all media forms. all these institutions—libraries included—grew up in an ecosystem where information was scarce, and information distribution was the base function of what they did. how they did things was a function of the need that they answered. but with digital, the ecosystem is changing, has changed, will change completely in the coming decades. information is abundant; distribution is (in theory) free information is now abundant and distribution is essentially (in theory anyway) free. institutions are having a hard time adapting, and at least part of the difficulty is shifting a mindset from function to purpose: shifting the thinking from how we do things defining our beings now, to why we do things defining how we’ll do things in the future. so: music labels thought they sold cds to people; newspapers think they get writers to make news articles and get people to read them; libraries think they give people access to books and computers. but they are all wrong, to a lesser or greater extent. these kinds of definitions get you tied up in functional activities, and they don’t really get to the core of what’s important, what the real thing is that an institution does, the real value it provides to the universe. what are libraries for? as a starting point, here is my proposal for what a community library is for: to disseminate books and information for free or close to free to archive information to provide a community space for people to interact around information perhaps: to give people the tools necessary to manage information in a sensible way. with that out of the way, here are some factors that will fundamentally change what libraries do in the future. the price of ebooks will tend towards zero publishers of all stripes—from the new york times to harpercollins to sonymusic—will continue to spend time and energy in the coming decade fighting people’s reluctance to pay for digital content at the prices they used to pay for analog media. but those efforts will fail, and ebook prices will drop, sooner or later, because keeping the prices up is fighting against two fundamental forces: supply and demand, and the elimination of the expenses traditionally associated with publishing and distribution. fundamental force #1: supply and demand the supply of books is increasing exponentially. in 2002 there were on the order of 275,000 books published by traditional publishers in the usa. by 2009, that number—if you include microand self-published work—rose to close to 1 million books. note that this was before the ebook revolution really got going, and publishing a “book” became an almost trivial matter. while many will point out that the quality of self-published books won’t compete with the quality of published works, that distinction is going away. we have major writers choosing to self-publish for economic reasons (barry eisler and joe konrath), and million-selling self-publishers signing with major publishing houses (amanda hocking). the distinction between self and published will fade, and the number of books out there is just going to continue to increase. demand on the other hand—defined by the number of hours per day humans can read books—is going to stay roughly constant. and the demand for books is facing an ever-growing challenge, the challenge of other things we can do with our time: movies, news article, blog posts, video games, youtube videos, angry birds, facebook—and any number of other instantly-available sources of information or entertainment—all compete with books for our time. supply of information is going up; demand is staying roughly constant. the economic equation is clear: the value of any random piece of entertainment (whether that’s a book or an mp3 track) will tend to zero2. we live in a world where the supply of books is growing exponentially, and the demand for books is relatively static, and certainly under fire. the result must be a decline in price. fundamental force #2: the cost of publishing & global distribution has gone to zero an ebook is infinitely copyable and infinitely distributable at (almost) zero cost. of course, you have to pay the writer and editor and all that, but getting text from a writer’s keyboard to the eyes of a reader might as well be free (to test this theory: find a long text file on your computer and email it to a friend). media businesses have spent the last 15 years fighting against supply and demand, and zero-cost distribution, using digital rights management (drm), paywalls, and lawsuits. there is no indication that this has worked, the music business has abandoned drm, and netflix now gives consumers unlimited movie downloads for $7.95 per month, a price that would have been laughed at just a few years ago. the price problem will be even worse in the book publishing business, because books are much easier to copy and ship around the internet than any other media; they are just text files, occasionally with images. whatever barriers to distribution official market channels put up (high prices, drm) will be easily overcome by unofficial/black market channels. libraries have long served as a place where cost-conscious readers could find books at near-zero prices (paid for by taxes or relatively low membership fees). but what happens when all these ebooks are available at prices approaching free—legally or otherwise—on the internet? while a certain portion of the population might choose the library out of ethical consideration, or fondness for the past, the laws of economics and physics will prevail in the long-run: people will get their ebooks where friction is least, and if that means free books on the internet, that’s where they will go. eventually price pressure will affect ebooks the way it has affected music and movies. piracy and unauthorized sharing of ebooks will grow as a black market; eventually publishers will recognize that they cannot compete against a black market that is so much better at matching supply and demand, and they will begin to provide ebooks at close-to-free prices. this is what’s happened in music (spotify, rdio, mog, grooveshark, last.fm, pandora), and movies (netflix, amazon on-demand movies). it will happen in ebooks. when this happens, libraries won’t be competing against illegal free content available through file sharing, but rather with nominally-priced subscription ebook services that provide unlimited access to ebooks to consumers (or something similar). so what happens to a library when all ebooks in the world are accessible to readers at a cost that approaches a couple of cups of coffee a month, or for more enterprising readers, nothing at all? what is the purpose of a library if one of its defining market advantages—its low price—no longer distinguishes a library from the commercial competition? all books will live on the web ebooks, as we now know them, are a transitional format. they won’t go away, but in a few years (2? 5? 20?) all books will live on the web, as well as in various other incarnations, such as printed books, epub, kindle’s azw, and whatever else we might do with them. but books will live on the web because there is more value for a reader if a book is on the web, and in print, and in ebook format, than if a book is only ebook and print. a book on the web can be searched, referenced, shared, copied, pasted, and who knows what else, more easily than if it is only in ebook format or print. the market economy is good at rewarding those who find ways to deliver more value to consumers, so there will be immense commercial incentive for new publishers to emerge, publishers that will put books on the web; old publishers will follow or perish, in the long run. one characteristic of the library is that it has always been the place that had the books we wanted to read. so what happens when every book in the universe is not just available to be bought, but available to be read and interacted with on the web, immediately from any person’s computing device? if the archiving of books happens instantly on the web, and if the dissemination of books happens at nearing zero cost on the web, what is a library for? the response to date: fake friction the tendency in libraries—as with all existing media institutions in the digital age—is to try to introduce artificial constraints that make digital information difficult in some of the ways non-digital information is. in the case of commercial publishers, this is achieved through digital rights management—which restricts readers’ ability to copy ebooks and move them from device to device. further, unique valuable characteristics of a digital book—e.g., easy copy/pasting—are generally disabled. in the case of libraries, the question has been framed roughly as: how do we replicate a financial model where we bought a copy of a print book and were able to lend it out only to one person at a time? in the physical world, library lending has two main constraints: physical constraint #1: only one person can have a particular copy of a book out at any given time. physical constraint #2: a patron can have a copy of a printed book only for a defined period of time. in the digital world, both of these constraints are artificial: ebooks are infinitely copyable at zero cost, so: an infinite number of patrons could theoretically “check out” an ebook at any given time there is no need to “return” an ebook; since it is infinitely copyable, the library always has other copies for other patrons. of course, the financial arrangement between libraries and publishers, developed in the print environment, and replicated for now in digital, introduces fake frictions of various kinds: (fake) digital constraint #1: only one patron can take out an ebook at any given time (fake) digital constraint #2: patrons must “return” those ebooks when they are finished with them. this replicates a print model, and allows libraries and publishers to continue their relationship more or less as it developed prior to digital. but this just won’t last, because it means that libraries will become uncompetitive—on price and convenience—with other ways of getting ebooks. libraries will become more and more irrelevant to readers. some solutions? chaotic change is coming for all who deal with books, libraries included. and the solutions to this uncertain future is to clearly understand what a library is for, and to make sure that resources are allocated to meet these needs as the world changes. above, i proposed a definition of what libraries are for: to disseminate books and information for free or close to free to archive information to provide a community space for people to interact around information perhaps: to give people the tools necessary to manage information in a sensible way. priorities must shift. 1. disseminating books and information for free i would argue that #1 will soon no longer be a unique property of libraries, and that easily accessible ebooks at close to zero cost will be available to everyone, either legally or otherwise. unfortunately, community libraries have structured themselves to date to fulfill this function, probably above all others. i don’t think disseminating free books will be a sustainable core function for libraries. 2. archiving the internet will serve the purpose of the great archive of all (new) books, and a good portion of old ones as well (see google books and the internet archive). at the same time, community libraries may well serve an important role in collecting, archiving, and organizing information important to a local population, whether print or digital. that all the information is available on the internet does not mean that it is well organized, especially for local interests. the “internet” cannot and will not archive specifically for specific populations, so there is an important role here for libraries. 3. community space already an important function of a library, providing community space and context for interaction around information should continue to be a focus, and is something that the shift to digital cannot change. indeed, as we continue to suffer from information overload from all sides, providing social context, and physical interaction in a public space, will surely grow in importance. 4. managing information that every bit of information might exist on the internet does not make it any easier for most people to navigate. indeed the role of libraries as curators, editors, and selectors will just grow in importance as the sea of bits and bytes continues to rise around us. conclusions a world of ubiquitous free or near-free ebooks is coming, in 5 or 10 or 20 years. and when that happens, a library that defines itself as “a place where you can get free or near-free books” will no longer be an institution providing a service deemed important enough to be maintained by its community. but libraries have never been solely about free books. they are about something deeper, about information, about access to knowledge, about providing a public space where citizens can interact with each other, all within the context of an exchange of knowledge. libraries are at the core of our understanding of civilization, and if we are to keep them healthy, we’ll have to make sure that they continue to answer deep needs in our society, rather than provide particular services because they’ve always done so. thanks to eli neiburger and alex wright for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article, and to brett bonfield for helping to prepare it for publication. ebook sales accounted for 1-2% for trade publishers in the usa in 2008. by 2010 that number was somewhere around 10%, and is expected to be 15-20% by the end of 2011. there is no reason to expect that this trend won’t continue, and major publishing houses expect 50% of their business to be digital by 2015. this doesn’t mean that print is going away, but it does mean that any person, business, or institution involved in books must prepare for a time, coming soon, when the majority of book reading is done on digital devices. [↩] note, however, that the value of sorting, aggregating, and presenting the right information, is going up. so google (sorting), amazon (aggregating), and apple (presenting) information are among the most highly valued companies in the world, while the producers of information—say, the new york times and random house—will continue to struggle. [↩] ebooks, economics, future, publishing collaborating with faculty part 1: a five-step program revisiting the ala membership pyramid 48 responses ellie 2011–04–20 at 3:14 pm i don’t know if this was meant to be an inflammatory post, but i find myself having an incredibly strong knee-jerk reaction to this piece on a couple of fronts. i’m particularly sad to see that someone who has been on a library board would list disseminating books as the number one reason why libraries exist. the history of libraries in america shows the purpose of libraries to be a public place of education and civic engagement. in a less positive light, its origins are as a place of indoctrination, where we can raise up the unwashed masses into good americans. in a kinder light it’s the place where we level the playing field and struggle towards equity. books are one means to that end. in the past they may have been the primary means (and i think even that could be debated), but they were never the end itself. in england, many lending libraries did begin as a way to cost share, but the huge public library movements in america did not come from that ethos. they came from a belief in the importance of literacy, education, and much as we like to forget – moral indoctrination. i am always frustrated by arguments about digital ubiquity that ignore the privilege they bring to the discussion. all the literature on the digital divide emphasizes that access is only one small aspect of the problem. (see jessamyn west’s recent presentations and book for more – e.g. http://www.librarian.net/talks/txla11/txla11.pdf). just giving people computers/broadband, or access to computers/broadband, or putting all the books online does not automatically solve the problem of the digital divide. i also object to the position that it is libraries who are trying to make it difficult for patrons to use ebooks. while we have certainly failed to negotiate better contracts with our vendors, that is not the same thing as actively seeking to make ebooks more like print books. the implication that libraries want or actively sought out this solution is just not true. i completely agree with your closing sentences, but argue that what you propose is exactly what public libraries do. i would argue the priorities you’re listing shifted a long time ago, and that our biggest failure is not in failing to realize and adapt, but in failing to market ourselves effectively and in failing to persuade public opinion to realize (or perhaps remember) that we are in fact cultural centers with a variety of offerings, not just buildings full of books. hugh mcguire 2011–04–20 at 3:54 pm sorry, just saw that i can respond directly. one last comment: perhaps i am speaking more about the ppopular impression of what a library is for, rather than what libraries think of themselves as for. but the question then is: what happens to public sentiment if/when lending books is no longer deemed valuable to the general public (because of easy/cheap access elsewhere)? how do libraries position themselves then, and how will they maintain the support of the communities that pay for them? ellie 2011–04–20 at 4:29 pm i think this comment is getting at what i failed to express with my digital divide comment (and may fail again to express well here). i think there is a shift in culture to view the library (and many other public institutions) in terms of ‘what does it do for me’ instead of ‘what does it do for society?’ we say, ‘i can use and afford computers and broadband and everything is online, so what is the point of a library for me?’ (ignoring those left behind in the digital divide) and the thing is – there will likely always be economic and cultural barriers to certain groups of people and to me, the library is a place we try to break down those barriers, not just a place we give free books to people who could probably actually afford them anyway. libraries in america started not just because people couldn’t afford to buy books and thought they could cut costs by sharing, but because they knew others couldn’t afford not only books but basic education, and they felt it was important as a society to provide a free place for intellectual stimulation and curiosity for everyone along with staff to help navigate those spaces. anyway, this is all a tangent to your piece and not at all a critique of it. just a personal lament :) you ask a valid question of how to position ourselves within this changing landscape. hugh mcguire 2011–04–20 at 3:37 pm i don’t know if this was meant to be an inflammatory post, but i find myself having an incredibly strong knee-jerk reaction to this piece on a couple of fronts. certainly it’s meant to be provocative. i’m particularly sad to see that someone who has been on a library board would list disseminating books as the number one reason why libraries exist. it is my experience that the biggest budget expenditure in a library budget is allocated to book lending, and i think that’s what will have to change, and radically. i suppose that’s my main point and might have been made more clearly. my experience is that the discussion around shifting budgets from books to other things isn’t an easy one. the history of libraries in america shows the purpose of libraries to be a public place of education and civic engagement… they came from a belief in the importance of literacy, education, and much as we like to forget – moral indoctrination. i wonder though if you asked around your communities what people would say? maybe that is my point, that libraries need to reposition themselves in the public imagination as something other than “a place where you take out books.” my experience is that that’s how they are seen. and indeed in my role on the board of the atwater library we spent lots of time trying to figure out how we could craft a message that resonated more widely with the wider population, how we could shift the institution from being primarily about books, to something completely different. we succeeded to some degree. certainly other libraries have done the same/ i am always frustrated by arguments about digital ubiquity that ignore the privilege they bring to the discussion. all the literature on the digital divide emphasizes that access is only one small aspect of the problem. (see jessamyn west’s recent presentations and book for more – e.g. http://www.librarian.net/talks/txla11/txla11.pdf). just giving people computers/broadband, or access to computers/broadband, or putting all the books online does not automatically solve the problem of the digital divide. i agree, and i don’t think i suggested otherwise. i also object to the position that it is libraries who are trying to make it difficult for patrons to use ebooks. while we have certainly failed to negotiate better contracts with our vendors, that is not the same thing as actively seeking to make ebooks more like print books. the implication that libraries want or actively sought out this solution is just not true. that could have been clearer, i suppose. the “fault” is not with libraries, but with publisher terms and vendor platforms; but this world of false friction is where libraries find themselves. i completely agree with your closing sentences, but argue that what you propose is exactly what public libraries do. i would argue the priorities you’re listing shifted a long time ago, and that our biggest failure is not in failing to realize and adapt, but in failing to market ourselves effectively and in failing to persuade public opinion to realize (or perhaps remember) that we are in fact cultural centers with a variety of offerings, not just buildings full of books. again, i wonder what the budgets look like, but perhaps what’s needed is a clearer statement to the public about this. if it hasn’t happened, why not? where is the blockage? ellie 2011–04–20 at 3:55 pm after posting my comment i did stop and wonder if this post was more about budget distribution, so thank you for clarifying that point. i have absolutely no first hand information about budget allocations at public libraries (i’m in academics), but your assumption rings true to me. i wonder how much of a catch-22 we’re in – if the public sees us as a free book warehouse, would they be up in arms if we slashed our book budgets? also, books aren’t free yet, and the most recent statistics i’ve read only have about 5% of americans owning ereaders (http://pewinternet.org/reports/2011/generations-and-gadgets/overview.aspx), so while i don’t disagree with the overall trend of ebooks being on the rise, if it’s going to take 10 or 20, i do wonder if it’s too soon to actually implement a drastic budget shift. i don’t wonder whether it’s too soon to have the conversation though, so thank you for that. hugh mcguire 2011–04–20 at 4:04 pm i wonder how much of a catch-22 we’re in – if the public sees us as a free book warehouse, would they be up in arms if we slashed our book budgets? yes, i think this is exactly why i wrote this: libraries need to have this conversation with the public, because if they don’t the conversation will happen without them, and that won’t be good for anyone. of course i might be wrong about near-free ebooks everywhere – or it may take decades. luckily i don’t have a library budget to manage! edgar crook 2011–04–20 at 9:01 pm excellent article, but i would suggest a couple of things. “it is my experience that the biggest budget expenditure in a library budget is allocated to book lending, and i think that’s what will have to change, and radically.” i certainly agree that book lending will need to substantially change. however the largest budget expenditure for most libraries is in fact the staff and not the lending materials. which is why i would have as first in your definitions of what is a library for. 1. to provide a range of services to the public through the use of professional librarian staff. as to the chapter on fake friction, i would agree and say that libraries have conspicuously failed to provide, anticipate or manage ebooks. libraries had enormous forewarning of ebooks rise, but failed to act, failed to organise and failed to negotiate, thus we are left with overdrive and whatever terms harpercollins etc. wish to force on us. hugh mcguire 2011–04–21 at 8:49 am however the largest budget expenditure for most libraries is in fact the staff and not the lending materials. yes, by budget i mean: the sum of: book purchasing, cataloging, square footage, staffing, & whatever other resources that get put into “acquiring & lending books” … as opposed to other things. note: i am not necessarily saying that we should slash book lending budgets. i am saying that libraries right now behave as if (= spend money as if) lending books is the most important thing they do. the importance of that service will continue to wane, in my opinion. so how will libraries adapt? pingback : akma » yes, indeed! lindsay s. c. 2011–04–21 at 9:17 am i agree that library as a community gathering place is extremely important. programming is a popular service and can be easily geared toward any group of people, young and old, of any ethnicity, education level, socio-economic level. another purpose of libraries is to fight for intellectual freedom, defend free speech and expression, and stand up to censorship. do you think these values will still be a part of the library’s definition in the increasingly digital future? hugh mcguire 2011–04–21 at 9:24 am yes, i think so, but i wonder how much support public libraries get for that work, within the governments that typically fund them, and the populations they typically serve? i don’t know. i certainly feel as if these kinds of ideas are less and less compelling to the general public in our “public sphere” … though of course, to me anyway, that makes libraries so much more important. because i think these ideas – rather than just being “good” – are the things that make our communities healthy. this is really the challenge for libraries, i think: to make the case that they are central pillars that make for healthy communities – books, ebooks, or otherwise. leigh anne 2011–04–21 at 11:06 am ellie expressed, and far more coherently at that, everything i am feeling in this moment. i, too, had a strong knee-jerk reaction to this piece, for the simple reason that i cannot, cannot understand why we are in such a mad rush to divest ourselves of everything human, tactile, tangible, physical, in favor of all that is cold, clinical, impersonal, digital. then again, i’m a poet/playwright in addition to being a librarian, which means i’m quite mad. but i will stand by my mad world to its bitter end, rather than go quietly into that horrid dark night, in which the tactile, sensual pleasure of a print book — made, i might add, from renewable resources instead of conflict metals that exploit workers and colonialize the digital sphere still further — are valued and cherished. leigh anne kevin 2011–04–21 at 1:30 pm as a librarian-cartoonist who often self-publishes (using print-on-demand services made possible by our digital tech, that is), i have sympathy for this knee-jerk reaction. actually, what worries me even more is the loss of diversity of materials, that we will throw all of our eggs into a digital basket and sacrifice all of the wonderful analog options we have created the past 100 years — not counting 500 years of bookmaking, of course. consumers now have a lot of choice to meet their information needs and their different learning styles. i’d hate for us to lose that. nancy rifkin 2011–04–25 at 8:39 am hear hear, leigh anne! bill mccoy 2011–04–21 at 11:55 am to the earlier comments hand-wringing about “digital divide”: i find this argument to be entirely backwards. digital will actually increase access drastically: 1. billions of people live without any access to libraries or bookstores but have phones, the fast majority of which will within a few years be internet-connected smartphones fully suitable for reading. 2. even in the affluent developed world, most people don’t live close to a good library and the selection of content is going to be far less than the 1m ebooks already commercially available today. 3. budget pressures mean library hours are increasingly limited and book acquisition budgets constrained, further limiting practical access. ebooks (including library-loaned) can be acquired 24×7 from any location. 4. every ebook is a large-print book. how many large-print books does your library stock? 5. every ebook can (license terms and sw permitting) be read out loud with text-to-speech functionality. how many audio books does your library stock? i love books but let’s face it: physical books in quantity are a luxury good for the affluent – in which category,in a global context, i include “underprivileged” public library patrons in u.s. and europe. digital is making a vastly increased selection of books available to all. mike shatzkin 2011–04–21 at 12:08 pm hugh, what a great piece. you were thorough and analytical and i think you laid out the issues beautifully. i think most people not deeply steeped in libraries would view public libraries as, primarily, places that gather content to make it accessible. the community space and education elements would be seen (by most) as secondary functions that flow from the building full of books. you’ve made a case i agree with, which is that over the next decade or two, the relative value of a building full of books is going to decline. the other worthwhile functions of a library will have to stand on their own to get funding and i really wonder whether the term “library” will be the right description of what they’ll be when that happens. but, whatever we end up calling it, every library around today is going to come up with a whole new rationale to keep its doors open in the years to come. spencer 2011–04–21 at 12:23 pm it’s like the author reached into my head and typed what was in there. anyone who disagrees is doing so because inertia is a powerful force, not because the argument is incorrect. leigh anne 2011–05–17 at 10:38 am actually, no – there are other reasons to disagree with this post. your statement is a perfect example of how the dominant discourse automatically dismisses criticism out of hand by making an ad hominem argument about the critic. pingback : a passion for 'puters » blog archive » in the library with a lead pipe john 2011–04–24 at 12:23 pm this is a very interesting and important post, but i question the economic assertion that “price of ebooks will tend towards zero.” yes, that is a possible result but it is not necessary or inevitable. obviously, it hasn’t happened yet (actually, cost of my kindle books have been increasing recently), and neither of the “fundamental forces” described in the post necessarily will drive ebook prices down to zero. i’ll start with fundamental force #2, which contains a stronger argument. the mere fact that it is possible to copy and distribute a product at no cost does not mean that it necessarily will become free in the marketplace. for example, consider the microsoft windows os. the cost of making and distributing another copy of windows has always been next to nothing. yet, bill gates has become one of the richest men in the world by selling a product that technically can be distributed almost as freely as an ebook could be. the whole for-profit software industry is trying to do the same. in many ways, there are very strong similarities between the for-profit software industry and ebook publishers. both are making a product in which the “first copy” costs can be very high, but the costs of making additional copies is almost nothing. that doesn’t mean that their products automatically become free. for an excellent, in-depth economic analysis of this topic see the book “information rules” by hal varian: http://www.inforules.com/ varian realized in the 1990s that most information goods could be copied at almost no cost in a network economy and talked about the various ways that information companies make money in that environment. the first fundamental force in the post — “supply and demand” — makes even less sense to me. yes, of course, it is true that there are many more books out there than readers can or want to read. but that has been true for at least 100 years since the invention of mass-production printing. i don’t know the exact numbers, but around 80% of the print books published — even before anyone thought about ebooks — never make any money because almost no one wanted to read them. it doesn’t make sense to talk about the supply and demand with regard to books in general because each different book or ebook is a different product. when people want to read a book, they want a specific title or a specific type of book. they don’t want just anything that happens to be published. for example, if my daughter wants the latest harry potter novel, i won’t satisfy her by saying: “i’m not going to waste my money on that potter book when there are millions of blog posts that you could read for free and lots of used paperbacks that i could get you at library book sale for almost nothing.” in fact, i think that the concept of supply and demand for books in general is almost irrelevant in trying to figure out how much ebooks will cost. hugh mcguire 2011–05–06 at 12:43 pm john, a few notes: 1. zero-cost copying & distribution. bill gates became one of the richest men in the world based largely on a business built up prior to near-ubiquitous broadband access, and based on two products: windows operating system, and ms office, both of which have lost significant market share to free alternatives (see, eg, google docs). my guess is that if you asked bill gates what the future of his business is, he would not say: selling individual instances of software to consumers. 2. supply and demand. what’s changed is that anyone can publish for free, and anyone can download any book from anywhere, any time. compare that to 10 years ago, where: a) it was expensive to publish a book b) you had to go to a book store to buy a book so readers now have access to unlimited books, and “publishers” (whoever they might be) have access to publish a book for free. if you don’t believe that will force prices down … well, i’m willing to bet you the average price of an ebook in 5 years that you are wrong. ahniwa 2011–04–26 at 11:29 am so do we get a pressbooks invite code for reading through this post? hugh mcguire 2011–04–26 at 11:56 am @ahniwa: yes! email me at support at pressbooks dot com pingback : library of the future « englishcaddy's blog pingback : are ebooks microfiche all over again? | it's not about the books craig 2011–04–27 at 7:59 pm fascinating articleit says so much of what i’ve been thinking but lacked the ability to express. but speaking as someone who harangued his public library staff for years about the coming of the e-book, and has now recanted, i believe that hugh is missing 3 vital points: 1. print is still with us – and much loved, and has a number of real, very tangible (literally) advantages – not the least of which is the generous “drm” (prm??) rights the buyer gets with it – i can lend it, sell it, do anything i want with it once i purchase the physical copy – publishers won’t like it, but users will demand this right. (and i realize that in hugh’s future world, this isn’t an issue as drm has disappeared – but my guess that this is a very long way off) 2. lack of retrospective digitization – the assumption that “everything is digitized” (or will be, or can be, or should be) is just incorrect. a small example – a co-operative i am involved with wanted to build a long term shared print storage facility. the board asked for a comparison of alternatives – the cost to store 2 million print vol in ideal conditions = $ 13 million. the cost to digitize 2 million vol = $ 54 mill. the facility is now built, and open for business. my library filled its allocation 2 days after opening. 3. the copyright quagmire – for the world beyond north america, the google books settlement is a copyright curiosity – but it will not apply (even when google gets its way) to the rest of the world. and that doesn’t even touch on drm. my prediction – “e” will grow – considerably – but print (especially legacy print) will only shrink marginally. john 2011–04–27 at 8:24 pm i found this an interesting and useful analysis. as hugh’s examples of fake friction show, the r in drm stands for restrictions, not rights. to use the word rights is to use the propaganda of those who wish to impose artificial scarcity on an infinitely renewable digital resource. the recent example of harpercollins proposing that an ebook has “worn out” after it has been borrowed 26 times, and must be replaced, is heroic in its stupidity. “pretend it’s print, but only when it suits us” is unlikely to be a winning strategy for either libraries or publishers. in passively accepting imposition of drm on ebooks, libraries are at risk of cooperating in their own demise and are acting against the best interests of their patrons. my other comment is that i’m not sure demand is quite as inelastic as hugh proposes. everyone i know who has some kind of ereading device says they are reading more than ever and finding new places in their day to read. this is only anecdotal evidence, and it would be interesting to find out how representative their experience is. but i agree growth in supply will far outstrip any growth in demand. the most worrying trend, i think, is that “fake friction” is being written into international treaties like the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement and the trans pacific partnership agreement. these essentially require signatories to pass legislation to protect analogue business models which the digital world has made obsolete. i think hugh is right that you can’t fight the physics for ever, but it will be a long and bloody battle. i strongly endorse lindsay s c that libraries “fight for intellectual freedom, defend free speech and expression, and stand up to censorship”. how ought libraries do this in the future? perhaps a good start might be to say no to drm. john 2011–04–28 at 10:29 pm @john there has been a lot of what you call “fake friction” in our economy for the last 200 years. patents and copyrights, which have been with us since our founding fathers, restrict people from copying ideas so that the inventor has exclusive rights to make money from his/her inventions. that is not “natural,” (any idea can be copied) but a lot people think that it is right to give inventors a reward for developing something new. it is ridiculous to talk about the “laws of physics” in this debate. we not talking about nature; we are talking about a social and moral values and how rights should be distributed. the goal should be to get the right balance between the rights of an author to control his creation and the rights of society to use and share his/her creation with others. john 2011–05–03 at 12:28 am the physics are relevant because we now have the most efficient copying machine ever invented called the internet. when the marginal cost of making a perfect digital copy is effectively zero, this fundamentally changes the landscape for writers and readers alike. i agree about the need to get the right balance, but we ought to do this in a way that takes account of physical reality, not by creating artificial scarcity. your founding fathers (and the statute of anne before them) were from an age when copying was expensive and hard. as craig notes, we readers get more rights with a paper book than we do with an ebook; copying an ebook is easy and cheap, so it comes with more restrictions. this strikes me as perverse and unsustainable, regardless of our social and moral values. in my country, the desire to impose digital restrictions has led to a law where those accused of online copyright infringement are assumed guilty and required to prove their innocence. is this the world we want to live in? john 2011–05–03 at 6:35 pm two responses: 1. to answer your question at the end. no, i definitely would not want to live in that world. i would hate to live in a country where people are presumed guilty for using and sharing ideas. but i also would not want to live in the world that hugh predicts — in which all books are free and authors have no way to get paid for their creative efforts. are those two extremes the only choices that we have? i don’t think so. 2. i apologize for the implicit cultural imperialism of writing “our” founding fathers in my response to your comment. i shouldn’t assume that i am writing for people from my own country on the internet. but, in some ways, my error illustrates my point. different countries have different laws and different social conventions, all of which are “artificial” and impose restrictions on us that we wouldn’t face in the state of nature. our goal should be to create the right artificial restrictions — those that are most beneficial to society. i agree with you that current intellectual property laws give way too much power to ip owners, but i think that they can be fixed without going to the other extreme and eliminating all of them as unnatural. hugh mcguire 2011–04–27 at 8:36 pm @craig: i’m not saying that print is going away, i’m saying that adult casual reading will move to ebooks, with lots of consequences. not least of which is a growing lack of interest from readers for what the public library provides – assuming (hopefully incorrectly) it mainly provides “access to books.” and unless libraries adjust their budgets, appeals to the public, and the services they provide in consequence, then they’ll whither, which no one wants to happen. pingback : friday reads – challenges editon « matt phillips corey 2011–04–29 at 2:49 pm i have read several articles this year trumpeting the end of print books in libraries and how libraries will be irrelevant once that happens. the authors seem to think that this is something those of us in the profession should be gravely worried about. what will we do with our libraries when the public no longer wants to read books in paper format anymore? those who work in libraries know that we do much more than just circulate books. there are two reasons i think libraries will be around and vital in the future (and still have print books). the first reason is that libraries have evolved as formats have. if you are as old as me you will remember libraries having lp collections; when those were superseded by cassettes, we collected those, when those were superseded by cds we got those. when people became interested in listening to books instead of reading them we started circulating audio books. libraries aren’t tied to a format; they are an equalizer and a community resource. as long as authors want to write and be paid for it, there will always be community members who want to read it, but don’t want to pay the full price for it. as long as that is the case, public libraries will have a place. we allow the have-nots to have access to the same media resources as the haves because we are a big (or small) institution that has the purchasing power to level the playing field for everyone. you can’t afford to buy it, or don’t want to spend your own money on it, the library can provide it for you. libraries will only need to radically change if publishing houses and authors decide they want to provide their services for free. in that case, the library will morph into some other community resource, i’m sure. but the death of the library as it is today is not imminent. secondly, i’m not convinced that the popularity of ebooks is the death knell for print books. motion pictures did not make live theater extinct; videotapes did not make going to movies a thing of the past. people still go to live theater, watch movies in movie theaters, and watch them at home on their televisions. i think reading formats are more similar to historical changes in theater than they are like the evolution of music audio formats. as i mentioned earlier in the article, libraries no longer carry lps (though they are making a comeback and some patrons still wish we had them), or cassette tapes because the cd format was far superior to its predecessors in both quality of recording and durability. ebooks are neither of higher quality nor more durable than printed books, so i think the two will continue to coexist for centuries. the real question for libraries will be what percentage of the budget to spend on each. public libraries are not on their deathbeds. they will survive and morph into what their community needs as long as communities are willing to support them. pingback : bibliotheken en het digitale leven in april 2011 | dee'tjes pingback : publishing talks interview with hugh mcguire of iambik | writerscast pingback : interview with david wilk : hugh mcguire pingback : interview with david wilk about iambik & other things | the iambik audiobooks blog comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct and the survey says… – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 5 sep ellie collier /7 comments and the survey says… in brief: the results are in for the in the library with the lead pipe reader poll. detailed results and sample responses for each question are provided. additionally, the article lists actions the editors will be taking based on the results. by ellie collier back in april we ran a reader poll asking some questions about our content and future directions. we’ve gone through the responses and wanted to report back on our findings. demographics first, some background. in the month of april 2012 we had 5,385 unique visitors with 1,883 of those being returning visitors. we currently have 5,409 rss feed subscribers. we also have 5 kindle subscribers.1 based on the average visit duration2 we’d say it’s safe to say most visitors of the site don’t read every article in full, but instead are checking in to see if the current article interests them. to that end, and based on some of the comments discussed later in this article, we’ve added a new “in brief” section to the beginning of each article to help with those decisions. april 2012 analytics for in the library with the lead pipe the reader poll received 189 responses. it is difficult to come up with an accurate number of readers of in the library with the lead pipe, but those 189 responses are roughly 10% of the number of returning visitors and roughly 3.5% of the unique visitors for that month. this was obviously a convenience sample rather than representative sample so join us in adding several grains of salt to the following summary of results. the majority of respondents identify as academic librarians. while we strive to be relevant across a broad swath of librarianship, we are aware that our founders came primarily from the academic environment and this affects the topics we select. moving forward, we hope to expand our authorship to be more inclusive of a wider diversity of issues in librarianship. some of the areas in which we know we would like to improve include areas of librarianship such as: cataloging, special collections, archives, medical libraries, school libraries, prison libraries, international libraries, and lis educators. (this list is not exhaustive.) we would also love to include a wider variety of voices from underrepresented and marginalized communities. and readers, if you know an awesome writer or have a suggestion on ways to diversify, please share! several ways to get in contact with us are at the end of this article. results for the question “what library type(s) do you most identify with?” results for the question “which of the following best describes your library affiliation(s)?” within academic librarianship, most of the respondents identified as reference and/or instruction librarians. the majority selected more than one category. many chose to write in additional position descriptions such as: all of the above, assessment, clinical librarian, collection development, eresources, government documents, learning commons, liaison, outreach, program coordinator, systems, tech trainer, and youth services. several checked “other” without adding text. results for the question “if you work in a library, which of the following best describe your position?” the majority of respondents identify as newer librarians who have worked in libraries from 0-5 years: results for the question “how long have you worked in libraries?” the vast majority of respondents follow in the library with the lead pipe via rss. this was a bit surprising to some of the editors due to our current immersion in a social media-heavy environment and the popularity of twitter among librarians. for comparison, we have 5,409 rss feed subscribers, our facebook page has 616 likes, we have 2,711 twitter followers and we are in 65 circles on g+. we realize that we had only been using social media as a way to alert readers about new articles. we are making a greater effort to be more participatory in those spaces. results for the question “how do you follow lead pipe?”   blog v. journal last up in the multiple choice category was how respondents viewed us: results for the question “do you view in the library with the lead pipe as a …” in the library with the lead pipe began by representing itself as a blog. however, behind the scenes the editors have been discussing what about our current incarnation separates us from an open access journal. we’ve had an issn since we started and are indexed in ulrich’s and lista. readers may or may not have noticed that we’ve altered some of our language. for example, we now refer to our published “articles” rather than “posts.” we take a lot of pride in the articles we publish and in our peer review process. although we started as a scholarly blog, we quickly realized that our open peer review process was a unique and robust experience for all involved. a typical article published here grows throughout the review process thanks to reviewers’ comments, conversations with the author, and even conversations back and forth between reviewers. frequently peer reviewers will engage with one another in conversation about ideas presented in an article. sometimes reviewers agree, other times they don’t. we feel that this rich peer review process sets us apart from scholarly blogs and puts us in the realm of “journal.” several comments also suggested that we should be more transparent in our peer review process and let our readership know more about what goes on behind the scenes. this article is part of that effort and we’ll also be sharing some of our process documents soon (see the section areas for growth below). we are also very interested in debates around publishing and tenure. does a journal need to have volume and issue numbers? do articles need to be published in batches? can well-researched, peer-reviewed articles be used for tenure portfolios if they were published on a blog? we’re excited to explore the boundaries around these issues. you like us, you really like us   wordle for the question “what do you like best about lead pipe?” this section had 134 replies. the top five codes were: quality (includes ideas like depth, breadth, well researched) (72), diversity (36), point of view (27), topics (22), and relevancy (18). the overarching theme in this section was quality. comments about the depth, breadth and level of research were common as well as the diversity of topics, authors, and viewpoints. a sample of responses: everything. the whole process that leads to publication meaning that it is refined and thoughtful and profound and all the other terms for ‘awesome’ excellent writing! in depth, pertinent, thought provoking, insightful. thank you. fresh voices from across the library profession, peer reviewed posts, and strong, clear writing. ideas and insights from all types of libraries. i enjoy the freedom to speak in a professional atmosphere and reading authoritative articles. it is earnest and thorough and appropriately documented. i often find myself reading articles on stuff i thought i didn’t care about. lead pipe is smart, current, and not pretentious. so many library journal articles seem to come out of a publish-or-perish culture at many of the larger academic libraries. sometimes i feel that we have so much literature, but none of it is really saying anything. i really appreciate that the lead pipers always seem genuine. you go deeper into issues; it’s the npr of my library news channels. (i mean this in the best of ways). when i first started reading lead pipe, i thought of it as a “blog with the perfect number of posts.” i *love* the regular schedule of publication–i am always interested in the content, and considering the length and depth of every publication, i really appreciate that i have two weeks to read the latest post before a new one comes out.   areas for growth   wordle for the question “what do you think would make lead pipe better?” this section had 99 replies. the top five codes were: more (23), shorter (22), none (e.g. “can’t think of anything” or “you’re doing great”) (20), more authors (13), transparency issues (7). the biggest trend in this section was “more”: more articles, more often, more authors, more topics, etc. the very close runners up were “shorter” and variations on “you’re lovely just the way you are.” the length of the articles at in the library with the lead pipe was a recurring theme throughout the comments. in the previous question there were comments specifically praising the length (12/134). the pro-length contingent was outnumbered by the requests for shorter articles (22/99), however, the majority of people who made a comment relating to more or shorter articles added a qualifier. for example, they’d like some shorter pieces interspersed with the longer ones, or longer pieces in installments. at this point we are pretty tied to our long form article format, but there were several interesting suggestions in those qualifiers that we’ll be mulling over such as breaking longer pieces into installments. if you have additional thoughts on this issue (or any other ones brought up in this article) please leave a comment below. one other trend from this section was comments on transparency issues. these were mostly one-offs, but touched on aspects like making our peer review process clearer, our posting schedule more obvious, being clearer about who is a guest author and who is a regular, and how guest authors are selected. while these may not have had the weight of numbers behind them, they’re easy for us to address. to that end, we plan on implementing the following changes: sharing some of our back end documentation including: guest author instructions peer review guidelines guest author framework (includes an overview of our publication process and timeline and a list of questions to help potential guests focus their topic ideas) compiling a dynamic index of peer reviewers to thank and publicize the individuals who have kindly dedicated their time and expertise to make the in the library with the lead pipe a success. adding a note to the front page explaining that our publishing schedule is every other wednesday. revisiting previous articles that lack guest author introductions and adding them retroactively. authors will include an “in brief” section (similar to an abstract) at the beginning of their articles from now on. we are considering retroactively adding “in brief” sections to previous articles.3 moving forward, we hope to expand our authorship to be more inclusive of a wider diversity of issues in librarianship. sample responses: hmmm. more of course. but the lengthy articles are hard to produce and come by. perhaps shorter pieces or compilation pieces interspersed between the longer pieces. or posts that insightfully introduce a topic and let the discussion follow? i really can’t think of anything, except maybe increasing the frequency (which i admit would be hard to do without sacrificing the quality). i’m ashamed to say i would appreciate some short posts. you are smart folks, and i’m guessing sometimes you have things to say that aren’t as big or long. that might generate more comments and more conversation as well. so perhaps it could be like an editor’s commentary that isn’t peer-reviewed? it’s often a bit long and intimidating (compared to other rss stuff). perhaps a short synopsis at the top, then the full article with citations etc? more. i know you’re all very busy, but this is one of my favorite library related blogs. i just wish there were more updates, more frequently, more authors (?). the thing i like most about lead pipe is unfortunately the thing that hinders it from doing something that i think might make it better. i’d love if there could be a more frequent posting schedule, if only because the writing is so thought-provoking. however, i can only imagine the work that goes into these articles, and if posts were to come on a weekly basis, i might wonder if they were as high quality as the posts that came once or twice a month. wider variety of contributors – it seems very closed-door, although that might not actually be the case your model fills a unique niche. more content would be better but not at the risk of diluting the quality. shorter posts, or posts in more installments–i read this at the ref desk and get interrupted a lot   topics   wordle for the question “what topics would you like to see lead pipe address?” we had nearly as many suggestions for topics (84) as we had replies (85). most comments gave several suggestions. the ones that had 5 or more votes each were: teaching/instruction (13) assessment (10) technology (8) career (6) change (6) outreach (6) morale (5) practical (5) service (5) we’ll be sure to mine this list for future article ideas. as a reminder, we are always seeking guest authors, especially those whose voices or perspectives are under-represented in our professional dialogue. read how to contribute on our submission guidelines page. sample responses: i always love posts on instruction and information literacy, but i understand that topic often takes over (just look at the tag cloud!). i’d be interesting in reading about profiles of interesting libraries, ones that have unique services or job roles for librarians that could/should be replicated at other libraries. i also like the idea of posts that find inspiration from outside libraryland. more on service assessment and measuring value, please! emerging trends and technologies including specific use examples/case studies i’d be interested in detailed real-life library scenarios with panel interpretations on how best to handle it and feedback on the policies and principles that come into play…maybe one case each month? comparison/contrast of library resources. what are the major options today? how to they compare to one another? what is the strength/weakness of each? some ideas on what to compare: article databases, ebook resources, ils, cms, etc. open source options – open education, textbooks, ils, software… i’m biasedbut in the library world in general i wish there was more support for library para-professionals and also help in making the transition from a para-pro to librarian. there is such a weird divide in the library world and i feel it is really unfortunate. library worklife. unions. salaries. unemployment.   issues   wordle for the question “what issues do you feel are most pressing in libraries today?” this section had 113 replies encompassing 34 different issues. the top six were: the perception of libraries and librarians (35) budgeting concerns (33) change (27) technology (23) publishing (13) ebooks (13) sample responses: the redefinition of what libraries are. how they can help with the digital divide. how they can advocate for their communities. the most pressing issue is that librarians need to become clearer about what it is that librarianship is about, and then confidently do it. we have allowed ourselves to be told we don’t matter any more. nothing could be further from the truth. the economic crisis and technological advancements, one keeps us from affording the other. the changing landscape of publishing and formats (yes, e-books are important). the potential evolution of the public library into a space for learning and culture as opposed to a more repository/collections-focused role. decreasing government support for public libraries and a corresponding increase in private and corporate funding, and what this says about the public sphere. technology, changes in librarianship staying fresh when you’ve been in the environment for a decade. figuring out when to adopt a new technology or try and when to take a pass, timing of technology adoption. the future of copyright and our role in moving change forward. professionalism; doing more with less; engaging with customers; innovation and change. the whole why libraries? agenda change and what that means for the future; adapting to new technologies while being mindful of social class differences in use of new technologies   fundraising on the reader poll we explained: we’ve been working through the process of registering as a nonprofit in order to support cool library projects. registration costs money (about $1,000) and so does support for library initiatives, so it would be useful to generate some income and one way to do that would be to accept advertisements. we’re proud of our editorial independence and would never do anything to sacrifice it, or even call it into question. would accepting advertisements from companies that aren’t associated with libraries cause you to think less of us? what about a donation button? respondents expressed overwhelming support (92/116) for a donation button (with only 3 comments against) as well as broad general support for advertising (49 unqualified for, 29 for with qualifiers, and 25 against). these results prompted further discussion amongst the editors. while the numbers alone would point towards allowing advertising, we felt there was enough concern both from comments in the poll and from our own reservations that we have decided not to pursue advertising. we are looking into implementing a donation button, but still need to work out the logistics for that. there was also a call for transparency in wanting to know what we’re hoping to accomplish as a nonprofit. in the library with the lead pipe is a labor of love for all involved. we have been lucky enough to use donated server space from ibiblio. but as we seek to grow our reach (see the mention of supporting cool library projects above), we will incur costs. as we say on our about page, “in the library with the lead pipe is intended to help improve our communities, our libraries, and our professional organizations.” publishing articles is one way of doing that, and we’ve focused on this for the past four years. however, for the last year or so, we’ve also been discussing other, complementary ways of accomplishing this goal. we have several ideas of types of projects and events that we’d like to fund, but are still debating which one(s) we feel are most feasible both in terms of funding and in terms of our schedules. we hope to share more in october. additional comments the last section asked “what else would you like to tell us?” and the responses warmed our hearts. out of the 49 responses, 41 were some form of praise with the remainder being comments on the blog v. journal issue, jokes, or sharing their love for rss. sample responses: i just wanted to say thank you. i don’t know that i’ve ever commented on any posts and sometimes when there aren’t many comments, you must think “gee, does anybody care?” i know how much work maintaining an operation like this must be, particularly after the honeymoon phase. please keep going! i like a blog that doesn’t shy away from long essays. so many places seem to feel apologetic if they write a long post, which just strikes me as silly. there are no rules about the length of a post in a blog; only the criteria of the author(s) for the achievement of their goals. the blog format is not typically quite as lengthy or verbose as most “lead pipe” posts. when i’m reading rss feeds (which is where lead pipe delivers), i generally give a max of about 5 minutes attention to any post. i’ve saved many lead pipe for weeks, repeatedly hitting “keep as new”, before eventually giving up and not reading them unless they’re written by someone i know personally or on a topic close to me. keep up the good work – i really enjoy your posts, and even when i don’t have time to read them, i bookmark them to read later. thanks for giving readers the opportunity to speak their minds. this is an amazing blog. please keep up the good work. reader feedback will only take you so far. studies have proven that people in feedback surveys don’t always articulate or properly address the issues that really concern them. so, take all these answers with a grain of skepticism. but not mine. rss forever and always. this is an absolutely amazing project. great job and thank you!! thanks for being awesome!   thank you thanks so much for taking the time to share your feedback with us. the results confirmed some of our hunches (audience composition, preference for variety) and gave us some great ideas for the future (see the entire “areas for growth” and “topics” sections). please feel free to leave additional feedback here, or anytime on twitter, facebook, or google+. if you’re interested in writing for us, see our submission guidelines. thank you to pete bromberg, erin dorney, and emily ford for their incredibly helpful critiques of this article and to all of the in the library with the lead pipe editors for reviewing the survey results and taking action. special thanks to brett bonfield for last minute code wrangling. amazon requires a charge for kindle subscriptions and we set the in the library with the lead pipe subscription to the cheapest possible option. at this time any proceeds ($11 last year) are donated to creative commons, as are any proceeds from ebsco’s indexing services. [↩] average visit duration did not vary much whether the visitor was new or returning [↩] if you’ve written an article for us and would like to help us speed along this process by submitting your own “in brief” please email me your text and i’ll add it in. ellie@leadpi.pe [↩] assessment, reader poll, results, survey “that’s how we do things around here”: organizational culture (and change) in libraries running the library race 7 responses jonathan rochkind 2012–09–05 at 2:12 pm on the question of ‘blog vs journal’, i’m interested in your comments about your robust peer review process — which i think sounds like is not a “double blind” peer review process, it’s an open process where neither the reviewer nor the author is anonymous to each other. i’m an editor at the code4lib journal, and we also use a non-blind peer review process. i wrote up some about why i think this actually leads to better content then a blinded process would here: http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/code4lib-journal-and-peer-review/ but we still occasionally get people saying “my tenure process won’t pay attention unless it’s blinded peer review.” (my answer is basically, sorry, that’s your institution’s problem). i wonder if you’ll run into that too. would be interesting for we less-traditional non-blinded peer review publications, especially both in the library sector, to compare notes. on the rss issue: you have noted most of your readers are rss readers. you also note you added an ‘in brief’ to the top of each article. if possible, you might consider offering an rss feed that’s _only_ of the ‘in briefs’. your rss feed now contains entire article text, and your articles get long. a feed of just the ‘in briefs’ (where the feed links were still to the full articles) would let peopel see in briefs and decide to click through. i’m also the ‘editor’ of the planet.code4lib.org feed aggregator. about a month ago i added your feed to that aggregator (i love your content). that may or may not have resulted in a spike of feed-reading-audience, depending on how your statistics are gathered. but a ‘brief only’ rss feed would be useful there; as it is now, the articles are so long they make it hard to read the rest of the feed (but i leave em there anyway cause i love what you’re doing and want to advertise it). ellie 2012–09–06 at 10:32 am you are correct that our peer review is not “double blind.” i actually only just recently found out that it is common practice (in the sciences at least) for authors to suggest appropriate reviewers for their pieces. so we do have that in common. we ask the authors to arrange to work with one of the lead pipe editors and an external (as in a non lead pipe editor) reviewer who has experience with their topic. we also offer to help with suggestions and connections if needed. the most common format for reviews is a google doc (though we don’t require it), so all of the reviewers’ and authors’ comments are on the same document and they can converse with each other as well as with the author. i think these dialogues are incredibly valuable. as far as i can remember, none of our authors (or potential authors) have specifically discussed the tenure process as a reason for wanting or not wanting to write for us. but i wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some busy people passed us by because we wouldn’t be considered in their portfolio. hence the line in the article about our interest in exploring boundaries. we’ll look into the separate ‘in brief’ feed. i know we’re looking into a site redesign as well, so i’ll add that to our list of desired features. i personally hate all feeds that make me click through for content and almost always immediately unsubscribe when i realize that’s how they’re set up, so i hadn’t looked past my own biases on that one. and thanks for including us in your aggregator! i don’t follow our stats very closely so one of the other editors may be able to comment if they saw a spike. brett bonfield 2012–09–06 at 1:29 pm it’s probably worth adding that our peer review process was inspired by the code4lib journal. and also that i’m a big fan of jonathan’s writing. thanks for including us in planet.code4lib.org. i feel the same way ellie does about feeds that require me to click through for the full text. echoing ellie, it’s good to read a persuasive argument that forces me to look past my biases. jonathan rochkind 2012–09–06 at 1:37 pm yeah, i wouldn’t suggest you should only offer a feed that requires you to click through for full text. (some people do that when they want to force users to come to the original website to read the content, not anyone’s goal here). but when the articles are as long as as yours, i think a feed of just ‘briefs’ with click through to fulltext might be a useful alternative. depending on how your feed reader works, those very long articles can disrupt the reading the experience for everything else. i really like what you’re doing, you’re getting a kind of content, intelligently written, long-form thoughtful essays that are based on facts and evidence but not afraid to draw a rhetorical line of argument and take a stand — that for whatever reason code4lib journal is not getting (even on technical issues). i’m curious how you’ve managed to get this great content, not necesarily because i want to copy it at code4lib journal (i think we’re both occupying different useful niches at this point), but just cause i’m curious how you managed to be so succesful here. also interested in how many articles you turn down — you don’t publish any stinkers, not sure if that’s becuase you’re turning lots of articles down or only attracting the right folks or what. in some ways, i think it might actually be to your benefit that you don’t look like “a journal” — i think c4lj, by “looking like a journal” ends up attracting submissions that are actually of _poorer_ quality, that we need to weed out (sometimes controversially). it would take a longer post to explain why i think this is so, but think of all of the terrible boilerplate “1. literature review. 2. findings 3. conclusion” articles you see in “real journals”, that don’t actually have anything valuable to add to the discourse. ellie 2012–09–06 at 2:02 pm i would say there are two main ways we get our content. 1) we write it. the majority of the editors (myself excluded) are in the regular writing rotation. 2) we recruit it. most of our guest authors were approached by one of us to write for us as opposed to submissions (which we actually get very few of – but would be happy to get more of – hence the call in this piece). we’ve actually turned down very few articles, but again, we’ve had very few unsolicited submissions. i think the recruitment allows us to approach people we are already impressed by and does help with quality, but it also hurts us in terms of getting a broader diversity of voices since we are limited by who we come into contact with (again, hence the call in this piece). karl 2012–09–05 at 5:02 pm i’ve never felt more a part of the broader library community than seeing some of my comments relayed here. thank you again for letting my input matter a little. many times has this blog renewed my faltering interest in librarianship. ellie 2012–09–06 at 10:13 am aw shucks! we’re blushing :) this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct an interview with paul ford and gina trapani – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 13 jun brett bonfield /3 comments an interview with paul ford and gina trapani paul ford and gina trapani by brett bonfield gina trapani and paul ford are programmers, interface designers, authors, editors, and broadcasters. they are consistently involved in the kinds of projects that we as librarians undertake when we’re at our best: finding imaginative, meaningful ways to make as much information as possible widely available, easily accessible, and interesting. gina trapani was the founding editor of lifehacker and has published lifehacker: 88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day (wiley, 2006), upgrade your life: the lifehacker guide to working smarter, faster, better (wiley, 2008), the complete guide to google wave (3ones, 2010), and lifehacker: the guide to working smarter, faster, and better (wiley, 2011) (the latter two with co-author adam pash). she is currently the founding and lead developer for thinkup, “a free, open source web application” that you can use to track “all your activity on social networks like twitter, facebook and google+,” the author and publisher of todo.txt apps (available for ios and android, as well as other platforms), the creator of narrow the gapp, “a data-driven web site about the gender pay gap” that is made with “open data, isosceles, bootstrap, insomnia, outrage, and hope,” and a co-host of this week in google on the twit.tv network. fast company named her one of the “most influential women in technology” in 2009 and 2010, and wired gave her its rave award for blogging in 2006. she lives in san diego. these are just some highlights: read her complete profile, her list of activities (going back to 2005; why don’t we all publish this kind of list about ourselves?), her github profile, her wikipedia entry, and her blog, smarterware, for more information. paul ford worked for five years as an editor at harper’s magazine, where he wrote and edited for the web as well as for print, and also designed and built its website, a project that included bringing harper’s 160-year, 80,000-article, 250,000-page archive to the web (the website remains profitable). he has also written for his own blog, ftrain, since 1997, the morning news since 2001, provided commentary for npr’s all things considered from 2003–2006, and published a novel, gary benchley, rock star, with penguin/plume in 2005. his ftrain post, “processing processing,” was included in the best software writing i (edited by joel spolsky) and he once previewed an upcoming south by southwest by posting six-word song reviews of mp3s submitted by each of the 1,302 bands that were scheduled to play (which earned him inclusion in best music writing 2009, edited by greil marcus and daphne carr)  he lives in brooklyn with his wife, maureen, and their two children, and takes on consulting projects, such as helping to relaunch gourmet magazine for the ipad. again, these are just some highlights: read his linkedin profile to for the rest of the story or, if you want a real treat, read the newly published “10 timeframes,” his “closing keynote at the 2012 mfa interaction design festival, a full-day event held on saturday, may 12, 2012, to celebrate the work of the 2012 graduating class of the interaction design mfa program at the school of visual arts in new york city,” where he teaches. throughout the speech, i was reminded of raganathan’s fourth law, “save the time of the reader.” when you review your career, what themes do you see? paul: i have always wanted to integrate my love for writing with my love of technology, but for the duration of my career—which has been fun for me but rather spotty in terms of it being “a career”—the right way to combine the two has often been a puzzle. i often felt that the people who want me to write found my nerdishness a novelty at best, suspicious at worst, and i spent a lot of time, you know, being called out of meetings so that i could fix a boss’s daughter’s ipod. the people who hired me to build websites found the writing suspect and were concerned that i’d write about them, which of course i never did, as i have sense. it’s very important in a workplace to settle people into roles so that you know they won’t go over to some other division and ask questions and piss everyone off. now, however, all of this seems to be less of a big deal, and the people who hire me to be a nerd for them are less anxious about the writing, probably because when they read me they realize i’m a big nerd—whereas the people who hire me to write are glad that i can read standards documents, code, etc., as that makes me less likely to make big mistakes and gives me occasional insights. gina: i’ve had two major obsessions in my career so far: personal publishing and archiving, and technology’s role in personal productivity. i have a terrible memory. i can’t remember what i ate for dinner last night, much less things like what countries i’ve visited or important people i’ve met. my father passed away when i was 20 years old. the fear of losing memories of the little time i had with him (and everyone who means something to me) drives a compulsion to journal, blog, tweet, post status updates, check in, and upload photos. the web makes it so easy to publish and share the most mundane moments. [insert hackneyed joke about tweeting what you ate for lunch here.] but that’s the stuff that can potentially mean so much down the road, in retrospect. so, i’ve spent a lot of my career working on personal publishing and archiving tools as a way to augment my own memory, as well as leave something behind that will help my kids understand me better someday. i’m also a procrastinator who suffers from a severe case of distractibility. i got interested in tech-driven personal productivity because hey, if you can code an algorithm that makes a computer complete tasks more efficiently, why can’t you “program” a human to do the same? i think the desire to systematize everything, to shave seconds off of every email reply, to figure out how to add items to your todo list in the fewest keystrokes possible—that all comes from some exaggerated sense of mortality. the more seconds and minutes that get away from me while i’m whiling away time on facebook, the less chance i’ll have to do something meaningful. you’ve both spent a lot of time on projects that encouraged you to think like an archivist or librarian (such as gina’s thinkup and other work with personal archives, as well as narrow the gapp, and paul’s sxsw mp3 catalog and the harper’s website, especially digitizing its archive). what aspects of working with archives were different from what you expected? gina: i’ve had it easy, not having to convince big organizations to digitize their past work. i’ve worked almost exclusively with data that’s available via apis or published documents. when i started thinkup, i was in love with the idea of simply giving users control and ownership of their social data archive. but a database alone isn’t compelling enough. the question is: how does this app present or remix this data in a way that turns it into an insight? the possibilities are endless, but finding the really useful ones is the challenge. paul: for me the key to working with large corpora of any kind is to think in multiples. if it takes you this long to scan one page, or review one mp3, how long will it take to do thousands or tens of thousands? what is the unit of work? how many hours are in a day? what can i parallelize? what are the limits i’ll hit in terms of storage, or human effort, or budget? and then you work backwards from there. the other thing i’ve learned, working with many organizations, is that assets are not easily unlocked—it’s one thing to say “can we put this online?” and another to deal with the legal, territorial, and cultural anxieties that define a big organization. that’s why so many archives never see the light of day. like editing and criticism, preserving texts and making them accessible can change how you think about the texts that you create. how have your archiving activities influenced your writing? paul: prose and archives are different kinds of documents with different interfaces. reading at its best is a linear experience—you are carried along by the story. the territory is controlled by the author. archives are for exploring, for piecing together understanding of history by trawling ephemera and uncovering odd corners of the past that challenge your assumptions of how people behaved. so when i write i’m thinking about how to create a single common experience between the reader and myself. and when i work on archives i’m thinking about the facets that can be used to search and explore. gina: yes, paul’s exactly right—an archivist builds facets of exploration and a writer creates a single common experience. when i’m writing online in any form, whether it’s an essay or a facebook status update, i get hung up on the grand contradiction of the web. on one hand, it’s easy (and encouraged!) to publish the most thoughtless off-the-cuff observations that matter in the moment, to “share” with your “friends.” on the other, the technology means those ideas potentially have the shelf-life of generations. it’s not just the google cache, either. when i think that the library of congress archived my tweet about being stuck in traffic last week, it gives me chills. it makes me aspire to publish things that are fit for a long shelf life. i think longtime web writers are archivists at heart, and treat social networks as distribution channels versus publishing tools. the old-school blogger or essayist regards the work like “books on a shelf”—writing published at a permalink at a domain name they maintain and refer back to later. today, the popular way to publish is to just add your ideas to the stream of ephemera that flows by on one service or another. if you’re lucky, it’ll get a thumbs-up or a star or a plus one or a comment. but eventually, it winds up in cold storage in some social networking company’s data center. gina touched on this in her answer, but i’d like to know more. what are your thoughts on writing for social networks vs. writing shorter pieces for the web vs. writing longer pieces for the web vs. writing for print-based periodicals vs. writing for ebooks or print-based books? gina: the nature of print scares the daylights out of me. once the ink hits that page, it’s all so final. before i published a book or a print magazine article, i thought i wasn’t a “real” writer because i only worked on the web. several books and magazine articles later the web is still by far my medium of choice—whether it’s a long piece for an online publication, a short piece for my blog, a tweet or even an ebook. paul: i no longer really see the difference. in print you get paid more and often factchecked. but i’m the same kind of writer for each. it seems that an ever increasing percentage of professional writers and publishers are making their books and articles available for free or, in the case of publishing or distributing through amazon, feel compelled to sell it for less than they think it’s worth. there are notable holdouts: harper’s publisher john r. maccarthur counsels writers not to write for free, and warren buffett recently placed a big bet on the ongoing profitability of local newspapers. what are your thoughts on the future of writing as a profession, both for yourself and in general? gina: the mediums may change, but there will always be a need for good writers in this world. how difficult or easy will it be to get paid for that skill? it’s complicated. in my limited experience, giving away my writing “for free” led to my first pro gig, which led to a book deal, which yielded magazine assignments, a web show, etc. i guess on some level i believe that giving your work away is how you get paid, eventually. paul: gina’s right—giving it away brings opportunities. in general it’s very hard to get people to offer you money for writing, and even harder to get them to send the check. like most careers in the arts, it’s something you do first for the love of it. my in the lead pipe with the lead pipe colleague, micah vandegrift, suggested i ask you about the relationship between your technical work and your writing. how do your coding, interface design, and writing complement one another? do they ever interfere with each other? gina: at the keyboard level, writing code and writing prose are vastly different activities. i have to consciously shift gears from one to do the other. code is a functional thing. it either works or it doesn’t, and there are tests which tell you if your code passes or fails. you spend a lot of time debugging problems. you have a lot more leeway writing prose. whether or not it works is a more subjective assessment. zooming out, the skills do complement each other. i like to think my writing experience has helped me produce code that’s easier to read and understand, that’s coherently commented, and that’s well-documented. since i primarily work on open-source software, releasing it is an act of publishing, so readability and maintainability is a top priority. on the other side, i hope my background as a coder helps me make more logical, well-reasoned points when i’m editing a piece. paul: they combine in many ways. for example, when i review books i scan them in and search through them, and can extract the text and manipulate it to count words. programming can be a tool for seeing patterns, which is complementary to the requirements of book reviewing. also, very often, when i am trying to get writing projects done, i will write tools for content management, instead of actually creating content, as a most pleasurable means of procrastination. kudos to karen schneider for suggesting i ask you about women in tech. what are the key interim steps that will get us where we should be? by the time paul’s nine-month-old twins learn to program computers, will anyone think twice if his daughter is better at it than his son? what about by the time they enter the workforce? gina: i wish i knew the answers to these questions. two major things we must do: get ‘em young, and make stem-related educational institutions and workplaces as welcoming as possible to women and girls. paul: this is a very serious issue that i have not investigated in depth, so i’m not going to offer an opinion. except to say this: i’ve worked with a number of great female programmers, information architects, project managers, and senior executives who were entirely equivalent in skill to their male counterparts. what criteria do you use in determining which activities you’re interested in pursuing? paul: i don’t really make decisions. instead, i pick my friends carefully. then i go where people ask me to go; when no one needs me to go anywhere or do anything i work on longer essays that i’ll publish some day. gina: i say “no” to everything by default. most of the time, i’m at peace with that. when it makes me uncomfortable or regretful, i reconsider. it’s hard to say exactly what the criteria is for the stuff i decide to pursue. it’s just a gut feeling. if i feel a spark of excitement about something, i’m in. that said, i do enjoy paying my bills on time and in full. thanks to paul ford and gina trapani for their thoughtful responses and their generosity, and to karen schneider and micah vandegrift for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. archives, design, gina trapani, interface, paul ford, programming, publishing, writing stop the snobbery! why you’re wrong about community colleges and don’t even know it what is digital humanities and what’s it doing in the library? 3 responses erica jesonis 2012–06–26 at 12:34 pm really great interview. i was particularly interested in gina’s impetus to archive the details of her life partially because of her father’s death. my husband’s mother died when he was 6, and he later became fascinated with photography as a means of slowing down time and savoring the past… he’s now a pretty accomplished professional and still enjoys the archival nature of his work, knowing that he is documenting life in a way that can be revisited. brett – i am very curious how you connected these two together to do the joint interview. they are two impressive and fascinating people and i think i opened like a million tabs just clicking all the links of their very cool projects… brett bonfield 2012–06–27 at 11:27 am thanks, erica, for your comment. i admire your husband for turning his loss into something so positive. while i’ve been fortunate enough not to have experienced anything i would compare to the death of a parent, one of the ways i’ve reacted to difficulties in my own life has been… well, fanboyishness. i emulate the work of people i admire as often as i can, and try to work with them myself when it seems to make sense. lead pipe has been a great excuse to email role models like gina trapani and paul ford to see if they would be interested in sharing their ideas with our readers. maybe i’ve been picking my role models well, or maybe i’ve just been lucky, but a surprisingly high percentage of the people i’ve asked to interview, write guest articles, or serve as reviewers have agreed to participate. pingback : what i read while away unlikely words a blog of boston, providence, and the world this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct students as stakeholders: library advisory boards and privileging our users – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 6 feb erin dorney /5 comments students as stakeholders: library advisory boards and privileging our users in brief: this article investigates the idea of library student advisory boards as mechanisms for building more student-centered libraries at colleges and universities. benefits of these types of organizations, measures of success, and the importance of acting on evidence-based user feedback are discussed. student orientation by tulane public relations by erin dorney introduction a google search for “library student advisory board” returns hundreds of results from different schools, leading us to documents that describe organizational structures, missions, and goals. it is clear that many academic and public libraries have bought into the idea of soliciting feedback directly from their users. however, while some of the literature has focused on the need for these bodies to exist, it is more difficult to find explorations of how libraries are translating feedback from their advisory boards into relevant change, how they are measuring their advisory boards’ success, and how much status or authority they are imparting to the board. this article, which focuses on academic libraries, explores the idea of students as stakeholders by examining the framework and uses of library student advisory boards. when possible, we favor evidence provided by our users over our own assumptions. advisory boards according to lee teitel, in an eric clearinghouse on higher education report, an advisory committee is “a group of volunteers that meets regularly on a long-term basis to provide advice and/or support to an institution or one of its subunits” (1). many academic libraries have developed such a group in order to provide more direct lines of communication between the library and the student body. some library student advisory boards are volunteer-based, some are elected through student governance bodies, some are official clubs, and some are ad-hoc—it all depends on local institutional factors. teitel states: “advisory committees can provide mechanisms at all levels of higher education to help improve communication and interaction with the outside world. they can provide fresh insights, powerful connections, access to valuable resources, and excellent public relations. in conjunction with a strategic plan or total quality management, they can be key elements in renewing and revitalizing an institution” (2). for a practical guide on starting a library student advisory board, check out the book the library student advisory board: why your academic library needs it and how to make it work by amy l. deuink and marianne seiler (mcfarland & company, inc., 2009). the book covers topics not included in this article, such as how to recruit members, examples of club activities, advisor duties, fundraising and relationship building. what students have to offer in 2011, zahra et al. completed a study of over 30 academic advisory boards that supported entrepreneurship centers. these boards consisted of community leaders and businesspeople convened to provide guidance on outreach, service, teaching, and fund-raising. defining an advisory board as a group of individuals brought together to help an institution better achieve its mission and goals, the study found that advisory board members provided the following resources to their organizations: legitimacy resources market intelligence access to data expertise industry reach (zahra 113) these resources form a basis for comparing how student library advisory boards may contribute within the context of higher education. legitimacy students are the primary clientele of most academic libraries. by giving them an opportunity to participate in the decision-making process, libraries can ensure that the collections, services, and programming they offer are truly student-centered. when communicating the importance of the library, one strategy would be to point to student-initiated decisions that demonstrate the value the library is providing to its community. resources while students pay tuition and fees to the institution that funds the operation of the library, many of the resources they bring to an advisory board are intangible in nature. these resources include many of the factors discussed below, including market intelligence, access to data, expertise, and industry reach. market intelligence with a fresh group of students arriving every year, working with a student board offers a way to gather information about changing needs and desires. students are immersed in current trends and can share information about the different technologies and behaviors that shape their information-seeking and usage. what form of social media is popular? are students using torrent sites to download textbooks? what type of program would be interesting enough to get people out of the dorms? libraries may be able to forecast or observe some of these factors, but working directly with users ensures that we are providing relevant services rather projecting what we think students want. much of this market intelligence will be specific to your institutional culture, strengthening the library’s hold on niche services and collections that provide local value. access to data coming from varied backgrounds, students have a diversity of experience that libraries can only glimpse from the outside. this is particularly true if board membership is solicited from underrepresented segments of the university community. while we are deeply entrenched in the profession of librarianship, students are engaged in the pursuit of higher education. librarians might all remember being students, but with technological and pedagogical change taking place all around us, we need to go directly to the source. students on an advisory board have a different kind of access to their peers because they see them regularly in classes and live with them in the dorms. they can keep their ears open for complaints and engage in discussions about how the library is being used (or ignored) by their friends. students are also an excellent source for into research and study habits (sharing their personal calendars, for example). expertise one of the most valuable resources that could be made available by student advisory boards is related to marketing: students know what will get the attention of other students. no one can use a service, collection, or attend an event if they don’t know about it. some students may also be experts in using library systems—experiencing them holistically from an outside perspective. much of our work as librarians is siloed, with cataloguers working on records, systems librarians building interfaces, developers building websites, subject librarians providing research help, and administrators creating policies. a student’s eyes may see gaps between these different segments and perhaps even affordances that we didn’t realize were there. industry reach the strongest industry power students have is as peer influencers. an informed and engaged board member can become a library advocate on campus, and champion the resources and services that are available. additionally, many students are more comfortable approaching their peers than a librarian, so if board members are identifiable they can provide a more comfortable line of communication. this can be facilitated by soliciting known “influencers” on campus to serve on the advisory board, such as students who are deeply involved in campus media outlets, student government, or other activities that put them in contact with a variety of their peers. measures of success while the existence of so many library student advisory boards indicates that many librarians have been persuaded that these types of groups are valuable, data on measuring their effectiveness is slim. as teitel states, this is likely because “…not everyone agrees on the definition of effectiveness” (3). many libraries include the existence of their student advisory board in bulletins, annual reports, and on their websites, but actual information about outcomes and accomplishments are difficult to locate. for instance, a recent search for “library student advisory board” in library, information science & technology abstracts (lista) returned minimal results—reviews of deiunk and seilers’ book and a few tangentially-related articles. for many libraries, the fact that the group exists seems to be success enough. this is particularly relevant when inviting critical users to join the advisory board. in her 2011 article about developing a faculty advisory board, farrell states: “this is an opportunity to turn a complainer into a champion as the board reviews services and collections and the complainer may gain a broader understanding of their complaints. if the library is failing to serve a certain segment of the faculty, then what better way to gain insights into this population than by listening to their perspectives?” (193). the quality of feedback gleaned from student advisory boards is another potential area for assessment. this measure is subjective and may vary based on organizational culture or require the negotiation of multiple (possibly conflicting) agendas. student rejection of an initiative that a library/librarian has invested a substantial amount of time and funding into may not be well received. farrell also states that “an advisory group’s success is ultimately determined by…its impact on library collections and services” (196). in their book the library student advisory board, deuink and seiler express the need for clear and measurable learning outcomes for all board activities. among other activities, their organization at penn state schuylkill raises money to build library collections, which can then be tracked and reported for assessment purposes. this form of assessment relies on the traditional metrics of collection usage to demonstrate value and success of the advisory board. in terms of areas ripe for future study, the assessment of library student advisory boards would be a valuable research topic. the adaptation of existing studies regarding non-student library advisory boards1 would also be intriguing. privileging the user while many academic libraries have student advisory boards, the techniques for measuring the success of these groups are, at best, lacking any sort of consensus. it is also unclear whether these groups have the ability to influence library decisions or if they exist solely because they sound good “on paper.” the idea of soliciting feedback directly from users is a sensible one, but privileging that feedback and actually making changes can be much more difficult. it sounds good when we can say to administrators (or the president of student government, or even the occasional student who seems to offer nothing but complaints) that we have a mechanism for getting student input on ideas and initiatives. but are we really listening? are we using that feedback to improve our services and systems? in their article on student advisory committees in academic libraries, benefiel et al. question why our largest user group (students) have the least amount of input regarding library decisions and policies that impact them. this disconnect between library decision making and its primary customers reinforces the stereotype of libraries as gatekeepers, doling out services that we deem “good for” our users regardless of their desires. conclusion it is a challenging time for all libraries, including those at academic institutions. while public libraries are familiar with responding to their communities (or board of directors), academic libraries have maintained more autonomy based on the traditional underpinnings of the library as the center for knowledge and intellectual growth within higher education. however, in an age in which accountability, responsiveness, and transparency are made priorities within higher education, the role of students as stakeholders in the direction of the library might not be far off. libraries need to solicit feedback directly from their users and use that information to bring about change. not just change for its own sake, but relevant change that will keep us vital to the communities we serve. imagine if we shifted the paradigm from “students don’t know what they need so libraries need to educate them” to “what exactly are they asking for?” what if libraries became really good at the things our users want, even though those things might be different depending on the institution? we could increase satisfaction and use, and display some sophisticated tricks along the way, building an evidence-based, student-centered library. if your library has a student advisory board, please talk to us in the comments section! i am eager to hear how your group measures success, and if you’ve had difficulty making use of user feedback, especially when it appears to conflict with feedback from other librarians, faculty, or administrators. many thanks to amy l. deuink, melissa gold, and lead piper brett bonfield for edits, comments, and thought provoking questions regarding this article. references and further readings benefiel, candace r., wendi arant, and elaine gass. “a new dialogue: a student advisory committee in an academic library.” journal of academic librarianship 25.2 (1999): 111. deuink, amy, and marianne seiler. the library student advisory board: why your academic library needs it and how to make it work. north carolina: mcfarland & company, inc., 2009. print. farrell, maggie. “developing a faculty advisory group.” journal of library administration 51.2 (2011): 189-197. kane, jennifer j., and jay e. jisha. “an analysis of sport management clubs and advisory boards in sport management programs across north america.” international sports journal 8.1 (2004): 132-138. teitel, lee, washington, dc. eric clearinghouse on higher education, and washington, dc. school of education and human development. george washington univ. the advisory committee advantage. creating an effective strategy for programmatic improvement. eric digest. n.p.: 1994. zahra, shaker a., lance r. newey, and j. myles shaver. “academic advisory boards’ contributions to education and learning: lessons from entrepreneurship centers.” academy of management learning & education 10.1 (2011): 113-129. leonhardt, thomas wilburn. “key donor cultivation: building for the future.” journal of library administration 51.2 (2011): 198-208.; kendrick-samuel, syntychia. “junior friends groups taking teen services to the next level.” young adult library services 10.2 (2012): 15-18.; farmer, lesley s. j. “collection development in partnership with youth: uncovering best practices.” collection management 26.2 (2001): 67. [↩] academic libraries, advisory boards, college students, future, users “someday when i am incompetent…”: reflections on the peter principle, leadership, and emotional intelligence aaron swartz 5 responses notinmy 2013–02–08 at 1:02 pm excellent topic, erin, beautifully framed and organized and great references. it’s something i’d like to implement or add student representation to an existing faculty committee, perhaps. when i visited the student government last year, the students’ requests were few (such as more library hours, more printers, more computers), and as they are given more chances to participate and we can increase of services, it may generate ideas for the students about what to request. and most institutional student surveys do not address library services in depth, while at the same time one needs to be careful about generating survey fatigue. i’ve also used walk-in surveys. at any rate, your theme of participation towards results and improvement is just right. erin dorney 2013–02–08 at 1:22 pm hi garrett – thanks for the comment. i have a feeling that the student requests you outlined (more availability, printing + computing) initially come up at a lot of campuses – i know they have at my institution. i think you’re right, the more communication the library can engage in with students, the more aware they will become about what we have to offer and how we might be able to tweak what we’re doing to better meet their needs. it’s a continual process. be safe with the storm stuff up there in ma and thanks for reading! pingback : frontal lobe » blog archive » on moocs, libraries, and disruptive models the mental machinations of sands fish petitelibrarian 2013–03–15 at 3:33 pm i’m in the process of taking over leadership of my university library’s graduate student advisory board while a colleague is on leave. our graduate board has been running for about one year at this point and i would say it’s a wonderful success thanks to my colleague who has worked so hard to build it. the group is managed and attended by librarians in our scholars commons, a section of the library devoted to graduate students and faculty needs. this means we are often able to respond right away to student concerns or, if we are unable to do so, bring graduate student concerns directly into the conversations taking place within the library. examples of this are as small as returning our drive-up library book drop, which had been moved during renovations. another much larger example is the expansion of our faculty delivery service to include teaching assistants. this took a lot of time and planning on the part of different departments in the library to implement, but it’s been an amazing success. having the voice of the graduate advisory board certainly helped to make both of these things happen. we’ve also found that the students on the board not only appreciate having us listen to their opinions, but also like receiving information about the library first hand. erin dorney 2013–03–17 at 8:27 pm hi abby – thanks for the comment! so does your library have multiple advisory boards, for undergraduates and graduate students? if so, do you do different activities with them? i have found that the advisory board meetings are an excellent time to dispel myths that may be circulating about the library and equip students with the right information to share with their friends. more than once they have reported to me that they were able to clarify something that their professor or a peer said regarding the library. good luck and thanks for reading! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct reflections on active collecting during difficult times – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2021 15 sep kyna herzinger and rebecca pattillo /0 comments reflections on active collecting during difficult times by kyna herzinger and rebecca pattillo in brief at the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, the archives and special collections library at the university of louisville launched a project to collect the experiences of those living through what many saw as history in the making. just weeks later, in the wake of the police killings of breonna taylor and george floyd, activists and citizens took to louisville’s streets to protest racial injustice, again marking an unequivocally historical moment. instead of collecting protestors’ experiences, archives and special collections began to consider the practicalities and the ethics of active collecting. these historical events occurred in succession, but the conversations around the movement for racial justice reframed our efforts as archivists to document pandemic experiences. this article explores the implications of active collecting and concludes that active collecting needs a framework of support. we briefly review the covid-19 project we launched at the university of louisville and assess its outcomes. we then use this project as a reflection on the role of active collecting as reframed by the lens of the movement for racial justice, and we propose that the scaffolding of this framework be formed by three important features: critical reflection, institutional affirmation, and an ethic of care. positionality statement kyna herzinger is a white-presenting yonsei (fourth-generation japanese american), pacific northwest u.s.-born, straight, cis, able-bodied woman. rebecca pattillo is a white, southern u.s.-born, queer, cis, able-bodied woman. at the time of writing, both are early to mid-career archivists employed in tenure-track faculty positions at the university of louisville in louisville, ky. introduction in 2016 and 2017, physicists jordan cotler and frank wilczek explored a framework in quantum theory that they called “entangled histories.” using this framework, they conceptualized the past as “an entangled superposition [or interweaving] of time evolutions which are shaped by the outcome of measurement in the present.”1 for the non-physicist, journalist jenna wortham offers a useful translation of cotler and wilczek’s work. “our best description of the past,” she summarizes, “is not a fixed chronology but multiple chronologies that are intertwined with each other.” 2 historians, too, have harnessed the term “entangled histories” as a way to conceptualize the interconnected practices, perceptions, and processes that influence seemingly disparate cultures.3 many of us, though, do not need the disciplines of physics or history to draw from simple observation this lesson: that countless interwoven stories give depth and nuance to a seemingly monolithic past, and at the same time, current technologies can potentially give voice to the many discrete stories that are entangled within a collective experience.4 rewind to the early months of 2020 and the archivist’s thorniest question—what should we save?—seemed obvious. significant history is rarely apparent when we are living in the moment, but with the global pandemic of the novel coronavirus, it felt like history was unfolding in real time. this awareness was paired with the sense that libraries, archives, and museums could throw all their resources toward documenting the evolving events but could never capture them all, and for that reason, archivists were uninhibited by the question of whose stories were the most significant and therefore the most worth saving. the pandemic represented an opportunity to preserve the entangled histories that would bring depth and nuance to tomorrow’s past. it was a chance for the documentary record to reflect more than just a handful of culturally dominant voices; it was a chance to capture a diverse cacophony. the university of louisville archives and special collections (asc) in louisville, kentucky, responded, sensing both an opportunity and an imperative. along with many repositories across the united states, asc launched a project to document the experiences of the university’s faculty, staff, students, and administrators during the covid-19 pandemic by inviting the submission of photos, videos, emails, blog or social media posts, and the like. experiences and reflections could range from direct observations to artistic expression and could touch on themes that spanned displacement from student housing, working from home, the shift to online learning or teaching, or leading the university through a crisis. in the following weeks, asc also volunteered to serve as the preservation home for a covid-19 time capsule initiated by the city’s frazier kentucky history museum.5 this partnership avoided competing collecting while it harnessed each institution’s strengths, pairing the frazier’s contacts with asc’s technological infrastructure. at the same time that schools moved online and white-collar employees were asked to work from home, a troublingly familiar story was captured by the media. a 26-year-old black woman named breonna taylor was shot and killed by louisville metro police when plain-clothed officers served a “no knock” warrant shortly after midnight on march 13, 2020. as the pandemic’s lockdowns and unprecedented job loss spurred widespread uncertainty, louisville activists began to seek justice for breonna. these local protests gained momentum as the national movement for racial justice grew in response to the may 25, 2020 murder of george floyd by police in minneapolis, minnesota. demonstrations and marches in louisville grew from hundreds to thousands of participants and prompted a range of responses from local, state, and federal officials that at times grew violent. the events of the days and weeks that followed may 25 were extraordinary, and again, asc saw the unequivocal significance of the moment. but while these events stirred the same impulse to collect, asc did not attempt a documentation project. instead, we began to consider the practicalities and the ethics of active collecting through the lens of this movement for racial justice.6 the reasons for this shift were varied and will be discussed in greater detail below. without a doubt, though, the movement to recognize the deep-seated role of racial injustice within our infrastructures, our laws, our institutions, and our own selves all served to illuminate an archival past that has been fraught with issues of ownership, agency, and representation. as we saw violence and force used against protestors, we turned to activist archivists like the blackivists and members of the teams that support documenting the now and witness.7 each highlighted issues that could emerge when preserving emotional, often traumatizing history and doing so with no foundation of trust, no mechanism for sustained support, and no guarantee of protection from the authorities. out of their poignant work, we began to ask questions like: is our collecting appropriate? how do we shift focus from collecting materials to serving communities?8 how do we ensure underrepresented communities are not simply the subject of collections but exercise control over their own histories and representation? how do we, as scott cline advocated in 2009, “operate within a moral and ethical imperative that ultimately associates archival practice [with]…the call of justice”?9 this article does not offer a tidy formula or a multi-step plan that will guide active collecting during difficult times. instead, it offers a glimpse into a messy and—as of yet—unfinished process, grappling with the areas of professional practice that these short-term projects expose, but that demand thoughtful, long-term cultivation and commitment. the authors hope that through our experience readers will find useful issues to consider before launching any active collecting project. we will briefly review the covid-19 project that we launched and assess the outcomes, and we will set asc’s efforts to collect individual experiences during the pandemic into a reflection on the role of active collecting in the archival profession as re-examined through the lens of the movement for racial justice. background historically, asc’s component units, which consist of rare books, photographic archives, university archives, digital initiatives, and the oral history center, have collected materials related to underrepresented individuals, groups, and topics.10 each collecting area has proudly embraced this identity, redoubling efforts in recent years and enabling targeted collecting to inform routine practice in an effort to capture a more representative documentary record. one of the factors that influenced this trajectory was the preexistence of a collecting repository in louisville, the filson historical society, which had been actively preserving the early history of the city and the surrounding region since the late nineteenth century. local history for many early historical societies focused on affluent, white families, and such was the case for the filson.11 the core of its collections and resulting publications reflected the affluent, white, cis male perspectives and interests of its founding members, and as a consequence, modern, twentieth and twenty-first-century collections that focus on urban history, social service, cultural organizations, and black and lgbtq rights found a more natural fit with asc. these circumstances have enabled asc staff to actively collect materials that range from the personal experiences of latinx community members to louisville’s underground punk rock scene, but they have also been hindered by an institutional history of racism and a lack of racial diversity within asc’s personnel.12 when situated within asc’s collecting practices, the covid-19 documentation project was not unusual, but neither was it unprecedented. in 2009, a flood of the ohio river had triggered asc’s first in-the-moment active collecting. this was prompted by local interest in louisville’s worst recorded flood, which had occurred in 1937. the 1937 flood served as a community touchstone, captivating interest across generations because of its wide-reaching impact. the 2009 flood project ensured that documentation would not be lost and, more importantly, supported the ability of louisville’s citizens to reflect on their own history. without established policies or procedures, asc quickly adapted forms and workflows in order to document the flood’s impact. asc solicited digital photographs from community members and collected online content through a trial subscription of archive-it, but even though the project established a precedent for quick-response collecting, it did not ultimately prompt a conversation about future active collecting. it is our hope that the covid-19 project will help asc frame key considerations that could guide future decision-making.13 project even though this article seeks to explore the implications of active collecting and not the merits of how asc executed the project, we will briefly chart our approach to establish context. the university of louisville issued a work-from-home mandate effective march 16, 2020, and classes, which were scheduled to resume after spring break but had been postponed for two days, moved online. one week into the university’s remote operations, the director of asc shared the university of north carolina – charlotte’s newly launched covid-19 active collecting project, suggesting that this could be a task for the hourly and student workers who we worried would lose hours during remote operations.14 the idea of launching a project of this nature garnered enthusiastic support from us and our colleagues. as with the flood of 2009, we sensed that future generations would want to know how the university and the broader louisville community responded to and navigated the crisis. we quickly realized that the challenge of designing and executing this project in a short time frame was ill-suited for hourly and student workers, so a team of four faculty archivists worked to implement the project.15 in fact, the initial task of determining a scope and workflow were more complex than we anticipated and were further complicated by our new teleworking realities. workstations consisted of whatever equipment employees had on hand at home and communication was handled through a flurry of overlapping emails, instant messages, and texts. despite these challenges, we quickly made several key decisions. first, we determined to collect solely from individuals affiliated with the university of louisville. we felt that the deed of gift would be less complicated if we treated submissions like university records, and we were concerned about the number of submissions we might receive if we opened the project to the community at large. we also did not want to duplicate efforts that we learned were underway at other area institutions. second, we selected a platform that would allow us to receive files with corresponding metadata along with a digitally signed agreement. initially, we assumed that we could replicate the unc charlotte project wholesale, but we found that the google form that they used had some limitations. asc would have had to pay for temporary storage, and contributors would have had to limit submissions to 10gb or less. we also considered file-sharing programs like the university’s box subscription, dropbox, and others, but ultimately, we decided to use libwizard. this product, which is an add-on to the popular libguides platform, ensured that each submission, along with its metadata and donor agreement, would remain together. even though libwizard accepted only certain standard file types, contributors could submit up to 100gb per entry, and we had the benefit of unlimited storage. finally, we determined what information we wanted to collect from participants, and more importantly, we crafted a donor agreement (see appendix a). the latter was adapted from existing agreements and drew heavily from what was used during the 2009 flood project. our libraries’ scholarly communications endowed chair, who holds a jd, reviewed the text which gave asc a non-exclusive license to exhibit, promote, reproduce, and distribute the donated materials. as an open license, the donor would retain copyright over their material. our director proposed the active collecting project on march 21, and we launched it on march 25. with the submission portal live and a workflow adapted from our existing digital processing practices, we then turned attention to publicizing the portal. first, we shared directly with faculty partners who had regularly incorporated archival research into their coursework and with whom asc staff had already developed a rapport. we also shared widely, notifying departments across campus and requesting their assistance to disseminate the link. we sent additional messages to student and employee organizations and placed a short pitch in the university’s announcement digest, which distributes separate daily emails to students and employees. within a few days, the office of communications and marketing contacted us about a write-up for the university’s official news site, and later, the project was featured by the association of research libraries, alongside several other libraries and archives that launched similar projects.16 we also shared the project on asc’s facebook and instagram social media accounts. archivists from other states reached out with questions, and we encouraged them to borrow as much or as little as made sense for their circumstances. meanwhile, the university libraries’ communications coordinator ensured that the project was visible to the libraries’ stakeholders. once the portal was ready to receive submissions, we also revisited the idea of collecting experiences from the broader louisville community. we learned by then that a local institution, the frazier kentucky history museum, had launched a similar project called the coronavirus capsule.17 we knew it was impractical to run similar projects in the same geographic region. we also knew that the frazier, a smithsonian institution affiliate whose mission is to interpret stories from the history of the state, did not have the infrastructure to preserve born-digital content. for that reason, we sought to form a partnership by offering to be the preservation home of the coronavirus capsule. by the time representatives from both institutions met, the frazier had established a website for the project, received submissions via email, and displayed them in a virtual exhibit. asc’s offer to preserve and provide long-term access to the coronavirus capsule was accepted, an arrangement that had the added benefit of satisfying our vision to document as many experiences as possible. since the frazier had been affected by the governor’s “healthy-at-home” order, which suspended operations of all non-essential businesses, frontline employees who typically worked with the public were assigned remote tasks arranging and describing the submissions.18 asc’s metadata librarian created a google sheet to capture metadata and document the submissions. the fields were standardized as much as possible by using data validation, drop-down menus with localized controlled vocabularies, and directions embedded in field headings. after several weeks of ongoing training and iterative changes to the spreadsheet, the frazier staff developed a rhythm, and we repeated a similar process when they began preparing the files for transfer. outcomes what we hoped to accomplish was clear to us. we wanted to capture the individual stories that would enrich an understanding of our shared experience during a truly historic moment. we could not, however, predict what would occur as a result of our efforts. the covid-19 documentation project and the frazier’s coronavirus capsule were, in effect, wildcards. following the march 25 launch of asc’s campus project, a few submissions trickled in and stopped just two weeks later. a second batch of materials, which appeared to be a class assignment, were submitted a few months later so that, in total, only eighteen individuals consisting of fourteen students, three staff, and one faculty member contributed their experiences. this was strikingly meager for a campus community of twenty-three thousand students.19 although we plan to keep the portal open for at least the first half of 2021, there has been no evidence to suggest that we will capture the full campus experience that we sought. in considering why we had such a low response rate, it is difficult to imagine that it never reached its audience—especially given our thorough and repeated efforts to share the project with the students, faculty, staff, and even administrators of our campus community. it is possible, though, that the submission portal itself was a deterrent. metadata fields that required the donor to provide a description of the submission, to upload each file individually, and to navigate the “legalese” tone of the agreement may have discouraged some individuals. some simply may not have had the time. spring break had coincided with midterms, and students and faculty needed to quickly turn their focus to learning or teaching online and then to tackling end-of-semester projects. more importantly, the early months of the pandemic were especially stressful and uncertain. some people quite understandably did not want to participate. others did not have the emotional, mental, or even physical capacity to reflect on the moment, particularly as many juggled family health concerns, childcare responsibilities, job loss, food or housing insecurity, and other challenges triggered by the pandemic. the frazier’s coronavirus capsule, in comparison, received a much greater response with 328 separate submissions from individuals, families, and entire classrooms. this number reflected the project’s scope as it accepted materials from anyone in the louisville metro region, but it also revealed the number of relationships that the frazier had already cultivated with area educators and which had been formalized for the purpose of the project as a partnership with the jefferson county public schools. although there were more submissions, the vast majority came from elementary school children and were works of amateur art. the coronavirus capsule thus contained a considerable amount of material that we had not previously accepted as archival. similarly, materials received from the faculty, staff, and students of the university community were not items that we would have otherwise automatically accessioned. submissions included some visual items like a photograph of the vacant campus and a queue of hardware store customers spaced every six feet, as well as a video of empty toilet paper shelves. as discrete items, the materials told little of the story that was not better framed and contextualized by local media. submissions also included written reflections, but the narratives were short, averaging only a paragraph long, and tended to be broad. they touched on multiple themes like isolation from friends, increased time with family, and remote instruction, but were scant on the illustrations or explanations that give depth to first-hand accounts. furthermore, the typos and unclear prose betrayed several authors’ hasty efforts. one student, who is now an alumna, did succeed in capturing a full picture of her experience, and she did so by submitting thoughtful content every few weeks. her submissions contained a mix of journal entries, photographs, and even an original political cartoon. the student struck a balance between specific experiences and contextual observations. early on, she reflected on the inequities exposed by the pandemic, and as the summer progressed, she shifted to the movement for racial equality, the presidential election, and the spike of infections going into the new year. the frazier’s coronavirus capsule contained similar gems such as an original folk song by two local musicians and evocative artwork that captured the range of experiences—from isolation and loss to determination and hope. the trends we observed in the first few months remained steady throughout the year. in hindsight, these early observations hinted at some underlying issues with active collecting during difficult times, but these issues did not become apparent to us until the movement for racial justice began to unfold. this social reckoning, which centered on the impact of systemic racism and white supremacy in american life, highlighted racial disparities like higher death and unemployment rates in communities of color during the covid-19 pandemic. this simple fact served as a catalyst to reframe our active collecting. we began to wonder how we might be perpetuating problematic representation in our collections and on whose emotional labor we were relying. put another way, we witnessed two significant historical events—a pandemic and a social movement—that occurred in rapid succession, but in which the second illuminated the first. in response, we began to grapple with the ways that privilege or the lack of privilege, stress or trauma, and movements or individual acts of dissent can play out in what is collected, how it is collected, and how it is represented or used. reflections the death of breonna taylor on march 13 coincided with early efforts to contain the spread of covid-19 in the united states, and the investigation into taylor’s death paralleled the launch of both asc and the frazier’s active collecting projects. taylor’s death was covered by the local media, but it was overshadowed by coverage of the growing pandemic. the movement to seek justice for breonna taylor began to take shape two months later around mid-may, and following the may 25 murder of george floyd, quickly solidified locally and across the nation. hundreds of protestors gathered in louisville on may 26 and, over the following weeks, that number swelled to thousands. jefferson square park, which is located at the heart of the city and adjacent to the county courthouse, city hall, and the louisville metro police department headquarters, became an impromptu base for activists and was renamed “injustice square park” and “breonna taylor park” by local black organizers. activists built a memorial to taylor and the countless black victims of racial and police violence and continuously occupied the park daily until winter weather made conditions unsafe.20 meanwhile, civic groups, institutions, religious organizations, and university of louisville students, faculty, and staff organized additional marches throughout the city during the spring, summer, and fall of 2020. the movement for racial justice occurred nearly back to back with the pandemic and captured our attention as caretakers and advocates of our local history and witnesses to the continued brutalization of black lives. our desire to document was driven by the conviction that history and the ability to reflect on one’s own experience are important, but that day-to-day life is often fleeting. these sentiments absolutely rang true in the early weeks of the pandemic and reverberated during the local movement for racial justice. but this resonance also offered an intense, strikingly useful lens that nudged us toward self-reflection. we had not grappled with the pragmatic issues encountered during the covid-19 projects (such as the impact on staff and lack of community engagement), much less the more troubling (the inclination to collect traumatic experiences, including from those who would bear a greater position of the costs). meanwhile, the movement for racial justice illuminated the need for humility and an ethical response in our archival work that we had overlooked. the following highlights some of the reflections and questions that we have been grappling with ever since. as the justice for breonna taylor movement gained momentum, we were immediately struck by our own impulse to actively collect materials that would document the protests. we considered our positionality as white and white presenting women, respectively, within a nearly all-white archival staff, at a predominantly white institution. we did not trust our own perspectives, which, from our own place of privilege, had driven a sense of urgency into documenting the covid-19 pandemic. we wondered how collecting racial justice experiences would only reinforce the cultural dominance of racism. our archival colleagues, after all, cautioned that records are “value-laden instruments of power,” and their creation, representation, and use are far from neutral.21 for that reason, we were hesitant to expand our active collecting to incorporate the movement for racial justice. our first question shifted to if, rather than what, we should collect. we were also hesitant to document protest experiences without the collaboration of local organizers. comments that came out of the society of american archivists’ community reflection on black lives and archives forum stressed that some local organizations may not want the assistance of archivists from predominantly white institutions, and forum participants recognized that some communities had little reason to trust those who have historically ignored their history.22 these considerations reframed our role as we accepted that we may not be the right people to actively collect the material, our institution may not be the right place to preserve them, and now may not be the right time. underlying this archival restraint was not inaction, but a movement toward an archival autonomy that is grounded in the recognition of participants as co-creators who should be empowered as decision-makers.23 because we did not have established partnerships with the activist community, nor an adequate relationship of trust with existing community-based memory workers, we chose to collect widely accessible materials as a launching point for our future researchers. these materials lacked depth as they took the form of local and national news articles, as well as social media posts promoting local events, press conferences, and actions by local activists and racial justice organizations. to protect privacy, the materials did not identify individual participants but captured the public face of organizations that were mentioned in the media. we have not ruled out the possibility of more substantial or directed collecting in the future, but only if it involves the black activist community and memoryworkers, is given institutional priority and support, and can be done with what public historian aleia brown describes as an “ethic of care.” brown’s work is situated in a long history of black feminist scholarship and memorializes ongoing events that affect black life. brown describes an ethic of care as “a deep love for black folks, and commitment to being accountable to black communities.”24 michelle caswell and marika cifor also frame the archivists’ role through the lens of feminist theory, highlighting that an ethic of care binds archivists “to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutually effective responsibility.”25 as we discussed the possibility of documenting the racial justice movement in louisville, we did so with an understanding that without a reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship with the activists and citizens we sought to document, we would be neglecting that ethic of care. the issues that became apparent during our conversations about documenting the racial justice movement in louisville revealed a lack of thoughtful consideration about active collecting as a whole, so that, ironically, these relatively short-term projects exposed areas in need of long-term attention. two areas, in particular, were captured by archivist mario ramirez, who highlighted, first, that simply acquiring diverse collections without diversifying those who are doing the collecting is inadequate. asc’s success in collecting from underrepresented communities obscured an institutional history steeped in whiteness, and one tellingly marked by a nearly all-white archival staff. our white identities influence the decisions we make about acquisition, description, and use, and ultimately, shape what and how collections are represented to researchers. by choosing a rather passive approach to our covid-19 documentation project by way of an online portal and lack of significant interpersonal engagement, we relied on the neutrality and safety of our whiteness. second, ramirez argued that repositories must embrace “a paradigmatic shift in power wherein whiteness no longer claims unquestioned and protected status and where the roots of our professional imbalances are addressed.”26 black, indigenous, and other archivists of color have borne the weight of this work, highlighting the harmful and oppressive systems that are upheld by a predominantly white profession.27 public historian gvgk tang poignantly observed one of the consequences of these power structures. “white middle-class public historians” they note, “are columbusing activist history-making and grassroots preservation work—treating it as a new frontier to be discovered, explored, and exploited. the recent spate of pandemic and protest collection projects initiated by traditional practitioners erases a rich history of activist-led scholarship and documentation efforts.”28 at minimum, white archivists must listen and learn, particularly when it comes to active collecting of events that disproportionately affect bipoc, lgbtq+, neurodiverse, disabled, and other historically marginalized groups. “ultimately, rendering marginalized communities the subjects of your research [or in this case, active collecting effort]” tang writes, “doesn’t absolve you of your privilege or complicity in an inherently anti-black, racist, classist, and ableist system.”29 if, indeed, “one of the most overlooked but important things that archivists working in hegemonic institutions can do is to ensure the acquisition, preservation, and accessibility of the very records that hold that institution accountable to its constituents,” what can archivists do to redirect their efforts and attention?30 instead of commandeering the work and history of underrepresented communities, perhaps archivists should consider what they can do to dismantle oppressive structures by maintaining the evidence of individual and group actions. an ethic of care should have also extended to employee wellness. as we came to realize the importance of aligning rapid response projects with strategic priorities, we realized that we had never discussed what tasks would be postponed to make room for active collecting. although projects that take longer than expected are far from abnormal, our day-to-day responsibilities never abated with some things taking longer to accomplish simply because of our remote work environments. the financial impact of the pandemic, meanwhile, prompted salary reductions, retirement contribution cuts, and furloughs across campus, but we met the demands of the projects aware of how important it was to ensure that asc was seen as a contributing member of the campus community. to be sure, we were grateful to have jobs, but in hindsight we wondered how to affirm workers during times when compensation is simultaneously diminished. we also wondered what could have been done to ensure that the workload did not add additional pressure to employees who were already coping with the stresses of an evolving covid-19 environment. asc employees, after all, were not immune to the concerns of the pandemic and louisville’s reckoning with racial injustice. our archival colleagues outside of louisville took interest in our active collecting efforts, with an eye toward launching something similar at their own institutions. it seemed to us that these kinds of projects were almost (forgive the bad pun) contagious as if many of us were engaged in a professional form of “keeping up with the joneses.” thanks to an increase in virtual professional development, which quickly became the norm through the summer and into the fall, we connected with institutions across the nation that also launched documentation projects and who described the same lack of engagement and dearth of submissions that we had seen. in our own community we were careful not to duplicate the collecting efforts of other area institutions, so if individuals did not want to share their experiences or did not see a need to do so, were these projects only serving archivists’ desires to collect? eira tansey described this initial fervor to collect first covid-19 and then racial justice materials as “the newest form of archival commodification” wherein archivists exploit personal experiences—at times traumatic experiences—in their scramble to appear relevant or signal care for their communities. in the end, though, archivists only jeopardize their own relevance as they shift attention away from one of their most important functions: holding institutions accountable.31 if preserving evidence of and maximizing access to institutional acts enables public scrutiny, could our time have been better spent? for example, in the early months of the pandemic, our administrators claimed that the university was committed to ensuring furloughed employees remained financially whole, but in fact, the administration targeted the lowest wage earners at a time when unemployment offices were overwhelmed. should we have done more to capture decisions that resulted in the most precariously employed navigating multiple pay periods without receiving either a paycheck or unemployment insurance benefits?32 finally, in the midst of these weighty issues, we wondered whether active collecting was the best use of our greatest resource: time. by may, we had observed the lackluster response to the covid-19 projects just as we realized that we had invested many more hours than we intended. this is not to say that an underperforming project or even a failed project is inherently without merit, but as time progressed, we lost sight of where active collecting fit into our core mission—to the degree that we wondered if, in taking on these projects, we had undermined our ability to accomplish our own strategic priorities that centered on access to existing collections and outreach to the faculty, staff, and students of our campus community. as we grappled with the best ways to achieve our goals within the confines of the pandemic, we realized that our finite resources deserved thoughtful allocation. this became even more apparent when we noticed that our administrators and publicists were the parties most interested in our covid-19 active collecting. archivist eira tansey aptly cautioned that these types of projects can “provide our administrators with feel-good press releases so they can somehow show that we’re responding to societal concerns, but without actually requiring any accountability or significant resource allocation on the part of the institution itself.”33 we felt like we presented ourselves capable of weaving gold from the proverbial straw, and even though asc has had a long history of shoe-string resources and can-do attitudes, we wondered what we were communicating to resource allocators and stakeholders when we continued to do more with less, especially in the face of a public health crisis that was financially impacting our institution. conclusion the latin roots of our english word record mean “to recall the heart of” and aptly capture the idea of revisiting the central significance of the past.”34 in recording our experiences, we do much more than jot down facts or plot data points; we capture and remember an essential and vital part of our own story. the archivist is especially attuned to the value of capturing these stories, but not only that; the archivist is aware that the documents which support our understanding of history are skewed heavily toward those in power. “[w]e learn most about the rich, not the poor; the successful, not the failures; the old, not the young; the politically active, not the politically alienated; men, not women; white, not black; free people rather than prisoners.”35 in response, we archivists have seized the idea that ordinary, obscure, and even silenced people have something to say, which leads us, on the one hand, to suggest that active collecting—especially when undertaken during difficult times—should have a robust framework of support. even when events necessitate a rapid response, the archivist’s instinct to collect should be buoyed with self-reflection, affirmed by institutional prerogatives, and marked by an ethic of care. but, we also recognized the impossibility of a single archive collecting the experiences of all members of society; it must be handled widely, and it must be handled outside of institutions. we entered into our active collecting projects without the sort of scaffolding that supported self-reflection, but despite our short-sightedness, the important events of 2020 created space to reflect on our decisions. they challenged our assumptions and reframed our responsibilities, prompting us to ask how we might better prepare for the next historic moment. this is not to say that we have formulated a one-size-fits-all solution. we have increasingly wondered, in fact, how an entirely different approach might have better served the faculty, staff, and students of our university community, and how asc, in partnership with other collecting repositories in our area, might have empowered individuals living in and around louisville to document themselves. rather than replicate the many documentation projects that sought to collect and preserve, we wondered how we could have facilitated discussion around personal archiving and preservation methods. how might we have equipped individual citizens to carry out their own active collecting? indeed, the most evocative stories about covid-19 and the justice for breonna taylor movement in louisville were not captured by either asc’s covid-19 project or the frazier’s coronavirus capsule. during the fall, professors from the university’s departments of pan-african studies and history had students, most of whom were black and brown, conduct interviews as part of the semester’s coursework. the classes collaborated with the director of asc’s oral history center who provided the professors and students with training and guidance and accessioned the materials which are now part of asc’s permanent collection. the resulting oral histories captured rich stories that revealed the complex interweaving of the effects of covid-19 and the racial justice movement on louisville’s black and brown community and its activists, and they inspired a sense of ownership in the telling of history. they also highlighted an impressive level of participant engagement. empowering university of louisville students to do their own archival project, under the guidance of their professor and an archivist, challenged the traditional oppressive structure of the archive—one which traditionally places power of accession, description, and collecting in the hands of a majority white, institutional archive. in comparison, our efforts to document were, at best, clumsy and, at worst, dominating as we toed the line between collecting university employee and student records and controlling or even shaping them.36 the very nature of our online submission form required a sense of technical know-how from those we sought submissions from. who might this have excluded? although we have explored some issues that may surface while documenting history in the moment, we recognize that these considerations are not exhaustive, but that they are the beginnings of a discussion centered on what is needed to support rapid response collecting. the questions that we have explored and that are outlined below may form the basis of a framework to guide decision-making, whether in response to a localized flood that displaces individuals from their workplaces and dorms, a pandemic that disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable populations, a movement calling for long-overdue justice in the face of racism, or any other significant event. of all the things to consider, perhaps the most crucial should focus on who is best equipped to meet peer to peer with the community that is being served. is there potential for the project to be community-led with institutional support, rather than being institutionally led with community support? is there community-led or grassroots documentation already taking place? if a formal archive is best to handle an active collecting project, it should be supported by three areas: critical reflection, institutional affirmation, and an ethic of care. the following questions may be used to consider these areas. critical reflection: what resources do we anticipate we will need to complete the project? do we have enough financial, human, and technological resources to meet that need? if not, how will we secure those resources?  what might need to be postponed or eliminated to take on the new project? does the project ultimately serve the institution, rather than archival users?  could this project be seen as archival commodification? rather than ask what you should collect, determine if you should collect. institutional affirmation where does this project fit into the archive’s mission and strategic priorities? how will we communicate (and later reiterate) the importance of this project to our staff? to our administrators?  how can we seek additional support from directors, deans, and other administrators? what additional support is needed to see the project through? ethic of care what is the potential emotional impact to staff and community members? what resources are available to assist both staff and community members and how do we incorporate those resources into our messaging? how does the positionality and identities of the archivist reinforce or dismantle existing power structures? how does the project serve or support the community it documents? is there potential for harm? if so, are there ways to mitigate harm? who are the project partners? how will we ensure the community’s perspectives are heard? if there is a lack of or no established relationship with those you seek to document, how can you build and sustain trusts amongst them? ultimately, these questions explore the unintended consequences of archival work and seek to position that work within a framework of professional values. we hope that others will build on this foundation by revealing limitations, suggesting additional considerations, and connecting real-world examples to the professional principles that support our collective work. acknowledgments we are indebted to stevie gunter, for graciously agreeing to review this article and to the lead pipe’s ian beilin and denisse solis, for providing helpful insights and key feedback and shepherding us through the editorial process. we would also like to thank our colleagues at the university of louisville for providing space to grapple with these ideas. rebecca would like to thank her partner, charlotte asmuth, for graciously offering their writing expertise as they read through many drafts of this article. appendix a: project portal documenting your experience during the covid-19 outbreak we are living in an historic moment. in the same way that, today, we want to know how louisvillians navigated the historic 1937 flood of the ohio river, years from now, others will want to know how we navigated the experience of a global pandemic brought on by the novel coronavirus. in the spirit of documenting this moment, the university of louisville archives and special collections wants to collect and preserve the experiences and reactions of uofl students, staff, faculty, and administrators. personal accounts can range from direct observations to artistic reflection and may touch on any number of themes such as displacement from student housing, working from home, the shift to online learning or teaching, social distancing or self quarantining, or leading the university through the crisis. personal accounts can be in the form of a journal or blog, email, photos, videos, audio recordings, or social media posts. first name: last name: email address: what is your university of louisville affiliation (administrator, faculty, staff, or student)? directions: you may upload standard word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, audio or video recordings, and compressed files. a single file may not exceed 100 mb (if your file does exceed this limit, please complete this form and contact k0herz01@louisville.edu to coordinate an alternate file transfer method. you may upload 10 files per form. describe your items.  please include the location/event, date, people included, and any other relevant information known. are you the sole creator of these materials? if not, please list the names of any other creators or co-creators, their email address(es), and the circumstances of how you came to have the materials. important: you must seek the approval of your co-creator(s) before submitting co-created materials. co-creator(s) should also complete a copy of this form, but note that files do not need to be uploaded. agreement by clicking on the checkbox and initialing this form, i acknowledge that as the creator and/or copyright holder of the submitted materials (“the materials”), i grant to the university of louisville and archives and special collections (“asc”) an irrevocable and nonexclusive license to make use of the materials, including but not limited to reproduction, distribution, derivative adaptations, and public performances and displays, consistent with accepted archival practices and asc policies as they may exist from time to time. a non-exclusive license transfers no copyright and the submitter otherwise retains all other rights in the materials subject to this prior nonexclusive license. by submitting the materials, i certify that i am the creator and/or copyright holder and have full authority to grant this license and have exercised appropriate diligence in creating the materials and capturing any images, likenesses, and/or other inclusions of possible 3rd party copyrighted materials. i also acknowledge that asc may distribute the materials under an open license, such as creative commons, of acs’s sole choosing that allow others to make use of the materials consistent with the terms of the open license in order to make the materials available for educational, informational, and similar purposes worldwide. initials: check one: i grant permission to use my name as the donor for exhibits, description, and publicity i wish to remain anonymous references briston, heather. “on accountability.” in archival values: essays in honor of mark a. greene, edited by christine weideman and mary a. caldera. chicago: society of american archivists, 2019. brown, alex. twitter, august 18, 2021. https://twitter.com/queenofrats/status/1427985206976253956?s=21. brooks,caitlin. “uofl archives and special collections documenting covid-19 experiences,” uofl news, april 3, 2020, https://www.uoflnews.com/post/uofltoday/uofl-archives-and-special-collections-documenting-communitys-covid-19-experiences/ caswell, michelle. “teaching to dismantle white supremacy in the archives.” library quarterly 87, no. 3 (july 2017): 222-235. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/692299 ——— and marika cifor. “from human rights to feminist ethics: radical empathy in the archives.” archivaria 81 (spring 2016): 24.  ———, marika cifor, and mario h. ramirez. “’to suddenly discover yourself existing’: uncovering the impact of community archives.” american archivist 79, no. 1 (spring/summer 2016): 56-81. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56 ———, alda allina migoni, noah geraci, and marika cifor. “‘to be able to imagine otherwise’: community archives and the importance of representation,” archives and records 38, no. 1 (2016): 5-26, https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2016.1260445 clay, richard h.c.. “from the president,” the filson news magazine 20, no. 2 (summer 2020): 3. cline, scott. “‘to the limit of our integrity’: reflections on archival being.” american archivist 72, no. 2 (fall/winter 2009): 331-343. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.72.2.g0321510717r6j14 cook, terry. “archival science and postmodernism: new formulations for old concepts.” archival science 1 (2001): 3-24. ———. and joan m. schwartz. “archives, records, and power: from (postmodern) theory to (archival) performance.” archival science 2 (2002): 171-185. cotler, jordan and frank wilczek. “entangled histories,” physica scripta 2016, no. t168 (may 2016): 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1088/0031-8949/2016/t168/014004 ———. “temporal observables and entangled histories.” (unpublished manuscript, february 20, 2017).  https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05838 daniels, caroline, heather fox,  sarah-jane poindexter, elizabeth reilly. “saving all the freaks on the life raft: blending documentation strategy with community engagement to build a local music archives.” american archivist 78, no. 1 (spring/summer 2015): 238-261. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.1.238. drake, jarrett m. “liberatory archives: towards belonging and believing (part 1).” on archivy (blog). (october 22, 2016). https://medium.com/on-archivy/liberatory-archives-towards-belonging-and-believing-part-1-d26aaeb0edd1 dunbar, anthony w. “introducing critical race theory to archival discourse: getting the conversation started.” archival science 6, no. 1 (2006): 109-29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-006-9022-6 evans, joanne  et al. “self-determination and archival autonomy: advocating activism.” archival science 15 (2015): 356-57. gould, eliga h. “entangled histories, entangled worlds: the english-speaking atlantic as a spanish periphery.” american historical review 112, no. 3 (june 2007): 766. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.112.3.764 groves, kaylyn. “research libraries, archives document community experiences of covid-19 pandemic.” arl views (blog), may 14, 2020. https://www.arl.org/blog/research-libraries-archives-document-community-experiences-of-covid-19-pandemic/ harrison, lowell h. “a century of progress: the filson club, 1884-1984.” filson club history quarterly 58, no. 4 (october 1984): 381-407. howard, rachel, heather fox, and caroline daniels, “the born-digital deluge: documenting twenty-first century events,” archival issues 33, no. 2 (2011): 100-109, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/72349 huvila, isto. “participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management.” archival science 8 (2008): 15-36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-008-9071-0 jimerson, randall c. “embracing the power of archives.” american archivist 69, no. 1 (spring/summer 2006): 32. ———. archives power: memory, accountability, and social justice. chicago: society of american archivists, 2009. jules, bergis. “confronting our failure of care around the legacies of marginalized people in the archives.” on archivy (blog), november 11, 2016. https://medium.com/on-archivy/confronting-our-failure-of-care-around-the-legacies-of-marginalized-people-in-the-archives-dc4180397280 ———. “archiving protests, protecting activists.” docnow, published june 17, 2020. https://news.docnow.io/archiving-protests-protecting-activists-e628b49eab47 ketelaar, eric. “tacit narratives: the meanings of archives.” archival science 1 (2001):131-141. project stand. “documenting student activism w/o harm.” accessed march 1, 2021. https://standarchives.com/elementor-6715/. quinn, patrick m. “archivists and historians: the times they are a-changing.” midwestern archivist 2, no. 2 (1977): 5-13. ramirez, mario. “being assumed not to be: a critique of whiteness as an archival imperative.” american archivist 78, no. 2 (fall/winter 2015): 339-356. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.2.339 rothert, otto a. the filson club and its activities, 1884-1922: a history of the filson club, including lists of filson club publications and papers on kentucky history prepared for the club, also names of members. louisville, ky: j.p. morton, 1922. sixty inches from center. “the blackivists’ five tips for organizers, protestors, and anyone documenting movements.” published june 2, 2020. https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/the-blackivists-five-tips-for-organizers-protestors-and-anyone-documenting-movements/. tang, gvgk. “we need to talk about public history’s columbusing problem.” history@work (blog), national council on public history, june 25, 2020. https://ncph.org/history-at-work/we-need-to-talk-about-public-historys-columbusing-problem/. tansey, eira. “no one owes their trauma to archivists or the commodification of contemporaneous collecting,” eira tansey (blog), june 5, 2020. http://eiratansey.com/2020/06/05/no-one-owes-their-trauma-to-archivists-or-the-commodification-of-contemporaneous-collecting/ texas after violence project. “trainings.” accessed march 1, 2021. https://texasafterviolence.org/?page_id=2627%3e. wetherington, mark v. “filson club historical society.” in the encyclopedia of louisville, edited by john e. kleber, 289. lexington, ky: university press of kentucky, 2001. witness. “witness resources.” accessed march 1, 2021. https://www.witness.org/resources/. wolf, stephanie,. “downtown breonna taylor memorial will ‘rest with her ancestors’ at roots 101.” wfpl news, november 2, 2020. https://wfpl.org/downtown-breonna-taylor-memorial-will-rest-with-her-ancestors-at-roots-101/ wortham, jenna. “how an archive of the internet could change history.” new york times magazine, june 21, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/magazine/how-an-archive-of-the-internet-could-change-history.html zinn, howard. “secrecy, archives, and the public interest.” midwestern archivist 2, no. 2 (1977), 14-26. jordan cotler and frank wilczek, “entangled histories,” physica scripta 2016, no. t168 (may 2016): 7, https://doi.org/10.1088/0031-8949/2016/t168/014004. see also jordan cotler and frank wilczek, “temporal observables and entangled histories” (unpublished manuscript, february 20, 2017), https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05838. [↩] jenna wortham, “how an archive of the internet could change history,” new york times magazine, june 21, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/magazine/how-an-archive-of-the-internet-could-change-history.html. [↩] eliga h. gould, “entangled histories, entangled worlds: the english-speaking atlantic as a spanish periphery,” american historical review 112, no. 3 (june 2007): 766, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.112.3.764. [↩] wortham, “how an archive of the internet could change history.” [↩] “coronavirus capsule,” frazier kentucky history museum, accessed march 1, 2021, https://www.fraziermuseum.org/coronaviruscapsule. [↩] throughout this article we use the term “active” to describe the idea of contemporaneous collecting in order to document events as they are happening. even though our project’s methods were relatively passive (participation, after all, was voluntary), we use this term in keeping with its broader use in the profession. active collecting finds its roots in the american archival tradition and, specifically, in theodore schellenberg’s mid-twentieth century contributions to appraisal theory. schellenberg argued that one of the archivist’s key roles is to select records for long-term preservation, and his work informs the intellectual foundation for the late-twentieth century idea of saving records as they are created. nonetheless, a number of archivists have acknowledged the immense challenge and inherent pitfalls of actively shaping the historical record. as canadian archivist terry cook noted, the archive is a “site where social memory has been (and is) constructed—usually in support, consciously or unconsciously, of the metanarratives of the powerful.” south african archivist verne harris highlighted an additional layer of complexity when he considered how the archivist infuses layers of meaning into the records at each stage of the curatorial process—not just when it is selected for preservation. when taken together cook and harris offer cautionary words, but they also invite archivists to be highly transparent in their professional practice and to create space for multiple interpretations of the record. while our active collecting project cannot be divorced from the positionality or temporality of ourselves or our institution, we echo cook in acknowledging that records are in a continuous process of being reimagined, and we hope that this article can be a tool in that process. theodore r. schellenberg, modern archives principles and techniques (chicago: university of chicago, 1956), 138-139; terry cook, “fashionable nonsense or professional rebirth: postmodernism and the practice of archives,” archivaria 51 (2001), 27; verne harris, “claiming less, delivering more: a critique of positivist formulations on archives in south africa,” archivaria 44 (1997), 136-138. [↩] “the blackivists’ five tips for organizers, protestors, and anyone documenting movements,” sixty inches from center, published june 2, 2020, https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/the-blackivists-five-tips-for-organizers-protestors-and-anyone-documenting-movements/; bergis jules, “archiving protests, protecting activists,” docnow, published june 17, 2020, https://news.docnow.io/archiving-protests-protecting-activists-e628b49eab47; “witness resources,” witness, accessed march 1, 2021, https://www.witness.org/resources/; “trainings,” texas after violence project, accessed march 1, 2021, https://texasafterviolence.org/?page_id=2627%3e; “documenting student activism w/o harm,” project stand, accessed march 1, 2021, https://standarchives.com/elementor-6715/. the authors are indebted to the members of documenting the now, witness, the blackivists, texas after violence project, project stand, and other black archivists and memory workers who have shared their expertise on documenting the racial justice movement. [↩] throughout this article, we use the term “community” to describe groups of people that may share a common geographic location, race, ethnicity, position (i.e. student or employee), or some combination of these and other identities. we recognize that this is an imprecise term and, more importantly, that librarians and archivists can be imperceptive to the many communities that ought to be served. alex brown (@queenofrats) aptly noted, “our service population is not 1 group but many. there is more than 1 community in a town or mentro [sic] area, but we provide the most services to 1 of those groups (guess which).” twitter, august 18, 2021, 9:26 a.m., https://twitter.com/queenofrats/status/1427985206976253956?s=21. [↩] scott cline, “‘to the limit of our integrity’: reflections on archival being,” american archivist 72, no. 2 (fall/winter 2009): 331-343, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.72.2.g0321510717r6j14. [↩] asc’s component units developed separately with rare books having been established in 1957; photographic archives in 1962; the oral history center in 1968; university archives, which includes community manuscript collections, in 1973; and digital initiatives in 2006. all units merged into a single library in 2013. of the collecting areas, the university’s archives and manuscripts was the one to embrace inclusive collecting from its inception thanks to the work of several key individuals. broadly, their efforts reflected then-emerging currents within the field of history as well as their individual experiences. (our colleague tom owen, for example, taught the university’s inaugural course in african american history—a concession by the university’s administration in the wake of student protests in 1969—and brought that lens into his work with the archives. he was also a self-proclaimed community hustler for defunct organizations.) when the archives received records from local individuals and organizations, the oral history center collected corresponding narratives, resulting in the african american community and louisville’s jewish community oral history collections. as the paper, photo, and rare book collections grew, the oral histories expanded as well to cover topics in the 1980s-90s like school integration, urban renewal, the civil rights movement in louisville, and more recently in the early 2000s louisville’s lgbtq community and fairness campaign. [↩] patrick m. quinn, “archivists and historians: the times they are a-changing,” midwestern archivist 2, no. 2 (1977): 8. quinn observed that “traditional notions of what types of primary source materials should be collected and from what sectors of the population…encouraged an elitist approach to writing history, an approach that in effect ignored the history of blacks and other minorities, women, working people and the poor.” lowell h. harrison, “a century of progress: the filson club, 1884-1984,” filson club history quarterly 58, no. 4 (october 1984): 381-407; otto a. rothert, the filson club and its activities, 1884-1922: a history of the filson club, including lists of filson club publications and papers on kentucky history prepared for the club, also names of members (louisville, ky.: j.p. morton, 1922), 15-19; mark v. wetherington, “filson club historical society” in the encyclopedia of louisville, ed. john e. kleber (lexington, ky.: university press of kentucky, 2001), 289. like many collecting repositories, the filson historical society has since taken steps to expand its collecting scope. most recently, in the wake of the movement for racial justice, to “[a]ctively engage with the louisville black community to more fully archive the marginalized histories of our city, state, and region.” richard clay, “from the president,” the filson 20, no. 2 (summer 2020): 3. [↩] caroline daniels et al., “saving all the freaks on the life raft: blending documentation strategy with community engagement to build a local music archives,” american archivist 78, no. 1 (spring/summer 2015): 238-261, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.1.238. [↩] rachel howard, heather fox, and caroline daniels, “the born-digital deluge: documenting twenty-first century events,” archival issues 33, no. 2 (2011): 100-109, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/72349. [↩] “contribute your stories of the covid-19 outbreak,” j. murrey atkins library, unc charlotte, published march 26, 2020, https://library.uncc.edu/contribute-your-stories-covid-19-outbreak. [↩] the university of louisville extends faculty status to some positions within the university libraries, including to seven of the thirteen positions in asc. each individual who was involved in the project holds one of these tenure-track faculty positions. [↩] caitlin brooks, “uofl archives and special collections documenting covid-19 experiences,” uofl news, april 3, 2020, https://www.uoflnews.com/post/uofltoday/uofl-archives-and-special-collections-documenting-communitys-covid-19-experiences/; kaylyn groves, “research libraries, archives document community experiences of covid-19 pandemic,” arl views (blog), may 14, 2020, https://www.arl.org/blog/research-libraries-archives-document-community-experiences-of-covid-19-pandemic/. [↩] “coronavirus capsule,” frazier kentucky history museum, accessed march 1, 2021, https://www.fraziermuseum.org/coronaviruscapsule. [↩] executive order 2020-257 (signed march 25, 2020), https://governor.ky.gov/attachments/20200325_executive-order_2020-257_healthy-at-home.pdf. [↩] university of louisville, just the facts 2019-20, 2020, https://louisville.edu/oapa/institutional-research-and-planning/quick-facts/copy_of_just_the_facts_2020webadacompliant.pdf. [↩] stephanie wolf, “downtown breonna taylor memorial will ‘rest with her ancestors’ at roots 101,” wfpl news, november 2, 2020, https://wfpl.org/downtown-breonna-taylor-memorial-will-rest-with-her-ancestors-at-roots-101/. the memorial to breonna taylor has since been transferred to roots 101 african american museum. [↩] terry cook and joan m. schwartz, “archives, records, and power: from (postmodern) theory to (archival) performance,” archival science 2 (2002): 178. see also terry cook, “archival science and postmodernism: new formulations for old concepts,” archival science 1 (2001): 7; eric ketelaar, “tacit narratives: the meanings of archives,” archival science 1 (2001):139, 141; randall c. jimerson, “embracing the power of archives,” american archivist 69, no. 1 (spring/summer 2006): 32. the literature applying postmodern theory to archival concepts is a useful foundation for conceptualizing archival power. cook, for example, shows that the power at work during record creation—including even “the document’s structure, resident information system, and narrative conventions”—shape the records, arguing that these forces are, in fact, more important than the records’ content. ketelaar observed that “not only the administrative context, but also the social, cultural, political, religious contexts of…creation, maintenance, and use,” shape the record. he challenges archivists to “stress the archive’s power” through deconstruction and reconstruction, an idea that jimerson also encouraged.  archivists, he wrote, should “embrace the power of archives” as a force for good, suggesting that archives can protect public interest rather than the privileges of the powerful. [↩] society of american archivists, community reflection on black lives and archives (forum, held online, june 12, 2020), accessed march 1, 2021, https://www.pathlms.com/saa/events/1996/video_presentations/162192. [↩] joanne evans et al., “self-determination and archival autonomy: advocating activism,” archival science 15 (2015): 356-57.  the authors defined “archival autonomy” as “the ability for individuals and communities to participate in societal memory, with their own voice, and to become participatory agents in recordkeeping and archiving for identity, memory, and accountability purposes.” [↩] aleia brown (@collardstudies) “the missing details, assumptions, one-dimensional presentations, and lack of accountability were all symptomatic of a lack of care for black life. lack of care doesn’t seem nefarious until you consider the ways this approach to black public history manifests deeper issues…care is also answering black studies scholar christina sharpe’s inquiry, ‘how do we memorialize an ongoing event?’ what is the violence wreaked by a capitalist, white supremacists, patriarchal society?” twitter, july 8, 2020, 7:06 p.m., https://twitter.com/collardstudies/status/1281001812032708610. [↩] michelle caswell and marika cifor, “from human rights to feminist ethics: radical empathy in the archives,” archivaria 81 (spring 2016): 24. [↩] mario ramirez, “being assumed not to be: a critique of whiteness as an archival imperative,” american archivist 78, no. 2 (fall/winter 2015): 352, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.2.339. [↩] michelle caswell et al., “‘to be able to imagine otherwise’: community archives and the importance of representation,” archives and records 38, no. 1 (2016): 5-26, https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2016.1260445; michelle caswell, marika cifor, and mario h. ramirez, “’to suddenly discover yourself existing’: uncovering the impact of community archives,” american archivist 79, no. 1 (spring/summer 2016): 56-81, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56; michelle caswell, “teaching to dismantle white supremacy in the archives,” library quarterly 87, no. 3 (july 2017): 222-235, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/692299; jarrett m. drake, “liberatory archives: towards belonging and believing (part 1),” on archivy (blog), october 22, 2016, https://medium.com/on-archivy/liberatory-archives-towards-belonging-and-believing-part-1-d26aaeb0edd1; anthony w. dunbar, “introducing critical race theory to archival discourse: getting the conversation started,” archival science 6, no. 1 (2006): 109-29, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-006-9022-6; isto huvila, “participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management,” archival science 8 (2008): 15-36, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-008-9071-0; bergis jules, “confronting our failure of care around the legacies of marginalized people in the archives,” on archivy (blog), november 11, 2016, https://medium.com/on-archivy/confronting-our-failure-of-care-around-the-legacies-of-marginalized-people-in-the-archives-dc4180397280. [↩] gvgk tang, “we need to talk about public history’s columbusing problem,” history@work (blog), national council on public history, june 25, 2020, https://ncph.org/history-at-work/we-need-to-talk-about-public-historys-columbusing-problem/. [↩] ibid. [↩] eira tansey, “no one owes their trauma to archivists or the commodification of contemporaneous collecting,” eira tansey (blog), june 5, 2020, http://eiratansey.com/2020/06/05/no-one-owes-their-trauma-to-archivists-or-the-commodification-of-contemporaneous-collecting/. [↩] ibid. [↩] archivists define accountability as the capacity to “answer for, explain, or justify actions or decisions” that are the responsibility of a system, individual, or corporate entity. what is more, archivists have identified accountability as a core professional value, and one that should guide daily practices and characterize professional intentions. archives’ role in supporting accountability gives archives power—power that is exercised during daily processes like deciding what gets saved, who gets access, and how records are represented, which ultimately impacts how we remember the past. nevertheless, the work of the archivists cannot foster accountability by itself; this is also the work of record creators and researchers, and in fact, the complexities of collecting for evidentiary purposes from the very institutions that often fund the archive can introduce tensions or, worse, interference. nevertheless, archives play a key role in cultivating transparency as they engage in this work. dictionary of archives terminology society of american archivists, s.v. “accountability (n.),” accessed august 3, 2021, https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/accountability.html; saa core values statement and code of ethics,” society of american archivists, last modified march 30, 2018, https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics; heather briston, “on accountability,” in archival values: essays in honor of mark a. greene, ed. christine weideman and mary a. caldera (chicago: society of american archivists, 2019), 76-81. randall c. jimerson, archives power: memory, accountability, and social justice (chicago: society of american archivists, 2009), 246-247. [↩] tansey, “no one owes their trauma to archivists or the commodification of contemporaneous collecting.” [↩] merriam-webster, s.v. “record (n.),” accessed march 1, 2021, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/record. [↩] howard zinn, “secrecy, archives, and the public interest” midwestern archivist 2, no. 2 (1977), 21. [↩] jimerson, 22-24. in summarizing other scholars, jimerson highlights the role that archives play in legitimizing and sanctifying certain documents over others and the role that archivists play in representation and controlling access.  the consequence, he notes, is a reinforcement of that which is culturally dominant: powerful, well-resourced, white, cis, male. [↩] academic libraries, active collecting, advocacy, archives, collection development, special collections dismantling the evaluation framework source evaluation: supporting undergraduate student research development leave a reply cancel reply save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the importance of thinking about thinking – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 3 mar ellie collier /7 comments the importance of thinking about thinking by ellie collier a review of how we decide by jonah lehrer i play magic. it’s a fairly complicated card game which calls on many of the same skills needed for games like chess or poker. poker has suits, magic has colors. and i hate playing black. unlike other colors, when i play a black card i often have to sacrifice a few of my life points or one of my other cards. good players know that this instinctually painful cost is often negligible compared to the positive effects of the card. but my gut reaction is still a big knee jerk “no!” i’m suffering loss aversion and i would be well-served to pause and analyze the situation. magic isn’t my only bit of nerdom. my partner and i play a lot of games. we host regular game nights and play just the two of us several times a week. his favorites are german-style board games which rely heavily on strategy and resource management. after a game, he and some of his friends will often point out which decisions were likely the most pivotal in the outcome. it always seemed placating to me, an emotional self-defense justification for not winning, but he insisted that studying your mistakes is the best way to learn. what’s all this got to do with libraries? well, the only way to avoid loss aversion is to know about it. to know when to trust your instincts and when to doubt them you need to spend a lot of time thinking about how you think. and it turns out the best way to become an expert at something is to spend a lot of time studying your mistakes. these are the first of several lessons in jonah lehrer’s how we decide that immediately made me think of current library hot topics like “transparency” and “perpetual beta.” in how we decide, lehrer spends a lot of time talking about experts in high tension situations, but there’s still plenty that can be applied to the library, which is what i’ll be doing with the remainder of this post. in the interest of full disclosure, i was not drawn to this book on my own as i was with made to stick. this review is the result of a request from fellow lead piper brett bonfield. (yes, we do take requests for post topics, or at least i do.) its relevance to libraries didn’t jump out at me as immediately as made to stick‘s did, but it did give me many ideas for my interpersonal relations, both at work and at home. for one, i’ll be asking my partner to help me study my gaming mistakes more often. i was particularly impressed with the quality of the writing in how we decide. it opens with a detailed first person narrative of lehrer’s experience piloting a boeing 737 over tokyo when one of the engines catches on fire. it turns out to have been a flight simulator, but you’re already hooked. lehrer continues to introduce a number of incredibly engaging professional scenarios and scientific studies and repeatedly calls back to them to reinforce his ideas. he seamlessly jumps between analogy, example, research study, and overarching theory. his main argument is that the age-old dichotomy between the rational and emotional sides of the brain is not only false, but destructive. his overall advice is to think about why you’re feeling what you’re feeling, to think about thinking and become a student of your errors. in that very first story lehrer pulls you into an emotional state then takes you back through the experience to try something different, which is exactly what he continues to ask of you throughout the book. your emotions are super smart, if you train them lehrer explains that conscious thought is only a small part of what the brain does. our orbitofrontal cortex is responsible for integrating much of our subconscious analysis into our decision making process. the orbitofrontal cortex “connects the feelings generated by the “primitive” brain—areas like the brain stem and the amygdala, which is in the limbic system—to the stream of conscious thought” (p. 18). these feelings are actually a summary of data processed by our subconscious, transmitted to our orbitofrontal cortex and interpreted as an instinct or gut reaction. it often provides a highly accurate shortcut to a drawn out conscious analysis. what makes expert chess, poker, and football players able to trust their instincts is that their instincts are finely tuned by a constant focus on mistakes. these players know that “self-criticism is the secret to self-improvement; negative feedback is the best kind” (p. 51). while i’m not suggesting you point out every mistake each of your colleagues or students makes, i would propose you try it on yourself and encourage it in others. we already know that students learn better when they are active participants in the learning process as opposed to passive recipients of information. we can insert that active learning even earlier in our instruction process by moving from having students apply what we’ve just shown them to having them reason through and come up with the solution on their own. taking it one step further than merely analyzing our mistakes, lehrer argues that mistakes aren’t things to be discouraged: they should be cultivated and carefully investigated. a crucial ingredient in education is the ability to learn from mistakes. this grabbed me both from an instruction standpoint—we should be cultivating those critical thinking skills—and from the idea of perpetual beta. i think a valuable question worth asking is, “will it take more time and effort to set up a committee to evaluate every possible scenario before launching a new service or to troubleshoot after?” the answer will definitely not be the same for every situation, but look for opportunities to jump in and learn as you go. lehrer explains a study by carol dweck which shows in startling statistics how important it is to cultivate an attitude of learning through analyzing our mistakes. dweck had 400 fifth-graders take a puzzle test. the children were given their scores and praise in the form of one of the following two sentences: “you must be smart at this” or “you must have worked really hard.” the children were then offered the choice to attempt a of set of puzzles similar to the ones they had just taken or a set that were more difficult, but from which they would learn a lot. dweck expected the different forms of praise to have a modest effect, but the results were dramatic. the children praised for their effort nearly all chose the harder test while those praised for their intelligence went for the easy one. later, when given a test written for eighth-graders the children in the hard-working group were excited by the challenge while the smart group became easily discouraged. the last set of tests were the same difficulty as the first. the hard workers saw an average score increase of 30% while the smart group’s scores dropped by nearly 20%. “instead of praising kids for trying hard, teachers typically praise them for their innate intelligence (being smart). dweck has shown this type of encouragement actually backfires, since it leads students to see mistakes as signs of stupidity and not as building blocks of knowledge. the regrettable outcome is that kids never learn how to learn…. the problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence—the “smart” compliment—is that it misrepresents the neural reality of education. it encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is learning from mistakes. unless you experience unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail” (p. 52-53). often times at the reference desk we are as much counselor as information specialist. after much conscious effort, i have gotten better at verbalizing my search strategy as i work with students. one of the benefits has been helping students learn that for more complicated topics refining your search terms is often an iterative process. i remember working with a student on a particularly finicky subject. the fact that i (the expert) did a search and got zero results, then tried again with a different term, and again with a third phrase before hitting on something that got us usable articles, was validating and enlightening for the student. she went from feeling stupid for not knowing the right magic word to learning a process she’ll be able to apply to every search in the future. it’s not about being smart, it’s about making the effort and learning from the failures. your emotions will also sabotage you many of our gut reactions are actually our vast amounts of experience (learned from mistakes) processed by our subconscious and passed up to our conscious mind via emotion. but we all know that we can’t always trust these instincts. lehrer covers the most common cases where our emotions lead us astray. one example is the loss aversion i mentioned at the beginning of this post. we put more weight on bad than good. lehrer states that, “in marital interactions, it generally takes at least five kind comments to compensate for one critical comment” (p. 81). the only way to avoid loss aversion is to know about it. the way to regulate our emotions is to think about them. “if the particular feeling makes no sense … then it can be discounted” (p. 107). lehrer suggests that you consciously question your emotions. think about why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. you may still go with your instincts, but by taking the time to think it through you may just catch yourself falling into a trap. “patients who have undergone cognitive-behavioral therapy (cbt), a form of talk therapy designed to reveal innate biases and distortions of the human brain, have also been shown to be less vulnerable to these same biases. scientists speculate that these patients have learned to recognize those maladaptive thoughts and emotions that automatically occur in the responses to certain situations. because they reflect on their thought processes, they learn to think better” (p. 242). this message really struck home with me. knowing you’re being irrational is only the first half of overcoming a misguided emotion. the second half is knowing why. while i wasn’t calling my hatred for black magic cards “loss aversion,” i did realize i was being irrational. i knew the better players knew more than i did, and i trusted that they had a more appropriate sense of which cards were better and worse. but learning that this is a typical reaction and, more importantly, understanding why it is a typical reaction, pushed me over the top from trusting the better players to actually “getting it” myself. the importance of regulating our emotional responses struck me especially for its use in interpersonal relations—our dealings with our colleagues, our managers, our staff, and our students. lehrer includes a great quote from aristotle, “anyone can become angry—that is easy. but to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy” (p. 107). this bit of advice was well timed for me. i had been getting more and more stressed at work over the course of a few weeks. i knew i needed to address it, but hadn’t decided how. in the end i realized i was taking too much personal responsibility for something that i shouldn’t have. that realization allowed me to actively decide where i wanted to continue to be involved and where i would choose not to invest my emotional energy. when you have a strong emotional reaction to something or someone, think about why you are so upset. often realizing exactly why you are having a strong emotional reaction is enough to give you the tools to deal with the issue. relying solely on rational thought will also sabotage you for starters, that’s how professional athletes crack under pressure and experienced performers freeze on stage—by thinking too hard about things that are typically automatic.1 lehrer’s tip—don’t think of the details of what you’re doing, but instead think of a descriptive adjective, words like smooth or balanced, that evokes your overall goal. choking isn’t the only danger of thinking too much. you’re also in danger of overloading yourself. you have a limited amount of working memory. the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for active analysis and decision making, can only handle so much information at one time. i was interested but not overly surprised to read that a bad mood is a rundown prefrontal cortex.  that’s all the more reason to make sure to regularly take time to yourself and especially to take the extra time to clear your thoughts before sending that impassioned email. lehrer explains how our rationality can become a liability, “since it allows us to justify practically any belief” (p. 206). he cites studies where republicans misremember the deficit under clinton, christians chose not to push the button to alleviate static over an atheist broadcast, israeli intelligence disregarded its own information leading up to the yom kippur war, and pundits on both sides consistently showed correlation between high confidence levels and incorrect predictions. in all of these situations each group was mislead by its own certainty and ignored contradicting evidence. lehrer argues that, “the only way to counteract the bias for certainty is to encourage some inner dissonance. we must force ourselves to think about the information we don’t want to think about, to pay attention to the data that disturbs our entrenched beliefs” (p. 217). in addition to working to develop our own internal dialog, “we can create decision-making environments that help us better entertain competing hypotheses” (p. 217). abraham lincoln is famous for his cabinet full of rival politicians. his ability to tolerate dissent and foster diversity was an enormous asset. he encouraged vigorous debate and discussion before making any decisions. airlines have implemented a highly effective decision making strategy called cockpit resource management (crm). they discovered that many errors were at least partially due to the “god-like certainty” of pilots. “the goal of crm was to create an environment in which a diversity of viewpoints was freely shared” (p. 253). hospitals have also adopted crm with great results.2 “the reason crm is so effective is that it encourages flight crews and surgical teams to think together. it deters certainty and stimulates debate. in this sense, crm creates the ideal atmosphere for good decision-making, in which a diversity of opinions is openly shared. the evidence is looked at from multiple angles, and new alternatives are considered. such a process not only prevents mistakes but also leads to startling new insights” (p. 255). while it would be wonderful if we all worked in supportive, collaborative environments where constructive criticism and active dialogs were encouraged, the truth is that it takes a lot of effort to create and maintain that atmosphere. anyone can take the first steps. i am particularly excited to have our e-resources librarian as my partner on the student technology use survey my library will be doing this semester. i know that i have a definite bias towards looking out for those left on the far side of the digital divide so her focus on technology integration provides an excellent balance. lehrer suggests being your own devil’s advocate. this is another place where you may be able to look for additional external substitutes. when we were working on our pitch for the student technology survey we wanted to be ready for any question library management might throw at us, but we weren’t entirely sure what those would be. our college has an internal grant proposal process. by completing the grant proposal we were prepared to answer questions about goals, objectives, timeline, budget, and how the project tied in to the library and college mission. we didn’t win the grant, but management approved and funded our project. a brief aside after explaining how our emotions can stand in for our experience, and when they shouldn’t, lehrer concludes that how we decide should depend on what we’re deciding. but before detailing his final conclusions he explores morality. moral decisions are unique in that they require the brain to take other people into account rather than act on purely selfish motives. moral decisions are strongly based in sympathy. it’s part of the reason we are more moved by the plight of one child than by statistics about millions. statistics don’t activate our moral emotions. it’s also why my college’s i am acc campaign is so much more moving than a list of statistics about the importance of community colleges. at this point i do want to warn any sensitive readers—and i include myself in this group—there are some upsetting animal studies described in lehrer’s section on morality. if you’d like to avoid them i suggest you skip about 3-5 paragraphs (sometimes more) any time monkeys are brought into the discussion. you won’t miss the gist of the lesson and there are compelling (and less graphic) human stories that still back up the message. deciding how to decide throughout the book lehrer repeatedly emphasizes that the most important thing is to think about how you’re thinking and study your decision making process so you can learn to make better decisions over time. make an effort to see the situation as it is, not as you want it to be. i’ve run into a related statement at faculty gatherings at my college that has really stuck with me: teach the students you have, not the ones you wish you had. in my community college we are seeing more and more students who are less and less prepared to do college level work. i often hear disparaging remarks towards the k12 system or pining for the academic rigor of the past. but just as often i hear faculty explain how proud they are that so many more students who wouldn’t have considered college a possibility in the past are now enrolling. these faculty challenge us to do everything in our power to meet students wherever they are along their path of educational development and help them reach their personal goals—which may or may not be a four-year institution. lehrer closes with an analysis on how to put all of this science to practical use in your life. if you have significant experience in the domain in question (your own personal preferences fall into this category), even if it is a highly complicated issue, you’re best served by collecting all the relevant information, then setting it aside and letting your subconscious decide. for all other situations you should at least question, and possibly ignore, your emotions. they’re particularly dangerous in situations that you’ve never encountered before. “emotions are adept at finding patterns based on experience… but when you encounter a problem you’ve never experienced before, when your dopamine nuerons have no idea what to do, it’s essential that you try to tune out your feelings” (p. 128). postscript while not covered in the book, one of the strongest lessons i took from it was the importance of how, when, and from whom you hear a particular message. as i read through this book i kept running into things i had been told before, but had dismissed initially. my partner had explained the importance of dissecting your plays in order to improve, but i thought he was just trying to make me feel better whenever he pointed out certain things were chance. my mother (a psychologist) had suggested i try to identify the reason behind the particular emotional reactions that were triggering my stress, but in the moment i was worked up enough that i didn’t see how that could possibly help. the next day when i read the same advice in lehrer’s book it clicked. (i called mom to share the laugh.3) it’s impossible to be calm and rational all the time, but by being aware of potential cognitive biases, we can more easily recognize when we are falling prey to them and incorporate good advice when we are calm enough to take it in. study questions lehrer’s final message is another call to think about thinking and to become a student of your errors. my personal goal this year has been to focus on improving my teaching, so this semester i’ll be applying that lesson to my instruction sessions by writing out my reflections after each class. here are some suggestions for other areas to focus on, based on the studies lehrer describes. can you find places in your teaching to let students try something on their own without instruction, help them verbalize what did and didn’t work, and allow them to try to come up with reasons why? can you set aside time after your sessions to critique your own teaching? or after a program to critique the planning process or the execution? or after a year purchasing for a new fund area or interacting with new faculty? what worked, what didn’t, what will you do differently? what are some of the other things that you do often that could benefit from reflection? how can we encourage ourselves and our students to see mistakes as learning opportunities rather than failures? can we work encouragement and instruction into the zero results pages of our catalogs? what can we do to help mold our workplaces into environments where we encourage sharing our failures and our learning process as much as we encourage sharing our successes? are there people you can partner with in your institution that can help balance any of the biases you know you bring to the table? are there other resources you can use as your own devil’s advocate? thanks to brett bonfield for the book recommendation and edits and to kim leeder and rachel slough their feedback and edits. rachel slough pointed out that barry green’s inner game of music also supports this idea in the “performance” context–and that under pressure we tend to become overly critical. [↩] “before crm training, only around 21 percent of all cardiac surgeries and cardiac catheterizations were classified as “uneventful cases,” meaning that nothing had gone wrong. after crm training, however, the number of “uneventful cases” rose to 62 percent.” (p. 255) [↩] on a related note, i remember learning about emotions in elementary school and being told that we choose our reactions. no one can “make you” angry/happy/sad. i refused to believe this until after college. in that same call my mom reminded me of another helpful way to phrase the same thought, “don’t give anyone that kind of power over you.” [↩] book review, how we decide, jonah lehrer teen tech week: create, share, learn @ your library déformation professionnelle 7 responses brett bonfield 2010–03–04 at 12:09 pm i first read about lehrer’s book when joe posnanski, a writer for sports illustrated, reviewed it on his blog. he summarized lehrer’s description of an experiment comparing rats to yale students that reminded me of my experiences providing reference services to students at another ivy league university: scientists put rats in a t-shaped maze and put food at one of the top corners of the t. they put the food on the left side 60 percent of the time and food on the right side 40 percent of the time. what they found is that once the rats realized that the food was on the left more often, they always went left, figuring in their own rat minds that more often than not, they would get food. but when they did a similar experiment with yale undergraduates — i’m not sure what they use as a reward for yale undergraduates — barbecued fritos? — they found something else. the students also came to realize that the reward was on the left most of the time, but they tried to figure out the pattern. there was no pattern, but their brains simply could accept that and so instead of going left and simply getting the reward 60 percent of the time, they tried to outsmart the system. and so they only ended up with the reward 52% of the time. as lehrer says — outsmarted by rats. maybe this explains why the same brilliant, high achieving students and faculty members were repeatedly frustrated by pretty similar searches. it wasn’t that they didn’t know how to get to or use business source premier or factiva or the various execrable thomson reuters databases — they just didn’t believe the cheese could be found in the same place over and over again. at least that’s one explanation. it’s also possible they were after real cheese and often the best we had to offer was velveeta. ellie 2010–03–07 at 1:58 pm thanks again for the recommendation brett. i think we have plenty of real cheese. it’s just all in that obnoxious blister packaging that can’t be opened without industrial scissors ;) derik badman 2010–03–04 at 5:05 pm oh, the hours i spent playing magic (i preferred blue). if there’s one thing i learned from four years of art school, it was how to take negative feedback and learn from it. it’s something that i’ve learned (the hard way) that most people don’t have. they take negative criticism as attacks, but you can only go so far with “that’s great”. the thinking about/analyzing your emotions section is very similar to what i’ve been reading in some books on zen (particularly by brad warner). ellie 2010–03–07 at 2:17 pm my favorite deck is a red/white one. i really appreciate constructive criticism. film school really grilled in its necessity for me. everyone was a bit overly nice though. i never had to deal with actual negativity. i even noticed myself fighting my instant rebuttals doing the rewrites on this article. :) hilary davis 2010–03–05 at 9:10 am thanks for this post, ellie – it was a nice break away from the constant momentum of work! and a great reminder to reflect on why we do the things we do the way we do them. it reminds me of a llama webinar i attended last year with pat wagner as the presenter. she focused on the importance of reflecting on why plans fail and encouraged asking hard questions when bad things happen to our well-intentioned plans. her advice for any major project was to build in time and money for reflection, getting everyone on board, giving people time to think, ask questions, take breaks, celebrate small successes along the way, repair from getting burned out, and limit doing work under crisis to minimize mistakes. in another llama webinar, also led by pat wagner, she discussed decision-making strategies and focused on what she called ways to “neutralize data for decision-making.” she described using “graphic models” (grids and t-bars) to avoid cognitive bias. in group settings, she recommended setting up a t-bar chart on a whiteboard so that everyone can keep track of what’s been discussed (and avoid redundant comments) with costs of making a certain decision on one side and benefits of making a certain decision on the other side. start with the negatives (costs) first to allow the criticisms to be aired, then go through and list benefits without making value judgments yet on either costs or benefits. then, weigh the results before deciding, making sure to distinguish between facts and opinions. how often do we actually use a cost/benefit ratio when making group decisions or individual decisions? this post gives us concrete examples of how we can make better decisions and i’d recommend this post to anyone thinking about how to develop better personal or professional leadership skills. ellie 2010–03–07 at 2:19 pm thanks for those meeting strategies! i am definitely going to have to try those out. black magic 2010–05–01 at 9:37 am i really do like lehrer’s writing style and enjoy his work. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct teen tech week: create, share, learn @ your library – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 17 feb robyn vittek /3 comments teen tech week: create, share, learn @ your library waiting for a ride home? by qualityfrog (cc by-nc 2.0) by robyn vittek have you ever noticed how many special events there are in library-land? national library week, read across america day, teen read week, national poetry month, national children’s book week—it becomes difficult to keep track! as much fun as it would be, it’s pretty much impossible to celebrate or even acknowledge each and every one of these. when used discriminately, however, they make a great marketing tool for the library to use in promoting programs and materials and can even aid in fulfilling the goals of vision statements and library missions. one of the newest national initiatives, teen tech week has been celebrated by ala’s young adult library services association (yalsa) since 2007. this year, teen tech week is march 7–13. according to the yalsa website, “the purpose of the initiative is to ensure that teens are competent and ethical users of technologies, especially those that are offered through libraries such as dvds, databases, audiobooks, and videogames. teen tech week encourages teens to use libraries’ nonprint resources for education and recreation, and to recognize that librarians are qualified, trusted professionals in the field of information technology.”1 i like in the library with the lead pipe, and i was really pleased when they asked to write an article, especially once we decided that teen tech week would be my topic. one of the things that makes in the library valuable for me is its goal, “to explore new ideas and start conversations; to document our concerns and argue for solutions.” teen tech week is a great fit with the first part of that goal, but not a great fit for the second. honestly, i wouldn’t know how to criticize teen tech week, constructively or otherwise—there’s just not a lot to criticize. (it’s not that i think ala/yalsa is perfect or anything, but that’s a different article.) teen tech week is just so open-ended and flexible, you don’t pay anything to participate, yalsa’s artwork and promotional materials are excellent—and with a free program i think there’s not a lot of expectation, so whatever you get from yalsa and provide for your teens seems good. i haven’t encountered any problems with it, and other than an aversion to technology in my personal life (i love my job, don’t get me wrong about that—i’m just a little more old-fashioned at heart than your usual early-thirties teen librarian), have no problems with technology-based programming, so i really have no criticisms. what’s great about teen tech week is that it gives us a built-in reason to push ourselves to get creative in our technology programming, to plan gaming events and listening parties, to investigate texting and social networking, and to push our non-print library materials. many teens use the internet and other technologies almost to the exclusion of books as their source of entertainment and information, which can make me reluctant to immerse myself in the world of chats and playlists and fanvids. i spend my personal time gardening and baking bread, and would prefer to spend more of my work time planning traditional book groups and teen advisory board (tab) events, but the fact is that many teens prefer texting to talking, rss to reading a book, and gaming to gardening. the methods and merchandise sold to them—very effectively, i might add—is what they’re using, what their friends are using, and, therefore, what we should be using to engage them. getting teens into the library ultimately, we want teens to visit the library. besides being, as we are so often reminded, the next crop of voters, teens are energetic, dynamic, and contagious—when teens latch on to something, they tell their friends. who tell their friends. who… you get the picture. these are the kind of patrons we want to attract, right? right. what is this generation known for more than anything else? they are one of the first generations to grow up completely immersed in technology—the internet has always been available to them. to get these kids to make the library ‘theirspace,’ we have to make them aware of all the wonders housed within, not only the books. although teens are familiar with the internet and internet-based gadgets (usually before we are) and feel comfortable using them, they don’t always use them to their best advantage. the pew internet and american life project reports that 71% of teens use the internet as their primary source for school projects,2 but many of those same students need guidance in using the internet effectively. by promoting teen tech week, you’re helping to let teens know that the librarians at your facility are information experts—dynamic, interested, up-to-date adults that they can turn to for help with their information needs, and not just encyclopedia pushers. something else to keep in mind when working with teen patrons—you won’t necessarily meet them face to face. their comfort with e-communication means they are more likely to want to text you or ask a question on facebook chat than to drop by for a visit. a brand new study from pew mentions that 73% of ‘wired teens’ now use social networking sites, and 75% of teens surveyed own a cell phone.3 to really connect with teen patrons, we need to reach out to them where they are, using the channels they’re most likely to use, rather than wait for them to come to us. granted, some of us may not feel entirely comfortable using these technologies, but celebrating teen tech week in your library is a great excuse to make yourself more comfortable! every year, yalsa generates a new theme for teen tech week that is general enough to work in a wide variety of ways to get the message across. this year’s theme is “create, share, learn @ your library.” getting started if you want to celebrate teen tech week at your library, a great place to start is the teen tech week website. here, you can register for teen tech week (registration closes mid-february, so if you’ve missed the deadline for this year, keep it in mind for next year), and also find and share program ideas, resources, and promotional tools. registration is free, and occasionally sponsors will send you incentives. posters and bookmarks are available from the ala store. one of the best features of the teen tech week initiative is it’s flexibility. for instance, many school districts take a spring break in the first few weeks of march. yalsa encourages you to “feel free to celebrate teen tech week at the best time for your library.”4 each year there is a different theme, but yalsa doesn’t get bent out of shape if you prefer not to use it. there’s an umbrella theme, “get connected @ your library,” that you can use every year, and the promotional products (like bookmarks) don’t always have the dates for teen tech week listed, so you can use them other years. if you want to start on a small scale, there are plenty of ways to do it. displays of technology-oriented materials such as playaways or books on cd, how-to books like flash animation for teens or the ultimate guide to video game writing and design, or how-to-download-ebook demonstrations are great ways to push stuff you already have in-house, and teen tech week helps create the focus to make these items more visible and relevant. the teen tech week website has some great resource lists to get you started.5 passive programs are a great fit for teen tech week, especially if you’re just starting out, or if your library staff is pressed for time to program. for instance, you could give prizes to teens in the library if you see them using a handheld device— “caught you texting!” holding a week-long scavenger hunt to highlight resources that use or promote the use of popular or emerging technological tools is another low-maintenance idea. you could do a “name that acronym” quiz —kwim? prizes can be cheap, like candy, ear buds, thumb drives, or stickers and decals to decorate an ipod case—the ala store even has this last prize for sale. you don’t have to use working technology to have an awesome program during teen tech week. ask your it department (or ask around at local companies) for spare computer and machine parts and make jewelry or funky sculptures. if you have a little money (or know some boys who have outgrown their toys), get some r/c car parts, erector sets, legos and the like and have a robot-building contest. even if you can’t get working motors, the robot sculptures will be a blast to create and look really cool in the teen area. going virtual if you are able to connect with your teens over the internet, and more and more library systems are recognizing the necessity of maintaining an online presence, your possibilities are practically endless. internet scavenger hunts are easy, cheap, and fun for teens to complete on their own time. online quizzes can be created on websites like quizilla or surveymonkey—they can be just silly, for-fun, multiple choice quizzes (who do you text most often?) or be used to gather real information about which web sites your teens prefer, their favorite type of music, which formats are used most frequently, etc. if you’re in a real time crunch, it could be something as simple as, “post a greeting (or comment on a book review, etc.) on the library facebook page this week, and get a prize! pick your prize up at the teen desk the next time you visit.” not only are you celebrating teen tech week, but it’s also a great way to let the teens know about your library’s social networking sites. on the akron-summit county public library blog/website for teens, we often add quizzes and other interactive posts. they can complement and promote in-house programming as well as stand on their own. book discussion groups can be moved to the virtual realm, onto sites like bookbundlz or shelfari. sites like these can really come in handy when travel is difficult, for teens who are too busy or can’t drive themselves to the library to make a meeting, or for teens who have moved away, but still want to connect with their friends ‘back home.’ the denver library uses part of their website for a virtual book club—when you sign up, they’ll send you emails of a five-minute section of a book chapter every day for a week. if your interest is piqued, you can come to the library and check out the book to read the rest.6 getting media into the mix if you have teen patrons who are more into writing than discussion, you could use the comments function of your library blog to start a round robin story that the teens write themselves. post a paragraph or two of an original story, and let the teens continue it in their comments. you’ll need to post a couple of guidelines and monitor submissions, but this can be a lot of fun. this is only one way teens can use the internet to showcase their creativity. websites like scratch allow teens to animate tributes to their favorite books, the library, or even create a basic video game. you could form a gallery on the site to collect all submissions from your local teens, and ask them to vote for their favorite projects. book trailers and short films are increasingly popular and a great fit for a library-based program. many teens can shoot short videos with their phones and cameras, but if your library has basic video equipment, you can get far more creative and involve more teens. our library recently purchased a digital video camera at target for $50, and one branch is going to use it, along with our galley copies, to do some unscripted reviews to add to the teen website. that’s inexpensive enough that many librarians would feel fine with their tab using it to create video shorts, film a short-scripted play, or do mock-interviews. most cameras have usb cords that allow you to connect them directly to your computer, and there is free video-editing software available online. if $50 is more than your library can afford, yalsa sometimes holds a mini-grant program specifically for teen tech week. in 2008 and 2009, they awarded forty $450 grants to school and public libraries to fund special programs and services. here are a few examples from the list of last year’s winners (the rest are available on the yalsa teen tech week website—see footnote): baraboo public library in baraboo, wisconsin will be using [the] mini grant to improve teen space in the library. a large, dark brick wall will soon be covered with a bright high-tech mural designed by a local teen artist. teens will learn how to wire led lights, construct led clocks, and make a scrolling marquee as [they] combine paint, electronic gadgets, and bling bling to create a unique and eye-catching focal point for [the] teen area. the dorris van doren regional branch (el paso public library system in texas) hosts artech fun: this program combines art and technology through the use of wacom’s bamboo fun tablet. funds will be used to purchase two digital drawing tablets and a small collection of digital art books to help teens take their art to the next level. guest speakers will be invited to show teens how to use a digital drawing tablet and talk about their careers. teens will then be able to reserve time slots to work on two projects. the first project is to create promotional art for the summer reading club and perhaps create an animated short. the second project is to create or upload their own artwork to be showcased in an art show that they plan at the library. bartow county library system in cartersville, georgia’s teen advisory board will use flip mino video cameras to create instructional videos for patrons. the teens will answer basic cell phone questions, explain how to use the online library catalog including how to renew items and place holds, and show how to set up an email account. these are just a few of the topics the instructional videos will cover. the teens will film and edit the videos before posting them to the library website, myspace pages, and making dvds that patrons can check out and take home.7 there are so many different directions you can go! it doesn’t have to be just ‘fun stuff.’ you can make teen tech week a meaningful and educational experience, and even give teens a chance to ‘give back.’ hold an old-cell phone drive in the teen area, and using your tab or regulars to help spread the word, and donate the phones you collect to a women’s shelter or similar charity. talk to your children’s library staff and see if there is a way the teens can create a special audio or video project reading or telling stories that younger kids could enjoy. recorded stories on cd for the little kids to take into a story tent or quiet corner to listen to on their own or with a friend could be fun for the teens as well as the kids. teens could record reader’s theater renditions of favorite children’s tales, or even film a full-on original play, with costumes and backdrops, to run on a loop on a tv in the corner of the children’s library. teen tech week would be a wonderful time to kick off a teen tech volunteer group who uses their tech-savvy (with a little guidance and training) to assist adults with basic computer usage, such as navigating the library website, using a search engine, or learning word processing software. often it’s hard to find the time to leave the circulation desk to help patrons lacking these basic technology-use skills, especially at peak hours. friendly, willing teens could be just the solution, and it can be win-win if they need volunteer hours for scouts, 4-h, or school. involving your peers speaking of school; be sure to let your local teachers and school library know about teen tech week, and how you plan to celebrate. they may want to help you promote your events or even get involved themselves. although teachers see teens even more often than we public librarians do, sometimes they need a push to relate to them through technological means, just like we do. the teen librarian/branch manager at our richfield branch, jen stencel, was recently talking to a teacher about our summer reading program, and witnessed firsthand a mini-epiphany. i was just at a 6-8 grade curriculum meeting this past friday and afterwards i was approached and spoke with the special ed teacher who was absolutely excited that we [the library] count blogs and such for ‘reading’ during our summer reading. she was excited to realize that reading blogs, posts, walls, emails, texts, im’s, etc., is just as much a reading skill—not a traditional skill, but one just as vital, if not more so in today’s world—as reading a book. this would surely excite her students, most of whom are tech-savvy, or at least tech-comfy. we then went on to talking—with exclamation marks flying—and she realized we let the kids count other technologies like playaways and kindles/nooks for reading as well. she was going to introduce her kids to the richfield branch shelfari site. i’m not sure if she was going to do the book club part of it, but she liked the idea of teens ‘socializing’ over books and the ‘fun’ way it would get them to write reviews and share comments.8 conclusion the exciting thing about teen tech week is that it gives us an opportunity to explore and learn to use all of the websites, gadgets, and formats that our library is purchasing, our teens are bringing into the building, and we are reading about in professional journals and magazines. it is a chance to let the teens know that libraries and librarians are not all about books. we are interested in learning about and sharing all types of information resources, and prove entertaining and cutting edge programming and services that occasionally dip into the philanthropic or even (gasp!) educational arenas. when you choose to participate in teen tech week, it’s not only the teens who “create, share and learn @ your library.” the staff will as well. my thanks to carrie burrier, lisa manocchio, sarah rosenberger, and to brett bonfield for their insight and suggestions for this post. this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. young adult library services association (2007). teen tech week mission. american library association. [↩] pew research center&mdsh;internet and american life project. [↩] pew research center—internet and american life project (2010). social media and young adults—a report. [↩] american library association (2010). teen tech week frequently asked questions. [↩] young adult library services association (2010). tech week event planning and booklists. american library association. [↩] denver library online book clubs. [↩] teen tech week 2009 mini-grant winners [↩] stencel, jennifer. 2010. retrieved from an email dated 2/15/2010 and edited with her approval. [↩] tab, technology, teen tech week, teens, yalsa critical literacy? information! the importance of thinking about thinking 3 responses amanda m. 2010–02–18 at 1:06 pm robyn – i don’t know how you and lead pipe knew i was sitting down today to finalize our pl’s teen tech week events and go live with our teen facebook page. thank you, thank you for the great ideas. what’s most exciting is activities that turn the creation over to teens. sure it’s scary to give up control, but with this age group they need to have a voice, especially in the library, that is validated and respected. excellent work. emily ford 2010–02–22 at 9:26 pm robyn, thanks for the nice post about teen tech week. i like that you point to the pew internet report, as i use it a lot to talk about people finding health information in my job. i was wondering if you could share what you’ll be doing after teen tech week to keep the ball rolling. sometimes i feel that dedicated weeks are good for advocacy, but they get forgotten after the week is over. what will you be doing to continue the dialog with teens about using technology with responsibility? what will you be doing to educate the rest of your library community about teens and technology? how do you think someone could expand upon teen tech week and make it an embedded part of what the library is and does? robyn v 2010–02–26 at 12:29 pm we have about 25 teen librarians in our system, so we do what we can to keep abreast of what’s new and current, and to make sure that our programming and materials are relevant to the population we serve. naturally not all of us are as tech-savvy as others, but we do our best to help one another out so that teens across the system get consistent service. our vision statement for teen services is “akron-summit county public library provides customized library services that connect teens to their local community and the larger world.” while it does not mention technology in any specific way, communication and connection is what drives many of the most popular technologies used today, and we try to keep that in mind when reaching out to our teens. having a firm idea of the purpose behind our programming is very important to us. we have a “technology committee” comprised of several teen librarians. their mission is to keep our online presence relevant, to educate other librarians about trends in that area and how we can use them to our advantage, and to help create programming that utilizes computers and other technologies. currently, they are working on expanding our teen volunteer program to include computer help volunteers. we also have a “gaming committee”, who helped to organize four system-wide gaming tournaments last year – no small feat with 17 branches! our library hosts ‘invent-a-palooza’ in the fall of each year, and this year we are hoping to use it as a jumping-off point for a robotics program in conjunction with our local girl scouts organization. essentially, basing a program or service around a certain use of technology should be a means to an end, not an end in itself. if a popular trend is being used by the library just because it is popular, but doesn’t otherwise fit the vision or mission of the library, it won’t necessarily be a positive experience for library or patron. you ask a lot of difficult questions, but i think asking them is the first step. i’m lucky to have an amazing administrative team who supports many of the new ideas we want to try, and understands the importance of teen services – i’m sure many other libraries have more of a struggle to promote teen services within the system than i do. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct source evaluation: supporting undergraduate student research development – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search source evaluation: supporting undergraduate student research development 2021 13 oct iris jastram, claudia peterson and emily scharf /0 comments source evaluation: supporting undergraduate student research development by iris jastram, claudia peterson and emily scharf in brief  each year since 2008, librarians at carleton college read samples of sophomore writing as part of the information literacy in student writing project. the data captured through this project combined with our experiences in consultations and instruction sessions give us a richer understanding of undergraduate information literacy habits. we highlight two challenges for novices: evaluating and selecting sources, and understanding the purpose and methods of integrating sources into written work. we discuss the evidence that leads us to these conclusions and the methods we use to promote student development in these priority areas. introduction carleton college’s reference & instruction librarians have engaged in the information literacy in student writing project (ilsw) since 2008.1 each year, our observations while reading hundreds of papers, the data captured through this project, and our experiences in consultations and instruction sessions give us a richer understanding of undergraduate information literacy habits. as this project has evolved over ten years, students’ research behaviors have changed, as have the methods by which students retrieve their sources and the pre-college experiences our students have had with research. in previous articles, we have examined how this project has helped our relationship with faculty members and how it has impacted our information literacy instruction.2 in july 2018, 10 years after our initial reading, faculty members, librarians, and academic staff came together to read papers written by a representative sample of our sophomores submitted as part of the campus-wide sophomore writing portfolio.3 the conversations we had during our reading sessions, the statistical analyses done by our data consultant, and our extensive experiences with research instruction and individual consultations, highlight two priorities for information literacy development for novice researchers: evaluating sources, and incorporating evidence into written work. in this article we present the evidence that leads us to these conclusions, and we discuss our work with students to help them learn to evaluate sources and use evidence. our information literacy setting carleton college is a highly-selective private, four-year, residential, liberal arts institution located in northfield, minnesota. the gould library at carleton college serves 2,000 students and 210 full time faculty members.4 from 2015-2021, the student population has had the following demographic characteristics: 12% first generation, 10% international, 29% students of color (who identify as at least one ethnicity other than white), and 58% receiving financial aid. reference and instruction librarians offer reference service 49 hours per week and also teach information literacy concepts and research skills in library instruction and student research consultations. we average nearly 800 consultations per year, 160 instruction sessions (primarily one-shot instruction), and 2,000 reference questions per year during non-pandemic years. while we have a strong writing across the curriculum program,5 there is no required composition course where students learn source use consistently. instead, the library and several other academic support units on campus share collaborative responsibility for course-integrated support for student development of some key information literacy skills, such as citing sources, academic integrity, creating annotated bibliographies, reading critically, and the like. key collaborators for us are the writing across the curriculum program, the quantitative resource center, the writing center, academic technologies, and more. together we work to reveal the constructed and variable disciplinary conventions that students must be able to recognize and interpret and, in many cases, reproduce through their research products. we also help students learn to work around and push against these conventions as necessary. studying the products of this distributed instructional model by reading the writing produced in classes spanning the curriculum gives us a holistic look at student capacities, strengths, and struggles that we could not find by assessing library interactions specifically. studying cross-disciplinary student writing in this way also helps us develop shared goals and priorities, both within the library and with other staff and faculty.  in the summer of 2018, carleton college generously funded an expansion of our regular ilsw reading to include faculty and academic staff as readers, and to hire a data consultant to help us with our analysis. we were able to bring together stakeholders from the various areas of campus that share leadership in teaching information literacy skills to students, including the director of the writing across the curriculum program, academic technologists, librarians, the director of the learning and teaching center, and faculty from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and stem fields. in all, five librarians, six faculty, and one academic technologist gathered for our norming session and to read an average of sixteen papers each for a total of 150 papers6 from a stratified random sample of sophomore students.7 together, readers identified clear, statistically significant trends in student information literacy practices. these trends also dovetail with research done in the scholarship of communication theory. the difficulties of using evidence: literature review it is probably not news to any librarian that students sometimes struggle to deploy information effectively in their writing. the entangled cultural maneuvers involved in effective source-based writing are more and more present in our professional thinking, in our literature, 8 and in the framework for information literacy in higher education.9 scholarship founded in genre theory and communication theory also shed light on the complications of learning to participate in scholarly communication. academic genres of writing are embodiments of complex purposes and contexts. any given utterance is “the product of the interaction between speakers and … the whole complex social situation in which the utterance emerges,”10 and “typified” utterances become genres packed with culturally encoded context, and expectation.11 the written genres that students are asked to produce, such as lab reports, position papers, research papers, and reaction papers are therefore encoded with whole constellations of socially constructed meaning. unfortunately for novices and outsiders, however, these culturally encoded genres shape everything from subtle signals about where this writing sits in the scholarly conversation to how readers should interpret the claims presented, or even what counts as good evidence.12 meanwhile, the most typical genre of academic writing that many students have read prior to college is the textbook, and the social context baked into that genre places the student into the role of “information receiver and learner,” or as psychologist barbara k hofer says, “passive receptors” of knowledge.13 what is contestable or not, what counts as evidence, and how authority works are all different in the context of information reception than in the context of information creation. students may therefore think that their primary goal is to communicate facts rather than build new insight, or they may not understand how to draw upon community expectations of authority, evidence, and argument to further their rhetorical goals. in mimicking the formats of academic writing without understanding the culturally encoded motivations and affordances of those academic genres, students struggle to use evidence to communicate effectively in their writing. this is not to denigrate replication and mimicry. one primary way that students begin to understand academic writing and disciplinary rhetoric is by mimicking what they read. from the field of education comes the term threshold concepts. “a threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. it represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress.”14 students are understood to function in a liminal state of mimicry until they’ve crossed the threshold into a new state of understanding.15 with the advent of the association of college and research libraries’ framework for information literacy in higher education,16 librarianship and the library literature has increasingly engaged with threshold concepts. many of us (the authors very much included) remember well our college days when it felt far more manageable to recreate what critical thinking looked like in writing than it was to actually think critically about our materials. many of us have great empathy for the feelings of inadequacy and outright fear that can come with assignments to create novel contributions to fields of study. evaluating and selecting sources librarians know that source evaluation is a difficult task, especially for novices in a field. there are check-list tools like the craap test17 to help students learn basic source evaluation, and we know that students apply broad heuristics to the challenge of sifting through the millions of sources available to them.18 but since “authority is constructed and contextual,”19 it is no surprise that there is literature criticizing these simplified evaluation strategies.20 it is also no surprise that when we use our ilsw rubric to evaluate student writing, “evaluation of sources” is the area in which students struggle the most. in the 2018 ilsw study, sophomore writers struggled to select high quality sources that matched their rhetorical goals. on our rubric’s four-point scale from 1 (poor) to 4 (strong), 12% of scores indicated “poor” evaluation of sources, and only 8% of scores indicated “strong” skills in this area (see figure 1). this rubric category also received the highest percentage of 2s (weaknesses interfere) and the lowest percentage of 3s (weaknesses do not interfere) compared to the other rubric categories. in addition to assigning rubric scores, readers were able to indicate key patterns that they noted in the papers they read. fully 24% of the papers were given the designation “sources lack breadth or depth consistent with genre,” and 15% went so far as to note a pattern of “inappropriate sources/evidence used to support claim” (see figure 2). in the optional free-text comments submitted by readers, more than a third of the comments addressed some aspect of source evaluation. for example, one comment read, “cited a daily kos article for info on the history of dance in the us (and this [daily kos] article even pointed to a scholarly book on the topic that the student didn’t look at).” weaker papers missed obvious avenues of source exploration or relied on secondary citations such as citing a new york times article that mentions a research study rather than seeking out the original study, even when the original sources were readily available through more specialized search tools such as our library discovery system or disciplinary research databases. this points to a common misunderstanding that novice writers hold about the underlying goals of source selection, not always realizing the culturally constructed authority structures that they could use (or productively flout) to more effectively borrow authority from their sources.  we investigated statistical differences in our scores between native english and non-native english writers, as well as between different races, ethnicities, and genders. however, our ilsw sample did not reveal any statistically significant differences between these groups. we do not know whether this is because there were no differences or because our sample size was too small to accurately assess all demographic groups. our 2015 research practices survey that measures pre-college experience revealed greater differences between first generation students, international students, and students of color as compared with white students,21 but we did not observe such differences in the ilsw results. these findings mirror our experiences in research consultations, where students express confusion about why particular research tasks are being asked of them, whether the sources they find fit their assignment requirements, and what kinds of sources are suited to different research topics or goals.the students’ work may be further complicated by a mismatch between their chosen topics and the source types that may be required by their assignments, or by misidentifying source types to begin with. for example, we often see students in research consultations who think they have found articles when they have in fact found book reviews or encyclopedia entries. this could be because databases don’t make this distinction clearly enough in their metadata or because the students don’t know what an article looks like compared with other similar genres. ​​even more fundamentally, students frequently assume that the primary goal for finding a source is to confirm that what the student plans to say is not new — that it is backed up by (or at least thought by) other people in the world. these assumed goals often do not match the professor’s goals22 of having students engage with literature in order to generate novel interpretations rather than simply report on what is already known. the difficulties of evaluating and selecting sources while these findings and experiences are sobering, they are not surprising. not only are sophomore students only half-way through their education, source evaluation is a nuanced and situation-dependent process, and the amount of information available to sort through is increasingly vast and entangled. at the same time, it becomes more difficult to distinguish between the various types of sources, especially online sources. every type of online source looks like a “website” or a pdf even when it may actually be anything from a blog post to a book review to a peer reviewed article to a full monograph. this phenomenon has been described as “container collapse.”23 coupled with our students’ reduced high school experience with research and with libraries,24 container collapse leaves students increasingly confused by source evaluation.  the problem does not just lie in the fact that students do not have much experience with using physical resources, or the fact that many sources now do not have a physical counterpart. multiple studies have shown that online sources are difficult to classify in general. in fact, two separate studies in 2016 found that there was no distinction between student level, age, or experience when it came to identifying online source types.25 instruction may improve performance,26 but the major finding is that online publications are difficult for people to classify correctly, even into broad categories like “academic journal” or “book review.” it may seem like a relic of a past era to think about publication types as an important aspect of source evaluation,27 but distinguishing between source genres is fundamental to the evaluation process. source genres “identify a repertoire of actions that may be taken in a set of circumstances,” and they “identify the possible intentions” of their authors.28 novice writers and researchers are therefore doubly hampered, first by not knowing which source genres are appropriate for various rhetorical tasks, and then by not being able to identify which genre of source they see in their browser windows. of course, evaluation doesn’t stop once appropriate source types are in hand. students then have to navigate disciplinary conventions, subtle “credibility cues,”29 and webs of constructed authority, all of which is in addition to the basics of finding sources that speak about their topics in ways that seem informative, relevant, and understandable.30 for such a daunting set of tasks, all within tight term or semester time constraints, it’s no wonder that some students falter. supporting student development in selecting sources for reference and instruction librarians supporting undergraduates, a foundational part of our work has always involved helping students develop the knowledge and skills needed for good source evaluation. our experiences and ilsw findings emphasize that this core work of librarianship is vitally important. while librarians may not be as knowledgeable about specialized disciplinary discourse, we are uniquely positioned to help students recognize and navigate disciplinary conventions,31 and there is also evidence that library instruction can improve students’ ability to recognize online source types.32 librarians help novice researchers develop their understanding for how to recognize source types through curated lists such as bibliographies, handbooks, research guides, and other resources that are created by experts rather than by algorithms. in an instruction session or research consultation, it takes very little time to show students that, in general, bibliography entries that list a place and/or publisher are books or chapters in books while the other entries are in some other kind of publication (journal, website, etc). librarians can then point out that bibliographies are more than just alphabetical lists of relatively random works cited in a text — that they are instead maps of scholarly conversations, gathering together (ideally) the most relevant and important sources related to the text at hand. students can then be encouraged to take notes on the keywords in bibliography entry titles, the journals that publish works related to the topic, prominent authors, key publishers, publication date distributions, and the like to develop a more nuanced sense of the kinds of sources that could be related to their topics. each entry in a bibliography is a potential source in itself, but it also points to pockets of related sources for students to explore. on our campus, librarians find that they can provide some very practical but crucial advice for  undergraduates by introducing and explaining less-understood source types and also by helping students develop research strategies that use the various source genres to their full advantage. for example, one of the first things some liaison librarians talk about in research appointments is the importance of using scholarly reference sources and even wikipedia to build context and gain a foothold in a new research area.33 it can seem inefficient to spend time reading a source that won’t be acceptable in a bibliography, since scholarly convention often discourages citing reference sources in academic papers. because of this, we often see students skip this step entirely and dive right into an argument without much knowledge about the subject they are trying to discuss. whether licensed or freely available, reference sources provide important factual contexts, define core vocabulary, and point to major voices in the conversation around the topic at hand. reference sources can also signal what kinds of other sources count as good evidence in this conversation, and where to find them.  crucially, going through the step of seeking out background sources, as joseph bizup terms them,34 will result in a better understanding of the topic at hand, which allows students to ask increasingly complex questions of their topic and make better use of analytical sources. reading, rather than being a process that happens separately and after finding and accessing information, is an integral part of both “rhetorical invention”35 and also information literacy. searching and even browsing may feel more active and efficient to the novice researcher, but good source discovery, evaluation, and selection all require active reading. and active reading in turn requires knowing how to spot and interpret the moves that authors make when positioning themselves against the backdrop of prior information, the language of the field (which will be useful for future searches), and the credibility cues that authors use when introducing outside sources into their writing. building this context is one of the most crucial early steps in the research process. organizing information sources is also critical to source selection. for example, at carleton we often introduce students to bibliographic managers such as zotero or endnote not only as citation generators, but as tools that help researchers think critically about their sources. we emphasize the practical aspects of these systems, but we also use them to teach students about the importance of citation tracking, tagging, and sorting, and how these practices allow researchers to see how sources are related to each other. we talk about the importance of organizing your own research and using a citation management system to identify prominent scholars, figure out which authors or experts are missing or left out, and even select source types if that is a requirement of a particular assignment. using sources in research and writing in our ilsw study, the use of evidence category on the rubric measures how well students synthesize, contextualize, and incorporate evidence into their writing. in 2018, this category of information literacy skill gave sophomore students almost as much trouble as the evaluation of sources category, with only 8% of papers given a “strong” score of 1, and 12% given a “poor” score of 4 (see figure 3). like with source evaluation, we expect carleton sophomores to find these skills challenging, and our study’s findings reinforced these expectations. in addition, 29% of papers received the designation “sources not integrated or synthesized,” usually indicating that students ceded control of their arguments to excessive quotation, summary, or reporting rather than calling on sources as rhetorical tools that advance the paper’s goals. readers noted in the free-text comments such patterns as “appears to cherry pick from those sources, most of which probably would have been great sources if used better,” or “there are a lot of opinions without much substantiation.” these weaker papers revealed confusion about the reason for drawing on evidence in the first place — not seeing the importance of interplay between source material and the student’s own thoughts.36 stronger papers, on the other hand, integrated evidence in service of the students’ rhetorical goals, and the students framed and contextualized this evidence such that it helped the reader understand and trust the paper’s claims.  students were often successful when attributing evidence in their written work, generally providing information that helped their readers understand the origins of the evidence and ideas they incorporated. only 14% of papers exhibited “egregious errors in bibliography, in-text citations, or notes,” and this rubric category received the second highest number of 3s and 4s after strategic inquiry. on the other hand, “under-cited/supported claims” was the most common pattern noted among papers, appearing on the scoring sheets 51% of the time, and nearly 48% of the optional free text comments submitted by readers pointed out misunderstandings about attributive practices. this suggests that students often attribute uncritically, not realizing that attribution is a set of rhetorical practices within academic communities rather than simply a set of mechanics that stave off plagiarism charges. in consultations and classes, we see similar confusion about when citations are expected and how they function, with many students thinking they should appear only after direct quotations or close paraphrases rather than understanding that citations also act as authority cues and as portals into further reading for future researchers. supporting student developing in using sources as with the use of evidence category above, the weaker papers in this category signaled confusion about the underlying purpose for bringing evidence and outside sources into papers. this signals a need for librarians, professors, and writing center professionals to explicitly discuss with students the reasons behind citation — its function within rhetoric —  rather than simply the mechanics of quoting, paraphrasing, and creating proper citations. novices in academic writing often benefit from explicit instruction in the ways that academic writing draws on communication conventions that they already know but may not have recognized in the unfamiliar genres they’re reading and writing about. especially with our first and second year students, we give them examples of the types of conversations they might have with a friend and point out that it would be awkward if one conversation partner simply repeated everything the other person was saying. instead, in conversations each person builds on what the other person has said to generate new meaning or knowledge. for our upper level students, we teach them that the point of research is not to create a collection of statements as proof that they have read broadly, but rather to focus on the work of finding connections, selecting key sources, and remaining flexible about their thinking so that they can remain responsive to what they’re learning. once a student gains a somewhat clear understanding of their topic, we then encourage them to identify any themes that emerge in the reading that would cause them to ask new questions, and we teach them to look for any small clues in their readings that indicate points where experts approach the topic differently, build on each other, push against each other, and in doing so make space for their contribution to human knowledge. this in turn helps students see that they can create space for themselves in the scholarly conversation — that they can join the conversation themselves by engaging with their sources rather than simply reporting on them. sometimes, a student’s ability to concentrate on finding good sources is complicated by the restrictions of their class assignments. we often see assignments where students are required to find an exact number of different source types, such as two peer-reviewed journal articles, a book, and a news source. this gives librarians an opportunity to teach students about these types of sources, where to find them, and how to recognize them, and how they function in scholarly communication. however, it does not always help a student to fully develop their own argument or ask more complex questions about their topic because they are consumed with making sure they are checking all the boxes of the assignment requirements. sometimes these requirements and constraints can help steer students toward topics or approaches that have well-matched sources available, but other times the writing prompt and its source requirements can be at odds with each other. in either case, students can learn to navigate the challenges of their assignments if they understand that not every topic can be fully explored only through peer reviewed academic journals. part of what they’re learning to do is scope their topics more appropriately, whether more broadly or narrowly, and to work within (or push productively against) disciplinary conventions about appropriate source types. as students grapple with the difficulties of entering a community of academic practice, another challenge they face has to do with attribution practices within the various disciplines. carleton students report worrying about accidentally plagiarizing, but they lack nuanced understandings of citation norms within each discipline and sub-discipline.37 this combined with not knowing that there is flexibility within citation styles to make citing decisions based on overall best practices, is a major stumbling block. the act of citing is often seen by students as something boring and mechanical, a check-box to mark. in fact, as robert connors has noted, “citations have an essentially rhetorical nature” that contain a “universe of meanings” and that are the “products and reflections of social and rhetorical realities.”38 citations function within scholarly conversation to help readers evaluate the claims at hand, help authors position themselves within the field, and point readers to related conversations in the literature.39 through our conversations with students in research consultations, we have found that students often mistake the various citation formats for arbitrary sets of rules, not understanding that each style matches a discourse community’s communication priorities and strategies.  in our experience, shifting the conversation toward these underlying goals of attribution and away from punitive and mechanistic tutorials helps students both make better choices in their citation practices and participate more fully in their scholarly community. each year we conduct training sessions with peer tutors in the writing center during which we discuss these concepts, and each year those peer tutors report that this was one of the most useful and eye-opening topics discussed during our training sessions. similarly, two quick questions have helped students in research consultations decide whether something they’ve written is “common knowledge” and therefore doesn’t need a citation: “might my reader not automatically agree with this? might my reader be curious to know more about this?” if the answer to either question is “yes” then a citation is useful. countless instruction sessions and research consultations over the years have dealt with similar themes, and students report similar feelings of empowerment (and sometimes even excitement) about attribution practices once they understand the many ways that citations can function in rhetoric.  conclusion our information literacy in student writing project and the scholarship in librarianship, information literacy, and rhetoric have shown us that there are a lot of opportunities to continue working with faculty, academic support staff, and students to assist with source selection and use. we also know from our research and first-hand experience that these practices are quite difficult and require just that: practice. library instruction can help over time and one of the advantages of having faculty score papers for our ilsw project with us is that they see concrete evidence that evaluation and source selection are challenges for students. results from our ilsw findings have opened up further opportunities with a number of faculty to provide more information literacy instruction and consultation to their students.40 we think it is also important to acknowledge the reality that the context in which our students find the majority of their research, the internet (including databases, online catalogs, google scholar, etc.), is only going to make evaluation more complicated. information that is born-digital does not fit into the neat containers we could hold in our hands and more easily identify, nor does all information correspond to a physical format anymore. for these reasons, librarians, faculty, and other academic support staff should discuss source evaluation and selection with students and equip them with strategies. acknowledgements this paper was only possible because of a whole community of people. we can’t possibly name everyone who has shaped our work and the ilsw project, but we would like to particularly acknowledge the contributions of: all the students who generously made their sophomore portfolios available for research members of gould library’s reference & instruction department, for conceiving of this project and carrying it through from year to year. especially matt bailey, sarah calhoun, audrey gunn, susan hoang, sean leahy, danya leebaw, kristin partlo, charlie priore, carolyn sanford, heather tompkins, and ann zawistoski. carleton’s gould library, especially college librarian brad schaffner, for supporting this project carleton’s dean of the college office, particularly bev nagel, george shuffelton, and danette demann for approving, supporting, and funding the 2018 ilsw study carol trossett, data consultant extraordinaire carleton’s perlman center for teaching and learning, especially melissa eblen-zayas, for invaluable support and advice carleton’s writing across the curriculum program, especially the director, george cusack and mary drew, for access to the sophomore writing portfolio papers and for so many other radical acts of collaboration carleton’s office of institutional research and assessment, especially jody friedow and bill altermatt, for access to sophomore student demographic reports all the faculty and staff who participated in the ilsw project’s reading days the reviewers who read and provided feedback on drafts of this paper. thank you for your time and insights ian beilin and amy mars. bibliography acrl. “framework for information literacy for higher education.” chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049670.1995.10755718. bakhtin, m. m. speech genres and other late essays. edited by michael holquist and caryl emerson. translated by vern w. mcgee. 1st edition. university of texas press slavic series 8. austin: university of texas press, 1986. bazerman, charles. “systems of genres and the enactment of social intentions.” in genre and the new rhetoric, edited by aviva freedman and peter medway, 69–85. london: taylor & francis, 2005. bizup, joseph. “beam: a rhetorical vocabulary for teaching research-based writing.” rhetoric review 27, no. 1 (january 4, 2008): 72–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350190701738858. breakstone, joel, sarah mcgrew, mark smith, teresa ortega, and sam wineburg. “why we need a new approach to teaching digital literacy.” phi delta kappan 99, no. 6 (2018): 27–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/0031721718762419. brent, doug. reading as rhetorical invention: knowledge, persuasion, and the teaching of research-based writing. urbana, ill.: national council of teachers of english, 1992. buhler, amy, and tara cataldo. “identifying e-resources: an exploratory study of university students.” library resources & technical services 60, no. 1 (january 7, 2016): 23–37. https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.60n1.23. buhler, amy g, ixchel m faniel, brittany brannon, christopher cyr, tara tobin, lynn silipigni connaway, joyce kasman valenza, et al. “container collapse and the information remix: students’ evaluations of scientific research recast in scholarly vs. popular sources.” in acrl proceedings, 14. cleveland, ohio, 2019. bull, alaina c., and alison head. “dismantling the evaluation framework – in the library with the lead pipe,” july 21, 2021. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2021/dismantling-evaluation/. calhoun, cate. “using wikipedia in information literacy instruction: tips for developing research skills.” college & research libraries news 75, no. 1 (2014): 32–33. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.75.1.9056. connaway, lynn silipigni. “what is ‘container collapse’ and why should librarians and teachers care? – oclc next.” next (blog), june 20, 2018. http://www.oclc.org/blog/main/what-is-container-collapse-and-why-should-librarians-and-teachers-care/. connors, robert j. “the rhetoric of citation systems part i the development of annotation structures from the renaissance to 1900.” rhetoric review 17, no. 1 (1998): 6–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350199809359230. cusack, george. “writing across the curriculum.” carleton college, 2018. https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/writingprogram/. daniels, erin. “using a targeted rubric to deepen direct assessment of college students’ abilities to evaluate the credibility of sources.” college & undergraduate libraries 17, no. 1 (2010): 31. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691310903584767. gullifer, judith, and graham a. tyson. “exploring university students’ perceptions of plagiarism: a focus group study.” studies in higher education 35, no. 4 (june 1, 2010): 463–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070903096508. hofer, barbara k. “personal epistemology as a psychological and educational construct: an introduction.” in personal epistemology: the psychology of beliefs about knowledge and knowing, 3–14. london: routledge, 2004. hyland, ken. “academic attribution: citation and the construction of disciplinary knowledge.” applied linguistics 20, no. 3 (1999): 341–67. jastram, iris, danya leebaw, and heather tompkins. “csi(l) carleton: forensic librarians and reflective practices.” in the library with the lead pipe, 2011. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/csil-carleton-forensic-librarians-and-reflective-practices/. ———. “situating information literacy within the curriculum: using a rubric to shape a program.” portal: libraries and the academy 14, no. 2 (2014): 165–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2014.0011. leebaw, danya, kristin partlo, and heather tompkins. “‘how is this different from critical thinking?’: the risks and rewards of deepening faculty involvement in an information literacy rubric,” 270–80. indianapolis: acrl 2013, 2013. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2013/papers/leebawpartlotompkins_howisthis.pdf. leeder, chris. “student misidentification of online genres.” library & information science research 38, no. 2 (april 2016): 125–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2016.04.003. lloyd, annemaree. information literacy landscapes: information literacy in education, workplace, and everyday contexts. oxford: chandos publishing, 2010. mcgeough, ryan, and c. kyle rudick. “‘it was at the library; therefore it must be credible’: mapping patterns of undergraduate heuristic decision-making.” communication education 67, no. 2 (april 3, 2018): 165–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2017.1409899. meriam library. “is this source or information good?,” 2010. https://library.csuchico.edu/help/source-or-information-good. miller, carolyn r. “genre as social action.” quarterly journal of speech 70, no. 2 (may 1, 1984): 151–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638409383686. reference, gould library, and instruction department. “research practices survey 2015-16.” northfield mn: gould library, carleton college, 2017. https://digitalcommons.carleton.edu/libr_staff_faculty/16/. russo, alyssa, amy jankowski, stephanie beene, and lori townsend. “strategic source evaluation: addressing the container conundrum.” reference services review 47, no. 3 (august 1, 2019): 294–313. https://doi.org/10.1108/rsr-04-2019-0024. simmons, michelle holschuh. “librarians as disciplinary discourse mediators: using genre theory to move toward critical information literacy.” portal: libraries and the academy 5, no. 3 (2005): 297–311. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v005/5.3simmons.html. soules, aline. “e-books and user assumptions.” serials: the journal for the serials community 22, no. 3 (january 1, 2009): s1–5. https://doi.org/10.1629/22s1. white, beth a., taimi olsen, and david schumann. “a threshold concept framework for use across disciplines.” in threshold concepts in practice, edited by ray land, jan h. f. meyer, and michael t. flanagan, 53–63. educational futures. rotterdam: sensepublishers, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-512-8_5. appendix: ilsw rubric footnotes the ilsw project uses a scoring rubric (see appendix) that is designed for use across disciplines, and it is intended to be flexible across many paper genres. it does not reveal specifics about student research strategies, but it does allow us to identify characteristics of information literacy habits of mind as they appear in completed student writing. the rubric calls attention to the clues students give their readers about how the students conceive of their research strategies and how they marshal and deploy evidence in service of their rhetorical goals. our full rubric rubric, scoring sheet, and coder’s manual are available at https://go.carleton.edu/ilsw [↩] iris jastram, danya leebaw, and heather tompkins, “situating information literacy within the curriculum: using a rubric to shape a program,” portal: libraries and the academy 14, no. 2 (2014): 165–86, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2014.0011; danya leebaw, kristin partlo, and heather tompkins, “‘how is this different from critical thinking?’: the risks and rewards of deepening faculty involvement in an information literacy rubric” (indianapolis: acrl 2013, 2013), 270–80, http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2013/papers/leebawpartlotompkins_howisthis.pdf. [↩] information about the sophomore writing portfolio can be found at https://www.carleton.edu/writing/portfolio/. [↩] more about carleton college can be found in this profile: https://web.archive.org/web/20210802183721/https://www.carleton.edu/about/carleton-at-a-glance/  [↩] george cusack, “writing across the curriculum,” carleton college, 2018, https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/writingprogram/. [↩] 25% of the papers were read twice to provide inter-rater reliability scores. among the group of readers, librarians had relatively high levels of inter-rater reliability (73% agreement). faculty disagreed on scores more frequently (54% agreement), possibly due to having less experience with the project or possibly due to their experiences grading papers according to how well the papers meet the requirements of their assignments rather than evaluating according to our rubric, which is not related to a particular assignment. however even with these differences, there were clear trends that emerged from the comments and from the statistically significant differences in the data. [↩] we did not include any measurement of whether students in this sample had had any library instruction or experience. [↩] see annemaree lloyd, information literacy landscapes: information literacy in education, workplace, and everyday contexts (oxford: chandos publishing, 2010). [↩] acrl, “framework for information literacy for higher education” (chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1080/00049670.1995.10755718. [↩] m. m. bakhtin, speech genres and other late essays, ed. michael holquist and caryl emerson, trans. vern w. mcgee, 1st edition., university of texas press slavic series 8 (austin: university of texas press, 1986), 41. [↩] carolyn r. miller, “genre as social action,” quarterly journal of speech 70, no. 2 (may 1, 1984): 163, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638409383686. [↩] see bakhtin, speech genres and other late essays; miller, “genre as social action.” [↩] barbara k hofer, “personal epistemology as a psychological and educational construct: an introduction,” in personal epistemology: the psychology of beliefs about knowledge and knowing (london: routledge, 2004), 3. [↩] jan meyer & ray land, “threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: linkages to ways of thinking and practicing within the disciplines.” (enhancing teaching-learning environments in undergraduate courses, occasional report 4; universities of edinburgh, coventry and durham; may 2003), http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/docs/etlreport4.pdf. [↩] beth a. white, taimi olsen, and david schumann, “a threshold concept framework for use across disciplines,” in threshold concepts in practice, ed. ray land, jan h. f. meyer, and michael t. flanagan, educational futures (rotterdam: sensepublishers, 2016), 53, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-512-8_5. [↩] “framework for information literacy for higher education.” [↩] meriam library, “is this source or information good?,” 2010, https://library.csuchico.edu/help/source-or-information-good. [↩] ryan mcgeough and c. kyle rudick, “‘it was at the library; therefore it must be credible’: mapping patterns of undergraduate heuristic decision-making,” communication education 67, no. 2 (april 3, 2018): 165–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2017.1409899. [↩] acrl, “framework for information literacy for higher education.” [↩] joel breakstone et al., “why we need a new approach to teaching digital literacy,” phi delta kappan 99, no. 6 (2018): 27–32, https://doi.org/10.1177/0031721718762419; alaina c. bull and alison head, “dismantling the evaluation framework – in the library with the lead pipe,” july 21, 2021, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2021/dismantling-evaluation/. [↩] private internal report of research practices survey administered by heds (the higher education data sharing consortium) results prepared by carol trosset in september 2015. [↩] gleaned from conversations with our liaison faculty and from conversations during internal professional development workshops, often led by the learning and teaching center. [↩] amy g buhler et al., “container collapse and the information remix: students’ evaluations of scientific research recast in scholarly vs. popular sources,” in acrl proceedings (association of college and research libraries, cleveland, ohio, 2019), 14; lynn silipigni connaway, “what is ‘container collapse’ and why should librarians and teachers care? – oclc next,” next (blog), june 20, 2018, http://www.oclc.org/blog/main/what-is-container-collapse-and-why-should-librarians-and-teachers-care/. [↩] we know this from the research practices survey, conducted at carleton in 2006 and again in 2015. this survey contains many measures of these changes in pre-college experience. while we are a highly selective institution, our students’ pre-college experiences with research have been diminishing over time. you can see some of the rps results at “research practices survey 2015-16” (northfield mn: gould library, carleton college, 2017), https://digitalcommons.carleton.edu/libr_staff_faculty/16/. [↩] amy buhler and tara cataldo, “identifying e-resources: an exploratory study of university students,” library resources & technical services 60, no. 1 (january 7, 2016): 33, https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.60n1.23; chris leeder, “student misidentification of online genres,” library & information science research 38, no. 2 (april 2016): 129, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2016.04.003. [↩] leeder, “student misidentification of online genres,” 129. [↩] aline soules, “e-books and user assumptions,” serials: the journal for the serials community 22, no. 3 (january 1, 2009): s4, https://doi.org/10.1629/22s1. [↩] charles bazerman, “systems of genres and the enactment of social intentions,” in genre and the new rhetoric, ed. aviva freedman and peter medway (london: taylor & francis, 2005), 69. [↩] erin daniels, “using a targeted rubric to deepen direct assessment of college students’ abilities to evaluate the credibility of sources,” college & undergraduate libraries 17, no. 1 (2010): 35, https://doi.org/10.1080/10691310903584767. [↩] alyssa russo et al., “strategic source evaluation: addressing the container conundrum,” reference services review 47, no. 3 (august 1, 2019): 294–313, https://doi.org/10.1108/rsr-04-2019-0024. [↩] michelle holschuh simmons, “librarians as disciplinary discourse mediators: using genre theory to move toward critical information literacy,” portal: libraries and the academy 5, no. 3 (2005): 297–311, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v005/5.3simmons.html. [↩] leeder, “student misidentification of online genres,” 129. [↩] cate calhoun, “using wikipedia in information literacy instruction: tips for developing research skills,” college & research libraries news 75, no. 1 (2014): 32–33, https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.75.1.9056. [↩] joseph bizup, “beam: a rhetorical vocabulary for teaching research-based writing,” rhetoric review 27, no. 1 (january 4, 2008): 75, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350190701738858. [↩] doug brent, reading as rhetorical invention: knowledge, persuasion, and the teaching of research-based writing (urbana, ill.: national council of teachers of english, 1992). [↩] anecdotally, when the reference and instruction librarians met with writing center workers in fall 2019 to discuss how we can better work together, one point of common ground was the desire to support students who struggle to get their own voice into their writing rather than relying on sources. [↩] judith gullifer and graham a. tyson, “exploring university students’ perceptions of plagiarism: a focus group study,” studies in higher education 35, no. 4 (june 1, 2010): 463–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070903096508. [↩] robert j connors, “the rhetoric of citation systems part i the development of annotation structures from the renaissance to 1900,” rhetoric review 17, no. 1 (1998): 6–7, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350199809359230. [↩] see ken hyland, “academic attribution: citation and the construction of disciplinary knowledge,” applied linguistics 20, no. 3 (1999): 342–44. [↩] iris jastram, danya leebaw, and heather tompkins, “csi(l) carleton: forensic librarians and reflective practices,” in the library with the lead pipe, 2011, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/csil-carleton-forensic-librarians-and-reflective-practices/. [↩] reflections on active collecting during difficult times new year, new cycles, new platform leave a reply cancel reply save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct aaron swartz – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 20 feb brett bonfield /10 comments aaron swartz a photo of aaron swartz by flickr user quinn norton entitled, “florence” (cc-by 2.0) in brief:this article discusses aaron swartz’s life and legacy, especially his contributions to libraries. via video, narrative, and archived email discussions, it conveys a sense of swartz’s values and conversational style. it concludes with a detailed timeline of his life. by brett bonfield this is a living article about someone who died. this version is complete, but it’s not finished because i’m not yet ready for it to be finished. i want to write about aaron swartz now because of what libraries meant to him and because of what he means to people who care about libraries. as much as has been written about aaron since his death, i don’t think that story has been fully told. i think it may be best to start with a video. there are no images of aaron in this video, just his voice. we had a camera pointed at him as he delivered this presentation on saturday, january 12, 2008, at the american library association midwinter meeting in philadelphia, but this is the version he liked best. http://youtu.be/bvjqxaoo4fi the talk is called “picking winners,” a topic my colleagues and i from acrl’s university libraries section “current topics” committee requested, and he used it as a chance to talk about technologies and other projects he cared about, including open library. this video was never posted anywhere because neither of us could get the slides and the audio to line up. i’ve gotten the video to the point where it’s mostly watchable, but it’s still kind of a mess in terms of synchronization. if you’re a keynote expert and want to give it a shot, i’d be happy to share the .key file with you. a few weeks later, on wednesday, february 27, 2008, he gave a different talk about open library at the code4lib 2008 conference hosted by oregon state university. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov-p2uzzc4s i’ve been writing about aaron and his connection to libraries since i was in library school. on july 17, 2007, for lisnews, i wrote a post called  “aaron swartz announces the open library.” here’s how it began: what are you supposed to feel about aaron swartz? he co-authored rss, served on the w3c’s rdf core working group, helped the wonderful john gruber design the amazing markdown, and developed and gave away software like rss2email that many of us use every day… and then he graduated high school. he went to stanford, naturally, at which point his already fascinating blog, raw thought, began alternating even more maddeningly between precocious, annoying, honest to the point of painfulness, and legitimately brilliant. aaron’s comment on the post: “thank you for the kind words. and i’m sorry for the annoying blog posts.” the fact that i’ve been writing about aaron for years1 is not intended to give me credibility. as has become obvious since his death, a lot of people admire aaron and a lot of us believe he had the capacity for greatness. i was consistently surprised and delighted by his thought processes and how he chose to spend his time. his curiosity, idealism, charisma, and productiveness gave me hope. maybe that explains the overwhelming sense of sadness i feel several times each day, and expect to for a long time. i also feel a lot of anger at the decisions made by mit and the prosecutors who were responsible for his case, and expect to live with that anger for a long time as well. it hurts to read that some people feel the memorials to aaron are canonizing him or treating him as a martyr. i feel like those characterizations question the sincerity of those who knew him or admired him or agreed with him or simply believe he was mistreated. it represents a callousness that i hope people can allow themselves to leave aside. it would be awful for me to tell anyone else how to feel about aaron’s death. i think those of us who are mourning are owed that same level of respect. i met aaron in person for the first time on january 12, 2008, when he presented at ala. and i saw him in person for the last time the next night. the two of us got together at the convention center and talked for a couple of hours, then i drove him to west philadelphia, where he was staying with friends. a couple of days later, he emailed to make sure he had the correct reference for a book i had recommended about nonprofit management and a week or so later we resumed our conversation via email. i’ve uploaded our email correspondence (direct link to the pdf) to the internet archive’s aaron swartz collection. at the time, aaron was beginning to assist with the formation of change congress (now called rootstrikers), an organization that sought to end corruption in the u.s. congress by reducing the influence of lobbyists and pacs, ending earmarks, supporting public finance for political campaigns, and promoting transparency. i was in favor of making it easier to prosecute corrupt officials by creating technology that ensured anonymity for whistleblowers and helped bring attention to the most credible and useful tips. there are a few things our email exchange illustrates: the nature of our in-person conversation that preceded this exchange. we were looking for practical ways that we, or a few people like us, could change the world for the better. which is not what i had planned to talk to him about. i wanted to know more about the diet he’d recently used to lose weight. i wanted the inside story of his time at reddit. i wanted to know what it felt like to leave stanford after a year. i wanted to know what paul graham was like once you get to know him. but i didn’t drive the conversation, aaron did. and he did it by asking questions. this style comes through in the emails he sent as well. it should be obvious how hard i’m working to keep up with him, to come up with ideas that he has not already thought of and dismissed. i can usually at least hold my own in these kinds of conversations. but i was badly outclassed, in person and via email, by someone roughly half my age. for instance, my case is centered around the idea that corruption would end if it were easier to report and more frequently prosecuted. aaron’s response: “i tend to disagree with the if-only-they-knew-the-truth school of thought. watergate happened not because the story came out — cointelpro started in 1956; stories like this came out all the time in the independent press — it was because nixon went after someone powerful (the dnc) who could fight back. had it been nixon burglarizing the socialist worker’s party offices again, the post never would given the story such attention and woodward and bernstein would have been stayed on the cub beat. so airing the stories is good, but it’s nowhere near enough. we need an alternate system for making them interesting and getting them to people. and that’s much harder.” he took me and my ideas seriously. because aaron seems to have known everyone who was anyone, it can be easy to think of him as someone who had no time for you if you were less accomplished than tim berners-lee or paul graham or lawrence lessig or danah boyd. that wasn’t the case. when we met, i was a recent library school graduate working part-time at a couple of libraries, a guy in his late thirties struggling to find my way in a new profession. it didn’t matter. he wanted to figure out what he could learn from talking to me or exchanging messages. and also what he could help inspire me to do. for instance, he suggests that i help make the nascent wikileaks website easier to use. there is foreshadowing in this exchange. his connection to wikileaks is rumored to be one of the reasons the prosecutors were so keen on a conviction in the jstor incident. and i display a great deal of naivete about prosecutors as well, which aaron doesn’t really call me on. that conversation ended, but we continued to correspond. he served as a reviewer for one of my first lead pipe articles before it went live. when the lead pipe editorial board was first discussing the possibility of a lead pipe 501(c)(3), i asked aaron for advice, and he put me in touch with his friend sj klein. i sent aaron the marc records for the collingswood public library, which he described as being received by his colleagues at the open library with “much rejoicing” during their annual meeting. when my friend gabriel farrell and i created a website to promote the harpercollins self-destructing ebook boycott, aaron made some suggestions on how we could improve it. aaron was an ally, one of the first people i would go to for advice on some of the projects i cared about most deeply. though we met that one time in person, aaron was really just an internet-friend. we were friends on facebook, contacts on linkedin, and shared a few songs with each other on spotify. the last thing he listened to on spotify, the day before he died, was a flying nun-era sally field singing a song called, “optimize”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td1wfqkujxu that song breaks my heart. i can’t help but attach a narrative to it. i picture him feeling down. i picture someone trying to do something to pick him up. that’s what this sort of song is best at. find a goofy song, send it to aaron, brighten his day. it always worked until it didn’t. when the only explanation anyone seemed to have for aaron’s death was that he was clinically depressed, i tried to accept that idea. it fit with the david foster wallace narrative. at the time of his death, aaron was writing a summary of wallace’s masterpiece, infinite jest. he’d blogged about it in two separate posts, “what happens at the end of infinite jest?“ and “on finishing infinite jest.” wallace was clinically depressed. aaron, like wallace, chose to hang himself. many of the things i’ve read about him since his death cite his short story about suicide as evidence of his clinical depression, his disinterest and lack of participation in reddit’s success as evidence of his selfishness and melodramatic tendencies, and his guerilla open access manifesto as evidence of his intention to distribute the jstor database online. when it seemed like it was the only narrative available, i tried to make it fit with my limited understanding of aaron as a person, with what i knew about his behavior leading up to his death. this narrative might be the most accurate one we will ever have, but i hope not. we all contain multitudes. that’s obvious, perhaps trite, but it’s also something we tend to forget when we follow our natural tendency to explain why others behave the way they do. which is why the portrait of aaron that taren stinebrickner-kauffman is creating on tumblr feels more believable, on an emotional level, than anything else i’ve read about him since he died. for instance, she doesn’t think he was clinically depressed. i wonder if she’s right, and what else she will be right about in the days ahead. we know there are going to be books about aaron swartz. the story of his death has been too big, and his life has been too well documented, for there not to be multiple biographies. i wouldn’t be surprised it there were a few already being seriously negotiated. i hope one of these biographies gives him the no one here gets out alive treatment, something like what jerry hopkins and danny sugarman did for jim morrison, the lead singer of the doors, in their 1980 biography. it might be nice to see aaron’s life turned into a series of melodramatic anecdotes that appeal to adolescents and inspire a decade or two of dorm room posters (assuming there are still dorms and posters in the years 2023 through 2038). i want to live in a world in which disaffected teens are at least as interested in coding and activism as they are in loud music and flattering pants.2 even more than that, i hope one of these biographies gives aaron his own robert caro, a biographer whom aaron held in great esteem; he called the power broker, caro’s biography of robert moses, “one of the very best books ever published,” and he admired caro’s four-volume biography of lyndon johnson as well. aaron’s life was far shorter than that of robert moses or lyndon johnson, but he was present as history was being made, and he collaborated with many of the people who i believe will define our present age. i think his life is worthy of the caro treatment. the question i have is whether the world aaron helped to create will be a world without caros or, for that matter, without his other favorite authors, including david foster wallace and noam chomsky. these writers and their works have been heavily subsidized by the education and publishing industries. much of aaron’s work threatened the publishing industry and, given that he dropped out of both high school and college, he also embodied a threat to traditional education. while he loved books, i have yet to see how he reconciled that love with his desire to make information open and accessible. i’m sure creative commons was part of that vision. i wish i could ask him if there was more to it. assuming traditional education and publishing continue to struggle, assuming a void develops where they have prospered for the last century or so, we have no way to know if anything will replace them. that may be good, on balance, just as an increasing number of teen activists seems likely, on balance, to be more beneficial than harmful. yet its seems that some of the things we love about education and publishing may soon become anachronisms, if they are not already. so it’s possible that the best we will ever get is a web-based article. fortunately, we already have a very, very good one: on february 7, 2013, slate published “the idealist: aaron swartz wanted to save the world. why couldn’t he save himself?” by justin peters. at least for now, i think this is the closest we have to a definitive telling of aaron’s story. since aaron died, i’ve been trying to figure out how to honor him in a library-centric way. many of the other ways that people have chosen to honor him overlap with libraries. for instance, at his memorial in new york city on january 19, 2013, taren stinebrickner-kauffman said that a way to honor aaron is that “all academic research from all-time should be made public and free and open and available to anybody in the world.” i want to see that happen, and i intend to help with that process, but i also want something more immediately achievable. and what i’m good at, as a librarian, is organizing information. justin peters did a good job, for slate, of creating a basic timeline of aaron’s life. my plan is to expand on that project, to create a much more detailed timeline. this project is not intended as an end unto itself. i see it as a resource for subsequent researchers, as a way to make aaron’s “robert caro biography” just a little bit easier to write.  like any library, it will always be complete, but also unfinished. as i learn more about aaron’s activities or come up with more illustrative or stable links, i’ll add them to the timeline below. at present, the timeline is just well formatted html. once i have a better sense of what else should be added, i hope to publish it in a format that’s more conducive to being remixed, and perhaps host it in a way that makes it easier for others to contribute, perhaps as a git repository or as a wiki. for now, i want this to be like john mark ockerbloom’s online books page, my own to edit, but something i hope everyone finds useful. aaron will never respond to another of my emails. but he may still have answers to questions i never got to ask him directly. for me, this timeline has a second purpose. as i read more texts he wrote, learn about additional conferences in which he participated, and discover additional projects he found compelling, it’s my way of having the conversation end later, when i’m more ready for that to happen. i’m not yet ready. thanks to laura quilter, and to lead pipe colleague erin dorney, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. aaron swartz: a timeline 1999 1999: joined the rdf core working group. stayed on until 2000. 2000 2001 2001: interviewed by lew koch, wbez 91.5. october 2001: published (with james hendler), “the semantic web: a network of content for the digital city,” proceedings of the second annual digital cities workshop, kyoto, japan. (based on “the semantic web in breadth“). 2002 2002: joined creative commons as a metadata advisor. stayed on until 2004. january 2002: published “musicbrainz: a semantic web service” in intelligent systems (ieee), 17(1), 76-77. october 8, 2002: camped out at the u.s. supreme court the night before it heard oral arguments in eldred v. ashcroft. 2003 2004 january 23, 2004: interviewed by jesper (waffle.net). april 20-24, 2004: attended 14th conference on computers, freedon, and privacy in berkeley, california (see photo of him participating in a mock vote during the conference). december 17, 2004: assists john gruber in publishing the definition for markdown, “a text-to-html conversion tool for web writers.” 2005 may 15, 2005: posted “what’s going on here?” to his weblog, raw thought. may 20, 2005: attended free culture: phase two conference at american university in washington, dc (see photos of him at the conference). june 1, 2005: posted “getting back on track” to his weblog, raw thought. june 1, 2005: posted “the god who wasn’t there (and the one who was)” to his weblog, raw thought. june 4, 2005: posted “stanford: season finale” to his weblog, raw thought. june 6, 2005: posted “sneak peek” to his weblog, raw thought. june 9, 2005: posted “sfp: home, sweet, home” to his weblog, raw thought. june 11, 2005: posted “stanford/sfp: leaving on a jet plane” to his weblog, raw thought. june 15, 2005: posted “sfp: first contact” to his weblog, raw thought. june 16, 2005: posted “sfp: dinner with dan” to his weblog, raw thought. june 16, 2005: posted “sfp: fire alarm” to his weblog, raw thought. june 17, 2005: posted “the immorality of freakonomics” to his weblog, raw thought. june 23, 2005: posted “the intentionality of evil” to his weblog, raw thought. july 3, 2005: posted “of washington and worcester” to his weblog, raw thought. july 5, 2005: posted “sfp: the spirit inside” to his weblog, raw thought. july 14, 2005: posted “help wanted: programmers for startup” to his weblog, raw thought. july 16, 2005: posted “change of course” to his weblog, raw thought. july 20, 2005: posted “our next superjumbo” to his weblog, raw thought. july 21, 2005: posted “serious social science” to his weblog, raw thought. july 22, 2005: posted “faces of fame” to his weblog, raw thought. july 26, 2005: posted “simon arrives” to his weblog, raw thought. july 26, 2005: posted “icommons summit” to his weblog, raw thought. august 2, 2005: posted “eat and code” to his weblog, raw thought. august 8, 2005: posted “behind the rant: maciej ceglowski” to his weblog, raw thought. august 25, 2005: posted “foo camp” to his weblog, raw thought. august 26, 2005: posted “reflections on cultural fragments” to his weblog, raw thought. september 16, 2005: posted “narcissism notice” to his weblog, raw thought. september 21, 2005: posted “paul graham is wrong” to his weblog, raw thought. september 24, 2005: posted “the republican war on science” to his weblog, raw thought. september 24, 2005: posted “serenity” to his weblog, raw thought. september 29, 2005: posted “serenity: a review” to his weblog, raw thought. october 5, 2005: posted “david lynch and vedic “science”” to his weblog, raw thought. october 12, 2005: posted >the new mccarthy: bill o’reilly” to his weblog, raw thought. october 16, 2005: posted “founders unite for startup school” to his weblog, raw thought. october 26, 2005: posted “the startup news” to his weblog, raw thought. october 28, 2005: posted “trials of testing” to his weblog, raw thought. november 8, 2005: posted “birthday thoughts” to his weblog, raw thought. november 25, 2005: posted “understanding economic jargon” to his weblog, raw thought. december 6, 2005: posted “rewriting reddit” to his weblog, raw thought. november 2005: merged infogami with reddit and became a co-founder of their new parent company, not a bug. stayed on january, 2007. december 22, 2005: posted “a brief history of ajax” to his weblog, raw thought. december 28, 2005: posted “howto: be more productive” to his weblog, raw thought. 2006 january 4, 2006: posted “colombia is bleeding” to his weblog, raw thought. january 5, 2006: posted “some announcements” to his weblog, raw thought. january 8, 2006: posted “say goodbye to embarrassment” to his weblog, raw thought. january 17, 2006: posted “in his own words 2” to his weblog, raw thought. january 27, 2006: posted “more mlkj day” to his weblog, raw thought. january 28, 2006: posted “the disappearance of thought” to his weblog, raw thought. march 27, 2006: posted “wassup?” to his weblog, raw thought. april 17, 2006: posted “what it means to be an intellectual” to his weblog, raw thought. april 23, 2006: posted “do faces cause depression?: self-experimentation in science” to his weblog, raw thought. april 26, 2006: posted “the miracle diet” to his weblog, raw thought. april 28, 2006: posted “a future without fat” to his weblog, raw thought. may 7, 2006: posted “book reviews” to his weblog, raw thought. may 7, 2006: posted “fat backlash” to his weblog, raw thought. may 10, 2006: posted “public service announcement” to his weblog, raw thought. may 15, 2006: posted “the book that changed my life” to his weblog, raw thought. may 22, 2006: posted “the conservative nanny state” to his weblog, raw thought. may 24, 2006: posted “introducing feeds.reddit” to his weblog, raw thought. may 27, 2006: posted “a non-programmer’s apology” to his weblog, raw thought. may 31, 2006: posted “gmail down” to his weblog, raw thought. june 1, 2006: posted “legacy” to his weblog, raw thought. june 6, 2006: posted “an inconvenient truth” to his weblog, raw thought. june 6, 2006: posted “shifting the terms of debate: how big business covered up global warming” to his weblog, raw thought. june 7, 2006: posted “making noise: how right-wing think tanks get the word out” to his weblog, raw thought. june 8, 2006: posted “endorsing racism: the story of the bell curve” to his weblog, raw thought. june 9, 2006: posted “spreading lies: how think tanks ignore the facts” to his weblog, raw thought. june 10, 2006: posted “saving business: the origins of right-wing think tanks” to his weblog, raw thought. june 11, 2006: posted “hurting seniors: the attack on social security” to his weblog, raw thought. june 15, 2006: posted “fighting back: responses to the mainstream media” to his weblog, raw thought. june 16, 2006: posted “life in suburbia: land of cliche” to his weblog, raw thought. june 20, 2006: posted “in offense of classical music” to his weblog, raw thought. june 20, 2006: posted “a clarification” to his weblog, raw thought. june 23, 2006: posted “what’s freedom?” to his weblog, raw thought. july 5, 2006: posted “release late, release rarely” to his weblog, raw thought. july 11, 2006: posted “the hard sciences” to his weblog, raw thought. july 12, 2006: posted “the attraction of the center” to his weblog, raw thought. july 17, 2006: posted “what makes a personality scary?” to his weblog, raw thought. july 18, 2006: posted “the fruits of mass collaboration” to his weblog, raw thought. july 19, 2006: posted “the techniques of mass collaboration: a third way out” to his weblog, raw thought. july 26, 2006: posted “i love the university” to his weblog, raw thought. july 26, 2006: posted “on losing weight” to his weblog, raw thought. july 26, 2006: posted “what does blogspace look like?” to his weblog, raw thought. july 28, 2006: posted “nutrition basics” to his weblog, raw thought. july 29, 2006: posted “what is going on here?” to his weblog, raw thought. july 31, 2006: posted “simple tips for longer living” to his weblog, raw thought. august 8, 2006: posted “solidarity for the shy: achieving critical mass” to his weblog, raw thought. august 11, 2006: posted “growth” to his weblog, raw thought. august 16, 2006: posted “the smalltalk question” to his weblog, raw thought. august 31, 2006: posted “wikimedia at the crossroads” to his weblog, raw thought. september 4, 2006: posted “who writes wikipedia?” to his weblog, raw thought. september 5, 2006: posted “who writes wikipedia? — responses” to his weblog, raw thought. september 5, 2006: posted “false outliers” to his weblog, raw thought. september 7, 2006: posted “who runs wikipedia?” to his weblog, raw thought. september 11, 2006: posted “making more wikipedians” to his weblog, raw thought. september 14, 2006: posted “making more wikipedias” to his weblog, raw thought. september 18, 2006: posted “code, and other laws of wikipedia” to his weblog, raw thought. september 22, 2006: posted “(the dandy warhols) come down” to his weblog, raw thought. september 24, 2006: posted “weekend update” to his weblog, raw thought. september 25, 2006: posted “of the mbta” to his weblog, raw thought. september 26, 2006: posted “alone in the hospital” to his weblog, raw thought. september 27, 2006: posted “a feminist goes to the hospital” to his weblog, raw thought. september 28, 2006: posted “a unified theory of magazines” to his weblog, raw thought. september 29, 2006: posted “take the easy way out” to his weblog, raw thought. october 1, 2006: posted “life in the hospital” to his weblog, raw thought. october 2, 2006: posted “fashion notes” to his weblog, raw thought. october 3, 2006: posted “the awfulness of college lectures” to his weblog, raw thought. october 4, 2006: posted “the greatness of college lectures” to his weblog, raw thought. october 4, 2006: posted “what’s radical about the liberal arts?” to his weblog, raw thought. october 6, 2006: posted “college: commodity or community?” to his weblog, raw thought. october 8, 2006: posted “mamet on auditions” to his weblog, raw thought. october 9, 2006: posted “visiting mission hill” to his weblog, raw thought. october 10, 2006: posted “visiting olin college” to his weblog, raw thought. october 11, 2006: posted “iz r childrens lrnng?” to his weblog, raw thought. october 12, 2006: posted “getting it wrong” to his weblog, raw thought. october 13, 2006: posted “getting it right” to his weblog, raw thought. october 15, 2006: posted “blast from the past” to his weblog, raw thought. october 16, 2006: posted “the sexual life of savages” to his weblog, raw thought. october 17, 2006: posted “talking right” to his weblog, raw thought. october 18, 2006: posted “science summaries” to his weblog, raw thought. october 19, 2006: posted “the invention of objectivity” to his weblog, raw thought. october 20, 2006: posted “i hate the news” to his weblog, raw thought. october 22, 2006: posted “the archives” to his weblog, raw thought. october 18, 2006: posted “that isn’t science!” to his weblog, raw thought. october 24, 2006: posted “a night at the coop” to his weblog, raw thought. october 25, 2006: posted “somerville’s oddest park” to his weblog, raw thought. october 26, 2006: posted “google and the gradient” to his weblog, raw thought. october 27, 2006: posted “founder’s syndrome” to his weblog, raw thought. october 29, 2006: posted “what is elitism?” to his weblog, raw thought. october 30, 2006: posted “up against love” to his weblog, raw thought. october 31, 2006: posted “and now, the news” to his weblog, raw thought. november 1, 2006: posted “the aftermath” to his weblog, raw thought. november 2, 2006: posted “the afterparty” to his weblog, raw thought. november 3, 2006: posted “everybody tells me so” to his weblog, raw thought. november 6, 2006: posted “mr. millionaire” to his weblog, raw thought. november 7, 2006: posted “the early days of a better website” to his weblog, raw thought. november 8, 2006: posted “robert walker, road warrior” to his weblog, raw thought. november 9, 2006: posted “the millionaire’s ball” to his weblog, raw thought. november 10, 2006: posted “life at the office” to his weblog, raw thought. november 12, 2006: posted “the meaning of borat” to his weblog, raw thought. november 13, 2006: posted “meeting peter singer” to his weblog, raw thought. november 14, 2006: posted “the existential terror of san francisco” to his weblog, raw thought. november 15, 2006: posted “office space” to his weblog, raw thought. november 16, 2006: posted “kahle v. ashcroft write-up” to his weblog, raw thought. november 18, 2006: posted “ostensible networks vs. friendship networks” to his weblog, raw thought. november 19, 2006: posted “san francisco: silicon valley’s ghetto” to his weblog, raw thought. november 20, 2006: posted “disinfecting the sunlight foundation” to his weblog, raw thought. november 21, 2006: posted “identity fetishism” to his weblog, raw thought. november 23, 2006: posted “bread and cheese” to his weblog, raw thought. november 23, 2006: posted “free speech: because we can” to his weblog, raw thought. november 5, 2006: posted “pay it forward” to his weblog, raw thought. november 27, 2006: posted “why it makes sense to bite the hand that feeds you” to his weblog, raw thought. november 27, 2006: posted “a trip to the courthouse: part 1” to his weblog, raw thought. november 28, 2006: posted “a trip to the courthouse: part 2” to his weblog, raw thought. november 29, 2006: posted “lazy backup” to his weblog, raw thought. december 1, 2006: posted “two conceptions of taste” to his weblog, raw thought. december 2, 2006: posted “never back to school” to his weblog, raw thought. december 3, 2006: posted “drop out” to his weblog, raw thought. december 4, 2006: posted “the genius is in the details” to his weblog, raw thought. december 5, 2006: posted “the city with no heart” to his weblog, raw thought. december 7, 2006: posted “competition of experimentation?” to his weblog, raw thought. december 11, 2006: posted “business “ethics”” to his weblog, raw thought. december 11, 2006: posted “the politics of wikis” to his weblog, raw thought. december 12, 2006: posted “the politics of wikipedians” to his weblog, raw thought. december 12, 2006: posted “seven habits of highly successful websites” to his weblog, raw thought. december 12, 2006: posted “eight reasons (some) wikis work” to his weblog, raw thought. december 13, 2006: posted “the goog life: how google keeps employees by treating them like kids” to his weblog, raw thought. december 14, 2006: posted “think bigger: a generalist manifesto” to his weblog, raw thought. december 15, 2006: posted “tips for better thinking” to his weblog, raw thought. december 17, 2006: posted “the grim meathook future” to his weblog, raw thought. december 19, 2006: posted “medium stupid” to his weblog, raw thought. december 19, 2006: posted “drugs and guns” to his weblog, raw thought. december 21, 2006: posted “museums and exploratoriums” to his weblog, raw thought. december 22, 2006: posted “cliche finder” to his weblog, raw thought. december 23, 2006: posted “sociology or anthropology” to his weblog, raw thought. december 24, 2006: posted “the journalist’s creed” to his weblog, raw thought. december 27, 2006: posted “cultural imperialism sucks: a visit to berlin” to his weblog, raw thought. december 27, 2006: posted “wither the two cultures?” to his weblog, raw thought. december 28, 2006: posted “welcome to the panopticon” to his weblog, raw thought. december 28, 2006: posted “causes of conformance” to his weblog, raw thought. december 29, 2006: posted “products that should exist” to his weblog, raw thought. 2007 2007: joined open library as its tech lead. stayed on until 2009. january 2, 2007: posted “happy new year” to his weblog, raw thought. january 2, 2007: posted “the sociologist’s creed” to his weblog, raw thought. january 10, 2007: posted “the capital of scandinavia” to his weblog, raw thought. january 18, 2007: posted “a moment before dying” to his weblog, raw thought. january 22, 2007: posted “last day of summer camp” to his weblog, raw thought. january 23, 2007: posted “the fundamental law of sociology” to his weblog, raw thought. january 24, 2007: posted “fired” to his weblog, raw thought. january 30, 2007: posted “cities” to his weblog, raw thought. january 30, 2007: posted “dresden” to his weblog, raw thought. january 30, 2007: posted “berlin” to his weblog, raw thought. january 31, 2007: posted “stockholm” to his weblog, raw thought. february 1, 2007: posted “cambridge” to his weblog, raw thought. february 3, 2007: posted “san francisco” to his weblog, raw thought. february 6, 2007: posted “justifications for myself” to his weblog, raw thought. february 7, 2007: posted “the logic of open drm” to his weblog, raw thought. february 7, 2007: posted “neurosis #9” to his weblog, raw thought. february 8, 2007: posted “the enemy too close to home” to his weblog, raw thought. february 8, 2007: posted “getting past” to his weblog, raw thought. february 9, 2007: posted “our underachieving college presidents” to his weblog, raw thought. february 11, 2007: posted “the activist’s creed” to his weblog, raw thought. february 12, 2007: posted “it’s faust!” to his weblog, raw thought. february 12, 2007: posted “incompleteness: the proof and paradox of kurt gödel” to his weblog, raw thought. february 14, 2007: posted “average people” to his weblog, raw thought. february 16, 2007: posted “god is my dungeonmaster” to his weblog, raw thought. february 17, 2007: posted “bandwagon” to his weblog, raw thought. february 18, 2007: posted “classism at google” to his weblog, raw thought. march 11, 2007: posted “ode to a blue bicycle” to his weblog, raw thought. march 13, 2007: posted “why you shop at wal-mart: economics eats itself” to his weblog, raw thought. march 13, 2007: posted “reagan, star wars, and the end of the cold war” to his weblog, raw thought. march 14, 2007: posted “hating john searle” to his weblog, raw thought. march 16, 2007: posted “write web works with me!” to his weblog, raw thought. march 18, 2007: posted “how quantum mechanics is compatible with free will” to his weblog, raw thought. march 23, 2007: posted “this television life” to his weblog, raw thought. march 25, 2007: posted “newspeak™” to his weblog, raw thought. march 26, 2007: posted “the secret behind the secret” to his weblog, raw thought. march 27, 2007: posted “aaron’s patented demotivational seminar” to his weblog, raw thought. march 28, 2007: posted “john hockenberry on reporting the war at nbc” to his weblog, raw thought. march 29, 2007: posted “everything good is bad for you” to his weblog, raw thought. april 22, 2007: posted “secured leisure” to his weblog, raw thought. april 24, 2007: posted “a call for science that matters” to his weblog, raw thought. may 6, 2007: posted “the incurable romantic” to his weblog, raw thought. may 7, 2007: posted “lengthy interview” to his weblog, raw thought. may 14, 2007: posted “follow your heart” to his weblog, raw thought. may 23, 2007: posted “discrimination and causation” to his weblog, raw thought. may 30, 2007: posted “that vision thing” to his weblog, raw thought. june 28, 2007: posted “books i recommend without reservation: 2006” to his weblog, raw thought. july 4, 2007: posted “real good books” to his weblog, raw thought. july 10, 2007: posted “fear and loathing in biotechnology firms” to his weblog, raw thought. july 16, 2007: posted “announcing the open library” to his weblog, raw thought. july 18, 2007: posted “fear and loathing: a correction” to his weblog, raw thought. august 1, 2007: posted “consciousness clarified” to his weblog, raw thought. august 4, 2007: posted “sci foo 2007 gossip liveblog” to his weblog, raw thought. august 5, 2007: posted “improving the foo camp format” to his weblog, raw thought. august 20, 2007: posted “the interrupt-driven life” to his weblog, raw thought. august 31, 2007: posted “perfectionism” to his weblog, raw thought. september 7, 2007: published “a non-programmer’s apology” in the best of technology writing 2007. september 16, 2007: posted “sweating the small stuff” to his weblog, raw thought. september 20, 2007: published “rachel carson, mass murderer?” in extra! september/october 2007. september 21, 2007: posted “was rachel carson a mass murderer?” to his weblog, raw thought. september 27, 2007: posted “the joy of public speaking” to his weblog, raw thought. october 12, 2007: posted “dear colleagues: orders from china’s minister of internet censorship” to his weblog, raw thought. october 22, 2007: posted “area scientist’s study confirms own prejudices” to his weblog, raw thought. october 25, 2007: presents on open library at harvard’s berkman center for internet & society. october 29, 2007: posted “how to build decent productivity software” to his weblog, raw thought. october 31, 2007: posted “bubble city: preface” to his weblog, raw thought. november 1, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 1” to his weblog, raw thought. november 2, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 2” to his weblog, raw thought. november 3, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 3” to his weblog, raw thought. november 6, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 4” to his weblog, raw thought. november 6, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 5” to his weblog, raw thought. november 6, 2007: posted “gphone announced, morons” to his weblog, raw thought. november 8, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 6” to his weblog, raw thought. november 14, 2007: posted “cooling the mark out” to his weblog, raw thought. november 15, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 7” to his weblog, raw thought. november 18, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 8” to his weblog, raw thought. november 19, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 9” to his weblog, raw thought. november 19, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 10” to his weblog, raw thought. november 27, 2007: posted “sick” to his weblog, raw thought. december 6, 2007: posted “the handwriting on the wall” to his weblog, raw thought. december 10, 2007: posted “judgment day” to his weblog, raw thought. december 14, 2007: posted “bubble city: chapter 11” to his weblog, raw thought. december 17, 2007: posted “no superpowers” to his weblog, raw thought. december 24, 2007: posted “the theory of the game” to his weblog, raw thought. december 28, 2007: posted “starting out in the morning” to his weblog, raw thought. 2008 2008: founded watchdog.net. stayed on until 2009. january 2, 2008: posted “2007 review of projects” to his weblog, raw thought. january 5, 2008: posted “2007 review of books” to his weblog, raw thought. january 15, 2008: posted “introducing theinfo.org” to his weblog, raw thought. january 19, 2008: posted “how dumb is daniel dennett?” to his weblog, raw thought. january 28, 2008: posted “a very speculative theory of free will” to his weblog, raw thought. february 4, 2008: posted “election slate: february 2008” to his weblog, raw thought. february 22, 2008: posted “very good introductions” to his weblog, raw thought. march 2, 2008: posted “the visible hand: a summary” to his weblog, raw thought. march 9, 2008: posted “review: the new ruthless economy” to his weblog, raw thought. march 16, 2008: posted “banff” to his weblog, raw thought. april 14, 2008: posted “welcome, watchdog.net” to his weblog, raw thought. april 15, 2008: posted “slaves of some dead sociologist” to his weblog, raw thought. april 20, 2008: posted “money and worth” to his weblog, raw thought. april 20, 2008: posted “money and control” to his weblog, raw thought. may 11, 2008: posted “the toolbox does not shrink” to his weblog, raw thought. may 12, 2008: posted “how to fix the news” to his weblog, raw thought. may 12, 2008: posted “science or philosophy?: jon elster and john searle” to his weblog, raw thought. may 13, 2008: posted “simplistic sociological functionalism” to his weblog, raw thought. may 14, 2008: posted “tectonic plates and microfoundations” to his weblog, raw thought. may 19, 2008: posted “the false consciousness falsehood” to his weblog, raw thought. june 9, 2008: posted “how to promote startups” to his weblog, raw thought. june 12, 2008: posted “is undercover over?” to his weblog, raw thought. june 16, 2008: posted “moving on” to his weblog, raw thought. june 19, 2008: posted “scenes” to his weblog, raw thought. june 19, 2008: posted “last goodbyes” to his weblog, raw thought. june 30, 2008: posted “capital and its complements: a summary” to his weblog, raw thought. july 2008: publishes “guerilla open access manifesto“ july 21, 2008: posted “the percentage fallacy” to his weblog, raw thought. august 11, 2008: posted “utilitarian equilibriums” to his weblog, raw thought. august 19, 2008: posted “the predator state: a summary” to his weblog, raw thought. august 22, 2008: posted “how to launch software” to his weblog, raw thought. august 24, 2008: posted “everyday utilitarianism: who gets the tv first?” to his weblog, raw thought. august 25, 2008: posted “my life with tim” to his weblog, raw thought. september 10, 2008: posted “a theory of change” to his weblog, raw thought. september 14, 2008: posted “a saipan story” to his weblog, raw thought. september 15, 2008: posted “obama’s next move” to his weblog, raw thought. september 16, 2008: posted “my slate” to his weblog, raw thought. september 18, 2008: posted “high gas prices are reagan’s fault” to his weblog, raw thought. october 15, 2008: posted “blame the terrorist black muslims” to his weblog, raw thought. october 24, 2008: posted “in defense of anonymity” to his weblog, raw thought. october 31, 2008: posted “what could happen” to his weblog, raw thought. november 1, 2008: posted “whatever it takes?” to his weblog, raw thought. november 7, 2008: posted “november 4” to his weblog, raw thought. november 13, 2008: posted “stealing your library: the oclc powergrab” to his weblog, raw thought. november 15, 2008: posted “oclc on the run” to his weblog, raw thought. november 15, 2008: posted “the credibility gap” to his weblog, raw thought. november 16, 2008: posted “kafka for the kindergarten set” to his weblog, raw thought. november 18, 2008: posted “an obama story” to his weblog, raw thought. november 19, 2008: posted “inside ge” to his weblog, raw thought. november 22, 2008: posted “obama’s strategy: a debate” to his weblog, raw thought. november 25, 2008: posted “blogs i would like to read” to his weblog, raw thought. december 11, 2008: posted “the forgotten sidekick” to his weblog, raw thought. >december 15, 2008: published “sokal affair” in encyclopedia of the culture wars: issues, voices, and viewpoints, roger chapman, ed. december 29, 2008: posted “bubble city: chapter 12” to his weblog, raw thought. 2009 2009: co-founded progressive change campaign committee. stayed on until february, 2011. january 3, 2009: posted “2008 review of books” to his weblog, raw thought. january 5, 2009: posted “the true story of the telephone” to his weblog, raw thought. january 8, 2009: posted “felten for cto?” to his weblog, raw thought. january 12, 2009: posted “why are online ads cheaper?” to his weblog, raw thought. january 16, 2009: posted “cass sunstein, concern troll” to his weblog, raw thought. january 28, 2009: posted “economic bs detector” to his weblog, raw thought. february 3, 2009: posted “belém” to his weblog, raw thought. february 4, 2009: posted “how depressions work” to his weblog, raw thought. february 13, 2009: posted “nyt personals” to his weblog, raw thought. february 16, 2009: posted “non-hierarchical management” to his weblog, raw thought. february 21, 2009: posted “rss hits the big time” to his weblog, raw thought. march 4, 2009: posted “a 24 puzzle” to his weblog, raw thought. march 5, 2009: posted “the intellectual’s creed” to his weblog, raw thought. march 9, 2009: posted “in defense of elections” to his weblog, raw thought. march 16, 2009: posted “journalistic capture and fixing cnbc” to his weblog, raw thought. march 23, 2009: posted “who really rules?” to his weblog, raw thought. march 24, 2009: posted “margo seltzer” to his weblog, raw thought. april 13, 2009: posted “the logic of loss” to his weblog, raw thought. april 14, 2009: posted “what are intellectuals good for?” to his weblog, raw thought. april 15, 2009: posted “a non-local revolution” to his weblog, raw thought. april 23, 2009: posted “transparency is bunk” to his weblog, raw thought. april 28, 2009: posted “investigative strike teams” to his weblog, raw thought. may 5, 2009: posted “a new kind of writing?” to his weblog, raw thought. may 17, 2009: posted “how policy gets made: a primer” to his weblog, raw thought. may 18, 2009: posted “this month in sociology” to his weblog, raw thought. may 18, 2009: posted “a life offline” to his weblog, raw thought. july 20, 2009: posted “namedropping” to his weblog, raw thought. july 24, 2009: posted “my life offline” to his weblog, raw thought. july 27, 2009: posted “writing a book: part one (ambition)” to his weblog, raw thought. july 28, 2009: posted “the median voter and the mixed voter” to his weblog, raw thought. july 31, 2009: posted “hot girl syndrome” to his weblog, raw thought. august 2, 2009: posted “life in a world of pervasive immorality: the ethics of being alive” to his weblog, raw thought. august 6, 2009: posted “writing a book: part two (structure)” to his weblog, raw thought. august 8, 2009: attended boston wikipedia meetup (see photos at wikipedia and archive.org. august 11, 2009: posted “reading samuel bowles” to his weblog, raw thought. august 12, 2009: posted “poverty kills” to his weblog, raw thought. august 17, 2009: posted “scenes 2” to his weblog, raw thought. august 18, 2009: posted “how to save a life” to his weblog, raw thought. august 20, 2009: posted “what kind of a thing is twitter?” to his weblog, raw thought. august 24, 2009: posted “the newswipe manifesto” to his weblog, raw thought. august 25, 2009: posted “google voice security flaw” to his weblog, raw thought. august 27, 2009: posted “why i won’t use rimuhosting” to his weblog, raw thought. september 7, 2009: posted “the trouble with nonprofits” to his weblog, raw thought. september 8, 2009: posted “a political startup” to his weblog, raw thought. september 8, 2009: posted “why i am not gay” to his weblog, raw thought. september 14, 2009: posted “a short course in ethics” to his weblog, raw thought. september 15, 2009: posted “honest theft” to his weblog, raw thought. september 16, 2009: posted “on finishing infinite jest” to his weblog, raw thought. september 16, 2009: posted “what happens at the end of infinite jest? (or, the infinite jest ending explained)” to his weblog, raw thought. september 18, 2009: posted “tim delaughter and the boundary of spectacle” to his weblog, raw thought. september 21, 2009: posted “the new science of causation” to his weblog, raw thought. september 23, 2009: posted “redesign” to his weblog, raw thought. september 24, 2009: posted “keynes, explained briefly” to his weblog, raw thought. september 22, 2009: posted “a summary/explanation of john maynard keynes’ general theory” to his weblog, raw thought. october 5, 2009: posted “wanted by the fbi” to his weblog, raw thought. october 19, 2009: posted “djb” to his weblog, raw thought. october 19, 2009: posted “subjectivism” to his weblog, raw thought. october 20, 2009: posted “disciplinary bubbles” to his weblog, raw thought. october 20, 2009: posted “because we can” to his weblog, raw thought. november 3, 2009: posted “election ballot 2009” to his weblog, raw thought. november 3, 2009: posted “the logic of google ads” to his weblog, raw thought. november 14, 2009: posted “is the dmca a scam?” to his weblog, raw thought. november 29, 2009: posted “how i hire programmers” to his weblog, raw thought. december 14, 2009: posted “googling for sociopaths” to his weblog, raw thought. december 27, 2009: posted “researcher job” to his weblog, raw thought. december 30, 2009: posted “against reflective equilibrium (or, what is ethics for?)” to his weblog, raw thought. 2010 january 3, 2010: posted “a backup solution?” to his weblog, raw thought. january 3, 2010: posted “2009 review of books” to his weblog, raw thought. january 8, 2010: posted “should our cognitive biases have moral weight?” to his weblog, raw thought. january 8, 2010: posted “do it now” to his weblog, raw thought. january 27, 2010: posted “is apple evil?” to his weblog, raw thought. january 30, 2010: posted “fewer representatives or more monitors?” to his weblog, raw thought. february 10, 2010: posted “the vioxx story” to his weblog, raw thought. february 11, 2010: posted “when is transparency useful?” to his weblog, raw thought. march 1, 2010: posted “howto: lose weight” to his weblog, raw thought. march 2, 2010: posted “howto: read more books” to his weblog, raw thought. march 4, 2010: posted “on dirfas” to his weblog, raw thought. march 8, 2010: posted “philosophical puzzles resolved” to his weblog, raw thought. march 14, 2010: posted “theory of change” to his weblog, raw thought. march 14, 2010: posted “the reason so many people are unemployed” to his weblog, raw thought. march 16, 2010: posted “the anti-suit movement” to his weblog, raw thought. march 29, 2010: posted “a reading machine” to his weblog, raw thought. april 7, 2010: posted “how to get a job like mine” to his weblog, raw thought. june 18, 2010: posted “that sounds smart” to his weblog, raw thought. june 20, 2010: posted “the political philosophy of toy story 3” to his weblog, raw thought. june 21, 2010: posted “brought to you by the letter s” to his weblog, raw thought. june 29, 2010: posted “management, organizing, mobilizing” to his weblog, raw thought. july 1, 2010: posted “the perils of parfit 1: credible commitments” to his weblog, raw thought. july 27, 2010: posted “you don’t know john (maynard keynes)” to his weblog, raw thought. august 4, 2010: posted “campaigners, please!” to his weblog, raw thought. october 7, 2010: posted “rethinking hyperbolic discounting (or, the percentage fallacy, continued)” to his weblog, raw thought. october 8, 2010: posted “the real problem with waiting for “superman”” to his weblog, raw thought. october 18, 2010: posted “when brute force fails” to his weblog, raw thought. october 18, 2010: posted “outline of a digital preservation system” to his weblog, raw thought. november 2010: joined demand progress as its executive director. stayed on until june, 2011. december 21, 2010: posted “a censorship-resistant web” to his weblog, raw thought. 2011 january 3, 2011: posted “2010 review of books” to his weblog, raw thought. january 4, 2011: posted “my twitter viewer” to his weblog, raw thought. january 6, 2011: posted “squaring the triangle: secure, decentralized, human-readable names” to his weblog, raw thought. april 6, 2011: posted “individuals in a world of science” to his weblog, raw thought. june 2012: joined avaaz as an advisor. stayed on until february, 2012. june 22, 2011: posted “new homepage” to his weblog, raw thought. july 18, 2011: posted “goods, services, and delegations” to his weblog, raw thought. july 18, 2011: posted “watch that space” to his weblog, raw thought. july 22, 2011: posted “how apple works” to his weblog, raw thought. august 18, 2011: posted “understanding groupon means understanding acsoi” to his weblog, raw thought. august 22, 2011: posted “what does google mean by “evil”?” to his weblog, raw thought. september 4, 2011: posted “a better travel guide for geeks” to his weblog, raw thought. november 1, 2011: posted “revolutions on the internet” to his weblog, raw thought. november 3, 2011: posted “apple and the kindle” to his weblog, raw thought. november 3, 2011: posted “steve jobs and the founder’s pain” to his weblog, raw thought. december 14, 2011: posted “on intellectual dishonesty” to his weblog, raw thought. 2012 february 2012: joined change.org as a consultant. stayed on until april, 2012. february 14, 2012: posted “when will experiences replace movie theaters?” to his weblog, raw thought. march 9, 2012: posted “how python 3 should have worked” to his weblog, raw thought. april 2012: joined thoughtworks as a tech lead. stayed on until he died. april 18, 2012: posted “y the power of exponents, just five levels of councils, each consisting of only fifty people, is enough to cover over three hundred million people.?” to his weblog, raw thought. april 19, 2012: posted “the 2011 review of books” to his weblog, raw thought. june 8, 2012: posted “perfect institutions” to his weblog, raw thought. june 20, 2012: posted “america after meritocracy: chris hayes’ the twilight of the elites” to his weblog, raw thought. june 26, 2012: posted “new: the pokayoke guide to developing software” to his weblog, raw thought. july 5, 2012: posted “thinking clearly about piece-work” to his weblog, raw thought. july 6, 2012: posted “libertarianism and the state” to his weblog, raw thought. july 8, 2012: posted “thoughts on citizen kane” to his weblog, raw thought. july 23, 2012: posted “is awkwardness avoidable?” to his weblog, raw thought. july 29, 2012: posted “what happens in the dark knight rises” to his weblog, raw thought. august 5, 2012: posted “what do startup founders want?” to his weblog, raw thought. august 10, 2012: posted “do i have too much faith in science?” to his weblog, raw thought. august 18, 2012: posted “look at yourself objectively” to his weblog, raw thought. august 18, 2012: posted “believe you can change” to his weblog, raw thought. august 18, 2012: posted “take a step back” to his weblog, raw thought. august 18, 2012: posted “raw nerve” to his weblog, raw thought. august 19, 2012: posted “edmund burke explains the dark knight rises” to his weblog, raw thought. august 22, 2012: posted “what happens in batman begins” to his weblog, raw thought. august 29, 2012: posted “what are the optimal biases to overcome?” to his weblog, raw thought. september 1, 2012: posted “lean into the pain” to his weblog, raw thought. september 9, 2012: posted “confront reality” to his weblog, raw thought. september 17, 2012: posted “cherish mistakes” to his weblog, raw thought. september 25, 2012: posted “fix the machine, not the person” to his weblog, raw thought. october 8, 2012: posted “how looper works” to his weblog, raw thought. november 1, 2012: posted “what happens in the dark knight” to his weblog, raw thought. the lisnews post was picked up, with permission and supporting documentation, by access, asia’s newspaper on electronic information products & services, which republished it in september 2007. here are a few other times i’ve referenced aaron in library-related publications: october 15, 2007 (library journal): “consuming information.” i recommended rss2email, software that aaron developed in his teens. lindsey smith has done a great job of maintaining it since may, 11 2006 or thereabouts, when aaron handed it off to him. it remains great software, and i continue to rely on and recommend it. november 15, 2007 (acrlog): “aaron swartz is speaking at midwinter.” november 19, 2008 (in the library with the lead pipe): “a useful amplification of records that are unavoidably needed anyway.” aaron also reviewed the article before it was posted. december 12, 2012 (letters to a young librarian):  “i began saying yes to all the interesting projects that came my way.” [↩] as one of my readers noted, this reads like a reference to cory doctorow’s novel, little brother, and its sequel, homeland, which was released on february 5, 2013 and for which aaron wrote the afterword and made suggestions while it was in progress. the only reason it isn’t a reference is because i still need to read both books, something i plan to do soon. [↩] aaron swartz, aaronsw, advocacy, memorial, publishing, scholarly publishing students as stakeholders: library advisory boards and privileging our users making it work: surviving as a librarian employed in another field 10 responses caropinto 2013–02–20 at 12:16 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: new article: brett bonfield on aaron swartz’s library advocacy + a timeline of his work. http://t.co/orlmwjfo bohyunkim 2013–02–21 at 10:53 am thanks for writing this, brett! i really appreciate the post and also you making available swartz’s “picking winners” video. i think there will continue to be authors like chomsky and dfw in the world aaron tried to realize. it will actually be a better environment where information and knowledge are easier to access and more transparent, thereby encouraging more exchange of ideas and thoughts across different areas. but it will not come by itself and we will have to work for it. i wrote about academic libraries and swartz’s legacy in acrl techconnect: http://acrl.ala.org/techconnect/?p=2823 and hope more librarians/libraries would start thinking about what we can do to free access to information and knowledge as much as possible. i love the part in which swartz talks about the desire to represent his favorite books on the internet. libraries need to be able to connect with those sentiments and ideas from their patrons. thx again for this beautiful post and sharing your correspondence with aaron. brett bonfield 2013–02–21 at 4:29 pm thanks for this comment, and for linking to your article. i liked it very much, and it informed my thinking, as did the articles you link to by librarians john dupuis, jonathan rochkind, and nancy sims. and to that list, i would add posts by library folks myron groover, eric hellman, ed summers, and jessamyn west, as well as a memory from gabriel farrell, and the conversations i had with colleagues, especially alexia hudson, who created the ala memorial resolution for aaron. and there are probably several i’m forgetting. i’m particularly pleased that you discussed computer access, and access to information, in academic libraries. i realize it’s not an easy problem to solve, but that doesn’t mean we can’t figure out how to solve it. pingback : aaron swartz and too-comfortable research libraries – library hat edorney 2013–02–21 at 10:49 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: new article: brett bonfield on aaron swartz’s library advocacy + a timeline of his work. http://t.co/orlmwjfo laurenpressley 2013–02–21 at 11:07 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: new article: brett bonfield on aaron swartz’s library advocacy + a timeline of his work. http://t.co/orlmwjfo sorfin 2013–02–21 at 11:41 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: new article: brett bonfield on aaron swartz’s library advocacy + a timeline of his work. http://t.co/orlmwjfo emily ford 2013–02–26 at 12:45 pm i don’t know how you do it, but i truly enjoy reading anything you write, brett. this particular article is heartfelt and sincere. your timeline must have taken quite a bit of work, but it was worth it because it adds quite a lot of value in that we can better understand aaron’s life and influence on our work as information folks. thank you for this article–truly and sincerely. brett bonfield 2013–02–28 at 9:48 am thanks. this is one of those articles i knew could never be as good as i wanted it to be, but was worth writing anyway. i’m glad it worked for you (and, i hope, others as well) in the way i hoped it might. pingback : links 11/3/2013: x server 1.14, red hat takes over openjdk 6 | techrights this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct what is digital humanities and what’s it doing in the library? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 27 jun micah vandegrift /20 comments what is digital humanities and what’s it doing in the library?  tl;dr – libraries and digital humanities have the same goals. stop asking if the library has a role, or what it is, and start getting involved in digital projects that are already happening. advocate for new expanded roles and responsibilities to be able to do this. become producers/creators in collaboration with scholars rather than servants to them. comprehending the digital humanities – from elijah meeks at stanford. where’s the library? by micah vandegrift introduction – on kirschenbaum in the spring of 2011, matthew kirschenbaum, professor of english at the university of maryland, published a piece for the association of departments of english titled “what is digital humanities and what’s it doing in english departments?” that piece has become one of the central defining works for the field/movement/ideal of digital humanities (dh), along with several other key articles (see sources for further reading section at the end of the article). kirschenbaum’s thesis is that over time “digital humanities has accumulated a robust professional apparatus that is probably more rooted in english than any other departmental home.” definitive as that is, with ample proof for the claim, he leaves room for an expansion and ends the article writing that: …digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active 24/7 life online.1 aside from the complications of defining what is/are/is-not digital humanities, it is in this publicly visible, collaborative, online network and infrastructure that the library should begin to see itself. in light of articles such as kirschenbaum’s, libraries have struggled to define their role in digital humanities, as the discussions around dh often resort to theoretical discourse or technical know-how. arguably, however, because the library already functions as a interdisciplinary agent in the university, it is the central place where dh work can, should be and is being done. dh projects involve archival collections, copyright/fair use questions, information organization, emerging technologies and progressive ideas about the role of text(s) in society, all potential areas of expertise within the field of librarianship. in fact, three out of four highly active digital humanities centers are physically located with their respective university libraries; maryland institute for technology in the humanities (mith) at the university of maryland – college park, scholarslab at the university of virginia, and digital scholarship commons (disc) at emory university are all housed in the library. the center for history and new media (chnm) at george mason university is affiliated with the history and art history department but is located in its own space. comparatively, and illustrative of the ongoing hack vs. yack dichotomy in dh (doing and making things rather than critically analyzing them), academic departments are more often where digital humanities is discussed, theorized and written about. additionally, the “alt–ac” (alternative academic) workforce, defined as people with graduate training in the humanities who pursue careers off the tenure track, tend to aim their professional aspirations toward working in a library, often without a traditional training in librarianship. the clir fellowship program is particularly designed for this. as evidenced by the recent alt-ac survey, self-identifying dhers fall into a wide variety of disciplines, many hold phd’s and few claim the title of “librarian.” although maintaining a visibility in dh, the library (writ large) has yet to fully understand itself as essential to the goals of digital humanities. through a brief overview of several foundational writings on digital humanities, this article will attempt to point out some areas where the library must better articulate this role. also, i hope to encourage librarians who are invested and interested in this and related areas to begin to approach digital projects as opportunities for partnerships. lastly, i will challenge the “service” model of librarianship and propose that the self-perception of the field needs to evolve to a “production” model. what you do with a million books, screwmaneutically speaking: the library as place – on ramsay wayne wiegand, historian of print culture and libraries, holds a mantra regarding the library as place. he states that rather than understanding “the user in the life of the library, we must see the library in the life of the user.”2 it would not be a stretch to attribute much of the innovation that libraries are undergoing to this ideal; that the user has evolved, and therefore so must the library. library programming now includes tips on web searching, there are more computer terminals than card catalogs, and coffee is close at hand. further, the library, as a staid institution of knowledge and exploration, should then blend in with the multitude of ways that the user discovers information. or so the story goes. placing wiegand’s hopeful thesis in the context of recent proclamations about the lack of necessity of librarians and the death of the humanities, one could assume that both are shushing and critically-theorizing themselves down the drain hole, and that there is no place for the library in the life of the user.3 the library must function as a place where scholars can try new things, explore new methodologies and generally experiment with new ways of doing scholarship, in order to challenge that perception. stephen ramsay, associate professor of english at the university of nebraska-lincoln and a fellow at the center for digital research in the humanities, in his “the hermeneutics of screwing around; or what you do with a million books” suggests that browsing, in opposition to searching, is a cultural imperative. browsability, in the most traditional sense, is still a relatively sore subject in librarianship. as resources move digital, and space is reallocated from stacks to “labs” and “commons,” the argument has been that browsing is non-imperative to the mission-critical tasks of the modern library. however, as ramsay puts it: it’s not a matter of replacing one with the other, as any librarian will tell you. it is rather to ask whether we are ready to accept surfing and stumbling—screwing around, broadly understood—as a research methodology. for to do so would be to countenance the irrefragable complexities of what ‘no one really knows.’ could we imagine a world in which ‘here is an ordered list of the books you should read,’ gives way to, ‘here is what i found. what did you find?’4 reimagining the place of the library, then, in light of the libraries’ role in the digital humanities, is not simply as a place to get the right answers, or be directed to the correct resource. the library must facilitate the screwmeneutical imperative, browsability and playfulness. the reference interview, guiding a patron to a specific research question in order to provide a specific research answer, rather than offering a method of wayfinding, needs to adapt to allow for exploration, particularly in dealing with scholars and students in the humanities. further, the library must be willing to allow dedicated time for what happens after exploration. the “serve ‘em and send ‘em along” model is no longer serving a patronage whose information needs include planning, building and executing projects that utilize the strengths of librarianship (information organization and broad contextualization). reframing the library as a productive place, a creative place, producing and creating something – whether that be digital scholarly works or something else entirely – will open the door to allow the library into the life of the user. one role for the library in dh, then, is to support the journey of research as a means in itself, and encourage imaginative, new, transformative uses of the products of research.5 why digital humanities? – on spiro asking what digital humanities is or who’s allowed to be involved fails to get at the real value this field offers to academia, cultural heritage and to the public. the key is realizing the potential that arts, music, poetry and literature can have when translated to digital forms, scraped with digital tools and re-presented to readers/viewers. at its core, dh shares the most basic goal with the library – accessibility of information. the multitude of dh projects aim to take cultural materials that were previously undiscoverable digitally, the very materials humanities scholars address and utilize for their work, and connect them to a new, broad audience. or build a tool to enable others to do exactly that. lisa spiro, director of national institute for technology in liberal education (nitle) labs and editor of the digital research tools (dirt) wiki, in her presentation “why digital humanities?” outlines the goals of the field from her perspective, honing in on five areas where digital humanities aims beyond traditional academic scholars. 1) provide wide access to cultural information, 2) enable manipulation of that data, 3) transform scholarly communication, 4) enhance teaching and learning, and 5) make a public impact.6 plainly, these overlap with librarianship at its best, and as the library works to refine its impact on society, exploring these areas through the lens of dh is a useful consideration. it is no surprise that words like “manipulate,” “transform,” “enhance,” and “impact” are leveraged when discussing a digitally-focused movement. the tech sector might use the word “disrupt.” in a good pr move, adopting trends in cultural discourse can lend credence to misunderstood areas. this bisects both dh and the library in the reality of attempting to communicate the value of the work we do as librarians and digital scholars. a recent college and research libraries news article, “2012 top ten trends in academic libraries,” claims that “academic libraries must prove the value they provide to the academic enterprise… unless we give our funding bodies better and more compelling reasons to support libraries, they will be forced by economic reality to stop doing so.”7 what the digital humanities offers that libraries typically have not is a tangible product – a website, a digitized collection with a built in text-mining tool, a tool to add layers of meaning to maps, a sexy interface. making “stuff” indicates effectively that there is work being done to provide valuable, useful, interesting content to an information-sucking world. additionally, dh revolves around building things that allow these projects to grow, develop, adapt and entice a wide variety of users including programmers, armchair historians, high-school students, and funding bodies(!), for example. tying the library’s strengths, people and ideals to tangible products of scholarly work (that aren’t necessarily “publications”) has the potential to bode well for the next round of legislation that claims “its all on google anyways.” accessibility as an idea is not new to libraries. approaching it as the work we do, rather than a service we offer, might be the disruptive extension that is necessary. spiro, also in her presentation, points out the limitations of print, another sore subject for the library, that dh projects attempt to affect; one can’t search, hyperlink, embed or quickly and efficiently develop a conversation on/in/around print. although this is evolving with new forms of texts, the challenges are considerable. scholarly communication, an emerging area of librarianship that is being actively explored in many institutions, is actually offering the library a distinct role in the dissemination of research. kathleen fitzpatrick, director of scholarly communication for the modern language association, eloquently states “closing our work away from non-scholarly readers, and keeping our conversations private, might protect us from public criticism, but it can’t protect us from public apathy, a condition that is, in the current economy, far more dangerous.”8 framed this way, it appears dh and libraries are traveling on the same trajectory, from supposed obsolescence toward redefinition through digital accessibility. participating in, advocating for and managing tools around emerging models of scholarly communication is another opportunity for the library to define its place in the scope of digital humanities. open access (scholarly communication) is to dh as open access (information accessibility) is to the library – the goal and context through which we define and promote our value. #alt-lis, skunks, hybrarians and “strange institutions” – on nowviskie embracing ‘screwing around’ and intimating a stronger sense of how to do digital accessibility are both well and good. revolutionizing the ways in which librarians understand themselves and their work, however, is the primary task at hand. altering the organization of the institution, doing away with reference desks, introducing new media, and all other growing pains libraries endure are ill-informed developments if the librarians, paraprofessionals and support staff have not re-imagined themselves and their skill-sets. digital humanities, already redefining the humanities and scholars therein as per kirschenbaum’s aforementioned piece, offers a looking glass through which to step. the shift toward alternative appointments in libraries (#alt–lis = scholarly communications, digital humanities librarians, data librarianship, e-science, digital archivists, project-based appointments, etc.) is building the capacity for the library to be productively integrated in digital scholarship. bethany nowviskie, director of digital research & scholarship at the university of virginia library, is an advocate for this great migration away from traditionally-understood librarian roles. several articles available on her blog, “fight club soap,” “lazy consensus,” and “a skunk in the library,” challenge the concept that a good librarian is a servant to the academic community, sitting in wait to provide for whatever the need may be. she writes, plainly and boldly: …[there is] a fundamental misunderstanding that librarians make in our dealing with faculty – and it comes down to what is, honestly, one of the most lovely qualities of library culture: its service ethic… the impulse is to provide a level of self-effacing service – quiet and efficient perfection – with a goal of not distracting the researcher from his work. you start this with the best of intentions, but it can lead to an ad-hoc strategy, in good times and bad, of laying a smooth, professional veneer over increasingly decrepit and under-funded infrastructure – effectively, of hiding the messy innards of the library from your faculty, the very people who would be your strongest allies if the building weren’t a black box.9 the level of anxiety these kinds of statements produce in librarians is scary. however, approaching a new frame of mind as an opportunity rather than a death sentence would seem to be the more productive response. accepting the responsibility to (quickly) adapt and evolve may incite a greater enthusiasm for the library among patrons, and propel its changing role in scholarly processes. at the july 2011 meeting of the scholarly communications institute, of which nowviskie is a co-director, shana kimball, head of publishing services, outreach & strategic development for mpublishing at university of michigan libraries, proposed the idea that what is necessary are more “strange institutions,” blending libraries, research centers, publishing houses and technology-producers.10 these peculiarities, she goes on to comment, would require a workforce of “scholar programmers,” elsewhere called “scholar technologists,” or in the context of the library, hybrarians. more often than not, this new breed of worker is not-necessarily an mlis holder, to the chagrin and horror of library-land. however, dh, and those invested in its future, are seeking these skill-sets, again providing an open door for librarians to revamp their self-perception and thus their perceptibility.  echoing nowviskie’s fight club reference, and as a challenge to librarians, “you decide your own level of involvement.” in closing, several points remain. this has all been said before.11 there are already advocates inside and outside the library for deep collaboration on projects that fit into the dh mold. what, then, is digital humanities and what’s it doing in the library? in every real sense, the library always/already has the necessary pieces in place to support, engage in and do digital humanities work. the issue, in my opinion, is simply this: digital humanities doesn’t have a place in the library. digital humanists do. “librarians” working in and across digital areas, who have been called many things over time, need to proudly identify themselves as dhers, and fully expect to be regarded as such by peers, colleagues, faculty and administrators, and let the broad work they do engage with that community. the problem is not browsing or access, it is timidity. and until librarianship moves away from our academic inferiority complex, and embraces the calling of digital work in contrast to the vocation of servitude, digital humanities will continue to be led by smart, capable, progressive faculty members in english and history. quoting ramsay again, in order for the library to do digital humanities it must embrace the charge to become “a bunch of people who had found each other through various means and who were committed to the bold and revolutionary project of talking to one another about their common interests”12… outside the four walls of the library. ——————————————————————– thank you to lead piper erin dorney, and colleagues markus wust at north carolina state and annie pho of hack library school for reviewing this article, forcing clarification of my ideas, and generally encouraging this piece to the state you see it in today. also, thanks to all those cited herein and the larger dh community for being supportive of me in my exploration of this exciting area. ——————————————————————– opportunities to get involved: thatcamp – the humanities and technology camp is an unconference bringing together scholars, technologists, librarians of all types, journalists, students and more. it has become the quintessential digital humanities gathering. librarians especially should consider attending thatcamp libraries and digital humanities this year and thatcamp acrl next year. *updated* digital humanities summer/winter institute – provides an opportunity for scholars to learn new skills relevant to digital scholarship and mingle with like-minded colleagues through coursework, social events, and lectures during an intensive, week-long event. it is “an event that combines the best aspects of a skills workshop, international conference, and summer camp.” acrl digital humanities discussion group – a recently formed venue for acrl members to meet and share ideas related to digital humanities and the role of librarians in this emerging discipline. also, read bob kosovsky’s report from this group that met for the first time at ala annual a few days ago. zotero digital humanities group – a place for all of those interested in how digital media and technology are changing the humanities to discuss and create the future together. contribute items to this open bibliography. dhanswers – a community-based q&a board for all things dh dhcommons – a hub for people and organizations to find projects to work with, and for projects to find collaborators. dirt wiki – a directory of tools, services, and collections that can facilitate digital research. developing a familiarity with these tools is one way to facilitate the librarian’s role in doing the work of digital humanities. sources for further reading: **nowviskie, bethany. “reality bytes.”** text based on talk given as opening plenary of the 53rd rbms pre-conference. http://nowviskie.org/2012/reality-bytes/ — *a must-read* digital humanities and the library: a bibliography. http://miriamposner.com/blog/?page_id=1033 the journal of digital humanities. http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/ the cuny digital humanites resource guide – http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/the_cuny_digital_humanities_resource_guide digital humanities now – showcases the scholarship and news of interest to the digital humanities community, through a process of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review. http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/ hacking the academy – a book crowdsourced in one week. http://hackingtheacademy.org/libraries/ humanities 2.0. series of articles on dh in the new york times. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/books/series/humanities_20/index.html a companion to digital humanities, ed. susan schreibman, ray siemens, john unsworth. oxford: blackwell, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/ digital humanities across galleries, archives, libraries and museums. a delicious stack curated by neal stimler, associate coordinator of images at the metropolitan museum of art. http://www.delicious.com/stacks/view/kpz9dg mccarty, willard. what is humanities computing? toward a definition of the field. http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/legacy/staff/wlm/essays/what/ nowviskie, bethany. “#alt-ac: alternative academic careers for humanities scholars.” http://nowviskie.org/2010/alt-ac/ scheinfeldt, tom. “ nobody cares about the library: how digital technology makes the library invisible (and visible) to scholars.” http://www.foundhistory.org/2012/02/22/nobody-cares-about-the-library-how-digital-technology-makes-the-library-invisible-and-visible-to-scholars/ svensson, patrick. “humanities computing as digital humanities.” digital humanities quarterly, 9(9)3.  http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000065/000065.html   kirschenbaum, matthew. (2010). what is digital humanities and what’s it doing in english departments? ade bulletin, 150. pg. 60. accessible at http://mkirschenbaum.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/ade-final.pdf  [↩] wiegand, wayne. (2005). library as place. presentation to the 56th annual biennal conference north carolina library association. accessible at http://www.ncl.ecu.edu/index.php/ncl/article/viewfile/70/88 [↩] see also the huffington post’s libraries in crisis section – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/libraries-in-crisis [↩] ramsay, stephen. (2010). the hermeneutics of screwing around. accessible at https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.playingwithhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/hermeneutics.pdf&pli=1 [↩] also noted in the recent clir report “one culture. computationally intensive research in the humanities and social sciences.” brief commentary with links to the report – http://digitallibrarians.org/node/6150 [↩] spiro, lisa. (2011). why digital humanities. presentation accessible at http://digitalscholarship.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/dhglca-5.pdf [↩] acrl research and plnaning review committee. (2012). 2012 top ten trends in academic libraries: a review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education. college and research libraries news, june 2012 73:311-320. accessible at http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/6/311.full [↩] fitzpatrick, kathleen. (2012) giving it away. accessible at http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/blog/giving-it-away [↩] nowviskie, bethany. (2011). a skunk in the library. accessible at http://nowviskie.org/2011/a-skunk-in-the-library [↩] views onto the future. collaborative document produced at the 2011 scholarly communications institute. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1niqsr-e-yu88-isvmezce1qhpbkrnmbxpscdmhbmzc8/edit?hl=en_us [↩] see: jisc: does the library have a role to play in the digital humanities?, jennifer vinopal’s why understanding digital humanities is key for libraries, digital humanities: roles for libraries by hitoshi kamada, roles of librarians in digital humanities centers from the digital libraries initiative 2010 meeting. [↩] ramsay, stephen. (2012). centers are people. accessible at http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2012/04/25/centers-are-people.html [↩] digital humanities, emerging roles, librarianship, productive an interview with paul ford and gina trapani the ebook cargo cult 20 responses nicholas schiller 2012–06–27 at 12:39 pm thank you. this article explained some things that i’ve been experiencing, but unable to clearly articulate. i’m a librarian who teaches and partners in a wonderful undergraduate digital humanities program (wsu vancouver’s cmdc: http://dtc-wsuv.org/cmdc/) i’ve found a home with these action-research scholars that connects my library values with their dh values in a productive and energizing manner. there are many ways to get involved, but i would also like to mention the digital humanities summer institute (http://dhsi.org/) as a way to get involved. the dhsi is a mashup of a traditional academic conference with papers presented and a week-long intensive training workshop where scholars get to work hands-on with dh tools and techniques. this would be a good opportunity for librarians to meet the community and learn something about tei, gis, mobile apps, and more. micah vandegrift 2012–06–27 at 1:57 pm nicholas, thanks for reading. i think there is a lot of potential for involving undergrads in dh work, and am excited to see what comes out of cmdc. and yes, thanks for recommending the dhsi – i’ll add that to the post. also, we should mention that mith will be hosting the 1st dhwi (winter institute) in maryland this coming january. http://mith.umd.edu/dhwi/ rebecca halpern 2012–06–27 at 1:37 pm micah, bravo! i was very much anticipating this article and it was well worth the wait. i think the reason, as a librarian, i feel disconnected from dh work is because i’m not sure how dh work orients the library “user.” i absolutely understand how this work benefits the library as a whole and the scholarly community, but am still struggling with how to make this work relevant and exciting for students. far, far too often, students don’t want browsability or the manipulatability (i made those words up), they just want to find their mandatory 5 articles and get out. how can we, as librarians, make this work matter to the students and (maybe most importantly) to the instructors? micah vandegrift 2012–06–27 at 2:10 pm rebecca – glad it hit home with you. great question – how does dh impact or interact with the library user? to be honest, i think it might not play as much of a role for the user you describe; there will always be those who only want the minimum that we can provide. but! as the library evolves, better articulates what we can/want to do, and as the work we do changes, i’d hope that the entirety of library users (academic, public, special, ect) would come to expect more. a good, solid example – the visualizing emancipation project. i’d bet that this would be incredibly valuable to american history 101 courses and that 99% of students, grad students and faculty don’t even know about it. so, (y)our role then is to be familiar with these tools, and promote them as we would any other resource. maybe instead of giving the student 5 articles, you give them 4 and one text-mining tool. glen worthey 2012–06–27 at 7:08 pm thanks for this outstanding and thoughtful article. i’d like to add something that surely qualifies as minor trivia — but trivia with a message, i hope. your provocative question, “where’s the library?” in elijah meeks’s stunning “comprehending the digital humanities” visualization, actually has a very simple answer: the library is the place where the data for this very visualization was collected, analyzed, and studied, and where the visualization itself created. you see, elijah works not only at stanford: he works in the stanford libraries. (this is a nice illustration of the wiegand mantra you quote: we must see the library in the life of the dher.) an even more trivial (but also illustrative) fact is that a huge glossy print of this very same visualization hangs on my office door (which is in the middle of the main library at stanford). elijah is my close colleague in the stanford libraries, and we, along with at least a half dozen others — or maybe it’s a couple dozen, depending on the day and whatever their current project is — all count ourselves as true blue, dyed in the wool dhers. this is all simply to concur wholeheartedly with your thesis that “libraries and digital humanities have the same goals,” and with your advice that we involve ourselves more actively in dh projects, that we advocate more strenuously for expanded roles in the digital scholarship happening around us, and that we become more active as producers, creators and scholarly collaborators in the dh endeavor. (or at the very least that we boldly post provocative and colorful dh research on our office doors as a proclamation that, yes, dh is now — and always has been — very much in the library.) glen, digital humanities librarian (say it loud, say it proud, &c.) pingback : the lazy librarian pingback : stewart varner pingback : library support for dh | stewart varner stewart varner 2012–06–28 at 1:49 pm hey micah! amazing post in an amazing venue. the comment i originally started got too long so i stuck it on my till-now sorely neglected blog. check it out here: http://stewartvarner.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/library_support_for_dh/ micah vandegrift 2012–06–28 at 2:44 pm i’m honored stewart. thanks for taking a look at it. here’s to more and further great work as we figure this all out! john russell 2012–06–28 at 5:47 pm possibly minor correction: your link to the digital thoreau site is “built in text-mining tool,” but vm (versioning machine) is collational software, not for text-mining. i think you are right that dh offers greater opportunities for involvement by librarians, though i wish you had been a bit more concrete than polemical. your rousing “cast off our chains!” rhetoric runs the risk of reinforcing a divide between librarian-work and research proper. strongly asserting that librarians need to do digital work without ever providing referents can lead to the reading i had when first going over your piece: librarians need to become scholars; scholarship is progressive, librarianship is servitude. but talk to some folks doing dh (and stewart varner’s post gets to some of this) and they don’t need more scholars, they need people who have metadata, preservation, and project management skills. i would argue that librarians who want to be involved in dh can do so by promoting skills they have as librarians, not by trying to be scholars or on the basis of non-librarian subject knowledge. personally, i’d like to see librarians who are excited by dh do a better job of showing how librarian skills bring a lot to the table. one possible avenue would be critically assessing dh projects, say on a dh&libraries blog of some sort. pingback : dcw volume 1 issue 6 – dh mad libs zach coble 2012–06–30 at 3:59 pm micah, thanks for the great article and a wonderful collection of links! you raise a good point about getting librarians to change their perceptions. it’s difficult for any group to fundamentally change how they view themselves, and librarians certainly aren’t notorious for such feats. in this regard, stewart’s response/post is particularly useful because it outlines concrete steps that we can take to begin supporting dh in our libraries. dh can be a big messy world and is often tied to big messy issues (copyright, open access, tenure and promotion, etc), so i found it helpful to start with what i knew – i’ve worked with omeka before and did my undergrad in history, so i asked a history prof if he wanted to create an omeka site for one of his courses. it’s not groundbreaking but it’s something. pingback : digital humanities « amanda cowell pingback : library support for dh « stewart varner john russell 2012–07–09 at 3:46 pm “but to be effective in the research context the librarian is going to be a lot more specific, and more directly involved with the researcher at the outset of a project, helping them put together a set of questions, data, and tools that will move a discipline forward, rather than waiting until a scholar shows up at the library with a problem.” one culture: “urgent, pointed, and even disruptive” pingback : navigating dh for cultural heritage professionals, 2012 edition | lot 49 pingback : proposed grad course for 2013-2014: practicing the digital humanities (draft) » roger t. whitson, ph.d pingback : mike d'errico , on preservation and “re-representation” pingback : libraries as laboratories for dh | this is a dh blog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct running the library race – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 19 sep erica jesonis /19 comments running the library race in brief: this article draws a parallel between fatigued runners and overworked librarians, proposing that libraries need to pace work more effectively to avoid burnout. through an exploration of cognitive science, organizational psychology, and practical examples, guest author erica jesonis offers considerations for improving productivity and reducing stress within our fast-paced library culture. “feet” photo by flickr user mark steele (cc by-nd 2.0) by erica jesonis i recently ran my first half-marathon and did pretty poorly. what upset me the most was not my pathetic finish time, but rather the chipper group in front of me that completed the race by alternating bursts of running with stints of walking, a method that boasts impressive results but gets little respect amongst serious runners (parker-pope, 2009). my group was determined to run the whole race, no matter what. i watched the walk-runners in envy as they chit-chatted, picking up their pace when their watches beeped for them to run. in all, they walked a large portion of those grueling 13.1 miles, and despite my continued running, i never caught up with them. i’m sure they crossed the finish line far ahead of me with smiles and high-fives, making plans to celebrate with margaritas; i trudged across and wanted to die. after the half-marathon, i began researching walk-run techniques, and i began to wonder if the same techniques might help make my work life more productive, too. common sense dictates that physical work is easier and more enjoyable when you take breaks, alternate muscle groups, and vary pacing. teachers apply the same methodology to pace their instruction, starting with warm-ups, building to more intense tasks, then backing off to allow creative and cognitive replenishment. these concepts may be intuitive when it comes to workouts or pedagogy, yet they are strangely foreign to the working world, particularly to the library world renowned for its never-quit work ethic.  we simply don’t give our minds the same consideration that we give our bodies. public libraries in particular are still nursing fiscal sprains from the past few years while trying to rally energy for the next budget cycle. worse yet, forecasts show that this library race we’ve all been running may just turn out to be an ultramarathon. the american library association (ala) reports that “despite some promise of budgetary relief, the extraordinary demands for service continue to outpace available funding needed to respond to those demands” (“public library funding landscape,” 2012, p. 10). simply put, we have more work to do with less money and the scenario is not going to change anytime soon.  adding to that, many library staff are already stretching to cover positions that were eliminated or left unfilled. this complaint is far from new, so why do i even bring it up? perhaps because my half-marathon failure made me realize that our coping mechanism is tragically flawed. we’re trying to work faster and harder to show that libraries are strong, able to cope, and able to succeed no matter what the future brings. but is this new pace sustainable? or is it actually dangerous and self-defeating? what your brain and your muscles have in common the brain is the lofty tower of our personalities, thoughts, memories, and existence, yet it often acts like a much simpler muscle, performing best when given rest and variation. just like a muscle, the mind is prone to its own types of fatigue such as diminished mental performance, distractedness, impatience, and a “measurable decline in directed attention capacity” (cimprich, 2007, slide 8). similar to a computer, the human brain effectively shuts down when overtaxed, and “if the capacity of working memory is exceeded while processing a body of information then some, if not all, of that information is lost” (cooper, 1998, section 2.6). i think of this as the “spinning wheel of death” that your computer gives when it looks like it’s processing a task, but it’s really just stuck and you end up having to do a hard reboot. our brains do the same when overburdened, particularly with extremely high cognitive load. the more you try to do at once (multitasking those emails, attending to that grant proposal, filling out your timesheet), the more likely you are to overload your brain’s attentional and functional capacities. as tempting as juggling seems, humans struggle to stay focused when doing or thinking about more than one task. in fact, even when we don’t think we’re “paying attention,” we are, just to something else. those pesky light-bulb moments that distract us from our object of focus are known in the scholarly world as task-unrelated-thoughts, or tuts (ariga & lleras, 2011, p. 439). we are all woefully familiar with tuts (and you’re probably having some right now), but what do you do about them? intellectual tradition admonishes that we need to be master of our attention, to give it a firm spank and tell it to quiet down, but those tuts may be a helpful warning sign that your brain needs a rest. the key to maintaining the brain’s focus over time isn’t iron-grip discipline. the solution is much more pleasant and perhaps even surprising: to take a break or switch tasks. imagine you are a cashier at the local grocery store.  every time you scan an item, the register makes a loud and annoying “beep.” that noise is meant to get your attention, and yet within a few hours or even minutes, your brain does an incredible job of tuning out that noise so it can focus on other input. we see this in all aspects of our lives.  for example, you probably don’t feel yourself wearing clothes right now and you might even be able to ignore that huge mess on your desk. research shows that “all perceptual systems show habituation effects” (ariga & lleras, 2011, p. 440).  basically, what we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and even understand tends to lose intensity the more we are exposed to it. this same concept holds true for your attention in a way that may seem paradoxical. the harder you try to pay attention to something—to think really hard about that work—the more “habituated” your brain becomes to the goal (ariga & lleras, 2011, p. 440). the longer you focus, the more susceptible you become to those annoying, interrupting tuts. this “habituation” may seem like a faulty system at first, but it is a necessary human coping and efficiency mechanism. consider all the annoyances we block out daily, as well as the tasks that the brain is able to quickly compartmentalize and routinize, requiring very little “active” thought at all.  but what about that challenging project you are slaving over? you don’t want your brain turning off.  the remedy?  taking a break and walking away from the task at hand. in the study, “brief and rare mental ‘breaks’ keep you focused: deactivation and reactivation of task goals preempt vigilance decrements,” researchers found that “vigilance decrement occurs because the cognitive control system cannot maintain the same goal representation active over prolonged periods of time” (ariga & lleras, 2011, p. 442).  this means that the brain’s ability to keep a goal at top priority diminishes over time. by pausing your work, or even switching tasks for a short time, you can trick your brain into keeping that goal in the number 1 slot, to “preempt full goal habituation from occurring by re-strengthening the goal’s activation level upon resumption of the vigilance task” (ariga & lleras, 2011, p. 442). letting go of the goal and then picking it back up again actually makes your mental grip stronger. this “habituation” phenomenon is strikingly similar to muscle fatigue: ask your arm to hold a 10-pound weight straight up in the air and it feels easy at first. a few minutes later, you’re struggling and your arm feels positively useless.  if you measure the total length of time you held up the weight, it doesn’t amount to much, but break the exercise into shorter segments, or repetitions, and you can hold that weight up for a very long time collectively.  although the brain isn’t a muscle, it certainly performs like one in this respect. ask it to pay attention without a break, and it quickly falters.  give it intermittent rests or changes, and that brain can be much more focused over the long-term, increasing your productivity and sharpness. taking frequent breaks isn’t always practical (or apt to make your boss happy), but the british have a wise adage: “change is as good as a rest.”  varying the type of work you do, especially alternating between tasks of high cognitive load and low cognitive load, can be a powerful way to restore the brain’s directed attention. switching briefly into a task that requires less deep thinking, such as cleaning up your email inbox, can be a productive way to pace your work. this act of mental downshifting replenishes the strength of your attention by moving “away from tired cognitive brain structures that have become fatigued through overuse” (cimprich, 2007, slide 10), allowing the brain to recharge. think of this technique as a type of circuit training for your brain. productive procrastination i’ve been exploring this concept through studies on cognitive science, but it also resonated with me as a former english teacher. my students were always thrown off by shakespeare’s use of comedic relief in his most tragic plays.  after ophelia’s death in hamlet, the grave diggers trade ridiculous jests about topics like mortality and suicide. to most teenagers, this dark humor makes no sense at all.  they know that hamlet is about to discover that his girlfriend is not only dead, but probably killed herself, and he probably drove her to it. why would shakespeare choose to make this funny? as a master of human nature, the bard knew that his audience needed a break. they needed some perspective from the tragic, because the play was about to get a whole lot more sad. writing in that break was pivotal not only to retaining the audience’s attention, but to making the end of the play that much more dramatic and effective. other literary greats also tout the creative benefit of the break. ernest hemingway advised that “the best way [to write] is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next…that way your subconscious will work on it all the time” (qtd. in phillips, 2004, p. 42). have you ever woken up in the morning with a solution to a problem that yesterday seemed unsolvable? our brains sometimes work best when we think we’re not thinking at all, but that magical equation can’t happen without time, rest, and perspective. true innovation and creativity often come after periods of what seems like non-work as, in the background, our brains are able to synthesize and weave thoughts we aren’t consciously “thinking.”  in one of my favorite episodes of mad men, don draper is criticized for his department’s nontraditional working habits and fires off this panache-filled retort: “we do this better than you, and part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive until they are” (gordon, 2009). creativity may look messy or unproductive at times, but can actually speed up performance in the long run (leybina, ong hui zhong & kashapov, 2011, p. 120). breaks or creative pauses may seem like procrastination, a dirty word in our proactive library culture, but reflection can mean the difference between making a good decision and a really bad one. in ancient cultures that prized time spent contemplating, procrastination was encouraged and lauded; it only became vilified only after the rise of the new world puritan work ethic (gambino, 2012). in his book about procrastination aptly entitled wait: the art and science of delay, frank partnoy advises that waiting helps us to make better decisions: “people are more successful and happier when they manage delay…we will always have more things to do than we can possibly do, so we will always be imposing some sort of unwarranted delay on some tasks. the question is not whether we are procrastinating, it is whether we are procrastinating well” (qtd. in gambino, 2012, para.12). partnoy overviews recent research into professional athletes and even people on first dates that found delaying to be a critical part of successful decision making (gambino, 2012). we think of procrastinating as avoidance or failure, but used appropriately, it’s a successful method for giving your brain vital processing time. when our work lives start to overwhelm us, pausing, varying work, and even strategically procrastinating can be powerful tools to create a productive and sustainable pace. but if we choose not to heed this advice, what happens?  the brain may dump excess information out, but many people also experience a worse phenomenon: the choke. that feeling of looking at your to-do list and seeing so many tasks that you feel your brain shut down. as science writer david disalvo explains: “the human brain is a powerful problem-solving and prediction-making machine, and it operates via a multitude of feedback loops. what matters most in the feedback loop dynamic is input—what goes into the loop that begins the analysis-evaluation-action process, which ultimately results in an outcome. here’s the kicker: if your input shuttle for achieving a goal lacks the critical, emotionally relevant component of belief, then the feedback loop is drained of octane from the start. another way to say that is—why would you expect a convincingly successful outcome when you haven’t convinced yourself that it’s possible?” (2012, para. 4). if your brain consciously or subconsciously knows that you’re asking for too much, it may play possum on you. certainly, there are times when we have to push through and do the work, no matter what.  but when that choke feeling becomes more and more frequent, our brains may be sending an important override to stop us from running down that path marked “burnout.” tired brains, tired organizations “216036” by flickr user biblioteca de la facultad de derecho y ciencias del trabajo universidad de sevilla (cc by 2.0) as an industry that boasts an incredibly talented but increasingly stressed pool of people, libraries are in danger of burning out en masse. research on workplace stress identifies six key areas related to burnout: “workload, control, rewards, community, fairness and values” (maslach, 2011, p. 44). like knobs on a mixing board, we can achieve a certain harmony by using some factors as cushions or compensation for others. for example, employees may accept a job that is high on workload and low on pay when those areas are evened out by a strong community and a workplace of integrity. i believe we as library professionals are uniquely blessed to work in a field that deeply honors community, fairness, and values—we share information freely, love to collaborate, and we go to great lengths to treat our patrons equally. those factors are integral to our collective character and have been our parachutes in these free-fall years. but are these factors enough in a library landscape that for many keeps growing higher on workload and lower on rewards? despite our heroic advocacy efforts, budget malaise may linger for years to come. ala reported in a recent press release that salaries for public and academic librarians are largely flat again for 2012, adding even more stress to the burnout equation (2012). when put under increasing pressure, the values that have kept us afloat through these lean years become tainted with cynicism, one of the most concerning risk factors of burnout (maslach, 2011, p. 46). marathons and long races are meant to be sporadic occurrences, with ample rest afterwards to avoid injuries. with both exercise and work, you can motivate yourself to work much harder than usual when you know the end is in sight, but what if there is no end? or if the end is simply beyond our means?  what happens when the “vision” becomes a culture in which we are expected to work harder and faster all the time, forever? enter the manic organization. a slightly manic person can be awe-inspiringly productive at first, but that constant frenzy of activity becomes their ultimate ruin. they lose the ability to make the most basic decisions wisely. left untreated, they risk death from exhaustion or suicide (royal college of physicians of london, 2008, p. 238). similarly, the manic organization can slowly march its way into the ground through perpetual activity as the humans that run it suffer the consequences of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. libraries are doing more than ever for more patrons, but the tenacious problem of offering so many services and materials and opportunities is that it becomes difficult to take a pause, especially when reduced budgets translate into reduced staffing. pausing is even more challenging when our work culture, a culture we’ve been forced into by our dire need to prove our value, focuses on results to the detriment of the process. effective marketing for libraries is essential, but is the constant stress on results causing us to devalue the necessary downtime? what about brainstorming time? replenishment time? these aren’t the kinds of activities we want to list in our advocacy campaigns or our annual reports, yet in the exercise and scholarly worlds, coaches and teachers know that these are the foundations of success. cutting them back would be unthinkable. conclusion looking realistically at how long libraries’ budgetary challenges may go on, we need to learn to pace ourselves for this race. one particularly volatile combination of risk factors is that of high workload with low levels of control (sargent & terry, 1998). a powerful way to relieve some of this pressure is to create control where we can, giving employees more tools to pace their work and more say over how their work is executed. in fact, research on productivity identifies work pacing as one of the key ways to insulate against other stresses. “a person who has too much to do is likely to be able to handle this stress if the job has some flexibility in terms of its allocation of time and energy to tasks” (sargent & terry, 1998, p. 231). in a workplace that can’t afford raises or promotions, workers may find relief in gaining flexibility of hours or some ability to work from home. a healthy organizational culture can set the model for effective pacing by coordinating collective down-times after periods of peak activity. for example, administrators can discourage programming in the month after summer reading or give more time to catch up on personal projects once new student orientation is complete. leaders can foster a workplace in which thoughtfully saying “no” is accepted and encouraged (ford, 2009). these measures shouldn’t be thought of as doing less or scaling back, but purposefully strengthening the organization so that future initiatives are successful. in the half-marathon, had i paced myself better to anticipate those hills, i could have preserved my energy. better yet, had i put my pride on the shelf and taken a few breaks, i could have run faster and finished with a better time. overworked people of the library world: it’s time to pace ourselves so together we can survive to the finish line.   many thanks to kim leeder, denise davis, and paula richwine, p.t., d.p.t., for their helpful feedback on prior drafts.  several others graciously read earlier versions and listened to my nebulous ideas – thank you kevin urian, laura metzler, lee o’brien, drs. aaron and katherine karmes, and in particular, leah youse. further reading on this topic: our librarian bodies, our librarian selves what do we do and why do we do it? that’s how we do things around here struggling to juggle: part-time temporary work in libraries the importance of thinking about thinking  references american libraries magazine. (2012). public library funding landscape (digital supplement summer 2012). retrieved from http://www.ala.org/research/sites/ala.org.research/files/content/initiatives/plftas/2011_2012/plftas12_funding%20landscape.pdf american library association. (2012). survey results indicate salaries for librarians in 2012 flat – and in some cases lower [press release]. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/news/pr?id=11243 ariga, a., & lleras, a. (2011). brief and rare mental “breaks” keep you focused: deactivation and reactivation of task goals preempt vigilance decrements. cognition, 118, 439-443. cimprich, b. (2007). attention restoration theory: empirical work and practical applications [powerpoint slides]. retrieved from http://www.umb.no/statisk/greencare/meetings/presentations_vienna_2007/cimprich_cost_pres_71007.pdf cooper, g. (1998, december). research into cognitive load theory and instructional design at unsw. retrieved from http://dwb4.unl.edu/diss/cooper/unsw.htm disalvo, d. (2012, august 07). the 10 reasons why we fail. forbes. retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2012/08/07/the-10-reasons-why-we-fail/ ford, e. (2009, december 16). how do you say no. [web log message]. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/how-do-you-say-no/ gambino, m. (2012, july 13). why procrastination is good for you. smithsonian magazine. retrieved from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-procrastination-is-good-for-you-162358476.html gordon, k. (writer) (2009). the fog [television series episode]. in weiner, m. (executive producer), mad men. amc. leybina, a., ong hui zhong, a., & kashapov, m. m. (2011). active or lazy: what motivates workplace performance. psychology research, 1(2), 114-122. maslach, c. (2011). burnout and engagement in the workplace: new perspectives. the european health psychologist, 13(3), 44-47. parker-pope, t. (2009, june 2). better running through walking. new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/health/02well.html phillips, l. (ed.). (2004). ernest hemingway on writing. new york: scribner. royal college of physicians of london. (2008). neurology, ophthalmology and psychiatry. london: royal college of physicians of london. sargent, l. d., & terry, d. j. (1998). the effects of work control and job demands on employee adjustment and work performance. journal of occupational and organizational psychology, 71(sep), 219-236.   librarianship, libraries, library advocacy, organizational culture, public libraries, workplace wellness and the survey says… editorial: have we changed the world yet? (oh, just wait) 19 responses kenley neufeld 2012–09–19 at 9:30 am brilliant. love the post and the reflection. we don’t do this enough in our society. one aspect that isn’t covered in the article is the practice of mindfulness to bring relief and focus in our work environments. in my space, i like to bring my full attention to all my activities and learn to train the mind. cultivate concentration. though it takes practice, it isn’t that difficult after a time and it can result in a much cooler and calmer outlook in the work environment. like what you wrote, stopping is a key aspect to developing this mindfulness and concentration. i look forward to more comments and thoughts on stabilizing our frantic lives. erica jesonis 2012–09–19 at 10:25 am thanks, kenley. i really appreciate your additional thoughts, particularly how like work pacing, mindfulness can bring both relief and focus. your comment reminded me of the french tradition of using the fountain pen. it’s at times messy, it takes longer to write, but it brings a purposeful slowing down and appreciation of the beauty and meaning of the task. thanks for reading and sharing! ann 2012–09–19 at 2:11 pm this is an excellent article. it is so typical of us to do more with less and has somewhat become a mantra and a badge of pride. i loved your points about leadership stepping in and doing the things necessary for staff to recover after summer reading or creating an atmosphere where staff can say no. i actually had a boss that insisted staff take september off from programming and there was actually a bit of grumbling; but, in the long run it was great because everyone was forced to slow down, take a breath and regroup. i had an occasion where i visited with a neuropsychologist and he told me something i didn’t know. sleep deprivation, even small amounts like an hour here or there, can produce symptoms that are similar to brain injury. sleep is when your brain rests and heals from stress, too much stimuli, and being overworked. he also told me that pausing for one or two minutes, eyes closed, clearing the mind of thoughts using a phrase (he suggested: calm. quiet.)is actually extremely useful in helping your brain concentrate effectively. he suggested doing this once an hour or more frequently during periods of high concentration. erica jesonis 2012–09–20 at 8:17 am thanks so much, ann. i am fascinated by what you learned from the neuropsychologist – i will look into this more! his tips sound profoundly helpful and very much in line with the research used for this article. thanks for sharing with us. sarah 2012–09–19 at 6:42 pm i’ve stopped doing other peoples’ work this year. this has been hard for me, but it’s been even harder for those whose work i did and those who assumed i would do other peoples’ work. but they are getting the message. we run libraries on the backs of women with part-time jobs who have to have someone else supply them with housing and health insurance. and the more we do, the more will be expected of us. stop the insanity!! erica jesonis 2012–09–20 at 8:19 am sarah – you are awesome and brave! have you encountered a lot of backlash? i agree that collectively, one of the best things we can do for the profession and for our colleagues is to be really honest about what workload is acceptable and manageable… linda 2012–09–19 at 8:40 pm librarianship is not difficult work. it’s not like running a marathon. henrietta 2012–09–20 at 3:33 pm linda, please grace us with an article! i would love to hear you expound on your view that “librarianship is not difficult work.” pingback : | we love gratitude : be grateful pingback : surviving the rat race « civil civil servant gratia karmes 2012–09–21 at 9:03 am erica, as someone who compulsively edits random magazine articles, pouncing on misplaced apostrophes and misused pronouns, first of all let me say–great writing. i think you’re right, that most sustained effort of any type is enhanced by thoughtful, planned breaks. it’s interesting that apparently the best type of training is also “interval” training, which incorporates lower intensity with full-on effort, and apparently maximizes muscle gain. elizabeth 2012–09–21 at 12:10 pm very interesting, thanks. i see the rationale in switching tasks and giving your brain a break, but i often find that the opposite tactic works better. if i have too many tasks to finish, i try to cycle between them all and feel overwhelmed. it’s much easier if i pick one, completely block out the others, and work on it steadily until it’s done. carla ehrenreich 2012–09–22 at 12:07 am i think one of the unintended consequences of just working harder is that it can seem to justify the cuts to those who made them. “see they didn’t need that money/staff/space they’re doing just fine without it”. my city has grown rapidly and the elementary schools are very crowded yet there has been real reluctance to build more schools. instead of converting the music and computer room and storage space to classrooms what would happen if they rented space from the church or rec center down the street. all of the parents whose kids were being housed “off campus” would be aware in a very dramatic way of the overcrowding of the school. questions start to be asked when members of the church realize school kids are using their space etc. perhaps sometimes dramatically not doing it makes the point better then anything else. brett bonfield 2012–09–24 at 11:35 am excellent article, and incredibly timely. as you counsel in the article, for the last couple of months i’ve been incorporating more interval techniques into my life. at work, i’ve been using the the pomodoro technique and it seems to be increasing productivity and reducing anxiety. i haven’t read the pomodoro book, so i may not be using correctly, but so far so good. i use a website called tomato timer to time my intervals. i’ve also incorporated more interval training into my exercise routines (and daily or near-daily exercise seems to help me sleep better and reduce stress). i’ve committed to going on one long run per week, and i try to take yoga classes when i can. but on the other days i’ve been trying to go on a short run or do a tabata routine. on the short run (~2 miles), i incorporate as many oneor two-block long sprints as i can manage after i’ve warmed up in the first mile, so the whole thing generally takes about 15 minutes. the tabata workout takes 8 minutes: 2 minutes of warm up, 8 sets consisting of 20-second high-intensity exercises paired with a 10-second rest, and 2 minutes of cool down. on days when i can’t fit a yoga class or longer run into my schedule, it’s nice to have exercise options that i definitely can find time to do. i hope these techniques might be useful to others. i’m also interested reading suggestions for similar techniques, either at work or in the rest of my life. pingback : a timely piece on burnout in libraries | yezbick.com: if it's weird, flip it over and check, it might be a yezbick chris everest 2012–10–11 at 7:02 am first of all – congratulations on the half-marathon – my running career is only re-starting now after what i call “the library stress & doughnut years” – my personal bests in the library and on the road were back in the 80s but i am hanging on as a master, a veteran and coping with deafness, depression and renal failure (transplant 1995). perhaps the problems of burnout in librarians might be helped by reducing the difficulties caused by poverty and promotion, fundamentally, the absence of promotion. in the meantime we put one foot in front of another, and smile…. erica jesonis 2012–10–12 at 12:20 pm chris – thanks for your comments. i love your decription of the “library stress and doughnut years” – so true! pingback : tensegrities » blog archive pingback : librarian blogs: a peek into the career | slm508mav this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct revisiting the ala membership pyramid – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 5 may eric frierson /5 comments revisiting the ala membership pyramid photo by flickr user neil burrows (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) by eric frierson introduction almost three years ago, emily ford wrote a post on ala’s membership pyramid.  in this post, she commented on the need for the american library association to engage people she called level 2 and level 3 members – those who paid dues to ala but who were not involved or only marginally so.  she argued that failing to do so would lead to the organization’s irrelevance and downfall.  the topic generated 44 comments, second most of all of our posts to this date – and it did so in the opening weeks of the blog. the comments included a response from then ala president-elect camila alire, who acknowledged the issues in the post: we hear you! we have heard your concerns from many other folks. we know that we have to stay relevant to folks coming in as new members and members for less than 5 or so years. we know we have to think/act out of the box. don’t give up on ala. we are working on it — but we are such a “process” organization that it is taking more time then we would like to admit. alire followed through on her promise and established the young professionals task force whose charge was to look at issues of engagement and retention with young professionals.  the initial work of this group resulted in a list of recommended actions for the association to take.  the list included some concrete steps to more fully engage young members. the task force presented its recommendations to the ala executive board in hopes that they would spur action on behalf of young members.  what happened was revelatory for the group, and reflection on the events that followed provides a road map for not only young members to get involved, but for all level 2 and level 3 members to participate in changing an organization to meet their needs. ala doesn’t have a magic wand ala’s executive board did not take long to respond to the task force.  in short, they told the task force that it was asking them to endorse several recommendations that they have no ability to endorse. the recommendation would either have to go to the policy committee of ala council, or to divisions and roundtables. executive board couldn’t simply make these recommendations happen. in a column for american libraries, former ala president jim rettig echoed this message: with all due respect, if ala members of any age group are waiting for a “magical entity” named ala to bring about change of the sort and at the pace the young librarians working group and many other members want, my experience over more than three decades indicates that they will have a very long wait. ala is us—change for its members comes through our initiatives. the most helpful thing ala can do is provide an environment in which members can continuously refine and redefine what participation means—an environment with not just appropriate tools, but also with enticing incentives. the best thing members can do is use that environment to get what they want out of ala. a little rebellion is a medicine necessary for the sound health of our association. to put it bluntly, ala is not your mom.  each member is responsible for using what resources the association provides to shape the organization into something worthwhile, and from an initial look  at the association’s website, ala (the big ala, not its divisions) offers many opportunities for individuals looking to engage with the association and its work: in-person conferences twice a year national library legislative day, virtual library legislative day and the legislative action center alaconnect, a social networking / workspace tool the emerging leaders program ala governance (including council and executive board) the copyright advisory network this list of resources alone allows motivated members (even those without any financial support) to take legislative advocacy action on a national or state level, discuss copyright issues with other librarians and copyright policy experts, and develop online communities around topics of interest or need. with additional money and time, members get access to discussion groups and social events at the conferences and the ability to participate on the ground in national legislative action. successful networking and a body of professional work will earn members the potential to run for office, increase members’ chances of getting involved in committee work, and having connections to draw upon when looking for jobs. there isn’t a shortage of opportunities, and at first glance, ala is providing the environment in which members can connect and make the association worthwhile.  are these opportunities enough to make ala worthwhile? so what’s the fuss? despite these opportunities, we still see people who believe the association is irrelevant, has a closed and elitist structure, and provides low value for the amount of investment ala requires. the young professionals task force responded to rettig’s column by agreeing that ala members are the drivers of change and value in the association, but also reminding readers what it is like to be new: to new members, who are still trying to memorize acronyms and study the organizational chart, and who have never spoken to anyone in a position of power within the association, being an ala member feels like being a guest on a cruise ship: you’re just along for the ride. new members’ lack of knowledge and information is a barrier to participation in the association, even for those motivated to get involved in association work.  in a recent research article titled “new kids on the block: my first time in a political community,” dudash and harris uncovered that political involvement is partly defined by “’having knowledge’ or ‘having information’ about politics” (p. 475). in the instance of politics, involvement means casting a vote for a candidate and engaging in discourse about issues.  in associations, it’s not entirely different – we also have elections and engage with others to learn or teach.  armed only with cursory knowledge of the association, new ala members will have trouble finding meaningful ways to engage beyond attending a typical conference program. going back to dudash and harris’s political research, we find a telling example of how young people make connections and get involved in supporting a cause or a person: i wasn’t an obama supporter, none of us were, but we went to this house party for obama. we felt like we were a part of the party, even though we weren’t supporters. it made us want to be supporters. even a house party made us feel a part of something. (p. 476) the party led to an engaged group of individuals more likely to investigate issues, take action, and participate in the political process.  how can we help new members of ala – those without a complete picture of what the association is and does – get to a point where they feel like they are a ‘part of something’ and the want to be involved in making the association better? #makeithappen is how to make it happen the only comment posted to the young professionals task force’s response to jim rettig was by jp pocaro of 8bitlibrary.com, plugging an unofficial ala annual dance party in new orleans.  it’s a way for people who enjoy dance parties to ‘feel a part of something.’  even with no stated professional purpose, it serves one. it is easy for people who have been members of ala for a long time and whose schedules are filled with meetings, discussion groups, and “official networking events” to perceive dance parties that last into the night as a misuse of time at conference; however, these parties do serve an important purpose for professional librarians who like to dance or go to dance clubs.  even if there are no professional discussions, it fosters a sense of belonging and gives people a reason to get together.  it makes being a part of ala more valuable, because people develop friendships that turn into professional discussions later in the conference. the dance party is not sponsored by ala.  all of the initiatives at the beginning of this post that are sponsored by ala are quite different than the dance party. there’s formality, structure, and in some cases, an application process and acceptance or rejection. there is a need for both, and if ala wants to remain true to its vision of fostering an environment in which members receive incentives for reshaping what participation means, then they need to support all types of events, including dance parties and impromptu networking events and presentations. looking at their activity, they do to some extent.  for example, at ala midwinter in san diego, a space was set up with a projector and screen in the main hall of the convention center, complete with round tables and power and connections for laptops. there are other examples of librarians – particularly young librarians – working outside of the official ala structure because it doesn’t meet their needs.  for example, the ala think tank sprouted out of a need for sharing expenses at conference, coordinate shared experiences amoung attendees, and the need to be able to respond to new ideas quickly without having to suffer through ala’s bureaucracy.  if participants in the think tank want to hold an impromptu flash mob in to raise awareness of the importance of libraries, they don’t need a conference programming committee to do it.  as their hasgtag suggests, they just #makeithappen. action items for ala and its members the first and most important object for ala should be to support these member created initiatives – even those that are outside of the ala structure.  continue to share news, events, and links to unconferences, think tank groups and dance parties over official communication channels like the ala facebook page or twitter feeds.  people new to the profession look to ala first, because the association is the primary organization of the profession.  it gets visibility in library schools and in libraries.  let’s add these non-ala opportunities for participation to the communication we give new members. the ala membership committee could create a welcome packet for new librarians that features the structure of ala and a way to find their home in association activities, including committee work, conference attendance, alaconnect groups, the new members round table, and others.  the packet should also feature non-ala activities that a new librarian may want to be involved with, depending on preferences and needs. ala might even consider sending financial support to these external groups if possible without attempting to absorb them.  help these member-driven groups to develop the environment for young librarians to succeed.  this may require some maneuvering if ala by laws do not allow for financing non-ala initiatives with its finances. seasoned members need to take the same approach.  many members are extremely good at involving new librarians in association activities.  for example, mentoring programs in the new members round table and other units of the association deliberately set up structures by which experienced librarians play host to new librarians.  these mentors provide great advice for a new librarian to get involved with the formal structure of ala, like advising people to go to committee meetings even when they are not on the roster in order to network with people that might place them on the committee.  mentors give people strategies on which conference programs are the best, and they encourage people to apply for programs like emerging leaders.  they recommend these paths because that is what has worked for them – but that might not be the right advice for everyone. what members need to do is to be aware of all of the other member-driven events going on that new librarians might be more attracted to than the official cadre of ala initiatives.  these external groups (like the think tank) might be just what they need to grow as professionals, even if it’s not what people have needed in the past. in time, young librarians become … not young librarians.  the association becomes less confusing.  people in positions of power in the organization become less intimidating.  life as a professional becomes normal.  perhaps then these members will find ways to shape the association itself into what they want and what it needs to be in the future. the pyramid revised ala has done a fantastic job of trying to support young librarians.  participation options are plentiful for those who can work in its structure.  those who thrive in those situations rise to become what emily called level 1 members.  there will still be a massive amount of members who pay their dues, attend conference, but don’t get involved in committee work or other activities of the association.  these are emily’s level 2 members. in the new model, there will still be level 3 members, defined as dues-paying members who join as a professional obligation, like the fact that ala provides toolkits and advocates on library issues. if ala and its membership do a good job, though, we eliminate the disenfranchised member that was also part of level 3. these members create their own structure to thrive in and occupy a shadow level 1 kind of member, engaged, active, making change and participating at high levels in whatever structure they create that works for them – all supported by the association and its members. much like the now official unconference that happens, the methods and models these young leaders develop will become part of what it means to be a member of ala. what works for you? if you are familiar with initiatives not mentioned in this post that happen outside the auspices of ala, please share them here!  what can members do now that will make the association better for its membership?  let us know in the comments. many, many thanks to jody bailey and emily ford for taking the time to clean this post up, offer encouraging remarks, and making the post much better than it was in draft form. references ford, e. (2008, october 15). on the ala membership pyramid [web log post]. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2008/on-the-ala-membership-pyramid/. young professionals task force. (2010, june 11). young librarians working group final report and recommendations. retrieved from http://connect.ala.org/node/105013 rettig, j. (2011, january 4). is the association ripe for rebellion? [web log post]. retieved from http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/01042011/association-ripe-rebellion johnson, a. (2010, september 23). ala is not your mom [web log post]. retrieved from http://www.abbythelibrarian.com/2010/09/ala-is-not-your-mom.html american library association. (2008, april 23). ala | american library association website.  retrieved from http://www.ala.org young professionals task force. (2011, april 4). ala is us, and we’re looking younger every day [web log post]. retrieved from http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/ala-members-blog/ala-us-and-we-re-looking-younger-every-day dudash, e.a., & harris, s. (2011). new kids on the block: my first time in a political community. american behavioral scientist, 55, p. 469-478. keeter, s., horowitz, j., & tyson, a. (2008). young voters in the 2008 election.  retrieved from http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1031/young-voters-in-the-2008-election sweeney, p.c. (2011, february 21). the revolution won’t be televised, but it will be facebooked [web log post]. retrieved from http://pcsweeney.com/2011/02/21/the-revolution-wont-be-televised-but-it-will-be-facebooked/ kleinman, d. (2010, november 24). the ala alienates librarians because it is politicized, elitist, group think oriented, not very professional, and generally does not serve the needs of librarians [web log post]. retrieved from http://safelibraries.blogspot.com/2010/11/ala-alienates-librarians-because-it-is.html   ala, associations what are libraries for? a short distance correctly: 13 ways of (not) writing (contrarian) librarianship 5 responses emily ford 2011–05–14 at 10:02 am i love your post, eric, and i love that you are posing some very challenging ideas to our largest professional association. give financial support to unofficial groups–well, i am quite cynical and think this is never going to happen, but i love that you are mentioning this possibility. for me i still have a bit of sourness for ala, even though i am very involved as a newsletter editor, a committee member, and as a young professionals task force member. i think the thing that still gets me is this: participation options are plentiful for those who can work in its structure. i’m not a fan of ala’s structure. at all. if it were up to me we’d tear down the ala sandcastle and begin rebuilding. i know i’m fantasizing. the structure is established in our history that goes back to 1876 (according to ala’s web site). can an organization this old and this huge and this established and rigid re-invent itself? i want it to, so badly, and that’s why i keep participating. joan 2011–05–14 at 5:00 pm eric, this is a great post; and thanks to emily for pointing it out to me. i have been in a few different places with ala: i used to feel like a confused, uninvolved but willing member. now i’m slightly less confused and chair of a committee. and i do still find the organization baffling. ala is a bit like an old building or house that’s had so many additions over so many years that you can’t even tell where it all started. people added new committees and sections to various divisions while similar functions were popping up in other silos. it’s overwhelming, when you’re a new librarian and there’s no one obvious group or place to focus your efforts. ala could probably use a big re-organization. but not only am i sure that’s not going to happen, i don’t think anyone who has climbed the power structure would be motivated to do that. a year-long presidency isn’t very long, and i’m sure the presidents have other pressing concerns beside trying to help a young person figure out if they should be in the acrl university libraries section or rusa mars or lita or whatever. we just muck through this on our own and try to find a spot to sit where we live the room and the people in it. so i get the frustration, and i think smaller initiatives are fantastic. but i agree with eric that complaining about ala is a bit like complaining about the government or traffic: it’s venting but probably won’t lead to anything if we don’t take action. michael henry starks 2011–05–16 at 7:28 am an impressive post, eric. you covered a lot of ground in an evenhanded way. having spent my first career in ibm, i can see how the size and complexity of ala is mysterious, intimidating or even apparently irrelevant to new librarians. i don’t have any insights into making ala into the organization it should be, whatever that is. but i did notice two things not in your post that may be worth addressing. the first is the culture of the organization. after basically saving ibm from disintegration, ceo louis gerstner wrote in his book, “who says elephants can’t dance?”, that culture wasn’t the most important thing in remaking ibm, it was the only thing. does the culture of the ala and librarianship generally need examination and change? the second is accreditation of library schools. do the requirements for accreditation reflect today’s requirements for success as a librarian? the blog posts and comments of many recent graduates suggest that schools are not providing what today’s librarians need. what is the ala doing to adapt accreditation to the profession’s new reality, and is the organization engaging students and recent graduates in a discussion of accreditation? eric frierson 2011–05–16 at 9:12 am thanks, michael! the culture of ala varies from silo to silo. i suspect you’ll find different norms, values, visions in each division of ala. lita is as different from pla as yalsa is to acrl. so many members participate in their divisions and begrudgingly pay their ala dues on top of their division dues (despite the fact that dues paid to ala support the work of divisions in some way). so if i had to assess, the culture of big ala is one of isolation. the structure supports that culture with its massive silos, but to some extent, members perpetuate it by wishing they could just belong to their silo and not the big ala. i have hope that cross-divisional (or non-divisional) efforts will shift that culture. the dance party and think tank mentioned in this post don’t align themselves with any particular division, and its in these member-driven events that a new culture of ala might rise (ironically, from non-ala events). is there more ala leadership (board, council) could do? aside from establishing task forces and committees, what ideas do you have? i must admit, i’ve been to one board meeting and no council meetings during my membership, so i can’t answer that question. moreso, i can’t assess whether the board or council would do something if the culture supports the status quo. to your second question: the committee on accreditation is in the middle of a 5-year review process of its “2008 standards for accreditation of master’s programs in library and information studies” document. i looked at the first round of comments on the document, and only 32.8% of respondents identified themselves as practitioners! that might contribute to why standards for accreditation of library schools are out-of-sync with practice. (not to mention the vastly different skill sets required of practitioners in the library field.) so is ala engaging recent graduates? not as much as they are engaging lis faculty. is this the practitioner’s fault? after all, the outcomes of new standards directly affect lis faculty, but only indirectly affect practitioners. naturally, lis faculty are going to be more engaged. again, if we (practitioners) are going to complain, there are venues to participate in change – but finding those venues is a little difficult for those confused by ala’s structure. emily 2011–05–18 at 1:07 am does it matter very much, and is ala different from other professional organizations of its size and type? i’m an uninvolved dues-paying ala member, and i’m comfortable with that. i have other local groups, issues, and organizations that absorb my energy, but support ala because it is the one organization that represents all of us, if blandly and abstractly. what else could a giant organization do? the times ive tried wading in, most ala work seems to be about reproducing ala. i’m not interested in doing that, but trust that enough people do that ala will still be there when i need information about the broader field, access to publishing and conference opportunities, or the joblist. council elections are competitive, which tells me interest in running the place is sufficient. does ala really need everybody? what’s the participation density like at the modern languages association or the american psychological association? could it be that we’re doing fine? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the quest for diversity in library staffing: from awareness to action – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 13 jan jennifer vinopal /34 comments the quest for diversity in library staffing: from awareness to action image by flickr user andy hay (cc by 2.0) by jennifer vinopal the work of diversity in libraries begins at the crossroad where superiority, inaction, and denial become intolerable. – sandra ríos balderrama, “this trend called diversity” in brief: despite our ongoing quest for diversity and a growing number of initiatives to increase it, the demographics of the professional librarian population haven’t changed in any significant way. we are starkly lacking in diversity based on race and ethnicity (we are overwhelmingly white), age (librarianship is an aging profession), disability, economic status, educational background, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other demographic and identity markers of difference. this lack of diversity should be seen as a signal, an invitation to us to look critically at our culture, our practices, and our assumptions, and investigate what it is about ourselves and our profession that is preventing underrepresented people from being able to, or even wanting to, enter and stay. we need an awareness of how privilege, bias, and the attendant power differentials and oppression play out at the individual and the systemic levels of our profession. and we must consider how these affect the experiences of underrepresented and marginalized people within our dominant (white, heterosexual, cisgender, and patriarchal) culture. in this article i consider the meaning of diversity in librarianship. then, using the climatequal organizational climate and diversity assessment as an example, i analyze the potential problems with our data collection and analysis related to diversity and organizational culture. i conclude by suggesting some practical steps for library leadership and by identifying future directions for research. why diversity and what does it mean? we often read about the benefits of diversity in organizations.1 the typical corporate “business case for diversity” focuses on the economic benefits of workplace diversity for the company, thereby treating staff from underrepresented groups simply as any other resource acquired and deployed to increase market share. conversely, our professional library associations affirm a commitment to creating diverse workplaces so that we may better serve diverse user communities, and even support democracy.2 for example, the association of research libraries’ initiative to recruit a diverse workforce mentions better organizational decision-making and problem-solving, as well as the correlation between institutional diversity and customer satisfaction.3 the american library association’s policy manual section on diversity says, “libraries can and should play a crucial role in empowering diverse populations for full participation in a democratic society.”4 the canadian library association’s statement on diversity and inclusion states, “[a] diverse and pluralistic society is central to our country’s identity. libraries have a responsibility to contribute to a culture that recognizes diversity and fosters social inclusion.”5 the international federation of library association’s ifla/unesco multicultural library manifesto recognizes that “[c]ultural and linguistic diversity is the common heritage of humankind and should be cherished and preserved for the benefit of all…therefore, libraries of all types should reflect, support and promote cultural and linguistic diversity at the international, national, and local levels, and thus work for cross-cultural dialogue and active citizenship.”6 not unlike the corporate business case for diversity, library arguments for diversity are usually framed as benefits to the organization and its users. less frequently do these explanations center on the potential benefits, or recognize the attendant risks to the underrepresented people hired as a result of these efforts. what do librarians mean when we say “diversity”? arl’s irdw and ala’s spectrum scholarship program focus exclusively on “racial and ethnic diversity.”7 however, the ala manual’s section,“diversity,” has a much broader scope, committing to combat discrimination based on “race, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, creed, color, religious background, national origin, language of origin or disability.”8 the cla states that “canada’s libraries recognize and energetically affirm the dignity of those they serve, regardless of heritage, education, beliefs, race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical or mental capabilities, or income.”9 ifla talks about serving a “heterogeneous society” with “complex identities,” and focuses on “cultural and linguistic diversity.”10 as well, some individual libraries and library schools have included diversity in their strategic plans and created special initiatives to diversify their staff or bring more people from underrepresented groups to the profession.11 some are quite specific about what “diversity” means to them and why it’s important, and some are less so. unless we are clear about what we’re trying to accomplish and why, and unless we’re willing to name and examine the underlying factors that thwart the changes we hope to see, we will ultimately fail. despite the growing emphasis on increasing the diversity of library school students and library staff, and despite the significant demographic changes in the united states population, the demographics of the professional librarian population have barely shifted in decades.12 our concerns sound remarkably similar to those of gerhard and boydston in 1993 who, looking back to affirmative action efforts of the 1970’s and 1980’s, lamented that “[l]ibrarianship has been committed to affirmative action, yet it has been historically difficult to convert that philosophical commitment into activity.”13 ala’s 2007 “diversity counts” report states, “credentialed librarians are predominantly women, ages 45–54, and white. they are not limited by disability and work full-time.”14 comparing the 2009-2010 ala community survey estimates15 with the 2010 united states census bureau’s figures16 reveals the disparity for race and ethnicity: comparison of the 2009-2010 ala community survey estimates and the 2010 united states census bureau estimates race/ethnicity (includes differences in language used) 2009-2010 american community survey estimates (diversity counts 2012 tables) u.s. census bureau population estimates, 2010 ala: white u.s. census: white alone, not hispanic/latino 88% 63.7% ala: african american u.s. census: black 5.2% 12.6% ala: asian-pacific islander u.s. census has two categories 2.7% asian     4.8% native hawaiian/other pacific islander alone:  0.2% native american/alaskan 0.16% 0.9% latino 3.1% 16.3% two or more races 0.85% 2.5% the association of research libraries statistics for 2012-2013 are comparable to the ala numbers above and underscore the magnitude of the disparity for representation by race and ethnicity in research libraries.17 these poor numbers are not unique to libraries; the statistics are similar in most institutions of higher education across the united states. the us national center for education statistics states that “[i]n fall 2013, of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, 79 percent were white (43 percent were white males and 35 percent were white females), 6 percent were black, 5 percent were hispanic, and 10 percent were asian/pacific islander.”18 the “diversity counts” authors state, “in regards to racial and ethnic diversity, the need for both intensified recruitment and retention strategies is evident.” at the same time they observe that “existing lis minority education and recruitment programs are able to yield just enough new graduates to provide for the replacement of retirees and those leaving the profession prematurely.”19 we lack other forms of diversity as well, though demographic data for areas other than race and ethnicity are less well tracked in the profession. the “diversity counts” authors say “the comparatively low employment of librarians with disabilities is also deserving of attention given the increase between 1990 and 2000 of people self-identifying [on the 2000 united states census] as having one or more disabilities.”20 while 19.2% of the population between the ages of 21 and 64 self-identified as having a disability on the 2000 united states census, according to ala statistics the percentage of credentialed librarians with disability status was 4% that same year.21 the authors are also concerned about the high attrition rate of librarians under age 45, which “accounted for 44% of credentialed librarians leaving the work force, [and which] speaks not so much to an inability to effectively recruit individuals to lis education and practice as to an inability to effectively retain them.” they go on to note that, “some racial and ethnic minority groups, notably african americans and latinos, are actually seeing a decrease in the number of credential [sic] librarians under age 45.”22 while the attrition rates of librarians is a more generalized problem in the profession, it would be well worth examining whether and why staff from underrepresented groups are leaving the profession at even higher rates than others. the same report acknowledges a vicious cycle that the lack of diversity perpetuates: “[t]he lack of diversity [in libraries] in regards to race and ethnicity, age group, disability, and other dimensions…work [sic] to distance the very communities they seek to attract.”23 the authors continue: the persistent lag in diversity in our lis schools, the number of librarians and library assistants leaving the profession prematurely, the aging of racial and ethnic minority library workers, and the continued under-representation of workers with disabilities, suggests a proportionally less diverse library workforce on the horizon.”24 we need to ask ourselves why “diversity never happens: the story of minority hiring doesn’t seem to change much.”25 underlying factors in attempting to answer this question, some library literature points to factors beyond just ineffective recruiting strategies. in a brief article in american libraries magazine, keith curry lance looks at the differences in the levels of racial and ethnic diversity in librarian versus library assistant positions. comparing the percentage of racial and ethnic subgroups in the us population, he finds that the distribution in library assistant positions is more or less proportional, whereas the distribution in professional librarian positions is not, the latter skewing heavily toward an overrepresentation of white people. ala’s 2007 “diversity counts” report confirms this discrepancy, and calls out academic libraries as particularly problematic: “when looking by types of libraries, the racial distributions are most pronounced in academic libraries. library assistants in academic libraries have three times as many latino and twice as many african american staff than their mls counterparts.”26 lance concludes that this is because of a “pipeline issue” related to national disparities in educational attainment between whites and underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. he says, where a relatively low level of educational attainment is usually required, the racial/ethnic discrepancies between the general adult population, high school graduates, and library assistants are either minimal, or, in the case of asians/pacific islanders, favorable to the group. it is librarian jobs—positions that generally require a graduate degree—that see more troubling discrepancies.27 based on the 2003 data tabulations from the united states census, lance shows that when one considers just the subset of these groups in the general population that hold graduate degrees, hispanics, african americans, and american indians/alaskan natives are actually represented proportionally in librarian positions.28 looking at graduate degree holders only, lance notes “the most underrepresented group, proportionally, is asians and pacific islanders.”29 recent united states census bureau numbers on educational attainment and ala statistics on credentialed librarians support lance’s observations.30 what both lance and the “diversity counts” report are acknowledging is a much larger and more troubling systemic problem negatively affecting the ethnic and racial makeup of the library profession. research shows that the educational attainment and general life trajectory of individuals is largely a result of the socio-economic status of their parents. a decades-long study of nearly 800 baltimore children illustrates how hard it is for the children of disadvantaged parents to move out of their income brackets. karl alexander, a main researcher on the project, says “almost none of the children from low-income families made it through college.”31 the library staffing pipeline is rooted in the discrepancies in socioeconomic status based on race and ethnicity, discrepancies which are inherited generationally. alexander explains, “this view is at odds with the popular ethos that we are makers of our own fortune.”32 as a 2007 acrl white paper on diversity acknowledges, “academic librarianship recruitment history cannot be divorced from the history of education and federal education policy in the united states. also important to federal education policy history is its relationship to civil rights history.”33 library discussions of and initiatives around diversity must recognize the historical and current factors contributing to how our profession is structured and functions. in addition to the structural pressures that inhibit educational attainment in certain socio-economic, ethnic, or racial groups, there are other insidious factors working against our stated goals of diversity. the dominant culture of our profession, from its foundations to the present day, reinforces itself by normalizing whiteness and other forms of oppression and by marginalizing difference.34 as april hathcock tweeted recently, “we treat diversity as a prob[lem] to be solved when the prob[lem] to be solved is whiteness in all its forms.”35 in a recent article, hathcock provided a definition of whiteness that recognizes other forms of oppression by the dominant (white, heterosexual, cisgender, and patriarchal) culture. [whiteness] is a theoretical concept that can extend beyond the realities of racial privilege to a wide range of dominant ideologies based on gender identity, sexual orientation, class, and other categories….it also stands as a marker for the privilege and power that acts to reinforce itself through hegemonic cultural practice that excludes all who are different.”36 in their article “diversity matters? rethinking diversity in libraries,” shinjoung yeo and james r. jacobs suggest that “diversity means little if there is no understanding of how the dominant culture and ideas are articulated within our institutions and our daily library practices.” they continue: one must ask oneself if it would be possible to really achieve diversity without challenging our racist, homophobic and sexist consciousnesses that are so deeply imbedded that we don’t even recognize them? if we are blind to our unconscious biases, then striving for numerically diverse organizations is building on a foundation of sand.37 unconscious or not, this ignorance of our own biases is willful and difficult to cure: the dominant group’s hold on power and privilege is at risk in any effort to open our eyes and to investigate the underpinnings of our profession’s whiteness and oppression named by yeo, jacobs, hathcock and others. recent research confirms the existence of this willful ignorance of bias within the dominant culture and how it plays out in practice. in a study of gender-based microaggressions, basford et al. note that, while overt sexism may be in decline, “many scholars fear that discrimination is not disappearing but rather has become more subtle in nature[,]”–equally pernicious but less likely to be perceived by those not targeted. they conclude that “women were significantly more likely to perceive workplace gender microaggressions than men….” and “women are more attuned to subtle forms of discrimination than men.”38 similarly, in her study of racial microaggressions in academic libraries, jaena alabi says, academic librarians of color noted that they are treated differently than their white peers. minority academic librarians are also more likely to perceive racial microaggressions directed toward colleagues. however, non-minority librarians are unlikely to report observing racial microaggressions.39 alabi notes as well that “racism and racial discrimination are seldom discussed explicitly in the lis literature, despite the presence of works chronicling the experiences of minority librarians.”40 what the research of alabi and basford et al. suggests is a dynamic already well known to people from marginalized groups: individuals from the dominant group have a tendency not to perceive (or to ignore) acts of subtle discrimination by members of their own group against individuals from marginalized groups. thus there is little incentive to report such experiences to the very members of that dominant group with the potential power to do something about it. when we refuse to recognize our own biases and the biases of others around us, our actions and their repercussions go unnoticed and therefore unexamined. image by flickr user r2hox (cc by-sa 2.0) measuring diversity and its implications one way that willful ignorance of bias manifests itself is in the ways that organizations measure “diversity” and interpret the results. i will illustrate this by considering the increasingly popular tool used by academic libraries to evaluate their organizational diversity, climatequal: organizational climate and diversity assessment, designed at the university of maryland and now run by the association of research libraries. in this article i use climatequal as a means to examine the ways that collective ignorance of the dominant group to bias and unexamined perpetuation of privilege and oppression can affect how libraries interpret the data that we collect and the way that we set priorities based on it. climatequal is described on its website as “an assessment of library staff perceptions concerning (a) their library’s commitment to the principles of diversity, (b) organizational policies and procedures, and (c) staff attitudes.”41 the theory on which the survey is based suggests that: [a] healthy organization is defined as one in which employees feel empowered and believe that the organization values diversity. it is an organization in which the policies, practices, and procedures are administered fairly and employees believe that they are treated fairly.42 climatequal is clearly designed and described as a measure of staff perceptions about the organization’s climate, including what they believe and how they feel about the organization’s fairness and how it values diversity. because of its focus on perceptions about what the organization values, climatequal can be a powerful tool for revealing and understanding fairness and bias within an organization. however, for a profession greatly lacking in diversity, relying on staff perceptions of demographic diversity and fairness as a proxy for organizational health might be quite problematic if not handled in an extremely thoughtful and well-informed way. a look at relevant research on race from outside the library literature will make it clear why this is the  case. as the above-cited statistics show, the library profession is overwhelmingly white. research studies have shown that, while white people say they like diversity, election and census trends suggest otherwise. a pew study found that while the majority of people in the united states profess a desire to live in racially, politically, religiously, and socioeconomically diverse communities, residential segregation belies their stated preference.43 we know that choice is hardly the reason why most people of color live where they do. as far as housing is concerned, choice in location is still a privilege primarily enjoyed by white people.44 the pew data suggest that “when the subject is community diversity, americans talk one way but behave another.”45 research also shows that white people’s tolerance for residential racial diversity is much lower than that of blacks. in “does race matter in neighborhood preferences? results from a video experiment” krysan et al. write: for the most part studies of residential preferences find that whites are willing to live with only a handful of african american neighbors (some put the figure at around 20 percent), while african americans are open to quite a diverse range of neighborhoods, though a “50-50” neighborhood is routinely identified as the most attractive…46 while this research did not study the preferences of whites for workplace diversity, we can imagine that many of the same dynamics and biases play out in white-dominated workplaces–even those that profess a desire for diversity. how much diversity is enough to make staff in the dominant culture, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, etc. feel like the workplace has achieved an acceptable amount of, but not too much diversity? and how much “valuing diversity” does the organization need to demonstrate in order for staff from the dominant culture to perceive it as sufficient, regardless of whether or not staff from marginalized groups would consider it enough? these questions and the research that underlies them should inspire us to think more carefully about how we interpret our climatequal results. climatequal respondents are asked to react on a 7-point scale, from strongly disagree to strongly agree, to phrases such as: the race of a team/division member does not affect how they are valued on this team/division. the support from supervisors that team/division members receive does not differ as a function of team/division members’ race. the support from supervisors that team/division members receive does not differ as a function of team/division members’ sexual orientation.47 the survey instrument is designed to elicit individuals’ perceptions about their own relationship to the organization. yet the way these question are worded–using the generic “a team/division member” and “they,” rather than “your race/sexual orientation” and “you”–thereby leaves the possibility open for respondents to answer based on their perceptions of how staff of other races, sexual orientation, gender, etc. are valued and supported in the organization. if your organization is between 80-90% white (a fair assumption based on ala and arl statistics), the overwhelming majority of the organization’s answers to questions about race will be based on white people’s perceptions and reflect a white cultural perspective. (the same holds for questions about other demographic categories vis-à-vis the dominant culture.) both the popular press and research on diversity attest to the fact that white people are unlikely to understand the lived experience of people of color and do not recognize racial bias when it occurs.48 as jaena alabi noted, “non-minority librarians are unlikely to report observing racial microaggressions” even though “minority” librarians are, in fact, experiencing them.49 thus, in an overwhelmingly white (and heterosexual, cisgender, and patriarchal) organization, it is important to recognize that the data we collect represents primarily the worldview of the dominant culture and will be shaped by its limitations and biases. the ways that the climatequal results are reported could potentially compound the problem. the results of an organization’s climatequal assessment can be evaluated in various ways. for example, organizations may compare results to their own own results from previous years’ assessments, or organizations may compare results to those of peer institutions that have also administered the survey. comparing a library’s own results from survey to survey, it’s impossible to know, for example, if an improvement in score is a result of actual increased support for diversity within the organization, or simply the demographic majority staff’s increasing comfort with the (likely biased) organizational culture they already have. as well, a common way to review climatequal results is to look at a library’s average scores on the various rubrics. focusing data analysis at the organizational level obscures dynamics happening within organizational subgroups, including minority identity groups. (this problem can be mitigated by further analysis, as discussed below.) ironically, the research cited above suggests that because of the dominant culture’s willful ignorance of bias, the less diverse the organization, the more satisfied the staff may be with their library’s current support for diversity, no matter how inadequate it is. as well, the climatequal site explains that comparing a library’s results with those of peer institutions “provides feedback from the survey that is grounded in a baseline from the libraries that have already participated.”50 however, if other institutions are having the same biases in their results as described above, comparison among them is unlikely to tell us anything useful about our own biased results. in reviewing climatequal survey results, we in the dominant culture are also less likely to recognize the built-in bias described above because of confirmation bias, “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses.”51 if we feel like we’re doing well on diversity and we believe our organization is fair and just (as it may well be for staff in the dominant culture), of course our diversity results will look pretty darn good to us. why question them? instead of falling prey to confirmation bias, it is possible instead to use the results of climatequal to reveal some of our unconscious or implicit biases. in addition to the perception questions, at the end of the survey climatequal asks respondents to voluntarily provide demographic information such as work status, race, religion, age, disability status, sex,  sexual orientation, and gender identification. although some of these  questions are asked in problematic ways, with them we are able to contrast the organization’s demographic data with its scores for staff perceptions of its commitment to the principles of diversity. (one of the most disturbing demographic questions mixes options for sexual orientation and gender identification in a single question and allows the user to choose only one or not respond at all, thereby forcing some respondents to erase a part of their self identity. this is a good example of a microaggression.) if an organization’s perceived level of diversity fairness is quite high but the actual demographic diversity of the organization is low, that is one clue that the results may be skewed by the significant underrepresentation of the very people who would notice and experience bias and discrimination in the organization. as well, we can compare the data for individual demographic groups to see if there are discrepancies in various identity groups’ perceptions of the organization’s climate for diversity based on demographic characteristics.52 for example, what if the comparison revealed that white people (or heterosexual people) think we’re doing well on diversity fairness whereas black people (or gay people) say they perceive discrimination? looked at this way, the climatequal data could provide us with a rare opportunity to experience organizational bias awareness, the first step toward addressing discrimination in our organizations. image by flickr user ~brenda-starr~ (cc by 2.0) a path toward awareness and action there is a large and rich body of research on workplace diversity, investigating questions such as self and group identity and stigma, power relations between groups, social networks, conflict and problem solving, and the emotional toll of being from a marginalized group in a workplace designed for and around the needs of dominant, white culture.53 the research of dobbin and kalev provides a cautionary note for us in our quest for diversity. in their article on corporate diversity programs from the 1960s to the present, they acknowledge the harm done in diversifying without dismantling power differentials: “[e]vidence to date suggests that bureaucratic hiring and promotion systems may have done more harm than good, institutionalizing patterns of inequality rather than challenging them.”54 they note that programs to increase gender and racial diversity had mixed success, and that even as some programs were successful, women and members of other underrepresented groups were often denied access to the management training that would have helped them move up in the management structure. they observed, innovations designed to quash managerial bias have been broadly ineffective. bureaucratic practices designed to eliminate managerial discretion from the hiring and promotion process have not led to increases in diversity; nor have diversity training programs designed to make managers aware of their own unconscious biases; neither have diversity performance evaluations that give managers feedback and career incentives to improve diversity.55 however the authors do note that some interventions were actually successful, including making managers responsible for advancing diversity and for recruiting women and people from other underrepresented groups.56 in its 2012 diversity standards: cultural competency for academic libraries, acrl acknowledges that moving from ignorance to awareness and then to positive action is a learning process. “to achieve diversity in substance as well as in form, libraries have to open their arms to all perspectives and experiences. that requires competency in matters of cultural pluralism that are not intuitive and must be learned, like any other essential skill.”57 research indicates the effectiveness of bias awareness interventions as a first step to developing insight into how implicit biases affect negative workplace behavior. in their article on gender bias and bias literacy, molly carnes et al. show how becoming conscious of one’s own bias is a prerequisite for taking action to correct it: “scholars in learning theory and organizational change converge on the importance of being able to articulate tacit knowledge to bring it into consciousness.”58 the results of their research-based bias awareness interventions at the university of wisconsin-madison suggest that this kind of approach to “consciousness raising” can be effective: “this broad range of research literature presents consistent advice regarding the steps necessary to overcome bias and produce intentional behavioral change.”59 these conclusions are supported by the research of ferguson and porter who looked at studies of intergroup bias and prejudice reduction. the importance of reducing implicit bias in the workplace cannot be overstated. implicit intergroup bias has far-reaching negative effects in many organizational domains, including, but not limited to, selection, retention (including compensation and promotion issues), teams-related issues, general work environment, and worker self-esteem and well-being…. in other words, fostering harmonious intergroup interactions is at the crux of producing the best possible outcomes in organizational productivity, organizational climate, and social justice.”60 a widely used instrument in social psychology for raising awareness of individual bias is the implicit association test (iat), which is freely available on the website of project implicit, an organization that promotes research on implicit social cognition.61 project implicit’s website explains that “the iat measures the strength of associations between concepts (e.g., black people, gay people) and evaluations (e.g., good, bad) or stereotypes (e.g., athletic, clumsy).” they continue, “implicit attitudes are positive and negative evaluations that occur outside of our conscious awareness and control.”62 like carnes et al.’s conclusions, project implicit contends that through awareness and vigilance, implicit preferences and biases can be changed. “research shows that implicit preferences are quite malleable so it is possible to manage and change them if you want to.”63 in an article on bias in library collection development, brian quinn suggests the implicit association test as a tool for selectors to become more aware of biases in collecting, as well as other tools such as self-paced online tutorials, guest lectures, and brown-bag discussions.64 while a crucial step, consciousness raising and addressing bias at the individual level must then be followed by critical analysis of the assumptions, behaviors, processes, and structures that undergird our profession. creating a culture of ongoing bias awareness, challenging individual and structural discrimination, and building organizations that truly value diversity also require leaders who are awake to the biases and oppression that are foundational to our political and socio-economic systems and to our profession. while organizational culture rests in the collective hands of all staff, library leadership controls the money, resources, and power needed to transform an organization’s strategic direction and policy. leaders can shape the organization’s values, and instigate change by setting strategic priorities, allocating staff time for learning opportunities (such as bias awareness), and encouraging critical inquiry by modeling the behavior we want to see.65 leaders can encourage and empower us to engage with essential questions like “in what way do i benefit from and perpetuate the status quo and how can i disrupt it?” and “how is valuing difference foundational to the mission of our profession?”66 sandra balderrama says, we must be able to articulate why we in our profession would want someone distinct from us to work with us, not for us. to work alongside us, not beneath us. to create with us, not duplicate us. to reciprocate with us, not assimilate to us. to mentor us, not intimidate us. to be an equal, not a box in the organizational hierarchy. to be a colleague.67 in a 2014 conference paper on women in leadership, chris bourg cautioned library staff interested in social justice issues but reluctant to take on leadership positions, that avoiding them “might mean that you are leaving the leadership of our profession in the hands of those who aren’t concerned about those things…”68 we need socially engaged library leaders who will push us beyond the next diversity initiative toward examinations of privilege, bias, power, structural discrimination, and institutional oppression, and how they further marginalize and drive away the very people we claim we want to include. image by flickr user microassist (cc by-sa 2.0) brass tacks for library leaders organizations take their cues from their leaders. if our enthusiasm for diversity isn’t backed up by concrete actions, our expressions of concern about it ring hollow. here are a few specific steps that high-level library leaders must take if we are to make our organizations and our profession inclusive, open to difference, and diverse. the ideas listed below aren’t new; many others have already suggested them. library leaders are in a position to prioritize them and make them happen. bias awareness and valuing difference create opportunities in the organization to raise awareness of implicit bias, discuss it, and take steps to reduce it. research supports the importance of openly recognizing difference vs. coloror gender-blindness (or other kinds of willful ignorance to recognize difference). ferguson and porter conclude that “a multicultural ideology is more beneficial than a colorblind ideology for both majority groups and minority groups, and for multiple intergroup and work-related outcomes.”69 create opportunities for staff to have meaningful conversations about bias and discrimination, organizational climate, culture, and diversity. name the problem don’t disguise the issues or use euphemisms. in research under way to evaluate library diversity plans, ione damasco notes that, while the word “inclusion” was frequently used, none of the plans included words such as “racism,” “anti-racist,” “whiteness,” “white privilege,” “privilege,” or “racial justice.” she continues, “we have to name our problems before we can fix them….our inability to articulate these issues in our formal documents might reflect our difficulties in overcoming the lack of diversity in our field.”70 we need to learn not just to see and name bias in ourselves and in the world around us, but to understand the underlying dynamics that perpetuate them and speak openly about them. mission and follow-through make diversity and social justice a genuine and regular part of the organization’s work. rather than just paying lip service to the concept of diversity, include diversity initiatives in the library’s strategic plan and then make time and provide support for staff to accomplish them. create a standalone diversity plan. damasco’s research shows that of 1500+ 4-year colleges and universities libraries surveyed, only 1.4% (22) had independent diversity plans. as a profession we can’t legitimately say that we believe in diversity if only a miniscule percentage of our libraries have plans to address it.71 data collection think critically about the data collection tools your organization employs, the data gathered, and how you make sense of it. in addition to knowing what kind of information the tools are designed to elicit and how they do so, it is also crucial to understand what biases we bring to our interpretation of the data, and to think about what data is missing and why. consider how different types of data might help expose bias in interpretation, for example, as noted above, by considering what it might mean to have a high climatequal score for perceived level of diversity fairness when the actual demographic diversity of the organization is low. recruiting for all but the highest-level library positions, for which recruiting firms may be engaged, we typically post job ads on websites and listservs and then encourage library staff to promote the position through their own networks. this reliance on personal networks, which tend to lack diversity, can serve to perpetuate demographically homogeneous workplaces.72 instead, go out and recruit job candidates from among the communities you wish to include in your organization. send staff to attend conferences or meetings that individuals from underrepresented groups attend and encourage them to think of your organization as a place that would welcome their applications. within your own organizations, recruit staff who are already credentialed but who, for whatever reason, haven’t made their way into professional positions.73 mentoring devise targeted mentoring and professional development strategies that encourage, support, and develop all staff in your organization. in her article on diversity initiatives in the profession, april hathcock strongly recommends mentoring early-career librarians from underrepresented groups in order to better support them as they rise in the profession. she specifically notes the importance of “[helping] library workers new to the profession to navigate the culture of whiteness in the profession at large and within your specific place of work.”74 we can also encourage non-credentialed staff already working in our libraries to pursue careers as library professionals and mentor them as they progress.75 pay for work all staff, including interns, should be fairly compensated for their work. as angela galvan explains, “only students with access to money can afford to take an unpaid internship…insuring the pool of well-qualified academic librarians skews white and middle class.”76 leaders in a growing number of library organizations are rejecting unpaid internships. recent examples include mit libraries, which will now pay all interns, and the digital library federation, which no longer advertises non-paying internships.77 future directions for research there is much research still to be done on issues related to the lack of diversity in librarianship and on how to recognize and dismantle the privilege and whiteness that are at the heart of our culture. here are just a few areas that need further inquiry: data on diversity: it’s much easier to write about the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in libraries than about other kinds of diversity because we lack meaningful demographic data for and research on other identity groups. what kinds of data might we gather to more fully understand the landscape, while being respectful of the many reasons why people from certain identity groups may not want to share personal information? organizational processes: what are effective ways to incorporate bias awareness into our organizational and professional development? what kinds of processes or structures might help push an organization toward a better understanding of privilege and discrimination, and an appreciation for cultural and demographic difference? attrition and avoidance: the ala’s research suggests that staff from underrepresented groups are leaving the profession at even higher rates than others. what reasons do departing staff give for leaving the profession? are these attrition rates higher than in comparable professions? does pay influence the decision by members of underrepresented groups to leave the profession or to avoid it completely? leadership: are there leadership styles or methods that can help promote organizational awareness of bias and discrimination and to develop actions to address them? how can leaders help managers and supervisors turn this awareness info positive change within their departments? how can leaders maintain a focus on these issues and hold themselves and the organization accountable, even while tending to all the other work of the organization? acknowledgements i would like to thank april hathcock and jill conte for their engaging and challenging conversations during the research process and their helpful comments and editing on drafts of this article. i’m especially grateful for jill’s patient and careful reading and her willingness to question my assumptions and point out my own biases in my writing. a special thank you to ian beilin, my in the library with the lead pipe internal peer reviewer, who asked difficult and important questions, and pushed me to clarify my arguments and polish my prose. finally, my gratitude to lead pipe editors erin dorney and ellie collier for their thoughtful feedback throughout the peer review process. works cited alabi, jaena. “racial microaggressions in academic libraries: results of a survey of minority and non-minority librarians.” the journal of academic librarianship 41 (2015): 47–53. https://www.atla.com/members/programs/libtools/documents/alabi_racial%20microagressions%20in%20academic%20libraries.pdf . american library association. “ala policy manual, section b.3 diversity.” american library association, accessed july 27, 2015. http://www.ala.org/aboutala/governance/policymanual/updatedpolicymanual/section2/diversity . ———. “core values of librarianship.” american library association, june 29, 2004. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/statementspols/corevalues . ———. “ala: diversity counts website.” american library association. accessed july 28, 2015. http://www.ala.org/offices/diversity/diversitycounts/divcounts. association of college & research libraries. “diversity standards: cultural competency for academic libraries (2012).” association of college & research libraries (acrl), 2012. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/diversity . association of research libraries. “initiative to recruit a diverse workforce (irdw).” association of research libraries. accessed july 25, 2015. http://www.arl.org/leadership-recruitment/diversity-recruitment/initiative-to-recruit-a-diverse-workforce-irdw#.vbqldrnvikp . ———. “minority representation in us arl university libraries as of 2012-2013: taking a closer look at the evidence.” association of research libraries. accessed july 31, 2015. http://libraryassessment.org/bm~doc/24morrisposter.pdf . balderrama, sandra ríos. “this trend called diversity.” library trends 49, no. 1 (2000): 194–214. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/8331 . barton, dominic, sandrine devillard, and judith hazlewood. “gender equality: taking stock of where we are – why are women still underrepresented at every level of today’s corporations?” mckinsey quarterly, september 2015. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/gender_equality_taking_stock_of_where_we_are . basford, tessa e., lynn r. offermann, and tara s. behrend. “do you see what i see? perceptions of gender microaggressions in the workplace.” psychology of women quarterly 38, no. 3 (september 1, 2014): 340–49. http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/38/3/340  doi:10.1177/0361684313511420 . bourg, chris. “mentors, gender, reluctance: notes from taiga panel on leadership at er&l.” feral librarian, march 24, 2014. https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/mentors-gender-reluctance-notes-from-taiga-panel-on-leadership-at-erl/ . ———. “the radicalism is coming from inside the library.” feral librarian. accessed december 21, 2015. https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/the-radicalism-is-coming-from-inside-the-library/ . canadian library association / association canadienne des bibliothèques. “canadian library association position statement on diversity and inclusion.” canadian library association / association canadienne des bibliothèques. accessed july 27, 2015. http://www.cla.ca/am/template.cfm?section=position_statements&template=/cm/contentdisplay.cfm&contentid=4713  . carnes, molly, patricia g. devine, carol isaac, linda baier manwell, cecelia e. ford, angela byars-winston, eve fine, and jennifer sheridan. “promoting institutional change through bias literacy.” journal of diversity in higher education 5, no. 2 (2012): 63–77. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc3399596/ 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ala office for research & statistics, ala office for diversity and decision demographics, january 2007. http://www.ala.org/offices/files/diversity/diversitycounts/diversitycounts_rev0.pdf. damasco, ione. “the practice of core values: academic library diversity plans and the acrl diversity standards.” presented at the acrl/ny symposium, baruch college, new york city, december 4, 2015. dobbin, frank, and alexandra kalev. “the origins and effects of corporate diversity programs.” in the oxford handbook of diversity and work, 253–81. oxford library of psychology. new york: oxford university press, 2013. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199736355.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199736355 doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199736355.001.0001 ferguson, hope e. “minorities: time to retire this outdated term?” the root, july 28, 2014. http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/07/minorities_time_to_retire_this_outdated_term.html . ferguson, melissa j., and shanette c. porter. “an examination of categorization processes in organizations: the root of intergroup bias and a route to prejudice reduction.” in the oxford handbook of diversity and work. oxford handbooks online. new york: oxford university press, 2013. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199736355.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199736355 doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199736355.013.0006 . galvan, angela. “soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship.” in the library with the lead pipe, june 3, 2015. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/soliciting-performance-hiding-bias-whiteness-and-librarianship/. gerhard, kristin h., and jeanne m. k. boydston. “a library committee on diversity and its role in a library diversity program.” college & research libraries 54, no. 4 (july 1993): 335–43. http://crl.acrl.org/content/54/4/335.full.pdf+html . hathcock, april m. “twitter post, 8/18/2015,” august 18, 2015. ———. “white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis.” in the library with the lead pipe, october 7, 2015. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/lis-diversity/. honma, todd. “trippin’ over the color line: the invisibility of race in library and information studies.” interactions: ucla journal of education and information studies 1, no. 2 (june 21, 2005). http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nj0w1mp . ifla. “ifla/unesco multicultural library manifesto.” international federation of library associations and institutions. accessed july 27, 2015. http://www.ifla.org/node/8976. kelley, michael. “diversity never happens: the story of minority hiring doesn’t seem to change much | editorial.” library journal. accessed july 25, 2015. http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/02/opinion/editorial/diversity-never-happens-the-story-of-minority-hiring-doesnt-seem-to-change-much/ . krysan, maria, mick p. couper, reynolds farley, and tyrone forman. “does race matter in neighborhood preferences? results from a video experiment.” american journal of sociology 115, no. 2 (september 2009): 527–59. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc3704191/ . lance, keith curry. “racial and ethnic diversity of u.s. library workers.” american libraries, may 2005. http://www.lrs.org/documents/workforce/racial_and_ethnic.pdf . madrigal, alexis c. “the racist housing policy that made your neighborhood.” the atlantic, may 22, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-racist-housing-policy-that-made-your-neighborhood/371439/. national center for education statistics. “fast facts.” accessed september 18, 2015. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61 . neely, theresa y., and lorna peterson. “achieving racial and ethnic diversity among academic and research librarians: the recruitment, retention, and advancement of librarians of color.” acrl board of directors diversity task force, july 2007. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/publications/whitepapers/acrl_achievingracial.pdf . page, scott e. the difference: how the power of diversity creates better groups, firms, schools, and societies. princeton: princeton university press, 2007. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8757.html . penn state university libraries. “a framework to foster diversity at penn state university libraries’ diversity strategic plan 2010-2015.” penn state university. accessed july 30, 2015. http://equity.psu.edu/updates-10-15/pdf/academic_frmwrkplan/framework_plan/univ_lib_plan_10_15.pdf. pew research center. “americans say they like diverse communities; election, census trends suggest otherwise.” pew research center’s social & demographic trends project. accessed july 25, 2015. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/02/americans-say-they-like-diverse-communities-election-census-trends-suggest-otherwise/. project implicit. “project implicit: faqs.” accessed september 19, 2015. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html. ———. “project implicit: implicit association tests.” project implicit. accessed august 4, 2015. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/. quinn, brian. “collection development and the psychology of bias.” the library quarterly 82, no. 3 (july 2012): 277–304. doi:10.1086/665933 . http://www.jstor.org/stable/info/10.1086/665933 . roberson, quinetta m., ed. the oxford handbook of diversity and work. new york: oxford university press, 2013. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199736355.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199736355  doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199736355.001.0001 rosen, jill. “study: children’s life trajectories largely determined by family they are born into.” the hub, june 2, 2014. http://hub.jhu.edu/2014/06/02/karl-alexander-long-shadow-research . simmons school of library and information science. “diversity and inclusion initiatives.” simmons college. accessed july 30, 2015. https://www.simmons.edu/academics/schools/school-of-library-and-information-science/about/initiatives/diversity-initiatives. starr, terrell jermaine. “10 things black people fear that white people don’t (or don’t nearly as much).” alternet, march 16, 2015. http://www.salon.com/2015/03/18/10_things_black_people_fear_that_white_people_simply_dont_have_to_partner/. unites states census bureau, data integration division. “current population survey (cps) data on educational attainment.” united states census bureau. accessed august 2, 2015. http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/index.html . united states census bureau. “equal employment opportunity (eeo) tabulation.” united states census bureau. accessed january 7, 2016. https://www.census.gov/people/eeotabulation/about/page_c.html . united states census bureau. “profile of selected social characteristics: 2000 census 2000 summary file 4 (sf 4) – sample data.” american factfinder. accessed august 13, 2015. http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=dec_00_sf4_dp2&prodtype=table . united states census bureau. “quick facts, united states. population estimates, july 1, 2014.” united states census bureau. accessed december 16, 2015. http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/pst045214/00 . west virginia university. “wvu libraries launches librarian diversity initiative.” wvutoday. accessed july 30, 2015. http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/n/2015/07/22/wvu-libraries-launches-librarian-diversity-initiative . wikipedia contributors. “confirmation bias.” wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=confirmation_bias&oldid=672196556 . yancy, george, and paul gilroy. “what ‘black lives’ means in britain.” opinionator: the stone, october 1, 2015. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/paul-gilroy-what-black-means-in-britain/ . yeo, shinjoung, and james r. jacobs. “diversity matters? rethinking diversity in libraries.” counterpoise 9, no. 2 (spring 2006): 5–8. http://freegovinfo.info/files/diversity_counterpoise.pdf . for a recent example, see: page, the difference. [↩] for a critical discussion of libraries, democracy, racial exclusion, and structural oppression, see honma, “trippin’ over the color line,” 8. [↩] association of research libraries, “initiative to recruit a diverse workforce (irdw).” [↩] american library association, “ala policy manual, section b.3 diversity.” [↩] canadian library association / association canadienne des bibliothèques, “canadian library association position statement on diversity and inclusion.” [↩] ifla, “ifla/unesco multicultural library manifesto.” [↩] association of research libraries, “initiative to recruit a diverse workforce (irdw).” [↩] american library association, “ala policy manual, section b.3 diversity.” [↩] canadian library association / association canadienne des bibliothèques, “canadian library association position statement on diversity and inclusion.” [↩] ifla, “ifla/unesco multicultural library manifesto.” [↩] some examples include: penn state university libraries, “a framework to foster diversity at penn state university libraries’ diversity strategic plan 2010-2015”; west virginia university, “wvu libraries launches librarian diversity initiative”; simmons school of library and information science, “diversity and inclusion initiatives.” [↩] the ala’s 2007 “diversity counts report,” notes that whereas the racial and ethnic minority population of the united states grew by a combined 152% from 1990-2000, “[d]uring roughly this same period…the number of racial and ethnic minorities receiving accredited mlis degrees grew by only 4%.” davis and hall, “diversity counts report,” 3. [↩] gerhard and boydston, “a library committee on diversity and its role in a library diversity program,” 335. [↩] davis and hall, “diversity counts report,” 5. [↩] american library association, “ala: diversity counts website.” [↩] united states census bureau, “quick facts, united states. population estimates, july 1, 2014.” [↩] association of research libraries, “minority representation in us arl university libraries as of 2012-2013: taking a closer look at the evidence.” [↩] national center for education statistics, “fast facts.” [↩] davis and hall, “diversity counts report,” 11, 3. [↩] ibid., 3. [↩] ibid., united states census bureau, “profile of selected social characteristics: 2000 census 2000 summary file 4 (sf 4) – sample data.” [↩] ibid., 11. [↩] ibid., 3. [↩] ibid., 18. [↩] kelley, “diversity never happens.” using the term “minority” to refer to underrepresented racial and ethnic groups is increasingly seen as pejorative, and it is also becoming numerically inaccurate as the united states moves toward becoming a “plurality nation,” where no race or ethnic group is projected to have a numerical majority within the total population. ferguson, “minorities: time to retire this outdated term?” and colby and ortman, “projections of the size and composition of the u.s. population: 2014 to 2060,” 13. [↩] davis and hall, “diversity counts report,” 14. [↩] lance, “racial and ethnic diversity of u.s. library workers,” 43. [↩] united states census bureau, “equal employment opportunity (eeo) tabulation.” [↩] lance, “racial and ethnic diversity of u.s. library workers,” 41. lance doesn’t say why this is the case. [↩] united states census bureau, “current population survey (cps) data on educational attainment”; american library association, “ala: diversity counts website.” based on the detailed united states census bureau cps tables for 2014, i calculate that the percentages for higher degree attainment (meaning master’s, professional, or doctoral degree) by racial group were 12% for non-hispanic whites, 18.4% for asians, 6.5% for blacks, and 3.8% for hispanics. (here i’m using the terminology used by the united states census bureau. [↩] rosen, “study.” [↩] ibid. [↩] neely and peterson, “achieving racial and ethnic diversity among academic and research librarians: the recruitment, retention, and advancement of librarians of color,” 8. [↩] for a recent article on the history of whiteness in the library profession, see honma, “trippin’ over the color line.” [↩] hathcock, “twitter post, 8/18/2015.” [↩] hathcock, “white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis.” [↩] yeo and jacobs, “diversity matters? rethinking diversity in libraries,” 1. [↩] basford, offermann, and behrend, “do you see what i see?,” 345. [↩] alabi, “racial microaggressions in academic libraries: results of a survey of minority and non-minority librarians,” 52. [↩] ibid., 47. see the article for her survey of the scant library literature on racism in academic libraries. [↩] climatequal, “about: what is climatequal?” (emphasis mine). i’m not sure what “principles of diversity” they are referring to, and they don’t provide a link to a source, but their core scales page does describe the different kinds of diversity that are covered by the instrument. these include “surface diversity” (related to differences based on external characteristics) and “deep diversity” (related to differences based on internal characteristics like values, interests, competencies, personality, beliefs, and assumptions). these two types of diversity are related, and climatequal measures both. [↩] climatequal, “climatequal faqs: survey theory and methodology.” (emphasis mine). [↩] pew research center, “americans say they like diverse communities; election, census trends suggest otherwise.” [↩] madrigal, “the racist housing policy that made your neighborhood.” [↩] pew research center, “americans say they like diverse communities; election, census trends suggest otherwise.” [↩] krysan et al., “does race matter in neighborhood preferences?,” 2. [↩] climatequal, “climatequal sample questions.” [↩] starr, “10 things black people fear that white people don’t (or don’t nearly as much).” [↩] alabi, “racial microaggressions in academic libraries: results of a survey of minority and non-minority librarians,” 52. [↩] climatequal, “climatequal: benefits of participation.” [↩] wikipedia contributors, “confirmation bias.” [↩] in order to maintain respondent anonymity, the instrument requires that you have enough respondents in each demographic category in order to break the data down in this way. if there aren’t enough respondents from the already-marginalized groups in question, this method is unavailable to us and the scant voices within these groups will be further marginalized. climatequal, “climatequal faqs: survey theory and methodology.” [↩] for an introduction to the wide variety of ways to investigate diversity in the workplace, see roberson, the oxford handbook of diversity and work. [↩] dobbin and kalev, “the origins and effects of corporate diversity programs,” 273. [↩] ibid., 274-275. [↩] ibid., 256. [↩] association of college & research libraries, “diversity standards: cultural competency for academic libraries (2012).” [↩] carnes et al., “promoting institutional change through bias literacy,” 64. [↩] ibid., 65. [↩] ferguson and porter, “an examination of categorization processes in organizations: the root of intergroup bias and a route to prejudice reduction,” 105. [↩] project implicit, “project implicit: implicit association tests.” [↩] project implicit, “project implicit: faqs.” [↩] ibid. [↩] quinn, “collection development and the psychology of bias,” 297. [↩] a recent mckinsey quarterly article underscored the importance of leadership in addressing the problem of gender equity in corporations. see barton, devillard, and hazlewood, “gender equality.” [↩] american library association, “core values of librarianship.” [↩] balderrama, “this trend called diversity,” 198. [↩] bourg, “mentors, gender, reluctance.” [↩] they define multiculturalism as “an ideology that promotes the recognition and acceptance of group differences.” ferguson and porter, “an examination of categorization processes in organizations: the root of intergroup bias and a route to prejudice reduction,” 108-109. for a critique of the term “multicultural” see honma, “trippin’ over the color line.” [↩] damasco, “the practice of core values: academic library diversity plans and the acrl diversity standards.” [↩] ibid. [↩] thanks to ian beilin for suggesting this problem. [↩] thanks to jill conte for providing me with this insight. [↩] hathcock, “white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis.” [↩] recognizing the low pay of non-credentialed library staff and the cost of graduate school, these efforts will be most successful if financial support is provided in addition to mentoring. [↩] galvan, “soliciting performance, hiding bias.” [↩] for a statement about mit’s new paid internship policy, see bourg, “the radicalism is coming from inside the library.” [↩] climatequal, diversity, identity, institutional racism, microaggressions, organizational culture, perceptions, professional identity, whiteness editorial: introductions all around and we’re back! 34 responses gina 2016–01–13 at 12:07 pm thank you for the article! in the spirit of respect for diversity, please reconsider using the terms “blind” and “blindness” as metaphors for lack of understanding or ignorance. a few resources: http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/11/ableist-language-matters/ http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/07/ableist-language-and-philosophical-associations.html http://mic.com/articles/94988/7-things-people-with-disabilities-are-tired-of-hearing#.mg6k29gof jennifer vinopal 2016–01–13 at 7:37 pm thank you for your comment and suggestion. rereading my article and your links i realize i should have picked less ableist language to make my point. jennifer vinopal 2016–01–14 at 7:06 am gina: thank you again. i’ve changed the language in the article to remove the terms “blind” and “blindness” except where they appear in direct quotations. i really appreciate your calling this to my attention. jennifer vinopal 2016–01–14 at 9:58 am gina: please see statement below from the editors regarding use of ableist language and changes made to the article. thank you. rodrigues 2016–01–13 at 12:58 pm i recognize so many factors mentioned here as things i’ve either been faced with personally in library work and hr practices or have seen happening to others. the big rub is that– as pointed to in the quote about bias becoming not less prevalent but simply more subtle, along with big words being said about diversity without a lot of real change– we’re left with a million anecdotes about microaggressions and barriers that we know are proof of these obstacles but individually make you wonder if it’s your own perception that is off. it’s like the interpersonal abuse of gaslighting but on an enormous, system-wide scale. jennifer vinopal 2016–01–13 at 1:09 pm thank you for sharing your experience, rodrigues. it’s insidious and so important for us to talk about and expose. and for people in the dominant culture, and those in power, to make it possible to have those conversations rather than cover it up/ignore it. erin dorney 2016–01–14 at 9:17 am at the request of the lead pipe editors, the author has amended this article to rephrase instances of abelist language. jennifer happily complied and on behalf myself, jennifer, ian, and the entire lead pipe editorial board, we apologize that this language was not addressed during the editing process. as jennifer said, we’re all learning, and we appreciate the comment left by gina that reminded us to be more careful and accurate with the words we publish. gina 2016–01–14 at 5:50 pm jennifer and the editors’ quick response is much appreciated. thank you for publishing the great work that you do! max macias 2016–01–14 at 11:49 am libraries are really white-supremacist. they are mostly unconsciously so–which is even more dangerous. even when poc get library degrees–many times they have bought into the white-supremacist system of education, information and knowledge creation it makes little difference. people need to care more about equity, social justice and diversity more than they care about their reputations. the library world blackballs and abuses people who speak out and point of these things. i’m a fantastic librarian, was the lsta advisory council chair for my state library, was the former reforma nw president, have achieved 100% retention in my info lit classes (the only one at my school to have done so), have over 22 years of experience working in libraries and i still can’t get a ft librarian job. i’ve been involved with so many councils, committees and such–and they never go anywhere–when it comes to social justice, equity and diversity. what the library world wants is poc who are “yes sir, yes ma’am” shufflers. they want a face of color who has a white-supremacist ideology within them. i can almost guarantee nobody will answer this post, or deride it. the library world, and education in general are complicit in bolstering white-supremacy. why don’t we have a poc terrorism task force in the library world. poc live under a constant state of terrorism, but people would rather speak about this stuff with distancing language. we need more people to speak out! thank you for your article. max jennifer vinopal 2016–01–14 at 3:10 pm thank you for sharing your experience, max. david 2016–01–27 at 2:37 pm wow, just wow. here i am approx 12 years in the library community working alongside poc being completely unaware that i was actually a nazi committing terrorism against non-white co-workers. amanda tarbet 2016–01–27 at 5:07 pm way to misunderstand the comment and immediately invoke godwin’s law. i suppose it’s too much to ask some people to think critically about the oppressive systems in which they are complicit and from which they benefit. david 2016–01–27 at 5:39 pm i’m afraid max invoked it first. i wasn’t the one slandering an entire profession as white supremacist terrorists. or does ‘thinking critically’ to you include calling people the worst names in the book? amanda 2016–01–27 at 6:21 pm except that’s not what he said. that’s what you think he said because, well, i’m not sure why. probably you’re a white guy who doesn’t like uncomfortable truths about his privilege. (correct me if i’m wrong, but based on past experiences that would be my go to explanation. and before you flip out, i am white.) at any rate, i’ll explain it to you. not because i think you’re interested in a dialogue or learning anything new since your initial comment was so antagonistic, but just in case anyone else stopping by who reads this thread is interested. white supremacy does not always equal nazism. we, americans, live in a white supremacist society that actively oppresses non-white people. librarians are not individually autonatically white supremacists, but white people and white librarians benefit from the white supremacy inherent in our society. and max is correct is saying that there is rampant complacency in libraries that can prevent us from doing anything about the white supremacy inherent in our institutions. as for terrorism, he wasn’t saying that librarians are terrorists who sit around plotting how to terrorize poc. the terrorism is built into the fabric of this nation. poc absolutely do live under a constant state of terrorism. murders of unarmed (and often innocent) black men and women at the hands of police and covered up by those police, the fact that black men are 8 times more likely to be killed by police then white men, are proof. as are things like the school to jail pipeline, higher rates of incarceration for crimes more likely to be committed by white people, and a whole ugly, horrible history of the things that have been done to poc in this nation that i will not type here because librarians should be able to research and learn. if we are not actively working to reduce inequality in our institutions, then we are allowing this racial terrorism to have the last word. that’s as much as i have the patience for tonight. the second hand embarrassment i have for you is exhausting. jennifer vinopal 2016–01–27 at 10:53 pm david: max did not use the term nazi. he is talking about white supremacy, which is a form of racism that promotes the idea that white people are superior to people of other races or ethnicities, and the belief that white people should therefore have and maintain power other them. one of the many ways white supremacy is exercised is by privileging other white people, either consciously or unconsciously, in professional situations. this can happen simply by maintaining the status quo in hiring and promotion. if we’re not actively seeking to change the demographics of our profession we are maintaining that status quo. shannon simpson 2016–01–14 at 5:41 pm thank you so much for your article! as a woman of color in the library field i have had many experiences validated in this and other recent research. i have many ideas for libraries in which we could level the playing field. from not requiring students to be enrolled full-time in order to be eligible for scholarships, (what happens when you don’t get any funding and now your weeks into grad classes?) to requiring that every single last person that is up for a library job being required to answer a question about inclusion, racism and cultural competency. if we cannot affect the pipeline immediately, at least we can seek out those members of the majority that will be willing to fight to make our field more inclusive -both in representation and thought. imagine if every single person we hired could talk competently about race and ability? why can’t that be a requirement for hire? as referenced in so much research, librarians of color feel overburdened with the work to make change in our profession on the fronts of diversity and inclusion, however, we cannot be the only ones taking up this fight. it’s the same problem in all of academia. many of us are extremely passionate about this topic, but because it is rarely valued at the same level as teaching or scholarship, we burn out because we are so often the ones doing the majority of the work. we need every librarian understanding this problem and championing this cause if those of us that are here and care don’t keep bowing out from burn out feeling non-valued in their efforts. we need to train those that are already here, only hire those that understand and can share the burden of the work in which we must all engage in order to keep our profession progressive and reflective of the communities that we serve. jennifer vinopal 2016–01–14 at 10:06 pm shannon, thank you for your comment and your great ideas for more actively building inclusive workplaces. i agree that this is a task for all of us, but *especially* for those of us in the dominant culture. as chris bourg recently said at the arl leadership symposium, “it is not up to librarians of color to solve the whiteness problem in librarianship – that’s on us white folk.” https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/whiteness-social-justice-and-the-future-of-libraries/ i believe that the burnout you describe is related to the attrition rates that i mention in my article — how could it not be? even as we work toward more being a more inclusive profession, there is research to be done to better understand the nature and the causes of burnout and attrition. i hope others continue this research and that we see more and more leaders who implement the things you mention above. elizabeth hopkins 2016–01–27 at 10:43 am i would say that during my career as a librarian, i have suffered reverse racism and even though i am more qualified, the job has been very often given to a member of a ‘minority.’ i am shocked and amazed that the underlying assumption is that diversity must take over and displace all whites. in general i am very disappointed that my own opportunities have been so greatly diminished because of the displacement of whites and the destruction of western civilization. the question is why must all of our countries be destroyed, when minorities should be encouraged to make their own parts of the world desirable places to live? amanda tarbet 2016–01–27 at 5:02 pm elizabeth, are you serious right now? there is no such thing as reverse racism. there is discrimination, which can happen to anyone in the united states, but the only people who can experience racism are oppressed minorities. i’m not even going to touch the second paragraph of your comment. it’s chock full of racist nonsense. why the hell would someone like you even want to work in librarianship if this is how close minded they are? you’re an embarrassment to our profession. shannon simpson 2016–01–27 at 6:13 pm elizabeth, your comments are extremely troubling. did you read the article and take a look at the research? you really, really, need to learn a lot more about our shared american history, about privilege and implicit bias, among a load of other things. one of the biggest problems i have with discussing hiring, is that there is such a very disturbing assumption that when there is a minority hire that somehow it was merely there minority status that got them the job and not their qualifications or abilities. many of us did not coast on into any job we wanted, many of us did not get scholarships and many of us are frustrated that we have to work in circumstances where diversity is just this annoying extra nuisance to some of our co-workers. i was passed over for a job that went to a young white woman that was a brand new lis grad. i had many more years of experience and background in the area. i would never assume that the people that did not hire me (i am a woman of color) were racist or even that i was somehow more qualified. what i assume is that i was over-qualified and that they might have really been looking for a new grad to fill the position or a million other things. you never know what a stranger may bring to the table and diversity of people has shown over and over to bring creative and progressive ideas to the table that are much better than when homogeneous groups make decisions. if you want your library to be better, you should want to work with a diverse group of people. the fact that all you saw with the woman that was hired over you was her skin color and made assumptions about her qualifications – most hr departments require minimum qualifications before anyone can step in the door – means that you felt you deserved that job. i would never feel like that! i don’t deserve anything in this world, i am just lucky to have a job and family and roof over my head. your comments are extremely troubling because of the assumptions you are making about people of color that are unfounded and debunked – less intelligence and inability to be from a desirable place? don’t get me started about what was plundered from the “less desirable places” from wealth to people, in order to build these “more desirable” parts of the world. jennifer vinopal 2016–01–27 at 10:39 pm elizabeth: this article isn’t about “displac[ing] all whites.” i’m not even sure how you could have taken that idea from the article that i wrote, because it’s certainly not in there. my article is about making our profession inclusive of all the different kinds of people who live in our society, and not discriminating against people based on disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, or any other factors. whatever your personal experience in librarianship may be, the numbers very clearly show that our profession in no way represents the demography of our country. and, as your comment so aptly demonstrates, people from underrepresented groups are frequently made to feel like they are unwelcome, that they don’t belong, and that people from the dominant group just want them to go away. yours is a very harmful statement. pingback : latest library links 22nd january 2016 | latest library links floyd council 2016–01–27 at 5:21 am “best article, ever.” african american male librarians can’t even be counted in america. may we all find our place in the village. jennifer vinopal 2016–01–27 at 10:54 pm thank you, floyd. shannon simpson 2016–01–28 at 1:23 pm jennifer – you should definitely turn this into a conference presentation. in fact, i would use some of the comments here and some recent and not-so recent ala think tank threads, (in facebook), to illustrate the gap in understanding about the importance of inclusion and the problems in representation among working librarians in the field. i conducted research a few years ago on race and debt and scholarships in attaining an mlis. i had over 1000 responses and left a field for comments. some of the comments from working librarians were appalling and completely the opposite of what was actually occurring in the field. i guess the adage: “never read the comments,” goes for well-written research and recommendations on respected blogs, as well. jennifer vinopal 2016–01–28 at 2:51 pm hi, shannon. thank you for your encouragement and for responding to comments above! i’m thinking about next steps and have something percolating right now. did you publish the results of your research? if so please add a link or citation here, or send it to me at jennifer [at] vinopal [dot] org. i’d love to see it. erin dorney 2016–01–29 at 3:18 pm the editorial board has determined that at least two of the above comments are offensive and in violation of our code of conduct. however, we have chosen to leave the comments up because other readers have responded so thoroughly and intelligently. we are opting to preserve the discussion as evidence for exactly why these discussions of inclusivity need to continue. we would like to remind our readers of the “further reading” on social justice issues links from our conduct page, particularly: – 18 things white people should know/do before discussing racism | the frisky (http://www.thefrisky.com/2014-06-12/18-things-white-people-should-knowdo-before-discussing-racism/) – racism 101: this shit doesn’t go in reverse | whites educating whites (so poc don’t have to) (http://whiteseducatingwhites.tumblr.com/post/28789498254/racism-101-this-shit-doesnt-go-in-reverse) moving forward, this comment thread will be moderated by the editors and comments will not be approved if they are determined to violate our code of conduct. pingback : “five generations of asian americans” by molly higgins | apala maha kumaran 2016–02–08 at 10:16 am my colleague sent me a link to this interesting article. i am one of the few canadian librarians interested in diversity in librarianship in canada. we don’t use the term “color” instead we use “visible minorities.” i am a visible minority and data on minorities in canadian libraries is hard to find. if interested please do see this article https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/eblip/article/view/23294 in 2011 a few foundational members started the visible minority librarians of canada (vimloc) as a network with cla https://vimloc.wordpress.com/publications/ pingback : valuing professional librarianship | hls pingback : prioritizing diversity and inclusion | lisa janicke hinchliffe pingback : reducing bias in the library job interview pingback : tech-ing to transgress: putting values into library practice pingback : making institutional change – checking out whiteness this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct “i remember…”: a written-reflection program for student library workers – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 14 nov elliott stevens and madeline mundt /1 comments “i remember…”: a written-reflection program for student library workers in brief: two librarians who run a library commons space implemented a written reflection program with their undergraduate student employees to improve team communication, create a qualitative record of the space, and generate case studies for discussion in group meetings. in this article, they present and analyze examples of their student workers’ reflective writing about their library space, delve into the literature of written reflection, and share how they changed the program after an assessment. part i: written reflection in the research commons i remember all the sounds of opening the library. the *shhnk* of swiping my card through the reader outside. the creaky turn and loud *click* of the door opening after turning the handle. the echoing *clack* of my boots resonating throughout the stairwell after stepping on the concrete floor…. these are the first few lines of a written reflection that an undergraduate student worker wrote in the library space we manage. a little over two years ago, we started a program in which we made written reflection a part of the jobs of the eight students we work with. these students staff a help desk, so periodically during their scheduled shifts, we cover the desk for them for a half hour. they have that time to reflect in writing about their work and their relationship to it, and the writing above shows a student describing what it’s like to open our library space. this student focuses on the sounds our space makes, playing with onomatopoeia, and they continue: ….the slight metal *hiss* of the stair gate’s springs being bent. the low, booming *gong* that echoes through the stairwell as the gate closes and hits the metal rail, syncopated with my boots descending down the steps. the quieter, smoother *sree* of the basement door handle. the lighter, higher pitched footsteps on the tiled hallway floor. the *chk* and *bmm* of the door closing as i round the hallway corner. the *sree* of another door handle and the muted *pmm* of my boots on carpeted floor. the echoing *bomm, bomm, bomm* of steps on concrete in another, more acousting stairwell. the vacuum cleaner’s *shvrooooooooom* getting louder and louder after each step up. the friendly *hello*, or *happy friday*. the almost unnoticeable *crinkle, crinkle, shvoop* of taking of jackets and setting down bags. the muted *click, click, click* of impatience as i wake the computer. the loud rattling and sometimes sudden *gleck, gleck, gleck, gleck* in rapid succession as i move a whiteboard without releasing the plastic brakes on the wheels. the whining *phwemp* of  wiping down whiteboards. the *sveeeee*, *jingle, jangle*, and *svooooo* of opening and closing the drawers to retrieve the keys. the loud, mechanical *chk, chk*, *jingle*, *chk chk chk*, and *fwooomp* of unlocking and opening the doors. the *good morning* as patrons file in. (note: throughout this article, we have chosen to preserve the spelling, punctuation, and syntax that students used in their writing and to forego any use of “sic” in brackets.) reading this student’s reflection now, we are amazed anew by how creative and detailed it is. we had given this person a writing prompt for the reflection–a prompt we’ll discuss later–and it’s fascinating to see how they made sense of it and turned it into something wholly their own. it’s of note, too, that this student wrote this reflection by memory. they weren’t composing as they walked through the labyrinthine path they take to open the library in the morning. no, they were able to recall these specifics while sitting still, and such an act seems to show that the space in which they work isn’t just something to remember but a memory palace–that is, a place that helps one remember because it’s meaningful. and reading this reflection, taking in details we ourselves never considered, we are reminded again of why we began this program in the first place. we had three reasons for deciding to pay student workers to reflect in writing while on the job, and they are these: to improve communication between them and us to preserve a qualitative record of the space in which we work to use these writings in group meetings, where we treat them as case studies and works of literature but like anyone who limits themselves to threes, we’ve discovered additional, unexpected reasons for committing to written reflection. some of these are easy to quantify or justify, while others are more intangible. at times, we’ve noticed that the value of written reflection isn’t just what information the reflections convey. it’s simply, elegantly, the open-ended but focused practice itself that’s worthwhile. written reflections are not just for therapists and professors; student workers can benefit, too! early on, when we began to consider incorporating written reflection into the library work of undergraduate students, we scanned library literature to see if such practices already existed. we wanted to find guidance on how to set up a written-reflection practice–as well as how to assess it–but our initial searches yielded nothing. we have yet to find anything directly related to what we’ve done. in fact, the only combination of “written reflection” and “librar*” we’ve found is in an article about ma librarianship students in sheffield, uk, who wrote reflections in a library management class (greenall and sen, 2016). we were shocked to find so little research about the value of written reflection in librarianship and student work in libraries, and we were surprised further that when we opened our search to undergraduate-student work in general, we still found next to nothing about written reflection. the closest thing we could find is by sykes and dean (2013), who write about the uses of written reflection in a work-integrated learning curriculum–a program in which third-year students find placement in an internship (p.186). they found that framing reflection as a “practice” rather than an “activity” brought about a shift in students’ thinking that reflections can lead to real-world action (p. 190). when we broadened our search terms to the workplace in general, we finally had some success in locating scholarship about written reflection and its uses in employment. we found articles about written reflection and corporate managers at a fortune 500 company (wood daudelin, 1996), an engineer at a refinery (rigano & edwards, 1998), and workers at a software company (cyboran, 2005). this research all came to the conclusion that written reflection not only improved critical thinking skills but also productivity and job satisfaction. as we continued to review literature related to written reflection, some of its deepest pools proved to be in the fields of therapy, education, and writing composition. written reflection, especially in the form of journaling, has been practiced in therapy and counseling for decades. ira progoff’s (1975) at a journal workshop is a prime example of a reflective writing process that has gone from being an anomaly to an accepted practice to an institution. gillie bolton’s, victoria field’s, and kate thompson’s (2006) writing works: a resource handbook for therapeutic writing workshops and activities is another text that has popularized reflective writing in therapeutic contexts. reflection, written and otherwise, has a long history in education. one early place to start is john dewey (1910), who in how we think argued for the value of what he called “reflective thought” and defined it as follows: “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought” (p.6). what’s more, for over forty years in higher education, instructors have taught written reflection in writing composition classes, where it has undergone at least three generations of changes (yancey, 2016, p. 9). within these generations, expressivist pedagogy, “which employs freewriting, journal keeping, reflective writing, and small-group dialogic collaborative response” has spoken to us and is the closest design and most obvious inspiration for the work we’ve done (tate, rupiper & schick, 2001, p. 19). in particular, within expressivist pedagogy, we’ve been most drawn to peter elbow and bell hooks, who are “paradigmatic examples of expressivist teachers” (tate, rupiper & schick, 2001, p. 20). their research about introspective writing practices as well as the practical, radical, and self-affirming ways of using such writing served as a crucial precedent for us. this look at literature about written reflection helped us think about what it might look like in our own space, specifically, or in the world of library science, in general. in particular, we were curious about whether or not written reflection would be an annoying, disconnected add-on to what student workers were already doing or if it would actually affect their work, their attitudes about it, and the ways they imagine themselves. student workers reflect on employment at the university of washington research commons we work in a library space–the university of washington research commons–that is meant to help researchers through processes that are experimental, creative, and interdisciplinary, so in many ways it was a perfect setting for testing out a practice in written reflection that we believed was both novel and boundary spanning. as part of our work, we supervise eight undergraduate workers who staff a help desk, and in the autumn quarter of 2016, we began to fiddle with including written reflection in the training of new student workers. we did this by sharing a google doc with them, giving them time to periodically reflect in writing during their training, and reading their reflections and offering comments. as mentioned earlier, we were aware of peter elbow’s work, especially his book writing without teachers, and imagined that encouraging new library workers to reflect about the research commons might help them track not just what they were learning in their training but how they felt about it. outlining a reflective-writing practice, elbow (1998) writes, “each week, take a fresh sheet of paper and write a brief account of what you think you got out of that week’s work: freewriting for class, any other writing, class reactions. these entries cannot profess to the truth. they are meant as a record of how you see things at the moment” (p. 145). in addition, we were attracted to the thinkings of theorists in critical pedagogy (like paulo freire and bell hooks), especially with regard to how they make sense of the concept of “praxis.” dealing with the term and how it relates to reflection, freire (2012) writes, “problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation… education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. in order to be, it must become” (p. 84). for us, what all this means is that written reflection isn’t just a mode for thinking and remembering; the act of reflecting is an action that has the potential to bring about effects that can jump off a document. whatever is written on a page can very much become real in a place like the research commons. below you’ll find a reflection that a student wrote in their first few weeks on the job. we believe it illustrates peter elbow’s point that reflection doesn’t necessarily capture capital “t” truth but a record of perception from moments that could otherwise be forgotten: working at the research commons has been quite like what i expected, based on the description of the job, training, and talking to other student squad members. i enjoy the pace of the position, as it allows for the luxury of reading interesting articles as well as catching up on class readings. most student jobs do not allow this, which makes me feel grateful for it. aside from the magically moving furniture of the space at closing and occasional lack of human interaction, there aren’t many frustrations with this position (if those are frustrations at all). i’ve encountered some nice patrons here and there. most are just students or faculty wishing to check out/return cords and markers, and they are usually in a rush. there were a couple people who stood out to me, however. one young man came up and decided to give me a gift certificate to the coffee shop he worked at (at the henry) as a part of his mission of giving free cups of coffee to people who worked at libraries. another older man came up and told me he was a new student here and wanted a small tour of the technology around here. sometimes things like these happen, which is nice. and though this reflection isn’t really written in the spirit of paulo freire’s problem-posing education, which jostles authors and readers into action (into praxis) via reflection, we do nevertheless think that the passage above shows someone who is in the process of becoming. this burgeoning reveals itself in the student’s turning over in their mind the pros and cons of different types of student work as well as the varied interactions they had had with patrons. we were pleased with this simple practice of having new student workers reflect in writing during their training. their writing was helping us understand some of the questions and concerns that new people might have about working in the research commons, and it led us to get to know them in ways that differed from in-person interactions. we probably would have stuck with this enlightening–though limited–practice and never thought about expanding it if we hadn’t attended a presentation about high-impact practices (or hips). in this presentation, some of our colleagues at the university of washington tacoma library laid out a new initiative in which they were systematically incorporating high-impact practices into their work and strategic plan (“uw tacoma library and high-impact educational practices,” n.d.). according to george kuh (2008), who coined the term “high-impact practices,”  hips are things that “have been widely tested and have been shown to be beneficial for college students from many backgrounds” (p. 9). they are practices like these: first-year seminars and experiences common intellectual experiences learning communities writing-intensive courses collaborative assignments and projects undergraduate research diversity/global learning service learning, community-based learning internships capstone courses and projects (p. 9-11) our colleagues’ work with hips captured our imagination and made us wonder if we should experiment with different hips or perhaps further develop the reflective-writing practice we had started. we began to think that all the student workers we supervise–not just the new ones in training–could benefit from the reflections and that perhaps the writing should be even more frequent and focused. with regard to the high-impact practice of “intensive writing courses,” kuh (2008) writes, “students are encouraged to produce and revise various forms of writing for different audiences in different disciplines” (p. 10), so we wondered if we could push our students’ reflections to be even more varied and intense. for example, we imagined that, in terms of audience, it might be beneficial for student workers to think about not only writing for us, their supervisors, but also for each other. further, we began to think of written reflections as “super hips” because we envisioned ways of connecting them to learning communities and collaborative projects. first rounds of revamped reflection: “why are we doing this again?” in the winter quarter of 2017, we introduced a revised and revamped written-reflection practice in the research commons–one that all student workers would do every quarter of the academic year. we explained this change to everyone (albeit hurriedly–more on that later…), and as we had already been doing, we shared a google doc with each of the eight workers, letting them know that this writing would be shared with us and no one else without their consent. we made it clear that they would get compensated for the time they put into their reflections, so we decided we would do this by covering the help desk for students for a half hour during times in which they were slated to work. that way, we wouldn’t have to schedule separate times for them or ask them to do their reflections outside of their regular hours. in this new program, we experimented with using a writing prompt. with the training reflections, we had simply asked students to write about how they were feeling or what they were thinking about, but with a new prompt, we decided to use an activity that dr. phyllis moore, chair of the liberal arts department at the kansas city art institute, created. when moore provides orientation to new adjunct writing-composition instructors in what she calls “comp camp,” she often shares a creative-writing activity that brings about unusually vivid and reflective results. it was inspired by the painter and poet joe brainard, who is known for having written a number of books in which every line starts with “i remember…” for example, brainard (2012) writes lines like these: “i remember the first drawing i remember doing. it was of a bride with a very long train” (p. 5). “i remember corrugated ribbon that you ran across the blade of a pair of scissors and it curled up” (p. 30). “i remember a dream of meeting a man made out of a very soft yellow cheese and when i went to shake his hand i just pulled his whole arm off” (p. 134). the first part of phyllis moore’s prompt is to share some of brainard’s work with students. next, the students get some time to list quickly some “i remember…” lines of their own, and in doing this, it’s important that they be as specific, detailed, and sensory focused as possible. once the students list their lines, they pick one of them and develop it into a few paragraphs that tell a story. finally, they examine their stories and write a few lines about what they think they mean. we were grabbed by this activity because it reminded us of some of the expressivist writing strategies that peter elbow argues for in writing without teachers.  for example, he says, “it’s at the beginning of things that you most need to get yourself to write a lot and fast. beginnings are hardest: the beginning of a sentence, of a paragraph, of a section, of a stanza, of a whole piece” (1989, p. 26). with the “i remember…” activity, in its first part, it’s hard to get stuck because you know you’re starting every line with the same two words. and writing about getting past beginnings and into selecting something to develop, elbow says, “sum up this main point, this incipient center of gravity in a sentence. write it down. it’s got to stick its neck out, not just hedge or wonder” (p. 20). this advice from elbow helped us to make sense of the second part of phyllis moore’s prompt, where students move from listing “i remember…” lines to picking one “center of gravity” to stick with and expand. so we took this activity and covered the help desk for half-hour spells so that the student workers could do their reflections. we recommended that they focus on their work and memories in the research commons, but we also said that if they had trouble getting started they could write about any experiences they deemed appropriate. if they didn’t like the “i remember…” prompt, we gave them the option not to use it at all and to spend the time reflecting in writing however they wanted. the writing at the very beginning of this article is one example of how a student responded to the first part of the prompt. here are some more “i remember…” examples from the winter 2017 quarter, all of which are set in the research commons: student 1: i remember craning my neck to see the slightest bit of snow through the windows in the corner. i remember noticing my surroundings and how the rc [research commons] is kind of like a fish bowl. i wrote a poem about it. student 2: i remember when i tried to replace a marker cartridge that was still full. blue ink splattered everywhere, on the desk and on my hands. luckily, it’s washable. i remember the man who wears fake glasses and glitter on his face realizing he and i both had the same favorite twilight zone episode. he was so excited to recommend me more “monster” shows (and later campy shows) that he wrote down the names of 15 ones to watch, each on a different green scratch paper. student 3: i remember the days when my best friend would stop by and bring me tea when i was working at the desk. the tea always had honey in it, and it would make me smile every time. i remember when a girl asked me to close the door during a black lives matter protest because it was distracting her from studying for her midterm. i said no. when we first read these lines, we immediately felt happy that we opened up the reflective-writing practice to everyone and that we planned to do it every quarter. these “i remember…” moments, with their crisp specificity and poetics, communicated important details and emotions to us that we had been missing. we also enjoyed the experience of being surprised by student workers whom we thought we knew and surely took for granted. in their writing, they revealed funny, intimate, and surprising insights. their gusto in responding to the writing prompt made us think of something bell hooks writes in teaching to transgress: “the first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring. and if boredom should prevail, then pedagogical strategies were needed that would intervene, alter, even disrupt the atmosphere” (1994, p. 7). though we weren’t bored by our workplace, we still felt that this writing brought fresh excitement and frisson to it. but the students didn’t stop with isolated lines. after completing the first part of the prompt, they continued by selecting one “i remember…” and developing it into a story. one student expanded one of the lines above into this true story: during spring quarter of last year, there was a large black lives matter protest that marched through the libraries. the protest exited the libraries through the research commons lobby, and they were armed with megaphones, signs and a lot of emotion. all of the students in the research commons stopped what they were doing, and quietly watched as the protestors marched by, except for this one girl. about five minutes into the protests exit, a girl came up to me, looked me dead in the face, and said, “can you close the doors or something? this is too loud”. i calmly replied, “i’m sorry, but you have to understand why i can’t do that. it’s incredibly disrespectful, and the research commons is an open space, so closing the doors will make no difference”. the girl then looked disgusted, and promptly retorted back with, “black lives matter? my midterm matters more”. that was the day that i realized that being in college doesn’t automatically make students immune to ignorance. i remember this story because it was so appalling. this girl showed no remorse for her words, and had such a hatred in her heart for people who were trying to peacefully make a difference. i will never forget the look on her face, and i will never forget how her words made me feel. my encounter with her made me realize that college doesn’t purge a person of their ignorance and close mindedness. it made me realize that sometimes college can make a person more self-centered, whether it be the pressure of maintaining grades or making friends. this experience has made me more cautious in the way that i handle frustrated students. when we first read the reflection above, we were excited and moved. we found it beautifully written and engaging to read, and it gave us a fresh insight into a place about which we thought we were experts. in addition, we were energized by the writing in that we believed it to be an example of what paolo freire would call “problem-posing education” in that the person who wrote it is clearly engaged in critical inquiry, not to mention “a constant unveiling of reality” (2012, p. 81). in the narrative, they are wrestling with what’s ethical and true. to say that we were pleased by this reflection as well as the other seven is an understatement. and to say that the students were as pleased we were, unfortunately, was not at all the case. instead, for the students, there was mostly confusion and some frustration about this new practice. though some of them seemed intrigued by it, others were simply tolerant or at a loss. more than once, they asked us, “why are we doing this again?”at the outset, we had hurriedly outlined what we were doing, but at this stuck point we decided we needed to do what we should have done in the first place: carefully detail what a written-reflection practice is and why we were committing to it. we also invited comments, feedback, and questions. to address this disconnect, we waited for our next monthly group meeting, and we gave a presentation in which we covered critical pedagogy, praxis, high-impact practices, and research about the value of written reflection. because we had only cursorily explained why we were committing to a written-reflection practice, we now did so explicitly. we said we saw three key benefits: to improve communication between student workers and supervisors, to maintain a qualitative record of the research commons, and to use reflections–with writers’ permission only–in monthly group meetings as case studies and discussion starters. we spent the rest of the meeting in conversation with each other, and when we finished, everyone seemed far more accepting of the experiment. after the meeting, we were able to settle into the written-reflection practice, and it seemed as though there was less puzzlement and more acceptance of what we were doing. a couple of quarters into this practice, we even conducted some assessment of it, and though the assessment had some weaknesses, it did nevertheless indicate that the students saw some value in reflecting while on the job. we decided to make written reflection a solidified part of student work in the research commons, and we’ve stuck with it to the present day. over time, we tinkered with alterations and revisions. for example, we’ve tried out different prompts. the “i remember…” one proved to work well, but for the sake of variation, we tested out a modified version of lynda barry’s “other people’s mothers” exercise in her book what it is (barry, 2008, p. 151-154). this was our attempt: make a list of ten powerful/strange/specific/weird/beautiful objects or people from your time at the research commons. pick one of those objects or people. answer some of these questions about that object or person: where are you in the research commons? what are you doing? why are you there? what time of day or night is it? who else is there? what season is it? what is in front of you? behind you? left? right? above? beginning with “i am,” tell us what is happening. write it like a story with details and dialogue. if you have the time, look at what you’ve written and write a line or two about what it means or how it’s significant to you.   this prompt did produce results, though some of the students said it was too complicated and that a half hour wasn’t enough time for them to work through all its parts. another prompt that we experimented with–one that was far more popular–came by way of a colleague, anne davis, who is a collection development coordinator and anthropology librarian. hearing about our written-reflection practice and amused by it, she said that a good activity might be to ask the students to periodically walk loops through the 15,000-square-foot space of the research commons and take notes about what they noticed. then, later in the quarter, the students could choose one or more of their noticings and use them to catapult into reflection. this idea immediately appealed to us because it reminded us of the work of eleanor duckworth, a theorist and researcher in the harvard graduate school of education who had challenged and inspired graduate students for decades. duckworth had done research with jean piaget in the 1960s and went on to found the concept of “critical exploration,” a process in which children question, investigate, hypothesize, and reflect about problems. with critical exploration, the most important thing is that people learn not from being told but through close observation and inquiry (duckworth, 2006, p. 171). by requesting that students take at least three strolls through the research commons and ponder the question “what do you notice?” our hope was that they’d begin to assemble new statements and stories of the place in which we work and not simply take it for how it’s defined in its web pages. as mentioned, the students enjoyed this prompt, and one of them even chose to record more than the three noticings we requested. this is that student’s account: 170411 – hushed phone calls and rapid typing in the morning light. the trees outside the eastern windows filtered the sun into a pleasant pale green color on the carpet floor. 170413 – someone took the welcome whiteboard in the lobby w/o me noticing again…. how does this keep happening? 170416 – someone straightened the paintings on the north wall. 170418 – where do things belong? the whiteboards all used to have (arbitrary) spots that they belonged in and would be reset to. 170420 – the paintings are no longer straight on the wall….. 170423 – sometimes i see people rolling long distances across the floor in their chairs when it would be far easier to just stand up. 170425 – the temperatures is normal in the research commons. not too cold. not too hot. i can wear a light sweater and be comfortable for 3 hours. incredible. 170427 – there are 41 people in the rc at 9:45am. 170430 – n/a 170502 – sometimes people just come in here to chill. some of our regulars are just here for an hour to be on their phones. it’s nice. 170504 – i keep forgetting to mention … whoever opens thursday is not changing the signs. also, today i answered a reference question about bees! these noticings are rich and varied, showing the number of stories and experiences involved in one student’s work in the research commons. this expanded composition came from this student’s noticings: reading through the above, i notice that most of my observations in regards to the research commons as a space have to do with how people interact with it. people straightening the paintings. people moving the whiteboards. people just sitting in a chair for an hour on their phones. as we sit behind the desk, there are many blind spots that hide all of these tiny interactions. first, there’s the big yellow stairwell, the core of the building, that blocks any view of about half of the research commons. then there’s presentation place, which only allows the slightest glimpse of what’s going on behind it’s tall whiteboard walls through the small arch to the west. the screen behind the desk, although transparent, is still just opaque enough to blot out important details (plus it’s behind the desk, and how often do we turn around in our chairs?). the view from the desk is really quite limited. there’s the entrance, the lobby, green b, the stairway, the green chairs to the north, and the large whiteboard tables to the south. that’s it. if you move your head around a bit you can get glimpses into green a too. in order to really see what’s going on in the rc, you have to walk (or roll in your chair, but the one at the desk is a little too tall for that). i think this raises an interesting idea about what our role is at the desk. in one meeting a while ago, i remember discussing what service we fulfill at the desk. we’re a help desk. we provide information about the libraries, the rc, campus, and where the bathrooms are. we check out materials, we help patrons with technology, but we’re also there to make sure patrons are using the space appropriately. walking around as a practice, doing so with the purpose of observing, highlights the blind spots at the desk and how much is always going on throughout the rc. i noticed people more, and i noticed their activities too, but most interestingly i noticed the traces of where people had been and what they’d been doing through the objects that were out of place. the rc is a dynamic space. in order to understand how people use it, we can look towards the space and its materials. writing like this is fascinating to us–not just because of the information it conveys and the channels of communication it opens. it interests us because it’s part of a tradition of thinking and learning that goes back over a hundred years to, at the very least, john dewey. earlier in this article, we cite dewey’s lines,  “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought” (p.6). and such behavior is exactly what we see in this student worker’s writing. we see they are looking for new patterns–and questioning old ones–all with the desire to make meaning and define purpose. part ii: early assessment in this section we address the insights and challenges of a very early assessment that we conducted about written reflections, high-impact practices, and connections between student work and student lives. we began planning the assessment after several months using written reflections and conducted it about six months into the program. we did the assessment to better understand what the impact of work in the research commons was for our student employees; although we took a holistic look at working in the research commons rather than only focusing on written reflection, the assessment gave us useful information about our written reflection program. this early assessment produced some insights, discussed below, that allowed us to make changes to the program. as a result, we focused our student employment experiments on written reflections, rather than continuing to try to offer a wide range of hips. we also made some changes in how we frame and scaffold written reflection with our students. finally, we learned from the assessment’s limitations and gained clarity about the kind of further assessment we’d like to do.  to more deeply understand written reflections and what they contribute to the research commons, we need to look at the program today and the reflections themselves–things we do in more depth in the final section of this article. we also need to reflect on how we have used pieces of reflective writing to communicate with each other, and what value we have come to take from those communications. the assessment to assess our program of written reflections, we created an interview guide that covered a lot of ground related to student employment in the research commons. the eight questions were very broad, soliciting student input on the bigger work-life-academics picture within which they did their work at the research commons. we asked questions about connections between students’ work and their personal and academic lives, hips, and general learning in addition to written reflection. in fact, only one of the eight questions was focused solely on written reflection. the interview guide was very broad, but it did give us broad results that ultimately helped us focus our energy on written reflection going forward. we pursued our university’s irb process, but the irb considered the project’s primary function to be assessment despite our stated plan to publish about the assessment, and so they determined it was not subject to irb regulation. however, we nonetheless followed appropriate ethical protocol for research with regard to participant consent and identity. we have made assessment interview participants anonymous in this article, and anything that could identify them has been removed. when we spoke with them about participating in assessment interviews, we made it clear that though they were required to do reflections for their jobs, they were not required to do interviews. our library assessment team conducted the six twenty to thirty-minute semi-structured interviews and provided us with a written summary of the results that included a limited number of quotes. we have never seen a full transcript of the interviews: all we have seen is the report written by our assessment team based on those transcripts. that report contained some interview participant quotes, pulled out by our assessment team, as well as an overall analysis of themes within the results (again conducted by our assessment team).  all quotes and insights in this section come from that assessment report, and we have indicated whether we are quoting an interview participant (as quoted in the report) or the report itself. we proceeded in this way to protect the students’ privacy and allow them to feel comfortable sharing honestly in a context where they weren’t speaking to their supervisors. insights the assessment report surfaced an important benefit of reflection along with a major contradiction: the assessment team indicated that “while many students felt that the reflections supported relationship-building among colleagues, they did not see this as directly useful to their work in the research commons” and “although some students questioned the value of writing and discussing reflections, they expressed interest in sharing stories about their professional experiences.” one student quoted in the report said, “seeing what my peers reflected on in winter quarter was valuable. i now see the job through their eyes as well as mine.” this student was referring to our early experiments in using written reflection for communication: at the point we conducted the assessment, we had held several team meetings in which we all looked at several reflections together and talked about the different ways we can handle challenging situations. the reflection about a black lives matter protest in the first section of this article was one such example. to us, as supervisors, sharing stories and relationship-building among colleagues is important and does contribute to a better research commons. does this mean that the students who participated in the assessment did not see relationship-building in the same way? did they have preconceived opinions about what their supervisors might find useful? because we made an ethical choice not to view the interview transcripts to protect participant privacy, we can’t know for certain.  however, we could and did use the information we received to experiment with improvements. we began to focus more on reflections as communication tools for students and supervisors, and as ways for students to share their stories, experiences and impressions with each other. something that we tried as an early experiment–sharing reflections in group meetings–has become a core part of the program. in the final section of this article, we provide some examples of how we are now using reflections in this way. we also continued to work to better scaffold and contextualize written reflection in the research commons, work that we began in response to student confusion early in the program. lessons learned while we we were able to make some changes to our program of written reflection based on our assessment results, we were somewhat limited by the structure of the assessment itself. this discussion of our limitations provides future directions for assessment, and future questions for investigation. we limited the depth in which we could investigate written reflection by asking students a very broad range of questions that went far beyond written reflection. we asked multiple questions about hips and focused extensively on connecting research commons work to student employees’ personal lives and career goals. this prevented us from focusing on how practices like reflection affect work in the research commons and relationships among supervisors and workers. now that our early assessment has emphasized relationship-building as an aspect of written reflection that students particularly value, we see this as an area for potential future in-depth assessment. additionally, the procedures we developed to protect student privacy were important and necessary but prevented us from seeing the raw data the assessment generated. when we received the report summarizing the interviews, some things confused us, and we struggled with context. we saw inconsistencies that both baffled and intrigued us, as discussed above in the “insights” section. future assessment will need to continue to navigate this tension between student privacy and access to data. after our early assessment, we were able to make changes intended to help new student workers in the research commons make sense of written reflection as part of their paid work. we also made changes in response to the value students place on written reflection as a communication tool. we learned much more about the questions we still have about written reflection in student employment, and the types of future assessment of this program that could be conducted. part iii: where are we now? where are we today? in these pages, we’ve given our reasoning for having student workers do written reflections on the job. we’ve shown some examples of their work, and we’ve gotten into some of the questions and conflicts we’ve encountered in introducing the practice as well as assessing it. as we write this article, though, what are things like? where are we now? and what can other educators and library workers learn from the current landscape of our written reflection program? in the research commons today, written reflection gives us a tool for team communication, team-building, and personal expression, along with a record of our library space. these outcomes are related to our initial program goals listed at the beginning of this article, yet they are deeper for the assessment, learning, and changes that we undertaken over the last several years. after conducting our assessment during the spring quarter of 2017, we realized we’d be hiring new student workers, and we saw this turnover as a chance to revise our job description and to make it clear to future workers that written reflection is a required and valued part of what we do. to our job description, in the “duties” category, we added the line, “periodically reflect in writing, sound recording, or drawing about work in the research commons.” now, we make sure that we define what such a duty entails in interviews and ask prospective workers what they think about it or if they have any questions or concerns. we believe that this revision has not only taken away some confusion, but also encouraged those who like to reflect to self-select. in the job duty we cite above, we made an additional alteration. students have the option not just to reflect in writing. they can also do so by recording their voice or drawing something–like a portrait or a comic. we made this change after speaking with kathleen collins, who is a colleague of ours and the children’s literature and sociology librarian. when we described our written-reflection practice to her, she wondered about students who might prefer to express themselves in different ways. she helped us see that we were preferencing one mode of communication over others, so we decided to offer other modes–or potentially multi-modes–in the practice. at this writing, no one has yet reflected by recording their voice or drawing or painting something, but this option is now available. as our job descriptions and hiring practices have evolved to center written reflection, so have our team communication practices. the assessment, in which students identified communication and story-sharing among team members as a benefit, highlighted the importance of reflections as a communication tool between team members. one of the consistent joys of this program today is discussing the stories of student workers in our monthly group meetings. above, in part ii of this article, we quoted a student in our early assessment who said “seeing what my peers reflected on in winter quarter was valuable. i now see the job through their eyes as well as mine.” this statement is powerful to us, and it reflects how we now consistently use written reflections in group meetings and trainings. one memorable reflection that we talked about in a group meeting was written by a student who regularly opened the research commons in the morning: as i came in to open, the library was so empty and so quiet. there wasn’t any life to it. while i was doing my routine walk through, i noticed that someone else was here with me. she was the janitor. i just smiled at her, and she smiled back. the library didn’t seem so empty anymore. at this point the library went from lacking life, to being full of life. they wrote about how their relationship with that custodian evolved over the course of the quarter and how they got to know each other through early-morning conversations and shared work. they reflected on how their relationship with the custodian reminds them that we are all part of a team keeping the research commons clean, safe, and usable for our patrons: “while throughout the entire night the library seems so dead, [the custodian] and i bring it back to life in the mornings.” they concluded by saying that they and the custodian: see each other every morning and we are super kind to each other. i think the main reason as to why this is so significant to me is because she reminds me a bit of my parents. i can also tell she is a hard worker and i value her work ethic. she makes sure our space is clean and she also is super sweet. i am happy that i got to meet [the custodian], and i am happy that we get to work together in the mornings to make sure that the research commons is presentable to the public. our discussion of this reflection reminded everyone in the meeting that we all have a role to play in keeping the research commons clean, orderly, and “presentable to the public” and led to people discussing how it’s important to respect our colleagues on the custodial staff by doing our part of the work rather than expecting them to do everything in the morning. some research commons employees never or rarely open the research commons, so they never encounter the custodial staff. discussing this reflection as a group gave us all a chance to think about the fact that, while we have professional custodial services at the university of washington, we also have a responsibility to straighten up our space so that the custodians can do their work. another example of how our understanding of the written-reflection program has evolved relates to our use of the accumulated record of reflections. because we employ undergraduate workers, we have a high and regular staff turnover. once our student workers leave, they often apply for jobs and internships, and as supervisors, we take our responsibilities as references seriously. with a catalog of a students’ reflections over the course of two years, we find that we are able to write much more effective and personal letters of recommendation. in addition, when applying for work, one student even mentioned that they brought up their experiences with written reflection in an interview. they wrote this: in the first two interviews i talked a bit about working in the libraries and how that has helped me be detail oriented and extra reliable. i mentioned those written reflections and how we collaborated as a team in creating an inviting space for students through various means. the intangible all these concrete benefits aside, written reflection doesn’t always have to have an immediate, quantifiable benefit to be valuable to the research commons and to our team. we want to avoid entirely quantifying and commodifying the value of quarterly written reflections. while we talk about tangible benefits to the organization in this article–improved communication, team-building, bringing student voices into group meetings–those benefits are certainly no more important than the benefit of reflection for reflection’s sake. students are not just pieces in the research commons operation machine–they are individuals who bring their lived experiences, stories, and worldviews to this space. respecting the intrinsic value of their reflections allows us to connect on a human level and to question the linear and quantifiable nature inherent in how we often talk about our work. a reflection in which a student writes about a problem with a patron is not inherently more valuable than a reflection in which a student writes about how the plant at our help desk makes them feel. for example, one student writes: for some reason, whenever i am stuck on a problem or pondering a thought, i tend to stare at the plant that we have at the front desk. i’m not to sure why. i like the plant. i think it’s so cute and it really gives the research commons a sense of life further than the many patrons that use our services every day. just like we take care of our patrons, we take care of our plant. the writer of this reflection goes on to talk about how they find the plant “soothing” and concludes by saying, “in my personal opinion, i believe that at this point, the plant isn’t just a plant, it is also a part of the research commons staff.” we never know how and when a reflection will be used or when it will be able to shed light on an unexpected situation. a reflection about a patron can be easy to apply and interact with on the surface, but it might end up providing no more than surface-level insight. the reflection about the plant could make us all look at our work environment in a new way. or it could simply be valuable as a piece of expressive writing that helped the reader think about their relationship with the research commons. thank you: our sincere thanks to our peer reviewers–misty anne winzenried and bethany messersmith–as well as to annie pho and the lead pipe editors for your direct, thoughtful feedback about this final paper and earlier drafts. through your generous comments, we came to see new perspectives and found connections we had missed. we would also like to thank all our research commons student employees for 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(1998). incorporating reflection into work practice: a case study. management learning, 29(4), 431-446. sykes, c., & dean, b. (2013). a practice-based approach to student reflection in the workplace during a work-integrated learning placement. studies in continuing education, 35(2), 179-192. https://alliance-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=tn_tayfranc10.1080/0158037x.2012.736379&context=pc&vid=uw&lang=en_us tate, g., rupiper taggart, amy, & schick, kurt. (2001). a guide to composition pedagogies. new york: oxford university press. uw tacoma library and high-impact educational practices. (n.d.). university of washington tacoma library. retrieved from https://www.tacoma.uw.edu/library/uw-tacoma-library-high-impact-educational-practices wood daudelin, m. (1996). learning from experience through reflection. organizational dynamics, 24(3), 36-48. https://alliance-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=tn_sciversesciencedirect_elseviers0090-2616(96)90004-2&context=pc&vid=uw&search_scope=all&tab=default_tab&lang=en_us yancey, k. (2016). a rhetoric of reflection. logan: utah state university press.   appendix: assessment questions interview questions: tell us a bit about your experiences working at the research commons, for example: how long have you worked here, what are some of your responsibilities? what have you found most enjoyable/challenging in your work here? what do you value most about working here? what have you learned through working at the research commons? about library services? about public/customer service? have you learned any skills (e.g., related to research processes, technology, etc.)? how has your work at the research commons had an impact on your academic work? your life? if interviewee is about to graduate: have you discussed the research commons in your job interviews, applications, etc.? for any skills mentioned in #2 above: how have you applied them to other situations (in academic/personal life)? have you been able to bring anything you’ve learned in classes to bear on your work here in the research commons? this could be direct (subject knowledge to answer a student question) or more indirect (group work/collaborative skills that you’ve been able to apply as part of working in the research commons “student squad”). i understand that as part of your position here, you’ve been working on written reflections. tell us a bit about what you did over the course of the year (e.g., how many did you do, what was the nature/content, did you talk about them with supervisor/peers, etc.). could you describe anything you got out of doing these written reflections? if you don’t feel that you got anything out of them, why is that? what would have made them more useful to you? how did the written reflections (including the discussions of them with peers/supervisor) have an impact on your work at the research commons? do you feel that they added value? how did they affect your relationship with your colleagues? supervisors? users of the research commons? what would you change about the reflections or the discussions about them? transition to talking about high impact practices: intensive, reflective writing can be an element of what is known as a “high impact practice”. the concept of high impact practices is one that is becoming increasingly important in u.s. higher education. high impact practices are defined as “transformative experiences that ‘require students to connect, reflect on, and integrate what they are learning from their classes with other life experiences” (markgraf 2015, p. 770).   within the field of librarianship, there has been some effort to expand the definition of high impact practices to include student employment experiences, as student employment can be one way of making connections between academic and extra-curricular activities (such as on-campus work).   it sounds like you’ve talked about what high impact practices are in the research commons over the past year, and it sounds like there were a couple of examples of these practices that you may have participated in, such as the opportunity to present about study abroad experiences and the reflective writing on your experiences as student employee.   beyond the reflective writing activities, have you participated in these kinds of activities/practices at the research commons (e.g. presenting about study abroad)? if so, what did you get out of it/them? for all the activities (including the reflective writing and any other activities you’d define as “high impact”), do you think that participating in these activities has changed your view of what it means to be a student employee and/or the relationship between your work/academic life? why or why not (and, if so, how has your view changed)? has your work in the research commons contributed in any way to achieving your academic goals? are there experiences you wish you had while working in the research commons that would have been valuable in drawing connections between your academic learning and student work? is this something you’re interested in (i.e., applying learning from classes in employment)? why or why not? i’d like to get your view on what “high impact practices” mean. if you had to describe the concept of “high impact practices” to a friend, how would you explain it? anything else you’d like to share with me about reflective writing activities or experiences as a student employee in the research commons? towards a critical assessment practice extending our reach: using day camps at academic library makerspaces to include homeschoolers 1 response pingback : “i remember…”: a written-reflection program for student library workers – educationbuzz this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct dismantling deficit thinking: a strengths-based inquiry into the experiences of transfer students in and out of academic libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 6 feb chelsea heinbach, brittany paloma fiedler, rosan mitola and emily pattni /4 comments dismantling deficit thinking: a strengths-based inquiry into the experiences of transfer students in and out of academic libraries in brief library research on transfer students tends to focus on the idea of the “struggling” transfer student and creating solutions to “fix” them. while we might assume transfer students will falter because they missed our institutions’ first-year offerings, this oversimplifies their vast and heterogeneous experiences. our study complicates the narrative of the lagging transfer student. we surveyed and interviewed students to gain a holistic understanding of their lives in the workplace, the classroom, and the library. we encouraged them to explore their identities as students, researchers, caretakers, employees, and more. we found that most had previously received information literacy instruction, some had 4-year degrees, and the majority had extramural experiences that gave them confidence and knowledge to navigate higher education. this paper explores the harm of deficit thinking, identifies how a strengths-based approach can inform librarianship, and shares data on transfer student experiences, challenges, and barriers. it offers readers an opportunity to consider how they might leverage transfer students’ strengths, rather than fixating on perceived shortcomings. by chelsea heinbach , brittany paloma fiedler , rosan mitola , and emily pattni introduction librarians have recently conducted a significant amount of research on transfer students (ivins, 2017a & 2017b). unfortunately, much of the early research and resulting programs have focused solely on the challenges they face and creating solutions to “fix” them. this perspective is called the deficit mindset or deficit thinking, which labels any student that does not fit into a traditional norm as “at-risk” or working at a deficit. the deficit mindset often occurs with the good intention of supporting these students; however, it can lead to problematic assumptions. while we might surmise transfer students will falter because they missed our institutions’ first-year offerings, this oversimplifies the vast and heterogeneous transfer student experience. our research attempts to counter this deficit mindset by intentionally focusing on previous experiences that might contribute to success at our institution. transfer students are not a monolith, and we recognized the complexities of their experiences through some of the literature, our work with them at multiple institutions, and as former transfer students ourselves. we aimed to learn holistically about our transfer students’ lives, what their previous experiences were, and how that might influence their time in and out of the library at the university of nevada, las vegas (unlv). we sought to gain a nuanced understanding in order to better support this student population in the library and advocate for them across campus. we purposefully did not attempt to compare transfer students to those who began their academic career at unlv. we did not want to treat first-time, first-year students as the norm that transfer students deviate from or as the barometer with which to measure other students against. instead, we focused exclusively on transfer students. literature review deficit thinking and strengths-based approaches deficit thinking is pervasive in higher education literature and practice. it is often discussed in relation to the success gap between minority and white students. valencia’s 1997 work discusses the long history of this problematic viewpoint in education: “of the several theories that have been advanced to explicate school failure among economically disadvantaged minority students, the deficit model has held the longest currencyspanning well over a century, with roots going back even further as evidenced by the early racist discourses from the early 1600s to the late 1800s…the deficit thinking model, at its core, is an endogenous theory – positing that the student who fails in school does so because of internal deficits or deficiencies” (valencia, 1997, p. 2). this thinking manifests in practice by believing that students who in any way do not conform to a “traditional” or privileged financial situation, home life, or route to education are not likely to succeed. this leads to lower expectations as well as an ignorance of their strengths (portelli, 2010). this mindset can be difficult to recognize because it is pervasive and often manifests in an attempt to help students, but deficit thinking, coupled with the influence of neoliberalism on education, can cause even well-intentioned teachers to harm marginalized students (sharma, 2016). in a study of pre-service teachers, picower (2009) found that white educators believe that their students of color are deficient and “place the blame of educational failure on communities of color rather than on the institutions that are inequitably serving them” (p. 210). educators operating through a deficit-oriented lens do not acknowledge the varied life experiences of marginalized students. rather than encouraging students to inform the nature of the learning environment, educators attempt to fix them to fit a mold defined by a society rife with inequities such as sexism, racism, ableism, and classism. k-12 teacher education literature has been at the forefront of discussing strengths-based approaches to teaching. this includes the closely related concepts of asset-based pedagogy, funds of knowledge, culturally relevant pedagogy, and critical pedagogy (ladson-billings, 1995; tate, 1997; moll, amanti, neff & gonzalez, 1992). meanwhile, higher education and academic libraries have made some positive movement away from the deficit model as well. for example, at the 2018 library orientation exchange (loex), tewell called on librarians to seek better teaching methods because “deficit thinking is a major aspect of information literacy and library instruction, whether we realize it or not; …this approach to education runs counter to meaningful educational practices; and we should adopt alternative pedagogies to resist this pervasive and counterproductive way of teaching” (2018). a 2017 study at gsm london created strengths-based initiatives for first-year students and found focusing on strengths during the transition to higher education improved student experiences and generally “allows people to better manage their weaknesses and become independent learners. recognising talents and strengths helps…develop appropriate approaches – from classroom design, assessment tools, learning resources and teaching delivery” (krutkowski, 2017, p. 228). a librarian who intentionally created a classroom environment grounded in asset-based teaching for students of color found that attending to the students’ cultural context, using auto-ethnographic approaches, creating opportunities for counter-stories, and avoiding the deficit mindset made information literacy education more “valuable, relevant, and useful” (morrison, 2017, p. 212). a recent study using the funds of knowledge concept to investigate the research skills of first-generation students states, “[they]…have strengths that they bring to college by virtue of their identities, lived experiences, and interests” (folk, 2018, p. 53). we hope to contribute to this growing body of strengths-based approaches in libraries. transfer students and libraries as the number of transfer students has increased, academic libraries have made efforts to address this population. some examples include librarian contributions and partnerships on campus-wide transfer student initiatives (ivins & mulhivill, 2017; jacobson, delano, krzykowski, garafola, nyman, & barker-flynn, 2017; tipton & bender, 2006) and personal librarian programs, where transfer students have an assigned point of contact in the library (coats & pemberton, 2017; lafrance & kealey, 2017; macdonald & mohanty, 2017). others have investigated cross-institutional collaborations in order to see what local librarians are doing for this population (phillips & atwood, 2009; roberts, welsh, & dudek, 2017) while some have taken steps to create connections across several institutions in order to foster transfer student success (mcbride, gregor, & mccallister, 2017; mccallister, gregor, & joyner, 2015). many of these studies express concern that students are underprepared for the expectations of a four-year institution and started initiatives to support transfer students in response (ivins, 2017). librarians studying student populations have often replicated the perspectives present in the deficit model of education. we as a profession have been quick to adopt language such as “at-risk”, “gaps”, and “lagging” to describe entire groups of students. these terms are a manifestation of deficit thinking and, in the context of transfer students, ignore the experiences these students had in their k-12 and previous college education. it dismisses the work of the school, public, community college, and university librarians who have taught them information literacy or helped them navigate a library in the past, and insinuates that the way “we” do it is superior. deficit thinking encourages institutions to “view students as deficient” rather than consider how “we librarians – as part of such educational systems – might ask ourselves to what extent we are part of the problem” (ilett, 2019, p. 180). meanwhile, other librarians and higher education researchers have made an active effort to view transfer students holistically and acknowledge how unique this population is in their work. for example, richter-erikum and seeber’s study (2018) echoed jacobson et al. (2017) by explaining that there is no single transfer experience and discussing the ways transfer students bring research skills with them from their previous institutions. they acknowledge that transfer students are not blank slates when they arrive on our campuses. lester, leonard, & mathias (2013) investigated the ways transfer students engage with campus and found that they view their social and academic lives as separate endeavors. sandelli (2017) asked readers to consider whether “transfer students [should] be treated as a single group or as subgroups based on characteristics such as age or previous educational attainment” (p. 407) and acknowledged that each institution’s answer will be different. we aim to build upon this work by using a strengths-based approach to learn holistically about the previous experiences of our transfer students, how those experiences influenced their lives both in and out of unlv classrooms, and subsequently, discover how we can best support them. our research considers how our profession currently discusses transfer students as coping with a myriad of deficits and argues that we should not continue to operate under this assumption, as it is damaging and oppressive. this is particularly true for our students of color, who have likely faced this mentality throughout their entire education. methods who we are unlv is a public, doctoral-granting research university of about 30,000 students. over 8,700 students are identified as non-traditional because they are over 23 years old, have dependents, have jobs, have had an interruption or delay in education, or serve or have served in the military (university of nevada, las vegas, n.d.-a). unlv has been designated by the us department of education as a minority serving institution; an asian-american and native-american, pacific islander-serving institution; and a hispanic serving institution. unlv is one of the most diverse college campuses in the us, and in fall 2018, 40% of our undergraduate students self-identified as first-generation. in the fall of 2017, there were 7,097 incoming undergraduate students with 32% or 2,287 transferring from another institution. of those incoming transfer students, 44% transferred from the college of southern nevada (csn), a local community college system. for the past eight years, unlv has earned the gold rating designation as a military friendly university from g.i. jobs magazine (mccabe, 2018). there are more than 1,800 active-duty, reserve, veteran or military family members on campus. many military service members start or continue their college education while enlisted which means a large percentage of transfer students are also veterans. only 6% of our student population lives on campus, making unlv primarily a commuter school. unlv struggles to build community because of this, and at the beginning of this project, there were limited initiatives aimed towards transfer students. what we did this was a mixed-methods study that included a survey and interviews. there were four researchers, with three acting as primary researchers and one serving as the transcriber and auditor. in january 2017, with data provided by the unlv retention, progression, completion initiatives & analytics coordinator, we sent a survey to 5,116 students and offered an entry into a drawing for a $50 amazon gift card. 568 students completed the survey (see appendix b), though many did not answer every question, as we did not require any individual questions. as part of the survey, we asked students if they were interested in a follow-up interview which offered entry into a drawing for an additional $50 amazon gift card. 155 students expressed interest in the interview. we then emailed all 155 students and scheduled 24 interviews assuming we would have some cancellations. before we began interviewing students, we practiced with student employees in our mason undergraduate peer research coach program (rinto, watts, & mitola, 2017). while not transfer students themselves, the peer research coaches helped us refine our questions. we then conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 transfer students (see appendix c). two of the primary researchers were present at each interview. one acted as the main interviewer while the other took notes and asked additional questions. we recorded the interviews in two places: on an app on a tablet and on a smartphone for backup. we then de-identified the recordings and uploaded them to a shared google drive folder. at the end of the interview, we asked students to complete an optional demographic survey for the purposes of ensuring a representative sample. after completing the interviews, the auditor transcribed them, and the primary researchers built a coding frame in order to do content analysis (see appendix a). our coding process was influenced by the qualitative content analysis work of hsieh and shannon (2005). we began by brainstorming codes and then collectively reviewed a sample transcript to expand upon them. we then reviewed three transcripts individually to norm the existing codes and add additional codes as necessary. once the coding frame and definitions were finalized, we began coding the interview data. each of the three principal investigators used atlas.ti to code eight interviews. one of each researcher’s transcripts overlapped with another researcher as a method to check for consistency in code application. we then merged our reports together in atlas.ti. as an additional norming measure, we sent our codes and their contents to the auditor, who performed random checks against the definitions to ensure they were used properly across the transcripts. the auditor also wrote her overall impressions and takeaways for each code. finally, we collectively wrote our perceptions from each code and looked for overarching themes to describe the transfer student experience as a whole. limitations we acknowledge that there are many voices that aren’t represented in our research because our interviews were conducted on campus during regular business hours. we likely excluded students who are working a traditional 9-5 schedule, who are taking classes online because of their location or accessibility, or who don’t have access to flexible childcare. the transfer students we talked to that had robust responsibilities outside of school tended to have supportive family members such as spouses to help out with childcare or finances during this period of their lives. additionally, the unlv student population is unique because of our high numbers of non-traditional students, commuter students, first-generation students, and minority students. we encourage librarians to get to know the transfer students at their own institutions. out of the 21 interview participants, 20 completed the optional demographic information survey. participants had an average age of 27.5 and ranged from 19 to 43 years old; 13 identified as women and seven identified as men. six participants identified as a veteran or retired military service member. fifty-five percent of our participants reported their race in an open-ended text box as white, with the remainder reporting their race as non-white hispanic or latino (15%), pacific islander (10%), multiracial (10%), and asian (5%). one participant who filled out the demographic information did not report their race. the self-reported demographics of our interviewees does not quite match the demographics of our diverse institution. for example, we did not speak to any black or african-american students, who represent 8% of the unlv student population. we also did not speak to any native american students, which comprise 0.2% of our students. asian and hispanic or latino students were also significantly underrepresented. meanwhile, white and pacific islander students were largely overrepresented (university of nevada, las vegas, n.d.-b). additionally, unlv’s data reports both race and ethnicity under the term ethnicity, making it difficult to compare the datasets. in retrospect, it may have been useful to collect demographic information in the main survey or intentionally reach out to diverse student organizations in order to ensure a representative sample in our interviews. results survey the survey questions revealed how students spend their time on and off campus and in and out of libraries. as mentioned above, not all of the 568 students answered every question. to account for this, our percentages have been calculated based on the number of participants (n) that answered that particular question. some of the most striking findings were regarding the research experiences of transfer students. when given a list of common library instruction topics, only 13% reported not receiving information literacy instruction (n = 529) (see appendix b question 11). in addition, 82% had completed a college research paper where they found sources, used them to support their topic, and cited them in a bibliography (n = 539). other major findings include that 58% of our transfer students work in addition to going to school, and 60% of those employed students work over 20 hours per week (n = 559). students reported that they used their time on campus for the following activities (see table 1). the results indicate that students do not spend a significant amount of time utilizing on-campus resources or participating in special events, but 93% say they spend at least a few hours on campus studying and completing classwork (n = 547). we also asked students which campus resources they use (n = 539) and discovered the top three include university libraries (81%), academic advising (73%), and financial aid (67%). table 1. how much time per week do you spend doing the following activities on campus outside of class? no time 1-5 hours 5-10 hours 10-20 hours more than 20 hours studying and completing classwork (n = 547) 7% 31% 28% 25% 10% socializing and hanging out with friends (n = 543) 34% 47% 15% 3% 1% participating in on-campus special events (n = 542) 69% 28% 2% 0.2% 0.2% utilizing on campus resources like student rec center or academic success center (n = 543) 45% 42% 10% 3% 0.4% we also wanted to know whether transfer students are using libraries, what they are using them for, and which libraries they are using. three quarters (75%) of students are using a library at least once a week (n = 538). while 88% report using our main campus library, 26% of students have used a public library in the past 6 months (n = 539). the majority of students are using libraries for study space (84%) or access to technology (52%), some are borrowing items (40%) and socializing (27%), and 16% reported taking advantage of research help (n = 527). the surveys offered an opportunity to gather a broad view of transfer student lives. we interviewed 21 of these students to get a deeper, more nuanced understanding of their experiences. many of the survey themes and questions were mirrored and expanded upon in our interviews. interviews varied lived experiences it is remarkably difficult to make generalizations about transfer students. they varied from students who had recently graduated from high school and started their education at a las vegas area two-year institution, to students returning to school after decades away, to students who had already completed advanced degrees and were working on an additional undergraduate degree program. of the 21 students we interviewed, 33% were veterans, 38% have been caretakers, and 100% had work experience. over half of the students had previously completed a degree, with ten having an associate’s degree, one having a bachelor’s degree, and one having a master’s degree. participant k served a religious mission. participant u works at a public library. participants t and j are majoring in education and nursing which require unpaid practicum hours. participant c has two children under five and is the legal guardian of two teenagers, and participant q drives 2,400 miles every other weekend to visit their child. participant d is a more traditional student that took no time off from education, but their mother is a phd student and their father is a pilot, so they have a lot of caretaking obligations for their younger siblings. self-sufficiency, self-awareness the interviews demonstrated that transfer students have an immense amount of self-sufficiency, self-awareness, and confidence. many specifically discussed the ways their previous experiences as workers, students, and caretakers contributed to their independent approach to schoolwork. for example, participant e reflected on how their previous experience as a soldier influenced their drive to seek information out for themselves: “i go straight online. for everything, i just, we’re just taught to. i mean being in the military, we’re just taught to look for it, because if you go ask somebody they’re gonna say, ‘did you look here first?’” participant p, another veteran transfer student, echoed similar sentiments: “i think my entire time in the navy influenced that…i personally feel like i’ve just been more tenacious like when i want something, i need to know something, i’m gonna go figure it out.” others noted how their time exploring other areas of life changed the way they see the opportunity to attend university. when explicitly asked what strengths they thought their previous experiences had afforded them as a student, participant g stated, “time management. um and what is really important in life. you know, i came back to school for me, but i’m sticking with it because of my kids.” this suggests a motivation for working through the difficulties of university life that many first-time, first-year students might not have quite yet. in addition, past academic experience gave transfer students confidence that they could complete their schoolwork. for example, participant j noted that the difficulty of previous classes completed assured them that they could handle rigorous coursework at unlv: “because of the um accelerated class schedule that i had at [previously attended small liberal arts college], i was able to really succeed at um unlv’s school of nursing because of the pace of back-to-back classes and really just, demanding schedules that i was like, ‘okay i got this.’” many students discussed reaching out to their professors if they needed assistance, but they also frequently said they would attempt every possible route before asking anyone for help. for example, when asked to consider where they would get help if they ran into an issue with a research project, participant a said, “i mean [i would ask someone] if i really needed help with something or if it’s like some subject that i really didn’t understand. um but if it was a subject that i really understand at least to some extent i would probably just seek it out on my own.” participants expressed concerns about asking a librarian for help, sometimes noting that they felt that the struggle was part of the learning process. for example, participant e stated, “they taught us the quick search but i kind of just play around with it just to get lost and then go back to the beginning. ‘cause on the way you can learn it, i think.” students displayed acute self-awareness of their own information seeking practices and processes. sixteen of the 21 participants used very specific language that signals familiarity with libraries (interlibrary loan, catalog, academic journals, database, specialized librarians, psycnet, jstor, search parameters, keywords, worldcat) and research (abstract, peer review, credible sources, citation mining, gis, apa, mla, chicago). they spoke confidently about the places they would search, strategies they would use, roadblocks they would maneuver through, and decisions they would make. they also frequently shared that they preferred to conduct research on their own and navigate the resources for themselves. “i don’t really…i’m just, it’s my personality. i don’t want to bother anybody. but if i have to, i will,” noted participant p. these self-sufficient approaches were repeated when they talked about navigating campus and institutional barriers more broadly. students talked adeptly about the ways they seek out resources around campus. transferable skills we asked students directly about skills they felt transferred with them from their previous experiences, but they also reflected on these throughout the entirety of the interviews. discussing the strengths they gained throughout their lives was natural. they often mentioned ways their previous academic experiences in high school and other higher education institutions benefited them at unlv. they also talked about using the context of their previous institutions to translate to something equivalent at unlv. for example, participant j noted, “i kind of just looked on the website and said like, ‘oh you know, like i had a student center, student wellness center at my last school. i’m sure they have something here.’” this extends to their academic information seeking. as a part of the survey, 82% of students said they had written a research paper where they found sources and cited those sources in a bibliography. during the interviews we found that these students are aware of how those skills can transfer to their new environment. participant g stated, “i mean it’s probably gonna be a lot the same, you know, the process. is there a library website here?” one student had actually received so much information literacy instruction that they expressed frustration at the repetitive nature of one-shot instruction sessions between institutions: “literally i feel like almost every semester whether it’s here at unlv or at my last school that we would always get the, you know, the library talk.” when asked directly how their previous experiences benefited them, participant n stated, “i feel like i, well, i use all the resources there like i am here so i realize that universities have certain resources that you can utilize. i brought that here um. basically my study skills that i learned there, i brought here and i’m tweaking a few.” all interviewed students had previous and current work experience that could reasonably give them important time management, project management, research, and communication skills that would benefit them as college students. those currently working ranged from “a few hours periodically here and there” to 50 hours per week with participant h even commenting, “i’m not gonna have the privilege to take six classes and work 30+ hours like a week in the future. like it’s a lot, i know it’s a lot.” oftentimes the work directly connected to their area of study. one student had advanced gis skills obtained through navy training and was studying earth sciences. another student worked as a tutor helping students research, write, and cite at their previous institution and was studying pre-nursing. one accounting major had experience working at h&r block and one biology major worked at a physical therapy clinic. challenges although our research was focused on strengths, we asked students about the challenges they faced at unlv as well. three themes emerged: dealing with institutional barriers, feeling like they don’t belong, and external demands on their time and energy. as for institutional barriers, students struggled to get familiar with the campus and the resources available to them. of the 21 interviewees, seven commented on having difficulty navigating campus size and resources and acknowledged they could have benefitted from additional guidance. for example, participant f stated, “i mean, i definitely see the need for something to help transfer students. i mean, i kind of just winged it and i’m doing okay. i’ve been here, this is like my second year and i feel like okay now, but when i first got here like i was lost, i had no idea what was going on.” many of our transfer students were also non-traditional students in other ways and subsequently struggled to identify with other students and sometimes did not feel they belonged on campus. for example, participant p reflected, “yeah, i’m not 18. i can’t relate to any of this. like a lot of these things are marketed to the average college student not affected by me. like a 31-year-old dad. like, i’m just gonna go to school and do my stuff and leave…” participant p went on to say, “i relate more to like my professors ‘cause we’re in more like same division age group.” students mentioned not spending much time building communities on campus. participant g, when describing their daily life on campus, stated, “i go straight from the car to class.” many of these challenges intersected. for example, participant c’s external challenge of being a parent is compounded by the institutional barrier of inaccessible and unaffordable on-campus childcare, “for transfer students or nontraditional students, you gotta think, we most likely have a family so why not open up your daycare and actually make it more affordable…why is it so limited?…and that it’s so expensive? i mean, it’s more money than the one that is down the street. seriously?” implications and a call to action transfer students are not less prepared than first-time, first-year students, as much of the deficit-oriented literature frames them. as they come to universities, transfer students have a variety of experiences that influence their ability to navigate campus, the library, and their various information needs. they are not significantly lacking in information literacy instruction compared to similarly credited undergraduate students, and they spoke confidently about the research process. while we recognize that confidence does not necessarily equal competence, many transfer students do have other experiences that help prepare them for academic information seeking and other skills important for academic success. transfer students do face challenges when attending our universities, but they also have previous experiences that they draw upon to meet those challenges. they are motivated, self-assured, self-sufficient, and offer unique skills to their universities. we believe transfer student outreach and engagement should be multimodal, with various points and levels of entry, and multi-formatted, including in-person and online. we should aim to create opportunities for students to feel like they are a part of the university, while also recognizing that campus community may not be as important to those who have robust social and family lives outside of school. as many transfer students are veterans, and the transfer veterans we talked to valued the military and veteran services center so highly, they will make a good partner for campus-wide initiatives. we also plan to connect with the academic advising and financial aid offices, as they work very closely with transfer students. we recognize the opportunity to collaborate off campus as well. our findings echoed richter-weikum and seeber (2018) and found that many students are using public libraries in addition to our own, so there is opportunity to work with them. we can also work more closely with our community colleges and other institutions in the area. as for instruction, transfer students spoke with familiarity and confidence about processes and tools that we teach. library instructors can use that experience to their advantage when designing information literacy activities. we should acknowledge the work our colleagues in community colleges and other four-year institutions are doing and build on it, as opposed to repeating basics. however, as not all transfer students have had these experiences, librarians must be flexible with any transfer-student-specific instruction and be prepared to scaffold the lesson up and down. additionally, we should leverage student confidence navigating resources online to highlight similarities with academic research and offer multiple points of access for resources and services. our findings also suggest transfer student workshops or information literacy sessions should be focused on advanced skills. not only are students likely to have received information literacy instruction before, they are often doing robust research in upper-division classes and would benefit from course-integrated, subject-specific instruction. in addition, individual librarians should ensure they are teaching various skills across their one-shot sessions and should communicate with one another what is expected to be taught at different levels. each course has unique assignment needs and student expertise, and students rightfully grow frustrated at the repetitive nature of standardized one-shots. while not all students have received information literacy instruction, libraries can cover the basics in other forms, such as online video tutorials. as with all classrooms and teaching environments, it is important to be cognizant of the various levels of expertise our students bring and accommodate them all as much as possible. finally, we should consider that many students that begin their academic careers at one institution will transfer out. we should therefore focus our instruction on transferable skills rather than needlessly institutionally-specific demonstrations. we ask all those working in education to dismantle deficit thinking and instead engage their students with a strengths-based approach. we can acknowledge the needs of unique populations without diminishing the complexities of their lives. we can provide services and resources that address the needs of a student group without falsely simplifying them to their challenges. we can give them the skills to be successful in a traditional academic institution without believing that the traditional path is the best or only one. what might happen if libraries and universities more broadly stopped seeing students as a risk to their retention policies and instead as an opportunity to reimagine the academy? much gratitude to eamon tewell, our external reviewer, kellee warren our internal reviewer, and denisse solis, our publishing editor. this paper wouldn’t be what it is without your thoughtful questions, prompts, and insights and we are deeply appreciative. thank you to kevin seeber for talking through this idea at the very beginning stages and inspiring us to purposefully avoid focusing on the deficit, to melissa bowles-terry, erin rinto, and susie skarl for reading drafts and sharing your thoughts, to james cheng for helping us ground our ideas in a methodology, and to the mason undergraduate peer research coaches for testing our interview questions and offering your perspective. finally, thank you to the amazing unlv transfer students who shared their experiences with us. talking to students is why we love our work and we appreciate you spending time letting us get to know you. references coats, l. r., & pemberton, a. e. (2017). transforming for our transfers: the creation of a transfer student services librarian. reference services review, 45(3), 485-497. https://doi.org/10.1108/rsr-11-2016-0079 folk, a. (2018). drawing on students’ funds of knowledge: using identity and lived experience to join the conversation in research assignments. journal of information literacy, 12(2), 44-59. https://doi.org/10.11645/12.2.2468 hsieh, h.-f., & shannon, s. e. (2005). three approaches to qualitative content analysis. qualitative health research, 15(9), 1277-1288. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732305276687 ilett, d. (2019). a critical review of lis literature on first-generation students. portal: libraries and the academy, 19(1), 177-196. retrieved from https://preprint.press.jhu.edu/portal/sites/ajm/files/19.1ilett_0.pdf ivins, t. (2017). guest editorial. reference services review, 45(2), 242-243. https://doi.org/10.1108/rsr-04-2017-0007 ivins, t. (ed.). 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(2018). library experiences of transfer students at an urban campus. student success, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.v9i2.411 rinto, e., watts, j., & mitola, r. (2017). the mason undergraduate peer research coach program at the university of nevada, las vegas libraries. in e. rinto, j. watts, & r. mitola (eds.). peer-assisted learning in academic libraries (pp. 64-80). santa barbara, ca: libraries unlimited. roberts, l., welsh, m. e., & dudek, b. (2019). instruction and outreach for transfer students: a colorado case study. college & research libraries, 80(1). retrieved from https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16925/0 sandelli, a. (2017). through three lenses: transfer students and the library. reference services review, 45(3), 400-414. https://doi.org/10.1108/rsr-10-2016-0074 sharma, m. 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(1997). the evolution deficit thinking: educational thought and practice. bristol, pa: taylor & francis. appendices appendix a: coding frame descriptions assets/strengths previous experiences such as life, caretaking, work that are reasonably likely to transfer to success as a student; not coding current challenges as strengths though they might also lead to concurrent learning experiences campus resource use (non-library) using services or spaces such as the student union, academic success center, professors, etc – incl. rebel mail – unlv only challenges current challenges institutional barriers issues on the part of the institution that serve as a barrier to student success ex. website difficult to navigate or lack of awareness outside challenges obligations or responsibilities that could reasonably interfere with student success ex. 3 children; time management challenges sense of belonging feeling unsure of one’s place in the university to the extent that it prevents awareness of, engagement with, or interest in services/resources daily life talking about day-to-day routines information seeking behavior looking for information about anything – includes differentiation of format preferences; does not include seeking help from services academic looking for information for an assignment or to study, etc. extramural looking for information for their own interest that wasn’t prompted by an academic need unlv library experiences experiences in unlv libraries services anything with a person/service desk impressions feelings or thoughts about the library resources books, online resources, wifi etc spaces used studying/group study rooms that don’t require a service desk wishes what they wish the library had previous academic experiences pre-unlv; includes impressions library all the subcategories of unlv library experiences but as one category – ex. impressions, spaces etc; includes online library website use non-library experiences in the classroom, on campus, online education (not related to online library use) work experience includes military previous label previous only if different from current current appendix b: survey questions what is your major? (comment box) are you currently employed? (yes, no) (if yes) during the semester, i work on average 1-10 hours per week (if yes) during the semester, i work on average 11-20 hours per week (if yes) during the semester, i work on average 21-30 hours per week (if yes) during the semester, i work on average 31-40 hours per week (if yes) during the semester, i work on average more than 40 hours per week how much time per week do you spend doing the following activities on campus outside of class? (options: no time, 1-5 hours, 5-10 hours, 10-20 hours, more than 20 hours) studying and completing classwork working an on-campus job socializing and hanging out with friends participating in on-campus special events utilizing on-campus resources like the student recreation center or the academic success center are you a member of a student organization? if so, please list any and all organizations you belong to below. (comment box) what services have you used at unlv? (check all that apply) academic advising academic success center career services disability resource center financial aid international programs (study abroad) it help desk jean nidetch women’s center libraries military and veteran services center office of international students and scholars student engagement and diversity student wellness and recreation center the intersection (multicultural center) tutoring writing center other (comment box) none how frequently do you use a library (any kind)? daily multiple times a week once a month once a semester once a year never what libraries have you visited in the past six months? (check all that apply) a library at my previous institution(s) branch library at unlv (architecture, health sciences, law, music, teacher development resource) college of southern nevada (csn) libraries (any location) lied library at unlv nevada state college (nsc) library public library other (comment box) none what was the purpose of your visit(s) to those libraries? (check all that apply) borrowing items such as books, multimedia, technology getting help doing research from library/university staff socializing or hanging out with friends special events study space tutoring using technology (computers, printing, etc.) other (comment box) are you aware that unlv libraries has librarians available to assist you with research via in-depth one-on-one appointments? (yes, no) have you written a research paper for a college course where you found sources to support your topic and cited them in a bibliography? as a college student, have you received information through instruction or online tutorials about any of the following topics? (check all that apply) how to cite a source how to find books how to identify differences between scholarly and popular sources how to find scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles how to use scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles once you have found them how to identify which sources to use for an assignment how to use other people’s ideas (avoiding plagiarism) unlv libraries facilities (can include tour) unlv libraries policies and services (printing, group study rooms, help desks, etc) other (comment box) i have not received information about any of these topics through instruction or online tutorials what additional library instruction are you interested in? (check all that apply) how to cite a source how to find books how to identify differences between scholarly and popular sources how to find scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles how to use scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles once you have found them how to identify which sources to use for an assignment how to use other people’s ideas (avoiding plagiarism) unlv libraries facilities (can include a tour) unlv libraries policies and services (printing, group study rooms, help desks, etc) other (comment box) no thanks, i’m not interested in research skills training (if interested in additional library instruction) how would you prefer to receive library instruction? (check all that apply) during class time email help desk one-on-one scheduled meetings with a librarian (research consultation) online chat or text online tutorials like youtube workshops other (comment box) overall, how satisfied are you by the unlv libraries’ spaces, services, and resources? very satisfied satisfied neither satisfied nor dissatisfied dissatisfied very dissatisfied does not apply comments: (comment box) what additional spaces, services, and resources do you wish unlv libraries offered? (comment box) would you like to be entered to win a $50 gift card to amazon? appendix c: interview questions tell me about your experiences before you came to unlv: where did you transfer from, why did you decide to come to unlv, what is your major? what are some of the most exciting things about being at unlv? what are some of the most challenging things about being here? walk me through a typical day when you’re on campus at unlv. walk me through a typical day when you’re not on campus. (if not specified) do you work in addition to going to school? (if not specified) do you take care of anyone in addition to going to school? when you first started here, how did you find out about services/resources available to you? (if not specified) has that changed? how do you find out about services and resources now? which services or offices do you use the most? (if not specified) why do you use those particular services? (if not specified) what do you use them for? think about a recent time you learned more about a topic on your own: a political issue, a scientific phenomenon, or how to fix/do something. where did you go to learn more about it and why? have you written a research paper for a college course where you found sources to support your topic and cited them in a bibliography? (if not specified) how did you go about getting information for that assignment? tell me about the process you will go through the next time you are assigned a research paper at unlv. if you needed help, where would you get it from? how did you use the library at your previous institution? how have you used unlv libraries? how would you describe unlv libraries? how is unlv libraries similar to or different from your previous institution’s library? are you aware that the unlv librarians offer one-on-one research consultations? if yes, have you used that service before? why/why not? if no, would you be interested in that service? what additional spaces, services, and resources do you wish unlv libraries offered? how did your previous experiences help you with your unlv experience? interviews, student behavior, transfer students transformative praxis – building spaces for indigenous self-determination in libraries and archives care, code, and digital libraries: embracing critical practice in digital library communities 4 responses debbie pattni 2019–02–06 at 4:26 pm as an advisor in the academic success center at unlv, (thanks for the inclusion in your survey!) you address some common experiences that our transfer, readmitted, veteran’s, and most non-traditional students experience. the unlv library is a great campus partner, and your focus on strengths instead of deficits aligns with my advising philosophy, “i also strive to focus on the students’ strengths as motivating them to find their own path to success (schreiner & anderson, 2005). strengths based advising, learning, parenting, and mentoring is far more encouraging, and your article is one i will share with my colleagues! chelsea heinbach 2019–02–07 at 5:42 pm thank you so much for your kind words debbie! we love partnering with asc. pingback : guest post: recent articles on information literacy research and practice – information literacy website pingback : applying counter-narratives to academic librarianship – acrlog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct renovation as a catalyst for change – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 18 nov erin dorney and eric frierson /15 comments renovation as a catalyst for change throwback thursday for november 18, 2015: take a look at renovation as a catalyst for change by erin dorney and eric frierson. we may be coming to the end of 2015, but it’s never too late to think about switching things up at your library! photo by flickr user drp (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by erin dorney and eric frierson introduction this lead pipe post is about two libraries attempting to reinvent services, collections, and spaces as the walls of their buildings come crashing down. rather than embarking on phased construction projects, the library buildings at both st. edward’s university and millersville university will be completely shut down for a period of one and two years, respectively. co-authors eric frierson, library digital services manager at st. edward’s and erin dorney, outreach librarian at milersville discuss renovations as catalysts for change, experimentation and flexibility, and distributed/embedded librarianship. these facets contribute to the identity crisis librarianship has struggled with since the information age began – only exacerbated by unique circumstances. the conversation below is one example of the kinds of real questions being proffered to librarians at both institutions: “i don’t mean to sound disrespectful,” began the biology professor, “but if we can do without a library for a whole year, what does that say about the library?” an awkward silence settled over the science faculty meeting before the librarian was able to pull together a response. “you’re right. the library as it exists now – the print collections, the reference desk – these may not be required elements of a thriving university library. this renovation project gives us the opportunity to re-examine what a library does on campus, what things we don’t need to do, and what things we could start doing that we haven’t done before.” this post will not cover the new, technologically-situated, collaborative learning spaces which will exist following the renovations, but rather discuss how renovations can bring organizational change that has the potential to shape the library of the future. it is our belief that the pace of change our libraries have adopted should become the norm at all libraries. st. edward’s university st. edward’s university is a private, catholic institution in austin, texas. it is home to over 5,000 students and is situated on a hill overlooking the lower colorado river, boasting gorgeous views of the austin skyline. enrollment has nearly doubled in the past ten years, and the campus master plan has made the grounds and buildings cohesive, beautiful, and a delight to explore. the library, however, has been a 30-year anomaly with its white stucco, rounded-edge shell. (current st. edward’s university library building) during the summer of 2011, the university received a gift of $13 million from austin-area philanthropists pat and bill munday for the creation of a new library and learning commons. the only catch is that construction must be complete within a period of two years. this aggressive timeline demanded the selection of an architect almost immediately, and the library, along with its partners in the new commons, needed to have the plan for the new space completed within a few short months. because the project involves renovating existing square-footage and building a new addition, almost all physical resources – including collections – will be need be removed from the building for one year. the print collection of 170,000 books will need to be aggressively weeded and stored off-campus, inaccessible during the project. only a few hundred high circulation items and the media collection will remain on campus. seventeen staff members will find a new home in mang house, a three bedroom residence with kitchen and a laundry room. the 100 computers and public use furniture from the old library will be dispersed throughout existing campus locations. (mang house – the temporary location for st. edward’s university’s library.) the librarians are not sure what mang house will be like. for so long, they have identified public services with the desk that sits near the front door of the old building. there is no space for a robust reference desk in the temporary location; instead, staff will have a smallish living room with a fireplace. for an entire year, the library will exist without a reference desk, a print collection, or dedicated computing and study spaces. “if we don’t have those things… who are we, exactly?” asks frierson and countless others. millersville university millersville university is a regional comprehensive pennsylvania state school with a 2010 fte of approximately 6,970 undergrads and 583 graduate students. as a state institution, campus buildings are only eligible for renovations on a strict schedule. originally allocated $7 million from the state for basic infrastructure updates, the library and university administrators have successfully increased that amount to $25 million based on additional state allocations, university support, and private donations. (millersville university library – under construction for two years) this intense renovation project will take 2 years to complete, gutting the interior of the 11-story building to replace all major systems (including heating, cooling, lighting, fire protection, vapor barriers and elevators). the library had to be emptied of all people, books, microfilms, computers, shelving, and furniture, down to the last piece of signage and window shades in order to allow construction to move at a quicker pace and ensure the safety of staff, visitors, and physical materials. over 300,000 print items have been placed in storage off-site, where, similarly to st. edwards, the books will be inaccessible to students and faculty members. (millersville university – the temporary library @ gerhart hall) for the next two years, the campus will rely on a temporary library in gerhart hall containing approximately 10,000 items and less than a quarter of the study and computing space that the old library provided. there is no traditional reference desk and most of the librarians are distributed across campus, embedded in offices within academic buildings that align with their liaison areas. similarly to the situation at st. edwards, this period of massive change calls into question everything an academic library has traditionally been known to provide and represent. renovation as a catalyst from a librarian’s point of view, temporarily disconnecting from the building provides an opportunity for a clean slate. many legacy processes are tied to institutional history and specific circumstances. to put it another way, buildings come with baggage. libraries make exceptions, create lengthy policies, even determine resources and services based on prior experiences. concern has been voiced by librarians (particularly those new to the profession) over the “way we’ve always done it” mantra that sometimes infiltrates institutions, marking this steadfastness as resistance to change that will leave libraries irrelevant to their constituencies. ross and sennyey (2008) describe some library services as holdovers from an era that has disappeared, “making our professional assumptions seem as foreign as a medieval manuscript in chains” (146). included in these assumptions are services that are tethered to user needs that no longer exist. the situations at st. edward’s and millersville are unique in that the renovations are not incremental. at both institutions, the scale of construction will shut down the entire space – not just one floor at a time. there are no branch or specialized libraries to absorb collections, services, or personnel. business simply cannot proceed as usual – the status quo has become impossible to maintain. the libraries at st. edward’s and millersville have an opportunity to let go of legacies in order to better meet the needs of their respective campus communities. warehouse for books one assumption under interrogation is the idea of a library as a warehouse for print books. neither institution is a research library attempting to collect and preserve all of the world’s knowledge. millersville has a collection development policy stating that theirs is a “teaching collection” which directly supports the university curriculum. with limited physical space and budget, items not used are transitioned out of the collection and replaced by more accessible materials relevant to institutional learning goals. the renovation at millersville has prompted the library to increase its number of electronic books and databases in order to support campus research needs. at st. edwards, the massive renovation project has provided the library with an “excuse” to look holistically at the print collection. one year ago, the library owned 170,000 volumes. through the first weeding project in the library’s long history, staff managed to reduce that number to 130,000. in the new building, space allocated for stacks can house approximately 90,000 books, meaning staff have some ways to go before boxing up the collection. because librarians can’t guarantee that the library will hold the same number of print volumes in the future, the space needs to have a flexible infrastructure in order to be used differently. it is possible that after two years of adjusting to primarily electronic scholarship, faculty and students may shed some of the traditional stereotypes held about libraries as warehouses for books. although collection assessment and strategic reallocation initiatives at both st. edward’s and millersville were primarily designed to help students and faculty survive the lengthy renovation periods, this may in fact become the de-facto standard for content development for the foreseeable future. preliminary findings of ebrary®’s 2011 global student e-book survey  revealed that while e-book usage and awareness have not increased significantly in 2011 compared to 2008, the vast majority of students would choose electronic over print if it were available and if better tools along with fewer restrictions were offered. reflecting global trends like this, libraries are moving towards an increase in electronic holdings and are reorganizing space within their buildings to emphasize engagement with content, not simply storage. rethinking reference in addition to addressing changes in content and collections, the renovations at st. edwards and millersville provide opportunities to experiment with (or without) certain longstanding library services. at millersville, the two years without a building have been internally referred to as “a big experiment” in order to test out new ideas and determine which existing or new services are brought back into the new library. traditional reference is one service currently being investigated for transformation. staff at millersville decided not to install a reference desk inside of the temporary library in gerhart hall. in fact, there are no librarians located within gerhart hall, only staff and student employees. for just-in-case research questions, the library has developed a stand up, self-help kiosk where users can walk up to a dedicated computer and instantly chat/im/email a librarian or pick up the phone and call. to assist, student employees working at the circulation desk are being trained on a referral system where they can lead students to the kiosk or direct them to specific subject librarian. staff at millersville have expanded their suite of virtual research help options for just-in-time questions. librarians take shifts providing assistance through phone, text, email and chat/im (11-8 monday through thursday, 11-4 fridays, and 2-8 sundays). another facet has been initiating at least three consistent office hours during which subject librarians will be available in their office for research consultations or appointments. inspired by austin’s coolhaus ice cream truck use of twitter to notify customers of their current location, st. edward’s is considering heavier use of social media to inform students and faculty where reference assistance can be found. while still in the planning stages, the general idea is for librarians to check in using foursquare or gowalla at various campus locations with a note about how long they will be there.  this check in will automatically propagate to the library’s facebook and twitter accounts and show up on the website in a rolling feed of library news and updates. in this scenario, even users who do not connect with the library through social media services will still benefit from the check in. librarians who station themselves around campus will be equipped with a netbook or a tablet computer with a keyboard and have the ability to print to any campus printer. the hope is that fully mobile librarians with high-end technology and the ability to help wherever the student may be will begin to shape expectations of students. traditional reference desks are often immobile and, in some cases, emphasize the power disparity between the knowledge seeker and the knowledge holder (either purposely or inadvertently). in these situations, it may be difficult for libraries to experiment with new methods of interacting with users, either face-to-face or digitally. it is easy to fall back on what is known, what is safe. the removal of these structures for renovation purposes is described by dorney as an “almost cathartic experience,” providing a sense of freedom to test user and librarian reaction to innovative avenues of service. professional identity & relevance while impact of these two renovations on their respective campus communities is an area ripe for discussion, the projects have also released the internal floodgates. both institutions are witnessing discussions relating to professional identity and the library’s relevance/value within higher education. often, anxiety accompanies these conversations, a natural reaction for any passionate professional. at millersville, staff is distributed on and off campus. there are librarians in academic buildings, staff in gerhart hall, librarians and staff at the off-site storage facility, and student employees everywhere in between. the way library work is accomplished is changing dramatically. employees are beginning to rely more and more on technology to assist in everyday activities. where resistance to change may have before existed for initiatives like video conferencing or using a wiki to share documentation, individuals have been forced out of their comfort zones to grow as a high-functioning team of professionals. in the case of st. edward’s, questions abound about how group dynamics may change when seventeen staff members are forced to exist within a cozy, three-bedroom house for one year. without personal offices, librarians there may have a completely different experience in terms of collaboration and it is inevitable that all interactions will reach new levels of intensity, for better or worse. though the st. edward’s library website already provides a great deal of services and resources, it will become even more apparent that it is the primary means of interacting with the library.  david lee king writes that “the library’s website is the library,” and the absence of a robust, physical presence will solidify that perception. it is time for as much – if not more – effort to be placed on our digital assets than our physical spaces. on failure & flexibility it would not be apropos to conclude this article without mentioning the importance of flexibility and freedom to fail. both authors have found that it is often the best laid plans that have disintegrated while spur-of-the-moment ideas have taken off like wildfire. there is no ultimate road map to ensure success. at millersville, for example, the old library was the tallest, most heavily-trafficked building on campus. assuming that the next largest building for student gathering was the newly-renovated student memorial center, librarians set up a “research blast” table in a high-visibility area. the plan was to have multiple librarians available in shifts with computers and informational handouts to help students with their research questions. staff promoted the one-week event heavily, using facebook, qr codes, emails, posters, word-of-mouth. librarians wore bright green tee shirts saying “ask me about the library” and were proactive, making eye contact and greeting students as they passed. the librarians barely received one research question the entire week. it turned out to be a great opportunity to answer questions about the library – what’s in the temporary library, where can i go to print papers, what is the new library going to look like, when is it the project going to be done? but librarians certainly weren’t helping students locate or evaluate peer-reviewed articles, analyze sources, or brainstorm search strategies. it was a failure in one aspect and a success in another. the freedom to fail and flexibility to adapt accordingly is paramount to initiating change. st. edward’s has the benefit of learning from millersville’s two-year experiment before knocking down their old building. if students are not using roaming librarians to ask research questions, then where are they asking those kinds of questions?  studies of student research behavior suggest that faculty members, teaching assistants, the writing center, and course readings and websites are frequently sources students turn to for help (foster & gibbons, 2007; head & eisenberg, 2009). though liaison librarians continue to inform faculty and teaching assistants about the services that will be available during construction, reaching students through course websites is another avenue worth exploring. currently, all blackboard course websites at st. edward’s university have a link labeled “ask a librarian,” which links students to the general reference assistance page. however, most students do not understand how librarians can help. to improve this blackboard presence, librarians have written a short javascript widget that will link students to course or subject-specific pages designed to be an in-context landing page for library resources and services. in other words, if a student clicks on “library resources” from a course in the school of business, he or she will be directed to the research guide for business students, not the generic library homepage. exploring new options takes staff time and creative thinking; some projects will fail, but the spark of innovation provided by challenging circumstances may result in new and improved practices that last well beyond the transition period into these new buildings. conclusion as economist paul romer once said, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” (rosenthal, 2009). in the cases of st. edward’s and millersville, the crisis of being without the library as one cohesive place provides librarians with an opportunity to initiate change. without the baggage of the past, libraries can look holistically at the their portfolio of services, determining which to continue investing time and resources into. others may have simply run their course, poorly designed from the outset or dated for serving a new generation of scholars. measuring the success of these experiments is often difficult. due to the magnitude of change (moving from one centralized building to many distributed/embedded locations), neither st. edward’s nor millersville can simply compare usage statistics to the those of the old library. because these libraries are focusing on interacting with users in new ways, measures have to be more comprehensive, taking both qualitative and quantitative aspects into account. in some cases, this will be longitudinal data. both authors are hopeful that what is learned during these experiments outside of the library will be brought back into the new libraries in order to support the university community at a higher level, showcasing our professional growth and relevancy. for each traditional library aspect that is re-envisioned, time and resources are made available to investigate new and innovative ways to interact with information. while keeping the history and mission of the academic library close to heart, librarians need to initiate honest, open, and difficult conversations and take immediate action towards readying academic librarianship for a new era. in her fall 2010 convocation address to the university community, millersville university president francine mcnairy stated: “…indeed, the ganser building will close, but the university library will not. you might think that the library is at the intersection of frederick and george streets, but it is actually at the intersection of scholarship, innovation, creativity and collaboration. and that’s the road to our future.” it is possible that upon moving back into each of these new libraries, the resources, services and spaces provided to users may look completely different. when individuals inquire about the risk of becoming irrelevant after a year or two without a building, perhaps that is the opportunity for librarians to inform their communities that the library is much more than bricks and mortar, and we are in the midst of fundamental shifts regarding our impact on students and learning. embarking on extensive renovations like those discussed here bring unique opportunities to initiate change within libraries, but they are not the only way to prepare for the future. the authors are issuing a call to action: how would you change your library as if you had a year without the historical baggage of a building? take those plans and run with them – there is no reason why you have to wait for the bulldozers. many thanks to melissa gold for her feedback on this piece. thanks also to lead pipers hilary davis, leigh anne vrabel, ellie collier, and emily ford for edits, comments, and thought provoking questions. references and further readings association of college and research libraries (n.d.). value of academic libraries report. retrieved november 8, 2011, from http://www.acrl.ala.org/value/?page_id=21 booth, c. (2010). librarians as __________: shapeshifting at the periphery. retrieved november 5, 2011, from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/librarians-as-__________-shapeshifting-at-the-periphery/ ebrary® (2011). ebrary surveys suggest students’ research needs unmet, results to be presented at charleston. retrieved november 8, 2011, from http://www.ebrary.com/corp/newspdf/ebrary_2011_student_survey.pdf foster, n. f., & gibbons, s. (eds.). (2007). studying students: the undergraduate research project at the university of rochester. chicago: association of college and research libraries. retrieved november 8, 2011, from http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/digital/foster-gibbons_cmpd.pdf frierson, e. (2011, july 8). course-specific library links in blackboard, moodle, or any lms you can name [blog post]. retrieved november 8, 2011 from http://thirdpartylibrarian.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/librarylinksinlms/ head, a. j., & eisenberg, m. b. (2009). lessons learned: how college students seek information in the digital age. project information literacy first year report with student survey findings. university of washington information school. retreived november 8, 2011 from http://projectinfolit.org/publications/ millersville university library (n.d.). millersville library renovation information. retrieved november 6, 2011, fromhttp://blogs.millersville.edu/newlibrary/ king, d. l. (2005, september 22). website as destination [blog post]. retrieved november 8, 2011 from http://www.davidleeking.com/2005/09/22/website-as-destination/ rosenthal, j. (2009). on language – a terrible thing to waste. the new york times magazine. retrieved november 8, 2011, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02fob-onlanguage-t.html ross, l., & sennyey, p. (2008). the library is dead, long live the library! the practice of academic librarianship and the digital revolution. journal of academic librarianship, 34(2), 145-152. st. edward’s university (2011). st. edward’s university receives $13 million from pat and bill munday. retrieved november 5, 2011, from http://think.stedwards.edu/marketing/blog/post/st-edward%e2%80%99s-university-receives-13-million-pat-and-bill-munday this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. gendered expectations for leadership in libraries the intersection between cultural competence and whiteness in libraries 15 responses jennifer 2011–11–09 at 9:12 pm i’ll be following the changes at st. edward’s with interest. i graduated from st. ed’s about six years ago. although i planned to be a librarian while i was in undergrad, was a voracious reader, and did a lot of independent research in addition to my courses, i hardly used the st. ed’s library at all, other than hanging out in the little kitchen area – it was the closest building to the bus stop. i usually walked down the street to the small austin public library branch (been moved since i was there) or took the bus downtown to the ut-austin libraries. i do remember the st. ed’s librarians being friendly and helpful in my career plans, and i used some of the online databases and occasionally ill’d materials, but that’s about it. eric frierson 2011–11–09 at 9:57 pm way cool, jennifer! i just started at st. ed’s about a year and a half ago – and i imagine it’s very much how you remember it. jennifer 2011–11–09 at 10:00 pm some of the buildings have changed a lot – the new science buildings and so on. i wonder if they ever got the pigeons off trustee hall…*snicker* that was the “exciting new” thing when i was there – won all sorts of awards and was constantly covered in pigeon poo! pingback : what’s interesting today | spinstah pingback : how renovation is forcing a change in the definition of the library/librarian « infopromom jean costello 2011–11–18 at 6:14 pm erin & eric – your article didn’t refer to a solid plan for this “time out” that describes new services, clearly delineates roles and responsibilities, outlines contingency plans, etc. it also didn’t suggest there has been deep collaboration with other university departments to craft new offerings, test new services or pedagogical approaches that might help students, etc. has there been a lot of upfront work done in these areas? if not, i feel as though i’m channeling the science professor who didn’t mean disrespectful when i say this seems mighty risky for library employees. once people let go their attachments to the physical library and what it represents for them, and meet their material & info needs elsewhere (as many do now), i’m not so sure they’ll be as interested in the new library in 2014-2015 as you might hope. tiffany lemaistre 2011–11–19 at 8:50 pm excellent post! besides the fact that i am watching st. edward’s with interest, i found the section on renovation as a catalyst insightful. it was interesting to think about the idea of physical place determining the library’s policies and services because we are having some of the same discussions at ut tyler. here it is our former ils rather than our building with the historical baggage. i’m so excited for you guys at st. ed’s! have fun. :) erin dorney 2011–11–22 at 4:10 pm hi jean – we were working within a fairly limited word count for this lead pipe post, so we had to pare a lot of our initial details down. i can’t speak for st. edward’s, but i can share some more about the millersville process. we certainly did a lot of planning upfront (several years-worth) but after almost an entire semester of being out of the building underneath our belts, we have found that even the best-intentioned plans sometimes don’t work out. there has been a lot of last-minute changes and we have tried to incorporate a certain level (attitude-wise and functional-wise) of flexibility throughout the organization. it has been very stressful at times – certain initiatives we thought were going to work smoothly have not and other have cropped up to fit university needs. i personally have done a lot of collaboration with the university communications & marketing department, the office of advancement, student senate, and admissions in my role as outreach librarian. others have worked closely with faculty to investigate new options for deeper engagement with classes and things along that vein. we have worked closely with our information technology department on new tools and services as well. in terms of getting people to come back to the new library post-renovation, i think the unique spaces there will certainly be a draw. at millersville, we are bringing some partners back into the building with us (center for academic excellence & instructional design) in addition to creating some one-of-a-kind spaces on campus: a faculty collaboration lounge, media production zone, 24-hour space, distance learning classroom, a room featuring a gas fireplace for events, and reading/sculpture garden to function as an outdoor classroom among other things. you can learn more on our renovation blog as well, where we have some of the original planning documents posted: http://blogs.millersville.edu/newlibrary/ . i’m sure at some point we’ll write some more in-depth articles about this entire process. you’ve given me a lot of ideas for things to include once we reach that point. thanks for the comments, everyone! jean costello 2011–11–24 at 10:41 am thanks erin – i understand the word count dilemma and have experienced it with my published writing on libraries. your plans & outreach sound terrific and i wish you great success. thanks too for the blog refernce – i’ll check it out. pingback : daily post to ppl ref 12/09/2011 | ppl ref bookmarks pingback : best of fall semester 2011 « hack library school pingback : page not found « library scenester pingback : librarian wardrobe « library scenester sumskillz 2015–11–24 at 9:58 am it is far to easy to make excuses to cut costs during a rebuild, based on assumptions about the future. while you can take a chance you’ll get by with less stack space, so you can provide more work space, engineer the building to handle the loads of stacks. if you don’t and find you are short of space, your only option to resolve the problem is off campus facilities with higher long term costs. the dream of ebook dominated collections is taking a backslide of late. we are at the mercy of the marketplace, a conversation that is difficult to have with dreamers and institutional executives. pingback : latest library links 27th november 2015 | latest library links this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct critical literacy? information! – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 3 feb heather davis /5 comments critical literacy? information! throwback thursday for february 12, 2015: take another look at heather davis’s article on the acrl standards from 2010. stop back on february 25th for a critical information literacy perspective on the new framework from ian beilin. photo by flickr user hammer51012 (cc by-sa 2.0) by heather davis picture it, a higher education institution, 2009. the sun is shining. it’s a warm summer day. your iced coffee perspires on the desk in front of you. you are a faculty librarian participating in a workshop with other faculty members on outcomes-based assessment for teaching and learning. you’re excited to make the leap from routine library orientations to in-class assignments centered around information literacy concepts, which will help improve your instructional sessions and place students on the continuum towards mastery of information literacy concepts. suddenly, the conversation turns to the topic of the learning outcome for information literacy. “how is information literacy any different from critical thinking?” “couldn’t we just get rid of information literacy since it shares similar outcomes with critical thinking?” wait, what?!? immediately, your head starts reeling with the national standards of the association of college and research libraries, various statewide initiatives that have mobilized to embed information literacy into k-12 and higher education curriculum, and individual faculty with whom you have worked with to cover these very same standards as part of their learning outcomes for their students. as you witness this debate unfolding, you think to yourself, what is the difference between critical thinking and information literacy? do they share some common characteristics? is it possible for one to exist without the other? how would you respond to this challenge, where there are shared outcomes among information literacy and critical thinking? the goal of the assessment-based learning outcome is to identify one necessary skill, such as teamwork, critical thinking, or communication, the student will use on the job, in their daily lives, or in the next stage of their educational process. this learning outcome is then embedded in an assignment or throughout the curriculum, and a scoring rubric is devised to focus on increasing student competency in this skill. this rubric allows for a quantitative value to be given to completed assignments representative of the student’s application of the skill and helps place them on the competency continuum somewhere between a basic, on the low-end of the scale, and advanced, on the high-end, which provides a great opportunity to make sure students are “getting it.” this process also engages both instructors and students in a teaching and learning partnership. by emphasizing the mastery of key learning outcomes at your institution students will be prepared for a post-graduate workplace environment. it is important to ask this question: is it possible for critical thinking to take the place of information literacy in today’s digital information universe? in this post i’ll be looking at information literacy and critical thinking as components of assessment. how is critical thinking and information literacy intertwined in the assessment of student learning? what other types of literacies are required for today’s student? why is information literacy critical to student learning? information literacy and critical thinking: an accidental marriage? to begin, we should establish some common ground on the definition of information literacy. the association of college & research libraries (acrl) outlines the major competency areas for the information literate individual: determine the extent of information needed access the needed information effectively and efficiently evaluate information and its sources critically incorporate selected information into one’s own knowledge base use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally1 these standards outlined by acrl have been integrated into evaluation rubrics used by instructional librarians across the nation in levels k-12 through higher education. while there is variation in the language and presentation used to express these competencies, information literacy assessment closely follows these standards. one such example of a higher education institution is mckendree university, which has its very own on-line, interactive information literacy rubric.2 developing and using a rubric for information literacy can help place an individual or group of students on the information literacy continuum, where a student may come into the instructional session scoring low, or beginning, and leave the instructional session scoring somewhere in the middle to high range, or mastering. through this process, we can gauge a student’s mastery of information literacy concepts and measure the effects of the instructional session on student learning. it is important to remember that when students hear the word “assessment,” this naturally inspires a lot of fear. they are concerned about having to take a test, turn in a paper, or engage in some form of an academic assignment. while fear may be a reality for most students, it is equally important to remember that these evaluation rubrics are also an assessment of the instructional librarian. they are tools for improving both learning and teaching, and provide very useful metrics for identifying future teaching opportunities. similar to information literacy, critical thinking has its own set of competencies. one of the leading organizations in providing a foundation for the assessment of critical thinking, foundation for critical thinking breaks this down into eight discrete elements: generates purposes raises questions uses information utilizes concepts makes inferences makes assumptions generates implications embodies a point of view3 critical thinking, as its own unique form of assessment, aims to get students to distinguish between empirical and factual evidence by applying higher order thinking to their own mental processes of receiving, taking apart, and synthesizing information. in addition, students balance all of this with an awareness of their own subjective judgment. assignments created with the learning outcome of critical thinking in mind strive to create a fair and balanced outcome and parallels similar skills that will be required for future practical application. in their article on the importance of this outcome for graduate and experienced nurses, fero, et. al directly link critical thinking to patient safety: “nurses must have the ability to recognize changes in patient condition, perform independent nursing interventions, anticipate orders and prioritize.”4 focusing on the critical thinking characteristics of “interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation,” fero, et al., argue that using a critical thinking framework in nursing education will bear directly on the nurse in their post-graduate nursing experiences.5 this study included an exercise that presented nursing students with videotaped scenarios in a clinical setting and then asked them to record, in writing, their identification of the problem and necessary action steps for the resolution. even though this case study incorporates situations aimed to exercise the critical thinking skills of its student membership, there are points at which information literacy competencies come into play. this is a perfect example of an inherent collusion between critical thinking and information literacy, as the scenarios presented in these videotapes require evaluation of visual information and critical thinking, which will then lead to an understanding of the information needed to resolve these problems. if professional disciplines, such as nursing, look to specific competencies for graduates entering the workforce, then educational institutions should meet this same need by embedding competencies in the curriculum. for example, washington state university has codified critical thinking for its student and faculty membership, by creating an online critical and integrative thinking rubric. it serves as an institution-wide foundation for learning assessment across disciplines.6 similar to the information literacy rubric, instructors use these templates as competency models, and modify existing critical thinking rubrics tailored to specific assignments. a class taught at wsu on investigations into the arts, manipulated the existing baseline of the critical and integrative thinking rubric to achieve its own critical thinking outcome for its course. these malleable rubrics are very useful in standardizing learning outcomes and setting clear guidelines for students to follow. presenting and following a scoring rubric with an assignment can also take a lot of the subjective evaluation out of assessment and point students toward clearly stated goals. until death us do part clearly, there is a shared relationship between information literacy and critical thinking. critical thinking comes into play when getting students on the path to looking at information and using it judiciously in light of their topic. library information instruction sessions have been following a trend which seeks to blend these two together, getting students to look at websites, articles, media items, and other online content with a critical eye toward evaluating these sources for credibility. library instruction incorporates brainstorming or concept mapping into sessions, providing students with a creative approach to generating a purpose for their assignment. increasing numbers of instructional librarians also devote time to the evaluation of information, which ultimately takes students out of the pre-packaged box of research databases and into the frontier of the freely available information online. ellie collier in her post, in praise of the internet: shifting focus and engaging critical thinking skills, touches upon this very relationship existing between information literacy and critical thinking. she encourages instructional librarians everywhere, “to shift our primary focus away from teaching how to find information and towards engaging critical thinking skills.”7 this does not mitigate the need for the information literacy competency, when in fact both of these competencies live in perfect harmony. both critical thinking and information literacy work together in a partnership, each leaning on and supporting the other. li zhang points to this very relationship between these two competencies, stating: an information literate student will be able to formulate research queries and create search strategies that reflect an understanding of information sources and their organization, analyze the data collected for value, and ultimately incorporate the data to solve problems. this literacy or competency goes beyond simply acquiring knowledge; it involves the process of critical thinking, which emphasizes reasoning, forming judgment about the evidence, and determining when new information must be generated. since information literacy and critical thinking are so closely related, it is the job of librarians who are also educators to go beyond merely providing lectures, but strive to cultivate students’ thinking skills in order to equip them with necessary strategies to cope with complex problems.8 working with students to foster a cohesive, give-and-take relationship between critical thinking and information literacy will reinforce their post-graduate skills. as zhang suggests, engaging students in that grey area between information literacy and critical thinking will foster direct engagement with information, and help them make connections between their research needs and the information available to meet those needs. specifically, zhang focuses on the following: comparing and critiquing websites for credibility; encouraging students to come up with their own standards of evaluation; using specific search strategies for online and database searching; and ultimately focusing on transference of skills between web and database searching. if you are an instructional librarian who loves to get your students thinking and talking about information, then you already know it is impossible to draw a clear line between information literacy and critical thinking. opening up the relationship increasingly, information literacy has become a national concern, stemming from a rapidly changing information and technology landscape. this includes print and electronic content, photographs, videos, podcasts, blogs, government documents, corporate records, institutional archives, and information formats yet to be defined. the concern for information literacy has had a long history, punctuated by different modalities: media, technology, computer, and cultural literacy.9 to this list could be added multimedia, digital, communications, and social media literacy. information literacy’s best friend, acrl, draws a clear line between information literacy and information technology, stating that “[information] technology skills enable an individual to use computers, software applications, databases, and other technologies to achieve a wide variety of academic, work-related, and personal goals.”10 similar to the shared relationship between critical thinking and information literacy, much of these alternate literacies can reinforce and provide added dimension to the information literacy competency and create critical skills for the 21st century student. as information rapidly changes in appearance and content, it is of import for information literacy to be a part of the conversation regarding other literacy modalities. the landscape of information literacy is changing, and these 21st century skills will also change the way students access, evaluate, incorporate, and use information effectively. perhaps now and in the future, writing research papers may not be the primary method of student assessment at every higher education institution, and may not always coincide with every institutions mission for its student membership; however, in an increasingly networked world the necessity for an information literacy learning outcome is paramount. beyond equipping students to interact with and use technologies effectively, being able to navigate information-rich environments is critical. information literacy: all by myself… the necessity for classroom embedded information literacy skills is unavoidable. when navigating different user groups (e.g., community college associations, library associations, local library councils, and national library associations) the feelings on the topic of information literacy is similar: “to be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.”11 even as information literacy bears strong ties to critical thinking, it must be able to stand alone as its own competency, by holding its own and be given equal representation in the assessment of teaching and learning. higher education institutions have taken a stand on the importance of information literacy, emanating standards and guidelines for the information competent individual from state and local government. the american association of community colleges (aacc) has made their stance on information literacy very clear: information literacy, which encompasses information fluency and information technology mastery, is critical to success in higher education and lifelong learning. rapid and continual changes in technology and the proliferation of information resources present students with an abundance of information through a variety of vetted and unvetted formats. this wide variety of choices raises questions about the reliability, authenticity, and validity of content and poses challenges for students trying to evaluate, understand, and apply the information.  the association of college and research libraries, in its information literacy competency standards for higher education, notes that information literacy is considered a key outcome by several regional and discipline-specific accreditation bodies because of its close ties to students’ competency with evaluating, managing, and using information . . . . an important element of both teaching and learning in today’s information age is information literacy — the set of skills needed to find, access, retrieve, analyze, synthesize and use information effectively and ethically.12 as discussed, information and technology is changing, as is the terrain of teaching and learning in higher education. among the current changes, peer-reviewed and trade journals are consistently moving to an online format, newspapers are scaling back print production to pursue an electronic future, mobile devices are being used to access and navigate online information environments, iphone apps are being created daily from a variety of creators, blogs and wikis are rapidly being created by both individuals and large-scale organizations, and educational content is shifting to open source environments. students encounter information in their daily lives when they drop by the supermarket to pick up groceries, when they sit down to watch television or stream media content on their computers, or when they engage in the task of media creation. first and foremost, this is all information. critical thinking and information literacy rubrics, as they are typically laid out, are very similar. however, critical thinking is rooted in developing a thought process that occurs around a variety of life skills related to interacting and engaging with information. information literacy has a marked departure from critical thinking. this happens when educating students about the types and formats of information and technologies that exist, and getting them to think about information and technology concepts in the aggregate. for example, we might emphasize, this is word processing, not, this is microsoft word 2007. or this is a search interface, not, this is a research database. increasing information competency equips students with the skills to efficiently navigate and gather requisite information they will need in the workforce. out in the “real world,” students are not likely to be presented with a google search box during every work task. instead they will be required to use a variety of search interfaces to get at the information they need to address the problem at hand, and be able to evaluate the credibility of those sources. they will need to be able to create workarounds when their information strategies fail them. they must be able to locate, gather, evaluate, synthesize, and responsibly use information. this process is markedly different from critical thinking, which often emphasizes thought processes around information, situations, interpersonal communication, project-based work, and other aspects. information comes in a variety of formats and is needed not only for writing research papers, creating presentations, but is a critical skill in dealing with day-to-day personal problems and issues. in an important study by project information literacy (pil) facilitated by the information school at university of washington, researchers found that students were frustrated equally when “conducting research, whether for course assignments or everyday life problems, [presenting] its own set of challenges that are usually exacerbated in digital environments. challenges are often deep-seated frustrations tied to finding resources students know exist, somehow, somewhere, but are unable to access.”13 one remedy can be found in a problem-based approach to the information gathering process, a process that can successfully be carried out through information literacy. by involving higher order thinking skills students see the connection between the skills they acquire in the educational setting and how they can be applied in their everyday lives. guided instruction on how to navigate a complex information landscape would greatly improve a student’s ability to appropriately identify and navigate information, and better equip them to amass information if a definitive information gap is found. developing information seeking strategies that meet real-life, everyday situations creates a natural bridge to workforce training, providing students with an invaluable set of skills similar to critical thinking, but independently valuable in its own right. rekindling the old flame library instruction sessions need to remain open to integrating critical thinking skills, as well as other learning outcomes and literacy modalities, in the k-12 and higher education setting. this practice can make information literacy relevant and test the mettle of this skill set in the educational environment. in the process of engaging students, we can find out what they think about information on a personal level as they interact with it in their daily lives. once we push students to “figure it out,” begin to stir their creative and intellectual faculties, we can start moving the conversation forward. while information literacy and critical thinking share a contiguous and inseparable relationship, one cannot exist without the other. without information literacy, students would find themselves equipped to think about situations and ideas, but incapable of recognizing and understanding the vast information network or how to access this network. alternately, without critical thinking we would have vast amounts of information with no way to filter, gather, or synthesize this information. it is also important for instructional librarians in an educational context to be involved in the development of an information literacy rubric. in the course of developing such a rubric, we can provide our instructional peers with a template for evaluating information literacy in their own classrooms, as well as our own. in addition, modifying existing rubrics at your institution can be an invaluable test of the impact of your teaching and show you if students are truly “getting it.” such a venture might also help integrate you more into instruction and allow students and instructional peers to see you as more than just the cool librarian with the book cart. along with critical thinking, information literacy should be offered with the same frequency as other teaching and learning assessments in the educational institution. it touches every aspect of practical skills provided at higher education institutions: automotive core students use mitchell 1® ondemand™ to create estimates and look up information on various types of automobiles; allied health and nursing students use medlineplus® to locate current, reliable information on topics of health and wellness; psychology students use search interfaces to review current literature on mental health topics; and students find themselves using these information strategies out in the world without realizing it. embedding information literacy into instruction with the same frequency as other outcomes-based assessments promotes an emerging population capable of working with various technologies, as well as an aptitude for finding the right information to meet a need in a timely and efficient manner. there is an everyday use for information literacy that would be lost if it were to disappear into or merge with critical thinking and obscure its importance by calling it anything other than information literacy. a very special thank you to emily ford, edward sargent, cheyenne roduin, and merinda kaye hensley for their invaluable insight and suggestions for this post. this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. “information literacy competency standards for higher education.” association of college & research libraries (acrl), 2009. http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency.cfm. [↩] mckendree university. “information literacy rubric.” information literacy rubric, n.d . http://www.mckendree.edu/academics/information_literacy_rubric.aspx. [↩] foundation for critical thinking. “critical thinking model 1.” the thinker’s guide to analytic thinking, 2007. http://www.criticalthinking.org/ctmodel/ctmodel1.cfm#. [↩] fero, laura j., catherine m. witsberger, susan w. wesmiller, thomas g. zullo, and leslie a. hoffman. 2009. critical thinking ability of new graduate and experienced nurses. journal of advanced nursing 65, no. 1 (january): 139-148, p. 140. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2648.2008.04834.x. [↩] ibid., p. 141. [↩] washington state university. “wsu’s critical and integrative thinking rubric.” critical and integrative thinking rubric, 2006. https://my.wsu.edu/portal/page?_pageid=177,276578&_dad=portal&_schema=portal. [↩] collier, ellie. 2009. in praise of the internet: shifting focus and engaging critical thinking skills. in the library with the lead pipe. january 7. http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/in-praise-of-the-internet-shifting-focus-and-engaging-critical-thinking-skills/. [↩] zhang, li. 2007. promoting critical thinking, and information instruction in a biochemistry course. issues in science and technology librarianship 51, no. 2 (summer) http://www.istl.org/07-summer/refereed.html. [↩] horton, jr., forest woody. “understanding information literacy: a primer.” united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization (unesco), 2007. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001570/157020e.pdf. [↩] association of college & research libraries. 2000. information literacy and information technology. information literacy competency standards for higher education. january 18. http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency.cfm#iltech. [↩] association of college & research libraries. “presidential committee on information literacy: final report.” acrl | presidential committee on information literacy, january 10, 1989. http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/whitepapers/presidential.cfm. [↩] american association of community colleges. 2008. aacc position statement on information literacy. american association of community colleges: position statements. may 4. http://www.aacc.nche.edu/about/positions/pages/ps05052008.aspx. [↩] head, alison j., and michael b. eisenberg. “finding context: what today’s college students say about conducting research in the digital age.” seattle, wa: the information school, university of washington, february 4, 2009. http://projectinfolit.org/publications/. [↩] critical thinking, information literacy, libraries, library instruction, teaching what water? teen tech week: create, share, learn @ your library 5 responses donna 2010–02–03 at 8:35 pm you may want to look at a new grouo of il videos and see what assumptions are driving the cretion of it. murals http://www.milesmultimedia.com/ donna heather davis 2010–02–03 at 9:09 pm i’ve seen these videos. thank you for sharing this! donna 2010–02–03 at 8:35 pm sorry. spelling was not what i intended. christy earp 2010–02–07 at 12:26 pm wilkes community college adopted a plan to increase student disposition to use critical thinking in all aspects of their lives. the foundation for critical thinking is the major model, and the cctdi (california critical thinking disposition inventory) was used to identify areas of weakness among faculty, staff, and students. a more detailed explanation of the plan can be read at http://www.wilkescc.edu/wcccms/wccinsider1.aspx?id=774, but in a nutshell, wcc’s focus is to help students learn to: -seek quality information -discover their assumptions about learning, topics, subjects, and people -ask questions -analyze different points of view the library plays an essential role in the pursuit of these abilities, including participation as instructors in required freshman seminar courses. faculty and staff also receive training in information literacy, through faculty/staff workshops and presentations, and through publications like the newsletter at the link below. http://www.wilkescc.edu/wcccms/images/website_-_2008-2009/instructional_services/pdf_documents/qep%20open%20line%20february%202009.pdf pingback : the canon and the archive | all these birds with teeth: this is not about science. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct w-e-b-s-i-t-e, find out what it means to me – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 22 jul brett bonfield /32 comments w-e-b-s-i-t-e, find out what it means to me integration photo by flickr user certified su (cc by 2.0) by brett bonfield it’s interesting how many people don’t really understand the concept of open source. people often describe freeware as open source, or they’ll describe free web-based applications as open source, or applications with apis that allow for mashups. there are articles all the time, on some of the most popular websites, that recommend free software but don’t distinguish programs the authors gives away for free from software that is actually open source. for a program to be open source, it has to meet two basic qualifications the author has to provide full access to its source code the software has to be accompanied by a license that protects the contributions and rights of the community. perhaps what people associate most closely with open source—free software—is its price tag. however, it is often pointed out that open source software is usually free like a puppy or a kitten: there may be no cost associated with acquiring it, but there’s more involved than just the initial cost. as with software you pay for, it takes time and money to integrate new software into an existing computing environment. the difference between open source projects and software purchased from commercial vendors is that vendors profit from the time users spend on integration and workarounds (the stories they share on mailing lists and at user conferences add value to the commercial product) while fixes contributed to an open source project are owned by anyone who wants to make use of the software and are protected by its open source license. that’s why open source means more than just the zero on its price tag: the most essential element of open source is that the data is yours. not just the data you entrust to the software, but the software itself. you are not reliant on the programmer who created it or the company that controls its license: you can alter it yourself or hire someone else to alter it for you. of course, the initial price matters. when libraries buy proprietary software, they aren’t just paying programmers to write code, system administrators to make sure computing infrastructure is working properly, and managers to provide the programmers and system administrators with meetings and timelines. they’re also paying for the company’s overhead expenses (such as the salaries of the salespeople who sell them the software) as well as the company’s profit margin. what if libraries hired every single programmer, systems administrator, and systems manager away from library software vendors—let’s say at exactly the same salaries they’re making now—and also purchased all their code and relicensed it as open source? the pool of employees making library software wouldn’t be any bigger, but the overall expenses for creating library software (less the one-time cost of purchasing the code) would be the same. except it wouldn’t, because libraries would no longer be paying for sales and other expenses or footing the bill for vendors’ profit margins. i’m not suggesting this is going to happen. libraries aren’t organized enough to scoop up every techie at every library technology company, and even if they were, the companies aren’t going to sell their intellectual property. no, i’m not suggesting it’s going to happen; i’m suggesting that it is happening. i’m suggesting that, within a few years, libraries’ software expenditure distributions will have changed. rather than paying outside companies to employ library programmers, software developers will work directly for libraries. the code will be different, it will be better, and it will be open source. and, if library software is like other software, there’s a good chance that a lot of the code will be contributed by volunteers—people who aren’t even employed by libraries, but are interested in the problems and possibilities presented by creating software for library users and employees. this is what happened with web server software, the programs that deliver code to web browsers (such as firefox): open source software, especially the software released by the apache foundation, dominates the web server market. it also appears to be happening with web browsers themselves (firefox again, though google’s open source chrome is off to a good start) and with the operating systems, primarily linux, that run the computers on which web server software runs. once open source software is good enough, and has a good enough support system, there aren’t any particularly compelling reasons to use propriety software. eventually, people come around to that realization, whether they care about the underlying code or not. the issues are that “good enough” is in the eye of the beholder and “eventually” can take an awfully long time. a quick survey: naming names when i took on the task of creating a new website for the collingswood public library, i looked at the software options that were available to me. i was familiar with some of them from my jobs at other libraries, and it’s not hard to figure out what software libraries are running or to investigate what they’re doing with it: it’s mostly just a question of visiting their website. in my opinion, the leading open source options seemed good enough—perhaps no better than the proprietary software that dominates the market, but also no worse and, more importantly, the open source software seemed to be improving more quickly. in my opinion, there are seven open source software projects worth considering blacklight (demo) evergreen (demo) kochief (demo) koha (demo) scriblio (demo) sopac (demo) vufind (demo) there’s some apples-and-oranges going on here, in that some of these packages are just components of a website and require other software in order to do everything a library website needs to do (such as inventory management). other packages cover the entire process. evergreen and koha cover the entire process. some people call them integrated library systems, though i wish they wouldn’t. blacklight, kochief, and vufind provide usability improvements for people stuck with existing library websites. some people call them discovery layer interfaces and a few people would probably still refer to them as online publicly accessible catalogs. if you know any of these people personally, please ask them to cut it out. sopac is still known to some as a content management system, and scriblio is still occasionally referred to as a blogging engine, though they’re also sometimes lumped in with blacklight, kochief, and vufind because, like these three, most libraries would probably choose to use them in conjunction with a system that assists with tasks like cataloging and circulation. for us, and for most libraries that use library-specific software to handle their inventory, these were all viable options. the library where i work uses innovative interfaces’ millennium, so these packages already work with it, could be adapted to work with it, or could replace it entirely. built from scratch, on a framework, or on an application one of the many advantages of open source software is that it’s often accretive: once one group of developers figures something out, they tend to share it. other developers are then free to build software on top of it, and these developers generally share their improvements. netscape opened the code from its browser and developers turned it into mozilla. other developers turned mozilla into firefox, which has been used as, among other things, the basis for a music player (songbird) and scriptwriting software (celtx). this kind of thing happens all the time. for some uses, it’s nice to work with software that’s built from scratch. other times, it’s nice to work with software that’s built on top of a framework—code designed specifically so that other code can be built on top of it. and sometimes it makes sense to work with software that takes software applications and adapts them to specific needs. both evergreen and koha were built from scratch, which makes sense: when they were started, there really weren’t any frameworks for them to use. vufind is built on the apache foundation’s solr project (which helps it optimize search), but its interface was built from scratch. again, when vufind was started, there weren’t any frameworks that made sense for it to use. if it were started today, it probably would use a framework, though that’s just speculation. vufind is partnering with blacklight in standardizing solr for library search. blacklight also makes use of a framework, perhaps the best known among web developers: ruby on rails. like vufind and blacklight, kochief uses of solr, but its interface is built using django, a competitor to the rails framework. there are two projects that make use of existing applications: sopac is built on drupal and scriblio is built on wordpress. both drupal and wordpress are well known and widely used. to pick just library examples, alaconnect and lisnews use drupal; jessamyn west, jenny levine, karen schneider, and meredith farkas use wordpress (and so do many—perhaps most—other successful library bloggers who run their own software). in general, like most users i’m fairly agnostic when comparing software that’s built from scratch to software that’s built on a framework or an application, but this information was useful to me in this instance because i really know and like wordpress, the software behind several projects i’ve developed or helped to develop, including in the library with the lead pipe. as with drupal, ruby on rails, and django, wordpress has a large and sophisticated user community. by choosing these applications and frameworks, the developers for blacklight, kochief, sopac, and scriblio are making it easier for technically inclined people to understand what they’re doing and also making use of a large group of programmers and users who are helping them to develop their library website software, even though they probably have no idea they’re doing it. by improving the underlying software, they’re improving all the programs built on top of the framework or application. language although i may be the world’s worst programmer, i still consider the programming language used in building the software for one of my websites. preferences tend to be idiosyncratic, and mine are no exception, but i try to be as objective as i can. for instance, i limit my choices to the languages that are popular (according to surveys like the tiobe top 20 or programming language popularity) and that are typically used to build websites: java, perl, php, python, and ruby (all of which are open source). languages (and frameworks) tend to be popular, and to add more developers, because they’re fun to use in developing software. also, when a language is popular and fun to use, there tends to be larger group of programmers who will help you, or who you can hire, if you run into trouble. combining my language preferences with the previous consideration (built from scratch, on a framework, or on top of an application), here’s my ordered list php/wordpress php/drupal python/django ruby/rails python (from scratch) ruby (from scratch) php (from scratch) perl (from scratch) java (from scratch) this doesn’t disqualify any of the contenders. here’s how they fit into my list php/wordpress: scriblio php/drupal: sopac (and also some of the extensible catalog project, though this project is not yet available for use or testing) python/django: kochief ruby/rails: blacklight python (from scratch): n/a ruby (from scratch): n/a php (from scratch): vufind perl (from scratch): evergreen (though it’s being extended in other languages) and koha java (from scratch): n/a, though the extensible catalog already makes use of java, and ole, which is still in the planning stages, may make use of java as well, though i’m mostly just speculating on this point. my disinterest in java, which i’ll admit is mostly just second hand, also helps to explain why i like moodle (php) for educational websites better than its open source competitor, sakai, which is built on java. documentation one of the advantages that commercial, proprietary software often enjoys over its open source competitors is documentation. this makes sense from a commercial perspective: write the documentation, point customers to it, and you can save on customer service. the catch is that documentation for commercial software is often hidden from search engines, so finding an answer to a question about commercial software often means navigating the vendor’s documentation or sending a message to its mailing list. at a previous employer, we were contractually obligated to constrain employee access to innovative interfaces’ documentation. while innovative’s information was well written, the search engine that was built into it was awful, so finding answers was often frustrating. the plan, when i left, was to buy a specialized server we could use to run our searches through an access-restricted google search. open source developers often seem more interested in improving the software than in writing documentation. it’s also a separate skill from writing code; people who are good at programming, and enjoy it, are not always the same people who are good at, and enjoy, writing documentation. as projects grow, people interested in writing documentation tend to get involved—and they make their discussions public. users and developers post their thoughts about issues they encounter and they link directly to the documentation, which means search engines become one of the best resources in understanding a feature or solving a problem with open source software. the programming languages i’ve cited all have excellent documentation, as do the frameworks and the applications. among the full-service website software, koha, the older of the two, has fuller and more user-friendly documentation, at least in my opinion; evergreen’s is good and improving, but doesn’t yet appear to be as polished or accessible as koha’s. among the other projects, vufind and blacklight probably have the best documentation—certainly enough to get you started, and sopac, though the newest of the bunch, has done a very good job with the basics, though as of this writing it is open about the absence of documentation for its more advanced features. i’m probably hardest on scriblio because it’s the project i know best, but scriblio’s documentation lags behind its peers and even relatively basic questions often need to be answered on the mailing list. to scriblio’s credit, these questions do get answered, but its lack of documentation is probably scriblio’s most notable shortfall (for instance, as of this writing its internal record format, marcish, is not yet documented on its website). among the list of major open source library website software projects, scriblio is ahead of only kochief, which is in the earliest stages of the documentation process. stability: leadership, community, funding when commercial software vendors go out of business, they often take their software with them (unless they sell it to another company or, like netscape, decide to release it as open source). that’s not a danger with open source software: as long as someone has a copy of the code, it remains available. i’m not aware of any significant open source projects that have simply disappeared. however, plenty of open source projects seem to die off when their developers stop making time for them. while it’s possible to revive stagnant projects or take them in another direction (wordpress, for instance, was a reinvigoration of b2/cafelog), it’s still advisable to look for projects that have a strong, stable community—especially for something as important as the software that powers your website. as with documentation, stability is not really an issue for any of the languages, frameworks, or applications i’ve mentioned. however, it seems like it may be more of an issue for the library-specific projects. koha and evergreen are closely associated with private companies that offer consulting for these projects. josh ferraro, one of koha’s early adopters in the united states and the release manager for koha 3.0, created liblime in 2005 in order to focus on providing support for koha users in north america (koha was released in 2000 and has a longstanding, active community in new zealand and europe; reading its well documented history and learning about its unsung heroes are good ways way to learn how open source projects evolve). while koha is as strong as its developer community—currently at about 90 developers, which is quite good—it seems likely that liblime’s success and koha’s will be intertwined for some time. unfortunately, there may be reasons to be concerned about liblime. most of what i’ve heard is just rumor, though in the last few days the liblime website’s management team page ceased to display photographs and blurbs about two of its members, debra denault (senior vice president, operations) and galen charlton (vice president, research and development, and the manager for the newest koha release, version 3.2). liblime also pulled its promised funding from the code4lib conference earlier this year rather suddenly and unexpectedly, or so it seemed to me. there could have been a non-financial reason for this decision, or it could have been a conservative move (the conference took place right after the sudden 2008-2009 downturn). just to be clear: i’m doing my best not to pass on gossip as fact, especially about a company whose employees i’ve met, respect, and like very much—and who funded a presenter, aaron swartz, when i found out last minute that ala wouldn’t waive aaron’s registration fee for the midwinter in philadelphia (even though he was addressing our discussion group for free and paying for his own travel expenses). and i’m not suggesting that either liblime or koha is in trouble. liblime is an important contributor to koha, but even among “pay for support” organizations, koha is bigger than liblime. still, just as it’s worth understanding what’s going on with automobile manufacturers before you buy a new car, it’s worth getting to know a bit about the groups who are working on your website software, whether they’re private companies or open source communities. evergreen, which was initially released by a consortium of georgia libraries as the pines catalog, saw several of its initial developers go on to found equinox software, a company that consults on evergreen installations. equinox has hired extraordinarily talented people, they’re hiring (which is always a good sign), and they have talented volunteers contributing code back to the project. to bring this back to the model i sketched out in the introduction, most of these “volunteers” are employed by libraries, not by equinox/evergreen. the rest of the projects have what could be considered a single point of failure: if their lead developer or sponsoring department were to abandon the project, they would likely lose a great deal of momentum. i believe, in each case, they would eventually regain that momentum or i would not have included them in this survey, but it seems clear to me that the other five projects are potentially less stable than evergreen or koha. based on its code updates, vufind appears to be adjusting well to its transition from being someone’s primary responsibility to being a community-based project. andrew nagy founded vufind while working for the library at villanova university (vufind is a pun on vu). he has since moved on to serials solutions, where he is one of the leaders of its summon product. vufind has received a mellon award and professional support is available through lyrasis, both of which are encouraging. however, it would be nice to see a new release (vufind’s latest release is its first release candidate for version 1.0, which came out on october 15, 2008) and, lyrasis, though large and diversified, is undergoing its own changes, so vufind could find itself with no organization other than its original developers offering commercial support. blacklight and kochief are similar to vufind, or at least to where it was when it was mostly a villanova project: blacklight is being supported primarily by the university of virginia library and kochief primarily by the drexel university library. both look great and are under active development, but neither has a large base of installed users. this is significantly mitigated by their use of popular languages and frameworks, but lack of support by virginia or drexel (at this point mostly drexel’s library systems developer, gabriel farrell) would be major blows to these projects. as far as institutional support, scriblio and sopac are a study in contrasts. scriblio isn’t technically based at a library: casey bisson, its lead developer, works as an information architect at plymouth state university, but he works centrally, not just for the library. he has, however, secured funding for scriblio from the mellon foundation and also joint funding from the neh/imls. meanwhile, sopac’s development has been funded by two of the finest and best funded public libraries in the country, ann arbor and darien, lead developer john blyberg’s former and current employers. neither scriblio nor sopac yet have large developer communities or installed user bases, and both remain highly reliant on their lead developers. self-hosted or outsourced one of the advantages of open source website software is the empowering feeling of downloading the software and running it on servers you control. however, it’s also useful to have the option of paying someone knowledgeable to run the software on their servers: as mentioned above, system administration is a career and an expense unto itself. some software offers the best of both worlds: go to wordpress.org and you can download wordpress and install it on your own servers; go to wordpress.com and you can sign up for a free website that’s powered by wordpress software, but works much like blogger or any other hosted software. in exchange, you give up a certain amount of control, but for many people it’s a welcome tradeoff. liblime and equinox specialize in their projects and offer hosting for them at what i consider reasonable prices. scriblio has a free hosting option that it is slowly rolling out to smaller libraries—an equivalent service to the wordpress.org/wordpress.com website option. for us, that was a big attraction. we give up some control, but taking server administration tasks and expenses out of the equation is a huge net win. to the best of my knowledge, there are no dedicated vufind, blacklight, kochief, or sopac hosts, though there are companies that specialize in php, rails, django, and drupal. for instance, palos verdes library district, which just released its sopac-based website, hired craftyspace to guide its implementation. help is available for running and hosting any of these projects, but for now managed hosting is most closely tied to koha, evergreen, and scriblio. choosing scriblio for me, the initial decision to use scriblio and the ongoing decision to stick with it are both difficult and obvious. i really like using wordpress and know it well—i created a very basic scriblio site even before i had my first interview for my current job, and setting it up took just a few hours—and i really like casey bisson as a person and as a web developer: our visions for libraries are awfully similar. for instance, scriblio creates unified websites: for scriblio libraries, the catalog and the rest of the website look alike and run on exactly the same software. what closed the deal for us was scriblio’s ability to pull in funding and its decision to turn some of that funding into free hosting for collingswoodlib.org (and similar libraries). scriblio isn’t perfect, but i’m very comfortable with scriblio and excited about where it’s heading. while i’ll be happier when there’s a larger developer community, more internal interest in standards, and better documentation, i have the ability to help make these changes. in particular, as one of scriblio’s early adopters, i bear more than a little responsibility for not having done more to improve its documentation; remedying this situation is high on my to do list. however, perhaps the main problem i have with scriblio is that my satisfaction with it diminishes my interest in getting more direct experience with the other software i could be using for our website. if i were a more talented programmer, i’d probably choose kochief because i’m most interested in learning python and django. i’ve also commented on my admiration for gabriel farrell elsewhere on this website. blacklight would probably be my next choice if i knew what i was doing: plenty of programmers i admire are fans of ruby and rails. if i were more interested in php, or was interested in hiring a developer, i’d strongly consider vufind. its user interface is attractive and polished, and a lot of good thinking and good work has gone into this project. if i had more money to spend on implementation and training, i’d hire liblime to host koha and migrate our data, or equinox to migrate us over and host us on evergreen. my hope, which i try to make real via advocacy, is that a larger entity than collingswood—camden county, vale, the new jersey state library—will make this decision and include us as partners. from what i’ve seen, i strongly prefer koha and evergreen websites to what millennium offers. as for choosing between the two, i’m not yet able to do it and don’t see any reason to decide just yet, though i have learned enough to decide that i don’t yet want us to abandon millennium on our own. when the time comes to migrate our data, both projects will have changed, plus we’ll be making the move alongside partners. fortunately, koha and evergreen are both great and getting better. i’ll decide later which one i most hope to use. if i were to leave scriblio tomorrow, the project i’d likely leave it for would be sopac. while i prefer wordpress to drupal, it’s mostly because i’ve been working on smaller projects: drupal was initially developed with more complex websites in mind, while wordpress was initially developed to handle simpler sites. they’ve been converging for years, as wordpress has gotten better at bigger sites and drupal has gotten better at smaller sites, but there’s still a perception—one i admit to not having tested in a few years—that drupal is better at handling larger websites. i also like the fact that sopac, like scriblio, creates more unified websites (why is it that most libraries still subject their users to a website that includes the catalog only as an adjunct?) and that sopac has darien library as its primary funding source and john blyberg as its lead developer. plus, it’s attractive, flexible, and fairly easy to implement: all in all, a deserving winner of lita’s 2009 brett butler award. for now, i’m happy with scriblio. it meets our basic needs and is steadily improving. perhaps the best endorsement i can offer for scriblio, at least for smaller, public libraries like collingswood, is my endorsement of its competitors. we use scriblio in spite of its competition, not because of it. thanks to casey bisson, nicole engard, and gabriel farrell for reading an early draft of this article, and to my itlwtlp colleague, derik badman, for helping me with its final version. blacklight, drupal, evergreen, kochief, koha, library websites, open source, scriblio, sopac, vufind, wordpress a look at librarianship through the lens of an academic library serials review we’re gonna geek this mother out 32 responses pingback : great post about floss projects and libraries | korerorero owen 2009–07–22 at 7:43 am i’m curious why you don’t like “integrated library system.” do you prefer “library management system?” it seems to me it’s necessary to have a way of distinguishing between an ils/lms and more standalone or add-on opac software. kyle 2009–07–22 at 8:55 am here’s an interesting statement: there’s a good chance that a lot of the code will be contributed by volunteers—people who aren’t even employed by libraries, but are interested in the problems and possibilities presented by creating software for library users and employees. i hope it happens, i really do. it would be great for the open source community to step up and support an institution that has shared its resources freely for decades, we do share a philosophy that way. i wonder if what you’re seeking, an os ils a great point: as projects grow, people interested in writing documentation tend to get involved—and they make their discussions public. users and developers post their thoughts about issues they encounter and they link directly to the documentation, which means search engines become one of the best resources in understanding a feature or solving a problem with open source software. to me this is easily the best characteristic of os projects, the momentum that grows within its developer and user-base that motivates people to help each other through open and accessible documentation and tutorials. it really is key. an extensive post, but i read every word. thanks! ~kyle~ @thecorkboard kyle 2009–07–22 at 8:56 am you can ignore this trailing sentence :) “i wonder if what you’re seeking, an os ils…” ~kyle~ emily ford 2009–07–22 at 9:43 am nice article! i have the same question owen has. can you tell us more about your grouch with the term “integrated library system” for koha and evergreen? also, would you mind spending some time thinking about and responding to the following: how can we successfully advocate for open source in institutional environments that are, um, less than “open?” (universities, research institutes, other organizations that have centralized web sites, etc.) pingback : 7 open source library software to consider…07.22.09 « the proverbial lone wolf librarian’s weblog brook westheimer 2009–07–22 at 10:26 am great article! full of plenty of useful information. ranti 2009–07–22 at 11:09 am nice article! it’d be interesting to do a cost analysis between paying commercial companies for their programmer time vs. having our own programmer. institution like ours might need to include the overhead as well (benefits, health insurance, etc.) john 2009–07–22 at 11:14 am really, really good and comprehensive post, brett. i could use this as the basis of any discussion on os catalogs, and indeed i will. thanks. pingback : libology blog » the state of open-source library software david talley 2009–07–22 at 1:29 pm add my thanks to the others for a thoughtful catalog. i wonder a little, however, about your premise that libraries can capture all of the overhead and profit that commercial software vendors have pocketed in the past. can libraries manage teams of developers as effectively as professional software companies can? i see the sense behind this extension of a library’s management skillset, but i’m not sure it’s going to work out as well in practice as we might imagine it in theory. just as documentation is its own skillset, so is it project management. do libraries risk diluting and defusing their focus on their central mission as they reset priorities toward developing those tech skills? contracting for a hosted installation of an os system is a way around part of this dilemma, but i’d be interested in thoughts about managing the coding projects themselves. jessamyn 2009–07–22 at 1:42 pm very nice and thorough article. every time i go to a library conference and see the big vendor types wiht their fancy booths, free drinks and other schwag i think that this is money that we spend on ils stuff that is not returned to us in terms of features or fixes. i bet selling is an even larger part of that little graph you made than most people imagine. brett bonfield 2009–07–22 at 2:40 pm @owen and emily: my primary issue with the jargon is that it seems to be institutionalizing decisions that no longer make sense. amazon has a website. we have an alphabet soup of software that’s getting better, but still doesn’t come close to competing with the user experience amazon offers. if we were to start from scratch, i suspect that we’d come up with something more unified, such as the new oclc web-scale service promises to be. and perhaps we still will. andrew pace, who is leading this project for oclc, previously managed ncsu’s endeca implementation, a website innovation that helped to serve as a blueprint for several of the open source projects i refer to in this article (from the kochief website: “kochief began with casey durfee’s open source endeca in 250 lines or less presentation at the code4lib 2007 conference, where he claimed to provide faceted features similar to the endeca and aquabrowser experiences using solr and django.”) @kyle: i agree about the great point above. i wish i could take credit for it, but it’s a comment casey bisson made after reading my first draft. @emily re: advocating for open source: what have you tried so far? what worked? what didn’t? @ranti: although they tend to be pretty dry, it might be worth checking out some total cost of ownership (tco) studies. @john: thanks. i hope you’ll publish as many of those discussions as time allows. @david: john (blyberg, above) is better qualified to comment on this than i am, though i think sopac speaks volumes by proxy. other than the libraries already mentioned in this article, some other examples of libraries who appear to be doing a nice job with their teams of developers include ncsu, the library of congress (it’s almost two years old, but i still love this post about the software they use internally), the university of rochester (home of the extensible catalog), and michigan (their labs project is really cool). @jessamyn: the thing that breaks my heart is when i talk to the salespeople themselves. they’re almost all bright, knowledgeable, hardworking, and helpful. they’d make great librarians. but instead we pay them to sell us access to software (or articles) we rent rather than own. alexandr ciornii 2009–07–22 at 4:08 pm why you don’t consider perl web frameworks like catalyst, jifty or cms like webgui, krang? nate curulla 2009–07–22 at 4:14 pm great article! but keep in mind with regard to koha that there are other options in the pay for support category, so if the one vendor mentioned here may look like they are having issues it should not reflect upon the stability of koha. it only shows that koha is an ever-evolving product that attracts competition. both bywater solutions llc and ptfs inc. are two pay for support vendors that have recently entered the market, and more will continue to come along. i believe that koha is more dependent on the success of the community more so than on the success of it’s support companies. brett bonfield 2009–07–22 at 4:52 pm @alexandr: the list wasn’t meant to be a comprehensive inventory of all the cool languages, frameworks, and applications i’d like to work with, it was meant to reflect what’s actually happening, or what i think seems likely to happen, in open source library website software. in addition to the perl web frameworks you mention, i also left out sinatra, joomla, plone, a bunch of interesting php and python frameworks, etc. the point of the exercise was to make sure people consider the underlying code in any website decision they make. @nate: agreed. i wrote, “liblime is an important contributor to koha, but even among ‘pay for support’ organizations, koha is bigger than liblime,” and ‘pay for support’ in that sentence links to a list of vendors that includes bywater and ptfs. however, liblime is at the top of that list, and liblime employees have been release managers for the last two koha versions as well as the documentation manager for both releases (and i think koha’s documentation is one of its best assets). even if, as i played around with in the intro, libraries suddenly swooped in and hired every liblime employee, i think it’s clear that koha would continue to be a great software project, though i also believe that liblime’s absence would be a significant blow to the community. that’s all i was trying to say: “it seems likely that liblime’s success and koha’s will be intertwined for some time.” monica schultz 2009–07–22 at 5:52 pm great article! i’m an oss advocate and believe funds are better spent on programming to offer any service you wish rather than making someone else rich. oss has been around for a very long time and hope that libraries can see the benefits of oss though this comes with a culture change which i’m hopeful will happen in california sooner than later :o) chris cormack 2009–07–22 at 6:47 pm hi there, id like to add my voice to nate’s. i’m chris cormack from catalyst and we provide koha support too. (ive been working on koha since 1999) hopefully some of the other people will chime in to help provide some reassurance. dan scott 2009–07–22 at 8:59 pm biblibre is another company that contributes substantial development effort to koha and offers support services. always nice to have international perspectives from companies like biblibre and catalyst. i could quibble and note that evergreen runs on the opensrf framework (json over xmpp for scalable web services in 2005… just a few years ahead of google wave’s similar technology), and that c is just as entrenched as perl in evergreen’s core – but all in all you’ve done a good job of knitting this all together. nicolas morin 2009–07–23 at 2:17 am gee, dan scott was faster than myself telling you that my company exists ;-) indeed : biblibre has been coding stuff in koha, and supporting libraries running koha for a long time. our own paul poulain first sent a patch in 2002 and we now have a staff of 8 mostly working on koha-related stuff. your point was well made though: koha has a community that’s strong enough, and big enough, that it will outlast any individual company going belly up, ours or any other. and to answer @jessamyn : we don’t go to conferences with fancy booths. it’s costly, and more often than not a loss of time too. but we do travel a lot to actually meet librarians in libraries, and benefit from word of mouth : you have a good ils, you do good work, you’re open to new ideas and new projects. that’s what works for us. mj ray (software.coop) 2009–07–23 at 8:25 am hi there. i’m a member of software.coop and a past release maintainer for koha. we provide koha installation, support and development services and i’ve done a lot of pro-bono hacking on it in the past (sql injection prevention stands out in my mind as a particularly long and dull one that we funded ourselves), in line with the core cooperative principle of community benefit. i know we’ve been overshadowed in recent years, but now that the credit crunch is affecting capital-based companies more than cooperatives, we’re starting on the comeback road. even without us, i don’t think koha’s success is dependent on any one company: companies have joined and left the koha community over time. that said, we’ve been trying to encourage a broader community than one dominated by a few support companies, but librarians haven’t really wanted to get involved. is this changing? do librarians care more about sustainable community in these uncertain times? of course, as a member of a tech worker cooperative, i’d love to see the oclc co-op getting involved with koha to represent their member libraries, or some other library co-ops getting heavily involved. can you help to make it happens? susan oneal 2009–07–23 at 8:47 am a thorough, updated review of open source for librariesmuch appreciated and i hope has a large audience. btw, you may not know of three public library koha projects in nj. two live installations are highland park pl, which used an out-of-the box koha and liblime for migration and support; e brunswick pl, which went live last week, and my library, middletown township pl, which plans to go live in september. e. brunswick and mtpl have partnered together with ptfs in md for project migration, support and a pretty hefty [$$ and #] amount of development, which we are very excited to be able to share with the koha community. in our situation, we required self-check out, computer time mgt, and a telephone notification system to be integrated with koha and since these are not robust enough in the library open source “market” our plan is to integrate proprietary systems with koha. i think this is something that open source proponents need to acknowledge as both possible and practical in the short term. finally a comment on the post above that asked the question “do librarians care….” of course we care and the opportunity to get involved [i can see from personal observation of my staff] has regenerated several long careers in librarianship. i’d ask the tech community to ask librarians what we can drop from our service plate so that we can devote more time to open source. it’s all been an “add-on” to customer demanded servicesso we are pretty exhausted these days. however, the energy of the koha community to push for product excellence and improve collaborationas evidenced in meetings such as this year’s kohacon in plano tx keeps inspiring us and reinforcing that our decision to go open source is not only the best one we’ve made since self-check out [2004] but the one with the most long term global impact on library operations since around the late 1970’s. john 2009–07–23 at 11:05 am in response to david above– yes, the decision to initiate and support an open source development project is one that should not be taken lightly. darien library chose to make a commitment to sopac on the basis of several criteria. 1) no other product exists that will do what we wanted. 2) we incorporated the design an implementation of sopac into our existing service model. 3) sopac, as a product, fills a giant, gaping hole in the next-gen catalog market and we were very confident that we would be able to pull together a development group to share in the development burden in the long-term. with regards to the third point, that is exactly what has happened–to the extent that commercial support is now available for sopac through craftyspace, who has committed back to the project some very valuable work. biblibre (mentioned earlier) has also contributed back to the project (they did the scut-work for internationalization support, and a french translation). add to that, active development work being done at three other libraries beyond darien and it becomes apparent that sopac is a very healthy os project. beyond that, your argument that these pursuits dilute our core mission makes some assumptions about what our core mission is that i might not necessarily agree with. david dorman 2009–07–23 at 12:37 pm here are additional os library software that did not get mentioned in the article. you would do your readers a service by giving these applications some attention in a future article. irspy (registry software for maintaining z39.50/sru gateways; developed by mike taylor) metaproxy (metasearch middleware; developed by index data) opals (an ils; developed by mediaflex) pazpar2 (metasearch middleware; developed by index data) yaz family of programs (tools for building z39.50/sru applications; developed by index data) zebra (db server & indexing engine; developed by index data) david brett bonfield 2009–07–23 at 1:03 pm it’s great to hear from the oss community. as i wish i’d made more explicit in my post, i want oss to succeed and i believe that it will, in part, because of the companies that are available to support it. i haven’t changed any text in the comments above, but i’ve made some comments conform with how we try to handle links (criteria: our readers’ convenience, accessibility, and fairness). as of now, only the first mention of a company is linked, and i’ve gone back and added links to the companies that provide koha support even if the commenter did not. the companies listed on the koha “pay for support” page i linked to in the original article but which have not yet been mentioned are: strategic data; turo technology llp (see link to the software coop, above); calyx information essentials; inlibro; openlx; pakistan library automation group; national centre for high-performance computing; tamil; sabinet; nucsoft oss labs; anant corporation; and libsoul. comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct learning to teach through video – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 14 oct kim leeder /13 comments learning to teach through video samsungtv 009 photo by flickr user ousby c/o by kim leeder it’s a truth so many of us keep in the dark corners of our lives as instruction librarians: we were never taught to teach. we’re not unusual, really, and the same is true of many of our higher education colleagues. we study a field, we gain some expertise in that field, and then – bam! – we’re thrown into the classroom without even a short lesson on instructional pedagogy. of course, most instruction librarians adapt admirably to this circumstance by doing some research, talking to more experienced colleagues, and gathering ideas from conferences. we get up to speed as quickly as possible by drawing on the knowledge around us. in this way, we improvise and improve our teaching to a level that is, in most cases, sufficient. when we try to adapt our instructional strategies to a new medium, however, the challenge begins anew. teaching in the classroom is not the same as teaching through a course management system (such as blackboard), and teaching on blackboard is different than teaching through video. all of these technologies tax our already minimal knowledge of instructional theory, and the results can turn out to be rather ineffective. i’ll be the first to admit that i have made students watch far too many dull, lengthy screencast videos in the effort to help them learn about research. and i’ve seen many similar videos around on youtube and on other library websites. our intentions are always good – to educate, to equip students with research skills – but the tools we produce could be better. recently my colleagues and i have begun a project to train ourselves in the pedagogy and technology of how to make effective video tutorials. i’d like to share some of what we’ve learned so far. it has all been new to me, and i hope that others may benefit from our efforts. a couple of disclaimers: first, i don’t claim to be an expert in video creation or educational pedagogy. my knowledge is still nascent. second, i don’t advocate video for video’s sake: be sure a video tutorial is the right medium for your intended goals before jumping into the recording process. when you want to teach a certain skill or idea, start by asking: how can i best get this information across? sometimes it will be video, but other times a step-by-step text description can be simpler and more effective. although as librarians we’re always eager to embrace the new technologies, it’s helpful to remember that the “old” technologies have their strengths as well. tasks that involve basic, step-by-step instructions may be better presented as text on a webpage (or–gasp!–handout) that will be easier for students to follow as they complete the steps in another browser window. on the other hand, those that involve navigation through various, complex online interfaces may need video be clear. sometimes it’s best to provide information in both formats to provide for different learning styles. some pedagogical context two well-known educational psychologists, richard e. mayer and roxana moreno, have written extensively on the cognitive implications of multimedia learning. most notable of their writings for our purposes is a 2003 article in educational psychologist entitled, “nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning.” the gist of the article is that the human brain’s ability to process information is divided into two channels, the verbal and the visual. and no matter what our multi-tasking millennials would have us believe, the brain can process only a limited amount of information from each channel at any given moment. here’s what the cognitive process looks like according to mayer and moreno. information comes in through those two “channels” of our ears and eyes. from everything we take in through our immediate, sensory memory, we select certain words and pictures that are processed to our working, or short-term, memory. at that point we begin making sense out of those pieces: aligning the images and sounds, organizing them into meaning, and most importantly, connecting the results with our prior knowledge in a way that will be added to our long-term memory. all of these steps are important, but perhaps most critical here is what happens between the sensory memory absorbing information and the working memory organizing it: selection. that’s the point where details will be lost unless we are careful to provide the most essential information as clearly and simply as possible, to ease the selection process along. so our students need to go through several steps to make meaning out of what we teach them: first, by paying attention; second, by making sense out of it; and third, by applying it to what they already know about the topic. as a result, educators using multimedia need to be thoughtful about the amount of information we’re providing through video and audio channels, and the pace at which we’re providing the information, to ensure that we’re giving students enough time to process it in ways that make sense to them. if we provide too much information at once, we cause cognitive overload, at which point our students shut down, lose interest, or otherwise simply stop learning. when beginning a new video tutorial, the most critical elements are the most basic ones: (i) identifying the audience, (ii) determining the goal or goals, and (ii) breaking down the task into its most basic elements. it’s always helpful to state the video’s goals at the start of a tutorial, and restate them again at the end to reinforce the message. the clearer the message of a video, the less cognitive load it will require from students who are trying to make sense out of it, and the more brainpower they will have left to process and internalize the skills being taught. all of this needs to be taken into account to achieve the goal of meaningful learning, which mayer and moreno define as “deep understanding of the material, which includes attending to important aspects of the presented material, mentally organizing it into a coherent cognitive structure, and integrating it with relevant existing knowledge.” principles of multimedia learning so how do we take advantage of cognitive theory to create meaningful learning through video tutorials? the key is to carefully review every element we add to a video to determine whether it is adding to or detracting from the viewer’s experience. to help us with this, moreno and mayer offer a series of principles on how people process multimedia, and in the article i mentioned above, make nine recommendations for multimedia instruction based on those principles (these were nicely encapsulated by ross perkins, assistant professor of educational technology at boise state university, in a workshop he provided for myself and my colleagues): split attention principle: students learn better when instruction material does not require them to split their attention between multiple sources of mutually referring information. modality principle: students learn better when the verbal information is presented auditorily as speech rather than visually as on-screen text both for concurrent and sequential presentations. redundancy principle: students learn better from animation and narration than from animation, narration, and text if the visual information is provided simultaneously to the verbal information. spatial contiguity principle: students learn better when on-screen text and visual materials are physically integrated rather than separated. temporal contiguity principle: students learn better when verbal and visual materials are temporally synchronized rather than separated in time. coherence principle: students learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included in multimedia explanations. as recommendations based on these principles, mayer and moreno suggest: using narration without on-screen text to remove the need for students to read and listen to text at the same time (called “off-loading”); allowing short breaks, or pauses, between sections of a presentation (called “segmenting”); starting off the presentation with lessons about any terms or concepts that are new and important to what they will learn in the video (called “pretraining”); leaving out any unnecessary audio or visual elements (called “weeding”); using arrows, highlighting, or other cues to the viewer as a means of clarifying important points or confusing images (called “signaling”); ensuring that on-screen text and images that rely on each other are shown physically close together (called “aligning”); removing visual elements that are duplicated by narration or graphics (called “eliminating redundancy”); maintaining a close match between narration and visual elements shown in the video (called “synchronizing”); and when possible, considering the particular audience of a video and matching the presentation style to their learning style(s). for instance, consider videos that include both verbal narration and on-screen text. providing such duplicative information is likely to bog down a student by requiring them to process the same information twice, using both verbal and visual channels. meanwhile, if the narration and on-screen text is being shown simultaneously with a screencast or other video element, it is likely that the student will not be able to process this third piece at all. instead, using verbal narration with a screencast will probably be more effective at keeping the student’s cognitive load manageable. similarly, when using a screencast of a library homepage, keep in mind that the large number of images and links on an average page can also cause overload. it’s easy to add a large arrow or call-out identifying the particular link you want students to see, and it will significantly reduce the cognitive demands of the shot. mayer and moreno’s oeuvre includes much more guidance on these issues, as does a 2006 article by nadaleen tempelman-kluit in college & research libraries. planning for video instruction with busy lives and jobs, many of us choose to create video tutorials on the fly simply by transferring strategies used at the reference desk or one-shot instruction. honestly, we do it every day at the desk, right, so how hard can it be to simply record the same information? well, it is harder than one might think when considering both pedagogical and cognitive implications. it’s important to begin with a plan; a breakdown of exactly what the goal(s) of the video will be, how the goal(s) will be achieved, and what exact steps must be shown in the video without any unnecessary or distracting elements. storyboarding is perhaps one of the most underestimated but most critical parts of the process of creating an instructional video. this is the same approach used by filmmakers to plan out scenes, props, and actors required in every different part of a movie. storyboarding does not have to be complicated or high art, it can simply be a listing of what will happen in each scene, in full detail. it requires us to walk through every second of the video in advance to make sure it is doing what we want it do. storyboards can be sketched out on paper or digitally but should incorporate whatever will be taking place on the screen visually, the full script that a narrator will speak, and an indication of any additional sound or graphical elements (such as call-outs) that may be included. i’ve just started using powerpoint as a storyboarding tool — putting visual elements in the slide section, and audio in the notes — and fellow leadpiper derik suggests post-it notes as a quick and easy method. storyboards help in planning a video so that it can be created in a way that reduces cognitive load for students, while also allowing us to budget our time more efficiently in the creation process. storyboards photo by flickr user cgc (cc by-nc 2.0) because each scene needs to be attended to individually, storyboards are useful on another issue in the planning process: reminding us to record video in short, manageable segments. first, this is helpful because it cuts out the precious seconds that tick by when we are transitioning between pages, such as when searching a database and waiting for the results to come up. second, recording short segments can be wonderful when something in the video needs to be updated later. the web pages and interfaces we rely on for our library catalogs and research databases change frequently, which can create a challenge when trying to maintain video tutorials that include them. when video clips are kept short, it is easy to re-record part of the video that includes the changed visual elements and drop the new clip into the tutorial. of course, those new clips can only be integrated if our method of organizing video files and completed tutorials is clear. it’s easy to let the long list of video clip, screen shot and screencast files flow into a variety of folders without keeping track of them. however, when those files are carefully tracked and identified (by filename) on the storyboard, and then all of the raw production files archived together for future reference, maintenance and updating suddenly becomes far easier and far less time consuming. the software many of the best videos incorporate a mix of screencasting (or screen recording), live video from a camera, and slide clips. in some cases they may also include extra sound effects or supplemental audio tracks. this can get complicated when working with so many different types of files. and, not surprisingly, there is no perfect, easy-to-use software package for video tutorial creation. camtasia studio from techsmith is generally considered to be the standard for true video and audio editing. camtasia is one of the few programs that accepts a wide variety of audio and video formats, and makes it possible to edit and integrate them in sophisticated ways. on the downside it is expensive and takes time to learn; after using it for over a year i am just starting to feel competent in the software. camtasia is available for a 30-day trial, and techsmith provides a number of high-quality (wouldn’t they have to be?) video tutorials on how to use the software. in addition to camtasia, there are a number of simpler, free programs that make some of the same functions possible. for screencasting only, techsmith also provides a program called jing that is far simpler and more user-friendly than camtasia, so that can be a great place to start for those new to video creation. screentoaster is a similar program, but unlike jing it’s web-based so does not require installation. unfortunately, neither jing (free version) nor screentoaster offer much in the way of editing options, nor do they provide screencasting files that can be integrated with other video clips. when working just with live video from a webcam or video camera, the simplest editing options are the default pc and mac programs: windows movie maker and imovie. both can be useful and make it easier to get started, but they also have more limited options than camtasia. for audio editing alone, audacity is a free program that many use for creating sound clips, sound effects, and podcasts. the settings used during video creation can have a big impact on the quality of the results. for the best quality, experts recommend that the resolution of the video recording should be as close as possible to the final product. for instance, youtube’s standard video resolution is 640 pixels by 480 pixels, so recording should take place at that image size. we’ve all seen screencast videos that recorded the individual’s entire screen at a resolution such as 1280×720, produced the video at the same size, and then uploaded the video to youtube, only to see the video size compressed to a degraded and unreadable result. recording at such a high resolution would, however, be appropriate for youtube’s high definition video, which uses 1280×720 as the standard. recording size can be changed within the video recording software or camera settings, or for screencasting the entire screen resolution can be changed to fit the desired result. it’s important, too, to be consistent in recording size when using video from several sources (screencast, webcam, video camera, etc.). overall, video should be both recorded and produced at whatever size is needed for the platform where it will be viewed in the end.   conclusion in general, all of the recommendations from cognitive theory indicate that the simpler the video, the better. the challenge is to balance this simplicity with our other needs: to cover complex material, to cater to various learning styles, to be accessible to hearing impaired students, to work within our often-limited video editing skills, and even to be entertaining. instruction through multimedia is highly challenging, often frustrating, and extremely time-consuming, but when done well it can have a dramatic impact upon student learning. for example, let’s look at a couple of great examples of videos that are both engaging and reflect awareness of the pedagogical and cognitive considerations described above. i’ll start off with a video from common craft, a great example of simplicity in action: common craft videos are excellent at breaking down an idea or task into its simplest elements and presenting them clearly and concisely without audio or visual distractions. they do all this in mere minutes while maintaining a level of humor and entertainment throughout to keep viewers interested. or how about this one? the university of texas at arlington has started a series of “librarian vs. stereotype” videos that are engaging and informative while still getting their message across: notice the simple white background; the creators of this video omitted any distractions or visual elements other than the people on the screen. and it works! our educational psychologist friends might have recommended against the background music as a non-essential element that adds to viewers’ cognitive load, but otherwise this is a terrific instructional video. now it’s your turn: what are your favorite examples of high quality instruction videos? what have been your experiences in trying to create videos for teaching? the comments below are open for your thoughts, links, and experiences. many thanks to lead pipers ellie collier and derik badman, as well as my boise colleagues memo cordova and ellie dworak, for providing valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this post. want to learn more? here are a few places to start: ganster, l. a., & walsh, t. r. (2008). enhancing library instruction to undergraduates: incorporating online tutorials into the curriculum. college & undergraduate libraries, 15(3), 314-333. mayer, r. e., & moreno, r. (2003). nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. educational psychologist, 38(1), 43-52. oud, j. (2009). guidelines for effective online instruction using multimedia screencasts. reference services review, 37(2), 164-177. tempelman-kluit, n. (2006). multimedia learning theories and online instruction. college & research libraries, 67(4), 364-9. educational theory, instruction, psychology, tutorials, videos an inflection point for american public libraries [re]boot camp: share some. learn more. teach better. 13 responses chad 2009–10–14 at 11:42 am very good discussion of tools, methods, and pedagogy. the tools are getting easier to use, and it’s become really easy to slap together a video or screencast without thinking about it, which i have been guilty of doing myself. captivate and other tools are just like powerpoint in that they give the user the ability to make really awesome or really terrible presentations. sometimes you don’t need to use every single feature that the software has, even though it’s tempting to do so. hopefully your post will keep readers from using text, arrows, fade-ins, and animated gifs all over their videos. while we have adobe captivate, i spend most of my time making screencasts and videos with camstudio (open source), my flip mino camera, and windows movie maker. it’s fairly low tech, but i can usually turn a video around pretty quickly. my storyboard is generally based on the questions i get from students, so i try to make the video for the broadest audience possible. i’m using blip.tv to host the videos, and then embedding them on places like this biz wiki page. i appreciate the links and further reading you’ve provided, and i’ll definitely be checking those out. thanks again for a great post. –chad ron 2009–10–14 at 3:05 pm this was extremely useful, thank you so much. btw, here is a tip to convert powerpoint presentations to video: smart ppt to video converter kim duckett 2009–10–14 at 4:58 pm thanks, kim! this is a wonderful overview of best practices in instructional video creation! it’s perfect content to share with librarians new to video projects as well as a good reminder for those who have been working with video for awhile. i particularly appreciate your great overview of cognitive load theory, which i also view as critical to keep in mind (but you sum it up much better than me). i second your point that video isn’t always the answer. it’s really hot right now and we librarians are all over it, but it can’t always be the right packaging for instructional content. for one thing, a video channels the user’s experience in a linear way when maybe what they really need is to scan text or images for the content that jumps out at them as most helpful. i think video is good for “show and tell” training (i.e. how to use a tool) and, in some cases, to tell a narrative that might be complicated or overwhelming to read. here’s a great example of the narrative genre that i just came across today: open access 101 – kim tom 2009–10–15 at 10:03 am this is cool. but man, creation (meaning “quality” creation) is really time-consuming. shooting a simple video with narration isn’t too hard with some rehearsal, but this professional production stuff is a full-time gig. a couple of years ago, i presented a program for creating flash-based instruction using powerbullet and wink (free software) for simple instruction (the files are still accessible here, http://www.pbclibrary.org/seflin/energize.htm), but i haven’t gotten into video editing. before i became a librarian, i thought i would be a media specialist, so i took a few eduction classes, and before that, i thought i could get into tv so i had some production training, so the theory for video production and instruction is still in my brain, somewhere (maybe). and about converting ppt to video (re: “ron says”), i save the slides as size 14.2 x 10.7 jpgs (matches a 1028 x 764 resolution screen) then use nero visionexpress that came with my dvd-burner to make video shows with pretty-good slide transitions. i have one in vcd format that plays on a cheap dvd player and it runs all day on an old tv in the teen area. (sorry, to go on so long..) thanks again. ellie 2009–10–15 at 1:36 pm fantastic article kim. thanks for summarizing and sharing. i think more of us could also be using what’s already out there and good as opposed to creating new mediocre. going on some of the collaboration ideas from jean’s post, i’d love to see a curated repository of exemplary instruction videos that would could direct students to. i know there are a number of places collecting instruction videos, and even specifically library instruction, but i haven’t seen one with a quality control mechanism or with explicit please copy this licensing. derik badman 2009–10–15 at 2:59 pm even better, a repository of the videos as raw material (video clips, audio clips), so that different libraries could remix their own version (with their own specific logos/peculiarities… kind of like nin releasing songs for fans to remix in garageband. pingback : friday link round up « ellie <3 libraries nadaleen 2009–11–02 at 9:02 am this is a great summary, thanks! also, thanks for the shoutout-i’m nadaleen, author of: tempelman-kluit, n. (2006). mul­ti­me­dia learn­ing the­o­ries and online instruc­tion. col­lege & research libraries, 67(4), 364 – 9. i love the common craft video examples as a good example of less is more. i actually tried a few of these type of videos for the library, and the process highlighted just how hard they are to make, and how much expertise they involve. here’s an example of me and one other person mucking about to make pretty awful common craft *type* vidoes with library content: http://www.nyu.edu/library/resources/ntk/movie/teaching_lib.html just as we-instructional design librarians-aren’t trained in learning theory, we are also not technical experts in all things. i think to make such videos great, you’d need to work with a graphic designer and filmaker. anyway, food for thought and thanks again for a great post! pingback : pligg.com pingback : viral notebook » lights. camera. action! creating video to enhance instruction pingback : informatlinoverload pingback : libr 246 week 12 post « phowie50 pingback : ben's edublog my wicked problem project – part a this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct open ethos publishing at code4lib journal and in the library with the lead pipe – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 12 dec emily ford and carol bean /0 comments open ethos publishing at code4lib journal and in the library with the lead pipe in brief: the library world is deeply entrenched in the open ethos, yet there are few examples of library publications that engage in open editorial and peer review processes. in this article we discuss the challenges and opportunities posed by the open editorial processes used at in the library with the lead pipe and code4lib journal. to end, we discuss the need to grow open review and editorial processes in library and information science publications. photo by flickr user fayster (cc by 2.0) by emily ford and carol bean the open ethos open source. open access. massive open online courses. open government. open data. creative commons licensing. these days open movements are everywhere. one might say that open is a fad or trope, but what happens in the world of open goes beyond any clichéd use of the word. with the prevalence of the open concept bridging from computer programmers to academia to democracies around the world, openness is now a pervasive ethos that has, for years, steadily gained momentum. one thing is certain: the open ethos is here to stay. in the library and publishing field, open access has been a hot topic for quite some time. the library and information science (lis) literature has discussed the need for an open and changing economy of academic and scholarly information for many years. authors and publishers have engaged in discussions regarding the economics of journal publishing; many authors argue that current practices of pricing and access are unsustainable. some authors have even proposed entirely new models of publication that are constantly changing and iterative (perakakis, et al. 2010). open peer review, an emerging open movement, further opens journal publishing practices. it does more than promote free access to published content, it seeks to create open peer review and editorial processes. open peer review is loosely defined, which caused an interesting discussion during this article’s peer review process. however, it is generally accepted that open peer review refers to non-traditional peer review processes that include disclosure of author and reviewer identities to one another. this is the definition assumed throughout the rest of this article. there are many different ways that publications have approached open peer review. one way to quickly share research is via pre-print servers. arxiv—a pre-print community and server in physics that was started in 1991—is a great example. at arxiv authors submit articles to the pre-print server before peer review occurs. once articles are accepted for publication at a journal, authors may replace the pre-print version on arxiv with a final version, as allowed by the terms of their author agreements with publishers. in this environment, articles must be posted by an author who has been “endorsed” by another arxiv community member. in 2011, axel boldt argued for arxiv to extend its process to become a true publication with an open peer review process.1 some journals simply require reviewers to disclose their identities and conflicts of interest, much like british medical journal’s reviewer guidelines. others, such as the journal atmospheric chemistry and physics (acp), work for a completely transparent review process. acp publishes reviewer comments  and author replies alongside final versions of accepted and published articles. some of these reviewer comments are anonymous, while others are attributed. at acp it is up to the referees whether they would like to disclose their identity. either way, their comments are published. there is no one uniform way that journals engage in and implement open peer review. although more examples of open peer review exist within the sciences, social sciences and humanities have also begun to engage the open ethos and open peer review experiments. currently, a second special issue of shakespeare quarterly using open review is underway. the first special issue used a “hybrid workflow” for the peer review process. it began with article vetting, performed by editors, and then opened articles to public peer review. in this public phase, authors’ and reviewers’ identities were disclosed. finally, in its third and closed phase, editorial decisions regarding acceptance or rejection were made. (fitzpatrick & rowe, 2010). other current experiments include peerj, a new model of open access publicationbased on a membership feethat encourages referees and authors to engage in an optional open peer review process. arguments in favor of open peer review cite numerous advantages for an open peer review process. one such advantage is that open peer review enables rich academic dialogue. wendy lipworth and her co-authors (2011) argue that their research “findings provide additional reasons … for allowing reviewers and authors to form direct personal relationships, for allowing reviewers to discuss their reviews with their colleagues, or for opening up the review process to broader participation” (p. 278). similarly, several authors argue that open peer review creates a more rigorous review process than traditional peer review, thus ensuring the quality of published articles. (mahrag & duncan, 2007; pöschl & koop, 2004; pöschl, 2008; bornmann, et al, 2010). when reviewer comments are published, reviewers are held publicly accountable for the quality of their reviews. additionally, bornmann (2011) and his co-authors performed citation analysis of articles reviewed and published by atmospheric chemistry and physics, finding review quality is the same as other journals in the field, and that articles published by the journal are more highly cited. boldt (2011) suggests that open peer review allows for a higher quality of referee comments than those written for closed review processes. finally, open peer review enables publication process timelines to be substantially shortened (cope & kalantzis, 2009; pöschl, 2008), thereby having quicker impact on research and academic communities. so too, are libraries and librarianship part of the emerging open ethos. our journals are no exception. both in the library with the lead pipe and code4lib journal (c4lj) use open peer review and editorial processes.2 in the rest of this article, we discuss the mechanics and experiences of open editorial and peer review processes at these journals, and make a case for the growth of open process publications in library and information science. the journals both in the library with the lead pipe and code4lib journal are open access publications  governed by editorial groups. the journals publish under creative commons licenses and are dedicated to participating in the open ethos of publishing. while regular lead pipe readers may be familiar with its founding and history from reading editorials such as have we changed the world yet?  and the survey says, readers may not be as familiar with code4lib and code4lib journal. code4lib journal is a part of the code4lib community, where open source, open access and open process are core identifying values of the group. the code4lib community includes anyone who self-identifies as a member. the barrier to participating in the community is low; the primary mechanisms are through the code4lib mailing list and internet relay chat (irc), supplemented by many regional meetings and an annual conference. while c4lj began as a vehicle for more formal and durable information sharing in the code4lib community, even the preliminary discussions expected a global audience. c4lj’s mission defines its audience as anyone and everyone interested in “the intersection of technology and libraries.” articles arrive in the journal’s inbox from several avenues: informal suggestions in the group’s irc and at the group’s annual conference, personal solicitations from members of the editorial committee or code4lib community, and in response to announcements sent to other email lists. c4lj’s reach is, indeed, global: it receives proposals from around the world. the journal’s focus, however, is far from global.  during the start up phase of c4lj, the inaugural editorial board came up with a list of topic ideas for articles which seemed to fit the interests of the code4lib community, and listed them in the journals’ article guidelines section. the fact that the journal has a limited area of interest makes it look like a more traditional avenue of scholarly communication. the fact that it doesn’t have traditional peer review as one of its identifying features has led to some interesting queries and discussions at c4lj. in line with the code4lib community’s open ethos, everything about c4lj is publicly available.  besides information published at the journal’s site, instructions and processes are detailed on the code4lib’s wiki. the wiki is a centralized place to keep everything documented and, most importantly for the editorial board, visible. during its founding in 2008, one year after c4lj’s, in the library with the lead pipe’s editorial board was committed to openness. to that end, the editorial board  wanted to use open source software and code and publish an open access journal that used creative commons licensing. board members wanted to establish an open peer review process that mirrored the journal’s dedication to the open ethos; the editorial board looked to c4ljas an example of how to implement open peer review. the editorial processes in the library with the lead pipe the open peer review process at lead pipe begins with the formation of article topics. although the editorial board sometimes receives completed articles as submissions, it is much more common for individuals to propose an idea for an article, rather than a completed article. frequently lead pipe editorial board members will share article proposals over its listserv. if the author is not an editorial board member, the editorial board member does this on behalf of the guest. typically, the editorial board responds to article topic ideas with questions about the topic that aim to help focus the idea into an article of appropriate scope and relevance. the editorial board also shares with potential authors a framework document that poses questions aimed at helping potential authors think through their work. for example, when the editorial board discussed this proposal, a very useful email conversation ensued. emily: hi everyone, i have been thinking about my next post. i think i want to write about the peer-review process at lead pipe, and make an argument for why this is a great peer-review model and should/could be adopted for other peer-reviewed journals. thoughts? brett: i think this is a great topic, though i think our process should just be one of the ones included in the article. for instance, i’d like to see code4lib represented… i’d also like to see other journals represented as well. just not sure which ones. micah: i’d like to read this too, especially with the inclusion of the code4lib voice. there is some movement in the scholarly communication world to experiment with open peer review – famously shakespeare quarterly ran a special issue using this method. kathleen fitzpatrick wrote a good thing about it too, in her published-online-openly-then-picked-up-by-nyu-press book, planned obsolescence. go for it! i’d love to review! erin: i love the idea and look forward to reading this. i can help review if you want! from the outset peer feedback helped shape this article. fellow editorial board members suggested the inclusion of a code4lib voice, and hence this article collaboration was born. all articles published at lead pipe undergo review by at least one external peer reviewer and one internal reviewer. normally, however, more individuals are involved. external peer reviewers are individuals who are not members of the lead pipe editorial board. article authors are responsible for identifying and recruiting external reviewers for articles. sometimes authors will ask the editorial board for recommendations on who might be well suited to review an article, but authors often find suitable peer reviewers themselves. this mirrors common practice in the sciences, when authors are often asked to recommend suitable reviewers for the articles they submit. recruiting external peer reviewers for lead pipe has never been a problem, as there are plenty of smart, capable people all over the world. since lead pipe attempts to reach a wide audience and to broach a wide variety of topics of interest, our community of potential and past peer reviewers is equally diverse; many reviewers have not even been librarians. peer review of lead pipe articles occurs in a variety of ways. while some reviewers may prefer to mark up a document in a word processing program, most frequently authors share a google doc with their reviewers (and the entire editorial board or its members who agreed to review the article). using google docs, reviewers make substantive comments discussing the content and organization of articles. by using a collaborative tool, article authors, editors and reviewers can read and respond to all commentary. in this environment many discussions have developed. authors can respond to comments and directly ask for further clarification of comments. sometimes reviewers disagree with one another, sometimes they agree. sometimes reviewers agree with others’ comment, and expand on their ideas, asking additional substantive questions. sometimes agreement is expressed by a comment that merely says “+1.” the peer review process at lead pipe is iterative and cumulative. the end product of its review process is publication of quality articles. further, reader commentary on published articles complement and continue conversations begun by authors. several authors have discussed potential problems caused by publishing numerous article versions. (prug, 2010; bornmann et al, 2010). versions of articles are difficult to track and may influence impact measures. although article versioning is problematic, it provides a record of the intellectual labor put into the creation of an article. in traditional peer review this information goes unnoticed or could be entirely lost. open peer review processes provide more acknowledgement of the intellectual labor of reviewing and editing. at lead pipe all peer reviewers and editors who have reviewed and edited articles are acknowledged at the end of each article. code4lib journal similar to lead pipe, the initial discussion on the code4lib list about starting a journal considered peer review options, including a suggestion to have articles vetted on an open wiki. in the end, general consensus was that peer review, whether open or traditional, (1) would slow down the process, (2) wasn’t necessary for the journal’s purposes, and (3) was effectively achieved by the process and makeup of the editorial committee.3 c4lj’s mission simply states “to foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future.” to that end, c4lj requires that authors agree to the us cc-by license (creative commons attribution), which fit the journal’s goals of permitting the widest sharing possible while preserving authors’ rights to be acknowledged for their work. authors are strongly encouraged  to release code under a suitable open source license, recognizing that open source licensing is not always possible, or desirable, for authors.4  for the editorial board, publishing current, usable information is preferable to requiring open sourced code. the most important factor for the code4lib community, including the journal, is transparency.  while editorial discussions about articles are on a closed list, everything else about c4lj is as open and transparent as it can be. the ethos within the editorial committee has been to quickly move non-editorial discussions about the journal to the open, public discussion list. one of the goals of c4lj is a quick publication cycle of eighteen weeks between the call for proposals and the publication of an issue. although authors sometimes send completed articles to the editorial board in response to the call for proposals, what is more common is brief summaries of what will be covered and why it is important. if the summary is unclear, the editorial board and the author may engage in an iterative process to refine the ideas. proposals are read and voted on by the entire editorial committee. if a proposal is accepted, one of the editors volunteers to shepherd it through the publishing process, and another editor volunteers to be the “second reader,” which insures that at least two sets of eyes are reading the drafts as they come in. editorial discussions of proposals and articles are probably the only parts of the code4lib community that are not open and completely transparent.  although a transparent editing process was discussed prior to start up, the editors wanted a forum where they would be free to speak their minds without repercussions. in essence, the editorial committee is a group of peer reviewers that discuss the merits (or not) of proposals and subsequent articles. although each accepted proposal has an assigned editor and second reader, drafts are forwarded to the whole group for comments. most importantly, proposals and drafts are provisionally accepted. actual publication requires another vote by all the editors. articles that pass the second vote typically have four to six editors that have read the final draft and voted in favor of publication. although the editors’ discussion list is closed, it is an open peer review process in the sense that the entire editorial committee is identified on c4lj’s site. all of the editors, past and present, have strong backgrounds in computer technology, libraries and archives. when someone submits an article, they are getting über peer reviewed! there was a recent editorial committee discussion about going beyond simply identifying the members on c4lj’s site, to identify the assigned editor who worked on each article. the biggest concern was that placing an editor’s name on an article might end up identifying the editor in metadata as a co-author. it is apparent that lead pipe and c4lj have many similarities in their open peer review processes. both journals are organized by committees, are open in their decision making, and have placed value on openness in their publication and editorial processes. in short, lead pipe and c4lj share the open ethos and embed it into their review processes. so how has it worked in practicality? the editorial processes in practice in the library with the lead pipe since lead pipe’s editorial board is a group that makes decisions using consensus, it expects the best intentions from its authors and editorial board members. despite the positives of the review process at lead pipe, the board has had some frustrating experiences. in one instance, the board worked with an author, spending several hours to read an article draft and provide suggestions for improvement. the author even had a scheduled publication date for the article. however, the author stopped responding to the editorial board, missed the publication date, and several months later the article appeared in an entirely different journal. the editorial board has also faced other challenges as it relates to lead pipe’s peer review process. one such challenge is editorial timing. as editorial board member brett bonfield put it, “who sees what and when is always a difficult balance.” since many of the editorial board members are also regular authors for the journal they, individually, struggle with how much they should edit others’ work. questions arise, such as: “if we over edit are we doing so to the detriment of the author’s voice? do we leave most of the content and organization commentary to the official peer reviewers, or do editors step in?” likewise, when do editorial opinions step in over peer-reviewers? what is the boundary? in the peer-review process, sometimes the different roles between internal and external reviewer can get blurred. while internal reviewers usually provide more feedback in terms of editing for style, mistakes, and copy editing, they also chime in to discuss content and organization of articles. to what extent internal editors have freedom with what gets published is something that we find tricky, and something about which the editorial board has no written policy or rule. positive experiences with lead pipe’s peer review process far outweigh the negative ones. board members have approached fantastic individuals out of the blue to ask if they would review or be involved with particular articles. barbara fister, kathryn greenhill, paul ford and gina trapani are a few examples. although board members may have no personal connections to some reviewers, they have been willing to review and offer feedback of great quality about lead pipe’s ideas and writing. the editorial board has also been able to leverage our professional networks to identify talented reviewers with specialized knowledge about the particular topics addressed in articles undergoing review. for authors the collaborative environment is supportive and nurturing. lead pipe wants to publish creative ideas, so rejections occur only when a) an author proposed an idea that will fit better in a different publication, or b) authors cannot adequately respond to questions and concerns about article content. the editorial board rejects publication proposals where the author wishes to remain anonymous. all in all, editorial board members work in a supportive role to authors who have ideas and thoughts that they would like to see published. if there are problems with the execution, board members do their best to provide the editorial support and feedback to feel good about publishing the ideas as a final product. as editors, it is beneficial for board members and other reviewers to see one anothers’ comments. “i can see if we’re giving conflicting advice and address that. and i learn a lot from other editors’ comments” notes ellie collier, a lead pipe editorial board member. conflicting editor opinions allow authors to make informed choices about revisions and edits of their work. while an author may understand one editor’s objection to a statement or article organization, she may feel justified in revising less if there isn’t unanimous agreement among reviewers and editors. one challenge that lead pipe still faces, is that of further opening up its editorial and peer review processes. unlike c4lj, lead pipe does not have a wiki organizing its process or documents. rather, the editorial board relies on a mess of google docs explaining its processes. some readers asked for more transparency regarding lead pipe’s peer review processes via the reader poll. however, the editorial board is currently working on publishing what it has. in a recent editorial board google chat meeting, one editor stated, “fwiw, we weren’t opaque, just overwhelmed.” this brings us to possibly the largest challenge of publishing lead pipe. all of lead pipe’s editors and reviewers are volunteers. the journal is a labor of love and many lead pipe tasks occur at home during evenings and weekends. from the beginning the project was very much a diy one, and the editorial board still accomplishes what it does via a certain je ne sais quoi or scrappiness. code4lib journal at c4lj the editorial committee likes getting complete drafts as proposals, but believes requiring only an abstract level proposal for an article speeds up the publication process. authors receive feedback fairly quickly about whether the committee is interested in a topic or not. the committee tries to hold to a thirteen week publication cycle from provisional acceptance to publication, which means a proposal submitted by the deadline may result in a very tight schedule for the author. this hasn’t generally been a problem since authors that submit proposals on the deadline typically are already working on a draft. also, since the committee sends out a formal call for proposals four weeks prior to the deadline, it begins receiving most proposals long before the deadline. discussion and voting begins as soon as proposals arrive. once an article has the required majority of votes in favor (documented on a privately shared google spreadsheet), the assigned editor (self-selected) notifies the author of provisional acceptance and begins the process of moving the article toward publication. article drafts are passed to the whole committee for review, but the assigned editor, with the second reader, takes primary responsibility for working with the author. any comments by other editorial committee members are summarized and passed on to the author by the assigned editor. this cuts down on confusion that can be created by comments and notes coming from several different directions. this process requires the author to do the bulk of the the work, with the editor helping to shape the article through comments and suggestions. experience has taught editorial committee members to look carefully at submitted proposals and ask for clarification up front, or to simply reject the proposals and include commentary about what would make it more appealing. if what the committee wants isn’t stated explicitly in the proposal, it’s going to end up being a lot of work for the editor to get the article to fit committee expectations. communication with authors at the proposal level is usually limited and formal, but once a proposal is accepted, this quickly changes. the committee typically chooses to edit the proposals about which it’s already excited, and is therefore eager to see them get published. during the process of reviewing a proposal, discussions sometimes get quite fervent, with one (or more) editors championing the proposal. for the editorial committee, the process of editing an accepted article really is a joint effort with the author to get it published. the feedback the editorial committee has received from c4lj authors, publicly and privately, has been overwhelmingly positive. authors appreciate the collaborative process where they get feedback that helps them shape the draft and get the article ready for publication. c4lj has been characterized, by those who have been through its editorial and review process, as being very author friendly. authors appreciate the short publication cycle and typically see their articles published in four months or less. from the perspective of the c4lj editorial committee, the process has worked well. articles are published quickly and the vetting process, where committee members read and vote on a proposal rather than a much longer, completed article, works well for all members, who volunteer their time. for each issue, editors typically take one article as “assigned” and volunteer as second reader for an additional article. individuals with more free time might take more articles to edit; those with less free time may only volunteer as second reader. the time factor does bite sometimes, when the committee has to delay publication of accepted proposals because everyone is already at their limit editing articles for the current issue. photo by flickr user dullhunk (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) expanding open peer review as part of the open ethos both c4lj and lead pipe have been publishing with open review processes since their founding. the journals embrace an open ethos that disrupts traditional boundaries of publishing in lis. libraries are at the heart of the open ethos because librarians understand and embrace open information, open access and open source. those values should be extended into the peer review process. our aims are to publish high quality, high impact articles that have far reach and can be quickly disseminated among our communities. our journals’ editorial and review processes have shown that open processes are sustainable. put simply: this model works. there is some inherent hypocrisy in the library profession when it comes to the open ethos. we want it for our patrons, but do we want it for ourselves? just recently acrl made the switch to publish college & research libraries and college & research libraries news as open access publications. ala publishing, on the other hand, has not made any visible move toward open access. other publishers of library journals, such as taylor & francis—whose subscription prices for social sciences journals are among the highest—will, arguably, be among the last to open their publications and their peer review processes.5 it is up to the small journals. journals published by libraries and library organizations need to start the movement. library publications should be at the frontier of open peer review. numerous library publications are already open access, so should consider how to open up the editorial and review processes. in doing so, these publications will continue information’s path to open and free dissemination. journals need not emulate c4lj and lead pipe, but might consider how open peer review will work for them. revealing the names of referees alongside published articles is one way this could be accomplished. journals should also consider publishing editorial and review process documentation. if open peer review processes are to be adopted, it is up to you, readers and writers. contact editors at publications you read and for which you write and let them know that you want to better understand the the publications’ editorial and peer review processes. ask them questions such as: have you ever considered publishing a special issue that experiments with open access or open peer review? can you tell me more about your review process? how many individuals will be reading my work? how are your article acceptance and rejection decisions made? consider writing editorial pieces or columns addressing open peer review to the journals you read. these editorial pieces are often where such discussions begin. as with open access, when editors see that their readership and their content creators are interested in understanding processes, they will respond. we can push our institutions and organizations toward the open ethos. if your place of employ has made the foray into journal publishing, approach those journals. if you’re involved in an organization such as ala, asist, or sla, ask publications committee members if they have ever thought about opening up review processes? if not, see if you can talk to a publications committee chair to express your enthusiasm for this idea. maybe the committee will investigate it further or sponsor a workshop or panel investigating open peer review. lastly, consider whether organizational or institutional bylaw changes may help promote opening editorial and peer review processes. if so, discuss this kind of movement with appropriate stakeholders. openness takes time and energy. traditional publishing and review practices will not change overnight, and when they do change these changes are made after many conversations that have deemed doing so is the right thing. as readers, writers, members of professional organizations and members of institutional communities, it is up to us to broach the topic of open peer review. for c4lj and for lead pipe open peer review processes have produced high quality, high impact publications. we are helping to shape the open ethos in librarianship, and we invite you to help shape it, too. many thanks to peter murray, brooke johnson, sara amato and hilary davis for providing thoughtful feedback on this article. additional thanks to in the library with the lead pipe editorial board members erin dorney, micah vandegrift, ellie collier, and brett bonfield for their comments. references & further readings askey, d. (2008). we love open source software. no, you can’t have our code.” code4lib journal, 5. retrieved from: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/527 bornmann, l., marx, w., schier, h., thor, a., & daniel, h.-d. (2010). from black box to white box at open access journals: predictive validity of manuscript reviewing and editorial decisions at atmospheric chemistry and physics. research evaluation, 19(2), 105–118. doi:10.3152/095820210x510089 bornmann, l., neuhaus, c., & daniel, h.-d. (2011). the effect of a two-stage publication process on the journal impact factor: a case study on the interactive open access journal atmospheric chemistry and physics. scientometrics, 86(1), 93–97. doi:10.1007/s11192-010-0250-4 boldt, a. (2011). extending arxiv.org to achieve open peer review and publishing. journal of scholarly publishing, 42(2), 238–242. doi:10.3138/jsp.42.2.238 branin, j. (2011). college & research libraries goes fully open access. college & research libraries, 72(2), 108–109. retrieved from http://crl.acrl.org/content/72/2/108.short cope, b., & kalantzis, m. (2009). signs of epistemic disruption: transformations in the knowledge system of the academic journal. first monday, 14(4-6). retrieved from: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2309/2163 fitzpatrick, k., & rowe, k. (2010). keywords for open peer review. logos, 21(3-4), 133–141. lipworth, w., kerridge, i. h., carter, s. m., & little, m. (2011). should biomedical publishing be “opened up?” toward a values-based peer-review process. journal of bioethical inquiry, 8(3), 267–280. doi:10.1007/s11673-011-9312-4 maharg, p., & duncan, n. (2007). black box, pandora’s box or virtual toolbox? an experiment in a journal’s transparent peer review on the web. international review of law, computers & technology, 21(2), 109–128. doi:10.1080/13600860701492104 perakakis, p., taylor, m., mazza, m., & trachana, v. (2010). natural selection of academic papers. scientometrics, 85(2), 553–559. doi:10.1007/s11192-010-0253-1 pöschl, u. (2004). interactive journal concept for improved scientific publishing and quality assurance. learned publishing, 17(2), 105–113. doi:10.1087/095315104322958481 pöschl, u., & koop, t. (2008). interactive open access publishing and collaborative peer review for improved scientific communication and quality assurance. information services & use, 28(2), 105–107. prug, t. (2010). open-process academic publishing. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 10(1), 40–63. reese, t. (2012). purposeful development: being ready when your project moves from ‘hobby’ to mission critical. code4lib journal, 16. retrieved from: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/6393 although the article was published in journal of scholarly publishing, a pre-print does reside on arxiv. [↩] see lead pipe’s open peer review process document, and c4lj’s page on the journal process and structure. [↩] for more information see several email threads at the code4lib list: a code4lib journal proposal and an attempt to summarize where we are. [↩] see, for example, terry reese’s article on purposeful development, and dale askey’s column, we love open source software. no, you can’t have our code. [↩] taylor & francis, have, however, made recent steps to open their publications in the lis fields. their author agreements for lis publications now allow authors to retain copyright of their works. [↩] open access, open ethos, open peer review, publishing join us on the dark (social) side? editorial: getting to know us – a single project, the reason we write, and a source of inspiration this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct letter from the editorial board – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2022 29 mar editorial board /8 comments letter from the editorial board dear valued readers, we would like to address some of the responses to our recently published article, “conspiratorial thinking in academic libraries: implications for change management and leadership.” while we do not believe that a convincing case has been made for retracting the article, as some have demanded, we acknowledge that our current editorial and review practices were insufficient in anticipating some of the responses that the article has received. it is our policy that the authors alone respond to criticisms of their work, should they desire to do so. this can take place within the comments section of the article, or elsewhere. it is wholly up to the authors whether comments made about their articles will be published, and whether they will respond to any particular comment. the article has received several abusive comments that violate our code of conduct, and some of these comments echo abusive and bullying language that has appeared in some of the social media commentary, and such comments will not be tolerated or addressed. this type of discourse does nothing to further the causes that the (usually anonymous) authors may claim to represent. as you may know, lead pipe is an all volunteer-run journal. we have encountered challenges and changes over the past two years. partly as a result of these challenges, we have recently decided to change our editorial and publication procedures. these changes will occur simultaneously with our move to a new platform that we hope will improve both the editorial process and reading experience. we are currently on hiatus as we transition to both a new publication schedule and a new platform, and that part of this transition will involve a thorough revision of our article submission and review policies. we are also issuing a call for new board members; we encourage you to join us as we usher the journal into this new phase and continue to serve and represent our profession.  moving forward, we want you to feel assured that we will remain true to both the standards and to the values that you expect from us. lead pipe editorial board conspiratorial thinking in academic libraries: implications for change management and leadership navigating the academic hiring process with disabilities 8 responses kate bowers 2022–03–29 at 4:21 pm reply you are flat-out wrong. retract. the requests to do so have been overwhelmingly compelling and well-sourced. stephanie 2022–03–29 at 4:22 pm reply hi! is it possible, when the article is published, to be clear about whether the comments are open or not? because it sounds like sometimes comments are closed at the authors’ discretion. wondering if that is clear to readers or not – to my memory, comments always appear open on itl but i can’t claim to have read every article. thank you! meredith farkas 2022–03–29 at 9:50 pm reply i agree 100%. it’s awful that people have crafted responses to the article in the blog comments only for them to go into a black hole. it’s a waste of people’s time and intellectual labor. if comments are not going to be published (barring abusive/harassing ones), don’t leave them open. meredith farkas 2022–03–29 at 4:48 pm reply while i appreciate that you responded, i am really disappointed in the response. there is a rhetorical approach i’ve seen from people on the defensive to focus on “abusive” or “bullying” responses in order to ignore legitimate criticism. you spent more time in this response talking about these abusive comments both on your blog and on social media (which is weird because i haven’t seen any abusive comments on twitter) than you did on explaining what went wrong in your review processes. you also represented calls/requests for retraction as “demands” (is a call for proposals a demand for proposals? maybe my vocabulary is off?) which further denigrated our critiques. in addition to my blog post, there have been a lot of cogent critiques on twitter from people with expertise in survey design, data analysis, and other areas whose constructive criticism you have essentially dismissed with your non-apology. i have served on an editorial board (as a volunteer), i’ve been a peer-reviewer, and i have published peer-reviewed scholarship (i was in fact one of the reviewers of the first article ever in lead pipe). i understand and respect the work that is involved. i guess i wonder what would convince you to retract an article? given that many of your peers feel that this piece is not up to the standards of the publication and harms scholarship in our field, by not engaging with any of those critiques, you are dismissing those critiques. it’s so disappointing and i know i can’t change your mind, but i can promise that i will never publish in your journal if this is your response to your readers’ concerns. steven bell 2022–03–30 at 12:30 pm reply i support your decision to maintain this article in its current state and let the readers make up their own minds about the value of the scholarship and what its implications are for our profession – and how they choose to make sense of the authors’ recommendations. once you give in to the library twitter outrage machine and allow it to influence your decisions, this journal (and others who experience it as well) will have its integrity permanently compromised. all that said, a review of your editorial policies sounds to be in order, particularly with respect to having qualified editors or research methodology consultants available to thoroughly review manuscripts so flaws can be shared with authors – giving them the opportunity to make the necessary corrections or withdraw the manuscript. meredith farkas 2022–03–30 at 5:32 pm reply oh steven. “the library twitter outrage machine?” did you actually read any of the critiques before you decided to chalk it up to the “outrage machine?” there were very real critiques about their methodology (including both whether the survey captured what they were trying to measure and the offensive and excluding way they asked about gender), the way they analyzed and drew conclusions from their data, plus their minimal use of the extensive literature of change leadership, choosing instead to only include really dated pieces on the topic whose author had even changed their views in recent decades. your decision to write off any critique that happens in social media as “the library twitter outrage machine” makes you sound like someone out of step with the nature of discourse today. perhaps take the time to actually read people’s critiques of the article before you dismiss them all as invalid. steven bell 2022–03–31 at 2:32 pm reply i am aware of the critiques. they make some valid claims. what’s more important is that i read this article and when you compare it to any of the hundreds of lis articles published annually, this one at least aims to be scientifically rigorous. you could likely subject any number of lis articles to the same level of methodological scrutiny and come up with plenty of flaws – not to mention so much of our research that’s based on responses to unscientific email distributed surveys. i don’t recall seeing many demands for article retractions though. i hope the authors will speak out in defense of their research. i think you have to acknowledge that the attention given to this article – and not others – has quite a lot to do with the the nature of the research and the findings. no doubt the readership of this journal didn’t expect to see an article of this nature published here. even the editors acknowledge much of the outrage on social media – some of which they characterize as “abusive and bullying”. and i see you didn’t hesitate to try to generate a similar reaction to my comment by sharing it on twitter and making use of an ageist stereotype. if that’s the “nature of discourse today” please count me out. i’m sure there are many librarians, boomers and otherwise, who agree with my position and my right to state it here in the comments. they probably won’t express their opinions though because they fear becoming the target of the outrage. so they stay silent. kyle banerjee 2022–03–30 at 3:23 pm reply somehow, i suspect the response would have been very different had the group studied been people who vote against library bonds leave a reply cancel reply save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct my maverick bar: a search for identity and the “real work” of librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 9 jun kim leeder /7 comments my maverick bar: a search for identity and the “real work” of librarianship by kim leeder summer interlude three years, twenty committees, twelve hundred instruction sessions, forty thousand monograph purchases, and half a million reference questions later, i’m at the point in this librarian job where i have enough experience to know how to get things done, and also enough to wonder, “what exactly am i doing?” the more you know, the more you know you don’t know, as they say. i exaggerate the numbers, but the above four things do seem to encompass the majority of what i do from day to day. of course there’s a wide variety of additional tasks that fill up my time in the office, from updating my library’s facebook page to presenting at conferences. all these things combine into the work portion of my life. is it a good job? undoubtedly. is it fulfilling? usually. fun? sometimes. but i can’t help but wonder what it’s all for. the danger of the summer lull, particularly for academic librarians — but perhaps for others, too — is that after the frenetic pace of the regular semesters, we suddenly have time to reflect. i call it a “danger” because it’s much easier to speed through life and work without asking too many questions. questions can get you into trouble if you don’t like the answers. but then a little trouble isn’t always a bad thing. my spring semester ended about a month ago. immediately after finals i went on a lovely long vacation, and now i’m back at work, waking up early thanks to jet lag, and taking a little time to think and ask questions. after all, this year was my midpoint in moving towards tenure at my institution, a circumstance that required me to submit formal documents to my colleagues so that they could offer constructive feedback about my progress in this position. it seems fitting, now that i have been evaluated by others on my librarianness, that i do a little review of my own and decide what being a librarian means to me. the librarian identity, or lack thereof one of my favorite things about being a librarian, and an academic reference and instruction librarian in particular, is the variety: the variety of tasks and duties i’m responsible for, the variety of people i interact with, the variety of information and topics i deal with on a daily basis. the average day in the life of an academic librarian is notoriously difficult to pin down, since the list of potential tasks accomplished in a single day is seemingly endless. i enjoy knowing that every day i do something a little bit different and yet it all somehow fits under my job description. on the other hand, it makes me wonder if my job description should be quite so broad. not that mine is different from those of identical jobs in other places; it’s not. i greatly enjoy the many types of tasks that cross my desk on a daily basis, but i see a red flag, too, in the sheer yawning chasm of work before me. in the back of my mind is the nagging concern that my work might be oversized, unfocused, and possibly on the edge of unmanageable. yet if i wanted to narrow it down to a few critical tasks, i’m not sure i could; too much else would be neglected or would get in the way. so i find myself asking, what’s at the core of it all? what is the real work of librarianship? this last question brings to mind a poem by gary snyder, “i went into the maverick bar,” in which the main character of the poem adapts his appearance to fit in with the customers of a country bar in new mexico. the real work of this poem, the work of coming to terms with place and identity, is far larger than any job, but if we shrink it down and tweak it slightly (with apologies to mr. snyder), the nature of the poem is still applicable. yes, i’m calling librarianship my “maverick bar.” not literally of course, since our workplaces in no way resemble the bourbon-and-beer scene in the poem, but i have the sense sometimes that librarians are a little bit like those folks in the bar – a little displaced, not quite sure who they are or what they should be doing. every culture has a life of its own beyond the individuals, and our library culture, too, is not quite native to where we now live. libraries were built for a print-based culture of collecting and preserving, but that culture has shifted dramatically around us while we continue to dance, a little awkwardly, to the band. our search for identity is clear to me as the source of many younger librarians’ efforts over the past several decades to combat the “librarian stereotype.” any culture that is so intent on making a sharp break from the recent past makes me suspicious.  i’m unable to accept that the inherent nature of librarianship has changed dramatically, even if it sports a nose ring and carries a smartphone. then there are the varied, insistent, even desperate initiatives to redefine our buildings in ways that will continue to appeal to library users, campus administrations, trustees, and boards of directors. i’ll be first in line to admire these new buildings and renovations, with their polished work spaces and bright, airy environments, but these new buildings may simultaneously advance us even further on the path to identity crisis. they include less and less of any particular thing that one would identify as characteristic of a library. after all, what purpose does a bookless, wholly electronic library serve that distinguishes it from an overblown student center? in this article from the mercury news, note the paragraph: libraries are the very heart of the research university, the center for scholarship. but the accumulation of information online is shifting their sense of identity. shifting their sense of identity to what, exactly? the article doesn’t say. these days we’re better at knowing what we’re not (bun-wearing shushers) than putting our finger on what exactly we are and what we’re here for. perhaps it’s this insecurity that causes librarians to try to do so many things all at once. we leap into social networks, digital repositories, and online services; we reconceive our collections; we become publishers as well as collectors; we reach out to our communities, campuses, and potential donors, stretching ourselves thin; we digitize; we redefine our jobs, and redefine them again; we rebuild, restructure, rearrange; we stand alert, ready for anything. and even when we are self-conscious enough to acknowledge our situation, we still don’t have any answers. in a blog post more than a year ago bobbi newman pointed to this problem, but rather than offering solutions she ends with the (admittedly potent) line, “we’ve got to change, and i mean really change.” the urgency and the need for change is clear to all of us; what no one can seem to put their finger on is how to change. and that leads to more identity crisis and more desperate grabbing at the technologies, tools, and strategies that might work in the short-term. we’re running on the information hamster wheel; we simply can’t do everything. and rather than try to do it all, it might be better if we do, well, nothing for a while. you don’t tell someone hyperventilating in panic to run some sprints, do you? no, you give them a paper bag or some distraction, speak calmly, and encourage them to sit down, relax, and put their fear aside. similarly, what libraries may need to do is stop, take a breather, release our fears of irrelevance and ask our patrons, campuses, administrations, donors — and yes, ourselves — what is our real work and what does it look like in 2010 and beyond? if indeed libraries have become irrelevant in the age of the almighty google — and i don’t think we have — wouldn’t you rather know than keep panting along on the hamster wheel, accomplishing nothing? in search of the real work what librarians do have is a set of core values that serves as the backbone of our identity and draws together even those working in nontraditional positions. increasing access to all types of information and all perspectives while protecting intellectual freedom and privacy; these are the values that unite us. i think every library student gets (or should get) a little rush upon first discovering the ala library bill of rights and realizing the larger issues that play a role in this field. if we boil it down, the major value expressed in this document is intellectual freedom, the full and equal access to all types of information for everyone. in my mind, this is one of the most critical roles a librarian can play. (though i have heard some debate on this; for more, stay tuned for ellie collier’s post later this month). the values that guide librarians don’t address the core tasks that cement these values to our daily lives in the field. while i would like to believe that my primary responsibilities reflect these values, i don’t knowingly achieve any goals related to intellectual freedom in my daily tasks. there is some gap between what i stand for as a librarian and what i do in practice, as all idealism shrivels a bit in the face of reality. i must please my boss, my tenure reviewers, my students, my campus administration. at a minimum, i hope my theory and practice don’t contradict each other. i wonder, too, if there are common tasks across all librarians’ various job types, professional organizations, and institutions. i can’t think of any other career that has so many different manifestations of what work in that field might look like. i’m not sure whether to call it flexibility or lack of focus. just think about the various titles that librarians work under: emerging technologies librarian, copyright librarian, first-year services librarian, digital initiatives librarian, as well as all the ones that are more traditional and familiar. not to mention librarians working in other information-related organizations that aren’t libraries. a considered look backwards at the librarian’s primary roles throughout history is interesting in the effort to make meaning out of this. in “tracing the archetypal academic librarian,”  stephen e. bales compares academic librarian job duties during two periods of early history with those of today. after reviewing the activities that took place in libraries during the time of assurbanipal (roughly 600s bce) and alexandria (200s bce), bales concludes that most of the primary roles of librarians have not changed over the course of several millennia: librarians from all periods of time have been involved in these tasks: identifying, selecting, acquiring, organizing, retrieving, conserving, and conducting some sort of scholarship. bales is not the only one to note that librarianship, historically, has taken place largely behind the scenes, and this was still the case in the late eighteen hundreds. no longer. bales’ insights might be helpful if not for the fact that i do very few of these things as part of my daily work as an academic librarian in 2010. not many librarians i know do much of this at all. in fact, the two things i spend a large proportion of my time on – outreach and teaching – didn’t even make the cut in bales’ listing of major roles. certainly in former millennia librarians had no interest in sharing their collections; documents were reserved for elite and wealthy scholars. nor does bales mention professional service outside of scholarship, which is a tremendous time commitment for many academic librarians. in my opinion, bales’ historical assessment of librarian duties doesn’t really cut to the “real work” of the field today. to gain a more modern perspective on the priorities of a librarian position, we can review evaluation documents from institutions that break out task areas into particular percentages. for instance, i happened upon a handbook from florida international university libraries (pdf) that prioritizes the work of an information services librarian in this manner: 35% reference/research assistance 25% information literacy 15% collection development 5% liaison 15% non-scheduled activities (service, conferences, professional development) 5% other duties as assigned by department head while i don’t advocate trying to break down one’s work schedule according to this sort of math (think of all the grey areas), it does make it clear that answering questions and teaching are by far the top two responsibilities at this institution. that sounds about right to me. of course, if we look closely at each of those categories we can see that they each encompass a wide range of more specific tasks. “information literacy,” for example, might include teaching (one-time workshops, for-credit courses, and perhaps additional sessions), assessment of current instruction, planning for future instruction, creating promotional and informational materials, etc. although it’s just one priority area, i’m sure it could fill a full-time librarian’s work schedule all on its own. it’s clear to most of us working in academic librarian positions – and probably all librarian positions – that the full array of responsibilities and duties our jobs encompass are simply not achievable in a regular work week. in case we thought it was just our imaginations, the university of california at berkeley conducted a workload survey of their librarians and received 31 responses that indicated overwhelmingly that getting the work done is more than full-time commitment. it’s no surprise that berkeley librarians largely felt obliged to work some evenings and weekends to keep up; even those in smaller institutions do the same. this makes it even more important to identify what our real work is, and to prioritize tasks in a way that empowers us to accomplish it. conclusions, such as they are there’s not much discussion in the literature of librarianship, so far as i can tell, to answer my rather philosophical question about what our “real work” is. i have located books and articles about job duties and priorities, some of which i mentioned above, but little that attempts to dig to the core of our professional beings. historically, i could argue that the real work revolved around collecting and preserving documents in the interests of greater knowledge. today, although that is one piece of the work most librarians do, it has certainly been deemphasized. the more i consider this question, too, the more i doubt that it could possibly have a rational, scientific answer. i relive that grad-school rush upon reading the library bill of rights, which is about as real as anything i could point to in this field. i think about the deep, true gratification i enjoy when i manage to connect an interested, intellectual person with new information that contributes to their perspective on a topic. i think about my colleagues in academic libraries, and about my colleagues in public, school, and special libraries. isn’t it true, in the end, that our real work is more about values than tasks? and that greatest value of all, even beyond any document compiled by any professional association: knowledge, with a capital “k.” i see no work in librarianship more real than the collection, protection, and dissemination of knowledge, and the empowerment of others in means to acquire it. although libraries historically were more about hoarding knowledge than sharing it, our work has not otherwise changed much over the millennia. the internet, while making information more widely available, has simultaneously obscured true knowledge and increased the importance of our real work. this revelation doesn’t directly help me manage my workload and organize tasks, but it does help to keep me theoretically and emotionally grounded in my job. my real work is knowledge. if i hold that goal in mind, the details of how i accomplish it on daily basis begin to fall into place. some of my duties, like teaching, support knowledge directly. other tasks, like tracking reference questions, are not tied to that higher goal but are necessary for the reality of my workplace. if i want to continue in my job, i can’t just stop doing those less crucial tasks, but i can prioritize my efforts and save the best of my energy for the real work of librarianship. +++++++ readers: i don’t speak for every librarian, just myself. what are your thoughts about the “real work” of librarianship? your comments below are welcome. +++++++ author’s note, or, a confession and suggestion for further reading: i’m embarrassed to say that i was unfamiliar with (or had forgotten) “the darien statements on the library and librarians” until after writing this post, but now that i have i strongly encourage anyone who is thinking about the real work of librarianship to read them. the document is an excellent, timeless vision of our field, and i nod to the wisdom of those who conceived it. +++++++ my thanks to the entire cast of itlwtlp as well as eric frierson and rachel slough for their invaluable feedback on drafts of this post. i have never before had so many helpful and insightful responses to any single piece of writing, and i hope the results reflect it. future, knowledge, librarianship, libraries, reflection, technology fantasy pricing – an interview with selden lamoureux the fiske report 7 responses t scott 2010–06–09 at 11:34 am librarians tend to confuse means with ends. and while you’re close to identifying the core work, i’d phrase it as connecting people to knowledge. that is the point of what librarians do — connect people to the recorded knowledge that they need for a whole host of purposes — education, entertainment, community… in the print world, the best way to do this turned out to be to build big buildings, fill them full of stuff, organize the stuff well and preserve it. but over the course of a couple of centuries, we began to think that our core work was to collect, organize and preserve documents, and we lost sight of why we do that. those tasks were never the point, they were just the means to a greater end. that end is just as important as ever, but as we move into the digital world, the means are radically different. consider that all of the processes, procedures, systems, policies, staffing, etc., that underlie the daily work of the library in the print world are focused on tracking the movement of physical objects in and out of buildings. now, we need to achieve the same greater good, but we’re no longer dealing with physical objects. thus, it may well be that “libraries” as we have understood them, will become irrelevant as we move further into the 21st century. that may be a cause for a bit of nostalgic mourning among those of us who love the world of libraries that we grew up in, but in terms of the larger cultural and societal needs that librarians fill, there is no need for any gnashing of teeth. librarians are more necessary than ever, because the information space has become so incredibly complex. i tell my staff that this is the best time in five centuries to be a librarian because we have the incredible opportunity to reinvent librarianship with a set of information tools that were literally unimaginable a generation ago. i wrote a post about this a couple of years ago that i think remains very relevant to this discussion: http://tscott.typepad.com/tsp/2008/08/libraries-or-li.html and i ended a presentation awhile back with this phrase: “it may be that the great age of libraries is ending; but the great age of librarians has just begun.” clare mckenzie 2010–06–09 at 6:32 pm this is an extraordinarily insightful piece of writing and i thank you wholeheartedly for publishing it. along with some 2 dozen others in (mostly downunder) libraryland i am currently engaged in a project called #blogeverydayofjune and while some of us are blogging on a personal level it is inevitable that the issue of professionalism and librianness has surfaced. your piece will become a valuable part of that discussion (as i intend to bring it into said discussion post haste). i’ll also be looking up t scotts reference as i found those comments equally inspiring. more than anything i’m grateful to be involved in a profession where i get to think about and act on these issues everyday: http://newgradlibrarian.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/getting-paid-to-have-fun/ naomi 2010–06–09 at 8:41 pm real work begins when students start thinking and producing their own work! it’s the synthesis, evaluation, and reflection on the process that is our real work. the selecting and sorting and locating all gets the party started! i’m a new mlis grad and i’m about to start a real job and discover the real world of librarianship! melanie 2010–06–10 at 7:26 am i don’t think you meant to do this, but at one point you seem to imply that all those primary roles that bales mentions are no longer relevant, which is incorrect. i sit next to the people involved in identifying, selection, and acquiring; i myself am one of the organizing librarians, which is a big job all by itself; my cubicle is a few floors above the ones involved in retrieving and conserving. scholarship happens based upon the choice of the individual librarian. eventually this may change (i don’t really think so, but i admit the possibility), but at this point, all these duties continue to occur, regardless of whether the resource is physical or electronic. and you cannot do your job of sharing knowledge until all those other jobs have been done first. thus my work is as fundamental to the purpose of sharing knowledge as the reference librarian who is actually engaged in conversation with the patron. there has been a major shift over the last few hundred years and more that has democratized access to information, which i think is a good thing, and has added to the work of the librarian. but that means that librarianship has added new roles, not that it has lost those historical ones. my identity as a cataloger is solid — to me, at least — because i know that regardless of format, information still needs to be organized and made accessible. (how can you use it if you cannot find it?) computers still do not replace human beings, and until there is real artificial intelligence, they never will. the title may change, but the fundamental nature of what i do as a librarian has not changed. maybe the difference in identity crisis is because you are in one of those “newer” roles for librarians. we’ve only been serving the general public for a few hundred years, and we are still figuring out what that means. in another few centuries, maybe we will understand ourselves better. felix chu 2010–06–10 at 10:15 am this is something that i have also thought about over the years. i work primarily as a cataloger. my personal mission is: “i intend to be the best intermediary possible in connecting people and needed resources.” i was at a gathering recently where nancy foster, director of anthropological research, river campus libraries of the university of rochester said that perhaps we are asking the wrong question. instead of asking our users what they want, we need to understand how they do their work and help them do good work. what she said and what my personal mission says are the essence of what we do. as kim said above, our roles (and technology) have changed and will continue to change, but we need to keep out focus on our values. technology and our roles are the process of implementation. john m. jackson 2010–06–10 at 11:15 am this is a wonderfully insightful post. i like what t scott said about connecting knowledge to people: this is what drives me. personally, i value knowledge, its preservation and access. professionally, i value the role that knowledge plays in people’s lives and in the lives of society. and so, i see my primary role as bring people and knowledge together. thank you, kim, for sharing your thoughts and giving me something valuable to contemplate this morning as i travel across the country. =) dana longley 2010–06–15 at 12:00 pm i would add to what naomi said on this excellent post: to me, what we do goes beyond connecting people and knowledge. why do people seek information & knowledge? to create new knowledge. to me, our ultimate core function is facilitating the creation of new knowledge. if all we did was ensure people could find information, but they had no idea how to use that information effectively, i would argue that librarianship as a profession would have died off long ago. i would argue the various things librarians do, such as preserving and organizing and teaching how to effectively and ethically interact with existing information, are essential to the knowledge creation process, which in itself is essential to the functioning of any modern society. that core library value/function is not going away; it might even be argued that it’s importance (to knowledge creation, to facilitating societal improvements) might increase over time. just my 3 cents… this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the fiske report – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 23 jun ellie collier /5 comments the fiske report ‘sitting on history’ by flickr user grytr (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by ellie collier introduction i have a soft spot in my heart for library history. i credit my library history classes for making me the academic librarian i am today. they taught me more about critical thinking, how to do research, and how to navigate an academic library than the rest of my program combined. in this post i am revisiting a particular set of topics that especially interested me while pursuing my degree – censorship, self-censorship, and librarian image-making. it seemed to me as i went through my program, that one aspect of library school that was particularly stressed was instilling the values of the profession. my introductory class posed mental exercises meant to make students think about privacy, access to information and their own personal biases. “a young girl wearing black with many piercings comes in looking for a book on suicide.” “a disheveled man with a beard comes in asking for books on bomb making.” while the introductory class told me what a proper librarian would do in those situations, the library history classes told me why the profession took a stance in the first place. louis robbins summarized the rise of the librarian as intellectual freedom fighter in her abstract to “champions of a cause: american librarians and the library bill of rights in the 1950s”: “the library profession’s understanding of the library bill of rights—and, in fact, american librarianship’s understanding of itself—is a product of both contemporary political discourse and of the american library association’s pragmatic responses to censorship challenges in the 1950s. between the 1948 adoption of the strengthened library bill of rights and 1960, ala based its ‘library faith’ on a foundation of pluralist democracy and used social scientific ‘objectivity’ to try to fend off challenges to its jurisdiction. when the mccarthy era brought challenges to the very premises of pluralistic democracy, however, librarians responded by becoming ‘champions of the cause’ of intellectual freedom” (robbins, “champions” abstract). while reading about this time period i also learned about the fiske report. from 1956 to 1958, marjorie fiske conducted a study of book selection and censorship practices in california. the fear generated during the mccarthy era lead the american library association to issue a number of statements declaring librarians the defenders of intellectual freedom. in contrast, fiske’s report showed that some librarians were not so quick to stand up for this belief, if they held it at all. born out of the fear generated by the political climate of the period, fiske found the echoes of mccarthyism present during many of her interviews. this is unsurprising, as the hollywood blacklist was still in effect and mccarthy himself had only just begun to fall from favor in 1954. some of the interviewed librarians may have even lived through wwi and helped to remove german language books from their libraries or complied with requests for names of patrons who asked for books on explosives (starr). however, the report uncovered several important themes that ran much deeper than current politics. this post will discuss the fiske report, its origin and findings, and its lasting implications. my goal is to share a bit of library history in the hopes that it will grant some perspective and elaborate the complexity and nuance of the issues raised. background between the two world wars, “the american library profession experienced a reawakening of debate regarding freedom of access. traditionalists advocated the guardianship of community values by restrictive collection policies, and progressives favored collection development that was once again neutral and actively representative of all points of view” (starr). in 1939, ala adopted the first library bill of rights, based on a policy of the des moines, iowa public library, possibly as a response to the controversy surrounding grapes of wrath (chadwell 20). another potential impetus was the challenge put forth by bernard berelson, “librarianship must stand firmly against social and political and economic censorship of book collections; it must be so organized that it can present effective opposition to this censorship and it must protect librarians who are threatened by it” (qtd in starr). in 1940, ala formed its first intellectual freedom committee. however, it was not until 1948 that ala adopted what is presently known as the library bill of rights (chadwell 20). in 1953 ala issued the freedom to read. the statement defined the profession’s “responsibility for making available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those the majority might label unconventional or unpopular” (chadwell 22). with these documents ala was strengthening its public position as defender of intellectual freedom. however, thomison said in the ala-sponsored a history of the american library association, “it was abundantly clear that the profession was not united in its bill of rights” (145). thomison explained “at the time of its adoption, the library bill of rights had been received with no objection. the intellectual freedom committee was also accepted with no problem. the attitudes of some librarians, however, began to change as the two began to function” (144). this was evidenced by letters to ala bulletin, library journal, and ala headquarters indicating extreme dissatisfaction with the current trends in literature. thomison offered forever amber, with its preponderance of sex, as an example: “the book’s popularity, and the problem of to buy or not to buy, was grist for many discussions, letters and speeches. in a number of cases, it is difficult to discern the difference between censorship efforts by the public and book selection by the librarian. the result was often the same, and in many cases the reasoning seemed very similar” (145). one explanation for this discrepancy was that “librarians’ relatively new role as activists in the cause of freedom of inquiry had only partially overtaken their role as guardians of public taste and morals” (robbins, “censorship” 74). the intellectual freedom committee was paying attention. “as early as the 1953 westchester conference, ifc leadership – worried about the effects on school and public librarians of loyalty programs, investigative committees, and the many widely publicized censorship conflicts – had proposed that research on the topic might be undertaken” (robbins, “censorship” 95). with a grant from the fund for the republic and the sponsorship of the school of librarianship of the university of california the project was conducted from 1956 to 1958, headed by marjorie fiske. marjorie fiske was a distinguished sociologist and teacher at the berkeley campus of the university of california, in the department of sociology and the school of librarianship. “often working with large interdisciplinary teams of social and behavioral scientists, she sought a method that would allow the research subjects to ‘speak for themselves’ in the final results” (kiefer). in her introduction to her report fiske explained: “the impetus for this study developed from the questions librarians and others concerned with the freedom to read asked themselves about the effects on library policy and practices of the investigations of national and state un-american activities committees, state education committees, and the widely publicized book-centered conflicts which have taken place in california since the end of world war ii. the study itself was viewed as controversial both inside and outside the profession of librarianship. nearly two years of discussion and persistent effort on the part of the intellectual freedom committee and a special planning committee of the california library association, as well as the faculty of the school of librarianship of the university of california, were required before the decision to undertake it was finally made” (1). findings when the study finally did proceed, fiske’s team conducted 204 interviews in 26 communities with school librarians and administrators, and municipal and county librarians. the end result was book selection and censorship: a study of school and public libraries in california. in it, fiske pointed out that at least as far back as the elizabethan era people have been concerned with the dilemma of quality versus demand (or education versus entertainment). this dilemma is something which librarians have continually struggled with in their book selection process. “two-thirds of the public librarians who contributed to this study used the words quality and demand as they discussed library objectives, and by far the greatest weight was to be found on the side of demand” (fiske 11). this orientation was often justified on the grounds that public libraries are supported by taxes and thus should provide what is most requested. it also helped to lighten the librarians’ task load by spending less time researching potential purchases. they could more easily justify their budget with higher circulation figures and, “book selection becomes ‘a snap’ – the desk staff pass along patron requests, you read the newspapers of the area, visit the bookshops to find out what is popular, and if you miss something a patron wants you can always dash out and buy it” (fiske 13). fiske also noted that librarians spoke only briefly about how they know their community’s needs. based on these vague comments, fiske pointed to a need for reliable methods of determining community needs and interests as well as the absence of systematic efforts towards appraisals of current holdings. the debate between quality and demand lead to the concept of balance. within the context of library schools the term “balance” was most frequently used to describe a well-rounded collection. “prescriptions for building basic collections for public or school libraries illustrate this concept by recommending definite proportions for various categories of subject matter with little regard for community differences” (fiske 15). fiske found that the term “balance” carried a professional sanction for public librarians, but that upon further examination the term turned out to be “a semantic convenience embracing a great variety of rationales for book selection” (15). in fact, many librarians used “balance” to express the goals of whatever aspect of book selection they found most difficult. for some it meant weeding old books, for others it meant providing all sides of an issue, or it could have meant a balance between actual and potential wishes of the patrons. one librarian said, “we talk a lot about balance, but it is really a semantic absurdity. what it boils down to is that you provide as much as you can of what anybody wants” (fiske 16). this sort of approach revealed that book selection practices were frequently found to differ from professional theory and established standards. fiske also reported wide variance in the use and perceived value of written book selection policies. while fiske viewed avoidance of controversial books to be the equivalent of self-censorship she explained that the librarians interviewed did not speak of censorship because they have “adopted an even more positivistic semantic philosophy” (fiske 63). instead of worrying about whether books were controversial the librarians interviewed said that “library materials must be in ‘good taste,’ they must be ‘suitable’ or they must be ‘appropriate.’ in school libraries or public library systems, the equivalent was likely to be the irreproachable statement, ‘our materials must supplement the curriculum’” (fiske 63). the report also discussed the discrepancy between theory and practice as it pertains to controversial materials. although close to half of the librarians interviewed in fiske’s study expressed unequivocal freedom-to-read convictions, “when it comes to actual practice, nearly two-thirds of all librarians who have a say in book selection reported instances where the controversiality of a book or author resulted in a decision not to buy. nearly one-fifth habitually avoid buying any material which is known to be controversial or which they believe might become controversial” (fiske 65). however, fiske found that librarians who had received professional training in librarianship were more likely to disregard the controversiality of materials when making their selections than librarians who had not had professional training. “even more decisive than professional training is length of work experience. librarians relatively new to the profession tend to be much less restrictive than their more experienced colleagues” (fiske 68). fiske found that in 82 percent of the circulating libraries studied, restrictions were placed on the circulation or distribution of materials. the most common forms of restriction were moving the items to the librarian’s office, placing the materials on reserve so that they have to be specifically requested, and placing questionable materials under or behind the front desk. additionally, nearly one-third of the circulating libraries reported that controversial items had been permanently removed from the collection. the librarians interviewed practiced self-censorship to avoid controversy and external censorship. librarians did not feel they could turn to either their state or national professional association for help against censorship. two-thirds of the school librarians belonged to the school library association of california (slac), almost half belonged to the california library association (cla) and more than three-fourths of the municipal and county librarians belonged to cla. despite this involvement, the most common complaint was that, “the two state groups (the cla and the slac) do not come to grips with controversial issues either on the local or the state level. members do not feel that they will be backed up by the profession in the event of local controversy” (fiske 104). thomison backed up this fear in his history of the american library association. “what was the recourse when the library bill of rights had been violated? what could be done to help the librarian under attack? the answer unfortunately was very little. the only force was moral force” (thomison 145). fiske found a general lack of self-esteem among librarians which also inhibited their ability to take a stand against censors. “our respondents believe that the public holds both librarians and libraries in low repute. on the whole, they share the public’s allegedly low opinion of the profession” (fiske 109). an analysis of the observations about what kinds of people librarians believe themselves to be found that “four negative traits were mentioned for every positive one” (fiske 110). while they admired within themselves a respect for ideas, knowledge, and intellectual freedom, they did not feel strong enough individually or professionally to assert these qualities “in the face of public disapproval or indifference” (fiske 110). reactions fiske first reported her findings at a symposium entitled “the climate of book selection: social influence on school and public libraries.” robbins explained that “the findings fiske unveiled at the symposium were widely reported in the press….major library journals, however, were strangely silent on the report in 1958” (98). fiske’s book, book selection and censorship, was published in 1959 and awarded the annual library literature award sponsored jointly by the american library association and the canadian library association (“news and notes” 692). various reviewers latched on to different aspects of the report. eleanor smith wrote in library journal that the report’s finding that librarians tend to be timid and were self-censors was not entirely surprising. however, “this is embarrassing to librarians as professional status seekers because it may overshadow the more positive findings of the study: when librarians are threatened by real outside censorship, they usually offer strong resistance” (smith 223). she went on to argue, “the fault, if it is a fault not to live up to the library bill of rights in serving the public, lies within the librarians themselves for the most part, as these interviews clearly show. they seem to lack confidence in their ability to select the best books as well as the courage to defend their collections” (smith 224). david sabsay claimed that the report “is a serious indictment of our philosophy and our integrity which we cannot ignore” (sabsay 222). he said that fiske’s report proved that it is not simply timidity that causes instances of self-censorship, but a lack of understanding of the purposes and goals of librarianship. however, leon carnovsky, in his review argued that the library bill of rights and policy statements “are slender reeds…not enough to protect a librarian when his professional existence may be imperiled” (carnovsky 157). others focused on policy, blaming fiske’s findings of the discrepancy between theory and practice on a lack of written selection policy. “this inconsistency is hardly surprising when one discovers the conspicuous absence of rules and policies on book selection” (jahoda 151). in his editorial in the ala bulletin, a. l. mcneal, then chairman of the ala intellectual freedom committee, suggested that first and foremost, “in order that the librarian at the local level may have full support it seems desirable to have well-established, written book selection policies, which are understood by his staff and known to his board or governing body” (mcneal 359). some reviewers looked to library education as the answer to the issue of librarians’ self-censorship. “in the long run, it is to the improvement of formal education for librarianship that we must look for an upgrading of the profession, and therefore of the professional image” (sabsay 223). asheim suggested that fiske had overlooked changes in library education over the years. “the education being given to younger librarians stresses professional responsibilities rather than skills and techniques” (540). however, he did allow another possibility, that being “the librarians with longer practical experience have become worn down and discouraged by the lack of support from their communities, and even overt attack and repudiation by their supervising authorities, in the matter of freedom to read” (asheim 540). a review from a sociology journal defended the librarians, “whatever faults these california librarians might have – and fiske spells them out clearly and sympathetically – they often do a better job than their community would prefer” (lee 303). while there were mixed reactions to the results and questions about what to do about them, most contemporary reviewers gave the work high praise and recommended it to a wide variety of readers. in public opinion quarterly marie johoda wrote, “miss fiske’s book will undoubtedly be read with profit by librarians and sociologists. i wish it one additional group of readers: high school and college teachers might find it a most stimulating text to acquaint their students with the ideas and difficulties of democratic institutions” (152). in the american journal of sociology lester asheim said, “while this study is primarily concerned with the librarian and his attitude toward the collection of materials which is his charge, it throws a good deal of light on the american educational system and on the temper of our society” (540). and in social problems melvin defleur wrote, “this is a carefully prepared, readable account of a major social problem. it should be of considerable interest to the educated layman, the civic leader, the educator, students of occupational sociology, community organization, mass communication and especially to librarians themselves” (94). fiske’s report had shown the profession that, at least in california, its proposed ideals were not consistently in  practice. surprisingly, there was little discussion of the report beyond the initial book reviews. while fiske’s study was at least in part initiated by ala’s intellectual freedom committee, i was unable to find any ala response to the study in my search of the library literature other than mcneal’s ala bulletin editorial. a history of the american library association, 1876-1972 does not mention the fiske report. in fact, in its summary sections on intellectual freedom it skips from 1953 to 1967. words speak louder than actions while ala may not have addressed the fiske report head on, it did continue to support intellectual freedom, publishing the robert b. downs-edited the first freedom: liberty and justice in the world of books and reading in 1960. downs was president of ala 1952-1953 and a vocal advocate for intellectual freedom throughout his career. the first freedom was produced as a response to mccarthyism’s lingering effects. downs explained that the book was made up of the “most notable writings in the field of censorship and intellectual freedom over approximately the past half century” (qtd. in robbins, “censorship” 102). robbins very aptly points out how the juxtaposition of fiske’s book selection and censorship and downs’s the first freedom epitomized the dichotomy of the library profession’s varying degrees of acceptance of and adherence to the library bill of rights. “fiske’s book testified that librarians were not putting into practice the code of freedom….downs’s the first freedom, on the other hand, exemplified the celebrated public role that ala had achieved in the defense of intellectual freedom in the 1950s” (robbins 102-103). ala has continued to build the reputation of libraries and librarians as defenders of intellectual freedom and crusaders against censorship. in 1967 ala established its office for intellectual freedom. in 1972 busha conducted a survey examining the attitudes of mid-western public librarians toward intellectual freedom and censorship based on fiske’s work. he came to much the same conclusion as fiske did 14 years earlier. he reported “that mid-western public librarians did not hesitate to express agreement with clichés of intellectual freedom but that many of them apparently did not feel strong enough as professionals to assert these principles in the face of real or anticipated censorship pressures” (busha 300). in 1982 ala launched banned books week in response to an increase in book challenges. “bbw stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them” (“banned”). this campaign highlights librarians’ role in fighting censorship. “fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections” (“banned”). yet, in 2002 ken p. coley published moving toward a method to test for self-censorship by school library media specialists. studying public high school libraries in texas, he found that “over 80 percent of the schools in the study show signs that self-censorship has occurred during the collection development process” (coley). these studies show that while our public image may have evolved radically over the last 60 years, our private practice still struggles with the same issues of social and community pressures, personal values and professional purpose. conclusion ala as a professional organization has declared strong support for intellectual freedom. however, it is important to remember that this is a relatively new turn of events. “the truth hurts, but the concept of intellectual freedom simply did not spring forth, athena-like from the head of zeus, as a fully-formulated principle of american librarianship. in fact, intellectual freedom as a significant principle of librarianship is a recently-evolved concept…when our profession set out to formalize its beliefs, it often did so in reaction to particular issues and events” (chadwell 20). robbins also reminded us that “in the early days of their profession librarians themselves preached the need to protect their readers by carefully screening what they made available to them” (“dismissal” 161). when the library bill of rights was strengthened in 1948 it was done in resistance to a coercive notion of americanism, in opposition to censorship and out of librarians’ desire to guard their professional prerogatives in book selection and collection building. it established as its foundation the values of pluralistic democracy – values of diversity, tolerance, and openness. “these values were not universally accepted, however, not even by all librarians, many of whom could not relinquish their role as protectors of taste and morals in exchange for the role of guarantor of access to ideas” (robbins, “dismissal” 161). in her 1960 review of fiske’s book, margaret kateley said, “this volume should be in the office of every head librarian and school administrator. it should stimulate further research into the character of the library as a public institution. aspects of the problem particularly deserving of attention are the public image of the library and the status of the librarian, criteria for book selection, the personnel shortage in libraries, factors influencing financial support of libraries, and administrative problems of school libraries” (kateley 136-137). these concerns sound alarmingly contemporary. my goal with this post was to share a bit of library history in the hopes that it would grant some perspective and elaborate the complexity and nuance of the issues raised. unlike many of my other posts, this is not a call to arms, but a call to reflect, to remember that things haven’t always been what they are today, that even today they may not be what you assume, and that there are many grey areas worth exploring. thanks to tristan boyd and to my lead pipe colleagues brett bonfield and emily ford for their helpful comments on this article. works cited & further reading asheim, lester. “book selection and censorship: a study of school and public libraries on california.” american journal of sociology 65.5 (mar. 1960): 539‑540. “banned books week: celebrating the freedom to read.” american library association, 2010. benemann, william e. “tears and ivory towers: california libraries during the mccarthy era.” american libraries 8.6 (june 1977): 305‑309. busha, c. h. 1972. “intellectual freedom and censorship: the climate of opinion in midwestern public libraries.” library quarterly, 42.3: 283-301. carnovsky, leon. “book selection and censorship: a study of school and public libraries in california.” library quarterly 30.2 (apr. 1960): 156‑157. chadwell, faye a. “intellectual freedom, an evolving and enduring value of librarianship.” oregan library association quarterly 8.1 (spring 2002): 18‑23. coley, ken p. “moving toward a method to test for self-censorship by school library media specialists.” american library association, 2002. defleur, melvin l. “book selection and censorship: a study of school and public libraries in california.” social problems 8.1 (summer 1960): 93‑94. fiske, marjorie. book selection and censorship: a study of school and public libraries in california. berkeley: university of california press, 1959. jahoda, marie. “book selection and censorship: a study of school and public libraries in california.” public opinion quarterly 25.1 (1961): 150‑152. kateley, margaret a. “book selection and censorship: a study of school and public libraries in california.” annals of the american academy of political and social science 331 (1960): 136‑137. kiefer, christie w. “marjorie e. fiske, psychiatry: san francisco.” 1992, university of california: in memoriam. ed. david krogh. berkeley: university of california academic senate, 1992: 47-48. langland, laurie. “public libraries, intellectual freedom, and the internet: to filter or not to filter.” pnla quarterly 62.4 (1998). lee, alfred mcclung. “book selection and censorship: a study of school and public libraries in california.” american sociological review 25.2 (1960): 303. mcneal, a. l.  “editorial.” ala bulletin 54 (1960): 359. “news and notes.” public opinion quarterly 24.4 (1960): 692. robbins, louise s. censorship and the american library: the american library association’s response to threats to intellectual freedom, 1939‑1969. westport, connecticut: greenwood press, 1996. ‑ ‑ ‑. “champions of a cause: american librarians and the library bill of rights in the 1950s.” library trends 45.1 (1996): 28-49. ‑ ‑ ‑. the dismissal of miss ruth brown: civil rights, censorship and the american library. norman: university of oklahoma press, 2000. sabsay, david. “the challenge of the ‘fisk report’.” california librarian 20 (1959): 222‑256. smith, eleanor t. “self‑censors.” library journal 85.2 (1960): 223‑224. starr, joan. “libraries and national security: an historical review.” first monday 9.12 (2004). thomison, dennis. a history of the american library association, 1876‑1972. chicago: american library association, 1978. my maverick bar: a search for identity and the “real work” of librarianship tryin’ to get my mojo workin’ 5 responses jeff scott 2010–06–23 at 11:49 am this is a wonderful article on library history. it’s amazing how little things change. i particularly liked the semantic convenience of balance as a rationale for book selection. i also remember an interview with rod serling describing what he called “pre-censorship” people removing parts from a tv script that would be challenged. librarians do that even today. lack of self-esteemd as a barrier to library advocacy. i wonder if a similar survey was conducted if we would find too different results as a whole. wonderful article, thank you again! ellie 2010–06–24 at 6:16 pm thanks so much, glad you enjoyed. and thanks for the reference to other fields. that’s an excellent point that this is a broader topic. cindy mediavilla 2010–06–24 at 5:58 pm thanks for this very thorough overview of fiske’s report. i, too, have long been fascinated by her study, which, though it was very much a product of its time, still has relevance today. perhaps the reason ala didn’t comment much on the report when it came out was because ala didn’t commission it. instead, it was the california library association’s (cla) intellectual freedom committee that initially broached the topic of a statewide study of the effect of censorship on california libraries. when the liberal foundation fund for the republic (itself under investigation for communist ties) agreed to fund the study, cla got cold feet, but did end up partnering with uc berkeley to see the project through. i would be happy to forward you other research on fiske if interested. ellie 2010–06–24 at 6:14 pm thanks for the correction cindy! i would still think ala would have been interested based on the topic alone, but also the positive critical reception. however, the fact that it was the california library association’s ifc and not ala’s ifc obviously makes a big difference. the quote i used was referring to ala’s ifc expressing interest in 1953, but that original source continues on to the cla’s ifc being the one to actually push it through. my apologies to all for missing that very clear distinction in my note taking. and i would of course love to read anything else on the subject. pingback : the fiske report « alabama library expo this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct conspiratorial thinking in academic libraries: implications for change management and leadership – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2022 8 mar catherine b. soehner and chanel roe /9 comments conspiratorial thinking in academic libraries: implications for change management and leadership in brief some level of belief in conspiracy theories among united states citizens is quite common. academic libraries have seen significant change over the past 30 years, creating environments ripe for employees to believe in organizational conspiracy theories, or the “notions that powerful groups (e.g., managers) within the workplace are acting in secret to achieve some kind of malevolent objective” (douglas, leite, 2017). through recreating survey research by douglas and leite (2017) in several academic libraries, this pilot study aims to discover if academic librarians have beliefs in organizational conspiracy theories and if those beliefs have any impact on an intent to leave. our study shows academic library employees who have strong beliefs in organizational conspiracies and are unsatisfied with their job do not have intentions of leaving the organization. while additional research with larger sample sizes is required to generalize these results beyond this pilot study, there are important implications for library leadership. one such implication is that organizational conspiratorial thinking is common in academic libraries, which can lead to low job satisfaction. another implication is that since meaningful work and money or stability were the most cited reasons for staying, leadership can look to these aspects for encouraging retention. introduction rob brotherton, the author of suspicious minds, suggests that conspiratorial thinking is so common that it is actually a part of everyday life for most humans. brotherton provides us with six elements that make up a conspiracy theory: “the prototypical conspiracy theory is an unanswered question; it assumes nothing is as it seems; it portrays the conspirators as preternaturally competent; and as unusually evil; it is founded on anomaly hunting; and it is ultimately irrefutable” (2016, page 80). brotherton also reveals that “just because it has the word “conspiracy” in it does not mean it is necessarily wrong (2016, page 65) and “whether they turn out to be true or not, conspiracy theories deep down, are unanswered questions” (2016, page 66).  douglas and leite in their article, “suspicion in the workplace: organizational conspiracy theories and work‐related outcomes,” offer us this definition of organizational conspiracy theories: “notions that powerful groups (e.g., managers) within the workplace are acting in secret to achieve some kind of malevolent objective” (page 487). psychologists suggest that belief in societal conspiracy theories tends to manifest when a person experiences a lack of understanding of major events in their world, a lack of control or uncertainty, or the need to keep a positive self-image (douglas, sutton, cichocka, 2017). conspiratorial thinking helps us make sense of a world that is constantly changing, manage what is not within our control, and maintain our sense of being a good and capable person. this can manifest in larger societal issues such as a belief in chemtrails, or conspiratorial thinking can appear in everyday matters, such as a belief that administrators in an organization have hired a construction company for an upcoming building project not because they were the lowest bidder but because the administrators will benefit financially.  research regarding change management, the process of planning and implementing change in an organization, suggests that all three of these same experiences of loss of control, lack of understanding, and a need to maintain a positive self-image manifest in the work environment when leaders invoke change. todd jick (2008), a leader in change management, states in his book chapter, “recipients of change,” “for most people, the negative reaction to change is related to control – over their influence, their surroundings, their sources of pride, how they have grown to be accustomed to living and working.” for example, imagine that a library dean decides to remove a reference desk, consolidate the reference and circulation functions at the circulation desk, and remove librarians from answering front line reference questions, replacing them with well-trained support staff. while the dean may have expressed her reasons for this change, librarians might understandably feel a loss of control over their work, a lack of understanding of the reasons for the change, and a need to maintain a positive self-image by imagining that library administration is completely wrong and that the librarians would never do anything as evil as this (i.e., we, the librarians, are much better than those in administration, thus maintaining a positive self-image). as with societal conspiracy theories, organizational conspiracy theories follow the definition proposed by brotherton and have the potential of being true (2016, pages 65-66). libraries are changing rapidly in response to advances in technology, expectations of users, funding, and other pressures from both inside and outside the library (hickman, 2017; pinfield, 2017). strategic planning often ushers in changes to an organization due to new priorities and goals. smaller changes and adjustments to library services, office space, equipment, and job duties are commonplace. assuming that change in libraries produces similar employee reactions as change in other organizations, beliefs in organizational conspiracy theories are a likely part of how employees in libraries cope with rapid change. research by karen m. douglas and ana c. leite (2017) regarding conspiracy thinking in the workplace focused on employees in for-profit companies. they confirmed their hypothesis that people who believe in organizational conspiracy theories have an increased intention to leave the organization and that this same belief is associated with decreased organizational commitment and job satisfaction. what is less known is the impact of belief in organizational conspiracy theories in a not-for-profit organization, such as an academic library. this study aims to answer the following questions: 1) do employees in academic libraries mimic employees in for-profit organizations regarding a belief in organizational conspiracy theories? 2) if so, does this influence intent to leave and decrease job satisfaction and a commitment to the library? 3) do library employees stay in an organization even when they have a stated intent to leave? our hypotheses: we anticipate finding that librarians and staff in academic libraries have strong organizational conspiracy beliefs, that these beliefs decrease job satisfaction, and that this combination of belief and decreased job satisfaction contributes to a decrease in organizational commitment and contributes to an employee’s intention to leave their job. there are three important implications for gaining this knowledge. first, understanding the impact of conspiratorial thinking will enhance what is known about leading change in academic libraries and will contribute to the national conversation regarding training programs for current and future library leaders. second, when employees leave an organization, hiring and training new employees is an expensive proposition taking up the time and energy of many current employees. third, an employee with low job satisfaction but who stays anyway is also expensive to the library organization in the form of low productivity.  method to tackle these questions about conspiratorial thinking in academic libraries, a survey of employees at three research libraries was conducted. this study was approved by the university of utah institutional review board. these research libraries were located in similarly sized academic institutions with student body counts of 33,000, 28118, and 26,060 at the time of the survey.  other similarities included location in utah and faculty status for librarians.  the deans of each academic library were asked if the survey could be delivered to their faculty and staff, and each dean agreed. an online survey developed by douglas and leite (2017) was reproduced and delivered to library employees at these three research institutions. the survey questions were identical to those created by douglas and leite (2017) except an additional open-ended question was added to the end of the survey, “why do you continue to work at your current job?” the survey was distributed over email using the survey monkey platform and asked employees to rate their belief in societal and organizational conspiracy theories, job satisfaction, commitment to the library, and their intention to leave on a scale of 1-7. the email contained a link to the survey, a letter of consent, and information about irb approval. group email lists containing the entire library staff and faculty were retrieved for each library and the survey was distributed using those group emails. a cover letter was in the body of the email, which explained the purpose of the survey and served as the informed consent notice by stating, “by clicking on the survey link, you are giving your informed consent to participate in the survey.” once a participant clicked on the survey link, they were sent to the survey. participants did not have to answer every question on the survey, were invited to skip any question they did not want to answer, and could stop the survey at any time. once data was collected, a graduate student in the university of utah mathematics department completed the data analysis and statistical computations. the questionnaire consisted of six sections as described below, with each section inquiring about the individual’s beliefs concerning organizational conspiracies; beliefs in general, societal conspiracies; organizational identification; organizational commitment; job satisfaction; and turnover intentions. to analyze the data, each individual’s sections were averaged, which represented the individual’s overall score in each section. these averages were used to create three different linear regressions. the predictor variables were job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and organizational commitment. the response variables varied between organizational conspiracies, general conspiracies, organizational identification, and organizational commitment. qualitative data from the one open-ended question on the survey was coded into themes. the question was, “why do you continue to work at your current job?” the twelve themes that were extracted after coding were: benefits retirement enjoy the work / meaningful work money / stability positives outweigh the negatives location of the job learning / new projects good environment like my colleagues flexibility no other / better opportunities convenience in-depth analysis was not performed on the data retrieved in answer to this question due to the small number of people (n=133) answering the survey.  survey questions see appendix a: survey belief in organizational conspiracy theories to measure organizational conspiracy beliefs participants were given a series of seven statements related to organization conspiracies within their workplace (e.g., “i think that a small group of people in my workplace makes all of the decisions to suit their own interests;” “i think that the powerful people in my workplace often do not tell employees the true motives for their decisions;” 1 – strongly disagree; 7 – strongly agree). belief in general, societal conspiracy theories to measure general conspiracy beliefs participants were asked to read seven statements related to general conspiracies (e.g., “the american moon landings were faked;” “the aids virus was created in a laboratory;” 1 – strongly disagree; 7 – strongly agree). organizational identification participants were given six statements related to the measurement of identification the individual has with their current workplace (e.g., “this workplace has a great deal of personal meaning for me;” “i consider myself a person from my workplace;” 1 – strongly disagree; 7 – strongly agree). organizational commitment| participants were asked to choose from 16 statements related to their commitment to their workplace      (e.g., “i think that people these days move from workplace to workplace too often;” “if i got another offer for a better job elsewhere, i would not feel it was right to leave my workplace;” 1 –  strongly disagree; 7 – strongly agree). job satisfaction participants were given seven statements related to job satisfaction (e.g., “the number of hours you work;” “your opportunities for advancement;” 1 – very dissatisfied; 7 – very satisfied). turnover intentions to measure intent to leave their current workplace participants were asked four questions (e.g., “do you intend to leave your job in the next 12 months;” 1 – not at all; 7 – very much). open ended question why do you continue to work at your current job? participants were able to provide a free-text answer to this question. results and discussion data collection took place october and november 2018 after each of the universities in the study had begun fall classes. out of 294 academic library employees invited to participate in the survey, 133 people responded, which was a 45% response rate. to begin our analysis, we averaged the results of each variable on the survey.  for example, with the variable of “belief in organizational conspiracy theories” there were a total of seven statements. for each statement, the participant was asked to rate their belief as 1-7 with 1 – strongly disagree and 7 – strongly agree. we tabulated all the responses in the survey with respect to their category and proceeded to calculate the average of all the statements. the average for organizational conspiracy beliefs was 3.15, which indicates library employees surveyed had some beliefs in organizational conspiracy. the average for general conspiracy beliefs was 1.41; this tells us that most employees surveyed do not have a strong belief in general conspiracies. the average for organizational identification was 4.99, this tells us that the majority of library employees strongly identify with their organization. the average for organizational commitment was 3.53, meaning that most library employees felt committed to their organization. lastly, the average for job satisfaction was 4.70, indicating that most library employees have a high job satisfaction.  descriptive statistics of results from each survey section mean (average), standard deviation, and correlation coefficients are presented in table i. when looking at the averages for each category, there were very high averages for organizational identification (average = 4.99 out of 7.00) and job satisfaction (4.70 out of 7.00), while organizational conspiracy beliefs (i.e., library administration is up to no good) averaged a little lower at 3.14 out of 7.00, indicating library employees surveyed had some beliefs in organizational conspiracies, but not a strong belief on average. the standard deviation for this last value at 1.56 means that there were averages as high as 4.70 and some as low as 1.58. table i. average and correlations between variables (r) variables average (sd) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 1. organizational conspiracy beliefs 3.14 (1.56) — 0.0873 -0.2819 -0.2299 -0.5268 0.2541 2. general conspiracy beliefs 1.41 (0.687) — — 0.0960 0.2509 -0.0032 -0.0086 3.organizational identification 4.99 (1.099) — — — 0.6120 0.5109 -0.1069 4.organizational commitment 3.53 (0.715) — — — — 0.4553 -0.0709 5. job satisfaction 4.70 (1.26) — — — — — -0.1939 6. turnover intentions 2.39 (1.81) — — — — — — the relation to belief in organizational conspiracy theories and job satisfaction have the highest correlation.  at a -0.5268, this means that a belief in organizational conspiracies was connected to low job satisfaction. this is an indication that our hypothesis that a belief in organizational conspiracies has an effect on low job satisfaction is correct.  however, there was not a correlation for high turnover intentions with high organizational conspiracy beliefs, meaning that even though people believed their administration was up to no good, they did not intend to leave the organization. additionally, a correlation between a strong organizational commitment with low organizational conspiracy beliefs was not found. this result means that these library employees were very committed to their organization and still had strong beliefs that their library administration was up to no good (organizational conspiracies). these two results indicate that our hypothesis that strong beliefs in organizational conspiracies will result in higher rates of turnover intentions and a decrease in organizational commitment was not correct.  as stated above, we anticipated finding that librarians and staff in academic libraries have strong organizational conspiracy beliefs, that these beliefs decrease job satisfaction, and that this combination of belief and decreased job satisfaction contributes to a decrease in organizational commitment and an employee’s intention to leave their job. to test our hypothesis, we used linear regression on the averaged variables listed in table i as variables 1-6. we then bootstrapped a sample of size n = 10,000 on the β coefficients from the linear regression in order to calculate a confidence interval (ci) for the coefficient in question. first, we use job satisfaction as the response variable (see table ii). table ii. job satisfaction. predictor variable coefficients p-value confidence interval organizational conspiracy beliefs -0.327287 0.000649 * (-0.3225, -0.1078) general conspiracy beliefs -0.118224 0.367522 (-0.5503, -0.1187) organizational identification 0.396363 9.99e-05 * (0.1054, 0.5428) organizational commitment 0.302790 0.048502 * (-0.1383, 0.1859) age 0.014846 0.042453 * (-0.0135, 0.0150) * p-value < 0.05 indicates significance this tells us that the significant coefficients in predicting job satisfaction are organizational conspiracy beliefs, organizational identification, organizational commitment, and age. however, of these significant coefficients the bootstrap confidence intervals tell us the only reliable coefficients (meaning their confidence interval did not contain zero) are organizational conspiracy beliefs and organizational identification. these results indicate that an individual could believe very strongly that organizational conspiracies are taking place and still feel satisfied with their job. for the next regression, we use turnover intentions as the response variable, see table iii. table iii. turnover intentions predictor variable coefficients p-value confidence interval organizational conspiracy beliefs 0.26135 0.0182 * (-0.0042, 0.4396) general conspiracy beliefs -0.11435 0.6452 (-1.0526, -0.0374) organizational identification -0.06456 0.6452 (-1.0526, -0.0374) organizational commitment 0.06774 0.8144 (-0.8464, 0.4714) age 0.0.01220 0.3758 (-0.0677, -0.0078) * p-value < 0.05 indicates significance the only significant coefficient in predicting turnover intentions is organizational conspiracy beliefs. however, the confidence interval from the bootstrap contains zero, which means the estimated coefficient of organizational conspiracy beliefs has a chance of being equal to zero. the linear regression for turnover intentions is not producing a reliable model. this is an indication that the turnover intentions of the participants is not following an obvious trend and therefore is making turnover intentions hard to predict. this could be evidence that individuals that are unsatisfied with their jobs are not intending to leave their organization. there are likely many factors that influence an intention to leave or stay; for example, an employee who is close to retirement may choose to stay in an organization despite low job satisfaction or strong beliefs in organizational conspiracies.  for the last regression, we use organizational commitment as the response variable (see table iv). table iv. organizational commitment predictor variable coefficients p-value confidence interval organizational conspiracy beliefs -0.0.0441721 0.20721 (-0.1384, 0.0104) general conspiracy beliefs 0.2313055 0.00312 * (0.1544, 0.4510) organizational identification 0.3689078 1.37e-11 * (0.3309, 0.5724) age -0.0009115 0.83641 (-0.0155, 0.0018) * p-value < 0.05 indicates significance the significant coefficients in predicting organizational commitment are general conspiracy beliefs and organizational identification. both of these significant coefficients are positive and have a bootstrap confidence interval that does not contain zero. we conclude that if an employee who answered the survey believed in general, societal conspiracies and identifies with their organization, then they are committed to their organization. this conclusion seems peculiar because our hypothesis for individuals who do believe in general, societal conspiracy theories was that they would have a low commitment to their organization. this result likely occurred because our dataset had only one individual who exhibited a high average for general conspiracy theories; this individual is satisfied and identifies with their organization. this was a surprising result in that, of the 133 survey participants, only one person exhibited a high average for belief in general conspiracy theories. in the survey, general conspiracy theories included statements such as “the american moon landings were faked;” and “the aids virus was created in a laboratory.”  at the end of the survey, participants were asked one open-ended question, “why do you continue to work at your current job?” the comments are useful to gain insight into the perspectives of the participants about why they stayed in their current employment. answers from the 133 respondents created 267 separate entries that were coded into twelve categories (see figure i).  figure i: why do you continue to work at your current job? accessible equivalent of this chart as a table. many survey participants indicated that they remain in their current jobs because they truly enjoy the work or find the work meaningful (70 of 267 entries or 26.2%). the next largest theme, 39 of 267 entries (14.6%), was the need for the money provided by employment or the need to have some financial stability, which was closely followed by participants liking their colleagues, 34 of 267 entries (12.7%). this is not too surprising as many people work in libraries for the enjoyment of the job rather than the amount of money they are paid. still, money and stability were important factors for many.  the following quotations from respondents are examples of the types of responses received where money and meaningful work are described:  “it is a good place to work. it allows me to do meaningful work. the pay is more than fair. i have great relationships with coworkers.” “steady income and benefits are needed to live in this economy and i enjoy the work i do. eventually though i might have to move on because as things stand currently there isn’t room for advancement or pay increase in my current position.” “i enjoy the work; the pay is good in comparison to other institutions; i like the atmosphere; i like my coworkers; i think there are a lot of opportunities for professional development and growth offered at my job.” one implication of the very high number of entries about meaningful work (70 out of 267, or 26.2%) and money (39 of 267 entries, or 14.6%) is that these are two areas library leadership can concentrate on as they seek to retain employees. engaging our employees with an understanding of how their work impacts the library, users of the library, the university, and society can provide a sense of meaning that was clearly important to these survey participants. finding ways to increase salaries is a constant pressure and one that is worth the time when administrators are looking to retain employees.  even with the above comments about meaningful work, survey participants also indicated having low job satisfaction. low job satisfaction among employees who choose to stay at their jobs can create other problems for the library. assuming todd jick is correct that for many employees a “negative reaction to change” involves a loss of control, lack of understanding, and a need to maintain a positive self-image and that these reactions create the mindset needed to believe in organizational conspiracies (douglas, sutton, cichocka, 2017), and that believing in organizational conspiracy theories is connected to low job satisfaction as described in this paper and in research conducted by douglas and leite (2017), then invoking change in libraries must be undertaken with great care. what was revealed in this pilot study was that library employees with low job satisfaction and high beliefs in organizational conspiracy theories did not contribute to an employee’s desire to leave, which means that they remained employed in the library. faragher, cass, and cooper in their 2005 meta-analysis of close to 500 studies found an “immensely strong relationship between job satisfaction and both mental and physical health.” many other research articles describe the connection between low job satisfaction and low productivity (aziri, 2011; bayona, caballer, & peiro, 2020; hochwarter, perrewe, ferris, & brymer, 1999; roberts & david, 2020; vrinda, 2015). while it is expensive when an employee leaves an organization, it is also an expensive proposition for libraries when their employees have low job satisfaction and low productivity. correcting the complicated connections between belief in organizational conspiracies, low job satisfaction, and low productivity requires educating our library leadership workforce, particularly as they work to invoke change.  limitations the assumption at the base of this research is that the survey developed by douglas and leite (2017) accurately captures an employee’s belief in organizational conspiracy theories, intent to leave, job satisfaction and commitment. a 45% response rate (133 out of 294) was a strength of this study, nevertheless, a study group of only 133 participants is a limitation, and therefore, the results cannot be extrapolated to all academic libraries. additionally, results were from three institutions that are relatively similar in terms of the size of the student body and are geographically located in a similar area of the country. the smaller study group still provided valuable information, which will assist in adjusting the approach of future research.  another limitation to the study was that only one person exhibited a high average for belief in the general conspiracy theories mentioned in the survey. this meant that we could not effectively use the average of this particular variable in the linear regressions. as part of the informed consent, participants were encouraged to send “comments, questions, or complaints about the survey” to the pi. two emails from participants indicated that some of the survey statements contained too many negatives, making it difficult to know how to answer. in conducting further research, survey statements will need review and possible adjustment to remove this confusion. conclusion there are three important implications for understanding organizational conspiratorial thinking in academic libraries. first, understanding the impact of organizational conspiratorial thinking will enhance what is known about leading change in academic libraries and will contribute to the national conversation regarding training programs for current and future library leaders. second, when employees leave an organization, hiring and training new employees is an expensive proposition taking up the time and energy of many current employees. third, an employee with low job satisfaction but who stays anyway is also expensive to the library organization in the form of low productivity. this pilot study confirmed our hypothesis that a strong belief in organizational conspiracies has a connection to low job satisfaction for the academic library employees who participated in the study.  however, this belief in organizational conspiracies and low job satisfaction did not connect to an intent to leave the organization, meaning that many people remain in their positions even when they are not satisfied with their jobs and believe that their library administration is making decisions based on their own self-interests or that will ultimately harm the library organization. while additional research with larger sample sizes is required to generalize these results beyond this pilot study, this correlation has important implications for library leadership.  first, organizational conspiratorial thinking is common in academic libraries, is connected to low job satisfaction, which has been associated with low job productivity, and should not be ignored or easily dismissed since having employees with low job satisfaction and low productivity is an expensive proposition for any library. organizational conspiratorial thinking is often a result of significant change in the workplace, so library leaders should invest in their own professional development that improves their ability to invoke change with the aim of addressing conspiratorial thinking directly. national leadership institutes frequently cover change management and can be an excellent source of learning and improving leadership skills. second, since library employees tend to stay at their organizations, library leaders do not need to worry as much about employees leaving the library even if they believe in organizational conspiracy theories and have low job satisfaction. what they do need to be concerned about is improving low job satisfaction, thus improving productivity as well as retaining highly productive individuals. with a majority of respondents indicating that meaningful work and money were reasons for staying in their current employment, leaders can concentrate on how employees define meaningful work, find ways to increase opportunities for meaningful activity, and seek to increase salaries at every opportunity. conducting this or similar studies designed to reveal retention strategies for employees who are members of black, indigenous, and people of color communities would improve leaders’ abilities to retain the individuals they work hard to hire. further research with larger sample sizes would provide an opportunity to learn more and potentially extrapolate findings to academic libraries in general. acknowledgements we are grateful to peer reviewer ikumi crocoll, and jaena rae cabrera, publishign editor for in the library with the lead pipe, for your insightful comments. your expert feedback made this a much stronger paper. (editors’ note: some have requested to have their names removed from the acknowledgements.) bibliography aziri, b. (2011). job satisfaction: a literature review. management research & practice, 3(4). bayona, j. a., caballer, a., & peiró, j. m. (2020). the relationship between knowledge characteristics’ fit and job satisfaction and job performance: the mediating role of work engagement. sustainability, 12(6), 2336. brotherton, rob. suspicious minds: why we believe conspiracy theories. nyc, ny: bloomsbury publishing plc, 2016.  douglas, karen m., and ana c. leite. “suspicion in the workplace: organizational conspiracy theories and work-related outcomes.” british journal of psychology 108, no. 3 (2016): 486–506. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12212. douglas, karen m, robbie m sutton, and aleksandra cichocka. “the psychology of conspiracy theories.” current directions in psychological science 26, no. 6 (2017): 538-42. faragher, e. b., cass, m., & cooper, c. l. (2005). a meta-analysis of the relationship between job satisfaction and health. occupational and environmental medicine, 62, 105-112. hickman, b. (2017). university libraries need to start putting the student first. guardian retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/aug/03/university-libraries-need-to-start-putting-the-student-first [google scholar] hochwarter, w. a., perrewe, p. l., ferris, g. r., & brymer, r. a. (1999). job satisfaction and performance: the moderating effects of value attainment and affective disposition. journal of vocational behavior, 54(2), 296-313. jick, todd d. “the recipients of change.” organization change: a comprehensive reader (2008): 404-417. pinfield, s., cox, a. m., & rutter, s. (2017). mapping the future of academic libraries: a report for sconul. london: sconul retrieved from: https://sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/sconul%20report%20mapping%20the%20future%20of%20academic%20libraries.pdf roberts, j. a., & david, m. e. (2020). boss phubbing, trust, job satisfaction and employee performance. personality and individual differences, 155, 109702. vrinda, n. n., & jacob, n. a. (2015). the impact of job satisfaction on job performance. international journal in commerce, it & social sciences, 2(2), 27-37. accessible equivalents figure i. why do you continue to work at your current job? themes number of responses retirement 8 flexibility 8 location of the job 10 no other / better opportunities 10 positives outweigh the negatives 11 learning / new projects 11 convenience 12 benefits 24 good environment 30 like my colleagues 34 money / stability 39 enjoy the work / meaningful work 70 return to figure 1 caption appendix a: survey tool general information 1. what is your primary work classification? __ full time staff __ part time staff __ full time faculty __ part time faculty 2. what is your age? _____________ 3. how long have you been employed at your current workplace? __ less than 1 month __ 4 – 5 years __ 1 – 6 months __ 5 – 6 years __ 6 months – 1 year __ 6 – 7 years __ 1 – 2 years __ 7 – 8 years __ 2 – 3 years __ 8 – 9 years __ 3 – 4 years __ 9 – 10 years more than 10 years, please indicate: ____ 4. what is your gender? __ male __ female __ transgender __ prefer not to say organizational identification 5. please indicate how much you agree with each statement below by selecting the appropriate response in each case. 1 – strongly disagree 2 3 4 5 6 7 – strongly agree my employment in my workplace is a big part of who i am. i consider myself a person separate from my workplace. what my workplace stands for is important to me. i share the goals and values of my workplace. my membership in my workplace is important to me. i feel strong ties with my workplace organizational conspiracy beliefs 6. please indicate how much you agree with each statement below by selecting the appropriate response in each case. 1 – strongly disagree 2 3 4 5 6 7 – strongly agree i think that a small group of people in my workplace makes all of the decisions to suit their own interests. employees in my workplace are not always told the truth by those in charge. i think that a small group of people in my workplace secretly manipulates events. i think that the powerful people in my workplace conceal important information from employees. i think that very important things happen in my workplace, which employees are never informed about. i think that the powerful people in my workplace often do not tell employees the true motives for their decisions. i think that there are secret groups within my workplace that greatly influence decisions. general conspiracy beliefs 7. please indicate how much you agree with each statement below by selecting the appropriate response in each case. 1 – strongly disagree 2 3 4 5 6 7 – strongly agree scientists are creating panic about climate change because it is in their interests to do so. there was an official campaign by mi6 to assassinate princess diana, sanctioned by elements of the establishment. the aids virus was created in a laboratory. the attack on the twin towers was not a terrorist action but a governmental conspiracy. the american moon landings were faked. governments are suppressing evidence of the existence of aliens. lee harvey oswald collaborated with the cia in assassinating president john f. kennedy. organizational commitment 8. please indicate how much you agree with each statement below by selecting the appropriate response in each case.   1 – strongly disagree 2 3 4 5 6 7 – strongly agree i enjoy discussing my workplace with people outside it.               i do not feel emotionally attached to my workplace.               i really feel as if my workplace’s problems are my own.               i think that i could easily become attached to another workplace as i am to this one.               i do not feel like a ‘part of the family’ at my workplace.               this workplace has a great deal of personal meaning for me.               i do not feel a strong sense of belonging to my workplace.               i think that people these days move from workplace to workplace too often.               i do not believe that a person must be loyal to his or her workplace.               jumping from workplace to workplace does not seem at all unethical to me.               one of the major reasons i continue to work here is that i believe that loyalty is important and therefore feel a sense of moral obligation to remain.               if i got another offer for a better job elsewhere i would not feel it was right to leave my workplace.               i was taught to believe in the value of remaining loyal to one workplace.               things were better in the days when people stayed with one job for most of their working lives.               i do not think that wanting to be a ‘company man’ or ‘company woman’ is not sensible anymore.               job satisfaction 1 – very dissatisfied 2 3 4 5 6 7 – very satisfied your work in general. the number of hours you work. your pay. your relationship with your fellow workers. your opportunities for advancement. your present situation in comparison to others working in this workplace. your future prospects in comparison to others working in this workplace. 9. how dissatisfied or satisfied are you with the following aspects of your job? turnover intentions 10. do you intend to leave your job in the next 12 months? 1 – not at all 2 3 4 5 6 7 – very much do you intend to leave your job in the next 12 months? 11. how strongly do you feel about leaving your job within the next 12 months? 1 – not at all strongly 2 3 4 5 6 7 – very strongly how strongly do you feel about leaving your job within the next 12 months? 12. how likely is it that you will leave your job in the next 12 months? 1 – not at all likely 2 3 4 5 6 7 – very likely how likely is it that you will leave your job in the next 12 months? 13. why do you continue to work at your current job? _____________________________________________ academic libraries, conspiratorial thinking, leadership, management are we walking the talk? a snapshot of how academic lis journals are (or aren’t) enacting disciplinary values letter from the editorial board 9 responses anonlib 2022–03–16 at 12:27 pm reply i have to admit, i’m perplexed at the purpose of this paper, and why it’s in a journal dedicated to critical librarianship. honestly, it’s astounding that the authors never really grapple with why library workers might be conspiratorial and/or paranoid, other than to connect such feelings to “change”. perhaps the paper could have been stronger had the authors conducted a more nuanced analysis of “conspiratorial thinking” and what it actually entails as well as whether it matters whether a conspiratorial belief has truth-claims or not. as it stands, there are numerous examples of bad, institutional behavior that lead to perfectly legitimate reasons for an employee or group of employees to believe that institutional leadership has antagonistic goals. case in point: https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/tempe-quietly-fires-its-library-director-after-staff-complaints-11538051. there may be no real, ulterior motive for ignoring or waving away such anxieties, but in doing so, the authors end up putting forward an argument that analyzing and managing conspiratorial thinking are matters of creating and sustaining a submissive and malleable labor force rather than considering the need for large scale, structural changes, something which would actually implicate library leadership. dana longley 2022–03–20 at 7:25 pm reply i must say i mostly agree with meredith farkas’ assessment of this article, in her post “so i’m a conspiracy theorist now? a call for retraction” (https://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2022/03/19/so-im-a-conspiracy-theorist-now-a-call-for-retraction/). this article seems to be written by two authors with little to zero experience on the front line of libraries (one a career manager and the other a data scientist, both from the same institution). i’m sure they meant well, but this article should be considered for retraction. barbara lewis 2022–03–21 at 12:06 pm reply if you read this article, i recommend reading this, too. https://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2022/03/19/so-im-a-conspiracy-theorist-now-a-call-for-retraction/ meredith farkas 2022–03–26 at 6:01 pm reply i don’t know if the editorial board has seen the discussions on twitter about this article or the call for retraction on my blog (https://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2022/03/19/so-im-a-conspiracy-theorist-now-a-call-for-retraction/), but i hope the board will look at the criticisms and calls for retraction and consider them seriously. this article is not only a poorly-researched and unhelpful contribution to the professional conversation, but it is also not consonant with the values of your publication. lead pipe has consistently been an important and admirably values-driven publication and i think we all are hoping to at least hear why the editorial board feels that this should have been published (and in this particular publication). jennifer vinopal 2022–03–26 at 6:14 pm reply in my experience, poor organizational culture and low morale are indicators of a leadership problem, rather than a worker problem. for example, leaders who don’t communicate well or at all and who make decisions without involving the front line people with the most experience can incur resentment, low morale, and, frankly, *well-founded* belief that leadership doesn’t care about them and their experiences, or respect their “sources of pride.” that’s not conspiratorial thinking but, instead, well-drawn conclusions based on astute (and likely repeated) observations regarding leadership’s openness about decision-making. it is the leader’s responsibility to cultivate the trust, communication and collaboration practices, as well as a work atmosphere of respect and gratitude that will make everyone’s work appreciated and successful. leaders should do this not to bank goodwill for times when change is needed, but because it respects the human dignity in everyone; we do it because it’s the right way to treat people. while the last paragraph of the article does nod towards the need for improved leadership skills, i think the author’s analysis needs to go well beyond the question of change management practices. labeling workers’ distrust of leadership “conspiracy theory” (akin to belief in faked moon landings!) is antagonistic and unlikely to engage anyone in productive conversation about work culture. you describe “employees with low job satisfaction and low productivity [being] an expensive proposition for any library.” think of how costly library leaders who cause low morale and low productivity are. jennifer vinopal 2022–03–31 at 8:30 am reply because i was asked by colleagues on twitter to clarify my comments, i’m adding here that i’m not saying that workers are always right and leaders are always wrong. or that leaders can’t be bullied/abused by employees. i know that happens. what i’m saying is, if you’re a titular leader your responsibility is to build a culture of respect and trust. it means creating a culture of accountability for oneself and others, and then holding people accountable, including the titular leader/s. ruth tillman 2022–04–01 at 1:08 pm reply this is an excellent clarification because while non-managerial workers can and do contribute to workplace toxicity, the greatest responsibility lies with the administration. this article does not seem to take these elements of power and accountability into consideration. thomas barber 2022–03–26 at 8:03 pm reply a good deal of hard and important work is contained, herein; and, i hope that it makes a significant impression. thanks to m.. soehner and m. roe. ruth tillman 2022–03–29 at 3:48 pm reply in this research, how did you distinguish from organizational conspiracy beliefs and the appropriate conclusion that decisions were being made without worker consultation, based on leadership hype cycles? it seems like you’re blurring these together. when workers conclude that decisions are being made in limited spheres, that their opinions aren’t valued, and that decisions which greatly impact their work will be made without them, they’re not necessarily engaging in a conspiracy. administrators stated goals and values do not always line up with their behaviors, which is the failure of administration, not of the workers. for an example that relates to actual conspiracy theories… the statement “the rich and mega-corporations are keeping everyone else down” can be part of some really egregious and racist conspiracy theories. it can also be part of an appropriate analysis of taxation structures, legal structures, etc. (i also wonder why you ignored years of critique of the “male,” “female,” “transgender,” “other” options on surveys and how this does not appropriately represent transgender respondents.) leave a reply cancel reply save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct join us on the dark (social) side? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 28 nov micah vandegrift /2 comments join us on the dark (social) side? in brief: in the library with the lead pipe is reviewing the needs and requirements of our website and digital profile. we would like to develop our branding, and based on reader comments in our recent survey, refresh the lead pipe’s infrastructure as a digital publication. applications for an intern are now being accepted. by micah vandegrift early last month, alexis madrigal, senior editor of the atlantic published a piece titled “dark social: we have the whole history of the web wrong.” the premise is simply that as we have entered into an era of social networking, there are huge swaths of sharing on the web that occur behind, outside or without the help of the social media on which many of us rely daily. madrigal points out that links shared in emails or instant messages aren’t tracked the same way social media are, and yet these social connections still achieve the same goal (moving information from one person to the next/many) and, in the case of the atlantic, contribute a larger percentage of traffic than the social media sites. considering this, madrigal offers three takeaways: 1) content is still king, 2) sharing on the web has become akin to an act of publishing, framing an “identity” that you wish to be represented as online, and 3) information behaviors evolve regardless of the tools available. there is a striking realization underneath this fascinating way of viewing what we know about the web: we probably don’t know what we don’t know. here at in the library with the lead pipe, we have not often concerned ourselves with web traffic, stats, analytics and the like, but recently we’ve begun to mull over what it is that we don’t know, and what it is that we might like to. our recent survey is one example of how we’re attempting understand our readers, our role and our responsibility to the profession of librarianship. in part due to my work in scholarly publishing, coupled with a summer fling at an advertising/pr firm and also my long-lasting interest in what used to be called “web 2.0,” i joined the lead pipe with some significant questions about how the lead pipe’s editorial board defined the public face of in the library with the lead pipe. fortunately, the lead pipers are a brilliant bunch and i was encouraged to take on the role of community manager to explore some of my queries and to get to the bottom of some of those other aspects of what we don’t know about what we’d like to know about us and you. an early question, and one that is asked often of any online publication, is what state the website is in, and if it could be minimalized, streamlined, expanded, mobile-readied, etc. we are incredibly fortunate to have had a fantastic head start with derik badman’s design and development skills that created the lead pipe as you know it today. when the original site was launched, the iphone was barely a year old and the multitude of apps and time-shifted reading experiences we currently enjoy were still in their infancy. underneath the surface, we have a pretty straightforward wordpress theme that has been maintained with the expert touch of brett bonfield. both the reading habits and the tools for content delivery have made substantial progress over the few years since we launched and our site is in need of a refresh. for example, it is exceedingly clear that a majority of our readers get our content delivered through rss feeds, bypassing the website altogether – at least that’s what you told us. a quick look at our site’s analytics from the past month proves alexis madrigal’s thesis: 42% of our traffic comes from “google” followed by 23% from “(direct).” (twitter and facebook follow with 7% and 5%, respectively.) so… what we don’t know and might like to explore is how our website functions as a delivery mechanism, a home for high-quality content, and/or a landing page for those looking to connect with us elsewhere. is in the library with the lead pipe a perfect test-case for the power of the dark (social) side?! should we construct a more expansive rss feed, pulling in the articles with other content in a nicely-formatted package, delivered straight to your email inbox or rss reader? how can we encourage comments in and across our output feeds so that we effectively participate in conversations with colleagues and peers, especially as one of our goals is to “start conversations”? rolled into pondering the state of our site are a few related questions: are we best utilizing the social media sites on which we are represented; how effectively are those sites managed and utilized; to what degree does our branding, tone/message, design/aesthetics need to be reinvigorated; and what do we do with the incessant pressure to upgrade or refresh? would our work still be accomplished and fruitful if we “published” as a beautifully crafted mailchimp email, or as a diy zine, or maintained our current incarnation as a journal published on a blogging platform? the nature of publishing being as diffuse as it is now, we find the opportunity to reimagine what that means and looks like for in the library with the lead pipe. which is where you come in – we are now accepting applications for our first ever intern. particularly, we are seeking someone with web development/design skills who is interested in the questions and issues posed in this article, and also in our mission to better the library community. the internship will run the duration of the spring 2013 semester, and will be focused on refreshing the lead pipe’s wordpress installation, including related projects. we’ve compiled a working list of some projects that we’d like to accomplish here. the intern will work closely with the lead pipe’s editorial board to identify possible upgrades and additions to the current brand, and will be instrumental in developing and implementing the changes. self-hosted wordpress experience is required, strong technical skills are recommended and an interest in marketing/social web is requested. students especially are encouraged to apply and we are happy to work with schools to provide academic credit. interested applicants should contact micah vandegrift at micah@leadpi.pe and please include a link to a digital portfolio. —thanks to lead pipe colleagues emily ford, ellie collier and erin dorney for reviewing, and to brianna marshall for the external review. internship, web development libraries: the next hundred years open ethos publishing at code4lib journal and in the library with the lead pipe 2 responses danielle 2012–12–10 at 7:09 pm can i request that the full text of the article remain available in the rss feed? i’m a big fan of reading the entire article in google reader instead of having to click out to the website to get the full-text. ellie 2012–12–10 at 8:07 pm do not fear! an “in brief” feed would be an additional option, not a replacement of the full feed. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct an inflection point for american public libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 30 sep jean costello /18 comments an inflection point for american public libraries in the library with the lead pipe is pleased to welcome another guest author, jean costello! jean is a technical project manager for a prominent stm publisher. she is a passionate supporter of public libraries and blogs regularly as the radical patron. by jean costello 2009 may be an inflection point for public libraries. this year, the deepest recession in u.s. history accelerated their financial trajectory. following nearly a decade of level or eroding budgets,1 libraries across america were threatened with closure due to lack of funds. some have closed and most are operating with dramatically reduced budgets. the recession has also increased usage, with citizens flocking to their local libraries to access computers for job search, participate in recreational activities and borrow popular books and dvds. as the economy improves, the public may remember the value delivered by their public libraries and restore funding. even if this happens, i believe funding will be insufficient to maintain the viability of our public libraries in the absence of new service offerings, service delivery methods and funding mechanisms. the philosophical and material underpinnings of our public library system are solid, however its organizational structure of wholly independent entities funded primarily by local taxes, developed in the mid-nineteenth century,2 is ill-equipped to compete with 21st century companies that provide more focused service offerings. google, amazon, and others will remain clear winners in terms of information findability and convenience for the general public. in the community realm, social media companies have disrupted our assumptions, understanding and behavior and their influence will grow without the availability of viable alternatives. and long term success in the entertainment or social service sectors seems tenuous given the array of commercial and government entities competing to support these needs. so is there light at the end of this tunnel? circumstances are starting to favor change. the economic crisis has prompted many americans to re-evaluate and modify their consumption habits.3 perhaps for the first time, some may find value in sharing rather than owning resources. the wall street bailouts of 2008/2009, and this year’s debate over healthcare reform, have foregrounded a national dialogue about the role of private companies and government agencies in american life. for public libraries, a multi-year funding crisis, news of academic institutions replacing their libraries with other facilities4 and a growing interest in mixed-use libraries5 may make the pain of doing nothing greater than the pain of doing something. this is a prerequisite for most organizational change. more importantly, the maturation of key digital technologies enables libraries to deliver new and existing services more efficiently on a large scale. the right change america desperately needs an institution dedicated solely to the public good, that serves all its citizens equitably, promotes genuine community and fosters a healthy, integrated sense of recreation and self-improvement. our libraries have done this magnificently for over a hundred years, through good times and bad, in the largest cities and the most rural communities. it’s one of the reasons library service offerings have remained constant for decades and funding secure for even longer. i believe we do not need to remake our public libraries; we simply need to shore them up. as we envision change, it seems important to preserve the local autonomy and authenticity that have collectively made these institutions a national treasure. the right change would bolster libraries’ ability to leverage digital technology while increasing use of their physical facilities and surrounding amenities. it would also be advantageous to attract more users with high-end needs, for they would likely spur new service development and be able to deliver more financial and political support than traditional constituencies. in my view, the public broadcasting model is a good way to meet these goals. imagine a single, non-profit entity positioned to attract major funding and provide technology solutions far better than any municipal organization or system can do on its own. imagine freeing countless public librarians and volunteers from rudimentary tasks to give them more time to collaborate on activities that inform, inspire, and entertain. imagine libraries providing trusted information and facilitating meaningful dialogues across america. imagine extending the work of passionate, outstanding librarians beyond their local libraries. a national public library (npl) corporation to augment the existing public library system would make this possible. (note: as a patron, i can speak to the public-facing aspects of this idea. i’d be interested in comments from library professionals about how the npl might offer benefits for optimizing library operations, professional development, etc.) npl purpose and funding like its counterparts in radio and television, the npl would syndicate high-quality programming to independent libraries across the country. programming in this context would include content as well as digital technology for operations or direct patron services. the npl would also provide consultation and coordination for fundraising activities. like the public broadcasters, npl would derive funding from multiple sources including the federal government, charitable donations from corporate sponsors and fees from member libraries. public libraries are nodes in a national system and it is appropriate that our federal tax dollars support it. corporate and foundation funding, with appropriate governance to counter undue influence from large donors, is a valid funding source. through their fees, member libraries would gain access to rich content and services and also secure a stakeholder position in the npl. programming; digital technology through my work as a library volunteer and advocate, i observe the significant amount of time library staff and volunteers devote to functions that can be optimized through technology. while technological awareness is generally high, people appear thoroughly overwhelmed by the plethora of digital tools and techniques available to them. as a result, even basic tasks such as maintaining lists of supporters who serve on boards and committees, make financial contributions and volunteer can be challenging. devising communication strategies amidst multiple, dynamic mediums including email, websites, blogs, and facebook can also be daunting. many of the library meetings i’ve attended have been as much about contact administration as about new programs or initiatives. in terms of patron services, i use a few libraries in massachusetts that seem to be on-par with their peers nationwide. despite my esteem and strong support for them, my honest rating for convenience and ease-of-doing business would be about a bor c. as someone who is employed full-time and needs access outside traditional business hours, is comfortable using internet services, and has other options for accessing information and entertainment, i find my public libraries are not keeping pace with service levels from other providers. within the libraries, information and service are readily available at the front desk. outside the library, it is more difficult to come by, or impossible, due to limited hours of operation. some libraries require that i phone or visit to seek staff assistance for straightforward transactions like renewing materials and reserving meeting rooms and museum passes. each seems to use a different method of posting events on their websites and few let me search for programs or register online. it’s easy to overlook or miss out on some good library programming as a result. none has an integrated electronic newsletter to keep me updated on library news, programs, and new material acquisitions. information about volunteering and making financial donations is also fragmented; giving to my library is not as convenient as it is with other organizations. here are a few online applications the npl could rapidly make available to deliver better online services and save staff time as well: a calendar to enable the public to search for events, add events to their personal calendars, and receive email alerts about programs they have registered for or that meet their interests. a reservation system for meeting rooms, museum passes, etc. a volunteer management system to make it easy for people to browse and search for opportunities and sign up to work. a secure payment system so people could make one-time or recurring monetary donations to their library. a contact management system for libraries and friends groups to identify and contact members, donors, etc. an email marketing tool to craft rich, targeted electronic communications to libraries’ multiple constituencies. a survey tool to enable libraries to query users directly about satisfaction with existing services and interest in new services. mobile applications for these services. the benefits of a single entity that develops robust, integrated solutions for these common functions and makes them available to every library are significant. in addition to administrative efficiencies, a standard application suite would save time for library staff who must now evaluate the myriad options for delivering these services, figure out how to implement and support them, process purchase orders and maintain licenses for commercial applications, manage multiple admin accounts, and write training documentation. it is an enormous amount of work, particular for smaller libraries without dedicated technical staff. properly designed and implemented, patrons could receive more information from their libraries and securely process transactions online. one advantage of a uniform application suite is that users would likely promote the services in casual conversation or show others how to use them, as they do now when speaking of netflix or other popular online services. my experience is that this does not happen today because services differ so widely from one municipal system to another. patron privacy protection is another advantage. today, many libraries use free or low-cost commercial services on their websites because they do not have the resources to develop or host their own solutions. these services open patrons to unwanted advertising or require that they trade their digital privacy in order to use them. it would be a great public service if libraries uniformly deployed open, non-commercial products that deliver outstanding service and protect patron privacy. it would also benefit the public and libraries if these solutions could be shared by other municipal agencies. the public would receive more convenient, consolidated access to their local governments and have their library to thank for it. libraries might find agencies that currently compete with them for local funding becoming allies if they were using modules of the library’s information system to manage some of their administrative functions. as a technology professional, i know solutions for the functionality listed above have matured to the point where integration and deployment by professional software developers would be reasonably straightforward. the npl could make wise use of existing open source software and cloud computing to reduce cost and lead time for delivering web applications to its members. i am also confident that robust solutions for online access to patron accounts and library catalogs could be developed better through the efforts of an organization staffed and focused on the challenge than the tapestry of public and private organizations currently working to develop solutions. programming; content given the competition from commercial information and entertainment companies, i think a successful strategy for public libraries is to augment existing services with those that commercial firms cannot or will not deliver. npl can provide enormous value in this area by syndicating the talent and contributions of public librarians throughout the country. a few ideas: online subject communities. the npl could deploy an online community module to facilitate engagement around subject specialties. these communities would feature curated content (something like currentcites for the public) and moderated group discussions by an individual librarian or small team of librarians. for a given subject, curators could surface and contextualize the most high-quality, trusted material on a particular subject to people who joined the community. they could initiate and moderate interesting forum discussions by asking perceptive questions and referring participants to other user comments or relevant content. part of the moderation would involve modeling organized thinking, clear and concise writing, and decorum—qualities that are sorely lacking in social media today. (recent coverage and commentary on john wilbank’s keynote at the society of scholarly publishers conference is a fine example of the potential for quality online discussion.) the list of subjects is vast, as librarians know, and who better to help the public explore them? collaboration with public broadcasters. pbs and npr collaborate to provide outstanding content. the forum network, which works with public stations and community partners to provide “a diverse range of perspectives on both local and global issues to audiences around the world” is one example. adding the npl to this collaboration would strengthen each organization. hidden gems book and film reviews. it is increasingly difficult for good creative works to see the light of day. consolidation in the publishing, television ,and film industries have diminished product quality; executives no longer feel confident or empowered to take chances on promising but unproven works. instead, they promote formulaic and derivative works they believe will feed the bottom line.6 additionally, the loss of independent booksellers and movie houses means that good works receive less exposure. impartial reviewers with access to publisher catalogs, a mission to find “hidden gems,” and a large national audience might help stem the tide of mediocrity. many library websites have links to recommended reading lists and reviews from publishers, personalities and ordinary book lovers. publishing npl content instead would have these advantages: it would reinforce the library “brand” rather than providing free advertising for others. it would reduce broken links and links to lists that haven’t been maintained. this may seem like a small thing, but in this day and age these really damage an organization’s credibility. it would reinforce the library’s role of guiding users to trusted sources. the public trusts librarians and a well-organized reading list created by librarians would garner attention and respect. (nancy pearl hasn’t done too badly, after all). most people understand that blurbs on book jackets and movie trailers are marketing pieces rather than genuine endorsements. some may also realize that people manipulate the online ratings systems as a way to market their products.7 librarians do not face pressure to push product and can offer thoughtful, unbiased opinions about good works of fiction and non-fiction. the reviews would be more valuable if reader comments and questions were moderated and engaged. an online survival series. for this feature, librarians could research, curate, edit, and present information on up to five important topics, with one topic covered each day of the week. here again, engagement with reader comments, questions, and content suggestions would enhance this series. suggested topics include: information overload—digital technology has opened the info floodgates and everyone i know is overwhelmed by the flow. this column would be dedicated to strategies and tools for finding the information you want and filtering out the rest. commercial search services and online social networks—google, facebook, and other services offer enormous benefits and can serve the public good, although we continually need reminders of their primary motivations to seek and maximize profit.8 librarians are well-qualified to provide much-needed public education about the nuances and implications of information organization, storage, and retrieval. trusted sources—in 2007, the new york times reported on “self-interested wikipedia edits” by corporations and government agencies.9 this spring, elsevier was exposed for publishing six fake medical journals.10 in late august, the washington post‘s ombudsman highlighted the paper’s penchant for covering the politics rather than the substance of healthcare reform.11 a recent survey reports that 63% of americans believe news stories are often inaccurate.12 we’ve got a rough-and-tumble infosphere on our hands and the public needs help finding and vetting information sources. librarians can help. digital privacy—people are generally not aware of the vast amount of data collected and stored about them. industry and our elected officials prefer to keep this topic opaque. libraries can serve the public good by enhancing the ala privacy revolution and regularly presenting information about it. public library spotlight. public libraries have a rich collective history and most have equally compelling individual histories. many are architecturally beautiful, interesting, and significant. all are reflections of their community. given this richness and the sheer number of them, i’m surprised public libraries have not been the subject of more artistic and non-fiction works. showcasing these fabulous institutions would be a great gift to present and future generations. fundraising consultation and coordination professionals at npr and pbs have devised a range of techniques for garnering financial support from people who use their services. public libraries would benefit from the expertise of professional fundraisers rather than relying on the part-time efforts of inexperienced librarians, staff, and volunteers. the public broadcasters have crafted campaigns that seamlessly promote the central organization and independent local affiliates. the same could be done for public libraries. the npl fundraising staff could craft messages that explain the need for funding over and above tax revenue. they could help public libraries articulate value beyond their existing user base. fundraising consultants could also help establish best practices for involving and promoting local businesses in fundraising campaigns. the npl could also help transform corporate and foundation funding of public libraries. having a central library organization to receive contributions would be good for donors and libraries. it would be a visible and efficient way for donors to demonstrate support for valued services to a significant number of people. it would also liberate librarians from chasing targeted small-dollar grants so they could focus on adding more direct value for the public. small grants spread across multiple municipalities, that carry significant administration costs for donor and library, could be replaced with large grants to the npl. the loss of the small grants would likely be offset by the fundraising consultation and coordination libraries would receive as part of their npl membership fees. large donations would support programming to provide more sustainable benefit to a greater number of libraries. the increased impact and efficiency would benefit all parties. new local services the services listed above will make local library websites more valuable to their communities. better utilities for calendaring, reservations, volunteer management, etc. will drive some increase in visitation, however new programs and services will be required to maintain the high usage libraries are currently experiencing. the hope is that efficiencies achieved by implementing npl developed systems and fundraising support would free time for other initiatives that benefit their local communities. library staff and volunteers are best suited to develop programs for their communities; however npl content and services might provide program ideas or help drive participation. a tie-in with content from public broadcasters, for example, might drive visitation. libraries could host regular “hidden gems” movie nights to provide access to films that don’t typically benefit from a wide release. or they might host local subject-based clubs to personally discuss or collaboratively research topics from the online communities. computer classes could be structured around the “information overload” series. or the library might become the locus for civic action around public issues like digital privacy that libraries have brought to public attention. another area where libraries can add unique and outstanding value is by publishing quality information about local issues. this service was provided during a period in the early 20th century described by library historian lowell martin as the “innovative years.” he writes that “libraries would pull together the facts about an issue—an upcoming election, a public figure, a catastrophe—and reproduce the material for the convenience of curious citizens”.13 interestingly, martin credits new technology (the telephone) and the pressure of limited budgets with making library service more reactive. nearly a hundred years later, these factors may have re-established the need for proactive library services. as with the online features, rich user engagement is a critical success factor. my town election/library/school dream provides further ideas for elements of this form of engagement. in conclusion public broadcasting is but one example of how organizations provide information services to leverage efficiencies and strengthen the viability of local enterprises. many private and public sector firms have adopted it. visit most realtor websites, for example, and you’ll find content, databases, and utilities provided by a central organization. college alumni and other membership organizations use companies like harris connect for tools to “create bonds that increase participation, membership and support.” an inflection point is a mathematical term to denote a point where a curve reverses direction. i believe a confluence of social, economic, political, and technological developments lays a foundation for a change in outlook for public libraries. a narrative of obsolescence can become one of rejuvenation and reaffirmation of their mission to provide a record of knowledge, support self-education, and provide wholesome recreation.14 a national public library corporation could promote the ideal of equal access to information by helping ensure that the smallest and poorest communities have access to many of the same resources as the largest and most affluent. it can help make the library 2.0 vision a reality. it could also add dimension to the concept of a “third place” by strengthening librarians’ role in the commons through influence in the development of “a set of [information] resources or resource systems, the communities that use them, and the social practices and property regimes for managing the resources.”15 in their existing form, i believe public libraries supported by a national public library corporation are uniquely positioned to help americans live richer personal and public lives. their mission is noble and broad. their staffs are dedicated and highly educated. they are geographically interspersed, with a strong culture of resource sharing and collaboration already in place. during their early “innovative years,” public libraries were trusted institutions of culture and knowledge at a time when information was scarce. an overabundance of information may usher in a second wave of innovation. let us hope the library community can take advantage of the opportunity. acknowledgements thanks to brett bonfield for his support and guidance on this article. thanks also to kent anderson for thought-provoking reflections in the scholarly kitchen blog as well as for sharing his thoughts on public libraries with me. references 1 oclc. (2008). from awareness to funding: a study of library support in america. and agosto, d.e. (2008). alternative funding for public libraries: trends, sources, and the heated arguments that surround it. in e. abels & d.a. nitecky (eds.), influence of funding on advances in librarianship. bingley, uk: emerald publishing group. 2 bostwick, a.e. (1910). the american public library. ny: d. appleton & co. 1910. 3dewan, s. (2009, march 10). one u.s. recession casualty: conspicuous consumption. the new york times. 4 abel, d. (2009, september 4). welcome to the library. say goodbye to the books. boston globe. and kelly, j. (2009, july 28). franklin high library undergoes transformation. milford daily news. 5 carlson, s. (2009, september 14). is it a library? a student center? the athenaeum opens at goucher college. chronicle of higher education and oder, n. (2009, august 4). milwaukee begins to “rethink libraries for the 21st century”; mixed-use facilities are part of the blueprint; community meetings are ongoing. library journal. 6 fisher, m. (2009, july 9). give struggling authors a chance. the atlantic. and (2009, january 3). blockbuster or bust: why struggling publishers will keep placing outrageous bids on new books. wall street journal. 7 davis, p. (2009, august 5). gaming the rating system. the scholarly kitchen. 8 waller, v. (2009, september 7). the relationship between public libraries and google: too much information. first monday 14(9). 9 hafner, k. (2007, august 19). seeing corporate fingerprints in wikipedia edits. the new york times. 10 grant, b. (2009, may 7). elsevier published 6 fake journals. the scientist. 11 alexander, a. (2009, august 30). a missing ingredient in health-care coverage. the washington post. 12 pew research center for the people & the press. (2009, september 13). press accuracy rating hits two decade low. 13 martin, l. (1998). enrichment: a history of the public library in the united states in the twentieth century. lanham, md: scarecrow press: p 51. 14 ibid, p13. 15 helfrich, s. and haas, j. (2009) the commons: a new narrative for our times. in helfrich, s. (ed.) who owns the world? the rediscovery of the commons. berlin: oekom verlag. centralization, funding, innovative years, npl, npr, pbs, public libraries, technology why isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? learning to teach through video 18 responses steve wilson 2009–09–30 at 11:15 am first, this is an ambitious and thoroughly considered concept. i congratulate and thank you. here are some further ideas you may wish to examine: 1. the majority of public library circulation on a national basis is now a/v material. paradoxically, this type of lending does not enjoy the support that book lending does. 2. some libraries do better on their own. large donors who give in support of the community in which they live may not be as eager to contribute to something that operates on a national basis. 3. some communities do not value library service. in a funding crisis, they vote to discontinue the activity. who are we to tell them they do not have that right? 4. the mission and structure of our operations have not changed much in a long time. what i see changing are demographics. we now increasingly serve those who cannot afford information access. most can afford access via fairly recent advances. to wit – the netbook, cable broadband, e-books prices lower and falling. those who can afford become correspondingly less willing to support those who cannot. 5. the average public library spends around 60% of its budget on salaries and benefits. recruiting and retaining sufficient talent in the it and km fields to make real advances is all but impossible for most. when was the last time you saw a web developer position advertised above $100k at a library? yet, these abound in the private sector. 6. when thinking strategically, focus on your competitors’ responses. if we attempt to make e-books as available as we do now print, how will authors and publisher’s react? how will community centers and community colleges (many of which have an array of programming no library can hope to match) react to our invasion of their “third place” space? let me highlight what is frequently the most important strategic force: barriers to entry. do libraries do anything that it would be so difficult for a potential competitor to do that the competitor would be effectively discouraged from the venture? i think there is only one thing: purchase and distribution of physical materials. sadly, as shown above, this is a dying enterprise. jean costello 2009–09–30 at 4:27 pm steve – thanks for your thoughtful comments. 1) the explosion of media formats has made things interesting, hasn’t it? libraries, content & device producers and consumers are all trying to sort it out. implicit in my proposal is an expansion of the commodities libraries exchange. incorporating more info facilitation (e.g. the online subject communities and collection/dissemination of local information) into their offerings will help temper the disruption of ever-changing info containers. 2) agreed. participation in the npl would be voluntary; libraries that wanted to go it alone would certainly be able to do so. helping the public and donors understand the new funding mechanisms would be one of the key challenges for the npl. i’d submit, though, that large local donors may also see benefit from the npl. the budgetary needs for libraries are so great today that many rely on private money to fund operations. if we could find a way to reduce the cost of operations, as my proposal would, donor money could be used for programs, buildings, etc. that arguably have more lasting value. 3) my proposal does nothing to limit local funding. what it would to, however, is help cushion communities from the impact of financial shocks on their libraries. if basic services could be provided & maintained by a central organization for lower cost, communities would not be faced with the all-or-nothing choices many are today. with my model, digital services could be maintained 24×7 even if hours were cut. additionally, patrons could do more self-service online (like reserving and renewing resources) to ease staff burden during tight times. 4) the oclc study of 2008 found that financial support was not tied to visitation; people who did not use their library were often likely to financially support it. one of the goals i listed under the right change was to increase services to high-end users (and more affluent users) – for it seems to make sense that increasing the number of people who use the library will also increase the number who support it. 5) software development/deployment is complex and requires a team of highly qualified people to deliver the services enumerated under programming: digital technology. an individual or 2-person team simply can’t stay on top of everything by themselves. that’s why it makes sense to assemble a staff of high caliber software professionals to deliver and support enterprise applications; once the app is deployed, increasing the number of people who can use it costs very little. 6) some participants in the existing structure would be displaced by my proposal, and are likely oppose it. you’ve hit a nail on the head by asking “do libraries do anything that it would be so difficult for a potential competitor to do that the competitor would be effectively discouraged from the venture?” the ideas i proposed under programming – content and new local services address this point. one of the reasons it’s important to maintain local autonomy is so library directors can craft service offerings that meet the needs of the communities they serve. some may need more children’s services, others may need more ebooks than books, some communities may love poetry jams and others may hate them. local librarians are in-tune with this. what they need is the support and flexibility to provide services their patrons value. my proposal gives library staff that support by reducing the need for them to perform tasks that are unduly rudimentary and time-consuming or beyond their structural capacity to do well. ~ jean jeff scott 2009–09–30 at 12:14 pm some really great ideas and concepts. i like the online services list. that’s a great template for libraries to copy and implement. i like your twist on the public radio concept. i’ve heard that analogy used for public libraries, but your take makes it more approachable. jean costello 2009–09–30 at 8:26 pm hi jeff – good to see you writing again on gather no dust. do you think the county system you help manage, with about 15 libraries, would find membership in an organization like i described beneficial? or, would they be more interested in developing the services themselves? joseph mcilhenney 2009–09–30 at 1:15 pm after years as a public librarian, in the harsh pennsylvania budget climate that has lasted decades and is at its worst now, i agree that public libraries have been so greatly wounded that they will never recover in their current form. however, i disagree that going national is the solution. in fact, the solution, in my opinion, is exactly the reverse. survival for public libraries will be found by going local. before world war ii all libraries were local. when the fighting men and women returned home they created a huge growth in nearly everything you can imagine, including local and state tax revenue. public libraries jumped on this gravy train as an undeniable public good. since that time librarianship was professionalized and library service grew into what we recognize today, but the gravy train crashed sometime ago. i recognize that by going local much of what we know about library service will change. many libraries will shrivel, others will close. however, on the fringes of libraryland local solutions are being found. at this point it would seem that the most drastic changes are the best solution. not far from the community college where i serve as library director is a library that took the café idea to the extreme. they did not put a café in the library; they put a library into a café. as professional librarians it is tempting to look down our collective nose at libraries in places like the family center of gap pennsylvania because they are not following professional norms. but this branch of pequea valley public library, a small library with a small budget itself, has a lot to offer it community. read a couple of chapters by the fire with a sandwich and coffee, and you’re hooked. what does this mean for librarianship? well, image waitresses who can also help with the library catalog. buss boys who know the difference between john grisham and john updike. imagine the library staff looking very much like the restaurant staff. imagine a library that sells books as well as lends them. a library that offers space to serve as a business incubator bringing new business to the community and allowing that business to grow while at the same time bringing income and interest to the library. maybe not the kind of library you would want to work in, but the kind a community would want. so we go back to the old library fights over “give the people what they want,” but this time the very survival of public libraries is on the line. jean costello 2009–09–30 at 4:18 pm hi joseph – my proposal was not to nationalize our libraries. indeed, my first statement under the right change was “as we envision change, it seems important to preserve the local autonomy and authenticity that have collectively made these institutions a national treasure.” i’ve proposed a means of resource sharing and cooperation that can reduce costs where it’s easiest to do so in order to devote resources to the local services that “get patrons hooked” :) my concern if we do not find better ways to support our public libraries is that they will eventually decline to the point where it doesn’t make sense to keep them open. to me, this would be a profound national tragedy. i am a bit concerned about a rush toward mixed-use models. it takes a certain amount of focus and professional support to do things well, and asking employees to spread themselves too thin might accrue to a poorer experience for the employee and the patron. the new content and local services i proposed play librarians to their strengths: managing information, facilitating dialogues around ideas, fostering community through shared interests & values. and, with the added time and npl consultation when needed, libraries can create partnerships with local businesses, like coffee shops and libraries for example, that strengthen both enterprises. ~ jean joseph mcilhenney 2009–10–01 at 11:46 am hello jean–we are approaching the same objective from two different directions. you make good points about a larger, more cost effective, infrastructure to support libraries. for too long we have recreated the wheel over and over again. my thinking stems from years of having to justify my library’s existence to legislators. they never cared, but the folks using the library did. the further a person was from my library the less they cared. additionally, the more i talked about the professionalism of my public librarians, the quicker their eyes glazed over. so, what do they care about? that, it would seem to me, is a local question. jean costello 2009–10–01 at 7:26 pm ah, now i understand. thanks for writing back. there are a number of ways to approach funding – and perhaps a few hybrids are needed. i was hoping my article would spark conversation among good people who care deeply about our libraries … and you’ve helped make it happen. irene e. greenberg 2009–09–30 at 6:42 pm i read this piece with great interest. whether jean’s brilliant model is implented nationally or locally is not the point, as far as i’m concerned. to me the key issue that jean identified is the fact that we need a new fundraising model if libraries are to achieve their full potential within their communities. the traditional, tax-based funding model that has served libraries for years is unbelievaby out of date. in the 1980’s, when reaganomics slashed grants to the non-profit sector, most organizations (at least those that survived) began developing alternative methods for generating funds, through donations and earned income. many of these groups are now extremely sophisticated, employing carefully integrated programs that combine e-marketing, direct mail, telemarketing, and personal appeals from board members to generate revenue from members, annual fund contributors, major donors, corporate sponsors, bequests, and capital campaign and endowment fund gifts. it is telling to note that paula kerger, the well-respected president of pbs, rose to her current position as a result of many years in public television fundraising. thirty years ago that would not have been the case. in those days, the path to the top in public broadcasting was exclusively through jobs in engineering and programming. that was then and this is now. the good news for libraries is that there are a number of proven, well established fundraising models out there that can be explored and employed to good effect. government grants will not disappear completely, but if we have learned anything over the past few years, it’s how dangerous it is to rely on them to such a large extent. libraries need to develop greater financial independence, starting now, if they wish to fulfill their potential in the years ahead. jean costello 2009–10–02 at 8:32 am irene – sounds like you’ve followed funding for awhile. steve wilson commented that libraries are a “dying enterprise”. i sometimes reflexively challenge those notions – not so much because i disagree with them but because i so desperately want them to be untrue. your comments expose the inertia libraries have demonstrated with regard to funding. i’d say the same for technology. this is not to disparage the hard work and achievements of staff/volunteers throughout the country; their broad mission, long history and independent organizational structure make libraries a hard ship to turn. as you say, they must start the turn now in order to remain viable. lindsay stratton 2009–10–01 at 2:40 pm many of the ideas presented in this article are things that library systems (i am training coordinator for a system serving 42 small, rural libraries in new york) are already doing, attempting to do, desperately working to clarify or replace outdated mandates so that we may do better, lobbying hard for the resources to do more of, while at the same time justifying our existence in the face of local funders who wonder why money goes to these intermediary agencies rather than directly to libraries and working around an out of touch state library. from where i sit, greater coordination of technology infrastructure, unified lobbying for library support across the board, coordination of staff ce and professional development, relevant standards for library accreditation, presence in policy making for drm / platform neutrality / digital equality – just these things alone would provide huge benefits to local libraries and these are things we need now, which are not being met sufficiently or consistently by library systems, regional library councils, professional associations, or the imls. jean costello 2009–10–02 at 8:22 am lindsay, earlier this month helene blowers wrote “my thinking is that if we don’t strive to be the “owners” of something, then our value to our communities diminishes.” imho, librarians stepping up to champion issues for the public like those you enumerated (drm / platform neutrality / digital equality) is a winning strategy. it would be of great public service and increase the perceived relevance and stature of the profession. one of the reasons librarians can not step up is because they’re spread so thin doing all the things you described at the beginning of your comment. i believe an organization like the npl, properly focused and staffed to deliver tangible solutions for libraries, would help enormously. ~ jean emily ford 2009–10–02 at 4:50 pm jean, thank you so much for a wonderful contribution to itlwtlp! having a patron’s perspective that discusses these issues is invaluable to us. your post is insightful and thought provoking. i wonder what implications this kind of network would have for the academic library field, especially in light of public vs private academic institutions. kathy dempsey 2009–10–14 at 2:00 pm jean, will you be my new bff? :-) my favorite sentence is this: “public libraries would benefit from the expertise of professional fundraisers rather than relying on the part-time efforts of inexperienced librarians, staff, and volunteers.” amen, sister. one thing i find interesting is that none of the commenters touched on the failures (pardon my french) of any of the current national orgs to tackle these challenges successfully. none of the help you mention has really come from ala, sla, webjunction, etc. they are all busy orgs w/ many goals. it does seem as if we’d have to build a whole new org from scratch (one not run by endless committees) to do what you propose. difficult? sure. impossible? not quite. i’m all for it. jean costello 2009–10–15 at 5:59 pm kathy – as an outsider looking in via the library press and blogs, it seems as though the failure you speak of from the national orgs is an elephant in the room. approximately a dozen librarians from across the country have messaged me privately via my blog to express frustration about it. i’ve come across far fewer public comments such as your lunchtime chat with helene blowers and jan van de geer earlier this year and carl grant’s commentary, libraries; a silence that is deafening where carl said: i think we librarians are lacking a national vision and agenda and are placing our profession and institutions at risk as a result. […]let’s carve a pathway, build a platform and align behind a clearly articulated vision of librarianship that will be understood and supported both nationally and internationally. my article is an attempt to get the ball rolling with a few lofty perspectives as well as concrete ideas and suggestions for funding, service development and professional development. hope it helps. kathy dempsey 2009–10–19 at 9:06 am if there is an elephant in the room, i’m likely to point it out. p.s.: the emperor is only wearing skivvies. amy taylor 2009–10–22 at 8:19 am i think this is a great idea. npl fills a need. perhaps the greatest need is to rebuild belief that public libraries are “dedicated solely to the public good” as you say. sadly, i don’t think the public believes this. even if librarians and ala believe that they are the best deciders/defenders of the public good, they are often at odds with what the public thinks is good. i hope npl will focus on the national, the public, and the libraries. pingback : libraries, ebooks, and a public broadcasting model this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a look at librarianship through the lens of an academic library serials review – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 8 jul annette day and hilary davis /6 comments a look at librarianship through the lens of an academic library serials review photo by flickr user elvie.r. (cc by 2.0) by annette day and hilary davis talk to any librarian or library vendor and you’ll hear the same thing – the global economic downturn is hitting hard. libraries everywhere are taking an axe to their collections; libraries are cutting book budgets, canceling serials subscriptions, allowing institutional memberships to lapse, and letting go of databases. libraries and their stakeholders are having to make some really hard, realistic decisions about how much they can do without, while still maintaining adequate support for learning, research, and teaching. the experience of a serials and databases review– reviewing all continuing expense obligations– can be a painful, traumatic process for any library. but it can also give a library some tremendous insights into its collection, its level of credibility within its parent organization, and just how well-positioned it is to fully support the needs of its constituents. a review can unveil some interesting issues in the business of librarianship, publishing, and scholarly communication – from the tools and skills necessary to make value judgments about a library collection to the potentially fatal future of some segments of the publishing industry. in this article, we outline the steps of a serials and databases review from the perspective of an academic library and unpack some of the big issues and questions that face our profession as surfaced through the experience of a conducting a review. 1. identify the serials and databases to successfully undertake a serials review you of course need a list of everything to which your library subscribes, how much you pay for each serial and database, and the dollar amount you have to cut to meet the bottom line. wherever possible you also want to gather data elements that, combined with cost, campus feedback and librarian knowledge, will help you ascertain the value each title brings to your community. some of the more common data elements librarians utilize in a review exercise are: vendor supplied usage statistics, impact factors, information about journals your constituents are publishing in and citing, and alternative access via databases that aggregate full-text journal content. this list of potentially useful collection metrics is certainly not definitive but it represents those data elements that are heavily relied upon by most libraries (for more see the metrics described by guy gugliotta). the above sounds a simple proposition, but the ways in which libraries subscribe to journals are not simple. for instance, journals and databases may be subscribed in a multitude of ways: through a package of journals/databases from a publisher, on the basis of an institutional membership, or through a consortial deal whereby access to a given resource is shared by all libraries in a consortium due to the fact that one of the member libraries subscribes to the journal. unfortunately, the tools available to us to manage and account for complex subscriptions don’t yet meet all of our needs. an ils (integrated library system) will likely work with the concept of an “order,” but an order doesn’t necessarily correlate to journal titles or other ways that journals can be purchased such as packages and memberships. if an order is for a journal package, say the acm digital library, only one record with the associated package cost may appear in your ils. the order is, in reality, for each of the 30 journals contained in that package but the native ils has difficulty with that concept. generating a comprehensive list of subscribed journal titles and their associated costs from an ils is far from straightforward, and in our experience no ils is currently set up out of the box to work that way. if you were to ask your acquisitions librarian, they would tell you that the issue goes even deeper – the way that serials agents and publishers set up the billing structure for libraries can dictate how libraries are able to describe the order and its related parts. consequently, a lot of larger libraries have turned to an erm (electronic resource management system) as a way to try to tackle some of the inadequacies of today’s ilss. theoretically, an erm helps libraries maintain a running inventory of journals to which they provide access (either paid or free), if they paid for them during the current fiscal cycle, the cost paid (either as an institutional membership, or as a subscription to a single title or a package of titles) and the library’s rights to the content for which they have paid (i.e., can the library claim perpetual ownership of the content or is the library simply leasing current access?). many factors have to be triangulated to reasonably determine if you’re getting good value for your subscription money. having this information collected in one place in preparation for a serials and databases review is critical, especially if your subscriptions have soared beyond 100 or so. however, based on our own experience and talking with other libraries, no erm is truly positioned to combine all of these pieces in a way that is efficient and accurate. a great deal of time and attention is needed to handle extraction of data, normalizing the data (e.g., the concept of “usage” and “downloads vs. accesses” is not applied consistently internally or externally by publishers/vendors), cleaning up the data (e.g., compiling cost data from multiple order records for thousands of subscriptions and variations in how serials are packaged), and interpretation of the data. the bottom line is that current ils and erm solutions are imperfect tools for comprehensively supporting a major serials and databases review to achieve cancellations and save money. what is needed from these kinds of tools is a way to co-locate order information with use information and provide a system to collect feedback from a user community to help determine the relative value of journals and databases when we have to make cuts to the collection. 2. communicate with users a major component of a serials and databases review is communicating with your users why a review is necessary, laying out how it will work, and making clear what kind of feedback is needed from them. it might not be the easiest dialogue to have with your community, but it is a prime opportunity to have honest, open conversations that will educate your patrons and address many of their commonly held misconceptions and anxieties. in order to make the best decisions on what resources to keep and what to cancel libraries have to actively solicit feedback from their communities. this is usually done in a combination of ways – meetings between librarians and faculty, emails to campus, and a web presence designed to communicate the reasons for the cuts and the mechanisms for providing feedback. some examples of websites created for this purpose are from north carolina state university libraries,  and the university of maryland libraries. ncsu libraries serials review form some libraries will ask for feedback on a list of every single journal and database to which they subscribe while others attempt to share only the content that isn’t deemed a “no-brainer” to keep. while the idea of providing as much information and data as possible to your users can be compelling, it has its drawbacks. is a data-driven approach the best method for getting feedback from constituents? you want to balance giving your users enough information to make informed decisions, but you don’t want to overwhelm them with information that they either don’t care about or that takes lots of explanation. journal cost, subject, usage statistics, impact factors, and the journals in which your constituents are publishing and citing (supplied by the local journal utilization reports (ljur) from thomson isi) are all standard metrics that will likely resonate with library patrons and that can easily be conveyed with each title on the list for review. what does it mean to “keep or cancel” a journal? a common misconception from patrons is that the print and online components or formats of a journal are “always” distinct and that canceling one format means that the other will still be available. of course, we know that this is not always the case as, often the cost of the print is tied to the online version (and vice versa). this is an opportunity to dispel another common misconception about potential cost saving by going electronic-only (dropping the print and maintaining only the electronic format of a journal). realistically libraries rarely see more than 5% savings by dropping print subscriptions but many patrons (usually faculty) expect the savings to be higher and are often startled that the cost of the journal isn’t halved by removing one format. from the publishers’ perspective the production costs of publishing journals, regardless of format, play heavily into the prices that libraries pay, hence the minimal savings. what about preservation for the long-term? one common anxiety that librarians still frequently meet is centered on the loss of the print journal. most libraries have moved large chunks of their journal collections to electronic only formats. the desktop convenience provided by the electronic format is expected by our patrons and the downstream cost savings that libraries can realize is beneficial. patrons have embraced the electronic format, yet when asked about canceling print counterparts (if you still have them) many users are reticent. sometimes their concern is tied up in the traditional notion of the library as a large print archive where researchers can serendipitously discover content by browsing in the stacks. in other cases, patrons are shocked that in the digital world libraries haven’t done a straight swap from shelf space to server space. the fact that, in most cases, these electronic materials do not reside on a local server, but are maintained on publishers’ servers across the world makes it hard to convey the shifted concept of ownership in the electronic world. libraries can negotiate for rights to own the electronic content just like it can own the physical item sitting on the shelf, but if that content resides on someone else’s servers, some patrons, perhaps rightfully, are distrusting of a move away from the print world and fearful for how we can successfully safeguard these materials for future generations. with the economic crisis providing the final nail in most print journal coffins, this is a great opportunity to educate your patrons about the concepts of archival and perpetual rights, explaining what options are available, such as lockss (lots of copies keeps stuff safe) and portico. what about other parts of a library system budget? a serials review brings to light the diverse services a library provides and the breadth of the patron-base the library supports. when asked to help make hard choices about cutting collections, some patrons may look to other library-provided services and question why the library thinks those services are more important than their favorite book or journal. reading room renovations, computer equipment refreshes, and laptop lending are services that might seem peripheral to one user but may be central to another user’s learning and research experience. any serials review will likely raise the thorny issue of how a library prioritizes resources, and reconciling that balance for some patrons will be difficult. the intricacies of university and academic library budgeting may not be what they want to hear about, but it is important to clearly explain, for instance, how a reading room renovation is supported with a budget source that is distinct and independent from the budget source that supports journals and databases. 3. evaluate feedback photo by flickr user nicole hennig (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) once you’ve collected the community feedback, the process of combining all of the information available about each of the serials and databases begins. we’ve referred to journal package and consortial dependencies already, but at this stage these issues truly make or break the decision to cancel a journal or database. does it make sense to dismantle a package of ten journals simply to be able to cancel two titles if the cost of canceling those two titles doesn’t save more money than keeping the package of ten intact? consortial dependencies are even more complex. your library may have access to a title based on the fact that another library in your consortium pays for a set of journals or databases, so the decisions made by that library to keep or cancel resources could severely impact the ability of their consortial partners to maintain a collection that best serves users. often, large journal packages are negotiated by a consortium of libraries and the savings that result from going in as a group can be compromised if one library decides to back out of the deal. the downstream effects of canceling journals and databases can build rapidly when these dependencies are in place. beyond package and consortium dependencies, the process of weighing the variety of metrics associated with journals and databases can be rather tricky. not all journals and databases provide usage statistics or impact factors. there has been much written (e.g., pikas, 2007; davis and price, 2005) about the reliability of usage statistics, even in light of existing standards for measuring electronic journal use. so, how do you balance the lack of metrics for some resources with the need to determine value of the resource to your community? to what extent do you trust usage statistics when they do exist (this might be a whole article in it’s own right)? these are just a few of the tricky issues that must be weighed when evaluating feedback and combining it with the data you may have. the bottom line is that a serials and databases review cannot and should not be entirely data-driven. the presence of data for some resources and the absence of data for other resources needs to be carefully weighed with the advantages and disadvantages of dependencies as well as the librarians’ expertise and knowledge about the research, teaching and learning needs of community. this is the value that collection management and acquisitions librarians bring to the table during critical budget cuts. 4. decision-making – what to cancel and what to keep? analyzing the feedback will hopefully have given you a clear idea of any “dead wood” that may be floating in your collection. if you are extremely lucky then you may be able to stop there, but the realities of today’s economic climate forces libraries to cut to layers far below the “dead wood.” tackling these deep cuts is truly painful, and at the final stage of the serials review requires the impossible task of balancing the campus feedback with your budget reduction target. you need to make the best decisions to minimize the impact of the collections cuts on teaching and research, preserve a balance between different subject disciplines and user groups, and refrain from strangling collections flexibility and growth for years to come. really simple, right?!! for most libraries, the strategies used to deal with collections cuts focus on some combination of cutting serials, reducing the monograph budget, going online-only (if you haven’t already), cutting standing orders, reducing the binding budget, and canceling databases. it is extremely tempting to shift the heavy lifting of the cuts to the monograph budget and shield the continuing resources from the cuts. a year or two of buying considerably fewer monographs sounds manageable and will likely have less immediate impact. however, unless your budget cut is a one-time reversion and everything will get back to normal next year, then be very cautious in hitting your monograph budget disproportionately from other collection areas. most academic libraries probably have between 75% to 98% of their collections budgets tied up in continuing resources. the bigger this proportion the more vulnerable your budget is to inflation. serials inflation is on average about 8% a year, while monograph inflation is much lower. the cushion provided by cutting the monograph budget will be eaten away quickly, and you will again be faced with cutting continuing resources just to keep inflation at bay. the act of building a collection quickly reaches the stage where it is one in, one out – nothing new can be added unless something is canceled. the collection cannot grow or be nimble enough to respond to new campus initiatives, it can only remain static. keeping a balance between serials and monographs is critical so that collections breadth, flexibility and growth are not lost to combating inflationary increases. a few lasting implications it will be hard to recover from substantial cuts for consecutive years, and the impact will be felt for years to come as gaps in collections begin to appear. as collections budgets continue to diminish leaving ever-widening gaps in collections that cannot be filled retrospectively without a large influx of money, libraries may well begin to step away from the notion of broad and comprehensive research collections. access to materials at the point of need will become the main focus with patron-driven collecting or access models becoming primary strategies. take a look at the taiga4 statement: “within the next 5 years collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron-driven. ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. the only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives.” this statement may at first seem outlandish, but has strong foundations in what we see happening now. with collections cuts, interlibrary loan (ill) is becoming a key service for every library, ill is the ultimate on-demand service. we also see libraries investigating and investing in user-driven collection models for their monograph acquisitions. these models are seen mainly in the e-book landscape with platforms such as ebl and myilibrary working with libraries to offer ownership combined with on-demand collection building models. other libraries are working to include print books into their on-demand collecting (spitzform and sennyey, 2007). all of these developments will produce some major changes in the publishing industry and perhaps ultimately in scholarly communication. libraries have been the main market for high level research monographs and journals over the years, but that market has been shrinking and will no doubt continue to diminish in the future. the large publishers will find some way to adapt, but the small publishers may not. small publishers don’t have the revenues to “retool” their products and pricing options to change with the times. some are still unable to provide standardized usage statistics (if any), and still others haven’t made the move to produce their journals electronically. other impacts of a serials review are captured in all of the backend work of a library’s technical services team (acquisitions, metadata, and cataloging) and the work they conduct with the serials agents and publishers. journal cancellations and conversions to electronic -only format will certainly imply work down the road to edit and update catalog records. subscription cancellations may also result in reduced discounts with subscription agents as your spending decreases. as a consequence, renegotiation of service agreements with serials agents and even new license agreements with publishers will be likely. the work required to act on the decisions made as a result of a serials review can instigate a great deal of costs in terms of time and staff to actually make the changes a reality. the impact of substantial collections cuts across a large number of academic institutions will be felt immediately by the scholarly publishing industry. longer-term implications for how research collections are built and the nature of scholarly communication are unclear. many possible outcomes exist and libraries need to take a lead role in shaping their futures so that they still remain central to the learning, teaching and research needs of their constituencies. many thanks to our reviewers who helped shape this article:  derik badman (itlwtlp), kristen blake (ncsu), maria collins (ncsu), emily ford (itlwtlp), and greg raschke (ncsu). references/further reading: davis, philip m. and jason s. price. 2005. “ejournal interface can influence usage statistics: implications for libraries, publishers, and project counter.” journal of the american society for information science and technology, v. 57, no. 9: 1243-1248. gugliotta, guy. 2009. “the genius index: one scientist’s crusade to rewrite reputation rules.” wired magazine: http://www.wired.com/culture/geekipedia/magazine/17-06/mf_impactfactor?currentpage=all lockss (lots of copies keeps stuff safe): http://www.lockss.org/ pikas, christina. 2007. “it’s about trust, reliability, accuracy…” christina’s lis rant: http://christinaslibraryrant.blogspot.com/2007/03/its-about-trust-reliability-accuracy.html portico (a digital preservation and electronic archiving service): http://www.portico.org/ project counter (counting online usage of networking electronic resources): http://www.projectcounter.org/ spitzform, peter and pongracz sennyey. 2007. “a vision for the future of academic library collections.” the international journal of the book, v. 4, no. 4: 185-190. taiga forum. 2009. “provocative statements (after the meeting).” taiga 4: http://www.taigaforum.org/documents/taiga 4 statements after.pdf this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. journal cancellations, serials review editorial: what not to do when applying for library jobs w-e-b-s-i-t-e, find out what it means to me 6 responses pingback : libology blog » choosing and choices – librarianship and serials joan perlman 2009–07–09 at 10:56 pm i totally agree. the most difficult aspect is getting instructors to respond in a timely fashion. pingback : links for 2009-07-10 « lawrence tech library hilary 2009–07–10 at 8:58 am @ joan: thanks for your comment. we broadcast the message about the serials review a number of ways – through our dedicated library representatives from each academic department, through our university library committee, through the campus newspaper, letters from our library director to each of the dept chairs, etc. leveraging existing contacts and emphasizing the need to make decisions collaboratively with the campus community is key, and in our experience, seems to work fairly well. what strategies have you used to get your users to provide feedback in a timely fashion? pingback : why is serials recordkeeping so problematic? « across divided networks pingback : interesting post from in the library with the leap pipe « what now? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct what water? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 21 jan sara seely /0 comments what water? photo by flickr user nathan degargoyle (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) by sara seely recently i was lucky enough to come across the publication of a commencement speech given by david foster wallace in 2005 to a group of wide-eyed graduates from kenyon college. while it’s difficult to sum up what one takes away from a four-year-degree, this particular rumination helps to qualify the value of a liberal arts education by hitting home a simple metaphor. wallace starts with a joke about fish. one looks to the other and says, “so, how’s the water?” the other fish replies, “what’s water?” the speech goes on to point out that a liberal arts education opens our eyes to the world around us by providing experiences that help us move beyond our assumptions. situations and phenomena in our daily lives become more nuanced and complicated. helping students “see the water” is at the heart of the information literacy teaching that librarians-as-educators do. when i think globally about information literacy and what’s outlined by the acrl information literacy competency standards, it seems we want students to open their eyes to the world of information. we want them to recognize that finding and using information isn’t as straightforward as it seems. not so that they’ll shy away, but instead, graduate with the abilities and understandings they need to shed assumptions, ask questions, and navigate an ever-changing information landscape. the individual goals and means of library instruction programs may vary, but some form of teaching happens at most academic libraries. librarians’ teaching takes the form of hosting workshops, teaching courses, and being there for students when and where they need us, from reference desks to chat rooms. and our teaching efforts are driven by goals for student learning, with the hope that we can play an active role in graduating information literate students–eyes wide open in the fish bowl. but this is a lot to accomplish in a never-ending stream of one-shot library workshops. at this collective realization a few years ago, the librarians at my library decided to face it head on. not that we thought one-shots weren’t effective, just that we weren’t sure what they were accomplishing, exactly. plus we were spending a lot of time teaching freshman how to find a book and an article and releasing them into the research paper abyss, and we wanted to consider other forms of teaching. i know we’re not alone in grappling with this conundrum and i hope to hear how you and your library are working to address our shared challenge: how to design an instruction program that meets our learning goals for students. a bit of background to begin addressing the learning goals we had for students, we first looked to the first-year writing courses that streamed through the library, english 101 and english 102. as is most likely the case in academic libraries across the country, we had been actively trying to reach as many students with foundational information literacy know-how in their first years of academic work. no matter how tailored our instruction was to a given assignment, we still felt a bit like broken records; each workshop needed to cover the “basics” and we rarely got past the book-and-article routine. we were left unsure of the impact of our efforts. like ducks in a pond, we appeared calm atop while our feet below paddled furiously to keep up.  so we began dreaming up our ideal instructional opportunity: a foundational information literacy course that gave students the time and space to meet the learning goals we set for them. though boise state university’s library has been teaching a one-credit library research skills class for the past decade or so, it had yet to reach its potential. titled university 106: library research, it has historically been a self-paced course that has students complete a series of question-and-answer worksheets, for instance: “go to the library of congress subject headings and find a narrower term for sports accidents.” more recently it has evolved into a project-based course where students continuously work towards several small or one more substantial culminating paper, bibliography or presentation. in the past two years, we’ve thrown the course into perpetual beta, ever evolving the curriculum, and have been testing the waters by experimenting with how the course is taught: in-person, online, and as a themed course (for example, one semester we “themed” two courses by focusing on business resources and diversity). we’ve also continuously expanded our offerings of univ106 from one large section to 23 sections this spring semester, taught by 13 librarians. the in-person sections of univ106 typically meet once a week for an hour in one of the computer classrooms in the library. there is also variation in how the online sections are offered. we have one large stand-alone, self-paced course that is capped at 150 students and team-taught by two librarians. we host this online course through blackboard, our campus course management system, in order to use the time-saving features such as automatic grading for quizzes. we also offer smaller sections online, capped at 25 students, that make use of a variety of tools, including wikis, blogs, google sites and blackboard. while all univ106 courses share standard learning outcomes, librarians have free rein to design experiences, activities and assignments that map how students get there. this freedom has led to a lot of creativity and experimentation with teaching techniques–from active learning to building video tutorials. here’s an example of a typical weekly assignment in the revamped university 106. a student is first asked to find a newspaper article that mentions research on their topic. as a next step, the student is asked to track down the original research article mentioned in the newspaper article. the student then answer a series of questions about the authorship, audience and kind of information they find in each article. this exercise would be supported with how-to instructional videos, step-by-step directions, and worksheets that scaffold the process. as an instructional team, boise state librarians have shared with one another while developing their own course content. i’ve learned a great amount from my colleagues as we’ve rolled up our sleeves and mucked around in the messy art of teaching. student learning has been the focus throughout all of this experimentation. the first semester i taught univ106 i had my 25 students work towards creating or editing a wikipedia entry of their choice. they were to add significant content with the support of at least 10  information sources–their justified “top 10” resources on a topic. a lot of things went well that semester: students showed up for our hour of class each week, performed the research-related tasks i asked of them, and even seemed to get excited when it came time to edit wikipedia live. but at the end of the semester i was left with a sinking hunch that students weren’t making connections between what they learned in univ106 and the research they would need to do for future courses; a hunch i’ve yet to confirm, but about which i am still curious. we’ll get to more on assessment in a bit. the problem was i spent much of that first semester fabricating a reason for my students to do academic research. by choosing wikipedia as the genre for their final project, i’d tried to create a context that was meaningful for them (beyond, “because i said so”), but i still felt as if a majority of the students were a bit too complacent about the work. i was left wondering how to better tap into their innate curiosity; i wanted my students to have genuine questions, an authentic information need to satisfy. but was i asking too much? university 106 is a one-credit pass/fail class, after all. that’s a lot of enthusiasm and engagement to expect for one credit. pairing university 106 with english 102 armed with a renewed enthusiasm for teaching, and with our eyes on the prize–laying a foundation of information literacy in the first years at boise state –we looked to trends and best practices in the profession. embedded librarianship has received a lot of interest in recent years, and seems to have had some success as a method of teaching information literacy skills to students at the point of need (bowler & street, 2008). the basic idea is to teach more than a one-time workshop in support of a project. instead, the embedded librarian has an ongoing  instructional presence in a course or project-based situation, either online or in person through a series of tailored workshops. with embedded librarianship in mind, we embarked on a series of conversations with the first year writing program to explore possibilities. as in many academic libraries, our instruction program had for several years been targeting our teaching efforts towards english 102: research writing for a variety of reasons. as the course title indicates, the focus of course is to develop research-based writing abilities, and so is a good fit for library research instruction. engl102 is also a course all students are required to take and usually take in their first year at boise state, which opens to the door to the possibility of reaching most incoming students with meaningful information literacy instruction. so librarians set out to proactively explore how to partner with engl102 faculty in the development of our instructional offerings so that we could identify and meet student needs. targeting collaborations with engl102 also made sense because of existing partnerships with faculty in the first year writing program. thomas peele, first year writing program assistant director, had already been leading a curricular change to emphasize research (peele & phipps, 2007). based on annual assessments of student work, the first year writing program had identified students’ limited research skills as needing additional instruction. when i started at boise state university i had assumed that building relationships with key campus partners would take years, but instead i was able to hit the ground running. within a year of my arrival, we were already discussing possibilities for co-teaching courses or pairing english 102 with university 106 as co-requisites, and the more we talked, the more the doors kept opening wider. it’s been an instruction librarian’s dream come true; a collaboration and mutual goal to support student learning. so, we’d found our match. the next step was to align the work librarians had been doing to redesign univ106 with the instructional needs presented in engl102. power-up! in spring 2009 kim leeder and i embarked on teaching four sections of linked univ106/engl102 courses, taking two each. students co-enrolled in paired courses of engl102 and univ106. of course, we needed to come up with a catchy way for students to recognize this new offering, and so it became project writing and research (power). we pitched it to students as a combined four-credit experience that would strengthen their research-writing skills. university 106 would act as a research lab for writing assignments in english 102 and the curricula would align so that the courses would be mutually supportive at the day-to-day level. kim and i met individually with our english faculty counterparts and designed a series of weekly activities and developed shared assignments that directly supported the research-based papers and projects students were working towards in engl102. right away i felt a different level of engagement from my students. i didn’t have to spend as much time introducing the “why” for research; the context existed in the paper writing of english 102. i could instead spend more time helping students explore and refine a topic and make it interesting for themselves and their intended audience. through their reflections and performance on assignments, it was clear students were seeing the applicability of the research side of things. i often received comments from a student who expressed in amazement that they were able to find articles for a biology assignment and other coursework. it was working! students were becoming better researchers and beginning to understand how these skills could be applied beyond university 106. since then we’ve expanded power course offerings from 4 to 20 sections. this growth has been supported by a state funded grant aimed to integrate technology into teaching in higher education. we’ve spent the past fall leading a series of collaborative institutes in which librarians and english faculty worked together to build the combined english 102/university 106 curriculum and content. the institutes resulted in a series of university 106 modules of research instruction, including content, activities and assessment. the modules currently number 22 in all and cover topics from image and video searching to field research to crafting search terms. librarians and english faculty also worked to create a combined course schedule in order to ensure the univ106 modules directly supported the weekly writing and research expectations for engl102. this push towards offering 20 sections has been quite an effort for everyone involved. collaborating closely with english faculty has made our course design that much richer and, well, more fun–certainly for us, and we hope for students as well. photo by flickr user nathan degargoyle (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) but, did they really get it? assessment has been a key tool to aid our decision-making processes, from deciding on course offerings to how we deliver and design course content. it was clear early on that if we were to put intensive efforts towards engl102 instruction, we needed to know if students were actually learning what we intended. at the end of each semester we’ve collected portfolios of student work from power sections. the portfolios typically consist of final drafts of their major papers and a reflective letter in response to prompts on both their growth as a research and a writer. librarians and english faculty developed a rubric to assess the quality of student work in terms of source variety, source appropriateness, citation use, and research strategies employed. the assessment of student work has proven to be an insightful lens into what they’re learning and what they’re not, and this has directly informed the development of course content. it’s also forced us to articulate what proficient research looks like. the spring 2009 assessment made clear that power students were using a wider variety of higher quality sources in their work. they were also significantly more able to discuss their research strategies. students in both power and non-power sections of english 102 struggled with citations. in response, we created an annotated bibliography assignment for use during the fall 2009 semester in order to provide formative feedback for students on citations prior to submitting a final draft. the upcoming portfolio assessment this spring will show us whether the added assignment improves student performance. course evaluations have also proven useful when considering course delivery and activities. students made it clear the first semester we taught power that they would prefer a combined course schedule and course site. this seems like a logical consideration now, but it was reflective of librarians and english faculty still thinking of the courses as separate in that first semester. i think the steps we’ve taken in the last semester to build on our collaborative efforts with english faculty while growing the power program has helped to create a one-course experience for students. opportunities & challenges although i’m hopeful heading into the spring semester, i’m also aware of the challenges and opportunities ahead. first and foremost teaching univ106, in all of its many forms, has proven a wonderful opportunity for librarians to grow as educators. we have learned to see through the water along with our students, and will continue to learn how to teach in a way that students learn. it’s felt like a cultural shift in librarian identity; my colleagues and i have truly seen ourselves as responsible for students becoming information literate, and therefore had to fully embrace our role as campus educators. having instructional partners in the english department, and seeing our teaching from their perspective, has also positively influenced the way we see ourselves as educators. but with the ultimate goal of reaching all incoming freshman, the task is a bit daunting with finite resources; good teaching takes time and effort. i’m not sure that we’ll ever be able to match univ106 with all 70 sections of engl102, but the challenge is there. we would need to develop a scaleable model of course design and delivery that doesn’t take us backwards when it comes to student learning. some librarians have expressed interest in matching a univ106-like-course to key courses in their disciplines. this is a wonderful idea, one that would tier the library instruction program to reach our goal of graduating information literate students. but we can’t be everywhere and do everything, so our course offerings will need to grow and balance over time. the ultimate goal is to have the academic library remain at the heart of teaching and learning on campus to ensure our relevancy as an academic unit and support student success in meaningful ways. as a next step, we’ll begin an assessment project this spring to follow univ106 students into future courses and beyond. we’ll be curious to see if students are able to transfer the foundational information literacy skills into their upper division coursework. the hope is to be better informed about what research abilities they’re expected to have in future courses, and we’ll use this insight to inform our course learning outcomes. we’ll see if they’re in fact able to see the water. instruction librarians are faced with the challenge of how to design and deliver an instructional program that meets information literacy learning goals. i’d like to hear about the efforts librarians are making at your own institution to address the information literacy needs of your students. i look forward to learning from your comments. bowler, m. & street, k. (2008). investigating the efficacy of embedment: experiments in information literacy integration. reference services review, 36(4), 439-449. peele, t. & phipps, g. (2007). research instruction at the point of need: information literacy and online tutorials. computers and composition. i’d like to thank ellie dworak, emily ford, kim leeder, ellie collier and derik badman for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions for this post.  and a special thanks to kim leeder for offering the opportunity to reflect on our work. collaboration, college students, information literacy, instruction, instructional design, research, teaching vision and visionaries: a whole bunch of questions to start off 2010 (as if you didn’t have enough of those already) critical literacy? information! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct gendered expectations for leadership in libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 4 nov jessica olin and michelle millet /23 comments gendered expectations for leadership in libraries photo by flickr user nic mcphee (cc by-sa 2.0) in brief despite significant gains in representation at the administration level, there is still a disparity between the percentage of women in our profession and women as library leaders. additionally, even when women attain leadership roles, even top positions in libraries, there are still hurdles in the shape of gendered expectations. this article examines the history of gender representation in the field, discusses some recent trends, and then makes some recommendations for creating an environment in which women can succeed and how, more specifically, the profession could become more supportive of women in leadership roles. by jessica olin and michelle millet introduction the path to the director’s office is convoluted for some and a straight shot for others, and the reasons we want to move up into administrative roles are even more varied. for some, financial considerations are uppermost. others seek careers in administration based on a conviction that “i can do a better job than my boss. i know it!” and then there are those individuals who know, from the moment they fill out their graduate school applications, that they want to be the “head cheese in charge” of a library. both men and women (and people who do not fall at either end of that false binary) can and do make good leaders, but stereotypes and gendered expectations present an unexpected barrier for many of us. women are often perceived as nice, kind, and nurturing, while men are usually perceived as forceful, knowledgeable, and decisive. if you do not fall neatly into one of these stereotypical modes, or even if you do, gender expectations can be at the root of a lot of workplace difficulties. in our case, both authors made the decision to seek a job in administration in part based upon the disproportionate gender representation among library directors, university librarians, and other leadership positions in the field. also, let’s be honest: we both knew we could do it better than some of the ways we had seen it done. and yes, we both ran face-first into gendered expectations. anyone reading this article is probably aware of the disparity in the numbers of men and women in librarianship. it’s something that people talk about. a lot. since the beginning of the 20th century, women have comprised 75% of the librarian profession (beck, 1991). but, by the middle of the century, the recruitment of men into the profession tipped the scales in administrative and management positions (o’brien, 1983). librarianship then became a predominantly female profession that was overwhelmingly led by men. this trend changed in the latter part of the last century and into the current one: according to association of research libraries (arl), male director representation dropped to around 40% (arl, 2010, cited in a literature review published by delong in 2013), which is a significant change. however, since the gender breakdown of the profession as a whole is still around 80% women and 20% men (according to multiple sources cited), this is still not a representative number. moreover, while it seems that we may have balanced the scales in terms of leadership positions (balanced to 50/50, that is, with some claims of salary parity for those that make it to the top) (deyrup, 2004), it is clear that a related issue began to emerge, probably due to the increasing numbers of women in leadership positions: a strong (mis)perception of women as leaders. meaning, even though there are more women leaders now, we are still not doing it right. or, more to the point, we are not doing it the way people want us to do it. we do not act like men. this is not, then, parity. it isn’t enough to have women in administrative positions and for them to be paid at similar rates, though that’s a great start. we want leaders, male or female or people who don’t identify in those ways, to be valued for what they each bring to their organizations. in this essay, we will consider some of the gendered expectations of leadership and how all of this bears on academic library leadership. we will also tell you how it makes us feel. we hope that it makes you angry like it did us. we hope that it makes you want to help us change the system. we are speaking both from our experiences and from evidence found in the literature, and we know that the lived daily experiences of gender-non-conforming and non-binary individuals can play out differently. we also want to affirm that race, age, and other cultural perspectives will influence not only your own experiences but the reactions of those around you. much of our research, which affirmed our suspicions, falls within the library literature, but there is a large body of work in business and psychology about the role of gender and gendered expectations in leadership. one further caveat: we know that available statistics usually skew towards arl libraries, but we feel this reflects the reality present in academic libraries at large. we hope that some of what we have learned personally and through considering the literature of the field is transferrable to other library types and even to other female dominated professions, but we would never presume to suggest that our solutions are a one-size-fits-all response to these expectations. gendered leadership in our lives the authors proposed this article out of a joint frustration with our own experiences as we transitioned from middle management as a department head and an information literacy coordinator respectively. we experienced a broad range of situations that were clearly gendered in nature, experiences we shared with each other and with other women leaders in our own and related professions (harris, 1992) only to find that we weren’t alone. it helped ameliorate the frustration to know others have had similar or even identical experiences. many female leaders we know were told to be nicer to their subordinates. we’ve also had similar experiences with being called slightly (or even blatantly) sexist things that, when mentioned to higher ups, were met responses like “well, that’s just the culture around here.” we we were not the only ones who’d had experiences at work with people who disliked our “style” as women leaders. being told to contain our anger when we see male colleagues yell at even the highest administrators with no negative repercussion is another source of frustration. for us, writing this article is a way to take our frustrations and experiences and turn them into something useful. when we spoke about our own experiences to a small group of other female library administrators, we were overwhelmed but not really surprised by their sharing of similar experiences. we asked permission to share some of their words in this essay, and promised anonymity in return. the authors both know that “challenging the status quo strongly enough to have an impact on it but not so strongly that one cannot succeed within it” (fletcher, 1999, p. 131) is a difficult balance to strike, and giving others voice is important to us. one of our colleagues explained, “at my current job, i recently stood/spoke up for all the women… when one employee thought it was appropriate to make a sexist comment. [our male superior] still hasn’t spoken to this employee because the conversation makes him ‘uncomfortable.’” another spoke about how she’s afraid to speak up: “i want to start a blog but i won’t because i know it will be used against me. i want to tweet like i used to [before coming to work at my current job] but know i can’t. it’s just so disheartening to know if i was a man that this would not be a thing.” we also heard about what happens when women take middle management roles in the intersection of librarianship and educational technology: “i suspect that the head of the tech/library department both a) thinks i’m stupid because i’m a woman and a librarian and b) is threatened by me because he’s realizing that i’m a lot better than him at certain things. it would be funny if it weren’t so frustrating.” another participant in the conversation shared how it’s not just leaders in libraries, but also women who take leadership positions in professional organizations: “i remembered watching certain women get torn apart in my state association for being too brash, too bossy, too ‘too’. i really admired many of them, and this still makes me sad and angry.” we were also pleased to hear what can happen when things go well, from someone who had left a previous job due to gender-based problems: “thank the high heavens i landed in a job (with an amazing female director) that supports me, encourages me to succeed and fail and all that good stuff!” gendered leadership everywhere these themes were born out when we looked beyond our own experiences. what we found in looking through literature, both in and outside of our field, was at times enraging and at times soothing in that it made us feel better that we were not imagining bias. it exists. gendered expectations of women leaders is a thing people in library science and beyond have been writing about for some time. a piece on the harvard business review blog network is especially worth noting here. “why do so many incompetent men become leaders?” by tomas chamorro-premuz (a professor of business psychology at university college london and a faculty member at columbia university) features a discussion of literature related to traits of successful leaders. in particular, chamorro-premuz posits that “the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio [in for-profit industries] is our inability to discern between confidence and competence,” (¶2). the author also spoke eloquently about the problematic nature inherent in the narcissism of hollywood-picture-perfect leadership, as well as how easy it is to promote such leaders because “a much bigger problem is the lack of career obstacles for incompetent men” (¶10). we all know competent, supportive, and deeply qualified male library leaders, but it does bear repeating: there are not as many career obstacles for men as for women who want to ascend to administration, which means it is easier for men who hold themselves authoritatively without actual authority to fool people into believing the lie. this is not to say that all incompetent library administrators are men, but it does say something that our profession is made up of an estimated 80% women, and yet the women in leadership is in the 50% range. this idea that fewer obstacles are placed in the paths of men who aspire to leadership is born out in other research. of particular interest is the work of ruth simpson who wrote, “masculinity at work: the experiences of men in female dominated occupations,” a little over ten years ago, in her work focusing on “pink professions.” the conclusions shared by simpson reflect our personal experiences in the field. even if the subjects of simpson’s study were uncomfortable with the distinctions, they readily admitted that much of what is done within “women’s work” fields is divided into front line work (women) and management (men). one particular criticism struck home: “ideologies and discourses of gender have a crucial role to play in promoting and sustaining the sexual division of labour and the social definition of tasks as either ‘men’s work’ or ‘women’s work,’” (5). crossing the lines of expected roles has multiple possible repercussions. negative outcomes, such as feminization and stigmatization, are possible, but the positive outcomes for men – such as “career effect” (implied professionalism and immediate respect) and “assumed authority” (being seen as the one in charge, despite a lack of experience) – are much more common. even more discouraging was how, in this study, male librarians and nurses felt freer to make mistakes and not be called to task for it, especially with regards to mistakes outside of the performance of duties, such as being repeatedly late to work. women and leadership: we keep reading and writing about the dichotomy as previously mentioned, the struggle of women to live up to or to fight gendered expectations of leadership positions is well-documented and a topic of strong dichotomies. some say women are doing quite well as leaders and some articles even suggest women make the best leaders. fairly recently, the mainstream media has been touting that companies can be most successful if they hire women to lead, while surveys of personnel still reveal that people prefer to work for men (eagly, 2007). when women are leaders, they are expected to act in a very specific, gendered way. alice eagly noted at an invited address at the american psychological association in 2006 that: women are faced with accommodating the sometimes conflicting demands of their roles as women and their roles as leaders. in general, people expect and prefer that women be communal, manifesting traits such as kindness, concern for others, warmth, and gentleness and that men be agentic, manifesting traits such as confidence, aggressiveness, and self direction (eagly, 4). to our eyes, that quote speaks to a commonly held perception: only men are expected to be agenic. if women are, then those women fail the “gender” test. we found similar themes everywhere we looked, and we found a lot while looking. in fact, we were surprised to find how deeply our topic had been researched previously. it was not so much that we thought we were the first to realize the issues of gender in leadership as that we hadn’t expected so much of it to fall within the realm of library science literature. in our experiences and training, we’d been presented with an image of library leadership as a somewhat monochromatic perspective, as predominantly male. one piece we encountered went so far as to explain the gender breakdown thusly: “it was the natural order for men to be heads of academic libraries, particularly major research libraries, and the male minority presumably advanced the careers of other men” (delong, 64). regardless of the past, the representation in our leadership has seen significant improvement. however, delong (who provided the statistics we quoted earlier in the article) shared a perspective that is a bit disheartening: women who aspire to leadership positions in libraries should be aware that the pace of change and acceptance of women in leadership roles continues to be slow, perhaps even slackening, and they will continue to find barriers and obstacles to surmount in attaining the career and leadership roles that they desire. (69) it would be easy for us to say that we, as a profession (both librarians and the subset of academic librarians), just need to set aside gendered expectations, but that would be naive at best and more realistically could be seen as disingenuous. fighting stereotypes definitely needs to be part of the effort, but we need to do more. by writing this article, we are hoping to confront these expectations as a first step. the larger work of intersectional feminists is slowly but surely shifting the attention of our broader culture, and this essay is our way to add our voices to theirs. we want to go a step further, however. we would like to share with you some ideas that have seen us and colleagues through difficult times. we would also invite you to comment on this essay to share your own approaches, with the obvious caveat of asking you to pay attention to the lead pipe comment policy. more personal experience so, how does it make two female library administrators feel to read article after article about how people really prefer male leaders and if they have to have a woman leader, they’d like her to fit their stereotype of “be soft. but, wait. don’t be too soft.”? well, it feels like reality. we came together to write this article because we started sharing our personal experiences with each other and found much in common. while both of the authors feel supported by our respective administrations, we have at times, especially early in our management careers, felt isolated, marginalized, and a myriad of other feelings because we weren’t perceived as the “right kind of female leader.” not nice enough or too nice. too harsh and bossy or too wishy washy. the interest in this literature and research came from a genuine place: from two women who do not fit the stereotype of overly warm or nice but both consider themselves to be empathetic, kind, and effective. conducting this survey of the literature, reading about these issues in depth, made us both angry, but it was also an affirming experience because it confirmed that we have not been imagining things. there is a clear gender bias both in how employees view their bosses and what their expectations are for those leaders. the question for us is now: what do we do to change these perceptions, if anything, and more importantly, what can we do to help our peers who understand this struggle and those who will come after us? what do we do now? talk to anyone who has researched the topic of library leadership and gender in the last thirty years and you will get a lot of nodding heads. “yeah, i read that too.” “yep, that’s what i was finding.” librarians are writing and reading and writing and reading about the problems of gender in our profession, but we need to do more. we need to walk the talk. we, managers and staff alike, need to be good allies. there is no one experience for women or women leaders or women academic librarian leaders, and we need to listen to the experiences of others – not just people who are like us. how do you get people to be supportive and good allies in the workplace? there are certainly best practices to follow such as partnering with campus human resources offices to offer training that address sexism, racism, homophobia, and encourage inclusivity. having others come into your library to offer the training also takes away the idea that the woman leader is the one pushing the agenda. this last thought is crucial. at larger institutions with larger libraries, library administrators can probably dictate these kinds of training without pushback, but at smaller institutions like ours we want to make sure people don’t feel singled out. but what does the woman leader do when she feels that she’s fighting an uphill battle without allies and is treated differently because of her gender? she must begin to confront the situation and document mistreatment. we also need to work to fight against the stereotypes and preconceived notions. the tattooed and tough librarian is just as misleading a stereotype as the bunned, cardigan wearing, shushing one. nobody is going to demonstrate exclusively female traits (conciliatory, nurturing, etc.) nor exclusively male ones (decisive, powerful, etc.). this suggestion is admittedly a perfect example of “easier said than done,” but it still bears stating. our national and state professional organizations need to help. there are numerous opportunities for leadership development, but none that specifically focus on the development and support of women as leaders. women leaders may have increased our numbers and we may have achieved parity in salary in certain kinds of positions in academic librarianship, but that’s just the start. our job descriptions might be identical, but the day-to-day reality of our jobs can look different from our male counterparts, and we need some help. existing support systems and training opportunities, such as the leading change institute (formerly the frye leadership institute) and the college library directors mentor program are a helpful start, but gender is barely mentioned, if at all, in such settings. there are structures in place for general leadership growth, but almost nothing exists that specifically addresses gender. both of the authors have been fortunate in the support we’ve received as we worked our way up the hierarchy of academic librarianship, but we both also had major hurdles to overcome with regards to gendered expectations. we can’t help but think that if we have faced these challenges, others have to be facing similar or even worse. we needed and created a support system in order to keep growing as leaders, but we know that’s not enough. the real fear is that if we do not change the system, if we don’t create a space for women to be encouraged, respected, promoted, and treated equally in library management, then the numbers will again drop and there will be less women leadership in libraries. again. women leaders are receiving too many mixed messages. those who want to make the changes do not often have enough structural power to do so. we need a larger, vocal, active voice. we want to encourage our community to take action and develop workshops and other continuing education opportunities specifically for women. but they need to be in a safe environment. women deans and directors need a place to talk to each other where they can talk about what really happens in their workplaces and not worry that it will get back to their campuses or libraries. it needs to be constructive and honest. we need to know what to do with problem situations at work where we know we are being treated unfairly, but no one on our campuses can give us more honest advice than “keep documenting it.” the problem is that documenting things and eventually removing the people involved doesn’t get at changing the underlying culture and systemic sexism. we need training in how to deal with situations that are not taken seriously at our workplaces. we need to create a stronger, more active and open peer group. we’ve developed this kind of community in the backchannels and whisper networks, but we’d like to see it become more intentional and supported by our professional organizations. furthermore, there is no space where most of us feel safe enough to share our thoughts about how we are treated as leaders. that is one of the biggest problems of all. at the very least, our leadership literature and training needs to be gender-inclusive (meaning that it specifically addresses the challenges of gender) instead of gender-neutral (which usually comes out male-oriented). we feel strongly that women do not need to act more like men. men also do not need to just play their societally expected “gender role.” and while we have mostly used the convenient shorthand associated with the fictional gender binary, we also strongly believe that people who identify as other than cisgendered need space and freedom of gender-expression as well. we all need to be ourselves. instead of a conclusion, a call to action we need to give each other room to maneuver and grow. the most important advice we have was reflected in a recently published article: christina neigel writes, “librarians need to be empowered to question assumptions about what it means to be a librarian in the 21st century by having a clear understanding of how their own profession is subject to social relations of power and domination,” (522). in other words, we need to remember that libraries are changing and growing organizations that need room to reflect our past as well as our future. through writing this article, the authors struggled with how honest to be about our own experiences. we know this problem is more than our immediate environs. there are certainly individuals who have made us uncomfortable, like the administrator who made an off color comment and defended it when an objection was voiced, but it’s not about the individuals. it’s about the system, the culture. women need to mentor each other and build each other up. finding a network of other female administrators is invaluable. the women who are like-minded, who have been there and done that, can lead you through the minefield that is often library administration. part of our conversation took place in a private online space, and the affirmations we got made us realize that we are trying to start a community. we need a way to pair mentors with mentees. perhaps this article is a bit of us thinking out loud, with a solid grounding in the literature, about what shape that could take. there are only two of us, but we see a need for something like the #libtechgender movement. we are proposing a partner hashtag and community that could grow beyond this article. we want to start #libleadgender. we want to find a way to pair those who are considering leadership with those who’ve already taken that step. we know there are models that work to pair new leaders with experienced administrators, but part of our intention in writing this piece is to encourage future leaders to take that step. we’ve both had conversations with new librarians who see what it’s like to lead a library and have sworn it wasn’t for them. but again, there are only two of us and if we really want to change perceptions and expectations of gender for leadership in libraries, we will need help. what do you say? are you in? the authors would like to thank the people involved with #libtechgender discussions, especially coral sheldon-hess, for getting us thinking in this way. we might not have pursued writing this article if not for their important work. we would also like to thank our support group of other female librarians for their insight, personal experiences and quotes that helped frame this work. and of course thanks to our reviewers marie radford, annie pho, and ellie collier. selected bibliography beck, c. (1991). reference services: a handmaid’s tale. library journal, 116(7), 33-37. chamorro-premuzic, t. (2013, august 22). why do so many incompetent men become leaders? harvard business review. retrieved from https://hbr.org/2013/08/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men/ delong, k. (2013). career advancement and writing about women librarians: a literature review. evidence based library and information practice, 8(1), 59-75. deyrup, m. (2004). is the revolution over? gender, economic, and professional parity in academic library leadership positions. college & research libraries, 65(3), 242-250. eagly, a. (2007). female leadership advantage and disadvantage: resolving the contradictions. psychology of women quarterly, 31, 1-12. fletcher, j.k. (1999). disappearing acts: gender, practice, and relational practice at work. cambridge, ma: the mit press. harris, r.m. (1992). librarianship: the erosion of a woman’s profession. norwood, nj: ablex. pub. corp. neigel, c. (2015). lis leadership and leadership education: a matter of gender. journal of library administration, 55(7), 521-534. o’brien, patricia nancy (1983). “the recruitment of men into librarianship, following world war ii.” in the status of women in librarianship: historical, sociological, and economic issues, edited by kathleen m. heim. new york: neal-schuman, 51-66. simpson, r. (2004). masculinity at work: the experiences of men in female dominated occupations. work employment and society, 18 (2), 349-368. a critical take on oer practices: interrogating commercialization, colonialism, and content renovation as a catalyst for change 23 responses val 2015–11–04 at 11:57 am i was once told by my director that i needed to “be less scary”. i asked what she meant by that, because i’m a pretty even-tempered person in general. turns out what she really meant was that i needed to be more humble. she said my coworkers found my proficiency in technology to be “intimidating”. so in fighting my way into the tech field, where my expertise is constantly called into question by the males around me, while they are usually taken at their word when claiming expertise, i somehow also have to be more humble? walking all these tightropes takes a toll on women (and anyone falling into the category of “other” in any given field.) chris bourg 2015–11–04 at 12:51 pm “we want to find a way to pair those who are considering leadership with those who’ve already taken that step.” i am so totally in. thanks! dan c. 2015–11–04 at 1:47 pm well said and an important call to action. i never experienced blatant homophobic comments until i became an academic library director (one would think you’d hear them in corporate libraries, but i never did). but i also got to see women get treated worse in managerial positions and that extends through all my previous types of job environments. we can really only enact this change if we all work together and share stories like you have. “we all need to be ourselves.” so true. emily ford 2015–11–04 at 4:24 pm thank you for this thoughtful article. one thing that i think we can add, is that this experience is also not limited to leadership. those who identify as women, even when not in leadership roles, encounter roadblocks when they don’t act like a “woman” would act. for example this happens when we raise critical questions without sugar-coating, when we are direct. the other thing that i think we need to explore, is that it is just as often individuals who identify as women as those who do not, who enforce systemic sexism and gender bias in the workplace. how do we have the conversation about gender-bias and systemic sexism on all levels? will it be a trickle down, or will it be a movement up? will it be both? how do those of us who are not leaders engage in this discourse with our administrators without repercussion? angela pashia 2015–11–10 at 10:12 am i agree that we need to also explore the ways that women leaders are sometimes the ones who uphold systemic sexism. i know that the call to action here is already a big project, but i would propose adding some discussion of how women battling against sexism in their own careers can avoid then imposing the same obstacles on the women who report to them. i have seen a middle manager complain about sexist structures holding her back, but then turn around and re-enact some of the same sexist biases toward her own reports. that seems even more frustrating than having those encounters with someone who seems clueless about such structures – not that ignorance of these structures is ok for leaders anymore, but on an emotional level, it seems easier to deal with from someone who never talks about systemic sexism than from someone who seems like they should know better… if that makes any sense! pingback : latest library links 6th november 2015 | latest library links nono burling 2015–11–06 at 1:30 pm i had an interesting experience recently. i was at a week long library leadership immersion program. there were 32 people selected to participate in the program and only 4 were male. (you had to apply and be chosen to participate). the interesting thing i noticed is that whenever there was a special assignment where each of the four groups needed to send one member forward at least two of the chosen representatives were male. these were not aggressive men pushing their way forward. i commented on it to my group. despite the fact that we were all being trained to become library leaders we the women chose our male counterparts to represent us. i was not the only person to make this observation. i don’t really know what it means but i think it was something important to note. carolyn carpan 2015–11–06 at 3:06 pm michelle and jessica, thanks for this article. it’s good to be reminded we are not alone in these experiences. count me in! evie lu 2015–11–10 at 4:27 pm sure, i’ll join in. newly graduated library science major looking for a mentor, would like chance to gain leadership skills though too. natasha 2015–11–13 at 4:00 am thank you for such a thoughtful article. women in work is a passion of mine and dealing with sexism on an almost daily basis has made me very sensitive to it. i often get told that i’m ‘too pretty’ ‘too outgoing’ (too) to be a librarian. i’m also a woman of colour which means at conferences there’s that issue as well ;) i noticed that library leadership is predominantly male but everything below is female – very weird actually. but, it also comes from other women as well – the assumption that i’m not going to know as much as my male colleague which somehow is even worse. pingback : article recommendation: gendered expectations for leadership in libraries | librarian in progress jacqueline 2015–11–16 at 10:27 am as a new manager, when i was having trouble with my staff, i was advised by hr to be friendlier, for example, by baking cakes and cookies and bringing them in. i was told this would endear me to people. the trouble in question centred around complaints from a minority of staff that my communication style was harsh, abrupt and bordered on bullying — two years on i am still mystified by this interpretation. to make it even worse, the complaints were made to my own manager, a notorious hardass, famous around the college for his temper and coercive ways. to hear from this man that i needed to be nicer was a bitter pill to swallow indeed. incidentally, all of the complainants were women. michelle 2015–11–16 at 10:39 am jacqueline, you and i live the same life. sigh. jacqueline 2015–11–16 at 1:20 pm shame, isn’t it? luckily i also work with a handful of reasonable people who reassure me that i am not a hysterical tyrant. i do bake, though. but i just like baking. pingback : gendered expectations for leadership in libraries | the idealis pingback : giving thanks to librarianship: #thankslibrarianship | bossladywrites pingback : generosity at work | acrlog pingback : peppermint coffee and library links | a story on its second reading pingback : if you give a librarian a cookie… | rule number one: a library blog pingback : the problems with the lita top tech trends panels | librarian by day pingback : librarianship doesn’t need professionals | acrlog pingback : a biblioteconomia não precisa de profissionais | index-a-dora pingback : bias in climbing the career ladder and hillary clinton | information wants to be free this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct transformative praxis – building spaces for indigenous self-determination in libraries and archives – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 23 jan kirsten thorpe /3 comments transformative praxis – building spaces for indigenous self-determination in libraries and archives in brief this article explores questions regarding the development and support of indigenous priorities and self-determination in australian libraries and archives. it calls for greater use of indigenous research methodologies within library and archival science in order to seek ways to decolonize and simultaneously indiginze libraries and archives. as a written reflection, the article shares the perspectives of the author, who has worked in the sector for the past two decades as an indigenous australian archivist. the article argues that more difficult dialogue needs to to take place around contested views of history, and around the inclusion of indigenous perspectives in library and archival praxis. it suggests that transformation can only start to be imagined when we acknowledge the ongoing effects of colonization on the lives of indigenous peoples, and examine the ways that the colonial process continues to marginalize indigenous people. the author explores questions of indigenous cultural safety, opportunities for increasing indigenous voice and representation and the implementation of indigenous protocols to enable truth-telling and activism around indigenous community priorities. by kirsten thorpe introduction indigenous peoples in australia have a complex relationship with libraries and archives. they are both places of distrust (mckemmish, faulkhead & russell, 2011) and places which hold significant cultural heritage materials that can be drawn upon for language and cultural revitalization (thorpe & galassi, 2014). our major cultural and collecting institutions also hold evidence of australia’s history of colonization – genocide, dispossession, and forced control over the lives of indigenous australian people, families, and children. there is recognition nationally and internationally that libraries and archives need to be decolonized (luker, 2017; o’neal, 2015) – yet, there remains a huge amount of work to be done to reshape and reassert indigenous perspectives in libraries and archives. this includes, for example, the need for us to reframe our national histories which are dominated by colonial narratives that other indigenous australian peoples and communities (behrendt, 2016). this article argues for the decolonization and simultaneous indigenization of library and archive practice and research. it calls for a transformation of practice and theory through dialogue and reflection – to build transformative praxis – so that librarians and archivists can work more effectively with their respective communities in culturally safe ways. indigenous self-determination in libraries and archives is an emerging area in australia, yet most calls for action and transformation are channeled through institutional contexts which often lack an understanding of indigenous histories, cultures, and ways of knowing, being and doing. with so many issues to tackle in terms of transformation, institutions often work to indigenize libraries, without necessarily thinking through the structural issues that need dismantling through decolonization. some of the key questions which are not adequately addressed are: how can libraries and archives engage with indigenous peoples and communities to build mutual partnerships within current frameworks? can libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions seek to indigenize – that is, build spaces for indigenous self-determination and voice – without first considering what roles they play in perpetuating colonial systems and structures? one of the ways in which indigenous self-determination has been enacted in institutional contexts has been through the adoption of indigenous protocols, as well as through efforts to employ indigenous peoples as librarians, archivists, curators, and liaison officers. however, the representation of indigenous people in the australian library and archive sector is at crisis level.1 the adoption of protocols and guidelines in public libraries, archives, and cultural institutions has been ad-hoc and their development not aligned with appropriate plans for action. the articulation and progression of priorities is also at the hands of non-indigenous leadership and whilst there is general support for protocols – which have been used for over twenty years in the australian context – there remain major power and structural issues in play for them to be successfully implemented and supported by the appropriate cultural authority of indigenous peoples and communities. this article argues for a transformation of theory and practice in order to realize indigenous self-determination in libraries and archives. without this transformation indigenous people will continue to be silenced and marginalized and made to feel culturally unsafe. methodology i draw on nakata’s concepts of indigenous standpoint theory (nakata, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c) and the cultural interface (nakata 2002, 2007a, 2007b). i utilize autoethnography as a method to share information on projects that i have been involved within research and practice across the cultural sector, which sought to enable spaces for indigenous people to have greater autonomy and voice (houston, 2007, p.45). autoethnography has been an important tool for me to engage in reflexivity and to draw out issues that have emerged over my professional career on both an ‘experiential and intellectual level’ (bainbridge, 2007, p.8). i also draw on critical theory from an indigenous perspective (moreton-robinson, 2015). i am inspired by kaupapa maori theory which is both critical and anticolonial, and which challenges dominant systems of power (pihama, 2015, p.11). within this framework, the concept of ‘decolonization’ is at the core of concerns for transformation (smith, 2012) and ‘praxis’ is envisaged as a dialectic relation between theory and practice and a place for ‘conscientisation, resistance and transformative action’ (smith, 2015, p.18). i consider praxis in this article in the way that pihami draws on freire’s (1985) notion of dialectical unity, where: “dialectical unity acknowledges the interdependence of theory to practice and vice versa. one cannot act fully without the other but rather there is a process of constant reflection and reshaping as each part of the unity informs the other” (pihama, 2015, p.9). for me, the complex questions that come into play in library and archive practice need to be considered in relation to theory, and vice versa, a transformation will not come without this dialogue in play. a note on the use of the term indigenous i use the term indigenous australian peoples within this article to broadly refer to aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples in australia, the first peoples of this country australia. the use of this terminology is used whilst acknowledging the diversity of aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples and communities across australia. this includes recognizing the diversity of experiences that communities have had with libraries and archives in urban, regional and remote contexts. i also acknowledge that my experiences have a specific focus on my being based on the east coast of australia – the first communities to be impacted by british invasion in 1788. i would like to also acknowledge the similarities and differences with other first peoples who have been impacted by settler-colonial experiences. indigenous standpoint: placing myself in context working as an indigenous archivist in australia i describe myself as an indigenous archivist, and a person who has worked across a number of library and archive contexts in australia. my family – on my mother’s side – are worimi people from port stephens new south wales (nsw), a coastal area a little over two hours from sydney, the capital city of nsw. i came to the profession through an equity program where i undertook a cadetship to train as an indigenous archivist. i have worked across government archives, public libraries, data archives, academic libraries, and a major research library/collecting institution. i have also been active within professional associations in australia across libraries and archives progressing indigenous policy, protocols and employment. i have been an advocate, a community facilitator, and an accidental leader having come into the profession at a time when only a small number of indigenous people were employed in libraries and archives. i was the first indigenous person in australia to be eligible for professional membership with the australian society of archivists (asa) after completing post-graduate archival studies in the late 1990s to be an archivist. i have undertaken post-graduate studies in archives & records and a masters of information management and systems (professional) where i completed a minor thesis titled ‘creating an aboriginal community archive in nsw’ (thorpe, 2017). when i reflect on two decades of professional experiences i am aware that many of the challenges i faced were so complex that they could not be solved merely with a consideration of changing practice. they required me to develop critical skills and reflection on theory (and the failure of library and archive curriculum) as well as skills to build community partnerships and engagement to address indigenous priorities and perspectives through reflexive praxis. moving from practice to research in 2018, i made a leap of faith and left a leadership role at a major cultural institution in australia, the state library of nsw, to undertake doctoral studies at monash university and take up an academic research role within an indigenous research institute, the jumbunna institute for indigenous education and research at the university of technology sydney. after two decades of being involved in professional practice, i felt an overwhelming sense of frustration about the lack of critical dialogue in the profession around indigenous self-determination and cultural safety. i witnessed the constant need to come up with practical solutions or projects which aimed to engage indigenous peoples, which were (although with good intention) fraught in design and delivery because of the way in which they were conceptualized and framed. many of these projects also lacked acknowledgment of the deep structural issues and power dynamics that were at play. the problem was that many projects and services were not being designed with indigenous community input or perspectives which often left the community in a position that they were asked to give approval for projects that were not reflective of community priorities or desires. i often found myself sitting in rooms having the same decadal long conversations, going nowhere, but around and around the same wicked problems (evans, mckemmish & rolan, 2017, p.2). my move from practice to research is a political act in order for me to redirect my labour to work directly with communities to tackle the ‘wicked problems’ through activism, and informed through indigenous methodologies and frameworks. my interests are in developing critical participatory research projects that provide an evidence base for advancing indigenous self-determined priorities across lis and archival science. reflecting on feeling culturally unsafe for me, 2018 was a year to start to unlearn ‘institutional thinking’ and an opportunity to begin writing and speaking with academic freedom. i want to discuss what i see are deep issues in our profession and use my experiences to shine some light on issues such as the cultural safety of indigenous people who both work in, and engage with libraries and archives. i personally feel that i have put myself on the line (body, soul, spirit, mind) for many years navigating these issues and sometimes the work has made me feel incredibly unsafe. i felt unsafe around the weight of our colonial history and working in places where people have not understood the ongoing effects of this history in the day to day lives of indigenous australian people. i’ve also experienced stress as i have had to politely explain indigenous perspectives to people who were not aware of their own positionality – their unconscious bias, stereotypes and prejudice – and their blinded support for systems that supported the continued colonization of indigenous australian people. this often means having to support people with their own white fragility (diangelo, 2011), while using your own emotional labour to make sure that other non-indigenous people feel ‘ok’ as they engage in difficult conversations. on the other side of the coin, working in institutional contexts has also placed me in complex spaces when working to support access for indigenous peoples and communities. when people access traumatic and biased records or information you need to take a role of supporter, contextualizing and explaining what the content and context of materials is likely to be, whilst at the same time being very aware of the ability of these materials to retraumatize people. i have witnessed sadness, anger, frustration as part of this process, working as an intermediary between the institution and the community. a vulnerable feeling of not really being fully in the institution, nor fully in the community. being in a leadership role also required me to continue the day to day work, whilst at the same time having a view of how to make structural changes which attempt to dismantle ongoing colonial processes and narratives. some of these changes may indeed never take place because they are impossible to achieve within these institutional contexts. in my former role at the state library, i helped reshape priorities around key areas such as indigenous collecting, services across public libraries in nsw, and support for indigenous digital keeping places. the indigenous services team at the library continue the significant work of finding pathways to support communities with local indigenous digital keeping places. whilst i am enormously proud of the work i have achieved over the past two decades, i know that much of the objectives achieved have required difficult dialogue: i have spent a long time working to convince people of why we needed to shift practice to respect indigenous perspectives, histories and cultures, and to keep indigenous people safe when engaging with library and archive spaces. i often felt like i was hitting my head on a door – suggesting pathways for change that were not within the ‘normal’ frame – or trying to morph indigenous concepts, protocols and processes into systems that were unable to bend or reshape in an expansive way. the time taken for these discussions has also been extensive: sometimes it took years to simply build visibility about particular issues and to have them placed on the agenda to be discussed and resourced. in addition, the fact that many archives and libraries are public sector agencies, limits what you can and cannot achieve, as well as what you can and cannot say in these contexts. i am constantly surprised and humbled by the patience of indigenous communities who sit alongside this work, people who recognise the deep issues that are at play and who recognise the long struggle that is ahead to both decolonize and indigenize libraries and archives. libraries and archives at the cultural interface there is no doubt that one of the major challenges of progressing indigenous priorities in the library and archive sector is the collision that exists between indigenous and western methods of managing information, archives, and knowledge (nakata, 2002). there is a clash of ways of knowing, being, and doing which intersect constantly around issues of information management. for example, institutions making materials open to public access when they may need to be managed through cultural protocols, providing open public access to offensive, racist and derogatory content that puts people at risk of intergenerational trauma, and providing access to materials which are historically biased and filled with untruths that need to be contextualized in such a manner through a right of reply. we are also challenged by the need to acknowledge the impact of colonization in the work of the sector, and to find ways to engage in new transformative agendas that stop the cycle of dispossessing indigenous peoples. native american scholar roy draws on nakata’s concept of the cultural interface to discuss this place of tension, arguing that “indigenous peoples live in this interface, the place where their indigenous life-ways and western viewpoints come together”, and “a place of tension that requires constant negotiation” (nakata 2002, p.286). within this space, roy suggests that “indigenous living may either flourish or be repressed, and it is here that cultural heritage institutions reside.” (roy, 2015, p.197). during my career, recognizing i was sitting in the cultural interface really helped me. i realized i was in a space where people had different notions of knowing and that, often, non-indigenous people were not aware of what they didn’t know – that they were not knowers in terms of understanding concepts such as communal decision making, kinship systems’ and elders’ roles, and protocols for managing information – such as who has the right to speak on certain topics. to further exacerbate this problem indigenous australian people are often challenged by working with professional colleagues or members of general public who have no awareness or understanding of indigenous histories and experiences, nor the ongoing impact of government policies over the lives of indigenous peoples and communities. other areas – such as the western constructions of classification and categorization and continued ‘othering’ of indigenous people as subjects (doyle & metoyer, 2015) – continue to be areas of tension, as well as the constant failure of projects and services being designed for rather than with indigenous communities. it is very easy to sit inside sandstone buildings, major collecting institutions, and archives, and not engage in robust embedded conversation with communities or stakeholder groups. a number of indigenous staff who work in the sector work tirelessly to build relationships between communities and institutions, but it often comes at a personal cost – navigating roles that extend beyond the nine to five working time – and playing multiple roles within the institution and within communities. there is often no recognition of these multiple roles in employment, either on a practical level of developing job or role descriptions that actually represent the work that you are doing, nor with the monetary value that is placed on the level of expertise. this is an area in itself that requires further discussion and research. we can draw on the concept of the cultural interface as a tool to consider what nakata describes as “intersecting trajectories” with “competing and contesting discourses within and between different knowledge traditions” and where there exist “ambiguities, conflict, and contestation of meanings” (nakata, 2007b, p. 199): it is a multi-layered and multi-dimensional space of dynamic relations constituted by the intersections of time, place, distance, different systems of thought, competing and contesting discourses within and between different knowledge traditions, and different systems of social, economic and political organisation. it is a space of many shifting and complex intersections between different people with different histories, experiences, languages, agendas, aspirations and responses” (nakata, 2007b, p. 199). one area of precaution, however, is that we need to engage in the cultural interface with community engagement and participation in full view, this work cannot rest on the labour and advice of indigenous librarians and archivists who are already underrepresented in the sector. indigenous staff have a major role to play, however, they are often placed in unsafe positions of being asked to be the expert on ‘all things indigenous’ and to make decisions about issues that are not theirs to answer. libraries and archives must engage with communities and representatives who have cultural authority to progress locally based priorities. in order to disentangle the issues we need to draw on indigenous and critical methodologies to engage and commit to ongoing difficult dialogue. an investment in contemplating issues within praxis as envisioned through kaupapa maori theory, that is, through a conscious decision to reflect on theory and practice, would enable a reflexive loop for indigenous community members, practitioners and researchers to work together to expose areas of complexity and to develop pathways for transformation. praxis will require a negotiation of power and a letting go of traditional practice in order to shape dialogue, or as krebs (2012) suggests a ‘search for win/win solutions located potentially outside the comfort zones of existing practice’ (p.189). key areas for transformation and support of indigenous self-determination in libraries and archives in the next section of the article, i will suggest key areas of transformation and support for indigenous self-determination in the library and archive sector and suggest resources for further reading and action to decolonize and indigenize libraries and archives. centering focus on indigenous self-determination in research and practice can be achieved in the following ways: utilise indigenous research methodologies, including the cultural interface and kaupapa maori theory to consciously build reflexive praxis dialogue to support indigenous priorities. be critically aware of the different ways of knowing that may come into play in these cross cultural exchanges and contexts. (see nakata (2007a) for the cultural interface and pihama, tiakiwai, & southey (2015)’s readings on kaupapa maori theory). draw on the un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples to commit support for indigenous self-determination and use it as a mechanism to examine the power structures that either support or silence indigenous voice. (see gooda (2012) for discussion on how the declaration can be used as a ‘roadmap’ for change across policy, services, and projects and a way to include indigenous participation in decision-making, whilst resisting the expectation that indigenous people ‘conform to mainstream practices’). engage in the use of indigenous research methods to decolonize and indigenize projects, research, and curricula. resist the temptation to develop research, services, or projects because ‘you think it’s a good idea’ and instead seek advice and input on priorities from key stakeholders to make the work meaningful and relevant. (see for example duarte & belarde-lewis’s (2015) method of ‘imagining’ and ‘creating spaces for indigenous ontologies’ and smith’s (2012) ‘25 indigenous projects’). adopt protocols for libraries and archives that are relevant to your local stakeholder groups and communities and develop action plans to bring the protocols to life. if protocols that exist are not relevant, work with your local community to create principles and guidelines for action that are relevant. (see atsilirn (aboriginal and torres strait islander library, information and resource network) protocols for libraries, archives and information services and the society of american archivists (saa) information and resource page for the history and development of the protocols for native american archival materials). examine the governance structures that are in place to support indigenous input and perspectives by increasing indigenous representation across decision making structures such as boards, director, and executive leadership positions. don’t do diversity with only ‘entry level’ positions, seek ways to bring indigenous voice into strategic decision making roles. (see the atsilirn protocols section on ‘governance and management’ and thorpe & byrne (2016) for a case study on how indigenous voice and representation was considered in an institutional context). work locally with indigenous peoples to prioritize efforts around building appropriate library and archive collections, decolonizing classification and description, as well as strategies to indigenize library spaces. (see the state library of nsw indigenous collecting strategy for an example of an institution reshaping a focus on collections created by rather than about indigenous people. see also doyle & metoyer’s (2015) indigenous knowledge organization special issue for a discussion on cataloging and description, and the state library of nsw indigenous spaces in library places strategy to support a nsw wide focus on building a vibrant public library network inclusive of indigenous peoples and communities). find ways to ethically engage indigenous communities in decision-making by respecting core values of shared-benefits and reciprocity. (see key documents such as the australian national health and medical research councils ethical conduct in research with aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples and communities: guidelines for researchers and stakeholders which outlines a set of principles for culturally safe research that can benefit indigenous people). resource decolonization and indigenization and recognize that this work cannot be done on goodwill, it will require a radical reallocation of people’s labour as well as time and resources to support its development. (see thorpe & galassi (2018) for a case study on developing a business plan for indigenous services, and examples of building priorities for institutional cultural competency in australian national and state libraries throughout 2019-2021). lobby professional associations to support the inclusion of indigenous perspectives in library and archive course accreditation and core competencies of professional programs. (see the australian library and information association’s recent focus on indigenous matters and launch of a new indigenous engagement specialisation). acknowledging the importance of cultural safety and intergenerational trauma in relation to libraries and archives indigenous australian people continue to suffer trauma when accessing collections: this is particularly relevant to members of the stolen generations who have been removed from their families and communities through discriminatory colonial policies. in the library and archives field, there is not enough acknowledgment of the impact that the information included in collections can trigger and perpetuate intergenerational trauma. there is also a lack of dialogue regarding the emotional and spiritual side of access to information and records, and of how practitioners and researchers can either build positive or negative experiences for communities engaging with their collections and services. much has been written internationally in archival studies about the ways in which history and perspectives can be silenced within collections and services (harris, 2002, p.69; evans, mckemmish, daniels & mccarthy, p.352). libraries and archives can play an important role in facilitating truth-telling about diverse histories and experiences. a starting point for libraries and archives could be for them to assist marginalized people to tell their own stories whether through traditional publishing or through digital curation. truth-telling means that we cannot silence history (or parts of it), nor silence indigenous perspectives. it also means that we need to enable opportunities for indigenous people to give a ‘right of reply’ (mckemmish et al, 2011, p.231) to records which are racist and derogatory (for example, projects such as mukurtu support this engagement and layering of voice and perspective). librarians and archivists are no longer in a position to profess blind ignorance of indigenous issues, these are not new issues in the field. professional competencies need to be built to enable ongoing dialogue and conversations about the difficult and painful histories of colonization and the ongoing impacts of these histories in relation to libraries and archives. the sector should also be more fully engaged in conversations about indigenous cultural safety, and examination of the ways that libraries and archives can make indigenous people feel culturally unsafe. we should aspire to build transformative praxis in a way that supports williams’ (1999) definition, where cultural safety is viewed as: cultural safety is an environment, which is safe for people; where there is no assault, challenge or denial of their identity, of who they are and what they need. it is about shared respect, shared meaning, shared knowledge and experience, of learning together with dignity, and truly listening (williams 1999, p.213). libraries and archives need to consider the cultural safety of their patrons in service and policy design, as well as consider the cultural safety of indigenous researchers and employees in their institutions. working in a culturally safe environment has a real impact on people; however, there is a lack of attention from institutions in acknowledging and taking action to improve these conditions. whether the lack of focus is motivated by ignorance, fear, or inertia, it is imperative for the sector to continue conversations around social justice, redress, and truth-telling as it relates to library and archives systems, services, and programs. we need to decolonize libraries and archives whilst simultaneously indigenizing library and archive theory and practice by working in partnership with indigenous peoples and communities. the cultural interface can assist us to keep with focus and clarity on identifying points of tension and complexity, whilst methodologies such as kaupapa maori theory provide a framework for building dialogue on praxis and opportunities for transformation and liberation. critical reflection on issues such as structural power, voice, and representation, can assist an unravelling of perspectives about indigenous sovereignty (moreton-robinson, 2015), structural racism and white fragility (diangelo, 2011), and exposure of the subtle forms of microaggressions that come into play in library and archive spaces (dunbar, 2006). conclusion – where to next? the role of library and archival praxis i have drawn on my professional experiences in this article to advocate for indigenous self-determination in libraries and archives and have argued that more robust and difficult dialogue needs to take place around the failure of library and archive theory and practice to support indigenous priorities. a research agenda needs to be built in partnership with indigenous peoples and communities to direct attention to the areas that need supporting: whether it be to progress indigenous employment in the sector, or reallocating resources from managing traditional library systems in favour of supporting systems that manage indigenous knowledge appropriately, addressing racism and bias in cataloguing and description, or in focussing support on indigenizing theory and curricula. our next generation of librarians and archivists deserve to come into the field with the appropriate skills and competencies to work respectfully with indigenous peoples and communities and to deal with complexity and wicked problems. one key area for major change that i see in relation to this is the need for indigenous research methodologies to be brought into tighter focus in lis and archival studies. it is critical that indigenous peoples and communities are involved in the decision-making process to better shape the way we envisage libraries and archives into the future. the sector also needs to stop the tendency of addressing complex problems with practical and temporary solutions and look for structural changes instead. finally, new theory produced by library and archival science professionals needs to draw on multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives, drawing more thoroughly, for example, on the social sciences and indigenous studies to understand human experiences, and to create new conceptual and theoretical models that can be utilised to address recurring problems. without these changes, the profession will continue to privilege certain sections of the population over others. acknowledgments i acknowledge my colleague dr jason desantolo for introducing me to literature relating to kaupapa maori theory and practice (and praxis). these ideas resonate deeply with me in terms of looking at engagement and the notions of transformation within the library and archive theory and practice. i pay my respects to other indigenous australian people in the sector nationally, and other indigenous peoples internationally2, who work in solidarity to progress these complex issues to decolonize libraries and archives. i would also like to thank monica galassi for comments on drafts of this article; jennifer o’neal for peer reviewing the article; and internal reviewer kellee warren and publishing editor ian g beilin for feedback on the article. the editorial process has assisted me to refocus the article around questions of why this work matters. i am very thankful for your time and assistance. references atsilirn (aboriginal and torres strait islander library information resource network). (2019). protocols for libraries, archives and information services. retrieved online on 11 january 2019 at: http://atsilirn.aiatsis.gov.au/protocols.php bainbridge, r. (2007). autoethnography in indigenous research contexts: the value of inner knowing. journal of australian indigenous issues, 10(2), 54-64. behrendt, l. (2016). finding eliza: power and colonial storytelling. university of queensland press. diangelo, r. (2011). white fragility. the international journal of critical pedagogy, 3(3). doyle, a. m., & metoyer, c. a. (2015). indigenous knowledge organization [special issue]. cataloging & classification quarterly, 53(5/6). retrieved online on 20 january 2019 at: https://open.library.ubc.ca/circle/collections/ubclibraryandarchives/494/items/1.0223843 duarte, m. e., & belarde-lewis, m. (2015). imagining: creating spaces for indigenous ontologies. cataloging & classification quarterly, 53(5-6), 677-702. dunbar, a. w. (2006). introducing critical race theory to archival discourse: getting the conversation started. archival science, 6(1), 109-129. evans, j., mckemmish, s., daniels, e., & mccarthy, g. (2015). self-determination and archival autonomy: advocating activism. archival science, 15(4), 337-368. evans, j., mckemmish, s., & rolan, g. (2017). critical archiving and recordkeeping research and practice in the continuum. journal of critical library and information studies, 1(2). gooda, m. (2012). the practical power of human rights: how international human rights standards can inform archival and record keeping practices. archival science, 12(2), 141-150. harris, v. (2002). the archival sliver: power, memory, and archives in south africa. archival science, 2(1-2), 63-86. houston, j. (2007). indigenous autoethnography: formulating our knowledge, our way. the australian journal of indigenous education, 36(s1), 45-50. luker, t. (2017). decolonising archives: indigenous challenges to record keeping in ‘reconciling’ settler colonial states. australian feminist studies, 32(91-92), 108-125. krebs, a. b. (2012). native america’s twenty-first-century right to know. archival science, 12(2), 173-190. mckemmish, s., faulkhead, s., & russell, l. (2011). distrust in the archive: reconciling records. archival science, 11(3-4), 211-239. moreton-robinson, a. (2015). the white possessive: property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. u of minnesota press. nakata, m. (2002). indigenous knowledge and the cultural interface: underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems. international federation of library associations journal, 28(5/6), 281-291. nakata, m. (2007a). the cultural interface and indigenous standpoint theory disciplining the savages: savaging the disciplines (pp. 195-212). canberra, a.c.t.: aboriginal studies press. nakata, m. (2007b). the cultural interface. the australian journal of indigenous education, 36 (supplementary), 7-14. nakata, m. (producer). (2007c). the cultural interface: an indigenous standpoint theory. [powerpoint presentation] retrieved online on 11 january 2019 at: https://wera.site-ym.com/page/sympmem2010siep?&hhsearchterms=%22martin+and+nakata%22 national health and medical research council (nhmrc). (2018). ethical conduct in research with aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples and communities. retrieved online on 11 january 2019 at: https://nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/publications/ethical-conduct-research-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-peoples-and-communities national and state libraries of australia (nsla) changes at nsla (information relating to cultural competency agenda. retrieved online on 11 january 2019 at https://www.nsla.org.au/news/changes-nsla o’neal, j. r. (2015). “the right to know”: decolonizing native american archives. journal of western archives, 6(1), 2. pihama, l., tiakiwai, s. j., & southey, k. (2015). kaupapa rangahau: a reader. a collection of readings from the kaupapa rangahau workshops series. te kotahi research institute. retrieved online on 14 december 2018 at: https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/11738 roy, l. (2015). indigenous cultural heritage preservation: a review essay with ideas for the future. ifla journal, 41(3), 192-203. smith, g. (2015) the dialectic relation of theory and practice in the development of kaupapa maori praxis. in pihama, l., tiakiwai, s. j., & southey, k. (2015). kaupapa rangahau: a reader. a collection of readings from the kaupapa rangahau workshops series. te kotahi research institute. retrieved online on 14 december 2018 at: https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/11738 smith, l. t. (2012). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. london; new york: zed books. thorpe, k., & byrne, a. (2016). indigenous voices in the state library of new south wales. the australian library journal, 65(1) thorpe, k., & galassi, m. (2014). rediscovering indigenous languages: the role and impact of libraries and archives in cultural revitalisation. australian academic & research libraries, 45(2), 81-100. thorpe, k., & galassi, m. (2018). diversity, inclusion & respect: embedding indigenous priorities in public library services. public library quarterly, 1-15. thorpe, k. (2017). ‘aboriginal community archives: a case study in ethical community research’ in research in the archival multiverse. monash university publishing. retrieved on the 17 december 2018 at: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=628143 williams, r. (1999) cultural safety – what does it mean for our work practice? australian and new zealand journal of public health, 23(2). there is a lack of data on current employment rates of indigenous australian people across the library and archive sectors in australia. the australian library and information association (alia) suggest that anecdotally there are fewer than 50 people who identify as being aboriginal or torres strait islander people in the lis profession: see https://www.alia.org.au/advocacy-and-campaigns/indigenous-matters. [↩] for ongoing discussions regarding indigenous archives see the indigenous archives collective at: https://indigenousarchives.net/ [↩] they can and they should and it’s both and: the role of undergraduate peer mentors in the reference conversation dismantling deficit thinking: a strengths-based inquiry into the experiences of transfer students in and out of academic libraries 3 responses pingback : historical reminiscents podcast ep 47: board diversity and participation cost – krista mccracken pingback : curated resources on diversity, inclusion, accessibility and equity for libraries – open pages ian mcalpin 2019–11–01 at 3:42 pm this article is both a force to be reckoned with and a truly motivating guide to someone trying to walk the path to indigenize archives. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the intersection between cultural competence and whiteness in libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 1 dec fiona blackburn /2 comments the intersection between cultural competence and whiteness in libraries photo from flickr user gigi_nyc used under cc-by-nd-2.0 in brief the context for this article is australian libraries and my experience there with cross-cultural provision. however, this article is not about providing library services for any specific group; it’s about cultural competence and whiteness. i begin with my background, so as to make clear how i participate, as a white librarian, in discussions about libraries and how they might be places where people from any cultural group find themselves reflected and where they find information the more easily for that reflection. i also start at that point because cultural competence requires an awareness of your own culture; for me, as a white person, that means thinking about whiteness. i then link experience with reading about cultural competence, and conversations with librarians who are also interested in cross cultural provision. whiteness in libraries is introduced via these conversations. a brief comparison is drawn between the usefulness of intersectionality and cultural competence in addressing whiteness. the conclusion is that cultural competence embedded in professional approaches, library operations and the library environment can be the means for addressing whiteness, if the understandings of power and privilege outlined in intersectionality are incorporated. by fiona blackburn introduction i am a 56 year old, tertiary-educated, female anglo-australian. i am also a librarian. i fit the demographic profile of the australian library workforce, which is described as highly feminised, professionally educated, ageing, and predominantly anglo-saxon (hallam 2007); or, ‘a largely english-speaking, culturally homogenous group’ (partridge et al 2012, p. 26). i have worked in the library industry for eight years, coming to the job after an employment history spanning at least four other industries. in these eight years i have developed a professional interest in cultural competence and whiteness in libraries. three factors motivated me to write this article. the first is  the challenges i experienced in my first library job. one set of challenges helped me find my feet as a librarian; another, outlined below, set a strong direction for future work and further study. the second factor is cultural competence, about which i learned in response to those challenges. thirdly,  the australian library and information management industry is beginning to address diversity, often through cultural competence. the australian institute of aboriginal and torres strait islander studies (aiatsis), the state library of new south wales and the state library of victoria all include cultural competence or proficiency in key policies and strategies. charles sturt university is committed to cultural competence in the context of indigenous content in curriculum; rmit university includes it as a topic in the professional experience course in its master of information management. most other library schools include in their program aims, development of skills for working in a diverse environment. my background i began work in the library and information industry as special collections manager at alice springs public library in central australia. the special collections were the alice springs collection, documenting the history, geography, economic development, and cultures of central australia; and the akaltye antheme collection, a local indigenous knowledge collection, developed in partnership with the traditional owners. ‘akaltye antheme’ translates into english as ‘giving knowledge’, the knowledge being a showcase of local culture for aboriginal and non-indigenous users of the library. in addition to a graduate diploma in information management, i also brought the accidents of life to that job. by ‘accidents’ i mean those developments which aren’t the product of any particular decision, which just seem to occur as life itself occurs and which coalesce into fundamental themes or directions. one of those accidents is being born white. other accidents include two books, read when i was twenty: bury my heart at wounded knee; an indian history of the american west, and living black; blacks talk to kevin gilbert. they were my introduction to indigenous people’s experience of history and colonisation. i had no idea of that reality until then. the ensuing couple of decades included naidoc marches, sorry day ceremonies, reconciliation activities, and visits to the tent embassy. friends and i mused about whiteness – what it means to be white when being white is the norm. this participation involved some decision-making but i had drifted into that left wing milieu – yes, an accident. another key accident was work as a personal care attendant in a supported accommodation centre for koories. the health effects of a colonised life of disadvantage and discrimination were glaringly evident: very high incidence of diabetes and corollary conditions, alcohol-related brain damage, staggering male morbidity. also clearly evident were the strength and resilience of culture, how hard people worked to maintain it and how they worked within it to maintain themselves and their community. the power of being white struck me for the first time: the residents were far more likely to do something when i asked them than when my largely sri lankan co-workers did. i attribute this to two things: the residents’ experience, often from very young, of near-complete control of their lives by white people in positions of power; and how, as a white person, i unwittingly used to the power and privilege that redounds to being white, and was able unknowingly but effectively to convey expectations. without the activist activities described earlier, i wouldn’t have perceived the effect of whiteness in an ordinary working environment for what it was; without that work experience, my understanding of the effects of a colonised life would be weaker. i outline this to indicate that i came to the special collections job beginning to understand my privilege as a white person. this privilege is reflected in the quality of my life; it is a product in part of the dispossession of aboriginal and torres strait islander people in australia, and continuing systemic advantage for white people. why is this important to this article? as i said in a conference presentation with sylvia perrurle neale, the indigenous services officer at alice springs public library, being a member of the dominant group is the biggest challenge i face in working in partnership with other, minority groups. working with aboriginal and torres strait islander people has been the main path for my learning about cultural competence and whiteness. however, cultural competence applies far more widely than only working with indigenous peoples. as ruby hamad illustrates, whiteness resounds systemically. i would like to extend hamad’s sentence, “[if you’re white,] you’re not going to be discriminated against on the basis of the colour of your skin” and suggest that you are also not likely to begin a sentence with the explanatory phrase, “in my/our culture …”, as i have so often heard members of minority groups do. you may never have to think about what your culture is, because as henry and tator (2006, cited in calgary anti-racism education) point out, whiteness in social, political and economic arenas is so much the norm, that it represents “neutrality”’. in a system that privileges some and marginalises others, often on the basis of skin colour but also on the basis of group membership, there are many marginalised groups. jaeger et al. (2011) argue that working with any marginalised group requires cultural competence. the challenges in that first job in 2006, alice springs staff suggested that the akaltye antheme collection be nominated for the library stars award at the australian library and information association conference. (this happened before i worked there.) it won: delegates judged it the best initiative for its method of establishment, content, popularity with aboriginal patrons, and the way the library adapted to the changed demand and use of the library that it generated. despite this organisational pride, akaltye antheme occupied a kind of limbo. everything was the special collections manager’s responsibility – to keep it tidy, repair items, endprocess acquisitions, liaise with aboriginal organisations on a range of library matters, and manage incidents arising among aboriginal patrons. similarly focussed collections and target groups weren’t similarly quarantined; for example, the junior fiction and non-fiction collections, and children’s behaviour, weren’t considered the exclusive responsibility of the children’s librarian. akaltye antheme was considered something for aboriginal people, not everyone who walked through the door, contrary to the intention of those who established it. aboriginal people, who could be up to 30% of the library’s patrons, used akaltye antheme regardless of this differential staff approach. they would often spend hours every day browsing and reading it. i wondered why akaltye antheme retained its special project status long after it was established, particularly when it was such an integral resource to a significant proportion of the library’s clientele and when it was intended for all patrons. i found this frustrating and isolating. i fit the librarian stereotype, i belong to the dominant group; yet the attitude of my (largely white, older, educated, female) colleagues to a collection they didn’t seem to consider core business, affected me. sylvia purrurle neale, an eastern arrernte woman, voiced similar frustrations. i felt capable of learning to manage the historical collection, partly because my undergraduate degree included an honours in history. i had no idea about how to manage the indigenous knowledge collection. this lack of educational preparation for working cross-culturally, then the isolation and frustration, echo mestre’s research into the experience of librarians responsible for services to diverse populations (2010). she reports stress, potential burnout, and isolation of individual professionals. she also identifies opportunity costs to library organisations which rely on individuals for the provision of ‘diversity services’. the costs include loss of experienced staff and of the opportunity for all staff to learn, and benefit from learning, how to work cross-culturally. she argues that embedding culturally competent service within the organisation benefits it and all staff. other commentators discuss the benefits of cultural competence in all aspects of library operations to organisational performance overall (kim & sin 2008, andrade and rivera 2011). learning about cultural competence my next job was as community engagement librarian with libraries act, focussing on building engagement with aboriginal and torres strait islander communities. while in alice springs, i had thought that managing akaltye antheme could be something on which to build in my career – there probably were not too many librarians in australia with experience providing services for and with aboriginal people. i had also thought uneasily about the differential in the benefit that accrues to a white librarian coming to town for a short time and leaving with a marketable skill; and that which accrues to the local community, who would stay in alice springs after i had left. i can’t at this point cite any research that verifies this differential. however, if my experience resonates with that of others who have worked with minority groups, research in this area may suggest that greater benefit accrues to those already in a privileged position, in this instance, white librarians. i began at libraries act determined that there had to be an organisational approach to community engagement, partly to avoid aspects of my experience in alice springs but also to achieve organisational aims. for aboriginal and torres strait islander people to want to come to their library, they have to find a place where they are comfortable, where they can see themselves or their culture reflected. partridge et al. (2012) point out that this applies for any cultural group. that is, any groups whose identity incorporates religion, disability, sexual orientation, age, recreation, employment, political beliefs, socio-economic status, educational attainment, and class (helton 2010, jaeger et al 2011). creating such an environment in a system of nine branches, a heritage library, and a central administration clearly could not be done by one person. advocating an organisational approach and the support of management led to a decision to implement the atsilirn protocols. the protocols are a set of guidelines for appropriate library, information, and records services for aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples, developed by aboriginal and non-indigenous librarians. i document this engagement with the act aboriginal and torres strait islander communities in a case study (blackburn, 2014). findings include that: a small team can achieve a lot with support from colleagues and where the community wants to be engaged; synergy between library objectives and a group’s aims will enhance outcomes; the protocols are useful in designing and choosing engagement activities; and the community will meet you more than half way in your engagement activities. there are still challenges. where staff responses to akaltye antheme included a kind of resistance, a significant proportion of libraries act staff, throughout the staff structure, want to engage with the aboriginal and torres strait islander community. the first challenge was to demonstrate that it wasn’t hard; once connections are made and sustained, engagement kind of runs itself. another challenge relates to staff being able to find the time in a busy service to make connections, including going outside the library, and then maintaining involvement. the next relates to how libraries usually conduct business. libraries are great on systems and processes; they are essential features of information management. however, if you want to build an engaged community, an insistence on a way of operating that suits internally devised systems is going to bump up rather hard against a community with its own way of organising, which is also given to taking ideas and running with them. these are essentially facets of the one challenge. the ‘special project’ status of a resource that should have been embedded in core business; the limitation on time for building and maintaining relationships; and a preference for uniform service delivery rather than flexibility, are each part of the challenge of sustainable cross-cultural provision. this challenge, in the manifestations just outlined, resides in library professionals and in organisations. for the first five years of working in libraries, i searched with little success for information about cross-cultural provision, cross-cultural communication, etc. in a library context. then a speaker who worked in education mentioned ‘cultural competence’ at a protocols implementation workshop. this was a key moment, albeit another accident. there was nothing in the australian library and information science (lis) literature then about cultural competence but there was discussion of it in us library literature. overall (2009) defines cultural competence for library and information professionals as: the ability to recognise the significance of culture in one’s own life and in the lives of others; to come to know and respect diverse cultural backgrounds and characteristics through interaction with individuals from diverse linguistic, cultural and socioeconomic groups; and to fully integrate the culture of diverse groups into service work, and institutions in order to enhance the lives of both those being serviced by the library profession and those engaged in service (p. 176). other service industries, like health and education, recognise that care or instruction that does not address the cultural context could have serious negative consequences. failing to acknowledge the inappropriateness of male clinicians providing some procedures for women from particular groups, for example, could result in those women choosing not to access health services. overall’s definition, which draws on theory from these industries, locates the site of cultural competence development within the professional workforce and library organisations, also the locations where the challenges of cross cultural provision arise. cultural competence has been incorporated into us library and information science education accreditation standards. research has supported its role in recruitment and retention, staff development, organisational performance, collection management, and service and program design (andrade & rivera 2011, kim & sin 2008, mestre 2010). whether cultural competence has been truly embedded into us library and information science is debated. case studies document incorporation into library business (e.g., rivera 2013, montague 2013); but berry (1999) and mehra (2011) assert that only token efforts have been made. others (galvan 2015, honma 2006, jaeger et al. 2011, pawley 2005, swanson et al. 2015) suggest that the issue is broader than development of cultural competence and includes diversity, race, racism, and whiteness. broadening the debate in this way names the issues – diversity, race, racism and whiteness – which cross-cultural provision should address. cultural competence clearly begins with the professional – and just as clearly should go beyond the individual to be developed within the whole organisation. the following examples demonstrate why culturally competent organisations are required as well as professionals. in 2013, during a libraries act planning day exercise, i noticed that a significant proportion of staff were either born overseas or were children of migrants; and the majority of that group were not anglo-saxon. (this reflects the demographic profile of the australian population: 26% are migrants; nearly three quarters of whom are not anglo-saxon.) (australian bureau of statistics 2012) nevertheless the library service remains an organisation based in western systems. the non-fiction shelves are organised according to dewey decimal classification, which privileges western or white concepts of knowledge. the bulk of the collection is in english. the songs sung during programs for babies and young children are most often english nursery rhymes. the library service remains a white one; staff from minority groups have adapted to the prevailing structure. wong et al. (2003) suggest that minority groups not only adapt to prevailing structures, they also adopt the underlying values. wong et al., canadian health practitioners of asian descent, found their heritage did not guarantee that they would deliver mental health care appropriately to members of their own groups. they instead adopted the racialised approaches to power embedded in the western health system in which they worked. why would libraries be any different, particularly as they run on complex, long established systems, systems which can be adapted without changing embedded values? dewey decimal classification, for example, is an ethnocentric arrangement of knowledge which has been modified to accommodate new and emerging areas of knowledge without changing the fundamental privileging of original concepts. the diversity envisaged in us discussions about cultural competence “encompasses race, gender, ethnicity, language, literacy, disability, age, socio-economic status, educational attainment, technology access and skill” (2012 symposium on diversity and library and information science education, cited in jaeger, bertot & subramaniam 2013). if culture is defined as “the shared daily activities of groups and individuals” (rosaldo 1989, cited in montiel-overall, 2009, p 3) then religion, political beliefs and affiliation, and recreational activities are also part of diversity and should also influence cross-cultural provision. helton (2010) and jaeger et al. (2011) acknowledge the usefulness of cultural competence for providing library services for all groups in diverse populations, not only those whose identity is defined by race or ethnicity. a fundamental aspect of cultural competence is that the process of achieving it never stops. press and diggs-hobson (2005) point out that the professional is of necessity constantly learning about cultures in a service population: knowing everything about all the cultures in a population, before encountering them, is not possible. ongoing interaction and actively seeking out knowledge (garrison 2013) are integral components of developing cultural competence. the knowledge i brought to that first job in alice springs has continued to expand, through work and study. most recently, during a short-term transfer to aiatsis, i had cause to think a lot about colonisation and its ongoing effects in a post-colonial world. whiteness in libraries in a recent conversation, a woman described how, when her family migrated from egypt to the united states and then to australia, her parents took her and her siblings to the library precisely so that they would learn how to fit in. relating this as an adult, she said her parents chose the library “because it was a white place.” when i mentioned this to other librarians interested in cross-cultural provision and social inclusion, responses included: you know i am really going to have to think this through. the whiteness of a library as a place to learn how to fit in. i never considered it that. i loved to read and that is the place to find books. at the same time, one learns english – to read and write – which is part of education and educating in the ‘white’ way which is at the foundation of libraries.(personal communication with an indigenous librarian, 16th september 2015); and i find it curious how they intentionally used it in their acculturation to the dominant australian culture … the literature that i have seen generally shows that immigrants trust the library and librarians. in that sense, libraries are welcoming and friendly spaces. however, that does not mean that libraries are culturally neutral zones and/or are as inclusive as one would like to think. i don’t think that this is all bad. it sounds like newcomers can benefit from it as they transition into the new society, however, long term this may cause them to feel excluded and/or that their cultures are less valued. likewise, this would clearly be exclusionary to minority groups, such as indigenous [sic] peoples, who are not trying adapt to the dominant culture, but are nations within their own right. (personal communication with phd candidate researching inclusion in libraries, 20th september 2015) these communications, and the following discussion, indicate that the need for cultural competence is not reduced by the uses people from minority groups can make of white spaces. if anything they underline the need for it, and for dexterity in its deployment. a 2003 evaluation of the project to establish akaltye antheme included comments that aboriginal people came to the library because it was a “neutral space”. they meant that it was a whitefella space free from the tensions of blackfella life; it was also a space where whitefella and blackfella clashes, common elsewhere in town, weren’t going to occur, where they could relax for a while and also make use of library services. in 2008, aboriginal people were observed using the library to do online banking, socialise, organise or inform others of community events like funerals, read hard copy and digital akaltye antheme resources, watch videos, draw, or browse the other collections (kral, unpublished report for council, 2008). aboriginal people used the alice springs library before the establishment of the akaltye antheme collection; however its popularity and changes in library use following its establishment suggest that the changed environment, while not making the library any less a white place, was valuable to aboriginal patrons. the indigenous librarian quoted before, further commented about the affirmation members of her tribe find in their own libraries. her comment reveals the value to individuals of places that reflect their identity: on the other side, you have tribal libraries where indigenous people go to learn not just reading and writing, but cultural aspects and language in the comfort of their created environment. my co-worker, she finds a reconnection to herself at the place we work. (personal communication 16th september 2015) the potential alienation of libraries built on whiteness, mentioned by the phd candidate, can be inferred from this comment. ettarh (2014) suggests “intersectional librarianship” as a means for working effectively with diverse populations. intersectionality recognises the interactions between any person or group’s multiple layers of identity and the marginalisation or privilege attendant on each. no single identity is in play at any one time; and outcomes and experiences vary correspondingly. multiple layers of identity result in multiple interactions between privilege and discrimination or marginalisation. the differing outcomes and responses arising from that interplay are evident in by the egyptian migrants’ use of the library for their children’s acculturation; and in the use of the public library and the akaltye antheme collection by aboriginal people in alice springs. an intersectional perspective can be developed by “learning to become allies … not just learning about the issues that affect the underrepresented but also learning how our own biases and privileges make it difficult for us to build alliances” (ettarh (2014). cultural competence requires virtually the same strategy for modifying personal and organisational practice. intersectional librarianship, however, discusses power and privilege, an omission in cultural competence theory that i have read. intersectional librarianship “involves challenging and deconstructing privilege and considering how race, gender, class, disability, etc., affect patrons’ information needs” (ettarh 2013). wong et al. (2003) argue that understanding power must be central to understanding culture and to negotiating its multiple layers and interactions. ettarh identifies as a queer person of color and talks of the challenges “we” librarians as a diverse group face in a diverse environment. her use of the first person plural pronoun, to include all librarians, accords with the effect of structurally embedded racialised power on all health staff, that wong et al. describe. cultural competence, as defined by overall (2009), does address the framework in which library operations occur: the professional development of the individual practitioner, the interactions between colleagues and between practitioners and patrons, and the effect of the environment, inside and outside the library. privilege, while not explicitly referenced in cultural competence theory, is implicit in how culture works; whiteness, again not explicitly referenced in cultural competence theory, is central in western library structures and operations, in the environment in which libraries are located. if the starting point of cultural competence is an understanding of the role of culture in your life (including your workplace), and in the lives of others, then you will also become aware of the interactions and interplay of privilege and marginalisation described by ettarh (2014). it should be possible to incorporate awareness of privilege and whiteness as another starting point for culturally competent practice. achieving inclusive services in the diverse australian population when the australian library workforce is culturally homogenous therefore poses a test. individual australian libraries are providing services to particular groups but how these initiatives are sustained is unclear, meaning that the risk remains for individuals responsible for ‘diversity services’ to struggle with the lack of support and isolation identified by mestre (2010). yarra valley regional library obtained grant funding to develop programs with the hearing impaired community, children and adults with low literacy, and children with autism autism (mackenzie 2014) – which makes me wonder whether the organisational challenge, of incorporating initiatives for minority groups into ongoing core business, might also remain. without education in cultural competence, practitioners do not have the opportunity to discuss and evaluate their cross-cultural initiatives within a theoretical framework. conclusion in a workforce that is predominantly anglo-saxon, in an industry that is firmly based on western concepts of knowledge and systems giving prominence to those concepts, but which provides services to a diverse population, a cultural competence that includes awareness of whiteness, of privilege and the mechanisms that make it available to some and not others, is essential. cultural competence can make the information at the heart of a library’s existence genuinely accessible. it can help create “low intensity meeting places” where different groups can interact – or not (audunson 2004); where people can seek answers to culturally shaped questions in culturally mediated ways (abdullahi 2008). i have appreciated the open-review process, particularly being able to choose one of the reviewers. it has felt more collaborative than the peer-review processes of other publications. thanks to sue reynolds and ellie collier for picking their way through the two drafts of this article, correcting grammar and asking questions that spurred me to clarify and extend what i was writing about. thanks also to hugh rundle, publishing editor. it’s been a cross-cultural exercise of itself and i particularly appreciate ellie’s contribution in that respect. references abdullahi, i. 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(2011). integrating diversity across the lis curriculum: an exploratory study of instructors’ perceptions and practices online. international federation of library associations and institutions journal, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 39-51. http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/hq/publications/ifla-journal/ifla-journal-37-1_2011.pdf    mestre, l. s. (2010). librarians working with diverse populations: what impact does cultural competency training have on their efforts?. the journal of academic librarianship, vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 479-488.  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/26006/mestre_librarians_working_with_diverse_populations_proof.pdf?sequence=2 montague, r. a. (2013). advancing cultural competency in library and information science, paper presented to ifla world library and information congress 2013, singapore, 17-23 august 2013, international federation of library associations, the hague.  http://library.ifla.org/274/1/125-montague-en.pdf montiel-overall, p. (2009). developing cultural competence to create multicultural libraries. paper submitted to the american library association international papers committee 2009 annual conference, chicago, usa. http://www.ala.org/irrt/sites/ala.org.irrt/files/content/irrtcommittees/irrtintlpapers/patricia_montiel-ove.pdf overall, p. m. (2009). cultural competence: a conceptual framework for library and information science professionals. the library, vol. 79., no. 2, pp. 175-204. partridge, h. l., hanisch, j., hughes, h. e., henninger, m., carroll, m., combes, b., … & yates, c. (2011). re-conceptualising and re-positioning australian library and information science education for the 21st century [final report 2011]. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/46915/ pawley, c. (2006). unequal legacies: race and multiculturalism in the lis curriculum, the library quarterly, vol. 76, no. 2, pp. 149-168. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/506955 press, n. o. & diggs-hobson, m. (2005). providing health information to community members where they are: characteristics of the culturally competent librarian. library trends, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 397-410. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu rivera, a. (2013). indigenous knowledge and cultural competencies in the library profession: from theory to practice, paper presented to ifla world library and information congress 2013, singapore, 17-23 august 2013, international federation of library associations, the hague,  http://library.ifla.org/275/1/125-rivera-en.pdf swanson, j., damasco, i., gonzalez-smith, i., hodges, d., honma, t. & tanaka, a. (2015). why diversity matters: a roundtable discussion on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship. in the library with the lead pipe, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/why-diversity-matters-a-roundtable-discussion-on-racial-and-ethnic-diversity-in-librarianship/ wong, y. r., cheng, s., choi, s., ky, k, leba, s., tsang, k. & yoo, l. (2003) de-constructing culture in cultural competence: dissenting voices from asian-canadian practitioners, canadian social work review/revue canadienne de service social, vol. 20. no. 2, pp. 149-167. australia, cultural literacy, organizational culture, whiteness renovation as a catalyst for change say what? exploring “the most interesting place in the city” – the comments section of online news articles 2 responses pingback : latest library links 4th december 2015 | latest library links pingback : a difficult book | hls this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct care, code, and digital libraries: embracing critical practice in digital library communities – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 20 feb kate dohe /3 comments care, code, and digital libraries: embracing critical practice in digital library communities in brief in this article, the author explores the necessity of articulating an ethics of care in the design, governance, and future evolution of digital library software applications. long held as the primary technological platforms to advance the most radical values of librarianship, the digital library landscape has become a re-enactment of local power dynamics that privilege wealth, whiteness, and masculinity at the expense of meaningful inclusive practice and care work. this, in turn, has the net result of self-perpetuating open access digital repositories as tools which only a handful of research institutions can fully engage with, and artificially narrows the digital cultural heritage landscape. by linking local narratives to organizational norms and underlining the importance of considering who does the work, and where they can do it, the author explores manifestations of care in practice and intentional design, and proposes a reframing of digital library management and governance to encourage greater participation and inclusion, along with “user-first” principles of governance. by kate dohe introduction digital programs in research libraries, such as institutional repositories and digital collections of unique special collections materials, are deep in their second or even third decade. the broad swath of products, technologies, projects, and professional practices that undergird individual efforts are mature, even as individual libraries are subject to economic stratification that impedes full engagement with those technologies and practices (dohe 2018). a variety of specializations within the digital library practitioner community continue to emerge each year–digital scholarship, digital curation, digital publishing, or digital strategies to name a few–and it is rare to find an academic library in the association of research libraries (arl) that does not include digital initiatives in its strategic plan or mission. clearly, the profession places a great deal of value on such efforts, and the most idealistic and ambitious mission statements emphasize the power of digital libraries to bridge cultural and geopolitical divides (“icdl mission” n.d.), share “the record of human knowledge” (“hathitrust mission and goals” n.d.), or facilitate global access to scholarly product (“mission and vision, texas digital library” n.d.).  digital projects have long been hailed as the ethical or even radical solution to our crises of the hour, whether those crises are journal pricing, original publishing, scientific reproducibility, research data management, or textbook affordability. yet here we are, twenty years later, and none of those crises have been solved. we built our digital repositories, invested our time and infrastructure, and struggle to reach users (salo 2008). the contemporary digital library product landscape is currently reduced to commercial options owned by the same content owners and vendors (schonfeld 2017b) that exuberantly pillage our collections budgets every year (mit libraries n.d.), and a handful of open source options with similar governance structures and substantial community dominance by a smattering of wealthy, historically white (hathcock 2015) arl member institutions. digital library initiatives across the u.s. are reckoning with very real questions of financial or legal sustainability, while the doors to participation remain firmly closed to broad swaths of the higher education landscape. even as a significant amount of the profession emphasizes the importance of digital projects work, the cloistered technical community that contributed to this state of affairs is poorly understood by many librarians outside “digital etc.” specialists. the end result is elite institutions making products for other elite institutions, and every year the technical and economic barriers to entry grow higher. how did we get so far from the truly radical roots of digital libraries, when the budapest open access initiative urged libraries, governments, and scholars to “unit[e] humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge” (chan et al. 2002)? why are our technical products failing our users? how is so much talent and investment (arlitsch and grant 2018) producing such mediocre results? more importantly, how do we re-invigorate our own open source projects and fulfill the ultimate missions of digital libraries? how can we create truly participatory digital library project communities? familiar wolves are at the door, slyly promising vertical product integration and improved discovery as they buy commercial digital projects platforms left and right (schonfeld 2017a). this isn’t ground we can afford to cede back to the same commercial interests that have put libraries on the ropes financially for decades. after an illuminating discussion over breakfast with a male colleague in my library’s technology division, i began to interrogate the ways this problem is a byproduct of social reproduction at our local institutions. he and i shared responsibility for digital library initiatives as peer department heads in our arl library’s it division. my librarians1 managed our digital collections, stakeholders, and users, while his developers were responsible for technical implementation of our portfolio of digital library applications, including code contributions to international projects. we had developed a mutually trusting work partnership and collegial friendship by the time we sat down at a diner on the second day of the code4lib national conference.  our seemingly innocuous conversation over coffee prompted me to reflect upon the full weight of gendered assumptions regarding the divide between our positions and the value of our respective labor, and underscored the ways these assumptions between individuals ripple through communities. while this conversation occurred between two colleagues at one research library, we also occupy roles and operate within social systems reproduced throughout the profession that dictate and shape the nature of our work relationship. open source digital library communities are largely driven by the priorities of technical staff like us at elite research libraries like ours, who frequently exist in a siloed, overwhelmingly white, predominantly cis-male micro-culture within their home libraries (askey and askey 2017), creating a masculinized environment that outsiders often negotiate through participation, emulation, or willful ignorance (brandon, ladenson, and sattler 2018). the inherently gendered tensions between predominantly male it groups and a feminized library workforce inevitably permeate the communities and applications imbued with our professional values. radical change to community projects requires a codified framework for equitable, just, and caring interpersonal communication that begins at the local level. whose community projects? any given library’s digital collections, institutional repository, and digital scholarship projects are typically powered by a variety of software applications, components, and services, rather than a single monolithic “digital library” application capable of serving up all types of content and data effectively. some of these services come packaged from commercial vendors, like worldcat’s contentdm or elsevier’s recently acquired digital commons, and the relationship between the software provider and customer library is similar to that of any other software or content package. many more digital library technologies (including some of those implemented in commercial products) are community-supported open-source projects. some of the most prominent examples include digital repository applications fedora and dspace, digital collections interface tools samvera and islandora, content viewer frameworks like the international image interoperability framework (iiif), content creation tools like omeka and open journal systems, and discovery services based on blacklight. this is far from a complete picture of the digital library project landscape, but serves to highlight the complex nature of implementing and maintaining an open source digital library program. it is fitting that collections and content intended to reach the global citizenry should be available with open source software applications. moreover, many of these applications are created, customized, and maintained by staff at the research and cultural heritage institutions that also steward the content. these are among the few products that we make, that are most directly for us, our content, and our users. this should represent a shift in power dynamics from vended solutions that is nearly as significant as the shift to open access to information. to borrow an analogy from safiya noble’s dissertation “searching for black girls: old traditions in new media” (noble 2012), open source digital library technologies are comparable to solar panels that “facilitate independent, democratic participation by citizens, and [show] that design impacts social relations at economic and political levels” in opposition to controlled and closed systems peddled as a “galaxy of knowledge” (appleton 2019) even as they proclaim their openness and transparency. community–and consequently, community membership–is critical to understanding these open source digital library projects. as open-source applications, anyone may download, install, and run digital library applications, though the technical skills to effectively customize and maintain these applications are non-trivial and often out of reach for anyone but professional software developers. this technical overhead can be an exceptionally high barrier to clear for participation in the community. as an example, the samvera community and toolkit requires adopters to make a staggering amount of critical and frequently binding technical decisions before even getting started; production-level adoption of the latest version of fedora is constrained to fewer than two dozen institutions worldwide at the time of this writing (“‘fedora 4 deployments – fedora repository,’” 2018); dspace has a robust adoption base but until the still-forthcoming release of dspace 7, two mutually exclusive user interfaces. upgrading applications over time–a necessity for a professional digital library program that promises permanence and preservation as a core service–also proves to be a fraught, labor-intensive effort, as seen in the slow adoption of fedora 4 (“designing a migration path – fedora repository – duraspace wiki” n.d.), or widely reported problems upgrading to ojs 3. governance structures of many of these projects tend to overlap in both structure, reward systems, and membership. institutions often have two avenues for participation in the governance and decision-making of these products—pay membership fees to secure a seat in leadership, and/or employ software developers who are talented enough to contribute code back to the application’s core source code. skilled developers with a high degree of institutional support may become official “committers,” which is often a meritorious individual achievement on par with elected professional national service, and the committers themselves have a strong say in product development and roadmaps. because this labor is extremely technical, administrative representation in steering committees or product leadership are often themselves technical department heads, division managers, or ads/auls. institutions with the resources to participate in these application communities at this level are often further privileged with grant funding opportunities to develop new tools or applications within this digital content ecosystem, and thus reify their status as community leaders. avenues for participation outside the programmer/management dyad within these open source product communities can be largely limited to programmer support roles like documentation, request management and release testing (as is the case with the dspace community advisory team), or specialist interest groups with no codified governance power, as is the case with the proliferation of groups in the samvera (“samvera ig/wg framework – samvera.,” n.d.) community. largely absent in these communities are liaisons, curators, or actual end users, and consequently there is a fundamental disconnect between developers of these applications and the front line users who must navigate, curate, and use the contents of such systems. many of the design discussions i have been privy to in local and organizational settings privilege the discussion of objects and data over people—the pursuit of a more perfect object model without centering and clearly articulating the user’s needs. hand-waving at “more discoverable” is often unexamined without clearly arriving at discoverable by who, for what purposes, and how we know that. the net result of this insular community development is that programmers and the people who supervise them at wealthy and historically white american institutions are making considerable product and implementation decisions about the most potent tools in our arsenal to resist neoliberalism. excluding those who possess insight into the social, political, and experiential impacts of technology from the messy discursive process of making it undermines the value of a collaborative professional tradition, and protects institutional white supremacy and all its trappings of valorized productivity. “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (lorde 1984). the economic and racial stratification resulting from this community insularity is counter to the self-proclaimed social justice spirit of early digital initiatives that emphasized their commitment to the public good of global open access to information, and open source technology to serve it. access barriers for users cannot be lowered when the technological barriers for a diverse member community are simultaneously raised. no hbcus are listed as fedora adopters of any version outside consortial support.  only four community colleges have deployed and registered their own dspace repositories (and two of the listed, registered repositories are defunct at the time of this writing) even as the community college consortium for open educational resources (“community college consortium for open educational resources.” n.d.) and similar initiatives emphasize the vital importance of access to locally-developed open educational resources for the (frequently non-white, non-traditional, poorer) student populations at community colleges. accessibility, particularly compliance with wcag 2.1 aa standards required at a growing number of institutions in response to lawsuits (carlson n.d.), continues to be elided with responses that individual members of “the community” need to identify and resolve such fundamental issues on their own (“dspace 6 and wcag website accessibility.” n.d.). while repository registries are voluntary and therefore inherently incomplete, they do paint a picture of self-identified organizations more likely to engage actively in governance and community initiatives for those products. the explanations for this delta between applications that serve clear needs and a potential user base are often presented as self-evident—these institutions “lack the resources,” which is typically a euphemism for “can’t afford a full time developer and systems team inside a library” (hamill 2015). often in the same breath, applications like dspace or the aging eprints application are presented as “turnkey” solutions in literature (maynard et al. 2013) and documentation (“what is dspace? – dspace knowledgebase” 2011). professional hosting for open source repository software is a comparably new phenomenon when one considers the lengthy history of such projects, many of which are designed as “single tenant” applications that can be difficult to scale for multiple institutions, or even multiple projects. furthermore, while the software is open source, there are obvious risks regarding public service sustainability any time a vendor comes into the picture. extensible repository systems like fedora are of abstract utility outside a very limited community, and the talent to configure and manage those applications comes dear. positions go unfilled, and issues can only be solved by a handful of developers at a few institutions. organizations without resources to participate in the open source communities may select vendor solutions for digital projects, which often prove to be less costly than the required fte and skill set for supporting a major open source digital library initiative. it is no coincidence that major companies like wiley and elsevier are buying products like atypon and digital commons respectively (schonfeld 2017b), to integrate with the scholarly enterprise software suites each company is building and marketing to provosts, directors of research, and university presidents. in this landscape, open access and cultural heritage content ceases to be an ethical imperative and instead becomes a lucrative revenue stream for organizations that have nakedly demonstrated their opposition to the free and open exchange of information over decades of doing business with libraries. the disadvantages of this state of affairs in the open source digital projects community are several-fold. open source tools aren’t designed to be adopted by the communities they could theoretically best serve, as users and content creators. this in turn artificially narrows the cultural heritage landscape as digital content is never shared or has no long-term stewardship. the communities that do adopt these applications are frequently so small that only a few people are equipped to share expertise with each other (which mitigates the advantages of having a community of practitioners). ultimately, the products become worse over time and present market opportunities for the same commercial interests that are hollowing out the mission of academia (seale 2013, bourg 2014, mountz et al. 2015), and put the entire open access and digital scholarship enterprise at risk. local cultures examining “…the people building these systems and the environments in which the software is produced, as part of the software’s ecology” (sadler and bourg 2015) is essential to understanding how digital library applications evolved in the manner they have. open source digital library architecture is not built by silicon valley techbros gleefully commodifying the labor of women and people of color (hoffmann and bloom 2016). it is built by our colleagues and friends; people we interact with every day on listservs, on calls, in slack channels, and in the halls. many developers and technical staff chose comparably lower-paying positions in higher education, and libraries in particular, because they value the library’s mission and workplace, and care about work-life balance–a far cry from “brogrammer” culture (crum et al. 2015). we are on the same side, and value the same things. yet library it culture is still a place apart within libraries, often very literally(askey and askey 2017)–a place with its own language, norms, rhythms, and priorities. libraries have long been understood as feminized workplaces, with (largely white) female librarians and non-technical support staff, and a higher proportion of (largely white) male managers (schlesselman-tarango 2016). library it, particularly in academic libraries, is often the opposite. women occupy a minority of positions and are less likely to take supervisory positions, and are less likely to be compensated comparably with male supervisors with equivalent experience and expertise (lamont 2009). the work environments are rarely as openly hostile or sexist in the vein of silicon valley, but entire books (brandon, ladenson, and sattler 2018) are dedicated to women who must navigate alienation, imposter syndrome, overt sexism, and unconscious bias throughout their careers in library it. gender is a vital dimension to understanding technological influence within libraries; as roma harris’s influential article on the topic states: “given the strong cultural and ideological associations between masculinity and technology in western society, it is impossible to consider the social shaping of technology in librarianship without taking into account the gendered nature of library work, particularly since studies of technological change in other sectors of the labor force reveal that the work of women and men is generally segregated, in part along lines structured by their association with or their use of particular technologies” (harris 1999). institutions with the resources to hire “digital etc. librarians” often rely on these positions to “bridge the gap” between librarians and library it, or “collaborate” through internal marketing and external proselytizing about the merits of a system designed largely by technical staff. these librarians often end up in service provision roles to ameliorate systemic usability flaws (mediated institutional repository submission workflows are a prime example of this). this in turn limits the opportunities for these librarians to collect and advance user needs or participate in the creation of better systems and projects. the work of a digital etc. librarian bears all the signifiers of carework typified by the broader profession of librarianship and explored at length in “on capacity and care” (nowviskie 2015), “library technologies and the ethics of care” (henry 2016), and others. it is also frequently composed of bullshit task completion (schmidt 2018) generated by questionable user interface decisions in software applications. furthermore, occupants of this role often feel most immediately the tensions between the patriarchal and technocratic “future of the library” and feminized care work explored in mirza & seale’s “dudes code, ladies coordinate” presentation at dlf 2017 (mirza and seale 2017b) as well as their “who killed the world?” chapter (mirza and seale 2017a) in gina schlesselman-tarango’s topographies of whiteness. in both works, the authors examine the ways in which the technocratic libraries of “the future” (and present) elevate technological production at the expense of care work required to support the end users of those products. this valorization of final product over emotional process positions digital etc. librarians as handmaidens to a vision of libraries that poorly emulates the commercial it industry. moreover, as digital initiatives, maker spaces, and technology initiatives for libraries occupy a progressively more prominent place in the strategic objectives of a given library, this isolated microculture is increasingly pushed forward as “the future of libraries” (mirza and seale 2017a) at the expense of feminized labor and values of librarianship. this explicit valuing of technological solutionism by local institutions is then echoed in the committees and organizations responsible for maintaining and governing open access digital library projects. just as technology is a reflection of the human values of its creators (noble 2012, winner 1986), the governance structures of digital library projects are a product of the values of the most influential adopters of these technologies, with explicit and nearly exclusionary value placed on functional code and technological work as an “in kind” contribution to those projects, as seen with fedora (“fedora leadership group in-kind guidelines” 2018) and islandora (“islandora and fedora 4” 2014) as notable examples. these are the only products that “count” (mountz et al. 2015) in this corner of the academic community. this, in turn, is underpinned by interpersonal dynamics within organizations, and the net result is that some of our worst biases manifest in the products we make. “just like all politics is local, all culture is local,” dr. chris bourg stated in her code4lib 2018 keynote speech in washington, dc (bourg 2018). aimed squarely and unapologetically at the ways white men can use their de facto positions of power and group belonging within library it departments to create—or hinder—inclusive environments, the keynote combined evidence and sociological theory with blunt instructions for white cis men in library it to be better. vouch for colleagues. make space. reduce stereotypical and exclusionary cultural markers. be cognizant of the bleed between social and professional.  definitely don’t get beers with the fellas and talk about the womenfolk.2 my own professional background echoes many of the findings and narratives of workplace studies and examinations of library it culture, including those described in dr. bourg’s keynote. i am a white female digital etc. librarian by trade, accustomed to being described by others in terms of my interpersonal skills and characteristics, with my technical chops left as a vague afterthought. i currently supervise only white and male faculty librarians in my library’s it division, and i worked with nearly exclusively white and male developers throughout my decade or so in the profession at arl institutions and private companies–places with money. my current library is similar to the physically isolated it spaces askey and askey describe, with our generally male technology division housed in a maze-like basement behind swipe card access points, and a highly collegial environment that relies heavily on technical knowledge and project-driven work that often seems disconnected from “the upstairs.”  i’ve always been “the woman in the room,” and even sometimes “one of the fellas” (always with an asterisk by my name), ready with an invitation to game night or a deep dive on george r. r. martin’s a song of ice and fire. alienation in both the male spaces of library it and female-dominated librarian communities has shadowed me for much of my career. dr. bourg’s code4lib keynote rang true to my lived experience as a woman marginalized within a system i recognized i was complicit in perpetuating. i was deeply surprised, then, when my colleague and breakfast companion asked for my impressions of the keynote the next day, and then confided3 to me that he became emotional and somewhat defensive during dr. bourg’s speech. he continued that maybe some men needed to be spoken to as she had, but he felt put off by what he perceived as stereotypes and assumptions about men in her presentation. i had long perceived this colleague as both cool-as-they-came and a reliably empathetic ally, so this admission unsettled me for its resemblance to white fragility (diangelo 2011) from someone i had never found susceptible to it, and who had long ago earned my respect for his introspection. if this genuinely well-intentioned male colleague’s perceptions were so far from my own, i thought, then how on earth can our library technology departments become more approachable and accessible? whither the ethics of care? ethics of care has emerged in recent decades as a powerful, intentionally feminist ethical framework centering relationships and emotion in moral development, typically credited to carol gilligan for originating the theory (webteam n.d.). with time and effort, the understanding and application of this ethic has evolved to encompass a broader array of intersectional (eugene 1992, graham 2007) professional (noddings 1990), and political (tronto 1993, hankivsky 2014) implications for care work.4 joan tronto delineates four components of ethics of care (tronto 2012) – responsibility: assuming a willingness to respond to a need within a relationship attentiveness: observing a need within a relationship competence: addressing a need effectively responsiveness: empathy for the perspective of others the explicit values of tronto’s framework–equality, freedom from oppression, democracy–align handily with the mission of librarianship, and the relational, emotional, empathetic work of academic librarianship across disciplines are easily understood as care work. tronto’s exploration of care work provides actionable criteria for characteristics of care. these criteria in turn make it possible to meaningfully assess the effectiveness of caring actions. in short, it helps us articulate the difference between simply telling colleagues and users “my door is always open” or “you can email me with any questions” and proactively working to reduce the psychological and interpersonal barriers that prevent people from taking those actions. high performing librarians exercise strong empathetic skills to identify, respond, assume responsibility, and effectively seek solutions to reducing those barriers. in particular, digital etc. librarians are often asked to do constant translation and code switching between programmers, curators, students, and faculty under the auspices of “bridging communication gaps,” yet frequently earn less than their programming counterparts, and have diminished influence in the direction and governance of digital library products. these librarians are doing the heavy lifting of emotional labor on behalf of the technical colleagues who are empowered to enact actual change in their repository communities, while they themselves call into yet another interest group to debate whether “title” should be required or only recommended in a system workflow. my breakfast companion and i were both aware (perhaps to varying degrees) that other staff in our library frequently approached me explicitly as this colleague’s “translator.” i often found myself assuming a disproportionate amount of emotional labor to explain technical concepts, or how decisions were made by our software developers, and occasionally provide encouragement and support for team members who felt apprehensive talking to my colleague. i had long understood this dynamic as problematic, particularly as a female peer manager in a technology division, but minimized my own feelings of frustration over it as “part of my job.” furthermore, much of my career as a digital etc. librarian had involved the same work, codified as position responsibilities–who was i to be annoyed when someone would privately take me aside and ask “ok, can you tell me what he meant by this? i couldn’t follow the technical explanation and i’m embarrassed to ask him about it.” care in our home institutions when care work is denigrated by our own research libraries, through both our employment practices and our local interpersonal behaviors, we create patterns of behavior and exclusion that manifest both locally and in our products. if we continue to privilege coding over care as if the two are fully disconnected, and hand the reins of what should be our most intentional and accessible applications to a homogenous cohort of well-intentioned but isolated decision makers who are removed from direct and constant care work for end users or colleagues, then we are complicit in the neoliberal hollowing of the academic library mission to use our resources for the public good. we produce software that serves the needs of technologists employed at rich white universities first, and everyone else as an afterthought. this is solvable and avoidable. locally, we can embrace and elevate the care work done by the librarians whose fates and careers are increasingly bound up in the viability of digital library software. 
stepping back to that fundamental question from my breakfast with my colleague—if reflective and helpful white men who want to be allies are struggling to respond competently to calls for more inclusive, caring spaces, what can be done? like too many women in this #metoo moment (though one with the privileges of whiteness, financial security, sound health, and more), i am tired. i am tired of patiently explaining, or pulling back the curtain on my own experiences. i am tired of answering men who ask “why didn’t you tell me?” when i believe a better question they could ask themselves is “what could i have done differently to help others be comfortable confiding in me?” moreover, this telling and retelling of what men can do to be better allies and why they need to take action may help with attentiveness to the problem and even assuming responsibility, but does little for developing competence or responsiveness on its own. “doing the thing is doing the thing,” as amy poehler put it in her memoir (poehler 2018), and our profession needs more opportunities for those who would support marginalized communities to practice the thing. for the previous three years, i had worked with another former colleague on an improv workshop specifically for librarians and technologists, which took into account the shifting landscape of librarianship in higher ed and gave our players an informal space to practice the essential skills of collaboration without the pressure of real expectations (pappas and dohe 2017). many of our workshop’s objectives echoed dr. bourg’s recommendations, with a performative twist—make your partner look good. be present. practice listening with undivided attention. commit to affirmation as a means to develop the best ideas. avoid assumptions about common knowledge. decenter yourself and focus on the needs of the ensemble. while the intent of the workshop was to foster collaboration across domains of distributed expertise, the same skillset applied to both allyship and effective care work, and represents a low-stakes learning environment to develop communication competence. these are concrete abilities that one must practice like coding, not fuzzy personality-driven soft skills that are difficult to assess or articulate. the pursuit of professional development opportunities and training on these skills should be taken as seriously as any request to attend a coding workshop, and just as we would expect a programmer to share a new tool or language with the team, we can and must expect the same from participants in a communication workshop. furthermore, the care work performed by librarian-technologists and digital etc. librarians can be emphasized and recognized within library it departments and divisions in a number of ways. de-emphasize and decouple quantity of submissions (especially faculty submissions) in repositories as a metric of performance. elevate and make visible the user research that informs local product decisions as an essential part of application research and documentation. emphasize demonstrable methods of emotional work, not “collaborate with stakeholders” as a panacea in position descriptions. stop treating diversity exclusively as a pipeline problem and reward efforts to connect with and meet the needs of underrepresented communities. for the love of capybaras, get in front of users before decision points have whistled by. coar, care, and the evolution of digital library communities at the time of this writing, digital library applications are at a pivotal juncture in their development and future evolution. high-profile crises in major projects, notably the closure of the digital preservation network, and layoffs at the digital public library of america, are focusing community attention on the governance of digital library projects and sustainability of membership-driven initiatives. questions of in-kind labor contributions are likely to rise as local library budgets continue to shrink, but so long as these contributions are limited only to coding and development activities, prospective participants and supporters will continue to be artificially limited. the coalition for open access repositories (coar) has requested comments on their “next generation repositories” proposal (“coar next generation repositories | draft for public comment” 2018), and the proposal does specify at a number of points that inclusivity and user engagement are guiding principles for the document. however, the user stories provided highlight a number of self-perpetuating assumptions about the nature of a human user as a high-level researcher that one would typically find at a high-level research institution in a western nation. students, public users motivated by personal interest, disabled users, and exclusively mobile users are nowhere to be found in the design of the “next generation repository,” leaving one to wonder if the next generation user is expected to evolve as well.   search results for “accessibility” on coar draft for public comment shifting practice within a community requires reconceptualizing the values of that community, and in this regard black feminists, womanists, and care scholars are instructive. in “to be of use,” toinette m. eugene emphasized connections, caring, and personal accountability, rather than the “arbitrary and fragile” market model of community (eugene 1992). this humanist and explicitly afrocentric centering of community broadens its scope beyond coders and managers, and instead encompasses the communal ways of knowing and doing work in this space. the organizations that sustain and steward digital repository products have a number of opportunities to engage with and support an ethics of care in the design and governance of their applications. one easy win is to establish parity between the influence of committers and non-programmers. what if quality end-user documentation, or design work, or user survey design, or accessibility assessments were credited and elevated by the projects in the same explicit way code is? what if those contributions shaped the strategic direction of those applications and communities? what if community outreach were baked into the charges of working groups, to seek new opportunities for growth and inclusive design?put in the parlance advocated by the collective authors of “for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university,” what if we counted differently (mountz et al. 2015)? the mukurtu project (christen, merrill, and wynne 2017) and community is emerging as a leader in inclusive digital cultural heritage practices. while the project’s primary application does not fulfill many of the essential tasks required of a repository, the content management system does accommodate behavioral metadata, cultural signifiers, and the expression of permissions aligned carefully to its community of indigenous peoples. moreover, these features were not identified and prioritized in a vacuum, nor was development work undertaken with the expectation that a community on the receiving end of centuries of violence and oppression would be eager to accept an existing repository platform. instead, the project originated as a grassroots program driven by community needs, evolved in response to the shared requirements of historically marginalized communities, and centered collaboration and consultation as the guiding principles of development. ultimately, mukurtu demonstrates the potential of an application and community with an inclusive ethics of care embodied in the mission of the platform and its evolution. conclusion four years after bess sadler and chris bourg’s code4lib journal article calling for explicitly feminist discovery products, and twenty years after roma harris shone light on the gendered power differentials in library technology change management, little has meaningfully changed with regard to the participants and governance structures of our digital repository ecosystem. in fact, newly emerged technologies such as iiif continue to mimic governance structures of other technical products, which in turn replicate the same imbalances in decision-making explored above. what is now emerging is an unabashedly feminist and inclusive call to action as a critical mass of librarians interrogate the ecosystems of digital library participation and reproduction. the practitioners of emotional labor and care work continue to be de-emphasized in conversations about products with very real impacts on their users, their careers, and the health of a hugely important strategic initiative within libraries. repositories and linked data platforms have the potential to be our most potent leveler of access and privilege, if we choose to embrace our responsibility and respond with intention. as chris bourg stated in her keynote at code4lib, this isn’t a pipeline problem, one that can be solved by just getting more “diverse humans” into the mix, as though it can be fixed with some magic combination of attributes. it’s an environmental problem that originates in our home institutions and the elevation of coding over collaboration, of objects over humans, and in-jokes over inclusion, and ultimately serves to starve our own digital repository applications. evolution of these communities without a rethinking of product governance may be slow. on a night during a conference when my “one of the fellas” asterisk was available to me, i spoke with a number of repository developers who proceeded to complain about the changes at the dlf forum over the last few years, scoffing that “no one even puts code on the screen anymore.” as an individual who had co-taught improv at the dlf forum as a means of strengthening collaboration between those who can teach, and those who can code, i found this to be a terribly myopic attitude. it came across to me as a distillation of the belief  that collaboration and soft skills and learning from users should be someone else’s skillset, or that there’s nothing to be gleaned from presentations that center the experiences of students, people of color, people with disabilities, public communities, and the complex, messy universe of invisible “end users” of our digital products if those presentations don’t also include an illegible (and inaccessible) screenshot of a json file. dlf is where i saw “dudes code, ladies coordinate.” i attended that year’s forum with my code4lib breakfast companion, and i remember at the time wishing that he had attended that particular session. i especially wished this a day later, when that same colleague forgot our prior plans to meet for lunch, and instead went out with repository developers from another institution to talk about emerging technical issues with strategic implications. i was not invited to that discussion, and instead i spent a few hours reflecting on how little i might be professionally or personally respected by the same people i needed to work with most closely. i understood his invitation to breakfast at code4lib, and the emotionally challenging conversation we shared, as a tacit effort to repair a fairly serious personal rent between us. i recognized it as one reciprocal act of care, in the bounds of one working relationship, at one arl institution. one site of cultural change. acknowledgements huge thank yous to my reviewers dr. melissa villa-nicholas and ian beilin, and my publishing editor kellee warren at in the library with the lead pipe, for your labor and thoughtfulness in helping to shape this piece. i’d like to thank a number of people for reading and engaging with the earliest versions of this article, especially erin pappas for encouraging me to seek publication, joseph koivisto and vin novara for extensive feedback, and bria parker, joanne archer, rebecca wack, rachel gammons, and kelsey corlett-rivera for their suggestions and support throughout. and finally, i have to extend my gratitude to ben wallberg, whose generosity as a colleague, collaborator, and friend made much of this article possible. references appleton, gaby. “guest post: supporting a connected galaxy of knowledge.” the scholarly kitchen, january 28, 2019. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/01/28/guest-post-supporting-a-connected-galaxy-of-knowledge/. arlitsch, kenning, and carl grant. “why so many repositories? examining the limitations and possibilities of the institutional repositories landscape.” journal of library administration 58, no. 3 (march 2018): 264–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2018.1436778. askey, dale, and jennifer askey. 2017. “one library, two cultures.” in feminists among us: resistance and advocacy in library leadership, edited by shirley lew and baharak yousefi. library juice press. https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/handle/11375/22281. bourg, chris. 2014. “the neoliberal library: resistance is not futile.” feral librarian (blog), january 16, 2014. 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https://journals.tdl.org/llm/index.php/llm/article/view/7244. poehler, amy. 2018. yes please. dey street books. sadler, bess and chris bourg. 2015. “feminism and the future of library discovery.” code4lib journal 28. https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10425. salo, dorothea. 2008. “innkeeper at the roach motel.” library trends 57:2. https://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/22088. “samvera ig/wg framework – samvera.” n.d. wiki. duraspace wiki. https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/samvera/. schlesselman-tarango, gina. “the legacy of lady bountiful: white women in the library.” library trends 64, no. 4 (2016): 667–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2016.0015. schmidt, jane. 2018. “innovate this ! bullshit in academic libraries and what we can do about it.” institutional repository. rula digital repository. may 29, 2018. https://digital.library.ryerson.ca/islandora/object/rula%3a7113. schonfeld, robert c. 2017a. “cobbling together the pieces to build a workflow business.” the scholarly kitchen, february 9, 2017. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/02/09/cobbling-together-workflow-businesses/. ———. 2017b. “reflections on ‘elsevier acquires bepress.’” ithaka s+r (blog). august 7, 2017. https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/reflections-on-elsevier-acquires-bepress/. seale, maura. “the neoliberal library.” in information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis, edited by lua gregory and shana higgins, 39–61. library juice press, 2013. http://eprints.rclis.org/20497/. tronto, joan. 1993. moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. new york: routledge. ———. 2012. “partiality based on relational responsibilities: another approach to global ethics.” ethics and social welfare 6 (3): 303–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2012.704058. winner, langdon. 1986. the whale and the reactor: a search for limits in an age of high technology. university of chicago press. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/w/bo3640244.html. webteam. n.d. “carol gilligan.” ethics of care. accessed july 5, 2018. https://ethicsofcare.org/carol-gilligan/. “what is dspace? – dspace knowledgebase.” 2011. wiki. duraspace wiki. december 2, 2011. https://wiki.duraspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageid=25467341. there is much more to explore in the demographic composition of “technical librarians” in systems, digital curation, data management, and other positions that require stronger it skills as a function of their position. further, people in these positions who may be perceived as “outsiders” to the majority cohort anecdotally take on masculine qualities in an effort to either fit in or establish dominance, which is surfaced in several narratives included in we can do i.t. edited by jenny brandon, sharon ladenson, and kelly sattler [↩] unsurprisingly, this keynote earned dr. bourg the vitriol of internet trolls who reduced these exhortations to “she’s saying girls can’t like star trek!” and decried the leftist takeover of libraries. the code4lib conference organizers and community issued a statement of support: https://code4lib.github.io/c4l18-keynote-statement/ [↩] this colleague has read earlier versions of this article, and has told me i may share this conversation as a part of the piece. we had multiple conversations about this article in which i asked him to affirm his consent and reflect on this conversation, and his feedback and changes have been helpful. however, in the development of the article, i frequently became anxious about what this would mean for him in particular and other colleagues more generally, which caused me to consider and reflect seriously on the ways in which i still elevate and prioritize white male feelings. all i can do is the work. [↩] while this article focuses on gendered dynamics within a specific community, it is also vitally important to consider the intersectional nature of racial, ableist, and economic systems that come to bear on care ethics within academic settings and the ways in which many people are excluded from the digital etc. practitioner community. [↩] digital curation, digital libraries, digital publishing, digital repositories, digital scholarship, digital strategies, ethics of care, open access, open source dismantling deficit thinking: a strengths-based inquiry into the experiences of transfer students in and out of academic libraries intersubjectivity and ghostly library labor 3 responses pingback : stew of the month: february 2019 pingback : bilimsel araştırma rehberi | yusuf hakan güngör naomi 2020–02–06 at 1:42 pm thank you for this article! this is a statement that i have been thinking a lot about for libraries. https://collegefund.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/creating-visibility-and-healthy-learning-environments-for-natives-in-higher-education_web.pdf this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct considering outreach assessment: strategies, sample scenarios, and a call to action – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 4 may shannon l. farrell and kristen mastel /4 comments considering outreach assessment: strategies, sample scenarios, and a call to action in brief: how do we measure the impact of our outreach programming? while there is a lot of information about successful outreach activities in the library literature, there is far less documentation of assessment strategies. there may be numerous barriers to conducting assessment, including a lack of time, money, staff, knowledge, and administrative support. further, many outreach activities are not tied back to institutional missions and event goals, meaning they are disjointed activities that do not reflect particular outcomes. high attendance numbers may show that there was excellent swag and food at an event, but did the event relate back to your missions and goals? in this article, we examine the various kinds of outreach that libraries are doing, sort these activities into six broad categories, explore assorted assessment techniques, and include a small survey about people’s experience and comfort with suggested assessments. using hypothetical outreach scenarios, we will illustrate how to identify appropriate assessment strategies to evaluate an event’s goals and measure impact. recognizing there are numerous constraints, we suggest that all library workers engaging in outreach activities should strongly consider incorporating goals-driven assessment in their work. by shannon l. farrell and kristen mastel introduction during times of competing interests and demands for funding, where do libraries stand? all types of libraries are feeling the pressure to demonstrate return on investment and the value of libraries to their constituents and communities. in recent reports gathered by the american library association, public libraries have demonstrated that for every dollar invested, three dollars (or more) of value are generated (carnegie mellon university center for economic development, 2006; bureau of business and economic research, labovitz school of business and economics, university of minnesota duluth, 2011). in academic libraries, the focus has been on demonstrating correlations between library use and students’ grades, retention, and graduation rates (oakleaf, 2010; soria, k. m., fransen, j., & nackerud, s., 2013; mezick, 2007), illustrating that student library use is positively correlated to higher grade point averages and improved second-year retention and four-year graduation rates. most of these methods utilize quantitative measures such as gate counts, circulation statistics, and other count-based data. although these techniques tell a portion of the story of libraries’ impact, they do not tell the whole story. many libraries use various kinds of outreach to reach and engage with users but numbers alone cannot capture the impact of outreach programming. other types of measures are needed in order to assess participants’ perception and level of engagement. in reviewing the library literature, we found many articles that explain “how-to” do a specific type of outreach. however, these articles rarely discuss how to assess the outreach activities beyond head counts, nor do they examine how the activities were tied to particular goals. outreach is most effective when tied to institutional goals. to measure success we must begin with a goal in mind, as this can help staff prioritize activities, budgets, and time. zitron (2013) outlines a collage exercise that can help create an outreach vision that is mapped to the institution’s mission and specific goals. once the foundation is laid, you can create activities that fulfill the goals, along with alternative plans to anticipate various situations. in their paper about creating video game services, bishoff et al. (2015) demonstrate how their institutional environment had a large impact on the kinds of services that were developed. they discovered that their “just for fun” gaming events were neither well received nor tied to the libraries’ goals. after some assessment and reflection, they shifted their focus to student and faculty-driven activities, such as a showcase of gaming technology and discussions related to trends in the gaming industry and gaming-related research. without goal-driven activities and assessment, how is the time, money, and energy justified? conducting assessment involves several challenges, including those related to time and budget constraints, staffing levels, and staff education. however, there are many strategies that can be employed, ranging from those that are quick and easy to those that are more time-consuming and complex. in this paper, we will outline the various categories of outreach that are prevalent in libraries, compile recommended assessment strategies, and using sample scenarios, we will illustrate how to use various assessment strategies in conjunction with defined goals. lastly, we will explore people’s comfort and familiarity with various assessment techniques through an informal survey, leaving you with a call to action to employ assessment in your daily work and outreach efforts. outreach categories there are as many definitions for library outreach as there are creative activities and strategies. while there is no one definition to define outreach within the library community, there are certainly themes across the profession. schneider (2003) identifies three factors to consider regarding outreach, “whether a need is expressed from outside the academy, whether they see their mission as an invitation to pursue an action on their own accord, or whether they construct a form of outreach in response to a specific problem or crisis.” in addition, it could be said that all outreach involves marketing library services, collections, and spaces. “library marketing is outreach. it is making people aware of what we can do for them, in a language they can understand.. [we] need to tell people we’re here, explain to them how we can help, and persuade them to come in through the doors, virtual or physical“ (potter, 2012). emily ford (2009) states, “instead of integrating library promotion, advocacy, and community-specific targeted services, we have left ‘outreach’ outside of the inclusive library whole to be an afterthought, a department more likely to get cut, or work function of only a few, such as your subject librarians.” outreach should not fall on the shoulders of just one individual. in order to be successful, a team-based approach is needed to generate and execute strategies. gabrielle annala (2015) affirms ford, and reflects that outreach is too broad of a term, and that we should instead describe exactly what we are doing in terms that are meaningful to our target audience. she states that outreach is actually a compilation of activities from advocacy, public relations, publicity, promotion, instruction, and marketing. hinchliffe and wong (2010) discuss how the six dimensions of the “wellness wheel” (intellectual, emotional, physical, social, occupational, and spiritual) can help libraries form partnerships across departments and serve patrons by considering their whole selves when developing resources and services. in this article, we view outreach as activities and services that focus on community and relationship-building, in addition to marketing collections and services to targeted audiences. there are numerous kinds of outreach activities that occur in libraries. in order to get an idea of the range of activities, we looked in the library literature, surveyed colleagues, and examined lists of past and upcoming events on a handful of academic and public library websites. although there are a wide range of activities, they appear to fall under a few broad categories. the variety of outreach activities are reflected in the survey conducted by meyers-martin and borchard (2015) of programming provided by academic libraries during finals. meyers-martin and borchard looked at the survey respondents’ budgets, who they partner with, their marketing, and how much time they spent coordinating the activities. here we build on meyers-martin and borchard’s groupings and propose some broad categories for outreach activities. activities were categorized based on what we interpreted as the primary intention. we acknowledge that most outreach crosses numerous categories, so they cannot be viewed singularly, but rather are themes that are touched upon during marketing, public relations, instruction, and programming. each category is accompanied by some illustrative examples. some of the examples we use could theoretically be placed in another category (or multiple categories), based on the intention and goals of the activity. knowing the kinds of outreach that are being used in libraries helps us to think about the kinds of assessment measures that might be appropriate for various activities. further, institutions can use the following groupings as a starting point to evaluate if they are employing diverse strategies or are targeted in one particular area. category 1: collection-based outreach activities in this category are those that are linked to a library’s collection, or parts of a library’s collection. despite this, there is a lot of variety in the kinds of outreach that can fall within this category, ranging from library-led book clubs, to author talks, to scavenger hunts (where patrons are asked to find specific items within the library). other examples of collection-based outreach include: summer reading programs, community read programs (where members of a particular community all read the same book at the same time), “blind date with a book” (where books are wrapped up in paper to conceal their titles and placed in a display to be checked out), exhibits (physical or online), and pop-up libraries (portable libraries, with materials from the home library’s collection). numerous libraries have built community around “one book” programs (evans, 2013; hayes-bohanan, 2011; schwartz, 2015) and summer reading programs (dynia, plasta, and justice, 2015; brantley, 2015), along with bringing materials outside the library walls (davis et. al., 2015). category #2: instruction & services-based outreach activities in this category focus on presentations and public guidance regarding library services. typical activities that would be placed in this category are: workshops (e.g. how to access new e-book platforms), classes (e.g. data management classes that are linked to library data management services, carlson et. al., 2015), and roving reference (where librarians go to alternate locations to answer reference questions; nunn and ruane, 2015; henry, vardeman, syma, 2012). category #3: “whole person” outreach zettervall (2014) coined the term “whole person librarianship” and states that it “is a nascent set of principles and practices to embed social justice in every aspect of library work.” activities in this category are primarily concerned with helping people on an individual level and to help them make personal progress in some aspect of their life. many of these activities revolve around health-based activities (e.g. health screenings, crisis support) and stress reduction programs (e.g. animal therapy, yoga), but many other services can fall in this category as well (including homework help, job search assistance, and tax preparation). while many libraries in particular have implemented animal therapy during finals stress relief (jalongo, and mcdevitt, 2015), or introduced programs to develop literacy skills (e.g. k-12 students reading aloud to dogs; inklebarger, 2014), libraries have also been on the front lines supporting their community during a crisis, such as providing a safe refuge for school children in ferguson (peet, 2015), or providing internet access, tablets, and charging stations after hurricane sandy (epps and watson, 2014). category #4: just for fun outreach activities in this category are those that are typically “just for fun”. they focus on providing a friendly or welcoming experience with the library and/or to redefine the library as place. examples include: arts and crafts activities, do-it-yourself (diy) festivals (hutzel and black, 2014; lotts, 2015), concerts, games/puzzles (cilauro, 2015), and coloring stations (marcotte, 2015). category #5: partnerships and community-focused outreach activities in this category are primarily focused on creating partnerships and working with community groups. this may also include working to cross-promote services with other organizations, promoting library collections/services at community-focused events, or providing space for external groups (e.g. anime or gaming clubs) within the library. partnering with outside organizations can aid in expanding the library’s reach for non-library users or underserved populations, such as partnering with a disability center for digital literacy training (wray, 2014), or improving access to health information through an academic-public library partnership (engeszer et. al., 2016). category #6: multi-pronged themed events and programming activities in this category take place on a large-scale, and usually involve numerous activities and levels of support, frequently over several days. many of these events involve a combination of collection-based outreach, instruction, and events that are “just for fun”, among other things. examples include: national library week (chambers, 2015), banned books week (hubbard, 2009), history day (steman and post, 2013), and college and university orientation events (boss, angell, and tewell, 2015; noe and boosinger, 2010; johnson, buhler, & hillman, 2010). assessment strategies we hope that the above categories will help you reflect on the types of outreach that you provide in order to develop effective outreach assessment strategies. there are a variety of assessment methods that can be employed to determine if your outreach activity or event was successful in terms of your pre-determined goals. some methods may take more time, involve more staff, or necessitate having a larger budget. some are only appropriate under certain conditions. further, different methods will yield different types of data, from hard numbers (quantitative data), to quotes or soundbites (qualitative data), to a combination of the above. there is no one perfect method; each has its pros and cons. when determining which method to use, you need to keep in mind what you are hoping to learn. are you primarily interested in the number of people who attended? do you want to know if particular demographic groups were represented? do you want to know how satisfied participants were with the event? do you want to know if people associated the event with the library? do you want to know if participants walked away knowing more about the library? each of these questions would need different types of data to yield meaningful answers, and thus, would require thinking about data collection ahead of time. in addition, keep in mind the audience for your outreach activity and let that inform your assessment strategies (e.g. outreach services off-site or with an older population might warrant a postcard survey whereas a teen poetry slam might involve gathering social media responses). when developing an assessment strategy it is best not to work in a vacuum. if it all possible, you should solicit people’s feedback on whether the strategy fits the goal. depending on the scale of the event or activity, you may need to solicit help or employ volunteers to gather data. depending on the amount or type of data generated, you may need help analyzing and/or coding data, generating statistics, or producing charts and graphs. we have compiled several assessment strategies here based on an audiences london (2012) report that discusses assessment strategies related to outdoor events and festivals. although this report was not library-focused, we believe these strategies can be utilized by libraries who conduct outreach. strategies: definitions of each of the strategies follows. table 1 illustrates the kind of data that each strategy generates. capturing comments: collect thoughts of motivated participants; can occur on paper, white boards, or other media (e.g. bonnand and hanson, 2015). compiling social media comments or press cuttings: gather coverage of an event through social media, newspapers, and other media outlets (e.g. harmon and messina, 2013; murphy and meyer, 2013). documentation: capture photographs and anecdotes in a document or report to paint an overall picture of an event. face-to-face audience surveys: administer questionnaires to participants at the event, led by an interviewer (e.g. wilson, 2012). focus groups: interview participants in groups, following the event (e.g. walden, 2015). follow up e-surveys: collect email addresses during the event and distribute an e-survey via collected emails following the event.   head counts: count the number of people present at an event. mini interviews during the event: conduct very short interviews during the event, led by a staff member or volunteer. the type of interview conducted can vary, whether it asks an open-ended question or has a set list of questions to be answered. minute papers: ask participants to take one minute to write down an answer to a question. as the name suggests, it does only take one minute and provides rapid feedback. the time involved is in generating a meaningful question and in analyzing and coding the results (e.g. choinski, 2006). mystery shoppers: recruit ‘undercover’ trained volunteers to evaluate your event and report experiences (e.g. benjes-small and kocevar-weidinger, 2011). observations during the event: note how participants move through the event and how they interface and interact with the event’s content (e.g. bedwell and banks, 2013). self-addressed postcard surveys: use a self-addressed postcard to deliver a short survey. vox pops: document participants’ thoughts and feelings via short audio or video recordings. table 1. types of data generated by various assessment strategies. another technique, not to be overlooked, is a self-reflection. char booth (2011) outlines three simple questions in her book related to teaching and instructional design that can easily be applied to outreach activities and used in conjunction with other assessment methods. the questions are: what was positive about the interaction? what went well? what was negative about the interaction? what went wrong? describe one thing you would like to improve or follow up on. it is easy to get into ruts with programming and advocacy. if the event was “successful” the last time, it is tempting to just repeat the same actions. if it did not go well, there may be an opportunity to change the event and make it better. by immediately following an activity with the three question reflection exercise, you have a starting point for expansion or improvement. sometimes it takes persistence and/or adaptation for outreach to take hold with an audience. hypothetical scenarios using the themes and assessment methods above, we have outlined a few hypothetical examples to help illustrate how the various techniques can be used and to help you expand your repertoire of evaluation strategies. each example describes the outreach activity, along with the type of library and staff involved, and identifies discrete goals that influenced the outreach activity and assessment strategy. each scenario outlines the time, budget, manpower investment, type of data to collect, and possible limitations. not every assessment strategy that could be employed in each example was discussed; rather, we have highlighted a few. we chose these examples to address the following questions: what is the event supposed to accomplish? how do we know if the event was successful? what data can be gathered to demonstrate if the goals were accomplished? what is the best way to gather the data? as these examples are hypothetical, we have not aligned these goals to larger organizational goals, but in a real-world scenario, that is another question that should be addressed. scenario #1: whole person outreach a medium-sized academic library is collaborating with their local health and wellness center to bring in a team of five animal handlers. this event will take place over the course of four hours midday during finals week inside the library in a reserved space. two library staff will be in attendance; one person is designated to support the animal handlers while the other interacts with attendees. based on previous events, 150 students are expected to attend. the budget for the event includes parking passes for the animal handlers, treats for the animals, signage, and fees associated with the coordinating organization. goal 1: to reduce student anxiety and stress during finals after participating in the pet therapy activity. students participating will demonstrate a reduction of three points on a 10-point scale between a pre/post survey. assessment strategy: face to face audience survey: recruit a sample of 20 participants to complete a pre/post survey to measure their stress/anxiety levels. time: moderate. it will take a fair amount of time to develop good survey questions. there are “free” easy to use tools that can be employed via paper or online (e.g. google forms). manpower: moderate. multiple people should be involved in developing questions and testing the instrument. depending on staff knowledge, you may need to seek assistance with analysis of the data. data: this survey will ask participants to rank their stress on a numerical scale; therefore, it will be quantitative data. if participants write in open responses, you will have to code qualitative data to pull out themes and make meaning of the feedback. limitation: students are busy, and may not have time to complete a pre/post survey. this will require tracking participants to ensure they complete the post survey. goal 2: to illustrate engagement with the mental health/wellness activity at the library. at least 150 students will attend and 50% of these attendees will spend five minutes with the animal teams. assessment strategy: head counts and observations during the event: one staff member will observe for 15 minutes at the top of the hour throughout the course of the event. data will be collected on: how many people attended? how long are people staying during the event? how many people walked away or rushed past? how many people asked questions? time: moderate. since we will only be observing for a portion of the event, this limits the time involved, but the data will also have to be compiled and analyzed. manpower: minimal. only one staff member needs to be involved based on this sample size. data: quantitative since we will be measuring the number of people doing specific activities, and length of time. we would only have qualitative data to analyze if we decide to record any comments made during the event. limitations: the data is limited to simple numbers and you do not know people’s reasons for dwelling at the station or walking away. you must be careful to choose appropriate behaviors to observe and to not attribute false assumptions to the behaviors (e.g. if a person rushes away, they must be scared of animals). combining this data with a qualitative strategy would answer the “why” behind people’s behaviors. scenario #2: large-scale, multi-pronged themed events and programming the library of a liberal arts college is hosting a first-year orientation event for the incoming class of 500 students. this event will be one day, over the course of six hours, with multiple activities available, such as meeting with subject librarians, hands-on time with special collection specimens, a photo booth, and a trivia contest. students will also be able to learn about library resources and services through a scavenger hunt throughout the library. since this event is so large, it involves participation from all library workers (approximately 30 people). the budget for this event is moderate: approximately $2,000 for library swag items (e.g. pencils, water bottles), marketing, and food to entice the students to attend. goal 1: to introduce students to library resources and services by having at least 30% of the first-year class participate in the library orientation. assessment strategy: head counts: counting all the students that come into the library to attend the event via gate counts before/after the event. this will measure what percentage of the incoming first-year students participated in the event, since it is optional. time: minimal. barely any time involved since this will be automated. manpower: minimal. one person will check gate counts. data: quantitative since we will only be measuring who attended the event. limitations: strict head counts do not measure engagement, how long they stayed, or what information they retained. also, if a participant stands in the way of the sensor, or a large group enters, gate count numbers may be inaccurate. goal 2: to increase undergraduate student engagement with the library. assessment strategies: observations during the event: there will be two people assigned to each activity station; one will record general observations throughout the event while the other engages with the students. data will be collected on: how many people participated in the activity? what questions did they ask? what comments did they make? did they ask follow-up questions about library services? time: intensive. there are numerous stations and the data will have to be compiled and analyzed. manpower: extensive. in this case, 15 people will collect data. data: qualitative and quantitative since we will be measuring the number of people doing specific activities and questions and comments made. limitations: it is important to not make assumptions about people’s motivations and experiences. you must be careful of the conclusions that you draw from observations alone. however, evaluating the data behind what questions were asked or what comments were made will provide richer information. compiling social media comments and documentation: gathering information about the event (including photos) via twitter, facebook, instagram, and student newspaper sources related to the event by searching on the library’s name and designated event hashtag. time: moderate. staff will have to actively seek out this information, as hashtags are not consistently used. manpower: moderate. one person will gather social media comments. data: qualitative since text and images from posts and articles will be gathered and coded based on participants’ impressions. limitations: there are questions of access; if comments are not public, you cannot find them. in addition, if participants post on alternate platforms (e.g. snapchat, yikyak) that you do not check, they will not be discovered. goal 3: students will become aware of at least two library resources and services that can help them with their upcoming research projects. assessment strategies: vox pops: using a video recorder, willing participants will be asked what library resources and services were new to them, and how they might use them over the coming year. this will take place in an area offset from the main library doors, so comments can be captured before people leave the event. time: intensive. it will take a fair amount of to set-up equipment, find and interview willing subjects, and process and edit video afterwards. there will also be a substantial amount of time involved in analyzing the content of the interviews. manpower: moderate. one to two people. this activity may require assistance with lighting, recording, interviewing and recruiting subjects, and processing video. data: qualitative since we will only be capturing people’s comments and reactions. limitations: this measures short-term awareness of resources just mentioned. this does not measure willingness to use such resources during point-of-need. focus groups: a week after the orientation event, gather a sample of ten first-year students and break them into two focus groups, lasting 45 minutes. students will be asked: what library services do they remember, what services have they used or do they plan to use, and what services would help them in their research. (depending on the time allotted for the focus group, you could prepare questions to address multiple goals; we will not do that in this example). students will receive a free pizza lunch for participation. time: intensive. recruiting volunteers, creating good questions to ask, observing and recording the focus groups, and coding responses will all take a lot of time. manpower: moderate. two people minimum will be needed to run the focus group and analyze data. data: qualitative since we will be gathering people’s comments. limitations: funds to provide lunch to participants might not be feasible for all libraries. further, although focus groups generate rich, qualitative data, the sessions may need to be audio recorded and transcribed (which may cost money). goal 4: determine if the layout of activities are efficient, and that high quality customer service is provided by library staff. assessment strategy: mystery shopper: recruit a few (3-4) upperclass students who are not heavy library users (so they will be unknown to library staff) and have them go through the event as a participant while recording their observations. they will use a checklist and observation form that asks questions about each activity, such as: did the library staff greet you at the activity? were there bottlenecks at the activity, and if so, where? where could signage be used to improve traffic flow? students serving as mystery shoppers will receive a bookstore giftcard for their time. time: intensive; it will take a lot of time to recruit and train the volunteers, create a checklist or form to record observations, debrief after the event, and code responses. manpower: extensive. it will involve library staff for training, debriefing, coding and analyzing the data and student volunteers to carry out the activity. data: both qualitative and quantitative (yes/no) depending on the feedback form for the student volunteers. limitations: funds to provide gift certificates to evaluators might not be feasible for all libraries. recruitment of mystery shoppers that are unfamiliar with the library’s orientation activities may be difficult, especially since recruitment will be prior to the semester beginning. focus groups: a week after the orientation event, gather a sample of ten first-year students and break them into two focus groups. during the debrief, students will be asked: which activities were most engaging and/or fun, what library services do they remember, and suggestions for improvement of the event. students will receive a bookstore gift card for participation. time: intensive. recruiting volunteers, creating good questions to ask, observing and recording the focus groups, and coding responses will all take a lot of time. manpower: moderate. two people minimum will be needed to run the focus group and analyze data. data: focus groups generate rich, qualitative data. limitations: funds to provide gift certificates to participants might not be feasible for all libraries. the focus group sessions may need to be audio recorded and transcribed (which may cost money). scenario #3: community-organization outreach a medium-sized public library is putting on a free two-hour workshop for adults to learn how to make and bind a book. library materials related to the topic will be displayed. the library will be partnering with a local book arts organization to put on the event. funding for the workshop is part of a larger community engagement grant. the library hopes to draw fifteen citizens for this hands-on activity. goal 1: to have patrons use or circulate three items related to bookbinding and paper arts from the library’s collection during, or immediately following, the event. assessment strategy: circulation/use counts: determine how many items were removed from the selection displayed at the event. time: minimal. selecting and creating an informal book display will require very little time. manpower: minimal. only one person will be needed to count remaining items from the display or look at circulation statistics. data: quantitative since we will only be measuring materials used. limitations: this does not gather what participants learned or how engaged they were with the event. goal 2: to develop a relationship with the book arts organization and co-create future programming. assessment strategies: mini-interview: interview the activity instructor from the arts organization following the event and ask them how they felt the event went, how the event could be improved, and if they believe that the partnership coalesces with their organization’s mission. time: minimal. since we will only be measuring the opinion of one person, preparation (generating questions) and analyzing and coding the results will be fairly simple and straightforward. manpower: minimal. only one staff person will interview the instructor. data: qualitative, as the questions will be open-ended. limitation: this assesses the opinion of the instructor, which might not be the opinion of the administration of the organization, which directs funds and time allotment. white board comments: ask participants: which of the following activities would you be interested in (pop-up card class, artist’s book talk, papermaking class)? have participants indicate interest with a checkmark. this will gather data on what kinds of programs could be created as a follow-up to the book-binding workshop. time: minimal. no time at all to set up. a count-based white board survey will require little preparation and post-collection time. manpower: minimal. one person will be able to post and record survey responses. data: quantitative since we will be using checkmarks to indicate preferences. limitations: questions must be short and require simple responses. if you use white boards at a large events, someone will need to save data (such as by taking a photo) in order to gather new responses. goal 3: to provide an engaging event where 75% of attendees rate the activity satisfactory or higher. assessment strategy: tear-off postcard: give out a self-addressed stamped tear-off postcard to workshop participants at the conclusion of the event. postcards will feature one side with dual marketing of the library and book arts organization while the tear-off side will have a brief survey. we want to use postcards as they will feature promotional materials from both the arts organization and the library, along with the survey. survey questions include: “rate your satisfaction with the workshop (from extremely dissatisfied to extremely satisfied, on a 5 point scale)”, “rate the length of the workshop (from too long to too short, on a 3 point scale)”, and “what suggestions do you have for improvement?” time: moderate. since this is a partnership, final approval will be needed from both organizations, meaning advanced planning is required. manpower: moderate. someone will need to design the postcard, develop survey questions for the mailing, and compile and distribute data to both organizations. data: quantitative and qualitative, as two questions will have numerical responses and one will be open-ended. limitations: postcards may not be suitable depending on the survey audience. it costs money to print and provide postage for the postcards. finally, unless people complete these on the spot, they may not be returned. a survey and a call to action we hope that the introduction to various assessment techniques drives people toward new ways of thinking about their outreach work. we know, based on the literature, that assessment is often an afterthought. however, we suspected this may have to do with people’s comfort level with the various assessment strategies. to test our suspicion, we conducted an informal online survey of librarians about their experience with outreach activities and various assessment methods. the survey was first distributed in conjunction with a poster presentation that we gave at the 2015 minnesota library association annual conference. the survey asked respondents: what kinds of outreach they have done, what kinds of outreach they would like to attempt, how they have assessed their outreach, how comfortable they would be administering suggested assessment methods, and what kind of library they work at. we had 39 responses to our survey, primarily from those who worked in academic libraries (see figure 1). figure 1. type of institutions where survey respondents work, measured by number who responded and percentage of the total. survey participants illustrated a range of experience with the various assessment methods that we listed (see figure 2). the only assessment method listed that was used by everyone was head counts. however, the majority of people have also tried taking observations during the event (76.9%). no other assessment method was used by the majority of survey respondents. the most highly used methods were, in descending order: compiling social media comments (41%), documentation (38.5%), face-to-face audience surveys (30.8%), follow up e-surveys (25.6%), and white board comments (25.6%). focus groups, minute papers, and vox pops were used very minimally. only two people had used focus groups and minute papers, and only one person had used vox pops. no one indicated that they had used either mystery shoppers or self-addressed postcard surveys. unfortunately, we do not know how frequently these various methods have been employed, as that question was not asked. a positive response could have been triggered from an event that happened several years ago. figure 2. number of survey participants who have utilized different methods for assessing outreach activities (out of 39 total responses). survey participants ranged in their level of comfort with the various assessment methods. figure 3 compiles our data on participants’ level of comfort, ranging from “not at all comfortable” to very comfortable”. everyone stated that they were very comfortable using head counts. the vast majority of respondents were comfortable with compiling social media comments and observations (95% each). figure 3. survey participants level of comfort with using various methods for assessing outreach activities. values are measured as percentages, with positive percentages indicating comfort and negative percentages indicating discomfort. table 2 compares participants use of each of these assessment methods to their comfort levels. for the purpose of this table, the “somewhat comfortable” and “very comfortable” responses were combined to define the percent of people who were “comfortable” and the “not very comfortable” and “not at all comfortable” responses were combined to define the “% uncomfortable.” interestingly, not everyone who indicated a high level of comfort has employed these methods. for example, only 16 of 37 people who are comfortable compiling social media comments have ever done so and only 30 of 37 people who are comfortable conducting observations have ever done so. the data clearly show that people are somewhat comfortable with a majority of the methods listed. a majority of people (over 50%) claim to be very or somewhat comfortable with 10 of the 13 methods. only 3 methods, minute papers, mystery shoppers and vox pops, had relatively high levels of discomfort among participants (28%, 33%, 41%, respectfully). in these cases, very few people stated that they had used these assessment methods, however. we fully realize that the results could have been different if we had more representation from public and school library staff. table 2. survey participants use of, and level of comfort with using, various methods for assessing outreach activities. percentages for “% comfortable” were calculated by combining “very comfortable” and “somewhat comfortable” values. percentages for “% uncomfortable” were calculated by combining “not very comfortable” and “not at all comfortable”. table 2 in general, this illustrated to us that even if people are aware and know about these methods, for some reason they are not putting them to use when assessing outreach events. we had a suspicion, based on our experiences, conversations, and the library literature, that this was the case. this brief survey confirmed our theories. however, the survey did not delve into any of the reasons why people are not using a variety of assessment methods and we can only guess what their reasons may include: time, budget constraints, lack of education, and administrative support. we have illustrated that many of the methods do not require much time or money as long as the assessment planning goes hand-in-hand with setting event goals and activity planning. lack of staff education is a real concern and those needing information about quantitative and qualitative methods may need to seek out classes, workshops, and professional development outside of their institution. that being said, there has been an increase in freely available or low cost web courses (e.g. coursera’s “methods and statistics in social sciences specialization”) and there are numerous books and articles published on the topic (national library of medicine’s “planning and evaluating health information outreach projects”). research methods have not traditionally been a required course in library schools, and therefore, it is unreasonable to expect that library workers have extensive experience in the area (o’connor and park, 2002; powell et al., 2002; partridge et al., 2014). however, due to external and internal pressure to show value in our libraries and activities, it is of utmost importance that we make assessment a priority. conclusion libraries have determined the need to participate in outreach activities for numerous reasons including: to connect with current and potential users, to stay relevant, to build goodwill, and to gain support. demonstrating the value of libraries has generated lively discussion in the last few years, much of which is focused on collection metrics and head counts, such as number of visitors to the library, number of items checked out, number of reference questions asked, or number of workshop attendees. although the library literature is filled with examples of various kinds of outreach activities and how libraries are connecting with communities, there is a distinct lack of discussion about how outreach is assessed. assessment strategies are needed to demonstrate a return on investment for our constituents, and to improve our marketing, public relations, advocacy and ultimately library patronship. as we have illustrated, there are a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods available that can be used to assess virtually any kind of outreach. the technique(s) that you choose will depend on various factors, including the goals associated with the programming, target audience for the activity, and the type of outreach. there are pros and cons to each assessment method, with some involving a larger budget, more staffing and time, or familiarity with research methods. however, it is not always necessary to use the most complicated, expensive, and time-intensive method to collect valuable data. we cannot leave assessment to library administrators and those with assessment in their job titles. there are many opportunities to test assessment techniques and gather data in our daily work. we want to encourage those in libraries who are doing outreach work to incorporate goal-driven assessment when sharing the results of their work. not only does it help illustrate impact, it helps others think critically about their own work and determine which kinds of outreach are most appropriate for their institutions and communities. by only focusing on head counts we undermine our ability to accurately understand the qualitative and quantitative relevance of the assessments made when evaluating library outreach objectives and goals. acknowledgements we would like to thank erin dorney, our internal editor, for shepherding us throughout the writing process, and providing good feedback. in addition, our gratitude goes to adrienne lai, our external reviewer, who posed excellent questions and comments to consider that strengthened this article. we would also like to thank our colleagues at the university of minnesota for providing feedback on our proposed outreach categories. references audiences london. 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(2014). whole person librarianship. retrieved march 10, 2016, from https://mlismsw.wordpress.com/2014/03/01/what-is-whole-person-librarianship/ assessment, evaluation, goals, missions, outreach, public services change in publication schedule beta spaces as a model for recontextualizing reference services in libraries 4 responses pingback : swila (still) on my mind pingback : links of the month – may 2016 – teen services underground catherine alloway 2016–06–28 at 3:21 pm good article! too many libraries do outreach without thinking of outcomes or assessment strategies. very useful and practical. camille thomas 2016–09–07 at 12:27 pm i have been searching for information about qualitative assessment of outreach services with no luck. i am so glad to see this article and its practical application guidelines! also, i think one reason why librarians use some methods and not others may also be an apprehension to approaching users– maybe because of time during initiatives, lack of past responses or lack of confidence. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a conversation with char booth – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 10 jun ellie collier /4 comments a conversation with char booth photo credit: andy snow photography welcome to a special audio edition of in the library with the lead pipe. ellie collier talks to char booth, e-learning librarian at the university of california at berkeley and author of informing innovation: tracking student interest in emerging library technologies at ohio university, a book length research report recently published by acrl and available as a free download. we’ll be talking about char’s path to librarianship, the importance of mentors, the process of writing and publishing her book and much more. i hope you enjoy it as much as i did. click to stream interview audio by ellie collier thanks to kelly jensen and emily ford for reviewing my questions, to brett bonfield for his technical expertise and, of course, to char booth. transcript: welcome to a special audio edition of in the library with the lead pipe. i’m ellie collier, reference librarian at austin community college and i’ll be talking to char booth, e-learning librarian at the university of california at berkeley and author of informing innovation: tracking student interest in emerging library technologies at ohio university, a book length research report recently published by acrl and available as a free download which is linked to in the transcript. we’ll be talking about char’s path to librarianship, the importance of mentors, the process of writing and publishing her book and much more. i hope you enjoy it as much as i did. ellie: for starters, can you tell us a little bit about your background? your path to librarianship? what you maybe did with undergrad or other jobs or interests that sort of took you here? char: sure, my path to librarianship was actually kind of short in a way. i left texas to go to reed college when i was still pretty young. i got a history degree up there. it’s in portland, oregon. and, like many people who graduate from liberal arts colleges, i had no idea what i was going to do. so i spent about a year just temping at portland state university, trying to figure out what i was going to do. and my mom and i have this really good relationship. she’s a smart lady, and i was trying to figure out what to do and she suggested “why don’t you look at library school?” and i thought, “uh… no.” but then i looked into it and it was actually a strangely perfect fit. sshe was just trying to get me back to austin and the ischool at ut austin is where i ended up going. so, that was basically my path. i wish it was more dramatic, but that’s it. ellie: that’s a very direct route, yeah. i just read that great post you wrote on advocacy on info-mational, which included your plans to sort of let that genuine passion you have shine through whenever you’re talking to faculty. so where along that very brief path did that passion develop? char: what i was talking about is that i think a lot of librarians who work in higher education have … it’s not necessarily an inferiority complex, but we sometimes get a little bit self conscious when we interact with faculty in terms of how we advocate for libraries. we usually go about it really practically, “i can do this for you, i can do this for you.” but some of us feel a little bit shy about talking about our convictions as librarians. i think that most of us have very strong convictions about being librarians. we might feel a little bit of vulnerability around that, but i recently have had some conversations with professors, faculty members, and graduate students at berkley and elsewhere that have really let me know that showing people the veracity of my passion about librarianship and my advocacy for it really can help them get insight into what brings people to academic libraries, what we can do for them, what we can do for students – the real breadth and depth of our profession as opposed to people’s impressions of it, which are never correct. they’re just not complete, they don’t have enough depth. so, anyway, all this passion really came from my experience at reed college with the research culture there and the library culture there. it’s an extraordinary undergraduate library. it supports students. kids at reed are invariably super nerds and we’re really self-interested researchers. we all have to do these really intensive senior theses and we live in that library. and they’re really sweet to us. the librarians are extraordinary. they let people drag cots in there. and when we all graduate we burn copies of our thesis in front of the library and it’s this crazy revelry. it just really instilled this idea of a research culture and libraries supporting students and i’ve never forgotten that. it’s what i aspire to. ellie: that’s fantastic! char: oh my god, yeah. it really is. it’s amazing, i miss it. ellie: i’m one of those anomalies, i think, that i managed to get into library school having almost never entered any school library. and i’m in community colleges now, and i love it, but yeah, i think i went into my library twice at penn state, ever, the whole four years. char: you know what’s funny, i was always in the library at reed, but it was really the place of it that i loved. i didn’t take enough advantage of the reference librarians there, which i find really ironic now, but i was just, “oh, i know it all. i can do it. whatever.” and then i realized how ignorant i was. it’s kind of incredible how much i didn’t know at the time. so that’s really filled me with this desire to help kids know that they don’t know everything, especially smart kids. and i’m at berkeley now, and they think they know what’s going on, but they totally don’t. ellie: so you went and got a second masters in instructional design. so what led you to that degree and what’s that brought in to your work as a librarian? char: oh so much, so much. i’m so glad i did that honestly. i got a second masters, it’s a masters in education, and it’s focused on instructional design and computer education and technology, so this idea of bringing technology into education and how you teach that and how you learn about that and all those things. i got that degree at ohio university in their college of education while i was working as a reference and instruction librarian there from ’06 to ’08. ohio university is an extraordinarily supportive library system in terms of professional development. they’re excellent. they basically paid all of my tuition, save maybe… ellie: nice. char: …5-10% of it. very nice. and i just worked really hard on it. i discovered that i’m really fascinated by learning theory and pedagogy and all of these things. and it gave me a lot of practical skills: in flash design, in instructional design, and all of these things that, had i known they existed in library school, or had they been subjects that were available in my program i really would have gone after. but i just didn’t know that’s what i needed to do. i also met a lot of k-12 educators who are full time teachers. they have a lot of strategies on how to motivate people. they have a lot of insight into how people learn. i just realized that i had not been taught enough about teaching to be a librarian. i think that’s an endemic problem in library education. we’re not taught to be educators even though that’s what we are. i think that in order to thrive we’re going to have to focus more on that in general. ellie: and that ties back too, to what you were saying about talking to faculty and i think it was emily that commented on your post too that being able to speak their language just helps so much. char: oh my god yes, totally. totally. and librarians are really good at speaking other people’s language. that’s what we do. that’s what we do at the reference desk. that’s what we do when we catalog books. that’s what we do when we design all these different information products. we’re very good at having insight into other people’s interests, research cultures, disciplinary vernaculars, all of these things. we’re adaptable to that. and tying that with the educational missions of libraries is very natural. and it helps us advocate for what we do because we can couch it in terms that are understandable, not only by different disciples, but different levels within those disciples. higher education institutions are giant complex hierarchies and you’ve got to be able to get at each level of that hierarchy in order to really be useful, i think. ellie: so speaking of ohio and of all these sorts of different areas we pull through, i know that you are a texan at heart. and so now you’re been off in rural ohio, now you’re off in berkeley. what’s it been like going such different places? what sort of culture shocks, if any, have you run into? char: have i run into culture? yeah. are you kidding? no, there’s no difference between ohio and berkeley, i’m sorry. [laughter] yeah, totally! i think a lot of us who are kind of early career librarians, you know, will go, get our first job and it might be somewhere interesting where we never thought that we would live. case in point, ohio? i didn’t really know much about ohio. or the university. it was a job that i got and man was i lucky because it was a perfect fit. it taught me an extraordinary amount about my own interests, how to be a good librarian because i was supported and mentored by everyone i worked with. extraordinary place. i cannot say enough positive things about it. it’s a model institution. i also really had the opportunity to get outside my urban self. and learn that there’s really no sense in thinking that one can only live in one kind of place. it’s that same kind of ethic of adaptability. i ended up adoring living rurally. it’s been actually a bigger culture shock moving to this urban area where, apparently everyone wants to live, but it’s a real challenge. it’s a very competitive culture out here in general because it is so desired. the opposite was true in this odd way in ohio, but it was so wonderful to live in a place that was really built on community and making relationships that lasted and were supportive and it was just such a friendly and kind place to live. and it was just gorgeous. and institutionally every university has a different institutional culture and i’m really fascinated by that. and just the idea of regionalism in general. so, i really am interested in the places that i work and my goal is always to love my job, so i only go places that i truly believe that i can do that. i think in terms of development in one’s profession, it’s excellent to work for different types of places because it gives you such a better perspective on what you can offer, the kinds of problems that can develop, the kinds of things that can develop to address those problems and it’s good, not always to move too much, but different types of experiences are really important. but, in terms of comparing things to texas, i mean, there’s really no comparison. ellie: of course, of course. so, switching gears, you were named a mover and a shaker and you were selected for the first class of ala’s emerging leaders. what motivated you to try for those opportunities? char: when i applied for emerging leaders it was super early on in my career at ohio university. i decided to apply for it because i’m the kind of person that just goes for professional development opportunities because i like to learn about stuff and i’m really a very collaborative person and i thought it would be a good way to get insight into the hugeness of ala, which can be really inscrutable when you’re getting started. ala’s this giant organization, you don’t even know where to turn in it if you want to get involved. so i applied for that. i was encouraged to apply for emerging leaders through a couple of different mentorships that i’ve had. i’m also a person that really believes in forming professional connections and being mentored. i naturally gravitate towards mentorships, in terms of me being a mentee, because i really respect the knowledge of people who have been around the block a few more times than i have in terms of their careers. it’s really, really important to perceive how we can create mutually beneficial professional relationships. and i’m not talking about some kind of noxious ladder climbing here. i’m talking about getting good work done, learning from people and having that be a really validating personal relationship builder in your career. and, i don’t know, i’ve got really good manners so people tend to like that in the folks that they work with. so, anyway, i think that one of my strongest mentors from library school, dr. roy, who is ala past president, i think she encouraged me to do it, which is great. i like to have an impact on the things that i care about. he way you do that is by taking those kinds of opportunities when they come to you. emerging leaders was a really good experience for me. and of course it’s always about the people that i end up meeting. i was able to meet and work with jenny levine, who writes the shifted librarian and who’s an amazing person and one of my closest librarian friends now. she was one of my project groups’ in emerging leaders contacts within ala. so that was awesome. that’s the kind of thing that happens when you do things like emerging leaders or you get nominated to be mover and shaker. at the reception at the mover and shaker thing i met michael stevens and meredith farkas. i work with them both, i love them both. and that’s how it goes. so it’s all about making personal connections out of professional opportunities and doing so in a way that is genuine and respectful and intent on the greater good. i think that’s really, really critical. ellie: i want to second what you were saying about networking, not in that awful way. char: because it sounds all circuit boardy. it makes people seem like implements that have these connections that may facilitate things and make things happen. but really it’s another aspect of enjoying the work that you do and making the work that you do have more impact. ellie: yeah. and, i mean, i would even call probably almost everyone that i’ve met in those opportunities and remained friends with, friends, so to me, even though, i know that it is networking, it never feels like it at the time, it never has any of those sort of negative connotations. yeah, i just sort of want to replace that with the idea of friendship. char: absolutely, and when you’re getting started, networking is a terrifying concept. i would hear the word networking, i’d be like, “oh my god, i don’t know how to do that. i don’t even have business cards, how am i supposed to network with anyone?” networking, all it is, is building relationships that originate in your genuine interest in what you do. ellie: well said. char: and finding other people that can help you do that. and that you can help do that. and it’s awesome. so, i’m all about that. you have to learn how to communicate well. it’s about being nice and not being opportunistic. ellie: yeah. so you do tons of stuff. you’ve had all these presentations, the cyber zed shed, you skyped into a presentation, i’m sorry i don’t have which one in front of me… char: oh man, that was scary. ellie: you’ve done acrl, computers in libraries, future of libraries. i’m sure i’ve missed some. how did you get hooked up with some of those? how have they impacted your career? char: i just applied for them. a couple of the presentations i’ve done have been invited but most of them are the kind of thing where you submit your proposal and they accept you or reject you. and i’ve got plenty of rejections. it’s about, does your idea fit the program and do they have space for you and all that stuff. and i’m weird, i like to present. i really, really like it. i hated it when i started. i was as nervous as anybody else, but i’ve just grown to love being in front of people in a way that is challenging to me and hopefully engaging and interesting for them in terms of the content that i’m talking about. it’s a great challenge and that’s really what it’s all about. so most of them i applied for, a couple of them i’ve been invited to. it’s amazing to watch a good presentation and i try really hard to give a good presentation. and it’s an excellent way to kind of develop my skills in presentation technology and different ways to try to express ideas. i’m really interested in visual design too, so when i make a presentation i like it to be pretty beautiful, i try. so it pushes you forward. and again, it’s a great way to connect with people and hear really good questions and think about the things that you’re doing in ways that you wouldn’t have ever thought about because you get this feedback from other institutions. you talk for 20 minutes about something that happened at your place and then 10 people come up asking questions through their institutional lens. and [you realize], “oh my god, that’s a completely different working culture, i never anticipated that problem. in that context it would work totally differently.” it’s so important. presenting is very fun. it was never something i had to do for tenure. it just kinda happened. but you do have to have that professional development support. it’s expensive to travel. one of the reasons i was able to do that, i should just mention this again, is that ou gave such extraordinary travel funding. as long as you’re involved, as long as you’re presenting, as long as you’re active in the things that you are doing, they would fund you. the same is true at berkeley, maybe to a lesser extent. ou is really out of the ballpark in terms of what they do or did for people. the funding situation all over the country is a little dicey right now, so i may be speaking of things that are not quite the same. but that was a great opportunity for me. ellie: do you have any favorite conferences or presentations you’ve given? char: i like acrl a lot. my first presentation, the one that really gave me the idea that i could enjoy presenting professionally at conferences and that it was a thing that i wanted to continue doing, was cyber zed shed back, i think it was in, was it ’06? aclr ’07? it was the first thing i ever presented and i was scared out of my mind but it went really well and i enjoyed it. i like the vibe at acrl. i gave a presentation at the last one in seattle. it was extraordinary. it was excellent. the audience was great. i cracked them up the whole time, which was rad. i like acrl. i do. ellie: nice. so also speaking of all of the stuff that you do, how do you stay sane? do you make an effort to divide your personal and professional life out? do you blend it all together? char: you really want to know what i do? i get up at 4 or 5 in the morning every day. ellie: oh my goodness. char: that’s what i do. so i don’t really work much at night. that’s how i divide my personal and professional life. i don’t work at night, but i certainly work at 4 or 5 in the morning. i write a lot and if i have a presentation i’m doing or something, that’s when it gets done. the early morning hours are really good for that because there’s really no other distractions. it’s very quiet, it’s a very focused time and i’m obviously a morning person. so that’s good. you can’t be happy professionally if you’re not happy personally. so, you can’t just privilege one and not the other. yes, i work very hard, but i also have a lot of interests and i care a lot about librarianship. i care a lot about what i do. so it brings me great personal satisfaction and joy and i’ve met a lot of people in my profession that are true friends and that do what i do, but i have plenty going on outside of that. and that’s good. ellie: so you’re getting up super early in the morning, is all of the sort of stuff we’re talking about stuff you take care of during that time or is any of it on work time? char: i’m really busy at my job. i have an amazing job. i do a lot of really interesting things and a lot of them involve a lot of networking and outreach and meetings and building different collaborative partnerships at berkeley. it’s difficult to do anything but my job at my job. that said, i am encouraged to work on the types of writing things that i work on when i can. it’s not discouraged by any means. i have a lot of support from my administrators, from my bosses and i work for some pretty awesome people at berkeley. so, if i have the time, it’s not like the time is not mine to work on professional stuff, but i’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. that’s what important at my work, but yes, i am supported in my professional activities as well. ellie: excellent. so talking about writing, ready to transition into the book a little bit, can you talk about the process of writing that, a whole book? and was that one part of your work at ohio or again, sort of totally extracurricular? char: the book that i just published through acrl, it’s available as a free download with a sample research instrument, a sample questionnaire, if anybody wants to download it and try to do the same environmental scan about students and technology, that’s available. you can also purchase a hard copy, but it’s definitely meant to be accessible to the widest possible audience. elile: that’s fantastic. char: that project originated as local research at ohio university. i was on this technology team and i worked with my manager, another mentor of mine, chad boeninger, who’s an extremely smart librarian. he has a blog called library voice that’s really excellent. he really had this idea that we should get better grounded in the technology and library culture of our actual institution in order to develop better technology products and i completely concurred, so spearheaded this long term research project and the report that i produced for that. i was also simultaneously working on it as my master’s report for my education degree. those two documents merged, and then i expanded them a lot and ended up writing on that for another 6 to 8 months and published that as the actual book/research report through acrl. so, it was a document that had a long life span and a lot of different iterations that really helped me get excellent insight into what i was trying to say. it’s local research findings, but it’s couched in this language of how to research your own institution to understand what it’s trying to tell you about what it needs from its library, not just in terms of technology, or this kind of minimum insight into the students that you’re serving. “do you like the library? yes or no?” it’s about really getting a handle on the culture in which you exist because that’s the culture that you serve and it’s different than any other library culture on the planet because that’s the way it works. ellie: i think that’s fantastic. char: what i’m trying to do is inspire people to couch themselves in that culture. you reflect it, those are your people. don’t stop looking at national studies, read the national studies and then use their research instrument to inspire your own research. see if your people are a reflection of those people, or if they’re not a reflection of those people. then you can build products that respond to their requests. it’s very important. ellie: i think it’s great that you touch on that. i find that a lot being in a community college setting, where they talk about, well, incoming freshman this… i’m like, mmmm, yeah… not my audience… so yeah, thank you for that. char: part of the reason i wrote this report in such detail and tried to really show how specific the library culture at ohio university was is because people arrive at different institutions of higher learning based on a variety of different factors, their class privilege, their prior academic performance, their location, their region… it’s this really complex demographic and social and cultural admissions process. so that creates these little microcosms that are completely unique and that libraries can learn to respond to. and work with. and understand. instead of just saying, “we’re the library. you need some help?” being a person that’s interested in that kind of regional, institutional, organizational culture, i think we should learn how to gain better insight into it. and ongoing insight, not just a one shot survey, but figure out how to figure out your context. ellie: mmmhm. and so, moving on with the process of the book, what was the publishing process like? did you approach ala? did they approach you? what was the timeline for publishing? we already talked about writing, but… char:  i’m working on a different book project right now on instructional technology, pedagogy in libraries, reflective practice, all of those different things. that book i was approached by ala editions to do as a consequence of being named a mover and shaker, which is something that i think is a common experience for folks that get that award. they get a lot of publication opportunities out of it. which is great. but, for the research report, i just cold called kathryn deiss at acrl. cold emailed i guess you could say. i had met her through jenny levine and i thought maybe the project might be of interest to her. i had the good fortune to also be edited in that process by joan lippincott, who’s really an amazing thinker in our profession in terms of these issues of technology in libraries and integrating our institutions into the institutions that support us and things like that. so, it was a really serendipitous process. the entire publication timeline, i guess was about august to april. so however many months that is. i can’t count very well apparently. but i had already been writing on it a while, as i said. a document existed, it just needed to get shipped into shape so to speak. so, i revised it, i worked on it. did a lot more analysis. formatted the document itself. and they let me design the whole thing. which is an incredible experience by the way. cover to cover. i designed that book. and it was wonderful. thank you katherine, thank you joan. thanks to dawn mueller at ala. all of them were great during that process. ellie: so you designed it into the pdf too? how did it come about that they offered the free version? char: well actually, i pretty much insisted on that. i always imagined it as a free download. i didn’t even think that it was going to be in a print publication version, but one thing led to another and it ended up being a good length for a soft cover research report. so, that’s fine, but i always imagined it as a free download. i really considered that it’s primary form. and of course it’s great that it’s available in a different format, but in my mind it originated as a web based document, download. ellie: alright, so, moving on. i know that the techsource people are going to cover a lot more of the content of it, so i just want to latch onto the one idea that sort of struck me, which was that one of the most interesting aspects of that skype project was your open, transparent reporting on the decision to sort of reevaluate the service. and i really like this shift towards publicly discussing and learning from projects even when they might be deemed failures. at my college we’ve been doing an im pilot through meebo, and we’re considering dropping that for various reasons. can you talk about the decision to reevaluate the service and who all’s involved in that and what sort of feedback it was met with? char: sure. what you’re talking about is this experimentation that we were involved in at ohio university with skype, using skype for different forms of public service. we created a video call kiosk and did a pilot with that and we also set up what we called skype in reference on our reference desk, so people with skype accounts could call and talk to a librarian that way or chat with them. the survey project came out of the fact that we were able to do so much experimentation at ou. the working culture is really supportive, a lot of people with a lot of creative energy in terms of creating library services that are worthwhile and innovative and just trying out all these new products, it was really fun. but at the same time, the more products you create, the more time it takes to staff them and the more that you want to make sure that they’re actually working out for you. and the skype project was basically the first thing that we had done that was … you might call it ahead of it’s time, you might call it misdirected, you might just call it too much. so, it was a lot of work to create and staff, and it drew on our relationships with the systems department and it was a great experiment, but at the same time, the video kiosk wasn’t used consistently enough to really merit us being on it all the time, in terms of our talking heads on the screen. our decision to reevaluate the service is this idea that a lot of people talk about, having things in constant beta and changing them up. it’s really about the flexibility to address the inevitable problems that come up. the fact that we are able to do that so transparently at ou is what gives us the motivation to talk about it and say, look, this is how we changed things, and this is how we tried to address the fact that the service wasn’t used enough. this is the model that we took on to try to mitigate those problem. when you work with emerging technology in libraries or in higher education or wherever, you’ve got to be able to switch gears when things don’t work right. we’re all treading new ground, not only in the technologies that we’re using, but like i said with the specific institutional cultures, different types of it relationships. you can’t rely only on the testimonials of others. you’ve got to figure out your own context before you know how to make something work. so that was really where this idea of gaining more insight into people and what technologies would work and what would not work. that’s where the idea originated. to stop creating services from the seat of our pants and start trying to do it from a more informed vantage point. and the service being reevaluated, it’s an ongoing process. more people continue to adopt skype and they’re still offering the service at ou in different forms, but they’re reevaluating having skype be the element on that information kiosk that is called when someone says “ask a librarian.” they might just switch it to text chat because it’s easier for people. so it’s really you want to triangulate what’s the way people want to be able to contact you and go there instead of just the thing you think is cool at the moment. ellie: amen. that was my last official question for you, other than sort of, what’s next on your list? do you have any latest technology thoughts? something that’s caught your interest that’s fun? that you’re working on now? char: so much actually. i mentioned before that i’m writing another book on library education. a lot of what i used to do at ou had to do with emerging reference technologies and now i have a lot more to do with teaching and learning and technology in those areas and those aspects. they all kind of blend together, but i’ve been really doing a lot more instruction and a lot more training and thinking about how to get people to use different types of learning technologies in libraries and how to connect the research mission of berkeley with the berkeley libraries via different technological means, so that’s on my mind right now in a lot of ways. in terms of what i’m doing outside of my immediate job, i’ve been thinking a lot about different types of interactive technologies. the ischool at berkeley is really excellent and it’s not really in the library paradigm anymore, but there was an exhibit on tangible user interfaces, student projects, this kind of hyper interactive type of design that involves a lot of immediate user feedback and very tangible, very kinesthetic technologies and they’re very interesting. i’m interested in seeing where that type of design goes for classroom interaction. i’m going to be keeping my eye on that for a while. also, a colleague of mine at ucsd, a friend and colleague and also my perennial editor, lia freedman, and i are talking over this project that we want to call bibliovox, which is this idea that it’s important to tell library stories in a way that retains our institutional memory and does what i was talking about earlier about talking about our passion, exposing a little bit more of our personality rather than just this caricature that a lot of people have in their minds about who librarians are and why we’re led to this profession. i think that we’re a profession of people who care deeply about what we do and about each other and about our patrons and about information and knowledge and research. and we are good people and there’s a lot of stories that need to be told. so what we’re thinking about is creating this online podcast archive if you will. maybe a blog that people can call into, answer a specific question, or create podcasts of each other talking about their memories about libraries, their inspirations about the profession, how they think it’s changing. it’s kind of inspired by that project storycorps that you’ll periodically hear on npr. so that’s another long term idea. and i really would like to try to think about how to replicate the research i did at ou across the university of california libraries. who knows if that will happen, but it seems like it would be a really valuable project. i guess that’s another professional thing that i’m interested in doing and hopefully achieving. so, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on. but that’s the way i like it. ellie: excellent. is there anything else you want our readers to know that i didn’t ask? char: i’ve talked a lot about different types of working cultures and how i really think it’s very important to try actively to enjoy your job and to create a positive working culture at the place that you find yourself. i feel like this is worth mentioning because i talk to a lot of people right now who are getting out of library school and are having a really hard time finding jobs. i think a lot of us are getting funding cuts. a lot of us are worried about freezes and layoffs and all those types of things. during this type of time it can get pretty hairy inside academia and it can get really fierce and it can get kinda ugly. i think that this type of crunch time is a really good opportunity to try to foster more supportive workplaces and workplaces that give a lot of opportunities for internal professional development and collaboration. if you can’t go gallivanting around the country, see lots of different conferences, there’s plenty of stuff you can do locally to train each other and work with each other and build the relationships that make workplaces pleasant as opposed to unpleasant. maybe this is just my cult of manners thing, but i really believe in it, why go to work at a place that doesn’t feel good to go to work at? it doesn’t make sense to me. i really think that people should cultivate an ethic of professional, collaborative, supportive collegial ethic. i think it’s absolutely essential. so mind your manners basically. thanks mom! ellie: indeed. well thank you so much char, this has been fantastic! char: thanks for the interview. you’re a friend of mine, so it’s kind of funny to be in this situation. i’ve been really fortunate to work on projects that i really really care about and have had the opportunity to think really hard about and it’s awesome to be able to talk about them. if anybody reads the report and has any questions about it, just please let me know. i’m a nerd and i love talking about research. just hit me up, my email’s in the back. all right? ellie: thanks for tuning in and as always, we welcome your comments. char booth, interview all dressed up with nowhere to go: a survey of ala emerging leaders editorial: what not to do when applying for library jobs 4 responses pingback : interview x2. « info-mational pingback : char booth interview « what now? radical patron 2009–06–14 at 1:45 pm thanks for bringing us char booth’s refreshing perspectives on librarianship. i’m about a third of the way through informing innovation and appreciate its candid and thoughtful assessment of library 2.0 implementation. char’s encouragement to tailor the tools to local needs is right on. her analysis is also very helpful to those of us outside the library profession who evaluate and implement technology. pingback : an accidental char booth morning « free moth :: flutterings this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: have we changed the world yet? (oh, just wait) – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 3 oct kim leeder and editorial board /10 comments editorial: have we changed the world yet? (oh, just wait) in brief: it’s our birthday! as in the library with the lead pipe turns four, the editors reflect on its evolution into an award-winning publication. we also share our plans to expand lead pipe into a nonprofit organization that will further our mission to identify problems, offer constructive solutions, and create positive change in the world of libraries. “prometheus bringing fire” photo by flickr user darijus  (cc by -nc 2.0) by kim leeder and editorial board we view in the library with the lead pipe as a collaboration with you, our readers. that means soliciting feedback, as we did recently with our reader poll and our article about the results of that poll, and it means encouraging readers to join us as guest authors. our goal is to be transparent and participatory so that each article we publish is worth the time you spend reading it and the time you spend considering its implications for your professional life. in this article we’d like to review our history and put it into context because we’re gearing up for the next stage of lead pipe’s development. we’d like to reflect on where we’ve been, reconsider the paths we’ve traveled, and then, looking forward, we’d like to invite you to help us grow lead pipe for the future. how it started on october 7, 2008, six energetic, creative, and inspired young librarians launched a blog they called, with a twist of board game humor, in the library with the lead pipe. the first article, titled simply “introduction,” was only six sentences long. it was the briefest article ever posted on this site, and a life-altering moment for all of us. the seed that would become lead pipe was planted months earlier during a spirited lunch conversation between kim leeder and brett bonfield, who wished to create a forum where forward-thinking, passionate professionals could share their ideas and constructive criticism of our field in order to effect positive change in libraries. kim and brett invited four standout individuals from public, academic, and special libraries around the country to join them in the project, adding derik badman, ellie collier, hilary davis, and emily ford to the project. the founding lead pipe editorial board was born. four months of rigorous brainstorming ensued: we shared a vision of creating an npr or a new yorker of library blogs, combining the intellectual rigor of an academic publication with the readability of a magazine and the storytelling power of public radio. together we molded a mission statement that still serves as lead pipe’s heart and driving force: in the library with the lead pipe is intended to help improve our communities, our libraries, and our professional organizations. our goal is to explore new ideas and start conversations; to document our concerns and argue for solutions. each article is peer-reviewed by at least one external and one internal reviewer. emphasizing peer review for each article is something that differentiated lead pipe originally from other blogs, and continues to help it stand out. our policy has remained the same since we began: every article we publish (excluding our own reflective or group posts, such as this one) must be critiqued by at least one internal lead pipe editor and one external professional not affiliated with lead pipe. the requirement that each of our articles be critiqued by at least two professionals in the field has enabled us to sustain a level of quality in the writing and research we publish that would not otherwise be attainable. evolution lead pipe has seen some important changes over the years: most notably our vision of it. we began by calling ourselves a blog, but even at the very beginning we stretched beyond a blog’s typical activities and set very high standards for our work. recently, realizing that very few (if any) blogs have issns, undergo a peer review process, are indexed in research databases, and publish long-form articles, we have come to see lead pipe instead as a scholarly journal. while many readers may still consider lead pipe a blog based on our history and format, our editorial board is transitioning, through the language we use and our approach to publishing, into the journal realm. lead pipe’s publication schedule and editorial board roster have seen changes as well. initially, each editorial board member served as both author and editor, and in our first months a new article was posted every week. this ambitious schedule quickly proved unsustainable. we realized that a new article every six weeks was too much to write, and we received feedback from readers indicating that they were also having trouble keeping up with our pace. in early 2009, we cut the publication schedule in half and began our current practice of publishing one new article every other wednesday. we also recruited our first guest authors, both to expand the diversity of voices and topics represented in lead pipe and to further distribute the workload. even after making these adjustments, we were still working hard. not only did we each write thoughtful, carefully researched, long-format articles several times a year, but we conducted intense, detailed conversations on chat and email about individual article topics, potential guest authors, and the scope and goals of the publication. our dual roles required a substantial commitment from every member of the lead pipe team: burnout and turnover were inevitable. it became clear that bringing fresh voices into lead pipe on an ongoing basis would be critical to its success. we have grown to embrace the idea that our  team members may serve as author-editors (which most of us still do), or as one or the other. four author-editors have joined lead pipe since 2008 (micah vandegrift, erin dorney, leigh anne vrabel, and eric frierson), four have “retired” (derik badman, hilary davis, leigh anne vrabel, and eric frierson), and one founder has shifted into an editor-only role (ellie collier). while seeing brilliant and beloved colleagues leave lead pipe to pursue other projects is a bittersweet experience, adding new minds to the team is a joyful one. although it is a fulfilling experience, identifying and recruiting the right people to join our editorial board is also a great challenge. we enjoy (and are deeply protective of) a spectacularly positive and collaborative environment. lead pipe has always been a consensus-based organization built on deep mutual respect: every decision made by the group is made by the group as a whole (and each member of the editorial board has veto power over every decision). no article has ever been posted nor editor added to lead pipe without the support of everyone involved. as a result, we have generally sought potential new editors from among the ranks of these who have already worked with one of our current editors successfully (and enjoyably) on a guest article—or alternatively, we might invite a potential new editor to contribute as a guest author with the hopes that a more expansive relationship might follow. accomplishments in the library with the lead pipe has been fortunate to gain a substantial following in our field. in addition to being indexed in ebsco’s library and information science & technology abstracts, we were recently recognized as salem press’s best general library blog of 2012. in numbers, lead pipe looks like this: 287, 367 lifetime visits to our website, 5,740 rss subscribers, 2,818 twitter followers, 651 likes on facebook, 78 on google+, and 1,533 comments on112 articles. of course, lead pipe‘s greatest asset is its readership. when we created the blog, we agreed early on that we wanted to engage readers and create a forum for conversation. to that end we crafted the following comment policy: we appreciate and invite your comments and discussion about posts on in the library with the lead pipe. constructive criticism is one of our primary goals, and we applaud it in our readers. comments that do not maintain a civil tone or that disregard the post’s topic will be deleted. we do not edit comments except by request of the poster. as authors, the lead pipe team puts a great amount of time and energy into writing articles, and we have been delighted to find that readers frequently respond by sparking interesting discussion in the comments and taking ideas in new directions. one of our main tenets is that if an article offers a critique, then it must also offer constructive ideas and solutions. there is no place for whining or complaining in lead pipe, but there is plenty of room for critical thinking, brainstorming, and helpful discourse. in the beginning, none of us dared to hope that the comment threads would be as interesting or constructive as they have become. in lead pipe, reader participation and dialog is just as important and engaging as the articles we publish. the future (you’re invited) lead pipe is a living organism that continues to grow and change (self-proclaimed nerd editor brett bonfield refers here to ranganathan’s fifth law, “the library is a growing organism”). above all, we want the journal to live up to its slightly sinister yet playful name by always being willing to look at our field with fresh eyes and challenge the status quo in a thoughtful and constructive way. cultivating and maintaining the attitude of a thoughtful revolutionary can be challenging over time, and we are constantly seeking new people with the right combination of passion, creativity, and collegiality to invite to our team. these days, our editorial board conversations are increasingly ambitious. what else might lead pipe be able to do? we ask ourselves. it’s not just about the words we publish. lead pipe is a labor of love. we feel like we’ve accomplished a lot, but we want to do more. we greatly enjoy thinking, researching, and writing about our field, identifying problems and proposing solutions, but there’s so much more to be done. our field is in crisis: we see substantial challenges facing librarianship, challenges that mere words will never solve, and we want to be part of the solution. we want to act and support action in others. we have learned through our own collaboration that truly great things can happen when committed, passionate people get together, and it is our hope that we might share this energy with all the other like-minded librarians out there in the world. we want to release the ripple that is lead pipe out into the sea and watch it swell into a tidal wave of positive change. we want to be an organization by librarians and for librarians, one that remains anchored in the realities of the field but is also ambitious and optimistic enough to shoot for the moon. to that end, we have begun the process of registering in the library with the lead pipe as a nonprofit corporation. our intention is to leverage our credibility and what name recognition we’ve acquired to raise money and channel it towards initiatives that will positively impact the world of librarianship. we want to do so thoughtfully and constructively, in the same way that we have built lead pipe over the last four years. our organization will be deliberate and passionate, it will be built through collaboration and consensus, and it will make careful, considered decisions. yet despite all this, it will not hesitate to attack those obstacles and assumptions that keep libraries from moving ahead. that is, and will always be, the mission and heart of lead pipe. turning words into action the lead pipe community has been an incredibly fulfilling and constructive experience for everyone involved. because we have individually and collectively gained so much from our participation, our wish now is to expand our community and share it with others in our field. as such, the editorial board has discussed and debated a range of ways to turn lead pipe’s talk into action. should we plan conferences, offer mini-grants, support fellows, publish books? we could go in a million directions, and would like to go in all of them. our initial plans, however, have solidified into three interrelated themes: bringing together librarians, information professionals, and others who are committed to supporting individual libraries or library-focused organizations for intensive brainstorming and problem-solving sessions, both in-person and online. providing scholarship, fellowship, or travel assistance for librarians, information professionals, or others who are working on behalf of libraries or library organizations, with an emphasis on participation in cross-disciplinary projects or conferences that extend the field of librarianship in new directions and/or contribute to increased diversity. funding and advising library-related initiatives that have the potential to positively impact the progress or direction of the field through nonprofit, community-based, open source, or other approaches. while our vision of lead pipe as an organization begins to sharpen and we simultaneously celebrate our fourth birthday, this felt like the right moment to share our plans with you. not just as an announcement but as an invitation to join us, to provide feedback on our goals and direction, and to (eventually, if you are so moved) donate to our cause. as we begin to establish the infrastructure that will enable us to accept donations, we’d also like to hear what platforms you think we should explore: amazon? braintree? dwolla? flattr? google? paypal? stripe? wepay? something else entirely? we have high hopes for lead pipe’s potential to create real change in libraries, but that will only happen if you’re with us. what do you think of our ideas for how we might accomplish our mission? what should we focus on in our fundraising? what should lead pipe’s nonprofit self look like? we invite your comments below to help us shape ourselves into a forward-looking organization. tell us what you would do—and maybe together we can create a new future for libraries. about us, ambition, collaboration, future, group post, mission, nonprofit running the library race editorial: our philosophies of librarianship 10 responses pingback : the best library blog/journal on the internets just got better | ink and vellum emily clasper 2012–10–03 at 11:50 am thanks for all of the hard work you have all dedicated over the last four years. i, for one, always appreciate the thoughtful, creative, and constructive commentary offered here. this is a great example of what professional discourse should be. (and way to go with the nonprofit thing!) john jackson 2012–10–03 at 11:56 am i’m especially excited about lead pipe’s ability to foster more of #1 and most notably in the context of solving specific problems. the format of “the hackathon,” where individuals with similar skill sets but varied work/life experiences come together to solve a unique problem in a given space and time, has always struck me as an ideal format for our uber-networked world and one that is under-utilized. consider: (1) lead pipers identify a specific problem/need within the library community. (2) lpers bring together volunteers and experts to hack away at the problem, either in person over a weekend or online, and produce a specific outcome/object. (3) results of said project are published in lp and shared with the community. this is a great endeavor, lp, and you’ll have all the support you’ll need from us, your readers, i have no doubt. also, check out rally.org. andromeda 2012–10–05 at 9:22 pm the digital humanities community did something like this with the one week one tool project. i’ve fantasized ever since about making that happen in libraryland. nicholas schiller 2012–10–03 at 4:54 pm at this point, i think consistency is more rare than innovation. so my request is that you all simply continue to pump out high-quality content at a consistent pace. of course y’all will continue to mutate and evolve, but the think that sets the lead pipe apart from other sources of innovative library thoughts is that the lead pipe continues to deliver consistently good content. emily ford 2012–10–05 at 5:58 pm thanks for this input. we hope to see us moving in an additional direction, not one that replaces what we already have going on here. we just want to have *more* impact and do it in more than one way. graceanne andreassi decandido 2012–10–03 at 5:13 pm put up a paypal button that says “donate” at the very least. allow people to give you some money easily. i am (mostly) retired, but i read this through my rss feed with great interest, and i hope to continue doing so. tyler dzuba 2012–10–03 at 5:46 pm i have to echo nicholas in pointing out that reliable excellence is central to what you do. to me, lead pipe is a crucial case study of what scholarly communication can look like outside the traditional journal model. real scholarship doesn’t need to live behind paywalls and small communities. i think (most) librarians understand that. i even think that most scholars from other fields understand that lead pipe’s model works better than elsevier’s. what’s hard is convincing them to follow suit. really, you’re leading the way, and your continued success will make that conversation easier. emily ford 2012–10–05 at 6:00 pm like. thank you for this comment. i’m beaming with pride for us (but not too much). kim leeder 2012–10–03 at 6:09 pm wow folks, now we’re really blushing. thanks so much for all your kind words and encouragement. we’re so very glad you find lead pipe to be valuable, and we’ll continue to do our best to live up to your compliments. please do feel free to offer your constructive criticism as well (after all, that’s what we’re all about!). is going nonprofit and pursuing the sort of initiatives we’ve outlined a good idea? what do you think? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct navigating the academic hiring process with disabilities – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2022 6 apr gail betz /0 comments navigating the academic hiring process with disabilities by gail betz in brief this article will describe strategies employed by academic librarians with disabilities throughout the hiring process. in in-depth interviews with 40 full-time employed academic librarians with various disabilities, numerous strategies emerged that these librarians utilized to adapt the hiring process to better accommodate their specific needs. qualitative methods were chosen to authentically capture the nuanced lived experiences of these librarians. the strategies described in this article will address three main themes: structural aspects of the interview day, intrapersonal coping strategies, and interpersonal coping strategies. while this article is written for librarians with disabilities to provide more tools to navigate the hiring process, there are also ways for administrators and hiring committees to rethink their hiring processes to improve accessibility and inclusivity. introduction scholarship outlining the exclusivity of academic recruitment processes often describe ways to improve racial inclusion or mitigate the financial burden of simply getting hired (cunningham et al., 2019). this article will describe the specific perspective of academic librarians with disabilities on how the recruitment process is exclusionary and inaccessible. however, the target audience for this article is not management or search committees looking to improve their recruitment process; the target audience is other academic library workers with disabilities trying to navigate a socially complex process with little concrete professional guidance. the strategies described below offer suggestions for disabled library workers to navigate the recruitment process successfully without necessarily disclosing a disability, as well as how to disclose a disability proactively so that it provides information about the culture of an institution, which can help provide an understanding of the workplace. while hiring managers and library administration can use this information to improve the hiring process for librarians with disabilities, and they should, directly supporting library workers with disabilities is the primary purpose of this research.  a note on positionality it is critical to the framing of this paper that i disclose that i am a disabled academic librarian, and that has informed my research questions and choice to pursue this area of research. my personal primary disability is visual impairment, which carries with it some of the least stigma associated with disability in our society (lyons et al., 2017). this part is important because it informs how i understand my own disability and worth within our society and within the profession. this also intersects with my identities of privilege as a white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle class woman who can also, if i choose to, pass as able-bodied. it is through conversations with other academic librarians with varying disabilities and levels of stigma that i came to understand that we all handle the hiring process, and especially if and how we disclose our disability status, differently. i wanted to know more about why people made the decisions they made.  literature review this article relies on the social model of disability to contextualize the experiences of these library workers. kumbier and starkey (2016) describe the social model as a “…framework in which the focus shifts from individual persons’ medical diagnoses and impairments toward the material, physical and social environments that impose limitations or create barriers for people with impairments…in this framing, disability is an inherently relational, social matter; it is something that happens, over and over, in interactions among people.” this model is critical to understanding that we can improve the hiring process and make it what we, as a profession, want it to be.  there has been a notable uptick in publications about disabled library workers over the last few years and more attention paid to disability and accessibility at conferences as well. much of the recent literature pertains to the job experiences of disabled librarians: the precarity, hostility, challenges, and, every now and then, inclusion (anderson, 2021; hollich, 2020; moeller, 2019; oud, 2019; pionke, 2019). in the summer of 2020, the society of american archivists published a robust set of recommendations on including archivists with disabilities in the hiring process that outlines a number of practical steps employers can take to improve the accessibility of their recruitment process (tang et al., 2020). earlier literature attempted to convince management that it’s a good idea to hire library workers with disabilities, with the united nations stating that workers with disabilities are loyal and have low turnover rates, so they are a good investment (o’neill & urquhart, 2011, united nations, n.d.). but there was also an increase in publications about library workers with disabilities in the early 1990s after the passage of the americans with disabilities act, without any known improvement in recruitment, retention, or job satisfaction of librarians with disabilities (barlow, 1995; bishop & beadles, 1995; gold et al., 2012; sager, 1998). this trend – to publish about the exclusion of a particular population within libraries and see no corresponding improvement – is similar to what librarianship has seen with calls for diversity and the persistent majority of whiteness within the profession (hathcock, 2015).  disability is harder to measure than racial representation in libraries. it requires people to understand themselves as having a disability and to have the confidence to disclose that identity somewhere – with human resources, with their team, or on a national survey (ala office for research and statistics, 2012). if people want to hide a disability, they can often do so, especially over a short time span like 24 or 36 hours. there is research to show that workers have plenty of reasons to not disclose a disability: stigma, a perception of incompetence, infantilization, and the perceived illegitimacy of the disability itself (bogart et al., 2017; gioaba & krings, 2017; lyons et al., 2017; pionke, 2019).  however, disclosing a disability can be beneficial. it is associated with higher self-esteem and disability pride, both of which can lead to self-advocacy at work (bogart et al., 2018). disclosing is also required in order to access accommodations – formal or informal – at work, which improves job satisfaction and well-being (oud, 2018). while it is typically a stressful process to disclose a disability to a potential, or new, employer, it can allow for someone to feel like they are truly “themselves” at work, presenting and living in a fuller identity than they would if they had chosen not to disclose (hollich, 2020).  methods research questions after repeated conversations with other disabled librarians about barriers in the recruitment process and the different ways we all handle those barriers, more formal exploration of the hiring process from the perspective of disabled librarians seemed like one path towards improving the accessibility of recruitment. ensuring that disabled librarians’ perspectives and experiences were centered throughout this process was of utmost importance.  my positionality as the researcher is also relevant here. as a mid-career, white, cisgender, heterosexual and disabled academic librarian who has interviewed at a variety of academic libraries across the united states, i have a specific perspective on this topic and various strategies that i personally use during the hiring process. based on the literature, and in conjunction with my own experiences and questions, the research questions that guided this study are: how do academic librarians with disabilities experience the hiring process? what strategies have academic librarians with disabilities used in order to successfully navigate the hiring process? what factors influence a disabled academic librarian’s decision to disclose disability status during the hiring process? in-depth, one-on-one interviews were chosen as the best way to capture the lived experiences of the hiring process. a list of interview questions was developed to answer the above research questions, and those interview questions were piloted with a disabled academic librarian colleague. an application to the university institutional review board was submitted, and it was determined that this study was exempt.  after receiving exempt status, participants were recruited for the study through emails out to academic library listservs and through twitter. interested participants were sent a link to a brief demographic survey and contact form housed in redcap for security purposes. various methods of communication were provided for accessibility purposes to ensure that study participants were contacted in a preferred modality.  one participant replied that they would prefer an asynchronous interview, and the questions were sent to that person as a text document. the rest of the study participants opted to have a synchronous conversation via either webex or the phone. in total, 60 librarians responded to the call for participants, and interviews were conducted with 40.  this phenomenological study utilized descriptive coding for data analysis (saldaña, 2016). phenomenology was chosen because of its unique ability to capture the lived experiences of minoritized people who have experienced something specific — some phenomenon — and then to describe the meaning of those experiences (neubauer et al., 2019) passages of text were summarized in a word or phrase and grouped into three major themes with individual codes nested underneath these themes. while the author worked on the bulk of this analysis alone, themes, codes, and key quotes were discussed with both able-bodied and disabled colleagues. since this study attempted to explore the lived experiences of a particular phenomena (the academic hiring process), descriptive language seemed to be the best way to summarize and collate a wide array of experiences rife with nuance.  participants  an email describing the study was sent out to several acrl, ala, and mla listservs in january 2020. participants were recruited who self-identified as disabled; no proof or further description was requested. while many participants disclosed their disability or disabilities during the interview, it was not required, and there were no specific questions asked about diagnoses or symptoms. people reported both visible disabilities with assistive technology or mobility aids such that they did not have a choice but to disclose their disability during the hiring process, as well as “invisible” disabilities that were not obviously apparent to interviewers if the participant chose to hide them. physical disabilities, chronic illnesses, and mental illnesses were discussed.  participants recruited were currently employed in an academic library setting of any type and in any position. the goal of seeking participants currently employed was to ask for strategies for navigating the hiring process from people who had successfully been offered an academic library position. while this was done to maximize the potential usefulness of strategies that the study participants described to the intended audience of disabled job-seeking librarians, it does introduce selection bias. specifically, this choice introduces survivorship bias by only interviewing librarians who have been successful in getting hired, rather than sampling all librarians with disabilities, employed or not (walters, 2021). disabled librarians who have been looking for jobs without getting hired could have different approaches or strategies not captured here.   it is also of note that out of the 60 people who replied to the call for participation, interviews were conducted between february 2020 and mid-march 2020. several of the last interviews were done after lock-downs for covid-19 had begun; and while this did not impact the content of people’s answers, it could certainly have impacted the emotional connection to their answers. relatedly, since these interviews were completed mostly before the beginning of the current pandemic, no one described any experience with virtual interviews, and no questions were asked about full-day virtual interviews.  data collection  interviews were conducted mostly via webex. they lasted anywhere from 15 minutes to roughly 90 minutes. all participants were asked the same set of questions regardless of how recent their interview experiences were or if they were disabled at the time of their hiring. all interviews were recorded with participant knowledge, and transcripts were downloaded afterwards. a few participants’ interviews were recorded using apple’s voice memo application due to technical difficulties with webex, and those interviews were transcribed by a third party (academic audio transcription, llc, a company that prioritizes using disabled workers). one interview was done by sending the participant the questions in a document and corresponding via email. since interviews were already being conducted remotely, lock-down for covid-19 did not impact the data collection process. i disclosed to each participant that i am disabled and gave a brief description of that disability, mostly at the beginning of each interview, although sometimes part-way through, depending on the context. this was done intentionally to express a shared experience and create trust between the researcher and participant.  results themes were broken down into three categories based on patterns that emerged from participants’ responses. the three themes were: interview day structure, intrapersonal coping mechanisms, and interpersonal coping mechanisms. two of these themes, interpersonal and intrapersonal coping mechanisms, tie back to the social model of disability because they are shaped by societal expectations of interview candidates in organizations like higher education.  intrapersonal coping mechanisms are informed by the social model of disability in that they are often related to a  participant’s fear of discrimination and, at times, feelings of internalized ableism. some people expressed a  perception that in order to pass as able-bodied, and therefore as a more desirable colleague, it’s best to self-accommodate and hide a disability from interviewers. how we perceive and present ourselves during the hiring process is informed by how we perceive our self-worth within society. interview day structure interview day structure encompassed things that candidates were either given or that they requested from the hiring institution. some aspects were already part of the standard interview procedure, like providing the interview questions in advance, and disabled librarians found these particularly accessible. others, librarians needed to request, like additional breaks throughout the day. when requesting accommodations like breaks, librarians said that they asked either the hiring committee chair or a human resources representative who was creating the schedule. people preferred to ask someone not on the search committee to ensure more privacy around their disability and were grateful when a form or email address was provided during initial contact from a search committee.  breaks while people felt that having adequate breaks would not solve all their interview-related exhaustion or pain, people wanted more breaks, time to be alone, and they wanted to know about breaks ahead of time:  i think that putting the presentation early and giving people breaks and not just sitting in a bathroom stall, which is what i had to do in a lot of places was just to go sit in the bathroom for a few minutes, so that i had a moment to take a deep breath and think through what it was that i was wanting to communicate in the next session and look over notes…there are a lot of coping skills that i think that we learned to use that we don’t even always realize we’re doing it, but having a moment to just go through all of that in the interview process is really helpful. sufficient breaks provided interviewees with the time to mentally and physically collect themselves. some people wanted alone time to review their notes, breathe, or use other calming techniques they utilize in stressful situations. others wanted breaks to take pain medication, stretch out aching joints, have a snack, or close their eyes. whatever people needed to do during breaks, everyone said that having more was always helpful than having fewer, and being able to anticipate the next break would help them to plan accordingly. tours tours contributed to both  physical concerns and social anxiety for people with various disabilities. many wanted to skip or cut parts of the tour because of pain but were afraid to seem uninterested or anti-social. several people noted how appreciative they were when tour guides gave options – accessible pathways, elevators, seeing a specific area or not – and gave appropriate forewarning of those options. one participant suggested asking for accessible adjustments on the spot as a way to test their interviewers, saying:  i have been known to surprise people during interview tours with no, i’m sorry – can we possibly find a route that doesn’t have twenty thousand steps? why is this campus so… we’re not in the mountains. why is this campus so freaking full of stairs? can we find a less step-oriented path? people also wanted copies of maps or other campus information to take with them so they could look at it more closely after the interview was over.  many participants referenced using tours as a way to assess the hiring institution by looking for things like the accessibility of the library building, the knowledge of the staff on the accessibility of the building, and how homogenous peoples’s workstations are. people with both physical and mental disabilities referenced looking at workstations for modifications as a visual symbol of acceptance of differences within the library staff, even if there weren’t visible accommodations or disabilities present.  questions in advance many participants mentioned having experienced receiving the questions in advance in some capacity in prior interviews, and everyone who had experienced this was appreciative. people received the screening interview questions and/or the full day interview questions anywhere from several weeks in advance to 15 minutes immediately beforehand. this helped people with conditions ranging from mental health and traumatic brain injuries to auditory processing disorders and hearing loss adequately prepare:  the first institution i interviewed at sent me the questions ten days in advance. it was really transparent and nice and inclusive and accessible. and because my autoimmune disorder causes, like, really bad brain fog and neurological problems, sometimes it was like, it made it so much easier. even if participants did not get the questions far enough in advance to research and practice their answers, being able to see the questions written down in real-time helped people to answer the question fully rather than asking the interviewers to repeat the question. opting out of meals as in anderson’s article about the interview experiences of autistic librarians, people echoed the sentiment that meals were often uncomfortable and caused significant stress (anderson, 2021). some institutions gave the option of not attending meals or provided a variety of ways to eat throughout the day that a candidate could choose from:  maybe i’m a weird person, but that was something that i think was really helpful, and just leaving, leaving some unstructured time in the evenings. like, not completely packing it out. like, not making me have dinner with people, like, both nights so that i could take some time to decompress at the hotel or whatever — that was really helpful. participants discussed wanting to skip meals for dietary restrictions, exhaustion, pain, or social anxiety, and everyone who mentioned it was nervous to make such a request for fear of seeming uninterested in the job or in their potential colleagues.  while many of the aspects of the interview day described above the institution can control, they are things that candidates can request as well, whether as a formal accommodation or not. when asked if participants requested accommodations during job interviews, almost everyone said no, and many participants followed up with something like, “i wouldn’t know what to ask for.” the above are just some examples people have asked for or found helpful when they were built into the interview process. some other examples that were mentioned were: getting the entire interview schedule in advance with interviewers’ names and positions, having options for the type of screening interview preferred (audio, video, text, or a combination), having options for hotels with floor plans and room types available, transportation options, and explicit parking instructions with a map provided showing accessible entrances.  intrapersonal coping people identified a wide variety of strategies they employed to make the interview process more accessible for themselves. many of these strategies require self-awareness of the way a disability or disabilities impacts the interview process and having access to the appropriate coping mechanisms that will alleviate some of that specific stress. it is naturally very individualized, but some patterns emerged between both people with similar disabilities and people with very different disabilities who cope in similar ways.  self-accommodations people identified strategies or coping mechanisms that they can use to create their own accommodations, typically as a way to hide their disability from the interviewers. oftentimes, people mentioned bringing specific supplies: painkillers, magnifying glasses, personal laptops, certain clothing and shoes. after describing a scenario where the visitor’s parking lot was far from the interview site and required navigating an inaccessible route, one participant said:  so i’m gonna take the stair option. now, i’m in pain. how much medication can i take to mitigate the pain without looking like i’m high, you know so, therein is a whole other thing. how much can i carry? you know, because i need to be more hydrated if i’m gonna take medication so i don’t look like i’m high. so now i have two bottles of water. now i’m adding more weight to my bag, you know, and so it just becomes this avalanche of now i need even more because of what i couldn’t get to begin with. another person said: so i have to pack a lot of like, normal medications. but then i also have to pack extra medications, because i don’t feel comfortable asking them to try to pick a restaurant that’s corn-free because that’s impossible to find in the us. and so i pack the medication, and i pack clothing and other things that will help me deal with the fact that i will almost certainly have massive digestive issues associated with the food they’re treating me to as part of the interview.  other people described more subtle self-accommodations, like making sure they sit in a specific area of a room in order to maximize hearing or lighting preferences, practicing meditation the morning of and breathing techniques during interview day breaks, or memorizing the presentation portion of the interview. regardless of the specific needs, almost everyone described an overarching way they self-accommodated — by “over-preparing.”  preparedness participants overwhelmingly spoke about accommodating for their own disabilities by preparing for every possible scenario and knowing as much about the institution beforehand as possible. while people said they would prepare with this sort of information anyway, regardless of their disability, they felt it took on more significance in light of a disability. one participant, who had interviewed preand post-stroke, said:  i was thinking a lot more about like, okay, where’s my hotel? how much time is it going to take me to get there? [what about] from the hotel to the interview location? i would’ve still done that type of stuff anyway, prior to the stroke, but i think it took on a new sense of importance to a certain degree of, like, i have to be comfortable, kind of navigating the space and know that there aren’t any particular obstacles.  people also took on extra costs, like flights or hotel rooms, to ensure that they would arrive early to an institution and could do this type of physical scouting ahead of the interview without time pressure. the unknowns of a physical space raised levels of anxiety for many people, so the extra time or financial cost was an investment people made in order to reduce their own stress and anxiety and to ensure they were as ready as possible.  physical preparation came up in most interviews in some capacity, but mental preparation also took a significant amount of time and resources for participants. this was an aspect where participants expressed a great deal of self-awareness of their own disability and their needs. in order to handle brain fog, social anxiety, stress, or memory loss, for example, people practiced interview questions and presentations and exhaustively researched the institution beforehand:  i feel that being as prepared as possible allows my stress level to go down. my only known seizure trigger is high levels of stress. interviews? yeah, no stress involved [sarcasm]. i try to prepare as much as i can ahead of time. so that helps to lower it some – i try to anticipate possible interview questions, practice the presentation. another participant described similar preparation strategies for an entirely different disability: usually i have, like pre-written – and that’s the other thing, i will sit down and figure out, like, here’s questions i can ask people that way i don’t have to think about it the day of.  so there is a lot of mental preparation. there’s a mental practice, i will practice my answers. i will try to find the best questions i can online that they’re going to most likely ask me and have pre-prepped my answers. so that way i’m not slurring words, i’m not stumbling on words – sometimes people ask me something, it takes me like, it seems where i like, pause, think think think think think, forty seconds later – the answer. for many people the added stress of an interview triggers or exacerbates what might in other situations be a disability they navigate easily.   preparing physically, mentally, and emotionally for the stress of an interview — the social aspects, the travel, and the best presentation of professional skills possible — drained people significantly beforehand and afterward. however, everyone mentioned this type of preparation as one of the best ways they could control the situation and cope with it. by coming in with as much knowledge as possible, people remarked that they knew they were the best prepared candidate they possibly could be and that it often got them job offers: i feel like i also kind of over-prepared in terms of like, oh, my resume and the cover letter and preparing for questions and answers. it’s like, i kind of, i knew that i was going to be dealing with some really, a lot of physical discomfort. so i was like, let me be the strongest candidate out there. i definitely did that. strategically applying to institutions some participants discussed screening institutions before deciding to apply for an open position. some ways people judge a university or the library is to look at diversity-related statements and strategic plans, any health insurance information that’s available online, how accessible the library’s website is, and how the library talks about services for students with disabilities:  so i was, i’ve been looking for a couple months and then this was kind of the first job that popped up where it’s like, okay i, i think i can do that and i’ve heard good things. and i think having the knowledge that they were socially aware, and very focused on, like, equity, diversity, social justice, that made me a lot more comfortable about applying there and not thinking that, like, they were at least going to try to be accommodating. and i think other institutions, i wouldn’t have been as confident that they would be. community word-of-mouth also informed people’s decisions to apply to particular institutions. talking to people within their networks about workplace culture, with particular attention to known accessibility concerns, helped people decide if an institution was worth applying to, even if the posted position itself looked interesting. job fit participants discussed both career choices in libraries and position choices in their specific area of librarianship as strategic for their access needs. a few hard of hearing librarians mentioned initially thinking that libraries would be quiet spaces where they could hear better, before working in them and realizing, “that’s not happening.” others mentioned targeting academia as a career because colleges and universities already accommodate students, so one might reasonably expect that they accommodate employees.  some participants talked more about targeting jobs that had physical aspects that meshed well with their disabilities: either the tasks were varied so they were able to get up and move around frequently or the tasks were computer-based so they were able to stay in a seated position without external physical demands. some considered aspects of the job that would contribute to their mental health, including if librarians at an institution were tenure-track or not: one of the things that really attracted me to the current position …is like, it’s faculty, but not tenure track. so, you know, you have to be engaged in the profession, which i’d like to do, but you’re not under the sort of rat race. so that’s really it was really important to me that they said, yeah, you know, on the weekend, they turn off. interpersonal coping interviews are a social process that require navigating expectations and judgment on both sides. participants expressed different strategies they use to determine if an environment was a good fit for them long-term or not. like intrapersonal coping mechanisms, interpersonal coping also required self-awareness about personal boundaries and access needs and the self-confidence to make decisions accordingly. navigating social cues eighteen people, nearly 50% of participants, mentioned navigating social cues during the interview process. this mostly manifested when people were concerned about physical symptoms of disabilities being judged instead as atypical social behavior. without disclosing the disability itself, people were concerned that not hearing well in restaurants, asking to use the elevator, or not seeing signage would appear strange and cause the interviewers to question them as potential coworkers in some way. some people mitigated this concern by disclosing the disability early on in the interview process, explaining that they have “some hearing loss” and might ask interviewers to repeat questions or that they have a difficult time making eye contact: no, i just, as i say, as soon as i start, i acknowledge that making good eye contact is important and i can’t really do that very well. and i explain why, and then i drop the subject. however, most people did not feel comfortable enough to disclose their disability strictly for social reasons. the concern about tours and social propriety came up repeatedly for people with mobility concerns and chronic pain and exhaustion. participants looked for implicit cultural norms in a library that indicated if people thought dieting, tracking steps, or eliminating things like caffeine were important. this type of “wellness” culture was considered a red flag, as participants said it often manifested in being negatively judged for requesting an elevator or having a diet soda during the interview. one participant summarized their thoughts with, “and so, you know…if you get the sense that people are like, ‘e rarely use the elevator,’ then that’s the kind of thing where it’s just like, no, thank you.” while most people tried to minimize their disability for social reasons throughout the interview process or downplay any seemingly odd behavior, asking for informal accommodations on the spot was also a way for people to judge if the institution was a good cultural fit. were people easy-going if asked to take the elevator instead of the stairs unexpectedly? did they bristle when asked to repeat questions several times? since an interview goes both directions, picking up on social cues from the interviewers helped candidates make decisions for their own health and well-being. boundaries and that and that becomes the…hardest part is, you know, well… where is the line with my dignity, versus, you know, my enjoying eating every single day, and having a place to live.  navigating the interview process brought up this feeling for many participants in some capacity, whether it was getting adequate time to prepare for an interview, getting travel costs reimbursed appropriately, or having enough rest before and after the interview day. how much is too much to go through for a job? one person said, “it’s this assumption that we’re all comfortable with your parameters and we’re not and i don’t have to be.” if something just absolutely will not work long-term or does not feel respectful or reasonable, having the ability, self-confidence, and self-awareness to know where to draw the line is critical to ensure that disabled librarians don’t end up in environments that will further disable them because they couldn’t get what they needed in an interview and won’t in the actual job (oud, 2019). interviewing the institution self-awareness of personal boundaries helped individuals determine if an institution was a good fit. people regularly referenced strategies they used to interview their interviewers, whether on a structural level regarding something like health insurance, or on an individual level, like if a coworker was okay with using the elevator repeatedly.  one person referenced sick leave as a structural concern she looks for, saying: with hr, i guess, anything that i would, you know, especially pay attention to what they say about sick leave and how that is being handled. and if they say things like, you know, they’re completely inflexible, or you have to always have a doctor’s note…that can definitely send up a red flag. like, maybe this isn’t the place, you know, for me to be at. others looked at the structure of the physical building— how accessible the restrooms are, for example – with one person noting:  i would almost prefer to go on an interview and see that they don’t have a handicap accessible restroom in the building then go and see that their handicap accessible restroom doesn’t have braille on the sign and has a toilet that’s not actually the right height and has a door that swings outwards but swings outwards in such a way that you have to close it in order to get past it, reopen it and then go into the restroom, you know what i mean? like all of these things where they label it ada and then i know that it’s not actually accessible, especially if it’s literally not ada because we all know that it can be ada, and still be inaccessible. people also looked for indicators of workplace diversity of any kind to judge if a library would be more accepting of disability. during tours, people looked for staff of different races and genders for visual clues as well as variety in workstation set-ups. several people noted that they actively discussed dei-related work in their interviews to see how interviewers responded, with one saying:  the last time i interviewed with someone they asked me to explain diversity, equity and inclusion and i used a couple different frameworks to explain it. and they were absolutely not familiar, and i asked them what their diversity equity inclusion strategic plan was, or how was it a part of their strategic plan? and it was not a part of their strategic plan. and in that case, i’m done. on individual levels, people used others’ reactions to requests for accommodations, discussion of work in inaccessibility-related jobs, and disclosure of their own disability to judge how accepting a workplace would be. one participant used her prior work experience with disability law to see how potential employers would respond, saying: actually, there have been a few times where i’ve, i’ve sort of mentioned, like, just i have like a background [in] disability law and i try to be really mindful of accessibility in whatever i’m doing, especially now that i’m a librarian. so i, i always take it [as] kind of a red flag if i mentioned that and people are like, well, we don’t really do anything here. and if we haven’t had a problem, and it’s like, they just aren’t thinking at all about, like, the possibilities or the fact that, like, they could have a problem but nobody wants to mention it, just kind of like this disregard is something that sends up a red flag for me. several people embedded their disability disclosure, or interest in disability justice research, into their presentation in front of a large group of people. one person noted a particularly positive response in her current workplace: i actually made it a part of my presentation, and the presentation was to twenty five staff members as well as members from the [liaison department]. so i got to gauge their reaction right then and there and nobody flinched – there wasn’t a single flinch. and that really showed me that this would be a place that i think that well, all right. using the interview strategically to judge if a workplace environment, whether physical or social, would be an appropriate match for access needs and well-being was a common theme for all study participants. while people indicated that it wasn’t always an option to turn down a job based on healthcare or financial needs, most people recognized that interviewing is a two-way street where the interviewing institution must also earn a candidate’s approval.  strategic disclosure people wrestled with the decision to disclose their disability in full, in part, or at all. prior experience in interviews and workplaces, as well as the stigma associated with various disabilities were factors that informed people’s decisions to disclose. when people did disclose a disability, they often did so as a way to judge if an institution would be a sustainable, accessible place to work. one participant explained their choice: “that’s why i’ve made this decision to go ahead and be open and honest and out about my disability because if these red flags pop up, if they choose not to hire me, i’d rather them not hire me then move from this frying pan into another frying pan.”  often, though, people tried not to disclose as much as possible. some people felt it wasn’t relevant to their ability to do their job while others thought it would lead to discrimination. if a specific access need arose, people would disclose part or all of their disability to get the accommodations they needed: an extra plane seat, different transportation options, a different type of screening interview, etc. people were more likely to disclose a disability if they felt it was necessary to get the accommodation they needed in order to access the interview — if they were not able to attend, or perform well, without the specific accommodation and could not otherwise hide it. one person described their thought process as:   if i, through investigation…find that this is going to be a place that has low accessibility, or you really have to make them understand [things like] no, i’m not walking up three flights of stairs, then you have to [disclose your disability], you have to. walking tour of campus? well, we’re gonna have to be smart about those choices. so not to inform them means that you arrive and they’re like oh, well, this is awkward. if something did not prompt that type of accommodation request, though, participants did not volunteer their disability status. 42% (seventeen out of 40) people said that they do not disclose their disability for fear of discrimination. several of those people said they check the human resources form box confirming that  they have a disability, with the understanding that the search committee doesn’t see those answers. a few were concerned that if they did not check that box, they could be denied needed accommodations after being hired. even if people opted to hide their disability during the hiring process, people agreed that they do tend to disclose something about their disability or any accommodation needs to a supervisor after being hired:  if it’s asked on the interview form, which it sometimes is, you know, do you require accommodations or do you identify as a person with a disability, i’ll definitely answer that truthfully. if it’s not asked in, during that process, i don’t proactively bring it up during the actual interview. so i guess if they’re proactively asking about it, then sure, i’ll answer. otherwise i don’t make a point of disclosing it. after i’m hired i do make a point of bringing it up with my direct reports and my supervisor as soon as i get in place, because i think that’s important. while disclosing a disability strategically during the hiring process can serve as a way to interview the employer, it is very much a personal choice, and anecdotally, people often said they were advised not to disclose. if the interview process was more accessible to a larger number of candidates, it would reduce the need for disclosure to get equal access for candidates with disabilities. disclosure of a disability is often complicated and fraught, and reducing the need of candidates to disclose in order to get necessary access would improve the recruitment of librarians with disabilities.  discussion and recommendations interview structure aspects of the interview that disabled librarians found particularly accessible can easily be inserted into current hiring practices by the hiring committees that want to implement them. ensuring there are breaks spaced out throughout the day and that candidates know to expect them is important. this allows candidates to have time alone to reflect or prepare, have a snack, do breathing exercises, stretch, or anything else that people would like to do for fifteen minutes alone in order to continue performing at a high level in a stressful setting. ideally, candidates would receive the interview day schedule prior to their interview so that they know what to anticipate for the day. if there are insufficient breaks built into the day, candidates can reach out to the hiring committee or an hr representative and ask for more breaks, ideally with a specific ask, such as, “i need fifteen minutes between these two meetings/after the presentation/before lunch.” if this cannot be accommodated, it is something to note about the workplace culture of the interviewing institution. details about the tour, if one is included, can be part of the interview day schedule that is sent out ahead of time, as well. links to a campus map or information about the terrain, the route, and any suggestions on appropriate shoes can be provided ahead of time. having this kind of information allows disabled candidates to ask for specific accommodations or make their own informed decisions about self-accommodations. it is difficult to prepare for unknowns in a physical environment; the more information is provided to candidates ahead of time, the more prepared disabled candidates are able to be about the situation they are entering.  providing the questions to candidates in advance also allows people to adequately prepare to present the best version of themselves. some participants indicated that they got questions a week or more in advance, while others got them fifteen minutes in advance. receiving them immediately before an interview can cause more anxiety for some disabled candidates (anderson, 2021) than it alleviates, so it could be most helpful to ask candidates for preferences. interviewers could ask the candidates during email correspondence if they want to receive the questions a week ahead of time, fifteen minutes ahead of time, or written out in real time. the caveat to offering options like this, though, is that candidates should not feel additional judgment or pressure to pick one or another option; options need to be offered, and candidates’ choices should be respected without attempting to guess why someone picked what they did. in the case that an institution requires that the same structure be applied across all interviews, it might be possible to give everyone the maximum amount of time allowable (i.e., the maximum number of breaks, the most far-in-advance notice of interview questions, etc.).  opting out of meals for any reason is also an issue that can be loaded with judgment or social pressure. candidates, disabled or not, have plenty of reasons why they might want to skip a meal with potential employers, and yet there is often social pressure associated with meals during interviews. the option should be provided to candidates to have a meal or not, and information about the restaurant(s) should be sent to candidates in advance, as well, so that they can prepare. if the meals are simply stated as part of the interview day schedule, candidates need the freedom to ask not to participate without disclosing why and without fear of judgment about their ability to do a job based on what meals they share or do not share with interviewers.  intrapersonal coping with or without the above improvements to interview practices, academic librarians with disabilities can control certain aspects of the hiring process themselves. creating their own accommodations, preparing for various aspects of the interview process, applying strategically to specific institutions, and looking at how a job will interact with access needs are a few ways for disabled librarians to take more control of the interview process. all of these require a level of self-reflection and knowledge of what works best for each person, given specific disabilities as well as other aspects of individual identities. a few participants mentioned that while they are looking for accessibility from the employer during interviews, they are also looking to see how other facets of their identities would be accepted or not; race, sexuality, and gender identity were a few that came up repeatedly. knowing priorities and boundaries ahead of interviews can help disabled librarians make informed decisions about what type of environment and job duties will best suit them day in and day out over potentially a long period of time. interpersonal coping librarians with disabilities need to be prepared to navigate additional, difficult social situations during interviews that their able-bodied peers do not. how to disclose; how not to disclose and “appear in abled drag,” as one participant said; and knowing what red flags to look for are all aspects of an interview that require additional reflection. these components are fluid and personal. especially as many disabilities can be progressive, what could be a red flag or a deal breaker can change over time and may be different for people with the same diagnosis.  strategically disclosing or not disclosing a disability, or multiple disabilities, played a large role in participants’ experience with interviewing. even for people who did not disclose, it played a part in how they navigated the hiring process and took up mental and emotional space. some people explained that if they have a physical disability and a mental disability, they will sometimes disclose the physical one, which has less stigma attached to it, as a way to judge how the mental disability would be understood if they accepted the job. while visible disabilities are stigmatized, invisible disabilities and specifically mental illness are often perceived as erratic and unpredictable, thus resulting in less capable employees (pilling, 2012). the contextual complexity of the “to disclose or not to disclose” question cannot be understated. being able to assess a situation and one’s own comfort level with disclosing can be beneficial in the long run because candidates can get a sense of a workplace culture that would or would not be accommodating, which impacts job satisfaction and well-being (santuzzi et al., 2019, oud, 2018). there is a balance between the benefits of disclosing a disability and the risk of that disclosure causing the loss of a job opportunity, as well as the health insurance and financial stability that employment can provide. navigating that balance is personal and strategic. limitations this study did not attempt to examine any aspect of intersectionality with which disabled librarians also deal. while demographic information was collected at the beginning of the study, it was not included in the analysis because demographic information was separated from interview transcripts to protect privacy. analyzing the differences in how people disclose disabilities or not and the specific ways people accommodate for themselves based on race, gender, sexuality, or class would be informative and would have provided extra nuance to this study. additionally, only one person analyzed the raw qualitative data. to decrease potential bias, having at least one additional person work on data analysis, particularly someone with a different type of disability, would have been helpful. including other perspectives in the data analysis phase of this project could bring out other themes that were not originally identified by the sole author.  further, limiting study participation to employed librarians excluded disabled librarians who have been unable to obtain employment. some participants were currently employed and disabled but had not been disabled at the time of their interviews and so projected what they think they would do in the future. instead of limiting participation to employed librarians with disabilities, limiting participation to librarians with disabilities who have navigated the hiring process while disabled, whether employed or not, could have improved the variety of strategies described by participants.  next steps the transition from graduate school to employment can be especially tricky for disabled librarians: accommodations are built into the student experience in a more standardized way than they are in jobs. figuring out how to navigate the hiring process and then advocate for necessary accommodations at different institutions that handle staff accommodations in myriad ways is frustrating and time-consuming, especially for someone doing this for the first time. more literature on the transition from school to employment and self-advocacy would help smooth that process.  educating management on working with disabled employees and helping people navigate the accommodations process, as well as actively creating a culture of accessibility, would go a long way towards recruiting and retaining librarians with disabilities. anderson echoed this in their study focused on autistic librarians, saying “perhaps the most impactful work that could be done next involves library administrators and hiring managers” (anderson, 2021). training on universal design, accessibility, and/or understanding how ableism pervades all of our policies would be extremely useful for leadership to enact change from the top. conclusion navigating an academic library interview with any kind of disability requires significant effort and self-awareness. however, there are many strategies for disabled library workers to use on their own, without disclosing, to improve their experience of the hiring process and successfully get a job that is, hopefully, a good cultural fit. there are also specific adjustments that people can, and should, request from institutions to make the hiring process more accessible.  librarians with disabilities bring unique lived experience and knowledge to an institution that is necessary to improve the experience of both library workers and patrons. while disability is often left out of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, it is the largest minority identity worldwide and intersects with every other identity (united nations, n.d.). any institution looking to foster an anti-oppressive culture must be proactively thinking about disability justice and the recruitment and retention of library workers with disabilities.  disabled librarians add value to any institution at which they work. we have the same skills our able-bodied peers have and are often creative problem-solvers because we navigate a society not built for us every day. being self-advocates and setting clear boundaries that respect our dignity is critical and appropriate. accepting a job offer at an institution is a significant commitment, and we need to be sure, to the best of our ability in a limited timeframe, that an institution will not erode our self-worth through ableist policies and practices. while society often frames disability negatively, or implies that a disabled person is lucky to be hired, the reverse is true: institutions are lucky to have us and the creativity and empathy that disability often teaches us. we need to utilize our collective power and advocate for what we need and want to see in hiring, both for ourselves and for other disabled library workers after us. people decided that the recruitment process in academia should be constructed in specific ways, and people also can reconstruct that process to be more inclusive.  acknowledgements i would like to express my sincerest gratitude for everyone who made this article, and project, stronger: ikumi crocoll and jessica schomberg for your excellent peer review skills; ian beilin for shepherding this paper through the itlwtlp publication process; marie kennedy, kris brancolini, nicole branch, and the 2019 irdl cohort for conceptualizing this project with me; and my colleagues at umb for the years of listening and editing and advice-giving they have put in on this. a profound thank you to the people i interviewed for this project — without their vulnerability and openness, this would not be the article that it is. bibliography ala office for research and statistics. (2012). diversity counts. american library association. http://www.ala.org/aboutala/sites/ala.org.aboutala/files/content/diversity/diversitycounts/diversitycountstables2012.pdf anderson, a. (2021). job seeking and daily workforce experiences of autistic librarians. the international journal of information, diversity, & inclusion (ijidi), 5(3), article 3. https://doi.org/10.33137/ijidi.v5i3.36196 barlow, c. (1995). don’t just serve people with disabilities—hire them. american libraries, 26(8), 772. bishop, b. a., & beadles, r. j., jr. (1995). interviewing under the ada–what librarians should know. college & undergraduate libraries, 2(1), 69–79. bogart, k. r., lund, e. m., & rottenstein, a. (2018). disability pride protects self-esteem through the rejection-identification model. rehabilitation psychology, 63(1), 155–159. https://doi.org/10.1037/rep0000166 bogart, k. r., rottenstein, a., lund, e. m., & bouchard, l. 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(2019). how phenomenology can help us learn from the experiences of others. perspectives on medical education, 8(2), 90–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-019-0509-2 o’neill, a.-m., & urquhart, c. (2011). accommodating employees with disabilities: perceptions of irish academic library managers. new review of academic librarianship, 17(2), 234–258. oud, j. (2018). academic librarians with disabilities: job perceptions and factors influencing positive workplace experiences. partnership: the canadian journal of library and information practice and research, vol 13, iss 1 (2018), 1. edsdoj. https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v13i1.4090 oud, j. (2019). systemic workplace barriers for academic librarians with disabilities. college & research libraries, 80(2), 169–194. pilling, m. d. (2012). invisible identity in the workplace: intersectional madness and processes of disclosure at work. disability studies quarterly, 33(1), article 1. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i1.3424 pionke, j. (2019). the impact of disbelief: on being a library employee with a disability. library trends, 67(3), 423–435. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2019.0004 sager, d. (1998). no barriers to service: librarians with disabilities. public libraries, 37(2). https://www.docdel.umaryland.edu/sso/illiad.dll?action=10&form=75&value=416855 saldaña, j. (2016). the coding manual for qualitative researchers (3e [third edition]). sage. santuzzi, a. m., keating, r. t., martinez, j. j., finkelstein, l. m., rupp, d. e., & strah, n. (2019). identity management strategies for workers with concealable disabilities: antecedents and consequences. journal of social issues. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12320 tang, l., malley, b., tanguay, c., & tumlin, z. (2020). best practices for hiring people with disabilities. archival outlook, july/august. united nations. (n.d.). factsheet on persons with disabilities | united nations enable. factsheet on persons with disabilities. retrieved january 22, 2022, from https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/resources/factsheet-on-persons-with-disabilities.html walters, w. h. (2021). survey design, sampling, and significance testing: key issues. the journal of academic librarianship, 47(3), 102344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102344 critical disability studies, disability, interview, job searching, professional development, professional ethics letter from the editorial board leave a reply cancel reply save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: getting to know us – a single project, the reason we write, and a source of inspiration – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 26 dec editorial board, ellie collier, brett bonfield and erin dorney /3 comments editorial: getting to know us – a single project, the reason we write, and a source of inspiration in brief: in this editorial, in the library with the lead pipe editorial board members individually answer three questions: if you had to work on only one project for the next year, what would it be? are you writing/researching for the love or for the tenure? (submitted via twitter by lead pipe reader kenley neufeld.) and, what was the most inspiring idea you encountered this year? photo from flickr user anonymous9000 (cc-by 2.0) by editorial board, ellie collier, brett bonfield, and erin dorney if you had to work on only one project for the next year, what would it be? ellie i pick weeding. this is very much a community college perspective, but i love weeding. i love pulling the circulation reports and doing the sorting to look both at what is high use and what goes on my weeding list. i love walking through the stacks and getting more familiar with the collection. and i love pulling those unused and outdated items out of circulation. within the community college setting i feel very strongly that books are for use. i’m sad when i see that 1997 copy of the opposing viewpoints on alcohol getting more recent circulations than the 2012 copy next to it. i’ve been doing a first pass level weeding at my current library: items that we’ve had since 1995 (the date of our ils migration) and have never circulated, but i would love to be doing a much more thorough job. emily ever since i’ve been at portland state, there has been a project to which i’d like to be able to fully commit. my predecessor received an lsta grant to create a digital library of local and regional grey literature from community stakeholders regarding urban planning – the oregon sustainable community digital library. (one of my liaison areas is urban studies and planning.) the project was high profile, inventive and included creating and maintaining community relationships with local agencies and organizations. however, due to a variety of circumstances it hasn’t been active, nor has the site been given any attention for quite some time. although i’m currently working with a team to assess the project and move it forward in some fashion, i don’t know what that fashion will be. had i the resources and time, i would dedicate an entire year to this project to make it what stakeholders and i wanted. it would mean getting into the community to talk to local agencies, organizations and faculty and student stakeholders; assessing the current collection; innovating ways to display its content and data; and incorporating all of these things into one meaningful, flexible and beautiful end product. brett maybe it’s the nature of managing a smallish, solidly middle class public library, or maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but my job doesn’t seem to lend itself to focusing on one project to the exclusion of others. fortunately, i’m able to supplement my day job with volunteer projects that reward sustained effort. the volunteer project i’d like to spend next year working on is the one kim alluded to in the editorial she published last october, specifically her discussion of turning words into action. these actions can be summarized as funding fellowships, organizing conferences, and providing venture capital. i’m particularly interested in that last idea: seeing if it’s possible to apply to libraries what we’ve learned from innovative start-up incubators like ycombinator, google summer of code, sxsw accelerator, and maybe even the tongue-in-cheek pinboard investment co-prosperity cloud. erin the george street carnival, a student-run literary journal at my institution, was revived in 2011 after a 3.5 year hiatus. if i had the chance to pick one project to focus my energy on for the next year, it would be to help that organization design a beautiful and streamlined online journal. the group of students working on the journal are amazingly talented and dedicated to showcasing the creative work of students, faculty, staff, and alumni (including poetry, fiction, and visual art). however, the journal is only offered in print. i’d love to help them expose the work to a broader audience, build the reputation of the publication, and maybe even digitize the past 37 years of print issues as a unique digital collection. micah i would build a digital scholarship center/program at florida state university. we are slowly working toward it and have some great folks involved already, but if i could dedicate all my time to making it happen in the next year, i would. in my mind this would encompass many of the things i’m interested in: securing financial support/grants, writing, brainstorming, working on teams with people i never get to work with, working with faculty in a new and different way, identifying the most interesting thing that we’d want to create, creating said thing, promotion and outreach about the project, then restarting the whole cycle. i’d really love to be actively involved in doing, making, building, participating, especially as things like the dpla, pressforward and anvil academic are moving forward so quickly. kim don’t make me pick one thing! no really, i don’t want to. please? the truth is that my first librarian job in reference and instruction is also the first job i’ve ever had that never got boring. i tell people this all the time, non-librarian people, and they raise their eyebrows at me. i know what they’re thinking. to the uninitiated, being a librarian sounds like the most boring job they could imagine, but the truth (according to me, anyway) is that we have one of the richest, most varied, and wonderfully complicated careers in the world. of course, that’s also what makes our jobs so challenging, since we have to juggle all those things and still try to maintain both our professionalism and our mental health. it’s not always easy, but it definitely keeps things interesting. becoming a small library director has taken my love of variety to a whole new level: i’ve gone exponential! not only do i get to do all the things i enjoyed as a reference and instruction librarian, but i’ve added, well, everything else that libraries do. all of it. it’s a delight. from @kenleyneufeld, “are you writing/researching for the love, for the tenure?” ellie both of my full time librarian positions have been with community colleges and while they both have something roughly akin to tenure, neither call it that and neither have a publishing requirement. so while i’ve transitioned to only editing here at lead pipe, i was writing and am editing and researching for the love, but also for the experience and the “it looks good on a resume” factor. i’m proud to have written what i have for lead pipe, and i definitely grew as a writer thanks to the review process, but i’m even more proud of how much i’ve grown as an editor. emily not that i should speak for anyone else, but i will: we all definitely do it for the love. for myself, never did nor do i currently see my participation in lead pipe because of promotion and tenure. (although it doesn’t mean i won’t include my lead pipe activities as part of my annual reviews, third year review and tenure review!) when we started lead pipe i was frustrated with the library profession and its discourse. i was a new librarian (just out of school one year!) who had endured a very unfulfilling emerging leaders experience and was already in my fourth post-degree job.((for more on this multiple jobs experience, see my struggling to juggle article from february 2011.)) i was hungry to have my voice, my thoughts and ideas heard. when kim approached me to join this forming group blog i jumped at the opportunity. i had no thoughts regarding my career, promotion or tenure (i wasn’t in a tenure-related position at the time)–i just wanted a platform to contribute my ideas and to participate in professional discourse. i completed both my mls and mis in 2007, but i did not have a “permanent” job until february 2012. (i am currently serving under my ninth job title, and the first that is an actual line-item on my library’s budget.) throughout my career the one thing that has been steadfast has been working with this publication and with this group of people. it is my community and it is my librarian home. that’s why i do it. brett i write because i don’t know what it feels like not to write, and i don’t ever want to find out. fortunately, we’re in a profession that values writing and offers many opportunities for those of us who wish to publish. unfortunately, our profession also frequently requires people who don’t wish to write to come up with something publishable in order to meet their tenure requirements. erin for me, both. like brett, i love writing and couldn’t imagine my life without it. i’ve had my own blog since 2008 which has been an outlet for my journey as a library school student and professional librarian. when i was invited to join the lead pipe, i knew that it would be a great opportunity to move beyond my comfort zone (doing more research-based, peer-reviewed writing versus the very casual posts i do on my own blog) and get experience with project management, group dynamics, and editing. i’m in my fifth year at my institution and just submitted my tenure and promotion applications this past november. i was definitely thinking about those things when i accepted the invitation to join the editorial board. i wasn’t just thinking about the importance of having lead pipe publications and responsibilities on my cv (although they are there, of course). i am also interested in sparking conversations on my campus about open ethos and non-traditional scholarly publishing. i figured that one of the best ways to “put my money where my mouth is” was to include lead pipe articles in my tenure application as peer-reviewed articles and include information about the importance of our journal within the field of librarianship (including some alt metrics). i am hoping that this inclusion will create conversation and debate among the tenure and promotion committee when they review my applications this spring. hopefully we can move toward the point where these new types of open scholarship are viewed on par with publishing a book or article in a traditional journal. micah in my case, librarians at florida state are non-tenure track, so to answer the question as asked, i write for love of the game. but, i would say that i also write for reputation and thinking about the future of my career as a librarian, which is sort of a “tenure-ish” sense of doing. i’m committed to the idea of “big tent librarianship” and writing for a publication like in the library with the lead pipe causes me to be engaged with new and different ideas that circulate through the field. there’s also that underlying thing where i just plain feel like i have something to say, and learning to write for the web has helped me express ideas that i might not have expressed elsewhere. i am very interested in the structures of promotion and tenure, especially as applied to librarians, and i hope that there will be many more productive conversations about where writing fits into our professional practice. i’m glad to (hopefully) be a part of those discussions. kim i write for the fame and fortune! i hear the check’s in the mail. and i write for the same reasons as brett: because i can’t not. i make sense of the world by putting my fingers on a keyboard and seeing what comes out. i make sense of my work in the same way. a friend of mine recently fell in love with the idea of using dictation software to write. he thought it would be much easier to talk into a microphone and “magically” compose articles and other documents without having to write or type. i’m the absolute opposite; i need to see words appear on a page or screen in order to fully process ideas and feelings. i wouldn’t call it “love,” exactly, because while the process is rewarding i don’t necessarily enjoy it. but i do find it valuable and necessary to the way i live and work. if there are some professional benefits, that’s just a bonus. what was the most inspiring idea you encountered this past year? ellie i’m going to go with this ala panel: insert catchy label here or the end of gen y, digital natives and the millennial student myth, in particular virginia eubanks. i like to call myself a technophile luddite. i trend towards early adopter in my personal life, but i do a lot of very basic tech support and computer help at the reference desk and balk at high tech movements in libraries. my students can’t afford their textbooks, they definitely don’t have ipads and most don’t have smartphones. this talk gave me another perspective on the assumptions we (on this side of the digital divide) make about technology and how best to combat the digital divide. emily the month of november was really inspiring this year. during november i participated in two community writing events, both of which were organized and conducted using social media: academic writing month (acwrimo) and digital writing month (digiwrimo). they are both challenges asking authors to write 50,000 words in one month, or to set some ridiculous writing goals and to do their damndest to achieve them. although november seems to have been some sort of writing month for quite some time, with national novel writing month beginning in 1999, the idea was novel to me, and 2012 was the first year digiwrimo existed. during november i attempted to write seven hours a week, and i think i just about did it. without acwrimo or digiwrimo, this would definitely not have happened. my next article at lead pipe will probably address my experiences with these events, and engage the idea of librarians as writers. so, more to come! brett i’m not as methodical in my self-testing as seth roberts and others who are leading self-tracked lives, but i like to experiment with new ways of doing things to see how they feel for me. the most effective techniques i’ve found in the past year involve intervals and repetition, the kinds of technique that erica jesonis discussed in her lead pipe article. for me, it’s pomodoros at work (i like tomato timer) and tabatas at home (i like the free version of the seconds interval timer), plus i incorporate intervals in one of my runs each week. also, while it’s not exactly interval training, i found bj fogg’s free, weeklong, 3 tiny habits course to be useful in much the same way: small tasks, clearly defined, associated with reasonable expectations, and repeated at sensible intervals. erin i’m very excited about librarian design share, launched in early december by april aultman becker and veronica arellano douglas. the design of the visual tools we use in libraries (handouts, web graphics, signage) is important and i think this kind of resource will inspire library communities to think more creatively about sharing their message, whatever that message happens to be at the moment. micah i draw inspiration from so many different things, it’d be difficult to narrow it down to one idea. this year i read much less professionally, but much more personally. i started my first job. i listened to a lot more music, and saw a lot fewer movies. i bought a home, voted for a president and am preparing for a first child. i left something behind and joined something new. there are a few stand out things that have stuck with me through it all. i had the opportunity to see henry rollins speak here in tallahassee in october. aside from the fan boy, “omg that is actually henry freaking rollins” thing, he said some things that sunk in. he said all around the world when he asks people what they want they most often say “a little water.” i still don’t really know what to do with that, but i think about it all the time. professionally, i have returned many times to two articles: giving it away by kathleen fitzpatrick and reality bytes by bethany nowviskie. both talk about the future directions of academia, and by extension the academic library, in the context of higher education, and both are from the perspectives of not necessarily librarians, which i tend to think is in incredibly valuable perspective to consider. i could quote these to bits, but i’d encourage you to take a few minutes and just glance through them. the idea that i’ve pulled from these is that things are changing, and for the better, and that there are opportunities to be involved in good, new work. that has really defined my year, and i hope it continues to for years to come. kim a fun, slightly quirky, inspiring idea that i’ve been revisiting and rehashing all year comes from a book called the library 2025 (forthcoming from ala editions) that i’m editing with former lead piper eric frierson. the book is a collection of visionary essays about the future of libraries, and one chapter compares future librarians to park rangers. now it may be that my nature-loving, granola-munching past is an influence here, but the metaphor of librarian as park ranger strikes me just right: i love thinking about the world of information as an environment that we inhabit just as we inhabit an ecosystem or landscape. i also love the idea of librarians as individuals who would have a home base (the park lodge/office) but would also rove the landscape to help people at the point of need. the idea is a little mindbending and the essay itself is both realistic and deeply imaginative. all in all, my props go to hugh rundle for lighting up my brain with the vision of librarian park rangers. the more i think about it, the better i like it. and, of course, i’m eager to see the uniforms. open ethos publishing at code4lib journal and in the library with the lead pipe “someday when i am incompetent…”: reflections on the peter principle, leadership, and emotional intelligence 3 responses erica jesonis 2012–12–27 at 3:16 pm thanks for sharing this. i loved reading everyone’s perspectives looking backwards and forwards. and while i feel slightly ashamed to say this, it was a nice holiday break to read an itlwtlp article that was skim-able and that didn’t require deep, soul-searching thinking :) i’m particularly struck by kim’s description of the “uninitiated” – i too struggle to convey to my friends, family and patrons the wide (and fascinating) array of work we tackle on a regular basis. this post reflects that spectrum really well and it makes me excited for a new year in library land. thanks, writers. kim 2012–12–28 at 10:37 am erica, i’m glad to hear i’m not the only one! glad we could help you get your enthusiasm up for 2013. and don’t be ashamed at all: i think i speak for all of us when i say it was a nice holiday break for us to write this, too. :) kenleyneufeld 2013–01–04 at 10:24 am thanks for sharing a little about yourself. it’s good to know out writers and editors in a different light. you are doing excellent for the profession. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct google, stupidity, and libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 22 oct kim leeder /17 comments google, stupidity, and libraries by kim leeder as a teenager, i never tried drugs because i didn’t like the idea of any substance affecting the processes of my brain. it never occurred to me that the long hours i spend working, reading, and researching in front of a computer could have a similar effect. photo by flickr user bill gracey (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) recently i found out that it could be happening to all of us: google and the internet as a medium could indeed be changing the ways our brains function and process information. “as marshall mcluhan pointed out in the 1960s,” writes nicholas carr in the atlantic, “media are not just passive channels of information. they supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. and what the net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” carr’s article in the july/august issue of the atlantic, “is google making us stupid?,” received some attention for accusing its readers of not being able to accomplish deep, sustained reading in the age of the internet. according to the article, the web is reprogramming our brains in a fundamental, biological way. (note: for a smart, satirical look at the issue, check out stephen colbert’s interview with carr). the responses to carr’s article came from both sides of the fence: those who agreed with with him and those who objected to the perceived insult to their intelligence. the chronicle of higher education came out with three articles that expressed concern and agreement: “your brain on google,” a compilation of somewhat ironic quotes from the web, “on stupidity,” an extended book review of “a cartload” of recent books on anti-intellectualism, and “on stupidity, part 2,” an english professor’s response to the problem. meanwhile, the new york times technology section printed a counterpoint by damon darlin, “technology doesn’t dumb us down. it frees our minds,” that accused carr of being a technophobe and insisted that “writing, printing, computing and googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.” the irony of the entire argument is encapsulated in the first two lines of the new york times article: “everyone has been talking about an article in the atlantic magazine called ‘is google making us stupid?’ some subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article.” darlin builds the satire by attempting to sum up carr’s article in a twitter “tweet” of less than 140 characters, but only skims the surface of the real irony: the likely truth that very few of the people discussing carr’s article had been able to read the whole thing. there’s something amazing and a bit disturbing about a culture in which everyone’s opinion is equally important and valid, no matter whether or not one has even a basic knowledge of the subject. as an academic librarian, i’m particularly interested in the implications for libraries of carr’s article. hand in hand with carr’s concern about a growing inability to engage in deep reading is the equal possibility of a growing inability to engage in sustained research. google leads us to believe that searching for information is easy when library research is complex, often frustrating, and full of twists and turns. so the next question is: does it have to be that way? it’s a given that library systems tend to be overly complicated, even for simple searches. the common refrain is: how can we be more like google? the followup question is: do we want to? these days academic libraries are grasping at every possible product—from federated searching to librarything—that might ease our students’ apparent impatience with the challenges of research. after all, the 2002 pew internet & american life report, “the internet goes to college,” made it clear that our students rely on the web first when they’re doing research, and generally use the library only as a latter resort. if academic libraries don’t make it easier for students to find relevant information for their course projects, they may not come at all. we may as well just hand google scholar the keys. on the other hand, a recent study of the research practices of college students in the humanities and social sciences offered more heartening results. alison j. head’s article, “beyond google” in first monday (later written up for september 2008’s college & research libraries) found that students are using libraries in greater numbers—and earlier in their searches—than the pew research center would have us believe. granted this was a study at a single, small, liberal arts college that doesn’t necessarily reflect the situation everywhere. but we can glean some optimism from the study, along with the requisite grain of salt. on the positive side, academic libraries have the benefit of a captive audience of students whose professors often require the use of library resources. while we may hope that these requirements train students in the ways of deep research, the day-to-day interactions at any academic reference desk would indicate otherwise. instead, a majority of students reflect a desire to find adequate sources for a given project as soon as possible, even if those sources are not ideal. is it google that has raised their expectations for how quickly an information search can be accomplished? a study from the british library calls this a “truism in the age in which we live” that “crosses all generational boundaries in the digital environment…. the speed of new media has cultivated a lowered tolerance for delay.” the study goes on to say: there is considerable evidence to support the view that many students do not explore information in any deep or reflective manner. the lack of any evaluative efforts on the part of information users has been documented…. according to levin and arafeh (2002) most students stop searching at ‘good enough’ rather than trying to find the best source etc. some ‘view the internet as a way to complete their schoolwork as quickly and painlessly as possible, with minimal effort and minimal engagement.’ english professor thomas h. benton’s personal observations are nearly identical. in “on stupidity, part 2,” he writes: essentially i see students having difficulty following or making extended analytical arguments. in particular, they tend to use easily obtained, superficial, and unreliable online sources as a way of satisfying minimal requirements for citations rather than seeking more authoritative sources in the library and online. without much evidence at their disposal, they tend to fall back on their feelings, which are personal and, they think, beyond questioning. the echo of carr’s article in both of these quotes is unmistakable. whether or not google is actually changing the biology of our brains it is difficult to say, but it does seem possible that google could be damaging our students’ ability or inclination to conduct real research. i’m not blaming our students. it is not the fault of anyone in particular if they are losing the interest and ability to conduct complex research. they are products of their culture, just as we all are. just as i am. in fact, those of us currently in our early to mid-thirties are in a unique position to address this issue. you see, i didn’t grow up with computers, but computers and i grew up together. i can remember, back in grade school, atari and i bumbling our way through asteroids. in high school, america online and i had our first heady experiences in online chat rooms. when i went to college my library’s young opac was incomplete and i still had to use the card catalog to find certain items. computers were leaking into my research in college, but their effect was fragmented. google was founded the year i graduated from college. i grew up with computers, but i grew up knowing that they were fickle, fallible, and constantly changing. i still have a collection of old floppy disks with files i will never be able to access again. i greatly enjoy technology, but i maintain a certain skepticism about it. that said, i had to make a conscious effort to read nicholas carr’s article all the way through. the first time i linked to it, i skimmed the first few paragraphs and bookmarked it. the second time, i skimmed further into the text. i didn’t actually read the whole thing until i chuckled at darlin’s observation on how few had read it and realized that i was not one of them. what happens to our libraries in a culture where sustained reading and deep research are skills that our students and patrons increasingly do not value? there is no easy answer, but the most critical thing we can do is reflect passion for our work and share it with our students. benton writes, “effective teaching requires embodying the joy of learning — particularly through lectures and spirited discussions — that made us become professors in the first place. it’s extremely hard, but teachers have been doing it for generations.” notice his admission that playing such a role is “extremely hard”; we can all appreciate his honesty there. it is hard to be an intellectual in a culture that values actors over educators. it is hard to face a constant onslaught of superficial research when we know how much richer and more inspiring information can be. but the payoff comes when we open the door and a student steps through, leaving google aside for the moment, to consider the wealth of research tools at their disposal that they never knew existed. if only it happened more often. it’s your turn: do you think google is affecting us? click here to take a short reader survey. many thanks to my itlwtlp colleagues derik and brett, and to rick stoddart, tom hillard, ellie dworak, and elaine watson for offering feedback that helped shape this post. anti-intellectualism, college students, google, reading, research, teaching on the ala membership pyramid pro-con-ference 17 responses derik badman 2008–10–22 at 10:19 am i haven’t read the article (yet, it’s on my “to_read” list in delicious), but i’ll jump in anyway. if the mode of information shapes our thought, i wonder if the online, hyperlinked mode of information is adding a benefit of interconnectedness to our thoughts. are we better seeing the linkages between ideas even if we are spending less time in extended concentration. i also question if the physical medium is as much the problem as the mode. the technology is still not quite there where people want to read long text on a screen. as screen tech improves perhaps our desire and ability to read longer and more in-depth will be correspondingly improved. there’s a lot of focus on making information easier to find. i really don’t see that as directly corresponding to less thinking. in a world where information is easier to find, the focus of instruction (by professors not just librarians) needs to focus on the critical thinking on, evaluation of, and linkages with various streams of information. those are skills needed by everyone, and those are skills that need to taught (starting at an early age). those are skills where people are failing. p.s. still don’t think that’s “irony” up in paragraph 4. jenny parsons 2008–10–22 at 11:18 am i’ve read it. i was nonplussed. (warning: cranky psychology major ranting about to begin…now.) i’d find most of the research cited (poorly) by carr and the british library to be more compelling if we had older data to which we could compare it– but we don’t. we can postulate all we like, but there’s very little evidence as to what kind of change google is making on is, if any at all. is it really changing the way we see information, or is it just catering to tendencies that we already have– hence its popularity? what’s entirely possible– and something none of us like to admit– is that in our culture “sustained reading and deep research” have never really been appreciated. while, like carr, i lack data, i do know that as a child in the 80s, i was “weird” for wanting to read nonfiction books for fun, and my mother, a very intelligent and skilled critical care nurse, admitted to me that she was intimidated by card catalogs and libraries. perhaps only now that we’re able to more easily track search habits and gauge attitudes towards research by ordinary people, it may seem that “deep research” is no longer valued. but is that really the case, or does it just seem that way since more people are capable of doing deep research than ever before, though they still don’t really like it? renee 2008–10–22 at 1:41 pm i’ve never read every word of any book or article i’ve ever read. as a young person i learned that skimming an article was far more efficient than reading it word for word. and this was long before google or the internet. google is simply a part of the “need it now” culture. just look at the nightly news: everything predigested into easy-to-swallow soundbites. for another take on pop culture and intelligence check out “everything bad is good for you” by steven johnson derik badman 2008–10–22 at 1:44 pm jenny: that’s a great point(s). emily 2008–10–22 at 3:47 pm as derik points out, i think (as one who hasn’t read the article, but based on your post) that much of this has to do with education and educational systems and philosophy that students are subject to at a very young age. critical thinking is a skill that needs to be trained and developed. i wonder to what extent parenting, as well as elementary and secondary education has to do with the ability for students to think critically, i.e. go beyond the “i need it now” from google. in general, what i am trying to say is that i think google syndrome needs further investigation to answer questions of: what is different between critical thinking skills and utility of students before and after google? what socio-economic/geographic backgrounds might play into how students learn and utilize critical thinking? is it lack of critical thinking or sheer laziness? i am also apt to lay blame to our current educational system. students attend college in huge classrooms and frequently anonymous environments. this remains a challenge to instructors and professors at universities who are dedicated to educating students and assisting them in developing critical thinking skills. those schools that generally focus curriculum on developing critical thinking and inquiry in students are those schools that are more expensive and provide a smaller classroom experience. not that we can ever resolve such disparities within our current system… emily ford 2008–10–22 at 3:59 pm oh, and just as i wrote this previous comment i noticed the following link on my rss feed from my delicious friends: cognitive evolution. could be an interesting read about evolution of cognition and how technology influences it! jan massie 2008–10–22 at 7:55 pm hi kim: i can’t access evan r. goldstein’s compilation of ironic quotes from the web at the chronicle of higher education on carr’s essay. was it really interesting? i would like to read it but i really can’t afford a subscription or web pass. kim leeder 2008–10–23 at 9:35 am hi jan, the quotes were collected from sites around the web, which makes them more interesting to me because it wasn’t an interview. so these are unself-conscious comments that still offer a flavor comparable to the colbert interview with carr. i could send it to you if you give me your email address… jim duran 2008–10–23 at 10:39 am perhaps we are not challenging students with “deep research” questions. if a freshmen can effectively meet the standards of a college paper by finding three sources from one google search, then maybe professors need to change the curriculum to make it harder for students to find relevant sources. i think the problem is not that students have a vast wealth of knowledge at their finger tips, it’s that they are only asked to write papers about “wolves in idaho” or the “oil crisis”. sure, if they wanted to they could spend hours at the library studying these topics, but google gives me 1,330,000 hits for “wolves in idaho” and 6,090,000 hits for “oil crisis”. i think we have a 20th century education system with 21st century students. jenny parsons 2008–10–23 at 11:13 am @derek: thank you. this is a sore spot with me– i’m not sure if it’s the cognitive psych undergraduate background, or the deep love of research that i’ve always had (“you want to stop there? but…there’s this book on ancient egyptian burial customs among the lower classes! doesn’t that sound like fun…oh, okay.”) @emily: such great questions…i don’t know if we have the data to answer them. i don’t know if we’ll ever have that data, actually. but your question “is it lack of critical thinking or sheer laziness?” makes me wonder– how would you tell the difference between the two? at some point, critical thinking begins to come naturally to young people; one of the byproducts of puberty is a development of abstract thought. is it the fault of student for not applying to their work the same vigor of inquiry they apply to american idol or parsing of facebook wall posts? or is it the fault of educators for not demanding such rigorous work? both, maybe? i don’t know– i know these questions are too knotty to answer here. @jim: i like the point you make. or, as a rejoinder: you could help faculty members devise curricula and assignments that simultaneously press the relevance and difficulty of research as well as the subject matter of the class. of course, you’d need the faculty member’s tacit approval, and agreement, and willingness to share stage time…all of these things can be hard. steve lawson 2008–10–23 at 12:22 pm i’m firmly in the jenny parsons and jim duran camp. i’m not convinced that people are any dumber than before, and i’m not convinced that students won’t rise to the occasion if taught properly and given appropriate, challenging assignments. you might also be interested in what wayne bivens-tatum has written on another, similar publication, the dumbest generation? hilary davis 2008–10–23 at 12:49 pm kim – great post – thanks for challenging me to think about more than just arl statistics this week! it’s definitely more than just google, search engines, and other quick-snippet rides into the info landscape that lead to suggestions that google is making people tend toward do just enough to get by. we’re all distracted and easily distract-able because of the pretty huge amount of info made available. we’re all being asked to do so much more, respond to anything and everything, have an opinion on a broad swath of topics rather than develop deep thoughts about a few things. i also think that for students in particular, skimming the surface of most things is normal. and what they do conduct deep research on is determined by what they value at a particular time in their lives – and i don’t honestly think that the period of time from teens to twenties is when they actually value deep thinking about school work (with exceptions, of course). i do agree with your suggestion that certainly a role of libraries is to be a place where deep thinking can happen – when the conditions are right – and what librarians can do is to foster those conditions and invite students to ask themselves deeper questions while helping them find x number of references for the paper that’s due tomorrow. i’m also not saying that students are incapable of deep research, i just think that an issue has to mean something to them on a personal level for it to be possible to dive deeper. just my two cents. jenny parsons 2008–10–24 at 10:42 am @steve: i’ve got it on my to-read list. from what i can tell, it’s one of those things i need to read when i’m in one of my more patient moods. starting on it after reading carr’s article may make me go ballistic– not fair to the author. (or to carr, truth be told. :) ) @hilary: i think you’re right where libraries are concerned. regardless of whether or not google and its ilk really are changing the nature of research and scholarship, a library can’t motivate a student who isn’t interested in learning to begin with. but of course, if something magical happens, and the student’s mind is changed…then, yes, we should be there. and the student should know to come to us, because we were helpful to him or her when they just needed so many articles or references for their papers. jan massie 2008–10–26 at 11:30 pm hi kim: that would be great. the colbert report interview wasn’t that great. too short and jokey, albeit entertaining. my email address is fortuneontherocks at yahoo.com. thanks. ross betzer 2008–12–09 at 3:19 pm i’ve read carr’s article (all the way through. in fact, i sat in a public library and read it in the actual, physical atlantic magazine, while on vacation in south dakota). it was some time ago, but i remember finding the article quite thought-provoking. an under-appreciated book on this issue of technology and its effect on us and our culture is “technopoly” by neil postman. though written in 1993, it’s still quite relevant. one of the author’s major points is that every technology has positive and negative effects: e.g., books let us record our history, but perhaps we have lost some of our personal ability to remember. postman would have us think about and reflect on the good and bad of any new technology. lots of people get upset when someone (like carr) discusses the potential negatives of a new technology (like google), but no one seems to notice that most everybody else (including us in library-land) are just singing the praises of every new technology without considering their ramifications. pingback : new library blog « level 1 librarian mace 2009–09–02 at 3:13 pm i’m coming here one year after the post. thank goodness for internet!! thanks for the excellent post and fantastic comments you all have made. especially jenny’s point that we don’t have data to compare to is spot on! i never liked these “we have lost the golden days” -rhetorics. when i ask when exactly was there such a time that everyone loved to read things properly and think things over thoroughly, i never seem to get an anstwer. such a time is perpetually in the past. aristotle wrote about it, didn’t he. one more thing: i happen to know librarians’ often check the google before delwing into their own quality databases of meaningful knowledge, even if they would silently disapprove other people doing so. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct pro-con-ference – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 29 oct derik badman /19 comments pro-con-ference library camp east photo by flickr user darien public library (cc by-nd 2.0) by derik badman earlier this month, i presented at a one-day conference. everything happened ordinarily. my submission of an abstract was accepted and i was scheduled in a session with two other presenters. preparing for the presentation, i worked up my outline, gathered images, and put my slides together. the night before, i practiced my session by making a recording on my mac. on the day of the conference, i was delayed and showed up late, so i missed the first presenters, arriving in time for the last part of the beginning session. following that, i participated in a round table discussion. i grabbed a drink and a quick snack during the break and chatted with one of the other presenters as i set up my slides. my presentation went well. it was not without some technical difficulties that forced me to cut my talk a little short, but i’m satisfied with how it went. the organizers tell me it was well received. i joined the audience to listen to the two presenters who followed me in the session. later there was more chatting and another session. i had to leave early, so i missed some of the last presenters. all in all it was a interesting day and a novel experience. you see, i was presenting at met@morph, the first annual web comics comic-con and conference and it was held in second life–my first conference presentation in a virtual world. derik presenting in second life. screenshot by sean kleefield. i tend to stay on top of the latest tech trends, but i’d been avoiding second life. i’m not interested in having another life, i’m happy with my first life, and i got my fill of avatars in all the years i played role-playing games (the ones with paper and dice). my impressions of second life have been so colored by the use of it as an alternate world/life that i neglected its use as a social communication tool. this experience convinced me of the potential for virtual worlds as virtual conference sites. with the economy tanking and travel prices increasing (i don’t want to think about how much it’s costing to get me across the country to acrl in march), large national conferences become ever more problematic for a larger number of librarians. there has always been a (perhaps large) group of librarians who have neither the personal nor institutional funding to attend conferences, a group which has been mostly shut out of ala (see emily’s post). why do people go to conferences anyway? anecdotally, the majority of librarian attendees go for: a) continuing education/keeping up, b) socializing/networking, c) presenting and sharing information and experiences, and d) committee work and other activities involved in making the content of the traditional conference that offer an opportunity to pad the resume. i’ll leave off: e) free stuff, though a perk, i doubt that is a main draw (i did enjoy my free trip to a game at dodgers stadium while at annual this year (thanks, eebo)). all of the aforementioned reasons can be replicated (with different levels of success) in other contexts. i’ll focus on two models, the virtual conference and the unconference, specifically considering reasons a, b, and c above. most virtual continuing education opportunities have, more recently, stuck to the webinar model. a presenter uses audio over slides to offer his or her information to a group of users watching from their computers. typically, the presenter’s talk is supplemented by a chat channel where users can comment and ask questions. attendees log in, the presenter speaks, questions are taken, and attendees log out. while this model can be effective for conveying information, it is not any more effective than just posting the presentation prerecorded and is severely lacking in any social aspect. other attendees are names on a list and perhaps an occasional chat comment. webinars are also visually dull (especially if the presenter is not skilled in slide design) and offer little interaction for the audience. one is easily pulled out of the moment, distracted, bored. i’ve never managed to sit still and attentive through a whole webinar. at the least, a live conference offers people to talk to before and after the presentation and people to look at during the event itself. participating in the second life conference was very different than any previous experience i’ve had with virtual presentations. a presentation in a virtual world allows for the same slides and audio presentation with chat commentary (equally prone to many of the failures of webinars), but it also opens up other opportunities. first of all, it’s more visually engaging and socially immersive. with more visual interest and movement–and unlike every webinar i’ve attended–i remained engaged by the presentations in second life. the virtual world also gave me a greater sense of the presence of other attendees. they were more than names on a list. they took up space. this alone improved the experience, but the medium provided an extra bonus of social interaction. i could chat (publicly or privately) with other attendees before and after the main presentation. sure, it wasn’t like hanging out at the hotel bar with a bunch of colleagues, but it was better than nothing. some might object to virtual conference participation based on the technical and training requirements. attendees need fairly modern computers, there’s no way around that. but considering how much it can cost to go to “real life” conferences, the cost is not prohibitive (i could buy a compatible computer for the price of a plane ticket across the country, and i could re-use it many times). this won’t open up opportunities for those lacking technology or money for technology. virtual world use also requires training. i’m not an active video game player. i had an atari and a commodore 64 when i was a kid (that dates me somehow), but never got further along than that. since then my game playing has been sporadic and social. i had to learn second life for my presentation–my first experience with a virtual world and i was going to be standing in front of an audience trying to talk and advance slides. however, i found it surprisingly easy to make an avatar, dress him up, and get used to moving/looking around the environment. admittedly, i’m good at picking up these things, clicking around and inferring what different options will do, but i did this primarily on my own (i did get training for doing the actual presentation and slides). with a little bit of training (and that would have to be part of any virtual world conference), most computer literate users could pick up enough to attend a presentation (if not necessarily have a great looking avatar). virtual world presentations open up a space for synchronous interaction at a distance. a great potential here would be micro-groups dedicated to librarianship, bringing together scattered librarians with common niche interests. for instance, i’d be interested in a small conference with librarians working at integrating their libraries into a blackboard environment or a small conference about comics in libraries. while virtual world conferences can offer geographically disperate librarians a greater sense of social interaction, the increasingly popular unconferences make use of social systems to create local in-person conferences. library camps are a good example of unconferences which have become ever more numerous over the past couple of years. in the fall of 2006 i attended library camp east, hosted by the fine people at the darien public library in darien, ct. the event was a one-day, informal gathering of a few dozen people. we met in the morning, brainstormed ideas for discussion, and created a multi-track schedule for the day. the discussions were informal and without any pre-planning, covering topics such as mash-ups, web design, and communication between techies and non-techies. the unconference offers an agility not found in a formal conference. attendees make the decisions of what the discussion topics will be, allowing for not only a greater sense of participation (how very 2.0) but also a greater chance of currency. the smaller nature of these conferences means they can be put on for less money, offering a cheaper (or free) alternative for budget-strapped libraries/ians. localized, one-day conferences would obviate much of the expense of travel and lodging associated with conferences. these types of events also enable attendees to network on a local level, building social relations amongst librarians which could lead to further collaboration and sharing. my primary personal disappointment with the unconference i attended was a result of the conference’s form. the topics decided upon by the group, on the day of the conference, ended up being mostly not of interest to me, and the time spent deciding upon topics ate up too much of the day. my unconference improvement suggestion is to start the conference online prior to the event. if attendees start planning the schedule collectively online, not only would time be saved at the event itself, but attendees might spend more time in consideration of topics and organizing the conference schedule. knowing some part of the schedule might also attract more attendees because it would eliminate fear of the unknown and potentially attract those who specialize in the pre-selected topics–attendees who could help facilitate discussions and provide a richer experience for everyone involved. both these alternative types of conference can fulfill the continuing education function of conferences without much argument. the socializing and networking function is less sure in a virtual world but is undeniable at an unconference. people are increasingly accustomed to making friends online. communities grow around message boards, listservs, twitter, facebook, and other social tools. the idea of a virtual world conference starting some kind of deeper social connection between participants is not that unusual. sure, we may feel we know someone better after spending a few hours with them at the hotel bar, but a virtual connection can become just as ‘real’. after all, when the conference is over, we go back home and connect with our new conference friends on our virtual social networks, don’t we? the major part of this blog was planned virtually after a few brief connections at ala annual this summer. so, this post is a call to action, or maybe just a call to continued action. let’s find ways to increase our continuing education and networking outside of the large annual conferences. unconferences have been popular, and i’m going to start making plans for an unconference in my area (philadelphia area librarians, let me know if you’re interested in either helping with planning, have a location, or just want to attend). so far, virtual world conferences have seemed to focus on virtual worlds themselves (like the recently announced “ala slymposium on virtual worlds and libraries in second life”), but the potential is there for an increase in more varied events. thanks to lianne hartman, for editing services and coming up with the title, and to emily ford, erin dorney, brett bonfield, and ellie collier for comments and edits. conferences, library camp, second life, unconferences, virtual worlds google, stupidity, and libraries sticking it to instruction 19 responses emily 2008–10–29 at 9:41 am i’m hugely comfortable in virtual worlds (i used to chat in muds, if we’re taking turns dating ourselves), but have been resisting the call to move more conference stuff online. i like to travel and see new places and meet people in person and do the chit-chatting thing. i have placed a moratorium on tote bags, but enjoy free pens, and want to talk to you about how to get in on that eebo swag next time. (dodger tix? really? where was i??) but we just this week got our first of what i imagine will be many budget cut memoranda. the travel budget has been slashed in half. and i bet it gets slashed again. my visions of acrl are fading in front of my eyeballs. so bring on the virtual and local conferences! as the ramifications of the collapse of late capitalism begin to settle into our bones, i bet most of us won’t have any other choice. richard 2008–10–29 at 9:56 am nice article derik. i’m a b) and c) conference attendee myself. kim 2008–10–29 at 10:59 am derik, i want to thank you for validating my avoidance of webinars. i always feel like i should support them as something of a “public good,” but once i get in there i just can’t stop my brain from wandering off. i’m intrigued by the online alternatives. i’ve never done more than create an avatar and flop around in second life, but i’d definitely use it for a conference. like emily, my travel budget’s shrinking this year, and i’m also looking at canceling my acrl plans in favor of the two alas. your post doesn’t explore the committee work possibilities related to taking our conferences online, and i think that’s increasingly becoming a no-brainer. how much of our committee work (and even our regular jobs) already gets done online? if we scheduled our committees to meet in second life twice a year (instead of at alas), couldn’t we accomplish just as much? i’m starting to think so. even if we could cut ala down to one physical meeting a year, that would have tremendous impact on our finances, the ability of members to participate more widely, and the environmental effects of our mass travels. i say, “onward to second life!” kim 2008–10–29 at 11:02 am ps: love your avatar’s tux. derik badman 2008–10–29 at 11:13 am emily: while i was working on this post, coincidentally, my travel budget potential was also reduced. kim: i was going to talk about the committee issue, but this one was getting out of hand, so i had to reign it in a bit. but, yes, i think with concerted efforts in training, a lot of committee would could be done in sl or some other virtual space. (found the tux for free. way nicer than my default avatar clothes.) john jackson 2008–10–29 at 2:07 pm i’ll be starting the sjsu online mlis program in january. one of the computing requirements is to have a machine capable of handling the sl interface. on the downside, i’m going to have to buy a new computer. but on the upside, i’ll be wandering into sl for the first time. like you, derik, i’ve had the same reservations about virtual worlds: i always found them to be over-wrought and giving back to the user less than what he/she put in. but after managing to get into the sl world for a few moments (before my current pc gave up the ghost), i realized the real potential it has for collaboration. i look forward to helping create better conferences in the future! hilary davis 2008–10–29 at 7:04 pm amen to kim about the committee work being redirected to non face-to-face settings. this is certainly one of main functions that would benefit from virtual meeting venues. i’m in the same boat as others who have commented that their travel budgets are being cut. however, while i’m open to virtual conferences (and have participated in one a couple of years ago, which was kind of a let down), i think that the conference experience on the large scale (e.g., sla, ala, acrl) demands a face-to-face setting because of the impact that it can have in terms of making connections and engaging with colleagues. i landed my first professional job in libraries in large part, because of a networking opportunity at lita in st. louis. while my resume and cover letter would have hopefully been convincing enough, having networked with folks from my prospective employer was that much more convincing. on a smaller scale, i tend to agree that the non face-to-face setting might actually work in that smaller crowds make conversations easier to strike up and ideas/conversations easier to follow. i asked my husband what he thought about this topic – as a chemist, he feels that face-to-face conferences are the only way for researchers to be truly accountable for their work. i don’t know that this applies to our profession as a whole. just out of curiosity, i looked around for other professions where virtual conferences are popular – hospitality and tourism, marketing, networks, education, for example. i think i’m due to try another virtual conference, but i’m not yet giving up on real, in-person conferences. erin 2008–10–29 at 9:06 pm derik & others – everyone here makes excellent points. i just want to add one thing: in my opinion (based on my experiences and observations), some libraries may be taking the wrong focus with secondlife. i’m just not sure how sl specifically relates to our patrons (in terms of getting them to use/embrace it or meeting them “in world” to provide reference service). i mean, in public libraries, you may be dealing with digital divide issues hindering people from logging in. in the academic environment, students don’t seem to be that into sl… and if they aren’t already there, who are we to try and lure them in? i think that sl has much more potential as a collaborative tool within our profession, for things already mentioned here (conferences, committee work, networking). also, i’m totally interested in unconferences/camps, so count me in! derik badman 2008–10–30 at 12:06 pm hilary: i agree with you about the large scale conferences to a certain extent. certain things cannot be replicated. one of the reasons i wrote about both virtual and un conferences is to think about the balance we can have. i should have made that more explicit. erin: i agree about uses of sl. it’s interesting how much library related events in sl seem to be about sl. it’s all so meta. it’d be like having an in-person conference about conferences. that has shaped my lack of interest in sl to a certain extent. “be where the patrons are” is well and good, but if they aren’t there, then what? derik badman 2008–10–30 at 2:41 pm a post at botgirl’s blog (she was one of the presenters at the sl conference): http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2008/10/copybot-as-revolutionary-part-1-how-drm.html has lead me to opensimulator http://opensimulator.org/wiki/main_page which appears to be an emerging open source sl alternative. stevenb 2008–10–31 at 1:43 pm you wrote: “while this model [webinars] can be effective for conveying information, it is not any more effective than just posting the presentation prerecorded and is severely lacking in any social aspect. other attendees are names on a list and perhaps an occasional chat comment. webinars are also visually dull (especially if the presenter is not skilled in slide design) and offer little interaction for the audience.” i can defitely agree that some webinars i’ve attended can be a snoozefest with a speaker droning on over bullet points. but the responsibility for creating a participative webinar depends on the organizers, speakers and attendees. we’ve done tons of webcasts at the blended librarians online learning community (http://blendedlibrarian.org). we’ve had some clunkers but we learn from the experience and work hard to make them interesting. first, we make every presenter go through a practice session and we coach them on how to present in the elluminate platform, what works visually and what doesn’t (not all listen well), how to integrate techniques to keep participants involved (polls, web tours,etc) and how to use the tools to make the session more interactive. this helps to an extent. many first time webinar presenters are nervous and want to keep things simple. we encourage and support them as needed. we also try to keep a lively chat going with the use of a “model citizen” – that’s someone who works the chat room to get attendees engaged in the discussion. this works pretty well to keep chat on target and get people asking questions. attendees can be more than a name on a list – we see this at all of our webcasts – folks who know each other, regular attendees, etc. you will see them interacting in the chat. finally, we’ve found that the vast majority of librarians who attend our webcasts do not use a headset. without that you can’t take advantage of the voip features. why won’t librarians invest $20 in a decent headset they’ll use regularly? when you have attendees with headsets all of sudden you’ve got real conversations going on. it makes a huge difference. so if a webinar is dull, it may be because the attendees won’t get involved despite our efforts to encourage (then again the vast majority of librarians who attend f2f presentations won’t say a word). webinars have their drawbacks, but i know the folks who attend our bl webinars truly appreciate them because for many librarians connecting to a webinar is the only opportunity they have for professional development. i would argue, that done right – with some advance planning, thinking about how to get the attendees activated, and a involved group of participants – a webcast can be far more dynamic than a prerecorded presentation. nate hill 2008–11–03 at 10:38 pm i think my only problem with presenting something in second life is that your presentation can only reach a very particular elite audience, an audience that i suspect might agree with or even already know a lot of whatever you plan on presenting. for example: i live in an area heavily supporting obama. if i gave a public presentation in first life on obama’s policies i am guaranteed to feel good at the end of that presentation because everyone will agree with me. nothing wrong with it, it just might not be that useful. if i presented in a swing state though… i’m not really into second life myself, and i certainly don’t hate on it or want to judge it, so don’t misunderstand me. i do think its important to consider your audience when using any media for communication, especially if you are trying to educate or sway opinion. if i had a particular library-related topic or initiative that i wanted to promote and truly communicate with a group, i try to use a ‘least-common-denominator’ approach when choosing my medium for knowledge transfer. i know you aren’t posting an argument that second life conferences should replace first life conferences. but make no mistakea second life conference is audience exclusive, not audience inclusiveregardless of the price of gas and travel. derik badman 2008–11–04 at 11:00 am thanks for the comments, steve. maybe i’ve gone to all the wrong webinars, but i’m not convinced it’s a very effective format. it seems more like a transitional format. nate: “your presentation can only reach a very particular elite audience, an audience that i suspect might agree with or even already know a lot of whatever you plan on presenting” i don’t follow the logic. while users of second life do require some amount of technology, they are not necessarily “elite.” and your argument that everyone would “agree” is illogical. if i do a presentation in second life about integrating library resources into blackboard, what is there to agree with and why would the audience necessarily already know about my topic? are all second life users automatically well versed in everything? is there no potential for new users to come to the presentation? i can see how you might get to your point, the majority of library related sl presentations i’ve heard about were about sl itself, which might lead to the situation you mention (and is the only way i can see your obama example being analogous). my point is it doesn’t have to be that way. you could talk about anything (the presentation i mention in my post was on comics). i’m not sure what the “least common denominator” would be. talking to everyone in person? writing? sure, all those are great. i’m offering some thoughts on alternatives. i’m not sure any format would necessarily be inclusive for everyone. that’s why we should be trying different options and formats. nate 2008–11–04 at 12:54 pm yeswe should be trying lots of different options and formats… i totally agree with that. all i’m really getting at is that virtual worlds like sl remain exclusive rather than inclusive, and ‘meatspace’ conferences are still better at feeling inclusive. my real, physical being as opposed to an avatar remains a better interface for information sharing. by “elite” i was getting at “exclusive”. i can stumble into a conference, but i can’t stumble into sl. re: familiarity with topics for presentationswell, with the blackboard example, no you can’t expect everyone to be familiar with the topic, no. true. what i’m trying to say is that if you gave that same presentation to a room full of people using as few bells and whistles as possible, you are likely to communicate well with a wider audience. now perhaps a wide audience is not what you wantperhaps a specialized audience congregates on sl that is appropriate for this discussion. more power to you thengood decision to do it there. maybe i flew off the handle with my comment. i’m really not a luddite at all, but i fail to see how a sl conference can compare to a real conference. if webinars are transitional, sl is most certainly transitional as well. no? nate 2008–11–04 at 2:15 pm oh one other little bit… as far as the “inclusive” thing is concerned, this is why i support things like rfid, mobile phone projects, qr codes, sensors, and really anything that is about dispersing information technologies in our real world environment and linking to a virtual environment. not that there aren’t issues with this as well, but ubiquitous or peravsive computing of that nature is “inclusive”. in a conference setting, presentation software, the public address system, the very architecture you sit in is “inclusive”. in an immersed environment, it is all “exclusive”. when the day comes that sl offers an overlay of info during a conference in my real life through an earpiece and eyepiece (which is sort of creepy), then it is “inclusive”. i suspect there might be some disagreement, but i wanted to put it out there… tell me why i’m wrong… help me refine my opinions… derik badman 2008–11–04 at 2:58 pm “i can stumble into a conference, but i can’t stumble into sl.” after you (in most cases) pay a registration fee and travel there. i don’t want this to be an either/or. there are always advantages and drawbacks. “what i’m trying to say is that if you gave that same presentation to a room full of people using as few bells and whistles as possible, you are likely to communicate well with a wider audience.” true, but they would have to be a local audience, that is people near me in space. which costs money and time. that’s the whole point of my post, alternatives. emily ford 2008–11–07 at 10:49 am first things first, you picked a super name for this post. to echo many of the voices that have commented here, i am also wary of the use of second life. like erin, i had always heard it touted as a place to provide reference and other library services, which i feel is as waste of time, unhelpful to patrons, etc etc. however, when i read your post i thought, why has all the hype been about the patrons? why can’t it be about us? i agree that seminars hosted on the web are terrible. (i absolutely hate the word, webinars.) at least most that i have attended are boring, not because of their content, but because the format of these online presentations simply mimic the presentation format of a slide show at a conference. we, librarians of the world, instructors and teachers of the public and of the student, are terrible presenters. take a terrible presenter to an online seminar forum and things just get worse. this is something that i have noticed at mla, ala, and various other conferences. what is it going to take to get presentations to step away from the 4 person panel format wherein participants don’t really participate? they are rather just passive actors on a stage. in general, we need to come up with ways for more pro-active presentation and conference formats. you pointing to that tangible part of interaction in second life might be a stepping stone to our re-thinking of conference presentations and participation. thanks for making me think about this one! i don’t hate the mention of second life in libraries anymore. derik badman 2008–11–08 at 1:21 pm all credit to lianne for the title. presenting skills is a big problem for most people i think, particularly when it is not something they on a regular basis. (that some of these poor librarian presenters are also doing instruction sessions is worrisome.) it’s something i’ve been thinking about a lot over the past year, as i’ve ended up doing more and more presentations. (maybe that’s another post.) pingback : presentation = speech + slides | in the library with the lead pipe this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct “someday when i am incompetent…”: reflections on the peter principle, leadership, and emotional intelligence – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 23 jan kim leeder /8 comments “someday when i am incompetent…”: reflections on the peter principle, leadership, and emotional intelligence “shadow steps” photo by flickr user elycefeliz (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by kim leeder a few years ago i learned of the “peter principle”: the concept that in hierarchical organizations, whether public or private, individuals are promoted up to their level of incompetence, and there they remain (peter and hull 16). in their book of the same name, the authors observe with satirical accuracy that, regardless of career field, high-performing individuals are continuously promoted over time until they reach the point at which the challenges of their new position exceed their skills, thereby decreasing their performance, eliminating the possibility of future promotions, and reducing the effectiveness of the organization as a whole. in short, most people advance in their careers until are promoted to a level at which they cease to achieve. peter and hull attribute this phenomenon to the fact that promotions are generally based upon performance in the old position, while each higher-level position requires new and different skills. strong job performance as a staff member is not a predictor of strong performance as a manager. it’s an appalling theory, and no less disturbing because it rings true. we’ve all seen it in action. for instance, a reference or cataloging librarian may suddenly be promoted to head of their department because they performed well as a librarian; but as a department head they now need a whole new array of skills to be successful, such as effective communication, strategic planning, and people management skills. instead of being promoted to their new role because they displayed the requisite skills to perform well as a department head (or the potential to develop them), they have been plunged into an entirely new situation without much, if any, preparation. perhaps they are lucky enough to already possess the aptitude for their new work and savvy enough to obtain whatever training they may need; in this case they have not yet reached their level of incompetence. but it is just as likely that they will muddle through, keeping the metaphorical lights on, but never achieving much or inspiring others. in exploring strategies for combating such a seemingly inevitable process, the answer is both the simplest and most challenging one possible: by recognizing and respecting our own professional boundaries. this sounds easy but is complicated by certain external factors that drive people to accept promotions, such as financial pressures, retirement concerns, and the appeal of a role with greater power to (ideally) effect positive changes in the workplace. the effects of the former two are obvious. with an eye on the mortgage payment or retirement account, individuals who know a promotion isn’t right for them may just take the position anyway. and who could blame them? there are bills to pay, children to send to college, and the security of the future to consider. regardless of our aptitude for a new position it would be difficult to turn down any opportunity to ease our financial burdens. obviously compensation models in any organization are deeply entrenched, but why do we all accept that the positions that involve the most administrative tasks should be the highest paid? why not consider a model based upon actual job performance regardless of role, that would actually encourage everyone to excel in the jobs we are best at? these are tricky questions, considering that administrators are often paid more because they are the most experienced (in years) and the most difficult to replace, but a high-performing administrator would still be paid well in a performance-based compensation model–along with high-performing staff at all levels within the organization. if we consider the latter factor that influences many of us in deciding whether to accept a promotion, the waters become a bit muddier. of course it is appealing to have greater power over one’s work and, potentially, over the work of others. but with such a motivator at hand, some may accept roles that they are not prepared to fulfill effectively. telling people what to do sounds easy enough, but true leadership is far more challenging. despite traditional concepts of management as a top-down activity, an increasing amount of scholarship points to the greater effectiveness of collaborative, bottom-up leadership based upon the cultivation of emotional intelligence (goleman 1995, 1998) and humility (owens & heckman 2012). decisionmaking through consensus, as discussed in last january’s lead pipe article by emily ford, may play a substantial role in this. owens & heckman’s research in particular indicates “that to effectively lead their firms amidst growing market complexity, leaders increasingly must be able to humbly show their followers how to grow by admitting what they do not know, modeling teachability, and acknowledging the unique skills, knowledge, and contributions of those around them” (811-812). this is a far cry—and happily!—from the “what i say goes” management strategies of old. when it comes to our ability to recognize when our skills and abilities match our job and when they don’t, emotional intelligence (which will be explored in more depth below) can play a critical role. are we making decisions about our work and the work of others for the right reasons? goleman notes, “it is not that we want to do away with emotion and put reason in its place, as erasmus had it, but instead find the intelligent balance of the two” (29). those who are able to gracefully recognize and combine such factors may have the potential to overcome the fate to which peter would say they are otherwise destined. leadership is a dirty word rhetorically speaking, the term “leadership” is inherently problematic. it implies that one or a few individuals “in the lead” possess the power and can take all the credit for an organization’s accomplishments. it limits our discussions about organizational effectiveness by implying that a powerful few are the ones who “make” an organization effective. overly emphasizing one person’s importance is a disservice to that organization and all who function within it. it’s time to update our terminology. in the deep blue sea: rethinking the source of leadership, wilfred drath asserts, “leadership will be understood not as a possession of the leader but as an aspect of the community (the team, group, organization, association, nature, culture). leadership will be framed as a communal capacity and a communal achievement” (xvi). over the years, some organizations have adopted “upside-down” organizational charts, which generally flip the display of employees and place the customer or patron at the top, with each layer of staff, from frontlines employees to the company’s executive positions, displayed below. for many organizations, it would look something like this: while this type of organizational chart certainly could function as a marketing strategy to reassure customers of their importance, a company that fully embraces this reverse hierarchy is making other statements as well. a traditional organizational chart is defined by lines of supervision and power: a manager is a salesperson’s boss, therefore the manager is displayed above the salesperson. this ties into the ongoing, traditional ways that salary and job titles have been assigned. but when this is flipped and an organizational culture reinforces a flipped hierarchy, there is one critically important difference: rather than defining levels by power, this chart defines levels by support. executives support the work of managers, who in turn support the work of frontlines staff, and so on. better yet, de-emphasizing the supremacy of managers and executives may support more flexibility in the workplace that may, in turn, allow those who have risen to their level of incompetence to find a way out through a shift in position. in the process of flipping the organizational chart, another truth comes to the forefront: managers don’t have staff. if anything, the staff has the manager! such shifts in rhetoric, while seemingly simple or even nitpicky, can have a profound impact on the psyche of an organization. each employee, regardless of their relative position in a traditional hierarchy, is considered one element in a collaborative team. reinforcing the hierarchy through possessive rhetoric, such as language that implies that a manager “owns” a staff, can diminish a team’s collaborative environment. this type of language not only inflates the manager’s role in guiding and supporting the team, but reduces the visibility of those employees’ knowledge, skills, and self-determination. who really needs to be led, after all? competent staff know their jobs, and if they’re not competent then the organization has other problems. very few of us need ongoing, daily supervision. in fact, most evidence points to the fact that employees who are given ownership of their job and the freedom to accomplish job-related goals in their own ways are happier and more productive (for instance, see seibert, silver, & randolph 2004). the best thing a so-called leader can do is support the team, offer guidance and inspiration to create a common vision, and otherwise stay out of the way. “leadership is not domination,” writes goleman, “but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal” (1995, 149). at its best, leadership is simply about empowering and bringing out the best in an organization’s staff.  shouldn’t that be called something else? emotions rule we’ve all heard the term “emotional intelligence” (ei), but how many librarians apply it in the workplace, or even fully understand the concept? in an article in the current issue of american libraries, david lee king and michael porter (2013) hail ei as a critical factor in cultivating positive relationships between and among library staff and customers. while it’s heartening to see the concept appearing in the pages of such a widely read publication in libraries, its cursory treatment in this article leaves much to be desired. is ei so well-understood and widely adopted in libraries that it no longer requires definition or context (or even an attribution to the book that made it a household term, daniel goleman’s 1995 emotional intelligence?). surely not. yet king and porter barely scratched the surface of the idea, providing little more than the circular reasoning that “we must work to develop our emotional intelligence because it will help us more accurately perceive emotions in ourselves and others” (81). while ei sounds like an idea everyone can easily grasp – after all, aren’t we all de facto experts on the subject of our own emotions? – it is far more than just understanding the basics of human psychology. it has to do with how we recognize and understand our emotions and those of our coworkers, and how we address those emotions in constructive ways. people respond differently to the same situation, so emotional intelligence demands sensitivity to those various responses. considering that king and porter omit a definition of emotional intelligence, it’s worth revisiting the concept here. in a 1998 harvard business review article, goleman succinctly summarized the components of emotional intelligence as follows: self-awareness, defined as the ability to understand and recognize your emotions and their effect on others; self-regulation, the ability to put emotions or impulse reactions aside and respond rationally to a situation; motivation, or the drive to achieve; empathy, the ability to recognize and understand others’ emotions and to respond strategically; and social skill, the ability to connect with and relate to others. none of this is easy, particularly during challenging interactions or difficult times. perhaps the two greatest calls to action in this list are to “respond rationally” to situations and to “respond strategically” to others’ emotions. together, goleman argues, these qualities describe a leader who is likely to motivate and inspire those they work with and create a positive, higher achieving work environment. those embracing the importance of ei in the workplace recognize that the key is not to try to leave emotions at the door, but to address and manage them constructively. this includes recognizing when decision-making may be inappropriately driven by emotions (or simple personality conflicts), and ensuring that reason prevails. while goleman’s research is already fifteen years old, its impact seems only to grow. a recent article in harvard business review provides what is essentially an update to the ei concept. in “leadership is a conversation,” groysberg and slind (2012) note, “smart leaders today, we have found, engage with employees in a way that resembles an ordinary personto-person conversation more than it does a series of commands from on high. furthermore, they initiate practices and foster cultural norms that instill a conversational sensibility throughout their organizations” (78). the shift to more global organizations, increases in the number of younger staff with different views on communication, and the spike in technological changes and social network activity have combined to effect a shift in the way employees interact on a daily basis and in the way leaders might most successfully function. groysberg and slind see this as taking place through what they dub the four “i”s: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality. the article, which includes a chart summarizing these new practices as compared to traditional ones, brings ei to the forefront yet again. leadership in libraries as organizations like any others, the same rules apply in libraries. just as groysberg and slind describe the effects of changing technologies and workplace demographics, so too are these forces playing out in the staffing profiles of our libraries. king and porter recommend a simple approach to these shifts, which serves as a starting point for discussion: a good first step is simply to recognize its importance and maintain an awareness of our reactions as they happen. examining the emotionalreactions of others, particularly in difficult times, is also important. listening, understanding, having patience, empathizing, and showing strength and resilience—these are all key components (81). by this reasoning, ei is just about being kind and rational with our colleagues. decades of top-down administrative theory have given way to a humanist approach to the workplace, driven and formed by the core fact that we are all human and subject to human joys and passions. shedding the belief that work requires the repression of emotions, and instead allowing those feelings to pass through the office in constructive ways, can provide needed catharsis for all involved. the challenge for library leaders is to support such catharsis. library work can be stressful, and every office environment has moments when not everyone gets along. when emotions flare up, the manager’s task is to acknowledge, understand, and defuse them by making appropriate changes. small adjustments to the daily life in the office may help, such as reconsidering who reports to whom or how workflows might be eased if personalities conflict. if changes are made, they must be made openly and with the support of all parties involved. this requires some level of sensitivity and flexibility to do well, but any efforts are sure to be appreciated. in many cases, just listening and allowing staff members to vent may be all that is needed. embracing a new, humanist framework in the office may be liberating. certainly it changes the model upon which peter’s principle is based, and holds the possibility of empowering us each to recognize when we have reached the right place in an organization that best fits our skills and interests. this is not to suggest that we should be afraid to try taking on new roles, nor that we should avoid a challenge. continuous growth and development is an important aspect of any career. but for those who rise to their level of incompetence and are emotionally intelligent enough to recognize their unfortunate position, the opportunity to shift (possibly “backwards”) within the hierarchy to a more suitable role is invaluable. an organization that functions based on supporting roles rather than reporting structures, one that endorses the importance of emotional intelligence in its daily functions, will be flexible and wise enough to support such shifts. in the end, isn’t that the sort of organization we’d all like to work for? many thanks to brett bonfield and jason martin for their patience and feedback as reviewers of this article. references drath, w. (2001). the deep blue sea: rethinking the source of leadership. san francisco: jossey-bass. goleman, d. (1998). what makes a leader? harvard business review, 76 (6), 93-102. ———. (1995). emotional intelligence. new york: bantam books. groysberg, b., & slind, m. (2012). leadership is a conversation. harvard business review, 90(6), 76-84. king, d. l., & porter, m. (2013). develop your emotional intelligence. american libraries 44(1/2), 81. available at http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/archives/issue/januaryfebruary-2013. owens, b. p., & hekman, d. r. (2012). modeling how to grow: an inductive examination of humble leader behaviors, contingencies, and outcomes.”  academy of management journal, 55(4), 787-818. peter, l. j., & hull, r. (2009). the peter principle: why things always go wrong. harperbusiness: new york. seibert, s. e., silver, s. r., & randolph, w. (2004). taking empowerment to the next level: a multiple-level model of empowerment, performance, and satisfaction. academy of management journal, 47(3), 332-349   ei, emotional intelligence, leadership, organizational effectiveness, organizations, peter principle editorial: getting to know us – a single project, the reason we write, and a source of inspiration students as stakeholders: library advisory boards and privileging our users 8 responses theriverant 2013–01–24 at 4:39 am rt @libraryleadpipe: “‘someday when i am incompetent…’: reflections on the peter principle, leadership, and ei” http://t.co/2sf0j1ri erinaleach 2013–01–24 at 10:23 am rt @libraryleadpipe: “‘someday when i am incompetent…’: reflections on the peter principle, leadership, and ei” http://t.co/2sf0j1ri dan c 2013–01–24 at 9:30 am interesting and timely post, but i think it misses one very important fact: no library is really a self-standing institution, so library managers tend to be just another step in the organizational chart. we all have to report to someone: the ceo, the provost, the library board, etc. i think that’s sometimes forgotten from other segments of the library. as a long time librarian (and long time library manager), it is my job to make my teams job as seamless and productive as possible. but that does have to be a two-way proposition. i promote (and sometimes even try to enforce) that my team go forth and try projects, work on new things, gain experience…they just have to let me and their teammates know they’re doing it. to often i think people don’t understand that an organization is not just hierarchical but linear and cyclical. and if we are looking for a new model with more emotional intelligence, there needs to be more lateral transparency and communication and that is something we don’t often see in libraries. it can be easy to blame management for a project fail or supposed lack of support, but what did that person do to make their project really work? i’m also a firm believer in project management, which is common in organizational development, but not necessarily in libraries. someone comes to me with a great idea, i am supportive, but i want to know what their next steps are. is there a plan if this becomes successful as to how we handle the larger workload? is there a plan b if its not successful? do i need to work with my superiors to transition this in? and, most importantly, have you told your teammates about this? i think the idea of the peter principle is valid and it our job as leaders to help facilitate the gaining of proper experience. but they have to be willing to work at it. pokane1958 2013–01–24 at 12:17 pm thanks, i am in the process of considering whether my skills and personal style are best suited to the mid management level i’ve just inherited. i know that ei is not my strength but i also know that to move my library from status quo to innovation i need to find ways to motivate people and so have to develop my skill set. of course, knowing i need to change and making the change is absolutely as hard as convincing my staff that they need and have to change. femilyr 2013–01–24 at 5:04 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: “‘someday when i am incompetent…’: reflections on the peter principle, leadership, and ei” http://t.co/2sf0j1ri robert 2013–01–28 at 4:23 pm on your “leadership is a dirty word” section, i agree that most people don’t feel the need to be micromanaged, and like you say, if micromanagement is in fact needed, then the organization has larger problems. however, i would point out that the business world makes a useful distinction between leadership and management, and in the end, your critique applies to managers but much less to leaders. this site–http://guides.wsj.com/management/developing-a-leadership-style/what-is-the-difference-between-management-and-leadership/–defines the terms fairly well. tl;dr: “the manager’s job is to plan, organize and coordinate. the leader’s job is to inspire and motivate.” the *leadership* skills (i.e., promoting a vision) developed in one position can effectively transfer from a lower-level position to a higher one, while the *management* skills (i.e., directing ongoing operations) needed in the higher position are not nearly as likely to be developed in the lower one. tina 2013–02–07 at 11:41 am robert makes an important point on the distinction between leadership and management. also, management skills can be learned but can you learn to be a leader? i spent many years in the business world before becoming a librarian and have to say that i see more resistance to being managed in the library world than i ever saw in the business world. there is an undercurrent of “who are you to tell me what to do?” and i’m not even talking about micromanaging people. sometimes a decision has to be made and it may be unpopular but the acceptance of that and the willingness to do it, in my opinion, is more prevalent in the business world than the library world. it’s been rather fascinating to watch. pingback : lis blogs galore! « sarah's posts this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct häuserkämpfe: an inside look at researching in diy archives – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 29 jan emily ford and jake smith /9 comments häuserkämpfe: an inside look at researching in diy archives die rote flora in hamburg, 2007 in brief: this article is an interview with jake smith, a phd student at the university of chicago who spent over a year in germany conducting his dissertation research in archives. many of the archives he visited in support of his project, “häuserkämpfe: squatting, urban renewal, and the crisis of dwelling in west germany, 1970-1995,” were small, do-it-yourself (diy) collections curated and cared for by motivated individuals within squats. this interview delves into his experiences conducting research in this environment. by emily ford and jake smith introduction in a recent conversation with a colleague she stated, “we are all amateur archivists in our own right.” of course she is right. we all have something that we keep and cherish, whether they are memories or physical objects. but what happens when amateur archivists are just a bit more organized, when they are a bit more official, yet still unofficial? when they are do-it-yourself (diy) archives? many diy archival collections exist, whether they are kept by a family member, community historian, or an unofficial archivist as part of a grassroots organization. what is it like for researchers to use these unofficial, diy archives? this question popped in to my head while catching up with a college friend in chicago during ala annual 2013. my friend, jake smith, a classmate from reed college in portland, oregon, had recently returned from living abroad in germany to pursue research for his dissertation. as he explained more about his project and research, i became inspired to figure out how to share his experiences with lead pipe readers and our professional community. jake is currently working toward a phd in history from the university of chicago. his dissertation project, “häuserkämpfe1: squatting, urban renewal, and the crisis of dwelling in west germany, 1970-1995,” took him to germany for over a year to conduct research. much of the research jake conducted while living in germany was archival, both in official archives and in more unofficial diy archives. the following interview with jake is an extension of our conversation that i hope will shed light not only on an archival researcher’s perspective, but will also bring to the fore the existence and importance of diy archives. interview emily: i love the title of your dissertation project. it sounds very much like a project that would be suited to the urban studies discipline. could you briefly describe your dissertation research? jake: in my dissertation, i trace the emergence and development of a peculiar form of pan-european spatial activism from its origin in amsterdam, frankfurt, and london, to its radicalization in the crucible of the 1980/81 european youth revolts, and finally to its partial diffusion in the spatially-circumscribed “scenes” of the late 1980s and 1990s. focusing primarily on the squatting movement, i argue that these forms of spatial activism should be resituated within the context of a larger “crisis of dwelling” in postwar europe, a crisis of the built environment and its effects on practices of sociability, community, and being-at-home. e: you lived in berlin for a year (or more) to conduct research for this project. could you talk about how you approached research in a foreign country? what was your biggest unexpected challenge? j: although it should not have been unexpected, my biggest challenge was mastering the bureaucratic language necessary to navigate german institutions. indeed, while my conversational german was perfectly adequate i was ill-equipped to deal with the institutional jargon that was necessary not only to gain access to sensitive archival material but also to procure a residence visa, sign a lease, and register with the police. e: this reminds me of a kafka-esque experience i had in munich. my mother sent me my knee braces (a product of my surgeries) so that i could feel comfortable playing frisbee and not worry about re-injuring my knees. she marked the package “medical equipment” so of course that raised suspicion. i had to go pick up my package and open it in front of a customs officer. the package was held in an enormously and surprisingly empty building that reminded me of the wayne estate. i had to walk through a series of empty rooms to find where i needed to be. but i digress. you mention that part of the challenge was dealing with institutional jargon to access archival materials. did you encounter any strange policies in the archives you visited? j: ha! i had a similar experience with customs in berlin in which i was forced to open a box of halloween candy in front of a small group of officials who, after much discussion, decided that the candy was of no value and that i would thus not be required to pay any extra fees. as to strange policies in the archives, this was certainly not the case in the diy archives where anything reeking of official policy was deemed distasteful. in the official archives, by contrast, there were some hurdles such as the requirement that i fill out official request forms to view sensitive materials and then wait weeks for them to be approved. ultimately, though, i was given access to the vast majority of the archival collections i wished to consult so my complaints should be taken with a grain of salt. e: you mentioned that you visited squats with some diy home archives and little libraries. how did you find these libraries? did you have to go hunting for them or were they out in the open? what challenges did you encounter in trying to gather information from these one-of-a-kind collections? j: the diy archives, or bewegungsarchive [(social) movement archive] as they are known in germany, are open to the public however they can be difficult to find since they are not as well known as the more official archives. while developing my research topic, i came across the website for the archive at the rote flora in hamburg and quickly found that there were similar archives in berlin, freiburg and other cities throughout germany and europe more broadly. indeed, it turns out that there is a surprisingly extensive network of alternative archives throughout europe. i think it would be highly productive for academic libraries and archives to forge closer connections with this vast network of diy archives. e: my colleague, hugh rundle, sent me an article to read entitled “the librarian as insider-ethnographer,”2 which discusses the role that some individuals play in squat/diy libraries. what do you think is the motivation for these individuals to act as a community’s archivist or librarian? j: i thought about this issue while doing my research but was not able to come up with a definitive answer. i think, in part, their motivation comes from the fact that they were — and oftentimes still are — involved with progressive activism in germany and believe that more effective forms of activism must necessarily emerge from a historically grounded understanding of the activist past. thus, instead of constantly reinventing the wheel each time a new problem emerges, german activists can – theoretically at least – utilize these archives to look back on the legacies of 1980/81, 1968, and even the communist resistance to the nazi state. another possible motivation may simply be the sheer joy of collecting personally resonant artifacts. such archival collections – be they alternative or mainstream – facilitate, i would argue, feelings of historical embeddedness, feelings that one has a legible place in the broad sweep of historical time. e: interesting. do you think either of these reasons mirrors your passion and drive for the topic as a historiographer? do you feel a particular emotional connection to your research on the topic– aside, of course, from the normal feelings and obstacles of writing a dissertation? j: i do feel an emotional connection with much of the material. on a very basic level, i sympathize both with the political positions and the cultural products of many of these activists. it is, after all, hard not to be enthralled with german punk music, wacky public art projects, and critiques of racist violence. i was also, however, moved by their emotionally resonant critique of social isolation in modern cities, their desire for interpersonal warmth, and their persistent attempts to forge connections with very diverse urban populations. walking around chicago, i’m oftentimes struck by the utter coldness of urban life, the uncanny feeling of being surrounded by strangers. i do realize, of course, that this is simply the nature of the urban experience, however, i can’t help but to wish for something more. the desire for social warmth within the west german left – what some have referred to as a “sehnsucht nach nähe” [literally “yearning for closeness”]  – is, in my opinion at least, really quite moving. e: what do you think is the challenge for historians such as yourself when it comes to conducting research with materials that are “underground” or “diy”? and how do you think those challenges spread to librarians and archivists? did you sense any tension between the academy and less traditional systems? how did libraries and these diy archivists react to your inquiries? j: by and large the archivists at these alternative archives were extraordinarily welcoming. they made coffee, engaged in small talk, and seemed genuinely interested in my project. i found this conviviality to be rather astounding given the fact that i was an american phd student with progressive views but without an activist pedigree. the warm welcome i received at these alternative archives was all the more surprising in light of my experiences at official archives, which, though not at all unpleasant, lacked a sense of interpersonal warmth. there are, of course, tensions between the academy and alternative archives, many of which revolve around funding. indeed, many of the archivists expressed a quiet sense of frustration that they received little to no funding while mainstream libraries with far smaller collections received an abundance of official funding. these feelings were, however, never made explicit — the archivists were simply too friendly to engage in such overtly hostile attitudes. e: did you learn any more political or policy oriented insights as to why and how these archives have been underfunded? j: it’s possible that there is still a fear that such material is incendiary in some sense, that it has the potential to incite the youth to revolt. it does, after all, often advocate for the overturning of capitalism and state power. it is also possible that official sources of funding simply distrust the organizational abilities of the diy archives and worry that they would be ineffective in the preservation and acquisition of archival documents. i would argue that both of these fears are misplaced though i’m sure many would disagree with such an assessment. e: how did you gain trust from collectors in order to conduct your research and see these unique collections? do you continue to have relationships with these collectors and collections and if so, is there anything in your background or identity that you think enables collectors to trust you? j: a good question to which i, unfortunately, must answer: i have no idea. i simply laid it on the table, told them what i was working on, and then tried to be as courteous as possible. i’m not sure they ever fully trusted me but they certainly got used to me and gave me access to their materials. part of this goes back, i believe, to the tendency of radical leftists in germany to focus on interpersonal connections and more “authentic” forms of community. part of it also probably stems from the simple fact that spending time with people tends to result in collegiality — though i may be a bit too optimistic on this front. in any case, i don’t think they had any real reason to trust me with their collections but they did so nonetheless. e: how do you think your experience may have been different if you were a part of the “authentic” community? j: i don’t think they would have treated many any differently, though i do believe that i would have been looking for different types of material. e: did anything about the academic libraries you visited in germany surprise you? j: i was most surprised by the fact that, in official german libraries, it was next to impossible to browse the stacks. when you enter an institution like the staatsbibliothek [national library] in berlin you first have to leave all of your personal belongings in a locker outside of the main reading rooms. once in the reading rooms you then have the option of perusing a limited number of reference books or placing an order for the books you wish to look at, some of which can then be taken off site. too often, we take for granted the extraordinary freedoms offered by something as basic as open stacks. e: so how did you know what books you wanted to request? do you feel like using the library catalog was a good enough way for you to do that? j: i think that by the end of my stay i was becoming somewhat more adept at finding the books i needed but most of the time i found myself groping in the dark. they have search engines but as anyone who has ever used such tools well knows, they are not a substitute for good old-fashioned browsing. e: did you have to modify your research approach based on availability of resources or the kind of library you were visiting? j: to a certain extent, yes. initially, i intended to use official documents such as police records and government reports but quickly found that these are highly restricted. in some cases, i was able to gain access to these documents by applying for special privileges and assuring the archivists that i would not be publishing any names or other personal data. reflecting back, i should have expected this given that many of the documents detail illegal activities and could be used for all of the wrong reasons. e: would you mind giving an example of the kinds of activities you were able to uncover and what those protected documents told you? j: primarily these were police documents describing criminal activities during riots such as breaking storefront windows, throwing rocks at police, and generally causing havoc. there were also official documents created during police stake-outs of the squats which detailed the activities surrounding the houses. the activities described in these documents are not really surprising, however the fact that they include names make them highly sensitive. e: if you had to pick one pamphlet that was your favorite, which would it be and why? j: it would probably not be a pamphlet at all but one of the many documentary films produced by and about the movement. one of my favorites is paßt bloß auf, which documents the squatting movement in freiburg in the early 1980s. the film is exceptional not only for its documentary footage of demonstrations and life inside of the squats but for its artistic innovation as well. e: what is your favorite story from visiting the squats? j: i can’t say that i actually have a favorite story or experience. not because i didn’t enjoy my time visiting the alternative archives in germany but because there were many small moments in which i felt infinitely lucky to be in such archives. for example, when the heat went out at the rote flora archive in hamburg and everyone went about their work in hats, gloves, and coats. or sitting and drinking a cup of coffee with the archivist in freiburg. or the wonderful sound of the teakettle at the papier tiger archive in berlin. fantastic experiences, fantastic places, fantastic people… e: thank you for sharing your experiences, jake. conclusion after my discussion with jake i was struck with how little i know of diy archives that may exist in the united states. certainly i know of docs populi, lincoln cushing’s project that brings “documents to the people,” but i am woefully uninformed of much else. as library workers we  engage with our communities, and discovering and supporting diy archival projects seems a natural fit. do you know of any diy archives? how do engage with them? many thanks to jessie lymn, not only for her inspiring article but also for helping review these interview questions and review the final interview. additional thanks to lead pipe colleagues brett, hugh, erin, and ellie for providing additional feedback. this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. in german this translates to “urban warfare” [↩] this article was written by jessie lymn, who graciously provided feedback on the questions i posed to jake, and also the final interview [↩] archives, germany, interview, research, squats editorial: our favorite articles from 2013 librarian as poet / poet as librarian 9 responses karl ericson 2014–01–29 at 3:55 pm i find this subject matter extremely interesting. though i don’t personally know of any diy archives, i’m sure they exist. i’m sure they exist right here in detroit where there is a long history of counter culture/lefty activism. i hope that there are some people who do know of these underground treasures. emily ford 2014–01–29 at 4:19 pm if you ask around, karl, i’m sure someone will know. when you find out let us know! emily ford 2014–01–29 at 4:18 pm a colleague just pointed me to the factsheet five collection. jason luther 2014–02–07 at 12:56 pm this book might be of interest: http://litwinbooks.com/feminist-activism.php there’s also this happening currently in detroit, karl — and i’m sure those folks might know some other places. there are many other zine archives at iowa, duke, berkeley, and other universities. jason luther 2014–02–07 at 12:56 pm sorry, here’s the link: http://art-design.umich.edu/exhibitions/detail/in_print_art_zines_small_press jay 2014–02–11 at 6:12 am nice post and well defined. bob schroeder 2014–04–08 at 2:06 pm yes – this article made me reflect on the work archivists do with various communities, as opposed to for them regarding helping to preserve their own stuff. alana kumbier has written about “archiving from the ground up” and her dissertation ( ephemeral material: developing a critical archival praxis) is a good source for that info. i suspect her new book ( ephemeral material: queering the archive, from litwan) will be interesting too. little_wow 2014–05–22 at 1:05 pm i have experience in diy archives both in germany and the us, and i would like to give some feedback. first, i disagree with the statement that “we are all amateur archivists in our own right.” are we also all amateur doctors because we can diagnose a cold? am i an amateur researcher because i read books? are we also all amateur documentarians because we film birthday parties? calling everyone an archivist or everyone a curator discounts the traditionally feminized, underpaid, and under appreciated work of curators and archivists and further props up the case that archival science is not a skilled profession. taking the viewpoint that “everyone is an archivist” does not help the field and in fact is a detrimental and backward approach. everyone is not an archivist, much like every piece of paper does not need to be kept and cherished. on another note: in the us, some diy archives become “legitimized” by institutional support, but are able to keep their diy spirit. i worked at the barnard zine library for three years, but there are other major diy archives that are actually still independent and much like the archives that jake and i encountered in germany. (see bottom of post) i also worked at das archiv der jugendkulturen in berlin as a volunteer for 6 months and found that the diy spirit was a lot like what i encountered in personal archives in the us. there’s never enough money or support to run, and they are in a constant state of flux, but they’re scrappy and wonderfully strange. they are also deeply problematic in terms of conservation, and hold incredible materials that are probably endangered in the long term. while i appreciate idiosyncratic filing systems, usable archives, and openness, at the same time, that often means disorganization and poorly preserved materials. archiv der jugendkultur suffers from all of these issues, but still manage to make it work. they strive to create quality work in a pretty difficult situation with limited funding. that being said, it’s easy to romanticize the “lone arranger” working to “save” archival materials, but we should save the romanticism for a day when skilled archivists and communities of researchers are valued, well-paid, and well-funded. here are some diy archives in north america: folkstreams began as a diy archive (folkstreams.net) papercut zine library http://www.papercutzinelibrary.org/wordpress/ barnard’s list of other zine libraries: http://zines.barnard.edu/zine-libraries an entire blog about diy archives: http://diyarchives.blogspot.com/ art metropol in toronto: http://www.artmetropole.com/ qzap: http://www.qzap.org/ i can probably think of more, but here’s a start. feel free to get in touch. emily ford 2015–01–11 at 1:35 pm i am just now seeing your comment and my apologies for being so delinquent! thank you so much for sharing your perspective and experience, and i appreciate your point about the phrase “we are all archivists…” i hadn’t thought of the power this now seemingly flip statement has, and what detriments it imposes onto the profession. thank you for sharing this, and my apologies. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct vision and visionaries: a whole bunch of questions to start off 2010 (as if you didn’t have enough of those already) – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 6 jan kim leeder /9 comments vision and visionaries: a whole bunch of questions to start off 2010 (as if you didn’t have enough of those already) photo by flickr user trochim (cc by-nd 2.0) by kim leeder during the last few frenzied weeks of the academic semester last month i came across an article i reviewed quickly and put aside, but which has lingered in the back of my mind despite the fact that i can’t seem to find it again. essentially, as a i recall, the article addressed the manner in which academic (and school?) libraries are evolving more fully into social spaces for students, along the lines of a second student union or a glorified internet cafe. the article raised the question in my mind of whether libraries, if they continue to progress in this direction, will eventually just merge into the campus student union, which also provides computers, study spaces, and food options. do we have a greater vision, a plan for where we’re going, or are we just rolling with the times? i spent a lot of time last fall researching an annotated bibliography on the learning commons that caused me to reflect on some of the same questions. in 1985 pat molholt published an article in the journal of academic librarianship titled “on converging paths” in which she suggested that libraries and computer labs were likely to merge into one. at this point we can say that she was partially correct, as the job description of a librarian now overlaps strongly in many ways with an information technology job description (i am not sure the reverse is true, however). as a reference librarian, i probably spend about the same amount of time helping students with research as i do helping them with technology. at many institutions the relationship between the library and it department are very close, and they often reside in nearby office spaces, but i am not aware of any place where they have yet been merged. the idea of combining libraries with information technology departments is scary to many, but also a very natural step. many libraries have their own it departments, or rely heavily on an organizational unit to build and update their website, keep online resources correctly linked and current, provide online reference services and technology support for patrons, and host multimedia content, among other things. if librarians were more highly trained in back-end technology, think of how much further we could take many of our instructional and service initiatives! if it professionals were trained as librarians, the same would be true. if you’re not familiar with the concept, the learning commons is the latest manifestation of the 1990’s information commons, which was a later manifestation of the 1980’s library computer lab. first we put computers in libraries and thought that was pretty cool. later, libraries at some notable institutions such as the university of iowa and the university of arizona decided to integrate their computer labs more fully by expanding the labs, providing a greater variety of software and hardware, offering combined research and technology help desks, and building computer classrooms where online research skills could be taught. that was the information commons. more recently, a number of universities are beginning to build on the information commons concept with the goal of a “seamless learning environment” in mind. the learning commons includes, in addition to the usual computer labs and classrooms, student services resources such as the writing center, career services, and residence life. in some cases these are physical facilities that combine several units, in other cases they are programmatic or service collaborations (if you’re interested in learning more about this, try learning commons: evolution and collaborative essentials or any of the other recent books on the topic). apparently, this is the next step in our evolution: it’s like creating the walmart of libraries where students can do their one-stop shopping for everything college. i think this is a really interesting direction, and i’m sure many of the learning commons will be (and continue to be) highly successful. the goal of the learning commons is to identify the ways students learn today and creative a responsive environment for them. but it makes me wonder what our libraries and our jobs as librarians will look like in the future if we continue to change in the direction of merging our buildings and services with everyone else’s buildings and services. will we even call libraries “libraries” then, or will we have more elusive names such as “integrated services building”? at the isb you can grab a cup of coffee, research and write a paper, troubleshoot your registration problems, and sign up for the dorm room lottery. i wonder if it will be the same person who can help students with all those things. and the most important question of all: do we know where we’re going? what makes a library a library? as i wrestle with this question, i have found interesting a conversation taking place among public and school librarians about what makes a library a library.” sarah houghton-jan began the discussion early in december on the subject of king county’s new “express library,” an unstaffed self-serve library branch. after 95 percent of local residents said they would prefer it, king county created a “mini-branch” where patrons can pick up holds, and the library system even threw in two computers for catalog searching and a small browsing collection. can one even call this a library? houghton-jan is not sure: it raises the question–-what makes a library a library? and not just because there aren’t live staff there. there is not a full browsing collection of materials, no internet-enabled computers, no wifi, no rooms to read or study in, no programs, etc. from her comment we might extrapolate that what makes a library a library are the things she listed: librarians and staff, a large collection, computers and internet access, study space, and programs of some variety.  but a few days later, a set of video interviews published by buffy hamilton from creekview high school in canton, georgia, seem to disagree, at least from the teen perspective. these young people generally see the library as a place to both hang out with friends and get their work done. out of the twelve students she interviewed (she notes eleven, but one video clip has two students), i was surprised to see that nearly half, or five students, cited “atmosphere” as what makes a library a library. what constitutes the library atmosphere was unclear. a few days later the barrow media center blog turned up with a podcast response to the two previous posts. i’m not entirely sure of the age group we’re talking about, but david c. barrow elementary school apparently includes students up to the fifth grade. barrow students are significantly younger than those interviewed at creekview, as is their view of “what makes a library a library?” in contrast to the older creekview students, barrow students nearly all cited books. their second most popular response was similar to creekview, a place to work, study, read, or do research. (as a side note, my favorite response of all was a young barrow student who said the library is a good place to “freshen her mind.”)if you’re interested, here’s a quick breakdown of the similarities and differences in the students’ responses: what makes a library a library, according to students at two elementary schools quality cited # students creekview # students barrow place to read/study/work/do research 6 6 hang out with friends 5 – atmosphere 5 – books/resources 3 12 quiet place 2 2 magazines 2 – fun place 1 1 librarians/help/people 2 5 place to learn – 2 total students interviewed 12 15 i think the commonly cited quality among both groups of students — the library as a place to read, study, work, and/or do research — is informative, and obviously carries over into college students’ views of the library. for students of all ages, the library is a place to get out of the house or dorm room and get work done. for older students, there is some social value to the library as well. i appreciate scott bennett’s view of the library’s value in the modern higher educational institution: the library is the only centralized location where new and emerging information technologies can be combined with traditional knowledge resources in a user-focused, service-rich environment that supports today’s social and educational patterns of learning, teaching, and research. whereas the internet has tended to isolate people, the library, as a physical place, has done just the opposite (p.3). the library as a place that counteracts the isolating nature of the internet is something i can get on board with. and again, it reinforces the idea of the library as an increasingly social venue. the value of the library as place appears to be alive and well, but what kind of “place” are we talking about? it seems important that we retain the “atmosphere” the interviewed students cite, but first we need to know what that atmosphere is. if our libraries morph into something else by blending with other campus entities, the qualities students enjoy might disappear. on the other hand, perhaps those qualities are so central to the library that they will persist regardless. vision: do we have it? photo by flickr user gabriel (cc by 2.0) being a librarian these days sometimes feels like being a passenger on a fast-moving train. we sit inside, hoping there is someone in front running the show, or hoping at a minimum that another train won’t run us off the track. but we sit looking out the side windows without having any idea what may be coming along the road in front of us. whether or not anyone’s in charge, it can be hard to tell. lots of people have taken stabs at predicting the future of libraries, and i can’t say with any authority (until we get there!) whether they have it right. will we be cultural centers, wholly special collections, digital repositories, absorbed into google, or just plain out of business? out of curiosity i searched the last six years of the journal library administration & management for articles with “future” in the title, and found only five. two were a two-part article on the future of libraries by bonnie a. osif from 2008 that summarized the variety of perspectives about library futures as represented in the literature. i must admit to being surprised to not see something more visionary in this journal. perhaps i am looking in the wrong place. but it seems to me, and i don’t mean to criticize any of our great library leaders, that most of the “vision” i see in the library field is just an expansion of what already exists. building on our strengths is a great thing, but it is a different thing than having a vision towards which to build our future. who is our henry ford, our steve jobs? who is leading us to a place where libraries will thrive and succeed in an uncertain future? some may argue that we don’t need visionaries to lead us, but i disagree. most of us work day to day with our heads down, just trying to get everything done. we need leaders who have the time and space to be constantly looking ahead, watching the clouds, and anticipating the storms and sunshine to come. looking forward i don’t have the answers — only a lot of questions. it seems to me that the first thing to ask is what we want libraries to be in the future. or would it be better phrased to ask what our students want libraries to be in the future? do we serve our students best if we turn libraries into learning centers combined with various other campus units? from my admittedly inexperienced perspective, and considering the state of the economy, i can see this road leading us towards a place of campus mergers. putting our instinct for self-preservation aside, is an eventual merger of the library, it department, and (potentially) other offices desirable? students might love it, as it will avoid their being redirected multiple times to the office that “handles that,” but will it be the best way to serve their information needs? of course we must balance what we want for libraries with what is possible, considering the changes in technology and learning that are still happening. we can’t predict where learning theory may take us next, but i learned while at the university of arizona that sitting around and waiting for the future to take us somewhere is an exercise in failure. peter drucker and other great management gurus encourage us to take control of our future by constantly assessing our successes and failures, experimenting with new innovations, and shedding those aspects of our work that don’t measure up. i like to consider what our libraries would look like if we tore them all down, erased our memories, and rebuilt them from the ground up. no doubt we would focus first on what our patrons need and use. not books, that’s for sure — forget about print. computers and software, yes, but everything will have to be wireless so buy up those laptops. online resources for sure, but reconfigured in simpler ways. we may still buy academic databases, but now that we’re cross-trained as it specialists we’ll build our own search engines that cross all of our various information platforms seamlessly. our buildings will be full of flexible social spaces that can be used for teaching, gaming, group work, and just hanging out with friends. we’re not going to design around the needs of computers anymore. we’ll share building space with the writing center, coffee shop, tutoring, business center, and maybe others. perhaps we’ll be a big educational mall. wallibrary. librarymart. overall, our libraries are innovative and ever seeking improvement, but let’s face it: we’re turtles among a race of hares when it comes to moving with the times. we grab onto new technologies eagerly, but don’t know what to do with them or how to use them effectively. we’re just starting to understand that assessment is important. if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that as a whole we move too slowly. and while it may get us somewhere faster, riding along in somebody else’s train may or may not take us where we want to be. i hear a little shrillness in the voices of many librarians who speak or write about the future. we argue with the world at large, insisting that not everything is available online, that libraries are not going out of business. we are insecure about our future and whether we’ll have jobs in ten or twenty years. i appreciate the optimism of those who are prepared to evolve with what comes, but i think that is missing the point a little bit. we should not just adapt to fit our changing present, but plan ahead and prepare and take the future by the throat saying, “throw at me what surprises you will, i am ready for you!” who are our visionaries, who is leading this charge of libraries into the future? i’m really asking you, itlwtlp reader, because i don’t know. i would love to hear about your vision and those you think visionary in the comments below. perhaps if we put our heads together, we’ll start to see a little glimmer of what’s down the road for us. thanks to ellie collier, emily ford, and tom hillard for offering feedback on a draft of this post. future, leadership, learning commons, librarianship, vision, visionaries editorial: all i want for 2010 what water? 9 responses stevenb 2010–01–06 at 8:57 pm i’d like to think that no matter what shape our future libraries take or how they evolve, that design will be an important process that we use to take us there. over at designing better libraries i try to share ideas on how this might work, and why design could help us to create a better library user experience. technology will always be important as a foundation for a strong library, as are the right books and digital content for a strong collection, but what ultimately matters in my vision for future libraries is the relationships that we establish with the members of the user community. information is increasingly commoditized and undifferentiated, so we have to ask why people will use libraries in the future – and what could we do to make libraries unique and more valuable to people. if we can’t answer those questions we may not have much of a future. so any vision needs to emphasize, i think, the important of the relationships you can build with librarians. i am not so worried about who is coming forward with a vision for the future of libraries. i do think it is critically important for librarians, perhaps with direction from the leadership, to develop a sensible vision for their library that reflects the expectations and needs of their user community – but also delivers unexpected and memorable experiences. each library and its community are so unique in ways that a single, central vision for this profession may not be possible. if each library can create a good vision for its future, that will only help to strengthen the entire enterprise. in some recent presentations i have been speaking about the concept of library fitness and how a fit library is a future proofed library. just as achieving personal fitness is a goal for a longer life, achieving library fitness is a strategy for organizational sustainability. i think there are some very basic strategies we can use to achieve library fitness (which i share in the talk – and in an article that should be published later this year). one person who i do think has offered some visionary ideas for the profession is david lankes. you may want to take a look at his blog and some of his projects. gareth osler 2010–01–07 at 7:01 am o, wonder! how many goodly creatures are there here! how beauteous mankind is! o brave new world that has such people in’t! — william shakespeare, the tempestact 5, scene 1 how’s that for a vision ;) rachel 2010–01–07 at 7:40 am you’re obviously american librarians – in a lot of uk universities, library and computing services have been merged for 10 years or more as learning resources centres. obviously there are still challenges for the future, but we need to be thinking about how we are going to provide information to our users rather than worrying about preserving “the library”. jean costello 2010–01–09 at 9:03 am terrific post! all the right observations & questions, just the right tone. thanks, kim. nathan 2010–01–11 at 7:34 am here’s one guy who some (my supervisor among them) see as a leader, particularly for k-12 schools (this is where i’m at): http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/ca6610496.html ellie 2010–01–21 at 12:33 pm thanks kim. i do think as technology is becoming more integrated into so many aspects of our society it does our users a disservice to claim “that’s not our department.” i see technology training and libraries as an excellent fit segueing smoothly into other information literacy topics. i also see many bewildered students wandering in to the library unsure how to proceed with all of the online forms they need to fill out and unsure where to go for help. our school has a phone hotline, but no in person help available. if they don’t have the skills to fill out their financial aid form or sign up for their student email account, how can i teach them how to navigate our library resources? there’s a quote i love that i’ve heard a number of times at my institution, you have to teach the students you have, not the ones you wish you had. so i think finding out what our users need and want from us is a very important step in the process, as well as whether or not it’s something we can reasonably provide. nancy 2010–02–20 at 4:54 pm i am the sole library staff at a young and growing university, and the library was part of the office of information services for the first 5 or so years of the university’s history. this worked because the cio was a librarian. in addition to the cio and the university librarian, there were 5 other it staff in the office of information services. recently there has been a reorganization. now my job title is university librarian and director of student services, and i no longer am in the office of information services. i miss it, and think that as a librarian, i brought a unique perspective to it and served as a bridge between the user and the technology. who knows what the future will bring? i’m still trying to keep a close relationship with my it colleagues, and am now learning the business of student services. dan macdonald 2010–12–21 at 10:20 pm kim, excellent article! i teach leadership courses for a post secondary in canada and you have incredible insight into the fundamentals of leadership. my humblest regards, dan macdonald prof. wajih a alvi 2011–10–07 at 5:20 am thought provoking, no doubt.all confusions & misubnderstandings will disappear once we realize well what a library is? it is an institution that has come into existence long long ago to link the user to information sources, whatever the format. it also used to shoulder the responsibility of preserving for posterity these information sources. but later,with the classification of libraries into different types,this job was entrusted to a particular type of library and others were absolved of this responsibility.we began with clay tablets as records or sources of information, continued with parchment, leaves etc and finally had the print on paper. and, now we have digital resources, available physically in electronic format or accessible remotely as cyber resource. librarian’s job continues to provide the connection. of course in this new/emerging information landscape we have to have new operatiions to provide access and also remodel our services. but the job is the same. definition, aims and objectives and purpose remain unchanged.myh concept of a library simply is: a place where information sources are organised for use. prof. wajih a alvi kashmir this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: what not to do when applying for library jobs – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 24 jun editorial board /34 comments editorial: what not to do when applying for library jobs by editorial board this week we decided to do a “collective wisdom” post about job hunting mistakes. this is an issue affecting every librarian, whether you’ve got a job, you’re in the market, or you’ll begin looking five years down the road. we’ve all made errors in selecting jobs to apply for, drafting our cover letters and resumes, and during interviews. once we realize what we’ve done, we promise ourselves never to repeat them again and create strategies that work for us. many of us have also been on the other side of the table, interviewing great candidates who are amazingly well prepared, and also some applicants who fail to put their best foot forward. this group post is our way of pulling together our collective experiences as both interviewees and interviewers and offering up some practical advice to our readers. we welcome your thoughts, advice, and questions. plan ahead! before you look for a job, while you’re still in school or if you’re getting curious about another facet of the library profession, it is most advantageous to you to schedule informational interviews. ask engaging and meaningful questions to show your curiosity about the institution/organization. ask about work duties, ask about the organizational culture. really get a feel for the place and decide if it’s something to keep on your list for a place of employ in the future. when it’s all said and done, write thank you notes to the people who took the time to speak with you. they will remember you when you return for an interview and in the future you can talk about this experience in your cover letter. if it’s not some place you want to work, you can still occasionally email these people and “update” them on your professional life. you never know, they might have some inside skinny about jobs in that area. currently, i am employed in a library where i conducted an informational interview two years before i eventually landed an actual interview at the institution. colleagues with whom i work everyday are people who received thank you notes from me while i was still in graduate school. -emily as you consider applying don’t worry about your inexperience. while many hiring employers look for applicants with experience in the job for which they’re hiring, some don’t. i, for one, would rather hire someone who demonstrates the desire and capacity to take on a new job. they bring a fresh perspective and an eagerness to learn that those hired laterally often don’t. -joan bernstein don’t apply for a job for which you have no qualifications. you are wasting the time of the people reviewing resumes and your own! they may remember you, and when they do it might be a time when you are qualified. sadly, by then you may have annoyed the wrong people. -derik along those same lines, think hard before applying for a job for which you are extremely overqualified. many libraries won’t hire someone with an mls for a non-librarian position. there’s less of a danger of inciting quite as much ire, but it’s still a waste of their time and yours. -ellie don’t go out for jobs without learning about the organization first. for the most part, the people who have hired me, and, to some extent, the people i’ve hired, are people i know. it isn’t that i’ve ever benefited from nepotism, at least not that i know of, or hired folks because i knew them, but the dynamics of filling open positions, even in the best of times, encourages employers to be risk averse. there’s usually high demand (many current and potential applicants) and low supply (usually just one or two open positions), and there are significant opportunity costs associated with making the wrong decision. the way to reduce a potential employer’s sense of risk is to get to know them in advance, or, at the very least, make sure mutual acquaintances advocate in your behalf. i look back at the times i attempted the job application equivalent of cold calling and shudder. -brett don’t forget about your needs. focus on yourself and your future working life. if you know you don’t want to commute an hour and half in the car each way to work every day, don’t apply for a job that would require this commute. likewise, if you know you are qualified for a position but it sounds like you’ll hate the work, don’t apply. it’s tempting to make these sacrifices, especially in our current economy and with the seeming scarcity of library jobs in certain markets (like portland), but it’s just not worth it. you’re better off poor and happy rather than miserable at your job or hating your commute. (i’ve done both and have vowed never to do either again.) -emily don’t develop an emotional attachment to a job listing. this seems to have occurred most often for me when i applied for a job that seemed perfect, usually because i hadn’t done my networking, so i romanticized the position and employer. emotional attachments also seem to accompany the reach applications, the feeling of, “it would be great if they hired me,” rather than the, “i’m going to be really great at this job the moment i start.” -brett application materials don’t use valuable space in your cover letter to summarize the job description/announcement or rehash facts from your resume. the people reading the letter know what they are looking for, so you should focus on why you are the person that fulfills those qualities. show them how, with narrative that won’t be found on your resume: details, story, analysis, anything that might be relevant, interesting, and positive. -derik i agree with derik that it’s a bad idea to summarize the job description in the cover letter, but on the other hand if you don’t address every job requirement listed in that description and explain how you meet it, you’re also missing out. your search committee members may be reviewing one hundred or more applications, so you can imagine how tempting it is to look for excuses to eliminate candidates from the pool. the cover letter can easily be a make or break element in that initial application review. if you don’t manage in the first page of the cover letter to make it clear how well you fit (and hopefully, exceed) all the requirements of the job in question, your application may get tossed into the backup pile pretty quickly. -kim but don’t bank on your cover letter either. personally, i read every cover letter that comes in and place an extreme amount of importance on applicants’ writing skills. i barely skim the resumes. but i know others who do the opposite. make sure your resume is just as perfect and tailored to the specific opening. don’t bank on your beautiful resume formatting either. chances are you’ll have to put it through some terrible online form that will destroy it. when that happens to me i always clean it up as much as humanly possible for the form, which usually means removing all of the formatting, and then email a pdf. speaking from the hiring side, i’ve only ever received the ugly forms, so either no one else is sending a follow up email or hr isn’t forwarding them. take the time to make the online submission look as nice as you can. -ellie don’t pretend it’s all about you. the “cold call” application also seems to lead to other mistakes i’ve made myself and see all the time in others: telling employers why you want a job or how it will benefit you rather than demonstrating how well you understand the organization and how useful you’ll be in helping the organization achieve its aims. if they don’t know you already, it’s natural to try to introduce yourself (see also: the only thing i’ve ever learned from seth godin). in my opinion, introducing yourself is almost always a mistake. don’t say anything about yourself until you’re asked, in person, and you’re sure they’re really interested. and then keep it brief, something i’m not good at, especially when i’m nervous or eager. -brett don’t overestimate your qualifications. one of the strangest resumes i ever received came from a plumber who applied for the head of reference position. i guess “mls degree” didn’t mean anything to him, so he thought it couldn’t be important. while this is an extreme example, i think it’s important to not over-analyze your qualifications. obviously, you should be in the right ballpark, but even if you’re not sure you’re the perfect applicant, go ahead and give it a shot. it’s the employer’s decision who to interview; don’t do that job for him by ruling yourself out. -joan bernstein don’t lie or exaggerate (excessively) in your cover letter. you may get called on it and look the worse for it. if you claim something is your research interest, be ready to answer questions about that interest with some modicum of intelligence and enthusiasm. -derik don’t write application materials in times of emotional duress. this might seem pretty simple to most people, but i recently had the experience of submitting a job application at a very emotional time. in my case a family member had just passed away and the application deadline, which i had been keeping in the back of my mind, got completely forgotten. i awoke one morning (the day before the deadline) and gasped as soon as i had opened my eyes remembering in shock that i hadn’t yet drafted a cover letter for the position. hurriedly i pieced together a draft over my lunch break and spent my evening hours “refining” the cover letter before i printed the application then drove it to the institution in order to get the application in on time. two days later i revisited the materials out of curiosity and was ashamed to see what i had written. sentences in my letter were missing prepositions, sentences were incomplete. to make a long story short, i should have passed on this job application opportunity and taken care of my emotional self over hurriedly applying for a job. at the very least, i should have had someone else read the cover letter before i pressed “print.” -emily don’t use the same resume without revisions. your resume should be tailored to the job that you’re applying for. it’s critical to take the extra time and attention to showcase how your skills and experience meet the job requirements as described in the position description. and remember that the job requirements are usually ordered from most critical to least critical in terms of reviewing applicants as a good fit for a position. so, if strong communications skills is a requirement that is listed first, make sure you pay particular attention to showcasing what you can bring to the position in terms of your ability to communicate effectively orally, in writing, and in interpersonal communications. if the position description requires experience or expertise with certain programming languages or software and you have that experience, be sure it makes it onto your resume. if your qualifications match the position requirements, then you’ve made it that much easier for the search committee to identify you as a qualified candidate. make sure that there are no spelling errors, that you’ve elucidated each acronym (where appropriate), and if you have gaps in your work history, be sure to clarify why they exist in the cover letter. -hilary don’t experiment with unusual organizational schemas in your curriculum vitae or resume. the search committee is going to be reviewing a whole lot of resumes and it helps them to be able to easily identify your educational background, work history, and other qualifications. if you decide that, say, grouping your past jobs by state sounds like a good idea, you’re going to drive them nuts unless there’s a really good reason to do so. and that’s just not a good foot to start out on. -kim but don’t be scared to try something different if it really makes sense in your particular situation. i came to librarianship from another career and with no library experience. i included a paragraph towards the end of my resume highlighting how my prior experiences explicitly related to the current position’s requirements, then briefly listed the job titles and dates. as i gather more library experience, that will come off, but at the time it showed that i was an experienced professional already and eager to apply those skills to a new field. -ellie once you’ve decided to apply, here are my tips, based on my experiences from the other side of the table: don’t get the name of the library wrong. hint: use the name as shown in the job posting. don’t be late! apply on time—by posted end date. don’t ignore instructions. if asked to apply by e-mail, don’t show up in person with your resume. don’t omit a cover letter. cover letters are important. include one. it shows that you are literate (hopefully) and it spotlights the strengths that make you suited for job. you, not the hiring manager, have a stake in identifying what sets you apart from other applicants. don’t generalize. make the cover letter, and resume, position-specific. generic applications don’t show much commitment on your part, and they communicate laziness. don’t randomize your resume. list most recent experience first. the hiring manager wants to know what you’ve done recently, as well as seeing a pattern of career progression. don’t be vague. be specific about your past responsibilities and accomplishments. don’t exaggerate, but don’t be too modest, either. -joan bernstein screening phone call with hr don’t ignore hr. this is where you have an opportunity to ask questions about the position and the timeline of the search committee process. and this is where you show who you are and your enthusiasm for the job. the people who call you are typically going to be very skilled in listening for how easy you are to talk to, how forthcoming you are with answers to questions, if you’re nervous or if you’re holding back. they bring this information along with your expressed level of interest back to the search committee. if you’re in a hurry to get the phone call over, it will be noticed. be genuine, be honest, be open, and be cheerful. -hilary phone interviews don’t be concise! if your phone interview runs less than a half hour, chances are you didn’t give your interviewers a good flavor for who you are. it’s incredibly difficult to make conversation with invisible people you’ve never met, and it’s doubly difficulty to put the required energy into selling yourself to them on top of it all, but if you don’t you’re going to find yourself back at square one. think of the phone interview less as an interview where you get grilled by the search committee and more as an opportunity to state your case. prepare your message in advance: identify two or three main points you want your interviewers to remember about you and fit those points into whatever questions you get. make the phone interview do what you want while still answering the questions. it’s extremely challenging, yes, but if you can pull it off you’re likely to stand out. -kim don’t freak out. when the people interviewing you on the other end are all in a room together with a speaker-phone, its downright freaky. there are awkward pauses and sometimes you can’t tell whether you’ve lost the phone connection. and you wonder to yourself if they are making faces at each other based on your responses. in my dark, dark past, i royally screwed up a phone interview and i will probably never apply to work at that organization again because of it. i under-prepared and got lost in my responses. however, i learned from it and modified my approach. first, don’t plan on conducting the phone interview in a setting where you’re worried that you’ll be disturbed (is someone likely to knock on your office door?, is it possible that the fire alarm will go off?). stay home or go someplace where you are sure you’ll be left alone. if you’re using your cell phone, make sure you’ve got solid battery life. second, take the advice in the section on “interview preparation” below and practice responding to interview questions. write out your responses and practice them out loud and get them so well-ingrained that you can spout them out at a moment’s notice. i was so scarred from my previous horrible phone interview experience that i wrote my responses on single sheets of paper and color coded them based on the topic so that i couldn’t lose track of what i wanted to say. i practiced these backward and forwards, and on the morning of my next phone interview i taped them up on the walls of my apartment and practiced them again. this phone interview went super—i had a new method that worked and i had regained my confidence in being able to conduct a great phone interview. bottom line: over-prepare for phone interviews. and remember, the people on the other end of the line also probably hate phone interviews too and those awkward silences are because they are writing notes to themselves or are trying to negotiate who responds next without talking over each other. -hilary interview preparation don’t be a generalist. look up the mission statement of the library and/or institution of which it is a part. be prepared to answer why you want to work in that particular type of environment specifically (e.g. academic, public, community college, etc.), not just libraries in general. ask for the names of the hiring committee, find out what you can about them, and whenever possible apply what you’ve learned. some academic hiring committees will have non-librarian faculty on the hiring committee. a particularly impressive applicant tailored her information literacy presentation to a specific assignment on that faculty member’s syllabus. even if you aren’t able to get that specific, be sure to tailor your presentation to the appropriate audience. a presentation on advanced search techniques in a mostly graduate level science database is not going to score you many points with a community college committee. i also have to agree with the others who have mentioned preparing questions for the committee, and not just logistical questions about benefits or when you’ll hear back. you want to know if you’re going to like it here, too. ask them what they enjoy most about coming to work each day at this particular institution or what they think the biggest challenges facing them are in the next year or so. -ellie don’t interview cold. this is important: you must, absolutely must, review the materials that you sent in with your application (resume, cover letter, references, etc.) and make sure that you have the key points about each experience or qualification ready to leverage to answer the interview questions. just as it is vital that you know your own resume and cover letter forwards and backwards, it’s also critical that you know the job requirements and that you have prepared key talking points about how you meet each of the requirements. there are tons of librarian interview question sets on the web (google “librarian interview questions“): use them to prep yourself. write out your responses to the questions, then say your answers out loud. practice with a trusted friend or relative. be prepared to use examples from your past work/classroom experiences to help illustrate what you can bring to the position or to help you answer a question. if you’ve got a list of the people you’ll be meeting on your interview, do a little investigative work on the web and see what projects and initiatives they’re involved with both at the organization that is interviewing you and in the profession as a whole (e.g., are they active in lita, ala, code4lib, sla?). knowing a little bit about each person will give you some insight into what is compelling to them and that will give you an edge in how you respond to interview questions and what kinds of things to chat about when you are walking with a search committee member between sessions or over lunch. and, by all means, prepare questions to ask—write them down and take them with you (google “questions to ask in an interview” if you need ideas). you will be asked if you have any questions during your interview and if you don’t have any questions for them, then it tells your potential employer that you’re really not that interested. -hilary seconding hilary here, in particular—have answers prepared for all the standard questions along with an example from a real life situation. there are a chunk of questions you are almost guaranteed to be asked, don’t let them be the ones that stump you. -ellie don’t treat every library as if it were the same. do your research about each place you interview, and know at least a few unique projects or initiatives that characterize them. if you can drop specific references during your interview you’re going to impress the heck out of them. wow, they’ll think, this person really wants to work here. and that’s what your interviewers want to find—the person who fits their position and their organization. -kim interviewing don’t wing it. look sharp—business casual or suit attire are expected. iron your clothes or get them pressed. wear kick-ass shoes. get a fresh hair cut. you need to feel good about how you look and on an interview day, this is absolutely critical. get sleep so that you have energy. there’s nothing worse than having to interview a candidate who looks tired, acts tired, and is slumping in their chair. shake people’s hands and be confident when you do so. you want these people to like you so you need to offer them a genuine, welcoming, warm handshake. shake everyone’s hand in the room, or at the very least, give recognition to everyone in the room. have a pencil and notepad ready if you feel you need it, but don’t write in it excessively while you’re being interviewed. and don’t write down everyone’s name when you’re introduced to them during an interview session. you can always request a list of the people that you met with from your hr contact at the end of the day if you really need to have an inventory of the folks who interviewed you. if someone asks you a question, look them in the eyes when you respond. if your gaze is all over the place or is focused on the paper in front of you, that tells the people who are interviewing you that you either aren’t confident in your response or that you have poor interpersonal skills. if you’ve practiced what you’re going to say and how you’re going to present yourself, then you should be able to look each person in the eye and express your genuine self. never, never denigrate or complain about someone at your current or former place of employment. seriously, this is a red flag to your potential employer that you have no tact, no professionalism, and no respect. thank each interview group for meeting with you and smile at them! it’s surprising how often nervousness will cause a candidate to keep their face unwelcoming and “frowny”—if you smile, they will smile back at you and you will feel good. simple as that. -hilary if you are doing a presentation as part of your interview, don’t make boring slides: lots of text, lots of bullet points, ugly pre-made templates. often, a presentation is a time during your interview when you will be seeing the largest number of people at once. catching their attention is important and that won’t happen if you are reading bullet points off a long sequence of slides. show creativity, if not originality, or at least steal from someone who shows creativity or originality. -derik don’t be shy! the interview is the only chance your interviewers get to see you in action, so pull together all your reserves of extroverted energy and make the most of the opportunity. be prepared with a list of questions and topics for small-talk to ensure that there is no dead air during your meetings. and for goodness sake, show interest in your interviewers! the easiest way to fill up awkward pauses is by asking them about their jobs and projects. -kim don’t tell the committee you’re nervous. of course you are, everyone is, you don’t need to draw attention to it. if your nerves are acting up so badly that you’re stumbling over the questions excessively, ask to take a moment to collect your thoughts, take a deep breath, a sip of water and continue. -ellie don’t be late. if you are chronic late-runner, the interview is not the time to let that quality shine through. -emily here are my tips for when you are called for an interview: don’t come in unprepared. study the institution’s website. google the institution and the person who’s interviewing you. this will demonstrate that you prepared for the interview and will distinguish you from other applicants. don’t act disinterested. be ready with good questions. you are a better candidate if you are able to engage the hiring manager in discussion. i always appreciated questions that i had to think about before i answered. this showed interest in the position and depth of thought—two definite pluses in a candidate. don’t ever badmouth past employers in an interview. i always thought that if i hired that person, maybe someday he’d be saying that about me! don’t forget to follow up with a thank you note. it’s common courtesy, and also an opportunity to reemphasize your skills and interest in the position. -joan bernstein references don’t only keep in touch with your references when you need their help. your references will be more willing and able to provide good information about your work if they have a personal stake in your well being. send them an e-mail at least a few times a year to let them know how you’re doing, what projects you’re working on, etc. even when you’re not looking for a job. -emily don’t leave your references unprepared. obviously, you want to ask people who you trust will say good things about you to be your references. when you apply for a job and you send your references’ names and contact info as part of your application, make sure to tell your references that you’ve just applied for this job. better yet, tell them before you send in your application materials. maybe they have colleagues at the organization to which you’re applying and can give you some insight to help you better craft your resume and cover letter. by all means give your references the heads up and make sure they have the resume (and maybe even the cover letter) for the job that you’re applying to as well as the job description. tell them why you’re interested in this particular position. you want to prepare your references for being interviewed about you! don’t leave them empty-handed or surprised when they get a call from an interviewer. imagine the kinds of questions that they could be asked (google “references interview questions” if you can’t imagine what these would be) and feed them potential responses by telling them about how you qualify for the job, what you like about the job, and what you like about the organization to which you’re applying. -hilary don’t give lame references. if the people you list on that page are not past supervisors, professors, or other professionals who can really speak intelligently about your strengths and skills, you’re only hurting yourself. the people on your references list should easily match up with your education and work experience listed on your cv or resume. -kim the offer don’t underestimate your value. that’s one error i hope never to make or have to deal with again: not knowing your price. knowing an organization and its expectations doesn’t just mean knowing that you’re going to be an asset, it means knowing how much of an asset you’re going to be. it means getting a starting offer for what you’re worth (and accepting it happily) or being willing to walk away if you don’t get an offer that meets your demands. there’s nothing worse than colleagues who whine about their salaries except, perhaps, being the one who’s doing the whining. -brett after you land the job you’ve just landed a plum job. a nice little bump in pay, something more aligned with your interests, a city you’ve always wanted to live in. time to file the resume away and unsubscribe from all of those pesky jobs rss feeds that were taking up all of your time? nope. odds are, this isn’t the last job you’ll ever have. and if you wait until two weeks before the application is due to get yourself ready for the next job, you’ll find you’ve got a lot of last minute scrambling to do. many library job applications include essays and a brief window of time in which to apply. prepare the basics in advance, and when you’re ready to apply you can focus on customizing your application. have a master resume on hand, something that you update every few months with new accomplishments (while you still remember them). rather than including a general summary of duties, pull highlights from your monthly reports that reference specific projects. it’s a good idea to keep an eye on job postings, even if you’re not on the market. you’ll be in a better position to identify trends, compare salaries, and track which skills potential employers are seeking. you’ll also have a better sense of what you’re getting yourself into. a month or three of scanning the want ads when you’re searching for a new job gives you a snapshot of the current atmosphere. with a year or two of trend watching under your belt, you’ll spot signals that are more subtle or nuanced. why does mclargehuge library repost the same position every eight months? why does tinytown library have such high turnover? by keeping your ear to the ground, you’ll be in a position to act on a good opportunity when it catches your attention, rather than settling for the best you can get when you’ve realized it’s time to move on.  -heidi dolamore guest contributor bios heidi dolamore lives in san francisco with her cat, bicycle, and unpaid library fines. joan bernstein recently retired as director of the mount laurel library (nj). she has spoken, written, and consulted nationally on subjects including the merchandising of public libraries and privacy protection in the library. she served as the president of the new jersey library association from 2006–2007. she can be contacted at joanbernstein@verizon.net. application, career, cover letter, interview, job, resume a conversation with char booth a look at librarianship through the lens of an academic library serials review 34 responses emily 2009–06–24 at 2:38 pm if there’s something in the job description that doesn’t match your qualifications, address it head on and explain how you can compensate. for example, we’re looking for a literature librarian you have a social sciences background? explain what literature background you do have even if it’s not at work, and the ways you would get up to speed if the job were yours. give it a sentence in the cover letter. admit it and explain. tara robertson 2009–06–24 at 7:57 pm thanks for this post full of good advice. it’s very timely for me as i’ve got a phone interview next week. thanks! (and hi heidi!) stephanie 2009–06–25 at 8:53 am great advice! for phone interviews, though – i would not agree with the “don’t be concise” part. at my library, when we schedule phone interviews, we’re usually doing 5 or 6 in a row. we want those calls to only last 30 minutes tops. we tell the applicant that at the beginning of the call. mostly it works out. occasionally, we get a rambler or someone who wants to tell us everything they’ve ever done ever – which means we don’t get a chance to ask all our questions which usually means we’re not calling that person in for a face to face interview. i would recommend finding out at the beginning of a phone interview how much time the search committee has scheduled and then respect that time limit. emily c 2009–06–25 at 9:17 am what a great post! i think about a month ago, lj had a pretty awful article about snagging a job. there was almost nothing helpful in it at all. total opposite of this! i’d have to agree that introducing yourself before a scheduled interview is a potential disaster. trying to introduce yourself before a job is posted is a much better idea. hdc 2009–06–26 at 8:16 pm for academic librarian positions, interviews can be a full day or even two, often meeting many people and being asked similar questions though out the day. a tricky part of this set up (aside from keeping your energy up) is telling your story and answering questions in a consistent way in each of the group meetings while being flexible enough that you don’t sound like a robot. one way to keep things interesting is to think about who you will be meeting in each of the groups – you are usually given a list – and tailor your questions to the kinds of things that each group might care about (potential office mates vs. department heads vs. the library director and his/her advisors). regarding telephone interview strategies: i haven’t had to do one myself yet, but one piece of advice i’ve always considered worth remembering: dress as if you are interviewing in person and not, say, your pajamas. it will have an impact on your attitude and speech. regarding nerves: whenever i get nervous in social situations i imagine that the people i am meeting are good friends of mine that i haven’t seen a while but have a genuine regard for their well-being. i found this to ease the tension and help me maintain a positive frame of mind. and who knows, if you get the job, such relationships might actually develop. lastly, i’d recommend coming up with a creative strategy or idea that has yet to be covered here :) pingback : blog searching assignment | library lady emily ford 2009–07–01 at 2:51 pm i don’t know much about the nuts and bolts of it, but ala has just released a seemingly useful and informative site getting a job in a tough economy. they even have a section called “what do i do if i’m laid off?” even better they recommend itlwtlp as reading. thanks, ala! kate c 2009–07–01 at 7:30 pm very helpful post. fortunately, i’m not job hunting but if/when i am, i’ll keep this post in mind. one thing to add–joan mentions don’t badmouth past employers. i also recommend not badmouthing potential employers after the job application process doesn’t result in your being hired. i shared an interview day with an applicant who later complained about the process on a public forum(on a listserv–this was a while ago). good way to keep yourself from ever being considered by that employer. rachel resnick--hire me! 2009–07–01 at 10:47 pm excellent advice. i think the only thing you didn’t cover was the appropriate resume length. i have received conflicting advice from “experts.” phillip m 2009–07–02 at 7:33 am thanks for these suggestions. i’m in the midst of a job search, and these reminders are good. regarding the interview: i’d add that you should make sure you know just what’s going on. i once had an interview with the library of congress for what i thought would have been a dream-come-true job. they phoned to set up what i thought was the preliminary phone interview. that all went pretty well. turns out, though, that they weren’t doing preliminary phone interviews and that it was actually the final, full, structured interview. so i had only fully prepared for part of the topics covered; i held back a couple things, expecting to bring them up in what i thought would be the ‘real’ interview; and – despite connecting well and feeling pretty good – i didn’t get the job. (at least i don’t think so, it’s been a long time since the interview and they haven’t sent me a ‘thanks, but no thanks’ letter ….) addie 2009–07–02 at 1:51 pm don’t submit a resume with an objective line that states you want to work in a different library than the one you are applying for. i saw this on the last search committee i was on. it’s good to tailor your resume to each job, but be sure to proofread! don’t lie in your cover letter or resume. one applicant claimed membership in an association i happened to be treasurer of. not only was she not a member, she hadn’t been one for several years. leigh anne 2009–07–02 at 3:42 pm thanks so much for an excellent post. i recently spoke to a class of library school students, and strongly suggested they read this, if they hadn’t already, as it contains a lot of good tips they may or may not have absorbed elsewhere… annalaura brown 2009–07–07 at 5:50 pm also make sure that you are really clear about how and why you are qualified. i have heard from search committees before that a large number of applicants fail to prove their qualifications. linda matson 2009–07–08 at 5:15 pm don’t fake it. if you don’t know, say you don’t know. linda matson 2009–07–08 at 5:17 pm and i disagree about not going for paraprofessional positions if you are a librarian. i moved to a new state, had library experience but a brand new mlis, had no contacts. the paraprofessional job gave me local references, got me working, and my employer was not shocked or upset when i found a librarian job within my first year. jobhunter 2009–07–14 at 10:19 am it would be great to see a corresponding list of what-not-to-do’s for employers. for example, take a look at your standard rejection letter and make sure it’s polite and blame-free (“thank you, but we had many excellent applicants” is much better than “we have decided to discontinue your candidacy”). send letters, don’t make phone calls, since there’s nothing like picking up one’s phone to find it’s a completely unanticipated rejection call. (caller id helps, but not everyone has it on every line.) remember when it was you on the other side of the equation, and act the way you wanted to be treated by others! dina 2009–08–03 at 10:19 am i am so glad i came across this, i am getting ready to embark on my mlis. in the meantime, i have applied for several shelver positions and have assumed my 20 years of corporate experience will translate into the skills i need to have, particularly when the job posting only require high school level experience. as of yet i have not gotten a single call. i fear over-qualification has been my nemesis although i think my cover letters have conveyed my reasoning and passion for wanting to work in the ligrary system, as well as, demonstrated how my skills are transferrable. maybe you can help me out? pigbitin mad 2010–10–01 at 5:36 pm dina, if you don’t already work in a public library where they say they will promote you the mlis is a waste of time. the library profession is particularly snobbish when it comes to letting in outsiders and they feel that only those with at least two years of “post grad” mls experience can alight to the top of their lofty tower. your 20 years of corporate (aka “real”) experience will not matter to these people. and unless you are 25 and have a subject masters in science, you can totally forget about getting a job in a university. it is almost as hard as becoming a tenured profesor. fearful o'ire 2009–08–04 at 10:44 am interesting contradictions in this overall helpful piece. 3 sequential recommendations: 1. go for stretch positions. don’t fret about being underqualifiedjoan bernstein 2. for god’s sake, don’t apply for positions for which you’re underqualified – derik 3. know what’s almost as bad as lacking experience? too much experience! you’ll piss people off if you try to get your foot in the door by applying for a position for which you’re overqualified. – ellie apologies for the rant. ellie 2009–08–04 at 2:27 pm different people have different advice. we’ve conveniently collected it all in one place for you :) speaking for myself, i’m just passing on the rants i’ve heard from coworkers when they see people with mlss applying for circulation positions. of course there are people with mlss in circulation positions, so not every place of employment has the same view. i would certainly suggest addressing your over-qualification in your cover letter, since the implicit message without any further information is likely to come across as, “i want a job, any job to get something on my resume and/or to be able to move to this city and as soon as something better comes along i’m gone,” which is unlikely to add points in your favor. joan offered the more standard advice – go ahead and apply for everything, you never know. then derik and i offered our responses – a little stretch may be fine, but let’s not get carried away here… there’s also a difference between the required and the preferred qualifications sections. typically hr will not even pass on the resumes that do not meet the mandatory requirements (e.g. an mls), and if they do leave the weeding of resumes to the library, they still won’t let you hire someone who doesn’t meet the stated minimum qualifications in the job description. plus the library hiring committee will sit there sifting through the resumes growing more frustrated with each one that doesn’t meet the requirements, wondering why these people applied for something that clearly stated it required 5 years of supervisory experience when they have 0. now, on the other hand, if the job description states 2 years experience in the preferred qualification category but none in the required, then by all means, go for it. that is probably a library like joan’s that is looking to hire new graduates. don’t worry if you don’t have all the preferred qualifications. and an additional caveat – everything i just said is coming purely from an academic library perspective. joyce b. 2009–08–12 at 6:55 pm while i find the post “inspirational” and it seems that all people posting about applying for librarian jobs are absolutely “chirpy” the realty is there is no shortage and deciding to apply is a necessity. i am watching my daughter who has had much experience attempt to even land an interview. she is currently working as a paraprofessional, had experience undergrad with the college archivist, did an internship in the college library and in grad school did quite well. so please stop recruiting people for library jobs and acting so happy happy happy. i don’t need to put on my smiley face. derik badman 2009–08–13 at 7:35 am “so please stop recruiting people for library jobs and acting so happy happy happy. i don’t need to put on my smiley face.” joyce, this post is not meant as recruiting (i don’t think any of us are in the position to be hiring anyone), but as advice for those seeking jobs. we realize the job market can be tough, and offer our post as advice in an effort to assist job applicants. kris 2009–08–20 at 2:12 pm until you have a written offer or are into a recognizable progression of events (confirmed date to start, where to report your first day, forms to be processed, fingerpring procedure, etc.), you do not yet have a job. in this economic climate, which seems to be a rerun of 1971-73, 1981-82, 1990-1992, etc., interviewing and networking are part of our profession’s “practice,” so keep at it! academic libraries’ interview committees can become discouraged if freezes are declared midway during successive recruiting cycles. they’ve invested a lot of work already, and don’t even get to meet any candidates. hang in there, everyone! sarah 2009–08–21 at 11:27 am thanks for this post – i’ve read it three or four times since it was written, searching for new angles i should be covering (or not covering, as the case may be) in my job search. could you address the issue of informational interviews in more detail, maybe even in its own post? i’m job hunting in a brand new city with no network of my own. the emails i’ve sent asking for informational interviews have gone unanswered. do you have any tips on how to even get an informational interview set up? i have started to wonder if it’s a foreign concept to most librarians (too “businessy” maybe?) or if it’s only appropriate if you’re still in grad school or a very recent grad (which i’m not). in a particularly worried moment, i wondered if it was a major faux pas to be requesting informational interviews at places which have jobs open you can’t apply for. and then there’s the question of who do you try to contact, the person who has the kind of job you’d like or the person who supervises that position? i could go on and on about what i’ve tried so far, but those questions should give sense of what i (and others) would be interested in hearing. thanks again! ellie 2009–08–25 at 10:41 am for a partial answer – i would say that anything you can do to get a personal introduction helps. the informal interviews i’ve agreed to have all been students that first asked to observe me teach through someone else – either a friend or a former professor. so i’d suggest reaching out to former classmates/professors/association members/friends to get some kind of personal connection into the request. pingback : on the hunt | melissa blog | melissa fortson comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct beta spaces as a model for recontextualizing reference services in libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 18 may madelynn dickerson /1 comments beta spaces as a model for recontextualizing reference services in libraries in brief: reference services are at a cross-roads. while many academic libraries continue to offer reference services from behind a desk, others are moving to roving and embedded reference models. meanwhile, libraries are also engaged in the development of collaborative learning spaces—often rich with technology, such as makerspaces and learning labs—but these spaces are often removed from the reference services environment. beta spaces are another type of collaborative environment used in both public and academic libraries with the potential to infuse energy into the reference space and emphasize research support through experimentation, collaboration, and user contribution. beta spaces are user-oriented environments with a focus on innovation and experimentation, much like a makerspace but with an emphasis on ideas over technology. a beta space model for reference services would enhance opportunities for active learning, help make the research process visible and tangible, and effectively demonstrate the value of reference. introduction by madelynn dickerson if the “library of the future” is an environment in which knowledge is created, not merely preserved and accessed (as arizona state university librarian james o’donnell suggested recently in his keynote at the 2015 charleston conference), then reference services are positioned within this future library to foster that environment (hawkins, 2015). in reality, traditional reference services are often questioned as an effective model for delivery of research support in academic libraries. the reference desk as a physical space was called into question by barbara j. ford in the mid 1980’s and sonntag and palsson boldly stated in 2007 that “it is unquestionably time to eliminate the reference desk and recognize that the services it originally provided have been replaced by course-integrated instruction and research assistance ‘on demand’” (sonntag and palsson, 2007). whether located at a central services desk or compartmentalized as a series of services such as roving or embedded reference, the way we think about reference delivery and the role it plays in the facilitation of intellectual experimentation and student scholarship is under constant pressure to demonstrate relevancy, and it certainly faces competition from both within and outside libraries (campbell, 1992; campbell, 2008; o’gorman and trott, 2009). alternative “spaces” in libraries are not new, but they tend not be built around reference services. beta spaces are defined by jeff goldenson and nate hill as “environments within a larger library ecosystem created to prototype and deploy new ventures” (goldenson and hill, 2013). while this often takes the form of makerspaces or digital labs in libraries, it also describes the work of student researchers (or any library user). scholarship is a “new venture” and the reference space can be a safe place outside of the formal classroom where students can experiment, explore, and even fail without fear of negative consequences. in this article, i explore the concept of the beta space and think about the ways that reference as an activity is one that makes the most sense if delivered in a beta environment. the final section of this article is a narrative case study of my own attempt (which may or may not have been successful) to recontextualize reference services at my library into a collaborative, experimental environment designed to inspire, encourage user ownership of the space, and demonstrate the value of reference. beta spaces: a definition the term “beta space” is not yet commonly used in library discourse, though the word “makerspace” is. makerspaces have been around for over a decade, and according to make magazine, the term began being used widely in 2011 (cavalcanti, 2013). according to the educause learning initiative (eli), a makerspace is a “physical location where people gather to share resources and knowledge, work on projects, network, and build” (“7 things you should know about makerspaces”). though this definition is broad, it emphasizes technology and the physical building of materials in a creative environment. further along in its definition of makerspaces, eli goes on to explain that “makerspaces owe a considerable debt to the hacker culture that inspired them, and many are still primarily places for technological experimentation, hardware development, and idea prototyping”. there are certainly elements of the makerspace in the beta space, but these terms (and these spaces) are not synonymous. the beta space is a prototyping space, but one that focuses more on ideas than technology. in a succinct definition from their article in library journal, jeff goldenson and nate hill describe beta spaces as “environments within a larger library ecosystem created to prototype and deploy new ventures.” both goldenson and hill worked to co-develop two independent beta spaces at their respective institutions, the harvard graduate school of design, and the chattanooga public library. the emphasis for both of these projects was the development of a community that supported experimentation—not just with technology, but with ideas. (goldenson and hill, 2013). chattanooga’s project is called “the 4th floor.” it evolved from the transformation of a 14,000 square foot storage area into a collective learning environment. the space is described as a “public laboratory and educational facility” with a focus on information, design, technology and applied arts. the space features computers with access to interactive online courses, a small collection of business and innovation periodicals, provides access to digital technology, and serves as an events space. harvard’s project was called the labrary. occupying a vacant storefront in harvard square, it was conceived by students as part of the library test kitchen, a course taught at the harvard graduate school of design. unlike the 4th floor, which is a permanent space, the labrary was a 37 day experiment, essentially a “pop-up” library designed to facilitate creative collaboration, exhibit student work, and try out new ideas from the library test kitchen such as tables that play low ambient noise to stave off complete silence (koerber, 2013). makerspaces, technology-rich labs, and the growth of digital humanities in the library space is not without controversy. the makerspace movement can be seen as part of a larger trend of applying a corporate mindset to library services, with a focus on technology and production rather than discourse. there are wider concerns that academic libraries are under pressure to adopt business strategies and focus on library users as “customers” (nicholson, 2015) as well as on the creation of knowledge as a consumable product (ward, 2012). a recent article in the los angeles review of books questions the neoliberal agenda of digital humanities in particular and specifically targets the “promotion of project-based learning and lab-based research over reading and writing” (allington, brouillette, and golumbia, 2016). these concerns are legitimate and it is healthy to question the motivations behind the transformation of any library service. library makerspaces—and by extension, beta spaces—are designed to support active learning through hands-on experiences. kurti, kurti and fleming explain that “maker education is a branch of constructivist philosophy that views learning as a highly personal endeavor requiring the student, rather than the teacher, to initiate the learning process” (2014). i believe that beta spaces offer an opportunity to facilitate collaborative learning outside of the classroom in a way that does not negate the value of traditional scholarship, nor supplant traditional library services, but it does offer an opportunity to enhance them. out of their experimentations, goldenson and hill establish three “shared beliefs” or themes about beta spaces. for them, beta spaces: facilitate real-time knowledge creation are designed for experimentation, and encourage community-driven innovation (goldenson and hill, 2013). it is important to remember the participatory element of beta spaces. the creative activities taking place within beta spaces such as the 4th floor and the labrary are user-driven. the spaces themselves were designed by librarians, faculty, (and in harvard’s case, graduate students), but the work that goes on there is fueled by user inquiry, needs, and creative impulses. a participatory design approach to the development of beta spaces in libraries is therefore at the foundation of the concept. “participatory design” was defined by the council of libraries and information resources (clir) in 2012 as “an approach to building spaces, services and tools where the people who will use those things participate centrally in coming up with concepts and then design the actual products” (participatory design in academic libraries). a beta space is nothing without the people who come into it to try out new ideas, whether through discussion, a more formal reference interview, the exhibition of user-created work, or even a creative response to a display prompt. the idea box at the oak park public library in illinois is an example of a beta space-type environment that is set up by library staff, but then powered by the creativity of the public who interact with and add value to the space through participation. the idea box is a 19’ x 13’ glass-walled storefront with regularly rotating displays that encourage people to come in, “tinker,” and experiment. the range of activities in this space has included magnetic poetry, advice sharing, dancing, and oral histories—all driven by user contribution. staff may have painted the room with magnetic paint and populated it with word fragments, but the poems were created by visitors and it is the visitors who give this space meaning (library as incubator project, 2013). with these examples in mind, a beta space can perhaps be summed up as: a space within the library environment designed to facilitate knowledge creation in real-time through user participation and experimentation. this is also what i consider to be the heart of reference services. beta spaces and reference services reference as a library service can encompass a range of activities, depending on the type of library and its particular mission. i have attempted to identify a core definition of “reference services” from ala’s reference and user services association (definitions of reference – reference & user services association), but found only definitions for the components of this service: “reference transactions” and “reference work.” according to rusa, reference transactions are “information consultations in which library staff recommend, interpret, evaluate, and/or use information resources to help others meet particular information needs.” the makeup of this reference work “includes reference transactions and other activities that involve the creation, management, and assessment of information or research resources, tools, and services” (rusa). these definitions were last approved in 2008 by the rusa board of directors and describe a fairly straightforward exchange between library staff and user, one that emphasizes the transference of information from authority figure to knowledge seeker and explicitly excludes formal instruction. with this definition, it is easy to see why reference services are at a cross-roads. an informal survey of reference services mission statements and statements of philosophy shows a broader scope for reference and research support services in both academic and public libraries. the mission statement for research and information services at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign, for example, states: “the research and information services is the university library’s central hub for research assistance, leading patrons to the discovery of library resources and expert help. we provide assistance to researchers working in all disciplines, help people to locate difficult to find items, and make referrals to subject specialists when appropriate. we support the educational mission of the university by approaching research support services from an instructional perspective, and by fostering user independence and the development of information literacy skills” (mission statement & vision). while couched in the practical (i.e. locating items and making referrals), this mission statement addresses the centrality of reference services to the overall mission of the library, and encompasses instruction in a way that the rusa definition does not. likewise, new jersey’s newark public library philosophy of service puts reference at the very center of what the library does. newark goes so far as to say: “reference service at the newark public library is one of the most vital and visible expressions of the library’s purpose and mission and is key to each of the library’s four primary service roles: to serve as a center for information, formal education, research and independent learning” (reference services policy – the newark public library). in many cases, however, reference services are not explicitly addressed in the library mission statements and the physical footprint of these services is being dismantled in some libraries. the news is often alarmist. in 2010, a los angeles times article on libraries in the digital age opened with the declaration that a public library in the denver area replaced its reference desk in order to make space for patrons to play “guitar hero” (sarno, 2010). in his 2013 study, “shall we get rid of the reference desk,” dennis b. miles found that a large percentage (66.4%) of academic libraries still use a physical desk to deliver reference services. but libraries are experimenting. in addition to desk-based services, librarians are engaged in roving reference, are consolidating service points (such as merging reference and circulation), and are offering more in-office consultations with students (miles, 2013). at sonoma state university, the reference desk has gone through a number of transitions in recent years, starting with a roving reference program in 2012 and the consolidation of the reference and circulation desks. while the combined desk allowed for more efficient staffing, it also served as a central place for answering quick directional questions and contacting subject specialists on an on-call basis (lawson & kinney, 2014). in 2001, librarians at northwest missouri state university completely removed their traditional reference desk and instead invested time in embedded instruction (both in the classroom and online), among other just-in-time services (meldrem, mardis, & johnson, 2005). this model essentially disperses the research activities central to the work of the library across campus and within the online environment. there is an uncomfortable tension between the stated value of reference services in library mission statements and the threat to the visible presence of these services in the physical environment through a dispersal of services or a limitation of services behind a static desk. many of the newest and most exciting spaces in libraries are technology-rich spaces such as makerspaces and digital labs, but these are often built out in separate classroom-like spaces. even the 4th floor at the chattanooga public library, a great example of a successful beta space, is quite removed from the primary services desk. if a library does have a reference desk, its function is surely in question when the new super-star room filled with collaborative technology and innovative resources pops up down the hall. instead, i see the potential in developing reference services spaces—such as a research or information commons space—as a beta space. instead of dispersing reference services, they can be integrated into the fabric of a creative, user-driven environment where a research consultation is not merely a “transaction.” goldenson and hill’s three themes for beta spaces (real-time knowledge creation, experimentation, and community-driven innovation) are very much in line with the scope of reference services. because users are actively engaged in the research process while using reference services—or have the potential to be while asking more directional questions at the reference desk—the beta reference space is an ideal environment to make research visible through collaborative inquiry, curated reference source collections, and interactive and other displays/exhibits like those in the idea box at oak park. placing reference within the beta space helps to clarify the services offered, inspire other researchers about what is possible, and educate users on available resources. focusing on knowledge creation within reference services validates the work of the library user and helps to establish a healthy symbiotic relationship between library staff and user. a (very beta) first foray when i was hired in july 2014 as the information specialist overseeing reference services at the pearson library at california lutheran university, the lines between reference services, circulation, and information literacy were fluid and confusing. the official home base for reference services was the “information commons” (ic desk), a dilapidated desk with two office chairs for staff on one side and a bank of 5 public computer workstations on the other. open every day from 10am-10pm during the semester, the ic desk was mainly staffed by students cross-trained in circulation. the circulation desk served as a de-facto reference desk during periods of understaffing. i needed to figure out what reference meant for us, how to ensure that it was meaningful to users and to the staff who worked there, and how to isolate it as a singular service in order to market it. in order to do this, i unconsciously drew on my experience teaching at an art school, where the students spent hours working in an atelier environment learning new techniques through trial and error. i was also greatly inspired by my very first library school class at san jose state university in spring 2015: “innovation and participatory programming in libraries,” taught by monica harris, to whom i owe a great deal of credit. this is where i learned about beta spaces. information commons desk with directional sign above at the ic desk, we were experiencing healthy patron interaction statistics. based on internal statistics collected on springshare’s libanswers reference analytics from fall 2014, the ic desk logged a monthly average of 101 in-person patron interactions and through libchat, desk staff engaged in an average of 116 online chats with patrons per month (serving an fte of approximately 4,100—about 2800 undergraduate and 1300 graduate students). most of the time, the desk was staffed with students while librarians were on-call. the stats seemed good, but anecdotally, there was a lack of awareness about reference services at the ic desk and low morale for those who worked at the “isolation corner.” many users came to circulation to ask reference questions and were annoyed at being redirected to the desk behind them. as the reference coordinator, it was challenging to staff the desk with librarians, who were heavily engaged with instruction and weren’t consistently able to commit to regular hours at the desk. for me, the information commons’ mission to “support research and learning by offering a conceptual, physical, and instructional space designated to deliver, instruct and gather information” was in question. it wasn’t really a commons. it was just a desk. with the support of the library director, i set out to establish a strategic plan for reference services (as a service and as a space) and as i developed these plans, they began to solidify around the concept of the beta space. the strategic plan’s stated mission was to “inspire research by providing a variety of research services to best meet the needs of clu students, faculty and staff by creating a scholarly environment that supports student learning across departments.” the plan was founded on five primary goals, which were stated with no clear timeline, and were based on an outline developed by nina simon in the participatory museum in order to evaluate success. goals for reference services at pearson library establish an environment of intellectual curiosity and exploration at pearson library raise campus awareness of research resources provided by pearson library increase number of meaningful patron interactions at the reference services desk increase opportunities for experiential learning at pearson library increase opportunities for clu community to share perspectives and experiences an important part of setting up a framework for later evaluation was not just thinking about the goals for the service, but about how users would ideally be affected by interacting with us. these desired outcomes are admittedly lofty. desired user behaviors and outcomes learn more about research resources and effective utilization of these resources visit and use the library more often, whether a student looking for research assistance, or faculty looking to support learning in their classroom perceive library as a center for rigorous scholarship on campus perceive library as a fun and approachable space for informal learning develop academic confidence and intellectual curiosity that leads to a life of learning outside the classroom the plan was to transform the ic desk into the “collaborative research commons” and to think of reference services as operating not just from a desk, but as encompassing all of the space around it—including the glass atrium, mobile furniture, and exhibit furniture that was already near the desk. the desk itself was due for an upgrade so i proposed moving it to a slightly more central location (but in fact just a few feet away) and adding truly collaborative furniture around a mobile, u-shaped central desk. proposed relocation of the “collaborative research commons”   proposed floor plan for the collaborative research commons the collaborative research commons would both replace and enhance existing ic desk services. instead of being parallel to the circulation desk near the entrance to the library, the new collaborative research commons would be located adjacent to the library’s open-air central atrium, which could be leveraged as exhibition and workshop space. this is where i imagined that research would truly become visible. students working in the space can be seen from all corners of the building and completed work can be hung on the glass. aligning the new desk to this idea box-like space was central to the renovation proposal. the new area would feature a more open, approachable (and mobile) desk that faces approaching patrons coming in through the front doors. optionally, a back-facing desk would face the general computer lab and serve as technology help, which did not have a public-facing desk in the library. surrounding the service desk(s) would be four round tables (on casters) with seating for between four to six people each. these tables would serve small groups working together on projects, as well as space for longer research consultations with librarians. they would not have mounted computers (as in the existing ic desk area), which impede mobility and effectively block communication between staff and patrons. laptops, tablets, and other technology could be brought into the space if needed from the existing mobile lab. these tables could also serve small classes coming in to do research together, which until then had relied on rows of desktop computers in the computer lab. by transforming the information commons into a “collaborative research commons,” which emphasizes the activity as opposed to the resource, we would be employing a “beta space” approach to reference services that encourages exploration of ideas and a cooperative learning environment based on social interactions and participatory practice. including collaborative tables and exhibition space into the overall research space is a way of “envision[ing]…boundaries in more porous ways” (rogers and seidl-fox, 2011). the space would become a classroom-like space outside of the traditional classroom allowing librarians to meet with students and faculty for research appointments, not tucked away in back offices, but at one of the round tables with a laptop, for example. now for the reality check. during the 2014-2015 academic year, we were not able to realize the physical transformation of the space through renovation, though library administration approved of the ideas and design consultants were brought in. the money just wasn’t available that year. but we ran a series of successful programs that demonstrated the potential of the beta reference space and generated new energy around reference services as the central arm for outreach and research support (as opposed to access services or information literacy instruction). in our first event, the atrium windows were used for the first time as gallery space for a student exhibition of islamic calligraphy and a small reception was held adjacent to the ic desk in december 2014. students and faculty came to speak about their work learning a new language and artistic technique through experiential learning in this calligraphy course. hanging the islamic calligraphy show on the atrium windows in 2014 the following semester, the space was used to display erasure poetry made from weeded library materials by staff, faculty, and students. the atrium hosted two creative writing classes in which students added their final products to both the atrium’s windows and to the april national poetry month display, and were assisted by reference staff as they navigated the exhibit space and selected source material for their poems. the ic desk also served as a stop for a poetry prompt station (staffed by the same faculty member who brought her creative writing classes into the atrium) where library visitors also had an opportunity to add their work to the display. students writing poetry inside and outside the atrium, our “idea box” of sorts at pearson library   adding new work to the april national poetry month display   students began to add their work to the atrium windows after writing poetry in a class session held in the atrium the events we held that year in the atrium and space around the ic desk may or may not have happened regardless of the strategic plan for reference services. but we were intentional in making the (in this case) creative scholarship visible and placing these creative activities around ongoing reference activities at the services desk. physical transformation of the space as proposed would help to cement the connection between the process of research and the resulting scholarship on display. going forward, we would need to expand beyond art and poetry in order to truly align reference activities to the generation of new scholarly ideas and demonstrate the value of reference services by highlighting evidence of learning outcomes, student accomplishments, and models for inspiring research projects. the official collaborative research proposal included dozens of thematic starting-off points to generate research ideas and pull in work from ongoing courses with amenable faculty members in a range of disciplines. ideas included inviting campus wellness center staff to serve as “reference librarian for the day” during health awareness month in january with interactive displays and resources on health topics; a “blind date with a book” display with a table set up for users to write valentine’s day love notes to their favorite books during february; and a mobile technology workshop with resources on creating short videos on tablets and ipads with an option to play the films on screens mounted in the space. the fact was that we tried these new programs in a fairly haphazard and difficult-to-assess way by making connections with faculty willing to experiment with new library spaces. we started to collectively think about the ic desk as something more than a little desk with a bank of computers and more as the potential hub of the library. to truly assess the impact of the renovation and actual utilization of a collaborative research commons, the following methods of assessment were identified as part of the proposal: measure and compare length and type of patron interaction taking place at reference desk before and after implementation of beta space project changes using libanswers reference analytics tool; align interactions with acrl framework as is currently done with information literacy instruction. include questions about awareness and effectiveness of environment and services in library survey deployed annually to students. offer short point-of-service surveys (such as reply cards) at time of patron interaction and/or program or event. measure attendance at programs and workshops. as programs are designed, define intended learning goals; document evidence of student learning through collection of work and/or photographs of participation and work (such as collecting found poetry and taking pictures of exhibition space after participants have added their work to it). add a question about reference space to course evaluation for classes that utilized the space during the semester. over time, collaborate with the alumni affairs department to identify post-graduation activities of participants and their continued perceptions of the library after graduation. our work was decidedly beta. we tried something new and made some concrete proposals. many libraries do the same kind of work and run the same kinds of programs that we did, but we placed these programs within the reference environment and linked the products of creative scholarship to the research process through physical association, and mindfully reconceptualizing the reference space as an informal learning environment founded upon experimentation. it is impossible to truly assess the success of what we did (beyond the communal feeling that we were on to something) because the collaborative research commons proposal wasn’t actualized and the methods of assessment couldn’t be tested. i left the pearson library the following summer and i know creative work continues to be done there, but i can’t know for sure how much of the original proposal will be supported in my absence. conclusion questions have been raised about the value of reference services in the 21st century library. what value does it offer users? how are users engaging with reference spaces? applying a participatory design model to reference services is an alternative to dismantling it all together or dispersing it to the point of invisibility. as libraries design and develop collaborative learning commons, digital labs, makerspaces, and beta spaces, why not centralize them around reference services. if these are the places where users engaged in new ideas and technologies really want to be, then what better way to facilitate new learning and guide the process than the physical and conceptual merging of beta with reference? in his 2009 article, “libraries and learning: a history of paradigm change,”scott bennett wrote the following in regard to library learning spaces designed in the 1990’s and early 2000’s: “some features of a learning-centered design – with the generous provision of group study spaces and information and learning commons chief among them – are now regular features of library planning. it is far from clear that our concern with learning goes much beyond these features, however” (bennett, 2009). i believe that incorporating the ethos of the beta space into the library learning space, and placing reference services within this context, is a way to take this next step. in my dream of dreams, academic reference librarians and subject specialists would not have offices deep in the back of the library building only to emerge for a couple of hours at the reference desk, but they would be permanently based out in the open—visible models for research and intellectual engagement in a user-driven, participatory environment like a beta space. understaffing is likely to continue to be a problem for many libraries long into the future, and the beta space model is an experimental step towards blurring the lines between faculty office, classroom, scholar commons, and gallery. librarians would not have static “shifts” out at a desk, or recede into the depths of an interior office to hold consultations. in the beta space model, there are opportunities to place librarians more permanently in public spaces by placing their offices within the space. this has the potential to relieve some of the pressure on reference librarians forced to bounce back and forth between office, desk, and classroom. it also has the potential to infuse reference services with subject expertise from teaching faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars. it could be a place where faculty or graduate “subject experts” could hold public office hours or drop-in research sessions, groups could engage in collaborative research projects, and technology experts could triage technology questions. these alternative activities keep the space alive even if there isn’t a reference librarian on duty at a given time. again, these things aren’t necessarily new to reference services, and these activities may be happening in other parts of the library or across campus, but i see an opportunity to centralize these key learning activities around reference services. in terms of curating the products of knowledge creation, our work at pearson library captured primarily examples of creative work—poetry, art, etc. but other examples could include collections of bound theses and dissertations, screens highlighting student and faculty work collected in institutional repositories, physical collections of student or community newspapers, campus journals, zines, or thematic user-curated displays of library materials. white boards, chalk-board paint, over-sized sticky notes, and tables topped with white-board surfaces are just some of the ways to collect the ephemera of the research process within the reference space. in addition, these activities support focus on student creation of knowledge as part of information literacy education as described in the acrl framework and have the potential to be expanded into a larger information literacy program in collaboration with other library departments (“framework for information literacy for higher education”). showcasing the work of student and faculty researchers provides a model and a shining light of what is possible. it is both inspiring and encouraging. when this is done in the active, participatory environment of the beta reference space, research is highlighted as both an end-goal and a process. the heart and soul of reference services is the personal interaction between librarian and user, which is itself an entrypoint into intellectual discourse. as technology evolves, this interaction takes on many forms—it can be a telephone call, an online chat, an embedded classroom session, or a conversation while sitting in front of a computer workstation. reference services is not bound by a desk, nor even by a room, but allowing the reference space to incorporate the elements of the beta space through display, participation, collaboration, and simple conversation, the “beta space” model positions reference services as essential to branding the library and facilitating an environment of intellectual curiosity and exploration. this might not work for every library—not everyone has a central atrium of course—but i truly believe in the value of reference services and in the value of the beta space. by merging the two, libraries offer a unique opportunity for user empowerment, demonstration of value, and research support. i would like to offer my most sincere thanks to ian beilin and kate adler for their incredibly meaningful feedback and guidance during the peer review process. as the internal reviewer for in the library with the lead pipe, ian offered supportive, substantive commentary on multiple drafts and some keen editing skills. kate made connections i wouldn’t have thought of on my own as external reviewer, and i have greatly valued her insights. many thanks to erin dorney, publishing editor at in the library with the lead pipe, for her support and guidance. i would also like to sincerely thank monica harris for first introducing me to the beta space. thank you! references 4th floor – chattanooga public library. (n.d.). retrieved from http://chattlibrary.org/4th-floor 7 things you should know about makerspaces (n.d.). retrieved from https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli7095.pdf bennett, s. (2009). “libraries and learning: a history of paradigm change.” portal: libraries and the academy. 9(2), 181-197. campbell, j.d. (1992). “shaking the conceptual foundations of reference: a perspective.” rsr: reference services review, 20(4), 29-36. campbell, j.d. (2008). “still shaking the conceptual foundations of reference: a perspective.” the reference librarian, 48 (100), 21-24. cavalcanti, g. (2013, may 22). “is it a hackerspace, makerspace, techshop, or fablab? make magazine.” retrieved from http://makezine.com/2013/05/22/the-difference-between-hackerspaces-makerspaces-techshops-and-fablabs/ definitions of reference – reference & user services association (rusa). (n.d.). retrieved from http://www.ala.org/rusa/resources/guidelines/definitionsreference ford, b. j. (1986). “reference beyond (and without) the reference desk.” college and research libraries, 47(5), 491-94. “framework for information literacy for higher education” (2015, feb 2). american library association. retrieved from: http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework goldenson, j., & hill, n. (2013, may 16). “making room for innovation.” library journal. retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/05/future-oflibraries/making-roomfor-innovation/#_ hawkins, d. (2015, nov 5). “star wars in the library.” charleston conference blog. against the grain. retrieved from: http://www.against-the-grain.com/2015/11/star-wars-in-the-library/ kurti, s., kurti d., & fleming l. “the philosophy of educational makerspaces: part 1 of making an educational makerspace.” teacher librarian. 41(5), 8-11. koerber, j. (2013, may 28). “looking through the labrary lens: lessons from the library test kitchen.” library journal. retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/05/buildings/lbd/looking-through-the-labrary-lens/#_ “library as incubator project.” (2013, june 26). out of the archives: live art & community participation in the oak park public library idea box. retrieved from http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=5025 medlrem, j., mardis, l., and johnson c. (2005). “redesign your reference desk get rid of it!” in currents and convergence: navigating the rivers of change : proceedings of the twelfth national conference of the association of college and research libraries, april 7-10, 2005, minneapolis, minneapolis, minnesota. chicago: association of college and research libraries. miles, d. (2013). “shall we get rid of the reference desk?” reference & user services quarterly, 52: 4, 320-333. retrieved from https://journals.ala.org/rusq/article/viewfile/2899/2972 mission statement & vision. (about research and information services). retrieved from http://www.library.illinois.edu/rex/about/mission.html o’gorman, j., & trott, b. (2009). “what will become of reference in academic and public libraries?” journal of library administration, 49:4, 327-339. retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01930820902832421 nicholson, k. p. (2015). “the mcdonaldization of academic libraries and the values of transformational change.” college & research libraries, 76(3), 328-338. participatory design in academic libraries: methods, findings, and implementations. (2012, october). council on library and information resources. retrieved from http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub155/pub155.pdf reference services policy – the newark public library. (n.d.). retrieved from http://www.npl.org/pages/aboutlibrary/reference_policy.html sarno, d. (2010, nov 12). “libraries reinvent themselves as they struggle to remain relevant in the digital age.” los angeles times. retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/nov/12/business/la-fi-libraries-20101112 simon, n. (2010). the participatory museum. santa cruz, calif.: museum 2.0. sontag g., & palsson, f. (2007). “no longer the sacred cow – no longer a desk: transforming reference service to meet 21st century user needs.” university of nebraska: lincoln libraries. retrieved from http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/oaiart?codigo=2293893 ward, s. c. (2012). neoliberalism and the global restructuring of knowledge and education. new york: routledge. beta spaces, learning commons, makerspaces, reference services, research support considering outreach assessment: strategies, sample scenarios, and a call to action inclusivity, gestalt principles, and plain language in document design 1 response pingback : a reference redo | acrlog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct say what? exploring “the most interesting place in the city” – the comments section of online news articles – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 16 dec margot hanson and annis lee adams /1 comments say what? exploring “the most interesting place in the city” – the comments section of online news articles image by flickr user marc wathieu (cc by-nc 2.0) in brief online commenting culture can be intriguing. do people comment on news articles about libraries? what do they say? these are the questions that led us to study public comments in response to news articles about libraries in major u.s. newspapers. newspaper articles were selected for analysis based on their relevance to libraries and the number of comments the articles received. we wondered: does the public see us as a “growing organism” or a stagnant, out-of-date dinosaur? a content analysis of these comments provides a snapshot of public opinion and perception. listening in on online conversations about libraries can provide insight into how the public views libraries and library services. people are taking the time to engage in online conversation about libraries, and librarians can learn from these discussions, either through passive or active participation. by margot hanson and annis lee adams introduction despite popular warnings of “don’t read the comments!” and “don’t feed the trolls!” we are fascinated by the culture of online commenting and find ourselves drawn to the comments sections of various online venues: news articles, youtube videos, blog posts, and other user generated content. we decided to pursue this interest as a multi-stage research project related to libraries. we initially focused on academic libraries via u.s. higher education periodicals (hanson & adams, 2014, april), then shifted to broader library topics found in u.s. newspapers (hanson & adams, 2014, november). despite trolling and other bad behavior, we were optimistic we would find useful conversations in the comments section that could provide insights for libraries. the pew internet & american life project report on how americans value public libraries in their communities also inspired us to investigate public opinion about libraries as seen in online comments. we started by identifying what types of unsolicited comments were being made about libraries without the motivation of surveys and incentives, as well as which topics generated the most interest among readers. the comments revealed what commenters like and dislike about libraries. we offer a sneak peek of what to expect from possible proponents and detractors through representative sample comments. hopefully, our research can help readers prepare plans for advocacy and marketing on behalf of their libraries. literature review one of the studies that motivated our current project was the pew internet & american life project report on how americans value public libraries in their communities. according to this 2013 report, americans strongly value the role of public libraries in their communities, both for providing access to materials and resources and for promoting literacy and improving the overall quality of life. most americans say they have only had positive experiences at public libraries, and value a range of library resources and services. (zickuhr, rainie, purcell, & duggan, p. 1) we were curious whether unprompted comments made by self-selecting commenters would share similar sentiments to those found in the pew research study. the pew research center followed up with a report on libraries at the crossroads in 2015 (horrigan), and we use the findings from that report as a point of comparison. studying user comments on news articles is a compelling sphere of research. comments can potentially reach the same readers as the articles they are associated with, and because of the flipped role from reader to content contributor, the ability to comment provides a forum for dialogue. commenting functionality is an equalizer—anyone can comment, and one doesn’t need special resources, wealth, or power to post comments. it enables readers to submit their own viewpoints, then discuss and deliberate with other commenters using the original article as the springboard or framework (springer, engelmann, & pfaffinger, 2015). multiple studies have found that online comments affect readers’ understanding of article content (anderson et al., 2013; felder, 2014; lee, 2012). felder details the effect comments can play in shaping perceptions of news sites’ quality, concluding that sites must moderate or limit public comments for the benefit of site traffic and discourse (2014). exhortations against reading the comments section are grounded in sound advice. suler (2004) explains that people express themselves online in ways that they never would in real life interactions. the extreme form of this behavior, referred to as trolling, is characterized by gleeful destruction or disruption. one study has found a correlation between trolling and the dark tetrad of personality: narcissism, sadism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism (buckels, trapnell, & paulhus, 2014). in addition to their potential for disruption, online comments have been found by some researchers to be frequently irrelevant to the topic at hand (edgerly, vraga, dalrymple, macafee, & fung, 2013; reagle, 2015). eliminating anonymity and moderating comments can improve both the quality and relevance of comment discourse (reagle, 2015). methods using circulation figures from the alliance of audited media, we identified u.s. newspapers that had a large digital circulation (as of march 2013). of those top newspapers, we narrowed the list of publications for this project based on whether the online version was searchable, allowed for date range limiting, and had publicly accessible comments made by readers. these criteria trimmed our list to the top three digitally circulated newspapers, and we added a fourth to provide local relevance to our regional library community. the newspapers included in this study are: the new york times, the wall street journal, usa today, and sfgate (the website of the san francisco chronicle). in each publication selected, we searched for the terms [library or libraries] and limited the date range to july 2013 through july 2014. our search limits yielded a total of 129 articles, 54 of which had comments (see appendix a: https://goo.gl/guahq2). 75 of the articles from our initial search results generated zero comments. 55 of these did not allow comments, and 20 did allow comments but had none. for our analysis, we included opinion pieces and blog articles on newspapers’ sites as well as standard news articles because they contribute to the dialog about libraries. we use “article” as an umbrella term. our sample consisted of 693 comments from a subset of 51 articles (see appendix b: https://goo.gl/nmoixz). three articles generated over 200 comments (see figure 1), which we excluded from our analysis. because the articles represented in our sample elicited an average of 29 comments, we were concerned that including articles with a disproportionately high number of comments would skew the overall topic coverage. for example, the fourth-highest-commented-upon article garnered 158 comments. this article about obama’s presidential library elicited many comments that focused on the preservation of history and floated that topic above others. we manually copied article metadata into a spreadsheet and recorded the type of library discussed in each article. next, we copied individual comments with their associated metadata. using a content analysis framework, defined by (babbie, 2007) as “the study of recorded human communications” (p. 320), we analyzed 693 comments. to develop a categorization system, we read the first 100 comments together to identify topic areas and establish consistency in our application of the topics. then, we divided the remaining comments to apply topics individually, conferring with each other periodically. we developed three questions with which to analyze the comments: what do people want from a library? what do people value about libraries? what library services can people do without? the first question examined what commenters wrote about services or materials they want libraries to provide now or in the future. we coded these as “desire.” regarding the second question, we coded comments with “value” when the commenter was aware that the library is already doing something, and they expressed appreciation. in response to the third question, when comments conveyed dissatisfaction with libraries in some way, we coded these as “doesn’t value.” online comments mirror the ephemeral nature of the internet; comments are added at different times, and although most comments are made during an initial spark of interest after the publication date of an article, more may be added at a later date. depending on the commenting policy of the publication, comments may be removed by the editors. comments may also be removed by the commenters themselves, and unlike the articles, there will be no record of “corrections” or “errata” for comments. if a publication transitions to a new commenting platform (from disqus to facebook, for example), past comments could be lost. because of these factors, our research project focuses on a snapshot in time. we examined comments made on articles during a specific time period, and those comments may or may not continue to exist in their original location in the future. due to the self-selecting nature of commenting culture, this project is not intended to encapsulate public opinion as a whole. we cannot claim that the comments we analyzed are representative of the general public, nor can we say that they are comprehensive. instead, we present results based on an existing public set of metadata produced by a group of motivated readers. results & discussion among the 54 news articles with comments, the predominant focus was on topics related to public libraries (40 articles, or 74%). a few articles also discussed other library types, such as special libraries (5 articles, or 9%), international libraries (4 articles, or 7%), academic libraries (3 articles, or 6%), and school libraries (3 articles, or 6%). some articles mentioned more than one type of library. public libraries are the most publicly visible of library types, as they are open to all members of a community (compared to special, academic, or school libraries, which allow entrance to specific patrons). it seems natural to us that news article coverage of libraries would focus on public libraries. due to the nature of most libraries being tied to a physical location, articles tended to highlight regional issues pertaining to their local public libraries. of the 54 articles that had comments, four of them garnered more than 100 comments each, indicating topics that generated high interest among readers between july 2013 and july 2014 (figure 1). the article that received the most comments, at a total of 368, was from sfgate in march 2014 explaining the san francisco public library’s new patron code of conduct (knight, 2014). the second highest-commented article generated 283 comments in the new york times, and detailed the decision by the new york public library in may 2014 to scrap its controversial plan to renovate one of their locations (pogrebin, 2014). an article from october 2013 on sfgate received 230 comments in response to coverage of the arrest at the glen park library branch of the “mastermind” behind the online shopping site silk road (lee, 2013). the fourth highest-commented article was published in the new york times in february 2014 about plans for the obama presidential library, which generated 158 comments (rybczynski, 2014). for a list of all articles with the associated number of comments, see appendix a: https://goo.gl/guahq2. at the other end of the spectrum, 20 of the articles in our initial search results allowed comments but had none. although trolling is rampant in many online forums, we didn’t encounter much incivility in the comments we analyzed. we attribute this to the mediated comment platforms used by online news publications, which maintain community discussion policies. many publications make use of third-party commenting platforms (such as disqus, viafoura, or livefyre), which require users to log in with an account. some publications employ facebook or google+ as commenting platforms, which not only require a login but also attach commenters’ actual identities to their shared opinions. many of the comments we analyzed did not directly address the coverage of the article. this is a common finding among studies which examine online comments (edgerly, vraga, dalrymple, macafee, & fung, 2013; reagle, 2015). of the comments that were relevant to the article topic about libraries, most expressed positive sentiment toward libraries (see figure 2). it is likely that some of the positive comments were written by library staff. in a few instances, commenters self-identified as librarians, library staff, library board members, retired librarians or friends and family of librarians. however, it was impossible to accurately identify the affiliation of all commenters. most prevalent comment topics we identified 22 topic categories discussed in the comments (see appendix c: https://goo.gl/fsibxj), and the following five topics were most prevalent in the comments. free access to information was the most discussed topic followed, in descending order, by physical collections, preservation of history, impact on community, and library as place (figure 2). in the following sections, we share comments that represent the most common sentiments or arguments made in each topic category. these can provide information to librarians who are making a case for a particular area of their libraries. these comments demonstrate the thoughts of the public from both sides of each topic. for the purposes of the following sections we grouped comments coded as “desire” and comments coded as “value” into a general positive category compared to negative comments that express dissatisfaction with libraries, or “doesn’t value”. we did this because “desire” or “value” comments indicated that commenters still believe in the importance of libraries. it is important to note that the number of positive comments far outweighed the number of negative comments. in the sections below, we provide at least one positive comment and one negative comment, so that our readers can get a sense of what the commenters expressed both positively and negatively, but this one-to-one ratio does not imply that the negative comments were of equal weight to the positive. in the following comment samples, we have maintained the original spelling and grammar. free access to information as one commenter notes, “since carnegie, libraries are in cahoots to inform the public for free.”1 libraries are commonly recognized as bastions of intellectual freedom and continuing education, and many comments reflected this core library mission. we categorized these comments under “free access to information.” in this category we labeled comments which addressed issues of public access to a wide variety of balanced information and protection from censorship. we identified the following comment as representative of common sentiment related to the value of free access to information provided by libraries. the commenter defends the need for libraries as providers of quality information. this comment was made to an article in the wall street journal entitled “do people need libraries in the digital age?” (farley, 2014). the answer is yes we do need libraries in the digital age because libraries is like to the heart and soul of accsssing information. information obtained from libraries is sometime more safer, legit and solid as compared to information on the internet (comment by user kendallsingh) on the other hand, seven commenters don’t value intellectual freedom and would prefer to have only content in libraries that they feel is safe for their children, such as this comment from the wall street journal in response to the article “furor erupts as singapore library pulls children’s books over ‘family values’” (wong, 2014). since this article was specifically about public libraries withdrawing two titles featuring same-sex couples, the comments expressing concern hone in on that topic, but librarians can expect similar push-back related to collections which reflected opinions that patrons may find challenging to their own belief systems. i bring my children to the libraries, and nlb has to ensure that the books my children are exposed to do not go against my religious beliefs and family values. i am seeing rather aggressive defending of the lgbt rights, so aggressive as to attack religion and the very definition of marriage and family. this kind of fighting makes me even more worried and want to protect my children. (comment by user christine) a couple of other detractors don’t value the library as a source of free access to information, because they feel the internet provides enough information. overall, commenters recognize providing free access to quality information as a primary function of libraries that continues today despite the proliferation of online access to information. physical collections “i want to ‘feel’ a book”2 is a familiar refrain that librarians frequently hear. the comments section of online newspaper articles is no different, and we found similar expressions in our sample. we categorized comments with the topic of “physical collections” whenever reference was made to tangible items in the library such as print books or other physical materials. this comment indicates value for physical collections in response to an article on sfgate about a new berkeley public library branch that was built for energy efficiency (baker, 2013). it illustrates the sentiment of support for why new library branches are still important. as to all the talk of why we need libraries: the analog experience of looking at a collection of books still trumps the incidental nature of searching via the internet, in my opinion. not every book is available on-line, nor do people always have the money for purchasing books/magazines on line. (comment by user rktrix) on the flip side, a comment in response to the wall street journal article, “do people need libraries in the digital age,” offers the opposite sentiment regarding the need for public libraries (farley, 2014). this comment echoes the three negative comments in this category that basically state libraries have been superseded by technology. the days of the public library are numbered. ebooks are easy, and efficient means of securing quality reading material. small local public libraries are expense to run, have limited titles, and are turning into public internet cafes. to those you like that kind of thing i say fine. join a club. my property taxes should not be financing your coffee clutch, reading time, porn surfing. (comment by user hbealejr) this comment reflects the misinformed opinions of a vocal few. obviously, e-books (and their associated platforms and devices) aren’t free, but this commenter is ignorant of the necessary infrastructure required to support library services. however, we should not be disheartened because the majority of comments expressed the high value most people place on checking out books, conducting genealogical research in library archives, and using library materials. preservation of history we applied the “preservation of history” topic when commenters discussed archives or other means of preserving knowledge for future generations. while there were comments that reflected the topic of preservation of history from multiple articles, the two illustrative comments that we share below are in reaction to the same new york times article. it was an opinion piece about president obama’s future presidential library, and it generated 25 of the 38 comments on this topic. the opinion of the article’s author was that president obama’s presidential library should be small rather than grandiose (rybczynski, 2014). many comments reveal the political perspective of the commenters, but the two sample comments below, one positive and one negative, demonstrate the commenters’ views on the library as a preserver of history. on the positive side, the comment below agrees with 35 of the commenters in expressing the importance of libraries to maintain historical records for future research. as time travels on, these libraries are great educators for people that come after. (comment by midwesterner) the following commenter clearly rejects the idea of comprehensive preservation of historical materials. only three of the comments categorized with this topic share this commenter’s opinion. go small, mr. president, indeed. glad to learn that these monstrous libraries of his predecessors are maintained with private funds. nixon’s tape were and still are a lot of fun but, after his resignation based on one of them, the rest are quite redundant, though. (comment by user ladislav nemecl) the majority of commenters understand the crucial role libraries play in maintaining and providing access to historical and archival information, such as presidential artifacts stored in national repositories. we must note, however, that this comment topic appears here predominantly because of the snapshot of time in which our research occurred. this article touched an emotional and political nerve that resulted in a remarkably high number of comments. impact on community whenever comments addressed how the library affects people and/or the socio-economic health within a specific geographic proximity to a library, we tagged them as “impact on community.” several comments convey supportive responses to the efforts libraries make in local communities to provide a “third space” for community members. for example, the following comment represents these positive sentiments in response to an article on sfgate about a new branch library with sustainable construction (baker, 2013). plus, libraries are great community spaces, providing a quiet space for reading, learning, research, and stories for the little ones. (comment by user rktrix) although there were few commenters who explicitly express they don’t value the positive impact libraries have on local communities, these commenters feel library funding should either be focused exclusively on books or done away with altogether. the following comment was made in response to the wall street journal article, “do people need libraries in the digital age” (farley, 2014). library staff sometimes acts too much like bureaucrats, looking to expand/redefine their services without buy-in from the community. if you want a place that is about social services (teen center, senior center, community center, etc.) that is fine – but that is not a library and that is not what the public perceives it is funding as a library. before taking on those new roles and shifting funding from books, it is city staff responsibility to get explicit buy-in from the people, not just let things slide through as under-the-radar budget line items that keep growing and growing… (comment by user library realist) the results of the pew report libraries at the crossroads echo our findings in this category. according to their recent survey, a “two-thirds (65%) of all of those 16 and older say that closing their local public library would have a major impact on their community” (horrigan, 2015, p. 10). from our analysis, when commenters discuss issues related to community benefits from local libraries, they evince a strong appreciation for the “extra” programming and services that libraries provide beyond circulating book collections. these benefits are sometimes explicitly detailed by the commenters and are sometimes expressed as a positive sentiment toward the intangible ideals that libraries represent. the negative responses typically indicate a lack of familiarity with modern public libraries on the part of the commenter, and reveal that the commenter had most likely not stepped foot in a library recently. library as place those of us who work in libraries obviously care about our physical spaces. we applied “library as place” to comments in which the commenter discussed library settings – whether to read, attend events, or its architectural design. one comment in response to the wall street journal article, “do people need libraries in the digital age,” (farley, 2014) provides a descriptive image of what one specific library means to that commenter, but a similar sentiment is echoed by many commenters. a few times per week, i will leave the office, turn my phone off and head for our public library. an hour in library…with ancient and modern authors, is the best respite in the world. you can’t be relaxed chasing google. (comment by user john) on the other hand, not all commenters appreciate a physical library building. in response to an article on sfgate regarding the opening of a brand new branch library in san francisco’s north beach neighborhood (lagos, 2014), one commenter writes: glad all that dough went to fix up libraries… most people can google for anything they’d find in a reference library and read books downloaded to their kindles or ipads…next, let’s spend millions of taxpayer dollars fixing up public telephone booths. welcome back to the 20th century. (comment by user suaveduck) funding for library renovations or new construction is a topic that comes up frequently in local communities. as with any issue related to money, it can be fraught with controversy. the comments represented in our analysis demonstrate support for maintaining and upgrading physical buildings, which meshes well with the findings from the pew report libraries at the crossroads. the pew report found that “nearly two-thirds (64%) of those ages 16 and over say libraries should ‘definitely’ have more comfortable spaces for reading, working and relaxing. this represents a modest increase since 2012, and it suggests that libraries still occupy a prominent spot in people’s minds as a place to go” (horrigan, 2015, p. 5). takeaways comments sections of news articles remain wildly interesting to us, running the gamut from humor to snark to insight. comments reflect popular opinions by self-motivated readers of online news articles and can be a source of ideas for advocacy. the majority of comments we reviewed were positive and appreciative of the services and spaces libraries offer, while the negative comments revealed a lack of awareness of the innovation taking place in libraries across the united states. our content analysis of comments revealed these prominent themes: free access to information, physical collections, preservation of history, impact on community, and library as place, among others. within each of these themes, we noticed trends in the vocabulary used by commenters. we offer here a sampling of the dominant language with the goal that librarians can piggyback on these arguments in favor of supporting library services and funding. in addition, librarians can address misinformed negative opinions. when discussing free access to information, commenters mention issues of balanced, uncensored collections which represent a wide variety of viewpoints. commenters are interested in having libraries provide online, 24/7 access to public documents and information. another frequent trend related to egalitarian access to information, and commenters express the desire that information not just be limited to economically advantaged citizens. many participants in the discussion point out that public libraries provide access to content to those who don’t have other means and wouldn’t be able to afford their own e-book readers and amazon downloads. in comments related to physical collections, discussions touch on access to unique and rare treasures not available online, and concerns about having enough space for expanding collections. commenters note that not everything is online, and there were even a few nods to interlibrary loan! several people also mentioned that print books can be a long-lasting “technology” which doesn’t become obsolete. preservation of history emerged as a category because many commenters use language which described preserving information for future generations, including the acknowledgement of national milestones. people communicate a desire for digitization of physical materials for universal access, but commenters also are concerned about issues of data migration when storage technologies evolve (from tape to cd-roms, dvds, etc). they also point out that the physical preservation of historical artifacts and documents is essential for original research. we noticed language trends that indicate commenters think of libraries as giving their communities an economic and moral boost that can help revive struggling communities and provide technological innovation. many commenters see value in providing community and learning experiences in communal spaces. people describe libraries as cultural and intellectual centers of society, and a common good that benefits all segments of society. many commenters profess their love of libraries with descriptions of specific library spaces, calling libraries monuments and architectural showpieces with large open spaces to enjoy or with nooks and crannies for studying and reading. additional descriptive words we enjoyed reading included: masterpiece, welcoming, destination, bright and cheerful, fabulous creation, gorgeous, grand. people mention that library spaces indicate the values of the city or community for literacy and learning. some are concerned about “exiling books” to off-site storage or converting to e-collections, expressing a desire to get lost in the stacks. several commenters convey support for costs associated with maintaining existing library buildings as well as new construction. although most of the comments indicated support for libraries, there were some comments that were ill-natured. some detractors described libraries as sanctuaries for criminals which leads to a circus atmosphere. these comments were mostly made in response to articles on sfgate which focused on library behavior policies, and revealed commenters’ concerns and fears about the homeless population. the following is one of three comments we encountered using the specific term “dinosaur,” indicating that the commenters don’t believe libraries are evolving effectively. this comment was made in response to an article on sfgate about a photography exhibit presenting public library buildings from throughout the contiguous united states (whiting, 2014). libraries are dinosaurs. they should all be turned into community centers or sold off. (comment by user evil_bert) we noticed some commenters not understanding what today’s libraries offer and describing expectations for services that are, in fact, already in existence. the previous comment is one example, revealing a lack of awareness of library innovation and hub of community services. many libraries offer assistance with literacy, tutoring, job searches, entrepreneurship, and myriad other offerings. the san francisco public library is one example of a library system addressing the needs of homeless patrons by employing a social worker. a few commenters think that libraries can be replaced by e-books, but of course libraries are already providing access to millions of e-book titles, and offer circulating e-book readers. in several places, other commenters stand up for the library in response to the snarky comments. the following example comes from the comment section of the farley article (2014), which asked “do people need libraries in the digital age?” it’s always so obvious when someone who doesn’t use a library comments on library collections and services…libraries provide access to not just paper books but also ebooks and especially forms of e-content and new technology. libraries provide spaces and tools for people to not just consume information but also produce it. all of this is …. ready for this? … for free. get with the program before you deem to assume what libraries have and provide. as long as there is information, in any form, and as long as people need to access it, there will be a place for libraries. (comment by user anonymous) taking a cue from these online library champions, library professionals can use the positive sentiment to help bring those with the dissenting opinion around to see the value that libraries have for many in the community. librarians can address the knowledge gaps of the general public, getting the word out that libraries are doing all the things. there are a variety of ways to raise awareness about libraries services, including participating in online comment areas, spreading the word on social media platforms, leading discussions in communities, and publicizing library innovations through more traditional marketing avenues to reach non-library users. mining the language of library cheerleaders provides touchpoints to shape fruitful conversations with community leaders, members of the public, and administrators. advance awareness of arguments by detractors can empower librarians to strengthen their messaging and improve external perceptions. we would like to express our extreme gratitude to our external reviewer amy hofer, internal reviewer annie pho, publishing editor erin dorney, and reader michele van hoeck. we have valued their insightful and constructive feedback and enjoyed the collaborative and responsive open peer review process. works cited alliance for audited media. (2013). top 25 u.s. newspapers for march 2013. retrieved from http://auditedmedia.com/news/research-and-data/top-25-us-newspapers-for-march-2013.aspx anderson, a. a. et al. (2013). the ‘‘nasty effect:’’ online incivility and risk perceptions of emerging technologies. journal of computer-mediated communication, 19(3), 373-387. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12009. baker, d. r. (2013, december 29). berkeley library branch a ‘zero net energy’ building. sf gate. retrieved from  http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/berkeley-library-branch-a-zero-net-energy-5100368.php buckels, e., trapnell, p. and paulhus, d. (2014) trolls just want to have fun. personality and individual differences, (corrected proof). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.016. edgerly, s., vraga, e. k., dalrymple, k. e., macafee, t., & fung, t. k. f. (2013). directing the dialogue: the relationship between youtube videos and the comments they spur. journal of information technology & politics, 10(3), 276–292. farley, c. j. (2014, february 12). do people need libraries in the digital age? wall street journal. retrieved from     http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/02/12/are-libraries-overdue-for-digital-change/?keywords=libraries felder, a. (2014, june 5). how comments shape perceptions of sites’ quality—and affect traffic. the atlantic. retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/internet-comments-and-perceptions-of-quality/371862 hanson, m. & adams, a.l. (2014, april). who do they think we are? addressing library identity perception in the academy. in 2014 carl conference proceedings. retrieved from http://carl-conference.org/sites/carl-conference.org/files/slides/hansonadams.pdf hanson, m. & adams, a.l. (2014, november). what does the public say? analyzing online news article comments about libraries. poster session presented at the california library association conference, oakland, ca. retrieved from http://bit.ly/1myojfu horrigan, j. (2015, september). libraries at the crossroads. pew research center. retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/09/15/libraries-at-the-crossroads/ knight, h. (2014, march 8). s.f. library proposes new code of conduct with penalties. sf gate. retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/s-f-library-proposes-new-code-of-conduct-with-5300570.php lagos, m. (2014, may 9). north beach library’s opening marks end of $200 million program. sf gate. retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/north-beach-library-s-opening-marks-end-of-200-5467298.php lee, e.-j. (2012). that’s not the way it is: how user-generated comments on the news affect perceived media bias. journal of computer-mediated communication, 18(1), 32–45. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01597.x lee, h. k. (2013, october 2). alleged online drug kingpin arrested at sf library. sf gate. retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/alleged-online-drug-kingpin-arrested-at-sf-library-4863306.php pogrebin, r. (2014, may 7). public library is abandoning disputed plan for landmark. new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/arts/design/public-library-abandons-plan-to-revamp-42nd-street-building.html reagle, j. m. (2015). reading the comments: likers, haters, and manipulators at the bottom of the web. cambridge, massachusetts: mit press. rybczynski, w. (2014, february 18). obama and his library: go small. new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/opinion/obama-and-his-library-go-small.html springer, n., engelmann, i., & pfaffinger, c. (2015). user comments: motives and inhibitors to write and read. information, communication & society, 18(7), 798–815. suler, j. (2004). the online disinhibition effect. cyberpsychology & behavior, 7(3), 321-326. http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/1094931041291295. whiting, s. (2014, april 16). photographer checks out us public libraries’ function, form. sf gate. retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/photographer-checks-out-us-public-libraries-5405100.php wong, c. h. (2014, july 12). furor erupts as singapore library pulls children’s books over ‘family values’. wall street journal. retrieved from http://blogs.wsj.com/searealtime/2014/07/12/furor-erupts-as-singapore-library-pulls-childrens-books-over-family-values/?keywords=libraries zickuhr, k., rainie, l., purcell, k., & duggan, m. (2013). how americans value public libraries in their communities. pew internet. retrieved from http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2013/12/11/libraries-in-communities comment by user “jack n fran farrell” to williams, a. (2014, june 27). got wi-fi? some libraries now lending hotspots. usa today. [↩] comment by user “john fitzgerald” to farley, c. j. (2014, february 12). do people need libraries in the digital age? wall street journal. [↩] content analysis, newspapers, online comments, perceptions the intersection between cultural competence and whiteness in libraries editorial: introductions all around 1 response pingback : latest library links 18th december 2015 | latest library links this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct beyond the threshold: conformity, resistance, and the acrl information literacy framework for higher education – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 25 feb ian beilin /11 comments beyond the threshold: conformity, resistance, and the acrl information literacy framework for higher education throwback thursday for july 16, 2015: in the library with the lead pipe welcomes ian beilin to our editorial board! in honor of throwback thursday, we’re highlighting ian’s recent piece on the acrl framework.   photo by flickr user laroyo (cc by-nc 2.0) in brief: the recently adopted acrl framework for information literacy for higher education has generated much critique and discussion, including many important reflections on the nature of information literacy and librarianship itself. this article provides a brief consideration of some of these responses and as well a critique of the framework from the perspective of critical information literacy. it argues that although the framework demonstrably opens up possibilities for an information literacy instruction that encourages students to question the power structures and relations that shape information production and consumption, it nonetheless rests on a theoretical foundation at odds with that goal. it urges librarians to embrace the framework yet also resist it, in the tradition of critical librarians who have practiced resistance to the instrumentalization of the library for neoliberal ends. by ian beilin the acrl framework: off to a running start by design and in its implementation, the process of drafting the acrl information literacy framework for higher education invited intense scrutiny and critique. the task force charged with creating the framework began its work in march 2013 and released the first draft for public scrutiny in february of the following year.1 through three drafts to the final version, which was made public in january 2015 and officially “filed” (approved by the acrl board of directors) shortly thereafter, the effort toward transparency included many opportunities for input that will help the framework earn a strong measure of democratic consent and broad participation. but a successful launch and general adoption are by no means assured, as the resistance to plans to scrap the existing standards has been and may continue to be strong.2 less easy for the task force to control or to even keep track of, however, were reactions on blogs, twitter, other social media, and in informal conversations, and these arenas continue to produce new and sometimes unexpected reactions to the proposed framework. it should have been expected that the lively debates among librarians have included searching, systematic, and thoroughgoing critiques of both the fundamental assumptions and the theory underlying the framework and even its reason for existing at all.3 the draft process has provided an opportunity for many people to talk about the meaning and purpose of information literacy instruction, information literacy in general, and even librarianship itself. as barbara fister stated in one of her early commentaries on the framework, “it is an opportunity for us to rethink how we do this and what kind of learning really matters.” (fister 2014a) i consider the framework already to be a success because the debate it has generated contributes to our thinking about and practice of librarianship in invigorating, productive, and necessary ways. in this article i will review and compare some of the critiques of the framework voiced thus far. i will also offer a critique of my own that attempts to read the framework from the perspective of critical information literacy and critical librarianship. librarians who identify with these labels, generally speaking, seek to anchor information literacy practice and librarianship as a whole to a commitment to both principles of social justice and a systematic critique of the power relations within which our field operates.4 but first it is important to cite some of the ample evidence that a wide range of reflective librarians are embracing aspects of the framework and running with it, with exciting results and prospects. this has happened because of the framework’s flexibility. troy swanson, a member of the task force, points out that the framework “can enable us to get to real student learning because it can be adapted to align with your goals as a teacher.” (swanson 2015) megan oakleaf has echoed this sentiment, stating: “essentially, librarians can use the framework as inspiration to focus on concepts, rather than exclusively on tools and techniques, and those concepts can be added or subtracted as student and faculty needs change.” (oakleaf 2014)  andy burkhart has described a library lesson for an ethnography class for which he utilized the threshold concept “research as inquiry.” his conclusion is that “using these threshold concepts may not work for everyone, but i can see them being exceedingly helpful to frame lessons and curricula. they help you focus on what is really important as opposed to getting stuck in what you think you are supposed to be teaching. instead of just teaching a lesson about doing ethnographic research i taught a lesson about inquiry and asking increasingly sophisticated questions.” (burkhart, 2014) arguing along similar lines more recently, lori townsend, silvia lu, amy hofer, and korey brunetti have defended threshold concepts for being flexible and versatile while still rooted in common problem areas specific to academic disciplines, even while allowing that the specific threshold concepts in the framework are necessarily only provisional and may not work for everyone: “if you consider your content with the threshold concepts criteria in mind, it helps identify some things that might prove problematic for students and stall their learning, yet that are needed in order to move forward in their understanding.” (townsend, et al 2015) of more importance to my argument in this article is the evidence that librarians interested in critical information literacy and critical pedagogy are also inspired by the framework. at at an upcoming loex15 session, for example, eamon tewell and kate angell will share how the frame “authority is contextual and constructed” “emboldened” them to construct “new ways to empower learners and discuss authority’s role in evaluating resources.” (“elevating” 2015) kevin seeber has shown how the frame “format as process” allowed him to teach critical thinking skills in the context of web-scale discovery (seeber 2015). examples such as these (which seem to be multiplying daily) demonstrate the pedagogical value and potential of the framework. although several critical librarians have found threshold concepts and/or the framework5 wanting in one or more areas, and although i am also critical of both, i don’t believe that these critiques invalidate the framework. in fact, despite the reservations that i will outline below, the framework does not contradict or undermine the possibility of a critical information literacy instruction or critical pedagogy, but may very well encourage it, which is a vital point that librarians should remember. many librarians who are committed to critical librarianship seem to share this view since they see the framework as more liberating pedagogically than it is constricting.6 a variety of responses before exploring the responses from the perspectives of critical information literacy and critical librarianship, i would like to provide an overview of some of the other critiques of the framework’s drafts. these critiques have been diverse, ranging from stunned incomprehension to almost utopian celebration. one subset of responses to the framework has made suggestions for improvement or requested clarification. these criticisms generally accept the framework on its own terms and are concerned with its practicality, implementation, adaptability, and accessibility. people ask how the frames or the threshold concepts upon which they are based will work in practice, what challenges will be posed by adopting the framework, how different it will be from the standards in this respect, and how librarians, faculty, and administrators will be convinced to replace explicit standards with a set of guidelines that are less prescriptive.7 many librarians are also anxious about potentially forfeiting the gains in information literacy instruction that have been achieved in the years since 2000, and which were at least partially premised on implementation and ‘selling’ of the standards. this has already proven to be one of the framework’s major stumbling blocks; at least some librarians have voiced alarm that losing standards spells trouble for their il programs and their libraries.8 related to the concerns about the framework’s accessibility and saleability to stakeholders have been complaints about the drafts’ alleged ‘jargon.’ even though much of the language that earned this epithet has been removed as a result of these complaints, some voices continue to describe the framework’s use of language borrowed from threshold concept theory as jargon.9 this concern about language is partly tied to the anxieties about strained relationships with stakeholders, but it also reflects a certain resistance among academic librarians to theory imported from other disciplines into library practice or even into lis scholarship.10 even someone sympathetic to the ideas behind the framework and to threshold concepts themselves might object to their explicit inclusion in a document which is intended to be used as a guide for establishing cross-disciplinary and inter-administrative relationships.11 but i would caution that although it may be true that the framework’s reliance on threshold concepts may put off some faculty members and administrators with whom we want to collaborate, we run the risk at the other extreme of offering something of only limited persuasive potential from the perspective of ideas, and this could jeopardize potential understanding and ultimately collaboration from non-library faculty members across the institution. librarians, as members of the academic community, must be prepared to engage with the scholarship and research of our peers if we wish them to engage with ours. and the most serious evidence of such engagement is to find specifically library-related applications of theoretical approaches from such fields as education, psychology and anthropology. to embrace theory from other disciplines will inevitably require us to learn to adapt concepts and language from those fields. in other words, it will require the introduction of novel concepts and ideas, reflected in new vocabulary. but rather than be afraid of such importations, we should engage them to test their foundations as well as their usefulness. another set of critiques has dissected the theoretical approach of the framework, and while not complaining so much about jargon, still finds it flawed, often fatally so. these critiques have been thorough. they tend to focus on the theory of threshold concepts and its application in the frames themselves and subject it to interrogation and detailed analysis. lane wilkinson (a former member of the task force) has provided perhaps the most exhaustive analysis and deconstruction of threshold concept theory and its application to information literacy in the framework. he set out to demolish much of the theory and language of the framework in several detailed blog posts over the summer of 2014. (wilkinson 2014a-g) wilkinson’s contentions are varied but his principal focus is mostly on the conceptual (in)coherence and contradictions of threshold concepts. there is less attention given to considerations of the ways that political, social, economic, and cultural power structures and relations are reflected by or are challenged by this approach to information literacy (although his discussion does not entirely exclude these concerns).12 a critical information literacy perspective on threshold concept theory it is a main tenet of critical information literacy that information literacy instruction should resist the tendency to reinforce and reproduce hegemonic knowledge, and instead nurture students’ understandings of how information and knowledge are formed by unequal power relations based on class, race, gender, and sexuality. threshold concept theory, both as it was originally formulated and as it is applied in the framework, can be seen as a reification of privileged knowledge that is historically and culturally contingent.13 threshold concepts attempt to align information literacy goals with the way that knowledge functions in our existing information system. threshold concepts were elaborated specifically to better enable students to master the difficult specialized fields of knowledge that define the various academic and professional disciplines. but they may end up functioning as the means to merely reinforce disciplinary boundaries and institutional hierarchies. morgan has noted how the framework’s effort to present threshold concepts in this way has produced an elision of their origins and contexts: “threshold concepts are treated as immanent entities, unique to specific disciplines, and not as essentially contingent.” (morgan 2012, 7) fister also cautions, in referring to the first draft: “…we need to bear in mind how these thresholds we define are cultural constructs and avoid assuming upper-middle-class white american experiences that might seem hostile or exclusionary to those who don’t fit that assumed identity.” (fister 2014a) if threshold concepts are cultural constructs, then a critical information literacy must move beyond them somehow. while threshold concepts may have an important place in the process of learning, information literacy must demand that the concepts themselves be questioned as part of the critique of the structure of knowledge that a critical pedagogy encourages. it is possible to see threshold concepts as an efficient way of getting students to become expert practitioners of existing disciplines. they do this, in a sense, by learning the rules. threshold concepts can be viewed as the habits of mind that one must have in order to make sense within a given intellectual community. wilkinson has noted that threshold concept theory has oversimplified or even misrepresented the true nature of academic disciplines, whose competing discourses reveal the opposite of what the theory claims: “the entire theory of threshold concepts has a funny way of oversimplifying the very real distinctions and difficulties that are inherent in a body of knowledge.” (wilkinson 2014a)  i would add to this point that teaching students how to function within an academic discourse can be perilously close to teaching students how to conform, how to get along, how to succeed. we want our students to succeed, but do we want the system that will enable their success to succeed as well? some may, but many librarians committed to critical librarianship do not. for the latter group the question is, how can we encourage student success without supporting the underlying structure of the system within which that success will take place? much of the rhetoric of information literacy, including that of the framework, represents the world of information (the framework refers to it as the “information ecosystem”) as something that must be mastered by individual students making their own ways through an educational institution out into the world. information literacy instruction is intended, positively and even progressively, to empower those individuals to succeed on their own terms to the greatest extent possible. it does this by inculcating habits of thinking and working that are most often described under the heading ‘critical thinking.’ but the problem with even some progressive information literacy rhetoric is that it does not question the fundamental units with which it is working: the individual information consumer/producer on the one hand, and the system of information on the other hand. the framework, despite its (debatable) greater theoretical sophistication, its great flexibility as a tool for enabling dynamic and creative information literacy instruction, and its emphasis on collaborative learning, still posits as its goal an individual student who has become a master or expert of our system of information. and even though it seeks to empower that individual, who could potentially work to change the conditions of information production and dissemination that exist today, the framework necessarily concentrates its efforts on the solitary mastery of the existing system. some critics have found the framework too narrowly focused on library-centered activities and skills, and they have questioned whether the specific threshold concepts in the frames are uniquely characteristic of the ‘field’ of librarianship or information literacy. fister states that as a librarian she isn’t particularly “interested in helping students think like librarians, but rather as curious people who understand how information works so that they can be curious effectively and maybe change the world while they’re at it.” (fister 2014b) nicole pagowsky has also expressed this sentiment in a blog post reacting to the first draft, referring specifically to the frame ‘format as process’ (renamed ‘information creation as a process’ in the final draft). the frames pay insufficient attention to the factors beyond academia that shape students’ consumption and production of information: “i was hoping to see a discussion on marginalized groups and whose voices get to be heard in traditional publishing and media (and why). these are important conversations to have with students, and particularly so when we are encouraging them to be creators of information, joining the conversation themselves. what impact might avenues of publishing have on their ability to be vocal when considering their perspective and identity? how is privilege intertwined in format and volume?” (pagowsky 2014) these observations indicate that instruction librarians interested in integrating an understanding of these larger issues into information literacy will need to supplement and/or alter the frames’ more restricted purview. but even in its narrow focus, the framework rests on questionable assumptions. the frame ‘scholarship as conversation’14 tends to idealize or even naturalize the process of knowledge production in disciplinary fields. it presents scholarly research as a largely honorable pursuit, viewed in isolation from the forces operating around (and within) it: “research in scholarly and professional fields is a discursive practice in which ideas are formulated, debated, and weighed against one another over extended periods of time.” as described, it does not pay sufficient attention to the ways that some voices are suppressed, silenced, and marginalized because they do not fit the proscribed boundaries of that field – which are, in the end, determined by a consensus of practitioners whose professional reputations and livelihoods often depend on the preservation of these boundaries and conventions. in other words, threshold concepts describe knowledge creation in a decontextualized manner, even though the framework tries to acknowledge the academic context of knowledge creation. while one might not share wilkinson’s denial that scholarship is in fact a ‘conversation,’ one can’t ignore how politics and power play a decisive role in the production of knowledge. (wilkinson 2014b) it is a common complaint within many academic fields that conformity, uniformity, predictability and consensus are all-too common features of scholarship – are these the results of a ‘conversation’ or something else? is it possible to build into the framework an acknowledgement that scholarship and research themselves are always functioning within particular economic, social, and political systems that help determine the features and structure of the ‘scholarly conversation?’ or must information literacy instruction move beyond threshold concepts altogether, even if it begins with them as a way of entering into and to some extent identifying with the existing structure of knowledge and expertise? these questions speak to one of the basic conundrums of critical librarianship and critical information literacy, namely: how does one teach students to understand and make the best use of existing systems of knowledge while at the same time prompt them to question the validity and structure of those systems? it’s a similar conundrum faced by all scholars and teachers in academia who see themselves as committed to radical social change: how can one be a part of the system of oppression yet claim to be fighting against it?15 to better appreciate the perils of relying on threshold concepts, it may help to consider the needs for which the theory was originally developed. they were proposed by educational theorists erik meyer and ray land with reference to teaching concepts in economics. that discipline, at least as it is practiced in the ‘western world’ today, functions largely as a closed field based on a broad consensus about the universal validity (at least in the abstract) of the so-called ‘free market’, in other words, the universality and inevitability of capitalism. economics, as an academic field, tends to naturalize capitalism and works to maintain the belief that the rules/laws of that system are simply the rules/laws of economics as such (even economists like thomas piketty who dare to challenge some of the field’s pieties still share this core faith16). it is very difficult for an economist who questions the fundamental assumptions of capitalism or denies its “laws” to succeed in or even enter the field, and the refusal to accept the field’s central concepts prevents communication at a basic level with the vast majority of its practitioners. it is likely that a typical economist – someone who would be considered an ‘expert’ or ‘authority’  – would judge a person making such a challenge not only ineligible to participate in the field, but perhaps even a threat to it. meyer and land do not pay attention to the limitations posed by established fields of knowledge, but rather the challenges that outsiders, or learners, face when trying to enter into productive learning, or ‘conversation’, within the field. their insight was to identify certain seemingly universal characteristics of knowledge within disciplines that can be treated as concepts that one has to master in order to function successfully as a practitioner in that field. these ‘troublesome concepts’, once grasped, allow the learner to readily understand the assumptions and terms of debate in a field. but i would argue that at this point the learner has in some sense reached the starting point, not the end point, of learning on a deeper level. now the task is to question what one has just learned – and this is where the question of information literacy’s ultimate goal returns. what is the purpose of information literacy instruction? from a critical information literacy perspective, the framework’s larger assumptions pose perhaps the biggest problems. one has to do with the term ‘information literacy’ and its complicated history. critical information literacy has sought to increase awareness of how much the information literacy agenda has been set and supported by broader structural forces in academia and the world at large that may in fact be at odds with the core values of librarianship, progressive learning and radical social change. christine pawley, in a trenchant and erudite critique of what she calls “information literacy ideology”, states that information literacy “has contributed to the decontextualization of information, obscuring the specific conditions of its production.” (pawley 2003, 425) this decontextualization allows people to forget, or not to learn, that “information never stands alone – it is always produced and used in ways that represent social relationships,” and that those relationships “reflect the underlying patterns that structure society.” (pawley 2003, 433) pawley has informed us that “information literacy” was elaborated at the beginning of the digital age and was intended largely to recuperate forms and markers of the authority from the age of print that were feared to be slipping away from librarians’ control: “…institutional practices of information literacy have the effect of reestablishing relations of authority and authenticity that developed over three centuries for the print production of commodified information.” (pawley 2003, 440) much of information literacy instruction, yesterday and today, is focused on preparing students to succeed in both academia and the world beyond it – which more often than not amounts to teaching them skills of research and thinking that will enable them to function as productive independent minds in a competitive, rapidly changing economic environment. in other words, information literacy is designed to improve students’ chances at getting jobs and succeeding in their chosen professions.17 no one who teaches and cares about students would object to that goal. but a critical information literacy expects more than this (and wants more for students); it pushes information literacy instruction, in various ways, not to be limited by this goal. moreover, critical information literacy even looks beyond ‘lifelong learning’, since the question always should be asked, what actually is ‘lifelong learning’ and what is its purpose? as cathy eisenhower and dolsey smith have argued, lifelong learning and critical thinking fall within the realm of neoliberal rationality which push the learner “toward a perpetual anxiety of regulation, of adjustment, of optimization—and toward reason’s perpetual self-improvement.” (eisenhower and smith, 2009) information literacy instruction is also about resistance chris bourg, in a 2014 address at duke university libraries, insisted that despite the fact that “neoliberalism is toxic for higher education…research libraries can & should be sites of resistance.” (bourg 2014). critical librarianship is at pains always to show that the existing information system mirrors the larger social and political order, which is characterized by a radically asymmetrical distribution of power, and is shot through, systematically and structurally, by racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism, and class oppression. an advocacy of progressive literacy of any kind within this system and environment, requires resistance on the part of the librarian: resistance to existing regimes of knowledge, as institutionalized by academic disciplines and departments (and enforced by academic rules and administrative bureaucracies), resistance to the commodification of knowledge, and even resistance to the stated goals of higher education as they are commonly promoted, especially by administrators, politicians, bureaucrats and educational reformers. failing to resist all too easily provides reinforcement to the existing system, and helps reproduce it. joy james and edmund t. gordon have described the problematic position that a radical or activist intellectual necessarily assumes within academia. their observations are relevant to the aspirations of critical information literacy and the basic dilemma that questions around the framework have called attention to. they claim that academic institutions “are at best liberal-reformist in their institutional policies and at worst complicit with the global military-industrial and consumer-commercial, complex that enforces and/or regulates the marginalization and impoverishment of the majority of the world.” they note that “institutions of higher education have a vested interest in keeping scholarship ‘objective’ (mystifying), ‘nonpolitical’ (nonsubversive) and ‘academic’ (elitist) and in continuing to reserve the most advanced technical training for that small portion of the world’s population who will manage the rest, as well as consume or control its resources and political economies.” with such an important mandate, anyone who works within academia (i.e. who is engaged in the ‘scholarly conversation’) is subjected  to intense pressures to conform: “…incentives offered by the academy reward those whose knowledge production contributes to elite power…that same system diminishes the production of potentially transgressive political knowledge by questioning its ‘objective’ status or ‘scientific’ value.” the participation of radical intellectuals in academic institutions actually “strengthens [those institutions] by allowing them to make hegemonic claims to fostering ‘academic freedom,’ a ‘marketplace of ideas,’ and rational neutrality…” (james and gordon 2008, 367-9). this perilous position, james and gordon argue, can only be remedied by exiting the academy and establishing solidarities with oppressed peoples organizing against the system (even if one keeps one’s ‘day job’ as a teacher and researcher within the academy). whether or not one accepts their conclusion, one can take their description of the situation of the activist scholar and apply it to critical information literacy, whose practitioners should always be aware of the reifying and recuperative functions of information literacy in the academy. eisenhower and smith have argued along similar lines, as i indicated above, but they believe that librarians may be in a position from which to exercise a greater freedom of action vis-a-vis the pressures to conform, by virtue of their marginal or liminal position within the academy. although librarians’ status varies very widely across academia, and it is therefore difficult to make such generalizations, the opening they suggest is nonetheless one that all librarians should seek, whatever their situations may be. (eisenhower and smith 2009) as long as we recognize the structural function of information and knowledge in our pedagogy, we can help bridge the gap between academia and the struggle for social justice. with respect to this goal, using the term ‘information ecosystem’, as the framework does, is not helpful. i recognize that the term has entered our daily vocabulary, but whether one intends to or not, the term works to reify information, despite the first frame’s title, “authority is constructed and contextual.” and even though the term stresses the rapidly changing nature of that system, it does not emphasize its artificiality and arbitrariness, that it is a reflection of a specific distribution of power. to describe natural processes requires a comprehension of complex and often rapid changes. but changes in knowledge are anything but natural. in the pages of this journal joshua beatty has pointed out the framework’s “neoliberal underpinnings” (something it shares in common with the standards). he usefully traces the history of using ecological language such as ‘information ecosystem’ to describe social forces to the business world of the 1990s, when today’s neoliberal order took shape. beatty convincingly links this naturalized language to a revived social darwinism in which only fittest survive in a cutthroat world of brutal competition. we are competing with others to acquire and produce the best information possible, and it is up to us (and our helpers, teachers and librarians), to acquire the necessary skills and smarts to do this. (beatty 2014, 10-11) when we unwittingly adopt this language to describe the learning processes that we wish to encourage, we may be leaving fundamental neoliberal premises unquestioned. while the framework does an admirable job of showing how threshold concepts can help shift information literacy toward a pedagogy that stresses the development of self-critical and self-conscious learning in the student, it does not state as its goal the formation of possible solidarities for the student to help change the information system itself, nor the hierarchies of knowledge and status within academia. furthermore, by continuing to stress the individual learner, it obscures the fact that any real change would actually require collective understanding and action rather than individualized learning. in this way the framework continues to do the work that the standards were doing all along. but the vital difference between the two, perhaps, is the enhanced opportunities for critical interventions that the framework provides and even encourages.18 from a critical information literacy perspective, then, it appears that the specific type of information literacy advocated by the framework is one which accepts the existence of a particular regime of knowledge, and demands that we as librarians focus our energies on making students and faculty competent citizens of that regime, even if dynamic, critical, and progressive ones. here again we are faced with the dilemma outlined above: students have immediate needs to be met – they are working on research papers, projects, reports, and theses. they not only need information and sources, and to learn how to conduct research, they also need to master the conceptual frameworks that will enable them to effectively and convincingly make persuasive arguments. all of this very sophisticated and complex instruction needs to be done in a short space of time. librarians have to help so many of them, with insufficient resources, and not enough time. where can an information literacy that raises an awareness of the contingent and arbitrary nature of the information system, be fit? when does it take place? can something like acrl’s framework possibly incorporate such a vision without undermining itself? the answers to these questions are varied and complex, and they are being explored by the many librarians who theorize and practice critical information literacy. they have taught us that we must assume a position of resistance rather than conformity to the existing information regime, if we wish to see it changed at all. part of the solution has to do with the content of library instruction. for instance, in teaching specific research or searching skills, the examples that we use in the classroom and at the reference desk can provide opportunities to question information regimes in more systematic ways.19 another part has to do with our everyday practice as librarians, inside and outside of the classroom. we can find a long tradition of resistance on the part of librarians, not only against the banning of books or spying by the government, but also against the very structure of information and knowledge that they are supposed to be the guides for unlocking.20 resistance is shown by librarians who take proactive measures in pushing for open access, calling out or refusing rapacious vendor contracts, or finding ways to actually make our profession more diverse, just to name a few areas. but what does resistance in information literacy instruction look like? i think we will see more creative examples in the coming years, thanks, ironically perhaps, to the framework, which, as i stated at the outset, has opened up the possibilities for action and maneuver on the part of instruction librarians, despite its ideological baggage. in this sense it is a progressive document, but it will require librarians to resist it in order for it to become a radical one. my thanks go to ellie collier and emily drabinski for their many trenchant comments and suggestions and also for helpfully encouraging me to emphasize my own voice in the editing of this article. thanks to robert farrell, barbara bonus-smit, and julia furay for inviting me to give an earlier version of this paper at acrl/ny-lilac’s panel on the framework in october, 2014 at barnard college. thanks also to donna witek for her brilliant reflections and inspiring efforts toward making the framework understood for critical librarians as well as for her encouragement in my own efforts in this regard. special thanks to rory litwin for pointing me to some of the rich history of librarian activism in the (near) past, and some of the written record of that history. thanks finally to all my interlocutors over the last several months online and in person who have grappled with the framework, especially to the #critlib community that generates a treasure trove of wisdom and practical insight every fortnight.   works cited accardi, maria t., emily drabinski, and alana kumbier, eds. (2009) critical library instruction: theories and methods. library juice press. acrl board of directors. (2015) “action form: acrl mw15 doc 4.0.” january 16, 2015. adler, kate. (2013) “radical purpose: the critical reference dialogue at a progressive urban college.” urban library journal, 19, 1. beatty, joshua. (2014) “locating information literacy within institutional oppression.” in the library with the lead pipe. september 24, 2014. berg, jacob. (2014a) “the draft framework for information literacy for higher education: some initial thoughts.” beerbrarian. 25 feb. 2014. —. (2014b) “the (second) draft for information literacy for higher education: my thoughts.” beerbrarian. 11 jul. 2014. bourg, chris. (2014) “the neoliberal library: resistance is not futile.” feral librarian. 16 jan. 2014. burkhardt, andy. (2014) “threshold concepts in practice: an example from the classroom.” information tyrannosaur. 4 mar. 2014. drabinski, emily. (2014) “toward a kairos of library instruction.” the journal of academic librarianship 40: 480-485. eisenhower, cathy and dolsy smith. (2009) “the library as ‘stuck place’: critical pedagogy in the corporate university.” in critical library instruction: theories and methods, edited by maria t. accardi, emily drabinski, and alana kumbier. duluth, mn: library juice press, 305-318. “elevating source evaluation: teaching and un-teaching authority in the critical library classroom.” (2015) loex 2015 – sessions. loex. web. 18 february 2015. fister, barbara. (2014a) “on the draft framework for information literacy.” library babel fish. inside higher ed, 27 feb. 2014. —. (2014b) “crossing thresholds and learning in libraries.” library babel fish. inside higher ed, 22 may 2014. —. (2015) “the information literacy standards/framework debate.” library babel fish. inside higher ed, 22 jan. 2015. gregory, lua, and shana higgins. (2013) information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis. duluth, mn: library juice press. hicks, alison. (2013) “cultural shifts: putting critical information literacy into practice.” communications in information literacy, 7 aug. 2013. hofer, amy r, lori townsend, and korey brunetti. (2012) “troublesome concepts and information literacy: investigating threshold concepts for il instruction.” portal: libraries in the academy 12(2): 387-405. hofer, amy r, lori townsend, and korey brunetti. (2011) “threshold concepts and information literacy.” portal: libraries in the academy 11(3): 853-869. james, joy and edmund t. gordon. (2008) “afterword: activist scholars or radical subjects?” in charles hale, ed., engaging contradictions: theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship. berkeley, ca: university of california press. 367-73. kagan, alfred. (2015) progressive library organizations. a worldwide history. jefferson, nc: mcfarland & company, inc., publishers. klipfel, kevin michael. (2014) “this i overheard…threshold concepts getting laughed out of the room” rule number one: a library blog. 3 nov. 2014. matthews, brian. (2011) “what can you do to help with troublesome knowledge? librarians and threshold concepts,” the ubiquitous librarian, chronicle of higher education blog network, 3 aug. 2011. morgan, patrick. (2015) “pausing at the threshold.” portal: libraries and the academy. 15(1). oakleaf, megan. (2014) “a roadmap for assessing student learning using the new framework for information literacy for higher education.” journal of academic librarianship. preprint. olson, hope. (2001)  “the power to name: representation in library catalogs.” signs 26(3): 639-668. pagowsky, nicole. (2014) “thoughts on acrl’s new draft framework for ilcshe.” nicole pagowsky (pumpedlibrarian). 2 mar. 2014. pawley, christine. (2003) “information literacy: a contradictory coupling.” library quarterly 73(4): 422-452. samek, toni. (2001) intellectual freedom and social responsibility in american librarianship, 1967-1974. jefferson, nc: mcfarland & company, inc., publishers. seeber, kevin. (2015) “teaching “format as a process” in an era of web-scale discovery.” reference services review 43:1: 19-30. swanson, troy. (2015) “the il framework and il standards cannot coexist.” 12 jan. 2015. tame the web. web. 12 jan. 2015. tewell, eamon. (2014) “tying television comedies to information literacy: mixed-methods investigation.” journal of academic librarianship 40: 134-141. townsend, lori, silvia lu, amy r. hofer, and korey brunetti. (2015) “what’s wrong with threshold concepts?” acrlog. 30 jan. 2015. wilkinson, lane. (2013) “information literacy: standards, skills, and virtues.” sense and reference. 5 jun. 2013. —. (2014a) “the problem with threshold concepts.” sense and reference. 19 jun. 2014. —. (2014b) “is scholarship a conversation?” sense and reference. 10 jul. 2014. —. (2014c) “is research inquiry?” sense and reference. 15 jul. 2014. —. (2014d) “is authority constructed and contextual?” sense and reference. 22 jul. 2014. —. (2014e) “is format a process?” sense and reference. 25 jul. 2014. —. (2014f) “is searching exploration?” sense and reference. 29 jul. 2014. —. (2014g) “does information have value?” sense and reference. 5 aug. 2014. see the acrl board of directors action form from january 15, 2015 for background and details about the process of drafting the framework. [↩] see for example the open letter of new jersey librarians criticizing the framework and protesting the sunsetting of the acrl standards, which indicates that there will be opposition not only to the replacement of the standards, but also the wholesale adoption of the framework that is meant to replace it. the recent acceptance of the framework by the acrl board of directors was accompanied by a temporary cancellation of plans to sunset the standards. [↩] for space reasons, i refer the reader to lane wilkinson’s helpful list of blog posts, which is now out of date, but provides a good starting point for reading a variety of responses to the framework’s early drafts. [↩] the literature on critical information literacy and critical librarianship (which are closely related and overlap quite a bit, but should not be equated) is rapidly expanding. see especially the contributions in accardi, drabinski, and kumbier 2009; and gregory and higgins 2013. probably the most extensive (though not exhaustive) bibliography of critical information literacy we have is to be found in the recent dissertation by b. a. mcdonough, critical information literacy in practice, 2014. [↩] as townsend, et al, have indicated in their recent acrlog post, the framework contains only one possible collection and interpretation of threshold concepts among many: potentially there might be other valid threshold concepts applicable to information literacy instruction. (townsend, et al 2015) [↩] intriguingly, fister has decided to embrace the framework because it returns to the original promise of the acrl standards when they were established in 2000: they “were meant as a starting place, that each library should adapt them to fit their local cultures and needs. they weren’t set in stone.” (fister 2015) [↩] the task force’s report attached to the final draft notes that in its tally of the 206 comment forms submitted following the release of the third draft, 67.4% of respondents supported the framework. (acrl mw15 doc 4.0) some librarians have already embarked on projects to help librarians map the standards to the framework in order to help them understand the continuities and make the transition easier in redesigning instruction programs. see, for example, amada hovious’ “alignment charts for acrl standards and proposed framework (work in progress)” and her related blog post. [↩] troy swanson, in a recent response to some of these concerns, convincingly defends the framework on the following grounds: “if we believe that information literacy matters in the lives of our students and see information literacy as a form of empowerment for our students, the idea that we should write standards because that’s what everyone else is doing feels hollow.” and, even more boldly, he suggests that “our profession has the opportunity to take the lead in moving away from the mechanistic bureaucracy of standards-based education. i do not know many faculty members who honestly think that more standards and more standardization will improve teaching and learning.” (swanson 2015) but emily drabinski urges us to take pause in this enthusiasm, alerting people how the framework’s acrl imprimatur insures that it will function in much the same way the standards has, only now libraries will have to shoulder the burden of spelling out the specific learning outcomes to which these guidelines may point. she suggests as an alternative a kairos of library instruction that does not rely on a universal, fixed document of any kind and that instead always responds to the specific time and place in which the instruction takes place. (drabinski 2014) critical advocates of the framework, myself included, would claim in response that it actually encourages kairos by not prescribing any specific learning outcomes or benchmarks.   [↩] andy burkhart, in a blog post, reported librarians at a discussion at 2014 ala midwinter referring to threshold concepts themselves as ‘jargon.’ (burkhart, 2014) [↩] a distrust of theory from other fields of course is not limited to lis or librarians. academic history, for example, has maintained a stubborn resistance to theoretical approaches and many of its practitioners and gatekeepers are on the lookout for ‘jargon’ in an effort to maintain clarity and rigorous thinking. the writing and teaching of history is, like the practice of librarianship, self-consciously a ‘popular,’ or public-oriented undertaking, and the assumption is that it should always only utilize language immediately familiar to the widest possible audience. however well-intentioned and even democratic this impulse is, it is often used as an excuse for avoiding an engagement with developments in other fields, or for simply dismissing them. for a brief and spirited plea for the importance of theory for history, see joan wallach scott, “wishful thinking,” perspectives on history (december 2012) [↩] kevin michael klipfel disapproves of threshold concept theory not so much because it has been borrowed from another field, but because it has not been ‘scientifically’ validated and is therefore not legitimate in the eyes of his colleagues in other disciplines. see his blog post, “this i overheard…threshold concepts getting laughed out of the room,” rule number one: a library blog, 3 nov. 2014. but even long before the framework committee went to work revising the acrl standards, some librarians embraced threshold concepts precisely because there were positive signs of acceptance and enthusiasm from colleagues. see, for example, brian matthews, “what can you do to help with troublesome knowledge? librarians and threshold concepts,” the ubiquitous librarian, chronicle of higher education blog network, 3 aug. 2011. [↩] in a similar vein to wilkinson, patrick morgan, in a recent article, has described the framework as ‘inchoate.’ (morgan 2014) and jacob berg, in his blog, has echoed and elaborated on some of wilkinson’s critique, but his objections, too, i would classify more as linguistic-philosophical. (berg 2014a-b) [↩] for an explanation of how threshold concept theory has been applied to information literacy instruction, see the foundational articles by hofer, townsend, and brunetti 2011, 2012. [↩] this is the frame’s name in the final draft of the framework. [↩] this is a question answered brilliantly by joy james and edmund t. gordon who conclude that in some sense there is no such thing as ‘radical’ scholarship and teaching, since true activism actually cannot take place within the academy. (james and gordon 2008) cathy eisenhower and dolsey smith offer a different view that sees more room for action for librarians in this regard because of their more liminal position in the academy. (eisenhower and smith 2009) see more on this in the section below. [↩] slavoj zizek and david harvey each have noted that piketty is best described as a utopian capitalist: for him there is no questioning the assumption that it is the only system that ‘works.’ see david harvey, “afterthoughts on piketty’s capital”; slavoj zizek, “towards a materialist theory of subjectivity,” lecture, the birkbeck institute for the humanities, university of london, may 22, 2014. [↩] drabinski shows how this justification became the “procustrean bed” into which il instruction was placed by the standards, and she argues convincingly that the framework inevitably is driven by the same mandate, which has only intensified since 2000. (drabinski 2014) [↩] beatty, in fact, is another critical librarian who acknowledges that “there are many ways in which the framework significantly improves on the standards.” (beatty 2014, 4) [↩] for examples of this see hicks 2013; adler 2013; tewell 2014. [↩] i cite here as likely the most well-known example the legendary sanford berman. a general history of librarians and resistance, not only in the united states but globally, has yet to be written. such a narrative would be useful for our present struggles since sometimes it seems that librarians believe that only recently has the library been challenged as a supposedly ‘neutral’ grounds for the discovery of knowledge. but librarians have been doing so since at least the 1930s. there are of course some excellent studies that are focused in scope, but very instructive for for this purpose: see especially, samek 2001; olson 2001;  kagan 2015. also helpful is the archive of the ala social responsiblities roundtable newsletter and the archive of the blog library juice [↩] acrl framework, critical information literacy, critical librarianship, information literacy, neoliberalism a conversation with librarian-editors #ditchthesurvey: expanding methodological diversity in lis research 11 responses pingback : link roundup : february 27, 2015 « a modern hypatia bob schroeder 2015–03–02 at 1:07 pm ian – thank you for your thoughtful & thorough essay! you’ve really opened up a space here for us to not only justifiably critique the new framework, you’ve also shown us places where we can engage with it in critically in our practice. but you’ve also used this framework point of time to open up a much larger investigation of the reason for education and our librarian roles in it. two sentences that really floored me are, “…teaching students how to function within an academic discourse can be perilously close to teaching students how to conform, how to get along, how to succeed…how can we encourage student success without supporting the underlying structure of the system within which that success will take place?” this is a point i’ve been wrestling with for some time now. how can we balance the real desires of students to learn things that will help them succeed (in their own definitions of that term that might include getting jobs and being comfortable) with our visions of success that that might transform the students and society? i’m new to critical theories and critical practice, but for me these lenses not only clarify so much about this current educative process i’m a part of, and they also explain a lot about my own journey through american education starting in the 1950’s. being a first-generation college student has allowed me to achieve many “successes”, both materially and in regards to extended intellectual horizons. and now, with the discovery of these critical viewpoints, it has given me the tools with which to question what we educators do. the rub, as you allude to, is that in academia we’re on thin ice – questioning the very system that gives us support for our questioning. it’s hard for me sometimes to not thing of my engagement with critical lenses as a faith or belief. is it a case of “the grand narrative is dead, long live the (new) grand narrative?” no answers yet on this one, just a lot of angst! (but living in this privileged place called academe i guess that’s what i have instead of misery or dread.) -bob pingback : teaching with big ideas: how a late addition to the acrl framework might make us rethink threshold concepts | acrlog acrl_is_itech 2015–04–23 at 12:30 pm beyond the threshold: conformity, resistance, and the acrl information literacy framework for higher education http://t.co/s7fvtlocmu acrl_cls 2015–04–23 at 12:33 pm rt @acrl_is_itech: beyond the threshold: conformity, resistance, and the acrl information literacy framework for higher education http://t.… leannajantzi 2015–04–25 at 4:18 pm (2) …mirrors the larger social and political order” http://t.co/otqpv2a4fi #framework pingback : final project: transforming teaching and learning through social media in a high school setting | a blog to be named later megan 2015–05–26 at 2:56 pm this is so great, ian. thanks and thanks and thanks. pingback : librarian as outsider hybrid pedagogy pingback : bibsonomy :: url :: in the library with the lead pipe » beyond the threshold: conformity, resistance, and the acrl information literacy framework for higher education pingback : breaking through the debate: understanding, critiquing, and applying the framework for information literacy for higher education | acrl-oregon/ola academic division blog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct accessibility for justice: accessibility as a tool for promoting justice in librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 29 nov stephanie rosen /0 comments accessibility for justice: accessibility as a tool for promoting justice in librarianship in brief recent critiques of diversity in higher education and librarianship by stewart (2017), hudson (2017), and hathcock (2015) have encouraged a critical shift away from diversity talk and initiatives, towards attention to equity, anti-racism, and whiteness. they point out that diversity initiatives often fail to address deeper power imbalances, and they offer new language for the effort to make our institutions more just. this essay offers another term for that effort: accessibility. linked to legal discourses of compliance on the one hand and to library values of access on the other, accessibility is rhetorically very useful. it is also historically complex and politically powerful. the americans with disabilities act (1990) was achieved through coalitional activism that reflects the intersectional nature of disability and, because the law prohibits discrimination by design, it demands active design agendas that stand to benefit people with and without disabilities—and marginalized people in particular. librarians committed to justice can use accessibility as a starting point to change our institutions. by stephanie rosen introduction recent critiques of diversity initiatives in higher education have encouraged a shift: away from individual acts of inclusion and celebrations of difference, towards transforming the policies, cultures, and conditions of our institutions. writers from the library to the professoriate have shown how current efforts make minor changes but maintain larger, structural barriers, and several of these writers have suggested a way out of this problem by offering a change in language. stewart (2017), hudson (2017), and hathcock (2015) argue for a critical shift away from conversations and initiatives about diversity and towards interventions focused on equity, anti-racism, and whiteness, respectively. all point out the paradoxical ways in which diversity (and sometimes inclusion) initiatives actually require the deeper power imbalances they fail to address, and each writer provides a new, alternate term to replace diversity. all of them are right. in the effort to make academic institutions more equitable and just, we need all the language we can get, just as we need a range of strategies. we ought to use all the rhetorics at our disposal. yet a change in language will not solve our challenges once and for all. the work we do in the name of diversity and inclusion, or did in the name of equal opportunity and affirmative action, is always evolving and always greater than the terms we use, each of which have unique strengths—rhetorical, historical, and political—to offer our efforts. in this essay i’d like to offer another term for use in this work: accessibility. like diversity, accessibility is unique in that people often agree on its value (accessibility is good, we are committed to accessibility) but may disagree on its meaning (is this accessible? how do i make that accessible?). this quality, as well as its links to legal and technical discourses of compliance on the one hand and to library values of access on the other, makes accessibility rhetorically very useful. promoting access is a core value in librarianship, and many in the profession are aware that we are supposed to promote accessibility. in addition to its rhetorical usefulness, accessibility has a more complex history and politics than at first glance. the americans with disabilities act of 1990 (ada), which mandates accessibility, was achieved only through coalitional activism that reflects the intersectional nature of disability. even today, while disability is said to “affect everyone,” it still disproportionately affects people of marginalized racial, socioeconomic, and gender identities. centering the needs and experiences of people with disabilities can therefore be a way of practicing social justice. and because the ada prohibits discrimination by design, it requires active design agendas that stand to benefit people with and without disabilities, and marginalized people in particular. accessibility is not the only term we need in making academic institutions more equitable and just. yet its enormous potential becomes apparent when we consider the wide reaching consequences of accessibility, the intersectional nature of disability, and the coalitional history of disability activism. what’s wrong with diversity? recent critiques of diversity in higher education and librarianship by stewart (2017), hudson (2017), and hathcock (2015) have encouraged a critical shift away from diversity talk and initiatives, and towards attention to justice, anti-racism, and whiteness. while none of these writers opposes the basic aims of diversity—“to diversify and thereby enrich the [library] profession” (ala) or to create “responsible and all-inclusive [library] spaces that serve and represent the entire community” (acrl)—all of them explain that the basic methods of diversity often maintain the status quo. stewart (2017), writing about institutions of higher education in general, cautions that diversity and inclusion have too successfully appeased powerful donors and student protesters alike, fooling us all with a false sense of progress while avoiding real transformative change. a shift to equity and justice, stewart explains, would realign campus efforts with the original “goals of the student activists of the 1960s through the 1980s.” stewart puts faith in equity and justice to ask tougher questions and push more radical agendas: diversity asks, “who’s in the room?” equity responds: “who is trying to get in the room but can’t? whose presence in the room is under constant threat of erasure?” inclusion asks, “has everyone’s ideas been heard?” justice responds, “whose ideas won’t be taken as seriously because they aren’t in the majority?” (stewart, 2017) the warning here is that mere attempts to “include diverse perspectives” will not lead to questions about why certain perspectives are dominant, or why certain people are in power. without the impetus to question dominant perspectives, there is little opportunity to change them. hudson (2017) offers a critique of diversity and inclusion initiatives in lis degree programs and professional library associations. in spite of decades of research on “race as a historically contingent phenomenon” (p. 1), hudson points out that lis diversity discourses rely on a relatively simple and stable version of race. degree programs are often preoccupied with identifying and counting racial minorities among their student body. programs are therefore less attuned to questions of how racial formations are produced in the first place, and how lis as a field may participate in this production. furthermore, a focus on individual cultural competence—overcoming “individual attitudes and (mis)understandings through education” (hudson, p. 18)—precludes more structural approaches to reform. hudson wishes to inject the limited anti-racism of library diversity initiatives with the power of critical race theory so that the profession can participate in a broader “inquiry into the specific ways in which race is constructed” and more effectively reform itself (p. 19). hathcock (2015) focuses on whiteness, not only of the profession itself (which is over 85% percent white [bourg, 2014]), but even of the diversity initiatives ostensibly designed to alter the demographics of the profession. for hathcock, drawing on galvan (2015) and hall (2012), “whiteness refers not only to racial and ethnic categorizations but a complete system of exclusion based on hegemony.” whiteness is what’s “at work when a librarian of color is mistaken for a library assistant by white colleagues at a professional conference”; whiteness is why lis diversity initiatives have onerous application requirements; and whiteness is what is recruited, promoted and retained as a result (hathcock). hathcock argues that lis recruitment for diversity is not working because the conditions of our recruitment select for only those “diverse” candidates who can “play at whiteness.” all librarians, regardless of their bodies or their backgrounds, are expected to conform to social, political, and professional norms traditionally associated with whiteness, all of which leads to the reproduction of the same librarians and library cultures and the attrition of librarians who are different. these critiques of diversity probably ring most true for those of us most committed to diversity. ahmed (2012) has shown that “diversity practitioners”1 are already aware that writing institutional diversity statements, policies, and documents can often get in the way of changing the institutions. even worse, exemplary diversity policies may lead to false assumptions of exemplary conditions for diverse people, even causing institutions to ignore or underestimate evidence to the contrary (chapter 5). yet ahmed’s interview subjects also explain that although the term may be “an empty container” (p. 80), it can be used strategically in multiple ways “to get people to the table” (p. 67) . in what follows, i look at what’s inside the term accessibility and how it may likewise be used. what is accessible? legal definitions and political potential when someone asks you if a library is accessible, you may begin to think about entrance ramps and elevators, or screen magnifiers and large print, or video captions and asl programming. in short, you may begin to think about whether the library’s spaces, collections, and services are “readily accessible and usable to people with disabilities” (ada, 1990). this phrase appears repeatedly throughout the text of the americans with disabilities act. it can serve as a preliminary definition of accessibility, but it also introduces a slew of questions. for example: 1. what does “readily accessible and usable” mean in different contexts? what might it mean for physical spaces, online resources, interactive events? 2. who are “persons with disabilities” and what specific needs do they/we bring to library contexts? the first question is addressed by a body of literature and documentation known as standards. we have the 2010 ada standards for accessible design, which describes architectural requirements for physical access. in the digital realm, we have the web content accessibility guidelines 2.0, which describes principles and criteria for accessible digital content and links to associated standards that describe criteria for interactive web applications, digital authoring tools, and electronic publications (aria, atag, epub). beyond these two most important documents, there are many other relevant standards—including perhaps the section 508 guidelines and the 21st century communications and video accessibility act—as well as softer guidelines, in the form of best practices and recommendations, that cover everything from teaching practices to exhibit design. when we have a specific question about how to make a specific context accessible, there are many places to look for an answer. the second question is addressed by the ada itself, which offers a broad definition of disability. according to the ada, a person with disabilities is any person who: has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activity or has a record of such impairment or is regarded as having such impairment (§ 12102) the question is further addressed by the us census bureau, which reports that nearly 1 in 5 people in this country have a disability (brault, 2012), and the world health organization, which reports that 1 in 7 people globally have a disability (2011). but these numbers and definitions do little to describe who people with disabilities really are, how they/we are unique, and how they/we are distributed among the total population. to begin to answer this question, people with disabilities are an extremely diverse group in every possible way. first, they/we are diverse in terms of ability. extrapolating from the ada definition, people with disabilities may include: people with mobility impairment or differences in motor control people with visual impairments, blindness, or differences in vision people who are deaf or hard of hearing people with cognitive or emotional differences, autism, ptsd, learning disabilities, depression people perceived as having a disability or a stigmatizing medical condition: diabetes, epilepsy, obesity people with previous disability: cancer survivors, people recovering from addiction furthermore, there is of course a great diversity in ability among people with disabilities in general and within any specific disability category. for example, the spectrum of visual acuity among people with so-called low vision is just as broad and varied as the spectrum of visual acuity among people with so-called typical vision. second, people with disabilities are diverse in terms of every other aspect of identity. people with disabilities are people of every background, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, nationality, and religion. and yet, people with disabilities are not evenly or randomly distributed among the total population. they/we overlap in striking ways with specific identities. for example: among americans over the age of 80, 70% of people experience disability (brault, 2012, p.5). lgbtq americans are two times more likely to experience a mental health condition (nami). among americans with disabilities of working age, over 55% are unemployed (brault, 2012, p. 11). among americans with disabilities of working age, over 25% live in poverty (brault, 2012, p. 11). among the world’s approximately one billion people with disabilities, 80% are located in the global south (grech, 2016, p. 3). these overlaps have complex social, political, and biological backstories. for example, the high incidence of unemployment and poverty among people with disabilities is not only because disability may keep some people out of the work force and therefore at risk for poverty. poverty itself increases the risk of developing disability because it often corresponds with lack of resources and exposure to environmental hazards (pokempner & roberts, 2001). as a corollary, because in this country poverty and wealth correspond to racial differences, this means that disability is not equally distributed across all races. for example, in the us among people age 22 to 44, severe disability is about 2 times more common among black people than among white people (pokempner & roberts, 2001, p. 434). people with disabilities are extremely diverse, but not randomly diverse. they/we intersect in significant ways with other marginalized groups. the latest thinking in disability studies and adjacent fields addresses these realities with more expansive frameworks—for example, debilities and capacities (puar, 2017), infrastructural neglect and environmental injustice (kim, 2016), and the uneven distribution of life chances (spade, 2015). these frameworks describe the conditions that produce disability among some populations and not others, in some places and not others. they point out that some people can claim disability—along with disability rights and disability pride—but many more people experience disability and debilitating conditions. all of these emerging frameworks from trans, queer, critical race, and postcolonial studies suggest that a focus on disability alone is not enough to understand disability for what it is: always an intersectional identity. fortunately, accessibility as a practice has the potential to affect the many identities that intersect with disability. what is accessibility? design philosophy and coalitional history accessibility is a design philosophy that centers the needs and experiences of people with disabilities. i have developed this working definition over several years of thinking back and forth across accessibility discourses and disability studies. it emphasizes the open and adaptable nature of accessibility, its accountability to people with disabilities, and its far-reaching consequences. by centering the needs of people with disabilities, accessibility puts those needs first, not to the exclusion of other users’ needs, but rather to the benefit of the overall design. by centering the needs and experiences of people with disabilities, accessibility is accountable to the embodied knowledge of real people even as their/our needs change, rather than wed to often outdated standards. as a design philosophy, accessibility is a system of values and goals we can bring to everything we do, from collections to services to hiring. accessibility as a design philosophy also brings us back to the ada, its uniqueness as legislation, and the coalitional history that led to its passing. the ada, signed into law in 1990, drew very significantly on the legacy of civil rights activism and civil rights legal theory. for example, in 1977, disability rights activists occupied the san francisco federal building to force the us government to sign section 504 of the rehabilitation act (the first piece of us legislation to prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities), clearly using tactics of civil disobedience developed in us black civil rights struggles (longmore). indeed, some of the activists, like black panther party member bradley lomax, were involved in both struggles (schweik, 2011). following the 1977 occupation, some of the same disability rights activists went to washington and made connections with prominent civil rights activists, lawyers, and politicians (davis, 2016). this eventually led to a 1981 summit in which people involved in passing the civil rights act of 1964 helped disability rights activists think through applying a civil rights framework to disability. this work eventually led to the ada as we know it (davis, 2016). the ada was made possible by earlier civil rights activism and legislation. and yet the ada is also different from that earlier legislation. the civil rights act (1964) prohibited “discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.” it outlawed the kind of active discrimination that was previously enforced through behaviors like segregation, intimidation, and denial of service. the ada (1990) also prohibits discrimination. but that discrimination was previously enforced largely through inaccessible design. to prohibit this kind of discrimination, the ada implies a proactive requirement to design things differently, such that people with disabilities are not segregated or denied service just because of the way things are made. this proactive requirement is extremely powerful, as it gives accessibility the ability to promote active design agendas that stand to benefit many people with and without disabilities. for example, accessible web design benefits people accessing the web with assistive technology as well as older technology, slower connections, and mobile devices. closed captions for the hearing impaired benefit people with varying levels of familiarity with the topic and the language. single stall locking restrooms serve people who use wheelchairs as well as people who are transgender or gender nonconforming. these illustrations of resonant design—cases where 2 different groups have coinciding needs and preferences in a particular context—show that accessibility benefits not just people with disabilities, and not just “everybody” (as is often said). accessibility, when used consciously as a tool for justice, can benefit people with disabilities and people with debilities, and people subject to infrastructural neglect, and people with limited life chances. that is, accessibility can be used consciously to impact, for example, people with less fluency in a dominant language, less access to computing and communications technology, or less safety moving through public space—people who may or may not claim disability. from access to accessibility in libraries as kumbier and starkey (2016) have recently pointed out, accessibility can and should be positioned as a natural extension of the library profession’s commitment to access. the 2004 statement from the american library association (ala) lists the 11 core values of librarianship, beginning with access: “all information resources…regardless of technology, format, or methods of delivery, should be readily, equally, and equitably accessible to all library users.” this access statement rings of accessibility and universal design, stressing that access must be for all, and that it is our responsibility to understand and eliminate barriers to access. the values statement elaborates that access should be free, without cost and without legislative restriction.2 kumbier and starkey explain how this original commitment to access and equity might be updated with recent thinking about disability justice. they advocate for a more transformative approach, beyond “access to information” and beyond “access as problem solving.” access as problem solving is a way of thinking that assumes that some people have access and some people have access problems (p. 478). kumbier and starkey want to think instead about a library in which no one is treated as an access problem and to suggest several avenues towards making our libraries accessible “in ways that exceed access to information” and would “contribute to the enactment of values like diversity and social responsibility” (p. 488). indeed, accessibility can help promote values of diversity and social responsibility, and can serve us in the work of making our workplaces and profession more equitable and just. as a tool for justice in librarianship, accessibility is inadequate on its own—just like diversity—and also necessary. its rhetorical usefulness in a profession explicitly committed to access should not be overlooked. neither should its historical particularities and its political potential. accessibility may help librarians interrogate the exclusions built into the design of our institutions. beyond achieving compliance with standards and making accommodations for people with disabilities, a lens of accessibility has the potential to transform many aspects of what we do. accessibility in hiring can be a starting point for addressing bias in job descriptions and search practices. accessibility in meetings can be a starting point for shifting power dynamics among working groups. accessibility in the classroom can be a starting point for inclusive teaching and engaged pedagogy. accessibility in scholarship can be a starting point for open access and community-accountable projects. accessibility in space design can be a starting point for built environments that invite and sustain more kinds of bodies and ways of moving or being. because disability is always intersectional and accessibility has more radical potential than at first glance, accessibility can be a powerful tool for justice, especially in a profession already committed to access. in centering the needs of people with disabilities, accessibility can impact a range of people with and without disabilities who are marginalized in library and other institutions. in altering the soft systems and physical infrastructures of our institutions, accessibility can affect how libraries work, and for whom, now and into the future. acknowledgements this essay distills thoughts that have developed over many years and reflects the input of many brilliant people. thank you to alana kumbier and amy koester for working to make this essay ready for publication. thank you to meghan sitar for directing me to kumbier’s article and lead pipe. thank you to jeff witt and mark puente for inviting me to present these arguments at the 2016 national diversity in libraries pre-conference. thank you to jasbir puar for the thinking that made this essay possible. thank you to kei kaimana for reading terrorist assemblages with me. references acrl diversity alliance. (n.d.). [statement of] purpose. retrieved october 25, 2017, from http://www.ala.org/acrl/issues/diversityalliance ahmed, s. (2012). on being included: racism and diversity in institutional life. durham, nc: duke university press. ala office for diversity, literacy, and outreach services. (n.d.). mission statement. retrieved october 25, 2017, from http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/diversity american library association. (2004, june 29). core values of librarianship. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/corevalues americans with disabilities act of 1990, pub. l. no. 101–336, 328 (1990). bourg, c. (2014, march 3). the unbearable whiteness of librarianship [blog]. retrieved october 24, 2017, from https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-librarianship/ brault, m. w. (2012). americans with disabilities: 2010. washington, dc: u.s. census bureau. civil rights act of 1964, pub. l. no. 88–352, 241 (1964). davis, l. j. (2015). enabling acts: the hidden story of how the americans with disabilities act gave the largest us minority its rights. boston: beacon press. galvan, a. (2015). soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship. in the library with the lead pipe. grech, s., & soldatic, k. (2016). disability in the global south: the critical handbook. cham, switzerland: springer international publishing. hathcock, a. (2015). white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis. in the library with the lead pipe. hudson, d. j. (2017). on “diversity” as anti-racism in library and information studies: a critique. journal of critical library and information studies. kim, j. b. (2016). anatomy of the city: race, infrastructure, and u.s. fictions of dependency. university of michigan, ann arbor. kumbier, a., & starkey, j. (2016). access is not problem solving: disability justice and libraries. library trends, 64(3), 468–491. longmore institute on disability. (n.d.). patient no more: people with disabilities securing civil rights. retrieved october 25, 2017, from http://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/patient-no-more national alliance on mental wellness. (n.d.). mental health by the numbers. retrieved october 25, 2017, from https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-by-the-numbers pokempner, j., & roberts, d. e. (2001). poverty, welfare reform, and the meaning of disability. ohio state law journal, 62, 425. puar, j. k. (2017). the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. durham: duke university press. schweik, s. m. (2011). lomax’s matrix: disability, solidarity, and the black power of 504. disability studies quarterly, 31(1). spade, d. (2015). normal life: administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law (revised and expanded edition). durham, [north carolina]: duke university press. stewart, d.-l. (2017, march 30). language of appeasement. inside higher ed. retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/03/30/colleges-need-language-shift-not-one-you-think-essay united states department of justice. (2010). 2010 ada standards for accessible design. washington, dc: dept. of justice. w3c world wide web consortium. (2008, december 11). web content accessibility guidelines 2.0. retrieved from http://www.w3.org/tr/wcag20/ world health organization. (2011). world report on disability. geneva, switzerland: world health organization. ahmed’s study (2012) draws from twenty-one interviews with diversity practitioners working in higher education institutions in australia and the uk. [↩] this information is supplemented in the ala policy manual b.2.1.14 economic barriers to information access. [↩] accessibility, disability, intersectionality, justice patron-driven subject access: how librarians can mitigate that “power to name” editorial: harassment in scholarship is unacceptable–and requires action this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct consultants in canadian academic libraries: adding new voices to the story – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 30 oct ania dymarz and marni harrington /1 comments consultants in canadian academic libraries: adding new voices to the story in brief the practice of hiring consultants in academic libraries is widespread, but research on the topic is not. we argue that this practice stems from underlying neoliberal ideals that may disenfranchise library workers. this research is the first to include the experiences and perspectives of library employees to better understand the practice of hiring consultants in academic libraries. we surveyed 189 library employees from english language canadian universities and colleges about their experiences and perceptions of consultant use in their libraries. participants were assigned to either library administrator (n=21) or library worker (n=168) employee groups and were asked to provide insight into their experiences with consultants. pivot tables were used to examine descriptive statistics and compare groups of respondents. the qualitative data was examined using a theoretical thematic analysis to address three themes: motivations for hiring consultants, the impact of the practice on library work and workplace culture, and perceptions of consultant work. we discuss these three themes by unpacking the role that power plays with respect to this practice. we find that the practice of hiring consultants is indeed a trend in canadian academic libraries, but that both groups of participants are conflicted about the impact of the practice. introduction the practice of hiring consultants in canadian academic libraries appears to be a growing trend (harrington & dymarz, 2018). however, scholarly research on the topic has not grown with it. in this way, consultant use is similar to other practices in academic libraries that have become commonplace and often go unexamined, including strategic planning initiatives, the deskilling and downsizing of librarian labour, and private sector relationships in libraries (adler, 2015). practices such as these that gradually seep into an organization without critical analyses or examination become normative. we believe that critically engaging with these practices can reveal underlying and unacknowledged forces within our workplaces that directly shape the nature of individuals’ work and library workplace culture. in 2018, we conducted a historical review of the literature about consultants in libraries to document the origin and scope of this practice. we also analyzed library and information science (lis) texts to show how students studying librarianship, and hence future librarians, learn about consultants. three common tenets were repeated throughout lis texts: consultants are “unbiased”, they provide “expertise”, and they offer “fresh ideas”. we also identified rhetorical strategies that appear throughout these texts, including the use of figurative and indirect language used to describe consultants’ roles. we concluded that the linguistic strategies used when characterizing consultants blur the reality of the practice, rather than clarify the role of consultants in libraries. our historical review outlined the growth and development of the practice of hiring consultants in libraries, and our textual analysis critiqued common representations of consultants and problematized the existing discourse within the library literature. the linguistic strategies identified in these texts also demonstrate how knowledge and power are exerted through the language employed about consultants. knowledge and power are observed to be interwoven concepts in a consulting relationship (pozzebon, 2012). we considered how knowledge and power play out in library settings when consultants are hired as experts and are given authority and control to make decisions about library work, decisions that affect the day-to-day work of library employees. disturbingly, we found that the literature and texts rarely include the perspective of library workers or address the impact of practices such as consulting on their work. we framed the practice of hiring consultants in academic libraries as a neoliberal practice that impacts the agency of library employees through mechanisms of knowledge and power. to address the lack of voices of library workers on the ground, our current research examines the experiences of library employees whose labour may be affected by the practice of hiring consultants. 189 library employees from english language canadian universities and colleges were surveyed about their past experiences and current perceptions of consultant use in their libraries. participants were assigned to either library administrator (n=21) or library worker (n=168) employee groups and asked to provide insight into their experiences with consultants, the impact on their work and workplace culture, and their understanding of consultants’ work in their libraries. in this article, we first define and clarify frequently-used terms, then follow with a short review of the practice of hiring consultants in libraries. we incorporate an introduction to research about canadian academic libraries to situate our findings into the context of academic library workers in canada. next, we present our survey methodology and highlight the quantitative results. the discussion section further explores our research questions addressing how themes of power play out in organizational hierarchies for individuals working in academic libraries in neoliberal times. the qualitative results from open-ended survey questions are woven into the discussion section. our conclusion reaffirms the importance of objectively examining the political and economic contexts in which academic libraries operate. literature review definitions and themes of power several terms and themes that are central in our article need to be defined and introduced. in our work, library consultant is defined as “an individual offering a range of professional skills and advice relevant to the operation of libraries. usually these skills will be marketed on a commercial basis by a […] person who is not directly employed by the library concerned but retained on contract for a fee” (prytherch, 2005). we use the phrase “the practice” throughout this article to capture the work for which a consultant is hired. next, themes of power connected to neoliberalism, organizational hierarchy, and agency are introduced, then further examined in relation to our findings in the discussion section. to begin, we believe that academic libraries are affected by the neoliberal ideologies that support private sector control, ongoing efficiencies, accountabilities, and austerity measures of doing more with less (bousquet, 2008). furthermore, we consider consulting to be a neoliberal practice that addresses crises and change by using corporate solutions. arguably, the interaction between corporate solutions and work in public institutions can be incongruent. for example, using corporate solutions for strategic planning, staff restructuring, and other organizational change may create conflict between the values of the profession (american library association, 2019) and the consultant’s work and recommendations for the library. seale (2013) highlights a possible conflict between hiring ala consultants to define and measure value in academic libraries when these consultants are also lis scholars. consultants, and in this case ala consultants, may not have a critical distance from their own work creating “a closed discursive system that undoubtedly promotes the uncritical adoption of ideas that seem authoritative and obvious” (p. 54). explicit conversations and engagement with a seemingly benign practice like hiring consultants exposes the unacknowledged impact of neoliberal practices on library employees’ work and workplace culture. we acknowledge the need to accept that librarianship is embedded in neoliberal political and economic contexts, as well as the need to recognize and discuss these contexts to create alternatives (seale, 2013). we also acknowledge that while organizational hierarchies are not solely a function of neoliberal structures, they are connected to power. in her research about library organization and management, lynch (1979) describes libraries as highly bureaucratic institutions that account for ongoing and eternal hierarchical structures in libraries. systemically, administrative power becomes built into organizational hierarchy with the greatest control, power and autonomy at the top, and control, power and autonomy decreasing as you move down the hierarchy. ongoing neoliberal ideals which espouse “performance-, cost-, efficiencyand audit-oriented” practices have been introduced into not-for-profit organizations such as those in higher education (diefenbach & sillince, 2011, p.1522). these institutions then become progressively bureaucratic, and neoliberal practices become synonymous with an increase in organizational hierarchy, with “increasing numbers of hierarchical levels providing people with disproportionate privileges and opportunities as well as unequal working conditions” (diefenbach & sillince, 2011p.1522). and finally, we introduce the theme of agency to explore both the empowering and disempowering aspects of the practice on the individual and the workplace. we use agency to describe the power an individual may or may not exercise as a result of the practice of hiring consultants. eggertsson (1990) states that a consultant will always have a strategic advantage as a consulting relationship can never be balanced. furthermore, in a discussion of power and politics in organizational studies, blackler (2011) conceptualizes power in four quadrants differentiating between personal power and collective power and between overt and unobtrusive power. our use of agency focuses on personal power in the overt sense (for example: having expertise, valued information, or connections). the remaining literature review uses and unpacks these definitions and themes in relation to the practice of hiring consultants in a canadian context. the canadian context the goal of our current research is to include the voices of canadian academic library employees when considering the practice of hiring consultants. because universities and colleges are major academic institutions in canada, but there is little research on college libraries (arnold, 2010), we targeted library employees from both canadian colleges and universities. in addition, minimal research exists that includes canadian academic library employees as a group. the most significant research would be the future of human resources in canadian libraries published in 2005 (ingles). this study conducted interviews, focus groups and surveys with four types of staff (librarians, other professionals, support staff, and paraprofessionals) across a variety of libraries (special, school, academic, and public) to investigate human resource challenges facing libraries in canada. the authors presented their findings in terms of 8rs: recruitment, retirement, retention, rejuvenation, repatriation, re-accreditation, remuneration, and restructuring. in response to the 8rs study, the canadian association of research libraries (carl) published 8rs redux in 2015 (delong, sorensen & williamson). this research also surveyed four staffing groups (librarians, other professionals, support staff, and paraprofessionals) to investigate changes in human resource challenges and to extrapolate for future planning. however, this is not a representative study because carl includes 29 research libraries in canada, while other university libraries and all college libraries were excluded. findings from this study indicate that organizational change will continue in academic libraries due to transformations of postsecondary education in canada, declining budgets, impact of new technologies, and capacity of current staff. the 8rs redux study highlights barriers to organizational change that include organizational culture, staff who are resistant to change, lack of employee involvement in change, and organizational hierarchical structure (p. x). borrowing directly from corporate ideologies, the report states that the “literature on organizational change and development provides evidence that principles of organizational development can be used within higher education to address the underlying causes of organizational problems while still maintaining commitment to academic excellence.” (p. x) because library consultants are commonly hired for strategic human resources planning, such as organizational change, this study is relevant to our own work. consulting in libraries the practice of hiring consultants originated in private, for-profit sectors where it developed quickly and without independent research to substantiate its use. fincham and clark (2002) for example, highlight how the lack of research about consultants in management has “constrained and distorted” what the practice is about. according to fincham and clark (2002), two distinct themes emerge in the literature written about management consultants: an organizational development perspective and a critical perspective. the organizational development literature is more common and is preoccupied with improving efficacy, consultants’ success, and the role of the consultant from the consultants’ point-of-view (appelbaum & steed, 2005; kakabadse, kakabadse & louchart, 2006). in contrast, the critical perspective “is regarded as a type of social discourse the elements of which reflect issues of power and the construction of knowledge” (fincham & clark, 2002). literature with a critical perspective serves to critique the practice of consulting as opposed to simply improving its efficacy or scope without question. scale (2016) found that there is minimal academic research, critical or supportive, about consultants in any type of library. the literature that is available primarily presents an organizational development perspective. for example, the professional literature centers on organizational and operational questions including how to hire a good consultant (matthews, 1994), how to be a good consultant (wormell, olesen & mikulás, 2011), and the factors that lead to successful consultant experiences (garten, 1992). this work begins and ends with the premise that the practice of hiring consultants is advantageous, and it precludes the need to ask further questions. in matthews’ report on the effective use of consultants in libraries, the role of the consultant is not questioned. consultant expertise is assumed throughout the report, but never discussed. similarly, there are texts written by consultants about their work, often for other consultants or those who aspire to this practice (see: de stricker, 2008, 2010; skrzeszewski, 2006; and the lis publication of the association of independent information professionals: aiip connections). we discussed a perceived trend in academic libraries to hire consultants for internal crises, change management projects, strategic planning processes and more (harrington & dymarz, 2018). our literature review summarized work written about consultants in libraries and we used this review to document a chronological history of the practice. the trajectory of the practice was on a continuum, beginning with construction and survey work (1940-60), moving to service and operational changes (1970-80), then on to environmental changes and budget challenges (1990-2000), and today reflecting organizational changes and change management (2010-present). we found that consulting originated from private, corporate models without consideration of its fit for libraries as public organizations, revealing an imbalance between the growth of the practice in the field and the literature available about it. for example, private sector approaches were readily adopted in libraries. in an entry in the 1975 edition of the encyclopedia of library and information science, schell recommends that lis should bring basic theory and practice from business consulting and apply it directly to libraries, while also acknowledging that there is little written about consulting in libraries. we then examined what was written about consultants in the review literature as well as lis educational materials from the library collection of a long-standing, ala-accredited lis program (harrington & dymarz 2018). the list of titles was generated from derivations of “library consultant” using keyword and subject heading searches. dictionaries, encyclopedias, directories, handbooks, guides, professional and scholarly publications were examined for the types of language used to define and characterize consultants over time. our findings indicate that the organizational development perspective is replicated throughout these texts. the hiring of consultants, and the language used to describe their role have not been challenged. for example, we found three core tenets used to describe library consultants: library consultants are “unbiased” professionals, who bring “expertise” and “fresh ideas” to a library. over time, characterizations and definitions of library consultants transformed from a description of consultant as “specialist” in 1943 (thompson) to consultant as “expert” by the 1980’s (young & belanger). consultants also were defined by their “fresh ideas” beginning in 1969 (berry) and extending at least to 2011 (wormell). consultants were characterized as “unbiased” beginning in 1977 (lockwood). we argued that this transformation was due to the restatement of representations of consultants over time, without examination or evidence of their accuracy. we also suggested that repeating these consultant characteristics over time not only regularized the practice of hiring consultants as unbiased experts with fresh ideas but could also have disempowered library workers. the second focus of our (2018) textual analysis found an overuse of rhetorical strategies, including polarizing, figurative and indirect language. polarizing language can be hostile and normalizes extremes of positive and negative characterizations of consultants. polarizing language does not leave room for informed nuanced or critical discussion about the evidence, value or outcome of the practice. for example, champions portray consultants as innovative, forward-thinking, and transformational (de stricker, 2010). in contrast, the opposing side claims that consultants “waste time, cost money, demoralize and distract your best people, and don’t solve problems” (townsend, 1970 p. 68). figurative and indirect language is often used to describe the work of consultants. this includes timekeeper, monitor, talisman, advocate, parasite, gardener, pilot, guide, trouble shooter, ritual pig, and magician (robbins-carter, 1984; kakabadse, kakabadse & louchart, 2006) rhetorical strategies such as these are intended to persuade a reader to accept the author’s characterization of the consultants, but they do not clarify the consultant’s role. although neoliberalism and agency are two themes that emerged from our historical review and textual analysis, it was necessary to investigate whether other themes might also emerge by surveying the experiences of the people involved with consultants in their libraries. the present research thus serves as a further step to shift the discourse towards a more critically informed perspective when examining the role of consultants by addressing the following research questions: what are the perceived motivations for hiring consultants in academic libraries? what is the impact of hiring consultants on library employees and workplace culture? what are the perceptions around consultants and consultant use by library employees? building on our previous research, we use descriptions and characteristics of consultants documented in the literature, along with themes of power, to investigate experiences and perceptions of canadian academic library employees. method using online survey software from fluid surveys, we developed 31 multiple-choice, closed-, and open-ended questions focussing on participants’ experiences with consultants during the past five years. five open-ended qualitative questions provided space for respondents to write about their perceptions and experiences with consultants that may not have been captured in the closed-ended questions. additionally, five multiple-choice questions included an open-ended “other” option, with the space to provide specific information. we received 260 surveys and analyzed 189. surveys were excluded if they were less than 35% complete, if respondents did not work in a canadian academic library, or if they did not work full-time. the content of the questions was generated from background reading about the role of consultants in libraries, and more specifically as a result of our previous research on consultants in libraries. for example, the types of consulting work that were most prevalent in the literature were highlighted in question 3, where respondents were asked to “select all areas of focus that consultants have worked on in your library.” similarly, we asked for levels of agreement across themes (questions 5-7, 17) that were replicated throughout texts about consultants: consultants are part of internal, organizational change; they provide expertise, objective advice, and fresh ideas; and consultants are essential. these survey questions can be regarded as the start of a dialogue that continued into the open-ended “further comments” sections. a small amount of demographic data was collected using multiple-choice options, including the province or territory where employed, type of academic institution (primarily undergraduate, comprehensive, medical / doctoral), years of experience in academic libraries, education level, and union representation. we did not collect racial or ethnic data. for anonymity purposes, we did not collect any identifying information such as name, email, or name of institution. the full survey is included in appendix b. during fall 2017, we recruited library employees working at english language colleges and universities in canada to participate. specifically, we targeted two groups of respondents: library administrators and library workers (referred to in the aggregate as library employees). library workers include the roles of library assistants, librarians, department or division heads, or other professionals working in the library. library administrators are university librarians, chief librarians, deans of libraries, associate university librarians, associate deans of libraries, or executive directors of libraries. these groups were established to ensure that we had a variety of perspectives about consultant use, from those that hired the consultants (library administration) to those that carried out the consultants’ recommendations (library workers). participants in the library administrator group were recruited originally through a list from the association of universities and colleges of canada. library administrators were invited to participate and to circulate our call for participants within their libraries. we thought that this was a good recruitment method to ensure that all library employees could be given the opportunity to participate. that is, although there are many professional organizations and list-serves available to reach canadian academic librarians, reaching other library staff is more challenging. however, we received feedback from one university librarian who suggested that this solicitation would work for administrators, but it would be rare for administrators to forward a solicitation email on to their staff due to the time and effort it would take to vet the appropriateness of the study. because of this feedback, we revised our recruitment method. we began to recruit participants using national (e.g. canadian association of professional academic librarians, capal) and provincial (e.g. british columbia library association, bcla; jerome-l, alberta; ontario college and university library association, ocula) canadian academic library listservs to expand the reach of our call for participation. descriptive statistics were calculated to categorize perceptions and experiences with library consultants across the two respondent groups. pivot tables were used to analyze descriptive statistics and compare groups of respondents. qualitative analysis was conducted using themes derived from our previous research and further identified in our survey questions. after a rigorous reading of the written responses by both researchers, the qualitative data were hand coded for emerging themes that were not previously identified. throughout the findings and discussion sections, we provide quotes from both employee groups. for anonymity, each respondent has been given a pseudonym, and identified by their employee group. we did not provide job type because this could identify the respondent. in total, we include quotes from 26 library employees with 14 representing librarian voices, and the remainder representing administrators and library workers who did not identify as librarians. findings we report our findings by collapsing the questions from the survey questions into three sections. after describing respondent demographics, we move on to topics about experience with consultants, then to perceived impact and value of consultants. the qualitative results from open-ended survey questions are incorporated into the discussion section. demographic information demographic information was collected in order to situate the respondents in groups and academic affiliations. the library worker group, with 168 respondents, also included four responses from library workers who are affiliated with canadian consortial groups. this was considered an appropriate placement because these respondents also stated that they were affiliated with academic libraries or institutions. the library administrator group included 21 respondents. college employees represent approximately 10% of each group. table 1 represents the group and academic affiliation of all respondents. table 1. q19,23: responses by employee group and academic affiliation (number of respondents in parentheses) college university consortium total (189) administrators 10% (2) 90% (19) – 11% (21) library workers 11% (18) 87% (146) 2% (4) 89% (168) full equivalent of this table as a list. we received responses from all ten canadian provinces. as table 2 illustrates, the representation from british columbia and ontario is the strongest. for purposes of confidentiality, we did not ask respondents to identify their institution. therefore, responses cannot be grouped any more precisely than by province. however, there could be overlap in institution amongst any of the participants. ten participants did not answer this question. survey questions 20 to 28 collected information to further describe those who responded to the survey. eighty-one percent of the library employee respondents are governed by a collective agreement, and over half (55%) identified as a librarian when asked to indicate their job type. additionally, 74% of library workers and 95% of administrators identified as having at least an mlis, mls, or equivalent. half (50%) of the library workers have been employed in libraries less than 10 years, while just over half (55%) of library administrators have worked in libraries for over 21 years. thirty percent of respondents worked in primarily undergraduate institutions, 43% in comprehensive universities, and 17% in medical/doctoral universities. in terms of the size of the institution as defined by the number of full-time equivalent students, 38% of respondents work at institutions with fewer than 12,000 students, 23% lay between 12,000-24,000 students, and 40% are employed at institutions with over 24,000 students. table 2. q22: responses by geographic location and employee group (number of respondents in parentheses) geographic location administrators (21) library workers (158) british columbia 9 49 alberta 0 20 saskatchewan 1 0 manitoba 0 8 ontario 8 58 québec 1 7 new brunswick 1 1 nova scotia 1 11 prince edward island 0 1 newfoundland & labrador 0 3 full equivalent of this table as a list experiences with consultants when we explored experiences with consultants, 62% of administrators and 64% of library workers reported that their library had hired a consultant in the past. thirty-eight percent of administrators were involved with hiring a consultant, compared with 13% of the library workers. with respect to the consultation process itself, 80% of administrators reported that they were active participants in contrast to 64% of the library workers. these responses are presented in table 3. table 3. consultants hired, and the role of library employees in the process (number of respondents in parentheses) employee group q1: my library has hired a consultant in the past (189) q11: i was involved in the hiring process (120) q12: i participated in the consultation process (120) q30: i have worked as a consultant in the past (186) administrators (21) yes 62% (13) yes 38% (5) yes 80% (10) yes 30% (6) no 24% (5) no 62% (8) no 20% (3) no 70% (14) unsure 14% (3) library workers (168) yes 64% (108) yes 13% (14) yes 64% (68) yes 6% (10) no 14% (23) no 87% (93) no 36% (39) no 94% (156) unsure 22% (37) full equivalent of this table as a list if a respondent indicated that a consultant had not worked in their library, they were asked to choose all that applied to their experience from a predetermined list or add their own reasons concerning why they believed this was so. of the 17% of respondents who completed this question (n=32), there was a response count of 61. more than half (53%) chose the statement: “it is not common practice at my library to hire consultants.” the second most frequent response was “it is too expensive” (44%), and the third was “we rely on internal expertise” (25%). in contrast, 79% of respondents (n=150) who have had consultants work in their libraries were asked to choose the most common reasons for hiring a consultant. again, they could choose all that applied to their experience from the predetermined list or add their own reasons, resulting in a response count of 426. the most frequent reason was “to provide guidance for decision making” with 65% (n=97), followed closely by “to complete a project that requires skills or knowledge not currently held by library employees” with 63% (n=94), and with just below half (49%, n=73) choosing “to lend external credence to a course of action”. four percent of the respondents did not answer either of these questions. 122 respondents across the two employee groups identified the focus of consultant work in their libraries (see figure 1). architecture and space planning was identified as the most common reason consultants are hired, and unquestionably requires specialized professionals. the other areas of focus that followed were categorized into core library organizational planning activities that involve people (library employees) as the focus, rather than physical structures (architecture and space). i don’t have the skills to work as an architect and i don’t think that i should have these skills. it makes sense to bring in consultants for these kinds of tasks. on the other hand, i think it is very problematic for consultants to be brought in for things such as strategic planning or reorganization. (corey, library worker) figure 1. q3: what was the focus of consultant work in your library? (choose all that apply) full equivalent of this figure as a list and table. note: there were ten predefined categories of consultant work, with an opportunity for participants to add other responses, most of which fell into one of these ten categories. other notable areas of focus for which consultants were hired include it projects (n=20), evidence-based decision-making (n=10), information literacy training (n=4), and outcomes assessment (n=3). five other individual responses did not fall into any of these areas. participants could choose or list all areas of consultant work that applied to their experience, resulting in a total of 390 responses across all library employees. as depicted in figure 2, over half of our respondents indicated that consultants had been hired three, four, or five times in their libraries, each for a different type of consulting work. these responses support our statement that the practice of hiring consultants is a trend, affecting multiple areas of work in canadian academic libraries. figure 2. q3: number of times consultants hired in my library (number of respondents in parentheses, with 122 respondents providing 390 total responses, across both library employee groups) full equivalent of this figure as a list. figure 2. q3: number of times consultants hired in my library (number of respondents in parentheses, with 122 respondents providing 390 total responses, across both library employee groups) count of consultant use (122) once (18) twice (25) three times (27) four times (23) five times (19) six times (8) seven times (1) eight times (1) % 15 20 22 18 16 7 1 1 impact and value of consultants table 4. q14: the consultant had a positive impact on… (number of respondents in parentheses, total n=126 across both library employee groups) agree neither agree nor disagree disagree … my workplace 29% (36) 42% (53) 29% (37) … library services 23% (29) 51% (64) 26% (33) … library patrons 11% (14) 61% (77) 28% (35) full equivalent of this table as a list the notion of consultant value was also investigated by asking library employees to agree, disagree, or remain neutral concerning a variety of statements (see table 5). we found that administrators agreed with the statements that consultants are unbiased and provide specialized expertise. although 62% of administrators thought consultants provide fresh ideas, almost 40% thought that consultants are not useful in terms of providing ideas that they have not already considered. interestingly, only 19% of administrators believed that consultants should be hired more often, and 67% are neutral on this topic. library workers were most agreeable about the specialized expertise provided by consultants (78%). similar to the administrators, 64% agreed with the statement that consultants provide fresh ideas and almost 40% indicated that their ideas are not new. library workers were less agreeable about bias, with over half in disagreement or unsure about consultant bias. regardless of the value that consultants may bring to a library, administrators and library workers were both unsure about hiring consultants more often. table 5. q17: perceived value of consultants (number of respondents in parentheses) value of consultants administrators library workers consultants… agree disagree neither agree disagree neither … provide fresh ideas 62% (13) 24% (5) 14% (3) 64% (108) 14% (23) 22% (37) … are unbiased 76% (16) 10% (2) 14% (3) 44% (73) 27% (45) 29% (49) … provide specialized expertise 86% (18) 0 14% (3) 78% (131) 4% (7) 18% (30) … should be hired more often in our library 19% (4) 14% (3) 67% (14) 15% (25) 35% (58) 50% (84) full equivalent of this table as a list discussion we obtained a sample of respondents from across canadian english language academic institutions who were candid about their experiences with consultants in their libraries, and perceptions of the practice. to further examine our findings, we break down our discussion into three sections to address our research questions that focus on motivations, impact, and perceptions of the practice. section one discusses the motivations for hiring consultants in canadian academic libraries. we find that consultants were hired for a variety of organizational work across many instances, supporting our argument that the practice of hiring consultants is a trend, affecting multiple areas of work in canadian academic libraries. section two addresses the impact of consultants on work and workplace culture in libraries. our results indicate conflicted or hesitant views by both groups of respondents. that is, all library employees were unsure about the impact of consultants on their work and workplace, but, at the same time, were critically engaged with the conversation about it. library workers also reported a lack of agency for themselves and their colleagues and reflected on the impact of this practice. section three expands on the broad range of perceptions about the practice detailed by both groups. surprisingly, participants agreed that consultants are unbiased, and provide expertise and fresh ideas. it is surprising because there is a noticeable disconnect between these positive characterizations, and the participants’ lack of desire to have consultants work more in their libraries. i. motivations for hiring consultants when we review the respondents’ perceived motivations for hiring consultants in libraries, our findings are consistent with those in the literature. hiring consultants is a trend (harrington & dymarz, 2018); there is marked dissonance for employees who work in a public institution under neoliberal ideologies (seale, 2013); and there is a lack of transparency about the practice (delong, sorensen & williamson, 2015). consultant work in library organizational areas such as strategic planning, change management, staff reorganization, staff development and team building was reported frequently (63%, 48%, 46%, 32% and 25% respectively – see figure 1). that is, the frequency of comments and opinions about consulting projects from both groups of respondents made it an important theme to explore further. figure 2 shows that it is common for consultants to be hired on more than one occasion. by combining the results of figures 1 and 2, we can assume that consultants are hired for a variety of organizational work across many occasions. these responses support our statement that the practice of hiring consultants is a trend, affecting multiple areas of work in canadian academic libraries. neoliberal ideologies figure prominently in our analysis and understanding of the practice of hiring consultants and are also reflected in the voices of some of the respondents. broadening our approach to the question of “why do you think consultants are hired?” moves us away from operational considerations to analytical ones and provides us with a more nuanced view of the practice. for example, some participants explicitly spoke to the neoliberal ideology underpinning the practice of hiring consultants: it seems to me, though, that consultant work has grown out of a business model where profit motif is the leading logic. consultants in this instance don’t bring fresh ideas; they bring capitalism. the academic library i work in and almost all libraries do not generate profit and so this ideology is counter to the very being of libraries. i would love a consultant that was an anti-capitalist library advocate. (corey, library worker) there is a sense that the consultant will swoop in, with an incomplete understanding of our environment, and apply standard business techniques to our situation, whether those techniques are appropriate or not. (frances, library worker) a number of respondents refer to policies or outcomes that evolve as a result of working in a neoliberal environment of doing more with less (bousquet, 2008). library workers spoke indirectly to the structures of neoliberalism by referring to “certain tasks and responsibilities being outsourced” due to lack of staff (kelly, library worker), or to a “troubling scope creep where consultants are hired to do project work that really should be done by librarians” (renee, library worker). hiring consultants to define and measure the library’s value are neoliberal rationales that may not align with the values and code of ethics of library workers. we suggest that there is a disconnect between ethical guidelines and values of librarianship when corporate models are used for organizational change including library restructuring and strategic planning. similarly, some respondents noted the dissonance between the values inherent in libraries and in the practice of hiring consultants. two library workers in particular speak to the values of library ethics versus the values present in the practice of hiring consultants: i was once presented with a list of potential values generated by a consulting firm as part of our library reorganization process, and among the options listed was “winning”. it was hard for me to trust that the consultant had the library’s best interest in mind if “wining” was on offer as a value.” (alex, library worker) the academic library i work in and almost all libraries do not generate profit and so this ideology is counter to the very being of libraries. (corey, library worker) a lack of transparency was seen in the carl study (delong, sorensen & williamson, 2015), where “only 14% of institution respondents (in our study referred to as administration) reported to have involved staff in the change decision-making process which is one of the most established methods of exacting successful change” (p. 28). similarly, a lack of transparency was described in open-ended responses from library workers: consultants were hired because administration, management, or the “higher ups” wanted to get something done without involving library staff. i think [our library director] was more influenced by what the higher-ups wanted than what staff actually wanted or needed.” (micha, library worker). ii. impact of the practice on work and workplace culture our findings reveal a mix of perspectives about the impact of consultant use in regard to the organization and the individual. problems with power in terms of organizational structure and lack of agency in consulting relationships highlighted in our literature review (diefenbach & sillince, 2011) are further unpacked in this section. the theme of organizational hierarchy surfaced most when respondents critiqued the exercise of power by administration. consultants were identified as a tool for administration: consultants are not necessarily objective. they may consciously or unconsciously provide solutions/ideas that are in line with management/administration’s desires. after all, that’s who’s paying the consultant fees. (sam, library worker) the following participant condemns a misuse of power in which administration avoids taking full responsibility for a decision made through the use of a consultant. this deferral of responsibility serves to problematize the dynamics of organizational hierarchy: use of consultants is a management technique to effect change without management having to take responsibility for the change. most believe the outcomes are foregone conclusions, already decided on by management, [they are] using the consultant to give the illusion [of] staff participation. this makes people distrustful of management and less engaged in their workplace. (lee, library worker) when the consultant intervention is, in the words of another library worker “chiefly symbolic” (jordie), then library staff can feel demoralized. this is linked to the theme of agency, specifically loss of power. the practice of hiring consultants was also identified by some participants to be disempowering not only for themselves, but also for their co-workers. reflecting on workplace culture in canadian research libraries, the carl study found that job satisfaction is not only related to what people do in their jobs, but that it is based on a variety of intrinsic indicators including relationships, equality of treatment, work life balance, and empowerment (delong, sorensen & williamson, 2015). some of the terms that surfaced spoke to a loss of power, as well as disillusionment, disengagement, distrust, and feeling undervalued. it is not surprising then that only 15% of library workers think consultants should be hired more frequently. administrators also identified with a loss of influence and importance. this loss of power should not be surprising since only 19% of the administrators believe that consultants should be hired more often (see table 5). the practice of hiring consultants in general has made employees feel insecure, distrustful of administration, concerned for the stability of their positions, and cost a good deal of time with very little outcome. the practice of hiring consultants has in general had a negative impact on the culture of my workplace. it has contributed to low morale. (val, library administrator) still other participants expressed a lack of agency, not necessarily by the fact that consultants were hired, but by the fact that the consultation process left them feeling powerless. the following quotes come from library employees with various roles within the library, but all speak to the same theme of disempowerment or decreased agency: staff seem to feel that we are being asked for feedback but that the ask for feedback is superficial – it’s pandering. decisions have already been made. (sean, library worker) many of the librarians commented on why we bother with consultations if they don’t listen anyway. (taylor, library worker) the person’s expert opinion was valued over the knowledge and experience of the people in the library. (rory, library administration) in other instances, the practice of hiring consultants had a positive impact on individuals. respondents noted the ability to bring in expertise in areas not currently covered by the library, along with an increase of internal skills as a result of consultant work. it is interesting that respondents from both groups spoke to feelings of empowerment after working with consultants: it has made our workplace more of a team-based workplace. people are more respectful of each other. (lou, library worker) it can be energizing and helps us to break out of entrenched patterns of thinking. (taylor, library worker) [it] expanded my understanding of areas in which i have worked with them; allowed the library to move forward in areas where we lacked in-house expertise. (pat, library administration) when reporting on the impact of hiring consultants, respondents on the whole provided a fairly balanced view. in thinking about a specific consultant intervention, respondents were asked to indicate their level of agreement with three statements: impact on workplace, library services, and library patrons (see table 4). the majority of responses for each impact statement assembles around the option “neither agree, nor disagree”. while a cursory analysis presents a cautious view of the practice, the volume of the qualitative data speaks to a more conflicted view: over 75% of respondents provide further clarification in open ended questions. there is a disconnect between the closedand open-ended responses. critical engagement with the survey topic further demonstrates that both groups of participants want to be involved in the discussion about the practice, but they are unsure, conflicted or hesitant about how they feel. as the workers whose labour may be affected, listening to their voices is necessary to understand the impact of consultants on work and workplace culture. iii. perceptions about the practice in the final section we discuss general perceptions of consultants through the language used when talking about the practice. many of these perceptions were identified in our introductory work about consultants (harrington & dymarz, 2018). in this research, we identified three core characteristics of library consultants: they bring expertise, are unbiased, and bring fresh ideas. these characteristics were repeated over time in lis materials without evidence to support or dispute claims of expertise, objectivity, or fresh ideas. respondents in the current study largely agreed with the characterization of consultants as presented in the literature either by way of agreement or critique. library employees also repeated the assumption that consultants are hired because of “objective advice”: my experience with hired consultants […], is the “objective advice” provided by the consultant tends to vary depending on the consultant’s expertise, knowledge, qualifications and skills. i’ve had a mix of extremely positive experiences and not so positive experiences. (jesse, library administrator) others provided a more impartial evaluation: sometimes libraries may hire consultants when they need to make some important changes. the consultant will be perceived as a “neutral expert”. however, there may be the equivalent expertise in the library, but this expertise may not be perceived as being neutral. (jamie, library worker) the use of figurative and polarizing language was also identified in our earlier work and replicated in the open-ended survey responses. we previously argued that the use of figurative language obscures the real nature of consultant work and circumvents the need for a more rigorous analysis of impact and outcome. that is, figurative and indirect language become distractions in the discussion about consultants. interestingly, these linguistic strategies were also provided by library workers: the old expression about a consultant being someone who asks to borrow your watch, tells you what time it is and then hands you a bill, is very accurate in my opinion. (riley, library worker) they can serve as an honest broker and get people together but sometimes they also have their own agendas which do not fit well in a library setting. (quinn, library worker) polarizing language similarly restricts the opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of the practice. by positioning the consultant as being entirely good or bad, the resulting discourse fails to support a fruitful discussion with room for both positive and negative perspectives, approaches, and outcomes with regard to consulting activities. in the qualitative data, there are numerous polarizing, critical statements from the library workers group when characterizing the practice. consultants cause resentment and jealousy (adrian), the practice is called dysfunctional (elliott), and consultants are distrusted and treated with suspicion (harper). furthermore, the following example expresses outright contempt: in my librarian circles, “consultant” is almost a curse word. i (and many of my colleagues) don’t respect those who are recognized as leading library consultants in canada. they’ve got corporate models, stale opinions, and a lack of intersectional analysis. (cassidy, library worker) no impact on my work, except it’s an annoying distraction that provides no real purpose for the librarian and staff but allows management to appear constructive and responsive… ticks the boxes of responsible management without actually doing anything meaningful. (jean, library worker) other responses depict a balanced perspective about consultants that allows room for both positive and negative aspects and a more nuanced and helpful discussion about the practice. for example, the following quote weighs the positive outcomes of consultant work with the negative emotions of colleagues. it has led to some good outcomes, providing an outlet for some employees to share concerns about change in the workplace and address communication difficulties within work groups. in some cases, it resulted in (or reinforced) employee cynicism about proposed changes to the workplace and bitterness about resources being expended on hiring consultants. (michel, library worker). whereas some respondents resisted the popular characterizations of consultants found in the literature, many reproduced these themes. one explanation could be that the lack of analytic discourse related to the practice encourages our community to uncritically adopt it. perhaps by furthering the kind of research presented here, a critical awareness can be developed within our literature and academic librarianship. recommendations for future research in hindsight, there are a couple of things we would do differently next time. due to language restrictions of the researchers, only anglophone institutions were targeted, but future work would ensure francophone institutions were included. future work would also include precarious employees, whether they are part-time or full-time workers. additionally, we would keep the survey open longer, sending reminder emails to library administrators to encourage more participation. inferential statistics were not successful due to the small number of responses. we could not substantiate any conclusions of statistical significance between the library employee groups, for example. however, the substantial number of open-ended responses and the depth of individual written responses provided rich qualitative data and allowed us to look for emerging and pre-defined themes that enriched our discussion. while our sample draws together a variety of library worker voices, we acknowledge that our survey design inherently suffers from self-selection bias. conclusion our findings represent a cross-section of canadian english language academic library employees who were candid about their experiences with and perceptions of consultants in their libraries. the survey results give us a preliminary understanding of some of the motivations for hiring consultants as well as a way to talk about the impact of the practice. we previously identified the practice as a product of neoliberal values that has been uncritically adopted across librarianship while it grew across all library sectors seemingly unchallenged. in summary, we find consultants are hired for a variety of organizational work across many occurrences, supporting our argument that the practice of hiring consultants is a trend, affecting multiple areas of work in canadian academic libraries. also, library employees are unsure about the impact of consultants on their work and workplace, but, at the same time, are critically engaged with the conversation about it. library workers report a lack of agency for themselves and their colleagues and reflect on the impact of this practice. loss of power, disillusionment, disengagement, and distrust are all feelings that further support our findings that most participants do not think consultants should be hired more often. in contrast, participants generally agree that consultants are unbiased, provide expertise and fresh ideas. this is surprising because we thought library workers would be less agreeable with the types of linguistic strategies used when characterizing consultants, particularly when they do not think they should be hired more often in their libraries. we suggest that the trend of hiring consultants for organizational work, along with the unquestioned acceptance of the practice continues to replicate the descriptions and characteristics of consultants, and implicitly discourages a critical understanding of it (harrington & dymarz, 2018). by thinking critically about how our work, and how the work of our colleagues is shaped by normative practices, such as hiring consultants in our libraries, we can raise awareness of how we resist or perpetuate the dominant values of our time. acknowledgements we would like to thank the survey participants for candidly sharing their experiences and perceptions about consultants in their libraries. we also acknowledge the thorough and thoughtful feedback from karen nicholson and denisse solis. their suggestions for further reading were essential, and their kind and supportive reviews guided us to reorganize and rewrite this paper. thanks also to ryan randall who helped ensure all of our figures and tables are accessible for all readers, and to ian beilin for editorial support and updating the timeline to fit our life priorities, beyond librarianship. references adler, m. a. (2015). broker of information, the “nation’s most important commodity”: the library of congress in the neoliberal era. information & culture, 50(1), 24–50. https://doi.org/10.7560/ic50102 american library association. (2019). core values of librarianship. retrieved june 5, 2019, from advocacy, legislation & issues website: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/corevalues appelbaum, s. h., & steed, a. j. (2011). the client-consulting relationship: a case study of critical success factors at mq telecommuniques. journal of business & economics research (jber), 2(2). https://doi.org/10.19030/jber.v2i2.2856 arnold, j. (2010). the community college conundrum: workforce issues in community college libraries. library trends, 59(1), 220–236. berry, j. n. (ed.). (1969). directory of library consultants. new york: bowker. blackler, f. (2011). power, politics, and intervention theory: lessons from organization studies. theory & psychology, 21(5), 724–734. bousquet, m. (2008). the corporate university. knowledge & power in the global economy: the effects of school reform in a neoliberal/neoconservative age. new york: routledge. de stricker, u. (2008). is consulting for you?: a primer for information professionals. chicago: american library association. de stricker, u. (2010). part ii: consulting: helping clients plan, adapt, choose… and much more. bulletin of the american society for information science and technology, 37(1), 45–46. delong, k., sorensen, m., & williamson, v. (2015). 8rs redux carl libraries human resources study: for canadian association of research libraries (carl). ottawa: canadian association of research libraries. diefenbach, t., & sillince, j. a. (2011). formal and informal hierarchy in different types of organization. organization studies, 32(11), 1515–1537. eggertsson, p. (1990). economic behavior and institutions. new york: cambridge university press. fincham, r., & clark, t. (2002). critical consulting: new perspectives on the management advice industry. blackwell publishers. garten, e. (ed.). (1992). using consultants in libraries and information centers: a management handbook. westport, ct: greenwood press. harrington, m. r., & dymarz, a. (2018). consultants in academic libraries: challenging, renewing, and extending the dialogue. canadian journal of academic librarianship, 3(0). retrieved from https://cjal.ca/index.php/capal/article/view/28203/21153 ingles, e. b., & 8rs canadian library human resource study (eds.). (2005). the future of human resources in canadian libraries. edmonton, alta.: 8rs canadian library human resource study. kakabadse, n. k., kakabadse, a., & louchart, e. (2006). consultant’s role: a qualitative inquiry from the consultant’s perspective. journal of management development, 25(5), 416. lockwood, j. d. (1977). involving consultants in library change. college & research libraries, 38(6), 498. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl_38_06_498 lynch, b. p. (1979). libraries as bureaucracies. library trends 27, 259–67. matthews, j. r. (1994). the effective use of consultants in libraries. library technology reports, nov(1), 745. pozzebon, m., & pinsonneault, a. (2012). the dynamics of client–consultant relationships: exploring the interplay of power and knowledge. journal of information technology, 27(1), 35–56. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2011.32 prytherch, r. j. (2005). harrod’s librarians’ glossary and reference book: a directory of over 10,200 terms, organizations, projects and acronyms in the areas of information management, library science, publishing and archive management (10th ed). burlington, vt: ashgate. robbins-carter, j. (1984). library consultants: client views. drexel library quarterly, 20(2), 88–99. scale, m. (2016). the partner-consultant: partnering with clients in consulting. aiip connections, 30(3), 8–9. schell, h. b. (1975). library consultants and consulting. encyclopedia of library and information science, 15, 201–224. seale, m. (2013). the neoliberal library. in shana higgins and lua gregory (eds.), information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis (pp. 39–61). retrieved from http://eprints.rclis.org/20497/ skrzeszewski, s. (2006). the knowledge entrepreneur. lanham, md: scarecrow press. thompson, e. h., & american library association (eds.). (1943). a.l.a. glossary of library terms: with a selection of terms in related fields. chicago, il: american library association. townsend, r. (1970). up the organization. alfred a. knopf, new york. wormell, i., olesen, a. j., & mikulás, g. (2011). information consulting: guide to good practice. oxford: chandos publishing. young, h., & belanger, t. (eds.). (1983). the ala glossary of library and information science. chicago: american library association. appendix a: full descriptions of tables and figures full description of table 1. includes question 19 and 23: responses by employee group and academic affiliation table 1 represents the employee group and academic affiliation of all respondents: 10%, or 2 administrators from colleges 90% or 19 administrators from universities 11% or 18 library workers from colleges 87% or 146 library workers from universities 2% or 4 library workers from canadian consortium total of 21 administrator respondents, which is 11% of total respondents. total 168 library worker respondents, which is 89% of total respondents. return to table 1 caption. full description of table 2. question 22: responses by geographic location and employee group table 2 represents the employee group by geographic location in canada. a total of 21 administrators and 158 library workers are included in this table. in british columbia, there are 9 administrator respondents and 49 library workers in alberta, there are no administrator respondents and 20 library workers in saskatchewan, there is 1 administrator respondent and no library workers in manitoba, there are no administrator respondents and 8 library workers in ontario, there are 8 administrator respondents and 58 library workers in québec, there is 1 administrator respondent and 7 library workers in new brunswick, there is 1 administrator respondent and 1 library worker in nova scotia, , there is 1 administrator respondent and 11 library workers in prince edward island, there are np administrator respondents and 1 library worker in newfoundland and labrador, there are no administrator respondents and 3 library workers return to table 2 caption. full description of table 3. consultants hired, and the role of library employees in the process table 3 represents a variety of experiences with consultants and respondents were asked to indicate yes, no or unsure. the responses are organized by the questions asked: question 1: my library has hired a consultant in the past, had 189 total responses 13 or 62% of administrators indicated yes 5 or 24% of administrators indicated no 3 or 14% of administrators were unsure 108 or 64% of library workers indicated yes 23 or 14% of library workers indicated no 37 or 22% of library workers were unsure question 11: i was involved in the hiring process had 120 total responses 5 or 38% of administrators indicated yes 8 or 62% of administrators indicated no 14 or 13% of library workers indicated yes 93 or 87% of library workers indicated no question 12: i participated in the consultation process, had a total of 120 responses 10 or 80% of administrators indicated yes 3 or 20% of administrators indicated no 68 or 64% of library workers indicated yes 39 or 36% of library workers indicated no question 30: i have worked as a consultant in the past, had a total of 186 responses 6 or 30% of administrators indicated yes 14 or 70% of administrators indicated no 10 or 6% of library workers indicated yes 156 or 94% of library workers indicated no return to table 3 caption. figure 1. question 3: what was the focus of consultant work in your library? figure 1 represents the type of work for which consultants were hired. respondents could choose all the types of work that they experienced: 72% of respondents had experience with consultants and architecture / space planning 63% of respondents had experience with consultants and strategic planning 43% of respondents had experience with consultants and change management 46% of respondents had experience with consultants and staff reorganization 32% of respondents had experience with consultants and staff development 25% of respondents had experience with consultants and team building return to figure 1 caption. figure 1. q3: what was the focus of consultant work in your library? (choose all that apply) architecture / space planning (72%) strategic planning (63%) change management (48%) staff reorganization (46%) staff development (32%) team building (25%) administrators (number of respondents) 11 10 8 6 4 4 library workers (number of respondents) 76 67 50 50 35 27 return to figure 1 caption. figure 2. question 3: number of times consultants have been hired in my library figure 2 consists of a pie chart and a table. the pie chart represents the total number of times consultants were hired across employee groups: 35% of respondents had experience with consultants once or twice 57% of respondents had experience with consultants three to five times 8% of respondents had experience with consultants six to eight times the table portion of figure 2 gives a percentage count for the number of times consultants were hired across employee groups: 18 or 15% indicated that consultants were hired once 25 or 20% indicated that consultants were hired twice 27 or 22% indicated that consultants were hired three times 23 or 18% indicated that consultants were hired four times 19 or 16% indicated that consultants were hired five times 8 or 7% indicated that consultants were hired six times 1 or 1% indicated that consultants were hired seven times 1 or 1% indicated that consultants were hired eight times return to figure 2 caption. table 4. question 14: the consultant had a positive impact on… table 4 depicts responses to statements about consultant impact, with closed choices of agreement. these results are across both employee groups, with a total of 126 respondents. for the statement, the consultant had a positive impact on my workplace: 36 or 29% agree 53 or 42% neither agree nor disagree 37 or 29% disagree for the statement, the consultant had a positive impact on library services: 29 or 23% agree 64 or 51% neither agree nor disagree 33 or 26% disagree for the statement, the consultant had a positive impact on library patrons: 14 or 11% agree 77 or 61% neither agree nor disagree 35 or 28% disagree return to table 4 caption. table 5. question 17: perceived value of consultants table 5 depicts responses to statements about the value of consultants, with closed choices of agreement. these responses are broken down by employee groups. for the statement, consultants provide fresh ideas: 13 or 62% of administrators agree 108 or 64% of library workers agree 5 or 24% of administrators disagree 23 or 14% of library workers disagree 3 or 14% of administrators neither agree nor disagree 37 or 22% of library workers neither agree nor disagree for the statement, consultants are unbiased: 16 or 76% of administrators agree 73 or 44% of library workers agree 2 or 10% of administrators disagree 45 or 27% of library workers disagree 3 or 14% of administrators neither agree nor disagree 49 or 29% of library workers neither agree nor disagree for the statement, consultants provide specialized expertise: 18 or 86% of administrators agree 131 or 78% of library workers agree none of the administrators disagree 7 or 4% of library workers disagree 3 or 14% of administrators neither agree nor disagree 30 or 18% of library workers neither agree nor disagree for the statement, consultants should be hired more often in our library: 4 or 19% of administrators agree 25 or 15% of library workers agree 3 or 14% of administrators disagree 58 or 35% of library workers disagree 14 or 67% of administrators neither agree nor disagree 84 or 50% of library workers neither agree nor disagree return to table 5 caption. appendix b: survey instrument—consultants in canadian academic libraries for the purpose of this study a consultant is “an individual offering a range of professional skills and advice relevant to the operation of libraries. usually these skills will be marketed on a commercial basis by a […] person who is not directly employed by the library concerned but retained on contract for a fee” (prytherch, 2005, p. 350). consultants can work individually or in teams. 1. to your knowledge, has your library ever hired a consultant? ● yes / no / unsure 2. what do you think are some of the reasons that a consultant has not been hired in your library? please select all that apply. ❏ it is too expensive. ❏ it is not common practice at my institution to hire consultants. ❏ it is not common practice at my library to hire consultants. ❏ there has not been a need to hire a consultant. ❏ we rely on our internal expertise. ❏ not sure ❏ other ______________________ 3. think of all of the instances when consultants have been hired in your current library. please select all areas of focus that consultants have worked on (select all that apply). ❏ acquisitions ❏ archives ❏ cataloguing/ bibliographic services ❏ loans ❏ management/ administration ❏ reference/ instruction ❏ research commons ❏ special collections ❏ systems/ it ❏ other, please specify: __________ 4. what are the most common reasons a consultant has been hired in your current library? please select all that apply. ❏ to alleviate employee* workload ❏ to complete a project that requires skills or knowledge not currently held by library employees ❏ to define a problem ❏ to develop employees’ skills and knowledge ❏ to provide guidance for decision making ❏ to lend external credence to a course of action ❏ to obtain views free of political, functional, or other bias ❏ to signify the import of a process or decision ❏ other, please specify ______________________ thinking about the library where you currently work, please rate your level of agreement (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree) with the following statements: (*note, an employee in this survey refers to any person employed at the library irrespective of rank or employee group.) scale: (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree) 5. it is common to hire consultants in the library to address internal issues such as team building and organizational change. 6. it is common to hire consultants in the library to deal with projects that require expertise not currently held by any library employees. 7. library administration often looks for alternative ways to solve a problem before turning to a consultant for help. 8. if you would like to provide any further comments as to why consultants are hired in your current library, please provide them here.____________ of all the times over the last 5 years that a consultant was hired in your library, pick the instance with which you are most familiar. if a consultant has not been hired over the last 5 years, select the most recent example you can think of. please keep that experience in mind when answering the next set of questions. 9. what was the area of focus that the consultant was hired to work on? select all that apply. ❏ acquisitions ❏ archives ❏ cataloguing/ bibliographic services ❏ loans ❏ management/ administration ❏ reference/ instruction ❏ research commons ❏ special collections ❏ systems/ it ❏ other, please specify: __________ 10. in your opinion, why was that consultant hired? select all that apply. ❏ to alleviate employee workload ❏ to complete a project that requires skills or knowledge not currently held by library employees ❏ to define a problem ❏ to develop employees’ skills and knowledge ❏ to provide guidance for decision making ❏ to lend external credence to a course of action ❏ to obtain views free of political, functional, or other bias ❏ to signify the import of a process or decision ❏ other, please specify ______________________ 11. were you involved in hiring the consultant? yes / no 12. were you an active participant in the consultation process? yes / no 13. if you were an active participant, please describe your role in the consultation process. __________________ 14. keeping that same experience of working with a consultant in mind, please rate your level of agreement (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree) with the following statements: ● my involvement in the consultation process was encouraged. ● the consultation process was transparent and clear. ● the initial objectives of the consultant were achieved. ● the consultant had a positive impact on my workplace. ● the consultant had a positive impact on my library’s services. ● the consultant had a positive impact on my library patrons. ● the consultant’s work was successful. now thinking more generally about the practice of hiring consultants in academic libraries, please reflect on how the practice has directly or indirectly shaped your experience in academic libraries. 15. generally speaking, how has the practice of hiring consultants impacted the culture of your workplace? __________________ 16. generally speaking, how has the practice of hiring consultants impacted your work? __________________ 17. thinking generally about your perceptions of consultants, please rate your level of agreement (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree) with the following statements: ● consultants provide specialized expertise. ● consultants provide objective advice. ● consultants provide fresh ideas. ● libraries should hire consultants more often. 18. if there is anything else that you would like to share regarding your perceptions of consultants, please leave your thoughts here. _______ 19. please indicate your current work environment. ● college / university / other, please specify: __________________ 20. please select the category that best describes your institution. ● primarily undergraduate / comprehensive / medical-doctoral 21. how many full-time students are enrolled at your institution? ● less than 12,000 / between 12,000 and 24,000 / more than 24,000 22. please select the province or territory you work in. ● alberta, british columbia, manitoba, new brunswick, newfoundland and labrador, northwest territories, nova scotia, nunavut, ontario, prince edward island, quebec, saskatchewan, yukon 23. please indicate your job type. ❏ librarian ❏ library assistant/ library technician ❏ university librarian/ chief librarian/ dean of libraries ❏ associate university librarian/ associate dean of libraries ❏ department head/ division head ❏ other, please specify ______________________ 24. please indicate the area of the library where you currently work. select all that apply. ❏ acquisitions ❏ archives ❏ cataloguing/ bibliographic services ❏ loans ❏ management/ administration ❏ reference/ instruction ❏ research commons ❏ special collections ❏ systems/ it ❏ other, please specify: __________ 25. is your work governed by a collective agreement? ● yes / no 26. how many years have you worked in an academic library? ● 0-5 / 6-10 / 11-15 / 16-20 / 21 or more 27. what age group do you fall into? ● 30 and under / 31-40 / 41-50 / 51-60 / 61 and over 28. please select your highest level of education. ❏ undergraduate ❏ mls (or equivalent) ❏ master’s (other than an mls) ❏ mls and another master’s ❏ doctorate ❏ other, please specific: _________ 29. job satisfaction. (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree) ● overall, how satisfied are you with your job? ● overall, how satisfied are you with your workplace? 30. have you ever worked as a library consultant? yes / no 31. if yes, in what capacity? ____________________ academic libraries, canada, consultants, labor, management, neoliberalism when does burnout begin? the relationship between graduate school employment and burnout amongst librarians librarianship at the crossroads of ice surveillance 1 response pingback : consultants in canadian academic libraries: adding new voices to the story – fernews.net this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: extra! extra! read all about it! – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 9 sep editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield /0 comments editorial: extra! extra! read all about it! photo by flickr user billingham (cc by-sa 2.0) by editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield we at lead pipe have had so much going on with us individually and as a collective that we wanted to take a post and share with you what’s new with us. in the library with the lead pipe almost 3 years old! lead pipe has gone through some transitions. you may have noticed recent additions of regular authors eric frierson and leigh anne vrabel. we were just featured on the very cool librarian wardrobe blog. we’ve also been kicking around some ideas about future directions for our little community here, trying to figure out if there are ways we can support library-related projects in addition to our blog/journal. kim leeder (by lead pipe proxy) 30-something years old mls university of arizona, 2006 ma in english from university of nevada, reno, 2000 director of library services, college of western idaho just a few weeks ago kim started a new job as director of library services at the college of western idaho. she’s jumping right into her new position and loving it, but she’s so busy that we’re reporting for her! please help us congratulate and support kim in this venture. don’t worry, you’ll continue to hear from her at lead pipe. emily ford 31 years old mls and mis august, 2007 from indiana university bloomington. interim librarian to the college of urban and public affairs at portland state university this july i transitioned from having two temporary part-time jobs to one. yes, still temporary and yes, still part-time. i feel lucky to have a job, especially when libraries in my metro area have laid off tenured library faculty. it’s a nasty job climate out there even without economic woes. i’m grateful for what i do have. the transition from a part-time hourly position to an interim fixed-term faculty position has been great. i’ve been learning a lot–soaking it all up like a sponge. instead of just doing my job(s), i’m able to be more engaged with the university community. i have the emotional energy and the time to do so and have been feeling much more like a nice and pleasant person. i’m happy to know where i am at all times and i’m sure my colleagues are, too. the switch from institutions has also been a cultural adjustment for me. now i’m a proud union member at a large academic institution in a state university system. previously, i worked at a public corporation with a smaller student body, a smaller library, and a completely different organizational culture. change is good. to complement my work transition i’ve rotated off of a few (3 or 4!) committees, joined different ones, and even decided to change my division membership in ala to further explore and grow my professional self. prior to my job change the spring and summer were busy as i worked closely with a great team of people to organize the 2011 oregon virtual reference summit. it’s a local conference that i thought was one the most engaging librar* conferences even before i served on the planning committee. i got to give a lightning talk and i’d be tickled if you watched it and let me know what you think.   ellie collier 32 years old msis in may 2006 from the university of texas at austin reference librarian, normandale community college my partner accepted a position at the university of minnesota, so this may we relocated from austin, texas to minneapolis, minnesota and i switched jobs from austin community college to normandale community college (in bloomington, mn). i also got married. my new position is very similar to my last one, but the environment and the student populations are different. ncc is a more focused transfer institution, while acc had a very strong workforce program. ncc had three librarian retirements (all reference and instruction librarians), a part-timer take a full time position elsewhere and another librarian on sabbatical leave (the cataloger), so we have five new librarians and only one returning librarian (the acquisitions librarian). my new position also has far fewer librarians per student, so i’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what the typical workload had been and how we want to distribute it now. hilary davis thirty-something ms, biology 2000, university of missouri, st. louis and missouri botanical garden mls, 2004, university of missouri, columbia associate head, collection management, north carolina state university libraries the ncsu libraries is in full-swing preparation for a new flagship library, the james b. hunt, jr. library, set to open in late 2012 or early 2013. with much of the collection being split between several locations, i’ve been helping to strategize how to redistribute the collection in a way that (hopefully) optimally meets patron needs and complements exciting new learning and collaboration spaces.  i’ve also been lucky to be involved in our local team of librarians who are participating in the arl/dlf e-science institute, with the aim to develop a strategic agenda for supporting e-science/e-research. on the sla (special libraries association) front, i’ve assumed the role of past-chair of the science-technology division this year, which means i get a chance to continue to work with some really great folks in sla and review the division’s recommended practices for updates and revisions.  and i become part of the vast network of people who have stepped up to lead the science-technology division, a large and diverse group of corporate, legal, government, academic, and solo sci-tech librarians across the globe. i’m looking forward to participating in the trln (triangle research libraries network) management academy in october, presenting a talk at the charleston conference in november, and helping to integrate the hunt library with our existing and evolving library collections and services.  if you’re interested in joining the team at the ncsu libraries, we are looking for qualified candidates for the position of reference librarian for the physical and mathematical sciences! brett bonfield 41 years old mslis, september 2007, drexel university director, collingswood (nj) public library i chaired my first ala presidential task force, future perfect, and presented its report to the executive board and to council at ala annual in new orleans this past june. you can get a pretty good sense of what we recommended by watching a short video interview with me, though the report itself is succinct, and we worked hard to make it both clear and jargon-free. while it’s nice to have completed the report, i really miss working with the other five members of the task force, kawanna bright, margaux delguidice, candice mack, ross singer, and rachel van noord, as well as roberta stevens (i still have no idea how she managed to make so much time for us), and hope to work with all of them again, both soon and frequently. in its july/august 2011 issue, public libraries published “getting paid,” the first article i’ve written for a publication other than in the library with the lead pipe since we started lead pipe almost three years ago. as of august 13, 2011, it carries a cc0 (creative commons zero) license. if you’re interested in the harpercollins boycott, you might find it interesting. i was recently nominated as a candidate for the lita board. if you’re a lita member, i hope you’ll vote for me. and if you’re not a lita member, but you’re interested in both libraries and technology, i hope you’ll join. i’m now a few months into my second year as treasurer for the new jersey library association. it’s far more difficult to understand how a professional association’s finances can and should work than i would have imagined, especially given the unpredictability of our economy. i haven’t done nearly as well as i would have liked, though grappling with njla’s finances has made possible one singularly energizing experience: working with peter pearson, president of the friends of the saint paul public library and lead consultant for library strategies, on a fundraising strategic plan for njla. we put together a committee during the spring and early summer, and peter flew out to meet with us in august. i’m now a few days into my second year as a ph.d. student in library and information science at rutgers university in new brunswick, nj. there are more required courses than i was expecting, and fewer people interested in libraries, but the faculty and the other students are bright and interesting, and i’ve been given plenty of freedom to investigate questions i’m happy to invest time in answering. the big challenge this year is to publish and present work that’s more readily identifiable as traditionally academic. if all goes well, i’ll find out in a few days that i’ve been accepted to present at my first academic conference. of course, doing “real” research is one of the reasons i enrolled in a ph.d. program. the other reason is my interest in teaching library school students, a desire to teach that meredith farkas put into words for me (and perhaps for a lot of us) during my final weeks in library school. this summer, i taught an on-campus course in web design through drexel’s library school, where i was mentored by the fantastic vanessa morris (read parts one and two of her interview at tame the web) and fourteen smart, dedicated, and patient masters students. if you’re in the philadelphia area, and you have an opening for a superstar intern, part-time librarian, or someone with a newly minted masters, please let me know. my job at collingswood public library remains incredibly fun and rewarding. in the next three weeks, we’re having a town-wide party to celebrate the library’s 100th anniversary, hosting the library’s third annual 5k, and supporting the 9th annual collingswood book festival. we’re also in the midst of installing new lights and ceiling tiles, trying to move to a virtual desktop environment for public workstations, and investigating grants to preserve the library’s archives and begin the process of making the collection available digitally. it’s been an interesting summer in collingswood, and the fall promises to be even better. leigh anne vrabel 38 years old mlis, august 2004, university of pittsburgh senior staff librarian, carnegie library of pittsburgh (main – reference services) i’ve spent most of 2011 trying to expand my repertoire as a reference librarian and contribute to the public service team in different ways. the traditional roles for which i was trained in library school have evolved almost beyond recognition, and i’m determined to keep pace with that evolution and stretch my professional boundaries, especially in collaborative situations. outreach figures largely into that equation.  talking to people face-to-face about the library is still one of the biggest thrills of my job, so i’ve worked with my peers on a variety of outreach programs, including tabling local farmers markets and the wildly successful “30 books in 30 minutes” program.  repeated on multiple occasions, this program involves a team of six library workers delivering rapid-fire book talks; half the fun is watching the clock to see if we can squeeze them all into a half-hour slot, and the audience eats it up, as well as checks out many of the books afterwards!  i’ve also been invited back to my alma mater to speak on the future of libraries, which just might evolve into a future lead pipe post. my main responsibility, and first love, is editing the eleventh stack blog, which has been named a finalist in the pittsburgh’s most valuable blogger awards.  our competition—in the “everything else” category—is stiff, but it really is an honor to be nominated. knowing that our collective hard work has earned the library a place at the table in the local blogosphere makes me want to work harder to keep the project fresh and exciting.  that’s why i’ve signed up for podcamp pittsburgh, an annual social media unconference.  i’m hoping to gain ideas and to network outside the profession, not only to spread the awesome, but to learn from folks who don’t think like we do. upcoming projects include teaching a resume writing class, being trained to help facilitate our wildly popular gadget labs, presenting with a group of my colleagues at the pennsylvania library association’s southwest chapter workshop in october, and helping out with a super-secret, amazing advocacy event i can’t talk about just yet.  the really difficult work, however, is all interior.  as rilke would have it, i am “living the questions”; i have, after all, been a librarian for seven years now, and a library worker for nine.  it’s definitely time to reassess, re-evaluate, and decide what i want now, and next, from my career.  stay tuned. eric frierson 31 years old msi, april 2006, university of michigan library digital services manager, st. edward’s university it feels like i’ve been turning dials on a control panel for life this month.  some dials i’ve turned way down: recently, i decided to drop off of facebook (though i have recently reactivated my account briefly to participate in a contest from the four seasons in austin; i will deactivate once the contest is over), resign from a couple of committee appointments, and take a hiatus from much conference travel, including ala midwinter and ala annual. on the other end, some dials have gone up to 11.  like brett, i’ve begun a phd program, and mine focuses on leadership in libraries.  i travel to simmons college in boston three times a year for week-long intensive course work.  throughout the rest of the year, i find time in my off hours to research, read, and write.  some of what i picked up in the introductory course informed my latest blog post.  the first semester alone has proven that this degree will be the hardest, most challenging thing i’ve ever done.  it has come with frustration, confusion, and that sense of, “man, i don’t know jack,” but i’m a firm believer that no real learning can happen without struggle. in the same leadership vein, kim and i are co-editing a book to be published by ala editions called the library 2025.  it will feature stories from new and aspiring library administrators and give the library world a glimpse at the vision these leaders hold.  we are accepting chapter proposals now through december, so please consider submitting a proposal. at work, i’m lucky to be a part of an exciting transformation.  our university recently received a gift of $13 million for a new library and learning commons.  we were given a two-year time frame in which to plan the new space, close down our old building, and reopen in the new space.  for one whole year, our library will be closed and our collections housed off-site.  when we open, we will not look anything like what we are now, and the building project is serving as a catalyst for making other dramatic changes to how we define “library” and what we do for the campus.  our new director, pongracz sennyey, is guiding us towards a vision of a future library that will require new competencies and a willingness to let go of legacy services that no longer serve the campus effectively. i’ve also spent the last year acclimating to systems librarianship.  i’m employing my computer science degree more now than i ever have, grappling with new programming languages and new tools to develop solutions for our library.  for example, i’ve recently had to learn how to use solr and lucene, implement omeka, and manipulate photograph exif data to determine a photo’s geolocation attributes. about us, group post, news resilience vs. sustainability: the future of libraries is the united states training too many librarians or too few? (part 1) this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct social media at the college of new jersey library – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 18 jan amanda e. cowell /0 comments social media at the college of new jersey library in brief: this article discusses how and why the college of new jersey (tcnj) library decided not to develop library-specific social media channels and why other academic institutions should consider a similar approach. for many years, most literature on social media was how-to based (jacobson, 2011); as a result, when academic librarians discuss engaging students, they start with a presumptive answer of “social media” and then work backwards to the how and why. in contrast, tcnj’s library addressed the question: “should the library actively develop its social media presence?” we first looked at the social media channels already supported by the college, and considered whether our audience was already being reached by other well-maintained sources. second, we looked at what students were already posting on social media about tcnj’s library, both publicly and anonymously. finally, we surveyed the students to better understand their social media usage, concerns, and desired method of interaction with the library. considering all of these factors, the library decided not to develop or maintain its own social media channels. by amanda cowell introduction this paper discusses how and why the college of new jersey (tcnj) library decided not to develop library-specific social media channels. for many years, most literature on social media was “how-to based” (jacobson, 2011); as a result, when academic librarians discuss engaging students, they start with a presumptive answer of “social media” and then work backwards to the how and why. the understanding is that since students are on social media, librarians should be too. in 2014, tcnj library had an abandoned twitter account and was absent from all other social media outlets. at that time, the library steering committee (lsc) issued a charge to the library web committee that stated “tcnj library does not have an official policy for participating in social media. the lsc has received a suggestion to consider the nature and extent of the library’s online presence in social media venues.”  the library governance process requires a three step process for any charge to ensure that there are opportunities for formal testimony and open comment from affected individuals. the steps are: identifying and reporting the problem. if necessary, the library steering committee (lsc) will prepare a charge identifying the issue for the appropriate committee. preparing a preliminary recommendation. making a final recommendation. committees are expected to be proactive in inviting stakeholder groups to provide testimony at both steps # 2 and #3 of the process. this type of feedback is usually gathered through open forums in the library, but attendance by undergraduates at these forums tends to be very low. instead, a survey was created to better understand undergraduate preferences and potential levels of engagement. literature review for the last decade, libraries have investigated how to best make use of social media for everything from marketing and outreach to information literacy and instruction. in a 2006 article published in library journal, beth evans of brooklyn college declared that the best way to reach students at her institution was myspace (evans, 2006). the same year brian matthews of georgia tech declared “among college students, facebook is king” (matthews, 2006). in 2010, andy burkhardt published guidelines for a library’s social media presence. in the article, he points out that when libraries are planning to use social media, or any technology they should first ask “why are we doing this, and what do we hope to gain from it?” (burkhardt, 2010).  while he offers no specific examples of what a library’s social media goal might be, he discusses its use as a tool for marketing new products or initiatives. he further explains that libraries should devise concrete goals for social media. one potential goal he cites is “after one year we will have 100 fans” (burkhardt, 2010). in her 2013 book entitled the librarian’s nitty-gritty guide to social media, laura solomon defined specific goals for social media usage. she recommends setting tangible goals such as “more people at events and programs” and “new knowledge about your patrons and how they view the library” (salomon, 2013). laura solomon also reminds users that to accomplish the goal of getting more people at events through social media, it is not enough to just announce the event as a library would in a newsletter. effective social media requires a lot of time, effort and planning in order to build connections and community (salomon, 2013). following burkhardt’s model, montana state university (msu) library created guidelines for building community and developing engagement online with social media. between april 2012 and august 2013, they were able to nearly double their twitter followers, growing from 514 to 937. as of november 26th, 2016, their twitter account has over 1,800 followers. while this is a massive increase, the student population at msu in 2015 was 15,688 and the msu library indicates that only about 11% of its followers are students (young & rossmann, 2015). social media at the college of new jersey library in order to better understand the library’s social media needs, the first step was to examine the social media policy of the college as a whole. the college publishes guidelines for creating a social media presence. tcnj’s office of communications, marketing, and brand management ask that the following questions be answered before starting any new social media channel on campus. what do you hope to achieve? who is your audience? what channels would reach them most effectively? do you have the resources and commitment to run these channels well? are other related departments already doing something similar? do you need multiple channels?  would few, stronger channels be better? the library web committee first considered the question: “who is our audience?”  to find the answer, the committee looked at tcnj library’s mission statement: “the college of new jersey library, in support of the college’s mission, provides high-quality information resources, expertise and a learning environment that enhances the search for knowledge and understanding. the library serves as an intellectual, cultural and social center for the college, empowering tcnj community members to become self-directed, lifelong learners and responsible citizens” (http://library.tcnj.edu). based on the mission statement, the library’s audience is the entire tcnj community. the committee next looked at the question: “are other related departments already doing something similar?” the committee found that the college was, and is, aggressively pursuing an active social media presence. for example, tcnj created a page for use by faculty, staff, students and alumni called tcnj today. tcnj today is designed to share campus news, and pulls data from all of tcnj’s social media accounts. tcnj also has many official social media channels designed to reach the entire campus, including a facebook page, twitter account, youtube channel, instagram account, etc. all of these channels are already designed to reach the library’s audience and the office of communications encourages individual departments to share their information on these already established channels. many tcnj schools and departments also have their own social media channels, targeting specific groups. the next question the library web committee evaluated was whether the library had the resources to create and maintain social media channels of its own. maintaining social media channels requires large investments in time and maintenance. social media managers are frequently reminded of the pareto principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule (matei & bruno, 2015). this rule states that only 20% of social media content should be about the brand – in this case the library – and the other 80% should be other content that is interesting to and shareable by users. the type of posting required to keep a social media site relevant and interesting requires a significant amount of personnel hours and expertise, particularly in finding non-promotional material. as the library had no additional funding to hire new personnel, social media content would need to be generated by existing librarians and staff. this would require shifting responsibilities and would take librarians and library staff away from other ongoing and proposed projects. around the same time, other departments on campus began encouraging the library to develop an institutional repository and digital archive. while these projects were not related to social media, limited resources and manpower made it impossible to continue with both of these efforts simultaneously. it was likely that these two projects would require the same librarians and staff to be successful. there was a great need to preserve and archive student and faculty research and material was being lost. additionally, the demand for digital materials related to college history was growing as the need for fundraising on campus increased. finally, the library looked at the most important question which asked: “what do we hope to achieve?” this came last because it was the least clear. tcnj’s library currently does not do any library programming throughout the year. while there are some events held inside the library, the library does not organize or sponsor them financially. any promotion that the library did was to advertise services and resources and to develop relationships with the tcnj community. the committee also recognized that the library markets itself and supports its community through building and maintaining strong relationships. the library prioritizes face-to-face interactions to build relationships with students and faculty. an information literacy course is taught every semester by a librarian and is required of all incoming students. subject liaisons teach dozens of library sessions throughout the semester. the liaisons also work individually with faculty and staff members to market our services by building relationships. in 2015 alone, librarians answered 5,600 reference and informational questions. librarians also serve on college-wide committees and planning councils, insuring that no matter what is being discussed, the library is always part of the conversation. research methods faculty and staff opinions were gathered during open forums in the library as part of the governance process. open forums are held during open campus meeting times and allow interested faculty, staff and students to weigh in on proposed policy changes. anonymous questions are gathered through a web form before the forum to frame the discussion. participants are encouraged to give feedback at the forums or to provide it anonymously through the webform afterwards. this data is compiled and used during the decision making process, however due to institutional review board (irb) constraints, those comments cannot be shared publicly. student attendance at the open forums was predictably low so the library decided to conduct a survey to assess specific undergraduate social media behavior. 86 undergraduate students were surveyed at tcnj in the spring 2016 semester. researchers obtained permission from professors to distribute surveys in randomly selected courses during regular scheduled meeting times. students were then given the option to spend the first five minutes of class either completing the survey or working on other course work. all survey participation was optional, and the college’s irb reviewed and approved the survey. the survey used the following definition: “social media refers to any commercial product through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content. examples include, but are not limited to facebook, instagram, yik yak, snapchat and twitter.” the survey addressed the following research questions: for what purposes do students use social media applications? what are the students’ privacy concerns when using social media both personally and professionally? what are the students’ expectations for social media interactions? is social media the best way to reach our audience? findings the survey was designed to determine why tcnj students use social media. results showed that, while 97% of students utilized social media for personal use, the numbers were lower for professional, academic and college-related activities. 78% of students surveyed indicated that they used social media for academic course work, 70% used social media for professional purposes and 60% indicated that they used social media to interact with non-academic areas of the college such as housing or dining services. in addition to assessing students’ social media habits, the survey also asked about their privacy concerns and how often they post publicly or anonymously on various topics. a likert scale ranging from “very comfortable” to “not comfortable at all” was used to assess how willing students were to make public posts on various topics. in order to understand what type of communication the students expected to receive, we used a likert scale asking students to rate how likely they were to expect a response to different types of feedback. 46.5% of students surveyed stated that they agreed or strongly agreed with this statement “when i post a comment or complaint about a customer service experience to their social media channels, i hope to get a response.”  fewer, only approximately 37%, said that they agreed or strongly agreed with statements asking if they expected to receive a comment when posting to their own page, a third party or in an anonymous forum. while, approximately 78% of students said that they use social media for academic course work, only about 50% were comfortable or very comfortable having professional or academic discussions on social media. furthermore, students expressed less comfort using social media for activities related to course work, grades and teacher reviews. therefore, while it was apparent that students were using these channels regularly, in view of the expressed discomfort with social media for academic and professional purposes, the library determined that student needs could best be met through face-to-face interactions and other channels. what patrons were already doing if the library was not going to create our own social media channels, the question then became how could existing channels best be used to reach the library’s users? to do this, it was important to identify where tcnj community members were online and more importantly where they wanted to find the library online. in order to find where tcnj faculty, staff and students were and had been online, the committee did targeted searches of various social media accounts looking for posts mentioning both the words, tcnj and library. all of the posts shown in this paper were found in 2016, anywhere between one year and four years after they were posted. while too much time had passed to effectively respond to these individual posts, they were evaluated to better understand how the library could respond to these types of postings in the future. the posts reviewed were gathered from a variety of sources, including student-run and personal twitter and facebook accounts. while some of the posts addressed real or serious problems in the library, others did not. it also was not always clear if the user expected a response. these posts could generally be categorized as related to facilities issues, noise and other student behavior complaints, and directional questions. some examples of the posts are shown below. currently, the library provides several ways for students to report problems or request information. there is a send-a-suggestion form located on the library website that allows users to send in comments or questions about the library. there is also a chat box, email form and sms number on the library website as part of our ask-a-librarian service. all of these methods allow the user to either comment anonymously or include their name. issues raised on social media are already handled through these other channels. students are also encouraged to come to the reference, circulation or it help desk to ask questions and to report problems. conclusions after evaluating the student survey, faculty feedback and existing social media interactions, the library web committee concluded that there was not a sufficient need to justify creating library-specific social media channels. like most libraries, tcnj library has limited time and resources to accomplish its goals while meeting the needs of all of its patrons. while the library strives to keep up with ever changing technology, decisions need to be made that best meet the needs of the majority of the tcnj community. for now, developing library-specific social media channels has been put aside so the library’s efforts can stay focused on moving forward in other directions. projects that are more highly demanded on campus, such as the library’s institutional repository and digital archive need to take priority. despite the decision not to create library-specific social media channels, social media is a platform that cannot be ignored. the library web committee determined that the library can reach a wider audience through already established channels, without spending time and effort to develop and maintain library-specific channels. the committee continues to develop better relationships with tcnj campus social media coordinators to ensure that news items get shared on the well-maintained channels that already exist. when trying to reach the campus community, librarians and library staff are encouraged to send newsworthy information to tcnj’s office of communication, marketing and brand management. this information will then be shared through social media channels already created and maintained by the college. in order to do this, the library created a social media policy to encourage and to set guidelines for these types of communications. the policy is currently under review by library administration. acknowledgements thank you to my reviewers bethany messersmith and leah white and publishing editor sofia leung for their time and assistance with this project. also, thank you to the college of new jersey library web committee for believing in me when i said it would be okay to not do something, even if it seemed as though everyone else was doing it. references burkhardt, a. (2010). “social media: a guide for college and university libraries.” college & research libraries news, 71(1), 10-24. constine, josh (2016). “yik yak’s cto drops out as the hyped anonymous app stagnates.” tech crunch. retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/06/yik-yuck/ digital trends staff (2016). “the history of social networking.” digital trends. retrieved from http://www.digitaltrends.com/features/the-history-of-social-networking/ evans, b. (2006). “your space or myspace?” library journal, 37, 8-13 jacobson, t. b. (2011). “facebook as a library tool: perceived vs. actual use.” college & research libraries, 72(1), 79-90.. matei, s. a., & bruno, r. j. (2015). “pareto’s 80/20 law and social differentiation: a social entropy perspective.” public relations review, 41(2), 178-186. mathews, b. s. (2006). “do you facebook? networking with students online.” college & research libraries news, 67(5), 306-307. solomon, laura. (2013). the librarian’s nitty-gritty guide to social media. chicago, il: ala editions young, s. w., & rossmann, d. (2015). “building library community through social media.” information technology and libraries, 34(1), 20-37. academic libraries, marketing, social media, technology liaisons as sales force: using sales techniques to engage academic library users updated submission guidelines for what we publish this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct hush… : the dangers of silence in academic libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 19 apr jessica schomberg and kirsti cole /0 comments hush… : the dangers of silence in academic libraries in brief this article critiques the idea that civility rhetoric decreases workplace bullying or discrimination. we use critical discourse analysis (cda) to do a rhetorical analysis of a campus-wide civility campaign in contrast with literature about civility in libraries. to combat discrimination and bullying, we need to be attentive to systemic power dynamics and to rhetoric designed to enforce compliance and conformity. we conclude with recommendations about how to raise our voices instead of silencing our peers. by jessica schomberg and kirsti cole introduction in this article, we use critical discourse analysis (cda) to compare the rhetoric of a campus-wide civility campaign with literature related to civility in libraries. the civility campaign was prompted by concerns about discrimination and bullying at a mid-sized public university in the midwest. within the particular context of academic libraries, we examine how the rhetoric of civility has historically been used to control behaviour. there is no evidence that this civility discourse has improved the situations of already-marginalized populations or reduced bullying. instead, it has contributed additional silencing rhetoric, which could have dangerous implications for the well-being of library employees and the patrons we serve. we will conclude this article with ideas about how librarians might go beyond performative civility to acknowledge the structural and cultural differences that exist within their communities. the campus civility campaign was a top-down attempt to control individual behaviour. it was introduced as follows: when civility is present in a community such as ours, it becomes a healthy, vibrant and rewarding place to live and work. without civility, it fails to thrive…we believe that civility comes down to treating everyone with respect. each of us is responsible for showing civility in our own actions.that’s why you’ll see a series of posters, table tents and electronic messages across our community challenging you to think about your choices. you can choose to be civil in a certain situation. or not. who will you decide to be? by placing the rhetorical focus on individuals, the campaign points to a compelling dynamic in the relationship between power and language. if the goal of the civility campaign is to provoke members of our community to speak and listen in particular ways, and about particular things, it is setting in place a series of rules for that community (glenn 1–2). critical discourse analysis (cda) helps us understand the relationships between language, culture, and inequality within a particular context (gee 23). in this context, the ethical uses of language brought up by the civility campaign are not reflected in the campaign itself. below is a table outlining the frame through which we understand this issue. these concepts guide and structure our analysis of the reaction to the campus civility campaign compared with existing literature about civility in libraries. on the left side of the table are the critiques our faculty association, which includes librarians, had about the civility campaign conducted on our campus. these concerns were taken from the recorded minutes of the april 2015 faculty association executive meeting. on the right side of the table are the themes that came out of a literature search conducted using the keywords silencing, civility, and professionalism. figure 1. civility framing faculty comments themes literature review themes what civility or politeness might mean in different cultures civility problems with moving from anti-bullying focus to civility focus bullying singular culture vs. the diverse cultures our campus represents monoculturalism posters encourage passive aggressiveness, not empathy or civility silencing microaggressions gatekeeping the 100% whiteness of the president’s cabinet. that people of color are held accountable but white people are not power and (white) privilege empty rhetoric of the civility campaign: it exists solely for “cya” so the university doesn’t get sued; protects the institution only but it’s empty, no real promotion of change empty rhetoric of academic freedom attention to constant administrative focus on budgetary constraints, and the cost of producing the posters precarity/job insecurity method to explore the civility campaign and understand the possible impacts of such initiatives in academic library spaces, we turn to critical discourse analysis (cda). cda “looks systematically at one or more of the often unnoticed details of grammar and word choice” (zdenek and johnstone 25). linguists and other researchers use cda to analyze large textual corpuses, as well as long stretches of discourse that include text, talk, image, and gesture. it is a methodology to find patterns that create, circulate, reinforce, and reflect societal norms and ideology (huckin et al 119). within the larger umbrella of cda, “recontextualization looks for and interrogates chains of events and texts” (fairclough 420). recontextualization considers the ways in which language is taken from its original context and transformed into different messages in different contexts. through that process, texts “are articulated together in new ways according to the logic of the recontextualising practice; and transformed from real to imaginary, and brought into the space of ideology” (fairclough 399). an example of recontextualization that we examine is how selected quotes from famous writers and philosophers are used to control how civility is defined. in this way, cda is valuable for examining ways in which power is constructed rhetorically (huckin et al. 114). critical discourse analysis is particularly useful for situations in which researchers wish to examine the relationship between institutional power and rhetoric (fairclough and wodak 271-80; lewis 374). cda allows us to explore the textual “silences, implicatures, ambiguities, and other covert but powerful aspects of discourse” (huckin et al. 110). the ambiguities of the civility campaign we analyze are particularly compelling because the faculty association unanimously opposed the administrative agenda surrounding the campaign despite sharing the goal of improving the campus climate. we use cda to coordinate the analysis of larger purposes for the civility campaign with the smaller details of the language used to represent civility to the campus community, particularly in the library. cda gives us the opportunity to look at the indirect or implicit meanings that the posters relay to us: how they shape us and our academic library space. analysis in analyzing the civility campaign, we rely on cues from the design and the alphabetic text of the posters in order to determine how meaning is made or how expectations for behaviour are established. the civility campaign ran from 2012 to 2015 and produced 49 unique posters. the posters were put up throughout campus buildings, small table tents for each of the posters were placed on tables in common areas, and both were prominently displayed in the library. the posters from 2012-2014 presented a scenario in which the purple side presented the “civil” or preferred response, while the gold side presented the “uncivil” response. at the bottom of each poster was the appeal “who are you?” 2012-2013 2013-2014 civility scene 16 civility scene 16 to express frustration… keep your language respectful. or… curse a blue streak—it’s great linguistic therapy. who are you? after faculty voiced their disapproval, the civility posters were modified. the 2014-2015 campaign posters include quotes from famous scholars, artists, writers, and thinkers. 2014-2015 civility scene 49 civility scene 49 respect yourself and others will respect you. – confucius who are you? as we analyzed the posters, we turned to word choice as an important category through which to understand possible themes. in coding the language used in the posters, we identified five thematic categories. for each poster theme, there is a corollary to one or more of the faculty comments identified in figure 1. figure 2. poster themes poster categories faculty comments polite communication bullying, passive aggressiveness, and gatekeeping community interactions protecting the university instead of faculty and students respectful behaviour silencing, ableism, and microaggressions social and cultural awareness reinforcing monoculturalism power dynamics privilege, precarity, intellectual freedom it is worth noting that many of the scenarios presented in the posters created intersections between the thematic categories. we review the thematic categories in context of the scholarship surrounding the issue in order to locate the interplay of such things as privilege and ableism, microaggressions and gatekeeping, and monoculturalism and precarity. because the discussion surrounding many of these issues is contentious, we believe it is important to look at the analysis of the texts in the specific context of the scholarship. discussion in this section, we interweave themes identified from faculty responses to the civility campaign with themes from relevant library literature. civility civility does not have a universal meaning. in her exploration of civility in diverse organizations, sampson takes a multicultural approach to civility in the library. she explores several definitions of civility. these range from “deference or allegiance to the social order” to “acknowledgement of equality between citizens in private, public or official interactions” (sampson 94). however, she notes that we can’t truly achieve this ideal until full societal equality is a reality. she also notes that in a more diverse environment, there will be conflicting social norms. this means that individuals have to self-regulate their own behaviour rather than relying on social support to interpret and guide behaviour. while shared experiences make it easier to have shared expectations, operating in a diverse environment means working without those shared norms. in farrell’s discussion of collegiality in library workplaces, she utilizes civility in a way more in keeping with the idea of allegiance to the social order, with librarians as role models. the idea of high standards and role model behaviour is a clear component of the civility campaign. the campaign presents the audience with didactic recommendations about behaviours or actions. there is no nuance, no space for cultural variance, and no attempt to educate the community about those behaviours. in civility scene 28, the audience is told to “model civil behavior.” civility scene 28 model civil behavior…. demonstrate it, day after day or… pay lip service—activating your mouth is way easier than activating behavior who are you? what is the “it” we are meant to demonstrate? is it in action and language? only in language? the scenario presented commands us to do, but does not help us learn how. some librarians take a more critical perspective to calls for civility, viewing them as attempts to silence dissent. shockey cites joan w. scott’s discussion of the steven salaita/university of illinois, urbana-champaign controversy, in which salaita’s offer of a tenured position was rescinded after he tweeted negative comments about israel. the uiuc chancellor decided those tweets provided enough evidence that his behaviour would threaten “the comfort, safety, and security of his students” (scott “new thought police”). elsewhere, schlesselman-tarango argues that historically, rhetoric about civility has been used as an assimilationist strategy (676). in this conceptualization of civility, the focus is on standardizing language, being respectful of authority, maintaining traditional gender roles, and creating a labor force that works hard without being disruptive. status quo maintenance is at the forefront of the civility campaign. in civility scene 11, the audience is targeted: supervisors. civility scene 11 civility scene 11 if you’re at the top of a hierarchy…model civility for those who work with you. act as if you’re exempt, civility is for suckers. who are you? we don’t know exactly what this outdated colloquialism is meant to invoke. though the poster lacks clarity, it attempts to focus on respectful authority and a non-disruptive labor force. sloniowski presents the rhetoric around civility as being a standard by which to demand affective labour and “service with a smile” (660). she engages in a marxist critique of the affective labour involved in librarians’ roles as “civilizers” or what farrell calls “role models” by observing how this form of labour is expected, but not valued as labour. in other words, while affective labour is a necessary part of maintaining cooperative efforts, it is often invisible, correlating “to an estranging, sexist, colonization of life by work” (sloniowski 655-656). interestingly, the shadow labour of civility is acknowledged by one of the quotes used in the 2015 civility campaign. a quote by ellen goodman says, “civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.” if a librarian’s perceived role is as emotional labourer, then the manipulative forces of such requirements put individuals in a position where they are constantly working to be seen as pleasant. we know this is not civility in the sense of creating a space where all members are treated with dignity. in fact, policing oneself and one’s environment in such a way may lead to microaggressions (sometimes coded as polite behaviour policing) or to outright bullying. bullying while they are often conflated, the difference between bullying and incivility rests in power. both can cause interpersonal challenges and both are interpreted through one’s own cultural prism, but when looking at how power is constructed rhetorically, there are differences. in the way that we use these terms in this article, bullying tends to appear in peer-to-peer or supervisor-to-employee relationships. incivility tends to be a component of relationships in which individuals who feel powerless in their role push back against those in power. hicks argues that concepts such as civility are promoted by organizations as a way of conscribing the rhetorical techniques allowed, making it more difficult to challenge those in power (hicks 251). several types of behaviours are typical of bullying, including “yelling, screaming, threatening… aggressive gossip, refusing to communicate, criticizing or humiliating someone in front of others, insults, isolation and/or withholding information or resources” (matesic 164). mobbing is a type of bullying done by a group rather than by a single person. examples of such behaviour includes excessive monitoring of break times, walking past an individual without acknowledging them, punitive desk schedules, withholding communication, and not providing sufficient resources to complete work tasks (matesic 164). while these descriptions focus on individual behaviours, keep in mind that they may be the results of structural problems (galoozis “me and you”). in the university context, our human resources department and unions recognize these bullying behaviours as a problem. while there are federal protections against harassment, bullying is much harder to identify, define, and understand. this makes it difficult for workplace hostility policies to consistently account for it (sepler 1). in most cases, organizations identify a vague list of behaviours that contribute to a hostile work environment, but that are also difficult to prove. however, a civility campaign functions beyond the realm of policy and enforcement. how administrators define bullying behaviours can shed light on the organization itself. when looking at how bullying is operationalized, we find that that victims of bullying are often productive. however, they have found themselves in organizations with low tolerance for diversity and rigid cultural norms. those in power, organizationally or in the social hierarchy, engage in bullying behaviour to enforce conformity or simply force out the outliers (fox and spector 254). using civility rhetoric to accomplish anti-bullying goals is the wrong technique. civility rhetoric as used in the civility campaign attempts to force all members of the community into a single acceptable pattern of behaviour. in order to counteract bullying one must acknowledge that bullying occurs when rigid norms exclude individuals who don’t fit into the dominant culture. monoculturalism monoculturalism is the expectation that all individuals conform to one worldview, which assumes itself to be neutral. in north america, monoculturalism1 prioritizes whiteness. as hathcock says in her examination of the failure of diversity initiatives in librarianship, whiteness is “a theoretical concept that can extend beyond the realities of racial privilege to a wide range of dominant ideologies based on gender identity, sexual orientation, class, and other categories” (“white librarianship”). in the context of campus civility, monoculturalism emphasizes one right way to be civil for the one campus community. this ignores that campuses, and libraries, are made up of individuals from many different communities with many different ideals of civility. though two of the civility scenes encourage a broadly accepting point of view (“be gender-inclusive in your language” and “recognize how different each individual is”), most of the posters project a nebulous definition of civility that does not take into account what civil behaviour looks like in different cultures. this campaign was approved by a largely white and male administration. as such, it is perhaps unsurprising that many more marginalized community members perceived the campaign recommendations as disrespectful. one example is civility scene 19. civility scene 19 civility scene 19 if a colleague shows signs of stress…ask if you can help. ignore it–feeling stress is natural, showing stress is weak. what will you choose? as suggested above, this didactic framing allows for no subtlely in an individual’s behaviour and ignores social power dynamics totally. imagine, for example, that your boss excuses themselves for making inappropriate comments because of stress; imagine the expectation to provide emotional support to a supervisor or chairperson who is emotionally abusing you; imagine civil behavior being defined by the expectation that you intercede without any thought to the inherent risks in doing so. this scenario also ignores cultural power dynamics that may discourage someone from directly interceding in such a situation. rhetoric about diversity and multiculturalism is often used to reaffirm the neutrality of whiteness while simultaneously ignoring structural oppressions (brook et al. 247). these power dynamics punish people who do not comply with white norms when conflict arises. for example, when critiquing the idea that reference librarians smiling at patrons is universally perceived as welcoming, brook et al. state that “this apolitical conception of responsiveness limits reference librarians’ ability to serve patrons of diverse racial backgrounds because it does not guide us toward a more nuanced, political assessment of individual and collective needs” (272). by only acknowledging superficial politeness norms, we don’t recognize the structural layers and nuances that underlie our interactions. we don’t allow people to be their real selves with us, which makes people more susceptible to the negative effects of overwork (mountz et al. 1248-1249). by creating environments where people are not allowed to behave in ways that reflect the communities to which they belong, we are in effect asking people to silence significant parts of themselves — especially when they don’t fit into monocultural norms. silencing silencing prevents people from engaging with difficult and controversial ideas, which runs counter to the goals of higher education. as o’donnell notes “education is not a space of absolute control. it has to permit unpredictability and surprise [and allow for transformation] through the encounter with a subject and the perspectives of others” (70-71). this is only possible when we allow space to make personal connections and become open to learning from people unlike ourselves; it cannot be imposed on us from above; it cannot happen when we’re not allowed to speak. in the area of silencing aspects of one’s own identity in an effort to deflect negative professional consequences, b. binaohan notes that “we have a professional environment where many people feel very comfortable saying some really heinous things but those whose lives are negatively impacted by those words must always smile and remain silent. because calling out oppression is almost always punished more heavily than being oppressive” (binaohan, “gender and presenting”). the poster campaign as a whole showcases silent passivity as a positive trait. passivity however, can be a problematic civil ideal, particularly if an individual is faced with threatening or harassing behaviour. civility scene 14 civility scene 14 mind your own business and keep quiet when a rumor comes your way. text the details to all of your friends immediately–with a big lol. what will you choose? civility scene 14 is again didactic, again extreme, but what if the rumor is addressed to a reference librarian? maybe a student reported to you that she witnessed another student being harassed while using the computers. is minding your own business the ethical response in that situation? though there is a clear indication in the posters that civility is a value on our campus, the passivity demonstrated on the positive side of the posters undermines the possibilities of community-building in favor of silence. power and privilege privilege is a complicated topic with multiple facets, including race, sex, ability, economic class, and more. in sayer’s book on the moral aspects of class, he notes that often those in power demand respect — not in the moral sense of respecting fellow humans, but in an amoral sense of global efficiency. when the expectation of respect for authority crosses multicultural lines without an understanding of those different cultures or a shared understanding of why certain qualities deserve respect, it creates a situation in which superficial politeness norms and showing leadership in a good light at all times becomes increasingly important (sayer 178). farrell argues that prioritizing collegiality creates a sense of shared purpose that helps libraries achieve their goals and also supports the work of individual library personnel (173). matesic’s research, on the other hand, found that poor behaviour “breeds in chaotic environments with weak leadership, some degree of job insecurity, nebulous task or work roles, indistinct performance measures and strong conformity to organizational culture” (165-166). in that scenario, trying to force feelings of collegiality rather than working to improve structural problems actually impedes civility. existing library and university structures were designed to maintain the status quo (de jesus, “institutional oppression”). while ideals about service and access are commonly discussed, actually making changes that don’t benefit those in power can be difficult, even when those in power claim to want to reach related goals. as chris bourg notes in her post on the whiteness of librarianship, our professional rhetoric claims that we reflect the nation’s diversity, but we don’t actually hire people of colour (“unbearable whiteness”). and even when we do hire people of colour, we don’t retain them (vinopal, “quest for diversity”). within the context of power and privilege, race is not the only factor we contend with. civility scene 22 civility scene 22 when talking to someone, be present in all senses. be there in body only—and twiddle away with your gadget du jour. who are you? civility scene 22 focuses on the role of technology in our face-to-face interactions. this recommendation is ableist, ignoring how embodied experiences vary. for example, common self-calming techniques for someone with autism are stimming or fidgeting, which in some cases involves “twiddling” with a gadget. in civility scene 49, confucius is quoted, “respect yourself and others will respect you.” for a person with disabilities, the social and cultural power dynamics; the inaccessible physical spaces in which they must operate; and the struggle with their specific impairments or body image can have lasting impacts on how they perceive themselves, on how others perceive them, and on how they understand the ways in which others perceive them. this doubleor sometimes triple-consciousness impairs the ability to comply with a simplistic directive to respect oneself. civility scene 1 civility scene 1 when you want to get a point across… be calm, clear, and coherent. or… raise your voice—makes you sound like the intimidator. who are you? demands for verbal clarity ignore individuals who may be learning the primary language of the community. it may also silence someone who speaks with a louder voice. civility scene 32 repeats this simplistic approach to speech differences. civility scene 32 civility scene 32 in any conversation… listen to the tone of your voice. or… ignore it—it’s all in the words. who are you? women are frequently referred to as “shrill” when they speak, particularly when they are in positions of authority (west). they may not raise their voice at all and be perceived as aggressive. gendered communication expectations can result in impossibly conflicted recommendations about how to behave in professional settings. this is especially damaging when this tone policing is used by a person in a position of authority, against someone with less power. as the library loon notes in her post on silencing and gender: “asking a potential or actual target to buck the system—not to mention assuming it’s their fault if they don’t, or if they do and are punished for it—piles responsibility in entirely the wrong place.” (library loon, “silencing”) conclusion in august 2015, after the faculty union’s continued objections to the campaign, the vice president of student affairs reported that the civility campaign posters would be replaced with “general university belief statement posters.” as such, posters produced in 2015-2016 include the mission of the institution, the goals of various departments, and some of our institutional student learning outcomes. while this was ostensibly a victory for the union, in actuality our requests for a focus on intersectional anti-bullying was ignored. next steps recognize how we reinforce silence if our discourse is based on prioritizing passivity and squashing dissent, the squeaky wheel gets replaced while non-challenging people get promoted in an endless cycle of bad civility campaign rhetoric. by eliminating people who challenge the status quo instead of spending time on doing the real work of combating oppression, we train newcomers to the profession to continue engaging in that silencing behaviour. seek remedies to performative civility protect library employees from threats of precarity through collective action and unionization of workers. we both work in an institution where tenure is protected by an active faculty bargaining unit. this means that during times of campus budget reductions, the process of cutting resources and positions is clearly articulated beforehand, and reduces the ability of administration to engage in retaliatory action against any single individual or group of individuals who choose to speak out. because librarians are part of the faculty union, they also receive these protections. this gives us the freedom to speak out against initiatives like the civility campaign and advocate for better methods. prioritize support for librarian scholarship and political engagement. writing, researching, learning new skills, and being intellectually challenged helps us develop a sense of self-efficacy and become better, more critical thinkers. prioritizing learning to use our voices, instead of learning to silence ourselves, allows us to become better advocates for ourselves and others. acknowledgements many thanks to our external reviewers for this article, eira tansey and sarah fancher; our internal reviewer, bethany messersmith; and to publishing editor ian beilin. their work keeping us focused is much appreciated! thanks also to nina de jesus, kyle shockey, and many others for critiquing early drafts and encouraging our efforts. references binaohan, b. “gender and presenting as professional.” i dream of being possible, 22 dec. 2013, https://b.binaohan.org/posts/2013-12-22-gender-and-presenting-as-professional.html bourg, chris. “the unbearable whiteness of librarianship.” feral librarian, 3 mar. 2014, https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-librarianship/ brook, freeda, ellenwood, dave, and althea eannace lazzaro. “in pursuit of antiracist social justice: denaturalizing whiteness in the academic library.” library trends vol. 64, no. 2, 2015, pp. 246-284. college portrait. “minnesota state university, mankato college portrait.” 2015. http://www.collegeportraits.org/mn/msu-mankato de jesus, nina. “locating the library in institutional oppression.” in the library with the lead pipe, 24 sept. 2014. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/locating-the-library-in-institutional-oppression/ fairclough, norman. critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. pearson, 2010. fairclough, norman, and ruth wodak. “critical discourse analysis.” discourse as social interaction. edited by teun van dijk. sage, 1996. farrell, maggie. “collegiality in the workplace.” journal of library administration vol. 56, 2016, pp. 171-179. fox, suzy, and paul e. spector. counterproductive work behavior: investigations of actors and targets, american psychological association, washington, dc, 2005. galoozis, elizabeth. “me and you and everything we know: information behavior in library workplaces.” in the library with the lead pipe, 26 feb. 2014. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/me-and-you-and-everything-we-know-information-behavior-in-library-workplaces/ gee, james paul. how to do discourse analysis: a toolkit. routledge, 2010. glenn, cheryl. rhetoric retold: regendering the tradition from antiquity through the renaissance. southern illinois up, 1997. hathcock, april. “white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis.” in the library with the lead pipe, 7 oct. 2015. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/lis-diversity/ hicks, darrin. “the promise(s) of deliberative democracy.” rhetoric and public affairs vol. 5, 2002, pp. 223–260. huckin, thomas, jennifer andruss, and jennifer clary-lemon. “critical discourse analysis and rhetoric and composition.” college composition and communication vol. 64, no.1, 2012, pp. 107-129. lewis, cynthia. “‘what’s discourse got to do with it?’ a meditation on critical discourse analysis in literacy research.” research in the teaching of english vol. 40, no.3, 2006, pp. 373–79. library loon. “silencing, librarianship, and gender: links, apologies, and suggestions.” gavia libraria 31 jul. 2013. http://gavialib.com/2013/07/silencing-librarianship-and-gender-links-apologies-and-suggestions/ matesic, gina. d. “internal world of libraries and the challenge of civility.” strategies for regenerating the library and information profession, edited by varlejs, j., lewis, l. & walton, g. walter de gruyter, 2009. http://www.degruyter.com/dg/viewbooktoc.chapterlist.resultlinks.fullcontentlink:pdfeventlink/$002fbooks$002f9783598441776$002f9783598441776.3.158$002f9783598441776.3.158.pdf?t:ac=product/41985 mountz, alison, anne bonds, becky mansfield, jenna loyd, jennifer hyndman, margaret walton-roberts, ranu basu, risa whitson, roberta hawkins, trina hamilton, and winifred curran. “for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university.” acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies vol. 14, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1235-1259. o’donnell, aislinn. “securitisation, counterterrorism and the silencing of dissent: the educational implications of prevent.” british journal of educational studies, vol. 64, no. 1, 2016., pp. 53. doi:10.1080/00071005.2015.1121201. sampson, zora f. “the role of civility in diverse relations.” journal of library administration vol. 27, no 1-2, 2009, pp. 93-110. sayer, andrew. the moral significance of class. cambridge university press 2005. scott, joan w. “the new thought police.” the nation 15 april 2015. https://www.thenation.com/article/new-thought-police/ sepler, fran. “workplace bullying: what it is and what to do about it,” journal of collective bargaining in the academy vol. 0, art. 42, 2015. http://thekeep.eiu.edu/jcba/vol0/iss10/42 schlesselman-tarango, gina. “the legacy of lady bountiful: white women in the library.” library trends vol. 64, no. 4, 2016, pp. 667-686. http://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/library-publications/34 shockey, kyle. “intellectual freedom is not social justice.” progressive librarian vol. 44, 2016, pp. 101-110. sloniowski, lisa. “affective labor, resistance, and the academic librarian.” library trends vol. 64, no. 4, 2016, pp. 645-666. vinopal, jennifer. “the quest for diversity in library staffing: from awareness to action.” in the library with the lead pipe, 13 jan. 2016. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2016/quest-for-diversity/ in the case of our institution, of the more than 15,000 students, we have about 2,200 students of color including 1,100 international students from 90 countries. for our populations of students, then, our campus is roughly 76% caucasian with 81% in-state undergraduates (college portrait). [↩] spring reading the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct “information has value”: the political economy of information capitalism – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 19 aug dave ellenwood /1 comments “information has value”: the political economy of information capitalism in brief information capitalism dominates the production and flow of information across the globe. it produces massive information institutions that are as harmful to everyday people as they are powerful. to this point, information literacy (il) educators do not have a theory and pedagogy of information capitalism. this article appraises the current state of political economy in il and begins to build a foundation for teaching a political economy of information capitalism. introduction these are economically and politically tumultuous times. the great recession of 2007-9, the rise of right-wing populism across the globe, a life-threatening/altering global pandemic, and the threat of species-ending climate change have left many feeling uneasy about the present, let alone the future. one bright spot is the unprecedented number of people who have poured into the streets to demand that black lives matter, but this was sparked by horrifying police brutality filmed and circulated online. in the meantime, the day to day operations of librarianship continue, permeated by these anxieties. in this context, libraries have seen the impact of increased corporate domination, budget shortfalls, and the corporatization of higher education. we are gouged by publishers like elsevier who offer package subscriptions with exponentially increasing costs while they rake in exceptionally high profits. elsevier had a 31.3% profit margin in 2018 amounting to about $4 billion (elsevier fact sheet, 2019). many corporate library vendors have consolidated to further ensure market power and control, a process which has often rewarded the largest companies. these companies are positioned to potentially consolidate further during the covid-19 pandemic. this is in part because they have the resources to further entrench their products in libraries by offering services that are free in the short term, but convert to high cost in the long term. while companies like elsevier make record profits, library workers of all types face increasingly precarious work arrangements and they serve students who are anxious about affording skyrocketing tuition as well as outrageous textbook prices. students are facing an information climate in which it is difficult to know which sources to trust because of an abundance of political information and disinformation. simultaneously, their data is being extracted by numerous social media sites (likely owned by facebook or google) and library vendors and publishers (lamdan, 2019), and their behavior is being manipulated by corporate algorithms seeking profits and political power. in the midst of these challenges, each term, teaching librarians get the opportunity to teach students information literacy (il). how can librarians use this opportunity to work locally with students to think through and have an impact on these massive political and economic problems? in her 2019 blog post information literacy’s third wave, barbara fister argues that we are entering a third wave of il education, a wave that focuses on the systems that structure our information environment. the first wave involved teaching students to answer questions through navigating library resources. the second consisted of teaching students how to maneuver the rise of the internet as an unwieldy site of information circulation. the third wave, she argues, needs to respond to the vast commodification of the internet. she demands that we “have to think about the economics underlying both the distrust of institutions and these new institutions of capital that depend on gathering and analyzing the minutia of our lives for predictive and persuasive purposes….” librarian scholars are piecing together new ways to understand and teach about information structures. librarians aptly describe the neoliberal foundations of il and make a strong case for how learners should be aware of knowledge construction in media (nicholson, 2018; drabinski, 2017; seale, 2012; enright, 2012; eisenhower and smith, 2010; haggerty and scott, 2019; bussell, 2018). but, to this point, the conversation has not fully developed into a coherent analytical force that describes the hierarchies that guide the flow of money in information systems. the field of political economy (of communication) can provide answers to some of these challenges, and tie them together in a theory that we cannot ignore.   the “information has value” frame of the association of college & research libraries’ (acrl) framework for information literacy is a starting point for developing a political economic approach to il. the goal of this essay is to recruit marx and subsequent political economists of communication/information to sketch out a basic political economy of information capitalism. ultimately, this article seeks to understand the dynamics of information capitalism so that through our teaching we can use this understanding to mount credible, comprehensive challenges to the system itself. library workers and students need to think and act democratically and collectively in order to address the problems posed by information capitalism. this article will introduce the opportunities presented by the value frame, appraise the strengths and weaknesses of current political economic thinking in il education, and expand on the concept of political economy and what it offers il. i will then present a basic theory of information capitalism which includes the concepts of value, commodification, commodity fetish, concentration of ownership, labor, and surveillance. i conclude with recommendations for teaching information capitalism and alternatives, including ways to transform the system individually and collectively. information has value the “information has value” frame provides a welcome opening to discuss information capitalism, including the commodification of information, information labor, concentration of ownership, and audience data extraction/surveillance. the value frame is part of the framework for information literacy for higher education produced by the acrl (2016). it evolved from the previous information literacy (il) “standard” that urged students to “understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally.”  while the standard shied away from critical analysis of information structures and simply demanded that we act ethically and legally within existing information structures, the value frame prompts us to teach economic dimensions of il more critically. although many might not interpret it through a marxist lens, the new frame recognizes that information “production and dissemination” is influenced by “legal and socioeconomic interests”.  it notes that expert researchers should understand that “value may be wielded by powerful interests in ways that marginalize certain voices”, but that this value may also be used by “individuals and organizations to effect change and for civic, economic, social, or personal gains”. while the frame implores researchers to understand their “rights and responsibilities” when participating in information communities, it also recommends that researchers thoughtfully “comply with” and “contest current legal and socioeconomic practices concerning the value of information”. in other words, it not only asks us to understand the rules of information communities, but also to challenge unjust structures. and while it includes some of the tone of the standard by centering source citation, those of us seeking to understand and transform our current information structures can use the value frame as an entryway. it is not perfect, but it provides an institutionalized opportunity to explore and teach how information is bought, sold, and produced through labor. this political economy approach is rooted in marxist theory and the analysis of subsequent political economists of communication, which seek to comprehensively understand and challenge information capitalism. information literacy as a neoliberal project to this point, librarians have not fully outlined a political economy of information literacy (il) education, and the majority of the political economic discussion in libraries has been dedicated to showing the ways that information literacy has a neoliberal capitalist orientation. neoliberal capitalism is a global political project initiated in the mid-1970’s by members of the capitalist class (those with ownership stakes in large businesses and corporations). they had the political backing of powerful government officials and the intellectual backing of chicago school economists and the austrian-british economist friedrich hayek. they had two primary goals: (1) converting as much of human activity as possible into market-based exchange; (2) transferring wealth to economic elites— and while this second goal was not explicit, when these two goals were in conflict, the second goal was to take precedence (harvey, 2005). this capitalist class effort was in response to difficulties in making profit. limits on capital’s ability to realize profit included corporate taxes, the falling rate of profit, and decolonization efforts in the global south that threatened capital’s exploitation of labor and resources from these areas. in many economies across the globe, neoliberals were successful at privatizing or eliminating government-provided social services (e.g. food, health, housing, and education). many scholars (smyth et al, 2019; o’sullivan, 2016) have shown that neoliberalism has influenced universities by turning higher education into a commodity as opposed to a fundamental right. for example, the massive increases in tuition and fees for public institutions, the stripping of tenure through the stark increase in adjunct faculty, etc.  in the last decade, librarians have paid considerable attention to the influence of neoliberalism on information literacy. both enright (2012) and seale (2012) argue that information literacy under neoliberal capitalism aimed to produce perfect neoliberal individuals. these imagined atomized individuals do not think collectively, but instead are able to use information to successfully navigate markets in order to better themselves and to be productive employees. nicholson (2018) argues that libraries are being swept into the corporatization of the university and that il is primarily about preparing people to compete in the international market. this results in the corporate culture-like quantitative assessment permeating il practice. eisenhower and smith (2010) are concerned that the higher education classroom in the neoliberal era is too commodified and entrenched in social and economic hierarchies to effectively challenge capitalism. they are even skeptical that librarians can use critical pedagogy without our efforts being co-opted by the corporate university. drabinski (2017), in a strategic twist, argues that il emerged from the context of neoliberalism, but nonetheless provides an opening for librarians. librarians now have a seat at the curricular table and we can use the opportunity to implement changes that benefit librarians and students in their local contexts. drabinski’s argument is an example of political economy thinking in that she roots il in history, but leaves room for struggle and change in the analysis. i hope to build on these arguments, recognizing that il teaching practices are shaped by a capitalist context, but also recognizing that we can take il in a direction that challenges information capitalism. that is where a political economic approach to teaching il enters the picture.  political economy for il a political economy lens for analyzing information creates many opportunities for teaching librarians and students alike. some define political economy simply as the relationship between democracy (how decisions are made about fundamental aspects of our daily lives) and the economy (how we sustain and reproduce ourselves materially) (mcchesney, 2013). a central question in political economy is: who has decision-making power and control over the production and dissemination of the materials humans need to sustain daily life? a political economy approach to information undoes the ideological damage wrought by mainstream economics. mainstream economics attempted to naturalize the laws of capitalism as though they are universal truths and the only way to conduct economic activity, as if capitalist economics were a natural science (mosco, 2009). this approach to economics forecloses the possibility for everyday non-elite people to change the structure of the economy to be more just. political economy has been around much longer than the modern discipline of economics. it is a long-standing intellectual tradition that maintains that the way in which humans provide life’s necessities is not natural or inevitable, but is something that can be altered through political struggle.  mosco (2009) describes four central features of a political economy analysis. (1) a commitment to history. library workers’ economic analysis should understand the way in which historical transformation and social change occurs. in marx’s view, history is shaped by class struggle or the conflict over the fruits of human labor in any given society. for example, in our capitalist society, history is shaped by the conflict between those who own the means of production (capitalist class) and those of us who have to sell our labor for a living (working class). (2) the social totality. rejecting the fragmentation of political and social realities, political economy reveals the big picture of our social and economic life. in other words, political economy asks: “how are power and wealth related and how are these in turn connected to cultural and social life” (p.4)? (3) moral philosophy. political economy is concerned with the underlying values and beliefs that are emphasized in economic systems (e.g. self-interest, collective well-being, or liberation from exploitation, etc.). (4) social praxis. this is the unity between thought/theory and action. political economy theorizes our current world and possible future worlds and helps us do the work of moving towards those worlds.  additionally, a political economy of information enables us to understand the material basis for information production and dissemination. people make money by commodifying information which in turn consolidates power into elites’ hands. the political economy of information unveils how information producers are exploited for the profit of a few. in this sense, it helps us sharpen our identification of elites with concentrated power. this is particularly useful when the current popular discourse describes a wide range of people as “liberal elites” (e.g. academics, college students, media workers, etc.), which muddies the collective understanding of who is elite. political economy exposes the problems of commodifying information and identifies trends across multiple information markets like textbook, scholarly communication, and news media markets. it reveals similarities and contrasts between information markets and other kinds of commodity markets that library workers can use to, among other things, connect broader anti-capitalist struggles to anti-information capitalist struggles.  finally, a political economy of information capitalism sparks our imagination around avenues for resistance. since information capitalism is the dominant system, and has complex defense mechanisms, we need to devise comprehensive ways to push back against co-optation of our creative capacities. using the social praxis described above, how can teaching librarians work with our students to challenge information capitalism in impactful ways? teaching economic dimensions of il: toward more than source evaluation there are several promising attempts within the library literature to think about information literacy through an economic lens, but these largely emphasize individual solutions like source evaluation. some scholar-practitioners have applied critical media literacy (cml) to teaching information literacy in ways that work to help students think analytically about media production. cml is a pedagogical framework for a variety of educational contexts and age ranges, that comes out of cultural studies (bussell 2018). cml focuses on teaching students how to critically read and understand the media as well as participate in alternative media production. brayton and casey (2019) combine cml and il to teach their credit course. in this method, they have students identify ideology and propaganda in news sources. they also have students reflect on the capitalist paradigm by asking questions about info commodification such as: should information even be sold? lastly, they have students reflect on collective intelligence by having them encounter wikipedia.  hilary bussell (2018) also uses cml to support il teaching in a credit context. she applies the cml framework to the value frame because it provides an opportunity to discuss the socioeconomic and cultural underpinnings of information. bussell’s approach emphasizes understanding how meaning is made through news production and includes a component on media ownership and structure. bussell’s cml teaching practice critically culminates in a project in which students make their own media, an empowering way to have students engage with the issues addressed by cml.  haggerty and scott (2019) use media and information production to teach the legal dimensions of current information economics. in their chapter on teaching copyleft in credit courses, they discuss the way in which copyright was originally designed to spur creativity and was much more limited than the copyright policies we have today. breaking from its origins, copyright has evolved to primarily benefit corporations, which actually dissuades creativity (mcchesney 2013). in their view, it is important to teach the limitations of copyright and to enlighten students about alternatives like copyleft which is defined as: “a movement responding to the constraints of traditional copyright by allowing the licensed work to be used, modified, and distributed as determined by the work’s creator” (haggerty and scott, p. 253). like other librarian scholars discussed earlier, they advocate student production of sources to teach the value of information.  these additions to the conversation are helpful, but they also present certain limitations. their strength is in the interpretive and ideological side of the information economy. in order for students to understand the dynamics of information capitalism we have to provide them with a theory that helps them interpret the system across multiple sites. the narrow focus of copyleft and cml cannot do this alone.  they also do not center capitalism, which weakens their analysis of the system of source production. this article seeks to build a more comprehensive approach. focusing on capitalism is necessary for improving our understanding of ideology and interpretation. however, despite these shortcomings, the teaching activities presented by these authors fit well into a broader political economic approach and should be consulted going forward.  char booth (2014) begins to address this more comprehensive picture under the banner of information privilege. their concept is very influential. so much so that it appears in the official information has value frame under the dispositions: “learners who are developing their information literate abilities…are inclined to examine their own information privilege.” information privilege is the notion that people have different access to information sources based on their position in society and institutional affiliations. for example, students at an institution of higher education have temporary privileged access to proprietary databases and the thousands of scholarly journal articles that they contain. students might not notice this privilege until they get out of school and experience various paywalls when attempting to access sources. part of teaching the concept of information privilege is uncovering these underlying issues and injustices. booth also hopes to encourage more open forms of information creation, critique of profit motives (although they do not elaborate on this in their original blog post) and to examine personal and institutional privilege. they have students think about the profit drivers beneath paywalls, the value of the openness of publications, and how to help those without information privilege circumvent strict licensing agreements.  in a talk for oclc, booth (2017) presents an even more comprehensive view of information privilege. they connect fighting white nationalism, advocating for higher wages for workers, eliminating overdue fees, and food and housing insecurity all to paywalls. booth also points to attempts by for-profit companies to co-opt the open access movement. they make mention of collective action in supporting the efforts to challenge information privilege by fighting for information justice. booth’s work pushes us towards a political economy analysis of information and i want to build from their information privilege concept towards a more comprehensive understanding of information capitalism. i suggest that we supplement the term information privilege with the term information capitalism because, as keeanga-yamahtta taylor argues, the concept of privilege without an analysis of capitalism muddies the overall picture of the political world. it obscures our ability to identify the elites and those who have power in a capitalist society, i.e. the capitalist class (taylor, 2017). this is not to say that privilege does not exist across or within classes, because it certainly does, but the phrase tends to focus on individuals who are not necessarily the owners of the means of information production and distribution, but are granted privileges by those owners. the process of granting privileges to certain groups is an essential capitalist strategy for maintaining power and avoiding a change in the overall social and economic structure. while individual students certainly have power, the vast majority are not members of the capitalist class and do not own the databases to which they have access. they are merely granted temporary access with their institutional affiliation. an information capitalism approach may alienate some students who are part of the capitalist class, or who strongly identify with this class. however, this approach gives members of these groups the opportunity to examine the issue structurally so they may see how inequality is produced. it is possible for members of this class to become allies of working class struggles. an example of this is resource generation, an organization that helps people who have inherited wealth funnel that wealth towards grassroots movements. this structural, information capitalism approach opens up collective inquiry and action as opposed to a focus on information privilege which emphasizes individual inquiry. foundations of information capitalism the current dominant global economic system is capitalism, a system that also dominates the production and distribution of information. capitalism is complex, but we can most simply define it as an economic system that includes strong private property protections, private ownership of the means of production, and a strong emphasis on markets for the distribution of goods and selling of one’s labor. i use the term information capitalism to describe our information economy because it largely fits into capitalist parameters. the fundamentals of capitalism apply to information capitalism and information markets in many ways, but information capitalism includes some complexities that require further exploration. key areas of focus are commodification of information, ownership, labor, and audience data extraction and surveillance. value the il frame states that information has value, but how does the political economy tradition define value? when defining value, marx is a fruitful starting place because value is a concept he spent a great deal of time and care developing. the marxian political economy tradition is central because his project sought to describe and disrupt capitalism and this inquiry is seeking to understand and challenge capitalist information relations. keep in mind, marx dedicated much of his work to describing capitalism from the inside, so he did not intend for his categories of value and beyond to be universal truths. instead, they are descriptions of the way that each concept works within capitalism. these concepts, like value and labor, can exist outside of capitalism, but they would take a different form (henderson, 2013).  in his enduringly influential work capital, marx (1990) began his inquiry into value, and capital itself, by examining the most basic unit of the system: a single commodity. commodities are goods that are produced for sale on markets. they may seem simple, but when examined closely, they have many sides: use-values, exchange-values, and values.  first, value is a foundational dimension of a commodity. to marx, value is a socially constructed category, because the value of commodities is in their relationships with one another and the people that produce and desire them. value in capitalism is contingent on labor and social relations in complex ways. therefore labor is a central category for marx, which we will explore further below.  second, commodities have use-values or something that makes it useful to someone. for example, a toothbrush is useful for keeping one’s teeth clean, avoiding cavities, and controlling breath odor. an information-based example would be a highly-cited scientific scholarly article published by elsevier. the article is useful because it provides unique insights on a scientifically important topic. all commodities have a use-value because if they cease to have a use-value then they are no longer commodities and are no longer available on the market.  finally, the last dimension of the commodity is the exchange-value. this is essentially the price that a producer can obtain by selling the commodity. a toothbrush might sell for something like $2-10 us dollars. the highly-cited scientific scholarly article published by elsevier might sell for something like $30-50. in this way, all commodities are exchangeable through money. if something is not exchangeable for money it ceases to be a commodity on the market. ownership and exploitation most basically, we can delineate two major categories in capitalism: (1) those who own the means of production (or communication) and (2) those who do not. the non-owners or the working class tend to be what marx calls “doubly free”: “freed” from owning the means of production, and “free” to sell their labor as the only way to sustain their lives. this is often under coercive and exploitative conditions. the owners purchase workers’ labor in order to keep their profits flowing, which helps them reproduce themselves in their role as owners. there are owners of the toothbrush factory and then there are the workers who make the toothbrushes. there are owners of publishers like elsevier and there are (paid and unpaid) workers like copy editors and scholars who produce the published content.  owners exploit labor by paying workers less than what they produce in value. this is called surplus value or profit, which is one of the primary subjects of class struggle. since profits are created on the backs of productive workers, they are alienated from the products of their labor. this is central to the productive function of capitalism or how it is ever expanding. people always get paid less than they are worth. this coincides with outright theft, primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession (harvey, 2005), which is how “free laborers” came into to being. examples of this are slavery and the outright theft of land from native americans. this also coincides with gendered reproductive labor that women traditionally do: activities like housework in factory-worker homes in which women did not get direct remuneration. a more just vision of political economy calls for democratic control and ownership over the surplus value and labor conditions. to be clear, capitalist exploitation is deeply intertwined with racism and patriarchy. cedric robinson (1980), who popularized the term racial capitalism, argued convincingly that capitalism always required racial differentiation and exploitation to function. silvia federici (2012) and others prove the same for gendered exploitation. the primary manifestations of racial and gender differentiation in capitalism are the production of racist and sexist ideologies, differentiated work arrangements across racial and gender identities, and disparities in the flow of material resources, i.e. varying degrees of exploitation. capitalists exploit these socially produced hierarchies in order to drive wages down and control workers. this uneven exploitation is evident in academia where women and people of color are rendered more vulnerable to the exploitative scholarly publishing process. it is difficult to take risks by publishing outside of the mainstream commodified journals when you are already under scrutiny based on marginalized identities. in this sense, being anti-capitalist also requires being anti-racist and anti-patriarchal. commodity fetish another concept from marx is the commodity fetish. capitalism fetishizes commodities in the circulation process by obscuring the social relations (hierarchies) involved in producing a commodity across space and time. we don’t see the factory conditions, how much the workers are paid, or the profits made by the owners of the toothbrush company when we purchase a toothbrush. we don’t see the struggle or ease through which the author was able to write their scientific scholarly article. nor do we see their paycheck, working/living conditions, and the profits elsevier makes when they sell the article. the commodity fetish also makes the process of exchange appear as though it creates profit for capitalists instead of the exploitation of workers. this false notion allows capitalists to claim to be the creators of profit because they circulate commodities. instead, workers created the surplus-value and profit, and are paid less than what they produced, if at all. they also have no democratic say over the fruits of their labor. the cycle of a scholarly journal article commodity  commodified information has a similar cycle to other commodity forms, with some variations. as a transition to examining the peculiarities of information capitalism, take the commodity cycle of a scholarly journal article as an example. this is a process that many library workers are familiar with, but its perniciousness becomes more clear in the context of examining information capitalism. a scientist, who is employed at a public university in the united states, wants to share their findings from a study they conducted. they write a scientific paper and send it to a top journal in their field. the journal editor accepts the submission, sends it out to several peer-reviewers, collects their feedback, and returns it to the scientist for changes. after they make changes, the scientist resubmits the paper and it goes through a final editing process. the journal is published by elsevier and elsevier provides excellent editing for this particular journal. the scientist approves of the edits and signs their copyright over to elsevier to circulate the article. elsevier then sells the article through database package subscriptions or through online article purchases by non-institutionally affiliated individuals. the scientist receives no remuneration for the sale and distribution of their work. instead, they may receive accolades from their colleagues, credit towards tenure, or the social satisfaction of sharing their research with the scientific community.  elsevier makes unparalleled profits off the sale of the scientists’ (and other scholars’) work. many scholars may condone this practice because they feel as though elsevier and other companies provide them with a service, but a growing number of faculty are dissatisfied and want to see their work shared more equitably (mckenzie, 2019).  again, this process makes scholars with precarious work arrangements and marginalized identities more vulnerable since they will likely be pressured to publish as much as they can in the most prestigious journals possible. these scholars have very little power and are easily exploited in these scenarios.  how did we arrive at a situation in which scholars gift their intellectual production to a massive corporation with no monetary compensation? in brief, the answer to this question is found in the power dynamics of scholarly publishing over the last 30-70 years (young, 2009). there was more competition in publishing at the beginning of this period, but the unique qualities of journals caused prices to rise at a high rate year after year. this became unsustainable for library budgets and major companies like elsevier started to claim that they could save libraries money by switching to digital publishing and selling libraries large packages of bundled journals. their promises of savings never came to fruition and instead prices continued to rise while competition shrank as major publishers bought up smaller publishers and scholarly associations.  this is a common story in information markets and the following exploration of the peculiarities of information capitalism help explain the construction and vulnerabilities of this commodity cycle. commodification of information, concentration, and oligopoly  the commodification of information may seem mundane and natural, but when examined closely the process presents many political economy problems. information is a “peculiar” commodity in that it does not get used up during its consumption. this is sometimes called a non-rival or non-excludable good. non-rival goods are different from most commodities,  which are exhausted in their consumption. for example, a toothbrush has a fairly short life, or at least that’s what my dentist says. in contrast, information remains usable after it is consumed and more than one person can consume the same information simultaneously. the contents of our scientific scholarly journal article remain after a patron reads them. furthermore, information of this sort is extremely inexpensively copied, especially in the internet era. in fact, some have called the internet “the largest copy machine” (kelly, 2008). but abundant goods do not have high exchange values, therefore information capitalists have to develop an artificial scarcity in information markets in order to increase exchange values. copyright laws and paywalls are erected around all types of digital information. as library workers and allies continue to build a politics of anti-information-capitalism, we need to know that information is an abundant resource. for examples of information abundance we can look to anti-information-commodification projects like wikipedia, oer, and free alternative news media. when information is commodified and sold on markets, this produces powerful ownership concentrations. political economists of information have documented the tendency for information markets to produce monopolies and oligopolies (mosco, 2009; fuchs, 2015; hardy, 2014). this type of concentration is endemic to information markets. currently, it is observable in textbook, scholarly communication, and news media markets.  in scholarly communication, the percentage of publications published by the top 5 publishers increased dramatically over the last 30 years in the social sciences.  for example, the top 5 publishers published 10% of psychology publications in 1953 and that number steadily grew to over 70% in 2014 (larivière et al, 2015).  80% of total textbook sales in 2016 went to 5 companies (senack and donoghue, 2016). the top 3 companies are currently pearson, cengage, and mcgraw-hill. in 2018, according to their respective annual reports, these three companies controlled a combined 68% of the higher education textbook market with pearson at 36%, mcgraw-hill at 21%, and cengage at 11%. furthermore, in 2019 mcgraw-hill and cengage embarked on a bid to merge their two companies and further concentrate ownership in the market. two of the major problems associated with this concentration are the stark increase in textbook prices and the limited representation of people of color and women as both authors and subjects.  and lastly, there is concentration across print news and broadcast media. in the uk, for example, the top three newspaper companies controlled 68.3% of the market in 2013 (hardy, 2014, p. 88), a trend which was stable for over ten years. a similar scenario exists in the us (abernathy, 2016). while these three examples are not exhaustive, they demonstrate that information markets have a consistent feature of ownership concentration.  this tendency exists in information markets for several reasons. first, markets tend toward concentration of ownership as marx observed, but info markets are particularly vulnerable because media is a public good and, in order to commodify it, a significant amount of legal and social effort must go into building the infrastructure that prevents copying and distributing it freely. for this reason, any market advantage is crucial because power players get to set the parameters that ensure their survival in the market (garnham, 2000). also, when a company gets a majority of advertising market shares, they can use the power of advertising to direct more traffic to themselves. this makes it very difficult for new companies to enter into competition. the barriers to entry are vast. (herman and chomsky, 1994) the ramifications of such an oligopolistic system are severe. political economy of communication scholar christian fuchs (2016) provides a non-exhaustive outline of the consequences of market concentration which is worth quoting at length: ideological power: corporations that produce or organise content have the power to provide material that aims to influence what people consider as correct and valuable views of reality and as truth. corporate monopolies hence have an ideological function; they can potentially lead to the simplification of complex realities.  labour standards: monopoly corporations can set low labour standards (especially concerning wages) in their industry sector. political power: in capitalism, money is entangled with political power; hence monopolies enable huge political influence of a small group of people.  control of prices: monopolies have the economic power to control prices of goods and services. control of technological standards: monopolies have the power to define and control technological standards. dependency of customers: controlling the power to define technological standards also means that the need of customers to buy evermore media technologies in order to remain up to date can be generated. hence a potential result is an increasing dependency on commodities produced by one corporation and increasing monopoly profits.  economic centralization: monopoly capital deprives others of economic opportunities.  quality: a monopolist might care less about quality because there are no alternatives to choose from for consumers.  consumer surveillance and censorship: if content and applications are monopolized—that is, most users have to rely on certain products of single media companies—operations of surveillance (i.e., monitoring, statistically evaluating, and recording audience and user behaviour, which content they create and consume, and how and what they communicate) and censorship can be carried out easier and more completely than in the case of several competing companies. this concerns especially communication technologies, such as phones and the internet. (p. 320) noble (2018) additionally demonstrates that information oligopolies can have devastating results for cultural content and reproduce racialized and sexist stereotypes (i.e. racist search results in google). also, in her exploration of the proliferation of fake news and disinformation, cooke (2018) describes the ways in which media concentration over the last several decades led to the weakening of information vetting practices and altered the construction of truth. for these reasons, the politics of anti-capitalist library workers includes challenging the commodification of information, the selling of information on markets, and its subsequent concentration of power into a few hands. labor and exploitation labor and exploitation are crucial starting places for teaching students about information capitalism because they are components with which students will likely relate. there are two primary forms of exploited labor in information capitalism: waged labor and unpaid prosumer (someone who is simultaneously a producer and consumer) labor. waged laborers have an arrangement that resembles that of traditional factory workers. they produce a product for a wage, but the owner pays them less than the worth of what they produce. the boss appropriates the surplus profit. there are laborers in this category that work across the range of jobs available in the information capitalist job market. for example, there are miners in regions of africa who extract minerals that are essential for modern computing (coltan, cobalt, etc). without them, many of our mainstream information technologies like cellphones and computers would not function. there is extensive documentation showing that these workers are super-exploited (exposed, 2016). there are also programmers that work for companies like amazon and facebook who make well over $100k per year and have a relatively privileged lifestyle. despite their relative privilege, these workers are paid less than the amount of value that they produce and are by definition exploited. tech companies appropriate the surplus profit these workers produce through software development.  students might particularly see themselves in the second category of unpaid prosumer laborers. this is the everyday social media user or even cell phone owner. people who through using a particular app or platform produce value without receiving payment. for example, facebook users do not get paid, but if all users decided to stop using the platform,  the company would be unable to make money. some scholars point to the similarity between this labor relationship and marxist feminist critiques of gendered labor (terranova, 2000). in industrial-era gendered labor arrangements, women performed the daily tasks of taking care of men so that they could fill the factories and produce commodities. this is called reproductive labor. their care work was not paid, but was essential for producing value. while there is a qualitative difference between the experiences of reproductive work in these two eras, the industrial era being associated with hard physical labor and the facebook era being associated with entertainment/leisure, the arrangement is comparable. both groups were/are essential to the process of producing profit through social interaction and care, and both did/do not get directly paid for their work. the prosumer arrangement raises questions about alternative forms of value, since value is created through everyday activities of everyday people. here, the autonomist marxist tradition argues that value is created through human social relations, highlighting one of marx’s concepts outlined in the grundrisse: the general intellect. this is the notion that human knowledge is collective and there are contradictions involved in privatizing it. the value created through human social relations should be shared with all! however, in capitalism, the general intelligence is easily integrated into the capitalist ownership structure. the task at hand is to revolutionize those relations so that the fruits of our labor can be shared. (terranova, 2000; hardt and negri, 2000) surveillance technology companies’ data collection and surveillance practices are now a powerful force in information capitalism, an additionally relatable issue for students. in order to understand the origins of tech surveillance we can go back to print news media that was dependent on ad revenue. to sell ad space and compete in the news market, a news media company needed to know as much as possible about its readers. the more a company knows about a user group, the more they can target them with ads that are geared towards them. in the internet age this evolved to emphasize gathering data on individual users as opposed to groups in interfaces like google and facebook, etc. in order to target individuals for ads. mosco (2009) calls this process of commodifying personal information, which is spurred by the necessities of market competition, immanent commodification.  further, the competition and the level of data gathered by companies have morphed into what zuboff (2019) calls surveillance capitalism, which is an economy that relies on the secret production of data profiles of individuals to urge them to act in certain ways. this enables tech companies and other elites to manipulate behavior in massive and alarming ways. one example of this was the cambridge analytica scandal in which a political firm accessed comprehensive data on 87 million facebook users in order to manipulate their vote in the 2016 us election. sarah lamdan’s (2019) work demonstrates that surveillance capitalist logic applies to library resources as well. for example, thomas reuters sells user data to united states immigration and customs enforcement (ice). this form of information capitalism raises an alarm about human autonomy as companies and governments can have unprecedented sway over individuals. and for this reason, and reasons raised above, library workers need to undermine information capitalism. moving forward in the il classroom and beyond there are two primary components of an anti-information capitalism pedagogy that library workers can use moving forward. first, teaching about information capitalism, and second, organizing against information capitalism for what char booth calls information justice. an information capitalism il curriculum should focus on three categories outlined above. these are (1) the commodification of information, (2) information labor, and (3) surveillance and privacy. a critical pedagogy rooted in student experience and liberation compliments each of these areas. students have myriad experiences with these areas. they have paid for expensive textbooks and hit paywalls for scholarly articles; they produce value through social media and databases search activity; and they have heard about personal data surveillance or experienced intrusive advertising. these common experiences make it easy to spark passionate student-centered conversations in the il classroom.  the energy, passion, and outrage generated by conversations about the harms of information capitalism can be directed towards organizing for information justice. in this sense, our il teaching expands beyond the walls of the literal classroom. library workers can pivot from conversations in which students sharpen their analysis of information economy to action that challenges the system. this action should be collective and organized. in credit-bearing classes, for example, students can work together on a campaign raising awareness of corporate media bias and ways to support alternative media. in one-shot instruction contexts, teaching librarians can channel righteous student anger about the high costs of textbooks towards grassroots campus oer initiatives. or, make room for students to direct the course of action. what do they think would be the most impactful ways to redress the harms of information capitalism and transform the system? additionally, library workers should continue to build their own ongoing anti-information capitalism organizing efforts. the most important organizing effort is for library workers to support the organization (union and otherwise) of information laborers of all types. organized workers can use their power to oppose the commodification of information and support alternatives, and pressure surveillance capitalists to stop extracting personal data. there is a wide variety of approaches to challenging information capitalism, but social praxis is central to any approach. engaging in theorizing the information economy landscape, taking action to change the unequal power relations, reflecting on the action, and repeating the process. conclusions the current form of information capitalism presents a range of significant problems, but it would be too bleak to only explore the problems without presenting alternatives and potential avenues for resistance. part of the pedagogy for information capitalism is to provide space for students to work towards transforming the system. in order to transform the system we can ask ourselves the question that the organizing collective movement generation asks as they develop strategy: “how can we come up with alternatives that starve the system?” (brown and brown, 2019). this first starts by understanding the system in order to avoid inadvertently reinforcing it in our acts of rebellion. one method for resistance is the individual strategy of evaluation. knowing the possibility of financial conflicts of interest that information producers have can help analyze the claims made by different outlets. how do the financial relationships of news organizations impact their coverage of certain topics? for example, how does the advertising support of big oil companies impact coverage of the climate crisis? students can use their understanding of information capitalism as well as these questions to guide their choice of sources for class assignments and other needs.  however, political economy approaches ask us to go beyond this narrow individual approach to think systemically and act collectively. again, political economy imagines that our economic arrangements are not natural or permanent, but constructed and changeable based on political organizing. this organizing should come from everyday people, workers (paid and unpaid) and our allies, and should challenge the social relations of information capitalism. in other words, organizing should move towards building power for the people who do the work and create the value, not economic elites or information capitalists. it means tearing down paywalls that block the flow of information that was created by the general intellect.  some alternatives that have the potential to build power and challenge information capitalism are open education (oe), open access publishing, and alternative media. in the oe movement, educators who believe that education is a human right realized that commodified textbooks are a barrier or burden to accessing education for many students. while the movement is producing real challenges for the textbook oligopoly, there are still debates about whether textbook commodities are appropriate, even when they have oe components. these decisions will be made in the coming years and educators with a political economic analysis should weigh in on this debate. but when working with students to challenge information capitalist social relations, the following questions are starting places: how can students and educators partner to support oe, open access publishing, collectively generated knowledge like wikipedia, and alternative media? how can they partner to challenge social media data extraction and surveillance with campaigns like wages for facebook? government regulation of tech company products, including racist search engine results is another option that noble proposed (2018). given the fact that governments have largely been captured by capitalist interests, can they be potential allies in anti-information capitalism struggles? what forums can we use to urge governments to regulate extractive tech companies, if any? working with students on these questions will assuredly produce exciting projects! acknowledgements writing this article was more of a collective than an individual project and i would like to acknowledge the incredible group of people that supported me in writing and publishing it. romel espinel and ian beilin’s formal peer-reviews were essential to polishing and clarifying my ideas. thank you to ryan randall for his expert editorial guidance throughout the process. several colleagues helped me develop and teach with the framework presented in this article. thank you to caitlan maxwell, katy dichter, lynn kanne, the librarians at uw bothell and cascadia college and the librarians at seattle central college. and thank you to christian anderson, emily drabinski, becca meredith, ben ellenwood, and vincent mosco for providing feedback on earlier drafts of the paper. bibliography  abernathy, p. m. (2019). the rise of a new media baron and the emerging threat of news deserts. retrieved from center for innovation and sustainability in local media, university of north carolina at chapel hill website: http://newspaperownership.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/07.unc_riseofnewmediabaron_singlepage_01sep2016-reduced.pdf acrl. (2016, january 11). framework for information literacy for higher education. retrieved august 1, 2019, from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework booth, c. (2014, december 1). on information privilege [blog post]. retrieved from https://infomational.com/2014/12/01/on-information-privilege/ booth, c. (presenter). (2017, november 9). for the greater (not) good (enough): open access and information privilege. speech presented at oclc distinguished seminar series:, dublin, oh. brayton, s., & casey, n. (2019). reflections on adopting a critical media and information literacy pedagogy. in a. pashia & j. critten (authors), critical approaches to credit-bearing information literacy courses (pp. 117-138). chicago, il: association of college and research libraries. brown, a. m., & brown, a. (producers). (2019, july 18). what time it is, with movement generation. how to survive the end of the world. podcast retrieved from https://www.endoftheworldshow.org/blog/2019/7/18/what-time-it-is-with-movement-generation  bussel, h. (2018). whose medium? whose message?: a critical media literacy approach to “information has value”. in m. k. oberlies & j. mattson (eds.), publications in librarianship: vol. 73. framing information literacy (vol. 2). cooke, n. a. (2018). fake news and alternative facts: information literacy in a post-truth era. american library association. cope, j. (2014/15). neoliberalism and library & information science: using karl polanyi’s fictitious commodity as an alternative to neoliberal conceptions of information. progressive librarian, 43, 67-89. drabinski, e. (2017). a kairos of the critical: teaching critically in a time of compliance. communications in information literacy, 11(1). retrieved from http://www.comminfolit.org/index.php?journal=cil&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=v11i1p76 eisenhower, c., & smith, d. (2009). the library as “stuck place”: critical pedagogy in the corporate university. in m. t. accardi, e. drabinski, & a. kumbier (eds.), critical library instruction: theories and methods (pp. 305-317). duluth, mn: library juice press. elsevier fact sheet. (2019, august 8). retrieved october 13, 2019, from mit libraries website: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/elsevier-fact-sheet/  enright, n. f. (2013). the violence of information literacy: neoliberalism and the human as capital. in l. gregory & s. higgins (eds.), information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis (pp. 15-38). sacramento, ca: library juice press. exposed: child labour behind smart phone and electric car batteries. (2016, january 19). retrieved october 13, 2019, from amnesty international website: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/child-labour-behind-smart-phone-and-electric-car-batteries/  federici, s. (2012). revolution at point zero: housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. oakland, ca: pm press. fister, b. (2019, february 14). information literacy’s third wave [blog post]. retrieved from library babel fish: a college librarian’s take on technology website: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/information-literacy’s-third-wave  fuchs, c. (2009). information and communication technologies and society: a contribution to the critique of the political economy of the internet. european journal of communication, 24(1), 69-87.  fuchs, c. (2016). reading marx in the information age. new york, ny: routledge. garnham, n. (2000). emancipation, media, and modernity: arguments about the media and social theory. oxford: oxford university press. haggerty, k., & scott, r. e. (2019). teaching copyleft as a critical approach to “information has value”. in a. pashia & j. critten (eds.), critical approaches to credit-bearing information literacy courses (pp. 259-270). chicago, il: association of college and research libraries. hagner, m. (2018). open access, data capitalism and academic publishing. swiss medical weekly, 148. https://doi.org/10.4414/smw.2018.14600 hardt, m., & negri, a. (2000). empire. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. hardy, j. (2014). critical political economy of the media: an introduction. london: routledge.   harvey, d. (2005). a brief history of neoliberalism. oxford, uk: oxford university press. henderson, g. (2013). value in marx: the persistence of value in a more-than-capitalist world. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. herman, e. s., & chomsky, n. (1994). manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media. london: vintage. kelly, k. (2008, january 31). better than free [blog post]. retrieved from https://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/ lamdan, s. (2019). librarianship at the crossroads of ice surveillance. in the library with the lead pipe.  larivière, v., haustein, s., & mongeon, p. (2015). the oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era. plos one, 10(6). retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 marx, k. (1990). capital: a critique of political economy (vol. 1). london, england: penguin classics. mcchesney, r. w. (2013). digital disconnect: how capitalism is turning the internet against democracy. new york, ny: the new press. mckenzie, l. (2019, july 11). elsevier ends journal access for uc system. chronicle of higher education. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/07/11/elsevier-ends-journal-access-uc-system  mosco, v. (2009). the political economy of communication (2nd ed.). los angeles, ca: sage. nicholson, k. p. (2018). on the space/time of information literacy, higher education, and the global knowledge economy. journal of critical library and information studies, 2(2). retrieved from http://libraryjuicepress.com/journals/index.php/jclis/article/view/86/36 noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression. new york, ny: nyu press.  o’sullivan, m. (2016). academic barbarism, universities and inequality (palgrave critical university studies). houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire ; new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. robinson, c. (2000). black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. chapel hill, nc: north carolina press. seale, m. (2013). the neoliberal library. in l. gregory & s. higgins (eds.), information literacy and social justice: radical professional practice. sacramento, ca: library juice press. senack, e., & donoghue, r. (2016, february). covering the cost: why we can no longer afford to ignore high textbook prices. retrieved from uspirg website: https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/national%20-%20covering%20the%20cost.pdf smyth, john, bottrell, dorothy, & manathunga, catherine. (2019). resisting neoliberalism in higher education volume i: seeing through the cracks (palgrave critical university studies). cham: springer international publishing. taylor, k.-y. (2017, may 13). picking up the threads of struggle (interview by d. denvir) [transcript]. retrieved october 13, 2019, from jacobin website: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/black-lives-matter-baltimore-obama-racism-freddie-gray-election-whitelash  terranova, t. (2000). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. social text, 63 (18)(2), 33-58. retrieved from google scholar database. young, p. (2009). the serials crisis and open access: a white paper for the virginia tech commission on research. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/11317/oawhitepaper.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y  training matters: student employment and learning in academic libraries the library commons: an imagination and an invocation 1 response pingback : day in review (august 17–21, 2020) association of research libraries this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct charles a. cutter and edward tufte: coming to a library near you, via bibframe – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 4 dec jason w. dean /11 comments charles a. cutter and edward tufte: coming to a library near you, via bibframe photo by flickr user ohio university libraries (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) in brief the library catalog as it exists today is a century-old tool that presents an array of challenges for its users. the manner in which users search for information has not changed since the inception of the paper catalog and its different indices. the electronic records that comprise library catalogs are in a format that is largely the product of cataloging standards and practices designed to replicate printed catalog cards. additionally, the syntax and terminology of the controlled vocabularies in the catalog are generally alien to its users. we live in an age of google, and our catalogs should reflect the information-seeking behavior of today’s user, not the user of one hundred years ago. by jason w. dean cutter and the modern catalog the format of the catalog we have today was largely set forth in charles a. cutter’s rules for a dictionary catalog, originally published in 1875. in that work, cutter suggested that the catalog should “enable a person to find a book of which either the author, the title, or the subject is known.”1 these suggestions mirror the typical indices found in the majority of catalogs today – author, title, or subject while also including an index of classification numbers (another suggestion of cutter’s). cutter fully expressed these ideas in his work with ezra abbott at harvard college to create the first known card catalog.2 indeed, one interacts with these indices in a similar manner to interacting with the separate card catalogs for author, title, subject, and shelflist. beyond the methods of indexing and searching, the very format of library metadata in the catalog is dictated by the “analog” catalog. the determinant for structuring marc was its direct predecessor – the catalog card itself. in her book henriette avram, creator of the marc metadata schema, acknowledges that the catalog card shaped the format of marc as the library of congress continued producing cards for distribution, as well as retrospectively converting existing bibliographic data in library catalogs into marc format. if one looks at a catalog card and a record in an electronic catalog, they are remarkably similar. beyond the metadata schema itself, the rules for description of items  perpetuate the formatting of data to make entries fit all on one card through standardized abbreviations seen in aacr2.3 the knowledge and tools needed to successfully navigate the catalog can be difficult to learn and so are rarely used by the majority of library patrons. for example, the searching help information at the university of arkansas extends over seven different pages. searching by subject headings can be frustrating and confusing, even for librarians. perhaps a patron is looking for a book about early maps of the arctic regions, and so chooses to search the subject index in the catalog. the patron tries different permutations of headings “maps — arctic regions” or “early maps — arctic regions” and after a few more attempts, gives up in frustration. the “correct” heading for this is, confusingly, “arctic regions — maps — works to 1800.” not only are the terms themselves esoteric, the syntax of subject headings is a syntax unknown to many. despite its limitations, the library catalog has served the information seeking behaviors of its users well for the past century. if a user knows how to manipulate and structure search entries, the electronic catalog in its present form is an excellent discovery tool. indeed, the catalog as it exists today is a reflection of a century of adjustment and manipulation by librarians and patrons. the concepts of controlled vocabulary, shelflist browsing, and convenience of searching an index are key contributions to access made by catalogers and the catalogs they create. beyond these concepts, the curated and authoritative metadata generated by catalogers is also of significant value in the keyword search centered information seeking behaviors of internet and library users. however, many information seekers prefer a google search to a search in the library catalog. based on colloquial evidence, most librarians can affirm that google, not the library catalog, is the “first line” for information discovery. furthermore, in a recent post on the chronicle of higher education’s website, brian mathews further attests to user frustration with the current structure of library catalogs and their inherent difficulties in navigation and use. google provides a single search interface for a wide variety of resources. with one search, a user can discover images, webpages, google scholar, google books and a wide variety of other online resources. search strategies can be very informal and still return reasonably applicable results. many libraries are attempting to address this preference through the implementation of discovery engines, such as summon and encore, that offer a single search interface for the information resources accessible through the library. google is now the default resource for information seeking – so much so that it is not uncommon for librarians to encounter individuals who assume that libraries will be obsolete because of google’s dominance.4 it is perhaps now a trope to refer to libraries in the age of google. however, this does not obviate the evidence that libraries do indeed exist in an age of google, and that by and large, individuals seeking information see google as their primary resource, their first line of inquiry. naturally this unnerves many librarians who see libraries and the collections they maintain as an authoritative, and perhaps definitive, repository of knowledge that can answer a broad swath of inquiries. what, then, can librarians do to address this preference for google as a device for information discovery? bibframe not since the advent of the catalog as we know it today have librarians been able to fundamentally rethink the nature of the catalog and how it is used to serve the information seeking behaviors of its users. this ability comes from the ongoing development of the metadata schema referred to as bibframe, which is powered by linked open data. bibframe will help to free library metadata from the silos in which it has been kept for fifty years, and will also allow this data to be interoperable with a far wider web of data, in addition to allowing for a re-thinking of the design and arrangement of the catalog. furthermore, the change in rules for metadata creation, represented by rda, will also help library metadata to be more useful, though perhaps to a lesser extent than bibframe. rda is designed as a rule set for entering metadata into many different schema – marc, dublin core, and bibframe. however, without the changes that bibframe represents, rda is largely a cosmetic change to library metadata. bibframe and linked open data in may 2011, the library of congress announced an initiative to examine the possibilities of moving library metadata in legacy formats (chiefly marc) into a wider web of data and knowledge available on and supported by the internet. in a report dated november 21, 2012, the library noted that marc has been an incredible success story in facilitating the machine automation of many library functions. however, the authors of the aforementioned report on bibframe point out that marc is perhaps outdated, and it is the responsibility of librarians to ensure that library metadata is fully integrated with existing metadata and web standards. in response to this need, the library of congress has put forward bibframe (short for bibliographic framework) as a recommended replacement for marc as a metadata schema. bibframe, working in the arena of linked open data, will move library metadata into a much broader network of information. indeed, the report highlights this change: as libraries become part of this larger web of data, by leveraging the use of stable identifiers to reference clearly differentiated entities, focus will shift from capturing and recording descriptive details about library resources to identifying and establishing more relationships between and among resources. this includes related resources found on the web, and especially those beyond the traditional bounds of the library universe. these relationships – these links – drive the web, transforming the information space from many independent silos to a network graph that branches out in every direction. relationships help search engines and other services to improve search relevancy and, most importantly, help users find the information they are looking for. this quote implies, but does not specifically state, bibframe’s use of linked open data for building web links and metadata into a larger “semantic web”. proposed by tim berners-lee in 2001, linked open data is the supporting framework for a larger movement called the semantic web. the semantic web, supported by linked open data, aims to describe the relationships between linked items on the internet. the vast majority of the internet is structured with links that do not describe the nature of the links between pages or objects – a typical hyperlink. in their article on the state of the semantic web, bizer, heath, and berners-lee highlight this by stating “in the conventional hypertext web, the nature of the relationship between two linked documents is implicit, as html is not sufficiently expressive to enable individual entities described in a particular document to be connected by typed links to related entries.”5 the semantic web aims to make information use and discovery a richer and more immersive experience through the description of these links – their semantics. supporters of the semantic web, and linked open data, see a changed information landscape with the implementation and adoption of the semantic web. computers and networks would be aware of the nature of the links between objects – that an author created a book, as opposed to a simple link between two resources. as bizer et al describes, “whilst html provides a means to structure and link documents on the web, rdf (resource description framework) provides a … model with which to structure and link data that describes things in the world.”6 machines could then suggest related items or ideas based on what a user is seeking, and chooses to display. this concept has the potential of creating a far more contextual experience for users engaging in information seeking and discovery. two examples of the possible benefits of placing library metadata in the linked open data arena appear in an essay in future internet, as well as in an interview with thea lindquist, associate professor and history librarian at the university of colorado boulder. the usefulness of this web of linked open data is further described in terms of possible impact for library catalog users: jane:  how do you describe to people what semantic computing might do for them? thea: usually i say that it associates related concepts, increases findability, context and interoperability, enables semantically rich services (like faceted searching, content recommendations, and visualizations) and allows re-use, re-mixing and re-presenting of data. if they look puzzled, i start by comparing the current web of documents to the web of data. when you search for a term on the web of documents, the computer looks for the string of characters you entered, and it has no idea what the meaning associated with those characters are. when it finds matches, it returns the documents in which they are found, and it is up to you to slog through those and figure out if any of the matches are indeed relevant. if you look for “buck”, you could get documents about a male, antlered animal, a dollar, throwing (a rider) by bucking, giving someone a ride on your bike (this usage may be limited to minnesota)…you get the picture. on the web of data, supported by ontological structures and intelligent applications, the computer can understand the word “buck” might have different meanings and what those might be, and it will ask you “are you interested in the monetary unit?” (among other things). if you say yes, it will direct you to the relevant data residing within documents rather than the entire document, whether the character string says “buck”, “dollar” or “single”. as a further illustration, the bibframe document itself describes the possibilities for libraries and users thusly: as libraries become part of this larger web of data, by leveraging the use of stable identifiers to reference clearly differentiated entities, focus will shift from capturing and recording descriptive details about library resources to identifying and establishing more relationships between and among resources. this includes related resources found on the web, and especially those beyond the traditional bounds of the library universe. these relationships – these links – drive the web, transforming the information space from many independent silos to a network graph that branches out in every direction. relationships help search engines and other services to improve search relevancy and, most importantly, help users find the information they are looking for. as bibframe structures library metadata in a way that is easily manipulated by machines, this new schema will free that metadata from the silos in which it has been stored for decades. the nature of library metadata structures has prevented the vast amounts of metadata created by catalogers and librarians over the past forty years from being easily used by tools outside of the library sphere. bibframe is built on xml (extensible markup language) and rdf (resource description framework), both “native” schemas for the internet. the web-friendly nature of these schemas allows for the widest possible indexing and exposure for the resources held in libraries. metadata could be indexed by major search engines, and incorporated into conglomerations and indices of linked open data, such as europeana. as a stopgap measure, blacklight implementation in the local catalog is useful for exposing library metadata to search engines, but this exposure is done after the fact, and is not integrated into the schema (marc) itself, creating additional ongoing work for catalogers. bibframe has the potential to “build-in” the ability for library metadata to be indexed easily by major search engines. this ease of indexing and “freeing” of library metadata has the potential to bring users back to the catalog, and back to library websites, as authoritative starting and ending points in information seeking. the addition of the great mass of authoritative library metadata potentially will not only enhance users’ searches through search engines, but those results will also drive users back to the source of that authoritative data – library catalogs. indicative of the “freeing” power of linked open data, john overholt’s essay titled five theses on the future of special collections highlights the need for library metadata to become part of the linked open data web in his referencing europeana, to date one of the largest implementations of linked open data in a more user-friendly format. furthermore, moving library metadata to a schema that is web-native also gives an added benefit to the user that this metadata is easily manipulated by widely available tools and programs for conducting research in the metadata itself. in a blog post on religion in american history, lincoln mullen highlights the potential for research in the metadata, as well as the challenges attendant to conducting that research with metadata structured in marc. beyond this “freeing” of library metadata from the catalog for indices and users, the use of web-friendly schemas has other positive impacts for the user and libraries. during a presentation and a question and answer session hosted by oclc, roberta shaffer of the library of congress shared additional information about bibframe. bibframe is currently in an early testing phase. however, if librarians and other interested parties wish to participate in the early phases of this new schema, there are several options to explore at the bibframe website. perhaps the simplest way to get involved with the new schema is to sign up for the listserv via email. also on this website, one can see library metadata structured in bibframe, as well as being able to convert marc structured metadata into bibframe through online tools. however, as roberta shaffer indicated, much of this work is in the early stages and is experimental. to this end, oclc released a report in june of 2013 that explores the use of bibframe in oclc’s worldcat database. bibframe and the web because of its use of xml, bibframe also has the advantage of being vastly more web-friendly than marc, and so catalogs could be structured far more differently than they are now, and far more attentive to the needs of catalog users. librarians have a professional and ethical obligation to their users, as the code of ethics of the american library association states: “we provide the highest level of service to all library users through appropriate and usefully organized resources.” lorcan dempsey, vice-president and chief strategist of the online computer library center (oclc), recently posted an essay exploring the potential of the library catalog to not only be a tool for local discovery, but also for discovery of items beyond the library’s collections. the breadth of items in dempsey’s example provides the user with a far broader array of information resources – a process that has the potential to be automated with the adaptation of library data and catalogs to linked open data. however, additional resources do not directly correlate to a better user experience for catalog users. librarians must look not only to the resources described in the catalog, but also to the user experience. on tufte and catalogs perhaps a useful starting point for librarians and designers to think about the design of catalogs powered by bibframe is the work of edward tufte. tufte is perhaps the best theoretician in modern user-centered graphic design. his four books on the display of quantitative information provide some useful guidelines for designers of these bibframe powered catalogs of the future. tufte is most closely identified with his work in visual displays of quantitative information, but his general ideas and theses can be applied to catalog design, which is the display of information. indeed, tufte says, “the design of statistical graphics is a universal matter – like mathematics – and is not tied to the unique features of a particular language.” however, most pertinent to the designer of the catalog is this quote from edward tufte: what is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult – that is, the revelation of the complex.7 a catalog displays a vast array of complex relationships in a way that users can understand. at this time, the navigation of these complex relationships is difficult for many users. having a single search interface is an acceptable beginning to a better catalog, but this is not the only solution to the problem, nor is it the exclusive solution. a user searching these relationships must search authoritative metadata – the metadata structured by both bibframe and linked open data and generated by catalogers. users will continue using library resources only if they find them authoritative, and easy to use and understand, not the equivalent of a link farm. searching authoritative metadata in a single search box is a start, but remember tufte exhorts designers to reveal the complex – to “give visual access to the subtle and the difficult.” this process, as described, is facilitated by bibframe, but few users have the ability and inclination to read raw xml code. in tufte’s essay on the cognitive style of powerpoint, he highlights that not only words, but also graphics, provide a powerful method of describing complex ideas to users and viewers. this concept could be applied to library catalogs by not presenting metadata in a “list” or “record” format, but instead in a dynamically generated relationships graph. this graph could contextualise the metadata, so that if a user desired to know more about the creator of a given work, then the user could navigate through the graph’s rich information context. this places information resources in a rich context of information in a visual format. it is this contextualization and description of relationships that will make user experience in the catalog richer, but these also are the intended design of bibframe, as stated in the bibframe document: as libraries become part of this larger web of data, by leveraging the use of stable identifiers to reference clearly differentiated entities, focus will shift from capturing and recording descriptive details about library resources to identifying and establishing more relationships between and among resources. this includes related resources found on the web, and especially those beyond the traditional bounds of the library universe. these relationships – these links – drive the web, transforming the information space from many independent silos to a network graph that branches out in every direction. relationships help search engines and other services to improve search relevancy and, most importantly, help users find the information they are looking for. though the format of the catalog is obsolete, the intellectual endeavor and practice that catalogs represent is undeniably significant and important – not only to the collective memory of society, or the users of libraries, but also to the users of the internet. the formatting of metadata in these catalogs, as guided by cataloging standards, is the result of two hundred years of research, interaction, and revision by librarians. however, this incredible array of metadata is locked away in an outdated metadata schema, with this metadata duplicated and hidden in many discrete library catalogs. though marc was a technical innovation in its day, new metadata schema are needed to best serve the needs of our users, as well as the wider public. librarians are uniquely poised to continue the creation of authoritative metadata that users can trust and use, while adapting that metadata to emerging technologies. indeed, librarians are already working on the production of new schema – namely, bibframe. this new standard will free library metadata from the silos in which it has been stored for far too long, as well as bringing library metadata into the wider web of linked open data. beyond this freeing of metadata, bibframe also has the potential to allow librarians and designers to fundamentally re-think the nature and experience of searching the library catalog. in the course of this new iteration of the catalog, it is librarian’s professional responsibility to take time to listen to their users, examine best practices (like those postulated in the work of edward tufte), and bring their own information expertise to the versions and implementations of a new generation of catalogers. perhaps closing with this reminder from charles ammi cutter is as fitting now in thinking both about metadata standards and catalog design as it was when he first wrote it over one hundred years ago, describing the work of the cataloger in the card catalog: the convenience of the public is always to be set before the ease of the cataloger.8 acknowledgements the author would like to express his deep gratitude for the invaluable help of penny baker, collections management librarian at the sterling and francine clark art institute (and an early user of both bibframe and rda) for her thoughtful comments and encouragement. the author also thanks his reviewers at lead pipe, hugh rundle, and emily ford. also, the author’s gratitude goes to erin dorney for beginning the process of publication. he would also like to thank his colleagues at the university of arkansas libraries, specifically cheryl conway, mikey king, and elizabeth mckee for their support and guidance in writing and publication. finally, his thanks go to jen dean, who always provides a patient sounding board and peerless editor. references and further reading avram, henriette d. marc, its history and implications. washington: library of congress, 1975. avram, henriette d., john f. knapp, and lucia j. rather. the marc ii format; a communications format for bibliographic data. supplement. washington: library of congress, 1968. avram, henriette d. the marc pilot project: final report on a project sponsored by the council on library resources, inc. washington: library of congress; [for sale by the supt. of docs., u.s. govt. print. off.], 1969. bertin, jacques. semiology of graphics. madison, wis: university of wisconsin press, 1983. bibliographic framework as a web of data: linked data model and supporting services, (washington, dc: library of congress, 2012), accessed september 20, 2013, http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/pdf/marcld-report-11-21-2012.pdf bringhurst, robert. the elements of typographic style. seattle, wa: hartley & marks, 2012. cutter, w. p. charles ammi cutter. chicago: american library association, 1931. cutter, charles a., w. p. cutter, worthington chauncey ford, philip lee phillips, and oscar george theodore sonneck. rules for a dictionary catalog. washington [d.c.]: g.p.o., 1904. lima, manuel. visual complexity: mapping patterns of information. new york: princeton architectural press, 2011. manguel, alberto. the library at night. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2008. schmidt, aaron. walking paper, accessed november 18, 2013, http://www.walkingpaper.org/ tufte, edward r. beautiful evidence. cheshire, conn: graphics press, 2006. tufte, edward r. envisioning information. cheshire, conn: graphics press, 1990. tufte, edward r. the visual display of quantitative information. cheshire, conn: graphics press, 2001. tufte, edward r. visual explanations: images and quantities, evidence and narrative. cheshire, conn: graphics press, 1997. charles a. cutter, w.p. cutter, worthington chauncey ford, philip lee phillips, and oscar george theodore sonneck. 1904. rules for a dictionary catalog. washington [d.c.]: g.p.o., p. 12 [↩] charles a. cutter, “the new catalogue of harvard college library,” the north american review 108 (1869): 96-129. [↩] henriette d. avram, 1975. marc, its history and implications. washington: library of congress, p. 3. [↩] indeed, an examination of recent search statistics in the university of arkansas’ libraries catalog shows that the closest replication to a google search – keyword searching – is far more popular. keyword searching represents approximately 31% of patron searches, while subject searching represents approximately three percent. [↩] christian bizer, tom heath and tim berners-lee. “linked data – the story so far,” international journal on semantic web and information systems (ijswis) 5 (2009): 3, accessed (september 20, 2013), doi:10.4018/jswis.2009081901 [↩] ibid. [↩] edward tufte, the visual display of quantitative information. (cheshire, conn. : graphics press.), 191. [↩] cutter, p. 5 [↩] creative destruction in libraries: designing our future giving games the old college try 11 responses dan scott 2013–12–05 at 1:43 am a clarification: bibframe is not wedded to xml; that is just one possible serialization (and at this point json seems to be favored). and a question: what role does blacklight play in disseminating library metadata to search engines? the latest releases of evergreen, koha, and vufind all publish schema.org structured data for their bibliographic metadata and holdings details, so they would be valid examples, but as far as i’m aware blacklight is not doing anything like this yet. jason_w_dean 2013–12–05 at 9:36 am hi dan, thanks very much for your comment. you are quite right on the xml and bibframe relationship, i was simply trying to highlight the web-friendly nature of bibframe and used xml as my single example. also, my statement on blacklight is based on the specific implementation of that product at the rock and roll hall of fame and museum library and archives. that institution uses millennium for their ils (marc records). their ead finding aids are built in archivists toolkit. digital items (pbcore) come from hydra asset manager, so they do not use evergreen, koha, or vufind. beyond that, i cannot really comment on their setup, but i think their systems librarian has presented on their implementation if you have questions about their implementation, etc. again, thanks for your comments! jason amsterdamos 2013–12–05 at 11:25 am hi, jason’s summary is correct. blacklight does marc “out of the box” but i had to extended it to include ead and pbcore. however, anything that can go into a solr index can be searched and displayed by blacklight, so there’s no restriction on the kinds of metadata you can use. it also does not have schema.org integration yet, but that’s being proposed for the 5.0 release in early 2014. adam wead systems and digital collections librarian library + archives, rock and roll hall of fame dan scott 2013–12–05 at 11:51 am adam: thanks! i was focusing less on the incoming metadata format for blacklight, and more on the statement that “blacklight […] is useful for exposing library metadata to search engines” — which it seems currently would mean either as relatively unstructured html, or via elements that point to alternate metadata formats. schema.org integration, on the other hand, is what the major search engines really seem to want; that’s why i mentioned evergreen, koha, and vufind as examples of catalogues that already expose metadata via schema.org. i’d love to help with adding schema.org to blacklight, assuming the display model relies on some normalization at the solr level for searching and displaying fields such as title, author, etc jgrobelny 2013–12–05 at 2:08 pm sorry: reference & instruction guy here: with such a broad mounting of information in the “open” does that leave libraries prey to market forces or open to wild manipulations (like wikipedia hoaxes) but with metadata)? it seems like part of the silo is a way to maintain the reliability, although you said existing authorities would stay intact. as far as catalogs being obsolete, i disagree, a lot of people use them and hone them. as you say ” the navigation of these complex relationships is difficult for many users” but i fell like that’s because life is complex as people move between media (physical v. digital), and a catalog reflects that complexity rather than oversimplifying it or giving the illusion of ease. that’s also my job security, so you’re welcome to call humbug though! jgrobelny 2013–12–05 at 2:12 pm http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=1042 jason_w_dean 2013–12–05 at 6:18 pm hi joe, no need to apologize – i am glad we have a reference and instruction person chiming in! to my mind the sharing of authoritative metadata will not only highlight local collections, but will also serve to improve data in general. however, the creation of that metadata should (and will, i hope) still be done by catalogers. metadata cannot exist without metadata creators, so there are always going to be those of us that have to feed the metadata machine. i also think the reliability (and interoperability) of the metadata schema will be to some extent guaranteed by the national libraries and organizations behind bibframe. i think the catalog itself – the idea of the catalog – is still entirely valid and key to libraries and their function. however, the current iteration of the catalog and its metadata is so antiquated – based on and around a format that is well over a century old. being able to create new and innovative iterations of the catalog is much of my interest in bibframe, and i think much of its potential lies in its power to move library metadata out of silos and into a far more interoperable and user-centered model – a next-generation catalog, if you will. hope that clarifies things some – thanks for your comments! jason jgrobelny 2013–12–05 at 6:21 pm it does, and thanks for your comments and essay. it reminded me that i need to keep my head up for these things as i provide r&i, because it’ll be a nice shift in the long run. pingback : live streaming κάλυψη συνεδρείων karen coyle 2014–01–12 at 9:25 pm while google is known for its “single search box,” that isn’t what brings people back — people use google because they find the results useful. google’s ranking makes use of millions of human decisions to create links between resources, providing a judgment on the relative value of different resources. library cataloging treats each item as an island (other than some cryptic notes which only display in a full record display), and avoids any semblance of evaluation. library cataloging completely misses the dynamic of the conversation between resource creators and users. in this sense, bibframe is no different from aacr+marc, because it’s the content of the bibframe description that makes a difference, not its format. right now, bibframe is focused on translating marc(aacr) to bibframe, which means that nothing innovative is happening at all. even moving on to rda will not bring change, as it is based heavily on current cataloging concepts. we have to move beyond descriptive cataloging and start making connections between resources and helping users find the most valuable materials. it’s very similar to tufte’s approach to data: we have data, but it doesn’t communicate to others until we find a way to make it meaningful to them. “making meaning” is the big challenge ahead of us. pingback : bibframe: the future of the library catalog | information technology sils 2014 this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct giving games the old college try – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 18 dec amy r. hofer /20 comments giving games the old college try “life’s a game” photo by flickr user señor hans (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) in brief: based on evidence that games might help students get more engaged in my online class, i decided to overcome my skepticism and road-test two information literacy games. first i tried bibliobouts, which uses the online citation management tool zotero to integrate gaming into a research paper assignment that is already part of the course syllabus. students have to set up zotero accounts and log into the game’s online platform to play and see their scoreboard; the technology requirements were too much for my class and the experiment didn’t feel successful. the following year i tried a comparatively low-tech game that students probably experienced as a regular assignment with a dash of competition thrown in. whether or not this activity is a real game, i have continued to use it because it encourages students to practice expert researcher skills. after reconsidering my assumptions about games in an environment where serious learning takes place, i still have questions about using them for information literacy instruction. giving games the old college try by amy r. hofer when it comes to educational gaming, i’ve always been skeptical. i’m not opposed to gaming on principle—resistance seems futile in the same way that campaigning against comic books and rock and roll once was. as a non-gamer, the idea of “gamifying” information literacy instruction just sounded like another bandwagon for librarians to jump on. yet the potential for engaging and even fun instructional activities was too much for me to resist. i decided to give games a try. with apologies to real game designers, i’ll define games as activities that are designed as games from the beginning (not retrofitted with “gamification” components), are played online, and create interactive user experiences. my reasons for this working definition are entirely selfish: i teach online information literacy courses so i’m always looking for activities that will engage students and meet my learning objectives. in this article, i look at where games fit into the information literacy instruction literature, discuss my experience trying out two different games in a for-credit online information literacy course, and leave you with the questions i still have now that i’ve reconsidered my assumptions about games in an environment where serious learning takes place. i’m not sure whether i fully met my goals with the games that i tried, but i did shake off some of my skepticism along the way. information literacy games it’s easy to find so-called information literacy games that turn out to be regular old research instruction activities with puns in their titles. as game designer liz danforth notes, “…game mechanics are being tacked on to practically everything these days, almost as an afterthought” (2011, p. 84). margaret robertson, another game designer, makes the point that adding progress markers like points and badges to an activity does not actually make the activity a game. by contrast, she writes, “games give their players meaningful choices that meaningfully impact on the world of the game… games offer fail conditions as well as win conditions… it’s crucial that we stop conflating points and games” (2010). broussard (2012) provides a thorough overview of online library games that meet at least some of these criteria, along with best practices for their implementation, in her article “digital games in academic libraries: a review of games and suggested best practices.” librarians have embraced game-based learning for some time. for example, in 2008 loex-of-the-west was about gaming in library instruction, while in 2010 the canadian conference workshop for instruction in library use took “design, play, learn” as its theme. the loex-of-the-west conference organizers wrote, the parallels between good pedagogy and game design were striking and thought provoking. both seek to engage and challenge players/students in active learning, problem solving, and experimentation using a variety of strategies from narrative learning to multimedia appeals to varying learning styles to rewards both intrinsic and extrinsic. (finley, macmillan, & skarl, 2008) others propose even more specific connections between gaming and information literacy. waelchli (2008) has done indicator-level mapping of the acrl information literacy competency standards to fantasy sports, while gumulak and webber (2011) mapped game-playing to the sconul information literacy standards. further, there is good evidence that real learning takes place in video games. one authority, james paul gee (2003), describes 36 different learning principles found in good video games (and not necessarily found in school curricula). along these lines, nicholas schiller (2008) provides an analysis of the video game “portal” that includes takeaways for instruction librarians. it is possible to find less optimistic opinions on the subject. for example, kickmeier-rust et al (2007) point out that games developed by educators are usually lackluster compared to the immersive experiences available commercially. ian bogost, a game designer and director of the graduate program in digital media at georgia institute of technology, concurs: “there just aren’t enough high-quality games that also serve serious purposes effectively. making games is hard. making good games is even harder. making good games that hope to serve some external purpose is even harder” (2011, p. 2). librarians would be right to wonder whether we can possibly hope to succeed where well-funded corporations often fail. postmortem-style articles in the library literature reveal some of the problems librarians have had with games. one of the 2008 loex-of-the-west sessions described how outsourcing development to game designers resulted in a game that, from the librarians’ perspective, did not adequately address the learning objectives set out in the acrl standards (hood, 2008). to take another example, a welcome week scavenger hunt game at uc merced flopped when very few students participated (mcmunn-tetangco, 2013). librarians don’t always like to share our failed experiments, but these case studies can be instructive. just because people learn while playing games, does it necessarily follow that we should therefore use games when the main goal is learning? students are bound to notice when games have learning as a primary outcome, though they play along in order to humor us or get their grade. librarian and blogger bohyun kim writes: “games are played for fun, and the fun comes from actions not having real-world consequences. for this reason, when a goal other than fun is imposed, the game begins to lose its magical effect on our motivation and productivity” (kim, 2012, 467-468). this suggests that games may fit best with orientation and outreach activities, where fun can be the primary goal. certainly no learner-centered librarian would advocate for dry, boring lessons. undergraduates, in particular, may need an ice-breaker to help them overcome library anxiety. but real learning takes time and involves difficulty, and i think that we can admit this to students. student comments after playing bibliobouts (one of the online research games that i road-tested) reveal that we’re not really fooling them anyway: “bibliobouts […] is a part of our grade so that’s why i saw it as an assignment. and like the game itself like finding sources, it was – it was helpful definitely but it was another assignment;” and, “you still had to go through and read the article. it still was a step-by-step process and that kind of gets boring like – not boring but it’s still something – like i saw [bibliobouts] as an assignment, an assignment rather than a game” (markey, leeder, & rieh, 2012, p. 25). reading the article may not be fun, but it is, ultimately, what you have to do. further, librarians already have a problem getting our instructional content taken seriously, and we should be careful that we’re not compounding our image issues through gamification. for example, a student who played bibliobouts said of the game: i think it’s good because you’re not realizing at the time that you’re learning about research. like you might not want to think, “oh, i want to go learn about library research today.” you’re playing the game and you’re learning about it without doing that. (markey et al, 2010) this student seems to say that the purpose of games is to sneak in the part that’s good for you – the chocolate-covered broccoli approach to information literacy instruction. the sneaky approach doesn’t sit well with my belief that students will benefit from librarians’ sharing the information science behind information literacy skills. one of my research interests is meyer and land’s threshold concepts, which encourage instructors to see students as novice practitioners rather than as outsiders to the discipline. from this perspective, librarians might look for activities that open the hood on database searching, or that contrast differing notions of authority in different contexts – that is, activities that will encourage students to view research through a new, librarian-like, lens (townsend, brunetti, & hofer, 2011). on the other hand, waelchli and others point out that games don’t always equate with fast and easy solutions. waelchli writes: video games create a unique popular culture experience where players can invest dozens of hours on one game, create characters to identify with, organize skill sets and plot points, collaborate with people around the world, and determine actions based on new and existing information. (2010, p. 381) players have the patience to spend this kind of time because they have achieved that enjoyable flow state. waelchli seems to throw down the gauntlet in challenging librarians to come up with game activities that will make students take our content more seriously, not less. i think that there is enough evidence on the side of gaming that it’s worth investigating whether it is a strategy that can be adapted for real learning beyond the orientation session. game #1: bibliobouts bibliobouts is an online game – scoreboard, points, badges, and all – designed to teach research and evaluation skills. it uses the online citation management tool zotero to integrate gaming into a research paper assignment that is already part of the course syllabus. the bibliobouts development team worked on the premise that interactive online gaming can help overcome the gaps in undergraduate information literacy skill development. (leeder, markey, & rieh, 2010). with the support of an imls grant, the bibliobouts team worked through several iterations of testing and assessment to develop the game (markey, leeder, & st. jean, 2011). the game is no longer available now that the grant has ended, though the developers hope to find an organization to maintain it in the future (c. leeder, personal communication, december 13, 2013). at the time of my bibliobouts experiment, i co-taught a 2-credit online information literacy elective called basic library skills—lib199 for short—with my portland state university library colleague kerry wu, business and economics librarian. when i saw chris leeder present on bibliobouts at the 2010 library research seminar i could immediately see its potential for lib199. the game seemed as if it might solve some of the problems that we were experiencing in our course: uninspired discussion board postings, little motivation to engage with classmates, and lack of community in the online classroom. we hoped that bibliobouts would provide opportunities to practice skills learned in the course while shifting some of the interactivity away from the discussion boards. bibliobouts was designed for use in disciplinary courses, but we were able to adapt it for our information literacy course. here is a detailed outline of how we used it in lib199. following the links below will also give you an idea of how the game works. one week before the game started, we… introduced the game along with links to bibliobouts home and setup instructions (links no longer available), asked students to participate in a group discussion to decide on our research topic, linked out to georgia state’s zotero guide and assigned a zotero practice exercise. the first and second weeks of play, we… provided detailed instructions about how to get started and how we would grade the first two bouts, linked to the bibliobouts game instructions, embedded the donor bout demo (no longer available), embedded the closer bout demo (no longer available), played the donor and closer bouts. the third week, we… provided instructions about the third bout and how we would grade it, linked to the game instructions, embedded the rating & tagging bout demo (no longer available), played the rating & tagging bout. the fourth week, we… provided instructions about the third bout and how we would grade it, linked to the game instructions, embedded the best bibliography bout demo (no longer available), played the best bibliography bout. to clarify the scope of our goals, we didn’t think of the game as a teaching tool. in fact, we added instructional content to make sure that we were supporting all of the skills that students would be practicing with bibliobouts. the new content included information on installing firefox, a graded assignment on source evaluation, a database search practice worksheet, and a handout on subject databases, all of which we felt were needed in order to prepare students to play the game (and all of which were relevant to the overall goals of the course). also, we had to make sure that that we covered the relevant concepts in time for them to be put to use in the game. bibliobouts in practice before we played bibliobouts, some students showed enthusiasm for the idea of a research game while others went into a technology tailspin over zotero’s firefox requirement. the week before we planned to start playing, we set up the game by asking students to make a group decision on a course discussion board about a collective topic to research. this process ran smoothly and we settled on “teen drug use” before the end of the week. those who suggested other topics (“alternative medicine” was a contender) were willing to go along with the majority decision in order to cooperatively play the game. we began running into problems when we asked students to follow directions to set up their bibliobouts and zotero accounts. starting the week before the game officially began, and continuing all the way to the end of the game, kerry and i fielded panicked discussion board posts, emails, phone calls, and visits to the library for tech help. almost half the class had trouble accepting their invitation to the game because they were logged into more than one email account (the game’s developers write that “observing some players’ exasperation with the game’s initial registration process was a difficult pill for the r&d team to swallow because students’ interest, goodwill, and patience were sometimes lost before they even started playing the game” [markey, leeder, & rieh, 2012]). students were very confused by having to sync two different third-party platforms – zotero and bibliobouts – on top of using the learning management system to access the course. we often relied on the game developers for help when we couldn’t figure out how to fix problems ourselves. for example, a student sent us the following email (anonymized, of course): i got an invitation forwarded to my yahoo address, and i followed it to the bibliobouts page and logged in, but nothing happened. i already have 2 zotero accounts and 2 bibliobouts accounts (one with yahoo address and one with gmail adress) i’ve tried 10 times to create a third with my school email address, but it won’t let me create one for some reason. bibliobouts obviously has some bugs that need to be worked out. can i do something else for the next 2 bouts? i can’t get it to work and i don’t have time to keep trying this anymore. maybe i did it wrong initially, but i can’t get it to work! i’ll do an mla bibliography for the next two, but i’m done wrestling with that stupid website! so frustrated! i’ll put it in what ever format you want with whatever sources you want, but i can’t get bibliobouts to work. please give me an alternative and let me know as soon as possible. our reply: yes, i agree that there are bugs with the bibliobouts game and i am really sorry that you are so frustrated. i hear you! i am trying one more thing. i just sent an invite to your yahoo account. please take a deep breath :) and accept that invite then register using that same yahoo address to create your account. let me know what happens, ok? good luck, amy the student’s response, which concluded the conversation: holy sh*# it worked! thanks for your help, i guess i’m back on track. hopefully there won’t be any other issues. because we heard so much about the problems—our discussion board was filled with subject lines saying “help,” “still confused,” and “more trouble”—kerry and i assumed that bibliobouts was a complete flop. we were prepared to adjust our grading scheme if needed so that we wouldn’t penalize students for participating in our experiment. but when the time came to assign grades, it turned out that the class did incredibly well at meeting the expectations we had set. almost everybody got the highest possible grade plus extra credit points for all four “bouts.” this was much better than they did on the individual quizzes and written assignments that we gave during the rest of the quarter. we were puzzled about how to connect the dots between the negative response to the game and the surprisingly good grades. did we realize our goals of providing skills practice and building online community? maybe. i think that students did have a good opportunity to practice—perhaps better than they gave the game credit for. we hoped to address a student engagement problem unique to the online environment, yet the game proved too difficult to administer in an entirely online course. as one student posted on the discussion board, “this is the hardest online assignment, and i have had 10 other online classes.” we did not repeat bibliobouts and resolved to henceforth and forevermore only use content that can be brought into the learning management system rather than asking students to navigate away to other platforms. game #2: citation sleuthing time passed, kerry moved on to other projects and no longer co-taught lib199, and i was ready to try another game in the course. this time i used a book as my starting point: let the games begin! engaging students with field-tested interactive information literacy instruction (mcdevitt, 2011). i decided to adapt jenna kammer’s game called database diving (while i was at it, i changed the name as well). it appealed to me because it creates a context for students to practice expert research behavior. professionals and academics don’t just read an article as a standalone piece—they read it in context and track down sources that catch their interest or relate to their own projects. at the same time, kammer’s game provides an opportunity to scaffold writing a bibliography, which was part of the final project for my course. the instructions and rubric for this assignment evolved over the three quarters that i used and refined it. here is how i presented it the last time it was taught: assignment 2: citation sleuthing this assignment has two goals: practice tracking down the sources of information mentioned in articles you read; and practice writing perfect citations in the style of your choice. 1. read dan fisher’s article, ready for the “digital natives”?, and write a perfect citation for it. 2. track down at least 5 of the sources referenced in the post and write perfect citations for them (i counted 13 potential sources that you could cite for this article). 3. keep going… if you see a reference list in one of the linked sources, track down and write perfect citations for those sources as well.  4. organize your perfect citations in a timeline, oldest to newest (note: usually bibliographies are organized alphabetically by the author’s last name, but for the purposes of this assignment please organize chronologically). in order to get full credit for this assignment, your timeline must include: citation for fisher’s article; citation for at least one book; citation for at least one scholarly article; citation for at least one report from a private organization; citation for at least one website or webpage. 5. the group leader will upload the citation timeline to the specified group dropbox. make sure that the names of participating group members are at the top of the document. note: perfect citations don’t have any formatting mistakes. we care about punctuation, capitalization, italics, the order of the elements, etc. visit the citation handout if you need a reminder of the resources available to you. the best you can do on this assignment is 5/10 if your citations are not perfect. extra credit: you can compete for extra credit points for your group by finishing first, having the most correct citations, or finding the oldest citation in the class. on your mark, get set, go! this activity was designed by jenna kammer and originally appeared in let the games begin!: engaging students with field-tested interactive information literacy instruction (neal-schuman, 2011).   rubric for assignment 2: citation sleuthing here is how we will evaluate assignment 2. please read the assignment instructions carefully before you begin! rubric for assignment 2: citation sleuthing 2 pts 1 pt 0 pts cite fisher’s article perfect citation has citation but it’s not perfect no citation cite at least one book perfect citation has citation but it’s not perfect no citation cite at least one scholarly article perfect citation has citation but it’s not perfect no citation cite at least at least one report from a private organization perfect citation has citation but it’s not perfect no citation cite at least one website or webpage perfect citation has citation but it’s not perfect no citation extra credit: 1 ec point for all members of the group that hands in their assignment first 1 ec point for all members of the group that submits the most correct citations 1 ec point for all members of the group that tracks down the oldest citation in trying out this new game i applied some of the lessons that i learned from the bibliobouts experience. it didn’t require registration with a third-party platform and could be done entirely using the same technologies that were used for all assignments (discussion boards, google docs, email). there was no signup process – students worked in assigned groups that stayed the same for the whole quarter. compared to bibliobouts, this game is decidedly low-tech. in order to prepare students for the assignment, i had to make sure that we covered the following skills before we started: identifying formats, advanced web search, searching databases for articles, searching the catalog for books, finding a known article, and citation. the groups had two weeks to complete the assignment. citation sleuthing in practice once again, the first time i tried the game my students did not have a good experience. they spent far longer than i intended on it. i assigned the newsweek article recommended by kammer, but its sources were in some cases vanishingly hard to track down, and students expended too much effort chasing after the extra credit points. i had a group get into a serious fight over whether they were allowed to include sources that did not meet the evaluation criteria we had practiced using in the previous assignment. one student posted to the discussion board: is it just my group, or is everyone spending hours upon hours on this? a classmate replied: that is such a great question. i feel like i am doing the amount of work equivalent to that of my 4-credit classes. trying to calm the waters, i wrote back: sounds frustrating! do you have 5+ citations on your timeline? if so, why don’t you check whether your group is willing to call it a day and hand in the assignment as is. that way you can move on to other things. hope this helps, amy with the help of my tas, emporia state university mls students jaki king and carolyne begin, i refined the wording of the assignment over the next two quarters in order to clarify my expectations about the amount of work involved. i also changed the rubric to enable partial credit for incorrect citations. since the goal is to track down and cite the sources, the points needed to be divided evenly between demonstrating those two skills. finding an article to replace the original one was tricky. for the purposes of the assignment, the article cannot already have a bibliography or links to its sources. it should lead out to the types of sources that students need to practice citing, such as journal articles and books. i also wanted it to relate to an information literacy or information technology concept in order to stay within the theme of the course. after trying to use a harvard business review blog post that turned out to only permit limited viewing, i finally hit on the fisher article referenced above. perhaps it’s unfair to compare this experience to the one i had with bibliobouts, since i gave this game the benefit of repeated attempts and revised it each time i used it. setting aside the technology problems that i eliminated by playing a game within the course, i was willing to stick with this game because the connection between my objectives and what the students actually practiced was more easily controlled. given another opportunity to teach a for-credit il course, i will use this assignment again. so… did gaming work for me? one premise of educational gaming is that it leverages our intrinsic motivation for play. given this, i was intrigued by the bibliobouts team’s findings that the real motivator for students to play bibliobouts is grades. even cash prizes were not as effective at getting students to play as the promise of a half-point grade increase from the professor (markey et al, 2009). this finding would appear to answer the question posed by the title of the team’s 2009 article, “will undergraduate students play games to learn how to conduct library research?”—yes, if it is required for a grade. this finding offers insight into how to increase game participation, but at the same time it casts doubt on the claim that playing educational games motivates students to learn. students took the competitive element of citation sleuthing very seriously. even one extra credit point clearly motivated them to find the most citations, hand their assignment in first, etc. i don’t think that it’s a good idea to equate feeling competitive with feeling playful. some of my students had an agonizing experience with the game. yet adding competition to an activity is a fairly simple way to “gamify” it, and it seems to me that it is so hard to use games well that we might be better off sticking with simple ideas. setting the motivation issue aside, does educational gaming improve student learning outcomes? the bibliobouts designers have collected data that provides subjective information about whether students were satisfied with their experience (markey et al, 2010), which is not quite the same thing (hofer & hanson, 2010). one faculty member reported in an interview that he saw improvement in the quality of final papers: “the assignments, the essays came out really much, much, much better than i have ever seen them with this group of students … so the quality of their thinking has gone up, which is why i am very excited about using this game” (markey, 2012, p. 11). the game developers’ research suggests, however, that students may not always apply the skills that they practice while playing bibliobouts when it comes time to write their papers. they game the system by focusing on scholarly sources while playing bibliobouts, but their assignment bibliographies were not significantly different from those of classmates who did not play or did not complete the game. bibliobouts is about finding sources, not necessarily understanding them, and so students may not have the reading skills or specialized disciplinary knowledge needed to actually interpret, evaluate, and deploy an academic article in their own work (markey, leeder, & taylor, 2012). in their publications (one of which i coauthored: markey, leeder, & hofer, 2011), the bibliobouts developers strike a balance between advocating for the product of their hard work – e.g. “bibliobouts solves the problem of teaching students information literacy skills, concepts, and tools in a unique way” (markey et al, 2010) – and calling for sensible pedagogy, such as “these findings demonstrate that information literacy games cannot stand on their own” (markey et al, 2009). the premise of the game itself is compelling in that it provides a very flexible scaffold for students to practice research-related skills while requiring faculty to consider how to integrate and support the game in the context of the course and assignment. however, playing the less immersive, more limited game worked better in my course. i was also able to set it up so that i could assess the effectiveness of the game itself, which i was not able to do with bibliobouts. at the same time, i’m not sure that my students experienced citation sleuthing as a game. it was presented as an assignment and generated as much anxiety as an assignment. i ended up feeling that if i engaged students and met my learning objectives, if i encouraged students to see information just a little bit more the way that information professionals do, then it didn’t matter very much whether the activity was or was not a game. after this much investment, i don’t think that i can qualify as a gaming skeptic anymore. however, i still think that the use of games, or gamification, should be very carefully considered. i’ll leave you with a few questions i’d like to discuss further – please comment! what is the minimum threshold for an activity to be a game? do we need a better way to differentiate between games, activities, and gamified activities? do librarians in particular need to think about games? or should we mind our own business? have you tried a game that worked? have you tried a game that didn’t work? do librarians need a widely usable game that’s developed by professionals? thank you to the readers of this article: chris leeder, emily ford, kerry wu, and korey brunetti. special thanks to lead pipe editor erin dorney for her patience, persistence, and insight.  references bogost, i. (2011). persuasive games: exploitationware. gamasutra: the art & business of making games. available from www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?page=1 broussard, m.j.s. (2012). digital games in academic libraries: a review of games and suggested best practices. reference services review, 40(1), 75-89. doi:10.1108/00907321211203649 danforth, l. (2011). gamification and libraries. library journal, 136(3), 84. finley, p., macmillan, m., & skarl, s. (2008). loex-of-the-west 2008: hitting the jackpot in las vegas. reference services review, 36(4), 343-346. doi:10.1108/00907320810920315 gee, j.p (2003). what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. new york: palgrave macmillan. gumulak, s., & webber, s. (2011). playing video games: learning and information literacy. aslib proceedings, 63(2/3), 241-255. doi:10.1108/00012531111135682 hofer, a.r., & hanson, m. (2010). upstairs-downstairs: working with a campus assessment coordinator and other allies for effective information literacy assessment. in 2010 carl conference proceedings. available from http://carl-acrl.org/archives/conferencesarchive/conference10/2010proceedings/amy-hofer.pdf hood, d. (2008, june 6). the library arcade. paper presented at the loex-of-the-west conference, las vegas, nv. slides available from http://www.slideshare.net/ebayworld/the-library-arcade  kickmeier-rust, m.d., peirce, n., conlan, o., schwarz, d., verpoorten, d., & albert, d. (2007). immersive digital games: the interfaces for next-generation e-learning? in proceedings of the 4th international conference on universal access in human-computer interaction: applications and services. available from www.scss.tcd.ie/owen.conlan/publications/fuitel_2007_conlan.pdf kim, b. (2012). harnessing the power of game dynamics: why, how to, and how not to gamify the library experience. college & research libraries news, 73(8), 465-469. available from http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/8/465 leeder, c., markey, k., & rieh, s.y. (2010, october 8). college student perceptions of learning academic research skills through an online game. paper presented at the library research seminar-v, hyattsville, md. available from http://www.lrsv.umd.edu/abstracts/leeder_et_al.pdf markey, k. (2012). building the games students want to play: bibliobouts final performance review. retrieved from university of michigan website: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/97036/bbfinalperfreviewtoimls.pdf?sequence=1 markey, k., leeder, c., & hofer, a.r. (2011). bibliobouts: what’s in the game? college & research libraries news, 72(11), 632-645. available from http://crln.acrl.org/content/72/11/632.full.pdf+html markey, k., leeder, c., & rieh, s.y. (2012). through a game darkly: student experiences with the technology of the library research process. library hi tech, 30(1), 12-34. doi:10.1108/07378831211213193 markey, k., leeder, c., & st. jean, b. (2011). students’ behaviour playing an online information literacy game. journal of information literacy, 5(2), 46-65. available from https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/jil/article/view/pra-v5-i2-2011-3/1819 markey, k., leeder, c., & taylor, c.l. (2012). playing games to improve the quality of the sources students cite in their papers. reference & user services quarterly, 52(2), 123-135. markey, k., swanson, f., jenkins, a., jennings, b., st. jean, b., rosenberg, v., yao, x., & frost, r. (2009). will undergraduate students play games to learn how to conduct library research? the journal of academic librarianship, 35(4), 303-313. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2009.04.001 markey, k., swanson, f., leeder, c., peters, g.r., jennings, b.j., st. jean, b., rosenberg, v., rieh, s.y., carter, g.v., packard, a., frost, r.l., mbabu, l., & calvetti, a. (2010). the benefits of integrating an information literacy skills game into academic coursework: a preliminary evaluation. d-lib magazine, 16(7/8). available from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/markey/07markey.html mcdevitt, t.r. (ed.). (2011). let the games begin! engaging students with field-tested interactive information literacy instruction. new york: neal-schuman publishers, inc. mcmunn-tetangco, e. (2013). if you build it…? one campus’ firsthand account of gamification in the academic library. college & research libraries news, 74(4), 208-210. available from http://crln.acrl.org/content/74/4/208.full robertson, m. (2010, october 6). can’t play, won’t play [web log post]. hide & seek: inventing new kinds of play. available from http://www.hideandseek.net/2010/10/06/cant-play-wont-play schiller, n. (2008). a portal to student learning: what instruction librarians can learn from video game design. reference services review, 36(4), 351-365. doi:10.1108/00907320810920315 townsend, l., brunetti, k., & hofer, a. r. (2011). threshold concepts and information literacy. portal: libraries and the academy, 11(3), 853-869. available from http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/7417 waelchli, p. (2008). librarians’ sport of choice: teaching information literacy through fantasy football. college & research libraries news, 69(1), 10-15. available from http://crln.acrl.org/content/69/1/10.full waelchli, p. (2010). playing with process: video game choice as a model of behavior. public services quarterly, 6(4), 380-388. doi:10.1080/15228959.2010.521091 charles a. cutter and edward tufte: coming to a library near you, via bibframe editorial: our favorite articles from 2013 20 responses dorothea salo 2013–12–18 at 10:44 am what kind of field-testing did you do on the games before assigning them to students? did you give them to other librarians to try out? cooperative faculty? student employees? i ask because any new assignment i invent always runs into field-testing issues. usually they’re my own fault; imprecision in assignment description is a favorite failing of mine, and sometimes an assignment that sounds great to me is pitched too high for my students. as i read your (excellent; thank you for writing it) article, my strong sense was that the problems you ran into were less with the concept of gaming than with the design/execution of the particular games. since i teach graduate students, this is easier to navigate for me than for most instruction librarians — i’m up-front about experimental assignments, and students are generally willing to cut me slack about them and return me useful feedback. if i were teaching undergrads, though (and i will be again, starting next fall), i’d really want to do a little usability testing on assignments, even if i couldn’t approximate the target population right away. jewaggoner 2013–12–18 at 12:59 pm thank you for this great discussion on the gamification of information literacy! i think that your first question regarding the threshold for games is very important and often overlooked by instructional game designers. i’m a big believer that games should first and foremost be fun to play. the player should be intrinsically motivated based on their enjoyment of gameplay. i’m in agreement with john ferrara that games should be games first: http://uxmag.com/articles/messification-why-games-should-be-designed-to-be-games-first amy hofer 2013–12–18 at 1:15 pm thanks for your comment and for the link to this article! i think that the most important word ferrara uses is “exploitation.” we definitely don’t want students to feel exploited by our attempts to get them to play. i’m glad that you brought up the importance of fun. do you think there’s hope that information literacy games can be fun, or are we bound for disappointment when students realize that they still have to read the article? jewaggoner 2013–12–18 at 3:28 pm hi amy. i see potential for a truly fun information literacy game. gee points out that gamers are frequently required to read text, sometimes rather lengthy text, as part of gameplay. as long as the text is meaningful and usable in the context of the game (ie. helps the player solve a puzzle), reading this text is not cumbersome but an enjoyable part of gameplay. i think this is part of his “text principle.” i think that truly integrating any required reading or searching into gameplay would definitely be required for enjoyment. requiring reading or searching in order to unlock a badge or earn points is not really gameplay, imo; it’s more like an assessment for which you earn a badge or points rather than a grade. some educational games seem to be wolves in sheep’s clothing; just tutorials with quizzes re-branded as “games” due to the inclusion of badges or a competitive element. (that said, i have no direct experience with either of the games you tried, so my comments are not directed at them.) melanie polutta 2013–12–23 at 8:15 am i confess, in reading through the different types of assignments you did, that i wondered if they were really games, and not simply competition. there is a difference between the two things, although competition is an inherent part of games, usually. amy hofer 2013–12–23 at 12:31 pm melanie, thanks for this comment! you’re raising a great point. i’m curious – where would you draw the line between games and regular activities? do you think it’s worthwhile or do you think it’s problematic to take just a component of games (like competition) into an educational context? paul 2014–01–03 at 1:21 pm i’ve used lyoming college’s goblin threat (http://www.lycoming.edu/library/instruction/tutorials/plagiarismgame.aspx) plagiarism game with classes in the past, and the students reacted positively to it. i don’t know how much they appreciated it as a game per se, but they said it was an enjoyable learning activity. i also use the keyword challenges (http://21cif.com/tutorials/challenge/q2q/keywordchallenge.html) from 21st century information fluency as an activity to open a discussion about keywords and related terms. that may be more of a puzzle than a game, but most of the students find it worthwhile, and all of the faculty love it. the thing i like best about these is that they are quick and simple ten-minute activities that can tie into larger lessons. many of the library instruction games i’ve read about are lengthy and involved, and sometimes how to play seems like a lesson in itself. for those of us who are limited to one-shot sessions, complicated games don’t offer much roi. amy hofer 2014–01–07 at 6:24 pm hi paul, thanks for sharing your experiences! i hadn’t seen the keyword challenge game before – i just tried one of the challenges and flunked :) looking over their instructions, it’s probably a matter of personal preference but i’m not sold on the language they use to describe searching: “power search,” “search problem,” “query,” “intermediate words” – i probably wouldn’t use this game myself just because i wouldn’t want to endorse that vocabulary by teaching it. i just gave the goblin game a second try and finally figured out how to get last goblin in the dorm room, so at least i’m not stuck at the very beginning anymore. how does the goblin game relate to plagiarism, though? is the point supposed to be that it doesn’t relate? do you feel that it’s successful because it makes taking a plagiarism quiz a teeny bit more entertaining? these are the honest questions of a non-gamer approaching library games! i also appreciate your point about our different instructional settings. have you used either of these to encourage students to engage with each other in some way? in an online course, that is a big concern (though either of these could be assigned as individual homework for practice, of course). paul 2014–01–08 at 6:24 am as a non-gamer myself, i had a very negative reaction to the goblin game. it seemed contrived and hokey. but i asked a student to try it out and give me his impressions. he said, “it was kinda fun and i learned a few things about plagiarism along the way,” so i started using it with classes. i guess it works for the exact reason you say: it makes the content delivery a little more entertaining. i used both of these as in-class activities, as icebreakers to lead into discussion. in an online class, it would be much harder to get that discussion going. maura smale 2014–01–03 at 6:34 pm great article, and you raise some excellent and thought-provoking questions. i’ve used smaller, one-session games in my instruction and have always been curious about what bibliobouts is like in action — it was really interesting to read about your experiences. i think there is a place for games in library and information literacy instruction, both longer, more involved games like bibliobouts as well as shorter games. though the latter might sometimes be described as assignments with competition, i think they can help increase student engagement with the material which is definitely worthwhile. it might not be possible for us to ever create a library game that’s so enjoyable that students pick it up and play it on their own, but i think that’s okay (and not necessarily the fault of games — students’ motivations/preparation for going to college are so varied that i think engagement will always vary based on factors not under our control). lately i’ve been thinking about information literacy games as a low-stakes, nonthreatening way to introduce students to the college library, the research process, etc. that is, we might not be hitting that flow state that comes from playing a game you find compelling for leisure reasons, but we might see other, more modest benefits from using games in our library instruction. amy hofer 2014–01–06 at 5:57 pm thanks for this response maura! the sensible middle ground :) i agree with you that for the reasons you’ve mentioned, games are a great fit for orientation sessions or introductory sessions. personally i’d love to have more ice-breakers in my teaching toolkit. mauraweb 2014–01–03 at 6:36 pm finally had a chance to read this excellent piece on using games in library instruction: – /2013/giving-games-the-old-college-try/ mauraweb 2014–01–03 at 6:37 pm argh, corrected link for last tweet: http://t.co/y3oih1gqua cunygames 2014–01–03 at 6:53 pm rt @mauraweb: finally had a chance to read this excellent piece on using games in library instruction: http://t.co/bfdc4xwyn8 pingback : incorporating play into instruction | mcnabbarchives fritzswanson 2014–01–04 at 10:53 pm that online library research game i helped design gets a (deserved) mixed review. #bibliobouts4evah! http://t.co/tyfgcxnenl umsi 2014–01–06 at 5:19 pm fascinating article on educational gaming featuring @bibliobouts and contributions from our professors http://t.co/rf1zgytt1o shinyswoots 2014–01–06 at 5:21 pm rt @umsi: fascinating article on educational gaming featuring @bibliobouts and contributions from our professors http://t.co/rf1zgytt1o lizowensboltz 2014–01–06 at 5:21 pm rt @umsi: fascinating article on educational gaming featuring @bibliobouts and contributions from our professors http://t.co/rf1zgytt1o thestackscat 2014–01–06 at 10:25 pm rt @umsi: fascinating article on educational gaming featuring @bibliobouts and contributions from our professors http://t.co/plwgcveemj this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the library commons: an imagination and an invocation – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 2 sep jennie rose halperin /1 comments the library commons: an imagination and an invocation by jennie rose halperin in brief commons theory can provide important interventions within neoliberal managerial information capitalism when applied to the library as an institution. the commons and its associated practices provide a model of abundance, sharing, and cooperation. libraries can and should participate in alternative economic and management models to create an inclusive vision beyond and in opposition to current social formations. “i’m interested in the way in which a deepening of autonomy is a deepening, not just among few people.. a deepening of scale and the potentials of scale.” – the undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (moten and harney 2013, 65) the spirit of the commons is the spirit of imagining, of bringing people and resources together, and creating a necessarily positive vision for the world not as it is, but as it could be. and commons are all around us: from community gardens, to certain kinds of open source software, to worker cooperatives. we participate in a commons when we submit our work to institutional repositories that are tended by communities with the goal of disseminating research to the world, and we participate in a commons when we collaborate with our neighbors and catch a glimpse of this vision of our fate. for libraries, the moment has never been more urgent and emergent – we have the tools in our hands, and it is up to us to make it happen. the word “commons” often functions as “a placeholder or a promissory note for all those rich, nuanced, complex, and sophisticated forms of relationality and value practice that have been obliterated within capitalist societies where a huge proportion of social relations have been subjugated to the market” (haiven 2016, 274). in modern commons theory, the commons serve to represent all the ways in which “human beings learn to cooperate with each other in routine, large-scale ways” (bollier & helfrich 2019, 13). as the authors of free, fair, and alive: the insurgent power of the commons put it, “commoning is everywhere, but widely misunderstood” (bollier & helfrich 2019, 14). in daily life, commons can take many forms, like the gardens and cooperatives mentioned above, but also neighborhood associations, direct democratic processes, consensus based community organizations, and more. in libraries, they may take the form of community cataloging projects, civic engagement projects in conversation with artists, community archives, or open and direct dialogue on topics that concern the community. commons can be ephemeral or permanent, a long term project or a moment of transcendence. beginning with an introduction to commons theory from a library and information science lens and ending with a few specific, non-exhaustive examples of the commons in libraries as well as specific practices to engage in commoning practices, i will attempt to blend theory and praxis in order to introduce another vision outside or beyond traditional institutional paradigms. commoning as a set of practices when librarians think of a commons, they likely think of the academic commons buildings in their institutions, creative commons licenses, or preprint servers like humanities commons. these examples are illustrative: humanities commons functions as a governed network and community working toward the common good and creative commons licenses provide a necessary intervention in capitalist systems of copyright enclosure.1 more specifically, the humanities commons and other preprint servers support communities that come together to govern a field of knowledge, working together outside of the confines of a hegemonic and unequal access system, building interventions through engaged scholarship to provide access for all. this example from the library world provides an in-road to begin to think about the commons and commoning as a set of practices. as professionals concerned with the free and open dissemination of knowledge, librarians could and should enact commoning practices in their communities, but more often than not fall into the neoliberal paradigm of the managerial business class and free-market values. library literature often treats patrons as customers, and librarianship as an institution is rooted in supremacy and oppression, drawing on the values of the white middle class women who dominate the profession (ettarh 2018). in “neoliberalism within library and information science,” jonathan cope writes, “as more information is produced in distributed networks that have new and ambiguous relationships to the specific geographical and educational communities, which libraries have traditionally served, it is lis’s responsibility to articulate a vision of how to view information as a public and common good” (cope 2014, 7-8). thus far, libraries as institutions have struggled to define themselves within this context of the common good, coopting the language of commons and making broad statements about “freedom” without inscribing these values in policy, worker rights, or provisioning of indigenous voices and voices of color in the field. in governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action, nobel prize winner elinor ostrom writes, “all efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems. these have to do with coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with a set of rules” (ostrom 1990, 27). in addressing existing social systems, particularly those that collectively govern the use of non-renewable resources such as water ways, ostrom proved that economically alternative situations could be beneficial to all parties involved. her writing is rooted in traditional economic reform – the commons in this definition provide a necessary alternative to the free market, rather than an overhaul of capitalism.  in other words, ostrom addresses what lewis hyde calls “the tragedy of unmanaged, laissez-faire, common-pool resources with easy access for non communicating, self-interested individuals”2 (hyde 2010, 44). to contrast ostrom’s fundamentally reformist vision of the commons, theorists fred moten and stefano harney present another form of commons: the undercommons. the undercommons is a state of “permanent fugitivity,” one that functions through “stealing” and “collective orientation” as a mode of functioning within and beyond institutions. the critical academic in this worldview questions everything, creates solidarity networks, and shares an aversion to neoliberal professionalization of communities, particularly academic communities. the undercommons can provide an important reframing of the commons, particularly when considering it from an historical and anti-colonialist point of view. in considering the institution, moten and harney write that libraries in the academy are “this incredible gathering of resources… it’s nice to have books,” but that the undercommons is “a kind of comportment or ongoing experiment with and as the general antagonism… it’s almost impossible that it could be matched up with particular forms of institutional life” (moten and harney 2013, 112). institutionally, the work in the undercommons is the work of the coalition, of the social, and against the neoliberal institution that precludes resistance and sociality. as an historical concept, the commons take root in medieval england, as lands where peasants could tend land in common, hold festivals, and govern independently outside of the purview of a feudal lord. this eurocentric definition is rightly criticized by many scholars. in “decolonization is not a metaphor,” tuck and yang address the commons directly, writing that the commons are often caught up in the liberal values of a natural right to property, a value that is withheld from native communities. in contrast, they describe, drawing from undercommons theory, “a labor that is dedicated to the reproduction of social dispossession as having an ethical dimension includes both the refusal of acquiring property and of being property” (tuck & yang 2012, 27). in commons discourse, the process of colonization is often described as “enclosures” of commons, but to “marshal all indigenous civilizations under the banner of the commons is to reduce a wide diversity of social formations under a eurocentric term… [and] reinforce a romantic idealism towards both the notion of the commons and indigenous civilizations”  (haiven 2016, 275). though fundamentally rooted in eurocentricism, the commons framework is diverse enough to hold radical, anti-colonialist, and anti-capitalist scholarship, particularly as regards decolonization, and blackness. addressing these roots, some of the most compelling commons writing comes from scholars like silvia federici or the work of the zapatistas, who declare autonomy and a “radical imagination that sees beyond the horizon of the state” or institution of “one no [to globalization], many yeses [to the commons].” if, as haiven writes, “when those many ‘yeses’ sound at once, we will hear the word ‘commons,’’ what do those many yeses look like for librarianship? when considering the patterns of commoning, which bollier and helfrich describe as a “triad” that contains many different elements, a theoretical framework can begin to be applied to libraries. the triad is defined by bollier and hilfrich as: social life, peer governance, and provisioning. elements within the triads include “cultivate shared purpose and values,” “bring diversity into shared purpose,” “consent-based decision making,” and “make and use together” (bollier & helfrich 2019, introduction). which aspects of this triad do libraries represent? can an institution ever implement the care that the patterns of commoning require? how can we uphold the value of the crucial interactions within the library without descending into institutional awe or unfair criticism? why is solidarity between libraries important? how can we uphold the values of libraries while critiquing the institution? libraries in the commons/the commons in libraries in “what’s in a name? the evolving library commons concept,” sheila bonnand writes, “while there are many attempts in our professional literature to define commons specifically, what seems to hold up over time is not any one definition or a perfectly consistent and discrete set of commons attributes, but a more generic, profession-wide concept that grows out of our literature, dialogue, and shared knowledge of individual institutions’ commons efforts” (bonnand 2010, 230). the article adopts a positive outlook regarding the adoption of “learning commons,” discussing how the use of the name is a “compelling example of successful professional dialogue,” transforming spaces and technology that “conjur[e] up thoughts of sharing, collaboration, unrestricted access, public use, and other egalitarian concepts” (bonnand 2010, 230). this definition calls to mind haiven’s assertion that “the commons has become something of a floating signifier” (haiven 2016, 271). is this the case in academic or learning commons? “these names in large part are signals to each other,” writes bonnand. “they guide our discussion and stand as evidence that the commons concept is evolving” (bonnand 2010, 231). “commons” in this context provide a signal that the library is up on trends rather than being actually committed to provisioning of communities, direct democracy, and governance that commoning entails. parsing the word “commons”within library spaces is unnecessary at best and a fool’s errand at worst. the unthinking use of the word commons that has pervaded the neoliberal university articulates the worst parts of our profession: the majority white, professional, competitive, assessment obsessed, rigidly taxonomic and “neutral” mainstream, which sees itself as “sharing and collaborative” no matter its behavior. indeed, most of the behavior within libraries does not constitute commoning within theoretical, academic, or political frameworks, from the managerial mindset of library staff to the conservative and uncritical approach to policing to the data brokering vendors that hold the profession hostage (see lamdan). in the popular liberal imagination, libraries are a trusted “knowledge commons” with librarians as tenders or maintainers of that commons. with libraries claiming stake to the word and invoking its spirit, it is worth investigating the meaning and patterns of commons and commoning that are part of the current moment, in which consumer choice has taken over public good in our spaces and workplaces, including libraries. as neoliberalism continues to erode civil society, leaving libraries as one of the few visible bastions of enlightenment liberalism, is it any wonder that the public clings to the fairy tale of the commons? in “commons against and beyond capitalism,” silvia federici and george caffentzis write, “it is hard to ignore the prodigal use of ‘common’ or ‘commons’ in the real estate discourse of university campuses, shopping malls and gated communities. elite universities requiring their students to pay yearly tuition fees of $50,000 call their libraries ‘information commons.’ it is almost a law of contemporary social life that the more commons are attacked, the more they are celebrated” (caffentzis & federici 2014). within libraries, we see this pattern taking shape as more institutions adopt “commons” within capitalist learning spaces. as libraries continue to define and redefine themselves in the 21st century, the reformist and the radical branches are split – the problem with the information commons is the institution it protects rather than the idea it espouses. in critiquing the institution to uplift the worker and the patron, the commons can be reconstituted and revealed. the commons against the institution after years of pressure, the american library association’s key strategic values are framed through a social justice lens in fall 2018, a list of lofty ideals including “advocacy; information policy; and equity, diversity, and inclusion.” as an optional professional organization rather than a union or worker’s rights organization, the ala’s framing of their mission does not necessarily reflect their actions. even if the organization did not continuously take problematic political stances for “neutrality” and “free speech,” the ala’s lack of teeth and enforcement means that the member-led, volunteer organization upholds the institution rather than the worker, or as lindsay cronk writes, “imagine if we stopped defending the idea of libraries and started to defend one another/stand together” (cronk 2019). in fobazi ettarh’s influential article on vocational awe, she writes, “librarianship, like the criminal justice system and the government, is an institution. and like other institutions, librarianship plays a role in creating and sustaining hegemonic values, as well as contributing to white supremacy culture” (ettarh 2018). from data brokering vendors that sell data to ice to management structures that cause and contribute to burnout to the “nice white lady problem” leading to a shameful lack of diversity in the field, the major organizations that uphold the institution focus on the institution rather than the worker. without fundamental, structural change, librarianship will continue to be reflective of racist, white supremacist society rather than its potential as a commons-space that works for all. in places journal, anthropologist shannon mattern observes that “public libraries are among the last free, inclusive, “truly democratic” spaces in american cities and towns” while recognizing that “libraries are not a universally inclusive space” (mattern 2016). drawing on the theory of “fugitivity as spatial condition” and the undercommons, she highlights a number of black archives that utilize this language and theoretical framework as a mode of operation. the highlighted projects, from alexis pauline gumbs’s “eternal summer of the black feminist mind” to olaronke akinmowo’s “free black women’s library,” are largely artist created and outside of the formal frameworks of institution, instead using library as metonym for free exchange of information, fugitivity, and the commons. embracing and supporting radical interventions in the space are crucial for libraries to provide a flexible canvas for marginalized groups. as mattern writes, “today’s fugitive librarians are free to transgress institutional conventions, operating outside the demands placed on (or imposed by) state-supported and commercial institutions” (mattern 2016). perhaps radical fugitivity will never, by definition, inhabit library spaces, but a more critical dismantling of the structures of oppression within the library can help libraries better partner with communities who are creatively working beyond boundaries. the promise is, drawing from a piece i wrote in community with other artists last year, “an alternate vision… to develop new ways of sharing resources, collaborating across boundaries, and engaging with larger movements for the liberated exchange of resources needed to live dignified and joyful lives in right relationship with one another and the planet” (arts, culture, and the commons 2019).  while it sometimes seems as if neoliberalism can function as a proxy for “all that is wrong within academia and the social sphere,” the undercommons and its related concepts can provide an alternative to the business mindset and settler-colonial enlightenment paradigm that pervades the taxonomic organization and vendor training that has become a pandemic within library work. in an interview with the association of research libraries, sylvester johnson says, “libraries cannot simply become tenants in the platform ecosystem of private capital, handing over billions of dollars to a small number of data landlords in exchange for storage, access, and analytics services. libraries will either become bankrupt in this new environment, or they will become active agents on the value-creation side, not as vehicles for private capital but levers for public good” (kennedy 2019). unfortunately, the landscape of information retrieval and access through licensing and databases has severely hindered the “public good” aspect of libraries and made workers and communities increasingly beholden to vendor capitalists who charge the public obscene amounts for what should be public, free, and shared. rethinking the library from an anti-capitalist commons perspective means upholding the value of the library worker, of the daily interactions that make the instruction, the arranging, and the describing useful and significant. in adopting a radical and experimental lens that seeks to change the world rather than simply maintain it, librarianship can engage more fully with the world that could be, rather than the world that is. in order to meet the demand of the community, the library should cast an eye toward the amateur, the outside of the box, the small, and the messy – the libraries, organizations, and communities that are the life-blood of what makes up the commons of libraries. toward the unprofessional, the small, the messy, the worker power of the library as librarians, we are taught that the undergraduate degree, graduate degree, professional job track has taught us invaluable skills that no other professional could possibly replicate. we are the chosen ones, and we have skills – if only the public, faculty, and management would listen. some of this possessiveness derives from the bleak job outlook of libraries, which has suffered from poor job prospects for at least the last 15 years. a “pink collar” job with over 80% of librarians identifying as women, libraries are one of the least racially diverse professions in the country. library leadership remains predominantly white and male, and job outlooks have been on a downward slope with depressed wages and cutbacks for as long as anyone can remember. with debt at our backs, we find ourselves thrust into institutions stuck in the past. our patrons and our communities are the lifeblood of the profession, but an administrative mindset and lack of worker autonomy within many libraries causes a high burnout rate and a feeling of lack of control. in conversation with communities, we can continue to shape another vision for what the library can be. constituting and reinventing commons ideology within the library context will be a series of small, local interventions, possibly coming from outside the field, and it must happen in conversation with communities. in order to define what commons ideology looks like more concretely, i will use the triad of commoning previously mentioned (governance, social life, and provisioning) to define the interventions and reinterpret commoning for information professionals. peer governance: worker power though the majority of librarians express relatively high job satisfaction, the field is rife with stories of burnout, micromanagement, exhaustion, and frustration with the status quo. in a recent survey, nearly 80% of library workers responded that they have experienced burnout in their careers (geary & hickey 2019). according to alique geraci, union members, who comprise approximately 21-26% of the library workforce, generally have higher pay and are provided better resources for negotiation and collective bargaining within the library. union members earn 38% more than their non-union counterparts, and are more likely to be covered by health insurance. when joined with teacher’s unions, librarians have made historic gains, as in the case of the university of california, which ratified a new collective bargaining agreement in 2019. besides major raises, the contract also included an intellectual freedom clause, protecting workers and patrons at the contract level (afl-cio fact sheet 2019). from a commoning perspective, unions provide access to direct democracy, which provides access to autonomous and self-organized groups. union drives, like the recent one at mit to unionize clerical workers, are a crucial step to build worker power, but there are other types of worker power that libraries could harness. in the book democracy at work: a cure for capitalism, richard wolff considers “worker self-directed enterprises” as central to the struggle for a more civic-minded and engaged workforce. he writes, “workers in most modern capitalist corporations are required by law and/or custom to accept working conditions over which they exercise no democratic control… for most workers in capitalist systems, there is no democracy in the workplaces where they must spend most of their lives” (wolff 2012, 147). worker self-directed enterprises (wsdes) can provide a series of democratic options to managers who may be hostile to unions. in their purest sense, the wsde is democracy in action, and there are several steps toward democracy that libraries can take on their way to worker autonomy. in wsdes, no executive is paid more than five times the lowest paid worker, and workers sit on the board of the organization. rather than following a managerial chain of command, a wsde as a “worker managed enterprise” provides workers more autonomy over the cooperative outputs of their labor. for example, in a traditional library context, directives would come from an executive director with a series of committees reporting upward, often creating bottlenecks and a lack of final decision-making power. in a wsde, the executive director would serve a primarily administrative role, with workers and committees running the primary functions of the library. participation in democracy at work has been shown to improve democracy in communities – a stated goal of many libraries in the 21st century.3 as the economy becomes increasingly rapacious and hostile to workers’ rights, it is imperative for libraries to move out of corporatized managerial space. to quote mark fisher, “if businesses can’t be run as businesses, why should public services” (fuller 2009)? social life: decolonize, decolonize, decolonize the impetus to “decolonize” praxis in librarianship is powerful. from re-reckoning with collections to stripping the institution of the “neutral” values that too often pervade professional spaces, decolonization is key to reconsidering libraries in anti-racist space. as nina de jesus writes in “locating the library in institutional oppression,” “the clear solution is decolonization…no reform is possible if we understand libraries as fundamentally white supremacist institutions” (de jesus 2014). providing some specificity to the steps of decolonization and steps of dismantling of white supremacy within libraries and knowledge institutions, in “imagining: creating space for indigenous ontologies,” duarte and lewis identify five steps to building indigenous knowledge systems toward decolonization. “make no mistake,” they write. “imagining is a specific, difficult, laborious task. it requires seeing with fresh eyes, and thinking with a new mindset. it requires imagining indigenous futures.” the five steps are summarized thus:     understand how colonization works     identify means to decolonize     spread awareness of indigenous epistemologies     build deep domain knowledge     design experimental systems, theory (duarte & lewis 687-688, 2012) canadian libraries, particularly the vancouver library system, have taken concrete steps to begin a decolonization process. from addressing structural biases in classification to culturally appropriate space planning, their management report addresses colonization by name, asking even if the process of decolonization applies to location of branches, not only layout (vancouver public library report 2017). through their first nations storyteller-in-residence program and culturally aware programming, vancouver public library is incorporating living culture into their work, programming and community (roy & frydman 2013). at x̱wi7x̱wa library, also in vancouver, the library has taken an indigenous approach to cataloging, learning from people and users to better classify their collections, organizing their collections geographically and in support of indigenous research and needs (worth 2019). amy parent, the researcher who created the ontology, described the librarians at ubc as “very much aligned with the way we form relationships with our communities” and committed to creating a “safe space” for indigenous communities (worth 2019).  in “imagining,” duarte and lewis cite the example of the southern california tribal chairmen’s association tribal digital village intranet, a homegrown system built to bridge the digital divide. supported by a doctoral student in information studies at ucla, the community created an ontology based on their ways of knowing, posting artifacts and discussing the intellectual project within their own knowledge framework (duarte & lewis 690, 2012).  moving from colonization to decolonization can take many forms, from alternate ontologies to creating more inclusive digital and physical spaces, and the work continues to emerge within the library and information context, if the end goal is to divest from colonization, hegemony, and white supremacy.  decolonization and coming together in alternative and community built knowledge systems creates a social life, or what moten and harney call “study.” to enter into the undercommons, they write, one must be engaged in a “study,” or social life, and the undercommons and the study are “what you do with other people. it’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under speculative practice… to do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice” (moten & harney 2013, 110). from a sociological point of view, a social life of the commons can help, per bollier and helfrich “cultivate shared purpose and values,” and “ritualize togetherness” (bollier & helfrich 2019, 103-105). building community and taking steps to decolonize is not just creating culturally sensitive programming. it means bold and often uncomfortable action to dismantle privilege and oppression within institutions.  provisioning: funding and supporting communities library funding is a loaded subject, and one that is seemingly endlessly beholden to the influence of foundations and grant cycles, taxpayer dollars, and $40,000 per semester tuition. bollier and helfrich provide several examples that communities can use to resource themselves by “relationalizing property” and supporting care work. in bethany nowviskie’s words, “how might taking care—and taking the concept of care more seriously in graduate education and cultural heritage infrastructure-building—serve to expand our scope” (nowviskie 2019)? by their nature, libraries already participate in relationalized property, as an extra-market space where commons should thrive. however, when asking how libraries fund and support their communities, it is important to remember that, like a field, commons are cultivated, and not left to grow without supervision. ostrom’s examples of watersheds and ecosystems are all highly complex, governed, dynamic systems, and under constant “intentional cultivation.” creating a commons is animated by acts of commoning, which is always active. the cultivation of “collaboration, horizontalism, direct democracy, member-participation, egalitarianism, anti-oppression, and the radical imagination” is essential to building the world that we want to see (haiven 2016, 280). while there are multiple examples of community funding in librarianship that invest in large-scale collective action and institutional buy-in for resources, the educopia institute can provide a model through its hosted communities: the library publishing coalition, the bitcurator consortium, and the metaarchive cooperative. educopia provides a “community cultivation field guide” that “provides a powerful lens that can provide both emerging and established communities with ways to understand, evaluate, and plan their own growth, change, and maturation” (skinner 2018, 7). through a matrixed community empowerment model, educopia provides resources on four aspects of community growth: formation, validation, acceleration, and transition. by centering communities in their work and assisting them in funding, hr, infrastructure, engagement, and governance, educopia is building smaller commons or community based projects outside of the traditional institution and providing an alternate vision for library work and funding. alternatively, by hiding their participation in extractive capitalism, whether through necessary capitulation to greedy e-book publishers or purchasing data brokering systems like westlaw that exploit patron information, libraries are effectively shutting their communities off from important conversations about procurement of resources that directly affect or threaten them. and when libraries address the needs of their communities, for example by eliminating library fines, communities are better served and provisioned. a budget is an expression of values. another concrete step libraries could take to better provide for and support their communities is participatory budgeting, which is used around the world to better resource communities and meet their needs. participatory budgeting “empowers people to decide together how to spend public money” (participatory budgeting project). direct, participatory democracy strengthens communities, and libraries should be at the center. conclusion a quote from the gwendolyn brooks poem “paul robeson” ran through my head throughout the writing of this article, “. . . we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond” (from danticat, 2017). the commons is a space of empathy, a knowledge that we are all interconnected with the gifts and abundance that the earth has to offer. it means moving beyond scarcity economics, resource hoarding, and anti-egalitarianism. the promise of the commons is what drew me to libraries to begin with, and it is the vision that keeps many of us working toward a more equitable future. acknowledgements to the editorial board of itlwtlp, thank you for accepting this paper and working with me to refine it. thank you in particular to ian beilin for his communication throughout the process and ryan randall for edits. enormous thank you to my friend and co-conspirator jessica farrell for her excellent feedback and support. overflowing love to my partner josh tetenbaum for endless discussions, edits, and book recommendations. thank you to my cohousing community for living the commons in daily life, to the harvard law school library for providing me the intellectual space to explore this topic, and to my colleagues and community members at creative commons for supporting thought and action to inspire sharing in action. so much gratitude to arts, culture, and the commons. your art makes the world a better place for everyone who’s lucky enough to be in community with you. bibliography arts, culture, and the commons. “the promise of the commons.” october 10, 2019. howlround theatre commons. accessed march 23, 2020. 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“locating the library in institutional oppression.” in the library with the lead pipe. accessed march 15, 2020. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/locating-the-library-in-institutional-oppression/. ettarh, fobazi. january 10, 2018.  “vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves.” in the library with the lead pipe. accessed march 16, 2020. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/. danticat, edwidge. january 31, 2017. “poetry in a time of protest.” the new yorker. accessed march 18, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/poetry-in-a-time-of-protest. de castell, christina. “vancouver public library management report.” vancouver public library. july 18, 2017. accessed march 23, 2020. https://www.vpl.ca/sites/vpl/public/cfla_trcrecommendationendorsement.pdf. dpe afl-cio. 2019. “library professionals: facts, figures, and union membership.” department for professional employees, afl-cio. accessed march 16, 2020. https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/library-professionals-facts-and-figures. duarte, marisa elena, and miranda belarde-lewis. 2015. “imagining: creating spaces for indigenous ontologies.” cataloging & classification quarterly 53 (5–6): 677–702. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1018396. fuller, matthew. 2009. “questioning capitalist realism: an interview with mark fisher.” mr online (blog). december 27, 2009. accessed march 21, 2020. https://mronline.org/2009/12/27/questioning-capitalist-realism-an-interview-with-mark-fisher/. “garrett hardin.” n.d. southern poverty law center. accessed march 16, 2020. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/garrett-hardin. geary, jade, and brittany hickey. “when does burnout begin? the relationship between graduate school employment and burnout amongst librarians.” in the library with the lead pipe. october 16, 2019. accessed july 21, 2020. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2019/when-does-burnout-begin/.  geraci, aliqae and shannon l. farrell. “normalize negotiation! learning to negotiate salaries and improve compensation outcomes to transform library culture” in the library with the lead pipe.” may 22, 2019. accessed march 23, 2020. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2019/normalize-negotiation/. haiven, max. 2016. “the commons against neoliberalism, the commons of neoliberalism, the commons beyond neoliberalism.” in the handbook of neoliberalism, edited by simon springer, kean birch, and julie macleavy, 271–83. london and new york: routledge. harney, stefano, and fred moten. the undercommons : fugitive planning & black study. wivenhoe: minor compositions, 2013. hyde, lewis. common as air: revolution, art and ownership. farrar, straus and giroux, 2010.  joranson, kate. 2008. “indigenous knowledge and the knowledge commons.” international information & library review 40 (1): 64–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2008.10762763. lamdan, sarah, when westlaw fuels ice surveillance: legal ethics in the era of big data policing (august 14, 2018). 43 new york university review of law & social change 255 (2019), available at ssrn: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3231431. marx, karl. 1867. “economic manuscripts: capital vol. i – chapter twenty-six.” marxists.org. accessed march 11, 2020. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm. mattern, shannon. 2014. “library as infrastructure.” places journal, june. https://doi.org/10.22269/140609. mattern, shannon. 2019. “fugitive libraries.” places journal, october. https://doi.org/10.22269/191022. ostrom, elinor. governing the commons : the evolution of institutions for collective action. cambridge new york: cambridge university press, 1990. nowviskie, bethany. “change us, too.” bethany nowviskie. june 30, 2019. http://nowviskie.org/2019/change-us-too/. skinner, katherine, phd. “community cultivation: a field guide.” november 2018. accessed july 20, 2020. https://educopia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/communitycultivationfieldguide.pdf. kennedy, mary lee. “sylvester johnson on humanism in our technological age.” november 13, 2019. association of research libraries (blog). accessed march 16, 2020. https://www.arl.org/news/mary-lee-kennedy-interviews-sylvester-johnson-about-humanism-needed-in-our-technological-age/. participatory budgeting project. “about us.” n.d. participatory budgeting project. accessed august 1, 2020. https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/. roy, loriene (anishinabe), phd & antonia frydman, msis.“library services to indigenous populations.” 2013. accessed march 24, 2020. https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/indigenous-matters/publications/indigenous-librarianship-2013.pdf. tuck, eve, and k. wayne yang. 2012. “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 1 (1). https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630. wolff, richard d. democracy at work : a cure for capitalism. chicago, illinois: haymarket books, 2012. worth, sydney. “this library takes an indigenous approach to categorizing books.” march 22, 2019. yes! magazine. accessed march 23, 2020. https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2019/03/22/decolonize-western-bias-indigenous-library-books. i worked for creative commons from 2013 to 2016. the “creative commons network,” reorganized in 2017, is a hierarchical structure built on top of the licenses to encourage uptake. organizationally, it is fully subsidiary of the organization and not autonomous. [↩] garrett hardin, who coined the phrase “tragedy of the commons” was a eugenicist white nationalist whose disproven theory nevertheless continues to be cited. his influence extends to neoliberal systems, which are also called “neo laissez faire economics.” [↩] see democracy collaborative, in particular white papers about the cleveland model. [↩] “information has value”: the political economy of information capitalism power and status (and lack thereof) in academe: academic freedom and academic librarians 1 response pingback : day in review (august 31–september 4, 2020) association of research libraries this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 3 may joshua finnell and stacy konkiel /0 comments the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter in brief: this article discusses the creation, philosophy, and future directions of the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter, a grassroots crowdfunding initiative incubated within library pipeline. on may 1st, the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter will distribute its monthly call for grant applications across a global network. on may 15th, the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter will close its call for grant applications. between may 16th and may 30th, the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter trustees will read, debate, build consensus, and ultimately vote on a winning project. on may 31st, the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter will announce the winning project. this cycle will repeat every month through september. what we are & what we fund the innovation in libraries micro-grant initiative is a community-funded effort that follows on the awesome foundation’s model: the grant brings together a group of trustees who make or direct a monthly personal contribution of $50 usd, for an aggregate of $1000 usd, to collectively fund one project per month. the trustees who fund and select the grant awardees were carefully recruited by members of library pipeline from around the world, and across the spectrum of librarianship, with an aim to create a funding body that would support innovation in all its diversity. to prevent financial constraints creating a barrier to participation, recruited trustees have the option of directly funding their own seat or requesting financial sponsorship for their monthly contribution. we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of our sponsors, whose funding has made it possible for librarians from all walks of life to serve as trustees. though several of our financial sponsors comprise the advisory board of library pipeline, many individuals chose to donate to the initiative anonymously. throughout the pilot period, ending with a final granted project in september 2017, grant applications are accepted from the first through the fifteenth of each month. trustees then discuss, vote, and fund one innovative library project in that month. through this model, the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter provides a catalyst for prototyping both technical and non-technical library innovations that embody the principles of diversity, inclusivity, creativity, and risk-taking. in march, for example, the trustees funded a collaborative project between the summit public library and the warehouse project & gallery entitled 100 years…100 selfies! who we are this initiative was spearheaded by bonnie tijerina, robin champieux, and well…us—joshua finnell and stacy konkiel—and we serve as the deans of the chapter. incorporating the principles of diversity and inclusivity into its formation, the chapter is purposefully assembled from a global cohort of librarians, with a range of experiences and backgrounds across public, academic, nonprofit, and corporate librarianship. other trustees include: sally brazil, chief, archives and records management, the frick collection sophie bussman-kemdjo, director of the african law library, a core program of the african innovation foundation kate byrne, repository platform product manager, symplectic priya charry, librarian, boston public library kayode sunday john dada, librarian, ahmadu bello university ellah diba-khani, librarian, university of botswana lenore england, assistant director, electronic resource management, university of maryland university college miguel figueroa, director, ala center for the future of libraries sheila garcia, mlis student, wayne state university michael gutierrez, reference & research services, new mexico state university lareese hall, library director, rhode island school of design purity kavuri-mutuku, senior librarian at nakuru public library stephanie kays, fine arts librarian, denison university jerry mathema, college librarian, masiyephambili college andrew nagy, saas product leader, ebsco anna naruta-moya, project director of the indigenous digital archive, museum of indian arts and culture amber painter, southwest regional coordinator, indiana state library mark robison, research services librarian, valparaiso university roy tennant, senior program manager, oclc programs and research laura zeigen, assistant professor and liaison librarian, oregon health & science university this initiative was incubated within the innovation within lis committee of library pipeline, a grassroots, volunteer-driven initiative dedicated to supporting structural change in librarianship by providing opportunities, funding, and services that improve the library as an institution and librarianship as a profession. after conducting an environmental scan, the committee identified both challenges and opportunities in growing an innovation culture within library and information science that include: funding, infrastructure, diversity, and inclusivity. as a corollary, the committee created recommendations for strengthening innovation in each of these areas. under the leadership of stacy as board chair, each committee was tasked with launching a “minimum viable project” that would pilot an idea suggested in their environmental scan. as a result, two projects have launched: the green open access working group, coordinated by the lis publications committee, and the innovation in libraries initiative. why we are whereas some see crowdfunding as a potential replacement for existing long-term funding mechanisms, especially in cultural production, we see crowdfunding as an opportunity to experiment on a small scale, creating a first step for projects that fall outside of mainstream funding models for myriad reasons. most ideas, at the point of illumination, are not always scaled to the size of an imls or knight foundation grant. it’s the micro ideas, the ones that might be small but could build into something bigger if it only had a little bit of support and funding, that we want to encourage and incubate. in this spirit, our application process is simple and succinct, with a focus on minimizing the time between the “tell us about your project” and the “do your project” phases. moreover, the innovation in libraries initiative is a tangible outgrowth of the library pipeline’s ethos: be dedicated, embrace risk, and trust the process. ultimately, membership in library pipeline is not just a line on one’s cv; it’s a commitment to building community, growing as a professional, and putting in work on ideas and projects that matter. if your interest is piqued by the innovation in libraries grants, send us your innovative, creative, and risky ideas. if you are interested in becoming a trustee or sponsoring an innovation in libraries initiative, please send us an email: libraries@awesomefoundation.org if you are the type of library professional who is interested in “less talking, more doing,” we invite you to join us at library pipeline and grow our grassroots organization. for news and updates on library pipeline and any of our projects, you can follow library pipeline, the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter, or the #goawg hashtag on twitter. acknowledgements:  many thanks to our internal reviewer for this article, amy koester, and to publishing editor annie pho. we would also like to thank the dedicated and generous trustees and sponsors who made the innovation in libraries af chapter a reality and the impatient optimists who make library pipeline hum. crowdsourcing, grants, grassroots, innovation, professional societies hush… : the dangers of silence in academic libraries preservation in practice: a survey of new york city digital humanities researchers this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct updated submission guidelines for what we publish – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 1 feb bethany radcliffe and editorial board /0 comments updated submission guidelines for what we publish it’s been about a year since we updated our publication schedule, and we thought it a good time to revisit our submission guidelines and clarify the description of the types of articles we publish, too. if you’ve been thinking about submitting to in the library with the lead pipe, take a look at these updates (also available under the submission guidelines tab). what we publish we publish high quality peer-reviewed articles in a range of formats. whilst we are open to suggestions for new article types and formats, including material previously published in part or full, we expect proposals to include unique and substantial new content from the author. examples of material we would publish include: original research with a discussion of its consequences and an argument for action that makes a unique, significant contribution to the professional literature. articles arguing for a particular approach, strategy or development in librarianship, with practical examples of how it might be achieved. transformative works with additional explanatory or interpretive content. for example, a transcription of an interview or panel discussion, with a substantial introduction explaining the importance of the subject to librarianship and a discussion of related literature. how to propose an article to propose an article, please submit the following to itlwtlp at gmail dot com: 1. an abstract of your proposed article (200 word maximum); 2. a link to (or attachment with) an example of your writing; and 3. your current resume/cv or a brief biography. (our goal is to share perspectives from across the library community, so this item is intended to give us a sense of who you are, with what type of library you are associated, if any, and what perspective you bring to the topic.) alternately, you may submit a completed article. it should be approximately 2,000-5,000 words with citations as appropriate. if submitting a completed article please ensure it follows our style guide. a member of the editorial board will respond to your message within a week. in general, we will make a decision based on how well your proposal seems to fit our goals, content, and style. we will include in our initial decision email any thoughts your submission raised among the editorial board. article framework questions if we like the sound of your initial proposal, we will proceed to the next step in the submissions process: framework questions. this step is vital in allowing the editorial board to have a stronger sense of your proposed article, your thesis, and what your article would contribute to the professional literature. we are interested in well written articles that have actionable solutions, and we intend that these questions will help frame your idea appropriately. we expect the framework questions will be answered thoughtfully and completely: 1. what specific event or experience led you to be passionate about this topic? 2. what 5-7 things are most interesting to you about your topic? 3. of those 5-7 things, what are the 3 most important things to consider about your topic and why are they the most critical? 4. what problem is your article addressing and what actions do you want readers to take after reading it? 5. is your topic more relevant to someone in an academic, school, public, government, private, medical setting, etc.? if so, how is your topic meaningful to someone not in that target audience? 6. in what ways does your article build upon and/or contribute to the existing literature? provide 3 annotated citations. depending upon your topic, these citations may be for research on which your article is based; examples that reinforce issues that you’re raising in your article; articles to which yours is responding; conversations to which you are adding; etc. 7. what do you want your readers to remember after they finish reading your article? the editorial board may ask additional questions or request further clarification after receipt of the framework questions before determining the final status of the proposal. if your article is accepted if we choose to accept your proposal, you will be assigned a publishing editor who will guide you through the lead pipe publication process. please see the about page for information on open access, copyright, licensing, and article processing fees. social media at the college of new jersey library sparking curiosity – librarians’ role in encouraging exploration this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct is the united states training too many librarians or too few? (part 1) – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 21 sep brett bonfield /43 comments is the united states training too many librarians or too few? (part 1) ‘two years ago” photo by flickr user leah (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by brett bonfield for new library school graduates, or for more seasoned librarians ready for a change, entering the job market can be an intimidating, frustrating experience. we hear that there are no jobs available, and that the few libraries that do advertise new openings are inundated with applications. perhaps less publicly, we also hear administrators express concerns about a lack of good candidates for important positions, and we notice some jobs being advertised for months or being re-posted, sometimes more than once. we notice ala’s estimate of over 122,000 libraries in the united states, as well as its estimate that academic, public, and school libraries employ over 150,000 librarians (ala does not estimate the number of librarians who work for special libraries, vendors, or other employers). it may also be worth noting that, although u.s. unemployment as a whole remains relatively high, employment rates appear to be stratified by education level: in 2010, the average unemployment rate among people with master’s degrees was 4%. because we do not yet have access to reliable, real-time data, we are left with imperfect, occasionally confusing information. no one knows the actual employment rate among librarians or how satisfied librarians are with their jobs. nor do we know how satisfied administrators are with the librarians they employ or the applicant pools for positions they hope to fill. by looking at the past and the near future, and by studying the process of conferring master’s degrees on prospective librarians, we can begin to think about strategies for ensuring that we, both individually and as a profession, are taking an efficient approach to matching libraries’ needs with the supply of library workers. should library schools admit fewer students? is the admissions process sufficiently selective? are library school curricula and graduation requirements too similar or too distinct? are they providing their students with the skills they need in order to get hired and do useful work? should there be licensing exams for librarians? what data would we need to collect in order to come up with useful answers to these questions? i hope this essay makes a contribution to that discussion. my original idea for it was to build on existing analyses of ala-accredited library programs, adding my own observations based, in part, on my status as a somewhat recent library school graduate (drexel university, september 2007), first-time adjunct professor (i taught a course at drexel’s library school this past summer), and potential faculty member (i am a ph.d. student at rutgers university’s library school). that will have to wait for the second part of this essay. before discussing how library schools might better serve public interests and their students’ needs, we need to make sure we have reliable data about current library programs. the rest of part one is devoted to the story of that data. the librarian job market: projections according to the latest data (2008) from the department of labor and the bureau of labor statistics (bls), there were 159,900 librarians and in 2018 there will be 172,400, a projected growth rate of 7.8% (between 7% and 13% is considered average). the anticipated number of job openings due to growth and replacement needs is 54,500, with 12,500 openings attributable to new jobs being created and 42,000 due to attrition.1 we have been hearing about the graying of the profession for a long time, a factor that will contribute significantly to roughly one quarter of all current librarians leaving the profession by 2018. who will be hired to fill those positions? what qualifications will they be expected to possess? right now, 84% of librarian jobs require a master’s degree, 13% require a bachelor’s, and 2% an associate’s, and new job postings appear to indicate an increasing expectation that applicants will have earned a graduate degree in a library-related field. according to nazi torabi’s review of research by robert k. reeves and trudi bellardo hahn, most current employers are requiring an mls or mlis, though even a master’s degree is not sufficient. in addition, writes torabi, “experience, either through internships, co-op programs, or part-time or full-time employment, is essential for new graduates seeking employment.” as mentioned above, the bls expects employers to need 54,500 new librarians in the ten years spanning 2008 to 2018. we can represent that need as requiring 5,450 new master’s-level graduates per year (54,500 divided by 10). if library schools were to continue conferring 5,478 degrees per academic year, which is the average number of mls and mlis degrees they awarded from 1997-98 through 2006-07, there would be roughly as many new librarians as new jobs for librarians.2 based on the years the national center for education statistics (nces) makes available for comparison, 5,478 master’s-level library degrees per year would be near the midpoint given library schools’ relatively recent history: 1970-71: 7,001 1975-76: 8,037 1980-81: 4,859 1985-86: 3,564 one concern, at least for recent and future library school students, is that library schools have already begun conferring more master’s-level degrees. the number of degrees conferred increased every year between 1999-2000 and 2007-08. in addition, in the two academic years following the ten years included in the average above (1997-98 through 2006-07), master’s-level graduates from library schools numbered 7,162 (2007-08) and 7,091 (2008-09). that not only makes the job market especially competitive for recent graduates, it also means, if the number 54,500 was correct, that library schools should aim to graduate roughly 40,320 for the eight years remaining in the bls ten-year projection, an average of 5,040 for the academic years 2009-10 through 2016-17. there are several problems with the information presented so far in this essay. before continuing, it seems worth discussing three primary issues. 1. unlike medical schools, which faced pressure not to produce an oversupply of physicians, there appears to be no pressure on library schools to graduate only as many librarians as will be needed to fill vacancies as with the job market as a whole, a limited level of unemployment among degreed librarians increases employers’ ability to hire selectively among the most qualified candidates while simultaneously decreasing salaries. when they produce more librarians than are needed, library schools make libraries happy by vetting, and providing initial training for, a more highly skilled, cheaper work force. the key for library schools is to avoid granting so many degrees that the entry-level market for librarians becomes significantly more competitive than comparable job markets. if a disproportionate number of potential applicants perceive librarianship as offering worse prospects than comparable alternatives, then it becomes increasingly likely that the overall number of library school applicants will decrease and that library schools will have to compete with each other more aggressively for the most highly qualified applicants. although library school students are already graduating into a difficult job market, it seems at this point to be no worse than the job market facing law school graduates. while the salary potential for the most highly qualified new librarians is nowhere close to the salary potential for the most highly qualified new lawyers, the risk is nowhere near as great in terms of the amount of debt encumbered by the average student or the time commitment required to complete school. on a risk-adjusted basis, it is entirely possible that library school is a safer decision. 2. economic projections are notoriously difficult projecting what will happen tomorrow is incredibly difficult, let alone what will happen next year or over the next decade. but selecting 2008 as the initial year for a projection may have been especially inauspicious given what happened that year: a decline in u.s. gross domestic product, along with the start of an unemployment spike and a stock market crash. projections are worthwhile in that they help to provide some direction, and there is no reason to believe the department of labor projections were based on anything but the best available information. but, as librarians well know, sometimes the best available information will only get you so far. 3. figuring out how many people graduate each year from an american library association-accredited program with a master’s degree in a library-related field is surprisingly difficult i thought this would be the easy part of this essay. with the help of a presidential task force on library education, ala’s committee on accreditation updated its standards for accreditation of master’s programs in library and information studies in 2008 and released a statement of core competencies in librarianship in 2009; it also released a revised second edition of its accreditation process, policies, and procedures in 2011. as is demonstrated in a library journal article by norman oder on the presidential task force on library education and in the committee on accreditation’s own standards review blog, many within the information professions take the accreditation process seriously, and there can be significant debates surrounding accreditation policy. ala’s office of accreditation helps to vet applicants for the external review panelist pool, and also supports the accreditation process by maintaining a directory of currently accredited programs, as well as a list of all programs accredited since 1925. however, no one at ala officially knows how many students graduate each year from the programs it accredits. when i asked for this information, i was directed to alise, the association for library and information science education, which produces an annual statistical report. the alise reports, which are compiled from questionnaires submitted annually by each accredited program, provide a great deal of data and analysis. however, i discovered a few problems when i tried to make use of alise data for this project: it is proprietary and accessible only to alise members. though the university of north carolina provides public access to the statistical reports for 1997-2004, several of alise’s more recent reports are inaccessible to me, despite my connections to rutgers and drexel. fair use seems sufficient for me to share the data i most care about—the number of graduates from each of the accredited library programs for each of the past ten years—but there is no reason to assume most readers would be able to verify any claims i make about the data. it appears to be inaccurate. the individual number of graduates for each accredited program, when summed, does not equal the number given as the overall total for reports covering the 1999-2000 (off by 8), 2000-2001 (off by 13), 2001-2002 (off by 19), or 2002-2003 academic years (off by 9). it is incomplete. the 2007 report, covering the 2005-2006 academic year, is unedited and unreleased, while the data for the 2008 report has not yet been compiled from that year’s questionnaires. the alise web page for its statistical reports lists both as being “for future release.” it does not match the data the schools reported to the national center for education statistics. moreover, in some years it is higher and other years it is lower, so it does not seem to be differing in a predictable way (such as nces including data from non-accredited programs). 1999-2000: 4,877 (alise “total”) or 4,885 (alise sum) vs. 4,577 (nces) 2000-2001: 4,953 (alise “total”) or 4,940 (alise sum) vs. 4,727 (nces) 2001-2002: 4,923 (alise “total”) or 4,904 (alise sum) vs. 5,113 (nces) 2002-2003: 5,175 (alise “total”) or 5,184 (alise sum) vs. 5,295 (nces) ipeds data: annual number of graduates from each ala-accredited program, 2000-01 through 2009-10 for these reasons, it does not currently make sense to use alise data as the basis for answering questions about the relationship between library schools and the library job market. fortunately, an alternative to the alise data is available through the nces integrated postsecondary education data system (ipeds) data center.3 ipeds uses classification of instruction programs (cip) codes, which for the most part are extraordinarily useful in figuring out how many people graduated from each of the ala-accredited library programs in each of the last several years. the last three cip code revisions—1990, 2000, and 2010—have the same code number for library science, 25. among accredited programs, all report graduates for the library science classification except the university at albany-suny, the university of michigan, the university of missouri, and the university of puerto rico. i have written to each of these schools and included their information in the following table. some observations about the data my goal for this essay was not to engage in detailed statistical analysis. rather, i wanted to verify that useful data is available for free from a readily accessible source, a necessary step before progressing to part two of this essay. however, before discussing part two, it seems useful to make a few observations about the data and ask a few questions that may eventually lead to useful information. if you rank the largest classes for each school by size, the top ten graduating classes between 2000-01 and 2009-10 are: 465 (san jose state university, 2009-10) 456 (san jose state university, 2006-07) 448 (san jose state university, 2007-08) 437 (san jose state university, 2008-09) 359 (university of north texas, 2006-07) 356 (university of north texas, 2009-10) 338 (san jose state university, 2005-06) 315 (university of north texas, 2008-09) (tie) 308 (san jose state university, 2004-05) (tie) 308 (university of north texas, 2007-08) all ten classes appear to be primarily attributable to two administrators. ken haycock was director of the school of library and information science at san jose state university from 2005 until 2010, and herman l. totten has been dean of the university of north texas school of library and information science since 2005. this raises two questions: is it a good thing for the profession for administrators to be able to position their schools as outliers in the production of ala-accredited master’s degree recipients? and if it is not, are there remedies that would avoid creating even greater issues than the problem they would be intended to address? it may be interesting to see if the number of graduates from a program relates to its perceived quality, a measure readily available through u.s. news: u.s. news ranked 50 master’s degree programs in the united states that are accredited by the american library association. the rankings are based solely on the results of a fall 2008 survey sent to the dean of each program, the program director, and a senior faculty member in each program. the questionnaires asked individuals to rate the academic quality of programs at each institution as outstanding (5), strong (4), good (3), adequate (2), or marginal (1). individuals who were unfamiliar with a particular school’s programs were asked to select “don’t know.” scores for each school were totaled and divided by the number of respondents who rated that school. does the recent increase in the number of library school graduates seem to correlate more closely with endogenous factors, such as the ischool movement or the increasing emphasis on online education, or with exogenous factors, such as the bureau of labor statistics study or broad economic trends?   looking ahead to part two the significant variation in the number of students in accredited library programs, along with the rapid increase in the number of students who receive their library training without ever meeting one of their professors in person, harks back to library education at this point in the last century. melvil dewey’s personal influence began to wane after the first few years of the 20th century and andrew carnegie was already very actively funding libraries, leaving something of a void in library education just as demand was increasing. there were few training programs we would think of today as library schools, so many of the people hired to work as librarians received their education through correspondence-based programs. in 1919, the carnegie corporation hired charles c. williamson to assess library education and make recommendations for how it might best support libraries and their users. in 1923, he published what is generally known as the williamson report, though its official title is training for library service a report prepared for the carnegie corporation of new york.4 williamson’s findings and suggestions led to the carnegie corporation funding the graduate library school at the university of chicago, which conferred the first ph.d. in library science, and played a pivotal role in establishing the standards for library education that arguably remain in place today.5  as noted above, ala began accrediting library schools in 1925. working together, ala and the carnegie corporation were increasing demand through advocacy for libraries—specifically, by funding new libraries—and also through advocacy for librarians by investing in their educational resources: new schools: dedicated, better trained faculty; modern textbooks; and updated, evidence-based curricula. meanwhile, they were decreasing supply by adding de facto regulation in the form of library school accreditation, a limitation on supply that continues today. from the occupational outlook handbook, 2010-11 edition entry for librarians: a master’s degree in library science (mls) is necessary for librarian positions in most public, academic, and special libraries. school librarians may not need an mls but must meet state teaching license requirements…. states generally have certification requirements for librarians in public schools and local libraries, though there are wide variations among states. school librarians in 20 states need a master’s degree, either an mls or a master’s in education with a specialization in library media. in addition, over half of all states require that school librarians hold teacher certifications, although not all require teaching experience. some states may also require librarians to pass a comprehensive assessment. most states also have developed certification standards for local public libraries, although in some states these guidelines are voluntary. these are not the only conditions minimizing competition and protecting working librarians from termination. librarians may also belong to a union, earn tenure (or quasi-tenure), or hold civil service commissioned positions. while occupational licensing among librarians is not as organized as it is in fields like medicine or law or the financial industry, it may be worth investigating if librarianship could benefit from more licensing or less, and, if any licensing at all is beneficial (either to the public, to librarians, or both), how it might best be organized.6 finally, it seems worth investigating who is educating librarians and how the educators have themselves been taught. library science is part humanities, part social science, and, at times in the past, and perhaps in the near future as well, part information science, and even computer science. figuring out how these tensions might be balanced has everything to do not only with the producing an appropriate supply of new librarians, but also ensuring these new librarians have the requisite skills to meet the demands of the marketplace. thanks to nicole cooke, and to my lead pipe colleagues, emily ford and leigh anne vrabel, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. and thanks to emily for helping me with the final draft as well. to find this data on the bureau of labor statistics website, go to selected occupational projections data: search by occupation, enter librarians as the keyword and choose “job openings due to growth and replacement needs, 2008-2018” as the variable. [↩] these figures are derived from data found in the national center of education statistics digest of education statistics for 2010 and for 2009, “master’s degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by field of study: selected years.” for 2010, the source data is found in table 283, and for 2009, it is in table 272. [↩] from the ipeds data center home page: select compare individual institutions. on the resulting page, select publicly released data, then select continue. the field labeled institution name on the next page also accepts either individual unitids for schools or a comma separated list of unitids. download this list of unitids for all schools that had ala-accredited programs between 2001 and 2010, enter its values into the institution name field, and chose select. if you choose, review the list for accuracy against the earlier linked current directory and historical list of ala-accredited programs, then choose either check all or check the box next to individual institutions and select continue. you will be presented with a list labeled my institutions. select continue. on the resulting page, select the plus sign next to completions to see a list of variables, and under it select the plus sign next to awards/degrees conferred by program (2000 cip classification), award level, race/ethnicity, and gender – includes new race/ethnicity and award level categories, and under it select the plus sign next to gender – 2002-03 to 2008-09. for step 1, select the check box next to any or all years between 2002-2003 and 2008-2009. for step 2, select both first major and second major and choose save; select library science (option 25) under cip code – 2000 classification and choose save; and choose master’s degree under award level code and choose save. for step 3, choose grand total. then choose continue near the top of the screen. you will be presented with a list labeled my variables. select continue. decide if you want institution name only or if you also want the unitid (i recommend the former), if you want short or long variable names (i recommend the former), if you want to view your report on screen or download it (i recommend the former first, followed by the latter), and if you want imputation and status flags. there is also an option to include a name for the table. select continue. adjust accordingly. data earlier than 2002-2003 is available, but uses 1990 classifications for its cip code and is listed under a different variable. there is also early release data available for 2009-2010, but it requires a free login, which can be obtained by contacting ipeds through its help desk. [↩] see also: vann, s. k. (1971). the williamson reports: a study. metuchen, n.j: scarecrow press. williamson, c. c. (1971). the williamson reports of 1921 and 1923: including training for library work (1921) and training for library service (1923). metuchen, n.j: scarecrow press. [↩] richardson, j. v. (1982). the spirit of inquiry: the graduate library school at chicago, 1921-51. chicago: american library association. [↩] see: kleiner, morris m. (2006). licensing occupations: ensuring quality or restricting competition? kalamazoo, mich: w.e. upjohn institute for employment research. kleiner, morris m. and krueger, alan b. 2010 “the prevalence and effects of occupational licensing.” british journal of industrial relations. 48(4), 676–687. kleiner, morris m. 2011. “occupational licensing: protecting the public interest or protectionism?” policy paper no. 2011-009. kalamazoo, mi: w.e. upjohn institute for employment research. winston, c., crandall, r. w., & maheshri, v. (2011). first thing we do, let’s deregulate all the lawyers. washington, d.c: brookings institution press. [↩] ala, alise, bls, education, employement, jobs, lis, nces editorial: extra! extra! read all about it! (the universal interrogative participle)* is going on with the authors guild? 43 responses pingback : is the united states training too many librarians? | iupui aliss pingback : is there a glut of newly minted librarians? « a blog on list john jackson 2011–09–21 at 11:49 am wow, thanks for puling all this information together, brett. i look forward to reading part 2. i had long suspected that library science programs were producing more graduates than the job market could support. accordingly, i’ve always encouraged classmates and new students in my program to pursue non-traditional careers and information professionals, especially since many sjsu students live in california where there is a market for just those types of jobs (advertising, media, corporate and tech worlds). as to academic rigor, i can say from personal experience that my mlis program was a cakewalk compared to my other masters in the humanities. i’ve certainly had stress, but not the life-threatening, existential strife that i would have expected from a graduate program, one that seeks to condition the best and (sad but imo necessary) weed out the rest. the thought that some schools see online programs as profit-generating models of education worries me (i do not know if they do, but i suspect as much). bill coventry 2011–09–21 at 2:30 pm actually john, online ala accredited degrees count the same as any other (though other schools obviously have better reputations than other). but it’s the way of the future. why spend the money on room & board, food, etc., if you can sit at your computer at home and get the same degree. why do i need to actually be at class at 9 a.m., when my work schedule dictates i have to be at work then. there are undoubtedly online programs that are simply meant to make money (phoenix, etc.), but accredited degrees used to mean you could find a job. jenny 2011–09–21 at 12:49 pm one thing that you do not mention is the profitability of library master’s degree programs. when you think about it, it costs the school very little to teach a library school student; very little specialized equipment is needed compared to programs in medicine or the sciences. as a result, universities see library students as giant dollar signs that contribute just as many tuition dollars as students in more expensive to teach fields, and as a result, they increase their numbers in order to increase revenue. once they graduate, the university does not care what happens to them. online programs only propagate this problem because there are no limitations as to how many students can squeeze into a physical classroom. higher education is increasingly about making money. and universities can make money off of library school students, so they keep admitting them, leading to a surplus. as a result, only the top few get jobs, leaving a huge number of degreed librarians without a future within the field. roger strouse 2011–09–21 at 2:55 pm both the facts and the reasoning in this post are specious at best. library schools are suffering financially, due to the facts that a.) library school alumni are notoriously poor contributors and donors; b.) library schools have a disproportionate number of students that are attending grad school on assistantships; c.) library programs are comparatively small so lack the economies of scale from which schools with undergraduates benefit. on the other ill-conceived point, in fact, library schools care a great deal about their graduates’ success, as this is directly related to those graduates’ liklihood to donate back to the school. the school’s financial fortunes are largely tied up with those of its graduates. at a large midwestern university with a prominent library school, the university actually loses money on each student (this is also true of its other professional programs like social work and journalism). it’s getting rather tiresome listening to recent grads vilifying their library schools, when in fact the grads themselves did little or nothing in the way of career planning and job market investigation on their own. in my previous role, i spoke to many recent library grads that were closed to any but the “perfect” job (usually related to some outdated version of what a librarian is). one told me that he only wanted to manage a large academic library. (he was entry-level!) another was waiting for the perfect academic job cataloging serials. elizabeth 2011–09–22 at 5:15 pm roger, your arguments are not true across the board. simmons, for example, has been experiencing significant financial difficulties as an institution over the last few years; the library program is actually one of the only ones at the school turning a profit. i also disagree that library school students have a disproportionate number of students on assistantships; nearly every student who enters a phd program in the humanities or sciences is going to be fully funded, which is definitely not the case in mls programs. roger strouse 2011–09–22 at 7:16 pm rarely is anything true “across the board.” i”m speaking from the perspective of one who has interacted with the deans of many library school programs. the fact that you know of one exception isn’t really important, is it? i don’t even know what to make of your other comment. most library students are masters students — on the whole, they are more likely than candidates of most other masters programs to have assistantships. this clearly affects the revenues at library schools negatively. if you are angry because you don’t have a job, i’m sorry — but it simply makes no sense to blame it on the greediness of library schools! seriously, the original post to which i responded was one of the most irresponsible things i’ve seen, devoid of facts or logic. and the author supposes she would make a good librarian??? emily ford 2011–09–23 at 4:11 pm hi roger, we appreciate you taking the time to read what we write and post and welcome your disagreement and criticism. it’s how we improve our writing and we love engaging in discourse about issues. you are obviously passionate about this and we’re glad you chimed in. on that note, please remember that we have a comment policy at in the library with the lead pipe. you can read it on our about page. we appreciate and invite your comments and discussion about posts on in the library with the lead pipe. constructive criticism is one of our primary goals, and we applaud it in our readers. comments that do not maintain a civil tone or that disregard the post’s topic will be deleted. we do not edit comments except by request of the poster. please try to keep it civil. thanks again for reading! emily jenny 2011–09–26 at 11:18 am i’d just like to add that i’m a fully employed librarian at a major university with a library school. the points i brought up were mentioned in an internal review the university did of our library school. and i can say from first hand experience and from the graduate students i work with that assistantships are definitely the exception. we have cut ours significantly over the past several years, and from being part of the hiring process, only the top library students even get a partial assistantship. they’re also the ones that are getting jobs in this economy after library school. there is a huge demand, but little supply of work while in school or after it. that makes me think that library schools have too many students. joyce 2012–10–16 at 3:59 am it’s easy to blame the graduates. but so many cannot find jobs it cannot be the only reason they cannot find a job. and they need to pay back loans. why should the library school make more money on the graduate once they have graduated? especially when they have accepted graduates who are facing the unlikelihood that they will ever be employed as a librarian. it one both several larger libraries shut down accepting applications for a pool because they had too many people employed who were qualified for promotions. also many jobs shut down accepting applications after a week or less because there are so many applying. if these schools want their own to have success why don’t they hire their own when a job comes up??? often they don’t. since when is education is for profit on the student that is produced??? bill coventry 2011–09–21 at 1:54 pm my personal experience has been that an ala-accredited masters does not get you a job. i am a published author with a second masters (this one in history). i also have 9 years experience working in an academic library (one of the top 50 according to u.s. news & world report) & have excellent references. but, after applying to nearly 400 libraries in 43 states, have basically decided to change careers. these applications, by the way, weren’t blindly sending out resumes, but jobs i found through my rss feed that fit my abilities. at least 300 i would be perfect for. so it’s very frustrating when you’re either ignored or get a rejection letter stating over 100 qualified candidates applied for the job. so unless students realize that they’re basically going into a diploma mill, they’re simply saddled with debt. roger strouse 2011–09–21 at 3:01 pm librarians today need a niche, a specialty. just like most other professions. my guess would be that you haven’t defined that for yourself if you have replied to 300 postings that you “would be perfect for.” no one these days is “perfect” for 300 different library jobs. stephanie 2011–10–12 at 10:28 am i would agree that we need a specialty. do you believe that library programs today provide that specialty? i’m not sure they provide it now… concentrations were only recently established at drexel, and were not available when i attended. of course i spend a lot of time on the job learning new skills and stretching the envelope of my generic job description. without these skills “on paper” though, i’ve found it to be very difficult to get an interview. mary 2011–09–21 at 2:03 pm in addition to asking whether the field is becoming oversaturated, maybe there is an element of library students’ training not matching up to real-world expectations. are they being trained in the wrong way? or are libraries not quite ready for the new skills that are being emphasized in mlis programs? ken haycock 2011–09–21 at 8:06 pm thank you for the summary of data and perspectives. san jose continues to grow and has reached its capacity for faculty/students, with almost 700 mlis graduates this year. classes are small and technology very sophisticated. we believe strongly in access and opportunity. as we grew, our ranking also grew, the highest movement of any school in the country. the efforts to tie librarian supply to library professional positions is faulty, however, on several levels. first, the schools create a talent pool, they do not match the number of graduates to the projected number of openings. second, we must seriously “uncouple” librarians from libraries. libraries are but one environment where professional librarians work. librarian is a job title which fewer and fewer librarians hold. the largest employers of professional librarians, e.g., are the vendors. google and yahoo regularly hired san jose graduates, but not for a corporate library. indeed, one year a highly visible silicon valley company closed its corporate information center yet hired san jose graduates as trainers in hr. are the former more “real” librarians? they each held the accredited mlis degree and were applying their knowledge, skills and abilities. librarians have a wide array of career choices, far more than ever before. they need not practice only in a building called a library. brett bonfield 2011–09–23 at 4:44 pm i may have misinterpreted the bls’s occupational outlook handbook. here is the entire text of its “employment” section: “librarians held about 159,900 jobs in 2008. about 59 percent were employed by public and private educational institutions and 27 percent were employed by local government.” which led me to believe that 14% are working in special libraries, for vendors, and in other non-traditional settings. this belief was reinforced by the following paragraph, from the “job outlook” section: jobs for librarians outside traditional settings will grow the fastest over the decade. nontraditional librarian jobs include working as information brokers and working for private corporations, nonprofit organizations, and consulting firms… librarians working in these settings may be classified as systems analysts, database specialists and trainers, webmasters or web developers, or local area network (lan) coordinators.” there seems to be a good deal of evidence that the percentage of non-traditional jobs for people trained by library schools is increasing faster than the percentage of traditional jobs, but i have not yet seen a report on how fast it is increasing. though i wonder if even that trend is likely to continue. i see no reason to question the likelihood that fewer people trained as librarians will be employed in traditional librarian roles at traditional libraries. but i wonder why people who expect to find jobs working for “private corporations, nonprofit organizations, and consulting firms” as “systems analysts, database specialists and trainers, webmasters or web developers, or local area network (lan) coordinators” would get an mlis. at this point, i hear more and more people questioning whether library school is the best way to train people to become professional librarians (some want new hires to have a ph.d. in another field, others want new hires to possess more developed technical skills than library schools typically emphasize). is anyone suggesting that the best way to create systems analysts, database specialists, or hr trainers is to put them through library school? christine ayar illichmann 2011–09–24 at 2:14 pm ken – your comment is spot on – i totally agree. “ala does not estimate the number of librarians who work for special libraries, vendors, or other employers” and that is a huge problem. some of us go to work for vendors or in non-traditional roles, and in doing so are shuttled to periphery of the profession. i contribute to libraries and librarianship, but i work for a vendor. in some ways we’ve vilified other options – and it needs to stop. there’s way more out there than just working in libraries – our degrees are immensely rich resources that can benefit a wide array of career paths. i enjoyed this article – very good food for thought, thanks brett. sandy 2011–09–22 at 10:14 am i graduated in august, and while i don’t expect to get a job right out of school, i was hoping that i would at least hear back from some of the places i have applied. i would love to go into some non-traditional libraries, but i have no idea where to start looking. mary 2011–09–22 at 11:31 am if you haven’t already, consider joining sla, or at least exploring their website: http://www.sla.org/. they also have a linkedin group that has some interesting discussions you can follow to learn more. you may want to join a local chapter and attend networking events. finally, there is also a “sla new york” job hunters group on linkedin – see if there might be something similar in your area if you are not in new york. good luck to you! stephanie 2011–10–12 at 10:52 am that’s a great tip! i’ve found many specialty postings there. if you’re looking in a particular area i recommend finding a state library directory that lists the locations of all types of libraries. i found lots of corporate and other non-traditional libraries in there. it looks like pa put theirs online: http://www.libdir.ed.state.pa.us/screens/wflibrarysearch.aspx pingback : links to share: september 22, 2011 | library technicians — blogging sharon 2011–09–23 at 7:02 pm good question. i don’t think it’s only about numbers, and i hope you’ll be addressing that in part 2. it’s really about what will libraries and other information centers have evolved into, and what kinds of skills are they going to need, when the graduates of 2014 start looking for their first job? pingback : learning blog #3a: “less a profession than an activity.” « looking glass librarian unemployed librarian 2011–09–29 at 11:10 am i studied over twelve years ago now, at a top school, just at the beginning of the ‘is movement.’ i got a job right out of library school, but others i know struggled for years with several part time jobs out of state. i think it would be useful to also look at geography in this equation. at some of the top schools it is assumed that students come out of state and seek employment at institutions out of state. other students intend to seek employment in their region. thank you for looking into this. i am always interested when statistics and the ‘word on the street’ don’t seem to match-up. i run into a lot of younger librarians in my state who are unemployed or underemployed. in public libraries, we have always been dedicated to helping the unemployed make career transitions, especially in hard times. perhaps being career ‘doctors,’ makes us the worst patients. while i am currently unemployed, i don’t blame my alma mater. librarianship is a noble profession. however, i hesitate to recommend library school to bright young students at this time. i hope you prove me wrong. limited professional opportunities for upward mobility and lateral moves at the management level might also be interesting to look at. a very smart and successful librarian once explained to me that if you want to move up in our field (public libraries) you have to change jobs every few years to find increasingly challenging management opportunities. bailey 2011–09–29 at 2:58 pm i’d like to point out that your article completely ignores canadian library schools, all of which are ala accredited. while i am not canadian, i completed my mlis at ubc and am now back in the u.s., working in a library. over one third of my fellow classmates were also non-canadians. i wonder how statistics in this article would change with ubc, alberta, dalhousie, mcgill, montreal, toronto, and western ontario added to the mix, as it is likely that many of these graduates are also job seeking in the u.s. (yes, i understand it may be difficult to separate this data in a logical manner, but it still something to consider). brett bonfield 2011–10–01 at 11:29 am thanks for making this point. alise gathers data for all ala-accredited library programs, so my original plan was to include canadian schools as well. once i realized it made more sense for me to use ipeds data (which only tracks schools based in the united states), i changed some of the text in the article, including the title. however, i neglected to mention canadian schools, and the article was worse for that omission. pingback : the ‘year of the librarian’ continues « reel librarians nadine 2011–10–11 at 3:24 am whilst this article’s writer says she is not getting wrapped up in the numbers, she has just critisised differences in reported figures of graduates between two different collectors alise vs. nces. i am sorry to point out that when you are dealing with figures of 4,500 (approx) then differences of 13 or less are negligiable differences and should really be ignored. indeed, when discussing differences between eg: 4,885 (alise sum) vs. 4,577 (nces) the difference is 308, which is less than a 10% difference, and then over the 4 years reported in the article, the difference closed, narrowing each year. i would have thought this could have been a difference in definition, collection methodology, or any of those other bug bears which burden the statistician, yet end up being vilified in print when compared. on a completely different note, perhaps library schools do not receive endowments from their alumni because, quite frankly, we do not on the whole make enough income to endow anything. those of use who may be fortunate enough to invent, create or discover something new in the library sciences are small, and what happens if you decide to donate your creation to society ie koha library management system? pingback : whaddya mean, you’re a librarian? « reel librarians emily ford 2011–11–10 at 12:42 am i don’t know if you saw this, but it’s compelling. when you sort, library science is listed as one of the disciplines with the highest unemployment rate of 15%– topped only by united states history (15.1%), miscellaneous fine arts (16.2%), and clinical psychology (19.5%). when you sort this data by median income, library science is the 5th lowest median. that’s a high percentage of people who weren’t earning much in the first place. what is wrong with this picture? i feel dismayed. there are so many passionate library professionals out there who are so good at what they do. this data shows that they are undervalued, and the market incredibly overblown. at whose profit and at whose loss? brett bonfield 2011–11–10 at 2:47 pm thanks for sharing this with me. i hadn’t seen it. it’s definitely interesting, and more than a bit troubling, though for what it’s worth, i’m pretty sure the study only includes people who chose library science as their undergraduate major. to the best of my knowledge ala does not maintain a list of certificate, associate’s degree, or bachelor’s degree programs, but the list maintained by the council on library/media technicians was updated just over two years ago, so it appears to be relatively current. emily ford 2011–11–10 at 2:50 pm i think this data is coming from the census, so it might be self-reporting on what people studied. i wonder from what census question the data comes–and if perhaps it reflects a mix of occupations and education…. pingback : librarian, cybrarian, schmibrarian | to books! bill 2011–12–17 at 2:26 pm in my library system, recent mls graduates are applying for clerical and library assistant positions that are paying $25,000 per year. yes, there are too many librarians graduating from college and not enough jobs for them, as they are soaking up the lower paid positions that were never intended for them. wendy 2012–02–19 at 4:31 pm hi there, i am in library school and appreciated your column. i am working on a research paper and was wondering where you got the stats for the claim that 84% of jobs require a mlis degree…it wasn’t clear from your lists of cites. thanks! brett bonfield 2012–02–20 at 12:47 pm yes, looking back on it now i could have made the relationship between the link and the data a lot clearer. the 84% figure comes from the department of labor, via a project it sponsors called o*net. the link is labeled “department of labor,” and in the article above it’s a couple of paragraphs before the 84% figure. when you follow the “department of labor” link, scroll down to the education section of the resulting page (the page itself is titled, “summary report for: 25-4021.00 – librarians”). wendy bunch 2012–02–21 at 1:33 pm thanks so much for getting back to me! have any idea how to cite it? i’m using mla style on my paper. i’ll probably figure it out but thought you might know…. wendy bunch 2012–02–21 at 1:35 pm thanks so much for getting back to me! any idea how to cite the link? i’m using mla style. i’ll probably figure it out but thought you might know… andy 2012–03–28 at 10:54 am i worked for over 6 years in a special library at a state preservation agency, before moving into the whacky and vibrant world of public libraries, where i am managing a serials collection for a library system and also serving as a public services librarian. although i would like to work in a management capacity at some point, i’m just glad to be working as a professional librarian at all, as many of my former colleagues on the state level were laid off or are working as “super-clerks.” i think this is also contributing to the glut–many mls holders who worked for state agencies and libraries across the country have lost their jobs because of the economic crisis. supporting a family of four, relying on state funding was incredibly precarious, and so folks like me with a number of years of experience are applying for entry level and/or non-management type jobs at institutions with more stable funding, and/or the librarians who have lost their jobs are applying to these positions. i applied for an academic post before accepting my current position, that paid just $2000 less than i’m currently making, and the position had apparently 200 applicants. it’s just a hard time for folks in all professions, across the board. pingback : tell me my math is wrong, because i don’t like these numbers | hiring librarians joyce 2012–10–16 at 3:52 am i think they are struggling to fill jobs because what they want is a person who has qualifications for 5 jobs. they want 5 to 7 years of progressively responsible job growth. language ability in spanish, i’ve seen russian, parsi, and some dialects that are spoken in a small area of one country. then there is the bouncy happy personality, a team player, computer skills that would require a computer degree, marketing skills. often for librarian 1 jobs they want a year of professional service. supervisory skills. for children’s librarian they often prefer those who have often been teachers. i have been amazed….and the income does not live up to the list of qualifications. some places, even public libraries, want two master’s degrees. never mind the person is still trying to pay for one…it is inflexibility not that they couldn’t find someone close to the description…and for public library work i don’t see that in most positions it’s needed. i have been reading that many new mls graduates are giving up and entering other professions. i believe the truth needs to be told. they do not need anymore librarians minted for at least 20 year. sharon 2012–10–16 at 6:04 am joyce, in my limited experience (3.5 years of part-time library jobs while i worked on the mls, and 2 years of full-time work), when the job description is that specific, there is already someone in line for the position. for whatever reason–civil service rules, union rules, or both–the promotion can’t be called a promotion, but must be opened to outside applicants so that if challenged, the administration can point to a folder of applications to prove that they did due diligence in searching for candidates. the other thing i learned in my limited experience is that when the first sentence of the job description specifies a particular personality type, it means they want an extrovert. not just someone who can fake it for 9 hours a day, but a real extrovert. i don’t waste my time and theirs by applying for these. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct when does burnout begin? the relationship between graduate school employment and burnout amongst librarians – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 16 oct jade geary and brittany hickey /3 comments when does burnout begin? the relationship between graduate school employment and burnout amongst librarians in brief burnout issues are of increasing concern for many service professionals, including library and information science (lis) workers; however, the majority of articles addressing burnout in the lis field describe methods of coping with burnout, but do not ascertain trends and preventable factors. the purpose of this study was to identify the percentage of lis workers (current and former) and students who have experienced burnout. additionally, this study focused on the correlation between those who work while obtaining their lis degree and whether or not they later experience burnout. these objectives aim to answer the question: what percentage of future librarians are more susceptible to burnout once they enter the profession because they are currently working while enrolled in classes? the lis field is competitive, and students are encouraged to gain experience in libraries while pursuing their lis degree. by identifying the prevalence of burnout within the lis profession and attempting to identify the earliest causes, we hope to spark a conversation between hiring managers and current or future library professionals about the effects of our profession’s expectations and the high risk of burnout. by jade geary and brittany hickey introduction burnout is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue in our society. according to a general population survey from statista, 21% of females and 17% of males age 18 and older in the u.s. suffer from exhaustion related to burnout (2017). librarianship is not immune to the increase in burnout. in fact, helping professions are particularly vulnerable to burnout (swanson 1992), and librarianship is a helping profession. it is essential to investigate the causes of burnout and how to prevent burnout. by looking at causes and prevention techniques, library and information science (lis) educators can help students prepare for the potential of burnout in their future careers and managers can become better informed on how to aid employees. the findings of our study indicate that there is a high connection between those that work while in library school and experiencing burnout. thus it is imperative that burnout prevention techniques are discussed with lis graduate students. this discussion includes both how to prevent burnout for themselves as well as how to aid others in burnout prevention.the latter is essential as it important for future managers to be able to assist those they work with in preventing and coping with burnout in librarianship. literature review the idea of work-related burnout first appeared in psychological literature in the 1970s (schaufeli, leiter & maslach, 2008). while burnout did not appear in the lis literature until more recently, there is still an abundance of information available. the lis dialogue on burnout ranges from coping resources (bosque & skarl, 2016; martin, 2009), webinars (rogers-whitehead, 2018; singer, & griffith, 2011; westwood, 2017), panels (block, clasper, courtney, hermann, houghton, & zulida, 2019), and scholarly literature (adebayo, segun-adeniran, fagbohun, & osayande, 2018) on this topic. burnout is not the sole domain of only one particular library type; it is pervasive in every type of library from special libraries to public libraries (mangus, salo, & jansson, 2018; salyers, et al., 2019; swanson, 1992). in fact, it is common for the literature to focus on particular job functions associated with librarian burnout (affleck, 1996; nardine, 2019). unfortunately, even with the growing popularity of burnout research, there is limited literature focusing on the root causes of burnout. this literature review will focus on the literature currently available on the topic while our data will help fill a gap in the literature of when burnout begins. defining burnout to begin, it is important to explore how burnout is defined and what the symptoms of burnout are. there are numerous definitions of burnout, but this study focuses on the definition provided by christina maslach, a leading authority on occupational burnout and the creator of the maslach burnout inventory. maslach (1982) defines burnout as “a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who do ‘people work’ of some kind” (p. 3). the primary factors leading to burnout are an unsustainable workload, role conflict and a lack of personal control at work, insufficient recognition or compensation, lack of social support, a sense of unfairness, and personal values that are at odds with the organization’s values (maslach & leiter, 2008). there are three overarching components of burnout: “overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment” (maslach & leiter, 2016, p. 103). maslach & lieter (2016) describe the physical symptoms of burnout as the following: “headaches, chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal disorders, muscle tension, hypertension, cold/flu episodes, and sleep disturbances” (p. 106). methods to prevent in the literature, many articles offer tips on how to prevent burnout. christian (2015) argues that proactive solutions are needed to “reverse the symptoms of a passion deficit” (p. 8). one solution offered by christian (2015) is for lis faculty to do a better job of preparing students for the “emotional labor” aspect of librarianship, including the negative side effects. this route takes a preventive approach; unfortunately, for those currently working in the field, precautionary methods do little to alleviate existing problems. in turn, there needs to be more literature on how to reduce burnout within the working profession for everyone from top-level administrators to part-time paraprofessionals. most articles on preventing burnout focus on steps that individuals can take. delguidice (2011), for instance, offers a list of ways for school librarians to avoid burnout after the appearance of symptoms: attend conferences, take your lunch break or “prep” hour, take a sick day, let your aides do more, partner with the public library, or reach out for help. campbell (2008) has many of the same suggestions, but also adds personalizing your workspace, engaging in meditation, and finding a hobby. farrell, alabi, whaley, and jenda (2017) suggest library mentoring— not as a method of prevention, but one of mitigation. they propose that mentors who are aware of the causes of burnout, including racial microaggressions and imposter syndrome, and symptoms of burnout are more likely to offer compassion and empathy. however, mentors who are unfamiliar with burnout may fan the flames of burnout by encouraging their mentees to work harder to prove themselves. scholarship on burnout in lis much of the scholarship surrounding burnout in libraries focuses solely on academic library settings. adebayo, segun-adeniran, fagbhohun, and osayande (2018) investigated “perceived causes” of burnout amongst all levels of library staff at academic libraries in nigeria by asking participants if they felt certain factors caused them to personally experience burnout. the causes included factors such as funding, support, and work environment. nardine (2019) focused specifically on academic liaison librarians in the association of research libraries (arl). kaetrena davis kendrick (2017) studied the low-morale of academic librarians and identified burnout, along with bullying and workplace toxicity, as being a contributing factor to issues with morale. although the literature is focused heavily on academic libraries, public libraries and librarians are not completely left out of the scholarship on burnout. lindén, salo, and jansson (2018) investigated burnout in public libraries in sweden. they studied organizational factors that lead to burnout and found that “the most frequently occurring stressors encountered in the library organization was the workload stressor ‘overload’, the job-control stressors ‘technostress’ and ‘patrons’, the reward stressor ‘poor feedback from management’ and the community stressor ‘isolation’” (p. 203). salyers et al. (2019) note the lack of literature available on burnout in public libraries. their study gathered data from 171 public librarians about the issue of burnout. salyers et al. (2019) found, several job and recovery-related factors to be associated with increased emotional exhaustion and cynicism and decreased professional efficacy. important job-related variables appear to be work pressure (associated with greater emotional exhaustion) and protective factors of autonomy, role clarity, and coworker support (for emotional exhaustion and to a lesser extent cynicism). (p. 981) swanson (1992) focus on burnout in youth librarians both in public libraries and school libraries. swanson (1992) emphasises how burnout is common within the helping professions and focuses on physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion, and psychological exhaustion. swanson (1992) found that her pool of participants did not experience a significantly high rate of burnout and exhaustion. the literature on burnout and school media specialists or special librarians is primarily limited to those articles which offer methods of prevention (delguidice, 2011; anzalone, 2015) rather than in-depth research into the prevalence of or specific factors leading to burnout. graduate students are virtually forgotten when it comes to scholarship on burnout within library and information science. multiple database searches failed to reveal any relevant articles. although research on this topic is limited within the lis field, burnout among students in other professions, such as social work and psychology, is being investigated. han, lee, and lee (2012) found that incoming social work graduate students are more susceptible to the three overarching characteristics of burnout identified by maslach if their emotions are frequently influenced by the emotions of those around them. wardle and mayorga (2016) found that only 14.28% of counseling graduate students were not on the verge of, or already suffering from, burnout. research question the focus of our study was to answer the following research question: are library school students who work through graduate school more likely to leave librarianship due to burnout than their peers who did not work while obtaining an mls/mlis degree? methods to gather our data, we created a branching survey that adjusted each participant’s questions based on their provided answers (appendix a). the survey is not an adaptation of the maslach burnout inventory because we were not measuring the degree to which librarians experience burnout. instead, librarians were asked to determine if they believe they have experienced burnout. other questions were designed to attempt to identify common experiences of librarians who have or have not experienced burnout. prior to completing the survey, participants were provided with an informed consent statement and an explanation of the purpose of our research. before completing the survey, our respondents were provided with a definition of burnout, which was adapted from maslach’s aforementioned definition. our research focus limited our pool of lis professionals. to be best aligned with our research question, the survey was targeted to mls/mlis students, current librarians, and former librarians. this was noted prior to beginning the survey with the following statement: “the survey is open to mls/mlis students, current librarians, and former librarians. we are not seeking responses from paraprofessionals at this time”. after approval from the institutional review board (irb) at both of our institutions, we distributed our survey on october 1, 2018. this was done via facebook groups, library think tank – #alatt and the library employee support network, as well as our own personal accounts. the survey was also shared via twitter, professional listservs, and via our home libraries. we posted our call for participation on social media twice, listservs twice, and our home libraries once. the survey remained open on google forms for one month. once the survey closed, all results were extracted from google forms via google sheets. an original copy of the data was kept and has remained untouched. the data was then cleaned. anyone who did not meet the criteria was removed, codes were set for the responses, and the data was moved into statcrunch for statistical analysis. results we received responses from 612 people who met the survey requirements (i.e. participants who completed library school or are currently lis students). the responses encompassed a wide range of library types: public (n=333), academic (n=216), school (n=74), archives (n=39), government (n=3), special (n=40), law (n=2), law firm (n=1), medical (n=2), hospital (n=1), subscription/membership (n=1), military (n=3), state (n=2), and high-density offsite storage (n=1). participants were able to indicate all of the types of libraries in which they worked, allowing our research to reflect a wide array of library experiences. current librarians there were 612 total respondents, of which 76.64% are current librarians. of the current librarians (n=469), 79.10% responded that they have experienced burnout based on the definition of burnout provided at the beginning of the survey. additionally, 47.33% of current librarians responded that they have considered leaving the profession due to burnout. an overwhelming majority of current librarians, 94.24%, were employed while they were enrolled in lis courses. current librarians who took an average of three credit hours per semester worked an average of 34.13 hours per week. those enrolled in more than twelve credit hours per semester worked an average of 18.22 hours per week. closer inspection reveals that 78.89% of current librarians had a job in a library while taking library school classes. overall, 74.84% of current librarians worked while enrolled in classes and experienced burnout, 10.87% worked but did not experience burnout, 4.26% did not work but still experienced burnout, and 0.85% neither worked while enrolled in classes nor experienced burnout later in their careers (fig. 1). figure 1. the relationship between working while enrolled in school and experiencing burnout for current and former librarians. alternate version of this bar chart as a table. former librarians of the total respondents (n=612), 5.23% are former librarians. of the former librarians (n=32), 71.86% responded that they have experienced burnout based on the definition of burnout provided at the beginning of the survey. burnout was the primary reason that 18.75% of former librarians left the profession and an additional 40.63% reported that burnout was a contributing factor in their decision to leave the profession. of the former librarians who experienced burnout, 86.96% worked while in library school. of those, 39.13% worked 31 or more hours per week. interestingly, 100% of former librarians who never experienced burnout worked in a library while in library school. overall, 62.50% of former librarians worked while enrolled in classes and experienced burnout, 21.88% worked but did not experience burnout, 9.38% did not work but still experienced burnout, and 0% neither worked while enrolled in classes nor experienced burnout later in their careers (fig. 1). lis students lis students comprised of 18.14% of our total participant pool. of the students who responded (n=111), 96.40% are employed. of today’s lis students, 61.26% work 31 or more hours per week in addition to taking classes. further inquiry reveals that 77.47% of student respondents work in a library, including 15.31% who have multiple jobs, at least one of which is in a library. furthermore, 53.15% of lis students take six credit hours a semester on average. the majority of those students, 59.32%, work 31-40 hours per week in addition to their class responsibilities (fig. 2). figure 2. the percent distribution of the hours lis students worked by the average number of credit hours they were enrolled in. alternate version of this bar chart as a table. discussion the results of our study highlight the pervasiveness of burnout in the lis field. out of the sample (n= 612), 81.86% of librarians reported that they have experienced burnout. with over three-fourths of respondents indicating they have experienced burnout, these results indicate that this topic demands further study within the profession. additionally, since we are investigating the link between burnout and working while enrolled in graduate courses, the percentage of students working while pursuing their masters must be taken into account. the discussion section will take a closer look at these numbers to help provide a more comprehensive picture of factors that influence burnout. generally speaking, it appears more graduate students are working than before. we do not have a breakdown by decade, but we do know that 96.40% of current students are employed while taking classes, compared to 94.03% of current librarians, and 84.38% of former librarians (fig. 3). figure 3. the percentage of lis students, current librarians, and former librarians who are working or worked while enrolled in graduate courses. alternate version of these pie charts as a table. not only does it appear that more of today’s students are working, but they are also working more hours on average than current or former librarians did as students (fig. 4). as expected, the average hours students spent at their jobs decreased as their average credit hours increased. the only exception was with retired librarians; however, only one retired librarian took an average of three credit hours and they worked an average of 15 hours which skewed the results. figure 4. average hours spent working while enrolled. full description of this line graph as a table. our survey only asked students if they were working for income, experience, or a combination of the two. as depicted in figure 5, the majority of students work for income and to gain experience. out of the 111 current lis students that responded to this question, 69.37% work while enrolled for both income and experience. one student commented that they are working specifically so they can receive benefits, such as insurance. this begs the question: will more students work full-time in the future to ensure they have health insurance and how will this increase their susceptibility to burnout? figure 5. why current lis students work alternate version of this bar chart as a list. contradictory to our predictions, as discussed in the results section, 100% of former librarians who never experienced burnout worked in a library while in library school. this data is varied from our current librarians that shows 74.84% of current librarians worked while enrolled in classes and experienced burnout. it would be impossible to draw conclusions from this data without talking more in depth with the former librarians that we surveyed. one possible explanation is the changing landscape of both librarianship and graduate work. even though the changing landscape possibly contributes to burnout, it does not mean that this is the reason that former librarians did not experience burnout. there are many additional factors like the number of working hours, credit hours taken, the rigor of programs, and the type of work schedule they had to maintain both as a student and a professional. limitations this study consisted of a variety of limitations. first, for roughly an hour when the survey was opened, there was an error with the branching in google forms. this caused four participants to receive the wrong screen via google forms that provided them with additional, irrelevant, questions. only a small number of participants were affected by the issue, and since we were quickly alerted, we were able to fix this issue without it affecting our results. to adjust for this error, we removed the “extra” information that was provided to us via the branching mishap. the second limitation would be our pool of participants themselves. selection bias is a possible concern. it is possible that lis professionals who have experienced burnout were most likely to complete the survey. additionally, it is difficult to connect with former librarians. most are no longer on traditional listservs and or social media. thus we had a relatively small pool of former librarians. the last limitation is the definition of “librarian”. according to the department for professional employees (2019), “in 2018, 53.5 percent of librarians held a master’s degree or higher” (p. 3). so, nearly half of those with a title of librarian do not have a master’s degree. we were specifically exploring the relationship between working while in library school and its impact on susceptibility to burnout later in life. therefore, for the purpose of our research, we limited our data only to library workers who attended and completed library school. we found that some participants took the survey even though they did not meet this requirement. consequently, they were removed from the pool. we recognize that burnout is an issue for all library employees, regardless of education or title; however, the scope of our study was limited to those who completed library school in order to determine if there is a correlation between burnout and work levels in library school. lastly, we intended to investigate the relationship between burnout and race and/or gender, but we did not receive enough data to dive into such a complex issue. conclusions burnout is a complex issue. an overwhelming percentage of librarians experience burnout. the vast majority of librarians work while taking graduate classes. however, based on the relative lack of data from former librarians and librarians who have not experienced burnout, we cannot definitively say that working while in graduate school is a source of causation. burnout is an invasive issue within librarianship. although this is something that we were aware of before we began the study, the data revealed how pervasive this issue truly is. we, as a profession, are suffering and it is clear that more research, training, and professional development needs to be done on this topic. we have only skimmed the surface of burnout research. there is much more room for analysis surrounding the degree to which people experience burnout within librarianship, rather than the prevalence of burnout in the profession. feedback from our participants, and on social media, revealed that there is definitely a need to focus on all library workers regardless of education or position. thus it is essential that more inclusive research is performed on this matter. further, exploring the potentially additional stressors of paraprofessional library work is a topic that needs to be investigated more in-depth. finally, it is important to note that our study was not limited to one type of library setting. many articles that are written about librarian burnout focus on just academic librarians or just school media specialists; however, our study shows that burnout is a risk no matter the library setting. it is our hope that this article can serve as a call for action for librarians, managers, and lis educators. hopefully, this can aid in a culture change for librarians and create greater support for burnout. librarians need to be able to openly discuss burnout and know that they are not alone in dealing with it. we hope that this article will act as a catalyst for such discussions. perhaps our survey will persuade hiring managers to take another look at the experience requirements for “entry-level” positions. if entry-level positions were truly “entry-level” and didn’t have such lofty experience requirements, then graduate students may not feel so compelled to exhaust themselves while in graduate school, thus possibly reducing the number of people who experience burnout. even with the overwhelming number of librarians who have experienced burnout, it is not a topic we heard mentioned in lectures or assigned readings in library school. as our findings indicate, our profession is rife with burnout. it is our hope that lis schools and educators will put more of an emphasis on preparing students to prevent burnout in their lives and the lives of others. acknowledgments we would like to thank megan fratta, our external reviewer, bethany radcliffe, our internal reviewer, and ian beilin, our publishing editor for all of their insight, suggestions, and guidance. we would also like to thank jesika brooks for proofreading early drafts. finally, we’d like to thank everyone who took the time to complete our survey. references adebayo, o., segun-adeniran, c. d., fagbohun, m. o., & osayande, o. (2018). investigating occupational burnout in library personnel. library philosophy & practice, 1–15. retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lih&an=133873688&site=ehost-live affleck, m. a. (1996). burnout among bibliographic instruction librarians. library & information science research 18, 165–83. retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&an=ej528004&site=ehost-live block, c., clasper, e., courtney, k., k., hermann, j., houghton, s., zulida, d., f., (2019, july). self care is not selfish: preventing burnout, american library association annual conference. american library association, washington, d.c. retrieved from http://bit.ly/begood2you bosque, d., & skarl, s. (2016). keeping workplace burnout at bay: online coping and prevention resources. college & research libraries news, 77(7), 349-355. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.77.7.9525 campbell, k. 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(2017). burnout or bounce back? building resilience [webinar]. retrieved from https://infopeople.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=640 appendix a link to survey questions survey questions relationship between working while enrolled in school and experiencing burnout figure 1. the relationship between working while enrolled in school and experiencing burnout for former and current librarians. worked while in school; have experienced burnout worked while in school; have not experienced burnout did not work while in school; have experienced burnout did not work while in school; have not experienced burnout former librarian 62.5% 21.88% 9.38% 0% current librarian 74.84% 10.87% 4.26% 0.85% return to figure 1 caption. percent distribution of hours worked by credits taken, lis students figure 2. the percent distribution of the hours lis students worked by the average number of credit hours they were enrolled in. hours worked credit hours 0 1-10 11-20 21-30 31-40 more than 40 3 0% 0% 0% 12.5% 62.5% 25% 6 1.69% 0% 16.95% 5.08% 59.32% 16.95% 9 6.9% 3.45% 24.14% 24.14% 27.59% 13.79% 12 8.33% 0% 25% 33.33% 16.67% 16.67% more than 12 0% 0% 33.33% 66.67% 0% 0% return to figure 2 caption. percentage working or worked while in graduate courses figure 3. the percentage of lis students, current librarians, and former librarians who are working or worked while enrolled in graduate courses. lis students current librarians former librarians worked 96.4% 94.03% 84.38% did not work 3.6% 5.97% 9.38% no response 0% 0% 6.25% return to figure 3 caption. average hours spent working while enrolled figure 4. the average number of hours a week lis students, current librarians, and former librarians work(ed) while enrolled in graduate courses. credit hours lis students current librarians former librarians 3 36.75% 34.13% 15.5% 6 32.69% 32.64% 37.16% 9 26.15% 24.25% 25.5% 12 25.88% 20.81% 10.5% more than 12 22.16% 18.22% 10.5% return to figure 4 caption. why current lis students work lis students’ reasons for working while enrolled in graduate school, given in actual numbers, not percentages: health care benefits: 1 both income and experience: 77 experience: 1 income: 28 return to figure 5 caption. burnout, library school, professional ethics, wellness leading from the center: reimagining feedback conversations at an academic library consultants in canadian academic libraries: adding new voices to the story 3 responses pingback : mentioned: burnout beginnings in lis – renewals pingback : elsewhere for january 4, 2020 floccinaucical taylor 2020–05–06 at 10:04 am this is such an important article and it feels oddly cathartic to see my experiences reflected here. while this is my anecdotal experience, i can say being employed as a graduate assistant at an academic library while working toward my degree made me ready to quit the field before i was even getting started. so often we are expected to perform at the caliber of professionals in the field for a fraction of the pay (or no pay, since your wages can be garnished as a result of the school paying for a portion of the tuition) and no benefits. not to mention the systemic issue of hiring libraries not valuing student employment or assistantships but also not being willing to be the providers of the relevant experience they apparently feel these applicants do not have. excellent way to create to disillusion. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: harassment in scholarship is unacceptable–and requires action – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 13 dec editorial board, amy koester, annie pho, bethany radcliffe, denisse solis, ian beilin, kellee warren, ryan randall and sofia leung /2 comments editorial: harassment in scholarship is unacceptable–and requires action something is rotten in the state of online scholarship. we here at lead pipe have noticed a significant uptick in commenting and other behaviors across multiple social platforms that constitute harassment—comments, subtweets, and actions meant to intimidate, cause anxiety in, personally discredit, and silence scholars who share their research and arguments through publication and in public fora. while we’ve noticed this increasing harassment in the context of lead pipe, our platforms, and our published authors, it is an issue by no means limited to our sphere.1, 2, 3 harassment is becoming rife to the point that those who observe it no longer register when it happens; and when it is noticed, inaction follows for any number of reasons. the harassment may feel so commonplace that it seems not to merit a response. observers may believe inaction is acceptable because the harassment doesn’t directly affect them. observers may fear that pushing back against the harassment will have negative consequences for them personally.4 the resulting effect: inaction and a lack of response demonstrate an acceptance of increased harassment as the status quo. we the editorial board of in the library with the lead pipe assert otherwise. we stand firmly in defense of the following: harassment as a new norm in scholarly discourse is unacceptable. it is the responsibility of those who observe harassment to condemn it—not the recipients or victims of said harassment. observers have the power and responsibility to name harassing behavior, to call out or call in those who perpetrate it, and to report abusive comments to site administrators. observers who feel personally unsafe calling out harassment publicly can report it anonymously by using the growing number of tools for flagging harassment for site administrators. there is a difference between criticism of a scholar’s work and a personal attack on that scholar. criticism of a scholar’s work serves to further discussion, knowledge, and thinking on the topic of the work, while personal attacks serve only to intimidate, threaten, and discredit the scholar as a person. scholarship, specifically online scholarship, requires a commitment on the part of editors, journals, and institutions to stand against censorship, bullying, abusive and incendiary comments, and harassment of all kinds. that means clearly articulating a standard for conduct and discourse, then holding all contributors and commenters accountable to these standards. the lead pipe editors aim to be allies for scholars and scholarship. we have long had our journal’s values and code of conduct accessible for both contributors and readers, but it’s clear to us in this current landscape that simply sharing those documents within tabs on our journal site, while good, is insufficient. we must also assert our values loudly and consistently. the editorial board of in the library with the lead pipe stands firmly against harassment of any kind. in the realm of library scholarship, we support the sharing of ideas, scholarly discourse, and academic critique, and we defend those who engage in these types of interactions. for those who step outside of scholarship and deal in personal attacks, character smears, and other harassing behaviors rooted in a person’s race, national origin, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, religion, or economic status, we will delete comments, flag content as inappropriate, and report conduct inconsistent with collegial scholarly communication. we are committed to these values and actions. as we assert where we stand as an editorial board and journal, we encourage all readers and scholars to consider where you fall in this landscape. we encourage you to consider whether you’ve intentionally or unintentionally perpetrated bullying or harassing behavior against a fellow scholar, critiquing them instead of critiquing their work. we invite you to contemplate whether you are passively or actively anti-harassment—do you shake your head and lament the state of scholarship when you see harassment, or do you speak publicly against it and report it?5 the space between passive anti-harassment and active anti-harassment is all the difference. without a community of readers, scholars, editors, journals, and institutions willing to both engage in scholarly discourse and actively condemn harassment, online scholarship may be in for a tragic final act. http://miscellanynews.org/2017/09/27/news/vassar-medievalist-harassed-for-advocating-diversity/ [↩] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/06/27/trinity-college-connecticut-puts-johnny-eric-williams-leave-over-controversial [↩] http://www.chronicle.com/article/academic-ethics-defending/239510 [↩] privilege factors heavily into inaction resulting from fear. for people of color, women, and other typically marginalized groups who act, fear of speaking out is rooted in the potentiality of becoming the next victim of harassment and trolling. for individuals with societal and academic privilege—white people in particular—the fear is that calling out harassment will result in being considered mean or humorless. there is a magnitude of difference between the potential damages of these consequences. [↩] one of the reasons we’ve seen the increase in harassment with reference to lead pipe publications is because readers have alerted us when they see it. we are grateful to these readers who reach out to us to report harassment. [↩] harassment accessibility for justice: accessibility as a tool for promoting justice in librarianship bringing student voices into the university archives:
 a student organization documentation initiative case study 2 responses nicole cooke 2018–01–28 at 3:41 pm my sincere thanks to the editorial board for this strong statement. you have taken the lead in the profession when it comes to speaking out about this issue, and it is truly appreciated by those of us who have experienced harassment. i hope others will follow your lead! we need to support one another in the important work that we’re doing. pingback : protecting library workers’ discourse around social justice | ala18 this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct #ditchthesurvey: expanding methodological diversity in lis research – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 11 mar rebecca halpern, christopher eaker, john jackson and daina bouquin /7 comments #ditchthesurvey: expanding methodological diversity in lis research survey rating scale: allie brosh, hyperbole and a half, cc-by-nc-nd 3.0 united states license. retrieved from http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/02/boyfriend-doesnt-have-ebola-probably.html in brief: recent content analyses of lis literature show that, by far, the most popular data collection method employed by librarians and library researchers is the survey. the authors of this article, all participants in the 2014 institute for research design in librarianship, recognize that there are sound reasons for using a survey. however, like any one method, its very nature limits the types of questions we can ask. our profession’s excessive reliance on the survey likewise imposes excessive limitations on what we can know about our field and our users. this article summarizes recent studies of the methods most common to lis studies, explores more deeply the benefits of using non-survey methods, and offers recommendations for future researchers. in short, this article is a call to arms: it is time to ditch the survey as our primary research method and think outside the checkbox. it is time to fully embrace evidence-based library and information practice and promote training in diverse research techniques. by rebecca halpern, christopher eaker, john jackson, and daina bouquin introduction how do we know what we know about libraries and their users? how do we best advocate for our library users and represent their needs in our services? what new theories are waiting to be developed to explain our reality? in order to comprehensively answer these questions, the lis profession must actively support skills development in research data collection, analysis, and distribution to allow librarians to investigate and address their most pressing issues and advance our field of knowledge. this article highlights the array of research methods available to us, and encourages lis researchers to expand the methodological diversity in our field. in particular, over-reliance on the survey method is limiting the types of questions we are asking, and thus, the answers we can obtain. this article is a call to arms: it is time to ditch the survey as our primary research method and think outside the checkbox. it is time to fully embrace evidence-based library and information practice and promote training in diverse research techniques. evidence-based library and information practice (eblip) is a relatively new concept. if we date its founding to the seminal works of john eldredge (1997, 2000a,b) and andrew booth (2000) about evidence-based librarianship in the medical profession, the concept is not quite 20 years old, and it wasn’t until 2006 that eblip had gained enough professional traction to support a journal dedicated to providing a forum for this type of research, evidence based library and information practice. according to eldredge, evidence-based practice “employs the best available evidence based upon library science research to arrive at sound decisions about solving practical problems in librarianship” and strives to put “the ‘science’ back in ‘library science’” (2000, p. 290). by using evidence-based practice in our decision-making, librarians can offer demonstrably better collections, services, and spaces. evidence in librarianship comprises three spheres of knowledge: professional expertise, local or contextual facts, and professional research (koufogiannakis, 2011). lis professionals use this collected evidence to, among many other things, make decisions about accreditation and funding requirements, plan for the future, make decisions about new services or changes to existing services, and decide how to focus outreach efforts. additionally, accreditation boards, senior university administrators, and boards of directors often require librarians to present assessment data or library-specific metrics. however, librarians are frequently not comfortable designing and administering research studies to obtain the types of data required of them (kennedy & brancolini, 2012). while eblip does not privilege the use of any one sphere of knowledge over another, the library and information science profession’s production of evidence is skewed toward expertise and non-research-based narratives, which do not implement rigorous or systematic scientific processes. one study analyzed the contents of 1,880 articles in library and information science journals and found that only 16% “qualified as research” (turcios, agarwal & watkins, 2014). the authors of that study used peritz’s (1980) definition of research, namely “an inquiry which is carried out, at least to some degree, by a systematic method with the purpose of eliciting some new facts, concepts, or ideas.” another study found that nearly one-third of all lis journal literature published in 2005 utilized a survey-based research strategy (hider & pymm, 2008). while surveys can be excellent tools for many questions, and are attractive for lis professionals because they can reach many people economically, effective surveys require knowledge of survey design and validation, sampling methods, quantitative (and often qualitative) data analysis, and other skills that require formal training many lis professionals do not possess (fink, 2013). without rigorous survey design and validation, data can lead to results that are invalid, misleading, or simply not meaningful to answer the question at hand.  additionally, surveys are not appropriate instruments for all research questions—some may attempt to use surveys in ways that are overly ambitious or not satisfactorily generalizable. likewise, some surveys may be administered in inappropriate formats or may inadvertently contain “forced-choice” questions (fink, 2013). whether the lack of diversity of methodologies in the professional library and information science literature is due to insufficient training in research design, the environment in which we conduct research, or simply a result of “imposter syndrome” (clance & imes, 1978), it is clear that librarians need to be better supported in developing research questions, designing methodologically sound studies, and analyzing and publishing our findings. literature review booth published the first review of evidence-based librarianship (ebl) in the general library literature in 2003. in it, he examined early development of ebl and its migration from the health sciences to library and information science studies. by 2003, the subfield of ebl was gaining momentum, having already been the subject of two international conferences, but it lacked a commonly agreed upon definition, scope, and terminology (booth, 2003). to address this situation, booth outlined the process of evidence-based practice, which comprises: focusing/formulating a question finding evidence filtering results appraising the literature applying the results in practice, and finally evaluating one’s performance. most notably, booth provides a “hierarchy of evidence,” originally created by jon eldredge (2000a; 2000b), that illustrates the most effective types of evidence for decision making, with systematic reviews and well-designed randomized controlled trials at the top and opinions, descriptive studies, and reports of expert committees at the bottom. as his review of the research shows, “explicit and rigorous” methods continue to be ebl’s most defining characteristic, the sina qua non of a process that requires valid evidence to improve everyday decision making. so how much of the professional lis literature constitutes research? according to a review by koufogiannakis, slater, and crumley (2004) of previous studies published between 1960-2003, the percentage of research articles reported in various lis journals ranges from 15–57%. their own evaluation of 2,664 articles published in 2001 found 30.3% could be classified as research. unfortunately, it is difficult to compare the findings of various studies due to their lack of a consensual definition of what constitutes a research article and their wide variation in sampling and categorizing methods. peritz’s 1980 definition of research (quoted above) is an often-used rubric for determining which articles in content analysis studies should be classified as research. yet despite the common usage of this definition, studies use different parameters for determining which journals to include and, as a result, report sharply divergent answers to the question of how much of the professional lis literature constitutes research. for example, consider three studies published in 2014: turcios, agarwal, and watkins (2014) examined articles published in 2012-2013 and found 16% qualified as research; walia and kuar (2014) examined six top-tier journals published in 2008 and found 56% qualified as research; tuomaala, jarveli, and vakkari (2014) concluded that as much as 70% of 2005 articles qualified as research. each of these studies cited the same definition of research but, in addition to looking at different publication years, the authors also used dramatically different selection criteria for the journals included in each study, respectively, lis journals available at the authors’ institution, purposive selection of journals published in the united kingdom and united states, and purposive selection of periodicals that had been characterized as “core journals” in previous studies. while the answer to how much of the lis literature can be classified as research remains uncertain, one finding remains the same across most studies: librarians rely on surveys. a 2008 study by gonzález‐alcaide, castelló‐cogollos, navarro‐molina, aleixandre‐benavent, and valderrama‐zurián that examined the frequency of keywords assigned to articles in the lisa database published between 2004-2005 found that “survey” was the seventh most common descriptor (out of almost 7,000 total descriptors) and was the most common co-occurring descriptor for articles dealing with academic or public libraries. koufogiannakis, slater, and crumley’s (2004) analysis classified approximately 40% of the research articles they examined as descriptive studies, most of which used surveys. after these, the most popular study types were comparative studies, bibliometric studies, content analysis, and program evaluation (only 12 of the 807 research articles used more rigorous methods such as meta-analysis or controlled trials). hildreth and aytac (2007) found that lis researchers use surveys in one-quarter of studies published between 2003-2005. these findings confirm the authors’ earlier study of articles published between 1998-2002, which found that the survey is the most commonly used method in lis research. hider and pymm (2008), davies (2012), turcios, agarwal, and watkins (2014), tuomaala, jarvelin, and vakkari (2014), and luo and mckinney (2015) all found similar results: surveys were the most commonly used data collection method (respectively, 30%, 22%-39%, 21%, 27%, and 47.6%). of particular note, when dividing research articles between those that used one method versus those that used mixed methods, turcios, agarwal, and watkins (2014) found that of the former studies, 49% used surveys. the one longitudinal study of lis literature mentioned above, tuomaala, jarvelin, and vakkari (2014), does conclude that the proportion of research articles increased significantly from 1965 to 2005 and, of those, the proportion of empirical research also increased. however, the survey method continues to constitute about one-quarter of all research strategies employed by the articles examined in toumaala, jarvelin, and vakkari’s study. these findings prompt the following questions: why the reliance on this one particular method? is it due to its ease of implementation or is there something inherent about lis research that makes the survey an ideal strategy? are we, as researcher-practitioners, missing out on key insights into our discipline? and, most importantly, what other methods are at our disposal? choosing the best methods answering the above questions will require more systematic analysis of lis literature and professional practices. until we, as a profession, are ready to thoroughly investigate our modus operandi, we offer this series of recommendations for choosing the best methodology and suggest a few alternatives to the survey. once you determine the question you seek to answer, ask yourself, “which method will provide the best answer?” the answer lies partially in the way you ask your research question and, to a lesser extent, the external constraints you have on your research, but ultimately it should depend on which method will provide “sound data.” as booth (2003) notes, evidence-based librarianship depends upon the use of “explicit and rigorous” methods. the method you choose must match the research question, in both form and function, and professional standards for rigorous research. the following sections briefly explain how to choose the right research method for your research question and detail some of the research methods at your disposal. research methods are generally divided into two types, named primarily for the type of data they obtain: qualitative and quantitative. qualitative data are generally text, sounds, and images, and typically answer questions such as, “what is the meaning of…?” or “what is the experience of…?” if the main objective of your research is to explore or  investigate, choose a qualitative method. qualitative research is defined by its contrast with quantitative research as “research that uses data that do not indicate ordinal values” [emphasis added] (nkwi, nyamongo, and ryan 2001). in contrast, quantitative research is defined as research that uses data that do indicate ordinal values—data that can be ordered and ranked, and can answer questions such as, “how many,”, “how much,” or, “how often?” examples of quantitative data are numbers, ranks of preferences, or scales, such as degree of agreement or disagreement with a statement. if the main purpose of your research is to compare or to measure, choose a quantitative method. to determine whether your research will require qualitative or quantitative data, look at your research question. as we noted above, the answer lies partially in the way you ask your question. for example, if you are seeking to answer the question: “what are the experiences of freshman college students in their first-semester literature course?” you may want to use a method that obtains qualitative data, such as an in-depth interview, participant observation, document study, or a focus group. if, on the other hand, you are asking a question that can be answered using ordinal values, such as, “is student learning improved by a mid-course intervention using library instruction?” you may want to use a method that obtains quantitative data, such as a poll, questionnaire, or statistical analysis of students’ final grades. once you decide which type of data will best answer your research question, you need to determine how you will analyze that data. examples of ways to analyze qualitative data include grounded theory, content analysis, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. quantitative data analysis primarily uses statistical approaches to analyze variation in quantitative data (schutt, 2012). a more detailed discussion of ways to analyze data is beyond the scope of this article. however, we recommend that readers consult the resource list at the end of this article for additional information. below are descriptions of several data collection methods, starting with qualitative methods and followed by quantitative methods. methods directly influence the types of questions that can be asked, and thus the types of knowledge generated, and vice versa. the following section will discuss several methods, their strengths and weaknesses, and the types of answers these methods can provide. qualitative research methods qualitative research methods are most appropriately employed when the research question is one that attempts to investigate, explore, or describe. these methods might examine a library user’s behaviors, experiences, and motivations. instead of attempting to prove a hypothesis, qualitative methods typically explore an area of inquiry to discover many possible viewpoints. below, we discuss four qualitative methods that may be useful to lis research: in-depth interviews, focus groups, vignettes, and participant observations. in-depth interviews, also called semi-structured interviews, are an effective way to explore the depths and nuances of a topic. they consist mainly of open-ended questions and, though they often follow a script, feel more like a conversation (guest, namey and mitchell, 2013). since the investigator is speaking in real-time with the research participant, the investigator has the ability to explore topics that arise using follow-up questions (a method called probing), such as asking the participant to explain what they mean by something they just said. in-depth interviews can help investigators gain insight into cultural knowledge, personal experiences, and perceptions (guest et al, 2013). in-depth interviews need not always follow the same question-response format. in a 2012 study of academic library architecture by yi-chu and ming-hsin, the investigators asked students to take photographs of library spaces. the authors then used the photos as a tool during in-depth interviews, a method called “photo-elicitation.” in this way, respondents were able to more clearly describe their preferences for library space, which often required the articulation of abstract ideas, using a unique data gathering process that helped to better answer the question “how do our students prefer to use library space?” while a survey could have been used to gather responses to this question, the ability of participants to photograph and elucidate their opinions provided library staff with a richer understanding of student preferences. one of the authors of this paper, eaker, is currently researching the information management practices of civil engineering professionals. he is using the in-depth interview so he can learn not only about how civil engineers manage all the information they use on a daily basis, but also about their experiences with managing information. he wants to know how they perceive the importance of information management skills to their work and is less interested in how often they do one thing or another; thus, the in-depth interview was chosen for depth of understanding over a wide range of experiences instead of a quantitative method such as a survey. similar to in-depth interviews, focus groups also allow the investigator to explore depth and nuance, but also have the added benefit of capturing interactions between participants, group dynamics, verbal and physical reactions, and problem-solving processes (guest et al, 2013). focus groups are carefully planned discussions on a focused topic, typically with 6–8 participants and 1–2 facilitators. the organic nature of the discussions that occur in a focus group can prompt participants to provide data that relates to the research question in unique ways, due to the influence of group dynamics and social norms, something which may not occur in a one-on-one interview. however, focus groups are at a distinct disadvantage when researching sensitive or confidential topics, as some participants may be hesitant to discuss such topics in the presence of others. in these cases, in-depth interviews may be a more appropriate data collection method. in a 2003 article published in college & research libraries that details the use and effectiveness of focus group, investigators at brown university library found that “focus group meetings usually cover a wider range of issues and concerns because even though the [discussion leader] has a script to follow, discussion is driven by participants and deviations from the script are allowed and can lead to more input by participants” (shoaf, 2003). interestingly, the investigators of this study (which examined user satisfaction and perceptions of the brown university library) also discovered a wide disparity between the findings of the focus groups and the findings of surveys that sought to answer the same research question. the difference was most likely due to the ability to probe participants about their responses to certain questions. as the author notes, through probing “clear patterns of deep concern began to emerge” that were not apparent in survey responses, and indeed, that surveys are not capable of obtaining. shoaf goes on to note that focus groups have concomitant benefits as well, including as marketing tools and as a way to validate the data of other studies. respondents in quantitative studies do not always need to respond to targeted questions. as noted above, visual objects like photographs can be used to inspire conversation. similarly, a type of verbal picture, called a vignette, can be used to elicit a unique way of thinking. vignettes, as defined by finch (1987), are brief stories, usually only a few sentences in length (though more detailed stories can be presented using “developmental vignettes”), that present an often hypothetical situation to which participants are asked to respond. much like in-depth interviews, these responses can be delivered orally or in writing, may be either highly structured or semi-structured, and often include probing follow-up questions. vignettes offer two primary advantages: (1) they provide an opportunity to study normative material (how a respondent believes the average person should respond to a given situation rather than how they or someone else would actually respond), which is often difficult to capture using traditional survey methods, in-depth interviews, or focus groups, and (2) they allow the investigator to explore perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs about material that may be sensitive or difficult to define. most notably, vignettes allow investigators to gain insight into their participants’ interpretive framework and perceptual processes by placing the participants within a situation that encourages them to explicate their social/cultural/group norms in order to respond to the characters in the story. for example, another author of this paper, jackson, is currently using vignettes to study how undergraduates perceive and value the threshold concepts outlined in the new acrl framework for information literacy for higher education. as some students in his population may have yet to “cross the threshold,” vignettes provide an avenue for discussing an idea that the participants may not be able to articulate. the data collected from vignettes is usually analyzed qualitatively in order to identify prominent themes. finally, participant observation is a method of data collection that, as the name suggests, involves the investigator observing participants in particular situations or contexts. this method is particularly useful when there is the possibility that participants may not be able to describe their experiences accurately or without the influence of social norms and expectations. in its simplest form, participant observation requires investigators to keep a log of observations and then subsequently analyze that log using qualitative analysis (e.g. coding, thematic analysis). librarians at the claremont colleges library (fu, gardinier, & martin, 2014) utilized participant observations in a unique way by asking students to use campus maps to track their daily treks through campus and, when in the library, used text messaging to observe what students were doing by texting questions to students who agreed to be observed (e.g. where the students were physically located, what they were doing, and who they were with at the moment). in this way, using a relatively low-cost data collection method, librarians were able to discover where students go before and after using the library as well as what they did while they were there . while this is not participant observation in its purest sense, it nonetheless draws upon the same theory: that after-the-fact, self-reported data can be misleading, but on-the-spot, direct observation can give a better sense of actual behavior. quantitative research methods as discussed above, quantitative research methods should be used when one seeks to answer questions using ordinal values, such as “how often,” “how many,” or “how important.” additionally, quantitative methods are typically employed to test a hypothesis or when the range of behaviors or outcomes is already known. below we describe some common and not-so-common quantitative methods that are useful for lis research: secondary data analyses; randomized controlled trials; social network analyses; and surveys. secondary data analysis “involves the analysis of an existing dataset, which had previously been collected by another researcher, usually for a different research question” (devine, 2003).  there are many advantages to using pre-existing data sets to answer a research question. first, by avoiding the creation of data, a researcher can spend more time analyzing and interpreting results. similarly, secondary data analysis allows a researcher access to data they may otherwise be unable to collect, such as longitudinal or multi-national data. in the best cases, those data sets will have already been validated and controlled for reliability by the initial researchers. since validating one’s own data set is time-consuming and requires specialized knowledge of statistical methods and research design, this can be a boon to novice researchers. secondary data analysis has been used in lis research to analyze the impact of libraries on student success and retention (crawford, 2015). crawford used data from the integrated postsecondary education data system and the academic library survey. she collected salient variables from each data set, such as expenditures for fte, library instruction, student services, and graduation and retention rates. using a variety of statistical models, she assessed the significance and influence of those variables on each other. she found that both “instruction spending per fte and student support spending” is highly correlated with student retention. these findings could be used to make informed decisions about budget allocation and how best to focus library resources to improve student retention and academic performance. another type of quantitative research method is the randomized controlled trial. randomized controlled trials are useful when the investigator wants to determine whether or not, and to what extent, an intervention affects an outcome (oakley, 2004). randomized controlled trials consist of a minimum of two groups, a control group and an intervention group, to which participants are assigned randomly. for example, to research the effectiveness of a mid-course intervention in a first-year literature class, the investigator could use a randomized controlled trial to divide the class into two sections: one would receive an intervention (e.g. a special tutoring session outside of the regular class) and the other, nothing. the investigator would then compare the two groups’ final grades to determine whether and how much the intervention helped or hindered the students who received it. shaffer (2011) did something similar using randomized controlled trials to examine learning and confidence levels among students receiving library instruction online versus those receiving in-person library instruction. the findings, which showed that face-to-face students were more satisfied, were statistically significant and thus could more effectively be used to make strategic funding and staffing decisions. social network analyses examine networks of human interactions and resource exchange (haythornthwaite, 1996). in lis research, social network analyses can be used to understand how students informally share information. by graphing and analyzing participants’ social, professional, and scholastic networks, the researchers can see where information is exchanged freely, where information exchange may be disrupted, or who serves as “hubs” to information exchange (haythornthwaite, 1996). this type of analysis could, among other possibilities, help librarians to identify effective modes of outreach or to understand peer networks among faculty and students. currently, kennedy, kennedy, & brancolini, (2015) are using social network analysis to study the sharing of research information among the initial cohort of scholars at the institute for research design in librarianship. by administering the social network survey to the same group of participants multiple times (the first phase of a longitudinal, multi-cohort exploratory study), they will be able to determine if the participants’ research networks increase in complexity over time. finally, we come to the most well known quantitative research method: the survey. as described earlier, surveys are the most frequently used research method in lis research. surveys are used when the investigators want to quantify something, i.e., the investigator’s research question is about describing how many, how much, or how often something occurs, which is often the kind of questions we ask.  surveys can measure the impact of services or collections, inform strategies for outreach, or evaluate instructional tools or methods, and are often the best tool to use when a large number of data points are necessary. they are highly structured; the questions and answer options are set in advance. no probing can occur as during in-depth interviews. surveys are relatively easy to administer because they are often inexpensive to deploy and are less time-consuming to analyze—though mastering survey design is difficult and requires pre-testing for validity, which is why lis professionals ought to consider using scales, measurements, and surveys that have already undergone rigorous testing. for example, one of the authors of this article, halpern, is conducting a study on the efficacy of activity-based instruction in online classrooms in alleviating information anxiety.  halpern is administering van kampen’s multidimensional library anxiety scale (2004) to measure anxiety levels in participants. instead of drafting her own scale and undergoing the rigorous and time-consuming validation process, she opted to use an existing, already validated scale. without validation and skilled design, surveys can elicit misleading responses by, for example, “prompting” subjects to answer in a specific way or confounding subjects by including double-negatives in the question wording. they can also lead to results that are not meaningful to the research question, as when subjects misunderstand the question or provide answers that do not address the research question. we recognize that there are methodologically sound reasons for using a survey, but like any one method, they limit the types of questions that one can ask. our profession’s excessive reliance on the survey likewise imposes excessive limitations on what we can know about our field and our users. surveys can provide important insights into questions involving, for example, library patrons’ usage patterns of materials in an institutional repository or how patrons become aware of the repository and the materials in it, but they cannot provide an answer to the question of why people access those materials. for example, if a team of researchers were interested in measuring the use of an institutional repository for the purpose of improving traffic to the site, they could use a survey to identify how many users were aware of the repository, how many users have accessed the repository in the past year, and the purpose the users provided for that access (chosen from a predetermined list of possible answers). the survey method, however, makes it difficult for the researchers to determine why a user would chose not to access the repository, as the possible explanations are infinitely diverse. while a list of predetermined responses can offer an answer to “what are the most common barriers to access,” even well-researched and pre-tested responses do not allow users to describe these barriers in their own words. by relying on a survey format, the researchers are potentially missing important issues like unique technological needs, diversity of content, and relevancy to user needs. we believe that our reluctance to answer the question why and our over-reliance on answering the questions how many and how often is crippling our ability to effectively deepen our understanding of the profession and communicate our value. while increases in user satisfaction levels, higher reported grade point averages, and improved reference statistics are certainly important metrics for measuring the effect of library services, by additionally answering why and how the library impacts these areas, we can dig more deeply into these determinants of student success and satisfaction to discover more than mere correlation. true causation may be a grail forever just out of reach given the nature of library services and education in general, but through more diverse qualitative methods, we can begin to see our true value in a clearer light. conclusion as evidence-based practice becomes increasingly critical to the continuation and evolution of our profession, we need to reflect on how we produce knowledge. our field is ripe for rigorous research, but our over-reliance on the survey is limiting the depth of that knowledge. with the survey method dominating most lis studies, we strongly recommend that librarians increase the diversity of their methodological toolbox. determine the methods that will most appropriately answer your research question and even go so far as to seek out questions that can be best answered by less frequently employed practices. as educators, information experts, and inquisitive professionals, librarians need to be willing to ask tougher questions, ones that can only be answered using unique and often rigorous methods. the authors of this article assert that it is time to ditch the survey as the default method of choice and we encourage our colleagues to think outside the checkbox. we also invite you to continue this discussion on twitter using the #ditchthesurvey hashtag. additional resources we want you to have all the help you need in expanding your repertoire of research methods. the following resources will help you learn more about research methods, research questions, and data analysis. arksey, h. & knight, p. (1999). interviewing for social scientists: an introductory resource with examples. london: sage publications. a detailed guide to conducting in-depth interviews and focus groups. this book contains instruction on designing a study, interviewing, protecting the rights and welfare of participants, and transcribing and analyzing data. connor, e. (ed.) (2006). evidence-based librarianship: case studies and active learning exercises. oxford: chandos publishing. intended for practicing librarians, library students, and library educators, this book provides case studies and exercises for developing evidence-based decision-making skills. corbin, j., & strauss, a. (2014). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, 4th ed. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. the late anslem strauss is considered the founder of grounded theory. this book presents methods that enable researchers to analyze, interpret, and make sense of their data, and ultimately build theory from it.  considered a landmark text for qualitative research methods, the book provides definitions, illustrative examples, and guided questions to begin conducting grounded theoretical projects. eldredge, j. d. (2004). inventory of research methods for librarianship and informatics. journal of the medical library     association, 92(1), 83–90. an annotated listing of research methods used in librarianship. the author provides a definition and a description of each method. some descriptions include a helpful resource to learn more about the method, and some include citations of articles in which the method was employed. “ebl 101” section. evidence based library and information practice. online: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/eblip/ the “ebl 101” section of this journal provides explanations of a different research method in each issue. each method is defined and described, and includes information about when the method could be used and procedures for conducting a study using the method. it also includes a listing of additional resources for further learning. fink, a. (2013). how to conduct surveys: a step by step guide, 5th ed. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. this how-to guides readers through the process of designing surveys and assessing the credibility of others’ surveys. fink focuses on choosing appropriate surveys, the wording or order of survey questions, choosing survey participants, and interpreting the results. guest, g., namey, e. e., & mitchell, m. l. (2013). collecting qualitative data: a field manual for applied research. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. this book explains options for collecting qualitative data, including the more common ones, such as in-depth interviews and focus groups, and the less common ones, such as lists, timelines, and drawings. stephen, p. & hornby, s. (1995). simple statistics for library and information professionals. london: library association publishing. written by two library and information science educators, this book is “written sympathetically” for the library and information professional who is scared of statistics. it provides a simple explanation of the types of statistical methods one may employ when analyzing quantitative data and focuses on what the various statistical tests do and when they should be employed. trochim, w. m. k. (2006). research methods knowledge base. online: http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/index.php this resource is a complete social research methods course in a convenient online format. librarians and information science professionals can work through the course at their own pace, or view specific pages relevant to their interests. it includes basic foundations of research, project design and analysis, and guidance on writing up your results. wildemuth, b. (2009). applications of social research methods to questions in information and library science. westport, ct: libraries unlimited. this book is intended to fill the gap in traditional library and information science research methods courses, which often rely on textbooks from fields such as sociology and psychology, by providing examples relevant to lis. its stated purpose is “to improve [lis professionals’] ability to conduct effective research studies.” wildemuth includes examples of effective use of different research methods and applications by prominent lis researchers. references booth, a. (2000, july). librarian heal thyself: evidence-based librarianship, useful, practicable, desirable. in 8th international congress on medical librarianship, 2nd-5th july. booth, a. (2003). bridging the research-practice gap? the role of evidence based librarianship. new review of information and library research, 9(1), 3-23. clance, p. r., & imes, s. a. (1978). the imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: dynamics and therapeutic intervention. psychotherapy: theory, research & practice, 15(3), 241. crawford, g. a. (2015). the academic library and student retention and graduation: an exploratory study. portal : libraries and the academy, 15(1), 41-57. doi:10.1353/pla.2015.0003 davies, k. (2012). content analysis of research articles in information systems (lis) journals. library & information research, 36(112), 16-28. devine, p. (2003). secondary data analysis. in robert l. miller, & john d. brewer (eds.), the a-z of social research. (pp. 286-289). london, england: sage publications, ltd. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9780857020024.n97 eldredge, j. d. (1997). evidence based librarianship: a commentary for hypothesis. hypothesis: the newsletter of the research section of mla, 11(3), 4-7. eldredge, j. d. (2000a). evidence-based librarianship: an overview. bulletin of the medical library association, 88(4), 289-302. eldredge, j. d. (2000b). evidence-based librarianship: searching for the needed ebl evidence. medical reference services quarterly, 19(3), 1-18. finch, j. (1987). the vignette technique in survey research. sociology, 21(1), 105-114. fink, a. (2013). how to conduct surveys: a step-by-step guide. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. fu, s., gardinier, h., & martin, m. (2014). ethnographic study of student research frustrations. research presented at the california academic & research libraries conference, san jose, ca. guest, g., namey, e., & mitchell, m. (2013). collecting qualitative data: a field manual for applied research. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. gonzález‐alcaide, g., castelló‐cogollos, l., navarro‐molina, c., aleixandre‐benavent, r., & valderrama‐zurián, j. c. (2008). library and information science research areas: analysis of journal articles in lisa. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 59(1), 150-154. haythornthwaite, c. (1996). social network analysis: an approach and technique for the study of information exchange. library and information science research, 18(4), 323-342. doi:10.1016/s0740-8188(96)90003-1 hider, p., & pymm, b. (2008). empirical research methods reported in high-profile lis journal literature. library and information science research, 30(2), 108-114. hildreth, c.r. & aytac, s. (2007). recent library practitioner research: a methodological analysis and critique. journal of education for library and information science, 48(3), 236-258. kennedy, m., & brancolini, k. (2012). academic librarian research: a survey of attitudes, involvement, and perceived capabilities. college & research libraries, 73(5), 431-448. doi:10.5860/crl-276 kennedy, m. r., kennedy, d.p., & brancolini, k. (2015). the personal networks of novice librarian researchers. paper presented at the 7th international conference on qualitative and quantitative methods in libraries, paris, france. koufogiannakis, d., slater, l., & crumley, e. (2004). a content analysis of librarianship research. journal of information science, 30(3), 227-239. luo, l. & mckinney, m. (in press). jal in the past decade: a comprehensive analysis of academic library research. journal of academic librarianship. nkwi, p., nyamongo, i., & ryan, g. (2001). field research into socio-cultural issues: methodological guidelines. yaonde, cameroon. international center for applied social. sciences, research and training/unfpa. oakley, a. (2004). randomized control trial. in m. lewis-beck, a. bryman, & t. liao (eds.), encyclopedia of social science research methods. (pp. 918-920). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. peritz, b.c. (1980). the methods of library science research: some results from a bibliometric survey. library research, 2(3), 251-268. schutt, r. (2012). investigating the social world: the process and practice of research. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. shaffer, b. a. (2011). graduate student library research skills: is online instruction effective?. journal of library & information services in distance learning, 5(1/2), 35-55. shoaf, e. c. (2003). using a professional moderator in library focus group research. college & research libraries, 64(2), 124-132. tuomaala, o., järvelin, k., & vakkari, p. (2014). evolution of library and information science, 1965–2005: content analysis of journal articles.  journal of the association for information science and technology, 65(7), 1446-1462. turcios, m. e., agarwal, n.k., & watkins, l. (2014). how much of library and information science literature qualifies as research? the journal of academic librarianship, 40(5), 473-479. van kampen, d. j. (2004). development and validation of the multidimensional library anxiety scale. college & research libraries, 65(1), 28–34. walia, p. k., & kaur, m. (2012). content analysis of journal literature published from uk and usa. library philosophy & practice, 833, 1-17. yi-chu, l., & ming-hsin, c. (2012). a study of college students’ preference of servicescape in academic libraries. journal of educational media & library sciences, 49(4), 630-636. this article would still only be a messy google doc if not for the insightful and encouraging revisions from brett bonfield and denise koufogiannakis; you two helped us craft the article we set out to write while adding a fresh perspective. this article was dreamed up during the 2014 institute of research design in librarianship, a 2 week-long intensive research seminar and lovefest, led by our mentors lili luo, greg guest, marie kennedy, and kristine brancolini. we owe you immense gratitude for helping us become self-described “research methods geeks.” and a huge thank you to our entire irdl cohort for their continued support, encouragement, and camaraderie (including, of course, our colleague emily). libraries, professional development, research, research methods beyond the threshold: conformity, resistance, and the acrl information literacy framework for higher education a radical publishing collective: the journal of radical librarianship 7 responses john meier 2015–03–12 at 10:17 am a related article just hit publication, which may be why you missed it. like the davies article, chu looked at 3 lis journals (different ones) but found a growth of non-survey studies. these are journals with publication by faculty at lis schools than practitioners. i personally was only instructed in survey research in library school, but now as a tenure-track librarian i have had to learn new research methodologies. for example, i recently chose interview over survey as a data gathering method, and content analysis over quantitative analysis. john meier 2015–03–12 at 10:19 am oh, here is the chu article: “research methods in library and information science: a content analysis” library & information science research, volume 37, issue 1, january 2015, pages 36–41 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0740818815000109 christopher eaker 2015–03–16 at 11:47 am thank you for the comment, john. we’ll check out that article. pingback : latest library links 13th march 2015 | latest library links pingback : stuff and things: recent work | john, from the library pingback : hack your summer: part one | hls pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » editorial: introductions all around this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct critical optimism: reimagining rural communities through libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 18 apr margo gustina /2 comments critical optimism: reimagining rural communities through libraries in brief: in the absence of governmental agencies and philanthropic support, many rural communities see their local library as the last civic, cultural, or service organization in town. this reality presents obvious challenges to the librarian, and also incredible opportunity. as the primary convener, libraries have the ability to facilitate regeneration in the communities they serve. this article situates rural librarianship within an organizing framework for change and discusses applications of community engagement tools and measures of impact aligned with social wellbeing. by margo gustina introduction rural libraries have the professional obligation, opportunity, and ability to facilitate positive transformational change in the communities they serve. rural libraries in the united states serve communities in decline. after years of population exodus, the remaining demographic is overwhelmingly made up of immobilized individuals and families. as agencies have made service decisions based on population densities, an ever increasing number of communities have been abandoned by human service and civic institutions. in this environment, rural libraries fill the ever widening gap between resources and needs. the rural librarian, to catalyze change and facilitate the realization of community aspirations, will become an organizer who will measure progress in terms of equitable social wellbeing, rather than roi and circulation statistics. reimagining communities in the gap between resources and needs, rural libraries can facilitate the re-imagining of their communities. utilizing organizing frameworks with community engagement tactics, social wellbeing measurements, and regenerative design principles, libraries surviving in service deserts have unprecedented opportunities to realize deep, impactful, just, and long lasting changes in their communities. to be organizers of community action, library people must acknowledge the intersection of privilege and domination that exists along ability, citizenship status, class, culture, gender, language, race, and sexuality lines. the full breadth of community diversity has to be appreciated, and members must hold agency in any change and decision making process. it is only through full inclusion that the full potential of systemic change can be realized. that necessitates the purposeful and active deconstruction of current barriers to access and agency for community members marginalized by current systems of domination. within the interrelated models presented here, libraries can organize and work with their members—the people whom they are to serve. in order for the organization itself to be inclusive and whole, the library organization members need to acknowledge and maintain awareness of the systems of domination they are working against in building equity and justice. for true community potential to be realized, community members themselves must be the designers of their future. existing rural conditions to fully appreciate how the models discussed here apply to rural libraries and the communities they serve, we must understand the conditions of resource poor geographies. rural immobility rural libraries largely serve the immobilized. most of their communities have limited or no governmental or human service infrastructure. libraries of all types, in all places, hold the potential to be both conveners and leaders in constructing the narrative of place. to fully realize that potential within the unique challenges of rural communities, library staff and librarians must actively engage in deconstructing interrelated systems of domination, rather than sidestepping them. it is especially important for rural librarians to mitigate these systems as there are few or no other institutions around to do it. understanding how people can find themselves in their individual conditions by virtue of their birth and circumstances is key to deconstructing our own supports for the dominating forces that lock people out of opportunity. as librarians, we have power within our communities—power that we should use to trust our neighbors in their knowledge of their own experiences and help them build on their own potential. the idea that people make their own bed is a hard one to overcome. a myth of mobility pervades all levels of policy and perception: “i’m going to start explaining to people: when you have an area that just isn’t working like upper new york state, where people are getting very badly hurt, and then you’ll have another area 500 miles away where you can’t get people, i’m going to explain, you can leave. it’s ok.” donald trump (herbert, 2017) individuals and families who cannot migrate for economic opportunity due to physical, emotional, intellectual, familial, cultural, racial, and class immobilizers make up a large portion of residents in rural communities. while the reasons for immobility might be individual and specific, overwhelmingly the most common condition across all rural communities in the united states is financial and resource poverty. resource and financial poverty “you have to be rich to be poor.” (brown, 2009) income inequality is only one part of a larger resource poverty story in rural communities. in much the same way that being financially impoverished is costly, living in resource-poor communities is expensive. over time, philanthropic funding has declined (lindsay, 2017), local tax bases have shrunk, and major commercial investment has vanished. this has meant that access to services in rural areas has dramatically decreased. additionally, access to agency partners has decreased for libraries working to serve the remaining population. people living in rural communities have limited or no governmental and human service infrastructure. the united states postal service controversially cut hours at 13,000 rural offices around the country in 2012, claiming success for rural communities because they didn’t simply close all the offices (liberto, 2012). like many rural services, the postal service no longer provided the return on investment to justify its continued existence. for residents most in need, lack of access to a health services infrastructure can propel them into devastating entrenchment in the poverty cycle. if you are going to have a baby or a heart attack, best to not live in a rural area where widespread hospital closures necessitate fair-weather travel greater than an hour to reach emergency medical assistance (maron, 2017). as researchers concerned with public health have noted, living in rural america stacks the deck against community members. according to the cdc, the frequency of early death was more than 50% greater in rural regions in the united states than in metropolitan communities (moy, et al. 2017). these statistics underline the very real impact a lack of resources has on rural residents. information and access poverty perhaps the most heavily documented and thoroughly researched (within librarianship) feature of rurality is the lack of diverse information access options. much of that research has been specifically focused on the near non-existence of affordable broadband internet access. a study by the american library association’s office of technology policy distills current conditions around technology-based services in rural libraries in the study rural libraries in the united states (real & rose, 2017). while most rural residencies have some sort of television via cable or satellite connections, they often do not have access to reliable cellular networks. as such, the primary internet delivery method in impoverished communities in urban and international rural areas, the smartphone, is unavailable to u.s. rural communities. widespread dead zones in rural areas make this mitigation of information poverty a near impossibility. research drawing out the social and democratic implications of the unique features of information access in rural communities is necessary.1 the limits of advocacy advocacy is the library field’s most commonly employed tool for change at both the state and national levels. empowerment, the key to libraries and communities sharing the work of reimagining the future, is largely missing in current advocacy practice. in no shortcuts: organizing for power in the new gilded age, author jane f. mcalevey describes the agency held by workers within three “options for change”: advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing. the power of the individuals in advocacy models are diminished or non-existent. advocacy is a tool of a few empowered to speak for the many through recognized channels, often defined and regulated by those in power. mcalevey offers an analysis of power that is useful to the work of librarians serving rural communities. table 1: options for change2 advocacy mobilizing organizing theory of power elite primarily elite mass, inclusive, collective strategy litigation, polling, advertising campaigns prioritizing framing, messaging, and representative people, than masses of people recruitment and direct involvement of large masses of people—majorities of constituent population to clarify what is meant by “power,” which can be a hotly contested word, the work of author and activist bell hooks is insightful. throughout multiple works, hooks digs into power, its nature, and its danger. in describing the classroom and her relationship to students, hooks explores the many ways in which power need not be domination. when working within a framework of organizing, librarians, by virtue of their profession, will have more power than some community members. through examining and understanding the nature of the power we hold, we are better equipped to share power with others. we can invite to the table, relinquish control of the floor, and share decision making in ways that empower others to reclaim their agency as shapers of their community future. organizing community members by empowering them to shape the future they themselves want may seem outside the role of the librarian. but our everlasting role is to provide access to information for the service base. the boundary lines of “access” require the deconstruction of all barriers to access that exist for each and every community member. it also pre-supposes that the boundary line of information is all modalities and experiences from which a person gathers information. finally, it states that the boundary of service is the community system, in which is nested smaller organizational systems, and which itself is nested in larger regional ecological, political, cultural, and social systems. full access to information by all community members is too large a job and requires the input of too many people for advocacy by the few to the few to be effective. advocacy does not build local capacity or transformative agency among community members. for rural communities specifically, with their small voting populations and light-weight tax base, politics is a game in which they are played rather than empowered. advocating within that field, while a tool to be employed, is not the tool of deep and sustainable change. listen, convene, contribute when we dismiss advocacy as our primary tool, we need to seek other tools to redesign our communities in a way that engages and reflects the peoples’ actual concerns. community engagement is a tactic the rural librarian as organizer can use for rebuilding local agency and collective action. this work can help reposition libraries as partners in improving the lives of the people they serve. this partnership is realized in the example of red hook public library in red hook, new york. at red hook, library director erica freudenberger and deputy mayor brent kovalchik teamed up to change how they operated. rather than advocating to distant politicians on library issues, speaking on behalf of a community from whom they rarely heard, they engaged directly with their community members, asked them about their aspirations, and facilitated direct community-led actions to move toward a better community. using the tools in the ala-harwood institute for public innovation joint product, libraries transforming communities: turning outward resources, they spent months listening to community members one-on-one and door to door, as well as in large community-wide facilitated conversations. rather than traditional focus groups about services, these conversations revealed aspirations, priorities, paths forward, and trusted partners. one of red hook public library’s actions which resulted from their conversations was facilitating the repair of a stop light. no one from the library shimmied up the light post to fix its timing. the library director and deputy mayor went to the officials they thought could take action on the concerns they heard. those officials said they couldn’t help, that the fix was beyond their power in a different agency. so the library did what libraries are supposed to do: they shared information with the public about who they would need to pressure and the tools they could use. they organized their community around an issue which community members themselves had identified. while the library facilitated, it was community members speaking with their own voices that made change happen. many would not see fixing the timing in a traffic light as a typical library service. in practice, though, it aligns perfectly with the mission of librarians to empower and provide access to opportunities for realizing potential in one’s self and one’s community. it is important that rural libraries not limit themselves to a narrow view of library service, but keep empowerment of all community members as a primary value. the red hook public library’s process is documented on the libraries transforming communities case studies page (ala, 2015). roi isn’t for libraries library organizations are faced with the same considerations and challenging forces with which other service agencies struggle. nonprofits are often encouraged to seek guidance in the for-profit world. it’s tempting to trust the tales of success, efficiency, and innovation we hear from the business sector, especially when we know what each service costs and that we must advocate to power players for every penny. and slowly, insidiously, libraries have allowed our measures of success to be shaped by a system of financial capital, the most glaring of which is our use of return on investment (roi). roi is a valuable model when we communicate libraries are not a “free” service but are comprised of resources for which all community members have a responsibility to contribute towards financially. still, the assertion of roi as a measure of importance in rural libraries should be limited to that conversation because when viewed within a larger context and benchmarked with non-rural communities it becomes problematic. rural communities are defined by their lack of density and population, immediately making roi ratios look less favorable than they would in more densely populated locales. table 2: average cost per open hour per capita by library service population range3 population range average cost per open hour per capita 100-1,000 $0.20914 1,001-2,500 $0.04556 2,501-5,000 $0.02523 5,001-10,000 $0.01793 10,001-20,000 $0.01473 20,001-50,000 $0.01181 50,001-100,000 $0.00738 100,001-250,000 $0.00334 250,001-500,000 $0.00141 500,001-1,000,000 $0.00086 1,000,001+ $0.00038 rural communities are expensive. the low population density and small tax base necessarily means that each hour of library service is exponentially more expensive, on a per capita basis, in smaller population communities (see figure 2, data set 2015 imls.gov). when library organizations focus on roi, they set a trap for themselves: one of dwindling returns in which tough choices have to be made on behalf of the individual investor. these tough choices include closure of library outlets, reduction of services or hours, or freezing staff wages and benefits. libraries are pressured to follow the path of so many organizations before them, which is to abandon services to sparsely populated communities. the roi simply isn’t good enough to justify continuation. roi does not measure the true critical nature of a library’s presence in a service desert. when library organizations abandon roi for measures of social wellbeing, we realign with our purpose and our communities. with this alignment, we can work from a position of potential rather than the continual struggle to mitigate challenges. dimensions of social wellbeing the institute of museum and library services defined the connection between social wellbeing and library services in the 2016 report strengthening networks, sparking change: museums and libraries as community catalysts (norton & dowdell, 2017). in their work, norton and dowdell condense related dimensions of social wellbeing into measurement content areas: table 3: data sources & indicators to measure social wellbeing4 social wellbeing dimension indicators data sources lifelong learning, cultural engagement school metrics; adult educational attainment; voter participation; density of cultural orgs locations nces; census; state ed.; local boards of election; imls economic wellbeing and diversity, housing quality poverty and unemployment rates; housing ownership and cost data; vacancy bureau of labor; census; hud; local court filings health, physical security mortality and disease rates; injuries and violence; violent crime rates census; cdc; state and local public health and health and human service agencies environment parks; vacant lots; environmental assets and risk areas epa; local planning department; parks and recreation department as libraries reflect on progress, data within social wellbeing domains can assist the library and its partners on prioritizing actions. noticeable throughout the data sources is the absence of traditional library measures. when we are contributors to social wellbeing, internal library measures don’t indicate our desired impacts.5 one social wellbeing dimension-based assessment content area is lifelong learning and cultural engagement, which is an area that rural communities specifically have profound challenges in growing. for instance, as noted above, rural communities suffer heavily from a lack of information access. the ripley free library took on this issue directly. in ripley, new york, there was no newspaper. no newspaper seems so commonplace that it hardly seems worth mentioning. but within the unique information landscape of geographically isolated communities, no locally operated print news source is a big problem. libraries are not newspaper publishers. but they are institutions whose purpose is to satisfy the information seeking behaviors of their public. so, in ripley, the library publishes the news. in resource poor geographies, communities don’t have the luxury of redundancy. to this end, the ripley free library uses the about town newsletter to communicate community resources and facilitate sharing of those resources between disparate organizations. this means that the school, which was under threat of closing, is being used by community adults to stay active and fit. about town also directly impacts civic engagement and decision making. in the october 2017 issue, the library reminds readers that lakefront revitalization is going to happen, that there have been community conversations held at the library for the previous months, and leaders want direct input from the community. the library is the home for the planning, the conversations, and now for the direct feedback on direction using paper “worksheets” and a list of possibilities to be explored. the ripley free library owns its role as a convener and includer, not as a lone hero. and so their community is experiencing increased individual empowerment and engagement. building a regenerative future together common to mcalevey’s (2016) organizing framework, the ala’s community engagement tool-kit, and the imls social wellbeing measurement model is a realization of people as multi-dimensional, multi-capability beings who have the capacity for collective decision making. empowering people, of course, means that they might not always work together towards the goals we want them to work towards. social justice, for example, is not an inevitable goal. it is important, then, that empowerment not be just an end goal in itself, but that it be focused on empowering the least heard voices, partnered with an explicit emphasis on human rights, and part of personal and organizational anti-oppression work. many rural communities have been living without robust government or agency services for so long that they have had the opportunity to imagine other solutions. community members and their libraries are gifted with the impossibility of a return to the past. once that realization is fully incorporated into local decision making, the community can become open to the possibility of building something new for themselves—something which engages rather than transacts, creates rather than consumes, shares rather than extracts. it can be more healthy and socially just. a shift to aligning goals with social wellbeing is not about resiliency, or a call to do more with less. it is a call to turn our backs on the traps laid out by systems of domination. it advocates for the end of begging, the end of trying to be people, organizations, and communities we are not. it is an invitation to stop craving and start creating a future of self-sufficiency, regeneration, and wellbeing on a community’s own terms. an asset available to rural communities which many urban communities no longer have is the proximity of poverty to wealth. in very small communities, the geographic and social distance between people of greater and people of lesser means is very small. without the buffer of distance, all community members are able to see the humanity in their neighbors, which affords the opportunity to address inequities and biases. libraries can strengthen their role as organizers to lead their communities in addressing the detrimental impacts of class, race, and other divisions in the local community. in order for this to be effective, the library must facilitate the community’s own aspirations for improving local quality of life through resources within their reach: partnership, bartering, collaboration, and sharing. imagine a geographically-isolated individual with few financial resources who has places to go but cannot afford a car. if the question asked shifts from “how do we buy this person a new car?” to “how do we help this person get where they need to go?” the solutions are more achievable. similarly, a library can help rephrase the question asked from “how do we bring industry back?” to “how do we create with what we have a community that is supportive and provides dignity and engagement for all residents?” giving up on the commercial dream is a necessary part of developing a sustainable local economy and a community that offers a life of dignity, support, contribution, and engagement—a life well-lived. don’t make decisions about me without me libraries can no longer think of themselves as bringers of the light to the downtrodden. that missionarianism empowers nobody. at best, it contributes to outdated perceptions of libraries, and at worst it makes more entrenched systems of domination keeping community members disenfranchised. to make real the promise of access, we have to develop methods of equitable access; and if we are to do that effectively in our geographically isolated rural communities, we must face head on the systems of domination that impede access. the deconstruction of these systems cannot be done for communities by people who have access to power. it must be done in deep partnership and collaboration, led by the people most heavily impacted by the changes happening in the local community. those working and living in rural communities would never turn to their neighbor or themselves and say, “we deserve to be abandoned.” all communities deserve a method of accessing information in all forms. when we see both of those statements as true, the full weight of responsibility of service can be realized by the librarian. further, we see that effective, lasting positive change can only happen in an environment of inclusion, empowerment, and human interest. rural librarianship is the long game. there is no independent award for being a valuable partner to your community in deconstructing systems of domination and building capacity and individual agency. i was recently struck by this quote from beverly gage in her opinion piece “when reform means a process of elimination” (gage, 2018): “reform,” these days, may purport to fix things, but it tends to evade the hard work of defining either a problem or a solution. it posits a self-evident consensus—about a system’s failures, and about what might be preferable—where none exists. as a profession we mistake activity (programming, attendance, etc.) for action. norton and dowdell (2016) posit that we need to shift from prioritizing attribution to contribution in the metrics we use. when we fully appreciate our community as a set of independent actors within a system, and that systems can be impacted by massive action, then we believe that positive, transformative change is possible. the rural librarian, to catalyze change and facilitate the realization of community aspirations, will become an organizer who will measure progress by the prevalence of equitable social wellbeing. acknowledgements thank you to eli guinnee for early draft feedback and multiple confidence boosters. thank you to reviewers deanna dicarlo and bethany messersmith for their thoughtfully considered edits and recommendations. also, thanks to publishing editor amy koester. references american library association (2016 march 15). “case study: red hook (n.y.) public library: one small win creates huge ripples of change”. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/tools/librariestransform/libraries-transforming-communities/case-studies/redhook document id: 2d54ca50-a8eb-eb34-1983-4efb0de63751 brown, d. l. (2009 may 18). the high cost of poverty: why the poor pay more. washington post. retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/ar2009051702053.html gage, b. (2018, february 13). when ‘reform’ means a process of elimination. the new york times magazine. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/magazine/when-reform-means-a-process-of-elimination.html herbert, g. (2017, july 27). president trump says upstate ny residents should leave to find jobs. retrieved from http://www.syracuse.com/state/index.ssf/2017/07/trump_leave_upstate_ny_jobs.html institute of medicine (us) roundtable on environmental health sciences, research, and medicine; merchant j, coussens c, gilbert d, editors. “rebuilding the unity of health and the environment in rural america: workshop summary”. washington (dc): national academies press (us); 2006. 2, the social environment in rural america. available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk56967/ institute of museum and library services (2017) fiscal year 2015 pls data file. retrieved from https://www.imls.gov/research-evaluation/data-collection/public-libraries-survey/explore-pls-data/pls-data liberto, j. (2012, may 9). postal service won’t close rural post offices, but hours cut. retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/09/news/economy/postal_service/index.htm lindsay, d. (2017, october 11). american generosity declines in the 21st century, report suggests. chronicle of philanthropy. retrieved from https://www.philanthropy.com/article/american-generosity-declines/241417 maron, d. f. (2017, february 15). maternal health care is disappearing in rural america. retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/maternal-health-care-is-disappearing-in-rural-america/ mcalevey, jane f. (2016). no shortcuts: organizing for power in the new gilded age. oxford up. moy e, garcia mc, bastian b, et al. leading causes of death in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan areas — united states, 1999–2014. mmwr surveill summ 2017;66(no. ss-1):1–8. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.ss6601a1 norton, m. and dowdell, e. (2017). strengthening networks, sparking change: museums and libraries as community catalysts. institute of museum and library services. https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/publications/documents/community-catalyst-report-january-2017.pdf real, b. and rose, r. n. (2017, july). rural libraries in the united states: recent strides, future possibilities, and meeting community needs. office for information technology policy at the american library association. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/sites/ala.org.advocacy/files/content/pdfs/rural%20paper%2007-31-2017.pdf srivatsav, a. (2016, february 5). map displaying median household income, population density and unemployment rate for usa. arcgis.com https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=ca88e94b0b3949af8bd5bd275cc2a4a5 though outside the scope of this paper, more research is needed to determine the destructive impacts of telecom consolidation of local broadcasters. see: information access in rural communities; mode of information access impacts choices; widespread acquisition of local tv stations by national corporations; disappearance of local papers and print news sources [↩] adapted from mcalevey, 2016, p. 11, table 1.1 [↩] this table is compiled from the institute of museum and library services annual survey of public library statistics for fiscal year 2015. i limited the libraries in the data set to those with populations greater than 100 and staff expenditures greater than $0. the formula for the every remaining library was total annual expenditure divided by total annual hours divided by total lsa population. i averaged the result of these individual results within the population ranges denoted in the table. [↩] adapted from norton & dowdell, 2017, p. 35, table 1 [↩] as a library worker, i’ve heard for more than a decade that public libraries need better metrics to describe their work and impacts. here it is! [↩] advocacy, empowerment, roi, rural libraries, social wellbeing scholarship as an open conversation: utilizing open peer review in information literacy instruction out of context: understanding student learning through museum studies 2 responses margo 2018–05–18 at 2:09 pm i just read this paper: mobilization of rural libraries toward political and economic change in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election by bharat mehra. library quarterly, october 2017. it does an excellent job of getting at footnote 1. find an academic who can get you behind the pay wall on this – it’s worth it! pingback : young 200#6rural communities in the global context: a case for funding small town and rural libraries as an investment in global and local economies. | versesinfo203 this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 10 jan fobazi ettarh /52 comments vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves in brief vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique. i argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary. this article aims to describe the phenomenon and its effects on library philosophies and practices so that they may be recognized and deconstructed. by fobazi ettarh author’s note: i use “librarians” here very broadly. i am not limiting the term to those who have the mlis because vocational awe affects those who work in libraries at every level. i would argue that it often affects staff more than it does librarians due to the sociodemographics of people in staff level positions as well as the job precarity that many staff positions hold. introduction on june 1st, mike newell wrote about chera kowalski and other librarians administering the anti-overdose drug naloxone (more commonly known as narcan) to patrons in and around mcpherson square branch in philadelphia.1 the article went viral and was shared sixteen thousand times. since then, kowalski has saved dozens more lives through the administration of naloxone. more libraries have since followed philadelphia’s lead in narcan training. representative patrick maloney of new york introduced the life-saving librarians act2 giving the secretary of health and human services the authority to award grants for naloxone rescue kits in public libraries. to representative maloney, and many librarians, training librarians to be literal life-savers makes sense because it serves the needs of patrons in our communities, and society as a whole. in addition to this core value of service, democracy is another value many believe libraries bring to society. hillary clinton, at the 2017 ala annual conference in chicago, commended kowalski’s work and also stated, “…you are guardians of the first amendment and the freedom to read and to speak. the work you do is at the heart of an open, inclusive, diverse society [and] i believe that libraries and democracy go hand in hand.”3 on its face, it seems natural that libraries and librarians should celebrate these stories. indeed, these librarians are working to save the democratic values of society as well as going above and beyond to serve the needs of their neighbors and communities. however, when the rhetoric surrounding librarianship borders on vocational and sacred language rather than acknowledging that librarianship is a profession or a discipline, and as an institution, historically and contemporarily flawed, we do ourselves a disservice. “vocational awe” refers to the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique. in this article, i would like to dismantle the idea that librarianship is a sacred calling; thus requiring absolute obedience to a prescribed set of rules and behaviors, regardless of any negative effect on librarians’ own lives. i will do this by demonstrating the ways vocational awe manifests. first, i will describe the institutional mythologies surrounding libraries and librarians. second, i will dismantle these mythologies by demonstrating the role libraries play in institutional oppression. lastly, i will discuss how vocational awe disenfranchises librarians and librarianship. by deconstructing some of these assumptions and values so integrally woven into the field, librarianship can hopefully evolve into a field that supports and advocates for the people who work in libraries as much as it does for physical buildings and resources. part one: the mythos of libraries and librarianship librarianship as vocation the word “vocation” (from the latin vocatio) is defined as “a call, summons,”4 and stemmed from early christian tradition, where it was held that the calling required a monastic life under vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience.5 indeed, from its earliest biblical instantiations, a vocation refers to the way one lives in response to god’s call. although the word has since become used in more secular contexts, my use of the word “vocation” to describe contemporary views of librarianship skews closer to its original religious context, especially concerning the emphasis on poverty and obedience. many librarians refer to the field of librarianship as a calling.6 ,  7 their narratives of receiving the “call” to librarianship often fall right in line with martin luther’s description of vocation as the ways a person serves god and his neighbour through his work in the world. the links between librarianship and religious service are not happenstance. indeed, the first western librarians were members of religious orders,8 serving the dual functions of copying and maintaining book collections. the library as a sacred place the physical space of a library, like its work, has also been seen as a sacred space. one could argue that it is treated like a sanctuary, both in its original meaning (keeper of sacred things and people), and in its more contemporary meaning as a shelter or refuge. again, the original libraries were actual monasteries, with small collections of books stuffed in choir lofts, niches, and roofs.9 the carrels still prevalent in many libraries today are direct descendants of these religious places. the word “carrel” originally meant “working niche or alcove” and referred to a monastery cloister area where monks would read and write. reflecting their conjoined history, churches and libraries had similar architectural structures. these buildings were built to inspire awe or grandeur,10 ,  11 and their materials meant to be treated with care. even now the stereotypical library is often portrayed as a grandiose and silent space where people can be guided to find answers. the bodleian library, one of the oldest and largest libraries in europe, still requires those who wish to use the library to swear an oath to protect the library: “i hereby undertake not to remove from the library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the library; and i promise to obey all rules of the library.” although contemporary architectural designs of libraries may not evoke the same feelings of awe they once did, libraries continue to operate as sanctuaries in the extended definition as a place of safety. many libraries open their spaces to the disadvantaged and displaced populations in the community such as the homeless or the mentally ill. in the protests and civil unrest following the shooting death of unarmed black teenager michael brown in ferguson, missouri, the ferguson municipal public library (fmpl) became a makeshift school for children in the community. when the story went viral, there was an outpouring of books, supplies, and lunches for the children. the hashtag #whatlibrariesdo became a call to action and resulted in a huge spike in paypal donations to fmpl. in addition, the sign on the library’s door stated, “during difficult times, the library is a quiet oasis where we can catch our breath, learn, and think about what to do next.” in this way, the library becomes a sanctuary threefold, a place where one can listen to the “still, small, voice,”12 a shelter for displaced populations, and a source of humanitarian aid. since ferguson, similar responses have occurred in libraries after major events in other areas such as charlottesville, virginia. and, in the current sociopolitical climate, much of the discourse surrounding these libraries center them as “safe spaces.” librarians as priests and saviors if libraries are sacred spaces, then it stands to reason that its workers are priests. as detailed above, the earliest librarians were also priests and viewed their work as a service to god and their fellow man. out of five hundred librarians surveyed, ninety-five percent said the service orientation of the profession motivated them to become librarians.13 another study found that the satisfaction derived by serving people is what new librarians thrive on.14 similarly, many christians describe their religious faith as “serving god,” and to do so requires a life spent in service. christians often reference mark 10:45 to describe the gravity of a call to service: “for even the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” considering their conjoined history, it should come as no surprise that librarians, just like monks and priests, are often imagined as nobly impoverished as they work selflessly for the community and god’s sake. one study of seasoned librarians noted that, “surprisingly, for a profession as notoriously underpaid as librarianship, not a single respondent mentioned salary” as a negative feature of the profession.15 as with a spiritual “calling,” the rewards for such service cannot be monetary compensation, but instead spiritual absolution through doing good works for communities and society. if librarians are priests then their primary job duty is to educate and to save. biven-tatums notes that public libraries “began as instruments of enlightenment, hoping to spread knowledge and culture broadly to the people.”16 the assumption within librarianship is that libraries provide the essential function of creating an educated, enlightened populace, which in turn brings about a better society. using that logic, librarians who do good work are those who provide culture and enlightenment to their communities. saint lawrence, the catholic church’s official saint of librarians and archivists, is revered for being dangled over a charcoal fire rather than surrender the church archives. today, librarians continue to venerate contemporary “saints” of librarianship. one example is the “connecticut four,” four librarians who fought a government gag order when fbi agents demanded library records under the patriot act.17 and now kowalski joins the ranks as a library “saint” through the literal saving of lives with naloxone. all of these librarians set the expectation that the fulfillment of job duties requires sacrifice (whether that sacrifice is government intimidation or hot coals), and only through such dramatic sacrifice can librarians accomplish something “bigger than themselves.” part two: locating the library in institutional oppression18 it is no accident that librarianship is dominated by white women.19 not only were white woman assumed to have the innate characteristics necessary to be effective library workers due to their true womanhood,20 characteristics which include missionary-mindedness, servility, and altruism and spiritual superiority and piety, but libraries have continually been “complicit in the production and maintenance of white privilege.”21 these white women librarians in public libraries during the turn-of-the-century u.s. participated in selective immigrant assimilation and americanization programs, projects “whose purpose was to inculcate european ethnics into whiteness”22 librarianship, like the criminal justice system and the government, is an institution. and like other institutions, librarianship plays a role in creating and sustaining hegemonic values, as well as contributing to white supremacy culture. james and okun define white supremacy culture as the ways that organizations and individuals normalize, enact, and reinforce white supremacy.23 cultural representations of libraries as places of freedoms (like freedom of access and intellectual freedom), education, and other democratic values do not elide libraries’ white supremacy culture with its built-in disparity and oppression. in fact, each value on which librarianship prides itself is inequitably distributed amongst society. freedom of access is arguably the most core value of librarianship. it runs throughout the entire library bill of rights and is usually defined as the idea that all information resources provided by the library should be distributed equally, and be equitably accessible to all library users. there have been, however, vast exceptions to this ideal. quantitatively, the most significant of these exceptions was the exclusion of millions of african americans from public libraries in the american south during the years before the civil rights movement.24 white response to desegregation efforts in public libraries varied. while some libraries quietly and voluntarily integrated, other libraries enforced “stand-up integration,” removing all of the tables and chairs from the building to minimize the interaction of the races in reading areas, or shut down the branch entirely. the result of these segregationist practices in libraries was a massive form of censorship, and this history demonstrates that access to materials is often implicated in larger societal systems of (in)equality. this should then hold true for other library values as well. protecting user privacy and confidentiality is necessary for intellectual freedom, and both are considered core values in librarianship.25 as mentioned earlier, when the patriot act passed in 2001, many librarians fought against handing over patron data, and there is a great deal of history of librarian activism around intellectual freedom. for example, the ala’s office for intellectual freedom coordinates the profession’s resistance efforts through the freedom to read foundation. there are also multiple roundtables and committees focused on local, state, national,26 and international conflicts over intellectual freedom. however, similarly to freedom of access, there have been exceptions. and, as libraries grapple with justifying their existence, many have turned to gathering large amounts of patron data in order to demonstrate worth. further, while often resisting government intrusions, libraries also commonly operate as an arm of the state. for example, lexis-nexis, a library vendor used in many libraries, is participating in a project to assist in building ice’s extreme vetting surveillance system.27 this system would most likely gather data from public use computers and webpages in public, academic, and private libraries across the nation, and determine and evaluate one’s probability of becoming a positively contributing member of society, or whether they intend to commit criminal or terrorist acts after entering the united states. although the erosion of privacy is not limited to libraries, other fields do not claim to hold the information needs and inquiries of their constituents quite as dearly. part three: martyrdom is not a long-lasting career up until this point, it might seem like i believe librarians should not take pride in their very important work. or that librarians who love their work and have a passion for library values possess some inherent flaw. this is not my intent. rather, i challenge the notion that many have taken as axiomatic that libraries are inherently good and democratic, and that librarians, by virtue of working in a library, are responsible for this “good” work. this sets up an expectation that any failure of libraries is largely the fault of individuals failing to live up to the ideals of the profession, rather than understanding that the library as an institution is fundamentally flawed. below, i mention the primary ways vocational awe negatively impacts librarians. awe we’ve now uncovered the roots of vocation within librarianship and its allusions to religiosity and the sacred. the vocational metaphor helps us understand cause. however, it is important not to forget awe, which represents the effect. merriam-webster defines awe as “an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred.”28 as mentioned earlier, libraries were created with the same architectural design as churches in order to elicit religious awe. awe is not a comforting feeling, but a fearful and overwhelming one. one of its earliest uses was within the hindu epic mahabarata. the god krishna inspired awe in the protagonist arjuna and commanded him: “do works for me, make me your highest goal, be loyal-in-love to me, cut all [other] attachments…”29 a more modern, secular example of awe is the military doctrine “shock and awe,” which is characterized as rapid dominance that relies on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy’s perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight. in both cases, awe is used as a method of eliciting obedience from people in the presence of something bigger than themselves. as part of vocational awe in libraries, awe manifests in response to the library as both a place and an institution. because the sacred duties of freedom, information, and service are so momentous, the library worker is easily paralyzed. in the face of grand missions of literacy and freedom, advocating for your full lunch break feels petty. and tasked with the responsibility of sustaining democracy and intellectual freedom, taking a mental health day feels shameful. awe is easily weaponized against the worker, allowing anyone to deploy a vocational purity test in which the worker can be accused of not being devout or passionate enough to serve without complaint. burnout with the expansion of job duties, and expectation of “whole-self” librarianship, it is no surprise that burnout is a common phenomenon within libraries. harwell defines burnout as the prolonged exposure to workplace stressors that often drain an employee’s vitality and enthusiasm, and often leads to less engagement and productivity.30 and being overworked is not the sole cause of burnout. in a study of academic librarians,31 study participants said they are forced to regulate their emotions in their work and that they often feel an incongruity between the emotions they have to show and what they really feel. librarians who interact with the public on a regular basis must interact with uncooperative and unwilling patrons, patrons who want preferential treatment, and so on. in the memorable phrasing of nancy fried foster, patrons often approach the reference desk looking for a “mommy librarian,” someone who can offer emotional support, reassurance, sociality, answers, and interventions at points of pain or need.”32 the gendered expectations of a library profession that is majority female can certainly exacerbate the gendered expectations placed upon interactions with patrons. ironically, institutional response to burnout is the output of more “love and passion,” through the vocational impulses noted earlier and a championing of techniques like mindfulness and “whole-person” librarianship. under-compensation “one doesn’t go into librarianship for the money” is a common refrain amongst library workers, and the lack of compensation for library work is not a recent phenomenon. a 1929 report summarized that “improvement in these conditions has not yet reached a point where librarianship may be said to receive proper recognition and compensation.” and in the 2017 library journal‘s placements and salaries survey, graduates overwhelmingly pointed to underemployment issues as a source of unhappiness, including low wages; lack of benefits; having to settle for part-time, temporary, or nonprofessional positions; or having to piece together two or three part-time positions to support themselves. librarians’ salaries continue to remain lower than those for comparable jobs in professions requiring similar qualifications and skills. statistics like these point to the very secular realities of librarians. librarianship is a job, often paid hourly. it’s not even everyone’s primary job. it has sick time, and vacation–or should–and imagining these facts aren’t important because of the importance of the library’s mission only serves the institution itself. through its enforcement of awe through the promotion of dramatic and heroic narratives, the institution gains free, or reduced price, labor. through vocational mythologies that reinforce themes of sacrifice and struggle, librarianship sustains itself through the labor of librarians who only reap the immaterial benefits of having “done good work.” job creep job creep refers to the “slow and subtle expansion of job duties” which is not recognized by supervisors or the organization.33 as this article argues, librarians are often expected to place the profession and their job duties before their personal interests. and with such expectations, job creep can become a common phenomenon. the problem with job creep manifests in multiple ways. one, what employees originally did voluntarily is no longer considered “extra” but instead is simply viewed as in-role job performance, which leads to more and more responsibilities and less time in which to accomplish them. employees who cannot do more than what is in the job description, perhaps for personal or health reasons, are consequently seen as not doing even the minimum, and management may come to believe that workers are not committed to the organization, or its mission, if they don’t do extra tasks. returning to chera kowalski and all of the other librarians currently training to administer, and already administering, anti-overdose medication, this expectation has gone so far as to create a precedent for representative maloney to introduce the life-saving librarians act. no longer are these trainings voluntary “extra” professional development; it will likely soon become part of the expected responsibilities of librarians across the country. adding duties like life-or-death medical interventions to already overstrained job requirements is an extreme but very real example of job creep. and with the upholding of librarianship as purely service-oriented and self-sacrificing, what is a librarian to do who may not feel equipped to intervene as a first responder? or a librarian who is dedicated to, say, a library value of children’s literacy or freedom of information, but because of past traumas, cannot cope with regular exposure to loss of life on the job? librarianship as a religious calling would answer that such a librarian has failed in her duties and demonstrated a lack of purity required of the truly devout. and without the proper training and institutional support that first responders, social workers, and other clinicians have, librarians, through such job creep, are being asked to do increasingly dangerous emotional and physical labor without the tools and support provided to other professions traditionally tasked with these duties. as newspapers, clinton, and librarians around the nation celebrate kowlaski and others like her, we must ask if those voices will chime in to also demand the therapy and medical services typically needed for ptsd and other common ailments of those working in such severe conditions. do we expect those benefits to manifest, or librarians to again quietly suffer the consequences of their holy calling, saving society at the expense of their own emotional well-being? diversity by the very nature of librarianship being an institution, it privileges those who fall within the status quo. therefore librarians who do exist outside librarianship’s center can often more clearly see the disparities between the espoused values and the reality of library work. but because vocational awe refuses to acknowledge the library as a flawed institution, when people of color and other marginalized librarians speak out, their accounts are often discounted or erased. recently, lesley williams of evanston, illinois, made headlines for being fired from her library due to comments (on her personal social media accounts), illustrating the hypocritical actions of her library in regards to the lack of equitable access to information. although she was advocating for the core library value of equitable access, similar to that of the “connecticut four,” her actions were regarded as unprofessional. as i mentioned earlier, vocational awe ties into the phenomena of job creep and undercompensation in librarianship due to the professional norms of service-oriented and self-sacrificing workplaces. but creating professional norms around self-sacrifice and underpay self-selects those who can become librarians. if the expectation built into entry-level library jobs includes experience, often voluntary, in a library, then there are class barriers built into the profession. those who are unable to work for free due to financial instability are then forced to either take out loans to cover expenses accrued or switch careers entirely. librarians with a lot of family responsibilities are unable to work long nights and weekends. librarians with disabilities are unable to make librarianship a whole-self career. conclusions considering the conjoined history of librarianship and faith, it is not surprising that a lot of the discourse surrounding librarians and their job duties carries a lot of religious undertones. through the language of vocational awe, libraries have been placed as a higher authority and the work in service of libraries as a sacred duty. vocational awe has developed along with librarianship from saint lawrence to chera kowalski. it is so saturated within librarianship that people like nancy kalikow maxwell can write a book, sacred stacks: the higher purpose of libraries and librarianship, not only detailing connections between librarianship and faith, but concluding the book by advising librarians to nurture that religious image conferred upon them. the ideals of librarianship are not ignoble, and having an emotional attachment to the work one does is not negative in itself, and is often a valued goal in most careers. what i have tried to do with this article is illustrate that history and expose the problematic underpinnings. because vocational awe is so endemic and connected to so many aspects of librarianship, the term gives the field a way to name and expose these things that are so amorphous that they can be explained or guilted away, much like microaggressions. and, through the power of naming, can hopefully provide a shield librarians can use to protect themselves. the problem with vocational awe is the efficacy of one’s work is directly tied to their amount of passion (or lack thereof), rather than fulfillment of core job duties. if the language around being a good librarian is directly tied to struggle, sacrifice, and obedience, then the more one struggles for their work, the “holier” that work (and institution) becomes. thus, it will become less likely that people will feel empowered, or even able, to fight for a healthier workspace. a healthy workplace is one where working around the clock is not seen as a requirement, and where one is sufficiently compensated for the work done, not a workplace where “the worker [is] taken for granted as a cog in the machinery.”34 libraries are just buildings. it is the people who do the work. and we need to treat these people well. you can’t eat on passion. you can’t pay rent on passion. passion, devotion, and awe are not sustainable sources of income. the story of saint lawrence may be a noble one, but martyrdom is not a long-lasting career. and if all librarians follow in his footsteps, then librarianship will cease to exist. you might save a life when wandering outside for lunch, but you deserve the emotional support you’ll no doubt need as a result of that traumatic event. you may impress your supervisor by working late, but will that supervisor come to expect that you continually neglect your own family’s needs in the service of library patrons? the library’s purpose may be to serve, but is that purpose so holy when it fails to serve those who work within its walls every day? we need to continue asking these questions, demanding answers, and stop using vocational awe as the only way to be a librarian. thanks and acknowledgments i’m very much indebted to the amazing and knowledgeable editors at in the library with the lead pipe, and in particular to sofia leung and nina de jesus for diligently removing all traces of footnote inconsistency, tense changes, and rogue commas, as well as helping me create the best possible version of this article. i would also like to thank amy koester for keeping us all on track when necessary, and also being incredibly flexible when life inevitably got in the way. finally, i would like to thank my partner for providing copious support as she listened to me whine and provided a steady stress writing diet of salt and vinegar pringles and uncrustables. any mistakes left in this document are most definitely my own. works cited “core values of librarianship of the american library association.”accessed december 4, 2017. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/corevalues anonymous. “who would be a librarian now? you know what, i’ll have a go.” the guardian. march, 2016. biddle, sam and woodman, spencer. “these are the technology firms lining up to build trump’s ”extreme vetting program.'” the intercept. august 7 2017. bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment. library juice press, 2012. clinton, rodham hilary. “closing general session” (speech, chicago, illinois, june 27, 2017), american library association annual conference, https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/hrc-transcript.pdf de jesus, nina. locating the library in institutional oppression. in the library with the lead pipe. september 24, 2014. emmelhainz, celia, seale, maura, and erin pappas. “behavioral expectations for the mommy librarian: the successful reference transaction as emotional labor.” the feminist reference desk: concepts, critiques and conversations, edited by maria t. accardi, 27-45. library juice press: sacramento, ca, 2017. escholarship.org/uc/item/2mq851m0 emmet, dorothy. “vocation.” journal of medical ethics 4, no. 3:(1978): 146-147. easwaran, eknath. the bhagavad gita. tomales: nilgiri press, 2009. foster, nancy fried. “the mommy model of service.” in studying students: the undergraduate research project at the university of rochester, edited by nancy fried foster and susan gibbons, 72-78. chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2007. frankenberg, r. white women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1993. garrison, d. the tender technicians: the feminization of public librarianship, 1876– 1905. journal of social history, (1972). 6 no. 2, 131–159. garrison, d. apostles of culture: the public librarian and american society, 1876–1920. madison: university of wisconsin press, 1979. graham, patterson toby. a right to read : segregation and civil rights in alabama’s public libraries, 1900-1965. tuscaloosa: university of alabama press, 2002. harwell, kevin. “burnout strategies for librarians.” journal of business & finance librarianship 13, no. 3 (2008): 379-90. hildenbrand, s. reclaiming the american library past: writing the women in. norwood, nj: ablex, 1996. houdyshell, mara, patricia a. robles, and hua yi. “what were you thinking: if you could choose librarianship again, would you?” information outlook, july 3, 1999, 19– 23. hunter, gregory. developing and maintaining practical archives. new york: neal schuman, 1997. inklebarger, timothy. 2014. “ferguson’s safe haven.” american libraries 45, no. 11/12: 17-18. jacobsen, teresa l. “class of 1988.” library journal, july 12, 2004, 38– 41. jones, kenneth, and okun, tema. dismantling racism: a workbook for social change groups, changework, 2001 http://www.cwsworkshop.org/parc_site_b/dr-culture.html julien, heidi, and shelagh genuis. “emotional labour in librarians’ instructional work.” journal of documentation 65, no. 6 (2009): 926-37. kaser, david. the evolution of the american academic library building. lanham, md: scarecrow press, 1997. keltner, d, and haidt, j. “approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion.” cognition and emotion 17, no. 2 (2003): 297–314. linden, m., i. salo, and a. jansson. “organizational stressors and burnout in public librarians.” journal of librarianship and information science, 2016. maxwell, nancy kalikow. sacred stacks: the higher purpose of libraries and librarianship. chicago: american library association, 2006. mukherjee, a. k. librarianship: its philosophy and history. asia publishing house, 1966. newell, mike. “for these philly librarians, drug tourists and overdose drills are part of the job” the inquirer (philadelphia, pa), june 1, 2017. newhouse, ria, and april spisak. “fixing the first job.” library journal, aug. 2004, 44– 46. pawley, christine, and robbins, louise s. libraries and the reading public in twentieth-century america. print culture history in modern america. madison, wi: u of wisconsin p, 2013. peet, lisa. “ferguson library: a community’s refuge: library hosts children, teachers during school closing.” library journal, january 1, 2015. pevsner, nikolaus. a history of building types. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1976. pitcavage, mark. “with hate in their hearts: the state of white supremacy in the united states” last modified july 2015. https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/state-of-white-supremacy rosen, ellen. improving public sector productivity: concepts and practice. thousand oaks, ca, usa: sage publications, 1993. rubin, richard e. foundations of library and information science. neal-schuman publishers, inc, 2010. scholes, jefferey. “vocation.” religion compass, 4 (2010): 211–220. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2010.00215.x schlesselman-tarango, gina. “the legacy of lady bountiful: white women in the library.” library trends, (2016) 667–86. retrieved from: http://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/library-publications/34. van dyne, and ellis, “job creep: a reactance theory perspective on organizational citizenship behavior as overfulfillment of obligations,” in the employment relationship: examining psychological and contextual perspectives, edited by phillip appleman new york : oxford university press. mike newell. “for these philly librarians, drug tourists and overdose drills are part of the job” the inquirer (philadelphia, pa), june 1, 2017. [↩] life-saving librarians act, h.r.4259 (2017-2018). [↩] hillary rodham clinton., “closing general session” (speech, chicago, illinois, june 27, 2017), american library association annual conference, https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/hrc-transcript.pdf [↩] jeffrey scholes. “vocation.” religion compass, 4 (2010): 211–220. [↩] dorothy emmet. “vocation.” journal of medical ethics, 4, no. 3:(1978): 146-147. [↩] anonymous. “who would be a librarian now? you know what, i’ll have a go.” the guardian. march, 2016. [↩] jamie baker. librarianship as calling. the ginger (law) librarian. march, 6. [↩] richard e. rubin. foundations of library and information science. neal-schuman publishers, inc. (2010) p. 36. [↩] a. k. mukherjee. librarianship: its philosophy and history. asia publishing house (1966) p. 88. [↩] nikolaus pevsner. a history of building types. (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1976) p. 98. [↩] david kaser. the evolution of the american academic library building. (lanham, md: scarecrow press, 1997) p. 5-16, 47-60. [↩] 1 kings 19:11-13, kjv. [↩] mara, houdyshell, patricia a. robles, and hua yi. “what were you thinking: if you could choose librarianship again, would you?” information outlook, july 3, 1999, 19– 23. [↩] ria newhouse and april spisak. “fixing the first job.” library journal, aug. 2004, 44– 46. [↩] teresa l. jacobsen “class of 1988.” library journal, july 12, 2004, 38–41. [↩] wayne bivens-tatum. libraries and the enlightenment. library juice press, 2012. [↩] doe v. gonzalez, 386 f. supp. 2d 66 (d.conn. 2005). [↩] nina de jesus. locating the library in institutional oppression. in the library with the lead pipe. september 24, 2014. [↩] gina schlesselman-tarango. “the legacy of lady bountiful: white women in the library.” library trends, (2016) 667–86. retrieved from: http://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/library-publications/34. [↩] see garrison, 1972, 1979; hildenbrand, 1996. [↩] todd honma. trippin’ over the color line: the invisibility of race in library and information studies. interactions: ucla journal of education and information studies, (2005)1 no.2, 1–26. retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nj0w1mp [↩] r. frankenberg. white women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1993. [↩] kenneth jones and tema okun. dismantling racism: a workbook for social change groups. changework, 2001 http://www.cwsworkshop.org/parc_site_b/dr-culture.html [↩] toby patterson graham. a right to read : segregation and civil rights in alabama’s public libraries, 1900-1965. (tuscaloosa: university of alabama press, 2002). [↩] “core values of librarianship of the american library association.”accessed december 4, 2017. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/corevalues [↩] e.g. ala intellectual freedom committee (ifc),intellectual freedom round table (ifrt), freedom to read foundation (ftrf), etc. [↩] sam biddle and spencer woodman. “these are the technology firms lining up to build trump’s ”extreme vetting program.'”the intercept. august 7 2017. [↩] merriam-webster’s collegiate dictionary. 11th ed. springfield, ma: merriam-webster, 2003. continually updated at https://www.merriam-webster.com/. [↩] eknath easwaran. the bhagavad gita. tomales: nilgiri press, 2009. [↩] kevin harwell. “burnout strategies for librarians.” journal of business & finance librarianship 13, no. 3 (2008): 379-90. [↩] julien, heidi, and shelagh genuis. “emotional labour in librarians’ instructional work.” journal of documentation 65, no. 6 (2009): 926-37. [↩] emmelhainz, celia, seale, maura, and erin pappas. “behavioral expectations for the mommy librarian: the successful reference transaction as emotional labor.” the feminist reference desk: concepts, critiques and conversations, edited by maria t. accardi, 27-45. library juice press: sacramento, ca, 2017. escholarship.org/uc/item/2mq851m0 [↩] van dyne, and ellis, “job creep: a reactance theory perspective on organizational citizenship behavior as overfulfillment of obligations,” in the employment relationship: examining psychological and contextual perspectives ed. phillip appleman (new york : oxford university press). [↩] ellen rosen. improving public sector productivity: concepts and practice, (thousand oaks, ca, usa: sage publications, 1993) p. 139. [↩] burnout, diversity, job creep, librarianship, under-compensation, vocational awe bringing student voices into the university archives:
 a student organization documentation initiative case study spotlight on digital government information preservation: examining the context, outcomes, limitations, and successes of the datarefuge movement 52 responses max macias 2018–01–10 at 9:59 am rad! your writing is so smart and not all academically boring! thank you! pingback : my vocational awe article is out! – wtf is a radical librarian, anyway? lizzybell 2018–01–10 at 2:56 pm this is really what i needed to read today. thank you for writing what i have struggled with mentally and emotionally for the last few months in particular. correction 2018–01–11 at 1:41 pm patrick maloney of new york is not a senator. amy koester 2018–01–16 at 10:57 am thanks for this correction; the article has been updated. meredith farkas 2018–01–11 at 11:11 pm this is a terrific article! thank you for it. having previously come from social work which also has a lot of image-related baggage (you’re either a selfless martyr giving your whole life to others or you’re a soulless bureaucrat who takes people’s kids), i’ve seen how people can get trapped by that and experience burnout because they either don’t fit or are trying too hard to live up to an unrealistic image of their profession. i feel like we are in such a polarized society now that people immediately jump to the conclusion that if you critique something you’re a hater. if you recognize institutional racism and oppression in librarianship, you must think all white librarians are racists. that’s b.s. to me, seeing one’s work or profession through a critical lens is an act of love, and that is what you did here. i believe that we can care our work without deifying it. we can do good work without being martyrs and losing sight of own needs. i really enjoy my job, but, at the end of the day, it’s just a job — not a sacred mission. i teach lis students and i’ve been really happy to see them in recent years talking more and more about labor issues in our profession whereas when i was in school 14 years ago, the idea of considering our needs was unthinkable. hopefully we’re moving to a more critical and aware and less awe-struck vision of what we do. i think our profession will be better for it. anon 2018–01–14 at 2:42 am ” if you recognize institutional racism and oppression in librarianship, you must think all white librarians are racists. that’s b.s.” can you elaborate on this comment? thank you. meredith 2018–01–17 at 12:36 pm i think some people respond to critiques of whiteness in librarianship as if they are being accused specifically of being racists and shut down. dialogue about these things can’t happen unless we let go of our personal sensitivity and recognize that we’re looking at institutional patterns of racism that, in many cases, are unrecognized and unintentional on the part of the librarians. we can’t have these conversations if white people always focus on themselves and not the big picture and how that big picture (whether intentionally or not) oppresses others. too often, people respond to critiques of whiteness in american institutions by saying that the author must think all librarians are racists. they are missing the point. robin rader 2018–01–23 at 7:42 pm you might be interested in roithmayr, r. (2014). reproducing racism: how everyday choices lock in white advantage. new york, ny: new york university press. pingback : vocational awe and professional identity | acrlog alyn 2018–01–12 at 4:18 pm i was so happy when, post-lis, i came across the phrase “vocational awe.” it perfectly captures a sense of disillusionment i experienced entering the field and discovering that the idealized vision of libraries i learned about just didn’t exist. while we did cover lots of issues surrounding equity and freedom of access (i.e. convos about digital divide, looking at library policies and who they protected/targeted), i’m pretty ashamed that we spent very little time talking about the history of segregation and libraries. i’ve never actually felt any inclination toward martyrdom. part of it’s personality, and part of it’s growing up with a mom who’s a part-time librarian and full-time martyr. even with that disinclination, i still feel the pressure to try to live up to that whole-self librarianship. i see librarians post about skipping lunch or using their days off to prep for programs, and i feel like i am somehow underperforming by not “going above and beyond” or “giving it my all.” this feeling is exacerbated somehow by my own sense of gender identity, particularly considering that i’m a children’s librarian. for the most part i’m a cis woman, though i occasionally experience some degree of disconnect with that identity (but not enough identify as nonbinary or trans*). for whatever reason, i’m pretty good at maintating work-life boundaries. but i know how many womyn struggle with that, which makes me feel both guilty and lacking somehow – as though my inability to put the needs of the children before my own, even during off-the-job time, makes me not nurturing/caring enough for either my profession or my gender. pingback : an introduction! – pursuing it with eager feet cj 2018–01–16 at 3:22 pm vocational awe. this is a new term to me, but it’s a great way to explain the perpetually (earnest & well-meaning but) patronizing “oh, you’re a teacher! thank you so much for all the work you do; i could never do that!” comments that i’ve always wanted to respond to with “hmmm, yeah. want to really show your gratitude? please pay me enough to pay my mortgage and my student loans.” anon 2018–01–16 at 5:06 pm very interesting article! i believe lesley williams’ name is misspelled, however. amy koester 2018–01–16 at 5:10 pm thanks for this correction; the article has been updated. ruth tillman 2018–01–17 at 2:54 pm i wanted to say that i really appreciate this concept of vocational awe and i’ve been reflecting on how it applied to be as a librarian who worked at nasa, another place which is heavily tied to vocational awe. i was a brand new librarian! i was at nasa! people always responded “nasa!” i had found so much of their work engaging and inspiring for so many years. and there were days that i could get fully caught up in the best of that awe. other times, it was a job. and then… there were times it was really bad. managing decisions by the contracting company i actually worked for which i considered harmful. certain patrons’ behavior driving us to develop policies of secrecy to avoid…incidents. harmful decisions by people in the admin over on the nasa side. physical harm caused to a coworker which occurred because of some of those decisions and which caused me and others emotional harm because a) we cared for her and her injury was potentially life-threatening (she recovered fairly quickly, but it was scary at first) and b) we realized our own safety did not matter to the people in charge. i was a librarian. i was at nasa. i realize now that part of what i was suffering from was my own vocational awe trying to navigate the world as a new librarian and part was other people’s as their expectations of what i was experiencing differed so greatly from my experience and… i remember the first time a librarian friend said “hey pal, how’s it going at nasa?!” and i didn’t lie. i told him i threw up on my walk to work and i cried at night and i wanted to find a new job and… his face… i mean he was completely supportive. but it was like telling a kid santa wasn’t real. the length of this comment has almost made me want to turn it into more of a blog post responding and reflecting but, see, here’s where the vocational awe thing comes in again. i feel the need to explore this and reflect, but i’m also afraid that if it becomes a standalone blogpost and not a comment on your article, especially with your article as context… more people will feel that same sadness my friend felt, that i’ll be perceived as disloyal to profession/mission, that people’s response to this image of a librarian at nasa will lead them to turn their disappointment into anger. these were all things i feared at the time and i guess…years later… i still do. pingback : new(ish) year, new(ish) editor! | snap section kathy 2018–01–18 at 2:04 pm not to be pedantic, but st. lawrence is the patron saint of archivists, and st. jerome (or st. catherine) the patron saint(s) of librarians. also, st. lawrence was burned on the grill for not turning over the ‘treasure’ of the church. secular authorities thought of gold and silver; st. lawrence brought in the poor and destitute. veronica 2019–01–08 at 9:32 pm i was looking around the internet to see if saint lawrence really was the patron saint of librarians and archivists, and the only site that listed us as part of his patronage was wikipedia. other sites mentioned saint jerome and catherine of alexandria. i even used my library’s databases and encyclopedia, and i was becoming very confused on where she got this tidbit of information – which she references multiple times. maybe there’s a piece of literature out there that i missed. pingback : application essays and congruence – gavia libraria pingback : on the mend: falling into and out of overwork | acrlog alex falck 2018–01–20 at 5:02 pm thank you for articulating this! there’s so much to talk about, for instance, the interplay of vocational awe and neoliberalism in shrinking library budgets. i hope you’ll consider writing more about this topic. pingback : shoutout: fobazi ettarh, mls – the ink on the page matt gullett 2018–01–23 at 12:47 pm thank you for articulating a sometimes subtle, yet harmful element of our professional bias in the idea/ideal of vocational awe. to offer such a thoughtful critique gives space and pause to reflect and realize just how much a lack of critique can actually harm our professional stance. as an academic librarian and a practicing psychotherapist, i notice how our profession, as you have revealed as well, struggles greatly with boundaries, i.e., mission creep, and self-care, i.e., having a life outside of one’s work. robin rader 2018–01–23 at 8:21 pm here’s another angle on the pitfalls inherent in vocational awe. “we must learn to honor excellence in every socially acceptable human activity, however humble the activity, and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity. an excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. the society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” gardner, j. w. (1984). excellence: can we be equal and excellent too? (rev. ed.). new york: norton. lincoln cushing 2018–01–24 at 12:28 pm thanks, it’s an important subject and i loved the naming of “vocational awe.” i expressed a similar analysis when i reviewed a 2002 book vandals in the stacks attacking an author – a non-librarian! – who dared critique some practices of the library and archive professions. karl 2018–01–24 at 12:52 pm i think this is an incredibly important piece, but i encourage taking it in a different direction. i work at perhaps the apex of vocational awe in librarianship: i am a theological librarian. that’s right, my religious identity is completely wrapped up with my professional role in all sorts of interesting ways. as a cis-hetero-white male, you might argue that i suffer less from that complex than others might. yet despite my privileged status, i still struggle with very human realities and have experienced various work settings both inside and outside of libraries. in my experience, completely “owning” the vocational awe can actually be transformative. you describe vocational awe as the set of attitudes that “result in beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique.” i think the presumption that institutions that are good and sacred are beyond critique is where this article runs into problems. in my own religious tradition, christianity, the goodness and sacredness of a group of people is precisely what allows it to come in for critique. in ancient israel, god held god’s people to a higher standard because they were a chosen people. jesus held his followers to an even higher standard of critique than what was common in his jewish society. he called religious people “whitened sepulchres.” because i work for a library at an institution that takes the christian scriptures and jesus seriously, we have a kind of built-in critical apparatus. we have to “do better” because we have a sacred calling. this includes issues of economics and work-life balance. i don’t make a ton of money at my job, but i am able to support my family, and my institution cares about making sure the spread between the highest-paid and lowest-paid workers is not that great. my institution also cares about breaks, sick and vacation time, time for family and church involvement and recreation, etc. these are not merely calculated approaches to retaining talent, but a kind of sacred obligation. i am very conscious of ways my organization continues to fall short. i do a lot of “job creep” (but on the flip side, folks whose job is not in the library care about it too and help me out). i too go home tired at the end of the day, and sometimes the bills feel impossible. still, i would not trade my “sacred” theological library for a “secular” one where i need to be constantly available just to tread water and the top dog makes 10x as much as the lowest paid worker. i would encourage librarians in libraries of all sorts to fully embrace the awe connected to our vocation, and to make the logical connection that the sacredness of what we do requires valuing and protecting the lives of the people who do this work. this includes part-time workers and folks without a library degree. no true martyr ever seeks to be one; the martyr is not “guilty” of the outcome of their life. a martyr continues to express their sacred calling even in the face of oppression and ultimately death, exposing the violence of the system that does not recognize their value. i hope (and pray) for more recognition of the sacredness of library work and less martyrdom. dd 2018–02–03 at 10:54 am as a librarian, understanding the professional awe and expectations of the calling, i am dismayed when i see other librarians not upholding the values of privacy and who are judgemental of users’ info needs and who are divisive. i then understand that the awe is an individual bestowal, not one that i can apply to the profession as a whole. also, it is not the individual librarian who make this vast amount of resources available. it is usually the taxpayer or generous donors who should be thought of in awe for their generosity. continental 2018–02–03 at 4:14 pm i really, really regret wasting my time and money on a useless mlis degree. i should have taken a 2 year paramedic certification course at the junior college. then my services would be in demand! janice flahiff 2018–02–04 at 6:59 am well said and summarized. not only applicable to librarianship but many positions in the paid and unpaid sectors. linked to this on my fb page. . thank you! on another note, i learned more on the job than at library school (early 80’s). in many ways i feel i just went to finishing school instead of graduate school. it just wasn’t very rigorous and there was too emphasis on people skills rather than technical/computer skills. wondering if times have changed? rose 2018–02–08 at 12:59 pm i totally agree with you on this. at lot of what library school is theory and developing professional skills. while i have learned things and have applied them to my work, the vast majority of learning is going to be experience. i am lucky to be working in a library while going to grad school. i feel for anyone that is going to grad school with the hopes of getting their foot in the door. at the library i am working at, i applied to three different positions before i even got an interview. the longer i go to school, the angrier i get. i had a project where we had to act as vendors/publishers/subscription agents giving a presentation to librarians about their products. while i understand this is for us to know how these players work, it still pisses me off that we had to act like them. maybe i am just burned out on school but school is not doing a lot for me. as far as i am concerned, i just got to get through this program. i have no idea where it will lead me. as long as i am able to pay my bills i am good. pingback : steering share: considering labor models in archives work – issues & advocacy comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the innovation fetish and slow librarianship: what librarians can learn from the juicero – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 18 oct julia glassman /6 comments the innovation fetish and slow librarianship: what librarians can learn from the juicero in brief this essay reflects on the effects of capitalism and corporatization on the work habits of librarians, and critiques the profession’s emphasis on innovation for its own sake. first, the essay compares juicero inc., a silicon valley startup that faced criticism for producing an expensive machine that squeezed premade packets of juice, to projects undertaken by librarians for the purposes of career advancement and prestige that may unnecessarily complicate the services provided to patrons. the essay then outlines the burgeoning slow movement within libraries and recommends that librarians leverage the movement’s principles to push back against corporatization in librarianship. by julia glassman the juicero: a parable in april 2017, the internet had a good chuckle over a start-up gaffe worthy of a silicon valley subplot, which centered on a device that claimed to be the keurig of juicers: one of the most lavishly funded gadget startups in silicon valley last year was juicero inc. it makes a juice machine. the product was an unlikely pick for top technology investors, but they were drawn to the idea of an internet-connected device that transforms single-serving packets of chopped fruits and vegetables into a refreshing and healthy beverage….but after the product hit the market, some investors were surprised to discover a much cheaper alternative: you can squeeze the juicero bags with your bare hands.1 the juicero machine originally cost $700—the price later dropped to $400 before the company functionally went out of business—and its wifi capability seemed to do little more than double-check the expiration dates written on the juice packets. to prevent customers from buying the juice packets on their own and saving a few hundred dollars, the company only sold packets to people who purchased the machine. one could argue that the juicero machine could have benefited people with limited use of their hands, but that argument would beg the question of why someone would pay hundreds of dollars for a juicero when they could buy containers of pre-made juice, which is essentially what the juicero packets contained. although huet and zaleski were restrained in their criticism, albert burneko at deadspin didn’t hold back: when [the investors] signed up to pump money into this juice company, it was because [they] thought drinking the juice would be a lot harder and more expensive. that was the selling point, because silicon valley is a stupid libertarian dystopia where investor-class vampires are the consumers and a regular person’s money is what they go shopping for. easily opened bags of juice do not give these awful nightmare trash parasites a good bargain on the disposable income of credulous wellness-fad suckers; therefore easily opened bags of juice are a worse investment than bags of juice that are harder to open.2 burneko makes a good point. this machine wasn’t just ridiculous, it’s an alarming symptom of late capitalism. it’s long been a feature of capitalism that, to a large extent, genuine needs are irrelevant to the market; what matters is what you can convince people to buy. the juicero is what happens when markets become saturated with every conceivable gadget, yet entrepreneurs and investors remain desperate to find some way, any way, to scrape out one more niche. it’s an often-overlooked facet of the fallacy of unlimited growth: human beings have a finite set of needs, and none of those needs includes a machine that does nothing but squeeze its own bags. i read the deadpsin article; i watched a video of the juicero in action; i indulged in some incredulous laughter. but i was surprised to find myself, even before the glow had faded, thinking uncomfortably about my own job as an academic librarian. the race to innovate at my institution, librarians’ career advancement is regulated through a process of peer review. every two to three years, each librarian writes a report of what they’ve done to warrant a raise and possible promotion and submits it to a peer review committee and the university librarian (ul). the centerpiece of the peer review packet is a threeto five-page document called the “statement of professional achievements,” or sopa. the idea behind it is fairly innocuous: the committee and ul simply want to see that you haven’t been sitting on your hands for two years. how well have you performed your job? what have you done to develop as an information professional and educator? have you helped advance the profession as a whole? simply put, why do you deserve more money? the problem, though, lies in the the word “achievements.” since the members of each year’s peer review cohort are judged against each other, and it has been made clear that only a select few can ever earn the coveted marker of “exceptional performance,” the process has become an arms race of the biggest, most impressive accomplishments librarians can showcase. how do you play up the fact that you’re a talented and beloved teacher when you have a colleague who has just overhauled the entire information literacy curriculum for their subject area and deployed a brand new series of online instructional modules? sure, that approach may not have been appropriate for the departments with which you liaise, but think about how these two stories look side by side. there is intense pressure to constantly innovate, to throw out the old and invent something new. this phenomenon is situated, of course, within a profession (and, indeed, a culture) that kicks around the word “innovation” as if it were a hacky sack. innovation isn’t just one factor of success in librarianship; it often seems to be the sole benchmark by which we measure the worth of our work. we’re pressured by tenure clocks and hiring committees to publish papers and present at conferences, and no conference is interested in a presentation on how the teaching technique you developed five years ago is still working fine. more than once i’ve witnessed enthusiasm for good ideas evaporate when it turned out we weren’t the first ones to have them, and thus wouldn’t get a publication credit for our efforts. the fixation on innovation, in turn—at least as it pertains to academic librarianship—is situated within a deeply corporatized academia. universities hire more administrators than faculty members.3 pharmaceutical companies exert frightening influence over medical research.4 business jargon like “core competencies” infects and then shapes our conceptions of pedagogy.5 put all these factors together—universities that see education as a product line and research as entrepreneurship, and information professionals working to advance their careers within such an environment—and perhaps it’s no surprise after all why my mind jumped from the world’s silliest juicer to academic libraries. when we begin to chase innovation for its own sake, seeking the approval of authority figures rather than considering the needs of our students and patrons, then we fall into the same trap as silicon valley startups frantic to woo investors. we put out flashy projects that take more time, resources, and money to do what we could have done with something much simpler—perhaps even with our bare hands. for example, a group of mlis students recently evaluated my library’s popular reading collection for a class project. the students expressed surprise and dismay that librarians were adhering to what the students called an “object-centric conception of a collection.” the fact that circulation rates were healthy and undergraduate students expressed excitement about the collection was not included in the mlis students’ analysis; in their view, the collection was deficient because it failed to significantly expand the definition of “collection.” in order for the collection to be successful, they believed, we needed to resist our desire to remain focused on items. the students also recommended that we replace our collections policy, which included a broad vision statement, with specific, measurable learning outcomes that would be frequently measured. a non-object-centric popular reading collection with learning outcomes instead of a collections policy? how innovative! the problem, though, was that the students seemed unable to explain what such a collection would actually look like, aside from telling us to put on more events. how does one build a popular reading collection without centering popular reading materials? how does one assign measurable learning outcomes to circulating items without committing gross violations of patron privacy? if the incident had merely consisted of a few over-zealous students, i might have shrugged it off; however, what troubled me was that several is professors and librarians expressed strong admiration for the students’ ideas and advocated moving forward with them, even though no one could articulate a realistic course of action or endpoint. i myself have fallen prey to the scramble to innovate. two years ago, a colleague and i created a pre-assignment for one-shot instruction sessions using a google doc.6 i tested it, piloted it, made some tweaks and adjustments, and started using it regularly in my teaching. in the fall of my second year using the assignment, though, with my peer review deadline looming, i looked at the google doc and felt a pang of anxiety. if i continued using the same tool, was that sufficiently innovative? would i appear to be stagnating? i decided to create a moodle version of the assignment for a lecture class i was working with so that in the future, faculty would have multiple versions to choose from. i spent weeks wrestling with moodle, but found the interface so clunky and incomprehensible that the week before classes started, i gave up and just tailored the original document to the needs of the class. it worked out perfectly. the students completed the assignment without incident, it met the faculty’s learning objectives, and it helped me teach more effectively. nevertheless, i felt guilty for doing the same thing twice. this pressure didn’t build up gradually, either; it started as soon as i began my career. for instance, in my first year as a librarian, when i sought travel funding to present at my first information literacy conference, i asked colleagues for advice on filling out the funding request form. the prevailing attitude was that my attendance had to benefit the library in an immediate and tangible way. “if you go, what will you be able to do when you come back?” one colleague prompted, sending me on an anxious hunt through the conference program for sessions that might appeal to administrators. the exchange of ideas, the honing of skills, and service to the profession are not enough, apparently, to warrant inclusion at a gathering for educators and academics. one is expected to come home and unveil something new each time. this, despite the fact that the patrons with whom we work remain, underneath our society’s increasingly frenzied pace of development, human beings: a species that hasn’t changed drastically in cognition or temperament for tens of thousands of years. we librarians like to muse that the codex is just as effective a piece of technology today as it was during the roman empire, but in our day-to-day jobs, we seem unable to believe that anything could work so well for so long. slow librarianship so, what’s to be done? how can we stay grounded in what’s genuinely useful, rather than what’s exciting in the moment? how do we avoid creating our own version of a $700 bag-squeezer? on a surface level, the answer is quite simple. we must let our patrons’ genuine, demonstrated needs and interests guide our work. what services and resources are they searching for? are we providing them? if not, how can we change our practices so that we are? yes, new technology or a radical departure from previous practices can be exciting and lead to publication. but does it meet an actual need?7 on a deeper level, though, we must push back against the corporate cultures in which we work. how? here i don’t have any easy answers. it is heartening, though, to see that librarians have begun to look to the slow movement for guidance. the slow movement began in the 1980s, when carlo petrini began the slow food movement to protest the degradation of food quality and agricultural ethics. working off of the principles that food should be “good, clean, and fair,”8 the movement protested the over-industrialization of food and sought to “counteract the rise of fast life” by emphasizing eating as an experience to be savored.9 although the movement started with food, its principles have proven adaptable and useful to many aspects of western and global culture. in the realm of librarianship, dewan10 cites carl honoré’s11 call to do “fewer things in order to do them better” and suggests that librarians both provide tranquil spaces for users and “model slow living” themselves. gervasio, detterbeck, and oling12 build on the movement’s principles of “resisting cultural pressures to hurry” in order to advocate for an assessment model “that emphasizes reflection, choice, and meeting local needs to provide more meaningful evaluations of library services and students’ research skills and to combat the corporatization of higher education.” these authors cite the “slow reading, slow education, and slow technology” movements, which emphasize reflection, quality, and sustainability, as precedents that libraries can build on. describing a comprehensive slow librarianship movement, applicable to all facets of library work in all types of libraries, is obviously far beyond the scope of this essay. however, a public commitment to prioritizing reflection and meaningful practices over chains of impressive-sounding achievements could serve to open up alternative avenues for professional development and recognition. learning from the jacaranda tree i certainly don’t want to sound like a luddite or a curmudgeon. the benefits of genuine innovation are obvious, and i know how frustrating it is to work with colleagues who dismiss any and all change as fads. i also recognize that every library environment is unique, and an idea that’s ill-suited to one scenario may be vital for another. finally, i realize that libraries must keep pace with the evolution of academia, even if curmudgeonly luddites like me disapprove of some of the particulars. when i first drafted this essay, the jacaranda tree outside of my window was just beginning to bloom. jacarandas are famous for their brilliant purple flowers, which erupt in breathtaking sprays every spring in los angeles, and every year i find myself checking the tree multiple times a day in anticipation. there’s nothing quite like walking down a street lined with jacaranda trees in full bloom. what you’ll never see on a tourism website, though, is what jacarandas look like for the vast majority of the year. in the summer they’re nondescript; in the fall they release a limited bloom and dull brown seed pods; and in late winter, most of their leaves turn yellow and fall off. however, the trees are doing important work all throughout the year. the jacaranda blooms fully only when the time is right—no sooner, and no longer. it’s supremely unhealthy, for both individuals and organizations, to try to be in bloom all the time. perhaps, if we reject the capitalist drive to constantly churn out new products and instead take a stand to support more reflective and responsive practices, we can offer our patrons services that are deeper, more lasting, and more human. acknowledgements: i’m grateful to my internal reviewer, amy koester; my external reviewer, maura seale; and my publishing editor, ian beilin, for their support and feedback on this essay. many thanks to annie pho, who gave me initial feedback on my essay proposal, and to the librarians and information literacy educators pioneering the slow movement within our profession. references burneko, albert (april 19, 2017). i just love this juicero story so much. deadspin. retrieved from http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/i-just-love-this-juicero-story-so-much-1794459898. dewan, p. (2015). slow libraries in a fast-paced world. library journal 140(18), 46. gervasio, d., detterbeck, k., & oling, r. (2015). the slow assessment movement: using homegrown rubrics and capstone projects for diy information literacy assessment. acrl 2015 proceedings. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2015/gervasio_detterbeck_oling.pdf. glassman, j. & worsham, d. (2017). digital research notebook: a simple tool for reflective learning. reference services review 45(2), 179-200. retrieved from http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/rsr-10-2016-0063. honoré, c. (2004). in praise of slowness: how a worldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed. san francisco: harpersanfrancisco. huet, e. & zaleski, o. (april 19, 2017). silicon valley’s $400 juicer may be feeling the squeeze. bloomberg. retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-valley-s-400-juicer-may-be-feeling-the-squeeze. slow food (2015a). our philosophy. slow food. retrieved from http://www.slowfood.com/about-us/our-philosophy/. slow food (2015b). about us. slow food. retrieved from http://www.slowfood.com/about-us/. ucla library information literacy program steering committee (2005). information literacy at ucla: the core competencies. retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8kh5v4q0. whorinsky, peter (november 24, 2012). as drug industry’s influence over research grows, so does the potential for bias. the washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-drug-industrys-influence-over-research-grows-so-does-the-potential-for-bias/2012/11/24/bb64d596-1264-11e2-be82-c3411b7680a9_story.html?utm_term=.f8e89dbebd4e. zamudio-suaréz, fernando (april 20, 2017). cal state’s growth in hiring of managers exceeds other staff, audit finds. the chronicle of higher education. retrieved from http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/cal-state-hires-more-managers-than-faculty-or-support-staff-audit-finds/117886?cid=wcontentlist_hp_latest. huet & zaleski 2017 [↩] 2017 [↩] zamudio-suaréz 2017 [↩] whorisky 2012 [↩] ucla library information literacy program steering committee 2005 [↩] glassman & worsham 2017 [↩] of course, these questions bring us to the sticky issue of the needs assessment, which is good and necessary in and of itself, but can so easily be used to quash new ideas and keep power structures in place. want to grind an unorthodox project to a halt, especially when it challenges hegemony? demand a mountain of irrefutable data justifying it. the question of which innovations are celebrated and which are sidelined is wrapped up quite tightly in issues of privilege and power. [↩] slow food 2015a [↩] slow food 2015b [↩] 2015 [↩] 2004 [↩] 2015 [↩] modular short form videos for library instruction socratic questioning: a teaching philosophy for the student research consultation 6 responses sarah lippincott 2017–10–20 at 8:35 am julia, thank you for this perspective and your apt analysis of the dangers of overzealous innovation. each institution is indeed different, but i found myself thinking, “if only libraries/librarians were overzealously innovative!” in my experience, the field overwhelmingly rewards mediocrity, conservatism, and maintaining the status quo. your point about colleagues and administrators blindly supporting abstract innovation without a concrete plan of action was very well-taken. i, too, have found myself in that position! however, your second example of caving to the pressure to innovate was building a moodle version of a worksheet. you further admit that you could not figure out how to use moodle effectively for this purpose, a task that should be easy for anyone with even modest computer skills. to me, your example therefore proves the opposite of your point: that this field lacks and desperately needs creative, technically savvy, ambitious professionals who aren’t afraid of change, of computers, of on-going learning. i mean this with all due respect. i simply find myself continually frustrated by the incredibly slow pace of change in the field, which is hastening the obsolescence of our profession, as our stakeholders blaze past us. the field needs to recruit young librarians who have the mindset and skills to succeed in the 21st century. i don’t innovate because i am a neo-liberal pawn caught up in capitalist ideas about progress. i innovate because i feel good when i challenge myself; because i feel good when i see how my own development positively impacts those around me; because i like making my job easier and more efficient through technology so i have more time for the fun parts; because i believe that i am capable of anything i put my mind to; because i love that i get to express myself through creative problem-solving; because i know that i need to do better for the sake of those (faculty, students, colleagues) who rely on me; because i know i need to do better than those in my organization who refuse to change and whose selfish decisions harm their constituents; because i love my job! sian 2018–04–06 at 11:38 pm what she said ^^^^ amy brunvand 2017–11–06 at 3:27 pm i agree with the sense of this article. the pervasive idea that anything technological is “innovation” and anything analog is out of date has not been good for libraries. i can really relate to the story about the mlis students who were confused by a collection of books. the poor students must experience real cognitive dissonance at being taught that nobody wants books any more, and yet they circulate! brownpa@nsula.edu 2017–11–07 at 12:07 pm innovation/assessment/youth and complacency/ignorance aren’t the only two possible poles on the continuum of contemporary librarianship, as glassman indicates by citing the values of reflection and quiet reading. michele jennings 2017–11–09 at 2:33 pm how interesting that the author of this article has really bypassed the issue of age–quite intentionally, i think–yet that seems to be the undercurrent of the comments. as the commenter on 11/7 perhaps was hinting at, not all young professionals are ruthless innovators that scratch their heads with chimp-like confusion when handling print volumes, and not all mature professionals are rusty cogs in the machine that drag their heels in the face of change. it isn’t about age, but about attitude. megan 2018–04–17 at 5:23 pm really enjoyed this article. it is thoughtful and timely. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct spring reading – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 5 apr editorial board, annie pho, bethany radcliffe, sofia leung, ian beilin, ryan randall and amy koester /0 comments spring reading it’s time for spring cleaning, and your editors here at in the library with the lead pipe are cleaning out our bookmarks, bedside reading piles, and saved articles folders. we’re revisiting some great recent reads in the process. here’s a selection of things we’ve been reading and that we think you might enjoy, too. feel free to add your own spring reading recommendations in the comments.   annie recommends: “on ‘diversity’ as anti-racism in library and information studies: a critique” by david james hudson i feel like this is the article on “diversity” that everyone should read. hudson looks at the literature that talks about diversity as the primary discursive mode of anti-racism in lis and pushes us to think deeper on these issues. his article is also published in the very first issue of the journal of critical library and information studies, which he states is a “potential site of critical exchange from which to articulate a sustained critique of race in and through our field.” “considerations on mainstreaming intersectionality” by rita kaur dhamoon* i read this article in preparation for a presentation that i did at acrl, and i feel it gives a really good overview of how theorists have applied and built upon the theory of intersectionality. dhamoon goes on to detail five considerations ”when operationalizing an intersectional-type research paradigm.” as lead pipe publishes more articles that discuss identity, structural inequities, and relationships of power and difference, i find that taking an intersectional approach would help people understand the complexities of these relationships. *i realize that this is a paywalled article, but if you want to read more of her writing that is published in an oa journal, check out “a feminist approach to decolonizing anti-racism: rethinking transnationalism, intersectionality, and settler colonialism.”   bethany recommends: democracy & education: an introduction to the philosophy of education by john dewey right now i’m reading up on cultivating shared physical spaces because i am at a campus where four academic institutions reside collectively. i haven’t read the entire book, but i’ve found some great nuggets of insight so far. my favorite quote to date is: “whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference” (p. 22). learning spaces: creating opportunities for knowledge creation in academic life by maggi savin-baden this book gets to the heart of what i believe academics work to nurture in higher education. i’ve been reading through it to develop a solid literature review for an upcoming article i’m planning to write. i appreciate the correlation the author makes between learning spaces and their ability to transform individuals’ perspectives. according to savin-baden, “learning spaces are often places of transition, and sometimes transformation, where the individual experiences some kind of shift or reorientation in their life world” (p. 8).   amy recommends: “gendered labor and library instruction coordinators: the undervaluing of feminized work” by veronica arellano douglas and joanna gadsby this paper from a presentation at acrl 2017 explores the ways in which the feminization of librarianship has influenced institutional organization structures, resulting in the proliferation of coordinator positions with responsibilities that tend more toward administrative and relational work than do other higher-level roles like managers and supervisors. this paper may be speaking specifically about instruction coordinators in academic libraries, but i see a lot here that speaks to my position in a public library, where a large part of my job is program coordination. the authors have me reflecting in particular on the amount of relationship maintenance i do in my work. “why ‘rock star librarian’ is an oxymoron” by allie jane bruce the team of contributors at reading while white always gets me thinking about a perspective i’ve thus far missed in my own reading and critical evaluation, but this piece particularly resonates—especially as invitations to publisher events at ala annual begin to trickle in. this editorial is in response to the wall street journal’s march 5 article about “rock star” librarians, and more specifically in response to the outcry against that article by youth-focused librarians. critics of the original wsj article claimed youth librarianship is grossly misrepresented by the article’s inclusion of only white men as their “rock stars,” but bruce’s response digs deeper to explore ways that those very same youth-focused librarians may be contributing to and shoring up a system that continually underrepresents us.   sofia recommends: “critical directions for archival approaches to social justice” by richardo l. punzalan and michelle caswell a colleague of mine, michelle baildon, recommended this really thoughtful article to me. punzalan and caswell examine the relationship between archives and social justice and suggest further explorations to move the archival field forward. they also make an argument for the fact that social justice has long been a part of archival work and that it is clear that social justice should be a central tenet of the archival field. i read it recently to help prepare for a workshop i’ll be co-teaching using materials from our archives. the students will also be reading it to provide a framing for the workshop, which is for a class on activism. i’m excited for our class discussion on this article! living a feminist life by sara ahmed i love sara ahmed’s work, particularly on being included: racism and diversity in institutional life, so when i saw that she just came out with a new book, i had to get it. if you aren’t familiar with her work, check out her blog feminist killjoys, which she wrote in conjunction with living a feminist life. this book really resonated with a lot of things i’ve been thinking about and struggling with, as her work always does for me. she’s already struggled through the same issues and is generously sharing her wisdom and hope. if that’s not enough for you, there’s a quote from bell hooks saying “everyone should read this book.”   ryan recommends: “yes, digital literacy. but which one?” by mike caulfield this article has been passed around quite a bit by some librarians and other instructors i follow, and with good reason. caulfield makes a persuasive case that, while useful starting points, information literacy acronyms like craap and radcab are insufficient. then he demonstrates a few types of domain knowledge and technical skills that could add up to a robust digital literacy. he argues that in addition to emphasizing the abstract values reinforced by various acronyms, instructors would better serve students by explaining the various ideologies one might encounter in the world of research, then giving them models, processes, and specific tools that help people act on abstract values. not only did i learn some specific skills and tricks—i knew of wolfram alpha but never thought to use it how caulfield suggests—the challenges he lays out have remained on my mind as i’ve been thinking about how to work with faculty on information literacy. his post provides an abstract appeal and some workable models, a combination i can’t help but appreciate.     rhetorical listening: identification, gender, whiteness by krista ratcliffe we read this rather quickly in a pedagogy class i took last semester, and it’s a layered enough book that i’m still re-reading it as i can make the time. ratcliffe’s arguments persuasively situate listening within rhetorical traditions, feminist theory, and critical race theory. what i keep coming back to is her emphasis on an ethics of accountability and the need to listen both to the claims people make and the cultural logics within which people make those claims. her chapters focus on different tactics for listening, including for public debates, scholarly debates, and within classrooms—all places potentially quite relevant for librarians. instead of trying to recapitulate her book in a paragraph, i’ll quote her motivation for writing the book: she was struck by the complications of her “own standpoint as a white feminist who had an abhorrence of racism and who had considered how racism works in the lives of non-white people but who had never really been taught nor had taken it upon herself to learn how racism functions in relation to whiteness and/or white people beyond the narrative that begins, ‘once upon a time, white people were racists’” (p. 35). if that starting point resonates with you, this book will amply reward your reading with both specific tactics for listening and the inviting introductions she provides to a host of other thinkers.   ian recommends: @jacobsberg twitter feed by jacob berg my reading routine for the past few months has been especially bifurcated. mornings are dominated by a wide variety of political news, much of which comes through my twitter feed, especially @jacobsberg’s seemingly endless stream of links to articles and posts mostly having to do with perpetual catastrophe of u.s. national politics. this daily breakfast diet usually does not put me in an optimal mood for a day’s librarianship (or maybe it does—thanks, jake!). “things left unsaid” by veronica arellano douglas & “seeking a diverse candidate pool” by angela pashia speaking of librarianship, my mood has been lifted recently by these two posts about the academic library hiring process (which i’ve shared with colleagues working on this issue at mpow) [both of these posts cite lead pipe articles, but that’s honestly not the reason i’m plugging them!]. both douglas and pashia describe the institutionalized oppressions that continue to structure and define much of our profession, but they also offer determination, hope, and advice about how to create, in douglas’s words, “a feminist, inclusive practice of librarianship.” vinyl records and analog culture in the digital age: pressing matters by paul e. winters & vinyl: the analogue record in the digital age by dominik bartmanski and ian woodward over those same last few months my days usually conclude with readings in the history of music recording and record collecting. these two books in particular have impressed me. the studies share a fascination with (and participation in) the recent “vinyl revival,” of which i’ve been a half-hearted participant. although the books provide very thoughtful and theoretically informed discussions of the place of vinyl records in their cultural and social contexts, the cumulative effect of their analyses was (for me) to demystify the vinyl record and reduce its fetish value. i’m more fascinated by the practice of collecting (regardless of format) and the ways that collecting creates communities of knowledge and structures knowledge, and these studies shed light on this phenomenon as well.   reading recruiting and retaining lgbtq-identified staff in academic libraries through ordinary methods hush… : the dangers of silence in academic libraries this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct liaisons as sales force: using sales techniques to engage academic library users – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 5 jan nathaniel king and jacqueline solis /5 comments liaisons as sales force: using sales techniques to engage academic library users in brief liaison librarians are assuming a wide variety of new roles that serve their institutions’ students, staff, and faculty. an essential foundation of these new roles is the ability to engage with the liaison’s user community. these engagement skills are not necessarily natural or innate, nor are they skills that most liaison librarians have had an opportunity to learn and develop. this article adapts a practical selling framework for the liaison context with examples that demonstrate how this framework can lead to improved communication, engagement, and problem-solving with liaison user communities. by nathaniel king and jacqueline solis “problem, solution, result…” by duncan c (cc-by-nc 2.0) introduction the movement from a collection-centered focus to an engagement-centered focus is a central element in the evolving landscape of liaison librarianship. although roles vary across institutions, liaison librarians share a common focus on supporting teaching, learning, and research by providing services to defined organizational units across the academic enterprise. although recent work provides a clear articulation of new and emerging areas of liaison librarianship (malenfant 2010; kenney 2015; miller and pressley 2015; pasek 2015; the ohio state university libraries n.d.), the existing literature provides little guidance on the interpersonal and communications skills that are required to carry out these new roles and responsibilities. while collection management, research services, and teaching remain core skills for liaison librarians, the advocacy elements of an engagement-centered philosophy positions liaison librarians as a “salesforce” for library-related solutions. while the lis literature provides a rich collection of perspectives and advice on outreach and marketing activities for liaison librarians (latta 1992; frank, raschke, and wood 2001; moore 2005; stoddart, bryant, baker, lee, and spencer 2006; rodwell and fairbairn, 2008; daniel et al. 2011; polger and okamoto 2013; silver 2014), this article endeavors to address gaps in the skills needed to engage more deeply with liaison user communities by identifying a compelling suite of practical communication techniques from the sales literature. these techniques provide a selling framework that can improve liaison librarians’ communication, engagement, and problem-solving skills. why sales? making reference to “sales” or referring to the work of librarians as “selling” tends to elicit negative responses from library colleagues (fister 2009; pukkila 2009; farkas 2009). while some liaison librarians may not see the need to sell their services, many libraries struggle with the fact that users and funders don’t know the full breadth and depth of what they offer (kenney 2015). stephen bell (2009b) makes the distinction between stereotypical depictions of selling and the kind of selling that needs to takes place in a library context: when i say “we [librarians] need to be more like salespeople” that doesn’t mean we should all become obnoxious used car salespeople. it’s not about “pushy” but it is about “persuasion”. my point is that we have to be assertive and get out of the library and let faculty know what we have and how to best use it. it’s not about pushing people to use our resources just because we have it. it’s about helping them to make the right choices and putting the resources where they can be readily found and used. if we just wait around for the customers – there – i said it – to figure it out and make the right choice that’s a surefire recipe for making ourselves obsolete. other leaders in the profession also recognize the importance of sales skills for liaisons. the sales role of liaisons is perceptively outlined by strong proponents of the engagement-centered liaison model, jaguszewski and williams (2013): liaisons are playing two new roles, that of advocate and of consultant, both with an emphasis on campus engagement. as advocates, they have become a research library’s ‘sales force,’ speaking on a wide range of topics and trends in higher education, influencing and persuading campus stakeholders on important issues, and serving as ambassadors of change. (16) in practical terms an engagement-centered model asks librarians to proactively and confidently uncover and solve constituents’ problems that relate to information use, management, and distribution. for peacemaker and heinze, engaged library users “pass a threshold from passive recipient of services, to a proactive involved partner who desires a role in shaping the services they receive” (peacemaker and heinze 2015). to achieve these ends, sales skills can greatly assist liaison librarians with promoting the benefits of library services and resources. building on this idea, this article advocates for what daniel pink (2012) calls “non-sales selling,” the daily activities in which “we’re persuading, convincing, and influencing others in ways that don’t involve anyone making a purchase” (21). but liaisons don’t learn sales skills although there is a recognition of the need for librarians to develop these advocacy skills (bell 2009; farkas 2009; highlender 2010), such skills are not necessarily natural or innate, nor are they skills that most liaison librarians have had an opportunity to learn and develop. while the outreach and marketing literature provides a comprehensive outreach template for liaison librarians, the existing literature has little to say about the communication skills that are needed to be effective in these activities. in order to thrive in this engagement-centered paradigm, liaison librarians must utilize a specific range of persuasion skills to sell services and solutions. in seeking out evidence for developing these skills, it quickly becomes clear that the academic research on sales in libraries is limited (fogel, hoffmeister, rocco, and strunk 2012). in response to these limitations, the authors examined classic “how-to” sales literature from seasoned sales professionals and sales guidance aimed at start-up and established technology firms. this literature provides a wealth of guidance on how to structure a sales conversation; advice for uncovering user needs; and methods for identifying potential users who will be receptive to your message. these sales methodologies and philosophies included: neil rackham’s (1988) spin© selling; zig ziglar’s (1984) sales advice; jill konrath’s (2010) snap selling; mark suster’s (2013) puccka sales methodology; robert miller, stephen heiman, and tad tuleja’s (1999) new conceptual selling; bosworth and holland’s (2004) customercentric selling; and mattson’s (2009) explanation of david sandler’s sales techniques. in these methodologies, there are four major elements that can be used to significantly enhance liaison librarian engagement: 1. recognition that selling is a positive and necessary part of a liaison librarian’s role. first, it is important for liaison librarians to embrace selling as a positive, mutually-beneficial activity. selling is not just high-pressure closing techniques that attempt to push a buyer into making a decision that they don’t want to make. at its foundation, selling is about helping people find solutions to their problems and challenges. sales conversations are natural parts of human interaction, in both professional and personal life. as sales guru zig ziglar notes in zig ziglar’s secrets of closing the sale: “everybody, including coaches, dentists, household executives, ministers, builders, interior designers, etc. sells and everything is selling” (111). in fact, ziglar stresses that “a … salesperson is a counselor who identifies that prospect’s needs and then fills those needs through his goods, products, or services” (127). this is exactly what liaison librarians aim to achieve in their engagement efforts — identify the needs of users that can be filled through library services and resources. 2. effective selling requires goal-focused interactions. after studying thousands of sales interactions, rackham (1988, 47) found that salespeople who have a clear objective for their customer had more successful interactions. this points to another communication technique that liaison librarians might use in interacting with library users. by approaching an interaction with a pre-determined goal in mind, liaison librarians can ask questions that help lead to the achievement of that goal. while many interactions with students and faculty are unplanned, a goal could be as simple as: “i would like this faculty member to know that i can help them with their data management plan.” 3. enthusiasm for the library’s resources and services. in order to convince someone to use a service or resource, it is necessary for the library liaison to clearly and genuinely articulate why they believe it will be useful. ziglar speaks passionately about the need for this enthusiasm: selling is essentially a transference of feeling… if i (the salesman [sic]) can make you, (the prospect) feel about my product the way i feel about my product, you are going to buy my product, if there is any way in the world that you can… now in order to transfer a feeling, you’ve got to have that feeling. (83) he also advises, “if you don’t believe the customers are the losers when they don’t buy, you are selling the wrong product. if you don’t feel a sense of loss for them, you are not going to be as effective and persuasive as you could be” (84). what this means for liaison librarians is that they must believe in the services their library offers. if, for example, liaison librarians are trying to sell an information literacy session to a faculty member, they must firmly and passionately believe that students are more successful when they participate in information literacy sessions. they must use that conviction to convince faculty that it is worth one (or more) class sessions to give students this opportunity. 4. ability to investigate the needs of the customer. rackham (1988) found that in long-term seller-buyer relationships, the ability to investigate the needs of the prospect by asking questions is statistically correlated with the success of the interaction (14-15). liaison librarians are trained to ask high-quality questions as part of the reference interview. by adapting this skillset toward a solutions-focused approach, liaison librarians position themselves to engage more effectively with library users. the next section describes how the use of rackham’s sales methodology can build on a liaison librarian’s reference interview skills to enhance problem-solving with library users. spin sellingⓡ sales methodology after investigating a range of different selling methodologies, we identified the spin® selling method as the strongest one for selling library services. the spin® selling method was developed by neil rackham of huthwaite, inc. (rackham 1988) and grounded in his research and experience examining factors that contribute to the success or failure of thousands of sales interactions. his methods are compatible with the goals of librarians because he explicitly places customer needs and benefits at the forefront of the sales process. his method lays out a step-by-step process for approaching sales as a conversation, providing a roadmap for people without sales experience to practice and replicate. liaison librarians can apply this methodology as a conversational framework for in-person interactions that necessitate the promotion of a library solution to a potential library user. this methodology can close the gap between what users know about library offerings and what liaison librarians can do to add value to the user’s work. 1. the s in spin: situation questions liaison librarians know that in order to provide relevant service to library users, it is essential to understand the context of their work. prior to meeting with a prospective library user, the liaison librarian should gather as much information as possible about the user. in anticipation of working with faculty, liaison librarians are skilled at tracking down faculty cvs and research interest statements online, locating past articles they have authored, identifying grants on which they are investigators, and reading syllabi and course descriptions for the classes that they teach. in cases where information is limited, the following type of in-person questions help to establish or confirm the context of the user’s work. these situation questions are closely related to the kinds of information-gathering questions librarians use in the reference interview, and are also common in outreach situations where the librarian is interacting with faculty and students. examples include: for faculty: a. which journals are most important for your work? b. are your students completing any research assignments this semester? for students: c. are you working on any research assignments this semester? d. how do you use the library? 2. the p in spin: problem questions based on the information gathered about the library user, the liaison librarian can then think about potential challenges that could be addressed by library resources or services. liaison librarians should try to put themselves in the mind of the user to brainstorm problems or difficulties that might suggest an interest in a library service or resource, and then plan how a conversation might flow from initial greetings to proposing a library solution. for example, if the librarian learns that the user has a large amount of research data stored on an external hard drive, the librarian might ask about the need for long-term access to that data or if the user is concerned about the risk of losing access to their data. when the user discusses a problem or difficulty they are having, the liaison librarian uses additional questions to determine the seriousness of the problem. the goal of these questions is to help the user begin to see how the problem is really affecting their work, because until they see the problem as something that needs to be solved, the motivation may not be there to take action. for example, with a faculty member, the liaison librarian might ask: a. what kinds of problems do you see in student research papers? b. what kinds of obstacles do you encounter when you are looking for grant funding? in another example, with a student, the liaison librarian might ask: c. when your instructor asks you for “peer-reviewed” sources, is it clear what they mean? d. do you spend a lot of time formatting the sources in your bibliography? 3. the i in spin: implication questions after identifying the problem, the liaison librarian can explore the implications of the problem/s identified on the user’s productivity or work quality. by focusing on the implications of the problem/s, the liaison librarian can increase the urgency of finding a solution because the seriousness of the problem will become apparent. as an example, a liaison librarian working with a faculty member might ask: a. how much extra time does it take to grade a paper with the problems you mentioned? b. have you ever missed out on grant opportunity because you learned about it after the deadline? for a student, the implications of the previously listed problems might be: c. do you spend a lot of time searching for peer-reviewed articles for your assignments? d. have you ever had points taken off for errors in your bibliography? 4. the n in spin: need/payoff questions in this part of the interaction, the liaison librarian asks questions that focus the user’s attention on the benefits of the library service or resource. the goal of these questions is to position the user to embrace the benefits of the liaison librarian’s proposed solution. for example, working with faculty, liaison librarians can help to outline the benefit of a potential solution by asking: a. so if we could help your students to find quality sources, would that help you? b. if there was a way to have funding alerts sent to you automatically, would that be useful to you? for a student, we might ask: c. if i could show you an easy way to find peer-reviewed articles on your topic, would that be helpful for you? d. if i could show you some software that automatically creates your bibliography, would that help you to save some time? below is an example of how a conversation between a liaison librarian and a faculty member might unfold: an assistant professor is in her first-year on the tenure-track. she teaches two classes per semester and has had limited contact with her liaison. the liaison librarian approaches her in the campus quad just before the beginning of the summer term… liaison librarian: hi! how are you? assistant professor: oh, hi—good to see you! liaison librarian: [let’s begin by asking some situation questions] are you teaching any classes this summer? assistant professor: yes, i’m teaching international relations. liaison librarian: is that a new or existing course for you? assistant professor: new, but i’ve borrowed heavily from a course i taught as a grad student. liaison librarian: do students do any research assignments in the class? assistant professor: yes, students will do a group research project and presentation on an aspect of the political economy of post-soviet states. liaison librarian: [ok, let’s try some problem questions to see if we can identify a problem that can be solved with library services or resources] what kinds of challenges do students experience when they’re doing their papers? assistant professor: based on my other courses this year, the first-year students really struggle with choosing quality academic sources for their projects. liaison librarian: [let’s change the focus to implication questions. what is the impact of the problem?] how do those problems affect your grading? assistant professor: well, with the first-year projects sometimes i actually have to find the web page they are citing and determine if it is acceptable or not. it doesn’t seem to matter that i tell them to use academic sources, some still cite questionable web sites. liaison librarian: [let’s dig a little deeper with an additional implication question…] that sounds like it takes a lot of time. how long does it take to grade one of those papers? assistant professor: it depends – if i’m in a good “grading zone” i can get through a well-written paper in about 30 minutes. it can take longer though, if i need to make a lot of comments or if i have questions i’d like them to address. liaison librarian: does that cut into your own writing and researching time? assistant professor: absolutely! liaison librarian: [using a needs payoff question, we can outline the benefit of the proposed solution…] so if we could reduce this problem, it sounds like it would save you a lot of time? assistant professor: if there was a way to help students make better decisions about quality sources, i would gain some valuable time – if you consider that i spend so many extra hours on these papers, that’s a lot of time that i could be writing! what have you got in mind? conclusion the strength of the spin® selling framework is its ability to structure the liaison librarian’s communication to address the needs and concerns of their campus community. by starting with the user, this methodology promotes the customized pairing of library solutions with the implicit and explicit needs and desires of the user. in order to practice the techniques huthwaite suggests, we adapted examples from the spin® selling book to create library-specific scenarios that allowed us to practice the four-step spin methodology. using this method in our own outreach activities has produced two important realizations. the first conclusion is that it is rare to find a user who has an exhaustive knowledge of the services and benefits of their campus library. with that knowledge in mind, liaison librarians can approach almost every user interaction as an opportunity to “sell” the user on the benefits of library collections, spaces, and services. in a higher education environment that demands efficiency and effectiveness, this mindset is an excellent way to enhance the use of existing resources and services. finally, in the same manner as the traditional reference interview, liaison librarians can learn and refine their ability to “sell.” the process of spending a few minutes writing down some potential problem questions in advance of a meeting is an invaluable confidence booster. in our experience, with practice, liaison librarians can generate problem questions with a similar proficiency to their reference interview skills. by approaching every interaction with the mindset that it is a potential “selling” opportunity and dedicating time for effective preparation, liaison librarians can develop a skill-set that adds significant value to their user community by matching existing services, spaces, and collections with users in ways that enhance their success. the authors would like to thank barbara alvarez (external peer reviewer), ryan randall (internal peer reviewer) and the editorial board for reviewing drafts of this article. their excellent feedback contained valuable insights and suggestions. the authors would also like to thank our publishing editor, ian beilin. his efficiency and responsiveness made the publication process a pleasure. references bell, steven. 2009a. “academic librarians are not salespeople – but they should be” acrlog march 24. http://acrlog.org/2009/03/24/academic-librarians-are-not-salespeople-but-they-should-be/. bell, steven. 2009b. “academic librarians are not salespeople – but they should be – comment.” acrlog, march 26. http://acrlog.org/2009/03/24/academic-librarians-are-not-salespeople-but-they-should-be/#comment-117468. bosworth, michael t. and john r. holland. 2004. customercentric selling. new york: mcgraw hill. daniel, linda, jean ferguson, teddy gray, aisha harvey, diane harvey, danette pachtner, and kristina troost. 2011. “engaging with library users: sharpening our vision as subject librarians for the duke university libraries.” http://library.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dul/about/subject-librarian-report-2011.pdf. díaz, jose. 2014. “the roles of engagement at the ohio state university libraries: thoughts from an early adopter.” the reference librarian, 55(3): 224-233. farkas, meredith. 2009. “didn’t know i needed to be a salesperson.” http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2009/04/10/didnt-know-i-needed-to-be-a-salesperson/. fister, barbara. 2009. academic librarians are not salespeople – but they should be – comment.” march 26. acrlog. http://acrlog.org/2009/03/24/academic-librarians-are-not-salespeople-but-they-should-be/#comment-117448. fogel, suzanne, david hoffmeister, richard rocco, and daniel p. strunk. 2012. “teaching sales.” harvard business review. 90: 7-8. frank, donald g., gregory k. raschke, julie wood, and julie z. yang. 2001. “information consulting: the key to success in academic libraries.” journal of academic librarianship 27(2): 90-96. highlender, stacy. 2010. “using sales skills in library work.” http://www.liscareer.com/highlender.htm. jaguszewski, janice and karen williams. 2013. new roles for new times: transforming liaison roles in research libraries. washington, dc: association for research libraries. http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/nrnt-liaison-roles-revised.pdf. kenney, anne r. 2015. “from engaging liaison librarians to engaging communities.” college & research libraries, 76(3): 386-391. doi: 10.5860/crl.76.3.386. konrath, jill. 2010. snap selling: speed up sales and win more business with today’s frazzled customers. new york: portfolio. latta, gail f. 1992. liaison services in arl libraries. washington, dc: association of research libraries. malenfant, kara j. 2010. “leading change in the system of scholarly communication: a case study of engaging liaison librarians for outreach to faculty.” college and research libraries 71(1): 63–76. mattson, david. 2009. the sandler rules: 49 timeless selling principles and how to apply them. beverly hills: pegasus media world. miller, robert b., stephen e. heiman, and tad tuleja. 1999. the new conceptual selling; the most effective and proven method for face-to-face sales planning. new york: warner books. miller, rebecca k., and lauren pressley. 2015. spec kit 349: evolution of library liaisons. washington, d. c.: association of research libraries. november. moore, melissa. 2005. “reeling’em in: how to draw teaching faculty into collaborative relationships.” resource sharing & information networks 17(1-2): 77-83. the ohio state university libraries. “a framework for the engaged librarian: building on our strengths.” https://carmenwiki.osu.edu/download/attachments/37010332/engaged+librarian+document. pasek, judith e. 2015. “organizing the liaison role: a concept map.” college & research libraries news 76(4): 202-205. peacemaker, bettina, and jill stover heinze. 2015. “moving users, moving results: exploring customer engagement for deeper relationships.” college & undergraduate libraries 22(3-4): 261-272. pink, daniel h. 2012. to sell is human. new york: riverhead books. polger, mark aaron, and karen okamoto. 2013. “who’s spinning the library? responsibilities of academic librarians who promote.” library management 34(3): 236–253. doi:10.1108/01435121311310914. pukkila, marilyn. 2009. “academic librarians are not salespeople – but they should be – comment.” march 30. http://acrlog.org/2009/03/24/academic-librarians-are-not-salespeople-but-they-should-be/#comment-117782. rackham, neil. 1988. spin selling. new york: mcgraw-hill. rodwell, john, and linden fairbairn. 2008. “dangerous liaisons?: defining the faculty liaison librarian service model, its effectiveness and sustainability.” library management 29(1/2): 116-124. silver, isabel d. 2014. “outreach activities for liaison librarians.” reference & user services quarterly 54(2): 8-14. stoddart, richard a., thedis w. bryant, amia l. baker, adrienne lee, and brett spencer. 2006. “going boldly beyond the reference desk: practical advice and learning plans for new reference librarians performing liaison work.” the journal of academic librarianship 32(4): 419-427. suster, mark. 2013. “how to develop a sales methodology: developing core principles can help unify your sales team as your company grows. here’s how.” inc.com. june 11. http://www.inc.com/mark-suster/how-to-develop-a-sales-methodology.html. williams, helene c. 2000. “an academic liaison program: making it work.” against the grain 12(5): 1-22. williams, karen. 2009. “a framework for articulating new library roles.” research library issues 265: 3-8. ziglar, zig. 1984. zig ziglar’s secrets of closing the sale. old tappan, nj: fleming h. revell company. critical pedagogy, critical conversations: expanding dialogue about critical library instruction through the lens of composition and rhetoric social media at the college of new jersey library 5 responses nathan rinne 2017–01–06 at 10:10 am guys, i think if you buy into the methodology, you are hard-pressed to resist the underlying philosophy. lex orendi lex credendi. if going into every interaction with faculty w/ intent to “score the goal” – your goal – how are you “starting with the user”? this is a recipe for exhaustion. the problem is that so many believe the libary’s traditional purposes have been exhausted… -nathan monique clark 2017–01–11 at 2:20 pm i don’t think the intent of this methodology is necessarily to “score the goal” as much as it is to help faculty and students see how the library’s resources can be of use to them. in a way, we’re already doing this when we conduct a reference interview with patrons–asking about the context of their information need, asking about any problems with finding, evaluating, or using this information, and suggesting resources for them to use. chris bishop 2017–01–06 at 11:01 am after five years of sales and then a career switch into librarianship — this is the post that i have always wanted to write. cliff van dort 2017–01–11 at 11:49 am great article and great to finally see this being written about. marketing and sales skills are essential to all the profession, not just the academic libraries (i work in a special/corporate library) ; gone are the days (they actually went several years ago) of “sitting back” and waiting for people to come in and use services and resources. as you say this only leads to our redundancy and closure. we proactively do this in our service, though not as much as i would like – having the right skills, personality, time and resources are a major stumbling block. from my own experience i can say that “selling” and “marketing” the service and resources in a similar way to selling products and goods is the way forward – we need to “sell” the benefits of the service, why they should be used, how they can help improve and enlighten and where the library staff can do so as well. i am sure many of us are struggling to do this with limited help, training (its difficult enough to go on library courses imagine asking to go on a sales course!) and staff perhaps chris [bishop] there is a niche here for you? megan mac gregor 2017–02–27 at 2:07 pm this is so spot on! librarians need to stop being afraid to use things that work in the retail/sales industry. those industries use it because it works, and if we can harness it to help people and bring them the benefit of our collections and services then why wouldn’t we use it? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a look at recessions and their impact on librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 14 jan hilary davis /10 comments a look at recessions and their impact on librarianship image courtesy of flickr user raybanbro66 by hilary davis given the constant flood of reports comparing our current economic recession with past major recession events including the great depression, i want to explore the historical patterns of employment rates and salaries for librarians at times of recession and the role of libraries during recession events. in 1933, carl milam, secretary of the american library association, along with ora wildermuth, an attorney in indiana, and h.l. woolhiser, a city manager in illinois, held a radio broadcast called “how to reduce the library budget.”  the transcript (available from the national municipal review, 1933, vol. 22, no. 8) unpacks a revealing conversation about the pressures on libraries during the great depression and the corresponding aims of the american library association. “judge wildermuth: wages are down, and the incomes from every business and every property has been drastically reduced. in many cases the income from property is not sufficient to pay taxes, much less living expenses of the owner…in a time of depression we have to stop considering what is good for a well organized social structure and consider what is necessary for continued existence of the people. in my town we have been spending $90,000 per month for poor relief and that is not enough. our public library spends about the same amount each year. suppose we are reduced to the necessity of eliminating one of these functions, which will it be mr. milam?” it’s 2009 and our nation is in a major financial crisis with a new leadership positioning itself to get our economy back on track. the media is spilling over with worsening updates on our economy, a shrinking job market and what it all means for citizens and their jobs. paul krugman, nobel prize winner for economics in 2008, called the current economic downturn the “worst situation in two lifetimes” on the december 29, 2008 airing of cbs’ face the nation program: by all accounts, the profession of librarianship is not immune to the compounding economic downfall. as of december 2008, the us national bureau of labor statistics declared a 7.2% unemployment rate across all professions and industries (approximately 10,015,000 unemployed persons), representing the highest unemployment rate since 1991. of that, librarians, trainers and educators make up 218,000 of the unemployed population. this is up from 98,000 unemployed people in this category in december 2007 to 218,000 in december 2008. so, what does all of this look like for the librarianship profession, a profession that very recently (december 2008) was listed as one of the top professions by the u.s. news and world report? how has librarianship fared over the past several economic recessions? how has our profession recovered from those recessions? what role are libraries playing during the current economic crisis? libraries during recession events praise for library services and collections during the current economic crisis is remarkably similar to the praise of libraries during the great depression. in his excellent investigation of the impact of the ala on the anti-taxation groups that arose in response to economic collapse during the great depression, brendan luyt (2007) summarized a set of position statements from the ala for the role of the library: “as providing encouragement for the citizen to re-identify with state, in the form of loyalty to the public library, a state agency. the library was portrayed as mediating between the individual and the rest of society. mediation had both ‘giving’ and ‘protecting’ functions. through the library citizens could be given access to practical instruction, as well as to the ‘finer’ cultural things of life, while also being protected against the forces of anarchy and disorder.” fast-forward to today’s recession and it’s hard to miss the praise for the services and collections that libraries offer. these reports mirror similar marketing materials published by the bulletin of the ala during 1933 and 1934 promoting the value and role of libraries during the great depression. take an ehow article for example, that promotes ways that citizens can make the most of libraries during an economic downturn: “members can re-skill themselves, enhance their knowledge, gain new capabilities and even save money while borrowing (instead of buying) popular books, study materials, novels and dvds.” —ehow stories of libraries providing access to books, videos/dvds, cds, newspapers, magazines, journals, reference guidance and internet service in addition to training and programming for children, teens and adults are popping up everywhere. a news-map snapshot of the latest news stories about the value of libraries over the past month on metacarta spotlights hundreds of locations where library usage has dramatically increased during the past year. at the same time, these news reports are remarking on the incredulity of library shutdowns due to lack of budget funds. given the inherent value of libraries during the current economic crisis, pennsylvania state librarian mary clare zales, testified before the house of representatives that libraries are essential to the nation. “the public library plays an even more important role as americans are facing tough economic times. library usage is up ten percent from the last economic downturn in 2001. debbie long of west goshen in chester county, pennsylvania noted the price of borrowing one hardback book from the library saves her enough to fill her gas tank halfway. so this year, she is frequenting the west chester public library instead of the bookstore. … patrons are visiting their library for more than the borrowing of free books. libraries offer databases with job listings, training on resume development, techniques for interviewing and 21st century skills needed to get that new job. the washoe county library system’s community resource center in nevada helped stephanie d’arcy, who hadn’t had full-time employment for several months, successfully get a job with the local parks and recreation department. … that library attendance has increased is not a surprise. studies from generation to generation have shown that in times of economic downturn, libraries become busier.” furthermore, library journal (november 15, 2008) reported that the american library association (ala) is seeking a $100 million stimulus package from congress to “help libraries aid americans as they deal with the nation’s current fiscal crisis.” with or without a funding stimulus, most libraries are undoubtedly facing significant budget cuts and seeking solutions via hiring freezes, layoffs, collections cuts, service cutbacks, foregoing computing refreshes, salary freezes, etc. just a few examples: free library of philadelphia system saved from closing 11 of 54 branches nevada public library preserves children’s reading program, but stops filling positions and replacing old computers university of tennessee health sciences library announces collection funding unsustainable cutback in library hours at florida state university libraries impact of recession events on librarian salaries and employment while libraries are seeing huge increases in usage, the job market for librarians is being hit hard. with unemployment on the rise and hiring freezes and layoffs in effect, what might our profession expect and can we identify trends from past recession events to help inform our future? i am not an economist or a historian, but i am deeply concerned about the impact of the current recession on the librarianship profession and want to try to bring to light any evidence from past recession events to prepare librarians for what might lie ahead.  much of what is presented below lends itself to many different interpretations and i invite our readers to make up their own minds and share their own insights. a recession is measured as a decrease in the gross domestic product (gdp) over at least two quarters. this can also be conveyed as a percent change in the gdp, as displayed in the figures that follow. i used salaries and number of people employed as librarians as two indicators of how librarianship has fared during the past recession events. giving credit to the sources of this data: average (a.k.a mean) annual librarian salaries came from the ala annual salary survey, a very handy report by denise davis from 2005 on librarian salaries and the gerould statistics 1907/08 – 1961/62. the number of people employed as librarians over the years came from the u.s. census bureau statistical abstracts and the u.s. bureau of labor statistics. the period of 1930-1961 included six recessions as identified by the u.s. national bureau of statistics. in figure 1 below, these six recessions are represented by the yellow vertical bars. the gdp percent change is represented by the blue line and the average librarian salaries is represented by the red line. from 1930-1939 (the great depression) the average librarian salaries slowly decreased from $2,099 in 1930 to a low of $1,591 in 1939. the following years from 1940-1947 show a gradual increase in the average salary from $1,724 in 1940 to $2,562 in 1947 even though there was a short recession from 1945-1946 (possibly due to the end of world war ii). one could speculate that because the librarian profession was not sought after by males returning from service, that job security for the women holding those positions was solid. however, during the mild recession from 1948-1949, average salaries did drop 6.3% followed by a substantial rise of 15% in 1949 ($2,759). for the rest of this period, from 1950-1961, the average salaries continued to increase despite three more recessions. this data suggests that even during this turbulent period, for those librarians who did have jobs, their salaries bounced back and even rose despite some some mild recession events toward the end of the period. figure 2 describes the period from 1988-2007 which includes three recessions: 1990-1991 recession event tied to a decrease in industrial manufacturing and sales, 2001-2003 recession tied to the dot.com collapse combined with 9/11, and the current recession from 2007-present. average librarian salaries increased steadily throughout this 20-year period, going from $29,675 in 1988 to $57,809 in 2007. the most dramatic increase in the average salary for librarians occurred between 1988 and 1989 when the average salary increased by nearly 12% (or $3,485). one might expect that the dot.com recession would have had an impact on librarian salaries given the profession’s close ties with the information industry, but does not appear to be the case. there could be many reasons why (e.g., librarianship, for the most part, was not at the bleeding edge of technology during 2001-2003), but the health of the job market has held steady with robust salaries during this period. taking into account the number of librarians employed, figure 3 describes the period from 1977-2007 which includes four recessions: 1980-1982 recession tied to the iranian revolution and u.s. attempts to control inflation, 1990-1991, 2001-2003, and the current recession. the gdp percent change is represented by the blue line and the number of librarians employed is represented by the red line. a lack of data deemed that i could not include earlier time periods, including the 1973-1975 recession which was linked to the oil crisis of 1973 and the vietnam war, but it appears that the economy is still in recovery mode from 1977-1978 as seen in the chart. what is evident is that during each of these recession events, the number of employed librarians decreased. the period from 1980-1982 saw a series of dramatic swings from a decrease in the number of employed librarians by 3.5% (dropped by 7,000 persons) in 1981 quickly followed by a sharp increase in 1982 by nearly 8% (an increase of 15,000 persons), immediately followed by another decrease of nearly 7% (dropped by 14,000 people no longer employed as librarians in 1983). the recession of 1990-1991 also saw a substantial decrease (nearly 7% or 15,000 people no longer employed as librarians). however, the period from 2001-2003 saw the greatest change – a drop of just over 16% (or 38,000 people not longer employed in librarianship). stabilizing from 2004 to 2006, the number of people employed as librarians increased from 217,000 to 229,000. the latest data for 2007 report that the number of employed librarians again dropped to 215,000. this seems to indicate that the number of employed librarians is a much more volatile statistic and more susceptible to major economic downturns. if you are employed as a librarian now, count your lucky stars because your salary, if history is any indication, should hopefully remain fairly stable. if you’re in the job market now, you will certainly find it a rough road ahead as long as this recession lasts. figure 1: comparison of gdp percent change and average librarian salaries, 1930-1961 figure 2: comparison of gdp percent change and average librarian salaries, 1988-2007 figure 3: comparison of gdp percent change and number of employed librarians, 1977-2007 the bottom line? overall this is pretty rotten news. it’s possible that the u.s. census hasn’t got the most current data and that much of this is certainly up for scrutiny; however, if the current recession is being called the worst recession since the 1930s, it’s hard to imagine the average librarian salary continuing to increase and the employment figures getting much better anytime soon. if you have a job, hold on it. if you don’t, there are some pretty good avenues to explore. in addition to hosting job ads, lisjobs.com is a great first stop for resources that help match librarians with free continuing education opportunities as well as help aligning your skills in a non-library workplace. the special libraries association (sla) has even set up a mentoring program for librarians who are between jobs or who have been laid off. eventually, things will improve. we can see from past recession events, the profession does indeed rebound. and, because libraries are acknowledged as a fundamental force that holds societies together, i think the important thing to take away from this crude analysis and brief snapshot of libraries during today’s economic recession is that our profession is buoyant and has a good chance of weathering this storm. the bright side of the recession is that libraries across the nation are getting the best pr in mainstream media that we’ve seen in a long time. indeed, libraries have traditionally been strongly promoted during times of economic crises (e.g., american libraries august 2002, pp. 62-63). the upsurge in use of libraries is good evidence as is the public outcry when a library is threatened with being closed down. revisiting the radio broadcast from 1933 on “how to reduce the library budget,” carl milam, secretary of the american library association at the time, crafted a careful argument supporting the value of libraries during economic crisis. his arguments framed the necessity to uphold librarian salaries, look for efficiencies in government, and make cuts to libraries in the order of (1) decrease operating costs, (2) implement efficiencies in routine processes, and as a last recourse, (3) cut the collections budget. one of h.l. woolhiser’s (the city manager from illinois) final statements from the broadcast is as true an argument for supporting libraries during today’s recession as it was for the plight of libraries during the great depression: “the library exists to provide the means of self-education. education is the interest of the state, and the educational institutions – school, libraries, universities – are engaged in the process of helping people to become intelligent members of society. in other words, society has a stake in what the library does. it is interested in having the library’s influence reach the largest number of people in the most effective way.” selected resources for further investigation: ala-apa’s better salaries/pay equity bibliography association of research libraries annual salary surveys tom terrell and vicki gregory’s 2003 paper, “a look at now and then: salaries of academic and research librarians” ala 2002 report, “public library use and economic hard times: analysis of recent data“ library journal’s placements & salaries surveys al direct january 7, 2009 issue includes 6 stories on libraries and the recession much appreciation to emily ford from itlwtlp, kim duckett and hyun-duck chung for providing thoughtful feedback on drafts of this post. recession; librarianship job market; great depression; economic crisis in praise of the internet: shifting focus and engaging critical thinking skills a librarian’s guide to 332.024 10 responses pingback : “a look at recessions and their impact on librarianship”…01.14.09 « the proverbial lone wolf librarian’s weblog emily ford 2009–01–14 at 11:56 am hilary, this is certainly a timely post! even after you wrote it ala came out with their advocating in a tough economy toolkit. one of the strengths of your post, i think, is mentioning some of the services offered by professional organizations for librarians who are finding them hit by unemployment during this time. where is ala on this list? as the largest professional organization in our field, it seems as if ala’s membership might have been hit hardest, just based on sheer numbers. were you able to find anything about initiatives from ala that are in support of individual members? again, ala disappoints… hilary davis 2009–01–14 at 1:07 pm hi emily – it’s possible that i missed ala’s services for laid off librarians, but i did attempt to find something (with no luck). hopefully others will post ala services similar to sla’s employment disruption program. thanks for pointing out jim rettig’s advocacy toolkit link! emily ford 2009–01–14 at 6:45 pm also, i just saw mention of this in al direct. in a new podcast, george eberhart, editor of american libraries direct, the weekly e-newsletter of american libraries magazine, discusses the special edition of al direct being released jan. 20. the special edition will describe the many ways the american library association (ala) is involved in dealing with libraries facing a tough economy. pingback : links for 2009-1-15 « birdbrain(ed) book blog derik 2009–01–19 at 1:25 pm interesting post, hilary (and extra point for stats and graphs). i have to wonder how those stats would break down if one divided librarians up by public, academic, and corporate librarians. are public librarians affected more by economic downturns? i wonder, but not enough to see if such a stat were possible. hilary davis 2009–01–19 at 2:26 pm hi derik – good question about the breakdown between types of librarianship; unfortunately the census bureau and bureau of labor statistics doesn’t break down employment by public, academic, corporate, school, etc. librarians. the salary surveys are a little more helpful in that you can look at how salaries are distributed across different types of organizations, but getting historical data on salary breakdowns isn’t straightforward (and in some years, doesn’t seem to exist). this ended up being a pretty ambitious project because data collection was not easy – maybe others out there can suggest other resources, but i could not find a simple, quick method to gather the data (with the exception of the denise david article that had already compiled a lot of salary data). it would be interesting to compare salaries, employment figures, and other factors with related professions (e.g., teaching) and my hope is that this post will fuel others to do additional research. this was just a first pass at trying to get some perspective on the impact of the economy on our profession. more robust, follow-up studies on this topic would be great for mls students looking for compelling projects. ellie 2009–01–20 at 10:10 am thanks for doing all that statistical research hilary! i hope it does inspire more related research. hilary davis 2009–01–28 at 2:13 pm there’s a nice overview in library journal on the state of library budgets (published jan 15): http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/ca6625159.html pingback : are you worth it? what return on investment can and can’t tell you about your library | in the library with the lead pipe this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct it’s not imposter syndrome: resisting self-doubt as normal for library workers – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 10 jun nicola andrews /10 comments it’s not imposter syndrome: resisting self-doubt as normal for library workers in brief library workers, as with other professions, are quick to diagnose ourselves and others with imposter syndrome when we doubt or devalue our everyday work.  however, methods of coping with imposter syndrome have changed little in the forty years since the term was first theorized, and often centre on feel-good fixes which do not address power imbalances between the sufferer and their workplace environment.  here, i examine the origins of imposter syndrome, and identify factors often misinterpreted as imposter syndrome but which are instead the product of oppressions such as precarious labour, racism, and sexism.  by unpacking how oppression and gaslighting shapes a workplace environment, we can then alleviate individuals with imposter syndrome of sole responsibility for their own healing, and hold institutions and managers accountable for the conditions they help to perpetuate. nb:  i use the terms “library workers”, “staff”, and “employees” interchangeably, to denote people who work in libraries at all levels. library workers who are volunteers, interns, students, or precariously-employed grapple with imposter syndrome as much as or more than workers who are formally credentialled with an mlis degree or who benefit from social credibility through their age, gender, or race. by nicola andrews introduction imposter syndrome is an evergreen issue within librarianship, and countless authors, presenters, and researchers have offered solutions to the issue since pauline rose clance and suzane ament imes first named it in 1978 (clance & imes, 1978).  the problem is pathologized as a syndrome, yet simultaneously framed as a natural part of entering a profession, particularly for women.  despite this acknowledgement of prevalence, solutions seldom analyze workplace culture or values, instead emphasizing that the afflicted individual should adjust their beliefs and behaviours.  by examining imposter syndrome literature, and reframing it in a culturally responsive way, we can identify causes of imposter syndrome, experiences misidentified as imposter syndrome, and how institutions benefit from it.  with this knowledge, we can then shift from treating imposter syndrome as a framework of individual affliction, to one which signals a need for institutional change and accountability. defining imposter syndrome imposter syndrome, also called imposter phenomenon, imposter experience, fraud syndrome, and imposterism, is when a person doubts the validity of their accomplishments, attributes them to external forces, and has an irrational fear that they will be revealed as a mistake.   pauline rose clance and suzanne ament imes first coined and researched the “imposter phenomenon” in 1978.  clance & imes’ (1978) groundbreaking work, the imposter phenomenon in high achieving women:  dynamics and therapeutic intervention; articulated crucial issues about workplace dynamics and the anxieties of working women. according to clance & imes (1978), “the term impostor phenomenon is used to designate an internal experience of intellectual phoniness which appears to be particularly prevalent and intense among a select sample of high achieving women.” (p. 241).  the article goes on to explain that men believe their success is due to their own inherent intelligence and worth, while women believe that their successes are due to external factors such as luck, or temporary qualities such as effort (clance & imes, 1978, p. 242). clance & imes’ (1978) study used a sample of 178 “white middle-to-upper-class women between the ages of 20 and 45” (1978, p. 242).  while men are acknowledged as also suffering from insecurity, clance & imes (1978) also state that, “we have noticed the phenomenon in men who appear to be more in touch with their “feminine” qualities.” (p. 241). imposter syndrome remains a contemporary workplace issue, yet research around it is centred in whiteness, and invalidates the experiences of queer people, people of colour, and survivors of bullying or abuse. in their article, clance & imes (1978) theorize how women seek validation and find mentorship, stating, “she uses her friendliness, charm, looks, humor, sexuality, and perceptiveness to win the person over”, and “she may volunteer to assist a professor with his/her pet research project. she may even become sexually involved with the mentor.” (clance & imes, 1978, p. 244).  it is appalling to consider this credible rhetoric – such thinking positions women as manipulative, while also dismissing the consistent work required to develop emotional intelligence and cultivate relationships.  qualities such as empathy and active listening are coded within the article as “feminine”; also reinforcing toxic masculinity.  most alarmingly, this viewpoint erases the ongoing history of misogyny, sexual abuse, and abuse of power within academia; which is certainly applicable to librarianship (ford, 2018).   clance & lanford (1993) published a paper fifteen years later, reviewing the original study and subsequent research.  although it states that imposter behaviours manifest differently between genders, the updated study finds no differences between genders as to the degree imposter syndrome is experienced (1993, p. 496).  gender is not mentioned beyond a binary in either work. clance & imes (1978) present several solutions to alleviate imposter syndrome – group dialogue and validation, challenging negative thought patterns, confronting fear of success, affirmations, imagining conversing with someone who they think they have “fooled”, keeping a journal of positive feedback, role-playing feeling intelligent, and practicing authenticity (1978, p. 246).  the 1993 article recommends therapy which focuses on childhood dynamics and expectations; which delegitimizes the impact of bullying, abuse, or precarity in adulthood.  modern solutions to imposter syndrome have not evolved much from those offered by the article – most of us can recall well-intentioned advice to set good boundaries, or practice mindfulness.  however, if we are still as afflicted by imposter syndrome now as when this article was published, over forty years ago, then we need a new approach, reframing the problem rather than the solution.   patterns of power and prevalence i started questioning imposter syndrome during my various stages as a graduate student; participant in professional development programmes; and in my first librarian role.  in each experience, i was surrounded by brilliant, talented people, and it was not unusual for myself or my peers to be awed by others in the room.  however, shyness, or gladness to be included among people you admire are not the same as an ingrained disbelief in belonging; and those instances in themselves were not noteworthy.  what intrigued me about these environments was that in each one, mentors or authority figures would warn us to shore up against imposter syndrome.  those in positions of power kindly-yet-repeatedly pushed the narrative that imposter syndrome wasn’t just a possibility, it was a natural experience that could strike at any point during one’s career, but was unavoidable as an early-career professional. my interest deepened when during my first six months as a credentialed, compensated librarian, i attended three separate training sessions pertaining to imposter syndrome.  these took the form of a workshop for library staff, a workshop for university employees, and a pre-conference workshop at a national conference.  the workshops were all led by women, and had majority female attendees.  workshop formats included a combination of presentations, inter-group dialogue, and time for personal reflection.  i am thankful for the opportunity these workshops provided to connect with others, practice radical vulnerability, and to talk openly about our internalized worries and shame.  misery loves company, and it can be comforting to step back and realize that no-one exudes non-stop confidence, and that sometimes we can all take ourselves a little too seriously. however, every session promoted imposter syndrome as a personal issue – and a personal flaw – requiring growth and grit to be overcome.  nowhere in these conversations did we address power dynamics or institutional accountability, nor did we pause to consider if there were populations whose anxieties could not be helped under an imposter syndrome framework.  while i had readily subscribed to the idea that it was inevitable that there would be stretches of time when i felt like a failure, i had not considered those who are systemically made to feel unsafe, lesser-than, or overburdened in their work.   as i considered the suggested remedies for imposter syndrome, i realized they erased my positionality and lived experiences.  as a māori, takatāpui, immigrant, person of colour, and first-generation scholar, i know that libraries and academia were not constructed for my benefit; and that systems of colonization, white supremacy, misogyny, and hatred continue to operate within them and wider society.  the lack of belonging i felt did not stem from a lack of self-esteem, but from the knowledge that libraries and academia as institutions never intended i belong. beyond my own anecdotal evidence, a scan of recent conference schedules reveals that the 2019 ala midwinter meeting offered career counselling, pop-up mentorship opportunities, and sessions including, “manage your stress and start living a healthier life today” and “overcoming imposter syndrome:  the perspectives of two new academic librarians”.  the acrl 2019 conference included the session, “when your internal narrative makes it hard to lead:  addressing imposter phenomenon of library leadership”.  the 2019 ala annual conference included “avramcamp”, a lita-sponsored session which promised advice to combat imposter syndrome.  of these conferences, the most high-profile event was the ala spectrum chair’s program, “imposter syndrome”, where a panel of library workers advised on overcoming imposter syndrome in the workplace.  every year, there are countless other conference sessions on imposter syndrome, as well as the multitude of blog posts and webinars designed to warn us of its existence.  as a profession, we keep talking about imposter syndrome, especially targeting library school students, newly-appointed managers, and people of colour.  when are we going to stop signalling that fear and anxiety is normal within our profession, and instead examine how these narratives are the result of institutions deflecting the need for change? library-specific literature library workers have also created library-specific scholarship on the syndrome.  in jumping into the deep: imposter syndrome, defining success, and the new librarian, lacey & parlette-stewart (2017) introduce some of the nuances of imposter syndrome and librarianship, such as overwork, and lack of orientation, job clarity, or mentorship for new librarians.  critically, lacey & parlette-stewart (2017) name library school programmes as an originator of imposter syndrome, as offering little to no concrete help in transitioning to the workforce.  they also name academic librarianship as an intense and competitive field, and draw attention to the role of temporary and contract-based work in breeding feelings of insecurity, worthlessness, and pressure to secure permanent employment. lucy rakestraw (2017) depicts the cycle of imposter syndrome and overwork.  rakestraw (2017) also notes that imposter syndrome is not nervousness or low self-esteem; and summarizes the various personas (harvey, 1985) in which imposter syndrome can manifest (workaholism, gratitude for “luck”, charm, blending in, procrastination), and the ways sufferers deflect their role in success.   i found three studies conducted on imposter syndrome within library & information science.  in the first, clark et. al. (2014) tested levels of imposter syndrome within newer librarians, younger librarians, and those whose jobs required more technical expertise.  after analyzing perspectives from 352 respondents, the authors concluded that younger and newer librarians reported higher levels of imposter syndrome than their older, more established peers.   clark et. al. (2014) also reported inconclusive results regarding technical expertise and imposter syndrome (p. 265).  tenure-track faculty with less than three years in their roles reported imposter feelings at a higher rate than their non-tenure and staff counterparts; and overall, one-in-eight library workers reported feelings of imposter syndrome.  importantly, they conclude by asserting that managers should actively intervene in overwork or fear of failure within their employees, and stress the need for openness, proper training, appropriate feedback, and observation as supervisors of new librarians (2014).  according to clark et al.,“while library organizations may not necessarily cause ip feelings, survey respondents perceived that the culture fosters those feelings” (p. 264).  in the second instance, barr-walker et. al. (2019) surveyed over 2000 members of the medical library association, replicating the methods previously used by clark et. al. (2014). of the 703 participants, one-in-seven indicated they may have imposter feelings, and the 79% who indicated that they did not hold a health sciences degree reported higher rates of imposter feelings than those who were formally credentialled in their subject area (barr-walker et. al, 2019, p. 326).  the authors recommend further studies to address intersectional relationships between race, gender, and privilege within library systems. in the third study, martinez & forrey (2019) draw on their experiences as new librarians, and speak to the impact of imposter syndrome on library instruction programmes.  they also address an important critique of the original imposter syndrome study with this quote by pauline clance: “if i could do it all over again, i would call it the imposter experience, because it’s not a syndrome or a complex or a mental illness, it’s something almost everyone experiences (anderson and kang, 2016).” (2019, p. 3).   the authors surveyed 172 early-career librarians, and found 85% felt insecure, underqualified, or in danger of being discovered as a fraud (martinez & forrey, 2019, p. 6).  respondent narratives highlighted the lack of training librarians receive on how to teach classes.  the article concludes with advice to “find a friend” and combat the isolation associated with negative self-talk.  however, they also include a paragraph on “how employers can help”, and the importance of setting clear expectations and providing consistent feedback (martinez & forrey, 2019, p. 6).   overall, research on imposter syndrome reinforces the narrative that overcoming it is an individual effort, but recent opinion pieces offer more holistic, radical viewpoints which acknowledge the role of systems in perpetuating imposter syndrome.  for example, mullangi & jagsi (2019) state: imposter syndrome, in many ways, is analogous to another, related, epidemic—that of clinician frustration—often termed burnout.  studies show that a third to half of medical students and clinicians are experiencing depression and anxiety, much higher rates than those observed among their non physician peers.  a single such affected physician can be prescribed medication, encouraged to seek talk therapy, or asked to take a therapeutic leave of absence.  but at the aggregate level, administrators are acknowledging that they have a part to play in addressing the structural environment—long hours, rising case loads, and an increase in administrative tasks related to electronic medical records, which can contribute to frustration  (p. 403). the ways in which institutional cultures and conditions may cause harm includes a variety of pathologized experiences, including imposter syndrome, low morale, and weaponized gratitude.  likewise, white supremacy within workplaces often surfaces as positivity culture, bootstrapping, and the mythology of “ professionalism” and “a good fit” (mirza & seale, 2017; lópez-mcknight, 2017; watson, 2017). we need to research and address how whiteness intersects with imposter syndrome, and how it informs whose expressions of need or assurance we affirm and reward. white supremacy and imposter syndrome as the initial imposter phenomenon study was conducted with white study subjects, it is not too surprising that solutions to imposter syndrome are also rooted in whiteness.  this whitewashing manifests in three major ways – tone policing, disregard for collective cultures, and homogeneous expectations of behaviour. the suggested means of overcoming imposter syndrome overwhelmingly amount to “developing confidence” or “being positive” (clance & imes, 1978). this positioning assumes that everyone with imposter syndrome lacks confidence or assuredness.  however, one can be confident in one’s own abilities or values, without being rewarded or in alignment with institutional priorities or workplace culture.  put another way, feeling devalued does not automatically mean someone feels worthless, and can instead indicate a lack of recognition or safety to express confidence in the workplace. advising performance of confidence can function as a form of tone policing, or shutting down concerns from a vulnerable party – particularly if the advisor has enough privilege to ignore existing power dynamics. using a framework which suggests that anxiety diminishes with confidence or poise makes another assumption – that confidence is uniformly accepted by everyone, in all environments.  it is not enough to simply be confident when expressions of confidence or positivity are routinely ignored or shut down.  for example, librarians of colour consistently have their credentials questioned, or their achievements diminished as tokenization or affirmative action by coworkers and patrons alike (brinkman et. al., 2015).  women are criticized for everything from their email punctuation to their style of dress – and studies demonstrate managers are less likely to hire women they deem unattractive, regardless of how confident those women are and what dress or grooming standards are in place for other genders (huang, 2018). not only can confidence be ignored, but there are negative consequences for asserting one’s boundaries – consider the routine violence towards people who dare to turn down romantic advances.  this notion of confidence is a preference for whiteness, not equally enjoyed by those who are not white, cisgender, heterosexual, male, or otherwise depicted by dominant narratives within society.  even clance (1978) approaches this, stating, “the phenomenon may be further maintained in response to the negative consequences that are likely to befall the woman in our society who displays confidence in her ability.” (clance, 1978, p. 5). establishing boundaries is only useful if you have the means to aggressively defend them, or if you are already respected.   clance (1978) posits that it is possible women eschew an image of success or independence out of fear of being seen as less feminine, but i argue the likely modern scenario is that success risks jealousy, bullying, or being undermined within a competitive workforce, and that deferring to those higher up the ladder is part of the everyday emotional labour performed to manage the emotions of those with more power than ourselves. lastly, the imposter syndrome framework does not leave room to explore cultures outside of whiteness.  confidence is not a homogeneous state which manifests in the same way for everyone, and yet under imposter syndrome, we are assumed to have a shared understanding of exactly how a “confident” person acts and speaks.  gestures, facial expression, eye contact, loudness, dress, tone, and posture are just some of the ways in which our non-verbal communication can vary – but the workplace standards by which we judge these features as expressing confidence or professionalism are driven by racism and white supremacy. as a māori, i cannot help but reflect on the differences in how pride and humility are perceived in aotearoa and the united states.  in te ao māori, society is collective and emphasizes the importance of and interconnectedness between relationships, land, and ancestors.  these values are enshrined in some of our commonly used whakataukī, such as “ehara taku toa, i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini” (my success is not mine alone, it is the success of the collective), or “kāore te kumara e kōrero mō tōna ake reka” (the kumara does not speak of its own sweetness).  achievements are often acknowledged as the result of generations of work, knowledge, and care by the community; a mindset that does not diminish our own role in the slightest.  naming those who have raised, influenced, and helped us is a joyful, community-driven practice, and one common among cultures that value community wellbeing over individual competition and success.   even among pākehā (new zealanders of european descent), humility, celebrating others, self-deprecating humour, and downplaying achievements or expertise are the norm, but do not signal lack of confidence or self-esteem.  while tall poppy syndrome – criticizing those who stand out or who are conspicuously successful – also features in aotearoa culture, a down-to-earth attitude is prevalent back home, and thanking others stems from connectedness and community. in my experience as an introvert raised within a collectivist culture, practices such as sharing credit, honouring elders, and not forcing myself towards extroversion often leave me feeling misunderstood in american workplaces. but beyond being underestimated, an individualistic workplace can be isolating, controlling, and abusive. how can we advise workers to be vulnerable and authentic, if institutions replicating whiteness may in fact end up harming workers who express themselves with trust or authenticity? imposter syndrome as gaslighting when confronted with a peer who is routinely anxious or dissatisfied with their achievements, many of us are quick to suggest imposter syndrome is the problem – a problem many of us can relate to and want to destigmatize. after all, we are a service profession that loves to help, particularly by providing information and resources. while it is admirable to want to help others overcome their difficulties, it is worth pausing to examine how these circumstances may result from concrete factors other than imposter syndrome.  workplace difficulties can manifest due to inadequate onboarding, job creep, or budget cuts (lacey & parlette-stewart, 2017); as well as more malicious reasons such as racism, bias, or bullying (kendrick, 2017).  changing these environments takes a lot of uncomfortable, hard work, including questioning who and what we value and reward on an institutional level.  what is less work for institutions is to shift accountability back onto the individual – which, very plainly, is gaslighting. psychology today defines gaslighting as a form of psychological manipulation where the victim is intentionally fed false information as a means of creating self-doubt. we typically discuss gaslighting in the context of relationships, particularly domestic partnerships and intimate relationships.  i use the language of gaslighting here to unpack how employer-employee relationships can be fraught with unbalanced power dynamics and a need or desire to control the behaviour of the employee.   consider the following examples: insistence that the lack of librarians of colour is a “pipeline issue” that can be fixed by diversity residencies, instead of a “racism issue” that persists despite short-term hires requiring job candidates to submit “diversity statements”, without requiring the institution to state how they protect, promote, and retain minoritized employees what experience and scholarship “counts” towards a tenure/promotion timeline insistence that indigenous elders should be cited as “personal communication” within citation styles, not as knowledge sources in their own right unofficially tasking diversity resident librarians with teaching the university how to work with minoritized people [as alston, chiu, colbert, and rutledge (2019) state, “while residents can bring fresh, positive energy into a library, they are new professionals and therefore should not be expected to work alone as change agents” (p.67).] in each example, workplace policies can directly contribute to a culture of anxiety, uncertainty, stress, and internalized blame within their employees.  the onus is on the worker to become resilient and less sensitive, gracefully absorbing harm for the comfort of the institution. as tewell’s (2020) work on resilience states, “most often, the ideal means of addressing this need is for the people with the perceived deficit to apply themselves, to conform, or otherwise assimilate to dominant culture” (p. 139). it is important to note that even if the intent of these workplace messages is not malicious – say, due to policies out of one’s control, or simple lack of awareness – that the impact upon workers can still be demoralizing.  while not everyone has the power to overturn institutional practices and policies, they can openly acknowledge that anxiousness is a rational response to a situation fraught with power dynamics and inequalities.  while in my experience, employers are willing to have discussions about imposter syndrome and cultivating resilience during work hours, there is not much more support offered to enact any of the suggested ways of decreasing stress levels, let alone examining institutional causes of stress.  again, it behooves any institution to avoid examining chronic anxiety in its employees beyond a surface level, and to insist that any meditation, yoga, or similar wellness practices take place on an employee’s own time. furthermore, as tewell (2020) writes, “the people not asked to show grit are the ones creating the terms and conditions.” (pg. 148).   it’s a start to encourage employees to adopt a “power pose”, or meditate for a few minutes to alleviate pre-meeting jitters – but such practices are rendered ineffective when workplace culture allows meetings to run long, be scheduled back-to-back, and for people to be ignored, bullied, or subjected to microaggressions.  you cannot meditate racism, misogyny, and overwork away. if you still need to attribute the anxieties of yourself or your colleagues to imposter syndrome, rather than critically examine the culture of your workplace, i have a suggested diagnosis:  you may have what i call imposter imposter syndrome. imposter imposter syndrome is when someone maintains a chronic belief in the inherent shortcomings and discomfort/imposter feelings of individuals, in order to maintain their own comfort and ignore or diminish societal and institutional patterns of injustice and oppression.  imposter imposter syndrome is a coping mechanism – if it is others who are individually at fault, then you can pretend that you will always have the favour or skills necessary to avoid harm in these systems. if you believe that other people are just inherently unhappy or uncomfortable in work environments, you can absolve yourself of being complicit in perpetuating these systems, consciously or otherwise. if you keep attributing your own poor feelings to imposter syndrome, then you can pretend that with enough work, you can feel better, even if your conditions remain the same. coping mechanisms develop for a reason – they can provide protection and hope during difficult times. but inherently blaming others for how they feel or avoiding taking a holistic look at the systems you participate in can be maladaptive. luckily, as with concepts such as vocational awe (ettarh, 2018), once you recognize imposter imposter syndrome, you can work to unlearn and resist it. one approach to doing so is trauma-informed care. trauma-informed care just as with cultural differences, expressions of trauma can also be misattributed to imposter syndrome. clance & imes (1978) identify working excessively hard, intellectual flattery or phoniness, and leveraging charisma as imposter behaviours. likewise, the personas of workaholic imposters are known to spend disproportionate and unnecessary effort on tasks compared to their peers, and chameleon imposters deflect the need for support (harvey, 1985; young, 2011).   more specifically, workers with these personas who are new, precariously employed, or trying to prove their worth may question their right to take sick days or annual leave, and stay late or work during lunch breaks and weekends. similarly, they may eschew celebrating their achievements in favour of looking ahead to their next project or task; and be more likely to accept extra work, such as covering early morning or weekend shifts – even if they feel overworked, or that this extra work will not provide an opportunity for growth. it is employers and institutions that benefit from this naive bootstrapping – at least in the short term – while workers with these characteristics risk their own burnout. similar characteristics can be identified within trauma responses and survival mechanisms, including “flight” (workaholism and perfectionism), and “fawn” (people-pleasing, difficulty saying no) (virzi, 2020; walker, n.d.).  further overlap exists between imposter syndrome, depression, and “freeze” trauma responses (inability to make decisions, spacing out, isolating oneself). not only do we potentially carry our trauma with us into the workplace, but we can also encounter direct, complex, historical, and vicarious trauma on the job.  within our profession we can be impacted by anything including mass job layoffs, institutions being defunded or outsourced, refusal to grant tenure, violent terrorist acts, and sudden pleas for help or medical assistance from our community.  at our professional meetings and conferences, we can be confronted by people who have harmed us or others, and we can be dehumanized and attacked behind closed doors, away from our support systems. even on a good day, free from direct violence and microaggressions, intergenerational trauma can manifest when we enter library and university buildings constructed by the labour of enslaved and incarcerated persons, on stolen indigenous lands.  white supremacy is reflected in institutional mascots, statues and monuments, subject headings, plundered objects, award names, and the languages and types of knowledge we deem as being valid or having scholarly merit.  complex trauma can surface through the prolonged process of job searching or experiencing job insecurity, through months or years of having to absorb others’ job duties due to budget cuts, or through counselling students experiencing personal crises, year after year. librarianship, like social work, is a “helping profession” viewed with vocational awe (ettarh, 2018).  those whose lived experiences include trauma may intentionally go on to serve similarly impacted populations (e.g. – people of colour, at-risk youth, undergraduate students), and as such risk their own retraumatization and burnout (van dernoot lipsky, 2009).  as a māori librarian, i often reflect on being an indigenous person and a first-generation university student, helping new first-generation university students navigate a colonial system of learning.  the work is rewarding, but also uncomfortable, and the cyclical nature of it brings to mind this passage by child protective agency worker harry spence (n.d.): i started really thinking about what it was like to be engaged in trauma and in creating it at the same time…we hire 24-year-olds right out of college, give them a months’ training, and then they go observe the most complicated families in our culture, and then they have an obligation to predict the future, and if they’re wrong they’ll carry blood on their hands and they’ll be publicly crucified.  (spence, n.d., as cited in van dernoot lipsky, 2009, p. 235). trauma-informed approaches to library work continue to grow, with multiple universities offering a conjoint degree in library science and social work, and public library systems such as denver and san francisco featuring licensed social workers onsite.  however, as with edi work, trauma-informed librarianship focuses primarily on patrons, despite our own needs. to begin reflecting on trauma-informed approaches, consider the six guiding principles of safety, trustworthiness & transparency, peer support, collaboration & mutuality, empowerment, and cultural, historical, and gender issues (2018, center for disease control).  a trauma-informed approach does not inherently pathologize nervousness, and it allows people to acknowledge and work through concerns, without punitive judgement.  similarly, a trauma-informed approach might make job expectations and support clear, while holding institutions accountable for co-creating conditions conducive to healing with their staff. conclusion:  shifting the burden claiming the label of having imposter syndrome can be a relief – it can allow you to articulate your struggle, and to develop a shared understanding of it with others.  with a “diagnosis”, you can then work towards seeking a cure; and taking steps toward action can be empowering and energizing in themselves.  for those who find this an effective and straightforward process, i am glad; and hope that you are able to support others in turn.  however, if attempting to advocate for your needs, and celebrate your contributions with confidence still results in feeling dismissed, underappreciated, and approaching failure, consider if the imposter syndrome framework is really serving you – or, if it actually serves someone else. much of the traditional advice for overcoming imposter syndrome is useful as a short-term coping mechanism, and can potentially help individuals perform confidence and adhere to mainstream expectations.  however, the imposter phenomenon has persisted for over forty years, and evidence suggests that it is not just a product of individual neurosis, but often one of collective anxiety due to neoliberal pressures, racism, sexism, and bias against minoritized people.   literature on imposter syndrome is plentiful, and usually contains exercises to give individuals some relief.  in 1981, joan harvey created the “harvey imposter phenomenon scale”, which was followed by pauline clance’s “clance imposter phenomenon scale” in 1985.  both instruments consist of statements which the subject responds to on a likert scale, resulting in a score measuring their likelihood of suffering from imposter syndrome.  building on this work, i have developed some exercises not for those with imposter syndrome, but for those who manage people and institutions.  the appendix for this article contains two tools i have created for people to examine their workplace policies and practices, and their own management styles.  the first is an “institutional imposter phenomenon test”; which is a flexible self-assessment addressing onboarding, communication, trust, boundaries, psychological safety, accountability, job clarity, institutional culture, and anti-racism efforts.  the second is a response to the 2018 “problem woman of color in the workplace” infographic by the safehouse progressive alliance for nonviolence, and illustrates how pushing minoritized employees out of organizations is not an inevitability, but that managers need to reflect, advocate, and make intentional efforts to retain their talented staff.  i have created these tools with institutions in mind, but all institutions consist of people who need to hold themselves accountable on an individual level to create positive change. ultimately, whether a manager or colleague, you cannot control how someone feels or responds to a situation – but you can take a hard look at how your complicity or behaviour might contribute.  we all have agency for compassion, as stated by van dernoot lipsky (2009): i often remind my colleagues that we may unknowingly influence systems simply by altering the way we interact with them.  we must never underestimate the power of changing ourselves, of committing to being a force for liberation, light, wellness, justice, and right action wherever we go  (p. 200). the original imposter syndrome study, and the suggestions it provides are rooted in white supremacy, and it is important we recognize this intersection before we rush to suppress it with wellness or deflection. there is unlimited potential to research how workplace conditions contribute to low morale, anxiety, and trauma, but we do not need to do more studies to know these environments are unacceptable, and that we can immediately begin to improve things for ourselves and our colleagues through reflection and a commitment to doing better.  acknowledgements with deep gratitude to the itlwtlp editorial board, who originally accepted this proposal in 2018. in particular, sofia leung served as a fantastic publishing editor, and held space for me to pause this project without letting me off the hook when it came to questioning and clarifying my ideas. denisse solis was a supportive and rigorous internal peer reviewer, whose input vastly improved the flow of this piece. fobazi ettarh was a generous and insightful external peer reviewer, whose work is also referenced in my piece. thank you all for seeing this process through with me. i am also grateful to ashley farley, who gave vital feedback and much-needed encouragement, emily spracklin, who has been an enthusiastic supporter on this project and helped strengthen my institutional ip test, and hannah rainey, who got the idea of imposter imposter syndrome immediately. appendix a:  institutional ip test (link to pdf) appendix b:  “problem” woc in the workplace infographic  view or download this infographic as a pdf. full textual equivalent of this image as a list. appendix c:  reimagined poc infographic view or 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(2016). the imposter phenomenon in higher education: incidence and impact. journal of higher education theory & practice, 16(1), 51-60. retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.otago.ac.nz/docview/1791293249?accountid=14700 rakestraw, l. (2017). how to stop feeling like a phony in your library: recognizing the causes of the imposter syndrome, and how to put a stop to the cycle. law library journal, (issue 3), 465. retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&authtype=sso&db=edshol&an=edshol.hein.journals.llj109.31&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s3818721 sakulku, j. (2011). the impostor phenomenon. the journal of behavioral science. 6(1) 75-97. https://doi.org/10.14456/ijbs.2011.6  sobotka, c.  (2014, may 8).  dealing with imposter syndrome and feeling like you belong.  inalj.  https://inalj.com/?p=70926 tewell, e. (2020). the problem with grit: dismantling deficit thinking in library instruction. portal: libraries and the academy, 20(1), 137-159. doi:10.1353/pla.2020.0007. van dernoot lipsky, l.  (2009).  trauma stewardship:  an everyday guide to caring for self while caring for others.  berrett-koehler publishers. virzi, j.  (2020, january 2).  fawning:  the fourth trauma response we don’t talk about.  the mighty.  https://themighty.com/2020/01/fight-flight-freeze-fawn-trauma-responses/ walker, p.  (n.d.).  the 4 fs: a trauma typology in complex ptsd.  pete walker, m.a., mft.  http://pete-walker.com/fourfs_traumatypologycomplexptsd.htm watson, m.  (2017).   white feminism and distributions of power in academic libraries. in schlesselman-tarango, g. (ed.), topographies of whiteness : mapping whiteness in library and information science (pp. 143-174). library juice press. way, k.  (2019, october 8).  mindfulness isn’t the answer to our completely hellish workplaces.  vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43k7bm/mindfulness-and-work-stress when your internal narrative makes it hard to lead: addressing impostor phenomenon of library leadership.  (n.d.).  retrieved from https://s4.goeshow.com/acrl/national/2019/profile.cfm?profile_name=session&master_key=01c75512-e623-3116-ea93-d6df68628122&page_key=126cb9a0-b53a-2a1e-9827-df2938a26c80&xtemplate&userlgnkey=0  young, v.  (2011).  the secret thoughts of successful women:  why capable people suffer from imposter syndrome and how to thrive in spite of it.  crown business. from appendix b the “problem” woman of colour in the workplace this infographic portrays a woman of colour progressing through a new workplace, in four main stages. the woman of colour enters the organization 1a. honeymoon – the woman of colour feels welcomed, needed, and happy 1b. white leadership 1c. tokenized hire reality – the woman of colour points out issues within the organization. she tries to work within the organization’s structure and polices. she pushes for accountability. 2a. repetitive injury & microaggressions response – the organization denies, ignores, and blames. the responsibility of fixing the problem is placed on the woman of colour. people of colour are pitted against one another. 3a. denial of racism 3b. target & attack retaliation – the organization decides that the woman of colour is the problem and targets her. the organization labels the conflict as a “communication issue” or claims that she is not qualified or “not a good fit” 4a. the woman of colour exits the organization. adapted from the chronicle of the problem woman of color in a non-profit by the safehouse progressive alliance for nonviolence. return to appendix b from appendix c actively welcoming and retaining people of colour in the workplace – a collaborative approach to autonomy and allyship. this infographic portrays a person of colour (poc) progressing through a new workplace, in four main stages. the person of colour enters the organization 1a. welcoming beyond tolerance – poc feels welcomed without feeling tokenized. collaborates with supervisor to set achievable goals. begins to develop organic, non-political, non-competitive relationships with peers. considers support system and goals outside of work. 1b. self-aware leadership 1c. context and relationship building adjusting to the organization – allies give information on the organization, building environmental awareness. poc is invited to collaborate on successful projects. poc is able to ask questions of trusted peers. both poc and institution are open to ideas. poc is able to steer clear of pitfalls and use their energy in an impactful way. 2a. minimizing microaggressions collaboration 3a. growth – the value and contributions of the poc within the organization are seen and named. relationships expand and deepen. the poc is able to choose to collaborate with other minoritized colleagues. poc and other marginalized people do not have to compete for resources or respect. retention & promotion – the institution and the employee are both open to feedback and change. management works to address bias and white fragility. continued opportunities are presented to the new poc employee. efforts are made to accept difference and move beyond face-value diversity. 4a. person of colour has healthy experience, and can choose to stay or to leave the organization. adapted from the chronicle of the problem woman of color in a non-profit by the safehouse progressive alliance for nonviolence. re-imagining by nicola andrews 2018, with permission from the center for community organizations. return to appendix c burnout, imposter syndrome, management, mindfulness, organizational development multilingualism, neoliberalism, and language ideologies in libraries creating a library wide culture and environment to support mlis students of color: the diversity scholars program at oregon state university libraries 10 responses pingback : new peer reviewed article: it’s not imposter syndrome: resisting self-doubt as normal for library workers – stephen's lighthouse charles stevenson 2020–06–11 at 2:20 pm hi nicola, i work with clients to help them overcome imposter syndrome, underearning and fear of failure and your post appeared in my google alert today. i’ve only read it once so far and know that it warrants a slower and more detailed re-reading, along with tracking back to the references you’ve quoted. your concept of ” imposter imposter syndrome” was interesting. from my quick read it sounds like the way that someone is playing the game of avoiding acknowledging the systemic issues in the organisation and placing the problem, therefore, at the feet of the person who feels they’re an imposter. quite a nifty side-step as such. one of the observations i offer to clients is that they can’t really be an imposter since a *real* imposter wouldn’t care whether they were an imposter or not (eg frank abagnale as in the film/book catch me if you can) and so the fact that we do care that we might be an imposter, means we’re not (!*#?). yup, our minds do love getting us in a double-bind! thanks for an informative article and i hope it gets a lot of traction in google as it’s well-worth a read. if it’s ok i’ll link to it when i next put up a blog post on is, should be in the next few days. cherio for now. nicola andrews 2020–06–11 at 6:33 pm hi charles – thank you for reading, and your response. it is very meaningful that the first comment here is from someone who directly works with clients to help them acknowledge their own worth and contributions. and yes, your initial read aligns with my thoughts – sometimes avoiding thinking of power structures and systemic issues is unconscious – but sometimes it is wilful, or at the least, a decision made by managers and supervisors even if out of avoidance. something i have been thinking about the last few days is that there are instances when someone feels like an imposter because they are treated poorly – but there are surely also instances where someone feels like an imposter because they have been promoted or given opportunities that truly exceed their skill level. in neither of these examples is it the fault of or a conscious decision by the person impacted, and yet they absorb the anxiety of the situation. double-binds, indeed! thanks again for your comment, and your ongoing work to help people believe in themselves. if this article is useful or interesting to you, please do share it. take care! dr theresa simpkin 2020–06–27 at 12:53 pm hello nicola. thanks for your article. despite the fact that after 5 or so years of research the impostor phenomenon (as it was originally termed) i still bristle at the term ‘imposter syndrome’, i have taken a very similar view of the construct as it plays out in organisations and broader social spaces. systematic and structural means of embedding the impostor phenomenon in the workplace have been acheived by the lack of diminished ‘otherness’ be that racism, sexism or whatever. it is insidious and as previous comments suggest, a nifty way of sidestepping responsibility as ip is framed as an individual response that exists within the ears of the individual. too much focus is placed on the ‘happy clappy’ responses that do not take into consideration real and embedded notions of ‘otherness’ and the power structures that maintain them. thanks for your article. nicola andrews 2020–07–06 at 11:14 am thank you for reading, dr. simpkin. it is so important that we take a full view of the power structures we participate in, and are not afraid to critique them. good luck with your continued work. lauren p 2020–07–05 at 3:09 pm do you know of other researchers who are really diving into the impacts of institutionalized racism and sexism on impostor phenomenon in urms in the academy? particularly science. nicola andrews 2020–07–06 at 11:26 am hi lauren – thank you for reading. i have not come across stem-focused research on this – at present, subject liaison librarianship would be the closest area i found, and all of the articles i cited (and my own) should be broadly applicable to this. good luck in your research. theresa 2020–07–15 at 7:43 am hi lauren, i’ve been doing work for some years on this in regard to women in stem especially. i’d be happy to connect. i can be contacted at the university of nottingham. theresa.simpkin@nottingham.ac.uk. dr. jones 2020–08–01 at 2:27 pm i am so happy to have come across your article!!!! i am giving a talk very soon on is and i have dedicated several slides on how the responsibility of addressing ip also lies on the shoulders of the employers and in my case my research institution. i am a postdoc in the stem field and i’ve always been one of only a handful of urms. my talk will be the first time anyone has ever discussed ip and it’s coming from a (seasoned) postdoc. i had a much longer path to take in order to get my phd, but i did it and i am the oldest postdoc at my institution…..which is why i said ‘seasoned’. i can’t wait to share some of the awesome information i recieved in this article and i found some good information in the comments! a change is needed and i am taking the lead. robert dickinson 2020–09–12 at 12:13 pm spectacularly interesting article! i’m not an academic in this field; you did a great job making it accessible to those outside your field. very well argued, and insightful into yet another way in which society puts the pressure on victims of oppressive systems to overcome their own oppression by themselves, instead of even recognizing the need for systemic change as the real solution. just wanted to say good job :) glad this piece has been written this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct creating a student-centered alternative to research guides: developing the infrastructure to support novice learners – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 21 oct jeremiah paschke-wood, ellen dubinsky and leslie sult /2 comments creating a student-centered alternative to research guides: developing the infrastructure to support novice learners in brief: research and course guides typically feature long lists of resources without the contextual or instructional framework to direct novice researchers through the research process. an investigation of guide usage and user interactions at a large university in the southwestern u.s. revealed a need to reexamine the way research guides can be developed and implemented to better meet the needs of these students by focusing on pedagogical support of student research and information literacy skill creation. this article documents the justification behind making the changes as well as the theoretical framework used to develop and organize a system that will place both pedagogically-focused guides as well as student-focused answers to commonly asked questions on a reimagined faq/research page. this research offers academic libraries an alternative approach to existing methods of helping students. rather than focusing on guiding students to a list of out-of-context guides and resources, it reconceptualizes our current system and strives to offer pedagogically-sound direction and alternatives for students who formerly navigated unsuccessfully through the library’s website, either requiring more support, or failing to find the assistance they needed. introduction the way librarians teach research methods and interact with faculty and staff across campus has changed over the years. this is due to a number of factors including reduced or flat budgets, increasing undergraduate enrollment, and changes to content delivery brought on by technological adaptations and users’ needs. amid these trends, more and more librarians search for active ways to engage novice researchers with instruction that provides guidance and scaffolding into more complex research practices and concepts, instead of instruction that focuses on search mechanics or rote practices. strangely, since their inception almost 50 years ago, research guides, often used to supplement instruction, have evolved into resource lists despite ample research suggesting this approach has limited efficacy as an instructional approach. librarians also now often need to look to technology to help support student learning or provide this instruction, with fewer opportunities for in-person instruction or fewer librarians to conduct this instruction. while academic libraries have long relied on subject guides as a means for supporting students through the research process, the advent of widespread internet usage allowed libraries to begin making guides available online. this process was streamlined even further with springshare’s development of the libguides platform in 2007. the ease of creating and copying libguides has provided librarians a means of developing online, scalable research support for students. in surveying guides across institutions, it is clear that the guides tend to follow a traditional “pathfinder” model that provides students with extensive lists of resources.1 while this is a valid use of guides, the changing expectations of students and faculty as well as more nuanced views of the research process require libraries to rethink the ways they support students as they attain information literacy skills and competencies. given these factors, our research focuses on whether or not current practices around the use and presentation of guides, which generally include comprehensive lists of resources without context or instruction, align with information literacy concepts as well as with commonly accepted practices around the way students learn. if the answer is no, what can we – as academic librarians and educators – do to provide a more useful and pedagogically sound option for early career undergraduates? how do we leverage our technology solutions to better serve this constituency who might not receive information literacy instruction through their coursework and might be intimidated by the prospect of asking for assistance from a person at a public service desk? at the university of arizona (uarizona), where this research is taking place, 20 liaison librarians are tasked with serving as the primary research support for the entire campus of over 45,000 students, while a smaller group focuses on information literacy instruction to the 4,000-6,000 new undergraduates that arrive on campus every year. the students possess varying levels of experience and skill in research. with the small number of liaisons working with this large community, the need for research support delivery via the library website and other online tools is more and more important. in this article, we will discuss utilizing the libguides and libanswers platforms to allow students to have more control over their research journey as they navigate the types of resources and library instructional support they need to develop successful research habits and practices. the methods we have used for these changes correspond to research in the application of adult learning theory in library instruction and the conclusions drawn by kathy watts in her 2018 analysis of the application of principles of andragogy in online library instruction that “college students… display the characteristics of adult learners. they like to know that their learning is relevant. they learn best when tutorials are problem-based. they come to library instruction with prior learning that needs to be accommodated. they prefer, and are capable of, self-directing their learning.”2 background given the current resource-heavy content in the university of arizona libraries’ (ual) course and subject guides, we began our research by looking for older literature about subject and research guides with the hope of discovering how research guides evolved. while we knew of more recent literature and projects – such as those identified by alison hicks in her 2015 article “libguides: pedagogy to oppress”3 – that position libguides as instructional tools, we were surprised to find that researchers have stressed the importance of designing guides with pedagogy at the forefront for decades. few of the suggestions that researchers previously put forth have been followed, including in the creation of libguides at our own institution.   the origin story of library research guides usually starts with topic-specific reference aids developed at mit in the early 1970s as part of the model library program of project intrex.4 these printed aids were called library pathfinders and marketed as such. 5 the pathfinders were expressly “designed to be useful for the initial stages of library research.” they were not intended to be bibliographies, exhaustive guides to the literature, or accessions tools. pathfinders were a “compact guide to the basic sources of information specific to the user’s immediate needs” and “a step-by-step instructional tool.”6 canfield (1972) explained that by “a judicious combination of a series of selected informational elements … a pathfinder enables the user to follow an organized search path.”7 the initial intention was never to create a comprehensive listing of resources but rather a suggested sequence of first steps. an even earlier precursor may have been the montieth college library experiment at wayne state university in the early 1960s. patricia knapp, an academic librarian and library educator, was an early proponent of integrating librarianship with academic instruction. knapp’s “path-ways” instruction embedded the library, both its physical collections and the organization of the collections, throughout the four-year montieth curriculum, building assignments that progressed in complexity as students advanced in their study and understanding of their disciplines.8 early articles described the strategic purposes of research/resource guides. alice sizer warner (1983) acknowledged that library pathfinders could be used as teaching tools and could enhance students’ research skills, though she did not offer specifics on how to accomplish those goals.9 thompson and stevens (1985) felt that traditional pathfinders were unsatisfactory because “they provided specific references to information and did not require students to develop their own search strategies.”10 jackson (1984) described the guides created at the university of houston-university park as “search strategy guides.”11 their guides emphasized a process for searching rather than pointing to specific information resources. the intention was to teach users methods for searching that could be applied in situations where subject guides did not exist. kapoun (1995) suggested that pathfinders failed to serve their original purpose. he stressed that pathfinders “should not dictate a single ‘correct way’ to perform topical research. instead they should facilitate individual styles of information gathering…. a pathfinder should offer suggestions, not formulas [emphasis kapoun].”12 by the late 1990s most libraries had developed online guides to both locally-held and internet-based subject resources, according to research by cohen & still (1999).13 while much of the literature continued to focus on the instructional purposes of online guides, many articles described methods, applications, and software that could be used to produce guides. yet even within these “how-to” articles were references to the instructional uses of guides. andrew cox (1996) described hypermedia library guides. he promoted the incorporation of graphics, images, sound and video files while acknowledging the technical challenges and limitations of existing browsers (netscape at that time).14 corinne laverty (1997) suggested that the web could function as a library’s desktop publishing system, revitalizing subject guides and pathfinders and allowing the creation and incorporation of interactive library tutorials. in addition to a discussion about technical solutions, she suggested several desired features of online pathfinders, including the “addition of a complete research strategy within a subject area rather than limitation to the traditional list of reference tools,” how to critically evaluate information and write a paper, and links to databases and tutorials.15 the challenge, according to laverty, was to “take advantage of the versatility and accessibility of the web in a way that enhances the library learning process.”16 a study of electronic pathfinders from nine canadian university libraries (dahl 2001) considered the intended functions of these guides. dahl felt that pathfinders had an instructional purpose — if they were mere bibliographies, they could not help students learn how to do research.17 carla dunsmore (2002) looked at the explicit and implicit purposes, concepts, and principles of online pathfinders. using both canadian and american university library pathfinders on three business topics, dunsmore identified two major functions: “facilitating access and providing a search strategy.”18 galvin (2005) found that “[p]athfinders which only list resources without providing explanations of the type of information offered in different sources do not teach students to evaluate information.”19 bradley brazzeal (2006) compared online forestry research guides to study how the guides incorporated the acrl’s information literacy competency standards for higher education. findings showed that some guides engaged the users by incorporating features that corresponded directly to elements of a library instruction session. he concluded that research guides had great potential to educate library users by helping them to understand the practical use of library resources and services.20 the time required to create and maintain internet-based subject guides was noted by morris and grimes (1999) in their study of research university libraries in the southeast. while the creation of guides was time-consuming, the librarians surveyed believed that the guides saved their users’ time in finding quality sites. the additional challenges of creating internet-based guides included the possible need for web masters, student workers, paraprofessionals, and new software to create, monitor and maintain the guides. consideration of search strategies or methods of conducting research were eclipsed by the technical challenges of creating online guides.21 in a follow-up study, the same authors concluded that library internet-based subject guides were becoming almost universal.22 the researchers’ use of the term “webliographies,” speaks to their use as a list of links rather than as a pedagogical tool. creation of “dynamic subject guides”, at york university, using an open source cms application was discussed by dupuis, ryan, & steeves (2004). the key objective of their guides was to serve as a starting point for research for undergraduate students. while the guides could be updated and maintained by librarians rather than computing staff, the guides themselves were chiefly search interfaces for library e-resources.23 moses & richard (2008) detailed the experience of two university libraries in implementing web 2.0 technologies (subjectsplus and libguides) for building online subject guides. at the time of writing in november 2008, the open source subjectsplus, developed by andrew darby at ithaca college, had been adopted by 15 libraries.24 libguides, a vendor solution developed by springshare, was reportedly being used by over 400 institutions. another early article (kerico & hudson 2008) about adopting libguides as a web-based platform described the ease of use and functionality of the libguides platform. the embedded web 2.0 features allowed librarians without expertise in computer programming or web design to quickly create general online resource guides and course-specific subject guides that utilized interactive web 2.0 features. more importantly, libguides could help refine instruction: the platform could make it easy to identify instructional elements that are common to all disciplines and encourage a “refined and collaborative approach to best practices for delivering content online to students and faculty alike.”25 glassman & sorensen (2010) suggested several web-based tools for the creation of library subject guides, pathfinders, and toolkits. options included content management systems such as drupal, blogging software such as blogspot and wordpress, and wikis such as mediawiki. other options included the open source applications libdata, developed by the university of minnesota libraries, and subjectsplus. ultimately glassman & sorensen’s library chose libguides for their online guides, citing the platform’s ease of use, customizability, strong vendor support, and content sharing.26 a nuanced criticism of research guides was offered by alison hicks in 2015. hicks questioned whether the predominant usage of libguides focused far too heavily on the decontextualized listing of tools and resources which isolated research from the reading and writing processes. this was troublesome because it positioned research as static and linear, leading to a predefined or pre-identified truth or right answer. a better solution would be guides designed around research processes, allowing opportunity for students to construct their own meaning-making process. hicks argued that “when we construct libguides around the resources that the librarian thinks the student should know about in order to ace their research paper, we attempt to simplify the processes of research.”27 ruth l. baker (2014) suggested that libguides could be used more effectively if they were structured as tutorials that guided students through the research process. such guides would “function to reduce cognitive load and stress on working memory; engage students through metacognition for deeper learning; and provide a scaffolded framework so students can build skills and competencies gradually towards mastery.”28 in one of the few studies conducted to assess the impact of research guides on student learning, stone et al. (2018) tested two types of guides for different sections of a dental hygiene first year seminar course. one guide was structured around resource lists organized by resource types (pathfinder design) while the second was organized around an established information literacy research process approach. the results showed that students found the pedagogical guide more helpful than the resource guide in navigating the information literacy research process. stone et al. concluded that these pedagogical guides, structured around the research process with tips and guidance explaining the “why” and the “how” of the research process, led to better student learning.29 a study focusing on the influence of guide design on information literacy competency (as delineated in the 2018 acrl framework for information literacy for higher education) for guides used outside the classroom by lee & lowe (2018) showed similar results.30 the pedagogical guide was organized around the research process identified in carol kuhlthau’s information search process (1991) and employed numbered steps to lead students through the research process. students using the pedagogical guide reported a more positive experience, spent more time using the guide, interacted more with the guide, and consulted more resources listed on the guide than students using a more traditional pathfinder (resource lists) guide.31 even though the study did not reveal a statistically significant difference in the information literacy learning outcomes between the students using the pedagogical guide and the students using the pathfinder guide, the authors proposed that there was a pedagogical advantage to having a more usable guide as well as lessening students’ negative emotions and anxiety related to research. if, as hemmig (2005) suggests, the origin of subject guides was knapp and the montieth library experiment project’s library “path ways”, then one of the central aspects of knapp’s research has been repeatedly lost and rediscovered, reiterated and ignored, over the last 50 years.32 there has been recurrent consideration of subject guides as pedagogical tools to teach how information is used within the disciplines and how research is conducted, but too often the focus has shifted to the maintenance, readability, format, consistency, language usage, and discoverability of guides. several authors share the same message of teaching strategies and methods; few reported on the successful implementation of those recommendations. our challenge as a large, public, land-grant university with over 35,000 undergraduate students, the two small departments of liaison librarians at ual face a daunting task of supporting students in pedagogically sound ways with limited resources. librarians often turn to online tutorials and guides to support the large student population. the ual has a recently updated suite of tutorials that librarians work to embed into early career undergraduate courses. in addition, liaisons consistently collaborate with faculty to develop course guides that support specific classes and assignments. although this approach has been useful, when we analyzed the usage of our guides as well as the questions that students were asking via chat and the reference desk, we found that the ual could improve our support for students by investing more effort and energy into developing guides that better connect information literacy practices to the principles of andragogy and that better support students in the meaning making processes of research that alison hicks so adroitly champions in her article “libguides: pedagogy to oppress?” research has shown that “[l]ibrary instruction seems to make the most difference to student success when it is repeated at different levels in the university curriculum, especially when it is offered in upper-level courses” and that “[a] tiered approach to teaching information literacy is in line with the way many universities teach other literacies, such as writing and math, with introductory skills at the freshman level and then more advanced practice as students matriculate.”33 a utah state university study that examined the impact of sequenced library instruction reinforces these findings as well as the need to use online learning tools to take advantage of flipped models of instruction when setting up a scaffolded program.34 given the need for scaling and providing opportunities for scaffolded and flipped instructional experiences that online research guides help fulfill, the use and usefulness of research guides for students is a primary concern for librarians. courtois, higgins, and kapur (2005) studied user satisfaction of online subject research guides at george washington university and found that while just over 50 percent of respondents rated the online guides positively, a full 40 percent rated the guides negatively.35 reeb & gibbons (2004) studied the disconnection between students and librarians’ mental models of information organization within academic disciplines as evident in online subject guides. their usability testing repeatedly revealed low usage of or dissatisfaction with subject guides. reeb & gibbons suggested that an undergraduate student’s mental model was focused on courses or specific coursework rather than the discipline itself. students found discipline-based subject guides lacking in context – they were confused by subject categorization and frustrated by not finding resources specifically tailored for their informational needs. the authors concluded that creating guides to support specific courses would be more useful to students than discipline-based guides.36 data on the usage of subject guides produced at ual bears out previous researchers’ doubts regarding usefulness. the research supports the conclusion that even though librarians may want to rely on subject guides as teaching and research support tools, most guides are underused. in observing the ual website and existing subject guides in the period from january 1 to may 31, 2019, there is an apparent gap in the way that librarians present information and the way that library users wish to interact with the information being provided. multiple subject guides produced by ual have less than 100 views for that five-month period, which amounts to less than one view per day. the most heavily viewed guides on the ual website focus on a specific, narrow topic or those developed for a specific course or program. ual libguides page views, jan. 1, 2019–may 31, 2019 libguide page views az residential tenants rules (topic) 19,287 bcom 214 (course) 8,621 gis & geospatial data (topic) 6,230 engl 102/108 (course) 4,837 mexican law (topic) 4,765 business (subject) 2,439 art (subject) 1,073 psychology (subject) 881 music (subject) 682 nutritional sciences (subject) 640 along with issues related to the use of ual subject guides, an analysis of our current site reveals that novice researchers encounter a number of navigational challenges when looking for guided research and/or instructional support. when looking for guidance, a user must navigate to the “research and publish” link, which then activates a dropdown selection where the user can select between links to research by subject/topic, research by course/program (both linking to alphabetical lists of libguides), “learn with tutorials,” which links to a set of foundational tutorials, “write & cite,” which provides links to citation and plagiarism resources and “support for researchers,” which links to specialized support for advanced research. while this linear and alphabetical representation of instructional support materials is not uncommon in academic libraries, it creates access challenges and misses an opportunity to demonstrate to students that research is process-oriented and recursive. it also raises the question of whether students understand the terminology in a way that allows them to find the help they need. in addition to navigational challenges, local decisions that were made when libguides were first implemented in 2013 further confound the research process. the original templates that the ual developed for libguides pages were designed through a lens that focused heavily on creating a consistent user experience (ux) across guides and are very linear and somewhat rigid in nature. as research on how students learn online has grown, we believe that ux concerns with navigation and consistency must be wedded to design approaches that incorporate the learner experience (ldx). we believe that the purposeful melding of ux and ldx will help ensure that libraries design interfaces that support and enhance “the cognitive and affective processes that learning involves.”37 a two-pronged approach: faqs and libguides several attempts have been made by the ual over the years to address these challenges and better integrate guides into the academic lives of students. one of the more successful projects has involved embedding library resources and instructional materials directly into the campus learning management system (lms).38 this project, named the library tools tab, began in the early 2000s and remains in use today. the goal of the project was to develop a tool that would provide access to a robust, embedded set of library instructional materials and resources through the campus lms. while the team did succeed in developing and launching a tool that integrated into the lms, it struggled with maintaining ongoing support and development and was never able to build it into as robust of a learning system as initially intended. in response to the above observations and experiences, a small working group of librarians began the process of rethinking and revising the ual’s approach to supporting online student research and learning. at the outset, the focus and intent was to improve the design of our subject and course guides. our project grew as we worked to incorporate the research and best practices that we had uncovered as part of our research. several factors influenced this expansion in scope including research conducted by william hemmig (2005), jennifer little (2010), shannon staley (2007), carol kuhlthau (1991), and meredith farkas (2012).  hemmig’s 2005 article credited patricia knapp and the montieth college library experiment project in the early 1960s as the genesis of pathfinders and later subject research guides. knapp’s work to develop library instruction as part of the college curriculum was user-centered. it was designed to teach students the effective use of the library and its resources, creating both ways for the student to progress from their current state (what they know) to their desired level of knowledge (what they want to know) and methods for the student to navigate the organization of scholarly information resources.39 knapp explained that “[k]nowing the way means understanding the nature of the total system, knowing where to plug into it, knowing how to make it work.”40 jennifer little (2010) pointed to cognitive load theory to inform the creation of pedagogically sound and useful research guides. little’s suggestions for incorporating cognitive load theory principles into research guide creation included tying guides to specific courses rather than broad subject areas and assisting students in developing self-regulated learning strategies by breaking down research into smaller steps. according to little, such guides “will motivate students to learn and remember how to navigate and use a wide variety of information resources.”41   shannon staley used the results of a 2007 study on the usefulness of subject guides at san josé state university to suggest that the prevailing model of subject guides – primarily a presentation of lists of resources – did not match the information search process (isp) used by students that was first documented by carol kuhlthau in 1991.42 kuhlthau, who focused on students’ information behavior, identified six stages of the isp: initiation, selection, exploration, formulation, collection, and presentation. staley proposed that subject guides incorporating “the cognitive process to completing course assignments – steps addressing the different stages of the student isp – would more closely parallel students’ mental model” and thus prove more useful to and more used by students.43 in 2013, meredith farkas and a team of librarians at portland state university released library diy, which is a “system of small, discrete learning-objects designed to give students the quick answers they need to enable them to be successful in their research.”44 the library diy approach is grounded in the idea that “libraries also need to rethink how we create online instructional content, which is often designed based on how we teach. a patron looking for information on how to determine whether an article is scholarly doesn’t want to go through a long tutorial about peer review to find the answer.”45 a common theme across the instruction-focused articles on library guides is the need for libraries to unveil systems and processes so that students can engage in research in a way that supports them as creators, explorers, and interlocutors in the research conversation. after exploring several different ideas, we landed on developing a scaffolded approach that is centered on an online, student-initiated, and self-guided research experience. our intent is to have a system that addresses discrete research concerns while surfacing the iterative nature of the research process. the centerpiece of the redesign is a set of reconceived frequently asked questions (faq) pages, developed to support the pedagogical approaches identified by knapp, little and kuhlthau, and heavily modeled on the library diy approach – so students have a great deal of personal control in the ways in which they plug into, navigate, and engage with library research.  to begin, we gathered local data by looking at queries submitted to our current faq system between jan.1 and may 31, 2019.the queries represent suggested questions for the faq, which theoretically will guide the user to their topic via a keyword system. however, for the six-month time period, 202 questions did not result in users clicking on a faq item. we found that though over half (n=125) of the questions submitted by users were related to account, software or facilities issues — e.g. “how do i renew books when i have fines?” most  of the remaining 77 questions submitted by users dealt with traditionally research-related topics. citation/copyright help was heavily represented, as were questions about peer review and scholarly articles, general searching, finding liaison librarians, and other miscellaneous research topics. chat transcripts followed a similar theme. the bulk (n=265) of the 479 sampled questions asked for basic research help — generally of the “how do i find an article about x?” variety or known-item searches, followed by general access issues (such as ebook or database access) then by citation and or copyright help questions. although the ual has a multi-search box in a central location on the website homepage, the data gathered from local chat transcripts and faq meshed with the research literature and confirmed that students need support related to how they navigate, understand, and apply the steps of the research process, not just ease of access to resources.  armed with data and a strong theoretical underpinning, we began the process of creating landing pages that serve as the gateway to the new system. after a few false starts, we worked with our instructional designer to develop the landing page below. it is designed to be visually simple and to help provide a quick on-ramp to research and library navigation as well as straightforward access to help via chat, text, telephone, email, or a liaison librarian. all answers to faqs are searchable from the landing page and are organized by category on the sub-pages. image 01. image of ask us landing page. image 02. image of library research faq subpage. we labeled and ordered the sub-categories to represent the major components of the research process, but also included a search bar so that students can quickly access information that they are seeking. the faq answers are grounded in approaching reference through the lenses of pedagogy and andragogy  and are designed to scaffold students into increasingly more complex and in-depth information after they have gleaned what they need from the introductory materials. each faq is constructed to answer a specific question as succinctly as possible and then provide links to more in-depth tutorials and resources that students can use as they continue on their research journey. this approach supports elmborg’s (2002) idea that librarians “must see our job as helping students to answer their own questions”46 and nancy fried foster’s assertion that librarians need to provide opportunities for students “to develop their information seeking skills and their judgement.”47  we feel that this treatment allows us to support students as they take ownership of their searching and learning processes and devise paths through the research process. image 03. image of faq answer on how to pick a topic for a research assignment page. although the initial rationale behind faq pages on library websites might have been a means to avoid potential redundancy in the sort of questions asked by patrons to an already understaffed and overtaxed public services staff (west 2015), the authors feel that the platform has potential to provide an additional opportunity for research help, particularly for novice researchers.48 since faqs provide an opportunity to create a living document that is updated often (west), the authors hope that the faqs might also provide an excellent opportunity to create a living pedagogical document that helps support students through the iterative process of research. along with restructuring the faqs, our research helped us identify several ways that we could improve the pedagogical functioning of our course, subject and topic guides. our original guides were structured to encourage creators to list all resources and content in a single column. this approach was heavily informed by ux best practices and aligned well with those but at times was overly restrictive and pushed creators into developing lists of decontextualized resources. image 04. image of a linear course guide layout for an anthropology course to address this, we worked closely with our instructional designer to develop guides that allowed the ual to expand out of our linear, resource centric approach. image 05. image of dissertation proposal design course page. the pilot guides have been well-received by faculty and students, and we soon realized that we would need to implement a system that supported content creators to develop their own instruction-focused guides rather than rely on a single person to develop these guides. to reach the goal of reimagining the way libguides can be developed and implemented to better support students in gaining research and information literacy skills, we constructed a system designed to support content creators in developing pedagogically sound guides that adhere to instructional best practices. we want this system to allow for flexibility in presentation and design while maintaining a consistent user experience. we searched across institutions to learn how different libraries managed guides and found that developing blueprint guides would be the most effective way of supporting ual content creators. the blueprint guides we have developed are meant to synthesize and represent the findings of the many years of research that librarians have conducted on the best ways to teach and learn with library guides. the blueprints are designed to provide creators with flexibility in design as well as efficiency in creation. this support is achieved through providing easy to adapt frameworks as well as specific directions (https://libguides.library.arizona.edu/guidelines/blueprints) on how and why to use a particular type of guide.  image 06. image of one page four column guide page. image 07. image of libguides blueprint guidelines page. conclusion our goal for the new process was to purposefully redesign our existing guides and reference ecosystem to move away from decontextualized lists of resources which encourage students to “engage in a one-stop shopping process.”49 instead, we would focus on students as active learners constructing their own meaning through the process of research. doing so would hopefully  strengthen students’ sense of self efficacy and ownership of the process, allowing them to become thoughtful contributors to the scholarly conversation. the new system was launched in august 2020, and guide creators are receiving training and support in adapting existing guides as well as in creating new ones. to ensure that librarians across the ual system are able to successfully implement this new approach, we have developed an infrastructure that starts with pedagogically oriented faqs that have been designed to adhere to adult learning theory and encourage independent use and discovery.  along with the faqs, guides have been rethought to better accompany students through the process of research rather than simply provide them with lists of potential resources. although constructing guides in this way often requires creators to commit to a philosophical move away from a “just in case” provision of resources mindset  as well as invest more time in thinking about how to construct paths through a particular research process, we have attempted to lessen the workload by providing a set of easy to duplicate blueprints as well as regularly updated instructions on how to implement these new practices. as of this writing there are six different blueprints with more in development. in the next phase of our research, the authors will be collaborating on a multi-institutional study to assess the pedagogical efficacy of the different blueprints and will share findings in a future publication.  finally, this model offers a means of bridging the gap between the ual discovery tool and the more in-depth tutorials and guides that ual librarians create to support students in their in-class research. it has been designed to provide  a way to support students who need help understanding or navigating a specific facet of their research process but are not in need of (or willing to invest the time in) more in-depth instruction. these changes are being undertaken with the intent of developing concrete ways to make the research experience as intuitive and seamless as possible for novice researchers.  acknowledgements many thanks to publishing editor kellee warren, internal reviewer dr. nicole cooke, and external reviewer erica defrain for their many insightful and generous comments on the manuscript. a special thanks to nicole hennig for all her hard work and expertise taking our ideas and turning them into something concrete and functional. thank you also to jennifer church-duran for being supportive of the need for changes and our research around it.  references baker, r.l. (2014). designing libguides as instructional tools for critical thinking and effective online learning. journal of library & information services in distance learning, 8(3-4), 107-117. https://doi.org/10.1080/1533290x.2014.944423  bowles-terry, m. (2012). library instruction and academic success: a mixed-methods assessment of a library instruction program. evidence based library & information practice 7(1), 82–95. https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/eblip/index.php/eblip/article/view/12373/13256  brazzeal, b. (2006). research guides as library instruction tools. reference services review, 34(3), 358-367. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320610685319 canfield, m.p. (1972). library pathfinders. drexel library quarterly, 8, 287-300. cohen, l.b. & still, j.m. (1999). a comparison of research university and two-year college library web sites: content, functionality, and form. college & research libraries, 60(3): 275-289. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.60.3.275 courtois, m., higgins, m. & kapur, a. (2005). was this guide helpful? users’ perceptions of subject guides. reference services review, 33(2), 188-196. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320510597381  cox, a. (1996). hypermedia library guides for academic libraries on the world wide web. program, 30(1), 39-50. dahl, c. (2001). electronic pathfinders in academic libraries: an analysis of their content and form. college and research libraries, 62(3), 227-237. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.62.3.227 dunsmore, c. (2002). a qualitative study of web-mounted pathfinders created by academic business libraries. libri 52(3), 137-156. https://doi.org/10.1515/libr.2002.137 dupuis, j., ryan, p. & steeves, m. (2004). creating dynamic subject guides. new review of information networking, 10(2), 271-277. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614570500082931 elmborg, j.k. (2002). teaching at the desk: toward a reference pedagogy. portal: libraries and the academy 2(3), 455-464. doi:10.1353/pla.2002.0050. farkas, m.g. (2013, july 2). library diy: unmediated point-of-need support. information wants to be free [blog]. https://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2013/07/02/library-diy-unmediated-point-of-need-support/  farkas, m.g. (2012). technology in practice. the diy patron: rethinking how we help those who don’t ask. american libraries, 43(11/12), 29. foster, n. f & gibbons, s. (eds.). (2007). studying students: the undergraduate research project at the university of rochester. chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2007. galvin, j. (2005). alternative strategies for promoting information literacy, the journal of academic librarianship 31(4), 352-357. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2005.04.003 glassman, n.r. & sorensen, k. (2010) from pathfinders to subject guides: one library’s experience with libguides, journal of electronic resources in medical libraries, 7:4, 281-291, https://doi.org/10.1080/15424065.2010.529767 grimes, m. & morris, s.e. (2001). a comparison of academic libraries’ webliographies. internet reference services quarterly, 5(4), 69-77. https://doi.org/10.1300/j136v05n04_11 hemmig, w. (2005). online pathfinders. reference services review, 33(1), 66-87. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320510581397  hicks, a. (2015). libguides: pedagogy to oppress? hybrid pedagogy. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/libguidespedagogytooppress/ jackson, r. & pellack, l.j. (2004). internet subject guides in academic libraries: an analysis of contents, practices, and opinions. reference and user services quarterly, 43(4), 319-27. jackson, w.j. (1984). the user-friendly library guide. college & research libraries news, 45(9), 468-71. kapoun, j.m. (1995). re-thinking the library pathfinder. college and undergraduate libraries, 2(1), 93-105. https://doi.org/10.1300/j106v02n01_10  kerico, j. & hudson, d. (2008). using libguides for outreach to the disciplines. indiana libraries, 27(2), 40-42. kline, e., wallace, n., sult, l., & hagedon, m. (2017). embedding the library in the lms: is it a good investment for your organization’s information literacy program?. distributed learning, 255-269. kuhlthau, c. (1991). inside the search process: information seeking from the user’s perspective. journal of the american society for information science 42(5), 361-371.  laverty, c. (1997). library instruction on the web: inventing options and opportunities. internet reference services quarterly, 2, 55-66. lee, y.y. & lowe, m.s. (2018). building positive learning experiences through pedagogical research guide design. journal of web librarianship, 12(4), 205-231, https://doi.org/10.1080/19322909.2018.1499453  little, j.j. (2010). cognitive load theory and library research guides. internet reference services quarterly, 15(1), 53-63. https://10.1080/10875300903530199  lundstrom, k., martin, p., & cochran, d. (2016). making strategic decisions: conducting and using research on the impact of sequenced library instruction. college & research libraries, 77(2), 212-226. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.77.2.212 mcmullin, r. & hutton, j. (2010). web subject guides: virtual connections across the university community. journal of library administration, 50(7-8), 789-797, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2010.488972  morris, s. e., & grimes, m. (1999). a great deal of time and effort: an overview of creating and maintaining internet-based subject guides. library computing, 18(3), 213-216. moses, d. & richard, j. (2008). solutions for subject guides. partnership: the canadian journal of library and information practice and research, 3(2), https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v3i2.907 peters, d. (2012, july 24). ux for learning: design guidelines for the learner experience. ux matters. https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/07/ux-for-learning-design-guidelines-for-the-learner-experience.php reeb, b. & gibbons, s. (2004). students, librarians, and subject guides: improving a poor rate of return. portal: libraries and the academy, 4(1), 123-30. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2004.0020  sizer warner, a. (1983, march). pathfinders: a way to boost your information handouts beyond booklists and bibliographies. american libraries 14, 151.  staley, s. m. (2007). academic subject guides: a case study of use at san jose state university. college & research libraries, 68(2), 119–139. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.68.2.119 stevens, c.h., canfield, m.p. & gardner, j.j. (1973). library pathfinders: a new possibility for cooperative reference service. college & research libraries, 34(1), 40-6. stone, s.m., lowe, m.s., maxson, b.k. (2018). does course guide design impact student learning? college & undergraduate libraries, 25(3), 280-296. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2018.1482808  vileno, l. (2007). from paper to electronic, the evolution of pathfinders: a review of the literature. reference services review, 35(3), 434-451. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320710774300  watts, k. a. (2018) tools and principles for effective online library instruction: andragogy and undergraduates, journal of library & information services in distance learning, 12(1-2), 49-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/1533290x.2018.1428712 west, j. (2015). getting your faqs straight. computers in libraries 35(3), 28-29. wilbert, s. (1981).library pathfinders come alive. journal of education for librarianship, 21(4), 345-349. https://doi.org/10.2307/40322698 worrell, d. (1996). the work of patricia knapp (1914-1972). the katharine sharp review, no. 3. available at http://hdl.handle.net/2142/78247 little 2010; hicks 2015 [↩] p. 54 [↩] [↩] wilbert 1981; sizer warner 1983; dunsmore 2002; hemmig 2005; brazzeal 2006; vileno 2007 [↩] canfield 1972; stevens et al 1973 [↩] stevens et al., 1973, p. 41 [↩] p. 287 [↩] hemmig 2005; worrell 1996 [↩] [↩] p. 224 [↩] [↩] p. 96 [↩] [↩] [↩] p. 59 [↩] p. 66 [↩] [↩] p. 150 [↩] p. 353 [↩] [↩] [↩] grimes and morris 2000 [↩] [↩] [↩] p. 41 [↩] [↩] hicks [↩] p. 111 [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] bowles-terry 2012 [↩] lundstrom et al 2016 [↩] [↩] [↩] peters 2012 [↩] kline 2017 [↩] knapp 82-84 [↩] p. 82 [↩] p. 60 [↩] [↩] p. 132 [↩] farkas 2013 [↩] farkas 2012 [↩] p. 459 [↩] p. 78 [↩] [↩] hicks, 2015 [↩] andragogy, libguides, pedagogy, research guides, subject guides power and status (and lack thereof) in academe: academic freedom and academic librarians culturally responsive community engagement programming and the university library: lessons learned from half a decade of vtditc 2 responses name*wally grotophorst 2020–10–22 at 10:04 am tried something along these lines 10 years or so ago. described here: : https://hdl.handle.net/1920/5972 idea was well received but it proved a bridge too far for many of our public services staff when it came time to keep the portals “current” and looking “lived in” name* elaine g 2020–11–07 at 6:01 pm i think this is great and am hoping to implement something similar on my campus. i noticed that you are using sidecar learning for your website tutorials instead of a guide on the side, which was created by u of a. is there a reason for this? i was just curious. is it worth the extra cost? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct power and status (and lack thereof) in academe: academic freedom and academic librarians – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 16 sep danya leebaw and alexis logsdon /1 comments power and status (and lack thereof) in academe: academic freedom and academic librarians in brief academic librarians do not experience full academic freedom protections, despite the fact that they are expected to exercise independent judgment, be civically engaged, and practice applied scholarship. academic freedom for academic librarians is not widely studied or well understood. to learn more, we conducted a survey which received over 600 responses from academic librarians on a variety of academic freedom measures. in this article, we focus specifically on faculty status for librarians and the ways this intersects with academic freedom perceptions and experiences. even though all librarians who answered our survey share similar experiences when it comes to infringements on their freedom, faculty librarians are more likely to feel they are protected in their free expression. we find it useful to situate librarians within a growing cohort of “third space” academic professionals who perform similar duties to traditional faculty but lack tenure and its associated academic freedom protections. we argue that more attention needs to be paid in the library profession to academic freedom for librarians, and that solidarity with other non-traditional faculty on campus is a potential avenue for allyship and advocacy. introductory note in november 2016, some colleagues and i made a libguide based on a popular hashtag syllabus, trump syllabus 2.0.1 the syllabus, drafted in response to trump syllabus, was crowdsourced by black academics seeking to counter the limited vision of the first syllabus, written by primarily white scholars, in an attempt to historicize how we arrived at a donald trump presidency. where the trump syllabus centered political, labor, and populist movements as the lineage of trump’s ascendence, trump syllabus 2.0 highlights the genealogy of white supremacy: anti-blackness, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, and settler colonialism. the works cited in the syllabus are predominantly scholarly texts, along with popular press articles and key primary sources, and the vast majority of the titles were held by the library i worked in at the time. my colleagues and i set up a guide with tabs for each week of the syllabus and linked to the catalog records for each title we already held, and to various licensed and unlicensed versions of other materials on the syllabus. some of our library colleagues were not on board with us publishing this guide, fearing backlash, but we were not prohibited from doing so. fast forward to january 2017: a right-wing student blog, backed by a conservative think tank, wrote a hit piece about our libguide, which received so much attention in the right-wing mediasphere that it eventually captured the attention of our campus public relations team. we were initially not asked to take the guide down, but when fox news called our college president’s office to inquire about the guide the following week, the president told the library to remove the guide immediately. i did push back, cautiously, against the decision, but ultimately realized i was powerless to change the situation without risking my job. i had always assumed i was protected in my work product by academic freedom, but i learned that week that i wasn’t. as an at-will employee at a private liberal arts college, academic freedom very clearly didn’t extend to me or any of my staff colleagues. –alexis logsdon introduction the libguide experience of one of this article’s authors led to conversations between the coauthors, early in 2017, about academic freedom for academic librarians in the united states. specifically, what protections do we really have and why does academic freedom matter to us? the election of trump sparked a moment of professional introspection in academic libraries that continues to this day: what were our public engagement obligations? do academic librarians need freedom of expression, and if so, what are the lived experiences of academic freedom for librarians across social identities? these questions led us to conduct a national survey of academic librarians in the fall of 2018. the resulting data has allowed us to study academic freedom for librarians, and its relationship to other factors like social identity and job status. in previous outputs of our research, we have discussed the history and state of academic freedom for academic librarians more broadly, and also highlighted findings related to race, sexuality, gender, and more.2 in this article, we will focus on the relationship between academic freedom and faculty status for librarians and how this surfaced in our survey findings. faculty status is the factor most associated in the common imagination and the literature with academic freedom protections. yet many librarians lack faculty status, have partial status, or are unsure of their protections regardless of their official status. even when classified or considered faculty, academic librarians are rarely treated as peers by other disciplinary faculty or university administrators. for these reasons, academic librarians are members of the academy with a markedly more tenuous hold on academic freedom claims. we hypothesized at the outset of our research that when librarians’ job status is precarious, they will feel less free to express themselves in the workplace and will be highly attuned to penalties for academic expression. our survey did find interesting distinctions between faculty and non-faculty librarians when it came to a variety of measures around academic freedom. indeed, faculty status affected respondents’ perceptions of academic freedom more than any other variable we studied. before sharing and discussing our survey results around this topic, we seek to contextualize librarians’ academic freedom within the context of the widespread, growing precarity of higher education workers. academic librarians experience significant insecurity that is related to their membership in an ever-growing class of higher education workers who occupy a liminal space between faculty and clerical staff. budgetary challenges and neoliberalism in higher education have led institutions to retreat from offering stable, tenure-protected employment and instead increasingly rely on academic professional staff and contingent faculty.3 this enables administrators to scale back autonomy, equitable pay, and protections like academic freedom. academic librarians have long occupied less stable and powerful positions on their campuses than traditional faculty.4 therefore, we believe academic librarians’ experiences with academic freedom are worth investigating further in their own right. however, librarians are also situated within a larger ecosystem of growing precarity on campus. understanding our role in this context can help us identify allies and avenues for advocacy. in the absence of tenure, academic librarians and other academic staff experience insecurity in their jobs that impedes their academic freedom. our research is interested in more than just policies but also how freedom of expression plays out (or not) in a variety of lived workplace experiences. we will share findings that suggest that faculty status truly matters for librarians to feel protected in their work activities. yet we will also describe a higher education landscape in which faculty status is available only to some librarians and certainly not the majority of library workers. the trajectory is toward fewer faculty-classified library positions, not more. our article offers a question as well as an argument: if faculty status is critical to academic freedom, but is only available to some of us, how can we advocate for better freedoms apart from that? methods and scope we conducted a survey in fall 2018 to study librarians’ perceptions of how protected they were by their institution’s academic freedom policies. we asked about a wide spectrum of “silencing” actions for academic librarians, from being skipped over for a promotion to being demoted to being fired outright, and inquired about how these formal and informal punishments impacted librarians’ lives. we also asked our respondents to share their demographic information, which enabled us to correlate their experiences with their social identities. our research project overall is a mixed method study, with an initial survey that we plan to follow up with interviews and textual analysis later this year. the survey was designed to gather information about academic librarians’ job status, experiences of academic freedom, and socioeconomic positionality. we asked approximately 30 questions that were a mix of closed, multiple choice, and open-ended questions. the questions about academic freedom were primarily matrix table questions for which respondents could rank their experiences on a scale. many of the social identity questions allowed for “other” and filled-in textual responses if respondents felt that none of the offered categories applied to them. we also provided space for open-ended comments at the end of the survey and for respondents to provide their contact information if they were willing to be interviewed at a later date. we issued the survey via national listservs and social media in the fall of 2018. we intentionally promoted the survey on a wide variety of professional listservs and using hashtags on social media to reach librarians of color.5 we had over 700 people start and just over 600 people complete the survey. we filtered out respondents who did not agree to our irb-approved consent form and those who stated that they did not currently work in an academic library. our survey questions were based on our hypotheses and also modeled after similar surveys.6 our previously published acrl 2019 conference paper provides a summary of responses to our survey as well as deeper dives into how responses corresponded to race and financial insecurity.7 in this article, we will focus primarily on librarian faculty status and how this corresponds to lived experiences of academic freedom. defining academic freedom academic freedom is a contested concept, so it is important for the purposes of our article to state that we align with those who believe scholarship and civic engagement—especially in librarianship—are inextricably linked. generally, the core principles of academic freedom referenced in most u.s. institutional policies adhere to the 1940 statement on academic freedom and tenure from the american association of university professors (aaup).8 this statement proposes three primary protections: the right to freely teach without interference, the right to research without interference, and the right to express oneself in the community without interference.9 while scholars and administrators generally agree on these basic precepts, they diverge when it comes to who, how, and how much these protections apply. one school of thought asserts that scholarship should be “pure” and remain disengaged from the civic sphere. in this formulation, academic freedom applies only to teaching and scholarship that is allegedly devoid of politics and “neutral.”10 another faction, with whom we are aligned, points to the origins of modern academic freedom as an important project intended to protect faculty (particularly those from the social sciences) whose scholarship engages directly with society.  historian joan w. scott, in her essay exploring this claim, argues that distinguishing between politics and scholarship is “easier in theory than in practice” and “the tension between professorial commitments and academic responsibility is an ongoing one that the principle of academic freedom is meant to adjudicate.”11 as an applied profession, librarianship presumes a link between scholarship and civic engagement. academic freedom is thus a deeply relevant issue for our field. academic freedom and librarians the concept of academic freedom in libraries is complicated by the library profession’s focus on the parent concept of intellectual freedom and the heterogeneous nature of library employment. the association for college & research libraries (acrl) has issued a number of statements in defense of academic freedom for academic librarians.12 however, the devotion to intellectual freedom for our users gets conflated with and obscures advocacy for our own academic freedom.13 academic librarians have one foot in academia and another in librarianship, with academic freedom a norm in the former but not the latter. indeed, supporters of library neutrality—the focus of a battle that mostly plays out in public libraries—often uphold intellectual freedom at the expense of other rights and freedoms. similar to the purity arguments put forth for academic work, some librarians claim neutrality as a core library value rooted in the american library association’s guiding values, the enlightenment, and political liberalism.14 others, including us, argue that library neutrality is conceptually impossible and also puts workers and the public at risk.15 media reports, anecdotes on social media, and the library literature all confirm ongoing barriers to librarians’ academic freedom. attempts by community members to censor or ban materials in libraries are so commonplace that the american library association promotes an annual “banned books week” and collects statistics from libraries on the issue.16 however, librarians experience other forms of infringement on their academic freedom that receive less attention from the profession. library science scholar noriko asato provides a long history of infringements on librarians’ academic freedom, not just in collection development decisions, but also when they question library policy, engage politically, or even about choices in their personal lives, and these same infringements were reported in our survey.17 these are not simply problems of the past. librarians in the university of california system learned during their union contract negotiations in 2018 that their institution believed academic freedom did not apply to them; this became the primary issue during their ultimately successful negotiations.18 according to a recent survey of canadian librarians, they face restrictions on what they research, and struggle to pursue scholarship in light of their other responsibilities.19 even when librarians are not directly restricted in their research or personal expression, they face structural inequities in terms of funding and time to do research compared to disciplinary faculty, leading indirectly to infringements on their autonomy.20 only half of all liberal arts college librarians report feeling “protected in their work as a librarian,” according to a survey conducted by librarian meghan dowell in 2018.21 dowell’s findings echo what non-faculty librarians reported in our survey, which is not surprising given how many liberal arts college librarians are classified as staff/non-faculty. librarians who stage exhibits are also regularly confronted with pushback and are forced to take them down.22 perhaps most alarmingly, librarians—especially librarians of color—have also been subject to harassment and abuse from the public for their workplace choices or public positions.23 these experiences are reflected in our survey findings as well, discussed in more detail below: more than 20% of respondents reported fear that their identity put them at personal risk. third space professionals academic librarians are situated within a broader context of academic professionals, beyond traditional faculty, on campus. generally, however, there is little in the academic freedom literature that specifically studies non-faculty higher education workers. despite our absence from the scholarship, research and anecdotal evidence from the media indicate that academic freedom issues surface regularly for academic professional staff on campus. sometimes, professional staff are performing duties similar to faculty but are unprotected when our pedagogy is questioned or we protest institutional policy. other times, since these are problems for staff rather than faculty, these issues are often not considered to have anything to do with academic freedom in the first place. as some of the longest-serving quasi-academic professionals on campus—not traditional faculty, but also not clerical or facilities staff—the experiences of academic librarians serve as a bellwether and a proxy for issues that undoubtedly resonate for our academic support professional peers.24 the number of academic support professionals grew rapidly in the late 1990s and we continue to comprise a significant portion of higher education workforces.25 there is cross-disciplinary literature on the complicated roles and identities of academic support staff, who occupy what educational studies scholar celia whitchurch calls a “third space” on their campuses.26 despite the growth of this group of higher education workers, the persistent and predominant characterization of the academic workforce is a simple binary of either professors or clerical staff. however, academic support professionals, perhaps most notably librarians and academic technologists, increasingly assume duties that were once reserved solely for traditional professors: teaching, research, and service.27 even though these staff are often doing faculty-like work such as teaching, service, and research, traditional faculty protections—including academic freedom—do not apply.28 without the protections of tenure and its associated governance, academic freedom as a right and protection is arguably toothless. with the erosion of tenure protections, in part through the dispersal of traditional faculty work to contingent faculty and professional academic support staff, “academic freedom today may be as endangered as it has been at almost any moment since the aaup’s inception.”29 tenure was never just about protecting research, according to academic freedom expert hank reichman, but instead must be championed for all involved in teaching and research on campus.30 yet we now have a class of workers on higher education campuses who are expected to be educators and lead students in traditional paths of learning, but could easily lose their jobs and livelihood if there is blowback to their speech or other professional choices. even when institutional policies around academic freedom are broad and inclusive of staff, in the absence of tenure, staff do not have the same meaningful freedom as faculty with tenure protections. if one can be fired at will, then one will almost certainly be guarded. further, even if workers are covered by academic freedom policies in principle, it is usually unclear if all their activities are protected. this is why many advocates believe the core of the academic freedom fight goes beyond having the right policy in place and is actually about extending tenure protections on campuses.31 in the following sections, we aim to bring a librarian-centered lens to this conversation, to make the case that in addition to contingent faculty, librarians and other academic professional staff must be brought into protection as well, given the nature of their work on campus. librarians as third space professionals academic freedom as it manifests for traditional faculty does not map neatly onto librarians’ jobs and experiences. like some faculty, academic librarians often engage in applied scholarship and are enacting professional expertise on a day-to-day basis in the academic sphere. however, academic librarians typically work within rigidly hierarchical library workplaces. unlike traditional faculty—who operate with significant autonomy and whose spheres (teaching, research, and service) are fairly well-defined—academic librarians also engage in a wide variety of professional activities well beyond just research and teaching and are usually directly supervised in this work. they are usually reviewed against a different set of performance metrics than traditional faculty. because librarians are more closely supervised and tend to have less power in their workplaces, many duties of academic librarians might be subject to penalties and pushback to a greater degree than those of disciplinary faculty.32 as we will discuss more in our article, academic librarians also occupy a wide range of job classifications and only some are in traditional, tenure-protected positions. many librarians are at-will employees or have some faculty-like rights but not all. unpacking academic freedom for librarians, therefore, requires a different and broader picture than looking only at institutional policies and rigidly defined cases. librarians occupy myriad job classifications on their campuses, complicating research and understanding around this topic. for instance, when acrl collects data from libraries on librarians’ faculty status, they ask an additional eight questions to establish clarity on the nature of that status. additionally, acrl then asks respondents to further detail whether or not librarians are “fully, partially, or not at all” included in policies such as “eligible for leaves of absence or sabbaticals on the same basis as other faculty” or “have access to funding on the same basis as faculty.” acrl’s data from 2017 indicates that out of 1,645 responding academic libraries, fte librarians at half of these (838, or 51%) had faculty status. however, 38% of libraries reported that their librarians have faculty status but not tenure. interestingly, more libraries reported that their librarians fully have “the same protections of academic freedom as other faculty” than reported that their librarians have faculty status (70% compared to 51%).33 this can likely be explained by the fact that some institutions do apply academic freedom policies to staff and students, but also could be because respondents made assumptions about their protections when they might actually not be present in policy or in practice. when it comes to librarians’ professional identity, institutional context therefore plays a key role. approximately 60% of our survey respondents claim to be “faculty or faculty-like” in their status.34 our findings do not tell us what that means to our respondents and this label is open to interpretation, especially for librarians who often have some kind of quasi-faculty status that is understood or experienced differently for individual librarians on the same campus. in their article on the role of academic librarians in their institutions, rachel fleming-may and kimberly douglass write, “the lack of consensus on the meaning and value of librarianship to academic institutions is also a likely contributor to the disparate treatment of librarians with faculty status from institution to institution.”35 in studying the professional identity of librarians as related to their job classification, shin freedman found, and our respondents reported the same, that librarians’ self-identity is closely correlated to institutional context, rather than broader professional norms and understandings. in other words, whether or not you identify as faculty-like has a lot to do with how your institution and library administration categorizes and treats you.36 this may seem like an obvious point, but it is worth calling out the distinction between traditional faculty identity and norms, which tend to be national in scope and much simpler to define—either tenure-track or contingent with clear rights understood to align or not with these two categories—and librarians’ roles and identities, which are much more locally bounded. while our survey relied on self-identification, we conjecture that self perception as being “faculty-like” is the strongest indicator of how librarians feel their autonomous work life is respected on their campuses. this has implications for librarians’ ability to advocate for their rights or even imagine alternatives to their current situations, likely compounded by how competitive the job market is for librarians.37 many librarians accept the classifications as they are wherever they can get a job, which is unsurprising given the challenging job market and also how much murkiness surrounds this issue in the literature and in practice. while the pros and cons of tenure for librarians are widely debated in the academic library literature, there is consensus that tenure is valuable when it comes to defending librarians’ academic freedom. indeed, academic freedom is regularly cited as a primary reason for academic librarians to maintain or seek faculty status and tenure.38 librarians publish on controversial topics to advance the field of librarianship and must regularly make potentially unpopular decisions in library operations. according to librarians catherine coker et. al., “if a librarian’s academic freedom is not protected, then, like teaching faculty, he or she might give a guarded and abridged version of the thoughts and ideas in his or her research. in addition, librarians may also guard against purchasing and disseminating controversial informational resources to help answer users’ questions, if they feel under threat that their job could be on the line.”39 joshua kim, an academic technologist who writes a regular column for inside higher ed, asserts that he would accept a lower salary in exchange for tenure because of the freedom he would have to do critical, applied research in learning innovation.40 librarians with tenure and with clarity around their status report higher job satisfaction, including when it comes to academic freedom protections.41 our findings survey responses academic librarians with faculty status, according to our survey respondents, differ greatly in their perceptions of academic freedom protections from librarians who do not identify as faculty. in every category of job duty we asked about, librarians who identified as faculty-like reported feeling protected in their work at higher rates (figure 1). perhaps predictably, some of the biggest disparities were in areas that are most faculty-like in function: research and publishing (72% of faculty-identified librarians vs. 58% of non-faculty librarians), instruction (67% vs. 56%), and interactions with faculty (69% vs. 55%). but there was also a stark contrast in responses about non-library campus activities (63% vs. 49%) and library programming work (68% vs 54%), both arguably central functions of librarianship and crucial sites of outreach and relationship building for academic librarians. even with the higher numbers for faculty librarians, our findings offer confirmation of what we saw in the literature in terms of the heterogeneity of librarian faculty status and relative power on campus. indeed, the figures are remarkable: a quarter of our faculty respondents did not feel well protected in their research and publishing activities, with similar responses for instruction and programming. these are the very “third space” areas where librarian innovation and creativity are seemingly most encouraged, and yet many of us do not feel like we can freely choose how we go about these tasks. according to the literature, faculty status for librarians varies widely from institution to institution in terms of what protections it affords. our findings appear to confirm that faculty status for librarians does not in and of itself equate to feeling fully protected. while there was a wide gap in the sense of safety for librarians of differing status, they report feeling silenced to the same general degree and by many of the same things (figure 3). by far the largest number of respondents, 50% of faculty librarians and 45% of non-faculty librarians, reported feeling silenced by “fear that speaking up will hurt my career.” more than 20% in both categories felt silenced by “fear that my identity will put me at personal risk,” suggesting that certain social identities put people at a greater risk for targeted harassment, regardless of faculty status. in addition, 18% of our respondents (both faculty and non-faculty) also reported feeling afraid for their personal safety if they were to speak out about their beliefs. these two findings resonate with lara ewen’s article on librarians and targeted harassment. citing an ala panel from 2018 called “bullying, trolling, and doxxing, oh my! protecting our advocacy and public discourse around diversity and social justice,” ewen describes the divergent experiences of two librarians: sweeney, who is white, said she was challenged mainly for the presumed content of the research, while cooke, who is african american, was harassed in a way that made it clear that her race was a factor. cooke was bombarded with hate mail and threatening voicemails. both researchers feared that cooke’s photograph, email address, and phone number had been copied from uiuc’s website and distributed throughout racist communities online.42 while librarians of various social identities are targeted for their research, the magnitude of the threats is often much higher for librarians from marginalized communities. why does fear of punishment seem to outweigh actual experiences of reprimands? the literature we reviewed earlier in this article points to a number of possible answers, all likely contributing to this disparity. academic librarians have any number of legitimate reasons to feel insecure, even in the absence of experiencing or witnessing direct penalties. faculty status for librarians often comes with explicitly fewer protections than what is written into policy for disciplinary faculty. even with faculty status, librarians typically have less security and power in their institutions than other faculty. many librarians who are classified as staff are keenly aware that their positions are ultimately precarious, even though, like other “third space” academic professionals, they perform work that—were it being done by disciplinary faculty—would be protected by academic freedom policies. as discussed in the literature review, many librarians work within a rigid hierarchy under direct supervision with far less autonomy than traditional disciplinary faculty. it is understandable that librarians would have a sense of caution and insecurity in these settings. finally, the dramatic transformation of the academic workforce in recent decades, referenced earlier in this article, itself presents an existential threat for academic librarians and our administrators. already more precarious on our campuses, we can see from these trendlines (and many others) that academic libraries are in defense mode when it comes to our budgets and workforce. all of these factors likely contribute to academic librarians perceiving a wide variety of potential threats to their work even in the absence of direct punishment, while simultaneously recognizing that their managers and library leadership are feeling their own set of pressures to avoid institutional conflict and protect their budgets and staff. the final set of questions we asked in our survey was about the impacts of punishment (figure 4). of those who had experienced punishments, a substantial number said it had affected their engagement and motivation at work, impacted their mental well-being, their relationships with co-workers, and their sense of belonging in their position. about 80% of non-faculty librarians reported that the punishments they had experienced had impacted their mental health, and a nearly identical number said the punishment had a negative effect on their motivation and engagement at work. the numbers were only slightly lower for librarians in faculty positions: around 70% reported these same impacts. around 60% of respondents in both groups said their experience with punishments had influenced their relationships with colleagues and students, and more than half reported that the experiences had made them question whether they belonged in their positions. other impacts that were reported by more than 40% of both faculty and non-faculty librarians included feeling that they could not adequately do their jobs, and, disturbingly, considering whether they belonged in the profession at all. these responses resonate with what librarian kaetrena davis kendrick terms “the low morale experience.”43 in kendrick’s study, “participants reported emotional, physiological, or cognitive responses to low morale” after a trigger event, which in turn lead to “a negative effect on [their] daily practice of librarianship.”44 while kendrick studied abuse in the workplace as the trigger for low morale experience and our survey asked about the impacts of academic freedom infringements, there is significant overlap in both experiences and impacts. figure 1. librarians’ perceptions of free expression by faculty status figure 1. a bar chart visualizing librarians’ perceptions of their protections for free expression, according to faculty status. accessible equivalent of this chart as a table. figure 2. librarians’ experiences of academic freedom infringements by faculty status figure 2. a bar chart visualizing librarians’ experiences of infringements of academic freedom, according to faculty status. accessible equivalent of this chart as a table. figure 3. experiences of feeling silenced by faculty status figure 3. a bar chart visualizing librarians’ experiences of being silenced, shown according to faculty status. full text equivalent of this chart as a list. figure 4. respondents who reported being “somewhat” or “significantly” impacted by punishments, by faculty status. figure 4. a bar chart visualizing respondents who reported being “somewhat” or “significantly” impacted by punishments, shown according to faculty status. full text equivalent of this chart as a list. open-ended comments in the survey’s open-ended comments field, many librarians offered insights into how their work environment failed to protect them. their reasons were complex and varied, but overall they describe workplaces where managers and library directors make unpopular decisions and librarians feel afraid to question these decisions. when they did question them, many librarians told stories of being informally punished by being given fewer opportunities or getting subpar reviews, and they feared “there will be subtle punishments for expressing beliefs that are odds with the administration.” several respondents talked about how research was treated in their faculty librarian positions: they had their research agenda questioned or outright denied, they had library leadership who sought to abolish research as a core job function, and they experienced informal punishments because of their research topics. some commented that academic freedom seemed to apply most in their institutions when it was tied to research and publishing. even with faculty status, many librarians feel they are treated differently from their peers in academic departments. more than one person reported that their research agenda was questioned by supervisors, that they had little control over their own schedules, and that they were “routinely” tone policed during performance reviews. the hierarchical workplaces in which librarians typically work, as described in our literature review, seem to complicate and sometimes seriously interfere with librarians’ freedom to freely pursue their research agendas. in keeping with the rest of our survey results, non-faculty librarians felt less certain that their speech and actions in the workplace were protected, even while experiencing similar academic freedom infringements as faculty librarians. in open-ended responses, a striking number of non-faculty librarians discussed the lack of clarity around academic freedom protections and, worse, library leadership (both managers and deans) who claim to support free expression but then respond negatively to it in practice. reading non-faculty librarians’ comments as a group reveals a consistent narrative of uncertainty, insecurity, and mixed messages: [i]t feels like our library leadership wants it both ways: librarians that will be active in high-profile research, publishing, professional and community orgs, etc., but also never say anything leadership doesn’t like. and what gets considered “controversial” at my library often seems pretty unpredictable. my university displays a wild mismatch between its stated policies and their application—academic freedom is not supported in general, especially at the library level. my institution claims to uphold academic freedom, but there is a silent understanding that said freedom really only means “freedom to uphold the ‘party’ line.” i think in theory they defend academic freedom, but in practice they are scared of anything that they perceive will damage their image. this is but a small sample of comments about mixed signals; this was one the most common complaints in our responses. these librarians point to a pattern of denied agency, of contradictory messages about their academic freedom, and managers unwilling or unable to defend their employees when the latter’s work product is questioned. the implication for many librarians is that outspokenness is something to avoid and to discourage in others. as one respondent eloquently described it, [i]t feels as if librarians, whether faculty or not, are taught to be nice and congenial. thus, the culture of the profession does not lend itself to speaking up without being labeled. the culture of “niceness” in libraries goes well beyond the scope of the current research, but is worth exploring as a root cause of much confusion and conflict arising from academic freedom expectations.45 niceness and neutrality work in tandem to create conditions that shut certain people out of the professional conversation, and even out of working in the library profession themselves.46 faculty librarians reported some of the same experiences with unspoken restrictions and less-than-encouraging messages from supervisors, albeit in smaller numbers. some of the comments echo what non-faculty librarians experience, but some point to specific inconsistencies between the rights they purportedly enjoy as faculty and how their libraries interpret those rights: most of the unfreedoms i experience are internal to the library. it is very conservative in comparison to the university. i don’t mean politically, i mean in risk taking and allowing a wide range of debate and speech. i have faced repercussions for things that are exceedingly trivial. my institution embraces social justice, but the library does not. i have been here for [length of time redacted] and in that time i have contributed a great deal to the community, but it is lost in the micromanaging by the dean. another librarian reported having to change research topics in order to be granted a sabbatical, and their comments reveal a keen awareness of how this violated their academic freedom: “requiring me to research something [my dean] really likes is a violation of my academic freedom, but i’m tired of fighting him and just need a break.” these remarks point to a schism between institutional values about academic freedom and libraries’ more measured, cautious approach. this kind of fractured experience can happen in the other direction as well: in the university of california librarians’ recent contract negotiations, one of the sticking points for faculty librarians was to have academic freedom protections written into their contract. while uc librarians have faculty status, the pushback they experienced made it clear that the university saw librarians as excluded from essential protections that come with that status.47 conclusion many librarians are living in a culture of fear on their campuses. despite working in academic settings where academic freedom is held up as a value and is presumed by many to apply to librarians, our survey respondents reported significant limits to their free expression. librarians are expected to enact independent, expert judgment frequently throughout their workdays. we are purchasing materials for our libraries, planning programs, teaching students, and have unique curricular insights. yet, we learned in our survey, many librarians are in workplaces where free expression is discouraged and even punished. indeed, as evidenced in figures 2 and 3 above, more than a third of librarians surveyed said they’d been informally punished, and 45% said they worried that speaking up would hurt their career. further, a culture of silencing and fear leads to a foreclosing of underrepresented voices, upholds the status quo, and hinders growth in our institutions. our research confirms some of our hypotheses about the role of faculty status in librarians’ academic freedom protections.  we were surprised, however, to discover that where faculty and non-faculty differ most is in their perceptions about their protections; we found a strong connection between faculty status and perceiving free expression to be protected. respondents without faculty status reported feeling protected in their job functions at lower rates than faculty librarians in every category we asked about, often with differences of ten percentage points or more. when it came to infringement of academic freedom, however, faculty and non-faculty librarians reported similar experiences. this raises interesting questions: why do faculty librarians feel more protected, even as they report being punished for their actions and speech? is there something about faculty status that empowers librarians to speak more freely, in spite of potential punishments? or is there more security in these positions, so that the punishments are easier to bear? whatever the reasons, it seems clear that faculty librarians are better positioned to speak out in their campus communities, take a critical approach to the core responsibilities of their positions, and generally be confident that they can approach their work without fear their views will get them fired. while it is beyond our powers and the scope of this research to resolve the disparity in academic freedom of faculty and non-faculty librarians, we can offer a way to begin examining what leads some librarians to feel protected and others not to. in the third space continuum, faculty librarians reside closer to traditional faculty and feel less precarious. conversely, non-faculty librarians, as evidenced in their survey responses and open-ended comments, are often forced to navigate complex, sometimes contradictory messages about their academic freedom from their managers. other times, the message is quite clear: they are considered staff, and staff are explicitly not covered by academic freedom in their institutions. how then do we advocate for more and clearer academic freedom protections for librarians of all job classes? as with any endemic problem, the solution needs both local and systemic dimensions. we offer some suggestions here, but we also encourage our colleagues to think about how these strategies would play out in their local context and if there are others that might work better for you. when it comes to solutions, we believe the answer lies in raising awareness about this issue, understanding one’s role in the academic ecosystem locally and beyond, and identifying allies beyond our own ranks. on a systemic and national level, the path will involve calling upon national networks and following successful models of progressive change. librarian professional organizations should attend to academic freedom as a distinct issue apart from book censorship and freedom for our users. we know from the acrl statistics cited above that more than two-thirds of academic libraries believe their librarians to have the same academic freedom protections as faculty. starting a conversation about these stated norms that are in conflict with our respondents’ reported experiences could lead to clearer protections. we should also participate in broader organizations like the aaup and other groups agitating for academics, and push the issue of librarians within those bodies. the local level has the most potential for meaningful change. it is imperative that librarians know exactly what or whether their employee handbooks, bylaws, union contracts, or other governing documents have to say about academic freedom for librarians. it may be that your handbook says nothing about academic freedom, but that is good information to have. if you have venues for discussing shared values around academic freedom within your library, try starting a conversation there. if there are explicit policies about academic freedom for faculty and students, but not for staff, are there official governance structures (such as faculty meetings or a university senate) through which this issue could be raised? who on your campus outside the library are likely allies, such as contingent faculty or academic technologists? by situating librarians within the framework of “third space professionals,” we can shift and clarify the conversations around academic freedom happening in our profession and on our campuses. when news stories tell us that even traditional faculty are at risk of losing their jobs from free expression, it follows that uncertainty and precarity are amplified the farther one is from the centers of power. adjunct instructors, at-will staff, and others in more insecure positions on their campuses are particularly vulnerable. organizing and agitating alongside other third space colleagues—academic technologists, staff researchers, lecturers—might be a more effective way to capture the attention and support of protected faculty and senior administrators. third space academic professionals may be suffering the same self-censorship instinct because of their own employment precarity, but through allyship and solidarity, we all might secure greater freedoms. building solidarity with local allies is an avenue toward greater power, such as organizing together into a union.48 while librarians often enjoy a stature on campus that other third space professionals do not (whether because of pay, additional benefits, or permanent employment status), the existential threat to higher education employment will be felt by us all.49 relying on tenure alone limits access to academic freedom protections to a select few and seems to be a losing path forward. if we collaborate together through unionizing or otherwise, we have the best chance of highlighting the need for academic freedom protections that extend beyond the tenure framework. appendix perception of protections, by union affiliation   union non-union social media 40% 47% interactions with other staff 73% 75% workplace policies 58% 59% off-campus activities 67% 66% programming 52% 51% interactions with students 69% 67% research and publishing 64% 62% instruction 65% 61% cataloging 36% 32% interactions with faculty 71% 64% non-library campus activities 62% 55% collection development 69% 58% acknowledgements yupei liu, a computer science and statistics major at the university of minnesota, helped immensely with statistical analysis and creating charts from our data. we are grateful to aaron albertson for his help testing our survey design. we also wish to thank early readers of our draft, heather tompkins and rachel mattson. finally, we also wish to thank the publishing editor of the submitted article, ryan randall, and peer reviewers, meghan dowell and ian beilin. accessible equivalents figure 1 as a table types of expression faculty non-faculty collection development 79% 67% cataloging 75% 66% research and publishing 72% 58% interactions with other staff 70% 62% interactions with faculty 69% 55% off-campus activities 68% 62% programming 68% 54% instruction 67% 56% interactions with students 66% 59% non-library on-campus activities 63% 49% questioning workplace policies 59% 52% social media 51% 47% return to figure 1 caption. figure 2 as a table types of infringement faculty non-faculty informally penalized for question workplace 31% 35% told not to participate in org. activity 18% 20% directed to change work 14% 16% formally penalized for question workplace 5% 5% return to figure 2 caption. figure 3 as a table types of effects faculty non-faculty fear that speaking up will hurt my career 49% 45% fear that my identity will put me at personal risk 21% 22% fear that speaking up could jeopardize my personal safety 17% 17% complaints from colleagues students or staff about my academic activities 11% 8% complaints from colleagues students or staff about my non-academic activities 5% 11% threats and harassment from coworkers students or faculty 5% 10% threats and harassment from the public 3% 3% complaints from the public about my non-academic activities 2% 3% complaints from the public about my academic activities 1% 4% return to figure 3 caption. figure 4 as a table effects of punishment: responses of “somewhat” or “significantly” faculty non-faculty motivation and engagement at work 71% 80% mental well-being 70% 80% relationships with coworkers and students 60% 64% sense that i belong in this position 56% 64% ability to adequately do my job 46% 51% sense that i belong in this profession 37% 42% physical well-being 30% 34% return to figure 4 caption. footnotes n.d.b. connolly and keisha n. blain, “trump syllabus 2.0,” public books, june 28, 2016, https://www.publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/. [↩] danya leebaw and alexis logsdon, “the cost of speaking out: do librarians truly experience academic freedom?” (association of college & research libraries annual conference, cleveland, oh, april 2019). http://hdl.handle.net/11299/203282 [↩] jennifer washburn, university inc.: the corporate corruption of higher education (new york: basic books, 2005). [↩]  rachel a. fleming-may and kimberly douglass, “framing librarianship in the academy: an analysis using bolman and deal’s model of organizations,” college & research libraries 75, no. 3 (may 2014): 389-415, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl13-432. [↩] we are white women employed at a large research university library in management, reference, and instruction positions. we tried to share our survey with as wide and diverse a pool of respondents as possible, well beyond our own limited networks, in order to best understand how socioeconomic positionality correlates with academic freedom for library workers. [↩] becky marie barger, “faculty experiences and satisfaction with academic freedom,” doctor of philosophy, higher education, university of toledo, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=toledo1279123430; “inclusive and functional demographic questions,” university of arizona office of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (lgbtq) affairs, accessed 1/23/2019, https://lgbtq.arizona.edu/sites/lgbtq.arizona.edu/files/inclusive%20and%20functional%20demographic%20questions.pdf; meghan dowell, “academic freedom & the liberal arts librarian,” capal18 conference, university of regina, saskatchewan, canada, 2018. https://capalibrarians.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/6c_dowell_slides-notes.pdf. [↩] leebaw and logsdon, “cost of speaking out,” acrl 2019. [↩] american association of university professors, “1940 statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure,” 1940, https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure. [↩] hank reichman, the future of academic freedom (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2019), xiv. [↩] stanley fish, “academic freedom and the boycott of israeli universities,” in who’s afraid of academic freedom?, ed. akeel bilgrami and jonathan r. cole (new york: columbia university press, 2015), 275–92. [↩] joan w scott, “knowledge, power, and academic freedom,” in bilgrami and cole, who’s afraid, 78. [↩] for instance: association for college & research libraries (acrl), “acrl statement on academic freedom,” 2015, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/academicfreedom; joint committee on college library programs, “acrl joint statement on faculty status of college and university librarians,” 2012, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/jointstatementfaculty [↩] gemma devinney, “academic librarians and academic freedom in the united states: a history and analysis,” libri 36, no. 1 (1986): 24-39; noriko asato, “librarians’ free speech: the challenge of librarians’ own intellectual freedom to the american library association, 1946-2007” library trends 63, no. 1 (summer 2014): 75-105. http://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2014.0025; richard a. danner and barbara bintliff, “academic freedom issues for academic librarians,” legal reference services quarterly 25, no. 4 (2007): 13-35. https://doi.org/10.1300/j113v25n04_03. [↩] see documents cited here: american library association, “intellectual freedom: issues and resources,” accessed february 3, 2020, http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom; john wenzler, “neutrality and its discontents: an essay on the ethics of librarianship” portal: libraries and the academy 19, no. 1 (2019): 55–78. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2019.0004. [↩] amelia n. gibson, renate l. chancellor, nicole a. cooke, sarah park dahlen, shari a. lee, and yasmeen l. shorish, “libraries on the frontlines: neutrality and social justice,” equality, diversity and inclusion: an international journal 36, no. 8 (2017): 751-766. https://doi.org/10.1108/edi-11-2016-0100. see also remarks from many of the panelists at the american library association 2018 midwinter meeting’s president’s program as highlighted in “are libraries neutral?” american libraries, june 1, 2018, https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2018/06/01/are-libraries-neutral/. [↩] see https://bannedbooksweek.org/ from the american library association. [↩] asato, “librarians’ free speech.” [↩] armando carrillo, “uc librarians conclude negotiations of salary increases and academic freedom protections” daily bruin, april 9, 2019. https://dailybruin.com/2019/04/09/uc-librarians-conclude-negotiations-of-salary-increases-and-academic-freedom-protections/. [↩] mary kandiuk and harriet m. sonne de torrens, “academic freedom and librarians’ research and scholarship in canadian universities,” college & research libraries 79, no. 7 (november 2018): 931-947, https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.7.931 [↩] fleming-may and douglass, “framing librarianship,” 395 [↩] meghan dowell, “academic freedom & the liberal arts librarian,” capal18, university of regina, saskatchewan, canada, 2018. https://capalibrarians.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/6c_dowell_slides-notes.pdf. [↩] stephanie beene and cindy pierard, “resist: a controversial display and reflections on the academic library’s role in promoting discourse and engagement,” urban library journal 24, no. 1 (january 1, 2018). https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ulj/vol24/iss1/6. [↩] laura ewen, “target: librarians: what happens when our work leads to harassment—or worse,” american libraries magazine, june 3, 2019. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2019/06/03/target-librarians-harassment-doxxing/. [↩] while outside the scope of this article, we encourage readers to review the literature on “critical university studies,” which explores how campus educators outside of the ever-shrinking category of tenure track faculty operate within university structure. see stefano harney and fred moten, the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study (london: minor compositions, 2013) and la paperson, a third university is possible (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2017). both moten and harney and paperson, among others, locate the spaces of radical transformation of the university outside of tenure track faculty positions. the work that these scholars see as central to injecting needed critiques of power and white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal structures of the university resides almost wholly in the work done by educators (in the broadest sense) with the most precarious positions. https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/a-third-university-is-possible. [↩] see judith e. berman and tim pitman, “occupying a ‘third space’: research trained professional staff in australian universities,” higher education 60, no. 2 (2010): 157–69. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9292-z. [↩] celia whitchurch, “shifting identities and blurring boundaries: the emergence of third space professionals in uk higher education,” higher education quarterly 62, no. 4 (october 2008): 377–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00387.x. the notion of a “third space” has been introduced and sometimes deeply studied in a number of disciplines with quite variable meanings and implications (i.e., place-based versus cultural versus professional). in libraries, see james elborg for a place-based understanding of third space theory: “libraries as the spaces between us: recognizing and valuing the third space,” reference & user services quarterly 50, no. 4 (2011): 338-350. [↩] bruce macfarlane, “the morphing of academic practice: unbundling and the rise of the para-academic: the morphing of academic practice,” higher education quarterly 65, no. 1 (january 2011): 59–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2010.00467.x ; fiona salisbury and tai peseta, “the ‘idea of the university’: positioning academic librarians in the future university,” new review of academic librarianship 24, no. 3/4 (july 2018): 244–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2018.1472113; also see reichman, the future of academic freedom, 5. [↩] related to these points is the literature on the academic identity that “third space” professionals bring to their roles, with disciplinary norms and an expectation of academic freedom baked into their ways of being an academic. see celia whitchurch, “the rise of the blended professional in higher education: a comparison between the united kingdom, australia and the united states,” higher education 58, no. 3 (september 1, 2009): 407–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9202-4; glen a. jones, “the horizontal and vertical fragmentation of academic work and the challenge for academic governance and leadership,” asia pacific education review 14, no. 1 (march 1, 2013): 75–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-013-9251-3; berman and pittman, “occupying a third space;” and macfarlane, “morphing of academic practice,” 65. [↩] reichman, future of academic freedom, 4. [↩] reichman, future of academic freedom, 7. [↩] reichman, future of academic freedom, 8. [↩] fleming-may and douglass, “framing librarianship.” [↩] mary petrowski, academic library trends and statistics (chicago: association of college & research libraries, 2017) 5, 136, 246, & 400. [↩] we did not ask respondents who claimed faculty status whether or not they were tenured or pre-tenure. in retrospect, it would have been useful to further disaggregate the faculty librarians to learn if tenured status also affected their responses. however, it is also worth noting that even with pre-tenure librarians included, faculty librarians overall feel more secure in their academic freedom protections than non-faculty librarians. [↩] fleming-may and douglass, “framing librarianship,” 394. [↩] shin freedman, “faculty status, tenure, and professional identity: a pilot study of academic librarians in new england,” portal: libraries and the academy 14, no. 4 (october 2014): 533–65. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2014.0023. [↩] eamon tewell, “employment opportunities for new academic librarians: assessing the availability of entry level jobs,” portal: libraries and the academy 12, no. 4 (october 2012): 407-423. [↩] catherine coker, wyoma vanduinkerken, and stephen bales, “seeking full citizenship: a defense of tenure faculty status for librarians,” college & research libraries 71, no. 5 (september 2010): 406-420. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-54r1;  elise silva, quinn galbraith, and michael groesbeck. “academic librarians’ changing perceptions of faculty status and tenure,” college & research libraries 78, no. 4 (may 2017): 428-441. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.78.4.428. [↩] coker, vanduinkerken, and bales. “seeking full citizenship.” [↩] joshua kim, “what percent of your (academic) salary would you trade for tenure?” inside higher ed (may 12, 2009), https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/what-percent-your-academic-salary-would-you-trade-tenure [↩] melissa belcher, “understanding the experience of full-time nontenure-track library faculty: numbers, treatment, and job satisfaction,” the journal of academic librarianship 45, no. 3 (may 2019): 213-219, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2019.02.015. [↩] lara ewen, “target: librarians: what happens when our work leads to harassment—or worse,” american libraries magazine, june 3, 2019. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2019/06/03/target-librarians-harassment-doxxing/ [↩] kaetrena davis kendrick, “the low morale experience of academic librarians,” journal of library administration, november 17, 2017. [↩] kaetrena davis kendrick, “the low morale experience of academic librarians”. [↩] see fobazi ettarh, “vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves,” in the library with the lead pipe, january 18, 2018; and gina schlesselman-tarango, “the legacy of lady bountiful: white women in the library,” library trends 64, no. 4 (2016), both of which offer an intersectional critique of how libraries enforce a performative librarian identity that purports to be neutral, nurturing, and inoffensive. [↩] gibson et al, “libraries on the frontlines: neutrality and social justice.” [↩] snowden becker, twitter thread, https://twitter.com/snowdenbecker/status/1044297787066671104; martin brennan, “uc administration: “academic freedom is not a good fit for your unit””, uc-aft librarians blog, august 13, 2018, https://ucaftlibrarians.org/2018/08/13/uc-administration-academic-freedom-is-not-a-good-fit-for-your-unit/. [↩] we did ask about union status in our survey, but there was little difference in any area between union and non-union respondents (see appendix). [↩] for more on librarian attitudes toward unionization, see rachel applegate, “who benefits? unionization and academic libraries and librarians,” library quarterly 79, no. 4 (october 2009): 443-463; stephanie braunstein and michael f. russo, “the mouse that didn’t roar: the difficulty of unionizing academic librarians at a public american university,” in in solidarity: academic librarian labour activism and union participation in canada, mary kandiuk and jennifer dekker, eds. (sacramento: litwin books, 2013).and chloe mills and ian mccollough, “academic librarians and labor unions: attitudes and experiences,” portal 18, no.4 (october 2018): 805-829. [↩] academic freedom libraries, academic libraries, altac, librarianaf the library commons: an imagination and an invocation creating a student-centered alternative to research guides: developing the infrastructure to support novice learners 1 response pingback : day in review (september 14–18, 2020) association of research libraries this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: our favorite articles from 2013 – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 15 jan editorial board, ellie collier, brett bonfield and hugh rundle /3 comments editorial: our favorite articles from 2013 “group hug” photo by flickr user peter harrison (cc-by 2.0) by editorial board, ellie collier, brett bonfield and hugh rundle to kick off 2014, we’re looking back at 2013. in the library with the lead pipe’s editors have chosen a few non-lead pipe articles, essays, speeches, or posts that we love from last year. some of us chose pieces that were published in lis journals or written by librarians, while others have chosen articles that relate to our work, even if they’re from slightly farther afield. the common thread: we think everything we’ve mentioned is worthy of your attention. ellie char booth, information privilege: critical approaches to access and advocacy my husband and i share our own version of tl;dr, which is v;dw (video, didn’t watch). if it’s a video, we can’t be bothered, since videos take so much longer to watch than it would take to read the same information. plus, you can’t skim them, and it’s often a hassle to wait for them to load on our tablets. i tell you this so you have adequate understanding of how awesome i think char booth’s closing keynote at the digital library federation forum was when i say that i watched the whole hour and six minutes. char is always an engaging speaker and this video is no exception, but it was the social justice message that put it on this list. marisol brito and alexander fink, learning from early childhood education: higher ed and the process of becoming as a new mother, the analogy of the playground interaction between teacher and child really resonated with me. it also reinforced several disparate conversations i’ve had with faculty members who want to draw students into the scholarly conversations of their disciplines and encourage students to go beyond basic report writing. tim chevalier , when who you are is off-topic tim chevalier provides an excellent discussion of some social justice/neutrality/pov issues with wikipedia. his ideas are absolutely applicable to how we teach information literacy. emily dorothea salo, how to scuttle a scholarly communication initiative satire. how frequently has it been used in professional lis publications to frame an argument and further an agenda? i confidently say hardly ever (without having researched the factual basis of my statement). well, dorothea salo, faculty associate at the university of wisconsin-madison’s school of library and information science, has done it and has done it with aplomb. in this article, published by the open access, library-published journal of librarianship and scholarly communication, salo points to all of the common ways in which individuals and institutions can ensure that scholarly communication initiatives fail. salo’s opening is anything but subtle: since clifford lynch’s infamous call to arms (2003), academic libraries have been wasting their time trying to change the scholarly communication system on the feeblest of rationalizations. proper librarians know that the current system is obviously the most sustainable, since it’s lasted this long and provided so much benefit to libraries (rogers, 2012a) and profit to organizations as diverse as elsevier, nature publishing group, and the american chemical society, as well as their ceos (berrett, 2012). moreover, faculty have proclaimed loudly and clearly that they believe libraries’ central role is to be the campus’s collective knowledge wallet (schonfeld & housewright, 2010; lucky, 2012), so who are librarians to argue? (p. 1) she continues in this vein for eleven pages, detailing issues in planning, software choice, staffing, psychological techniques (including hypocrisy and microagressions, among others), and tips for specific kinds of librarians. even if you aren’t a librarian who has engaged much with scholarly communication initiatives in your day-to-day work, upon reading this article you will laugh, you will cringe, and you might even cry onto your dusty and food stained keyboard. as she concludes salo points out that, “many of the techniques suggested in this paper do not apply solely to scholarly communication initiatives. properly deployed, they can scuttle almost any sort of risky, faddish new initiative in academic libraries” (p. 11). indeed, salo has successfully, wittily, and gracefully characterized how we, in libraries, can easily ensure failure that reaches far beyond the world of scholarly communication, and even beyond the world of academic libraries. in a single word: brilliant. jason vance, staplercide! i am heartened by the slowly trickling infiltration of creative writing into academic library publications. first salo’s article, then jason vance’s “staplercide!” article, published in december 2013’s issue of college & research libraries news. this piece, which chronicles the death of fifteen (yes that is a one and a five) staplers over one (only one!) semester at middle tennessee state university’s james e. walker library, offers a lighthearted view into the minutiae experience by almost any library worker who has ever staffed a public service point. vance expertly begins his article. “we have experienced 15 deaths in my library this semester. three victims were decapitated. the bodies of two other victims were never found. others were abused and left for dead. my library is facing a crisis. staplercide—the murder of library staplers—is at an all-time high” (¶ 1). as a reader one is immediately drawn in and wants to learn more about staplercide. this is a testament to vance’s writing prowess. but not only can vance write, he has a sense of humor, too. his article is accompanied by images of upside down staplers—documentation of a machine’s demise. but the fun does not end here! vance has created the lives and deaths of academic library staplers, a tumblr blog chronicling librarians’ and staplers’ plights. my favorite is the most recent post (as of my writing of this editorial): “stapler 11, the old man, is dead. it was 279 days old, making it the longest living stapler of 2013. cause of death: flaccid spring.” anyone who has ever worked at a public service point in libraries has surely felt, if even for a moment, “geez, what am i, a free office supply store clerk?!” the levity that vance brings to this feeling, the passion he takes to turn something frustrating and time consuming into a project to share with his community in tennessee and in the library community, well, that shows dedication. it is this kind of attitude that i want to see in library workers everywhere. well done, mr. vance. char booth, banishing your imposter: metacognition and myths of self i confess, one of the reasons i love char’s writing is that we have a somewhat common background and educational experience. we both grew up in the south/southwest; char in texas and i in oklahoma. then we both arrived at reed college in portland, oregon the same year. so when i read char’s self-reflective writing, it resonates not only with my oklahoma born-and-raised, reed college educated, academic librarian self, but i am floored by how succinctly and aptly char captures and communicates introspective professional themes. our existential performance apprehension is a form of violence that does little for collective or individual physical/mental/spiritual health. directed outward it creates judgment and envy, which i have experienced everywhere from queer culture to surfing to sangha. directed inward, it leads to the unconscious cultivation of highly specific negative myths of self, internally-spun stories reinforced by external feedback and an ongoing, conditioned interpretation of experience. simply slot in your own narratives (“i can’t _______,” “i’m not great at _______,” “i suck at _______”) in any personal or professional context, and you have identified these self-myths. more often than not they become the lenses through which we see, and they distort far more than they correct. what i love in this paragraph is the acknowledgement of how violent we can be with ourselves. before reading this piece i had never thought about imposter syndrome or other personal narratives as violent. now it clicks. in a metacognitive way. this blog post is a great reminder for us about ways in which we take reflection and intention as library workers, and use metacognition to improve our approach to the work environment and our contributions to our profession. alexis dinno and chelsea whitney, same sex marriage and the perceived assault on opposite sex marriage okay, okay, this article has nothing to do with lis, and yet it does. this piece was written by a faculty member and a graduate student in one of my liaison departments as urban & public affairs librarian at portland state. first and foremost, the article appeared in plos one, an open access journal that pushes for all research of sound quality to be published. as a matter of fact, the journal’s website boasts: too often a journal’s decision to publish a paper is dominated by what the editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership — both of which are subjective judgments and lead to decisions which are frustrating and delay the publication of your work. plos one will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership (who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them). but it’s not just dr. dinno’s choice of publishing venue that pushed this article onto my list of favorite reads for 2013. it is what she does with her research; dr. dinno is dedicated to social justice through policy change. using data and her expertise as a social epidemiologist, she makes and presents a cogent arguments that (i hope) will influence policy changes. what i find so inspiring about this article is that it reminds me we can do the same thing in libraries. we, too, can research and write to influence positive changes as we look to a vision of libraries’ and librarians’ roles in a just society. andromeda yelton, #libtechgender: your world and mine andromeda yelton on gender and technology. i can’t do it justice with any summary, so go read it and the articles she references. hugh rundle, free range librarianship: public librarian as park ranger even if i did not know and work with hugh here at lead pipe, his book chapter would be on my list as one of the most innovative, readable, and exciting pieces of professional literature i read this year. in his chapter, hugh puts forth his vision of a public librarian embedded within her community. she is a free range librarian without an office or scheduled reference desk duties. hugh documents a day in her working life, sharing examples of how she connects with business owners, city planners, and others within her community. hugh’s chapter is a must read. in fact, the whole book in which it appears, planning our future libraries, should be on everyone’s reading list. brett i want to promote open access and celebrate the scholars who publish important, interesting, well written work in peer-reviewed, creative commons-licensed journals. for this reason, i only considered peer-reviewed articles published in doaj-indexed journals that publish all of their work with a creative commons license. i also limited myself to journals that publish in areas of librarianship that i find particularly interesting, and to journals that publish solely in english. my favorite (non-lead pipe) peer-reviewed articles from open access lis journals published in 2013: jill cirasella and sally bowdoin, just roll with it? rolling volumes vs. discrete issues in open access library and information science journals there’s nothing flashy about this paper, but everything about it is just right: the topic is intrinsically interesting to readers of the journal in which it is published; the research is novel and has implications beyond its field; the research model is appropriate and the results are explained fully and succinctly; and the writing is economical, but with an understated sense of humor. if you teach a class in any area of social science and you’re looking for an example of how good, basic research should be done, i encourage you to share this paper with your students. i mean, if you want a classic paper you can always go with miller’s “the magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information.” but if you’re looking for a paper that’s contemporary, gets the same kinds of things right (i.e. clarity of ideas, economy of language, understated humor), and is easier for your students to imagine themselves writing, i recommend “just roll with it.” christian dupont and elizabeth yakel, “what’s so special about special collections?” or, assessing the value special collections bring to academic libraries i love it when writers use examples from airline engineering to make points about other fields, or simply to explain their own decision making. if you’re at all interested in investing, whitney tilson’s five-part analysis of jetblue from 2003 is still a wonderful read. malcolm gladwell’s discussion of pilot error and cultural norms in outliers (2008) was interesting, as was gladwell’s consequent discussion about culturalism with the korean. and atul gawande’s discussion of how medical practitioners can learn from airline engineers in the checklist manifesto (2010) is a must read. (if you haven’t read it already, do so immediately. i’ll wait.) so please bring your seat to an upright position, make sure all of your electronic devices are in airplane mode, and enjoy the first six paragraphs dupont and yakel include under the subheading, “taking flight”: to overcome this last defect, it would be enough to apply a more precise measure. looking at the basic metrics other industries have developed to measure their business performance can be instructive. for example, two basic metrics that the airline industry uses to measure overall business capacity and volume are “available seat-miles” (asms), which is equal to the number of available seats multiplied by the number of miles flown, and “revenue passenger-miles” (rpms), which equals the number of filled seats multiplied by the number of miles flown. dividing rpm by asm yields a third metric, “load factor,” which represents the percentage of airline seating capacity that is actually used (massachusetts institute of technology, global airline industry program, n.d.). because these metrics are simple in concept and can be equally and objectively applied across all airline companies, they are useful for assessing the performance of individual airlines from quarter to quarter, comparing the respective performance of multiple airlines over a single quarter, and benchmarking the overall performance of the industry over time. lthough special collections reading rooms are seldom arranged or oriented to calculating seating availability or measuring their performance as a quotient of seats filled, it may be useful to consider adopting a measurement strategy akin to revenue passenger-miles in order to enable libraries to engage in meaningful longitudinal and comparative assessments. as shown above, the reader-day metric fails to adequately convey the amount of time that researchers actually spend in the reading room. it also does not take into account differences in reading room schedule. if a reading room is open for four hours on a saturday afternoon should that be considered equivalent to a weekday when the reading room is open for six or eight or ten hours? most special collections that employ a reader-day metric do in fact treat all of these as equivalent, which is to say that they consider a “day” to be any day when they maintain at least some reading room hours. taking a lesson from the airlines, these shortcomings could be remedied by simply refining the basic reader-day metric to instead count reader-hours. just as airlines use seat-miles rather than, say, seat-segments to gauge capacity and profitability, so, too, special collections libraries could achieve a more precise, consistent, and objective measure of their use by counting the actual hours that researchers spend in the reading room. and it would not be hard to do. to facilitate the tabulation and calculation, the manual tally sheets and reading room logs that most special collections employ to track usage could be replaced with simple electronic databases that staff would use to record the time that researchers enter and leave the reading room. if the log also linked visits with individual researchers, reports could be constructed to calculate the number of unique visitors during a given time period and analyses of the average visit lengths of various categories of users (such as students, faculty members, visiting scholars, and members of the general public). visitors could even be given “smart” cards to scan upon entry and exit, like those the national archives and records administration has begun issuing at some of its research facilities. furthermore, reader-hour data could be correlated with circulation or item usage data to provide a kind of “load factor” indicator of reading room use. how many items, on average, do various categories of researchers consult when they visit the reading room? to facilitate basic comparisons, it would be enough to divide the total number of items used during a given time period by the total number of reader-hours. having precise metrics and consistent data collection methods would enable managers to assess the adequacy of their services and staffing over time. are special collections reading rooms in fact getting busier as evidence from some libraries, largely anecdotal, would suggest? have changes in policy, such as allowing researchers to use personal digital cameras in the reading room, had an effect on the way researchers are using their time in the reading room? are researchers spending less time in reading rooms because they can now come in and make their own digital copies at no charge and then consult these copies at home on their own time? or is the opposite occurring: because it is now quicker and easier to obtain copies, are more researchers spending more time in the reading room and requesting more materials? (pp. 15-16) kyle hall, cindy murdock ames, and john brice, open source library software development in a small rural library system (note: while this is my favorite code4lib journal article from 2013, there were four more that were so good i had to include them in our “references and further reading” section at the bottom of this article.) my favorite section of the article: of course, no solution is completely free; with oss [open source software] you might save funds on software and license fees, but there are costs associated with hiring staff capable of installing & managing it. however, we have found from our first oss project onward that the costs of such employees can be considerably less than many organizations pay for commercial software solutions. furthermore, our it staff were able to apply the skills and knowledge gained implementing oss solutions in our libraries to a wide variety of projects, since oss projects are often built using many of the same tools. hall, murdock ames, and brice make me want to be a better librarian. they also provide a great example of the kind of sensibility, and the kinds of skills, that library schools should be teaching (see: simpson, immediately below). betsy simpson, hiring non-mls librarians: trends and training implications most interesting paragraph: when asked, academic library directors cited the need to hire non-mls librarians for subject expertise and technical skills, such as web design, data management, and digital services as well as data curators, copyright specialists, instructional design specialists, rare books curators, subject liaisons, and archivists. a few expressed concerns about mls preparation as noted by one respondent who said, “… the skills and knowledge needed to run today’s and tomorrow’s libraries are increasing and increasingly complex, and may not all be provided by the traditional mls.” in this regard, another comment made was, “the poor quality of the ala-accredited mlss that are being produced is one of the reasons that some directors are considering forgoing the degree.” (p. 9) cf., ala accountability and accreditation of lis programs and is the united states training too many librarians or too few? (part 1) (i’ll publish part 2 one of these days…) rick stoddart, “straight to the heart of things”—reflecting on library metaphors for impact and assessment it’s not just enough to know the facts, but you have to present those facts in a way that conveys meaning. stoddart, an assessment librarian, discusses the importance of metaphor in a paper i believe every librarian owes it to themselves to read: i believe metaphors are of particular value to libraries because they frame patron comprehension, inspire library direction, and can be used to illuminate the potential of a library. unfortunately, describing a library as a library does not always achieve the desired results when we communicate with our stakeholders, funding agents, or communities. the library as a self-referential metaphor is still entangled in librarian stereotypes and the deeply rooted definition of a library as simply a storehouse for books. salinero & grogg (2005) provide a bibliography of the various articles found in the literature railing against librarian stereotypes. yet, these limiting assumptions remain a challenge for libraries to overcome. smith and yachnes (1998) suggest that, “the general script for behavior in a library is very similar to the one that applies in churches, museums, art galleries, or concert halls — all use of the underlying categorization of sacred space from which we are barred such profane items and behaviors as noise, food, drink, and boisterous behavior” (p.726). library assessment has an important role to play in breaking down these outdated stereotypes and traditional assumptions. assessment is one tool to help ‘flip the script’ by communicating a more robust story of the library through evidence, value, and impacts. we all need to do a better job framing these library accomplishments and outcomes within the descriptive language that speaks loudest to our stakeholders. i believe metaphors offer one pathway to make progress on this mission. honorable mention kristina southwell and jacquelyn slater, an evaluation of finding aid accessibility for screen readers noteworthy meredith farkas and lisa hinchliffe, library faculty and instructional assessment: creating a culture of assessment through the high performance programming model of organizational transformation vee herrington, the academic library: cowpath or path to the future? ramesh pandita and b. ramesha, global scenario of open access publishing: a decadal analysis of directory of open access journals (doaj) 2003-2012. see also: ramesh pandita, growing trend towards open access publishing at global level: an analysis of directory of open access journals (doaj) …plus a great (non-peer-reviewed) commentary from an open access, peer-reviewed publication (see emily’s commentary above)… dorothea salo, how to scuttle a scholarly communication initiative …my favorite article in a non-open-access journal… emily ford, defining and characterizing open peer review: a review of the literature …and a plea there are several fantastic lis publications that are indexed in doaj, refer to themselves as open access, and make their content available in full text for free, but publish some or all of their work without a creative commons license. if a journal published even a few articles in 2013 that were not accompanied by a creative commons license, i excluded all of its articles from consideration for my favorites, honorable mention, and noteworthy lists. i understand why these journals would choose not to require their authors to accept the journal’s preferred license, and i’m not criticizing them for their decision. however, i don’t think it’s inconsistent to applaud them for making their content available for free while also wishing they would adopt a creative commons license. it’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s similar to the standard open source distinction between “free as in speech” and “free as in beer.” and so ariadne, college & research libraries, d-lib, first monday, and journal of electronic publishing, while it sometimes seems impossible to love you more than i do, the possibility exists. please add one more tick mark to your tally of readers and potential authors who hope you will formally adopt a creative commons license in the near future. my hope for greater use of creative commons licenses extends to every other lis journals as well: i encourage every editorial board of every lis journal to adopt a creative commons license, and i encourage authors to publish all of their best scholarly work exclusively in creative commons-licensed journals. i believe you will be pleased with your decision if you do. hugh given my article on the need for public librarians to engage with peer reviewed literature, it’s probably a bit hypocritical of me to not follow brett’s lead and restrict my list to academic journals. nevertheless, what i’m listing here are five articles that really made me think in new ways about what it is to be a librarian in 2013. most of these articles are neither directed at, nor written by, librarians. perhaps that is one of the reasons i feel they offer refreshing insights. richard nash, what is the business of literature? this article was a highlight for me because it explores the long history of book publishing, presents an honest and clear-headed analysis of the internal contradictions of literature as a business, and finishes with a call to arms for everyone involved in literature, whether as a writer, publisher, librarian, or reader: book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and fragile than it actually is. by defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian. the business of literature is blowing shit up. kenneth cukier and viktor mayer-schönberger, the dictatorship of data anyone with even a passing interest in information and its management will remember 2013 as the year ‘big data’ went mainstream. i liked cukier and mayer-schönberger’s article in mit technology review because it dared to question the zeitgeist and point out the dangers and limitations of the big data craze. discussing robert mcnamara’s obsession with metrics in his management of the vietnam war, they write: as the vietnam conflict escalated and the united states sent more troops, it became clear that this was a war of wills, not of territory. america’s strategy was to pound the viet cong to the negotiation table. the way to measure progress, therefore, was by the number of enemy killed. the body count was published daily in the newspapers. to the war’s supporters it was proof of progress; to critics, evidence of its immorality. tim sherratt, a map and some pins; open data and unlimited horizons tim sherratt is now the manager of the trove portal at the national library of australia. when he gave this keynote address at the digisam conference in malmö, however, tim had only worked with trove on his own time by using their api. amongst several insights,tim reminds us of two extremely important things here with regards to open data, and the neutrality of librarians and archivists: …open data must always, to some extent, be closed. categories have been determined, data has been normalised, decisions made about what is significant and why. there is power embedded in every csv file, arguments in every api. this is inevitable. there is no neutral position. all we can do is encourage re-use of the data, recognising that every such use represents an opening out into new contexts and meanings. beyond questions of access or format, data starts to become open through its use. in duff and harris’s words, we should see open data ‘as always in the process of being made’. cherian george, the unknowing of public knowledge alas, i didn’t attend the ifla world congress in august, but shortly after cherian george gave this extraordinary plenary address, an abridged version appeared in my streams. in this paper, george explores the conundrum that in a world of unprecedented access to information we simultaneously find ourselves in an age of unprecedented censorship, truthiness, and new speak. george worries about a tendency towards public forgetting. reminding us of donald rumsfeld’s famous “known unknowns” speech, he notes: rumsfeld left out a fourth category that forms a central concern of this essay. the unknown knowns. these are the things of which reliable knowledge is out there —yet it is studiously avoided, because the truth is too inconvenient to some. i found cherian george’s paper invigorating, because it reminds us that libraries and librarians (especially public and state/national libraries) are a public good, and that what we do is more than just a social safety net or cheaper way to read. george tells us we should be more proactive about sharing the knowledge we care for, and that “the role of journalists and librarians as guardians of public knowledge and public reason remains as important as ever.” marcus westbury, what’s the difference between enabling and programming? marcus westbury and his work have intrigued me for several years. in this piece (and the post he published just prior to it) he lays out a framework to distinguish between programming and enabling when it comes to the activities of cultural organisations. westbury had in mind arts organisations such as the ones he has spent most of his life running, but i think this is an extremely useful model for public libraries. as i see it, public libraries are above all an enabler. with new models of librarianship increasingly focused more on events and programs, it is important that we don’t lose sight of this crucial role as an enabler rather than simply a deliverer of ‘programs’. gretchen like hugh, i feel a little guilty about not highlighting articles published in academic journals since the article he wrote earlier this year about public librarians’ involvement in library research resonated with me, but i can’t deny how much of my professional development and learning comes from blogs, conferences, and colleagues in addition to more academic reading. here, then, are three articles that i found personally meaningful, practical, and timely, plus two items that made me think more deeply about what i do. at the beginning of 2013, i took a new job supervising a teen services department in a branch of a large urban library. my patrons are almost exclusively teens of color and many are low-income, so most of my reading and learning this year has centered around management, urban librarianship, and underserved populations. tiffany williams, being diverse in our support for stem my library has made it a point in recent years to position itself as a leader in education in the city, and my branch is in an area where it frequently feels like schools are failing their students. stem is a hot topic in young adult librarianship right now, so integrating stem programs, activities, and perspectives into the library services my department is offering has been at the forefront of my mind. in this article, williams points out that minority students are dramatically underrepresented in stem classes and careers; examines how and why racial and ethnic minorities are excluded from stem fields; details methods to incorporate a multicultural point of view in stem classes; and suggests ways that librarians can help students of color overcome barriers to stem participation. while her findings and advice are practical, i also appreciate how she digs deeper into, and finds important new facets in, something that feels very buzzword-y. k-fai steele, ‘what we think actually matters?’ teen participatory design and action research at the free library of philadelphia one of the most important aspects of providing truly meaningful, effective library services to teens is giving those teens agency in what the library does. giving teens a voice provides them with an opportunity to practice critical thinking and to develop leadership and communication skills—part of helping them develop into happy, healthy adults. steele outlines how the free library of philadelphia involved teens in the design of the new teen center at the parkway central library: teens weren’t just recruited for focus groups, but were hired as assistants and engaged in interactive feedback and visioning activities over a period of months. this article provides a great showcase of how to involve teens in a major capital project, take them seriously, and make them a meaningful part of the process, creating a conversation between the library and teens rather than merely soliciting one-way feedback. i was particularly impressed with how getting teens involved was something that had the whole institution’s support, and that it was so successful that they were able to use what they’d done as a model for use at other branches. photos of the teens and some of the work they did were posted on the yals site. sarah flowers, what your manager wishes you knew okay, i’m cheating a little: this is actually a series of blog posts. last year i took on a new role in a supervisory position, and after having to be the boss, i now understand how to communicate with my boss and administrators to my own advantage much more effectively. in my experience, teen services librarians (and others who work with teens in libraries) often love their work and believe in what they do, but they’re not always able to communicate the value of their work to their supervisors—and it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do or how much what you do matters if you can’t get the people in power on board with you. these six blog posts—on presenting oneself as a professional, speaking the language of administration, collecting and understanding data, “sharing information up the ladder,” thinking big picture, and advocating widely—will help any frontline library worker who engages teens become more powerful in their ability to speak up for themselves and their teens, and get the administrative support they need. lee rainie, the new library patron i adore the pew research center’s internet & american life project. rainie’s keynote address summarizes and synthesizes findings from many of their reports from the past few years of research they’ve done on public libraries. he talks about who library patrons are, how they use libraries, how they perceive libraries, and what they want from libraries. what made this really interesting for me was his dissection of what different populations and groups—people of color, people without internet access at home, parents, young people—want from libraries. the pew research center is one of the few organizations that has the resources to conduct rigorous nationwide research about libraries, and being able to digest its findings and understand how to apply them to the planning my library does is valuable. on top of all of that, rainie’s a delightfully engaging speaker. linda braun, maureen hartman, sandra hughes-hassell, kafi kumasi, and beth yoke, the future of library services for and with teens: a call to action this report (the culmination of an effort begun at the national forum on libraries & teens) looks at the current state of teens, education, and libraries; explains the purpose and outcomes of the summit held earlier this year; and points to the future. youth librarianship often feels very practical—here are new storytime ideas! how long do you let a book sit on the shelf before you read it?—so i appreciate things that help us pull back and look at the big picture. i found this report particularly useful because it gathers data and information from a wide variety of sources, creating a comprehensive view of youth and libraries, and because it’s forward-thinking. in the same way the pew research center is one of the only sources for wide-ranging research on libraries, it’s good to see yalsa creating a document that steps back for a wider view and indicates future directions for meaningful library services to teens. references and further reading anderson, r. (2013, july 15). the moab design for digital object versioning. code4lib journal (21). http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8482   booth, c. (2013, october 3). banishing your imposter: metacognition and myths of self. http://infomational.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/banishing-your-impostor-metacognition-and-myths-of-self/   booth, c. (2013, november 6). information privilege: critical approaches to access and advocacy. http://mediasite.engr.utexas.edu/utmediasite/play/15fef35f23364ca0bbe4f0ee5f04a3e71d   braun, l.w., hartman, m.l., hughes-hassell, s., kumasi, k., and yoke, b. (2014, january 8) the future of library services for and with teens: a call to action. national forum on teens & libraries. http://www.ala.org/yaforum/sites/ala.org.yaforum/files/content/yalsa_nationalforum_final.pdf   brito, m. & fink, a. (2013, july 2). learning from early childhood education: higher ed and the process of becoming. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/files/learning_from_early_childhood_education.html   chevalier , t. (2013, july 11). when who you are is off-topic. http://geekfeminism.org/2013/07/11/when-who-you-are-is-off-topic/   cirasella, j., & bowdoin, s. (2013). just roll with it? rolling volumes vs. discrete issues in open access library and information science journals. journal of librarianship and scholarly communication, 1(4). http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1086   cukier, k., & mayer-schönberger, v. (2013, may 31). the dictatorship of data: big data gets personal. mit technology review. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514591/the-dictatorship-of-data/   dinno, a. & whitney, c. (2013). same sex marriage and the perceived assault on opposite sex marriage. plos one 8(6): e65730. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0065730   dupont, c., & yakel, e. (2013). “what’s so special about special collections?” or, assessing the value special collections bring to academic libraries. evidence based library and information practice, 8(2), 9-21. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/eblip/article/view/19615   farkas, m. g., & hinchliffe, l. j. (2013). library faculty and instructional assessment: creating a culture of assessment through the high performance programming model of organizational transformation. collaborative librarianship, 5(3), 177-188. http://collaborativelibrarianship.org/index.php/jocl/article/viewarticle/250   flowers, s. (2013, may-jun.). what your manager wishes you knew. http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/tag/what-your-manager-wishes-you-knew/   ford, e. (2013). defining and characterizing open peer review: a review of the literature. journal of scholarly communication, 44(4), 311-326. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jsp.44-4-001   hall, k., murdock ames, c., & brice, j. (2013, october 14). open source library software development in a small rural library system. code4lib journal (22). http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/7939   herrington, v. (2013). the academic library: cowpath or path to the future? journal of library innovation, 4(2), 54-68. http://www.libraryinnovation.org/article/view/278   klein, m., & kyrios, a. (2013, october 14). viafbot and the integration of library data on wikipedia. code4lib journal (22). http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8964   george, c. (2013, august 20). the unknowing of public knowledge http://www.mediaasia.info/the-unknowing-of-public-knowledge/   mcgrath, g. (2013, january 15). the format registry problem. code4lib journal (19). http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8029   nash, r. (2013, spring). what is the business of literature? virginia quarterly review, 14-27. http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2013/spring/nash-business-literature/   pandita, r. & ramesha, b. (2013). global scenario of open access publishing: a decadal analysis of directory of open access journals (doaj) 2003-2012. journal of information science theory and practice, 1(3), 47-59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1633/jistap.2013.1.3.4   pandita, r. (2013). growing trend towards open access publishing at global level: an analysis of directory of open access journals (doaj). international research: journal of library and information science, 3(3). http://irjlis.com/growing-trend-towards-open-access-publishing-at-global-level-an-analysis-of-directory-of-open-access-journals-doaj/   rainie, l. (2013, october 29). the new library patron. speech presented at internet librarian 2013, monterey conference center, monterey, ca. http://www.libconf.com/2013/10/28/internet-librarian-lee-rainie-keynote/   rochkind, j. (2013, january 15). a comparison of article search apis via blinded experiment and developer review. code4lib journal (19). http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/7738   rundle, h. (2014). free range librarianship: public librarian as park ranger. in k. leeder & e. frierson (eds.), planning our future libraries: blueprints for 2025 (pp. 55-68). chicago: ala editions. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/857141238   salo, d. (2013). how to scuttle a scholarly communication initiative. journal of librarianship and scholarly communication, 1(4). http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1075   sherratt, t (2013, june 11). a map and some pins; open data and unlimited horizons, http://discontents.com.au/a-map-and-some-pins-open-data-and-unlimited-horizons/   simpson, b. (2013). hiring non-mls librarians: trends and training implications. library leadership & management, 28(1). http://journals.tdl.org/llm/index.php/llm/article/view/7019   southwell, k. l., & slater, j. (2013). an evaluation of finding aid accessibility for screen readers. information technology and libraries, 32(3), 34-46. http://dx.doi.org/10.6017/ital.v32i3.3423   steele, k. (2013). ‘what we think actually matters?’ teen participatory design and action research at the free library of philadelphia. young adult library services, 11(4), 12-15.   stoddart, r. a. (2013, october 29). “straight to the heart of things”—reflecting on library metaphors for impact and assessment. journal of creative library practice. http://creativelibrarypractice.org/2013/10/29/straight-to-the-heart-of-things/   vance, j. (2013). staplercide! college & research libraries news, 74(11), 50-57. http://crln.acrl.org/content/74/11/570.full   westbury, m. (2013, october 26). what’s the difference between enabling and programming? http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2013/10/26/whats-the-difference-between-an-enabling-and-programming/   williams, t. (2013). being diverse in our support for stem. young adult library services, 12(1), 24-28. retrieved from http://www.ebscohost.com/academic/academic-search-premier (will also be available in a month or two on the yals online archive.)   yelton, a. (2013, november 20). #libtechgender: your world and mine. http://andromedayelton.com/blog/2013/11/20/libtechgender-your-world-and-mine/ giving games the old college try häuserkämpfe: an inside look at researching in diy archives 3 responses dorothea salo 2014–01–15 at 11:22 am wow! i am so surprised, and so grateful! thank you very much for the kind words. also for the nine open browser tabs i have now… pingback : "editorial: our favorite articles from 2013" in the library with the lead pipe | ischool mls emily ford 2014–01–16 at 11:32 am dr. dinno reports the following: “also, our article has been cited in two amicus briefs for state cases being heard on appeal in u.s. district courts for va, nv and hi (now mooted): coakley, m., nadeau, g. c., millar, j. b., harris, k., jepsen, g., iii, j. r. b., nathan, i. b., madigan, l., miller, t., mills, j. t., gansler, d. f., foster, j. a., king, g. k., scheiderman, e. t., rosenblum, e. f., sorrell, w. h., and ferguson, r. f. (2013). brief of massachusetts, california, connecticut, delaware, district of columbia, illinois, iowa, maine, maryland, new hampshire, new mexico, new york, oregon, vermont, and washington as amici curiae in support of appellants. amicus brief. beverly sevcik, et al. vs. brian sandoval, et al. (united states district court for the district of nevada) and natasha n. jackson, et al. vs. neil s. abercrombie, governor, state of hawai’i, loretta j. fuddy, director, department of health, state of hawai’i and hawaii family forum (united states district court for the district of hawaii). lustig, c. b., shuttleworth, t. b., ruloff, r. e., boies, d., silver, r. b., schiller, j. i., olson, t. b., mcgill, m. d., tayrani, a., fiebig, c., theodore j. boutrous, j., lipshutz, j. s., isaacson, w. a., and goldman, j. m. (2013). memorandum in support of plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment or, in the alternative, preliminary injunction. amicus brief. timothy b. bostic, tony c. london, carol schall, and mary townley vs. janet m. rainey, in her official capacity as state registrar of vital records, and george e. schaefer, iii, in his official capacity as the clerk of court for norfolk circuit court.” this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct in praise of the internet: shifting focus and engaging critical thinking skills – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 7 jan ellie collier /25 comments in praise of the internet: shifting focus and engaging critical thinking skills photo by flickr user orangeacid by ellie collier my alternate title for this post was “the internet is awesome. start acting like it.” it is a call to arms to shift our attitude away from magnifying the perils of online research and towards examining the many types of useful information along with how and when to use them; to shift our primary focus away from teaching how to find information and towards engaging critical thinking skills. often we have just one class period with our students and “the greater need is evaluation; they already know at least one method of finding articles.” [1] the kernel of this post emerged from a recent conversation with my brother. he asked me, “what would you estimate the ratio of inaccurate to accurate information on the internet is?” i hemmed and hawed and asked, “on the free web or including subscription sites?” he clarified, “well anytime i’ve randomly wanted to look something up … i’ve never come across something i’ve noticed to be faulty, but i wonder sometimes if a) i’ve totally been mislead by faulty info or b) if most stuff i’ve ever looked up is ok. but they make such a big deal to not trust things on the internet unless you know the poster is reputable. i think information is more likely to be incomplete rather than flat out wrong. go find something wrong on the internet and give me a link.” i sent him some of the standards: http://www.dhmo.org/ [2] http://zapatopi.net/afdb/ [3] http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ he asked, “what search would bring those things up that you’d actually be looking for? i’m just curious sometimes about these things. i’m skeptical of the skeptics, you know.” a bit of background: my brother and i are both within or at least near the cusp of the age groups defined as millennials, digital natives, net generation, etc. we also come from a family that highly values education. we both have masters degrees; his is in science education. he teaches 9th grade science at a public school. in short, he’s an intelligent, well-educated, and internet savvy young man. so his questions made me think hard about what i had learned about how to teach students to evaluate internet sources. personally, i only know about those sites because people use them as examples when teaching how to evaluate websites. there are scores of sites that list examples for teachers to use. but i would argue that they are not the examples we should be using. they are not what will be on the first page of results on a real life information query. or at least they wouldn’t be if so many education sites weren’t linking to them. [4] the real things they will typically encounter are much more complicated. and in all fairness, more likely to have decent information. i’ll interject here with another anecdote as a case in point. i was helping a student who had to write a paper on psychedelic mushrooms. this is a recurring assignment from a comp i professor who has his students write about various drugs, so i already knew from past experience that our library had relatively little information on this particular topic. the student had a note from her teacher saying she had relied too heavily on one particular source. she was frustrated because it had been the only place she had been able to find much of the information for her paper and now she wasn’t sure where else to look. it turned out to be an excellent teaching moment, and a much better example of the type of site we should be showing students how to evaluate. i explained the importance of looking for and reading the “about us” information and how she might not want to quote fire and earth erowid in a college level paper. i also showed her that even though fire and earth don’t pass the credibility test, they did document their sources. it turned out that nearly every quote this student had selected for her paper had originally come from a government publication. even better, the erowid site included a direct link to the original source. i explained that the dates on these reports were a little older and showed her how she could find more recent information from the same government organizations. i very much doubt she followed up on every one, but hopefully she at least learned something about evaluating websites and following citations. in “dissecting the web through wikipedia,” adam bennington makes a similar case for using wikipedia to teach these skills. [5] “the goal here is to show students how to gather the same resources that support the wikipedia entry. this helps expose the searcher to the wide variety of quality material contained in the library including the physical collection, electronic resources, and inter-library loan services (for resources not contained in the user’s home collection). it also gives the librarian a chance to explain how this content is different from what one might find with solely a google search.” i fully support bennington in his focus on wikipedia. it is a cultural phenomena that we ignore at our own (and our students’) peril. it is also another example of the complexity of internet sources and another chance to practice critical thinking. when i discuss wikipedia, i usually mention how steven colbert told his fans to change a wikipedia entry on elephants to say “the number of elephants has tripled in the last six months.” so if you had seen it that day you might have believed that. in every class there are still students that didn’t know wikipedia could be edited by anyone, so first it covers that feature. this example is not only about wikipedia’s dangers though. the wikipedia community responded quickly, fixing the error and protecting the page from further attack. so while it can be edited by anyone and errors do occur, so do corrections, another feature. we do our students a disservice when we dismiss such an amazing and useful resource, when instead we could be using it to teach them about the research process not to mention the power of individuals working together to share knowledge. using more realistic examples in our instruction and explaining the positive aspects as well as the negative will help both the students and our image. as my brother said, when he has searched for something online, he mostly receives decent information. despite all the (certainly valid) questions about the secrets behind page ranking algorithms, a basic search will generally return fairly decent results with today’s technology. he (and our students) have every right to be skeptical of the skeptics. condemning the internet as a wasteland or a dangerous minefield when this is not the students’ personal experience only hurts our credibility. emily drabinski summed up the severity of what is at stake in her comments on my first draft, “as a reference and instruction librarian, i feel like my entire job depends on whether or not students and faculty seek me out for help. losing credibility by trying to convince students of a reality they have never experienced means i’ve lost a chance to seem authoritative and like i know what’s what.” if we continue to insist on this paradox between our authority and their personal experience we risk alienating the people we are trying to help. in free culture, elizabeth daley discusses using various media in education, but her point applies here as well: “you know, you’ve got johnny who can look at a video, he can play a video game, he can do graffiti all over your walls, he can take your car apart, and he can do all sorts of other things. he just can’t read your text. so johnny comes to school and you say, “johnny, you’re illiterate. nothing you can do matters.” well, johnny then has two choices: he can dismiss you or he [can] dismiss himself. if his ego is healthy at all, he’s going to dismiss you. [6] in addition to using more realistic examples in our instruction, i’d also like to suggest a tiny change in vocabulary. when discussing sources let’s talk about whether they are appropriate to cite in the student’s paper, rather than whether they’re appropriate to use. there are many resources that are perfectly useful throughout the research process that may not be appropriate to cite in the final paper. while pursuing my msis, i wrote a paper entitled “writing forms and usage during the viking age.” like every other student today, as part of my research process i did a google search. i read wikipedia entries. i also used the more encouraged sources, searching the library catalog and subscription databases, and browsing the shelves. this was an obscure subject and required a lot of digging. by far my most useful source was vikinganswerlady.com. the viking answer lady is christie ward. her resume lists experience in computer science and web design, but no degrees and nothing related to viking studies. our standard instruction would dismiss her site for not having an “about us” page and, after finding her resume, dismiss her as not an authority. yet, reading through the site she is obviously dedicated, well read, and documents her sources. from my bibliographic essay [7]: “for a more in depth study of viking age literacy, i was lucky enough to be pointed towards james e. knirk’s “learning to write with runes in medieval norway” (runica et mediævalia. opuscula 2. stockholm, 1994) and aslak liestøl’s “the literate vikings” (proceedings of the sixth viking congress. uppsala, 1971). these two articles in particular provided much of the serious analysis that was missing from the easy to find general information. they also provided a large number of attempted and partial translations of runic inscriptions that helped inform my summaries of the various types extant.” i was lucky enough to be pointed to those articles because i emailed viking answer lady with my general thesis and asked her advice on where to look for more information. she might not fit the standard authority criteria that were established in the pre-internet age, but i would argue she is most definitely an authority. even if she is not an authority i would cite in a paper, she was an important step along the way of my research process. we are quick to explain as it becomes easier and easier for anyone to put anything online that more and more incorrect, misleading, and otherwise “bad” information is becoming available. but the opposite is also true. it is just as easy for dedicated hobbyists, gifted amateurs, independent scholars and the like to put up incredibly useful information. (not to mention marginal voices that are often excluded from more traditional modes of public discourse.) more and more organizations are providing their services and expertise online. we should be encouraging our students to take advantage of these wonderful resources, not handicapping them by refusing, discouraging, blocking, filtering, or otherwise denying access. as we teach students to approach information critically we can also explain the importance of the intended use of the resource. to write a research paper on a medical condition you want to use reputable scientific information. but a chat room or forum might be much more useful for dealing with patients’ emotions and gathering first hand accounts, even if not all the scientific information in it is vetted. with these types of examples students can begin to learn to ask themselves questions about what types of information they need, who might have the information they are looking for, what type of person or group would have collected it and why, and where would it have been made available. my brother asked in summary, “basically, if you’re writing a paper for school, only use peer reviewed stuff.” but it’s not that simple, is it? i sometimes moonlight at a wonderful four-year college where everyone has to take two courses that include in-depth position papers on controversial topics. students (and even teachers sometimes) are often confused about whether what they’re looking at should count as authoritative. one of the examples i always give is that if you want to know the nra’s stated position on gun control there’s no better place to go than the nra website. if you want to know the statistics of children killed by their parents’ guns, i wouldn’t get it there. another example: if you’re writing on star trek culture or the phenomena of fan fiction you would absolutely want to use fan sites. rather than focus on these fan sites as examples of non-authority we should be focusing on clarifying your purpose and identifying what types of sources would fit. i am calling for a shift in focus and in attitude. when deciding how to split your time, give precedence to critical thinking skills. rather than extol the evils and dangers of the internet, focus on the gems. in teaching how to find the gems we teach how to sift out the soil, sand and fool’s gold, but the emphasis should remain on the gems. personal experience shows us that we can typically easily find anything we want online. emphasizing the chaff discredits us. so as you go into your instruction sessions this next semester i encourage you to spend less time on boolean and more time using realistic examples to help engage students in a critical discussion about how to best use the internet for research. further reading: for lesson plans and concrete examples of how to incorporate these themes into your instruction see: miller, sara d. “learning outcomes, instructional design, and the 50-minute information literacy session.” presented march 7, 2008 to the library & information sciences section. bennington, adam. “dissecting the web through wikipedia.” american libraries. august 2008: 46-48. for more information on the growing importance of dedicated amateurs see: howe, jeff. “the rise of crowdsourcing.” wired june 2006 notes: [1] quoted from: miller, sara d. “learning outcomes, instructional design, and the 50-minute information literacy session.” presented march 7, 2008 to the library & information sciences section. [2] just in case it’s not obvious: dhmo = h20 = water [3] the tin foil hat site is often used in k-12 for website evaluation exercises. read their response. amusing and insightful. [4] a fascinating aside: i did a google search on “octopus” to see if the pacific northwest tree octopus site would come up. it was the second result after the wikipedia article, most likely because it is linked to off of so many education (read-reputable) web sites. but on the search results page, underneath the link, in brackets it says “contains fictitious information.” [5] quoted from: bennington, adam. “dissecting the web through wikipedia.” american libraries. august 2008: 46-48. [6] quoted from: lessig, lawrence. free culture. while not directly related to this post, i wanted to share that this quote continues: but instead, if you say, “well, with all these things that you can do, let’s talk about this issue. play for me music that you think reflects that, or show me images that you think reflect that, or draw for me something that reflects that.” not by giving a kid a video camera and … saying, “let’s go have fun with the video camera and make a little movie. but instead, really help you take these elements that you understand, that are your language, and construct meaning about the topic.” [7] i just want to put a plug in for bibliographic essays as an excellent tool for ensuring real thought goes into selecting sources. thanks to emily drabinski, emily ford, and derik badman for their feedback and edits. information literacy, instruction editorial: getting to know you… even better a look at recessions and their impact on librarianship 25 responses veronica 2009–01–07 at 10:54 am this post made my morning, as did this line in particular: “condemning the internet as a wasteland or a dangerous minefield when this is not the students’ personal experience only hurts our credibility.” i feel pressured by some nebulous notion of good librarianship to teach students the “right way” to do research with the “right sources,” even though i know in my heart, mind, and gut that there is no absolute “right.” you’re absolutely right about librarians needing to guide students through more realistic methods of conducting research (ones that we often use ourselves). i want my students to think critically about different sources when they are conducting research, rather than simply checking the “peer-reviewed” box on an ebsco database. time to revise my teaching once again! :-) emily 2009–01–07 at 11:21 am i think we really need to let go of our need to be “right.” there’s no right–only partial perspectives/strategies that work in some situations and not others. i feel like fields from composition theory to anthropology to science studies have ‘known’ this for so long, and i’d like to see our field open the door and let in a little of this light, too. and i’d rather teach students the hows and whys of struggling and grappling than teach them what they need to know. i mean, how in the world could i know that for all of them in all places?!? andrew klein 2009–01–07 at 2:35 pm ellie, this is so, so good. i always kind of feel like a heel when i’m pointing out these cherry-picked “bad” websites that everyone uses and now i know why. of course the focus should be on the good information, not the bad stuff. it’s just easier to say what not to use. nikki 2009–01–07 at 2:38 pm i’m finding this post particularly helpful, if not inspirational, as i prepare for my first instructional session. rmm 2009–01–08 at 9:23 am very thoughtful, useful post by ellie. ellie writes: “when discussing sources let’s talk about whether they are appropriate to cite in the student’s paper, rather than whether they’re appropriate to use. there are many resources that are perfectly useful throughout the research process that may not be appropriate to cite in the final paper.” that’s a great point, but i worry that that kind of distinction might confuse students who struggle with what to cite to avoid plagiarism. a reassuring rule-of-thumb is, if you’re not sure whether to cite something, then cite it–it’s better to overthan to under-cite. but now we would be entering into discussions with students about gathering information and not citing it. i don’t think that many librarians anymore inveigh against the free web as a minefield of dangerous information. instead, i think the problem comes from poorly designed classroom assignments, where students are required to only use peer-reviewed articles as sources–and you see those assignments in 100-level classes, where beginning students really need to use (and cite!) some trustworthy, popular material as they begin to understand a subject. thanks for the thoughtful discussion on this awesome blog. john 2009–01–09 at 12:37 pm well done! i agree that the internet is awesome! kim duckett 2009–01–10 at 7:45 am thanks for this thoughtful post. i love how you use your discussions with your brother to illustrate ideas. i agree that your shift in language towards whether sources are appropriate to “cite” rather than “to use” is a great idea. also, your emphasis on helping students with critical thinking skills shines a spotlight on how librarians can help students with the gray area between finding information and doing something thoughtful with it (which is often way harder for students and i imagine even more anxiety-provoking). but i agree with rmm that i don’t think most librarians present the web as a “minefield of dangerous information,” and librarians are frequently trying to work students through poorly envisioned assignments. one of the things that i most passionately believe about teaching students is that they need more context — context for how information is created, vetted (or not), and packaged…as well as the economics that so often surrounds information. it’s easy for “library instruction” to remain point-and-click training about how to use different information resources. while i’m with you that we should spend less time on boolean, i’d also argue we should step back and make sure we carve out time to have *conversations* with students around questions like “what is peer review in the first place?” “what makes someone an ‘expert?'” “how does information get into wikipedia?” “why exactly do you see those messages to buy an article through google scholar?” these concepts are directly tied to critical thinking and lifelong learning. dave wilson 2009–01–10 at 1:23 pm thanks for a wonderful, thought-provoking post just as we head into another semester of instruction! derik badman 2009–01–11 at 1:04 pm a thought-provoking post, ellie. i really like idea of information appropriate to cite v. use. this is something i end up having to stress a lot with students doing statistical research. a lot of students want to cite some random web page they find with a simplified statistic, when they can track down (often by simply following a link on the same page they are looking at) the original statistical report/data containing a wealth of information. shinylib 2009–01–12 at 5:47 pm ah, i’m feeling validated. thanks for that! in addition to the thoughtful feedback that’s here in the comments, i wanted to mention that even when i’m teaching a “check the peer reviewed box” type of class i still begin with and continually refer to what i call the “self-check” (most important part of the research process is what i call it) in which i urge students to ask themselves if what they are looking for (expert commentary of some kind, usually) is likely to be found where they are looking and with the terminology they are employing. then i ask something like: if you were writing a paper about the struggles of moms in the pacific northwest to supply their children with raw milk would you choose the moms for raw milk blog or the usda dairy facts page? so far that analogy is working (but maybe because legalizing raw milk is an actual issue here?)… so far that idea that the student with the assignment has some expertise and should depend on their common sense a bit has been encouraging and seems to resonate with students. ellie 2009–01–13 at 11:39 am thank you everyone for all the support and additional tips. rmm – you make a good point about being very careful when discussing citations and teaching about plagiarism. i agree that it’s better to over-cite than to under-cite, but i still think the process of gathering information and realizing you might not use every single resource in the final paper is a useful discussion to have. derik brings up another example – the student finds the information on one site, but would be better served to use that to find the original source, rather than cite the random web page. better to cite than not cite, but even better yet to use it to get to better information. rmm & kim – as to whether or not librarians portray the internet as dangerous, i’m sure there are many approaches and it is shifting with time, but as i look at instruction pieces coming out of educational institutions around the web i still see an emphasis on the perils rather than on the good stuff. the danger of writing about it here is that i’m just preaching to the choir. i also agree on the topic of questionable assignments and introducing students to peer-reviewed articles when they are likely to be less useful or completely over their head. maybe we can coax a guest writer to give us some tips on talking with teachers. :) kim – i love your discussion questions! thanks for sharing them. shinylib – i like that example for the self check. i don’t think raw milk would resonate as much in texas, but the idea that by virtue of knowing their assignment they have some expertise is definitely something i’ll use. oelibrarian 2009–01–13 at 3:39 pm bravo! i like the part about figuring out what is good to use in a project and what is good to cite. and i appreciate how you break down the evaluation sites between credible and useful. despite the fact that a site may not be credible, there may still be useful information there. it’s gotten me thinking about research in general and what it really means to do research. has it changed with the way information is available today. or is it really the same and we just believe it is different because of the amount of information we have access to? ellie 2009–01–13 at 3:45 pm i was reading something recently about every generation complaining about too much information being available and the need for better categorization and finding tools, which was an interesting bit of perspective. pingback : rethinking how we teach evaluating resources and research « what now? ellie 2009–01–15 at 6:52 pm i just wanted to share this fantastic related post i just read. http://info-fetishist.org/2009/01/03/discovery-and-creation-and-lies anne-marie 2009–01–16 at 5:29 pm thanks ellie – i think i was reading your post while you were reading mine! there are many things i love in your essay, but i think the distinction between use and cite is a really, really important one. i think it is more authentic in terms of how it describes how we really do research and learn from research — and i also think it’s always a good idea to reinforce that idea of research as something bigger than a process of finding quotes to support an argument. our beginning composition require students to use both “background” and “speaker” sources to get at this idea, and that concept of “speaker” sources really helps get us all thinking about how the sources you might want to cite in an academic argument paper can come from all kinds of places. thanks! red 2009–01–20 at 4:22 pm i think the most common weakness of web pages is they are superficial more than wrong. also, the point about the nra site being useful for some info on guns but not others is important. that’s something to focus instruction on, i’d say, more than the truly goofy sites (although they can make an impression on students). pingback : at random « applied design librarian pingback : it’s the collections that are special | in the library with the lead pipe sara miller 2010–05–19 at 3:27 pm thanks for the cite! my article is no longer up at my web site but here is the full citation: miller, s. d. (2009). learning outcomes, instructional design, and the 50-minute information literacy session. the michigan academician, 39(1), 31-45. ellie 2010–05–23 at 2:19 pm thanks sara! christie ward 2010–10–27 at 3:02 pm i’m glad that the info i pointed you towards helped! and i love this essay. i try to give my sources so hopefully people will use good, critical thinking to evaluate what i write. a doctorate doesn’t necessarily make a person a good source – educated people can have some very “tin foil hat” ideas and viewpoints (as can we all). i hope that consumers of knowledge will use good consumer habits with information – check the sources, evaluate the reliability, and so forth. and that really should apply not just to the web, but also to sources in print, from lectures, and the like. ellie 2010–10–27 at 3:38 pm thanks christie! pingback : “i came to the library to get some information, not to have a conversation with the librarian” or, “the user experience in the library” | a searching librarian pingback : library technology conference (march 15) « ellie <3 libraries this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct modular short form videos for library instruction – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 4 oct cindy craig /9 comments modular short form videos for library instruction in brief expensive software isn’t necessary to create effective tutorials. quick, unedited tutorials created on social media, such as on instagram or snapchat, may be more effective. these short form videos (sfvs) combine the advantages of animated gifs with the advantages of screencasts: modularity, repetition of steps, and animated visuals supported by pertinent audio. sfvs are cheap (or free) and easy to make with materials libraries already possess, such as internet access, computers, and smartphones. they are easily replaceable if the subject changes. the short form forces librarians to get right to the point. finally, sfvs are easily disseminated on social media and have the potential to go viral. by cindy craig introduction in this article, i describe how i came to use social media videos to teach library skills and abandon the screencasting format. i describe some key learning theories for effective tutorials and how various tutorial formats fit those theories. finally, i provide some tips for making tutorials in instagram or snapchat. background screencast tutorials, such as those made with camtasia studio and adobe captivate, have become a staple for instruction librarians. over the course of my academic library career, i’ve made dozens of screencast tutorials on a variety of topics such as avoiding plagiarism, using subject databases, printing from library computers, and reserving study rooms. the advantage of video tutorials is their ability to provide library instruction around the clock. and with enrollment in online courses at an all-time high, online instruction is more important than ever. however, there are significant drawbacks to screencast tutorials. one is that they can be difficult to make. if your library has the budget for a professional screen capture program, the learning curve for using it may be too high. also, when a vendor decides to change a database platform a week before the new semester starts, your carefully made tutorial is instantly stale. another, and perhaps more significant, issue is: are students actually using online tutorials? in one survey of undergraduates by colosimo and kasuto (2012), one third reported they would not watch screencast tutorials for a variety of reasons, among them “no need,” “no time,” and “no interest.” this finding points to some worrying issues regarding online tutorials (and information literacy instruction in general). many undergraduates, especially those new to college level research, tend to overestimate their information literacy skills, a phenomenon known as calibration (yates, 1990). another is that today’s students are used to a high level of human-centered design in their computing devices. library tutorials seem clunky and confusing compared to the seamless app interfaces they take for granted on their mobile phones and tablets. students will ignore screencasts if they are over three minutes long, take too long to load, don’t play well on a mobile device, or are not available at the point of need (plumb, 2010; slebodnick & riehle, 2009). how can instruction librarians overcome these barriers and create tutorials that are effective and engaging? two learning theories may be of help: cognitive load theory and dual coding theory. key learning theories cognitive load theory asserts that, for learning to take place, the demand on working memory must be minimized. working memory, which is our mind’s temporary sketchpad, can only hold about seven units of information for about a maximum of twenty seconds. information not encoded into long term memory disappears from one’s mind (miller, 1956; peterson & peterson, 1959). think about being introduced to someone new, only to forget their name moments later. researcher john sweller (1994) found that novice learners, such as undergraduates, are especially vulnerable to cognitive overload. he recommends decreasing cognitive load by putting smaller bits of information together into chunks. for example, a seven-digit phone number is easier to remember because it is clustered into two chunks. ideally, tutorials would demonstrate step-by-step how to perform a task, known as a worked example. a library tutorial about a database, for example, would show each step to finding and using the thesaurus feature. dual coding theory, developed by allen paivio (1975), asserts that students learn more effectively if their visual and verbal channels are engaged at once. pairing words and images in a meaningful way, such as with a mnemonic device, decreases the demand on working memory. in a screencast tutorial created in camtasia, for example, one could use the callout feature to highlight a key concept, such as the word “abstract”, and pair it with footage of a database record. even better is to pair audio narration with moving images, since only using visual elements can still overwhelm working memory. think about the extra effort it takes to watch a film with subtitles. choosing the best tutorial format taking these learning theories into account, one might think the best choice for tutorials would be the screencast, since it combines moving database footage with audio narration. my own research found that this was the case. i compared two tutorials on a biology database: one a screencast featuring audio narration and callouts of important concepts, the other a series of web pages with static screenshots that students could click through. in a follow up quiz, the students who watched the screencast scored higher than the other group (craig & friehs, 2013). however, a 2012 study by lori mestre found the opposite. most of her students also preferred using a tutorial with static screenshots than watching a screencast. their reasons included: ability to quickly return to a section explaining a step. ability to skip around sections instead of watching a video beginning to end. ability to get the big picture by scanning the whole page, then returning to individual steps. the screencast was tedious to sit through. the few students who preferred the screencast liked the mouse movements and the highlighting. they also found the voice narration explaining each step to be helpful. so, considering these conflicting findings, i wondered what format would combine the best aspects of a screencast with the best parts of a static web page tutorial. that’s why i was intrigued when i came across a 2014 article in lead pipe by karl suhr about using animated gifs for library tutorials. suhr noticed that animated gifs, which he considered antiquated and distracting, had recently made a comeback as a storytelling device in the form of jokes and memes. as information literacy instruction is also a form of storytelling, animated gifs might be a good format for library tutorials. suhr’s reasons included: a group of pictures gives immediate feedback as to how much information is being conveyed. a screencast, on the other hand, doesn’t give much of a clue as to what the user is committing to. pictures have natural break points between steps. a series of images enhances closure, which is the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole. comics artists employ closure by carefully sequencing panels and knowing what to keep “off-screen.” a series of animated gifs combines closure with the dynamic element of video. suhr recommended making a series of animated gifs displayed in a sequence on one screen. this could help users understand “a multistep process that depends on properly executing the one before it,” such as searching for a book in the library catalog. animated gifs are also a good choice for practical reasons in that they are easy and cheap to make and don’t require a broadband connection to view. trying short form videos at that point, i decided screencasting might be dead and to switch to another online tutorial format. i wanted to combine the best aspects of animated gifs and camtasia videos. also, i wanted to reach students through their smart phones, which were seemingly ubiquitous. so, i turned to social media. i decided to try vine as a format for library tutorials. at the time, vine was still a very popular video sharing service that at its peak had 40 million users. the videos were only six seconds long and played in a continuous loop. the constraints of this format enhanced creativity by requiring users to tell stories with quick cuts and non-sequiturs (hern, 2014). some users gathered millions of followers by becoming masters of short-form storytelling, such as gainesville, florida native thomas sanders, who, incidentally, developed a comic series called “storytime” (fenn, 2014). i planned out a series of vine videos showing each step in a research process. step one/video one: locate the psycinfo database on the psychology libguide. step two/video two: perform a search and browse the records. step three/video three: use psycinfo’s term finder to find relevant results. a colleague, april hines, and i created this series using her smartphone and my computer screen. april narrated the videos while i clicked through the relevant screens. she approached the narration as an undergraduate student browsing through the library’s website doing research. for instance, in the first video, she says “i need articles on pet therapy” as a mouse cursor clicks on the psycinfo link. the second video shows the list of psycinfo results as she says, “these are all about pet scans. am i using the right terms? let me try the term finder.” the cursor clicks on the term finder link at the top of the screen. the third video shows the thesaurus terms for pet therapy. april’s voice says, “oh, animal assisted therapy” as the cursor clicks on the thesaurus term. as a new list of records pops up on the screen, she says, “much better!” this process was much more difficult to coordinate than we thought and took several tries to get right. however, we were able to load the videos onto a vine account. i also made a libguide and embedded each video so they would appear in order on one screen. users could easily scan the whole series, view them in order, or skip around to different steps. to assess the new videos, april and i showed them to a focus group of students from our library’s booster club. these students have helped with assessing library services in the past, so they were eager to help. i asked the students to view the psycinfo tutorial series on their own mobile devices, then attempt to search the database for an article. they had trouble navigating to the libguide where i embedded the videos. it was much easier for them to watch the videos on vine. the students were able to follow the psycinfo tutorial series to the end and successfully locate articles, but they needed to watch the videos over and over. the students found the narration useful and they liked that the videos automatically repeated. we had planned a second focus group, but the vine service was discontinued and our videos were no longer accessible. april and i recreated the series, as well as some new tutorials, using instagram and snapchat. these programs have a little more flexibility than vine. instagram allows 15 second videos while snapchat videos are 10 seconds maximum. snapchat also allows you to add annotations and captions, which makes videos more accessible for users who cannot hear audio narration. in one of our videos showing how to access the list of project starter databases, we added an annotation at the bottom showing the library’s web address. instagram has the boomerang app, which bounces a two-second clip back and forth. in one of our videos, we drew an arrow to the off-campus access link on the library’s home page. the boomerang app moves this arrow back and forth, highlighting the link. the full series of videos is located here: https://www.instagram.com/uflibrarywest/. we showed this second series to a different group of library ambassador volunteers. this group was also able to successfully use psycinfo after viewing the video series. however, some of their responses pointed to some possible challenges that instruction librarians should keep in mind. one is that the library ambassadors, already avid users of the library, were very confused by the library’s website. they were unsure how to even find the library’s home page without googling it. once they were at the home page, they were unsure how to find and use databases appropriate to their subject areas, often defaulting to the favorite of professors everywhere, jstor. one student demonstrated calibration when she claimed to not need library instruction, but showed the most surprise at the skills she learned from the videos. at this point, my use of social media tutorials is still in the testing phases and has not yet been adopted by my library. however, i believe, based on my analysis and on focus group feedback, that this format has great potential to teach information literacy skills. going forward, i plan to further explore how best to deliver short form video tutorials so that they are available to students at the point of need. based on what i’ve learned so far, here are my recommendations for best practices: carefully map out the research process from start to finish. don’t assume users will even know how to find your library’s website. break up the research process into smaller chunks. think about where users are likely to get stuck or confused. your videos should help users over these hurdles. if you plan to capture screens from a database, have a partner click through the screens while you hold the smartphone or tablet. as you film, add simple narration to clarify what is being shown. avoid distracting music or sound effects. use captions to make your videos more accessible and to reinforce the message. conclusion the best short form videos adhere to dual coding theory in that they combine visuals with just the right audio for immediate impact. also, the brevity and repetition of short form videos require little demand on working memory. short form videos on social media are a part of what juhlin et al. (2014) call the new video culture, which has been made possible by cheap video production tools and high bandwidth. camera phones have replaced digital cameras for taking photos and videos in everyday use. the image quality of camera phones has increased to a level of quality that was only available to professionals just a few years ago. this has led to video consumers also becoming producers and sharers of content, or “prosumers.” social media sites provide outlets for prosumer content. the result is a dynamic and diverse video medium that has become a form of dialog. in this new medium, spontaneity and authenticity of videos are more important than careful editing, which helps explain the enormous appeal of services like vine, snapchat, and instagram. acknowledgements: thank you to my internal reviewer, bethany messersmith, my external reviewer, renee romero, and publishing editor, sofia leung for your support and helpful advice. special thanks to my colleague april hines for her assistance with creating the videos and with conducting the focus groups. special thanks to curt friehs, my colleague and longtime collaborator on research with online tutorials. and thank you to lori mestre and karl suhr, whose articles inspired me to take a new direction with online tutorials. references colosimo, a. l., & kasuto, e. (2012). library video tutorials to support large undergraduate labs: will they watch? issues in science and technology librarianship, 68. craig, c. l., & friehs, c. g. (2013). video & html: testing online tutorial formats with biology students. journal of web librarianship, 7(3), 292-304. fenn, m. (2014). thomas sanders’ bold, gate-crashing comedy shines in vine compilation. retrieved from: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/vine-thomas-sanders-story-time/ hern, a. (2014). vine’s co-founder colin kroll: ‘six seconds just feels right’. retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/24/vine-video-flickr-colin-kroll juhlin, o., zoric, g., engstrom, a., & reponen, e. (2014). video interaction: a research agenda. personal and ubiquitous computing, 18(3), 685-692. mestre, l. s. (2012). student preference for tutorial design: a usability study. reference services review, 40(2), 258-276. miller, g. a. (1956). “the magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information”. psychological review. 63(2), 81-97. doi:10.1037/h0043158. paivio, a. (1975). coding distinctions and repetition effects in memory. in k. w. spence (ed.), the psychology of learning and motivation (pp. 179-214). new york: academic press. peterson, l., & peterson, m. j. (1959). short-term retention of individual verbal items. journal of experimental psychology, 58(3), 193-198. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0049234 plumb, t. k. (2010). creating electronic tutorials: on your mark, get set, go! journal of electronic resources librarianship, 22(1), 49-64. slebodnik, m., & riehle, c. f. (2009). creating online tutorials at your libraries: software choices and practical implications. reference & user services quarterly, 49(1), 33-37, 51. sweller, j. (1994). cognitive load theory, learning difficulty, and instructional design. learning and instruction, 4(4), 295-312. suhr, k. (2014). using animated gif images for library instruction. retrieved from: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/using-animated-gif-images-for-library-instruction/ yates, j. f. (1990). judgment and decision making. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. information literacy, online tutorials, social media creating connections: how libraries can use exhibits to welcome new students the innovation fetish and slow librarianship: what librarians can learn from the juicero 9 responses pingback : instagram and snapchat videos as short-form library tutorials – the a2j lawbrarian blog antonio dias figueiredo 2017–10–11 at 6:15 am thanks for such a nicely argued text and inspiring research. i’ve just recommended it on my facebook page (in portuguese). my only humble comment is that there may be some contradiction between your recognition that “today’s students are used to a high level of human-centered design in their computing devices” and your claim that “spontaneity and authenticity of videos are more important than careful editing.” as ios11 now lets you produce screencasts for free, i could imagine a two step process where you would: (1) capture the screens from the database on ios11; (2) edit the resulting video on a cheap but powerful ios editor, such as pinnacle studio pro, which lets you zoom on to the specific spots of the database screen. this would get round the unfriendly interfaces of present day databases and improve (actually, make possible) legibility. cindy craig 2017–10–11 at 2:13 pm hello antonio! thank you for your thoughtful comments. (and thank you for your kind comments on my article in your facebook post!) i should clarify that, while students demand high quality from their computing devices, they don’t necessarily expect the content to be high quality. pinnacle studio pro is $129.95, which, while cheaper than camtasia and captivate, may still be too costly for some libraries. the screen recording feature on ios11, used on its own, may be an excellent tool for making tutorials, with the caveat that the tutorials remain simple and brief. i’ll give it a try! antónio figueiredo 2017–10–11 at 4:51 pm hello cindy! thanks for your kind reply. i was mentioning pinnacle studio pro for ios, which works beautifully on the ipad. in europe, it costs 13.99 euros. in the us it should cost between $ 10.00 and $15.00. i’ve used it in the past and was genuinely impressed. the learning curve is a little steep at first, but if you follow a 30 minute tutorial and get used to it, it’s a breeze. assuming that whoever produces an sfv is likely to produce some more, it might make sense. this is, of course, a mere suggestion by someone who loved your project and would like to help. cindy craig 2017–10–12 at 4:47 pm i found pinnacle studio pro in the apple store for $12.99 usd! oooo….i’ll have to try it now! michael jones 2017–10–20 at 7:21 am hello cindy, thanks for sharing about your interesting work. i too have been experimenting with the use of video for delivering tutorials in recent years so it was really good to hear about your approach. i’m also very interested in how social media is used by academic libraries and have published some research that i carried out into its effectiveness in communicating with users in uk further education. how have you found social media as a platform for disseminating your videos? do you feel like you are able to reach a large enough portion of the student population via this medium? cindy craig 2017–11–07 at 1:21 pm hello, michael! thank you for your comments. i’m interested in reading your research. at this point, i feel more study is needed to determine the most effective way to disseminate video tutorials. one challenge is to choose the right social media platform, since they are always changing! the students i spoke to gravitated towards different platforms for different uses and audiences. michael jones 2017–11–20 at 9:14 am hello cindy, thanks for the reply. if you fancied glancing through my research you can find it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000616668959. if you don’t have access to jolis then there’s an earlier draft available via northumbria university’s open access research portal: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/27839/1/article.pdf i completely agree that choosing the right social media platform is very difficult. part of the problem is you’re never going to find one platform that all of your library users are on and so it becomes impossible to offer consistent delivery across the student body. that’s why we chose to disseminate our videos via tutor sessions which all students will attend once a week and so we can be sure that pretty much all of our students are receiving some basic information literacy training via this means. obviously, this depends on the nature of your institution and whether this kind of regular contact with students is available. pingback : the year in learning: recommended l&d articles from 2017 this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct recruiting and retaining lgbtq-identified staff in academic libraries through ordinary methods – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 22 mar elliott kuecker /1 comments recruiting and retaining lgbtq-identified staff in academic libraries through ordinary methods in brief while the american academic library field works hard to include all patrons and materials that represent less dominant populations, it should be more mindful of inclusivity in its own workforce. particularly, the field does nothing to explicitly recruit or retain lgbtq-identified librarians. the author proposes practical remedies to these problems that directly respond to workplace studies on interpersonal difficulties lgbtq-identified librarians and others have cited as barriers to happiness in the workplace, and argues toward more inclusive lis education and financial support. most importantly, the author hopes to convince others to abandon the tired rhetoric that positions the library field’s “feminization” as a misunderstanding and damaging consequence to be combated, and instead replace it with feminist conversations about the gendered aspects of the field. introduction the library and information science (lis) field is its own worst enemy in terms of recruitment and retention of underrepresented employees. while the field has sufficient scholarship on diversity in collections, censorship issues, and how to provide programming for patrons from various backgrounds, lis articles rarely discuss successfully recruiting and retaining librarians who come from less dominant cultures or are underrepresented within the field. the small amount of scholarship that does exist on this topic is excellent, though limited to visible minorities. particularly, the field lacks recruitment and retention strategies for academic librarians and staff who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (lgbtq). i argue that the way the lis field discusses the gendered nature of library work constitutes a microaggression in itself, and that the field does not do enough to recruit and retain academic librarians who identify as lgbtq. my argument is built on several foundations. first, “current research on recruitment and retention” reviews the scholarship that proves that comfort and safety at work are the most important factors in retaining employees in academic libraries. for those who are not members of america’s dominant culture, the issue of comfort and safety is both more urgent and pronounced; this section expands on the literature that discusses the issue for people of color. second, “how microaggressions ruin positive workplace culture” explains the current scholarship on microaggressions directed toward people of color in the library workplace, and includes scholarship from other fields that discuss microaggressions toward lgbtq-identified employees. third, “lis scholarship and anti-feminist rhetoric” discusses the lis field’s characterization of the “feminization” of librarianship as a detrimental act, and how this view is a sexist, aggressive behavior in itself. finally, “practical methods for improvement” describes feasible tactics both individual libraries and the global lis field can practice in order to be more thoughtful toward these issues. i suggest that all these changes be made every day, in the quotidian aspects of our work, in order to lead to a permanent cultural shift. current research on recruitment and retention scholarship on lis management practices demonstrates that internal workplace forces are more significant than external forces in keeping librarians happily employed in the academic library field. though much of the opinion-based scholarship deals with budget cuts, lack of respect for the field from non-librarians, and other forces outside of a library’s control, a wealth of empirical evidence suggests that the most important factor in retaining librarians is an internal factor: a positive workplace environment. libraries spend large sums of money on the hiring process for new librarians, as jones argues, but they rarely spend any money or time on acclimating the new librarian into the new work environment, much less acclimating the library to the new employee.1 given kawasaki’s argument that the initial period for an incoming librarian is the most significant time in the new-hire’s career in terms of deciding how they feel about their work, we should focus much more on this early period. even if a successfully-retained librarian stays at a library they dislike, the librarian likely has formed an attitude that decreases workplace satisfaction and inhibits successful performance.2 some studies that focus on worker attitude exist, though the exact number of academic librarians who quit their job after being hired is unknown. in 2001 the association of college and research libraries (acrl) formed the ad hoc task force on recruitment and retention issues to address what they termed a “top issue” in the field. the task force surveyed librarians and asked how long one worked in the field, what type of college library they worked for, what their reason for leaving was, and so forth. but, despite the task force’s effort, individuals who have left the field infrequently want to participate in the research. what data the task force collected tellingly showed that 44.4% of librarians who left academic libraries entirely to go into other fields stated that work environment was the reason for their departure; another 27.8% cited salary, and 16.7% cited respect for the field from others. luzius and ard note that a poor workplace environment ultimately contributes to a lack of ability to attract new and interesting people to librarianship.3 albanese’s survey about workplace satisfaction never directly asked a question about “workplace environment,” instead opting to bank on external reasons; but when albanese asked “which attributes contribute most to success?” his survey participants responded with a resounding 68% for interpersonal skills, and only 2% for budget.4 more specifically, scholarship on retaining librarians of underrepresented communities echoes the two sentiments that studies reveal: positive workplace culture and climate keeps happy and productive employees, and underrepresented groups face more varied issues related to workplace culture. andrade writes that the problem typically begins after potential librarians decide to enter library school, even before they enter the job market. few library schools have any classes related to diversity training, what it means to be culturally competent, or similar issues that may affect the workplace environments of new librarians.5 this deficit results in a group of people on the job market who are untrained in several significant elements of workplace professionalism. to illustrate this point, surveys such as the climatequal at the university of arizona cited by andrade6 and williams ii7 indicate that low scores in “interpersonal justice and work unit conflict” prove the main reason for workplace unhappiness, and that the highest amount of unhappiness in these categories came from “individuals who did not associate themselves with the dominate culture.”8 similarly, love writes that library “employees in the workforce who are not part of the dominant culture have struggled with subtle demands to ‘adapt and fit in,’”9 rather than with appreciation of who they are. this is a huge factor in retention because an employee who feels unwelcome can create an adversarial environment with the administration, often leading to a less productive employee who wants to leave rather than to increased performance. as love says, “change has come at such an alarming pace to every aspect of work life except diversity”10; the sentiment in this quote reflects the amount of talk in the academic library field about changes in technology, roles, and instruction, and the minimal talk about adaptation to increased diversity of staff within the academic library workplace. love cites a 1994 study that lists internal barriers to job satisfaction in a workplace as “negative attitudes, discrimination, prejudice, stereotyping, racism, and bias,”11 all of which fall within workplace climate descriptions similar to those used in andrade’s study. alire describes how a lack of leadership possibilities also leads to low retention of ethnic and racial minority employees. the secondary benefit of having underrepresented populations in leadership positions is that not only is the individual growing their career, but they are more likely to retain the minority employees under them and aid in recruitment by taking on “the additional responsibility of identifying and developing emerging minority leaders.”12 similarly, neely and peterson write that retaining librarians of color should involve shadowing existing leaders and nomination for awards that will assist in promotion, which does not currently occur enough.13 damasco and hodges echo the sentiment that workplace culture is the largest problem facing, specifically, librarians of color. they cite a study from the association of research libraries (arl) that concluded that african-american academic librarians who reported being unsatisfied with their jobs mentioned “feelings of isolation, [inadequate] library diversity programs, working conditions, [lack of] support from peers”14 and other issues of that nature. their survey-takers complained that isolation at work led to tokenism, including frequent instances of being asked to lead diversity programing, or being given titles such as “diversity specialist,” though these types of involvement were not acceptable contributions for the tenure and promotion process. they also reported general discouragement from peers, hostility, and disparate expectations of people of different cultures in their workplace. some scholars, such as simmons-welburn15 and majekodunmi,16 suggest dialogue groups, staff trainings, and open forums to discuss issues such as these in the workplace. how microaggressions ruin a positive workplace culture the singular study on microaggressions and workplace culture is alabi’s 2015 survey about the occurrence of racial microaggressions in the academic library workplace and the consequences of these actions.17 the survey was circulated via several listservs in 2011 and completed by 139 participants of various races and ethnicities.18 the results suggest that frequent microinsults, microinvalidations, and other forms of microaggressions often left people of color in the academic library workplace feeling isolated and finding their work environment to be hostile. even survey participants who did not identify as minorities expressed surprise at some of the comments made by co-workers. in “‘this actually happened’: an analysis of librarians’ responses to a survey about racial microaggressions,” alabi includes comments from the survey that illustrate how some participants felt that current efforts toward retention and recruitment were insincere. alabi writes, “eight comments focused on issues related to recruitment and retention. one non-minority respondent said, ‘i think there needs to be a bigger push for minorities to enter library school and encourage librarianship as a career,’” and another wrote, “in my experience, attempts at ‘increasing diversity’ are still quite superficial.’”19 more poignantly, a participant stated, “‘racism is a major issue in libraries. we’ve closed it off as a viable career path because it relies on shared cultural values and access to cultural and material capital.’”20 and finally, one participant commented that, “’the reason that many african american and latino librarians leave this profession is because of the constant lack of emotional intelligence that is needed in the work place today […]. academic libraries are very poor examples of pushing forth diversity candidates for positions at the administrative level for minorities’”21 (capitalization in original). though these statements are made in regard to race, they also speak to diversity in general in the academic library field, and can be used to point to some universal issues. because no survey on lgbtq microaggressions has been done in librarianship, this survey can apply, as can additional research from other fields. this research reveals that microaggressions are the route through which academic librarians who live outside of the dominant culture realize they are not welcome in the profession, despite the liberal mask the profession wears. microaggressions are a particular type of discrimination; they are different from outright violence, and they fall within subtle or accidental statements or behaviors that reveal one’s heterosexist attitudes. nadal, whitman, davis, erazo, and davidoff write: microaggressions are behaviors and statements, unconscious or unintentional, that communicate hostile or derogatory messages, particularly to members of targeted social groups… because people in contemporary times do not engage in overtly hostile or consciously biased behavior toward marginalized groups, some people believe they neither hold biases against other groups nor participate in discriminatory behavior; in fact, many individuals may report that discrimination no longer exists.22 or as platt and alexandra explained, microaggressive “discriminations stem from systemic, deeply ingrained social justice problems such as privilege, inequities in power, stereotyping, and societal biases.”23 lgbtq microaggressions fall within many categories, but can be characterized by common themes. nadal, whitman, davis, erazo, and davidoff write that a microinsult is something such as, “you’re too pretty to be a lesbian.”24 invalidating reactions to daily experiences (such as suggesting someone is overreacting); applying dominant social norms to all relationships; erotizing people based on their identity; and making assumptions of sexual pathology also constitute forms of microaggressions toward lgbtq-identified individuals. a difficult and ill-recognized microaggression can also be the denial or defensiveness of the aggressor. another difficult aspect of studying lgbtq microaggression is the lack of scholarly sources in any field on this topic—lgbtq-focused research has lagged behind other research. seventy-three articles with key topics related to “race” and “microaggressions” show up in databases, but only five articles show up related to “transgender” and “microaggressions.”25 from the few studies conducted on academic campuses, we can extrapolate some information about academic libraries. nadal, et al., write that when college students who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer were surveyed, 96% reported experiencing interpersonal microaggressions and 98% reported experiencing environmental microaggressions, while only 37% reported blatant discrimination due to sexual orientation.26 relatedly, tetreault, fette, medlinger, and hope write that in a survey conducted about perceptions of the lgbtq climate on campuses, lgbtq-identified people viewed environments free of overt heterosexism positively because of a lack of violence and lack of attention generally to lgbtq issues.27 the standard for a positive environment consisted of a lack of negatives rather than of blatant cultural inclusiveness, such as expecting a campus to provide resources and actually welcome lgbtq for who they are. research also suggests that microaggressions have a more dangerous impact on mental wellbeing than overt discrimination. nadal, et al., write, “results further indicated that microaggressions were predictors of most self-acceptance and distress, while blatant discrimination did not significantly relate to either variable.”28 this particularly matters for the workplace because, as buddel notes, lgbtq-identified people come into a workplace with pre-existing stress: before even meeting new coworkers lgbtq-identified people must deal with “identity management” and “sexuality disclosure.” an employee entering a new workplace does not know what the consequences of coming out or revealing certain preferences may be. buddel writes that degges-white and shoffner’s 2002 theory of workplace adjustment describes four facts that people negotiate as they transition into the workplace: 1. satisfaction describes the ability to engage meaningfully with coworkers; 2. person-environment correspondence refers to the degree of congruence between the person and the work environment; 3. reinforcement value refers to the extent that the workplace fulfills a psychological need; 4. ability refers to the degree of skill and personal trait congruence with the workplace.29 all of these categories, each necessary for a person to adjust to a new workplace, are at risk if (1) there are no other openly lgbtq people; (2) there are no lgbtq people in leadership; (3) microaggressions are present in the workplace; or (4) the workplace neither attempts to adapt to the new person, nor makes an effort to ease the new person’s adjustment. lis scholarship and anti-feminist rhetoric unlike much of the research already discussed, nectoux’s book of personal narratives written by lgbtq-identified librarians in 2011, titled workplace issues for lgbtq librarians, is less empirical and more personal, and it provides a great diversity of different identities and workplace issues to consider. one such anecdote comes from phillips, who shares that the reason he pursued academic librarianship was because the university he attended had accepted a non-discrimination policy that included sexual orientation (but not gender identity), so he decided that he could pursue academic librarianship as a field, as it seemed universities were growing in this way.30 but he cites having to work with only straight colleagues on lgbtq-related scholarship and being forced to use his social media accounts in his professional life (thus automatically outing him), as ways his job lacked sexual-identity-related issues awareness. ciszek writes from the perspective of a library administrator who remains closeted, fearing being out will hinder advancement in his field. (phillips, 86.)) he cites that a supportive network, both in one’s individual library and nationally, is the most important element to being out at work.31 roberto discusses the difficulties in transitioning (female-to-male in this case) at work in a library. he describes the double life lived between different subsets of librarians, and he worried that at conferences their two separate groups would interact. he describes the awkwardness of being on the job market while transitioning, but notes that lgbtq allies at his particular library helped him get and keep his job.32 in these cases and others, interpersonal relationships were the crux for success in the workplace. these anecdotes also provide evidence that many academic library environments provide neither a comfortable nor a supportive workplace for many lgbtq-identified people. but what is of greater interest to me is that lis scholarship that engages with notions of gender shows hostility and backward thinking by continually arguing that the field itself suffers from being associated with that which is feminine and that which is homosexual, and that this association renders the field illegitimate. this scholarship often focuses on the male librarian stereotype and the embarrassment and struggles to which male librarians are subjected for working in a “female” profession. this literature does not discuss gender equality or recruiting more diverse people into the workforce—it is heterosexist writing concerned only that people might mistake straight men for gay men (feminine ones at that), and a repeat of the antiquated idea that what is feminine is naive and shameful. this literature is written not as a critique of equating femininity and homosexuality with negativity, but rather with the expressed intention of proving that the field is not feminine, and not homosexual. further, it is written by and for librarians, with little input from or attention to cultural forces outside of the field. as dickinson writes, “the possibility remains that such stereotypes never really found strong footing in the public consciousness,” and that “the image of the effeminate or gay male reference librarian was more entrenched within the library profession itself than it was outside of it.”33 the study referenced by dickinson, james carmichael, jr.’s “the male librarian and the feminine image: a survey of the stereotype, status and gender perceptions,” sought to disprove that men only wanted administrative positions and to prove that men, in fact, shared with women the “negative (feminine) stereotype of the profession while being immune from it, thus profiting from its existence in terms of preferential treatment and consideration because they were men.”34 he also sought to prove that male librarians suffered from “low self-esteem”35 on account of their public image. in gathering the results, he notes that “the most prevalent stereotype is ‘effeminate (probably gay)’”36 and commenters wrote various statements about how they were presumed gay until proven straight (which is the same scenario as being assumed straight until coming out as gay, which affects gay people in every facet of life). not surprisingly, ten percent more of the gay-identified respondents showed awareness of the feminine stereotype than did straight respondents.37 when this study was repeated (with a smaller sample size) by piper and collamer (2001), they concluded, “the greatest puzzlement was that respondents acknowledged that there were more women in the field than men, but did not consider librarianship a women’s profession… male librarians are currently quite content with their role, with respect to gender issues, in the library world.”38 even given such clear research results, more scholarship continues to be published that frets over the supposed abuse and shame men face in librarianship. hickey’s (2006) study focused on how male librarians fare working in a “non-traditional work environment,” or rather, in a work environment where there are more women than men. his study participants reported feelings of social isolation,39 criticism for not understanding how to organize a teatime,40 and anxiety in dealing with issues related to personal identity formation. a major flaw with his study is that the anecdotes relate common workplace issues (e.g., a supervisor picking favorites) more than anything directly related to gender issues. there are many other examples of questionable research and assertions. blackburn’s 2015 “gender stereotypes male librarians face today” worries over how heterosexual male librarians must feel hurt and thus avoid the lis profession because they risk being thought of as feminine or gay. blackburn writes, “men in nontraditional professions such as nursing and librarianship have become targets for stereotyping, creating a vicious cycle. men assume the stereotypes are valid, they avoid taking the jobs, and the profession continues to see fewer males entering the workforce, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of low employment rates.”41 her logic suggests that what is distinctly feminine is by nature negative, and should be taken out of the profession so that men who are uncomfortable with that which could be viewed as feminine or homosexual will join the profession. critical discussions of gendered aspects of the field would do better to critique the systems that associate what is feminine and homosexual with what is unlearned, illegitimate, and shameful. we should avoid becoming more “masculine” in order to solve this issue, but more aware and culturally competent, instead. practical methods for improvement one major difference between tackling recruitment issues for librarians (and potential librarians) who identify as lgbtq, and for librarians of color, is that there are no identity-based initiatives at either the individual library level or the national lis field level for lgbtq-identified people, as there are for people of color. there are programs related to librarianship, like the martin duberman visiting fellowship at new york public library, which funds a scholar using the lgbtq sources in their archive, or the american library association’s (ala) gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender round table, which discusses information needs and serving patrons who identify as lgbtq, but neither is specifically about librarians themselves. the lis field has taken commendable steps that result in people of color feeling more welcome in library school and in entry-level positions after graduation. according to haipeng42 and acree, epps, gilmore, and henriques,43 part of the commitment to recruiting new graduate librarians in underrepresented populations into an academic library can involve offering them something that makes them feel wanted for who they are. many schools have residency programs for ethnic minority librarians, such as cornell university, iowa state university, university of michigan, ohio state university, and yale university, among others.44 these programs are good for recruitment because they offer librarians a chance to develop collections based on their interests, participate in workshops that may increase retention, and earn fellowships with high-quality benefits. the librarians already employed by these universities also have the opportunity to show their support for this type of recruitment and learn from these newly-recruited students. the ala’s spectrum initiative, which provides financial aid to students of color for three years and includes annual reports from the student, participation in a longitudinal study, and support to attend the spectrum institute, is described as the largest diversity initiative in the field.45 this type of opportunity has significant value because it not only helps fund a student’s education, but it also supports research related to the needs and satisfaction levels of the award-winners. symbolically, it serves as an important welcome sign to people of color interested in librarianship. similar residencies for lgbtq-identified librarians would be an excellent addition to the field. these residencies would give these librarians an opportunity to take leadership roles, meet other librarians like themselves, and have special professional accolades when entering the job market. scholarships such as the spectrum initiative opportunities would give lgbtq-identified people encouragement to be out and pursue the field. such scholarships could follow the spectrum initiative structure to ensure ongoing retention in jobs and in the field as a whole. importantly, unlike people with disabilities, people of racial minorities, members of religious groups, those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer –and many others identities– are not protected classes of people by the united states government, though some of these categories are protected to some level in some states, counties, or cities.46 trying to find employment where one feels comfortable enough to come out is a precarious position. people cannot choose to come out or stay closeted on their own terms, as with transgender people who have changed their name or sex on their birth certificate, a fact that will be involuntarily revealed if a background check is done by the employer. further, lgbtq-identified people often have to break from their family of origin if that family does not support them, so a program such as the spectrum initiative would provide much-needed financial aid and emotional support for things like education and career training, as well as a sense of security within the field. another tactic that could be employed at the individual library level is producing academic library job advertisements written to recruit lgbtq-identified librarians (as williams, ii argues doing for people of color47) by broadening the job descriptions to include enticements that might attract people outside the dominant culture. he writes, “the hiring opportunity should be looked upon as a means to move the library to the next level of excellence by creating a post that is broad in scope, flexible,”48 and allows for someone from an unconventional background to feel empowered to apply. he writes that, “when creative use of the vacancy becomes the norm in academic library recruitment programs, it establishes another norm that opportunities in our library are no longer static, but dynamic.”49 this strategy would apply to all populations outside of the dominant culture. if the workplace is truly inclusive, signals or direct statements could be placed in the job advertisement to specifically recruit underrepresented applicants and alleviate the worry that they may end up in a hostile environment. also on the individual library level, as simmons-welburn50 and majekodunmi51 suggest, interpersonal issues within the workplace can be improved through understanding. they argue for communication and education. dialogue groups and forums about issues affecting minorities can be useful at staff trainings, though existing research only extends to visible minorities. this type of initiative can also be extended to lis graduate programs. since nearly all programs require a core class introducing students to the field of librarianship, that class could include substantial discussions of cultural competency, workplace ethics and attitudes, and the field’s commitment to inclusive behaviors. library scholarship and training emphasizes accepting patrons who come to the reference desk as they are, on not judging their questions, and on including a variety of interests in the collection; yet simultaneously the field fails to foster these same attitudes among colleagues who work together at least 40 hours a week. in terms of future scholarship, more quantitative studies need to be conducted on how many people in libraries identify as lgbtq; how many people are out in the workplace; and what types of workplace behaviors and attitudes make lgbtq-identified librarians and staff feel as if they are not included, or make them feel fearful, or hated. identifying what microaggressions happen in academic libraries and general academic workplaces is another area of necessary research, especially since academic communities so often see themselves on the outside of—or beyond—issues related to discrimination. because of the accidental nature of microaggressions, they are very likely to happen in the academic workplace, as the scholarship has proved. finally, lis scholarship must immediately move away from publishing about the supposed shame of working in a profession associated with the feminine and the homosexual (an association largely managed and perpetuated by librarians themselves). the topic shows antiquated, sexist, self-hating, and self-perpetuating thinking; the notion that a male librarian must be worried about being perceived as homosexual is an unacceptable, contemptuous sneer toward what it is and what it means to be homosexual. the implication is, in no uncertain terms, that being feminine (or being a woman) or being homosexual is something about which to feel bad and something from which to distance oneself. as this line of scholarship stands now, if left uncorrected, the real enemy of recruitment and retention of lgbtq-identified librarians will be the attitudes embedded in the field itself. conclusion in addition to the practical steps we can take to recruit lgbtq-identified people into the lis field, we must also retain them and keep them satisfied, or even thrilled, with the field that they have chosen. in order to accomplish this goal, we must become critics of more than our collections, archives, and budgets, but also critics of our daily behavior and contributions to scholarship. we must be mindful of the goals of feminism when we are selecting the language to use when we describe the gendered aspects of the field, and the language and behavior we use around our colleagues or would-be colleagues. we must be mindful of the disparity of opportunities and safety among different types of people when we suggest new scholarships, initiate new workshops, and assist in decisions about whom to promote. these shifts are not the type that are made by showing allegiance to a particular activist group or participating in a single training; these shifts take place every day in the mundane and quotidian aspects of our work. i am grateful to reviewers amy koester and taryn marks, and to publishing editor ian beilin, for their time and feedback. they made huge improvements to my work, thank goodness. references acree, eric kofi, sharon k. eppes, yolanda gilmore, and charmaine henriques. “using professional development as a retention tool for underrepresented academic librarians.” journal of library administration 31, no. 1-2 (2008): 45-61. alabi, jaena. “’this actually happened: an analysis of librarians’ responses to a survey about racial microaggressions.” journal of library administration 55, no. 3 (2015): 179-191. alabi, jaena. “racial microaggressions in academic libraries: results of a survey of minority and non-minority librarians.” the journal of academic librarianship 41, no. 1 (2015): 47-53. albanese, andrew richard. “take this job and love it.” library journal 133, no. 2 (2008): 36-39. alire, camila a. “diversity and leadership: the color of leadership.” journal of library administration 32, no. 4 (2001): 99-114. andrade, ricardo and alexandra rivera. “developing a diversity-competent workforce: the ua libraries’ experience.” journal of library administration 51, no. 7-8 (2011): 692-727. blackburn, heather. “gender stereotypes male librarians face today” library worklife: hr e-news for today’s leaders. (2015). http://alaapa.org/newsletter/2015/09/08/genderstereotypes-male-librarians-face-today/ blobaum, paul. “gay librarians on the tenure track: following the yellow brick road?” in workplace issues for lgbtq librarians, edited by tracy marie nectoux, 63-67. duluth: library juice press, 2011. buddel, neil. “queering the workplace.” journal of gay and lesbian social services 23, no. 1 (2011): 131-146. carmichael, james v. “the male librarian and the feminine image: a survey of stereotype, status, and gender perceptions.” library and information science research 14 (1992): 411-446. ciszek, matthew. “managing outside the closet: on being an openly gay library administrator,” in workplace issues for lgbtq librarians, ed. tracy marie nectoux, 83-90. duluth: library juice press, 2011. carmichael, james v. “the gay librarian: a comparative analysis of attitudes toward professional gender issues.” journal of homosexuality 30, no. 2 (1996): 11-57. creth, sheila d. “academic library leadership: meeting the reality of the twenty-first century,” in human resource management in today’s academic library: meeting challenges and creating opportunities, edited by janice simmons-welburn and beth mcneil, 99-116. westport: libraries unlimited, 2004. cook, james c. “gay and lesbian librarians and the ‘need’ for gltb library organizations.” journal of information ethics, fall (2005): 32-49. damasco, ione t. and dracine hodges. “tenure and promotion experiences of academic librarians of color.” college and research libraries 73, no. 3 (2012) 279-301. dickinson, thad e. “looking at the male librarians stereotype.” the reference librarian 37, no. 78 (2003): 97-110. farkas, meredith gorran, lisa janicke hinchliffe, and amy harris houk. “bridges and barriers: factors influencing a culture of assessment in academic librarians.” college and research libraries 76, no. 2 (2015): 150-169. hall, liz walkley. “changing the workplace culture at flinders university library: from pragmatism to professional reflection.” australian academic and research libraries 46, no. 1 (2014): 29-38. hastings, samantha kelly. “if diversity is a natural state, why don’t our libraries mirror the populations they serve?” the library quarterly: information, community, policy 85, no. 2 (2015): 133-138. haipeng, li. “diversity in the library: what could happen at the institutional level.” journal of library administration 27, no. 1-2 (1999): 145-156. hickey, andrew. “cataloging men: charting the male librarian’s experience through the perceptions and position of men in libraries.” journal of academic librarianship 32, no. 3 (2006): 286-295. irshad, muhammad. “factors affecting employee retention: evidence from literature review.” abasyn journal of social sciences 4, no. 1 (2011): 84-102. jones, dorothy e. “’i’d like you to meet our new librarian’: the initiation and integration of the newly appointed librarian.” the journal of academic librarianship 14, no. 4 (1988): 221-224. kawasaki, jodee l. “retention-after hiring then what?” science and technology libraries 27, no. 1-2 (2006): 225-240. “know your rights: transgender people and the law.” american civil liberties union. (2016). https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/transgender-people-and-law love, johnnieque b. “the assessment of diversity initiatives in academic libraries.” journal of library administration 33, no. 1-2 (2001): 73-103. luzius, jeff and allyson ard. “leaving the academic library.” journal of academic librarianship 32, no. 6 (2006): 593-598. majekodunmi, norda. “diversity in libraries: the case for the visible minority librarians of canada (vimloc network).” canadian library association 1, no. 59 (2013): 31-32. martin, judith n and thomas k. nakayama. “reconsidering intercultural competence in the workplace: a dialectical approach. language and intercultural communication 15, no. 1 (2015): 13-28. millet, michelle s. “is this the ninth circle of hell?” library journal 130, no. 5: 54. nadal, kevin l., chassitty n. whitman, linsey s. davis, tanya erazo, and kristen c. davidoff. “microaggressions toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and genderqueer people: a review of literature.” the journal of sex research 53, no. 4-5 (2016): 488-508. neely, teresa y. “diversity initiatives and programs.” journal of library administration 27, no. 8 (1999): 123-144. neely, teresa y., and lorna peterson. “achieving racial and ethnic diversity among academic and research librarians: the recruitment, retention, and advancement of librarians of color, a white paper.” college and research libraries 68, no. 9 (2007): 562-565. phillips, jason d. “it’s okay to be gay: a librarian’s journey to acceptance and activism,” in workplace issues for lgbtq librarians, edited by tracy marie nectoux, 33-47. duluth: library juice press, 2011. piper, paul s and barbara e. collamer. “male librarians: men in a feminized profession.” the journal of academic librarianship 27, no. 5 (2001): 406-411. platt, lisa f. and alexandra l. lenzen. “sexual orientation microaggressions and the experience of sexual minorities.” journal of homosexuality 60, no. 7 (2013): 1011-1034. ridinger, robert b. “out lines: an lgbt career in perspective.” in workplace issues for lgbtq librarians, edited by tracy marie nectoux, 131-130. duluth: library juice press, 2011. robert, k. r. “pronoun police: a guide to transitioning at your local library,” in workplace issues for lgbtq librarians, edited by tracy marie nectoux, 121-127. duluth: library juice press, 2011. simmons-welburn, janice. “creating and sustaining a diverse workplace,” in human resource management in today’s academic library: meeting challenges and creating opportunities, edited by janice simmons-welburn and beth mcneil, 71-81. westport: libraries unlimited, 2004. simmons-welburn, janice. “diversity dialogue groups.” journal of library administration 27, no. 1-2 (1999): 111-121. stambaugh, laine. “recruitment and selection in academic libraries,” in human resources management in today’s academic library: meeting challenges and creating opportunities, edited by janice simmons-welburn and beth mcneil, 27-36. westport: libraries unlimited, 2004. tompson, sara r. “competencies required!” science & technology libraries 27, no. 1-2 (2006): 241-258. thompson, w. on being as if, imagination and gay librarianship. in workplace issues for lgbtq librarians, edited by tracy marie nectoux, 255-266. duluth, mn: library juice press, 2011 tetreault, patricia a., ryan fette , peter c. meidlinger, and debra hope. “perceptions of campus climate by sexual minorities.” journal of homosexuality 60, no. 7 (2013): 947-964. williams ii, james f. “managing diversity.” journal of library administration 27, no. 1-2 (1999): 27-48. dorothy e. jones, “’i’d like you to meet our new librarian’: the initiation and integration of the newly appointed librarian.” the journal of academic librarianship 14, no. 4 (1988): 221-224. [↩] jodee l. kawasaki, “retention-after hiring then what?” science and technology libraries 27, no. 1-2 (2006): 225-240. [↩] jeff luzius and allyson ard, “leaving the academic library.” journal of academic librarianship 32, no. 6 (2006): 593-598 [↩] andrew richard albanese, “take this job and love it.” library journal 133, no. 2 (2008): 36-39. [↩] ricardo andrade and alexandra rivera, “developing a diversity-competent workforce: the ua libraries’ experience.” journal of library administration 51, no. 7-8 (2011): 693-694. [↩] andrade and rivera, 692-727. [↩] james f. williams ii, “managing diversity.” journal of library administration 27, no. 1-2 (1999): 27-48. [↩] andrade and rivera, 696. [↩] johnnieque b. love, “the assessment of diversity initiatives in academic libraries.” journal of library administration 33, no. 1-2 (2001): 77. [↩] love, 78. [↩] love, 83. [↩] camila a. alire, “diversity and leadership: the color of leadership.” journal of library administration 32, no. 4 (2001): 98. [↩] teresa y. neely and lorna peterson, “achieving racial and ethnic diversity among academic and research librarians: the recruitment, retention, and advancement of librarians of color, a white paper.” college and research libraries 68, no. 9 (2007): 562-565. [↩] ione t. damasco and dracine hodges, “tenure and promotion experiences of academic librarians of color.” college and research libraries 73, no. 3 (2012): 281. [↩] janice simmons-welburn,. “diversity dialogue groups.” journal of library administration 27, no. 1-2 (1999): 111-121. [↩] norda majekodunmi, “diversity in libraries: the case for the visible minority librarians of canada (vimloc network).” canadian library association 1, no. 59 (2013): 31-32. [↩] jaena alabi. “racial microaggressions in academic libraries: results of a survey of minority and non-minority librarians.” the journal of academic librarianship 41, no. 1 (2015): 47-53. [↩] jaena alabi, “’this actually happened: an analysis of librarians’ responses to a survey about racial microaggressions.” journal of library administration 55, no. 3 (2015): 182-184. [↩] alabi, 187. [↩] alabi, 187. [↩] alabi, 187. [↩] kevin l. nadal, chassitty n. whitman, linsey s. davis, tanya erazo, and kristen c. davidoff,“microaggressions toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and genderqueer people: a review of literature.” the journal of sex research 53, no. 4-5 (2016): 488. [↩] lisa platt and alexandrea lenzen, “sexual orientation microaggressions and the experience of sexual minorities.” journal of homosexuality 60, no. 7 (2013): 1012. [↩] kevin l. nadal, chassitty n. whitman, linsey s. davis, tanya erazo, and kristen c. davidoff, 490. [↩] kevin l. nadal, chassitty n. whitman, linsey s. davis, tanya erazo, and kristen c. davidoff, 492. [↩] nadal, whitman, davis, erazo, and davidoff, 494. [↩] patricia a. tetreault, ryan fette, peter c. meidlinger, and debra hope. “perceptions of campus climate by sexual minorities.” journal of homosexuality 60, no. 7 (2013): 950. [↩] nadal, whitman, davis, erazo, and davidoff, 494. [↩] neil buddell, “queering the workplace.” journal of gay and lesbian social services 23, no. 1 (2011): 139. [↩] joseph phillips, “it’s okay to be gay: a librarian’s journey to acceptance an activism,” in workplace issues for lgbtq librarians, ed. tracy marie nectoux. (duluth: library juice press, 2011), 38. [↩] phillips, 87. [↩] k.r. roberto, “pronoun police: a guide to transitioning at your local library,” in workplace issues for lgbtq librarians, ed. tracy marie nectoux. (duluth: library juice press, 2011), 121-127. [↩] thad e. dickinson, “looking at the male librarians stereotype.” the reference librarian 37, no. 78 (2003): 106. [↩] james v. carmichael, “the male librarian and the feminine image: a survey of stereotype, status, and gender perceptions.” library and information science research 14 (1992): 416. [↩] carmichael, 417. [↩] carmichael, 422. [↩] carmichael, 423. [↩] paul s. piper and barbara e. collamer, “male librarians: men in a feminized profession.” the journal of academic librarianship 27, no. 5 (2001): 410. [↩] andrew hickey, “cataloging men: charting the male librarian’s experience through the perceptions and position of men in libraries.” journal of academic librarianship 32, no. 3 (2006): 290. [↩] hickey, 291. [↩] heather blackburn, “gender stereotypes male librarians face today” library worklife: hr e-news for today’s leaders. (2015). http://alaapa.org/newsletter/2015/09/08/genderstereotypes-male-librarians-face-today/ [↩] li haipeng, “diversity in the library: what could happen at the institutional level.” journal of library administration 27, no. 1-2 (1999): 145-156. [↩] eric acree, sharon k. epps, yolanda gilmore, and charmaine henriques. “using professional development as a retention tool for underrepresented academic librarians.” journal of library administration 31, no. 1-2 (2008): 45-61. [↩] haipeng, 146. [↩] teresa y. nealy, “diversity initiatives and programs.” journal of library administration 27, no. 8 (1999): 125. [↩] “know your rights: transgender people and the law.” american civil liberties union. (2016). https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/transgender-people-and-law [↩] james f. williams ii, “managing diversity.” journal of library administration 27, no. 1-2 (1999): 27-48. [↩] williams ii, 44. [↩] williams ii, 44. [↩] janice simmons-welburn, “diversity dialogue groups.” journal of library administration 27, no. 1-2 (1999): 111-121. [↩] norda majekodunmi, “diversity in libraries: the case for the visible minority librarians of canada (vimloc network).” canadian library association 1, no. 59 (2013): 31-32. [↩] nothing tweetable: a conversation or how to “librarian” at the end of times spring reading 1 response pingback : lgbtqia scholarship roundup for april 12, 2017 – glbt news this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a radical publishing collective: the journal of radical librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 25 mar simon barron /2 comments a radical publishing collective: the journal of radical librarianship photo by flickr user, julian stallbrass, licensed under cc by 2.0. image has been cropped. in brief: the journal of radical librarianship is a new open-access journal publishing scholarly work in the field of radical librarianship. the focus on critical approaches to librarianship and anti-marketisation of information is reflected not only in our subject matter but in our publishing model, our licensing model, and our organisational practices. we hope to foster open and engaging discussions about radical approaches to librarianship and information studies. by simon barron there’s a growing amount of discussion in the uk about ‘radical librarianship’: a concept that covers a range of ideas about political engagement in librarianship and information studies. 2015 sees the launch of the journal of radical librarianship: a new publication attempting to capture some of that discussion and disseminate it to a wider audience in an open and critically rigorous way. fundamentally we want to promote discussion about the political nature of librarianship and to discuss radical alternatives to current practices and prevailing thinking in the profession. a radical approach broadly speaking, ‘radical librarianship’ could be said to be a focus on the ethical roots of librarianship. some of these ethical considerations are articulated by authors like froehlich1 and include respect for the individual and individual freedom, social responsibility, and organisational obligations. central to radical librarianship’s ethics is presenting an alternative to the prevalent trend towards marketisation of libraries. over the past few decades, libraries have shifted towards a market-oriented approach: one that emphasises marketised solutions to service provision (that is, solutions used in the private-sector free market environment). for example, clark and preater (2014) point to the use of market-oriented language in professional discourse: “as a profession we have broadly accepted the idea of members or users as “customers” or “consumers”, and accepted the need to adopt market strategies to meet their needs… this is so accepted that a rejection of this approach, for example rejecting the label of “customer”, has become seen to be old-fashioned and outdated.”2 lis ‘thought leaders’ and writers tell libraries to market themselves, to adopt the practices of successful retail chains. social media pundits tell librarians to think about their ‘personal brand’ and to manage their online presence as if it were a social marketing campaign. an independent library report for england published in december 2014 recommended to the uk government that libraries “can only be saved if they become more like coffee shops with wi-fi, sofas and hot drinks”3. the recommendation that libraries adopt private sector service practices like this is present in a lot of professional discourse in librarianship and has been aptly chronicled in recent years by public libraries news and informed. this trend must be seen within the context of the prevailing social framework of neoliberalism. neoliberalism can be defined as the belief “that markets are inherently efficient and that the state and public sector have no essential role to play in economic development apart from facilitating the expansion, intensification and primacy of market relations.”4 it is an emphasis on laissez-faire capitalism and the free market and the theory was a formative tenet in the economic policies of conservative prime minister margaret thatcher in the uk and republican president ronald reagan in the usa during the 1980s5. as organisations – and governments – across society have adopted neoliberal practices, libraries have followed unquestioningly. the move towards a market-oriented approach has been framed in lis professional discourse as not just a progressive approach but as necessary to the survival of libraries. following the trend in professional literature, librarians at management level have shaped their library’s practices to fit the neoliberal theory. the prevailing (and ‘progressive’) view implicitly “advocates a belief there is a market relationship between the service and the user, with barriers placed between the two, and reduces the relationship between libraries and users to a transactional one with the library supplying information – viewed as a commodity in a market setting.”6 libraries have been encouraged to think of their objectivity as political neutrality and librarians have been discouraged from thinking about the political implications of their work. radical librarianship is an alternative position. it acknowledges that libraries are and always have been inherently political7 rather than – as has been the accepted view – politically and ideologically neutral8. it argues that the ethical roots of librarianship are openness, free access to information, and a strong community spirit – principles we apply differently to the neoliberal appropriations of those terms – and that practice in librarianship should be true to these roots. it attempts to present a real alternative to the current orthodoxy in library discourse: a discourse that sits within a wider dominant ideology of capitalism. photo by flickr user, library_mistress, licensed under cc by-nc-nd 2.0. in the uk, this has manifested in the radical librarians collective, a loose affiliation of like-minded library and information workers who come together to challenge the marketisation of libraries and the prevailing neoliberal position. the radical librarians collective facilitates communication between like-minded people and hosts non-hierarchical events for discussion and social interaction. at a radical librarians collective meeting in london, uk, in may 2014, a group raised the idea of a publication space for writing on the subject of radical librarianship. publishing work on radical librarianship in the form of an academic journal would be a way to bring theory and practice together. “at this stage, the most significant victory for the radical alternative is to open dialogue about the alternatives. without dialogue, without alternatives being voiced and discussed, there is no hope for a radical alternative.”9 the journal of radical librarianship will facilitate that dialogue. a radical journal the journal of radical librarianship is a new open-access journal publishing a combination of peer-reviewed scholarly writing and non-peer-reviewed commentary and reviews. we’re looking for work on the subject of radical librarianship and related areas. broadly speaking, anything that investigates the political aspects of librarianship or takes a critical theory-based approach to lis10. the journal is available at http://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/ and is open for submissions. information ethics are core to the journal’s mission and so the team have made a conscious effort to adopt practices in keeping with our shared moral code. we have set up the journal in such a way as to support the exchange and reworking of knowledge: we want to make work as freely available to the public as possible and we want to encourage ‘remixing’ of the ideas in our published work11. in practical terms, this commitment to an ethical publishing code has informed our hosting and our licensing. the journal is hosted on an open journal systems platform: an open-source piece of software from the public knowledge project designed to facilitate open-access publishing for journals and other publications. works in the journal of radical librarianship are published under creative commons licenses: either creative commons attribution 4.0 (cc by) or creative commons public domain (cc0) licenses. the cc0 license has allowed this article to reuse some of the content of the journal’s introductory editorial by stuart lawson12. although under cc0 others can freely use the content without attribution to the source, articles can also be referenced normally with attribution in citations. the focus on alternative approaches also informs our editorial team structure. the current team includes a range of people from different sectors with different experience. as we continue, we will have a fluid editorial team with a non-hierarchical structure easily receptive to change. from the beginning, we’ve focused on collective decision-making with no single person able to make big decisions without consulting the rest of the team. through use of online communication and collective decision-making software loomio, we’ve made decisions that reflect compromise and direct diplomacy and that don’t give authority to any individual team member. though centred in the uk, the journal of radical librarianship has an international scope and we encourage submissions from anywhere in the world. we hope to publish work in multiple languages as a recognition that, in order to share knowledge as widely as possible, we should not preference one language over others. submissions are accepted in any language. fundamentally the journal of radical librarianship aims to provide a publication space for alternatives in librarianship discourse. in the lis publishing landscape, there is little space for writing that challenges – or falls outside the assumptions of – society’s dominant neoliberal ideology. while much library publishing ignores the political context of library and information studies and presents libraries as politically neutral institutions, the journal of radical librarianship situates lis within the political framework of society and examines library issues from that perspective. the journal of radical librarianship is not unique in lis publishing: several other publications produce work with similar scope. we acknowledge their value and hope to work together as complementary rather than competitive publications. progressive librarian is a journal produced by the us-based progressive librarians guild; library juice press is a publisher of a number of books on “theoretical and practical issues in librarianship from a critical perspective”; collaborative librarianship is a journal publishing work on cooperative librarianship. in the library with the lead pipe can also be included in this list for its commitment to open-access and progressive publication practices and we’d like to thank them for giving us the space to write about the journal of radical librarianship. this is just a selection of english-language publications in similar areas and demonstrates that there is an ecosystem of library and information authors interested in exploring radical and critical approaches. we want to position the journal of radical librarianship as an attempt to enrich the existing community by applying innovative scholarly approaches to the field. photo by flickr user, ijclark, licensed under cc by 2.0. a radical community the journal of radical librarianship is open for submissions. if you’re unsure about an idea for submission, please email journal-editors@radicallibrarianship.org. for peer-reviewed articles, we are looking for pieces that take radical approaches to subjects such as: information literacy, politics and social justice, scholarly communication, equality and diversity, library history, management and professionalism, and political economy of information and knowledge. our editorial team is flexible and we will look at work outside those boundaries. we’re also looking for non-peer-reviewed pieces. we accept editorials and commentary on relevant political issues or library issues. we’re also accepting reviews of media relevant to the scope of the journal. if you’re interested in becoming a reviewer, please contact stuart@journal.radicallibrarianship.org. we want a discussion. only by working together and discussing subjects out in the open in a free and unrestrained way will we be able to bring about change. we want people to read the work we publish, think about it, argue about it, disagree with it, use it in their working lives. we want people to think critically and act radically. we want people to see the alternatives. we want to talk about libraries. we want to talk about politics. we want to talk about radical librarianship. acknowledgements thanks to the editorial team of the journal of radical librarianship for contributions and feedback on this article and for all the hard work involved in setting up and running the journal. thanks to stuart lawson for his sterling work on getting us up and running. we’d collectively like to thank the editorial team at in the library with the lead pipe for giving us the space to contribute this piece and for their excellent editorial input. froelich, t., 1998. ‘ethical considerations regarding library nonprofessionals: competing perspectives and values’, library trends, 46 (3), pp. 444-466 http://hdl.handle.net/2142/8168. [↩] clark, i., and preater, a., 2014. ‘creaters not consumers: visualising the radical alternative for libraries’, infoism, 2014-11-13 http://infoism.co.uk/2014/11/creators-not-consumers/ [↩] clark, n., 2014. ‘the great british library betrayal: closures bring national network to brink of ‘absolute disaster’, reveals official inquiry’, the independent, 2014-12-17 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/the-great-british-library-betrayal-closures-have-brought-national-network-to-brink-of-absolute-disaster-reveals-official-inquiry-9931965.html [↩] lowes, d. e., 2006. the anti-capitalist dictionary: movements, histories and motivations. london: zed books, p. 170. [↩] jones, c., et al., 2005. for business ethics. london: routledge, p. 100. [↩] clark and preater, op. cit. [↩] giroux, h. a., 2004. ‘neoliberalism and the demise of democracy: resurrecting hope in dark times’, dissident voice, 2004-08-07, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/aug04/giroux0807.htm [↩] lewis, a. m., 2008. introduction. in: alison m. lewis (ed.), questioning library neutrality: essays from progressive librarian. duluth, mi: library juice press, pp.1-4 http://eprints.rclis.org/15071/1/questioning_library_neutrality_intro.pdf [↩] clark and preater, op. cit. [↩] smith, l., 2014. ‘radical librarians collective (part three): critical theory’, lauren smith, 2014-05-16 https://laurensmith.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/radical-librarians-collective-part-three/ [↩] lessig, l., 2008. remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. london: bloomsbury academic, http://remix.lessig.org/ [↩] lawson, s., 2015. ‘editorial’, journal of radical librarianship, vol. 1, http://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1/5 [↩] advocacy, capitalism, copyright, ethics, information ethics, journal, librarianship, neoliberalism, open access, outreach, politics, radical librarianship, radicalism, writing #ditchthesurvey: expanding methodological diversity in lis research randall munroe’s what if as a test case for open access in popular culture 2 responses bob schroeder 2015–04–02 at 5:38 pm kudos! thank you all for creating this collaborative space for exploration of these radical ideas. at the critlib15 unconfernece in portland or last week ( http://critlib2015.weebly.com/ ) a few of us were talking about the need for such a venue – looks like you all had this discussion a year before us ;) best of luck! pingback : revolting librarians revisited | hls this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct bringing student voices into the university archives:
 a student organization documentation initiative case study – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 28 dec jenifer becker /1 comments bringing student voices into the university archives:
 a student organization documentation initiative case study in brief the undergraduate student experience has long been poorly and selectively captured by university archives. though student narratives have always been essential for creating a complete history of the university, current nationwide student protests have made these voices all the more important to capture. as students engage in activism, regarding issues relevant to student life and wellbeing such as title ix violations, tuition hikes, and racism on and off campus, college and university archives must go to additional lengths to document these activities. a student organization documentation initiative, focused on actively seeking and informing student donors, can assist in filling these archival gaps. in the six-step iterative process, archivists would begin with a survey of their collections and their community. contacted through various means of outreach, student organizations would engage in discussions focused on introductory archival instruction and donation interests and concerns. then, following formal and informal evaluation, archivists would reflect on and rework the initiative. in its initial iteration, the documentation initiative has successfully solicited donations from 21% of the student organizations at washington state university vancouver. this article reflects on the project’s design, successes, and failures in its first year. additionally, it looks forward to the iterations to come. by jenifer becker introduction student narratives have long been an underrepresented voice within college and university archives. the last couple of decades have seen a rise in archival projects and scholarship geared towards bringing these voices in. despite the recent advocacy by archivists, the erasure of the student narrative continues to be an issue. the need for increased advocacy, outreach, and donor solicitation has become all the more apparent as students have come forward to demand change following tuition hikes, title ix violations regarding sexual assault and harassment mishandlings, and incidences of racism and racial microaggressions on and off campus.1 student activism has made way for a wave of new student organizations and new collaborations and coalitions between existing student organizations. created within a movement, these coalitions and organizations may be as enduring as the black student organizations which came to be in the late 1960s. however, they may also exit the campus scene as quickly as they arrived. these records – already struggling from the ephemeral nature of a student’s brief tenure – have an added urgency and uncertainty. beyond creating an increased imperative to document student work, student activism has also created an increased need to do so ethically and with care. as a traditionally hidden department, university archives must work harder to show themselves as allies as students question administrative policy. a documentation initiative actively engaging student organizations presents the possibility to bring in these challenging student narratives. the six-step iterative student organization documentation initiative outlined in this case study includes surveying, initial contact, discussion, evaluation, reflection, and reworking. first, collections are surveyed for potential gaps. beyond the collections, the campus is also surveyed for present campus climate and possible allies in this work. then, various forms of outreach are employed to make initial contact. when contact is successfully made, students meet for a discussion which is part introduction to the archives and part donor conversation. in these meetings, students have the opportunity to discuss the work they are doing on campus, the materials they are creating, and the concerns they might have with donating. as appropriate, formal and informal evaluation is taken from students through surveys, continued communication, and donations. all this feedback is taken into consideration as the initiative is then reflected upon and reworked. this article reflects on the student organization documentation initiative’s first year of implementation at washington state university vancouver. of the 53 student organizations on campus during the 2016-2017 academic year, nearly a third responded to contact and 11 student organizations – or 21% – went on to donate materials. each step of the initiative is outlined and places for improvements are considered. literature review the effort to bring undergraduate students into the archives and special collections as either users or donors has gained stride since the turn of the century. the body of scholarship detailing outreach practices and theory on basic competencies and skills has grown significantly, slowly ushering archivists away from the image of being passive stewards of collections, reluctant to invite users in.2 this movement from passivity has also encouraged archivists to consider students not only as potential acquirers of knowledge within the archives, but also as sources of knowledge. this article borrows from literature which looks to the student as a user of and donor to the university archives. student as user archives are often new and intimidating to undergraduate students, who frequently lack confidence in their ability to use archives and primary sources. despite the difficulty in acquiring them, archival and primary source skills are important for any college student. however, to ethically allow students to donate, these skills are a necessity. students must understand what an archive is and how their records will be used. therefore, to see students as a donor they must first be seen as a user. in 2008, elizabeth yakel presented composites of various users based on her years of interactions with these populations.3 the composite “brad” highlights the difficulties undergraduates have with being archives users. though he struggles to navigate the archives and special collections, brad is hesitant to ask for the extra help he needs and worries doing so might undermine his intelligence. yakel’s insights are important for considering the tone to create with students to encourage questions. to improve student confidence, archivists have considered the necessary skills and knowledge – or archival intelligence – needed for students to comfortably navigate the archives. in 2002, yakel identified skills for learning to access and utilize the archives and special collections. key amongst these, yakel argues students must be able to define what an archive is and what findings aids are. additionally, students must know how to utilize finding aids and related access tools.4 in encouraging students to define terminology for themselves, yakel places agency on students to be active participants in acquiring these skills. the following year yakel and deborah torres identified arguably more advanced skills for archival intelligence. in addition to needing advanced critical thinking and problem-solving skills to maneuver around archival collections, yakel and torres argue users must have an understanding “of archival theory, practices, and procedures.”5 efforts to encourage students to gain this intelligence or understanding of the archives has taken many forms of outreach. in 2008, wendy duff and joan cherry identified five types of archival instruction which might help students, including brief interactions at the reference desk, tours with introductions to policies, tutorials using archival resources, multiple hour sessions, and full-term course.6 the pair found, following a survey, that students marginally increased their confidence following an orientation to the archives. in “selling the college and university archives: current outreach perspectives,” tamar chute notes the lack of university archives access and/or interest in promoting access prior to the early 1980s.7 in the face of this need to change a perception of exclusion, archivists have created a myriad of outreach projects. they have targeted audiences from various bodies on or related to a college campus, including students, faculty, administration, and alumni.8 programs have often gone beyond traditional outreach to much success, for example with the creation of holiday based events utilizing related collections.9 in the face of present day campus issues, archivists have also informed students through lectures and exhibits on past student activism.10 student as donor actively seeking student records has been an interest for some time in college and university archives. interest in student materials grew out of the late 1960s broader interest in expanding historical narratives beyond the quintessential affluent white male narrative. interest in the student narrative began with a focus on the educational endeavors of students and the respective records those endeavors generated.11 perhaps spurred by an interest to avoid family educational rights and privacy act (ferpa) regulations or a desire to document students more holistically, recent decades have seen a growing interest in the examination of student life beyond the purely academic.12 while some have considered student oral histories as a means of collecting the whole through a few student experiences, others have continued to segment the population – particularly through student organizations – in the hopes of collecting a bit from the many.13 though targeting student materials through student organizations presents the possibility of excluding voices and segmenting the student experience, organizations often last longer on a college campus than the typical student. in “giving it more than the old college try: documenting diverse populations in college and university archives,” kathryn m. neal examines the diverse bodies – such as departments, offices, and student organizations – on a campus, the types of documents they may hold, and the potential ways to reach said populations.14 included in these options, neal provides a model for a diversity initiative, which involves collection surveys and network building, collecting, and various outreach methods. focused on the student government specifically, megan stark, et al. worked with the associated students of the university of montana to digitize their papers.15 while external users may find interest in these records, it is believed the collection will primarily be accessed for the continued use of the student government. beyond a model for bringing in student materials, stark, et al.’s work speaks to the importance of listening to student needs, even if those needs depart from the donor norm. despite more active and aggressive efforts to solicit collections, there continues be a struggle to bring these narratives in. in 2005, swain identified three hurdles that must be overcome in order to promote donation.16 swain’s findings were informed by a survey of seven classes which had received an orientation to the archive. the survey sought to find suggestions for outreach and collection-development programs. swain argued that first, archivists must change student perception of the archives. second, archivists must discover how students are documenting their experience. third and finally, archivists must motivate students to donate their documents. similar to swain’s work, jessica l. wagner and debbi a. smith conducted a student survey, circulated via mass email, to learn about the archives’ use and perceptions and to attempt to solicit student materials.17 the survey found a lack of knowledge of the resources available to students. additionally, students were unaware that the university archives were interested in student life and related documents. following the survey, the archivists considered their next steps forward, including becoming involved in freshman orientation sessions and coordinating with student organizations. in the face of student opposition to or disinterest in donating, some have suggested methods to document student activities through website captures, eliminating the need to engage with students. in 2007, prom and swain set out to capture websites for all student organizations rather than a select few.18 following the captures, students were contacted via email with the option to change the terms associated with the materials or to have them removed. written prior to the outgrowth of social media and present-day campus climate issues, the ethical ramification of what is being advised by prom and swain was likely not as clear in 2007. however, in a time of student distrust, this method may not be best for instilling trust and building partnerships. limitations as with many outreach programs before this one, this documentation initiative segments the student population. it focuses on one aspect of their experience as students – their involvement in student organizations – and excludes other elements, including their coursework and their home life. additionally, each institution has its own culture, making it difficult for a case study to act as a representative model. washington state university vancouver has several quirks that differentiate it from other institutions. wsu vancouver is a non-residential, 28-year-old branch campus with an average student age of 26. furthermore, while there has been some student activism at wsu vancouver, students have yet to focus specifically on campus climate or politics. outreach methods used at wsu vancouver may not translate well on other campuses and archivists on campuses that have seen issues of inclusivity may need to use extra care. the six-step iterative project design the documentation initiative utilizes a six-step iterative project design: survey, initial contact, discussion, evaluation, reflection, and rework. while the task of bringing student narratives in through a project of this scale may be daunting, the methods present in this project are not dissimilar from those commonly employed by archivists. the survey and analysis below provide a description of how each phase was enacted at wsu vancouver in its first year. survey first, archivists must survey their collections to learn what student materials are already present in the university archives. beyond serving to show the gaps present, surveying the university archives can also highlight interesting organization materials to include later in donor discussions. where possible, archivists should view acquisition records or other documentation that might suggest how these materials came to be in the university archives. despite being a young campus, the wsu vancouver archives and special collections had already successfully captured several student-run media outlets, including the vancougar newspaper and the salmon creek journal. unfortunately, this was largely the extent of the student materials in the archives and special collections. this meant that there were not many exciting examples to show students to reassure them that the archives and special collections had already begun the work to preserve their history. it also meant looking beyond the archives to get an understanding of the campus culture. archivists must be informed about what is currently occurring on their campus. current issues will impact the types of outreach and contact possible and appropriate. additionally, beyond understanding what is happening with students, it helps to learn the various faculty and administrative bodies which may be of help in this project. this initiative was implemented shortly after i came to wsu vancouver. the lack of institutional knowledge, especially regarding the campus climate, made the surveying period essential. this project required an understanding of the campus climate and its relationship to student protests that had been taking place across the united states; of the players, including student groups, faculty advisors, and the administration; and of the structures and outreach currently in place. beyond the archives, the campus was far quieter than many around the united states. in fall 2016, students held a black lives matter rally and march through campus.19 in the wake of the 2016 u.s. presidential election, there were also several events for students to voice their concerns.20 though there was student activism present, that activism was not directed towards the administration or other bodies on campus. instead the students have consistently looked beyond to the national landscape. this has provided for a certain level of liberty when considering outreach that might not have been possible elsewhere. the student community portal, cougsync, was invaluable in learning about the 53 active student organizations and their respective leaders and faculty advisors. with attendance at student events and student-led rallies, trusted staff and faculty made themselves apparent. these faculty and staff were informed of the project and encouraged to talk to the students within their sphere about preserving their records. initial contact second, the archivist will seek to make initial contact with the student organizers. the ideas for how this might be accomplished are endless and include attending student events, emailing, engaging in a social media campaign, creating an exhibit, or using popular forms of student outreach, such as tabling on campus in which students gather in a designated spot on campus to inform passing students about their group. archivists should consider the various forms of contact students are using to get out their message and evaluate if reaching out via these methods would be feasible or appropriate for the university archives. students were contacted both in person – through an involvement fair, rallies, and events – and via email. near the end of the fall 2016 semester, this project received funds from the wsu vancouver diversity council allowing several of the first student organizations’ donated materials to be processed.21 this created another opportunity to reach out to students and encourage donation with the knowledge that trusted faculty and staff on the diversity council had vetted the project. towards the end of the academic years, select faculty advisors were also contacted via email to encourage student interest. of the 53 organizations on campus, 17 followed up in some form. for some students, initial contact and knowledge that the archives and special collections was interested in their work was all that was needed to encourage donation. four groups opted to never meet for a discussion and to instead email their items and the transfer agreement or add me to their organization’s google drive. though this made formal evaluation difficult, student ease should be the priority. discussion third, once students have expressed interest in learning more, the archivist will meet for a two-part discussion including an introduction to the archives and a donor conversation. these meetings should take whatever format students are comfortable with – be it with the entire organization, board members, or a chosen representative. additionally, these discussions should take place wherever students are comfortable, such as in the library or during their regularly scheduled meeting. seven of the 17 groups contacted opted for a group-based discussion format. the discussions began and concluded with the distribution of questionnaires evaluating students’ archival knowledge. due to one group not being able to finish questionnaires at the end of the discussion, the meetings generated 19 pre-discussion and 13 post-discussion questionnaires. an additional two organizations opted for in-person discussions, however the one-on-one meetings with organization leadership hindered formal evaluation. while this project first and foremost sees students as donors to the college archives, students must also be considered potential users in order to provide an introduction to the archives. therefore, the first component of the discussion should offer a very basic introduction to what an archive is, what finding aids are, and how students would go about gaining access to their institution’s repository. this conversation seems to be most successful with plenty of examples of student organization materials to illustrate the items the archives might be interested in. additionally, it helps to have a finding aid present to demonstrate what will become of their items once donated. during the orientation period of the discussion, it is often difficult to identify what to include and what to exclude. unlike an instruction session or orientation to a class, students in an organization may come from departments across the campus and they may range from freshmen to seniors. this conversation then works best when students guide it – asking for clarification in places where they are confused and asking to bypass sections they are familiar with. to encourage students to make the most of this time, archivists should promote an environment where they feel safe to ask questions. the second component of the discussion is a donor conversation. students might be questioned about their organization’s history and mission, the materials they create, and the types of materials which best represent their work. they may also be questioned on whether or not they have continued ties to alumni in the hopes of generating material for donation further back than the last couple years. all students surveyed said their respective groups were creating emails, event sign-in/sign-up sheets, flyers/posters, photographs, and giveaways/swag. many members also stated their group was creating meeting minutes (n=11) and some form of printed updates, such as a newsletter (n=6). all groups also had some level of social media presence. when asked which materials best show the work their groups are doing, meeting minutes (n=6), flyers/posters (n=6), and photographs (n=4) received the most support. this emphasis on familiar mediums – though typically created digitally – is interesting in the face of growing interest in capturing social media. the donor segment of the conversation also gives students an opportunity to address any concerns they may have regarding donating. even after a brief introduction to the archives, students may not understand the full implications of donating. it is the archivist’s duty to inform students of potential concerns and tactics for easing those concerns. when asked about their concerns about donating in the 13 post-discussion questionnaires, the majority (n=9) stated they had no concerns. those with concerns were worried about the identification of members (n=2) and the archives and special collections having access to their social media accounts (n=1). with these groups that mentioned concerns, the archives and special collections then discussed the possibility of redacting names, setting restriction periods, and/or donating only selected social media posts rather than documenting and capturing the whole. in the end, the students chose the latter option. finally, an in-person meeting is a great opportunity to conclude with the next steps to donating. in discussions to the entire organization, the archivists can take this time to remind students about the types of materials they have agreed to donate. in discussions to group leadership, archivists may also assign topics to take back to the whole of their organizations, specifically regarding concerns or additional contacts with alumni that other members may have. if students feel confident in donating at that point, they can simply be set up with a transfer agreement and a prospective donation date or timeline. evaluation fourth, archivists should attempt to gather formal and informal feedback on the successes and failures of the contact and discussion. this may look like allowing time before and after the discussion for the students to rate their current understanding of archives and of the need to preserve the materials they create. in individual one-on-one discussions and email correspondence, formal feedback may not be feasible or entirely comfortable. in such cases, informal feedback may be expressed in continued contact or continued interest in donating. prior to the discussion, nearly all (n=18) of the students were familiar with the term “archive(s),” though the majority (n=17) had never visited an archive before. despite this, no student stated they would be uncomfortable at the prospect of visiting one, though several (n=7) felt they would need additional instruction before utilizing their campus archives. following the discussion, all students surveyed stated they would be comfortable using archival resources without further instruction. reflection fifth, following evaluation the archivists would enter a period of reflection where they might consider the interactions and progress thus far. data from formal evaluations can easily be compiled to reflect student thoughts on the discussions. other less formal points to consider might be rate of student response, interest in utilizing collections, and continued interest in donating. methods of outreach employed in the first iteration led to nearly a third of the organizations making contact. while this was a mildly successful beginning effort, the fact that two thirds did not respond, signals more efforts need to be made. on a campus like wsu vancouver, this will likely translate to more aggressive forms of outreach, such as stopping by at the beginning or end of an organization’s meetings. additionally, from the 17 organizations that expressed interest, five later indicated they might wish to donate later rather than in the current academic year.20 this lack of donation suggests there needs to be continued and possibly more aggressive follow-up measures taken, beyond email correspondence and checking in during happenstance in-person meetings. as the documentation initiative moves into its second year at wsu vancouver, new outreach and follow-up methods have begun to use structures already in place, such as library social media accounts and student organization orientations to create more chances for interactions. this closer consideration for locating potential points of contact with students is just one of the means of reworking the documentative initiative. rework sixth and finally, the project is reworked to incorporate the successes, failures, and other lessons learned during the previous iteration. the lead should consider ways to utilize connections – both with students and other departments on campus – made throughout the first iteration. they should also consider ways to tackle new goals and to fill gaps still present within the collection. this phase comes alongside, as do all the steps following the discussion, additional follow-up as necessary to ensure donations from student organizations which have already been reached. as those leading the initiative get more involved in campus life, they will likely become more informed about the various structures already in place. for example, in the initial iteration the archives and special collections learned that in order to get funds allotted by the student government at wsu vancouver, two students from every student organization must attend an orientation hosted by the office of student involvement annually. the archives and special collections has now begun the process of taking part in these orientations. in a very brief 5-minute introduction, the archives and special collections hands out an information sheet and transfer agreement form and explains that the work the students are doing throughout the year is important to university history and that the archives would like to preserve that work. it is hoped that reaching them early will keep donating in their mind throughout the school year. the archives and special collections is also hoping to develop permanent ties to the office of student involvement to streamline donations. in addition to participating in these orientations and in the involvement fair at the beginning of the fall 2017 semester, an exhibit was displayed in the library highlighting materials already collected and advocating for further donations. this exhibit gave new students an opportunity to learn about some the active organizations. it also gave returning students some encouragement to donate materials they still have from previous years. as wsu vancouver continues to grow its student organization collection, the archives and special collections will continue to explore the ways these materials might be used to encourage further donation, such as tabling with potential throwback thursday (#tbt) material. beyond outreach, the archives and special collections is also reconsidering the donor discussions. when asked about improving the discussions, several students (n=5) stated they wanted more structure in what to include in their donation – despite having examples of what they might consider including. this desire presents a difficult fine line for the archivist. too little structure seems to make students believe donating is far more difficult and time consuming than it is; too much structure may exclude creative projects students are engaged in. tentatively, students will be given a list of materials they might want to include and language which will hopefully make it clear that these are not the only options open to them. conclusion throughout the different phases of this first iteration from the 2016-2017 academic year, 11 student organizations donated materials from at least the past years’ activities. materials collected in the first iteration at wsu vancouver have since been processed and finding aids can now be found on the archives & special collections’ online portal.22 at wsu vancouver, we hope with new outreach methods, the next iteration will bring more interest from other organizations and continued interest from the organizations which have previously been reached. as each organization’s leadership and membership turns over, outreach will likely have to continue year after year, though we hope in time the archives and special collections’ might become a seamless part of their spring leadership transition. at wsu vancouver and beyond, the student organization documentation initiative holds the promise to not only combat swain’s hurdles, but to go further to address present campus climate issues. as stated above, in 2005, swain argued that archivists must 1) change student perceptions of the archives, 2) learn the materials students are creating, and 3) encourage student donations. though often this project found students who lacked any perceptions or understanding of the university archives, with outreach and discussions students can begin to perceive the archives as a resource for them to succeed academically and to preserve their work on campus. additionally, the discussions, both in person and via email, provide an opportunity for archivists to learn about student life and how they are documenting it. finally, through contact and the iterative nature of the project, archivists can repeatedly encourage students to donate the materials they are creating. while swain’s three hurdles still provide an excellent starting point for designing outreach to potential student donors, written prior to the current prevalence of student activism, answering the three hurdles is no longer enough. archivists must also be able to create trust and transparency. reaching student donors and maintaining their interest with their hectic schedules pulling them in different directions is difficult. it is tempting then in an age when so much of their lives are digitally preserved to simply capture it without permission and without contact. while this practice is concerning from the standpoint of copyright and intellectual property laws, i implore university archivists to look beyond copyright and ferpa to the ethical ramifications of doing so. the university archives should not become yet another place for student distrust of campus authorities. students must be educated about the potential hazards that come with donation, especially when they come from vulnerable populations on campus or when they have been engaged in work which combats campus administration or policies. students, as with any donor, should have the right to decide how much and what of their life is preserved. this documentation initiative provides an opportunity for archivists to build a relationship of trust and transparency with students through continuous communication. acknowledgements thank you to the university of california, los angeles’s mlis program for allowing me to explore this project while i was a student. thank you to karen diller, robert schimelpfenig, and the wsu vancouver library for supporting this project and the representation of student voices in the university archives. thank you to the wsu vancouver diversity counsel for funds to process student organization records donated in the 2016-2017 academic year. finally, thank you to my editors jenny kinniff, bethany messersmith, and ian beilin for helping me take a project that has been in my mind for years and translate it into an article that will hopefully help preserve the student narrative. references acrl diversity alliance. 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(2015). enabling acts: the hidden story of how the americans with disabilities act gave the largest us minority its rights. boston: beacon press. galvan, a. (2015). soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship. in the library with the lead pipe. grech, s., & soldatic, k. (2016). disability in the global south: the critical handbook. cham, switzerland: springer international publishing. hathcock, a. (2015). white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis. in the library with the lead pipe. hudson, d. j. (2017). on “diversity” as anti-racism in library and information studies: a critique. journal of critical library and information studies. kim, j. b. (2016). anatomy of the city: race, infrastructure, and u.s. fictions of dependency. university of michigan, ann arbor. kumbier, a., & starkey, j. (2016). access is not problem solving: disability justice and libraries. library trends, 64(3), 468–491. longmore institute on disability. 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[↩] elizabeth yakel, “managing expectations, expertise, and effort while extending services to researchers in academic archives” in christopher j. prom and ellen d. swain, ed. college and university archives: readings in theory and practice (chicago, il: society of american archivists, 2008): 261-287. [↩] elizabeth yakel, “listening to users,” archival issues 26, no.2 (2002): 112. [↩] elizabeth yakel and deborah a. torres, “ai: archival intelligence and user expertise,” the american archivist 66 (2003): 51. [↩] wendy m. duff and joan m. cherry, “archival orientation for undergraduate students: an exploratory study of impact,” the american archivist 71 (fall/winter 2008): 501-502. [↩] tamar g. chute, “selling the college and university archives: current outreach perspectives,” archival issues 25, no. ½ (2000): 33-48. 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[↩] kathryn m. neal, “giving it more than the old college try: documenting diverse populations in college and university archives” in christopher j. prom and ellen d. swain, ed. college and university archives readings in theory and practice (chicago; society of american archives, 2008). [↩] megan stark, et al., “building a community of the students, by the students, for the students: collaborating with student government organizations” in innovative solutions for building community in academic libraries (hershey, pa; information science reference, 2015): 82. [↩] ellen d. swain, “college student as archives’ consultant? a new approach to outreach programming on campus,” archival issues 29 no. 2 (2005): 113-131. [↩] jessica l. wagner and debbi a. smith, “students as donors to university archives: a study of student perceptions with recommendations,” the american archivist 75 (fall/winter 2012): 558-566. [↩] christopher j. prom and ellen d. swain, “from the college democrats to the falling illini: identifying appraising, and capturing student organizations websites,” the american archivist 70 (fall/winter 2007): 344-365. [↩] auz burger, “black people united holds black lives matter rally,” the vancougar, october 6, 2016. http://www.thevancougar.com/black-people-united-holds-black-lives-matter-rally/ (accessed september 29, 2017). [↩] andrew hanchett, “unity rally allows students and allies to express solidarity,” the vancougar, december 5, 2016. http://www.thevancougar.com/unity-rally-allows-students-and-allies-to-express-solidarity/ (accessed september 29, 2017). [↩] “diversity mini grants,” washington state university vancouver, https://admin.vancouver.wsu.edu/diversity/diversity-mini-grants (accessed september 29, 2017). [↩] “finding aids.” washington state university vancouver library. https://library.vancouver.wsu.edu/archive/finding-aids (accessed october 25, 2017). [↩] editorial: harassment in scholarship is unacceptable–and requires action vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves 1 response pingback : academic library evolution #infoshow this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct scholarship as an open conversation: utilizing open peer review in information literacy instruction – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 4 apr emily ford /2 comments scholarship as an open conversation: utilizing open peer review in information literacy instruction in brief: this article explores the acrl framework for information literacy’s frame, scholarship as a conversation. this frame asserts that information literate students have the disposition, skills, and knowledge to recognize and participate in disciplinary scholarly conversations. by investigating the peer-review process as part of scholarly conversations, this article provides a brief literature review on peer review in information literacy instruction, and argues that by using open peer review (opr) models for teaching, library workers can allow students to gain a deeper understanding of scholarly conversations. opr affords students the ability to begin dismantling the systemic oppression that blinded peer review and the traditional scholarly publishing system reinforce. finally, the article offers an example classroom activity using opr to help students enter scholarly conversations, and recognize power and oppression in scholarly publishing. by emily ford introduction you don’t have to look far to find stories from academic authors, editors, and publishers for tales of peer review gone wrong, or very very bad. whether it is a peer-review system that privileges citations of works by white males over indigenous academics; or peer review that misses big mistakes in research methodology; or even the hidden labor of peer review–peer review can be a dubious undertaking. yet, peer review is a foundational process of scholarly communication. the gold standard for peer review in the past eighty years or so has been double-blind peer review (shema, 2014). double-blind peer review is a process in which neither the submitting authors nor the reviewers know one another’s identities or institutional affiliations. it is review that happens in a “black box”; the entire process is hidden, even to key constituents, such as submitting authors. many see double-blind peer review as a way to eliminate implicit bias in review, while others argue that double-blind peer review does not adequately mask author identities and that it generally introduces a host of other problems to the peer-review process. too, the double-blind peer-review system does not invite the curious public, students, and other members of the scholarly community to learn from others. however, there is a movement that seeks to solve some of the problems inherent in double-blind peer review: open peer review (opr). opr, where authors’ and reviewers’ identities are disclosed to one another, is a movement that attempts to address problems in double-blind review. it also seeks to address issues such as lengthy timelines between article submission, acceptance, and publication. so what does this mean for library workers? undergraduate students in library and college classrooms are asked to find peer-reviewed journal articles for assignments, and graduate students must frequently submit their own work to peer-reviewed publications. library workers answer questions about these assignments at the reference desk and discuss peer review with students in library classrooms. there is no doubt that robust discussion and debate can occur during the peer-review process, but how do scholars learn to participate according to its social norms? who is invited in and who isn’t? how are they invited in? and how are student-participants empowered to challenge those social norms? in this article i present and frame opr not just as a process for scholarly publishing, but also as a tool for information literacy instruction that can help library workers invite students to better understand scholarly conversations and to contribute to them. further, i argue that by using opr in teaching, opr can be a mechanism to start dismantling oppressive power in the scholarly publishing system. then i will discuss how opr invites a broader engagement with review and scholarly conversations, and i will offer one example of utilizing opr to invite undergraduate students to participate in this aspect of scholarly conversation. open peer review before we dive in and for those who are unfamiliar, i would like to address what opr is. in essence, opr allows for open communication between authors and referees. names of both the reviewers and authors are known to one another. in many implementations, reviewer reports and author responses are published as supplemental material to final article versions. some opr journals also facilitate community review where any community member may contribute their review in addition to those of the assigned referees.1 this mirrors what can occur on pre-print servers. it should be noted that opr implementations are all different and are intended to serve specific communities. in stem there has been a move to more granularly define opr (ross-hellauer, 2017) than the overarching definition that i provide here and which i have investigated in my work (ford, 2013). in my view, however, and for the intent of this article, open communication between authors and referees is a sufficient functional definition. (for a more thorough explanation of opr please read my short take in acrl’s keeping up with… open peer review, or learn about the opr process at this journal in an article from 2012, open ethos publishing at code4lib journal and in the library with the lead pipe.) there is a world of quantitative research into peer review quality, as well as opr and its impact on research quality–mostly from the clinical, biomedical, and other stem fields. qualitative research on opr in the social sciences and arts and humanities exists in much smaller quantity, partially due to the relative glacial pace at which these scholarly disciplines have investigated and experimented with openness in their publishing processes, if at all. in one presentation at the eighth international congress on peer review, sarah parks (2017) mentioned that their findings placed use of opr in publons social and behavioral science journals dead last among all the disciplines. our own field of librarianship, which champions openness and access to information, has been slow to experiment and adopt open review. to my knowledge, lead pipe was the first (ford, e. & bean, c., 2012) and remains the only lis publication where all articles undergo an opr process. (it should be noted that journal of radical librarianship and journal of creative library practice both offer opr as an option, but authors may also choose to undergo blinded review.) scholarship as conversation in 2016 the association of college and research libraries board of directors adopted the framework for information literacy. the framework presents six frames for information literacy: authority is constructed and contextual, information creation as a process, information has value, research as inquiry, scholarship as a conversation, and searching as strategic exploration. this article discusses only one of the frames in depth, scholarship as a conversation. while i do mostly discuss this frame, it should be acknowledged that frames do contain some overlap. that, however, is outside the scope of this article. scholarship as a conversation is a broad frame that examines learners’ dispositions, behaviors, and acculturation into their selected disciplines. students who successfully engage in this frame may participate in scholarly conversations by evaluating works in their given disciplines and will see themselves as contributors to those conversations. in academic discourse and scholarly communication, peer review plays a large and powerful role in scholarly conversations. the peer-review process is an avenue in which many scholarly conversations occur, and which has been largely ignored by the literature discussing student participation in them, both before and after the development of the framework. during the development of the framework and since its official adoption, the library community has taken a great interest in it. library workers have written and published many articles that criticize the framework, as well as many that laud it. too, scholars have thoughtfully approached it to offer enhancements. there even exist numerous white papers, such as the 2013 acrl working group report intersections of the framework and scholarly communication. however, most of the literature about this particular frame fails to deeply examine its relationship with peer review. for example, in nancy foasberg’s 2013 article, “from standards to frameworks for il,” scholarship as a conversation is broadly discussed as an example of the framework better embracing community than did its predecessor, the standards for information literacy. foasberg asserts that scholarship as a conversation “…emphasizes the scholarly communities in which knowledge is produced,” (p. 709), and advocates for student voices to participate in scholarly conversations. “if we understand scholarship as a conversation and research as a process of engaged inquiry, then the framework also needs to consider students as potential participants in, rather than mere consumers of, these activities” (p. 710). indeed, foasberg’s work points to the framework’s improvements in deeper and better acknowledgement of the social contexts in which scholarly conversations occur, but it is not in the scope of the article to offer library workers suggestions on how to implement such concepts into their instruction. unlike foasberg, julia bauder and catherine rod (2016) offer a literature review to present information literacy teaching practices as they correlate to each frame. in their analysis of the frames, however, peer review is mentioned only once, and then only as it relates to information creation as a process. moreover, their discussion of scholarship as a conversation surfaces two notable practices, both which do not adequately address peer review. first, they present the work of anne-marie deitering and sara jameson (2009), which focuses on freshman writing classes and students’ first entrances into scholarly conversations. next, they discuss using review articles to showcase for students the focus of disciplinary conversations. while i do not want to trivialize these important aspects of scholarly conversations and the importance of teaching students about them, i maintain that in our current scholarly publishing system the peer-review process is one in which many scholarly conversations occur. the library literature seems to have largely ignored this process as part of instruction. it is a process that can elucidate for students how scholarly conversations proceed and invite them to participate in those conversations. prior to the publishing and adoption of the framework, donovan and o’donnell (2013) discussed how traditional scholarly communication paradigms limit how we can teach and engage in information literacy. even before the acrl framework made salient that “…novice learners and experts at all levels can take part in the conversation, established power and authority structures may influence their ability to participate and can privilege certain voices and information” (p. 8), donovan and o’donnell acknowledged that learners are excluded by the traditional model of publishing, which “… enforces the authority of the academy” (p. 123). they argue, however, that “the re-situation of students with respect to academic publishing patterns is a powerful way in which to reorient student authority inwards” (p. 127). finally, they nod to opr, stating that “…more egalitarian modes for producing and sharing information have brought about similarly open methods of review that question traditional notions of expertise” (p. 129). given this questioning of those notions, it is appropriate that students may have an opportunity to engage in this particular process. too, andrea baer (2013) nominally discusses models of peer review as they relate to digital scholarship (p. 115) but does not offer much of a view as to how to embrace opr and to invite students into participate in it. finally, ashley ireland (2016) briefly discusses how library instruction based in queer theory can expose power structures in a peer-review process. “librarians who expose the gaps that exist in peer-reviewed publishing, an industry that holds a great interest in reinforcing its dominance, would be exposing the power structures at play that reinforce the status quo” (p. 144). so why the failure of deeply addressing peer review as part of scholarly conversations in developing dispositions for information literacy learners? it is possible that participation in peer review is more advanced that most information literacy instruction offered by library workers who teach. true, learners must be deep in their disciplines, and often even several years into their graduate studies or have completed graduate programs, before they are invited by editors to officially participate as referees for scholarly articles, books, and other content. this points to some inherent elitism of the process. but professors require students to find peer-reviewed articles and laud peer review as a marker of trustworthiness and quality. in our current era of alternative facts, engaging students in peer review may help them to think more critically about research and evidence. perhaps more relevant, however, is the fact that most peer-review processes happen in a black box. in addition to the blinding in peer review, there is often little transparency as to how and when editorial publishing decisions are made. if the process is opaque to the professors and instructors who must engage in it, how can they teach their students about it? i see opr as an offering to library workers and instructors to engage students in peer review and gain a deeper understanding of it. on language: diversity, inclusion, and social justice before i dive into the next portion of this article, i need to clarify my use of language and terms. one of my main intellectual frames is that blind review is part of and perpetuates an oppressive scholarly publishing system. i see using opr in the classroom as a way to not only invite young scholars into an open scholarly conversation, but also as a way to invite them to help usurp peer review’s role in the systemic oppression prevalent in the scholarly publishing system. unfortunately, dominant discourse does not use the term oppression to discuss some of these issues, but focuses on surface issues, coined “diversity and inclusion.” diversity and inclusion efforts focus on representation, celebration, and empowerment of people from all backgrounds. the folks at simmons libraries have succinctly outlined the differences in their anti-oppression libguide: though they go hand in hand, diversity & inclusion are not the same as anti-oppression. diversity & inclusion have to do with the acknowledgment, valuing, celebration, and empowerment of difference, whereas anti-oppression challenges the systems and systemic biases that devalue and marginalize difference. diversity & inclusion and anti-oppression are all necessary in order to work toward equity and justice. (simmons libraries, 2018) in this article, my use of the words diversity and inclusion refers to representation of all people and empowerment of all people, respectively. these are the terms that our institutions use, and the terms used by acrl, which recently adopted equity, diversity, and inclusion as a “signature initiative” into its plan for excellence. in addition, when i use these terms i also see them as growing the possibility to further anti-oppression by challenging and eventually dismantling the current peer-review system. i should also note that the term social justice is, to me, aligned with anti-oppression. it is a term that i see more widely used by our field than the term anti-oppression. for this article i have chosen to use the terms diversity, inclusion, and social justice. diversity and social justice in scholarly communication scholarly conversations happen at conferences and in publications. the process of peer review, occurring most often prior to the publication of works, is a large part of that conversation. and most often that part of the conversation occurs behind a layer of opacity. moreover, the people who wield the power of what conversations are recorded and represented are varied, but in journal publishing, editors, editorial boards, and peer reviewers wield a lot of that power. so who are the editors, publishers, reviewers, and editorial board members? one can make some assumptions, but there has been little data collected in this regard. the demographic majority of publishers are white (greco, et al, 2015), and there is a lack of published data as to the diverse make up of peer reviewers.2 one could assume, however, that the pool of peer reviewers—largely from the academy—reflects faculty and scholarly publisher demographics, which are majority white (roh, 2016a). charlotte roh lays out evidence of bias created by privilege and points out that “…one possible consequence is a feedback loop in scholarship that privileges and publishes the majority voice, which is often white and male” (2016b, p. 82). in short, one well-grounded assumption is that the scholarly publishing environment does a poor job including the voices of people of color, transgender and queer people, women, and other marginalized folks–voices that are not able to be heard because they are oppressed by the loudness or pervasiveness of the voices from a dominant group. charlotte roh, emily drabinski, and harrison w. inefuku (2015) argue that scholarly communication can be a mechanism to shrink the equity gap and move toward a more socially just scholarly publishing system. among other factors, i see changes in peer review to be integral to this effort (ford, 2017). the fact of the matter is that scholarly conversations are ruled by the tradition of double-blind peer review, but also by the majority—white—voice. the majority voice, then, becomes amplified and stifles minority voices. i would go so far as to say that in many cases scholarly conversations reflect elitism, classism, misogyny, and racism. for college students whose demographics are increasingly diverse and not reflective of the demographics of academic faculty and publishers,3 the double-blind peer-review system does not offer them a place. diversity and social justice in information literacy instruction critical information literacy is an approach to information literacy that is well-suited to attend to issues of social power, social exclusion, and social justice in information literacy instruction. because library workers using a critical information literacy approach ask students to position themselves to question existing power structures of information creation, representation, access, and delivery, it is well aligned with a worldview that embraces diversity and works toward dismantling systems of power. several of the scholars whose works i have already cited show this disposition. there is not yet a large body of literature that explicitly discusses the acrl framework and its relation to diversity and social justice. however, the 2017 article by lua gregory and shana higgins, “reorienting an information literacy program toward social justice: mapping the core values of librarianship to the acrl framework” relates scholarship as a conversation directly to acrl’s core value of diversity. in the article they develop learning outcomes that reflect their mapping exercise. for scholarship as a conversation, their outcomes are: “develop familiarity with modes of discourse in order to join conversations and circumvent systems of privilege;” and “resist normative structures that privilege certain voices and information over others by engaging in inclusive citation practices” (p. 54). finally, some instances of opr can include community review in addition to formally appointed reviewers. in these instances, peer reviews could be considered user-generated content, which maura seale (2010) asserts “…can offer a challenge to dominant and mainstream discourse by introducing words and perspectives of individuals who would otherwise not be heard” (p. 230). further, seale succinctly affirms that user-generated content can allow students to begin critically questioning “traditional and authoritative sources of information” (p. 230) and via its dissemination “…can contrast and thus expose the otherwise invisible infrastructures of dominant forms of knowledge production, including whose voices and perspectives they validate, and those they do not” (p. 230). with some implementations of opr, which allow public or community peer reviews, the possibility exists for this to occur. so how can we invite marginalized voices into scholarly conversations and amplify those voices? how can we get students to meet those outcomes articulated by lua and higgins? as a library worker who provides instruction, i see this coalescence of the framework and work toward social justice in scholarly publishing as an opportunity to crack open the scholarly communication paradigm. the students with whom we work are going to be the people who continue scholarly conversations in the future. i embrace the assertion that “librarians must be proactive in breaking from the paradigms of scholarly communication as it is currently taught” (donovan & o’donnell, p. 123). case study in this section of the article, i offer an experience that i hope will provide an example of inspiration of how to integrate opr in the information literacy classroom. it’s not that i don’t value the framework for information instruction, but my day-to-day reality is that i can usually only touch on one or two concepts in any given instruction session. moreover, i have to balance my relationship with faculty and their openness to my pedagogical style.4 while this usually does not inhibit me all too much, it is rare that i am able to engage in critical pedagogical aims for the entirety of an instruction session. all too frequently scholarship as a conversation and inviting students to become part of the conversation is further down my priority list than ensuring that students can succeed on their assignments to find 5 peer-reviewed articles for their annotated bibliography, which must be completed with proper apa citation formatting. and as most library workers providing instruction are probably aware, these outcomes can only be accomplished once students understand what is an annotated bibliography. the more ambitious outcome to have students frame their own ideas and participate in scholarly conversations is apt to get lost in the machinations of understanding an assignment, using effective keyword search strategies, choosing appropriate resources and databases to search, evaluating and selecting search results, and all of the other skills students need. in the fall of 2016 i was approached by a faculty member to develop and deliver a library instruction session to two cohorts of build exito scholars in winter 2017. build exito is an national institutes of health-funded program that provides undergraduate students education, training, and the support they need on their way to becoming scientific researchers. one of its major goals is to support students from underrepresented groups who are working toward a career in the bench and life sciences. one thing i find particularly compelling about this program, is that student participants are referred to as scholars. this simple change of language, which is taken seriously by all involved, signals for students that they are already part of a research community—part of a scholarly conversation. the program supports participating scholars throughout their higher education path, beginning with their first courses at community colleges, through transferring to a four-year institution, and their application for graduate studies. the program offers an integrated curriculum, peer and career mentorship, and research experiences via assistantships and research learning communities, all in a supportive environment. build exito scholars come to portland state from local community colleges, but also from all over the united states. many scholars in the program also come from american territories such as guam, puerto rico, and the marianas islands. these scholars, in addition to their racial and ethnic diversity, are frequently also first-generation college students. when discussing with the faculty member the goals and outcomes for an instruction session, it became clear to me that this session would be different than any other i had taught. of course building critical thinking in research was one goal, but build exito operates with a worldview that acknowledges power differentials and disparities in academic research, with the aim of developing scientific researchers who can work to dismantle and reshape power structures so that they become more diverse and inclusive. my view of higher education and information literacy instruction follows in the same vein, and here i was presented with an opportunity to dive deep with that lens! but it was also new for me and a little intimidating. although i grew up a religious minority (ethnically jewish in oklahoma), i have walked through the world with race, class, cisgender, and education privilege. would this lens coming from someone like me make sense with this group? i was excited to work on expanding my skills as one who helps to facilitate learning and critical thinking. too, my research and knowledge of opr, which i see as a mechanism that enables authors and publishers to work toward ameliorating harmful power structures in the academy and scholarly communication, seemed to nicely dovetail into this session’s focus. finally, i felt like i would really be able to use opr in the classroom and dive deeper into scholarship as a conversation than before. this two-hour library instruction session was part of these students’ required extra mentoring/workshop during the term. the first forty-five minutes of the session was spent on discussing keyword search strategies, exploring the library’s catalog system, and generally focused on reviewing library systems and search techniques–all with a critical lens. then, we used the rest of the session to explore peer review. at the outset of our time together i asked students what they knew about peer review. although they reported having already had many conversations about peer review in their orientation to the program (at which i presented), during their mandatory workshops, and in their for-credit courses, it was clear to me that they still viewed it as a mystical process. in order to more clearly show students the peer-review process, i had students look at a pre-selected open peer-reviewed article and its review process from f1000research. i asked the scholars to read the article abstract, and then to read certain portions of the referee comments and author responses to them. after the scholars had read through the materials, i gave them a series of questions to discuss in small groups. those questions were: why did the reviewers respond as they did? how did the authors respond to reviewer comments? how did reviewer’s respond to the revised article? from observing this, what you have learned about the peer-review process? our conversation based on the article was pretty good, but it was clear that there was still a bit of a disconnect for students. they weren’t wholly familiar with the research and concepts at hand. but the activity did not end there. we then moved into a more deliberate, authentic, and “hands-on” approach, which i developed with inspiration from an activity from an open peer review workshop at the 2016 force 11 conference. each table of scholars received a print-out of a tweet about climate change (tweet 1, tweet 2, tweet 3), which i selected because of the evidence offered in each of them. the students’ task was to peer review the tweet. and wow, did they go all out. the room was full of energy, and the previously dull and quieter tone in the room became noisy and vibrant. after the scholars worked in their groups, we reconvened for discussion. i asked them: what was your peer review? what was your process? what came up for you? did you have any emotions about it? with this activity i witnessed students moving from semi-engagement with the on-paper peer-review exercise, to being excited and confident to contribute their knowledge to a conversation. they were reviewing the works of experts and gaining a deeper understanding of peer review in the process. in my view, it also opened for students the possibility for them to have agency and power to embrace mechanisms that are currently challenging the scholarly communication system status quo. most of the information i gleaned from a closing student assessment showed that the opr exercises were the most impactful for students. one student stated that they learned that “the peer-review process has ‘steps,’ i hadn’t seen the process before.” too, several students articulated that the activity excited them and they wanted to learn even more about peer review. “i learned so much about the peer-review process and am fascinated. i would love to learn more,” and “[i] learned about the editorial process. [i] really appreciated the peer review conversations we had.” certainly there are things i would do differently if i have the opportunity to use these exercises again. first and foremost, i would better tailor the reading and text-heavy portion of the exercise, and if possible, i would flip this portion of the session (for reading to be completed prior to our session). this would allow more time for peer reviewing tweets and discussing the experience, especially since this portion of the class was the most engaging, fun, and what the instructors and students enjoyed the most. next, i would spend more time to find tweets from a more diverse group of experts. it is embarrassing to admit that all of the tweets we reviewed were from the white male majority, though not for lack of trying. (i was surprised by how much time i spent on identifying these tweets, attempting to find diverse representation, and even then i failed.) conclusion one of the ways we can help students engage in scholarship as a conversation is to engage in instructional practices that embrace advances in scholarly communication that allow for greater inclusion and a diversity of voices. opr is one such practice. with most scholarly conversations guarded by an opaque peer-review process, it can be challenging to demonstrate how this “gate-keeping” process works. (this process is also racist, misogynist, elitist, and classist.) by providing transparency in peer review, we are making space for queer and trans voices, voices of people color, and the voices of other marginalized people to participate in scholarly conversations. we are also inviting students to see its “nuts and bolt” so that they, too, can participate in and work towards improving the system. while it can be hard to engage in deep exploration of peer review in any given instruction session, exploring opr may be well worth your while. in addition to it transparently showing students the process, it can be fertile ground to further invite students to participate in scholarly conversations. class activities that engage with opr can start to uncover peer review’s mechanics and invite students to begin dismantling the oppressive system of blind review by engaging in open scholarly conversations. with diversity, inclusion, and social justice work the scholarly communication system can be re-invented so that it supports and reflects all researchers. acknowledgements many thanks to my external reviewer, gr keer, for their thoughtful insights on drafts of this article, and for challenging my diversity and inclusion frame. i expected to receive helpful and substantive comments and they delivered! additional thanks to sofia leung of the lead pipe editorial board who provided thoughtful copy edits and pushed back on some of my language so that i could express my meaning with greater clarity and impact. finally, thanks to ian beilin at lead pipe for his support and for managing this process from start to finish. references association of college and research libraries. (2013). working group on intersections of scholarly communication and information literacy. intersections of scholarly communication and information literacy: creating strategic collaborations for a changing academic environment. chicago, il: association of college and research libraries. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/publications/whitepapers/intersections.pdf baer, a. (2013). “critical information literacy in the college classroom: exploring scholarly knowledge production through the digital humanities.” in l. gregory & s. higgins (eds.), information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis (pp. 99–120). sacramento: library juice press. bauder, j., & rod, c. (2016). “crossing thresholds: critical information literacy pedagogy and the acrl framework.” college and undergraduate libraries, 23(3), 252–264. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2015.1025323 deitering, a.m., & jameson, s. (2008) “step by step through the scholarly conversation: a collaborative library/writing faculty project to embed information literacy and promote critical thinking in first year composition at oregon state university.” college & undergraduate libraries, 15(1-2), 57-79. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691310802176830 donovan, c., & o’donnell, s. (2013). “the tyranny of tradition: how information paradigms limit librarians’ teaching and student scholarship.” in s. higgins & l. gregory (eds.), information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis. library juice press. foasberg, n. m. (2015). “from standards to frameworks for il: how the acrl framework addresses critiques of the standards.” portal: libraries & the academy, 15(4), 699–717. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=qc_pubs ford, e. & bean, c. (2012). “open ethos publishing at code4lib journal and in the library with the lead pipe.” in the library with the lead pipe. december 12. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/open-ethos-publishing/ ford, e. (2013). “defining and characterizing open peer review: a review of the literature. journal of scholarly publishing, 44(4), 311–326. http://doi.org/10.3138/jsp.44-4-001 ford, e. (2017). “advancing an open ethos with open peer review.” college & research libraries, 78(4), 406–412. http://doi.org/10.5860/crl.78.4.406 greco, a. n., wharton, r. m., & brand, a. (2016). “demographics of scholarly publishing and communication professionals.” learned publishing, 29(2), 97–101. http://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1017 gregory, l., higgins, s. (2017). “reorienting an information literacy program toward social justice: mapping the core values of librarianship to the acrl framework.” communications in information literacy, 11(1), 42–54. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2017.11.1.46 ireland, a. (2016). “queering library instruction for composition: embracing the failure.” in n. pagowsky & k. mcelroy (eds.), critical library pedagogy handbook (vol. 1, pp. 139–150). chicago: association of college & research libraries. https://works.bepress.com/ashley-ireland/6/ kaspar, w. a. (2017). “the role and responsibility of peer review.” college & research libraries, 78(7), 874–877. http://doi.org/10.5860/crl.78.7.874 keer, g. (2016). “barriers to critical pedagogy in information literacy teaching.” in n. pagowsky & k. mcelroy (eds.), critical library pedagogy handbook (pp. 65–74). chicago: association of college & research libraries. parks, s, gunashaker, s, smith, e. (2017). “use of open review by discipline, country, and over time: an analysis of reviews and journal policies posted on publons.” international congress on peer review and scientific publication, chicago. https://peerreviewcongress.org/prc17-0264 roh, c., drabinski, e., & inefuku, h. (2015). “scholarly communication as a tool for social justice and diversity.” in digital repository conference papers, posters and presentations. http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/digirep_conf/8 roh, c. (2016a). “inequalities in publishing.” urban library journal, 22(2). https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ulj/vol22/iss2/2/ roh, c. (2016b). “library publishing and diversity values: changing scholarly publishing through policy and scholarly communication education.” college & research libraries news, 77(2), 82–85. http://crln.acrl.org/content/77/2/82 ross-hellauer, t. (2017). “what is open peer review? a systematic review.” f1000research, 6(1), 588. http://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.2 seale, m. (2010). “information literacy standards and the politics of knowledge production: using user-generated content to incorporate critical pedagogy.” in m. t. accardi, e. drabinski, & a. kumbier (eds.), critical library instruction: theories and methods (pp. 221–236). duluth: library juice press. http://eprints.rclis.org/20499/ shema, h. (2014). “the birth of modern peer review.” scientific american. april 19. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/the-birth-of-modern-peer-review simmons library (2018). anti-oppression. https://simmons.libguides.com/anti-oppression/welcome see f1000research and atmospheric chemistry & physics for examples. [↩] though in our own field, wendi arant kaspar, is leading the charge at college & research libraries, having collected demographic data from reviewers serving at the journal. this data is reported in kaspar’s 2017 editorial, the role and responsibility of peer review. [↩] for statistics please see the national center for education statistics’s status and trends in the education of racial and ethnic groups 2016 [↩] gr keer has noted that this is a common theme among instruction librarians in their 2016 book chapter, “barriers to critical pedagogy in information literacy teaching.” [↩] acrl framework, critical information literacy, information literacy, open peer review, scholarly communication, scholarly publishing user-centered provisioning of interlibrary loan: a framework critical optimism: reimagining rural communities through libraries 2 responses pingback : scholarship as an open conversation: utilizing open peer review in information literacy instruction – the idealis pingback : scholarship as an open conversation: utilizing open peer review in information literacy instruction | infodoc microveille this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct without foundations, we can’t build: information literacy and the need for strong school library programs – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 7 mar cara berg, darby malvey and maureen donohue /5 comments without foundations, we can’t build: information literacy and the need for strong school library programs in brief information literacy is an essential life skill, and learning information literacy starts when students begin their schooling in the k-12 years. however, a disturbing trend has arisen: the lack of school libraries, and librarians, in schools across the country. without a school librarian, students are not learning the foundations they need to become information literate. this paper, written from the perspective of a school, public, and academic librarian, discusses why school librarians are essential: not only for the k-12 students, but for information professionals and users of information everywhere. by cara berg, darby malvey, and maureen donohue introduction where do students learn to be information literate? ideally, students develop the foundations of information literacy during their formative years in school.  while classroom teachers play a pivotal role in a child’s development, the librarian is the school’s only information literacy expert, and often the only staff member with the education, expertise, and time to ensure that students are receiving a thorough education in this area. the absence or poor utilization of a certified school library media specialist (slms) has a deep, direct impact on k-12 students and those pursuing higher education: the problems and disadvantages affecting students without access to a certified slms have repercussions far beyond the classroom.  without the foundation an slms provides, students lack opportunities to develop information literacy skills, including the ability to analyze information for credibility, use information ethically, and conduct inquiry based research in order to seek information (donohue & keehbler, 2016). the loss of certified slms not only affects students throughout their studies, but also has far-reaching, real-world consequences. although many students may encounter other types of certified librarians throughout their lives, the loss of a strong information literacy foundation at an early age is often impossible for information professionals at the public or college library level to correct. this means that students who have had little or no access to certified slms face serious disadvantages as they enter institutions of higher education, the military, or the workforce. this is an issue that affects all facets of the library profession. in the state of new jersey, our anecdotal observations turned into actual data with the administration of a survey in 2016. the new jersey library association (njla) together with the new jersey association of school librarians (njasl) conducted a survey of over 1,500 school librarians in the state of new jersey. this survey was used to determine the current staffing of school librarians in public schools and the role of school librarians as educators. it was open for three months and over 600 responses were collected. the results determined that not only was there a severe decrease in the number of school librarians in public schools, but that the school librarians who were currently employed in a district were not being utilized for their professional expertise. according to donohue & keehbler (2016), “there are approximately 20% fewer school library media specialists (slms) in new jersey than there were in 2007-2008.” nearly 15% of  elementary level schools are “without certified school library media specialists” and “over 20% of high schools have no certified school library media specialist available to students” (p. 3). school librarians who were surveyed listed their additional duties throughout the day that took them away from their media centers and their students. survey respondents communicated that these responsibilities included covering lunches, serving as test coordinators, teaching computer/technology classes, supplementing administrative assistants, and substituting for other classes where teachers were absent. as a profession, it is vital that we examine the role of certified media specialists in the school setting, ensuring that our colleagues across the profession understand the important work school library media specialists do each day.  it is also important that we begin to identify the roles and responsibilities of the other information professionals too often tasked with trying to make up the difference for students without access to an slms. what are the challenges and obstacles these librarians face, and what are the limitations that prevent them from being able to assist those students who haven’t received the proper foundation?  assessing and understanding these issues is the first step in ensuring that all of our colleagues – not just those in the school setting – are able to successfully advocate for the reinstatement of certified slms in our nation’s public schools. the role of school librarians in schools for generations of us public school students, access to a highly qualified school librarian in their k-12 schools was a given.  school librarians were a ubiquitous part of a public school education, and were tasked with helping students and faculty tackle the world of information and research.  to most, getting a true education without access to a trained school librarian was an impossibility; assignments could not be completed, research needs could not be met, and students could not graduate prepared to tackle life inside or outside of academia without having gained critical information literacy skills in their formative years from their school librarians. in recent years, school librarians – rebranded school library media specialists (slms), as new technologies came into play – have performed equally essential roles in a rapidly evolving information environment.  in fact, many argue that a fast-paced, constantly changing information landscape makes qualified librarians more essential than ever in public schools. in their framework for learners, the american association of school librarians (2018) identifies several ways in which modern students must do more than simply locate information but rather must engage meaningfully with it, from curating resources to diversifying their inquiry processes. from our youngest kindergarten students to our graduating high school seniors, today’s us school children face an onslaught of media and information the likes of which no prior generation has seen. knowing how to locate, process, sort, and apply that information, and perhaps more importantly, knowing how to impart that knowledge to others, takes a specialized skill set unique to the training and education of a slms. at every stage of the k-12 educational process, qualified school librarians are one of the keys to a student’s success (kachel, 2013). in large part, this is because subject area teachers simply are not provided the time or training necessary to help students go from novices to competent researchers (aasl, 2012). when classroom teachers are able to collaborate with certified slms who enhance and support content-area lessons, students reap the reward. elementary school at the elementary school level, most commonly defined in the united states as kindergarten through grade 5, slms are responsible for helping to introduce students to the vast world of knowledge and information with which they will need to interact for the rest of their lives, and the technology that allows them to do so.  this is a time of intense curiosity and rapid intellectual growth for most students – and elementary school librarians must cater with equal attentiveness to both the 5-year-old kindergarten student who is just learning to read and the 11-year-old 5th grader who is struggling to complete research on the internet for the very first time.  although promoting a love of reading and care for library materials remains a key piece of the elementary library experience, at its core even the most bare-bones modern elementary library program should seek to help students answer several difficult questions, including: what are your interests and how can you find out more about them? how can you ask questions that help lead you to what you need?  once you know your questions, how do you decide who to ask? what is information and where can you go to safely look for it?  what technology is available to help you? when you find information that is helpful, how can you use it? these questions may seem simple, but the ability or inability to answer them has a profound effect on students both inside and outside of the classroom as they complete their elementary school education, and as they move on to upper grades.  the foundation provided by the quality lessons of an effective slms at this level supports the work of classroom teachers who strive to get their students thinking critically, making connections between units or texts, drawing on prior knowledge and experience to inform classroom learning, and developing a sense of self and an interest in personal growth (smith, 2006). in addition, certified slms are often leaders when it comes to addressing new content and curriculum standards, helping to guide both colleagues and students through the ever-changing standards that shape public education. even beyond the classroom, the skills taught by an elementary slms help young students begin to identify and, more importantly, articulate their interests and desires. these important benefits are compounded as students move on to upper grade levels in the middle school with more demanding academic requirements. middle school at the middle school or junior high level, most commonly comprised of grade levels 6 through 8, the role of the slms remains one of encouraging curiosity and helping students locate that which is relevant to their interests, beyond school assignments.  however, the librarian at this level becomes equally concerned with helping students begin to define when, why, and how to to choose and use specific information. while the elementary school librarian will often employ guided searches, limiting students’ research options to ensure that they are successful in their endeavours, the middle school slms and the classroom teachers with whom the slms collaborates face the daunting task of teaching students how to navigate the endless research options available.  much like the successful elementary school slms, the middle school slms will promote literacy and encourage a love of reading, but will also craft a school library program that teaches valuable skills and answers fundamental questions that simply can’t be tackled in the classroom alone. these questions include: what makes a source of information reliable, valuable, or authoritative? how can i determine the purpose or agenda of a publication, article, or web resource?  how does that agenda affect whether i choose to use that resource? how can i curate a list of resources that i trust? how can i structure my search process to be most effective? where can i turn for help when my search is not yielding useful results? as the questions our students must answer become more complicated, so, too, does the instruction.  at the middle school level, it becomes nearly impossible for classroom or subject teachers to provide adequate instruction in these areas, because as students begin conducting research in nearly all of their subjects, the level of expertise required to guide a student through the modern research process requires a true information professional.  a rapidly changing technology landscape, an ever-growing array of available sources, and the need to compete with what has become students’ first instinct (to “google it” or “ask siri”) means that those leading young people into the world of true research must be expertly trained and up-to-date. it is not only in the classroom, however, that an slms proves to be a vital resource for middle school students.  at this stage, students begin to conduct research relevant to their home lives and personal interests. this type of research may be more casual than that conducted for a classroom assignment, but it is no less important.  in fact, for many students, the searches they undertake beyond the classroom setting are perhaps the most vital. students engage with the vast information resources at their fingertips not only to begin shaping their own beliefs and opinions – on politics, religion, social issues, and more – but in many cases they also turn to the internet for answers to questions about sexuality, personal relationships, and mental, emotional, and physical health.  at these moments, middle school students – already of an age at which much in their lives is confusing – must be able to navigate their searches by recognizing bias, identifying reliable resources, and knowing how to ask for what it is they need. high school at the high school level, typically grades 9-12 in the us public school system, students begin to face the reality of life after school.  for some, this means continued education at a college, university, or trade school. for others, it means entering the workforce or joining the military. for all, it means that their ability to locate and evaluate information is about to be put to a very real, high-stakes test. whether attempting to locate the college that meets their needs, navigate the daunting process of online job searches and applications, or sort fact from propaganda as they make important life choices, high school students carry with them all of their information needs from middle school with the added necessity of beginning to use their information sorting and searching skills in real-world situations that directly impact their lives.  at this level, the slms not only continues to guide students through the academic exercises and resource evaluation begun at lower grade levels but also continues to curate a robust collection of literature and nonfiction materials of interest and value to students. they also take on the very important task of empowering young people to attend college, engage in the workforce, and prepare for the realities of adult life. the slms will use the knowledge students have gained over their many years of library instruction and begin teaching them to apply what they know to the decision-making process. rather than answering broad, overarching questions, what the high school slms does that no classroom teacher can do is tailor the skills she teaches to students’ individual needs. this is essential for students who need extra support for difficult or overwhelming research topics. as anderson (2011) points out, real-world examples from high schools have shown that when media specialists are removed, over-taxed teachers often find it necessary to simply cut research projects or information literacy skills from their lesson plans (p. 16). yet the questions students must successfully answer are simultaneously deeply personal and intrinsically tied to the realities of the outside world, requiring true information literacy skills. some such questions might include: who will i vote for, and how will i make my choice?   what factors are important to me when deciding on which college to go to, and where can i find that information?   what matters to me as i decide where to rent an apartment or buy a house?  where will i look for reliable data to guide me? which careers interest me? what kind of outlook do those careers have in terms of job availability, pay, and working conditions? as is evidenced by the above questions, many us high school students are facing real choices that may affect their whole lives, and some are doing so with very little guidance from trusted adults. at this point in their lives, students who have had access to a comprehensive k-8 school library program with a qualified slms have a significant advantage over their peers, and those who continue to have access to a 9-12 program are positioned more favorably still. this is because the high school slms not only helps students access databases and scholarly resources for school assignments, teaches them how to responsibly and ethically use information, and guides them through the process of finding resources that meet their personal needs, but also points them toward a future in which they will be able to employ a critical eye and a questioning mind as they interact with information through the remainder of their lives. the need for school libraries. a public librarian perspective a public library and a school library are a perfect partnership, sharing many of the same goals including equity of access to information and resources for students, lifelong learning, and critical use of information and technology (njasl, 2010). both libraries wish for their students and student patrons to be knowledgeable and informed citizens.  when one half of this partnership does not exist, students become disadvantaged and become an underserved population not ready for an information age. a public librarian can serve patrons from an early childhood age until long into their adult lives. from board books and storytimes for infants, to adult book clubs and homebound services for the elderly, a public library plays a broad role in its community and a public librarian provides patrons with lifelong learning (ifla, 2004). the most important role, arguably, is serving the student community. public librarians serve students in grades kindergarten through college during after school hours, on weekends, and on school vacations. these public librarians who serve student populations rely heavily on school librarians to teach students information literacy skills so that public librarians can support their curricula during those after school hours (abram, 2011). in 2016, the new jersey library association (njla) put out a call on new jersey to support highly effective school library programs, stating that “school libraries are a safe learning environment where all students have equal and equitable access to learning, support, and information for personal and educational purposes. njla believes that our schools must serve as an ‘equalizer’ to provide all students with equal and equitable access to the resources, support and instruction necessary to succeed academically and become productive and engaged citizens in a democratic society” (njla, 2016). in the 21st century world in which we currently live, students must be able to navigate the information world accurately and credibly. without school librarians and effective school library programs, public librarians become burdened with the additional task of having to teach students basic research skills, digital literacy skills, digital citizenship skills, and many more skills that fall under the umbrella of information literacy. why a public librarian cannot replace a school librarian legally, a public librarian should not replace a school librarian simply because a public librarian is unqualified. a slms in the state of new jersey is required to take additional classes for a separate certification during their master’s coursework that makes them specifically qualified to obtain a position in a school setting. according to the rutgers master of information program website (2018), this additional course plan is approved by the state and it is a requirement for school library certification. the school library media specialization has been designed to meet the new jersey department of education requirements to become certified as a school library media specialist by the state of new jersey.  with this degree librarians can work in elementary and secondary creating collections, providing information on literacy education and collaborating with teachers to provide a wide range of learning opportunities for students (rutgers, 2016, p. 1). these additional requirements make a slms a “specialist” when working with students in a classroom setting. this is a specialty that a public librarian does not have. public librarians who serve a student population do, however, have other specialties.  one of those specialties is to act as a support for students in many other areas of their lives.  the areas can range from mental health support (takahashi, 2016) to readers’ advisory support, and programming to support effective peer communication skills. these areas can be extremely broad but extremely important, leaving little to no time to replace a school librarian and their duties. public librarians are trained only to reinforce research skills and critical thinking skills in support of school libraries. why a school librarian/school library is important to a public librarian when a librarian comes across a student who has not had the opportunity to access an information literacy curriculum during their education, both the student and the public librarian become disadvantaged. the short interaction that a public librarian has with a student is extremely important and will determine if the student feels their needs were met. a student who experiences a frustrating and disappointing reference interview is at risk of never returning to the public library, resulting in a student who will lack out of school education such as homework help and access to resources for questions related to academia, health, and finances. all of which relate to life long learning. a common reference interview between a librarian and a patron aids both parties. not only does it allow the librarian to know exactly what the patron needs but also, by asking the right questions, it allows the patron to explore what their exact needs are. however, the interview becomes meaningless if the student does not know what to do with the information they were just given. without school librarians and effective school library programs, public librarians will come across more and more students who cannot efficiently access and navigate databases. students will leave the public library discouraged and angry that they could not complete their assignment and librarians will be discouraged that they cannot effectively support what is supposed to be taught to the student during school hours. from a student’s perspective, one who has been exposed to a school library and an effective school library program sees a public library as a backup, or an alternative location that can provide them assistance for their academic needs. however, a student who has not had access to either a school librarian or an effective school library program (an issue of inequity) will not only have trouble navigating resources and databases, but they will have trouble navigating the physical library. a public librarian cannot effectively do their job if a student is afraid to simply walk through the doors or approach a librarian. public librarians rely very heavily on school librarians to set the standard for not only what students are capable of in a library but also what a librarian is capable of doing for the student. the need for school libraries: an academic librarian’s perspective for an academic librarian, school librarians are a crucial ally in facilitating information literate students. it begins with the aasl standards and continues to the association of college and research libraries (acrl) framework for information literacy for higher education (2015). together, those two documents give us the guidance for students from k-12 and then beyond. burke (2017) examines the 2009 aasl standards for 21st century learners and discusses the linear structure versus the more fluid aspects of the 2016 acrl framework. burke points out that due to the structure of both the standards and the framework, there might be a gap in student learning. she also provides a sample of the language of the standards and the similar learning objectives of the framework. since the publication of burke’s article, the aasl standards have undergone a revision and, while not fully nonlinear like the acrl framework, the standards and framework now share several concepts and ideas. to get to the mastery of skills noted in the acrl framework, students must learn the basic skills outlined in the aasl standards. there is a clear link between many of the frames in the aasl standards to the frames of the acrl framework. the chart below matches one of the frames from the aasl standards to the acrl framework: comparison of an aasl standards frame and an acrl framework frame aasl standards framework for learners acrl framework for information literacy in higher education ii. include, b. create authority is constructed and contextual learners adjust their awareness of the global learning community by: interacting with learners who reflect a range of perspectives. evaluating a variety of perspectives during learning activities. representing diverse perspectives during learning activities. develop and maintain an open mind when encountering varied and sometimes conflicting perspectives develop awareness of the importance of assessing content with a skeptical stance and with a self-awareness of their own biases and worldview question traditional notions of granting authority and recognize the value of diverse ideas and worldviews this table focuses on the “include-create” frame and the “authority is constructed and contextual” frame. for students to get to a point where they have an open mind and are looking at diverse perspectives, they need to have experience with those skills. learning to evaluate different ideas and mindsets with learning activities in k-12 will set them up to evaluate their own bias and critically look at different sources with an open mind. threshold conceptsand the idea behind the acrl frameworkis to, like riding a bike, permanently learn the skill. to achieve that skill, the students need the background that would come from exposure to the aasl standards. the acrl framework does not exist in a vacuum without the aasl standards; the concepts covered in the framework assume students have acquired the skills in k-12 to be able to perform college-level research. however, that is not usually the case. students often come to college overwhelmed by the research process. the 2013 project information literacy study interviewed students entering college on their information literacy skills and found that many of their interviewees found college research overwhelming. in addition to struggling with the task of college level research, students arrived at a place that had, on average, 19 times as many databases as a high school library (head, 2013). academic librarians find themselves unable to cover the higher-level concepts without covering the basic concepts from k-12. many college courses have prerequisites, however there are no prerequisites for library instruction or research. for example: a popular assignment in college is for students to find sources, many times scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles. librarians can focus their information literacy session on how to distinguish a scholarly peer-reviewed journal article from a trade publication. however, without learning what a periodical issomething that should have been learned at k-12 level, the concept of what a scholarly peer-reviewed journal article is becomes impossible. the disconnect becomes a major issue of equity. students who have had the instruction and the research in k-12 are better prepared – they have seen databases such as those provided by the vendor, ebsco and have received specific instructions on how to search. students without that instruction have never seen the databases before and don’t understand the concept of keyword searching, boolean operators, or other information literacy skills. some people may be quick to say that since colleges have librarians, this is not an issue as the students will see the librarian once they enroll at their chosen higher education institution. that is not true. first, while many colleges and universities have innovative library instruction programs to ensure that all or most students in their first year attend an information literacy session, that is simply not guaranteed in all universities. in addition, if students have never interacted with a librarian before, they might not know that reference librarians exist and what they to expect if they talk to one. finally, if librarians are trying to get the students up to speed for what they should have learned in k-12, they will be unable to bring students to the level that they need to be at for college level research. college faculty and adjuncts, unaware of this disconnect, will assign research papers based on their own learning outcomes and the course skill level. why an academic librarian cannot replace a school librarian an academic librarian cannot replace a school librarian in the same way in which a college professor cannot replace a first grade teacher. school librarians generally receive a different type of training than academic librarians – the coursework for obtaining their mlis reflects this training. while academic librarians possess the mlis, they do not necessarily take the coursework that school librarians do. that coursework prepares school librarians for the challenges they will face not only as librarians but as professionals who interacts with children and students, like a teacher, guidance counselor, or other k-12 professional. the academic librarian cannot replicate what is taught in k-12. instead, the academic librarian should look to work with school librarians on collaborations that enhance the students’ information literacy skills. saunders, severyn, and caron (2017) surveyed high school and college librarians and found a discrepancy between what high school and college librarians think each other teaches their students. they also noted the “dim view of student abilities related to information literacy” (p. 279) shared by both college and high school librarians. the recommended approach is for more collaboration between high school and college librarians. this was also echoed in varlejs (2013), who looked at the information literacy gap between high school and college students. finally, when evaluating her study on students’ information skills as they enter college, head (2013) states, “it was not that [the students] were not good at researchthey were entirely new to research…we believe it is imperative for higher education librarians and educators to recognize the plight of school libraries” (p. 31). what’s next/advocacy/call to action we have identified in the preceding paragraphs why school librarians are essential, and why librarians outside of k-12 should be alarmed about what is going on. in our home state of new jersey, the new jersey library association has formed a school libraries task force to address this issue. the task force has started campaigns, made legislative visits, and currently has two bills in the new jersey state assembly that, if passed, would respectively mandate a school librarian in each school based on school enrollment and integrate an information literacy curriculum to be instructed by a certified slms. we know in the state of new jersey we have a lot of work to do, but we are happy that our work has raised awareness so far. we also know that the more librarians from diverse specialities who are made aware of this issue, the stronger our voices will be in addressing our needs. we know that librarians need to advocate for themselves, but if we advocate strictly for our own specialties, we miss the bigger picture – that all libraries need each other and all librarians are essential. whether you are a slms or not, advocacy can be as simple as: inquiring about the school library staffing situation where you live, where you work, or where your loved ones live. does each school have a certified slms? does that slms have school library duties? are students exposed to that slms on a regular basis? contacting your legislators. write them letters, send them an email, call their office. let them know how important a school librarian is to our students and their future. forming a partnership. reach out to fellow librarians and start the discussion on how a strong foundation of information literacy and research skills taught by a slms allows the opportunity to build students who are ready for the 21st century. no matter how you choose to participate, advocacy has been and will continue to be the key to ensuring that students in our home state and states across the nation have equitable access to the types of high-quality, professional school library programs they deserve. while we speak from our own experiences as new jersey librarians, this issue does not affect new jersey alone: this is a nationwide issue. the literature we’ve reviewed and the studies we’ve examined include data and opinions from a variety of different states around the country. if we, as librarians, ignore something so vital to our profession, we’ll one day find this problem impossible to rectify. the work we do as librarians is essential and meaningful to our students and communities. that work starts with the school librarian. acknowledgements the authors graciously thank sofia leung, bethany messersmith, and heather dalal for the guidance, careful consideration, and assistance during this process. we are truly grateful. references abram, s. (2011). “the pipeline: school library/public library partnerships”. internet@schools, 18 (4), p. 21-22. american association of school librarians. (2012). “school libraries count! national longitudinal survey of school library programs.” retrieved from: http://www.ala.org/aasl/sites/ala.org.aasl/files/content/researchandstatistics/slcsurvey/2012/aasl-slc-2012-web.pdf american association of school librarians. (2018) “aasl standards framework for learners.” retrieved from: http://standards.aasl.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/aasl-standards-framework-for-learners-pamphlet.pdf anderson, m. (2011). “what happens when media positions are cut?” library media connection, 29 (6), p. 16-18. association of college and research libraries (2015). framework for information literacy for higher education, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework burke, j. (2017). “from the aasl standards to the acrl framework: higher education shifts in pedagogical strategies”. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/from-aasl-standards-to-the-acrl-framework-higher-education-shifts-in-pedagogical-strategies/ donohue, m. and keehbler, j. (2016). school library programs in new jersey: building blocks for realizing student potential with essa legislation opportunities. retrieved from: https://njla.org/sites/default/files/2016essaandnjschoollibraryprograms.pdf häggström b.m. (2004). the role of libraries in lifelong learning: final report of the ifla project under the section for public libraries. retrieved from: https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/public-libraries/publications/lifelong-learning-report-2004.pdf head, a (2013). “learning the ropes: how freshmen conduct course research once they enter college.” project information literacy research report: the passage studies. retrieved from: http://www.projectinfolit.org/uploads/2/7/5/4/27541717/pil_2013_freshmenstudy_fullreportv2.pdf “information literacy education: equity of opportunity for nj students” (2016). unlock student potential. retrieved from: http://unlockstudentpotential.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/infoliteracyonepage.pdf new jersey association of school librarians, new jersey library association (2010). fact sheet: public libraries and school libraries. retrieved from: http://unlockstudentpotential.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/njpublicvsschoollibs.pdf new jersey library association (2016). new jersey library association calls on new jersey to support highly effective school library programs. retrieved from: https://njla.org/sites/default/files/njlastatementonschoollibraryprograms.pdf rutgers school of communication and information (2018). master of information program information. retrieved from: https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/academics/graduate/master-information/master-information-program-information rutgers school of communication and information (2016). school library media specialist course study. retrieved from: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19jxj6w7s4jnoj2xsuutlg73-pgasjc_vktenvqkluno/edit#heading=h.l4envayz4abz saunders, l., severyn, j., and caron, j. (2017). “don’t they teach that in high school? examining the high school to college information literacy gap.” library and information science research, 39 (4), p. 276-283. smith, e. (2006). student learning through wisconsin school library media centers [case study]. madison, wi: division for libraries, technology and community learning. takahashi, d. (2016). the calm before the storm: how teens and libraries can fight mental illness. retrieved from: http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2016/05/29/the-calm-before-the-storm-how-teens-and-libraries-can-fight-mental-illness/ varlejs, j. and stec, e. (2014). “factors affecting students’ information literacy as they transition from high school to college.” school library research, 17, p. 1-23. academic libraries, advocacy, collaboration, information literacy, public libraries, school library media specialist editorial: what we’ve been up to user-centered provisioning of interlibrary loan: a framework 5 responses pingback : is a school librarian necessary? – cass gee pingback : supporting school librarians – not just a luxury | techielibrarian pingback : the last five, march 11 – paradox/paradigm laura krier 2018–04–07 at 10:24 am while i agree that students would be better prepared for higher education and life in general if they received some information literacy education in primary and secondary schools, i don’t know how much evidence there is that in the past school librarians were ubiquitous or that they taught information literacy. i’d like to see more evidence to support this claim. i also don’t agree that academic librarians expect students to already have a range of il-related skills on entering university. i think instructors outside of the library do, but in the library we know that these are skills that still need to be developed. certified smls in schools who are integrated into classroom instruction would likely make a huge difference in their learning. so would having a lot of the resources lacking from public schools. but i don’t think their absence is new. mlr 2018–09–27 at 6:50 am excellent article. your research highlights illustrates the importance of the progression from k to college to life long learner of each librarian in their particular setting. i will be using your article to advocate for my k-8 program this year. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct on scholarly communication and the digital humanities: an interview with kathleen fitzpatrick – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 14 jan andrew lopez, fred rowland and kathleen fitzpatrick /5 comments on scholarly communication and the digital humanities: an interview with kathleen fitzpatrick photo of a class in radio technology at radcliffe college 1922. retrieved from wikimedia commons.   in brief: at temple university libraries (tul), librarian fred rowland began conducting interviews and sharing them as streaming audio through tul’s website in 2007. the following interview transcript with digital humanities scholar kathleen fitzpatrick offers insight into her work and a discussion about the future of scholarly communication. an introduction has been added to the interview, which addresses both the transcription process and the implications of using digital media to make more scholarship available to a wider audience beyond academia. by andrew lopez, fred rowland, and kathleen fitzpatrick introduction in 2007, librarian fred rowland started recording and sharing his own interviews with students, scholars, and practitioners on the temple university libraries website. the interviews are noteworthy not just for the reasons any interview would be, but because they capture some of the creative intellectual energy that circulates through an academic institution on a regular basis. they are furthermore conducted by a librarian, which is not typical. to give a sense of what the interviews accomplish, consider rowland’s discussion with the editors of the journal n+1. when the editors visited temple university to talk about their experience starting a print journal in the midst of the online transformation of the early 2000s, rowland made arrangements to sit down and talk with them on record about their work. his n+1 interview offers unique insight into the formation of a significant publication at a particular historical moment. it also serves as a record of what transpired on the occasion of their visit. indeed, something similar would need to be said for each of the many interviews rowland has conducted over the course of the last eight years; a growing body of work that merits further consideration. in 2015, rowland’s interviews continue to offer high quality, original content from the front lines of research and publishing. from the perspective of a fellow librarian, his interviews can be seen as an example of professional and scholarly engagement.  he asks smart questions of a diverse cohort of academics whom we might not otherwise encounter. my interest in his work, and the desire to transcribe it, developed alongside the expansion of his outreach. gradually, my interest took the form of a concern, first about the findability of the interviews via keyword searching online, and later about their longevity as potentially valuable primary documents. how is anyone going to find these interviews? and how long are the audio files going to last? in my opinion, such rich dialogue should be transcribed and published in order to increase access to it, in order to make it easier to cite should anyone wish to reference its contents, and in order to preserve it as part of the historical record. though it is tempting to see the transcribed interview as simply another way of accessing the same content, it is important to draw a distinction between the audio recording and the transcription. the meaning of the original interview slips and slides at each stage of editing and through the transformation from one medium to the next. kathleen fitzpatrick’s participation in the interview transcribed and published below is an example of the engagement she encourages scholars to make outside the peer-review process. she is concerned that the current grip of peer-review on tenure, promotion, and recognition prevents humanities scholars from taking advantage of the innovative and creative possibilities of new technologies. by participating in informal interviews such as the one that follows, scholars would likely lose some control over their message as it passes from one form and audience to another (although fitzpatrick’s participation as a reviewer in this publication helps ameliorate that effect here).  as she explains during her conversation with rowland, scholars get a little nervous when moving outside traditional venues for just this reason. reliance on the monograph has always offered humanities scholars the illusion of control as their work is likely to reach but a small coterie of like-minded academics and enthusiasts who share a similar background and orientation. digital media and the internet have the potential to expand the audience of scholarly work beyond the confines of the academy, if only scholars are willing to work towards such developments. this is both an exciting and unsettling prospect. in order to breathe new life into the humanities and reach wider audiences, scholars will need to learn to negotiate these uncertain and ambiguous encounters. given the longstanding relationships between librarians and scholars, the academic library becomes an important pivot-point in this process of engagement between the world of scholarship and wider communities of interest. librarians have a long history of building personal and professional relationships that encourage conversations across communities, and the academic library is increasingly becoming a hub of publishing support and expertise. as they make the work of scholarship available to wider audiences, academic libraries can play an essential role in loosening the grip of traditional peer-review on the career choices of scholars. around the turn of the century, with two decades of experience in the book trade, and a privileged perspective on the rise of the internet, rowland began working as a librarian in classics, philosophy, religion, and economics. his interviews take place in his small, modest office, decorated with books, family photos, a few buddhas, and a bust of shakespeare. though it is understood that recordings of the interviews will be posted to his blog on the temple university libraries website, it is important to recognize there is no audience at the time of recording, making each interview a rather intimate scholarly conversation between author and librarian. the two participants respond to physical and verbal queues in order to develop a sense of shared meaning. the author provides greater or lesser details and explanations depending on her intuitions and assumptions of the librarian’s knowledge and understanding. in relative terms, this is an impromptu encounter for a scholar, more dance than lecture. once the interview is over, the editing begins, as rowland prepares the conversation for an audience. a preliminary effort is made to remove verbal prompts, hiccups, and pauses. unnecessary signals of agreement or understanding are truncated and digressions deleted. though rowland does not go out of his way to shorten his interviews, the audience’s brief attention span must be considered. once the edited recording is posted online, the encounter has already been stripped of some of its context, and, short of some kind of pre-publication agreement, the scholar’s message is increasingly dependent upon the kindness of strangers. the audio introduction rowland provides before the interview is an additional opportunity to layer in a meaning over which the author has no control. the text of the blog post adds yet another layer. the move between forms of media – from audio recording to transcript – is one more step, and arguably the longest, away from the original encounter. as with the audio editing, accuracy in transcription involves finding some further balance between recording every utterance in all of its detail and stripping out the more detailed idiosyncrasies of speech that may be considered irrelevant. as more of the context is stripped out in transcription, however, what remains of the conversation that took place in rowland’s office? as fitzpatrick goes to read the following transcript, one can imagine her thinking at various points that she should have finished this thought, or rephrased that question, or taken the time to explain some important background information. scholars, who pride themselves on accuracy, precision, and message control, and whose careers are so dependent on reception by peers, might be anxious and reluctant to enter a wider cultural orbit. the intervention that kathleen fitzpatrick advocates is actually much greater than engaging in a few interviews. she and her colleagues are working to influence the scholarly publishing environment in ways that make alternate venues such as blogs and podcasts more respectable as a means of scholarly recognition. in this interview she discusses her experiences with the communities that form around blogs and her experiments in peer-to-peer review. not only do these forms make scholarly work available to the wider public and encourage its response, but they do something more novel in terms of scholarship. they show the scholar’s work in process, as fragments, that precede the finished product in the form of a book or journal article. instead of the monograph springing fully formed from the mind of the scholar, we begin to see the building blocks, like a painter in her studio. if this ethos in scholarship takes hold, we will see an increasing emphasis on the processes – the conversations, the blind alleys, the preliminary judgments and analyses – that are currently obscured from view. the scholars who have agreed to interviews with rowland over the past eight years should be congratulated on their willingness to open up their scholarship to the public. it is one very small but important step in transforming the relationship between the academy and the wider world. kathleen fitzpatrick has been particularly gracious and generous through this whole process, a fine example of the engagement she advocates for her peers in academia. the following interview between rowland and fitzpatrick took place on march 7, 2013, at temple university, before fitzpatrick gave a lecture at the center for the humanities entitled “the humanities in and for the digital age.” it provides an introduction to her work, her two books the anxiety of obsolescence: the american novel in the age of television and planned obsolescence: publishing, technology, and the future of the academy, as well as a discussion about the meaning of the digital humanities, the crisis in publishing, the history of peer review, and what’s in store for the future of scholarly communication. in discussing these topics, rowland and fitzpatrick address an array of philosophical questions pertaining to the internet’s effect on the human brain, the status of attention, what counts as knowledge, our notions of the author and the text, and the history of reading. rowland’s references to recent books, such as nicholas carr’s the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains and robert darnton’s the case for books: past, present, and future, add substantially to the conversation. interview audio of interview fred rowland (fr): kathleen fitzpatrick is the director of scholarly communication at the modern language association and a visiting faculty member in the english department at new york university. her graduate work was concentrated in contemporary american fiction and media studies, resulting in her first book, the anxiety of obsolescence: the american novel in the age of television, which analyzed the anxiety and vested interests surrounding the purported demise of literature. she began a blog shortly after completing anxiety of obsolescence called planned obsolescence, because she was, as she writes in the introduction, “left with the detritus of many smaller ideas that demanded a kind of immediacy, and yet seemed destined to fade into nothingness” (planned 7). at the invitation of scholars at the institute for the future of the book, she participated in the founding of the online collaborative called mediacommons, which, in the words of its website, is a community network for scholars, students, and practitioners in media studies promoting the exploration of new forms of publishing. her work on her blog and mediacommons led to her second book, planned obsolescence: publishing, technology, and the future of the academy, a fascinating and incisive look at the future of publishing and scholarship in the academy. kathleen fitzpatrick gave a lecture at the center for the humanities at temple on march 7, 2013, entitled “the humanities in and for the digital age.” before her talk she kindly stopped by my office to discuss her work in scholarly communication and the digital humanities. i am fred rowland. [1:44] fr: kathleen fitzpatrick, thank you very much for speaking with me. kathleen fitzpatrick (kf): well thank you for having me. fr: i was wondering if you would just talk a little bit about your first book, the anxiety of obsolescence: the american novel in the age of television. what is it about, and what were you trying to accomplish? [1:59] kf: well i had been hearing for years, as long as i could remember, that the novel was a form under threat, that the novel was this dying form that no one was paying any attention to anymore. and that new forms like television or film or what have you were taking over the cultural brain space. and so what i was interested in was less trying to figure out whether that was true or not. i sort of began from the presupposition that it was not actually true, because there are more novels published every year than there ever have been in history. instead, i was trying to figure out why we claim that the novel is a dying form and what purposes those claims serve. and what i found the longer i looked into the question was that the claim of the novel’s obsolescence serves to protect it in a certain way from the onslaught of these new forms. it sort of creates what i like to refer to as a cultural wildlife preserve. [3:02] fr: yes, what do you mean by that exactly? kf: it’s a protected space within which we can understand that this threatened form deserves some kind of special treatment. it needs to be protected in order to preserve the heritage of our culture as it has been practiced for centuries. as you can hear in that kind of rhetoric, this notion of cultural heritage and preservation, often what we’re talking about is a fairly conservative impulse. to protect the old from the encroachment of the new. so what i was really interested in in this volume is attempting to think about what that new was.  and what kinds of dangers the novel felt like it was being threatened by. [3:55] fr: and the authors, who are the authors you were dealing with? kf: in that book i am primarily dealing with thomas pynchon and don delillo. but a host of associated authors, who are working in that same postmodern vein, are also thinking about the ways the cultural landscape in the united states is changing in the period of television’s onset. fr: you give one example, and this was a fairly well known example, because it broke into the public space, about a certain conflict that developed on oprah. i remember that, but i wasn’t really paying attention at the time. how does that feed into your book and your argument about these tensions? kf: this moment of conflict that you’re talking about is of course the kerfuffle between jonathan franzen and oprah winfrey (fitzpatrick, anxiety 1-2). when oprah had extended an invitation to franzen to appear as part of her book club, she had adopted the corrections as one of the book club’s books. and franzen said something pretty unfortunate in an interview not really expecting it to get around in the way that it did. and it seemed to indicate that oprah’s audience was not the kind of audience he was hoping that the corrections would reach, and that he was kind of uncomfortable having the oprah seal of approval on the cover of his book. and oprah’s response was to disinvite him and to end that period of the book club’s conversation with the corrections. there was this tremendous brouhaha that came up around this. everybody felt like they had to take sides. either franzen was absolutely right, and we were seeing the encroaching commercialization of literature… fr: the downfall of literature… [5:48] kf: absolutely, and the ways that corporate media was really encroaching on the space of free expression. or, there were the folks who were defending oprah by noting that franzen’s approach to understanding literature was a fairly elitist one and that his description of oprah’s audience was dismissive at best. fr: especially since she did get a lot of people to read good books. [6:12] kf: exactly. so i don’t entirely take a side in that debate, although i am clearly in the course of the book more interested in the kinds of opening up of the audience that television is able to perform in the ways that oprah is able to bring people to the book who wouldn’t have been there otherwise. but i think it’s a really emblematic moment of exactly this conflict between television and the literary. [6:46] fr: this got me wondering about a book i read recently called the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains. it’s a fairly good book, which i really enjoyed, and it was recommended to me by someone else here on campus. the author describes how he was able to get away from his iphone and his facebook and his various electronic accounts. he moved with his family to a very pristine environment in colorado to write this book about the internet. he presents a lot of scientific information about how the internet is rewiring our brains. and it is very interesting. but when i read something like this i also think to myself of my mother telling me as a young boy “don’t sit too close to the television because it will ruin your eyes,” or because it will do this or that to you. and so i wanted your opinion, you know i also think about when the web first became widely available there were just real millennial expositions on how the internet and the web were going to transform everything. they were going to make democracy break out all over the world, they were going to destabilize all of the powerful forces. so it seems like you’ve got, on the one hand, the utopian dreaming, and now there’s sort of a dystopian feeling creeping in here. although there’s some true stuff to what he writes. [8:29] kf: it is undoubtedly true that the internet, that our iphones, that all of the different forms of technology that we’re surrounded by change the ways that we interact with the world. it is unquestioned. but the degree of that change, and whether it’s actually rewiring our brains, i think, is really under question. there are other folks who are writing about this same kind of question. i think of cathy davidson, for instance, who recently moved from duke university to cuny. she suggests that the mode of the internet’s distribution of attention – rather than having the sort of deep focus that long form print has long had, the ability to think in nonlinear, connected, more distributed ways – is highlighting different kinds of skills that students and workers today really need to develop in order to cope with multiple information streams at multiple times. so all of this suggests that, yes, the internet is producing different modes of learning and different modes of thinking, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. my sense is that, as you say, these kinds of anxieties about what the internet is doing to us are very, very familiar. they’re very much the same as the concerns about what television was doing to us. television was turning us all into couch potatoes, television was disconnecting us from one another, etc. all of those kinds of things. and yet, none of that seems to really have borne out. the american public hasn’t entirely dissociated itself from reality, it hasn’t become any lazier than it used to be. [10:28] fr: this was particularly a strong feeling for me, because my father actually locked the tv away in the closet during the school week when i was growing up. he would bring out the tv, we would be waiting for him to get home on friday evening so he could unlock the tv…[laughter] kf: literally unlock the tv, that’s great… fr: it’s very interesting now with my own kids and their devices that just seem, no matter what you try to do, they seem to proliferate, because there’s always at least one or two really good reasons why you should have these things. [11:14] kf: i got asked a question not too long ago that i thought was really important in this regard about teaching in the age of all of these divergent information streams constantly coming in. i was asked you know in this kind of environment, how do you command student attention? and all i could think was that attention really is not something to be commanded. fr: yes, you’ve never been able to command attention… [11:40] kf: exactly, it’s something to be channelled. what we’re learning from the internet is the increasing ability to channel attention in multiple ways in different forms at different times. fr: yes, so in your book, in both of your books, you treat both anxiety and obsolescence. but they are in relatively different contexts. in the first book, you describe it as literary criticism. by the time you get to your second book it’s clearly something else. you’re talking about scholarly communication, the digital humanities. how did you get from the first book to the second book? i know that you had a blog called planned obsolescence. could you talk about this transformation? [12:45] kf: sure. the anxiety of obsolescence, the first book, was published in 2006, but i finished writing the book more or less as we know it now in june 2002. at that point, i thought ridiculously optimistically it was going to be about a year and a half before the book would be read by anybody. and i had all of these ideas that were left over and stirring about from having finished the book. so i thought i am going to start one of these blog things that i’ve been hearing about. and i’m going to put some of these ideas out there and see if i can get conversations going. and very quickly, at least by academic terms, i really did get those conversations going. i developed an audience, i found other academic bloggers, there was a real community that developed around these blogs. and it became a real source of energy and engagement, and the development of really fun work. [12:43] at the same time all of that’s going on, i’m trying to get this book published. and i had had interest in the manuscript a few years before from some academic presses that i really was excited about the possibility of working with. they had told me as soon as you’re done with the manuscript, send it on to us and we’ll take a look. and when i did in june 2002 when i finished up the manuscript, all of those presses that had previously been interested came back and said we still love this project, and we’d love to publish it, but we just can’t afford to right now. fr: it was right after the internet bubble collapsed. [14:18] kf: exactly. and i started discovering that it wasn’t just those presses. they weren’t unusual in the university press landscape at that point. everybody was in this same kind of circumstance in which they were having to scale back the numbers of titles that they were publishing, they were having to think of things other than sheer quality in order to make publication decisions. and this put a great difficulty in the path of authors of first books, authors who did not already have track records with university presses. so instead of taking a year and a half for people to get their hands on this book, it ended up taking four years. [15:01] it was in the process of attempting to get that book published, while keeping this blog, that i started thinking about what scholarly communication was becoming, what it could be if it were all online in the form of a blog, and why we still need the book and what the book might become as we go forward. so i started at first writing on my blog about it, then writing some extended articles, and then the next thing you knew i woke up one day and realised that everything i had been doing was developing into the book, planned obsolescence. [15:36] fr: so i guess did this surprise you, the path of your career? kf: [laughter] it did. it was not an expected path. looking back on it, it makes perfect sense. fr: right, you were dealing with those issues in anxiety of obsolescence. were you at any point concerned for your career, because you were going from a recognized academic field, literature, into something that is interesting, it’s exciting, it’s developing, but as far as tenure decisions, that kind of thing? [16:15] kf: sure, i had always been a little bit fringey even within literary criticism. i was working on contemporary fiction, which was very popular with the students, i’ll put it that way, but it had less purchase within english departments per se. even more, i was working on this media studies stuff. i mean, what did television have to do with english departments? fr: and then, you studied television in terms of literature in your first book, but were you studying television outside that, in more general terms? kf: television as television? my position at pomona college was joint between english and media studies, and so i was teaching classes that were focused on television in american culture and focused much more directly on the media per se. [17:04] fr: i spoke with somebody who studies film here [at temple university]. since my children watch tv, and i try to limit it, but they certainly do watch it. what i found with my son watching tv was that he would really engage with some of these shows and he really enjoyed some of these shows. and i asked her [this person at temple university], my question to her was, is there something going on when you watch tv that’s more than just passive absorbing of information, because what i saw and what it seemed like i was seeing was a real engagement with the content that was not wholly pernicious. [17:45] kf: absolutely! fr: and so the same questions are going on with the internet with people spending time and absorbing things from the internet. the questions do seem to be very similar in many respects. kf: absolutely, going back to this whole couch potato idea. we have this idea that the process of watching television is a wholly passive one. we lie back and the story comes at you. but it’s never been that passive. because it’s always been about sharing television with someone. talking with your family, talking with your friends; kids reenacting television shows on the playground. there’s always been this kind of activity around it. so i think that similarly we think of the internet as being populated by bloggers in their pajamas in the basement. and in fact there’s real substantive intellectual and communal engagement that takes place in all of these networked spaces. [18:45] fr: how would you define the digital humanities? kf: for me it has to do with the work that gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study. and that happens in two different ways. on the one hand, it’s bringing the tools and techniques of digital media to bear on traditional humanistic questions. but it’s also bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital media. it’s a sort of moving back and forth across those lines, thinking about what computing is, how it functions in our culture, and then using those computing technologies to think about the more traditional aspects of culture. [19:34] fr: okay, good. your first chapter in planned obsolescence is about peer review. when it comes to scholarly communication, peer review is what holds everything together, or prevents real changes in the system. could you give us a little background on how peer review developed? kf: sure. you’re absolutely right that peer review is the lynchpin in all of this. when we were in the process of beginning to found new digital scholarly communication networks online, the first question everybody asked is what are you going to do about peer review? peer review has a couple of different histories that get told. one of which, the most common that you’ll hear, is that at a certain point in its past the royal society of london, which had developed the first recognizable academic journal, philosophical transactions, made the decision that it was going to send everything that was being considered for publication in philosophical transactions out to be reviewed by at least two members of the academy prior to its inclusion. and this is sort of the moment that gets described as being the onset of peer review. [20:47] there is another history that mario biagioli unfolds in his study of peer review, which is to say that peer review doesn’t actually begin with the royal society of london or with journal publications, that there is an earlier form that takes place around the printing of books in the first place. and that in england in particular in order to receive royal permission to print books the printer of those books had to take responsibility for the content in them. and so the crown passed to the printer this royal imprimatur, this royal approval to print this kind of material under the assumption that the printer would not allow anything that was libelous or heretical to pass through its processes. and so the first form of peer review, biagioli argues, was in fact a mode of censorship. that controlled the material that was being produced so that it wouldn’t anger the crown. [21:51] but what happens is that when the royal society gets founded, that imprimatur passes to the society and the society agrees that nothing that it publishes will have any endangering aspects to the crown. and so one of the forms that this form of censorship morphs into is peer review, instead of the sort of external censoring official governmental control over what’s being produced; instead it’s sort of internal self-policing. and so biagioli comes to suggest that peer review is a profoundly foucauldian mode of creating discipline. and literally discipline as we understand it in that michel foucault sense, but also discipline in the sense of the academic structuring of knowledge. knowledge comes to be regulated through the form of peer review. and in this way it comes to seem that peer review is not just about filtering potential material that can be published for quality, but is instead about policing the boundaries of what can be considered knowledge. in that respect, the internet poses great challenges…[23:19] fr: yes… kf: …to the nature of peer review. and not simply because anybody can publish anything, right, anybody who knows how to produce a little html, or who can get their hands on a decent web editor, can post whatever they want to on the internet provided they’ve got access somewhere. it’s also that there is this potential explosion in thinking about not just knowledge, but also who gets to produce that knowledge and what  qualifies as knowledge, and who gets to decide what is knowledge. so one of the things that i’m thinking about in planned obsolescence in that particular chapter on peer review is whether the mode of peer review that has long been established within the academy – pre-publication gate-keeping, that kind of makes sure that everything that gets published is the best material, and sort of selects for quality and makes sure that things have certain kinds of quality control around them – whether that can at all function online, or whether the attempt to reinstate that pre-publication gate-keeping in online spaces, like with online journals, saying that we’re going to have rigorous peer review before we release any articles, is in fact working counter to the internet’s best mode. [24:45] fr: so you’ve done a lot of writing, but also you’ve done work online in trying to change the reliance on traditional peer review. can you talk about your experiences with your book planned obsolescence in releasing it for pre-publication peer-to-peer review, and tell us what that is? kf: i had been working for some years prior to finishing up planned obsolescence with an online network called mediacommons. at the point when i was working with nyu press planning on publishing planned obsolescence, it was clear to the press that i was going to want to do something with the book online. and they were thinking, my editor was thinking, that maybe i would want to have a blog alongside it, or to kind of prepublish little bits of it or something like this. and what i suggested was that since i was making this argument about the way that peer review best functions online, i should actually sort of at least put my metaphorical money where my mouth was, and try it out. [25:53] so we posted the entire text, the draft of the manuscript, the entire thing with the exception of the conclusion, which had not yet been written, on mediacommons, in our mediacommons press area. it’s a blog-based structure but it runs with a plug-in called commentpress that allows for paragraph by paragraph commenting. we posted the entire thing there and opened it up to online commenters, asking explicitly for feedback to help me with the revision process. at the same time that this was going on, the press sent the manuscript out for traditional peer review as well, knowing that the process was going to have to be approved by the editorial board, and that it would have to meet some traditional standards. [26:42] but i was interested in having both modes of review available because i wanted to do a little bit of comparison between them and see what kinds of differences they produced.  the open review online was an extremely exciting process. i got a lot of engagement from a lot of great people. i had a lot of voices participating in that review process who would never have been called upon in a traditional review process, and yet who provided me with absolutely crucial feedback. [27:13] fr: how many comments did you get? kf: oh gosh, it was just shy of 300, i think, from about 45 unique commenters, which i was very pleased with. and among those commenters there were several members of the library community, for instance, who would never have been called upon to serve as peer reviewers and yet there is a crucial chapter in the book that focuses on library issues. and they were able to help me really significantly improve that chapter. [27:42] at the same time, i got these two traditional peer reviews, which were both fantastic. really careful, sensitive readings of the book as a whole, that did a lot of really deep thought about the book’s structure and about parts that were working better than others and so forth. and what i finally came to discover in this process was that the openness of the online review allowed for many more voices, allowed for discussion amongst those voices, so people argued amongst each other, and not just with me, and it allowed me to contextualize those reviews, because i knew who the reviewers were. i didn’t ask them to sign their names, but they did. so i had context for understanding the comments they were making and knew how to interpret and how to connect different ideas. on the other hand, the comments were very, very local. they were focused on specific issues within the text, and there weren’t really comments about the overall structure of the text. and then there were places where there were no comments whatsoever. because people don’t tend to comment online to say “i totally agree. this is exactly right.” so i had no idea how to interpret silence. did it mean that everything was fine? did it mean that everything was so bad that no one was going to embarrass me by saying so? [29:12] fr: or did it mean that people just didn’t read those parts? kf: exactly. whereas with the two traditional reviews, they did deal with the entirety of the book. and i knew that when they said chapter 3 was fine, that chapter 3 was fine. so what we were able to take from this is the sense that we need to develop a mode of online review that allows for the best aspects of the open review that we did, but that still allows for the development of this holistic picture as well, something that can deal with the entirety of the text at the same time. fr: interesting, and are other people doing this? [29:50] kf: yes, actually mediacommons has since engaged in a number of different experiments with folks who are interested in using these open review processes, including we did a couple of different experiments with the journal shakespeare quarterly… fr: and can you tell us what those are? [30:07] kf: the first was for a special issue on shakespeare in new media. the special editor for the issue, kathy rowe, posted a select number of essays from that special issue for the same kind of open review that we used on mine, but with a few sort of tweaks in the process. they went out to a very specific set of reviewers asking them to come to participate, they had a very defined period during which commenting would be open, and then comments were closed at the end, and so forth. we have a couple of authors right now who are in the midst of open review experiments on mediacommons; jason mittell with his book complex tv, and aram sinnreich who is working on a book called the piracy crusade. and both of them have chosen, rather than as i did, posting the entirety of the book online all at once, they have been releasing the texts chapter by chapter, seeing if an audience can be built over time that can then follow through and will develop some cumulative thoughts as it goes. mediacommons and nyu press jointly received a grant from the mellon foundation last year to conduct a study of open review practices and develop some sort of best practices for folks who want to conduct experiments like these. we submitted our white paper draft to this kind of open review process as well. and now the final open review paper is available on the mediacommons website. [31:52] fr: okay and just a little bit about mediacommons and how it developed? kf: it developed out of a lot of the blogging that i had been doing right around the time that  i was trying to get the anxiety of obsolescence published. i wrote this one blog post in particular that had me thinking out loud about what a scholarly communication network that looked more like blogging might do for us. and i ended up getting an email message from bob stein, who is the director of the institute for the future of the book, saying “we’ve been thinking about this and we really want you to come talk to us.” and i thought, “oh my gosh, really?” and it was amazing. i went and had this series of meetings with the folks at the institute, and out of the course of those meetings came mediacommons. the institute was absolutely fundamental to establish… [32:48] fr: they’re at nyu? kf: yes, they’re connected with nyu. mediacommons has since sort of developed its own independent existence. it’s still at nyu being housed by the nyu library’s digital library technology services group. it has a network of scholars, students, activists, practitioners, all working in the area of media studies. we have a number of different projects that our editorial board has developed and it has been extremely exciting. it’s been around for about 6 years now. [33:24] fr: how does moving more scholarship into web-based formats destabilize our notions of the author and the text? when we talk about peer review, it’s not just an abstract argument, it’s also the bread and butter of academics, right? they get tenure through peer review, they get promotions to full professor through peer review. this is a very unsettling notion when people’s lives and livings are in the mix. what does this do to the author and the text? kf: there are some serious changes that are at least potential for the ways that we understand the author and the text. the changes in the nature of the text seem obvious to us. texts can become nonlinear online, they can include media objects online, they can be interactive, they can be code, they can be… [34:25] fr: and there’s also this sense that they never end… kf: that’s one of the crucial things for our understanding of the author, because we understand the author to be someone who produces discrete, finished, complete, perfect texts. we only see the end result of a long process. fr: it’s a product, it’s a thing… [34:45] kf: it is a product, right. i believe that the longer we work in these online spaces the more we are going to start understanding the act of authorship as being a process, rather than as the production of products. it’s going to be something that’s more ongoing, more fluid, more collaborative. and we’re going to understand our relationship to the texts that we’re producing as being something that is more ongoing and that doesn’t have quite the beginning and end that we come to expect. [35:20] fr: this is interesting from the standpoint of teaching at the university and dealing with students who are writing papers, because the interactive part of scholarship is really something students have trouble grasping. they never see it, although professors will – and they should do this – get up and talk about who is this person responding to in this work? and i think the difficulty for a young student is that they see a book written out by a single author and it really takes some work and some experience to realize that every argument the author is making, he or she is responding to what somebody else has said, or these ideas that are out there. this would be really useful for students who would be able to engage and see by example that these conversations are going on. [36:26] kf: and i think that seeing by example is absolutely crucial, not just to understanding how conversations develop across authorial lines, right, that everyone is always responding to someone else. and therefore any single author text is always collaborative in ways that are sort of belied by the single author’s name on the cover. but also that, you know, i have taught writing for a long time, and have many colleagues who of course do a lot of teaching of writing. and i often hear colleagues frustrated with students’ difficulties in understanding the process of revision as deeply as they would like. they get frustrated that students come in and they just sort of did surface corrections, rather than really rethinking the ideas and the format and presentation of the ideas in the text. and i think, in no small part, that’s because we never model the process for them, right, we never show them that we start out in a totally different place from where we end up in working on an essay ourselves. if we were to show them some of that process, show them the bad first draft, and then all of the work that happened in conversation leading to the next draft, and then the polishing that happened in order to get to the final thing, students might have less of a sense of these ideas just sort of springing forth in full essay format with proper citations. [37:56] fr: you have sort of the romantic notion of the author, the genius that just has this inspiration…. the scholarly monograph seems to have been in crisis for decades. given the pressure that scholarly publishing, and i’m thinking here mainly in terms of the humanities, the pressure that scholarly publishing is under, are you surprised that the monograph, as it’s currently understood in humanities publishing and scholarly publishing, hasn’t changed more than it has? kf: i’m not entirely surprised. i mean, you are absolutely right that university press publishing has been existing in a constant state of crisis certainly since the ‘70s if not before. the monograph hasn’t changed for a couple of different reasons. there are profound forces keeping it looking exactly like it is. one of them is university presses and their extremely constrained budgets. in order to do something different there has to be a lot of research and development. there has to be a lot of exploration. there has to be a lot of experimentation. and that kind of experimentation really requires the folks doing the experimenting to at least admit the possibility of failure. but i think the other part of this, the university presses are only one player in this entire chain of producing the scholarly monograph and keeping it looking exactly like it is. a far more important player in that process is the faculty. right, the folks who are writing these things. and it’s in no small part the tenure review process, which persuades even faculty who want to experiment, who want to do something unusual, who want to produce a digital archive, or want to produce something interactive online, to kind of reign those experimental ideas in and force them between covers in print, because that’s the only thing that anybody believes will get them tenure. and it’s really going to require a serious change in the ways that individual faculty and departments and colleges and universities on the whole approach their understanding of what counts as the large-scale work of scholarship in the humanities in order for the humanities monograph to become something other than what it is. presses feel utterly constrained by faculty desires. faculty desires are utterly constrained by the tenure process. and we end up just not changing anything. [40:46] fr: can you imagine alternatives to the scholarly monograph? what would you…? kf: yes, i think there are lots of alternatives already out there. there are some really amazing projects that are being done out of digital humanities centers, like the scholars’ lab at university of virginia, like the center for history and new media at george mason, like the maryland institute for technology in the humanities at the university of maryland. i could go on and continue naming digital humanities centers that are all over the place. but you see projects that are bringing together digitized corpora of particular authors and texts, or that are doing certain kinds of scholarly editing work around particular authors, or that are doing deep text mining and visualization projects around the incredible quantity of digitized material that exists out there now. [41:45] there are projects that are being built in new platforms like scalar which allows for multi-modal argumentation that can move fluidly across text and video and audio and image and other kinds of media forms that are being published openly online. all of these are really phenomenal alternatives, and i think more and more of them are developing everyday. one of the challenges is getting the folks who are reviewing these projects to recognize that they are works of scholarship, that they are being produced in different ways, that they may be being produced collaboratively, they may not have beginning and end dates, they don’t have covers that sort of demarcate the borders of the text, but they are a similar kind of work, they are the act of scholarship. [42:37] fr: in some of your recent talks and articles you make interesting arguments for opening up humanities scholarship to the wider world beyond academia. can you talk about that? kf: public intellectual work, i think, is something that a lot of scholars in the humanities feel deeply ambivalent about. on the one hand, we all sort of want to do that kind of work, to reach out to the public, to have a greater public engagement for the kinds of work that we’re doing. but on the other hand, it feels like this very scary endeavor, in no small part because a lot of the criticism that the humanities have come in for, since the 1980s in particular… fr: the culture wars? [43:20] kf: the culture wars, exactly. on the one hand, there’s this common sense that the public doesn’t understand or appreciate why it is we do the work we do. i mean, you’re just reading books, how can you take all this too seriously. you’re reading too much into things, as people will say. and there are the political conflicts that come up around a lot of humanities work as well. so it feels like there’s this great danger in putting work out to the world where it can be openly criticized and misunderstood. so we hold it back and kind of keep it to ourselves and communicate only with other experts. but in so doing, we end up convincing the public that there’s nothing serious going on in the humanities, that in fact if you want to think about what’s going on seriously in higher education today, it’s all stem research. it’s wonderful that we have a president right now who is really invested in increasing higher education opportunities across the united states, but if you listen to what’s coming out of the white house it’s all stem, stem, stem. fr: science, technology… [44:27] kf: the humanities simply don’t exist. to some extent, i really believe that opening work in the humanities up to the public can help break down that wall, can help remind everyone what the humanities is doing, why it matters, what we have to share with the world in teaching about our culture, and the ways that individuals engage with it. so i do believe that it’s absolutely crucial that we start doing a better job communicating with the public in order to get that work out there. [45:00] fr: robert darnton wrote an essay in his book, the case for books: past, present, and future, it’s a collection of his essays, and i can’t put my hands on the individual essay or the quote that i’m thinking of,  but when i read this i was fascinated. it was a description of a person, i think it was a women, and this person was in early modern europe, maybe around 1600, and he described her as really using books as sources that she could just sort of dip into for little bits and pieces of information. there was no sense in the way he was describing it that this person saw the book as a complete entity, as we’ve just been discussing it. and so i was wondering, could you talk a little bit about the history of reading and how our assumptions about that history might prevent us from thinking clearly about reading on the internet? [46:08] kf: i am far from an expert on the history of reading. i would really want to direct people who are listening to this to robert darnton, to other people like leah price, who are much more fully engaged with that universe of research than i am. but i will say that there are moments in the history of reading at which we can see very clearly that our ideas or idealized notions about what it is to read a book, to sit down as an individual by yourself and engage in a long sustained fashion with a text, starting at the beginning and working through to the end, have not in fact always been the same. there have been other modes of thinking about what it is to read; reading out loud, reading in public spaces, reading in groups, reading bits and pieces of things, picking things up and putting them down… fr: for a quote… kf: absolutely, and there is a wonderful bit of work by roland barthes, and now i can’t remember which book it comes out of, but he makes the argument about what had been seen as the practices of the bad reader, the reader who skips and jumps around in the text, as being, in fact, the empowered reader. this is the reader who is engaging in what he refers to as the process of tmesis, right, who is picking up various ideas from the text, who is doing what she wants with them, who is skipping around at will, and who is really on some level writing the text herself. fr: by active synthesis… [47:45] kf: exactly, and so the description that barthes presents of this reader is very much like the description of the user of the internet, who is following links and moving around and not really behaving in a disciplined fashion, starting at the beginning of something and working her way through to the end. but is instead following paths of association that are about the branches of knowledge that she is trying to produce. so i think this mode of reading that feels so undisciplined and dangerous to us is not about a loss of the powers of concentration, right, it’s not about something that’s been done to us by television or the internet. it’s not that we no longer know how to sustain our concentration, it’s instead that we now have a technology that actually works with our powers of association, with the way that thought works, in a much more fluid fashion. fr: yeah… kf: and i think it is a crucial moment of liberation to realize that we can let ourselves follow these associative paths. and in fact, one of the sort of negative stories that gets told about readers on the internet, following a chain of links and then not knowing how they got where they were going, and never having really found the thing that they were looking for. in fact, we’re developing better and better technologies that allow us to gather the material that we need to pull the ideas together in ways that allow us to do better synthesis, that keeps track of those pathways that we followed to get where we’re going. [49:26] fr: you have a recent article called “reading (and writing) online, rather than on the decline” (available from profession 2012) and it deals with some of the things we’re talking about right now. but i just spliced or grabbed some quotes from that and i thought i would read them out to you and let you comment on them, okay? so here we go. [49:47] “reading has never been a straightforward means of downloading meaning constructed by an author in a reader’s brain. digital platforms call attention to the degree to which reading is a communal process rather than an individual activity. the relationship between writers and readers online has become less focused on the one-way broadcast of information and more productive of a multi-dimensional conversation that takes place within a community” (45). so…? [50:19] kf: this is exactly the thing that we’ve been talking about across this conversation. that we have this romantic notion that the author produces an idea and conveys that idea perfectly into the brain of the person who is reading the text. that the reader perfectly obtains that idea and processes it in exactly the way that the author intended, should the author have done his job perfectly. and, in fact, it’s never been that straightforward. the possibility of misreading has in fact been the norm. and the reader has always been free to do with the bits and pieces of the text what he or she will. so digital platforms really sort of call attention to this. to the act of bringing together ideas, to the act of interpretation, and particularly to the act of the creation of community between author and reader, and among readers in the act of engaging around a text. one of the things that the internet adds most explicitly to this development of reading across its history is that it’s become profoundly a read-write medium. readers online expect, on some level, that there will be comments available, and that they will be able to respond if they want to. if they don’t want to respond in the comments on the text that they’re reading, they can go to their own blogs and grab quotes and respond to them and have a conversation within their own communities about the things that they’re reading. [52:01] and it’s that process of the seamless movement from reading to writing, and then back again, that i think has really distinguished the internet in a whole lot of ways. now there are precursors for this, of course. in earlier eras the development of the commonplace book, the commentary, and so forth. fr: which is oral culture, right? [52:24] kf: exactly, the seminar. all of this has been about the process of creating new texts around existing texts. [52:33] fr: how do you think university presses will change in the next ten years? and do you think they should survive, or what are your thoughts? you’ve dealt with a bunch of them… kf: i think university presses serve an absolutely crucial role for scholars in the production and dissemination of certain kinds of work. the reason university presses came into being had to do with the fact that scholars in the humanities were producing these monograph books and commercial presses didn’t want to publish them because there wasn’t a sufficient market. the university saw its responsibility as being facilitating the communication of the work that was going on within its faculty to the outside world. and so universities formed presses and they started distributing the work that was being done originally by their own faculty on their campuses to other campuses. and so the university press was born. [53:37] but the university press over the course of the first half of the twentieth century morphs into this odd relationship to its campus, in which many university presses are now understood to be revenue centers on their campuses. they’re required at minimum to break even. there are even presses that are required to actually contribute back to their universities. there are university presses that are seen as being fully businesses that just happen to function with the university name. and i believe that those university presses serve an absolutely crucial role in the dissemination of scholarship, because they are this locus of not-for-profit communication of the work that is being done by scholars in the humanities. but i think that those presses need to develop, and this is not something that the presses haven’t been trying to do, trust me, and i understand how difficult this is. but they need to develop a different relationship to the universities that house them. the universities really need to understand their responsibility, once again, with respect to the dissemination of scholarship. i also think that university presses need to develop a much more symbiotic relationship with, for instance, libraries, with information technology centers on campus, with academic departments, with the other aspects of what’s going on on campus, that might help fully integrate them into the life of the institution in a way that makes them see very clearly at the heart of what it is the institution does. but that would also sort of alleviate some of the wheel reinvention that has to happen with university presses now because they are adjunct to the campus, rather than being a part of the campus. [55:26] fr: and what role do you see academic libraries playing in this whole publishing ecosystem? kf: well it’s clear that libraries have a crucial role to play. there are increasing numbers of library publishing ventures that are springing up on campuses across the country. there are many libraries that are in fact developing really intimate relationships with their university presses. in some institutions, the press has been brought in fully under the library. in some, there’s just a deep partnership between them. i think that libraries have a certain amount of room for experimentation with new forms of scholarly production and dissemination, because many libraries have technology centers where that kind of research and development work gets done. many libraries have been working on institutional repositories that have allowed them to sort of gather and disseminate the work that’s being done by the faculty on their campuses, just like those original university presses were intended to do. so i believe that rather than doubling efforts across the library and the press, increasingly we’re finding libraries and presses working in a kind of symbiosis, really thinking about how together they’re producing a range of forms of communication for faculty who really need it. [56:51] fr: finally, in your introduction to your book anxiety of obsolescence, you mention that you grew up reading literature and watching tv and you never saw these as incompatible. so, to end our interview, i was just wondering, what were some of your favorite tv shows growing up? kf: oh boy, you know, if i think back on childhood television watching experiences, and you may remember this one, having had your television unlocked on the weekends, i will inevitably think back to what seems to me the iconic saturday evening lineup of archie bunker, mash, mary tyler moore, bob newhart, carol burnett. fr: oh, i remember all of them, yes. [57:40] kf: i grew up in the central time zone, so it started at 7 and it ended at 10. it was the only time i was allowed to stay up and watch television until ten o’clock was those saturday nights. and i don’t think that lineup could ever be reproduced today, but i think back on those saturday nights in front of the television with great fondness. acknowledgements fred rowland’s interview with kathleen fitzpatrick was transcribed from audio and edited by andrew lopez. thanks are due to fred rowland and kathleen fitzpatrick for undertaking this interview, for agreeing to let me transcribe it, and for participating as peer reviewers in the preparation of the transcript for publication online. an additional thanks is due to fred rowland for collaborating on the introduction with his input on the interview process and his thoughts on scholarly communication. thanks also to dean of university libraries at temple university, joe lucia, for sharing his insights on interview transcription with fred rowland. emily ford at lead pipe has been patient and dedicated throughout the transcription process, which may not have been completed without her support. thanks also to carrie kent and my colleagues at connecticut college for keeping this conversation alive. audio recording of interview an audio recording of this interview is available for streaming or download from the temple university libraries website: http://sites.temple.edu/humansciences/2013/05/11/kathleen-fitzpatrick-on-scholarly-communication-the-digital-humanities/ references & further reading barthes, roland. the pleasure of the text. trans. richard miller. new york: hill and wang, 1975. print. biagioli, mario. “from book censorship to academic peer review.” emergences: journal for the study of media & composite cultures 12.1 (2002): 11-45. print. carr, nicholas g. the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains. new york: w.w.norton, 2010. print. commentpress: a wordpress plugin for social texts in social contexts. institute for the future of the book. web. 3 dec. 2014. darnton, robert. the case for books: past, present, and future. new york: publicaffairs, 2009. print. davidson, cathy n. now you see it: how the brain science of attention will transform the way we live, work, and learn. new york: viking, 2011. print. —–, and david theo goldberg. the future of thinking: learning institutions in a digital age. cambridge, mass.: mit press, 2010. print. fitzpatrick, kathleen. the anxiety of obsolescence: the american novel in the age of television. nashville: vanderbilt university press, 2006. print. —–. “the humanities, done digitally.” debates in the digital humanities. ed. matthew k. gold. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press, 2012. 12-15. print. —–. planned obsolescence: publishing, technology, and the future of the academy. new york: nyu press, 2011. print. —–. “reading (and writing) online, rather than on the decline.” profession (2012): 41-52. print. —–. “we never do anything alone: an interview on academic authorship with kathleen fitzpatrick.” a companion to media authorship. by jonathan gray and derek johnson. malden, ma: wiley blackwell, 2013. 544-550. print. maryland institute for technology in the humanities. university of maryland. web. 3 dec. 2014. mediacommons: a digital scholarly network. institute for the future of the book. web. 3 dec. 2014. mittel, jason. complex tv: the poetics of contemporary television storytelling. new york: nyu press, [forthcoming]. price, leah, ed. the history of the book and the idea of literature. spec. issue of pmla 121.1 (2006). jstor [database]. web. 3 dec. 2014. rowe, katherine, ed. shakespeare and new media. spec. issue of shakespeare quarterly 61.3 (2010). project muse [database]. web. 3 dec. 2014. rowland, fred. “interviews with authors.” fred rowland – librarian. temple university libraries. web. 3 dec. 2014. rowland, fred, et al. “n+1: the temple university libraries interview.” journal of librarianship and scholarly communication 2.1 (2013). web. 3 dec. 2014. roy rosenzweig center for history and new media. george mason university. web. 3 dec. 2014. scalar. the alliance for networking visual culture. web. 3 dec. 2014. scholars’ lab. university of virginia. web. 3 dec. 2014. sinnreich, aram. the piracy crusade: how the music industry’s war on sharing destroys markets and erodes civil liberties. amherst, ma: university of massachusetts press, 2013. print.     digital humanities, interview, publishing, scholarly communication, transcript editorial: these are a few of our favorite things a conversation with librarian-editors 5 responses pingback : editors’ choice: in the library, with the lead pipe: on scholarly communication and the digital humanities: an interview with kathleen fitzpatrick | digital humanities now pingback : library links 16th january 2015 | latest library links pingback : revise and resubmit: an unsolicited peer review | roopika risam pingback : across two (imperial) cultures | roopika risam pingback : wk.10 digital publishing & knowledge mobilisation | this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct adopting the educator’s mindset: charting new paths in curriculum and assessment mapping – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 22 apr bethany radcliffe /2 comments adopting the educator’s mindset: charting new paths in curriculum and assessment mapping throwback thursday for june 18, 2015: in the library with the lead pipe welcomes bethany messersmith to our editorial board!  in honor of throwback thursday, we’re highlighting bethany’s recent piece on curriculum and assessment mapping.   photo by flickr user montyaustin (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) in brief: the greatest challenge that i faced in my role as information literacy librarian occurred as a result of a higher learning commission (hlc) initiative at my institution, requiring all academic programs/departments to create/review/revise program-level student learning outcomes  (plslos), curriculum maps, and assessment maps. this initiative served as a catalyst for the information literacy program, prompting  me to seek advice from faculty in the education department at southwest baptist university (sbu), who were more familiar with educational theory and curriculum/assessment mapping methods. in an effort to accurately reflect the university libraries’ impact on student learning inside and outside of the classroom, i looked for ways to display this visually. the resulting assessment map included classes the faculty and i could readily assess, as well as an evaluation of statistics on library services and resources that also impact student learning, such as data from libguide and database usage, reference transactions, interlibrary loans, course reserves, annual gate count trends, the biennial student library survey, and website usability testing. by bethany messersmith embarking on a career in information literacy like most academic librarians there was little focus on instruction in my graduate school curriculum. my only experience with classroom instruction occurred over a semester-long internship, during which i taught less than a handful of information literacy sessions. although i attended  acrl’s immersion-teacher track conference as a new librarian, i was at a loss as to how i should strategically apply the instruction and assessment best practices gleaned during that experience to the environment in which i found myself. when i embraced the role of information literacy librarian at southwest baptist university (sbu) libraries in 2011, i joined a faculty of six other librarians. the year i started, the university libraries transitioned to a liaison model, with six of the seven librarians, excluding the library dean, providing instruction for each of the academic colleges represented at the university. prior to this point, one librarian provided the majority of instruction across all academic disciplines. as the information literacy librarian, i was given the challenge of directing all instruction and assessment efforts on behalf of the university libraries. although my predecessor developed an information literacy plan, the library dean asked me to create a plan that spanned the curriculum. charting a new course   the greatest challenge that i faced in my role as information literacy librarian occurred as a result of a higher learning commission (hlc) initiative at my institution, requiring all academic programs/departments to create/review/revise program-level student learning outcomes  (plslos), curriculum maps, and assessment maps. i found assessment mapping particularly nebulous, since the librarians at my institution do not teach semester long classes. in lieu of this, i looked for new ways to document and assess the university libraries’ impact on student learning not only inside, but outside of the classroom setting. the resulting assessment map included classes faculty and i could readily assess, as well as an evaluation of statistics on library services and resources that also impact student learning, such as data from libguide and database usage, reference transactions, interlibrary loans, course reserves, annual gate count trends, the biennial student library survey, and website usability testing. as is the case when discovering all uncharted territories, taking a new approach required me to seek counsel from communities of practice at my institution, defined as “staff bound together by common interests and a passion for a cause, and who continually interact. communities are sometimes formed within the one organisation, and sometimes across many organisations. they are often informal, with fluctuating membership and people can belong to more than one community at a time” (mitchell 5). at sbu, i forged a community of practice with faculty in the education department, with whom i could meet, as needed, to discuss how the university libraries could most effectively represent its impact on student learning. learning theory: a framework for information literacy, instruction, & assessment within the library literature educational and instructional design theorists are frequently cited. instructional theorists have significantly shaped my pedagogy over the past three and a half years. in their book, understanding by design, educators  grant wiggins and jay mctighe point out the importance of developing a cohesive plan that serves as a compass for learning initiatives. they write: “teachers are designers. an essential act of our profession is the crafting of curriculum and learning experiences to meet specified purposes. we are also designers of assessments to diagnose student needs to guide our teaching and to enable us, our students, and others (parents and administrators) to determine whether we have achieved our goals” (13).  they propose that curriculum designers embrace the following strategic sequence in order to achieve successful learning experiences – 1. “identify desired results,” 2. “determine acceptable evidence,” and 3. “plan learning experiences and instruction” (wiggins and mctighe 18). as librarians, we are not only interested in our students’ ability to utilize traditional information literacy skill sets, but we also have a vested interest in scaffolding “critical information literacy,” skills which “differs from standard definitions of information literacy (ex: the ability to find, use, and analyze information) in that it takes into consideration the social, political, economic, and corporate systems that have power and influence over information production, dissemination, access, and consumption” (gregory and higgins 4). the time that we spend with students is limited, since many information literacy librarians do not teach semester-long classes nor do we meet each student who steps foot on our campuses. however, as mccook and phenix point out, awakening critical literacy skills is essential to “the survival of the human spirit” (qtd. in gregory and higgins 2). therefore, librarians must look for ways to invest in cultivating students’ literacy beyond the traditional four walls of the classroom. librarians and other teaching faculty recognize that “students need the ability to think out of the box, to find innovative solutions to looming problems…” (levine 165). in his book, generation on a tightrope: a portrait of today’s college student, arthur levine notes that the opportunity academics have to cultivate students’ intellect is greatest during the undergraduate years. while some of them may choose to pursue graduate-level degrees later on, at this point their primary objective will be to obtain ‘just in time education’ at the point of need (165). it is this fact that continues to inspire an urgency in our approaches to information literacy education. one of the most challenging aspects of pedagogy is that it is messy. while educators are planners, learning and assessment is by no means something that can be wrapped up and decked out with a beautiful bow. education requires us to give of ourselves, assess what does and does not work for our students and then make modifications as a result. according to educator rick reiss, while students are adept at accessing information via the internet, “threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge present the core challenges of higher learning” (n. pag.). acquiring new knowledge requires us to grapple with preconceived notions and to realize that not everything is black and white. despite the messy process in which i found myself immersed, knowledge gleaned from educational and instructional theorists began to bring order to the curriculum and assessment mapping process. eureka moments in higher education: seeing through a new lens for the first time eureka moments are integral to the world of education and often consist of a revelation or intellectual discovery. this concept is best depicted in the story of a greek by the name of archimedes. archimedes was tasked  by the king of his time with determining whether or not some local tradesmen had crafted a crown out of pure gold or substituted some of the precious metal with a less valuable material like silver to make a surplus on the project at hand (perkins 6). as water began flowing out of the tub, legend has it that “in a flash, archimedes discovered his answer: his body displaced an equal volume of water. likewise, by immersing the crown in water, archimedes could determine its volume and compare that with the volume of an equal weight of gold” (perkins 7). he quickly emerged from the tub naked and ran across town announcing his discovery. although we have all experienced eureka moments to some extent or another, not all of them are as dramatically apparent as archimedes’s discovery. in his book entitled archimedes’ bathtub: the art and logic of breakthrough thinking, david perkins uses the the phrase “cognitive snap,” to illustrate a breakthrough that comes suddenly, much like archimedes’s eureka moment (10).  although the gestational period before my cognitive snap was almost three and a half years in the making, when i finally  began to grasp and apply learning theory to the development of plslos, curriculum, and assessment maps, i knew that it was the dawning of a new eureka era for me. librarians play a fundamental role in facilitating cognitive snaps among the  non-library faculty that they partner with in the classroom. professors of education, history, computer science, etc. enlighten their students to subject-specific knowledge, while librarians have conveyed the value of incorporating information literacy components into the curriculum via the association of college and research libraries’ (acrl) – information literacy competency standards for higher education. now, through the more recently modified framework for information literacy for higher education, librarians are establishing their own subject-specific approach to information literacy that brings “cognitive snaps” related to the research process into the same realm as disciplinary knowledge (“information literacy competency standards”; “framework for information literacy”). like most universities, each academic college at sbu is comprised of multiple departments, with each consisting of a department chair. the university libraries is somewhat unique within this framework, in that it is not classified as an academic college, nor does it consist of multiple departments. in 2013, the library dean asked me to assume the role of department chair for the university libraries, because he wanted me to attend the department chair workshops led by the assessment academy team (comprised of the associate provost for teaching and learning and designated faculty across the curriculum) at sbu. these workshops took place from january 2013 through august 2014. all department chairs were invited to participate in four workshops geared towards helping faculty across the university review, revise, and /or create plslos, curriculum, and assessment maps. while my review of educational theory and best practices certainly laid a framework for the evolving information literacy program at sbu, it was during this period that i began charting a new course, as i applied the concepts gleaned during these workshops to the curriculum and assessment maps that i designed for the university libraries. what i learned about the relationship between curriculum & assessment mapping in conversations with assessment academy team members currently serving in the education department, i slowly adopted an educator’s lens through which to view these processes. prior to this point, my knowledge of plslos and curriculum mapping came from the library and education literature that i read. dialogues with practitioners in the education department at my campus slowly enabled me to address teaching and assessment from a pedagogical standpoint, employing educational best practices. educator heidi hayes-jacobs believes that mapping is key to the education process. she writes: “success in a mapping program is defined by two specific outcomes: measurable improvement in student performance in the targeted areas and the institutionalization of mapping as a process for ongoing curriculum and assessment review” (getting results with curriculum mapping 2). while hayes-jacobs’s expertise is in curriculum mapping within the k-12 school system, the principles that she advances apply to higher education, as well as information literacy. she writes about the gaps that often exist as a result of teachers residing in different buildings or teaching students at different levels of the educational spectrum, for example the elementary, middle school, or high school levels (mapping the big picture 3). the mapping process establishes greater transparency and awareness of what is taught across the curriculum and establishes accountability, in spite of the fact that teachers, professors, or librarians might not interact on a daily or monthly basis. it provides a structure for assessment mapping because all of these groups must not only evaluate what they are teaching, but whether or not students are grasping plslos. curriculum maps are just a stepping stone: assessment mapping for the faint of heart when i assumed the role of information literacy librarian at sbu, i knew nothing about assessment. sure, i knew how to define it and i was familiar with being on the receiving end as a student,  but frankly as a new librarian it scared me. perhaps that is because i saw it as a solo effort that would most likely not provide a good return on my investment. i quickly realized, however, that facilitating assessment opportunities was critical because i wanted to cultivate eureka moments for my students. in the event that  students do not understand something, it is my job to look for strategies to address the gap in their knowledge and scaffold the learning process. assessment mapping is the next logical step in the mapping process. while curriculum maps give us the opportunity to display the plslos integrated across the curriculum, assessment maps document the tools and assignments that we will utilize to determine whether or not our students have grasped designated learning outcomes. curriculum and assessment maps do not require input from one person, but rather collaboration among faculty. according dr. debra gilchrist, vice president for learning and student success at pierce college, “assessment is a thoughtful and intentional process by which faculty and administrators collectively, as a community of learners, derive meaning and take action to improve. it is driven by the intrinsic motivation to improve as teachers, and we have learned that, just like the students in our classes, we get better at this process the more we actively engage it” (72). assessment is not about the data, but strategically getting better at what we do (gilchrist 76). utilizing the educator’s lens to develop meaningful curriculum & assessment maps over the last three and a half years i have learned a great deal about applying the educator’s lens to information literacy. it has made a difference not only in the way i teach and plan, but in the collaboration that i facilitate among the library faculty at my institution who also visit the classroom regularly. perhaps what scared me the most about assessment initially was my desire to achieve perfection in the classroom, a concept that is completely uncharacteristic of education. i combated this looming fear by immersing myself in pedagogy and asking faculty in the education department at sbu endless questions about their own experiences with assessment. the more i read and conversed on the topic, the more i realized that assessment is always evolving. it does not matter how many semesters a professor has taught a class, there is always room for improvement. it was then that i could boldly embrace assessment, knowing that it was messy, but was important to making improvements in the way my colleagues and i conveyed plslos and scaffolded student learning moving forward. in their article “guiding questions for assessing information literacy in higher education,” megan oakleaf and neal kaske write: “practicing continuous assessment allows librarians to ‘get started’ with assessment rather than waiting to ‘get it perfect.’ each repetition of the assessment cycle allows librarians to adjust learning goals and outcomes, vary instructional strategies, experiment with different assessment of methods, and improve over time” (283). the biggest challenge for librarians interested in implementing curriculum and assessment maps at their institutions stems from the fact that we often do not have the opportunity to interact with students like the average professor, who meets with a class for nearly four consecutive months a semester and provides feedback through regular assessments and grades. the majority of librarians teach one-shot information literacy sessions. so, what is the most practical way to visually represent librarians’ influence over student learning? i would like to advocate for a new approach, which may be unpopular among some in my field and readily embraced by others. it is a customized approach to curriculum and assessment mapping, which was suggested by faculty in the education department at my institution. a typical curriculum map contains  plslos for designated programs, along with course numbers/titles, and boxes where you can designate whether a skill set was introduced (i), reinforced (r), or mastered (m) (“create a curriculum map”). for traditional academic departments, there is an opportunity to build on skill sets through a series of required courses. for academic libraries, however, it is difficult to subscribe to the standard  curriculum mapping schema because librarians do not always have the opportunity to impact student learning beyond general education classes and a few major-specific courses. this leads to an uneven representation of information literacy across the curriculum.  as a result, it is often more efficient to use an “x” instead to denote a program-level student learning outcome for which the library is responsible, rather than utilizing three progressive symbols. one of the reasons why curriculum and assessment mapping at my academic library is becoming increasingly valuable, is largely due to the fact that administrators at my institution are interested in fostering a greater deal of accountability in the learning process, namely because of an upcoming hlc visit. in her article entitled, “assessing your program-level assessment plan,” susan hatfield, professor of communication studies at winona state university writes: “assessment needs to be actively supported at the top levels of administration. otherwise, it is going to be difficult (if not impossible) to get an assessment initiative off the ground. faculty listen carefully to what administrators say – and don’t say. even with some staff support, assessment is unlikely to be taken seriously until administrators get on board” (2). in his chapter entitled “rhetoric versus reality: a faculty perspective on information literacy instruction,” arthur sterngold embraces the view that “for [information literacy (il)] to be effective…it must be firmly embedded in an institution’s academic curriculum and…the faculty should assume the lead responsibility for developing and delivering il instruction (85). he believes that librarians should “serve more as consultants to the faculty than as direct providers of il instruction” (sterngold 85). to some extent, i acknowledge the value of  hatfield’s and sterngold’s views on the importance of administration-driven and faculty led assessment initiatives in the realm of assessment.  campus-wide discussions and initiatives centered around this subject stimulate collaboration among interdisciplinary faculty who would not otherwise meet outside of an established structure. as a librarian and member of the faculty at my institution, their stance on assessment creates some internal tension. while it is ideal for our administrations to care about the issues that are closest to their faculty’s hearts, many times they are driven to lead assessment efforts as a result of an impending accreditation visit (gilchrist 71; hatfield 5). while i would love to say that information literacy matters to my administration just as much as it does to me, this is an unrealistic viewpoint. the development, assessment, and day-to-day oversight of information literacy is an uphill battle that requires me to take the lead. my library faculty and i must establish value for our information literacy program among the faculty that we partner with on a daily basis. so, how do we as librarians assess the university libraries’ impact on student learning when information literacy sessions are unevenly represented across the curriculum? in a conversation with a colleague in the education department, i was encouraged to determine and assess all forms of learning that the library facilitates by nature of its multidisciplinary role. in brenda h. manning and beverly d. payne’s article “a vygotskian-based theory of teacher cognition: toward the acquisition of mental reflection and self-regulation,” they write: because of the spiral restructuring of knowledge, based on the history of each individual as he or she remembers it, a sociohistorical/cultural orientation may be very appropriate to the unique growth and development of each teaching professional. such a theory in vygotsky’s sociohistorical explanation for the development of the mind. in other words, the life history of preservice teachers is an important predictor of how they will interpret what it is that we are providing in teacher preparation programs (362). my colleague in the education department challenged me to think about the multiple points of contact that students have with the library, outside of the one-shot information literacy session and include those in our assessment. as a result, i developed curriculum and assessment maps that not only contained a list of courses in which specific plslos were advanced, but also began including assessment of data from libguides, gate count, interlibrary loan, course reserve, biennial library survey, and website usability testing on the maps as well. all of these statistics can be tied to student-centered learning. assessment of them enables my library faculty and i to make changes in the way that we market services and resources to constituents. the maps illustrated in table 1 and table 2 below are intentionally simplistic. they  provide the library liaisons and faculty in their liaison areas with a visual overview of the  information literacy plslos taught and assessed. when the university libraries moved to the liaison model in 2011, the librarian teaching education majors was not necessarily familiar with the plslos advanced  by the library liaison to the language & literature department. mapping current library involvement in the curriculum created a shared knowledge of plslos among the library faculty. i also asked each librarian to create a lesson plan, which we published on the university libraries’ website. since we utilize the letter “x” to denote plslos covered, rather than letters that display the  depth of coverage – introduction, reinforcement, mastery, lesson plans provide the librarians and their faculty with a detailed outline of how the plslo is developed in the classroom. apart from the general visual appeal, these maps also enable us to recognize holes in our information literacy program. for example, there are several departments that are not listed on the curriculum map because we do not currently provide instruction in these classes. many of the classes that we visit with are freshman and sophomore level. it helps us to identify areas that we need to target moving forward, such as juniors through graduate students. table 1-adapted curriculum map – click to enlarge table 2 reveals a limited number of courses we hope to assess in the upcoming year. in discussions with library faculty, i quickly discovered that it was more important to start assessing, rather than assess every class we are involved in at present. we can continue to build in formal assessments over time, but for now the important thing is to begin the process of evaluating the learning process, so that we can make modifications to more effectively impact student learning (oakleaf & kaske 283). the university libraries is a unique entity in comparison to the other academic units represented across campus. this is largely because information literacy is not a core curriculum requirement. as a result, some of the plslos reflected on the assessment map include data collected outside of the traditional classroom that is specific to the services, resources, and educational opportunities that we facilitate. this is best demonstrated by plslos two and five. for example, we know that students outside of our sessions are using the libguides and databases, which are integral to plslo two – “the student will be able to use sources in research.” for plslo five – “the student will be able to identify the library as a place in the learning process” we are not predominantly interested in whether or not students are using our electronic classrooms during an information literacy session. we are interested in students’ awareness and use of the physical and virtual library as a whole, so we are assessing student learning by whether or not students can find what they need on the university libraries’ website or whether they utilize the university libraries’ physical space in general. table 2-adapted assessment map (first half) – click to enlarge table 2-adapted assessment map (second half) – click to enlarge transparency in the assessment process curriculum and assessment maps provide librarians and educators alike with the opportunity to be transparent about the learning that is or is not happening inside and outside of the classroom. i am grateful for the information i have gleaned from the education department at sbu along the way because it has inspired a newfound commitment and dedication to the students that we serve. although curriculum and assessment mapping is not widespread in the academic library world, some information literacy practitioners have readily embraced this concept. for example, in brian matthews and char booth’s invited paper, presented at the california academic & research libraries conference (carl), booth discusses her use of the concept mapping software, mindomo, to help library and departmental faculty visualize current curriculum requirements, as well as opportunities for library involvement in the education process (6). some sample concept maps that are especially interesting include one geared towards first-year students and another customized to the environmental analysis program at claremont colleges (booth & matthews 8-9). the concept maps then link to rubrics that are specific to the programs highlighted. booth takes a very visual and interactive approach to curriculum mapping. in their invited paper, “a more perfect union: campus collaborations for curriculum mapping information literacy outcomes,” moser et al. discuss the mapping project they undertook at the oxford college of emory university. after revising their plslos, the librarians met with departmental faculty to discuss where the library’s plslos were currently introduced and reinforced in the subject areas. all mapping was then done in weave (moser et al. 333). while the software emory university utilizes is a subscription service, moser et al. provide a template of the curriculum mapping model they employed (337). so, which of the mapping systems discussed is the best fit for your institution? this is something that you will want to determine based on the academic environment in which you find yourself. for example, does your institution subscribe to mapping software like emory university or will you need to utilize free software to construct concept maps like claremont colleges? another factor to keep in mind is what model will make the most sense to your librarians and the subject faculty they partner with in the classroom. as long as the maps created are clear to the audiences that they serve, the format they take is irrelevant. in janet hale’s book, a guide to curriculum mapping: planning, implementing, and sustaining the process, she discusses several different kinds of maps for the k-12 setting. while each map outlined contains benefits, she argues that the “final selection should be based on considering the whole mapping system’s capabilities” (hale 228). the curriculum and assessment mapping models i have used for the information literacy competency program at sbu reflect the basic structure laid out by the assessment academy team at my institution. i have customized the maps to reflect the ways the university libraries facilitates and desires to impact student  learning inside and outside of the classroom. in an effort to foster collaboration and create more visibility for the information literacy competency program, i have created two libguides that are publicly available to our faculty, students, and the general public. the first one, which is entitled  information literacy competency program, consists of plslos, our curriculum and assessment maps, outlines of all sessions taught, etc. the academic program review libguide provides an overview of the different ways that we are assessing student learning – including website usability testing feedback, annual information literacy reports and biennial student survey reports. due to confidentiality, all reports are accessible via the university’s intranet. acknowledging the imperfections of curriculum and assessment mapping curriculum and assessment mapping is not an exact science. i wish i could bottle it up and distribute a finished product to all of  the information literacy librarians out there who grapple with the imprecision of our profession. while it would eliminate our daily struggle, it would also lead to the discontinuation of  eureka moments that we all experience as we grow with and challenge the academic cultures in which we find ourselves. so, what have i learned as a result of the mapping process? it requires collaboration on the part of library and non-library faculty. when i began curriculum and assessment mapping, i learned pretty quickly that without the involvement of each liaison librarian and the departmental faculty, mapping would be in vain. map structures must be based on the pre-existing partnerships librarians have, but will identify gaps or areas of growth throughout the curriculum. i would love to report that our curriculum maps encompass the entire curriculum at sbu, but that would be a lie. initially, i did a content analysis of the curriculum and reviewed syllabi for months in an effort to develop well-rounded maps. i learned all too quickly, however, that mapping requires us to work with what we already have and set goals for the future. so, while the university libraries’ maps are by no means complete, i have challenged each liaison librarian to identify plslos they can advance in the classroom now, while looking for new ways to impact student learning moving forward. during the mapping process, i was overwhelmed by the fact that the university libraries was unable to represent student learning in the same way the other academic departments across campus did. i liked the thought of creating maps identifying the introduction, reinforcement, and mastery of certain skill sets throughout students’ academic tenure with us. however, i quickly realized that this was impractical because it does not take into account the variables that librarians encounter, such as one-shot sessions, uneven representation in each section of a given class, transfer students, and learning scenarios that happen outside of the classroom itself. using the “x” to define areas where our plslos are currently impacting student learning was much less daunting and far more practical. it is important to anticipate pushback in the mapping process (moser et al. 333-334; sterngold 86-88). when i began attending the department chair workshops in 2013, i quickly discovered that not all of the other departmental faculty were amenable to my presence. one individual asked why i was attending, while another questioned my boss about my expertise in higher education. in the assessment mapping process, faculty in my library liaison area were initially  reluctant to collaborate with me on assessing student work. despite some faculty’s resistance, i was determined to persevere. as a result of the workshops, i established a community of practice with faculty in the education department and grew more confident in my role as an educator. i know that there are gaps in the maps, but i have come to terms with the healthy tension that this knowledge creates. while i have a lot more to learn about information literacy, learning theory, curriculum and assessment mapping, etc., i no longer feel under-qualified. as an academic, i continue to glean knowledge from my fellow librarians and the education department, looking for opportunities to make modifications as necessary. i have reconciled with the fact that this is a continual process of recognizing gaps in my professional practice and identifying opportunities for change. after all, that is what education is all about, right? many thanks to annie pho, ellie collier, and carrie donovan for their tireless editorial advice. i would like to extend a special thank you to my library dean, dr. ed walton for believing in my ability to lead information literacy efforts at southwest baptist university libraries back in 2011 when i was fresh out of library school. last, but certainly not least, my gratitude overflows to the educators at my present institution who helped me to wrap my head around curriculum and assessment mapping. assessment is no longer a scary thing because i now have a plan! works cited booth, char, and brian matthews. “understanding the learner experience: threshold concepts & curriculum mapping.” california academic & research libraries conference. san diego, carl: 7 apr. 2012. web. 17 mar. 2015. “create a curriculum map: aligning curriculum with student learning outcomes.” office of assessment. santa clara university, 2014. web. 13 apr. 2015. “framework for information literacy for higher education.” 2015. association of college and research libraries. 11 mar. 2015. gilchrist, debra. “a twenty year path: learning about assessment; learning from assessment.” communications in information literacy 3.2 (2009): 70-79. web. 4 mar. 2015. gregory, lua, and shana higgins. introduction. information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis. ed. lua gregory and shana higgins. sacramento: library juice. 1-11. library juice press. web. 13 apr. 2015. hale, janet a. a guide to curriculum mapping: planning, implementing, and sustaining the process. thousand oaks: corwin, 2008. print. hatfield, susan. “assessing your program-level assessment plan.” idea paper. 45 (2009): 1-9. idea center. web. 27 feb. 2015. hayes-jacobs, heidi. getting results with curriculum mapping. alexandria: association for supervision and curriculum development, 2004. ebook academic collection. web. 26 feb. 2015. —. mapping the big picture: integrating curriculum & assessment k-12. alexandria: association for supervision and curriculum development. 1997. print. “information literacy competency standards for higher education.” 2000. association of college & research libraries. 11 mar. 2015. levine, arthur. generation on a tightrope: a portrait of today’s college student. san francisco: jossey-bass, 2012. print. manning, brenda h., and beverly d. payne. “a vygotskian-based theory of teacher cognition: toward the acquisition of mental reflection and self-regulation.” teaching and teacher education 9.4 (1993): 361-372. web. 25 may 2012. mitchell, john. the potential for communities of practice to underpin the national training framework. melbourne: australian national training authority. 2002. john mitchell & associates. web. 18 mar. 2015. moser, mary, andrea heisel, nitya jacob, and kitty mcneill. “a more perfect union: campus collaborations for curriculum mapping information literacy outcomes.” association of college and research libraries conference. philadelphia, acrl: mar.-apr. 2011. web. 17 mar. 2015. oakleaf, megan, and neal kaske. “guiding questions for assessing information literacy in higher education.” portal: libraries and the academy 9.2 (2009): 273-286. web. 21 dec. 2011. perkins, david. archimedes’ bathtub: the art and logic of breakthrough thinking. new york: w.w. norton, 2000. print. reiss, rick. “before and after students ‘get it’: threshold concepts.” tomorrow’s professor newsletter 22.4 (2014): n. pag. stanford center for teaching and learning. web. 7 mar. 2015. sterngold, arthur h. “rhetoric versus reality: a faculty perspective on information literacy instruction.” defining relevancy: managing the new academic library. ed. janet mcneil hurlbert. west port: libraries unlimited, 2008. 85-95. google book search. web. 17 mar. 2015. wiggins, grant, and jay mctighe. understanding by design. alexandria: association for supervision and curriculum development, 2005. ebrary. web. 3 mar. 2015. academic libraries, college students, evaluation, information literacy, instructional design, library assessment, organizational culture randall munroe’s what if as a test case for open access in popular culture editorial: as the world turns so do we: a new publication strategy 2 responses pingback : latest library links 24th april 2015 | latest library links pingback : hack your summer: part one | hls this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct preservation in practice: a survey of new york city digital humanities researchers – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 17 may malina thiede /1 comments preservation in practice: a survey of new york city digital humanities researchers in brief digital humanities (dh) describes the emerging practice of interpreting humanities content through computing methods to enhance data gathering, analysis, and visualization. due to factors including scale, complexity, and uniqueness, the products of dh research present unique challenges in the area of preservation. this study collected data with a survey and targeted interviews given to new york city metro area dh researchers intended to sketch a picture of the methods and philosophies that govern the preservation efforts of these researchers and their institutions. due to their familiarity with evolving preservation principles and practices, librarians are poised to offer expertise in supporting the preservation efforts of digital humanists. the data and interviews described in this report help explore some of the current practices in this area of preservation, and suggest inroads for librarians as preservation experts. by malina thiede (with significant contributions from allison piazza, hannah silverman, and nik dragovic) introduction if you want a definition of digital humanities (dh), there are hundreds to choose from. in fact, jason heppler’s whatisdigitalhumanities.com alone offers 817 rotating definitions of the digital humanities, pulled from participants from the day of dh between 2009-2014. a few of these definitions are listed below: digital humanities is the application of computer technology to make intellectual inquiries in the humanities that either could not be made using traditional methods or are made significantly faster and easier with computer technology. it can include both using digital tools to make these inquiries or developing these tools for others to use. –matthew zimmerman dh is the study, exploration, and preservation of, as well as education about human cultures, events, languages, people, and material production in the past and present in a digital environment through the creation and use of dynamic tools to visualize and analyze data, share and annotate primary sources, discuss and publish findings, collaborate on research and teaching, for scholars, students, and the general public. –ashley sanders for the purposes of this article, digital humanities will be defined as an emerging, cross-disciplinary field in academic research that combines traditional humanities content with technology focused methods of display and interpretation. most dh projects are collaborative in nature with researchers from a variety of disciplines working together to bring these complex works to fruition. dh projects can range from fairly traditional research papers enhanced with computing techniques, such as text mining, to large scale digital archives of content that include specialized software and functionality. due to the range of complexity in this field and the challenges of maintaining certain types of digital content, long-term preservation of dh projects has become a major concern of scholars, institutions, and libraries in recent years. while in the sciences, large scale collaborative projects are the norm and can expect to be well funded, dh projects are comparatively lacking in established channels for financial and institutional support over the long term, which can add another layer of difficulty for researchers. as librarians at academic institutions take on responsibility for preserving digital materials, they certainly have a role in ensuring that these dh projects are maintained and not lost. for the purposes of this paper, a digital humanities project will be broadly defined as cross-disciplinary collaboration that manifests itself online (i.e. via a website) as both scholarly research and pedagogical resource using digital method(s). methods can include, but are not limited to, digital mapping, data mining, text analysis, visualization, network analysis, and modeling. literature review the library of congress’s (n.d.) catchall definition of digital preservation is “the active management of digital content over time to ensure ongoing access.” hedstrom (1998) offers a more specific definition of digital preservation as “the planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies necessary to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable.” digital preservation is a complex undertaking under the most favorable conditions, requiring administrative support, funding, personnel, and often specialized software and technology expertise. kretzschmar and potter (2010) note that digital preservation, and, in particular, digital humanities preservation, faces a “stand-still-and-die problem” because it is necessary to “continually…change media and operating environments just to keep our information alive and accessible.” this is true of preserving most digital objects, but the complex, multi-faceted nature of many dh projects adds additional layers of complexity to the already challenging digital preservation process. zorich (2008) lists other components of the “digital ecosystem” that must be preserved in addition to the actual content itself: “software functionality, data structures, access guidelines, metadata, and other…components to the resource.” kretzschmar and potter (2010) lay out three seemingly simple questions about preserving digital projects: “how will we deal with changing media and operating environments? who will pay for it? and who will do the work?” whose answers are often difficult to pin down. when working with dh projects, ‘what exactly are we preserving?’ may also be an important question because as smith (2004) notes that “there are…nagging issues about persistence that scholars and researchers need to resolve, such as…deciding which iteration of a dynamic and changing resource should be captured and curated for preservation.” in 2009, digital humanities quarterly published a cluster of articles dedicated to the question of “doneness” in dh projects. kirschenbaum (2009) notes in the introduction to the cluster that “digital humanities…[is] used to deriving considerable rhetorical mileage and the occasional moral high-ground by contrasting [its] radical flexibility and mutability with the glacial nature of scholarly communication in the fixed and frozen world of print-based publication.” unlike some digital assets that undergo preservation, dh projects and the components thereof are often in a state of flux and, indeed, may never truly be finished. this feature of dh projects makes their preservation a moving target. kretzschmar (2009) detailed the preservation process for the linguistic atlas project, a large scale dh project that spanned decades, explaining “we need to make new editions all the time, since our idea of how to make the best edition changes as trends in scholarship change, especially now in the digital age when new technical possibilities keep emerging.” another example of a dh project that has undergone and continues to undergo significant revisions is described in profile #5 below. in addition to the particular technological challenges of preserving often iterative and ever-evolving dh projects, there are structural and administrative difficulties in supporting their preservation as well. maron and pickle (2014) identified preservation as a particular risk factor for dh projects with faculty naming a wide range of entities on campus as being responsible for supporting their projects’ preservation needs, which suggested “that what preservation entails may not be clear.” bryson, posner, st. pierre, and varner (2011) also note that “the general lack of policies, protocols, and procedures has resulted in a slow and, at times, frustrating experience for both library staff and scholars.” established workflows and procedures are still not easily found in the field of dh preservation, leading scholars, librarians, and other support staff to often attempt to reinvent the wheel with each new project. other difficult to avoid problems noted across the literature are those of staff attrition and siloing. although rife with challenges, the preservation of dh projects is far from a lost cause, and libraries have a crucial role to play in ensuring that, to some degree, projects are successfully maintained. the data and interviews summarized in this paper reveal how some of these projects are being preserved as well as their particular difficulties. there are certainly opportunities for librarians to step in and offer their preservation expertise to help scholars formulate and achieve their preservation goals. methodology the methodology for this project was influenced by time frame and logistics. initially the project was slated to be completed within five months, but the deadline was later extended to nine months. because it would have been difficult to interview multiple individuals across new york city within the original time frame, we decided on a two phase approach to conducting the survey, similar to zorich’s methodology, where an information gathering phase was followed by interviews (zorich, 2008). the survey involved (1) conducting an online survey of nyc faculty members engaged in digital humanities, and (2) performing in-person or phone interviews with those who agreed to additional questioning. the survey provided a broad, big picture overview of the practices of our target group, and the interviews supplemented that data with anecdotes about specific projects and their preservation challenges. the interviews also provided more detailed insight into the thoughts of some dh scholars about the preservation of their projects and digital preservation in general. the subjects of our survey and interviews were self-selected faculty members and phd candidates engaged in digital humanities research and affiliated with an academic institution within the new york city area. this population of academics was specifically targeted to reach members of the dh community that had access to an institutional library and its resources. we limited our scope to the new york city for geographic convenience. we targeted survey respondents using the nyc digital humanities website as a starting point. as of october 2015, when the selection process for this project was underway there were 383 members listed in the nyc digital humanities online directory. an initial message was sent to the nycdh listserv on june 3, 2015, and individual emails were sent to a subset of members in june 15, 2015. we approached additional potential survey respondents that we knew fit our criteria via email and twitter. figure 1: nyc digital humanities logo survey the survey tool was a 34-item online qualtrics questionnaire asking multiple choice and short answer questions about the researchers’ work and their preservation strategies and efforts to date. the survey questions were developed around 5 specific areas: background information about the projects and their settings, tools used, staff/management of preservation efforts, future goals, and a query about their availability for follow up interviews. as all dh projects are unique, respondents were asked to answer the questions as they pertain to one particular project for which they were the principal investigator (pi). interviews interviewees were located for the second phase of the research by asking survey respondents to indicate if they were willing to participate in a more in-depth interview about their work. interested parties were contacted to set up in-person or conference call interviews. the interviews were less formal and standardized than the survey, allowing for interviewees to elaborate on the particular issues related to the preservation of their projects. each interview was recorded but not fully transcribed. team members reviewed the recordings and took detailed notes for the purpose of comparing and analyzing the results. limitations although the scope of this project was limited to a particular geographic area with a large population base, the sample size of the survey respondents was fairly small. the institutions of all but three respondents are classified as moderate to high research activity institutions according to the carnegie classifications. these types of institutions are by no means the only ones involved in dh work, but the high concentration of respondents from research institutions may indicate that there is greater support for dh projects at these types of institutions. as a result, this paper does not provide much discussion of dh preservation practices at smaller baccalaureate or masters institutions with a stronger emphasis on undergraduate education. a note about confidentiality individuals who participated in the online survey were asked to provide their names and contact information so we could follow-up with them if they chose to participate in the interview. individuals who took part in the interviews were guaranteed confidentiality to encourage open discussion. all findings are reported here anonymously. survey results the survey was live from june 3, 2015 to july 10, 2015. in total, 18 respondents completed the survey. demographics of the faculty engaged in digital humanities our survey respondents represented 10 new york city academic institutions, with the most responses coming from columbia university. department affiliations and professional titles are listed below (figure 2). figure 2. institutional affiliations of survey respondents (n=18) institutional affiliation # of respondents columbia university 5 cuny graduate center 3 new york university 2 bard graduate center 1 hofstra university 1 jozef pilsudski institute of america 1 new york city college of technology 1 queensborough community college 1 st. john’s university 1 the new school 1 departmental affiliations of survey respondents department affiliation # of respondents library/digital scholarship lab 7 english 4 history 3 art history 2 linguistics 1 unreported 1 academic titles of survey respondents academic titles # of respondents professor 4 assistant professor 3 associate professor 2 adjunct/lecturer 2 digital scholarship coordinator or specialist 2 phd candidate 2 director 2 chief librarian 1 we asked respondents where they received funding for their projects (figure 3). responses were split, with some respondents utilizing two funding sources. figure 3. funding source funding source # of respondents institutional funding 28% grant funding 22% personal funds 17% institutional and grant funding 17% no funding 11% institutional and personal funds 6% dh project characteristics as previously mentioned, respondents were asked to choose one digital humanities project in which to answer the survey questions. questions were asked to determine the number of people collaborating on the project and the techniques and software used. the majority of respondents (88%) were working collaboratively with one or more colleagues (figure 4). figure 4. collaborators involved in dh project (n=18) # of collaborators # of respondents 2-3 collaborators 33% 6+ collaborators 33% 0 collaborators 22% 4-5 collaborators 11% the techniques utilized are listed in figure 5, with 61% of projects utilizing more than one of these techniques. figure 5. techniques used in dh project (n=18) technique # of projects data visualizations 39% other* 32% data mining and text analysis 28% geospatial information systems (gis) 22% network analysis 17% text encoding 11% 3-d modeling 6% *maps, interactive digital museum exhibition, audio (2), software code analysis, data analysis tools, ohms (oral history metadata synchronizer) the techniques mentioned above are created with software or code, which can be proprietary, open-source, or custom. respondents utilized a mix of these software types, with 33% of respondents saying that they used proprietary software in their projects, 89% report using open-source software, and 33% used custom software. a list of software examples can be found in figure 6. figure 6. software utilized by respondents proprietary software open-source software adobe photoshop (2) wordpress (6) adobe dreamweaver omeka (3) adobe lightroom python (2) google maps mysql (2) textlab timeline.js (2) sketchup qgis (2) weebly dspace knowledge of preservation 33% of respondents reported that they had formal training in digital preservation, which the authors intended to mean academic coursework or continuing education credit. informally, respondents have consulted numerous resources to inform preservation of their project (figure 7). figure 7. sources consulted to inform preservation source percent published scholarly research 72% colleagues or informal community resources 66% digital humanities center, library/librarian, archivist 50% grey literature 44% professional or scholarly association sponsored events 22% conferences 33% campus workshops or events 11% none 6% project preservation considerations preservation of their dh project was considered by the majority (72%) of respondents. when asked who first mentioned preservation of their project, 93% of those who had considered preservation said either they or one of their collaborators brought up the issue. in only one instance did a librarian first suggest preservation, and there were no first mentions by either funder or host department. the majority of initial preservation discussions (53%) took place during the project, with 39% taking place before the project began, and 8% after project completion. when asked to consider how many years into the future they see their project being usable and accessible, the majority (56%) said 5+ years, followed by 3-4 years (22%), and 17% were unsure. one respondent noted they were not interested in preservation of the project. preservation strategy version control, migration, metadata creation, emulation, durable persistent media, and bit stream preservation are just a few strategies for preserving digital materials. we asked respondents to rate each strategy by importance (figure 8). figure 8: preservation strategies by importance all respondents reported that they backup their work in some capacity. the most respondents (78%) are using cloud services. half report the use of institutional servers, and 44% use home computers. github was mentioned by two respondents as a safe storage solution for their projects. the majority of respondents (66%) are utilizing more than one way of backing up their work. interview findings through follow-up interviews with five respondents, we delved into several of these projects in greater detail. interviewees gave us more information about their projects and their partnerships, processes, and policies for the preserving the work. profile #1: dh coordinator interview conducted and summarized by nik dragovic respondent 1 was a coordinator in a digital humanities center at their institution and had undertaken the work in collaboration with librarian colleagues because the library works closely with researchers on dh projects at this particular institution. this initiative was unique in that no preservation measures were being undertaken, a strategy that resulted from discussion during the conception of the project. the resulting life expectancy for the project, comprising a geography-focused, map-intensive historical resource incorporating additional digital content, was three to four years. the reason for the de-emphasis of preservation stemmed from a shared impression that the complexity of preservation planning acts as a barrier to initiating a project. given their intention to produce a library-produced exemplar work rather than a traditional faculty portfolio piece, the initiative was well-suited to this approach. the technical infrastructure of the project included a php stack used to dynamically render the contents of a mysql database. the general strategy incorporated elements of custom software and open source technologies including neatline and omeka. the unique perspective of the respondent as an institutional dh liaison as well as a practitioner made the interview more amenable to a general discussion of the issues facing a broad set of digital humanists and their interaction with library services. the overriding sentiment of the respondent echoed, to a large extent, existing literature’s assertion that dh preservation is nascent and widely variable. specifically, the interviewee opined that no one framework, process, or solution exists for those seeking to preserve dh outputs, and that every project must have its own unique elements taken into account. this requires an individual consultation with any project stakeholder concerned with the persistence of their work. a primary element of such conversations is expectation management. in the respondent’s experience, many practitioners have the intention of preserving a fully functional interface in perpetuity. in most cases, the time, cost, and effort required to undertake such preservation measures is untenable. the variegated and transformative code stack environments currently underpinning dh projects is a leading issue in permanent maintenance of the original environment of a dh project. as a result, the respondent advocated for a “minimal computing” approach to preservation, in which more stable formats such as html are used to render project elements in a static format, predicated on a data store instead of a database, with languages like javascript as a method for coordinating the front-end presentation. this technique allows not only for a simpler and more stable preservation format, but also enables storage on github or apache servers, which are generally within institutional resources. another preservation solution the respondent explained was the dismantling of a dh project into media components. instead of migrating the system into a static representation, one leverages an institutional repository to store elements such as text, images, sound, video, and data tables separately. the resulting elements would then require a manifest to be created, perhaps in that format of a tar file, to explain the technology stack and how the elements can be reassembled. an internet archive snapshot is also a wise element to help depict the user interface and further contextualize the assets. in the experience of the respondent, helping digital humanists understand strategic and scaled approaches to preservation is one of the greatest challenges of acting as a library services liaison. students and faculty have an astute understanding of the techniques underpinning the basic functionality their work, but not the landscape of current preservation methodologies. not only is the learning curve steep for these more library-oriented topics, but the ambitions of the library and the practitioner often diverge. whereas the scholar’s ambition is often to generate and maintain a body of their own work, the library focuses more on standardization and interoperability. this creates a potential point of contention between library staff and those they attempt to counsel. often the liaison must exercise sensitivity in their approach to users, who themselves are experts in their field of inquiry. the broader picture also includes emerging funding consideration for national grants. when asked about the intentions of the national endowment for the humanities to incorporate preservation and reusability into funding requirements, the respondent expressed skepticism of the agency’s conceptualization of preservation, stating that a reconsideration and reworking of the term’s definition was in order. to apply too exhaustive a standard would encourage a reductive focus on the resource-intensive preservation methods that the respondent generally avoids. like most facets of the dh preservation question, this warrants further inquiry from practical and administrative standpoints. in a general sense, realistic expectations and practical measures ruled the overall logic of the respondent, as opposed to adherence to any given emerging standard presently available. profile #2: library director the impetus behind respondent 2’s project was not to advance scholarship in a particular subject, so the preservation strategy and goals differed from projects that had a more explicitly scholarly purpose. the idea was hatched by a team of librarians as a means to help librarians learn and develop new skills in working with digital research with the ultimate goal of enhancing their ability to collaborate and consult with researchers on their projects. the learning and training focus of this project informed the team’s preservation strategy. a number of tools were used to plan, document, and build out this project, and some levels of the production were designed to be preserved where others were intended to be built out, but then left alone, instead of migrated as updates become available. the process was documented on a wordpress blog, and the ultimate product was built on omeka. the team did preservation and versioning of code on github, but they do not intend to update the code even if that means the website will ultimately become unusable. what was very important to this team was to preserve the “intellectual work” and the research that went into the project. to accomplish that, they decided to use software, such as microsoft word and excel, that creates easy to preserve files, and they are looking into ways to bundle the research files together and upload them to the institution’s repository. respondent 2 expressed that an early problem they had with the technology team was that they “wanted everything to be as well thought out as our bigger digital library projects, and we said that dh is a space for learning, and sometimes i could imagine faculty projects where we don’t keep them going. we don’t keep them alive. we don’t have to preserve them because what was important was what happened in the process of working out things.” this team encountered some challenges working with omeka. at one point they had not updated their version of omeka and ended up losing quite a bit of work which was frustrating. “we need to be thinking about preservation all along the way” to guard against these kinds of losses of data. working with the it department also posed challenges because “technology teams are about security and about control” and are not always flexible enough to support the evolving technology needs of a dh project. the project had to be developed on an outside server and moved to the institutional server where the code could not be changed. profile #3: art professor respondent 3’s institution has set up a dh center with an institutional commitment to preserving the materials for the projects in perpetuity. the center relies on an institutional server and has a broad policy to download and maintain files in order to maintain them indefinitely on the back end. front end production of the project was outsourced to another institution, and the preservation of that element of the project had not been considered at the time of the interview. this researcher’s main challenge was that although many of the artworks that are examples in the project are quite old and not subject to copyright, certain materials (namely photographs of 3d objects) are copyrighted and can only be licensed for a period of 10 years. the front-end developer expressed that 10 years was a long time in the lifetime of a website (which would make that limitation of little concern), but being able to only license items for a decade at a time clashes with the institutional policy of maintaining materials indefinitely on the server and raises questions about who will be responsible for this content over the long term if the original pi were to move on or retire. profile #4: archivist interview conducted and summarized by hannah silverman respondent 4, who has developed a comprehensive set of open source tools for the purpose of archiving documents and resources related to a specific historical era, sees their work within the sphere of digital humanities. the sense that their archival work was essentially related to the digital humanities came about over a period of time as their technical needs required them to connect with a larger set of people, first with the librarians and archives community through the metropolitan new york library council (metro), then as a dh activity introduced at a metro event. “i myself am writing a [dh] blog which originally was a blog by archivists and librarians…so, the way i met people who are doing similar things is at metro. we are essentially doing dh because we are on the cross of digital technologies and archives. it is just a label, we never knew we were doing dh, but it is exactly that.” the respondent goes on to describe the value of developing tools that can read across the archive, allowing researchers to experience a more contextual feel for a person described within the material – adding dimensionality and a vividness to the memory of that person: what i am struggling with is essentially one major way of presenting the data and that is the library way. the libraries see everything as an object, a book is an object, and everything else is as an object. so they see objects. and if you look at the ny public library…you can search and you can find the objects which can be a page of an archive but it is very difficult to see the whole archive, the whole collection; it’s not working this way. if you search for an object you will find something that is much in the object but it is not conducive to see the context and the archives are the context, so what i am trying to see if we can expand this context space presentation. we spent very little money on this project product which we use to display the data. there is a software designer…who built it for us, but if we could get more funding i would work on [creating] a better view for visualizing the data. several projects [like this] are waiting in line for funding here…we collect records, records are not people. records are just names. we would like to put the records in such a way that all the people are listed and then give the information about this person who was in this list because he was doing something, and in this list because he was doing something else, and in this document because he traveled from here to here and so on. that would be another way of sort of putting all the soldiers and all the people involved in these three (volunteer) uprisings for which we have complete records of in part of the archive. we have complete records of all the people in such a way that you could follow a story of a person and also maybe his comrades in arms. it may be the unit in which he worked, and so on. the respondent has addressed preservation with multiple arrays of hard drives that are configured with redundancy schemes and daily scrubbing programs for replacing any corrupted digital bits. also copies stored on tape are routinely managed in multiple offsite locations, as well as quality assurance checks occurring via in both analog and digital processes. profile #5: english and digital humanities professor interview conducted by hannah silverman and summarized by malina thiede. the project discussed in this interview began as a printed text for which an interactive, online platform was later created. the online platform includes data visualizations from user feedback (such as highlights) and a crowdsourced index, as no index was included in the original print text. the code for the project is preserved and shared on github which the interviewee sees as a good thing. the visualizations of the data are not being preserved, but the data itself is. there is an intent to create and preserve new visualizations, but the preservation plan was not set at the time of the interview. the initial project was conceived and executed in a partnership between an academic institution and a university press on a very short timeline (one year from call for submissions to a printed volume) with very rigid deadlines. due to the rapid and inflexible timeline, preservation was not considered from the outset of the project, but a data curation specialist was brought in between the launch of the site and the first round of revisions to review the site and give advice on issues of preservation and sustainability. the institution supporting the project has strong support for digital initiatives; however, an informal report from the data curation specialist tasked with reviewing the project indicated that “precarity in the institutional support for the project could result in its sudden disappearance.” the interviewee stated that “we are less focused on preservation than we should be” because “we’re looking towards the next iteration. our focus has been less on preserving and curating and sustaining what we have” than on expanding the project in new directions. at the time of the interview, this project was entering a new phase in which the online platform was going to be adapted into a digital publishing platform that would support regular publications. the interviewee indicated several times that more of a focus on preservation would be ideal but that the digital elements of this project are experimental and iterative. the priority for this project is moving ahead with the next iteration rather than using resources to preserve current iterations. analysis & conclusion through this survey of nyc librarians, scholars, and faculty, our aim was to capture a sample of the work being done in the digital humanities, paying close attention to this population’s preservation concerns, beliefs, and practices. through this research, we offer the following observations regarding dh content creators and preservation: 1. preservation is important to the researchers working on these projects, but it is often not their main focus. 2. scholars working on dh projects are looking for advice and support for their projects (including their project’s preservation). 3. librarians and archivists are already embedded in teams working on dh projects. preservation challenges we noticed through textual responses and follow-up interviews that preservation rarely came up in the earliest stages of the project – sometimes due to tight deadlines, and other times simply because preservation is not generally in the conversation during the onset of a project. researchers are typically not accustomed to thinking about how their work will be preserved. the workflows for traditional published research leave preservation in the hands of the consumer of the research, which is often the library. however, dh and other digital projects often have less clearly defined workflows and audiences, making it less obvious who should be responsible for preservation and when the preservation process should begin. our data indicates that most planning about preservation occurs sometime during the course of the project or after its completion, rather than at the beginning. best practices for digital projects state that preservation should be a consideration as close to the beginning of the project as possible, but researchers may not be aware of that until they have done significant work on a project. it is also noteworthy that just over half of our survey respondents set a goal of preserving their work for five or more years, and significant percentages (22 and 17, respectively) set goals of three to four years or were unsure of how long they wanted their work to be preserved. this indicates that not all projects are intended to be preserved for the long term, but that does not mean that preservation planning and methods should be disregarded for such projects. as these projects go forward, respondents who do want their projects to be available long term grapple with the difficulties that surround preservation of digital content and the added time commitment it demands. the following survey respondent illustrates this potential for complexity: unlike many digital humanities projects this project exists/existed in textual book format, online, and in an exhibition space simultaneously. all utilize different aspects of digital technologies and are ideally experienced together. this poses much more complicated preservation problems since preserving a book is different from preserving an exhibition which is different from preserving an online portion of a project. what is most difficult to preserve is the unified experience (something i am well aware of being a theatre scholar who has studied similar issues of ephemerality and vestigial artifacts) and is something that we have not considered seriously up to this point. however, because books have an established preservation history, the exhibition was designed to tour and last longer than its initial five-month run, and the online component will remain available to accompany the tour and hopefully even beyond, the duration of the project as a whole has yet to be truly determined and i am sure that considerations of preservation and version migration will come up in the near future for both the physical materials and the digital instantiations of the project. it promises to provide some interesting conundrums as well as fascinating revelations. and another survey respondent: i feel like i should unpack the perpetuity question. our project is text (and) images (and) data visualizations on a website. the text (and) images i’d hope would be accessible for a long time, the data (visualization) relies on specific wordpress plugins/map applications and may not be accessible for a long time. since we’re self-administering everything we will take things forward with updates as long as we can, but… roles for librarians and archivists as one librarian interviewee explained, preservation is a process that needs to be considered as a project is developed and built out, not a final step to be taken after a project is completed. hedstrom noted as far back as 1998 that preservation is often only considered at a project’s conclusion or after a “sensational loss,” and this remains a common problem nearly 20 years later. therefore, librarians and archivists should try to provide preservation support starting at the inception of a project. considering preservation at an early stage can inform the process of selecting tools and platforms; prevent data loss as the project progresses; and help to clarify the ultimate goals and products of a project. nowviskie (2015) posed the question: “is [digital humanities] about preservation, conservation, and recovery—or about understanding ephemerality and embracing change?” humanists have to grapple with this question as it regards their own work, but librarians and archivists can provide support and pragmatic advice to practitioners as they navigate these decisions. sometimes this may mean that information professionals have to resist their natural urge to advocate for maximal preservation and instead to focus on a level of preservation that will be sustainable using the resources at hand. librarians and archivists would do well to consider this advice from nowviskie (2015): we need to acknowledge the imperatives of graceful degradation, so we run fewer geriatric teen-aged projects that have blithely denied their own mortality and failed to plan for altered or diminished futures. but alongside that, and particularly in libraries, we require more a robust discourse around ephemerality—in part, to license the experimental works we absolutely want and need, which never mean to live long, get serious, or grow up. profiles #1 and #2 exemplified the ‘graceful degradation’ approach to dh preservation by building a website that was intended to be ephemeral with the idea that the content created for the site could be packaged in stable formats and deposited in an institutional repository for permanent preservation. the project discussed in profile #5, while not explicitly designed as an ephemeral project, has a fast moving, future focused orientation, such that any one particular iteration of the project may not exist indefinitely, or even for very long. of course, an ephemeral final product may not be an acceptable outcome in some cases, but advice from librarians can inform the decision making process about what exactly will be preserved from any project and how to achieve the level of preservation desired. due to variations in the scale and aims of individual dh projects and the resources available in different libraries, it would be virtually impossible to dictate a single procedure that librarians should follow in order to provide preservation support for dh projects, but based on our data and interviews, librarians who want to support preservation of dh research can take the following steps: 1. keep up with existing, new, or potential dh research projects on campus. depending on the type of institution, those projects may be anything from large scale projects like the linguistic atlas mentioned above to undergraduate student work. 2. offer to meet with people doing dh on campus to talk about their projects. begin a discussion of preservation at an early stage even if long term preservation is not a goal of the researchers. establishing good preservation practices early can help to prevent painful data losses like the one mentioned in profile #2 as the project progresses. 3. work with the researchers to develop preservation plans for their projects that will help them meet their goals and that will be attainable given the resources available at your institution/library. – in developing a plan, some of the questions from our survey (see appendix i) may be helpful, particularly questions about the nature of the project and the intended timeline for preservation. – also keep in mind what resources are available at your library or institution. kretzschmar and potter (2010) took advantage of a large, extant media archive at their library to support preservation of the linguistic atlas. the interviewees in profiles #1 and #2 also mentioned the institutional repository (ir) as a possible asset in preserving some of the components of their work. (while useful for providing access, irs are not a comprehensive preservation solution, especially at institutions that use a hosting service.) – coordinate with other librarians/staff that may have expertise to help with preservation such as technology or intellectual property experts. as discussed in profile #3, copyright can pose some challenges for dh projects, especially those that include images. many libraries have staff members that are knowledgeable about copyright who could help find solutions to copyright related problems. – for doing preservation work with limited resources, the library of congress digital preservation site has a lot of information about file formats and digitization. another good, frequently updated source from the library of congress is the digital preservation blog the signal. although created in 2013 and not updated, the powrr tool grid could be a useful resource for learning about digital preservation software and tools. conclusion dh projects are well on their way to becoming commonplace at all types of institutions and among scholars at all levels from undergraduates to full professors. the data and interviews presented here provide a snapshot of how some digital humanists are preserving their work and about their attitudes toward preservation of dh projects in general. they show that there are opportunities for librarians to help define the preservation goals of dh projects and work with researchers on developing preservation plans to ensure that those goals are met, whether the goal is long term preservation or allowing a project to fade over time. acknowledgements although this article is published under a single author’s name, the survey and interviews were created and conducted by a team of four that also included allison piazza, nik dragovic, and hannah silverman. allison, nik, hannah, and i all worked together to write and conduct the survey, analyze the results, and present our findings in an ala poster session and to the metropolitan new york library council (metro). writing and conducting the interviews was likewise a group effort, and all of them contributed to writing our initial report although it was never fully completed. the contributions of these team members was so substantial that they should really be listed as authors of this paper alongside me, but they declined when i offered. this project was initially sponsored by the metropolitan new york library council (metro). tom nielsen was instrumental in shepherding this project through its early phases. special thanks also to the pratt institute school of information for funding the poster of our initial results that was displayed at the 2015 ala annual conference. additional thanks to chris alen sula, jennifer vinopal, and monica mccormick for their advice and guidance during the early stages of this research. finally, thanks to publishing editor ian beilin, and to reviewers ryan randall and miriam neptune. their suggestions were immensely helpful in bringing this paper into its final form. references bryson, t., posner, m., st. pierre, a., & varner, s. (2011, november). spec kit 326: digital humanities. retrieved from http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/spec-326-web.pdf carnegie classifications | basic classification. (n.d.). retrieved from http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/classification_descriptions/basic.php hedstrom, m. (1997). digital preservation: a time bomb for digital libraries. computers and the humanities, 31(3), 189–202. kirschenbaum, m. g. (2009). done: finishing projects in the digital humanities, digital humanities quarterly, 3(2). retrieved from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000037/000037.html kretzschmar, w. a. (2009). large-scale humanities computing projects: snakes eating tails, or every end is a new beginning? digital humanities quarterly, 3(2). retrieved from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000038/000038.html kretzschmar, w. a., & potter, w. g. (2010). library collaboration with large digital humanities projects. literary & linguistic computing, 25(4), 439–445. library of congress. (n.d.). about – digital preservation. retrieved from http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/about/ maron, n. l., & pickle, s. (2014, june 18). sustaining the digital humanities: host institution support beyond the start-up phase. retrieved from http://www.sr.ithaka.org/publications/sustaining-the-digital-humanities/ nowviskie, b. (2015). digital humanities in the anthropocene. digital scholarship in the humanities, 30(suppl_1), i4–i15. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv015 smith, a. (2004). preservation. in s. schreibman, r. siemens, & j. unsworth (eds.). a companion to digital humanities. oxford: blackwell. retrieved from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docid=blackwell/978140510313/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-5-7&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-5-7&branddefault walters, t., & skinner, k. (2011, march). new roles for new times: digital curation for preservation. retrieved from http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/nrnt_digital_curation17mar11pdf what is digital humanities? (2015, january). retrieved from http://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/ zorich, d. m. (2008, november). a survey of digital humanities centers in the us. retrieved from http://f-origin.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1834/files/2013/08/zorich_2008_asurveyofdigitalhumanitiescentersintheus2.pdf appendix: survey preservation in practice: a survey of nyc academics engaged in digital humanities thanks for clicking on our survey link! we are a group of four information professionals affiliated with the metropolitan new york library council (metro) researching the digital preservation of dh projects. contextual information is available at the mymetro researchers page. our target group is new york city digital humanists working in academia (such as professors or phd candidates) who have completed or done a significant amount of work on a dh project. if you meet this criteria, we’d appreciate your input. the survey will take less than 15 minutes. the information we gather from this survey will be presented at a metro meeting, displayed on a poster at the annual conference of the american library association, and possibly included as part of a research paper. published data and results will be de-identified unless prior approval is granted. please note that your participation is completely voluntary. you are free to skip any question or stop at any time. you can reach the survey administrators with any questions or comments: nik dragovic, new york university, nikdragovic@gmail.com allison piazza, weill cornell medical college, allisonpiazza.nyc@gmail.com hannah silverman, jdc archives, hannahwillbe@gmail.com malina thiede, teachers college, columbia university, malina.thiede@gmail.com is your project affiliated with a new york city-area institution or being conducted in the new york city area? yes no title or working title of your dh project: does your project have an online component? yes (please provide link, if available): to be determined no what techniques or content types have you used or will you use in your project? select all that apply. data visualizations data mining and text analysis text encoding network analysis gis (geospatial information systems) 3-d modeling timelines what date did you begin work on this project (mm/yy) approximately how many people are working on this project? 2-3 4-5 6+ i am working on this project alone has preservation been discussed in relation to this project? yes no who first mentioned the preservation of your project? self librarian dh center staff project member funder host department other: at what stage in the project was preservation first discussed? before the project began during the project after project completion who is/will be responsible for preserving this project? select up to two that best apply. self (pi) library host department another team member institution person or host to be determined campus it another institution how important are each of these processes to your overall preservation strategy for this project? bit-stream preservation or replication (making backup copies of your work) durable persistent media (storing data on tapes, discs, or another physical medium) emulation (using software and hardware to replicate an environment in which a program from a previous generation of hardware or software can run) metadata creation migration (to copy or convert data from one form to another) version control are there any other preservation strategies essential to your work that are not listed in the above question? if so, please list them here. do you have defined member roles/responsibilities for your project? yes no not applicable, i am working on this project alone. what is your main contribution to this project team? select all that apply. technical ability subject expertise project management skills is there a specific member of your team that is responsible for preservation of the technical infrastructure and/or display of results? yes no is there a dh center at your institution? yes no how often have you consulted with the dh center for your project? never once a few times many times dh center staff member is a collaborator on this project my institution does not have a dh center how is this project funded? select all that apply institutional funding grant funding personal funds were you required to create a preservation plan for a funding application? yes no what kinds of resources have you consulted to inform the preservation of your project? select all that apply. published scholarly research (such as books or journal articles) guides, reports, white papers and other grey literature professional or scholarly association sponsored events or resources (such as webinars) conferences campus workshops or events colleagues or informal community resources none dh center, library/librarian, archivist have you had any training in digital preservation? yes no how many years into the future do you see your project being usable/accessible? 1-2 years 3-4 years 5+ years not sure is your resource hosted at your own institution? yes no if no, where is it hosted? how are you backing up your work? select all that apply. cloud service institutional server home computer dam tools not currently backing up work other which of the following types of software have you used to create your project? select all that apply. proprietary software (please list examples) open-source software (please list examples) custom software if you would like to add any perspectives not captured by the previous questions, or clarify your answers, please use the comment box below: your full name email address institutional affiliation primary department affiliation academic title if applicable, when did/will you complete your phd? would you be willing to be the subject of an approximately 45-minute interview with a member of our team to talk more in-depth about your project and preservation concerns? the innovation in libraries awesome foundation chapter from accidental to intentional library management: the risws approach 1 response pingback : preservation in practice: a survey of new york city digital humanities researchers – the gale blog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct we used problem-based learning in library instruction and came to question its treatment of students – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 9 aug elliott stevens and andria tieman /3 comments we used problem-based learning in library instruction and came to question its treatment of students in brief: two instruction librarians at a medium-sized liberal-arts college on the east coast of the united states replaced their lecture-style teaching with problem-based learning (pbl). they collaborated with two english instructors to bring pbl to a two-session sequence of library instruction. however, the more they used pbl, and the more they read about how other instruction librarians had employed it, the more they came to see how problematic it can be—especially in its failure to see students as teachers. in this article, you will consider if problem-based learning needs a refresh with critical pedagogy. in the studies that followed pedagogy of the oppressed, i sought for more clarity as i attempted to analyze student-teacher relations. i have insisted on making it clear that teachers and students are different, but if the teacher has opted for democracy, he or she cannot allow this difference to become antagonistic. this means that he or she must not allow his or her authority to become authoritarian. 1 how we found problem-based learning we were two librarians at a medium-sized liberal-arts school on the east coast of the united states when we began to replace our lecture-style information literacy instruction with problem-based learning (pbl). at our college, there were about 4,000 undergraduate students, and at our library, we worked with thirty-one other librarians and staff, with ten of the librarians doing around 180-200 sessions of instruction each academic year. before we experimented with pbl, nearly all our instruction was one-shot and lecture-style. the ten of us who taught had a checklist of things we should cover in a fifty or seventy-five-minute session. this checklist started with library basics like how to contact librarians, find hours of operation, and check a library account. it then moved on to simple catalog and database searching before getting to specialized, subject-specific libguides we had made.2 we taught in a computer lab in the library, where we would stand at the front of the room, project the computer screen, and lead students through our list. we requested that students log onto computers and follow along as we went through our steps, but whenever any other librarians sat in the back of the room, perhaps to observe our teaching, they couldn’t help but notice that not all of the students took our lead. instead, some students would go to google or perhaps use library resources (like specialized databases) that weren’t being demonstrated at the time. other students wouldn’t log on at all and would be using their phones. if we got through our program in thirty-five or forty minutes, we’d let the students know they could use the rest of the time—ten or fifteen minutes—to search on their own. sometimes we would rove around the room at that point, and other times we wouldn’t. this method of teaching worked for us because it was reproducible and predictable. by having one checklist that performed well enough for all classes, we didn’t have to come up with new or drastically different lesson plans; and by providing only one-shot instruction, we didn’t have to worry about covering twice as many (or maybe even three times as many) sessions. we were, after all, part of a small group of instruction librarians, a fact that constrained just how much we could experiment with additional teaching while shouldering other responsibilities. besides, in the post-instruction surveys we sent to faculty and instructors, they either praised us or had no gripes. they were satisfied with what we were doing, and the instruction requests, on the order of 190 a year, kept rolling in. although we knew lecture-style, one-shot instruction worked well enough from our perspective (the librarian’s view), and though we knew faculty and instructors had no qualms with it, we had little idea about how the students felt. we were not sending post-instruction surveys to them, and in the last ten or fifteen minutes of a session, when we interacted with them directly, they weren’t commenting on our teaching methods, and we weren’t asking them for advice or critique. it would have been easy to continue what we were doing, but the lack of student participation and feedback bothered us. we were familiar with ideas from critical pedagogy, and in many ways we realized our teaching epitomized paulo freire’s “banking concept” of education. to define that term, freire writes: in the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as a process of inquiry.3 the perniciousness of the banking concept isn’t just that teachers view students as empty or in deficit; it’s also that teachers fail to make space for students to learn in ways that call upon their unique lived experiences. ira shor, another practitioner of critical pedagogy insists that “students are creative, intelligent beings, not plants or blank slates or pegboards for teacherly hammering.”4 and bell hooks, perhaps the most influential critical pedagogy theorist of them all, goes further by writing about pushback from teachers whose students seek to upend the banked class: during my twenty years of teaching, i have witnessed a grave sense of dis-ease among professors (irrespective of their politics) when students want us to see them as whole human beings with complex lives and experiences rather than simply as seekers after compartmentalized bits of knowledge.5 passages like the ones above, with their clear, direct language, helped us define our vague but persistent worries about not involving students in the learning process. we saw that our methods of instruction were shutting down opportunities for mutual teaching and learning and that, in effect, as students walked into our computer lab, we were asking them to check themselves at the door and leave their histories, their identities, and their knowledge behind. although critical pedagogy began to transform our thinking and served as our catalyst, strangely enough the instruction we designed next wasn’t based on the ideas of freire, shor, or hooks. instead, because problem-based learning was popular in library journals at the time, and perhaps because it superficially reminded us of critical pedagogy, we turned to it. only later, when reflecting on the effectiveness of problem-based learning, would we return to critical pedagogy. problem-based learning—from medical school to libraries problem-based learning started in ontario, canada, at mcmaster university in 1969, a year before paulo freire published pedagogy of the oppressed. it was developed by faculty in mcmaster’s health sciences and was used in the medical school. teachers observed that “students were disenchanted and bored with their medical education because they were saturated by the vast amounts of information they had to absorb, much of which was perceived to have little relevance to medical practice.”6 to address their concerns, they created pbl, a drastically different alternative based on these principles: learning is student-centered learning occurs in small student groups teachers are facilitators or guides problems form the organizing focus and stimulus for learning problems are a vehicle for the development of clinical problem-solving skills new information is acquired through self-directed learning.7 because problem-based learning and critical pedagogy started almost simultaneously and because they share certain features—like an emphasis on problem-solving and an aim of upending hierarchies—we’ve wondered if their theorists and practitioners were at all in conversation with one another. “was there any exchange?” we’ve asked ourselves. were there professional networks that bridged north america and south america? we haven’t been able to find any evidence of collaboration, so perhaps these ways of teaching and learning simply happened coincidentally and in parallel. nevertheless, as we first read about pbl’s origin and history, we couldn’t help but to recall passages of freire’s like this: those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. they must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in relation with the world.8 but even as we noticed similarities between critical pedagogy and pbl, we also began to pick up on stark differences, most of which concern the very definition of what it means to be a student or a teacher. in pbl, for instance, roles are clearly defined in that the learning environment should be focused on people identified as “students”; that is, education should be “student-centered.” furthermore, anyone who had defined themselves as a “teacher” should ideally switch their role and behavior to that of a “facilitator” or “guide.” a practitioner of critical pedagogy like freire, in contrast, is wary of saddling anyone with roles that not only simplify but also dichotomize. he writes: through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.9 these divergent ways of understanding what it means to be a “teacher” or a “student” became more pronounced and concerning to us as, much later, we got deeper into our own use of problem-based learning and delved further into the writings of instruction librarians who had tried it. but early on, when we were gathering information about pbl in libraries, we weren’t yet critical of it. instead, we were simply learning about something new—like that it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s that librarians began to employ pbl and tout its efficacy. in articles from journals, we read about librarians who raise the importance of problems and case studies used in instruction10, 11, 12 and who, like the faculty at mcmaster university, choose to redefine themselves as “tutors,” “guides,” “facilitators,” and “coaches.”13, 14, 15 in addition, “student-centered” learning becomes the fashionable term16, 17, 18 and small-group learning is what’s preferable.19, 20, 21 oftentimes, these groups have to “report to” or “debrief” the rest of the class. although these methods are similar to the original mcmaster program and to one another, too, there are also important differences amongst them. for example, some librarians claim pbl can be accomplished with a one-shot session22, 23, 24 while others argue that far more time is required.25, 26, 27 some show librarians working closely with faculty and instructors28, 29, 30 while others show very little interaction or none at all.31, 32 beyond all these similarities and differences about pbl in library journals, there is also a pronounced pattern in which some librarians and faculty members—the newly self-labeled “facilitators” and “guides”—characterize students in broadly negative ways, especially before intervening with pbl. regarding students, they write lines like: when [students] do not get what they think they are looking for immediately, they are apt to say, “this database sucks,” discard it, and try another source—just as uncritically as they might decide just to try another web site or another store at the mall when they do not immediately find something for which they are shopping.33 [pbl] is also a great option for teaching information literacy to uninterested students who believe they already know how to find the information they need.34 we also began to better understand that students who are not given any support or structure to begin the research process only use what they already know (the internet), because the unknown is too unknown or too invisible to their untrained eye.35 but we must take care to not move too quickly and must be sure to connect important concepts previously learned with new concepts to be learned. it is soon apparent that students who have not used and identified appropriate information sources will always be unable to identify believable solutions to real-life problems and to move beyond what they already know.36 we don’t recall if we took issue with these lines when we first read them. at the time, we were combing the articles for ideas, hoping they would help us put together instruction that would break us out of our banking-concept-based checklist. later, though, as we began to work with pbl, and as we went back to these articles, we couldn’t help but to feel that statements like the ones above betrayed a contradiction in how librarians use pbl in instruction and write about it after the fact. simply put, what’s the point of “student-centered” learning that dismisses where students are coming from? and what are we to do if, after our own forays into pbl, we can’t agree with such characterizations of students? a quick sketch of what our problem-based learning looked like: in putting together our version of problem-based learning instruction, we elected to borrow elements from what several other librarians had tried as opposed to inventing something wholly new or recreating but one method exactly. this is what we put together: similar to what barbara kenney37 recommends, before the pbl instruction began, we met with the instructor of the class to go over their assignment, settle on library resources to include in instruction, and come up with three problems. for our problems, instead of using case studies, which are what kenney employed, we chose to go with questions. for the first of two fifty-minute instruction sessions, we started by asking the students about their assignment. after a brief discussion, we then presented them with the first question we brainstormed with their instructor. next, with the students’ input, we discussed how the question could be broken up into keywords before we demonstrated how it could be plugged into two library resources. (some librarians who have used pbl in instruction provide orientation about research materials38, 39, 40 while others, to great effect, choose to have students figure them out on their own.41, 42 ) after that, the students did their own searches with that same question while we roved around the room with their instructor, encouraging students to speak with us and with one another. we then demonstrated two more library resources before, again, the students did their own searches. although this session did not include group work and reporting out, which are often components of pbl, we believe what we did here still fits the pbl description because problems were, in fact, the driver of the session. furthermore, in some library articles about pbl, group work is not featured at all.43, 44 in the second of two fifty-minute sessions, we did a quick review of what we did in the first session before we broke up the students into four groups. two of the groups got the second question of the three that we had developed with their instructor, and two of the groups got the third question. for about twenty minutes, the groups explored their questions while we and their instructor circuited the room, speaking with them and listening them talk to one another. then, for the final twenty minutes, the groups took the role of the teacher and taught us what they had learned. (for reasons we’ll get to later, we prefer to characterize what the students did at the end as teaching, not “reporting” or “debriefing.”) a closer look at our use of problem-based learning and what came out of it meeting with instructors before instruction: in order to come up with problems to pose in two sessions of library instruction, we opted to team up with two instructors who were teaching english composition classes. both of them were introducing assignments in which their students would have to identify a problem—it could be a local, national, or global issue—and propose a feasible solution by way of argumentation and research. speaking with these instructors, we agreed to come up with three questions for the sequence of instruction. we decided to come up with questions, as opposed to problems or case studies, because both instructors stressed inquiry in their classes, and they believed that in order to come up with a good argument or solution, you must first be able to raise questions you genuinely want to know the answer to. having decided on questions as our focus in problem-based learning, we collaborated to come up with some that we not only thought worked with the assignment but also provoked us into feeling we’d want to write problem-solving papers of our own. these are the questions we came up with: how does poverty affect the learning of college-age students in the us? what are colleges doing to be more energy efficient? what, exactly, could our school do to be more energy efficient? what do colleges do to provide resources for students who live off campus or who commute to campus? what does our school do? should our school do something more? at colleges, what are the attitudes toward terms like “safe space,” “microaggression,” and “trigger warning”? are there colleges that provide rape kits—and the professionals (sanes) [sexual assault nurse examiners] trained to administer them—for their students? should our college provide these?45 what are colleges doing to address the cost of textbooks? what actions are being taken to stem the rise of human trafficking in europe and the us? how is funding and security protection at unesco world heritage sites coordinated/handled? looking at these questions now, and having read more carefully about pbl, we see that some of them aren’t truly the open-ended or “ill-structured problems” that are preferred.46 to make these questions more open-ended, we should have taken better care to ensure their answers aren’t just bits of information found on websites or in databases. for example, our question “what are colleges doing to address the cost of textbooks?” simply requires students to discover something—like the initiative the university of massachusetts, amherst, has put forward with open educational resources. however, if we had described how costly textbooks can be on our own campus and asked students what can be done about that problem, then that would have been a much more open-ended question or an “ill-structured” problem. despite the fact that we could have improved our questions, we did find it was worthwhile to spend time with instructors, review assignments together, think about lesson planning, and come up with questions that were important to us. oftentimes, theorists in critical pedagogy write about the power differential between teachers and students, but they don’t mention the oppressive dynamics that can exist between educators working together, like librarians and instructors or faculty. in these planning meetings we had, the instructor was not dictating a lesson plan to us, and we weren’t imposing banking-concept methods on them by assuming they didn’t know anything about worthwhile library instruction. thinking about paolo freire, bell hooks writes, “there was this one sentence of freire’s that became a revolutionary mantra for me: ‘we cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become subjects.’”47 by working closely with each other from the beginning, we were ensuring we’d both be actors—not the acted upon—in the classroom, and we hoped that students would also feel like agents once the instruction began. the first session of instruction: to describe our teaching method in this first session, which took place in our library’s computer lab and was only fifty minutes long, we came to refer to it as a “verse-chorus-verse” approach in that we would alternate between starting a discussion or demonstrating a resource for no more than five minutes before speaking about something or working together. so, after having introduced ourselves and given the students a few minutes to fill out a quick pre-instruction survey, we encouraged people to speak by asking them about what they knew about their problem-solving assignment. in one class, the students said they weren’t sure what the assignment was because they had only just received it. we next looked at the assignment together, and one student identified that a peer-reviewed article was a requirement. “what does ‘peer-reviewed’ mean?” we asked everyone. one student ventured it’s when people in your class read a draft of your work. the instructor then stepped in and said that, yes, that’s one way of thinking about peer review but that another is a particular genre feature of scholarly writing. she went further by describing the process of the academic peer review. in another class, when we were again speaking about components of the assignment, one student said they could cite newspaper articles in their writing. “when citing news sources, is there anything you have to be careful of?” we asked everyone. one person said newspapers can be biased, and as we continued to ask questions about bias, students mentioned that sources like the new york times could be considered more liberal, while the wall street journal was more conservative. next, we presented one of the questions we had concocted with the instructor. we explained that we thought the question we had come up with went well with the problem-solving assignment and that it was something we were truly curious about and wanted to investigate with their help. breaking up our question into keywords, we next used that language to demonstrate how a couple databases (academic search complete and jstor) worked before encouraging the students to use that same question—as well as those keywords and other language they generated—to conduct searches of their own. after that, we showed how proquest newsstand (or literati by credo) operates and also shared some site-specific googling tips before, again, opening up the time for students to do their own searches, keeping our original question in mind. when the students were doing their own searches and experimenting with databases and the open internet, we and the instructors roved around the room, checking in with people individually and listening if students were speaking to one another. in a session in which students were using the question “how does poverty affect the learning of college-age students in the us?” we noticed one student had googled a thesaurus in order to come up with synonyms for “poverty.” another student, comparing academic search complete and jstor, told us and other students around her that she believed jstor’s boolean operators did not work as well as academic search complete’s. she wanted to know why jstor broke up her terms if she had stipulated she wanted articles that must include both “college” and “poverty.” in that moment, we said we didn’t know the answer but that, perhaps, we could look it up and encouraged her to do the same. in a first session with another class, when we were exploring the question “what are colleges doing to be more energy efficient? what, exactly, could our school do to be more energy efficient?” a student found that “going green” was a useful term to use in proquest newsstand. another student conducting a site-specific google search with “site:.edu” found a university webpage from 2007. “is this source too old?” he said. we asked him what he thought, and he came to the conclusion that it depends on what you’re writing about. another student was finding material in projectmuse, a resource we didn’t demonstrate but that they found serendipitously on one of our library’s webpages. yet another student discovered she could start with a search in literati–she was looking for reference material about “green energy”–only to get offered links that would take her to academic articles in jstor. she pointed all this out to us when we visited. although these are admittedly anecdotes (and clearly not generalizable to a particular population) for us they confirmed well enough that demonstrating resources for fifteen or twenty minutes and having students do their own searches for thirty or thirty-five minutes is a far better, far more active use of time than the other way around. in the past, when we had lectured to students and worked through our checklist, we could go through most of the session without hearing a single student voice. with problem-based learning—even our modified version of it that, in this first session, didn’t include group work—the focus can be on a question instead of a lecturer. what this means is that there was much more time for everyone to participate, and people were speaking with us, their instructor, and one another from minute one. deborah cheney48 and barbara kenney49 have both written about how pbl brings about more interaction between the students, librarians, and instructors, and this is undoubtedly what we experienced as well. furthermore, moments like the ones above illustrated that first-year college students do have much to share and contribute when it comes to library research. as ira shor insisted, they aren’t plants, they aren’t pegboards; like anyone they are intelligent, curious humans who bring rich, varied experiences with them to the classroom. as eric hines and samantha hines plainly state, “it is a commonly held opinion among teaching faculty that the average college student lacks sufficient skill and training in critical thinking and information literacy”50 but that wasn’t our belief or that of the instructors we worked with. even if we had held that grim view, how could we have failed to notice what the students brought to this first session of instruction? certainly, they showed they had something to learn when it came to the specific resources we were working with and the conventions of academic writing and research, but they also repeatedly proved they arrived to the session not as blank slates but as diaries full of lived experiences, many of which already equipped them with a framework for analyzing information. thinking about these examples, we also can’t help but to return to cheney’s words: it is soon apparent that students who have not used and identified appropriate information sources will always be unable to identify believable solutions to real-life problems and to move beyond what they already know.51 [emphasis ours] again, this just wasn’t what we observed, and even for the students who weren’t immediately able to find “appropriate information sources” related to the question we provided, it was obvious that what they already knew (that is, their lives, their memories, their experiences) wasn’t something to dismiss or discount. having read cheney’s article, we have only respect for how dynamically she teams up with faculty members, and her instructional design and teaching are clearly powerhouse, but in passages like the one above, she betrays something about pbl that we came across more than a few times in library journals; namely that while pbl might appear progressive and “student-centered” on the surface, it can still harbor banking-concept beliefs. to come back to freire again, this happens in particular when students are seen only as objects to control—as “students of the teacher”—as opposed to “students teachers.” really, for pbl in libraries to be truly effective, we have come to believe its tenets must be revised and paired with concepts from critical pedagogy. the second session of instruction: after the first session of library instruction driven by problem-based learning, no more than a week later, we met for a second fifty-minute session of pbl. to start this second session, which was in the students’ classroom and not the library’s computer lab, we spent about five to ten minutes reviewing resources from the last time—things like academic search complete, jstor, proquest newsstand, literati by credo, and site-specific googling—before we broke the students up into four groups. we gave two of the groups a question we had prepared with their instructor during our initial planning meeting and the other two groups a different question. the students had twenty minutes to investigate their questions (they had brought laptops), and for the last twenty minutes of the class, each group stood up, embodied the role of the teacher, and taught us about what they had found, using the classroom’s desktop computer, big screen, and projector. similar to what other instruction librarians had done, we chose to have more than one session of problem-based learning because we felt it was impossible for students to explore questions meaningfully in a one-shot sliver of time. barbara kenney, who argues that pbl can be done in a one-shot, insists that instruction librarians can make good use of a fifty-minute session “by creatively designing an instruction plan that relies on defined goals and objectives based on a problem that captures student interest.”52 however, she doesn’t show how this can be done in less than an hour because, when she gives an example of her own, it’s in an eighty-minute block of time.53 in another article that seeks to show pbl can be done in one shot, katelyn angell and katherine boss describe a program that’s more of a scavenger hunt (one branded “the amazing library race”) where students search for answers to prompts like “look in the library catalog for any books written by jay-z. write down the call number of the book.”54 such prompts are even more closed-ended and less “ill-structured” than the ones we had come up with and don’t push people into thinking about problems beyond how a catalog works, where books are shelved, and whether or not they’ll place in a competition. furthermore, in “the amazing library race,” although the students did work in groups, it was more to compete against instead of teach one another. the groups never had a chance to “report” to others or “debrief” what they discovered because they were pitted against one another. really, though this event had elements of pbl in it (that is, problems and group work) it has more the appearance of an active-learning activity. the more we conducted our own sequenced sessions of problem-based learning, the more we saw that even 100 minutes weren’t enough; we would have preferred to have at least one more fifty-minute session. and the more we employed pbl, the more we valued its emphasis on group work, although we eventually came to see it much differently from other instruction librarians, not to mention the original architects of pbl at mcmaster university. in the paragraph above, we chose to put quotes around words like “report” and “debrief” not just because we’re citing language that other instruction librarians prefer but because we want to distance ourselves from those verbs. in the final twenty minutes in which the students shared their findings, we could not say they were “debriefing” us, which is language that’s absurdly corporatized, even militarized. no, they were teaching us and each other. when alexius smith macklin writes, “in pbl, there is no teacher, per se”55 we believe they are nullifying students who are also teachers. responding to smith macklin, we would say, “in pbl, everyone has the chance to be a teacher or a student. roles are not fixed but fluid.” again, this is not to discount how skilled instruction librarians clearly are in the pbl articles we read or to imply they don’t care about students. in kate wenger’s “problem-based learning and information literacy,” she describes a beautifully designed series of five seventy-five minute sessions of pbl.56 while we aspire to teach as well as wenger does in that sequence, we also find it strange she uses no form of the verb “teach” when describing the students’ actions. (instead, the students “recorded,” “addressed,” “spent time,” “discussed,” “felt,” “gave,” “responded,” “started to develop,” and, for a second time, “gave.”57 ) what’s more, on the part of wenger or the faculty member she worked with, there is no admission of having learned from the students. the student are never seen as teachers. so it’s a great contrast in perspective that as we and the instructor roved around the room in the first half of this second session of instruction, we recognized that students were actively working with and teaching one another, not to mention us. for example, as one group of four students embarked on researching the question “what actions are being taken to stem the rise of human trafficking in europe and the us?”, one student suggested they would start looking up terms in literati and asked if someone else would like to give academic search complete a try. when we checked back with this group a few minutes later, we noticed that the student who was using literati had found its “mind map,” which is a feature that visually links words in the shape of a web. at the center of this student’s web was “human trafficking,” and they were sharing other language the program had generated with the rest of the group. the student who had been using academic search complete now wanted to know how you can figure out if an article is peer-reviewed or not. we said that, to start, in its results screen, you can check a box that says “scholarly/peer-reviewed.” another student in the group noted that jstor doesn’t have that checkbox. “so how do you find out if something is peer-reviewed in jstor?” we asked the group. joking, the student using academic search complete said, “oh, i just won’t use jstor then.” we laughed before we suggested they could always google the name of a journal title to see if they could figure out if it’s peer-reviewed. that, or they could use a specialized database like ulrichsweb to confirm what a journal’s designation is. “and when you research,” we said, “you’ll often have to consult more than one database. academic search complete gives you access to one pile of information, but jstor gives you access to another pile. when you research, you might have lots of luck in one place and little success in another.” a student in another group in another class—one looking into the question “at colleges, what are the attitudes toward terms like ‘safe space,’ ‘microaggression,’ and ‘trigger warning’?”—wanted to know if site-specific googling worked only in general for “.com,” “.org,” “.gov,” and “.edu” or if they could use it for combing a specific website. “can i use it to search youtube?” she wanted to know. we asked her to try it, and she plugged in “site:youtube.com” for a search about safe spaces on college campuses and got some results. someone else in her group had found an article on jstor and wanted to know if they had to read the whole thing to understand it. “does it have that thing at the beginning? the summary?” someone else in the group asked before we could respond. they explained that academic articles usually have summaries at the beginning, and we took the opportunity to say that, in the genre of scholarly writing, those summaries are often called “abstracts.” again, although these scenes are anecdotes, we do feel they capture the spirit of the seven follow-up sessions of problem-based learning we participated in. in moments like these, it’s apparent that students benefited from working together in groups and that they were acting not just as students but also as teachers. the students’ embodiment of what it means to teach was clearest in the final twenty minutes of this second session, when they stood up at the front of the classroom and, using the room’s computer and projector, taught us and one another about what they had found. one group that had looked into the question “at colleges, what are the attitudes toward terms like ‘safe space,’ ‘microaggression,’ and ‘trigger warning’?” said they had to use many different search terms in order to find anything in an academic database like academic search complete. they showed us how, in the “advanced search” page of that database, they had even gone so far as to use the “not” boolean operator in order to weed “high school” out of their search results. “at first, we weren’t sure what the ‘not’ was for,” one of them said, “but it did help us find this article.” it was an article called “how white faculty perceive and react to difficult dialogues on race,” and another student in the group mentioned that it would be especially good for people at our own school to read because, currently on our campus, a program called “difficult dialogues” had been started to address the campus climate, particularly with regard to race. someone else in their group showed how they had done a site-specific google search of our college’s website, using terms like “safe space” and “microaggression” and were surprised that very few webpages came up. “it only comes up on a women’s studies course description,” this student said. another group that had explored the questions “are there colleges that provide rape kits—and the professionals (sanes) [sexual assault nurse examiners] trained to administer them—for their students? should our college provide these?” found that our college did not provide access to sexual assault kits or staff sexual-assault nurse examiners in our health center. the students pointed out that using the search term “sane” didn’t always get them the information they were looking for and that it sometimes resulted in resources about mental health. nevertheless, they had used site-specific googling to find universities, like the university of iowa and oregon state university, that did provide sexual-assault kits and counseling for their students. they also used google maps to show us just how far away the nearest hospital was from our own institution. “this is how far a victim would have to drive to be examined,” one of the students said. their instructor praised them not only for finding salient information but also for making such a compelling argument. “these are the kinds of problems and solutions you could write about for your own papers,” she said. as we cited earlier in this paper, one of the core tenets of problem-based learning is “learning is student-centered.” in response to that declaration, however, we can’t help but ask, “but what happens when students are, in fact, teachers?” in such cases, does it mean the center shouldn’t be on them? from our experiences using problem-based learning in library instruction, we have found it’s impossible to say that students aren’t also teachers, that they don’t teach themselves as well as their librarians and instructors. what’s more, to say they are “reporting” or “debriefing” when they are truly teaching is to misrepresent the agency they’re taking in the classroom. in pedagogy of the oppressed, paulo freire writes, “education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.”58 although we have enjoyed experimenting with problem-based learning, and though it’s a significant improvement on the banking-concept education we had been relying on previously, for us it’s apparent that the instruction librarians who have used it are still trying to solve its contradictions. in fact, lately, we have been turning to people who work with critical librarianship because, through #critlib, we see that, years before us, librarians have been employing critical pedagogy and the ideas of theorists like paulo freire to question practices in information literacy instruction.59, 60 practitioners of critical librarianship seem to find, as we did, that if students aren’t seen for who they are, and if their experiences aren’t respected and heard, then the education that results isn’t democratic but oppressive. results from our survey:61 in the articles we read about problem-based learning in library instruction, no one had surveyed students about what their experiences with learning in libraries had been like in the past. most of the students we worked with were first-year college students—and a good number of them were first-semester college students—so their experiences with library instruction often went back to their time in high school. in one of our pre-instruction questions, we asked students how they had been taught about library resources in the past. with a lecture? an activity? in groups? other? in response, eighty of the 110 students (73%) said they had been taught about library resources through lecturing. four students (4%) said they had learned in groups. for us, this confirms that, when students come to our library instruction, they already have a history of learning only via banking-concept methods. percentages like these convince us to continue with teaching methods that trouble the boundaries between what it means to be a “teacher” or a “student.” later, in a post-instruction survey, we asked students about the group work we had incorporated into our problem-based learning. ninety-six out of around 126 students took this survey, and seventy-six of them (79%) said that working together in groups was helpful. furthermore, twenty-four of those students (25% of the total) responded positively to our prompt “usually, i don’t enjoy working in groups, but this was still helpful.” we were surprised to see so many of the students approved of working in groups because, anecdotally, we had sometimes heard from them that working in groups can be problematic; that is, it can be awkward to have students assign roles for themselves that are equitable, and for some students, group work is associated with busy work. but, again, these results encourage us to continue finding ways for students to work together in groups, particularly in ones that lead students, librarians, and instructors to act as both students and teachers. the point is not to be “student-centered” because it’s just as important for the center to be on “students-teachers” and the problems they’re studying. at the end of our post-instruction survey, we also left open-ended space for students to write about their favorite and least favorite parts of the instruction. here is a sampling of their responses: “what was your favorite part of this instruction?” “it was good examples that were being used. i like that we were able to do a test to see what sources we can find as if we were actually writing the proposal paper.” “doing the research myself, instead of just listening the whole time. (hands on feeling ).” “meeting as a group, and being given examples of how to properly research these topics” “my favorite part was investigating the different terms my group had to research because i had not known what some of the words meant.” “seeing how other groups found their articles.” “i think actually looking up real examples of research questions was very helpful to actually get used to using the online sources.” “the group part because we could talk with others about what they were doing.” “what was your least favorite part of this instruction and why?” “the lengthy instruction of how to look through research information we already know how to.” “my least favorite part was the group presentation because it was difficult for me to find good material.” “lecturing how to use the data bases because i already knew how.” “learning how to search the databases because this has already been taught to me.” “i have learned how to use databases many times. my least favorite part was having to sit throughout the entire presentation again. it was a nice refresher, but very repetitive.” “the library instruction part because it wasn’t very interactive.” “the repetitive instruction about some of it.” there is richness in these responses, and they give us plenty to think about as we work to revise our instructional design. for one thing, although we see some people recognized the benefit in research questions provided to them from us and their instructor, we think it would be far better if they were to look into open-ended, “ill-structured” questions, problems, and case studies of their own design. these questions of their own could replace the ones we provided; that, or perhaps they could draft and investigate their own in a third session of instruction. we also acknowledge that many students perceived our instruction as repetitive and not interactive enough, and that means we still have much to learn when it comes to offering library instruction in which they feel seen, engaged, and alive. at the beginning of this paper, we placed an epigraph that spotlights text from a letter of paolo freire’s. in it, decades after the publication of pedagogy of the oppressed, he admits he still thinks about the relationships of and differences between students and teachers.62 he raises the crucial point that anyone who identifies as a teacher must take pains not to let their authority veer into the authoritarian. we see that, in the future, as we work to bring more critical pedagogy to problem-based learning—and to be in conversation with people practicing #critlib—the best way to guard against authoritarian practices is to share the dissonances and delights of teaching with others. a sincere thanks to amanda hornby, sofia leung, annie pho, and lead pipe editors for your direct, thoughtful feedback about this final paper and earlier drafts. through your generous comments, we came to see new perspectives and found connections we had missed. bibliography angell, katelyn, and katherine boss. “adapting the amazing library race: using problem-based learning in library orientations.” college & undergraduate libraries 23, no. 1 (2016): 44-55. barrows, howard s. “problem‐based learning in medicine and beyond: a brief overview.” new directions for teaching and learning 1996, no. 68 (1996): 3-12. beilin, ian. “beyond the threshold: conformity, resistance, and the acrl information literacy framework for higher education.” in the library with the lead pipe (2015). cheney, debora. “problem-based learning: librarians as collaborators.” portal: libraries and the academy 4, no. 4 (2004): 495-508. diekema, anne r., wendy holliday, and heather leary. “re-framing information literacy: problem-based learning as informed learning.” library & information science research 33, no. 4 (2011): 261-268. freire, paulo, and macedo, donaldo p. letters to cristina: reflections on my life and work. new york: routledge, 1996. freire, paulo, ramos, myra bergman, and macedo, donaldo p. pedagogy of the oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. new york: bloomsbury academic, 2012. hines, samantha, and eric h. hines. “faculty and librarian collaboration on problem-based learning.” journal of library innovation 3, no. 2 (2012): 18-32. hooks, bell. teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york: routledge, 1994. kenney, barbara. “revitalizing the one-shot instruction session using problem-based learning.” reference & user services quarterly 47, no. 4 (2008): 386-91. pelikan, michael. “problem-based learning in the library: evolving a realistic approach.” portal: libraries and the academy 4, no. 4 (2004): 509-20. riedler, martina, and mustafa yunus eryaman. “transformative library pedagogy and community based libraries: a freirean perspective.” critical theory for library and information science: exploring the social from across disciplines (2010): 89-99. shor, ira. when students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. chicago: university of chicago press, 1996. smith macklin, alexius. “integrating information literacy using problem-based learning.” reference services review 29, no. 4 (2001): 306-14. snavely, loanne. “making problem-based learning work: institutional changes.” portal: libraries and the academy 4, no. 4 (2004): 521-31. spence, larry. “the usual doesn’t work: why we need problem-based learning.” portal: libraries and the academy 4, no. 4 (2004): 485-93. kate wenger. “problem-based learning and information literacy: a natural partnership.” pennsylvania libraries: research & practice 2, no. 2 (2014): 142-54. preand post-instruction survey questions: pre-instruction questions: what kinds of research materials have you used for assignments? check all that apply. databases (like jstor) academic journals books e-books encyclopedias wikipedia google google scholar other (please specify) generally, how confident are you using research materials for assignments? very confident confident somewhat confident not very confident what do you look for to assess the quality of research materials? check all that apply. author date publisher peer-review format (print material or online) bias popularity type of web address (.com, .org, .edu, .gov) how confident are you assessing the quality of research materials? very confident confident somewhat confident not very confident have you been taught how to use research materials? yes. in one class yes. in more than one class no i’m not sure / i don’t remember who taught you? a teacher a librarian the teacher and librarian were team teachers i taught myself other (please specify) how were you taught? check all that apply with a lecture with an activity in groups other (please specify) if you’re working to finish an assignment, how likely are you to try to use a research material that you don’t have experience with? very likely somewhat likely likely not very likely rank from 1-5 (1 being the most credible, 5 being the least credible) the credibility of these materials. an article from a national newspaper a blog a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal an advocacy organization’s website a government website post-instruction questions: what kinds of research materials have you used for assignments? check all that apply. databases (like jstor) academic journals books e-books encyclopedias wikipedia google google scholar other (please specify) generally, how confident are you using research materials for assignments? very confident confident somewhat confident not very confident what do you look for to assess the quality of research materials? check all that apply. author date publisher peer-review format (print material or online) bias popularity web address (.com, .org, .edu, .gov) how confident are you assessing the quality of research materials? very confident confident somewhat confident not very confident if you’re working to finish an assignment, how likely are you to try to use a research material that you don’t have experience with? very likely somewhat likely likely not very likely rank from 1-5 (1 being the most credible, 5 being the least credible) the credibility of these materials. an article from a national newspaper a blog a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal an advocacy organization’s website a government website how effective for your learning was using problems that your teacher provided? not at all effective somewhat effective effective very effective how helpful was it to research these problems in groups? usually, i don’t enjoy working in groups, but this was still helpful usually, i don’t enjoy working in groups, and this was not helpful usually, i like working in groups, and this was helpful usually, i like working in groups, and this was not helpful what was your favorite part of this instruction? what was your least favorite? why? paulo freire, letters to cristina: reflections on my life and work (new york, routledge, 1996), 162 [↩] libguides are a springshare product that enable librarians to make simple websites full of images, links, and widgets. at our institution, we used them to make resource guides for majors like “biology,” “black studies,” or “women’s studies.” [↩] paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed (new york: bloomsbury academic, 2012), 72 [↩] ira shor, when students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy (chicago: university of chicago press, 1996), 12 [↩] bell hooks, teaching to transgress (new york: routledge, 1994), 15 [↩] howard barrows, “problem-based learning in medicine and beyond: a brief overview.” new directions for teaching and learning, no. 68 (1996): 4 [↩] barrows, “problem-based learning in medicine and beyond: a brief overview,” 5-6 [↩] freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, 60 [↩] freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, 61 [↩] debora cheney, “problem-based learning: librarians as collaborators.” portal: libraries and the academy 4, no. 4 (2004): 495-508. [↩] eric hines and samantha hines, “faculty and librarian collaboration on problem-based learning.” journal of library innovation 3, no. 2 (2012): 18-32. [↩] barbara kenney, “revitalizing the one-shot instruction session using problem-based learning.” reference & user services quarterly 47, no. 4 (2008): 386-91. [↩] katelyn angell and katherine boss, “adapting the amazing library race: using problem-based learning in library orientations.” college & undergraduate libraries 23, no. 1 (2016): 44-55. [↩] anne diekema, wendy holliday, and heather leary, diekema, holliday, and leary. “re-framing information literacy: problem-based learning as informed learning.” library and information science research 33, no. 4 (2011): 261-68. [↩] kate wenger. “problem-based learning and information literacy: a natural partnership.” pennsylvania libraries: research & practice 2, no. 2 (2014): 142-54. [↩] angell and boss, “adapting the amazing library race: using problem-based learning in library orientations,” 44-55. [↩] kenney, “revitalizing the one-shot instruction session using problem-based learning,” 386-91. [↩] wenger,”problem-based learning and information literacy: a natural partnership,” 142-54. [↩] alexius smith macklin, “integrating information literacy using problem-based learning.” reference services review 29, no. 4 (2001): 306-14. [↩] alexius smith macklin, “integrating information literacy using problem-based learning.” reference services review 29, no. 4 (2001): 306-14. [↩] wenger, “problem-based learning and information literacy: a natural partnership,” 142-54. [↩] angell and boss, “adapting the amazing library race: using problem-based learning in library orientations,” 44-55. [↩] kenney, “revitalizing the one-shot instruction session using problem-based learning,” 386-91. [↩] smith macklin, “integrating information literacy using problem-based learning,” 306-14. [↩] cheney, “problem-based learning: librarians as collaborators,” 495-508. [↩] hines and hines, “faculty and librarian collaboration on problem-based learning,” 18-32. [↩] michael pelikan, “problem-based learning in the library: evolving a realistic approach.” portal: libraries and the academy 4, no. 4 (2004): 509-20. [↩] hines and hines, “faculty and librarian collaboration on problem-based learning,” 18-32. [↩] pelikan, “problem-based learning in the library: evolving a realistic approach,” 509-20. [↩] smith macklin, “integrating information literacy using problem-based learning,” 306-14. [↩] angell and boss, “adapting the amazing library race: using problem-based learning in library orientations,” 44-55. [↩] diekema, holliday, and leary. “re-framing information literacy: problem-based learning as informed learning,” 261-68. [↩] diekema, holliday, and leary. “re-framing information literacy: problem-based learning as informed learning,” 261-68. [↩] wenger, “problem-based learning and information literacy: a natural partnership,” 147. [↩] cheney, “problem-based learning: librarians as collaborators,” 497. [↩] ibid, 506. [↩] kenney, “revitalizing the one-shot instruction session using problem-based learning,” 388. [↩] kenney, “revitalizing the one-shot instruction session using problem-based learning,” 388. [↩] kenney, “revitalizing the one-shot instruction session using problem-based learning,” 389. [↩] smith macklin, “integrating information literacy using problem-based learning,” 308. [↩] cheney, “problem-based learning: librarians as collaborators,” 498. [↩] pelikan, “problem-based learning in the library: evolving a realistic approach,” 515. [↩] diekema, holliday, and leary. “re-framing information literacy: problem-based learning as informed learning,” 263. [↩] hines and hines, “faculty and librarian collaboration on problem-based learning,” 22. [↩] when we came up with this pair of questions with the instructor, at the time, there were many articles in the national news about the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses and how problematic their investigations were. we thought these questions could go well with a problem-solving assignment in which a student could write about how they might right injustice on college campuses, but looking at these questions now, we see they obviously could, and potentially did, raise past trauma. this is not to say that we shouldn’t encourage students to investigate topics like sexual assault, but it is to acknowledge that we were rash to offer up these questions without developing trust over time with students and giving them the clear option to opt out or select an alternative topic. paul baepler and j.d. walker’s article “active learning classrooms and educational alliances: changing relationships to improve learning” in particular reveals how trust can be forged between teachers and students, not to mention where we went wrong. [↩] kenney, “revitalizing the one-shot instruction session using problem-based learning,” 390. [↩] hooks, teaching to transgress, 46 [↩] cheney, “problem-based learning: librarians as collaborators,” 497. [↩] kenney, “revitalizing the one-shot instruction session using problem-based learning,” 390. [↩] hines and hines, “faculty and librarian collaboration on problem-based learning,” 19. [↩] cheney, “problem-based learning: librarians as collaborators,” 506. [↩] kenney, “revitalizing the one-shot instruction session using problem-based learning,” 387. [↩] ibid, 389 [↩] angell and boss, “adapting the amazing library race: using problem-based learning in library orientations,” 47. [↩] smith macklin, “integrating information literacy using problem-based learning,” 309. [↩] wenger, “problem-based learning and information literacy: a natural partnership,” 149-50. [↩] ibid. [↩] freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, 72. [↩] martina riedler and mustafa yunus eryaman. “transformative library pedagogy and community based libraries: a freirean perspective.” critical theory for library and information science: exploring the social from across disciplines (2010): 89-99 [↩] ian beilin. “beyond the threshold: conformity, resistance, and the acrl information literacy framework for higher education.” in the library with the lead pipe (2015). [↩]  we went through the irb at our school, and our application did not end up “under review” or “exempt.” instead, they determined that our project was not technically research and, as a result, was excluded from the irb process altogether. (they said what we were doing was more of an assessment of a practice.) though we were excluded from the irb process, at the beginning our first session of instruction, before we gave the students surveys, we still gave them consent forms, letting them know about our project and how we intended to present and write about it. the form also let them know that participation (or lack or participation) in the surveys or sessions of instruction would not affect their grades. [↩] freire, letters to cristina: reflections on my life and work, 162 [↩] banking concept, critical librarianship, critical pedagogy, group work, problem-based learning, student centered editorial: recent reads finding foundations: a model for information literacy assessment of first-year students 3 responses samantha hines 2017–08–28 at 7:07 pm as one of the authors of the pieces you examined, i loved this critical look at pbl. while it was an interesting and novel way to better engage with faculty on my campus at the time, it is not an approach i use any more for many of the reasons you mentioned. thank you for this! elliott stevens 2017–08–30 at 5:33 pm thanks very much for reading our article and for your feedback! i look forward to checking out productivity for librarians. f martin 2018–07–21 at 6:53 pm dear elliot, wonderful piece on pbl! came across this as i was researching something in this field. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct from the frying pan into the fire (and back again): adventures in subject-based, credit instruction – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 7 mar natalie tagge /7 comments from the frying pan into the fire (and back again): adventures in subject-based, credit instruction   in the frying pan / university of washington libraries digital collections by natalie tagge my best experience as a teacher-librarian was leading a credit, semester-long course while a librarian at the university of illinois springfield (uis) during which my students came to care deeply about the topical content and used their developing research skills to further their engagement.  for librarians, though, this is the exception rather than the rule. now i am at a new position at the claremont colleges library and am starting to translate the experience of having a whole semester to teach students into a more traditional environment of limited student-librarian contact.  i have found that my credit teaching experience has provided me with insight into how to teach information literacy skills in any context.  i’d like to use this post to reflect on my process of developing a credit course and to share a few insights on how the lessons learned from semester-long teaching can be integrated into more traditional library instruction situations. too often instruction librarians are dropped into the middle of a subject-based course and forced to integrate their lessons into its already established content and teacher-student dynamics.  or we teach semester-long information literacy courses that are either attached to a separately developed topical course or divorced from an academic subject altogether.  the fundamental question about teaching information literacy in any environment is: how do we get students to care?  this is an important question that was on my mind throughout the development of my course, and continues to drive my instruction decision-making. developing the course in the spring of 2010, the university of illinois springfield (uis) brookens library was working with the associate vice chancellor for undergraduate education to develop a new comparative societies credit-bearing course within the general education curriculum.  comparative societies courses aim to help “students begin to master tools and methods for becoming global citizens.”  one of the academic competencies students are expected to develop in such a course is to “demonstrate basic informational literacy.” that being the case, pairing it with research skill development seemed like a natural fit: meaningful comparison necessitates skillful information discovery, assessment, and evaluation. i agreed to teach the freshman-level, semester-long course in the spring of 2011.  the experience would allow me to face the same challenges as full-time faculty, interact with students on a semester-long basis, and develop a view of the library and its resources from the eyes of a course instructor. one of the first challenges in developing a course that was topical rather than library-focused was deciding on a content focus.  i had previously co-taught a  library research methods class, and therefore knew that integrating content that was of interest to me personally was important.  i arrived at the broad theme south africa: apartheid’s legacy to create opportunities for students to compare apartheid and post-apartheid south africa. i was somewhat familiar with the topic based on my own undergraduate research, but presenting myself as an expert on a topic in which i only had a slight background was one of my biggest hurdles. it was somewhat similar to my anxiety teaching new instruction sessions, especially those out of my areas of expertise, and on a much larger scale.  i had taught chemistry instruction sessions without every having taken a college-level chemistry course, and i tried to remember that professors often teach outside their expertise, especially within first-year courses (myers & kircher, 2009). once i determined my content focus, it was time to develop my first syllabus.  i began by reviewing my previous experiences as a student.  i considered classes i liked and didn’t like in college, and i looked at some of the syllabi from these courses for themes, sources, and inspiration.  next, i evaluated the tools that were available to me, including my colleagues’ expertise. a librarian who had been involved in the course before me had developed a framework.  i met with my library research methods co-teacher to brainstorm which of that course’s components could be reused effectively. after i had gathered as much material and inspiration as possible from my previous experiences, i started exploring additional resources.  knowing that most first-year students wouldn’t have a working knowledge of south african history, i found a history text that was well-reviewed and fairly priced around which to structure my syllabus. not until fairly late in the syllabus development process did i really start integrating research skills into the course.  i wasn’t confident that these components would appear organically in the syllabus, and had feared the course would be boring (probably to the students, certainly to me) if there wasn’t something topically interesting to provide structure for the research itself. i incorporated research skills in four ways: topical course readings, information literacy textbook readings, class discussions, and graded work. some of these strategies were more successful than others, as i’ll describe later in this post. i know now that the key to developing a strong syllabus is confidence, enthusiasm, and agility.  librarians, based on our professional ethos, bring a long list of positive attributes that can aid in this process. we can identify effective research assignments that use scaffolding and other techniques to guide the acquisition of information literacy skills.  plus, librarians are fundamentally good at research, able to locate excellent, appropriate readings and examples of syllabi and assignments as sources of inspiration. course readings while the focus of the course’s content was comparing apartheid and postapartheid south africa, i utilized the underlying course structure to explicitly expose students to different information sources and formats.  i hypothesized that a basic understanding of a topic should help students work their way through difficult content, so the readings progressed over the term from straightforward, popular writings to more sophisticated, academic articles.  we started with reference works (wikipedia, britannica, atlases, etc.) and proceeded to reading books, magazine articles, government documents, and finally, scholarly articles. i introduced websites by content rather than form.  for example, i presented the south african constitution as a government document that just happened to be available on a website. following this reading order made sense because it allowed students to get a basic descriptive orientation to south africa from day one: where is it located?, who lives there? it also allowed students to warm up to the heavy critical thinking and reading skills necessary to read a journal article.  this approach worked well at the beginning of the semester, but was less effective toward the end when the students were asked to read journal articles.  the students often did not complete journal article reading assignments or found them difficult to comprehend. information literacy textbook in addition to a south african history text with an emphasis on apartheid, i required the students to buy (or find in a library) a specific information literacy textbook.  about 75% of their textbook was required for the course.  sadly, the research skills textbook was a bust.  the students didn’t do the reading from the book, partly because i didn’t adequately integrate the readings effectively into the course.  as nancy wooten colburn notes, “teaching is a combination of art and science.  if the overall goal of teaching is student learning a teacher will work to find ways to affect change in student motivation”  (wootton colborn, 2010, p. 237). i didn’t give my students motivation to read about steps to use in evaluating information. late in the course, in an attempt to salvage the content, i discovered that students responded much better to a five-minute introduction to resource evaluation, followed by activities that incorporated evaluation skills.  i ended up utilizing the book as a resource to develop in-class activities and to provide students with succinct definitions of types of resources. class discussion because i believe that research skills are only interesting to students when combined with interesting content, i tried to teach research in innocuous bites.  the course catalog description presented south africa as the focus of the course, so i understood that many students were taking the course because of the topic being studied and not the skills being taught.  when students read passages from a colonial-era travelogue, a tour in south africa by joseph john freeman, we spent a few minutes at the start of class discussing primary and secondary sources, public domain works, and google books. surprisingly, most of my students weren’t familiar with google books.  the students’ attention only lasted so long, so i made sure to redirect discussion to the “juicy” stuff, in this case the biased language the british explorer used to discuss different ethnic groups in south africa. ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ my integration of research skills into the class sessions was grounded in the course content.  i tried to consider every reading from the perspective of what information literacy lesson could be taught through discussion of the resource. overall, this approach worked well and was an interesting teaching method that helped students learn.  in contrast, my students did not respond well to days when i did traditional library instruction, for example, demonstrating databases that might be helpful for their final research projects. graded work all of the graded work in the course required formal research.  i tried to scaffold the assignments so that by the final research paper the students would be able to find, access, evaluate, synthesize, and cite information properly.  i also often followed a teaching pattern where the students would need to find and use an information type outside of class prior to being assigned to read that type of source. for instance, a short assignment comparing a popular and scholarly article followed this pattern: i had students complete a reading in the information literacy textbook about popular and scholarly articles, led a discussion about the two types of sources, added some information on the course libguide, explained the assignment, and made sure the students were reminded that they could ask me questions or visit my office if they wanted extra assistance.  students had been assigned popular article readings, but had not been assigned scholarly article readings at this point in the semester. having students complete some assignments preceded only by brief introductions to the concepts was an interesting way to help them become independent learners.  inevitably, some of the students responded better than others to these independent learning tasks. challenges i experienced a number of difficulties teaching in the topical for-credit environment; namely classroom and time management, issues related to classroom diversity, and emphasizing research skills.  whether a librarian is teaching for a full semester or entering a classroom for one class period i believe it is important to fully reflect on classroom dynamics and the potential difficulties instructors face.  i know experiencing these difficulties has helped me better appreciate faculty resistance to “giving up” class time, but also has given me even stronger confidence that librarians are an important part of a course. classroom management and discipline were bigger challenges than i had expected.  i had previously taught high school students for a year, so was able to handle simple issues such as students wandering into class very late or not turning assignments in on time.  i had a harder time with larger issues such as academic dishonesty and, regrettably, lost my temper a few times. i had discovered from teaching a previous course, library research methods, that you have to be very explicit with rules and expectations to fulfill the goals of the course and to keep moving through the syllabus.  i often had to be stricter with due dates and the structure of class sessions than i would have preferred. time was a huge issue.  i fairly accurately predicted the amount of time necessary for lesson planning, grading, and interacting with students about their work on a one-on-one basis.  i did not, however, truly understand the time-consuming issues i would encounter and their emotional impact. i spent many hours mulling over how to deal with students who didn’t attend class or turn in their work, who plagiarized, were unable to read or write at a college level, and, in one instance, acted out aggressively. determining what boundaries to create with some students was challenging.  for example, one student emailed me during class to ask for an extension on an assignment i had already graded–while i was handing them back to his classmates.  in many ways, i discovered i was out of sync with the skill levels of freshman as well as the expectations of the institution where i was teaching.  i found support in asking my colleagues for advice and in reading that other librarian teachers were also surprised by lack of student motivation (blakeslee, 1998).  it would have been very helpful for me to observe freshman classes and read freshman papers prior to teaching.  not only would this have been extremely beneficial to teaching this course, it also would have greatly improved my work as a instruction librarian at uis. my class was extremely diverse, and from the beginning of the class this affected its dynamics in ways i had not previously considered.  on the first day of class, a student asked me to step out of the classroom and directed me to assign seats in the class to prevent students from separating themselves based on race.  it quickly became clear that i needed to reflect on my positionality as a white, young, middle-class instructor teaching on the topic of south africa (takacs, 2002).  it was challenging to balance and respect all the voices of my class while still making sure to emphasize that opinions did not count as facts.  teaching a diverse group of students, many of whom had very different life experiences from my own, also reminded me that “interactions with information are highly personal and highly value-laden” (swanson, 2010, p. 270).  while “hot button” issues provide wonderful themes around which to structure a class, there will inevitably be emotional issues that a librarian needs to be ready to address.  one effective way of dealing with emotional issues was to teach students to support their positions with research. finally and most importantly, i found it challenging to ensure that i allocated the amount of time to teaching research skills that i had intended when i first envisioned the course.  when trying to help students become competent, college-level readers, writers, thinkers, and communicators, it can be challenging to emphasize research.  i have always abstractly understood that prioritizing information literacy was difficult, but have always been a bit frustrated with faculty that fail to emphasize research in their freshman courses.  once i actually saw that many students in my class could not write a comprehensible sentence, it was hard not to abandon information literacy in favor of basic literacy. applying the lessons after a full semester of solo teaching, i have newfound insight into how vital it is to have a librarian working with a course, especially at the freshman level (i would have loved to have had a librarian assigned to my class!).  a scripps college professor recently mentioned that he couldn’t imagine any faculty not wanting a librarian working closely with his first year class.  he felt that it was important to have a person whose clear focus was developing research skills.  the bright spot in balancing all the literacies that need to be taught is that it points to the extreme need for librarian, faculty, and writing center collaboration (diederich & schroeder, 2008; callison, budny & thomes, 2005).  it takes a whole institution, in many cases, to teach students all the skills they need.   i am also keenly aware that students generally don’t enroll in a class because they are seeking to develop their information literacy skills; rather they choose classes based on the topic of the course. i am now translating my experiences into a more “traditional” library instructional environment.  i work for esteemed liberal arts colleges and i hope information literacy instruction can be a critically engaging component of our academically rigorous courses.  in the past, i often approached planning for an instruction session by developing tactics to get students to care about the library catalog, databases, and the activities involved in research.  now i’m shifting my focus from thinking primarily about the research and library resources to thinking, instead, about the student perspective. instead of asking myself what research tools might be helpful to a class, i’m trying to focus on what students want or need to learn more about in a class, and what they want or need to research.  helping them find the information they need may sometimes mean teaching them how to use library resources, but sometimes it will mean other things. one way i am attempting to learn more about student needs is by better understanding the topics they are being taught.  i have made an effort to meet with every course instructor i have worked with this semester to learn more about their class and how i might help. i have rarely initiated this conversation in the past, feeling lucky when professors asked me to come into their classrooms and not wanting to “push my luck.” i realize many librarians will not have the same experiences i have had, but i recommend that everyone seek out a teaching opportunity that is far enough beyond what we consider our area of expertise to be anxiety-inducing.  that may mean designing a full-credit class, collaborating with a faculty member, teaching a one-shot for a discipline we are not familiar with, or trying at least one unfamiliar technique in a class we teach every semester.  i think teaching beyond our comfort zone helps us to see students, faculty, and ourselves in different ways and makes us more effective instructors in our everyday teaching environments.  i also believe the more experiences we have, the closer we come to realizing our best moments as a librarian. i would like to thank jane treadwell, karen moranski, amanda binder, sarah sagmoen, waheedah bilal, and pamela salela for their support as i developed and taught uni 105: south africa, apartheid’s legacy.  i would like to thank char booth, ellie collier, emily ford, and kim leeder for providing insightful commentary on my post that helped me greatly improve it.   works cited american library association (2009). core competences: available from http://www.ala.org/ala/educationcareers/careers/corecomp/corecompetences/finalcorecompstat09.pdf blakeslee, s (1998). librarian in a strange land: teaching a freshman orientation course. reference services review, 26(2), 73-78. callison, r., budny, d., & thomes, k. (2005). library research project for first-year engineering students: results from collaboration by teaching and library faculty. reference librarian, 43(89/90), 93-106. diederich, n. a., & schroeder, s. j. (2008). effect of writing centers and targeted pairings on students repeating first-year composition. learning assistance review, 13(2), 17-26. kuh, g. (2007). how to help students achieve. chronicle of higher education. http://chronicle.com/article/how-to-help-students-achieve/31980/. myers, j. c., & kircher, c. (2007). teaching without license: outsider perspectives on first-year writing. teaching english in the two-year college, 34(4), 396-404. swanson, t. (2010). information is personal: critical information literacy and personal epistemology. in m. accardi, e. drabinski & a. kumbier, critical library instruction theories and methods. (pp. 265-277). library juice press: duluth, minnesota. takacs, d (2002). “positionality, epistemology, and social justice in the classroom”. social justice, 29(4), 168-181. wootton colborn, n. (2010). the motivation triangle: affecting change in student learning in credit il courses by examining the student, the course content, and the teacher.  in c. hollister (ed.), best practices for credit-bearing information literacy courses. (pp. 227-241). chicago: acrl. college students, information literacy, instruction snooki, whale sperm, and google: the unfortunate extinction of librarians when they are needed most out of the library and into the wild 7 responses pingback : sharing is caring | this dissertation is going to be fun, like dessert natalie tagge 2012–03–08 at 11:25 am i’m glad you found the post insightful. (i know you heard about this class plenty when i was teaching it:) i think it’s great that you’re sharing it on your blog that is read by mostly non-librarian academics. the more communication between librarians and phd students/faculty, etc. the better. susan montgomery 2012–03–09 at 2:26 pm hi natalie, i really enjoyed this post. are you willing to share your resources for the “five-minute introduction to resource evaluation, followed by activities that incorporated evaluation skills” this is a teaching area that i’d like to improve. natalie tagge 2012–03–12 at 1:57 pm hi susan, i’m glad you enjoyed the post! the five minute introduction came from a quick review of the 4th chapter on evaluating information in the textbook we used, 100% information literacy success. there were various activities throughout the semester: students working in pairs to evaluate websites, discussions of the differences in intended audiences of popular vs. scholarly articles on the same topic, the students’ presentations included an element of evaluation they were graded on, etc. i tried to incorporate evaluation into the content we were covering. emily ford 2012–03–16 at 12:21 pm i love that you talk about the emotional challenges you faced in students and in yourself. reflecting on it, do you think there’s anything you could have done to be prepared for that? natalie tagge 2012–03–19 at 8:58 pm hi emily, that’s a very good question. i had to think about my answer for a few days. i wish academic librarian teacher training was emphasized more in my mlis program. my understanding of college course dynamics was formed through a combination of my undergraduate experience, teaching high school students and my interactions with faculty and students primarily through library instruction and reference contexts. i don’t think my understanding was completely off, but some actual training would have been helpful. it could be argued that teacher training to the depth i needed (to teach a whole semester long course) isn’t generally within the scope of what mlis programs are trying to teach, but if librarians are expected to insert themselves into those dynamics within another person’s classroom i don’t see the harm. i doubt i could have predicted some of the emotional challenges i encountered (and am afraid if i did i might have balked from teaching the course). i would have really benefited from having a trusted mentor who was a course instructor at the same institution or a similar institution. i had great library colleagues at uis to run issues by, but no one whose primary responsibility was course instruction. pingback : shout outs « librarian with glasses this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct new literacies, learning, and libraries: how can frameworks from other fields help us think about the issues? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 6 nov eveline houtman /42 comments new literacies, learning, and libraries: how can frameworks from other fields help us think about the issues? using the computer at the north greenwood library: photo by flickr user clearwater public library system photos (cc-by-nc-sa 2.0) in brief: in the library world, we may look to other fields to help us make sense of new digital literacies. their frameworks may offer us new perspectives, challenge our assumptions, or give us greater clarity on the issues. transliteracy is one non-library-centric framework that has been promoted for this purpose. it has also been critiqued, and i argue we need more debate before we take it as a settled concept in our field. i briefly introduce some alternative frameworks from education and literacy research as a way to move the discussion forward. by eveline houtman introduction the negotiations among kids, parents, educators, and technologists over the shape of youth online participation is also a site of struggle over what counts as legitimate forms of learning and literacy. any discussion of learning and literacy is unavoidably normative. what counts as learning and literacy is a question of collective values, values that are constantly being contested and negotiated among different social groups. periods of cultural and technological flux open up new areas of debate about what should count as part of our common culture and literacy.  – from the report of the digital youth project (ito et al., 2010, p. 23) our notions of learning and literacy are in flux. new technologies and new practices clamor for our attention, including an increasing array of social media platforms and mobile devices; new participatory practices, such as gaming and gamification; and new forms of scholarly communication, such as academic blogging and peer review via tweet. educators, including librarians, have responded to the challenges of 21st century learners by identifying skills, competencies, fluencies and literacies to be taught, but these are also in flux, with the concepts and methods often contested. learning and literacy are core values in librarianship. we’re having our own discussions and debates in our workplaces, at conferences, online, and in the literature. our associations have also weighed in. this year, the american library association has published two reports dealing with digital literacy. the report of the office for information technology policy’s digital literacy task force (2013) defines digital literacy and discusses public policy as it affects digital literacy and libraries. the association of college & research libraries’ (2013) white paper looks at the intersections between new models of scholarly communication, information literacy, and digital literacy. we also look to other fields to see how their perspectives and frameworks can inform and enrich our discussions. librarianship is a relatively small field, and like a small country we need to be aware of the language and culture of our larger neighbors. frameworks from other fields may enrich our discussions by challenging our assumptions, pointing us in new directions for action, or giving us new ways to communicate with our communities. in this article, i look at a number of frameworks from other fields that have something to say to us in the library world. a conceptual framework is simply a structure or model that helps us make meaning of issues or phenomena in ways that lead to greater clarity and coherence. a framework can be thought of variously as a lens through which to view the issues; a map of the territory under consideration; or a working tool (bloomberg & volpe, 2012). conceptual frameworks can allow us to step back from the day-to-day to frame issues in a larger context. alternatively particular frameworks may guide our day-to-day actions and practice. even within the same field, different frameworks can map the same territory in different ways. for example, the acrl information literacy competency standards (2000) can be understood as one framework for information literacy in the context of higher education. the sconul seven pillars of information literacy (2011) provide an alternative framework for the same area. unless they rise to the level of standards, frameworks are not fixed and unchanging but rather evolve together with our changing understandings and changing circumstances—and even standards undergo periodic revision. frameworks from other fields push us to think outside the librarianship box. we can then work elements of what we discover back into our own frameworks. transliteracy is one non-library-centric framework that has already been presented to the library world as a way to help us conceptualize the new digital literacies. the brainchild of u.k. new media researcher sue thomas, it first emerged in 2007. thomas and her co-authors define transliteracy as “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, tv, radio and films, to digital social networks” (thomas, joseph, laccetti, mason, mills, perril,& pullinger, 2007). academic librarian tom ipri (2010) adds that “the essential idea here is that transliteracy is concerned with mapping meaning across different media and not with developing particular literacies about various media.” transliteracy has been heavily promoted in the library world over the last few years, with discussion taking place on librarian blogs, particularly the libraries and transliteracy blog, in journal articles (andretta, 2009; ipri, 2010), in conference presentations, and even in entire conferences. the term has penetrated into all areas of librarianship (although this doesn’t necessarily equate to widespread adoption): public, school, special, and academic librarianship. the idea of transliteracy resonates for many people, who see it as capturing important ideas about the new kinds of communication taking place all around us. the promotion of transliteracy has certainly brought to the fore the issue of how to incorporate the new digital literacies into our practice. the term has also been critiqued and debated; even its promoters recognize it as divisive. lane wilkinson describes a presentation he gave at loex in 2011 in which he asked his audience how many people thought transliteracy was a “meaningless buzzword without substance.” according to wilkinson, half the standing-room-only crowd put up their hands. for this reason, it can be surprising to see transliteracy being presented as a settled concept in a number of venues, including at the association level. for example, the acrl (2013) white paper suggests that transliteracy may be useful in understanding the intersection of digital literacy, scholarly communication, and information literacy. the recommendations made by the acrl information literacy competency standards review task force (2012) include incorporating transliteracy into the revised information literacy standards. there’s a need for further discussion and debate. a key piece missing from the library community’s discussion of transliteracy is any consideration of other possible, alternative frameworks that might provide insight into the issues of new digital literacies. it’s important to remember that transliteracy’s creator, sue thomas, is just one of the many thousands currently researching new media and new literacy practices. in addition, transliteracy was introduced to the library world as an emerging concept, something to keep our eyes on (ipri, 2010). before we fully embrace transliteracy as a settled concept, it’s worth looking at how it has developed since thomas first brought forward the idea in 2007. most people in the library world, i suspect, know transliteracy through its definition, which has been widely quoted. thomas and her co-authors (2007) go further, however, and propose transliteracy as a “unifying perspective on what it means to be literate in the twenty–first century.” they stress that it’s not just about digital literacy but “about all communication types across time and culture,” that it’s “an inclusive concept which bridges and connects past, present and, hopefully, future modalities.” their examples draw on “history, orality, philosophy, literature, and ethnography.” transliteracy as presented here encompasses everything from forty-thousand-year-old cave paintings and the earliest forms of writing through oral traditions, including non-western traditions such as the dreaming songs of the aborigines of australia, to the problem of western graphocentrism, as well as blogs, wikis, and media convergence. the authors identify issues for further articles, for example, whether transliteracy is a practice or a way to analyze practice. they also open up transliteracy to other researchers for further development, in particular suggesting a need for ethnographic research into transliteracy. i’ll come back later in this article to look at how transliteracy has developed since it first emerged in 2007. first, though, i’ll briefly introduce some alternative conceptual frameworks from literacy research and education, two major fields also grappling with the issues raised by new digital literacies—and surely the major fields to consult on issues of literacy. which frameworks we choose to draw on matters. different frameworks raise different issues and lead us to different questions. they also involve different bodies of research. librarians will get this right away: try searching in google scholar on “digital literacy” versus “new literacies” versus “transliteracy.” literacy, literacies, new literacy studies literacy is a complicated topic even before we get to digital literacy and new literacies. there’s no single definition. and it’s actually still a relatively new and evolving term; not that long ago, educators simply spoke of teaching reading and writing (lankshear & knobel, 2011). literacy can be conceived of as a cognitive process that takes place within an individual, as a set of autonomous skills that can be standardized and tested—in other words, as the ability to read and write. this is still the dominant paradigm for literacy. digital literacy, too, is often framed in terms of skills. for example, the oitp task force (2013) writes that “digital literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, understand, evaluate, create and communicate digital information. basic reading and writing skills are foundational; and true digital literacy requires both cognitive and technical skills” (p.1). however, literacy can also be conceived of as social and cultural practices situated in particular contexts. literacy practices are what people do with literacy (barton & hamilton, 2000, p. 7). this view, of literacy as sociocultural practices, arose in the last decades of the 20th century as literacy studies took a “social turn” (gee, 2000). studies in fields such as linguistics, psychology, and anthropology looked at literacy in different contexts, non-western as well as western, and found very different practices. this is where literacy (singular) came to be seen as literacies (multiple). new literacy studies (nls) is an umbrella term for the research, often ethnographic in nature, that looks at literacy as situated practices. mills (2010) reviews a decade of nls studies (1999-2009), 39 studies in total, that take a “digital turn,” applying the nls lens through ethnographic observation to new digital literacy practices. the research sites include schools as well as online communities and out-of-school practices; they include such practices as anime fan sites, relay writing on microblogging sites, web quests, and digital movie making. the digital youth project, a large, three-year ethnographic study of youth’s new media literacy practices, explicitly uses new literacy studies as one of its frameworks (ito et al, 2010, p. 24). the researchers conducted 23 case studies that looked at new media literacy practices from “hanging out” (casual participation in friendship-based activities, e.g. on facebook) to “geeking out” (intensive participation in interest-based activities, e.g. the creative production involved in augmented gaming). in nls, literacies are seen as bound up with issues of identity and ideology. jim gee writes of ”discourses,” which he defines as ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing, that are accepted as instantiations of particular identities … by specific groups…. discourses are ways of being “people like us”…. each discourse incorporates taken-for-granted and tacit “theories” about what counts as a “normal” person and the “right” ways to think, feel, and behave. these theories crucially involve viewpoints on the distribution of “social goods” like status, worth, and material goods in society (who should and who shouldn’t have them) (gee, 2012, pp. 3-4). academic or school discourse, for example, which requires particular kinds of academic literacies, has traditionally conferred social goods such as status and jobs. a student’s home and other out-of-school literacies may be very different; in fact, the gap between youth’s everyday literacy practices and their in-school practices may be widening (ito et al. 2010). literacies are seen as embedded in power relations, with the dominant, established literacies in conflict with newer, emerging literacies. it’s not hard to find examples of ideological struggles over literacy, including attempts to ban particular books and struggles over curricula. this lens can be applied to new digital literacies as well. the researchers in the digital youth project see a contest between new and traditional literacies, as reflected in my opening quote. in fact the researchers, without endorsing the idea of the digital native, see an “intergenerational struggle over authority and control over learning and literacy” (ito et al, p. 14). they add, “although some of the literacy practices we describe may be keyed to a particular life stage, new media literacies are not necessarily going to ‘grow up’ to conform to the standards of their elders but are likely to be tied to foundational changes in forms of cultural expression” (p. 26). the nls lens can be applied to new forms of scholarly communication as well. for example, academic bloggers may get pushback from more traditional scholars. dan cohen, now the executive director of the digital public library of america, provides an example from digital humanities (although he doesn’t use the nls framework himself). after writing a how-to book about digital history on the web, he was disappointed at the resistance it faced. he is now writing a new book, the ivory tower and the web. in an online draft of the first chapter, he looks at the academy’s non-acceptance of new media practices and sees inertia, conservatism, and prejudice. to some extent, he sees this as understandable: “almost by definition, academics have gotten to where they are by playing a highly scripted game extremely well. that means understanding and following self-reinforcing rules for success.” this involves tenure, for example, as a social good. cohen sees his book as a polemic to convince the hesitant:  we have done far less than we should have by this point in imagining and enacting what academic work and communication might look like if it was digital first. but the web and the academy are not doomed to an inevitable clash of cultures. viewed properly, the open web is perfectly in line with the fundamental academic goals of research, sharing of knowledge, and meritocracy. multiliteracies the multiliteracies framework takes the concept of multiple literacies and asks what it means for pedagogy. this framework came out of discussions of the new london group (1996), a group of ten educators including gee, gunther kress, allan luke, and courtney cazden.  their original article was reprinted in a seminal collection pulled together by two of the group members, bill cope and mary kalantzis (2000), a collection that continues to be cited today. this article has been described as “the central manifesto of the new literacies movement” (leander & boldt, 2012, p. 22). the new london group saw existing literacy pedagogy as a “carefully restricted project—restricted to formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of the language.” they proposed broadening this pedagogy to include “negotiating a multiplicity of discourses” (p. 61), a multiplicity having two main aspects. one aspect is the increasing social, cultural, and linguistic diversity of a globalized society—today’s shifting communications landscape isn’t only about technology. the other aspect is the increasing multiplicity of communications channels and media stemming from the rise of digital technologies, with texts becoming increasing multimodal, that is, drawing on modes such as visual or audio, as well as linguistic modes. kalantzis and cope (2012), who have further developed the framework, summarize these two aspects as the two “multis” of multiliteracies: multi-contextual and multimodal (for more on multimodality, see the next section). the new london group (1996) proposed changing both the content (the “what”) and the form (the “how”) of literacy pedagogy (p. 63). kalantzis and cope (2012) outline a series of guiding questions for the multiliteracies approach to pedagogy that could be useful to us in the library world. these include: what and how do we teach in the context of enormous changes to the modes and media of communication? how do we promote understandings about literacy relevant to our contemporary times when our ways of making meanings are changing so radically? if literacy has traditionally been understood to be two of the three “basics” (the proverbial three “r”s of reading, writing and arithmetic), what might be considered “basic” today? what is the continuing role of the traditional basics, and how do these connect with “new basics”? (kalantzis & cope, 2012, pp. 2-3) what are the new basics for information literacy? one place to start might be the reports of project information literacy, which look at the information behavior of college students in the digital age. another place might be the area of threshold concepts, that is, identifying the key big ideas in information literacy that could transform student learning (townsend, brunetti, & hofer, 2011). barbara fister identifies the tacit knowledge we hold about information and how it works that our students may not share. what does it mean for our teaching if, for example, our students have no experience of print-based newspapers or journals? more broadly, the new london group saw transforming literacy pedagogy as part of a “larger social project” (p. 72). they wrote that “literacy educators and students must see themselves as active participants in social change, as learners and students who can be active designers—makers—of social futures” (p. 64). this is also reflected in kalantzis and cope’s (2012) questions: how do we enable all learners to make and participate in meanings that will enable them, as children and later as adults, to be effective and fulfilled members of society; to make a contribution to society according to their interests and abilities; and to receive in return the benefits society offers? how do we redress the ongoing and systemic inequalities in literacy learning and broader educational outcomes for learners from different backgrounds and with different dispositions? (p. 2) issues of inequality speak to the core values of librarianship. the oitp task force (2013) reminds us of libraries’ work towards not just digital access, but also digital inclusion. multimodality multimodality, which gee identifies as a new interdisciplinary field of study, deals with meaning-making across different representational modes, including language both written and spoken, as well as image, movement, sound, gesture, posture, and facial expression. gunther kress, the leading theorist of multimodality, sees a shift from the dominance of “the constellation of mode of writing and medium of book/page” to the dominance of “the constellation of mode of image and medium of screen” (kress, 2004). on the screen, text is secondary to image; it is image that shapes the design. different modes have different characteristics and take on different roles in communicating. for researchers, multimodal research provides a fine-grained method of analyzing digital data and environments. for creators, design and choice are key issues: they decide which modes to use in communicating meaning in a particular context to a particular audience (kress, 2004). for educators, multimodality has profound implications for the teaching of  “reading” and “writing” for the 21st century. as jewitt (2005) writes, “as words fly onto the computer screen, revolve, and dissolve, image, sound, and movement enter school classrooms in ‘new’ and significant ways, ways that reconfigure the relationship of image and word.” she looks at “the changing role of writing on screen, in particular how the visual character of writing and the increasingly dominant role of image unsettle and decentre the predominance of word” (p. 315) and argues that school literacy must take into account the multimodal environment of the wider world. even in formal scholarly communication, the range of modes now available can go beyond written text. for instance, the online journal jove (journal of video experiments) features peer-reviewed videos. my colleague heather cunningham, has been looking at new media in traditional medical journals, and has found peer-reviewed images, podcasts, videos, and interactive quizzes, though she has also found problems of discovery and access. there is a large and growing body of literature on multimodality, including work on multimodal composition, storytelling, texts, reading, literacy, research, and analysis. practitioner researchers have described and analyzed classroom literacy practices incorporating multimodality (for example, vasudevan, schultz, & bateman, 2010; miller & mcvee, 2012). multimodality has been used as a lens to analyze new forms of text (for example, simon, acosta & houtman (2014) use an academic blog as data). the routledge handbook of multimodal analysis (jewitt, 2009) presents a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. although often associated with digital texts, multimodality also takes into account communication beyond the digital. kress, for example, has conducted research on multimodality in both the classroom and the operating theater. new literacies new literacies is a term often used in the field of education, particularly in literacy studies, for various digital literacy practices. a key concept here is that literacy is no longer a stable entity, but rather something that is continuously transforming:  to have been literate yesterday, in a world defined primarily by relatively static book technologies, does not ensure that one is fully literate today where we encounter new technologies…. to be literate tomorrow will be defined by even newer technologies that have yet to appear and even newer discourses and social practices that will be created to meet future needs. thus, when we speak of new literacies, we mean that literacy is not just new today; it becomes new every day of our lives (leu, kinzer, coiro, castek, & henry, 2013, p. 1150). leu et al. (2013) use the term “deictic” to describe new literacies; something that is deictic changes its meaning from day to day. for example, at this moment the word “tomorrow” refers to a specific date on the calendar. in 24 hours, it will refer to a different date. so, too, with the word “literacy”; what it references is constantly changing. so what was considered a new literacy yesterday may not be new today; what’s new today may not be so new tomorrow. lankshear and knobel (2011) emphasize this does not mean new in the sense of the latest fad, but rather new in the sense of shifting paradigms. they see new literacies as needing both new “technical stuff” (this generally means digital) and new “ethos stuff”—a new mindset, new values (p. 28). in the category of new “ethos stuff”, they see new literacies as, for example, more participatory, collaborative, and distributed; less published, individuated, author-centric, or expert-dominated. another key difference is the greater use of multimodal forms of expression that include images, video, and sound with written text. eventually, however, the new “ethos stuff” will become sufficiently established to become conventional, and then that literacy will no longer be new. when looking at digital technologies, we should always ask “what is new here?” suggests neil selwyn (2012), who has extensively researched new media and technology use in education. the flipside of “what’s new?” is “what’s still conventional?”  these are simple but surprisingly useful and clarifying questions when looking at any new literacy practices. consider wikipedia. it’s a crowdsourced wiki (new), but because it is still an encyclopedia (conventional), it should be treated by college students like any other encyclopedia: use it for background and references (with maybe some extra care), but generally avoid quoting from it. i’m constantly surprised how many students know the “rule” not to quote wikipedia, but can’t explain why this “rule” exists. if we want to dig deeper, we can look at issues like an encyclopedia’s claims to neutrality and authority and how these change (or remain stable), or how an encyclopedia constructs knowledge. as another example, consider scholarly journal articles. the initial move from print to digital was enormously disruptive to libraries, but today a journal article published as a pdf in a commercially published online journal looks entirely conventional. open access journals often look and feel equally conventional, maybe as a way to be taken seriously as scholarly journals, but open access itself is still new “ethos stuff” and remains disruptive. going further afield, we may find hybrid forms: blog-journals like in the library with the lead pipe; journals that feature editor-selected blog posts, such as digital humanities now; forms like the “blessay”, dan cohen’s coinage for a hybrid blog post-essay. we may find open peer review or the open scholar, whose work at all stages is fully open source. new “ethos stuff” also encompasses new skills or fluencies, such as henry jenkins’s (2006) list of the social skills needed within a participatory culture. he writes, “the new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.these skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom” (p. 4). his list includes play, simulation, multitasking, and transmedia navigation. several relate to information literacy (although the term isn’t used), particularly judgement, or the ability to evaluate sources; appropriation, or the remix of cultural materials; and networking, the ability to “search for, synthesize, and disseminate information” (p. 90).  although jenkins gives many suggestions for ways educators can promote these skills, librarians, sadly, are only referenced in the context of traditional gatekeeping functions that are seen as no longer appropriate in the online environment. the question remains of what to do with these continuously transforming literacies in our practices. in education, the focus is on what happens in the classroom, discussions that have relevance for many librarians. leu et al. (2013) see a more important but changing role for teachers in an environment where no single person can expect to keep up with all the new literacies, so “teachers will increasingly become orchestrators of learning contexts rather than dispensers of literacy skills” (p. 1163). students may take the lead; i could see librarians taking the lead as well. and surely we have an important role to play in what leu et al. call the “new literacies of online research and comprehension.” unfortunately, these authors discuss online research and comprehension at length (pp. 1163-69) without once referencing information literacy, though they reference related concepts such as media literacy and critical literacy. as can be seen in this section, the language around new literacies can often seem uncritically utopian. neil selwyn (2011) argues that researchers in the areas of media, education, and technology too often tell optimistic stories of how technology could be used, focusing on “‘state-of-the art’ rather than ‘state-of-the-actual’” (p. 211), possibly because they themselves are high-tech early adopters. he urges researchers to focus more on everyday stories in order to tell the whole story. frameworks “in conversation” i’ve presented these frameworks separately, but in practice the theorists, researchers and practitioners developing or drawing on these frameworks are often “in conversation.”  gee (2010) for example talks of “new literacies studies” (just to further confuse the terminology), that is, new literacies studied through a new literacy studies lens as sociocultural practices. rowsell, kress, pahl, and street (2013) argue for new literacy studies and multimodality as complementary perspectives. leu et al. (2013) propose new literacies (uppercase) as a new unifying theory that brings together all the theories of new literacies (lowercase), including multiliteracies, multimodality, and new literacy studies. they call for researchers in various traditions to collaborate on a broader theory of new literacies. so far, they have identified eight central principles: the internet is this generation’s defining technology for literacy and learning within our global community. the internet and related technologies require additional new literacies to fully access their potential. new literacies are deictic. new literacies are multiple, multimodal, and multifaceted. critical literacies are central to new literacies. new forms of strategic knowledge are required with new literacies. new social practices are a central element of new literacies. teachers become more important, though their role changes, within a new literacy classroom. (leu et al., 2013, p. 1158) the pieces sit together somewhat uneasily. in particular, critical literacies (practices that interrogate the social and historical contexts of texts; christensen, 1999) seem to have been included in a halfhearted and apparently uncritical manner. the critical component is central to new literacy studies and multiliteracies, but here it’s poorly integrated and developed. although new literacies (uppercase) aims to draw on multiple perspectives, it’s clearly still a work in progress. it’s interesting to note that in explaining “new forms of strategic knowledge,” the authors write, “new literacies will often be defined around the strategic knowledge central to the effective use of information within rich and complexly networked environments” (p. 1162)—possibly an opportunity for librarians, as information literacy experts, to join the conversation? information literacy is present in the handbook of research on new literacies, where u.k. media researchers livingstone, van couvering, and thumin (2008) discuss a possible convergence of information literacy and media literacy. they first contrast the two literacy traditions: in general, the media literacy tradition stresses the understanding, comprehension, critique and creation of media materials, whereas the information literacy tradition stresses the identification, location, evaluation and use of information materials. metaphorically, we might say that media literacy sees media as a lens or window through which to view the world and express oneself, while information literacy sees information as a tool with which to act upon the world…. both metaphors are problematic…. the research questions asked within the two traditions also differ. information literacy research has attended more to questions of access, while media literacy research has paid more attention to questions of understanding. (p. 5)…. while they address broadly the same theme, media literacy and information literacy do so from different standpoints. the language of skills and abilities, everywhere to be found in information literacy discussions, is rarely present in media studies, being considered psychologically reductionist, neglecting the important ways in which actions are culturally and historically conditioned. (p. 7) it’s interesting and useful to see our framework, information literacy, from an outside perspective. the authors see a convergence already happening, and map a way forward for research in new literacies in which information literacy and media research work together in a complementary manner. transliteracy reconsidered if we consider transliteracy alongside these other frameworks, we can see that there’s considerable overlap, particularly with multimodality, but also with the ethnographic approach of new literacy studies. thomas sees transliteracy as providing a “unifying perspective on what it means to be literate in the twenty–first century,” but it’s unclear how transliteracy would unify or mesh with these other frameworks. transliteracy seems at once too broad and too narrow. too broad because it tries to encompass every aspect of human communication’s past, present, and future. too narrow because it fails to take into account issues of importance to the library world, such as pedagogy and digital inclusion. it’s also unclear what structure thomas proposes within her work that would provide clarity and coherence. how does her “messiness and uncertainty” help us think through the issues? does it generate fruitful questions? does it point us to action? transliteracy was introduced to the library world as an emerging concept. given the deictic nature of new literacies, new concepts and theories are constantly emerging and it can be difficult to determine which will take hold and which will fade away. so how has transliteracy developed since 2007, when thomas first introduced the term? there were early nibbles of interest from some literacy researchers (e.g. alvermann, 2008), but this interest seems to have faded (alvermann, for example, is co-editor of the volume in which the leu et al. article appears). thomas’s 2007 article invited other researchers to develop the concept of transliteracy, but this call has largely gone unanswered. although thomas says that she was inspired by alan liu’s research on online reading, which he calls transliteracies, there is no further connection between their work. thomas herself has established no research agenda around transliteracy, and the further articles she promised have failed to materialize. in practice, the term transliteracy hasn’t gained significant traction anywhere but the library world. check out google scholar for confirmation; thomas herself acknowledges the library world for being “the first to pick up the baton” on transliteracy. this raises new issues. do we really want to adopt a term not recognized by people in other fields? librarians want to take part in the larger debates and discussions on new digital literacies together with educators, researchers, and policy makers. our frameworks also have something to say to other fields, but it sometimes feels as if the library world is invisible. i’ve given examples above where researchers were oblivious to a possible role for librarians or for information literacy. the oitp task force (2013) also notes that “the role libraries play in digital literacy is not always recognized and valued, even within institutions or communities in which libraries are embedded—an issue of invisibility” (p. 20). surely we’ll communicate better with our peer communities if we’re not using a term and a framework that no one understands, that separates us from the conversation and muffles our voice. do we really want to continue to carry the baton for transliteracy? or might we want to look at and draw on some alternative conceptual frameworks from other fields? it’s not a settled issue at all. acknowledgements i’d like to thank my reviewers, rob simon of the ontario institute for studies in education and brett bonfield of in the library with the lead pipe, for all their helpful comments and for pushing me to make this a better article. they made open peer review a pleasure. i’d also like to thank itlwtlp editor erin dorney for her assistance at the earlier stages of the submission process. references and further reading alvermann, d. (2008). why bother theorizing adolescents’ online literacies for classroom practice and research? journal of adolescent & adult literacy, 52 (september), 8–19. doi:10.1598/jaal.52.1.2 barton, d. & hamilton, m. (2000). literacy practices. in d. barton, m. hamilton, & r. ivanic (eds.), situated literacies: reading and writing in context. london, uk: routledge.  christensen, l.m. (1999). critical literacy: teaching reading, writing and outrage. in c. edelsky (ed.), making justice our project: teachers working towards critical whole language practice. urbana, il: national council of teachers of english. cope, b. & kalntzis, m. (eds.) (2000). multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures. new york, ny: routledge. gee, j.p. (2000). the new literacy studies: from ‘socially situated’ to the work of the social. in d. barton, m. hamilton, and r. ivanic (eds.), situated literacies: reading and writing in context. london, uk: routledge. gee, j. (2010). a situated-sociocultural approach to literacy and technology. in e.a. baker (ed.), the new literacies: multiple perspectives on research. new york, ny: guilford press. gee, j. p. (2012). social linguistics and literacies: ideology in discourses (4th ed.). london: routledge. ito, m., baumer, s., bittanti, m., boyd, d., cody, r., herr-stephenson, b., . . . tripp, l.. (2010). hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: kids living and learning with new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. jewitt, c. (2005). multimodality, “reading”, and “writing” for the 21st century. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 26(3), 315–331. doi:10.1080/01596300500200011 kalantzis, m. & cope, b. (2012) literacies. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. lankshear, c. & knobel, m. (2011). new literacies: everyday practices and social learning (3rd ed.). maidenhead, uk: mcgraw hill. leander, k., & boldt, g. (2012). rereading “a pedagogy of multiliteracies”: bodies, texts, and emergence. journal of literacy research, 45(1), 22–46. doi:10.1177/1086296x12468587 leu, d. j., kinzer, c.k., coiro, j., castek, j., & henry, l.a. (2013). new literacies: a dual-level theory of the changing nature of literacy, instruction, and assessment. in r.b. ruddell & d. alvermann (eds.), theoretical models and processes of reading (6th ed., pp. 1150-1181). newark, de: international reading association. miller, s.m. & mcvie, m.b. (eds.) (2012). multimodal composing in classrooms: learning and teaching for the digital world. new york, ny: routledge. mills, k.a. (2010). a review of the “digital turn” in the new literacy studies. review of educational research, 80(2), 246-271. doi:10.3102/003465431036440 new london group. (1996). a pedagogy of multiliteracies : designing social futures. harvard educational review, 66(1), 60–92. rowsell, j., kress, g., pahl, k., & street, b. (2013). the social practice of multimodal reading: a new literacy studies-multimodal perspective on reading. in r.b. ruddell & d. alvermann (eds.), theoretical models and processes of reading (6th ed., pp. 1182-1207). newark, de: international reading association. selwyn, n. (2011). technology, media and education: telling the whole story. learning, media and technology, 36(3), 211–213. doi:10.1080/17439884.2011.572977 selwyn, n. (2012). ten suggestions for improving academic research in education and technology. learning, media and technology, 37(3), 37–41. doi:10.1080/17439884.2012.680213 simon, r., acosta, a., & houtman, e. (2014). “memeration”: exploring academic authorship in online spaces. in r. e. ferdig & k. e. pytash (eds.), exploring multimodal composition and digital writing. hershey, pa: igi global. townsend, l., brunetti, k., & hofer, a. r. (2011). threshold concepts and information literacy. portal: libraries and the academy, 11(3), 853–869. doi:10.1353/pla.2011.0030 vasudevan, l., schultz, k., & bateman, j. (2010). rethinking composing in a digital age: authoring literate identities through multimodal storytelling. written communication, 27(4), 442–468. doi:10.1177/0741088310378217 frameworks, information literacy, literacies, multiliteracies, multimodality, new literacoes. literacy, new literacy studies, transliteracy what we talk about when we talk about public libraries creative destruction in libraries: designing our future 42 responses lane wilkinson 2013–11–06 at 10:52 am hi eveline; excellent article! and thanks for linking back to my blog. though, you may notice that i haven’t written or presented on transliteracy since late 2011. what gives? well, looking over my old posts and presentations, my angle was pretty consistent: transliteracy is simply about making sure that what we teach when we teach information literacy will transfer across platforms and media. that is, we should teach information literacy concepts across many media, not just with respect to library resources. it sounds obvious and, indeed, many library instructors criticized transliteracy for being otherwise obvious. but, to many librarians, the idea of incorporating multiple media in library instruction was (and still is) novel. as far as i’m concerned, transliteracy is and has been a fairly simple, relatively obvious, and rather narrow little concept that we can add to our toolbox and then move on. it was never a movement. or, it shouldn’t have been. so, the fact that transliteracy was mentioned in the acrl standards revision really bothered me for precisely the reasons you covered and, when i was drafted to the committee (to be fair, probably only because of my involvement in transliteracy), i made it clear that i didn’t want transliteracy to appear in the revised standards. don’t worry, it won’t. :-) eveline houtman 2013–11–06 at 9:44 pm hi lane, thanks for your comments! interesting that you’ve moved away from transliteracy, the term at least. besides blog posts, i’ve also read your 2012 article on transliteracy in information literacy beyond web 2.0, where you derive pedagogical principles from transliteracy and use these in your workplace. you also divide literacy into descriptive (transliteracy) and evaluative (information literacy). what are your thoughts now on these ideas? not to put you on the spot, but because i’m genuinely curious. as for the acrl standards, i attended the webinar this week and i gather the focus is now on metaliteracy. i haven’t looked at this in any detail, so i’m not commenting on the substance. however, i’m concerned that the creators of metaliteracy also draw on transliteracy. for example, sue thomas will speak on transliteracy at the metaliteracy mooc. lane wilkinson 2013–11–07 at 1:09 pm given how many putative “literacies” are discussed in the library literature, i still think it helps to separate them into those that deal with information use (descriptive, though i now prefer “communicative” literacies) and those that deal with information evaluation (evaluative). it just seems to me that when we talk about print, computer, digital, or visual literacies we’re talking about skills that are categorically different than the higher-order skills discussed in information, media, or critical literacies. i suppose my thinking has evolved a little insofar as i now believe that the communicative literacies are first-order, and the evaluative literacies are second-order. as to metaliteracy, i appreciate the idea that information literate learners ought to be reflective about their information habits, though i’m unsure that metaliteracy is sufficiently distinct from more general critical thinking skills. personally, i don’t really follow the trans/metaliteracy discussions anymore. if anything, i’ve learned that my understanding of trans/metaliteracy is far more restricted than that of trans/metaliteracy aficionados. just give it a year and we’ll have a new (prefix)literacy to argue about. postliteracy? protoliteracy? autoliteracy? ethnoliteracy? i guarantee it. emilymelissabee 2013–11–08 at 5:41 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: just posted, eveline houtman’s “new literacies, learning, and libraries” looks at transliteracy {content} http://t.co/… pingback : saturday evening posts | jkbeitz pingback : all those new literacies, what’s a librarian to do? | u of t librarians blog pingback : response to eveline houtman – lonely at the front? we need an international transliteracy network | sue thomas suethomas 2013–11–15 at 5:33 am hi eveline, thanks for your very detailed article. i’ve responded at http://suethomasnet.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/response-to-eveline-houtman-lonely-at-the-front-we-need-an-international-transliteracy-network/ – hope you find it of interest. eveline houtman 2013–11–15 at 4:56 pm thanks to sue thomas for engaging with my article. i have some comments on her comments! first, she gives examples of transliteracy research that she suggests i might not be aware of. i *was* aware of several of these – and of course the transliteracy, technology and teaching conference and the metaliteracy mooc come out of the library world. but she also writes that i might not be aware of these because the researchers are “working in isolation” and i think she puts her finger on an important issue. as i hope i showed in my article, there has been a rich and vibrant conversation on new literacies, multiliteracies, multimodality, and so on, ongoing for at least the last 15 years. transliteracy remains isolated outside the broader conversation, engaging only a small number of researchers. as illustration, my article’s reviewer from the world of literacy education, rob simon of the ontario institute for studies in education (http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/oise/about_oise/robsimon2013dct_20130402.html), had never heard of transliteracy. secondly, thomas suggests that the frameworks i talk about come from theorists in the “academic echo chamber”, as opposed to librarians “working at the coal-face with real people” who “know the practical day-to-day realities.” or as opposed to herself, who prefers to be “more engaged in actually doing it.” these are just false distinctions. anyone following the links to the researchers or the literature that i provided in my article will find many “doers”, and many examples of projects or research with “real people.” (and i cite only a small portion of the research.) thirdly, thomas suggests that those working within the transliteracy framework are at the forefront of trends in information technology and that it’s “lonely at the front” – but in fact transliteracy overlaps substantially with earlier frameworks. so if we use the neil selwyn question from my article we might ask: what’s actually new about the transliteracy framework? and then there are my own questions: how does it help us think about the issues? does it generate fruitful questions? does it point us to action? pingback : defining ‘new literacies’ | nicole shapiro's blog pingback : task – thinking hard | rjen3856 pingback : tutorial 1 (week 3) responses | iteachstufftokids pingback : what are “new literacies”? | digitalliterate pingback : tutorial one – new literacies | digital media in little miss tea's classroom pingback : ‘new literacies’ | edmt6008: digital media in the classroom pingback : new literacies | forever hatching pingback : ‘new literacies’ | angelaelisepatterson pingback : task 1: navigating the new literacy of a blog! | lambyemily's blog pingback : tutorial week 1task | tgir2835's blog pingback : new literacies | digital media in the primary classroom pingback : new literacies | moniquejam pingback : new literacies | jmic1705 pingback : defining ‘new literacies’ | launching classrooms into cyberspace pingback : the brave new literacy world | mrnoblesblog pingback : what are new literacies? | aneenha's digimedia blog pingback : new literacies | miss. jeon's digital classroom. pingback : what are new literacies? | 6008 digital media pingback : new literacies: what is it? | brave new world comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct ethical financial stewardship: one library’s examination of vendors’ business practices – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2021 31 mar katy divittorio and lorelle gianelli /1 comments ethical financial stewardship: one library’s examination of vendors’ business practices by katy divittorio and lorelle gianelli in brief the evaluation of library collections rarely digs into the practices or other business ventures of the companies that create or sell library resources. as financial stewards, academic acquisition librarians are in a unique position to consider the business philosophy and practices of our vendors as they align with the institutions we serve. this article shares one academic library’s research and assessment of library vendors’ corporate practices, a review that involved purchasing consumer sustainability rating scorecards and accessibility reports. challenges the library faced include lack of vendor involvement and how to move forward when it is discovered that a provider’s business ventures could harm our library patrons or their families. as a library that serves two official hispanic-serving institutions (hsi) and one emerging hsi this evaluation also considered how vendor practices may impact hispanic/latinx students.  introduction the ethical behavior of businesses is often referred to as corporate social responsibility (csr), or conscious capitalism. csr is the idea that businesses have a responsibility to consider collective values and contribute to society in a positive way. for some companies it is a fundamental part of their business model, for example toms donates a pair of shoes for each pair purchased. for others, it means allowing employees to volunteer during the year, contributing to charity, or developing more sustainable business practices. greater societal good has been shown to have many benefits for businesses, including increased revenue, improved employee retention, and a strengthened supply chain (trotter, 2017). this concept has even been incorporated into business curricula. villanova university offers four types of csr programs and harvard business school has a corporate responsibility initiative (cri) with the goal of studying and promoting responsible business practices (villanova university, 2020; harvard kennedy school, n.d.). a 2019 article published in the international journal of corporate social responsibility points out that “business’ concern for society” can be traced back centuries to roman law, but the concept was not written about until the 1930s (agudelo et al., 2019). in the 1950s csr was mostly philanthropic, while the growth of social movements in the 1960s highlighted issues impacted by corporate decision making such as pollution, employee safety, labor laws, and civil rights. it was in this environment that companies, such as ben & jerry’s, started to integrate social concerns into their foundations (agudelo, et al., 2019).  csr has continued to evolve as investors demand that companies “serve a social purpose” (proulx, 2018). in 2018, the founder of the investment firm blackrock sent an ultimatum to several large companies demanding that they either contribute in a positive way to society or lose his firm’s financial support. given that blackrock is the world’s largest investment firm, with $6 trillion in assets, this move was considered “a lightning rod” moment by the associate dean at the yale school of management, an expert on corporate leadership (proulx, 2018). legal changes also reflect this trend. beginning in 2018, under eu law, public companies are required to report company details that go beyond their finances, such as their diversity policies (agudelo, 2019).   contributing to society in a positive way involves more than just financial support; social responsibility also includes issues related to ethics and equality. in 2019, the interfaith center on corporate responsibility (iccr), an investor advocacy group, submitted ten proposals to amazon, encouraging the company to refrain from selling facial-recognition software and to directly link executive compensation to improved diversity and sustainability practices (romano, 2019). more recently, covid has put a strain on many consumers, and this combined with racial unrest is “bringing about rapid change and heightened consumer expectations” (moore, 2020). as companies fight to stay viable in these uncertain times, csr can be an important part to staying in business, especially as people “see through platitudes and hold companies accountable when their stated values and actions do not align” (moore, 2020).  library acquisitions staff are consumers, though purchasing content for the library and university rather than for themselves. just as individual consumers base buying decisions on personal principles, librarians operate within the values of their institutions and profession. background auraria library serves three institutions of higher education on one campus: university of colorado denver (cu denver), metropolitan state university of denver (msu denver), and community college of denver (ccd). the authors would like to acknowledge that in order to create the auraria campus in the early 1970s families, homes, and businesses were displaced (gallegos, 2011). eminent domain was enacted to remove hundreds of families and their homes, and most of the families living in the area at the time were hispanic/latinx and protested their forced relocation (rael, 2019). as a form of reparation, the three institutions offer free tuition to the families, children, and grandchildren of those who were forcibly displaced and kept some of the houses to be used as part of the campus (rael, 2019).  the auraria campus was designed as a place where a student could attend community college, transfer to a four-year college, and go on to earn a graduate degree all on the same campus. while that vision has changed over the years and each of the institutions has carved out its own identity, the library continues to be one of the few shared resources and services. auraria library serves a diverse patron population and offers resources that support curricula from the vocational to the phd level. msu denver & ccd are hispanic-serving institutions (hsis), while cu denver is an emerging hsi. hsis are public and private, two and four-year not-for-profit institutions that have at least 25% full time enrollment of hispanic undergraduate students.  implications for hispanic-serving institutions city university of new york law professor sarah lamdan published two articles that explore “the ethical issues that arise when lawyers buy and use legal research services sold by the vendors that build ice’s surveillance systems” (lamdan, 2019, p.1). westlaw, a leading legal database used by lawyers, libraries, and other private industries to conduct legal research is owned by thomson reuters, a company that also creates clear investigation software. clear is thomson reuter’s software that law enforcement agencies, including u.s. immigration and customs enforcement (ice), use to collect thousands of data points on people in order to assist with their investigations and identify community threats. the funds that libraries pay westlaw support the creation and operations of clear. these library funds are supporting surveillance, including surveillance of our most vulnerable communities. ice was created in part as a response to the september 11, 2001 attacks. while unauthorized immigration levels have decreased since 2007, immigration detention and removals have increased since 2015 (krogstad et al., 2019; guo & baugh 2019). ice has been criticized for its policies and abuses of power. ice tracks down immigrants when nothing illegal is happening and who have no criminal record (lamdan, 2019). in 2017, ice requested that the national records and archives administration (nara) destroy documentation for abuse allegations related to violent assault, sexual assault, and death back to the creation of ice in 2003 (eagle, 2019). while nara initially approved this request public and professional outcry pushed nara to reevaluate this decision (eagle, 2019). because of these practices, people within various professions have pushed back against working with ice and the companies that build products for ice. employees at microsoft (including its github subsidiary), google, and amazon have all pushed back against their own companies working with ice (bergen & bass, 2019; chao, 2018; shahani, 2019; shaban, 2018). colleges and universities around the u.s. are seeing demonstrations from their students against ice and companies that do business with them (mclean, 2019). for example, at johns hopkins, associate professor drew daniel, who started the campaign for his university to cut ties with ice stated, “i think there’s a very strong feeling across the board from undergraduates that it was deeply inconsistent that you wanted an inclusive and diverse campus while partnering with ice, because of the racism in the way ice targets black and brown people” (mclean, 2019, pp.2-3). the deferred action for childhood arrivals (daca) program started in 2012 and allows children brought to the u.s. without authorization before june 2007 and under the age of 16 deferred removal from the country. this allows them to stay in the u.s. and attend school and work with authorization. this policy was put in place under the obama administration. while in 2017, the trump administration announced it would end daca, in 2020 the supreme court ruled that trump could not immediately end daca, and president biden took steps in 2021 to protect the policy (liptak & shear, 2020; redden, 2021).  most undocumented immigrants live in twenty cities across the united states. denver has been on this list since 2005 (passel & cohn, 2019). colorado has implemented several programs that support its undocumented student population. msu denver serves more hispanic/latinx students (5,469) than any other higher education institution in colorado (phare, 2019). all three institutions on the auraria campus have support services for daca students. msu denver was also the first institution in colorado to offer in-state tuition to undocumented students, and colorado passed the asset (advancing students for a stronger economy tomorrow) bill that provides undocumented students the opportunity to pay in-state tuition at public institutions if they fit certain criteria (metropolitan state university of denver, n.d.). in october 2019, the university of colorado system and msu denver co-signed a u.s. supreme court brief to defend young people who immigrated illegally as children and that supports their ability to pursue higher education (langford, 2019; presidents’ alliance on higher education and immigration, 2019). when the u.s. supreme court heard oral arguments to end daca in november 2019, cu denver and msu denver reconfirmed their commitment to supporting daca and undocumented students (dewind, 2019; watson, 2019).  there is surging nationwide enrollment of college students who self-identify as hispanic/latinx and the number of hsis are increasing as a result (garcia, 2019). according to predictions u.s. high school graduation rates will peak in 2025 with a national dip following in 2026 (wiche, 2016). white high school graduates are decreasing while it is predicted that non-white high school graduates will increase from 42% to 49% of the u.s. population by 2023 (wiche, 2016).  in colorado there is very little state support for higher education (state support for higher education per full-time equivalent student, 2019). because of this, universities and colleges rely heavily on tuition monies, and any dip in enrollment can mean a crisis for the institution. higher education administration needs to be aware of how their practices affect their growing hispanic/latinx population. if colleges and universities work with companies that could harm these students or their families then they risk losing a segment of this growing student population.  vendor ethics taskforce (vet) as auraria library staff became more aware of the undocumented student experience, their experiences with ice, and the increasing importance of csr, they wanted to act. in september 2018, auraria library created the vendor ethics taskforce (vet). the charge of vet was to research and evaluate its learning materials vendors using values-based metrics. vet’s assessments would be used in renewal or new subscription/purchasing decisions and negotiations and to start conversations with vendors about areas of concern. as good stewards of the institutions’ funds, its goal was to avoid working with companies that are out of alignment with the library’s and institutions’ values.  vet selected a small number of vendors to assess to start including a variety based on size and products offered. vet wanted a broad representation in its pilot project and so included vendors that vet had potential ethical concerns about, vendors it thought would score well overall, and vendors for which vet was unsure of the outcome. vet consisted of members from collections strategies, researcher support services, and education and outreach services departments. vet selected five metrics after reviewing the library’s values and mission statement; its three institutions’ values, vision, and mission statements; and the american library association’s professional values. the metrics are as follows:  1. diversity: this metric seeks to examine the internal hiring practices of the company, paying particular attention to the diversity of the companies’ high-level staff and board members and pay equity.  2. ethics: ethics refer to what the company values and how this informs its decision making. this is commonly referred to as a company’s code of conduct, standards of business, core values, or code of ethics. 3. data privacy: what data does the company collect on patrons? how is it used and by whom? is the company also an information broker? does it actively collect and sell data?   4. accessibility: does the company have an accessibility statement, and does it indicate they follow national accessibility standards? do the company’s products meet national accessibility guidelines (wcag, section 508)? if not, how are they addressing the shortfalls?  5. environment/sustainability: does the company have a statement on sustainability? does it give to an environmental charity? is it winning sustainability awards? after several months of researching and determining the metrics that vet would use vet recognized the need for outside expertise. vet researched outside consultants and obtained funding to procure their services. in early 2019 vet selected two companies with which to contract: ecovadis and michigan state university’s usability/accessibility research and consulting services (msu uarc). because transparency was an important component to this project, vet informed each library vendor via email before the vendor was assessed. msu uarc has been used by the big 10 academic alliance. vet elected to pilot this service with six vendors and spent $3,000. during this assessment msu uarc checked each vendor’s website against web content accessibility guidelines (wcag) 2.0 aa. msu uarc was given temporary access via a guest login to do this work and then provided a report listing the major accessibility issues on the site. the big 10 academic alliance had reports on some of the library’s vendors, but they were a year or more out-of-date. vet planned to use the older big 10 reports against our newer ones to see which vendors are making improvements and which ones were taking no action in improving their accessibility. the second company, ecovadis, conducts consumer sustainability ratings on vendors using international standards and produces a vendor “scorecard.” each scorecard has four categories: environment, labor & human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. during our pilot vet had access to a limited number of vendors’ scorecards. if the vendor was already in the ecovadis database, vet received immediate access. if not, it would take ecovadis a month or two to get the vendor added and collect all the data points to create a scorecard. in addition, an ecovadis representative planned to work with vet on having follow-up conversations with vendors if the scorecard revealed areas of concern. they could help vet plan, for example, challenging conversations in which vet asked a vendor to consider changing specific practices that had been uncovered in the report. this ecovadis pilot cost the auraria library $2,000.  each of the ecovadis vendors was sent a letter via email inviting them to participate in this initiative in may 2019. see appendix a for an example. the letter, signed by auraria library’s director, explained that vet wanted to conduct this assessment to help its library demonstrate excellent financial stewardship, while also ensuring that the social and environmental performances of its vendors aligned with its institutions’ values. the vendors were also notified that there would be a small cost to them to participate in addition to the fee auraria had already paid. depending on the size of their company the vendor would need to pay somewhere between $500 and $2,000. the authors have chosen only to share the names of the vendors for whom we did receive scorecards. outcomes and findings ecovadis overall vet discovered that library vendors are not ready to participate in a program like ecovadis. out of all the vendors contacted, only two shared their ecovadis scorecards. one was clarivate, and it already had a scorecard in place. informa was the only vendor willing to go through the steps to have itself assessed. some of the other companies said they were not able or willing to participate due to the labor and cost involved to them. however, there was one company that already had an ecovadis scorecard but refused to allow ecovadis to share it with vet. vet members ended up talking with vendors’ lawyers in a few cases when the company was deciding whether to participate. some companies said they would reconsider participating in the future.  since auraria library had paid for access to scorecards and was not getting them due to lack of vendor participation, vet decided to try another tactic. vet reached out to university procurement staff to let them know about this pilot and to see if they had any vendors they would be interested in asking for scorecards. as it happened, the director of strategic procurement had been considering ecovadis for some time. university procurement added their own suppliers and were able to get reports for adobe, agilent technologies, avis, cisco, dell, enterprise, fastenal, lenovo, medline, sap se, staples, thermo fisher scientific, ups, and ww grainger.  the two ecovadis scorecards for the library vendors varied in detail. the one for clarivate did not have enough information to be helpful due to a lack of documented policies or procedures shared by clarivate with ecovadis. the informa scorecard showed informa in a high percentile (good). overall, informa had many more strength areas than areas that needed improvement. vet also had various conversations with its informa representative and was able to learn about the work informa is doing and awards they have received around sustainability.  despite not being able to obtain ecovadis scorecards for most vendors, the project resulted in a stronger relationship between university procurement and the library. the ecovadis scorecards for university procurement, on the whole, contained more detail and information that could help the university identify companies that support the institution’s values. one reason for this could be that these larger companies are expected to provide this information to their customers. libraries have not historically been asking for this type of information from library vendors, and so perhaps these companies were unprepared to give it out. accessibility reports after receiving the accessibility reports in august 2019, vet shared them with our tri-institutional accessibility committee, a committee that consists of accessibility experts from each school on the auraria campus and several library representatives. each report described accessibility issues the vendors had resolved based on the big 10 reports, issues that still existed, and new accessibility issues. the tri-institutional accessibility committee suggested a couple of tactics: 1) include the areas that are below wcag 2.0 aa standards in the next license, with the statement that they must be resolved by the next renewal or the library will cancel; and/or 2) negotiate a lower price, since accessibility is below standards. following that meeting, we sent the accessibility reports to our vendors and asked for a response on how they planned to resolve the areas of concern.  the first vendor to respond said they were planning a platform audit in 2020 and would incorporate vet’s accessibility report findings to ensure that areas that require action will be improved by their product team. the next vendor we heard from would not add the additional accessibility clause we suggested and refused to add even the library’s standard accessibility language in the license (see appendix b), which most vendors are willing to add. finally, several vendors never replied at all despite repeated attempts at contact by our library.  internal vet templates since most of the vendors vet contacted were reluctant to participate in the ecovadis assessment process, vet created an internal template to gather information itself. see appendix c for the template. through this process, vet found many positive steps that vendors are taking and awards they are winning for their csr efforts.  for example, informa has won multiple awards for its sustainability work. it was named a 2018 industry mover in the dow jones sustainability index; a member of the ftse4good index, which is a group of ethical investment stock choices based on a range of corporate responsibility criteria; and a constituent of the ethibel sustainability index for excellence in europe, which is a list of the 200 top performing companies for corporate responsibility in europe (g. howcroft, personal communication, march 21, 2017). through this template, vet also found that cambridge installed a large solar array to cut co2 emissions by 20% (cambridge university press, 2019). this was especially positive and consistent with auraria’s values, as the auraria library had just installed solar panels on the roof, which cover two-thirds of the library’s current energy usage and distribute surplus power back to the campus grid (evans, 2019). the coalition for diversity and inclusion in scholarly communications (c4disc), which officially launched in 2020, promotes the diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility work being done by scholarly communications associations and societies.  vet used the research it gathered when holding conversations with vendors. thomson reuters’ clear investigation software and specifically ice’s use of this data was still a major concern for a library that serves so many undocumented students. during a phone call with westlaw representatives, vet addressed some of its concerns including the concern that clear software relied on artificial intelligence and facial recognition software, which has been shown to be racist and sexist (lohr, 2018; buolamwini & gebru, 2018). vet also was concerned that the thomson reuters’ ceo was on the board of the ice foundation. this was an uncomfortable conversation and indicated that many of our library priorities were out of alignment with priorities for thomson reuters. vet received follow-up information that addressed some vet concerns, specifically that clear does not use facial recognition technology and that the ceo is no longer on the ice foundation board (the ice foundation is no longer in operation as of the writing of this paper). one of vet’s library colleagues wanted to test removing his data from clear, but when vet looked at the criteria, he did not qualify. thomson reuters allows judges, public officials, or members of law enforcement to request their personal data be removed if they can prove that having the data in clear exposes them to risk or physical harm and/or they are a victim of identity theft (thomson reuters, n.d.). as an alternative, our colleague submitted an information request form to find out what information clear has collected on him. after several weeks he received 41 pages of data from clear. the data that clear had on him included name, gender, social security number, phone number, date of birth, spouse, addresses (11 previous going back 15 years), ownership of four different cars, utility records, voting participation, and political party. there were also around 40 categories they collect data on for which nothing was returned for our colleague. thomson reuters collects this type of data on all of us.  they also have incorrect data. the cover letter misgendered the individual and included incorrect addresses, an incorrect marital status, and an incorrect age range (swauger, 2019). this is an example of the data thomson reuters sells to ice and other law enforcement agencies. the consequences of ice and other law enforcement agencies using incorrect data when detaining and arresting people is chilling.    one outcome from the creation of vet and its many discussions was shifting print book purchasing away from amazon to local and independent bookstores. there was unanimous support for this within the library, and the move has received positive feedback from faculty. while most of the library’s print books are purchased via the vendor gobi, around 13% have historically been purchased via amazon. auraria library moved that 13% to independent and local bookstores, companies that the library wants to support. there are still a small number of books purchased via amazon if the library is unable to get them elsewhere. vet made this move because amazon operations are out of alignment with auraria library’s values around supporting the health and wellbeing of people, especially those from marginalized communities. amazon is in the surveillance business and has created and used facial recognition software with its product rekognition, which has been shown to incorrectly identify people (snow, 2018; williams, 2020). in june 2020 amazon put a one-year moratorium on selling rekognition to police in response to community protests against police brutality and the deaths of many people of color at the hands of law enforcement (amazon, 2020). amazon is also repeatedly accused of having poor and unsafe working conditions for its employees (spitznagel, 2019; tims, 2019).  despite not being able to leverage outside expertise such as ecovadis, vet will continue gathering reports on vendors using our internal template and sharing them with our librarians who make collection decisions. it has allowed us better insight into the companies with which the library works. an added benefit to the research is staff staying informed about industry changes and current events in the publishing world.  vet also hopes to work with other libraries to combine our efforts. for example, another university of colorado campus library is planning on reviewing diversity classification types, such as women, minority and small businesses, for its suppliers. this library will add the supplier type into its integrated library system so it can easily run reports to see where its funds are going. the library hopes to see how much it is spending on women-owned businesses or small businesses.  challenges and limitations during this project, vet experienced numerous challenges. the biggest challenge was developing a response when discovering a concerning policy or practice. all three institutions on the auraria campus are committed to supporting undocumented students. the funds our library spends on thomson reuters products may go to support clear investigation software, which is sold to ice for multi-millions (lamdan, 2019). the information collected by the clear software may be incorrect as we saw from our colleague’s report, and using it to target undocumented immigrants is concerning.  nonetheless, our paralegal and other students need westlaw to succeed in school and compete in the workforce. if our library cancelled our westlaw subscription, this would put our students at a disadvantage and they may not be able to secure employment in the legal field.  our librarians talked with legal and paralegal professors on campus and trialed other products, but westlaw is what law firms use. as lamdan (2019) points out westlaw and lexis are the dominant resources used within the legal profession.  it put us in a position of having to support one student group over another. while cancelling westlaw would be a strong statement of our library’s values, it would not change thomson reuters’ work. it would continue to develop clear and sell it to ice and other law enforcement agencies. in the end, the library reluctantly renewed its westlaw subscription. another challenge was getting vendors to participate in a formal project that uses internationally recognized standards. while vet was able to research on its own, the level and amount of information the authors were able to gather was very limited compared to a program like ecovadis offers. although csr has a long history across industries, many vendors were reluctant to provide information addressing sustainability, diversity, privacy, accessibility, or ethics. it is our hope that persistent discussions about these issues will encourage our vendors to make changes that benefit libraries and the communities we serve. this is an approach summarized by the ceo of newground social investment, a seattle investment firm: “you have to have consistent applied pressure to gradually change. but because [the companies are] so big, that change of trajectory leads to immensely better outcomes” (romano, 2019). while vet hoped to demonstrate ethical financial stewardship with this project, the authors recognize the library’s budget is just a small percentage of an institution’s expenditures. the library may be working towards conscious consumerism, but other departments may still have problematic business relationships. many higher education institutions hold contracts with prison industries to use prison labor (burke, 2020). for example, msu denver and, until recently, cu denver had to purchase office furniture from the colorado correctional industries (cci) (byars, 2020; metropolitan state university of denver purchasing manual, 2017). cu denver is currently reexamining this business relationship after protests from students, staff, and faculty (hernandez, 2020). prison labor falls outside the fair labor standard act and is overwhelmingly made up of people of color, perpetuating oppression and worker exploitation (leung, 2018).   conclusion the authors call on other librarians and national library organizations to advocate that library vendors proactively address and share work around sustainability, diversity, privacy, accessibility, and ethics in their companies. lack of documentation or little to no work towards ethical practices from a vendor does not necessarily mean that a library should stop doing business with them. in these cases, there is potential to have productive conversations between the vendors and the library to encourage companies to incorporate a csr model. when a library sees a vendor take positive actions it is important to reinforce the value of that work. if a library sees a vendor out of alignment with their institution’s values, it should hold conversations first with the vendor and, if that goes nowhere, then hold conversations with appropriate individuals within its institution. in addition, libraries should support companies that are doing ethical work, look for alternatives, and create their own resources. we hope to see librarians continue to identify and address vendor business practices that hurt our students, especially those who come from marginalized communities. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank all of the current and past members of the vendor ethics taskforce: gayle bradbeer, karen sobel, katherine brown, molly rainard, and shea swauger. we are also grateful to sommer browning, lando archibeque, and meg brown-sica for reviewing early drafts, internal peer reviewer ikumi crocoll and publishing editor ian beilin. references amazon. 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(2019, march 11). 20 metro areas are home to six-in-ten unauthorized immigrants in u.s. pew research center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/11/us-metro-areas-unauthorized-immigrants/ phare, c. (2019, may 13). new colorado law extends state financial aid to dreamers. red. https://red.msudenver.edu/2019/new-colorado-law-extends-state-financial-aid-to-dreamers.html presidents’ alliance on higher education and immigration. (2019, october 7). 165 universities and colleges file amicus brief urging supreme court to protect daca. https://www.presidentsimmigrationalliance.org/pressrelease/165-universities-and-colleges-file-amicus-brief-urging-supreme-court-to-protect-daca/ proulx, n. (2018). do companies have a responsibility to contribute positively to society? the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/learning/do-companies-have-a-responsibility-to-contribute-positively-to-society.html rael, a. (2019, september). let’s talk: auraria displacement. [presentation]. university of colorado ethnic studies program, plaza building 102l, auraria campus, denver, co, united states. redden, e. (2021, january 21). biden makes immigration day 1 priority. inside higher ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/01/21/biden-takes-action-immigration-day-one romano, b. (2019, march 8). activist shareholders push amazon from everything from facial recognition to climate change. seattle times. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/activist-shareholders-push-amazon-on-everything-from-facial-recognition-to-climate-change/ shaban, h. (2018). amazon employees demand company cut ties with ice. the washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/22/amazon-employees-demand-company-cut-ties-with-ice/ shahani, a. (2019, august 20). employees demand google publicly commit to not work with ice. national public radio. https://www.npr.org/2019/08/20/752670444/employees-demand-google-publicly-commit-to-not-work-with-ice snow, j. (2018, july 26). amazon’s face recognition falsely matched 28 members of congress with mugshots. aclu. https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/amazons-face-recognition-falsely-matched-28 spitznagel, e. (2019, july 13). inside the hellish workday of an amazon warehouse employee. new york post. https://nypost.com/2019/07/13/inside-the-hellish-workday-of-an-amazon-warehouse-employee/ state support for higher education per full-time equivalent student – map view (2019): state indicators: nsf – national science foundation. https://ncses.nsf.gov/indicators/states/indicator/state-support-for-higher-education-per-fte-student swauger, s. [@sheaswauger]. (2019, december 13). the fact that they misgendered me in the letter even though they’re sending a report with my gender information [tweet]. twitter. https://twitter.com/sheaswauger/status/1205589727035838465 swauger, s. [@sheaswauger]. (2019, december 13). it also had wrong information. i’ve been divorced for over 2 years, and the report had 13 different data points [tweet]. twitter. https://twitter.com/sheaswauger/status/1205589727035838465 thomson reuters. (n.d.). legal notices public records privacy statement. retrieved february 14 2020, from https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/legal-notices/privacy-records?cid=trsite tims, a. (2019, april 14). fines and frantic life on the roadthe lot of amazon’s harried staff. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/apr/14/amazon-fines-depot-workers-driver trotter, g. (2017, december 08). more companies find spending on corporate responsibility increases the bottom line. chicago tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-kraft-heinz-social-responsibility-plan-20171208-story.html villanova university, (2020, january 23) types of corporate social responsibility programs and career options. (2020). retrieved february 14, 2020, from https://www.villanovau.com/resources/public-administration/types-corporate-social-responsibility-programs/ watson, m. (2019). defending daca in denver and d.c. red.  western interstate commission for higher education (wiche). (2016). knocking at the college door: projections of high school graduates through 2032. www.wiche.edu/knocking. williams, m. (winter 2020). the trouble with facial recognition. aclu magazine. appendix a dear vendor,  auraria library would like to invite you to partner with us on a vendor assessment pilot project. inspired by the work of mit and the university of california, we are beginning a project to go beyond cost-per-use assessment of our learning materials and explore values-based metrics. this kind of assessment will help auraria library continue to demonstrate excellent financial stewardship while also ensuring that the social and environmental performances of our vendors align with our institutions’ values.  in order to complete this project, we have selected the ecovadis corporate social responsibility (csr) monitoring platform. the university of california also uses ecovadis to assess the vendors with whom they work. the ecovadis platform combines csr assessment expertise and data management tools which will allow you to demonstrate your best practices in areas of sustainability, diversity, and ethics. several vendors we already work with have completed this process. we have chosen you for this pilot project because we highly value the content you provide to our patrons. as a large academic library, we believe that by taking part in this assessment you are signalling to your customers that you care about social responsibility and sustainability.  the ecovadis csr monitoring platform is co-financed by auraria library but also requires vendors to pay an annual subscription fee. this scorecard will be available to other institutions that work with ecovadis. you will soon receive an invitation from ecovadis to activate your account. upon registration, the first stage will be to complete a csr performance assessment.  we thank you in advance for your time and willingness to embark on this exciting pilot project.  best regards, appendix b  example 1 licensor shall comply with the americans with disabilities act (ada), by supporting assistive software or devices such as large print interfaces, text-to-speech output, voice-activated input, refreshable braille displays, and alternate keyboard or pointer interfaces, in a manner consistent with the web accessibility initiative web content accessibility guidelines 2.0 aa http://www.w3.org/wai/guid-tech.html). licensor shall ensure that product maintenance and upgrades are implemented in a manner that does not compromise product accessibility. licensor shall provide to licensee a current, accurate completed voluntary product accessibility template (vpat) to demonstrate compliance with accessibility standards (https://www.itic.org/policy/accessibility). if the product does not comply, the licensor shall adapt the licensed materials in a timely manner and at no cost to the licensee in order to comply with applicable law. source: big ten academic alliance standardized accessibility language https://www.btaa.org/library/accessibility/library-e-resource-accessibility—standardized-license-language example 2 licensor shall comply with the americans with disabilities act (ada), by supporting assistive software or devices such as large print interfaces, text-to-speech output, voice-activated input, refreshable braille displays, and alternate keyboard or pointer interfaces, in a manner consistent with the web accessibility initiative web content accessibility guidelines 2.0 (http://www.w3.org/wai/guid-tech.html).  source: “soft” privacy clause modified from liblicense example 3 the university affords equal opportunity to individuals in its employment, services, programs and activities in accordance with federal and state laws. this includes effective communication and access to electronic and information communication technology resources for individuals with disabilities. [supplier] shall: (1) deliver all applicable services and products in reasonable compliance with applicable university standards (for example, web content accessibility guidelines 2.0, level aa or section 508 standards for electronic and information technology as applicable); (2)upon request, provide the university with its accessibility testing results and written documentation verifying accessibility; (3) promptly respond to and resolve accessibility complaints; and (4) indemnify and hold the university harmless in the event of claims arising from inaccessibility. source: university of colorado boulder’s mandated language appendix c vet master template  resource:  subscription period:  this profile last updated:  company: parent company:  ☐public company or ☐private company ☐for profit company or ☐non-profit company vet metric summarized/highlighted findings links/shared drive paths take note! diversity        data privacy        ethics       accessibility        sustainability     daca, data privacy, ethics, library databases, vendor relationships, vendors we need to talk about how we talk about disability: a critical quasi-systematic review equitable but not diverse: universal design for learning is not enough 1 response anita coleman 2021–06–02 at 12:43 am i was delighted to read and learn. were ebsco, gale/cengage among the vendors who refused to participate? vendor scorecards would have been helpful, but listing the names of all vendors who refused to participate or for whom scorecards weren’t made available (would have been helpful as well. thank you. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct making a new table: intersectional librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 2 jul fobazi ettarh /18 comments making a new table: intersectional librarianship in brief: when librarians discuss the lack of underrepresented populations in librarianship, the solutions suggested most often are recruitment and awareness. but these discussions focus on one matrix of identity, like race or class, and ignore the fact that people embody multiple, layered identities. by treating these matrices of identity and marginalization as separate entities, librarians fail to fully understand how oppressions work in varying contexts. we need to go beyond the traditional diversity rhetoric and speak instead of intersectional librarianship. this article defines intersectionality, how it differs from the current discourse, and how it can be used to help librarians understand and serve diverse populations better. by fobazi ettarh “diversity” is a hot button term in librarianship. every few months, there is a new editorial about diversifying the profession. as the field remains mostly white and middle class, each author reflects on the disparity and presents their ideas on how to increase and improve diversity recruiting of both students and faculty. within the past year, articles such as “the mls and the race line” and “diversifying the lis faculty” have continued the conversation about recruitment of people of color (poc) into the field. however, there is not nearly enough discussion on how to remove barriers for librarians and library students within the field. how do we make sure that both existing and aspiring librarians interact with patrons and other librarians in a manner that is respectful? the answer to that question is intersectional librarianship. what is intersectionality? kimberlé crenshaw, a professor at ucla who specializes in race and gender issues first developed the theory in 1989 (“kimberlé williams crenshaw,” 2014). patricia hill collins, a sociologist who focuses on the intersections within the black female experience, expanded upon the theory in the 1990s in conjunction with popular black feminist theories of the time. the theory states that various categories of marginalization and identity interact on multiple (and often simultaneous) levels. too often people look at diversity as different and separate spheres: race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. this view is reflected in the types of workshops and sessions seen at ala and other conferences. out of the few “diversity” sessions, there will be separate ones on race, on lgbtq issues, and so on. however, these spheres of identity intersect in a variety of different ways. the experiences of a white queer patron (or librarian) will be very different from those of a black queer one. by treating these issues as separate entities, we as librarians fail to fully understands how oppressions work in various contexts. intersectionality is a tool for studying, understanding, and responding to the ways in which axes of identities intersect and how these intersections contribute to unique experiences of oppression and privilege. why does it matter? in the past several months librarians have been having interesting conversations regarding gender, sexuality, and librarianship. julie jurgens’s tumblr post “ego, thy name is librarianship” discussed the disproportionate number of men acclaimed in the library community for such a female dominated field. kate tkacik, a 2013 library journal mover and shaker, encouraged female librarians to “lean in to librarianship” and speak up for and promote themselves in the work environment. sarah alexander spoke about the challenges of being an openly lgbtq librarian in a guest post on hack library school. all three articles end by stating that ultimately being vocal and expressing your whole self in the profession is paramount. this advice is well intentioned, but may not work for everyone. these conversations are instigated by people from white, middle-class backgrounds and are grounded in their experiences of privilege. this is unsurprising: most of the field falls within this demographic. it can be more dangerous for poc to speak up or “lean in” at the workplace. compounded with other identities such as disability or gender, to visibly be their whole selves can seem impossible. fear of job loss or not hiring; fear of not being allowed to use appropriate restrooms; or even fear of physical violence are just a few of the very real issues that are swept under the rug when loud and explicit advocacy are offered as blanket advice. the “lean in” advice is, in fact, about how to have it all, while offering precisely zero guidance on how to dismantle the structural barriers to gender equity that still impede most women. not only does the “lean in” and “speak out” advice ignore structural barriers such as racial discrimination and poverty, it ignores the different cultural views of women. when a white woman negotiates and advocates for herself she is seen as “greedy, demanding or just not very nice” and “people report that they would be less inclined to work with them, be it as coworkers, subordinates, or bosses.” however, when a woman of color, and especially a black woman, advocates for herself, not only does she have to contend with all of the negative associations the white woman faces, additionally, it is seen as anger or being “uppity,” also known as the “angry black woman” stereotype. so when poc, especially women of color, express similar ideas it’s not seen as an expression of confidence and leadership, but rather insolence and insubordination, and part of the “angry black woman” or “spicy latina” stereotypes. in the workplace and beyond, people perpetuate these stereotypes through microaggressions, or brief, everyday behaviors that communicate hostile or derogatory slights and insults directed towards a marginalized group. the important word to take away from the definition is “everyday.” a microaggression is subtle, underhanded, and often intended to be humorous, like a joke using stereotypes. a classic microaggression is the expression of surprise at a poc’s “eloquence” and “reasonable” tone. the underlying message behind this surprise is the belief that all minorities have a stereotypical “loud” and “aggressive” demeanor. microaggressions are not limited to race or culture, they also occur along class lines and the gender/sexuality spectrum, e.g. jokes about being too “pretty/feminine” to be gay. since it’s not usually said with malice, coworkers are more likely to share. and because they don’t see the jocular form of throwaway line as inherently racist, protestations are seen as being “overly sensitive.” projects such as “i, too, am harvard” and “oberlin microaggressions” document some of the common microaggressions that people in marginalized communities endure on a daily basis. when librarianship is viewed through a single-axis that is reflective of the dominant culture, certain values, such as individualism and assertiveness color the advice and practices deemed acceptable. these values and practices eventually become the norm. this, in turn, becomes the lens through which those within the profession discuss problems and subsequent change. for example, a common issue within the field is the lack of women in technology and digital librarianship. an example of single-axis thinking is saying that sexism causes the lack of women without considering that women of colour, queer women, and trans women might have a different experience. any work done that seeks to solve the issue along only one axis leaves behind these women. no one lives a single-axis life. we all embody multiple axes of identity and oppression throughout our lives that often affect us simultaneously. as flavia dzodan said, “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.” to treat librarianship and its communities as a single-axis phenomenon renders those who occupy the intersections invisible and therefore ignored. neutral repositories? a common value taught in library school is the importance of the librarian as an objective and neutral professional. as public servants, librarians must serve all communities equally regardless of moral values and political views. the librarian’s primary role is that of a facilitator in the public’s access to information and knowledge. however, librarianship is inherently political. even activities in which librarians are specifically trained to maintain “neutrality,” such as collection development, are intrinsically political. what is seen as normal or neutral is indicative of the status quo or the hegemony. in a society that favors “assertiveness, competitiveness, sportsmanship, linear thinking, individualism, and the sublimation of emotion,” women and minority viewpoints are often counter to the dominant ideology (stoffle & tarin, 1994). in addition, choices represented by programming and library materials tend to support the white heterosexual middle class power structures. for example, the relegation of black history displays and programming to february or lgbtq materials to april or june sends a message that these topics, these populations, are only valued seasonally and aren’t an integral aspect of the dominant culture. and in fact, the definition of neutral or neutrality according to merriam-webster is a “person, country, etc., not aligned with or supporting any side or position.” in other words, to be neutral is to be detached. if, however, neutrality is centered around factors such as assertiveness and sublimation of emotion reflective of the dominant white, heterosexual male society, then neutrality is not actually neutral. therefore, it requires a level of privilege to be seen as detached and neutral. those within the profession who do not fall under that paradigm must assimilate and conform to this notion of “neutrality” or risk not being taken seriously by the community, losing institutional support, or worse, jeopardizing job security. a librarian who only obtains materials focused on underrepresented communities may be seen as biased, but collection development that focuses on mainstream culture is not. despite the claim of neutrality, most libraries and archives support the dominant culture and marginalize those who fall outside it through invisibility. not only that, but they actively cause harm in the name of neutrality by giving voice to hate speech when neutrality is interpreted as giving equal voice to “both sides.” whose table? todd homma led a panel called “in visibility: race and libraries” at last year’s ala annual conference. during the discussion, he noted that the phrase “making room at the table” is often heard in conversations about diversity, but further complicated the notion by asking, “whose table? and do we really want an invitation?” for me, the answer is no. librarians commonly use the term diversity as a catch all phrase. in conversations about societal oppressions that occur among librarians on tumblr and other social media venues intersectionality is rarely addressed unless it is by someone who identifies as a member of multiple communities. often these conversations don’t occur at all. the lack of an intersectional perspective has greater repercussions. recently, in conversations surrounding the black caucus of the ala (bcala) feelings about ala annual 2016 being held in orlando, too many couldn’t see the difference between feeling unsafe due to race and the stand your ground law and a more general feeling of discomfort in states that don’t allow gay marriage. not only does this ignore the existence of queer people of color, but it demonstrates how abstract the discourse of diversity and intersectionality is to many librarians. these discussions cannot be seen as abstract and academic. treating these topics abstractly suggest that there are no real-world effects and they can therefore be glossed over or not discussed. because of this environment, instigating the discussions is commonly seen as a radical or political act. but this is a false dichotomy; upholding dominant values is in no way less political. the privilege of taking no action is also a politically charged move (jensen, 2005). how can librarians make their respective libraries safe for these populations, if people in the field don’t feel safe? what now? so how does one develop an intersectional perspective? we can start by learning how to become allies. being a good ally is not just about learning about the issues that affect the underrepresented, but also learning how our own biases and privileges make it difficult for us to build alliances across and between communities. mainstream movements focus on the white and middle class. it’s not enough to be an ally to one group in a silo. we need to educate ourselves on how these intersecting oppressions affect our community. lis theory is based on a foundation of understanding and interpreting the information seeking practices, behaviors, and needs of patrons. many mlis programs have syllabi with pertinent materials and i have referenced a few below. converse with those who identify themselves as members of those groups. while it is not their job to educate you, engaging in a dialogue with people from underrepresented communities and listening to how their oppressions intersect can go a long way. incorporate programming and library materials for diverse audiences into all library programs, presentations, and displays throughout the entire year and for multiple topics. for example, for a valentine’s day/romance display, incorporate materials with lgbtq protagonists, queer people of color (qpoc) protagonists, and protagonists with disabilities. challenge all of the assumptions about your patrons, your collections, and your attitudes toward your employees and coworkers. libraries and archives need to publicly declare that these “isms” will not be condoned. this can be done in the following ways: provide staff with diversity training address signs of microaggressions and injustice in the workplace investigate complaints quickly, thoroughly, and sensitively take disciplinary action against those who break the policy as librarians, we can no longer hide behind “neutrality” and “objectivity.” engaging in conversations and then turning those conversations into action is paramount. if librarianship at its core is a service profession, then we must do everything to ensure that the culture in the libraries and archives and in the field serves all populations. thanks and acknowledgments i’m very much indebted to the knowledgeable editors at in the library with the lead pipe, and in particular to ellie collier and cecily walker for diligently removing all traces of passive voice and rogue commas as well as helping me create the best possible version of this article. and ryan randall, a fellow tumblarian for telling me about this wonderful website and acting as a catalyst to submit a proposal. finally, i would like to thank my sister for forcing me to stop slacking and actually finish it. references cooke, n. (2013, september 25). diversifying the lis faculty. library journal. retrieved 00:13, june 17, 2014, from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/09/opinion/backtalk/diversifying-the-lis-faculty-backtalk/ dasgupta, n. (2013). implicit attitudes and beliefs adapt to situations: a decade of research on the malleability of implicit prejudice, stereotypes, and the self-concept. advances in experimental social psychology, 47, 233-279. hall, t. d. (2007). race and place: a personal account of unequal access. american libraries, 38(2), 30-33. honma, todd. (2005). trippin’ over the color line: the invisibility of race in library and information studies. interactions: ucla journal of education and information studies, 1(2). jensen, r. (2005). the myth of the neutral professional. progressive librarian, 24, 28-34. jaeger,p.t. (2012). disability and the internet: confronting a digital divide. lynne riener: boulder, co. jaeger, p. t., subramaniam, m., jones, c. b., & bertot, j. c. (2011). diversity and lis education: inclusion and the age of information. journal of education for library and information science, 52, 166-183. kimberlé williams crenshaw. (2014, april 23). in wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. retrieved 00:13, june 17, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=kimberl%c3%a9_williams_crenshaw&oldid=605399556 overall, p. m. (2009). cultural competence: a conceptual framework for library and information science professionals. library quarterly, 79, 175-204. stoffle, c.j., and tarin, p.a. (1994). no case for neutrality: the case for multiculturalism. library journal, 119(12), 46-49. sue, d. w., & constantine, m. g. (2007). racial microaggressions in everyday life; implications for clinical practice. american psychologist, 62(4),  271-286 wilson, t. d. (2000). human information behavior. informing science, 3(2). diversity, outreach exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part i – the leap open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression 18 responses hsifnihplod 2014–07–02 at 9:36 am rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog aliasyd 2014–07–02 at 9:37 am rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog lizlieutenant 2014–07–02 at 9:41 am rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog laurendodd 2014–07–02 at 9:57 am rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog librarian_lush 2014–07–02 at 10:14 am rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog mwanucha 2014–07–02 at 11:10 am rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog aszingarelli 2014–07–02 at 11:12 am rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog cmcaffre 2014–07–02 at 12:04 pm in addition to the suggestions you provide to help us avoid “isms” in our profession i’d like to suggest starting with bringing critical theory into the lis education as well. i just attended a great session on this at ala and i am sold! look for more great things from nicole cooke, safiya noble, and robin fogle kurz (http://ala14.ala.org/m/node/15626) roselovec 2014–07–02 at 12:33 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog onacameo 2014–07–02 at 1:38 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog pingback : hls weekly round-up | hls mre1920 2014–07–05 at 10:29 am rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog zeeerin 2014–07–08 at 11:58 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog kenleyneufeld 2014–07–13 at 11:15 am this has been sitting in my “to read” folder a week or two and finally got to it. what an important conversation to have both for the library profession but also for the broader society. i frequently reflect on how we can do things differently and am not always certain of the path. i do wish there were more conversation here bit i’ll share on my networks. pingback : food for thought: the work of intersectionality | amiable archivists' salon pingback : food for thought: intersectionality and intervention | amiable archivists' salon alise_ie_sig 2014–07–16 at 2:27 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: making a new table: intersectional librarianship: intersectionality http://t.co/eonjtisbog pingback : for the love of “librarian” | inalj this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 16 jul ellie collier and editorial board /21 comments open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression in brief: a call for articles based on an open source outline by ellie collier and editorial board on january 20th, 2014 nina de jesus posted “outline for a paper i probably won’t write.” the editors at in the library with the lead pipe approached de jesus to see if she might like to write it after all. we also discussed her idea to release her outline with an open source license and see what others would write. we are thrilled to announce that de jesus agreed to both. if you are interested in writing an article for us based on this outline and would like to work with a lead pipe editor, please email ellie@leadpi.pe by august 13th, 2014. if you would like to write your article without going through the lead pipe peer review process, please email ellie@leadpi.pe by september 10th, 2014 with a link to your completed article. you are not bound to follow the outline to the letter. we welcome divergence and dissent. depending on the number and quality of submissions we receive, we will either publish all of the articles together as a digital edition or we will publish de jesus’s article here along with links to any other articles published using this outline. the deadline for the completed article is september 10th, with a publication date of september 24th. making a new table: intersectional librarianship editorial: announcing in the library with the lead pipe’s community code of conduct 21 responses elliehearts 2014–07–16 at 9:38 am rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted lmiles 2014–07–16 at 9:42 am rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted kellymce 2014–07–16 at 9:44 am rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted lizlieutenant 2014–07–16 at 9:46 am rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted lindyjb 2014–07–16 at 10:09 am rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted lettersfromvani 2014–07–16 at 10:10 am rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted starchytuber 2014–07–16 at 11:56 am rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted femilyr 2014–07–16 at 1:30 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted parody_bit 2014–07–16 at 1:31 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted thepinakes 2014–07–16 at 1:51 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted nora_almeida 2014–07–16 at 1:56 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted lynnemthomas 2014–07–16 at 2:01 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted rbmsinfo 2014–07–16 at 2:01 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted morbidflight 2014–07–16 at 2:15 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted ebonymagnus 2014–07–17 at 9:35 am rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted inaljnaomi 2014–07–17 at 10:57 am rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression: http://t.co/zadzyhpted alyciaicyla 2014–07–17 at 5:38 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: open source outline: locating the library within institutional 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editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 18 sep ashley rosener, emily frigo, susan ponischil, annie bélanger, jacklyn rander and elisa salazar /3 comments leading from the center: reimagining feedback conversations at an academic library in brief what if we brought the same compassion and learner mindset that we use with students to our interactions with colleagues? inspired by change management through the lens of appreciative inquiry and interpersonal effectiveness, a team of university library faculty and staff developed a series of professional development workshops to establish a shared baseline of communication skills. focusing on personal responsibility as a change management strategy, while fostering a culture of accountability that recognizes shared humanity and intentionality toward growth, the team initiated conversations on receiving feedback. drawing upon literature addressing professional development, psychological safety, positive-negative asymmetry, and self-compassion, this article discusses the team’s systematic approach to the professional development trainings on feedback, the planning process, and workshop scaffolding. by ashley rosener, emily frigo, susan ponischil, annie bélanger, jacklyn rander, elisa salazar introduction our new dean and organizational change provided the opportunity and, in our case, the motivation, to deal with changes effectively. guided by conversations on appreciative inquiry1 facilitated by our new dean, interpersonal effectiveness training with our university work-life consultant, and resources related to receiving and providing feedback, a group of library faculty and staff developed a series of workshops to navigate organizational change within an academic library. communication, especially responding to and receiving feedback, was an area of growth for our libraries and a starting point for our professional development series. organizational change is difficult, as is interpersonal communication. miscommunication happens easily and can become widespread. by investing in personal and workplace-wide professional development, organizations can take small steps to mediate conversations and check for understanding so as to avoid unnecessary conflict. we will share how providing a shared vocabulary and understanding how we engage collectively can renorm conversations and improve interpersonal relationships. background growing a culture of authenticity and accountability requires the skills to give and receive feedback. but changing work culture is incremental and takes time. ensuring that the change will be impactful and long-lasting requires the commitment and agency of people throughout the organization. we wanted the skills development to support the cultural change that was taking place in our library in a meaningful way. therefore, we chose a peer-led approach, paired with support from senior leadership. we began the process of working on appreciative inquiry by asking generative questions to enhance interpersonal communication skills and used those as building blocks towards a culture of inclusion. further developing the skills to have healthy dialogue would allow us to lean into discomfort, grow to a culture of authenticity and accountability, and eventually achieve a culture of actively inclusive practices. how can we expect to navigate tough conversations around oppression and exclusion when we, at times, struggle to talk about what happened in a meeting? how equitable would it be to ask new members of the faculty or those of under-represented backgrounds to call out inequity when the skills to receive feedback were not there? as a primarily white academic institution, we saw education as one way to help counter microaggressions (burklo, 2015), but that was not enough. we want to create a healthy climate and strengthen our interpersonal skills to support our growth as whole people, and given the demographics of whiteness in our profession, we have a responsibility not to add to the emotional labor of people of color to educate their colleagues on the often subtle nature of microaggressions or the impact of white privilege (alabi, 2015). education about dialogue and feedback was a first step and foundation—idealistically, we thought we could start to disarm “righteous reactions” or fragility (diangelo, p. 123). from a shared ability to have healthier dialogue, we believe that we can grow to have crucial conversations around inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (idea),2 such as addressing microaggressions and handling them in the moment. once we had come to these realizations and commitments, we wanted a learning and strengths-based approach to change and growth. often, asking questions can be a way to clarify what is at the heart of our concerns and to develop a shared understanding (schein, 2013). to honor this need for shared understanding, we chose appreciative inquiry as the central part of the framework for our organizational evolution. affirmative or positive questions support the development of a positive environment; while negative questions focus attention on what is wrong, positive ones focus on what could be (cooperrider, whitney, stavros, 2008). asking and answering positive questions supports new ideas, alternatives, enthusiasm, and commitment from coworkers. positive questions can lead to better communication and increase understanding and commitment. they can also support staff growth and change. by appreciating what is good before exploring what could be better, trust and compassion builds between peers. we felt this approach would help us develop that trust as well as peer relationships, empathy, accountability, resilience, and agency. in a culture of authenticity and accountability, we have a duty to share productively and constructively our concerns and needs as well as our affirmations to colleagues. we can no longer afford to be nice at the cost of growth and change. we wanted to create an environment of sharing thoughts and feedback. therefore, developing the skills to do so with respect, compassion, and empathy was a critical goal as we sought our next evolution. literature review below we focus on the core of the literature that was instrumental in informing our thinking and approach to supporting others at our library through skills development. using an interdisciplinary approach, we looked beyond the library literature to the field of organizational psychology and change management. this literature is dense and unpacks the complexity of creating and sustaining a learning culture within the workplace. professional development while there is a fair amount of literature on professional development in libraries, fewer articles describe or discuss professional development led by colleagues. most of the literature focuses on initiatives developed by senior leadership in collaboration with outside speakers and facilitators. pennsylvania state university libraries provides us with an example of bottom up staff development with an institutionalized in-service day led by library staff. each year, a library staff “planning committee has free reign to recruit presentations and plan the day… the entire process is directed by the committee; we have never been disappointed” (snowman, 2017, p.9). this yearly in-service day has been found to be “extremely beneficial from many developmental angles. presenters hone their public speaking skills, learn to fit content to allotted time, and develop a reputation among their peers as people who are knowledgeable, articulate and dependable” (snowman, 2017, p.11). this success story is a good model for libraries seeking new professional development methods. additionally, when employees lead formal learning opportunities they gain leadership experience while demonstrating to all that in house expertise exists at all levels of an organization, thereby promoting a learning culture within the workplace (ellinger, 2005). negative impact and psychological safety it is important to realize that negative experiences and words often have a higher impact than positive ones in making sense of the world (vanish, grossman, and woodward, 2008). research on the ratio of positivity to negativity (p/n) in team interactions shows that the high performing teams have a high p/n ratio of 5.614, which means that for every negative statement, there are over five positive ones (losada and heaphy, 2004). additionally, in the context of the relationship between a supervisor and employee, bono, foldes, vinson, and muros look at a number of empirical research studies and “suggest that even though most supervisory interactions are positive, the overall net effect of interactions with supervisors may be slightly negative because of the stronger effects of negative interactions on employee mood” (2007, p.1358). understanding the impact on employees is just one of the human and organizational costs of conflict. according to a 2010 study in canada, leblanc found that “managers and leaders spend an average of 3 hours of work time plus 4.5 hours of distraction or worry on workplace conflict every week” (as cited in oore, leiter, & leblanc, 2015). it should come as no surprise then that libraries and library leaders view emotional intelligence as a key skill. hernon and rossiter surveyed library directors and asked them to identify the most important emotional intelligence traits. in the category of empathy, “there was widespread consensus that ‘treat people with dignity/respect’ was the first choice, followed by ‘attract, build, and retain talent’ and ‘good interpersonal/people skills,’ which tied for second position” (hernon & rossiter, 2006, p.266). negative comments and conflict can impact one’s sense of psychological safety. psychological safety is required for candid conversations and this is something individuals, teams, and organizations need to actively cultivate. kahn defines psychological safety as the “sense of being able to show and employ self without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career” (1990, p.705). the intrapersonal, group/team, and organizational levels all bring elements into play that can influence one’s sense of psychological safety. it is a dynamic element that is shaped by organizational norms, leader management style, group dynamics, and interpersonal relationships, and it has a locus of control on an individual level (kahn, 1990, p.705). dutton et al state, “this sense of being valued and worthy is not a state that is a given in work organizations; rather, it is something that is created or destroyed by the way that people interact with one another at work” (as cited in dutton, workman, & hardman, 2014, p.280). while some management styles use conflict to generate creativity, fighting behaviors inherently erode psychological safety. psychological safety has a relational and social component and needs to be continually nourished to create a healthy environment. research also suggests that conflict can be viewed as a threat to one’s identity or relationships (drago-severson & blum-destefano, 2016). “norms of niceness may reflect more than an overreliance on politeness or rules of etiquette, because the ability to comfortably manage conflict or criticism is in fact a developmental capacity” (drago-severson & blum-destefano, 2016, p.24). niceness can become synonymous with civility and a way to maintain “the hierarchy of the status quo at the moment, which means racial inequality, gender inequality, class inequality, stays permanent” (itagaki qtd. in fadel, 2019). conversations around racism easily trigger white fragility, “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves” (diangelo, 2011, p.54). it is predicated on a deeply rooted notion that only bad people are racists rather than a structural understanding of racism. since according to this notion nice people are not racist, niceness becomes a way to maintain white privilege and a culture of white supremacy. these norms are a fraught place to be and hard to unpack. yet, how you know and learn is also part of a developmental capacity that changes over the course of your life. drago-severson and blum-destefano use a constructive-developmental lens based on keegan’s adult development theory and advocate meeting people where they are at and building their capacity to stretch and hear what you are saying (2017). the research we read made a strong case for an iterative, scaffolded approach given that individuals are always evolving. feedback is important to individual growth, but in a recent article, “preparing early career librarians for leadership and management: a feminist critique,” the authors noted a “common theme […] that respondents felt frustrated about the feedback they receive from supervisors. unspecific feedback, no feedback at all, or informal feedback that does not reflect the formal review were major points of frustration” (thomas, trucks, koons, 2019). the authors note that this information indicates “that the supervisor may not understand their work, and does not give appropriate or helpful feedback because they cannot.” giving and receiving feedback are challenging to most people and these skills are infrequently taught. despite this lack in training, learning how to better give and receive feedback can greatly improve one’s personal and work life. stone and heen’s thanks for the feedback: the science and art of receiving feedback well provides a vocabulary for understanding feedback conversations and how to improve as a receiver. this can empower receivers in the feedback dialogue. self-compassion after teaching our workshop series, we did more research in the literature and made connections with what we taught and the idea of self-compassion. neff defines self-compassion as having three components: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness (2003). if one has a more compassionate orientation to oneself, they are in a place where they can more readily “hear” feedback and extend compassion to others. the concept connects to mindfulness, resilience, and coping with stress. alongside this, there is also an internal, personal component that individuals can cultivate to build resilience. self-compassion provides a means to create this internal fortitude and grounding to provide greater agency. in the literature, we found self-compassion discussed in other caring professions or in relation to students, but not as frequently in librarianship. a recent study found that self-compassion may be a way to help cultivate authenticity (zhang et al, 2019), the “subjective feeling that one is currently in line with one’s inner values, attitudes, traits, and emotions” (sedikides, slabu, lenton, & thomaes, 2017, p.521). when you feel you are being true to yourself and being authentic, it may generate a sense of power and agency (gan, heller, & chen, 2018). with interpersonal communication, the challenge is to juggle simultaneously remaining authentic, respecting others’ authenticity, and ensuring you are not doing harm. the larger frame is to consider both the intent and impact in your communication, as there is often a gap between the two (using the sbi feedback model to understand intent). regardless of your intent, you need to own your impact and be accountable for it. according to utt, it is a matter of justice because the effect of our actions (regardless of intent) can deeply impact our identities and lives (2013). by keeping the focus on the impact, “it takes the person who said or did the hurtful thing out of the center and places the person who was hurt in the center. it ensures that the conversation is about how ‘what they did’ hurts other people and further marginalizes or oppresses people” (utt, 2013). accountability is necessary for a healthy organizational culture as it defines boundaries and expectations for behavior. in order to hear, you need to listen with deep intent and with an awareness that it may change you or potentially cause you to reevaluate your orientation or sense of self (drago-severson & blum-destefano, 2017). additionally, “if hearing is meaningful, it has to be embedded in an openness where what is said might be heard even if it threatens to break the order of the known world for those who listen” (stauffer, 2015, p.80). kahn and fellows referred to dr. spreitzer’s research on psychological empowerment indicating that “when our voices are heard, we feel a sense of efficacy: a sense of what we say is valued and valuable, makes a difference to others and to our work, and has influence around us” (kahn & fellows, 2017, p.114). this type of openness requires vulnerability and courage that is uncomfortable, maybe even conflicts with one’s sense of psychological safety. it also requires a commitment to constructive intent and respect, an intent to reaffirm and build forward; and a commitment to not intentionally do harm. learning culture a workplace learning culture requires articulating both goals and values that are reflected in policies and practices. it can take time to learn and adjust to new accountability norms. learning is crossing a threshold and perhaps even reconciling a perceived loss of privilege in changing how you communicate in order to be heard. for change to occur, we need to cross a threshold between judge and learner; in that, there is discomfort and the ability to recognize that what you thought was not true. cognitive dissonance, when new information differs from your own beliefs (festinger, 1957), sets the stage for attitude and behavior changes. to both foster and establish such norms, collective leadership and meeting agreements are one key way to articulate shared values and link those values to practices (see the below image of collective leadership and meeting agreements created by the arcus center for social justice leadership at kalamazoo college). discomfort is part of the learning process but can feel unsettling and even “incongruent with the idea of safety” (aaro & clemens, 2013, p. 137). establishing workplace values and behavior norms become key to better equip folks to enter a space of dialogue and learning (aaro & clemens, 2013, p.142). it paves the way for social justice-oriented conversations that we need to have in order to challenge systems of power, oppression, and privilege. during organizational change, even one with an appreciative approach, the process can be both exciting and stressful. it is a time to reset or even reaffirm expectations. during our workshop series, and afterward in faculty meetings, we saw the need, if not yet always the desire, to continue focusing on interpersonal communication. collective leadership and meeting agreements created by the arcus center for social justice leadership at kalamazoo college, used with permission. full text of these agreements as a list. what we did creating workshops for library faculty and staff came from interest generated by a faculty book discussion in the summer of 2017 featuring thanks for the feedback: the science and art of receiving feedback well which offered a flipped, practical approach to the topic. stone and heen’s text was also suggested as a resource during appreciative inquiry training in early 2018. after the training, faculty who had participated in the book group created a proposal to continue the discussion with workshops. two library faculty and two staff were the intrepid leaders in this venture. the thanks for the feedback task force was asked to build a library-wide professional development experience for summer 2018. the plan, which took six weeks to develop and implement, included learning circles and workshops for formative colleague feedback and constructive handling of “conflict” using stone and heen’s book as a guiding text. the goal of these peer-led workshops was to empower staff with skills they could use to be more effective communicators and to advocate for themselves—skills to help with workplace conversations and others where stakes are higher, such as annual reviews and contract renewals, where formative feedback can be so important. creating strategies to advance communications, part of our libraries’ strategic plan, was carried out in part by library staff who saw this as an opportunity to develop their own leadership skills. in may of that same year, the dean asked the university’s work-life consultant to conduct interpersonal effectiveness workshops for all library personnel to address ways to manage change. the interpersonal effectiveness for work and life training was developed to empower employees to learn communication strategies to prevent conflict from arising and foster intentional communication. this three-hour training provided practical tools along with discussion and practice opportunities. participants were able to receive feedback on specific issues related to communication. the objectives of this training are as follows: increasing awareness through the use of mindfulness strategies learning a specific script to increase effectiveness when making a request or setting boundaries identifying strategies to listen, validate, and give generative feedback understanding how to leverage personal integrity for wise communication communication skills discussed were based on marsha linehan’s evidence based therapeutic approach, dialectical behavioral therapy, which combines mindfulness practices with cognitive behavioral therapy. the work life consultant composed a comprehensive training focused on improving employee effectiveness and wellness. the work life consultant’s role on campus is to offer support to employees on a variety of work life needs. she is available to meet one-on-one with individuals who need additional support with the generalizing skills for a variety of contexts. all faculty and staff were required to attend the training; the intention was to provide a common language and baseline skill set for all employees. using thanks for the feedback, the task force designed and created two workshops. one addressed the types of feedback and another discussed how to navigate conversations. a third workshop, inspired by drago-severson and blum-destefano’s book tell me so i can hear you: a developmental approach to feedback for educators, was created to explore adult developmental theory and offer strategies for growth. our assertion when creating these workshops was that feedback is about the future. we wanted to inspire receivers of feedback with practical approaches that could be used in situations ranging from informal peer-to-peer conversations to employee evaluations. we wanted to share what we learned, engage with our peers, and identify some strategies to improve communication. all three workshops were designed to provide context, opportunities for self-reflection, and strategies for growth. to make the most of the time during the workshops, book chapters, podcast episodes, articles, and other recommended readings were made available prior to the workshops through e-course reserve. this allowed attendees to come in with a general understanding of the content. while the may workshops with the work-life coach were mandatory for all library employees, the task force members felt this should not be the case for the workshop series in an effort to encourage engagement and excitement around the topic. to open each workshop, the taskforce identified the following guiding principles to set the tone: we approach these workshops as peer facilitators not experts. we are all sincerely interested in this topic, still learning, and still trying to walk the talk. we embrace a learner mindset and a positivist approach: what do you/we do well? and what can we do even better? we value psychological safety. we hope to provide a safe space to share experiences, perspectives, and challenges. share as you feel comfortable. while all three workshops could be stand-alone sessions, there was some information that was scaffolded across the three. the first workshop we created was called “types of feedback.” it outlined the first two chapters of stone and heen’s book, which focused on the three different types of feedback identified as coaching, evaluation, and appreciation. participants were provided online access to a study guide for the book along with chapters 1 and 2. the workshop was an hour long with less than an hour of outside preparation for participants. slides reviewed key chapter concepts, provided prompts for both small and whole group discussions, and highlighted a ted talk video from sheila heen. partner discussions, group discussion, and self-reflection prompts created opportunities for colleagues to discuss ideas and ask questions. the second workshop created was developed using chapters 5 and 11 from thanks for the feedback. titled “navigating the conversation,” it provided a chance to talk about relationship triggers and how those triggers impact how we receive feedback. relationship triggers involve what we think about the giver and how we feel treated by the giver (stone, 2015). chapter 11 talks about how to handle conversations considering elements called keyframes, defined as “stages and moments in the conversation that can serve as landmarks” (stone, 2015). four feedback skills—identified as listening, asserting, “process moves,” and problem solving—were offered as considerations. this workshop included less than an hour of outside preparation and an hour of meeting time. slides included various types of review content with prompts for discussion and self reflection. the third workshop created, “ways of knowing,” had a slightly different approach. it provided a glimpse into constructive developmental theory to talk about how one grows, develops, and learns across the lifespan. participants were introduced to the four ways of knowing according to adult development theory: instrumental, socializing, self-authoring, and self-transforming. beliefs, values, and areas of growth for each of the four types were discussed and practice scenarios were offered. throughout the workshop, attendees were encouraged to reflect on their own ways of knowing and brainstorm strategies to support the different ways they learn and grow individually. this workshop was thirty minutes longer than the others with less than an hour of outside preparation. slides were created to highlight obstacles to communication and to provide opportunities for self reflection and awareness. considering the voluntary nature of attendance, the workshops were relatively well received with 57% of our faculty and staff, including administrators, attending at least one of the three workshops. task force members were excluded from all statistics. of those who participated, 68% attended more than one of the workshops, indicating an interest in the topics presented. at the end of each workshop, attendees filled out a paper evaluation form. interest in workshop topics ranged between 4 and 5 on a five point scale and comfort level with feedback between 3.5 and 5. attendees’ comments identified, among other things, “the importance of asking clarifying questions” and “the need for more empathy and fewer assumptions.” workshop attendees suggested a variety of ways to keep the conversation going. there was a strong interest in more workshops, a book club, and a brown bag lunch series, as well as scripts and practical tips with opportunities to practice receiving feedback using techniques identified. several responses suggested using strategies learned for performance reviews. based on these results we repeated the first two workshops in december 2018, “types of feedback” and “navigating the conversation.” once our workshop series concluded, an electronic survey was distributed to all library employees and garnered a 41% response rate. takeaways from this survey were similar to the paper survey. attendees wanted to learn more about navigating a conversation and how to communicate feedback preferences to people. respondents also noted that the workshops were informative and interactive. a few people shared regrets that conflicting schedules didn’t allow them to attend. we asked how people wanted to keep the conversation going and received many of the previously mentioned suggestions which showed strong support for a book club, brown bag lunches, and scripts with practical tips. next steps interpersonal effectiveness skills for giving and receiving feedback are capacities that one can grow over time with practice. we knew that the workshops were a milestone along the journey of growth and an inclusive culture. when considering next steps, we took a step back to consider the landscape. according to ala’s diversity counts study, female library staff outnumber male library staff by about 80%, and white people outnumber people of color by 85-90%. it also reveals that expectations of service tend toward expectations of behavior. this is often referred to as emotional labor which, defined by hochschild, “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (1983). for instance, emmelhainz, pappas, and seale point out an example of this in the guidelines for behavioral performance of reference and information service providers (2013). visibility and approachability are the first points established: “in order to have a successful reference transaction, it is essential that the reference librarian be approachable.” this is followed by sixteen ways to be approachable broken into three categories: in general, in person, and remotely. according to 1.1.2 in the guidelines, an approachable librarian “is poised and ready to engage patrons…to stop all other activities when a patron approaches and focus attention on the patron’s needs.” this document is seen as representative of monoculturalism and white blindness (brook, ellenwood & lazzaro, 2016). inherently, then, approachability is often defined by whiteness. anchored in whiteness, it reinforces approaches that keep white people comfortable, preventing challenges to this status quo (diangelo, 2018). in her keynote address at the 2019 innovative library classroom conference, veronica arellano douglas called out patriarchal systems and identified structures placing service above the intellectual work of librarians. in light of these realities, what steps can we take to challenge systems and structures that, according to arrelano douglas (2019), are “harmful to women, marginalized peoples, and human connections”? as we were intentional about heading toward a culture of active practices of inclusion, we understood the need for building blocks toward healthy dialogue, candor with cognitive empathy, and active accountability as peers. as we began the work to change our structures for hiring to be inclusive and high-empathy, we provided the interpersonal effectiveness training. we also worked to make explicit more parts of our work culture, such as core workplace principles, expectations of attendance, and other implicit practices that can be tripping hazards. we continue to offer these feedback workshops as baseline trainings to share core workplace principles and collective engagement expectations, and to answer the questions of new hires on a continuing basis. inclusion needs a foundation of interpersonal effectiveness from all, as well as the ability to have dialogues and brave conversations. further, we continue to encourage faculty and staff to lead from the center by supporting their capacity and agency while fostering open communication with senior leadership. in practice, our colleagues did question as well as express concern that these professional development workshops and workplace principles were dictating how they feel or express their feelings at work. it was a question that addressed checking our understanding of our shared vocabulary in addition to how it works in practice. the growth mindset, positivity, self-compassion, and resilience have all become popular buzzwords and malleable in their meaning. there is also critical discourse on how these growth-oriented frames are used. berg, galvan, and tewell note that “resilience often becomes performative for everyone, including managers, who embrace the concept in a well-intentioned but detrimental move to improve employee or organizational well-being” (2018, p.2). in this frame, resilience becomes part of a larger narrative of maintaining the status quo, perpetuating inequality, and doing harm. ethics of care from feminist theory provides another needed lens that emphasizes the relational aspect of care between people and a way to counter a performative view of work or being. with this ethic, the focus is on “attentiveness, trust, responsiveness to need, narrative nuance, and cultivating caring relations” (held, 2006, p.15). in relational care, a mutuality and dialogue are present; it also connects to trust as well as our sense of safety in our workplace relationships and larger organization. of course, all of this takes time and practice. another frame that explicitly addresses power dynamics is anti-oppressive facilitation, expanded on by aorta (anti-oppression resource and training alliance). regardless of your approach, it is key to check-in with colleagues as well as acknowledge their autonomy to know which techniques to add to their tool kit and which ones to lay aside. change can be incremental and we all grow at different paces. the foundational framework and language for interpersonal effectiveness set the expectation that all faculty and staff will have a working knowledge of these skills. the next step involves opportunities for colleagues to practice using these skills in a safe setting using role playing. an interactive training will allow employees to gain an increased sense of mastery, as well as troubleshoot with the work life consultant in areas where they struggle. furthermore, employees will learn how to generalize skills for many different settings. several role-play sessions have been recommended to senior leadership by the work life consultant; these sessions would use both common and uncommon scenarios where the employee might be caught off guard. practicing will allow employees to automate a thoughtful and intentional response to conflict as opposed to a reactive response. in this way, the interpersonal effectiveness skill set becomes a proactive approach to conflict. as employees begin to practice some of these skills and see success, a second training focused on emotional awareness and safety is under consideration. the training could also include several interactive role play sessions. this training will have employees practice taking ownership of their own wellbeing and learn to feel empowered when they do find themselves in difficult situations. therefore, employees will have skills for preventing unproductive conflict as well as managing discourse successfully. this interactive training will further address concerns raised by our peers after the 2019 library faculty reviews revealed an opportunity for growth in the area of feedback conversations and roleplaying. our faculty reviews begin with a peer (unit) review, which can feel vulnerable for all involved, especially the colleague under review. it also provides time for us to practice our interpersonal communication skills and an opportunity to improve how we give feedback. to reset expectations on the library faculty reviews for contract renewal, tenure, and promotion, an external facilitator will do a one day training using entitlement theory as a foundation. this new training will give us time to focus concretely on “who do we want to be and how do we get there.” to continue empowering others through discourse and action and provide iterative learning opportunities, task force members have taken some next steps. in may 2019 the faculty learning community discussed warren berger’s the book of beautiful questions: the powerful questions that will help you decide, create, connect, and lead. this discussion informed a library-wide training session that same month titled “generative questions: big beautiful questions.” our dean has also worked to create brave spaces3 in the library by providing agency to individuals at all levels and facilitating a brave spaces discussion with our leadership team. with a constantly evolving organization and new employees, we plan to continue this work and make it iterative. conclusion organizational change is difficult, as is interpersonal communication. miscommunication is normal, can be widespread, and affects many. acknowledging this helps you realize that learning to check for understanding and effectively managing conflict is a necessary skill. by investing in personal and workplace-wide professional development, you can take small steps to mediate conversations and check for understanding so as to avoid unnecessary conflict. we talked about how providing a shared vocabulary can renorm conversations and interpersonal relationships. having principles about how you engage together collectively can help center the relationships and yourself when you hit communications bumps. creative conflicts lead to innovation and sometimes miscommunication. by asking questions, rather than making assumptions of intent, you can exercise your self-agency over engagement. by bringing empathy and respect, you can lay out workplace expectations. it takes courage and vulnerability to be self-reflective, and lots of practice to incorporate new ways of knowing. our goals, as authors and members of our libraries, are aspirational. movement forward requires a learner mindset and a positive approach. managers need to value those who speak up to challenge the status quo, and at the same time, open communication needs to be balanced to limit or redirect off topic comments (edmondson, 2014, p. 40-41). when unpacking interpersonal communications, there need to be discussions about power differentials and the whiteness of our profession. while this work takes time, workshops like ours can provide a foundation to address larger systemic issues. acknowledgements we would like to thank our reviewers leah white and ryan randall. their thoughtful comments were instrumental to this final article. we would also like to thank amy koester, our editor, for her guidance throughout the process. references alabi, j. 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(2005). contextual factors influencing informal learning in a workplace setting: the case of “reinventing itself company”. human resource development quarterly, 16(3), 389-415. emmelhainz, c., pappas, e., & seale, m. (2017). behavioral expectations for the mommy librarian: the successful reference transaction as emotional labor. in the feminist reference desk: concepts, critiques, and conversations. library juice press. uc berkeley: library. retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2mq851m0 evans, g. e., & ward, p. l. (2007). management basics for information professionals. new york, ny: neal-schuman. fadel, l. “in these divided times, is civility under siege?” npr. national public radio. 12 march 2019. 16 july 2019. festinger, l. (1957). a theory of cognitive dissonance. stanford university press. gan, m., heller, d., & chen, s. 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(2008). appreciative inquiry for change management: using ai to facilitate organizational development. kogan page limited. losada, m. & heaphy, m. the role of positivity and connectivity in the performance of business teams. american behavioral scientist, 47(6), february 2004 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0002764203260208 mayorga-gallo, s. & hordge-freeman, e. (2016). between marginality and privilege: gaining access and navigating the field in multiethnic settings. qualitative research, 17(4), october, 2016 https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794116672915 neff, k. (2003). self-compassion: an alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. self and identity, 2(2), 85-101. oore, d., leiter, m., & leblanc, d. (2015). individual and organizational factors promoting successful responses to workplace conflict. canadian psychology-psychologie canadienne, 56;36;(3;2a;), 301-310. doi:10.1037/cap0000032 sedikides, c., slabu, l., lenton, a., & thomaes, s. 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(2019). “preparing early career librarians for leadership and management: a feminist critique.” in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2019/early-career-leadership-and-management/ using the sbi feedback model to understand intent (n.d.) retrieved from https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/closing-the-gap-between-intent-and-impact/ utt, jamie. intent vs. impact: why your intentions don’t really matter. (2013). everyday feminism. https://everydayfeminism.com/2013/07/intentions-dont-really-matter/ vanish, a., grossman, t., & woodward, a. (2008). not all emotions are created equal: the negativity bias in social-emotional development. psychological bulletin, 134(3), 383-403. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.134.3.383 watson, p.d. (1994). founding mothers: the contribution of women’s organizations to public library development in the united states. the library quarterly, 64(3), 233-269. doi:10.1086/602699 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4308944.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3abb18f945df167eab3ccc5a8c073d805e zhang, j. w., chen, s., tomova, t. k., bilgin, b., chai, w. j., ramis, t., . . . manukyan, a. (2019). a compassionate self is a true self? self-compassion promotes subjective authenticity. personality & social psychology bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218820914 appendix “collective leadership and meeting agreements” created by the arcus center for social justice leadership at kalamazoo college be here and be present. arrive promptly. pay active attention to those speaking. think well of each other. we recognize and value that we each enter this experience with the intention of building a shared understanding and goal of moving forward. understand the difference between intent vs. impact. address the ideas, not the person. personalize our statements. we use “i” in dialogue and “we” when formally representing a group. keep confidentiality. personal experiences bravely shared stay within the space. share ideas and concepts only. expect unfinished business. addressing the issues before us will take concerted effort and time. share the space. speak up. hold back. be aware of time. react minimally, act maximally. if something triggers an emotion, take a few minutes to gather before responding. avoid assumptions. ask questions. remember that we all have different experiences. ask questions or ask someone to give a longer explanation to make sure you understand their point or perspective. return to figure 1 caption. appreciative inquiry is a process and approach to facilitate positive change in organizations, groups, and communities. at its core, it assumes that some things are working right and that this core must be preserved. it seeks to understand the good and set a path to the ideal new state. it is grounded in five principles: constructionist, simultaneity, anticipatory, poetic, and positive. it leverages powerful questions with active listening to have conversations that matter and create new ways of thinking. (https://www.centerforappreciativeinquiry.net/more-on-ai/what-is-appreciative-inquiry-ai/) [↩] idea working definitions for grand valley state university libraries: “equity: the active, ongoing work of identifying and eliminating barriers preventing full participation by all members of the library community. inclusion (& diversity): the continuing practice of providing an environment in which all members of a library’s community feel welcome, safe, supported, respected, and valued. accessibility: ensuring our tools, devices, services, and environments are available to and usable by as many people as possible.” [↩] brave spaces are an evolution from safe spaces. in instances when conversations shift from polite to controversial, safety has been invoked as a way to stop the conversation and remain comfortable. brave spaces shift the emphasis to bravery while being anchored in ground rules for engagement, where cognitive empathy is at play, and a baseline level of trust is built. in particular, when thinking of social justice, safety, defined as free from harm or risk, does not allow us to deconstruct whiteness as the discomfort, negative emotions, and guilt are seen as harm. for more, see https://bravespaces.org . [↩] feedback, leadership, learning culture, organizational culture, professional development, psychological safety, training against medicine: constructing a queer-feminist community health informatics and librarianship when does burnout begin? the relationship between graduate school employment and burnout amongst librarians 3 responses rose 2019–09–18 at 10:11 am just a note that the definition of emotional labor should actually be attributed to arlie hochschild, not emmelhainz, pappas, and seale. they are directly quoting hochchild’s definition in their book chapter (which is cited). annie 2019–09–19 at 4:39 pm thank you for the calling in. i’ll let the co-authors know. pingback : everything i needed to know (about business information literacy instruction) i learned in kindergarten (guest post by amanda kraft) this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct creative destruction in libraries: designing our future – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 20 nov caro pinto /9 comments creative destruction in libraries: designing our future in brief: joseph schumpeter defines creative destruction as a “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” as libraries struggle with how to position themselves to thrive in the digital age, how can we balance the traditional elements of librarianship like collecting and reference with the demands of the present, all without sacrificing staffing and support for collections, space, and community? image credit: rebecca partington by caro pinto in my first job after library school, i worked in manuscripts & archives in the yale university library. there i worked adjacent to an extraordinary archivist named laura tatum. laura was the architectural archivist and she worked with firm records and personal papers, forging unique relationships with donors to streamline the processing of manuscript and records collections. through laura i became familiar with eero saarinen, the finnish architect who designed the twa terminal at kennedy airport and the gateway arch in st. louis. saarinen’s structures and aesthetic mesmerized me. i spent hours poring over plans, drawings, and photographs of his completed projects during the slower moments of my reference shifts. at home i began reading widely about his work. i continue to take field trips to his completed projects whenever time allows. saarinen designed furniture and buildings with the intention to build a vision for the present that also leaned forward to the future. considering his projects and his vision for futurism in the built environment, i began to connect my interest in saarinen with my exploration of the role of creative destruction in academic libraries. through the course of my reading, i came across these words from saarinen: “each age must create its own architecture out of its own technology and one which is expressive of its own zeitgeist-the spirit of the time.” (serraino, 2009) within our own libraries and within the field of librarianship at large, creative destruction is the idea that in order to create new ways of knowing and thinking, we must break with the past to plan and shape our future. through my relationship with laura, my devotion to saarinen scholarship, and my interest in futurism, i often consider what creative destruction can and should mean for libraries. what should libraries be in the twenty-first century? what should twenty-first century librarians do? as our collection bases transition from print to hybrid print to digital collections, libraries face new challenges around budgets, space, personnel, and questions of relevance. many organizations have shuttered their reference desks in favor of unified information desks like the info bar at hampshire college or programs like the personal librarian program at yale. technical services and acquisitions departments manage spreadsheets of data to make selection decisions, rather than relying on a monkish bibliographer ordering title by title. libraries are increasingly loud, bustling, collaborative places, out of step with the image so many have of the classic library-a somber building governed by a stern cat lady who demands silence. can librarians and libraries evolve to meet new challenges and expectations, or will these things require  a new generation of managers who will, as a colleague remarked to me in 2010, “turn off the lights?” librarians are guardians of our profession: we are the stakeholders in our future. libraries have long survived threats to their existence and as scott bennett discussed in 2009, have experienced “paradigm shifts” from “reading centered” spaces into “learning centered spaces.” (bennett, 181-182)  the nature of librarianship in the digital age demands that we continue to re-evaluate our work and confront the reality that our personnel, job descriptions, and spaces must change. in order to facilitate that change, what should we give up? if libraries do what saarinen suggests – creating their own architecture reflective of the time, how will libraries creatively destroy traditional aspects of our profession without too much collateral damage? how can we make creative destruction in libraries, particularly in the context of higher education, sustainable and constructive as we create a profession that fits the evolving demands of our digital age? students are the heart of today’s academic libraries; engaging students as collaborators in library work; redesigning spaces to be active hubs of student engagement and learning; and putting ourselves in the role of students for a continuous arc of learning to continually revise how we provide and promote library services. tools of the trade: once pencils, now pinterest recently, while i was sitting on the reference desk in archives & special collections at mount holyoke college, i ran into a colleague from my days as an archives assistant at the university of massachusetts. we caught up after having not seen each other since 2007, when i graduated. while i was working with other patrons, he walked around the reading room, marvelling at the readers, poring over the card catalog that houses descriptive details of collections and remarking, “the tools of the trade: the pencils, the cards, the boxes.” indeed, those were the tools of the trade when i worked at umass processing collections and responding to reference requests. but will they be for much longer? recently, the taiga forum posted about a “gentle disturbance, the end of library scut work?”  responding to an earlier piece in library journal, where stanley wilder asserted that the decline in library support and student worker staff since 2008 in (association of research libraries) is less a byproduct of the recession and an impact of the “evolving nature of library work.” wilder writes, “the iconic image of library workers pushing book trucks is quickly slipping into obsolescence…lower skill library work is disappearing, and it will never come back.” (wilder, 2013) at mount holyoke college, we continue to hire student workers to manage the stacks, and to staff service points like the circulation desk and the research help desk. indeed, i see students pushing book trucks daily as physical books return to the library and to their rightful places in the stacks. however, these are not the only types of student positions we offer at mount holyoke; in true “learning paradigm” fashion, we engage students in library work that leverages critical thinking skills and creative imaginations. the library at mount holyoke college employs students to conduct outreach, publicize events, and generate content for our social media channels. these positions leverage the excellent communication skills that the mount holyoke college curriculum cultivates while preparing these students to apply skills learned in the classroom, exercised in student positions and applied in internships and jobs off campus. students as collaborators incubating projects and actively engaging in daily work is a core part of how we can promote and sustain a user-centered library experience. the increasing disappearance of piecemeal library work among student workers is a new opportunity to train undergraduates to meet the demands of today’s workplace; we may give up solitary, meditative, repetitive tasks for these works, but the students and staff who supervise them gain much more. where students like me once relied on pencils for our library work, today’s students rely on pinterest. this used to be my playground? revising job descriptions as stanley wilder discussed the end of the low wage library work in library journal, he also described the simultaneous 40% increase in professional library salaries. (wilder, 2013) citing the impact of digital scholarship, wilder wrote, “there is a second answer as to how libraries managed to raise skills and salaries: they had to. for every physical process that no longer exists, a new and complex digital process has sprung up in its place. these digital processes employ far fewer people but the expertise required is greater.” indeed, the trend that wilder reports at arl institutions is similar to trends at liberal arts colleges; new developments in digital scholarship, collections, and workflows supplants traditional library work. i made this connection over the summer when the five colleges (five colleges, incorporated is a consortium of colleges in western massachusetts) held a digital humanities symposium to consider how to build an effective community of practice in the digital humanities, especially at liberal arts colleges. we circulated a call for proposals and invited speakers from colgate university, haverford college, and washington & lee university to present on how they were conducting digital scholarship in their local contexts; how they were adapting to the new scholarly landscape; and how their organizations were changing to meet the growing demands of digital scholarship. in all cases, staffing changed to reflect the new missions and charges of departments. washington & lee created a brand new position of digital scholarship librarian; haverford underwent an organizational shift that resulted in one of their unit heads becoming the digital scholarship coordinator; and finally, colgate saw sweeping changes in terms of how their library shifted from a 20th century model of reference librarians to a dynamic team of 21st century instructional designers. joanne schneider of colgate reflected on the process: “this effort also has focused on rebuilding the collaboration for enhanced learning (cel) group, a partnership of the libraries and information technology services composed of librarians and technologists who provide coordinated support to faculty who wish to rethink courses and pedagogical approaches using current and emerging technologies to enhance student learning and engagement with information.” (digital humanities for liberal arts colleges symposium, 2013) in order to accomplish this transition, the organization had to destroy old job descriptions and create new ones in their stead. the type of human capital transformation described at colgate is also represented well at columbia university, where librarians in the history and humanities division cultivated the developing librarian project as an effort to empower their librarian staff to reinvent themselves to meet the challenges of the present and position themselves for success in the future: “in the fall of 2012, and running in parallel with the expansion of the digital humanities center, we initiated the developing librarian project (dlp), a two-year training program, with the goal of acquiring new skills and methodologies in digital humanities. the dlp is created by and for librarians and other professional staff in the humanities and history division.” (dh+lib, 2013) columbia recognizes schumpter’s “incessant revolution” and responds by empowering its staff to gain the skills necessary to participate in the digital scholarship ecosystem by participating in the process themselves. the team reflected in their announcement on dh + lib, the association of college & research libraries digital humanities interest project earlier this summer stating, “we realize training is no longer a thing to do a couple of times a year, but a continual process of learning integrated into the fabric of what we do every day. in that sense it would be more accurate to say that ours is not a training program, but part of our continuing professional development and research. we are committed to gaining a better understanding of emergent technologies and to being partners in the research process.” (dh+lib, 2013) projects like the developing librarians project and organizational shifts like the one described at colgate university enforce the idea that in order to stay agile and relevant, librarians and libraries must have organizational structures and programs in place to promote change. libraries cannot realize radical change to support emerging digital scholarship unless we build organizations and cultures with the human capital to scaffold instruction, resources, and technical support to enact new models for scholarship. just as the jet age demanded new architecture to acculturate americans to air travel, libraries must design new types of organizational structures and cultures to acculturate faculty and students to the changing demands of our rapidly shifting scholarly landscape. trading spaces: a slide library becomes a media lab the end of “scut work” wilder describes and new trends in student library employment have coalesced in a project at mount holyoke college called the media lab. i first learned about the lab during a webinar i hosted last february about new types of learning spaces at liberal arts colleges. my colleague, nick baker, presented on the development of the media lab he built in collaboration with arts faculty at mount holyoke college in the former mhc slide library. in 2002, the slide library at mount holyoke enjoyed a triumphant renovation; faculty packed the library reviewing slides for their lectures. as time passed and database products like artstor matured – and other faculty members began digitizing slides to embed in power point presentations – by 2009 mount holyoke faculty no longer stood “elbow to elbow” in the slide library. the space stood idle. in 2010, the library created a new department, digital assets and preservation services (daps) and absorbed the slide librarian into their group. the slide library effectively closed; the art librarian and the former slide librarian shifted to the main library. in response, the art and architecture departments hosted a contest for students to propose new plans to revise the space. students across the five colleges submitted proposals. the winning proposal devised a pop-up media lab; the students wanted to add new furniture, computers, and some minor physical modifications to the space. while plans moved forward with an architecture consultation and a modest budget proposal of $50,000, the financial landscape at the college  rendered those changes impractical. in spite of this, baker and the art department moved forward with small changes, couches from elsewhere on campus moved into the space along with older computers and some grant-funded studio supplies. with minimal intervention, baker and faculty programmed the lab slowly with workshops and projects. baker hired students to do experimental projects and serve as ambassadors to evangelize about the space and its potential for interdisciplinary studio work. the students’ outreach efforts drew more students into the space. faculty and library staff recognized that in order for precious campus space to remain vital, it was necessary for the the slide library to close and transform into something entirely new. baker also found ways to ground the space in the past in spite of its experimental nature. as baker cleared out projectors and obsolete technologies, it inspired him to save some items and create a slide museum that demonstrates for students how the building was used in the past. what was state of the art in 2002 became obsolete by 2009. a creative intervention transformed a slide library into a dynamic teaching and learning space. the evolving nature of the curriculum demanded a new type of space informed by student needs. given the constraints of budget and space at mount holyoke college, librarians, faculty, and students collaborated to remake an obsolete space into a energized and relevant one. which way do we go? as guardians of the profession, we all must decide how to proceed. in many cases, change is hard, even emotional for some employees, users, and organizations. there are clearly tasks that librarians will no longer do: sit at reference desks for regular shifts, only develop collections by ordering monographs title by title, or shush patrons as they labor in rows of tables in pristine reading rooms without a machine or whiteboard in sight. there are librarians who mourn the loss of some of these activities, their hours spent reading book reviews, days at the reference desk where people asked questions of facts now easily accessible through a plethora of online resources. on the other hand, there are a growing number of librarians like me who have “library” in their job titles, but who also work in instructional technology or digital scholarship or digital humanities, or as digital archivists. transformations like the developing librarian program at columbia or the staff reorganization joanne schneider initiated at colgate require bold leadership, vision to build new programs and positions that did not exist, the balancing of budgets by dissolving positions like reference librarian or cataloger in favor of different choices – relevant ones. we may throw out older copies of aacr2 as our supply closets burst with materials discarded from our desks, but we are not discarding the contributions of our librarian forebears. those communities built the foundations that our positions of the future depend upon; we create new opportunities unimaginable by previous generations, but we must do so with an eye towards respecting the past, too. acknowledgements: many thanks to emily ford for shepherding the project from idea to article; alex gil (external editor) for astute edits, my writing group at mount holyoke college, especially julie adamo, sarah oelker, and alice whiteside for their support, and, finally, to laura tatum, whose encouragement, friendship, and brilliance inspired me to evolve and grow as a librarian. references and further readings: serraino, pierluigi. eero saarinen, 1910-1961: a structural expressionist. köln ; london: taschen, 2005. schumpeter, joseph a. capitalism, socialism, and democracy. new york; london: harper & brothers, 1947. bennett, scott. “libraries and learning: a history of paradigm change.” portal: libraries and the academy 9, no. 2 (2009): 181–197. booth, char. “the library as indicator species: evolution, or extinction?” october 18, 2011. http://www.slideshare.net/charbooth/the-library-as-indicator-species-evolution-or-extinction. “the end of library scut work? | taiga forum.” accessed september 8, 2013. http://taiga-forum.org/the-end-of-library-scut-work/. “the end of lower skill employment in research libraries | backtalk.” accessed september 8, 2013. http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/06/opinion/backtalk/the-end-of-lower-skill-employment-in-research-libraries-backtalk/. “digital humanities for liberal arts colleges symposium.” accessed october 31, 2013. https://sites.google.com/a/mtholyoke.edu/digital-humanities-for-liberal-arts-colleges-symposium/. “the developing librarian project.” accessed october 31, 2013 http://acrl.ala.org/dh/2013/07/01/the-developing-librarian-project/ nick baker, interview by caro pinto, mount holyoke college, august 21, 2013. academic libraries, creative desruction, higher education, liberal arts colleges, makerspaces, saarinen, social media new literacies, learning, and libraries: how can frameworks from other fields help us think about the issues? charles a. cutter and edward tufte: coming to a library near you, via bibframe 9 responses laborlibrarian 2013–11–20 at 9:36 am “as stanley fish discussed the end of the low wage library work in library journal, he also described the simultaneous 40% increase in professional library salaries. (fish, 2013)” in referring to the source, readers will learn that this figure covers a 10-year period, that 27% is accounted for by ‘routine wage growth’, and that it is only applicable to arl member libraries. please try to employ stats with more care. i’d hate to see folks throwing around that 40% number indiscriminately without actually looking at aggregate salary data (from the arl or ala-apa salary surveys) or labor market statistics. robert teeter 2013–11–20 at 12:54 pm there’s a reference to “fish 2013” in the article, but it doesn’t show up in the references. the one link to lj doesn’t work. caro pinto 2013–11–20 at 7:20 pm here’s the link to the lj article: http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/06/opinion/backtalk/the-end-of-lower-skill-employment-in-research-libraries-backtalk/#_ it should be stanley wilder, not stanley fish. thanks for catching that! caro pinto 2013–11–20 at 8:28 pm it’s been corrected in the article, too. pingback : 5 things thursday: taxonomy, serials solutions, nara | mod librarian pingback : rxn: creative destruction | the girl works stevem 2013–12–02 at 10:45 am i applaud your search for a new way of thinking about the future of libraries and librarianship in this new millennium. almost 3 years ago i wrote in my blog 21st century library “discontinuous thinking sounds very impressive. some might call it thinking outside the box, or lateral thinking, or creativity, or whatever. the point is still that conventional thinking and incremental decision making will not address the changes that confront 21st century libraries. charles handy based the title of his book the age of unreason on george bernard shaw’s observation that “all progress depends on the unreasonable man. his argument was that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, while the unreasonable [person] persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore for any change of consequence we must look to the unreasonable man, or, i must add, to the unreasonable woman.” [handy, c. (1990). the age of unreason. harvard business school press, boston, ma.] discontinuous thinking 10 reasons to believe discontinuous change pingback : #8: in which i blog about blogs | historicity pingback : nmc library horizon report 2014 (pt. 1 of 6): documenting where we are and where we might be going | building creative bridges this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct snooki, whale sperm, and google: the unfortunate extinction of librarians when they are needed most – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 22 feb margaux delguidice /8 comments snooki, whale sperm, and google: the unfortunate extinction of librarians when they are needed most “google can bring you back 100,000 answers. a librarian can bring you back the right one.” — neil gaiman by margaux delguidice the night before i was scheduled to return to work after summer vacation i was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling trying to quiet my thoughts and reset my body into work mode. unfortunately i was unsuccessful. my quest led me to the couch where i began to mindlessly flip through channels searching for something to bore me to sleep. i landed on a late night talk show where the infamous snooki of the jersey shore fame happened to be the guest. as i went to change the channel i paused when i heard her reason for being asked onto the show; she was there to promote her book. this interview i had to hear. throughout the course of the interview she quoted lines from her book; however, what disturbed me the most was a phrase she mentioned that has been haunting me ever since that sleepless night. “oh, it’s totally true,” she giggled while carelessly flipping her hair over a glittery shoulder. “the ocean is salty because of whale sperm.” the interviewer raised her eyebrows as snooki continued on, doing her part to educate the american public. “i’m telling you it’s true, just ‘google it’.” despite snooki’s glaringly inaccurate scientific claim, i was far more rattled by her assurance that this ridiculous statement had to be correct because she found it online, so therefore it must be true. sleep eluded me that evening as i realized how desperately we, as librarians, are needed in the 21st century to help the public, our patrons, wade through a sea of misinformation. each day we aide our patrons as they seek to rebuild their lives and their careers after an economic meltdown that never seems to end, yet in the midst of an economic crisis that has enveloped a culture overloaded with information, we are under attack, forced to prove our relevance in a digital age where the bottom line trumps common sense. just “google it” anyone that has ever needed to look up movie times before a big date or needed to learn how to grill a steak five minutes before the start of a backyard barbecue knows that google and other search engines are useful tools. a simple google search has come to my rescue to solve basic queries and reference questions on many occasions. are you confused about how to use that new air purifier you bought? don’t worry, you can just “google it” and a diy message board will help you out. did you leave the gps out in the cold car for too long and now you will never make it to aunt sally’s surprise 80th birthday on time? no problem, google maps to the rescue. in the 21st century, internet searches are no longer new and fun novelties to explore, they are a part of our daily lives, intertwined with our “to do” lists, holiday shopping, vacation planning, and errand running. i even relied on google to retrieve pop culture references and articles to help me write this essay! as search engines enhance daily activities, it is clear that anyone who can formulate a question can execute an internet search, just like anyone with a computer and internet access can build a website. while those basic steps are easy to complete, there are situations where all members of society will require more than directions, fun trivia, bare facts, or the answers to basic reference questions. during crucial, key life situations our patrons will require more than just the results of a simple search. examples of such moments and times are: when informative, high quality medical information is needed, not speculation; when assignments demand pieces of literary criticism that can only be found in peer-reviewed journals written by scholars; and when locating an unbiased, fair review means the difference between a business’s success or failure. yes, people in our society can easily find information, but how many times during their busy lives do they stop and evaluate the quality of information that they find online? how many times do they silently ignore the nagging question in the back of their minds that asks if the information they found online is really correct? that is when the public needs our help as information experts to help them navigate through the haze of misinformation and disinformation that is found when the internet turns from helpful to harmful. unfortunately, our profession and the libraries that we serve are in danger of becoming extinct, just as we are needed the most. paging doctor speculation… doctor speculation, report to the online message board immediately one of the earliest things that i learned in my first class in library school over ten years ago was the true definitions of three words: information, misinformation and disinformation. at the time the words seemed similar, but my wise professor spent a lot of time dissecting each one and discussing the difference between the terms. i learned in that class something that all librarians know, that misinformation is inaccurate information delivered with the absence of malice and that the person or service delivering the inaccurate facts is not intentionally trying to mislead or misinform. of course as librarians we know that disinformation is the most sinister of the three terms, yet do our patrons know to be wary of false information that is published to purposely and deliberately misinform and mislead? today, misinformation can be found on the internet in many places, including online encyclopedias, personal websites, web communities, and medical message boards. which means that when the public turns to the internet for information and guidance they may not always be receiving high quality or accurate information. members of our society may not realize that librarians are trained to analyze all types of information and use their expert, learned skills to evaluate the validity of information found from all sources, especially those published online. the reality is, as internet usage becomes a necessary part of our daily life, the amount of information that the public encounters increases. the trend towards self educating without the guidance of a professional can at times be a good thing; however there are also times when attempting to weed through an abundance of information can be an overwhelming, frustrating, and possibly damaging experience. librarians, recognizing the danger of this type of often misdirected self education, have developed innovative methods to combat the misinformation that can be found by searching through online message boards. one such program is known as “slam the boards,” a grassroots movement that has librarians “invade” popular message boards and answer as many questions as possible with authoritative, accurate answers. the authoritative answer is accompanied by a caveat that lets the public know that their query was returned by a library professional, an information specialist that is able to provide answers steeped in fact rather than speculation. for more information on “slam the boards,” or to get a movement going in your library community, see the library journal article below. online searches may yield misinformed medical results “not all web-based information is accurate” (stapleton, 2010). that was the statement provided by the journal watch publication, pediatrics & adolescent medicine, after medical researchers in the u.k. conducted google searches looking for advice on five common pediatric topics. the results caution that online medical information is “highly variable and often inaccurate” (stapleton, 2010). if doctors do not provide or discuss the best sources to locate reputable online information with their patients, then patients should seek the assistance of information professionals. in july of 2005, the internet journal of orthopedic surgery scanned the internet using common search engines in an effort to assess the validity of information found online with regard to certain types of orthopedic surgery. the results of their study reflect the inadequacy of detailed medical information found on most websites (garvan, gupta, tan, & xu, 2005). furthermore, this study confirmed that the abundance of information found online could be overwhelming to patients that are searching for information without the guidance of a medical or information professional who can act as a “referee” to help filter, sort, and evaluate the information (garvan, gupta, tan, xu, 2005). in the wake of this disturbing trend, the medical library association, alarmed by the amount of overwhelming, inaccurate and even dangerous information available to patients online, has created “a user’s guide to finding and evaluating health information on the web” (“medical library association resources: a user’s guide to finding and evaluating health information on the web,” 2012). this guide was created to steer the millions of americans that search the internet every day looking for health information towards high quality sources, thereby helping patients avoid the maze of misinformation and dangerous disinformation that can be found online. theoretically a good concept, yet how many patrons know that these types of resources are available? even with the availability of online, credible guides, the public can easily breeze over these entries in favor of the first result in the google results list. furthermore, even if patrons are able to find and access the information, how much of it are they able to comprehend? librarians are obviously not allowed to dispense medical advice; however, they can use advanced reference tools and resources to define medical terminology for their patrons. this service is especially helpful for non-native english speakers, english language learners, and patrons new to this country. in 2009, the library of congress formed a “metadata for digital content” group with the goal of providing the public better access to digital materials by helping users locate relevant sources when they search. according to the resident metadata experts at the library of congress, “perfect metadata is not required, good metadata is useful” (“access through metadata: library group tackles the challenge”, n.d.). despite the valiant efforts of all librarians to direct and encourage their patrons to utilize high quality librarian reviewed sources, many patrons will still inevitably use a search engine for many of their medical queries. knowing this, the librarians at the library of congress, in the aforementioned group, are exploring the concept of changing the way metadata is used in presenting search results. their findings can then trickle down to benefit the entire library community. by attacking the problem of inaccurate search results from the back end, librarians can work to steer their patrons towards more reliable websites as metadata places a central role in ensuring that a website is highly visible within a search results list. moving forward on a quest for accurate and reliable information, the idea is that metadata can be used to promote credibility in conjunction with visibility. simply put, how can we harness the power of metadata to help patrons locate data that is useful and reliable for their needs? this is one of the many ways librarians can work to help combat the problem of inaccurate information, both medical and non-medical, found online. discrepancies found in medical information that can be accessed online do not just affect the realm of traditional, western medicine. patrons that are looking to find information on alternative and holistic medicinal treatments should be aware as well when they conduct online searches for web-based health resources. the national institutes of health, via their national center for complementary and alternative medicine, has provided an online resource to help the public evaluate health resources that they find online. this information is an invaluable resource for those searching for reputable and reliable treatments and practitioners as an alternative to western medicine. librarians, using the tool of an in-depth reference interview, can guide their patrons towards this and other useful resources. librarians have also worked to make things simpler for those patients who do not feel comfortable divulging personal health information to a librarian during an in-person reference interview. as technology is updated and changes are made, patrons have the option of texting, e-mailing or instant messaging in real time, sensitive questions to a reference librarian to maintain a degree of anonymity. librarians also work to ensure that their library home pages contain up-to -date and accurate links to reputable websites. for people who are too ill or incapacitated to visit the library in person, these links allow librarians to direct patrons toward quality medical information. once we guide patrons to these reputable resources, or take the time to help them locate information via an in-depth reference interview, we will always warn patients to discuss any medical advice or treatments found online with their doctor. we as librarians may know this, so the question then becomes, how can we get our patrons to realize that these services exist? the college conundrum: conducting research in the digital age upon entering college many students hold the misconception that “everything can be found online,” which leads them to quickly learn a lesson in information literacy—it isn’t that easy. according to the 2009 project information literacy project report, despite all of the digital information and information technology available to students, “research seems to be far more difficult to conduct in the digital age than it (was) in previous times” (eisenberg & head, 2009). students soon learn that when they need to retrieve sophisticated information and execute complex online searches, librarians can provide valuable knowledge and services. the services of academic librarians are particularly useful in the 21st century digital age. librarians can help students of all ages make sense of all the resources available to them, including instruction on choosing the best source to fit their research needs and requirements for outcomes. for example, there are times when executing a simple, free search will not provide students access to the high quality literary journals and historical documents that can be retrieved via online, subscription databases. once students realize this, the usefulness of the library and librarians becomes clear. in response to the rigors and demands of college level research, students are appreciative of the services provided by librarians, and students “value libraries for giving them the information-gathering context that they need to carry out course-related research” (eisenberg & head, 2009). as a practicing school librarian and public librarian who also “moonlights” and teaches a research class at a local college, i have witnessed firsthand the useful tips, tools, and assistance that academic librarians provide for eager and anxious students. unfortunately, some students are unaware that these services are available to them and they stumble through their college years without adequate access to the vast array of services that academic libraries provide, including remote database access, writing center revisions, and citation assistance. during the fall semester, i teach an academic writing and research class to adult learners in their last semester of college. working with the academic librarians on campus, i ensure that our first two classes meet in the library and that students receive an introduction to library sources and services from one of the librarians. for many of the students, this is their first time receiving any type of formal instruction on all that the library has to offer. once they are made aware of the library resources accessible to them, both the quality of their work and the ease with which they are able to complete assignments drastically improves. the remedy for the initial problem was the introduction of a mandatory “library 101” class for all freshmen students to complete during their first semester, coupled with the addition of extensive “libguides” and specific, focused, bibliographies and pathfinders on the college library’s website. the library 101 class was specifically designed to enhance the first year experience of college students by offering flexible course times and a versatile curriculum that does not interfere with their regularly scheduled classes. this six-week, one-credit class can be taken on-site or online, and culminates with the students producing research bibliographies and a final paper that correlates to one of their core subject areas. these academic librarians recognized a serious information literacy problem and worked quickly to ensure that their library would be utilized to its full potential. as library professionals this represents an example of our ability to constantly adapt to our patrons’ needs. brother can you spare our library? a disturbing question has been circulating throughout our society since the dawn of the internet: “now that we have the internet, why do we still need librarians?” this question was birthed quietly, in small circles, most likely the result of old stereotypes that continue to haunt our profession. the question has grown into a topic that provides fodder for many of the cocktail party conversations and holiday dinner debates that we all have experienced. over the years, librarians have managed to make headway against this misinformed idea, yet the current economic climate only serves to feed the beast. some frustrated policy makers and politicians no longer see the value of librarians when their vision and our efforts are marred by economic hardship and devastation. according to the 2010 ala brief, a perfect storm brewing, “budget cuts threaten library services at a time of increased demand.” these cuts often come in the form of a reduction in operating hours and, in extreme cases, library closings. “in the grip of one of the most severe recessions since the great depression, americans are turning to their libraries not only for free access to books, magazines, cd’s and dvd’s but also for a lifeline to technology training and online resources for employment, continuing education and government resources” (a perfect storm brewing: budget cuts threaten public library services at time of increased demand, 2010). despite these positive usage reports, budget cuts (the ironic ramification of the same recession that is driving more people into the library), are closing library doors and reducing staff available to assist patrons. according to the aforementioned ala brief, “15 percent of public libraries report operating hours decreased over the fiscal year.” these drastic cuts are certainly not limited to the realm of public librarianship. despite the usefulness of vital services provided by special libraries, academic libraries, and school libraries, the perfect storm of an economic recession coupled with a backlash of misinformation has put many library services and positions in danger. in august of 2011, faced with the loss of $500 million to $1billion in state aid, the university of california, san diego experienced drastic budget cuts that will shut four campus libraries and the fallout will most definitely continue as they continue to face cuts of up to $52 million over the next six years (perez, 2011). the result of budget cuts like these at academic libraries has been the removal or cancellation of research journals, books, and database subscriptions, with the effects being felt from california to new mexico and into the northeast. medical libraries are feeling the budget pinch as well. in a 2009 statement on the global economic crisis and its impact on health sciences library collections, the medical library association and the association of academic health sciences libraries commented on the lack of funding and resources available to medical libraries and librarians during the recent economic crisis. similar to what is happening in the public, school, and academic library realms, budget pressures are “forcing some community hospitals to close their libraries, [and are] severely decreasing or eliminating access to vital information and resources” (statement on the global economic crisis and its impact on health sciences library collections, 2009). additionally, in 2010 the national library of medicine (nlm) made the decision to end their support of go local websites that allowed patrons access to health services within their community. several reasons were cited for the end of the unique program that used the expertise of medical librarians to index local medical information and sites useful and relevant for local patrons in various states and communities. the rapid growth of the internet since the inception of go local in 2001, along with the fiscal constraints of tough financial times, led to the cessation of this service. nlm cites the use of online search engines, insurance websites, and other health sites as useful alternatives for the service. while there are relevant medical sites available, it is an open question whether our patrons equipped with the necessary tools to determine which ones ones are most accurate and reliable; especially bearing in mind that judgment can be clouded when a person faces a new or severe medical diagnosis. furthermore, where can members of the public turn that have difficulty understanding english and are just learning the language? medical terminology is at times difficult for native english speakers to understand. knowing this, librarians have always served as a resource for english language learners and members of the public new to the community and country. the economic strain on libraries and library services may mean that librarians are no longer able to provide vital services for the patrons that need them the most. the situation in schools is bleak as well, as school librarians are facing the same unfortunate budget cuts that threaten other library professionals. school librarian positions across the country are being cut and those who retain their jobs often work in less than ideal conditions as the budget lines that fund many school library programs are being eliminated or drastically reduced (receivers, 2011). similar to the situations in public, academic, and special libraries, these positions are being eliminated just as the need for these types of specialized librarians is at an all time high. this is especially true in light of the implementation of a new set of national common core standards that require the expertise of school librarians to help students develop information literacy and reading skills to support these new standards. the immediate past president of the american association of school librarians (aasl), dr. nancy everhart, echoed the need for school librarians in a statement she released in march of 2011. “not only do strong school library programs create an environment where independent reading is valued, promoted and encouraged, but studies have repeatedly demonstrated that students in schools with strong school library programs learn more, get better grades and score higher on standardized tests. by eliminating school librarians, schools are losing a vital collaborator whose educational specialty is teaching lifelong, independent learning skills. without these crucial skills, how will today’s students succeed in tomorrow’s global economy?” (everhart, 2011). how can we as a profession combat a culture of speculative misinformation that surrounds our profession? how can librarians from all sectors of the profession band together to fight back so we all may achieve our ultimate goal of continuing to help our patrons when they need us the most? the answers may be found by exploring one word, visibility. a new role for all librarians: relevancy through visibility librarians know that the internet serves as a useful tool that enhances our profession, yet it is in no way a suitable replacement for our profession. how many other people outside of the “library world” know and understand that fact? one ramification of these tough economic times is that all librarians must work even harder to show the world the relevance and importance of their positions by making themselves even more visible in their districts, universities, organizations, and communities. this means that in addition to navigating through our everyday roles of helping patrons to access, analyze, and retrieve high quality information, we all need to take on the added task of becoming our own public relations advocates. unfortunately, it is not enough to assume that the public, lawmakers, and taxpayers know what we do and how hard we work. we need to work together, as a profession, to show others the value of librarians, and to finally put to rest the image of libraries as dusty vestiges from an antiquated era. community collaboration school librarians know that the key to success and the way to maintain a vital, thriving position within their school and district is to collaborate with teachers and faculty members. by keeping the doors to their library open, along with the lines of communication, the library literally becomes “the hub of the school.” is your library the hub of your community? are all of your services being utilized? if so, does the local press know of all the wonderful things that are happening in your library? though it can be an arduous task to promote the many events that happen in both libraries where i work, the effort pays off when the public sees the benefits of their taxpayer dollars highlighted in the local paper, hears about it on the radio, or watches it on the news. for examples of articles that i have written, specifically to boost awareness about the innovative programs happening at my library, see the links to the garden city news articles below. by inviting the press, taking pictures, and compiling a fact sheet and press packet for each event, i am always ready to make my library visible within the community, ensuring that the services we provide will continue to exist for our students and patrons. to help guide other librarians in these activities, a colleague and i have published a book, along with an accompanying mutable cd of documents that includes sample forms for librarians to access when they need to communicate information about events to the press. information on this book, make a big impact @ your school board meeting can be found by accessing the website of the abc-clo publishing company listed below. the book was originally conceived with a primary audience of school librarians, though the marketing and advocacy tools and tactics make it valuable to librarians in all sectors of the profession in addition to working with journalists, partnering with local community organizations can further solidify the library’s place in the community and create mutually beneficial relationships. for example, are you looking for prizes to help fund the annual summer reading challenge? work with your local rotary club, veteran’s association, or knights of columbus. get creative with your community outreach and you will have fun, fascinating stories that emphasize the importance of the library’s role within the community. an example of this type of catchy program is the “doctors prescribe libraries campaign.” this successful venture was put into place in washington state in july 2011, and enticed new patrons to the library by showing parents the importance of preparing students for school by utilizing the programs and services available at the local library. “the new program was created to engage children who might have never used the library. in addition to following the reach out and read model during their appointments, participating healthcare providers give families a brochure about the library and a coupon that can be exchanged for a free book” (scaff, 2011). for more information on instituting this innovative type of program in your area, visit the link to the article below from the in the kitsap sun. academic and special librarians can get also reap the benefits of a collaborative culture by reaching out to their fellow faculty, staff members, and office workers. these highly skilled specialized librarians are brimming with professional knowledge and are able to provide useful professional development sessions on innovative topics that can ultimately assist their colleagues with their daily tasks and instruction. professional development sessions can be used to showcase and highlight the helpful components of databases and other instructional tools, along with providing access to cutting edge research tools that employees may not have the opportunity to investigate and experiment with on their own. remember, all of these professional, collaborative events can be “covered” by the librarian and written up in the form of articles for a school, corporate, or hospital newsletter, drawing attention to the need for medical libraries and librarians and the value of their services. according to a 2005 library journal article, it may even save librarians’ jobs. the article, “rx for medical libraries,” encourages medical librarians to collaborate with physicians and go out of their way to interact and educate patients. “to get patients into the library, have hospital staff get the word out that there is a library and that patients are welcome to use it. suggest to the doctors or nurses that they write up an inforx referral for a visit to the library to talk to the librarian and hand them a sample of what one might look like. some patients think the library is only for the doctors. visit patients in the waiting rooms or hospital rooms and ask what they need to know” (banick, 2005). engagement through social media as librarians, we embrace new techniques and methods that provide a platform for gathering and disseminating information. many librarians have utilized the power of the social media revolution as a new means of reaching their patrons and promoting their libraries and library programs. take advantage of the features offered by sites such as twitter, facebook, wikis, and ning to publicize library events and services and to interact with patrons and the local press. savvy librarians know that the one rule of effective marketing via social networking is that social media only works because of the social aspect of the medium. posts and tweets should exist as interactive tools where the communication flows freely between librarians and their patrons. find out what they enjoy about the library, and also solicit ideas for programs and events they would like to see happening at the library. url shortening services that provide trackable links, such as those provided by bit.ly, can be useful in tracking the statistics related to users that click on the links that you post. this service helps librarians generate information on their visitors and patrons, allowing them to tweak the programs and services that they provide to better suit their patron needs. for more information on utilizing social networking techniques to increase awareness about your library and its programs, see the blog post, “social media best practices for libraries,” via the link below. beyond just “google it” access to accurate information for all should not just be a luxury for those with the means, resources, and time to investigate and evaluate sources. libraries and librarians provide equitable access to high quality information and make this basic right a reality for all of our fellow citizens and patrons. as librarians we are constantly working to adapt our services to meet patron needs, and to offer programs that recognize and utilize new methods of digital information retrieval. libraries are the lifelines of their communities, schools, and organizations. we need to do our part, as a profession, to keep them thriving. many thanks to brett bonfield for his invitation to write and for his guidance throughout the entire process. this piece would not be what it has become without brett’s insightful suggestions that gently nudged me out of my comfort zone. additional thanks are extended to erin dorney and emily ford from in the library with the lead pipe for their eagle eye copy edits and thoughtful suggestions. i am so grateful to deb levitov, school library monthly managing editor extraordinaire, for taking the time out of her hectic schedule to provide candid comments and suggestions. references a perfect storm brewing: budget cuts threaten public library services at time of increased demand.(2010). american library association. retrieved january 7, 2012, from http://www.ala.org/research/sites/ala.org.research/files/content/initiatives/plftas/issuesbriefs/issuebrief_perfectstorm.pdf access through metadata: library group tackles the challenge. (n.d.). digital preservation (library of congress). retrieved february 17, 2012, from http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/series/challenge/metadata_digital_content_challenge.html american libraries, ala news. (2011, march 18). aasl president releases statement on school library position cuts [press release]. retrieved february 8, 2012, from http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/ala/aasl-president-releases-statement-school-library-position-cuts banick, c. r. (2005). rx for medical libraries. library journal, 130(19), 32-34. retrieved january 26, 2012, from http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/ca6282616.html blumstein, l. (2007, august 31). on september 10, librarians will be a presence on answer sites. library journal — library news, reviews, and views. retrieved february 17, 2012, from http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/ca6473249.html delguidice, m. (2011, october 10). adelphi librarian visits gchs: college research and collegiate expectations discussed |. front page | www.gcnews.com | garden city news. retrieved february 17, 2012, from http://www.gcnews.com/news/2011-10-28/school/adelphi_librarian_visits_gchs_college_research_and.html delguidice, m. (2012, february 3). gchs library hosts after school nook book discussion club. front page | www.gcnews.com | garden city news. retrieved february 17, 2012, from http://www.gcnews.com/news/2012-02-03/school/gchs_library_hosts_after_school_nook_book_discussi.html delguidice, m., & luna, r. (2012). make a big impact @ your school board meeting. linworth. http://www.abc-clio.com/product.aspx?isbn=9781598848991 dougherty, r. (2011, february 4). why is the ocean salty? snooki has a unique theory. yahoo! voices. retrieved january 7, 2012, from http://voices.yahoo.com/why-ocean-salty-snooki-has-unique-theory-7783074.html?cat=49 eisenberg, m. b., & head, a. j. (2009, february). project information literacy progress report (rep.). retrieved january 9, 2012, from the information school, university of washington website: http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/pil_progressreport_2_2009.pdf evaluating web-based health resources [nccam cam basics]. (2011, april 1). national center for complementary and alternative medicine [nccam] – nccam.nih.gov home page. retrieved february 1, 2012, from http://nccam.nih.gov/health/webresources/ garvan, j., gupta, m., tan, s., & xu, z. (2005). appraising the quality of material on joint replacement surgery on the internet. the internet journal of orthopedic surgery, 2(2). retrieved january 26, 2012. grabowska, k. (2010, march 18). social media best practices for libraries [web log post]. retrieved january 25, 2012, from http://tametheweb.com/2010/03/18/social-media-best-practices-for-libraries/ k. s. (2011, july 13). doctors prescribe regular library visits. kitsap sun. retrieved january 25, 2012, from http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2011/jul/13/doctors-prescribe-regular-library-visits/#ixzz1kvwno7ye medical library association resources: a user’s guide to finding and evaluating health information on the web. (2012, january 11). medical library association mlanet. retrieved january 25, 2012, from http://mlanet.org/resources/userguide.html perez, e. (2011, august 26). ucsd library cuts mean 150,000 books must go. california watch | bold new journalism. retrieved from http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/ucsd-library-cuts-mean-150000-books-must-go-12293 receivers, p. (2011, july 3). librarian positions cut in schools across the country. breaking news and opinion on the huffington post. retrieved february 8, 2012, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/31/librarian-positions-cut-schools_n_869458.html stapleton, f. (2010). is medical advice on the internet reliable? journal watch pediatrics & adolescent medicine. doi: 10.1056/pa2010042280000001 statement on the global economic crisis and its impact on health sciences library collections (rep.). (2009, may). retrieved january 26, 2012, from medical library association/association of academic health sciences libraries website: http://www.mlanet.org/government/gov_pdf/2009_may_glbleconcrisis_statement.pdf this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. advocacy, information literacy, marketing q&a: lead pipe on professional development from the frying pan into the fire (and back again): adventures in subject-based, credit instruction 8 responses pingback : snooki, whale sperm, and google: the unfortunate extinction of librarians when they are needed most | julie's information professional e-portfolio torstein låg 2012–02–24 at 4:20 am thank you! that was a very inspirational post. fighting misand disinformation seems to me the most important and challenging goal for any librarian. i do worry, though, that it might not make libraries more popular with budgetary authorities in the short run. still, serving the public well may influence public opinion in favour of libraries in the long run. oh, do you by any chance have the details for that gaiman quote? margaux 2012–02–24 at 8:09 am thank you for the comment! i agree that librarians are walking a fine line between trying to please their budgetary authorities and trying to do the best job they can for their patrons. the information for the neil gaiman quote came from an april 2010 video interview that he gave at the indianapolis marion county public library. he has several great quotes in that interview!  the link is below, it is titled “neil gaiman on libraries” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh-sr1ucq6g&feature=youtube_gdata_player torstein låg 2012–02–24 at 8:15 am ah, lovely, thanks. i’ve come across that quote several times (and who wouldn’t want to us it?!) and now i know where its from. :) nicole thompson 2012–02–29 at 9:41 am thank you so much for this! as a high school librarian (or media specialist, as we are called here…) i am constantly fighting against the “google it” generation that insists the best way to find a book in a library (not kidding here) is to google the title. now, we have come a long way from that in the years i’ve been here, but still, everyday, i have a student (or ten) who seems to thing google will provide everything they need, from (as you so aptly put) movie times to information for their research paper on a supreme court case. we very recently began playing about with trails assessment created by kent state, having various classes starting research projects take the assessment as a pre-test to give the teacher and me some idea of what their knowledge base is. shockingly, the students were not only happy to be challenged, they wanted to learn the right answers, and thus, the right way to go about researching. it turned into the best “teachable moments” of my career for a solid week. i have even had parents emailing and calling, asking about this test, and seeing if they could take it, then asking questions about how they can help their children learn how to find the best information that is available for their school projects; not just what the first 10 hits in a google search will get them. thanks so much for this post! margaux 2012–03–07 at 11:41 am hi nicole, thanks so much for writing this comment. i feel your pain and sympathize with the obstacles that we are up against; however it sounds like you are making a lot of progress and are doing great work! congratulations! in may my book will be coming out and we have a lot of information on how librarians can use the trails to support their library programs via data driven library programs. i thank you so much for the comment and hope to stay in touch. perhaps our high schools can sype at some point. thanks again, margaux pingback : discovery services in a google world | redux justin ippolito 2012–04–17 at 12:54 am this is such a beautiful article. the quality of information has suffered as a result of this hyper connected age of instant gratification. no effort is ever involved, just “google it”. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct finding foundations: a model for information literacy assessment of first-year students – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 23 aug zoe fisher and kevin seeber /0 comments finding foundations: a model for information literacy assessment of first-year students in brief this article presents a case study in establishing an information literacy instruction and assessment program for first-year university students at the university of colorado denver. rather than presenting assessment data, we document the process in which our department engaged with the student learning assessment cycle, with the intention of allowing other information literacy professionals to see how we established an instruction program for first-year english composition. we include a description of in-class exercises, rubrics, and the procedures we followed in order to assess the foundational information literacy skills of first-year students on our campus. this assessment was not conducted to demonstrate what students learned from librarians (thereby illustrating the value of library instruction). rather, we assessed student learning to ascertain the information literacy skills students bring with them into a first-year english composition course. introduction the longstanding model of information literacy instruction at our institution centers on a librarian-course faculty relationship. this type of relationship has been investigated by several others, including hardesty (1995) and badke (2005). typically, course faculty request a one-shot instruction session delivered by a librarian. working with the faculty member, the librarian determines the content of the session and what, if any, student learning assessment will take place. for some libraries, that assessment is connected to the association of college & research libraries (acrl) initiative that academic libraries need to “demonstrate value” (acrl, 2017). in instruction sessions, librarians have tried to do just that by giving students some kind of pre-test or initial assessment to determine baseline skills at the beginning of a course (henry, glauner, & lefoe, 2016). next, the librarian provides instruction in some format (in-person, through online modules, an embedded assignment, etc.). finally, the students demonstrate their learning through a summative assessment (a post-test, a final paper, etc.). the students’ final results are compared with their initial assessment results to prove that the librarian’s efforts had a transformative impact on student learning. this model is widespread in academic libraries, and had long been the practice at auraria library as well–until fall 2016, when the foundational experiences librarian and the pedagogy & assessment librarian worked together to design and implement a department-wide information literacy curriculum for first-year english composition courses. using a new model of instruction and assessment, one shared lesson plan was used by the entire teaching team (including full-time instruction librarians and part-time graduate student assistants) that allowed for us to gather and analyze student learning assessment data in a group effort. the purpose of this assessment was specifically not concerned with demonstrating the library’s value. instead, we sought to assess what students had already learned before arriving on our campus. doucette (2016) analyzed 39 papers published in the proceedings of the library assessment conference from 2006 to 2014 and found that motivations for library assessment generally fell into two categories: the motivation to improve the library or to prove or demonstrate something about the library. doucette’s articulation of the dichotomy between prove and improve gives us something to consider about the approach to student learning assessment in information literacy instruction. this present study addresses a gap in the literature by emphasizing the value of assessment for the purpose of examining students’ experiences and improving information literacy instruction, rather than aiming to prove how effective our library instruction has been. in this article, we provide a model for creating a sustainable cycle of instruction and assessment at an academic library by emphasizing shared curriculum, department-wide assessment activities, and coordination with a department rather than individual faculty members. institutional profile auraria library serves three separate institutions of higher learning—metropolitan state university of denver (msu denver), the university of colorado denver (cu denver), and the community college of denver (ccd)—all on one shared campus in downtown denver, colorado. the approximate fte enrollment across the three schools is in excess of 30,000, and the total student headcount exceeds 40,000 (auraria higher education center, 2017). there are approximately 5,000 faculty and staff who support the three institutions, including 100 library workers. all library faculty and staff are employees of cu denver. the education & outreach services department of auraria library was formed in 2015 as a sub-group of a larger public services department. the faculty and staff in the department have extensive teaching experience, and information literacy instruction has been a service provided by auraria library for more than twenty years. like many academic libraries, most of auraria’s instruction has been determined by course faculty negotiating with individual librarians. over time, librarians developed longstanding relationships with course faculty, loosely arranged around a subject liaison model. as a result of these relationships, librarians were not in the practice of sharing lesson plans for instruction sessions with other members of the teaching team. this meant that there was little, if any, consistency between one session and another, even though librarians taught many of the same courses. in other words, the content of the information literacy instruction sessions was dependent upon the librarian customizing the session to the course faculty’s request, rather than the librarian using standard instruction curriculum for that specific course. the authors of this article are relatively new to auraria library. kevin seeber began his role as foundational experiences librarian in july 2015; zoe fisher started a year later, in july 2016, as the pedagogy & assessment librarian. according to internal documents and conversations with colleagues, auraria library had never developed department-wide shared curriculum or engaged in programmatic student learning assessment prior to the 2016/2017 academic year. previous assessment studies were limited to one subject-specialist librarian delivering instruction in one course and using pre-/post-tests to measure the impact of that individual’s instruction (ferrer-vinent & carello, 2008; ferrer-vinent & carello, 2011). another study invited librarians and english composition course faculty across the campus to opt-in to a pre-test/post-test information literacy assessment, but it did not systematically involve the entire teaching team or specific campus departments (sobel & wolf, 2011). beginning in fall 2016, our approach involved every member of our teaching team (9 instruction librarians and 5 part-time graduate student assistants) planning, teaching, and assessing the same lesson plan across dozens of sections of a first-year english composition course, similar to the model described by gardner archambault (2011). following a review of the general education curriculum at cu denver, we selected english composition ii, known as engl 2030. by reviewing syllabi and course catalog descriptions, we found that this course is the only required course for students which also includes a research component. there is not a common syllabus shared between sections, so course assignments vary from instructor to instructor. the education & outreach services department head reached out to both the chair of the english department and the coordinator of the first-year writing program to explain our goals and ensure that they would be willing to partner with the library on this new approach to information literacy instruction. while many english faculty had used information literacy instruction in the past, the session outcomes varied based on the instructor’s assignments. there had not been a coordinated attempt to integrate a librarian-facilitated session across all sections of engl 2030 (approximately 25-40 sections per semester). to achieve our goal to provide the same information literacy session to all sections of engl 2030, we developed a lesson that would: – be delivered in 75 minutes; – focus on skills that students could reasonably demonstrate in that amount of time; – focus on concepts over tools; – assess students through open-ended questions that invited their interpretation and experiences (rather than valuing library-centric “correct” answers). our new approach to instruction the foundational experiences librarian wrote the lesson plan in consultation with the education & outreach services department head, using an outline that he had previously used with other first-year classes. before the adoption of this lesson, most of the instruction provided to first-year students by the teaching team had focused on selecting specific databases and developing search terms with boolean operators. in contrast, the engl 2030 lesson implemented in fall 2016 does not mention databases at all, and the bulk of the session is focused on evaluating and discussing scholarly and popular articles. we felt that it was important to focus on the concept of evaluation in this session because the engl 2030 curriculum requires students to find, analyze, and integrate arguments from different types of information sources, including popular and scholarly articles. to that end, we saw value in gathering student learning assessment data at the beginning of the session in order to measure and reflect on what our students know before they receive information literacy instruction. we wanted to know: what do students know about different types of information in a first-year english composition course? developing this baseline would help inform our future choices in other information literacy instruction sessions, including other first-year and upper-division courses. we also wanted this evaluation to reach across as many sections of engl 2030 as possible, which required multiple librarians to teach from a shared lesson plan. this lesson plan represents a significant departure from the typical information literacy instruction sessions provided by our teaching team, which often focus on database selection and database search strategies. in order to help instruction librarians feel more comfortable with this new approach, we facilitated a mock teaching session where instructors participated as students in order to familiarize themselves with the lesson plan. we also regularly provide internal professional development events focused on classroom teaching skills, such as guiding discussions, managing classroom time, and lesson planning. in june 2017, we instituted a peer teaching observation program to teach instructors how to observe and give feedback on classroom instruction. even with all of this support, some library instructors have been hesitant about using the new lesson plan. concerns included the fact that the session is discussion-based, not demonstration-based, and that databases and library resources are not central to the session content. some library instructors were not comfortable with facilitating large group discussion. with these concerns in mind, we continue to work on developing our teaching skills as a department. lesson plan the learning outcomes for the session are: 1. students will be able to identify the main characteristics associated with a scholarly article. 2. students will be able to compare scholarly articles with other types of information. 3. students will be able to locate scholarly articles using the library website. the 75-minute lesson plan was divided into three parts: in the first part, students were provided with two articles and a series of questions to be answered about them. in the second part, the librarian facilitated a discussion about the two articles. in the third and final segment of the lesson, the librarian briefly introduced the library’s website and discovery layer, and invited students to do some practice searches in order to highlight the different features of the tool (e.g., the ability to save and cite sources, as well as the option to access all different formats of information in full-text online). unlike most information literacy assessment approaches, our student learning assessment was administered at the beginning of the session, following only a brief introduction of the intended outcomes. from there, students worked in pairs or small groups to skim through two articles—one from a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal (in the fall, we used the journal of higher education and in the spring, we used american economic journal), the other from a popular press news outlet (the atlantic magazine and nbcnews.com, respectively)—and answer a series of questions about how the articles are written. these questions asked students to consider several of the factors students might evaluate when reviewing a source of information, including the article’s source, the author’s credentials, the voice of the text, and the intended audience. many of these questions are heavily informed by the acrl framework for information literacy for higher education (2015), especially the frames “information creation as a process” and “authority is constructed and contextual.” to encourage deep and critical thinking, we asked students open-ended questions that are not necessarily evident in the text, such as, “how long do you think it took the author to research, write, and publish this article?” this question requires some analysis regarding how information is produced, and allows us to better understand students’ current perceptions of scholarly and popular information. in other cases, though, we asked more direct questions, such as, “how did the authors gather outside information/evidence for this article?” this prompt subsequently asks students to skim the articles and look for specific markers of the formative processes which led to the creation of this text. additionally, the exercise is framed as comparisons of “scholarly and popular” information, rather than the more typical “scholarly versus popular” naming convention. this is done to support the idea that these types of information are not in competition with another, and that the popular information with which students might be more familiar is just as useful as scholarly information, though the applicability of either type depends on context (seeber, 2016). when facilitating the large-group discussion with the whole class, the librarian asks students to consider things like, “which source is better?,” with the answer we want to cultivate being, “it depends.” students should feel comfortable acknowledging that news can provide recent information and current events, as well as opinions and editorials, while scholarly articles allow researchers to investigate and answer questions using research methods appropriate to their fields. one of the more provocative questions we posed to students was, “which article contains the author’s opinions?” while we weren’t able to go into deep conversations around this idea, we did attempt to highlight that researchers, like any human beings, have opinions. typically, scholars express their opinions through a researched claim supported by evidence–but other scholars may disagree with their conclusion, just as newspaper editorials present opposing opinions. we hoped that this brief discussion would begin to destabilize the notion of scholarly articles as “neutral” or “unbiased” information. in their classroom responses, we found that students were ready to engage in this kind of analysis, which forms the core of the english composition curriculum. it was a deliberate choice on our part not to focus the session on a demonstration of library interfaces. as wallis (2015) writes in a blog post about discourse theory and database demonstrations, there are “so many layers of destruction inherent in my process of pointing, clicking, and narrating.” she goes on to write, “i am not modeling good search strategies, i am erasing myself as a teacher.” with this in mind, we felt it was important to focus on a discussion of the similarities and differences between scholarly and popular articles and why both are important, rather than focusing on the mechanics of how to access these types of articles. this broke with the tradition of the library teaching team and challenged the expectations of some course faculty, but overall response inside and outside the library was positive, with the english department chair noting that the library’s curriculum complemented the english curriculum. assessment procedures it is generally agreed that the purpose of the student learning assessment cycle is to use assessment results to inform and improve pedagogy, thereby improving the student learning experience (roscoe, 2017). with this in mind, we learned a great deal from our initial assessment practices in fall 2016, which were modified and improved for spring 2017. this study is focused on our program and processes rather than our student learning results, so this section will highlight process improvements in our assessment practices (rather than showcasing student learning gains). one of the simplest changes that yielded the most drastic improvements was changing how we collected students’ responses. in fall 2016, we distributed paper worksheets in class, which were completed by students using pen or pencil. the paper worksheet was divided into three columns: questions in the far left column, then spaces for the responses about article 1 and article 2 in the following right columns. after teaching 20 sections, we collected 170 worksheets, which were de-identified (students were asked not to write their names on the sheets, but we removed names if they did) and randomly numbered. the paper worksheets were then scored by hand, in a process that will be detailed shortly. in spring 2017, we moved the questions to an online form. this proved advantageous for multiple reasons: one, students in online and hybrid sections were able to participate in a modified version of the lesson; and two, students in face-to-face sections (taught in computer labs) were able to type in their responses, which our team found much easier to read than handwritten answers. another helpful improvement was including questions that allowed students to answer with radio buttons and checkboxes,rather than free text. for example, when we asked students to consider how long it took to research, write, and publish each article, their options were a series of radio buttons (days, weeks, months, years) which resulted in quick and easy scoring. in another question, we asked students how the authors researched the articles (their research methods), and their options were a series of checkboxes (so they could select multiple answers). their options included reading other articles, interviewing people, conducting an experiment, administering a survey to a group of people, and so on. how long do you think it took for them to research, write, and publish this article? hours days weeks months years how did the authors gather outside information/evidence for this article? (check all that apply) □ they talked to a few people (interviews) □ they gave a survey to a lot of people (polling) □ they gathered and analyzed numbers (statistics) □ they read other articles (citations) □ they wrote about what they think (opinions) □ they did an experiment (scientific study) □ other: figure 1 printable version how did we score the responses students typed into the online form? we found our answer in a relatively low-tech (but creative) solution: a microsoft word mail merge. student responses from the form were exported to an excel spreadsheet, where data was cleaned to remove duplicate and blank submissions. cells were labeled accordingly, and a microsoft word template was created that mimicked the paper worksheet students used in fall. the worksheet data from the excel spreadsheet was merged into the microsoft word template, creating 232 paper “worksheets” with typed answers. worksheets were randomly numbered. in both fall and spring, student responses were scored with a rubric created by the pedagogy & assessment librarian and the foundational experiences librarian. the rubric provided scores for each question using a scale of exemplary (2), satisfactory (1), and unsatisfactory (0). when scoring the worksheets, librarians used a simple online form to enter their scores. the scores were attached to the worksheet number, and each worksheet was scored at least three times. the scoring data was analyzed by the pedagogy & assessment librarian who found consensus scores for each work sample. for example, if two librarians gave a score of 1 and one librarian gave a score of 0, then the consensus score would be 1. what we did with our assessment results the pedagogy & assessment librarian compiled assessment results into brief reports (approximately 2-3 pages) explaining our methods and providing an overview of scores. these reports were shared with the cu denver english composition department chair, the education & outreach services department, the library as a whole, library administration, and the cu denver university assessment committee. in general, the response to our approach was very positive. the university director of assessment complimented the library’s assessment process, specifically highlighting our use of a shared rubric, multiple evaluators for each work sample, and evidence of using results to improve pedagogy (k. wolf, personal communication, may 30, 2017). while our assessment process yielded several benefits, the most valuable outcome was not the student learning results themselves, but rather the departmental conversations that they sparked. the process of collectively teaching the same lesson, gathering the same student work samples, and scoring student work together helped our team connect in new ways. following the scoring sessions our colleagues opened up about pedagogy in ways that we had not done in the past, with members reflecting on student responses and discussing implications for their future practice. an inspiring example of librarians working together to review student work to improve pedagogy can be found in holliday, dance, davis, fagerheim, hedrich, lundstrom, & martin (2015). conclusion we are not sharing this process with the expectation that it will be, or even should be, duplicated at other institutions. the purpose of this study was not to establish an empirical truth; we were not testing a hypothesis and we do not seek for other instruction programs to replicate our findings. instead, our aim in presenting this study is to provide an example of how libraries can conduct assessment focused on valuing students and their experiences, rather than demonstrating the value of libraries. subsequent information literacy instruction can then build on those foundational experiences and adequately recognize the knowledge and skills students already possess, rather than viewing first-year students as entering higher education with an inherent deficit which we must address. we also believe very strongly in institutional context–that the students enrolled in one school are not the same students enrolled at another. to that end, we feel it is valuable for librarians to gather their own student learning assessment data. in conclusion, we recommend that information literacy instruction programs, regardless of size, consider the following when approaching the development of first-year information literacy curriculum in order to develop a sustainable approach to student learning and assessment: lesson plans emphasize hands-on activities that develop discussions around information literacy concepts (such as “information creation as a process” and “authority is constructed and contextual”), not skills (such as database demonstrations); instruction programs coordinate instruction with departments (for example, all sections of the same course, especially required courses with research), not individual faculty; develop and use shared lesson plans to ensure consistency, rather than individualizing lesson plans for different faculty who teach the same class; collect the same assessment data to gather a meaningful number of student work samples, rather than creating different assessments for each section; instruction librarians work together as a team to assess all student work samples, using a shared rubric; reinforce the value of learning your own institutional context rather than attempting to prove that the one-shot “moved the needle” of student learning. we’d like to thank our peer-reviewer, lauren wallis, as well as ian beilin, annie pho, ryan randall, and the entire lead pipe team. references association of college & research libraries. (2015). framework for information literacy for higher education. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework association of college & research libraries. (2017). acrl value of academic libraries. retrieved from http://www.acrl.ala.org/value/ auraria higher education center. (2017). about auraria campus. retrieved from https://www.ahec.edu/about-auraria-campus/about-the-auraria-campus/ badke, w. b. (2005). can’t get no respect: helping faculty to understand the educational power of information literacy. reference librarian, 43(89/90), 63-80. doi: 10.1080/01942620802202352 doucette, l. (2016). acknowledging the political, economic, and values-based motivators of assessment work: an analysis of publications on academic library assessment. retrieved from http://libraryassessment.org/bm~doc/48-doucette-2016.pdf ferrer‐vinent, i. j., & carello, c. a. (2008). embedded library instruction in a first‐year biology laboratory course. science & technology libraries, 28(4), 325-351. doi: 10.1080/01942620802202352 ferrer-vinent, i. j., & carello, c. a. (2011). the lasting value of an embedded, first-year, biology library instruction program. science & technology libraries, 30(3), 254-266. doi: 10.1080/0194262x.2011.592789 gardner archambault, s. (2011). library instruction for freshman english: a multi-year assessment of student learning. evidence based library & information practice, 6(4), 88-106. retrieved from https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/eblip/index.php/eblip/article/view/10562/9379 hardestry, l. (1995). faculty culture and bibliographic instruction: an exploratory analysis. library trends, 44(2), 339-67. henry, j., glauner, d., & lefoe, g. (2016). a double shot of information literacy instruction at a community college. community & junior college libraries, 21(1-2), 27-36. doi: 10.1080/02763915.2015.1120623 holliday, w., dance, b., davis, e., fagerheim, b., hedrich, a., lundstrom, k., & martin, p. (2015). an information literacy snapshot: authentic assessment across the curriculum. college & research libraries, 76(2), 170-187. doi: 10.5860/crl.76.2.170 roscoe, d.d. (2017). toward an improvement paradigm for academic quality. liberal education, 103(1). retrieved from https://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/2017/winter/roscoe seeber, k. p. (2016). it’s not a competition: questioning the rhetoric of “scholarly versus popular” in library instruction. retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10150/607784 sobel, k., & wolf, k. (2011). updating your tool belt: redesigning assessments of learning in the library. reference & user services quarterly, 50(3), 245-258. wallis, l. (2015). smashing the gates of academic discourse: part 1. retrieved from https://laurenwallis.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/smashing-the-gates-of-academic-discourse-part-1/ appendix scholarly and popular articles worksheet comparing arguments in scholarly and popular articles start by comparing the articles briefly skim the two articles to answer these questions. don’t worry about what the articles say—instead, these questions are about how the articles are written. comparing arguments in scholarly and popular articles first article second article 1. what is the title of the article? what is the title of the journal, magazine, or website that published it? 2. do the authors have any credentials listed, such as a degree or professional experience? why does knowing this matter? 3. what kind of research went into the article? how can you tell? 4. what style of language is used? please provide an example. 5. identify the intended audience of the article. who would read this? how can you tell? now, compare their arguments next, review the sheet with summaries of both article to answer these questions. 6. do the two articles seem to agree or disagree? in what ways are their main ideas similar or different? 7. what topics do they focus on the most? are there any areas that you think they ignored? printable version scholarly and popular articles rubric engl 2030 fall 2016 scholarly and popular articles rubric exemplary (2) satisfactory (1) unsatisfactory (0) 1. what is the title of the article? what is the title of the journal, magazine, or website that published it? identifies the correct article and periodical titles for both examples (“how to graduate from starbucks” from the atlantic and “understanding sources of financial support for adult learners” from the journal of continuing higher education). fully identifies the article and periodical for one example and partially identifies the other (e.g., gives one periodical title but not the other, or “the money report” instead of the atlantic). only provides the article titles for both examples (no periodical titles), or misidentifies the article/periodical titles entirely. 2. do the authors have any credentials listed, such as a degree or professional experience? why does knowing this matter? identifies existence of credentials for both examples. provides rationale for how authors’ credentials impact authority/credibility (e.g., “yes, shows their credibility on the topic”). identifies existence of credentials for both examples. does not provide rationale for how authors’ credentials impact authority/credibility. does not identify existence of credentials for both examples (e.g., indicates the atlantic article author has no credentials. 3. what kind of research went into the article? how can you tell? qualifies types of research for both examples. provides reasoning based on evidence in the text (e.g. interviews, references). qualifies types of research for both examples. does not provide reasoning based on evidence in the text. does not qualify both types of research (e.g., gives an amount of research rather than a type; “a lot”, “not much” etc.) 4. what style of language is used? please provide an example. differentiates the style of language for both examples and provides examples from the text. differentiates the style of language for both examples and does not provide examples from the text. does not differentiate the style of language for both examples (indicates the same style of language for both articles), or blank. 5. identify the intended audience of the article. who would read this? how can you tell? identifies researchers within the academic field (e.g., “continuing educators”) and “the public” or “casual readers” for the popular source. identifies generic audiences for both articles (e.g. “students over age 24,” or “people on financial aid”). does not differentiate between audiences (indicates the same audience for both articles), or blank printable version academic libraries, first-year experience, information literacy, library assessment we used problem-based learning in library instruction and came to question its treatment of students from aasl standards to the acrl framework: higher education shifts in pedagogical strategies this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct are you reading ya lit? you should be. – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 27 jul gretchen kolderup /73 comments are you reading ya lit? you should be. photo by flickr user thiru murugan (c/0) by gretchen kolderup i’m a young adult librarian, but i didn’t read young adult lit when i was a teen myself. i was a precocious reader and desperate to be treated like a grown-up, so i read books for grown-ups because anything else was just too puerile for someone as obviously mature and sophisticated as i. it wasn’t until i was in my mid-twenties, working on my mls and realizing that i wanted to work with teens, that i discovered there was a huge, glorious world of excellent ya lit that i had completely missed. now it’s almost all i read. outside of ya circles, i sometimes find myself having to justify my tastes to others. yes, a lot of why i read ya lit is because i work with teens. but even if i were to switch careers, i would continue reading ya lit because it’s good. that’s not to say adult lit isn’t, of course, but ya lit has a freshness that i really enjoy, and it rarely gets bogged down in its own self-importance. ya lit is also mostly free of the melancholy, nostalgia, and yearning for the innocent days of childhood that i find so tedious in adult literary fiction. i think the reason some grown-ups look down their noses at ya lit is because they haven’t read any of it recently, so they don’t know how good it’s gotten—or how different it is from what they might imagine it to be. while there are still books that deal with big issues, the “problem novel” of the ’70s and ’80s has been eclipsed by more slice-of-life contemporary fiction, romances, fantasies, mysteries, sci-fi stories, and genre-blending tales that defy categorization. for as much attention as the twilight series has gotten, it’s certainly not all that’s out there. ya lit is so much more than a genre i think it’s a lack of exposure to contemporary ya lit that makes adults refer to it as a “genre.” much of the time when people say “the ya lit genre,” what they really mean is category rather than genre, and that’s fine. however,  i recently attended a talk by an author who had been writing adult genre fiction and was working on her first ya novel, and she kept referring to the characteristics of the ya genre, as if all ya books were somehow fundamentally the same. when we can hardly even agree on how to define ya lit1, how can we so easily reduce it to something as strictly delineated as a genre? this author characterized ya lit as first-person, coming-of-age stories told in 300 pages or fewer. while it’s true that a lot of ya lit is written in the first person, there’s plenty that isn’t: 54%, according to koss and teale2. furthermore, while there certainly are shorter titles being published for teens, every single book in four well known ya and upper middle grade series—harry potter, percy jackson, twilight, and the hunger games—are all longer than 300 pages. but what about that coming-of-age bit? koss and teale find that “[o]verall trends in subject matter included a shift away from coming-of-age stories to a focus on books with themes of fitting in, finding oneself, and dealing with major life changes.” ya lit isn’t so much about that moment when the protagonist becomes an adult (or sees how to do so, or realizes why he or she must do so some day), it’s about discovering who we are  within the context of our society. that’s much more universal. so it seems silly to me to call ya lit a genre, to pretend that it’s all somehow the same. but if it isn’t a genre, just some part of the greater world of fiction, what can we say about it? how does it compare to fiction for grown-ups? and what makes it worth reading even if you’re not a teen? what we talk about when we talk about ya lit before i begin to answer these questions, i should clarify what i mean when i say “ya lit.” as hard as it is to define, i should at least try to specify what i don’t mean. just as there is no age at which a child instantly becomes an adolescent or an adolescent becomes an adult, the flow from children’s lit to ya lit to adult lit doesn’t divide itself neatly into specific age ranges. ala’s newbery medal is given to books written for readers up to fourteen years old, but its michael l. printz award goes to books aimed at readers who are twelve to eighteen. while this article will discuss  some middle grade titles that have crossover appeal to both children and teens, i won’t be addressing the lower end of middle grade fiction. i also won’t be writing much about stories written for those in their late teens or early adulthood; there seems to be a disappointing gap in fiction aimed at college-aged people, although some are drawing attention to this gap. when i say “ya lit,” i’ll be mostly talking about fiction, and fiction aimed at those in late middle school and high school. there’s a difference, smaller now than in the past, between what is written for teens and what teens actually read. historically, what might have been called literature for youth was fiction that was essentially an instruction manual intended to create well-mannered young people, didactic tales of what happens to disobedient children, and the problem novel of decades past—essentially what adult writers thought teens should be reading3. fortunately, these days libraries and booksellers are classifying what teens want to read as ya fiction. my library has titles in our ya collection that are also in the children’s collection, and our ya lit section also includes books ostensibly for grown-ups that have appealed to teens, such as catcher in the rye and treasure island, as well as more contemporary adult titles with teen appeal. ya lit is similar to adult lit ya lit is a quickly growing field: the market has expanded by 25% in just over a decade.2, and publishers and authors are clearly aware there’s money to be made here there’s even a recently published book about writing ya lit in the “…for dummies” series, attesting to the commercial growth of the ya sector of publishing. one notable trend is the success of book packagers, such as alloy entertainment, that develop ideas for new series and then contract out the writing to authors, who work closely with editors to flesh out the stories, which are then sold to publishers. the books are designed to be commercial successes, and in 2008, eighteen of the twenty-nine titles that alloy produced made the new york times best seller list for children’s lit. their series, which include the gossip girl, luxe, and sisterhood of the traveling pants books, are often created with movie and television tie-ins in mind.4 book packagers are not new, nor are they unique to ya lit: they have been around since the stratemeyer syndicate churned out nancy drew and hardy boys books, and they create coffee-table books and self-help series for grown-ups as well.5 while the ya titles created by packagers are certainly different beasts creatively than books that are conceived and crafted by individual authors, they sit side-by-side on shelves of libraries and bookstores, expanding  the range of what’s available to readers of ya lit. like books for grown-ups, ya lit has stories that are written to be bestsellers, such as  the gossip girl series or the maximum ride books, as well as more  literary fiction with sophisticated tones, themes, motifs, and character sketches, such as mt anderson’s the astonishing life of octavian nothing, traitor to the nation and  tim tharp’s the spectacular now. in some ways, ya lit has become a lot like literature for grown-ups: it is both commercial and creative, it covers a spectrum of critical literary quality, and it has titles across many genres. ya lit is different from adult lit ya lit is also different from fiction for grown-ups. there don’t seem to be as many westerns. the romances are a little different. it’s not hard to find more gentle mysteries, though unlike mysteries for grown-ups, ya mysteries are a lot less likely to include  recipes for desserts. less superficially, the tone of ya lit is often different: there’s less retrospection, less melancholy and nostalgia. often, though not always, ya lit is more story-focused. all of this, i think, reflects the differences in the minds and lives of teens compared to adults. one of the biggest differences in the landscape of ya lit is that there’s more genre-blending than in adult literature. it may be because teens’ literary tastes are still developing, while adults are more likely to have very particular reading habits, but i think it’s also because the newness of ya lit allows for innovation. for all the flack they get, the twilight books are a great example of genre-blending. they have vampires, but they’re not horror stories. and  the paranormal element is  only one aspect of the story: much of its appeal is in the romance of forbidden love. there’s also an  action element, featuring vampires versus werewolves (or good vampires versus evil vampires, or good vampires plus werewolves versus the vampire establishment). anna godbersen’s luxe series is set in 1899, but its focus isn’t the events of the time so much as the intrigues and romances of the young elite. the first book begins with the funeral of the lovely, beloved elizabeth holland and then jumps back a few days so readers can follow how it all happened and discover the secrets she and her peers kept and exposed. yes, it’s historical fiction, but it’s really a delicious, scandalous romance. libba bray’s gemma doyle trilogy (which begins with a great and terrible beauty) is another genre-blender. sixteen-year-old gemma, who has been raised in india, has a vision of her mother’s mysterious death before it occurs. gemma is forced to return to her father in victorian england, who then ships her off to a boarding school. the girls there initially snub her, but as gemma begins to discover and develop her powers, she gathers her own clique. throughout all of this, gemma is being observed by the beautiful, mysterious kartik, who has followed her from india. historical fiction, supernatural powers, a boarding school setting, and a romance all come together in a book that was selected by teens for yalsa’s teens’ top ten as well as by librarians for yalsa’s best books for young adults. even the pretty little liars series isn’t just about rich girls being catty. there is a lot of that, along with plenty of designer brand name-dropping, but foremost on the protagonists’ minds are the messages they have been receiving from a friend of theirs who went missing years ago, and presumably died. figuring out who it is that knows all of their secrets before those secrets get spilled is the mysterious core around which the boyfriend-stealing and backstabbing swirls. in a recent blog post, ya author chris wooding discusses the freedom he gets from having permission to blend genres, drawing on examples from ya lit and a few middle grade titles: a publisher of young adult books doesn’t have to deal with the genre prejudice of the adult market. children’s books are divided on the bookshelves by age, not by subject. genre works are mixed in with the others where the browsing public can see them. my own ya books—a jumble of sf, fantasy and horror—sit happily next to jacqueline wilson’s stories for pre-teen girls. in contrast, you’d have to visit the fantasy/sf section to find my adult-market books, which you wouldn’t do if you weren’t already a genre fan. there’s a similar lack of boundaries within the ya genre field. there’s no high fantasy or hard sf, no new weird or urban fantasy. genre definitions mean nothing. you want to write a steampunk post-apocalypse adventure full of cities that drive around eating each other? or a book about a child passing through alternate realities in search of a weak and feeble god? or a dystopian sci-fi about an underground city that’s running out of light? go for it! such ideas would be risky prospects at best in the adult market. books that don’t fit into easily recognisable pigeonholes traditionally struggle in comparison to those that do. straight-out fantasy and sf are much safer bets than something genre-straddling and unfamiliar. just look at the big sellers in the field if you need evidence. not so the ya market. what’s currently happening in ya lit one characteristic of ya lit that differs from adult lit, and is so fundamental to the field that it drives what gets published, is the quick turnover in trends. inspired by the success of the twilight saga, lots of other paranormal romance stories have been published in the last few years. more recently, as the hunger games series has risen to popularity, we’ve been seeing more dystopian tales, though i think even that wave is starting to crest and we’ll soon see a new theme or archetype or proto-genre rise to take its place. the point is that currency is key. while there will always be fans of paranormal romance, a lot of teen readers tell me they’re “so over” vampires, werewolves, and fallen angels. in the same way that youth culture is focused on what’s new and trendy, so is ya lit, which means librarians need to remain alert to new publications and weed aggressively.it also helps ya lit create an environment that encourages innovation. perhaps driven by the same desire to be where the money is being made, we’re also seeing a lot of new series and trilogies. series and trilogies certainly aren’t new in ya lit, but they’re a huge proportion of what my library has on its shelves and what my patrons are reading. as i write this, seven of the top ten titles on the new york times best seller list of children’s chapter books are part of a series—and the new york times also has a separate children’s series list. even debut authors often start out with the first book in a trilogy, as evidenced by veronica roth’s divergent, currently number eight on the new york times list of best selling chapter books for children. this prevalence of series is a double-edged sword: if you like the first book, you know what to read next, but some of my teen patrons are starting to express a desire for a book that “just ends” rather than leaving unanswered questions for the next installment. although it’s not as much a problem as it is with manga series, which may have several dozen volumes, if you’re trying to start a ya collection at your library, it’s hard to decide if you should get all thirteen books in the gossip girl series plus the four additional novels in the spin-off series, or buy seventeen other titles. other recent trends in ya fiction include books told from multiple viewpoints (will grayson, will grayson; nick and norah’s infinite playlist; please ignore vera dietz, confessions of the sullivan sisters); novels written in verse (books by ellen hopkins, sonya sones, sharon creech, virginia euwer wolff, and lisa schroeder); and retold, twisted, and fractured fairytales (beastly, princess of the midnight ball, the iron king, and into the wild, as well as stories by shannon hale, donna jo napoli, and robin mckinley). historical fiction seems to be getting a make-over, too: i’ve been seeing a lot of historical fiction that isn’t focused so much on the events of that time period (you know, the kind of historical fiction you read in school because your teachers knew it was a stealth history lesson) but is instead a romance or a fantasy that just happens to be set in another time period (the luxe, a great and terrible beauty, the season, the vespertine, and wrapped). i’ve also recently noticed a number of historical fiction titles that involve time-travel to blend in characters with more modern sensibilities (revolution, the time-traveling fashionista, steel, and timeless). one trend that’s received a lot of media attention recently is the perceived “darkness” in today’s young adult literature. it started with “darkness too visible,” an article in the wall street journal by meghan cox gurdon about her concern over the mature content that can be found in today’s ya lit. her article sparked a flurry of blog posts and counter-arguments, a follow-up post from gurdon, and the separate appearances of ya authors maureen johnson and lauren myracle on public radio to discuss ya lit with gurdon. i think this “darkness” really attests to the reality of teens’ lives today and our growing trust in them to be able to handle reflections of that reality (or the “increasing sophistication and emotional maturity of teenagers,” as david levithan put it). that’s not meant to imply that all ya books are dark: there are certainly gentler titles. ya lit is big enough that there are stories for every reader, just as there are with titles intended for grown-ups. adults reading ya lit in short, you should read ya lit because it’s good. it’s fresh and exciting and there are interesting new things to find. it’s so good, in fact, you may not realize you’re reading ya lit: a non-librarian friend had enjoyed paolo bacigalupi’s nebulaand hugo award-winning the windup girl, so he read ship breaker (which won the printz award and was a national book award nominee) when it came out. he was astonished to learn that this book, with its dark themes and tone, was a ya title. another recent trend in ya lit is adult authors making their youth lit debuts. candice bushnell, carl hiaasen, kelley armstrong, kathy reichs, clive barker, terry pratchett john grisham, and james patterson have written ya or middle grade books. adults who are curious about ya lit might follow a favorite author and see where it takes them. you certainly won’t be the only adult reading ya lit. in addition to those of us who work with young people, “regular” grown-ups are joining in. a los angeles times article from early 2010 featured some of these adult readers of ya lit. five months later, the new york times explored some of the reasons for that interest. surveys showed then that “the percentage of female ya fans between the ages of 25 and 44 has nearly doubled in the past four years,” and “today, nearly one in five 35to 44-year olds say they most frequently buy ya books. for themselves.” despite this growing acceptance of ya lit among grown-ups, and despite the fact that ya lit can be analyzed as literature6, it’s still met with resistance or prejudice, especially in classroom use7. even within the literary world, ya lit is often looked down upon. in her essay “i’m y.a., and i’m o.k.,” margo rabb writes that she was surprised to hear that her novel cures for heartbreak had been purchased as a ya title. when she told another writer that her book was being published as ya, the writer responded, “oh, god. that’s such a shame.” even sherman alexie, whose the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian won the national book award for young people’s literature, was asked, “wouldn’t you have rather won the national book award for an adult, serious work?” i have to believe that these authors for grown-ups aren’t reading ya lit before they judge it. adults who want to read stories of high literary quality won’t be disappointed with ya lit, especially if they begin their sampling with award-winning titles. in 1996, after more than a decade of dormancy, a national book award category for young people’s literature was resurrected. this award isn’t just for ya lit (it can go to titles for a younger audience or to non-fiction), but the ya lit titles to which it is awarded are of the highest literary merit. the boston globe-horn book awards are a prestigious award in youth literature. they have a fiction and poetry category that recognizes winners as well as  up to two honor books. the michael l. printz award has been administered by the american library association since 2000 and recognizes winners and honor books that “exemplify literary excellence in young adult literature.” while it’s true that not every ya title will appeal to grown-ups—some really are best appreciated by teens—there are many with crossover appeal. others have made excellent suggestions (examples 1, 2, 3); here are a baker’s dozen of mine: the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian by sherman alexie chains by laurie halse anderson the astonishing life of octavian nothing, traitor to the nation, volume 1: the pox party by mt anderson ship breaker by paolo bacigalupi what i saw and how i lied by judy blundell monster blood tattoo: book 1: foundling by dm cornish looking for alaska by john green jellicoe road by melina marchetta sold by patricia mccormick the knife of never letting go by patrick ness between shades of gray by ruta sepetys the monstrumologist by rick yancey the book thief by markus zusak a few closing thoughts ya lit is big and getting bigger. ya lit is good and getting better. ya lit is a diverse mix of genres and styles and themes and tones, and it spans the quality spectrum just like books for grown-ups do. while ya lit is written with teens in mind, it has evolved beyond the coming-of-age concerns that first popularized the category and now fully merits adults readers’ attention. another thing i love about ya lit is the way authors connect with fans and speak with passion about their field. many ya authors have twitter accounts that aren’t managed by a publicist (maureen johnson‘s interactions with her fans are especially hilarious), and the youtube channel john green runs with his brother has created an entire community of nerdfighters that are spending the summer reading and discussing the great gatsby—for fun. mary e. pearson wrote an article for the tor blog about what ya lit is and isn’t, and why it deserves to be respected. ellen hopkins spoke passionately at yalsa’s 2010 ya lit symposium about the response she has received from readers of her books that say that she, through her books, saved their lives. that kind of connection and mutual support is awe-inspiring. what i think is most exciting about ya lit is that the kids who are reading it now are our next authors, both of books for grown-ups and books for young people. the exciting, innovative stories they’re reading now are what will shape their imaginations and sensibilities when they go on to become writers themselves. that fills me with hope for our literary future. acknowledgements my sincerest thanks to brett bonfield for several rounds of thoughtful feedback, to candice mack for her eye for detail, and to nancy hinkel for her extremely helpful perspective from the publishing world. this post is much stronger for their comments and suggestions. citations 1. cole, pam b. (2009). young adult literature in the 21st century. boston: mcgraw-hill. 49-50. 1. koss, melanie d. & teale, william h. (2009). what’s happening in ya literature? trends in books for adolescents. journal of adolescent & adult literacy, 52(7), 563-572. 2. kiefer, barbara, h., helper, susan, & hickman, janet. (2007). charlotte huck’s children’s literature (9th ed.). boston: mcgraw-hill. 3. mead, rebecca. (2009, october 19). the gossip mill: alloy, the teen-entertainment factory. the new yorker. 62. 4. rich, motoko and smith, dinitia. (2006, april 27). first, plot and character. then, find an author. the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/books/27pack.html 5. daniels, cindy lou. (2006) literary theory and young adult literature: the open frontier in critical studies. the alan review, 33(2), 78-82. 6. scherff, lisa & groenke, susan. (2009). young adult literature in today’s classroom. english leadership quarterly, 31(4), 1-3. teens, young adult literature collaborating with faculty part 2: what our partnerships look like leading with heart 73 responses pingback : librarified » a grown-up’s guide to ya lit pingback : kt literary » blog archive » ya lit, and why everyone should read it s.r. samuel 2011–07–27 at 6:13 pm wow, this is an amazing article. i love what you say about the differences between ya and adult lit: “ya lit has a freshness that i really enjoy, and it rarely gets bogged down in its own self-importance. ya lit is also mostly free of the melancholy, nostalgia, and yearning for the innocent days of childhood that i find so tedious in adult literary fiction.” yes—you pretty much summed up why i adore ya lit and have chosen to write in this category. so much adult lit makes me yawn. a lot of adult novels are written with an agenda, and the true delight of a good story gets lost. thanks for a great post. it was a joy to read! :) gretchen kolderup 2011–07–28 at 10:07 am so glad you liked the post! i’ve heard from others that they love that ya lit just wants to tell a good story–because that’s what they want to read. that’s not to say there’s no emotional complexity in ya lit, of course. do people ever question your choice to write for teens? s.r. samuel 2011–07–28 at 11:43 pm yes, i agree, there’s wonderful emotional complexity in ya lit. since i work in education, no one’s ever wondered why i want to write a novel for teens. however, i get the feeling some people think it’s “cute” or “a fun hobby” rather than consider it creating “real” literature. emily 2011–07–27 at 7:38 pm great post! thanks for putting so much thought and time into writing it. gretchen kolderup 2011–07–28 at 10:08 am thanks, emily! it was such a great experience to write this guest post. i’m so glad you’re happy with the final product! kristen kittscher 2011–07–27 at 7:55 pm fantastic article. i happen to be in the book club mentioned in the la times article, and i must sheepishly admit that the adults outnumber the kids most of the time! gretchen kolderup 2011–07–28 at 10:10 am hah! even if there are more grownups than kids, i like that you can cross generations to discuss great books that you all love. pingback : librarified » library day in the life project, round 7: day 3 pingback : i see red. « everyday performance sarah csekey 2011–07–28 at 8:47 am thank you for articulating the shift in ya, and indicating that we should stop with the ‘genre’ and start with the ‘section.’ a shift in labeling makes it much easier to do ra, by losing the idea that the novels must fit a particular formula, and simply suggesting great literature. gretchen kolderup 2011–07–28 at 10:11 am exactly! libraries need to reflect, in their shelving and labeling, the expansion and diversification of ya lit. i guess the balance is in putting things where our patrons expect to find them, but also leading them to new things they might not have thought to try. mia 2011–07–28 at 9:18 am this is such a thorough and insightful article! like you, i was always handed “adult” books as a precocious teen reader and didn’t discover the joys of ya lit until getting my library science degree. i always sneak a few ya books in our adult displays to try to “trick” people into discovering how rich that section of the library is– it’s usually pretty effective because on top of all the other excellent points you make, ya book design and covers have also gotten very sophisticated and cool. thanks for such an affirmative post! gretchen kolderup 2011–07–28 at 10:14 am thanks, mia! our ya novels have a big red “ya” sticker on the spine, and i’m finding that adults skip over them in mixed adult/ya displays, assuming they won’t like them. (it’s especially killing me to see that right now, because we have a “judge a book by its cover” display out and the ya books all look so good among the adult books, but no one’s taking them!) it still requires a lot of handselling to get them to take a novel from our ya collection home with them. are you having more luck? what’s your secret? graceanne_ladyhawk 2011–07–28 at 10:27 am just assigned this post to my graduate students in young adult literature (i teach online for rutgers.) thank you. olivia 2011–07–28 at 12:45 pm that’s exciting! i’ve been considering going to school again, and live near enough to rutgers. i have an undying love for ya lit. is there a degree or course path you’d recommend? does rutgers offer a degree in ya lit, or is that sort of course just available for grad students? i checked out http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/professional-development/childlit/youngadult/index.html gretchen kolderup 2011–07–29 at 6:35 pm wow! i’d be interested to hear what they think about it. pingback : in the field | discharged! jade 2011–07–28 at 12:18 pm great post! i love ya lit– that’s mostly what i read. robin b 2011–07–28 at 12:55 pm great article and round up of solid points. i’m also particularly pleased to see you discuss genre-blending. when i was debating the whole gurdon/wsj debacle with various folks, one of the things that really irked me is this presumption that ya lit is a genre (and, of course, the ways people were defining said genre in such narrow terms.) however, it did get me thinking about genre and how i see ya lit as being far more free of what i think of as genre snobbery, both from writers and readers. i advise so many adult readers in my library who are unwilling to even consider a title outside their designated genres, but teens (and readers of ya lit) are so much more open to any genre provided it’s a good story that’s well written. gretchen kolderup 2011–07–29 at 6:39 pm it’s hard because those of us who work with teens and their lit know the depth and breadth of ya lit, but it seems like a lot of the discussions that happen outside of our bubbles are with people who aren’t as familiar and have preconceptions of what they’re going to find in ya lit, or with people who have a small sample size behind their argument. it’s tough to try to engage people in conversation when you have such different perceptions of the subject. and yeah, i like that my teen patrons are willing to try new things! it’s exciting to be able to introduce someone to something they wouldn’t have tried otherwise and then have them come back to tell you “i loved this give me more.” in general, i feel like teens are more excited about the things they’re into than adults–it’s one of the reasons i like working with them so much! jeri c. 2011–07–28 at 7:24 pm great post gretchen! this is an impressive compilation of titles and information. gretchen kolderup 2011–07–29 at 6:40 pm thanks, jeri. :) deborah taylor 2011–07–29 at 10:14 am i was so impressed with this article and i really admire its fresh and positive look at the category. i plan to include it in readings i recommend for my ya literature class. however, like so many articles that have appeared on this subject, i am struck by the paucity of attention given to african american authors. i have seen no mention of angela johnson, a printz award winner and very literary writer. i have seen no mention of jacqueline woodson, a winner of the margaret edwards award for her body of work. on the popular side, i have seen no discussion of sharon draper of sharon flake who have given voice to minority teens for years through their work. writers like g. neri and jaime adoff are producing quality work that readers should know about. there are new writers like kekla magoon and tanita davis tellinfg solid stories that teens will enjoy. i am a great admirer of all of the writers you mentioned but i have found the works of african american writers almost invisible in this discussion. gretchen kolderup 2011–07–29 at 6:57 pm deborah, i appreciate you calling me out for the homogeneity of the recommendations i make here. you’re right that it’s a very white list–and it’s not as if there are a lack of talented, critically-acclaimed authors of color. in addition to the ones you mention, walter dean myers and nikki grimes have won awards for their writing and deserve more attention than they get. i initially had angela johnson’s the first part last on my list of suggested books, but had to cut down the list by about half and didn’t keep the title (i should have). part of my lack of attention to authors of color is a personal lack of experience with their writing. i’ve been working hard to fix that lately (i especially enjoyed jewell parker rhodes’s ninth ward and am listening to pick up game: a full day of full court right now), but i’m still less informed than i’d like to be about what’s out there. more attention is being drawn to diversity in ya lit by malinda lo and cindy pon through their diversity in ya project (check out their posts on ya books in particular) and by ari of reading in color. pingback : 5 friday favorites | the raven's spell pingback : fugs and pieces. july 29th go fug yourself: because fugly is the new pretty astewart 2011–07–29 at 8:24 pm i really enjoyed this article. i have a 14 yr old son who has always been a voracious reader. we shop for his books together and i have read several of his series (alex rider, percy jackson, harry potter), among others. i am dismayed at the lack of books geared toward boys in his age group. he discovered ‘steampunk’, but we haven’t yet found very many of that type appropriate for him either. my son loves to read a variety of topics, but has no interest in the ‘romantic vampire’ books that fill the shelves. if anyone has any suggestions, i’d love to hear. thanks! lisa 2011–07–30 at 5:05 pm there’s the young james bond series by charlie higson, the cherub series by robert muchamore, neal shusterman’s skinjackers trilogy, patrick ness’s chaos walking trilogy, and scott westerfeld’s leviathan/behemoth/goliath steampunk trilogy. other authors to keep an eye on are pete hautman, paul griffin, will hill, markus zusak, tim tharp, john green, barry lyga, matt de la pena, and about a gazillion more. there are thousands of ya books published every year, and keeping up with them is a full-time job and then some. gretchen kolderup 2011–08–02 at 10:21 am in addition to lisa’s suggestions below, i’d like to point you to your local library. they’ll have people there who can point you to new books, and who can even talk to your son about what he’s liked and disliked and tailor their recommendations specifically to his tastes. and since it’s a library, he can take a whole bunch home and then see which ones he likes, read those, and just return the rest. pingback : the saturday post: photos, videos, covers & more! « novel novice kat 2011–07–30 at 8:42 pm lovely article. thank you. i noticed you had a couple of australian authors in your list and if you haven’t already, you should definitely check out sonya hartnett and shaun tan, two of my favorites and australia’s best writers, ya or otherwise. gretchen kolderup 2011–08–02 at 10:40 am i love shaun tan! i first discovered him when i read the arrival and have been a fan ever since. his books always trigger a powerful emotional response in me. it’s been fun as i’ve rediscovered ya lit to be able to explore non-american authors. australia has some really excellent ya authors and i’m so glad their works are making it to the us. what are your favorite resources for finding outstanding australian ya fiction? the commonwealth writers’ prize has gone to ya authors before, but they’re mixed in with adult authors. the aurealis award recognizes sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers. the children’s book council of australia chooses a book of the year, including one for older readers. the prime minister’s literary award recognizes young adult titles in a separate category. and then many states have a premier’s award that often has a young adult category. are there other awards or resources i’m missing? mif 2011–07–31 at 4:37 am great article. and fabulous to see a number of aussie ya authors. and just for the record melina marchetta wrote on the jellicoe road. :) cheers gretchen kolderup 2011–08–02 at 10:42 am ah, drat, no matter how many times you go over something, some typo or misspelling always seems to make it through. thanks. :) courtney vail 2011–07–31 at 7:41 am awesome post. i love the growth ya has experienced in the last ten years, there’s something for everyone, and i also love all the genre blending, since those are the types of books i love to write. my new ya novel kings & queens is mystery, suspense, romance, baseball and even a dash of sci-fi. i also like the different forms of writing that crop up in ya and take you by surprise, the experimentation and shattering of convention, like books entirely in verse or texts and social media. gretchen kolderup 2011–08–02 at 10:49 am yes! i didn’t really touch much on form or format here, but you’re right that there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in ya. i love that not only are there novels in verse–they’re popular. bekka black’s idracula is an interesting example of the text/social media-centered books you mentioned: it’s a modernization of dracula told entirely in texts, emails, and browser screenshots. it’s also available as an iphone app. robin griffin 2011–07–31 at 11:37 am i absolutely love your view of ya lit. i am a middle school teacher. reading is not a popular past time for a lot of my students. last summer, i went on a mission to read as many books as i could that were geared toward middle school students. i wanted to get them as excited about reading as i am. i am on my 50th book since last july 1st. i began the year by doing book talks about the books i had read over the summer. i posted a list of “what is mrs. griffin reading now” in my classroom and on my class website. as my students learned about the books i was reading, they wanted to read them. score!! i ended up buying multiple copies of books and started waiting lists. i now have over 300 books in my classroom library. two other wonderful things that came from this was that the kids were going home, telling their parents about the books they were reading and the parents began to “check out” books as well. they loved them. they were signing up on the waiting lists too!! my co-workers began reading them! they signed up on the waiting lists. then…my students began going to the book stores. they would bring in books they had purchased and read so i could read them. they were so excited about reading. they want to know, even though i’m not going to be their teacher this year, if they can still check out books from my room. :) it has been the most rewarding experience i have ever had in my 11 year educational career. this year, my students and i (56 of us) read 652 books. this summer they are still checking out books – traveling back and forth to the school during the summer. i hope to ignite the same fire within my students this year!!! gretchen kolderup 2011–08–02 at 10:50 am robin, this is the most encouraging, inspiring story i’ve heard in ages! you’ve created a community of readers, not only among your students, but also reaching out to their parents and coworkers! what an awesome revolution at your school! betsy 2011–07–31 at 8:11 pm great article, gretchen. now i’ll just have to badger you for a follow-up on nonfiction? a great part of ya lit, too. adding charles and emma, to your reading list, maybe? gretchen kolderup 2011–08–02 at 10:54 am thanks, betsy! i’m still discovering ya nonfiction and don’t really feel like i know it well enough to write about it–yet! i have read charles and emma, and one of my big projects in the last year has been creating a ya nonfiction section in my library’s collection. this year’s goal is to expand it, get to know it better, and start incorporating it into my readers’ advisory work. do you have any good resources for finding nonfiction that teens will enjoy? pingback : interesting thoughts about ya « writing and illustrating comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: as the world turns so do we: a new publication strategy – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 6 may editorial board, erin dorney, lindsey rae, brett bonfield, ellie collier and hugh rundle /4 comments editorial: as the world turns so do we: a new publication strategy in brief: announcing an update to in the library with the lead pipe’s publication strategy. by editorial board, erin dorney, lindsey rae, brett bonfield, ellie collier, and hugh rundle in the library with the lead pipe began in the fall of 2008 with lofty publication goals. six librarians launched the site as a peer-reviewed blog, with plans to publish an article every wednesday. in their introductory post, they even mentioned the idea of increasing publication to twice weekly. five months later, the editorial board announced that they would be moving to a bi-weekly format and opened up submissions for guest post proposals. the board found that writing lengthy peer reviewed articles every week was challenging, and readers (while enjoying the content and conversations) were having a difficult time keeping up with that amount of output. starting in the spring of 2009, members of the editorial board contributed articles on a rotating basis, with guest proposals sprinkled in when available. the editorial board was essentially filling dual author/editor roles. since 2012, lead pipe has moved away from a group blog model and toward a journal model. while many readers may still consider lead pipe a blog based on our history and format, our editorial board is transitioning the language we use and our approach to publishing. we have issns, index in research databases, publish long-form articles, and participate in the peer-review process. because of these efforts, we have come to see lead pipe as a scholarly journal. with these changes have come shifts among our roles as editorial board members. although originally in dual author/editor roles, over the course of the last several years, editorial board members have steadily moved away from authorship. instead of writing content for lead pipe, we now focus on soliciting guest proposals, developing our website, serving as internal peer reviewers, recruiting external peer reviewers, replying to website comments, and coordinating social media. what this means is that the editorial board of lead pipe is no longer regularly contributing articles for the journal, but is instead focused solely on editorial responsibilities. we do contribute through irregular editorials (usually filling in when our standard, bi-weekly publication schedule would require an article to be published on a holiday) and news updates like the one you’re reading now. editorial board members are still welcome to submit a proposal for a lead pipe article, but editors are not expected to write articles. taking the editorial board out of the publication rotation has decreased the amount of content we have to publish. as a result, we are relying more heavily on submissions. in the past, most author submissions were recruited by lead pipe editors—writers who we knew or whose work we admired. with a submissions-focused model, we are now working with more unfamiliar (and often emerging) authors. we feel that our peer review process is particularly supportive of new professionals, and we enjoy working with that demographic, though it often takes more time to get articles publication-ready. we currently do not have enough content on a regular basis to reliably publish a brand new, long form, peer reviewed article every other wednesday. after much discussion, we have decided to change our publication strategy once again. we will publish an article every 2 weeks—either on wednesday (a brand new article) or on thursday (a “throwback thursday” article pulled from our archives of over 170 previously published articles). this strategy will allow us to promote some of our older, yet still relevant articles to readers who may have missed them the first time around. lead pipe believes that libraries and library workers can change the world for the better. we improve libraries, professional organizations, and their communities of practice by exploring new ideas, starting conversations, documenting our concerns, and arguing for solutions. we are always looking for submissions. we encourage creative thinking, envelope-pushing, and constructive criticism. authors can send in a completed article or an idea for consideration, and we are eager to work with new professionals or those without prior publishing experience. we look forward to hearing from you. adopting the educator’s mindset: charting new paths in curriculum and assessment mapping “i’m just really comfortable:” learning at home, learning in libraries 4 responses pingback : latest library links 7th may 2015 | latest library links emily ford 2015–05–11 at 4:13 pm i think you’ve raised an important point here. the “pink labor” that happens in journal publishing is frequently behind an opaque wall. the work that it takes to work with authors to develop their emerging voices is a rare model in peer-reviewed publishing paradigms. from the outset lead pipe has valued this over the amount of content, so i applaud the current ed. board in making this hard decision to stick with these values. ahniwa ferrari 2015–05–12 at 5:20 pm content is hard! i wish you guys the best of luck with this change, and will think of you if i ever feel like writing any long form thoughts on libraries. pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » change in publication schedule this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a conversation with librarian-editors – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 28 jan ellie collier /3 comments a conversation with librarian-editors in brief: ellie collier interviews several librarian-editors about the publishing process, with a focus on “call for chapters” style books. by ellie collier introduction: i began working on in the library with the lead pipe in 2008 as a founding editor and author, despite hating to write. the prospect seemed too exciting to let my own dislike of writing get in the way. i was the first editorial board member to step off of our initial author rotation and i remain grateful that the board let me stay on in an editorial role only, stepping back into a writing role from time to time to share survey results or make announcements like our code of conduct. over the past six years i’ve enjoyed growing my editorial skills immensely and have been vaguely on the lookout for additional opportunities to use those skills. my personal interest in editing and specifically wanting to learn more about the type of editing involved in “call for chapters” style books has lead me to this interview with a group of librarian-editors. format: i wanted to approximate a conversation, allowing those answering the questions the opportunity to interact with and respond to each other while also allowing time for thoughtfully constructing answers. with that end in mind, i chose a collaborative google doc as the interview medium. i also thought that this might be a good topic to follow up with a google hangout including editors who are willing to participate (with participants submitting comments and questions via chat). let us know in the comments if that would interest you. introductions: heather booth is the editor, with karen jensen, of the whole library handbook: teen services (ala editions, 2014) and the author of serving teens through readers’ advisory (ala editions, 2007). she is the teen services librarian at the thomas ford memorial library, a booklist reviewer, and a blogger and speaker on topics relating to effective teen library services.   emily drabinski is coordinator of instruction at long island university, brooklyn. she is series editor of gender & sexuality in information studies (litwin books/library juice press) and sits on the board of radical teacher, a journal of feminist, socialist, and anti-racist teaching practice. she also edited (with alana kumbier, and maria accardi) critical library instruction: theories and methods (library juice press). nicole pagowsky & miriam rigby are co-editors of the librarian stereotype: deconstructing presentations and perceptions of information work (acrl press, 2014). nicole is a research & learning librarian at the university of arizona and writes and speaks about library instruction, game-based learning, and critical librarianship. she will be co-editing a forthcoming handbook for critical library instruction with acrl press. miriam is a social sciences librarian at the university of oregon and currently serves as vice-chair of the anthropology and sociology section (anss) of the association of college & research libraries. she researches and writes on a variety of of subjects, with recent foci in instruction techniques and social websites such as reddit. the interview: ellie: can you give a brief overview of what the stages in the process were for you? what is the order of events: idea, pitch, find publisher, call for chapters, select, compile, edit, publish? what am i missing? heather: my process was largely dictated by the fact that the book i edited is part of an ongoing series. in my case, an acquisitions editor from the publisher i had worked with on my previous book approached me. she sent a copy of another book in the series, i wrote a proposal for the book i envisioned based on the structure and scope of the others in the series, and we went to a contract from there. once the contract was set, i spent a lot of time looking for work that was already published that i could request for reprint. around this time, i encountered some personal delays and the project went on hold for a bit. then i brought a co-editor on, at which point we revisited the original proposal, revised it slightly to include more original content, and began both writing and soliciting writing from others. we looked for leaders in the field on a variety of topics and contacted individuals directly. editing the articles happened next, and i did request a few significant revisions from authors. compiling, organizing, and editing for consistency were the last phases before it went to the acquisition editor and back to us, and then the copyeditor and back to us one last time. miriam: nicole and i did things a little bit backwards. we had a successful conference panel and then a webinar on aspects of our book, decided to try to put a book together on the topic, advertised for chapter proposals, and then went to acrl press with an almost complete proposal (with most of the chapter topics) to pitch our book idea. i think that having a fairly solid and fleshed out book proposal helped our pitch, but apparently most people pitch the book idea and then put out a call for papers… like heather described. as for content, we wanted completely new work, and with specific parameters for thorough research techniques, so we selected chapter proposals based both on originality of topic and research plans. we also required that everyone be able to complete their chapters within about 8 months—though we staggered due-dates of drafts and edits to make a manageable timeframe for everyone. there was a lot of back and forth between the authors and us, both for basic editing reasons, and because nicole and i really wanted our authors to push their ideas and be able to make bold arguments. (i think maybe some of the authors were a bit shy or hesitant at first in a semi-self-censoring way, but everyone opened up really well once we made it clear that we wanted them to be strong in this way.) as the book progressed, a couple chapters exited the project for various reasons and we solicited a couple different chapters to fill topic-gaps that our original selections left. and we solicited a couple other chapters just because we thought they’d be awesome. in addition to our own editorial input, we also sent each chapter out for double-blind peer-review, and near the end of the project, we also had pairs of chapter-authors trade their chapters with each other (based on similar topics/themes) for one last round of input and editing. then we sent everything off to acrl’s copy-editors who made additional suggestions, which nicole and i mostly fixed up (with author-permission) as they were fairly minor edits. the launch of the book was quite the big deal too… but nicole gets the majority of the credit for coordinating that… so i’m going to let her speak now! nicole: yes! miriam captured our process very well, so i’m going to avoid repeating what she has already described. i will say that with the topic of librarian stereotypes and the challenges we face, the idea for the book was to really speak to this being a serious topic with implications for diversity (and lack thereof in the profession), status and pay, and notions of gendered work. with that in mind, our cfp was very important and had to be handled with care. we needed to be clear that this was a scholarly volume and that chapters should be well-researched. instead of just pointing out tropes in popular culture, for example, we wanted authors to go in depth as to the implications of the existence of these tropes and look to gender studies, lgbtq+, anthropology, psychology, etc. we spent a lot of time crafting our cfp to reflect what we did—and did not—want for submissions. it’s sort of a catch-22 with finding a publisher and pushing a cfp, because a publisher typically wants to know who will be writing the chapters and what the topics will be before agreeing to sign; and on the flipside, authors typically would like to know who the publisher will be before putting in the effort to draft a proposal and get on board. as far as launching and promoting, we plotted out what would have most impact and when (announcements, book giveaways, etc.). and having an additional platform (librarian wardrobe) where we had an already established audience of librarians interested in these topics made it easier to get the word out. we also lucked out working with kathryn deiss and acrl press, where it was possible to try new ideas and generate excitement with encouragement and support. emily: i met alana kumbier at the lgbt-alms conference when it was in new york in 2010. alana talked to me about her idea for a book, and then we met up again a week or so later at the thinking critically conference in milwaukee. rory litwin [of library juice press] attended that conference too, so the three of us sat down over meat salads and talked about the potential project. (i love conferences in wisconsin—all meat salads and glasses of milk.) he was into it, i pulled in my colleague maria accardi, we wrote the cfp for critical library instruction, and it was on. we got a surprising number of submissions—surprising now that i’ve worked on a number of different volumes as a series editor. it turns out to be very difficult to get a sufficient number of quality chapters to make a whole book. i think critical library instruction just arrived at the right time, when there was a critical mass of people with things to say about how to teach critically in the library classroom. if i did that book again, i think i’d put more work into recruiting submissions from authors whose work i admire. ellie: you’ve touched on this in a broad sense already, but could you go into a little more detail about the idea formation stage? what was the inspiration for your book? what excited you about your topic? emily: this book idea arrived at just the right time for me, professionally. i’d been teaching just long enough to have a critique of my own practice, and was beginning to suspect that it was about more than boolean operators. i had just published my first ever book chapter, “teaching the radical catalog,” in k.r. roberto’s radical cataloging, and had just joined the board of radical teacher, a feminist, socialist, and anti-racist journal of teaching practice. so pedagogy was all i was thinking about. at the same time, i was working on my own line of inquiry about queer theory and cataloging that turned into “queering the catalog: queer theory and the politics of correction,” published in library quarterly last year. so i knew there were a lot of interesting things i had to say about critical approaches to instruction, and i was excited to see what other people had to say. i also can’t stress enough how wonderful it was to work with alana and maria on the project. editing together meant we had lots of warrant to talk to each other all the time, work through ideas, share labor, and generally live inside a small political and intellectual world together for a year or two. that was a total pleasure. nicole: i had started librarian wardrobe in 2010 to catalog how librarians dress for work as a reference for the field, but also as a way to publicize that we don’t all look the same or fit the stereotypes. as more conversations around these topics arose surrounding the blog, it was apparent that although people are aware the stereotypes exist and realize to some extent that they hinder our work, it didn’t seem that it was as widely known that these are gender, diversity, and social justice issues and that we need to do something about them instead of just rolling our eyes at shushing bunhead images in popular media (and that it’s much deeper than popular media). miriam and i had met at ala in new orleans in 2011 and hit it off, and i remembered we had similar interests and that she had a background in anthropology. so, i asked her if she’d like to organize a panel with me around these topics, and with her background and expertise, if she’d be the moderator. she agreed, we had a blast with awesome panelists (k.r. roberto, dale mcneill, jenny benevento, and allie flanary) and it was standing room only at ala in anaheim the following year. we were also able to turn the panel into a webinar with ala techsource and library boingboing and had over 300 people attend. we then thought… we know this is important, there’s a lot of interest, and we need to do something with this. and so a book was born. heather: like i said, the idea for the book came to me from an editor at editions as she was looking to add to an existing series. so it was interesting to work within the structure that was already there and figure out how to shape it to meet the needs of a different group of readers. with both this and my previous book, i wanted to balance the theoretical with the practical. i think it’s just as important to know why we do it as how we do it, and more than anything that was my initial guiding principle. it wasn’t until my coeditor karen jensen came on board that the idea really started to take shape. she had created the teen librarian toolbox blog and was just amazingly prolific and had all of this good energy and was getting feedback from different people than those i knew professionally. working together, we were able to reach out to a wider group and really craft a book that is essentially the guide we wished we had when we started as teen services librarians. ellie: how did you decide it should be written through a call for chapters? did you consider other formats—a special issue of a journal for example? heather: the series aspect dictated the format for me. i think in this case, it works well for a couple reasons. first, as it’s published by ala editions, it indicates that ala is placing teen library issues on a pretty high platform. the other titles in the series are the whole library handbook, which is broad and all-encompassing, and the whole school library handbook, which is specific to a unique setting. that our book is included with these two demonstrates that addressing the needs of adolescents in libraries, and the work of teen services librarians, is of significant importance. it also keeps the content together. there are a few different journals that publish material similar to what is in our book, but the articles are spread out, and each issue needs to cover other material too. i like that it’s a cohesive whole in a book. miriam: as i recall, we never really considered something other than a book. we wanted to compose something that was fully our own and didn’t place many restrictions on us in terms of form and content. the main driving factor in how we suggested types of topics in our call for chapters, selected chapter proposals, and specifically requested chapters from additional authors (though with a lot of flexibility on what they wrote about), was that we wanted a book that got at as many perspectives as possible—so we didn’t just look at race, or ethnicity, or just at gender, or just at specific ways of thinking about the myriad issues. and we think we were pretty successful at getting this balance. there are certainly still some gaps, but we were able to push the conversation on stereotypes in many directions to help promote even more conversations into the future—even including the conversation of why are we so obsessed with stereotypes, which a lot of people feel is detrimental to getting librarianship done (but we make sure to cover why that’s not really the case.) emily: we never considered a journal issue, although i can’t say why. a journal issue never occurred to me! patrick keilty and i are editing an issue of library trends based on presentations at the gender and sexuality in information studies colloquium held at the university of toronto in october 2014. that’s largely because patrick has already co-edited a book in that area (feminist and queer information studies reader, with rebecca dean) and also because an issue of a prominent journal promises to make a different kind of impact, not just in terms of tenure considerations (which are real), but also in terms of readership. i do think they’re different animals, in part because of how we access them. i don’t know the last time i held a print journal in my hands and read it cover to cover. books are different, the physical object matters in a different way, and has a different kind of life. i’ve edited a journal issue and worked on a lot of books. books are way more fun. ellie: heather mentioned initially planning to use mostly previously published works, did anyone else use (or consider using) previously published materials? in what ways did working with those differ from soliciting new writing? heather: some of the chapters in our book had been published previously. honestly, there is a lot of content out there that we would have liked to include in the book, but we ran into a lot of difficulty in obtaining rights to reprint. i’m really glad that we have the pieces that we have that are reprinted as they add a lot and the diversity in tone is great, but i also like that the pieces that were written just for this book help to make it a cohesive work. emily: we didn’t consider collecting previously published work. i think if we’d intended to make critical library instruction a textbook, we might have done that differently. keilty and dean included previously published work in their collection, and faced the same challenge heather did—reprint rights are expensive and hard to get. nicole: we also did not consider this, but did contact potential authors who had previously published relevant work (including blog posts) and asked if they would be interested in adapting/expanding it for the book. ellie: what was your process for recruiting authors and calling for submissions? did you already have many authors in mind? in the end, what was the balance between chapters that were submissions vs. recruited? heather: all of our chapters were recruited—either by asking directly or by obtaining reprint rights. we found our authors and submissions in a few different ways. initially, as i outlined the sections i wanted to have and the topics i wanted covered, certain people who are leaders on those topics stood out—debbie reese on the topic of diversity and accurate representation is one, joni bodart on booktalking is another. they’re really some of the first people who come to mind when those topics come up, and we were fortunate that they wanted to contribute on the topics we suggested. for other topics, the conference/workshop/panel networking that emily and nicole mentioned really factored into our process. we made lists of people who were doing good work in our areas of interest: people we knew in real life, people we knew of through virtual plns, people we had seen speak at conferences, or people who we knew were speaking at conferences that we couldn’t attend but were following through twitter conversations. basically, if we read something that really got us excited about the topic, that person went on our list as a potential author. this allowed for expert coverage on all of the topics we felt needed to be addressed with very little overlap. emily: we put out a cfp on a bunch of listservs, rory shared it on his blog, and we all shared it with our individual networks. we ended up not soliciting chapters from people, although if i could go back in time, i might have done that—it would have been great to have a chapter from james elmborg, for example. i wish we’d taken heather’s approach. next time, i’ll read this article first, before i get started! nicole: we mostly took the same approach as emily, the majority of our chapters came through proposals, but then we did approach authors for a percentage. our particular topic for the book both has and has not been written about a lot, if that makes sense—written about mostly tangentially for what sparked our interest, so we had to think of ways to talk with potential authors about how their work related to our book and how they could tweak it just a little bit to fit in with the general subject area. ellie: how did you vet the authors and their ideas, especially how did you get a sense of their writing and work ethic? miriam: we asked for chapter proposals to include not just the concept/idea for the chapter, but also a description of research methods, and an explanation of their expected timeline for research and writing—including a discussion of any potential delays such as getting human subject research approved. one thing we somewhat regretted not requesting were writing samples from the authors in the form of previous publications, or even research papers from graduate school. for the most part this wasn’t really a problem, but for future projects it would definitely be a step we’d include—not just because it would help us gauge writing styles, but also because some people have excellent ideas and excellent writing skills, but flounder a little bit in the short description of future research, so it’s possible we might have included submissions we passed over in the first round. for the solicited chapters, it was pretty easy, as we knew their writing style already (that’s why we sought them out), and so we were basically asking authors if they thought they could complete an original work in x number of months (or even weeks in one case). heather: our process was like miriam’s for her solicited chapters. there were a few people who we asked but were unable to finish the work for a variety of reasons, and a few others who we asked for more significant revisions than others, but by and large the work we got was what we expected. emily: we went on abstracts alone! when i think back to it i’m a little shocked it all worked out. i think our collection is as uneven as any edited volume, but by and large i’m really proud of what’s in the book, even though now it feels like we just got really lucky. ellie: did you plan to write a chapter? did you end up writing a chapter? miriam: nicole might have started with big ideas for our chapter, but i set out with the idea that we’d have a fairly basic “introduction to the book and the concepts” type of chapter. and then we started writing it and we kept thinking of more things to include, and more works to cite, and more concepts to introduce… and then we had a giant chapter that we ended up editing back down fairly significantly. but overall, i’m quite pleased with what we ended up with—we still basically introduce concepts and the background to the book, just with more depth and analysis than i’d first imagined. emily: i didn’t plan to write a chapter. alana didn’t write a chapter either, but maria did. alana and i wrote the introduction. i didn’t think i had it in me to both edit and write something, because editing is a ton of work. and it turned out i liked editing a lot better. i love working with authors and texts to make something really work. i’m a decent writer, but i think i’m a better reader. alana and i wrote the introduction to the book, and i really loved doing that, looking at what we’d come up with, how we’d sorted it, what was behind our decisions, etc. it’s just the editorial version of talking about yourself. what’s more fun? heather: i did, and i did! karen and i both contributed our own writing. i did the bulk of the editing, so there are more writing contributions from karen, plus she had some really great resources already written and ready to go that we were able to use. ellie: let’s talk about the editorial process: did you do both copy-edits and substantive review? what techniques did you use to ensure diversity and to push authors to think deeper? if you worked with a co-editor(s), how did you divide your efforts? did you use the chapter authors as co-reviewers of each others chapters? what do you think of that idea? emily: maria, alana, and i divvied up the chapters and each edited a third of the book. there was some horse trading—there were submissions i really wanted to work with, and others that were quite challenging for me—but mostly we just added up the chapters and divided by three. we all read all the chapters and gave general feedback, and then split them up for more in depth review. it’s an editor reviewed book, meaning we didn’t send the chapters out beyond ourselves. i think the best editing reads for big picture stuff, making synthetic connections that authors sometimes can’t see, and pointing to assumptions that might benefit from explication and evidence. good editing is constructive rather than destructive, pointing to ways to strengthen a piece rather than pointing out all the ways a piece gets it wrong. i have been on the receiving end of peer review many times and really think it’s an art. i’ve had reviews that have pushed me to make more daring claims (to the extent that anything in this field can be daring!) and resulted in much stronger pieces, and i’ve had reviews that just made me feel bad about myself. i worked hard to give the authors i worked with a generous and critical engagement, the best gift you can give a writer. you’d have to ask them if that was effective or not! nicole: we did both, we mostly focused on substantive review, but copy-edited as well. acrl provided us a copy-editor to review the final manuscript, which was so completely wonderful, allowing us to put more of that focus into content. miriam and i both edited every single chapter. on some, one of us might have taken the lead, but we both read and provided feedback on all work (and all drafts of that work). we used google docs to send feedback, which allowed for more interactivity and discussion with authors. to push authors to think more deeply on certain topics, i think we did a lot of question posing. just asking authors what they thought of x or y, or why did they discuss the topic in this way, and did they think of z? what emily says is very important, and i think when you’re approaching deadlines, as an editor you can get stressed out and want to comment quickly, but it can be an art to think about how your feedback might affect those receiving it and adjust accordingly. beyond that, we did have authors review each others’ chapters. we paired people up who had complementary topics and had them share feedback. not only did it let authors get additional feedback from another perspective, but it helped them think about their own writing in a different way. additionally, we had double-blind peer-review and found librarians and other academics with related research backgrounds to read and comment on chapters. on one hand we might have gone overboard with all the reviewing, but because these are sensitive topics, and because miriam and i are both cis-het white women, we wanted to make sure that the chapters speaking to diversity in particular were looked at from perspectives more diverse than ours. heather: we also had a copyeditor through editions, but as i read and reviewed the pieces, i did copyedit too. it’s really hard not to! i feel fortunate that i had worked with an editor previously, so as i read the submissions, i tried to do what my editor did for me: ask questions, address organizational confusions, give nudges when it seemed the author was on the brink of something bigger than what was currently written. my co-editor karen edited my pieces, and i did the remainder, with the exception of the reprints, which we left as-is. ellie: nicole touched on this a bit in her last answers, but what technology did you use in various stages? what technology worked and what failed? heather: we wrote the whole thing in a shared dropbox. it was our best solution for version control. we also did lots of texting back and forth, and stored more than we ought to have in gmail. we used one spreadsheet to track where in the process various submissions were, another one for author contact information, and another for tracking reprint permissions. emily: ours was a google project, we even had a google group that we used to communicate with one another, although i think that only lasted a minute before we reverted to email threads. i used a google spreadsheet to track submissions and due dates and email addresses and follow-ups. we submitted the final manuscript as individual chapters in an email to rory. now i use dropbox to facilitate file transfer from authors in my book series to library juice press/litwin books, but that wasn’t part of my workflow back then. which is funny, because dropbox is my whole life now. we had a joke at the time that we should publish a paper on how we managed the process of assembling a book—those kinds of articles seem to have so much more traction in library science than some of the political and theoretical work we published in that collection! nicole: our workflow was similar to emily’s google experience, where our whole world became google (or, isn’t it already? heh). we had a google group for communication, we set up a separate gmail address for just book emails that miriam and i shared, we used google spreadsheets to track everything, and as i mentioned, used google docs for moving drafts back and forth with feedback and discussion. miriam and i also heavily used gchat to discuss progress and process. we used word for the double-blind peer review so there would not be names attached to any comments, and we erased all author info within the document settings. when we worked with acrl at the final manuscript stages, we moved to dropbox and to using only word and pdf files. ellie: how did you connect with your publisher? did you ever consider going the open source/open access digital publishing route? self publishing? why or why not? i know the librarian stereotype has been able to make chapters available in institutional repositories, can you talk about that process as well? heather: i was first connected with ala editions back in 2004 when my then-supervisor joyce saricks nudged me to write a book on reader’s advisory for teens. editions had published her books and she introduced me to her editor there. they liked my work and asked me to take on the whole library handbook: teen services. i feel like i’m a broken record on this—series title dictated many of the decisions, so self-publishing was never a consideration. nicole: we chose acrl specifically because we wanted the book to be directly associated with scholarly work to have a more serious treatment of these topics. acrl also has great copyright policies for authors, is a non-profit, and as mentioned, willing to create oa pdf versions of chapters (those should be available soon!). emily: our book is explicitly political, so we went with a political press. rory was right there at the meat salad buffet table with alana and i as we talked through our idea. we’ve also been able to submit chapters to institutional repositories, but there are only a few on deposit. librarians are apparently like anyone else when it comes to getting our work in the campus ir! ellie: what other details have we not covered? was there something that you weren’t aware would be a part of the process, or that took more time or was harder than you anticipated? heather: obtaining reprint permissions was hands down our biggest unexpected challenge. that was frustrating because there are certainly pieces out there that i wish we could have included. finding my coeditor karen and essentially starting the process over was not something i anticipated at the outset, but it was a wonderful development. it was also much easier than i anticipated to work with someone i’d never met in person at a great distance. emily: heather’s right about the challenge of obtaining permissions. it can be frustrating and expensive! also, editing means an agreement to enter into many relationships that will likely involve at least some degree of conflict. i didn’t realize how much affective labor would be involved in working with authors. if you’re conflict-averse (like i am!), it’s important to be prepared to face those aversions head on, whether it means saying no to an abstract that you can just tell won’t work, or the hard work of telling an author when something isn’t working. editing that engages texts critically, productively and with generosity is hard work with an emotional dimension i didn’t anticipate. doing it in a way that produces the best possible work from friends and strangers is a real skill. nicole: i’m not sure if i can think of anything else that miriam and i haven’t noted already. we did write our own chapter as mentioned, so that entailed a lot more work for us on top of everything else. if both editing and being an author, my advice would be to plan that out well in advance and don’t think you’ll just start working on your chapter once the bulk of editing is done for all the other authors. you’ll be exhausted! having a “final” date for editing typically doesn’t work out as planned, so we were still doing a ton of editing as we were writing, re-writing, and editing our own chapter. miriam: one other thing that we haven’t really mentioned much yet is some of the design and finishing aspects of the book. we have an awesome graphic/comic style chapter from amanda brennan and dorothy gambrell, which dorothy created the art for. she figured out the layout of that quite expertly, though it was enlightening to learn some of the copyediting notations for how it would be worked in with the uniform chapter headers and such. dorothy also designed our book cover (based on bureau of labor statistics data about librarians) with her infographics expertise, which was an absolute lifesaver, as nicole and i were incredibly stumped on a design, or even what statistics we wanted to represent with the design. finally, i think everyone is pretty well aware how hard it is to come up with good titles for things, but it was still quite the nerve racking endeavor to find a title we felt really positively strongly about. like nicole said, it’s important to plan out well in advance… but there are some things that only happen when they happen, and luckily it all worked out for us! ellie: what were your overall feelings about the experience? what did you feel was especially successful? what would you do differently? what would you like to try? heather: i feel that the biggest success was bringing all of these voices together. we have over twenty contributors, and they all have something important to say. i feel very fortunate that the book is working as a platform to elevate some really great voices and perspectives. meeting and working with my coeditor was another great take-away. due to outside conflicts, the book was just not happening the way it needed to before karen came on board, and we’ve developed a strong working relationship as a result. if i were to do it again, i’d ask for more pages. there’s so much more that we could’ve covered! nicole: it was a great experience and i’m glad miriam and i got to work together on this. our authors were fantastic and i’m really proud of what we all accomplished. most successful i think was actually doing what we set out to do: compiling different approaches to the issue of stereotypes and diversity from the perspective (scholarly) that we were hoping for, and from a diverse group of authors. of what i’d do differently, hmm, i’d say we were extremely organized with all of our spreadsheets and set dates, but maybe next time i’d want to share a document with all authors so they could see their progress and make sure they’re keeping up with everyone else on deadlines. i’m going to actually keep this in mind since i have another book project starting soon with acrl press: kelly mcelroy and i will be co-editing a critical library instruction handbook and have just released our call for proposals! emily: i love editing. after critical library instruction came out, i picked up the book series gig from rory litwin, and that’s been a continued absolute pleasure. editing means opening the door for other people to do their thing, have their say, and maybe help make that say a little more precise and well-argued. things i’m always reminding myself to do: say no when no needs to be said. fulfill ego elsewhere—few people remember the editor, not the tenure review committee, sometimes not even your mom, and if you’re good at your job the reader won’t notice. work a little every day. don’t fear email. big projects are the result of a zillion tiny decisions, so go ahead and make them. and don’t be afraid to commit to print—it’s the only way to keep talking. further reading: the call for papers for librarian wardrobe series description for series on gender and sexuality in information studies thanks so much to heather booth, emily drabinski, nicole pagowsky, and miriam rigby for their thoughtful answers and to bob schroeder and erin dorney for their assistance in shaping the questions.    interview on scholarly communication and the digital humanities: an interview with kathleen fitzpatrick beyond the threshold: conformity, resistance, and the acrl information literacy framework for higher education 3 responses pingback : friday finds – january 30, 2015 — @tlt16 teen librarian toolbox pingback : library links 30th january 2015 | latest library links pingback : in the library with a leadpipe: conversation with librarian editors | international librarians network this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct user-centered provisioning of interlibrary loan: a framework – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 21 mar kurt munson /4 comments user-centered provisioning of interlibrary loan: a framework in brief: interlibrary loan (ill) has grown from a niche service limited to few privileged scholars to a ubiquitous expected service. yet, workflows still assume specialness. users’ needs should come first and that means redesigning ill into a unified linear user-centered process. it is not just a request form, rather we need improved mechanisms for users to track, manage, and communicate about their requests. this article explores how ill developed, problems with the current ill ecosystem, and changes that can make ill centered on users’ needs and processes rather than backend library systems. by kurt munson introduction interlibrary loan (ill) provides library users with a critical tool to acquire resources they need for their information consumption and evaluation activities whether research, teaching, learning, or something else. the 129% increase in ill volume between 1991 and 2015 in the association of research libraries (arl) statistics clearly shows that ill has grown from a niche service to an expected one (arl, 2016). yet, our library processes for providing this service have not kept pace with technological development. thus, the provision of ill is less effective than it could be because it is predicated upon library processes and systems rather than on most effectively meeting users’ needs. this article explores the development of ill as a service, suggests areas in need of improvement, provides a framework for redesigning this service in a user-centered way, and finally outlines efforts to create such a user-centered ill to meet those needs. interlibrary loan holds a unique place within the suite of services libraries provide. ill is entirely user initiated and driven by demonstrated user need. it provides a mechanism for users to acquire materials they have discovered and determined to be worthy of additional investigation but for which local copy is not available. ill expands the resources available to users to that which can be delivered, not just the contents of the local collection. the modern research library offers a range of services under the ‘resource sharing’ umbrella, including consortial sharing of returnables, interlibrary loan of returnables and non-returnables, and local document delivery operations. the ill process discussed in this article is restricted to ill as a brokered process whereby a library requests and arranges the loan of a physical item for use by an affiliated user. ill practitioners refer to this process as traditional ill of returnables, as the item will be returned to the owning library. scans or reproductions of articles or portions of a work provided from a local collection or by another library fall outside this article’s scope because the workflows for sourcing and providing those items are quite different. this article primarily concentrates on ill between academic libraries, though its recommendations are generalizable to public, medical, and other libraries. historical development ill has a long history as a library service but for most of that history, it was a niche service provided to only a select group of library users, most often faculty members and perhaps graduate students. ill was difficult, time consuming, and required a great deal of staff effort. simply identifying an owning library was a challenge before the introduction of shared computerized catalogs. citations needed careful verification to ensure accuracy, particularly for items created prior to the introduction of the international standard book number (isbn) system in 1968. identifying holdings and ownership represented huge challenges. while tools like the pre-1956 union catalog existed, these were out of date as soon as they were printed. requests were made via mailed paper request forms. the library that owned the item would likely know nothing of the requesting library so the trusted relationships we take for granted had not yet developed. a library might send an item or it might not. an owning library might respond in the negative or it might not. it was at best an arduous process analogous to weaving cloth and sewing garments by hand rather than purchasing ready-made off the rack clothing. the creation of the oclc cooperative in 1967, specifically its shared index of items, provided the opportunity to vastly improve ill processes and workflows. the oclc database, eventually to be known as worldcat, contained one record for a work and libraries that could indicate who owned a copy of that item. it was now possible to identify ownership easily. moreover, this identification could be done in one place with simultaneous citation verification. oclc introduced the first of its interlibrary loan subsystems in 1979 (goldner, birch, 2012, p. 5) because there were now enough item records and holding records in the shared oclc index to support ill processing. over time, additional axillary ill services for library staff were introduced by oclc. for example, a library can provide contact information, address information, and explain what it will and will not lend with any associated costs for these services in the ill policies directory. the oclc ill fee management (ifm) system provides an automated billing system as part of the transaction process. ill became markedly easier to do, or at least portions of the process did. the development of worldcat and other union catalogs made the process of identifying owning libraries and placing requests much easier but these were closed systems with limited functionality. these systems did one thing: placed a request. yet, ill is a multi-part process consisting of many disparate steps that library staff perform. files of request forms require maintenance. users need to be contacted when items arrive or need to be returned. circulating necessitates tracking over time. physical items require packing and shipping. invoices require payment. for the library user, ill is just one of many tools to acquire materials and the user’s interest is accessing the materials, not how the library chooses to source the requested item. users once filled out a paper form which staff keyed into the requesting system. then the user patiently waited until they received a phone call or postcard alerting them that the item had arrived. to be sure, verification and ordering had become easier but the process still involved many handoffs between different systems with minimal communication. easier ordering allowed ill request volumes to increase markedly (goldner, birch, 2012, p. 5). ill management systems were developed to automate the management and tracking of requests over their lifespan in addition to handling communication with users and to circulate the items. illiad is the most common ill management system used today in academic libraries. both owning libraries and requesting libraries came to rely upon these systems to manage requests over their lifespan. request databases replaced file folders. data could be pushed from one system into another. routine tasks, such as sending overdue notices, could be automated. ill had become a standard mainstream expected service rather than the niche one. improved staff processing was not the only driver for increased volume. openurl and other outgrowths of user-facing databases and the ubiquity of the internet made discovery easier (musser, 2016, p. 646). the easy transfer of metadata via openurl increased request volume because users could request items by pressing a button instead of filling out a paper form. the request went into the request database for staff processing. nonetheless, the improvements ill management systems provided remained rooted in ill’s traditional union catalog-based requesting workflows. they focused on making library staff processes to provide items more easily rather than user workflows or needs. issues with the approach and workflows described above are explored below. problems with our current approach a number of issues limit ill service’s usability which in turn limits its effectiveness for both users and library staff. to be sure, ill services are valued by users and play an integral part in the suite of services libraries provide to source materials for users, but it can be improved upon by reconceptualizing the process whereby it is provided. libraries can rethink how the individual parts of the process, be they software or workflow, are put together. areas for reconceptualization fall into five broad categories, and these are discussed below. first, existing systems are based on identifying libraries that own a requested item. but for the purposes of ill, ownership is only the first step in the process. an on-shelf loanable copy must be located because only items that fit these criteria can fill the user’s need. worldcat can tell us who owns an item but what we need is a library that can loan the item. owning libraries, or lenders as ill practitioners call them, still need to perform a search of their local catalog to determine if the item is on shelf and loanable. this involves a time-consuming antiquated manual workflow that fails to take advantage of tools such as z39.50 for automated catalog lookup. workflows have not kept up with technological advancements. consortial borrowing systems, such as relais d2d or vdx, where a group of libraries share a discovery layer that displays availability, mitigate the issue described above but these systems also have a serious shortcoming: they force users to execute the same search in multiple discovery layers to find an available copy. users, having identified an item, cannot simply submit a request and have the library source it for them. rather, libraries expect users to navigate across disparate interfaces with unique request processes to request an item. thus discovery and delivery become a fractured process for users as libraries push the work of finding a loanable copy onto their users. second, identifying owning libraries remains tied to the searching of union catalogs because metadata is not recycled efficiently. a user searches their local library’s discovery tool and finds that an item they want is checked out so they fill out an ill request form populated with metadata from their local discovery tool. library staff, or preferably automated systems, then re-execute a similar search using that same metadata against a larger database to identify potential lending libraries and the request is ported into a different system. since the metadata populating the local discovery tool likely came from worldcat in the first place and that metadata will be used to search against worldcat again, said metadata should be trusted rather than assuming that the citation needs verification by library staff. this is again an antiquated workflow rooted in past practices. third, ill is very much predicated on the terms imposed by the owning library. while the oclc policies directory provides library staff with information about terms of use for borrowed items, the lack of consistent agreed-upon standards for loan periods between libraries creates a situation ripe for confusion on the part of users. again, this harks back to an era where ill was rare, difficult, and unique rather than the current situation where ill is a standard service. too much emphasis is placed on unique locally defined rules rather than on setting broadly agreed-upon standards or considering users’ needs for materials. fourth, the process uses siloed systems with weak integrations and poor interoperability. discovery happens in one system. requests are managed in a separate ill management system which ties to an external ordering system for sourcing items. when the item arrives at the borrowing library, these respective systems must be updated but then the item needs to be handled as a circulation likely in a separate system again or in a system separate from the one that manages the user’s loans for locally owned materials. yes, the systems can communicate between each other but this process is staff intensive and lacking in automation. crosswalks, bridges, and information exchange protocols are not employed fully or efficiently. finally and most importantly, providing ill services is predicated on library processes or library tools rather than user processes or needs. users must learn and jump between disparate systems, often with jarring handoffs, to acquire materials. depending on how the item is sourced by the library for the user, they need to find the system where the library has chosen to process that request. communication is scant. it comes from different systems and mostly consists of silence until a pick up notification is sent. this confusing process is followed by inconsistent rules surrounding use based on the lending library’s terms of use. usability studies have demonstrated how this confuses users (foran, 2015, p. 6). presented with multiple, often contradictory delivery options, and unclear explanations of the differences between them, users tend to place requests in each system in the hopes that one will work. not only is this poor customer service, but it also increases staff workloads and costs for the library with duplicated work. why? because libraries define ill success as having acquired a copy for the user. the user’s needs—required turnaround time, format, amount of time they will need the item or even its relative importance to them for intended use of it—are secondary, when even considered. libraries need to gain a better understanding of how ill fits into the user’s activities and how they can more effectively support those activities. ill needs to be borrower-centered not lender-centered. in many ways the issues outlined above are a natural outcome of a service’s evolution over time and the result of a fairly stable ecosystem that expanded gradually over time. the foundational systems which undergird the service were able to absorb the increased request volume and processes simply continued without redesign or rethinking. yet the environment in which the service exists is evolving rapidly and the time for a radical rethinking of the technology used to support the service workflows and metrics for success is here. recommendations for developing an alternative framework at the international illiad conference in march 2016, katie birch of oclc announced that oclc intended to “move illiad to the cloud”. far more than any other change in ill processing or systems, including the introduction of worldshare ill, this announcement shook the foundations of academic library ill in the united states. we were presented the opportunity to reimagine how we provide ill services. we began to ask the question “what should the ill workflows be?” how could we make them more user-centered rather than continuing the historic workflows mandated by vendor-supplied platforms? concurrently and partially in response to this announcement the big ten academic alliance (btaa), previously known as the center for institutional cooperation (cic), embarked on a project to explore, redefine, document, and share a user-centered discovery to delivery process. the project’s goal was to describe an easy-to-understand user experience that shielded them from the disparate library staff systems and provided a more linear discovery to resource delivery process. usability studies confirmed library staff members’ impression that the process was confusing and disjointed to users (big, 2016, pp. 19-22; big, 2017b, pp. 19-21). cooperatively with ivies plus libraries and the greater western library association (gwla), we defined base requirements and system functionalities for a new user centered vision of ill. a one page summary document entitled “next generation discovery to delivery: a vision” was released in february of 2017. staff from btaa libraries, including the author of this article, wrote two reports entitled “a vision for next generation resource delivery” and “next generation resource delivery: management system and ux functional requirements”. these works, in part, inform the three broad recommendations outlined below, described as: user process, technological, and cultural. to start, the library tools that support the users’ processes must be based upon their workflows rather than the processes library systems staff use to manage that work. where in the past a user interface was tacked onto a library staff system, this should no longer be the case. users deserve a simple universal request mechanism, a “get it” button (foran, 2015, p. 5) that connects to a smart fulfillment system (big, 2017b, p. 9). requests should display in a single dashboard-like interface that allows users to manage all their library interactions in one place (big, 2017b, p. 9). no longer should users be expected to hunt across disparate library system interfaces to locate their request for that specific item. achieving this requires that we rethink how we, library staff, present library systems to users. since the primary local discovery layer is the user’s primary entry point into the library and the place where they manage their library interactions, this interface needs to be the place where we display all request information to them. thus, vendors who provide discovery layer tools must make them open and capable of incorporating data from external sources so we can provide users a unified display. they should be shielded from systems libraries use to perform their work of fulfilling requests. users need items and which library staff process is invoked is immaterial to them. getting the item is paramount. this notion must inform how libraries design, combine, and present their backroom systems to our customers. second, delivery of an available on-shelf loanable copy to the user who needs it and made the effort to ask for it is what matters, not identifying owning libraries. ill loans are simply more complicated circulations. discovery tools should be separated from discovery options as these two do not need to be interconnected. the metadata from discovery is all that is needed to initiate delivery. request should be managed via a lightweight system specifically designed around the efficient and timely fulfillment of that user’s request with user satisfaction serving as the primary metric for defining success. the btaa reports named this new idea “resource delivery management system” (rdms) (big, 2017b, p. 12). working off a list of potential partner libraries maintained and defined in the rdms, a simple z39.50 search using that recycled metadata should identify a potential lending partner and when a loanable copy is found, a request should be placed via ncip with routing and courier tracking/shipping information included in the rdms’s request record. circulations of ill items should occur in the local library services platform (lsp) so users can managed all loans regardless of how they are sourced in one place. the ideas above, in many ways, represent a somewhat radical break from past processes or practices. they decouple sourcing of materials from a shared index. instead, they are based on library-defined partnerships and the identification of a loanable copy at a partner. moreover, this approach promotes interoperability across different systems as the request is not tied to any legacy or monolithic system. multiple micro-systems each play a part to complete a multistep process. finally, it limits the functional scope of the rdms to just the management of delivery, avoiding the current problem of (often subpar) duplication of functionality across systems. while no such system as described above exists, potential development is under exploration by vendors. the ideas outlined above further move us from the current siloed systems to one where integrations are central and key and where the best, most appropriate system, manages or provides the required information (big, 2017a, p. 1). thus, the local lsp handles all aspects of notification, circulation, and fines or blocks. viewing this as a process consisting of many parts also allows us to reimagine it so that we can incorporate other previously excluded information such as shipping status derived from the ups or fedex apis. additional communications to users about the status of their request should be included too. companies provide these updates on orders and shipping as a matter of course so libraries can also. users reasonably expect them. authoritative sources, rather than poorly duplicated ones, should be called upon to provide information as needed. local address information sourced from that campus identity management system, for example. this system consists of many parts communicating with each other via protocols using apis when needed. binding their collective parts together with each assigned a specific task provides a new framework for the workaday provisioning of ill services. technology is easy to change. culture is more difficult, particularly entrenched library policies. these policies’ efficacy at guiding user behavior and promoting shared stewardship of materials is almost never tested. yet, users and library staff are both equally engaged in the management of loaned items. libraries need to embrace the early slogan of the rethinking resources sharing initiative, “throw down your policies and embrace your collections” and libraries need to manage this sharing efficiently in a data-driven way. it is important to remember that users need materials to complete their work. the use of materials by users is predicated upon their need, associated timeline, and perceived value of the item. as the big ten academic alliance has stressed, “all that matters is format, time to delivery, loan period, and costs to the patron, if any” (big, 2016, p. 9). these items have value to the user. they put effort into acquiring them. ill is entirely user-driven unlike many other library processes. arbitrary loan periods as set by any owning lending library may and in fact do come into conflict with users’ needs (foran, 2015, p. 4). libraries can resolve these conflicts easily by moving to standardized loan periods for ill. standards should replace the boutique exceptionality encouraged by the oclc policies directory. stated differently, the emphasis needs to shift from lender-imposed restrictions to borrowing libraries having the ability to communicate standard policies. for example, the btaa shared twelve week loan period, when complemented by the equivalent northwestern university local loan period, coupled with user blocks and assessment of replacement cost fines after thirty days provide a consistent user experience that, in turn, encourages the timely return of items. for example, only 29 of 29,137 total ill loans were lost by northwestern university users in 2016. this example demonstrates how consistent policies promote compliance. why? because they are both easy to understand and failure to comply with communicated expectations has direct consequences, specifically the loss of library privileges. further, research done by the ivies plus libraries demonstrates that almost all items are returned to the owning library after the user has completed their use of said item. only 70 items of roughly 750,000 over three years were truly lost by patrons or never returned. this data clearly demonstrates the need to rethink policies across libraries and reconsider shared assumptions. in other words, the emphasis needs to be on understanding user behavior based on their needs and developing effective ways to affect their behavior to achieve agreed upon reasonable outcomes. libraries must also shift from their historic lender-centric ill system to one where an ill user receives an item and national standards provide them a consistent easy-to-understand experience. this would promote an environment where borrowing libraries can more effectively manage their users. appropriate effective tools, tested by data, are needed. ineffective tools need to be discarded, like overdue notices via email from the lending library to the ill borrowing staff. these will never affect user behavior. making the process easier for users to understand in terms of policy is critical. the introduction of standardized loan periods, replacement costs, and the like across libraries would simplifying the management of ill for both users and library staff. it would also greatly assist in achieving compliance and reducing (often pointless) staff work. rather than starting with the question of which library system can perform a specific job, we need to rethink this process and backfill the appropriate system, library or other, from the starting point: the initial discovery and request by the user. the btaa phrased this as smart fulfillment. smart fulfillment is a linear path for users to follow where effective automated handoffs between library systems source and manage requests from or in the most appropriate place. conclusion ill has grown from a niche service to an expected standard one, growing 129% between 1991 and 2015 in arl libraries (arl, 2016). yet workflows and system integrations have not evolved as much as they should have in response to this growth. a confluence of announcements and work to redefine processes now presents libraries with a unique opportunity to rethink ill, transition from legacy practices, and to unify the fractured discovery to delivery process we present to our users. if we integrate library systems and systems that support library systems differently, and effectively leverage each system’s strength, we can create an easy-to-use service that meets demonstrated user needs. we can provide a service that provides smart fulfilment of requests and improves both the user and staff experience. this should be our goal. the author wishes to extend his deepest thanks to heidi nance, director of resource sharing initiatives for the ivy plus libraries, for her willingness to review this article, apply her deep knowledge of ill while doing so, and for the thoughtful comments and suggestions. thank you, heidi. references association of research libraries. (2016). arl statistics 2014-15. association of research libraries. retrieved from http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/service-trends.pdf big ten academic alliance. (2016). a vision for next generation resource delivery. retrieved from https://www.btaa.org/docs/default-source/library/d2dnov2016report.pdf?sfvrsn=4 big ten academic alliance. (2017a). next generation discovery to delivery system: a vision. retrieved from https://www.btaa.org/docs/default-source/library/discoverysystemsvisiononepage.pdf?sfvrsn=2 big ten academic alliance. (2017b). next generation resource delivery: management system and ux functional requirements. retrieved from http://www.btaa.org/docs/default-source/library/next-generation-resource-delivery–functional-requirements.pdf foran, k. (2015). “new zealand library patron expectations of an interloan service.” new zealand library & information management journal. 55(3), 3-9. https://lianza.org.nz/nzlimj-volume-55-no-3-october-2015 goldner, m., & birch, k. (2012). “resource sharing in a cloud computing age.” interlending & document supply, 40(1), 4-11. https://doi.org/10.1108/02641611211214224 musser, l., & coopey, b. (2016). “impact of a discovery system on interlibrary loan.” college & research libraries. 77(5), 643-653. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.77.5.643 stapel, j. (2016). “interlibrary loan and document supply in the netherlands.” interlending & document supply. 44(3), 104-107., https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds-03-2016-0015 interlibrary loan, interlibrary services, resource sharing, technology without foundations, we can’t build: information literacy and the need for strong school library programs scholarship as an open conversation: utilizing open peer review in information literacy instruction 4 responses luke m 2018–04–03 at 8:27 pm hi kurt, an interesting insight into how ill operates in north american libraries! the thing that stood out the most as a difference between us and australian ill systems (if i have read your paper correctly), is the onus placed on users to find out which libraries hold the item they want and send separate requests to each institution or public library service. i think the libraries australia document delivery system (ladd), managed by the national library of australia could prove a good model for a more user friendly experience. australian and new zealander users can search for an item across the national bibliographic database. once they identify that an item exists in australia or new zealand, they can simply ‘get it’. you can view the database for yourself here – https://librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au/search/simplesearch?action=login&mode=login&main=true&querystring=null . depending on the rarity of an item or where it is held, there may be a fee charged for the item, but many public libraries will supply an item for free. the request is mediated by a librarian at the library they belong to, who double checks for availability of an item then forwards the request on to every holding library on the users behalf. this is managed by a rota, so the ill officers at holding libraries will see the requests one at a time until someone can fulfill it. in this way a request can often be fulfilled withing about 5 – 10 days. this is how it works in a public library in queensland anyway, the process could be a bit different for academic libraries. this paper from the national library of australia goes into some more detail about how ladd works – https://www.nla.gov.au/content/libraries-australia-document-delivery-a-system-for-a-variety-of-users hope this is of interest! luke m 2018–04–03 at 8:34 pm i have incorrectly addressed my comment to heidi rather than the author. sorry kurt! could the moderators please amend this? kurt munson 2018–04–04 at 9:58 am the national bibliographic database is like to oclc’s worldcat for the us. remember that there is no equivalent national database for the united states, a key difference. our’s is a much more distributed system where we start with a local system, often for one library only, and then move out from that in concentric circles of fulfillment systems ending with oclc’s worldshareill. a kay 2019–03–13 at 11:02 pm totally agree with kurt. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: these are a few of our favorite things – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 17 dec editorial board, brett bonfield, cecily walker, ellie collier, erin dorney and hugh rundle /2 comments editorial: these are a few of our favorite things “darlington bookplate” image by louis rhead, 1902 (cc by 2.0) in our last editorial of the year, the in the library with the lead pipe editorial board is looking back at 2014. as we did in early january, we’re sharing some of our favorite non-lead pipe articles, essays, speeches, or posts from the previous twelve months. by editorial board, brett bonfield, cecily walker, ellie collier, erin dorney and hugh rundle brett in honor of lead pipe’s new status as a cc-by journal, i’m only considering works published in journals that have adopted cc-by licensing. evviva weinraub lajoie, trey terrell, susan mcevoy, eva kaplan, ariel schwartz, and esther ajambo. using open source tools to create a mobile optimized, crowdsourced translation tool. code4lib journal, 24. how badass is this project? too badass to format its citation correctly. it would be a crime to et al anyone associated with this article or even obscure their names by lastname, firstnaming them, because what they’ve done and how they’ve written it up fills me with hope for libraries, library journals, and open source technology, and even an extra jolt of hope for the world. a team of 2.5 ftes and 4 student employees at oregon state university libraries & press teamed with maria’s libraries, a nonprofit that works in rural kenya to, well, do what the paper says. one challenge, other than the ones related to technological infrastructure and money: 40 spoken languages. when people ask if libraries are still relevant, tell them this story. and it’s not like the library and press at oregon state isn’t busy serving its own students, too. among other things, they’re publishing open textbooks, and writing up that project beautifully as well (see below). also, be sure to read kristina spurgin’s, “getting what we paid for: a script to verify full access to e-resources,” and kelley mcgrath’s superb editorial introduction to issue 26, “on being on the code4lib journal editorial committee.” browning, r. creating an online television archive, 1987–2013. international journal of digital curation, 9(1), 1-11. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.288 lagoze, c. ebird: curating citizen science data for use by diverse communities. international journal of digital curation, 9(1), 71-82. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.302 robinson, a. from princess to punk: digitisation in the fashion studio. international journal of digital curation, 9(1), 292-312. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.269 the international journal of digital curation is a great journal! i don’t know why i hadn’t encountered it before researching this year-end write-up, though now i’m going to make it a point to read through its archives. the journal’s papers and articles are all so interesting and well written that i refuse to limit myself to  just one. do yourself a favor. read all three. maxwell, j., & armen, h. dreams reoccurring: the craft of the book in the age of the web. journal of electronic publishing, 17(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0017.125 the money quote: “a big part of what makes books and book culture loveable and compelling is the craft of the book. publishing is of course an industrial activity—it is perhaps the very prototype for industrial activity. and in literature there is, of course, art. but craft is a third category in between. beyond storytelling, beyond reaching an audience, beyond filtering and curating and marketing, there is also the business of making things. and especially: making things that last.” even without the hüsker dü allusion in the title or the frank chimero quote in the text itself, i would have found myself nodding appreciatively throughout this essay. i think we can take it as given that there is more good stuff to read now than at any time in history, almost certainly by multiple orders of magnitude. but i’m not convinced there’s more great stuff, perhaps because the mechanisms that encourage “more good” simultaneously discourage, and possibly even punish, great. royster, p. foxes propose new guidelines for henhouse design: comments on niso’s proposed open access metadata standards. journal of librarianship and scholarly communication, 2(3). http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1170 and i quote, “frankly, the publishers need to put their house in order before presuming to prescribe new metadata standards that will perpetuate their uneven and self-serving administration of the rights they have wrested from the academic laboring class.” hallelujah! also, be sure to read micah vandegrift and josh bolick, “‘free to all’: library publishing and the challenge of open access,” and (as i alluded to above) shan sutton and faye chadwell, “open textbooks at oregon state university: a case study of new opportunities for academic libraries and university presses.” real, b., bertot, j. c., jaeger, p. t. rural public libraries and digital inclusion: issues and challenges. information technology and libraries, 33(1), 6-24. rock solid scholarship on an important, overlooked topic. the kind of article ital does well. cecily the pieces i’ve chosen aren’t academic in nature, but each resonated deeply for a variety of reasons. joy, erica. the other side of diversity. medium, 4 nov 2014. diversity in tech workforces was a hot issue this year, what with the rise of #gamergate and the continued efforts of blacks and other people of colour to draw attention to the lack of ethnic diversity in tech companies. erica joy’s article grabbed my attention because she wrote poignantly about how it feels to be “the only” minority in the room, and the bargains we must make with ourselves and others to exist in these spaces. making your way never comes without a price, and joy writes about this clearly and unflinchingly. west, jessamyn. things that make the librarian angry. medium, 12 dec 2014. when a piece begins with the quote “enforcing artificial scarcity is a bad role for a public institution,” public librarians can’t help but take notice. jessamyn west argues that the deals that libraries make with publishers to provide ebooks to patrons results in cognitive dissonance for professionals who talk reverently of easy access to information and intellectual freedom. west admits that being a librarian who provides access to drm-protected materials places her in a personal moral quandary. she suggests that the solution to this problem may rest with intellectual workers daring to step forward and challenging these restrictions. ellie not especially relating to libraries in any way, but i have been absolutely loving the rise of makeup tutorials as social commentary. see megan mackay’s ray rice inspired makeup tutorial and jian ghomeshi inspired makeup tutorial and tadelesmith’s gamergate makeup tutorial. i would love to read more on this phenomenon. sarah wanenchak, apple’s health app: where’s the power? in line with recent discussions about whether libraries/librarians are capable of being neutral, and whether neutral is even a desirable goal, this article discussed how design cannot be neutral because it will always reflect the designers’ assumptions. “the design of things – pretty much all things – reflects assumptions about what kind of people are going to be using the things, and how those people are going to use them. that means that design isn’t neutral. design is a picture of inequality, of systems of power and domination both subtle and not. apple didn’t consider what people with eating disorders might be dealing with; that’s ableism. apple didn’t consider what menstruating women might need to do with a health app; that’s sexism.” see also, astra taylor and joanne mcneil, the dads of tech #critlib twitter chats i reactivated my twitter account just to follow/participate in these. fantastic librarians having really important conversations “about critical perspectives on library practice.” nashville library, all about the books, no trouble ending on a cute note: “our nashville public library team celebrates library cards in this adaptation of meghan trainor’s performance of “all about that bass,” as seen on the tonight show with jimmy fallon. we had a little bit of fun showcasing how easily nashvillians can borrow, download and stream books, music and movies with a free library card.” emily it seems like my picks are always about the big picture. i blame it on my reaction to the “in the weeds” nature of librarians, and my need to step back, reflect, and think beyond the walls of what i know and with which i am comfortable. critical journeys: how 14 librarians came to embrace critical practice by robert schroder. library juice press, 2014 through 14 interviews, bob schroeder1 captures current thinking and reflection about critical theory from a diversity of librarians.  what i love so much about this book is that an interview with a relatively new-to-the-profession librarian, dave ellenwood, exists side-by-side with established career librarians and theorists such as john buschman. (i stumbled upon buschman’s dismantling the public sphere while researching a paper in library school, and have since been trying to remain tied to theory in my practice.) throughout the interviews many themes emerge: the woefully poor job library schools do in incorporating critical theory into their curricula; the reflective balance needed to put theory into practice; and a commitment on behalf of these librarians to improve their communities through engagement with critical ideas. additionally, i am impressed that bob has taken traditional scholarship (as defined by traditional promotion and tenure committees) and morphed it into a series of stories and relationships. as librarians i don’t think we take enough time to learn from one another in the way that bob has presented his work. it is evident that his approach to learn from these individuals is very much indebted to his engagement with and immersion in indigenous research methods. this book and the librarians featured in it ask us to reflect on our own practice, and hopefully will inspire future readers as the individuals featured in it have inspired me as i read. lawrence, eton. “strategic thinking: a discussion paper.” research directorate, public service commission of canada (1999). so what’s a 15-year-old white paper doing on my list? this year, as with every year, the library where i work is trying to plan. the problem is libraries in general seem to approach planning crisis aversion with little forethought. our roadblocks to progress are seemingly endless, yet if we cannot position ourselves beyond implementing band-aids of temporary staffing, covering the costs of journal inflation, and servilely reacting to the needs and whims of boards, university presidents, other administrative leaders, and the individuals we serve, we are positioning ourselves for obsolescence. lawrence’s paper outlines how to think strategically: “…strategic thinking involves thinking and acting within a certain set of assumptions and potential action alternatives as well as challenging existing assumptions and action alternatives, potentially leading to new and more appropriate ones” (p. 4). i’d say that as librarians and libraries we’re not good at doing this. this paper proffers food for thought for all of us. send it it your boss and your boss’s boss today. wheelahan, l. (2007). how competency‐based training locks the working class out of powerful knowledge: a modified bernsteinian analysis. british journal of sociology of education, 28(5), 637–651. doi:10.1080/01425690701505540 because of the work i’ve been doing this year on the internally grant funded digital badges for creativity and critical thinking project at my institution, i’ve been thinking a lot about learning outcomes, how to integrate library learning outcomes and content into courses, and generally how to improve students’ critical thinking skills. as such, i’ve spent a portion of the year reading literature in this arena, and yet, i’m bothered by what seems to be an acknowledged theme and concern about competency-based education: the neoliberalization of it. yet there doesn’t seem to be that much concern by the library profession about this trend as a whole.2 (maybe we’re too concerned with staffing band-aids and budget cuts to reflect on this dangerous trend affecting education as a whole?) leesa wheelahan’s paper (and further, her 2012 book, why knowledge matters to curriculum) outlines for me some serious concerns i have about the growing learning outcomes or competency-based approach to education, and yet i remain passionate about learning outcomes. wheelahan’s analysis has made me reflective and concerned: how can i work with learning outcomes, improve students’ skills and critical thinking, but also empower students at the same time? wheelahan contends that competency-based educational approaches, rather than liberating students, keeps students locked into the same social and economic power structures in which they currently exist. competency-based approaches do not liberate and empower students, they merely reinforce existing social and economic standing, and deny students access to critical knowledge, discovery, empowerment, and transformation. as a profession, we are late to engage with these ideas. erin i’m on a leave of absence from my position as a librarian this academic year, so i took a step away from library literature. here are some other things i came across: rodenberg, ryan m. a law professor walks into a creative writing workshop. pacific standard magazine. 16 sep 2014. so much academic writing is awful, awful, awful. rodenberg nails it with his suggestion: “first, tenure-track assistant professors in the sciences and professional programs should be actively encouraged to take at least one creative non-fiction writing workshop during their pre-tenure period… if professors are to have any chance of being anything even close to a quasi-public intellectual, this should be mandatory. a poorly written academic article on an already-esoteric topic is destined to have zero impact.” cohen-rottenberg, rachel. 10 questions about why ableist language matters, answered. everyday feminism. 7 nov 2014. this article was originally published in 2013, but i didn’t see it until it was crossposted in november of this year. reading the piece opened my eyes to the different ways language is used as a tool of oppression, and i have been thinking about it ever since. king, andrew david. the weight of what’s left [out]: six contemporary erasurists on their craft. the kenyon review blog. 6 nov 2012. yes, yes, it was published in 2012… but this is so my jam and i just came across the interview this year. erasure poems are created by removing words from an existing text and framing the result on the page as a poem. this craft interview between king and six writers has further grounded my own work—i am currently working on a manuscript of erasure poems sourced from shia labeouf media interviews. house, naomi. why i quit my library job and why i no longer want one. inalj. 29 july 2014. as always, house is inspiring and level-headed. her post was one of the things that prompted me to think long and hard about my own career options, encouraging me to take a leap into the unknown. schwartz, tony, and porath, christine. why you hate work. the new york times sunday review. 30 may 2014. i have… thoughts about the way we work. as i have grappled with these thoughts over the last year, i have sought out different perspectives on why i might be feeling dissatisfied or disengaged. it’s heartening to know that i’m not the only one encountering unsustainable work models—and that there are things we can all do better. a good read for any supervisor or manager. thompson, derek. quit your job. the atlantic. 5 nov 2014. “…young people aren’t any more likely to quit today than they were in the 1970s or 1980s. but once they leave, young people today are more likely to try out an entirely new job.” this article kind of blew my mind. hugh edson, michael peter. dark matter. medium, 19 may 2014. in this piece michael peter edson compares online engagement in the glam sector to astrophysics when vera rubin discovered ‘dark matter’ in the 1960s. focussing particularly on museums, edson powerfully argues that whilst we may feel that digitisation, online engagement, and the sharing of data have come a long way in the last two or three decades, in reality we are barely starting: despite the best efforts of some of our most visionary and talented colleagues, we’ve been building, investing, and focusing on only a small part of what the internet can do to help us accomplish our missions. 90% of the universe is made of dark matter—hard to see, but so forceful that it seems to move every star, planet, and galaxy in the cosmos. and 90% of the internet is made up of dark matter too—hard for institutions to see, but so forceful that it seems to move humanity itself. what i like about this piece is that edson is not criticising or sniping. rather, he argues that there are enormous untapped opportunities for museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions to further our missions by embracing the open and read-write nature of the web. edson tells the story of rubin’s discovery as a way of sharing the excitement and wonder she felt, and the advances that became possible once her discovery was confirmed. markman, chris & zavras, constantine. bittorrent and libraries: cooperative data publishing, management and discovery. d-lib magazine, march/april 2014. in this article markman and zavras explain how the bittorrent protocol works, and argue that it provides huge opportunities for libraries to increase both efficiency and openness. whilst i’m certainly no bittorrent expert, this article makes it easy to understand the principles. markman and zavras point out that bittorrent is extremely efficient at transferring data (this is one of the reasons it is favoured by people downloading large video files), making it ideal for libraries with slow or poor quality internet connections, or with large data transfer needs. other opportunities are less obvious, but just as useful. from diy lockss to better analytics, markman and zavras provide plenty of intriguing reasons to take a look at bittorrent—and none of them involve game of thrones. song, steve. the morality of openness. many possibilities, 19 june 2014. language matters. in june, steve song highlighted the problems with ‘openness’ as a goal. song argues that whilst open access to information is important, most of the time what people really want is something slightly different. his post resonated with me, as an open-access advocate who works for local government. those who argue for completely transparent government are often also the same people who complain that the public service is often inefficient and risk-averse. these are simply two sides of the same coin, however. song argues that often when people say ‘openness’ they really mean ‘trust’. this is an important discussion for those of us working in libraries of all types. your turn what’s the best thing you read in 2014? bob is a co-worker and good colleague of mine. he wrote a series of two articles for lead pipe this year on indigenous research methods: exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a community: part 1 – the leap and exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part ii – the landing. [↩] my search for neolibera* and education in library, information science & technology abstracts retrieved a mere 15 articles, the most relevant of which was joshua beatty’s september 2014 lead pipe article, “locating information literacy within institutional oppression.” [↩] exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part ii – the landing on scholarly communication and the digital humanities: an interview with kathleen fitzpatrick 2 responses elaine harger 2014–12–30 at 8:07 pm the circle, by dave eggers, is the best thing i’ve read in 2014. a cautionary tale of sorts of the potential tyranny of “likes,” 24/7 attachment to social media, and threats to privacy of body-cam/gps/etc. technologies. eggers looks at how we use these technologies now and extrapolates a couple years into our future, telling an engaging story all the while. if i were to recommend an all-librarian-read book for 2015, it’d be this one. now available at your fav indy book store in pbk. emily ford 2015–01–06 at 1:25 pm thanks for the suggestion, elaine! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: what we’ve been up to – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 21 feb editorial board, amy koester, annie pho, bethany radcliffe, denisse solis, ian beilin, kellee warren, ryan randall and sofia leung /0 comments editorial: what we’ve been up to your editors at lead pipe wanted to share some of the things we’ve been working on and thinking about, lead pipe aside. enjoy!   amy one of the projects i work on at my library is the civic lab, a pop-up participatory program initiative centered around facilitating deeper exploration of how our government works, social issues with policy implications, and topics in the news. the civic lab has been an active initiative for a year and a half, and as we’ve continued to iterate this concept we’ve been thinking about and developing strategies to address two key questions that have emerged. first: how do we balance our desire to respond quickly to topics in the news with our desire to provide vetted, curated resources? for most of our pop-ups to date, we’ve planned topics well in advance of the program. that timeline has allowed us to create curated handouts for the topics we’ve discussed, filled with content like key definitions, questions for discussion, and resources for further exploration. if we want to be able to respond to a news topic immediately after it happens, however, we can’t take the time to curate a resource list, format it, put it through proofreading, etc. the result is that we’ve been experimenting with what we’re calling “rapid response” pop-ups, where we show up to talk about a current news item with some civic lab signage, a laptop to be able to dig into topics, and a handout of go-to news sources that is broadly applicable. this standard handout offers multiple avenues for answering questions about emerging news topics, with tips like “for local news stories, start with a local source” and listings of reputable go-to sources for business, science, and political news items. having these handouts available at rapid response pop-ups has allowed us to give a solid resource to participants looking to use more effective strategies for staying informed on any topic, including recent rapid response discussions like immigration legislation and gun violence in schools. second: how do we facilitate participants adopting a more critical lens on the news media they consume? for us, this isn’t about sussing out so-called “fake news.” rather, it’s about helping patrons understand the conventions and ethics of journalism so that they can confidently consume news coverage from any news source. after consulting with a journalism professor friend, we put together a pop-up on the topic “what is journalism? (and what isn’t?)” meant specifically to help patrons think about what is news coverage, what is analysis, and what is opinion content in their chosen news sources. we’re looking to have conversations about how to tell what’s objective coverage regardless of the source, and in the process de-emphasize the subjective analysis and opinion pieces that tend to infuriate rather than inform.   annie there’s a lot of stuff going on for me lately, including finalizing the manuscript that i am co-editing, pushing the margins: women of color and intersectionality in lis. it really takes a lot of work to edit a book and this process has taught me a lot about what goes into it. that being said, it also has taken up a lot of my time and cognitive energy. the other night, i was texting my friend about how i constantly feel like i’m behind on everything, but then i realize that perhaps i am really doing too much. my friend replied “we need to learn to do less and that it’s okay. we’re still awesome people and professionals” which maybe sounds simple, but for many women of color (woc) librarians i know, this is a really difficult message to internalize and accept. i’ve been thinking a lot about woc librarians and labor, especially in reflecting on fobazi ettarh’s article about vocational awe and how it relates to mental health and burn out. veronica arrellano’s latest on humblebrags, guilt, and professional insecurities also resonated with me as i have been grappling with my own physical and mental health and making sure that i am taking time for myself outside of work. all of this seems timely, because this week is also lis mental health week (feb 19-23, 2018) and there’s a host of things happening in conjunction with the week, including a twitter chat on feb 22 at 2 pm pst / 4 pm cst / 5 pm est / 10 pm utc with the hashtag #lismentalhealth, as well as a zine that you can purchase with all proceeds going to mental health first aid.   bethany as a library director, i’m realizing the importance of grant writing to support projects that fall outside of my day-to-day operating budget. so, that’s what i’ve been spending a lot of time doing over the past few months. ivy tech community college columbus has offered faculty/staff the opportunity to apply for internal mini grants to support student retention and learning. last semester i applied for a grant to fund my library’s columbus past, present & future series, which was aimed at highlighting our community’s past and expectations for the future. i was a recipient of one of those grants, which put the needed wind in my sails to apply for another mini grant last month. i received that one as well and am now in the process of purchasing kindles that i’ll be loading bestseller titles on in the next few weeks. these will be available for checkout to my constituents, as well as the other institutional partners that reside on my campus – iupuc and purdue polytechnic. with the help of our grants office in indy, i applied for a sparks! grant through the institution of museum and library services (imls) towards the beginning of february. if we are selected for this grant, it will help fund an entrepreneurial space for students, faculty and staff, as well as the columbus community. we’re hoping to incorporate new furniture layouts and conduct business workshops that would be offered by faculty at ivy tech, iupuc, and purdue polytechnic. grant writing has always terrified me. i’ve always worried that i wouldn’t be able to articulate my library’s mission/vision in a way that would compel granting bodies to give. i’m learning to take risks, however, and it’s an exciting time to learn how the grants office at my institution can support and coach me through the process. if you are looking for a way to offer new services and resources outside of your annual budget, don’t let the fear of not being a good writer or a lack of grant knowledge stop you! chances are you have a grants office available to you too and you may be months away from securing your first grant too!   denisse in october of last year, after having been a cataloger for three and a half years, i started my first full time, faculty status, reference librarian position. it has been an exciting adventure so far to shift gears and put into practice ideas i had been collecting as an mlis student. some were simple, such as creating a book display and purchasing more books by people of color, but my main purpose, to support students and student organizations is a slow and steady process. it will take time and relationship building. meanwhile, i am creating a contest for national library week and delving into the world of student outreach and library marketing. additionally, two colleagues and i began working a 60 minute presentation, our first, about professional development and career advice for our state library association’s annual conference. it has caused a great deal of reflection about this profession, my place in it, and my identity. i am also working on a poster proposal about languages, libraries, and communities. this means i will be traveling to several conferences this year, the first of which was ala midwinter where junot díaz asked a question that i think we all need to pause and consider. he asked the audience if during these conferences there is ever a day of remembrance, to remember the history of libraries and “recommended that every year we recognize the history of segregation as it relates to libraries. every year, we must remind ourselves from which we come. at the heart of decolonization is to remember.” since then i have been thinking about how ala as an organization can have a day of remembrance and do justice to its equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives.   ian i recently attended the two-day symposium “libraries in the context of capitalism” at the metropolitan library council of new york, which was keynoted by barbara fister. fister’s presentation set the tone for much of the following proceedings: a hopefulness that rested on a trenchant, unsentimental, and sober(ing) view of libraries’ place in north american history and society. fister reminded us that north american libraries were , from their origins, institutions of social control. although she did not explicitly say so, she implied that they continue to be, depending on the roles that librarians wish to play in either furthering the aims of settler colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and economic exploitation or resisting these structural features of our society and culture. all of the panels, presentation, discussions, and activities that followed explored a wide variety of ways that we can do the latter. you can read fister’s reflections on the symposium here. among the highlights of the conference for me was a presentation by carrie salazar entitled “using the library to empower diverse community college students.” salazar described the various ways that she prioritizes and centers the needs of marginalized students in her library, as well as the strategies she uses to communicate with them and to earn their trust. she also described the ways that she tries to deemphasize her role as an authority figure whose presence intimidates or constrains students’ research behaviors; in particular, she noted how positioning the librarian as content ‘expert’ can have a negative impact, and she suggested a more supportive and productive (and radical) approach in which the librarian treats the students as the experts. another presentation that i hope will find broader circulation soon was roxanne shirazi’s “rethinking value in academic libraries.” this rich and suggestive talk began with a reminder from the leap manifesto: “public scarcity in times of unprecedented private wealth is a manufactured crisis.” such manufactured crises are also created, or echoed, by library administrators, often ignoring both librarians and patrons in the process. the reason for this, shirazi argued, is that library work is a form of domestic labor upon which capitalism depends and which it exploits and devalues. academic capitalism has generated a literature on academic value, but shirazi found that it tellingly never mentions libraries or librarians, underscoring the invisibility of library labor. the appropriate response to this situation, shirazi suggested, is to carry on the struggle for professional autonomy.   kellee our special collections library just wrapped up hosting a research day for the chicago metro history fair. the history fair provides an opportunity for middle and high school students to participate in historical research, and a statewide competition. there are several libraries and archives around chicago that host a research day for the students, and the special collections library at university of illinois at chicago is one of them. during research day, students are able to learn how to locate, evaluate and use secondary and archival resources for their projects. before i accepted my current position, i didn’t know that i would be working with middle and high school students for four to six months out of the year. as with post-secondary students, middle and high school students are at varying levels of skill when it comes to research planning and strategy. some work independently, while others work in a group of three. some are more serious than others, but they all have the opportunity to engage with historical documents and rare books. working with the students takes a lot of patience, but i am glad that many of the students are african american and other students of color because that is one of my goals as a professional; to introduce students of color to archival materials, and to complicate history with them. i am also currently working on a few research ideas and proposals, and plan to attend a few professional conferences this year.   ryan the biggest change we’ve made about instruction at my library lately has been “flipping” the lower-order components of our one-shot sessions. our faculty took to the term “badges,” so we’ve run with that for the combo of videos, tutorials, and quizzes that students do prior to working with a librarian in classes. we started out with the three courses we visit most frequently and we’re building out from there. flipping the lower-order parts of instruction has given us the time to do more engaging and reflective activities with students in class, making the visits more compelling and memorable for everyone involved. at the 2017 acrl washington & oregon joint conference back in mid-october i saw a number of great panels. two that i still think of weekly are from fellow community colleges. jennifer snoek-brown and candice watkin gave an inspiring presentation on all the ways that tacoma community college has been integrating oer into their library. samantha hines from peninsula college gave a great talk about learning from failure around diversity in the library profession, which she’s apparently just published a version of with pnla quarterly.   sofia over the past year, i’ve been doing a lot of reading and absorbing of various talks, workshops, and presentations to help me envision a new teaching and learning program at my library with social justice as our end goal. something that’s come up repeatedly is this notion of the stories we tell ourselves and how that influences how we behave, the worlds or systems we create or hold on to, and how we move through those worlds or systems. a workshop i attended in january of this year, unleashing alternative futures: constructing new worlds through imagination, narrative, and radical hope, clarified much of this for me when the wonderful facilitators defined world building as a paradigm shift and a way of making space for new perspectives or world views. whose global village?, by ramesh srinivasan, discusses how enlightenment and colonialist ideas have led to a series of myths that have heavily influenced the way we view and develop technology: “…the way we choose to historicize technology, most notably the internet, shapes our beliefs and assumptions about what it can be. creation myths shape visions of the future” (p. 30). this, in conjunction with linda tuhiwai smith’s decolonizing methodologies, which fellow librarian, vani natajaran, recommended to me, are helping me deconstruct the foundations of our very euro-centric systems of organizing and defining knowledge. how do we teach this to our students while also empowering them to envision new paths forward (the way the alternative futures workshop asks us)? how do i prepare my colleagues to teach this to our students? have thoughts on this? get in touch! i would love to talk to other folks as i continue to struggle with these questions and develop my thoughts around these heavy ideas. editorial spotlight on digital government information preservation: examining the context, outcomes, limitations, and successes of the datarefuge movement without foundations, we can’t build: information literacy and the need for strong school library programs this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: diy library culture and the academy – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 3 apr emily ford, kim leeder, erin dorney, micah vandegrift and editorial board /16 comments editorial: diy library culture and the academy in brief: in this editorial, in the library with the lead pipe editorial board members erin dorney, emily ford, kim leeder, and micah vandegrift discuss their upcoming panel presentation that will take place at the acrl 2013 national conference in indianapolis. the panel, with the same title as this editorial, will address what we believe constitutes do-it-yourself (diy) library culture, its presence in academia, and its implications for the future of librarianship. we conclude by asking readers to contribute your voices and ideas to the discussion by blogging, tweeting, youtubing, and attending the event in person. be sure to tag your remarks with #diylib and, if tweeting, mention @libraryleadpipe. photo by flickr user john manyjohns (cc by-nd 2.0) by emily ford, kim leeder, erin dorney, micah vandegrift, and editorial board introduction librarianship has seen a groundswell of innovative do-it-yourself (diy) activity in recent years. projects have popped up here and there; creative, independent efforts with the goal of solving problems, increasing effectiveness, and making positive change in the field. take, for instance, library juice press, the library as incubator project, the blended librarian webcast, and ala’s library lab. we see our own blog-turned-journal, in the library with the lead pipe, as a diy effort. diy projects are shiny and exciting (and time-consuming), but to what end? for academic librarians this diy culture is closely tied with professional development and scholarship, but what does it say about the future of the academic library profession? this is a question we propose to answer in a panel session at the acrl national conference this month. the panel, with the same title as this editorial, will address what we believe constitutes diy library culture, its presence in academia, and its implications for the future of librarianship. however, we wanted to “flip” the presentation, take it out of the box, and shake it around a little, so we’re sharing our content in advance of the conference in this editorial. what this means is that instead of spending our hour in indianapolis presenting content, we can focus on conversation and interaction to explore the issue together and showcase a variety of voices and perspectives (now that sounds pretty diy-y, doesn’t it?). please read on, contribute your thoughts (using the tag #diylib) and, for those who will be attending acrl national, join us to continue the conversation in person on thursday, april 11th at 3-4 p.m. in the jw marriott grand ballroom 9-10. kim diy activities are always creative by nature, but diy culture in libraries is less about creativity and more about basic survival. a traditional library is a dead library. we know this: if libraries don’t change they will fade away, eclipsed by the free, the instant, and the easy. the mantra of twenty-first century librarianship is and must be: change, change, and more change. diy is what we call the change that we invent rather than waiting for others to invent it. i embrace this attitude. i finished my mlis in 2006 and joined the field, like many of my contemporaries, with the full awareness that my brand new career might only only have another ten or twenty years of gas in the tank. i was perfectly comfortable with this uncertainty. i was optimistic, and continue to be optimistic, that i was joining a field that was actively evolving, and in whose evolution i would be lucky enough to participate and, perhaps, even influence. but i was also willing to accept the possibility that i might be making another career change in the future when librarianship disappeared or became something totally different, even unrecognizable. as academic librarians, we have a wide array of daily tasks to accomplish. we answer questions, we collect, we teach, we budget. beyond those daily tasks are the bigger concerns, the bigger questions: what does it mean? what are our big-picture goals? where are we headed as a field? and when we dip our toes into those questions, we find that there are no easy answers. we also find that no one else is going to answer those questions for us, so we begin to imagine, and plan, and create, and build. we begin to recreate ourselves and to make meaning that will sustain us, and our field, long into the future. we are diy because we can’t be anything else, because anything else would be raising the white flag of librarianship letting the future sweep us away. we must reinvent ourselves and our libraries or we will become anachronisms, defeated by time. we will not give up. we have too much to offer. erin the thing i love about the diy movement in libraries is that you have the freedom to pick things that are important to you. you don’t have to fit the mold of what a librarian or a library “should” look like. you can reinvent yourself, the services your offer, the resources you provide to the community, and more based on your continual growth as a person and as a professional. you can be responsive to the needs of your community by moving towards the outskirts and taking action. yes, it might mean you work on your diy project on nights and weekends. yes, it might mean volunteering and doing work with no monetary reward. yes, it might mean that some of your colleagues snub their noses at your “most recent trend.” but to me, those seem to continually wind up being the projects that make me feel most passionate about being a librarian, and quite honestly have kept me engaged in this field. ever since i graduated from library school in 2008, people have worried about the future of libraries and if we’ll be around in 20 years and if so what libraries will look like. to some, that might be scary. but i didn’t become a librarian for stability. i became a librarian because of its potential–the opportunity to be part of redefining the status quo. diy is about reinventing yourself and reinventing librarianship in the process. emily in a way, we academics have been doing the diy thing ever since the academy was the academy. with intellectual curiosity we pose questions, design experiments, conduct research, and reflect and report on our findings. in essence, the academy has born the ultimate diy culture. however, over hundreds of years what was at first diy has become institutionalized, regularized, and politicized. for those of us in tenure-related positions, our work is evaluated by our peers via promotion and tenure processes. so how is our current diy work valued? how is it assessed and evaluated? what tensions lie between the “traditional” form of diy and its contemporary manifestations? will contemporary diy simply morph into a new traditional form? it remains unclear whether diy library culture has indeed become mainstream or whether it will remain on the periphery. in the academy, where tradition seems to rule the proverbial roost, how can contemporary diyers positively change their libraries and communities and successfully play the institutional and political games inherent in higher education? micah when diy is the topic, i tend to lean toward a historical view, placing everything i know about self-madeness behind the culture/mindset/ideology of diy born out of the post-punk subculture of the early 80s. what kids like ian mackaye and henry rollins did was diy, sure, but not the same thing we are talking about here. their “doing it themselves” was born purely out of necessity; no one was going to put out their records… ever. diy, as it became enmeshed in our cultural consciousness, began as an imperative not a luxury; a must, not a choice. in the subcultural movement that followed, “diy” evolved to be a code of conduct, an ethic or a principle. an important one, truly, but losing some of the grit and gall of which it was spawned. i think i have to take an oppositional view than i had originally presented to my colleagues – i think what we do is not diy. it is a new culture of professional development, yes, one driven by what we want, and how we work, rather than what professional associations or historical guidelines tell us. but, i do not see subversion of bureaucracy. i do not see radical shifts in the work we do, especially in academic librarianship. if i take a hardline, diy-historicist point-of-view, there is little that might qualify as diy in librarianship. don’t get me wrong, we are overwhelmed with self-motivation, passion, creative projects, community building and scrappy, get-it-done attitude. but what is it that we must do? that we do because no one else will do it? what do we do ourselves that compels others to participate based on the “damn the man” principle? ingenuity and innovation in our work is essential. but, to truly adopt a do-it-yourself culture in academic librarianship i think we should stop talking about the ebook problem and build our own platform-agnostic e-reader. we should stop writing for publishers that are unwilling to adapt to our intellectual property demands. we should invest in developing publishing partnerships within our universities and colleges. we should teach our students to be the best god damned googlers on the planet. we should hack every software and challenge every vendor to provide an open api so we can build what we really need, not what they sell us. or we should walk away. currency in the future diy culture of academic librarianship will be exactly what it was in the dc punk scene: relationships with other similarly-minded peers, willing to do what it takes to accomplish the task at hand. there’s a lot of confusion in librarianship about what constitutes diy-ness. can we clear that up and come to some sort of agreement as to what, how and why it matters to our current state of “work”? conclusion this is a diy panel and we want to hear it from you. is diy library culture a precursor to more traditional praxis? or is diy culture, as micah claims, ultimately a subversion? where is diy culture taking our profession? what are the practical outcomes of diy culture for professional achievement? do you agree or disagree with some or all of what we’ve said? tell us about it! we want you to share your 1-minute videos, comments, and tweets before our panel at acrl next week. make sure you tag your responses with #diylib and be a part of something awesome! tweets about “#diylib” acrl, acrl2013, conferences, diy, diylib, group post, panel, presentation building a community of readers: social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries the digital public library of america: details, the librarian response and the future. 16 responses librarianvoices 2013–03–27 at 6:00 pm lead pipe: editorial: diy library culture and the academy http://t.co/kzdfuiizv5 #librarian infopeep 2013–04–03 at 6:40 am in the library, with the lead pipe: editorial: diy library culture and the academy http://t.co/jj23qx8swc libraryfeed 2013–04–03 at 6:58 am editorial: diy library culture and the academy http://t.co/phi59d4hmz libraryleadpipe 2013–04–03 at 8:44 am our editorial about #diylib has been published. be sure to keep tweeting us with your ideas about #diylib. http://t.co/m4stvfyah5 femilyr 2013–04–03 at 8:44 am rt @libraryleadpipe: our editorial about #diylib has been published. be sure to keep tweeting us with your ideas about #diylib. http://t … pingback : #diylib free government information support | librarianship = pingback : library juice » comments in response to lead pipe editorial, “diy library culture and the academy” pingback : diy vs. startup: choose your flavor of change the ubiquitous librarian the chronicle of higher education pingback : acrl 2013 conference | erin dorney pingback : reflections on acrl 2013 | academic librarian pingback : diy collections – a case against that term | start an archives! pingback : diy vs. startup, or false dichotomies and labels | information wants to be free pingback : when diy = sigh. | info-mational pingback : library stories you may have missed oedb.org pingback : library stories you may have missed oedb.org pingback : two kinds of revolution | peer to peer review this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct creating connections: how libraries can use exhibits to welcome new students – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 20 sep emily frigo, erin fisher, gayle schaub and cara cadena /2 comments creating connections: how libraries can use exhibits to welcome new students in brief:  feelings of loneliness are common among first-year college students during the start of the academic year. academic and social integration into the campus community—both factors that can positively affect student retention—are critical yet difficult for any one group to manage. grand valley state university libraries expanded its reach to help foster student engagement through an immersive, multifaceted exhibit showcasing personal stories of students through illustrations and audio recordings. participants also had an opportunity to contribute to a mural. the exhibit, which ran for the first six weeks of the fall semester, provided students with novel ways to connect and identify with their peers. we will highlight an innovative approach to cultivating student belonging and detail how an exhibit can strengthen the library’s institutional relevance. by emily frigo, emily fisher, gayle schaub, and cara cadena the experience you’re a college freshman living away from home for the first time. you don’t know many people. it’s the week before school, and you’ve been through several campus orientations. you decide to go to the library with your laptop, get a cup of coffee, and plan your first week. on the way in, you pass a glass-enclosed gallery and see a large mural of colored dots. text on the door reads, “connected: an exhibit of shared laker experiences.” curious, you decide to check it out. copyright grand valley state university, 2016 upon entering you see a poster which reads, “we’re all human. we all have stories. in an increasingly noisy world, we may not always truly hear each other. through shared stories, we can find connections, find community, and find ourselves.” watercolor portraits of eight current students hang on the walls. you read quotes from these students and learn something personal about each one. matthew, an international student, shares that it’s been difficult learning to cook for himself. “i usually just eat cereal,” his story explains. another student mentions how her relationship with her mother has improved since she moved away from home. each anecdote is vastly different from the next, but they all read as authentic. the emotive power of watercolor brings each person to life in a unique way. copyright grand valley state university, 2016 then you see two ipads mounted on the wall, each with a set of headphones asking if you’d like to hear stories from more grand valley state university students. you put on the headphones and meet elyse, 28, who just finished her first year at gvsu. after dropping out of high school and taking classes at a local community college in her early twenties, elyse looks at education differently than she once did. she is a highly motivated, successful student who, after graduating, plans to pursue a master’s degree in journalism and someday ride a motorbike through vietnam. next you listen to vanessa’s story. she graduated in 2017 with a degree in allied health sciences and a minor in criminal justice. she plans to pursue a master’s degree in public health. growing up bilingual in a small town made vanessa’s transition to gvsu a bit of a challenge at first. seeking out (and receiving) grants, getting involved with student support services, and being her own strongest advocate, vanessa has become an amazing example for others on how to succeed at college, no matter what your background. through each of these stories, you start to realize that gvsu is more than just 25,000 students; it’s 25,000 individuals who also didn’t know what they were doing when they were freshmen, but who persisted, asked questions, and eventually met goals they didn’t realize they had. copyright grand valley state university, 2016 you hang up the headphones and find a large table inviting you to express how you’re feeling about the new school year by painting a white paper dot in watercolor. tips for painting in watercolor and a color wheel of emotions sit upright on the table—nervous is orange, hopeful is light green. ten other emotions span the wheel. you tape your dot to the collective mural. you notice that many others have filled their dots with similar colors, and you begin to feel less alone. you’ve made your mark on campus, one of many you will make, signaling the beginning of your college experience. introduction “connected: an exhibit of shared laker experiences” was deliberately designed to support students at a key transition point—the start of the school year—by fostering social engagement and cultivating a sense of belonging, both of which can ease their acclimatization to college.1 the exhibit, designed and curated by erin fisher, gayle schaub, cara cadena, and emily frigo, signaled to students that the mary idema pew library learning and information commons is full of dynamic and accessible spaces, all intended to help them thrive. it proved to be a novel and meaningful way to reinforce the university’s mission of supporting students. this article describes the exhibit itself and details the collaborative and participatory strategies used to engage visitors and build community through creative expression. while the exhibit has a student-centric focus, the design strategies and overarching philosophy can be adapted in all types of libraries. background & rationale grand valley state university (gvsu) is a comprehensive university committed to providing students with a broad-based liberal education. the university libraries demonstrates its student-centered focus with continual study of space usage in its buildings, robust patron-driven acquisitions, a peer research consultant program, responsive web design, and a curricular-based library instruction program. faculty and staff strive to identify and provide support for students at their points of need. the mary idema pew library, which opened in 2013, exemplifies a student-centered focus through both form and function. it was designed based on research of student study habits, preferences, and needs. the physical spaces accommodate students’ desire for flexibility and comfort; the furniture is moveable, outlets are never more than a few feet away, ample natural light fills the space, and there is a wide range of seating options. the building also includes dedicated spaces for events and exhibits in the hopes that students from all disciplines engage in moments of learning outside of the classroom. library programming is also intended to enliven the atmosphere and signal that the library is a vibrant community gathering space. this includes the gary and joyce dewitt exhibition space, the installation space for the connected exhibit; it is centrally located and glass enclosed to encourage drop-in viewing. however, observations showed that few students visited the gallery outside of formally scheduled programming. anecdotally, students have said they are unsure whether they are allowed in. more broadly, some students and faculty report that the mary idema pew library can be an intimidating place. we wondered if library anxiety related to the building may be a factor inhibiting students from fully engaging with our spaces and thus our services. libraries have long participated in orientation programs, summer bridge programs, and more, to raise awareness of the library and help students transition to college. common across all these programs is the goal to create a positive experience with the library and thus help alleviate library anxiety.2 erin, library program manager, was searching for a creative and compelling way to show students that the gallery, like all other spaces in the library, belongs to them. emily, first year initiatives coordinator, wanted a unique way to welcome first-year students to campus and to the library. student focus the starting point of a student’s college journey is a crucial transition point for freshmen. fisher and hood’s assertion, the most frequently cited to date in the literature, is that homesickness sets in after the first couple of weeks of the term.3 feelings of ineptitude and isolation can negatively impact a student’s ability to succeed in college.4 according to the gvsu mapworks5 2013 and 2014 survey results,6 grand valley students tend to score lower than students from peer institutions in the areas of academic and social integration, both factors that can impact student retention.7 engaging with peers is integral to a student’s successful transition.8 a participatory exhibit was an innovative way for students to connect with their peers and help normalize the emotions that accompany the start of the school year. while gvsu has a robust library instruction program and information literacy is integrated into the general education curriculum, it does not have a first year experience (fye) program. without a fye program, support services are distributed across the division of student and academic affairs, making it challenging for gvsu libraries to collaborate and integrate on campus. one of the goals of the exhibit was to raise awareness of the library’s support services among other campus units. to see the true value of the library, the campus community needed to see beyond the beautiful, light-filled building to appreciate the staff and services that undergird it. exhibit execution in august 2015, erin and emily’s outreach efforts manifested in an exhibit titled “letters for lakers.” the exhibit encouraged visitors to take a letter, leave a letter, send a letter. approximately 50 unique letters containing encouraging messages, reflections, and memories related to the college experience were written by gvsu faculty, students, and staff. these letters were reproduced to fill 300 or so envelopes that hung on the gallery walls. in total, 220 letters were taken. mailboxes were set up and blank letterhead sat on a table for students to write letters to their future selves. 165 students participated in this activity. all 1,000 postcards printed were taken. student visitors were also encouraged to use sticky notes to leave encouraging messages for one another. 183 sticky notes were contributed. student participation with the exhibit exceeded expectations, so plans were made to create a subsequent exhibit in 2016. copyright grand valley state university, 2016 colleagues cara cadena and gayle schaub, liaison librarians, joined erin and emily to form a working group in january 2016. cara brought a needed and different perspective working with professional programs on our downtown campus; gayle was invited because of her outreach efforts and her passion for supporting students. the group met several times to brainstorm ideas. we considered the space constraints, costs, technical expertise, and other elements while keeping in mind the stated goals: entice students to enter and explore the exhibition space to signal to them that they can take ownership of the space. invite students to join each other in collective expression through a participatory element. generate a sense of welcoming to assuage feelings of homesickness. signal to students that the library is a safe and welcoming space where students’ voices are heard and valued. together, we decided that the 2016 exhibit would include student stories paired with watercolor portraits and audio stories. through stories, we hoped to illustrate that no one is alone in their trepidation, happiness, and exasperation, and that the campus community works collaboratively to welcome and support them. a participatory component where visitors could directly contribute would also be included. the exhibit was inspired by many different creative influences, most notably the oak park public library’s idea box, humans of new york, wendy macnaughton, damien hirst, and storycorps. watercolor portraits in 2014, a dedicated group of gvsu students began taking photographs and gathering stories from fellow students in the style of the widely popular project humans of new york, which pairs photographs of everyday people with person-on-the-street interviews. we approached humans of grand valley (hogv) as collaborators on this project because this style is one imbued with an overwhelming sense of authenticity. the student group gathered a special collection of stories specifically for the exhibit. of the twenty stories they collected, eight were selected for display, chosen to represent a range of experiences and connect with our diverse student body. we approached art and design students to find an artist to create the watercolor portraits. alumna ellie lubbers was hired to create original illustrations of students based on photographs taken by hogv. this resulted in eight stunning watercolor illustrations. below each portrait was an excerpt from the full-length interview conducted by hogv. copyright grand valley state university, 2016 ellie had been a resident assistant in the campus dorms. her skills were paramount in making our vision truly come to life. she assisted with the overall exhibit design and installation, was instrumental in shaping the participatory component, and created promotional materials. ellie also provided other critical feedback on how we could best reach students to accomplish the stated goals. audio stories the impetus behind the collection of audio stories was the desire to make the exhibit as inclusive as possible, not just its content but also the modes of interaction with the content. the inclusion of recorded stories, separate from any visual representation, added another dimension to the peer-to-peer interactive nature of the exhibit. audio stories were longer, more in-depth than the stories that accompanied the watercolors. the stories are digitally archived, with transcripts, keeping them accessible long after the exhibit’s run. as avid listeners of the weekly broadcasts of storycorps, heard on national public radio’s morning edition, we understood the power of stories to inspire, unite, and comfort. in fact, storycorps’s mission expressed perfectly one of our primary goals: “…to remind one another of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between people, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters.”9 students narrating their stories for others to hear was an intriguing addition to the primarily visual exhibits visitors had experienced thus far in the library. to solicit a wide variety of stories, we reached out to the directors, organizers, and faculty advisors of groups at gvsu that offer support, resources, and guidance to students of various backgrounds with differing needs. the invitation to participate didn’t make any specific demands; students were simply asked if they’d be willing to tell a story or two about their experiences at gvsu. we received responses from a number of student organizations representing students of varying ages and from a spectrum of gender, social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. ten students shared their stories. the original, full-length recordings were transcribed and then edited into shorter sound bites for the online collection used in the exhibit. for most of the students, it was the only time they had been offered the chance to talk at length about themselves, to articulate their unique educational challenges and successes, and to be truly heard. for those who participated, the process of storytelling was as important as the stories themselves.10 one student’s recording session included a highly emotional recounting of a racially charged conversation with a professor. afterward, she recognized aloud that not only had she not intended to tell that particular story, she felt an extraordinary sense of relief and empowerment at having done so. in telling her story, she realized her experiences shaped who she was, helped her find strength, affected her career choices, and defined her self-worth. another participant, a returning veteran student, military wife, and pregnant mother of a toddler, found the storytelling process unexpectedly cathartic. as she spoke, she came to terms with the incredible amount of work and stress she faced, breaking down more than once. for all ten participants, the exhibit creation process gave as much or more to them as it did to the visitors. participatory mural approximately 900 cut circles of white vinyl stickers were affixed to a wall of the gallery to create the canvas for the temporary, participatory mural. corresponding three-inch circles cut from watercolor paper sat on a nearby table along with paint, brushes, water, and instructions for the activity. a color wheel detailing a range of emotions was prominently displayed to guide visitors in creating a watercolor dot that was unique to their experience. watercolor was an ideal medium for representing emotions and it provided a low-threshold way for anyone, no matter their artistic ability, to participate. the value of arts programming the exhibit provided visitors with a visual, auditory, and tactile experience that was multivocal and interactive. no other means would have provided such capabilities; art historian mark getlein explains that artmaking has the power to “create places for some human purpose; create extraordinary versions of ordinary objects; give tangible form to the unknown; give tangible form to feelings and ideas; and refresh our vision to help us see the world in new ways.”11 the non-prescriptive nature of art also means that individuals can interpret work based on their own unique experiences. through art, we created an accessible space where students could connect with their peers, the library, and the university at large in a novel way. participatory techniques the exhibit’s participatory artmaking element deepened students’ experience by allowing them to not only consume its content but contribute to it as well. we were first introduced to the concept of participatory exhibits through the work of nina simon, author of the participatory museum. in the book, simon explains that participation enables visitors to “create, share and connect with each other around content.”12 the techniques popularized by simon have been widely adopted by museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions as a way to more actively engage visitors while still honoring the mission, vision, and values of an institution. claire bishop writes about participation in the realm of contemporary art in the book participation. in the introduction, she lists three reasons why artists typically employ participatory techniques: they give the audience agency; they are less hierarchical than other modes of artistic production; and they create social bonds through collective expression.13 the mary idema pew library strives to create a learning environment that “supports the whole student through the academic journey.”14 participatory exhibits are an exemplary way to build students’ affinity for the library. we believe they lead to deeper engagement with our spaces and services, while also allowing students to make connections with their peers. social connections are critical to students’ overall success. alexander astin states that “peers are the single most potent source of influence,” affecting virtually every aspect of their development.15 our exhibit goes far beyond traditional library orientations by acknowledging that social needs are equally as important as academic, and does so at a crucial time in their college journey. even more, exhibits like “connected” give students the opportunity to actively engage in creative expression, a key tenet of a liberal arts education. exhibit evaluation libraries of all types still struggle to find the appropriate means to evaluate cultural programming.16 with each new exhibit, we consider new or revised ways to measure reach and impact more concretely. our quantitative evidence is sparse but the qualitative evidence gathered suggests that the exhibit accomplished its intended goals. we do not know how many people in total attended the exhibit because the space does not include sensors to count visitors. our target audience comprised 4,380 first-time students. almost 300 dots were painted as part of the participatory mural. although attendance numbers do not directly correlate with value, the metric would be helpful to evaluate reach. a small table near the mural wall included a comment box and slips of paper with a prompt asking students to “tell us what element(s) of the exhibit you connected with most.” feedback was uniformly positive. we received 60 responses, including the following statements: “i loved that we can connect with the community with art, colors, and how we feel.” “i connected with a few of the stories. i love how there is always someone out there feeling the same emotions.” “so good! i never thought so many other students were as nervous all the time as i was.” “awesome! i enjoyed listening & reading others’ stories. i can relate.” “this was a beautiful opportunity! i loved being able to be creative which is something i don’t get to do often!” “thank you so much for bringing this here. it was a great outlet to silently release my emotions creatively.” conclusion our organization supports a culture of innovation and informed risk-taking, which allows us to try new methods of engaging and supporting our students. the exhibit is a good example of that culture in action. conceptualizing and designing a project of this scope and magnitude was not easy, yet creating spaces for discovery is worth doing. like many art exhibits, ours was designed to elicit contemplation and creativity; we wanted visitors to listen and learn. student stories were honest and insightful. the stories, the portraits, and the wall of emotions were intended to make visitors feel more connected to a place (grand valley) they would call home for the next several years, and a space (the library) where they would spend a lot of their time. they also reminded us, the exhibit organizers, that everyone has their own set of difficulties and triumphs. the components of the exhibit were unique to gvsu. your participatory exhibit will be unique to your library community, but the message will be the same: the library is a place where stories matter and individual voices are heard. acknowledgements: thank you to our internal reviewer, bethany messersmith; our external reviewer, jamie vander broek; and publishing editor, amy koester. “connected: an exhibit of shared laker experiences” was created in collaboration with humans of grand valley, especially jaclyn ermoyan. grand valley alumna ellie lubbers created original artwork for the exhibit. thank you to len o’kelly ph.d., who patiently edited the audio files for exhibit and archiving. our gratitude to matthew reidsma for wrangling the website for the audio stories. endless thanks to the students whose stories were featured in the exhibit. references astin, a. w. (1993). what matters in college?: four critical years revisited. san francisco: jossey-bass. batty, p. (2014). map-works executive summary. retrieved from http://www.gvsu.edu/cms4/asset/dd2de79e-bc8a-0755-18696bc35286807f/map-works_exec_summary_2014.pdf bishop, c. (2010). participation. london: whitechapel. fisher, s., & hood, b. (1987). the stress of the transition to university: a longitudinal study of psychological disturbance, absent-mindedness and vulnerability to homesickness. british journal of psychology, 78(4), 425. fraser, j., sheppard, b., & norlander, r. j. (2014).  national impact of the library public programs assessment (nilppa): meta-analysis of the american library association public programs office archives. (newknowledge publication #imls.74.83.02). new york: new knowledge organization ltd. getlein, m. (2008). living with art. new york: mcgraw-hill higher education. gvsu office of institutional analysis. (2013). results from the map-works survey of first-year undergraduates. retrieved from http://reports.ia.gvsu.edu/mw2013/map-works_firstyear_2013_report_031114b.pdf jiao, q., & onwuegbuzie, a. (1997). antecedents of library anxiety. the library quarterly: information, community, policy, 67(4), 372-389. retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40039590 kuh, g., kinzie, j., buckley, j., bridges, b., & hayek, j. (2006). what matters to students success: a review of the literature. commissioned report for the national symposium on post-secondary student success: spearheading a dialog on student success. national postsecondary education cooperative (npec). makowski, m. (2016). mary idema pew library named landmark library. gv now. retrieved from https://www.gvsu.edu/gvnow/2016/mary-idema-pew-library-named-landmark-library-9603.htm simon, n. (2010). the participatory museum. santa cruz, calif: museum 2.0. stanton, b. (2017). humans of new york. retrieved from http://www.humansofnewyork.com/ storycorps. (2017). mission statement. retrieved from https://storycorps.org/ thompson, n. (2015). seeing power: art and activism in the 21st century. brooklyn, n.y: melville house. thurber, c. a., & walton, e. a. (2012). homesickness and adjustment in university students. journal of american college health, 60(5), 415-419. tinto, v. (1975). dropout from higher education: a theoretical synthesis of recent research. review of educational research 45(1) 89–125. retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/1170024 tinto, v.  (2010). from theory to action: exploring the institutional conditions for student retention. in j.c. smart (ed.), higher education: handbook of theory and research, vol. 25 (pp. 51-90). doi:10.1007/978-90-481-8598-6_2 tinto, 1975; 2010 [↩] jiao, 1997 [↩] 1987; thurber & walton, 2012 [↩] tinto, 1975; 2010 [↩] map-works is an online student retention tool administered by skyfactor. [↩] batty, 2014; gvsu office of institutional analysis, 2013 [↩] tinto, 1975; 2010 [↩] kuh et al., 2006 [↩] storycorps, 2017 [↩] audio stories featured students from: wise (women in science and engineering); trio student support services, a federally-funded support program for first-generation and limited-income students; gvsu crew (club sport); gvsu veterans network; milton e. ford lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender (lgbt) resource center; padnos international center; devos center for entrepreneurship and innovation. [↩] 2008, pp. 7-10 [↩] simon, 2010, p. ii [↩] bishop, 2010 [↩] makowski, 2016, in an interview with retired dean of university libraries lee van orsdel [↩] 1993, p. 398; kuh et al, 2006 [↩] fraser, et al., 2014 [↩] art, creativity, exhibits, higher education, library programming, outreach from aasl standards to the acrl framework: higher education shifts in pedagogical strategies modular short form videos for library instruction 2 responses alison moore 2017–09–22 at 4:49 am hello really loved this idea of the connected wall/exhibition. i am a part -time library assistant in a healthcare library run by queen’s university, belfast, which is for university students and healthcare professionals. before my present job i was a textile designer and so i appreciate this as a piece of art but love the idea of the interactive function helping the students settle into university life. i also am a mum and left my daughter to university in england. i think knowing that there is somewhere to go and just read and hear from others that have had the same problems and your not on your own. it would be comforting to know. pingback : thing 3.5 – library blogs – liminal librarian this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct resilience vs. sustainability: the future of libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 24 aug karen munro /20 comments resilience vs. sustainability: the future of libraries by karen munro the new status quo inside and outside of libraries, everybody is nervous about change.  we use terms like “disruptive change” and “tipping point” to talk about the fear that we are traveling into a world where we can’t continue to do what we’ve always done.  some people think we’ve already passed that point, and that our old strategies for navigating change aren’t working for us anymore.  instead of looking backward, they say, we should be looking around.  what kind of world are we living in today?  how do libraries fit into it now, and in the future? here’s a thought experiment:  read the following passage.  then ask yourself:  how well does the analogy apply to the world of libraries? imagine you are on a boat docked in a calm harbor and you want to quickly carry a brim-full cup of water across a stateroom without spilling.  now imagine the same situation but with the boat in rough seas.  in harbor, the solution is simple: just walk quickly, but not so quickly that the water spills.  at sea, speed is a secondary concern; now the real challenge is to maintain balance on an abruptly pitching floor.  the solution now is to find secure handholds and footholds and to flex your knees to absorb the roll of the boat.  in harbor, the solution is a simple optimization problem (walk as fast as possible but not too fast); at sea the solution requires you to enhance your ability to absorb disturbance–that is, enhance your resilience against the waves (reid, w. in walker & salt, 2006, p. x). i immediately thought about libraries when i read this passage, which was written to describe the concept of ecological resilience.  ecological resilience is a theory of sustainability developed in part to describe and address the inherent uncertainty and insecurity of major systems change.  what does that mean?  briefly put, resilience acknowledges that we live in a state of constant change, in systems that are larger, more complex, and more interrelated than we know.  when we try to control change in one part of the system—to optimize it for our current needs—we often create effects that we can’t predict. a system’s resilience is its “capacity…to assimilate disturbances without crossing a threshold into an alternative and possibly less ‘friendly’ stable stage” (rees, 2010, p. 32). in ecological terms, we’ve got front-row seats to one of the largest, most far-reaching pieces of resilience theater of all:  climate change.  you don’t have to look far to find evidence of just how sweeping and unpredictable the effects of climate change already are.  in an op-ed piece in the new york times in february of this year, paul krugman draws a link between increasingly severe weather and global political unrest, via the link of food insecurity.  more recently, the times pointed out that droughts in the american south were not only killing crops, but also forcing ranchers to sell off their stock, causing fluctuations in the price of beef.  even more unpredictably, prolonged droughts have killed power in cities where chemical deposits are building up on electrical towers (2011). climatologically, we seem to be entering into a world with new levels of volatility and unpredictability, in which status quo models of sustainability won’t help.  major weather events impinge on us financially, socially, politically, and in other ways that we can’t foresee—because they are part of a global system so large and complex that it’s practically invisible to us. resilience theory tells us traditional ideas of sustainability (reducing our carbon footprint, recycling, restoring habitat) aren’t going to buy us a stable, manageable future. instead, we need to embrace the reality of continuous, unpredictable future change, and looks for ways we can adapt to survive the irreversible changes we’ve already made. and what does any of this have to do with libraries, again? well, apart from the fact that libraries are a small part of the larger whole that’s affected by power outages, floods, and tornadoes, they’re also part of several other big, complex systems.  these systems–publishing, academe, intellectual property law, technology, the economy–are undergoing major changes that affect libraries in complex, sometimes unforeseen ways. there is no future point at which we can expect things to settle into a static, optimal state.  resilience theory advises us not to focus our energy on creating ways to continue “business as usual” into an uncertain future. instead, it pushes us to acknowledge ways our brave new world has already changed irrevocably, and start looking for ways to adapt to those changes. the changing world of libraries thanks to budget cuts, changing demographics, proven print formats migrating to untested digital ones, major media industries searching frantically for new revenue streams, recession-battered bond measures and challenges to fair use and rights of first purchase, the 21st-century library’s future is anything but stable and manageable. we’re starting to accept that we’re not going back to a print-based world or a world in which we can rely on generous annual budget contributions from our campuses and state legislatures.  we’re starting to embrace mobile services for users who never visit us in person and we’re taking on more responsibility for instructional technology, copyright guidance, and scholarly publishing. as a profession, we know we’re living in a new world [1], and that more change is on the horizon.  but resilience isn’t just about acknowledging the inevitability and unpredictability of large systems changes.  it’s about adapting intelligently to those changes, in order to thrive in a constantly shifting world.  that’s where things get really tricky—and where we might look to principles of ecological resilience for some advice. characteristics of a resilient library the following characteristics are adapted from walker and salt’s resilience thinking.  they describe key qualities of resilient social-ecological systems:  since no ecology exists separate from human components, we can’t set aside cultural and economic considerations when we think about ecologies.  some of these suggestions are in line with what we’re already doing in libraries, and some fly in the face of conventional strategic planning for change. according to walker and salt, a resilient world (and by extension, library) would take into consideration a broad range of qualities, outlined here below. diversity.  ecological diversity improves resilience because it makes systems less vulnerable to any particular threat.  if one species dies out, others move into the gap.  in libraries, diversity might mean that we offer a wide range of services and resources to our users—so that if any particular user need disappears, we move on to fill others [2].  one classic example: as traffic diminishes at in-person reference desks, many libraries are shifting to provide chat or mobile reference, where interactions are increasing. cultivating diversity might mean that we invest in unique, singular collections rather than a “monocrop” of core collections.  doing so would affirm the professional, specialist role of the librarian as collection developer, familiar not only with the main corpus of a field but also with its rare, esoteric, and ephemeral materials.  if we combine a commitment to diverse collections with careful attention to what our users need most, we stand to create rich, distinctive collections that reflect our institutional and community character, now and for posterity. variability.  as walker and salt point out, “[i]n and of itself, change is neither bad nor good”; the only certainty is that change will always be with us” (p. 10).  trying to freeze an ecosystem or an institution at a point of maximum gain usually creates unforeseen problems down the road.  a resilient library would be willing to experiment often and allow failure to occur as a natural part of life.  if at least some of the other characteristics of resilience are in place, no individual change, breakage, or loss should be enough to bring the system down. resilient librarians accept both the ups and downs of the institutional life cycle.  we may be uncomfortable with the idea that we or our institutions will go through thin times, but we should recognize that nobody’s on top all the time.  that recognition can help us keep our heads during downturns, and find opportunities where others may see threats. building a tolerance for variability doesn’t mean accepting perpetual decline, and it doesn’t mean institutionalized apathy.  it means taking the long view, remembering our core values, and not panicking when times get rough. modularity.  ecologically, a system is modular if there’s enough compartmentalization within it to allow part of the system to change or collapse without taking the whole thing down.  in ecosystems, modularity complements diversity–both strengthen the overall system by providing natural brake points for damage or disease. libraries are usually complex organizations made up of many interconnected units.  what happens when one of those units has to substantially retool or retire?  how many other units would be affected by the fallout–by taking on additional workload, being slowed down by bottlenecks, having to regain lost expertise and institutional knowledge, etc.? sometimes the answer to this question comes down to sheer staffing numbers.  libraries with smaller staffs are necessarily more closely interconnected than those with larger staffs.  in small-staffed libraries, people must often wear more than one hat and back each other up across units.  if there’s no good way to make a library more modular, the next-best solution may be to recognize the vulnerability and work to strengthen the institution in other areas. ideally, the resilient library is made up of work groups that are strongly linked to a central node but loosely connected to each other—so, for instance, communication is good throughout the institution, but work can continue if a unit goes down or changes radically. acknowledgement of slow variables.  ecologically, some changes take place over a long period of time and may be invisible to us until they reach or pass a tipping point—like melting polar ice.  economically, we have a tendency to ignore this fact and to concentrate on the immediate and short-term.  needless to say, this can have disastrous consequences. like an ecosystem, a library is subject to slow variables.  we all see changes in our user demographics, shifts in direction in our parent institutions, hills and valleys in our budgets.  many of the decisions we make are in response to these factors, over which we may have little or no control.  but resilience doesn’t require us to control changes like this; instead it asks us to acknowledge them. tracking and documenting long-term trends makes them concrete to us and to our users and funders.  it increases our ability to address them and learn from them, to predict future change.  we may not be able to do much about a long-term economic recession, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore it.  if we acknowledge the long, slow changes in our environment we can learn to tell productive stories about them to ourselves and our partners. tight feedbacks.  ecologically, tight feedbacks provide immediate responses to changes in the system.  tight feedbacks are the opposite of long variables.  they mean that effects are closely linked to causes, and thresholds are obvious.  so, for instance, heavy rains may cause a flood downriver.  the flood happens right away, not years after the rainfall.  this is very different from the example of melting polar ice, above–or from, say, the cumulative effect of years of acid rain on forests. resilient libraries would build in as many mechanisms for tight feedback as possible.  the people who make decisions need to get feedback on the results of their decisions right away.  if students are up in arms about a change in the library’s hours, that information can’t gather dust—and it can’t be ignored.  if collection cuts are killing an academic department’s hiring ability, that information needs to get quickly to the right people.  if a unit’s morale is low, or it lacks direction or resources, there has to be a way for that information to get to the right people sooner rather than later. in this respect, larger libraries may be at a disadvantage, because of the sheer size of their administrative structure.  larger organizations often require more vertical levels of management, and the relationships between work units and administrators may be more complex and intertwined. to counteract this, libraries with large staffs might build in multiple ways for feedback (including anonymous feedback) to reach the right people.  leaders might take responsibility for making themselves accessible, and for informing themselves by walking the halls, taking other staff out for coffee, inviting students to serve on advisory groups, or working at a public service desk once in a while.  henry v disguised himself to walk among his soldiers before the battle at agincourt.  library leaders who want to create resilient organizations could take a note from his playbook. social capital.  ecological systems don’t stand alone:  they depend on working social networks through which people can recognize and respond to problems.  at root, our ecological problems are all social problems, and their solutions will be social too.  without trust, cooperation, and empathy, we’ll never solve the problem of global e-waste contaminants in rural china, or ivory poaching in africa, or gas-guzzling cars rolling off assembly lines in detroit.  before we change the world, we have to change our minds–and to do that, we need to care enough about each other to sit down and talk. the same is true in libraries.  we work in highly social organizations, often in direct service to a community of users, and in collaboration with others who may be across the hall or across the country.  we’re masters of sharing information and resources, and we depend on our personal and professional relationships with each other to keep our systems running.  as anyone who’s been in a toxic workplace can say, it only takes one recalcitrant, embittered, or bullying officemate to bring morale and productivity down. resilient libraries actively foster good working relationships, clear communication, and strong buy-in at all levels of the institution.  in order to be responsive and flexible in the face of radical change, we must first recognize that we’re all in this together.  social capital is one of our greatest assets, because it binds us together in a single endeavor–and together we can always do more. innovation.  resilience theory tells us that maintaining the status quo with diminishing resources isn’t going to solve our ecological problems.  choosing paper over plastic at the supermarket checkout isn’t the answer:  instead, the answer is to change our assumptions, and bring our own cloth bag so we can avoid the choice completely.  some ecologists would go further, and say we should look for ways to stop buying consumer goods that eventually end up in landfills. to be truly innovative, we must examine our assumptions, our habits, and sometimes our beliefs.  we must see our environment with clear eyes, and respond courageously and creatively, with a willingness to fail and try again.  this process can be uncomfortable, even threatening.  it can also be exhilarating, and can breathe new life into routines we thought were set in stone. resilient libraries must reward experimentation—or at the very least, not thwart or penalize it.  as walker and salt write, “the warning bell to a resilience thinker is increasing preoccupation with process (company policies, public liability, compliance, tort laws, etc)” (p. 147-8). libraries mired in administrative hierarchy, legacy practices, and “just because” attitudes are unlikely to be able to respond to changes with agility and verve. it’s important to note that innovation in response to change takes resources–not just one-time resources but a continuous investment.  in the january 2011 issue of college & research libraries, terra b. jacobson examines one common library innovation of the last few years–the library facebook page.  in her conclusion, she notes, “librarians should not get too attached to facebook, as there is always the next tool or social networking site that people are using….librarians should be prepared to leave their hard work behind to jump to the next tool” (p. 88).  in order to try new things, librarians must not only have support from their institution and the time and flexibility to generate ideas–they must also have energy, optimism, and the ability to shift gears quickly when situations change. ecosystem services.  a truly efficient and resilient economy acknowledges the many “invisible” benefits that ecosystems provide, from purifying air and water to controlling erosion and providing a buffer against severe weather events.  cities already purchase watershed lands to protect their water supplies and corporations are taxed for causing air pollution; resilience theory suggests we should go further in this direction.  if we factored in the true human and ecological costs of cheap food and gasoline, we might see much quicker and more radical changes in our patterns of consumption. like an ecosystem, a library provides many benefits that often go without saying, from job-hunting assistance to educational enrichment to neighborhood stability and quality of life.  articulating these benefits, and even assigning a dollar value to them, helps libraries and others understand just how valuable is the library’s “niche” within a campus or a community.  what would it costs families and cities to provide youth and early-development child services, if the library didn’t do it?  what would it cost campuses to offer the instructional, recreational, and acculaturative offerings that libraries give students? like watching and articulating slow variables, the work of recognizing embedded services requires us to make mental shifts and engage actively with outside stakeholders.  librarians may start talking about their libraries as community anchors, cultural destinations, and educational partners.  these are roles that libraries have always performed–resilience theory calls for us to recognize them and keep them on the table when we discuss the value of our institutions. redundancies.  many ecological systems rely on redundancy to help the overall system withstand shocks.  from species that produce far more offspring than can be expected to survive, to ecosystems in which multiple species provide the same function, natural systems pair redundancy with diversity to stay resilient. it may be anathema to suggest it, but organizations, too, can benefit from strategic redundancy.  the lockss (lots of copies keep stuff safe) initiative acknowledges the importance of keeping multiple copies of print collections in major research libraries—precisely in order to have back-up copies in case of catastrophe.  digital collections, too, must be backed up continuously.  not even cloud computing will save us from the need to store and manage multiple versions of items in our collections. as libraries increasingly learn to operate as multi-institutional collectives, we might consider whether we’ll be truly well served by eliminating all redundancies in positions.   walker and salt remind us that “[t]otally top-down governance structures with no redundancy in roles may be efficient (in the short term) but they tend to fail when the circumstances under which they were developed suddenly change” (p. 148).  library leaders might look closely at the diversity and modularity of their organizations, and consider a few “what-if” scenarios, before cutting out all redundancies.  what if that position becomes vacant?  what if we’re faced with a new or increased need?  how quickly and effectively could we respond to that scenario, and how important would it be for us to succeed? generalists.  organisms that can fill more than one ecological “slot” are an important part of a resilient ecological mix, and are often readier to survive a change in their environment.  by definition, generalists have skills that allow them to cover many bases.  coyotes, hawks, and raccoons are good examples of generalist species that adapt well to a wide range of habitats, foods, and living conditions–and that can shift to city living if their natural habitat is compromised. librarians who “specialize in generalizing” may have skills that allow them to work across units, and even outside the library completely.  while the traditional role of the generalist reference librarian has come under siege in recent years, it may not actually be generalism that’s the issue here, but rather the relevance of the skills in question. a colleague with a broad range of relevant skills is a valuable asset to any institution.  a librarian who can manage projects, create digital finding aids, consult with faculty, and vet content for a library-published scholarly journal is essentially someone who can do four different jobs.  in an institution in which these skills are relevant to the work at hand, a generalist who can step in and out of several roles–from public service to behind-the-scenes work, for instance–may be more resilient and adaptable than a specialist who fills only one role. what next? the 2011 taiga provocative statements ask us to consider a five-year future in which libraries will engage in “radical cooperation,” librarians will stop building collections, and the most successful institutions will have redefined or eliminated many or most of their existing positions.  while these predictions may not all come true, they point toward a future that isn’t completely improbable.  the taiga statements take to the extreme some of the trends we already see in the world of libraries.  it’s hard to ignore them outright. resilience theory tells us that we shouldn’t ignore the changes we see happening around us, or the ones coming down the road–and that we shouldn’t fear them, either.  the basic tenet of resilience theory is that change is perpetual and inevitable.  they key to managing it successfully is to acknowledge it and build thoughtful, adaptive systems to respond. the library of the future may not be a stable, predictable place, but it should be a place with room for diversity, strategic redundancy, innovation, and experimentation.  above all, it should have room for the meaningful recognition of our intellectual and communal values.  as librarians and library leaders, we must be able to relinquish the idea that we can control our environment, and instead take on the hard work of building resilience. to walker and salt’s list of qualities, i’d add a few more.  building resilient libraries will take energy and courage.  it will take a willingness to step outside our traditional roles and engage in the messy, tough work of redefining ourselves and our institutions.  it will take patience–with each other and with the process. and it will probably take a lot more besides. but think about the enormous potential and real value embodied on our libraries’ shelves and in our reading rooms, on our servers and at our service desks.  and ask yourself:  won’t it be worth it?  i think it will. many thanks to nicholas schiller, kim leeder, and eric frierson for their perspectives on this piece. references association of college and research libraries. (2010). 2010 top ten trends in academic libraries. retrieved from http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/6/286.full jacobson, t. (2011).  facebook as a library tool: perceived vs. actual use.  college & research libraries, 72(1), 79-88. krugman, p. (2011, february 6).  droughts, floods, and food.  the new york times.  retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/opinion/07krugman.html?src=me&ref=general rees, w. (2010). thinking “resilience.”  in r. heinberg, d. lerch (eds.), the post-carbon reader (pp. 25-40). healdsburg, ca: watershed media. severson, k., & johnson, k. (2011, july 11).  drought spreads pain from florida to arizona.  the new york times.  retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/us/12drought.html?hp taiga forum. (2011). 2011 provocative statements.  retrieved from http://www.taiga-forum.org/ walker, b., & salt, d. (2006).  resilience thinking. washington: island press.   [1] for examples of our present change, one need only look to our professional association. for academic libraries, the 2010 top ten trends in academic libraries identifies forces of change. [2] in ecological terms, species extinction generally indicates an imbalance – often one we should address. in terms of libraries, the ‘extinction’ of a particular user need is usually more complex, and may point us toward new service niches we need to fill. future, libraries, resilience leading with heart editorial: extra! extra! read all about it! 20 responses pam ryan 2011–08–24 at 10:43 pm great post, karen. really enjoyed this. karen 2011–08–25 at 12:05 pm thanks pam! jennifer c. 2011–08–24 at 11:02 pm as a current mlis student with a science background this was the perfect analogy. now i want to read resilience thinking. karen 2011–08–25 at 12:06 pm thanks, jennifer. i’m glad this resonated for you! and resilience thinking is definitely worth a read. pingback : resilience vs. sustainability « karen munro, learning librarian michele van hoeck 2011–08–25 at 1:16 pm the ecosystem analogy is very helpful. thanks for writing. karen 2011–08–25 at 7:44 pm glad to hear it, michele! pingback : veckan som gick #34 « peter alsbjers blogg! jennifer meyer 2011–08–29 at 8:32 am well stated. i love what you quoted from jacobson about not getting too attached to facebook. that strikes a cord with me because it is something i feel our profession struggles with. i was at an unconference about a year ago about library leadership and the keynote speaker said that librarians needed to get more comfortable with being in “beta”. assume what you are using now, won’t be what you will be using later. great post. thanks! karen 2011–08–29 at 3:46 pm thanks, jennifer. i’m glad this resonated for you. beta isn’t always a comfortable place to be, but maybe we can find ways to get a little more used to it. pingback : digital library emily ford 2011–09–07 at 2:47 pm i’m so glad you brought up the taiga statements, karen. something that i was alerted to the other day is that these statements are being used as expert opinion as to what is happening. people who don’t work in libraries are taking these statements as truth! what will happen to libraries! needless to say, i was dismayed by this. but what i do want to say is that i think the way you present thinking is so much better than taiga– and i think it’s something we need to share with our administrators who may not fully understand libraries. karen 2011–09–30 at 3:51 pm hi emily! i think the taiga statements are successful in that they provoke…generally indignation and concern, but at least they provoke. they’re brutally framed, and i hope there aren’t administrators out there who are using them verbatim in their libraries (i can’t imagine the morale issues this would cause) but they do get people thinking. my sense is that they’re a springboard and a challenge for us to find thoughtful, comprehensive, compassionate, and effective ways to manage change. alyssa 2011–09–07 at 5:31 pm i appreciated your salute to generalism (as long as your many skills are relevant). in selecting my coursework for my mls, i’m trying to diversify and choose classes i normally wouldn’t in order to try and learn about the most areas that i can. i’m glad to hear that it’s still a decent strategy to have. thanks for the thoughtful post! karen 2011–09–30 at 3:52 pm hi alyssa. i strongly believe that getting a diverse skill set is important–and i also believe that taking a wide range of classes in school is important, because it will help you decide what you most want to do (and what you’re best at.) as a wise person once said, beware of being too good at something you don’t like doing… pingback : quora pingback : resiliencia frente a sostenibilidad: el futuro de las bibliotecas « bibliotecas 2029 pingback : i think, therefore i am…often confused pingback : 21st century scribes? i think not. | i think, therefore i am…often confused pingback : backlog part two: quixotic ferocity, or embracing the library crisis narrative. « info-mational this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct take the template and run: austin community college’s student library and technology use study – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 15 dec adrian whatley and ellie collier /0 comments take the template and run: austin community college’s student library and technology use study in the library with the lead pipe welcomes guest author adrian whatley. adrian whatley is the e-resources librarian at austin community college. she views her job as connecting students to the information they need in the easiest, most time-efficient manner possible. by adrian whatley and ellie collier part one: setting the stage austin community college library services (accls), like many academic library systems, is coming to terms with an increasingly tech savvy student population that will ultimately transform the nature of the work we do, the services we provide, and the content we offer. instead of relying on assumptions and overheated trendcasting, we wanted to hear from the students themselves: the devices they own, which social networks they frequent, and what types of tech-oriented services they would like to see from us. our goal was to ascertain the facts that would lead to the oft-lauded data-driven decisions that all libraries seek. to that end, we conducted a college wide student library and technology use environmental scan. the idea for doing the survey germinated in the summer of 2009, while collaborating on a webpage that would feature a collection of links to online searching, citing, and organizing tools. after musing about what students might find most useful, we had a “why don’t we just ask them?” moment. ellie had recently interviewed char booth about her research report, informing innovation: tracking student interest in emerging library technologies at ohio university (a research report), which she felt was an especially good example of hard data about student technology use. moreover, adrian had attended booth’s presentation at the 14th annual acrl convention in seattle, and had been very impressed by the insightful, and in some cases, counter-prevailing wisdom of the results. we batted around the idea about replicating the survey at our own institution. would the social network usage of acc students mirror ou’s?1 how would community college students differ in their rate of technology adoption? and most importantly, would they friend us on facebook?2 part two: getting to yes every institution has its own structure for approving projects. accls functions primarily through a team structure, but was also engaged in creating a project proposal form that would allow individuals to propose projects for themselves, or for a specific team to tackle. we were very excited to take on this project ourselves, so we brainstormed approaches and settled on filling out the application for an acc innovation grant as a way to organize ourselves before presenting our proposal to library management. the application process for the grant necessitated the completion of a scope and purpose statement, planning report, budget request, and project timeline. the documentation process proved invaluable to us as we pitched the project and conceptualized its deployment at acc.  because we had done the initial legwork of nailing down timelines and formulating grand strategies, it was easier to focus on important details, such as honing the phrasing of the survey instrument itself. while we didn’t receive the innovation grant, we received strong support for the project from our library dean, who facilitated our goal of offering a cash prize rather than an electronic gadget (a move that created additional administrative hoops). she also provided extra adjunct librarian hours to afford us time off the reference desk to focus on the project. part three: nuts and bolts austin community college consists of eight campuses throughout central texas serving roughly 44,000 students with nearly three quarters of our students attending part time. each campus has its own library, and in 2008, all eight libraries combined had a door count of 1,124,027 and 1,014,250 hits on our homepage.3 the fact that our virtual and actual visits are nearly equivalent highlighted to us the need for a serious and measured evaluation of technology use among our student population in order to further develop digital services. we spent the summer and fall of 2009 determining our scope and purpose, defining the research questions, and developing the survey instrument with feedback from our colleagues. we also evaluated several types of survey software, and decided that surveymonkey provided the best delivery and analysis options. our goal was to survey the entire acc student body. the survey itself consisted of 7 demographic questions, 21 multiple-choice questions about library and technology use, and 3 open-ended items that queried general student experiences with acc libraries. while drafting the instrument, we quickly found that we wished to ask many more questions than our respondents likely had the patience to answer, so some focusing of direction was necessary. we put a lot of effort into making the survey as short as possible and ended up tabling many questions that we would have liked to ask (though we did save them for future use). our primary criteria was, “how would we use the results from this question?” with that as a guideline we decided  to cut common survey questions like race and gender, which may have been interesting, but wasn’t going to impact whether or not we create a mobile website or offer text messaging reference. we kept demographic questions about campuses and majors so that we could gauge how representative our sample was and provide bibliographers with custom profiles. with our editors’ red pens in hand we also cut questions about information literacy, search strategies, favorite resources, and library website usage, deciding that that cell phone usage and general comfort with technology would be our main foci. we probably should have cut even more, both to increase the response rate and to reduce the amount of work needed to process and interpret the results. promotion and distribution of the instrument took place in february. the survey was open to all acc students and available from march 22 until april 16. we collected a total of 1,097 responses (87.8% completion rate). promotional efforts included: a link on the library homepage, a splash on the acc homepage, posts to the acc faculty listserv, a presence on the library’s blackboard tab, bookmarks, posters, table tents, links on the desktops of the computers in the computer lab, links on the student life website and facebook pages, and an article in the student newspaper, the accent.  our colleagues also greatly assisted in the marketing of the survey by directing students to it at the conclusion of library instruction sessions and reference interviews. part four: death to all open ended questions! ellie was able to pull together the main responses almost immediately thanks to the simplicity of reporting in survey monkey. coding the responses to the open ended questions was, however, another story entirely. we decided to put our graduate school research methods course to use. we reviewed the responses independently to come up with categories, met to finalize agreed upon categories, coded the questions independently, and met again to agree upon codes. in hindsight, this was overkill. we could, theoretically, tell you our intercoder reliability now, but for our purposes, it really doesn’t matter and it added an enormous amount of time and energy to the whole process. we were able to create and demo a slideshow of graphs of the results to the multiple choice questions at multiple library meetings in may. it took us until november to complete the coding and data crunching for the open ended questions. we feel it would have been preferable to have more of the results available sooner to capitalize on the initial excitement. we would recommend cutting several steps, perhaps just reading the questions separately to brainstorm categories and attach initial codes and then meeting to come to consensus. the open ended responses did provide an interesting look into many of our and our students’ assumptions. for example, a number of the responses to our question about texting services made it clear that students did not know they could renew books online. we had a different question that asked students what services they were and weren’t familiar with and 32% responded that they didn’t know they could renew books online. however, the open ended responses made much more of an impact on us. so, to be clear, we’re not saying don’t use open ended questions, just don’t worry about being quite as thorough as we were. part five: results! for full summary of results, or to follow along with graphic representations of the data while you’re reading, open the slideshow. before detailing responses, we would like to caution that this is a convenience sample rather than a probability sample. nearly half (47%) of respondents learned of the survey through the library website, so results are skewed towards students who use the library website. [slide 2] however, we were pleased to see a large response number (total started survey: 1,250, total completed survey: 1,097) and a wide variety of majors represented, with the highest being nursing (151, 12.4%) and general education transfer credits (98, 8.1%). [slide 4] overall, we had generally positive feedback, in particular, that the library is valued as physical quiet space to work/study. students reported physically coming to the library (63% 2-3 times/week or more) more than using the library website (45% 2-3 times/week or more). [slide 12] this mirrored the informing innovation results which also showed a greater use of the library building than the library website (p. 67) we saw from booth’s report that the study had a side effect of increasing student awareness of library services. with that in mind, one of our questions was a bucket list of every service we could think of. of the items with low awareness, the biggest takeaway in our eyes is letting students know about their library account and how to access it online. [slide 14] students showed general confidence in their searching and technology abilities, but not in web design or fixing computer problems. while they tended to feel that their research skills were at least adequate, there was a sharp decline in their confidence from using the internet for personal use to using it for school to researching with library resources. [slide 17] these results were nearly identical to those from informing innovation (p. 63). about half (47%) of our respondents owned smartphones. on the assumption that we have a disproportionately tech-savvy sample, we can hypothesize that some smaller percentage of the whole student body have smartphones. slightly fewer (44%) owned vhs players and only 53 students (5%) owned e-book readers. [slide 20] it is interesting to compare these results to the 2010 ecar study of undergraduate students and information technology, which found a 3.1% ownership of e-book readers and 62% ownership of smartphones among its respondents (p. 42). we made an error in formatting the computer and laptop ownership question4, but generally we found that most respondents did own a computer. seventy students (6%) reported having no internet connection at home, and another 21 (2%) used dial-up. the same number of students reported having wireless and broadband (about 60%). a quick glance at the data showed that many students selected wireless without selecting where their wireless was coming from, so the broadband/cable/dsl adoption is likely closer to 90%. [slide 22] ellie was particularly interested in this section of the survey. she has had several students refuse e-books as potential sources saying they didn’t have computers and/or internet at home. if we combine our students with dial-up and those without internet at home, that means nearly a tenth of our students don’t have the tools to use our online resources. if we are correct in the assumption that this sample was a particularly tech savvy subset, the number could be larger. we  asked students how likely they were to embrace new technologies. the responses trend slightly above average, enforcing our assumption that our sample is slightly skewed towards the tech savvy. [slide 25] the ecar results (p. 39) were similar however, so it could also simply show a trend of people preferring to consider themselves average or above. another portion of our survey listed a wide selection of social networking and other online activities and asked respondents how often they participated in each. texting and facebook were the only two answers with high “every day” response rates. watching videos on youtube and reading wiki articles were the highest “2-3 times a week” responses. most other options had high scores in the “never” category. [slide 26] most (96%) respondents own cell phones. [slide 29] offered a selection of cell phone activities, text messaging scored highest in the “every day” category, with “never” being the most common response for most other choices (including post to twitter, read or contribute to blogs, download music, watch videos, read e-books). [slide 30] in terms of interacting with the library, students would most like to use text messaging to receive renewal or overdue notices and to renew materials. [slide 32] more than half (66%) of respondents’ cell phones can access the internet [slide 33] and there was generally high interest in using the library website on their phones, with the most positive responses for finding hours, locations and phone numbers, checking their account/renewing books, and searching for books. [slide 34] facebook was the top social networking site both in terms of reported use (45% use it all the time) and in willingness to friend the library (25%). all other choices (including twitter, myspace, second life, delicious, and more) scored highest in either “never use it” or “never heard of it.” [slide 37] facebook was also the overwhelmingly preferred social network of respondents to the  ecar, while myspace was a distant second (p.11). of the 484 students who wrote in the open ended section answering, “would you like the acc libraries to have accounts on any of these sites? why or why not? what type of information would you want the library to share?” the top categories of replies were: yes, facebook (97) content – events (49) negative feedback about social networking sites in general (32) content – contact information (31) negative feedback about the library being in a social space – these are personal/private spaces and/or non-academic (25) nearly half of respondents chose firefox as their preferred web browser, though we believe this question may have been inadvertently skewed by offering “google chrome” as a choice rather than just saying “chrome.” we believe the high choice of chrome (21%) can at least partially be attributed to students selecting the search engine google rather than the browser. this belief is based on additional write in answers choosing yahoo! as their preferred browser. [slide 39] (to the best of our knowledge, yahoo! does not currently offer a browser, though they may have in the past, so we cannot entirely rule it out.) more than half (59%) of respondents customized their browsers [slide 40], and 56% indicated interest in a library related-plugin. [slide 41] (luckily, acc already offered the libx toolbar). we ended with three open ended questions: what do you like most about the acc libraries? (988 replies) top responses: staff (268) ease of use (213) quiet (164) computers (146) collection (133) facilities (82) atmosphere (64) hours (49) resources (48) printing (42) what would you change about the acc libraries? (930 replies) top responses: nothing (260) provide more computers (117) provide more space (83) stay open longer hours (82) provide more books (76) specific/one of a kind complaints (46) enforce quiet (39) provide more study rooms (27) provide more seating (24) printing (23) / outlets (22) the last question asked whether they had any other comments. the top two responses far outweighed any others and they were, “no” and generally positive feedback. part six: missteps and mental models we had hoped to create bibliographer reports like char booth did, breaking down responses by subject area, however only a handful of categories had enough responses to make this worthwhile. we have also offered to run any requested analyses, but have had very few requests. we already mentioned our formatting mistake on the computer ownership question and the issue with offering browser choices. we also had a few questions that asked, “if the library offered x…” and received write in replies along the lines of, “i didn’t know you did that,” telling us either the student didn’t read the question clearly enough, or we didn’t word it clearly enough. other responses revealed more about our students’ mental models. some responses showed student assumptions on how the library and technology interrelate. others revealed assumed relations between physical areas or services that are run by different departments. here are a few examples of acc students’ misconceptions that we encountered while reading open ended responses: all traditional library materials (books, articles, videos, etc.) are available electronically. lack of distinction between a phone application and the internet/web. lack of distinction between a browser and the web. lack of distinction between copier and printer. lack of distinction between computer labs and library. lack of distinction between other acc service providers and library. assumption that if the library offered text a librarian we would be giving out librarians’ personal cell phone numbers. some of these are just interesting without being particularly problematic. ellie noticed an increasing number of students standing in front of the copier looking for their print jobs, but was much more understanding of the confusion after seeing her doctor’s office’s all-in-one giant copier/scanner/fax/printer. some signage may be helpful, but the issue doesn’t have much impact on student success or on how students view the library. complaints about computer labs and wireless service however, do effect how students view the library. they are also, both fortunately and unfortunately, handled by a different department. the confusion is particularly understandable since in many buildings the computer lab is physically inside the library. we hope to address a number of these issues in a public response to the survey. we will also be sharing a final report with the college and highlighting items of interest for specific departments. finally, there are those more esoteric issues that are much harder to tackle. we can create a tutorial or link to an explanation of electronic publishing or a definition of a browser, but how do we get students to watch it and how do we know if they understood? and how much does it really matter? if they can get online, check their email, register for classes and get the research they need to finish their paper, is it hurting them if they “clicked the blue e” without knowing what a browser is or how it’s different from an app? as technology lines blur, how important is it to fully understand all the distinctions? we’d love to hear your take. part seven: still to come we are writing this article and our final report to the college at the same time. some of our preliminary recommendations include: publicize the library account features and how to access your account online. – e.g. place a library account bookmark in each checked out book for a week. create a “did you know?” page on our library website. review open ended answers to “what would you change” and list items that were requested that we already provide. also provide brief answers to items that are out of our control – e.g. computer labs are run by a different department, library does not control the wireless. run a “you asked, we answered” promotion – e.g. promoting library anywhere and the libx toolbar as a response to survey results. create a simple short explanation of textbooks. cover that the library doesn’t purchase textbooks & why. explain that student services makes the decisions on how many and which textbooks to purchase. tips on how to improve your chances on getting a textbook (clean record, completed form, etc.) address mental models – provide an explanation of how books end up online (that not every book is available as an e-book). investigate checking due dates and providing renewals through text messaging. some of our results fit the standard pronouncements about student social media and technology use (everyone is on facebook, text messaging is the current hot thing), but  some of our library-oriented results in particular surprised us (the students particularly value the library as place and want the librarians to enforce the rules – especially keeping the facilities quiet).  we hope that sharing our experience has encouraged you to adapt booth’s template for your own institution. thanks to char booth for her inspiration, hard work, and feedback on this article, and to emily ford and eric frierson for their feedback. additional resources full survey instrument ecar study informing innovation the physical and the virtual: the relationship between library as place and electronic collections ellie in particular was interested to see if danah boyd’s findings about class and social network preference would be visible in our results. we certainly did not see the animosity towards myspace that booth saw in her results, but we did still see facebook as the primary player in social networking sites for our students. [↩] not so much. [↩] data from the acc student factbook [↩] we asked how long they had owned their laptop and desktop computers. we misconfigured the question such that they could not select the same answer for both. [↩] austin community college, char booth, informing innovation, survey, technology welcoming the homeless into libraries editorial: the leaky pipe: lead pipers weigh in on wikileaks this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct we need to talk about how we talk about disability: a critical quasi-systematic review – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2021 24 feb amelia gibson, kristen bowen and dana hanson /0 comments we need to talk about how we talk about disability: a critical quasi-systematic review by amelia gibson, kristen bowen, and dana hanson in brief this quasi-systematic review uses a critical disability framework to assess definitions of disability, use of critical disability approaches, and hierarchies of credibility in lis research between 1978 and 2018. we present quantitative and qualitative findings about trends and gaps in the research, and discuss the importance of critical and justice-based frameworks for continued development of a liberatory lis theory and practice. disability and conditional citizenship much of the mythos of modern american librarianship is grounded in its connections to grand ideas about community, citizenship, rights, common ownership, and, in many cases, stewardship of public goods and information. despite these ostensibly community-oriented ideals, much of the current practice of librarianship and information science (lis) in the u.s. is also embedded with and within neoliberal social and political institutions and norms (bourg, 2014; ettarh, 2018; jaeger 2014) that often tie library and information access to selective membership and “productive citizenship” (fadyl et al., 2020), and marginalize disabled people who are considered “unproductive.” this ongoing internal conflict is reflected in perennial debates about intellectual freedom and social justice (knox, 2020), as well as commonplace beliefs and practices about belonging and ownership in public space. under neoliberalism, “tax paying citizens,” “dues paying members,” and “loyal customers” all claim rights and privileges denied to non-contributing “non-citizens”or outsiders. this excludes disabled people, people experiencing homelessness, teens, nonresidents, and anyone else who has not sufficiently “paid their dues.” this framework reflects the medical model of disability, which sites the locus of responsibility for cure or rehabilitation with the individual. this same value system deprioritizes community investments in libraries and other non-revenue generating information infrastructures—framing them as leisure, demanding increasing budget efficiencies and consistent positive return on investment (roi), while engaging in “benevolent” surveillance and data collection in the name of optimization and revenue generation (lee & cifor, 2019; mathios, 2019). these austerity measures often reinforce the status of disabled people as “sub-citizens” who are often denied access based on cost or inconvenience (sparke, 2017; webb & bywaters, 2018), and who must often trade personal disclosures and dignity for the most basic accommodations. this effect is particularly pronounced for disabled people of color who bear the burden of multiple marginalizations across many social and technical contexts. the danger of single-axis definitions of disability without critical self-reflection and examination, and without the willingness to tease out and openly name intersections of ableism, racism, xenophobia, sexism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia masquerading as practice, policy, research and education, we continue to create and reproduce violent (and mediocre) information systems and spaces. this violence might not be explicit or intentional, but intentions are beside the point (and are frequently used to derail discussions about outcomes and the need for systemic changes). focusing on disability as a single axis of identity effectively codes disability as white (gibson & hanson-baldauf, 2019), and actively ignores the specific information needs and access issues that disabled bipoc experience, including heightened risk for police violence, lowest rates of employment, and increased discrimination within educational and financial institutions (goodman, morris, & boston, 2019). it also prioritizes white comfort over the needs of disabled bipoc, and allows white people (disabled and nondisabled) to enjoy the fruits of structural ableism and racism without the guilt of doing explicitly ableist and racist things (stikkers, 2014). disciplinary subdivisions—especially public, academic, and medical librarianship—also betray a one-dimensional understanding of what constitutes “normal” public or academic information and what constitutes special “medical” or “health-related” information. these implicit frameworks for “norms” and “pathologies,” which are based in a medical model of disability that focuses on individual impairment, cure, and accommodation, also impact the qualitative experience of library spaces for community members and library workers. over the last quarter of a century, disability activists and movements have challenged the primacy of the medical model, arguing for disability as a social construct, imposed by a society that values conformity over individuality (oliver 1990; olkin 1999). according to the social model, one is not disabled by his or her physical embodiment, but rather by a society unwilling to accept and accommodate the wide diversity of humanity. igniting the disability rights movement, the social model served as an emancipatory force by empowering individuals to assert their rights and fight for the removal of disabling barriers (barnartt &altman 2001). more recently, critical disability theory, disability justice frameworks, and other disability frameworks have offered disability rights advocates and scholars a means to construct more authentic representations of disability, physical embodiment, social power structures, and intersecting identities. both shifts could, if integrated into lis, have profound implications for the way we conceptualize systems and services for disabled people. who do we believe? the hierarchy of credibility the near-invisibility of disabled people in the research process can be attributed to what becker (1966) referred to as a hierarchy of credibility. that is, the tendency of researchers to prioritize and amplify perspectives from those with greater institutional power and social capital over the voices and lived experiences of marginalized people. in academia, this hierarchy assigns the highest authority on information related to disability to medical professionals and other healthcare providers, parents, and additional caretakers; disabled people are placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. the regular exclusion of disabled people in positions of power in research reflects broader societal devaluation. this devaluation is evident in citation practices and research methods, such as those that assign authority to healthcare provider narratives as “expert opinions” while denigrating disabled people’s narratives as unscientific anecdotes. it is a gross understatement to say that the history of disability reflects a systemic lack of justice in american social and political systems (braddock & parish, 2001). although the birth of the scientific method eventually facilitated more sophisticated biological and technical treatments and supports for many disabilities, it also established rigid parameters for “normalcy” and social aberrance, and firmly established lines dividing disability and power. these parameters persist in the current day, informing scholarship and practice that still elevate conformity to the norms established by a nondisabled white center. simultaneously, that center reserves for itself the institutional, economic, and political power to shape norms, determine policy, establish the boundaries of “ability” and “disability,” and assign value to those categories. this hierarchy of intersectional ableism reflects the hierarchy of privilege and prerogative outlined in harris’ (1993) whiteness as property. we see this phenomenon frequently in discussions about disability accommodations, when nondisabled managers decide that an employee is not disabled “enough” to warrant accommodations, or that an accommodation is an “undue burden” (e.g., pionke, 2017). the same processes that marginalize the employee also make it difficult for them to attain the career advancement needed to make those sorts of decisions themselves. like whiteness, ableism protects itself by building social, political, and economic structures (policies, norms, institutions, etc.) that reinforce systems of privilege and exclusion. we see this in the elevation of professional training over lived experience, and parents and families over disabled individuals themselves. research that focuses on disabled people as subjects but ignores their perspectives function to exclude them from influencing lis practice and research in any meaningful way. it silences critique in favor of topics, frameworks, and questions designed (and often answered) by nondisabled people. hill’s (2013) study offers one of the few expansive reviews of lis field’s literature on disability. employing a content analysis of articles published between 2000-2010, hill reported a scarcity, unbalanced, and limited scope of disability-related publications. of the 198 articles identified, the vast majority focused on visual disabilities (41%) and non-specific, general “disabilities” (42%). practitioner literature made up approximately 65% of the available literature. hill described the articles as predominantly practitioner-centered expositions of how people with disabilities operate within library spaces, challenges encountered, and interventions. hill also observed that these articles were most often written from a non-disabled viewpoint, gave minimal consideration to intervening social or attitudinal factors, and offered guidance largely lacking empirical support. research investigations made up the remaining 35% of the literature reviewed. of the seventy studies identified, only twenty-five solicited input from disabled people. research involving accessibility testing commonly recruited non-disabled participants over disabled participants. hill concluded, “overall, there appears to be a lot of discussion about people with disabilities, but little direct involvement of these people in the research” (p. 141). methods a systematic literature review was deemed most appropriate to meet the aims of the present study. as the methodological tool, the approach offers a highly structured and rigorously comprehensive process, allowing the research team to capture a bird’s eye view of the available literature, detect variance in the literature, and identify gaps in the recorded knowledge. this methodology also allows for replication and the ongoing pursuance, appraisal, and integration of new knowledge. while widely applied within medical and healthcare research, xu, et al. (2015) report a recent rise in systematic (and quasi-systematic) reviews in lis, and advocate for further use of the method. researchers conducted the systematic review between august 2018 to may 2019 using the following steps: identifying research questions determining criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of literature establishing and implementing the search protocol screening and extracting non-relevant results using inclusion/exclusion criteria conduct a randomized sample selection of the literature develop coding schema and establish intercoder reliability review and apply coding schema research questions building on data presented in hill’s (2013) review of lis literature covering a ten-year span between 2000 and 2010, this investigation aimed to establish a baseline of understanding pertaining the historic and present-day representation of people with disabilities through a systematic quantitative and qualitative examination of the lis research and practitioner literature, guided by the following questions: how many articles about disability in lis have been published in the 40-year period in question? how do lis researchers define disability? what disability frameworks have informed lis research related to disability between 1965 and 2018? what hierarchies of disability and credibility are evidenced in the literature during that period? to what extent are critical disability frameworks employed in writing about disability in lis? inclusion criteria the next step was to establish distinct perimeters for the scope of literature to be reviewed. this involved discussion among the research team to develop criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of specific works. as outlined in table 1, selection included publication date, peer-review status, presented content (topic and type of article), availability in full (either online or through interlibrary access), printed publication language, and the discipline-explicit subject heading of the journal or conference proceeding in which the article was published. table 1: inclusion and exclusion criteria screening categories included excluded publication date published between january 1978 and september 2018 published prior to january 1978 language english non-english subject discipline library and information science (lis) non-library and information science review process peer review process for publication no peer review process for publication article type original research, viewpoint, technical paper, conceptual paper, case study, literature review, general review book reviews, bibliographies, editorials, posters, announcements and other brief communications central focus article content centers on people with disabilities article content contains only a perfunctory reference to people with disabilities availability article can be found online and in full text full text article is not available online *publication subject discipline verified using ulrich’s online serial directory establish and implement a search protocol the research team developed a search protocol for the systematic identification and extraction of literature. this included determining relevant sources, database tools, and search terminology. sources were limited to lis journals and conferences with established peer-review processes for publication acceptance. the team selected two bibliographic databases to conduct the search based on relevancy, coverage, and reputation: library and information science source (liss) and library and information science abstracts (lisa). next, the researchers developed a list of keywords by conducting an exploratory search of controlled vocabulary within each database thesaurus. these keywords were intended to capture conditions listed under “disability” within each database and to capture common disabilities that were not specifically associated with variations on “disability” (search query 1) in each database. this meant that names of specific conditions that might be expected in discussions about disability (e.g., “deaf” or “blind”) might not appear in initial searches, because they were included in the results from search query 1. search queries 2 and 3 were intended to expand the possible scope of the initial list, in order to capture literature on specific conditions that were inconsistently indexed as disabilities in an exploratory literature search. from this list, three search queries were constructed (table 2) comprising: (1) the term “disability” and variations of the term in current and past practice; (2) additional specific categories of disability for expansion of results list; and (3) and disability frameworks. table 2: inclusion and exclusion criteria search queries query content search query 1 disability or disabled or handicapped or “differently abled” or “differently-abled” or disabilities or “special needs” or retardation or retard* search query 2 autism or asd or adhd or “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” or “auditory processing disorder” or “traumatic brain injury” or dyslexia or (add and attention) or (sensory and disorder) or aphasia or agraphia or “perceptual disturbance” search query 3 “social role valorization” or “complex embodiment” search queries 2 and 3 did not include specific categories and frameworks containing the word (or variations of the word) “disability” as it was assumed the queries would yield duplicate results captured under query 1, for example “physical disability” or “social model of disability”. the three search queries conducted on each database that used the available filtering functions to narrow the scope of literature based on established inclusion and exclusion criteria yielded 17,632 references. next, reference results were exported into a microsoft excel spreadsheet and displayed horizontally (one reference per row) and organized vertically into columns (by author, article title, publication date, etc.). duplicate references were identified and extracted and using conditional formatting and customized sort & filter functions. upon completion of this process, 7859 duplicate articles were removed from the literature set and 9773 references remained. table 3 presents an aggregate view of this process. table 3: distribution of downloaded and duplicate references database references downloaded duplicates identified within and between prescreened references library and information science abstracts(lisa) 13445 (7859) 7955 library and information science source(liss) 3562 1620 library and information science technology abstracts (lista) 625 198 total 17632 (7859) 9773 screen and extract non-relevant reference data using inclusion/exclusion criteria the next phase involved screening references for the purpose of extracting all non-relevant references from the literature set. as previously outlined in table 1, screening categories included the article publication date, printed language, publication discipline, review process, article type, online availability, and central focus. while database filter functions were activated during the initial query search process, manual screening proved necessary to ensure inclusion and exclusion criteria were met. a summary of the process can be found in table 4, followed by detailed descriptions of the screening categories. table 4: summary of screening process screening categories references removed references remaining publication date 0 9773 language 223 9550 subject discipline 2382 7168 review process 21 7147 article type 927 6220 topic relevance 5400 820 online and full text availability 161 659(remainder requested via interlibrary loan) publication date. the first step in the screening process was to organize the literature set by publication year and scan for articles published prior to january 1978. no articles were identified for extraction during this process. printed language. to identify and extract non-english publications, the language column of the literature set was alphabetized, thereby grouping publications by language for bulk removal. in some cases, languages were displayed in brackets following the article’s title (i.e. “title [hungarian]”). these titles were identified using excel’s “find” function, and searching for brackets. the remaining non-english titles were identified individually throughout the screening process. the researchers removed a total of 223 non-english language articles, leaving 9550 references in the set. subject discipline. the literature set was then screened to identify and remove publications (i.e. journals and conference reports) from outside of lis. to accomplish this step, references were grouped by publication title and screened using ulrich’s online serial directory to verify each publication’s subject heading. publications without lis subject headings (e.g., “library and information science” or “information science and information theory”) were removed from the literature set. a total of 7168 remained after the removal of non-lis sources. review status. in addition to extracting non-lis publications, ulrich’s online serial directory was used to determine a publication’s review process. works published in sources without a peer-review process were removed, accounting for 21 references with 7147 references remaining in the literature set. article type. references were then sorted and categorized by article type, as determined by the established exclusion criteria. this task was completed using excel’s “find” function to search the title and abstract columns. table 5 provides a list of terms employed in the search. references identified through this process were then screened by eye to confirm or reject group identity and color-coded accordingly. nine hundred twenty seven references met criteria for exclusion from the study and were removed. a total of 6220 references remained. table 5: exclusion criteria screening terms content type excluded search terms book reviews “book review”, “is reviewed by”, (name of reviewer) “reviews the book” bibliographies “bibliograph*” posters “poster” editorials “editor*” introductions “introduction” “special issue” brief communication “notes” “memorandum” “announcements” “news brief” “from the field” “article alerts” conference proceeding, misc. “schedule” “agenda” “overview” “conference” “meeting” “summary” “minutes” “proceedings” central focus. remaining references were then screened to determine topic relevance – that is, articles predominantly centering on disability and disabled people. this entailed open coding a subset of the data to create an extensive list of disability-related search terms, including disability classifications, frameworks, degree of impact language, intervention-related terms, and people-first language (table 6). again, the purpose here was to avoid excluding any article focused on disability, but to begin to weed out articles that were not focused on human disabilities. additionally, we attempted to stick as closely as possible to an emergent characterization of disability as from the literature, rather than imposing our own definition. table 6: disability-related search terms terms disability classifications adhd, alzheimer, apraxia*, apsperg*, acquired brain injury, asd, attention, autis*, behavior challenges, blind, brain damage, cognitive needs, deaf, delay*, dementia, depress*, development*, disab*, disorder, dwarf*, dyslexi*, epilep*, gait, handicap*, hearing, impair*, little people, low vision, memory, mental illness, mobility, limitations, motor skills, multiple sclerosis neurodiv*, palsy, ppd-nos, quadri*, retard*, sensory, special needs, spinal muscular atrophy, stammer, stutter, syndrome, tbi, tic, traumatic brain damage degree of impact mild, moderate, profound, severe, significant intervention accessibil*, aac, adaptive, assisted, assistive, augment, braille, cochlear implants, habil*, inclusion, inclusiv*, sign language, special education, therap*, wheelchair population children with, individuals with, people with, young adults with, underserved, marginalized disability frameworks social model, medical model, critical disability, disability studies, social role valorization, ecological model, complex embodiment using these terms, the abstract column was searched using excel’s “find” function. abstracts with one or more search terms were marked for screening and reviewed individually to determine topic relevance and central focus. abstracts without a central focus on disability or disabled people were extracted from the set one at a time, and additional disability classifications were added as they emerged (after the initial search). upon completion, 820 relevant works that were available online, in full text, and via interlibrary loan remained. table 6 provides a summary of the screening process to filter out non-relevant references from the literature set. select a randomized sample from the literature given the high volume of articles identified and time limitations of the research team, a representative sample size from the literature set was calculated at 262 with a confidence level of 95% and a confidence interval of 5. in total, 282 references were randomly selected using an online randomizer tool. develop coding schema and establish intercoder reliability the primary aim of the study was to gain a better sense of how disability is understood and represented in the lis literature, and moreover, the extent to which critical disability has informed research and practice. to accomplish this goal, the reviewers established a coding schema to represent basic determinants of a critical disability approach. table 7 provides a short list of codes and criteria. while precise definitions of critical disability theory differ, some we applied the following common criteria to rating the articles (alper and goggin, 2017; goodley, 2013; meekosha and shuttleworth, 2009). connects theory with practice/praxis and vice versa (code: tap). the article explicitly sits within ongoing conversations among academic research communities, communities of practice (e.g. librarianship, occupational medicine), and the disability communities being discussed. the criteria for connection between theory and practice/praxis refers to connections with ongoing discussions that affect the lived experiences of disabled people, as well as contributions to those discussions. recognizes disability as socially and politically constructed (code: con). the article goes beyond an individual-medical definition of disability to include the understanding that disability is also a state of being (or an identity) produced through socially constructed definitions of physical, emotional, mental, and social “normalcy” and “fitness;” and reinforced through systems and infrastructure (e.g., information systems and physical structures) that support those understandings of normalcy. acknowledges the corporeality of disability and engages with the reality of physical impairment and individual perception of limitations (code: bod). the article recognizes that, while disability is socially and politically constructed, it is also situated within the individual, and acknowledges experiences situated in the individual body and mind such as pain and sense of impairment. explicitly acknowledges and/or addresses power and/or justice (code: pow). the article explicitly acknowledges the existence of social and political power in information systems and services and/or frames equity/equality in terms of rights and justice. the writers of the article write from the position that disabled people have the right to equality and equity in information access. the article does not characterize access as optional, extra, or “charitable”. builds on an activist historical tradition of fighting the exclusion of disabled people (code: opp). the article makes practical recommendations to improve access to systems, information, or data. each article was rated for each criterion on a scale from 1 (more true) to 5 (less true). table 7: critical disability coding schema code criteria tap connects theory with praxis and vice versa. con recognizes disability as socially and/or politically constructed. bod acknowledges the corporeality of disability and engages with the reality of physical impairment and limitations. pow explicitly acknowledges and/or examines issues related to power, access and justice. frames access as a right. opp builds on activist historical tradition in response to exclusion of disabled people. recommends changes to improve on oppressive or exclusionary systems. to ensure intercoder reliability, the three reviewers coded identical samples of twenty articles independently and compared finding using the recal 3 tool (freelon, 2017; freelon, 2010). krippendorf’s alpha for the 3 coders was .867. once intercoder reliability was established, each reviewer read and coded full text of their assigned set of articles. table 8: intercoder reliability coder sample size coder 1 139 coder 2 118 coder 3 25 total 282 findings the following findings begin with a general analysis of the identified 820 relevant references available online and in print, followed by a more nuanced analysis of a representative sample (n=282) of the relevant literature to better understand the ways in which disability has been understood and represented in the lis research and practice literature over the years. general overview of the disability-related literature published in lis the number of lis published articles focused on disability and disabled people has increased sharply over the past four decades. figure 1 presents a distribution of disability-related articles published in lis journals over the last four decades. as hill noted, much of the work was practitioner focused, but the percentage of work focused on technology increased over time. of the 820 relevant articles identified, 396 (48.29%) center on various types of technology or aspects of technology, including assistive technology, mobile technologies, web design, software development, communication devices, accessibility, and the digital divide over the 40-year span. figure 1: distribution of articles published between 1978 and 2018 figure 1 accessible equivalent of this chart as a table. a focus on technology in original research. figure 2 shows how many of the full final sample articles published in each decade were focused specifically on technology. over the 40-year period, the percentage of papers focused on technology grew from 6.45% in 1978-1988 to 53.87% in 2009-2018. figure 2: proportion of lis disability articles focused on technology between 1978 and 2018 figure 2 accessible equivalent of this chart as a table. the final sample of 282 articles included original research, technical papers, conceptual works, viewpoint articles, and literature reviews. as highlighted in figure 3, research papers comprised the largest portion of the literature set (55.1%). of the 155 original research papers in the final sample, 124 (80.7%) studies predominantly focused on technology. studies related to website accessibility comprised 44.8% of this research. other technology-related topics included assistive technology design and evaluation, evaluation and assessment of mobile platforms, e-reader use and program implementations, online behavior, and distance education. figure 3: distribution of articles in the representative sample figure 3 accessible equivalent of this chart as a table. what disability communities do we study? figure 4 describes the frequency of specific disabilities identified in the representative sample. most authors addressed disability as a single, broad category, generalizing among a wide range of conditions (41%, n=118). the second category of disability that emerged most frequently in the literature was blindness, vision impairment, and vision loss (19%, n=53), followed by learning disabilities (7.4%, n=21). these two findings echo hill’s (2013) findings. the least frequently listed were palliative care patients (.3%, n=1), people with multiple sclerosis (.3%, n=1), and people with hiv (.7%, n=2). it should be noted that we did not add chronic illness categories to the initial search for disability topics. it is likely that the number of articles found is more reflective of lis’ general exclusion of people with chronic illness from disability discourse over the period of study than a reflection of the total lis research focused on hiv. figure 4:categories of disability identified in the sample literature set figure 4 accessible equivalent of this chart as a table. assessing disability models articles were assessed and given a single point for each of the five critical framework criteria met (see table 7 for explanation of criteria). this examination of the sample literature set reveals most works do not engage with critical disability frameworks (see figure 5) in any meaningful way. approximately 54% (n=153) of the articles explicitly connected the work to some form of theory or built on previous research and broader conversations in disability communities. of the 282 articles, 79% (n=223) addressed disability as an individual physical and/or cognitive condition experienced by individuals. only 36% acknowledged disability as a social and/or political construct. it should be noted that these categories (disability as physical and disability as social) are not mutually exclusive. approximately one-third (32.7%) of the articles acknowledged disability influenced by a combination of both individual/physical and social/political factors. approximately 44% (n=122) of the sample explicitly recognized information access and accessibility as explicitly related to power or as a justice issue. sixty seven percent (n=190) of the articles in the sample recommended systemic change, but these changes varied based on authors’ specific definitions of disability. those who defined disability primarily physically were more likely to suggest changes to technical systems. those who defined it socially were more likely to suggest changes in services, policy, and training. figure 5: frequency of each critical criteria in sample figure 5 accessible equivalent of this chart as a table. critical criteria points were tallied and each article was given a critical framework score (cfs). the higher the cfs, the more criteria the title fulfilled. of the articles in the sample, most fell between 2cfs (24.9%, n=70) and 3cfs (26%, n=73). among the 2cfs group, bod (recognizing disability as individual/physical impairment)(80%, n=56), and opp (makes recommendations for change)(55.7%, n=39) were most frequently selected, suggesting that most articles took a strictly medical approach, and made suggestions for improvements based on that perspective. con (disability as socially constructed) was the least popular (15.7%, n=11). among the 3cfs group, bod(83.6%, n=61), opp (82.2%, n=60), and tap (connects work to theory)(67.1%, n=39) were most frequently selected. pow (addresses power, access, and justice)(n=32) and con(n=11) trailed behind. among the 4cfs group, con (60.5%, n=26) was selected least. figure 6: percentage of titles with total critical framework scores (cfs) figure 6 accessible equivalent of this chart as a table. many articles avoided discussing social implications of recommendations made beyond immediate service or technology improvements. authors largely sidestepped intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and disability, focusing on a single-axis identity (disability only). hierarchies of credibility assessment of credibility in articles coded as research studies were conducted qualitatively, as this data is more nuanced than other measures and therefore more difficult to evaluate quantitatively. because many studies were multi-method, several studies fit into multiple categories. five strong themes emerged in the sample studies that hint at a framework for assigning credibility and authority in the design and evaluation of lis disability research (presented in order of relative frequency). 1. self-referred authority: author described systems/services/designs proposed, created, and (sometimes) evaluated by the author (without input from disabled people). these included self-generated system designs, and articles describing library programs. 2. academic/professional authority: heuristic evaluations of existing programs and policies based on previous researchers’ and practitioners’ work, reflecting a traditional literature review model and traditional academic citation practices. 3. academic/institutional authority: policy, practice, and curricular analyses – sometimes informed by previous researchers’ work and statements or input from local, national, and international disability organizations. 4. self-referred authority/mediated participation: primarily experiments engaging disabled participants as research subjects in studies designed by (presumably nondisabled) researchers. 5. experiential authority: surveys and interviews that asked disabled people for their thoughts/opinions. discussion lis researchers continue to struggle with operationalizing the power and identity in studies related to access, racism, sexism, and ableism (honma, 2005; yu, 2006). many also continue to ignore the social and technical implications of power relationships between and among groups. kumbier and starkey (2016) argue that the “conceptualization of access as a matter of equity requires library workers to account not only for the needs of individual users, or of specific groups of users but also for the contexts (social, cultural, historical, material, and economic) that shape our users’ terms of access.” the extent and quality of information services in support of disabled people directly reflects how disability is perceived and understood within the library and information science (lis) literature, practice, and education. an appraisal of the lis landscape suggests an unprioritized and short-sighted understanding of disability and much work to do. we exist in a time where we are constantly confronted by the importance and value of human-centered and humane, respectful, compassionate information and data systems and services. libraries are constantly innovating and reinventing themselves. the covid-19 pandemic has, yet again, given us an opportunity to listen to our disabled and chronically ill colleagues and community members, reflect, and re-imagine a field that values and respects us all equally. what would it mean to decenter nondisabled perspectives in our practice and our research and to lean into the frameworks and values established in disability justice communities and literature? what would it mean to deconstruct our hierarchy of credibility and rely on disability communities to define who is disabled? what would our research and education look like if we regularly engaged with disabled people as research collaborators, rather than subjects? in our current context, what could co-liberatory information work become? how would we expand our thinking and practice beyond technical accessibility, basic physical accessibility, and segregated programming models? is this even possible, given the financial and administrative structures of most public and academic libraries? much of the work sampled framed the discipline’s struggle to provide minimally equivalent access and services as innovation. a large percentage of technology research focused on basic web accessibility and relied on self-referred or professional authority. few studies actually engaged disabled participants in ways that might influence the scope or design of the research. fewer still considered intersectionality (crenshaw, 1990), and the experiences of disabled bipoc and/or disabled lgbtqia+ people. this highlights the scarcity of training and education on disability issues, rights, justice, and accessibility in the field. this gap has, in the past, limited continued development of substantive theory and praxis around disability and information within lis. reassessing our disciplinary and cultural preference for individualism over interdependence could support information systems, services, spaces, and communities built on care webs (piepzna-samarasinha, 2018) and institutional responsibility rather than individual access and responsibility, and wholeness (berne et al., 2018) rather than clinical cure or rehabilitation. recent growth in the number of researchers in this area, including bipoc researchers (cooke & kitzie, 2021), disabled researchers (brown & sheidlower, 2019; copeland et al., 2020; niebauer, 2020; schomberg and hollich, 2019) and an increase in community-engaged and community-led research provides a point for optimism. this holds promise for more radical redesign of systems and services related to information, data, literacies, in more diverse communities. the covid-19 pandemic has reminded us how important access to good health information is for public decision-making, but this need for public data and information is not new. the need for national and local level community information and data exists for marginalized folks all the time. we envision a public and academic (and perhaps health) librarianship that follows the lead of disabled community members, supporting decision-making and on issues of importance to them, such as personal data stewardship and safety, informed refusal, financial and insurance literacy. community-led research and practice should move beyond leveling access and centering marginalized people to the work of dismantling margins whenever possible. no justice without critique the critical disability framework we developed was not an especially rigorous one, in terms of building capacity for equitable and just information systems and spaces for people with disabilities, and most of the works examined only scored a 2 or 3 out of 5. disability justice advocates have long pushed for much more transformative policies, disability-led work (rather than participatory work, which is typically led by nondisabled people), anti-capitalism, collectively oriented systems of care and access (rather than individually oriented access), humane and sustainable labor practices and ideologies, and collective liberation (hosking, 2008; berne et al., 2018). the framework also excluded explicit acknowledgment of intersectionality; justice-oriented methodologies (e.g. community-led research and autoethnographies). while a critical perspective alone isn’t enough to build just systems, we cannot hope to build just, humane, or useful systems with a timid stance on critique. additionally, a myopic focus on individual behaviors, intentions and the cognitive perspective hampers our capacity for rigorous examination and improvement. a critical perspective enables us to contend with the social systems, norms, and frameworks that scaffold our research and practice, the definitions, assumptions, and biases that form their foundations, and the systems of power and control that serve as mortar to hold them together. acknowledgments we would like to thank jessica schomberg and ryan randall for your work in reviewing this paper. your insightful feedback helped us clarify and strengthen our arguments and explanations. we would also like to thank ian beilin for managing this publication and keeping it on track through a summer of unrest and a year of pandemic life. this publication would not have been possible without your support. this publication was made possible in part by the institute of museum and library services re-07-17-0048-17. accessible equivalents figure 1 as a table figure 1. distribution of articles published between 1978 and 2018 year number of disability-related articles 1978-1988 62 1989-1998 90 1999-2008 280 2009-2018 388 return to figure 1 caption. figure 2 as a table figure 2: proportion of lis disability articles focused on technology between 1978 and 2018 year disability with tech disability without tech total articles percentage with focus on technology 1978-1988 4 58 62 6.45% 1989-1998 25 65 90 27.78% 1999-2008 158 122 280 56.43% 2009-2018 209 179 388 53.87% return to figure 2 caption. figure 3 as a table figure 3: distribution of articles in the representative sample number of articles percentage of articles original research 145 55.13% general reviews 51 19.39% technical papers 23 8.75% conceptual works 19 7.22% viewpoint articles 16 6.08% literature reviews 9 3.42% return to figure 3 caption. figure 4 as a table figure 4: categories of disability identified in the sample literature set category of disability number of articles percentage of articles (rounded) non-specific and generalized 127 45 blindness and low vision 59 21 learning disabilities, including dyslexia and other print disabilities 28 10 deafness and hearing impairment 19 7 physical disabilities 13 5 autism 10 4 general aging 10 4 intellectual disabilities, including down syndrome 8 3 mental illness, including dementia 3 1 hiv 2 1 multiple sclerosis 2 1 palliative – end of life 1 0 totals 282 102 return to figure 4 caption. figure 5 as a table figure 5: frequency of each critical criteria in sample critical criteria number of articles con (disability as socially constructed) 102 pow (addresses power, access, and/or justice) 123 tap (connects theory to practice/praxis) 153 opp (recommends systemic changes) 190 bod (disability as physical/medical model) 223 return to figure 5 caption. figure 6 as a table figure 6: percentage of titles with total critical framework scores (cfs) number of criteria fulfilled percentage of articles number of articles 1 criterion 17.79% 50 2 criteria 24.91% 70 3 criteria 25.98% 73 4 criteria 15.3% 43 5 criteria 16.01% 45 return to figure 6 caption. references alper, m., goggin, g. 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(2017). austerity and the embodiment of neoliberalism as ill-health: towards a theory of biological sub-citizenship. social science & medicine, 187, 287–295. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.12.027 stikkers, k. (2014). “ . . . but i’m not racist”: toward a pragmatic conception of “racism.” the pluralist, 9(3), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.5406/pluralist.9.3.0001 webb, c. j. r., & bywaters, p. (2018). austerity, rationing and inequity: trends in children’s and young peoples’ services expenditure in england between 2010 and 2015. local government studies, 44(3), 391–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2018.1430028 xu, j., kang, q., & song, z. (2015). the current state of systematic reviews in library and information studies. library & information science research, 37(4), 296–310. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2015.11.003 yu, l. (2006). understanding information inequality: making sense of the literature of the information and digital divides. journal of librarianship and information science 38, 229–252. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000606070600 critical disability studies, critical librarianship, disability, intersectionality, systematic review culturally responsive community engagement programming and the university library: lessons learned from half a decade of vtditc ethical financial stewardship: one library’s examination of vendors’ business practices this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct what we talk about when we talk about public libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 23 oct hugh rundle /6 comments what we talk about when we talk about public libraries east ballarat library: photo by flickr user c/o raaen99 in brief by hugh rundle the early founders of free public libraries intended them to achieve particular outcomes: a place for working people to access the wisdom of the classics, to socialise and to become more informed and educated citizens and avoid spending their time idling, lonely or drunk. there is, however, little incentive for public librarians to undertake the research required to test whether these outcomes are being achieved. in this article i explore the state of public library research in the australian and international context by highlighting the low participation rates of public librarians in peer-reviewed article and conference paper publication. i then consider the incentives and disincentives within public library management structures that inhibit research by public librarians. if we are to manage public libraries in an effective and scientific manner, public librarians must be encouraged to undertake rigorous research and public library administrators must clarify the particular outcomes they are seeking. when you’re a librarian in melbourne, the figure of redmond barry looms large. an irishman trying to build a life in respectable nineteenth-century london society, after his father’s death barry found himself on the other side of the world just in time for the proclamation of the new colony of victoria and the gold rush that followed. barry was instrumental in the establishment of the university of melbourne, the victorian parliamentary library and the melbourne public library (now known as the state library of victoria). barry was a complex man. he was keen on the forms of british high society, snobbish in his attitudes to literature (he refused to stock fiction in the melbourne public library) and very much a man of his time in his attitude to women. at the same time, barry became well known for representing aboriginal defendants at court (usually for free), presided over the acquittal of the eureka rebels, and his melbourne public library was one of the first free libraries – open to any person over the age of fifteen years at no charge –  in the world.1 barry, a very proper british empire conservative implementing radical new social experiments, exemplifies the complex birth of free public libraries. whilst many in the usa look to thomas jefferson as the father of modern public libraries, the reasoning behind the provision of free public libraries in the english speaking world is in many ways best understood by examining the arguments in britain and her empire in the mid nineteenth century. the british public libraries act 1850 was passed just a year before redmond barry convinced the victorian colonial government to build the melbourne public library and the parliamentary debate highlights both the reasoning behind the establishment of public libraries and their long history of political controversy. liberal members argued that the provision of public libraries would “afford the working classes in our populous towns proper facilities for the cultivation of their minds, and the refinement of their tastes in science and art”, and that if workers remained uneducated and uninformed they were more likely to be whipped up into a mob. conservatives argued that the bill would simply lead to working people (and landowners) being taxed so that the idle middle classes could enjoy reading newspapers and books in their ample leisure time, or alternatively that the library buildings would be used by radicals as ‘lecture halls’ to spread sedition.2 as for barry, he explained his push for the establishment of public libraries in a speech at the opening of the free public library of ballarat east several years later in 1869: the hours of labor reduced to eight3, leave to artisans, tradesmen, and other dwellers in towns a very large portion of the remainder of the twenty-four virtually unoccupied. the high rate of remuneration for every kind of labor places within the reach of all, means to indulge in the sensual excesses so destructive to health, strength, and reputation, temptations to which are so numerous on all sides. how is this leisure to be disposed of? in the public-house? the singing-hall? the dancing-saloon? which hold out seductions somewhat more dangerous, methinks, to honest labor than those presented by a library; or in listless inaction, in weary unoccupied solitude? that cannot be. while man is a social animal society he must have, and better a thousand times that he should he should seek relief from the tedium of unemployed hours in the improving conversation of worthy authors, dead or living, than in the debasing, brutalising communications from which it is so difficult otherwise to escape. it was this fear of the working class either rising up in rebellion or sinking down into depravity that ultimately drove the establishment of free public libraries. when it seems that every month brings another opinion piece proclaiming the death of libraries, complete with comments from those arguing their taxes should not be spent on such things, we should remember not only that this argument is at least 150 years old, but that the point of public libraries was never just the cheap provision of books. the men involved in the mid-nineteenth century debates on free public libraries intended these institutions to achieve certain aims – refinement of tastes and manners, education in practical skills, reprieve from loneliness, an increase in sobriety and, it appears, an avoidance of singing-halls and dancing saloons. thirty years later, carnegie had much the same aims.4 so the question is – are we meeting these goals, or their modern equivalents? are we doing our jobs well? are we measuring our performance against these goals, or are we actually measuring something else? what is it that we talk about, when we talk about public libraries? read-only culture recently, as part of a project to develop a workplace learning network, my library ran a survey of staff so we could understand what professional reading and learning staff were already undertaking, and their level of interest in publishing professional texts.5 of the librarians who answered the survey, nearly all of them listened to, read, or watched professional texts, but only about half were interested in producing them. we don’t currently have further data from staff about why they’re interested in reading but not writing, but this survey result is not an outlier in the wider world of libraries. when it comes to professional development and professional literature, public librarians have been underperforming for many years. consider to what sort of librarianship the most successful journals are dedicated. the australian library and information association (alia) currently publishes two academic journals – australian library journal (alj) and australian academic and research libraries (aarl). that is, one generalist library research journal, and one dedicated to academic and research libraries, respectively. in 1988 auslib press began publishing australasian public libraries and information services (aplis), but this publication ceased in 2012 with the retirement of auslib press founder dr alan bundy. i contacted dr bundy to ask for some background on aplis. he noted that for the 25 year life of aplis … australia was one of the very few countries with a public library journal at a critical juncture in the development and recognition of public libraries as the most used and valued community provision. the other countries were the us, uk and scandinavia, of which only the us still has a public library journal.6 this can be seen as either a failing of the public library sector or as a sign of its maturation, with public librarians being more willing to now publish in general library journals. but are public librarians really more willing to publish in general library journals? on the face of it, the answer does seem to be a qualified “yes”. my quick analysis of articles7 in australian library journal over the last five years shows that around 30% were on a public library theme and 40% generally applicable, with articles centred around school, special, and academic libraries making up the remaining 30%. this is certainly encouraging, although it is still the case that academic and research libraries have their own alia-published journal in addition to alj. when we talk about public libraries in peer-reviewed academic articles, it’s not to a large enough extent to justify our own journals. showing up the real difference between public and, particularly, academic librarians can be seen at conferences. alia figures show that there are 27,500 library and information workers in australia and 7,500 of those work in public libraries.8 that’s roughly 27% or at least one in four. in australia, there are several national library conferences, but the two big ones are both biennial – the vala conference and the alia biennial. at the 2012 vala conference public librarians presented at four out of forty-five sessions.9 this means less than nine percent of presenters were from public libraries, compared to twenty three percent of attendees. at the 2012 alia conference public librarians presented at six out of forty sessions, or fifteen percent10. it might be argued that these conferences are just not the type that attract public librarians. perhaps public librarians prefer to share information and research in a less formal way? maybe we just go to different conferences? it is true that events like victoria’s annual young adult literature conference reading matters are important to the calendars of public and school librarians, but events like this differ in their scope and aims. at reading matters there are no professional research papers presented – it’s a valuable event, but it’s more like a writers festival than a professional conference. the problem is not the style of the conference11, but the content. meeting morris gleitzman might be fun and inspiring, but it doesn’t really enlighten us about whether lending his books to kids achieves the goals of our library services. when we talk about public libraries at reading matters, we talk about what children might enjoy about certain authors’ books. we talk about what those authors try to do with their stories. we talk about how we respond to those stories ourselves. we don’t talk about how we have tested our strategies for ‘relieving the tedium of unemployed hours’ for young adults, using replicable processes. access even when we’re wanting to find out about research, public librarians simply don’t have the same access to academic journals as those who work in universities. i have been unable to find any hard data on this, but an understanding of the average public library work environment reveals the potential problems. many library services subscribe to hardcopy journals for their staff to read. these journals are then routed around the organisation to staff who wish to read them. hardcopy journal routing is inefficient – bottlenecks can develop if particular staff members are tardy with their reading, the staff at the end of the routing list receive the journal weeks or months after it is issued and once it moves on staff can not easily go back to an old edition. most public libraries also subscribe to at least one or two journal aggregators such as proquest research library or ebsco’s abi/inform global. the budgets of most public library services do not stretch nearly as far as academic libraries for this sort of thing, however, so inevitably public libraries provide access to fewer publications. universities also provide access to a much wider range of journals, providing access to a wider pool of research from related fields. these factors then affect the crucial matter of familiarity. whilst in theory all public librarians are highly skilled and knowledgeable with regard to the use of academic journal databases, in reality the proportion of public library patrons who require or ask for assistance with these products is quite low. inevitably public librarians have less of a focus on them than other knowledge such as the state of current popular fiction, how to navigate through ever-changing library ebook services, and recommended picture books for potty training. public librarians are not looking at journal databases, talking with academic students and academics, and discussing academic research topics every day like most academic librarians do. this difference in work environments can push the idea of research to the back of public librarians’ minds. looking for our car keys under the street light when i first discovered there was a journal called evidence based library and information practice i thought it was a pretty weird title. after all, what other kind of library and information practice could there be? later it struck me that the reason we don’t need a journal called anecdote based library and information practice is that we see it happening around us every day. public librarians meet a lot to discuss issues, ideas and programs, but we don’t objectively measure the effects of our programs as well as we could, and, as we have seen,  rarely share them in a scientific way. this is not to say that public librarians don’t think about why we do what we do, but the incentives are skewed towards easily understood metrics – ‘bums on seats’, door counts, total loans – rather than the more difficult to measure but more useful research around how our services actually affect people’s lives. horowitz and martin noted that this problem even extends to the journal papers that are written. in their report from the ala 2013 conference, ‘the librarian as practitioner/researcher: a discussion,’ horowitz and martin remark that, to improve research, librarians must start with research in mind. too often, a librarian collects data to solve a problem or to answer a question, and then decides to write and publish an article. consider the questions asked in victoria’s annual public library statistical report. this report is used for many purposes and is generally seen as a ‘like for like’ comparison of library services in the state. each year, libraries self-report on things like the number of items in their collection, service population, loans, website hits and expenditure. these figures are (usually) fairly black and white – the number of items in your collection is what it is. the report records things that are easy to measure, but it does not, and can not enlighten us about whether any particular library service is achieving the goals elucidated by redmond barry and other public library founders. it has little to say about the ‘improving conversation of worthy authors.’ it tells us nothing with regard to any particular library service’s success overcoming listless inaction, or weary unoccupied solitude. even if barry’s goals are not to your taste, and you feel that fighting the scourge of dancing saloons is a little passé, setting target numbers for their own sake is of little value to any worthwhile ambitions. if the number of database searches increased this year, is that because more people are finding information that improves their lives, or is it because the interface changed and people need to perform more searches to find the information they want? if your wifi usage increases because more people are sitting alone at a study desk losing their savings at online poker, is that a success? this isn’t library science – it’s accountancy. ironically, the comprehensive research that does measure the broader effect of library services is usually undertaken by non-librarians. when the public libraries victoria network (plvn) decided to fund its libraries building communities report it engaged new focus research, a research consultancy. when the dollars, sense and public libraries report into the financial benefits of libraries was commissioned, sgs economics did most of the work.12 these reports are excellent documents and have been used by victorian public libraries to make their case for funding and compare their practices to their peers. they are widely considered to be ‘landmark’ studies, either the first or one of the most comprehensive of their type, and have been cited in papers calling for more effective metrics for library service provision. the fact, however, that they both had to be commissioned by a sector lobby group, rather than being undertaken by library professionals or academic researchers as a matter of course, is telling.  whilst there are a few academic researchers with a professional interest in public libraries, there are simply not enough of them, and they cannot work effectively alone. public librarians need to be actively involved in the research, pairing their knowledge of day to day public library practice with the research methods expertise of full time academic researchers. when we talk about public libraries, our data often comes from other professionals. carrots, sticks and culture ultimately, these barriers are not insurmountable. the most important reason for insufficient research on public libraries and what we do is a lack of appropriate incentives. at a basic level, we might consider who makes decisions about funding, and who are the ‘customers’ of each library. in universities it is senior academics and academic boards full of people who (presumably) value research and science that make the funding decisions,13 and students and academics who are the customers. in public libraries it is councillors or board members drawn from the wider community who make the funding decisions, and the general public who are the customers. local councillors are mostly concerned with keeping their constituents happy, so the question is not necessarily “what is the most effective library program and management strategy” so much as “what is the least-cost operating model that keeps local residents happy?” in universities, schools and corporations there is generally agreement from all stakeholders on the purpose of the organisation. the library’s role in supporting that purpose should therefore be relatively clear and universally understood. “we provide value to the organisation by helping achieve the goals of x and y” is the ‘elevator pitch.’ therefore the library has a vested interest in proving that it achieves the goals of x and y. in government, particularly local government, there is often disagreement about the purpose and priorities of the government itself14, making the library service’s position ambiguous. “our services are popular” becomes the safer ‘elevator pitch.’ the structure and incentives within public libraries therefore differ compared to other libraries. if you asked the average public librarian why they don’t write up and present conference papers they would probably tell you they are ‘too busy’. what this really means is that they have stronger incentives to do things other than undertaking and writing up research. ‘too busy’ happens because there is no incentive to produce research and no sanction for failing to do so. worse, given that supervisors and managers operate in the same environment, there may even be sanctions (implicit or otherwise) against spending time researching, publishing and presenting findings. in my own state of victoria, the local government act requires local councils to publish details of all interstate travel by councillors and employees – details eagerly read by local news media looking for stories about junkets and government waste. no prizes for guessing what impact this has on the ability of local government employees to attend national conferences held outside the state. public libraries also tend to have a relatively flat staffing structure, with little opportunity for promotion (particularly if one has no desire to be a manager), no ‘tenure’ and no concerns about ‘faculty status’. the research in librarianship – impact evaluation study undertaken in the uk in 2011, for example, showed that nearly 60% of public librarians in the study indicated that ‘engagement with research’ was not rewarded in the formal career review process in their workplace. this was in marked contrast to those working in academic environments, and even in special libraries. in an organisation based upon research such as a university or professional firms, research is more likely to be encouraged, rewarded, or even required. this lack of incentives explains the final problem for public library research – that of support and encouragement. to again take australia and alia as an example, alia has a research committee which aims to assist the creation and dissemination of library research. currently the make up of the committee is six academics, two academic librarians, two school librarians, one librarian from the state library of new south wales15 and two members in other information related roles, both with extensive academic backgrounds. none work in public lending libraries – likely because of the same disincentives stopping public librarians from participating in research. inevitably, their backgrounds mean that these research committee members will be drawn to academic and, perhaps, school libraries when considering what research to encourage. through no fault of their own, the committee members are unlikely to have a strong understanding of the work undertaken in public libraries and what research opportunities may be present. they are also unlikely to have deep connections to the public library community. the research assistance available from the committee and alia is also heavily skewed towards things that would assist academics. the alia research fund is useful for those needing funding for a research project, but for public librarians what they actually need is regular paid time off from their day job, rather than cash. this is not a problem unique to australia or alia – micah vandegrift also identified it in ‘rewards and recognition in libraries’ which mostly considered the american experience. the relationship of public librarians to professional research seems to suffer from a positive feedback loop. since so little research seems to be of benefit to their daily practice, librarians from the public library sector are less likely to prioritise reading and contributing to the body of professional research. because public librarians make up such a small proportion of those producing library science research, the body of research in turn continues to concentrate mostly on other areas, particularly academic library practice. and since so little research seems to be of benefit to their daily practice… when we talk about public libraries, what we talk about should be the missions and goals of our libraries, and how we are achieving them (or not). when we talk about public libraries, we need to be able to do so with evidence. when we talk about public libraries, it should be more than just talk. if the corpus of library science research is to be relevant to all libraries, it needs to reflect the reality within all sectors. university graduates and professors are a poor model for the broader population, so any research based on their needs or reactions is only partially applicable to practice in public libraries. science and research is all about learning and improving things. without high quality, professional-level research taking place by and for public libraries, we rely more on guesswork and heuristics than real evidence, and potentially miss enormous opportunities to improve and enrich the lives of our communities.  thinking about research questions is also likely to help us to think about why we provide library services. as aaron schmidt reminded us just last week, when we talk about public libraries, we should focus on people, not tools. now what? there are a few things we can all do right now to increase the amount of public library research: develop missions with measurable outcomes redmond barry was pretty clear about the mission of public libraries. barry, and the other early proponents of free libraries, wanted a place for working people to access the wisdom of the classics, to socialise and to become more informed and educated citizens and avoid spending their time idling, lonely or drunk. most public library missions these days are much more vague than that, which makes measuring our success in meeting them difficult. collect better data much of the data collected by public libraries is about our collections and resources – how many, how expensive, how old? it’s time for us to do more to quantify how people actually use our services. investigate and use open access journals there is an increasing number of open access library journals.16 most of these allow readers to subscribe via rss, making keeping up to date easy. public library managers can encourage staff to access these journals without any extra cost to the organisation. make friends academics and professional organisations should actively encourage public librarians to take part in joint research projects conference papers presentations with academics and librarians from other sectors. a partnership between practitioners and academics can only benefit both, and will help  both to normalise research within public libraries and increase the scope of academic research. play favourites conference organisers could consider a quota system for presenters to ensure the public library sector is well represented. consider ways you can assist librarians who may be unfamiliar with the process of writing a conference paper, or provide incentives for those who have never been to a conference. make time public library managers and directors should consider whether you can make space within your librarians’ schedules for research, and consider making it a measurable requirement of their jobs. this could be a variation on google’s famous “20% time” – perhaps “10% time” – to perform or write up research projects could be both offered and required as part of all professional positions. network the idea of a ‘personal learning network‘ (pln) has been embraced by many librarians and educators. this concept can be expanded to assist more hesitant staff to embrace the opportunities of using online sharing tools to find relevant research and ideas by creating a ‘workplace learning network’ based on the same principles. show off setting up your own institutional repository, or partnering with a local university to use theirs, can showcase the work that your library staff are doing and prove that your work has impact. the parliamentary and national libraries of australia, for example, publish staff research papers on their websites – there’s nothing to stop local public libraries doing the same. conclusion for our public libraries to remain relevant and useful, the way they are managed and the services they provide must be based on evidence and relevant best practice. everything we do must be considered in the light of our stated purpose and mission, and whether it gets us closer to achieving that mission or purpose. currently, there is too little incentive to scientifically test whether our practices achieve our goals. public library sector representatives and professional organisations need to consider how they can encourage more public library research by academics – whether by way of grants, research funds or other mechanisms. public library directors and managers should consider whether their long term interests and goals are better served by giving space to their staff to pursue controlled studies and other research. conference organisers should consider what mechanisms they can use to encourage papers by public librarians. academics should consider widening the scope of their research papers to include public librarians in their research. public librarians should consider whether we can really call ourselves professionals if we are not testing the value of what we do against the aims of the institutions for which we work. if we are merely measuring our performance against targets, rather than goals, our communities will not be best served. redmond barry, william ewart, andrew carnegie and even thomas jefferson were not interested in public libraries for their own sake. all were, in their different ways, social reformers. when they talked about public libraries, they were interested in the ends they thought the provision of public libraries could achieve. if we are to know whether we are achieving the ends these men hoped for, more work needs to be done to identify the barriers to public library research, and how they might be overcome. get on that, library science. acknowledgements a huge thanks to constance wiebrands for graciously agreeing to review this article, to dr alan bundy for politely responding to my impudent enquiry, and to lead pipers brett bonfield, ellie collier, emily ford, gretchen kolderup. without their wise and helpful advice this article would be a half-formed and poorly articulated thought bubble. of course, if you think it still is, that’s entirely my fault, not theirs. references and further readings abc radio national. redmond barry: visionary or scoundrel. big ideas. broadcast 25 june 2013. http://hugh.li/l/5u alia conference 2012 program and abstracts. http://conferences.alia.org.au/alia2012 barry, redmond. address on the opening of the free public library of ballarat east. 1 january 1869. http://hugh.li/l/5w bundy, alan; private correspondence. 2013. carnegie, andrew. wealth. the north american review. vol 148, iss 391 (june 1889) pp654-665 http://hugh.li/l/5x cruickshank, p, hall, h and taylor-smith, e. enhancing the impact of lis research projects. oct 2011. http://hugh.li/l/5y horowitz, l., & martin, j.. the librarian as practitioner/researcher: a discussion. evidence based library and information practice, 8(3), 79-82 (2013) http://hugh.li/l/61 house of commons debate 13 march 1850. hansard vol 109 cc838-50. http://hugh.li/l/5v huysmans, frank & oomes, marjolein. ‘measuring the public library’s societal value: a methodological research program’. ifla world library and information conference. august 2012. http://conference.ifla.org/past/2012/76-huysmans-en.pdf public libraries victoria network. annual survey of victorian public libraries 2011-12. http://www.plvn.net.au/node/18 schmidt, aaron. ‘focus on people, not tools’. walking paper. published online 14 october 2013 http://www.walkingpaper.org/6000 vala conference 2012 programme. http://www.vala.org.au/vala2012-conference-programme vala conference 2014 brochure. http://www.vala.org.au/vala2014/vala2014-se-brochure.pdf vandergrift, micah. ‘rewards and recognition in libraries’. in the library with the lead pipe. 25 sept, 2013. http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2013/rewards   you can learn more about barry’s extraordinary life in this excellent podcast from the abc’s radio national [↩] given that it was just two years after the 1848 revolutions across europe, this concern was hardly unfounded [↩] the eight-hour working day was introduced in victoria in 1856 [↩] regrettably information regarding his opinion on singing-halls remains incomplete. [↩] i’m using ‘texts’ in the literary theory sense here [↩] i believe dr bundy is referring to public library quarterly here [↩] between 2008 and october 2013 alj published 26 articles about public libraries, fifteen about academic libraries, 12 about school or special libraries, and 34 which were either generically about librarianship or were did not fit any of these categories. these numbers do not include the special 2011 anniversary edition which was entirely filled with re-published articles from earlier volumes. [↩] this is slightly ambiguous, the public library figure is fte from 2010-11, the other is unclear [↩] not counting vendor presentations or keynotes [↩] not counting keynotes [↩] reading matters is way more fun than the alia biennial [↩] admittedly this study was an economic one, outside the expertise of most librarians [↩] at least in terms of how money is spent within the university – obviously overall government funding is a different matter [↩] hence ‘politics’ – one need simply glance towards the recent us federal government shutdown to observe this phenomenon in extremis [↩] in most australian states these are non-lending public research libraries [↩] you’re reading one right now. [↩] australia, conferences, evaluation, history, mission, peer review, public libraries, research, researchers the library as incubator project wants you to look at programming as collection development new literacies, learning, and libraries: how can frameworks from other fields help us think about the issues? 6 responses pingback : public libraries, research and a little bit of redmond barry | it's not about the books fiona 2013–10–23 at 7:36 pm a few comments: – most australian public librarians are essentially public servants and therefore subject to the same control on communication exerted by the employing organisation that other public servants are. if your paper has to be approved by senior management or a marketing team then genuine discussion or debate is pretty hard to start. many codes of conduct disallow what might be perceived to be political comment – which is interpreted to mean critical comment; and discussion of aims objectives and performance can easily be construed as exactly that today. also, many organisations now claim ownership of their employees’ publications – you might have produced the ideas and discussion in your own time but if the subject is your workplace, then the publication is considered by some organisations to be owned by them. you retain the intellectual property but not having copyright is a disincentive to engaging in research beyond counting the numbers or conducting satisfaction surveys. – when i first read libraries building communities, i thought it an excellent publication for the reasons you outline. reading it again five years later, having done a research methods subject, i was stunned at the paucity of resources mentioned in the ‘select literature review’. it doesn’t really measure up as rigorous research although the reports are excellent advocacy documents. – public librarians seem to be focussed on day to day service for their patrons rather than the picture you’re addressing. it’s that vocational thing that seems to pervade most librarians’ motivation. – the library workforce in australia doesn’t have the education about barry et al’s aspirations for public libraries or theoretical or philosophical frameworks that underpin the issues you’re discussing. i don’t know how you’d get it past the bean counters or the faculties in which some lis schools strangely sit – e.g. business and it logistics at rmit university – but courses in the history of librarianship would in my opinion be great additions to australian lis programs – in addition to the disincentive first mentioned, you have to factor in the time and intellectual distance required to formulate questions, conduct research, think the findings through and then write it all up when considering why public librarians don’t seem to do much research. hugh rundle 2013–10–24 at 8:37 am thanks fiona, i agree with a lot of this, especially your comments about lis education. i think some (but not all) of the problems regarding politics are solvable if project research focusses on particular details or projects, rather than trying to answer all questions at once. so there’s no point asking “what’s not working?” or “is this library service achieving its goals?” but rather “this particular aspect of this particular program was designed to achieve this particular outcome. did it work?” a useful example, perhaps, is matthew reidsma’s work conducting rigorous usability testing on his organisation’s websites and then talking about it at conferences. granted he works at a uni and not a public library, but the example shows you can talk about failures if your research and testing is part of a a continuing process of finding out what works. beancounters should love this sort of thing – it makes us more efficient. susan 2013–10–30 at 12:38 am well thought out and articulated hugh. you certainly raise some pertinent issues. brad jones 2013–11–05 at 5:24 am interesting piece. …and it isn’t just public libraries… a while back peter macauley raised his concerns over the lack of higher level (i.e phd) qualifications, research skills & evidence based approaches in librarianship generally, including at academic levels. see http://conferences.alia.org.au/ebl2005/macauley_pps.pdf & http://conferences.alia.org.au/alia2004/pdfs/macauley.p.paper.pdf . a colleague & i were privileged enough to present at the 3rd ebl conference in 2005 brisbane & tried to put what we saw as a vet perspective on things. this was published in the first eblip issue http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/eblip/article/view/16 where we suggested the term ‘evidence literacy’. for a later 5th eblip conference (stockholm 2009) i presented some research work from my grad cert. this was a fairly comprehensive view of the vet library literature as evidenced in the voced database. this was published at http://eprints.qut.edu.au/30364/1/c30364.pdf starting at p75. the results suggested librarians were good at literature research, but we didn’t do research research (i.e. research designs, stats etc). we didn’t publish much where it mattered, & what was there was fairly lightweight on the evidence scale. readers might find it of interest. in these times of cutbacks i suspect we may wear some of the costs of the lack of evidence of library contributions to their respective sectors. pingback : yearly wrap-up, 2013 edition | jenny arch this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the library as incubator project wants you to look at programming as collection development – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 9 oct katie behrens, erinn batykefer and laura damon-moore /6 comments the library as incubator project wants you to look at programming as collection development in brief: the library as incubator project is a web-based project that seeks to promote and facilitate creative collaboration between libraries and artists of all types, and to advocate for libraries as incubators of the arts. through founding and maintaining the project, we began to see that not all knowledge worth collecting for a library was written down – much of the creative skills and expertise of artists and makers in the community was only accessible by talking and learning from them. the best way to collect this information is through partnerships and programming – “programming as collection development.” several libraries lead the way in this new concept of collecting information, and the evolution of library makerspaces has ushered in more and more opportunities to partner with local artists and makers. most importantly, every library must look to its own community to build an individual collection of local skills and knowledge.   by katie behrens, erinn batykefer, and laura damon-moore our beginnings the genesis of the library as incubator project was innocuous:  it was a question without an answer. co-founders erinn batykefer, laura damon-moore, and christina endres met during their first semester of coursework in the master’s program at the university of wisconsin-madison school of library and information studies in the fall of 2010. our very first course was a broad overview that introduced the bedrock philosophies of library service. a lecture by one of our professors, dr. louise robbins, on the importance of creative advocacy for libraries got all of us excited about innovative ways to show a community what the library does and can do. what followed was one of the most exciting conversations we had in the class: it focused on advocacy and creative ways to make sure a community understands the work and the value of the library. we discussed targeting advocacy campaigns to particular user groups in order to create personalized profiles of what the library could do for children, job seekers, english language learners, seniors, and other groups. then laura introduced a group of library users not usually included in that list: artists. in her work for the uw-madison friends of the libraries newsletter, laura had written a piece about a local artist named martha glowacki whose art installation pieces were strongly influenced by library research—so much so that they wouldn’t exist without the library. afterward, we wondered about artists as a user group—did they use the library as martha did? were their needs met? what did they need from library spaces and resources that were different than other people? laura holds a degree in acting and erinn is a published poet, and we had our own ideas about how libraries were useful for creative work, but had anyone written about it? after some research, we realized we couldn’t find anything about artists in the academic library literature, so we set out to answer these questions ourselves. during a one-credit independent study course, we designed a qualitative survey and sent it to over 100 artists, writers, makers, and librarians in the madison area. we wanted to know if artists used their local library (or any library, for that matter), how they used libraries, and what kinds of services they’d like to see from libraries. we were blown away by the response: not only do libraries play a huge role in a lot of artists’ work and creative process, but in so very many different ways! we heard everything from “i found books that inspired me” to “i actively seek out library resources to help with project research” to “i love working in the hushed quiet of a library. in the survey, we also asked artists, “what does the phrase “library as incubator” mean to you?” almost everyone latched on to our language to describe libraries as a place to nurture creative ideas from beginning to completion, like an incubator nurtures eggs to become chicks. it seems like a strange word choice, but the name stuck as the most fitting way to capture the idea. the results of our survey surprised us, and we knew we had to share what we learned – we knew this could change how libraries serve both the artists in their communities and everyone else, too. and then our world exploded with the massive wisconsin budget protests of early 2011. the state budget was undergoing a significant restructuring, which included substantial cuts to libraries and prominent publicly funded arts organizations. at that point, we started to realize that our grand idea—the idea of promoting the library-as-arts-incubator—might be more than just a pet project for a trio of library school students. we realized that libraries functioning as arts incubators could provide the spaces and materials necessary to sustain the artistic and creative work of writers, illustrators, painters, photographers, poets, playwrights, and performing artists of all kinds when local and state governments took an axe to the arts budget. we saw real potential for libraries to come to the fore as arts incubators in the same way that they have become necessary job-search hubs by providing internet access, resume workshops, and professional development materials for many, many job seekers during this recession. so we hatched plans to spread the word about libraries and artists to the world. we needed a central hub where anyone could find and share stories about library arts incubation, and in the digital information age, that meant a website. the library as incubator project officially launched in october of 2011, and it has grown beyond our wildest imaginings. at first, we used the website to share the answers that artists had provided to our survey along with their work, and solicited new content from artists and libraries. but we wanted to share more artist interviews, more digital collections, and more ideas from libraries about the partnerships and programs they developed that not only support artists, but also connect them to the community by sharing their skills and their work. we knew artists were already using libraries as arts incubators; we wanted the site to collect as many accounts of that relationship as we possibly could so that the library as incubator project could become a resource and an advocacy tool. almost two years later, our mission hasn’t changed: to promote and facilitate creative collaboration between libraries and artists of all types, and to advocate for libraries as incubators of the arts. we also started building a social media presence in order to engage with a broad audience of artists and libraries. the response since we launched has been amazing. we’ve heard from libraries and artists from all across the united states and all over the world: from qatar, new zealand, australia, britain, and elsewhere. clearly, there is a need for the library-as-incubator idea, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to help meet that need. it’s why we continue to volunteer our time for the project, why we take on new writers and interns to help us keep the content on the site and on social media new and engaging, and why the project is still going strong even as we have graduated and moved on to jobs in the library world.   programming as collection development – a new concept? a woodcut artist demonstrates her work at the rochester public library as part of their “caution! artist @ work!” series. the library as incubator project began by looking at artists as a library user group and how a library could best serve that population. however, it quickly morphed to include stories about libraries forming great relationships with local artists and utilizing them to provide innovative programming. think about it: if you know there’s a local painter who uses the library for inspiration or work space, ask that painter if she would be interested in teaching some basic painting classes in the library. it’s a win-win situation: the painter has a captive and interested classroom to teach, and the librarians don’t have to learn how to teach painting. also, you’ve strengthened a tie in your community. some would call this community engagement or outreach, but we began to wonder: what if this kind of programming was actually an extension of collection development? what if you could collect the intangible skill-knowledge of an artist just like you collect a book, dvd, or database – not by writing down his knowledge but by partnering with him? a wild concept, we know, but hear us out. there are many facets to the mission of the library as an institution—serving the public, providing resources, promoting literacy, acting as a cultural repository–but all of these facets contribute to a single goal: connecting people with information. when information was written on scrolls, the library of alexandria kept scrolls for scholars to use. when the codex (the rectangular, bound book) became the most useful form in which to store information, libraries began collecting books. with the rise of electronic resources and databases, libraries make that information accessible to patrons. however, all of these examples relate only to information that has been written down or recorded in some way. what if the information most needed by a patron is not recorded information, but rather information contained in someone else’s head? there are artists, makers, and craftspeople in your community who know a great deal about their craft. that information or knowledge may not exist in a book or online video tutorial. it exists in the mind of the maker, and we at the library as incubator project believe that it is just as much the duty of the library to “collect” that knowledge through partnerships and programming as it is to purchase new books for the shelves. the process of collecting this information is something we call “programming as collection development;” it provides makers with a way to connect and share their knowledge with the rest of the community, and the community a chance to explore something that cannot be found in books.   makers, makerspaces, and how they connect the incubator focuses on promoting arts programming and partnerships in libraries, but we’ve found that because art is so closely tied to creativity—and creativity so closely tied to maker culture—that it’s often difficult and unproductive to separate the arts from making. it’s worth taking a step back to look at maker culture in order to see how well it fits with the mission of the library. the terms “maker” and “maker culture” were coined by dale dougherty, founder of make magazine and creator of maker faire, to encompass all different kinds of creative individuals. one doesn’t have to be just a seamstress or a home brewer or someone who likes tinkering with electronics anymore – now you can identify as a “maker.” “maker culture” refers to the whole ethos and process of fiddling, tinkering, experimenting, failing, reworking, recycling, upcycling, hacking, and creating. maker culture does not depend on a perfect setting or dedicated space. it’s a way of looking at the world, creatively testing the boundaries and playing with what you have. the larger world has noticed the growing trend, too. back in 2009, the wall street journal pointed to a comeback in tinkering during the economic recession, and a year later, national public radio ran a story about tinkering, which introduced listeners to several well-known makerspaces across the country. you may have noticed that maker culture has taken the library world by storm in recent years, and it seems like everyone (public libraries, academic libraries, archives & special collections, etc.) is stumbling over themselves to fund the purchase of a 3d printer or laser cutter. makerspaces, hack(er)spaces, fab labs—terms that were previously only known to the maker subcultures–are now thrown around with relative ease at library conferences and on librarian blogs. it’s all very exciting, but it’s also moving very fast. it has the feeling of a trend or fad, and any good librarian has to wonder: is this makerspace thing really where our attention should be focused? our answer? yes! …with some clarification. author cory doctorow is an outspoken advocate for both libraries and maker culture, so we know we’re not the lone voice in this debate. in a guest post for canadian book distributor raincoast books, doctorow points out that makers are proponents of free and accessible information, just like librarians. makers are also in the business of lifelong learning, just like libraries, but usually through doing rather than reading. so when it comes to common missions and goals, makers and libraries are on the same road. the idea box at the oak park public library is the epitome of a blank-slate makerspace. most libraries, at least public libraries, are already engaging in maker culture with knitting clubs, “crafternoons,” lego clubs, workshops on composting, fermenting, cooking, and other diy mainstays, and of course, children’s story times. all of these programs are well and good on their own, but they only scratch the surface of where the library mission and maker culture meet. as far as materials sharing, makerspaces fit right in with the mission of the library. libraries own books and databases for people to share, so why not a 3-d printer? non-library makerspaces and workshops in the community have been operating as a tool-share for years. after all, not everyone can own a table saw. and yet, community makerspaces are so much more than a communal tool bench. as a member of a makerspace like pumping station: one in chicago, you have access to the tools and the skills and knowledge of everyone else around you. the skills and knowledge that are behind craftsmanship and artistry – this is the unwritten information that libraries should begin to collect through outreach and partnerships.   selected examples thankfully, as our friend lavar burton used to say, you don’t have to take my word for it. in a recent feature on npr, american library association president barbara stripling made reference to libraries that loan people: “there are people in the community who say, ‘i’m an expert at electronics or plumbing. so put me in the catalog. if somebody has a question that i can help answer, they can check me out.” that’s precisely what we’re getting at: collecting teachable skills and knowledge, in the form of community members, just like you’d collect other materials (you know, without objectifying any human person). libraries across the country have been putting this idea of “programming as collection development” to work, and we’ve seen it most clearly through the development of library makerspaces. carnegie library of pittsburgh (pa) and madison public library (wi) are some of the best examples. teens at carnegie library of pittsburgh create their own stop-motion animation video. the labs at the carnegie library of pittsburgh, clp’s teen makerspace, turned to experts in the community to provide exciting, creative, and tech-focused activities for their young adults. programs include everything from a dj-ing workshop in collaboration with a local dj and an organization called hip hop on lock, to tapping the talent and expertise of the pittsburgh filmmakers collective for filmmaking workshops. partnering with local groups and individuals means that library staff aren’t under pressure to learn everything about every topic the teen users might be interested in, and teens are excited about the prospect of working with experts in the fields that mean something to them. they also learn valuable digital skills by applying them to personal projects. in this way, their learning is driven by their passion, not a curriculum. (click here for more recent updates) cyanotype prints from a workshop at madison public library wait to be washed. madison public library in madison, wisconsin, taps into its community to engage patrons of all ages with its new program series called the bubbler. the bubbler leverages the sizable community of creative businesses and individuals found in this university town to provide a menu of hands-on programs that range from poetry readings to art shows to screen-printing and stop-motion animation workshops. the bubbler (unlike other library makerspaces) does not have a permanent base in the library but instead is made up of a network of satellite or pop-up locations in library branches and other cultural institutions (an art museum, for example) all over madison. mpl’s the bubbler recently won a national endowment for the arts our town grant to help expand the programming calendar and build foundational partnerships. the labs and the bubbler are examples of libraries that curate local know-how to offer a rich slate of programs for their users. working with local individuals, organizations, and businesses as programming partners relieves library staff of having to plan, prep, and facilitate programs that they might not feel qualified to lead, or have the time to do well. these partnerships are not one-sided, either—the community partners benefit from the exposure they receive at the library, and patrons are more likely to come back  because they have a chance to try out a new skill with no risk involved. although we’ve stressed local skills and expertise up until this point, “programming as collection development” applies to local content creation as well. there are several notable examples of libraries that intentionally collect community-created content, such as music by local bands and a collection of poetry by local writers. we’ve been able to highlight a number of these projects on the library as incubator project website in an effort to draw attention to the importance and benefit of creating access to community content and opening up a broader dialogue on the library as a place where one can not only access and consume information, but also create it. poster from the local music project at iowa city public library. iowa city public library recently launched a new digital music collection called the local music project. through the project, the library leases the rights to records by local musicians, which cardholders from iowa city and the library’s service partners can then download and keep–for free. there are currently fifty-eight albums available on the local music project page, and more on the way. this exciting new service model started with a common problem: the library needed a new way to deliver music to patrons. cds have high loss rates and many borrowers simply take them home and rip the music. in order to keep things legal and reduce the amount of theft that plagues av collections, the library began looking into digital options, and the local music project began to take shape. they created a contract with the help of the city’s lawyer, and then ventured out into iowa city’s music scene to sign bands and negotiate license fees. sacramento public library is home to a wonderfully integrated program that supports local writers of all kinds: the i street press community writing and publishing center. funded by grants from the institute of museum and library services and the california state library, the sacramento public library is re-inventing library service to their community with an espresso book machine designed to print on demand, a massive online database of printable books (many of them out of print), and an integrated suite of writing workshops to teach writing craft and guide interested patrons through the process of self-publishing. in addition to printing on demand and writing workshops, the library is also growing an impressive local authors collection with the help of i street press. when a patron decides to self-publish her work through i street, she has the option to donate a copy to the library. the book is then catalogued, and added to the local authors collection at the central library. the titles are included in the system’s 28-branch catalogue as well, and are available to everyone in the area with a library card! practical application – what can you do? a contemporary dance workshop at flushing public library in queens, ny. at the library as incubator project, we know that in order for libraries to become true incubators for creative artists, we can’t very well say that librarians must all become arts educators, literary agents, and arts administrators. rather, we encourage libraries to fulfill and in some cases expand their role as community information organizers and providers—tapping in to the arts educators, the editors and writers, the community theater and music groups who want to engage with their community as much as the community wants to engage with them. these partnerships can be maintained at a very low cost to the library and provide high-quality programs that are meaningful for both the facilitators and the participants because they are all part of the same community. for example, you don’t have to know a thing about arduino to bring in someone from your community to teach a class on it. whether or not you’re able to pay them depends entirely on your library, but most librarians have found that community members are more than happy to share their passion with others for free. in all of our features and interviews, we have found this to be especially true of artists. local artists love to share their work and their passion with a wider audience. a lot of people won’t set foot in an art gallery, but they’ll at least look at an exhibition hanging on the library’s walls. the library is a kind of neutral space that can act as a “meeting of the minds.” academic libraries have convinced engineering departments to share their 3d printers, computer science departments to share their programming computers, and art departments to share their design expertise. disciplines can meet in the neutral crossroads of the library space, learn from each other, and make new connections. everyone wins. obviously, partnering with individuals and businesses in one’s community is not a new idea for most libraries. what may be a new idea is approaching programming as an integral aspect of collection development and devoting the same attention and intentionality to program planning as one does to managing a collection of print and digital materials. when the library provides a space for users to engage with their community in a very hands-on, personal way, it becomes a true hub of community knowledge and skill sharing. so. programming as collection development: are you on board yet? it’s a surprisingly simple concept – not all useful knowledge to be collected is written down, and one collects that human knowledge through library programs and partnerships – but we’ve tried to cover it from multiple angles. the most important point about this mentality, and we can’t stress this enough, is to know and rely upon your own community. every community will have a different culture, and no one should feel any pressure to duplicate another library’s programming. when a librarian develops a collection of materials for her library, she taps into the local tastes and values. when looking for a place to start collecting through programs, use local expertise and knowledge. is there a group in your city that fixes up broken bikes for fun? invite them to teach a bike clinic in the library! perhaps you know of a community member that silk screen prints her own t-shirts; ask her to lead a program! or maybe you need to seek out someone in your community who embodies the maker spirit. he’ll probably be game for anything. the possibilities are, quite literally, endless. what do you think about “programming as collection development”? is this a revitalizing idea, or simply a repackaging of what you’ve done for years? how would you go about collecting skills and expertise in your community? do you know of any libraries pursuing this kind of programming? we’d love to hear your comments and discussion below – let us know what you think!   if you’d like more information on who we are and what we do, visit us online at the library as incubator project website, or follow us on twitter, facebook, and pinterest. in the coming months, look for the launch of our sister-site, the book to art club, which will provide arts-incubating librarians with easy, downloadable book club templates that include hands-on activities designed to expand and enrich participants’ experience of the books they read. if you want to pilot the book-to-art club at your library, please get in touch! and don’t miss our upcoming book from coffee house press called “the artist’s library,” which will be published in spring 2014. (check out the official press release here.) acknowledgements a special thanks to our team members, holly stork-post and angela terrab, for listening to us we circled around this topic endlessly in the past few months and for reading drafts. you’re the best! a huge thank you to our editors at in the library with a lead pipe. our first draft was a stinker, and your wise suggestions made it 10,000 times better. really, if we could send you chocolates and flowers, we would!   resources & references from the library as incubator project website batykefer, erinn. (2012, oct 18). “cyanotype workshops at madison public library.” the library as incubator project. retrieved at http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=7030 batykefer, erinn. (2012, mar 30). “i street press: a community writing & publishing center.” the library as incubator project. retrieved at http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=3856 batykefer, erinn. (2012, july 5). “iowa city public library’s local music project.” the library as incubator project. retrieved at http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=5056 damon-moore, laura. (2012, oct 8). “what we mean by “incubator”.” the library as incubator project. retrieved from http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=5966 fear, emily. (2012, june 29). “the labs @ carnegie library of pittsburgh.” the library as incubator project. retrieved at http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=5184   from elsewhere on the web blair, elizabeth. (2013, aug 13). “beyond books: libraries lend fishing poles, pans and people.” national public radio. retrieved at http://www.npr.org/2013/08/13/211697593/beyond-books-libraries-lend-fishing-poles-pans-and-people doctorow, cory. (2013, feb 24). “libraries, hackspaces and e-waste: how libraries can be the hub of a young maker revolution.” raincoast books (blog). retrieved at http://www.raincoast.com/blog/details/guest-post-cory-doctorow-for-freedom-to-read-week/ hidalgo, jason. (2012, oct 19). “the future of higher education: reshaping universities through 3d printing.” engadget. retrieved at http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/19/reshaping-universities-through-3d-printing/ kalish, jon. (2010, nov 21). “diy ‘hackers’ tinker everyday things into treasure.” national public radio. retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2010/11/12/131268511/diy-hackers-tinker-everyday-things-into-treasure lahart, justin. (2009, nov 13).  “tinkering makes comeback amid crisis.” wall street journal. retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/sb125798004542744219.html arts, collection development, makerspaces, programming rewards and recognition in librarianship what we talk about when we talk about public libraries 6 responses knitandb 2013–10–15 at 4:54 am the library as incubator project wants you to look at programming as collection development http://t.co/srs5mgxlvr recherche, participation gypsy_librarian 2013–10–15 at 5:42 am rt @katreeeena: the library as incubator project wants you to look at programming as collection development (via @pocket) http://t.co/iykp… kristanshawgo 2013–10–17 at 10:29 am mt @iartlibraries: are programming & collection development mutually exclusive? no way! see more at @libraryleadpipe http://t.co/ezsynznpbq dwattersw 2013–10–17 at 4:58 pm the library as incubator project on programming as collection development via @libraryleadpipe (http://t.co/eyoyqgzxqj) hughrundle 2013–10–17 at 10:11 pm rt @iartlibraries: join the conversation on “programming as collection development” @libraryleadpipe http://t.co/kqugnkiwbi what do you thi… kel_karpinski 2013–10–20 at 8:43 pm the library as incubator project wants you to look at programming as collection development » http://t.co/lrdciprnne this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct culturally responsive community engagement programming and the university library: lessons learned from half a decade of vtditc – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 2 dec craig arthur, freddy paige, la' portia perkins, jasmine weiss and michael williams /0 comments culturally responsive community engagement programming and the university library: lessons learned from half a decade of vtditc by craig e. arthur, dr. freddy paige, la’ portia perkins, jasmine weiss, and dr. michael williams (good homie signs’ “hip hop @ vt” mural 7/18) in brief vtditc: hip hop studies at virginia tech is an award-winning series of experiential learning-focused, culturally responsive community engagement programs. it is deeply rooted in hip hop culture and is cosponsored by numerous organizations both on campus and in the community; the heart of the program is undoubtedly the virginia tech university libraries. we have hosted more than 350 programs over the past five academic years. notably, our community engagement fellows, a team of undergraduate and graduate students, helped design and co-teach approximately forty-five media literacy workshops in the community beyond campus in the ‘19-’20 academic year. our guiding mission is to remove barriers to entry, to recognize art as scholarship, to learn by doing, and, importantly, to create an expressive and collaborative environment which allows for creative freedom.  introduction vtditc: hip hop studies at virginia tech, or, more commonly, virginia tech digging in the crates, is a practitioner-focused, student-driven, culturally responsive community engagement program that prioritizes experiential learning. the multifaceted and ever-evolving program is based in southwest virginia on the campus of virginia tech (a public, land grant university with a student body of approximately 30,000). vtditc was co-created by a diverse transdisciplinary team and is now in our fifth consecutive academic year of programming. the program has iteratively developed since the fall 2016 semester; we have successfully hosted more than 350 events.  importantly, vtditc builds on a 22 year history of hip hop based curricula and approximately 35 years of hip hop based co-curricular programming at the university. vtditc’s ability to connect and engage such a large group of people is a special attribute of the program. many universities have similar clubs or groups that bring together dancers with dancers or rappers with rappers, for instance, but vtditc is a unique community engagement program in that it prioritizes unity over stratification. the hip hop community at vt can be relatively small if people were counted solely by an arbitrary declaration like ‘hip hop scholar.’ however, when we invite our community to engage in hip hop as a culture, our participation numbers dwarf many other programs that could be considered our peers. vtditc’s success is at least partially due to the fact that a dynamic group of hip hop practitioners who embody the culture beyond our connection to the university co-create and care for it. we shift the university setting and resources to support hip hop culture, not the other way around. this article does not aim to chronicle the important role hip hop culture plays in education and college campuses (see rawls & robinson, 2019, as well as petchauer, 2009 and 2012, gosa & fields, 2012, and nielson, 2013) nor does it seek to record hip hop culture’s history at virginia tech (see fralin, et al., 2018). we also are not seeking to describe a hip hop ethos (see harrison and arthur, 2019). rather, we look forward to sharing this case study as an exemplar of culturally responsive programming supported by a university library. in this article we explain how as engaged scholars we commit to understanding the role of culture in education as flexible, local, and global.  hit the crates & create the vtditc community chose our name as a way to recognize one of the many research processes inherent to traditional hip hop arts communities as well as a nod to specific cultural stalwarts. the term ‘digging in the crates’ refers to the traditional information seeking/archival research process that hip hop djs and sample-based producers use to find their source material. digging, understandably, is the physical and intellectual labor of the discovery process in this context – or the work required to locate, sort, and analyze vinyl records. the crates are the acid free archival box equivalent for the vinyl dj. a dj or producer who spends time in the crates has a larger musical vocabulary as a result – just as time spent in library archives benefits a research writer (craig, 2013 & rice, 2003). beyond our name, the vtditc program utilizes effective engagement practices from the broader hip hop community to increase the reach of the virginia tech university libraries’ programming. providing opportunities for community members to engage with hip hop culture’s productions old and new, local and global, is an objective of many of our efforts.  our guiding principles and mission statement early in the development of the program, our leadership board co-created our guiding principles: to remove barriers to entry, to recognize art as scholarship, to learn by doing, and, arguably most importantly, to establish an expressive and collaborative environment which allows for creative freedom. nearly half a decade later, applying these principles still guides the program in the direction of success.  our mission statement was created shortly after founding the program. although it has been remixed and edited slightly over the years, the essence has remained the same. the latest iteration of our mission statement is as follows:  hip hop studies at virginia tech, or vtditc, exists to foster community-based learning among hip hop artists, fans, practitioners, and scholars digitally and globally. we aim to model that students, faculty, and staff’s personal interests are worthy of academic study and publication as well as further institutionalize hip hop studies’ presence on virginia tech’s campus. another motivator that guides our programming is the need to challenge the white heteronormativity of higher education and, especially, library spaces (rosa & henke, 2017). we build upon the work of scholars such as ladson-billings (1995, 2014), gay (2000), and rawls and robinson (2019) in an effort to nurture both the shared and divergent cultural backgrounds and sensibilities of our community members. removing misconceptions that specific groups are not to be included in the socially constructed identity of a hip hop scholar or practitioner requires intentional effort toward increasing representation of excluded identities. recognizing that hip hop culture was birthed and nurtured in black and brown working class communities, our leadership board prioritizes creating opportunities for hip hop arts practitioners and scholars of color. beyond considering race and ethnicity, we are deliberate about requiring gender parity among compensated guest artists and scholars. these are two examples of how the vtditc community acts as agents of change to redress historical and contemporary oppression in educational spaces (nysed, n.d.).  the origins of vtditc the first meeting of what would eventually become our leadership board, the program’s decision making body, took place on december 9, 2016 in newman library. newman is virginia tech’s main campus library. it is also home to a modest recording studio (now known as media design studio b). the focus of this initial meeting was to create a monthly hip hop-focused seminar series that would take place in the largest venue in newman, the multipurpose room or mpr. volume 1: intro to djing and fair use occurred a couple of months later in february 2017.  along with the university libraries, representatives from a variety of both student organizations and campus units served as co-sponsors and worked hard to make the event a success. to start the event, students dylan holiday and alayna carey (alayna is a member of our leadership board at present) taught a workshop with librarian craig arthur. the workshop addressed the intersections and divergences of djing and fair use principles. afterwards, the sixty or so attendees had the opportunity to each try their hand at djing with a variety of equipment set up for their use. the vast majority of the equipment belonged to members of the leadership board. virginia tech’s own breaking (also known as breakdancing) club ended the event with an informal cypher. the event’s sponsoring organizations included the africana studies program, the black cultural center, the flowmigos (another name for the vt breaking club), the intercultural engagement center, the gloria d. smith professorship in black studies, students of hip hop legacy (a club related to hip hop fandom), vt expressions (a club focused on hosting open mic events), the vt women’s center, and wuvt 90.7fm (the university’s student-run radio station). this workshop is now considered a foundational component of our  seminar series. it kicks off every year as a welcome event to our community members both old and new. the second iteration of this workshop received front-page coverage in the local newspaper; the article highlighted how hip hop culture was connecting students, faculty, staff, and community members in the newman library (korth, 2018). (for an approximation of the vibes at this recurring workshop, see vtditc, 2018a.) the six elements of vtditc: hip hop studies at virginia tech vtditc is comprised of six main components: 1) the seminar series, 2) media literacy workshops, 3) weekly studio hours, 4) the community engagement fellows program, 5) credit-bearing curriculum, and 6) practitioners for hire. each of these elements serves a unique subset of our community; for instance, the audience of our media literacy workshops are typically k-12 students while our practitioners for hire element connects local artists with campus units for opportunities for the artists to be compensated for their talents. while the program originated with the seminar series, the majority of our labor is spent on the other components. 1) the seminar series: vt’s longest running monthly event since that first seminar in february 2017, we have hosted 22 additional iterations of the seminar. approximately two dozen artists and scholars from beyond the campus have been compensated to share their expertise with the community we foster. the series, which takes place (originally in-person, now virtually [due to covid-19], and, in due time hopefully, both virtually and in-person) on the second or third thursday evenings of september, october, november, february, march, and april. our seminars specifically occur during these months because that is when the regular school semesters take place. december and may are skipped due to the harried nature of the exam season. the seminars have addressed a wide range of topics including but not limited to gender, artistic ethics, heteronormativity, entrepreneurship, race, and police brutality. a recent example of how we addressed a topic using a hip hop lens was at our seminar vtditc volume 22: hip hop & police brutality. we hosted several scholars to discuss how hip hop music has long documented police violence. we selected hip hop songs that featured lyrics chronicling artists’ personal interactions with police over the course of three decades. throughout this seminar, we conducted a group temporal analysis of how artists use their music to express the climate of police brutality across time periods and geographic differences. ideally each year the planning committee develops seminars that directly discuss music creation as well as seminars that engage other hip hop practitioners in topics such as dance, the visual arts, journalism, and entrepreneurship.  while including academic voices is important, intentionally prioritizing the perspectives of hip hop arts practitioners is essential to our program. our seminar series does not regularly follow the typical academic panel format. even the events that do resemble a more traditional academic seminar feature a single artistic performance at a minimum. the information discussed in our seminars applies and appeals to a wide range of individuals. as a result, attendees include virginia tech students, faculty, staff, that of nearby institutions, and community members from the broader new river valley and roanoke valley. as a result of the covid-19 pandemic, guests must now virtually attend our seminars. over the past few months, we have had individuals from across the united states check out our events. previously (before covid-19), guests would need to physically come to virginia tech’s newman library to attend these events.  when attendees arrive at our seminars, they are greeted by a live dj mix of hip hop music curated by our own dj c. sharp. after the welcome mix, the event’s creative director and mc (roles currently occupied by jasmine and la’ portia) bring the community together for announcements. we begin by expressing gratitude to our community partners as well as acknowledging the tutelo/monacan nations as well as the enslaved african people (virginia tech’s blacksburg campus was formerly the site of the smithfield plantation) who occupied this land before us. following our announcements and land acknowledgements, we introduce our artists, scholars, and/or practitioners and they begin their presentations. throughout the seminar there are often exercises where the community interacts with the practitioners. when meeting in person, food was provided midway through the seminar for the community to share. this feature of our seminar series symbolizes a hip hop tradition of breaking bread, but also serves as an opportunity to (albeit marginally) help reduce food scarcity on campus (us gao, 2019). at the conclusion of our seminar, we make sure to allow time for an open question and answer session so that the community can have another opportunity to engage with the practitioners and as well as each other. we have also hosted numerous more participatory, performance-based events such as beat and mc battles. (see vtditc, 2018b for highlights of our second annual beat battle as an example of how we are reimagining the seminar format.)  (some members of the vtditc leadership board 9/17; l-r: eric luu (‘18-’19 creative director, vt ‘19), craig arthur (university libraries), juel downing (black cultural center student assistant ‘17-’18, vt ‘18), yamin semali (atlanta-based mc, producer, dj, & recording engineer), mallory foutch (former program coordinator, vt women’s center), and dr. a. kwame harrison (professor, department of sociology & the africana studies program); image courtesy of richard randolph [vt ‘20]) 2) do things for the kids: media literacy workshops for the broader community this important component predates the program and is arguably our community’s favorite element of the vtditc program. craig has offered free dj classes throughout the new river valley for close to a decade. he had already integrated his twenty-year dj practice into his librarian praxis prior to joining virginia tech. recognizing that virginia tech university libraries was in the process of creating its digital literacy initiative shortly after his arrival, he realized that these workshops would dovetail well with many of the learning outcomes therein and could support the initiative’s efforts. since that time, we have offered more than 100 creation-focused workshops for the larger community.  throughout the years, some of our more regular community partners have included – but are by no means limited to – the boys and girls clubs of southwest virginia, numerous iterations of the local alumnae chapter of alpha kappa alpha sorority, incorporated’s annual steam camp, roanoke public libraries, higher achievement, incorporated, vinton public library, and the west end center for youth. each of these organizations excels in providing programming to populations that virginia tech has traditionally underserved.  although the pandemic has put a temporary stop to our in-person media literacy workshops, we are currently re-developing our lesson plans to work in an online synchronous learning environment. we have hosted three such virtual workshops this semester. our workshops previously prioritized providing both access to music production equipment and utilizing an experiential learning approach to connect hip hop’s creative practices to steam education. science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics (steam) education is enhanced by hip hop practices which encourage students to engage in inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking. unlike stem, the addition of the arts component adds opportunities for students to thrive and connect with abstract concepts (liao, 2016). while it is difficult to replicate the hands-on experience – such as time with turntables, records, dj mixers, samplers, drum machines, and microphones – the online environment is well equipped for other creative practices like writing raps, critiques, and reflections. online students are also able to engage activities which allow them to explore the relationship of beats per minute in a song and other numerical factors. engineering is an emerging area of interest in the vtditc media literacy workshops. we hope to explore the connection between the built environment and community impacts. hip hop artists regularly communicate their experiences within their environmental context. billboard charting hip hop artists have published songs that reflect the impacts that natural disasters, environmental injustice, and unsafe infrastructure systems have had on black communities. through a lyrical analysis of songs to introduce engineering issues, students are encouraged to consider engineering as a career path to serve their communities.  3) cooking up: studio hours studio hours are a weekly (every friday afternoon) three hour open studio session for any member of our vtditc community to record, refine the mixes of their existing recordings, write new material, and seek guidance from their fellow artists. importantly, studio hours serves as a fellowship-focused space and a markedly strong community of practice is evident. this component of the program began in the spring semester of 2018 and has persisted since. it takes place in the location of our initial planning meeting back in december 2016: media design studio b in newman library. mds b offers a recording booth, several audio interfaces, condenser microphones, and two computer workstations – one for audio recording and mixing and another for audio-visual production and/or audio pre-production work. the studio can comfortably accommodate approximately a dozen people. we prioritize the artists’ comfort  and have long been intentional about not overpacking mds b. the vtditc community has not only hosted the longest continuous program in mds b with studio hours, we have also provided valuable user feedback to the team that runs the space. our programming has helped transition the space and equipment therein from a faculty-focused curriculum development lab to a more outwardly-focused recording studio marketed to the broader community. numerous songs have been recorded in mds b by vtditc community members during studio hours. students retain ownership of their work and are guided through the process of publishing their music in both digital and analog formats. the black cultural center mixtape is an example of a community project that came into being largely as a result of studio hours. the bcc mixtape can be found on virginia tech’s black cultural center’s soundcloud page; it was a long term, intensive project that was the brainchild of former bcc director kimberly williams. the project’s production, which took place over the course of two semesters, was largely orchestrated by the vtditc community.  vtditc students have also performed live on wuvt90.7fm, the university’s student-run radio station, and as opening acts for several major artists when they have performed on campus. we are particularly proud that multiple vtditc alumni have gained employment in creative arts-focused organizations. many have continued their connection to vtditc by collaborating with the current community. we have also hosted regionally and internationally renowned artists and recording engineers as a component of our studio hours program. they include stimulator jones, tim donovan, omar offendum, sum, ian levy, and emcee lioness. as a result of these particular studio sessions, several collaborative songs have been released; they feature students, faculty members, and community members.  each semester, a vtditc community member – often the lead technical director – serves as the resident recording engineer and studio hours community manager. we also attempt – with varying degrees of success – to ensure that we have an aspiring engineer in the wings to sustain the program’s momentum. there are relatively many virginia tech students who create their own music, but there are a limited number of students wanting to learn the engineering process necessary to record music. as a result, we intentionally promote the engineer mentor/mentee experience in hopes that we find interested individuals. our current creative director, jasmine, has expressed interest in music engineering and our leadership board is working to ensure that our current lead technical director shares all of their knowledge. these student leaders have been essential to the success of our constantly evolving and co-constructed studio etiquette guidelines as well. the guidelines ultimately reflect the values of the program and, in turn, ensure that the media co-created during studio hours is indicative of what we are trying to accomplish as a community. since the guidelines are prominently on display and reiterated at each of our sessions, they rarely need to be actively enforced. (vtditc studio etiquette guidelines – fall 2019) 4) learning by doing: the vtditc community engagement fellows the faculty members on the leadership board created the vtditc community engagement fellows program as a way to intentionally transfer skills. students apply to partner with faculty members and dedicate time specifically to cultivating their expertise. this requires a relational process of shared responsibility with students and faculty. inasmuch, the vtditc community engagement fellows program helped us achieve an aspirational goal – to increase the agency of students within the community. the fellows – a team of approximately half a dozen undergraduate and graduate students – are essential to the success of our seminar series, our media literacy workshops, and studio hours. fellows comprise an interdisciplinary team that represent a wide swath of campus life and student organizations. oftentimes, the seemingly sole unifying feature of this team is that nearly all of the fellows are hip hop arts practitioners – be it djs, mcs, beat makers, visual artists, or dancers.  each fellow is classified as either a technical director or a creative director depending on their interests and skill sets. the technical directors, led by a lead technical director, are responsible for the more mechanical aspects such as setting up and striking equipment as well as djing and running audiovisual equipment (and, lately, monitoring chat and moderating attendees) during our programs. the creative directors, led by a lead creative director, handle the more visionary aspects of the program. they help determine the upcoming topics for our seminar series and identify artists and scholars with whom we should engage. they also shape the visual and virtual identity of the program via graphic design and actively maintaining our social media presence. despite the differentiation of duties, both technical and creative directors play an active role in co-designing and co-leading our media literacy workshops. inasmuch, the vtditc program allows for unrivaled and, importantly, compensated experiential learning opportunities on campus and in the community. numerous alums are now working in hip hop arts-based or adjacent professions – as recording engineers in commercial studies or as a community manager for an international breaking school, for example – due in part to this experience. 5) not so formal learning: the curricular components vtditc is, without question, a largely co-curricular program. however, along with founding leadership board member dr. a. kwame harrison, craig has co-taught two iterations of a credit bearing course that was directly tied to the vtditc program: africana studies 4354/sociology 4124: foundations of hip hop. this course was offered in fall 2017 (63 students) and spring 2019 (39 students). in keeping with the emphasis on experiential learning evident in the rest of the vtditc program, students were afforded the opportunity to create media projects rather than traditional academic essays in both iterations of this course. many students made use of the resources – equipment loans and the media design studio b, for instance – provided to them by the university libraries to do so. we have partnered with the department of sociology and the africana studies program, largely thanks to dr. harrison, to co-teach several independent study courses as well. foci of these courses have included mcing, coordinating events on campus, and internships in commercial recording studios.  6) you can’t pay your bills with exposure: practitioners for hire as previously mentioned, the vtditc program intentionally prioritizes hip hop arts practitioners in all that we do. we do our best to leverage our campus relationships to connect these practitioners with compensated work. there are typically many opportunities – and unfortunately the majority pay with only exposure – for visual artists, djs, photographers, videographers, and dancers to share their work on a college campus. over the years, we have successfully connected members of our community with rare paid opportunities provided by the university. one example of our practitioners for hire component is the relationship we have fostered with north carolina based muralist good homie signs and the university. good homie has created six of the seven murals (the remaining mural was created by meme of the cbs and few & far crews) vtditc has coordinated since the beginning of the program. “narrative art”, commissioned in april 2019 for a co-sponsored program on the rhetorics of graffiti with the department of english and dr. jonathan gross (purdue university), has been on display in a popular meeting room in shanks hall, the home of the english department, since june of last year. this component of the vtditc program is an innovation to the best of our knowledge; we hope to continue to connect hip hop arts practitioners with similar paid opportunities on our campus in the coming years. (good homie signs’ “narrative art” mural completed 4/19 and permanently installed in the department of english’s conference room – 6/19) (good homie signs’ ut prosim [or “that i may serve” – the university’s motto] mural completed 9/20 and installed permanently in newman library 10/20; note: third image courtesy of cat piper [vt ‘21]) (good homie signs’ bobcat studios mural completed 11/20 and located in the bobcat studios recording studio at radford high school [radford, va]) the voice of the community to help assess the program, community members are asked to share their feedback. the following quotes are excerpts from testimonials, post-event interviews, and event planning meetings. quotes were selected to describe how members of our community speak to the connection that the vtditc programming supports.  “even outside of breaking, vtditc always brings a really cool vibe to whatever they have going on, whether it’s a rap sesh or craig spinning records or even just chilling and talking about current issues. it’s like a hip hop family, which is nice to see anywhere, especially in a place like blacksburg.” – virgil thornton love is an important ingredient in our events to balance the work required to discuss the tough issues our community faces. academia is dominated with debates and lectures, and while both of those formats are present in vtditc programming, many of the discussions at our events are modeled to mimic a family dinner conversation. food is present and our crowd separates into small focus groups.  “my favorite memories were the beat battles–more specifically, seeing professors and students compete, champion, and show a bombastic love for each other.”  – kimberly williams  breaking down hierarchy is extremely important to empower voices. the vtditc community creates opportunities for faculty, staff, students, and non-university affiliated community members to compete on a level playing field. healthy competition allows for supportive energy to be transferred from the community into individuals and their creations. many of the artistic works shared in our competitions are works in progress that are improved through community input.  “vtditc is more than a library program; it is a community program, yet i continue to discuss its connection to the library and my librarianship. this is because working with vtditc showed me the value of leaving the library to listen to the people the library serves, and this is a lesson i am extremely grateful for as it makes me a better librarian.” – kodi saylor “i learned to listen better, respect better, and uplift better by being in that environment, which is something that came about naturally because that positive energy was already present.” – jon kabongo listening to others and valuing what they have to say is a non-negotiable community requirement of vtditc. the success of the vtditc program is greatly due to our ability to listen to what community members want and need. our community members feel listened to and reciprocate our efforts by listening to others at our events. virginia tech has aspirational community guidelines which unfortunately are not always upheld. our community is not without flaw, but it is apparent that we are committed to superseding the expectations and standards of the broader university environment. we are not building a utopia but an incredible amount of trust is being developed within our community where open mics and vulnerable identities co-exist.  plans for the future we feel confident that we have the program more or less dialed in both in practice and in theory, however we would like to increase the number of people that participate in the program. to date, the vtditc community has been funded largely by the university libraries (approximately $10,000-$15,000 per year) via departmental support for outreach programming as well as by financial support from campus units and internal grants. the vast majority of these funds have gone directly to student wages, artist and scholar honorariums, and purchasing the equipment necessary to support the program. we have received several internal grants (ranging from $500 to $10,000) in additional funding. to increase our impact in the broader community, we plan to aggressively seek external funding and sponsorships beyond campus.  additionally, we also hope to further refine our programmatic assessment. qualitative data have been collected from events and engagements which has helped vtditc grow. a student collected several testimonials at our events as a part of a journalism project which was continued by our event staff in hopes of finding opportunities for improvement. participant testimonials have helped tune the amount of time allotted for discussion at events as well as the importance of communicating to students opportunities to become the hosts of our events. testimonial data also helped the vtditc event team create  “no-photos please” lanyards to protect student privacy, especially when engaging in politicized topics. planning meetings for vtditc events are open to anyone, and insights provided by visiting community members have improved our events – especially as new topics are explored in conjunction with new partners. in particular, visiting community members have helped us take an iterative approach to how we promote our events and spread the reach of our programming. vtditc hosts the most attended and longest running series in the newman library, and while the participation rates are impressive, we strive to develop richer quantitative measures of success to explore and assess the program’s success. with the program growing in scale, quantitative measures are beginning to become more applicable for measuring program success through standard statistical procedures. for our online programming, which has connected over 160 participants in the same virtual meeting, a survey is being designed to accompany our registration process which will collect likert scale data to record participant perceptions of engagement and knowledge gains. this likert scale data will be recorded and used to help the leadership and advisory boards make decisions about the program’s trajectory. we also plan to leverage this data as evidence of the program’s impact for external grant funding.  conclusion community practices are established over long periods of time. although the program is almost half a decade old, vtditc is just getting started. constructing, deconstructing, and re-envisioning the program has been a repetitive process. working in the university environment, vtditc was designed to be dynamic and capable of growing even with a large number of individuals whose tenures are relatively brief. many challenges are present when engaging with communities as volatile as those in higher education, especially with respect to continuity, trust, and funding. our guiding principles and engagement practices help to mitigate several common failures. post graduation vtditc students have open lines of  communication with the program and provide guidance to the generations that follow. vtditc only engages in community partnerships that are designed to meet community needs, and prioritize community empowerment, not the further establishment of the academic institution. financial constraints are considered opportunities to develop alternate paths towards success, while maintaining a high standard for the quality of our outputs. while the vtditc community cannot be duplicated at other institutions, by presenting our process, we hope to provide others with the ability to sample our program to create their own sound engagement practices with their community.   acknowledgements this article would not have been possible without the scores of students, artists, community members, as well as virginia tech faculty and staff who have played varying – but all vital – roles in the vtditc crew over the last half decade.  arthur j. boston, ian beilin, and ryan randall’s formal peer-reviews were also invaluable as we wrote, remixed, and reworked this articles’ numerous drafts. thank you for your patience, kindness, and support. the vtditc community dedicates our work to the memory of: james “trigganamatree” maples (5/23/93-10/8/18) – the reigning vtditc mc battle championchris “dj g-wiz” gwaltney (3/12/87-11/21/20) – early supporter of the program and co-teacher of numerous vtditc media literacy workshops references craig, t. (2013). “jackin’ for beats”: djing for citation critique.” radical teacher, 97, 20-29. drake, d. (2006, march 27). “hip-hop’s unknown legends: the diggin’ in the crates crew.” stylus magazine. http://stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/hip-hops-unknown-legends-the-diggin-in-the-crates-crew.html fralin, s., foutch, m., arthur, c., harrison, a.k., paige, f., luu, e., & downing, j. (2018). hip hop @ vt. exhibit displayed in newman library from august 2018 to november 2018. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/89299 gay, g. (2000). culturally responsive teaching: theory, research, and practice. new york: teachers college press. gosa, t. & fields, t. (2012). “is hip-hop education another hustle? the (ir)responsible use of hip-hop as pedagogy.” in porfilio, b. & viola, m. (eds.), hip-hop(e): the cultural practice and critical pedagogy of international hip-hop (pp. 195–210). peter lang. harrison, a.k. & arthur, c. (2019). “hip hop ethos.” humanities, 8(39), 1-14.  korth, r. (2018, february 26). “students digging monthly hip hop event.” roanoke times. https://roanoke.com/news/education/higher_education/virginia_tech/students-digging-monthly-hip-hop-event/article_d3face79-2e2a-5e86-aa6f-24f390c1f620.html ladson-billings, g. (1995). “toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy.” american educational research journal, 32(3), 465-491. ladson-billings, g. (2014). “culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: a.k.a. the remix.” harvard educational review, 84(1), 74-84. liao, christine (2016). “from interdisciplinary to transdisciplinary: an arts-integrated approach to steam education,” art education, 69:6, 44-49. new york state department of education. (n.d.). culturally responsive-sustaining education framework. http://www.nysed.gov/common/nysed/files/programs/crs/culturally-responsive-sustaining-education-framework.pdf  nielson, e. (2013, april 29). “high stakes for hip-hop studies.” the huffington post. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/erik-nielson/high-stakes-for-hip-hop-studies_b_3170794.html petchauer, e. (2009). “framing and reviewing hip-hop educational research.” review of educational research, 79(2), 946–978. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308330967 petchauer, e. (2012). hip-hop culture in college students’ lives: elements, embodiment, and higher edutainment. routledge. rawls, j.d. & robinson, j. (2019). youth culture power: a #hiphoped guide to building teacher-student relationships and increasing student engagement. peter lang.  rice, j. (2003). “the 1963 hip-hop machine: hip-hop pedagogy as composition.” college composition and communication, 54(3), 453-471. rosa, k. & henke, k. (2017). 2017 ala demographic study. american library association. http://www.ala.org/tools/research/initiatives/membershipsurveys u.s. government accountability office. “food insecurity: better information could help eligible college students access federal food assistance benefits.” u.s. government accountability office, january 9, 2019. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-19-95. vtditc [vtditc hip hop studies at virginia tech]. (2018a, october 19). #vtditc vol 10: intro to djing & fair use [video]. youtube. https://youtu.be/oolwlylnkli  vtditc [vtditc hip hop studies at virginia tech]. (2018b, november 2). #vtditc vol 11: beat battle & music production workshop featuring beatsbyjblack [video]. youtube. https://youtu.be/nbofsk20s-a appendix vtditc: a rough and incomplete timeline 5/29/2016: craig was invited by dr. karen davis to teach a dj-based media literacy workshop for alpha kappa alpha sorority, incorporated’s tau mu omega chapter’s first steam camp. the camp happened on the campus of radford university which was both dr. davis’ and craig’s employer at the time. although craig had been djing for 18 years and had taught numerous individuals the craft by this point, this workshop was the first time he had the opportunity to teach a group of middle school students from a media literacy perspective. 6/4/2016: craig was invited back to teach a dj-based media literacy workshop for alpha kappa alpha sorority, inc.’s tau mu omega chapter’s second annual steam camp. this collaboration continues annually to the present.  9/10/2016: craig began working at his alma mater in the role of teaching & learning engagement librarian. 12/9/2016: the first meeting of what would become the vtditc leadership board took place in what is now the media design studio b in newman library. 2/14/2017: vtditc collaborated with roanoke public libraries for the for the love of hip hop program at their main branch. rpl and vtditc have partnered roughly a dozen times over the interceding years and our relationship with rpl is one unquestionably one of our strongest community partnerships. 2/16/2017: vtditc vol 1: intro to djing & fair use. this event – along with every other in-person seminar series event – took place in newman library’s multipurpose room. vt students dylan holliday and alayna carey served as workshop co-teachers alongside craig. alayna (vt class of ‘20) is still a member of the vtditc leadership board. 3/16/2017-3/18/2017: first vt hip hop appreciation weekend – a three day collaboration between students of hip hop legacy, the flowmigos/vt breaking club, and vtditc – occurred. 3/16/2017: vtditc vol 2: hip hop entrepreneurship featured dj zomanno (los angeles based dj and vt alum), justin kim (los angeles based musican and model), and vt student nathan zed. dr. a. kwame harrison (vt department of sociology and africana studies program) moderated the discussion. 3/18/2017: give me a break 3 versus 3 b-boy/b-girl jam (sponsored by the flowmigos/vt breaking club with assistance from vtditc) took place in the newman library multipurpose room. 4/20/2017: vtditc vol 3: gender & hip hop featured legendary poet and vt faculty nikki giovanni. vt phd student corey miles and the black cultural center’s director kimberly williams moderated the discussion. 9/14/2017: vtditc vol 4: beat battle & music production workshop featured yamin semali (atlanta based producer, dj, mc, and recording engineer). local music producer electrobro won first place. 10/12/2017: vtditc vol 5: mc battle & workshop featured daytripper (atlanta based producer, dj, and mc) and emcee lioness (maryland based mc and vt alum). trigganamatree (aka james maples who passed tragically the following year) won the battle. 11/2/2017: vtditc vol 6: hip hop & digital literacy featured dr. ad carson (uva department of music), sum (los angeles based mc), vt student nathan zed, and stimulator jones (roanoke based musician). dr. a. kwame harrsion moderated the discussion. spring semester 2018: we began hosting vtditc studio hours in what is now the media design studio b in newman library. the sessions occurred from 11am to 2pm every friday that semester as well as during the summer. 2/11/2018-2/17/2018: vtditc artist/entrepreneur-in-residence. los angeles based artist sum served as the university libraries first (and only thus far) artist/entrepreneur in residence. sum met with over 30 members of the campus community during his residency. afterwards he presented a document with numerous recommendations and debriefed interested members of the university libraries with his findings via a virtual meeting. 2/15/2018: vtditc vol 7: the hour challenge – a collaborative music creation competition – took place. three teams of approximately half a dozen randomly chosen local hip hop artists were given an hour to create a full song. the crowd picked their favorite at the conclusion of the event. logistically it was a nightmare but it all worked out somehow. recap video 2/28/2018: the roanoke times publishes a front page story on the vtditc program. 3/15/2018-3/17/2018: 2nd annual vt hip hop appreciation weekend transpired. sohhl, the flowmigos, and vtditc served as co-sponsors. 3/15/2018: vtditc vol 8: hip hop & liberation featured dr. brandy faulkner (vt department of political science), omar offendum (los angeles based mc), dumi right (vt alum and virginia based mc), and saba taj (durham based visual artist). recap video 3/17/2018: vtditc park jam featured muralists icue (atlanta) and good homie signs (north carolina) as well as atlanta based dj and mc daytripper. 4/19/2018: vtditc vol 9: gender & hip hop ii featured blair ebony smith (university) and kyesha jennings (nc state). recap video fall semester 2018: vtditc studio hours continued in mds b. we altered hours to fridays from 2 to 5 to better serve our community’s needs. 8/23/2018: the hip hop @ vt exhibit opened in newman library. this exhibit – which was created in collaboration with the university libraries’ course exhibits program – was on display on the main floor of newman library through nearly the entirety of the fall semester. mural timelapse video 9/20/2018: vtditc vol 10: intro to djing & fair use – the return consisted of a workshop by craig and numerous vt djs/students who also served as small group coaches. recap video 10/11/2018: vtditc vol 11: beat battle & music production workshop featured beatsbyjblack (northern virginia based music producer) and was hosted by vt student eric luu. vt student samwmta won first place. mike abstrakt, a roanoke-based high school student and music producer, took home second place. recap video 11/12/2018: vtditc vol 12: hip hop & mental health featured dr. ian levy (manhattan college), dr. freddy paige (virginia tech department of civil and environmental engineering), dr. brandy faulkner, and emcee lioness.  2/7/2019: vtditc vol 13: hip hop & interrogating civility. this event, in collaboration with the office of student conduct, took a critical view of the imperative of civility on our campus. dr. andrea baldwin (vt department of sociology), yolanda avent (vt community and cultural centers), vt student juan pachecho, and dr. ad carson (uva) served as panelists.  2/28/2019-3/2/2019: 3rd annual vt hip hop appreciation weekend took place. sohhl, the flowmigos, and vtditc again served as co-sponsors. 2/28/2019: vtditc vol 14: gender & hip hop iii – the return of the b-girl. graffiti artist meme, dancer bgirl macca, and emcee lioness served as panelists for this iteration of our seminar series.  3/2/2019: 2nd annual vtditc park jam featured muralists good homie signs and meme. recap video 4/7/2019: black cultural center (bcc) mixtape released. this collaborative project – the culmination of a semester and a half of work largely done during vtditc studio hours – was formally released at a celebration at the bcc. 4/18/2019: words of the prophets: graffiti as political protest in greece, italy, and poland. this collaborative program with the vt department of english featured dr. jonathan gross (professor of english at purdue university). he shared his research regarding the rhetorics of graffiti art. good homie signs created a 4’ by 16’ mural prior to this event. it is now on display in the department of english’s conference room (shanks hall 380). 4/18/2019: vtditc vol 15: show & prove. this event was an all elements open battle for local hip hop arts practitioners. members of the flowmigos won first place. 8/2019: the vtditc leadership board established our inaugural advisory board. the first advisory board consisted of juel downing (vt class of ‘18 and original leadership board member), dr. j. rawls (dj/producer and educator), sum (mc), emcee lioness (vt class of ‘07 and mc), dumi right (vt class of ‘95 and mc), and dr. joycelyn wilson (assistant professor of black media studies, georgia tech). ‘19-’20 academic year: notably, the vtditc community engagement fellows co-designed and co-taught 45 media literacy workshops for the broader community. roughly a dozen partner organizations helped facilitate these workshops. 9/19/2019: vtditc vol 16: hip hop & race – what hasn’t been said. this event consisted of small group discussions led by a team of moderators.  10/17/2019: vtditc vol 17: soul sessions – rebel voices. this iteration of our seminar series was a collaboration with roanoke-based open mic series soul sessions and celebrated of lgbtq+ history month. 11/14/2019: vtditc vol 18: 3rd annual beat battle & music production workshop. this recurrence of one of our most anticipated events was judged and hosted by stimulator jones (roanoke based musician, dj, and producer). vt student and music producer prince predator (vt class of ‘21) won the battle.  february 2020: bobcat studios project. vtditc was awarded a $3000 internal grant by vt’s institute for creativity, arts, and technology to create a recording studio and the culturally-relevant curriculum necessary to support it at radford high school (radford, virginia).  2/20/2020: vtditc vol 19: intro to djing and fair use iii. this workshop was taught by ucla department of africana studies’ lynnée denise and focused on their research regarding the dj as scholar. 2/28/2020: vtditc held a master class with legendary recording engineer tim donovan in media design studio b.  mid march 2020: vtditc studio hours transitioned to a virtual-only format. 3/19/2020: vtditc vol 20: gender & hip hop iv’s original date. we rescheduled this event to 10/15/2020 and transitioned to a virtual format due to the covid-19 pandemic 3/21/2020: 3rd annual vditc park jam’s original date. we rescheduled this event to 9/19/2020 due to the covid-19 pandemic. 6/4/2020: vtditc vol 21: black communities & the police. this was our first virtual-only seminar series event and it transpired shortly after george floyd was murdered by the minneapolis police department. community stalwart dr. brandy faulkner kindly shared her expertise with us yet again. mid august 2020: vtditc studio hours reinstated in-person programming in mds b. 9/17/2020: vtditc vol 22: hip hop and police brutality. our second virtual only seminar series event featured dr. brandy faulkner, dr. ellington graves (vt office for inclusion and diversity and department of sociology/africana studies program), roanoke-based recording artist macklyn, and radford university department of social work’s dr. deneen evans. panelists analyzed both current and classic hip hop songs as foundational texts describing instances of police violence.  9/19/2020: 3rd annual vtditc park jam – the do-over. north carolina based artist and regular vtditc collaborator good homie signs created a 4’ by 16’ mural of the virginia tech motto ut prosim (or “that i may serve”) outside of newman library. the mural was installed in newman library the following month.  10/15/2020: vtditc vol 20 – the do-over: gender & hip hop iv featured dr. shante paradigm smalls (st. john’s university). this event was our third virtual-only seminar series event. dr. smalls presentation focused on their research regarding queer hip hop historiographies. 11/12/2020: vtditc vol 23: hip hop entrepreneurship ii featured stacy epps (atlanta-based artist and attorney). at our fourth virtual-only seminar series event, stacy’s workshop focused on the steps necessary for aspiring artists to professionalize their creative practices. 11/13-11/15/2020: good homie signs created the bobcat studios mural (12’ by 24’) at radford high school.  images: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rmesxfmpcqjjrdjmrpcyqdebjxwsjvss?usp=sharing  testimonials: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nd0b8qqrzrvpw1tojhwlmog1yrazqv89ypekcoymvwo/edit?usp=sharing community building, community engagement, community groups, hip-hop, library programming, public services creating a student-centered alternative to research guides: developing the infrastructure to support novice learners we need to talk about how we talk about disability: a critical quasi-systematic review this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct welcoming the homeless into libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 1 dec kim leeder /17 comments welcoming the homeless into libraries photo by flickr user alex barth (cc by 2.0) by kim leeder i hope those reading this post had a warm, happy thanksgiving, surrounded by family and friends. i spent most of last week in florida at my parents’ “snowbird” house with my immediate family, all of us having traveled at least 1,200 miles to eat, drink, and laugh together by the pool. while there i spent my downtime reading a moving memoir about homelessness entitled breakfast at sally’s. the irony of reading such a book at thanksgiving did not escape me, nor did the dramatic contrast between my comfortable lifestyle and that of former publishing mogul richard lemieux. lemieux’s business collapsed in 2002 and left him homeless and clinically depressed, after which his wife left him and his adult children turned their backs. about to take his own life, he was stopped from jumping off a bridge only by the barking of his beloved dog. breakfast at sally’s is about lemieux’s struggles to survive and find new meaning in life, offering a unique if somewhat darker perspective on american culture. throughout the author’s sad experience some bright points appear, however, including the many churches and organizations such as the salvation army (which the homeless dub “sally’s”) that provide free meals, clothing, and a sense of community for those on the streets. the kindness of those who dedicate their time and energy to keeping these associations running is critical in keeping lemieux and his fellows alive and fed. another bright point that appears early in the story is the public library, about which lemieux says: the library was another sanctuary for the homeless. there was always plenty for everyone, rich and poor. those without a roof over their heads could escape with wolfe, kafka, or robert louis stevenson and have shelter from the heat and the cold, the rain and the pain (31). this passage, along with repeated references to the importance of books to various homeless characters in the story, gave me pause. the small city where i live, boise, idaho, may have lower rates of homelessness than larger metropolitan areas around the nation (12 people out of every 10,000 are homeless in idaho, versus 22 nationally according to the national alliance to end homelessness), but even in my university library we see individuals on a regular basis who appear to fit the profile. have i ever helped them, or has my library been doing anything to help? not beyond the definitions of what we do for any other community user, and in fact perhaps less. we may watch them out of the corners of our eyes to make sure they don’t cause any trouble, and we tolerate their presence. if they have a photo identification card we’ll let them use a public computer for an hour, and if not they can have ten minutes or so at a quick-use machine. if no students complain, they can nap in one of our lounge chairs upstairs in a quiet corner. that’s not much, particularly when you consider the situation from lemieux’s vantage point on the streets. the obstacles between his circumstances–with no address, phone number, or job references–and a rebuilt, stable life seemed insurmountable. of course libraries aren’t homeless shelters or counseling centers and homelessness is complicated problem that libraries alone don’t have the power to solve. the madison, wisconsin, central library is an example of the conflicts that can arise when a library is so popular with the homeless that other patrons object. on the one hand, the library is providing a positive experience for homeless individuals. pat schneider, author of the above-linked article from the cap times, writes: ask [the homeless] why they hang out at the library and they’ll talk about comfort. it’s warm. it’s dry. there are public restrooms. but the library offers much more. “they’ve got books and magazines and music. i love the library,” enthuses one young woman. this echoes the sentiments expressed by lemieux in breakfast at sally’s. on the other hand, a large population of homeless patrons can make others (justified or not) feel unsafe or uncomfortable walking in the building. schneider continues: [t]he crowd on the library patio turns off some, library officials admit. “i hear anecdotally of people saying they prefer to go to branches because they feel safer,” says theodore “tripp” widder, president of the madison library board. balancing the needs of varied library user groups is not easy, and it becomes especially difficult when there are deep-rooted prejudices against one particular group, like the homeless. yet if we truly serve our communities, as any library open to the public inherently does, we would do well to reconsider our attitude and our services for the poor and the homeless. think about the requirements for the basic services that most of us take for granted, such as requiring a home address or driver’s license to check out books or to access a computer. while such things sound simple, someone who has lost their home has often lost access to those basic privileges as well. this is not just a public library issue: it’s an issue for all libraries that are open to the public. if we serve the public, we serve the wide variety of people who make up the public, regardless of their address. in the spirit of the holiday season, i’d like to dedicate this blog post to some of the wonderful libraries that have met the call for help in their communities, and i’d like to share their stories from my research and reading on this topic. perhaps their stories, like breakfast at sally’s, can inspire the rest of us to greater understanding of the plight of the homeless. perhaps they can remind us of our ability–and responsibility–to work with local organizations to create programs and services to assist the needy in our own towns and cities. ala and homelessness in 1990 the american library association approved policy #61, library services to the poor. this policy was created based on the belief that “it is crucial that libraries recognize their role in enabling poor people to participate fully in a democratic society, by utilizing a wide variety of available resources and strategies.” the policy, overseen by ala’s office for literacy and outreach services, includes sixteen objectives to accomplish this goal, from promoting food drives to eliminating fees for those who can’t afford to pay them, as well as creating low-income programs and services. the “poor people’s policy,” as policy #61 is called, is a statement of belief and a list of general tenets that all libraries are encouraged to adopt, similar to the library bill of rights. however, as sanford berman described in a 2006 article in street spirit, the poor people’s policy has not been accepted as widely as that older document. berman’s observations on the tension between library ideals and reality are an insightful and passionate reflection of our profession’s unintentional hypocrisy. library services, in general, serve the haves and exclude the have-nots, a circumstance he labels “classism.” examples of classism include the small number of libraries carrying major serials on homeless issues; the fact that libraries in the lowest income areas are often open the fewest hours; and policies and laws banning “offensive body odor,” bathing, or sleeping (such as in san luis obispo and houston). he ends with this plea: if librarians and others can first recognize their own attitudinal hang-ups, understanding what makes them view welfare mothers and homeless people, for example, unfavorably, and ultimately grasping that poverty—not poor people—is the problem, that poverty can be reduced if not ended, and that the most vulnerable and dispossessed among us are citizens and neighbors who deserve compassion, support, and respect—if we can do these things in our heads and hearts, then there’s a real chance to overcome classism. perhaps the strongest response to the poor people’s policy has been within the social responsibilities round table, which created their hunger, homelessness & poverty task force to advance the objectives of the policy. the task force expanded those objectives and provided more specific recommendations for libraries interested in improving their accessibility to all, while working on raising awareness and action. still, one task force can’t do it alone. to make libraries more welcoming and supportive for the poor and the homeless, individual libraries need to adopt the poor people’s policy and take responsibility for those in need in their own communities. a 2002 article by lan shen, “the dilemma of urban library service for the homeless,” (current studies in librarianship, v. 26 no. 1/2), breaks down existing library services for the homeless into three categories. the first is partnering with local government or nonprofit agencies to provide learning opportunities for the homeless, perhaps by providing lists of local resources or making meeting rooms available for support groups. the second category is bringing library programs or services out to homeless centers or shelters, such as storytimes for families. the third category is in-library programs and services like literacy programs, “camps” for homeless children, or referral services. shen’s article is helpful as a starting point in beginning to think about some of the potential ways to serve the homeless in our communities. some libraries are even finding ways to expand beyond those categories to provide out-of-the-box initiatives in their communities. the h.o.m.e. page café in philadelphia is a prime example. the h.o.m.e. page café one of the most powerful initiatives in libraries to support the homeless is the h.o.m.e. page café at the free library of philadelphia. this library coffee shop grew out of a partnership between the library and project h.o.m.e. (housing, opportunities for employment, medical care, education), a local nonprofit working on homelessness and related issues. the two had initially collaborated to solve the library’s problem with their restrooms, which were popular with the homeless to the point of alienating other patrons. project h.o.m.e. offered to fund a program in which formerly homeless individuals in supported housing were hired as restroom attendants to monitor the restrooms and keep them clean. the library watched their restroom problems dissolve, while needy individuals got back on track to supporting themselves. the program has been extremely successful and cemented the partnership between the two organizations (see “the story of the h.o.m.e. page café” in public libraries jan/feb 2009, pp. 32-34). when the free library of philadelphia decided to create a coffee shop, project h.o.m.e. proved to be an invaluable collaborator once again. they proposed a café whose primary purpose would be not revenue but job training for formerly homeless individuals living in supported housing. they obtained a grant, garnered equipment donations from starbucks, and brought in a local bakery interested in supporting social causes. they hired employees, not based on their knowledge or experience, but their need and potential (there are a few examples in other fields, too, for instance gould farm in massachusetts). the result of this partnership was a library café that helps the homeless get back on their feet while inspiring loyal patronage among socially aware customers. through collaboration and creativity, the free library of philadelphia and project h.o.m.e. have built a model that could be constructively reproduced in cities across the nation. hopefully, it will be. crossing library types to serve the homeless the dr. martin luther king, jr. library in san josé, california, combines the san josé public library and the san josé state university library in one collaborative system to better serve both communities. and they do! in an article last year in the reference librarian, “addressing the needs of the homeless: a san josé library partnership approach,” lydia n. collins, francis howard, and angie miraflor describe how the libraries joined together not only in a shared building, but also in a combined effort to bring services to the homeless in their community. they formed a task force to identify needs, priorities, and community partners, and began a concerted outreach initiative. like the free library of philadelphia, the dr. martin luther king, jr. library partnered with local organizations in san josé such as innvision, which serves low-income people in the san josé area. the library brought computer classes and storytimes to innvision’s centers, and the two organizations plan to expand their joint offerings. further, the library began to plan their own in-library programming to address the needs of homeless patrons, such as assistance with job applications, legal information, and english as a second language training. the library brings social workers and lawyers into the library to offer advice and guidance to the homeless during free sessions. and to top it all off, the library administration provided customer service training to librarians and staff to increase their sensitivity to homeless patrons. collins et al report: there are two on-going programs targeted specifically at the homeless: storytimes for families and computer classes. both programs are conducted at homeless agencies and bring in 35 to 40 children and adults. there is also a weekly “lawyers in the library” program that offers free 20-minute legal consultations, and there is a continuous waiting list for this service (114). while collins et al. acknowledge that they need to assess current initiatives and seek new ways to support the homeless in their community, they are actively experimenting with a variety of approaches and adjusting their services and programs based on the feedback they receive. by building an environment of sensitivity and accommodation, they have embraced the poor people’s policy and are a model example of a multiple-library-type partnership created for the benefit of the homeless in their area. although it is unusual for an academic and public library to share a space, that is not a barrier to cross-library collaboration on programs and other initiatives similar to those at the dr. martin luther king, jr. library. conclusion i certainly don’t have the answers to homelessness, but perhaps in the writing of this post i have uncovered a few answers to homelessness as it relates to libraries. the first and most obvious conclusion is that libraries that have “problems” with homeless patrons should seek out partners in the community to help them solve those problems in a way that will simultaneously assist the homeless population. no one wants to use the library restroom to bathe, nor is the library anyone’s first choice for napping. the initiatives described in this post—and i’m sure there are more that i haven’t uncovered—reveal that collaboration with organizations already working on homeless or low-income issues can often provide meaningful solutions that can even offer positive press for the library. further, any library that serves the public would do well to adopt the poor people’s policy and consider new, collaborative ways to serve those in need in the local community instead of tossing them out the door. another conclusion we can extract from the stories provided here is the undeniable fact that libraries of any type can help homeless individuals rebuild their lives if we can eliminate classist attitudes and policies and stop judging people based on appearance (and aroma). like the libraries described above, we can plan or host programming targeted to the needs of those on the streets. we can educate ourselves on local organizations and laws that the homeless should be aware of, and reach out to them with that information. these initiatives don’t have to be time-consuming for those of us already stretched thin; they may just require contacting local partners and offering space or other support. above all, it’s important for those of us working in libraries to keep in mind that, like it or not, libraries are a lifeline for those without homes. we provide safe spaces, a sense of community, and a means of communication. in breakfast at sally’s lemieux describes the isolating effect of homelessness caused by living outside the daily bustle of work, home, and family. libraries have the ability to create opportunities that empower people to reconnect with their world. as individuals we can help by putting aside our distractions, digging down into our humanity, and treating all our patrons with compassion, kindness, and generosity. it may not be in our job descriptions, but it is in our power to make a difference. suggestions for further reading: gehner, j. (2010). libraries, low-income people, and social exclusion. public library quarterly, 29(1), 39-47. doi:10.1080/01616840903562976. lemieux, r. (2008). breakfast at sally’s: one homeless man’s inspirational journey. new york: skyhorse pub. tashbook, l. (2009). aiming high, reaching out, and doing good: helping homeless library patrons with legal information. public libraries, 48(1), 38-45. my thanks to ellie collier, ellie dworak, emily ford, and amy vecchione for offering valuable feedback on a draft of this post. charity, collaboration, equal access, holidays, homelessness, policy 61, poor people's policy, poverty x take the template and run: austin community college’s student library and technology use study 17 responses jane salisbury 2010–12–01 at 2:05 pm thank you for a great summary of recent history and call to action. i applaud the openness and lack of fear-mongering in your post! it is in our power to make a difference. clare mckenzie 2010–12–01 at 5:50 pm this is a great article, consistent with all that comes from the lead pipe team. insightful, thoughtful and most importantly thought provoking. i hope everyone i know reads it! anne 2010–12–01 at 7:59 pm very insightful indeed. i work in a large urban public library and we have a varied population that includes homeless men, women, and families. behavior problems are not as great as one might expect. this is due to two things: first, we have a standards of conduct policy that we enforce for each person in the building. as an urban library, we also have a security team that goes above and beyond. they have led our staff in changing the atmosphere. our standards of behavior are not unreasonable. due to lack of seating, we must prohibit sleeping and do so gently. body odor offensive to others is handled in a positive manner by a quiet and empathetic discussion and encouraging the customer to make use of local options, including medical services. we have a standard handout and, if we are not all familiar with each service, we can learn and explain. most importantly, we bear in mind that each of these customers is an individual. we may be the only person who recognizes that person as an individual all day. not a “homeless dude.” an actual individual. we get to know them just as we get to know our other regular customers. we know their names and many staff now feel comfortable with having those particular customers know theirs. we build community with all customers, not just the clean ones. and that is the greatest reward. i have seen withdrawn and disheartened homeless and poor drawn out of their isolation. they overcome their fear of us and begin to look us in the eye and communicate. as their fear decreases, so does ours. we build a bridge with that group just as we do with customers belonging to other groups. when you start to build a bridge, it’s amazing how many people will meet you in the middle. kim leeder 2010–12–02 at 2:00 pm thanks to jane and clare for your kind words. anne, thank you for sharing your library’s story — what a great example for the rest of us! it seems like a combination of firm security and a compassionate approach may be the key elements for libraries popular with the homeless in their communities. it’s wonderful to hear you reinforce the fact that there’s a balance that is achievable for all of us. caitlin quinn 2010–12–02 at 4:46 pm kim, i appreciate your insights and shout-outs to libraries and partnerships that are already modeling examples of successfully identifying community needs and establishing support efforts. thank you and may i repost? caitlin q. kim leeder 2010–12–02 at 6:53 pm thanks, caitlin! we have the blog under a creative commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/) — you’re welcome to repost as long as you credit us. enjoy! rick 2010–12–02 at 7:20 pm your post reminds me of the concept of “critical information literacy”, i came across reading r. hall’s article titled: public praxis: a vision for critical information literacy in public libraries (public library quarterly, 29(2), 162-175). critical information literacy suggests that librarians need to engage their communities more directly and actively by asking why an information need exists. such a why question in the context of this post is why homelessness might be occurring in the library’s community? to quote the hall: “if public libraries recognize that information literacy is not a neutral skill that can be “deposited” into library patrons, they must take up this challenge as information literacy educators—to become partners with the members of their communities, pose problems, and act upon the world in order to change it. problem-posing public libraries will actively seek out issues of concern within the community and create spaces for these conversations to happen. they will address controversial topics and ask challenging questions. these conversations can include library-sponsored events, panels, conferences, speakers, even blogs and wikis—any forum that will include community members in the exchange of ideas and give them the opportunity to pose questions and problems, too.” hall draws from the concepts of social justice and the work of friere. indeed, libraries and librarians would do well to “act up on the world and change it” if they can. read you will 2010–12–02 at 8:59 pm i am currently on a public library board and our director has requested that we create a policy to disallow patrons with bad body odor. yes, she is trying to keep the homeless out of our public library. it saddens me to know that she is trying to turn our “public library” into a “not so public library”. thank you for all your posts, this helps put everything into perspective. bev 2010–12–03 at 9:33 pm i just cannot get used to hearing people put down the misfortunes of others. i received my mls 32 years ago and during the years i was working the sort of comments you have mentioned were common. i have been disabled for 6 years and spent 2 montha this summer homeless myself. this is not something i pictured when i started school or my first library position. i commend all of you who are working to help those of us who may find ourselves in unique situations due the quirks of life. brett bonfield 2010–12–03 at 9:39 pm great post, kim. as i read it, i found myself raising objections. they felt realistic, grounded in the difficult decisions anyone in charge of a budget must make. and then, as i kept reading, you addressed each one of them. you’re right. what we need to commit to is clear. we also need to understand that, as with other commitments such as freedom to read, making the commitment is just the first of many important steps. since we like to think systematically here at in the library with the lead pipe, i’ll make two suggestions for some systematic changes that i think would lead to useful changes in library culture. 1. i’d like to see a library school establish a dual-masters degree program with a school of social work. my sister has a social work degree (and, coincidentally, she works at project h.o.m.e.), as does my wife. as a library director, i’d love to hire a well trained librarian who also had a social worker’s training, orientation, and skills. 2. i’d like to see prominent funders — imls or gates-level funders — sponsor initiatives to study and package the kinds of programs that are working well, such as the ones you mention above. libraries are really good at collaborating and information sharing, though it seems we often do best when we have great working models to copy. kate 2010–12–06 at 2:11 pm i love the idea of a joint mls/msw degree. as a current mls student about to enter the field as a public librarian, i’m realizing more and more how useful that would be. in san francisco, the library and the department of health have formed a partnership that places a psychiatric social worker in the library to help serve homeless patrons, and others. when librarians themselves don’t have this kind of training, these kinds of partnerships are key to making sure we’re getting everyone the help and information they need. the jobless librarian 2010–12–08 at 9:42 am thank you for bringing awareness to ways in which libraries can help the homeless. this is the first i’ve heard of the “poor people’s policy” and i am glad that such a document exists. i hope that more libraries will work to eliminate classism and strive to better assist the most vulnerable in our communities. ed 2010–12–08 at 2:53 pm excellent article, thanks so much! the cap times article you pulled from had another piece that i think really illustrates where current thinking among beleaguered library staff is missing the point: “library officials like director ************** are quick to say that it’s not homelessness, but behavior, that is the issue.” actually, homelessness itself is the issue and we need to engage institutions to develop successful community partnerships that actually serve the homeless instead of address the “problem” through design or policy. david 2010–12–31 at 11:17 pm i was reading this article on the new year’s evening, sitting in the comfort of my home with heater quietly working. it made me think about the time when economy went down and i had a real chance to become a homeless myself. i think it is great that many libraries make an effort to help homeless and treat them as people who need help, and not as a nuisance. jean costello 2011–04–07 at 9:39 am hi – i just came across some great work about social exclusion in libraries and remembered this wonderful post & comments. here’s material from the workingtogether project in canada: kenneth william williment, it takes a community to create a library brian campbell, community-led libraries toolkit pingback : does your policy pass the smell test? | cheryl becker eric rife 2012–07–19 at 3:47 pm i loathe being a fly in the ointment, especially with regard to such a compassionate article, but …. the fact of the matter is there are as many different types of homeless as there are in any other type of group, as limieux himself points out. too often, in the noble effort to be compassionate and to serve all, we entertain the notion that the homeless are merely victims of a cold and cruel society who are being underserved by the public library system(s). during my 12 years at the library where i work, i’ve helped people locate lost relatives, get social services, get enrolled in school, fill out job applications and copy edit resumes. i’ve forgiven fines, handed out cash (my own, not the library’s), and purchased toiletries and clean clothing for some of the patrons. i’ve bent rules, allowed people to bring in “service animals” (that are obviously not) and catered to the whims of people who seemingly only know how to acquire what they want through intimidation. and every day, i have to be a diplomat, arbitrating childish squabbles at the internet terminals where our regulars sit all day playing games and watching videos. my experiences are hardly unique and every staff member i know can tell similar stories of the lengths to which they’ve gone to serve all our patrons. while i agree, wholeheartedly, that we must combat classism, racism and sexism wherever we find it, we must also accept that people who aren’t mentally ill or disabled are usually responsible for the predictable consequences of their actions. and in the case of way, way, way too many homeless patrons, those actions include abuse of the staff and other patrons and a complete disregard for the needs of others. no one wants to believe, especially me, that many homeless patrons are happy living the life they do. but the fact of the matter is many of them are perfectly content to spend their days watching music videos and playing games on the computers, while other patrons, anxiously looking for a job or social services, must wait while someone finishes their umpteenth game of magic diamonds. i don’t begrudge the money they make panhandling (which, according to several of the homeless patrons i’ve spoken with, regularly nets them a few hundred dollars a day), nor do i necessarily begrudge anyone for poor hygiene, sleeping or bathing in the restroom. i don’t even resent richard limieux who, by his own admission, was a successful businessman with a country club membership and “a beautiful home on the water, boats, cars, hot tubs and exotic vacations.” i do, however, resent anyone who feels entitled to treat staff and other patrons with contempt. i do resent the guy who bled all over me (as i was pulling him off a security guard) which led to months of worry and hep b shots. and i resent the homeless who circulated the petitions to cut public workers’ pay, benefits and pensions. thanks in part to their dutiful efforts, new hires in our city will not receive a pension and all city workers have their pay frozen for a total of eight years. that said, will i continue to treat all patrons with the same respect, dignity and level of service i’ve always provided? of course. will i ever feel guilty because, ostensibly, library staff don’t do enough for the homeless? never. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct leading with heart – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 10 aug eric frierson /11 comments leading with heart photo by flickr user calsidyrose (cc by 2.0) by eric frierson introduction there are sections of the bookstore many people don’t want to be seen in. for me, it’s the business section. every time i’m scanning the spines of new titles on leadership, innovation and management, i feel a little nervous that someone’s going to jump out of the photography section and call me a square. i don’t think i’m alone in this. there’s a strong anti-corporate feeling in many of the social circles i inhabit. in fact, the bookstore i usually go to is the largest independent bookseller in texas. in a city whose mantra is “keep austin weird,” it’s not unexpected. business books represent corporate culture, “the man,” and mumbo-jumbo for suckers in suits. it’s not just in austin. mega-corporation ibm recently released a commercial that featured “buzzword bingo” in which employees of a large organization are called to a large meeting with the ceo of the company who boasts about the direction of the organization. as he spits out buzzword after buzzword (e.g., “web 3-dot-0,” “out-of-the-box thinking,” “value-added”), cynical employees mark off squares on the premade bingo cards. what i get is this: administration, regardless of what kind of organization you’re in, is often functioning within a “dilbert-like” reality. managers are wrapped up in their insulated world of mission and vision statements and strategic planning. they have delusional and misguided ideas about what goes on at the frontlines. i suspect that for many librarians, the words mission and vision and strategic planning conjure up the same kinds of images. perhaps you haven’t played buzzword bingo, but you’ve exchanged knowing glances with coworkers during planning meetings. you’ve experienced enough strategic planning to know that the majority of the time it’s not going to get you anywhere, and it’s going to take a long time to do so. a recent excerpt from benjamin ginsberg’s book the fall of the faculty that appeared in the chronicle of higher education provides examples of visions that turned into strategic plans that turned into years-long failed efforts at change. he faults administrators that use the strategic planning process for their own personal gain in the form of resume-building experiences. these career administrators busy themselves with visioning and planning rather than making real change, all the while continuing to seek out more lucrative opportunities for themselves. in essence, these inauthentic leaders were using the process for personal gain, and others in the organization could sniff it out. it’s important to note that ginsberg doesn’t deny the effectiveness of a good vision or a good strategic plan. he highlights the university of illinois strategic plan as one that contains the characteristics of effective corporate or military plan in that it has explicit objectives and ways of measuring success. it’s not the idea of vision and planning that is broken – it’s the way in which it happens and the motives behind the process that make for failed efforts. authentic leadership princeton philosophy professor emeritus harry frankfurt’s essay on bullshit was a best seller when it was released as a book in 2005. in it, he writes about authenticity and fakes: for the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. in order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. what is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. it may be, after all, an exact copy. what is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. (frankfurt, 2005, p. 47). this echoes ginsberg’s stance that the processes used for change are not inherently bad. it also explains why a fiscally sound, conceptually correct plan might reek of bullshit. together, frankfurt and ginsberg highlight the need for competent, authentic leaders. authentic leadership isn’t just about leaders who are true to themselves and their organizations, though that is a part of it. bill george (2003) identifies five dimensions of authentic leadership: purpose, values, relationships, self-discipline, and heart. purpose authentic leaders know who they are and what they stand for. they know where they are headed and are inspired and intrinsically motivated to achieve their goals. the way this comes out in leadership situations is leaders who have passion. values authentic leaders understand their own values, and they use those values to know the right thing to do in difficult situations. instead of compromising their values in difficult times, they use those situations to strengthen their understanding of their own values. people can tell leaders are true to their values through their behavior. relationships authentic leaders engage in mutual disclosure with others. they build strong bonds between themselves and others based on trust and closeness. they don’t necessarily reveal everything to everyone, but they are considered transparent and open. they will be open about their weaknesses and are willing to listen to others. people describe leaders with these kinds of relationships as well connected to others in the organization. self-discipline authentic leaders who practice self-discipline are able to maintain focus and stay on track in order to reach their goals. they are accountable to themselves, to others, and they hold others accountable to the organization. others know what to expect from them and describe these leaders as consistent. heart perhaps the “softest” of the dimensions of authentic leadership, heart represents the awareness leaders should have about others’ struggles. they seek to help others who need it. they are frequently described as compassionate leaders who put others before themselves. a lack of authentic leaders there are few people who can live up to these standards on a daily basis. there are even fewer who have the management skills to use visions, missions and strategic plans to effect the change they want to see. even fewer occupy management and leadership roles in our workplaces. it’s no wonder there are so many “buzzword bingo” sessions in our work lives. we have seen economic, social, and political leaders create massive amounts of distrust of leadership throughout our society. even those identified as authentic leaders have turned out to be less authentic than we had hoped. in what is a basic textbook for leadership studies, leadership: theory and practice by peter northouse, of the three case studies exemplifying authentic leadership one was about greg mortenson. mortenson, author of three cups of tea, was once known for his selfless, purpose-driven work in creating schools in difficult political and geographical areas. now, he is more known for lying about the extent of his work. authentic library leaders now more than ever, libraries are in search of authentic leaders because we have pressing problems. budgets are being slashed around the country. in my own state, governor rick perry has signed off on a budget that will cut 88 percent of the state library’s programs that aide and assist libraries throughout the state. by  virtue of their transparency, self-discipline, and high ethical standards, authentic leaders enhance employees’ engagement with the organization and inspire behavior that goes beyond what is expected (walumbwa, wang, wang, schaubroeck, & avolio, 2010). frankly, that’s what we need to solve difficult problems. in a study of 387 employees and their 129 direct supervisors, researchers found that supervisors who demonstrated authentic leadership characteristics led more motivated, empowered teams than those who were not authentic leaders. because followers can identify with authentic leaders, they feel more empowered to make change as well (walumbwa et al., 2010). we need employees that don’t just come to work for a paycheck – we need employees that come to work engaged in the profession and concerned about what’s happening around us. we need employees who are willing to go above and beyond to ensure our users are being served in spite of the cuts all around us. the vision thing motivated employees who feel empowered are great, but all of that energy needs to be synchronized, and therein lies another role for the leader: vision-setting. business guru john kotter found that of the eight reasons why firms fail, three of them had to do with vision. firms that failed underestimated the power of vision, undercommunicated the vision, or permitted obstacles to block the new vision. the leadership challenge places ‘inspiring a shared vision’ in its model of effective leadership. other studies on leadership have placed vision at the core of the transformational change process (zaccaro & banks, 2004), claiming that it is responsible for generating trust in leaders, aligning the beliefs and values of entire organizations, and intellectually stimulating all who work there (kirkpatrick & locke, 1996). vision can be a powerful motivator if it appeals to major stakeholders in an organization, including staff, customers, and community members. the business world has a variety of examples of successful visions. kotter’s seminal work, leading change, identifies six characteristics good visions have. imaginable the vision is something that is easily pictured. it doesn’t represent the organization as it is now; rather, it is a picture of the organization in the future. this ‘future organization’ provides people with a direction. desirable the vision is something the appeals to a variety of stakeholders, not just a single group of people. visions that ignore one group of stakeholders in favor of another will eventually demoralize followers and invariably spark resistance. feasible the vision should not be so farfetched that it appears unattainable. in order to develop a vision that will seem feasible, it should be rooted in reality. that said, it should not be an incremental change, as this will not be inspirational. the right vision stretches an organization’s limits, but not to a point of incredulity. focused the vision should provide a clear direction to work towards. kotter provides the example, “to be a great company,” as a vision that lacks enough focus to answer questions about where the organization is going. flexible just as a vision should not be too vague, it should also not be too prescriptive, limiting the options an organization has for achieving the vision. a flexible vision allows for the environment to change and the organization to adapt to it while remaining focused on the vision’s goals. communicable the vision is easy to communicate. it shouldn’t take longer than a couple of minutes to explain well. if the vision is too complicated to communicate, it will eventually lose its power as others in the organization try to adopt it as their own. library vision statements in looking at library vision statements posted on websites, it is clear that there are not a lot of what kotter would define as good – and without a good vision statement, it will be difficult to align a whole library to achieving change even with a good leader. it is clear that that the library world has yet to embrace a single definition of what constitutes a vision.  these statements range from long, multi-page documents that more closely resemble a mission statement (what a library does and its purpose) to one-liners than seem more like a slogan. kent state university libraries the libraries provide information resources and services that are essential to research, discovery, and learning at kent state university. activities of our information professionals include synthesizing, organizing, evaluating, and providing access to the corpus of human knowledge and experience. we are committed to the broad-based support of our primary users – students, faculty, and staff – while also recognizing our role in ensuring and maintaining the carnegie research ii status of the university. we also provide leadership in cooperation with other university offices in the visioning and management of new and more effective information resource services to the university community. our vision embraces this ideal while acknowledging that we are bound by available fiscal resources. it goes on to list seven statements of belief too long to include here. obviously, this vision statement is much too complex to be easily communicated. it also speaks of the library as it is now and doesn’t provide an image of the library in the future. the university of texas at arlington library the ut arlington library … the best choice for navigating the world of ideas. this one is definitely communicable. however, it does not have enough focus to guide individuals in the organization. when confronted with a choice to create a learning commons or build a special collection, this vision statement wouldn’t lend much support. it’s also hard to imagine what this place will look like in five years with no imagery or description of the future library. keene state college in new hampshire mason library’s vision is to achieve excellence in the following: mason library partners with the campus community to prepare citizens ready to engage in the world. the library is a knowledge center where students learn information literacy skills that empower them to navigate a rapidly changing environment. the library offers a welcoming space at the heart of the intellectual endeavor integrating materials, technology, place, and teaching in the tradition of a public liberal arts institution. this vision statement is a good balance between focused and flexible.  it highlights a distinct direction for the library: community partnerships, a knowledge center that adapts to new environments, and a physical space with materials and technology.  still, it doesn’t specify strategies to achieve this future, nor does it tie the library to specific technologies.  “materials,” for example, might mean books, journal articles, and other traditional library materials; however, if the institution shifted to a data-centric curriculum and adopted an e-reader program, this vision is still relevant. the power of vision, authentically led new technologies, shrinking budgets, the growth in the demand for ebooks and several other converging forces are changing the landscape for library work.  at the same time, the library’s relevance is being called into question in our communities, our schools, and our colleges and universities by those who would believe “it’s all on google.”  our institutions are competing for scarce resources: for public libraries, fire and police get funded as essential services; for school libraries, instructional units[1] get priority funding; and for colleges and universities, other schools and academic units are vying for the same funding libraries seek. clearly, libraries operate in a volatile environment that demands strong leaders to unify an organization and set a path for success. authentic leadership describes how leaders can interact with followers to overcome organizational inertia and inspire action through purpose, values, relationships, self-discipline and heart.  these leaders have integrity and emotional intelligence, and they rally entire organizations around common, heart-felt goals using a clearly articulated vision of the future. emergent leaders with vision leaders are not always the director.  they can be found throughout the library and are identified by the way they are able to influence others to create a new future for the organization. northouse (2010) identifies those who do not hold formal authority but who exhibit leadership qualities as emergent leaders.  these leaders are identified by the way they motivate others, initiate new ideas, and seek others’ opinions.  they are passionate and involved. library visions can (and should) be emergent as well.  all institutional visions were once just the vision of a single individual that were shaped by others in the institution. kouzes and posner elaborate: we all have dreams and aspirations.  we all think about the future; we all want tomorrow to be better than today.  leaders have to make sure that what they see is also something that others can see.  when visions are shared they attract more people, sustain higher levels of motivation, and withstand more challenges than those that are singular. (2002, p.105) while you may not have the authority to define the vision of the library and draft it as part of a strategic plan, you certainly can have a vision and share it with others – even if it’s not in the context of formal planning meetings. for example, in developing the st. edward’s university library website, i had conversations with each staff member at the library to come up with a shared vision for the site.  this vision was partly mine – i built the bones of it on my own – but it was shaped through conversations with people that knew the st. edward’s community, including faculty and students.  the final vision that guided website development was: the st. edward’s university library website is the go-to resource for academic research for our faculty, staff and students.  it provides unfettered access to high-quality library materials and opportunities for website visitors who have never interacted with the library in any other way to expand their research capabilities through intuitive design, rich information literacy content, and ways to communicate with library staff.  the library’s website will be ubiquitous in the research lives of our users and its content and tools will be found throughout the seu digital infrastructure. because each member of the organization contributed to this shared vision, it withstood early criticism and gained buy-in quickly.  others saw themselves and their input in the website.  part of my role as an authentic leader in this situation was to listen actively to others and be honest and open about my own intentions for the site.  i was passionate about making an excellent site that would serve the st. edward’s university community by recognizing the needs and interests of all major stakeholders.  as corny as it sounds, it was an effort both of the mind and the heart, and i believe that is why it has been a success. i’m not a director, but i certainly have a vision of what the library will be in the future.  i believe it is a vision that i share with several of my colleagues, and that helps guide my actions.  as my library embarks on a strategic planning process that began this month, i am ready to contribute my vision to the conversations that our entire staff will have about the direction our library will take.  if i do that with authenticity and heart and articulate a good vision, i will help steer this library into the future. what you can do you can be an authentic leader.  here are some thoughts on becoming an authentic leader at your library, regardless of your position: take leadership seriously.  just as the library community has come to embrace teaching as a skill that requires passion and knowledge, so does leadership. participate, if possible, in leadership development.  the american library association’s emerging leader’s program is one example, but state library associations may offer something as well.  the most valuable learning experience i have had has been the texas library association’s tall texans leadership institute, led by ala president-elect maureen sullivan and george washington university libraries dean jack siggins.  if leadership is a phenomenon you’re really interested in understanding, there are graduate programs like simmons college’s managerial leadership in the information professions [2] that can engage you in leadership theory and help you explore how leadership happens in libraries. find your own vision and voice.  you cannot authentically lead using someone else’s vision and someone else’s passion (kouzes & posner, 1999).  i recommend the leadership challenge, which not only is a great read, but provides activities to articulate your authentic self.  this sounds touchy-feely, but it is something many of us do not do in the midst of our busy, hectic days. lead.  take the five dimensions of authentic leadership and apply them in your work, starting today. many thanks to dr. anne marie casey, director of the hunt library at embry-riddle aeronautical university and irene m. h. herold, dean of mason library at keene state college for their perspectives on this piece.  as always, thanks to all of my fellow lead pipe editors, but especially emily ford and ellie collier who provoked me with insightful comments and questions. references george, b. (2003). authentic leadership: rediscovering the secrets to creating lasting value. san francisco: jossey-bass. ginsberg, b. (2011). the fall of the faculty: the rise of the all-administrative university and why it matters. new york: oxford university press. frankfurt, h. g. (2005). on bullshit. princeton: princeton university press. kirkpatrick, s.a. & locke, e.a. (1996). direct and indirect effects of three core charismatic leadership components on performance and attitudes. journal of applied psychology, 81, 36-51. kotter, j. p. (1996). leading change. boston: harvard business school press. kouzes, j. m., & posner, b. z. (1999). encouraging the heart: a leader’s guide rewarding and recognizing others. san francisco: jossey-bass. kouzes, j. m., & posner, b. z. (2002). the leadership challenge. san francisco: jossey-bass. northouse, p. g. (2010). leadership: theory and practice. thousand oaks: sage. walumbwa, f. o., wang, p., wang, h., schaubroeck, j., & avolio, b. j. (2010). psychological processes linking authentic leadership to follower behaviors. leadership quarterly, 21(5), 901-914. zaccaro, s. j., & banks, d. (2004). leader visioning and adaptability: bridging the gap between research and practice on developing the ability to manage change. human resource management, 43(4), 367-380.   [1] as a former high school teacher, i am fully in support of recognizing school libraries as instructional units, especially considering that many states require their librarians to have been classroom teachers for years. [2] disclaimer: i am a current student in this program. i love it! authenticity, leadership, vision are you reading ya lit? you should be. resilience vs. sustainability: the future of libraries 11 responses jeff scott 2011–08–10 at 12:06 pm really great post! the buzzword leader is a common ailment of staff everywhere. it poisons the message of someone who is trying to be authentic and transparent, adding cynical fuel to the fire of jaded staff. i’ve thought about this issue a great deal over the years, thank you for writing this. librarian_101 2011–08–11 at 4:36 pm can i just say – thank you? thank you for not just recognizing but calmly and smartly calling out a massive problem in our field. i have been saying for years that we have lots and lots of managers (and many of them struggle with the day-to-day duties of that job) but very few who can lead. it does take a rare person who can both manage people and projects and inspire and engage others, but we should be encouraging these people to come forward. unfortunately, i’m not seeing that happening much. it’s truly a shame, but a trend that i hope will change very soon. veronica arellano 2011–08–12 at 11:57 am i really appreciated your blog post and the thought you put in to describing ideal library leaders, but i must say, i was completely distracted by your redesign of your library’s website! i thought it was clean, intuitive, and functional. as someone who will be undertaking an academic library website redesign this coming year, i would love to use your site as inspiration. eric frierson 2011–08–12 at 2:01 pm ha! thanks, and stealing the design would be flattery. :) must thank our outstanding university web team at st. ed’s for doing the heavy lifting with the code and being very attentive to the design that reflected our library goals. dale 2011–08–12 at 1:31 pm nice post that captures some very profound points. glad you included the hook about no one being able to do all of those things each and every day. there’s real truth behind that statement, but it doesn’t mean we should not aspire to be transparent and trustworthy at all times. eric frierson 2011–08–12 at 2:00 pm thanks for the comments, everyone! does anyone want to highlight a particularly authentic leader in libraries that you know about? i can name several people that come across as open, supportive, and passionate about the work – barbara macadam, aul at the university of michigan… laurie sutch, academic learning facilities coordinator also at um… these two taught me so much about being a leader early in my career. honored to have worked with them. dale 2011–08–12 at 2:21 pm sarah michalak at unc-chapel hill would be on my list. pingback : part ii – strategic plans – vision & mission « earl's business pingback : very comprehensive strategic plan #2 « earl's business vivienne blake 2011–08–23 at 9:53 am thank you for an inspiring post, defining what constitutes effective, generous and human leadership. oleg k. 2011–08–23 at 9:02 pm eric, i liked how your article cut through the half-marketing/half-management self-help gobbledegook to explain authentic leadership. i was particularly pleased with the personal example you used; you did what a leader should do – you had a personal vision, but you created an environment where everyone had a chance to contribute. i’m a librarian now, but i worked as stage manager in the theatre before, and this is ability to have a strong personal vision and yet let everyone (actors, designers, crew…everyone) feel like it was they who made the show happen. anyhow, nicely done. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct from aasl standards to the acrl framework: higher education shifts in pedagogical strategies – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 6 sep jennifer l. c. burke /3 comments from aasl standards to the acrl framework: higher education shifts in pedagogical strategies in brief how does the framework for information literacy for higher education function in relation to the information literacy standards used with students in k-12 schools and how does it inform academic librarians’ pedagogical strategies? while these documents are strongly related, there are large differences in their theoretical approach to information literacy, which are revealed in their definitions, treatment of dispositions, and approach to measurement. this leaves gaps in instructional approaches and student learning. understanding these differences enables librarians in higher education to leverage the framework to teach all students and fill in instructional gaps, regardless of how much information literacy instruction they have received in the past. introduction i became an academic librarian in august 2016, shortly after the acrl formally adopted the framework for information literacy for higher education. the framework is a fundamentally different document than the aasl standards for 21st century learners, the standards from which i worked as library media specialist in a college preparatory high school. while the student population in that high school was fairly homogeneous (racially, socio-economically, etc), the students in my college classes were from all over the world, had any background imaginable, and were at different skill levels. they had unique k-12 experiences and vastly varying degrees of information literacy instruction prior to coming to campus. i needed to work effectively with the framework in planning lessons and assessing student learning to properly support all of these students. to better understand a new guiding document, i did close readings, comparing and contrasting the two documents, and delved into articles discussing their usage and teaching philosophy; however, i found no literature on how the two functioned together. in this paper, i use the final draft of the framework for information literacy in higher education (2015) and the current 2009 version of the aasl standards for 21st century learners and examine them independently from how they are utilized in classrooms. i set out to compare and contrast the theory behind each of the documents, aasl relying on behaviorist theory and the framework relying on critical librarianship and social constructivism. these theories speak very different ideas about how students learn about information, creates learning gaps, and effects our pedagogy practices in the classroom. theoretical approaches each document presents a set of beliefs and a definition of information literacy that provides groundwork for the formation of their objectives (the standards for aasl and the knowledge practices for acrl). the aasl standards’ common beliefs are a series of statements placed in the beginning of the document without any introduction as to their meaning or purpose. i am writing with the assumption that these present an underlying philosophy for the standards. the common beliefs include statements like “ethical behavior in the use of information must be taught,” “school libraries are essential to the development of learning skills,” and “technology skills are crucial for future employment needs” (aasl, 2009, pg. 2-3). the aasl standards’ definition of information literacy, placed within the common beliefs and further explained directly after, states that “information literacy has progressed from the simple definition of using reference resources to find information. multiple literacies, including digital, visual, textual, and technological, have now joined information literacy as crucial skills for this century.” each of the standards begin with “learners use skills, resources, and tools to: [action word here]” (aasl, 2009, pg. 3). this definition and standard set is skills focused, emphasizing the use of tools and technological skills to find information. this approach, like the older acrl standards, views information as “a commodity external to the learner, which can be sought out, possessed, and used” and portrays the students as individuals who acquire information skills through practice (foasberg, 2015, pg. 702). these foundational principles are much more reflective of behaviorist theory, a teaching theory that asserts that is “typified by rote learning, drill-and-practice” and “manifests itself through changed bahaviours such as the acquisition of new practical abilities” (elliot, 2009, pg. 1). this approach typically views the instructor as the ultimate authority within the classroom and that teaching and learning is sequential. what this means in information literacy is that if a student acquires the skills to access information through a variety of avenues, in a particular order, then they will have achieved information literacy. behaviorist focus on sequence is seen through the standards’ structure. they approach each measure in a highly structured, nested fashion that provides a clear order in which students are to approach research and information. standard 1.1.1 states students should “follow an inquiry-based process in seeking knowledge in curricular subjects, and make the real-world connection for using this process in own life” (aasl, 2009, p. 3). the rest of the standards in section 1 then present an ordered, linear list of actions students are to take for this “inquiry-based process.” the standards for the 21st-century learner in action defines dispositions as “learning behaviors, attitudes, and habits of mind that transform a learner from one who is able to learn to one who actually does learn”, states that they can be taught through assignment structure (i.e., building in activities that require persistence), and “can be assessed through documentation that proves the student has followed the behavior during the learning process” (2009, p. 8). this is reiterated in the standards document itself which defines dispositions as “ongoing beliefs and attitudes that guide thinking and intellectual behavior that can be measured through actions taken” (aasl, 2009, pg. 8). but does a student’s action and behavior truly reflect an inward attitude? while the actions prescribed in the aasl standards should not be ignored or undervalued, it is problematic to assume that an attitude can be measured through action or that learning can only occurs with the “right” attitude. many students learn to simply act the way they think they are supposed to act (i was one of these students!). the standards also have a tendency to hide additional physical, observable skills within the dispositions sections, further confusing inward attitudes and outward behavior. while the aasl standards mention social context, working together, and thinking skills that launch independent learning, they do not place a lot of focus on student reflection. the framework’s beliefs explicitly address both the faculty and student roles and responsibilities, reflecting on their own behaviors and actions with the academic community, and how information functions in a cultural landscape. each of the frames within the framework provides a concise statement and provides a list that begins with “learners who are developing their information literate abilities [action word here]” (aasl, 2009, pg. 3). the standards focus on the student using a tool or someone else’s expertise to complete their tasks; the framework places the focus on what the student is doing and thinking. the difference is subtle and simple, but significant. the framework defines information literacy as a social practice, emphasizing “dynamism, flexibility, individual growth, and community learning.” it reaches beyond skills in locating information and addresses how information is created, how the students use the information to create their own knowledge, and students’ responsibilities to participate in the learning community. this is strongly reflective of critical librarianship and social constructivist pedagogy, a theory that emphasizes how a student’s language and culture, as well as context (of the information and the student’s role in society) affects learning. critical librarianship is the “inflection of critical theory in library and information science” (garcia, 2015, par. 6) and has been defined as “a movement of library workers dedicated to bringing social justice principles into our work in libraries” (critlib, n.d., par. 1). it states that “critical self-reflection is crucial in becoming more self-directed in the rapidly changing ecosystem.” critical self-reflection depends heavily on student engagement and requires librarians to create lessons that focus more on the nature of information as opposed to lessons that focus on extracting information (articles and resources) from a system. the frames, or threshold concepts (ideas that enlarge ways of thinking) are arranged in alphabetical order, providing no sequence and implying that each concept is equal in importance. while some order of research process is provided within the research as inquiry and searching as strategic exploration frames, there are major language differences. instead of emphasizing order (there are no numbers in the frames’ lists), the framework breaks down cognitive skills that are at play in searching: comparison between aasl standards and acrl framework standards: standard 1.1.8 framework: searching as strategic exploration “learners demonstrate mastery of tech tools for accessing information and pursuing inquiry.” “match information needs and strategies to appropriate search tools.” “design and refine needs and search strategies as necessary, based on search results.” “understand how information systems (i.e. collections of recorded information) are organized in order to access relevant information.” “use different types of searching language (e.g., controlled vocabulary, keywords, and natural language) appropriately.” staying true to its focus on self-reflection, the framework defines dispositions quite differently than the standards. dispositions are a “tendency to act or think in a particular way. more specifically, a disposition is a cluster of preferences, attitudes, and intentions, as well as a set of capabilities that allow the preferences to becomes realized in a particular way” (salomon, 1994). the framework views dispositions as a dimension of learning, implying that the student’s attitudes and values are present and active at all times (acrl, 2015, pg. 2). because the framework acknowledges that these attitudes are ongoing, the dispositions set forth are to be born out of, or at the very least, influenced by, the knowledge practices. they are not meant to be a set of measurable outcomes but a set of “good ideas” that instructors are trying to grow within students’ mental landscape during instruction. instructional and learning gaps these differences in approach leave gaps within student learning. these gaps include the issue of authority, age-appropriate cognitive awareness, creating personal connections with information, information privilege, awareness of the creation process, and how information is used. perhaps the largest gap in focus between the documents is the issue of authority, which is largely absent in the standards. it is briefly mentioned in standard 1.1.5: learners “evaluate information found in selected sources on the basis of accuracy, validity, appropriateness for needs, importance, and social and cultural context.” there is no information on how students should determine accuracy or validity, and so it implies that sources should be chosen prior to identifying where authority comes from in their chosen research subject. because the standards are largely behavior based, this pedagogical approach relies on the instructor. this is not a comment on the professional knowledge of the instructor but of the tradition of placing authority solely in instructors and in academic resources found through library databases. in addition, this leaves very little room for choosing an informally packaged source, such as social media. the framework provides an entire frame on authority, discusses how students will define different types of authority, and acknowledges that different disciplines have accepted authorities. it highlights how the social nature of the information ecosystem effects where researchers go to discuss findings and connect with each other. the framework also invites students to consider their own views, giving them authority in the research process as well as those who guide them through it. teaching concepts of authority could lead students to first identify authority figures prior to beginning research; however, the framework does not prescribe an order in which research should be approached in this area. another gap between these documents is the issue of age appropriate cognitive process. standard 2 states that “learners use skills, resources, and tools to: draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations, and create new knowledge.” this standard is all about drawing conclusions and synthesis. this standard is one of the most difficult to address with younger students. bloom’s taxonomy, published in 1956 and revised in 2001, is a framework created to classify thinking into six cognitive levels of complexity. this framework begins at a rote level of thinking (remembering) and works its way up through understanding, applying, analyzing, and evaluating, up to the highest level (creating) (anderson, et al., 2001, p. 31). k-12 pedagogy still relies heavily on bloom’s taxonomy, and while most of the standards focus heavily on the bottom layers of cognition (using tools, retrieving information, following procedures, etc.), standard 2 primarily focuses on higher levels of cognition. while this provides one of the best parallels between the standards and the framework, and is one of the best transitions between high school and college level thinking, this standard can be challenging when working with younger students. because the standards are meant to be applied to a 13 year span of students, librarians must be fully aware of child and adolescent development at multiple stages and be able to apply it with full flexibility—something not expected of classroom teachers. unless a school librarian has a full pedagogical background in k-12, this can be very difficult. to make personal connections and organize knowledge in useful ways, students must confront their own thoughts and ideas about how they will use their resources. this reinforces the idea that authority does not lie within information itself but also within those who created it and how they fit into scholarship. this also means that individuals must make decisions about what types of information they are receiving and how to deal with it. the information has value frame calls students to recognize issues of access and their own information privilege, something that is felt long before college (acrl, 2015, pg. 6). the common beliefs of the standards state that “all children deserve equitable access to books and reading, to information, and to information technology in an environment that is safe and conducive to learning,” but this statement is only presented to the professional and does not directly appear in the standards list. the framework takes this further, stating that the professional must “acknowledge biases that privilege some sources of author over others, especially in terms of others’ worldviews, gender, secual orientation, and cultural orientations” (acrl, 2015, pg. 4). this is supporting in targeted objectives by saying learners “understand how and why some individual or groups of individuals may be underrepresented or systematically marginalized within the systems that produce and disseminate information” and that students should “develop awareness of the importance of assessing content…with a self-awareness of their own biases” and “examine their own information privilege” (acrl, 2015, pg. 6). while these discussions may be happening in k-12 schools, there is no expectation of it as it is absent from the actual set of standards. this is a large step away from a behaviorist approach and toward critical library pedagogy. in thinking about what voices may or may not be represented and the ability (or lack of ability) of some groups to access information, students can begin to understand that they are only finding information that represents certain ideas. this could encourage them to dig deeper when researching and find alternative points of view. middle and high school students not only deal with academic literature but must deal with the high influence of social media and need to be able to recognize any manipulation that may be occurring in information they encounter outside the classroom. for students to understand how information can be manipulative, they must understand the nature of how different resources are created and for what purpose. the framework specifically addresses information creation. it says that learners must “articulate the traditional and emerging processes of information creation and dissemination in a particular discipline” and “recognize that information may be perceived differently based on the format in which it is packaged” (acrl, 2015, pg. 5). students are often told that they cannot use resources on the internet or that they can only use resources found through the library’s database and rely on a “model of information literacy instruction which universally praises scholarly research and devalues alternative venues of information dissemination” (seeber, 2015, pg. 162). this is often for the sake of guiding the students toward only information that is accurate and reliable, however, students must resist this assumption. library databases (k-12 database packages included) access information that comes from news sources, websites, non-peer reviewed journals, and portions of peer-reviewed journals that are not refereed. the standards state that students should “make sense of information gathered from diverse sources” but the framework explicitly points to the information creation process as a guide for students to determine accuracy, not where it appears (aasl, 2009, pg. 3). in terms of learning, students are at a distinct advantage if they know, explicitly, that “information is made in different ways, valued for different reasons, and used to achieve different ends” (seeber, 2015, p. 161). identifying how a resource was created lets them more readily see bias, holes in arguments, and author agendas over those who rely on prescribed sources. this also means that students can then more easily justify using resources they have found on social media if they can determine that the author and process of creation was accurate. it shifts the authority of the information away from its packaging and onto the actual process of creation. closely akin to how information is created is how information is used. most teenagers have social media accounts and are actively sharing information (personal or otherwise) on these platforms. information has value directs students to “understand how the commodification of their personal information and online interactions affects the information they receive and the information they produce or disseminate online,” an issue wholly absent from the standards. research has demonstrated how impactful our emotions can be on social media. a 2014 study detailed how facebook’s control of the emotional nature of a person’s newsfeed impacted their interaction with the media platform and how this control affected the tone of the information that the individual would share (kramer, guillory, & hancock). this and similar research (detecting emotional contagion in massive social networks by coviello et al., 2014, and measuring emotional contagion in social media by ferrara & yang, ) shows the large-scale impact that social media can have on people, particularly young individuals. the impact of this type of manipulation may be tempered by a systematic, curricular awareness through information literacy standards. effects on pedagogy skills-focused teaching is the simplest way to create lessons from the standards since they provide point-by-point, measurable actions. this style of teaching relies heavily on database demonstrations, point-and-click skills practice, checklist-style website tests, and worksheets. while some activities can be built to push students to think critically, most of the standards point to abilities and dispositions that are visible. assessments in skills-focused lessons often focus on if the student was able to find a source for a paper or project that the instructor or librarian deems “reliable,” or if the student was able to cite the source correctly. the end result is king; anything else is rarely assessed, even the steps in the middle. if those steps are assessed, it is typically in the fashion of a yes-or-no formula of the students performing particular actions and in the “right” order. the following is an example of a skills-focused activity that was embedded into a 65 minute workshop i created in the fall of 2014 for a middle school social studies class: lecture & activity: go through the research process using the 7 (altered) steps of research: identify your topic create a keyword list find background info find resources (websites) on your topic evaluate your findings publish your project cite your resources after an explanation of each step, the students will do an activity to respond to, thus completing that step of their project. these include: a keyword building activity locating an encyclopedia article finding websites and applying a checklist-style evaluation recording information about the site and how they will use it, and finally, creating citations for any resources they plan to use. this workshop was built on a scaffolding method referred to as the “i do, we do, you do” method. the idea is that students see a concept first, then practice it with guidance, and finally do it on their own. i embedded this method into each step with the exception of publishing. this method is useful for all age levels, but especially for a class of 6th grade students who are, developmentally, operating heavily in the stages 2 and 3 of bloom’s taxonomy, a framework published in 1956 and revised in 2001. this framework begins at a rote level of thinking (remembering) and works its way up through understanding, applying, analyzing, and evaluating, to the highest level (creating) (anderson, et al., 2001, p. 31). there are some higher-level elements, but the lesson relies heavily on observable actions and the hands-on skills that students need to practice. as a high school librarian, i struggled with providing enough higher level activities for my students while still following the behaviorist standards. i often had discreetly file lesson plans that did not actually follow the true activities that i was utilizing in the classroom. some high school students receive basic instruction in database use only or no information literacy instruction at all. according to a 2013 study done by the national center for education statistics, only around 62% of reporting traditional public schools and 16% of reporting charter schools in the united states employed a full-time, paid, state-certified library media specialist (bitterman, gray, & goldring, 2013, pg. 3). we do not know if these professional are providing information literacy instruction according to the aasl standards. this creates a necessity for higher education librarians to teach information literacy “from scratch.” while academic librarians cannot change gaps in the standards or the fact that many of our students have never met with a librarian in a classroom setting, we can build a bridge between skills-focused instruction and student-centered activities to meet the needs of young adults and adults, particularly in their first year. the use of a first year or foundational experiences program is an example of how some universities support the transition between high school and college information literacy. these programs typically focus on students who are transitioning from high schools and community colleges and those who are first generation students in their families. another method of supporting this transition is through programmatic assessments of basic information skills. these assessments provide insight to the librarians and faculty about the nature and level of student information literacy. the framework calls librarians to a greater responsibility in “identifying core ideas within their own knowledge domain” and “collaborating more extensively with faculty” (acrl, 2015, pg. 2). moving away from the traditional point-of-service for first year classes and toward a programmatic approach not only increases collaboration with subject faculty, but also ensures better library exposure to students who may not be inclined to walk through the doors which may result in greater library use through their college years. because of the swiftly changing nature of information and how we interact with it, academic librarians have a greater responsibility to teach skills that can be applied outside the institutional walls, particularly with regard to issues of information creation, access, and motives within the publishing process. while it is safe to assume that incoming students know how to perform basic searches using internet search engines, they may not be able to know what to do with that information or distinguish the differences between scholarly and popular materials. the framework, being supported by social constructivist ideas, moves beyond skills-based instruction requires us to ask students to think critically, to utilize their own experiences, and to use resources that could have been previously prohibited, such as social media. to include more hands-on, directly applicable activities, and incorporate more critical information literacy theory into my lesson plans demanded that i refocus lessons on the “why” instead of the “what.” this effectively shifted my role from “expert” to “guide.” this is supported by andragogy, one of the most well-known adult learning theories. andragogy, or the methods and principles of adult learning, leans on the principles that adult learners are self-directed and responsible for learning, work best under problem solving and hands-on practice, and seek information that has direct application to their immediate situations (knowles, 1980, p. 44). the research process was a very common request for lesson topics in my university teaching. below is how i restructured the k-12 research process activity to focus on the framework. k-12 research process activity activity: students are given 2 popular articles and 2 scholarly articles. they are tasked with creating two short lists of common features for each of the categories. each group has a student come up to the board and records their list (the result will be a large list for each category). discussion: librarian calls the class together to discuss the lists. questions could include: who write scholarly articles? popular articles? what kind of credentials (degrees, jobs, etc.) do they have to have to write these? who do they write for? why do they write these? how long does it take for a scholarly article to be written? a popular article? short video on peer-review process (creation, purpose, etc.) librarian draws a timeline on the board for the peer-review process discussion: let’s talk about the timeline for peer-review articles. what is peer-review? who are the author’s peers? what are reviewers looking for when they read an article? how long does this process take? how might a peer-review article from one discipline look different from another discipline? add to the timeline by including popular articles, books, and other types of resources how does the length of time each resources takes to create affect how you use it for your paper/project? demo of main database search tool: using one of the student’s topics, demonstrate the usage of the library’s discovery tool, its filters, and its citation tool, pointing out the difference in search terms with the database vs google. this should only take 5-10 minutes. student searching: students are directed to search either the main database tool or the internet (or both) for a source they may want to use. remind them to think about how the information was created, who created it, and why when determining if they will use the source. this activity takes students through the principles of information creation and forces them to consider how the information fits into the cultural landscape of higher education and society, leveraging the highest level of bloom’s taxonomy at almost every step. one of the ending measurements is the same as my original k-12 lesson (a useful source for their project), but the cognitive demands and understanding of information are vastly different. instead of being told to simply evaluate information for accuracy, students must consider the context in which the writer’s authority resides. from this, students can then reason why different points of view (academic and non-academic) matter in research. if students do not understand the nature of authority and focus on the skills of retrieval only, they run the risk of devaluing a professional’s knowledge simply because they do not work in an academic field or because the information is coming from a website. while i do recognize that this lesson is built for college students, this is not beyond the cognitive levels of high school students. structurally, the framework alleviates obstacles in lesson planning in terms of targeting specific objectives. for example, standard 3.2.3 states that a student should “demonstrate teamwork by working productively with others” (aasl, 2009, pg. 5). while working productively with others is a good social skill, it has no specific placement in information literacy without bringing in at least one other standard for context. the framework, focused on principles, reworks the idea of cooperation into students seeing themselves as “contributors to the information marketplace/scholarship rather than only consumers of it” (acrl, 2015, pg. 8). this can be a teachable objective on its own without having to be paired with another standard or objective. the practices and dispositions with the framework can be utilized and targeted alone and can be taught within the context of school or outside of it. the framework “contains ideas that are relevant for anyone interacting with information in a contemporary society” (seeber, 2015, pg. 159). moving from a statement of action (behaviorist) to a statement of metacognition (constructivist) moves the standards out of isolation and into a larger context. it allows me to take a frame as a whole or a particular knowledge practice and embed it into a course assignment because i am not teaching a discipline—i am teaching ideas that nest within any circumstance, both academically and personally. this results in net gains for our students, empowering them in their research, in their interactions on social networks, and in their encounters with media. while the framework does not provide point-by-point measureable activities, it does not run counter to measurable assessments, and it can be situated into any library’s missions and goals and lends itself to working with inclusive populations. it allows for one lesson to be applied to multiple classes regardless of the students that make up that particular class, that particular day. support level can be changed, students can “drive” more or less, activities and tools can be exchanged, all while teaching to the same frame. because the framework addresses almost every single area of the standards (the exception is some of the standards pertaining to personal growth), even students who have never had information literacy instruction during k-12 aren’t “behind” students who have. all students benefit from thinking about why and how they, and others, make information choices. discussion while the observable, measureable skills in the aasl standards are positive skills to have, being based on behaviorist-style ( lecture, point-and-click demonstrations, and students’ abilities to simply find information) does not prepare students properly for modern university level instruction. by drawing on social constructivist and critical librarian pedagogy, the framework for information literacy for higher education encourages student self-reflection and examining how information functions in a greater context beyond an assignment. it pushes librarians to create learner-centered and authentic activities through which finding information becomes a cognitive process, not just a physical one. by being more aware of how information is used socially, politically, and culturally, students are empowered to understand how articles are created, how to evaluate arguments, and how to apply new knowledge to their own scholarly work. skills like these are vital in our everyday, technology-driven, socially connected world. examining these documents and their theories brings to light a number of issues that i simply cannot address in one paper: 9-12 students could benefit from having a separate higher-level set of standards; how the american association of school libraries and the association of college & research libraries are failing to work together to create cohesive standards; how much pressure is being put on k-12 librarians to have a more thorough knowledge of child and adolescent development than classroom teachers; how high school students should also receive the benefit of being taught in a constructivist manner through the lens of social equality; etc. while these issues that have been brought to the surface through this process, we can and should be taking immediate steps in our pedagogy practices to help alleviate that the strain in k-12 to college transition in our students. by understanding how our students have been taught, we can build on this to create lessons that take information literacy further. how these two documents function together will change soon. aasl is currently in the process of revising the standards for the 21st century learner. the new standards are forecasted to be launched in the fall of 2017. i am very interested to see the changes and how they might affect our k-12 colleagues and their students and, a few years down the line, academic librarians who work with these same students in higher learning. many thanks to my publishing editor, ian beilin, and my peer-reviewers, amy koester and kyle harmon, for working so hard to put out great material. a special thanks as well to kevin seeber for all of your advice and guidance, particularly in the beginning stages of this publication journey. i greatly appreciated all the wonderful feedback from all of you! references american association of school librarians. (2007). standards for the 21st-century learner. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/aasl/standards/learning american association of school librarians. (2009). standards for the 21st-century learner in action. chicago: ala. anderson, l.w. & krathwohl, d. r. (eds.) (2001). a taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: a revision of bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. new york: addison wesley longman. association of college & research libraries (2015). framework for information literacy for higher education. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework bitterman, a., gray, l., & goldring, r. (2013). characteristics of public elementary and secondary school library media center in the united states: results from the 2011-12 schools and staffing survey (nces 2013-315). u. s. department of education. washington, dc: national center for education statistics. retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013315.pdf coviello, l., sohn, y., kramer, a. d. i., marlow, c., franceschetti, m., christakis, n. a., & fowler, j. h. (2014). detecting emotional contagion in massive social networks. plos one, 9(3), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0090315 critlib. (n.d.) about/join the conversation. retrieved from http://critlib.org/about/ elliot, b. (2009). e-pedagogy: does e-learning require a new approach to teaching and learning? scottish qualifications authority, january 2009. retrieved from https://www.scribd.com/document/932164/e-pedagogy ferrara, e., & yang, z. (2015). measuring emotional contagion in social media. plos one, 10(10), 1-14. https://10.1371/journal.pone.0142390 foasberg, n. (2015). from standards to frameworks for il: how the acrl framework addresses critiques of the standards. portal-libraries and the academy. 15(4). 699-717. doi:10.1353/pla.2015.0045 garcia, k. (2015). keeping up with…critical librarianship. keeping up with…, june 2015. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/critlib knowles, m. s. (1980). the modern practice of adult education: from pedagogy to andragogy. chicago: association press. kramer, a. d. i., guillory, j. e., & hancock, j. (2014). experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. pnas, 111(24). 8788-8790. http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full salomon, g. (1994). to be or not to be (mindful). paper presented at the american educational research association meetings, new orleans, la. seeber, k. p. (2015). this is really happening: criticality and discussions of context in acrl’s framework for information literacy. communications in information literacy, 9(2), 157-163. retrieved from http://www.comminfolit.org/index.php?journal=cil&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=v9i2p157&path%5b%5d=218 finding foundations: a model for information literacy assessment of first-year students creating connections: how libraries can use exhibits to welcome new students 3 responses lisa hinchliffe 2017–09–06 at 11:44 pm there appears to be a citation error in paragraph 4 under “theoretical approaches” that seems rather important given this articles intention to compare two documents. “learners who are developing their information literate abilities…” is the lead-in phrase in the acrl framework, not the aasl standards as it is cited in this article. jenni burke 2017–09–07 at 2:20 pm lisa, you are absolutely correct. that citation was for a sentence that was removed. thank you very much for catching that. the citation should be (acrl, 2016, p. 4)! jennifer burke pingback : finding joy in the process – jennifer burke this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the digital public library of america: details, the librarian response and the future. – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 24 apr micah vandegrift /4 comments the digital public library of america: details, the librarian response and the future. in brief: the digital public library of america (dpla) launched last week. this article attempts to tease out the librarian response to dpla and explore what it means for the future of the library in popular imagination, as well as in our field. i describe the what, who, and how of dpla and ask, after two years of work on the project, what can librarians can expect from dpla and what does dpla expect from us? this article concludes by proposing that librarians want four things from dpla: advocacy, inclusion, investment and clarity.   by micah vandegrift introduction: two years ago i took a gigantic leap of professionalism and subscribed to my first mailing list ever, the digital public library of america discussion list. the concepts and ideals behind the digital public library of america (dpla) were just coming into shape and i was so excited about it that i went so far as to agree to have it inundate my email inbox. not long after, i wrote a post about dpla for the blog, hacklibraryschool, in which i spelled out some of my interest in the project, as well as some important questions to consider. quoting myself, “the reason [dpla] feels so important, is that a group of capable and brilliant folks from a variety of reputable institutions (libraries, institutes, universities) have identified a need, and have initiated a grand idea to address that need.” now, with the launch of dpla, i’d like to provide a quick overview of how the project has grown, where it is going, and most importantly, what it means for librarians. following a brief introduction to the project, i survey the literature about it, introduce some questions and issues with which the dpla still needs to contend, and close by suggesting a possible collaborative future including the work we do in large-scale projects like this. what is the digital public library of america? the concept of a national public library is not new. traditionally, the library of congress (loc) is seen as the national library of america, for good reason, but the loc’s stated mission is primarily to serve the research needs of the u.s. congress. with the wealth of digital information and the tools finally becoming available, extensible, and accessible, governments around the globe are beginning projects to create “digital libraries” of their heritage and history. in fact, dpla planning documents mention the national libraries of norway, the netherlands, and south korea as models to explore.  there are three layers to the project: a portal, which is the public-facing website with search functions; a platform, the code underlying the technical infrastructure, which is open source  so that others can build on top of it; and a partnership, which pairs this project with libraries, museums, archives, funders, universities, schools, and other institutions, to advance the mission of libraries in providing access to information. the dpla, in its current incarnation, is primarily a metadata repository that pulls open data from cultural heritage collections at multiple institutions and centralizes it. as stated in dpla’s mission, “the dpla is leading the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all.” while collecting numerous digital objects into one point of access may seem idealistic, dpla is taking practical steps in a sensible direction. building on the work of related projects like hathitrust, internet archive, and europeana, the digital public library of america intends to capitalize on previous and ongoing digitization projects by letting many digital objects be discoverable on one platform. however, there are numerous things to consider when launching a digital project with regards to the target audience/participation, scope of content, finances/business models, governance, legal issues, and technical aspects. luckily, those were the exact areas that the dpla identified as “workstreams,” in which qualified and competent professionals worked for the past two years. those workstreams have now been consolidated into committees that will continue to inform the development of the project. the focus on cultural heritage collections, an early example of which can be seen in leaving europe —a jointly curated dpla/europeana virtual exhibit—allows dpla to begin quickly with content that is already easily accessible. john palfrey, of the berkman center for internet and society and lead spokesperson for dpla, states, “in its first iteration, the dpla will combine a group of rich, interesting digital collections, from state and regional digital archives to the special collections of major university libraries and federal holdings. dpla will demonstrate how powerful and exciting it can be to bring together our nation’s digitized materials, metadata (including catalog records, for instance), code, and digital tools and services into an open, shared resource” (palfrey, 2013).  there has been a great deal of discussion about including books (eor otherwise), orphan works, scholarly materials in open access institutional repositories, and other readily available digital corpora. going forward, these other content types may be considered for inclusion in the dpla, though the version of the dpla that launched last week includes only metadata related to cultural heritage objects. who is involved in dpla? committees conversations about a broad, multi-institutional collaboration on a national digital library in america began at an october 2010 meeting of the radcliffe institute for advanced study, culminating in a steering committee. in december 2010, the berkman center for internet and society convened a meeting that would produce the dpla secretariat, directed by maura marx of open knowledge commons. with the foundations laid, these teams began to define the details, possibilities, and grand ideals of the digital public library of america. the work of the steering committee and the secretariat was invaluable to the early progress of dpla, in addition to the individuals listed below. robert darnton “a library without walls,” a piece written by robert darnton for the new york review of books, is generally seen as the inception of the dpla. darnton is a historian and the director of harvard university libraries. he has remained involved in the conception and governance of dpla, serving on the steering committee as well as being a public voice for the project from time to time. john palfrey a director at the berkman center for internet and society, palfrey has been the most vocal and visible proponent of dpla since early planning meetings, and currently serves as president of the dpla board of directors. he previously directed harvard’s law school library and is now the head of school at phillips academy in andover. palfrey’s book born digital may have run across your desk at some point. dan cohen only recently announced as executive director of dpla, dan cohen brings years of experience leading the roy rosenzweig center for history and new media (chnm) on high-profile digital humanities projects like zotero, press forward, and hacking the academy. cohen, a digital historian, brings – as the library loon has pointed out –  public presence, authority, and gravitas to the position.1 emily gore the first official employee of dpla, emily gore has worked in libraries and technology for 12 years. as the director of content, gore oversees the “what” that will become dpla’s collections. she was most recently employed as the associate dean of digital scholarship and technology at florida state university and is a 2011 graduate of the frye leadership institute.2 amy rudersdorf as dpla’s assistant director of content, amy rudersdorf “is responsible for digitization partnerships and related workflows, metadata normalization and shareability, and community engagement to promote the dpla as a community resource.” she is a leader in digital preservation and also teaches metadata and digital libraries for graduate programs in library and information science. partner organizations from the very beginning, dpla was lent credence due to the partner organizations that signed on in support of the initiative. the smithsonian institution and the national archives pledged content partnerships early on, and in recent weeks the new york public library, artstor, the biodiversity heritage library, and the library at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign have all signed on as well. the fact that there is an open invitation to “join” allows dpla to build a coalition that will draw more interest and investment. a full list of the current partner organizations is available on the website. in addition to content, dpla secured funding from the sloan foundation, the institute for museum and library services (imls), the national endowment for the humanities and others, marking it as a worthy investment for prestigious funding organizations. the public (me and you and everyone we know) early conversations surrounding dpla included worries that a project of this scale might not include enough people from the library community. these concerns were addressed in multiple ways, which i will illuminate later in this article. primarily, the project extended multiple calls for participation, including a public wiki, the aforementioned listservs, open workstreams, appfests, and beta sprints, and many librarians and others had a hand in creating what it now is. a get involved page invites continued participation and asserts the dpla’s insistance on this project continuing to be built as a community.  the prevailing zeitgeist of open, collaborative, “public,” project-based, and community-built and -owned initiatives serves the dpla well. margaret heller, writing for acrl tech connect, reported from dpla midwest, “i found the meeting to be inspirational about the future for libraries to cross boundaries and build exciting new collections. i still have many unanswered questions, but as everyone throughout the day understands, this will be a platform on which we can build and imagine” (heller, 2012). in a similar spirit to the crowdsourced participation of wikipedia, “the dpla… [is] very leanly staffed with tons of volunteers,” says john palfrey.  thousands of librarians, technologists, students, professors, curators, and administrators worked to build the project over two years through discussions and hackathons. “this may feel like a utopian project,” palfrey continues. “if we don’t aim for what we want, we’ll sell ourselves short. we need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade” (borman, 2012). what dpla isn’t dpla is not a public library, a content repository, or a threat to traditional library services. in defining a massive project of this scope, calling it a “public library” has led some in the profession to dismiss it outright, or at least question its motives. the chief officers of state library associations went so far as to issue a resolution [pdf] that the name be changed. how could a well-funded, harvard-based, academic-focused, non-librarian-led thing purport to call itself a “public library”? the inclusion of “public” in the title is important in defining the role of this organization in our country’s mind. people understand that the items in a public library’s collection belong to them and are available for their use. so it should also be with dpla, dan cohen wrote, claiming that public libraries engender trust, localness, relevance, and familiarity. the ultimate decision to call the project the digital public library of america was a conscious one, reflecting an intention to make it known that the public are invited and expected to claim ownership of the collection. it is not a public library in the same way that the brooklyn public library is, yet the goals and hopes of the organization are the same.  as it is now, content (digital objects/files) from digital libraries that partner with dpla will remain with the institutions. only the metadata about those objects will be harvested for display and discovery from “hubs” like the smithsonian institution or the digital library of georgia (the full list of hubs is available online). this approach accomplishes two things at once: 1) it utilizes the “open data” that is becoming more essential for the discoverability of online digital collections, and 2) it is creating a model by which potential future “donors” can participate in the dpla. digitization efforts at regional, state, or local institutions will have a single point of access to make their cultural objects and artifacts available to their communities, the general public, and researchers. the motivation for including your library’s digital collections in the dpla is the increased discoverability and cross-collection connections that will be more evident when searching inside one aggregated platform. it is important to remember that we (dpla and the field of librarianship, writ large) are on the same team, working diligently to provide access to information. it is for the users, not for us. dpla has the potential to be an additional resource for the library community to connect our patrons with the wealth of knowledge and information we protect and preserve. seeing it as anything but an incredible resource would be a disservice. peter murray, in a report from the audience and participation workstream meeting at george mason university, lists the variety of groups that this resource might affect. his list includes “casual searchers, genealogy, hardcore enthusiasts, wikipedia/open source folks; info nerds, small business/startups, writers/journalism, artists, students, public school teachers, home schoolers, scholars, other digital libraries, state libraries, public libraries/public librarians, museums, and historical societies” (murray, 2012). approaching the dpla as a resource for our users, in combination with the long list of skills and competencies that librarians of all types possess, will serve to strengthen our shared goal to enlighten and inspire. what librarians think of dpla nearly absent from taking a leading role in dpla is the american library association. aside from the occasional editorial in american libraries magazine, time and space at annual conferences for dpla-based discussions or presentations, and the current president of ala, maureen sullivan, sitting on the marketing and outreach committee, there has not been any significant visible support for the project in the multitude of committees, offices, round tables or divisions of ala. a statement from alan inouye, director of ala’s office for information technology policy, expresses nominal interest, without much substance, saying, “ala is following the development of the dpla with great interest and optimism… the very creation of the dpla enterprise has raised the profile of libraries in the digital age… ala appreciates the ambitious and perhaps daunting scale and scope of the dpla undertaking” (cottrell, 2013). representing some significant portion of librarianship, with membership at 60,000, ala appears to have purposefully distanced itself from active participation in the dpla for reasons that have yet to be disclosed. the online computer library center (oclc) is also largely missing from the dpla infrastructure. perhaps indicative of their thoughts on the project, the oclc report, “america’s digital future: advancing a shared strategy for digital public libraries,” vocalizes desires for public library involvement in the creation of a national library. the opening pages of the report, based on a meeting at los angeles public library, state, library leaders contributing to this discussion agreed: many public librarians feel behind in the evolution to a more digital library. participants noted that academic and research libraries have made more strides in shaping a digital future, evidenced in the major projects and new efforts of organizations such as the hathitrust. participants also noted that the rapidly evolving digital activities in the commercial sector, such as e-books and e-book reading devices, are “changing the game” for public libraries, and that public libraries have been too slow in generating a national, concerted plan (de rosa, et al, 2011). early criticisms of dpla included charges that public libraries had not been consulted or included in the planning or leadership of the project. to the contrary, everyone involved in dpla— including robert darnton, john palfrey, emily gore, and dan cohen—have made it clear that dpla is meant to connect people with the local and public institution, not direct them away from it. palfrey goes so far as to urge libraries that their involvement is fundamental and necessary. he writes that “libraries must make a digital shift, charting a course that is different from our present direction. no one should fear (or act like) libraries are going away, but we need to continue to strive to change the services they provide and to build the case for them in a digital era” (palfrey, 2013). david rothman, founder of teleread and librarycity.org, has been vocal about approaching this project cautiously, especially in regards to k-12 education and school librarians, who are intended as a primary target of this initiative. his editorial in the chronicle of higher education, titled “it’s time for a national digital-library system: but it can’t serve only elites,” mentions the extreme focus on humanities-based content, to the exclusion of scientific, medical, mathematical, business, and vocational collections. he also accuses dpla of engaging in high-academic rhetoric, “while ignoring, for instance, reference services, user communities, and grass-roots content like oral histories” (rothman, 2011). some of his concerns (a breadth of content beyond cultural heritage objects and flexible technology) are now recognizable goals of dpla’s continued growth. rothman’s suggestions that dpla remain invested in literacy and the digital divide are also well-taken; these issues will remain at the forefront of libraries regardless of a national digital library’s claims of access for all. nate hill, assistant director of the chattanooga public library, offers a different take, proposing that dpla offers public libraries a reformative path. i think that the dpla is a great opportunity for libraries to shift their focus to supporting a different set of activities in our buildings… creation activities: the production of new knowledge for personal growth and sometimes even the public good.  the future of public libraries lies in supporting creative endeavors in their local community and empowering the patrons to contribute their creative work back to the community or to the whole world via the internet… there is no other institution doing this work, and public libraries are best situated to fill the gap (hill, 2011). the evolving mission of the library is a discussion that flows across interdisciplinary lines and hill encapsulates it nicely. his assertion could as easily be applied to academic libraries. since dpla is a concept of an academic librarian and the investment of many in the higher education enterprise, it seems the research library community has more easily embraced the project. this is in no small part due to the focus on research and access to primary sources that has led academic libraries, museums, and historical societies to actively pursue digitization projects, content which can easily be ingested to the dpla version 1.0. the dpla will play an important role in the ongoing transformation of “the library” from a strictly consumptive space to a broadly creative space due to its open infrastructure, collaborative ethos, and hopefully even involving the public in the creation and curation of content. in late 2011, molly raphael, at the time president-elect of the american library association, echoed hill’s opportunist bent, albeit cautiously. listing “the issues that generated the most passionate discussions,” she writes (adding her own thoughts in parentheses): ●   should we only consider open access, or should we think about the possibility of tiered access? (my take: open access seemed to rule the day.) ●   what is being conveyed by including “public” in the name? (my take: let’s not get too bogged down on the name, but we need to be careful about what we convey by the words we use.) ●   whose voices were we missing, such as school librarians or others, and how do we make sure that the tent is “big” and welcoming? (my take: the tent kept getting bigger as more people were invited, but we knew that we needed to consider the question: “who is not in the room that should be in the room?”) ●   how should we approach the challenge—look for low-hanging fruit, such as material already in the public domain? seek to tackle the issue of orphan works, where much of the content that researchers want can be found? build on the work of those who are already building large digital libraries? (my take: we have opportunities to build more coordinated access to much that is already available digitally, but let us not lose sight of the importance of access to those sources that have legal complications.) ●   how can we be sure that we put needed focus on metadata and apis and not just on capturing the content? (my take: thank goodness this effort is being driven by librarians and researchers who care about the keys to access.) ●   how important is it to tackle copyright revision? do we have the tools we need without thinking about that now? (my take: this is a tough one. opinion about what we can or can’t do under current law is divided, but generally most agreed that we would need to press for copyright revision eventually, particularly for orphan works) (raphael, 2012). many of the issues raphael lists are similar to the current focuses of the research and academic librarian community: copyright, re/use of metadata, open access, and the “big tent” approach to building and consensus-making, are defining the culture of higher education. in contrast to the aforementioned public library considerations, there has been much less of an active response from academic librarians. several research libraries have joined as partners, expressing obvious support at the institutional level, but individuals have been less forthcoming. perhaps this is due to the fact that academic libraries are more deeply invested in access to primary source materials and are more agile in approaching technological changes, as that seems to be the trend in higher education. the academic library conversation, then, is more topic-specific (ex. copyright) than focused on large-scale projects. or, academic libraries are approaching the project with distanced interest, beholden first to the goals of their school and the bureaucracy that often entails. college and research libraries news briefly mentioned dpla in its top trends of 2012 report as a project worthy of attention. that report lists trends that include digital preservation, data curation, and scholarly communication, which are all related to the work and goals of dpla. finally, for a personal perspective on dpla, andy woodworth provides a specific sense of why this massive project may have yet to breach the consciousness of the larger library community. he writes, “the digital public library of america seems like the manhattan project: it’s massive, complex, has great minds from many different fields working on it, and not many people know about it. not because it is secretive [and] not for a lack of exposure… it just hasn’t arrived at the tipping point of intruding on the lives of librarians on their home turf. that’s where i find myself: how will this affect my community?” (woodworth, 2012.) as open and inviting as dpla has been, they have yet to purposefully and single-mindedly answer that question: what are the implications of dpla for the library community? how does this affect our patrons? the distance between large-scale initiatives and the insularity of library work (either public, academic, school, or special) is a singular factor in librarian buy-in. woodworth continues, “from my perspective, the dpla is at the opposite end of action spectrum for digital content and digital rights from me. we are both working towards the same goal, but i am operating from the grassroots level while it operates from a top-down perspective.” following the launch of dpla last week, library journal compiled an article titled “librarians respond to dpla launch” including opinions from jason griffey, jessamyn west and others, ranging from excitement for the open api to noticeable errors in legacy metadata. what librarians want from dpla themes from the various responses to the dpla can be condensed into four broad areas that i’d propose encapsulate what librarians want from the digital public library of america: advocacy, inclusion, investment, and clarity on why we should participate and how we can get our communities involved. advocacy the political climate in which we function requires consistent messages, constant efforts, and collective representation. if dpla intends to function as a highly recognizable (“public”) facet of our ecosystem, it must advocate at the highest levels for the needs of the future library. dan cohen, representing the interests and influence of many behind the scenes at dpla says, to that point, “i see a strong advocacy role for the dpla, to say that a better balance is needed in the twenty-first century, so that the landscape for reading and research isn’t further circumscribed and hindered by digital friction” (enis, 2013). it is the hope of the library community that this will ring true as dpla moves forward. inclusion libraries want to be included in the construction of a national digital library. again, dpla has worked to ensure that this occurs, and as more libraries and librarians become aware of this project, i hope that time, energy, and resources will be devoted to participating in this grand experiment. already organizations like the american council of learned societies are offering positions for post-doctoral fellows to work on the project. i would call on the library community to proactively pursue inclusion, and encourage our professional organizations to consider offering similar opportunities (fellowships, internships, scholarships) to prove our vested interest in working together to build the dpla. investment dpla will have to prove its support for existing institutions. as a starting point, providing a portal into the work of others is an efficient strategy, but as we all know, there’s much more where that came from. how does the digital public library of america plan to utilize their funding, resources and momentum to reinvest in, and enrich, the collections and communities that are not yet digital? dan cohen: “i want the american public to know that the dpla will be the place to go to find documents and images about their hometown, scanned and curated locally; to be able to pull out their smartphone, launch an app powered by dpla’s data, and take an impromptu walking tour of the hidden past of their current location; to see the dpla’s open and free content spread across classes from kindergarten to graduate school; and many other exciting possibilities enabled when formerly disparate collections are knit together—entirely new kinds of searching, discovery, and learning. forget the massive technical infrastructure; if the dpla can ignite that wonder that only libraries can provide, we will have done our job” (enis, 2013).3 clarity many initiatives that garner excitement in the library community look great from the outside, but are fraught with loosely defined goals, aims, and a general lack of detailed plans for moving forward. librarians, eager and skeptical at the same time, require a deep sense of purpose tied to real, concrete outcomes. dpla is close to providing that level of clarity, but additional information would be helpful, such as:  what methods are in place for rural libraries to begin collecting and submitting oral histories?; will there be a pbs-style curriculum module to engage school librarians?; is there a media campaign targeted at public libraries?; a toolset for scholarly utilities that could help with citing items and repurposing metadata?. these details would address andy woodworth’s question, “how does this apply to my patrons?” it is still a little early in the process to expect the fullness of clarity that many of us would like, but continuing to ask and expressing our detailed needs will keep practicality at the forefront of this developing initiative.  these four areas require as much from librarians as they do from those steering the digital public library of america. rather than approaching the dpla as a harvard initiative, i’d like to propose that we take them at their word and take ownership of this as a realistic, collaborative, inclusive, “public” opportunity to showcase one aspect of value for libraries in a digital world. considering the practical implications of a national digital library for our daily work, we should contribute to the conversation and development of the platform, the portal and the partnerships that define the dpla. if it is successful, dpla could be a national treasure which brings to light the value and essential qualities of our beloved organizations, as well as the physical collections and intellectual issues that we labor on daily (copyright, fair use, information literacy, access). even if we don’t each have the time to get personally involved, we ought to articulate the wide-ranging possibilities and benefits of such an idealistic enterprise to public schools, to higher education, and to citizenship and government. in fighting for the ideals on an ambitious project like dpla, we are fighting for our own place in the information economy. the digital public library of america is, as robert darnton puts it, “the confluence of two currents that have shaped american civilization: utopianism and pragmatism” (darnton, 2013). let us then envision the grand ideal while rolling up our sleeves. what role could be more fitting for american librarians than a passion for principles blending with an enduring work ethic? it is who we are and what we do.   further reading and discovery: stacklife, library observatory  and dpla map – examples of what can be built on top of the dpla’s open api. now, with no further ado, we present… the digital public library of america! the atlantic, 4/18/2013. dpla launches to the public. huffington post, 4/18/2013. how the dpla hopes to build a real public commons. the verge. 4/3/2013. what we hope the dpla will become. open knowledge foundation blog. 4/17/2013.   references: borman, laurie. building the digital public library. american libraries magazine, 4/19/2012. cottrell, megan. a digital library for everyone. american libraries magazine, 4/15/2013. darnton, robert. the digital public library of america is launched. the new york review of books. 4/25/2013. de rosa, cathy, chrystie hill, andy havens, kendra morgan and ricky erway. america’s digital future: advancing a shared strategy for digital public libraries. 2011, oclc. http://dp.la/ enis, matt. q&a: dan cohen on his role as the founding executive director of dpla. the digital shift: library journal. 3/12/2013. heller, margaret. report from the digital public library of america midwest. acrl tech connect. 10/22/2012 hill, nate. what a national digital library means for public libraries. text of a talk given to digital library federation, 2011. palfrey, john. what is the dpla? library journal. 4/8/2013 palfrey, john. what the dpla can mean for libraries. the digital shift: library journal. 1/3/2013 raphael, molly. the first digital public library of america workshop. inside scoop: american libraries magazine. 3/9/2012. rothman, david. it’s time for a national digital-library system: but it can’t serve only elites. the chronicle of higher education. 2/24/2011 —                              the risks if the dpla won’t create a full-strength national digital library system: setbacks for k-12, family literacy, local libraries, preservation, digital divide efforts? llrx.com. 12/19/2012 vandegrift, micah. the digital public library of america. hack library school. 5/10/2011.   ***thanks, as always, to lead pipe colleagues emily, ellie, erin, and brett for editing and challenging my writing and ideas herein. a special thanks to emily lloyd of hennepin county libraries for serving as an external reviewer.  the library loon’s article “dpla and the so-called ‘feral librarian’ is a must read for insight on dr. cohen’s role in the project. [↩] full disclosure: emily hired me into my current position and was my direct supervisor for eight months before joining dpla. [↩] see also: emily gore’s scannabago concept [↩] dpla editorial: diy library culture and the academy becoming a writer-librarian 4 responses pingback : the scoop on the dpla | lis 670 student discussion blog pingback : the digital public library of america | exploring social informatics pingback : dpla for you & me | your libarchivist pingback : call for endowment seeks to ease the suffering of libraries this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct spotlight on digital government information preservation: examining the context, outcomes, limitations, and successes of the datarefuge movement – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 7 feb eric johnson and alicia kubas /6 comments spotlight on digital government information preservation: examining the context, outcomes, limitations, and successes of the datarefuge movement in brief: access and preservation of online government data and information has been a long-standing and complex issue for librarians in government information librarianship, but it has recently started to receive attention on a larger level from the media, public, and libraries in general. the most recent initiative to archive digital government data was the datarefuge movement in 2016 and 2017, which sponsored datarescue events where people came together to capture static webpages and harvest dynamic online content for preservation purposes. this article examines the history and context of print and digital government information preservation initiatives and then focuses in on the datarefuge movement to discuss its outcomes, limitations, and successes in light of long-term preservation and public access. by eric johnson and alicia kubas introduction when publicly useful datasets and information under government control are no longer freely available, when they are hidden, or when the public does not know they exist (or existed), those datasets are lost. the restriction of data availability can occur for many reasons, including political bias, temporary government shutdown, link rot, and routine redesigning of websites. in the worst case, not only access will be affected, but data collection itself may be halted. while some might view a reduction in data collection favorably, there are many datasets integral to research, improving health, mitigating crime, community building, and other areas important to improving quality of life in the united states. while the loss of information can be considered a nuisance or inconvenience to people who use that information on a regular basis, there is a more significant consequence to creating political bias in available information. if information is no longer available to be read, our freedom to effectively govern our democracy is curtailed. “the right of free inquiry and the equally important right of forming their own opinions…is of the utmost importance to the continued existence of democracy…and that freedom of the press in all forms of public communication be defended and preserved” (texas library association 2013). that includes not just political opinion statements, but also the data and information citizens can use to make informed decisions about political leaders as well as daily choices. for instance, knowledge about climate change can persuade a person to make personal behavioral changes as well as inform their decisions about local and national leadership. furthermore, government information is not just important to the general population: it is used by policymakers, academics, researchers, and many others for decision-making and critical discussion. the u.s. government collects, aggregates, and disseminates a large volume of information. the authors believe that this information should be freely available without bias based on political views or motivations. accessibility of information, including government information, has been of concern to libraries since their inception (although, unfortunately, there were times in their history where access was limited to certain groups of people). the term “free” library or “public” library shows a philosophical difference from private subscription libraries of the 1700s and 1800s. localities decided to make books freely available to the populace, and thereby increase societal good (american library association n.d.). libraries participating in the federal depository library program (fdlp), a program run by the u.s. government publishing office (gpo) for federal publication dissemination to the public, agree to provide access to government publications and information free of charge to anyone who requests it. within the profession, librarians generally believe that freedom of information is essential (american library association 2006). freedom of information is an extension of freedom of speech and is not only supported by the u.s. constitution’s bill of rights, but by the universal declaration of human rights supported by 48 countries (united nations n.d.). all of these ideas underscore librarians’ philosophy of universal access to information of all types, including data, and show why the topic of access to government information and data is so pertinent to libraries. the presidential debates and political campaign statements in 2016 showed that one of the candidates scorned and rejected evidence that the world’s climate has been changing as the result of human activities. the new york times reported that “mr. trump has called human-caused climate change a ‘hoax.’ he has vowed to dismantle the environmental protection agency in almost every form.” (davenport 2016). after president trump was elected, information under his control and in conflict with his own viewpoints was seen to be at risk and of concern to the public. consequently, scientists and concerned citizens began collecting and archiving data from government websites (dennis 2016), and thus began the datarefuge movement and its datarescue events where academics, librarians, coders, concerned citizens, students, and many others developed new models of cooperation to assist in the collecting and archiving of government information. these events also helped raise awareness of the longstanding issue of online government information preservation. libraries and other non-profit organizations contributing to this effort would then manage and provide access to that information into the future. within the context of datarescue efforts and this article, government data is defined as data, metadata, and information under government control and generally accepted to be in the public’s best interest to be made publicly available. this includes data that is collected or created by the government, or required to be submitted to the government for public dissemination or organized access. the organization and access to data and summary information along with metadata that is provided by government websites is essential to retrieving and understanding the underlying data. this does not include sensitive or secure information. to fully appreciate the efforts, goals, and impact of the datarefuge movement and datarescue events as well as the roles librarians can play, it is important to understand the context in which datarescue was born. this article includes a brief history and current status of government information dissemination and access through the federal depository library program as well as current initiatives to make government information and data accessible long-term and preserved for public access. throughout, we will discuss challenges and barriers to preservation and future access of digital government information and data that come up with each program or initiative. finally, we will examine the impact as well as the limitations of datarescue events and u.s. government data preservation as a whole. overview of the current landscape the federal depository library program (fdlp) government information in the united states has been disseminated to the american people since 1813 when congress authorized house and senate journals as well as other congressional publications to be distributed to select universities, state libraries, and other organizations (mcgarr 2000). since then, the federal government has taken major strides forward in ensuring public accessibility of government information of all types and in all formats through the inception of the government publishing office, formerly known as the government printing office, and its public dissemination arm in 1895, which took up the role of the federal depository library program to deposit tangible government materials into depository libraries across the united states and its territories. the height of paper document dissemination by gpo was in the 1980s, when the number of publications distributed to depository libraries increased by more than one-third (u.s. government printing office 2011). while this program seeks to disseminate to libraries all government information of public interest, there have always been documents, even in the print era, that have not been funneled through the program. what further complicates this issue is that federal agencies began to question the statutory authority and constitutionality of requiring agencies to contract with gpo for printing after a 1983 supreme court decision that called similar issues into question (petersen 2017). today, this continues to be a contentious issue with agencies deciding to skip over the gpo altogether in favor of other publishing means and providers. naturally, this problem is even more dire in a digital-heavy publishing environment where dissemination and deposit does not occur through the fdlp. in an era of print, a category of participating depository libraries, called regional depositories, agree to retain all disseminated documents to ensure long-term access to tangible government documents. with the era of electronic government information, the system became more complex. by the 1990s, government information had an electronic presence that eventually came under gpo’s purview with passage of the 1993 gpo electronic information access enhancement act (government printing office electronic information access enhancement act of 1993 1993). gpo was then required to provide “a system of online access” to various prominent government publications deemed appropriate for electronic access by the superintendent of documents. a year later, gpo rolled out gpo access, its database for online access to government publications–primarily congressional materials–and thus began its efforts to provide permanent public access to online government materials published in conjunction with gpo. this does not mean that libraries were not still continuing to receive many publications duplicated in print or only available in a physical format. the push for online access was precipitated by a rising user preference for digital access as well as the cost-saving that digital publishing provided over print, and the publishing format was often decided by what would be the most inexpensive to produce (mcgarr 2000). by the 2000s, many depository libraries were moving towards digital access instead of tangible access precipitated by a variety of factors, including user preference, availability of publications in print, and availability of physical space in libraries. this phenomenon was also reflected in the decline in tangible publication distribution through the fdlp: 12.2 million in 2000 to 3.2 million in 2009 (u.s. government printing office 2011). today, depositories that receive few to no print documents are becoming more common, and the amount of tangible distribution of government publications is declining as many agencies are publishing exclusively online content. although gpo access provided a major step forward in public access to electronic government information, by the early 2000s an update was needed. in 2009, gpo’s federal digital system, or fdsys, was released to the public. this new system offered an improved interface for online access to mostly post-1996 congressional and executive government publications, both digitized and born-digital, and it also served as an archive for long-term preservation and access to this digital content. in 2016, gpo unveiled govinfo.gov, its newly redesigned beta interface, for improved user experience and enhanced functionality with a purpose to “ingest, authenticate, preserve, and to provide version control to the information products of the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the u.s. government” (u.s. government publishing office, office of the superintendent of documents 2017, 6). with the overall move to a majority of government publications being published digitally without being deposited in libraries but rather linked from a local catalog to gpo’s catalog or system, digital preservation and access has become a prominent concern for gpo, the depository community, and users. born-digital government information and data it is clear that gpo has a vested interest in preservation of digital information, whether digitized from a physical copy or born-digital, although they have limited statutory authority to act on this interest. one of the major problems, though, is that gpo can only preserve the publications and information that it receives from federal agencies and organizations. the failure of many agencies to submit all of their published or distributed information is a long-standing problem for gpo. in a 1996 report, gpo had already identified notification and compliance from agencies as a major issue in the context of a more electronic government landscape: “with the increasing emphasis on electronic dissemination and decreasing compliance with statutory requirements for agencies to print through gpo, identifying and obtaining information for the fdlp is becoming increasingly difficult” (u.s. government printing office 1996, ii). another major concern is the cost-saving move to reduce publishing of government products through gpo in general. today, access to agency publications has become more difficult as the landscape is almost exclusively digital and more agencies are simply posting data, reports, and information on their webpages and not submitting any content to gpo to be disseminated or archived. to assist with this problem, gpo has a document discovery program where lost or fugitive documents–online or tangible materials published by a federal agency that were not distributed through gpo–can be submitted for potential inclusion in gpo’s catalog and the fdlp (medsger and webb 2016). these are usually instances where the agency has posted a report on its website believing that decision is compliant for public access, when federal mandate also requires agencies to submit this information to gpo. organized access to these materials by depository libraries and their preservation becomes more tenuous the more disaggregated they become, especially as digital publishing of federal publications continues to increase. in 2012, federal agencies published approximately 92% of government publications in a digital format (federal depository library program 2012, sec. 13.3), and today this is likely much higher with only a relatively small amount still published in print since the obama administration’s call for expanded digital offerings of agency information in 2012 (office of management and budget, the executive office of the president 2012). while government-collected data and databases are included in the fdlp’s purview (u.s. government publishing office, office of the superintendent of documents 2017), data portals and raw datasets are content which gpo itself does not actively preserve nor deposit to depository libraries for local preservation. the u.s. federal government is the largest collector of data in the world, making this a wealth of information to which the public does not have guaranteed long-term access. mistakenly, some assume that the bulk of this published data is accessible via data.gov, the federal government’s open data portal, but this is a metadata portal without hosting capabilities or preservation practices for the data itself. gpo does, however, archive some government webpages that are in scope of the fdlp and not duplicated in print, although it is not clear that this is done in a consistent or comprehensive manner (dahlen 2017). furthermore, they are not able to capture content that is not easily crawled or imaged, like video, datasets, portals, and other more complicated information types. this overall issue is why libraries, both depository and non-depository, as well as others, have turned their attention to this daunting problem through various initiatives and efforts. initiatives to preserve or replicate government information with the many issues and gaps in existing efforts by gpo or federal agencies to provide long-term public access to born-digital government data, a variety of libraries, consortia, federal agencies, and others have stepped up to make progress in finding a solution to this large and complex issue of preservation of digital federal government data. the initiatives discussed below have worked on this issue in a variety of ways. some have sought to archive individual webpages while others have focused on content specific to gpo’s online systems. still others are seeking to raise awareness and advocacy towards the issue which is a step forward in finding more interested parties and resources to assist with this growing problem. the efforts are ordered chronologically from their inception to show the progress that has been made and built upon throughout the last decade. lockss-usdocs one partnership that has been active for many years is the lockss-usdocs network, a privately-run network also known as the digital federal depository library program. this network began working on replication of digital federal content in 2010, building on the work done by libraries already using lockss to preserve documents harvested from gpo access between 1991 and 2007 (jacobs and reich 2010). lockss stands for “lots of copies keep stuff safe” and this is the main principle on which this stanford-developed preservation network leans. the lockss-usdocs private network consists of 36 libraries, universities, the library of congress, and gpo, each of which host copies of ingested digital content from gpo’s fdsys (lockss n.d.). a major advantage to this model is that access is always guaranteed to member libraries in the case of a government shutdown during which gpo’s servers may be offline; the disappearance of digital content from government websites; or tampering with authenticity of a document (jacobs and reich 2010). however, the downside is that access is limited to those libraries that are lockss members in the usdocs private network; it is free to be a member of lockss-usdocs if a library is already a member of the larger lockss community, which requires a fee based on institution size and affords access to a variety of preserved content on top of government documents (lockss n.d.). however, there is an option to join lockss-usdocs without being a member of the lockss group, and this entails a smaller fee to cover support costs (lockss program n.d.). although this initiative is admirable in working to mirror gpo’s fdsys content for future public access, it has not been able to address born-digital content on agency websites that has not been funnelled through the fdlp, and it is only available to those who are members. end of term projects there are a variety of initiatives underway to preserve government information and data for future public access, with the end of term project being one of the first. this collaboration among the library of congress, california digital library, university of north texas libraries, internet archive, george washington university libraries, stanford university libraries, gpo, and the public nominated 11,382 web pages from executive, judicial, and legislative government sites to “harvest and preserve” around the conclusion of the presidential administration ending on january 20, 2017 (federal depository library program 2016; university of north texas 2016). it actually took several months to capture the data. previous end of term web collections are available at the end of term web archive with collections for 2009 and 2013. the information collected is meant to be an archive of web pages and has expanded to include some of the underlying datasets (end of term web archive 2016). however, these datasets have not been comprehensively captured in the past. the disadvantage to this project is that it cannot capture dynamic data from backend databases since they are not directly exposed on the internet. to access that data, typically a web form is filled and submitted and the server uses those parameters to query a database. the results are displayed on another web page. downloading the whole underlying database is difficult or impossible. to programmatically access the data through the web requires someone to analyze the website’s database interface and program a tool to methodically query for data from that database. preservation of electronic government information (pegi) project the preservation of electronic government information (pegi) project is a new venture into digital government preservation which brings together information professionals from universities and federal agencies, including gpo and the national archives and records administration. they recommend an environmental scan and a registry of what data are being collected and preserved (halbert 2016). in addition, the pegi project will focus on stakeholder outreach and awareness through national forums to be held in 2018 and funded by an imls national leadership grant (preservation of electronic government information project n.d.). overall, the goal is to educate and take measure of the overall status of government data preservation and then make recommendations for future work in this area. datarefuge project by university of pennsylvania program in the environmental humanities (ppeh datarefuge project) the datarefuge project was a collaboration between the ppeh, penn libraries, the environmental data & governance initiative (edgi), and other groups concerned with climate change data that in 2016 launched what they called datarescue events. these events consist of downloading and archiving at-risk data into a refuge, or repository, mirrored in multiple locations (ppeh lab-datarefuge 2016). the collaboration focused on addressing five concerns about federal climate and environmental data: what are the best ways to safeguard data? how do federal agencies play crucial roles in data collection, management, and distribution? how do government priorities impact data’s accessibility? which projects and research fields depend on federal data? which datasets are of value to research and local communities, and why? on top of these concerns, one of the most difficult and tedious issues in an initiative like this is keeping track of the chain of custody of the data–namely, “where the data comes from originally, who copied them and how, and then who and how they are re-distributed” (allen 2017). this would not be an issue for content that is preserved and made accessible by the originating authority, but for any harvesting done by an external actor it is an important concern. datarefuge points to this as the “cornerstone” of the entire initiative. documenting how data were archived preserves integrity, ensures verifiability, and contributes to the overall usability of the data in the future. trying to predict how data may be used in the future and by whom is tricky at best, but consulting with those who already use data can help those preserving this data to do an optimal job of creating metadata for future users. the collaborators kept these larger issues in mind when they created the event workflow and social network to help facilitate datarescue events to nominate and download datasets for preservation. nominated websites were copied into the internet archive–a non-profit digital library with more than 15 petabytes of information (internet archive n.d.). after more than 200 terabytes of government website data were downloaded, the next step was to create metadata records and provide access to the data in the datarefuge repository (environmental data & governance initiative 2017). the focus of the datarefuge project has also expanded to suggesting other possible event ideas to help communities build data durability (ppeh labdatarefuge 2017d). ppeh, edgi, and their partners made an attempt to crowd source identification and collection of government information. they assisted in the collection of large amounts of information by creating and modifying data collection workflows. collected webpage data are available from http://eot.us.archive.org/search/ using keyword searches. additional descriptive metadata and indexing are being created to facilitate access when browsing by government agencies (bailey 2017). after the large wave of datarescue events swept the country, the momentum continued with a meeting of representatives from universities, research libraries, federal agencies, repositories, academic consortia, non-profits, and other stakeholders in washington, d.c., in may 2017 to discuss the next steps towards a larger scale approach to this initiative. this meeting of the nascent libraries+ network culminated in a report summarizing the events of the meeting, but unfortunately, no significant progress has been made by the group, with the most recent activity a blog post from june 2017 (libraries+ network 2017). datarescue events while there was concern for data preservation prior to the trump administration coming into power, data loss occurrences immediately after the inauguration prompted organizations such as the humane society of the united states (hsus) to act. for example, the washington post reported on february 3, 2017, that animal welfare data had been removed from the u.s. department of agriculture (usda) websites, which included inspection reports on the treatment of animals at labs, zoos, breeding operations, and other sites (brulliard 2017). in response, the hsus notified the usda that it would initiate legal action (wadman 2017). the usda responded that the website change was not the result of the new presidential administration, but just an ongoing website review. on august 18, the public search tool for animal welfare act compliance records was reinstated to the usda website (usda aphis n.d.). some organizations reacted to the threat of removed data by hosting “datarescue” events (harmon 2017). beginning in toronto in late december 2016, and followed by philadelphia, chicago, indianapolis, los angeles, and ann arbor in january 2017, the datarescue movement continued across the country with many universities sponsoring and organizing events. the number of public events peaked in march 2017. the number of datarecuse events per month, december 2016-june 2017 (graphic created by the authors) more than 50 events were publicized on the ppeh website, and nearly 200 newspaper and magazine articles were published related to datarefuge, with 173 listed as of september 18, 2017 (ppeh labdatarefuge 2017b, 2017c). the events were spread across the united states with a concentration around the coasts and the midwest (ppeh labdatarefuge 2017a). a map of datarecuse locations (graphic created by the authors) after downloading hundreds of datasets and thousands of webpages, the work continued with cataloging the rescued data. metadata needed to be created to make the data findable. ppeh datarefuge organized a workflow for making data uploaded to the datarefuge repository accessible (ppeh labdatarefuge 2017e). datarescue limitations and challenges it is difficult to determine the success of the datarescue movement, and indicators of success may lie in the organizers’ goals for each datarescue event. many event organizers reported the number of websites they archived or gigabytes of data downloaded (torres-saez 2017), but much of the data downloaded is still available on government websites. the motivations for government website changes are difficult to ascertain, and this makes the issue more complicated because there is no one root cause for disappearing data. broken links and modified text can happen without malice or intent as institutions routinely re-organize their websites for a variety of reasons. however, each administration has policies that agencies are expected to follow. one summer intern on a communications team at the epa was asked to draft tweets they could post to promote environmentally friendly lifestyles. she was also instructed, “don’t mention climate change or going ‘green.’” links to epa’s information on climate change had become dead and she wondered, while policies may change, “could science, based on years of research, really become outdated, too?” (miller 2018). no matter what the cause of data disappearance, the need still remains to make preservation copies of data so that they can be accessed by future researchers. additionally, it will take time for downloaded data and websites to be indexed and made fully available. there were terabytes of data downloaded during the events, and it is not clear if all of that data made it through the curation phase to be placed in the datarefuge repository. additionally, deficiencies in the data because of how the data were collected may not be obvious until later. another challenge is that by the time the datarescue movement was in full swing, it was already too late and critical data may already have gone missing without anyone realizing it. not being able to get to the data at the source (i.e., federal agencies) causes this problem and is an inherent issue in the datarescue workflow. the most glaring downside of the datarefuge initiative and datarescue events was the questionability of the accomplishment of long term preservation of government data. the main goal of datarescue was to save government data for the future if it ever disappears. however, viewing the datasets indexed and archived in the datarefuge repository through a lens of data curation for reuse and long term usability finds the metadata and documentation generally lacking for preservation purposes. much of this can be ascribed to the workflow itself, which emphasized chain of custody and authenticity of the data over usability of the data and the ability to understand the context of the data if the website where it resided is gone in the future. the goal of the initiative was to save the data, and the curated datasets can indeed be found in the datarefuge repository, but the larger picture of long-term use was not addressed. part of this issue is relying upon community-driven work completed by individuals who do not have the expertise of data curation and understanding of archival practices. public outcry around this issue occurred because of a fear and concern for the disappearance of government data, and this is why events spurred such interest and coverage from the media. datarescue attendees had a feeling of productiveness and accomplishment in contributing to this cause and felt satisfaction with the initiative taken up by datarescue organizers and groups. even though attendees of these events were fulfilled at the idea of contributing to this lofty goal, it is akin to the feeling of contributing to a charity for the sake of making oneself feel good and then ignoring the fact that much more needs to be done to solve the problem. furthermore, only a fraction of government data was harvested. edgi reported 63,076 pages were seeded during datarescue events to the internet archive using their chrome extension and workflow, with 21,798 of these pages containing datasets or other dynamic content. while this is positive at a surface level, over 194 million unique urls were captured for the eot 2012 through human-contributed urls and web crawlers that automatically snapshot the pages (phillips and tarver 2016). it would be nearly impossible for humans to go through every agency webpage looking for dynamic content or datasets that need to be specially harvested for preservation. lastly, this initiative has come to a standstill after its wave of initial interest and involvement from stakeholders, leaving no overall systemic plan to continue these efforts into the future. frankly, federal agencies are not currently empowered by the current presidential administration to work on this issue with well-meaning academics and non-profits. positive outcomes of datarescue despite the lack of meaningful preservation efforts under the datarefuge banner, the opportunity for a library to showcase its services and its ideals was valuable. furthermore, depending upon participants’ roles in the event, each person likely had different takeaways and appreciations for the goals of datarescue. for example, those nominating pages to the internet archive or end of term project could see the vast amount of government information and the many different types of information the government publishes, which gave librarians working with government publications collections an opportunity to speak about their role in government and civic literacy, preservation of historical print government content, and to promote research and reference services. many libraries that hosted these events were also able to get positive press coverage about these efforts and highlight their roles in civic and community engagement. this is especially important to those that are land-grant universities with their “democratic mandate for openness, accessibility, and service to people” (association of public and land-grant universities 2012). highlights in the local newspaper, student newspaper, local radio, and even national print and radio media were widespread during the height of the datarescue events early in 2017. while these events did not precipitate a deep shift in government data preservation, they are a step in the right direction to raise awareness of the issue. in addition, datarescue events gave university libraries a reason to collaborate with other campus groups and external partners. this most often included a digital humanities group, political science and government departments, environmental advocacy groups, and open data and hacker groups, among others. a few events included companion events such as speakers, workshops, discussions, and teach-ins. for example, at the two-day datarescuedc event at georgetown university, one day focused on a round table discussion about open data and data vulnerability as well as a teach-in focusing on the importance of climate data while the second was spent on data archiving. both talks featured speakers and guests from around campus as well as the outside community (datarescuedc 2017). the additional context around government transparency was another positive outcome of these events. encouraging civil engagement and literacy in light of what the federal government can do with access to information was also important. at nyu’s datarescue event in february 2017, jerome whitington from nyu showed changes to the epa website which removed the text “and mitigate[d] the effects of climate change” from a section on waste water energy use (phiffer 2017). starting these sorts of discussions and highlighting the overall issue of access to government information were the successes of these events, even if long-term preservation was not achieved with this movement. conclusion regardless of the limitations of the datarefuge project and datarescue events, this initiative brought widespread awareness to this complex and longstanding issue. the need to create a historical record of government websites and protect access to data between and during every presidential administration is still important, as this data will continue to disappear through a variety of means including government shutdowns, broken links, and policy changes. as organizations gain more experience and funding, the processes for pre-emptive collection and metadata creation are becoming more sophisticated; in the future this will hopefully pay off, although partnering with federal agencies would be the most ideal step forward in getting ahead of the problem. there is a need for more institutional support through organized, well-funded programs and tasking the gpo with perpetual archiving and access to all public government data and websites. with this in mind, there is also a need for advocating for adequate funding for gpo to do this work. while there is no one answer to this overwhelmingly complex issue, it is clear that libraries in particular view this issue as an opportunity to contribute their expertise and resources in making forward progress towards solving this problem. although there are many private, non-profit organizations that can help with the issue of disappearing or inaccessible government data and information, many libraries and librarians are uniquely positioned as publicly-funded and public-focused centers that have vested interest in these efforts because of their overall mission to provide universal access to information. even though the datarefuge movement did not precipitate a long-term solution or continue its momentum, there is no way to succeed in addressing this problem without making some attempts and seeing what happens. even if some of those attempts are less than successful, sometimes it is the missteps that pave the way for more successful endeavors. acknowledgments many thanks for the insight and feedback from reviewers shari laster and denisse solis, and publishing editor amy koester. references allen, laurie. 2017. “data refuge rests on a clear chain of custody.” ppeh lab. february 1, 2017. http://www.ppehlab.org/blogposts/2017/2/1/data-refuge-rests-on-a-clear-chain-of-custody american library association. 2006. “library bill of rights.” text. advocacy, legislation & issues. june 30, 2006. 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https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/data-rescue-boulder-saved-actual-science-lots-joan-torres-saez united nations. n.d. “universal declaration of human rights | united nations.” http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html university of north texas. 2016. “nomination tool: project url nomination.” 2016. http://digital2.library.unt.edu/nomination/eth2016/ u.s. government printing office. 1996. “study to identify measures necessary for a successful transition to a more electronic federal depository library program.” june 1996. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/govpub-gp3-83702f16b5d4a3823308c2c477545669/pdf/govpub-gp3-83702f16b5d4a3823308c2c477545669.pdf ———. 2011. “keeping america informed.” u.s. government printing office. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/gpo-keepingamericainformed/pdf/gpo-keepingamericainformed.pdf u.s. government publishing office, office of the superintendent of documents. 2017. “public policy statement 2016-1: scope of government information products included in the cataloging and indexing program and disseminated through the federal depository library program.” https://www.fdlp.gov/file-repository/about-the-fdlp/policies/superintendent-of-documents-public-policies/2739-scope-of-government-information-products-included-in-the-cataloging-and-indexing-program-and-disseminated-through-the-federal-depository-library-program ———. 2017. “gpo’s sysem of online access: collection development plan.” https://www.fdlp.gov/file-repository/about-the-fdlp/gpo-projects/trustworthy-digital-reports/2930-final-systemcolldevplan-09302017 usda aphis. n.d. “usda aphis | awa inspection and annual reports.” https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/animalwelfare/sa_awa/awa-inspection-and-annual-reports wadman, meredith. 2017. “updated: usda responds to outcry over removal of animal welfare documents, lawsuit threats.” science | aaas. february 6, 2017. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/updated-usda-responds-outcry-over-removal-animal-welfare-documents-lawsuit-threats datarefuge, datarescue vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves editorial: what we’ve been up to 6 responses elizabeth foster 2018–02–07 at 11:03 am hi! please update the link to the datarescue dc page: https://datarefuge.github.io/datarescue-dc/. the description of the events is also out of order (day 1 – teach in, day 2 – data archiving). thanks! amy koester 2018–02–07 at 2:01 pm the article has been updated to reflect these changes. james jacobs 2018–02–07 at 10:56 pm hi folks. thanks for writing. preservation of govt information is of critical importance. may i clarify your description of lockss-usdocs? the term “private” is just to differentiate these projects from the global lockss network and simply means a group of libraries that use the lockss software for a specific type of collection (govt documents, theses, data etc). while the project began by harvesting and collaboratively preserving the content on gpoaccess, we have continued to harvest gpo content as they’ve evolved their content management system from gpoaccess to fdsys to govinfo.gov. we collect and preserve *everything* on gpo’s system. there are 40+ collections, most of which span early 1990s – present while some (eg treasury dept docs and the bound congressional record) go much further back. (see https://www.govinfo.gov/app/browse/category/bills-statutes). and a clarification on how the software works: lockss works with a permission statement posted to a site which tells the software that the content on the site may be collected. getting every one of the 440+ executive agencies and commissions to grant permission is a near impossibility, which is why i’m extremely supportive of gpo efforts to ingest executive branch information, which will allow us to expand the amount of executive branch documents collected and preserved. the software is meant for preservation, but the content is made freely and openly available to the public (not just to lockss-usdocs members) if/when there’s a “trigger event” — like a journal publisher going out of business. james jacobs 2018–02–07 at 11:40 pm sorry, but one more clarification is needed in terms of the end of term web harvesting project. eot has now been done at the end of each of the last 3 presidential administrations starting in 2008. the latest (2016) harvest was put together by a combination of seed (url) lists collated from official sources (like usa.gov and the general services administration list of official .gov domains) and then filled in with seed nominations from the public. we had 15,000+ nominated seeds from 400+ nominators (via the unt form) and over 100,000 seeds nominated from datarescue/edgi events/tools. this time around, we collected about 300 tb of data total (including ~130 tb of .gov ftp site archiving) which comprised @ 310,000,000 web urls + 12,000,000 ftp files. please see this presentation by jefferson bailey and myself at sjsu library school on may 1, 2017 for more info and background on end of term (http://bit.ly/sjsu_eot_2016). pingback : spotlight on digital government information preservation: examining the context, outcomes, limitations, and successes of the datarefuge movement – the idealis eira tansey 2018–03–02 at 9:35 am the focus on the fdlp program here is a bit perplexing to me. to situate and contextualize the landscape of government information in the last several years means at least acknowledging the role (at least statutorily, if nothing else) of the national archives and records administration in the rules concerning the records of executive agencies. the lack of discussion in this article of nara’s role in developing the regulatory framework for government records is really disappointing. to my knowledge, much of the records that are created by agencies like epa and doi are affected far more by nara’s actions (and sometimes inaction) than the aims of the fdlp. finally, the article would have also benefited from a discussion of the obama-era ostp office policy of open government. while there are very good critiques on how the open government directive came up short on many counts, the original 2009 era directive did provide one of the better blueprints for building on in the interest of proactive disclosure of government data. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part ii – the landing – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 3 dec robert schroeder /5 comments exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part ii – the landing photo by flickr user paulio geordio (cc by 2.0) in brief: this article is the second and final installment of my research exploring critical and indigenous research methods and their relation to lis. what is the context of these twentieth century methods and what might they mean to a librarian in the twenty-first century? read along as i discover, for myself and my “research community,” some unexpected, and perhaps profound, aspects of these research methods and their associated worldviews. by robert schroeder when we last met i was heading off to discover “…critical and indigenous research methodologies and what relevance they might have to librarians and the field of lis” and also what it was like to research with community.1 (see the set-up of this research at “exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part i – the leap.”) gr keer, one of the reviewers of this article, noted the idea of discovering things that are already there is especially poignant in a context of things indigenous. so i’ll qualify this word discovery by noting that the process of researching and writing this article was a discovery of things unknown to me and the members of my research community. the critical and indigenous scholars who created the scholarship upon which i relied already knew and embodied this knowledge, and i thank them at the outset for their cogent articulations of various ways of knowing. many of you reading this article will also already have discovered the ideas here — but i offer my own personal journey as an organic part of this academic research. this may be heresy to many, but i feel it germane to the topics at hand. over the past few months my mind lived in these new places of critical and indigenous research and i’ve come to see my self as part of my research.2 this article is the second and final installment of this research, “the landing.” first i will provide some needed history and context of extant research methodologies (and what lies behind them), next i will explore critical and indigenous paradigms, then i will discuss ways they might relate to librarians, and finally i will conclude with reflections on the process of researching with a community. as you may recall, inspired by my initial readings in indigenous research methods i formed an ad-hoc research community. they gave me information and sources that helped jumpstart my research and they helped me formulate the original research questions for this article.3 by their research methods ye shall know them as an academic librarian i have a working knowledge of quantitative and qualitative methods, and i utilize this basic knowledge as i conduct reference interviews and individual consultations with students. in order to understand critical and indigenous research methods and how they differ from other methods, i realize that i first need to find their context and locate them within the larger historical landscape of academic research. it quickly became apparent to me that methods were just the tip of an existential and cultural iceberg, and i had never looked below the water line. as jerry willis, in his foundations of qualitative research, eloquently states: in the social sciences there are a number of general frameworks for doing research. the terms qualitative and quantitative often are used to describe two of these frameworks. however, these terms imply that the main difference between the different frameworks is the type of data collected: numbers or something else such as interviews or observations. actually, the differences are much broader and deeper and beliefs on several different levels, from philosophical positions about the nature of the world and how humans can better understand the world they live in to assumptions about the proper relationships between social science research and professional practice. terms such as worldview and paradigm better capture the nature of the difference between different approaches to social science research…4 i asked an unassuming question of method and suddenly philosophy was rearing its intimidating head! while i prefer to not have to use philosophical jargon, we will use a bit because the scholars we will meet here use it. so for the concept of “the nature of being” or “the nature of reality” we will use the word ontology, and for the ideas of “knowledge” and “the relationship between what is known and the knower”, we will use epistemology. when most of us think about traditional research methods we are actually thinking about a much more qualified subset of research methods. perhaps we are not conscious that in our academic library worlds we are (mostly) talking about research methods developed from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries by rich, western-european, heterosexual, abled5, academic, men. what you are reading now, an academic peer-reviewed article, is a partial descendant of this lineage, tempered of course with later twentieth and twenty-first century developments. i think it is important for me to recognize this as one of the lenses through which i write, and through which you are probably reading this. while lenses can help to focus our minds, they can also limit and distort what we perceive. “if you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. you are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree. ” ― attributed to michael crichton table 1 below is a grid showing the three major historical academic research paradigms.6 remember, this is only a map and a two-dimensional representation and it is not a substitute for reality; only a potential aid to orientation to the landscape of this research. table 1 research paradigms – major issues the first column lists our familiar friends, ontology, epistemology , and methods. this relation implies that methods are informed by how a researcher thinks about knowledge, and what constitutes knowledge is predicated on how a researcher constructs a vision of reality and their own being. once we understand our reality, and what can be known, method becomes the answer to the question “how can we come to know it?”7 the subsequent three columns—positivism, postpositivism, and interpretivism—show the three major paradigms of western academic research which existed up to about the middle of the twentieth century. positivism developed in europe out of the scientific revolution of the late renaissance and on into the enlightenment. enlightenment scholars believed that, “knowledge that is acquired from the right use of reason is truth, in that it represents something real, unchanging and universal about the hu(man) (sic) mind and the structure of the natural world.”8 rather than metaphysics and religion, empirical and quantitative methods became the basis of the natural sciences.9 positivists believed, and still do, that objective facts and universal truths are out there to be discovered – quantitative data is king. as scholars began to study people rather than matter, a fracture began to develop within the monolithic structure of positivist research. in the early nineteenth century auguste comte codified what he named “sociology.” like the natural scientists, he was still looking for universal and generalizable laws, albeit in the realm of society. by the later part of the nineteenth century wilhelm dilthey conceptualized that the natural sciences (naturwissenschaften) were fundamentally different from the human sciences, including the social sciences (geisteswissenschaften). research in the human sciences meant to develop understanding (verstehen), as opposed to universal truths.10 by the mid twentieth century a post-positivist outlook in the social sciences developed. post-positivists, while still sharing the ontological beliefs of the positivists, admitted that as human beings, researchers’ points of view and bias needed to be taken into account. zina o’leary, author of the social science jargon buster, states: … there began to be a growing recognition of things like the fallibility of objective sciences conducted by subjective humans; the constructed nature of our world; the inconsistent and variable nature of the social; the impact of researcher worldview on inquiry; the value of the qualitative; the limits of top-down approaches to knowing; and the political nature of knowledge production.11 within the post-positivist camp qualitative methods had arrived, if not uncontestedly. “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” – yeats, the second coming in the later part of the twentieth century the small fracture in academic research that began in the eighteenth century grew into a chasm, or perhaps a series of chasms. at this time many researchers, especially in the social sciences, adopted new paradigms, which are collectively called interpretivism. researchers in interpretivist paradigms see reality and knowledge as socially constructed, and allow for more subjective methods of research. alison pickard, author of research methods in information, sees two general subgroups within the interpretivist camp. under “human inquiry” she sees many modern social science disciplines and outlooks including constructivism, and under “critical theory” she includes feminism, marxism, post-modernity, post-structuralism, and structuralism.12 other researchers choose to break out critical theories, constructivism, and the participatory paradigms from the term interpretivism in order to emphasize some of the major differences in each approach.13 as the emphasis of this paper is on critical and indigenous methods, i will use the latter, more expanded view. table 2 expands the research paradigm chart to encompass the critical paradigm and one possible model of an indigenous worldview.14 i offer it as a map to the next few sections of this paper. table 2 research paradigms – major issues critical research as mentioned above, the critical paradigm encompasses many modern movements such as feminism, marxism, post-modernity, queer theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism.15 each movement brings unique characteristics and outlooks to bear on the questions of research. here i will reflect on concerns and questions that many critical researchers often hold in common. joe kincheloe and peter mclaren describe a criticalist as: …a researcher or theorist who attempts to use her or his work as a form of social or cultural criticism and who accepts certain basic assumptions: that all thought is fundamentally mediated by power relations that are socially and historically constructed; that facts can never be isolated from the domain of values or removed from some form of ideological inscription;…that certain groups in any society and particular societies are privileged over others and, although the reasons for this privileging may vary widely, the oppression that characterizes contemporary societies is most forcefully reproduced when subordinates accept their social status as natural, necessary, or inevitable; that oppression has many faces and that focusing on only one at the expense of others (e.g., class oppression versus racism) often elides the interconnections among them; and, finally, that mainstream research practices are generally, although most often unwittingly, implicated in the reproduction of systems of class, race, and gender oppression (emphasis added).16 i will focus on what this description tells me are the differences between a critical worldview and positivist or post-positivist worldview. critical researchers do not merely describe or understand reality; they critique it. they ask limited questions of a socially and historically constructed reality — questions of power, privilege and oppression. they recognize their own values and ideologies, put them front and center in their work, and constantly offer up self-critiques in order to better understand the influence they and their points of view have on their work. criticalists, by centering their ideologies in their work, hold up a mirror to researchers in the positivist and post-positivist traditions. what is reflected is that the positivists’ assumptions in regards to their methods, that they are neutral and objective, are not true. positivist inquiry is also underpinned by often unarticulated values and ideologies. as marion namenwirth states, “scientists firmly believe that as long as they are not conscious of any bias or political agenda, they are neutral and objective, when in fact they are only unconscious.”17 the most telling is the part of the kincheloe and mclaren quote above, is that it notes that scholars using traditional forms of research, consciously or unconsciously, are reinforcing and reproducing an oppressive system. also, it would seem that critical research methods are not restricted by a specific form — either quantitative or qualitative. similar to freirean pedagogy, these methods are critical in that they are in line with the goals of emancipation and empowerment of both those researching and those being researched.18 critical research is unabashedly political and often transformative. as critical researchers are often based in the social sciences, people are their subjects. however, the critical understandings and positions of researchers might not be shared with those being researched; can this be seen as colonizing? after exposure to critical theory, if those researched do not see themselves as oppressed in the ways explained to them, what are the options? perhaps the researcher, in a dialogic manner, will work with those researched to redefine the local condition in local terms? one such critical method is participatory action research (par). par also includes the community in the research process in a democratic fashion, from the setting of the research agenda to the analysis of the findings. the boundaries of research and participants are blurred, and the research is meant to change and liberate the researcher as much as it is those researched.19 others, too, have also noted contradictions in critical methods. gaile cannella and yvonna lincoln note: indeed, knowledge production, traditionally the province of the scholarly profession, has finally seen its flowering in the information age and the information society. however, even when we recognize this research/power complicity we must still, as academic knowledge generators and producers, conduct research, both because of the influence that it holds within dominant discourses and, more selfishly, because that is what we are hired to do in certain kinds of institutions. critically-inclined academics, however, continue to struggle with how to rethink our fields in ways that generate critically oriented questions and methods, even while addressing issues such as voice, representation, and the avoidance of new forms of oppressive power. although qualitative methods and alternative paradigm inquiry offer possibilities for the generation of epistemologies and methodologies that insist upon the examination of themselves, even qualitative inquiry creates power for, and all too frequently, a focus on the researcher herself. thus, we are caught in the paradox of attempting to investigate and deconstruct power relations, even while we are ourselves engaged in a project which creates and re-creates power accruing to us.20 being aware of ourselves, our research, and how we and our methods are situated in regards to larger society as well as those researched, does not absolve us of the implications of our position. but perhaps this awareness can be a first step toward social justice? “the word itself, ‘research,’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary.”21 – linda tuhiwai smith regarding indigenous peoples and research, linda tuhiwai smith goes on to say: when mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. it is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about research. the ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples.22 as i write them smith’s words make me pause again, as i paused when i first read them. they make me aware of the position i hold as a researcher in the culture of a dominant imperial power in the early twenty-first century. i am arrogant enough to attempt to shoe-horn indigenous paradigms into a grid, table 2, the concepts of which grew out of a western academic worldview and philosophy. but hearing her words, and those of the other indigenous scholars who i have been privileged to read over the past few months, i was able to reflect on what i was attempting. i realize that my goal with this table is not to capture or colonize indigenous methods, but rather to see, on this small stage of research methods, what arises when indigenous worldviews meet western schema over 500 years after that first, disastrous meeting. i am hoping that my struggle here may, in a concrete way, help to illuminate some of the characteristics of indigenous paradigms. the word indigenous (small “i”) means “produced, growing, living, or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment.”23 it comes from the latin indu, within, plus gignere, to beget. in terms of “indigenous research” or “indigenous research methodologies,” ‘indigenous’ most often means research by people who, until recently, were not associated with the western academic traditions. indigenous scholars note that this term (capital “i”) has political connotations and most indigenous peoples have experienced, and continue to experience colonialism.24 ‘indigenous’ is not universally seen as a positive term. as smith remarks, “identifying as ‘indigenous’ can be dangerous in some parts of the world; it can be associated with dirtiness, savagery, rebellion, and since 9/11, with terrorism.”25 while theoretically this term could refer to people from any continent, the scholars that i have studied are indigenous north americans, aboriginal people of australia, and maori from new zealand.26 scholars such as shawn wilson, linda tuhiwai smith, margaret kovach, and mary hermes have articulated an understanding of the complexities and benefits of indigenous research methods—in part as a defense of their methods and their cultural values in academe, but also for the benefit of both indigenous and non-indigenous researchers. it wasn’t until the late 1990’s that this articulation appeared in academic writing.27 it would seem logical as it was only at this time that indigenous scholars worldwide had reached a small but critical mass in western academic institutions and could begin researching and publishing in scholarly venues. many of these researchers, schooled in critical ways of thinking, began to focus on their own unique, existential, and cultural circumstances. looking at table 2, at the column for an indigenous paradigm, we can see that the idea of relationships resonates throughout. from the very outset the indigenous paradigm resists the schema of ontology/epistemology/methods, a schema inspired by western philosophy. wilson, in research is ceremony, repeatedly highlights that in an indigenous worldview the ways of knowing about the world and the nature of reality are the same — epistemology is ontology. wilson notes, “there is no word for ‘grandmother’ in cree — it is either ‘my grandmother’ [nookoom] or ‘your grandmother,’ [kookoom]. when i have asked people how to say grandmother, the response was, ‘you can’t be a grandmother without being attached to something.”28 multiple realities exist as multiple relationships exist. it would seem that knowledge is not so much contained in facts, like who people “are” (in an objective way), but rather knowledge is the relationship itself. these reality-making relationships are not just with people, but with the environment, culture, the cosmos, and spirituality.29 it must be stressed that indigenous knowledge, true to its meaning of “being born from the place,” is rooted in the local. with each group of people and location an indigenous worldview will be different, as the relationships in any specific instance will be unique. nothing scientifically generalizable can be known and applicable to all indigenous worldviews; better words to use would be somewhat resonant with or suggestive of. i cannot talk about the indigenous paradigm, but rather an indigenous research paradigm, based also on my relationship to the knowledge with which i have come in contact. so what does this mean for indigenous research methods? they, too, are linked organically with indigenous ontology and epistemology. as we can see from the “indigenous” column of table 2, they are centered upon relationships; the relationships of the individuals within a community, of a community to its place and to the cosmos, and the relationship of a community to a researcher as well. all of these relationships will affect the methods used. in the cree tradition such methods might be sharing circles, story, or protocol.30 obviously the research methods will be locally derived and intended to support and benefit all members of the community studied. think of a spider’s web, with all of the strings being the relationships between the parts. if you touch one string the effect is felt throughout the web, and so you must take care to cause the least disruption. regarding one of her research projects in a canadian first nations community, mary hermes’ notes: i approached the research methods as something that could change over the course of the research. to start, my only guide was that what i did and how i did it were ‘situated responses,’ specific to the culture, the problems, and the dynamics of the particular context. one other guiding principle emerged over time: be in the community as a member first and researcher second. in this way the community itself influenced and shaped the methods. the relationships i enjoyed were not designed just to extract information or to exploit an ‘insider’ perspective. the work i did was based on mutual respect and reciprocity, as a person who was deeply invested in studying a problem but not willing to prioritize this over the relationships created in the process. this meant that i had multiple responsibilities (not just to a university or a ‘committee’) and relationships with people had a variety of dimensions. within this context ‘methods’ took on new meanings; methods were no longer simply tools for taking or discovering something. as textbook and tradition took a backseat to ethics and responsibility, methods began to felt like a recursive process rather than one procedure, apart from the whole. (emphasis added)31 my added emphases above point to another unique feature of indigenous research: researchers prioritize good relations over the research product. in fact the strengthening of relations between researcher and those researched is always part of the process. according to linda tuhiwai smith, research must go even further, educating, healing, and empowering indigenous peoples in their struggle for self-determination.32 indigenous research methodology also shares many characteristics with participatory action research (par).33 however the points made by hermes and smith above set indigenous research apart from par. par may be employed by indigenous researchers but indigenous research is not by definition par.; indigenous research privileges indigenous ways of knowing and being, and is heavily centered on relationality. reality (ontology) and what we can know about it (epistemology) are both products of relationships. “if research doesn’t’ change you as a person, then you haven’t done it right.”34 – shawn wilson what then might critical or indigenous methodologies mean for libraries and librarians? this question does not mean we should inappropriately appropriate indigenous methods. rather, what can an awareness of these differing methodologies and paradigms mean to our professional lives and practices, for both indigenous and non-indigenous librarians? this is a question that arose from my engagement with my research community in my first article.35 library collections immediately come to mind. by being aware of the large variety of methodologies available to researchers and the worldviews they represent, we might better build balance into our collections. most of the disciplines with which subject librarians liaise are anchored in specific paradigms. for example, the curriculum and instruction faculty at portland state university with whom i work are critical constructivists. knowing this helps me when i purchase material for their students, but knowing more about their theoretical base (which happens to dovetail nicely with my nascent praxis), i’m able to connect with these faculty on other levels. i realize, too, that for many indigenous scholars the act of adapting to western research and publication norms can be stressful, and much indigenous research may not be always come to us via the formats and publishers with which we are used to dealing. shawn wilson notes that for indigenous scholars these culture clashes are numerous. the western norm of anonymity for research subjects is often in direct opposition to the indigenous ethics of relationality, where a person’s words are always credited to the speaker – remember knowing the relationship between the speaker and the listener is paramount.36 western random sampling is also antithetical to the idea of choosing subjects based on the connections that researchers have with those researched.37 even the format of western scholarly articles (including this one), where the author discovers truths for others, and reiterates the important and salient features of the research, can be insulting in many indigenous cultural contexts.38 in this regard i reiterate my hope that you see this article in the framework of the growth of my personal understanding, and my story that i offer. your comments requested and offered below will hopefully include your understandings. margaet kovach brings to light other complexities faced by indigenous researchers when she writes: the act of compiling and organizing research findings for publication in and of itself presents a tension for indigenous researchers who do not wish to compromise or diminish the power of oral culture in knowing. yet, to remain viable in academic, our research must be written, assessed, and published…the incorporation of narrative story, and self-location found within indigenous writing is perceived as indulgent rather than being recognized as a methodological necessity flowing from a tribal epistemology….the difficulty is that it is measured against a contrasting worldview that holds a monopoly on knowledge and keeps different forms of inquiry marginalized.39 knowledge of these two paradigms can also help inform our library instruction. subject librarians often teach instruction sessions for methods classes or classes where advanced undergraduates or masters degrees students are learning the ethos of their discipline, including what counts as knowledge, and what methodologies are privileged within a discipline. by introducing the ideas that research is never neutral, objective, or apolitical and that method and epistemology are choices, librarians can interrupt hegemonic discourses a bit, and allow students a place to consider alternatives. when appropriate, librarians can also consider using their understandings of critical or indigenous methods in their own research projects–always being aware of the potential for misappropriation. when we work with a group of “subjects” in our research, perhaps students, faculty, or other librarians, what role do they play? are they subjects from whom we extract knowledge, which we then interpret and publish as our discovery? as i write these words i see even the kind of research that i’m doing here, researching in previously published works, follows this method. would a critical stance make our research more emancipatory and might we use more democratic and participatory methods; ones that would allow the researchers and researched to become one and the same, with shared responsibility for co-creation of the questions, the methods, and the discussion? i’m hoping to have done some of this with my learning community. linda tuhiwai smith also notes, that indigenous researchers struggle with major questions, such as, “whose research is it? who owns it? whose interests does it serve? who will benefit from it? who designed its questions and framed its scope? who will carry it out? who will write it up? how will its results be disseminated?”40 indigenous librarians can certainly discover and utilize the powerful tools and methods in their own traditions. but to what extent can non-indigenous librarians effectively and respectfully use indigenous methods? here i think we need to reflect deeply. scholars like margaret kovach see that critical researchers can be natural allies of indigenous scholars in that the critical questions they ask about power and privilege open up space for discussion of indigenous paradigms.41 but as scholars who represent the latest in the long line of colonial researchers, non-indigenous researchers need to be hyper-aware of not extracting, claiming a “discovery,” and singularly profiting from indigenous methods. we need to guard against our own misappropriation and misrepresentation of indigenous methods. we can talk with indigenous scholars, and learn from them, but we cannot talk for them. there is much in the format of this article that i would credit to my exposure to indigenous methods. i find myself being more self-revelatory, conscious of my relations to those i’m researching and for whom i’m researching, and also incorporating longer quotations from those scholars with whom i am interacting. i feel that i’m using these methods because over the last few months i have been in contact with the work of indigenous researchers who have been eloquently articulating their worldviews and methods, and who have been modeling them in the ways they have chosen to present their ideas in their works. i am grateful for both their abilities and their devotion to starting this conversation in the academy. these paradigms, the critical and the indigenous, open up great opportunities for librarians and all others in the academy. critical researchers offer up a mirror to traditional researchers, one which allows them (us) to see that what we thought were pure, neutral and objective motives and methods in our research, are always political and often oppressive. as researchers we need to question our own individual reasons and practices around research – the subject has become an object of research. my seemingly innocuous question about indigenous research methods actually opens up huge questions about academe. margaret kovach speaks to this point: there is an understanding that inclusion of indigenous knowledge requires multiple strategies for reconsidering the existing system. the strongest potential for fresh discourse rests with the ability of invested non-indigenous academics to listen attentively to not only what diminishes indigenous research scholarship, but also to what helps. furthermore, a new non-homogenous academic landscape asks that it not simply listen anew, but listen differently to what is being said. (emphasis added)42 i feel that indigenous ways of knowing offer a great challenge and opportunity to the academy. they ask us why we are doing research and for whom are we doing it. more importantly who is able to do research and in what ways? who can be an academic and how can they be one? is the western academy based on a worldview or big enough to include worldviews? these large questions are asked and answered in many discussions all across our campuses. why are peer-reviewed articles privileged in promotion and tenure committees and in student papers? where are oral traditions? what gets into our libraries and what doesn’t? if you are not white, or male, or heterosexual, or middle-classed, or abled, do you have to become more like that to be a university student or a professor? in this paper i’ve looked at an indigenous worldview through a lens from the western academic tradition. it might be fruitful to switch lenses. if, as shawn wilson’s book title says, “research is ceremony,” what ceremony does traditional academic research perform? what mirror does it hold up to the academy — and, do we like what we see? i won’t answer this question here, but i invite readers to ruminate and respond in the comments below. research is relationships inspired by my modicum of knowledge about participatory paradigms and indigenous methods of research, i wanted this article to reflect a community based approach to research, at least to a small degree (see the first half of this article for more detail). the mediacommonspress is a robust instance of research with a community, whereby book chapters are collaboratively developed and comments and suggestions are made by anyone throughout the writing process; basically open and incessant peer-review. the software used is comment press which is an open source plugin for wordpress. with this article i wanted to try a pilot of a low-cost alternative using google docs — open publishing for the rest of us. in the first article i created a survey and 22 librarians responded to it. i used the questions and comments that these librarians gave to my survey to help inform the initial direction of this article. i found their comments to be helpful in a variety of ways; they confirmed many of my initial questions and they also provided invaluable resources for me to use to jump-start my research. twelve of those respondents left their email addresses and volunteered to read a draft of this article prior to publication – its first tumbling through peer review. two other librarians responded to the first article and so my review community has grown to 14 members. as wrote the first draft of this article i found that having a research community “at-my-back” to be comforting. i knew at least a few people were interested in reading it, and i also felt some of that “submission anxiety” to be alleviated. when i usually submit an article to a journal for blind peer review, i often over-obsess with getting it perfectly perfect, hoping that it will at least be accepted with revisions required. knowing my people were there, willing to help me polish the rough edges of the first draft, made me more relaxed in my approach and allowed me to leave some i’s undotted and some t’s uncrossed. i knew i had time to look at this again, before submitting it for publication. but having a community made me feel more responsible, too. i have asked my community to add their comments on this process. again, they were helpful to me as i revised this second article, and i offer them here as an appendix: research community comments. researching with my ad-hoc community was interesting and helpful — i now wonder how it might work in a more formal and scaledup version. as i conclude this article, i offer my community a sketch of a vision. the vision has been informed by my research on indigenous methods over the past year, and my excitement for and my desire to better integrate indigenous methods and research communities into academic librarianship. what if acrl, with the help of a grant, were to set up a clearinghouse for research community building (crcb)? this would be an online database of librarians who are interested in supporting others with their research (via feedback and review), and possibly also interested in co-researching with others on various topics. librarians would enter their names and research interests into the database, along with the kinds of support they are willing to give. researchers who are looking for feedback could query the database and find potential community, and then contact them to see if their project might be copasetic with them. the comment press software would then be available in the crcb for the research community to use. they might decide to use it for just their community members to provide feedback, or they might open up the settings to allow outside feedback as well. the works nurtured in the incubator might appear in many forms. they might be manuscripts for potential submission to extant journals or they might be published within the crcb site in a plos one or arxiv  manner, or perhaps they would be formatted along with other articles as an edited ebook. i hope that you might share other ideas below in the comments, and that we as a community can begin to engage in a variety of research methods, some which are based in more critical and indigenous ways of seeing the world. acknowledgements: first i want to sincerely thank shilo george, that natural catalyst and all around agent provocateur, for inspiring me to attempt this research adventure! i would like to also thank all of my research community partners that helped with the framing of the research questions for this, and the prior article, and for their help in reviewing my first draft. i must also thank all of the honors college and graduate school of education students at portland state university with whom i’ve been discussing research paradigms lately in research classes. and special thanks to gr keer, amy hofer and emily ford and the other lead pipe editors who took the time to review this piece.   references & further readings brown, t. (2001). action research and postmodernism : congruence and critique. buckingham [england] ; philadelphia: open university press. canella, g. and y. lincoln. (2012). “deploying qualitative methods for critical social purposes.” in s seinberg and g. cannella (eds.) critical qualitative research: a reader, 104-115. new york: peter lang publishing. denzin n., and y. lincoln, (2008) “introduction: critical methodologies and indigenous inquiry,” in n. denzin, y. lincoln, and l. smith (eds.), handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies, 1-20, los angeles: sage. erickson, f. (2011). “a history of qualitative inquiry in social and educational research.” in n. denzin & y. lincoln (eds.), the sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp. 43-59). thousand oaks, ca: sage. hermes, m. (1998). research methods as a situated response: towards a first nations’ methodology. international journal of qualitative studies in education, 11(1), 155-168. kincheloe, j. mclaren.(2005). rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. in n. denzin and y. lincoln (eds.) sage handbook of qualitative research, 303-342. kovach, m. (2009). indigenous methodologies: characteristics, conversations and contexts. toronto: university of toronto press. lincoln, y., lynham, s. and guba, e. (2011) “paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences, revisited. in n. denzin & y. lincoln (eds.), the sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp.97-128). thousand oaks, ca: sage. namenwirth, m. (1986) “science through a feminist prism.” in ruth blier, feminist approaches to science, (pp 18-41) ny pergamon press. o’leary, z. (2007). the social science jargon buster. london, england: sage publications ltd. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9780857020147 pickard, a. (2013). research methods in information (2nd ed.). chicago: neal-schuman. schroeder, r. (2014). exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part i–the leap. in the library with the lead pipe. shields, c. (2012). critical advocacy research: an approach whose time has come. in s seinberg and g. cannella (eds.) critical qualitative research: a reader, 2-13. new york: peter lang publishing. smith, l.t. (2012). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). london; new york: new york: zed books. weber-pillwax, c. (1999). indigenous research methodology: exploratory discussion of an elusive subject. journal of educational thought/revue de la pensee educative, 33(1), 31-45. willis, j. (2007). foundations of qualitative research interpretive and critical approaches. thousand oaks, calif. ; london: sage. wilson, s. (2008). research is ceremony: indigenous research methods. black point, n.s.: fernwood pub. robert schroeder, “exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part i–the leap”. in the library with the lead pipe, (2014). https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/exploring-the-leap/ [↩] a serendipitous email from a librarian colleague, anne-marie deitering, clued me into the method of autoethnography, and i think i may have been on the path of partially recreating this method. for more on autoethnography see http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095 [↩] see https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/exploring-the-leap/ [↩] jerry willis, foundations of qualitative research: interpretive and critical approaches. (thousand oaks, ca ; london: sage, 2007): 22-23. [↩] i use the term “abled” here, and not “able-bodied” as the abilities in question are not merely physical ones, but mental, emotional and social as determined by the culture in question. [↩] this table was copied, with permission, from a series of tables by jerry willis’ in foundations of qualitative research (tables 3.1, 3.2 and 4.1) with some additional information from a similar table in allison jane pickard’s research methods in information (table 1.1). both of these authors acknowledge the previous work of egon guba and yvonna lincoln in aiding them in the creation of their tables. willis based his tables on egon guba’s the paradigm dialog, 1990. pickard based hers on yvonna lincoln and egon guba’s naturalistic inquiry, 1985. [↩] allison pickard, research methods in information (2nd ed.). (chicago: neal-schuman, 2013): 6. [↩] tony brown, action research and postmodernism : congruence and critique. (buckingham [england] ; philadelphia: open university press. brown, 2001): 21. [↩] jerry willis, foundations, 60. [↩] frederick erickson, (2011). “a history of qualitative inquiry in social and educational research.” in n. denzin & y. lincoln (eds.), the sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed.,). thousand oaks, ca: 2011: 44. [↩] zina o’leary, the social science jargon buster, (london, england: sage publications ltd. 2007) doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9780857020147: 2. [↩] allison pickard, research methods in information, 12. [↩] yvonna s. lincoln, susan a. lynham, and egon g. guba. (2011) “paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences, revisited.” in n. denzin & y. lincoln (eds.), the sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp.97-128). thousand oaks, ca: sage. publications ltd. 2007). [↩] this table draws upon the work of the authors cited in table 1 (above), plus the author’s reading of the indigenous scholars’ work cited in regards to an indigenous paradigm. [↩] a great series is published by peter lang called critical qualitative research edited by shirley steinberg and gaile cannella. [↩] joe kincheloe and peter mclaren. “rethinking critical theory and qualitative research”. in sage handbook of qualitative research, 303-342. (2005): 304. [↩] namenwirth, marion (1986) “science through a feminist prism”, in ruth blier, feminist approaches to science, (pp 18-41) ny pergamon press (1986): 29. [↩] norman denzin and yvonna lincoln, “introduction: critical methodologies and indigenous inquiry,” in n. denzin, y. lincoln, and l. smith (eds.), handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies, 1-20 (los angeles: sage, 2008): 5. [↩] allison pickard, research methods in information, 164. [↩] gaile cannella and yvonna lincoln, “deploying qualitative methods for critical social purposes,” in critical qualitative research: a reader, 104-115 (2012): 106. [↩] linda tuhiwai smith, decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). (london ; new york : new york: zed books, 2012): 1. [↩] ibid., 1. [↩] merriam-webster online, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indigenous [↩] shawn wilson, research is ceremony: indigenous research methods. (black point, n.s.: fernwood pub. 2008): 16. [↩] linda tuhiwai smith, decolonizing methodologies, xii. [↩] for two resources for research beyond the geographic areas i’ve concentrated on, see indigenous pathways into social research (2013) mertens, cram, & chilisa (eds.), and handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (2008) denzin, lincoln, & smith (eds.) [↩] cora weber-pillwax, “indigenous research methodology: exploratory discussion of an elusive subject,” journal of educational thought/revue de la pensee educative, 33(1)(1999): 33. [↩] shawn wilson, research is ceremony, 73. [↩] ibid., 74. [↩] margaret kovach, (2009). indigenous methodologies: characteristics, conversations and contexts. toronto: university of toronto press. (2009) 36. [↩] mary hermes, “research methods as a situated response: towards a first nations’ methodology.” international journal of qualitative studies in education, 11(1), (1998) 166. [↩] linda tuhiwai smith, decolonizing methodologies, 130. [↩] margaret kovach, indigenous methodologies, 27. [↩] shawn wilson, research is ceremony, 135. [↩] schroeder, “exploring critical and indigenous research methods.” [↩] shawn wilson, research is ceremony, 130. [↩] ibid., 129. [↩] ibid., 133. [↩] margaret kovach, indigenous methodologies, 84. [↩] linda tuhiwai smith, decolonizing methodologies, 10. [↩] margaret kovach, indigenous methodologies, 86. [↩] ibid, 157. [↩] critical methods, critical theory, indigenous methods, research methods introducing library pipeline editorial: these are a few of our favorite things 5 responses bharati 2014–12–15 at 3:20 am dear sir/madam, with reference to the subject my name is bharati k.b from hubli i am working in the college library at new college.this college is recently opened i want more improvement in this college library so please tell me some good things for improvement in our library thanking you with regards bharati k.b bob schroeder 2015–01–07 at 1:06 pm hello bharati – sorry i didn’t get back sooner i was on vacation for a few weeks. you have an interesting question, but it seems very broad to me. please contact t me via email if you’d like to discuss it further. my email is schroedr@pdx.edu roberta astroff 2015–05–26 at 6:06 pm i wondered if you came across this book: otros saberes: collaborative research on indigenous and afro-descendant cultural politics (global indigenous politics), (2014) edited by hale and stephen. its geographic focus is latin america, its subject matter is community organizing, but its epistemological focus is, as the title says, other ways of knowing and indigenous research. it is an interesting contribution to the literature. i just found your article through the call for papers for the autoethnography library project, and am glad to find this website. bob schroeder 2015–05–26 at 6:19 pm hi roberta – i’m not familiar with this work, but thanks for letting me know about it. it sounds like it has some great examples of critical, community-based research! pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » editorial: these are a few of our favorite things this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct in pursuit of equity: applying design thinking to develop a values-based open access statement – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 25 jul lillian rigling, emily carlisle and courtney waugh /4 comments in pursuit of equity: applying design thinking to develop a values-based open access statement in brief we wanted to rethink how our library supported open access, so we attempted to ask ourselves and our staff why they supported “open” and how they defined “open”. by unpacking our institutional and individual understandings of “open” using design thinking principles, we were able to not only create a strong and value-driven statement, but to also open the door for staff at all levels to engage in policy-making for the organization. by lillian rigling, emily carlisle, & courtney waugh introduction on august 2, 2017 elsevier announced its acquisition of bepress, the academic software firm that produces digital commons–an institutional repository platform used by libraries across north america. at the university of western ontario, the largest bepress institution in canada, the news came as a surprise to library staff. conflicting opinions arose: our users appreciated digital commons’ features, but to use an elsevier product for a repository intended to disseminate open access (oa) works would run contrary to our organizational and professional values. our professional ethos to support equitable access to scholarship and our professional ideal of user-centred decision making seemed to be in direct opposition to one another. at least, that was the conflict that we anticipated, until we realized that the individual values of western libraries’ staff–and subsequently their individual understandings of oa–are not as homogenous as we had first assumed. as roger c. schonfeld (2017b) put it, we have over time failed to “align unambiguously on what [our library and its support for oa are] trying to accomplish.” without a strong foundation, we have consequently failed to create meaningful strategic avenues within our organization to engage with our community around oa, and to achieve our goals related to open scholarship. as we wrestled with this conflict and emotion, we recognized that we as a library cannot practice according to our values if we do not know what our values are. we confronted head-on our assumption that our organizational values were clear-cut and in stark contrast to users’ needs, which was preventing our ability to respond to elsevier’s acquisition of bepress. to make an informed decision in the face of the elsevier acquisition, we needed to provide space for all staff perspectives related to oa to be heard. only by doing so could we begin to collectively shape an understanding of and strategy for oa. in reality, our values were more nuanced than we had initially anticipated, which is something we only came to realize after providing staff with a space to articulate their perspectives. throughout this process, we challenged the notion that our organizational policies and practices are an accurate reflection of the values of the entire staff complement. by turning the lens that we use to understand the needs of our users on ourselves, we were able to unpack our individual values and create a meaningful, grassroots policy statement on oa. institutional context western libraries is one of the top ten research libraries in canada, encompassing eight service locations distributed across the university of western ontario campus. it is also a member of the ontario council of university libraries, the canadian association of research libraries, and the association of research libraries. the size and scope of western libraries’ collection is in keeping with that of a research-intensive university, with access to an impressive array of collections and content (including oa content made available through numerous publishers and organizations) to support students and faculty across thirteen faculties and nearly one hundred departments. western libraries’ collections and services are further enhanced through its collaborative relationship with three affiliated university college libraries: brescia university college, huron university college, and king’s university college. for over a decade western libraries operated under a liaison model with librarians and archivists providing research, instruction, and collections support for one or more campus departments. in june 2017, following many months of staff consultation and planning, the library administration proposed its new organizational renewal initiative in which library services are built around five core functional areas: user experience & student engagement; teaching and learning; research and scholarly communication; content management, discovery, and access; and archives and special collections. the new emphasis on research and scholarly communication necessarily shifted the work associated with oa from a committee related mandate to the individual core responsibilities of team members, which in turn necessitated a critical conversation about why and how we value and support oa. concomitant with the organizational renewal was the library’s decision to discontinue its oa fund which existed to support authors wishing to publish articles in oa journals that charge article processing charges (apcs).  there was consensus that the oa fund was not an efficient model to support oa in a broad way. the fund only supported the publication of a few papers, most of which were published by large for-profit publishers. spending that same amount on institutional memberships or similar initiatives that support oa publishing and open infrastructure would allow us to support more authors on campus, or to explore alternative funding and oa publishing models. this decision gestured toward a more values-based approach to supporting oa; however, any values underpinning the rationale were not made explicit. this is not to say that western libraries did not value oa prior to the reorganization; quite the contrary. our approach to supporting oa (and scholarly communication work in general), however, tended to be risk-averse and conservative, focused on the how of oa rather than the why. public facing messaging about oa was centred on meeting compliance-based mandates such as those established by the tri-agency —1 — and other grant funding bodies, with very little emphasis placed on the values of oa. support for researchers was reactionary and scatter-shot due to the reality that knowledge and expertise for oa was concentrated in one or two individuals who were doing this work on top of other full time responsibilities. the organizational renewal provided a mechanism for knowledge transfer that would facilitate a more distributed, coordinated, and intentional approach to oa support.another example of western libraries’ early efforts to support oa is our long and fruitful relationship with bepress. since 2009, bepress has been used to power our institutional repository, scholarship@western, which collects, disseminates, archives, and preserves a variety of materials created or sponsored by the university of western ontario. in december 2017, scholarship@western achieved a milestone with its five millionth download, and as of june 14, 2018 there were 24,564 works posted and 5,825,028 downloads. much of our support for oa centred on the benefits of using the institutional repository, making the mechanics of oa a focal point. it was elsevier’s unanticipated acquisition of bepress that provided a tipping point for a system-wide conversation about oa. literature review our approach to unfurling and reconstituting our understanding of and support for oa was informed by the coalescing of three factors. community response to bepress acquisition with the renewed focus on building capacity to support oa work in our local context, the acquisition of bepress by elsevier shocked our campus community. we were not alone. educational institutions across north america reacted adversely to the surprise announcement. on the day bepress announced this acquisition, individual reactions ranged from fear to rage to disappointment. as bepress customers were not consulted with or notified before the public announcement, emotions ran high (schonfeld, 2017a) —2 —. within hours, librarians and scholars were calling for the identification and/or development of alternative solutions (o’keefe, 2017). in the days following, organizations began to take action. the public knowledge project (pkp) released a statement targeted at bepress users who publish original content through the digital commons journal-hosting platform. this statement not only detailed the potential benefits of using pkp’s open journal system, but also announced the development of a migration plugin specifically designed to move content away from digital commons (stranack, 2017). within and outside of the academic library community, tensions related to the acquisition remained high for several months; within one month, the scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition (sparc) issued a direct and public statement detailing their disappointment at elsevier’s business practices that are antithetical and incompatible with oa work: the acquisition is especially troubling for the hundreds of institutions that use digital commons to support their open access repositories. these institutions now find their repository services owned and managed by elsevier, a company well known for its obstruction of open access and repositories (joseph & shearer, 2017). this discontent turned into action on the part of many libraries. most notably, the university of pennsylvania issued a statement about their intentions to leave bepress because of the acquisition in november 2017. they called this plan “operation beprexit.” they approached their intended migration with an emphasis on clearly articulating why they support an institutional repository and what types of supports or services those values might spawn (allen, wipperman & whitebloom, 2017). they concluded their statement with a call to action to the academic community to “…find solutions that align with our values as researchers, libraries, and universities and serve our collective communities’ needs” (leaven, 2017). values-based practice the values of librarianship, institutional values (both at the university and library-level), and the values of individual library workers have often been invoked as the tides of practice change. historically, library research has tended to focus on demonstrating library value to external stakeholders as opposed to understanding library values (drabinski & walter, 2016). the library community is experiencing an internal conflict as we struggle to both be a “neutral” space welcome to anyone, while we also attempt to work in a socially conscious way, imposing our values and using our “neutral” position within the community to be anything but apolitical (lewis, 2008; sendaula, 2017; weissinger, 2003). at the same time, we have begun to reflect more critically on our practice, evaluating the ways we have portrayed ourselves as neutral while still acting in ways that demonstrate our privilege (christen, 2017). in the business world, values-based practice is defined as “… doing the right thing for the right reasons and not compromising core principles” (dean, 2008). there is an enormous body of literature on the positive impact of values-based leadership on stewarding a successful business career, a better workplace culture, and a more profitable corporation. however, in librarianship, the term “values-based” tends to refer to a set of core values as articulated by an organization or professional society. most notably, the american library association’s core values of librarianship document is used as the backbone of many articles on values-based practice in libraries (miller, 2007). these values, however, were not sourced by the library community at large; rather, they were initially created by a small task force. each member of the task force was asked to identify values they felt were of universal importance across all libraries. over one hundred values were proposed, and the task force whittled these one hundred down to eight (weissinger, 2003). individual subfields of librarianship have issued calls for a need to define a statement of core values to facilitate improved collaboration and goal-setting in a nebulous or rapidly changing field (spiro, 2012; ferguson & bunge, 1997). however, in more recent calls for values-statements, there is an acknowledgement that statements of shared values can limit growth and experimental work that pushes the boundaries of these values. as such, spiro recommends that these values-statements be created with significant community contribution, in order to build consensus around the final product (spiro, 2012). design thinking and consensus building the rise of user experience and design thinking methodologies in libraries has provided a framework with which to build consensus around service and space design. its most popular applications have been in rethinking library spaces beyond the carrel and rethinking the library’s presence online. typical applications involve direct consultation with or observation of users (grguric, rigling, waller & cross, 2017). however, it is important to establish a common understanding of organizational goals and strategies before taking on a human-centered design project. only by beginning with an internal focus can a library align user needs with an organization’s priorities and mission (heath, 2016). design thinking has also proved to be an effective way to parse together disparate concepts and identify common themes and connections to create effective policies that account for obstacles (mintrom & luetjens, 2016). by creating a concept map of a problem space, one is able to both broadly identify the range of ideas associated with the space and to also narrow down these ideas to start forming consensus and identifying meaningful patterns (knudtson, 2016). our approach as members of the scholarly communications subcommittee at western libraries, we each had a vested interest in supporting “open” on campus and had volunteered our time to committee work. our project team was comprised of emily carlisle, a co-op student from the faculty of information and media studies working on special projects related to journal hosting and the institutional repository, courtney waugh, a liaison librarian with research interests in critical librarianship and an emerging professional focus in scholarly communication, and lillian rigling, a recent librarian hire and the newly appointed co-chair of the scholarly communications subcommittee with a background in user experience design work. each of us brought a unique perspective to this problem space, but we shared the common goal of rethinking oa work. hoping to establish a common understanding of organizational values around oa—with which we could begin to collectively shape an oa strategy that effectively serves our users—we employed an iterative design thinking process and design thinking strategies, specifically concept mapping. we approached this as an exploratory project, generating buy-in first from the scholarly communications subcommittee. on behalf of the scholarly communications subcommittee, we invited participants from across western libraries and our affiliate libraries to explore how we define oa, and why and how our libraries support it. held on october 23, 2017 (and coinciding with the first day of open access week 2017), our collaborative discussion brought nineteen participants from five different campus libraries, who together represented a range of job titles and levels of seniority. student assistants, library assistants, and librarians were in attendance, coming from, for example, library information resources management, our map and data centre, our business library,  and our faculty of information and media studies graduate library that supports the ala-accredited mlis program. following a discussion of oa in general, each attendee was asked to consider their opinion in response to the following prompts:      what is open access?      why does (or should) western libraries support open access?      how does (or could) western libraries support open access? participants were encouraged to independently write as many ideas as possible on individual sticky notes. after recording their responses on sticky notes, attendees worked in three groups to collaboratively generate concept maps out of the individual responses to each prompt. similar responses were grouped together under encompassing terms, while relationships between each of the grouped concepts were captured and articulated. all three groups were given an opportunity to rework each of the concept maps. each group spent a few minutes interpreting the concept map and making changes as they saw different or missing connections or ideas. the groups then presented back to all in attendance, and a discussion was held in order to ensure that the ideas and relationships captured in the final versions (pictured below) reflected group consensus. the three concept maps together illustrate each attendee’s individual understandings of oa, made meaningful by a visual structure that represents the group’s understandings of oa. figure 1: finalized concept map formed in response to the prompt, “what is open access?” figure 2: finalized concept map formed in response to the prompt, “why does (or should) western libraries support open access? figure 3: finalized concept map formed in response to the prompt, “how does (or could) western libraries support open access?” we also attempted to address any gaps in the concept maps by having a broader, open-ended discussion about how we currently present oa to our community and how other similar institutions present oa. we provided anonymized oa statements from several university libraries and had participants write down as individuals what they thought worked well and what could be improved. we then had an open-ended conversation about these statements and what potential qualities would improve the efficacy and comprehensiveness of western libraries’ statement. finally, we distributed an anonymous survey to assess the event for individuals who had attended, and to provide an opportunity for individuals who were unable to attend to offer feedback on the three questions we posed for the concept maps as well as on the general topic of western’s oa statement. a new statement these concept maps, the virtual participation, and the artifacts of the discussion were used to inform western libraries’ new statement on oa. courtney waugh, who had been involved in the session planning but was not present during the collaborative event, brought a fresh perspective that was helpful for analyzing and synthesizing the data. drawing on the concept map visuals and the sticky notes produced by each attendee, she identified central themes that best captured how western libraries defines oa, and why and how our libraries support it. central themes were determined from recurring terms in individuals’ sticky notes, and from the differentiated groups that brought together related ideas in the concept maps. these themes, coupled with attendees’ suggestions for improving the existing oa statement (pictured below), were then incorporated into a new and improved oa statement. figure 4: identified areas for improvement in our old open access statement the new statement takes a more proactive position on oa, highlighting western libraries’ commitment to key values embedded in oa such as equitable access, innovation in research, and the sharing and reuse of new ideas. the statement also describes how western libraries partners with researchers looking to pursue open avenues, highlighting services such as individual consultations, education via outreach and workshops, self-archiving support, institutional memberships, and journal publishing. additionally, the statement recognizes that in an evolving scholarly ecosystem, “experimentation is necessary in order for libraries, publishers, and our communities to find sustainable models for open research.” as such, the statement is flexible, subject to change as western libraries’ commitment to oa is embodied in new or adapted services. more importantly, the new statement reflects understandings of oa across different roles and levels in our library system. throughout western libraries, staff in different roles and departments have developed understandings of oa that are rooted in their personal experiences and interactions with western’s community. considering these understandings and experiences during the process of developing the new statement has allowed for the creation of a statement that captures values and services related to oa in their most relevant sense to western libraries’ staff and community. perhaps because of the new statement’s reflection of staff values within and across western libraries, the initial draft made its way to senior leadership with little objection. the approval of leadership was crucial for us in a time of transition, but because of the enormous amount of change happening within the organization at the time of this project, we anticipated our project might be subject to backlog. additionally, because of the grassroots nature of this project, we were unsure of how it would be received; we had not sought administrative approval to write a new oa statement. however, given the significant artifacts of our process, and the transparency in our consultation, the leadership was prepared to receive the statement and our wait for approval was short. we presented the new statement to members of our ontario library consortium at the ontario library association super conference in 2018 and received a similarly positive response. since its official implementation in january 2018, the new oa statement has provided a solid foundation on which to make thoughtful decisions about western libraries’ support for oa. it has inspired the pursuit of initiatives that align with our communal values; for example, investment in institutional memberships to oa initiatives or open infrastructure and active investigation of open educational resources. in the coming months the statement is also set to inform a campus-wide oa policy—a move that aligns with the value that western libraries places on having the campus community recognize oa as a priority. built out of a focus on building consensus around values and service, the new statement is proving an effective means of pursuing actions that are rooted in our organizational values. implications for library policy development throughout this process, we recognized that this strategy was not only an effective way to create meaningful change with a new statement, but also that the process itself disrupted organizational norms around policy creation and empowered new voices to be represented in library policy. by inviting participation from casual and part-time employees, students, and library assistants, we heard different and valuable perspectives. additionally, by creating an environment where non-administrators represented the overwhelming majority of participants and all participants had an opportunity to contribute their individual ideas without attaching their identity or position, we did our best to disrupt organizational power structures at play in a typical committee. by continuing this strategy for our work, we may over time be able to increase participation from library assistants, student staff, and non-managers in articulating the creation of organizational values and culture. the artifacts we produced from this event, including photos, sticky notes, and virtual feedback, provided strong documentation to support the choices we made in synthesizing the data. for example, when a question was posed after the release of the statement about the choice of the term “equitable access” as opposed to “equal access,” we were able to point specifically to the place on the “why support open access” concept map where equity and equality were discussed, and elaborate on that discussion. these artifacts will also prove helpful with generating administrative buy-in as we move forward in scaling our approach to create a campus-level oa statement. conclusion libraries are having more crucial conversations about neutrality, and are working to strike a balance of service-oriented and social-justice-oriented work. we have been broadly interpreting our post-enlightenment era value of “access to information” to strive for a nuanced and intricate understanding of equity within information access. however, in order to continue aligning our practices with our values, it is important that we not only articulate the values of the profession, but also explore our personal values. as facilitators, we were challenged to articulate our own understanding of open and work to incorporate our conceptions with those of our colleagues. what we would have approached as wordsmithing and editorial work in a committee-setting, we saw instead as an opportunity for personal exploration. the process was also liberating for us as western libraries staff. by clearly articulating our commitment to oa services as a way to contribute to equity of the global knowledge base, we were able to reimagine conversations with our local community and make room for experimentation with new ideas. it also allowed us to say no to projects and partnerships that didn’t share our values. for example, when asked to support a membership with a publisher to support article processing charges for hybrid journals, we were able to clearly refer to our statement and only support “publishers or organizations that develop and advance open infrastructure.” finally, by making the process inclusive of any staff member who indicated interest, it began to open the doors for new conversations between staff. we have been able to strike project teams that are inclusive of staff and librarians who do not have job titles or job description that mention “open” but who bring a unique perspective and passion to the table. by practicing librarianship through the exploration of our own values, we can develop meaningful and actionable policy and service. turned on ourselves, design thinking is a powerful means to identify individual and organizational values and to develop policies out of communal values. with this basis we can then begin an external approach, aligning our users’ needs with the mission and values that are prioritized across our organizations or profession as a whole. acknowledgements we are so thankful for the support of our colleagues at western libraries in this process: the individuals who brought energy and critical perspectives to our event, vice-provost and chief librarian catherine steeves who supported the dissemination of this statement, and joanne paterson who helped facilitate our concept-mapping event. thanks also to our colleague kristin hoffmann for copy-editing to improve the clarity of our writing. we express gratitude to our peer reviewers, donna lanclos and annie pho, for your support and ideas, and to sofia leung, our publishing editor, for keeping us on track. finally, we are especially grateful for the wonders of wifi on buses and planes, allowing us to work on this from literally anywhere in the world. references allen, l., wipperman, s. l., & whitebloom, k. (2017). beprexit: rethinking repository services in a changing scholarly communication landscape. in cni fall 2017 membership meeting. retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/106 carlisle, e., rigling, l., paterson, j., & waugh, c. (2018). open by default? concept mapping our way to open access consensus. presented at the ontario library association super conference. christen, k. (2017). we have never been neutral: search, discovery, and the politics of access. lecture presented at distinguished speaker series, dublin, ohio. retrieved from https://www.oclc.org/research/events/2017/07-13.html dean, k. w. (2008). values-based leadership: how our personal values impact the workplace. the journal of values-based leadership,1(1). drabinski, e., & walter, s. (2016). asking questions that matter. college & research libraries, 77(3), 254-268. doi: 10.5860/crl.77.3.264 ferguson, c. d., & bunge, c. a. (1997). the shape of services to come: values-based reference service for the largely digital library. college & research libraries, 58(3), 252-265. doi:10.5860/crl.58.3.252 grguric, e., rigling, l., waller, m, & cross, w. (2017). applying design thinking to the scholarly communications problem space. presented at the force11 scholarly communications institute. heath, p. (2016). applying human-centered design to the library experience. in a. priestner & m. borg (eds.), user experience in libraries: applying ethnography and human-centered design(pp. 49-67). new york, ny: routledge. joseph, h., & shearer, k. (2017, september 06). elsevier acquisition highlights the need for community-based scholarly communication infrastructure. retrieved from https://sparcopen.org/news/2017/elsevier-acquisition-highlights-the-need-for-community-based-scholarly-communication-infrastructure/ knudtson, e. (2016, august 30). concept mapping for designers of the future. retrieved from https://www.cooper.com/journal/2016/8/concept-mapping-for-designers-of-the-future leavens, s. (2017, october 9). penn libraries to end partnership with bepress. retrieved from https://beprexit.wordpress.com/official-statement/ lewis, a. (2008). introduction. in a. lewis (ed.), questioning library neutrality: essays from progressive librarian. library juice press. miller, r. k. (2007). the value of values-based literature: an exploration of librarianship’s professional discussion of core values (unpublished master’s thesis). university of north carolina, chapel hill. mintrom, m., & luetjens, j. (2016). design thinking in policymaking processes: opportunities and challenges. australian journal of public administration,75(3), 391-402. doi:10.1111/1467-8500.12211 naqvi, r. (2018, january 25). western research repository reaches five millionth download. western gazette. retrieved from https://www.westerngazette.ca/news/western-research-repository-reaches-million-downloads/article_f3f3f430-01f3-11e8-aee6-f3eca4329a33.html o’keefe, k. (2017, august 3). elsevier acquires bepress: library and knowledge community respond [web log post]. retrieved from https://kevin.lexblog.com/2017/08/03/elsevier-acquires-bepress-library-knowledge-community-respond/ schonfeld, r. c. (2017a, august 02). elsevier acquires institutional repository provider bepress. retrieved from https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/08/02/elsevier-acquires-bepress/ schonfeld, r.c. (2017b, august 07). reflections on “elsevier acquires bepress.” ithaka s+r. retrieved from http://www.sr.ithaka.org/blog/reflections-on-elsevier-acquires-bepress/ sendaula, s. (2017, july 07). libraries are not neutral spaces: social justice advocacy in librarianship. retrieved from https://lj.libraryjournal.com/2017/07/shows-events/ala/libraries-are-not-neutral-spaces-ala-annual-2017/ spiro, l. (2012). “this is why we fight”: defining the values of the digital humanities. in m. k. gold (ed.), debates in the digital humanities. university of minnesota press. stranack, k. (2017, august 8). rethinking bepress [web log post]. retrieved from https://pkp.sfu.ca/2017/08/08/rethinking-bepress/ weissinger, t. (2003). competing models of librarianship: do core values make a difference? the journal of academic librarianship,29(1), 32-39. doi:10.1016/s0099-1333(02)00403-2 western libraries. (2018). open access. retrieved from https://www.lib.uwo.ca/scholarship/index.html the canadian institutes of health research (cihr), the natural sciences and engineering research council of canada (nserc), and the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc) http://science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_97415.html [↩] note: this knowledge comes from both schonfeld’s piece and our own personal knowledge as bepress customers. [↩] design thinking, open access, participatory policy-making, values-based practice “life-now”: james tiptree, joanna russ, and the queer meaning of archives editorial: update to lead pipe submission guidelines 4 responses pingback : in pursuit of equity: applying design thinking to develop a values-based open access statement – stratelligence stevenb 2018–08–07 at 8:16 pm i’m always interested in learning more about how librarians are using design thinking to solve a problem or improve the library experience, but i’m not seeing a design thinking process in this article. maybe i’m missing something, but other than the brainstorm and post-information organization, what other phases of the design thinking process did the library staff go though to develop the statement? the design thinking toolkit for libraries isn’t always the go to for a design challenge, but it could have provided more of a structure for this library. lillian rigling 2018–08–13 at 1:46 pm hi steven, i really appreciate your feedback! i believe the design thinking toolkit for libraries is really well-optimized for service and space design, but we chose to take a more freeform approach as the toolkit did not feel like a great fit for policy-development. perhaps it could be better articulated, but the choice of the process, the concept mapping event itself, and the writing process represent the inspiration, ideation, and iteration framework laid out by ideo. the statement itself is also meant to be iterative; as new events occur, we have the option of revisiting this statement (in fact, we invite continued feedback from our user community in the statement itself). we also hope the statement will serve as “inspiration” and foundation for the iterative development of a new suite of services and resources to support open on campus. pingback : in pursuit of equity: applying design thinking to develop a values-based open access statement – the idealis this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 3 jun angela galvan /42 comments soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship image by flickr user tweng (cc by-sa 2.0) in brief: despite the growing body of research on our professional demographics and multi-year diversity initiatives, librarianship in the united states remains overwhelmingly white. i suggest the interview process is a series of repetitive gestures designed to mimic and reinforce white middle class values, which ultimately influence the hiring decisions—and relative lack of diversity—of librarianship as a whole. i consider how the whiteness of librarianship may manifest long before the hiring process. by identifying and interrogating the body of white, middle class values inherent to both librarianship and professional job searching, i offer suggestions to encourage an authentically diverse pool of applicants. by angela galvan defining whiteness whiteness is a shifting status bestowed by those in power, intertwined with class relationships and the production of structural inequalities. see the transformation of italian, german, irish, and polish people from white ethnics to white over the 20th century in the united states. “the italian comes in at the bottom, and in the generation that came over the sea he stays there. in the slums he is welcomed as a tenant who ‘makes less trouble’ than the contentious irishman or the order-loving german.” (riis, 1890) for the sake of brevity, whiteness in this essay means: white, heterosexual, capitalist, and middle class. whiteness is “ideology based on beliefs, values behaviors, habits and attitudes, which result in the unequal distribution of power and privilege.” (http://www.ucalgary.ca/cared/whiteness) beliefs, values behaviors, habits, and attitudes become gestures, enactments, and unconsciously repetitive acts which reinforce hegemony. soliciting performance, hiding bias librarianship is paralyzed by whiteness. this will continue unabated without interrogating structures that benefit white librarians, including the performative nature of recruitment and hiring. the interview and academic job talk conceal institutional bias under the guise of “organizational fit” or a candidate’s “acceptability”, while the act of recruiting presents an aspirational version of the library to candidates. the standing-room-only presentation at association of college & research libraries 2015 on the experience of academic librarians of color suggests librarianship is at least aware of its demographics. some libraries are attempting to recruit broader pools of applicants, with a few offering ever-popular diversity residencies and fellowships. the fellowship model is mutually beneficial and offers chances to experiment with otherwise risky initiatives. however, fellowships mask precarity under the illusion of faculty status and support, when librarians accepting these positions may have neither (salo, 2013). while recruiting initiatives and fellowships are reasonable starting points, they become meaningless gestures for institutions which screen on performing whiteness. these actions are further undermined by framing diversity as a problem to be solved rather than engaging in reflective work to dismantle institutional bias. framing diversity as the problem implicitly suggests a final outcome, locating responsibility and discomfort away from white librarians while marginalizing colleagues who do not perform whiteness to the satisfaction of gatekeepers. finally, when librarians who are not white and middle class arrive, they are alienated as “the diversity hire”, erasing their skills, talents, and expertise (sendula, 2015). librarians with visible minority status are assigned more work, as many marginalized librarians are appointed to diversity and hiring committees by default. this strands non-white and middle class librarians in a “murky place between gratitude and anger” (bennett, 2015) as their visibility changes to suit the needs of the organization. that librarianship remains overwhelmingly white suggests marginalized librarians are seen when the institution finds it convenient, but rarely heard during critical stages of the hiring process. the current librarian job market solicits performance and creates barriers to entry in three ways: cultural negotiation, conspicuous leisure, and access to wealth. image by flickr user wolframburner (cc by-nc 2.0) barriers to entry culture the whiteness of librarianship begins long before the job application process, as traditionally underrepresented students come to university systems with varying experiences in libraries. conclusions on this subject vary: libraries can be a source of anxiety for marginalized students (haras, lopez & ferry, 2008); the university library can feel overwhelming compared to underfunded or nonexistent k-12 libraries (adkins and hussey, 2006); or the library as a site of abundance and discovery. nearly all scholarship on the subject agrees the library is a site where information seeking and cultural hegemony are negotiated (long, 2011; sadler and bourg, 2015). for marginalized students, an academic library may be the largest they’ve ever encountered. “for students from a nondominant culture, knowing how to use library resources is not merely about finding information but also about navigating culture.” (adkins and hussey, 2006) white savior narratives are found throughout librarianship, where white librarians are framed as benevolent actors toward people of color, who “lack the agency necessary to enact positive changes in their own lives. the underlying assumption is that people of color, on their own, fail to enact resilience,resistance, and success…any achievements in these areas seem to result from the initiatives of the white savior.” (cammarota, 2011) rather than disarm the “structural, systemic, oppressive conditions disproportionately affecting the most economically disadvantaged people”(groski, 2008) the middle class white savior perpetuates myths about poverty. marginalized patrons in libraries become the saved and lifted, without necessarily seeing themselves in the space of the library. students not reflected in the culture of the library are unlikely to see librarianship as a possibility (williams and van arnhem, 2015). marginalized students employed outside the university system face additional barriers as their work typically does not cultivate the development of a white collar professional identity. the hospitality industry, food service work, call centers, and other low income employment offers prescriptive identities, removing most agency from the employee. marginalized students in graduate programs arrive after enduring lifetimes of institutionalized oppression surrounding their origins, with a painful awareness the they of “professional language” refers to themselves (overall, 1995; johnson black, 1995; bennett, 2014). moving from a prescriptive work environment to a professional one requires a certain amount of socialization into white culture. i don’t think of myself as an ex-hotel night clerk, but will always be a librarian even if my job title doesn’t reflect this. librarianship is not simply what we do at work but a component of how we identify as people (gonzalez-smith, swanson & tanaka, 2014). this creates a dissonant sense of self and belonging in the profession, when our identity does not conform to professional expectations, “worldviews, or emotional orientations” (costello, 2005). librarians themselves manufacture the culture of whiteness, with its ever-shifting criteria and continuous trading in surfaces (ewen, 1988). our policies embrace the fiction of neutrality, while our spaces, practices, and culture are not neutral entities (sadler and bourg, 2015). the idea of library-as-neutral is seductive because of its usefulness and minimal intellectual effort required from white librarians: neutrality is the safest position for libraries because it situates whiteness not only as default, but rewards and promotes white cultural values. whiteness-as-default allowed the conversation about 2015’s banned books week poster to incorrectly assume no muslim women were part of the image’s construction, effectively acknowledging librarianship’s tendency to reproduce inequalities and in many cases manufacture them in our systems and practices. from organizational structures and descriptions, to images and policy, librarians engage numerous fictions upholding cultural hegemony (drabinski, 2013). “libraries and professional organizations have put together documents and policies on information ethics and intellectual freedom in an attempt to broaden the professional perspective. while these are important policies and procedures, they still reinforce cultural hegemony as they are primarily written in the language of those in power. for example, statements on professional ethics are put together by professional organizations, the overwhelming majority of whose members are white. intellectual freedom is influenced by the discursive formations of those who write and enforce these policies. it is those in power who decide what level of intellectual freedom the library will support.” (adkins and hussey, 2006) while librarians may fill social media with images of what librarians look like, our professional organizations and policy language articulate further what successful librarians look like: how they organize, what voices are heard, how they construct strategy, which crisis are acceptable to address and which should be suppressed under tone arguments or claims of unprofessional behavior. the fiction of neutrality became apparent to me as a circulation desk clerk in a large public library system. over winter break i visited an affluent suburb of cleveland, ohio where my partner’s family lives. we toured the public library and i was impressed with the college and career prep resources available. at my home branch i asked if i could make a similar display. i was told “our kids aren’t really the college type,” and reluctantly allowed to maintain a small collection in the young adult section. this same system employed several librarians who insisted on business wear for work in a casual dress environment, explaining “children in this neighborhood need a model for what a professional is, because they don’t have contact with any.” many public library systems continue to address poverty from a deficit theory framework, ignoring the connection between treating poor people as inherently flawed and the profession’s inability to recruit marginalized workers. a question posted to librarian wardrobe suggests one applicant’s struggle to be comfortable, yet professional during interviews. “i tend towards a ‘soft butch’ style and a very broke budget, but i have a major interview coming up. any suggestions for an outfit that gets across my personal identity, my willingness to crawl around looking for a book, but also my professionalism?” this poster reveals their gender performance during an interview is necessary to maintain the comfort of others, not to present the ‘authentic self’ search committees claim to want. their question, like so many others i found during my research, is about this maintenance. how can i be butch, but not too butch? should i buy a plain band for my left hand if i am unmarried? should i dye my hair or have it relaxed? how provocative is a suit that isn’t gray, black, or navy? where can i buy a button down shirt that will not gape at my chest? will not wearing makeup cost me a job? if transcripts are required, how will i explain a differently gendered name? each question reflects problems about how to address the cultural expectations of whiteness in the context of othered bodies. librarians who wear natural hair, whose shape/stature make it difficult to find professional dress, or librarians with disabilities have found their bodies as they exist to be deemed unprofessional. rather than assign this failure to designers’ inability to account for variations in bodies, this is passed on to applicants. few blame manufacturers for ill-fitting suits. we blame bodies for not conforming to them. such anxieties are pervasive, even when acknowledged. in 2014, i sat on a panel discussing gender, agency, and resistance where one presenter–a scholar from india–expressed concern in the context of her research how wearing a sari during her talk would mean risking objectification and dismissal in a room full of feminist folklorists. the academic job talk is similarly concerning, as the growing tendency to record and make available such talks transforms the interview process into a mediated performance. an intellectual understanding of bias isn’t enough, it must be interrogated to dismantle the mechanisms which produce bias. conspicuous leisure and wealth in flooded job markets, barriers to entry can include requiring prior library service for any library job. while mlis students benefit from on the job experience, such screening policies would exclude promising applicants unable to enroll in face-to-face programs: rural students, students with nonstandard work schedules, students with family obligations, students transitioning careers, and other mlis-holders outside the fictions of “ideal worker” (davies, 2014). hiring librarians has documented responses from hiring managers claiming students in online programs cannot work in teams or learn effectively, when many students choose online programs for the exact opposite reasons. as with myths about poverty which overshadow the well-established resourcefulness of poor students, online mlis students are dismissed as asocial and not “team players”. bias against online mlis students is especially harmful to rural and underfunded libraries, in light of the geography of mlis-holders (sin, 2011). the reality of post-mlis education includes thousands of webinars, moocs, chats, listservs, virtual meetings, systems work, and other collaborative technologies. suggesting online programs lack rigor or cannot result in “real” learning is harmful, technophobic, and helps maintain the whiteness of academic libraries. this attitude favors applicants with the wealth and time to enroll in face to face programs, even though very little of their development as librarians occurs in lecture style, classroom settings. “candidates must prove that they want it enough, prove that they are ‘the best’, where ‘the best’ sometimes just means the most willing and able to work for free” (hudson, 2014). conspicuous leisure manifests in the time lost learning to perform whiteness and the wealth required to do so effectively. unpack for a moment what the notion of being “put together” professionally involves: hairstyles, makeup, becoming comfortable in costuming which may or may not be designed for our bodies, voice coaching to eliminate accents and modify tone, time for exercise to appear “healthy”, orthopedics to address poor posture, orthodontics and teeth whitening, eye contacts if our lenses distort our appearance, concealing body modifications, and the countless ways marginalized librarians modify gesture, develop behavioral scripts, and otherwise conceal their authentic selves in the interest of survival. favoring applications with access to time and wealth is a larger manifestation of problems in hiring for libraries: we choose people like us because it is easy, rather than advocating for different views by picking “unfamiliar” candidates who might interrogate the processes. this manifests in micro (but no less harmful) aggressions if librarians who aren’t white and middle class manage to get hired and do not perform to “model minority” standards or otherwise refuse to sit quietly. “our reviews are full of words like ‘shrill’, ‘abrasive’, ‘hard to work with’, ‘not a team player’, and ‘difficult’. we’re encouraged to be nicer and less intimidating and more helpful. action items and measurable metrics are nowhere to be found.” (tableflip.club) for marginalized librarians, the successful performance of whiteness may include integrating aspects of the self which allow white saviors to feel good: i am resilient; i overcome; i have transcended my station. such gestures convey applicants understand the rules of whiteness and hidden curriculum of the academy. strategically revealed narratives of working nonstandard hours, surviving “bad” neighborhoods, single parents, holding multiple jobs while attending school, and similar stories can become currency in white culture (cecire, 2015). white culture embraces stories of overcoming intense odds while learning to perform whiteness, in the same way it creates and consumes stories of poverty tourism and role play for self-promotion: food stamp challenges, homeless awareness “sleep outs”, and the ever-expanding white savior industrial complex. recently, these stories have migrated away from individual librarians to libraries as institutions: media coverage of uprisings in ferguson, baltimore, and others center the library as a character in resiliency narratives. while the institution benefits in the short term from increased attention and support, this reinforces an ongoing messaging problem: libraries are most visible in the context of state sponsored violence. libraries cannot simply possess inherent value, they must be framed as populist defenders or as sanctuary. above all else they must struggle. by contrast, librarianship assumes access to wealth or tolerance for debt to afford tuition, professional membership, and service opportunities. if i activate my american library association membership for all divisions and sections applicable for my job, the annual fee would come to $223 usd. this does not include conference registration fees, travel costs, a safe place to rest, or food. activity in local and regional groups varies in cost, depending on the organization’s philosophy. competitiveness in the current job market requires at minimum a well-placed practicum experience conducting librarian level work, but only students with access to money can afford to take an unpaid internship. galleries, libraries, archives, and museums throughout the united states continue exploiting unpaid labor, insuring the pool of well-qualified academic librarians skews white and middle class. in the application process, asking for salary history is careless and further privileges a particular kind of applicant. for marginalized hires, salary history is another instance in a lifetime of humiliating scrutiny and surveillance on behalf of the state: the free application for student aid (fafsa), housing vouchers, the supplemental nutrition assistance program (snap), charity organizations, free or reduced cost student lunches, and invasive discussions with intervention professionals. fafsa and snap programs are specific to the united states, but surveillance apparatus can be found wherever the “dole” exists. librarianship as a profession suffers when practitioners conflate sacrifice with worth, as though receiving comparatively lower salaries were justified due to our status as workers with a “calling”. marginalized librarians–especially women–are taught to avoid negotiation and highlighting their accomplishments, to say nothing of diminished opportunities to build a livable salary history. this is culturally reinforced, as women pay measurable social costs for promoting themselves (bowles, 2007). marginalized librarians find themselves trapped in a rigged process: provide salary history and be underpaid, demand more and be rejected, all with the knowledge that salary will provide access to professional development opportunities. for marginalized librarians, functioning at work requires navigating white cultural norms, conforming to professional orientations potentially at odds with their identity, taking on the additional work of speaking for an entire group of people (gonzalez-smith, swanson & tanaka, 2014) and for women, engaging in emotional labor to “be nicer” rather than producing tangible results. librarianship can claim to recruit a diverse workforce, but without interrogating whiteness, the only winning move for marginalized librarians is not to play. the responsibility of fostering an inclusive workforce must fall to white librarians in power.   interrogating whiteness how can we interrogate the process? as i watch other marginalized librarians go through their job searches, a few ideas come to mind: in the absence of paid internships, offer professional development: pay for a conference or workshop attendance fees. if this is not possible, integrate opportunities for networking and mimicking the gestures of professional socialization. offer hands-on, project driven assignments, and create opportunities to showcase critical thinking and data-driven decision making to interns. weeding books for three weeks and journaling the experience in a blog is not a solid project, yet i’ve seen this offered as one a half dozen times. practicum requirements in library and information science graduate programs are meant to be process assignments; a conversation about meaningful, engaging work is part of that process. offer flexible times for internships. requiring specific availability is the prerogative of the library, but understand this limits the diversity of your applicant pool. partial or fully virtual internships offer tremendous opportunities for the library to expand as a truly 24-hour entity. update boilerplate job descriptions to remove salary history requirements. given the profession’s reliance on unpaid labor and part-time work, salary history does not reflect individual worth or ability. screen interview notes for biased language. “doesn’t seem professional” as criticism without articulating why is a problem. when someone says “i just like them better,” find out why. if search committees consistently defer to one member, find out why. decide what you are attempting to measure with interview questions. open-ended questions have answers that feel correct–there’s nothing wrong with behavioral interviews but hiding bias in a “correct” answer or “gut feeling” is a problem. avoid using white savior narratives when dealing with communities and patrons in poverty. when seeking marginalized employees to serve on diversity, hiring, or outreach committees, consider if this is the only kind of service work they’re asked to do.  consistently asking the same people to perform emotional labor causes burnout and suggests the organization is not listening to marginalized staff. remember diversity is not always visible, and people should not have to disclose their lived experience to be heard by the organization. provide anonymous options for employee feedback. give people the power to do their jobs. actionably curious librarians without basic agency required to explore reskilling and shifting responsibilities causes breathtaking harm to our profession. research suggests a number of librarians are bypassing this conversation altogether to avoid paternal it policy, hostile administration, and often both (yelton, 2015). librarians in environments with agency and trust consistently build wonderful things. conclusions librarianship in the united states lacks diversity because the existing workforce functions within oppressive structures, while the culture of whiteness in libraries maintains them. recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce is the responsibility of all librarians, but this process will move faster with individual voices in power interrogating bias in their practices. while these suggestions are not exhaustive nor universal in their application, i hope they can function as starting points for difficult but necessary discussions. thanks to cecily walker, jessica olin, and annie pho for asking hard questions and wading through my rusty prose. cecily in particular tolerated many stream-of-consciousness twitter dms. this essay would not exist without stephanie sendaula, brit bennett, and many other librarians and writers whose work shaped my thoughts. i am grateful for the library and information science job seekers who shared their anxieties, their victories, and infectious tenacity. works cited adkins, d., & hussey, l. (2006). the library in the lives of latino college students. the library quarterly, 76(4), 456-480. bennett, brit. (2014, december 17). i don’t know what to do with good white people. jezebel. http://jezebel.com/i-dont-know-what-to-do-with-good-white-people-1671201391 (accessed 12/20/2014) bennett, brit. [@britbennett]. (2015, april 3). as someone who has been in so many privileged spaces, i know that murky place between gratitude and anger all too well. [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/britrbennett/status/584077605026029568 bowles, h. r., babcock, l., & lai, l. (may 01, 2007). social incentives for gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations: sometimes it does hurt to ask. organizational behavior and human decision processes, 103, 1, 84-103. cammarota, j. (january 01, 2011). blindsided by the avatar: white saviors and allies out of hollywood and in education. review of education, pedagogy & cultural studies,33, 3, 242-259. cecire, natalia. (2015, april 26) resilience and unbreakability. works cited  http://natalia.cecire.org/pop-culture/resilience-and-unbreakability/ (accessed 04/27/2015) costello, c. y. (2005). professional identity crisis: race, class, gender, and success at professional schools. nashville, tenn: vanderbilt university press. davies, a. (2014). the origins of the ideal worker: the separation of work and home in the united states from the market revolution to 1950. work and occupations, 41(1), 18 – 39. dews, c. l. b., & law, c. l. (1995). this fine place so far from home: voices of academics from the working class. philadelphia: temple university press. see carolyn leste law’s introduction and laurel johnson black’s essay, “stupid rich bastards”. drabinski, e. (april 01, 2013). queering the catalog: queer theory and the politics of correction. the library quarterly, 83, 2, 94-111. ewen, s. (1988). all consuming images: the politics of style in contemporary culture. new york: basic books. gonzalez-smith, swanson, & tanaka (2014). unpacking identity: racial, ethnic, and professional identity and academic librarians of color. in pagowsky, n., & rigby, m. e. (eds). the librarian stereotype: deconstructing perceptions and presentations of information work. (149-173). chicago, il. association of college & research libraries. haras, c., lopez, e. m., & ferry, k. (september 01, 2008). (generation 1.5) latino students and the library: a case study. the journal of academic librarianship, 34, 5, 425-433. hudson, cate. (november 18, 2014) we hire the best. model view culture, 18: hiring. modelviewculture.com/pieces/we-hire-the-best (accessed 2/10/2015). mcmillan cottom, tresse. (2013, october 29) the logic of stupid poor people. tressiemc http://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-people/ (accessed 03/25/2014) riis, j. a. (1890). how the other half lives: studies among the tenements of new york. (making of america.) new york: charles scribner’s sons. sadler, b., bourg, c. (2015). feminism and the future of library discovery. code4lib journal, 28. http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10425 (accessed 4/15/2015) salo, d. (august 15, 2013). how to scuttle a scholarly-communication initiative. journal of librarianship and scholarly communication, 1, 4.) sendaula, stephanie. [@sendulas]. (2015, march 26). lrt: plus, it’s super awkward when colleagues and/or patrons ask if you’re the diversity hire. [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/sendaulas/status/581152140955095040 sin, s. c. j. (january 01, 2011). neighborhood disparities in access to information resources: measuring and mapping u.s. public libraries’ funding and service landscapes. library and information science research, 33, 1, 41-53. williams iii, j., van arnhem, j. (2015) but then you have to make it happen code4lib journal, 28. http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10487 (accessed 4/15/2015) yelton, a. (april, 2015). political and social dimensions of library code. (chapter 5) (report). library technology reports, 51, 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/ltr.51n3   diversity, job market, librarianship, organizational culture “i’m just really comfortable:” learning at home, learning in libraries revising academic library governance handbooks 42 responses cuttingthecheez 2015–06–04 at 12:05 pm great discussion and breakdown of this issue! mary anderson 2015–06–04 at 6:59 pm sorry, but i didn’t get much past the first paragraph. i’m white. i’m heterosexual. i’ve been middle class for most of my life, and i’ve definitely benefited from capitalism. i came to librarianship at the age of fifty. this is the first full-time, permanent job i’ve ever had. it developed after i worked for two years as an intern. my internship was posted on the internship site of the library school at the multiculturally diverse university were i was earning my mlis. my internship was at a multiculturally diverse university that’s on the cutting edge of diversity research and activism. yet there were few (if any) other applicants, of any color or persuasion. i worked my butt off and was lucky enough to be hired full time so i could support myself after going through a nasty divorce, having major surgery, and finding myself in a newly emptied nest. everyone’s different. we all have challenges to overcome, and we all have opportunities to make excuses or step up, but ultimately we’re all responsible for making our own paths. just my two cent’s worth. fiona blackburn 2015–06–23 at 9:07 pm hello mary you’ve had a difficult time. there’s no question that the library industry is a tough nut to crack and it doesn’t give all that much return. imagine how much harder it must be for people up against the inbuilt biases and obstacles that angela describes. i’m an australian librarian so i’m not familiar with a lot of the structures and processes that she mentions but i do know that as an anglo middle aged female i benefit enormously from being white. i know for instance that i don’t have to wonder whether i didn’t get that job, or that tenancy, or was overlooked at the shop counter because i’m black or my english isn’t very good or i’m a migrant or refugee. because i’m white and not black or a migrant or a refugee, i know i won’t get abused on public transport or singled out for contumely by my government. further, i got my start in librarianship in a library that had a local indigenous knowledge collection – and looking after it was my responsibility, a white woman from thousands of miles away, not a local indigenous person. yes we all make our own paths but we don’t all have the same start – some of us have much more difficult terrain to travel through. and some of us will be far more affected by reverses than others; and sometimes lack of resources and experience or different experience will be the factor that means we’re more affected by those reverses than others are. there is much more debate in united states librarianship about matters like this than in australia – well done to those who have raised them; i acknowledge your strength and the persistence it takes to raise them and get their veracity accepted, even if only by some. pingback : latest library links 5th june 2015 | latest library links pingback : librarian to be. . . max macias 2015–06–07 at 3:51 pm thank you for your lucid breakdown of what is going on in librarianship when it comes to ethnic equity and inclusion. the explication by you explains why there is no progress when it comes to ethnic inclusion and equity in librarianship. this means that those people of color who do make it in libraries–tend to be beholden and reinforcers of the status quo. this is also a reason for a lack of innovative thought in this area. thank you for this post! andrew finegan 2015–06–08 at 8:03 am whilst i find your research and discussion fascinating and worthwhile, i have to admit that i’m extremely uncomfortable with the term “whiteness”. just as i would be extremely uncomfortable with the term “person of colour” if somebody chose to describe me that way. just as somebody of german / irish / italian / polish descent might object to their cultural identity to be reduced to “white”. i would suggest that a more appropriate term would be “privilege” – as this is something that race, gender and class all contribute to, without evoking overly-simplified ideas of racial identity. andrew finegan 2015–06–08 at 3:20 pm but that aside, i pretty much agree that there’s a lack of diversity in libraries, and without it, libraries will struggle to truly represent the needs of its communities, whether it is in its collections, its services, or its capacity for advocacy as a community hub. shgmclicious 2015–06–25 at 1:16 pm one of the reasons we fail to move forward in this conversation and conversations about privilege in numerous other fields is because white people are afraid to own their whiteness. whiteness is not an insult. but it is what you are. it’s of course not all you are, but it’s important to recognize that having the privilege to be a part of whiteness and to look white is a major advantage in the world. fiona blackburn 2015–06–25 at 7:10 pm i don’t know that we’re afraid of acknowledging our whiteness as we don’t realise we’re white and we don’t realise what being white means. white is the ‘norm’, so ‘normal’ that it’s invisible to those who are white. that invisibility means that conversations about discrimination start with the focus on blackness, or colour, or other differences – which focus of course reinforces the norm of whiteness, and so it goes. celia 2015–06–08 at 9:30 am thank you for this article. in response to other commenters, i’d point towards johnson’s ‘privilege, power, and difference’ for more on why privilege sometimes gets tied in specifically with whiteness (even though not all white people get to *feel* the experience of social privilege). if you’re white (like i am!) please take the time to read more on whiteness; there are a range of educated perspectives. pay attention to the stress, the worry, and the frustration that can come from reading about whiteness & diversity. i’m still learning, myself. so much going on in your article, angela. thanks so much. it’s good for librarians to be aware of the impact of our implicit culture on librarians from minority communities (extra workload), young librarians (unpaid, menial tasks), new older librarians (often undervalued or face age discrimination), librarians from poor communities (who put the most into their job and get the least back) and librarians who otherwise struggle to ‘fit in’ to the expectations we have for each other. keep with it, whether you’re white or of color, male or female, whatever your origin, sexuality, religion, or class — we need all of us here and recreating librarianship as a space that welcomes all of us. pingback : library values and the alt-ac career | the dumpling cart bob schroeder 2015–06–08 at 11:30 am thank you for this informative look at how the interview process looks though eyes different than mine. i was just at the capal conference in ottawa and one of the leitmotivs in the sessions was the need to hire more diverse librarians. but as we furthered this discussion over mealtime it became clear to me that this is only the beginning of the process. i think what many of us really want is someone “diverse” to come on board so we can check off that all important diversity check box; someone that will easily, by the time their tenure vote rolls around, learn to be more like “us.” (i a white male). i think for diversity to really work we (who are in power in libraries) need to really want diversity, which means unexpected, and wonderful change. not that we’re hiring diverse people to change us, but knowing that we, and our institutions, will be changed in ways we don’t comprehend. we in power have to be open and ready for the struggles and ultimate benefits a diverse workforce will bring. emily 2015–06–12 at 2:50 am thank you for this work. i would love to hear more of your thoughts on how we can support new librarians (especially “diversity hires”) once they get into their jobs. as an early-career librarian, i moved to a new city to start a new job. i’m not the only poc in my office, but i will be soon. however, i don’t feel secure enough in my position to engage in hypercritical issues with my supervisors about race. i’m pretty good at navigating white cultural norms and i hate to be the token voice, but i’m also starting to feel very isolated. what i miss most about my university days are the poc-only spaces i could access. there has to be a way to create safer spaces (virtually or physically) for self-identified minority librarians (what is the right term?) to get together and support each other. and what if that means creating spaces where white folks aren’t allowed? will there be a backlash? will we make ourselves even more vulnerable? i’m afraid to find out. seth allen 2015–06–12 at 9:49 am not to mention religious and technological biases – i worked for two small seminaries. people scoffed at theological librarians since they though we held dusty bibles all day, but we do a variety of tasks. and getting a job at an impoverished library that lacks technology is not helpful when every job ad requires someone who knows how to use libguides, virtual chat, and other tools of affluence. jumping from a job with little resources to a well-staffed library is hard. veronica 2015–06–12 at 12:54 pm this is a fascinating article generating a much-needed conversation. i think a lot of your “interrogation” points really challenge us reflect on the way we approach diversity in libraries, particularly your point about diversity not always being visible, and your comments about questioning biases that are couched in language of a candidate’s “fit.” and can i just say, thank you for the call to end the “white savior” narrative. it is rampant in higher education (not just academic libraries and libraries generally) and it is completely marginalizing to the groups of students it claims to want to help. department of library and information science 2015–06–16 at 3:16 am have just gone through the article and its quite good. cheers pingback : are online mlis degree-holders “less than?” | information wants to be free abi solanke 2015–06–23 at 2:54 pm one of the reasons for terminating my library appointment was “request to attend a wedding.” of course, i am african-american in a white dominated library and university. pingback : mls student summer reading ischool mls shgmclicious 2015–06–25 at 1:11 pm the overwhelming whiteness and the microaggressions that come with being nonwhite and being young (can we talk about how white people always think people of color are younger than they are because they just don’t know how to look at people of color) are why i’m leaving the field two years after graduation. and why i never felt all that comfortable or welcome in libraries to begin with. “i don’t think of myself as an ex-hotel night clerk, but will always be a librarian even if my job title doesn’t reflect this. librarianship is not simply what we do at work but a component of how we identify as people” this. i mean, not hotel clerk, but other jobs. i will have those tendencies, i know people will always ask me for booklists, i will always like to organize and standardize and control vocabulary…but i’m done with working in this area. daisy 2015–06–29 at 11:40 am i appreciate the analysis and suggestions for practice. nice work. however, i just read (haras, lopez & ferry, 2008) and i can not find where this case-study states that “libraries can be a source of anxiety for marginalized students.” i do not disagree with this statement; i just do not see college-student stress or anxiety addressed in the case-study cited. perhaps this citation was an error. galvan_as 2015–06–29 at 11:55 am thank you for your comment. in this case no, that study does not ultimately _conclude_ academic libraries are a source of anxiety. my citation draws largely from the paragraph: “while most students expressed confidence that they were not “hopeless” when it comes to research, they also recounted experiences in which teachers did not adequately prepare them in the use of the library, of substandard school library collections, and of frustrated attempts at using the academic library. barely three-quarters engaged in some form of research activity during high school. one in four students did not do any research until college. however, since information literacy skills are not mandated in california’s public schools, it is hard to make the case that academic library usage and library comfort are inevitable for any student.” (431) this suggested anxiety to me. pingback : hack your summer: part one | hls ignayseeoh 2015–07–01 at 6:25 pm don’t get me wrong, i do believe that people instinctively show bias toward individuals who are most similar to them in terms of appearance and behavior. and that certainly helps explain in part why the library profession has struggled to reflect the diversity of the united states as a whole. but i think this is more a matter of human psychology than the result of some imaginary “white structure” implemented to oppress all people of color. not all white people are the same and not all people of color are the same. in fact, almost everyone and every family is an amalgam of different races and ethnicities. it is strange that an argument for diversity can fail to capture this essential truth and reduce humanity in such…forgive me…black and white terms. the author seems misguided by elements of critical race theory, which in turn cause her to make sweeping generalizations about categories of people without regard to differences relating to socio-political-economic class. moreover, she has reduced american society to a manichean dualism based on characteristics that she has arbitrarily determined as preeminent. that says more about her than it does about society. seriously, why isn’t whiteness defined simply as the state of being white? (incidentally, the author never clearly defines what “white” means either.) why does a white person have to be straight, possess a savings account, and enjoy reading the wall street journal? the author never answers these questions. apparently, these are self-evident truths. does that mean if you are irish-american and gay or a blonde communist that you’re not white? and who gets to decide racial/ethnic membership? is there a white tribal council that determines all of this? and does that mean conversely that if i’m a person of color who dresses professionally, speaks standard english, and aspires to be a successful businessman that i’ve somehow joined the dark side (or the white side depending on how you look at it) and betrayed my people? this is what happens when one mixes victimhood with interdisciplinary studies. i agree: the library profession lacks diversity. but analyzing it from such a narrow, propagandist lens will do more harm than good. race and ethnicity are complex concepts that require more sophisticated tools of analysis. i’m not saying that race and ethnicity don’t matter. but we can and should do better than this. esther 2015–07–06 at 1:32 pm hi, ignacio, i see your point, but when i read the article, and re-read it now, i can’t say i agree. i feel like ms. galvan does explain who is part of the patriarchy at issue from the very beginning: “whiteness in this essay means: white, heterosexual, capitalist, and middle class.” the points ms. galvan makes are important, and they seem to be missed in your response. the points in the article don’t treat “mainstream professionalism” as invalid. doe does point out how exclusive it can be, and that value can come from people that don’t fit that particular mold. she seems to ask a broader question. can a library worker look and speak in a way that others consider “non-professionally,” as you put it? someone with a lisp, someone who mispronounces “libary” for library, code-switches, dress differently (bright colors, “loud” accessories, ethnic jewelry, thrifty clothes, soft-butch style)? just by asking the question, we are now able to bring to light the issues we face all the time: being hired, at staff meetings, when creating committees. we are limited, and continue to be limited. in my opinion, it doesn’t help to reduce the points made while also knowing that the full message of the article isn’t being addressed. i am so excited by ms. galvan’s article! we talk so little about diversity, and offer such few solutions. it was thrilling when school library journal had an issue devoted to diversity, and it would be wonderful if other library publications followed suit. we don’t have one single problem when it comes to diversity, but many, and it is really, really great to see all the comments/discussions going on thanks to this article being published. alecto greenslade 2015–07–06 at 10:23 pm hi all i think it helps to think about these issues from a systemic perspective, rather than an individual one. here is australia, our frameworks are western, ie white, although there is another set of cultures (aboriginal and torres strait islander) that have existed here for much longer than european settlement. nevertheless we live in a westminster form of government, an english system of law, in an environment where protestant and catholic religions are dominant and where most migrants come from britain (yes still!). our politicians are disproportionately white. i worked in a prison library last yea; the custodial officers were predominantly white, aboriginal and torres strait islander people were disproportionately represented and other minority groups were also present in larger proportion than they are in the general population. every migrant, and the indigenous peoples, have to fit into those systems. yes those systems have changed to accommodate some aspects of the cultures migrants from other parts of the world (thank goodness) but they are still recognisably english. it’s still not uncommon for migrants from parts of asia, for instance, to choose an anglicised name when they get here, to fit in more quickly, rather than use their own name; people with qualifications in their home country have to gain equivalent recognition before they can work in their profession (this can mean starting their qualification from scratch). from this perspective, we live in a white world, into which individuals in all their complexity and diversity fit themselves, where ‘white’ is the institutional norm so that, for instance, the problems that arise for aboriginal people living here are labelled ‘indigenous issues’ rather than problems of inbuilt disadvantage. even though the workforce in the library service where i am employed is almost as diverse as the rest of the australian population, library systems are unchanged by that or by the diversity of the population; there is one person, one, in management who is not white. i think it’s more useful to think about issues of whiteness this way, looking at structures first and the consequences for people second, rather than try and measure individuals’ whiteness. cheers libraryleadpipe 2015–07–06 at 4:28 pm we’ve had to delete a couple of comments in this thread, so it seems like a good time to remind people of the in the library with the lead pipe comment policy: “we appreciate and invite your comments and discussion about articles on in the library with the lead pipe. constructive criticism is one of our primary goals, and we applaud it in our readers. comments that violate our code of conduct, disregard the article’s topic, or fail to add to the discussion will be deleted. we do not edit comments except by request of the poster.” 5lawslib 2015–07–11 at 7:19 pm in the library with the lead pipe » soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness & librarianship http://t.co/ncofu69d43 ramon trane 2015–07–22 at 5:16 pm great article. no doubt that libraries reinforce, like any other institution, this whiteness. no news. pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » why diversity matters: a roundtable discussion on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship pingback : weekly round-up | hls pingback : an if-i-was-going-to-saa hypothetical schedule | library blerg pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct multilingualism, neoliberalism, and language ideologies in libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 29 apr ean henninger /7 comments multilingualism, neoliberalism, and language ideologies in libraries in brief this article calls for a more holistic and inclusive approach to the under-examined issue of language in libraries. it begins by foregrounding language as a category of difference and arguing for its consideration in discussions of access, equity, diversity, and inclusion. by drawing on literature from applied linguistics and library and information studies, it then explores the effects of neoliberalism and language ideologies as two factors that affect the treatment of language in libraries. neoliberalism extends market logic to non-economic realms of life, ignores or commodifies cultural and affective aspects of language use, places languages in competition with each other, and promotes utilitarian and managerial responses to language issues. meanwhile, language ideologies promote adherence to standard language forms, bolster the idea that one language can be better than another, and make certain languages a requirement for fully accessing the library. both ideologies foster reductive views of language, cover for other forms of oppression, and limit diversity and representation. finally, the article offers solutions to counter these approaches, such as increasing staff and collection capacity, creating policies, programming, and training that address language issues, and promoting the treatment of language in libraries as a site of analysis and discussion. read the article resumen este ensayo tiene como propósito promover una mentalidad más inclusiva y holística en cuanto a temas relacionados al uso de la lengua, como el multilingüismo, en las bibliotecas – asuntos que han sido poco examinados en la literatura. empieza por describir el lenguaje como categoría de diferencia y abogar por su consideración en las discusiones sobre la accesibilidad, la equidad, la diversidad, y la inclusión. a través de un análisis basado en la lingüística aplicada y los estudios de bibliotecas e información, este ensayo explora los efectos del neoliberalismo y las ideologías lingüísticas como dos factores que afectan las maneras en que se considera la lengua en las bibliotecas. el neoliberalismo, al extender la lógica de la economía a realidades no-económicas de la vida diaria, ignora o mercantiliza aspectos culturales y afectivos del uso del lenguaje, situando las lenguas en competición entre ellas, y promoviendo respuestas utilitarias y gerenciales a los asuntos del lenguaje. a la misma vez, ciertas ideologías lingüísticas fomentan adherencia a variedades estándares de las lenguas, apoyando la idea que una lengua puede ser mejor que otra, y convirtiendo ciertas lenguas en requisito para acceder a las bibliotecas. ambas ideologías fomentan perspectivas reduccionistas del lenguaje, cubren otras formas de opresión, y limitan la diversidad y la representación. al final, el presente ensayo ofrece algunas ideas para retar estas ideologías, tal como aumentar la capacidad de los empleados y las colecciones, crear políticas, eventos, y programación informadas por el multilingüismo, además de fomentar una capacitación profesional que incluya asuntos de lengua y promoción del uso de la lengua en las bibliotecas como locus de análisis y discusión. lee el artículo by ean henninger introduction in libraries, as elsewhere in life, language is both a means of oppression and a force for positive change. people use it to exclude and marginalize, and they use it to uplift and give a voice to others. following a social constructivist approach, it is also a key means by which people build and engage with infrastructures and ideologies. language is important to consider in public and academic libraries across the world because they are highly linguistic spaces: they contain people, texts, information, instruction, and more, all of which rely on language to relate to each other. as well, past and ongoing colonial and capitalist projects have used both language (heller & mcelhinny, 2017) and libraries (popowich, 2019) to further their goals, making the interplay between the two a potential site of analysis, understanding, and positive social change. authors in the library field have critically explored language in many different ways, most often through examining specific aspects of it such as microaggressions (e.g. sweeney & cooke, 2018) and classification (e.g. drabinski, 2013). while such articles connect those aspects to broader issues of marginalization and power, there is less connecting them to or grounding them in a systemic analysis of language itself. collins (2018), in her exploration of language, power, and oppression via a critique of diversity discourse, suggests that language practices remain underexamined in the library field. one reason is likely that, as she points out, when “language is a tool for considering every other possible barrier, interrogating language itself is an easy omission to make” (p. 40). another possible reason is language’s role, also described by collins, in establishing, locating, and consolidating power. when examining the workings of language could create space for interrogation and possible change, those in power may, whether consciously or not, have a vested interest in avoiding or co-opting that investigation. i agree that language remains underexamined, and to build on this work, i am interested in exploring the role of specific languages in relation to each other, or to put it another way, discussing multilingualism in libraries. looking at language in general is important, but discussing the treatment of specific languages is also worthwhile, both for practical reasons and because it offers concrete examples of broader ideologies that influence library services. in particular, multilingualism foregrounds the ways that language operates as a category of difference and intersects with other differences to produce structures of privilege and oppression. just as language in general has power, specific languages have more power than others in many contexts, a situation which is sometimes referred to as linguistic dominance (accurso, 2015). in supporting specific languages and giving them power, libraries set conditions for who can engage with the library: who can access resources, who feels included, and who sees themselves in collections and services. not only do languages have power, they are complex, and decisions about a given language must be made with an understanding of that language’s full context. if a library treats a given language only as an object of study, something that resides in individual books, or something that must be supplied to meet demand, not as something that is intertwined with culture, race, gender, and access to power, then the picture is incomplete. such an incomplete view will result in services that fail to adequately support library users. in this light, actions such as having an official language of instruction, collecting language-learning materials, and building infrastructure such as signage and websites in certain languages are not neutral actions. professed neutrality with regards to language would perhaps make sense if all languages existed in a vacuum and were on equal footing, but instead, they belong to people, and people are anything but neutral. as park and wee (2012, pp. 143-149) describe, constructing a given language as neutral obscures the power relations that give rise to that assumption of neutrality. present and historical power imbalances, geographic contexts, staff capacity, and more all mean that the treatment of languages in libraries indicates values and ideologies with implications for equity, diversity, inclusion, and access. multilingualism and social justice piller (2016) discusses multilingualism and social justice at length, problematizing common notions of linguistic diversity and offering numerous examples of linguistic barriers and exclusion in work, education, politics, and society more broadly. she resists conceptions of languages as discrete and standardized objects, pointing out how even variations within languages can be grounds for marginalization. in this view, multilingualism also encompasses these variations, such as dialects, accents, and registers, and blends of different languages, such as codeswitching. piller also makes a case for language as a means of establishing a difference that intersects with gender, race, class, and more, producing inequality in complex ways. inequality and discrimination based on language is also known as linguicism (vásquez, 2013), and it takes many forms. in some cases, language results in inequality by itself when people who are less familiar with a given language are less able to access resources mediated through that language. in such cases, making specific languages a condition for access to services can be a significant barrier. in other cases, languages, dialects, and accents, from their associations with markers such as race and nationality, serve as proxies for other forms of discrimination. this discrimination is often implicit, but it can also be extremely explicit, such as with the prohibition of indigenous languages in residential schools, prejudice against african-american vernacular english, and the many documented cases of white people in the us and canada telling people using languages such as spanish and chinese to “speak english.” as these examples suggest, incidents that invoke language are rarely just about language: they call to mind racism, nationalism, and the erasure of indigenous and other languages through colonization, assimilation, and dispossession. heller and mcelhinny (2017) explore these historical roots and their current manifestations in-depth, noting languages’ roles in difference and inequality as they trace how missionaries, educators, anthropologists, and others have produced and legitimized boundaries between languages and the people who use them, privileging certain languages over others in the service of colonialism and capitalism. given the past and present realities of colonialism and capitalism, and given that libraries are complicit in the broader structures that have brought them about, libraries cannot possibly be free from their effects. alternatives to the linguistic marginalization and inequality created by these and other forces require responses that recognize the value and dignity of all languages and the people who speak them. part of this response involves understanding and identifying the ideologies that drive these processes, as describing their operations can open them up to analysis and change. two examples of ideology that shape responses to multilingualism in libraries and have been underexamined in this regard are neoliberalism and language ideologies. neoliberalism excludes various aspects of languages by focusing solely on their market value as commodities, while language ideologies result in the privileging of certain languages or language variations over others. neoliberalism neoliberalism as a concept has been explored with some frequency in the literature on both language and libraries. a precise definition is difficult given the variety of contexts in which it manifests, but holborow (2012) identifies four main ways to approach it, all centered on notions of individual freedom within a market-centric economy: as an economic theory, a mode of capitalist production, a form of discourse, and an ideology. whatever the approach, neoliberalism seeks to extend capitalist market logic to all aspects of life, not just economic or political ones, and specific features of this logic affecting languages in libraries include commodification, decontextualization, demand, and economic utility. authors in the library field have demonstrated the prevalence of neoliberalism in a variety of settings: in public libraries through policy documents (greene & mcmenemy, 2012), a “customer-driven” service approach that avoids social responsibility (hudson, 2017), in academic libraries through rhetoric in strategic plans (waugh, 2015), discourses on information literacy (seale, 2013), reference services (sharpe, 2019), and more broadly through theorizing neoliberalism’s effects on language and library service (buschman, 2017). in particular, authors have highlighted the commodification of library users and their data (mathios, 2019) as well as information services generally (trosow, 2014).  given that neoliberalism has already been observed in these other aspects of library work, it stands to reason that it would manifest itself in the area of multilingualism as well. however, when the literature on neoliberalism in libraries looks at language, it does so at a general or discursive level, not with a focus on multilingualism. by contrast, the library literature on multilingualism does not explicitly address neoliberalism, though its strong emphasis on collections and digital libraries is implicitly neoliberal. a previous article (henninger, 2018) reviewed this literature and asserted that most of it lacks a holistic or coherent approach to multilingualism. instead, it is largely reactive and indicative of neoliberal discourses that do not make space for critical activity and are not socially engaged. two positive exceptions since this review come from mcelroy and bridges (2018), who situate access and discoverability for scholarly communications in broader contexts of multilingualism and english-language hegemony, and from espinoza and solis (in press), who interrogate linguistic diversity in libraries with reference to linguistic imperialism and the historical factors that have led to english’s dominance.  however, the bulk of the literature on multilingualism in libraries still views language barriers as individual problems to be solved rather than considering the systemic and contextual changes necessary to reduce those barriers and improve access. it is perhaps easier to talk about library holdings and digital architecture in discrete and reductive terms in line with commodity logic, but such a purely mechanistic or solution-oriented view cannot fully comprehend the messiness and complexity of languages. neoliberalism is implicated here, and inasmuch as the library literature reflects the library field, its predominant focus stands to inform library services and shape the field’s views on language. in contrast to the library field, the literature on applied linguistics addresses neoliberal features of commodification, decontextualization, demand, and economic utility with regards to both language in general and specific languages, suggesting by extension how they may operate in libraries. holborow (2015) describes how neoliberalism treats all skills, including language, as commodities that can be used by employers or workers to their advantage and to gain access to capital. flores (2017) further argues that turning languages into commodities is a means of dispossessing them from the communities to whom they belong and that in a society with racial hierarchies, views of language as a commodity are more likely to benefit dominant linguistic communities who have the power required to access such commodities. holborow (2015) relates this commodification to decontextualization, suggesting that treating languages as commodities on a market strips them of social meanings and relations external to that market, divorcing them from their broader contexts. flores (2017) agrees, saying that languages have become removed from their contexts and institutionalized in ways that fail to challenge existing hierarchies or broader racial inequalities. both holborow and flores resist the idea that languages can be fully reduced to commodities by affirming that they belong to and come from human beings, who are deeply embedded in social relationships with each other and with language. as a result, neoliberal logic offers an incomplete picture of languages in part because it does not take these social relations into account. holborow explores these relations in the context of labor, and flores in the context of race, but of course language has many more connections to gender, class, ability, and more. when these connections are ignored or made invisible, they risk maintaining the status quo and foregrounding languages’ economic value only. such a mentality also contributes to a mechanistic and utilitarian view of languages as discrete and interchangeable components. as one example of how these processes of commodification and decontextualization play out in practice, cameron (2005) describes ‘bilingual’ call centers in quebec that require employees to use english and french independently without mixing the two languages. as she points out, this approach ignores the cultural and linguistic knowledge involved in code-switching and bilingualism, which are instead devalued and prohibited because they do not support the profit-seeking ends of the employer. what the employer instead seeks is a specific form of a language that can be incorporated into call center infrastructure as a commodity independent of context. an equivalent to this decontextualization in public libraries might be collection development in, for example, french or arabic that does not consider the different dialects or variations used by local communities. another example is language skills in library job postings, which are often framed in the context of completing specific tasks such as cataloging or programming and not as a skill with the potential to inform every aspect of a position’s duties. neoliberalism also affects language in libraries by framing library services based on demand and economic utility. under neoliberalism, user demand becomes the guiding principle for whether to provide a commodity. this logic does not allow for proactive provision of goods or services based on prior ethics or values, but is only ever a reactive response to ineffable market forces. in libraries as well, there is a danger of relying too heavily on reacting to stated needs, or demands. what such an approach ignores, however, is that people may not be comfortable or capable of stating those needs for many reasons, including language barriers. when it comes to the neoliberal focus on economic utility, libraries have parallels with the english language learning industry: while libraries often have to justify themselves in terms of the economic support they provide (seale, 2013; hudson, 2017), teaching and learning english is justified and encouraged in many countries as providing people with access to capital and mobility (shin & park, 2016). one example where the two intersect are language-learning collections and programs in public libraries, which are often provided with the goal of helping people learn english so that they can integrate into society, often presupposing a monolingual society, and contribute to the economy. ultimately, the neoliberal emphasis on commodification, demand, and utility misrepresents and omits aspects of how languages exist in context. it flattens different languages into technical skills independent of context, and it collapses varieties of the same language into a standard form, ignoring what they index about class, gender, and other differences. just as viewing people only in terms of their economic value ignores key aspects of the human experience, viewing languages in the same way reduces the complexity and multiple dimensions of what languages are. however, even when neoliberal treatments of language meet with resistance, other ideologies may be ready to justify and perpetuate the status quo. language ideologies in different times and places, certain languages have held more power than others as the main languages of commerce, science, politics, mobility, and more. in the past, these have been languages such as latin and french, and in many places, one such language is currently english. such situations are not accidental but have instead relied on various processes to encourage the spread of these languages. these processes may occur more explicitly, such as through overt colonization, missionary activity, and nationalist consolidation, or more subtly, such as through cultural products and knowledge dissemination (heller & mcelhinny, 2017).  neoliberalism as an ideology has undoubtedly helped these processes in recent times by discouraging close attention to power structures in favor of using ‘market forces’ as a reason for the spread of languages such as english, but as del percio and flubacher (2017) point out, neoliberalism is closely related to “assumptions of nativeness and purity that continue to produce and legitimize hierarchies and forms of difference” (p. 8). it is important for those with power to have ways of naturalizing and justifying power imbalances among languages when they do come up, and one main way of doing so is through language ideologies.  language ideologies are a concept which kroskrity (2010) defines as “beliefs, feelings, and conceptions about language structure and use which often index the political-economic interests of individual speakers, ethnic and other interest groups, and nation-states” (p. 192). people express various forms of exclusionary language ideologies more or less explicitly in different contexts. few people today would come out and say that their language is better than others, though some still might in service of nationalist ideology or to justify excluding those who do not speak it, but softer versions of language ideologies still give that impression, intentionally or not. lippi-green (2012) describes an ideology of standardization that produces a bias towards an idealized language form, while piller (2016) notes how the association of language with territory often leads to an ideological connection between languages and nation-states. this connection does not only come from individuals: it can be formalized from the top down through laws or policies on official languages, as in canada, and it also operates outside of formal channels. english is not the official language of the united states as a whole, but it often seems that way due to english occupying a hegemonic position in other parts of society (schmidt, 2008). as these examples suggest, language ideologies are different from neoliberalism in that, instead of stripping away social relations, they actively highlight the benefits of a shared language, dialect, or accent to selected social relationships, such as nationality, racial identity, and class. they are similar in that they can suggest, sometimes even more strongly, that certain languages are better than others, and they likewise produce hierarchies. adding to the market-based framework offered by neoliberalism, language ideologies may justify one language form over others for reasons such as divine right, national allegiance, and pure utility, and they may promote the marginalization and exclusion of those who do not adhere to that form. one reason for the promotion of certain language ideologies over others is what piller (2015) terms the “monolingual mindset” that arises from people inhabiting relatively monolingual environments. monolingualism produces a particular perspective the world over, in that some people will simply lack the lived experience of multiple languages that more multilingual individuals have. as such, people who are more monolingual will always be at more of a distance from the fact of multilingualism than those who negotiate multiple languages on a regular basis. in this way, monolingual environments see the rise of ideologies that justify, encourage, and naturalize monolingualism. being monolingual is not on its own a bad thing, except that certain languages are inherently more tied to power than others, and so people who speak those languages will hold more power as a result.  for many who read this article, that language will likely be english. just as the library field is centered on white, cisgender, and middle-class conceptions of the world (hathcock, 2015), it is also centered on english. this fact goes unanalyzed partly because the field is immersed in the language, with work, conferences, articles, and more all done in english. another reason, which collins (2018) points toward, is that “because white people hold hegemonic power within libraries, the language they use […] reaffirms the dominance of their racial privilege” (p. 43). use of english likewise stands to affirm and consolidate that power, denying any power or privilege that may come from using other languages. just as whiteness is an invisible default and norm for comparisons (hathcock, 2015; brown, ferretti, leung, & méndez-brady, 2018), english holds a similar position among languages and forms part of whiteness in us and canadian contexts. although library literature mentioning language ideologies is scarce, the examples that do exist show english’s dominance affecting library services too. reznowski (2009) traces english-only ideologies in us education and public libraries, providing examples of how libraries have alternately stifled or encouraged multilingual services. espinoza and solis (in press) similarly review the history of the english-only movement in us history and libraries and report on a survey providing further evidence that languages besides english are not equally visible or recognized in libraries. finally, mcelroy and bridges (2018) suggest hegemony and privilege as reasons for english’s prevalence in academic publishing.  as these and other examples show, language ideologies inform judgments about the roles and uses of languages, and those judgments in turn inform everything from collection policies to storytimes. ideologies that favor monolingualism, whether explicit or not, result in assumptions that make the dominant language a requirement for accessing and engaging in community within the library. they put the burden on others to learn that language, not on speakers of that language to spend time and effort on other languages that have little or no apparent value to them. they also lead to library collections and services in other languages being marked as nonessential or apart from ‘core’ dominant-language offerings. if library workers do not critically consider how assumptions about language inform their actions, they risk disenfranchising those who may speak differently. discussion though neoliberalism and dominant-language ideologies have differing foci and means of operation, they have several effects in common. they both inhibit equity, diversity, access, and inclusion by implicitly assigning moral value to languages relative to each other: neoliberalism by naming the ‘best’ languages as the ones that compete most successfully on the ‘linguistic market,’ and language ideologies through prescriptive notions of a right way to speak a language, or a right language to speak. both also distort or omit aspects of how language exists in context, such as its connections to race, ethnicity, culture, and more, and the validity of variation within and among languages. in these ways, they enable the centering and prioritization of some languages over others, leading to a risk of languages not being treated in an equitable manner.  one could argue that truly equitable treatment may be impossible for reasons of practicality: how can a library expect to provide the same level of service for, say, english and spanish when spanish speakers are only a small percentage of the local population and many of them speak english anyway? however, one could also ask: who does using practicality as a reason not to do something benefit? is the issue just a lack of capacity, or is it also that there aren’t enough spanish speakers among library staff due to homogeneity in the field? while it is true that adequately serving every single language in a library system is usually not possible, it rests with libraries to determine the limits of that possibility. even if support for a specific language is not feasible, staff can still provide broad support aimed at removing or communicating across language barriers. a case might also be made for utility: a lingua franca would certainly enable and simplify communication and ease of access in some ways, but again, the question is: utility for whom? does it come at the cost of other languages and the people who use them? fluent speakers of such a language are more likely to benefit from that fluency, creating or perpetuating inequities in access. an economy may benefit from everyone who contributes to it speaking the same language, but the economy is not the point of life. while some languages will absolutely be more useful than others in given contexts, the problem comes when this fact is extended uncritically and universally to become a utilitarian mindset and when a focus on ‘useful’ languages comes at the expense of others. languages and the people who know them deserve more than a utilitarian approach: languages’ value comes not only from their usefulness for communication, but from the cultures, histories, and perspectives that they represent. in libraries, staff need to make sure that decisions about languages do not come from a view of a particular language as a demand-driven commodity or a prerequisite for using library services. instead, resisting the neoliberal commodification of languages and the privileging of some languages over others means showing a holistic understanding of multilingual experiences: what it means to be a language learner, what it is like to be in an unfamiliar linguistic environment, what barriers to communication are, and how language use intersects with nationality, race, class, and so on. it is always worth asking which languages are even deemed worthy of representation in the first place, and questioning and resisting these ideologies’ assumptions about the relative value of languages is one path to a more just and inclusive approach to language in libraries. towards action as bacevic (2019) states, it is not enough to simply know how neoliberalism works, or to presume that knowledge alone is enough to counter its operations: any criticism has to translate into action informed by that knowledge. the same could be said of language ideologies, and not only should critics transform knowledge into action, this action needs to take place collectively. individuals have limited capacity for change on their own, and systemic problems require collective solutions. as well, this work should not rest solely with people who know multiple languages. similarly to how white people need to step up in terms of antiracist work, more monolingual people should step up and support more multilingual people.  as heller and mcelhinny (2017, pp. 243-244) suggest, neither abstract understandings of language nor purely practice-focused descriptions can provide a full picture of language’s workings on their own. examining the interplay between the two by connecting theory to practice and vice versa appears to be productive grounds for discussion and action. while by no means exhaustive, the following actions suggest broad ideas and specific examples of ways to counter neoliberalism and exclusionary language ideologies and work towards better linguistic access, equity, diversity, and inclusion. their goal is not to pretend that language problems can be solved through technical or managerial solutions, but instead to propose sites for looking both theoretically and practically at language practices. create space for staff to recognize, reduce, and eliminate linguistic barriers. such space could take the form of training, workshops, and discussions, or perhaps individual projects to describe and change the language practices of a given library. as one example, some colleagues and i led a conference workshop that took attendees through a number of activities aimed at fostering thoughts on service design for multilingual users. one such activity involved asking pairs to communicate first without words, then without using a language they knew well. another one asked people to first name something they could do to make their library as inaccessible and unwelcoming to multilingual users as possible, then to think about whether there was anything in their libraries that remotely resembled that idea. in many cases, there was. while such exercises may not be helpful for everyone, many attendees appreciated them, and they offer one way to shift thoughts and perspectives away from the comfortable default of everyday work hire and support linguistically diverse staff. staff are a key means of shaping how libraries facilitate access to information, and the languages they know will inform that work as well. support could look like extra pay for language use on the job and equity-informed retention efforts. at the same time, it is important to remember that simply having linguistically diverse staff is not enough: library staff should avoid tokenism and ensure that asking people who know a language to use it in the course of their work does not become a burden for them. it is also worth remembering that language proficiency does not always come with cultural competency or the lived experiences shared by members of other communities who speak that language. offer collections, outreach, and language-based programming with language in mind. these services remain key means of access to information in libraries, so it is always worthwhile to incorporate language-related research, principles, and perspectives into their development. as one example, although english remains the language of instruction at my current institution, it also offers tutoring where students can discuss their assignments in other languages with a peer tutor who also speaks that language, recognizing that language’s value both on its own and for supporting increased understanding. also, language-based programming does not always require organizers to be multilingual: for example, language exchanges started at the university of british columbia (ubc tandem, n.d.) rely on participants to teach languages to each other through immersion. as well, they have reciprocity and respect for all languages as founding principles, showing how specific programs can be informed by broader values. finally, better inclusion can even occur within a single language: smith (2018) offers positive examples of academic library outreach practices that highlight the role of language variation in promoting representation and racial literacy. create space for other languages in policies, procedures, and infrastructure. documents such as collections policies and instructional plans inform action and promote accountability, and if language about languages is not in them, then there is less cause to be active and accountable. what would it look like for a collections policy to say it will represent the languages spoken by those the library serves, for a website to have a space for indigenous language resources, or for a strategic plan to list language as one of the forms of diversity that it claims to value? it is also worthwhile to make library infrastructure such as websites and signage available in other languages. however, technical fixes on their own are insufficient, and policy on its own is not enough, as espinoza and solis (in press) make clear in questioning the extent to which the american library association’s guidelines for the development and promotion of multilingual collections and services have actually been implemented. engage in action-oriented research on language in libraries. as the literature shows, there is ample room for research not just about the logistics of accommodating other languages in libraries, but also about the attitudes, experiences, and perceptions of both staff and library users when it comes to language. one study (henninger, 2018) incidentally hinted at some of these attitudes as it sought to determine whether staff language skills represented the languages present in three libraries’ service areas. another study (espinoza & solis, in press) showed gaps between staff language use and formal recognition of those skills, whether in job descriptions or through compensation, that deserve further attention. learn from fields such as applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and education, and from people who are already doing this work. using ideas and theoretical frameworks from other fields can strengthen the work done in libraries and increase understanding of the issues discussed in this article. analyzing and explaining language practices is one step towards changing them where necessary, and theories and models from applied linguistics, such as darvin and norton’s (2015) model of investment and the douglas fir group’s (2016) framework for second language acquisition offer ways to do so. they explicitly foreground the various factors contributing to language use, critically engage with the roles of surrounding social forces, and challenge neoliberal views of individuals as rational actors who are solely responsible for their motivations and behavior. as well, people in other communities may confront the fact of linguistic difference much more often than people in libraries. mandatory student attendance at public schools means that teachers and other staff must confront multilingualism much more often than workers in libraries, where there is no such mandatory attendance. as a result, there is a sizable body of literature in the education field on supporting and teaching multilingual learners. if they are not already doing so, library workers can also learn from organizations aimed at assisting recent immigrants, assisted living facilities, people revitalizing indigenous languages, and other groups who may encounter and think about multilingualism more than library staff in many cases. one current example of this work comes from the indigenous languages resource centre at calgary public library (rieger, 2019), which has been created and run in partnership with indigenous elders and authors. unfortunately, some such partnerships are still framed in the language of adjustment, assimilation, and english-centrism, which can be quite explicit (e.g. mccrary, 2017). for example, queens public library (n.d.) organizes its own-language partnerships under the heading “new americans” and refers to them as being offered in english and “immigrant languages,” positioning english as the national language and discursively excluding people who have been americans for years and still speak languages besides english. take a holistic and proactive approach to language and multilingualism. this entire article argues for this approach, but it bears repeating. a change of perspective at the individual, organizational, societal levels is necessary to produce broader change at all of those levels, and library workers must consider how their attitudes towards languages are influenced by norms, assumptions, and biases and relate to race, gender, ability, and more. when it comes to multilingualism, it is possible to ask versions of the same questions from stewart (2017) that collins (2018, pp. 49-50) suggests can be asked of language practices in general: “who’s in the room?” [whose languages are represented in the room?]  “has everyone’s ideas been heard?” [whose language skills permit them to hear those voices?]  “who is trying to get in the room but can’t?” [what languages are needed to get in the room?] “whose presence in the room is under constant threat of erasure?” [whose languages are devalued or threatened?]  “whose ideas won’t be taken as seriously because they aren’t in the [linguistic] majority?” as both authors emphasize, it is not enough to focus just on questions of diversity and inclusion: equity and justice are also important considerations. it is also possible to imagine paradigm shifts in the metaphors used for language: for example, flores (2017) advocates for moving from viewing language as a resource, which results in commodifying both languages themselves and linguistic diversity, to viewing it as a site of struggle, which would highlight racial and other inequities. conclusion language in general has power, and specific languages have more power than others, which is maintained through material infrastructures informed by ideology. languages also have social, affective, and intangible dimensions that are ignored or commodified under a neoliberal mindset and discounted in favor of other considerations under dominant language ideologies. language is complex, containing as it does aspects of power, oppression, difference, and more, and it deserves a similarly complex response.  we cannot ignore the existence of language in libraries when libraries serve linguistically diverse populations, when language shapes access to library services, and when certain languages receive more equitable treatment than others. people should be free to use the languages that they want, and libraries should support them in that choice via services and infrastructure. those who want to learn another language should be able to do so, and libraries certainly have a role to play in that. however, those who want to use their own languages should also be welcomed, whether through specific support for that language or through general strategies to support multilingual users. no one should be coerced into learning another language or excluded from services for not learning it, and the idea that one language can be inherently better than another must be challenged where it exists. readers who have traveled abroad or even within their own countries may have a sense of how nice and comfortable it is to find a language they know in a place where people mainly use another one. why, then, should we not extend the same comfort to others? by being proactive, by critically considering language practices, and by imagining new modes of library service, we can make libraries into places where all people feel comfortable with their languages, not just dominant languages. to support all library users, recognizing the validity of all languages and the complexity of language, in general, is a good place to start. acknowledgements i would like to thank publishing editor denisse solis, internal reviewer kellee warren, and external reviewer michael mohkamkar for their time and effort supporting the publication of this article, as well as my colleague holly 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(in press). entre mundos y fronteras: an exploration of the visibility and value of linguistic diversity within the lis workforce. in a. ndumu (ed.), borders and belonging: critical examinations of library approaches toward immigrants. sacramento: library juice press. flores, n. (2017). from language-as-resource to language-as-struggle: resisting the coke-ification of bilingual education. in m.-c. flubacher & a. del percio (eds.), language, education and neoliberalism: critical studies in sociolinguistics (pp. 62-81). bristol: multilingual matters. greene, m., & mcmenemy, d. (2012). the emergence and impact of neoliberal ideology on uk public library policy, 1997-2010. in j. heinstrom & a. spink (eds.), library and information science trends and research: europe (pp. 13-41). bingley: emerald. hathcock, a. 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(2008). defending english in an english-dominant world: the ideology of the ‘official english’ movement in the united states. in a. duchêne & m. heller (eds.), discourses of endangerment: ideology and interest in the defence of languages (pp. 197-215). london: continuum. seale, m. (2013). the neoliberal library. in l. gregory & s. higgins (eds.), information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis (pp. 39-61). sacramento: library juice press. sharpe, k. b. (2019). “commonsense” academic reference service: neoliberal discourse in lis articles, 1975–2014. library quarterly, 89(4), 298-315. https://doi.org/10.1086/704963  shin, h., & park, j. s.-y. (2016). researching language and neoliberalism. journal of multilingual and multicultural development, 37(5), 443-452. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2015.1071823  smith, f. a. (2018). linguistic diversity in libraries. library journal. https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailstory=linguistic-diversity-in-libraries-backtalk  stewart, d.-l. (2017). colleges need a language shift, but not the one you think. inside higher ed. www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/03/30/colleges-need-language-shift-not-one-you-think-essay.  sweeney, m. e., & cooke, n. a. (2018). you’re so sensitive! how lis professionals define and discuss microaggressions online. library quarterly, 88(4), 375-390. https://doi.org/10.1086/699270 the douglas fir group. (2016). a transdisciplinary framework for sla in a multilingual world. the modern language journal, 100(1), 19-47. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12301 trosow, s. e. (2014). the commodification of information and the public good. progressive librarian, 43, 17-29. ubc tandem (n.d.). “about.” ubc tandem language learning program. https://tandem.ubc.ca/about/ vásquez, o. a. (2013). language. in p. l. mason (ed.), encyclopedia of race and racism (2nd ed., vol. 3, pp. 46-48). detroit: macmillan. waugh, c. (2014). balancing visions and values: an exploration of market rhetoric in canadian academic library strategic plans. progressive librarian, 43, 47-56. language, multilingualism, neoliberalism communicating with information: creating inclusive learning environments for students with asd it’s not imposter syndrome: resisting self-doubt as normal for library workers 7 responses pingback : icymi: april 2020 seminar on the acquisition of latin american library materials bob schroeder 2020–05–05 at 6:36 pm thanks for this article! it’s a good one to help us start thinking about who’s not in our libraries, linguistically as well as culturally. i wanted to recommend a book chapter that also speaks to many of the issues you raise here. it’s an autoethnography by michele r. santamaria entitled ” you, she, i: an autoethnographic exploration through noise”. it’s from a book, “the self as subject: autoethnographic research into identity, culture, ad academic librarianship.” even though it starts from the point of view of a librarian, rather that the library users, it arrives at many of the same places as your article. (and full disclosure, i was one of he editors of the book ;) ean henninger 2020–05–05 at 7:22 pm thanks, bob! i will be sure to check it out. ean henninger 2020–05–05 at 7:27 pm thanks, bob! i will be sure to check it out. halka 2020–05–17 at 8:44 am what a fantastic article! i have been doing very similar research and writing a paper with similar themes for an mlis class and i really enjoyed reading your research. let me know if you’d ever like to discuss your work–i find it fascinating. pingback : archives plan of action – co-learning experiences pingback : what are archives? – co-learning experiences this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct adventures in rhetoric: the traditional library – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 5 jun kim leeder /16 comments adventures in rhetoric: the traditional library in brief: librarians make frequent reference to “the traditional library” yet there is no accepted definition of the term. responding to a debate that began at the 2013 acrl national conference, the author presents the results of a literature survey that explores the rhetorical usage and meaning of the phrase. results indicate that the “traditional library” is commonly defined as a physical space emphasizing physical collections, and is often invoked as a counterpoint to the “modern” or “digital” library. a discussion of the potential value of such rhetoric follows. partial results of a google image search using the keyword, “tradition.” by kim leeder first: a bit of context in a recent lead pipe editorial i accused do-it-yourself (diy) library culture of being a survival strategy (dorney, ford, leeder, & vandegrift, 2013). “a traditional library,” i said, “is a dead library.” i repeated this statement as part of a panel presentation in front of a large group of librarians at the association for college & research libraries (acrl) national conference in indianapolis in april. i repeated it knowing full well that such chicken little rhetoric was likely to irritate, if not infuriate, a substantial proportion of my audience, but hoping that it would jump-start a constructive, creative conversation. i did not expect applause, nor did i receive any. instead, i found hornets. glorious, buzzing hornets. in case you missed the subsequent exchange, here’s a quick review. after a brief but lively debate in which several people passionately defended the traditional library’s future, the panel went on to explore examples of diy culture such as library juice press and the library as incubator project, and to discuss how diy might interact with longstanding, as-yet-unavoidable institutional structures like the academic tenure system. there was a lot of constructive, idealistic discussion, as well as a healthy dose of rabble-rousing. anecdotal feedback after the panel was encouraging. attendees on twitter and elsewhere described feeling empowered and excited to effect positive change in their libraries. conference-goers even cited the panel as an “honorable mention” in the acrl 2013 people’s choice awards. yet a few days after the session came a blog post by library administrator brian mathews (2013). while mathews refrained from participating in the discussion in indianapolis, he wrote that he was “surprised by the attitude that the session generated. there was a lot of ‘damn the man’ talk,” he says, which he interprets as egotism and pessimism. according to mathews, diy culture is destructive while “startup thinking” is innovative. unfortunately, he omits his references on startup thinking and refrains from sharing examples of such thinking in libraries beyond a nod to the #makeithappen philosophy. he concludes, “diy feels more like a political statement than an innovation statement.” mathews appears to have missed the point: it’s both. meredith farkas (2013), who was also at the acrl panel session, responded to mathews, noting that “[m]ost of the people at the presentation were talking about finding space to make innovative projects happen within traditional libraries.” interestingly, in the same post she later returns to attack the same rhetoric, stating, “the notion that there is a ‘traditional library’ and that we need to move away from that is a fallacy. does every generation think they invented change? libraries have been changing and adapting and becoming what their communities need for at least the past century.” her comments are echoed by maoria kirker (2013), who acknowledges that “tradition exists and will forever remain an element of librarianship,” but asserts that “[w]e need to stop using the word ‘traditional’” because it is so commonly misunderstood. ah, but there’s the rub. the “traditional library” is so deeply rooted a concept that even those who object to it can’t avoid using the term. it is a baseline against which we compare our progress, the tick marks on the wall against which we measure our growth. without a traditional library there can be no modern library, no concise phrase that captures our past, and no thumbnail of our future. so what, exactly, is a traditional library? this article is a rhetorical adventure into that core question. the rhetoric of tradition as any scholar of language will tell you, the only true way to determine the meaning of a phrase is to survey the literature and see how it’s being used in practice. regardless of what we think of the term, what do we mean when the words slip out; when we talk about the “traditional library” in our conversations and publications? the next section of this article presents the results of a literature survey of both the professional and popular library literature to pinpoint the active, everyday meaning of the phrase. i present the following amalgamation of quotes after searching library, information science, and technology abstracts, jstor, google, and google books for the term “traditional library.” for those interested, a crowdsource-friendly spreadsheet summary of the results is available for review and additional contributions. while a wide array of librarian authors freely employ the phrase “traditional library,” only one specifically defines the qualities of such a library in detail. a panel of authors led by raj reddy (1999) from the international technology research institute published a report on digital information in japan that identifies the traditional library as an institution characterized by these traits: emphasis on storage and preservation of physical items, particularly books and periodicals cataloging at a high level rather than one of detail, e.g., author and subject indexes as opposed to full text browsing based on physical proximity of related materials, e.g., books on sociology are near one another on the shelves passivity; information is physically assembled in one place; users must travel to the library to learn what is there and make use of it (6). according to this perspective, the traditional library is equivalent to the physical library: it is driven by a focus on physical items and physical spaces. the priority in such a library, as reflected in traditional library building design, is the housing and protection of the current and future print collection. as a result, write latimer & niegaard (2008), “[m]ost library buildings were, and still are, large, intimidating, and frequently unwelcoming” (55-56). reddy et al. are not alone in equating the term “traditional” to “physical”; on the contrary, the wide majority of those who referenced the “traditional library” based their work on the same definition. for instance, l.a. ogunsola (2011) addresses the concept in an article entitled, “the next step in librarianship: is the traditional library dead?” published in library philosophy and practice. he writes, “[t]raditionally, libraries were collections of books, manuscripts, journals, and other sources of recorded information…. in a traditional library, the catalogue is used to find traditional library materials” (2). the apparent redundancy of this statement only underscores the embeddedness of the term “traditional” and its close ties to the physical world. even popular sources such as ask.com (“what is the difference,” n.d.) and liswiki (“digital library,” n.d.) define the traditional library as “manual” and “confined…within a physical boundary,” respectively. also common in the literature is the use of the term “traditional library” as a counterpoint to discussion of the “digital” or “online” library. authors repeatedly employ the concept of the traditional library to frame discussion of how rapid changes in technology are affecting libraries. the comparisons reinforce the idea that traditional means print. david lee king (2007), for one, crafted a library 2.0 spectrum in which “[o]n the left-hand side of the spectrum are the luddites. these are very traditional libraries and librarians who really don’t understand the need to change and/or adapt to emerging trends.” or consider diane kresh’s statement in the whole digital library handbook: “while traditional libraries are limited by storage space, digital libraries have the potential to store much more information” (2). the traditional library in context historically speaking, the focus on print materials in a “traditional” library addressed the needs of the community and the times. in an article in the library quarterly, dan lacy (1969) writes “the original, we may properly say ‘traditional,’ pattern of library service in the united states was based on a relative immobility of users and of materials and on a political system that looked to local sources of support for social services of all kinds” (13). lacy describes the early interlibrary loan system, noting its limitations due to the slow speed of mail and lack of rapid transit. in a brief yet insightful article in scandinavian library quarterly, roland persson (2003) makes the similar observation, “[t]he traditional library is in harmony with the industrialised society and the modern library with, what we initially call the information and media society.” the distinction is based upon the economics of the time in which the library exists: those born in industrial times focus upon industrial products, while those born in information times focus upon media products. the boom in mass-production during the industrial period fed the traditional library’s emphasis upon print books. when considering the historical implications of the “traditional library” concept, it’s helpful to revisit farkas’s comment from above. she wrote, “does every generation think they invented change? libraries have been changing and adapting and becoming what their communities need for at least the past century.” she is not the only librarian to see the concept of the “traditional library” as a moving target. as described by donald t. hawkins (2012), a recent debate at the 2012 charleston conference argued this statement: “the traditional research library is dead.” a vote of the audience at that session found that popular opinion was divided nearly in half, with 52% of attendees agreeing that traditional libraries are dead, and 48% objecting. hawkins encapsulates debater derek law’s (con) position as such: “tradition is about evolution. research libraries have existed for about 3,000 years. traditional libraries have always adapted to changing media.” perhaps the traditional library should be considered more of a spectrum than a point of comparison, or perhaps it is one point upon the spectrum. persson writes: most libraries find themselves in a state of motion transporting them from the traditional to the modern….evolution is not constant or equally fast in all spheres. it is not unusual to see organisational changes adapt libraries to the modern model, whilst a library’s entire mentality and developmental strategies belong to those of the traditional model. this may explain the apparent frustration expressed by some diy-ers, where they are ready to embrace services or concepts relevant to modern libraries only to find resistance where traditional processes remain. in this case, then, where “traditional” is one point on a spectrum and “modern” is the opposite point, libraries can measure their progress against the qualities of each to determine their success by popular standards. if there are points where they still harbor traditional models, those points are brought into sharp relief by the comparison. in the end, the common usage of the term “traditional library” is inseparable from its association with print collections and physical spaces. even michael gorman (2000) admits, “i use the word ‘traditional’ with great reluctance and simply for want of anything better–its pejorative overtones of clinging to the past, of being place-centered and exclusively book-centered, bear no relationship to the experience of modern libraries.” the traditional library is a physical library: a building constructed first and foremost to house print collections; people are secondary. this characterization of the traditional library has become a touchstone against which librarians at every point in our ongoing journey into electronic media can evaluate, assess, and use to reassure themselves that they are, indeed, moving the field forward into the future. as david lankes (2011) observes, “[t]housands of years of tradition serve as inspiration for our future, not as a set of shackles binding us” (1). the traditional librarian while this article is primarily concerned with representations of the library as institution, it can be difficult to separate portrayals of the “traditional library” from those of the “traditional librarian.” the rhetoric shifts easily between the two, as the place and the people who created it are tied closely together. if the traditional library emphasizes collections over people, the traditional librarian must, by definition, be book-oriented. if the traditional library prioritizes the preservation of print materials, the traditional librarian must be a gatekeeper. discussion of one leads to discussion of the other. for instance, kirker begins her recent blog post by challenging the “traditional library” concept, but then goes on to comment, “if an outsider was looking in, it’s my opinion that they’d hear the word ‘traditional’ and apply the age-old stereotype of the music man‘s marian the librarian.” while the traditional library rhetoric revolves around physical spaces and print collections, the traditional librarian concept is a culturally recognized image: bun, glasses, and all. rhetorically speaking, the term “traditional librarian” is not commonly used, but may be replaced with the “librarian stereotype,” which is frequent in the literature. from studies of hollywood characterizations of the profession (walker & lawson, 1993) to pinterest boards collecting images depicting librarians (for instance, the “librarian stereotypes” board by peter alsbjers blogg and ruth kneale), the librarian stereotype is a concept both prevalent and provocative that inspires extensive debate and commentary. in fact, it is so widely used that it has inspired substantial rhetorical study already (lutz, 2005; stoddart & lee, 2005; carmichael, j.v., 1992) that need not be replicated here. so what? regardless of whether we agree with the usage of any particular term, rhetoric has meaning and impact. at its essence, “rhetoric [is] a form of communication that uses particular symbolic expressions to persuade a targeted audience” (lansford, 2011, 1478). while farkas and gorman both object to the rhetorical concept of the “traditional library” as it is commonly used, and the fact that it is a term frequently employed to signal the end of a particular era, they overlook the intrinsic, symbolic value of the term. it is political and innovative, providing a platform for those seeking new ways to embrace change. if we define it rhetorically as an institution focused on physical spaces and materials, then there remains no question: the traditional library is dead. that doesn’t mean libraries as an institution are dead, nor does it mean that the physical library as a component of some larger organization is dead. the traditional library has been replaced with an expanded vision of itself, one that encompasses traditional values and features but extends outward to include the vastness of free and licensed digital resources as well as spaces and services that are entirely people-focused. the contemporary library, in contrast to the traditional library, resides online, teaches, reaches out and asserts its value across its community. gorman (2000) writes, “my idea of a ‘traditional library’ is one that selects, collects, and gives access to all the forms of recorded knowledge and information that are relevant to its mission and to the needs of the community it serves, and assists and instructs in the use of those resources.” though unable to alter the common usage of “traditional,” gorman reminds readers of the root functions of any library, regardless of platform or format. lankes takes this one step further, noting that librarianship “is not about cataloging, or books, or buildings, or committees–it is about learning, knowledge, and social action” (1). those who object to the rhetoric of tradition point to the long history of libraries and their constant adaptation to new directions in culture and technology. language is always a moving target, and the rhetoric employed at any single point in time serves as little more than reference point against which to compare the past and the future. the concepts of “traditional” and “modern” will always be relative to the present and, as such, have ever-evolving definitions. yet flawed as these terms are, they still serve a purpose in informing the field, inspiring comparison, and inciting continuous improvement; in short, rhetoric inspires change, and change is how we survive. what do you think? do you find “the traditional library” to be a useful concept, or is it more damaging than it is valuable? you’re invited to continue the debate in the comments below. acknowledgements many thanks go to julie jergens of hi miss julie as well as several lead pipe editors — brett, ellie, emily, and erin — for their thoughtful feedback that helped to shape and improve this article. references carmichael, j. v., jr. (1992). the male librarian and the feminine image: a survey of stereotype, status, and gender perceptions. library and information science research 14, 411-46. retrieved from http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/j_carmichael_male_1992.pdf. digital library [wiki page]. (n.d.). retrieved from http://liswiki.org/wiki/digital_library#a_shift_from_traditional_library_to_virtual_library. dorney, e., ford, e., leeder, k., & vandegrift, m. (2013, april 3). editorial: diy library culture and the academy. in the library with the lead pipe. farkas, m. (2013, april 24). diy vs. startup. or false dichotomies and labels [blog post]. retrieved from http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2013/04/24/diy-vs-startup-or-false-dichotomies-and-labels/. gorman, m. (2000). our enduring values: librarianship in the 21st century. chicago: american library association. hawkins, d.t. (2012, november 10). hyde park corner debate: the traditional research library is dead [blog post]. retrieved from http://www.against-the-grain.com/2012/11/hyde-park-corner-debate-the-traditional-research-library-is-dead/. king, d. (2007, august 1). am i a 2.0 librarian and the library 2.0 spectrum [blog post]. retrieved from http://www.davidleeking.com/2007/08/01/am-i-a-20-librarian-and-the-library-20-spectrum/#.uayunjz3xry. kirker, m. (2013, may 6). tradition and the rhetoric of the modern library [blog post]. retrieved from http://maoriakirker.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/tradition-and-rhetoric/. kresh, d., ed. (2007). the whole digital library handbook. chicago: american library association. lacy, d. (1969). the traditional library. the library quarterly, 39(1), 13-22. lansford, t. (2011). rhetoric. in g.t. kurian, (ed.), the encyclopedia of political science, v. 5, (p. 1478). washington, dc: cq press. lankes, d. (2011). the atlas of new librarianship. cambridge: the mit press. latimer, k., & niegaard, h. (2008). ifla library building guidelines: developments & reflections. berlin: walter de gruyter. lutz, c. (2005). from old maids to action heroes: librarians and the meanings of librarian stereotypes. (unpublished master’s thesis). university of maryland, college park, md. retrieved from http://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/2670. mathews, b. (2013, april 14). diy vs. startup: choose your flavor of change [blog post]. retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/theubiquitouslibrarian/2013/04/14/diy-vs-startup-choose-your-flavor-of-change/. ogunsola, l.a. (2011). the next step in librarianship: is the traditional library dead? library philosophy and practice. paper 606. persson, r. (2003). traditional and modern in the library world. scandinavian library quarterly, 36(1). retrieved from http://slq.nu/?article=traditional-and-modern-in-the-library-world. reddy, r., ager, t., chellappa, r, croft, w.b., davis-brown, b., mendel, j.m., & shamos, m.i. (1999). wtec panel report on digital information organization in japan. baltimore: international technology research institute. retrieved from http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/people/faculty/mshamos/1999digitaljapan.pdf. stoddart, r.a., & lee, a.r. (2005). paradoxical views of “librarian” in the rhetoric of library science literature: a fantasy theme analysis. georgia library quarterly, 41(4), 5-10. retrieved from http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=lib_facpubs. walker, s., & lawson, v.l. (1993). the librarian stereotype and the movies. mc journal: the journal of academic media librarianship, 1(1), 16-28. what is the difference between traditional library and modern/digital library? [website]. (2012). retrieved from http://www.ask.com/answers/175814981/what-is-the-difference-between-traditional-library-and-modern-digital-library. change, diy, future, history, librarianship, libraries, rhetoric, rhetorical analysis, tradition, traditional library what i wish i’d known about building teen services from scratch call for articles 16 responses startupsleuth 2013–06–05 at 6:08 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: new article! adventures in rhetoric: the traditional library http://t.co/c1xqe3wldp #diy #acrl2013 jamesmcgoran 2013–06–05 at 7:28 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: new article! adventures in rhetoric: the traditional library http://t.co/c1xqe3wldp #diy #acrl2013 dan c. 2013–06–05 at 10:37 pm i enjoy the premise of this article and while i agree with the subject, i think it’s limiting (and ultimately defeatist to the topic) to not have really gone further back. perusing through articles from library journal (uk) from 1903 or special libraries from 1915 or even ala proceedings from the 19th century, you’ll see that they’re discussing the exact same thing. the rhetoric of traditional libraries and attempts to change it by the newer generation in basically the tenant of what we call librarianship since 1876. i’d like see everyone complaining now about change to address that historical perspective that it always asks for change. edorney 2013–06–06 at 10:36 am rt @libraryleadpipe: new article! adventures in rhetoric: the traditional library http://t.co/c1xqe3wldp #diy #acrl2013 brian 2013–06–06 at 2:34 pm “unfortunately, he omits his references on startup thinking and refrains from sharing examples of such thinking in libraries.” here are my references: http://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/18645 john keogh 2013–06–06 at 4:00 pm we get so caught up in comparing the form and practical functioning of different types of libraries that it becomes all too easy to believe that these forms and functions are the definition of a library. we must remember that form and function are merely strategies employed to try and achieve deeper goals and serve essential functions in our communities. by throwing these differences in library form and function into stark contrast, it highlights what aspects of librarianship are artifacts of circumstance, and what represent the underlying and enduring purposes and values of libraries. these changes, this evolution, is a powerful opportunity for us to reflect on our core reasons for existence, independent of our circumstantial functioning. from this perspective, all options and resources, all working models and theories, are equally available to us, and all equally subject to assessment and evaluation. “traditional” vs. “modern”, physical vs. digital – each is unique and potentially useful to our patrons, each has its limits. if we focus on purpose and not on format, it resolves this entire debate and allows us to move forward with all extant information tools available to us. michael. 2013–06–07 at 4:32 am farkas’s comment about every generation inventing change is incredibly insightful. in my studies, one thing i’ve noticed is that libraries change. and all the time. whether it is moving from card catalogues to electronic catalogues, or closed stacks to open stacks, or any of the myriad of other changes just in the last twenty years, change is continuous. perhaps a good definition of “traditional library” is “the library i grew up with”. except that the libraries i grew up with switched from card to electronic catalogues. they introduced barcodes. they stopped stamping the return date anywhere, but instead provided a printed paper slip. there is no traditional library. except, well, it’s the physical library isn’t it (because that’s what i grew up with). that’s the only definition that makes sense to me. my view is that a library is a library is a library, as john said, we should focus on the purpose, not the format. regarding traditional librarians: if i say i say i’m studying librarianship, people say “oh, you like books then?”, i say “well yes (who doesn’t?), but that’s not why i want to be a librarian…”. i then normally have to explain how the library isn’t dead, and how even if no one ever made a physical book ever again, there would still be a need for librarians and libraries. thanks for this interesting article. ps you seem to be missing the gorman reference in your list. kim leeder 2013–06–07 at 1:19 pm thanks for your thoughts, michael! i’ve added the reference (sorry!). pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » adventures in rhetoric: the … | eua raina bloom 2013–06–07 at 10:25 am thank you for this piece/ongoing discussion. it’s important to note what the rhetoric of “tradition” allows us to distance ourselves from in library history – i’d like to call attention to the section “the traditional librarian” and stress that all of our cultural touchstones for that figure/image/stereotype are female. discussions of the current profession’s relationship its history often fail to take into account that librarianship is, statistically speaking, a woman’s field. given both that and western culture’s anxiety about the feminine, what does it mean if we announce the death of the traditional library/librarian? what are we rejecting when we do that? what are we casting aside that is of potential value? and, most urgently, why? pingback : glorious, buzzing hornets | ink and vellum beth posner 2013–06–13 at 1:16 pm binary images of librarians and libraries – as omnipotent or powerless, as know it alls or know nothings – abound in popular culture. the dichotomy between old school print gatekeeping versus high tech digital innovation represents another example. the reality, however, for most libraries and librarians, lies somewhere in between. and, as librarians working to connect people and information we should maintain the best of our “traditions” while also incorporating the best of new formats, services, policies and procedures. there is no need to force false choices between opposite poles. it’s all part of an evolutionary continuum of librarianship. as such, i think it would be more rhetorically useful if libraries are represented, discussed and considered wholistically rather than as traditional or modern. pingback : adventures in rhetoric | life, love, happiness, and the pursuit of good food pingback : traditional vs. modern libraries | john the librarian pingback : 21st century literacies and reading/learning in public: a discussion with richard e. miller | fsu digital scholars aravind subbiah 2014–02–24 at 12:47 am i enjoy the premise of this article this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: recent reads – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 26 jul editorial board, ian beilin, amy koester, sofia leung, bethany radcliffe, annie pho, ryan randall and denisse solis /0 comments editorial: recent reads it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, and your editors at in the library with the lead pipe are busy keeping up with the influx of patrons, with improving our instruction programs, and with other joys of summer. as always, we’re also thinking of ways librarians can improve our profession. here’s a few recent articles that we’ve been revisiting and think you might also enjoy reading or revisiting. if you have other reading recommendations, feel free to suggest them in the comments. fobazi ettarh’s making a new table: intersectional librarianship april hathock’s white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis juleah swanson, ione damasco, isabel gonzalez-smith, dracine hodges, todd honma, and azusa tanaka’s why diversity matters: a roundtable discussion on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship jennifer turner and jessica schomberg’s inclusivity, gestalt principles, and plain language in document design jennifer vinopal’s the quest for diversity in library staffing: from awareness to action   editorial following the yik yak: using social media observations to understand student needs on college campuses we used problem-based learning in library instruction and came to question its treatment of students this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct x – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 10 nov emily ford /22 comments x thanks to heather b. of [!!!]sweet peas photography[!!!] on flickr for this image by emily ford a little background here at in the library with the lead pipe we’ve had several potential guest authors ask us if we would publish their work under pseudonyms or anonymously. usually the requests we receive to post anonymously are those that are steeped in controversial situations that might have ramifications for the author in her or his work place or career. so far we have turned down all of these requests. the problem with anonymous and pseudonymous publishing (let’s combine these terms and call them undisclosed publications) is that with this form it is easy for pieces to be unproductive and inappropriate. we at lead pipe maintain this blog as a place to think critically about our professional lives and to provide proactive creative solutions to problems and issues in our profession. this goal is posted on our about page: ”our goal is to explore new ideas and start conversations; to document our concerns and argue for solutions.” we thought that the tone of the proposed undisclosed pieces don’t fit with this goal, seeming like complaint pieces with little background supporting evidence, and with little or no creative and critical solutions posed. following along these lines we employ a comment policy on the blog, but take no stance as to the identity of the commenter. “we appreciate and invite your comments and discussion about posts on in the library with the lead pipe. constructive criticism is one of our primary goals, and we applaud it in our readers. comments that do not maintain a civil tone or that disregard the post’s topic will be deleted. we do not edit comments except by request of the poster.” since the idea of undisclosed publication is not new and seems to come to us with some regularity, we thought it deserved a bit of thought, some writing, and frankly a bit more navel gazing or rumination– despite the fact that this is already well-covered (and controversial) territory in our profession. please note that this piece is written from my viewpoint even though it was sparked by conversations at lead pipe. it does not reflect the ideas of my lead pipe colleagues. i deviate from my lead pipe colleagues in that i feel there is no reason for critical thinking and creative solutions to be masked. anonymity should be a last resort, and there’s very little room for last resorts in published professional discourse. when i started thinking about this post i recalled my readings for susan herring’s gender and computerization class that i took in graduate school. the advent of internet technology enabled people to reinvent themselves. it enabled women to adopt male personas and vice versa. think about second life and the avatars that we are able to create for ourselves in virtual worlds. in a virtual world one can be most anything. but this kind of liberation started before the graphical interface of the internet appeared in the 1990s. think about the telnet era, even then people were presenting themselves via different personas online compared to real life. one of the most liberating things that the internet offers for many people is the ability to assume a different physicality, identity, and personality. amy bruckman discussed this in her 1993 paper, gender swapping on the internet (pdf). since the telnet era undisclosed publication and internet use has boomed. blogs and blog comments can be published anonymously; characters in online games provide alternate personalities to the ones we bring to our day jobs. in short, technology allows us to do and say things that we never would do in person. as liberating as this is, it is much easier for us to not be accountable for our actions. it allows us to break social contracts and norms in the manner of rude comments and offering arguments unsupported by any evidence or logical reasoning. an argument against undisclosed discourse hiding our identities allows us to break accepted social practice and  there is nothing inherently unethical or wrong with creating a character in second life or engaging in gender swapping or other identity experiments online. however, the realm of library professional discourse, i.e. writing critical essays or peer reviewed articles that contribute to the discourse of our profession, is not where this kind of experimentation or use of nondisclosure should occur. undisclosed publishing can be used to insult, act violently, and lash out in a way that defies our understanding of social contract and accepted norms of professional behavior. it can easily lead down the path of snarky and negative venting that are wholly unproductive. what happens if you want to retroactively take credit for your previously undisclosed ideas? walt crawford tackled this issue in a 2007 piece in econtent. “i have seen more than one case, though, where a pseudonym has gone bad. i’ve seen the retroactive addition of a real-world signature to every post in a blog, including those that might never have been written were they signed originally. identity revelation can happen because a blogger has a book or article published and is proud of it, referring to it in a manner that makes the blogger’s name obvious. it can happen because the blogger triangulates his identity too narrowly over time.” any previously published undisclosed writings may find an author backpedaling when her identity is revealed. librarianship has the perfect example of an unproductive undisclosed blogger: the annoyed librarian. this undisclosed blogger is currently hosted by library journal, a publication that provides news, reviews, and information related to librarianship. the annoyed librarian can be snarky and she can be mean. (try her post about anarchist librarians and library porn, wherein she calls anarchists simpletons and idiotic.) personally i think there is a difference between outright calling someone an idiot and having a well thought out argument that leads your readers to their own conclusions. while she does have some good critical ideas they tend to be masked by a breaking of accepted professional social contract. when an undisclosed writer attacks and contributes unproductively to professional discourse she suffers no consequences. on the flip side, when this same undisclosed author makes compelling and productive arguments the gravity of those arguments are undermined by the author’s previous work. those who choose to publish under a pseudonym, particularly a pseudonym that becomes known for bullying and counter-productive arguments, are not giving their valid, well considered, well argued, and productive ideas a chance. buschman et al, published an editorial in progressive librarian on this topic, “the inauthenticity of online interactions is a continuum, stretching from routine use of “handles” instead of names, to elaborate cultivation of false online persona, to abusive anonymity in malicious exchanges.” (p. 6) while buschman and his colleagues focus their editorial on attacks made by political right-wing library bloggers against those with opposing views, buschman and his co-authors’ argument is sound. they discuss the long and hard won intellectual freedom that academicians practice and for which librarians and academics continue to fight. “intellectual freedom is a variant also meant to protect open, public exchange in the interests of an open society and democracy.” (p.4) hiding one’s identity is not an action that points to open and public exchange. will manley has also taken up the issue of undisclosed discourse in american libraries. he makes some very interesting points in his editorial column from january 2010. “in a bygone era of accountability, newspapers would not publish a letter without identifying the writer. but today readers are permitted to post anonymous responses to each and every article.” (p. 112 american libraries, and online.) while manley points toward the anonymous comments on news web site blogs and political propaganda on the internet, his point is well taken—the accountability and reliability of a source used to matter. in libraries and for librarians, it still should. contrary to manley’s viewpoint there have been recent articles and blog posts discussing nondisclosure from the journalist’s point of view. matt zoller seitz wrote a nice piece over on salon.com that, wittily defends anonymous speech online and points to some of the ugliness it can create. “the protective force field of anonymity — or pseudonymity — brings out the worst in some people.” seitz satirically writes that he is pro-anonymity for its sheer ugliness: “and yet anonymous comments — all of them, even the written equivalent of high-speed drive-by shootings — serve a useful function. they show us what the species is really like: the full spectrum of human behavior, not just the part that we find reassuring and enlightening.” do any of us want the comparative equivalent of “high-speed drive-by shootings” in professional library discourse? we are librarians and library workers, not drive-by shooters. i personally don’t think that american librarianship is ever going to be so controversial that we need to hide our professional identities from one another. (i am aware that this is not the case in all countries, and even professional opinions may have such political ramifications where one’s life might be in danger.) in this point i agree with joseph s. fulda, who in the journal of information ethics argues that: i am in grave doubt as to whether the the rules announced in the third and fourth points [using a pseudonym to argue something verifiable and using impeccable reasoning] can be merged…whether it would be ethical to publish—under the veil of pseudonymity—such an argument…more bluntly, i can see no constructive purpose for such publication, let alone under the veil of pseudonymity…” (p. 82) fulda essentially argues that if your argument is sound why would you need to mask yourself from your intended audience? it seems less productive than making a productive argument under the auspices of oneself. when one presents a productive, insightful, and well-reasoned argument it is easier to be given credit and to laud the merits of the author. undisclosed publications lack credibility and are prone to counter-productivity. as a teacher and librarian i always encourage my students to consider their source. what authority does that source have to make that argument and those claims? without knowledge of an author’s expertise, experience, and general knowledge of the subject, how are we to even consider this kind of discourse as valid? a brief tangent on peer review a nuance of professional discourse lies within the traditional model of peer review. here we have an example of an accepted practice that relies on undisclosed identities. traditionally peer review occurs in a blind environment where reviewers do not know the identity of the author and the author does not know the identity of the reviewer. from the lens of traditional peer review it seems that a piece of writing or discourse, no matter the source or author, is judged solely on the value and productivity of its content. if we judge works based on the traditional peer review process it should follow that authorship of these articles is moot and that undisclosed publishing would be accepted practice. but it’s not. (the anonymous peer review argument is possibly how the journal of access services got away with publishing an entire issue dedicated to the annoyed librarian’s writings.) we do not use the traditional peer review model for in the library with the lead pipe. we use a form of open peer review wherein the identity of the author and the identity of the reviewers are known to both parties. this open peer review process means that authors are able to engage in conversations with her reviewers beyond one reading or review of a piece. she might bounce ideas off of a reviewer in the revision process. moreover, it allows an author publishing at lead pipe to find reviewers who have close knowledge of the subject matter at hand. for example when i wrote about the google book search settlement, i sought to have a reviewer with intricate legal and library knowledge. to this end one of the reviewers for that piece held an mls and a jd. to me getting feedback from a reviewer that had intricate legal knowledge was paramount. in blind peer review i would not have had this option. i would not have known if my reviewers had any prior knowledge to the issues relating to the google book search settlement, copyright, or law.  for me using the open peer review process has improved my writing tenfold. the conversations i’m able to carry with my reviewers, and the substantive feedback i’ve received have far surpassed my albeit limited experience with the traditional peer review process. the last resorts we (arguably) do not live in a country where we can be arrested for well-reasoned arguments and where bloggers aren’t regularly sent to prison. however, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences for what we say and do publicly, be it in regard to politics or in the workplace. this is where the “last resort” idea comes into play. i think there is a place for last resort and only last resort author nondisclosure in professional discourse. that place is very small and should be used only when situations are dire. moreover, political discourse is another arena in which i feel strongly that there is a vast amount of room for undisclosed writing and discourse. in an ideal world, substantive comments and civil discussion online would not lead to negative consequences in the workplace or professionally. however there are many professionals who do not feel they cannot speak their mind freely. within their own organizations they might fear recourse if they discuss politics or professional ideas. miriam cook of the guardian writes in in defence of anonymity online that “anonymity online sets us free. the facility to create our own content and comment on websites would be far less valuable to us were it restricted to posting under “real” names.” her argument is based in the political. when people use their real names online to discuss politics, they might suffer repercussions in their place of employ, hence the need for the veil of pseudonymity and anonymity when commenting on news blogs. consider, for instance, what recently happened to juan williams. he was fired from npr after making comments regarding muslim people.while i do not agree with the remarks mr. williams made, i can see where if he felt the need to express them, his employment would have been protected. moreover, sometimes remarks can be taken out of context, as has been argued in the case of with mr. williams. ramifications can result in either case. thanks to photo phiend on flickr for use of this image undisclosed publication in the united states goes back all the way to the federalist papers, which were all published with the same moniker–publius. the authorship of these 85 publications is still disputed today. for perhaps the most theoretical argument about political anonymity, i’d like to to turn to anarchist and revolutionary political discourse. much but not all of anarchist and revolutionary writing occurs anonymously. the theory follows that by focusing on political actions or events and not on the author, the event takes on more meaning. rather, the event is not subsumed by the individual identity of the person with the thought or taking the action, or by historical record. “the most successful poisoning of class oppressors, for example, are those never known as such. just like the perfect crime, the subversive act seeks to escape all detection, cover its tracks and avoid appearance in the archives; for the perpetrators to strike (anonymously) again. only those who wish to be martyrs, self-publicists or media personalities would wish to wait around to offer their names and have their picture taken.” without a trace. by anonymous but not all anarchists have written anonymously, as alex gorrion points out. the ability for political discourse and thought to be penned anonymously still remains of huge import to the anarchist (non)community and other revolutionary groups. like i mentioned earlier, many people work in environments where it is hard to engage in discourse, even productive and well reasoned discourse, with our fear of recourse. this is probably the case for all of the submissions that have been sent to in the library with the lead pipe requesting undisclosed publication. for me this kind of environment bleeds into professional discourse practices in our individual workplaces; and sometimes that can mean using anonymity as a tool. michael stephens and michael casey made this point in the transparent library: six signposts on the way. “be willing to accept anonymity. anonymity can encourage people to share observations or ask questions that might otherwise never emerge. be willing to look past nonconstructive critical statements gathered from staff or the public via surveys, comments, or feedback forms. there may be substance behind the snark to be addressed and used. what about bad or “not so useful” statements or suggestions made by staff? name-calling, for instance, may not merit an open reply, but it’s best to address even slightly feasible ideas, if only to acknowledge the input and encourage more feedback. explain why a particular idea might not work at this time, and direct focus to other areas. or involve staffers in exploring the costs and benefits of particular ideas that might demonstrate their feasibility to all.” because of internal politics making anonymous suggestions regarding workflow and organizational changes can be the most productive tactic. without the political weight of an identity attached those ideas may be more seriously considered when faced only as an idea, not as the person who is the mouthpiece for the idea. take for example the suggestions of combining the circulation and reference desks into one service desk. an idea such as this might have far-reaching implications for library workflow and management; it can be very controversial. what if it were the reference manager making this suggestion? or what if it were an hourly student worker? who we are in the workplace can help and/or hinder change. if we are to think seriously about ideas then sometimes it is best if ideas are just ideas and not attached to identities. so where’s the line? i’d like to think that most writing and discourse in librarianship is reliable, credible, and contributes to professional discourse. it is via writing and conversation that we are able to propose new ideas, troubleshoot, engage with our professional peers, and create new and exciting work. in an ideal world libraries and librarianship would be havens of open and transparent discourse where we would all be able to contribute productively to improve our communities and workplaces. but it’s not an ideal world so we must accept that undisclosed publication happens. contributing to discourse in an undisclosed manner is tricky. it is typically counter-productive. it invites an author to accept no accountability for her words. it can enable her to attack and bully. or pieces with undisclosed authorship could just become avenues for venting. and although venting can feel good it might be that venting is actually bad for our morale. sadly many of us work in organizations where there might be real consequences for making our ideas public–no matter how well reasoned they are. for these people writing publications with undisclosed attribution might be the only way to offer their ideas to the discussions happening about libraries and librarianship. publishing productive commentary in this way should be a last resort. will you get fired for writing this? will your career not advance because of what you wrote? will your idea not be heard if your name (or job status) is attached to the idea? if so, then a last resort might be for you. thanks to michael casey, ellie collier, hilary davis, and amy hofer for their substantive and insightful comments on this piece. without their help this article would not have been completed. references and citations: anonymous. (2003). without a trace. retrieved 10/30/2010 from http://theanarchistlibrary.org/html/anonymous__without_a_trace.html bruckman, a. (1993). gender swapping on the internet. proceedings from the internet society, 1993. retrieved 10/30/2010 from http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/papers/bruckman/gender-swappingbruckman.pdf buschman, j, rosenzweig, m, & mccook, k. (2007). on anonymity in libraryland blogging. progressive librarian, 29, 3-7. casey, m. & stephens, m. (2008). the transparent library: six signposts on the way. library journal. november 15, 2008. retrieved 10/30/2010 from http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/ca6611609.html cook, m. (2010). in defence of anonymity online. the guardian. march 17, 2010. retrieved 10/30/2010 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/17/protecting-online-anonymity crawford, w. (2007). security, na’ivete, and the limits of pseudonymity. econtent 30(6), 60. dachis, a. (2010). venting frustration will only make your anger worse. lifehacker. retrieved 11/9/2010 from http://lifehacker.com/5614548/venting-frustration-will-only-make-your-anger-worse fulda, j.s. (2007). the ethics of pseudonymous publication, the journal of information ethics 16(2), 75-89. gaus. g. (2008). contemporary approaches to the social contract. stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. retrieved 10/30/2010 from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractarianism-contemporary/ gorrion, a. (2010). anonymous: that most prolific of anarchist writers. the anvil. april 1, 2010. retrieved 10/30/2010 from http://theanvilreview.org/print/anonymous_that_most_prolific_of_anarchist_writers/ jardin, x. (2007). egypt: blogger kareem amer gets 4 years for insulting islam. boingboing.net. retrieved 11/8/2010 from http://boingboing.net/2007/02/24/egypt_blogger_kareem.html journal of access services, 5(4). 2008. manley, w. (2010). that’s news to me. american libraries. january/february 2010. p. 112. on the media. transcript of “the firing of juan williams.” october 22, 2010. retrieved 11/8/2010 from http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/10/22/02 seitz, m.z. (2010). why i like vicious, anonymous online comments. salon.com, august 3, 2010. retrieved 10/30/2010 from http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/08/03/in_defense_of_anonymous_commenting stelter, b. (2010). npr fires analyst over comments on muslims. the new york times. october 20, 2010. retrieved 10/30/2010 from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/business/media/21npr.html the federalist papers. accessed 11/8/2010 from http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/abt_fedpapers.html open peer review. (n.d.) retrieved 11/9/2010 from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_peer_review anonymity, discourse, pseudonymity, publishing the desk setup welcoming the homeless into libraries 22 responses lauren 2010–11–10 at 10:14 am this is a really interesting topic. at the university i received my mlis at, the director is a tyrant. a lot of faculty have been afraid to speak out non-anonymously because those who have done so are being let go. myself and a group of students held a forum because the director is shifting the entire program online but won’t admit it to students. we did so using our real names and everything and presented in person. i also feel that things shouldn’t be anonymous when they relate to problems. also, being anonymous should not give people in our profession a license to be vicious. emily ford 2010–11–10 at 12:55 pm that sounds like a sticky situation. i’d love to hear more about how the presentation went. lauren 2010–11–12 at 6:06 pm unfortunately, not as well as we had hoped. my personal experience was having the director of the program call me a liar for saying i had taken an online class when it was “impossible.” um, i totally took it online, buddy. also my advising professor was told that if she published 3 times within the year, her contract was renewed. she published 4 with a 5th one pending and he didn’t renew her contract. said the “committee” didn’t think she was doing all she should be. she was also one of the professors that agreed with our student presentation. laura zeigen 2010–11–10 at 11:17 am “fulda essentially argues that if your argument is sound why would you need to mask yourself from your intended audience?” for the very reason that you point out later – “many of us work in organizations where there might be real consequences for making our ideas public–no matter how well reasoned they are.” emily ford 2010–11–10 at 12:57 pm my fear is that people are too quick to take the “last resort” stance. i think we all as individuals need to consider: is saying what you feel and arguing it productively really going to have such dire consequences? sometimes the answer is yes, but i think we too often just fear consequences that might not be as serious as we imagine. leigh anne 2010–11–10 at 2:23 pm emily, couldn’t agree with you more on the “fear factor,” as it were. while there can be consequences to speaking up, they are frequently not as dire as we imagine them to be. and if they are? well, as for me, i would consider it a blessing to be let go from an organization that did not respect my right to have an opposing viewpoint (thank goodness this is not currently a problem). a wonderful, provocative post with an excellent critical analysis. thanks for bringing up this issue. now “all” we have to do is figure out how to change the culture of library science so that speaking truth to power, with courtesy, is valued more highly… emily ford 2010–11–11 at 9:34 am thanks for the compliment. i agree that i think i’d rather not work in an organization where an opposing viewpoint had such dire consequences. progress cannot happen without respectful and productive disagreement. laura zeigen 2010–11–11 at 10:06 am “progress cannot happen without respectful and productive disagreement.” agreed, but where did (or were) we supposed to learn this? sometimes this learning happens in classrooms when teachers are able to facilitate such a discussion. however, aside from anyone who participated in public speaking and formal debate, where is this idea (respectful and productive disagreement as good and a necessary part of progress) taught or embedded? supposedly it’s a core part of american culture, but too often the “respectful” and “productive” aspects of public discourse don’t make it to the table. how does a culture (a country or an organization or a profession) transform into one where respectful disagreement is not just “tolerated”, but actively encouraged? lauren 2010–11–12 at 6:10 pm i wouldn’t like to work in an organization like that either, but what would happen if the place becomes that way? and assuming the economy, finding another job would be difficult? i think it’s a real catch-22. it’s like that george bush quote that was something along the lines of “if you don’t support the war on terror, you support the terrorists.” no matter what, i shouldn’t have to be bullied into changing my mind. daniel hooker 2010–11–10 at 1:23 pm what a great post. thank you for writing this — i have long been dismayed by the acceptance and approval that inappropriate and anonymous librarians have found online. you are quite right to accept uncredited discourse as a last resort, though my concern is that too often people may assume they are in a position of last resort when they are not. we as librarians need to foster a culture of productive online discourse and one that discourages the inappropriate use of uncredited writing, especially considering that many librarians today are tasked with educating their users on appropriate use of social media. if we cannot demonstrate appropriate personal and professional behavior online, how can we be expected to pass on that knowledge to others? john buschman 2010–11–10 at 4:20 pm emily, i believe you further parse the issue well. the purpose of our piece was, as much as anything, to disentangle undisclosed attribution (i like that phrase) from first amendment rights, intellectual freedom, privacy, and a “right” to secrecy. i think your dividing line of undisclosed attribution as a last resort is a useful one – and i agree with the post that notes that imagined consequences are frequently overblown. nice work emily ford 2010–11–11 at 9:37 am thanks, john. i do see a difference between privacy (where i live, who are my friends, what is my phone number, etc) and professional discourse. it can be hard to define the line, however, when it comes to politics and profession sometimes–particularly for people such as myself who feel that being a library worker and engaging professionally in library issues is political. kathleen mccook 2010–11–10 at 4:33 pm we should stand-up for the right to workplace speech. have the courage to sign when we have convictions. emily ford 2010–11–11 at 9:38 am agreed. nicole pagowsky 2010–11–10 at 6:58 pm anonymous commenters and bloggers like the annoy[ing] librarian really do serve as “high-speed drive-by shootings.” even many of the anonymous comments in the chronicle, clearly get very out of control, to the point of hate speech and personal attacks. hiding identity when engaging in discourse can occasionally serve it’s purpose, as you mention, and as a last resort, but i agree we will progress further as a profession with open communication. ellie 2010–11–11 at 11:53 am i think overall i tend to agree, but for me the focus is still on the content not the identity. i don’t think griping or personal attacks are productive and people are more likely to gripe and attack anonymously, but i don’t personally take issue with anonymity itself. brett bonfield 2010–11–15 at 1:40 pm definitely, though i seem to make decisions about what to read based, in part, on the identity of the author. i often find myself scanning an author’s bio, or running a quick profile search, before reading anything the person wrote. almost always, if the author is anonymous (or even effectively anonymous), i’ll move on to the next thing. i don’t know that i’d defend my strategy, but with so much available to read i think we have to have short cuts. and, given my reaction the few times i have made exceptions — personally, i think the “ed dante” piece in the chronicle is a total waste of time — i think i’m unlikely to change any time soon. ellie 2010–11–15 at 5:31 pm i think i probably make more of my what to read decisions based on the identity of the person suggesting that i read the article. i probably don’t even note the author much of the time, though i may note the website that is hosting it. and of course, if something is put forward as “this study shows” then i try to go find the original study, but in terms of “here’s a take on this issue” i suppose i’m a bit of a drive-by reader, skimming for key ideas that make me think, possibly discussing them with whoever is nearby irl, and moving on. jean costello 2010–11–11 at 9:24 pm great post! i agree with everything said above. i also support moderated anonymity – that is, publishing content anonymously, on behalf of someone who feels risk of harm by being identified. i’ve offered anonymity to people who work in libraries that have told me they’d like to offer the type of analysis i do on the radical patron blog but cannot for fear of being ostracized by coworkers or censured by management. what would make anonymity workable in this case, i think, is that authors would not truly be anonymous – i’d know them. my name and photo are on the masthead and i’m not going to publish anything i believe is unproductive or inappropriate. would be great if library journal used the same judgement. john buschman 2010–11–15 at 1:51 pm i do think we need to be careful in our discussions here about slip-sliding toward excusing anonymity as a necessary by-product. i believe that’s what emily was trying to help us do with this posting. having your boss mad at you is quite different than having your career actually, truly threatened. boss mad doesn’t equal a reason to defend anonymous postings. that we can imagine a threat should not be enshrined *as* *the* *actual* threat. second, we need to grapple always with the means (technological anonymity) and what it enables (anonymous unaccountable attacks). i think we are at a case where it is in-for-a-penny, then you’re in-for-a-pound in this case: without a fairly bright line, you let a certain lj-sponsored anonymous blogger/attack specialist into legitimate discourse. thanks all – a good exchange. steven v. kaszynski 2011–01–21 at 9:53 am i just chimed in on this topic at my blog. if you’ve a mind to, have a peek. http://golibrarians.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/anonymous-authorship/ cheers. pingback : anonymous authorship « the go librarians this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct struggling to juggle: part-time temporary work in libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 9 feb emily ford /53 comments struggling to juggle: part-time temporary work in libraries photo by flickr user stuant63 (cc by-nc 2.0) by emily ford several of my in the library with the lead pipe posts have centered around work/life balance, or being happy and healthy in a job. when i wrote about losing my mojo i also mentioned that a big thing for me was my transition from working full-time to half-time. after that post i enjoyed a summer of half-time work in which i was able to pay rent, eat, go on day trips to the oregon coast and columbia river gorge for hikes, and generally re-infuse myself with energy. i needed the break. it was great, but i knew it wouldn’t last. i wasn’t saving any money and my position was temporary, with a one-year contract. i knew i would eventually need to pick up another part-time job to get my student loans paid more quickly, save money in case my temporary part-time job was not refunded in the next fiscal year, and, of course, to indulge occasionally at an out-of-my-price-range restaurant. i also knew that i wanted to accept the right part-time job. and i eventually did. in late september i accepted a part-time hourly wage contract position to fill in as a reference and instruction librarian at a local state university. of the six jobs i’ve held over the past three and a half years since i’ve had my mls, only one of my positions was permanent (and it had its issues, which is why i left) and only three have been full-time. currently i’m working two part-time temporary jobs. one is as a scholarly communication librarian at a medical school and the other as a reference and instruction librarian at a large, urban state university. don’t get me wrong; i am lucky. despite its part-time temporary nature one of my jobs offers me health insurance, professional development funding, faculty status, and the ability to work on engaging projects. but my current experience is taking me back to the right-out-of-library-school piecemealing together of part-time work to pay the rent. it’s an experience all too common these days and it can be difficult to professionally balance more than one job, let alone balance life and work. with this post i’d like to examine a bit more in depth some of the professional issues facing many librarians today who are working not one, but maybe 2 or 3 or 4 part-time library jobs.  the library journal placement and salaries survey 2010 indicates that while full-time placement is up, so are part-time, temporary and non-professional placements of lis grads. while some people work part-time jobs as a choice, others work part-time jobs because these are the only employment opportunities afforded them. the trend to work numerous part-time temporary jobs is growing, and there seems to be no end in sight. balancing work and life is one challenge in and of itself, but what of the challenge of balancing numerous positions and a life? being curious i did a pretty extensive search of the professional literature to find discussions surrounding part-time work. i found articles that fell into one of several categories: articles that discuss part-time employment and job sharing as good ways to maintain work/life balance. these articles (to be referenced later) focus on those individuals who choose to work part-time. criticisms of employers and institutions regarding part-time work in the form of letters to the editor. the employer’s perspective of how cost-efficient part-time work can be at the administrative level. articles discussing the advantages and the disadvantages of part-time work. one of the things that stuck me about my literature searching is that few of these articles are recent. in fact, several of the longer substantive articles date from the 1980s. the nature of libraries has changed quite a bit in the past 30 years, and we have yet to get a handle on what it means to have a growing part-time temporary work force. for perspective, many newer librarians, such as myself, were still in elementary school at time these articles were written. there is much debate about the use of adjunct or part-time instructors in higher education in general. longmate & cosco (2002) cite the growing trend for community colleges to have an instructor workforce comprised of 60% part-time instructors; compared to 20% in 1970. given discussions in academe regarding part-time work and the growing numbers of part-time temporary library workers, it is again time to have national dialog about part-time temporary librarianship. the benefits the benefits of having a part-time job or a job share situation are, indeed, rich and plentiful. lori wamsley, (2008) like many of her predecessors from the 1980s and 1990s, points to the advantages of flexibility, networking, gaining experience, and staying in a local area. others point to the advantages for people who have children and families (library personnel news, 1993; notowitz, 1983; dinerman, 1988; laynor, 1987). indeed, when i worked part-time i enjoyed my hobbies more and was able to spend more time with loved ones. working two positions enables me to have diverse work experiences. i have different job descriptions that concentrate in differing library work. in one position i am deeply engaged in scholarly communication, providing education and support to a community about the nih public access policy, and supporting publishing issues such as author rights. in the other position i serve as a subject librarian, providing reference services to a diverse audience of students, graduate students, and faculty. about 40% of my time in this position is at a busy reference desk–a kind of work i find quite satisfying. i also deeply enjoy the classroom teaching, collection development, and other aspects of this position. this diversity of day-to-day duties brings me great satisfaction. additionally, working in more than one library enables me to develop professional relationships with an abundance of coworkers. where one library does not employ subject specialists, the other has many with specialized research and publications interests. where one library employs those who are expert searchers and work in rigorous research support, the other excels in instruction development for undergraduate students. working at two different institutions affords me the opportunity to engage with a wealth of individuals who have a diversity of expertise. from my coworkers at both institutions i have amassed a great deal of knowledge and experience. to this end i am able to bring what i have learned from one institution and use it at the other. for example, during a reference shift at the large university library i received a phone call from a faculty member concerned about copyright and fair use for her coming term’s course-pack. using my knowledge of copyright and publishing as a scholarly communication librarian, i was able to assist her by explaining fair use, even though at the time i was serving as a reference and instruction librarian. similarly, i am able to use my knowledge of resources offered by both libraries to refer students and faculty from each school to the other when the respective institution’s resources aren’t what a patron needs. for some individuals not being tied down to one job is a benefit. temporary part-time contracts mean that you can work when you need to work. conversely, if you want a day off you can simply request it. contract work allows for the flexibility of choosing which contracts to take. if you are working a part-time temporary position and you are offered a contract extension or a contract renewal, you don’t have to take it. for some, this is quite a benefit to be able to choose when and how much one works. finally, i am able to live in the city i love. when i finished library school i knew that i didn’t want to live anywhere other than my home city so i made the choice to move home without a job. i knew in my heart that i would be happier in my chosen surroundings than by choosing a job over a city. luckily i have been able to remain employed over the past three and a half years, which is a feat in and of itself. the disadvantages part-time temporary work has numerous disadvantages that must be considered. for many people working more than one part-time temporary position is the only employment choice afforded them. it can feel like being between a rock and a hard place, especially if you want to work full-time in the library profession but don’t have the opportunity to do so. what some of the family-friendly articles i read fail to mention is that the income of part-time positions is not enough to support a family. some people might choose to work full-time in another profession for health benefits and to support their families, while others decide to take numerous part-time temporary library jobs (to end up working full-time or more than full-time) so that they might use their coveted mls in the library field. sometimes individuals accept positions that do not require an mls, often remaining in paraprofessional positions. for many, accepting part-time temporary work is the decision to be a librarian. i fear that many individuals feel they don’t have a choice but to accept and be grateful for any library-related job opportunity that comes their way. as a result, individuals work several part-time temporary positions, struggling to balance numerous jobs and life. ultimately, individuals will need to make a choice that best suits their life needs. working less than full-time  is simply not economically viable for most people these days. librarians, in particular, who frequently have student loan debt from undergraduate and graduate careers, feel the pressure to repay their loans. i personally don’t know anyone who went into librarianship for the money, so we can assume that the full-time pay, much less the part-time pay, is not enough. the fact that i was able to work half-time for three months was a definite luxury, but after that time i needed to find additional work. as discussed by almost all of the articles i read, part-time temporary jobs do not pay health, retirement, vacation or sick time benefits. the hourly wages for these positions fall below those of an institution’s full-time counterparts, and employees have no guarantee that they will continue to have a position from contract to contract. “nearly 64 percent of part-time librarians are paid at the low end of the wage scale” argues gover (1994) citing hogue & sisson (1993).   for many the inequity in pay is a big frustration. another disadvantage that has been discussed in the literature is exclusion from the work environment (wamsley, 2008; maxwell, 1997; gover, 1994; pontau & rothschild, 1986; anderson, 1995; braudy & tuckerman, 1986). as a part-time temporary worker one might not be well trained to know  library policies. moreover, individuals may feel disconnected from coworkers by not being invited to participate in meetings, institutional and department decision-making (anderson, 1995) and by being the individuals who work the undesirable shifts (braudy & tuckerman, 1986).  barbara mettler (1988) points out that sometimes being a substitute leads to “some staff view subs as ‘fair game’ and will do ‘creative’ things with their schedules.” (p. 9) she discusses a situation where a coworker left the substitute alone while the coworker took extended lunch breaks. while i’d like to think this is not a normal practice, it shows how inequity in the work place can grow between part-time temporary staff and regular employees. one of the disadvantages that i have not seen discussed in any articles is commuting. while i personally have the luck of working jobs situated only a mile and a half apart, many of my librarian colleagues work far away from their homes. i would find it much more difficult to hold two part-time professional positions if such proximity between institutions did not exist. my colleagues’ several jobs are far from one another and can result in the stress of rushing from one job to the next. additionally the time and money individuals spend commuting in cars, paying for gas, parking, and daycare just so they can work numerous jobs adds up to be quite an expense. as an example, when i began looking for part-time work, i turned down a part-time temporary substitute librarian position 21 miles from my home, and 20 miles from my half-time job. i was sad to do this because the library environment seemed energetic, but i knew that i could not balance such a long commute between two positions, home, and an uncertain work schedule. for some, part of this equation is also how long they are asked to work. will they be driving a long ways to fill in for only a 2 hour shift? this leads us to yet another disadvantage: scheduling. scheduling between multiple part-time jobs can be onerous and difficult. just keeping track of what days and what shifts you work can be a chore; especially if your shifts vary week to week. in my case i have caught myself, in the middle of an instruction session, referring to the wrong library! another scheduling dilemma is that many substitute librarians might not feel that they are able to say no when they are asked to fill in for a shift. if they say no once, they might not be called in the future to cover for a shift. “but it is a fine balance between being available and unavailable for work; you don’t want to be too unavailable to work, because then you likely won’t get any scheduled hours,” (p. 7, wamsley, 2008).  sometimes this can result in forgoing the luxury of a weekend so that you can keep working in the future, pay the rent, etc. many part-timers also struggle with a work/life balance on top of the work/work balance. part-time librarians typically work more undesirable hours than their full-time permanent counterparts. evening and weekend shifts are typically covered by part-time employees (braudy & tuckerman, 1986; wamsley, 2008). substitutes or on-call workers have unpredictable hours. you might receive a call only one hour before a shift to see if you can cover for someone who is out sick. for some librarians this can be a difficulty. friends and family may have regular 8-5 jobs, so connecting with loved ones can be a hardship. one of the most troubling disadvantages is that part-time workers often have little to no support to engage in professional development and service. having been a professional for over three years i am a member of various committees locally and nationally. with a full-time position i was supported to participate in librarianship in this manner and i continue to do so. again, i am lucky that one of my positions supports my professional service and scholarship in the form of travel to conferences, committee participation, and writing. however, when i am gone from my hourly position for committee work or am attending a conference, i receive no pay for that time. this has resulted in me facing the difficult choice to sacrifice either money, in the form of pay, or sacrifice my professional development in missing committee meetings and conferences. the other choice i face is whether to make up missed work hours when i do participate in a conference. will i work saturday and sunday for the paycheck? most individuals who work part-time temporary positions are not supported in their endeavors to participate in professional development opportunities. by this i mean they are not supported financially to attend conferences, nor are they given the release time to work on committee obligations or attend conferences and workshops. and yet, in the future when they apply for full-time permanent jobs employers might favor a librarian who has engaged in service and professional development over one who has not. chan and auster (2003) point to the need to address professional development and training for part-time library workers, stating that “part-time status reduces opportunities for updating; because libraries have come to rely on part-time librarians, the updating needs of these part-time employees should be addressed” (p. 282-283). part-timers typically must attend conferences on their own time and on their own dime. for many part-timers the decision becomes “learn or get paid” and that is not an easy decision to make. some might choose to make up lost pay by working weekends or extending work hours, so as not to lose too much pay for attending a conference or workshop. photo by flickr user digitalnative (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) balancing more than one job part of my decision to work two jobs was financial; i needed to be able to save money and pay off my student loans. the other issue at hand is that the job market in my city is tight, and there are few full-time permanent jobs to be had in any field, let alone in libraries. i am not alone in this employment situation. as i mentioned in the introduction, the part-time nature of academic work is growing. with this growing population of part-timers, we are all facing the conundrum of how to find good balance between two jobs. one of the reasons i wanted to write this post was to discuss the challenges i’ve faced, but also look at the positive aspects and growth that i experience working two fulfilling library positions. i have enough money coming in between both positions, and my ability to retain the perks of a regular employee at one institution has assisted me professionally. both positions are part-time temporary and i enjoy both of them greatly. however, i find that on any given day one job will get my better self and the other will get the worse. just like work/life balance, work/work balance demands a person to choose one thing over another. (remember the cycle of rotating neglect i talked about in how do you say no?) to this end i don’t feel that on any day either job gets my best. ideally, i would be able to have one job and concentrate my energies on providing the best service to patrons and making the best decisions for my library. being in more than one place can spread energies thin, and can result in confusion, disconnectedness, and exhaustion. i’ve found some techniques that are helpful for balancing two professional positions. one, i try to be present within my communities. when i walk in the door of the medical school library i consciously put on my scholarly communication and medical librarian hat. likewise, when i enter the door at the state university library, take off my medical librarian hat and i put on my reference and instruction hat. i try to not check my other work’s e-mail when i’m at either institution, but sometimes i fail at this. changing hats is just one way that i try to be fully engaged at either institution when i arrive. it helps me to keep up by regarding daily announcements and news from either institution, so that i feel like i’m in the loop with each place. i read staff blogs, weekly e-mail announcements, meeting minutes and other work related materials. these make me feel more connected to what is happening at each work place. it alleviates some of the disconnection that can result from only being around part of the time. sometimes changing hats and perspectives in the middle of the day can be tough. i’ll find myself going through selection slips at one institution and think, “i should buy this for my other library!” and sometimes i do forward myself book titles to purchase, e-mail tidbits on resources, etc that will benefit my other job at the other library. frequently i’m still thinking about presentations i gave at my other place of work, or an instruction session i gave the previous evening. the different nature of my part-time temporary positions has created some inequities in how i view and treat each workplace. since the medical school does support my service activities and some conference travel, i try to pack in all of my professional development and committee work while i’m on their dollar. since i also have a job to do, a lot of these commitments will bleed into my weekends, which i’ve long valued as sacred, non-working times. conversely, my other employer is unable to support my committee service. as with my professional commitments, i use the benefits from my salaried, faculty position to visit the doctor, or make necessary car mechanic appointments. as a result i sometimes feel frustrated by trying to be a professional and do a professional job without the institutional support that would make it easier and my job more fulfilling. likewise my differing employee classification between the two institutions can be a strain. i am faculty at one institution and not at the other. as a faculty member i participate actively within the library and work on library-wide projects rather than my singular job duties. as an hourly wage employee, i do not participate in long-term projects, nor do i participate at the same level as my full-time permanent counterparts. my situation is quite unique in this regard. the divergent nature of my employee status at the institutions stems from my 3-year work history at the medical school and my newness at the state university. because of my experience as a faculty member at the medical school figuring out how to be a professional in an hourly-wage position is complicated. i would like to be involved at the larger level for library decision-making, but i don’t have the institutional knowledge, nor do i feel comfortable within the organization’s culture to participate as fully as i would like. when i took on a second temporary part-time position my partner warned me that i was going to be exhausted and that it was going to be arduous. he was right. yet i deeply enjoy both of my positions and while i feel certain frustrations, i am comforted in knowing that i’m gaining rich experiences and that this situation will not last forever. the employer’s perspective certainly the use of part-time temporary employees stems from economic need. there is no doubt that library budgets are suffering and as a result personal budgets are, too. chervinko (1986) points out that: “using temporary workers is an excellent means of solving some staffing problems in the library. the business world has long recognized the value of these workers and is using them in greater numbers for specialized jobs. libraries can use them efficiently and economically for staffing major in-house projects. to achieve the maximum benefits from their service, it is necessary that they be carefully selected and thoroughly trained and motivated to produce high quality work. moreover, they must be treated as equal members of the library staff.” (p. 220) one of the aspects that i value from this business and administrative perspective is the need to treat part-time employees as equal members of the library staff. from the numerous articles i’ve read and from personal experience, part-time employees do not feel they are treated as equal to their full-time permanent counterparts. again, in this regard i have been very lucky to be in positions that respect my experience and ideas. bette anderson also addresses this issue in her 1995 article trends in the workplace: part-time librarians. “my personal assessment is that the practice of relying on part-timers may save money for employers, but without enlightened management it can result in hidden costs in terms of employee morale and quality of public service” (p. 264). she continues, pointing out that “as outsiders, they are not invited to become part of the decision-making process” (p. 265). these two quotes point to the need for management and administration to be sensitive to implementing part-time temporary work. part-time temporary jobs are cheap for libraries, but at what cost? is turnover for part-time temporary work high? what are the training costs? before implementing part-time temporary positions library administrations should put plans in place that address the needs for part-time workers to be treated professionally. for example, where will these employees be able to hang their coats? what are best practices for hiring part-time temporary workers? professional treatment might include providing some contract hours to engage in professional development activities, or allow paid sick leave. not all of these suggestions will be feasible for every institution, but they are points for managers and administrators to consider. what can employees do? as a new librarian, an underemployed librarian, or someone who only wants to work part-time, what can you do when it comes to the tension of piecemealing together part-time jobs? i would encourage you to ask about professional development possibilities before signing any contracts. engage in a dialogue with your potential employer and potential supervisor to see if there can be an agreement that will make working several part-time jobs more enjoyable and avoid some of the common disadvantages of working part-time temporary positions. try to ask for a few hours of your contract work to serve on a committee, or ask if you may attend a conference and receive some financial support to attend. it is pivotal that we, as professionals, have a clear, constructive dialogue about both the benefits and the disadvantages of part-time temporary work. harsh letters to the editor regarding poor treatment by an employer will not help part-time temporary employees anywhere. instead, consider entering into dialogue with your supervisor about how to balance your time. part-time temporary employees should remain sensitive to the budgetary and political obstructions facing institutions and library administrators. likewise, institutions and administrators should seriously evaluate how to make and use part-time employees in a responsible and respectful manner. it would be interesting if part-time employees might draft a set of best practices or points for consideration for their libraries. in the future, the library’s administrators might use these points when hiring more part-time and/or part-time temporary employees. conclusion if part-time work with benefits were the norm in libraries, then libraries, patrons, and employees would benefit. for many libraries and institutions this kind of solution is not feasible with their tiny, and continually shrinking budgets. since part-time temporary workers are becoming the new norm in libraries, i think it’s time for us to engage in healthy discussion about these issues. this post is my call to have individuals, institutions, and organizations once again examine the issues of part-time temporary labor. let’s talk about creative solutions and ideas that will benefit institutions and individuals. as gover pointed out in 1994, it’s time for further study. where is the study? who’s going to do it? (it’s probably not going to be the part-timers, because they have enough on their plates.) but it is time for us to have a greater national dialogue and come up with some techniques to improve working environments for librarians in the trenches. you can contribute by adding your voice. share your story, your concerns, your triumphs. what have you experienced as advantages to part time work? what about disadvantages? i’d like to hear from the administrative perspective answers to the following: have you supervised part-time employees? what challenges did you face? what were your successes? what went in to the decisions to create the positions? what would you look for from a part-time temporary employee in the future? from the non-administrative side i’d like to hear answers to: what is your experience with part-time temporary work/workers? what would best practices look like to you?  do you have any other benefits or disadvantages to mention? what might lead you to a decision to work part-time temporary jobs? many thanks to fellow part-timers chau hoang-fossen and kim read for their comments and feedback. additional thanks to lead pipe bloggers, hilary davis, ellie collier, and kim leeder for thoughtful comments; and to tom raffensperger and michael bowman for conversations, feedback, and their perspectives regarding this topic. references and further reading anderson, b. (1995). trends in the workplace: part-time librarians. public libraries, 34, 264-265. braudy, j., & tuckerman, s. (1986). the part-time academic librarian: current status, future directions. library journal (1976), 111, 38-41. brustman, m. j., & via, b. j. (1988). employment and status of part-time librarians in u.s. academic libraries. the journal of academic librarianship, 14, 87-91. temporary librarians in california academic libraries: results of a statewide survey of library directors. (1989). library personnel news, 3, 57-58. chan, d. c., & auster, e. (2003). factors contributing to the professional development of reference librarians. library & information science research (07408188), 25(3), 265. chervinko, j. s. (1986). temporary employees in academic and research libraries. the journal of academic librarianship, 12, 217-220. delguidice, m., luna, r., & zorn, m. g. (2010). public librarian. knowledge quest, 38(5), 26-29. dinerman, g. (1988). temp in a teapot. new jersey libraries, 21, 14+. falk, p.k. (2001). grant-funded temporary employees in libraries. technical services quarterly, 18(3), 35-46. gover, h. r. (1994). whose bargain? the use of part-time employees in libraries: a call for further study. alki, 10(3), 17, 20. hogue, e. m. & sisson, l. (1993). bargains of the century: part-time librarians. the bottom line, 7(2), 18-22. laynor, b. (1987). librarianship and motherhood: a part-time solution. medical reference services quarterly, 6, 15-25. longmate, j. & cosco, f. (2002). part-time instructors deserve equal pay for equal work. the chronicle of higher education, may 13, 2002. retrieved 2/6/2011 from http://chronicle.com.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/article/part-time-instructors-deserve/23489/ maatta, s. l. 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(2008). the adventures of a part-time librarian. ola quarterly, 14(3), 5-7, 34. employment, jobs, part-time reconsidering facebook editorial: lead pipe debates the stealth librarianship manifesto 53 responses michele 2011–02–09 at 8:52 am great piece, emily! i think every situation is different. i understand and empathize with your struggles and challenges while working two pt jobs. my personal opinion is that your case is exceptional and, as you say, lucky. you have been working in professional positions since graduation. i think there is a large swath of library school graduates who are never able to get that first ft or pt professional position. obviously i’m biased, since i am one of those people! i started working in a paraprofessional position at an academic library while finishing my mls. (i graduated in 2008.) i found out the hard way that the job market was not great, so i decided to take advantage of my employer’s tuition policy and begin a second master’s program. now, i’ve backed myself into a corner. i don’t want to leave my paraprofessional position because i won’t get tuition benefits. there are no jobs for me at this institution. do i stay or do i go? do i continue to valiantly try to remain in academic librarianship, or do i try to move into public, where i have no experience? add to that the fact that the work i do now is not necessarily the professional direction i want to go in. (throw in some internships, and a pt reference librarian job, too.) when the perfect opportunity to work in the special library i wanted to work in came up, albeit pt, i took it. i still work ft and, now, pt. caveat should be my middle name! i get paid horribly at my pt job and the people in the organization (i work in a special library in a culinary school) have no respect or esteem for the library. i am the only staff there and i get to manage (and conduct) every single aspect of the library from ordering, reference, it, cataloging, managing a web presence, software testing, faculty liaising, donor relations, and whatever else needs to be done. the consultant they hired to catalog the library randomly chose a special loc system that she failed to document, so i need to re-catalog the entire library (yay!). with all of this that i’m able to put on my resume, i’m still on the fence (and have been for over 9 months) about whether i should stay or not. anywho, i know i’m not alone in trying to do whatever it takes to find that professional position, but i honestly think i’d be less-stressed working two professional, pt positions, than the one ft paraprofessional position and one pt professional-even-though-my-own-employer-thinks-the-library-is-a-joke position. i don’t feel like either of my jobs is a “real” job. yes, i’m lucky to have a job at all, much less two, but it can be grueling! (sorry for the rant! this piece really hit a personal nerve because i’m in a multi-job situation myself!) megan 2011–02–09 at 12:01 pm michele, i’m in a very similar situation to yours; i began working as a paraprofessional at an academic library 3 years ago and am still here, 6 months after graduation, because i cannot find a full-time professional job. in january i began teaching a semester-long information literacy class two evenings a week at a local career college. it’s great experience, but exhausting to work 9-5 m-f at my paraprofessional job and 6-10pm th-f at my professional job (and that doesn’t take into account lesson planning and grading, which i do evenings and weekends, and commuting; my part-time position is 30 miles from my full-time job and 20 miles from home). like emily, i do not get release time for professional development/committee work/conference attendance at either of my jobs, so i worked 13 days straight in order to attend midwinter last month. also like emily, i realize this is key to my eventually finding a full-time professional job–it’s the one thing that makes up for my lack of professional experience–so i’m (mostly!) happy to pursue these activities on my own time. i do seem to be getting a better response to my job applications, though, so i’m hopeful the pervasive tiredness is worth it! emily ford 2011–02–09 at 7:51 pm thanks for leaving a comment, michele. my case is exceptional and i feel very lucky and am happy with the choices i have made. just because it’s challenging, it doesn’t mean i don’t enjoy it. it sounds like your situation is really frustrating! when this happens to me i try my best to focus on the positive things, the experiences i’m gaining, etc. we’re all in it together. hang in there, michele. ellie collier 2011–02–09 at 1:31 pm thanks for tackling this topic emily, particularly the techniques on how to help deal with the disconnect. at one point shortly after graduating i was working three different part-time positions at once, spread all around town and it is definitely stressful. i did eventually take an laii position so that i could have full time work and benefits. it was a very difficult decision and i was lucky to find full time professional work only a semester later. i also picked up hourly evening work while being employed full time to help pay off those student loans faster. it was a wonderful experience and change of pace since it was a different type of library, but it was incredibly draining and left me with very little free time. emily ford 2011–02–12 at 1:51 pm thanks for sharing, ellie. i think for many this is a very hard decision to take a classified position, even though we have the coveted mls. the thing i like about your story is that you did it for a while, and now you’re not having to juggle a full-time job and a part-time job! it’s good to know that these situations aren’t going to last forever. olin 2011–02–09 at 1:51 pm good read emily. i just finished my mls in december and am lucky enough to have gotten a pt temporary position at the place i was interning in last semester. i’ve been told that a full time position might be opening up soon, but so far nothing. luckily my fiancee earns enough to bring home the bacon and i’m getting benefits through her, otherwise i would really be in dire straits. emily ford 2011–02–09 at 7:54 pm i have my fingers crossed for you, olin! i’m glad you’re working in a library, so many people don’t even have that opportunity. i also find it interesting that you comment here about your fiancee bringing home the bacon. many of the articles i read about this topic were about women who made the choice to move to half-time jobs so that they could take care of their children and husbands. my how times have changed… i just don’t see that we are able to do that anymore. jenny e. 2011–02–09 at 5:48 pm i received my mls in may 2009. since august 2005 i have worked 2 part time paraprofessional positions at two different public libraries in my hometown. i jobhunted on and off all through grad school and have jobunted “full time” since my last semester or two. i live right on the line of two states. been job hunting in both. no luck so far. i’m glad to hear i’m not alone and i’m also not the only one working two part time library jobs. i am devoted to this profession. that’s why i’m stuck with two part time jobs. i can’t imagine working in a different field. ideally i’d like to find a full time job near my hometown but at this point i’ve tried within 3 hours. emily ford 2011–02–09 at 7:55 pm that’s the decision that so many people make, jenny. piece together work in the profession rather than taking a job outside of libraries. times are tough everywhere. your devotion will serve you well. :) sjmbqczyc 2011–04–22 at 11:40 pm aiecaw gyaydthxfram deb 2011–02–10 at 1:35 pm i’m one of those who choose to work p/t while my son was young, and i was fortunate to have a husband who had/has a f/t job with benefits. i’m back working f/t now. having been in the profession for many years, my advice to newly minted librarians who are job hunting is if at all possible to not limit yourself geographically. also, network, network, network. who you know and who knows and respects you could get you a one-up on the competition. if you’re still in library school, make sure you get work experience–internships, field placements, etc.–join library student groups and be an active not passive member. go to state and national conferences and take advantage of the student intern opportunities that many library professional organizations have. this obviously requires a monetary investment, but it could pay off in the long run. like anything in life, it’s a risk… lots of good luck as well to you all :-) emily ford 2011–02–12 at 1:55 pm thanks so much for commenting, deb! i agree with you that networking is key. in fact, the jobs i currently have are places where i had informational interviews when i was a library school student. also, regarding not limiting oneself geographically is tough. i thought about this a lot before i came back to portland from library school in bloomington, dead set on finding a job in portland. as my 3.5 year history shows, that limit is perhaps the very reason that i’ve not been able to find full-time permanent work. however, when i did make the decision to move back home i was following the advice of a true friend who told me. “emily, if you take a job somewhere else for a while you’re still going to have your heart set on portland. just move home. you’ll be able to find some kind of job and you’ll be happier.” she was right. i still owe her for that great advice to this day. rachael 2011–02–18 at 10:13 am emily, thank you for your post. i’m a portland girl myself, and did my graduate work on the east coast. it never crossed my mind that living off the west coast was an option, but as i hit the job market i applied for any job available (coincidentally all east of the mississippi) and ended up taking a “dream job” on the east coast. it has definitely been a wonderful experience, and i am grateful for the amazing professional work i’ve been able to do; but as you say, my heart is still in portland. it’s a tough decision on what is more important – career or quality home life (arguably effected by lack of career). i don’t have the right answer, but i did appreciate your perspective and sharing your decision on returning home. it was a nice look over the fence to where the grass is always greener, and has given me a lot to think about. emily ford 2011–02–18 at 10:54 am you’re welcome, rachael. when i was looking i had other advice, too. people whom i trust and respect deeply were also telling me not to go home without a job, that it was dangerous, that i needed to find a job, get experience, and then get a job in portland later. i was impatient. i’m still happy with my decision, because my life is rich with friends and loved ones, excellent coffee, bicycling like mad, and the best breakfasts in the country. to me, it’s been worth it. :) hannah storm 2011–02–18 at 12:01 pm –“my advice to newly minted librarians who are job hunting is if at all possible to not limit yourself geographically.” i need to highlight this since it is one of the most often cited pieces of advice. but who exactly is this advice intended for?i think we need to be clear. it’s utterly not helpful for the individual that’s either married, or single with child(ren) and an existing support network in their locale. in my case, i can’t just move off to where the jobs are because my husband, the primary breadwinner, would need to secure a job first (he’s in a field that, gasp, pays the relocation) which is significant. then there’s our young daughter, what kind of place would it be for her?that’s a major consideration. we don’t currently have a support network to leave, but we have each other; the single parent would be ill advised up and leave if they’re not going to have the necessary support network, especially if it involves childcare. i’m not going to go there with the networking since this (in my experience) seems to be so closely tied to the professional development/continuing education piece which was already discussed thoroughly in the post, along with the monetary ramifications of it. i’m speaking from the vantage of a mls holder, who has worked exclusively as a temp and/or part library worker (some part-time positions cobbled together at one time). i’ve since left the library field to work full time at a healthcare it company. (i’m also a ptown native, living elsewhere for 6 years). emily ford 2011–02–18 at 7:23 pm thanks for bringing this up, hannah. it’s definitely a big issue; especially when librarianship is a 2nd or 3rd career for many people who already have established “adult” lives. you are quite right that networking is really tied in with the professional development community. however, i have seen people do amazing networking just by harnessing the power of their isps and logging into linkedin, alaconnect, and other sites. have you tried networking in that way at all? if so, was it useful? ashley 2011–02–10 at 3:19 pm glad to see you tackling this topic! i got a full-time job right out of library school in 2005 (ah, the old days when the economy was good), but then after moving for the sake of my husband’s new job in 2007, i’ve been unable to find a full-time job in a library, even though i live near a fairly large city. i’ve combined a part-time library job with a part-time-work-from-home consulting gig. currently, i’m working temporarily in a full-time position at the library while a full search is conducted. i can apply, but i’m not guaranteed anything except to be able to return to my part-time hours, which is probably more generous than a lot of situations would be, though it’s still frustrating. i would be more than happy to consider paraprofessional work to land a full-time library job, but my experience is that libraries won’t hire a librarian in a paraprofessional job because they’re afraid she’ll either quit or become confrontational with other librarians or a non-librarian supervisor. i don’t want to leave the profession because i know it will be almost impossible to return, but i don’t know how much longer i can do this. the inconsistant schedule is tough on my family, and my lack of success is pretty hard on my self-esteem. emily ford 2011–02–12 at 1:56 pm that sounds like a frustrating position to be in, ashley. i’m wishing you the best of luck! karen 2011–02–11 at 1:20 pm great piece, emily! i have experience from both sides of this issue. i worked from many years as a paraprofessional at a university before decided to get my mls. once i did, i continued in my ft paraprofessional job and also worked as an adjunct librarian at the local community college. it was actually a great experience for me as the pay was excellent, i got some great experience, and my supervisor at the ft position was willing to work with my schedule. within six months of graduation, i was offered a ft contract librarian position at the university where i had been working as a paraprofessional. i continued to work the pt adjunct position and it worked out very well – until the university developed budget issues and made the decision not to renew librarian contracts. i had to take a job outside the library field for six months. during that time i wasn’t able to work at the community college because my new employer would not allow it (they considered it a conflict of interest). i am back to working full time managing the library at a small private college. i have picked up an occasional adjunct shift at the community college, but it is exhausting since i have a 30 mile commute one way for the ft job and difficult hours. at the college where i manage the library, i hired and supervised a part-time librarian. knowing that this was her first job out of library school, i really tried to provide her with opportunities to work on projects that would help further her career (although there was no support or funding for professional development). when she first started, i told her the same thing a former library supervisor told me years and years ago – that my job was to ensure that she would move on to a better job before i did. i’m sad to say that due to budget cuts, she was let go. it can be extremely hard to include a part-time librarian in the life of the library. their work hours typically fall outside those of their manager, so written communication skills (on both sides) and the ability to work independently are crucial. i would encourage library managers to do everything possible to support your part-time people. they are a wonderful resource. just don’t take advantage of them. emily ford 2011–02–12 at 1:59 pm thanks for talking about how you work with part-time employees, karen. i think that your communication to them seems to be key! i’m sure it makes those individuals feel appreciated and supported– which i think is something that part-timers might not get a lot of. (not that they aren’t appreciated or supported, but that the communication about it isn’t there.) i have also supervised people before who had differing work schedules than mine. it is tough! thanks for talking to that point. i think that if part-timers can put their feet in a supervisor’s shoes, it is really helpful to ease frustrations. heather 2011–02–11 at 6:18 pm i’ll echo the others: terrific (and very timely) piece, emily. i always enjoy your posts. i too have experiences from both sides of the issue. in the two years after i graduated from library school in late 2004, i actually had *four* different p/t library jobs at once. talk about juggling! for me, it was by choice, for a few different reasons: i wanted to gain work experience in as many different libraries as possible (my positions were as a pre-pro in tech. services at a very large city main branch; a copy cataloger at an outsourcing firm; a weekend supervisor at a medical school; and a sole elementary school librarian). additionally, i knew that i wanted to take some time off to teach english in europe for a year before i came back and started my search for a full-time, professional position. for me, it worked out really well: i discovered that tech. services was the right fit for me, and my supervisors during my time in these positions have since become wonderful contacts/colleagues in the field. i remained in touch with my supervisor at the medical school while teaching in france and, knowing of my experience in tech. services at the other library and outsourcing firm, as well as being familiar with my work ethic, she offered me the full-time tech. services librarian position at the school. i have been here for four years now, and still love it. i use all of the skills i honed in all of my part-time jobs — even the non-tech. services ones! [additionally, my time as a school librarian taught me that, although i’d spent most of my time at library school studying to be a children’s librarian, in actuality it was not something i enjoyed as much as i thought i would!] on the other side of things…when our f/t systems librarian at the medical school left a year or so ago, it was decided that his position would be cut into half-time. we subsequently had two librarians who stayed only until they found full-time work elsewhere (which ended up being less than three months for each of them — just long enough for us to train them). the entire process was frustrating for everyone involved — not to mention the time-sink of reviewing and interviewing candidates! not to go on and on here, but i agree — there are definitely benefits and drawbacks to part-time work, for all parties involved. the reality is, though, that it’s going to become more and more common…and my one hope is that people who are considering and/or starting library school right now understand that the part-time conundrum will almost certainly be in their future. it’s definitely “the new normal.” emily ford 2011–02–12 at 2:03 pm thanks for bringing up your experience with the part-time librarians in your current institution. that is really a conundrum, when training and hiring are such investments to lose good people to other work. one of the keys that i think is part of the hiring process, is making sure hires want part-time work. while not everyone does, my situation, when i picked up a second job, was that i did want the part-time work. my supervisors, who were doing the hiring, wanted to ensure that there wouldn’t be as much attrition by hiring people who would be ok with the part-time part. being in a situation where i was guaranteed a half-time job with benefits for a year, i felt quite comfortable in accepting the hourly contract position. alesia 2011–02–13 at 6:25 pm hi emily, this is a timely post for me as i just started a new job as a director of a community college library and most of the public services staff are part-time librarians. i’m still getting to know them and their situations but several also work part time at a public library. as i look at how to make changes at our library, it is challenging to get their input because of the varied schedules and desk coverage. so far meetings have been with full time staff. i do talk to them when i’m out at the desk and a couple regularly send me email with input and ideas. i inherited this situation but i feel badly that i don’t have an opportunity to hire them full time or at least provide some benefits. over time, i would like to reduce our reliance on part-time staff and convert some of these positions to full time. in the couple months i’ve been here, my observation is that my salary budget is very dependent on the larger college priorities. in our case, they have to hire more full-time faculty teachers because increasing enrollment has thrown the student teacher ratio out of whack. also, my ability to effect change is dependent on the budget planning cycle. our fy12-13 budget was submitted this fall before i started. so my first opportunity to develop my own budget request won’t be until next fall! i appreciate your raising awareness of this issue and it has reminded me that i need to take time to develop and engage the part-time staff. emily ford 2011–02–17 at 7:23 pm alesia, i’m so glad to hear your management perspective on this. budgets are definitely one the main reasons that i see as why so many part-time temporary positions exist. and yes, larger institutional priorities always effect libraries and their budgets. thanks agian for commenting. pigbitin mad 2011–02–15 at 9:44 am the more i learn about libraries, the more i have learned to hate them and everybody who works in them. the prevailing advice seems to suggest that you should work 70 hours a week for peanuts to get a job that pays $15,000 per year. i didnt do an internship in library school because i had a paraprofessional full time job in an academic library. i knew i could never get hired there, but i thought it would at least look okay to another type of institution. not so. however, it is not just libraries. it is our entire economy being hijacked by birchers and other tea baggers. if we don’t fight with guns and bombs i don’t think anything will improve…ever. emily ford 2011–02–17 at 7:27 pm i’m sorry you’re so frustrated, pigbitin mad, that you would consider taking up arms to solve problems. as i mentioned in this article and in my previous writing, i don’t think that airing dirty laundry as angrily as you have here is a constructive means to affect positive changes in our profession; nor do i feel it is appropriate to engage in professional discourse using a moniker that asks no accountability of yourself. i realize you’re frustrated, but being as angry as you are will not help any of us make the positive changes we all need in libraries. i urge you to consider how your actions are effecting the hundreds and maybe thousands of unemployed or underemployed or unsteadily employed library workers out there. we should all be in this together. annalaura brown 2011–02–17 at 6:08 pm what a great article. as someone who worked for 3.5 years part time at the same college library and who recently was luck enough to get upgraded to full time, i can totally relate to everything you say here. in some ways i’m rethinking my decision to be a librarian but my sky high student loans won’t let me do anything else right now. oh well, i still love libraries. emily ford 2011–02–17 at 7:28 pm annalaura, i’m so glad you’re sticking with it! i’d hate to see good passionate people, like yourself, give up on libraries. michelle oleson 2011–02–17 at 6:23 pm i also work 2 part time library jobs, while supplementing my income from online web work. the library gigs i have weren’t meant for someone with an mls degree like me. i even have experience working professionally at an academic library. but when i moved to minneapolis, where i want to live permanently, there were no jobs for a professional. i took two para-professional jobs, with the promise from my employers that something full time would likely come up soon. one of the jobs will end in three months, and that full time promise has come to nothing. once again, i’ll be looking for additional part time work. i wish people could retire so the younger generation could move in to their spots. all the older librarians i talk to can’t afford to retire. emily ford 2011–02–17 at 7:51 pm michelle, the economy tanking really has had huge effects on labor issues, as you’ve pointed to here. many people lost their nest egg, their retirement funds, and can’t retire even though they’d like to! but i’d also like to point to the long line of conversation in librarianship that deals with the myth of the graying of the profession. where are the jobs? michelle oleson 2011–02–17 at 8:34 pm i think you jumped to the end of a discussion on me. my librarian friends who are also looking for jobs and i often talk about the fact that there *are* jobs out there. there *are* libraries that aren’t closing. those jobs already have people in them. even if a position comes open, it’s gone to someone who knew someone in hr or administration. that’s where the jobs are: they’re already taken. emily ford 2011–02–18 at 10:51 am i hope you’re right, and i hope you’re wrong at the same time, michelle. i’d like to think that positions are filled with the best fitting and most qualified person, rather than someone’s friend. i think part of my slant is that i’m in portland, where the job market is slim, and we have an over saturated market, due to a portland co-hort of a distance education program, and the fact that no one wants to leave this city! michelle oleson 2011–02–18 at 11:52 am i think you’re definitely right about market over-saturation. it’s why i went into web design as well, but that’s a hit or miss market too. :) susan 2011–02–17 at 6:30 pm i got my master’s in library science back in 2006, and found my first full-time professional job quite easily– a month and a half long job search yielding two offers. however, i had to leave that job when my fiance relocated and had the hardest time finding a job since the economy tanked. i couldn’t turn down the two part-time offers i had because even part-time work in my sub-field of library science was so scarce. that said, i’m having a hard time imagining continuing working two part-time jobs for much longer. emily, you seem to have a much more ideal scenario. i have found that my two part-time jobs leave me with a very very small amount of vacation time (one is a benefited part-time job, so i cannot take unpaid time off, and the other is a contracted position with no time off) nevermind a regular schedule that leaves me wiped out by the week’s end, with one day every week where i leave my house at 10 am and don’t return until 9:30 pm. on top of the 40 hours i work for the two positions, i also work every other weekend. i have struggled mightily with both work-work balance and work-life balance, and dream of my old job, where my biggest grievances were my quirky co-workers! with a fair amount of experience under my belt (i had a supervisory position before, and worked with a wide age range), i feel vastly underpaid and underutilized. i feel left out of organizational decision making, and it seems i am always missing the fun stuff at once place when i am scheduled to work at the other. i am torn between my initial love for the profession and the cold hard reality that i cannot continue along this path if its my only hope to remain in the profession. i have graduate student loans to pay off, and never thought that as i worked more years, i would be moving down the pay scale. i probably sound more disheartened than i am, but i don’t want to provide too much personal information about my situation. there are aspects that i enjoy about both positions, and i do received professional support for conferences. however, at this point, i am trying to think of another field where my skills would be valued. emily ford 2011–02–17 at 7:59 pm susan, it sounds like you’re facing some tough choices. unfortunately that’s what part-time work makes us do, face the hard choices. “do i work this weekend shift or do i take a much needed break?” for some people, as you are an example, the choice becomes, “do i continue to work in libraries?” it must be incredibly disheartening, susan, and i think that you sound quite positive given your current frustrating and hard situation. i’m thinking good thoughts for you. :) amy 2011–02–17 at 11:25 pm i find this piece informative, but also very depressing. one of the reasons i decided to go back to school to get my masters, and chose library science over arts administration and education, was that i wanted to be able to have one full time job that i loved doing. for the last two years, before starting school, i was working at an entry-level paraprofessional education position – it was all right for the moment, and helped me to really see what career paths i was most interested in, but the low pay meant working two other part time jobs just to barely make ends meet. it might have been more tolerable had been living more comfortably between 3 jobs instead of month to month . . . but it was nevertheless, a recipe for burn out. i don’t think i could do that again, especially not with graduate loan debt on top of my undergraduate loans. emily ford 2011–02–18 at 10:45 am amy, you’re right. i can be disheartening. but that’s why i wrote it. despite how disheartening working part-time temporary jobs can be, they can also be really good experiences. it’s all about choices and patience sometimes. hang in there! pigbitin mad 2011–05–03 at 7:50 pm well, all degrees are now useless. the only thing to do is move to india and become a medical coder. we should demand that our president nuke that country unless they allow americans to move there and take advantage of their incredibly low standard of living so that we too can make 20 cents an hour doing medical coding. as al capone was reputed to have said: you can get a lot farther with a smile and gun than you can with just a smile. this country is finished. sara 2011–02–17 at 11:39 pm yes, yes, and yes. thanks so much for this article. it’s really important to treat this topic seriously since more librarians (and archivists) are finding themselves in this working situation and institutions are relying on more temp workers. i don’t think that managers or professional organizations are asking enough real questions about how a shift away from full-time permanent professional jobs is affecting those they hire, the morale of all staff and the field as a whole. i’m going on three years of part-time, temp employment. all great projects, fantastic institutions, but yes– very low pay and no benefits, no involvement in larger library issues or policy making, no support for professional activities and long-distance commutes. thanks again for calling attention to these issues. emily ford 2011–02–18 at 10:42 am you’re right, sara. it’s becoming ubiquitous, and that is scary. but as several of my colleagues have pointed out to me, it’s less so in libraries right now than say, in community colleges in general; a big problem. i’m glad you’re still able to see the positive in your positions! that can be hard sometimes when one’s exhausted from working and commuting and making up missed work hours from being sick, etc. emily ford 2011–02–18 at 10:48 am oh, and i forgot to say…. yes i think professional organizations, institutions, and administrators should be asking hard questions, examining this practice, and engaging in dialogue with part-time workers. as i wrote in my post i am very lucky. i chose to go half-time for a while and i when i got a second job i chose the right one. i also work with people who are very sympathetic and understanding. this is a pretty rare situation. realizing how rare my positive situation is, and still getting disheartened by it sometimes, i felt like i had to write about it for all of the others who don’t have it so lucky. thanks for commenting. debbie graham 2011–02–18 at 9:51 am the fact is, the united states is unique among industrialized nations in that the benefits for part-time workers are so limited and employers take advantage of it. in france for example, most people do not work part-time because part-timers get the same benefits as full-time workers. (employers get around this disadvantage to a certain extent by offering short-term rather than permanent contracts because everyone works under a type of contract…but at least while you’re working you get benefits and then unemployment is generous). what this means here in the library world is that more and more libraries “make do” knowing that as professionals the staff will work hard. having worked part-time at 3 libraries i know that is far harder than working full-time at one position and you really can get much more work of a part-time worker–it depends on what responsibilities are given and that can vary widely. in fact, oddly enough, i often had more day-to-day work when i worked 6 hours straight, 5 days a week than now when i work full time. and there is the relief of not working every weekend or even every other weekend–i am grateful every day. good luck to you all. but until the us changes (not likely) labor laws, this is perhaps going to get worse before it gets better. emily ford 2011–02–18 at 10:40 am i’m really glad you brought this up, debbie. i see myself working harder and accomplishing more with half-time than i was able to with full-time. i feel very strongly about work/life balance, and have often wondered about a more european model where a full-time work week is not 40 hours, but more like 30. how would society benefit? marcia 2011–02–18 at 10:59 am emily, very interesting article. i feel for librarians just starting out. i worked as a part-time librarian for 5 years and 3 months until june 2010 when i was laid off. this status of part-time began by choice, as i had developed severe carpal tunnel syndrome at my previous job of 7 years as an internet cataloging librarian. unlike most people, my part-time employment did offer the same benfits as full-time employment. currently, i am looking for work, but i feel because of my age (mid-50’s), i am not going to be considered for most positions. i love library work, however, i don’t want to be a digital librarian. i am not in a financial position to retire yet, and, fortunately, my only child is out of college with no debt on our part. so it’s just me to support right now. i have considered the entrepreneurial route in my current city of wash., dc, but feel somewhat overwhelmed by all the technology that grows more pervasive everyday. my desire to set up a website, blog, tweet, facebook, upload videos, etc., etc., is kind of low, due, in part, to the fear of aggravating my carpal tunnel yet again. just some thoughts from an aging librarian with 26 years of professional work and no where to channel it in an income-producing way just yet. emily ford 2011–02–18 at 7:26 pm this must be so incredibly discouraging, marcia! i really hope that some library will see the light and be able to recognize your incredible experience and dedication to the profession. don’t give up, we need people like you in librarianship! mary 2011–02–18 at 12:35 pm marcia, don’t give up hope! a former colleague of mine just got a new ft supervisory position last summer at the age of 62. we got laid off together and after nearly a year of searching and many interviews she got a job. i’m a paraprofessional (ft) at a public library. in 2009 i was laid off when my position was eliminated and spent a year searching for work without success. 6 months ago i was called back to my library when a colleague left and a spot opened up. i’ve been here for 10 years. for about half of that time, i felt it was mostly rewarding here. office politics, personnel dysfunction; a contentious staff-to-admin relationship and the general wearing-down of living in a severely economically depressed area have taken their toll on my enthusiasm. getting laid off and called back after such a long period as forever altered the way i view my place as part of the team (shaky). if the state budget is slashed again (likely), i will still be the most vulnerable to layoff as the least-tenured paraprofessional (after a decade!) while i have fallen back into the old routine, my relationships with my remaining colleagues are professional but no longer friendly. i keep repeating to myself like a mantra that i am fortunate to have this job, but it is a test of mental fortitude to navigate this workplace environment every day. once upon a time i wanted to pursue the mls, but i see degreed professionals struggling to find even pt work at wages equivilent to what i made as an entry-level paraprofessonal 10 years ago (and my library is on the low end of the scale for wages), and i no longer think that’s a worthwhile investment of time or effort. i’m exploring other masters’ options now in my original field of tesol education. life is too short to be continually stressed and miserable at work. over the past two years, i have seen 90% of the postings in the public library field demanding mlis for even very pt positions. so there is work to be had if you’re willing to do the juggle thing. i’m wondering if ft positions in libraries are an endangered species. very interesting article, emily. good job! denise 2011–02–18 at 2:30 pm emily, you are indeed fortunate to have benefits and responsibilities with your jobs. when i get sick, i have to decide whether to expose everyone at work to what i have or lose pay. i am the one that covers the desk while everyone else gets to attend staff meetings. one library i worked at had a staff day where they completely manned the library with temp workers while they spent a day in training. i would get called so seldom to work there that in between times they often moved things around and i couldn’t find where things were to show patrons. i had a stack of e-mails waiting for me to wade through every time i went to work there, and as you say, i might be called in for 1 1/2 hours although i spent nearly as long commuting to and from the job. in my current position, every time i ask to be given some responsibilities, i am told i can wash book covers or rubber band groups of books together. i used to be included in trainings, but they’ve cut that out too. for a while, i was trying to take webinars while i was on the desk to keep my skills up, but when my boss found out, she put a stop to that. i used to feel like i was competent to be hired, but now i can’t even get paraprofessional jobs. i even tried applying for one where i knew the library director and i didn’t get it. i can’t afford membership dues or committee work any more, and my morale is at an all time low. i had thought librarianship would be a career, but it has become just a job until i can retire. i no longer harbor any hopes of being anything more than a temporary less-than-part-time library worker. i graduated in 2006 and have been willing to relocate. i’ve gone to interviews out of state that depleted my savings, but to no avail. i’m wondering if i wasn’t better off before i went to library school? emily ford 2011–02–18 at 7:30 pm i’m sorry you’re having a negative experience, denise. that certainly doesn’t sound like your professional skills are being put to good use. without a challenge we are all apt to get bored and aggravated! i wonder if you could talk to your supervisor’s boss about some of your issues? would it help to try and advocate for yourself that way? no one likes being in a bad work environment that doesn’t support you being proactive about your learning. it sounds like you might try to create some conversation about your situation where you work to see if there might be some opportunities for you to have more support to use your skills. hang in there! tom 2011–02–19 at 6:56 pm seems like crux of this p-t stuff is this: do you want the job(s) and is there requisite pay, benefits and professional respect? i’m part-time for 3.4 years since downsizing. not enough of any of the above is much coming my way(especially any carrying of any bit of insurance costs/coverage). been exclusively looking for library jobs, but believe i need to move outside being captive of that box. i’m closer to retirement than i am for an extensive career. balancing? how? get one-part time job and how do you fit in the next? in many libraries you’re on 2 nights per week. will the 2nd (or 3rd) p-t place ask the same? likely. what will give? working all nights? no one guarantees you job in life, but after awhile you gotta’ tire of the struggle. i work in a public, and the masses are beaten down for its lack of jobs and its facing similar issues. i put on a happy face, but how long does anyone persevere? emily ford 2011–02–22 at 6:14 pm not for very long, tom, and that’s one of the problems? it is hard to persevere. it is hard to not be exhausted… i am thinking good thoughts for you and your job search. robin 2011–02–20 at 8:39 pm thanks, emily, for the article. thanks, all, for the discussion/venting/sharing. i’ve worked half-time in a paraprofessional position for decades, watching ft positions being cut into two pt along the way. to make ends meet i’ve always had at least three jobs, sometimes temporary or seasonal. in 2002 i made the decision to get the mls, dreaming of working in one place, ft, with a better salary level. while commuting to school full time i was working at two jobs until my last year when i picked up another library job. i graduated in 2006 and the dream is dimming. suffice it to say i am unable to relocate in the near future, maybe never if my situation does not change. so, i am working as a paraprofessional in a half-time position with some benefits in one library. i work as a paraprofessional in a part-time position (one day a week plus sub work) with no benefits during the school year in another library. then, i work as a professional librarian (no benefits) in yet another library, but as a “sub.” so that’s three libraries. on the side i’ve had two other part-time positions (not in the library field) for decades. yet, i make less than 30k/year. i’m blessed to say that i love each of my jobs, and i love the variety. even the three library positions are very different from each other. but i still would like to stop job juggling – it is draining. i would like to be able to focus and really make a difference. alas, i am not alone. in my half-time position the vast majority of staff are also job juggling. most of us feel like we have so much more to offer, but we are in boxes in many ways and on many levels. in keeping my eyes peeled for library jobs, i’m seeing more and more pt with not-so-good pay. in my area of the country the vast majority of libraries are one-horse-shows requiring an mls and experience, usually, but not always. although financially it is tough (and i’ve been crowned the queen of make-do and ms. frugal) i’m glad that i have jobs. i will persevere and look forward to better times! emily ford 2011–02–22 at 6:15 pm thanks for sharing your experience, robin. pingback : emily ford …in six | inalj (i need a library job) this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 25 jan emily ford /15 comments consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries “occupy boston – process” photo by flickr user tim pierce (cc by 2.0) by emily ford introduction since occupy wall street finally started getting mainstream media coverage, the idea of consensus decision-making seems to have permeated our american psyche. for me, it was waking up to a story on npr’s morning edition that i couldn’t shake. the story featured a discussion of the group meetings and decision-making process occurring in zuccotti park, where protesters deliberated their need for sleeping bags (chace, 2011)⁠. despite the somewhat flip tone of the piece, it stuck with me. the occupy librarianship trope hit the blogs a few weeks later, and we at lead pipe chimed in with our group post occupy librarianship: 5 variations on a theme (bonfield, frierson, ford, leeder, & vrabel, 2011)⁠. consensus was also on my mind at work. we had recently begun a search for a new university librarian, so discussions about our visions for the library and qualities desired for incoming administrators had been abundant. (i even found myself wondering if we needed a human microphone in our public services meetings.) i began questioning what i thought i knew about consensus: in professional organizations and in the work places are we understanding and engaging in consensus decision-making in a way that is wholly democratic? do we understand consensus decision-making theory? what does it look like in praxis? what potential does this decision-making process—which, in contemporary society, has been left to be practiced mostly by community action and social action groups—have for libraries? in this piece i will discuss what i have learned about the praxis and theory of consensus decision-making; its benefits and pitfalls; and point to some examples. then i will discuss what i think libraries can use and apply from consensus decision-making models. what is consensus decision-making? consensus decision-making is not a new concept or practice. in fact, it has been used for hundreds of years by native american/first nation groups and quakers (hare, 1973; infoshop, n.d.; rifkin, m., 2005).⁠ more recently, it has been used by anarchists; housing and food cooperatives; and other social action groups. several publications have documented these group consensus processes, such as martha’s rules; building united judgment: a handbook for consensus decision making; on conflict and consensus: a handbook on formal consensus decisionmaking, and consensus decision making. while each of these resources points to slightly different versions of the group decision-making process, they all follow a common thread of democratic decision-making practices. peter kakol (1995) designates “equal access to political decision making for all” (para. 6) as the first of his ten anarchist principles. he continues, “all those who are affected by a particular decision should be able to participate in the making of that decision” (para. 6). this sounds like what we commonly practice and understand as democracy, but it isn’t exactly what we practice. sager and gastil (2006) point out that “democratic” majority rules decision-making is “…the most commonly used group decision rule in the united states” (p.2). yet, majority-rules democracy enforces hierarchical relationships, pits sides against each other, and imposes a “pressure to conform” (moscovici, & doise. 1992; trans. halls, 1994, p. 66). it creates winners and losers in each decision. moreover, discussions preceding voting and majority-rules decisions can be greatly influenced by individuals’ social capital and authority in a group, and are tied to individuals present to participate in the decision-making process. in other words, what we have been understanding as democratic, is subject to disenfranchising individuals and re-enforcing power structures. consensus decision-making attempts to rectify these problems. i contend that the most common misconception regarding consensus decision-making assumes that decisions are reached unanimously. in fact, sager and gastil (2006) point to a difference between “consensus outcome” which implies unanimous agreement, and the “consensus decision rule,” which refers to a consensus decision-making process. comparison of decision making processes process outcome majority rules discussion occurs and a vote is taken. votes fall on both or all sides of an issue. the majority wins. consensus outcome discussion occurs and a vote is taken, with all votes falling on one side of an issue. consensus is reached via voting; i.e. there is nothing to contend. consensus decision rule “…is a complex, time-consuming social process” (sager & gastil, 2006, p. 3). it involves discussion of individual concerns. no vote is taken until all are comfortable moving forward. all individuals can support the decision, based on discussions and concerns raised during the decision-making process. decisions reached via consensus decision-making are rarely unanimous. instead, consensus means that a group works toward a common goal that supports a group’s collective vision and mission. “of course, full consent does not mean that everyone must be completely satisfied with the final outcome—in fact, total satisfaction is rare. the decision must be acceptable enough, however, that all will agree to support the group in choosing it” (avery, auvine, streibel, & weiss, 1981, p. 1). ⁠similarly, in his book empowerment and democracy in the workplace, john dew (1997) posits “…at any time, every group member is at least 70% comfortable with each decision the group has made” (p. 118). the difference between unanimity and consensus is that unanimity supposes all individuals agree fully on the action taken, whereas consensus stresses an individual’s support of a collective mission or vision. even though and individual may not fully agree with the tactics taken to get there, she can support the decision. one of the dangers of group decision-making–as addressed in numerous scholarly publications from social psychology and communications—is the concept of groupthink. groupthink occurs when groups sacrifice dialog. individuals potentially suppress concerns and differences in order to avoid conflict and achieve harmonious consensus. this results in group decisions that are potentially contentious and not those that best support the group’s end goal or desired outcome (dew, 1997; mohammed, 2001; mok & morris, 2010; moscovici & doise, 1992/1994; solomon, 2006)⁠. consensus decision-making processes attempt to avoid negative consequences from groupthink, social capital, authority, and social hierarchies. to accomplish this, groups must work to build respect and trust. in a trusting and respectful environment, discussion and conflict can occur and groupthink can be avoided. in fact, consensus cannot exist nor can it be achieved without conflict. in conflict & consensus, moscovici and doise (1992/1994) point to numerous studies showing that the stronger the conflict and disagreement in a consensus decision-making process, the more sticking-power resulting decisions have. additionally, scholars have shown that the greater the conflict involved in problem-solving and decision-making, the more creative the solutions and decisions (mohammed, 2001; moscovici et al., 1992/1994; murrell, stewart, & engel, 1993; troyer & youngreen, 2009)⁠. those decisions made via consensus achieve more buy-in, and in the end result in greater success due to the collective support for decisions. there are two interrelated aspects of consensus decision-making that must exist and function well in order for the process to be successful. first, individual participation in the decision-making process must occur. second, conflict must arise and be resolved. without participation and its proportional resulting conflict, consensus decision-making would not be a successful form of decision-making; the process is key to its success. in consensus decision-making, like other decision-making processes, conflict is managed in the form of open discourse. participants are expected to engage in active listening and respect each individual’s contribution to discussion. moreover, consensus decision-making should center on solving problems faced by the collective, not the individual. “consensus decision making works best when the participants believe they belong to the group, and the group belongs to them. this group solidarity develops out of mutual trust and respect. as trust and respect grow within the group, members will feel free to express opinions and feelings, and to disagree without fear of consequences.” (avery et al., 1981, p. 85)⁠ if members of a consensus group are not working toward the same goal, or they do not feel ownership and accountability for the success and well-being of the group, consensus decision-making will not work. so what does a consensus decision-making process look like in praxis? as mentioned earlier, there are many different forms consensus decision-making can take. in my research i found the process outlined in building united judgment, (avery et al., 1981)⁠ to be the most thorough and appealing. the second chapter, “a step-by-step process for consensus” thoroughly outlines the process from preparation to final decision. like many group decision-making processes, it begins with agenda setting and identifying a facilitator for the process. agenda items should be clearly defined and should state decisions that need to be made. after agenda items are introduced, discussion occurs. discussion consists of individuals presenting ideas as a response to the issue at hand, concerns and opinions about the issue/proposal, and responses to what has already been said. it is the facilitator’s responsibility to keep discussion on topic, provide clarification and rephrasing of discussion, summarize points, and ensure that all voices are heard and understood by the group. after discussion, the facilitator will test for consensus, making sure to summarize what has been most positively discussed as a solution or action. at this point more concerns can be raised and discussed, and consensus may be met, even though it may not fully appease everyone at the table. however, “…it must be one that all group members are willing to live with” (avery et al., 1981, p. 13).⁠ in addition to the discussion process, any group member may choose to block an action or decision. “blocking is a statement of the great seriousness of someone’s objections to a decision. in practical terms, it is a strong indication that the group requires more time to reach consensus” (avery et al., 1981, p. 29). (for more on blocking, read laird schaub’s (2003) short piece: blocking made easy (or at least easier): taking a look at the dynamics of dissent and mary ann renz’s (2006) the meaning of consensus and blocking for cohousing groups.) my explanation of the process is certainly an oversimplification.there are many other aspects built into consensus groups, including group building, problem solving, and even evaluation or assessment of a group’s decision-making process. martha’s rules, which can be used as an alternative to robert’s rules of order, is another consensus-based process. it outlines a five-step process for decision-making featuring separate steps for a “sense vote” and a “vote vote.”  “the point of the sense vote is to discover how the group feels about a proposal” (minahan, 1986, p. 54)⁠. the sense vote asks: who likes the proposal, who can live with the proposal, and who is uncomfortable with the proposal. in contrast, a “vote vote” is to: “…find out what those who are “uncomfortable” are uncomfortable about and then find out whether the group as a whole wishe(s) to decide by majority rule. the facilitator asks those who (are) uncomfortable to state the reasons for their discomfort….after hearing the objections of those who are uncomfortable, a vote is taken. the question is, ‘should we implement this decision over the stated objections of the minority, when a majority of us feel it is workable?’” (p. 55) there are numerous other variations for consensus decision-making, from the quaker and native american traditions to processes developed and used by small social action groups for governing meetings and decisions. generally, consensus decision-making takes into account the reasons individuals may disagree, and embraces conflict resolution in discussions. it is more democratic and group-oriented than a majority rules process. groups using consensus decision-making have stronger collective ties and accountability for the success of their organizations. it can’t all be coming up roses, can it? photo used with permission of the artist, faulkner short chances are your work groups and teams already use some form of consensus to make decisions and govern the work of your library. consensus decision-making is a fantastic process when it works, but it certainly has its drawbacks. first, consensus decision-making takes a long time. for each individual in a group to voice her concerns and for group members to respond can be a lengthy process in small groups, and even lengthier for large groups. for small groups, such as lead pipe’s editorial board, consensus can work extremely well. the larger a group, however, the more likely the process is to break down into groupthink. what’s more, sometimes decisions need to happen quickly and simply cannot wait for a consensus process. who will make decisions that need to occur quickly? in this situation, one hopes that a decision-maker remains true to the group’s collective vision, and can respond on behalf of the group. another issue is that of participation and social dynamics. group members should feel safe to talk openly about their concerns, and each individual should actively participate by speaking and listening during the decision-making process. when individuals dominate meetings or do not engage in active listening, the consensus process breaks down. implicit in social dynamics are hierarchies, power, elitism, and privilege that can contribute to dysfunction and invisible power dynamics in consensus decision-making (freeman, j., n.d.). therefore, individuals need to be aware of these pitfalls, and be dedicated to creating an environment that enables consensus decision-making processes, even at times when decisions do not need to be made. what’s more, library culture is stereotypically conflict averse. being a service-oriented profession, library workers aim to help people, not disagree with them; so it makes sense that our culture might feel uncomfortable with conflict. individuals may be hesitant to participate in discussions, and in doing so, open up meetings and discussions to be dominated by those who are more vocal. due to this aversion, library groups attempting to engage in consensus decision-making are at great risk of running into groupthink. group composition can also hinder consensus decision-making. groups may be comprised of a mix of administrators and workers, which, for some individuals may stymie participation and feelings of safety. what’s more, consensus may break down if all individuals who will be affected by decisions are not involved in the decision-making process. libraries are not immune to this dilemma. how frequently do teams of administrators or professionals make decisions that impact classified staff, student workers, and others who weren’t part of the discussion or decision-making process? external factors challenging consensus decision-making in libraries are those organizational structure imposed on libraries by their governing bodies. cities, counties, corporations and universities—those bodies to which most libraries report—are typically structured hierarchically, with departments and committees reporting up the chain of command. frequently libraries in these organizations mirror this structure. this does not mean that consensus decision-making cannot occur, however, the process must co-exist and function within a larger structure that may not fully support the consensus decision-making process. it may be that your working group uses consensus to make decisions while the entire organization does not. it may happen that your team makes a decision, which is then reported up to administration. administration may either support, modify, or rescind the decision. this might feel disempowering and you might see it as an abrogation of your group’s value within the library. in this case, it would make sense to open dialog with administration to discuss this outcome. perhaps administration’s reasoning is strong enough, that if it were presented via a consensus process, your group’s decision may not have had the same outcome. despite these challenges, consensus decision-making seems to be a promising possibility for libraries. moving toward a consensus model libraries are institutions that have historically been dedicated to the free and open exchange of ideas. in their current form, they work collaboratively with their communities, establishing and maintaining consortial relationships, and providing a supportive space for dissent and discourse. it is only intuitive that libraries could operate with the same machinations of open discourse and decision-making processes, much like the collective in zuccotti park. for libraries consensus decision-making can create strong organizations that will encounter great future successes. in 2005 barbara fister and kathie martin presented their paper embracing the challenge of change through collegial decision-making (fister & martin, 2005)⁠ at acrl, which offers a different model for libraries. in it, they describe their library’s reorganization into a flat organizational structure. “rather than have a director we would elect a chair every three years as other departments did. the chair, as ‘first among equals,’ would add the tasks for coordinating the library’s efforts and liaison with the administration to his or her portfolio” (p. 4). fister & martin present a model in which their library is governed by consensus not only in faculty groups, but by classified staff as well. of their organizational chart they say, “this new chart, two overlapping circles of responsibilities…erased the old vestiges of hierarchy lodged in nominal supervisory roles given to librarians over paraprofessionals and showed the collegial conversation extended to the entire library staff” (p. 4). gustavus adolphus college’s library is certainly a creative example of how librarians and library workers have engaged in a consensus model. despite the challenges of implementing consensus decision-making in libraries, it should be well worth it. there are a number of things you could do to try to work toward improving consensus decision-making in your library: talk to your library director, your supervisor, your mentor, your colleagues about the idea of consensus decision-making and see what they think. evaluate your current decision-making model. does it work for your group? would group members be open a more consensus-based model? get training in good meeting facilitation practices for group members. you and your colleagues could learn active listening and other communication skills that contribute to successful consensus decision-making. try to work on embracing conflict and productive discussions in meetings. work toward creating a safe and respectful environment where each individual feels safe discussing her concerns in a group. try using martha’s rules next time you hold a meeting. libraries can be very siloed organizations. how often are public services staff involved in cataloging, acquisitions, and electronic resources management decisions, and vice versa? what will happen when catalogers are alongside instruction librarians thinking of new approaches to resource discovery? consensus can open opportunities by deconstructing silos and starting to create new models for library decision-making. libraries that successfully engage in consensus decision-making will see improvement in making decisions that best serve their patrons; more cohesion in staff and accountability; and are likely to experience more creativity in problem solving. individuals in these libraries will most likely become more dedicated to serving the organization and working towards its shared vision and mission. the reason these changes may occur, is that the decision-making and visioning is shared—individuals all contribute to the definition of and accomplishment of goals. individuals would begin creating and environment of respect and trust, enabling them to participate in a democratic decision-making process. what has been your experience with consensus? many thanks to barbara fister, robert schroeder, gretta siegel, and sarah ford for providing perspective and thoughtful comments on this piece. additional thanks to erin dorney, hilary davis and brett bonfield from in the library with the lead pipe for copyedits and even more thoughts. and finally, a shout out to faulkner short for letting me use his image in this post. he takes stunningly beautiful photographs. bibliography avery, m., auvine, b., streibel, b., & weiss, l. (1981). building united judgment: a handbook for consensus decision making. madison: the center for conflict resolution. also available at: http://www.archive.org/details/buildingunitedjudgmentahandbookforconsensusdecisionmaking bonfield, b., frierson, e., ford, e., leeder, k., & vrabel, l. a. (2011). occupy librarianship: 5 variations on a theme. in the library with the lead pipe, (october, 26). retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/occupy-librarianship/ chace, z. (2011). occupy wall street: where everybody has a say in everything : planet money : npr. morning edition. retrieved january 13, 2012, from http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/05/141048592/occupy-wall-street-where-everybody-has-a-say-in-everything dew, j. (1997). consensus decision making. in j. dew, empowerment and democracy in the workplace (109-122). westport: quorum books. fister, b., & martin, k. (2005). embracing the challenge of change through collegial decision-making. currents and convergence: navigating the rivers of change: proceedings of the twelfth national conference of the association of college and research libraries, 12, p. 1-7).retrieved from http://homepages.gac.edu/~fister/acrl2005paper.pdf freeman, j. (n.d.). the tyranny of structurelessness. retrieved january 20, 2012 from http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm hare, a. p. (1973). group decision by consensus: reaching unity in the society of friends. sociological inquiry, 43(1), 75–84. infoshop. (n.d.). consensus decision-making – infoshop openwiki. retrieved december 11, 2011, from http://wiki.infoshop.org/consensus_decision-making minahan, a. (1986). on the bias. affilia, 1(2), 53-56. mohammed, s. (2001). toward an understanding of cognitive consensus in a group decision-making context. the journal of applied behavioral science, 37(4), 408-425. doi:10.1177/0021886301374002 mok, a., & morris, m. w. (2010). an upside to bicultural identity conflict: resisting groupthink in cultural ingroups. journal of experimental social psychology, 46(6), 1114-1117. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.020 moscovici, s. & doise, w. (1994). conflict & consensus: a general theory of collective decisions. (w.d. halls, trans.). thousand oaks: sage publications. (original work published 1992). murrell, a. j., stewart, a. c., & engel, b. t. (1993). consensus versus devil’s advocacy: the influence of decision process and task structure on strategic decision making. journal of business communication, 30(4), 399-414. doi:10.1177/002194369303000402 renz, m. a. (2006). the meaning of consensus and blocking for cohousing groups. small group research, 37(4), 351-376. doi:10.1177/1046496406291184 rifkin, m. (2005). representing the cherokee nation: subaltern studies and native american sovereignty. boundary 2, 32(3), 55-86. sager, k. l., & gastil, j. (2006). the origins and consequences of consensus decision making : a test of the social consensus model. southern communication journal, 71(1), 1-24. schaub, l. (2003). blocking made easy (or at least easier): taking a look at the dynamics of dissent. communities, (119). solomon, m. (2006). groupthink versus the wisdom of crowds : the social epistemology of deliberation and dissent. the southern journal of philosophy, 44(s1), 28-42. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2006.tb00028.x troyer, l., & youngreen, r. (2009). conflict and creativity in groups. journal of social issues, 65(2), 409-427. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.2009.01606.x collective, consensus decision-making, decision-making, decisions, libraries, organizational structure perspective and doing good work q&a: lead pipe on professional development 15 responses pingback : consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries — library journal reviews michael 2012–01–26 at 3:25 am thanks for the interesting post and the interesting links! it’s always nice to see a different point of view put forward. i’ve been in different groups (left or green) that have practised consensus deliberately and a couple (non-political) that practice it, though the folks involved wouldn’t think of it as such. (by which i mean, though nominally decisions are taken by vote, if someone disagreed the group tried to fix the problems.) i’ve also been in too many meetings at work where i’m sure it could have been useful; though anything that makes meetings go for even longer… and i think that’s the biggest potential problem with consensus style. people already don’t like meetings, and anything that makes them longer is sure to be disliked. (also, i’d never heard of jesse shera before today. i’m a non-usa library student.) emily ford 2012–02–01 at 1:44 pm i think this is really interesting that people might be engaging in consensus, but aren’t thinking of it as such. i have also been in situations where i disagreed with the need for more meetings–where’s the compromise between consensus and efficiency? rebecca 2012–01–26 at 5:59 pm this is a really fantastic post – thank you for sharing it! i am one of many librarians with the audre lorde to howard zinn library of occupy boston, and it so happens that we recently created a reading/resource guide for the ob community on consensus-building and nonviolent communication. (available here: http://wiki.occupyboston.org/images/c/cd/consensusnonviolentcommunicationresourceguide.pdf). we had been asked by some members of the ob community to create it in anticipation of a “co-creating a safer community” forum. i just shared this post with the a-z library listserv, and i hope that it’ll help inform intentional communication within our own community as well as each of our interactions in the larger lis field. again, many thanks. emily ford 2012–02–01 at 1:10 pm you are most welcome. i’m glad to hear of the resources on nonviolent communication you’re making available to the community. in general, i think we can learn a lot about intentional communication in libraries and in every workplace. kim leeder 2012–01–27 at 11:45 am emily, you’re so amazing at presenting ideals in a way that makes me think, “i could do that!” as a new library director i’d really like to figure out how to build consensus decisionmaking into my new organization. i’ve been recently working on a future-thinking org chart, since my college is growing like crazy and we anticipate doing a lot of hiring in the next few years (er, forever). the trick, to me, is how do i build this idea of consensus into an org chart? who reports to whom? the flattest possible scenario means everyone in the whole place would report to me, and i’m not sure that’s workable once we get larger. or can we have multiple reporting layers but still make decisions in the same way? i’m just not sure about how this looks where the rubber meets road when we figure in the fact that everyone needs a supervisor to meet the requirements of our larger organizational structure. emily ford 2012–02–01 at 1:14 pm kim, this is a really interesting and exciting conundrum that you have. what would our organizations look like if we had the support to do re-org for future thinking? i think one of the things that you might think about is what the contracts between your administration and its reporting bodies say. i discovered, via a discussion with a colleague at mpow, that our union contract discusses faculty governance– but that in contract, our faculty body can make any recommendation it wants to administration, but administration has every right to completely ignore those recommendations. it’s almost like being in a right-to-work state. you might be able to talk to the folks over at gustavus adolphus and see how they are liking the re-org that they did to use collegial decision-making; they might have some tips for you as you consider your future thinking. kathleen 2012–02–01 at 8:14 am will be recommending to my classes. emily ford 2012–02–01 at 1:42 pm thanks, kathleen! juan 2012–02–01 at 12:35 pm i gotta admit, as wonderful as this all sounds, and as much as i’m all for democratic decision-making, i’ve rarely seen it work at my library. committee work here suffers from consensus decision-making. it drags out decision-making and is an inefficient use of staff time. the thing is, our director wants staff buy-in. as such, she pushes committee decision-making. committee membership reflects the diversity of the library by director design (i.e. she likes to assign persons from multiple departments rather than just those with hands-on knowledge). this means that a committee devoted to, for instance, redesign of the library website might include persons who have no knowledge of web design or the principles of site architecture. those who have a better grasp of design principles often end up locking horns with those who think it’s as simple as formatting a word document. i’m simplifying, but you get my point. did i mention that the decision-making process drags on when decisions are made in committee? so much wasted staff time, which means wasted taxpayer money. i would prefer that a very small group of people (2-3 people) with hands-on knowledge of the issue come up with recommendations that can be pitched to a larger group rather than making decisions within a larger group/committee. when i saw this post, i immediately thought of recent nytimes article that critiques group decision-making: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html worth a read. honestly, i prefer work-democracy (see wilhelm reich’s “the mass psychology of fascism”). in short, those who do the work make the decisions. people not directly involved in the work are not involved in the decision-making process. you can provide others with opportunities for input–and should–but it should never be about involving persons from disparate departments, etc simply to make people feel like they had a hand in the decision-making. and i hate it when admins use committees to create the illusion of consensus decision-making, but then toss aside committee recommendations if they don’t jive with the output they were looking for before committee membership was even delegated. emily ford 2012–02–01 at 1:41 pm i’m so glad that you took the time to comment, juan, and show the other side of what can happen in consensus processes. there are many arguments out there that point to consensus hindering democratic process. for instance, i was just sent a link to a piece by howard ryan called blocking progress: consensus decision making in the anti-nuclear movement. while i haven’t yet had the time to read it, i will be interested to see if this piece points to the privilege problem that jo freeman discusses. i agree that there are times when we just can’t get things done by consensus and things can break down. at this point, what can be borrow from consensus that will still enable us to have some collective decision-making, but that won’t block progress? also, how can we engage in these practices at work and collaborate with an administrative body that will respect this process, instead of ignore it? (see my previous comment in response to kim discussing the contract between my union and my university’s administration). i’m going to give that reich a read… juan 2012–02–01 at 3:12 pm if i might go somewhat off-topic and rant a bit more, i’d say that the main problem facing humanity and progress on any level is the fact that to greater and lesser degrees humans are–across the board–irrational. and since people in admin are merely human, they are bound to implement all sorts of irrational practices and make all manner of irrational decisions (and they do). luckily, those at the “to a lesser degree” end of the spectrum keep things moving in a generally positive direction most of the time; however, meaningful progress is an incredible lofty goal. in a sense, humanity has been making the same mistakes and such since the advent of opposable thumbs. we seem stymied in terms of our evolution as a species and choose to delude and content ourselves with the notion that advancements in the tools we use to kill each other, keep each other alive a little longer, communicate with each other, etc., reflect the continued evolution of our species. the reality is that building more powerful weapons, drugs, apps and whatnot is not progress; the reality is that we’re failing again and again to make meaningful philosophical leaps. as bill hicks put it, “evolution did not stop with the development of thumbs….it’s time to evolve ideas”. but humans are irrational and almost universally in denial of this fact. sorry to wax so cynical, but it’s getting to a point where the folks who are “to a greater degree” irrational are trashing the ecosystem to such an extent that all other considerations seem moot and i’m incredibly pessimistic about the future. to quote bill hicks again, “we’re a virus with shoes”. and the world will likely be a better place when we’re gone. regardless, i’m glad that these conversations are happening, that there are people looking at disparate points of view, thinking critically and all that, for this kind of exchange is truly the only way we’ll move forward. if only the majority of the people on this planet felt the same way. yeah, i’m extremely cynical, but maybe, just maybe, it’s not too late. john buschman 2012–03–15 at 1:06 pm emily & commenters, i’ve dragged my feet for a very long time responding & posting my response for a number of reasons. emily most certainly does not minimize the difficulties, nor oversell the benefits. and when i was not a manager or an administrator, i found this process useful to forge a community of interest to counter seriously bad (bad, not poor) administration. however: 1) like neighborhood watches, these kind of initiatives tend to get energy from problems or bad situations that need to be addressed (like my experience). most support/engagement melts away after the problem is solved – or it drags on a bit. library workers often “just want to come in and do their jobs.” consensus decision-making is best used selectively in my experience. 2) (channeling my inner juan here): people weasel on their commitments. simply put, you can’t collectively peer into one anothers’ souls to see if people are being up front. i’ve experienced this too: based on consensus, i’ve taken enormous political risks in the name of the group, only to realize just how alone i was in taking those risks. library workers tend to be risk averse, and in the end, someone has to take responsibility. 3) which leads me to: the role of leadership. this is tricky, because i don’t want to pull the “its lonely at the top” thing. but… institutions pay leaders more to take responsibility — but that also includes morale, institutional integrity, and so on. in the end, a good leader straddles that very thin line between opening things up and then seeing them through in a responsible, open, and communicative way — or explaining what ended up not getting done and why. 4) (inner juan again): there are snakes-in-the-grass. ulterior motives can and often masquerade as for the benefit of the whole (a specialized project, off-loading disliked work, or simply revenge). i actually had someone a number of months ago suggest that we not upgrade our computers and save the money (so he wouldn’t have to learn anything new on it). which brings me to a closely related point: some folks are simply unwilling or unable to think about a larger whole. it is simply beyond them intellectually or ethically. hence, the stable historical examples of consensus decision-making tend to be moral or ethnic communities with strong ties in place, and few opportunities for exit. and hence, consensus decision-making in other contemporary arenas (like occupy & some of the other examples noted) tend to be temporary contracts. i don’t know if its human nature (ala juan), but it definitely is part of western neoliberal culture. so, my take: consensus decision-making is highly, highly useful and productive for something very episodic like long-range or strategic planning for a library; it is probably the way a smaller unit (w/oversight to protect integrity and distribution of work) should do its business. that it can and does work, often when properly set up, obviates the “heroic leadership” nonsense we’re so often fed. but, lets not fool ourselves that libraries would be perfect if only the inmates ran … (never mind!). pingback : consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries | loomio pingback : weekly link rounduplone star librarian | lone star librarian this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct out of the library and into the wild – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 21 mar lana mariko wood /7 comments out of the library and into the wild librarians out of the library and into the rain at the 2006 boston pride parade. (photo courtesy of the author.) by lana mariko wood librarians and library school students have a lot to gain by sharing their skills with groups outside of the library, such as community organizations, social justice groups, and non-profits. by building coalitions and offering support to different groups, librarians help lend their particular expertise while simultaneously advancing the roles of these groups. these projects help increase the visibility of librarians and libraries. when we leave the library and enter the wild, we build our professional and personal relevance and bridge connections with socially and politically minded groups. librarian skills are broad and varied, and cannot be neatly categorized in an acid-free, archival box. a master’s degree in library science, information science, or some hybrid of library and information science (lis), develops varied skill sets and career possibilities, such as: reference, management, technical services, user instruction, human computer interaction, and scholarly communication advocacy. plus there are a number of specializations available, like archives, school media, librarian leadership, etc. therefore, there is no one skill set to which i’m referring as being optimal to share outside of the library, or no one type of lis professional to share them. for purposes of simplification, in this article “librarian skills” refers to the skills one picks up in library school, library jobs, or, more generally, in the lis field. there have been a number of articles referencing the importance of librarians expanding their own skills by attending conferences and professional development activities in other fields, such as bonnie swoger’s piece why academic librarians need to stop going to library conferences and hilary davis’ déformation professionnelle. i agree that attending non lis professional conferences is something we should be doing, and concur that part of what makes us more skilled at our jobs, particularly in academic libraries, is fluency in current trends and developments in the subject fields we support. by contrast, this piece argues that librarians should take their librarian skills to other professions and other organizations outside of lis. with this, we are turning the tables on what the other articles have argued, because the librarians are the skilled experts, sharing their knowledge with other groups and professionals. why share? between september 2009 to september 2010, about 62.8 million americans, or roughly 26.3 percent of the population, volunteered their time to groups including religious organizations, educational or youth services programs, and social or community service organizations (bureau of labor statistics, 2012). did you volunteer, and if so, were you volunteering librarian skills? as librarians, we have a particular expertise which can help advance the mission of groups we personally support. by volunteering with groups we want to work with, we align our professional skills with our personal values. denise pasquinelli, an education product designer with her mlis, describes her experience helping bitch magazine create a community lending library. “i deeply value being a facilitator of education and the human right for free and open access to information. when given the opportunity to create a special collection library for an organization that values empowerment, equality and feminist values – the decision was a no brainer!” (d. pasquinelli, personal communication, march 5, 2012). simultaneously, these partnerships help to increase our skills and visibility as a profession, as well as increase awareness of what libraries offer, which are both visibilities needing to be increased. “part of the problem is simply that most activist groups do not consider libraries as strategic access points for filling information needs. this attitude is recurrent and circular” (schuman, 1987, 130). melissa morrone and lia friedman follow up this statement by placing it in current context that “now with the internet and web readily available to most, the influence of libraries – and, by extension, librarians – is even more tenuous for social justice activists” (morrone & friedman, 2009, p. 386). our active participation with these groups as librarians helps show the versatility of our profession. by meeting people outside of the library and in the groups of which we are a part, we are helping them while also gaining supporters and advocates for libraries and librarians. when we build these connections, we build up each other’s communities, and we put faces on the name of our profession and strengthen our networks for when we need help and support. contributing your skills and therefore feeling valuable can be affirming for the individual contributing the skills. one needn’t look far to confirm that service and helpfulness are librarian job requirements. the american library association lists “enjoying helping and serving others” as the first quality to being a librarian (american library association, 2012).  the library and information science honors society, beta phi mu, motto translates to “consumed in the service of others” (beta phi mu, 2012).  many librarians enjoy the feeling of being helpful and sharing their expertise with others, and these associations often give you ample opportunities to get the warm fuzzies about helping out. one librarian explained the joy she finds by being a skilled librarian as “i enjoy the ‘florence nightingale’ aspect of being a help” (julien & genuis, 2009, p. 931). volunteering librarian skills not only feeds the soul and psyche, but also can help build your experience and your resume. the current job market is challenging for most to secure steady employment, especially for recent graduates from lis programs (bonfield, 2011). volunteer partnerships, though likely unpaid, help one build skills and work experience, as well as demonstrate ingenuity and innovation. ideally, some of these partnerships may lead to jobs, whether for the group with which you are volunteering, or through a similar group to which they recommend you. perhaps by putting a face to librarianship and recognizing what skills and value librarians bring, organizations may recognize the need for a librarian and hire one. regardless, these partnerships can help develop your skills and provide valuable experience that will be desirable to future employers. who is already sharing? one of the primary groups providing librarian assistance in non-traditional places is radical reference. “radical reference is a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social justice and equality. [they] support activist communities, progressive organizations, and independent journalists by providing professional research support, education and access to information” (radical reference, 2004). since its inception in 2004, radical reference has grown to become an international group that has a number of autonomous collectives around the country, who participate in various projects and actions, either virtually or in person. radical reference members “take their skills and values in evaluating resources and bring them to the social justice communities of which they are part” (morrone & friedman, 2009, p. 374). street reference and protest support is what first prompted radical reference into existence. radical reference began in 2004 in new york city to provide in-the-street reference to protestors at the republican national convention. librarians came prepared with ready reference kits that included information on diverse topics, such as information on one’s rights if he or she is detained, synopses on what people are collectively protesting about, and information on where the closest bathrooms are (morrone & friedman, 2009, p. 372). preceding this, jessamyn west of librarian.net provided in the street reference at burning man and the world trade organization protests in seattle in 1999 (edwards, 2006). one of the traditional ways librarians have contributed skills outside of library walls is by helping groups create their own libraries. michelle budt-caulk wrote an article about volunteer librarians for american libraries. in it, she write about her positive experience bridging her skills with her personal values when she helped her church establish a lending library. as the only trained librarian volunteer, she became the resident expert and notes that a side benefit of volunteering is the personal gratification. “it doesn’t get any better than this – utilizing my skills in a profession that i love and getting many thanks for it” (budt-caulk, 2006, p. 38). in portland, oregon, radical reference members helped bitch magazine develop a community lending library of feminist and pop culture texts. radical reference members worked with the non-profit magazine staff to understand their needs and vision for the project, and with this information created a system for how the library should be organized, cataloged, and housed. they also set up a system with documentation that could be easily translatable to future bitch volunteers staffing the library, who may not be trained as librarians. debbie rasmussen, the former editor of bitch, said that radical reference “brought skills and expertise that none of us here at bitch had… we were pretty lost until they arrived! … it’s brought new meaning to the work we do because we’ll finally have a way of connecting more directly with the community here in portland, on top of connecting with an amazing group” (morrone & friedman, 2009, p. 392). just down the road, other radical reference affiliated librarians have been volunteering for years helping create and run the q center’s lgbtq lending libraries. ismoon hunter-morton, the q center librarian, began volunteering on the project in 2008 when her former partner, also a q center volunteer told her there was a growing queer book collection that needed some attention. since then, the library has grown from 500 books to 2,500, which are all cataloged online and will soon be circulating. ismoon’s volunteer job duties have included “soliciting book and archival donations, recruiting and organizing volunteers, holding library work-days, advertised via facebook and conference presentations, and cataloging the library in [dewey decimal classification] specifically tailored to lgbtq culture and user-needs.” she has also “helped people look [for] information on sensitive topics such as marginalized sexualities and genders, domestic violence, resources for parents of trans children, and discrimination within our queer and allied communities” (i. hunter-morton, personal communication, march 7, 2012). amanda meeks, another steadfast q center library volunteer and lis graduate student at emporia state university joined ismoon after learning about the library while organizing emporia lis student’s annual library prom, held at the q center. she reached out to ismoon and began volunteering and focusing on readying the collection for circulation by both writing policies and guides, and physically preparing the materials and leading other volunteers in preparing the materials. amanda speaks very highly of her experiences volunteering at the q center library, and writes about how her experiences volunteering in the library connect her to the larger glbtq community and its history. “i’ve never truly felt like an activist until i started with this project; it has been incredibly rewarding to work with ismoon and the wonderful volunteers that we’ve found. i feel that queer librarians are making bigger waves in our profession than ever before and i am happy to find time amidst my studies to add some momentum towards progressive practices and rectifying the history and past invisibility of glbtq communities” (a. meeks, personal communication, march 7, 2012). ismoon has since gone on to build connections with other radical community libraries and has created an annual radical library crawl, which includes participation from radical book artists, self-publishers, and librarians, such as street books and the independent publishing resource center. presenting informational sessions or teaching workshops at non-lis conferences is an excellent way to bring librarian skills to non-lis groups. these workshops can be anything from tips on researching particular databases, or free sources relevant to the subject matter of the conference, or teaching about copyright and fair use. if you see a need in another field’s professional development that you have expertise to fill, do it. radical reference members have taught fact checking workshops at grassroots media conferences and women, action, and the media conference. arpita bose and melissa morrone, librarians in new york, taught a free workshop at the park slope food coop in brooklyn on finding consumer health information with freely available and public library resources. for arpita, she found volunteering in a way to continue performing a librarian skill she no longer exercised in her job, while also connecting with the community. “for four years i had worked on a contract with the national library of medicine to provide training to librarians and members of the public on health information resources, and i missed the public service aspect of that job. leading a workshop at the coop seemed like a great way to contribute to the community” (a. bose, personal communication, march 1, 2012). radical reference collectives have also taught workshops at book fairs and skillshares, including community needs assessments, archival best practices, filing successful freedom of information act requests, and navigating copyright. library school student groups have been key allies in sharing librarian skills with different groups. there are currently twelve progressive librarians guild (plg) student chapters at different library schools (progressive librarians guild, 2012). many of these groups have volunteered with the creation of alternative library spaces, such as the zine library papercut in boston. they have also collaborated with prisoner support groups, such as books through bars and the prison book program. some of these groups have organized field trips to visit radical and alternative libraries and archives in their communities – helping to create bridges into these organizations that could lead to future collaborations. students from different lis programs have helped build or consult on websites for external groups. additionally, these library school groups help to provide a space where progressive students may gather together to have space to collaborate and bring discourse to their schools through group events and speaker forums. as mentioned earlier, sharing librarian skills can help to build community. in the spirit of coming out of the library, a group of librarians in boston marched in the boston pride parade, carrying signs saying things like “librarians are novel lovers” and “can i help with your reference queery?” while marching is arguable as a “librarian skill,” solidarity actions like these help to bring awareness to the profession and connect us with diverse communities. similarly, tabling at community events, as radical reference has done, help to raise awareness of librarians and librarianship and embed us in the communities we serve and are a part of. these bridges help to present an authentic portrait of the diversity within the field and break down stereotypes of what librarians are like. when we volunteer with other groups, we can also simultaneously build community amongst librarians. ismoon hunter-morton writes about how volunteering with the q center in portland, oregon has provided her with a network of librarians and library students with similar interests. “i love working with queer and allied library students and librarians because we have created a network of people in the area who are committed to library service to marginalized communities and to continuing the tradition of librarian activism, providing free information to people who need it most” (i. hunter-morton, personal communication, march 7, 2012). community building can also be created through a shared affinity, such as that of libraries and baked goods, as occurred for kate angell, a librarian in new york who began baking vegan treats for volunteers at occupy wall streets’ people’s library (angell, n.d.). similarly, student lis groups at graduate schools such as simmons college, pratt institute, and university of pittsburg have organized and hosted skillshares where fellow library school students and librarians share their librarian skills with each other. perhaps the most potent contemporary example of contributing librarian skills to a movement is seen in the various occupy libraries that have sprung up around the country. these libraries have received national news coverage, including a new yorker post, and an article in the new york times about the audre lorde to howard zinn library (a to z) at occupy boston. in addition to collecting and cataloging lending collections, occupy libraries have built subject guides to popular topics, organized community events, helped publish poetry anthologies, and answer reference questions. archivists are working to catalog the ephemera related to the movement – such as signs, newsletters, photographs, and media. and in a great display of meta-librarian-ing, occupy librarians presented at ala midwinter, about the librarian skills they used in creating these alternative spaces (rapp, 2012). now occupy libraries are working to build an occupy consortium, where libraries can share resources and support each other. heather mccann, one of the organizers at a to z explained her experience with the occupy boston library as “transformative.” she continues by writing “we came together, many of us strangers around a common interest: providing information to the people of occupy boston. for me, i knew that i wanted to be involved with the movement, so i thought about how my skills could be of the greatest use. fortunately, the other radical reference librarians, some simmons students and a few others had the same thought… we frequently heard that the library tent was one of the most welcoming places at occupy boston” (h. mccann, personal communication, march 7, 2012). how do i share my librarian skills? hopefully you are feeing inspired to take your librarian skills out of the library and into the wild. how do you prepare for such a journey? while there is no one way to line up this adventure, there are some travel considerations for making the journey easier. first you should consider whether you are traveling solo, or whether you will feel more comfortable taking a group trip. if you want to travel as a group, connect with lis groups that are already serving the community, like radical reference or even the closest plg student chapter, and find out what projects they are currently involved in. or, form an affinity group of like-minded librarians interested in similar projects. another place to look for groups and people working on similar issues is on ala connect, the american library association’s online community. next, think about which groups in your community, or online, align with your personal politics and convictions and reach out to them to see what sort of skills they may be in need of. reach out to these groups and market yourself by being clear about what you can bring to their organization and ask what their needs are, since they may not know what librarians can offer. do they have a need for research, archiving, needs assessment, or any other sort of skills that you have? ask what they need help with. if what they really need help with is stuffing envelopes, and it is not a good fit for you, politely decline and find other groups whose needs match your skills. or, if the project that they need help with is something that you do not currently know how to do, but you know someone who does, see if you can recruit her for the project; if you work together you can simultaneously gain new skills through this collaboration. you can turn to websites like volunteer match and idealist, which help connect people with non-profit volunteer opportunities. or try reaching out to your social networks through websites like facebook, twitter, and google plus, to find out which groups and projects your friends and colleagues are working on that could use some librarian skills. perhaps you can meet a group in need of librarian skills at a non-lis conference, skillshare, or other community event. you can participate in events like librarians build community at ala annual, where volunteers have helped rebuild libraries in new orleans, following the damage from hurricane katrina. another effective way to integrate this work would be for organizations like ala’s emerging leaders program to expand their projects to include work with clients outside of the library world who may need assistance by librarians. effective partnerships are symbiotic, providing personal fulfillment for the librarian while providing necessary skills and expertise for the organization. when we share librarian skills with different groups, we promote and support social causes, as well as promote ourselves. it is critical for our relevancy as a profession and as professionals to make these bridges and enhance our skills, and we can have a lot of fun in the process. every time we step out of the library and into the wild, it becomes a much more welcome place. big thanks to my peer reviewers – jenna freedman and melissa morrone, both inspirations and active participants inside and outside the library. i owe you both more vegan sundaes than i can count on one hand. huge thanks to emily ford at itlwtlp for helping support and push this article along, and for being very considerate and patient when life events kept getting in the way. thanks to amanda meeks, arpita bose, denise pasquinelli, heather mccann, and ismoon hunter-morton for sharing their experiences sharing librarian skills. thanks to lia friedman and melissa morrone, again, for writing “radical reference: socially responsible librarianship collaborating with community,” which i relied upon heavily. thanks to radical reference for being rad and providing a vehicle to share our skills with other communities and each other. bibliography american library association. (2012). me, a librarian?. retrieved march 7, 2012, from http://www.ala.org/educationcareers/careers/librarycareerssite/mealibrarian. angell, k. (n.d.) baked goods for good librarians. retrieved march 8, 2012, from http://bakedgoodsforgoodlibrarians.weebly.com/. beta phi mu headquarters. (2012). beta phi mu headquarters. retrieved march 7, 2012, from http://www.beta-phi-mu.org/. bonfield, b. (2011, september 21). is the united states training too many librarians or too few? (part 1). in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved march 8, 2012, from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/is-the-united-states-training-too-many-librarians-or-too-few-part-1/ budt-caulk, m. (2006). volunteer librarians. american libraries, 37(1), 38. bureau of labor statistics. (2012, february 22). volunteering in the united states – 2011. news release. retrieved march 7, 2012, from http://www.bls.gov/. edwards, e. (2006, jan. – feb.). taking it to the streets: passion, librarians and radical reference. clamor magazine, 35.5. retrieved march 7, 2012, from http://clamormagazine.org/issues/35-5/content/media_4.php julien, h., & genuis, s. k. (2009). emotional labour in librarians instructional work. journal of documentation, 65(6), 926-937. doi:10.1108/00220410910998924 morrone, m., & friedman, l. (2009). radical reference: socially responsible librarianship collaborating with community. the reference librarian, 50(4), 371 – 396. progressive librarians guild. (2012, march 2). progressive librarians guild chapters. retrieved march 8, 2012, from http://libr.org/plg/chapters.php. radical reference. (2004, august 1). about radical reference. retrieved march 7, 2012, from http://radicalreference.info/about. rapp, d. (2012). ala midwinter 2012: occupy wall st. librarians wonder, when did sharing become a revolutionary act?. library journal. retrieved march 8, 2012, from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/01/library-services/ala-midwinter-2012-occupy-wall-st-librarians-wonder-when-did-sharing-become-a-revolutionary-act/. schuman, p. (1987). libraries and coalition building. in e. j. josey (ed.), libraries, coalitions, & the public good (pp. 127-133). new york, n.y.: neal-schuman. activism, community building, outreach, radical reference, volunteer from the frying pan into the fire (and back again): adventures in subject-based, credit instruction answering questions about library impact on student learning 7 responses jean costello 2012–03–28 at 11:52 am hi lana – thanks for the specific examples of the professional services librarians have offered to their communities. i’m intrigued about the private lending libraries — specifically why the organizations felt the need to create their own libraries instead of using their public library — and whether the librarians tried facilitating dialogue between the org and the local library about providing access to the materials they find valuable. i can see the potential there for some really great discussions that would help strengthen the public libraries and potentially open up an array of services to the organization that they may have been unaware of. for example, perhaps the org didn’t use their public library because their subject matter is under-represented in the collection. another may be the need for a high level of discretion in order to feel ‘safe’ accessing the materials. in both cases, the public library would benefit from hearing from non-users about how to meet their needs. and, once members of the organization began using their libraries more, they might find people (library staff or patrons) with computer skills or equipment that would be useful to them. they might also find unexpected allies, in other community organizations, local businesses & interest groups, etc who also use the public library. lana 2012–04–02 at 12:35 pm thanks for your comments, jean. i can’t speak for the q center, but in my experience helping bitch create their community lending library, bitch had the idea to create a lending library as a way to tangibly give back to the community, and strengthen conversations and connections. since they are best known for producing bitch magazine, they had already collected a large and unique collection of books related to feminism, pop culture, and other topics covered in their publication. thus, they already had the materials to create a library, and were continuing to receive more from publishers for reviewing and reference. we (rad ref volunteers) stepped in with expertise on how to take this collection of books being used internally by staff and volunteers and share it with the larger community. portland has an amazing public library system (multnomah county library), and bitch’s intent isn’t to pull users away from public libraries, but rather to showcase and make available their unique collection, and give back to the community. i don’t think donating their materials to the public library would have achieved a similar outcome. however, i don’t think it’s too late to connect with the public library. i think it would be beneficial for both parties if multnomah county library partners with local, small, special collections in the area (perhaps they already are?). it would also help to raise awareness of the materials available in these small libraries like bitch and the q center, and raise awareness about the awesome organizations that have these libraries. ismoon maria hunter-morton 2012–04–07 at 8:38 pm hi jean. well, q center’s kendall clawson library is private in that it is owned by a community center that serves queer people and our allies. i would love to have a direct connection to (and direct funding from) the local public library! i’m a public librarian, i work for multnomah county library on-call, and several of my volunteers have been local library students and public library workers. mcl provides public excellent access to lgbtq databases, fiction, and even expensive queer scholarly publications, free with your library card. the problem is that public libraries do not keep a comprehensive run of published materials by/for/about queer people that goes back to the stonewall riots and before, but community members do. and, if a book is no longer being read or is no longer current, it may be weeded. patrons seeking information on lgbtq topics can feel intimidated to ask random library staff about sex, sexuality, and gender identity. also, queer community libraries and archives would like to be the owner of our own materials in case of political/cultural changes at the administrative levels of government and private organizations. after all, telling personal stories, publishing them, and then preserving them for the future is a matter of trust. i would love to continue this conversation about connecting community and public libraries: ismoon.maria@gmail.com. thanks! ismoon maria hunter-morton, ma, mlis portland, oregon rcn 2012–04–01 at 12:32 am your post is quite timely for me, a recently retired (june 2011) public reference librarian who last month checked out volunteer match and found a better-than-hoped-for match for me! just yesterday i learned how i’ll assist the regional cat resource center, which is basically an i&r organization for all things cats. from the comfort of my home, i’ll field and respond to email and phone inquiries about feral and domesticated cats. perhaps i can help with the design of the site, as well as the interface for volunteers (including a knowledge base). and maybe i can let local librarians know about this helpful online resource. i’m thrilled by this opportunity! lana 2012–04–02 at 11:46 am thanks for sharing, rcn. i love this example of sharing librarian skills and am happy to hear you’re helping kitties in the process. happy retirement! pingback : librarian activisim = awesome « acorn electric pingback : exercise 2: the first ever iheartrains library blog awards | iheartrains this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct call for articles – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 13 aug editorial board /1 comments call for articles by editorial board we’ve just finalized revamping our publication process documentation. now that the new documentation is live we thought it was a good time to post another call for articles. what we publish we publish high quality peer-reviewed articles in a range of formats. whilst we are open to suggestions for new article types and formats, including material previously published in part or full, we expect proposals to include unique and substantial new content from the author. examples of material we would publish include: original research with a discussion of its consequences and an argument for action. articles arguing for a particular approach, strategy or development in librarianship, with practical examples of how it might be achieved. transformative works with additional explanatory or interpretive content. for example, a transcription of an interview or panel discussion, with a substantial introduction explaining the importance of the subject to librarianship and a discussion of related literature. why publish your article with in the library with the lead pipe? in the library with the lead pipe is internationally recognized as a forward-thinking, open access, peer reviewed journal. formerly considered a peer-reviewed blog, in 2012 lead pipe won the salem press library blog award for ‘best general blog.’ later that year, after consulting with our readership, lead pipe was repositioned as a professional journal. we are listed by the directory of open access journals, lista, and ulrich’s as a peer-reviewed journal. thousands of readers subscribe via rss, and lead pipe receives over 5000 unique visits from across the world each month. if you are ready to submit an article proposal, or for information on lead pipe’s licensing and copyright policy, please read our submission guidelines. you may also be interested in reading about the lead pipe publication process. if you’re looking for ideas, take a look at our last call for articles. about us, call for articles editorial: announcing in the library with the lead pipe’s community code of conduct call for social media editor 1 response pingback : bibliolinks: on 3 minute ted talks, and more | exbibliolibris this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct new schedule and a call for guest authors – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 11 mar editorial board /0 comments new schedule and a call for guest authors by editorial board since our launch last october, in the library with the lead pipe has been publishing a new post nearly every wednesday. as writers, drafting long-form, in-depth posts on a weekly basis has proved challenging, even with the contributions of our talented guests. we’ve heard from many of you that, as readers, you’ve found it hard to keep up with our pace. to resolve this in the library with the lead pipe will be moving to a biweekly format starting next week. you can expect our posts to come less often, but with the same high-quality content and fresh, boundary-pushing angles that you’ve come to enjoy. sound good? please use the comments to share your thoughts on our new schedule. and while i’ve got your attention: in the library with the lead pipe is opening our doors to guest post proposals from our readers. see the submissions guidelines page for more details. announcements, guest authors, schedule will the real emily please stand up stepping on toes: the delicate art of talking to faculty about questionable assignments this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct will the real emily please stand up – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 5 mar derik badman /6 comments will the real emily please stand up this is the first in a series that i’ll will be writing about personal information management. image by the author. by derik badman while personal information is often thought of as only the documents, emails, and other pieces of information that people receive or retain for some potential, immediate, or future need, william jones, in his keeping found things found: the study and practice of personal information management (morgan kaufmann, 2008), expands the field to include information about “me” or owned by “me.” as our online identities, information about us online, expand, how can we manage that information to put our best face (identity) forward? my online life has proliferated greatly over the past years. what once was an email account that i accessed through a text-based interface and was primarily a way to communicate with a few friends i knew “in real life” has become multiple blogs, websites, social networks, comments, micro-blogs, status updates, photos, drawings, links, presentations, and more. each one is a new profile and another place people might find my content (or at least something about me). perhaps i’m lucky in that i have an unusual name. i can google myself and go through 100 results without finding a hit that isn’t me (also an indication of how active my online life is, i guess). take a look at the first page of results on my name in quotes. on examination the results reveal a few points of interest. seven out of ten feature my name in the page’s title. six of the ten have my name in the url. the top result is my home page, which has my name in neither title nor url, but is in the header of the page and the metadata and probably a lot of links go there referencing my name. the remaining result is my profile on my library’s libguides, which simply features my name 10 times in a very small amount of text. when you are trying to find out about someone online, a lot is based on names in titles and urls and links from one site to another. that is no problem if you have a rare name (at least, rare online) and your name ends up in titles of pages or urls. but many services don’t put names in page titles; maybe they just put your username, which is often not your name or even close to your name. maybe your name only appears once on a page, but it’s a single important occurrence (table of contents of a book, praise in a newspaper article or blog post). how will people find you (if you want to be found)? how will people find what you want them to find (the good stuff)? even more problematic is the case of someone with a name that is shared by others who also have some kind of online life. confusion can easily occur to the casual searcher. i have a friend who has not only someone with the same name as her but who is also in the same profession. this lack of difference in basic identifiers (same name, same occupation) can increase the chances of confusion and a mingling of multiple identities. in the case of my itlwtlp colleague emily ford, a google search on her name does bring up her author page at this site (result nine). but it also brings up emily ford the author of a book from the “erotic print society”, emily ford the marketing manager, emily ford who posts about restaurants in the san francisco area, emily ford the rowing coach at oregon state, as well as emily’s in alaska, massachusetts, and north carolina. some of these might be the same emily–does author emily live in san franscisco or coach rowing, did emily from north carolina move to massachusetts–, but they might also all be different. in a world full of emily’s, how does our emily associate herself with her content and not someone else’s? if she is looking for a job and someone googles her name, the googler should easily realize that these are not all the same emily, but he or she may make wrong assumptions about certain content. he may think itlwtlp emily also writes erotic fiction–our emily may not want people thinking that. he may miss positive content that emily would want others to see. there are no easy answers to these problems, but a number of sites and tools have been made to help aggregate online identity and make connections between the sites you want people to see. claimid, created by two doctoral students at unc’s school of information and library science, was designed as an online identity manager. you create an account to manage your claimid page (you can take a look at mine) which serves as a kind of home page. for the many people without a homepage, who use facebook or twitter or blogger as their primary online home, the claimid page offers a single page to aggregate your personal information. this page is used as a repository for your links: links about you, links by you, as well as links that people might think are about you (so you can say “not mine!”). by putting your name in the url, the title, and the metadata, claimid hopes to make your page rise in search results. by linking back to your claimid page from your various online profiles, you can help raise that profile (most search results use inbound links to increase relevancy). with claimid you can stake a claim to your online identity, tweaking it as you see fit by adding or not adding content. claimid makes use of a few emerging (already emerged?) tools for making social/identity connections online. of relevance to gathering personal information about yourself is “rel=me”. this is a subset of the xfn (xhtml friends network) microformat. a microformat, as succinctly described by microformats.org, is “designed for humans first and machines second, …a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” basically, it is a way to embed data that is both human and machine readable. xfn is used to embed social relationships into links. if i have a link on my blog to another blog, i can use xfn to note that the owner of that other blog is a “friend” or a “colleague” or even that i have “met” them. these relationships are marked using the “rel” (short for relationship) attribute of link tags in html. if a normal link to my friend’s blog looks like this: <a href="http://someblog.com">a blog i read</a> a link to my friend’s blog, where i am using xfn, may look like this: <a rel="friend" href="http://someblog.com">blog i read</a> this would allow xfn aware applications to know that i consider the owner of the “blog i read” to be a friend. for online identity, the value of “me” can be used for the “rel” link attribute to represent a link to another page about/by the same person. the use of “rel=me” is already in place at a number of web applications and sites. take a look at the html of any flickr profile page where the user has filled in the “homepage” field, and you will find a “rel=me” link. similarly, the “web” field of a twitter user’s profile is also linked with “rel=me”. these links make an assertion of identity between two sites. ideally, a user would be able to create reciprocal “rel=me” links to loosely verify the relationship. in other words, if my twitter page has a “rel=me” link to my home page, my home page would also have a “rel=me” link to my twitter page. this reciprocal linking shows that i have control over both sites, thus verifying their connection as “me.” verifying who “me” is, is another problem all together. if someone else made a twitter account and linked as “rel=me” to my home page, there would be an ambiguous relationship, because i, in control of the home page, would not link back to someone else’s twitter account with “rel=me.” these links are not about establishing who someone is, rather they are about relationships: saying that this account and that account are the same entity. these links are what would be considered “semantic links”. the idea of semantic links is that the link itself helps explain the relationship between the two ends of the link (in this case, people relationships, but it could also be other types of relationships). of particular importance is the ability of machines (other computers) to “read” these links and understand the relationship. google’s social graph api is one application designed to read these semantic links using the “rel” attribute and xfn. the social graph is not yet widely used, but it points to the potential for these types of tools. for the time being, it’s interesting to use the social graph to see how one’s own accounts and sites are connected. one can peruse a few example applications of the social graph including the site connectivity demo.1 you can type one or many websites into the site connectivity box and it will track down “rel=me” links, both one way and reciprocal. see the results for my homepage here. the results show how my various sites/accounts connect to each other through “rel=me” links. the first section, “info on your connected sites” shows sites connected by “rel=me”” links. the sites in the left column are those linked from my homepage. the right column indicates the strength of the connection. sites at the top of the table with green numbers are reciprocally linked with “rel=me”. i’ll admit it’s not all completely clear to me. the “possible connections” sections show sites that link to one or more of my other sites. i’m not sure why my home page appears down here. i do know that a few of my itlwtlp colleague’s twitter accounts appear in this section because they have this site in the “web” field of their accounts. because i am also pointing at the same page, the social graph thinks we might be the same entity. you’ll note that i’ve actually got a number of reciprocally connected sites and profiles. this is primarily because my home page links out to a number of my profiles with a “rel=me” link. when those sites (twitter, flickr, etc.) are also using “rel=me” a reciprocal relationship is created. even if you don’t have your own home page (or a claimid page) linking out to all these services, you can create a networked identity by linking your profiles to each other. tools able to identify and follow these semantic links can follow chains of links to create an aggregate. if you put someone’s twitter url into the site connectivity demo at google, you can often immediately find that user’s profile in various blog platforms, flickr, friendfeed, technorati, and other sites. try it for yourself. if we put aaron schmidt’s walking paper website url into the search we end up with a list of potential connections to friendfeed, flickr, yelp, technorati, and lastfm2. do these connections, publicly discoverable as they are, offer a threat to privacy? i would say, “no.” the type of information tracked by the social graph api, all of these links, are based on information published by the people in the links. i choose what i put into my twitter account web field. i choose what goes into my flickr profile and all my other accounts. if i don’t want these pieces of information to be discovered, i shouldn’t make them public or at least not link them together. by choosing which connections you create and how you label them, you can create multiple online identities. if i had wanted to, in the past, keep my librarian self separate from my comics blogging/drawing self, i could have made a concerted effort to not link those profiles, to use separate home pages, separate usernames, separate commenting identities. it might not have been a perfect separation, but it would have helped a lot in separating the two identities. in my case, those both becoming ever more public identities, it does not behoove me to do this. i want the connections to be made. one should be aware that any information that gets out there publicly could be put to use by sites and users outside the original context. this gets done already; think about the white pages that spread across the internet and the sites that aggregate them. in the past i’ve found sites that list my last four or five phone numbers and addresses all at once. this is being done with our social networking information. going through the google results on my own name (above), i found results at the site delver. there were two pages for “derik badman.” one seems to be drawing on my flickr information (and links to my now deleted myspace account), showing my profile, connections, and thumbnails from that site. the second seems to be drawing a limited amount of information from facebook, including a small subset of my friends (perhaps those that had public profiles?). why are these two profiles separate? as far as i can tell, this is because my public facebook page had no links to any of my other accounts, thus keeping the site from making the connection between the two. so what does all this matter to librarians, that is, beyond a personal interest in their own online identities? information literacy, educating our patrons, is more than just about finding, using, and evaluating information made by others; it is also about our own information and our own personal information space. and personal information is more than just the stuff we keep on our computers. personal information is also the information about us that others might find, use, and evaluate. if we are aware of these issues, we can advise patrons to manage their online identities. tools that automatically create these connections will only increase over time. people should be aware of their online identities as they look for jobs (don’t you google candidates?), while those with a public personality, or who want to have a public personality need to be even more careful of the identity they put forward. for self-promotional reasons, being able to manage and connect all one’s various profiles, content, and networks can aid in creating exposure for creative endeavors. younger users can benefit greatly from being aware of these issues before their online identities proliferate, allowing a great control of these identities from the start. some of us are stuck with what’s out there, and all we can do is manage the results. thanks to: emily ford for comments and the use of her name, ellie collier and hilary davis for comments, and lianne hartman for editing, comments, and the title. (edit: and thanks to lianne for noticing my typo in the title, which you can still see in the url.) the use of other “rel” values can be used by this system to works towards a “distributed social network.” this article by ben ward is a good introduction to the topic. [↩] i should note that none of this is private information. it’s all based on publicly viewable links. [↩] microformats, online identity, personal information management it’s the collections that are special new schedule and a call for guest authors 6 responses steve lawson 2009–03–05 at 1:31 pm derik, this is a thoughtful and enjoyable post, and i look forward to seeing where you take the theme in your follow-up posts. here are a few questions and comments: * is this need to manage identity unique to twenty-first online life? have non-famous people had to worry about stuff like this before? * what opportunities do you think librarians will have to really work with patrons on these kinds of images? * name confusion can be fun. i’m twitter friends with my favorite googleganger, a london bass player named steve lawson (of course), and i sometimes pass along direct messages or replies that came to me that are meant for him. and i believe there was a “league of steve lawson” group on facebook for a while. * i think about the validity and verifiability of identity online when a “famous” person comments on my blog. aside from checking the ip address from where the comment was posted and emailing an externally-verified email address for that person, there’s no good way to know if it really is michael gorman descending from mt. olympus to comment. * i have very little confidence in this semantic web stuff. and i don’t know that claimid or microformats or whatever are going to be much help to the casual web searcher trying to determine which emily he’s found. that could just be my lack of imagination. * lastly, i was happy to be present at an internet librarian preconference session when iris jastram talked about a similar topic. i think iris has written about identity management too, but you could do worse that to read jenica rogers-urbanek’s notes on iris’s talk. derik badman 2009–03–05 at 1:40 pm thanks for the comments, steve. *i’d imagine that managing identity was a different problem pre-internet. it was all about the personal relationships, the gossip, the “what are people saying about me.” that operated in a limited sphere, that has exploded with increasing online visibility, search engines, etc. *i’m honestly not sure what the opportunities are for most librarians. i think, from an academic standpoint, there is something very important to be said for scholars/faculty to consider the image found of them online and how they might best gather their content and reactions to their content so as to best display it to potential colleagues, students, deans, media (to be one of those “experts”). *love to term “googleganger”. *validity and “real” identity are a whole other bag of worms. something that i hope to take up in another post. *like anything else these semantic links add a tool to the repertoire. in this case linking and online aggregation can help raise search results in relevancy. having some kind of home page to aggregate your content and differentiate yourself can help people know who is who. or at least help people know who you are not. *thanks for the reading suggestions. i’ll check them out. another emily 2009–03–12 at 10:03 am i actually recently blogged about something related to this someone created a second account for my boyfriend – same name/picture/geographical location…without his permission. we’re not certain who is behind it, but about 40 of his friends accepted this imposters friend request without question. that is scary! i think we will see more and more that googlegangers are actually imposters – for various reasons – to spy on someone else, to amuse oneself, to ruins someones professional or personal life… but yeah, that’s another bag of worms as well. derik badman 2009–03–13 at 11:48 am another emily: wow, that is an interesting occurrence. i know there have been issues with celebrities (or semi-celebrities) and account confusion. this is where authentication comes up, which is a whole other topic, but one problem with authenticating anyone online is that it is all based on relative criteria: an email address, a url. aarontay 2009–08–06 at 9:37 am recently i was trying to find out which library vendors/journals were on youtube or slideshare. lists exist for the same thing for twitter and facebook, but not youtube or slideshare. naturally,i had the same idea as what was in this post, let’s see if i can find related sites using the twitter sites as a starting point. why not use the google graph api… the other trick to check if x on network a is the same as y on network b is to check lifestreaming aggregators (claimid probably counts as sort of one), the famous of which is friendfeed. would it surprise you to know that these methods weren’t too successful? the later was marginally better. but what was the easiest method? using http://namechk.com/ and similar services. this counts on the fact that people tend to use the same username across the web. i’ve being very quick to sign up for web2.0 accounts so basically every account that allows only one aarontay is me (some accounts are me, but i lost the password!). but this doesn’t solve the problem since there are multiple people wanting to own the same username. i noticed for example ebscohost having to settle for a variant of their name on youtube :) basically if library vendors are not using such technologies to identify themselves, chances are few are doing so. i would add that libraries since 2006 began opening web accounts all over the place, while chances of a “name collision” are less, you would still need some means of identifying real accounts. i’ve being blogging pieces like “libraries on twitter”, “libraries on friendfeed”, “libraries on google profiles” , while my latest post was trying to identify libraries on getsatisfaction, yelp, uservoice. i would add finding if a certain library is on a certain service is not easy :) uciama 2010–11–04 at 9:46 am i have used namechk.com and found my twit id taken. but i have my .com! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: announcing in the library with the lead pipe’s community code of conduct – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 30 jul ellie collier and editorial board /2 comments editorial: announcing in the library with the lead pipe’s community code of conduct by ellie collier and editorial board the editorial board is pleased to announce in the library with the lead pipe’s adoption of a code of conduct. by doing so, we hope to protect the members of our community from harassing behaviors in lead pipe spaces, including this website, our social media spaces, and any other lead pipe-sponsored spaces. as of today, everyone participating in lead pipe spaces is expected to comply with the code of conduct (copied below and also linked in the top navigation bar). reported violations of the code of conduct will be handled by members of the lead pipe editorial board. you can contact us at conduct@leadpi.pe. we encourage everyone who interacts with the lead pipe community—readers, editors, authors, commenters, and our friends and advisors—to familiarize themselves with the guidelines set forth in the code of conduct. we believe that clear, specific codes of conduct make communities safer and more welcoming, and are pleased to have one in place for in the library with the lead pipe. summary in the library with the lead pipe intends to help improve communities, libraries, and professional organizations. our goal is to explore new ideas and start conversations, to document our concerns and argue for solutions. in keeping with our community building values, we are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, national origin, or economic status. we do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form. this code of conduct applies to all lead pipe editors at all times, and to all conduct by all participants in any lead pipe sponsored spaces, including our website, mailing lists, and social media spaces, along with any other spaces that lead pipe hosts, both online and off. some lead pipe-sponsored spaces may have additional guidelines in place, which will be made readily available to participants, who are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules. anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the lead pipe editorial board. definitions harassment includes: comments that reinforce oppressive power dynamics related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, national origin, or economic status unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment failure to use a person’s chosen name and pronouns (see https://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender) gratuitous or off-topic sexual images in public spaces physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop threats of violence incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm deliberate intimidation stalking or 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oppressive behavior or assumptions. reporting if you are being harassed by a member of the lead pipe community, if you notice that someone else is being harassed, or if you have any other concerns, please contact the lead pipe editorial board at conduct@leadpi.pe. if the person who is harassing you is on the editorial board, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. we will respond as promptly as we can. we will follow the best practices as laid out in geek feminism’s conference anti-harassment/responding to reports. this code of conduct applies to lead pipe sponsored spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of the lead pipe community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. we will take seriously all good-faith reports of harassment by lead pipe members, especially members of the editorial board. this includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. the lead pipe editorial board reserves the right to exclude people from lead pipe spaces based on their past behavior, including behavior outside lead pipe spaces and behavior towards people who are not involved with lead pipe. in order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response. we will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. at our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of lead pipe members or the general public. we will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent. consequences participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. if a participant engages in harassing behavior, the lead pipe editorial board may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all lead pipe spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other lead pipe members or the general public. comment policy we appreciate and invite your comments and discussion about articles on in the library with the lead pipe. constructive criticism is one of our primary goals, and we applaud it in our readers. comments that violate our code of conduct, disregard the article’s topic, or fail to add to the discussion will be deleted. we do not edit comments except by request of the poster. all content posted on in the library with the lead pipe is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial license including comments added to the articles. as such, all comments may be archived along with the articles they accompany for the purposes of the author’s record of publication. further reading if you need more information on any of the social justice topics referenced in this document we suggest you start with some of the following resources: finally, a feminism 101 blog feminism 101 | shakesville ableist word profile | fwd (feminists with disabilities) for a way forward 18 things white people should know/do before discussing racism | the frisky another 101 fact: there is no such thing as reverse sexism | the gender blender blog faq: aren’t feminists just sexists towards men? | finally, a feminism 101 blog racism 101: this shit doesn’t go in reverse | whites educating whites (so poc don’t have to) why reverse racism isn’t real | faminspire anger as a tool in social justice movements | life as i know it license and attribution this policy is licensed under the creative commons zero license. it is public domain; no credit and no open licensing of your version is required. this policy is based on the example policy from the geek feminism wiki, created by the geek feminism community. http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/community_anti-harassment many thanks to members of the geek feminism community for creating the original community anti-harassment/policy and especially to tim chevalier and mary gardner for reviewing lead pipe’s code and announcement. open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression call for articles 2 responses pingback : hls weekly round up | hls sarah 2014–08–02 at 1:25 pm this is really excellent and i’m very glad you’re doing this. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct answering questions about library impact on student learning – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 4 apr derek rodriguez /5 comments answering questions about library impact on student learning photo by flickr user wordshore (cc by-nc 2.0) by derek rodriguez this essay reports on a project which evaluated the understanding library impacts (uli) protocol, a suite of instruments for detecting and communicating library impact on student learning. the project was a dissertation study conducted with undergraduates enrolled in upper-level and capstone history classes at six u.s. colleges and universities in 2011. my first essay for in the library with the lead pipe introduced the protocol and provided background on the approach. this essay uses selected results from the 2011 project to demonstrate how the protocol works and suggests ways readers can get involved with future uli projects. high expectations for higher education these are trying times in u.s. higher education. only 63% of u.s. students who enroll in college graduate within six years[1]  and the u.s. now ranks 12th among oecd nations in college participation rates among young adults.[2]  further, the lumina foundation predicts a shortfall of 23 million college graduates in the u.s. by the year 2025.[3] students and parents are also questioning whether the benefits of a college degree justify the ever-increasing costs of attending college.[4] stakeholders and customers are seeking reassurance that colleges and universities are delivering value for money. in these belt-tightening times, all units on campus, including the academic library, are under scrutiny. support for teaching and learning is at the heart of most academic library mission statements. yet, never has it been more important for libraries to demonstrate evidence of this support. the association of college and research libraries’ (acrl) value of academic libraries report  charges academic libraries to meet this challenge. one of its central recommendations is for “libraries to … define outcomes of institutional relevance and then measure the degree to which they attain them.”[5] the acrl recognizes the importance of this issue in its recently revised standards for libraries in higher education. the new standards differ from previous versions by setting clear expectations for libraries to “define, develop, and measure outcomes that contribute to institutional effectiveness and apply findings for purposes of continuous improvement.”[6] just what outcomes do libraries influence? where should libraries focus their assessment efforts?  retention and graduation rates are logical outcomes to consider, but student learning outcomes are the gold standard in higher education accountability. demonstrating library impact on student learning has proven challenging work. roswitha poll and phillip payne (2006), for instance, point out several difficulties in measuring library impact on student learning including the possibility that services can have different effects on different user groups, difficulties in accessing student performance data, and the diversity of methods in use prevent benchmarking of any sort. [7] in my opinion, doing nothing is not an option. libraries need efficient methods for connecting student use of the library with the learning outcomes that matter most to faculty and stakeholders. failure to do so leaves libraries out of important campus conversations about student learning. the uli protocol is designed to meet this challenge. what are student learning outcomes? for several years, academic libraries have communicated impact in terms of information literacy outcomes. as i wrote last year, information literacy outcomes are important but they are not the only learning outcomes stakeholders are interested in. the uli protocol broadens the scope for library assessment beyond information literacy to the student learning outcomes associated with the academic major. learning outcomes expected of graduates within an academic major describe the competencies most clearly defined by faculty and best understood by stakeholders. for instance, a recent graduate in the discipline of history would be expected to demonstrate the abilities to ‘frame a historical question,’ ‘build an argument based on evidence,’ and ‘communicate the argument coherently.’ the uli protocol further focuses the library assessment lens on capstone projects in which undergraduates are expected to demonstrate these abilities. a capstone experience such as a research project or independent study is considered a high impact practice in undergraduate education. students engaged in high impact practices work hard, interact with faculty and classmates in meaningful ways, and report higher learning gains than peers. [8] the capstone makes a good focus for assessment because these are times when students demonstrate the skills expected of graduates, faculty expectations are at their highest, and student effort should be at its peak. learning expectations in capstone courses can be described in a rubric. rubrics are intended to serve as “scoring guides” to “help clarify how instructors evaluate tasks within a course.”[9] for example, the utah state university history department created a capstone rubric which defines a set of expectations for grading student papers in the key areas of historical knowledge, historical thinking, and historical skills: table 1 learning outcomes for capstone history papers student demonstrates an understanding of the key historical events related to the thesis (outcome 1) student frames historical questions in a thoughtful, critical manner (outcome 2) student evaluates and analyzes primary sources (outcome 3) student evaluates and analyzes secondary sources, demonstrating an awareness of interpretive differences (outcome 4) student employs a range of primary sources appropriate to the informing thesis (outcome 5) student employs a range of secondary sources appropriate to the informing thesis (outcome 6) student presents a well-organized argument (outcome 7) argument is well-substantiated; student properly cites evidence (outcome 8) student employs proper writing mechanics, grammar, and spelling (outcome 9) adapted from the capstone rubric used by the utah state history department [10] if professors and instructors are assessing student work for these outcomes, library assessment tools should link library use to student learning outcomes at this level of detail. answering ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions of library impact understanding library impact means more than connecting the dots between use and expectations for student learning. librarians need to know why students choose or choose not to use certain library resources and services. librarians also need to know how students use libraries. what was important about a given service or resource?  where did the student encounter problems? answers to ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions like these can support improvement efforts, resource allocation, and advocacy. the critical incident technique (cit) is a research method well-suited to this type of problem.[11] participants in cit studies are asked to ‘place themselves in the moment when’ they were performing a task or participating in an activity. questions and probes identify factors which influenced task success or failure. analysis of reports from multiple participants provides a general understanding of the activity. the cit has been widely used in information behavior and library impact studies over the past 30 years.[12] tuning outcomes: a method for communicating library impact communicating library impact on student learning in terms that resonate with stakeholders and customers is a significant challenge. the uli protocol draws on the work of tuning projects funded by the lumina foundation and the american association of college and university’s value rubrics[13] project to meet this need. this article focuses on the role of the tuning outcomes in the uli. what is tuning?  faculty, recent graduates, and employers work together in a tuning project to create “a shared understanding” of what college graduates should know and be able to do. these projects generate ‘tuning outcomes’ which represent discipline-specific competencies expected of graduates at the associates, bachelors and master’s degree levels.[14] tuning outcomes can then serve as frameworks to guide assessment of student learning and communicate student competencies. projects conducted in indiana and utah generated sets of learning outcomes for history majors.[15] the utah state history department’s capstone rubric was created during the utah tuning project. research design for the 2011 ‘history capstone’ project figure 1 illustrates the logic of the uli protocol: students use library resources, services, and facilities during high-impact academic experiences, which support student achievement of associated learning outcomes. those achievements can be communicated to stakeholders using recognized learning outcomes frameworks like the tuning outcomes.   the protocol explores this assertion with two instruments: a critical incident survey and a learning activities crosswalk. cit survey the uli protocol uses the cit in a web-based questionnaire.[16] students respond to the survey during the last month of the semester when they are taking the capstone or upper-level course. originally prototyped in two interview-based studies,[17] the uli survey asks students to ‘think back to a memorable time’ when they were working on their research project. the instrument identifies the library resources, services, and facilities students used during these projects and the ways in which this use contributed to or inhibited achievement. open-ended questions gather ‘user stories’ that complement or reinforce other findings. the instrument closes with questions about affect (anxiety and confidence) and demographics. learning activities crosswalk a research project in history consists of several overlapping stages, which i call learning activities.[18] these learning activities were identified in earlier studies and informed by carol kuhlthau’s model of the information search process.[19]  for instance, students begin their history projects by getting oriented to their assignment and the resources necessary to complete it. next they choose a topic and develop a thesis. the student completes the project by building and communicating an argument using appropriate sources. content analysis methods are used to construct a crosswalk between the activities and associated learning outcomes. selected results librarians, history faculty, and undergraduates at six colleges and universities in the u.s. participated in the ‘history capstone’ project in 2011. i refer to each institution as sites a, b, c, d, e, and f to preserve their anonymity when discussing results. site a is a liberal arts university, sites b and f are private liberal arts colleges, site c is a master’s level public university, and sites d and e are public research universities.[20] selected findings from the studies at site a and b have been reported previously.[21] upper-level and capstone courses in history were eligible to participate. faculty members teaching these courses and librarians at each site helped facilitate the project.  faculty provided syllabi and other course learning outcomes documentation.  both librarians and faculty helped refine the instrument to meet local needs and add local questions. finally, both groups helped with distributing survey urls to students and encouraging their participation. one-hundred-twenty-seven students reported ‘critical incidents’ about their experiences completing projects in these courses, making up a 34% response rate overall. participants’ email addresses were used in a drawing for gift certificates at each study site. at the conclusion of the project, participating librarians and faculty received a summary report and a link to a web portal for reviewing detailed results. student respondents were largely of traditional college age (18-22) (87%). a majority worked at one or more jobs (74%) and lived off-campus (60%). sixty-four percent of respondents were women, 85% were seniors, 94% were enrolled in college full-time, 9% were first generation students, and 17% reported transferring to their current institution. collections are king the uli instrument asks students to reflect on four types of library use: electronic resources and discovery tools (referred to as electronic resources for brevity), traditional resources, services, and facilities or equipment. students also identified their most important use in each category. the respondents reported using over 1,800 distinct types of library resources, services, and facilities during history research projects. the top 20 most common types of use are presented in figure 2. students also reported over 2,100 ways that their ‘most important uses’ helped or hindered their achievement. the document-centric nature of history projects likely accounts for the fact that the library catalog (98% of respondents), books (98%), indexes or databases (87%), and e-journals (81%) were the top uses among this cohort. a full 77% of respondents said that books from the library were their most important traditional resource for the project. of these respondents 61% reported books led them to relevant sources, 76.8% reported books provided the best information for their project, 56% reported books provided information not found elsewhere, 22.2% reported finding too much information in books, and 18.2% reported difficulties finding books in their libraries. primary sources in the form of archives (55%) and electronic primary sources (70%) were used by a majority of respondents. non-library websites (61%) and internet search engines (75%) were used by a majority of students as well, but only 8 respondents reported either category as their ‘most important’ electronic resources. before we move on, i want to reflect on this point. respondents used internet search engines, but most students claimed the library catalog (27.6%), library databases (21.3%), e-primary sources (19.7%), and e-journals (13.4%) were their ‘most important’ e-resources. these findings may be consistent with those reported by oclc in a 2006 study which found that a majority of students reported starting their search with internet search engines but preferred library sources for their credibility and trustworthiness.[22] there may be other influences at work. the project information literacy (pil) found that professors and instructors likely have a great deal of influence over student information behaviors as well. alison head and michael eisenberg reported in 2009 on a pil study which found that 74% of their undergraduate student respondents reported using scholarly research databases because they “have the kind of information my instructor expects to see.” [23] in the ‘history capstone’ study, syllabi provided by participating faculty frequently set a minimum number of sources and page counts for papers. some defined the types of primary and secondary sources acceptable for their papers and in other cases, clearly prohibited using unapproved ‘internet’ sources. these factors may have driven students’ decisions to prefer library-provided resources over search-engines and non-library web-sites. these findings are also consistent with those reported by william wong and his colleagues in 2009 who found the most common reason among business and economics students for using ‘internal’ resources such as library acquired books and databases was the “quality and credibility of material and broad subject coverage.”[24] further, these authors found that more experienced, expert users were more likely to use internal resources than inexperienced users. these phenomena could also be at work in this uli study as 84% of the respondents were seniors and 78% were history majors. these are cohorts who ostensibly should be more experienced with resources for the discipline than younger students or non-history majors.   services the book-centered nature of these projects likely accounts for the fact that 61% of respondents used interlibrary loan (ill) during their projects and 41% reported ill was their most important library service. about one-half of the respondents (52 %) reported using in-person services such as asking reference questions or requesting research consultations. forty-seven percent said library instruction helped them during their projects. yet only 14 (11%) reported using email or chat reference services. over 30% reported that library instruction (16.5%), reference (11%) or research consultations (5.5%) were their most important library services. ninety-three percent of students who claimed library instruction as their most-important service reported that it helped them ‘learn about information sources for my project’. again, it is worth reflecting on these figures. over one half of the respondents said they talked to a librarian in a reference transaction or a research consultation during these projects!  what are other researchers reporting?  oclc found that 33% of students in a 2006 study reported using reference services monthly.[25]  alison head and michael eisenberg in 2009 noted 20% of students reported they asked librarians for help when completing course-related research assignments.[26] i won’t argue that these findings indicate reference trends are reversing or that my results are widely generalizable, but it is possible that students value in-person services more heavily during high-impact experiences like capstones. the influence of faculty and librarians cannot be overlooked here. a majority (93%) of syllabi examined during this project indicated a library instruction session was built into the curriculum for these courses. this likely encouraged use of in-person services among these respondents. yet, correlation is not causation … future research is needed. use of library space and equipment ninety-four percent of respondents reported using library facilities and equipment. seventy percent used library space for studying or research, 68% used library printers, and 66% used library computers. among these respondents: 51% reported valuing quiet study space; but 11% had problems with noise. 80% reported library computers provided access to productivity software and 53% reported library computers allowed them to access needed information. 13% used space for collaborating with peers, yet half of these students had a hard time finding space to accomplish this task. use by learning activity students completing the uli survey identified the learning activities during which they used their most important library resources, services, or facilities. as seen in figure 3, at least 80% of respondents reported using their most important library resources, services, or facilities during 5 of 8 learning activities: getting oriented, developing a thesis, gathering evidence, finding secondary sources, and writing. we can now drill down into these results. figure 4 presents the proportion of students using their ‘most important’ resources, services, and facilities during each activity. students could select more than one activity per use. because we are focusing on the ‘most important uses’ this chart only displays data about 462 of the 1,806 distinct uses (25.6%) named by students. for those of us who have worked with students on the reference desk, the variations in use by learning activity are not necessarily surprising.   “please think back to a challenging time during the project …” open-ended questions in the cit survey encourage respondents to elaborate on their experiences. one set of questions explores a ‘significant challenge’ faced by the student during their project. ninety-six students provided usable responses to this series of questions.[27] fifty-six percent of these challenges were related to information seeking such as selecting tools, finding primary and secondary sources, and interpreting information, such as: “it can be difficult to identify the best database to consult.” “i was having a difficult time locating primary sources.” while this was a ‘library’ assessment project, students identified non-library challenges as well. forty-one percent of respondents reported challenges related to academic work tasks like choosing a topic, developing a thesis, and building an argument: “i had trouble narrowing my topic to a feasible argument.” “my biggest problem was corroborating my own ideas with an established scholar’s” figure 5 illustrates the number of respondents reporting challenges by task type and the learning activities in which the challenge was faced. one third to one half of the respondents who answered these questions faced their challenges in the earliest stages of the project with a peak during the ‘gathering stage.’  forty-eight students (50%) then reported facing a challenge during the act of writing.   sixty-six students reported how they overcame their challenges. as shown in figure 6, forty-four (66%) overcame their challenges through effort, such as “i dove into primary material” or “brute force–tried new search terms until i got what i wanted.” seventeen (26%) used a specific library resource or service such as interlibrary loan, or jstor. twelve out of 66 (18%) respondents asked for help from a librarian (6 respondents) or their professor (6 respondents) when overcoming their challenge. bringing it all together … linking library use to student learning the learning activities crosswalk links library use with learning expectations associated with student projects. this is illustrated using the learning activities used in the uli survey and student learning outcomes defined in the utah state university history department’s capstone rubric provided in table 1. for instance, a student who is ‘choosing a topic’ or ‘developing a thesis’ is performing activities related to ‘framing a historical question’ (outcome 2). a student ‘gathering primary sources as evidence’ would be demonstrating the ability of ‘evaluating and analyzing primary resources’ (outcome 3). these connections can be illustrated for groups of students using results from the study. 46% of respondents at site f used their most important traditional resources (principally books) when choosing a topic; 88% of respondents at site a and 64% of respondents at site c used their most important traditional resource when developing a thesis. these are times when students develop and demonstrate the abilities of framing a historical question (rubric outcome 2) and evaluating and analyzing primary and secondary sources (outcomes 3 and 4)   73% of respondents at site d, 75% of respondents at site e, and 92% of respondents at site b used their ‘most important’ electronic resources (mostly the library catalog, e-journals, digital primary sources, and indexes and databases) when gathering evidence to support a thesis. this is a time when students develop and demonstrate the abilities of evaluating and interpreting primary sources (outcome 4) and employing primary sources appropriate to the informing thesis (outcome 5).   54% of respondents at site e, 64% of students at site d, and 67% of students at site f used their ‘most important’ facility or equipment (including study space and library computers) during the activity of writing. this is a time when students develop and demonstrate the abilities of organizing an argument (outcome 7), citing evidence (outcome 8), and using proper writing mechanics (outcome 9). results for individual students the uli ‘history capstone’ results for individual students illustrate how the crosswalk works and how the qualitative and quantitative data complement one another. for instance, student c-12 is aged 23-30, a history major, and a 5th year senior attending college full-time at site c, a master’s level public university. she works 2 jobs and holds an internship. she used 24 types of library resources, services, and facilities when working on her project including reference services and a research consultation. at the beginning of the cit survey, student c-12 reflected on the learning objectives associated with her project. her observations mirror the rubric outcomes of ‘employing a range of primary sources appropriate to the paper’ (outcome 5): “… when it came to the paper she [my professor] wanted us to work with many sources learning how to decide which ones are the best to put towards our paper. she also wanted us to learn how to become better writers.” student c-12 reported that electronic journals, books, a research consultation, and computers in the library were the most important resources, services, and facilities to her during the project. table 2 demonstrates the learning activities that these uses supported. student c-12 reported a challenge narrowing her topic, an issue which is related to the utah learning outcome ‘framing a historical question’ (outcome 2). she also had concerns about finding enough resources, a task related to the utah rubric outcome ‘employing a range of primary and secondary sources’ (outcomes 5 and 6): “narrowing down my topic as much as the teacher wanted. i was concerned that i was not going to be able to find enough information and write such a big paper on a narrow topic.” this challenge occurred during the getting oriented, choosing a topic, and gathering evidence stages of the project. she overcame this challenge by scheduling a research consultation with a librarian during the gathering evidence and finding secondary sources learning activities: “[i] did a [research consultation] session and worked with a librarian to find many more sources through different databases and journals.” she was anxious before and during the project, but reported improved confidence after completing the project. respondents like her, who used research consultations and reference services, were more likely to report increases in confidence than those who did not.[28] later she wrote that she achieved the learning objectives associated with the paper: “i think i did. if i could do this project again i would try to not wait till so far at the end to put the paper together.” a framework for examining library impact these selected results demonstrate how the uli protocol provides a framework for exploring library impact on student learning. focusing on the learning activities associated with high impact activities like the capstone generates a natural pathway for linking library use to expectations for learning. in the value of academic libraries report,[29] megan oakleaf called for new work connecting library use to student achievement results. the uli protocol is well-positioned to meet this challenge. asking ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions with the critical incident technique, generates rich information about the ways students use the library to meet their learning goals as well as illuminating the problems they have. library managers can use these data to support internal improvements or resource allocation decisions. finally, aligning library assessment with faculty-led initiatives like tuning will make it easier for libraries to join campus conversations regarding student learning. threats or opportunities? these are challenging times in higher education. expectations are running high and demands to control costs continue to mount. libraries and other campus units can take a ‘wait and see’ stance in case the ‘accountability clouds’ blow over. i think this is a risky move. i hope libraries will be proactive by examining library impact and sharing their findings. doing so will bring libraries into important campus conversations about student learning and advance our collective knowledge in this area. next steps for the uli protocol planning is underway for the next round of uli studies. in each project, the uli instruments will be adapted for specific academic majors, to reflect each library’s specific service offerings, and to accommodate ‘custom local’ questions. the next round of uli projects will build on current work in two ways. first, the uli protocol will be tested in new disciplines such as the social and life sciences in addition to more studies in the field of history or other humanities disciplines. second, the uli model will be adapted to include existing data sources such as results of student assessments in the form of rubric scores, course grades, or other measures. participating in a uli project is one way to help move the library impact agenda forward. to get involved or learn more, please contact me at the understanding library impacts project website. acknowledgements i want to thank ellie collier, hilary davis, nathaniel king, and jennifer rutner for reviewing drafts of this article and for their valuable insights and suggestions. thanks again to hilary for her assistance in preparing the final version. i also want to acknowledge the anonymous contributions of faculty, librarians, and students who facilitated and participated in the project. [1] radford, a.w., berkner, l., wheeless, s.c., and shepherd, b. persistence and attainment of 2003–04 beginning postsecondary students: after 6 years (nces 2011-151), 2010. u.s. department of education. washington, dc: national center for education statistics, table 3. [2] oecd. education at a glance 2011: oecd indicators, 2011, chart a1.1, p. 30. [3] lumina foundation. “our goal,” 2011. [4] the costs of attending college in the u.s. increased 4.9% annually from 2000 to 2009. college board. trends in college pricing, 2009. [5] oakleaf, megan. the value of academic libraries: a comprehensive research review and report for the association of college and research libraries (acrl). chicago: ala., 2010. executive summary, p. 5 [6] american library association. association of college and research libraries. standards for libraries in higher education, 2011. american library association, acrl, college libraries section. [7] poll, roswitha & payne, philip. impact measures for libraries and information services. library hi tech, 24(4) (2006):547-562., p. 549. [8] kuh, george d. high-impact educational practices: what are they, who has access to them, and why they matter. washington, dc: american association of colleges and universities, 2008. [9] mcinerney, daniel j. “rubrics for history courses: lessons from one campus.” perspectives on history 48(7) (2001):31-33, p. 33 [10] used with permission of dr. daniel mcinerney, department of history, utah state university. [11] butterfield, l.d., borgen, w.a., amundson, n.e., & maglio, a.t. fifty years of the critical incident technique: 1954-2004 and beyond. qualitative research, 2005, 5(4) 475-497. [12] see for example radford, marie l. the critical incident technique and the qualitative evaluation of the connecting libraries and schools project. library trends, 55(1) (2006):46-64; marshall, joanne g. the impact of the hospital library on clinical decision making: the rochester study. bulletin of the medical library association 80(2) (1992):169–78; tenopir, carol & king, don w. perceptions of value and value beyond perceptions: measuring the quality and value of journal article readings. serials 20(3) (2007):199-207. [13] the american association of colleges and universities recently produced what it called the essential learning outcomes as part of its leap (liberal education for america’s promise) project (2007).  aa c & u identified a range of broad abilities and knowledge that undergraduate students majoring in all disciplines should master. the value project (valid assessment of learning in undergraduate education) the american association of colleges and universities sponsored work that identified 15 value rubrics to guide local assessment efforts.  see association of american colleges and universities (2007). college learning for the new century a report from the national leadership council for liberal education and america’s promise, washington, dc: aac&u. http://www.aacu.org/leap/documents/globalcentury_final.pdf and rhodes, terell l. “value: valid assessment of learning in undergraduate education.” new directions in institutional research. assessment supplement 2007, (2008): 59-70 for more information. [14] lumina foundation. tuning usa, 2009. [15] indiana commission for higher education. tuning usa final report: the 2009 indiana pilot, 2010. and tuning usa final report – utah, november 18, 2009. the lumina foundation has funded ‘tuning’ projects in other disciplines as well. for instance, the project conducted in indiana focused identified outcomes in history, chemistry, and education. the utah project generated tuning outcomes in history and physics. a project conducted in minnesota tuned biology and graphic arts. the lumina foundation has funded two new tuning projects in the last six months. the midwest higher education consortium is tuning psychology and marketing in illinois, indiana, and missouri and the american historical association is beginning a nationwide tuning project in the field of history. [16] the qualtrics online survey application was used to gather responses for this study, http://www.qualtrics.com. [17] rodriguez, derek a. investigating academic library contributions to undergraduate learning: a field trial of the ‘understanding library impacts’ protocol. 2007; rodriguez, derek a. “how digital library services contribute to undergraduate learning: an evaluation of the ‘understanding library impacts’ protocol”. in strauch, katina, steinle, kim, bernhardt, beth r. and daniels, tim, eds. proceedings 26th annual charleston conference, charleston (us), 2006. [18] learning activities used in the history capstone project in 2011 included: getting oriented, choosing a topic, developing a thesis, gathering primary sources as evidence to support my thesis, finding secondary sources, creating a bibliography, writing, and preparing an oral presentation (sites c, d, e, and f).  the crosswalk was conducted using content analysis of syllabi, program-level documentation of expectations for student learning outcomes, and products of the indiana and utah tuning projects.  multiple coders assisted with content analysis tasks.  inter-coder agreement was assessed through the use of krippendorff’s alpha reliability coefficient.  see hayes, andrew. f., & krippendorff, klaus.  answering the call for a standard reliability measure for coding data. communication methods and measures, 1 (2007):77-89. [19] kuhlthau, carol c. seeking meaning: a process approach to library and information services. westport, ct: libraries unlimited, 2004, p. 82. kuhlthau’s model includes six stages: initiation, selection, exploration, formulation, collection, and presentation. [20] institutional control, type, basic carnegie classification, and size of the student body for each site are provided for each site. site a:  private liberal arts university, master’s s, (5,000+ students); site b: private liberal arts college, baccalaureate college(arts & sciences), (<2,500 students); site c:  public university, master’s l, (15,000+ students); site d: public research university with high research activity (ru/h), (25,000+ students); site e:  public research university with very high research activity (ru/vh), (30,000+ students); site f:  private liberal arts college, baccalaureate college (arts & sciences), (3,000+ students). three of the institutions are in the southeastern u.s., two are in the midwest, and one is in the northeastern u.s. [21] rodriguez, derek a. “the ‘understanding library impacts’ protocol: demonstrating academic library contributions to student learning outcomes in the age of accountability: a paper presented at the 9th northumbria international conference on performance measurement in libraries and information services, york, england, august 23, 2011. proceedings preprint [22] oclc. college students’ perceptions of libraries and information resources: a report to the oclc membership. dublin, ohio, 2006. [23] head, alison j. & eisenberg, michael b. “lessons learned: how college students seek information in the digital age.” project information literacy first year report with student survey findings, university of washington’s information school, 2010, p. 27. [24] wong, william, stelmaszewska, hanna, bhimani, nazlin, barn, sukhbinder. user behaviour in resource discovery: final report. 2009, p. 79. [25] oclc. 2006, 22. [26] head & eisenberg, 2009, 23 [27] multiple coders categorized qualitative responses and inter-coder agreement was assessed using krippendorff’s alpha reliability coefficient. [28] students were asked questions about their anxiety and confidence before and after the project using a 5-point likert scale.  students who used research consultations (χ2=19.5847, df=6 p=0.0033) and reference services (χ2=14.695, df=6 p=0.0228) were more likely to report increases in confidence in their research skills than those who did not use these services. [29] oakleaf, 95. capstone, college students, critical incident technique, high impact practices, library assessment, library impact, student learning outcomes, tuning, undergraduate history, value out of the library and into the wild in the library with the lead pipe reader poll 5 responses pingback : new answering questions about library impact on student learning – stephen's lighthouse pingback : around the web: decline of the library empire, libraries' impact on student learning and more : confessions of a science librarian pingback : common core | pearltrees pingback : academic news roundup: assessment, active learning, and online ed | ink and vellum pingback : regarding “library impact on student learning” « studiumlibrarios this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct perspective and doing good work – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 11 jan brett bonfield /6 comments perspective and doing good work “paul farmer speaks at ideo” photo by flickr user global x (cc by 2.0) this post is adapted from a speech i gave at drexel university’s beta phi mu initiation on december 6, 2011. the text of the original is available on scribd, and a video of my speech, which includes a brief introduction by helen snowden is available on vimeo. by brett bonfield greek picnic is a reunion and gathering of the alumni and current members of the nine historically african-american fraternities and sororities. it was first celebrated in philadelphia in 1974, where it has been celebrated every year since. for most of its history it was a well attended event, but in the mid-1990s it got to be really big. i’ve read estimates that 100,000 people would register and another 100,000–200,000 would attend some events around the city during greek week each july. the city of philadelphia didn’t seem to know what to do with this sudden influx of college students and alumni. it seemed like they just wanted to drink and party all night, and most philadelphians seemed to see the situation as a public safety issue that should be handed over to the police. businesses would close for the week and gate their doors and windows, so each night bored students and alumni would cruise up and down broad street and south street. sometimes things got out of hand. what do you do with a bunch of people who just want to drink and party all night? which leads to my first point: perspective. so you have this annual crush of african-american fraternity and sorority members and alumni who want to drink and party all night. you know who else likes to drink and party all night? mummers. if you’re unfamiliar with the mummers parade, think of it as philadelphia’s version of the new orleans mardi gras parade, only it’s held on new year’s day. philadelphia hasn’t always handled its relationship with the mummers as well as it should, but on the whole we do pretty well. i think most philadelphians agree that new year’s day wouldn’t be the same without boisterous people in feathers strutting down broad street playing banjos. you know another group that just likes to drink and party all night? delegates at political conventions. around the same time the city had no idea what to do with all these college students and alumni who visited us each july, we were getting ready to host the 2000 republican national convention, the one where george w. bush was nominated for the first time. we were building hotels and fixing up the convention center. just across the delaware river, new jersey was rebuilding admiral wilson boulevard in camden. the republican national convention lasted four days, from july 31 until august 3, and then everyone went home. which is what you would expect. you don’t get to be a delegate without putting down roots. it’s not like the delegates were going to spend three or four nights in philadelphia, fall in love with the city, and decide to relocate. you know who does that? college students. when i was a first-year undergraduate at rutgers, one of my friends from summer camp came up to visit me for a few days. i introduced him to my friends, we went to my classes together, and he transferred to rutgers from virginia tech and became my college roommate. i realize that’s just one data point. here’s another. one winter break, i went out to visit a friend in albuquerque. he showed me around and i fell in love with the place and resolved to move there as soon as i could. within a couple of years i had graduated from rutgers, packed everything i owned in my new saturn, and i had an apartment in albuquerque and a job at page one bookstore. that’s the kind of thing college students will do. and that’s exactly what philadelphia needed in the mid-1990’s. its population had been declining for decades. there were thousands of abandoned houses all over the city that would eventually get bulldozed. students at drexel and penn and temple and all of its other schools would leave the moment they graduated. the city of philadelphia should have realized those hundreds of thousands of college students and alumni coming to greek picnic every july could help to revitalize things. government officials should have been working with employers and real estate agents and mortgage brokers and sports teams and musicians and dance clubs and theaters and restaurants and everyone else who could have made them feel like vips. instead, philadelphia treated them like criminals. and greek picnic got smaller again. it could have been racism that clouded philadelphia’s perspective. but that doesn’t explain love park. love park, which is about a block from city hall, has been internationally recognized for almost two decades as one of the world’s truly legendary skate parks. it was the main reason philadelphia was chosen as the site for the 2001 and 2002 x games. so what did philadelphia do? it started enforcing a ban on skateboarding in love park. a group called friends of love park proposed a popular solution that would have kept certain paths clear for pedestrians and only allowed skating after 3:00 p.m. on weekdays. a company out of california called dc shoes offered the city a $1 million donation if it backed the plan. the city turned it down. again, we have this dying city with a steadily declining economy and population. as with the sudden popularity of greek picnic in the mid-90’s, through no planning of its own, philadelphia got a fantastic opportunity to become younger and hipper and economically stronger. and we blew it. i don’t mean to pick on philadelphia. we also have examples of stepping back, getting a better perspective, and making great decisions. the free library’s turned its “homeless problem” into one of its greatest successes by partnering with project h.o.m.e. now the library’s bathrooms and its cafe are among the nicest in the city and, just as significantly, formerly homeless workers have good jobs and new skills. another reason not to pick on the city of philadelphia is that all of us occasionally need help with our perspective. drexel, for instance, specifically its library school. can you name the most famous and historically significant graduate of the drexel library program? barbara rose johns powell. it’s a little bit of a trick question, because she’s not famous for what she did after she graduated. she’s famous for what she did before. that’s a point i always try to make to library students and new librarians, and to anyone thinking about going to library school. what you do before you get your library degree matters, which is one of the reasons ala only accredits masters-level programs. you’re expected to have worked a bit before becoming a librarian, at the very least as an undergraduate, and ideally a bit after as well. for instance, i was a fundraiser and web developer before i went to library school. those skills helped me get my current job and i still use them all the time. so here’s what barbara rose johns powell did before she went to library school. she helped end segregation in this country. seriously. barbara rose johns attended a segregated high school in farmville, virginia. on april 23, 1951, she led her classmates in a strike to protest the school’s inadequate conditions. she had turned 17 only one month earlier and was a junior in high school, which didn’t stop her from convincing her classmates’ parents to support the strike. she also went to the naacp and persuaded them to provide legal assistance. three years later, in 1954, farmville’s was one of the five cases the supreme court considered in brown v. board of education when it ruled that segregation was unconstitutional. after marrying reverend william powell, and after drexel, barbara rose johns powell worked as a school librarian in the philadelphia public school system (she was admitted to drexel on september 27, 1976, and was awarded her master of science on june 2, 1979). for her, working as a school librarian wasn’t all that different from what she’d done as a high school student. for her it was all about education. she was born on march 6, 1934, and died on september 25, 1991, just 57 years old. how cool would it have been to have her as your school librarian? mrs. powell, can you help me with my paper on racism? can you help me get over my fear of public speaking? i also like to imagine her getting called in for one of those interrogations last spring led by attorneys from the los angeles unified school district. as the los angeles times reported, “a court reporter takes down testimony. a judge grants or denies objections from attorneys. armed police officers hover nearby. on the witness stand, one librarian at a time is summoned to explain why she—the vast majority are women—should be allowed to keep her job.” can you imagine barbara rose johns powell on the witness stand? mrs. powell, can you tell us what you contribute to student education? what have you done to improve educational outcomes? i think those los angeles lawyers would have had a pretty difficult time pushing mrs. powell aside. unfortunately, that’s sort of what drexel has done. those of us who want to change librarianship for the better, and see librarianship as our best chance to change the world for the better, have a role model in barbara rose johns powell. i’d like to see drexel start celebrating its connection to her sensibility and her legacy. i’d like to see the american library association and the american association of school librarians do the same. so that’s perspective in the abstract. let’s bring it home. what does all this talk about perspective have to do with you? we’re in a rough economy. it’s a tight job market. libraries are in transition. google and amazon and ebooks, oh my. the sky is falling. that’s one way to look at it. as you might imagine, at least for you, i don’t see any of these situations as bad things. public libraries are counter-cyclical. higher education is counter-cyclical. in a down economy, people use public libraries more. they go back to school. transitions are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to make a real and lasting difference. for instance, i don’t think it’s a coincidence that ala’s freedom to read statement was originally issued in 1953, during the time the case initiated by barbara rose johns was working its way through the federal courts. change was in the air, just like it is now. which leads me to my second point: no one can stop you from doing good work. getting a good job and doing good work are not the same thing. they’re correlated. but it’s not clear to me which is the cause and which is the effect. here’s how i describe my decision to become a librarian. if i could help end deaths associated with hiv, if i thought i had the ability to further the research or reduce the harm caused by the virus, that’s what i would be doing. but i’m squeamish, vegan, and not the least bit handy. so i do what i can to help people, and i try very hard to take my work just as seriously as someone whose work contributes more directly to public health. this is what i have to contribute. paul farmer didn’t have to become a librarian because he’s amazingly good at keeping healthy people healthy and helping sick people become as healthy as possible. as with barbara rose johns powell, i’m not comparing myself to paul farmer. but both of them are role models for me, and i hope they’ll be role models for you as well. when paul farmer was in medical school at harvard, he started working in haiti, then the poorest country in the world. his efforts were small at first, given that he was just one person doing what he could, plus he had to divide his time between haiti and boston, generally six months a year in each. when he was in boston he would borrow medicine and resources, and recruit people to help him, and slowly he built the nonprofit he founded, partners in health, into one of the world’s most significant international health and social justice organizations. if you gave to haiti after the 2010 earthquake, there’s a good chance you donated to partners in health. it’s also a great place to donate if you’d like to help people in lesotho, malawi, peru, russia, rwanda, the united states, the dominican republic, kazakhstan, mexico, guatemala, or burundi. i strongly encourage you to read a book that tracy kidder wrote about paul farmer called mountains beyond mountains. it tells farmer’s story really well, and it also makes you want to to good work. and it helps you realize there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. so what do i mean by good work? here are my three ideals for good work: you feel so passionate about it that it doesn’t feel like work. it does so much good for other people that you can’t help but feel good about yourself for having done it. it gives you a chance to work with people you admire. i’ve been really fortunate to work on a lot of different projects and with a lot of different groups that meet those criteria. i worked on an open source project when i was a library student at drexel. i helped found in the library with the lead pipe, and i wrote for library journal and acrlog. in the last two years i’ve worked on a couple of ala presidential task forces, and even chaired one. i’ve served on a few boards for library organizations. i’m in a calendar called men of the stacks that’s raising money for the it gets better project to help end bullying. and, of course, i’ve gotten to help a lot of people at the libraries where i’ve worked. some of those things have depended on other people either hiring or electing or choosing me, but a lot of them didn’t.  and i feel like i see new projects all the time that i’d work on if i had the time or that i wish i’d thought of or that i’m glad someone else is doing. the library as incubator project, a new project that highlights the way artists and libraries can work together. it was started by three students at the university of wisconsin-madison program. the hack library school movement is fantastic, and has accomplished an amazing amount in just over a year. ala think tank, an open group on facebook, has a lot of energy and ideas, and its members #makeithappen. library boing boing is coming, and it’s coming soon. be part of it. and don’t forget about the library & information science stack exchange. it could be huge. i would love to take part in anything related to the digital public library of america. one option would be to get involved as an editor at library news, a new community like reddit or hacker news that’s devoted to libraries. i’m also really excited about gluejar, a company that’s working with authors to get them to release electronic versions of their books with creative commons licenses. founder eric hellman has already hired recent library graduate and budding library superstar, andromeda yelton, and he appears to have some sort of working relationship with library of congress librarian/programmer ed summers as well. code4lib, an anarcho-democratic community of programmers who work with libraries, is the most interesting thing happening in the library world, and i definitely recommend that you become a part of it in a way that suits you. the open shelves classification project is still looking for someone to lead its attempt to compete with dewey, lc, and bisac.  they got a lot accomplished a couple of years ago, but they’ve been dormant for a little while. if you want to prove yourself as a cataloger, that’s a great way to get started. among the newer open source library projects to watch are the extensible catalog at the university of rochester and the kuali ole project that has a bunch of sponsors and partners. and there are another dozen or so library related open source projects that are worth learning and helping to develop or document. what’s most exciting is that i’m just scratching the surface. there are so many things that are right about libraries today, but there are innumerable things that could be improved. and there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. whether you have a job lined up already or you have no idea where your next job is going to be, i hope you’ll devote yourself to finding problems you’re passionate about solving, people you’re passionate about helping, and a community of like-minded peers. you just have to look at things from a useful perspective and commit to spending your time doing work that doesn’t feel like work. it took me a long time to find work that met all of those criteria. i tried a lot of things before i went to library school. as much as i’ve been trying to do it for the previous 3,000 words, i’m not sure i’m capable of expressing how grateful i am to have found librarianship, or how grateful i am to have colleagues and peers like you as readers and, more importantly, as collaborators. the librarians i’ve met in the last few years are the smartest, kindest, most helpful people i’ve ever worked with, and i can’t thank them enough for all the opportunities they’ve given me, for how much they’ve helped me to gain a sensible perspective on how best to approach problems, and how to go about doing good work. i wish the same for you for the remainder of your career and for the rest of your life. thanks to sarah houghton, phyllis bonfield, and jeffrey bonfield, and to my lead pipe colleagues, ellie collier, erin dorney, hilary davis, and emily ford for their help. thanks also to terri breitenstine at the office of the university registrar at drexel university for confirming barbara rose johns powell’s enrollment and graduation information. barbara rose johns powell, beta phi mu, drexel, inspiration, keynote, paul farmerr, philadelphia editorial: favorite gift books consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries 6 responses ellie 2012–01–25 at 11:44 am inspiring brett! thank you. pingback : best of fall semester 2011 « hack library school pingback : beta phi mu « biblioethnofolio pingback : the skills you don’t learn in school « hack library school pingback : career advice: 2012 mover & shaker brett bonfield pingback : emily ford …in six | inalj (i need a library job) this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct reconsidering facebook – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 26 jan hilary davis /14 comments reconsidering facebook photo by flickr user laikolasse (cc by-nc 2.0) by hilary davis last year there was a revolt against facebook. lots of people were weighing the pros and cons of becoming a facebook dropout, including librarians. for many of these detractors and potential detractors of facebook, the disjunct structure of personal and professional identity was no longer holding up under the pressure of facebook’s urgings to reveal all and merge personal and professional spheres into one. those who have attempted to draw this line by creating multiple facebook accounts are all too familiar with facebook’s stance against more than one individual account (and others have written about the tension of treating your facebook account as a personal, professional, or hybrid space, e.g., rogers, 2010). identity issues aside, many users didn’t have time to devote to figuring out how to manage the dynamic and fickle privacy settings of their facebook identities to get things back under control. some were simply frustrated that facebook offered no consistent and clear assurances on how their information and online habits would be used. a lot of people left facebook, including myself. until recently, i didn’t think i was missing out by not being on facebook. backing up a bit most librarians first joined facebook when it was limited to universities and colleges. for many academic librarians, it was the latest cool thing to experiment with to enhance engagement with students. many librarians on facebook published profile updates and expressed their interests as they related to their jobs and educational backgrounds. their aim was to “be where the students were” and to explore the new world of social networking via facebook. the choice of whether to seek out students and invite them to be facebook friends worked for some and didn’t work for others (e.g., see the review and survey results published by connell, 2009). on most accounts, facebook has been considered a low cost, minimal effort venue for engaging with current and potential library users. in fact, many blog posts, white papers, and conference proceedings (but surprisingly few articles, e.g., jennings and tvaruzka, 2010) have been published about how librarians and libraries may leverage facebook for outreach and engagement. much has changed in just a few years as facebook opened beyond academia. since september 2006, when facebook was opened up to allow anyone to join, the number of active users has grown by over 4000%. millions of business websites are connected via facebook (e.g., the current most popular business on facebook is coca-cola with over 22 million fans). these days, facebook users can get personalized content delivered to them on websites affiliated with facebook (aka “instant personalization”). facebook is packing on more and more corporate investors and making itself more attractive and lucrative for businesses. by leveraging strategies that push “instant personalization” across the web, facebook is encouraging the community on facebook to change their expectations of what should (and shouldn’t) happen on facebook. while most librarians are still feeling the sting of students’ early reactions that “friending” a librarian on facebook was “creepy,” there appears to be a shift in this perspective. roblyer, et al. (2010) report that students’ perceptions about interacting with faculty and librarians are morphing to suggest that they do expect these interactions to be just as likely in facebook as they are in more traditional communication venues. while there are valid reasons for maintaining a wary stance regarding a personal/individual facebook account, there are also compelling reasons to use facebook to fulfill your obligations as a librarian. it should be noted that many libraries are creating or updating their presence on facebook, and that the concerns around a business or organization presence may not be as alarming as they are for individual facebook accounts. benefits of being a facebook dropout for many, the decision to drop out of facebook suggested that they might gain some control over their online identities and reinstitute the distinction between their personal and professional spheres. just a few months before “quit facebook day” (may 31, 2010), dan yoder posted his top ten reasons to quit facebook. there are several reasons posted by yoder that resonated most with many users’ decisions to deactivate (or even delete) their accounts: “even your private data is shared with applications.” in april/may 2010, facebook introduced the open graph protocol in an effort to support the aim of providing more opportunities for instant personalization experiences for facebook users. the open graph api enables an owner of a website to paste in a bit of code into their site that will help the site align better with your personal preferences and habits that you have made publicly available via facebook. for example: if my facebook account included information or patterns of use indicating that i like thai food, then when i visit a website that has the open graph api, it may deliver content targeted toward my preference for thai food. companies such as pandora, yelp, abc news, and simply hired are taking advantage of this new way to engage users. some users view the instant personalization experience as a time saver and a convenience, while others find it to be too close for comfort. “facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch” and “facebook has flat out declared war on privacy.” taken together, these two complaints reiterate that any personal or professional information that one presents on the web can and probably will be mined and regurgitated in some way for profit. the trouble with facebook is that users expect to have more control over their information and online habits – because you must log in to participate in the social network, you expect the information to be somehow under your control. “facebook’s terms of service are completely one-sided.” the crux of this complaint is that facebook owns the data that you release to it, share within it and that others share about you within the service. this may be one of the most compelling arguments for not having a facebook account. even so, most librarians do realize that information about them and their consumption patterns of information, merchandise and services is valuable to a lot of online organizations (e.g., amazon). the issue that has irritated a lot of privacy-conscious librarians is that facebook seems to be a little less clear about customer privacy. revealing information about your self in facebook or in facebook applications that function outside facebook could be a potential threat to your sense of privacy due to the shifting tension between facebook’s ever-changing privacy controls and their aim to enhance sharing and engagement of users and their information. drawbacks of being a facebook dropout in light of the evolution of facebook at the most fundamental level, the duty of librarians is to remove the barriers to information for the members of the community to which we belong. we are also responsible for staying aware of the trends and issues impacting these various user communities – what they are studying, where they are seeking information, how they are sharing information, and what barriers they encounter as they go about their scholarship. alongside the casual, social interactions, facebook is one of those places where this collection of scholarly activity is happening. as more and more information providers/publishers, libraries and librarians have been getting in on the action with users on facebook, librarians who are absent from facebook may actually be missing a lot more than they think. to support this perspective, in response to dan yoder’s reasons to leave facebook, david lee king posted “10 reasons to not quit facebook.” several of his points resonated with me and my decision to return to facebook. “your customers are using facebook” and “your community is on facebook.” mathews (2006) described the initial results of his outreach campaign via facebook to engineering students at georgia tech. he was able to answer patron questions including which software was available on library computers, how to renew items online, recent building changes, and information about library study spaces. a little closer to home, my colleague, orion pozo, uses his facebook account, the ncsu libraries englibrary twitter account and the physical and engineering sciences news blog to simultaneously broadcast and re-broadcast information about ncsu engineering and the ncsu libraries. like mathews, through his “friend” connections with ncsu engineering graduate students and faculty, pozo has been able to answer questions about how to use subscriptions that the libraries maintains for the ncsu community. in one instance, he showed a grad student how to search springerlink’s website for ebooks that the ncsu libraries had acquired (helping to mitigate delays in getting the marc records into our catalog). in another case, he helped a grad student access the ncsu libraries online subscriptions from off-campus. while these transactions solve relatively simple problems, the ability to provide good customer service via facebook has helped to underpin the support that the ncsu libraries aims to provide to our community. reaching out to users (where-ever they may be) who may otherwise go away frustrated sends a strong message to our users and to our stakeholders that the ncsu libraries is clued into their needs and expectations. “did i mention free marketing?” with facebook’s population hitting around 500 million active users, half of which log in to facebook every day, with each user being connected to an average of 130 other users, this venue becomes a very compelling place for a business or organization to be. facebook is working hard to make it an even more profitable and worthwhile place for businesses and organizations to be as well. with their social plugins and business integration features (e.g., open graph api, mentioned previously) companies are able to generate more comments, discussion and interest than occurs on their own websites. “publishers may be concerned about losing advertising revenues if people are spending time on a facebook fan page rather than generating page views on the brand’s website. but many publishers have shown that a strong presence on facebook, twitter or linkedin can actually drive more traffic while increasing engagement. —behling, 2010. facebook members can click on a “like” button for any facebook page or any website that has a “like” button installed (via the open graph api) and automatically be connected to information about that page. for example, i could indicate that i “like” the d.h. hill library on the north carolina state university campus, joining the other 800 people on facebook who have also publicly declared their “like” of the d.h. hill library. i will be connected to updates about the d.h. hill library and other people will know how i feel as well. now, if the ncsu libraries website (including the d.h. hill library) took advantage of facebook’s like button and other social plugins, then the ncsu libraries website would be able to connect with me leveraging some of my personal preferences (via facebook) and perhaps even offer me a more personalized experience when i visit that website (or push alerts to my facebook account) letting me know about new services, events or collections that might be relevant to my interests. “start conversations.” most issues affecting librarians and libraries, such as changes in databases, journal subscription rates, and publisher mergers are commonly aired out on discussion lists in conjunction with meetings at national or regional conferences. the tide may be turning to include facebook for those kinds of discussions and debates. one example: a few weeks ago, librarians began hearing about the possibility that the publisher mcgraw-hill may pull popular engineering reference works from the online full-text database knovel. it is these popular engineering reference works that provide much of the value to the knovel database. mcgraw-hill wants to make their reference works available online exclusively through their own platform – yet another product for which libraries must find funding in yet another year of budget cuts. while the details aren’t critical to this discussion, what is interesting is that librarians are discussing this issue and are voicing their concerns to mcgraw-hill via facebook (see posts from “just others” from december 2010)! facebook’s role in facilitating this kind of interaction between librarians and publisher/providers may be in the early stages, but this example suggests that facebook does indeed play a significant part in the relationship between libraries and resource acquisition. taking some hints from businesses on facebook below is a sample of publishers and providers of journals and databases to which many libraries subscribe. the data show popularity of these publishers/providers on facebook as of january 25, 2011. the number of facebook users who have declared their “like” for these publishers/providers is indicative of the engagement power of facebook. perhaps this new kind of engagement is due to the shift in facebook’s community demographics and/or that facebook users have started thinking differently about their interactions within facebook. when users align themselves with non-academic entities on facebook, this suggests that their perspectives about who they wish to engage with is shifting from solely student-to-student interaction to user-resource provider interaction – and that interaction is not necessarily the library or librarian! popularity of common library database providers on facebook as of january 25, 2011 publisher/provider facebook popularity institute of electrical and electronics engineers (ieee) 122,822 likes jstor 76,924 likes knovel 16,020 likes mcgraw-hill education (asia) 15,929 likes public library of science (plos) 8,038 likes projectmuse 3,010 likes society for applied mathematics (siam) 1,770 likes in scanning through the wall posts and discussion boards on these publishers/providers facebook pages, i see many gaps where libraries and librarians should be present. take jstor’s facebook page for example. since early november 2010, there were at least 12 separate wall post questions from users (whether they are students or faculty is sometimes difficult to distinguish) about how to access or search for jstor articles. a similar set of questions about access exist on the discussion boards in jstor’s facebook page. in most of the cases, a representative from jstor pointed out how to access jstor articles from the users’ home library subscriptions or suggested that the user request that their library subscribe to jstor content. users also asked jstor for help finding articles on things like african music and behavioral finance (separate queries). but most of all, users were piling on the love for jstor: “jstor saved my life :d” and “where have you been all my scholastic life? jstor is my hero!” and, my favorite “if i ever have twins, i want to name one of the j, and the other stor, so when i call their name i will be reminded of sweet, sweet, jstor.” i haven’t heard of instances where a library user declared this level of adoration for a library, but i would certainly like to hear about any examples. likewise, it would be interesting to see a study documenting how libraries (not just individual librarians) are leveraging the social networking power and intel-gathering force of facebook to better engage with students. summing up a lot about the way that facebook supports the profession of librarianship has changed in the past few years and even since the mid-2010 uproar that led to many users deciding to decommission their facebook accounts. while i am not aware of any studies that measure the trends in librarian presence and interaction on facebook, anecdotal evidence suggests that in addition to other communication venues (discussion lists, twitter, etc.), many librarians are on facebook and this is where considerable discussion about issues relevant to librarianship are happening. a librarian colleague reported using her facebook account to brainstorm with her librarians’ group about work-related project plans and publication advice. i suspect that this kind of professional networking on facebook happens more often than we think and that the value of having all of those relationships in one place is understated. by tapping into the facebook accounts of their community members and the pages of publishers/providers, librarians can stay up-to-date on domain-specific research, learn about changes to publishers’ content, and engage in the conversations that are happening in these spaces. but there might be more value for libraries to be involved with facebook beyond keeping their librarians up-to-date. libraries might leverage the social plugins made easily available via the open graph protocol on their websites to automatically tap into a visitor’s likes and dislikes and offer up personalized services and content. initiatives such as the open library environment project led by kuali with a handful of sponsoring institutions is interested in creating similar types of instant personalization experiences between libraries and patrons. for me, the benefits of being on facebook (e.g., keeping myself in the loop about issues that impact my job, staying connected with publishers/providers, other librarians and members of my campus community) outweigh the risks of being on facebook (e.g., finding time to manage my account, monitor privacy settings, deal with a glut of “gifts” of virtual garden vegetables and getting “poked”). for the time being, i’m keeping facebook in my toolkit of communication and professional social networks. many thanks to ellie collier, emily ford, and joe kraus for reading earlier drafts of this post and for all of their helpful comments and suggestions. references behling, ellie. 2010. “publishers turn to facebook for community-building.” emediavitals posting august 6, 2010: http://emediavitals.com/article/1005/publishers-turn-facebook-community-building (last accessed on january 25, 2011). connell, ruth sara. 2009. “academic libraries, facebook and myspace, and student outreach: a survey of student opinion.” portal: libraries and the academy, v. 9 (1): 25-36. crawford, walt. 2010. “does every librarian need to be an involved expert at everything?” walt at random blog posting june 1, 2010: http://walt.lishost.org/2010/06/does-every-librarian-need-to-be-an-involved-expert-on-everything/ (last accessed on january 25, 2011). jennings, e. and k. tvaruzka. 2010. “quick and dirty library promotions that really work.” library innovation, v. 1 (2): 6-14. king, david lee. 2010. “10 reasons to not quit facebook.” davidleeking.com blog posting may 4, 1010: http://www.davidleeking.com/2010/05/04/10-reasons-to-not-quit-facebook/ (last accessed on january 25, 2011). mathews, brian. 2006. “do you facebook? networking with students online.” college & research libraries news, v. 67 (5): 306–307. paul, ian. 2010. “it’s quit facebook day, are you leaving?” pc world, today@pc world blog posting may 31, 2010: http://www.pcworld.com/article/197621/its_quit_facebook_day_are_you_leaving.html (last accessed on january 25, 2011). roblyer, m.d., et al. 2010. “findings on facebook in higher education: a comparison of college faculty and student uses and perceptions of social networking sites.” the internet and higher education, v.13 (3):134-140. rogers, jenica. 2010. “iolug speaker’s notes on online identity.” attempting elegance blog posting january 5, 2010: http://www.attemptingelegance.com/?p=652 (last accessed on january 25, 2011). yoder, dan. 2010. “top ten reasons you should quit facebook.” rocket.ly blog posting april 26, 2010: http://www.rocket.ly/blog/posts/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook.html (last accessed january 25, 2011). facebook, librarians on facebook, quitting facebook disappearances struggling to juggle: part-time temporary work in libraries 14 responses emily ford 2011–01–27 at 2:09 pm i’m so glad you wrote about this, hilary. i’ve struggled on fb to keep the personal personal and the professional professional, and i fail at it, miserably. but i stay because of the arguments you pose about it being professional. i find it has great utility to connect with my colleagues, but also as a library tool. conferences that i’ve helped plan have used fb to promote their events. now, the trick to is get libraries to have patrons want to name their kids lib and rary…. joan 2011–01–27 at 3:09 pm hilary, this is very interesting. i think a lot about how fb can connect students to libraries, but via the page function, not through fb friendships between librarians and students. (i used to think that was the way to go, way back in the old days of fb, but now i think i benefit from keeping my own connections mostly personal.) here’s the thing i can’t quite figure out: we know fb is incredibly useful for companies to connect with consumers/users/patrons (ie coke, as you discuss above). i’ve noticed lately that large companies like adidas will feature their facebook url rather than their website url in tv commercials. plus many, many public libraries have very active, vibrant pages on facebook with thousands of fans. yet, there aren’t many academic libraries who have succeeded here. many academic librarians were early adopters of facebook, but i wonder if we haven’t quite kept up with the latest developments for our libraries. sure, we have lots of friends (personal and / or professional), but then our library pages languish without content and fans. hilary davis 2011–01–27 at 3:45 pm joan, thanks for posing a great question! i don’t have the answer, but i wonder if the success of those libraries that do have successful engagement with users via facebook is potentially due to the integration of facebook on their websites. wake forest university’s z. smith reynolds library, for example, has a facebook button plopped right on their homepage along with a news feed from their facebook account (as well as their twitter feed). it would be an interested avenue of research to see if there is a correlation between the use of facebook social plugins on library websites and the engagement level of their users on their facebook pages. jean costello 2011–01–27 at 4:39 pm hi hilary – going where your users are is a persuasive argument for fb use. many points raised in the ala’s online privacy campaign (http://www.privacyrevolution.org) are as well. in its 23 minute “choose privacy” video (http://vimeo.com/11399383), past president camila alire stresses the value libraries place on patron privacy and – at least to me – seemed to position the library as a “safer” alternative for information exchange than the internet. it strikes me as a real dilemma and i’m not sure how to reconcile libraries’ privacy values and use of social media, particularly fb which makes no bones about monetizing every byte of data on its network. do you know how people within the library community think about this? thx, jean hilary davis 2011–02–02 at 10:39 am hi jean – you make a great point about the tension between libraries’ privacy values and use of social media to engage their users. my sense is that opinions vary greatly withing the library community, but hopefully we’ll see some more comments here. joan 2011–01–27 at 5:25 pm hilary, thanks for your response. you raise a good point. i’ve been thinking about how to approach some of these questions in my research, and it’s really hard. for one thing, you can’t really capture fb interaction except via screenshots (if it’s not a page you administer). and the content can change in a minute. i would love to see more research along these lines, or even just ideas of methodologies. megano 2011–01–28 at 1:52 pm hilary, thanks for a really interesting article. i would like to point out something else about our illusion of privacy on facebook–you stated that: “the trouble with facebook is that users expect to have more control over their information and online habits – because you must log in to participate in the social network, you expect the information to be somehow under your control.” this is very true, but it’s not the whole story. the electronic frontier foundation has a great timeline here: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ showing how their policy has eroded over time. hilary davis 2011–01–28 at 3:09 pm hi megan – thanks for pointing out “facebook’s eroding privacy policy” link. to add to that, there was recent news just a couple of days ago that fb is utilizing fb users’ behavior to promote advertisements (“sponsored stories”). from a cnn article: “any time you interact with a brand on facebook, your action could be used as an ad that entices your friends to do the same. for the moment, there’s also no way to opt yourself out of being featured.” megano 2011–01–28 at 2:11 pm i just realized that might have sounded critical–to clarify, i know that to facebook or not to facebook is a difficult decision. i still have a personal facebook page, but i struggle with whether to keep it/ how to keep it private or appropriate as well. cindy web server 2011–05–22 at 5:30 pm thanks for the information of the usduario toos expectation is to have control over our accounts and greater security pingback : it’s not really that new anymore now, is it? « the wondering librarian pingback : reconsidering facebook | catch it!: news & views from the field of medical librarianship pingback : vancouver public library « librarisaurusrex pingback : to facebook or not to facebook…that is the question… « group 3 this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the desk setup – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 27 oct brett bonfield /6 comments the desk setup derik badman developer, springshare who are you, and what do you do? by brett bonfield i’m derik badman. for a paying job i work as a web developer for springshare, inc (creator of libguides and libanswers). most of my time is spent working on libanswers: adding features and occasionally fixing bugs. i also spend time working on a new product (as yet unannounced), and answering support questions from our customers. in non-paying capacity, i make (drawrite) comics, often of an experimental nature, which get posted at my website, madinkbeard. what hardware are you using? my main computer is a 22.5″ imac with a 3.06 ghz processor and 8gb ram, running os 10.6.4. i use this most of the day, most every day for my programming, drawing, and other things like watching tv/movies. i also have an 12.5″ asus eee pc laptop running windows 7. i mainly use this for testing windows issues (internet explorer) or for when i need to do some typing related work away from my desk. my laptop use has cut down a lot since i got my motorola droid running android, which i use far too much for email, texting, twitter, rss reading, managing my todo list, taking photos, and note taking. i use a wacom intuos 3 tablet for making my comics, and i’ve got a western digital external hard drive for backups. for scanning (mostly) and printing (rarely), i’ve been really happy with the hp psc 1510 all-in-one, which was cheap years ago and has held up really well. and what software? the software i really live in right now: chrome for my regular internet browsing. firefox for viewing and testing my development work (primarily because the firebug add-on is so useful for dealing with css and javascript). textmate for my actual coding. tweetdeck for twitter and facebook monitoring. adium for instant messaging. evernote (on my mac and on my droid) for notetaking and listmaking. mac mail for my work email. adobe creative suite 5 (primarily photoshop and indesign) for making my comics and for various image-related work tasks (icons, logos, etc.) if you count web applications: remember the milk for my todo list. gmail for personal email. google reader for rss feeds. google calendar for my schedule. delicious for bookmarking. wordpress for blogging and posting my comics a lot of these applications i use on all three of my devices, and often that multi-platform use is why i’ve chosen products. what would be your dream setup? probably the only thing i could ask for is one of the wacom cintiqs, which is a very large tablet with a built-in screen. otherwise, for now, i’m really happy with my setup, which admittedly is mostly all new in the past few months. paula brehm-heeger library services manager, public library of cincinnati and hamilton county who are you, and what do you do? i’m paula brehm-heeger and i am the central region library services manager for the public library of cincinnati and hamilton county. i manage the direct public service departments at our large main library located in downtown cincinnati and also six of our 40 branch locations. all six of the locations i oversee are located in urban areas. i’ve been working in libraries for more than two decades with a lot of that time dedicated to serving teenagers. i was the president of the american library service’s young adult library services association in 2007-2008. my first book, serving urban teens was published in 2008 by libraries unlimited. what hardware are you using? at work i use a standard desktop setup with a pentium 4 processor. at home i mainly use a dell xps laptop and sometimes sneak a few minutes on my husband’s laptop—also a dell but an older model (inspiron 6000). i use my husband’s laptop when i need to run numbers because he purchased a number pad to make calculating easier. i’m too lazy to actually buy one but always think it’s a great example of a simple hardware add-on that can make a huge difference in efficiency. for my portable devices, i have a blackberry storm and my first generation 60gb ipod classic. i’ll probably have to update the ipod soon but i really do like my classic’s display so i haven’t been compelled to try anything new yet. at home we recently updated our tv—finally abandoned our tube-tv in favor of a new samsung flat screen! i also have three weather alert radios that i use in some capacity every day, including one that features a sensor to tell me the temperature on my front porch because i hate to be surprised about the weather. and what software? at work and on my home setup i use a windows os. i use internet explorer at work and firefox at home. i used standard office products for writing my book—microsoft 2003, and i worked with a freelance graphic designer to produce a few of the charts. the biggest challenge in writing the book was keeping things organized in my email and folders! i requested reproduction rights for a number of items and also did my own indexing. the primary tools we have used in analyzing data are microsoft excel and spss (statistical package for the social sciences). greg edwards (the library services director at my library) and i set up a logical data entry form in excel which he then utilized for entering the data in spss. our data analysis, like any good evaluation of data, depends heavily on constructing a logical way to compare the data. excel and spss are just tools—figuring out what it is that you’re hoping to find out is the most important step. gigo (garbage in, garbage out)—even the best spreadsheet and data-mining software won’t help if you haven’t taken the time to logically think through what it is you’re comparing and how the data points relate to each other. on my blackberry my favorite apps are google maps, weatherbug, pandora, facebook, and quickpull. pandora has replaced satellite radio for me in the car. i just plug the blackberry into the auxiliary jack and select my station. quickpull was an important find for me. a lot of times i concentrate on apps that make me happy and ignore things that keep my devices healthy and functional, so setting up a nightly schedule for rebooting was a big step. at my library we now employ a blackberry enterprise server solution so i can review all my work-related email on my handheld, too. i wasn’t a big facebook user until i started using the app on my blackberry. now it’s so simple and easy to check whenever/wherever that i check it a lot more, update my status, and send pictures regularly. itunes is software i use all the time. i’m addicted to downloading tv shows—especially those shows no one else i know is willing to watch with me. i watch them whenever i get a chance. this is especially great whenever i have to go anywhere on an airplane. the other software that has changed my life is my digital video recorder—does that count as software? i think it does. i love it and don’t know how i ever managed my tv life without it. what would be your dream setup? the quantum computer described in the traveler trilogy by john twelve hawks. how awesome would it be to have technology designed by beings from another realm? though i’m guessing the tech support might be complicated. i also need to invest in my first ebook reader but haven’t committed to any on the market yet. the ipad seems impressive but is much more than an ebook reader, so maybe the nook is the best option for my particular need. i’m planning to make a decision sometime before the holiday season. whatever i select, my ideal set up would allow for easy, simply downloading of ebooks and viewing them on a device that is lightweight with reader-friendly eink. i think even the highest-end ebook readers aren’t quite there on reproducing the eye-friendly feel of ink on paper. but it’s close. ellie collier reference librarian, austin community college who are you, and what do you do? i’m a librarian at austin community college. my title is reference librarian/assistant professor (we have faculty status, i don’t teach any credit courses), but i also do instruction and collection development, am the subject liaison to a number of departments (psychology, radio-tv-film, and visual communications), and serve on library and college-wide committees. i’m also an editor and writer at in the library with the lead pipe. i’ve recently started calling myself a technophile luddite because while i geek out over tech in my personal life, much of my day is spent helping users who don’t own personal computers and are not comfortable with technology. i try really hard to be an advocate for those users when discussing new technologies and interfaces for the library. away from work i’m an active board and card gamer, and a less active video gamer, crafter, and cook. what hardware are you using? at work i mostly use what they give me. right now that’s a dell optiplex 780 (2.93 ghz processor, 4 gb ram, 150 gb hard drive—of which 119 gb is free right now) and a fairly nice sized flat panel monitor. i have the standard mouse, keyboard, and speakers for peripherals, along with personal earbuds that i brought in to spare my office mate from whatever i’m listening to. we’re also given a thumb drive which i pretty much only use to transfer pictures to a laptop that has an sd card reader so i can put them on the sd card for our large display tv, or to take documents to a computer that has access to a color printer. each campus has a digital camera, but i don’t use them that much. i did request and receive a logitech webcam and a blue snowball microphone which i use for creating tutorials. i used to have a printer that i shared with my office mate, but it’s been out for repairs for months, so i share the main one with the whole office, and i use the student printers as well. at home i have a 2005 dell that was good for gaming when i bought it, but has been reinitialized and barely sees use anymore. a cat knocked the speakers onto the cpu and shorted it out. i managed to get most of the drivers reinstalled, but the sound card doesn’t work anymore and i’ve been too lazy to bother trying to fix it. my main computer is my little netbook, an asus eee pc 1000he. and more and more, my motorola droid. i have an external cd/dvd burner that i almost never use and an external hard drive (one of those cute passport ones) that i thankfully used to backup my desktop before the cat attacked it. i also have one of those low end all-in-one scanner/printers. i own a hand-me-down medium sized tv that i use to watch david attenborough documentaries and play my gamecube (i’m currently loving baten kaitos). i have accidental cable because they couldn’t figure out how to shut it off when they set up my internet (through a smaller local company), but i don’t have that hooked up. i use a wireless router for my netbook and i have the cheapest possible internet, so between the dinkier computer and the slow internet i pretty much never watch any internet videos at my apartment. i save those up to watch at my partner’s place on his big screen tv that he has hooked up to his computer or watch them on my droid. and what software? i am incredibly lucky to have full admin rights over my work computer. we’re running windows 7. they’re actually pretty good about getting us software if we ask for it, but i’m more an instant gratification person, so i tend to just download something free at my moment of need. i use gimp and sometimes just paint for my photo manipulation. i have nvu for the rare times i need to do more with html than i want to mess with in notepad. foxit for editing pdfs. fireshot and jing for screen captures. snaplinks (now multi links) is my favorite firefox add-on ever (you click and drag over a bunch of links on a page and it opens all of them in new tabs). chrome and firefox for browsing. delicious for bookmarking items for the staff development committee. i use wordpress for my work blogs and we have an internal wiki run by etouch samepage. we also use libguides, liveperson (for chat) and iii/millennium. but honestly, most of my day-to-day tasks are accomplished in my browser (gdocs, showing students library resources, my email—which i run through gmail) or in excel. the dying desktop has openoffice because i couldn’t be bothered to dig out my ms office installation disc the last time i needed to open a document. the eee pc has whichever version of windows and office it came with. i use picasa for pictures, pandora for music, itunes for podcasts, firefox for browsing, gchat for talking to my brother, gmail for email, gbookmarks for bookmarking, gdocs for most of my word processing, greader for blogs. sensing a theme? on my droid i have google sky which is super awesome and i pull it out all the time even though it can be a little sad with all the light pollution in big cities, but it’s always good for figuring out whether that really bright thing is a star or a planet (tip: it’s usually a planet). i used to always carry a paper day planner, but i think i’ve begrudgingly made the switch to filling those roles with gcal and gtasks. i use gtasks for my grocery list, too. oh, and gvoice for transcribing my voicemail. it’s hilariously terrible, but often close enough to get the idea. what would be your dream setup? i’m really pretty pleased with my current situation. i wouldn’t turn down a killer gaming computer, but i wouldn’t use it enough to justify owning it either. what i’d really love is a dedicated, built-in kitchen computer for cooking—with one of those plastic, gel covers over the keyboard so i can wash it off afterwards. or maybe just a touch screen. and that’s probably totally attainable with current technology and will probably be within what i’m actually willing to pay for something like that within a few years. clayton copeland lis doctoral candidate, university of south carolina who are you, and what do you do? hi, everyone! i’m clayton copeland, and i am currently a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow with the school of library and information science at the university of south carolina. go gamecocks! i’m a true “carolina girl,” and in more ways than one! in addition to being a student with the university and earning a master’s degree in library and information science here, i was born and raised in the palmetto state. libraries are the places of my earliest and happiest memories. the library was such a peaceful, tranquil place to me, a place where happy days were made happier and challenging days easier. no matter the burdens of my heart, somehow opening the library door, finding just the right book, and cuddling in a soft comfy chair made everything seem ok again. all of my worries seemed to be carried away by the gentle rustling of turning pages. my book journeys allowed me to discover both far and distant places and places within myself. books gave me the gifts of learning and self acceptance. i loved the library so much that i became a “mini-me librarian” in second grade, when my school librarian made all my dreams came true and asked me to be her “assistant.” i’ve worked in libraries in one capacity or another since, and i have loved every minute of it. to me, there is no greater privilege than putting a book in a child’s hand or helping any library user find the information he or she is seeking. of late, my day-to-day work involves my dissertation study, equity of access to information: a comparative exploration of library accessibility and information access from differently-able patrons’ perspectives. the study explores the lived experiences of library patrons whom society labels as “disabled,” and seeks to understand the extent to which our libraries are meeting their information needs and are providing them with equal access to information. what hardware are you using? a dell latitude d 620, with 2.16 ghz and 2 gb ram. the computer travels well and is also flexible in its capabilities and functions. after long days of work, i connect to a 20 inch lcd monitor and standard size keyboard for better visibility and greater ease with typing. in a recent pursuit to find a small, lightweight computer for easier transport and travel to and from professional conferences, i purchased a samsung netbook. i use a walker for ambulatory purposes, so space for carrying books and everything that must travel with me on the road and day-to-day is at a real premium. the small size and lower weight of the netbook offer a reliable and portable alternative to the more substantial laptop. and what software? windows xp is the university-supported operating system at the moment. my professional day would not be complete without numerous interactions with the microsoft office suite, which i use for writing and preparing course lectures for the courses i am teaching. i also rely heavily on adobe acrobat for creating pdf files as well as dragon naturally speaking version 10, a voice recognition program i use for recording notes, writing papers, and transcribing interviews with dissertation study participants. of course, google calendar and gmail are absolute musts when it comes to staying organized and in touch with colleagues, family, and friends. what would be your dream setup? opportunities to interact with technologies personally as well as opportunities to learn from students, colleagues, and the people i am getting to know via my dissertation research increasingly make me aware of an ever-growing need for affordable, reliable, responsive, and universally accessible technologies. technology has incredible potential. my greatest hope and “dream” is for technologies to help their users overcome barriers—whether physical, economic, social, or otherwise—that traditionally could prevent or inhibit access to information. although so many facets of accessibility and technology have been (and are being) addressed, i am becoming more and more aware of our need to improve their accessibility; without it, the tools we intended to be facilitators of inclusion become another cause of exclusion. birkin james diana programmer, brown university library who are you, and what do you do? i’m birkin james diana. i’m a programmer for the brown university library. my work there focuses on enhancing our digital-repository, developing apis and services based on lightweight soa principles, enabling disparate systems to work together, and developing cool desktop and mobile-friendly services for users. what hardware are you using? i am one with an early 2010 13″ macbookpro laptop. an apple laptop has been my primary machine since the black and white 1991 powerbook 170. they work for me. my previous laptop had a beautiful 15″ screen but i regularly missed the portability of a beloved 12″ powerbook g4 i had around 2004. when this beautiful 13″ model became available, i took the leap, and have been thoroughly happy with it. over the past few months i’ve experimented with an external display at work. a bluetooth kensington slimblade mouse drives the laptop. i also use an iphone 3gs extensively, and have an ipad i bought largely as an experiment to monitor the ui creativity explosion i knew it would foster, and to understand first-hand what space it can occupy between a pod/phone and laptop. at home our numerous macs are connected by and backed up to an apple time capsule base-station. and what software? textmate is my favored programming tool for python and django, my favored language and framework (the django documentation oozes a refreshing depth of thoughtfulness). initially trained in java, around 2005 i came to love eclipse and its plugins, and periodically fire it up and look at the latest version of pydev (for python development), but i always come back to textmate. it’s not as full-featured as some other editors, but its clean interface and lightweight speedy feel are a pleasure. i tend these days to have chrome open to university email, calendar, and wiki tabs, firefox open with the web developer plugin and firebug for examining webpages, and safari for other browsing. i also always have open bbedit, apple mail (which integrates fairly well with the university’s switch from outlook to gmail), transmit for ftp, apple’s terminal, versions for subversion work, and clockwork, an old 2006 shareware app i use as a timer for focused work-bursts. daily, i use the iphone app todo which, with some angst, has replaced the wonderful lifebalance as my preferred organizer. lastly, in the context of api and complex web-communication analysis, wireshark is an impressive, powerful tool i regularly dust off. what would be your dream setup? to a large extent i have it, in terms of hardware and software. that’s a nice thing about programming: it doesn’t require a huge tool investment, even for those drawn to high-quality well-designed tools. my move toward the dream setup has to do more with ‘practice’ and ‘environment’. regarding practice, i periodically play with that balance between using known, comfortable tools and systems, and experimenting with possibly better ones (example: trying distributed version control). so an ideal setup would inherently be a bit fluid. regarding environment, a dream setup would somehow allow for others to know when i need to be left alone to concentrate, and when i am / will be approachable for the good collaboration that our team values. no easy solution to that. but that’s why a single-screen portable laptop setup remains so appealing. i can just pick up and go find a quiet place to concentrate and work for a while if unable to do so in my normal workspace. (of course, this does bring up the hardware desire for much, much faster wireless-speeds.) this is a great question; i see a group brainstorming meeting in my team’s future! emily drabinski instruction librarian, long island university, brooklyn who are you, and what do you do? i’m emily drabinski, an instruction librarian at long island university, brooklyn (go blackbirds!). i come from a failed first try at being a writer and editor, two things i do lots of as a librarian. i edit a book series for rory litwin’s library juice press about gender and sexuality in librarianship, work on a journal called radical teacher, and saw my first edited book, critical library instruction: theories and methods (with maria t. accardi and alana kumbier) come out last spring. i still daydream about running away to a tiny house on top of a mountain overlooking an ocean and writing the most beautiful book ever written ever in the whole wide world. maybe if i get tenure. what hardware are you using? i walked to a friend’s house the other day with nothing but my pockets, and realized i was carrying almost $800 in gadgets. and i think of myself as a paper-and-pencil kind of person! i use a 13-inch white macbook at home, an dell optiplex desktop that takes up my entire desk top in the office, a motorola cliq phone that i wish had the latest android update, a second-generation kindle, and an 8gb fifth-generation ipod nano. (those last three are my new yorker commute trifecta. they’re my car.) love my gadgets, but i still buy two thirds of my books in print, use my kindle primarily to pay for the newspaper again, and track my reading using an old card catalog drawer. i love living in the future, but the past is relentless. so far, there seems to be room in the present for both. and what software? i live in google and google lives in me, even though i know they’re tracking me and selling me and locking me in. mail, talk, voice, calendar, reader, docs (love google forms!), scholar, groups, books, i’m a fan of it all. dropbox has been a godsend for manuscript-length files. i backup on a la cie drive, but everything goes into dropbox, too. and i love the social web, twitter and facebook, and wordpress for blogging, mostly about my lunch. what would be your dream setup? i’d love a featherweight laptop with a battery i could recharge in the sun, something i could take from home to work to play and back without even thinking about the weight. my mobile device works great for most things i do, but i still want a computer i can sit down and type on with a nice big screen. and i know this is unpopular, but if google could insert a firefox browser with all my tabs open just behind my eyeballs, i’d be fine with that too. ryan eby sysadmin and developer, ann arbor district library who are you, and what do you do? i’m a sysadmin and developer at ann arbor district library. i take care of the network administration, system administration, and helping the development team when able with the website and other software development projects. my day-to-day responsibilities and projects vary considerably and it’s difficult to generalize with everything we do. you can find some of the software we’ve released on the ann arbor district library page at github. what hardware are you using? i use pretty much all apple hardware. i have a mac mini running os x server as the occasional desktop, though i tend to be mobile, and use a macbook pro 17″ 2.5 ghz intel duo with 4 gb ram for most of my work. an iphone 3gs and ipad complete my mobile setup. with fixing things constantly as part of my job, i want something that just works for my personal setup and i’ve had good luck with this arrangements. os x gives me enough unix underpinnings to let me do everything i need. for general hardware we tend to be an hp shop with numerous dl360‘s with mix of dual and quad core xeons for various tasks and various ranges of hp switches. the public computers are all hp thin clients, and staff thin clients are being migrated to the same hardware. you can read more about the hardware on ann arbor district library developer blog; a post about our software is forthcoming. connection is fiber to all of our branches except one, which has a t1 due to location. i have no real hardware at home as i do mostly work related things. the exception is airport expresses, which are scattered around the house for airtunes. and what software? osx snow leopard with some common apps installed: things: task and project management, dropbox synced 1password: password management, dropbox synced dropbox: best thing out there chrome for most browsing with firefox installed for when i need firebug coda for coding, and textmate for when i need more power pixelmator for general image manipulation git/github for version control ruby and capistrano (parallel ssh commands) for various sysadmin tasks the iphone/ipad have ssh and rdp clients along with instapaper, stanza, things, 1password, dropbox, and a couple of dropbox-powered notes apps. we’re mostly an open-source shop. our public computers are thin clients that run a simple debian installation. they connect to windows terminal servers, giving patrons a windows environment while retaining the back-end manageability of linux. the thin clients were rather cheap, and we already had a citrix-based server farm. since we’re running it as a web-based application, we could drop the citrix licensing, so costs are low. running it as a linux/web-app combination has also allowed the public computers to become a rapid development platform where changes can be rolled out quickly, both to the os and for other management needs. we plan to open source the software once our current round of testing is finished. most of the other servers run gentoo with software installations based on the tasks we need to accomplish. most of our development is done in drupal, so servers tend to run apache, mysql, and php. we also have nginx, couchdb, redis, and ruby running for a few applications. the windows terminal servers are virtual. what would be your dream setup? i’m pretty happy with the current setup: having pretty much all linux clients allows administration and debugging to be fairly straightforward. dropping windows would be nice, but is probably far in the future given the ongoing demand for microsoft office. ahniwa ferrari library development project manager, washington state library who are you, and what do you do? i’m a nerd (and incidentally a librarian) who tries his best to find ways to push reference services forward, on a grand scale, for libraries in washington state. i’m a project manager in library development at the washington state library, and i spend most of my time coordinating our statewide reference cooperative, ask-wa. with over 65 library systems participating in this project, this means that i do a lot of scheduling and quality control work, provide a lot of reference and technology training, arrange continuing education opportunities for librarians throughout the state, and generally try and get the word out to the public that reference librarians are awesome. i also coordinate our statewide database trials, assist with our statewide downloadable audiobooks project, review grant proposals for other projects, act as editor-in-chief for the official agency blog, and am the chief architect and curator of our hard times resource guide. what hardware are you using? i use what the state gives me, which works fine for my purposes. it’s an hp desktop machine, runs windows xp pro, and packs a dual-core 3 ghz processor and 3.5 gb ram. my favorite thing about it is the added nvidia quadro nvs 290 video card, which supports my dual hp l1950 lcd monitors (in a side-by-side configuration). they could take away everything else, but i’d go nuts of i had to work on a single monitor again. peripheral to the desktop i have a logitech webcam pro 9000 that i use for weband video-conferencing, along with a plantronics .audio 400 dsp headset. i have an i-rocks ir-4610 usb 2.0 4-ports hub that i purchased personally and brought from home (i have much more use for it at work), into which i regularly plug: my ipod touch (2nd generation, 8gb), which i use to keep track of apps for libraries, and which was quite helpful in designing my own app, ask-wa, which recently launched for both iphone and android platforms. my motozine zn5 mobile phone, which i don’t actually like to use as a phone, but which i use quite frequently as a camera when i’m out visiting libraries. my sandisk sansa fuze mp3 player (8gb), which i decided to purchase for myself after a great deal of research in light of our downloadable audiobooks project, and which i mainly use to listen to said downloadable audiobooks in my car during my commute. my sandisk cruzer titanium flash drive (4gb), which wouldn’t be noteworthy except that a. it’s made out of titanium, which is automatically rad, and b. it’s a rugged beast that has lasted on my keychain for over three years now and has survived regular use. when i’m on the road i have a netbook that i use for work, which is an hp mini 2140 (the 1366×768 resolution version), and which sports an intel atom 1.60 ghz processor and 2 gb of ram, and which also runs windows xp pro. i have the larger, 6-cell battery, which lets me (if i shut off wi-fi) run for about 7 hours at a conference without having to plug-in. it also has a built-in vga webcam which i use occasionally to record presentations at conferences. at home i run a three-year-old desktop that i assembled inside a quiet antec p180b case with hand-picked components. it’s a little worse-for-wear for my having dropped it off the bed, but it still does what i need it to do. and what software? ask-wa runs on oclc’s questionpoint software, so i get to use that a lot, and after 2+ years, i’m happy to say that i almost have it figured out. i’ve crowd-sourced some of the scheduling aspects of ask-wa so that now libraries can manipulate their own schedules using google calendar, which saves me a lot of time. i like a lot of other google applications as well, and regularly use google reader, google voice, and gmail, for their respective functions. i’m a firefox user and devotee, and have a number of add-ons now that i couldn’t imagine living without. among others, i regularly use pixlr grabber to swipe screenshots for presentation slides, and i use shareaholic about a dozen times a day to push library-related news items (and other items of interest) to my tumblr account, which in turn pushes out to my facebook and twitter feeds. at work i use a lot of microsoft office products: outlook, word, excel, and powerpoint, all 2007. nothing too exciting there. i use camtasia studio 6 for creating screencasts and training videos, which i switched to after using jing for a time and finding it too limited. i like free software, including 7-zip for zipping and unzipping files, cutepdf so that i can print anything into a pdf file, tagscanner for mucking with mp3 filenames and tags (useful for audiobooks), and pidgin for the occasional informal work-related chat. i use elluminate for web-conferencing and webinars, including my own monthly webinar series for reference librarians, ref22. elluminate does more than the software we use to have (wimba), but i haven’t decided if i really approve of it or not, yet. what would be your dream setup? in terms of a desktop system, i actually think i could use two more monitors. i think that four monitors total in a 2×2 setup would be pretty awesome. aside from screen real estate, so long as the computer is fairly responsive and i don’t spend too much time waiting, i’m pretty easy. that said, i’d still like to bump up to windows 7, and i wish that outlook worked better than it does. what i would really love is a mobile-sized device that dual-boots as an iphone and android device (maybe even throw windows 7 mobile in there), with at least 64gb of space, with at least a forward-facing camera that takes good quality photos and video, with an integrated microphone and speaker, and that could connect via wi-fi and all mobile data networks. this magical device would also have a battery capable of eight hours of continuous use, and would allow folder-level file management on a pc connected through a simple usb cord. i really want the magical mobile device that works as a camera (photo and video), mp3-player, cell phone, mobile gaming, and all-purpose work device, and i want it to be open and i don’t want to pay exorbitant monthly fees to be able to use it. and i’d really rather it wasn’t an apple device. is that too much to ask? alison hicks romance language librarian, university of colorado, boulder who are you, and what do you do? i’m a modern language librarian who researches technology and foreign language librarianship. while language learning is more and more driven by technology, language librarians aren’t exactly known for their flashy tech expertise. my aim is to help spread technology skills and enthusiasm throughout language librarianship and departments in order to push the language/literature/information/technology frontier. to this end, i’m active in salalm, the seminar for the acquisition of latin american library materials (¡vamos salalm!) where i write a web 2.0 column for the newsletter/blog, set up a mentor social network, and head salalm’s first e-strategy committee. my work with my departments and salalm is mostly informed by the more general reference and instruction technology stuff, such as usability testing, widgets, qr codes, and mobile learning. i’ve kind of muscled my way in on it but i love exploring how new technologies can (or cannot) be adapted for research or teaching purposes. i’m currently the romance language librarian at the university of colorado at boulder, where i serve as the bibliographer for french, spanish, italian, portuguese, and comparative literature. what hardware are you using? this section is going to be embarrassingly short; pretty much my only gadget is my 13″ mac book, which replaced my beloved g4 powerbook earlier this year. yep, that’s right: no cell phone, no tv, no wii, no nothing… what can i say?! my scottish genes just can’t bring themselves to shell out that much for a smartphone, although i have to say that when i replaced my mac earlier this year i did receive a free ipod touch and i’m getting pretty addicted to the small screen. my uncle also once gave me a first generation sony e-reader which i used fairly regularly, but not enough to replace it when it died. though i do use my computer to excess, so i guess that makes up for the lack of other hardware. and what software? i moved to the us in 2005 to do my msis with the impression that americans learned to code in the cradle. i soon realized i was wrong, but this didn’t stop me from taking all the technology courses i could find. and this probably helped me get my first job at lanic, a latin american website where we used terminal. i still use terminal today, largely for my husband’s retro webpage, but it’s more likely that i’ll be using textedit, text wrangler, and fetch at home, and dreamweaver at work. mostly i work in a pretty standard firefox enabled cloud though. i used bloglines for five years for rss and since the sad news of its demise, i’m looking for a replacement. yahoo pipes for fancier rss, google alerts for, well, web alerts, jing for screencasting, wordpress for blogs, flickr for photos, and delicious for personal and subject guide bookmarks. for collection development activities, i use a lot of targeted rss fed through yahoo pipes. instruction is when jing and sporcle (a quizzing software) come to the fore. i also helped implement libraryh3lp for im and text messaging reference, and jing for im videos. my latest reference project involves qr codes, and i use microsoft’s tag program for this. most of my collaboration with colleagues happens through google docs. i’m a new convert to google docs: i resisted the google siren call for years because i was worried about privacy issues, but zoho downtime finally made me change over and now i can’t go back. i use ning for the social network that i built for salalm, and twitter for other professional development activities. i withstood twitter for ages too, but i found that having to consolidate and condense my thoughts really helped my learning process. nothing very unusual on my touch (stanza for ebooks, metro for public transport, pandora for music, the guardian for news), except convert everything, a conversion app. it’s taken me five years to manage to translate feet and inches and i’m pretty sure that i’m never going to understand fluid ounces. what would be your dream setup? that we move beyond dismissing web 2.0 as just a technology. web 2.0 isn’t a thing, a tool or a trend; by its very uncontrolled, decentralized, and conversation-enabling nature it has engendered enormous sociological and pedagogical change. by continuing to look at web 2.0 as just a trendy tool, we fail to understand its true potential and we fail to support the changing information paradigms. i love what i do but i think there’s a lot more room for truly enlightened discussion and reinvention in the research world. my second greatest dream is that there is universal wi-fi. enough of the spotty, slow connections, the extortionate costs, and that frustrated, useless feeling when you’re out and can’t look something up. yay finland for making broadband a legal right; i hope other countries are equally inspired. thirdly, and slightly less grandly, that every page that i want to follow has an rss or a twitter feed. if a page doesn’t have a feed then i’m pretty much never going back—it’s very frustrating. subscribing to individual rss feeds may be a little old school now, but while techmeme and other aggregators filter a lot of the noise, jaron lanier has inspired me to try and avoid being “trapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts.” so rss, and increasingly twitter, is still my number one choice for a web desert island. all that news! that i want to read! just waiting for me! and lastly, i’d love a guardian newspaper quick crossword app. i can’t do us crosswords (too many baseball players as clues), but a non cryptic quick crossword app would make my day. anna johnson library instruction coordinator, mt hood community college who are you, and what do you do? i’m anna johnson and i coordinate the library instruction program at mt hood community college. i schedule librarian-led research skills instruction in about 200 different classes every year, in a wide variety of subject areas (even math!). i teach about half of these library instruction classes, and i also teach several one-credit courses, like “college success” for new students and “teaching at the community college” for fellow (and future) educators. my job is completely different every day and i absolutely love it. what hardware are you using? at work i use a college-issued dell setup with windows 7 (64-bit) and a 17-inch monitor. i had a second monitor until a few weeks ago when i realized i care more about wooden desktop real estate than digital desktop real estate. our library’s tech guy bet me a dr pepper that i’d ask for that other monitor back by december, but i’m happy to have it gone. so far. thanks to a decade-old wrist injury, i use a natural ergonomic keyboard and a natural wireless laser mouse (both from microsoft). i love this weirdo ergo equipment but it renders my computer pretty useless to anyone else who tries to use it, especially since all the letters on the left side of the keyboard’s split have somehow wiped off. the other hardware on my work desk is an ihome, for the rare days when i’m in my office long enough to listen to my ipod, which is a 5th generation (video) model, 4 years old and still going strong. i have an ancient cell phone, so old it still flips closed, on purpose—if i had a smart phone i’d be an even bigger slave to email than i already am. at home i have an acer aspire one netbook. i love it for three big reasons: it actually fits on airplane seat-back trays, it’s perfect for tv watching on hulu and netflix, and it doesn’t get in my way when i hook it up to a projector for presentations. and what software? if circa 1990s graphic designer me was reading this, she’d be so disappointed to know that i spend 90% of my computing time using microsoft office programs, but most of my work these days can’t happen without word, excel, and (especially) outlook. i quite like the xobni add-on for searching in outlook, and it tells me fun facts like that i send way too many emails. nearly all of my work involves collaboration, so i give folks lots of ways to chat with me. between outlook, gmail, meebo, and windows live messenger, i’m constantly getting four different pop-up notifications in my system tray. this year i’ve been trying to better integrate library resources into the college’s online classes in blackboard, so the adobe cs5 suite is the newest addition to my software toolbox, especially photoshop, dreamweaver, and captivate. alongside these i use lots of “helper” applications, like audacity, and i’m a big fan of levelator for cleaning up uneven audio files. i can’t live without adobe acrobat, and never post documents online without first converting them to pdfs. itunes is almost always running whenever i’m at the computer. at work i stream wers, a great radio station out of emerson college in boston, and at home i dive into my 560 gigs of music on my buffalo terastation external hard drive. what would be your dream setup? i’m still chained at the hip to my flash drive so i’m trying to decide if i should get on the cloud computing bandwagon or if i just want a powerful laptop that i can take between home and work. i have high hopes for a one-computer future for myself. i’ll be a happy early adopter guinea pig if and when my college starts supporting laptops instead for desktops for our faculty office computers. lynda kellam data services and government information librarian, university of north carolina at greensboro who are you, and what do you do? i’m lynda, the data services and government information librarian at the university of north carolina at greensboro. i do numbers and track down the government stuff. i also help train our reference interns who are lis graduate students. what hardware are you using? at home i have a 2.4 ghz intel core 2 duo imac with a 20-inch screen. i am also a bit of a gadget collector, so i have an acer netbook, an 6 six-year old dell inspiron laptop (mostly for running civilization iii), a 64gb wi-fi ipad, a 30gb 5th generation ipod, a 1gb pink ipod shuffle, a 16gb 4th generation touch, and an htc hero phone with the android platform. i really need to sell some of these! the main things i use now are the imac, ipad, touch, and the phone. my work computer is a 2.16 ghz intel core 2 duo dell latitude laptop hooked up to another big as an elephant screen. i also have some hand-me-down equipment to use for scanning and other projects. the laptop has been a great tool; i wouldn’t be able to do my job well without it because i need the mobility. on a given week i’m rarely in my office for long. and what software? day and night i use mostly firefox. it is the first program i start up when i get up in the morning and when i get to work, especially now that we have switched over to google apps for education. i tried using google chrome on my imac but it didn’t have my passwords so i lazily switched back. firefox’s homepage goes to my work and personal gmail accounts, the library homepage, our library chat (libraryh3lp), and my personal chat (meebo). after logging into those i usually check the echofon firefox add-on twitter feed. during my typical workday i’m switching between google documents, for things i’m sharing, microsoft word, for big writing projects, and evernote, for pretty much everything else. i’m currently finishing up a book project so i have spent most of my time in microsoft word this month. i regularly use spss, a statistical software, for data work. i have sas training, but have few requests for it. and for some reason, i end up using adobe photoshop quite a bit. i know it better than any other editing program so i just default to it, i guess. we aren’t allowed administrative rights to our computers, which means i don’t get to experiment much with software on the inspiron. i have to save the experimentation for the acer or my imac. on my imac i use primarily evernote, pages, skitch, tweetdeck and cultured code’s things. i would love to have skitch at work because you can do photo editing in a fraction of the time it takes me in photoshop. it is a super program! i am an evernote junkie, too. everything i need is in there and i can access it on my gaggle of gadgets. i’ve gone pro because i use it for so many work projects. i’m a recent convert to things. i’ve used remember the milk for a couple of years, but it can be so complex that i always get confused and abandon it. i now basically use rtm for my grocery list. things, on the other hand, has a simple interface that is easy to use, and i have access to it on the ipad or itouch. what would be your dream setup? i think for work i am finally reaching that point. we switched to google apps, libguides and libraryh3lp this year, which means that i can answer student questions, update my library course guides and help out on chat from anywhere. as a reference and instruction librarian i shouldn’t be tied down to an office space; i should be able to roam and still have access to my work. the only thing i would change is that i would love to have a mac pro for a second work computer for the mac-specific software like skitch and things and because i prefer the os. i bring my ipad to work regularly, which is a good substitute. i have remote office hours in a dormitory, and i’ve used it several times there. the library website and databases display pretty well. i do wish it ran flash because then it would be the perfect little remote reference machine. i’m pretty happy with my current home set-up. out of all of the gadgets i’ve bought my imac was one of the wisest. it does everything i need. bohyun kim digital access librarian, florida international university medical library who are you, and what do you do? my name is bohyun kim (twitter: @bohyunkim) and i design web sites, create databases, manage electronic resources, and plan and manage all aspects of technology (hardware, software, and services) at my library. i also write grant proposals and work as the project manager for technology-related grant projects. i am the digital access librarian and one of the library’s four founding librarians of florida international university (fiu) medical library in miami, fl., which opened in the fall of 2009. what hardware are you using? at work, i have a dell pc with intel core 2 duo (2.4 ghz), 3.35 gb ram, and a 20″ monitor and a mac mini with intel core 2 duo (2 ghz), 2 gb ram, and a 19″ monitor. i use a gefen dvi switcher to connect the pc and the mac mini with one keyboard and other usb devices. at home, i have a 19″ imac with intel core duo (2 ghz) with 2 gb ram and a 17″ macbook pro with intel core 2 duo (2.33 ghz) with 2 gb ram. i also have a samsung n120 netbook (intel atom 1.6 ghz and 1 gb ram) and i own an iphone 4, which i use every day, and an ipad that i use mostly for pdf reading. i use an evoluent vertical mouse at both work and home. and what software? i mostly work in adobe dreamweaver and photoshop. the text editors i use for scripting are notepad++ (windows) and textwrangler (mac), both of which are free. my favorite sftp programs are winscp (windows) and cyberduck (mac). i have been quite tempted to purchase textmate and transmit for a while. so i may purchase those sooner or later. i rely on xampp and mamp for testing server-side scripts on my local machine. firebug and colorzilla are the two firefox extensions that i most frequently use. i also occasionally use live http headers (firefox extension) to troubleshoot access issues with e-resources. i heavily use firefox for web design and development work, but for general web browsing i prefer chrome for its speed. i heavily use iphone simulator for mobile web app development. for creating instructional materials, i use jing, fireshot (firefox extension for windows), screenjelly, camtasia, audacity, and garageband for screen capture, screencasting, and video and audio editing. i use dropbox on all my computers including my mobile devices. the apps that i most frequently use aside from mail, calendar, and ipod are dropbox, good reader, and iannotate on my ipad and twitter, ps (photoshop) express, podcaster, facebook, audiobooks, twc (the weather channel), and stanza, and dropbox on my iphone 4. i love playing with note apps although i am a terrible note taker. among many note apps, i love push+pop for its extremely simple interface. i also have several games on my iphone, and my recent favorite is superquadra and frict. i have been trying to revive my long-lost doodling ability after listening to the inspiring talk about doodle revolution by sunni brown at the big web show and ted. but so far, i haven’t gotten much beyond purchasing the brushes app and drawing a few palm trees and dogs! what would be your dream setup? as far as available hardware goes, i would like a macbook air with a 27″ cinema display and a mac mini on the side with the fastest processor and the largest ram possible. for things that do not exist yet, i want a foldable and rollable paper-thin touch-screen computer that can be charged wirelessly with the projection keyboard feature. emily lloyd associate librarian, eden prairie library who are you, and what do you do? i’m emily lloyd, an associate librarian with a large public library system, a mom to a teen and a tween, and the author of shelf check, a librar* comic and/or blog. some of my interests right now include the idea of spontaneous library programming and librarians as lifehackers for their communities, as well as the possibility of libraries offering library-published original or curated free ebooks to members. why limit our ebook offerings to our overdrive collections when e-publishing is so easy and free? we could partner with local historical societies for an e-volume of local lore, or publish a collection of our staff’s favorite public domain stories, or an anthology of poems or humorous essays by staff or teens from our teen advisory groups, etc. what hardware are you using? i have a dell inspiron 1525 laptop. i’ve had it about two years, and it’s my first new, not hand-me-down laptop, a gift from my mom. it’s fine, but could be faster. since mid-august, i’ve had a wi-fi-only barnes & noble nook. i use it for library books, the occasional purchase (i was able to download mockingjay at 11:00 p.m. when it was released at midnight est! [i’m in central]), and (most heavily) with instapaper for reading longer articles and blog posts. outside of the slow start-up time, i think it’s great, and really like the way it feels in my hands. i don’t have a smart phone yet, but i bought a 3rd-gen ipod touch last spring so i wouldn’t feel completely out of the loop when it comes to trying out apps (backfire note: i still feel out of the loop, since many of the apps i’m most interested in require a camera that the touch doesn’t have). i used the touch as an ereader before i got the nook, and continue to use it for free books from feedbooks via stanza. and what software? google docs. itunes. skype. there isn’t much i don’t do online or in-browser. blogger, google reader, delicious. twitter. i make shelf check at toondoo, a free strip-building site i’m very grateful for, supplementing their clip-art style graphics with things i slap together at picnik (also free). i use picnik a lot for library book display signage as well. for browsing, i use chrome and make frequent use of talon, aviary’s brilliant screen capture extension, which lets you edit your capture in-browser. at work, we recently upgraded to office 2007, and added audacity and gimp to all public computers. i’m excited to spend more time with them. what would be your dream setup? unfettered access to a great tech zoo. i don’t feel i need to own things so much as i feel that not being able to play and spend time with them is becoming a liability. i’m thinking of trying to start up a kind of tech gear co-op, either neighborhood or workplace-based, where you can take my nook home for a week (i don’t think a weekend’s enough) and try checking out a library book, and i can take your macbook and camera home and try out imovie. or even something as simple as a “bring your gear to work day” or staff meeting, where we lay all our stuff out and teach each other the basics about it. clifford lynch director of the coalition for networked information who are you and what do you do? i’m clifford lynch. i’m the director of the coalition for networked information; i’m also an adjunct professor at the university of california, berkeley school of information. in terms of computing-supported work, this means that i deal with vast amounts of email, spend a lot of time looking at various kinds of things on the net, experimenting with various software and services, and editing or commenting on documents. i struggle to get original writing done, and to mange the research materials that underpin this. and i’m on the road almost all the time, so portability and reliability are very important. what hardware are you using? i’ve had apple powerbooks for years and years; i’m currently on a 13 inch aluminum macbook pro that’s about a year old, with a solid state drive replacing the hard drive and the memory maxed out to 8 gb. these machines are finally at the point where you can put enough memory on them so they aren’t memory constrained (at least for what i do), which is really nice. i don’t use an external monitor; i have an assortment of external drives in various places as one level of backup. and handy access to a good duplexing laser printer (i’ve been using hps for the last seven or eight years) is important. i don’t use a lot of gadgets at present: for example, i have a boring quad-band unlocked cell phone that basically makes phone calls and roams internationally pretty gracefully. though in due course i suspect i’ll end up on an iphone or something like that. and what software? of course the usual stuff: os x, safari and firefox, microsoft office. i should say that the current trends towards very highly integrated software systems scares me to death and i try to avoid it (update your browser, and your mail and calendar suddenly break!). for email i’m still on classic, now four years unsupported, eudora, and live in fear that it will suddenly stop working when apple updates the operating system. the good news is there are some promising successors coming along, albeit slowly. i use meeting maker for calendaring, and an absolutely fabulous, indispensable program called circusponies notebook for note taking, list making, and organizing. there’s lots of other software i’m experimenting with on an ongoing basis, including various word processors and text editors, and systems like mathematica, netlogo, and tex that i’d like to really master someday. and i still haven’t found a solution i’m fully happy with for bibliography management and organizing the masses of papers, reports and other documents that i have on my local drive that have been downloaded from the net. what would be your dream setup? in terms of hardware, i feel like i’m in pretty good shape, finally; i don’t feel like my laptop is severely underpowered for the basic work that i’m trying to get done. i do find some of the apple product line trade-offs between capability and portability frustrating—the laptops with the bigger screens are consistently much more capable, and i keep wishing they’d couple the computational and storage capabilities less tightly to the screen size for those of us who prize a small footprint. i miss the non-glare screens that apple used to use, and battery life can always be improved—particularly now that you can’t just pack an extra battery. network speed, ubiquity, and cost are real issues for me. i wish i could count on fast reliable wireless, backed up by fast backbone network connectivity (think about hotels, where the wireless is ok but everybody then bottlenecks onto a single t1 line out of the hotel)—everywhere and affordable. this is a particular nightmare when traveling abroad, but it’s bad even in the us. this is a major barrier to making more integral use of cloud services of various kinds (even basic things like backup; i do use this, but only as part of a broader strategy). in terms of software, i think there’s still tons of room for progress towards a dream configuration. and let me close with a plug for content. availability of journal articles in digital form is pretty good, and this is a huge boon when doing research. i can’t wait for the day when i can get the vast majority of the books that i have in hardcopy digitally so that i can put selected books on my hard drive, search them and annotate them when i’m working on writing something. sarah murphy school librarian and desk set co-founder who are you, and what do you do? i am sarah murphy, and i’m a school librarian at an independent k-12 boys’ school in manhattan. in 2006, maria falgoust and i co-founded the desk set, a fund raising, party throwing organization of librarians and bibliophiles. i live in brooklyn. what hardware are you using? at home, i use my laptop—a macbook—and when i choose “about this mac,” i discover that it’s a macbook 4.1 with an intel core 2 duo speeding along at 2.4 ghz. i have an 8gb ipod touch to carry around music and photos, and check the web when i’m lucky enough to hit a wi-fi spot. for playing music, i’m considerably more fond of my circa 1955 magnavox console turntable. i adore my decade-old canon canoscan which lets me make flyers (or my own wedding invitations) using paper and other physical media (like scrabble tiles!) and still distribute them like a proper 21st-century gal who wants to avoid extra waste and cost. and to supplement all of this, i’ve got a ten-dollar phone that doesn’t even take pictures. so, if i need to capture the moment, i might borrow my husband’s canon rebel xs or i’ll use my super rad diana+ from lomography (a gift from some of my desk set pals). at work, i’m primarily hooked to a 21.5-inch 3.06 ghz imac, and i often teach lessons using a smart sb660i3 smart board ® 600i interactive whiteboard system and uf55 projector. i’m circulating 24 dell 2100 netbooks, 4 macbooks, and 2 ipads. and what software? most of what i do happens online, and my browser of choice is firefox. at work, when i’m not teaching, i’m usually staring at either our online library catalog (destiny library manager from follett) or my email (.edu mail powered by gmail). at both home and work i’ve more or less ditched ms office in favor of google docs. and i can’t get through the day without my google calendar. the netbooks run ubuntu, and i encourage the students to use google docs rather than open office. when they return the netbooks, i’d rather not have to worry about what files they leave behind: when all their work is in their email, it disappears when they log off. the desk set has a blog powered by wordpress, and the blogs at school also happen to be from wordpress. and i’m pretty wild about imovie for library instructional videos starring fourth graders, or for video invitations for desk set events. when screenplays are required, i’m happy to use celtx, mostly because it’s free, but also because screenplays for fourth graders don’t really require final draft. what would be your dream setup? i am fairly satisfied with what i’ve got, but i admit that i’m sort of loving the ipads at school and would love one of my own. but i wouldn’t use it for its (very nice) kindle app or its (also ok) ibooks app, because my ideal setup for reading is still the book. honestly, i’d love to ditch everything digital all together. my eyes have been more strained lately and i often feel like i spend most of my time writing and reading emails about what i’m going to do, and very rarely ever do anything. so my ideal ideal setup would be a house full of printed books, the aforementioned magnavox, and a bottle of wine. kenley neufeld library director, santa barbara city college who are you, and what do you do? my name is kenley and i like to explore new ideas, play, listen to music, sit in meditation, and do my best to help others. if i can listen, to myself and to others, then i’m on the right track. if i can “be present” and bring “awareness” to all my actions then what i do is what i am doing. that said, i recently came across a seth godin discussion on what we should be doing in our organizations. i like what he wrote. my job should be seeing new opportunities, making decisions that work, and understanding the connection between my audience, brand, and ventures. i try to apply this in my work life where i serve as the library director of a large community college library in santa barbara. it’s a great place to arrive every day. it has a motivated, passionate, and supportive staff. what a difference that makes! what hardware are you using? main device (appendage?) is my iphone 4. wow, what a device! when using a full size computer, at home and in the office, i have a 15″ macbook pro (2.8 ghz intel core 2 duo and 4 gb) running snow leopard (and windows 7 via parallels 5 as needed) with an attached 24″ apple cinema display. blue snowball microphone and g drive for backups. my ipad comes in handy when going to meetings or the coffee shop. and what software? on the iphone, i love using gowalla, foursquare, and facebook. safari and calendar are the close follow-ups. hipstamatic camera app for taking fun pictures. 1password for tracking my virtual wallet and passwords. the mbp keeps chrome and firefox open all the time. i use the dev version of chrome and am also testing firefox 4. some sites that i use don’t work well in chrome (my preferred browser) and by having firefox open and available i can easily switch over to the other browser. also, i have two different google accounts that i use and prefer to keep them open in different browsers. tweetdeck appears when i can support the time. in the background is adium, skype, dropbox, and jing. 1password for fast logging in to websites. my ipad needs to have other functionality so i use iannotate pdf, instapaper, goodreader, im+, and tweetings. 1password is a must, again. overall, i spend quite a bit of time with web apps. i’ve lived in gmail for most of the last six years. all my calendars are in google, but i have them connected with my iphone and ipad using the google/exchange option. pay for mog for my music listening needs. wordpress is the bomb. what would be your dream setup? i’ve worked pretty hard at setting up systems that meet my needs. the laptop needs to stay small enough to travel, but large enough to work at the desktop. it’d be nice to have a second cinema display on the desktop. still waiting for the ideal audio storage and playback system in the cloud. nothing quite has the mix right… cost, speed, ease of use, integration with existing tools, etc. an android to play with and explore carlos ovalle computer systems developer, university of texas, austin who are you, and what do you do? i’m carlos ovalle. i’m an it person, doctoral student, and occasional lecturer at the university of texas at austin’s ischool. i offer various types of tech support and run the it lab. i teach an undergraduate class called information in cyberspace. i study technology and law (especially copyright) and try to figure out how these things affect the practices of cultural institutions like libraries, archives, and museums, and maybe have suggestions for various groups about those subjects. i’m an american library association copyright scholar, and i try to help answer librarians’ questions about copyright at the website i helped build at librarycopyright.net. i’m on the board of eff-austin. i’m working on my qualifying paper and some other projects involving some local archives and museums. also, i play games when i have time. sadly, that isn’t too often recently, but my wife and i are on the library guild in wow. what hardware are you using? my work desktop is an older system, but i really like it: a dell precision pws380, pentium d 3.20 ghz, 4 gb of ram, 500 gb hard drive using raid 5 (basically, 3 hard drives striping, so that if one fails it can be replaced—that has saved me on multiple occasions). i also occasionally use a dell mini 10v or a macbook pro. home personal computers: dell xps 6301. intel core2 quad, 3 ghz, 8 gb ram running 64-bit windows 7 ultimate, nvidia geforce gtx 285 video card, 750 gb hard drive. that’s supposed to be my gaming/high processing computer, but in all honesty it gets used the least of any of my systems. i mainly use this one when i want to hole up in a room and do a ton of academic work. the computer i use the most often is my laptop, a dell vostro 1720 with an intel core2 duo, 2.66 ghz, 8 gb 64-bit windows vista, nvidia geforce 9600m gs video card and 500 gb hard drive. i use it for absolutely everything. the latter are the newest systems; they’re a bit of overkill for what i ordinarily do with them, but i expect them to last 4-6 years without much problem. the rest of the systems i mentioned are probably 5-6 years old, but still very usable. my newest project is going to be getting ubuntu running on a six-year-old precision. and what software? lots. i try to be at least familiar with everything we have in the lab. i regularly use windows oss because i support them, and i run xp, vista, and 7 on my various systems. although a coworker does most of the mac stuff, i do try to keep familiar with os x for the times i support it. this second, i’m using ssh secure shell client to connect to a red hat server and using alpine to check my email. i’ve got about 40 or so firefox tabs in five windows. i’ve got skype and pidgin running for im, and winamp pro for music. i’ve got excel and word open for a research paper i’m collaborating on. what would be your dream setup? dream—two main systems. for a desktop, up the ram, processor, and graphics card on my xps system, and since i’m dreaming, also have it be a lot quieter. plus a giant monitor, naturally. the biggest problem i regularly face is with my laptop cooling. i’ve had to purchase a cooling pad, and it still overheats regularly. so a fairly high-end laptop that doesn’t suffer from cooling problems is like a dream right now. dan scott systems librarian, laurentian university who are you, and what do you do? hi, i’m dan scott, a decrepit 38-year-old systems librarian at laurentian university. i spend an inordinate amount of time trying to help the evergreen free software library system project on most fronts: features, bug fixes, community, and ease of use. i also maintain the file_marc php library for reading and writing marc records. what hardware are you using? most of my time is spent on a lenovo thinkpad t400 with a dual-core 64-bit processor, 3 gb of ram, and a 500 gb 7200 rpm hard drive (i buy a 3rd party hard drive and swap it in myself rather than paying the crazy premium that the manufacturer would demand). i never use an external monitor, and i disable the trackpad in the bios—i love the nipple—but i do plug in a stock external lenovo mouse and keyboard when i’m at the office. i’ve used thinkpads for ten years; i blame my previous career with ibm for getting me hooked. coffee|code runs on a linode virtual private server with 512 mb of ram and 16 gb of storage. my htc nexus one phone is my truly mobile computer; having email, a full web browsing experience, and gps navigation continuously available changes things. i own my phone outright, so i was able to switch to a local sim when i spent two weeks in amsterdam and got unlimited data for €2.50/day. in the last two weeks i relied on the phone’s ability to act as a wi-fi hotspot while working at a cottage without an internet connection, and then again for a few more days when i returned home and found my dsl connection was dead. the 3g speed on the phone is as fast as my dsl connection—hard to believe that i used to use a 300 baud modem to connect to the world. i also use the phone to read books to my daughter at night; we just finished alice in wonderland and are moving on to through the looking glass. the nexus one has also taken over most of my on-the-go media consumption needs, but when i’m traveling light or conserving batteries i’m very happy with my 8 gb sansa clip+ with an additional 8 gb microsd card. it has a tiny form factor, long battery life, and supports ogg vorbis and flac, which is how i’ve stored most of my music collection. i ride a 2008 norco nitro (hardtail, hydraulic discs) and occasionally take advantage of the great trails in sudbury, but usually it suffers the indignity of being used for commuting. and what software? i’m currently running fedora 13 on the laptop. linux has been my primary desktop for over a dozen years. i’ve been a gnome user for the last few years; before that i was a kde user (during the halcyon kde 3 days), and before that i ran windowmaker. the software behind the coffee|code blog is serendipity. i run “screen” on every server so that random network problems don’t really interfere with my work. i use mutt for email, and i use libreoffice to create presentations or when people send me microsoft word or excel documents. i use keepassx for password management on my laptop and synchronize the password database with my phone running keepassdroid. i run virtualbox ose (open source edition) as distributed in the fedora packages so that i can build and test virtual images of evergreen on other distributions such as debian and ubuntu, and occasionally to test software on a windows xp (ugh) virtual image. i mostly program in perl,javascript, and php using the vim text editor and subversion repositories. i write tutorials and documentation in asciidoc and store those in bazaar repositories. for web browsing and web development, i’m pretty much evenly split between firefox + firebug + noscript and chromium. neither browser helps with the hell that is debugging internet explorer, though. for communication, my primary tool is the xchat irc client for staying in touch with #code4lib and #evergreen on freenode. i also run empathy so that people who aren’t library geeks can contact me via various instant messaging protocols. i fairly obsessively use the standard web interface to communicate on the identi.ca microblog service, and very rarely i check in on twitter. for a podcatcher, gpodder is the bomb. what would be your dream setup? i downsized from a 15″ laptop to a 14″ laptop, but was surprised that it was a 14″ widescreen—which ended up having approximately the same footprint as my old laptop. my first thinkpad was a 13″ ultra-portable; i would happily go back to that form factor if i didn’t have to sacrifice the processor, ram, hard drive capacity, or battery life. it looks like the thinkpad x201 line is what i would be dreaming about currently. throw in a decent port replicator and a dual-monitor setup; i’m sure i could get used to it. i would ideally be using that setup to work on free software written in python, stored in a distributed version control system, bolstered by a rich set of unit sets and solid documentation. cindi trainor head of library technology, eastern kentucky university who are you, and what do you do? i’m cindi, and i’m a librarian. i’m also a mom, wife, student, photographer, crocheter, runner, reader, and writer. i work at eastern kentucky university currently, where i’m the head of the library technology division. the word “division” is a little heavy to describe my fantastic five, who keep all the technology in the libraries (from sfx to the public pcs and everything in between) a-humming along as best we can. which is to say that we set it up, and when it breaks, we fix it. like many librarians responsible for technology, i’m an accidental technologist. my current favorite distraction—aside from crocheting and running—is watching dr. who. what hardware are you using? my work computer is a 13″ macbook, which i love and take everywhere with me. at home, i have a 24″ imac. i shoot primarily with a canon 5d and the f2.8 24-70 mm, f2.8 70-200 mm and f1.8 85mm lenses. i use the 24-70 mm lens for most shooting, but the best portraits come with the 85mm lens, which yields sharp images with vibrant color and butter-soft bokeh (the out-of-focus background that makes the subject pop!). fantastic! i have experimented with off-camera lighting using the ultra-portable kit recommended by the strobist blog including the canon 580ex, canon st-e2 flash trigger, and westcott collapsible umbrella—but mostly rely on natural light for shooting. and what software? connecting: tweetdeck, chrome, adium writing: wordpress, scrivener, google documents shooting: flickr, photoshop, lightroom, picnik, iphoto chilling: last.fm, grooveshark, and pandora roaming: lamely enough, i still have a dumb phone. someday, my distracted driving will be web-based and gps-guided. i kid! what would be your dream setup? i would love to have a canon 5d mark ii, but by the time i buy a new camera i bet there will be something even better available. my next camera-related purchase will probably be another l-glass lens. now that i have a camera that can shoot acceptably in isos above 100 (the rebel i had really couldn’t), i don’t have to rely so heavily on lenses with huge apertures. when i eventually get better training on studio lighting, i’d like to own a cloth backdrop and a few studio lights. if i ever decide to move on from librarianship, my absolute dream job would be to be the presidential photographer, provided that by the time i get around to it, the president is still someone i like. more realistically, i’d probably be content shooting and writing for a publication of some kind. dee venuto media services coordinator, rancocas valley regional high school who are you, and what do you do? for almost 20 years i’ve been a teacher librarian. for the past three years, i’ve served a wonderfully diverse and large population as the media center coordinator at rancocas valley regional high school in mount holly, new jersey. most of my technology choices are based on creating relevant experiences for my students and networking with individuals interested in the library world. recently, a challenge led by the county chapter of glenn beck’s project 9/12 group resulted in the banning of our school’s copy of amy sonnie’s revolutionary voices, an anthology of writings by lgbtq individuals. this threw my career into a new direction: i now find myself an advocate for intellectual freedom and spending more time working on our nation’s growing digital/educational divide. whether presenting at ala or working as a member of the state library cooperative board of new jersey, i hope to offer insight that helps all types of libraries collaborate for the benefit of our profession and patrons. what hardware are you using? i regularly use a hp 8510w notebook with windows xp. although quite heavy, it easily travels to and from work with me and offers me security when presenting in other locations. the lab in my library uses vista and offers me another experience. at home, i’m addicted to the wireless laptop, much to the chagrin of my family, but am integrating the ipad too. in addition, anticipating the purchase of macs at our school i’ve started to play with a macbook pro. and what software? facebook, twitter, gmail, microsoft outlook, google docs, primitive website design using our school’s provider, delicious, noodletools (checked out zotero, but my students and i aren’t ready for that), smartnotebook, prezi, windows movie maker, powerpoint, professional listservs, firefox, safari, research databases, yahoo im, and itunes. as always there are plans to learn new things really soon such as tweetdeck and ilife, with possibly ning on the horizon. what would be your dream setup? besides being shown a source that outlined exactly which technologies would best serve my students’ needs, i would love to have a second 30-station imac lab in our library—complete with dual platform capabilities—so i could teach students how to create content using ilife or movie maker with information from their own devices (phones, mp3 players) or the library’s. i also dream of an educational system that allows this to happen by catching up to its 21st century learners and integrating a curriculum which gives them skills in the ethical use of technology. personally, i entertain the idea of an iphone or droid, but really don’t think i should be plugged in anymore than i am. brett bonfield library director, collingswood (nj) public library who are you, and what do you do? i’m the director of the collingswood (nj) public library and a part-time phd candidate at the rutgers library school in new brunswick, nj. i’m also a co-founder and editor at in the library with the lead pipe, treasurer for the new jersey library association, and i work on a couple of presidential task forces for the american library association. outside of work, i’m a wedding officiant, a barefoot runner, and a certified yoga teacher. what hardware are you using? my primary home computer is a new apple imac (21.5-inch, 3.2 ghz, 4 gb), which we bought in august to replace a dell poweredge 600sc (pentium 4 2.4ghz, 2gb, sceptre x7 monitor) we’ve had since 2002. the imac is my first apple computer and so far i’m very impressed. i got it, in part, because i’m so taken with my 8 mb ipod touch, which i use all the time. my laptop is a first generation pangolin value from system76, an independent computer vendor out of colorado that sells ubuntu machines and provides very good customer support as well. we bought it in 2006 and it’s still going strong, though if i had the purchase to do over again i would have gotten a much lighter machine. at work, i use a white label pc (pentium 4 2.8 ghz and 2 gb) sold to the library by an independent, local computer vendor a year or so before i got here. dealing with its finicky motherboard sold me forever on kingston memory, as much for its customer service as for its products. my camera is a samsung sl270, though i’m a terrible photographer and, as i discovered when using its hd video mode, an even worse videographer. i also have a long-discontinued and practically invulnerable nokia cell phone on a prepaid t-mobile plan (the next best thing to my dream of not having a cell phone at all). and what software? i like and rely on dropbox, firefox, google docs, gmail, pinboard, lastpass, libreoffice, photoshop, vlc, and the three-headed notes team of simplenote (for touch and synchronizing), notational velocity (mac desktop client), and resophnotes (windows desktop and portable client). on windows, i’m a fan of 7-zip, foobar2000, notepad++, putty, winscp, and microsoft excel and word (2003 and earlier), and security essentials. on os x, i’m a fan of cyberduck, itunes, and skim, and i really like safari, stanza, icombinator, and hacker news mobile on my touch. i’m trying to learn vim yet again, this time by choosing macvim over textedit as often as possible. if vim finally takes, i’ll owe a big debt to yehuda katz. i like chrome (especially its developer tools) and safari, but almost never use them now that i’m in school and rely on zotero, which is only available for firefox. fortunately, almost everything i like about the other browsers is now available for firefox as well (and sometimes exclusively), including private browsing mode, smart keywords, sync, adblock, betterprivacy, https-everywhere, instaright, link widgets, optimizegoogle, readability, and scrollbar anywhere. i also use and appreciate firebug, flashblock, and noscript, though i’d like to find a way to be less aware that i’m using them. for maintaining the library’s vista-based public workstations i depend on ninite to keep the software up to date and steadystate to maintain security and set session time outs. i’d like to upgrade from vista to windows 7, but windows 7 doesn’t support steadystate and i won’t upgrade without it. the collingswood public library’s website (including its catalog) run on the wordpress-based scriblio, and wordpress is the platform for in the library with the lead pipe as well. i use wordpress.com and feedburner to maintain the email list and send out the newsletter for my wife’s yoga studio, and mad mimi for the collingswood public library’s list. i host rss2email on my own server and send all my feeds to gmail. i’m also playing around with tweetbymail, so i can interact with twitter via gmail. the fewer interfaces i have to deal with, the better. what would be your dream setup? most interface/platform improvements don’t mean much to me. cpu speeds have long surpassed my cognitive limitations, and interfaces have been good enough for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when i wanted them to be more responsive. if anything, i tend to consciously slow down how fast i speak and type so that i don’t say or write something i haven’t thought all the way through. meanwhile, i’m assimilating new information ever more slowly. what would really impress me would be ways to seamlessly provide privacy and security in networked environments. for instance, i would really like to have access to a wireless mesh network, like the one being developed by the one laptop per child project. i also dream of libraries wholeheartedly adopting tor (or, perhaps, vpn or ssh tunneling), which would require two complementary initiatives: making tor faster by installing relays on library servers, and spreading the word on what it does and how to use it—which may have the salutary effect of educating people about the relevance of libraries’ longstanding commitment to privacy. afterword five years ago, before i had started researching library schools i might want to attend, i didn’t know much about librarianship. i think i would have been surprised by the phrase “library and information science.” what did one have to do with the other? like many technologists, i may have had some vague notion that librarians had something to contribute to discussions about information and metadata and standards and access, but my concept of what librarians did and what they knew probably had more to do with stereotypes and anecdote than on an understanding of reality. which is a shame. although in the last few years i think we’ve done a really good job of making clearer connections between libraries and technology, i don’t think anyone is surprised when librarians are omitted from discussions about and between prominent technologists, such as the one facilitated by the setup. (note: by “librarians” i mean anyone who works in, with, or for libraries. hat tip to eli neiburger for saying what i’d been thinking, only less clearly, for some time before he said those words out loud.) i love the setup. it’s a great publication, it’s beautifully designed, the questions are perfect, and the interview roll includes many of the techies i most admire, along with many others who i hadn’t heard of by name before they appeared but whose answers were fun and instructive. although i’m not surprised that no librarians have been included in the setup, i thought it would be useful to see if librarians would be as interesting to interview as people who work in professions that are more generally perceived as it. that’s for you to decide, but i think the answer is yes. i started this project with high expectations, and every one of the librarians i interviewed exceeded them. thanks to all participants for their answers and great photos, and thanks to daniel bogan for starting and running the setup, for giving it a creative commons license, and for agreeing to serve as a reader for this piece. thanks also to chris boetticher for his photo-editing wizardry, to my lead pipe colleague, eric frierson, for reading and commenting on this post in draft form, and to derik badman, laurel bliss, ellie collier, hilary davis, allie flannery, emily ford, aj johnson, cindy phillips, jean rainwater, and marcellus turner for suggesting people for me to interview. finally, thanks to derik badman for last-minute troubleshooting—either wordpress or our host choked on this post and i had to go directly into mysql to take it live, a task made much easier by my new friend, sequel pro. hardware, interviews, profiles, setup, software, technology #hacklibschool x 6 responses ahniwa ferrari 2010–10–27 at 10:09 am wow, i’m in such great company here! thanks for including me, brett. the article looks great and there are some amazing individuals here. micah vandegrift 2010–10–27 at 10:58 pm this is an amazing post. i always love seeing how other people are using tech as tools to manage work/life, and i have taken quite a few notes from thus post. allisoni’d suggest you look into dapper for scraping rss from sites that don’t have a feed. pretty cool tool. also, i’m working on a massive, yahoo-piped, post ranked, library/museum blog rss aggregator function opml thingy that i think could be insanely useful to many if us in the field who want to keep an ear to the ground without investing hours per day playing catch up. stay in touch and i’ll share when it’s up and running. the.effing.librarian 2010–10–29 at 1:24 pm my dream setup would be to go back to 1975. no. 2 pencil. legal pad. ibm selectric. desk phone: 2 lines. radio shack 8-track tape player: bto ii. marlboros. emily ford 2010–10–30 at 12:04 pm i am also a evoluent vertical mouse user at work and at home, like bohyun. i’ve also made good use of the logitech usb headsets in the past, for narrating camtasia videos. the other thing that has been a lifesaver, since i’ve been playing musical cubicles at work, is my set of shure sound isolating ear phones. it’s the only way i get anything done in my work environment. evgeny suslikov 2011–11–26 at 2:04 am dear sirs, i’m the developer of fireshot webpage capture plugin and i found that the homepage link to fireshot specified at your webpage is not correct. i’d greatly appreciate if you could change it to http://screenshot-program.com/fireshot instead. if you’re interested in a free fireshot pro key, kindly please let me know. thank you! pingback : » the setup tech in the trenches this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct following the yik yak: using social media observations to understand student needs on college campuses – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 12 jul celia emmelhainz and miriam rigby /3 comments following the yik yak: using social media observations to understand student needs on college campuses in brief: what can social media tell us about our patrons? we look at yik yak through the lens of library ethnography, suggesting that anonymous social media can reveal not only complaints and commentary about library services and spaces, but also uncover students’ emotional and social experience with research and study space. looking at social media posts on yik yak, we uncover common threads of social dynamics, expectations of quiet space, and frustration with studying, all of which increase our understanding of student experiences in us and international libraries. by celia emmelhainz and miriam rigby parseltongue in the library, screenshot by celia emmelhainz, cc-by introduction as librarians, we always want to better understand and connect with our patrons—and to use our understanding to set up more useful spaces and services. in the past 10 years, librarians have moved from relying on user surveys to working with anthropologists and ethnographically-trained librarians. these collaborations let us learn not just what our users say to our face, but what they actually do—and how they live their lives in relation to the library as a space and social place. ethnographic methods provide librarians with a series of approaches that let us see our libraries in their social context.1 these could include things such as inhabiting study spaces and watching the social habits of patrons in our library, observing spatial usage and leading mapping exercises with students, embedding in research methods or capstone seminar courses to observe how library research is taught, and even inviting students to document their own experiences through photos, videos, and research diaries.2 such ethnographic methods differ from the “interviews and surveys” baseline of qualitative user experience research in libraries, as ethnographic methods can allow us to embed over time in our users’ social and virtual spaces. inhabiting the same world that our students inhabit can lead us to much deeper understanding than just recording their reported experiences through surveys, focus groups, or interviews alone.   in this article, we take another ethnographic angle, that of digital ethnography. by collecting and reflecting on changing social media posts, we as researchers use the internet to observe–in real time–how patrons discuss their engagement with the library. anonymous, location-based services like yik yak let us practice trace ethnography, observing the times, places, and digital traces by which students express their relationship to the library.3 one puzzle for us was that whether we run qualitative or quantitative studies, our libraries still find it hard to gain feedback from those who do not currently use our services.4 how can we know what people are thinking if they don’t share their thoughts? how can we learn what students need if they don’t darken our revolving doors, use our website, or volunteer for a research study with a side incentive of pizza? and even when patrons complete an interview or survey, do they realize they’re editing their thoughts—perhaps based on a desire to be polite and helpful to us as librarians? using social media apps to reach out and listen to students with this in mind, we chose to gain a new angle on our libraries by analyzing anonymous and ephemeral social media posts on yik yak. public, school, and academic librarians already use social media such as twitter and facebook to gain feedback from tech-savvy users.5 yet trend-responsive patrons are always moving from one network to another. a prior generation left tribe, friendster, and myspace for facebook, while today’s students may leave shell profiles on facebook, while using other apps in order to avoid parents, teachers, and corporate advertisers.6 one student at ut austin describes facebook as “dead to us” and an “awkward family dinner party,”7 noting that his friends now enjoy medium, groupme, whatsapp, tumblr, and snapchat instead. as younger patrons leave networks like facebook, they move to ephemeral social media such as snapchat, where messages disappear after viewing;8 instagram, where they curate daily life for a wide audience;9 whisper, where they anonymously share their “secrets” with those nearby; and yik yak, a source of anonymous chatter on many college campuses.   while instagram remains strong, though, most apps are ephemeral. they move in and out of popularity, with posts fading out over minutes, hours, or days. in fact, yik yak itself announced in april 2017 that it is ceasing operations.10 we argue, though, that capturing these passing streams of student experiences in the library continues to have value. like culture as a social construct, social discourse on social media apps is both passing and long-lasting in impact. so why pay attention to passing trends, and how can we capture lasting value from these ephemeral posts? listening to campus yaks at the time we reviewed each of these apps in 2015, yik yak was reaching the height of its popularity. discussions of the pros and cons of social media were appearing regularly in the chronicle of higher education and inside higher ed. among those apps existing at the time, we found yik yak’s comments on campus life to be the most revealing in understanding our patrons. started by two graduates of furman university, yik yak was a mobile app that launched in 2013 and gained rapid popularity on and near college campuses, as well as some high schools.11 it let users within a few miles12 share anonymous, wry comments on daily life, and allowed other users to upvote or downvote existing posts, as well as add their own responses and commentary. as we found with yik yak, anyone with a smartphone or tablet can view campus chatter, from hookup requests and dorm party announcements, to bathroom humor, complaints about homework, and anguish over life and relationships.13 bonded with the people near me, screenshot by celia emmelhainz, cc-by lessons from yaks in the wild the authors had a unique opportunity for research when we found ourselves snowbound together during ala midwinter 2015. as blizzard-like winds blew across chicago, we ensconced ourselves indoors and surveyed over 10,000 “yaks” posted at 60 public, private, and religious universities across north america. using yik yak’s “peek” feature to see campuses besides our own, we collected anonymous, public posts by students in the vicinity of major campuses. methodological discussions of the ethics of performing ethnography online differ in whether to inform subjects, often depending on the nature of the research, topics of study, and expectations of privacy involved. in this case we determined that the brief nature of comments on the library, full anonymity of users, ephemeral nature of posts, and public availability to any smartphone user worldwide all reduced student expectations of privacy as well as the risk of harm. further, we found no way to directly contact users, and are now quoting posts not tied to any specific user, and which no longer exist except in our screenshots.14 this sample was collected on sunday, 1 february, 2015 between 5pm-2am est, and included posts about academic libraries from hawai’i to london, although primarily in the united states. because the app lacked a search feature, we scrolled through both the 100 most “recent” yaks, which last until voted down, and the 100 most popular (liked) yaks, which last several days until they time out of the system.15 while users can save images to their phones, most posts disappear within two to three days. the timing for our survey was excellent: on some campuses, it was the sunday before midterms; on others students were returning from winter break or anticipating a snow day, and many were balancing studying with parties for the super bowl. these varied conditions gave us a wide cross-section of student experiences as they prepared for a coming week on campus. we searched by name for campuses that would give us a range of insights, and content varied widely. on some campuses we found just one or two yaks referencing the library among 200 recent and popular posts. at others, the library was not mentioned (and so they are not included in our sample). in other words, libraries comprise a small slice of youthful online commentary—less popular than hookups and pizza, but important enough to occasionally bubble up in student chatter. in reviewing sixty library-related yaks, we found forty that fell into four thematic clusters, including the library as study space, the library as site of suffering, and the library as social space, as well as students commenting in a way that suggested (to us as librarians!) a need for research support and information literacy training. 1. libraries as a quiet study space many students framed their local library as a quiet space in which to study. for example: pomona: shoutout to the people rushing to the library after super bowl ends #workhardplayhard endicott: sunday is supposed to be a day to relax and yet it’s my busiest and most stressful day oregon: the library should have an adderall vending machine michigan: are any libs open tomorrow? where are we supposed to study if the libraries are closed [for a snow day]? oberlin: is mudd open? i actually have stuff to prepare for the first day of class and reading marxian philosophy is really hard with chatter and rap in the background new mexico: where can i get free pizza today? since i’m stationed in the library today bates: the library is nice and quiet. thanks super bowl! yet this desire for a focused study space led others to express frustration with patrons who were talking… or breathing loudly. boston: please don’t breathe so loudly in the library british columbia: why are u here, girls that come to koerner to socialize and talk super loud? bates: that glare you give when you’re in the library and you hear people outside your window having fun brigham young: since when is it okay to hum in the library? carleton: the person behind me on 3rd libe is panting profusely, wtf? ucl, london: when the guy next to you is whispering his essay aloud in the library, and it sounds like parseltongue in other words, in contrast to libraries’ attempts to open up interactive study spaces, many students were frustrated by the noise levels and distracting patrons around them. students’ highly emotional responses to these issues online suggests the need for more quiet student study spaces–something that libraries such as colby college have implemented as the result of library observations, interviews, and ethnographic projects. 2. libraries as a site of suffering while students appreciated the library as a quiet study space, they also expressed ambivalent feelings about studying in the context of a university library. of course, we attempt to make the library a welcoming space, yet students still feel a range of internal affective experiences as they study. because this momentary experience is not be captured in library surveys, we find social media all the more useful to help us grasp the quiet struggle going on in front of us, in carrels and at tables where students wrestle with the tension between getting work done and wanting to relax: colby: nothing worse than seeing other people from your class leaving miller while you’re stuck there with so much left to do pittsburgh: opens up courseweb and sees 25 notifications, closes laptop and cries oxford, uk: hate it when a procession of tourists come through the library. makes me feel like an exhibit in the world’s most boring zoo charleston college: i’ll be suffering in the library studying for my cellular biology exam tomorrow if you need me berkeley: frustrated guy next to me in the library just threw down his pen and sighed so hard he farted. me too, bruh carleton: things the libe doesn’t have: heat, wifi. things the libe does have: books on the origins of hats ohio state: the walk to the library is the boulevard of broken dreams cambridge, uk: oh god, the library is getting spooky. no one else is here (i think) and my lack of sleep isn’t helping… georgetown: is there anyone still in library? adderall vending machine, screenshot by celia emmelhainz, cc-by. for example of an actual library vending machine with medications and other supplies, see https://www.instagram.com/p/bpgywivb0rf/ 3. libraries as social space we also found that many students use yik yak to comment on studying in relation to other students. the social aspect of studying in the library is highlighted by the insider language used (“the libe”) as well as the shared humor and social experience of students sleeping, sighing, or simply being in proximity to each other: charleston: whenever i’ve been sitting in the same spot in the library for a long time, i always feel like i’ve bonded with the people near me u chicago: nothing reminds me of the interconnectedness of humanity like realizing that everyone in the harper chairs naps in the exact same position british columbia: when you open your laptop in a library and beyoncé is still playing (british columbia) sarah lawrence: slc life: smoothies in the library social media posts can also capture how the library is perceived both socially and spatially, at a more granular level than observed with other assessment measures: u washington: library logic: *sees a table with only one person* *goes in search of another table* miami u: what floor you study on in king says a lot about you. what’s your favorite? texas a&m: why do foreign people always talk in the library? gtfo as in the quote from texas a&m above, we should here note that the anonymity of many social media apps also brings up critical concerns of racism and exclusion, highlighting how our libraries are still not a safe space for everyone. although we did not encounter other racist or sexist comments in this brief survey, we have seen them over time on our home campuses. and while most student users quickly down-vote such posts out of existence, their presence still creates a hostile space of social exclusion, and mirrors the microaggressions minority students already experience offline on college campuses.16 this darker side of student sociality on the web should prompt us to check in with vulnerable populations and make sure we host a safer and more inclusive space in our campus libraries. 4. the ongoing need for study aids and information literacy finally, students used yik yak to comment on their information habits or seek assistance from others. we wondered, here, if they were either too intimidated to approach a teacher, or didn’t realize that a librarian could be of use in helping them access related resources. whether asking about assignments, offering flashcards, or commenting on how they seek information, these posts hint at ways librarians could improve the cultural relevance of our marketing and services for students: alabama: what’s the format of econ 110 tests? oxford: the great feeling when you open a journal article and half the pages are references unc: writing a scientific journal article is about as useful as the magic scarf i got three years ago grinnell: anyone in intro sociology that wants pretty comprehensive flashcards? it feels like a shame to waste them. ohio dominican: can’t find study aids anywhere [crying emoticon] and a few more students raise issues of copyright and intellectual property, grousing about others copying their yik yak posts, or asking if they can get away with illegal downloads on their campus: ohio state: reposts [of popular yik yaks] are academic misconduct montana: can you get in trouble for using youtube to mp3 on campus? new mexico: i read yik yak in the mornings like it’s the morning paper calgary: an update on my game: 3 weeks and still have not opened a book bringing it home as librarians, then, we found social media posts eye-opening for the light they shine on our campus and student experiences. in library ethnography, even a small study can be insightful,17 and these posts gave us one unobtrusive view into students’ digital lives. the floor you study on, screenshot by author celia emmelhainz, cc-by in talking with others, though, we also found that comments on social media can be used to directly improve our services. at the university of oregon libraries, lesli larson (director of communications and marketing) used yik yak to actually change library outreach, reporting: i do monitor yik yak to find out what undergrads are saying in raw/unvarnished terms. the key takeaway from yik yak for me is how student chatter reinforces wayfinding findings about the library. students prize quiet study spaces, compete for study spots during finals, and proudly identify themselves as frequent or first time library users.” this student chatter helped lesli keep displays relevant, and sparked her “program to create a display system for our reservable study rooms.” as she wrote to us, “i definitely invoked yak feedback about the scramble for study spaces” as she planned library improvements. (her strategy here was to frame improvements as pilot projects or ongoing iterations of existing projects, thus avoiding the need for extensive bureaucratic review before implementation.) while specific social media services rise and fall, lesli’s experience suggests that attending to these apps helps us see another angle of campus life. however, we have two caveats: first, that reading a hundred posts often resulted in only one about the library (and in celia’s case at colby college, checking in daily for a semester netted only 100 comments on the library). this suggests social media may be more useful for getting a sense of trends and conversations on campus as a whole, than for learning only about the library. in addition, we recommend that librarians practice self-care when viewing negative comments, either about campus in general or about the library and vulnerable student populations in particular. because yik yak is an “offstage” space,18 we warn you to take it with a grain of salt. students post cynical comments to win the upvotes of their peers, and not all students are equally represented. we believe it can be a useful inverse of positive encouragements on our library surveys, but it certainly isn’t the whole picture. when students write with an edge, it often does not reflect the deep respect they have for their peers, their campus, and the libraries and librarians who help them in their daily life. further, we suggest librarians avoid directly advertising on anonymous social media. faculty do intervene, as when colgate university faculty popped up on yik yak to encourage students during finals,19 but one-time posts by popular faculty are the exception to the rule. even lesli, who used yik yak for “stealth communication” and promoting free coffee at finals, chose to communicate as if student-to-student, rather than as an institutional advertiser. screenshot by celia emmelhainz, cc-by instead, we recommend you let social media apps spark insight into how students relate to each other, and how they communicate wryly about the library among their peers. in ephemeral online spaces like yik yak, we learn best by quietly observing as ethnographers and listening in to learn how patrons relate to their library, their campus, and their world. acknowledgments: the authors would like to thank erin pappas (external peer reviewer) and annie pho (internal peer reviewer) for reviewing drafts of this article. we really appreciate their constructive comments. we would also like to thank our publishing editor, amy koester, for her guidance in this process. finally, we would like to thank all the members of anss (the anthropology and sociology section of acrl) for their collegiality and for the opportunity to develop as anthropology librarians among a great cohort of peers. addendum: below is a list of colleges we reviewed, in alphabetical order. although we did not sample systematically from a list of known colleges, we sought out diversity between urban and rural environments, selective liberal arts colleges, major research universities, and smaller campus environments. we sampled for geographic diversity across both the united states, as well as, in a more limited fashion, canada and the uk. (we checked several university locations in france but did not find yik yak in operation there). this list is not comprehensive, as when we did not find any library-related posts at a college, we did not keep a record of the search. bates college boston college byu hawai’i cambridge university (uk) carleton college carroll college charleston college colby college duke university endicott college georgetown university grinnell college harvard university lewis and clark college macalester college miami university (ohio) new york univeristy oberlin college ohio dominican university ohio state university oxford university (uk) pomona college sarah lawrence college stanford university texas a&m university university college london (uk) university of alabama university of british columbia (canada) university of calgary (canada) university of california berkeley university of california irvine university of chicago university of hawai’i at hilo university of michigan university of montana university of new mexico university of north carolina–chapel hill university of oregon university of pittsburgh university of washington celia emmelhainz, interviews, focus groups, and social media: lessons from collaborative library ethnographies in america and kazakhstan, conference paper for ifla 2016, http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/1329. [↩] nancy fried foster and susan gibbons, eds., studying students: the undergraduate research project at the university of rochester (chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2007), and nancy fried foster, ed. studying students: a second look (chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2013). [↩] r. stuart geiger and david ribes, “trace ethnography: following coordination through documentary practices,” 44th hawaii international conference on system sciences (hicss)/ieee (2011): 1-10:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/hicss.2011.455 (accessed march 20, 2014). [↩] leah emary, “the why, what and how of using ethnography for designing user experience in libraries (and a few pitfalls to avoid),” in user experience in libraries: applying ethnography and human-centred design, ed. andy priestner and matt borg (routledge, 2016, p. 68-93). [↩] andy burkhardt, “social media: a guide for college and university libraries,” c&rl 71, no. 1 (2010): 10-24, http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/1/10.full.pdf+html. elizabeth price and rebecca richardson, “eavesdropping on the user experience,” c&rl news, 78, no. 1 (2017): 16-10, http://crln.acrl.org/content/78/1/16.full (accessed february 9, 2017). [↩] jillian d’onofro, “what teens say about facebook, instagram, and snapchat,” business insider (2013), http://www.businessinsider.com/what-teens-say-about-facebook-instagram-and-snapchat-2013-11 (accessed february 7, 2015). [↩] andrew watts, “a teenager’s view on social media,” medium (2015), https://medium.com/backchannel/a-teenagers-view-on-social-media-1df945c09ac6 (accessed february 2, 2015). [↩] will oremus, “is snapchat really confusing, or am i just old?” slate (2015), http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/01/snapchat_why_teens_favorite_app_makes_the_facebook_generation_feel_old.html (accessed february 7, 2015). [↩] danielle salomon, “moving on from facebook: using instagram to connect with undergraduates and engage in teaching and learning,” c&rl 78, no. 8 (2013): 408-412, http://crln.acrl.org/content/74/8/408.full.pdf+html. [↩] emma hinchliffe, “it’s the end of the line for yik yak,” mashable, 29 april 2017, mashable.com/2017/04/29/yik-yak-shuts-down/#4fijzjpowqqu, accessed 30 may, 2017. [↩] amy carlson, “ignite session: outreach, yik yak, and reality tv,” the scoop, american libraries, (2015), http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/ignite-session-outreach-yik-yak-and-reality-tv/ (accessed 20 february, 2016). [↩] evelyn m. rusli, “yik yak, big in schools, is a hit with investors too,” wall street journal (2014),  http://www.wsj.com/articles/year-old-messaging-app-yik-yak-draws-big-valuation-1416791097 (accessed february 8, 2015). [↩] however, as participation is based within a one-mile radius, some distance-education students may be limited to observing without the ability to directly participate, hinting at the unequal access to campus resources and dialogue that they face. [↩] for a further critique of the ethics of online ethnography, see lisa sugiura, rosemary wiles, and catherine pope, “ethical challenges in online research: public/private perception,” research ethics (2016), 1-16. [↩] see our addendum for a list of colleges and more on our sampling methodology. [↩] scott jaschik, “rally at colby against racist yik yak comments,” inside higher ed, april 17, 2015. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/04/17/rally-colby-against-racist-yik-yak-comments, accessed 30 may 2015. [↩] sims kline, “the librarian as ethnographer: an interview with david green,” c&rl 74, no. 9 (2013): 488-491, http://crln.acrl.org/content/74/9/488.full.pdf+html. [↩] erving goffman, the presentation of self in everyday life (new york: doubleday anchor books, 1959). [↩] kaitlin mulhere, “yik yak take back: professors turn yik yak into happy space,” inside higher ed (2014), https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/12/15/professors-turn-yik-yak-happy-space (accessed 15 february 2015). [↩] academic libraries, library assessment, library ethnography, social media, user experience neurodiversity in the library: one librarian’s experience editorial: recent reads 3 responses edward bilodeau 2017–07–12 at 12:50 pm thanks for sharing this! i’ve thought about conducting similar research, but have wondered about how i would go about getting ethics approval without being able to get permission from the people whose communications i’d be capturing. do you have any insights/advice to share on this? celia emmelhainz 2017–07–19 at 1:24 pm edward, that’s a good point. i’d say that researchers and writers should always discuss ethics with colleagues, advisors, or supervisors even when it’s not formally required. there is an argument that saving public posts for internal organizational use (rather than for generalizable research) doesn’t require ethics review. writing journalism or oral/life history doesn’t require an ethics review. and gathering public data or interviews for market research also doesn’t require an ethics review, although these are all functionally similar to library research. so as academic librarians, we’re in the unique place of capturing what is really user-experience data, but considering whether to seek an ethics review before we do so. i’ll also say that ethics reviews vary wildly. at one uni, i had a project approved within an hour of submission (!). at others, low-risk inquiries into library user experience have taken months of extensive protocol revisions and heightened security. your institution will determine how easy it is to submit several small projects for review, and may also have advice on what they consider research vs. user experience testing for a service organization. as to online research, for message boards with stable user identifiers, there are established guidelines for getting an ethics review, approval from moderators, and then announcing the project and what will be collected, so that users can opt-out. because stable online posts can reveal personal information, and combined with each other can reveal an identity (or could be publicly searched with a handle that e.g. reveals an identity), this is important to handle carefully. yet in our case, we had no way to contact users, who had no handle and whose posts weren’t tied to each other. the posts are now gone. and even if we’d tried to announce (on 40+ college sites!) that we were looking (for one day!) at library posts, our post would have disappeared within hours. it was still something i wrestled with, but i couldn’t see a way to even get permission from people in this situation. and most ethics reviews center on consent, making me curious about how this would actually be handled. in other words–you’ve brought up something really interesting. if you’d want to talk further about the kind of research you have in mind, feel free to post, or email me (lastname@berkeley.edu) and share more. miriam rigby 2017–07–19 at 2:15 pm in my experience, i’ve had no trouble getting “exempt” status from (multiple) university human subjects review boards for this type of research (on anonymous online forums, with no direct-surveying/questions, and no risk to the subjects.) the geiger & ribes article we cite on trace ethnography also discusses a growing concensus about the lack of a need for permission in this particular online scenario. (it would be different of course if there were significant risk to the subjects, if they were easily identifiable via usernames, or so forth.) this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct call for articles – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 19 jun editorial board /0 comments call for articles in brief: in the past, in the library with the lead pipe has asked our readers what topics they would like to see covered. today we share a list of the articles we dream of publishing. by editorial board in addition to asking our readers, the editorial board at in the library with the lead pipe often discusses ideas for articles that we would like to read. sometimes one of us approaches a writer we think would be a good fit, sometimes we write it ourselves, and sometimes those ideas get lost in the ether. today we would like to share some of these ideas in their varying states of thought-out-ness in the hopes that one of you would like to pick up the gauntlet. all of the editors agree that we want to publish articles from a diversity of voices in public, academic, special, and other libraries as well as a diversity of voices from world experience. as we wrote in our summary of our reader poll: while we strive to be relevant across a broad swath of librarianship, we are aware that our founders came primarily from the academic environment and this affects the topics we select. moving forward, we hope to expand our authorship to be more inclusive of a wider diversity of issues in librarianship. some of the areas in which we know we would like to improve include areas of librarianship such as: cataloging, special collections, archives, medical libraries, school libraries, prison libraries, international libraries, and lis educators. (this list is not exhaustive.) we would also love to include a wider variety of voices from underrepresented and marginalized communities. and readers, if you know an awesome writer or have a suggestion on ways to diversify, please share! ellie i was recently reading the controversy over “sick-lit” (general topic: ya books dealing with tough subjects and whether they encourage dangerous behavior vs. allow safe exploration) and was thinking i would love to read a lead pipe-style lit review on the issue. prison libraries/librarians: either a “day in the life” or a “here’s how we’ve done it” (with “it” being a particular program/initiative/etc.). social justice topics in general. history of libraries/librarianship: digging into some current issue and describing how it relates to library history, or taking an historical issue and showing how it’s still relevant today (as i did with the fiske report article). emily i’m always looking for articles that challenge me and make me think deeper than i normally would. to that end i would love to have article submissions that deal with theoretical and political topics. theoretical articles could take many different forms. one might take a theory from another discipline, unpack it for librarians, explain why we should apply it in librarianship, and outline how to do that. or maybe an article could propose a new theory. political topics could be those dealing with international, national, regional or local politics and how libraries fit into these themes. like ellie, i would like to read more articles dealing with social justice issues, or those that have a critical social justice slant. other, more concrete ideas for potential articles i’d love to read include: discussion of technology in public libraries digital literacy programs/issues social justice issues around controlled vocabularies or other cataloging/classification schemes creative pieces (an epic poem?) responses to current trends/happenings in the library world. e.g. respond to a book, ted talk, pew report, etc. erin i don’t think libraries do succession planning well (or sometimes at all?) so i’d love to read a piece about talent-pool management, leadership grooming (specifically within an institution versus library leadership in general), strategic advancement to more challenging roles, and tips for exit/retirement-planning so we can move away from relying so heavily on institutional knowledge. i’d also like to read an article about piracy/illegal downloading. who are the key players these days? how are libraries/higher ed impacted by piracy? maybe even some (anonymous) interviews with high-frequency downloaders to get their perspectives on why they think downloading is okay: is this a culture shift? i’m interested not only in books, but music, movies, television shows, etc. i’d like to hear more about academic libraries that are employing students in new and unique ways, leveraging their talents to improve the library and maybe the connection between student library employment and outreach. possibly how being employed in the library as a student provides valuable life/learning skills and how that relates to retention. i sometimes hear the statement that “ebooks are more environmentally friendly than print books” as an argument for why they are so popular/should be embraced. it’s not that i disagree with this, but i think it might be interesting to read an article about how many books are printed a year, how much that costs, the environmental impact and how it might be mitigated by recycling, and then a discussion about similar costs for electronic book readers (manufacturing, recycling, etc). mostly i just want to satisfy my own curiosity, though maybe to make it more library related, maybe it would be interesting to read a discussion about how we could educate our users about electronic recycling options. or how libraries recycle/get rid of print books and computing materials? hugh like emily, i’d like to see a little more politics discussed in library literature generally and lead pipe specifically. i’m not really interested much in seeing another ‘libraries are so important and we need to save them’ opinion piece, but rather some critical analysis of how the politics of information and political economy affect what we do as librarians, and how we do it. this could encompass all sorts of articles from the ethics of copyright to the practicalities of open government. i also would be happy to see something on internal politics within the profession and within workplaces. i’d like to see a wider pool of contributors: some more views from public libraries; librarians who aren’t from north america; and, if possible, articles from people who aren’t librarians and don’t work in libraries but have interesting things to say about and to those of us who do work in libraries. brett i’m interested in an article that describes a heuristic for determining the most widely read or influential texts in a given profession, and then applies that heuristic to librarianship. i think it’s easier to understand what i’m after by first describing attempts that have taken place in professions that are relatively similar to librarianship. in the june 2008 issue of communication monographs, michael pfau makes an explicit case for developing a bibliography that could form the foundation of an advanced education in communication. making use of his position as editor of the journal of communication, he sent an online survey to the 55 members of its editorial board asking them “to identify classic scholarship on mass communication (up to five books, articles, or book chapters) that they think should be read by all communication phds, regardless of their specialty” (pfau, p. 121). he received 35 responses: katz and lazarsfeld’s personal influence, published in 1955, had the most mentions, with eight. it was followed by “an edited collection by bryant and zillmann, media effects: advances in theory and research (1994; seven mentions); lazarsfeld, berelson, and gaudet, the people’s choice (1948; seven mentions); rogers, diffusion of innovations (2003; six mentions); mcquail, mass communication theory (2005; five mentions)” (p. 124). three other works had four mentions each. pfau’s conclusion: “if there is a classic canon of mass communication scholarship, it isn’t as well defined as i would have preferred” (p. 124). in 1999, douglas p. lackey conducted a somewhat similar survey, though rather than asking only colleagues he worked with directly, he gathered addresses from the philosophers’ email directory and sent a “questionnaire to 5,000 teachers of philosophy” asking “respondents to name the five most important books in philosophy in the twentieth century, and also the five most important articles” (lackey, pp. 329-330). lackey received 414 responses, which he felt represented the whole of philosophers in north america: “since there are about 10,000 teachers of philosophy in north america, we had replies from 4% of the entire profession. at a confidence level of 80%, the survey has an error rate of plus or minus 3%, assuming that we reached a demographically representative group. we have no reason to believe that we did not” (p. 330). though he listed the 25 books that received the most mentions in his article about the survey, the top five stand out: wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations was named on 179 ballots and received 68 first place mentions; heidegger’s being and time was on 134 ballots and was mentioned first 51 times; rawls’s a theory of justice was on 131 and was first 21 times; wittgenstein’s tractatus logico-philosophicus was on 77 and mentioned first 24 times; and russell and whitehead’s principia mathematica was on 64 and mentioned first 27 times. no other book was on more than 63 ballots or mentioned first more than 16 times. lackey found less agreement on articles. “many voters were hard pressed to list five, and so the total number of citations per title is down, so much so that many of the differences in ranking are statistically insignificant. nevertheless, at the top there are statistically significant differences between ranks, and certainly one can distinguish statistically between articles at the top end from articles at the bottom” (p. 337). the top five were quine’s “two dogmas of empiricism” with 131 mentions; russell’s “on denoting” with 85; godel’s “on formally undecidable propositions of principia mathematica and other systems” received 40; tarski’s “the concept of truth” got 39; and sellars’s “empiricism and the philosophy of mind” got 37. no other article was mentioned more than 26 times. lackey’s conclusion: no book and no article received a majority of the votes, and many listed titles received a small number of votes. i am not disheartened by this: given the spread of interests among the voters and the number of available choices, that there are pockets of agreement and convergence (on dewey’s experience and nature, for example) shows something. and beyond any doubt, the survey shows that philosophical investigations, being and time, and a theory of justice are our favorite books, and that “two dogmas of empiricism” and “on denoting” are our favorite articles (p. 342). librarians have long relied on the idea of canons, bibliographies, and core collections. the idea that libraries might contain anything other than canonical works—that a portion of the library should be devoted to popular or ephemeral materials—is an enlightenment innovation, though even modern libraries were devoted almost solely to materials that received approval by institutional sources, either explicitly in the form of collection lists or implicitly in the form of positive reviews in library journal or publishers weekly (battles, 2003; buchsbaum, 2009; budd, 2008; laney, 1988; ranganathan, 1931/2006). even today, librarians rely on a variety of authoritative lists for collection development; in addition to the aforementioned periodicals, which are still in print, librarians make extensive use of subscription databases such as resources for college libraries, a collaboration between the association of college and research libraries, choice magazine, and bowker, the latter of which “has been providing libraries with the bibliographic resources they need to perform critical library processes including collection development, acquisition, and reference” for over 140 years. in addition, librarians rely on “best of” lists, both those published at the end of a year, decade, or century in mainstream publications, as well as on disciplinary best of lists like michael pfau’s study on mass communication and lackey’s study on philosophy. in most fields of study, it is not difficult to find bibliographies or top 25 or top 100 or intra-disciplinary surveys that are similar to the ones discussed above relating to communication and philosophy; a quick inquiry on any search engine for the “best” or “greatest” or “most influential” or “notable” or “top 100” books in many social sciences, such as anthropology, economics, sociology, or psychology reveals multiple instances of practitioners, academics, or even amateur bibliographers or book reviewers listing their choices for the field’s canon or classics. for instance, in psychology, christopher d. green, a professor at york university in toronto has an extensive website entitled “classics in the history of psychology” and john f. kihlstrom, a psychology professor at the university of california-berkeley, conducted his own “great books in psychology” survey in 2005 in which he asked psychologists on three mailing lists—the society of experimental psychologists, the society for a science of clinical psychology, and the society for personality and social psychology—“to contribute their own short lists of fondly remembered, perhaps lifeor career-changing textbooks, read either as undergraduates or graduate students” (kihlstrom, 2006). among library science’s peer disciplines, it is easy to find such lists, and librarians not only study these lists for other fields, they help to create and formalize them. as julianne buchsbaum points out, “(t)he people who are in a position to create canons include those such as editors and publishers (who determine what makes it into print in the first place), professors (who decide what to include on academic syllabi), and librarians (who have a role in deciding what makes it into the library’s collections)” (p. 2). ironically, librarians appear not to have made many public attempts to establish a canon for themselves. though librarians are drawn to working with texts, and spend their professional careers organizing texts so the most relevant ones are available to researchers (and even non-researchers with casual information wants or needs), it seems odd that it is difficult to determine which texts librarians consider most relevant to their own profession. to the best of my knowledge, there have been only four noteworthy attempts in the last 40 years to identify a canon for librarianship. it appears that the first contemporary attempt at creating a bibliography of classic or canonical lis texts was landmarks of library literature, 1876-1976, edited by dianne j. ellsworth and norman d. stevens (1976). in their introduction, the editors acknowledge librarianship’s ambivalence toward its own literature, as well as an abundance of library anthologies that “bring together what one editor or another has felt are the best or most useful articles in one area of the field or another. so many anthologies have been published that criticism of anthologies is virtually a field in its own right.” (p. 2). however, they appear to believe that no other anthology had attempted to define a canon, and seem comfortable with the idea that attempting to establish one was a worthwhile task: “as librarians committed to the preservation and use of written records we recognize that there has been much that has been written and published in our field in the past 100 years that is extremely important and significant. surely the written word has had a major impact on the theory and practice of librarianship. this anthology is intended to identify and present those contributions that represent true landmarks for our profession” (p. 3). though landmarks contains numerous essays by librarians who are well known (at least to library historians), and though the editors both acknowledged that “criticism of anthologies is virtually a field in its own right” and wrote that they “hope those who review and read this anthology will disagree with our selection of articles and will find glaring omissions” (p. 4), they probably were not prepared for its review by marc gittlesohn in the journal of academic librarianship: “having thus granted there is merit in some of the essays, i must hasten to add that this does not justify the compilation itself. for the life of me, i cannot figure out just why the editors put this volume together” (p. 245). in their introduction, ellsworth and stevens concede that, “in many ways a bibliographic essay might have been a better approach, for space limitations have precluded our including it (sic) in this anthology many items that ought to constitute a part of such a review” (p. 3). why they saw this as an either/or proposition is unclear. though space limitations are important, it seems they could have created a small section within the 520 pages of their book to include their list of librarianship’s true landmarks, not just the landmarks that would fit within the confines of their page limit. three years later, george s. bobinski accepted this bibliographic challenge with “notable books in library science: a preliminary list,” which was included in drexel library quarterly‘s two-part series on “the literature of library and information science.” books included in his list had to be useful or influential in “practical or theoretical ways;” “essential tools of the profession;” “historical or notable;” “brilliant scholarly works that helped contribute new knowledge or understanding;” or “reports, surveys or standards which had an obvious … impact on librarianship” (bobinski, p. 50). he further limited his list to works that were at least ten years old at the time of his survey, to “us authors or works published in the united states,” and to works written by authors who were “librarians or directly associated with libraries.” he chose not to include articles, in part because the ellsworth and stevens anthology was still so new at the time bobinski was conducting his research and preparing his manuscript. several works influenced bobinski’s decisions, including harris and davis, jr.’s american library history: a bibliography (a comprehensive, but not evaluative listing of work about american library history), david kaser’s “a century of academic librarianship as reflected in its literature,” and donald j. lehnus’s milestones in cataloging, which uses isior google-like regression testing to measure the impact of work on cataloging literature, and also identifies the length of time after publication that that a work continues to be cited. he is also so influenced by bibliography of librarianship (1934/1970), which was compiled by margaret burton and marion vosburgh, that he includes it in the list itself. about it he writes: from the introduction by arundell esdaille, “it is curious that librarians, constantly the cause of bibliography in others, should have only thus late come by a bibliography of their own craft.” forty-five years later it still remains the first and only bibliography in the field and is still important historically. it barely qualifies for this listing since it was compiled and published in england, but one of the compilers (vosburgh) was american. (p. 62) after compiling his own list, bobinski sent a letter to 60 “distinguished, retired librarians” asking them to respond with a list of “classics in the field.” he thought of simply asking for their response to his list, but after deciding “independent nominations … would be more meaningful,” he “provided only a few examples from (his) list as background information” (p. 63). he received responses from 24 librarians. bobinski’s preliminary list consists of 51 titles. in addition to bibliographical information about each work, he includes a brief annotation and indicates how many of the 24 librarians he surveyed have nominated each title. the support for the books among the librarians surveyed varied considerably: there were nine mentions for the american public library building (wheeler & githens, 1941) and eight for carleton bruns joeckel’s government of the american public library (three tied for third most mentions, with six nominations each), but 20 out of the 51 notable titles that bobinski included in his list were not nominated by any of the librarians surveyed. bobinski concludes his essay with a list of the 74 titles that received nominations but did not make his list—none received more than three nominations—and a list of the librarians who responded to his request, though he keeps their list of nominations confidential. bobinski’s list, though a unique reflection of bobinski’s interests and orientation, is difficult to draw inferences from or to build upon. as dorothy b. lilly writes in her review of his work for information processing & management, “the methodology is suspect, the list is hodge podge” (p. 301). there have been two recent, though informal discussions around the idea of creating a list of classic works in librarianship. the first took place on the jesse mailing list in response to a discussion thread started by syracuse’s david lankes on may 16, 2006 and concluding 31 responses later on june 14 of that year. soon after lankes’s original post—which includes a request for comments on topics he plans to cover in a phd-level lis course but does not include a list of the texts he intends to use as source material—christopher brown-syed suggests that lankes include ranganathan and shera in his bibliography and also asks if “maybe a good collective project would be a ‘top 100’ list of the great books of lis?” ruth fenske quickly writes in to support the idea of creating a top 100, and lorna peterson responds to the list with a suggestion that lankes consult bobinski and landmarks of library literature, as well as “dead germans,” sydney pierce’s article for american libraries. sue myburgh also posts in support of the idea of a top 100 list, and asks “could we be sure to include publications from authors from countries outside the us, or about non-us situations?” and in another follow-up post suggests that john budd’s work might offer a complementary alternative to pierce. and from there the discussion draws rapidly to a close. lankes posts once more to the mailing list, writing that he will share the bibliography he creates for his class once it is finalized, but appears never to have posted such a list, at least not on jesse or any other publicly accessible resource. the second more recent took place on kathryn greenhill’s librarians matter following her post on june 11, 2011, “100 articles that every librarian should read.” greenhill, responding to a challenge issued by claire brooks and constance wiebrands to name 100 such articles, suggested approximately 40, though even she was “sure that only about a quarter of them would make it to a definitive list of ‘must reads’ for every librarian.” however, greenhill augmented her list by creating a public zotero group to which others could contribute, “librarian must reads.” as of june 11, 2013 (two years after greenhill’s original post), the group had grown to include 122 entries. for about three years, i was sure i was going to write this article myself, but it’s become clear to me in the last few months that it’s not going to happen. it remains an article i still very much want to read. as a librarian, this topic interests me for two reasons: for any given discipline, i want a defensible system for determining which professional and academic texts should be included in a library’s collection. i hope that what i have written above might be somewhat useful as a literature review on this topic, but i have yet to come up with a rational heuristic for identifying a disciplinary canon. i would love to publish an article that describes such a system. i want current and future librarians to have a touchstone literature, a set of texts we can refer to and feel fairly confident that our peers will know what we mean. i think this will make our own conversations more efficient, and i think it will also help to inspire a bit more confidence that what we’re publishing for one another actually matters. conclusion if you are interested in tackling any of these subjects, please see our submission guidelines. if you have questions, contact us. references and further reading battles, m. (2003). library: an unquiet history. new york: w.w. norton. bivens-tatum, w. (2012). libraries and the enlightenment. los angeles: library juice press. bobinski, george s. (1979). notable books in library science. drexel library quarterly, 15(3), 50-77. buchsbaum, j. (2009). academic libraries and the remaking of the canon: implications for collection development librarians. library philosophy and practice, 2009, 1-6. budd, j. m. (2008). self-examination: the present and future of librarianship. westport, ct: libraries unlimited. budd, j. m. (2001). knowledge and knowing in library and information science: a philosophical framework. lanham, md: scarecrow press. burton, m., & vosburgh, m. e. (1970). a bibliography of librarianship: classified and annotated guide to the library literature of the world (excluding slavonic and oriental languages). new york: b. franklin. (original work published 1934) cyzyk, m. (1993). canon formation, library collections, and the dilemma of collection development. college and research libraries, 54(1), 58-65. ellsworth, d. j., & stevens, n. d. (1976). landmarks of library literature, 1876-1976. metuchen, n.j: scarecrow press. gittelsohn, m. (1976). landmarks of library literature, 1876-1976 (book). journal of academic librarianship, 2(5), 245. green, c. d. classics in the history of psychology. accessible from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/. greenhill, k. (2011). “100 articles that every librarian should read.” librarians matter. accessible from: http://www.librariansmatter.com/blog/2011/06/15/100-articles-every-librarian-should-read/. harris, m. h., & davis, d. g. (1978). american library history: a bibliography. austin: university of texas press. joeckel, c. b. (1935). the government of the american public library. the university of chicago studies in library science. chicago: university of chicago press. kaser, d. (1976). a century of academic librarianship, as reflected in its literature. college and research libraries, 37(2), 110-27. kihlstrom, j. f. (2006). great books in psychology. available from http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/greatbooks.htm. lackey, d. p. (1999). what are the modern classics? the baruch poll of great philosophy in the twentieth century. the philosophical forum, 30, 329–346. doi: 10.1111/0031-806x.00022 laney, e. j. (1988). library school curriculum: library publishing. library trends, 36(4), 709-23. lankes, r. d., brown-sayed, c., fenske, r., peterson, l., and myburgh, s. (2006, may 16-18). compiling an lis bibliography. message posted to http://listserv.utk.edu/cgi-bin/wa?s2=jesse&d=0&q=compiling+an+lis+bibliography. lehnus, d. j. (1974). milestones in cataloging: famous catalogers and their writings, 1835-1969. research studies in library science, no. 13. littleton, co: libraries unlimited. lilly, d. b. (1981). the literature of library and information science, parts i and ii (book review). information processing & management, 15(5), 301-2. pfau, m. (2008). tension between breadth and depth in mass communication education. in issue forum: breadth and depth of knowledge in communication. communication monographs, 75(2), 119-26. pierce, s. j. (1992). dead germans and the theory of librarianship. american libraries, 23(8), 641-43. quinn, b. (1995). some implications of the canon debate for collection development. collection building, 14(1), 1. ranganathan, s. r. (2006). the five laws of library science. new delhi: ess ess publications. (original work published 1931). resources for college libraries. learn more about rcl: project partners. available from http://www.bowker.com/en-us/products/rcl/learn_more/project_partners.html. wheeler, j. l., & githens, a. m. (1941). the american public library building: its planning and design with special reference to its administration and service. new york: scribner. adventures in rhetoric: the traditional library an interview with steve roggenbuck this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct building a community of readers: social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 20 mar jenny ellis and kyle cook /28 comments building a community of readers: social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries “the gates through central park benches” photo by flickr user sterling ely (cc-by-nc-sa 2.0) in brief: library ebooks are currently read in different, unconnected reading platforms. because all library ebook vendors use the same adobe adept system to circulate ebooks, they could be delivered to a single aggregated reading app. this article discusses social reading and why libraries should look at the technology, and details the adobe adept drm system, oauth, and application programming interfaces (apis) to illustrate how an aggregated reading app could be built. by jenny ellis and kyle cook book bench: an aggregated ebook reading app it’s a tuesday morning, i am talking with my co-worker, sally. she teaches a lot of the ebook classes at our library. she tells me about a new reading app she found on a technology blog. it’s called book bench. “it’s a new reading app,” she says. “i’ve got my overdrive, 3m, and ingram books on it.” “wait. what? you put all your library ebooks in one app? can i do that?” “yes,” she tells me. “just go to the app store and download book bench.” “okay,” i say, “ i’ve got the app. now what?” “tap ‘sign up’ to make a book bench account. then use your new account to sign in to the app.” “got it. where do i add my adobe id?” i ask. “you don’t need one,” she says. “the book bench username and password takes care of the adobe authorization. isn’t that cool?” “yeah, that will make helping people a lot easier. how do i get my books?” “use the settings to log in to our library’s ebook services with your library card and pin.” “okay, give me just a second.” i use the app to log in to overdrive, 3m cloud library, and ingram. “hey! there are all my ebooks!” i exclaim. “you’ll love this next part. you know how you can’t add 3m books to your goodreads bookshelf?” “yes,” i tell her. “that does bug me.” “book bench has goodreads integration,” she says. “so, when you get your books in the app, you can save your 3m and ingram books to goodreads too.” “oh, you’re reading in a sunburned country?” i ask. “i’m reading that too. i love bill bryson.” “i’ll send you an invite to join my reading group in the book bench app,” she says. “we can talk about the book while we read!” book bench isn’t real. we just made it up. but it illustrates how we imagine library ebooks could be. it could be exciting to explain that you can get ebooks from the library. we could be connecting with friends inside a book, sharing ideas about the books we’re reading together. instead, we wind up apologizing: for getting an adobe id; for having several separate ebook systems; for the number of steps involved in getting an ebook onto a reading device. and that’s just to the 38% of library users who even know we have ebooks (raine and duggan). we want to suggest a new app. we’re calling it book bench. it’s an aggregated ebook reading app that would bring books from all library ebook vendors together in one place. this would allow libraries to promote a single service with a consistent user experience. it would provide a platform to support conversation around books, the kind of discussion that libraries already encourage with our in-person programming. an app like book bench would allow people to connect with one another inside a library ebook. libraries purchase ebooks from different distributors—including overdrive, 3m, and freading—and each distributor delivers ebooks in different reading apps. but a multi-vendor aggregated reading app is possible. drm technology does not require a vendor-supplied platform for ebook reading. in fact, because all of our vendors use the same “adobe digital experience protection technology” (adept) system for drm, library ebooks could be delivered to a single app, like our theoretical book bench app. we will discuss social reading and why libraries should look at the technology. then we’ll detail the adobe adept drm system, oauth, and application programming interfaces (apis) to illustrate how an aggregated reading app could be built. connecting readers inside books reading is both a solitary and a social activity. we read in solitude then come together to talk about what we’ve read. our desire to talk about books is the same whether we read ebooks or print. the digitization of books did not change our desire to talk about books, but it has given us new possibilities for how we can share ideas and connect to one another (alber and miller, book: a futurist’s manifesto). kindle allows readers to highlight text in order to associate a comment with a specific passage in a book. you used to have to wait to see what a friend thought about a specific passage. digital books, where readers are connected to the internet as they read, allow us to share margin notes in real time. while kindle highlights let you see what someone thought about a specific passage, you aren’t able to comment back and start a conversation. we need to be able to leave comments for one another if we want to foster conversation. goodreads, a social network for readers, allows people to share what they are reading and discuss books. if you are on page 185 of in a sunburned country, you can find the title on goodreads.com and post a status update with a comment: “australia is terrifying. i never imagined the animals he’s talking about. is this hyperbole on bryson’s part? or is the country really so deadly?” your goodreads friends can see your progress update and can comment back. you can’t see the passage from the book your friend is reading, but you can have a discussion about the passage they found interesting. it is a different experience than kindle highlights. kindle shows you comments while you are inside a book. goodreads shows you comments in a separate website. social reading social reading combines the convenience of kindle highlights with the discussion capability of goodreads. users are able to bring the conversation into the ebook they are reading. connecting inside the book is important. when you move discussion to the comment section on a blog, a discussion forum, or email, you’re no longer in the book. you have to leave the reading app and open up another program. it is easy to become distracted instead of remaining focused on the thoughts you wanted to share. if discussion can happen inside a social reading app, readers can communicate with one another while staying focused on the text. our colleague, sally, uses subtext, a social reading app that allows her to create reading groups, so she can have a discussion with her book club while they read. at the end of each chapter, a small box appears at the top of the screen where sally can record her thoughts. at the prompt, she pauses and writes a note to share with her reading group. a small “discussion” icon in the corner shows when there are new notes from other group members. the group can talk to one another by replying to comments. (figure 1) figure 1 – discussion in subtext the discussion you have while you are reading is different than the one you have when you are done. social reading keeps comments in context, which allows for a shared experience of the text. as you read, you have thoughts about characters, situations, or plot, that you want to share with someone in the moment. the asynchronous aspect of social reading lets members carry on a discussion even if they read at different times of day. readers can record their thoughts as they occur, rather than wait for a club meeting. groups can stretch the book discussion across an entire month. group members can talk to one another when it is convenient and pick up a thread of conversation hours or days later. a night owl reading at 2 a.m. can carry on a conversation with her early-bird friend, who was reading at 7 a.m. social reading in the aggregated reading app there are different ways to organize social reading. how we organize discussion and connect people in our imagined book bench app, or any aggregated reading app, will determine how successful the social interaction will be. there are two kinds of sharing: broadcasting to anyone or sharing with a limited group of people. kobo pulse is an example of this first kind of sharing, where you see comments from everyone in the kobo store. kobo has more in common with kindle highlighting than the group discussion that happens in subtext. as you read a kobo ebook, you see icons in the margins of the book which lead to comments left by everyone who bought the same book. while reading jane eyre, you might run across a passage that has 237 comments. it might be interesting to read the comments, but the chance that you’ll engage in a conversation with 237 people you don’t know is pretty slim. social reading apps are most successful when they facilitate conversation between readers with existing real-world ties. while studying bookglutton, a social reading website, creators travis alber and aaron miller noticed patterns in user behavior. users were 80% more likely to participate in a social reading group discussion when they were invited by someone they knew. the groups with the most participation had users who weren’t just familiar with one another, but were part of a real-world group, like a book club or a class. the actual discussion was better because people knew one another and there was a sense of trust and familiarity (alber and miller, book: a futurist’s manifesto). while library users might enjoy social highlighting, sharing notes, and reading community comments, a library social reading experience needs to enable private group discussion. if five library members want to form a group, they need to be able to find one another, establish their group, and organize their discussion around chapters or page numbers. a group member needs to be able to pose a question in a chapter 3 thread, inside the book. a reader can reach out to the four other group members and ask “what is michael chabon talking about in chapter 3? this sentence is 12 pages long and i’m lost. do you guys know what is going on?” adobe drm & the acsm file if we want to enable readers to connect with one another inside a book, and create a consistent user experience, we need to bring everyone together in a single app. the key to aggregating ebooks from different vendors into a single reading app is the common adobe adept drm system, and especially one of its features, the adobe content server message (acsm) file. publishers sell ebook files encoded with adobe drm. drm controls what you can do with an ebook besides read it—how many devices a book can be on at a time and how long it can be checked out. drm-encoded ebooks get stored in a retailer’s adobe content server. overdrive, 3m, freading, ingram, and baker & taylor all sell adobe drm-encoded ebooks. whether you are purchasing directly from kobo or checking out an item from a library that contracts with overdrive, after you click ‘download,’ the behind-the-scenes action is the same. key parts of the adobe drm system (adept) adobe content server: server that stores drm-encoded ebook files and tracks the use of those books once they’ve been delivered to the user. each retailer/vendor has its own adobe content server. adobe: the activation service keeps track of registered adobe ids and the devices authorized with those ids. acsm file: “adobe content server message.” carries the name of the book and the location of the adobe content server that stores the book. adobe id: unique id associated with a specific user. it unlocks the acsm file. adobe reader mobile sdk: software development kit that companies use to build their own adobe drm compatible mobile reading apps. downloading an ebook to a laptop sally wants to borrow fahrenheit 451 from overdrive to read on her sony reader. she uses her library card to check out the book, then clicks a link to download the ebook to her computer. as far as sally is concerned, she has just downloaded the ebook. after she opens the file, the book loads in adobe digital editions and she moves it to her sony reader. what sally doesn’t see is the complex interaction between her computer, adobe, and overdrive’s adobe content server. what is hidden from her is the key to the aggregated reading app, the acsm file. first, sally clicks the download link in her overdrive account. adobe’s content server 4 overview shows how this works (figure 2): a request is sent to overdrive’s adobe content server: “hey, someone wants an ebook, fahrenheit 451.” overdrive’s adobe content server returns an acsm file. the acsm file is not the ebook. it is an access token for the ebook. the token contains only the title of the book and the location of the adobe content server where the book is stored. figure 2 – downloading to a laptop, step 1 next, sally opens the acsm file with adobe digital editions, though she does not realize that is what she is doing; in her mind, she is just clicking on an image of the book cover. opening the acsm file triggers a series of interactions between overdrive’s adobe content server, adobe, and her computer. (figure 3) adobe digital editions asks for an adobe id, then connects to adobe’s servers to see if the adobe id is valid. if sally has not reached her limit of authorized devices, adobe sends an authorization message and associates her computer with her adobe id. once the computer is authorized, adobe digital editions grabs sally’s adobe id and the acsm file, and passes this information to overdrive’s adobe content server. overdrive’s adobe content server encodes the ebook with sally’s adobe id and adds the lending period set by her library, usually one to three weeks. the adobe content server delivers the drm-encoded epub file to sally’s computer, where it opens in adobe digital editions. since the epub ebook, fahrenheit 451, is associated with sally’s adobe id, only devices with her adobe id can open it. figure 3 – downloading to a laptop, step 2 no matter where she borrows or purchases a book, the acsm file is handled the same way. (adobe systems, architecture) adobe drm and acsm is the same on mobile devices when sally moves to a mobile device, like her ipad, downloading looks different, but nothing changes with adobe drm. she uses her library card to borrow a book from overdrive and she clicks a download link to download the ebook to her overdrive app. the behind-the-scenes communication between her device, adobe, and overdrive’s adobe content server is the same. but the outcome is different. on her laptop, sally downloads an acsm file. she must open that file with adobe digital editions. on an ipad, the acsm file is sent directly to her overdrive media console app. the difference lies with how overdrive download links are coded. when she clicks the download link on an ipad, the overdrive web site detects she is on a mobile device and automatically opens the acsm file in the overdrive app. this makes using overdrive on ipad easier, but has nothing to do with adobe drm. acsm files can be opened by any adobe compatible app. you can open an overdrive ebook in the books-a-million app. you can open a freading book in the bluefire app. the brand of the app doesn’t have to match the store where you get a book. what matters is that the app is authorized with an adobe id. the acsm file is the common denominator for all library vendors. each vendor makes adobe drm-encoded books available for checkout. checked out books are listed on sally’s bookshelf in her overdrive account. if she can access the acsm file, she can download the book to any adobe-authorized reading app. vendor id: adobe authorization without adobe id vendor id is a part of the adobe adept drm system. it allows bookstores to authorize their branded reading apps with a store login instead of an adobe id. the adobe authorization process still occurs, but the customer never sees it. any acsm file can be opened by any vendor id, no matter where a book was purchased. books-a-million is a good example of vendor id in use. sally creates a books-a-million store account to buy an ebook at booksamillion.com. she uses her email as her login. when she finishes payment, books-a-million instructs her to download the bam reader 2 app. when sally opens the bam reader 2 app, she is asked to authorize the app with her new bam login. this is just like authorizing adobe digital editions with her adobe id. when sally authorizes the bam reader 2 app with her bam id and password, she triggers an interaction between the bam app, the bam store database, and adobe. the steps for authorization with vendor id are described in adobe digital publishing: vendor id specification (figure 4): bam reader 2 takes the bam id, then connects to the books-a-million customer list to see if the bam id is valid. the books-a-million customer database sends back a message that confirms that the bam id is valid. bam reader 2 communicates with adobe to complete authentication. the app contacts adobe’s activation server and provides an authorization token that says the bam id is legitimate. the activation server connects to the auth service at books-a-million to look for an authorization record that matches the authorization token that was sent by the app. the auth service confirms that the bam id is legitimate. the activation server takes the authentication token and records the bam id and device information into the adobe database. the adobe activation server authorizes bam reader 2 with the bam id (vendor id). no separate adobe id sign-up is required because the vendor id is an adobe id. (adobe systems, 2) figure 4 – authorizing an ipad with vendor id once bam reader 2 is authorized, sally sees a list of the books she has paid for and can download them. the word authorize is important. sally isn’t just logging in to see the list of ebooks she has paid for. she’s authorizing the app with her books-a-million id to unlock adobe drm-encoded ebooks. accessing an adobe drm-encoded ebook works the same as our previous example. when sally wants to download water for elephants, which she previously purchased at booksamillion.com, she taps the cover image in her bam reader 2 bookshelf to download the book. (figure 5) bam reader 2 sends a message to the books-a-million adobe content server. the adobe content server sends back an acsm file with the name of the book and the location of the adobe content server where the book is stored. bam reader 2 grabs sally’s bam id and the acsm file, and passes this information back to the store’s adobe content server. the adobe content server associates the ebook with sally’s bam id. the adobe content server delivers a drm-encoded epub file to sally’s app. since the epub ebook, water for elephants, is now associated with sally’s bam id, only devices authorized with the same vendor id can open it. figure 5 – downloading an ebook to ipad this series of interactions between an app authorized with a vendor id, adobe, and the adobe content server is identical when dealing with any acsm file. the user experience for books-a-million is straightforward and simple. sally signed up for a books-a-million account to purchase an ebook. she signed in to bam reader 2 to read her book. sally was never asked to create an adobe id. she didn’t need to create one because her books-a-million login is dual purpose: it 1) signs her into the web site and 2) authorizes the app. building the aggregated reading app if you can gain access to the acsm file, you can put library books from any vendor in one reading app. our imagined reading app, book bench, could use either adobe id or vendor id. there are four general ways adobe id or vendor id could be implemented. 1. universal app with adobe id our aggregated reading app with adobe id could be used by any library system. the advantage of using adobe id is versatility. patrons would be able to add library books and purchased ebooks to the same reading app without tying them to a library vendor id. readers who want to participate in a reading group discussion could bring their borrowed and purchased books together in the same app. readers would still create an adobe id at adobe.com, just as they have for years. the drawback is that the adobe id is perceived as an extra step. it also brings drm to the forefront. it is disappointing to sign up for adobe id, since the only purpose is to add drm to the books you want to borrow. it feels like a barrier that makes it take longer to get free books from the library. bluefire reader and readmill, reading apps not associated with any specific store or ebook vendor, are two examples of type of universal reading app. douglas county libraries has an individual version of this called dcl reader. their app is branded to a single library but, because it is authorized with adobe id, can display ebooks from anywhere. 2. individual app with vendor id our aggregated reading app could use the library card number as vendor id. individual libraries would each purchase both a branded app and a vendor id implementation. patrons would download their library’s app and sign in with their library card and pin. they would load ebooks from all their library’s distributors to their library’s single app. the negative perception of an extra step would be eliminated by using an existing user id, the library card number. adobe would communicate with the patron database to authenticate users and authorize the reading app. because the authorization occurs through the patron database, the app would only work for one library. unlike our first option, this app would be for library books only because patrons would not want their purchased books to be tied to the library’s vendor id. 3. consortia app with vendor id libraries could join together as a consortium in order to create a single, shared aggregator app that uses library card numbers as the vendor id. individual libraries would each have to purchase a vendor id implementation. the user interface on the shared app would require patrons to first identify their library, then enter their library card number and pin. because cardholders would choose their library from a menu, the app would work for any library in the consortium. the 3m cloud library is an example of a shared app that uses vendor id. 4. library-agnostic app with vendor id libraries could join together as a consortium in order to create a single, shared aggregator app and a new web service we refer to as “book bench.” instead of using the library card number as vendor id, the book bench username would serve as each cardholder’s vendor id. when patrons sign in to the book bench app with their login, they would also be authorizing the app, just like the books-a-million example described above. the new web service includes an additional step, as with signing up for an adobe id, but the perception would be different. instead of having to sign up for an additional account, the adobe id, users are signing up for a service, book bench, that will enable them to read all their library books in one place, whether those ebooks are hosted by overdrive, 3m, freading, or another library vendor. the reason for signing up for the id can change the perception that the id is a negative. plus, the web service can have additional features and add value in a way that signing up for adobe id does not. bookish is an example of this type of vendor id authorized app and web site. the two universal aggregated reading apps described above, one with adobe id (1) and the book bench vendor id (4), could be used and promoted by any library, anywhere. a single app promoted by all libraries would improve the visibility of library ebooks because we would all be advertising a single service. getting books to the app we’ve shown that the acsm file is the key to downloading ebooks to a non-vendor reading app. to access the acsm file, a user needs to be able to login to an account and view all of their borrowed ebooks. we’ll refer to this as a bookshelf view, similar to what we saw with the bam reader 2 app in our books-a-million example. only this time, instead of viewing a bookshelf inside the retailer’s app, we’ll be accessing an online account on an app that is outside the store ecosystem. the tools we’ll need to duplicate the bookshelf functionality seen in bam reader 2 are oauth and an api. an api is protocol or interface that “gives programs access to information” (mcguire and croll). oauth is a web standard that enables users to grant apps or websites limited permissions to personal information stored in another account (brail and ramji, 5). if you’ve ever used “sign in with facebook” or “sign in with twitter” on a web site, you’ve used oauth (5). subtext and readmill, two social reading apps, use oauth to connect users’ online ebook accounts and apis to display ebooks in a bookshelf view within the reading app. these apps will help us illustrate two ways libraries might create a bookshelf view in the book bench reading app. one option would use oauth to connect directly to a patron’s individual accounts with each ebook vendor. here, the ebook aggregation would happen in the app. the other option would use an oauth connection to display ebook titles already compiled in an online account. the ebook aggregation would happen in the account. use oauth to connect to multiple vendor accounts sally uses subtext on her ipad. subtext has an option that allows her to connect the app to her google account using oauth. the google books api allows subtext to display titles sally has access to in her google play account. when sally chooses to open a book, the google books api confirms she owns the book, then delivers the full-text in subtext (goldman). the reading app is pulling books in from an outside retail account. the aggregation is happening inside the reading app instead of in a central online account. the subtext-google connection is analogous to the connection that would occur between book bench and sally’s overdrive, 3m, axis 360, and other ebook vendor accounts. if ebook vendors develop a bookshelf api, book bench could use that api and oauth to pull in books from separate library ebook vendors. for instance, book bench could pull in books from a user’s overdrive, 3m, and axis 360 accounts and aggregate them in a single view within the reading app. use oauth to connect to a single online account our colleague, sally, uses readmill on her iphone. readmill allows her to aggregate all her ebooks from different retailers into a single online account, so she can access them from the readmill app. when she purchases an ebook from google play, feedbooks, or another ebook retailer, she can add the acsm file to her readmill.com cloud account. she authorizes the readmill app to view her online account and titles are displayed in the app bookshelf. when she taps on the title of a book, an acsm file is downloaded to the readmill app. adobe confirms that the app is authorized with an adobe id. the book is then transferred to the readmill app. readmill is analogous to the aggregation that exists in new york public library’s bibliocommons implementation. the digital checkouts and digital holds section in sally’s new york public library bibliocommons account displays all her borrowed ebooks from 3m cloud library and overdrive on a single bookshelf. (figure 6) ebooks from different vendors are consolidated in a single online user account. sally can use the download link in her bibliocommons account to send her overdrive ebook to a reading app. this is accomplished with screen scraping, a way of grabbing data without a formal software connection between databases, but it illustrates what a bookshelf api would do. figure 6 – nypl bibliocommons digital account view readersfirst and the development of vendor apis the new york public library bibliocommons implementation demonstrates that a single, consolidated bookshelf is possible. library ebook distributors do not yet offer a bookshelf or lending api or oauth connection to developers across the board, but it is technology libraries could ask them to add. the missing pieces that would enable an aggregated reading app are uniform authorization protocols, and holdings and lending apis. readersfirst, a coalition of public libraries, is working with content providers and urging them to develop these protocols and apis. creating a community of readers libraries have always connected people around books, creating communities of readers through book clubs, storytelling, book festivals, and author talks. these connections have been made in the physical space, bringing neighbors from the local community together. but communities span more than local geography. a reader’s community isn’t just their local library; it is anyone they know, from college roommates and friends to family members, all of whom might all live in different states and belong to different libraries. the social tools we see appearing in ebooks can help make connections through reading beyond the walls of the local library. the future of social reading the future of reading will include social discussion and sharing. library readers will want to connect with one another inside the pages of a book. social reading is going to be broader than what can happen in a library’s aggregated reading app. readers will want to connect to friends in the library app and also friends reading on other platforms, like nook or ibooks. this kind of cross-platform communication is coming. in fact, the kind of bridge that creates a connection between two different reading platforms already exists. social reading services readsocial and readmill both offer software apis that can connect users on different reading platforms. the connection works by having each store’s platform install the exact same api. if book bench and nook both install the same social reading api, users could share highlights and comments even though they are reading on two separate platforms. the api is the bridge that lets readers communicate. help create a successful community of readers support readersfirst and tell ebook vendors that we want apis and authorization protocols that will allow us to move books and data to our library accounts, and also move them directly to ebook reading apps. ask vendors if the apis they are developing will incorporate a bookshelf feature so that borrowed books can be displayed inside an app on a virtual bookshelf. look at license agreements and make sure that ebooks can be moved to other apps. ask vendors about their roadmap for the future to see if their vision matches your library’s goals. try social reading. learn how it works and experiment with friends or book clubs at your library. experiment with subtext, readmill, copia—social reading apps that will open adobe drm-encoded ebooks, including library ebooks. try bookshout!, a social reading app and store. figure out what features you like in these apps and what you would like to see improved. existing social reading apps can help us determine what type of interaction would best support conversation for library book clubs as well as discussion among friends. book bench is entirely theoretical, but an aggregated library reading app is possible. it could do more than unify a patron’s reading experience. it could help bring readers together. by working together, libraries can make this a reality. many thanks to our reviewers, brett bonfield, erin dorney, jim loter, and bryan jones, for their edits and perspective. in addition, thanks to micah bowers, jason sacks, andrew goldman, matthew bostock, travis alber, aaron miller, natalie rios, and  jeremy zhe-heimerman for help with our research. further reading above the silos: social reading in the age of mechanical barriers, by travis alber and aaron miller, for a history, overview, and outlook of social reading. “on the adobe ebook platform,” by micah bowers, for an overview of the adobe adept platform. sources adobe systems, digital publishing group. adobe digital publishing: vendor id specification. october 10, 2011. “architecture.” adobe content server 4. retrieved from: http://www.adobe.com/products/content-server/architecture.html  alber, travis and aaron miller. “above the silos: social reading in the age of mechanical barriers.” book: a futurist’s manifesto: a collection of essays from the bleeding edge of publishing. edited by hugh mcguire and brian o’leary. sebastopol, ca: o’rielly media, inc., 2012. 127-144. personal interview. nov. 2012. bowers, micah. “on the adobe ebook platform.” bluefire reader : news and commentary from bluefire productions, the creators of bluefire reader.  parts 1 -7.  jan. – jun. 2012. retrieved from: www.bluefirereader.com/blog/?cat=4 personal interviews. feb. 2013. bostock, matthew. personal interviews. feb. 2013. brail, greg and sam ramji. oauth: the big picture. n.d. retrieved from: http://info.apigee.com/portals/62317/docs/oauth_big_picture.pdf “downloading 3m cloud library ebooks for nook.” eready richland.  apr 2012. retrieved from: http://rcpleready.wordpress.com/3m/nook/ goldman, andrew. personal interview. feb. 2013. google inc. “using the api – google books api family.” apr 2012. retrieved from: https://developers.google.com/books/docs/v1/using#workingbookshelves mcguire, hugh and alistair croll. “book as api” 15 feb 2013. slide 9. retrieved from: http://www.slideshare.net/bitcurrent/book-as-api-hugh-mc-guire-and-alistair-croll-toc-nyc-2013 rainie, lee and maeve duggan. “e-book reading jumps; print book reading declines.” pew internet. 27 dec 2012. retrieved from: http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/12/27/e-book-reading-jumps-print-book-reading-declines/ sacks, jason. personal interviews. feb 2013. yue, ching. “vendor id part 1: overview.” datalogics blog.7 jan 2013. retrieved from: http://blogs.datalogics.com/2013/01/07/vendor-id-part-1-overview/#more-634 adobe drm, ebooks, public libraries, social reading making it work: surviving as a librarian employed in another field editorial: diy library culture and the academy 28 responses pingback : social reading with goodreads | sjsu slis 246 spring 2013 edorney 2013–03–25 at 12:57 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: new: building a community of readers: social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app: http://t.co/smcwxzbtmq learnfreely 2013–03–26 at 8:30 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: new: building a community of readers: social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app: http://t.co/smcwxzbtmq gluejar 2013–03–27 at 11:09 pm rt @micahsb: great article! social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/ugb6joilka http://t.co/ugb6joilka klausfeldam 2013–03–27 at 11:12 pm social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app http://t.co/c2sawhmxru sammii_tweets 2013–03–27 at 11:17 pm rt @micahsb: great article! social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/ugb6joilka http://t.co/ugb6joilka cookonbooks 2013–03–27 at 11:18 pm rt @librariescount: this is a brilliant idea for building a community of readers from @libraryleadpipe. http://t.co/6uyhx8yumf seedogthink 2013–03–27 at 11:38 pm rt @micahsb: great article! social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/ugb6joilka http://t.co/ugb6joilka shortgrassnews 2013–03–27 at 11:39 pm rt @micahsb: great article! social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/ugb6joilka http://t.co/ugb6joilka karentoittoit 2013–03–28 at 1:35 am the future of ebook reading & libraries > app suggestion that could definitely work! by jenny ellis tx @tapsister http://t.co/cuqvxpq6xc ebookscamb 2013–03–28 at 3:44 am rt @micahsb: great article! social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/ugb6joilka http://t.co/ugb6joilka norrisjude 2013–03–28 at 4:22 am rt @micahsb: great article! social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/ugb6joilka http://t.co/ugb6joilka huwie 2013–03–28 at 5:11 am wil je weten hoe adobe drm achter de schermen werkt (ook voor bibliotheektoepassingen) lees dan dit artikel -> http://t.co/lqa45pp2gg marisaschwab 2013–03–28 at 7:08 am rt @micahsb: great article! social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/ugb6joilka http://t.co/ugb6joilka techsvcslib 2013–03–28 at 7:15 am rt @micahsb: great article! social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/ugb6joilka http://t.co/ugb6joilka paulkbiba 2013–03–28 at 8:25 am rt @micahsb: great article! social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/ugb6joilka http://t.co/ugb6joilka hleman 2013–03–28 at 8:41 am rt @micahsb: great article! social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/ugb6joilka http://t.co/ugb6joilka kinglyhq 2013–03–28 at 9:07 am social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries – http://t.co/tsqly2z1gl by in the library with the lead pipe henrikberggren 2013–03–28 at 11:07 am lots of great thoughts, very aligned with @readmill http://t.co/ch8vw5rxnd feedbooks_fr 2013–03–28 at 11:20 am building a community of readers: social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries http://t.co/uoyibawmrl cookonbooks 2013–03–28 at 1:09 pm @libraryleadpipe @mbowers @matthewcbostock @screenkapture @readwithsubtext me & @fozzieblue: thanks for help on http://t.co/iuuyujrfz3 ala_techsource 2013–03–29 at 1:06 pm building a community of readers: social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries http://t.co/ky03vavrxe lorebrarian 2013–03–29 at 2:34 pm rt @ala_techsource: building a community of readers: social reading and an aggregated ebook reading app for libraries http://t.co/ky03vavrxe pingback : reading about ereading this week 4/1/2013 | allegany county library system director's notes pingback : what i’m reading this week | documenting the humanities comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct “i’m just really comfortable:” learning at home, learning in libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 20 may mariana regalado and maura smale /7 comments “i’m just really comfortable:” learning at home, learning in libraries throwback thursday for january 28, 2016: exploring ways to serve commuter students better?! grab a cup of coffee or tea and get comfy because mariana regalado and maura smale’s article from last spring is a great read! matteo, a borough of manhattan cc student, drew a picture of himself sitting on the sofa at home reading for his research paper. in brief: while commuter students may use their college or university libraries, student centers, or other campus locations for academic work, as commuters they will likely also create and negotiate learning spaces in their homes. our research with urban commuter undergraduates revealed that finding space for their academic work at home was difficult for many students whose needs collided with the needs of other residents using those locations for non-academic purposes. understanding the details of students’ off-campus academic workspaces can inform the design of learning spaces in academic libraries. by mariana regalado and maura smale jessica,1 a 20-year-old student at hunter college in new york city, woke up at about 6:00 a.m. one spring day and got ready for school. she left her home in the bronx where she lived with her mother and uncle and his family, including her three-year-old cousin, at around 7:00 a.m. she took a bus to the subway station, then rode two different subway trains down to hunter’s 68th street main campus, switching from the express to the local. jessica was attending college full-time and her four classes that day began at 8:10 a.m. and continued through to 4:00 p.m., with two ninety-minute breaks during which she did homework in the library, ate lunch in the cafeteria, and relaxed by using the computers in the library. after her classes were over jessica traveled back to the bronx. her commute home was via a different subway line and took slightly longer than in the morning; she arrived home just after 6:00 p.m. in the evening she helped her mother cook dinner then watched a soap opera until about 11:00 p.m. in her private bedroom. jessica multi-tasked during this time, doing some of her homework while watching tv. at 11:00 p.m. she switched off the tv and began working on an essay for her theater class. jessica went to sleep at around 2:00 a.m.; since she did not have any classes the following day, she “didn’t really mind staying up that late.” jessica had a laptop and did some of her schoolwork at home late into the evening. however, with all of the family members living together, especially her toddler cousin, her home was often noisy and she sometimes had difficulty doing her homework there, even though she had her own bedroom. when she was on campus, jessica often spent the time between classes working on the second floor of the library, sometimes using a computer to review course materials or print out an essay; she did not always bring her laptop to campus as she sometimes had heavy textbooks to carry. jessica’s home was located close to the new york botanical garden, which she considered a retreat: she often went there to do her academic work when the weather was mild. • • • • • millions of u.s. college students, like jessica, commute to their campus and classes rather than spend their undergraduate years in a residence hall. while commuter students may take advantage of their college or university libraries, student centers, or other campus locations for their academic work, as commuters it is likely that they need to engage in scholarly work in their homes as well. this article discusses research on ways that urban commuter college students create and negotiate learning spaces in their homes, complementing more traditional study spaces such as libraries. understanding the details of students’ off-campus academic workspaces–the comforts and pitfalls, the benefits and constraints—can inform the design of learning spaces in libraries and on campus. this research is part of a study we conducted of undergraduate scholarly habits at the city university of new york (cuny). we interviewed students to learn about the locations where they do their academic work, their reasons for choosing those spaces, and their successes and challenges in using them. we met with students at six cuny colleges: brooklyn college, city college, and hunter college, which offer baccalaureate and masters degrees; new york city college of technology (city tech), which offers associate and baccalaureate degrees; and bronx community college and borough of manhattan community college (bmcc), which offer associate degrees. cuny is the largest urban public university in the u.s. and enrolls approximately 270,000 students in degree-granting programs at twenty-four undergraduate and graduate schools in the five boroughs of new york city. cuny students reflect the astounding diversity of new york city and 44.8% of undergraduates were first-generation college students in 2012 (cuny office of institutional research and assessment, 2012a). while we did not collect detailed demographic information about the students we interviewed, we did learn a great deal about how each student’s particular living situations influenced their learning spaces, as will be shown below. at each of the six colleges we interviewed thirty students using three ethnographic research methods: photo surveys, mapping diaries, and retrospective research process interviews.2 in the photo surveys, we gave each student a list of twenty objects or locations related to their lives as students, for example “your favorite place to study” or “a place in the library you don’t like,” and interviewed each student when they returned the photos to us. for the mapping diaries, we asked each student to log their activities, including time and location, over the course of one typical school day, and also to draw their progress through the day. we also conducted retrospective research process interviews with students in which we asked them to describe and draw the activities they engaged in as they completed work on a research assignment. our visual and interview data illuminated much detail about students’ experiences as scholars outside the classroom. cuny is overwhelmingly a commuter university, and students spend much of their time away from campus at home, work, and other locations. because commuting to campus was a time-consuming process, many students expressed a preference—or a need—to create their academic spaces in their homes rather than in the college library or other campus location. some students told us that they chose to do their scholarly work at home because it was a familiar place, with all of the comforts to which they were accustomed. others chose to complete their schoolwork at home because of external factors, for example, if their classes or job ended for the day after the college library was closed. still others acknowledged the allure of customizing their study setting when doing scholarly work in their homes. however, many students noted constraints of space, noise level, or the activities of other residents while working at home. these students, like jessica, struggled with the impact of the overlapping activities of others on their own desire to create a meaningful academic space, and engaged in a variety of strategies in attempt to mitigate those effects. published research on strategies used by undergraduate commuter students to create learning spaces at home is slim. the library study at fresno state used interviews and student photographs to delve into the details of students’ school days, and conducted interviews in student homes as well as the dormitories. many of their findings were congruent with what we learned at cuny: a student often needed to create a space for their scholarly work in a room or area not intended for or solely devoted to their academic work. one fresno student complained about his noisy roommates, and others found themselves “impacted by space limitations, shared bedrooms, and younger siblings” (delcore, mullooly, & scroggins, 2009, pp. 17, 21). however, the students interviewed at fresno also spoke of rooms used for schoolwork in addition to the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms—for example, a crafts room, office, or garage (delcore et al., 2009, pp. 15, 17). most students at cuny described much more constricted home spaces, reflecting the high population density of new york city and the predominance of apartment buildings over other types of residences. far more research, most of it quantitative, has been undertaken to ascertain the academic and social benefits and constraints for undergraduates who live in residence halls. krause suggests that the “quality and nature of social interactions have a significant impact on university retention rates,” and that building relationships with peers can be more challenging for commuter students than for residential students (2007, p. 28). shushok, scales, sriram, and kidd report finding many advantages for undergraduates who live in dormitories on campus, including more participation in extracurricular activities, more frequent interactions with peers and faculty members, more positive perceptions of the campus climate, higher satisfaction with the college experience, greater personal growth and development, more effort and involvement in both the academic and social experiences of the college, and a higher rate of persistence and degree completion (2011, p. 14). however, a recent review of the literature found that published studies yielded a mix of evidence of both advantages and disadvantages to college students living in residence halls. sanchez (2012) undertook a predominantly survey-based study at the university of nebraska-lincoln to compare the experiences of first year students who lived in a residence hall with those who lived at home and commuted to campus. students who enjoyed living in the dorm reported that it was convenient to campus and kept them connected to the university, yet others noted difficulties with roommates and excessive noise in the dorms. students who lived at home mentioned their appreciation for the money saved as well as the familiarity of their homes, rooms, and families (also found by green, 2012, p. 98), yet also noted the inconvenience of commuting to campus and the feeling of disconnection from college life. the advantages of studying at home since the vast majority of cuny students live off-campus and commute to college, it is difficult to generalize the definition, physical layout, or social structure of home for all cuny students. almost all of the students we spoke with lived in one of the four more residential outer boroughs of new york city—the bronx, brooklyn, staten island, and queens—either in an apartment or house.3 a small number lived in manhattan or in one of the surrounding suburbs. high-rise apartment dwelling predominates in new york city; over half of all occupied residences are apartments in buildings with a least ten units (united states census bureau, 2012). surveys conducted by the university have gathered data on the household composition and family obligations for students at the university that can help us envision our students’ residences. while there are differences visible across the six colleges where we interviewed students, broadly speaking the household composition and family obligations for students at each of the campuses are similar: most cuny undergraduates are unmarried and live with members of their family, most often parents or guardians. a minority of undergraduates support children with whom they may or may not live, a higher number of students at the community colleges and comprehensive college than at the senior colleges. no more than 11% of the undergraduates at cuny colleges live alone, and 12% or less live with friends or roommates (cuny office of institutional research and assessment, 2012b). most of the students we spoke with preferred to do their academic work at a library, usually their own college library, as we have discussed elsewhere (regalado & smale, forthcoming 2015). a similar study at the residential university of rochester also revealed that more students chose to use the library for their academic work rather than work in their dorm rooms (briden & george, p. 26, 2013). however, we did meet a sizable number—over a third of the students we interviewed—who most often chose to engage with their academic work at home. the reasons these students gave for choosing to create a learning space at home were varied and centered broadly on themes of comfort, customization, and, ultimately, familiarity. the importance of a location with “a lot of comfort” to accomplish academic work was noted by most of the students who considered home to be the preferred study location rather than the library or elsewhere. soft seating options emerged as a priority, notably opposed to the straight-backed, unpadded chairs and other furniture often available for student use in the library. though many academic libraries do offer upholstered armchairs, lounge chairs, or sofas, our observations indicate that these types of seating are in the minority at the six libraries we visited. cuny libraries are typically highly space-constrained, and since soft seating tends to invite lounging and conversation, many of these libraries have opted not to include soft seating in attempt to maintain a quiet environment for studying students. many of those students for whom comfort was a priority mentioned a preference for studying on a sofa or couch in their homes, most often in their living room or other common area in the apartment or house in which they lived. a remarkable number of students indicated that their own bed was the preferred study location at home; numerous students photographed their beds for the prompts “your favorite place to study” or “a place at home where you study.” while a bed is certainly comfortable, given its association with sleep it is perhaps not the home location most conducive to work, as a couple of students pointed out to us during their interviews. those students who preferred to study on their beds may also appreciate the privacy afforded to them in their bedrooms, even those who share a bedroom, though none mentioned that in our interviews. well, now that you’re talking about libraries, in general i prefer studying in my bed than at the library. just because this library specifically doesn’t have many comfortable seats. [. . .] and i just really like to be comfortable when i’m studying. – samantha, hunter college the option to eat and drink while engaging in their academic work was also important to those students who liked to study at home, and seemed to fit well with their common desire for a comfortable workspace. for many, access to food and drink was a critical component of their academic workspace, and some preferred to study in the kitchen or dining room of their apartment or house. for these students the academic space was imposed on the food preparation and consumption space that typically predominates in those locations. i love the kitchen. [. . .] 
because it’s so close to food. the lighting is really bright, not right there, but the lighting is pretty, it’s like right on top so it hits me, right. [. . .] and, i dunno, just really the food. and it’s comfortable for me ‘cause i’m always in the kitchen eating, so it’s good for me. – maya, hunter college the opportunity to customize their academic workspace in the ways each found most conducive to study was also mentioned by many of the students we interviewed who chose to study primarily at home.4 while this customization took a variety of individualized forms for different students, it typically included reference to the ability to have all of their academic materials available to them and organized in the way they saw fit, rather than the smaller subset of items that each was able to carry to campus on any particular day. student responses to the photo prompt “the place you keep your books and school materials” displayed a wide range of storage solutions. as expected, many students stored their academic materials on bookshelves or at their desks, both traditional locations for scholarly supplies, while a substantial number of student photos revealed under the bed and on a dresser as common storage places the ways that each student used their home as an academic workspace also included strategies to customize areas of the apartment or house that were not dedicated to academic activity. as noted above, many students studied in their kitchens or at a common dining table while eating and drinking. especially in small apartments that may not have dining rooms or room for desks in bedrooms, the common dining table in the kitchen or living area may also be used by the residents of the house for many activities that require the use of a table and chairs. a bronx cc student described studying at the kitchen table alongside her elementary school-aged child while they both did homework, a strategy that required them to move their academic supplies to another location during mealtimes. perhaps the most unusual use of residential space for academic activities that we heard about during our research was shared by a hunter college student who was studying for the mcat entrance exam for medical school. she had created study guides for herself by writing the materials she needed to memorize for the test onto large sheets of poster board which she hung up in her family’s bathroom so that she could review that content easily in that location. isabella, a bronx cc student, shared her preferred workspace at home: the common table in her apartment. she had school-aged children and told us that they would all do their schoolwork together at the table. time was an important factor for students in considering their preferred learning spaces, and the opportunity to study at a time that was convenient to them was a high priority for students who preferred to do their scholarly work at home. many students indicated that they simply did not have time to study during the day as school and work schedules did not allow for it. some wished that their college library was open later—the libraries at the colleges we visited typically close by 11:00 p.m. during the regular semester, with longer hours during exam weeks. however, some students also noted that they did not feel comfortable commuting from campus to their homes late at night, which impacted their choice of study location even with longer library hours. on the fifth page of her mapping diary sarah, a city college student, drew some of the frequently mentioned comforts of home, including food, bed, and lighting. ultimately, the reasons cited by the students we met who showed a strong preference for doing their academic work at their apartment or house converged on the theme of familiarity. home was a familiar place, comfortable and easy to customize, and always open with food and drink available. for these students, the familiarity of their homes gave them a sense of ease while studying that outweighed any potential negative aspects of creating learning spaces at their residence. students expressed this to us in many different ways, all of which suggest that at home it was easier for them to get their schoolwork done without having to make adjustments based on location. yeah, i’d rather study at home. [. . .] it’s more comfortable, and it’s not a lot to adjust to, it’s just at home, you already know the environment. –jayden, city tech the challenges of academic work at home while some students were able to successfully create an academic space in their homes, we spoke with others who were frustrated by their attempts to get scholarly work done at home in locations primarily associated with residential, family, or leisure activities. for some students it was the physical limitations of home that constrained its use for academic purposes. we met students who did not have a desk to use for their schoolwork, perhaps the piece of furniture most often associated with the activities of a scholar. other students we spoke with did not have access to a bookshelf, drawer, or other expected items of furniture to store their academic books, folders, and other supplies. a city tech student noted that while she did not have a desk for herself in her room, there was a child-sized desk for her daughter there. a brooklyn college student shared his school materials storage solution with us: the ottoman in his family’s living room, which opened up to reveal storage space. the component of the residential landscape that seemed to impact most significantly on students creating academic space was the presence of the multiple other people engaged in a variety of actions and activities. this affected each student in different, sometimes concurrent, ways. some students lacked the privacy they desired to accomplish their academic work, perhaps sharing a bedroom or desk with one or more people. indeed, the space constraints of city living emerged in the accounts of a number of students, in particular those whose personal and sleeping space was also a common living area, as this bronx cc student notes about studying at home where the living room is also his bedroom. i mean, it depends on . . . ’cause sometimes my cousin can have company coming in and out of the house. “what’s up bro? what’s up bro?” every five minutes, you know? [. . .] then sometimes it could be . . . i dunno. just what i need. sometimes i need to be at home. i need to study and to be outside the school. ‘cause sometimes it’s even more so at the school, whereas at home there’s only four people that are in the house at any given moment. –marcus, bronx cc while some students were unaffected by competing activities in the kitchen or dining room at home, one hunter college student revealed that the ability to eat and drink whenever the impulse struck her drove her to study in the library. indeed, none of the college libraries allowed food or included a café or other eating options within the library itself. interviewer: and if you had a choice would you prefer to study at home, or study here on campus somewhere? student: i would prefer to study on campus because i find that i’m much more productive on campus. the main reason is because the campus doesn’t have a refrigerator. i tend to have a lot of things to snack on when i’m doing work at home, so then i’m halfway through my work and i realize i have no snacks. then i go to the kitchen, but then on the way to the kitchen i get distracted by other things . . . like the tv. and then, i’m like, “huh, let me sit down and have my snack and watch tv,” and my work never gets done. but [on campus], since there’s no kitchen i can’t get distracted. just sit at my desk and do what i do. –yasmin, hunter college many students shared information and communications technologies necessary for their academic work—most often desktop computers, laptops, or printers—with some or all of the residents of their homes. students’ access to these technologies was thus not always unimpeded, and they sometimes had to schedule their academic work around their family members’ or roommates’ competing needs. further, the noise produced by the non-academic activities of other members of the household, noise from televisions, video games, conversations, and others, was also noted by some students as a potential (and actual) distraction. both students who had a private bedroom and those who did not mentioned that the members of their household engaged in activities that produced noise, sometimes to an extent that each found disruptive to their scholarly work. the need to negotiate use of home spaces is highlighted by a brooklyn college student. my house is very noisy, it’s a lot of noise, and the thing about it is if i can’t study on campus, i would go home and sit in this little corner [. . .] everybody knows that while i’m in the living room and i’m studying, they can’t come in and watch t.v. –damerae, brooklyn college damarae, a brooklyn college student, photographed a small side table in his living room in response to the prompt, “your favorite place to study;” note the tv visible on the left. finally, because creating an academic space at home was often a challenge and a frustration for students who did not have a private room in their home, some students ended up using the college library even when it was not their first choice, though others made do at home. the challenge of finding an adequate place to create academic space was met creatively by one successful bronx cc student we spoke with, who had several younger siblings at home, but the same solution would not work for many. interviewer: “a place at home where you study.” what is this place? . . . it looks like the hallway outside your apartment. student: yeah, this is a hallway. you can see the other different apartments along the hall. interviewer: why this place? student: because it’s a quiet area. sometimes when kids are running around, “aaaaargh!” i need to find some quiet, so what i do is that i just sit in the hallway. it’s not uncomfortable; it’s pretty cool. you know, i know everyone on my floor, so, they’re like “oh, you’re studying again!” but they admire me, you know, for putting so much hard work into my schoolwork. –audrey, bronx cc audrey, a bronx cc student, took a photo of the the hallway of her apartment building where she sometimes does her academic work in order to avoid noisy younger siblings. conclusions: home away from home while many cuny students preferred to study in the comfort of their own homes, for others the college library represented the best possible option for an effective study space. what can college and university libraries, and campuses more generally, learn from the experiences of the students we interviewed? one possibility is to consider initiatives that create a home-like or dormitory-like experience on campus for commuter students. seattle university’s collegium program provides “home-like environments in which commuter and transfer students can renew themselves between classes, meet with classmates and faculty in a relaxed setting, have conversations with friends, [and] enjoy a snack” (seattle university, 2013). the collegium program uses space on campus, not in the library, but perhaps library space could be converted to meet some of these needs, too. commuter students will likely always have the need to engage in some coursework at home, despite the distractions and constraints that many experience when they attempt to construct learning spaces there. while some students can be successful using the college library as a learning space, others cannot. to better accommodate commuter students within the bounds of the campus it is worthwhile to consider how to ensure that the library is an inviting location in which students can successfully accomplish their academic work. indeed, recent research on student retention confirms the critical importance of “adequate facilities in the library, student center, and academic buildings for students to study, type papers, and make copies of course materials while on campus,” that “are open around times that classes are scheduled, including in the evenings and on weekends” (braxton et al., 2014, p. 62). college and university libraries that serve commuter students may consider adding features or services to specifically accommodate their needs. lockers or lockable carrels that can be reserved by students may relieve them of the need to carry their readings and other course supplies back and forth between home and school. study rooms or other spaces for solo (rather than group) use may provide the opportunity for students to spread out in the way that is most comfortable for them. quiet workspace in college or library computer labs may also be useful to students and, if not possible, perhaps laptop or other device loans can fulfill students’ needs for academic access to computers. it is important to note the tensions that may emerge when considering a comfortable space for commuter students to accomplish their academic work in the college or university library. many institutions with large commuter populations may not have the physical space or the financial ability to create ample space for students to lounge, eat, relax, and otherwise unwind between their academic commitments. as a location on campus that is generally considered to be quiet, safe, and (we hope) inviting to students, the tendency to use any “comfortable space” in the library as a lounge will likely always be strong for students who truly need such a space. however, on campuses that experience extreme space constraints, as is true at some cuny colleges, adding comfortable seating may encourage conversation and lead to conflict with students who rely on the library as a quiet place for their academic work. additionally, while allowing food and drink in the library might be seen by some students as encouraging leisure activity, for others eating while studying may be an essential part of how they make their academic space work for them. small libraries in large colleges must grapple with these tensions as they consider how best to configure their limited physical spaces. local conditions and student needs are likely to vary a great deal, thus even a brief user inquiry is valuable to ensure that decisions about how to shape campus spaces are based on actual student needs not just those assumed by college faculty, staff, and administrators (cf. foster & gibbons, 2007). at city tech we are using the results of this research as we plan to renovate one area of the library to provide more seating and study options for students. at brooklyn college our research results have already informed small scale decisions such as the addition of express computers for email and quick printing without sign-in; they are also being brought to the table as we develop a strategic space plan, including a possible re-consideration of our no-food policy. as our research has shown, understanding the commuter student experience off-campus can provide invaluable data to inform the creation and maintenance of appropriate learning spaces for commuter students on campus. acknowledgements this article was strengthened by the thoughtful and insightful feedback of our external peer reviewer henry delcore, our lead pipe peer reviewer erin dorney, and our lead pipe editor ellie collier. many thanks for working with us! we would also like to thank the cuny students and faculty we interviewed for their time and effort spent speaking with us, taking photos, and drawing their experiences. we appreciate their willingness to share and the opportunities that this project has provided us to make improvements in our libraries. this work has been supported in part by grants from the city university of new york psc-cuny research award program as well as a cuny fellowship leave. references braxton, j. m., doyle, w. r., hartley, iii, h. v., hirschy, a. s., jones, w. a., & mclendon, m. k. (2014). rethinking college student retention. san francisco: jossey-bass. briden, j., and jones, s. (2013). picture my work. in n. f. foster (ed.), studying students: a second look (pp. 25-44). chicago: association of college and research libraries. http://hdl.handle.net/1802/28781 cuny office of institutional research and assessment. (2012a). a profile of undergraduates at cuny senior and community colleges: fall 2012. city university of new york. http://cuny.edu/about/administration/offices/ira/ir/data-book/current/student/ug_student_profile_f12.pdf – – – – – . (2012b). 2012 student experience survey. city university of new york. http://www.cuny.edu/about/administration/offices/ira/ir/surveys/student/ses2012finalreport.pdf delcore, h. d., mullooly, j., & scroggins, m. (2009). the library study at fresno state. fresno, ca: institute of public anthropology, california state university. http://www.csufresno.edu/anthropology/ipa/thelibrarystudy.html foster, n. f., & gibbons, s. (2007). studying students: the undergraduate research project at the university of rochester. chicago: association of college and research libraries. http://hdl.handle.net/1802/7520 green, d. (2012). supporting the academic success of hispanic students. in l. m. duke and a. d. asher (eds.), college libraries and student culture: what we now know (pp. 87-108). chicago: american library association. krause, k. d. (2007). social involvement and commuter students: the first-year student voice. journal of the first-year experience & students in transition, 19(1), 27–45. mizrachi, d. (2011). how do they manage it? an exploratory study of undergraduate students in their personal academic information ecologies (dissertation). university of california, los angeles. regalado, m., and smale, m. a. (forthcoming, 2015). “i am more productive in the library because it’s quiet:” commuter students in the college library. college & research libraries. http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2015/02/05/crl14-696.full.pdf+html sanchez, s. e. (2012, april 18). freshman year living arrangements and college experiences for local students (masters thesis). university of nebraska-lincoln, lincoln, nebraska. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cehsedaddiss/90 seattle university. (2013). collegia program. http://www.seattleu.edu/ctsl/collegia/ shushok, f., scales, t. l., sriram, r., & kidd, v. (2011). a tale of three campuses: unearthing theories of residential life that shape the student learning experience. about campus, 16(3), 13–21. doi:10.1002/abc.20063 http://works.bepress.com/rishi_sriram/6/ u. s. census bureau. (2009). american housing survey (ahs): new york city. retrieved may 20, 2013, from https://www.census.gov/housing/ahs/data/newyork.html all student names in this article are pseudonyms. [↩] our complete research protocols, including interview questions and time log templates, are available on our project website. [↩] we did not explicitly ask students if they lived in apartments or houses. somewhat confusingly, many new yorkers tend to use the term “house” to refer to their home regardless of whether they live in an actual house or an apartment. [↩] research has shown that students who live in residence halls also customize their academic workspace, sometimes extensively. mizrachi (2011, pp. 240-256) discussed undergraduate ucla students’ customization of their dorm rooms—especially their desks—to facilitate creation of their learning spaces. [↩] academic libraries, college students, community colleges, commuter students, library design, off-campus, student behavior editorial: as the world turns so do we: a new publication strategy soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship 7 responses pingback : latest library links 22nd may 2015 | latest library links pingback : our article on student learning at home | undergraduate scholarly habits ethnography project linda wadas 2015–05–22 at 10:31 am thank you for this valuable work. it is vital that we have ethnographic studies like this to share with administration. pingback : school of doubt | student vets, classroom accommodations, brave spaces, academic competition, homework and social justice, and more: required readings, 05.24.15 maura smale 2015–05–25 at 4:08 pm thanks linda, we’re so glad you’ve found it useful! we really enjoyed working with bmcc students on this project, they’re terrific. susan levy 2016–01–12 at 1:53 am back in ancient history, when i went to hunter (graduated 1970) and lived in brooklyn, a lot of reading assignments were done on the subway. maura smale 2016–01–13 at 12:13 pm hi susan, thanks for reading our article. yes, that was my experience as a grad student in the 90s and 00s as well, and we heard lots of students share that they did as much work as they could on the subway. crowding conditions and lack of seats sometimes stymied them, though. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct “life-now”: james tiptree, joanna russ, and the queer meaning of archives – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 11 jul isaac r. fellman /3 comments “life-now”: james tiptree, joanna russ, and the queer meaning of archives in brief: archives have special meaning for queer people, and there are fascinating parallels between queer and archival thought. the author draws on several sources to explore these ideas: a case study of archival correspondence between two queer science fiction writers who saw very different futures for their letters, elizabeth freeman’s concept of “queer time,” and a meditation on archives and chosen family. by isaac r. fellman introduction archivists, queer people, and science fiction writers have one substantial thing in common: they spend a good deal of time imagining the future. they may be profoundly pessimistic about that future. they may have been told that they don’t personally have one. certainly they know that the universe to come is — in j.b.s. haldane’s famous formulation — queerer than we can imagine. but they persist in exploring the possibilities of other eras, other lives. the critic elizabeth freeman evokes some of these parallels in time binds, her 2016 examination of queer culture and its relationship to temporality. in one discussion of the formation of lgbtqia+ canons, for example, she could easily be talking about archival collection development: since “we can’t know in advance […] what is queer and what is not, we gather and combine eclectically, dragging a bunch of cultural debris around us and staging it in idiosyncratic piles ‘not necessarily like any preexisting whole,’ though composed of what preexists.”1 as an archivist who is also queer2 , i recognize this imperative to imagine future needs without assuming too much. here is the archivist’s perpetual struggle to make our organization legible to others. here is our doggedness, our cultivation of taste, and our collage-like approach to history. here, furthermore, is a certain suggestion that archives have a special meaning to queer people – a fundamental rhyme with our condition, and a tendency to work in our interests. although archives have been turned to many social purposes besides queer liberation, i believe that they are powerful tools for that liberation, for a range of reasons that include the short jump between archival philosophy and queer culture, as well as archives’ practical relevance to people who must look for places outside the nuclear family to safeguard their memory. in this article, i explore these ideas through a case study of two fascinating collections at the university of oregon (uo): the papers of science fiction writers joanna russ (1937-2011) and james tiptree, jr. (1915-1987). tiptree was a remarkable auto-archivist, among her other talents, and her correspondence with russ explores and details her unique archival thought. russ and tiptree russ and tiptree’s papers were posthumously donated to uo. during their lives, they carried on a unique epistolary friendship, during which they argued, scolded, advised, agreed, came out along multiple vectors, and confessed their love. it appears, however, that telephone conversations were the closest they ever came to a meeting, unless we can count the shared fate of their letters. readers unfamiliar with james tiptree will have noticed that i’ve referred to him by female pronouns. this is because he was the pseudonym of a female writer, alice sheldon. before taking up tiptree’s pen, sheldon had already led a storied life: artist, second world war spy, research psychologist, wife of a powerful cia officer, and daughter of explorers. as tiptree, she wrote lush, dark stories about gender and embodiment and biology; she also corresponded with many other authors and fans, taking on the persona of a traveled, world-weary man who shared every biographical detail with herself but one. it was in this persona that she met joanna russ, to whom she was eventually outed as a woman, and to whom she later came out as a lesbian.3 russ, conversely, had been publicly lesbian almost from the beginning of their friendship. like tiptree, she was a sophisticated, highly literary writer identified with science fiction’s new wave movement of the 1970s; she is best known today for her experimental novel the female man. she was a generation younger than tiptree, and in their correspondence, tiptree often admonishes or advises her – very often, as i shall discuss, on the subject of archives. but their story is also a love story, and in this, it was russ who took the lead. in one letter, she frankly confessed that “i was in love with you when you were ‘james tiptree, jr’ and have been able to transfer that infatuation to allie sheldon, who is, after all, the same person.”4 chosen family, queer time in opening a space just now for russ and tiptree’s personal stories, i’ve taken a moment to slip into what freeman calls “queer time” – to “dwell in some other temporal regime,” as she puts it5 , or at least to dwell on a story that i personally find very moving. queer time is a kind of alternate history that exists “within the lost moments of official history,” and which “generates a discontinuous history of its own.”6 one aspect of queer time is the temporal quirk of queer relationships, which don’t always map onto heterosexual models of what relationships look like. an inexperienced drag queen, for example, may be mentored by a “drag mother” who is only slightly older, or even a contemporary. this theme has strong connections to another concept close to tiptree and russ’ story: that of chosen family. chosen family is a crucial aspect of queer identity – an identity whose definition often begins with alternative models of attraction, but ultimately contains a whole political ecosystem composed mainly of blurred borders and fractured boundaries. queerness is the place where society’s tectonic plates meet and grind together. and chosen family is the place where this geology becomes genealogy.7 queer families form outside of the heterosexual construct of the nuclear family. they’re made up of friends, mentors, partners, exes, children, and others. even a very conventional-looking queer family, say a same-sex couple with children living in the suburbs, is still chosen in a way that the heterosexual family across the street is not. the couple across the street chose each other, yes, but there was a default form in place for what would happen next. the queer family has no default form. it’s a multifaceted crystal that often grows into fantastic shapes. i see russ and tiptree’s relationship through this crystal – first through one facet, then another. were they lovers? never quite. were they mother and daughter? in a way; tiptree was always advising russ about things, expressing concern for russ’ generation of women, and encouraging her to achieve her full potential. yet tiptree spoke initially as a father figure, not a mother, and russ later acted as counselor during tiptree’s coming-out. “sisters”? “friends”? it’s pointless to ask. tiptree wrote vigorously to russ about her doubts in matters of gender – an early letter about her theory that the two genders are “men and mothers” nearly resulted in a falling-out. if she couldn’t be more precise, what hope has the reader to describe the way that the two of them were related? and yet it’s this very lack of precision that makes them a queer family. in her discussion of bertha harris’ postmodern lesbian novel lover, freeman posits that the queer chosen family is not just disconnected from conventional relationships, but also “unbound from linear time.” she discusses the novel’s frontispiece, a “hand-drawn family tree of sorts” which sets out its characters’ connections – but “rather than situating characters above and below one another to indicate generations, this tree shows six fronds shooting out centrifugally from its center. the names of all the characters in the novel perch or hang from one frond or another, in no particular order. furthermore, this genealogical kudzu ensnares lover’s incidental characters, a few catholic saints, pets mentioned in passing within the novel, and ‘a british bottle of vinegar.’”8 i see a powerful connection between this organized chaos of chosen family, the concept of “queer time,” and the archive. archival systems may abound with metaphors of the nuclear family – in tools such as archivist’s toolkit and archivesspace, we find “sibling,” “child,” and “parent” relationships, and we “spawn” new records from old – but the fact remains that archives are not nuclear families, any more than russ and tiptree were. they are protean information, facts that can be rendered in any order. like the chosen family, they have an infinite number of forms. and their order is always “chosen.” donors9 choose where to leave papers; repositories choose what to collect. as for “original order,” in practice it’s always up for interpretation. when the collections have been processed and placed on the shelves, their physical proximity is up to chance. collections in juxtaposition don’t form nuclear families, but neighborhoods.10 like the queer neighborhood, they’re places where powerful connections can form from proximity alone. let us come, then, to russ and tiptree’s letters, which through the uo library now share an address. the correspondence from almost the beginning of their correspondence, tiptree’s concerns are strikingly archival. again and again, she urges russ to observe some simple rules of preservation. she asks her to type on only one side of the page, and to keep carbon copies. her thinking is partly practical: her eyesight is bad. but she is also demonstrating an archival mind, one that’s driven by the excitement of preserving the past for the sake of the future. one representative letter (undated, fall 1973) reads, “it isn’t just good phrases, what i mean you should save. it’s whole unrecapturable chunks of life-now. yeah, you can be sure i’ll save them — but my effects will end up being burned in some charity ward, let us not kid. do your researchers propose to look into the back wards of every va hospital?” likewise, on september 25th, 1973, she cries out: it is obvious since you write on both sides of the page that you do not keep carbons. this is very wrong. this is a sin. sin. why? because you are tossing off stuff like a fire-wheel, gems […] you think they will stay there, in your mind — please, human, take it from me they will not. they will change and evolve and shed themselves — or just ignominiously be forgotten. letters in which you say anything should be part of your notebook. then they will be there when you need them fresh and beating, not even because you’re a writer but because one of the most useful things a thinking person can have is his own past. i mean useful, not just elegiac. later letters continue this theme. on november 16th, 1973, she writes: “again, your letter fires me with the urge to force letterex upon you. […] joanna, people like me make a nice note about sending stuff to bowling green university….and then never do it. never quite.” on september 22nd, 1974: “great letters as usual which i am now burdened down guarding. i accept the burden but tremble to think how i can fulfill it. (does the smithsonian take writers’ notebooks?)” and on november 27th, 1975: “i am saving all your letters in a notebook and will do my best to see they end up in bowling green. but are you sure you don’t want xeroxes?” i’ve quoted tiptree at this length because i want to emphasize her archival philosophy. she’s doing many things in these exchanges: advising, admonishing, complimenting, flirting. but at the root of them is a fundamental faith in archives, a believe that when we let our words loose, we also lose part of ourselves. it doesn’t seem to occur to her – and if it does, she isn’t interested in exploring the idea – that russ might not care whether anyone but tiptree reads the letters, or might actively wish them to disappear into oblivion.11) in fact, that apparently was her wish. on october 15th, 1973, russ fired back: “of course i never keep carbons. this is so that all my correspondents will feel guilty & will save my letters (as i save other people’s). then 100 years from now stupid tho’ deserving scholars will clamber all about the world trying to piece together my correspondence & cussing under their breaths. (none of their business, anyhow.)” nonetheless, tiptree remained committed to her own archival mission. years later, after she was outed, she began to seriously contemplate archiving the letters she’d written and received during the tiptree pseudonym’s heyday. she took steps to make the bowling green fantasy come true. on march 12, 1979, she writes to russ with some ire: re this business of my shipping all of tiptree’s life and papers to bowling green — nobody has read your letters. nobody is reading your letters, nobody will read your letters — in fact, at present, nobody can read your letters. your letters to tip (and me) are in closed binders, like everyone else’s, and all that can be read is your name on the spine of the binder(s). to tiptree, secrecy is as important as preservation. it’s possible for an archives to be both restricted and vital. to keep them in both conditions, she suggests a kind of hipaa of the closet, or else a kind of citizen’s copyright. the whole works, all my mss, notes, correspondence, even my stacks of fanzines, repose in some kind of order in sealed cartons in the basement of an honorable man in another city [jeff smith, who ultimately donated the papers to uo], identified only by number cued to a private list. while she speaks seriously of her archival goals concerning preservation and privacy, she is flippant about the death of “tiptree,” seeing herself as “his” literary executor: you see, being dead, i decided to accede to bowling green’s request and do as i’d promised, ship everything to them, under seal, and then have each correspondent queried to assign a date on which their letters could be read. 10, 50, 100 years, whatever. the one thing i will not fo [sic] is burn them. however, being not only dead but mad, i neglected to tell anyone about this, and simply left everything to jeff[…] after talking at greater length about privacy concerns, tiptree adds: the thing is, among all the mundane chitchat and personal trivia, my correspondents periodically emitted flashes or pages and paragraphs of brilliance and truth, and i will not destroy the kernels with the chaff. moreover, the lot as a whole give a funny, perfectly complete complete [sic] picture of the whole ten years from birth to destruction, of a tiny little episode in [science fiction] history…ideal grist for some post-fusion phd’s green little paws. why did tiptree, whose many careers somehow never touched on librarianship, spend so much time and energy thinking about archives? her later years were marked by physical and mental illness; the process of putting together her collections could not have been easy. part of it, i suspect, is bound up with a desire to tidy up a life which was drawing to a close – in the same year that she wrote the above-quoted letter to russ, she also wrote her suicide note, keeping it on file until her actual death by suicide in 1987. but i believe that tiptree’s queer archival mindset went beyond similar practicality. however one wishes to speculate about her identity, it’s clear that she was quite queer. in the wildean sense, she was always over-dressed and over-educated; her most famous photo shows an imposing, patrician butch who is also somehow wearing two pearl necklaces. james tiptree, jr. photo courtesy university of oregon. larger version of same image it’s an inescapably campy image, bringing up freeman’s description of camp as “a mode of archiving, in that it lovingly, sadistically, even masochistically brings back dominant culture’s junk and displays the performer’s fierce attachment to it.”12 the color-coding, the painstaking choice of repository, the binders – a powerful word for later generations of female-assigned gender rebels – all speak of a powerful attachment to such “junk.” and it brings up valerie rohy’s observation that there’s a strong connection between queerness and a desire for organization, research, knowledge: “it should be no surprise that queers are liable to an intense library cathexis. what sort of people, after all, must research who they are?13 i am confident that tiptree understood the archives as the ideal resting place for her memory. queer people are prone to losing their biological families. historically, we have sometimes been forced to undergo sterilization; today, we still risk barriers to reproduction, and sometimes find ourselves unable to remain connected to our families of origin. the nuclear family’s guarantee of memory, the proverbial list of names in the family bible, is at times closed to us. certainly it was closed to tiptree, who left no biological children. but she did leave chosen family, and chosen family merges naturally into the archive. conclusion verne harris, in his essay on the french feminist philosopher helene cixous, applies her ideas to archives this way: “the full meanings and significances at play within any part of a storehouse’s content are indeterminable. for its content is an ever-shifting swirl of recording and imagining, of narrativizing and fictionalizing.”14 queer identity, with its place at culture’s edges, is similarly liminal and complex; archives may seem set and final once placed on their shelves, but there is a streak of queerness engrained in the form itself, in the shifting meanings harris describes. i am again reminded of rohy, who remarks of alison bechdel’s very archival graphic novel fun home, “perhaps this [book] is what queer genealogy looks like: not the accidental genetic relation of lesbian daughter to bisexual father but the strands of identification and disidentification — gendered, literary, aesthetic, archival — that engage the two in an endless conversation.”15 “an endless conversation”: a remarkable afterlife for two passionate people who, in the end, had to build their relationship solely on talk. in becoming archival subjects, russ and tiptree have slipped into queer time for good. acknowledgements thanks to jeff smith for granting me permission to quote from the tiptree letters, madelyn arnold for granting permission to quote russ’ replies, and patti perret for allowing me to reproduce her photograph. my mentor steve duckworth encouraged me to write this paper and was its first editor; i owe him a great debt. perri parise arranged for me to get mls credit for researching and writing an early draft. lynne stahl gave me all the right advice and recommended key readings, including time binds. at the university of oregon library, linda long showed me what archival reference ought to look like, and also gave me much-needed copyright guidance. at lead pipe, publishing editor ian beilin repeatedly saved me from myself, and alexis lothian and ryan randall provided a brilliant and deeply considered peer review. lastly, the members of wiscon 42 created the perfect environment for me to write the last major draft of this paper: nurturing, adventurous, and a place where everyone’s heard of james tiptree, jr. references freeman, elizabeth. time binds: queer temporalities, queer histories. durham: duke university press, 2010. kindle edition. harris, verne. “insistering derrida: cixous, deconstruction, and the work of archive.” journal of critical library and information studies 1, no. 2 (2017): 1-19. accessed november 9, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.28 phillips, julie. james tiptree, jr.: the double life of alice b. sheldon. new york: picador, 2007. rohy, valerie. “in the queer archive: fun home.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 16, no. 3 (2010): 341-361. 10.1215/10642684-2009-03 weston, kath. families we choose: lesbians, gays, kinship. new york: columbia university press, 2005. joanna russ papers, coll 261, box 10, special collections & university archives, university of oregon libraries, eugene, oregon. alice b. sheldon, pen name james tiptree, jr., papers, coll 455, boxes 74 and 120, special collections and university archives, university of oregon libraries, eugene, oregon. loc 122. the quotation is from eve sedgwick’s “paranoid reading and reparative reading.” [↩] i use the term in the popular as well as the academic sense: an identity that’s both personal and political, and that can’t be separated from the kinship i feel with other queer people. [↩] although this is a typical capsule biography of tiptree, there’s one respect in which i’m personally unsure of its accuracy. namely, had she been born a hundred years later, would tiptree have identified with a different gender than that assigned to her at birth? there is much in julie philips’ excellent biography to suggest so, from early diary entries that declare “i am no damned woman[;] wasteful god not to have made me a man” (p. 99) to a later discussion of her choice to undergo a breast reduction in middle age, whose rather tortured justification was that “boyish clothes look younger, or healthier, because they contrast a woman’s features with a man’s, rather than with a girl’s. in a clean white shirt i still look like a perverse young boy, and this is about my best effect, from the standpoint of attraction” (p. 195-196). this, combined with her masculine pseudonym and the great difficulty she experienced in writing without it, makes me worry that by calling “her” “alice sheldon,” i am in fact misgendering and deadnaming this writer. however, “she/her” were the pronouns she used in life, and so i will use them here. as for the name, “tiptree” remains the convention used in the science fiction field, and so it is easy for me to default on “tiptree,” which i suspect is ultimately more accurate than “sheldon.” [↩] russ to tiptree, 25 july 1977 [↩] loc 54 [↩] loc 66 [↩] or, as kath weston puts it in loc 217 of families we choose: “familial ties between persons of the same sex that may be erotic but are not grounded in biology or procreation do not fit any tidy division of kinship into relations of blood and marriage […] lesbian and gay relationships seem to cut across [the] categories of law and nature.” [↩] loc 1088. i am duty bound here to point out that the name “james tiptree” derives from a brand of british marmalade. [↩] my friend, the queer scholar lynne stahl, points out that this word has enormous resonance in a discussion of queer reproduction. (document comment to author, may 20, 2018.) [↩] i warmly credit brenda marston, archivist at the cornell human sexuality collection, for the image of the archival neighborhood. (email message to author, november 10, 2017.) [↩] another remark from stahl: “to queer the notion this paragraph articulates further, i wonder if it’s helpful to consider preservation as reproduction/the making of queer family. while the letters were not public artifacts at the time, tiptree seems to be presuming that they someday will be — her and russ’s offspring or parthenogenetic heirs or something along those lines? their immortal future, at any rate.” (document comment to author, may 30, 2018.) to this, peer reviewer alexis lothian adds: “maybe russ’s uncaring is a different kind of queerness, one that is uninterested in reproduction or seeks a more immaterial version of it – as seen in jose munoz’s ‘ephemera as evidence.’” (document comment to author, june 20, 2018.) see also lothian’s own “archival anarchies,” which is highly recommended. [↩] loc 1679 [↩] p. 355 [↩] p. 6 [↩] p. 349 [↩] interested in writing for lead pipe? we’re calling for submissions. in pursuit of equity: applying design thinking to develop a values-based open access statement 3 responses pingback : rachel fellman, emporia state university slim student, a busy summer… – scala oregon pingback : year in the life: rachel fellman, part 6 | snap section pingback : the quiet solidarity of national coming out day through queer storytelling and coffee – acrlog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct responsive acquisitions: a case study on improved workflow at a small academic library – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 5 nov brian greene /8 comments responsive acquisitions: a case study on improved workflow at a small academic library fast delivery, photo by flickr users david, bergin, emmett and elliott (cc by 2.0) in brief: fast acquisitions processes are beneficial because they get materials into patrons’ hands quicker. this article describes one library’s experience implementing a fast acquisitions process that dramatically cut turnaround times—from the point of ordering to the shelf—to under five days, all without increasing costs. this was accomplished by focusing on three areas: small-batch ordering, fast shipping and quick processing. considerations are discussed, including the decision to rely on amazon for the vast majority of orders. by brian greene i’m impatient. this is especially true when it comes to getting library materials for our patrons. i’m aware of the work required to get a book into someone’s hands: it has to be discovered or suggested; ordered; shipped; received; paid for; cataloged and processed—only then is it made available on a shelf. skip or skimp on any one of these and the item never shows up or may never be found again once it leaves the technical services area. but performing these steps well mustn’t lead to months of delay. patrons want—and deserve—today’s top sellers today, not next season. students and faculty are knee-deep in research this week; next month is too late and who knows when that inter-library loan will actually arrive. it’s a cliché, but our society is fast-paced and instant gratification is king. i’m not the only one who is impatient. background in 2011, i took advantage of an opportunity to put into place a fast acquisitions workflow that i’d been formulating. this effort followed in the footsteps of a wide variety of libraries that have prioritized the importance of getting materials into patrons’ hands as quickly as possible (speas, 2012). at the time i was the newly hired director of library services at columbia gorge community college (cgcc), in the dalles and hood river, oregon. cgcc is a small community college east of portland that encourages innovation. the timing was right to try the new acquisitions workflow: the library staff—especially fellow librarian katie wallis—was receptive and ready for a challenge; the business office was supportive; i was new to the college and my boss believed in my ideas. the goal was to make the entire process, from the ordering decision until the item was in a patron’s hands, as fast as possible without sacrificing quality or spending more money. specifically, we wanted the process to take less than a week from start to finish. that is, from the point when a decision was made to acquire an item we wanted it to be on the shelf within five business days. this would be a substantial improvement over cgcc’s existing practice and faster than any acquisitions process i had experienced. other libraries, including large ones such as the columbus metropolitan library, have managed an impressive 48 hours to process materials after they were received, but i am unaware of a library attempting such a short turnaround time from the point of ordering (hatcher, 2006). achieving such an ambitious goal would require rethinking all aspects of the process. in other libraries i’ve worked at, acquisitions processes generally took from several weeks to a few months from start to finish. to be sure, occasional high priority rush orders were acquired and processed quickly, but they were the exception. acquisitions typically took a long time and i’d realized that a few points in the process were especially prone to delay. the first delay often occurs during the selection process when lists of desired items are created. lists i created regularly sat untouched for weeks or even months. this happened either because the list was waiting for someone else to do the actual ordering or because i had become distracted and hadn’t finalized it for some reason. this seemed like an area where a lot of time could be saved. not only that, but the very practice of ordering big batches of items contributed to slowdowns later in the process, as we’ll see. the second slow point was more clear-cut: shipping times. in order to get our entire process down to less than a week we clearly needed reliably quick shipping. perhaps not surprisingly, faster shipping is probably the easiest way to speed up an acquisitions process as it doesn’t involve changing workflows or priorities. however, fast shipping is often expensive. identifying fast shipping that didn’t increase our costs would likely determine how successful our overall effort would be. the third slow point was the bottleneck that occurred in technical services when a big order arrived that, understandably, took a long time to catalog and process. backlogs have been prevalent in libraries for decades and i’ve worked in several where it was not uncommon for items to spend more than a month being cataloged and processed (howarth, moor & sze, 2010). to be sure, prioritizing fast, efficient cataloging is essential to getting acquisition turnaround times down, but dozens of items can only be processed so quickly, especially at a small library. at larger libraries the quantities are bigger but the concept is the same: there are only so many items existing staff can reasonably process in a given day. that being the case, this bottleneck provided two areas for improvement: improving the actual technical services workflow as well as re-thinking how orders are placed so as not be to overwhelmed when they arrive. by focusing on these three areas—immediate, small-batch ordering; fast shipping; and quick processing—we identified solutions that led to a dramatic decrease in the overall turnaround times for our acquisitions process. the three areas and our methods of addressing them are similar to those often identified in the “buy instead of borrow” philosophy of collection development. with this method libraries monitor interlibrary loan requests and purchase those items that meet set criteria, a concept subsequently expanded to ebooks and often referred to as patron-driven acquisitions (allen, ward, wray & debus-lópez,  2003; nixon, freeman & ward, 2010). our process at cgcc differs from these efforts in that we applied the practices to all acquisitions rather than just interlibrary loan or ebooks. implementing responsive acquisitions the most prominent change we implemented at cgcc was to move virtually all of our ordering to amazon. at some institutions this might require completing a sole-source justification, but that wasn’t the case at cgcc. in any event, given the benefits outlined here i suspect it would have been straightforward to justify. prior to amazon, we used several vendors and while they each had their strengths, they were simply too slow. in contrast, amazon is fast and offers competitive pricing. additionally, we paid for an amazon prime membership (currently $99 annually) that made amazon really fast because it includes free two-day shipping on most items.1 relying almost exclusively on amazon meant that we needed to have a credit account (essentially a credit card) with amazon that allowed us to pay our bill monthly instead of with each order. our business office worked with us to set up open purchase orders (pos) for different types of materials as well as a process for tracking the orders and paying the monthly bills. while seemingly simple, my experience is that not all business offices can or will allow such an arrangement. since we were ordering from amazon it made sense to do some of our other collection development work, such as selection, on amazon as well. it’s worth emphasizing the distinction between the selection process—deciding which items to purchase—and actually acquiring an item. this article focuses on the latter. while our selection process certainly evolved and no doubt sped up, we continued to take our time identifying the best materials to support the college’s curriculum. the changes came once we decided to order an item, whether it took weeks or only seconds to reach that decision. once decided, we ordered the item immediately or typically within 24 hours. ordering was facilitated through the use of amazon’s wish lists to organize and prioritize acquisitions. we maintained three main lists, for books, movies, and music. we used additional lists for special projects. amazon’s wish lists have several valuable features that assisted selection and acquisitions: they help minimize unintentional duplicate purchases by notifying you if an item was previously purchased or is already on a wish list (helpfully, if you add an item a second time it moves to the top of the list); they have built-in priority and commenting capability; they can be shared, which means anyone can create a list and share the link so that all orders can be placed from the same account (lists can also be kept private); and overall, wish lists are as easy to use as amazon itself. while other vendors have analogous collection development tools of varying complexity, my experience is that they are less intuitive to use than amazon’s wish lists. for example, ingram’s ipage doesn’t automatically warn users when they’ve added a duplicate title or if that title was previously purchased. it is possible to run a duplicate isbn search in ipage selection lists, but it’s not automatic and previously purchased items are only included if they’re still on a selection list. a significant benefit of using amazon with a prime membership is that it allowed us to intentionally move away from big orders and instead make frequent, small orders; sometimes even ordering a single item at a time. small orders are easier to process than larger orders. we generally received new items in batches of one to ten. in comparison to dozens of items in a batch, even ten items seems manageable to process quickly—certainly within a day—and it was our practice to catalog items within 24 hours. placing small orders is mentally-freeing as well, since you don’t have to put a lot of thought into compiling a complete list of titles. ordering small batches through amazon is relatively efficient; it’s a simple process to place orders once you’ve logged in and selected an item, as anyone who has ordered through amazon has experienced. the only difference as an institution is that when completing the purchase we added the appropriate purchase order number for bookkeeping purposes. once an item arrived a librarian handled the cataloging, which for the most part was basic copy cataloging. once cataloged, a library assistant or a student assistant did the remainder of the processing, again within 24 hours and often the same day. at that point the item was ready to go and either added to our new book/media display or placed on the hold shelf. to recap: from the time an order was placed items typically took two days to arrive, one day to catalog and another day to finish processing; four days total. but our emphasis on completing the process quickly—coupled with small-batch ordering—meant that we regularly bested even these times. for example, cataloging and processing was often completed in a day or even a single afternoon. in practice, if someone requested an item that we decided to purchase we would order it immediately, sometimes while the patron was still standing there. this got the process started and drove home the notion that we were listening to their needs. with an amazon prime membership, shipping cost is the same regardless of the size of the order. more frequently, however, if an item was identified for purchase we gave it a “highest” priority in a wish list and then one person was responsible for regularly checking the wishlists and placing an order that included all of the highest priority items. this generally happened daily. the two methods helped give us the best of both worlds: a simple way to frequently order a handful of high priority items as well as the ability to order a single item immediately. super-fast acquisitions two-day shipping is fast and comes standard with an amazon prime membership, but we regularly had items delivered even faster, as in the following day. shipping from our previous vendors took longer, and faster shipping led to the easiest time savings of all the changes we implemented. depending on proximity to your library and order volume other vendors may be able to compete with amazon’s two-day shipping, but overall i suspect amazon has the most competitive shipping options for a majority of libraries, which is an important advantage. whichever vendor you go with, you should need—and want—the fastest shipping you can afford. for nearly all of our orders (90%+) the entire process took five business days or less and a majority of items were available for patrons two to three business days after the order was placed. on a number of occasions someone asked for an item and it was hand delivered to them the following afternoon. research has shown quick turnaround times to be a driver of patron satisfaction and, indeed, at cgcc reaction to such quick turnaround times was positive (hussong-christian and goergen-doll, 2010). people were amazed that it was even possible for their item to be available so quickly because the fast shipping meant that in many cases we were faster than if they’d purchased the item from amazon themselves. while most positive feedback cgcc received on this point was anecdotal, patron surveys from this period capture an increase in satisfaction with library services. this suggests that, overall, our efforts to improve services—including more responsive acquisitions—were working. being responsive to our patrons’ needs and fulfilling their requests quickly helped to cement the library in their consciousness as a viable option for obtaining materials. things to think about while cgcc’s experience was a resounding success, there are a number of constraints and drawbacks to keep in mind. one prominent constraint is size. cgcc is a small academic library that spends approximately $14,000 annually on physical books and media. we seldom ordered multiple copies nor did we automate any of our acquisitions through the use of standing orders. instead, we relied primarily on two related ways to track expenditures and ensure allocated funds would last the entire year. the first way stemmed from the fact that we knew a $14,000 budget meant we could spend a little over $1,100 per month. when we placed an order we would note basic information—date, amount, number of titles and po number—in a simple spreadsheet that made our expenses to date easy to see. at the same time, we established multiple open purchase orders for a given category of materials (e.g. books or media), each for a portion of our total budgeted amount. for example, we might start the fiscal year with a $2,500 po for books and a $1,000 po for media, understanding that those amounts were expected to cover purchases for about three months. we established new pos quarterly before the existing pos were exhausted. in short, once our allocation for the year was established we determined roughly how much could be spent per month and stuck to it. if we went a little over one month we compensated for it the following month. other considerations range from the philosophical to the practical. on the philosophical side is the reality that some libraries may avoid supporting amazon because of the role they’ve played in altering the bookselling landscape or concerns about supporting industry consolidation and the long term consequences of that trend. indeed, amazon was able to fulfill the vast majority of our orders (>95%), with most of the rest being textbooks we bought from our campus bookstore or independent films purchased directly from their distributor. while this consolidation is arguably good from the perspective of being able to efficiently fill orders from a single source, the long-term effects are hard to predict. to mention just one minor example, amazon could change its policies governing how prime works for institutional or high volume customers, perhaps by substantially increasing its cost or otherwise devaluing its benefits. such negative changes should perhaps be expected if competition decreases. on the other hand, many libraries already purchase at least some materials from amazon. a 2008 association of american university presses survey of academic librarians found that 31% of respondents used amazon as their primary book distributor, a number that seems likely to have increased in the intervening years. when implementing these changes at cgcc we initially tried to avoid using amazon because of concerns about supporting industry consolidation as well as a desire to support more local alternatives. we looked into ordering through powell’s books, portland’s well-known independent bookseller. powell’s offers a generous discount to oregon libraries that helps make their prices highly competitive. however, the library discount could not be combined with free shipping, meaning shipping charges must be factored in when doing a price comparison. amazon’s combination of overall price and shipping speed—especially with an amazon prime membership—led us to decide it was the best value available to us and to a large extent forced our hand; as stewards of public funds we felt obligated to use the vendor that met our needs at the lowest cost. in the end, our desire and responsibility to quickly obtain competitively priced materials trumped our philosophical concerns about supporting amazon’s industry-consolidating practices. cataloging practices are another consideration as proper cataloging is sometimes put forward as a necessarily slow and deliberate process. while high quality cataloging records should be valued and expected, libraries need to be careful not to sacrifice the good (i.e. fast processing) for perfect catalog records. this is not to say that error-ridden catalog records are acceptable; they aren’t. like many things, however, there are diminishing returns when striving for perfection and immaculate records may not be worth the effort. mary bolin’s summation of the situation and her call for quantity as well as quality in cataloging remains as relevant today as when it was published more than 20 years ago. in short, she states how “high quality and high quantity in cataloging are not incompatible” (1991, p. 358). moreover, bolin opens her piece by referring to andrew osborn’s similar argument made a full fifty years earlier (1941). given the prevalence of copy cataloging and the reasonably high quality records available through oclc and some library consortiums, a skilled cataloger should be able to quickly obtain high quality records for most commonly held items, tweak them as needed and move on. if the process seems slow then the library needs to decide whether the improvements obtained from a more deliberate process are worth the delay. libraries that rely more heavily on original cataloging will necessarily require more time per item, but they, too, should foster a culture that values quick cataloging. some libraries reduce the need for in-house cataloging and technical services through the purchase of pre-processed materials. amazon launched its own processing program for libraries in 2006 (amazon, 2006), but apparently it never took off and an amazon representative i spoke with said it was discontinued in 2007, a mere year after it started. at cgcc, the vast majority of items we acquired were broadly held and good quality catalog records were generally available from oclc or our consortium. as noted above, a librarian imported the records and made changes as necessary. we strove to catalog items within 24 hours of their arrival with an additional 24 hours allotted for further processing, a target that we typically met or exceeded. while the evidence supporting this practice is anecdotal, cgcc experienced increasing circulation statistics that suggest, at a minimum, the overall benefits of the changes outweighed the costs, including costs from an emphasis on quick cataloging. another consideration is amazon’s frustrating practice of not consistently including packing slips in packages (forget drone delivery—consistent packing slips would make me a happy bookkeeper). when this happened we needed to look up item prices so that we could add their value into our library management system as well as print our order confirmation for documentation purposes. something else to be aware of is that invoices are calculated per shipment, not per order, which further complicates bookkeeping. for example, the order you place for $200 may be shipped in three separate packages, resulting in invoices for $90, $60 and $50 to reconcile. neither of these—lack of packing slips and per shipment invoices—are hard to handle, but they are added wrinkles. all told, the bookkeeping was straightforward and it took less than an hour per month to organize the paperwork for the business office, which paid the bills. finally, while i like the simplicity of amazon’s wish lists and competitive prices, i can envision how libraries with a more robust materials budget may find that amazon’s wish lists aren’t up to the task of large volume ordering or that their existing vendor’s discounts are superior to amazon’s prices. amazon alternatives the most prominent change we implemented at cgcc was to move practically all of our ordering to amazon. this was a positive move because it helped us to quickly address two of our problem areas (slow shipping and processing big batches of items). with that said, i see amazon as a tool that we used to help speed up our acquisitions process; other libraries may find different tools that work as well or better for their specific circumstances. the point to emphasize is that your library should want and expect fast shipping along with the ability to place orders in small batches at a low cost—the goal being to get items into your patrons’ hands as quickly as logistically and financially possible. conclusion cgcc’s responsive acquisitions workflow was a positive change for patrons, the library and the college as a whole. most importantly, patrons had their items weeks faster than they otherwise would have. for the library, the faster workflow meant improvements in everything from happier patrons to requiring less space in technical services to store items that were waiting to be processed. at the same time, these benefits occurred without a higher cost, either in terms of higher prices or staff time and resources. implement fast acquisitions in three steps commit to making the process fast and efficient; get staff buy-in. identify and use the fastest shipping you can afford, either from your existing vendor or alternatives with fast shipping and similar levels of service. review cataloging processes with an eye towards efficiencies. determine how many items can reasonably be processed in a day and order roughly that many (or fewer) items at a time. acknowledgements i want to thank everyone who read this article and provided feedback and/or encouragement: my reviewers rachel howard at university of louisville and hugh rundle with the city of boroondara for their time and thoughtful comments; erin dorney and the other editors at lead pipe for their guidance and support; ellen dambrosio and iris carroll at modesto junior college for reading an early draft and encouraging me to seek a wider audience for it; and katie wallis at columbia gorge community college for her help implementing a super fast acquisitions process that far exceeded my expectations. thank you all. references allen, megan, suzanne m. ward, tanner wray and karl e. debus-lópez (n.d.). “patron-focused services: collaborative interlibrary loan, collection development and acquisitions.” digital repository at the university of maryland. retrieved from http://drum.lib.umd.edu/ amazon (2006). “amazon.com announces library processing for public and academic libraries across the united states.” amazon media room. retrieved from http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?p=irol-mediahome&c=176060 the american association of university presses (2008). “marketing to libraries: 2008 survey of academic librarians.” aaupnet. retrieved from www.aaupnet.org bolin, mary (1991).  “make a quick decision in (almost) all cases: our perennial crisis in cataloging.” the journal of academic librarianship, 16(6): 357-361. hatcher, marihelen (2006). “on the shelf in 48 hours.” library journal, 131(15): 30-31. howarth, lynne. c., les moor and elisa sze (2010). “mountains to molehills: the past, present, and future of cataloging backlogs.” cataloging & classification quarterly, 48(5): 423-444. hussong-christian, uta and kerri goergen-doll (2010). “we’re listening: using patron feedback to assess and enhance purchase on demand.” journal of interlibrary loan, document delivery & electronic reserve, 20(5): 319-335. nixon, judith m., robert s. freeman and suzanne m. ward (2010). “patron-driven acquisitions: an introduction and literature review.” collection management, 35(3-4): 119-124. osborn, andrew d. (1941). “the crisis in cataloging.” library quarterly, 11(4): 393-411. speas, linda (2012). “getting new items into the hands of patrons: a public library efficiency evaluation.” public libraries online, 51(6). as a bonus, up to three other amazon accounts that share the same address as the prime member can also take advantage of the free two-day shipping, a benefit that was much appreciated by other departments on campus. [↩] about the patron, acquisitions, amazon, cataloging, collection development, vendors using animated gif images for library instruction introducing library pipeline 8 responses christine schutz 2014–11–05 at 1:09 pm we’ve been using this model with an apx. $50k book budget at the college of idaho library since 2011 (converting many ill requests to purchases, using amazon prime for all orders, often providing a 3-day request-to-patron cycle) and using amazon as our sole book supplier (with accompanying and ongoing concerns about amazon’s business practices) since 2004. i’d be interested to read counter arguments (not connected to concerns about amazon, which are real and valid) and reasons for maintaining more traditional ordering models in small libraries still obtaining print materials. brian greene 2014–11–05 at 9:25 pm christine – it’s reassuring to know that this model is working in other libraries, especially with a larger book budget such as yours. given the benefits, i would also like to hear arguments in favor of traditional ordering models. i hope supporters of those methods will share their experiences. mark gottschalk 2014–11–05 at 6:17 pm one thing we have started doing is having faculty link us to their amazon wish lists, especially in history where the professors are looking for more titles on areas they teach and especially areas they assign written assignments. it has worked well so far and is slowly gaining traction among our faculty. bruce jensen 2014–11–14 at 11:13 am hi–you mentioned powell’s; were there conversations with them how their shipping/pricing structure discourages libraries like yours from working with them? is this one their radar now, in light of what you guys have accomplished? thanks ~ brian greene 2014–11–14 at 3:18 pm prior to implementing our shift to amazon i had several conversations with the appropriate staff at powell’s, including one face-to-face conversation at their flagship store in portland. i explained what we were looking to do and was frank about amazon’s advantages as well as our preference to work with powell’s. they wanted our business and provided quotes for several test orders so that we could compare pricing. in the end they were sympathetic and good to work with, but acknowledged they couldn’t compete with amazon on overall cost. of course that was several years ago; i haven’t followed up with them to see if their situation has changed. i would love to see libraries work more closely with independent booksellers and to steer a greater percentage of our budgets their way. strategies for successfully (i.e. cost-effectively) doing so would be valuable additions to the broader acquisitions conversation. brian greene 2014–12–10 at 2:50 pm st. edward’s university librarians kady ferris & tina herman buck recently published an article documenting a similar process at their library. see “an ethos of access: how a small academic library transformed its collection-building processes.” abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2014.900732 the piece describes a reliance on ebooks that isn’t covered in the responsive acquisitions article, but the overall philosophy–especially regarding cataloging practices, fast delivery and increasing use of amazon in place of traditional vendors–mirrors the conclusions detailed in the article describing cgcc’s experience. shelley blackman 2015–01–27 at 11:21 pm thank you for sharing your experiences with amazon, brian. at evergreen valley college, we also use az for the bulk of our orders (for print books) and we’ve been able to benefit from both the free shipping and discounts for placing large orders. we spend approx. $15k with amazon yearly. two questions: (1) had you explored using barnes and noble (or other large, online retailers besides powell’s) as your primary vendor? (2) we are also looking at alternative ways of expanding our ebook collection. is there a way for academic libraries to purchase ebooks through amazon? thanks again. ~shelley~ brian greene 2015–01–28 at 4:23 pm hi shelley, we discussed other online retailers, but the only in depth comparison we did was with powell’s. (i would be curious to hear from those who have compared other options.) my perception is that barnes and noble has slower shipping times than amazon; 3-4 or 4-6 days for their express delivery, depending on the item’s availability. even their premium “expedited” option appears to be slower than prime. still, slightly slower shipping might be worth the trade off if they were consistently less expensive or otherwise superior. regarding ebooks, i have only limited (but positive) experience using amazon’s ebooks in academic libraries. amazon touts its partnership with overdrive and public libraries, although presumably other types of libraries could participate: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docid=1000718231 this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct revising academic library governance handbooks – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 1 jul jen stevens, theresa calcagno, claudia c. holland and nathan putnam /0 comments revising academic library governance handbooks original image by flickr user sasquatch 1 (cc by 2.0), with minimal modification by c. strunk (10 june 2015). in brief regardless of our status (tenure track, non-tenure track, staff, and/or union), academic librarians at colleges and universities may use a handbook or similar document as a framework for self-governance. these handbooks typically cover rank descriptions, promotion requirements, and grievance rights, among other topics. unlike employee handbooks used in the corporate world, these documents may be written and maintained by academic librarians themselves1. in 2010, a group of academic librarians at george mason university was charged with revising our librarians’ handbook. given the dearth of literature about academic librarians’ handbooks and their revision, we anticipate our library colleagues in similar situations will benefit from our experience and recommendations. by jen stevens, theresa calcagno, claudia c. holland, and nathan putnam background and context there are three handbooks at george mason university (mason) governing individuals in various faculty positions: the academic/professional faculty handbook, the librarians’ handbook, and the mason faculty handbook, which covers instructional faculty.2 librarians at mason, a young institution founded in 1957, are classified as professional faculty, a non-tenured faculty classification. as such, librarians are governed by the university’s administrative/professional faculty handbook (a/p handbook), as well as by the librarians’ handbook (handbook), which became an appendix of the former in 2000. the handbook contains provisions that apply only to professional faculty librarians. although the history of the handbook is not well documented, its precursor was an evaluation and promotion document that was used by library administration as early as the 1970s. librarians who hold a professional faculty position at mason (~45) are members of the librarians’ council (council), which plays a significant governance role by defining the standards for librarian rank, contract renewal, and promotion in the librarians’ handbook. our handbook differs significantly from the a/p handbook because the librarians’ handbook includes a statement on academic freedom, a professional review process for contract renewal and promotion, professional ranks, and some aspects of the grievance and appeal processes. consequently, our handbook is more analogous to the mason faculty handbook. in late 2009, the council voted to review and, as needed, revise the handbook, especially sections related to professional peer review and librarian ranks. we began in the summer of 2010 with the appointment of an ad hoc handbook review committee that was selected by council officers and approved by the library’s senior administrators. the a/p handbook was under review at this same time, so revising the librarians’ handbook concurrently made sense. our colleague representing the library in the a/p handbook group was also appointed to chair the council’s ad hoc committee, and her dual role proved to be most advantageous to our revision process. literature review although there is a substantial body of literature regarding employee handbooks as a whole (most of it in business and human resources), relatively little has been published on creating and revising faculty handbooks, let alone librarian faculty handbooks. articles that do include library faculty tend to do so in a cursory fashion. one example is a 1985 chronicle of higher education article “writing a faculty handbook: a 2-year, nose-to-the-grindstone process” that provides a brief description of the recommended process from a legal standpoint and an outline for how to structure the resulting document. this outline includes librarians, along with other “special academic staff and categories,” but only as a line item (writing 1985, 29). one of the few articles describing the actual process of writing and revising faculty handbooks, james l. pence’s “adapting faculty personnel policies” focuses solely on instructional faculty (pence 1990). a more detailed faculty handbook outline that addresses material applicable to librarians is provided in drafting and revising employment policies and handbooks. 2002 cumulative supplement (decker et al. 2002, 456-511), but it is more of a prescriptive example from the standpoint of human resources law rather than a “how to” or case study. although it is unclear why library faculty are not more fully included in such articles, one reason may be the lack of conformity regarding librarian status in higher education institutions. as surveys such as mary k. bolin’s “a typology of librarian status at land grant universities” indicate, librarian status varies widely (bolin 2008). for the purpose of her survey, bolin grouped librarian statuses into “professorial,” “other ranks with tenure,” “other ranks without tenure,” and “non-faculty (staff)” (bolin 2008, 223). these statuses span a continuum, with “professorial” being closest to instructional faculty who have tenure and research requirements and “non-faculty (staff)” being the furthest. more variation may exist within those statuses; for instance, at some institutions, “non-faculty (staff)” librarians are represented in faculty senate, while at others, they are not (bolin 2008, 224).3 we are not aware of any research that reports how many academic librarians are covered by broader faculty handbooks. given the wide disparity of librarian status, and the fact that librarians may or may not be part of their institution’s larger faculty handbook, it isn’t surprising that librarian handbooks have not received a lot of attention in the literature. process our review began in earnest in september 2010. we met weekly, which made it easier to maintain discussion continuity from one meeting to the next, and began with deciding on an approach and a tentative timeline. our initial deadline was april 2011, which mirrored the working deadline for the a/p handbook. because both handbooks had to be approved by mason’s board of visitors, we believed it would be advantageous to submit ours as part of the a/p handbook. to learn more about the history of pertinent sections, we talked to our library colleagues who worked on previous versions of the handbook. we reviewed the academic college and research libraries (acrl) standards for faculty status for academic librarians (2007) as well as librarian governance documents from other colleges and universities in virginia.4 these document reviews confirmed that our handbook was already aligned with the published acrl standards, provided insight into how governance was handled at other institutions, and gave us ideas to consider for our own handbook. for instance, we considered aligning the professional peer review process with the annual administrative review process and adjusting the professional review calendar. we met with representatives from the university’s human resources department, the provost’s office, and the office of university counsel several times to ask questions and learn more about the legal and administrative issues and policies affecting our handbook. information shared during these meetings indicated the roles of different faculty handbooks at mason and how ours fits into the broader institutional picture. each committee member volunteered to revise specific sections based on their interest and experience. we reviewed sections as they were revised, rather than in any specific order. several sections (e.g., introduction, professional development) were revised quickly, whereas others involved deeper discussion. for example, we thought it was critical to discuss the sections on librarian ranks and professional review together because they were so closely related. the complexity and sensitivity of this subject matter sparked discussions that spanned multiple meetings and content iterations. section discussions were often quite detailed, covering all possible aspects–from the overall intent and purpose of the content to the specific definitions of words and phrases. decisions about the level of textual vagueness or detail desired had to be made. proposed revisions were considered, modified, discussed, and modified again. we spent a lot of time on word choice to make the document more cohesive and minimize ambiguity. to enhance the handbook’s professional appearance, we standardized punctuation, capitalization, and format, and removed references to specific web sites. throughout our work, we needed to share working documents easily with one another (there were seven committee members), which we accomplished using dropbox. this practice alleviated some problems with version control, but edits were occasionally made to multiple versions of the same document that later needed to be reconciled. the “track changes” functionality within microsoft word was also critical to share changes we had made and add comments and questions. as the work progressed, the committee chair compiled the revised sections into a final draft for review and created a list of major revisions to share with council members and reviewers. feedback from our colleagues was critical, and we gathered it using online polls and surveys, and town hall meetings. we frequently presented reports at council meetings to inform the larger body of our progress, receive verbal feedback, and address any questions or concerns. both the university librarian and vice president/cio for information technology (cio), the libraries’ most senior administrators at that time5, were required to review and approve our revised handbook prior to submission of the final draft to hr for integration with the a/p handbook. to expedite this process, we gave the university librarian revised sections as they were completed for his review and comments, and we met with him on several occasions to discuss his questions and concerns. the revision schedule changed during the process, largely because it took us longer to revise some sections than we originally anticipated. other delays occurred after we wisely decided to mirror the a/p handbook revision schedule, which lagged behind ours. for example, protracted discussions of the grievance and termination sections of the a/p handbook lead to delayed revision of those same sections in the librarians’ handbook. we wanted to ensure that whatever modifications the a/p handbook committee made would not conflict with the rights conferred librarians in our existing handbook (e.g., grieving salary or filing a grievance as a group). we also chose to defer to the a/p handbook for parts of the grievance and termination sections that were duplicative, which streamlined our document. a more flexible timeline meant our revision process took longer than it might have otherwise, but our revised text did not conflict with the revised  a/p handbook. as a result, it enabled submission of a combined, single document from hr to the board of visitors at one time rather than in pieces. we finished the handbook revision in july 2011 and sent electronic copies to the cio and the university librarian for review and comment. the university librarian provided his feedback in late november and our final revision was completed in february 2012, after which it was sent to human resources for integration into the newly revised a/p handbook. subsequently, the combined document was submitted to mason’s board of visitors, who approved it on march 21, 2012. table 1: table of contents. george mason university librarians’ handbook (george mason university 2012b).   professional peer review for librarians because professional review is the most important aspect of self-governance defined in our handbook and detailed in our council’s bylaws, a brief description of this process is in order.6 the council’s professional review committee (prc), a standing committee, consists of seven elected members who serve staggered two-year terms; a librarian is eligible to serve on the committee after having gone through this peer review process at least once. the university librarian, in consultation with the prc chair, designates subcommittees of three reviewers for each reappointment or promotion review. librarians are permitted to request that a subcommittee member be recused if a potential conflict of interest exists.7 based on a librarian’s hire date (see the professional review calendar section below), their review begins with submission of an annotated curriculum vitae (cv) or a “dossier” to the prc. the dossier is, in fact, a notebook containing the librarian’s cv and detailed documentation of all accomplishments (e.g., publications, presentations, awards, grants, offices held, etc.) achieved during a specific period of time. mason librarians report progress in three areas: 1) professional competence; 2) scholarship and professional service; and, 3) service to the university and the community. however, only information related to scholarship and service are included in the dossier; content related to professional competence, as well as the required supervisor’s evaluation letter, are neither reviewed by nor available to the prc subcommittee. points to consider during the revision process, we identified several major issues we believe readers will benefit from learning how we handled, or did not handle. they are grouped by issues related to handbook content and those related to our revision process (see below). professional review calendar a critical situation the committee wanted to rectify was the inequity in time newly hired librarians were allowed before their initial professional peer review. all librarians, regardless of rank, receive an initial two-year contract.8 librarians hired before march in a calendar year must submit their cv or dossier for review the first january after they are hired. however, librarians hired later in a year may have up to twice as much time before their initial review (table 2). several adjustments to the calendar were considered, but ultimately, we could only incorporate minor changes due to limits imposed by the provost’s and university librarian’s schedules, which, in turn, are dictated by the university’s fiscal year. *for a subsequent promotion, the dossier should cover all professional activities since the last promotion. ** contract term = rank + 1 year table 2. documentation requirements by librarian rank and review type (george mason university 2012b).   librarian ranks handbook content related to librarian rank required a lot of attention, with one example being the basic definition of a librarian. the handbook defines a mason librarian as a library employee with a professional faculty appointment and an ala recognized degree9; this definition also confers council membership. table 3 details the basic criteria required for each librarian rank. table 3. mason librarian rank criteria (george mason university 2012b).   recently, however, professional faculty positions formerly held by librarians have been filled by individuals without an mls, thus disqualifying those individuals from becoming council members. likewise, individuals who hold an mls or similar degree and are hired in classified staff positions are not eligible for council membership. the revision committee and council discussed retiring the library degree requirement, but ultimately did not change the definition primarily because these colleagues would not be subject to professional peer review. if the council membership definition were changed, three repercussions may take place: the librarians’ council would no longer be a “librarians’” council; non-mls professional faculty would be subject to peer review or there would be two systems of review; and/or the librarians’ council would be dissolved and all rights conferred by the librarians’ handbook terminated. none of these possible repercussions appealed to council members at the time. we also discussed whether to require librarian 1s to apply for promotion to the librarian 2 rank as part of their initial reappointment. this idea was dismissed because we were unable to make the desired changes to the professional review calendar. under the existing calendar, librarian 1s with no previous experience going up for initial professional peer review might have as little as 18 months of experience in an academic library. this is insufficient experience for advancement to the rank of librarian 2, which at mason requires a minimum of three years. external reviewers composition of the professional review (prc) subcommittee for individuals seeking promotion to librarian 4 concerned the handbook committee. neither the handbook nor council bylaws require reviewers to be at or above the level of the librarian under review or promotion, even though it circumvents potential personnel problems to make this a requirement (e.g., a negative review may be more easily challenged). because no mason librarians held the librarian 4 rank when we revised the handbook (and there still are none), we wanted to ensure promotion to this rank was conducted by reviewers who could draw from the maximum years of experience possible despite holding the rank of, at least, librarian 3. one solution we considered was to invite an external reviewer to participate in a prc promotion subcommittee. this reviewer would be selected from either the mason community (non-library), or from another institution. although external reviewers typically participate in instructional faculty promotion and tenure reviews, we decided this option would not work for us and sought another solution. eventually, we concluded that all reviewers for a librarian 4 promotion should be a librarian 3 at a minimum. because prc members are elected on staggered terms, however, there is no way to predict how many librarian 3s may be serving on the prc in a given year, nor do we know who has decided to seek promotion until a month before the reviews begin.10 consequently, to increase the pool of reviewers needed for a given year, we revised the handbook to allow eligible library faculty not currently on the prc to be appointed as a reviewer rather than hold an election. this change, which was incorporated into our council’s bylaws, ensured that all prc subcommittee members who review a librarian 4 promotion bring the experience of at least a librarian 3 to the process. furthermore, in years when there are a large number of reviews (15-20) to be conducted, the prc now has the ability to appoint additional reviewers when needed. dossier requirement for review formerly, librarians being reviewed for each contract renewal and/or promotion submitted dossiers (i.e., often lengthy notebooks) to the prc that documented their publications, presentations, service, and professional development activities. after much discussion, we proposed that librarians undergoing a second or later reappointment had the option to submit an annotated cv in lieu of a full dossier. dossiers would continue to be required from librarian 2s and higher undergoing their first contract renewal and/or all librarians applying for promotion in rank. we thought this option was logical from the standpoint that annual evaluations are required of each librarian, anyway, so an annotated cv would suffice for the purpose of contract renewal. because an annotated cv is a synopsis of one’s professional activities, it requires less work and documentation than a dossier. the university librarian approved this option. council approval neither the council’s bylaws nor the handbook require members to vote on a handbook revision. we had to decide whether it was important to seek council approval of the revised document. after much discussion, we chose to ask for a vote of endorsement before sending a complete draft revision to the university librarian for his formal review. council approved the draft by a substantial majority. follow up on implementation of revisions once our ad hoc committee met its original charge of producing a revised and approved handbook, we were disbanded. we did not develop a plan to implement changes to the handbook, and neither did the librarians’ council. as a result, three years after approval, much work remains to be done. changes to the handbook required revision of the council’s bylaws and procedural changes in the professional peer review process. the bylaws were revised, but the professional review committee has been slow to incorporate all the procedural changes and decisions described in the new handbook into the prc documents that are used to manage and guide the process. this has resulted in continuing confusion with the professional review process, ironically the primary reason we opened the handbook for revision. recommendations for revising your handbook when we began this project, it seemed overwhelming. early on, we discussed our revision strategy and made decisions about how to allocate and accomplish the work. our plans changed over time, of course, and new approaches were proposed and adopted. re-examination and adjustment of our workflow throughout the project contributed greatly to our success. library consolidation, changes in librarian status, and other factors are affecting even long-established academic libraries, public and private. these changes likely require modifications to documents governing librarians at these institutions. despite our institution’s relative youth, we offer the following recommendations to other librarians embarking on a handbook or similar governing document revision.  table 4. recommended actions and resulting benefits when conducting a handbook revision.   like most undertakings of this magnitude and importance, the handbook revision project was extremely time-consuming and, at times, frustrating. nevertheless, we successfully balanced our council’s needs within the university’s framework. we were intent on working with our colleagues to create a more professional document that is applicable and fair to today’s members. most importantly, we gained an intimate familiarity with our handbook—a responsibility all academic librarians with a similar governance structure should work toward. even when librarians who have a handbook or similar governance documents never have the opportunity or need to revise their handbook, we believe that it is vital to be knowledgeable about its content and ready to advocate for and promote the rights it confers to their colleagues and administrations. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank our peer review editor, vicki sipe, catalog librarian at the university of maryland, baltimore county and our editors at in the library with the lead pipe, ellie collier and annie pho. references association of college and research libraries. association of college and research libraries standards for faculty status for academic. 2007. accessed june 5, 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardsfaculty. bolin, mary k. “a typology of librarian status at land grant universities.” the journal of academic librarianship. 2008. v. 34, issue 3, pp. 220-230. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2008.03.005 decker, kurt. h. drafting and revising employment policies and handbooks, 2nd ed., 2 volumes. new york, ny: wiley, 1994. decker, kurt. h., louis r. lessig, and kermit m. burley. drafting and revising employment policies and handbooks. 2002 cumulative supplement. new york, ny: panel publishers, 2002. george mason university. administrative/professional faculty handbook, (2012a). accessed december 22, 2014. http://hr.gmu.edu/policy/apfacultyhandbook.pdf. george mason university. “librarians’ handbook,” in administrative/professional faculty handbook, appendix c (2012b): 18-32. accessed december 22, 2014. http://hr.gmu.edu/policy/apfacultyhandbook.pdf. george mason university. faculty handbook, 2014. accessed december 22, 2014. http://www.gmu.edu/resources/facstaff/handbook/. pence, james. l. “adapting faculty personnel policies.” new directions for higher education. fall 1990. 59-68. doi: 10.1002/he.36919907108 “writing a faculty handbook: a 2-year, nose-to-the-grindstone process.” chronicle of higher education. october 2, 1985. v. 31, issue 5. p. 28       some librarians are governed by documents developed by human resources, faculty unions, or content within a faculty handbook. there is a dearth of available information regarding handbooks for academic librarians. see bolin 2008 [↩] for the purposes of this article, we define “instructional faculty” as faculty in the more commonly accepted traditional sense (i.e., professors of english or chemistry) as well as non-teaching research faculty, and term and adjunct faculty, who are also included in this faculty handbook. [↩] professional library faculty at george mason do not have elected representation in the faculty senate. [↩] in addition to the george mason university faculty handbook, we read faculty handbooks from the following virginia colleges and universities:  james madison university, radford university, university of mary washington, university of virginia, virginia commonwealth university,  and virginia tech. since our review, all of these handbooks have been revised except for radford university and the university of mary washington. [↩] the university libraries is now directly under the purview of the provost. [↩] the professional peer review process is distinct from mason’s professional faculty annual performance review, which takes place between a librarian and his/her supervisor and is required by the a/p handbook. [↩] the standard  procedure is that librarians from the same department cannot review one another. this can cause problems for departments with large numbers of librarians. [↩] mason librarians hold multi-year contracts, the duration of which is determined by an individual’s rank. [↩] according to the a/p handbook, “typical professional faculty positions are librarians, counselors, coaches, physicians, lawyers, engineers and architects…[that] require the incumbent to regularly exercise professional discretion and judgment and to produce work that is intellectual and varied and is not standardized” (george mason university 2012a, 4). [↩] in 2014-2015, the prc included three librarian 2s and four librarian 3s while the entire council composition was: 2 librarian 1s, 21 librarian 2s and 18 librarian 3s and no librarian 4s. [↩] academic libraries, george mason university, handbooks, librarian governance, peer review soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship why diversity matters: a roundtable discussion on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: update to lead pipe submission guidelines – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 8 aug amy koester, annie pho, bethany radcliffe, denisse solis, ian beilin, kellee warren, ryan randall and sofia leung /0 comments editorial: update to lead pipe submission guidelines in brief: announcing an update to in the library with the lead pipe’s submission guidelines. we have received feedback about our submission process and have reexamined our framework questions. as a result, the lead pipe editorial board has revised the set of framework questions to better assist author(s) in developing their proposals and provide the board with a deeper understanding of the author’s proposal. we have edited out some parts of the framework questions that were superfluous and expanded on others. there are two major changes to the process. the first is the inclusion of a two-part question that will result in an author’s positionality statement. positionality is a term from the field of sociology in which the researcher reflects on their position in the world and how it shapes their research. this may be influenced by the researcher’s race, gender, geographic location, religious beliefs, etc. second, in relation to question four, in order to engage with a wide audience, authors should make an effort to minimize the use of jargon. more information will be included in our style guide in the coming weeks. here are the updated framework questions: 1. briefly explain what specific event or experience led you to pursue this topic, what motivates you? how does your positionality or identity inform your relationship to this topic? 2. what are the 3 most important things to consider about your topic and why are they the most critical? 3. what problem is your article addressing and what actions do you want readers to take after reading it? what do you want your readers to remember after they finish reading your article? 4. how can lead pipe help you connect with your intended audience for this article? how is your topic meaningful to someone not in that target audience? 5. in what ways does your article build upon and/or contribute to the existing literature? provide 3 sources. depending upon your topic, these citations may be for research on which your article is based; examples of conversations to which you are adding reinforce issues that you’re raising in your article; articles to which yours is responding; conversations to which you are adding; etc. 6. if your article involves research on human subjects, have you secured proper permissions and approval to report on this data? please indicate if your article includes images that require permissions to publish. we hope these changes will make the submission process clearer and easier. if you have feedback or questions about these changes, please feel free to email the board at any time at itlwtlp[at]gmail.com. editorial in pursuit of equity: applying design thinking to develop a values-based open access statement racing to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy: but who are we leaving behind? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct what i wish i’d known about building teen services from scratch – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 22 may gretchen kolderup /14 comments what i wish i’d known about building teen services from scratch in brief: during my first professional position i found myself building a teen services program from scratch at a public library in a small town. in this article, i reflect on some of what i learned through that experience, including the value of data, the importance of having a vision, how much relationships matter, and the value of professional community. i conclude with a call for dialogue among other builders of teen services to share our experiences and lessons. teen iron chef competition – photo by gretchen kolderup by gretchen kolderup when i finished library school (where i’d focused on teen services), i was expecting to work in a birth-through-eighteen youth services department and was hoping i’d be able to specialize in teen services while working alongside and learning from my other youth-serving colleagues. after all, there weren’t too many librarians i knew who did just teen services. instead, i was hired as the first teen services librarian at a library in connecticut and found myself building a teen program nearly from scratch — all while working part-time (first 19 hours a week, then 21, then 28, with more hours each fiscal year). it was my first professional job, and i was building myself as a librarian as much as i was building the ya program at the library; i learned a lot about the real world of library work, about myself, and about the value of professional community. i’ve written a few posts for the yalsablog about my experiences [1] [2], but i’d like to dig a little deeper and explore some ideas more thoroughly here. this isn’t going to be a practical how-to guide for others who are building ya services from scratch; for that, i’d recommend sarah ludwig’s excellent, encouraging starting from scratch: building a teen library program. this article is, instead, a collection of personal reflections on four things — the value of data, the importance of having a vision, how much relationships matter, and the value of professional community — that i wish i’d appreciated when i was beginning to build teen services from scratch. i wish i’d known the value of data oftentimes i think the data we gather and report to our administration feels like a chore, but especially since i was building a program from scratch and only had 19 or 21 or 28 hours to do everything from selection and weeding to programming to outreach, i wanted to know what was working and what wasn’t, and numbers were one good way to assess that. i was lucky enough to have taken a course in library school on how to evaluate library services using different kinds of data gathering methods and different kinds of analyses. it was one of the least popular classes (perhaps because librarians are, by and large, more word people than number people), but i’d done my bachelor’s degree in math and i enjoyed it and learned a lot. i didn’t realize, though, how useful the things i learned in that class would be — it was one of the most valuable courses i took. because i was the first librarian of my kind at this library, i didn’t always have data from before i started. circulation data that predated me were easy to get, but there were only a handful of teen-focused programs held before i arrived, so it was important to choose my metrics and start establishing baseline data as early as possible. my supervisor was the head of collection management, so i was able to watch closely how the ya collections were performing. every month, i tracked circulation for ya fiction, nonfiction, audiobooks, graphic novels, and periodicals, and calculated what percentage of the entire library’s circulation was ya materials. i compared that percentage to other months that year and the same month in previous years. i tracked the turnover rates for our general ya fiction collection versus the recently purchased (and differently shelved and displayed) ya fiction. i carefully recorded and graphed everything and could thus prove that what i was doing was working. for example: ya fiction circulation as a percentage of all circulation had been falling in the three years before i was hired, but after i began working, that trend reversed itself. even though print circulation across the library was falling, circulation of ya print materials was increasing. after creating the new ya fiction section and shelving more items face-out, circulation increased. when i suggested moving the ya audiobooks from the teen section to instead be shelved next to the adult audiobooks, circulation increased. after introducing a teen summer reading program, circulation of ya materials increased drastically in the summer months. because i had data that showed that what i was doing with the ya collection was working, i could prove that having a ya librarian was good for the library (increased circulation stats were something the director could include in her reports to the board and the community) and good for teens. but while i had a relatively easy time improving circulation of materials, successful programming proved to be more complicated. part of this, i think, was because programs for teens were totally new to my library, whereas books for teens were not. teens thought about books when they thought about the library, so getting them to check out more or getting more teens to visit to borrow materials wasn’t hard. however, because teens didn’t think about events when they thought about the library, building a consistent program audience was more challenging. for each program i held, i counted attendance, which is pretty standard, but then every month i’d analyze it. how had average program attendance changed from the month before (or the year before, once i’d been at the job long enough)? which programs were attracting more teens (or fewer)? how was attendance at our book club versus the teen advisory board trending over time? in the last year, what was the average attendance — but what was the standard deviation, too? (that is, was a particular monthly program attracting a consistent number of kids, or were there some months where we had a lot of attendees and some where we had few or zero?) these data were really useful in deciding which programs were worth the time it took to plan and run them and which weren’t — or which ones needed extra publicity or promotion through outreach. for example, i had no problem ending movie nights when no one was coming, but i refused to let our book club die and was going to try everything i knew to do to increase attendance. (even though libraries are certainly more than books, it’s one thing our community expects from us that other organizations likely don’t offer.) before i started at this library, there was a summer reading club for children and one for adults, but not one for teens. summer reading programs are paramount in the youth services world, so i designed a program based on the one at the library where i’d done a summer internship during library school and made sure to collect a lot of data along the way via reading logs and at the end with a survey to kids who participated. once the summer reading club was over, i put together a report — in part for my director but mostly for myself — that analyzed how the club had done. since it was the first year, i didn’t have previous data to compare it to, but i was able to analyze who participated in the program, how they’d heard about the club, how the number of registrations and reading log entries rose and fell through the summer, what prize levels participants reached, what formats they chose for their reading, and which authors were popular. because i knew in detail how the club had played out and what kids thought about it, i was able to make changes for the next year that saw a major increase in the number of kids who registered and increased participants’ reported enjoyment of the program. i was also able to use the data they generated about what and how they read to shape my collection development efforts. it took work to collect and analyze the data, but both my patrons and i were much more satisfied with the summer reading club in its second year, and, had i stayed at that library, i’m sure the third year would have been even better. i also collected data on how many questions i answered when i was at the newly-created ya service desk, what kinds of questions those were, and how many questions per hour i was answering (since i didn’t always spend the same number of hours at the desk in a given week). i didn’t know ahead of time what the data would show, but gathering as much data as possible helped me make connections i might not have otherwise. for example, the way desk transactions correlated with program and circulation data was interesting: most of my reference desk transactions were performing readers’ advisory or helping patrons locate books, and a rise in reference transactions per hour matched closely with increases in circulation from month to month. had most of my questions been homework help, i would have expected my transactions per hour to peak around the beginning and end of the school semesters rather than during the summer as it did. the data told a story, and being able to track and compare data helped me better understand what my patrons expected from the library. the metrics you choose really do matter. my director wanted to know the number of reference transactions performed at the ya desk every month for her own reports, but i was much more interested in the number of transactions per hour since the number of hours i spent at the ya desk changed from month to month. (i was the only one who ever staffed the ya desk, so if i took a week-long vacation, that’d be a week that no questions were answered, and a 25% drop in the number of transactions wouldn’t be unexpected — but also wouldn’t be very helpful in knowing how i’d served my patrons that month.) sometimes statistics are for directors or for reports to the state library, but statistics can also be an irreplaceable way to know how you’re doing, what’s getting better, and what needs either more attention, restructuring, or to be phased out. it takes work to collect the data, but what it tells you about your patrons and services is invaluable. of course, numbers aren’t the whole story. especially in teen services, a lot of what we do is focused on helping kids develop into happy, healthy adults and lifelong learners and readers, which can be tough to measure numerically without large-scale longitudinal studies of both library users and nonusers. we measure some of our impact in how many teens we reach through programs or through lending materials, but we measure a lot of our impact in how we change lives in large and small ways. in addition to my spreadsheets of statistics, i also kept a text file of what i called “good library moments” — things like when a mother told me her son hadn’t been much of a reader but was now totally hooked on our summer reading club or when a teen told me she loved the manga club because she felt like she was around people who understood her and that she could be herself in a way she couldn’t at school. i’d look through that list on bad days to help me remember why i was in this profession, but i’d also use those anecdotes (with identifying information removed) in the monthly reports i sent to my director alongside statistics. statistics help us know how we’re doing with our work, but personal stories of the impact we have on kids’ lives help us remember why we do that work in the first place. i wish i’d known how important it is to have a vision all of the data collection and tinkering with services i was doing would have been scattershot if i hadn’t had an idea of where where i was and where i wanted to be (or could be). i wouldn’t have believed you as a library school student, but after my experience with building teen services from scratch, i believe that developing a vision for your department is one of the most important things you can do. this was something we touched on a little bit in my library management class, but we didn’t spend a lot of time on it and it all felt very silly and corporate. after i’d been at my library for about five months, our director wanted to put together a vision statement and strategic plan for the library with input from each department head. i was nervous about the prospect: i had less than half a year of hands-on experience, and i was still introducing so many new things for teens that it was hard to know how those efforts would be doing in a few months, much less a year or five years. but through the process of coming up with a vision statement for my department, i really had to think about why we were doing what we were doing, what i wanted to provide to my patrons, and how what my department did fit in with the rest of the library. the town where i worked has a teen center, and i spent a lot of time trying to decide what differentiated the library from the teen center. obviously the library is more media-focused (we devote a lot of our building and budget to books, music, and dvds in a way that the teen center doesn’t, and they do more teen programming than we do), but if we were going to be offering teen programs like video game tournaments or teen iron chef competitions, what made us and the teen center different? was it possible for me to do those things and still maintain the library perspective? i’m still not sure i have a great answer for that (other than the library being more focused on lifelong learning), but having to write a vision statement and look to the future of my department forced me to clarify and articulate the library’s values when it comes to teen services. this was good for me because as i was planning new projects and programs and outreach, i was grounding them in what i had decided was important. working on a vision statement was also immeasurably useful in being an advocate for my department and my teens. once i had a vision statement and had identified my department’s five core values, i could take that vision with me to talk to administration, to parents, to schools, and to the community at large. it was easy to explain why a program was appropriate for the library and why it was good for kids. it was easy to explain why the teen perspective mattered in the library as a whole and how what i was doing supported the library’s mission statement. it was easy to talk about why the library was a natural partner with different organizations. it was easy to explain why we wanted funding for new projects. i knew why i was doing what i was doing and how everything i was doing connected to everything else, and that gave my outreach and advocacy efforts such clarity. now that i’m working in a more established program, i’m not sure i feel as compelled to create such a detailed vision for teen services, but i do want to have a direction, good justification for why i’m doing what i’m doing, and a sense for how everything we do for teens connects. creating a vision or a mission statement, regardless of the final product at the end, is a good thought exercise that has helped me be more reflective about my work. i wish i’d known how much relationships matter this might be a function of working in a small town, but while trying to build something new at the library, i was continually reminded how much relationships — between me and my teen patrons, between my department and others in the library, between the library and the schools, and between the library and the community — mattered. this definitely wasn’t something we touched on in library school; my youth services classes were all about programming or youth development or books for young people. we didn’t talk a lot about community building or how to raise awareness of what the library does for teens. but relationship-building affects all other aspects of library services to teens. the first month or so of programming that i did was a disaster: no one came to anything, because no one knew anything was happening, or if they did know, they had no reason to come and none of their friends were going anyway. it wasn’t until i got to know our regular library teens and could convince them to come to programs and bring their friends (and had learned what programs they were actually interested in) that my attendance numbers were non-zero. knowing kids in the community personally and then using their relationships with their friends was key to getting my programs off the ground. trying to get the word out about anything i did was also hard because while the library had established channels for reaching adults — via an e-newsletter, our website, press releases in the paper, and announcements via other community groups, for example — we didn’t have a way to get the word out to teens. i put up posters in the teen area and around town, but it wasn’t until i developed relationships with the schools, the pta, and other groups in town and could ask them to tell their students or members about what we were doing that i started to see kids i didn’t already know come to my programs. building relationships with other community groups gave me the opportunity to use their pr outlets to promote my programs. and finally, while i could do programs or buy materials for teens who were already using the library, it was by forming partnerships with other organizations that we were able to do something special. i worked with the teen center to get books into their rec room, reaching kids we would never see at the library. i worked with a local private psychiatric facility and drug treatment center to get books to the kids living there, and when i left, we’d been talking about doing a book discussion with them or bringing an adapted version of our summer reading club to them. a few months before i left, i also started working with the creative writing teacher at the high school to launch a literary magazine for teens that would solicit submissions from across the entire county. the relationships i built with the librarians and staff members at these organizations helped both of us create something neither of us could have done alone. i’m glad i knew how valuable it is to have a professional community this one is a little bit of a cheat because it’s something i discovered in library school and brought to my first job with me, but i still want to emphasize it. so many ya librarians are basically solo librarians (and so many school librarians are quickly becoming the only librarians in their schools or districts) that working with teens can be lonely work. having connections with other ya librarians — whether through local or state library associations, national associations, or just forming relationships online — is essential if you want to be exposed to new ideas, keep on top of what’s happening in the field, and find companionship with like-minded people. once you’ve built a network, relationships can be sustained through email and twitter exchanges, facebook groups, and meet-ups at conferences. especially since this job was my first one out of library school, i depended on my peers for practical ideas from programs to displays to ways to run a summer reading club. i also depended on them for encouragement when no one turned up for a program or when i met resistance to new ideas in my community. honestly, i don’t know how i would have done my work without being able to rely on the inspiration and support of my colleagues across the country. and as i found myself growing and learning, i discovered other librarians who were also building teen services programs from scratch, and we were able to learn from each other. we could share common concerns and questions and encourage one another. for example, after all the work i put into creating the spreadsheets i was using to track circulation, program attendance, and reference transactions, it felt great to share those templates with a fellow builder of teen services, have her crunch her own numbers, and see her use what she’d discovered in an annual report to her administration. i also found that the work i was doing for yalsa and the work i was doing for my job fed one another. i served on (and then chaired) yalsa’s amazing audiobooks for young adults committee, which made me a much more sophisticated listener and a better listeners’ advisor — and the conversations i had with kids and parents who enjoyed audiobooks helped me remember what to listen for in the titles the committee was evaluating. chairing a committee helped reinforce my supervisory skills (useful in teen advisory board meetings!) and time management skills. managing yalsa’s ya lit-focused blog, the hub, positively steeped me in the world of young adult literature, and the trends and connections that i noticed while i was ordering books or putting them on display or recommending them to patrons gave me ideas for posts for the blog. and through all of that work, i was meeting more people to add to my personal learning network. writing, both for my own blog and for the yalsablog, also helped me live a more examined professional life. having to sit down and think through what worked or didn’t for a program, how i was going to plan a new project, or what i had learned through some experience reinforced those lessons i’d learned and gave me the chance to see things from a different angle. this relates to writing a vision statement in that the more you think about what you’re doing and why you do what you do and how it’s going, the better equipped you are to make good decisions later. i certainly wouldn’t have been as good at my job if i hadn’t had a network of peers, connections with other librarians further along in their careers, and fulfilling association work that reinforced what i was doing at my library. a library science degree is a static thing that you get once, but a good professional community is a never ending source of continued learning throughout one’s career. are there other builders of teen services out there? in 1995, 11% of libraries reported having a dedicated young adult librarian (either full-time or part-time); in 2007, that number was 62%[3], so when i started my job, i assumed that the upward trend would continue and that we’d see more builders of teen services. unfortunately, the most recent public library data service (plds) survey from 2012 found that the percentage of libraries that reported having a full-time ya librarian dropped from 51% in 2008 to 33% in 2012[4], so it seems the number of builders of ya has likely shrunk. if library budgets ever improve and the ya librarian community can advocate for itself, it may be that we see more rebuilders of ya in the coming years — at least, i hope so. there’s a lot i wish i had known when i started my last job and found myself unexpectedly building teen services from scratch, but there’s a lot i learned during my time with that library. now that i’m in a new supervisory position, heading teen services at the new york public library’s bronx library center, i’m once again finding that there’s a lot i don’t know — but i’m looking forward to learning, reflecting, and sharing with my professional community. while there are other young adult librarians who are also the first ya person their library has had, their experiences are bound to be different from mine based on their libraries, communities, backgrounds, and circumstances. i was a new librarian, i was the first teen services librarian and a department of one, and i was part-time. i’m interested in how my perspective and experiences are similar to and different from those of other librarians who are building teen services from scratch, and i think we can benefit from sharing our stories with each other. if you’re in a similar position, building ya services from scratch or rebuilding ya services after your library was without a staff member whose job was to serve teens, what has your experience been like? i found data collection and analysis, writing a vision, building relationships, and cultivating a professional network really important, but i’m sure others learned different things. did you struggle with some of the same things i did? what have you had to learn quickly on the job? what about the job has surprised you? we can all benefit from each others’ experiences and become better librarians by sharing! acknowledgements my sincerest thanks to lead pipe editorial board members ellie collier and emily ford for their patience and thoughtful editing and to my colleague emily calkins charyk for her unique insight and immensely useful observations. without them, i would have given up on trying to coalesce and condense my thoughts into this article long ago. citations [1] kolderup, gretchen. (2011, january 24). learning as i go: building a foundation for teen services. the yalsablog. retrieved from http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2011/01/24/learning-as-i-go-building-a-foundation-for-teen-services/ [2] kolderup, gretchen. (2012, october 11). connect, create, collaborate: building teen services (nearly) from scratch. the yalsablog. retrieved from http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2012/10/11/connect-create-collaborate-building-teen-services-nearly-from-scratch/ [3] flowers, sarah. (2012). evaluating teen services and programs. chicago: neal-schuman. 13. [4] young adult library services organization board of directors. (2013). reaching library administrators. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/yalsa/sites/ala.org.yalsa/files/content/administrators_mw13.pdf community building, new librarians, public libraries, teen services, teens, ya librarianship, ya services becoming a writer-librarian adventures in rhetoric: the traditional library 14 responses sarah_ludwig 2013–05–23 at 8:57 pm gretchen — thank you so much for the endorsement! i’m so flattered! also….awesome post. i’m starting a new job soon, and i feel like i need to remember a lot of this stuff. i’ve felt a bit bogged down lately and this is very inspiring. thanks. :) gretchen kolderup 2013–05–23 at 10:01 pm oh, you’re welcome! i meant it — i would have been much less sure of myself without your book, and i’d highly recommend it to just about anyone. where’s the new job? are you still doing school librarianship? sarah_ludwig 2013–05–24 at 11:21 am that is really nice of you. wow. i am going to ethel walker, a girls’ boarding school in simbury, to be the head of their library. i’m really, really excited. gretchen kolderup 2013–05–24 at 11:30 am very cool — congratulations! will you live on-campus? i’ve always been intrigued by the idea of working for/at a boarding school. pingback : show me the awesome: advocate or vacate | sam's lit cafe 2.0 pingback : veille hebdomadaire – 02.06.13 | biblio kams mclicious 2013–06–16 at 11:07 am this is such a great post, gretchen! gretchen kolderup 2013–06–17 at 3:16 pm thanks a lot, hannah! april 2013–06–26 at 8:46 pm gretchen, what motivated you to move the ya audiobooks to the adult audiobook collection? was interfiling ya audio with ya print books not an option? (we are evaluating our collection locations, so this is interesting to me…) gretchen kolderup 2013–06–27 at 10:42 pm the ya audiobooks weren’t circulating well, so i wanted to do *something* with them. most of the patrons who asked about them or whom i saw browsing them were adults (either parents looking for something to listen to on a family road trip or teachers trying to find a way to keep up with ya lit on their commute), and i couldn’t find a single teen who actually listened to audiobooks on their own — there’s a real stigma against them in the community where i used to work; a common response to me mentioning an audiobook was a withering “i know how to read.” it also seemed (from information conversation) that people only used audiobooks in certain circumstances (like road trips or commutes), so interfiling them with print fiction didn’t seem like the right choice — they weren’t viewed as equivalent to the print version of a book, and patrons who checked out audiobooks were specifically looking for that format. obviously different communities have different users with different needs, so i think talking to your patrons is the best way to figure out what to do at your library! pingback : blogging about professional blogs | jennifer harden personal journal pingback : where are we going, and how will we know when we get there? | literacy in a digital age joyce fong 2013–12–27 at 11:18 am i’d like to say that this is a very insightful article and very inspiring for new ya librarians such as myself! thank you for this! pingback : great resources for developing services to teens! | inalj this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct communicating with information: creating inclusive learning environments for students with asd – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 1 apr frederick carey /0 comments communicating with information: creating inclusive learning environments for students with asd in brief the focus of this article is twofold: it 1) considers how digital humanities techniques and methodologies increase accessibility and scholarship opportunities for students with autism spectrum disorder; and 2) outlines how libraries can collaborate with existing services to provide subsequently appropriate supports for students. autism spectrum disorder (asd), one of the increasingly prevalent manifestations of neurodiversity within higher education, presents significant challenges to students interacting with academic resources and producing traditional scholarly outputs. traditional scholarship presupposes that students possess a certain level of ability to interact with their course materials, analyze that interaction, and then write both about their interaction and analyses. however, limitations in working memory and theory of mind create additional barriers for students with asd in meeting these presumptions. fortunately, emerging scholarly practices within the digital humanities now provide more equitable mediums for scholastic output as well as new opportunities for students to access and interact with course content and materials. while current structures within academia presuppose that students are able to interact with materials in a specific way, libraries are uniquely positioned to collaborate with constituent departments and services across campuses of higher education to teach students emerging strategies to more effectively interact with scholarly materials. by frederick c. carey introduction institutions of higher education not only offer students the academic freedom to cultivate intellectual interests and develop skills that they can hone into lifelong careers, but they also establish social and professional expectations that provide the foundations for sustained success. as such, students are expected to interact with social and professional networks both in person and virtually. however, studies show that perpetual connectivity through social media and other technological platforms contribute to increased cases of stress, anxiety, and depression.1 therefore, institutions of higher education support students’ needs in these areas by offering mentoring, mental health, and transitional services to better equip students to successfully adapt and thrive within their new environments. the effectiveness of these services, however, are explicitly connected to the makeup of the student population they serve. currently, student populations across higher education continue to grow increasingly neurodiverse2 , and as such, both social and academic services have been institutionalized to meet student needs. institutions provide supports for transitioning into new routines; navigating new social structures both in and outside of classroom settings; managing fatigue and sensory overload; treating anxiety, depression, and stress; as well as developing executive function (ef) skills related to planning, organizing, and prioritizing information; self-monitoring; self-regulating; and creating time management plans. these services are essential for acclimating to the social and professional structures of higher education and post-collegiate life, but do not provide all the tools neurodivergent students need to succeed in academia. autism spectrum disorder (asd), one of the increasingly prevalent manifestations of neurodiversity within higher education, presents significant challenges to students interacting with academic resources and producing traditional scholarly outputs. traditional scholarship presupposes that students possess a certain level of ability to interact with their course materials, analyze that interaction, and then write both about their interaction and analyses. however, limitations in working memory and theory of mind (tom) create additional barriers for students with asd in meeting these presumptions. fortunately, emerging scholarly practices within the digital humanities (dh) now provide more equitable mediums for scholastic output as well as new opportunities for students to access and interact with course content and materials. while current structures within academia presuppose that students are able to interact with materials in a specific way, libraries are uniquely positioned to collaborate with constituent departments and services across campuses of higher education to teach students emerging strategies to more effectively interact with scholarly materials. therefore, the focus of this article is twofold: it 1) considers how digital humanities techniques and methodologies increase accessibility to course materials and scholarship opportunities for students with autism spectrum disorder; and 2) outlines how libraries can collaborate with existing services to provide subsequently appropriate supports for students to more effectively interact with their course materials. autism spectrum disorder the 5th edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm-5) characterizes asd as a range of neurodevelopmental conditions that manifest through either deficiency in social interaction and communication across multiple contexts, or restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities3 . since the publication of dsm-5 in 2013, asd now “encompasses disorders previously referred to as early infantile autism, childhood autism, kanner’s autism, high-functioning autism, atypical autism, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, childhood disintegrative disorder, and asperger’s disorder.”4 subsequently, the challenges that those with asd face can vary depending on the manifestation in each individual. asd continues to grow as one of the most common manifestations of neurodivergence both inside and outside of higher education. the center for disease control and prevention’s most recent statistics indicate that the overall prevalence of asd is approximately 1 in 59 children over the age of 8 years old, or approximately 1.7% of the overall student population.5 despite the increased prevalence and understanding of asd, graduation rates within higher education for students with asd remain low. according to a 2011 report commissioned by the us department of education, 52% of students without any registered disability graduate from their respective programs, while only 39% of students with asd graduate.6 these statistics reveal a gap in equitable higher education opportunities for students with asd. this gap becomes even more apparent when considering the number of students who enter higher education without a formal asd diagnosis or who choose not to disclose their diagnosis. in a study conducted by white et al. evaluating the prevalence of students with asd on college campuses, none of the 5 participants who met asd criteria from the 667 sample set had previously been diagnosed.7 furthermore, underhill et al. discovered that many students elect not to disclose their diagnosis out of fear of either becoming stigmatized by their instructors and peers or creating new social barriers for themselves.8 subsequently, these students do not receive many of their entitled supports, and it is likely that the true gap in graduation rates is larger than the statistics indicate. supports prioritizing immediate social, environmental, and executive function challenges are increasingly becoming routine procedure across institutions of higher education. in order to effectively establish equitable learning environments for students with asd, however, it is imperative that support be given to students in navigating the inherent social and communicative components of scholarship, especially within disciplines that emphasize expository and persuasive writing. acknowledging these fundamental characteristics of traditional scholarship and the added challenges that they create for students with asd will positively contribute to establishing more inclusive, equitable learning environments. social and communicative characteristics of traditional scholarship the social and communicative interactions inherent within traditional modes of scholarship create barriers for students with asd. despite oral communication barriers appearing more immediate than those created by written language due to observable extrinsic manifestations, the skills required to understand and interpret both modes of communication remain similar. in fact, the syntactical structure and language of the written word is often more complex than oral speech.9 this can be especially true of the materials that students work with in higher education that, depending on the discipline, may incorporate high amounts of technical writing, figurative language, or older systems of speech that are no longer used in contemporary language. language comprehension is established by forming inferences and hypotheses from the language used, the schemata in which it exists, and the context in which it was delivered. it presupposes an inherent understanding of the social constructs of language.10 in order to accurately and effectively make inferences based on the schemata and structure of the communicated information, one must have mastered the social context in which the information exists and is delivered. current social skills interventions offered through therapy treatments can assist those with asd to interpret facial expressions, body language, and other markers to better navigate social interactions.11 these strategies can be used to indicate when sarcasm, metaphor, or other nonliteral expressions of language may be changing the meaning of what is spoken.12 however, students do not have the same markers that help recognize such constructs when reading. in speaking of figurative language, vuchanova et al. state that “such expressions are characterized by interpretations which cannot be retrieved by simply knowing basic senses of constituent lexical item, and where the addressee needs to arrive at the intended meaning rather than what is being said.”13 therefore, while the skills required to understand oral and written language are similar, interpreting written language relies solely on the intrinsic social and communicative literacy of the reader, while oral language interpretation can benefit from extrinsic interventions. producing written language, however, proves even more challenging than interpreting it. in a study on effective writing interventions for students with asd, accardo et al. state that “writing has a social context, follows rules and conventions, and makes use of inferences and ambiguous meaning to convey humor and metaphor, all of which can be challenging to individuals with asd.”14 when reading, students only need to recognize the social context of what is presented, but when writing, they are expected to recreate that social context and use it to deliver their thoughts and findings. the skills needed to recognize social structures differ drastically from those needed to replicate these structures, and as such students with asd face significant barriers in producing traditional scholarly outputs. furthermore, the rules and conventions of writing differ depending on genre. in a 2020 study, price et al. demonstrate that expository and persuasive writing prove more challenging than narrative writing for students with asd.15 additionally, walters’ 2015 case study into the experiences of two first year writing students with asd states that one student “struggled to translate her passion for writing into the classroom because her ways of writing – particularly in her fan fiction communities – were not valued as social or socially meaningful in her course.”16 students in higher education are not only expected to write across genres, but also are often writing across academic disciplines that incorporate their own specific conventions. all of these challenges can be further understood by considering the roles of working memory and theory of mind in these processes. working memory working memory proves essential for communicating any thoughts, ideas, or connections as it dictates the amount of information an individual can efficiently process at any given time. camos and barrouillet describe it “as a kind of mental space, located in frontal lobes of the brain, corresponding to a quick-access memory able to hold temporary, transient plans for guiding behavior.”17 it enables the multitasking functionality required when making connections, taking notes, and presenting information. subsequently, students with asd experience numerous challenges when interacting with their course materials due to limitations in their working memory. thoughts easily get lost while considering the syntactical components and structure of language when performing tasks such as reading and writing. graham et al. point to spelling as one such challenge. they state that “students may forget plans and ideas they are trying to hold in working memory as they stop to think about how to spell a word.”18 similarly, thoughts and connections can be lost when attempting to parse the syntax and structure of complex writing, metaphors, figurative language, or other nonliteral structures. while executive function strategies, such as immediately writing down thoughts when you have them, are helpful techniques for overcoming such challenges, limitations in working memory present persistent obstacles for students with asd. theory of mind tom directly impacts how individuals recognize, empathize, and interact both with thoughts and emotions, and subsequently highlights many of the challenges that students with asd face when interacting with their course materials. the role of tom can be better understood by distinguishing between cognitive tom and affective tom. pino et al. state that “cognitive tom refers to the ability to make inferences about beliefs, intentions, motivations and thinking, whereas affective tom is the ability to understand what people feel in specific emotional contexts such as their own emotional states.”19 in order to effectively make inferences and connections through cognitive tom, it is necessary to recognize and understand emotional states and undertones through affective tom. scholarship, especially in the humanities, expects a high-level cognitive tom, and subsequently, a strong foundation in affective tom. however, the inherent social and communicative components of language and traditional scholarship create major barriers for students with asd in establishing an affective tom foundation. limitations in working memory further exacerbate this loose foundation as students attempt to build upon it using the skills involved in cognitive tom. furthermore, studies demonstrate that students with asd do not develop tom skills at the same rate as their peers. tom development progresses in a specific sequence, and broekhof et al. demonstrate that while students with asd follow the same sequence as their peers, their developmental timeline is comparatively delayed.20 in order to create equitable and inclusive learning environments in institutions of higher education, it is therefore essential that supports be implemented to assist students with asd in overcoming these barriers and accessing course materials more effectively. emerging opportunities over the last few decades, research and the way it is conducted has developed just as rapidly as the technology available to researchers. in reflecting upon research developments during this era of technological growth, it is easy to think about the way that new (and not so new) tools have been adopted into the research process. the digital humanities, however, encapsulates much more than just tools and how they can be integrated into humanities research. dh represents the discovery of new methodologies for doing research, new ways of interacting with materials, and new manners for telling stories and disseminating knowledge. dh is not a replacement for the humanities; it enlarges the scope of what is possible within the humanities and how humanities research can be done. it increases accessibility not only to how materials can be analyzed and interrogated, but also to how information can be shared and communicated. it allows for a much more inclusive environment that invites new perspectives and collaborations across disciplines. not only do dh methodologies, techniques, and outputs grow the humanities, but they can also provide respite to many of the scholastic challenges that students with asd face. these emerging scholarly practices create opportunities for people to access and interact with materials in ways that were previously not possible. textual analysis techniques such as sentiment analyses and topic modeling can provide students with asd opportunities to move beyond some of the challenges they face when interacting with course materials. various forms of visualizations can provide alternative scholastic outputs for students instead of the more limiting traditional forms. dh practices can not only provide students with asd the opportunity to interact with scholarly materials in a more unrestrained way, but they can also empower students to communicate their work and tell the stories they are interested in telling through a more unrestricted outlet. furthermore, libraries have emerged as the center of dh support in institutions of higher education. this is due in part to libraries serving the needs of all constituent departments as a neutral entity. more importantly, however, libraries are devoted to helping students develop information literacy skills. the association of college & research libraries’ (acrl) framework for information literacy in higher education (framework) defines information literacy as “the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning.”21) the values of information literacy and dh methodologies and practices ideally dovetail to make libraries the natural support structure for dh projects. textual analysis strategies mckee describes a textual analysis as “a methodology – a data-gathering process – for those researchers who want to understand the ways in which members of various cultures and subcultures make sense of who they are, and of how they fit into the world in which they live.”22 traditionally, researchers conduct such analyses by interrogating, interacting, and interpreting texts through close readings that combine their individual perspectives, contextual awareness, and the structures of the texts undergoing analysis. however, through dh practices the scope of what can be analyzed and how things are analyzed continues to grow larger. individual words and the subsequent grammatical and syntactical structures in which they exist can now be analyzed as individual data points that allow increased accessibility to texts. information hidden in the structure of the texts now can be mined, visualized, and interpreted. these practices do not replace traditional processes for gathering data from texts, instead they provide alternate access points for individuals to interact with the data, identify patterns and trends, and interpret the information presented. these alternative access points present students with asd increased opportunity to interact with texts and bypass some of the social and communicative structures inherent within them. idioms, similes, metaphors, and other representations of figurative language all base their comparisons on an intuited set of shared characteristics. glucksburg claims that one technique for grasping the abstract meaning of figurative language is categorization, which “involves finding the nearest available category that subsumes both x and y.”23 as previously discussed, connecting abstract concepts provides a barrier for students with asd and consumes a large amount of their working memory. topic modeling is a textual analysis strategy that simplifies this process by clustering similarly used words together to help illuminate the syntactical structure and schemata of the text. this allows students to more easily recognize patterns based on how the words are used within the local context, and focus on the meaning of those patterns instead of struggling to establish the syntactical structure of the text. students are able to establish labels for these word clusters based on those patterns and assign their own meanings and interpretations to the groupings. the structures created by topic modeling allow students to move beyond the social and communicative schemata used to deliver the meaning, create a more solid affective tom foundation, and maximize the amount of working memory available to interact with the meaning of a text though cognitive tom skills. students can also perform a sentiment analysis on a text as a strategy for moving beyond literal language. sentiment analyses, or opinion mining, allow students to perform emotion recognitions and polarity detections to establish words or phrases in a text that represent emotional meanings. emotion recognitions can not only help solidify an affective tom foundation within the context of any given text, but they can also alleviate some challenges posed by limitations in working memory by providing a non-abstract structure for students to recognize and assign more figurative and abstract concepts. similarly, polarity detection creates a structure in which abstract ideas can be categorized by emotional relation and be used comparatively. cambria states that polarity detection is “usually a binary classification task with outputs such as ‘positive’ versus ‘negative,’ ‘thumbs up’ versus ‘thumbs down,’ or ‘like’ versus ‘dislike’.”24 such identification can be especially useful in comparing voices within a single text or comparing tone within larger corpora. similarly to topic modeling, sentiment analyses maximize students’ functional ability to employ cognitive tom skills to interact with course materials beyond the meaning of the language within that set schemata. strategies such as these relate directly to two of the threshold concepts in acrl’s framework: “information has value” and “research as inquiry”. first, acrl states, “information possesses several dimensions of value, including as a commodity, as a means of education, as a means to influence, and as a means of negotiating and understanding the world.”25 when interrogating texts, there are several layers of information and dimensions of value. researchers can extract a plethora of information and insight conducting a close reading of a text. however, incorporating textual analysis strategies allows for different information and insight to be drawn from different layers of resources. these strategies increase the scope of what is possible when working with texts. furthermore, acrl adds that “research is iterative and depends upon asking increasingly complex or new questions whose answers in turn develop additional questions or lines of inquiry in any field.”26 these strategies allow researchers to ask questions and embark down roads of inquiry that were not possible in the past. in helping students develop information literacy skills, librarians encourage the use of new research strategies to find new ways of interacting and interpreting information encased within materials. alternative outputs emerging dh methodologies not only allow for outputs, such as story mapping, geographic information system mapping, and social network analyses to be considered as alternatives to traditional forms of scholarship, but in some cases they necesitate it. as technological advancements grow and new methods of conducting research emerge, traditional forms of scholarship grow increasingly restrictive. unilaterally relying on traditional scholarly outputs undermines the research process and places greater emphasis on individual outputs than on the research itself. scholarly outputs are simply instruments used to communicate knowledge derived from the research process. to adhere to a singular, prescriptive output while more appropriate outputs exist for communicating specific information is not only counterintuitive, but also jeopardizes the impact of the research itself. in leading the charge to develop student’s information literacy skills, libraries emerge as ideal advocates for promoting the implementation of increased scholarly outputs. acrl’s framework cites “information creation as a process” as one of the threshold concepts of information literacy. in defining this frame, acrl states, “information in any format is produced to convey a message and is shared via a selected delivery method.”27 it adds that “the iterative processes of researching, creating, revising, and disseminating information vary, and the resulting product reflects these differences.”28 in order to properly assist students in developing information literacy skills, it is therefore essential that librarians not only make students aware of alternative outputs, but that they also advocate to constituent departments on campuses of higher education to do the same. in order to create inclusive learning environments for students with asd, the emphasis needs to be placed on the research process itself, not the output. emphasizing traditional outputs highlights limitations beyond students’ control. in focusing emphasis on the research process, students will be empowered to direct their efforts to conducting research and developing strong foundational research strategies. it is imperative to encourage students to communicate their research through the medium that they perceive to be the appropriate output for their project or individual communication style. opportunities for library supports libraries provide an ideal infrastructure for supporting neurodivergent students to more effectively interact with scholarly materials. these supports need to take a more prominent role in conversations regarding the future of information literacy. as emerging scholarly practices continue to become an increasingly prominent part of research, it is important to consider the challenges that neurodivergent students face when interacting with materials, and consider new research techniques and methodologies as opportunities to create more accessible, inclusive learning environments. this endeavor is not only a cornerstone of information literacy, but a principal value of librarianship. in discussing the differences between data and information, lanning asserts that information needs “some kind of context for their meaning to be discerned.”29 as discussed, there are numerous layers to this context that create barriers for neurodivergent students to effectively interact with information due to the social and communicative aspects of the syntactical schemata in which it exists, limitations in working memory, and comparatively delayed tom development. however, the unique role of libraries within institutions of higher education creates opportunities to teach emerging research techniques and strategies to students directly, collaborate with services across campus to create more holistic support networks, and work directly with constituent campus departments to establish inclusive learning environments. campus-wide collaborations in a study into establishing strategies for more effectively integrating student supports into their academics, dadger et al. found that all strategies have the same two aims: “(a) to make student services and supports a natural part of students’ college experience and (b) to increase the quality of both support services and instruction.”30 in order to effectively meet these goals with relation to supporting neurodivergent students and establishing a strong network of services, increased collaborations between librarians and disability services, academic mentors and coaches, and advising personnel are crucial. the challenges that neurodivergent students face are multifaceted and require a widespread system of supports that work harmoniously together. dadger et al. found that the first step to creating such a network is to connect preexisting services.31 many established library services, especially one-on-one consultations with librarians, can prove beneficial to neurodivergent students, but students may not be aware that these services exist. students who disclose their diagnoses and seek supports from campus are involved in at least some, if not all, of the aforementioned programs, so increased collaborations can increase visibility of preexisting library services. such collaborations would also invite the establishment of new supports. in a 2018 survey assessing which supports students with asd found most helpful, accardo et al. discovered that 91% of participants identified academic coaching as a preferred service, with one participant adding that coaching is a support that “isn’t contingent on somebody’s agenda for me.”32 academic coaching and mentoring provides increased agency to students, and librarians can positively contribute to furthering that development by providing services around interacting with course materials. if greater collaboration exists between librarians and mentors, then mentors will both be able to suggest to their students specific library services that benefit their individual goals and plans, as well as make suggestions to librarians for new services that they think would benefit their students. all of these collaborations can help students interact with their course materials by making library services more visible and encouraging increased communication between students and their full network of supports. liaising with constituent departments as previously discussed, many neurodivergent students elect not to disclose their diagnoses and subsequently do not receive any of the services to which they are entitled. this makes it all the more important for liaison librarians to work closely with their constituent departments to establish inclusive environments and practices. much of the outreach that liaison librarians do is already geared towards creating inclusive learning environments, but it is imperative that liaison librarians bring new research strategies both to their students and faculty to ensure continued growth in developing such practices and spaces. as conversations focused on neurodivergent inclusivity within information literacy continue, many new practices will emerge and liaison librarians will be the primary drivers of delivering these practices across campuses. for now, many of these practices within the humanities are emerging through dh engagement, so it is imperative that liaison librarians focus on cultivating dh understanding and acceptance within the culture of their constituent departments. organizing workshops and presentations that incorporate dh practices relevant to departmental research interests, inviting constituent faculty to collaborate on a project incorporating emerging scholarly practices, and sharing digital projects are a few examples of efforts that may lead to increased opportunities to grow emerging practices in constituent departments. many disciplines are still in the midst of establishing best practices for considering scholarship and outputs that fall outside the traditional scope, and as such, may be unsure as to how to appropriately encourage students to engage with such practices. moving forward, libraries will continue to play an integral role not only in supporting the creation of new information and scholarship, but also ensuring that best practices are created for using research innovation to create inclusive learning environments. teaching emerging research techniques the majority of students will engage with library-led information literacy opportunities through supplementary sessions within courses taught through constituent campus departments. while some courses may integrate these sessions at numerous points during a semester, it is common that students either only have the opportunity to participate in one session or are not presented with the opportunity at all. the focus of these content-oriented courses is not to develop information literacy skills for interacting with course materials, but instead is on extrapolating knowledge or ideas by interacting with the course material and then presenting this knowledge through a largely proscriptive medium. their structures presuppose that students are able to interact with the materials in a specific way, and are not designed to teach students how to interact with the materials themselves. they may introduce new forms of materials and teach students how to use or incorporate those materials, but even within these situations the ability to interact with the information is assumed. while these courses may not be the appropriate place to teach students techniques or research methods that enable a deeper interaction with their texts, such a course is necessary. the mission and values of librarianship make libraries the ideal home for such courses. libraries are becoming the central support for emerging scholarly practices and dh, and the devotion that librarians demonstrate to information literacy make them ideally suited not only to teach students how to interact with materials, but also how to present their work in nontraditional ways. such courses can empower all students, but especially neurodivergent students, to not only take control of their own research endeavors but also to increase agency when participating in other courses. despite most academic disciplines requiring some variation of a discipline-specific research and writing course, these courses are structured around traditional academic norms that do not provide neurodivergent students with the supports they need for effectively interacting with materials. if libraries begin offering courses that teach these supports, then neurodivergent students may face reduced barriers in their discipline-specific courses. more research into the effectiveness of such courses needs to be conducted, but indicators discussed in this article suggest that they have the potential to positively contribute to more inclusive learning environments. conclusion institutions of higher education are currently maneuvering shifts both in the neurological makeup of student populations and the composition of scholarship itself. as student populations continue to grow more neurodiverse, and dh practices establish themselves as research norms, libraries will play an important role in establishing more inclusive learning environments for students and faculty. neurodivergent students face a plethora of additional challenges to their peers. while many of those challenges are already being supported through various services, there are no institutionalized supports that help students approach the social and communicative aspects of interacting with information and their course materials. limitations in working memory and tom development combined with the social and communicative components inherent within the engagement with and production of traditional modes of scholarship significantly impact neurodivergent students’ abilities to successfully maneuver collegiate expectations. however, libraries can play a decisive role in supporting these students and creating more inclusive learning environments. dh methodologies and practices challenge the limitations of traditional modes of scholarship and provide neurodivergent students an opportunity both to interact with and present information in ways that they were unable to in the past. libraries can currently teach strategies for interacting with information by integrating into the ever-growing system of services campuses offer students. they can implement research strategy courses that specifically target the research needs of neurodivergent students and advocate for more inclusive practices to be implemented within constituent departments. moving forward there is an increasing need for greater emphasis to be placed on supporting the information literacy needs of neurodivergent students. as institutions of higher education continue to grow more neurodiverse, it is the responsibility of libraries to create accessible means and strategies for students to effectively interact with and present information. acknowledgements i would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to peer reviewers jessica schomberg and bethany redcliffe, as well as publishing editor ian beilin for their insight, enthusiasm, and encouragement throughout the review process. their thoughtful feedback and probing questions contributed immensely to the formation of this article. i would also like to thank merinda mclure, whose continued support and guidance during the early stages of developing these ideas was irreplaceable. i am very thankful for all of your efforts and contributions to making this the piece that it is. thank you all! references accardo, amy l., elizabeth g. finnegan, s. jay kuder, and estyr m. bomgardner. “writing interventions for individuals with 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[↩] accardo et al., “accommodations and support services preferred by college students with autism spectrum disorder.” autism 23, no.3 (april 2019): 574.; anderson et al., “a systematic literature review of the experiences and supports of students with autism spectrum disorder in post-secondary education.” research in autism spectrum disorders 39 (2017): 33–34.; gena p. barnhill, “supporting students with asperger syndrome on college campuses: current practices.” focus on autism and other developmental disabilities 31, no. 1 (2016): 3.; underhill et al., “autism stigma in communication classrooms: exploring peer attitudes and motivations toward interacting with atypical students.” communication education 68, no. 2 (2019): 175.; van hees et al., “higher education experiences of students with autism spectrum disorder: challenges, benefits and support needs.” journal of autism and developmental disorders 45, no. 6 (2015): 1673.; wei et al., “the effect of transition planning participation and goal-setting on college enrollment among youth with autism spectrum disorders.” remedial and special education 37, no. 1 (2016): 3–14. [↩] american psychiatric association. diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fifth edition (2013). [↩] ibid. [↩] centers for disease control and prevention, prevalence of autism spectrum disorder among children aged 8 years. autism and developmental disabilities monitoring network, 11 sites, united states, 2014 (2018): 2. [↩] newman et al., the post-high school outcomes of young adults with disabilities up to 8 years after high school. a report from the national longitudinal transition study-2 (nlts2) (2011): 16-21. [↩] white et al., “college students on the autism spectrum: prevalence and associated problems,” autism 15, no. 6 (2011): 695. [↩] underhill et al., “autism stigma in communication classrooms: exploring peer attitudes and motivations toward interacting with atypical students,” communication education 68, no. 2 (2019): 189-190. [↩] alan g. kamhi and hugh w. catts., “language and reading: convergences, divergences, and development,” in reading disabilities (1989):1-34. [↩] ibid. [↩] matthew d. lerner and amori y. mikami., “a preliminary randomized controlled trial of two social skills interventions for youth with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders.” focus on autism and other developmental disabilities 27, no. 3 (2012): 147–57. [↩] it is important to remember here that there are multiple manifestations of asd, and while these techniques can be modified to support individuals with asd, they are not applicable universally and do not prove effective for all people. furthermore, these techniques help recognize that something more may be contributing to what is being communicated beyond the literal meaning of the words, but they do not always help decipher the full meaning of what is being communicated. [↩] vulchanova et al., “figurative language processing in atypical populations: the asd perspective,” frontiers in human neuroscience 9 (2015): 1. [↩] accardo et al., “writing interventions for individuals with autism spectrum disorder: a research synthesis,” journal of autism and developmental disorders (2019): 2. [↩] price et al., “a preliminary study of writing skills in adolescents with autism across persuasive, expository, and narrative genres.” journal of autism and developmental disorders 50, no. 1 (2020): 319–32. [↩] shannon walters, “toward a critical asd pedagogy of insight: teaching, researching, and valuing the social literacies of neurodiverse students,” research in the teaching of english vol. 49, no. 4 (may 2015): 353-354. [↩] valerie camos and pierre barroulillet, working memory in development (2018): 3. [↩] graham et al., “writing characteristics of students with learning disabilities and typically achieving peers: a meta-analysis,” exceptional children 83, no. 2 (2017): 200. [↩] maria chiara pino et al., “simple mindreading abilities predict complex theory of mind: developmental delay in autism spectrum diorders.” journal of autism and developmental disorders 47, no. 9 (2017): 2744. [↩] evelien broekhof et al., “the understanding of intentions, desires and beliefs in young children with autism spectrum disorder,” journal of autism and developmental disorders 45, no. 7 (2015): 2035-2045. [↩] association of college and research libraries (acrl). “framework for information literacy for higher education.” (2015 [↩] alan mckee, textual analysis : a beginner’s guide. (london: sage publications, 2003), proquest ebook central: 8. [↩] s. glucksberg, “understanding metaphors: the paradox of unlike things compared,” in ahmad k. (eds), affective computing and sentiment analysis: emotion, metaphor, and terminology, springer, dordrecht (2011): 4. [↩] e. cambria, “affective computing and sentiment analysis,” ieee intelligent systems 31, no.2 (march 2016):103. [↩] acrl (2015). [↩] ibid. [↩] ibid. [↩] ibid. [↩] scott lanning, concise guide to information literacy (2017): 3. [↩] mina dadgar et al.“strategies for integrating student supports and academics: strategies for integrating student supports and academics,” new directions for community colleges no. 167 (2014): 50–51. [↩] ibid, 48-49. [↩] accardo et al. (2018), 574-83. [↩] open to what? a critical evaluation of oer efficacy studies multilingualism, neoliberalism, and language ideologies in libraries this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: the leaky pipe: lead pipers weigh in on wikileaks – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 29 dec editorial board /1 comments editorial: the leaky pipe: lead pipers weigh in on wikileaks   photo by flickr user ian boyd (cc by-nc 2.0) by editorial board introduction let’s start off with a little background and context, just in case you haven’t been glued to the news to catch every nuance of the wikileaks story. the guardian has a helpful timeline of the saga to get you (at least partially) up to speed, and if you don’t like theirs, there are plenty of others. overall, the various issues and plotlines in the wikileaks story make it so complex that it’s highly challenging to summarize. the simplified version would go something like this: once upon a time, a young hacker (julian assange) decided that the world would be a better place if there were no secrets and all information were shared. he founded an international organization of tech-savvy activists (wikileaks) to create a protected, anonymous platform where individuals could safely share secret information and expose corruption. the organization was successful and began to expose all kinds of formerly secret information to the world. unfortunately, the world was not entirely happy about it. the governments who had created the secret documents got angry and began to point fingers. the united states accused and arrested a young man (bradley manning) who they thought had betrayed them, while american politicians began to speak out against the organization. the u.s. government wanted to arrest the organization’s leader (again, assange), but couldn’t figure out exactly what he had done wrong. suddenly, bad things began to happen to the organization. companies that provided internet hosting, financial services, and other support for the organization began to close its accounts. other tech-savvy activists with strong opinions about freedom of information (anonymous) began to attack the websites of the companies that had closed the organization’s accounts. next the swedish police announced that they wanted to arrest the organization’s leader for taking advantage of two women. the women accused the leader of doing bad things to them, changed their minds, and then changed their minds back again. the u.s. got in line to prosecute him because he had made them look bad. finally, the organization’s leader was arrested in london and a wacky liberal dude (michael moore) paid his bail so he could stay with a british friend and await trial (for what, we’re still not entirely sure). most recently, the organization’s leader announced that he’ll be writing a book to cover his legal costs. stay tuned for next year. that brings us up to the present day. it is far from over, but a few lead pipers wanted to join the fray and weigh in on the situation from the librarian point of view. so here goes… kim on information activism & scale considered as a historical document, the wikileaks “about” page reads something like the american declaration of independence. it describes as underlying principles of the organization a belief in “the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the improvement of our common historical record and the support of the rights of all people to create new history.” it quotes thomas jefferson in the assertion that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” it refers directly to the united nations’ universal declaration of human rights and specifically to article 19, which states, “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” and, like those rebels who produced the declaration of independence, the organization behind the document is now facing the consequences. within the past month wikileaks accounts have been closed or suspended by an increasing list of companies including amazon, mastercard, visa, paypal, bank of america, and apple. everydns.net pulled their primary domain, wikileaks.org, offline (though not to worry, they have seemingly endless mirrors of the site). not to mention the sexual assault allegations filed against wikileaks founder julian assange in sweden. right or wrong, it’s an astounding modern tale of david v. goliath on an international scale. what’s a librarian to think? we, of course, have our own declaration, the library bill of rights, which asserts that libraries “should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.” it’s interesting, though not surprising, that one of the computer wallpaper options offered on the wikileaks “support” page uses the same phrasing as a well-known library blog, “information wants to be free.” meanwhile, in the recent youtube release of the swedish television documentary wikirebels, the term “information activist” was used several times to describe assange. evidenced in part by yet another rhetorically related library blog, i expect that many librarians would consider themselves information activists, if asked. in a post on the young librarians series blog, leah white defined an information activist as “a vigorous advocate of knowledge gained through study, communication, research or instruction.” assange says that the people behind wikileaks, “believe a richer intellectual and historical record that is fuller and more accurate is in itself intrinsically good, and gives people the tools to make intelligent decisions.” while librarians don’t handle classified government documents on a daily basis, there’s a clear connection between the philosophy of wikileaks and that of our libraries. information creates a knowledgeable citizenry, and a knowledgeable citizenry makes better choices. yet all libraries are clearly not on the same page when it comes to wikileaks: the library of congress, mother ship of all u.s. libraries, blocked access to the controversial website from its computers, though they apparently reinstated it later. even the most opinionated information advocate — in fact, assange himself (based on the change in wikileaks policy to edit later documents) — acknowledges that if the release of classified documents may cause harm to individuals named in those documents, there may be limits to how much information is good information. there is a line where information may shift from empowering to dangerous, and wikileaks has been walking that line. still, the crux of the issue is whether an organization should have the right to publicly release leaked documents, which boils down to freedom of the press. when is it okay to censor a media organization? there’s no easy answer to that question, particularly when you consider an organization that exists outside the laws of any particular nation. complicating the issue, the most fascinating aspect of the wikileaks controversy is the fact that it’s a completely new phenomenon. documents have been leaked in the past, both in the u.s. and in other nations, but they’ve been leaked to newspapers and other media on a smaller scale. the scale was smaller in large part because it took time to photocopy documents and send them to journalists, and once the documents had been leaked newspapers could only publish a certain amount at a time. the internet changed that playing field. what we’re seeing with wikileaks could never have happened before, and neither united states nor international law was prepared to deal with it. in an interview with daniel ellsberg, assange’s predecessor commented: this is the first really large-scale, unauthorized disclosure leak since the pentagon papers. there has been nothing like it in the 40 years in between…. i couldn’t have released on this scale 40 years ago. in fact, i couldn’t have done what i did do without xerox at that time. ten years earlier i couldn’t have put out the pentagon papers. wikileaks has gained so much attention not just because they are publishing classified documents, but because technology has made it possible for them to publish mind-boggling quantities of classified information without going through any traditional media outlets. assange has coordinated with various international newspapers, but those papers have played the game on wikileaks’ terms. furthermore, wikileaks is publishing this information without being subject to the laws of any individual nation, as their organization is distributed around the world. most fascinating of all, behind assange and wikileaks is a virtual guerilla army of the techno-savvy who have repeatedly–and with some success–attacked the companies who have taken a stance against wikileaks. we’re looking at a scenario in which the web is like the nineteenth-century american west, and assange is the new sheriff in town. eric on transparency if wikileaks has taught me anything, it’s the value of creating a culture of transparency. to be transparent is to have the ability to make decisions with clear objectives and reasoning and to be prepared with justification for one’s actions. that’s the real value in transparency: you’re held accountable for your actions, and knowing that, you think critically before acting. you don’t want to make a mistake that will be seen by all, so you make sure your choices are sound. you make fewer poor decisions because you know what you do is in the open. best of all, in a transparent society, you are ready to answer the “why?” questions that will be asked after you’ve make a decision. even if you make a mistake, you will have your reasoning to explain your actions. on the library of congress’s blog, matt raymond shares the loc’s statement on the decision to block wikileaks: the library decided to block wikileaks because applicable law obligates federal agencies to protect classified information. unauthorized disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents’ classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents. this is the equivalent of saying, “them’s the rules.” it’s an easy out for government agencies. if the white house says so, then that’s the way it’s going to be. there’s no apparent critical thinking. there’s no reasoning. there’s simply following the rules. i’m the father of a toddler. it’s much easier for me to say “stop drawing on the wall with permanent marker” and put my kid into a timeout for defying that order than it is to get my kid to understand why drawing on the walls is a bad thing. after all, the kid will stop once put in a timeout. there’s no need to explain to him why his actions were bad–he just knows that there’s a punishment associated with that behavior and that’s enough to get him to stop. his toddler brain isn’t ready for critical thinking; it just responds to a negative stimulus. at some point, he’s going to develop the capability to think for himself and solve complex problems. his vocabulary will shift from predominantly “no” to predominantly “why?” my parenting strategy had better be ready for this. if i lay down rules like “don’t dunk the kitty in the bathwater,” i had better be prepared with good reasons for why it’s a bad idea. that’s much harder to do. it’s ridiculously easy to get my kid to follow rules now. as he grows, he’ll become more defiant if he can’t make sense of the rules of the house. this means i’ve got to be more transparent on why the rules exist; if i can’t come up with a good reason, i have to be willing to admit that they might not need to exist at all. that’s the situation the library of congress was put in. it is enforcing a rule that has no apparent reasoning, and the american public is not a bunch of toddlers. the loc needs to articulate the reasons for their actions. perhaps they need to demand that the white house provide reasoning for its rules before following them. simply citing a message from the white house is not reasoning. like the librarians who defied the patriot act by deleting circulation records and fighting the law in court, it’s time for the library of congress and any others who are told to ‘protect’ classified information to demand reasoning. it’s time for our government to be able to articulate why wikileak’d documents need protection in a way they helps us understand the decisions that are being made. that said, i can’t claim that wikileaks should or should not be blocked. i haven’t read the vast majority of them, nor do i have the diplomatic or military expertise to know what would be a breach of security that would put real lives at risk. i do expect that the american public should demand reasons for civilian deaths in the wars in iraq and afghanistan. “because they are embarrassing” is not a reasonable explanation for their protection. we need to know because the actions taken by our military and government are on the american public’s behalf. transparency is hard. it requires time to think deeper about decisions, to be prepared with an articulated reasoning for one’s actions, and to communicate reasons to the appropriate audiences. it also means that when you make a mistake, you learn from it. leigh anne throws the books at you and now for something completely different: the role of print artifacts in a digital scandal. in a case of dueling memoirs that simply cries out for aaron sorkin’s input on the inevitable feature film, both julian assange and his wikileaks co-founder, daniel domscheit-berg (a.k.a. daniel schmitt) have acquired publishing contracts for their version of what one could call wikileaks genesis.  yes, you read that correctly:  two people who leveraged social technologies to turn world politics upside down are now seeking both commercial gain and cultural legitimacy in the form of traditional print books and conventional publishing channels. this is what happens, apparently, when you upset amazon, mastercard, visa, and paypal: you’re forced to spread your message via an outdated medium that is (i hear) dying. i shouldn’t joke; it’s not funny. and yet, in some ways it is. it’s just not “ha-ha” funny. perhaps it’s more akin to that uncomfortable laughter that settles over a party when someone expresses controversial opinions in mixed company. once more the question arises, a question some librarians thought long-settled: what is the appropriate role and value of a physical book in a 21st-century library environment? random house/knopf/crown certainly sees value, to the tune of $1.5 million for assange, who vows to pour it all back into wikileaks. in the temporary absence of pre-pubs and review copies, librarians are left solely with their ethics and policies as the basis for decision-making about books that are certain to fly off library shelves, if purchased. but is popular demand enough, in this situation? does the permanence of a physical text imply inevitable inclusion in a physical library? put on your collection development hats, librarians, and ask yourself some questions.  will you purchase schmitt and assange’s books for your collections?  at least one pundit claims assange’s writing shouldn’t be published at all. how would you respond? does your library own assange’s prior work, underground? if not, will you purchase it now? other texts of cultural relevance have sprung up in both digital and print formats; will you purchase these? to take it a step further, what is the relationship (if any) between your library’s collection development policy and its intellectual freedom policy? what portions of the ala code of ethics are relevant to this discussion?  how many replacement copies will your library purchase if the works are stolen?  how would you respond to a library user’s complaint about the purchase? how long will these works be relevant to your collection?  at what point, if any, should deselection occur? how will you make all these decisions? i ask questions rather than dictate conditions because i prefer to judge a book by its covers, as well as what lies between them. in fact i cheerfully volunteer to review both memoirs so that the library community may have the published professional review we so frequently fall back on as necessary for our collection decisions (google me, random house: i’m born digital!). while i personally fall firmly in the camp of those who believe information wants to be free, our own admiration of–or disdain for–the politics of wikileaks is not enough of an objective standard by which to make these choices.  one of our roles as librarians is to collect and preserve the cultural artifacts spawned in the wake of current events, be they memoirs, newspaper articles, blog posts or podcasts…provided we take the time and effort to craft a professional rationale, and ensure that the works meet its requirements. having discharged our responsibility to our patrons, what is our responsibility to ourselves as library workers?  the most wonderful thing about the decision to publish print memoirs of the wikileaks affair is that it forces librarians on both sides of the “print vs. digital” skirmishes to review their positions. rather than continuously predict the death of print, why can’t technophiles concede that there are weaknesses in the digital publishing model that the traditional publishing model can supplement? late adopters, for their part, now have the opportunity to learn, in a format they prefer, how digital activists like assange and schmitt are shaping the future, and why the tools they use have such critical implications for information storage and retrieval. there is a happy medium to be found here, and i’m confident that library workers can use the wikileaks scenario as a framework for questioning our assumptions, understanding our philosophical differences, and crafting a professional discourse in which opposing viewpoints coexist peacefully, rather than at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. in a delightful episode of serendipity, i’ve been reading tracy hickman’s novel, song of the dragon, between bouts of researching and writing this post. one of hickman’s tribes is a race of elves called the iblisi, whose function is to preserve the true history of the rhonas empire, regardless of what fictions the various court factions cook up to gain favor with the emperor. the iblisi work secretly and silently, and few citizens of the empire understand their work. however, without them, the empire would crumble into utter confusion. so it is with librarians in the age of the 24/7 news cycle: we are here to manage the constant flow of data, and provide manageable frameworks for storage and retrieval. sometimes that’s a book. sometimes it’s a blog post. and sometimes, it’s a photo of questionable taste but cultural relevance. as long as the professional discourse about formats is rooted in logic, ethics and standards, i will be satisfied. battle on, wikileaks.  battle on, librarians.  and may the odds ever be in your favor. note: for those interested who will be in san diego next week, you may want to join in on the ala midwinter discussion. assange, censorship, group post, international, politics, technology, wikileaks take the template and run: austin community college’s student library and technology use study disappearances 1 response suzi w. 2010–12–31 at 3:38 pm as the daughter of a career foreign service officer, and as a public librarian for almost a decade, i have mixed feelings. i would even call my feelings scrambled eggs with green and red peppers. over thanksgiving i watched “fair game” (the valerie plame story, the spy outed by scooter libby) with my parents. what did i take from this movie and the conversations we had after the credits rolled? a heightened sense of what i already knew before i walked into the theater: that national security and covert intelligence are more important than what civilians might understand. yes, transparency is important. but so is context and responsible reporting (aka journalism), and not just doing something “because i can.” i agree with journalist and blogger gary goldhammer, who wrote this in his blog, below the fold: “according to wikileaks, ‘publishing improves transparency, and this transparency creates a better society for all people.’…yes, but not always. transparency also requires judgment and analysis. transparency unchecked will get people killed.” making photocopies of classified documents willy-nilly and posting them on the web is the behavior of a hacker, not a journalist. carl bernstein and bob woodward were journalists. julian assange and his cohorts are hackers. i also know that many librarians side with assange & co. because “information wants to be free.” as a librarian, i *do* believe information should be free. but i also believe that information should be organized and contextualized. my job as a librarian is to help organize and contextualize information, and i am grateful for the work already done by journalists and librarians to find context not only for the wikileaks themselves, but also for what the leaks mean for the future of journalism, the internet, transparency, and national security. the way we share information is changing at a breakneck speed and the leaks are for better or worse a part of that change. my hope is that we would continue to have the maturity to find context for the changes in information sharing and to help patrons understand that context. that is why i got my masters in library science, after all. in answer to leigh anne’s questions about the book that is forthcoming, yes, i would buy the book for my library. yes, i would restock it if it was stolen. i would do this for the same reason that i have no problem knowing that tucker max books live on my library’s shelves. to every book, their reader. i read somewhere that being an adult was the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your brain without going crazy. that’s where i stand with wikileaks. scrambled eggs with peppers, red and green. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: favorite gift books – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 28 dec editorial board, brett bonfield and erin dorney /4 comments editorial: favorite gift books photo from flickr user quinn.anya (cc by-sa 2.0) by editorial board, brett bonfield and erin dorney with the holidays among us, email on a short hiatus, and a few new books on our bedside tables, several of us from the lead pipe would like to share some thoughts about what makes for a great gift book to give or to receive. our favorite gifts books may not all be in amazon’s best sellers list, but we offer our own short list with a healthy helping of caveats and opinions. what’s your favorite book to give or receive? brett i have a theory of gift giving: 1. a gift should be something its recipient wants. it makes no difference whether they know they want it or not, which is the aspect of gift giving that always used to throw me off. to come up with the perfect surprise or, alternatively, to fulfill a long held wish; this was the conundrum. half the time i would get obsessed with finding something they didn’t know they wanted but would light up their face the moment they opened it; the sort of present that would forever change their lives for the better. the other half of the time i would get obsessed with getting them the thing they always wanted. now i don’t worry about it. if i feel pretty sure they want a gift, i’m happy to get it for them, provided it meets my other criteria. 2. a gift should be something its giver actually likes. let’s pretend someone i love is really into cooking and really into science, and let’s pretend i’m in the habit of buying $500 gifts for this person. i still wouldn’t give them nathan myhrvold’s new book because of his behaviors and statements around patents. it’s not that i’m trying to dictate morality or taste for the people closest to me, it’s just that i know my own biases make it impossible for me to figure out if a gift i wouldn’t want for myself is something the person i’m buying a gift for would want to own. in other words, my not wanting something means i can’t be sure it meets the first criterion. 3. a gift should be a luxury for its recipient. there are plenty of things people want but won’t buy for themselves. sometimes it’s something they simply can’t afford, but sometimes it’s something they can afford but have persuaded themselves they shouldn’t buy because it seems extravagant. the key is to find something in the latter category. some of my favorites lately: good wine; specially imported olive oil; finishing salt; high quality socks. for some, newly issued hardback books fit into this category: we’ll wait our turn to get them from the library, maybe buy them as ebooks, or just wait for the paperback or until we find one used. i know that’s how i am, at least for the most part. it feels decadent to purchase a brand new book by a favorite author, one that’s printed on paper and can be mine forever. 4. a gift should fit comfortably within your budget. no one wants you to overspend. maybe in a perfect world a $40 bottle of champagne or a $30 new release would make the perfect holiday gift. but a lot of us don’t have the scratch to go around buying $40 bottles of champagne or $30 hardbacks for everyone on our gift lists. in this instance, even for those people in your life who seem to have everything, a thoughtful donation makes a wonderful gift. you don’t have to tell them how much you’ve given. and, so long as it meets all of the other criteria, they’ll love it. 5. experiences are preferable to objects. most people have more stuff than they need or want. ask yourself: is this something they’ll use all the time, or at least turn to in moments of crisis? if not, maybe you can give them an experience rather than an object. personally, i include reading in the experience category more than the object category since most of us have developed the ability to find a good home for our books (objects) once we’ve read (experienced) them, whether it’s on our own shelves or others’. which is why i love to give and receive books as gifts, and why i recommend breaking ties completely with any non-readers in your life. i’m kidding, mostly. as long as they like socks, olive oil, salt, or wine they can’t be all bad. a few recommendations: jonathan franzen is not one of my favorite novelists, but he’s one of my favorite writers. the guy writes wonderful stories about his own life and he has great taste in literature. he also wrote my very favorite book review, the one from 2004 in which he sang alice munro’s praises in the new york times. print out this review and give it to someone who will appreciate it, along with runaway and/or hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage. do you know any cool people who like good stories that make them question their assumptions and leave them feeling smarter? two books that manage this trick: atul gawande’s better and christopher mcdougall’s born to run. if inspiration is your thing, go for mountains beyond mountains, the book about paul farmer by tracy kidder. it goes nicely with farmer’s new book, haiti after the earthquake, and especially nicely with a donation to partners in health. eric ugh! i hate buying people books. i used to be an avid buyer of books, demonstrated by four full ikea billy bookcases (before they became “thing”-cases). however, since becoming a librarian and having a kid, i buy far fewer books and rely on libraries to provide my family with reading materials. we have two great public libraries where i live – the austin public library and our very own wells branch community library – both of which have met our reading needs very nicely. we make one or two trips to the library each week for story time and to pick up some new books. more than anything, i want the people i buy for to use their local libraries to find new and interesting things to read. as a result, i’ve purchased a lot of book reading accessories along with doing some “research” as a gift. for example, i’ve bought my wife multiple book reading lights (that will clamp to a book or her kindle) and one of those contraptions that holds a book open for you, which came in handy when she was suffering from mommy thumb. for my dad, who has always been into underground comics, i’ve purchased materials to make his own comics, as well as found him articles and commentary on r. crumb from academia. i like to think it provided a new perspective on a topic he’s always been obsessed with. one year, when i worked at the university of michigan’s graduate library, i made the reference staff there custom book plates on hand-made paper that featured scenes from in and around the library. i tied them up with a glue stick and a little bow. but an actual book? there’s too much individual choice to select a title for someone else. i am too finicky a reader to presume i could pick something that someone else was sure to like that they couldn’t get for free at their local library. (although i’ll second brett’s recommendation of born to run, especially for athletes and runners.) emily see, i have this resentment with systems that aren’t open or those that won’t play nice with others. my phone is a first-generation droid and my traveling computer is an ancient (three years old) asus eeepc 900, whose linux-based operating system, xandros, was so frustrating and ridiculously hard to update that i gave up and started over by installing ubuntu. i refuse to get an iphone or ipad (i’m still so confused as to who thought this was a good name for a tablet computer) and am loathe to engage in the i-ification of everything. (but i do love my still functioning classic click wheel ipod.) maybe it’s my stubborn idealism about open interoperable technology, but if i had the resources i’d give everyone i know a nook tablet – and not just because i really want one. i’d do it because the nook tablet is the ultimate in playing nice. it reads almost any format of e-book publication – or any other kind of file, for that matter – which is far better than the kindle will do. i’d do it because i want there to be a major competitor to the kindle and amazon. i’d do it because the nook is more in line with the interoperability standards i’d want in my devices. and of course there are a few books i’d have pre-loaded on these nooks. i’d give three: feminism is for everybody by bell hooks – because as the title indicates, it’s for everybody! cookwise by shirley corriher – because it’s a basic for the kitchen, and i love to read the hows and whys behind my meals. the sojourn by andrew krivak – i got this for $3 from a vendor at ala annual for an airplane read on the way home from nola. it was by far the best novel i’ve read in years, and the fact that it was published by the not-for-profit bellevue literary press doesn’t hurt. hilary like some of my colleagues here, i don’t often give books as gifts unless they are specifically requested. and that is for the reason that most of my family, friends and colleagues are resourceful library users. nevertheless, my top picks are… the best recipe (or the new best recipe) – this is an ever-evolving compilation of well-vetted recipes by the folks who run cook’s illustrated and america’s test kitchen. this book disseminates the best approach to common recipes (e.g., banana bread, pizza dough) based on a series of tests conducted by professional chefs who run experiments on each recipe. think of it like a consumer reports for recipes. flip flop fly ball (by craig robinson) – this is a book that i secretly lust after and i am not at all a baseball fan. this is a superb reference for example after example of beautiful ways to make a compelling point with data, in this case sports stats. the plant-book (by david mabberley) – this book is the essential reference book for people who like to think about plants. it’s equally as appropriate for a hard-core botanist as it is for a backyard gardener. erin i seem to be in the minority amongst my lead pipe colleagues and am what some might call a book-pusher. i routinely gift books for holidays and birthdays, and have also been known to randomly distribute paperbacks throughout the year based on gut reaction. often, my gifts are secondhand books, collected from thrift shops, library book sales, church rummage sales or straight from my own shelves. subject content varies based on the individual and i have a variety of strategies for matching a book to its reader. one is to poach ideas from curated lists. there are hundreds of best book lists that are compiled each year from both mainstream and independent groups. i have also found success in tapping the network of my peers, including browsing people’s public-facing amazon wish lists and library thing reviews. another strategy is to ask librarian friends and coworkers for recommendations. or, i just buy another copy (or give away my copy) of a book i have read and loved, willing to chance that my friend or loved one will enjoy it as well. this holiday season, i gifted books to each of my three brothers, including the hunger games series, a new official scrabble dictionary, a compilation of canoe games, philip k. dick’s valis, and the great equations: breakthroughs in science from pythagoras to heisenberg by robert p. crease. i love receiving books as gifts, although my to-read pile towers dangerously at the point of collapse. being able to look at my shelves and recall where a certain book came from makes me happy. it contributes to my idea of a personal library – one compiled by those who know me the best and carefully curated and culled as the years pass. to me, the gift of a book is never wasted. although a certain amount of sentimental value is placed on volumes given, i never feel pressure to keep something i have read forever. if a gift book does not particularly resonate with me, i pass it along on its journey, donating it to a library, friend, or random person on twitter. with e-books, this is more difficult due to closed and proprietary systems, one of many flaws in our existing structures. there is a place for the circulation and sharing of books outside of a library, with the public and personal coexisting serendipitously, sustaining one another. csi(l) carleton: forensic librarians and reflective practices perspective and doing good work 4 responses andromeda 2011–12–28 at 10:39 am nice link to thinking, fast and slow. grant got that for christmas which is very convenient as it means i can steal it for my flight to midwinter. andromeda 2011–12–28 at 10:51 am ok, now that i’ve read the rest of your post (what? kahneman’s so exciting one must comment instantly!) i have to admit there is at least one more very nice link in there. also i must second the recommendation of better, which i adored (and raise you “everything gawande has ever written or will ever write”, starting with binging on his new yorker essays: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/atul_gawande/search?contributorname=atul%20gawande ). clearly i will have to read born to run, as your description of who would like it might as well have a huge blinking sign with my name on it. and to recommend a few more — here are books i read through the library, then promptly looked for excuses to give someone else so i could generate some royalties for the author: nnedi okorafor’s who fears death (best book i read in 2010) and nk jemisin’s inheritance trilogy (2/3 published thus far iirc). (these are for people who like speculative fiction, which as far as i’m concerned ought to be everybody.) emily ford 2011–12–29 at 6:41 pm so my to read list just grew exponentially. thanks, all. emily ford 2011–12–29 at 6:46 pm oh– also for christmas i got: the savage detectives, which i’ve started and am addicted to; and herta müller’s the land of green plums, which, if the english works out for me, i’ll read it in german, too. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct zen and the art of constructive criticism – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 2 may erin dorney /28 comments zen and the art of constructive criticism “critique 2/2” photo by flickr user bruno boutot (cc-by-nc-sa 2.0) by erin dorney introduction if there were a single piece of advice i have for new professionals entering the field of librarianship, it would be to develop the skill of giving and receiving criticism. this isn’t something i’ve been able to find in an lis course catalog, slate of webinar programming, or conference booklet (although it looks like there’s an awesome presentation later this week at loex!). while we’re not formally educated in the art of critique, library professionals are required to provide and accept feedback in a variety of different situations. for example, we might engage in giving and receiving criticism to and from colleagues, supervisors, and mentees and in other situations (for tenure, during instructional observations, when providing job references, during peer review, annual evaluations, etc.). even when handled constructively, feedback can be a heavy burden, particularly for new professionals entering the field. our hesitation to educate and engage in positive feedback models is symptomatic of a black and white view of the world. in librarianship, this view manifests itself through dualities like cataloging or public services; user-focused or stuck in the past; innovative or resistant to change; colleagues who love us or hate us. communication is seen as either good or bad, delineation often made within seconds based on gut reaction and the context surrounding a particular situation or person involved. but every situation has its shades of gray. although we are not our ideas and we are not our words, we often place a sense of ownership and identity in communication. the difficult part comes when we need to separate ourselves from what we say and what we hear. my own struggle with criticism is a process of continual learning based on research and self-reflection. this lead pipe article will outline tips for providing constructive criticism, methods of accepting feedback when it is given, and how to productively handle destructive criticism. why criticism is threatening it is important to mention that dealing with criticism is not simply an exercise of mental control. who among us has not experienced the racing heartbeat, tense muscles, and rise in blood pressure the moment a grad school paper is delivered with a grade or a peer-reviewed article is sent back with edits? when our actions are called into question, we are forced to counteract our own physiology. in her article on the psychology of giving and taking in critical feedback, wright refers to this as a “negativity bias,” based on the fact that different nervous system circuits handle negative information/events than handle positive information/events. baumeister and his colleagues from case western reserve university and free university of amsterdam unpack this idea further in their extensive 2001 study of why bad is stronger than good across a broad range of psychological phenomena: “even after the behavioral response to a fear-inducing conditioned stimulus has been extinguished, the brain retains a changed pattern of neuronal connections between cells…” (baumeister 336). thus, these negative systems are more sensitive and as a result, we react quickly and viscerally to bad news. our reactions are based on deeply seeded “fight or flight” survival instincts. when we are critiqued we risk exclusion and with a pack mentality, this would equal death. “survival requires urgent attention to possible bad outcomes, but it is less urgent with regard to good ones. hence, it would be adaptive to be psychologically designed to respond to bad more strongly than good,” says baumeister (325). right now you may be wondering what any of this has to do with the modern world. while we no longer travel in herds, our culture is predominantly a social one. there is pressure (from the media, our upbringing, the government, our peers) to conform and exist within the boundaries of what is acceptable. most of us function within this system to earn the money we need to purchase the necessities of life. it’s not exactly hunting, but the grocery store certainly isn’t free. “what hurts most in negative feedback, then, isn’t the overt content of the message so much as the threat of exclusion, abandonment, and ostracism that accompanies it,” says wright (59). in the workplace, criticism threatens our ability to survive. it’s no wonder our palms get sweaty walking into our annual evaluation meetings. at a basic level, criticism is judgment and no one likes to feel judged. in a profession full of individuals who care so deeply about their work, receiving feedback can often feel like a personal blow. our workplaces are emotionally charged, particularly during times of great change. giving constructive criticism before discussing how to productively receive criticism, it’s imperative to focus on how we communicate when we give it. always providing constructive criticism is a step in the right direction towards strengthening emotional intelligence. begin by questioning your motives for providing feedback to another individual: the wrong reasons to give feedback: defend/excuse your own behavior to demoralize/condemn you’re in a bad mood to appease a third party to make yourself seem superior/powerful the right reasons to give feedback: commitment/concern for another sense of responsibility to guide/mentor to support/enhance source: booher although considering your motives may seem like a basic first step, a reflective practice of communication is the most effective. the individual you are providing feedback to will only be able to guess at your intentions based on what you communicate through words and body language. being upfront about your intentions also includes being open about the severity of the criticism. what are the consequences for the recipient of this criticism? are comments being offered up as food for thought? did he commit career-suicide and is being fired? will the conversation end with a formal complaint for her personnel file? it is critical to communicate the severity of the feedback at the beginning of the conversation so that the individual can stop worrying and focus on the issue at hand rather than the consequences. another strategy for giving constructive criticism is to lead the conversation with questions and observations. this helps the individual feel a sense of ownership in the conversation as opposed to being scolded. for example: “did you know that the pitch of your voice changes during class? i could really tell when you believed in what you were saying and when you didn’t.” bringing attention to something through observation or asking a question may be enough push for the individual to make a change. constructive criticism should be concrete and actionable, providing the recipient with alternatives for correction. there is a fine line between being constructive and couching criticism in positive affirmations. for example, consider the difference between “the unicorn on that poster looks a little sad. have you thought about raising his eyebrows or giving him a smile to help convey a happier expression?” and “wow, that unicorn is amazing, it’s so artistic and well-proportioned, and it’s super adorable, but… it has really sad eyes.” without clear communication, we may fail to deliver critiques effectively. this can make the situation more stressful as the individual struggles to decipher mixed messages. receiving constructive criticism “quality constructive criticism implicitly recognizes worth in receivers’ work…” (petress) even when given constructively, for the right reasons, and with grace, receiving criticism can feel uncomfortable. however, a big part of learning is recognizing, analyzing, and fixing our mistakes. in a profession focused on lifelong learning, the skill of accepting feedback should be an area of continual improvement. criticism is best received when it is invited, so perhaps we should welcome it more frequently within libraries. dianna booher (ceo of booher consultants, a dallas-based communications training firm) recommends starting long-term professional relationships with a frank discussion, asking “do you intend to make any mistakes over the course of the next three years?” yes, this is a hilariously absurd line of questioning— of course mistakes will be made! however, a line of conversation in this vein opens the door to a conversation about how the individuals would like to handle criticism and feedback. would you like to receive feedback in-person? how often? over email? at the end or beginning of the day? using humor to lighten the tone of this important dialogue will decrease anxiety and help both parties feel more relaxed moving forward. it is a strategy that would be ideal for new librarians, interns, or graduate assistants, in order to start developing their emotional intelligence and ability to give and receive criticism. in order to receive more concrete and actionable criticism, ask for feedback on a specific aspect of your work rather than general thoughts. for example, instead of asking a colleague “how do you think my instruction session went?” ask “did using poll everywhere seem to increase the amount of student interaction/interest in the session?” or “how do you think the peer-to-peer learning aspect of having students demo ebsco discovery service at the front of the class went?” asking for feedback on a particular aspect lets you relax and focus on the areas you’re interested in improving, rather than being self-conscious about aspects you know you can improve on your own. considering the medium through which you communicate your request for feedback (and the feedback itself) is also important. it is incredibly difficult to provide constructive criticism through e-mail, as tone is hard to discern and body language is non-existent. communicating face to face is best, even if it’s just a quick 15-minute conversation in a colleague’s office. the late dr. ken petress, professor emeritus of communication at the university of maine, recommends that recipients resist being dogmatic or rigid about their work, whatever it may be. we sometimes hear what we want to hear, not what is being communicated. this is understandable when we have poured a lot of time and energy into projects that we are passionate about. however, the ability to remain flexible and adapt to critical feedback are skills that will help move librarianship forward. destructive criticism one of my lead pipe colleagues, brett bonfield, shared the following story with me, told by paul graham about sam altman. it has become “…something of a legend,” among start up founders and hackers and receiving a similar reaction that ranganathan’s “every book its reader” gets among librarians (bonfield): “someone who’s not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. if an adult says ‘that’s a stupid idea,’ a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel. but rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. the adult response to ‘that’s a stupid idea,’ is simply to look the other person in the eye and say ‘really? why do you think so?'” interpreting criticism can be tricky, as it is difficult to separate criticism of one’s work from criticism of the person. try to make a good-faith assumption that the criticism is positively motivated. if the conversation still feels destructive, engage in perception checking to determine if you are decoding the speaker’s message correctly. this provides a non-threatening opportunity for the critic to clarify their feedback before professional relationships are damaged. criticism hinges on the perception of authority, which can often impact its reception. in the workplace, unsolicited advice can trigger resentment because the recipient may feel like the critic is presuming authority over him or her. “such feedback tends to come across as a power play— something that’s easier to tolerate in a manager who’s a recognized authority than a peer who isn’t,” says wright (61). so, what can you do when you doubt the authority of the person giving you feedback, either because the person is not in a supervisory role or you doubt that they are offering something constructive and for the right reasons? being equipped with language to respond to destructive criticism can help you deal with it in a healthy manner. the following phrases leave the door open for discussion— everyone involved gets to save face. it can be stressful to feel obligated to solve a problem at a particular moment in time. adopting these responses can demonstrate that you are open to new ideas but don’t force you to commit on the spot, a particularly useful technique if you suspect that the criticism is being delivered for the wrong reasons. feel free to add your own responses to the list in the comments area below the article. you know, you might be right that’s a good idea. what would that look like? i hadn’t thought about that. let me think about that. how could we make that work? professionals should keep in mind that leaders are always targets for criticism. “to put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as i can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction,” says technologist clay shirky. destructive criticism, typically motivated by negativity, says more about the critic than the recipient. in these cases, it may be helpful to investigate resources on how to care less. conclusion giving and accepting criticism requires great emotional strength, but that is no excuse to avoid conflict. good decisions emerge from conflict and consensus decision-making. however, it is important to communicate constructively in order to move our profession forward and build meaningful relationships. libraries and other institutions must develop a culture where dissent is okay, even valued. graduate programs in librarianship should integrate teaching feedback models into the curriculum. in their pilot study, educators patricia l. harms and deborah britt roebuck found that business students appreciated opportunities to role-play giving and receiving feedback to become more comfortable with the process of delivering constructive criticism (426). after learning the bet/bear model in the classroom, students reported adopting this approach successfully in real world situations. additionally, professional development opportunities abound in this area of interpersonal communication. libraries continue to seek out ways to develop leadership potential through regional and national programs like the ala emerging leaders. as we consider how managers are being created, the ability to give and receive constructive criticism should be high on the list of desired traits. hands-on workshops with role-playing and “judgment-free” practice zones could be organized for conference programming. as a new professional, this has been one of my largest areas of growth over the past four years. and, as advocates of lifelong learning and an informed citizenry, it is important for librarians to act as role models to the people we serve. on a final note, if your only comment to this lead pipe article is “this sucks,” i refer you up to the criticism motives chart in section two. learn it. live it. we can all do this better. many thanks to james delrosso for his constructive criticism on this piece. thanks also to sheila kasperek, lindsey girard, and lead pipers hilary davis, brett bonfield, ellie collier, leigh anne vrabel and emily ford for edits, comments, and thought provoking questions. props to #alatt for the brainstorming! references and further readings baumeister, r. f., bratslavsky, e., finkenauer, c., & vohs, k. d. “bad is stronger than good.” review of general psychology, 5.4 (2001): 323-370. bonfield, brett. “erin’s article topic – criticism (for may 2).” message to erin dorney. 15 apr. 2012. e-mail. booher, dianna. “communicate with confidence and give constructive criticism without crippling others.” women in business 51.5 (1999): 44. burkhardt, andy. “constant critic or creative colleague?” information tyrannosaur, march 13, 2012. http://andyburkhardt.com/2012/03/13/constant-critic-or-creative-colleague/ farkas, meredith. “charitable reading.” information wants to be free, january 11, 2007. http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2007/01/11/charitable-reading/ ford, emily. “consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries.“ in the library with the lead pipe, january 25, 2012. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/consensus/ goldsmith, barton. “ten tips for delivering (constructive) criticism.” successful meetings 54.9 (2005): 26-27. graham, paul. “how to disagree.” paulgraham.com, march 2008. http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html graham, paul. “why to not not start a startup.” paulgraham.com, march 2007.  http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html harms, patricia l., and deborah britt roebuck. “teaching the art and craft of giving and receiving feedback.” business communication quarterly 73.4 (2010): 413-431. manley, will. “will unwound #731: “tough love”.” will unwound, april 12, 2012. http://willmanley.com/2012/04/12/will-unwound-731-tough-love/ perception checking. national conflict resolution education in teacher education (crete) collaborative project, n.d. http://www.creducation.org/resources/perception_checking/how_well_do_you_understand.html petress, dr. ken. “constructive criticism: a tool for improvement.” college student journal 34.3 (2000): 475. pirsig, robert m. zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: an inquiry into values. new york, morrow, 1974. shirky, clay. “a rant about women” clayshirky.com, january 15, 2010. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/ sutton, robert. “the virtues of emotional detachment” business news on the huffington post, june 20, 2007. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-sutton/the-virtues-of-emotional-_b_53008.html wright, karen. “a chic critique.. (cover story).” psychology today 44.2 (2011): 54-63. criticism, critique, etiquette, leadership, librarianship, professional development, psychology, wellness, workplace in the library with the lead pipe reader poll what we talk about when we talk about brangelina 28 responses ann wilberton 2012–05–02 at 9:17 am criticism! one of my favorite topics. i’m so glad to see this blog address this topic. sometimes, i think our profession is so focused on the nuts and bolts of librarianship, we forget to address the skills that go beyond the library walls. i also applaud you for recognizing the value of tackling this as one of your areas of growth. mastering these skills will help you far beyond the actual moment that criticism is delivered or received. when i’m offering advice to friends about this or other workplace issues, it always seems to come back to this: learn how to not take things personally, even when it is intended to be personal. and as you said, the fight or flight response is one we can’t control in the moment, as its happening (possibly); but, we can undertake practices such as meditation that would help us lessen the response. there are also ways to practice mind control that eventually rewire your trigger. they’ve done studies on monks measuring their responses to various stimuli and they actually physically respond compassionately to things that would make most people angry. i’m sure there are numerous techniques for mastering one’s mind. i tend to lean towards mindfulness based techniques because they have also helped me cultivate compassion, which has helped me in more ways than i can count. all of this is a lifelong journey: developing the skills that will help you navigate work and life. the rewards are immeasurable. imagine a workplace where everyone was adept at delivering and receiving criticism with grace. people would be less afraid to share ideas. collaboration would spark innovation and people would have the freedom to fail. wow. that would be awesome. emily ford 2012–05–02 at 2:22 pm yes, meditation and attitude adjustment are key ideas when it comes to being able to take and give constructive criticism! for me personally i find that having a meditative yoga practice and also setting daily intentions works well. thanks for pointing that out, ann. erin dorney 2012–05–02 at 2:58 pm hi ann – thanks for your kind comments on the article. i agree 100% about not taking things personally. it’s difficult to fight that feeling sometimes, but it’s crucial to being able to accept feedback and improve your work. love the comment about rewiring your trigger as well – i think the first step there is identifying what our triggers are. then we can move forward with dealing in a more productive manner. and, your last few sentences? that is exactly the library environment i want to work in :) i think it’s possible to get there. thanks for reading! ellie 2012–05–02 at 1:02 pm i love this piece so much. my one major quibble is with the quote from dianna booher (“do you intend to make any mistakes over the course of the next three years?”). i completely agree with benefits of having a frank discussion about how to handle feedback and have done this many times with new colleagues. but the actual sentence she offers strikes me as incredibly confrontational and i think it is unlikely to be taken as humor and answered with ‘of course i will.’ especially depending on any power dynamics between the parties. it feels like a trick question and it seems like something that will immediately shut down communication. i think a better opener would be something more along the lines of, “i really appreciate feedback, it helps me learn and grow, here’s how i like to receive it, what works best for you?” erin dorney 2012–05–02 at 3:02 pm ellie – i agree, the context of the situation (and history of people involved, and their professional relationship to one another) might call for some creative license on the wording of starting a conversation in that vein. i think the phrase you suggested is great because it opens the door for a give and take – kind of like the idea that a mentoring relationship goes two ways. also, i was just thinking… maybe power dynamics in the workplace should be a future lead pipe article! i think there are a lot of places we could go with that one… :) ellie collier 2012–05–02 at 3:11 pm excellent article idea! emily ford 2012–05–02 at 1:57 pm at our statewide conference our keynote speaker was robert killen, who talks about facilitating dialogue. (sneak peek here) a mantra: “you are not your ideas.” i think one of the problem is that we, as people, take things way too personally, and this inhibits us from thinking creatively to come up with solutions when what we’re doing is problematic. i would also like to add, that i think the means by which we ask for feedback is so important. i like that you are showing us ways to ask more meaningful questions (ie, concrete questions vs. general) but also asking for feedback informally, walking up to your colleague’s office, makes it much more important than scheduling a meeting or asking for feedback via e-mail. thanks for tackling this, erin! ellie collier 2012–05–02 at 3:21 pm i also wanted to emphasize the usefulness of asking for very specific feedback. i was preparing an hour long presentation on the future of libraries for a job interview. i asked some colleagues if they would let me do a practice run in front of them. they not only said yes, but did some extra recruiting of audience members for me which ended up giving me a much broader perspective in my feedback and ended up being helpful for the library school student who got to see an academic hiring presentation. before i started i let them know that i hadn’t practiced a ton yet, so i didn’t need feedback on eye contact or pauses or ums and ahs. what i really wanted to know was: (1) did the order of my ideas work or should anything be reordered? (2) did my activity work? (3) did i fulfill what was asked of me? (i shared the exact language of the presentation request.) they were so amazingly helpful. they probably would have been anyway because they are awesome people, but knowing what areas i wanted to focus on made sure i got the critique i really needed. lindsey girard 2012–05–03 at 4:53 pm i think this is a really great point to emphasize, not only for the purpose of utility, but also in terms of helping us feel better about receiving criticism on our work. asking for feedback on something specific gives you more control over the situation. you’ve directed your audience’s attention to where you want it to go, and you’ve taken out some of the uncertainty that makes receiving feedback so scary. going into a feedback situation blind with no idea as to what the other person is going to say is one of the scarier parts for me. asking for specific commentary makes me feel like i have greater agency over the situation, which alleviates a lot of my anxiety from the get-go. great article, erin! erin dorney 2012–05–03 at 10:15 pm ellie that is such a great example, and one i plan on putting into practice immediately. i think it’s also helpful in that you are openly “admitting” that there are other aspects that might not be perfect yet, but that you can get a handle on on your own. we’re not perfect, and i think recognizing that (and communicating it) can go a long way in relaxing the doors to allow constructive criticism to flow between individuals. lindsey – yes! that is one of the scariest aspects for me as well. it’s easy to get worked up over/anxious about what the person might say if you have no idea what angle they’ll be coming from. thanks for all of your help with the article, too! ann 2012–05–03 at 1:22 pm i just wanted to say that i really enjoyed this article. points of it resonated with me and what i’ve experienced in my professional life. advice in any soft skill is always “easier said than done.” soft skills are so, well, squishy. i find it very valuable, though, to hear that others have felt or experienced the same things. reading suggestions for how they have come to deal with it helps me view my own situation with fresh eyes that takes that “pack exclusion” fear away by giving me a broader pack with which to identify. so, i guess i just wanted to say thank you for writing this piece and letting me know i’m not a lone wolf. erin dorney 2012–05–03 at 10:21 pm ann – thanks so much for your comment. knowing that the article resonates with others makes me feel better as well. we’re certainly not the only ones (or profession) out there struggling with this and trying to educate and improve ourselves. ellen 2012–05–03 at 4:54 pm erin, i remember this discussion on #alatt and the article has come out beautifully! i’ve read it twice now; it’s so thoughtful. at our library, we’re soliciting new bloggers to contribute to the blog. we’ve had conversations about the role of the editorial team–that team provides constructive criticism so that we all have a product of which we can be proud. i sent your article to our two associate directors who are soliciting new bloggers and they said it’s required reading for anyone joining the blog team. thanks so much for taking on this topic. erin dorney 2012–05–03 at 10:27 pm hi ellen – thanks so much! i’m glad we could help. i just joined the lead pipe team about 5 months ago, and i have to say that i am loving the team approach. the constructive feedback we give and receive on all of the articles published here make them much stronger… i can’t even tell you how much my original article changed after integrating feedback during the review process. which makes me think… it might be an intriguing post to share an article in multiple stages – pre and post (or even during) peer review to show the level of feedback that is given to writers. i wish you the best of luck with your sheridan libraries blog! and if you have any questions we might be able to help with re: the editorial experience/process here at lead pipe, just shoot us an email :) laura zeigen 2012–05–03 at 8:26 pm this is a great article! it is one with advice and wisdom i wish i had received at least 15 years ago! this dynamic (of giving and receiving constructive criticism) is definitely a learned skill and something that is challenging for most of us to do, but, once learned something that would greatly improve our effectiveness at work. erin dorney 2012–05–03 at 10:29 pm thanks laura! i agree. imagine if we fully-integrated this into lis education. it could really change the trajectory of the field if we could all learn take things less personally and work together to collaborate in the truest sense. thanks for reading the lead pipe! vanessa morris 2012–05–04 at 3:27 pm wonderful article. one of the most helpful things for me was joining a writing group that critiques each others work. my group taught me how to separate myself from whatever is being criticized, and not to take it personally. i found that my reactions to the written constructive criticisms improved with time. this, in turn, had a marvelous effect on my ability to *happily* and constructively receive face-to-face criticisms. erin dorney 2012–05–07 at 9:23 am hi vanessa – thanks! building a community where critique is expected and welcomed is a great idea in terms of becoming more comfortable giving and receiving feedback. the expectations are really clear for everyone in that case, so you can focus more on making improvements to your writing and less on the negative feelings that may come along with it. thanks for the comment! pingback : new zen and the art of constructive criticism – stephen's lighthouse lorne doone 2012–05–14 at 1:55 pm just read “imagine” by jonah lehrer … chapter 6 – about plussing during criticism… “whenever work is criticized, the criticism should contain a plus, a new idea that builds on the flaws in a productive manner…. when plussing works, it’s incredibly effective at generating creative breakthroughs” erin dorney 2012–05–26 at 4:36 pm lorne – thanks for the comment. i love the idea of plussing – sounds like it could be really helpful during the brainstorming/idea generation process. pingback : zen e arte da crítica construtiva — informalidades amy 2012–05–21 at 8:08 am i agree that formal instruction in constructive criticism would be very useful to library professionals. being able to take anything other than positive feedback on board doesn’t come naturally to me, nor i suppose, to many people. nobody wants to hear bad things about themselves! i think that setting up regular one on one meetings between staff and managers is a good way to ensure constructive criticism is expected and seen as a normal part of the work environment… as opposed to sitting down with the boss only when there is a problem. in my experience, approaching my managers and proactively asking for feedback has got easier with practice and is preferable to sitting around waiting for it and expecting the worst. erin dorney 2012–05–26 at 4:39 pm amy – i completely agree about regular meetings between staff and managers. consistency is important because then you come to expect feedback. individuals can start getting used to that they might not be 100% right all the time when constructive criticism is shared more often. thanks for the comment! pingback : say it with a smile « hack library school pingback : summer_lins « her life with books esther grassian 2012–09–21 at 3:15 pm thanks–this is a very interesting article. i’d just like to add that i’ve been teaching a graduate information literacy course in the ucla ischool as an adjunct lecturer about every other year since 1990. (my colleague, joan kaplowitz and i proposed this course in 1989.) each time i teach it, i ask mlis and ph.d. students to observe others teaching and to focus on 2 questions: “what did you like?” and “how would you do it differently?” students use these questions in assignments that include observing a librarian teach a f2f session, reviewing an online library instruction site, and commenting on in-class student teaching/learning, both group and individual. so this is an example of one method of critiquing that is taught in an ischool, that is, when this course is offered. unfortunately, it’s an elective and in some years, when budgets are tight, it isn’t offered at all. pingback : zen e arte da crítica construtiva | moreno barros this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct q&a: lead pipe on professional development – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 8 feb editorial board /11 comments q&a: lead pipe on professional development photo by flickr user forkergirl (cc by-nc-sa) by editorial board this week, in the library with lead pipe fields professional development and career questions from library school students at the university of north carolina at chapel hill. the questions they asked ranged from committee work to composing cover letters to conference attendance. here is the complete list (so you can jump around if you like): what committees do you serve on that are most important/relevant to your professional development? which activities do you feel have been the most beneficial for your professional development? what is the best way to represent professional development on a resume? should most relevant/recent experiences be included rather than a long list of professional development experiences? is it better to include more substantial professional development experiences on a resume (e.g. conferences) rather than short, 1-2 hour in-house professional development experiences? when you first started publishing, did you have to submit to multiple journals before your article was accepted?  how did you decide which journals to submit to (or what process did you use to narrow the list)? how often (if at all) and in what ways do you use social media professionally?  how are you cultivating your online presence, keeping track of current trends in librarianship, and learning to use new technologies once you are “in the field” and are busy working. how can publishing a blog or having a twitter feed, etc. work to your advantage/disadvantage when it comes to being hired for a job? aside from publishing inappropriate material, should you also be wary of putting your views on a certain topic online in case your potential hirer disagrees with those views? how can you bring up professional blogging in a resume or job interview? is it possible to provide links to published blog posts in a resume, or is that inappropriate? do you have any tips for getting the most out of a large conference? in true lead pipe fashion, our team has responded with a range of perspectives. we don’t have all the answers, and we don’t always agree, but we appreciate the opportunity to share our thoughts with you. please join the conversation by adding your own thoughts on these questions in the comments. 1. what committees do you serve on that are most important/relevant to your professional development? emily i think it’s equally important to serve on committees that are related to your job and also those that you find interesting. at least for me, a lot of my professional development work occurs “off the clock” so it helps if it’s something i care about and in which i’m interested. fortunately, my employment and my professional development interests have been complementary. over the past year i’ve changed jobs and focus, which has led me to re-evaluate my professional development commitments. since i liaise with disciplines that study policy, my involvement in library legislative and policy focused committees still remains relevant. however, i’ve been actively looking for additional professional development opportunities related to the areas of my job as a subject librarian. while to some extent this reflects my change in jobs, it mostly reflects my evolving interests as i come to know position. because of this, when i last renewed my ala membership i made the hard decision to drop my membership in rusa and switch to acrl to reflect the direction my career was going. i looked to join relevant sections of acrl that mirrored my interests as well as those that would help me develop into a more knowledgeable urban & public affairs librarian. i joined the law and political science section (lpss), the instruction section (is), the health sciences interest group (hsig), and the university libraries section (uls). i also continued to be a member of new member’s round table (nmrt) and social responsibilities round table (srrt). currently acrl is seeking volunteers for committees, so i’m deciding to which committee i’d like to try and join. eric more important than association committees are the people i work with here in austin—they provide the best learning opportunities i’ve had in some time.  cross-departmental teams that involve information technology, the faculty, and other academic support staff at the university provide new perspectives on higher educational imagine there will be a point when i’ll be ready to reinvest in developing an association-based career, but for now, i’m turning towards those closest to me to grow and change as a professional. kim all of them. some committees are more dynamic than others, and some address topics that are more directly relevant to my work, but every group i’ve participated on as member or chair has helped me grow as a professional. even if i’m not learning content that informs me as a librarian, i’m learning how to plan and run meetings, how to budget and manage projects, and how to productively collaborate with individuals around the country. plus, i’m meeting people who might potentially create opportunities for me in the future (and vice versa). i see a direct link between my ala/acrl activities and the fact that i was hired as a library director so early in my career; when interviewing, i cited examples from my committee work as evidence of my administrative potential. i’m somewhat unusual, i think, in that i truly enjoy committee activity. that stems in part from my unending curiosity about librarianship and my colleagues, and in part from the fact that i don’t take myself too seriously. i do serious work, but we’re all volunteers on these committees and we should be able to laugh, too. i try to bring that joy to every meeting. ellie like eric, i’ve stepped back from being on a ton of committees. i had some negative experiences at the national level and have found much more satisfaction at state and local levels. i’ve recently moved and haven’t fully settled into my new location yet, but when i was in texas i was on the automation & technology round table. they gave me my first professional public speaking opportunity. i showed up to a meeting after having been awarded a scholarship from them and they asked what programs i thought were missing from their lineup. i told them my ideas and they asked if i’d be up for speaking. that lead to continued presentations at the texas library association annual conference for several years. i’ve also really enjoyed serving on selection committees. in addition to all the usual benefits of committee work, you can also learn a lot about what aspects of proposals make them most likely to succeed. it definitely makes me more confident when submitting applications or proposals of my own. 2. which activities do you feel have been the most beneficial for your professional development? brett getting to know other librarians, both locally and across the country, many of them with jobs that are very different from mine. as a profession, we’re incredibly approachable and eager to help. for me, it’s just a question of getting past my shyness and introducing myself, either in person, on the phone, or online. i always try to have a few questions in mind that seem particularly appropriate, or have a project or two i want to discuss. and then i have to make sure to follow up, which can also be challenging: when you’re in the middle of a project it’s difficult to take a breath and send out an update to people who helped you get started, and when a project is over it’s tempting to move on to the next thing. this is definitely one of my struggles, but i try to be mindful of it and do the best i can. again, librarians are happy to help, but if they give you advice you have to do something with their suggestions and let them know about it, and if they collaborate there has to be an outcome. eric changing jobs altogether.  before becoming a systems librarian, i was the opposite—a reference and instruction librarian.  it has taken me over a year and a half to begin to feel comfortable in my systems role, but it has changed my perspective on the profession immensely.  i think of it like a master of some athletic skill—like a golf swing.  when you become an expert at doing things one way for so long and you introduce a new skill (like a new golf swing), you may actually become a worse performer than you were before… until you get the hang of it.  then you become even better and, in my opinion, more valuable, dynamic, and adaptable. even if you don’t change jobs altogether, look in-house to find job sharing opportunities in an area completely outside your routine work.  try learning to catalog, or maybe take  a stab at instruction.  it might change your perspective on what you consider yourself “good” at. continuing education, if it’s an option for you, is also a nice way to build a robust skill set.  at st. edward’s, i’m able to take up to two credit courses a semester for free; i’m in my first semester of an mba program, taking a course in statistics and in conflict resolution and negotiation.  the latter is a class based on role playing and scenarios, and there’s been nothing better to get me out of my comfort zone and into difficult situations. erin participating in the ala emerging leaders program has been one of the most beneficial professional development activities for me so far. i was able to meet and work with ala leaders and colleagues from all over the country within one year. that was back in 2009 and i still find that many of my professional accomplishments (publications, presentations, guest blog postings, etc.) have stemmed from collaborations with other emerging leaders. there are definitely pros and cons to the program, and they are continually looking for ways to make it better, but in my book, the connections you can make there are priceless. which brings me to my next point: collaborations. find ways to work with other people. team projects and co-authorship have taught me so much—how to work virtually, the give-and-take negotiation of multiple viewpoints, the brainstorming potential of great minds. it’s easier to share the load and keep each other accountable for things like publications and presentations. 3. what is the best way to represent professional development on a resume? should most relevant/recent experiences be included rather than a long list of professional development experiences? is it better to include more substantial professional development experiences on a resume (e.g. conferences) rather than short, 1-2 hour in-house professional development experiences? emily your resume should reflect how you meet the needs of the position to which you’re applying. every time you apply for a job you should be tweaking your cover letter and resume to highlight those experiences that best match the job description. for example, in my most recent job application process i highlighted my professional activities in regards to scholarly communication and legislation in my cover letter to illustrate my experience with and knowledge of copyright and policy, respectively. because i had mentioned them in my cover letter, the committee reading my resume would have seen these activities and others in the “professional activities and service” section of my cv. hilary emily is absolutely correct that you should tailor your resume and cover letter to each and every job you apply for (1) because it shows that you are actually interested in the job and (2) you want to showcase and highlight why you are a good fit for the job.  i would limit the listing of professional development experiences to those that are relevant/loosely relevant for the position or that demonstrate a perspective that you can bring to the job (e.g., you apply for a reference librarian position, but you participated in a workshop on scholarly communication—list it because it shows that you have some exposure or engagement with scholarly communication issues that might be handy for the reference librarian position).  whatever you list, you should provide some sense of order—chronological, from most recent to older, is standard.  it’s preferable to leave out the 1–2 hour in-house professional development experiences where you were a passive participant (i.e., audience member of a seminar in your library) unless you’re so new to the field that this is all you have under your belt. ellie i agree with everything said above and just want to add that the answer will also vary depending on your years of experience and what type of job you’re applying for. as an academic librarian, i expect to see a 2–3 page cv and wouldn’t be particularly alarmed if it were longer. i wouldn’t write off a 1 page resume, but i don’t consider it the standard. i do notice that students tend to have more of their coursework and smaller workshops, but if i’m hiring for an entry level position, that’s what i expect to see. if i’m hiring for more experience, those smaller things seem like reaching. it also depends what you’re trying to convey. like everyone said above, you should be tailoring the resume to the job, so if they didn’t ask you to list your professional development experiences and yours aren’t relevant to the position, they’re not really adding anything. if they really gave you meaningful experience that is relevant to the position, then include them and mention them in the cover letter. i do tend to list conferences on my cv, but i’m typically trying to express an engagement with the broader community rather than specific skills gained. 4. when you first started publishing, did you have to submit to multiple journals before your article was accepted?  how did you decide which journals to submit to (or what process did you use to narrow the list)? erin i recently had a peer-reviewed article published in the journal of web librarianship, my first article highlighting original research (a use of space: the unintended messages of academic library web sites). my co-authors and i designed a timeline with deadlines for each step of the research, analysis, writing, and editing. these deadlines were incredibly helpful in terms of keeping our momentum going on the project. between the time we conceived the article to the time it was published, the project took us almost exactly one year (mid-summer 2010 to early-fall 2011). this is a really short turnaround time for a peer reviewed article, and i would say it’s in no small part due to the fact that we queried the journal very early into the process. all it took was an email to the editor with an explanation of what we wanted to do. in return, we received valuable feedback that helped shape our research methodology and saved us a lot of tough editing further down the line. in the end, we only submitted to the journal of web librarianship and were accepted after one round of revisions. identifying where we wanted to publish helped us conform to acceptable publishing guidelines that vary from journal to journal (headings, author biographies, citation style, etc.). when we were looking at potential journals to submit to, we considered our content (was it a good fit topically?) and if the journal was peer reviewed (i go up for tenure in the fall and needed a peer reviewed article on my cv). however, in the future, i will be doing everything i can to publish in open access journals. ellie i have not submitted anything for publication outside of in the library with the lead pipe, but while i was in library school i was encouraged to submit to college & research libraries news as a good starting place. kim that’s a good question. i think the truth is that when i was getting started i didn’t really make a conscious decision about what to write or where to publish; i was lucky to have mentors who were experienced writers and allowed me to co-write with them. they already knew the process and had the connections and knowledge to get published, and i was eager to try out my voice and contribute to the scholarship of our field. we both came out of it with another publication so it was a win-win. i did this on several early writing projects and it gave me an invaluable leg-up in my writing career. i would recommend that approach to anyone trying to break into publishing, as well as to those new to librarianship in general. i personally haven’t found organized mentoring programs to be successful for me, but i work hard to establish and maintain informal mentoring relationships with those i have met who i feel i can learn from. we’re in a field of the most helpful people in the world! you can’t throw a canvas bag in the air at an ala conference without hitting someone who’d love to help you out. some people are more forthcoming than others, but the great majority of individuals i’ve approached have been receptive and generous with their time and knowledge. librarians are wonderful people. 5. how often (if at all) and in what ways do you use social media professionally?  how are you cultivating your online presence, keeping track of current trends in librarianship, and learning to use new technologies once you are “in the field” and are busy working. brett i’ve made a conscious decision not to use twitter and to avoid facebook, google+, and linkedin as much as possible. when people contact me through these services it goes to email. that’s also how i follow the roughly 70 blogs, journals, and mailing lists to which i’m subscribed: i have them set up to go to my email. in general, if there’s anything important happening, it shows up in one of my subscriptions very quickly. the only three websites i check regularly are hacker news (2–4 times per day), library news (1–2 times per day), and pinboard’s popular page (2–3 times per week). in terms of putting myself out there, again i mostly use email: it’s a great way to  communicate directly with someone or with a small group. i’ve also averaged three posts a year on the lead pipe, plus i help edit another three or so, and contribute to group posts like this one. i’d also really like to see library news succeed, so i’m making an effort to post there as often as i can. i think most new technologies are incredibly simple to use, so it always kind of surprises me when librarians make a big deal about learning to use them. the whole point of twitter or if this then that or google chrome or ipads is their ease of use. i think the greater challenge is learning to use the older technologies that are much more powerful once you invest the time. i’m already behind on code year, but committed to using it to finally learn javascript. i also really want to learn vim. and then python. there’s nothing shiny and new about simple programming languages or powerful text editors, but if every librarian learned these technologies it would revolutionize the profession. eric +1 on code year.  i have a computer science degree and program as a part of my job, so none of the code is new for me.  however, i’m intrigued by mozilla’s open badge initiative (which i heard about through the vp of information technology at my university), and code year is giving me a user’s perspective on how badges might be used to demonstrate all of the learning that happens outside of formal educational credits. that illustrates one way i keep up: through the people i associate with.  it at st. edward’s is filled with brilliant people who are always on the bleeding edge of what’s new in tech, so i keep in touch with them, figure out what trends are coming in higher education tech, and apply them to libraries. not really social media, i guess, but social. as for an online presence, you’re looking at it.  i rarely tweet, i’ve left facebook, and i have google+’d once (in an experiment with social search).  i have started and stopped blogs a few times, and i’d like to find the time to do more than just lead pipe publishing. erin i’m an advocate for merging the personal and professional in your online presence. this feels most comfortable to me and i don’t have to worry about feeling inauthentic on or offline. it can certainly be different for others based on their experience and comfort level. my facebook profile is private, my twitter (@libscenester) is public, and my blog (library scenester) is public. i have a google+ profile, but i don’t use it often. i never feel pressure to update my social media—i update when i have time or the inclination, when the mood strikes. so, my posting can be rather sporadic as opposed to scheduled. in terms of keeping up with current trends, i rely on facebook and twitter for the most part. this week i unsubscribed from my 300+ rss feeds, a kind of personal spring cleaning. i plan to add them back selectively, only the ones i know by name because they were inspiring or memorable. my goal is to clear space for some reading outside of librarianship, in fields like design, art, and higher education. there were a lot of library blogs i subscribed to just because i felt like i “should” but i didn’t really enjoy reading them. it was a truly liberating feeling. i recommend trying this kind of “cleanse” if you’re looking for ways to escape the echo chamber. ellie i only actively keep up with facebook, which i do use for both professional and personal connections. i’ve always been of the “don’t say it online unless you’re okay with everyone seeing it” mindset, so i don’t feel much tension between whether my librarian colleagues see posts about my board game marathons or whether my friends are bored to tears with all my information literacy posts. i don’t have any special privacy settings or permissions set up along those lines. when twitter and friendfeed first seemed to be the thing to join i did join them both, but didn’t find a community that engaged with me. the people i friended on facebook did comment and reply to my comments, so that’s where i’ve maintained an account and the rest i’ve let fall away. i use facebook and my rss feeds for keeping up in a general sense, but really most things i don’t actively make a conscious effort to keep up with. being a techy and geeky person by nature, i tend to hear of tech things through my non-librarian reading and friends. and i tend to learn how to use them by just fooling around with them. 6. how can publishing a blog or having a twitter feed, etc. work to your advantage/disadvantage when it comes to being hired for a job? aside from publishing inappropriate material, should you also be wary of putting your views on a certain topic online in case your potential hirer disagrees with those views? brett here’s how i see the situation: you have views you feel so strongly about that you would be willing to publish something about them. but an employer disagrees so strongly, either with the views themselves or with publishing something about them, that it would prevent them from offering you a job. in my opinion, that’s the best argument i’ve ever heard for publishing your views, either online or in print. you wouldn’t be happy working for an employer like that, and they wouldn’t be happy having you as an employee. emily what brett said. and also to expand on this, there have, in the past year, been several job postings in my region for institutions that require you conform to a community’s way of life or religious views in order to be a successful job applicant. some of these jobs even required applicants to submit a “statement of faith” (of the christian flavor). being an atheist jew, i couldn’t even consider these opportunities. in this economy it may be tempting to convince yourself that you could write a statement and work in such an environment, but if your gut tells you anything otherwise, don’t apply for that kind of job. if you do, you should consider that any employer that weeds out candidates based on faith, (or anything else—smoke free workplaces are a good example, too) your online presence and personal life will likely be under scrutiny. there are enough people out there who can and will apply to these jobs and whose values are in line with the employer’s; you’d just be wasting your energy. don’t fake it to make it. ellie i agree with the sentiments above about not wanting to work somewhere that wouldn’t hire you for views you feel strongly about. i’ll add however that you still ought to put some thought into how you express yourself online. i think our current sharing atmosphere has us putting out a lot more off the cuff things that don’t fall into the category of “feeling so strongly you’re willing to publish.” i’ve seen people get in trouble at work for using social tools inappropriately during work time and was very surprised that the person hadn’t thought it was inappropriate at the time. i’ll reiterate my motto of “don’t put it online anywhere (no matter how protected you think you’ve got your privacy settings) if there’s anyone out there you wouldn’t want to see it.” also only you can make your own decisions about which things are most important to you. i have my own pet issues and they would definitely stop me from working certain places, but others may not feel as strongly. i don’t think i could be comfortable working someplace that had any anti-lgbtq policies, but i have a friend who is bi who applied to work at a religious school that takes an explicit stance against homosexuality in their policies. it’s not my place to say where that person would and wouldn’t be comfortable working, but if they want to work there, they also want to make sure they don’t have an online presence that could get them fired. if it’s a topic that you don’t care much about, but you know a potential employer might, why take the risk? if it’s something that is important to you, then i completely agree with what everyone else said above. also, to address the first part of the question, since no one said it explicitly, i’ll add that having a strong online presence can help you in many ways. it can show you’re tech savvy if you have a well-designed website. it can show you’re up on current technology. it can show you are personable and have good communication skills. 7. how can you bring up professional blogging in a resume or job interview? is it possible to provide links to published blog posts in a resume, or is that inappropriate? emily again, when you’re working on a cover letter or resume, carefully read the job description and advertisement. is there language in it that speaks to being engaged in the profession? chances are the answer is yes. bringing up your blog is appropriate if you are directly relating it to the position and requirements expressed in the job description. to use another example from my recent experience: the job advertisement and position description of the job for which i was applying, required for the successful applicant to contribute to the scholarly and professional literature. i used as examples my experiences writing for and being an editorial board member of in the library with the lead pipe to speak to these requirements. i was able to make connections between writing topics for lead pipe with my evolving scholarly agenda, and my drive to contribute to the written discourse in lis. because of the connections i was able to make between lead pipe and the position, i found that during my interview the search committee and others in the library were curious about my experiences and wanted to hear more. since i was able to frame this discussion as relevant to the job at hand, i got to talk about blogging and writing professionally. i have all of my pieces with in the library with the lead pipe linked from my cv. they are peer-reviewed and they show my ability to think, write, and engage professionally in discourse. however, if were writing in a non-peer-reviewed blog, i might simply include one link to the blog, instead of linking to each individual article. ellie i totally consider my lead pipe articles to be published papers, so i do list them under my publications section in my cv, and list that i’m an editor. i picked a few of my favorites and called it something like selected works. i also list presentations. i don’t list any of my personal blog posts because i don’t think they are academic enough, but i do list my personal blog somewhere on my cv. i only mention them in my cover letter if it’s relevant to the job listing, e.g.,  if they specifically list wanting someone involved nationally, or collaborating electronically and asynchronously, or if the specific article deals with a topic they focus on, like assessment. kim i differ from emily and ellie on this. personally i consider writing for a blog to be recreational activity so i don’t give it much attention on my cv. lead pipe appears in two lines on my cv under “other publications,” and that’s it. i definitely don’t list all my posts. that’s not to say that a potential employer wouldn’t find my blogging interesting, but i think the rest of my work as a professional has to stand on its own. i’ve also worked for more conservative libraries where such activity is considered a liability more than an asset, so unless you can afford to be choosy about your workplace, you might be better off playing it safe. 8. do you have any tips for getting the most out of a large conference? brett go to meetings rather than presentations, ideally smallish meetings focused on topics that have little to do with your job or areas of expertise. i’m the director of a small, public library, and i belong to lita, so do spend some time in meetings that cover what i do on a day-to-day basis, but i particularly love going to acrl and alcts committee meetings. i also love ala’s council meetings (which are large, though not all that many people actually talk) and ala task force meetings. just by showing up and being quiet and paying attention (turn your devices off and write things down on paper), i find myself leaving these meetings with several good ideas. i also try to make sure i line up meetings or meals with people before i go. i don’t fill my schedule because it’s always good to have some flexibility, but it’s nice to catch up with people i only see once or twice a year, and i also try to meet at least one or two people in person every time i go to a large conference. i mean, of course you’ll meet far more people than that, but i think it’s worth scheduling something with one or two new people in advance. emily i diverge from brett in conference tactics. usually i attend the meetings of the committees i’m on or interested in, and then i choose a few programs and discussion groups that interest me and get me out of my comfort zone. sometimes programs promise to be interesting on paper, but when it comes to actuality it’s not what you thought. i try to sit on the aisle or at the back of the room for an easy escape route. if i’m unsure about a meeting or program, i always choose a second option, be it another program, getting lunch, or hitting the exhibit hall. then, if the program doesn’t interest me, i have a plan b. hilary some organizations offer a conference buddy system (e.g., ala and sla).  sign up for those and meet with your buddy in person or online before the conference and get their take on what you should plan on attending.  if you have questions or comments for the speakers of the events you attend, go up and talk to them!  bring your business card and be sure to hand them out when you have a common interest and/or you’ve requested someone follow-up with you.  likewise, if you promise to follow-up with someone, be sure to make the turnaround time after the conference quick.  email speakers who you’re interested in learning more from after the conference.  go to the exhibit hall at least once or twice to see what they’re like.  step up to a vendor’s exhibit and find out what the vendor’s pitch is by asking things like “what’s new at x?”.  finally, check out stephen abram’s conference tips (still relevant even though they’re from 2006!). ellie i’m more comfortable if i know someone, so i try to arrange to meet up with a friend or friend of a friend at a few points throughout the event. i’ve also found socials to be great. for ala, i try to get to the community & junior colleges library section dinner and the glbt round table social. i tend to know someone and then they know more people and i end up getting a nice new bunch of professional colleagues. also, don’t feel obligated to stay at a session that isn’t doing anything for you. session hopping is totally standard practice. kim the simplest and most critical thing you can do to get the most out of large conferences is to embrace your inner extrovert. we’re librarians and the great majority of us are natural introverts, but at conferences you have to set that aside. as brett touched upon in #2 above, you have to leave your shyness at home and push yourself to make conversation with complete strangers. if you walk into a meeting or program and don’t know anyone, find a seat next to a person who looks sympathetic, put on your friendliest smile, and reach out your hand. make small talk. ask them about their work, their activities, their kids or pets. we all love to talk about our passions. don’t hide behind the “introvert” label at a conference or you will miss out on the richest part of attendance: getting to know more of the amazing people in our field. blogging, committees, conferences, job searching, networking, online presence, personal branding, professional development, publishing, resumes, social media consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries snooki, whale sperm, and google: the unfortunate extinction of librarians when they are needed most 11 responses andromeda 2012–02–08 at 12:23 pm oh, you wanted opinions, did you? ;) #1: screw committees. i’ve been trying to reverse-engineer ala for a couple of years now, and almost every time i ask “how do i get involved?” people respond as if i’ve asked “how do i join a committee?” and, you know what? they’re not the same thing. i have a greater allergy to meetings than most people, perhaps, and a near-spastic hatred of meetings where things don’t get done. and committees — while sometimes important — aren’t always the best way to get things done. so i’ve been looking for other ways to be involved, and i’m going to answer the question of “what committees should i join?” as if i’ve been asked “how can i get involved?” ;) for me: emerging leaders. conference attendance, especially plotting and scheming at happy hours — i like annual and midwinter best but of course conferences happen for different niches and at different scales; whatever works. attending meetings of committees i’m not on but whose work i’m interested in — they’re open! i watch and listen and try to understand what the issues are and how the organization works. blogging, tweeting — again, talking to people. building things out of technology that let people access professional info in new ways (such as http://jaguars.andromedayelton.com, with my el team, and @jaguarbot — both of which are all about ways to get involved). writing for techsource. i have, finally, and after turning down some requests, joined a handful of committees, though their work is not underway yet. and for those i use the following criteria: 1) do i care about their work? (of course) 2) does it give me the opportunity to work with people i respect, people i want to collaborate with and/or get to know better? 3) does the committee’s charter include action verbs? this one is important. many ala committees’ charges only include verbs like “study”, “advise”, “recommend”. this, frankly, is crap. this is a recipe for doing a ton of work which will get turned into a white paper in somebody’s consent agenda and thrown into an oubliette. i simply will not serve on a committee whose verbs don’t include things like “implement” or “do” — a committee invested with the authority to actually follow up on its own recommendations. i recommend everyone else refuse to serve on limp-verbed committees, too. and that ala stop creating them. ok, now that i’ve gotten that out of my system, time to read the rest of the post. :) emily ford 2012–02–08 at 1:53 pm ok, so action verbs just might be my new rule for committees– thanks for pointing this out! andromeda 2012–02–08 at 2:41 pm thanks! small steps to a much better world :) andromeda 2012–02–08 at 4:15 pm and how could i possibly have left interest groups off of the list of great ways to get involved. ellie 2012–02–08 at 1:26 pm re kim’s #7: good point! i have typically been applying for jobs where they want a hot young tech savvy upstart, thus my professional blog is bonus points. i particularly highlight lead pipe when i can relate it to job requirements (like working collaboratively across distances), but leave it as a short line item otherwise. this also relates back to #6. i’m not sure i would want to work someplace that thought lead pipe was points against me. though i’d totally be fine working someplace that didn’t care about ellie <3s libraries. joan 2012–02–08 at 1:45 pm this is great stuff, guys, and a real service for library school students. as a unc sils alum, i want to say to unc sils students: use unc librarians! use sils alums! unc libraries have some incredibly talented folks who can teach you an awful lot; sils alums are working in all sorts of libraries all over the world. don’t be scared to ask questions. we love it. (we’re librarians after all.) i have some additional thoughts for students about facebook, twitter, blogs, etc. i agree in theory that a potential employer who is scared off by strong opinions may be one to be avoided. but, as a member of a search committee, i do want to see that you can present a professional image. this means that if you are ranty and political, do it under a pseudonym or at least don’t connect it to your full name. if you have a professional website or one you developed for your ls program, don’t link it to your knitting tumblr. knitting isn’t bad, but i don’t want to see your quirkiness when i’m evaluating you for a potential job. show me that you know the difference between a personal and professional online presence. and *please* lock down your privacy settings on facebook. if you don’t, it makes me think you don’t really understand social media. and don’t friend every librarian out there if you are mostly personal on fb. sure, it’s great to have coworkers as fb friends, but only accept those requests of people who you might actually see socially unless you are always and only professional on fb. not managing your online identity well doesn’t demonstrate a very sophisticated understanding of these technologies–and this is relevant to librarians’ jobs. similarly, think carefully if your professional blog is ranty about ala, not finding a job, ls school, etc. if you are really negative online, that tells me you might be a really negative person in general. now, if you have a professional blog that has strong opinions about electronic resources, publishing, library instruction–that’s great. that won’t scare me off if i think it’s constructive. but please don’t mix in your listings to your crocheted spoons on etsy, okay? i hope this is helpful and not overly prescriptive. i think too many students struggle with the transition to a professional, online presence and think, “but i’m not ashamed of who i am!” it’s not about being ashamed. it’s about not telling us everything about you before we’ve even read your resume. emily ford 2012–02–08 at 2:00 pm i think that this is incredibly helpful, and it also speaks to how and why lead pipe got created. we wanted to have a space to think critically about issues, but also to provide our pro-active ideas and solutions. instead of lead pipe being a place for rants, we wanted our posts to incite change with constructive criticism. not to toot my own horn, but i think my first post, on the ala membership pyramid is a good example, as are countless other lead pipe posts. also, thanks for talking about privacy in fb, i think your perspective here adds a lot to the discussion. james 2012–02–13 at 9:54 pm i’m going to go against the grain here… the best thing you can do when it comes to professional development is to spend your free time acquiring real technology skills and/or learning a language other than english that is commonly spoken in your area (spanish, for example). those are the skills that are most in demand, and very hard for libraries to find. secondly, expand your social network, and impress the people who know you. good letters of recommendation are like gold. as a person who hires librarians, i don’t care about the committees they have served on, the blogs they have written, what they have done for ala, etc. i care about how well they can serve our patrons, how quickly they can adapt to new technologies, how professionally they can act, how well they know the literature for their area of specialization, how friendly they are, how good they are with pr and advertising, and other essential things. ellie 2012–02–24 at 12:37 pm i’m not sure that’s very against the grain. at least i certainly agree with you. we answered the questions that the students asked, which happened to focus on committees and publications. but you make an excellent point that maybe we should have also answered the question behind the questions in terms of what types of skills they should be putting an effort into developing. i like your list. pingback : 8 clips on work and professional development, 3/14/12 « alchemical thoughts pingback : shout outs « librarian with glasses this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 11 sep phil minchin /29 comments two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture in brief photo by flickr user david amsler (cc by 2.0) by phil minchin for various reasons, libraries have largely ignored the volume of new content whose creation has been enabled by the internet. we have failed to recognise that the same systems that created all those creative opportunities also offer opportunities for us. among those potential boons are tools that could help us deal with the floods the internet unleashed, and a great many more opportunities for us to help serve our communities besides. this article outlines the big-picture issues at play in this conversation; then, rather than explore the practical implications in a monologuegraph, links to an open document so readers can participate in developing those opportunities. introduction three things make a library a library rather than a mere staffed warehouse for written (or other) works: the catalogue, the shelving, and the community. library staff – the kernel of the library community – group and sequence their collections in logical, predictable orders and then index them to help people find the works they’re looking for; they store works in ways that prioritise accessibility rather than – or along with – efficient use of space; and they work to share their collections among a particular community, whether that community is defined by shared academic interests, shared occupations, lineage, a common employer, or something as basic (and democratic) as shared geography. this last point is, to me, the fundamental activity of libraries: sharing. cataloguing and specialised storage are essential, but ultimately necessitated by sharing; a private collection which will never be seen by any other person, not even an heir, usually has far less need for transparent organisation. libraries have always existed to create a common ground where everyone has access to the same works and the same information. who is able or encouraged to access that common ground is, of course, a product of the politics of the society in which the library stands; but once free to roam within the library space, everyone has the same scope for learning and discovery according to their individual interests and abilities. and the work of library staff is not only to manage logistics, but to create and maintain a social space where this ideal of a common intellectual resource is as closely realised as possible, as expressed both in the interactions in the space and in the systems that organise, store and share the library’s collections. as we all know, all three of those things (indexing, storage and sharing) have been radically transformed by the information revolution and the shift of people’s attention from broadcast to networked media. storage on the digital network reams and gigabytes could be, and have been, written about the transformation of storage in the electronic age (including, but not limited to, the shift from printed codices to e-books). on top of the necessary spatial compression inherent in electronic storage, allowing us to store massive amounts of culture in tiny physical volumes, we no longer even necessarily need to store things ourselves: consider where your catalogues and e-books are physically located. enclosing multiple forms of electronic media – not just static pictures, but sound, animation, complex real-time interactive systems, any new stimulus which might be expressed through as-yet-unseen output devices – within an e-book is also possible now. finally, storing works in machine-readable form also obviously requires that we have access to technology to translate it into human-readable form; and this requirement, coupled with the speed of electronic transmission, has meant that “storage” is almost as much a referential process as it is a physical one (part of the reason for the amorphous metaphor of the “cloud”). libraries’ slowness to stake our claim in this transformation, while understandable (i am a codex-fetishist myself), has seen us largely surrendering the e-book field to the legally-obliged-to-be-unreasonably-greedy corporations lurking behind our natural allies, the publishers. as a result we have been locked out from lending some electronic materials entirely, by drm seemingly designed to circumvent lending (and the right of first sale which is one of its foundations). the douglas county library (dcl) e-publishing initiative is a commendable and momentous first step, and i can only urge that more library staff explore the trails being blazed by dcl, and the many fascinating sidetracks branching off that trail. so we are now beginning to explore how to employ new storage media in the fulfilment of our mission. i am arguing here that the shift to a networked, all-to-all distribution architecture also has implications for both the other core characteristics of a library. both the process of sorting and indexing information and the process of sharing have been radically transformed by the rise of the network. however, libraries’ awareness of these changes has largely focused on the challenges they create for us; we have neglected to consider the ways in which, just as the network has boosted the supply of information by orders of magnitude through efficiencies in the creation and distribution processes, it can also create efficiencies and opportunities we can use to keep abreast of the flood and even offer our patrons new services. if anything, it is even more imperative that we think seriously about these possibilities and work to realise any that prove worthy than it is to start doing e-books well, vital though that absolutely is. the transformation of storage has added some interesting technical possibilities to e-books, and capacity to link to reference material and translation notes allows the construction of new works around the originals, but it is ultimately the most trivial of the three shifts: the translator of the oresteia makes more of a difference than whether it is read on a scroll, a page or a device. the same is not true of electronic catalogues as compared to card catalogues, nor of networked file sharing as opposed to printing, shipping and shelving codices. some questions that from exploring these possibilities arise include: how do we build on networked infrastructure to best gather and present the creative, the ingenious, the original, and the other resources our patrons need – and also offer? are there ways to allow for that same mutuality and interactivity in the construction of our catalogues and collections without compromising quality? how do we ensure that, in an age when more and more exceptional resources are available for free, the assistance we offer people in exploring the world of culture and information isn’t unduly limited to commercially published material? similarly, how do we engage with and support the best new commercial models while supporting the best of the old? the nature of the topic is such that i can’t offer a concrete, comprehensive implementation process. each library will prioritise different things from among the wide array of options that arise from applying the principle to their specific circumstances. what’s more, some possibilities only emerge from a large inter-library consensus. (helping to build that consensus, and enable those possibilities, would certainly be a desirable outcome for this article. note too that the consensus need only be large, not unanimous.) given that inability to describe exactly how these things might pan out in your particular library context, this article will focus on a big-picture analysis. despite this, my ultimate focus is far from abstract and hypothetical. i see many logical consequences at a more practical level, tools and measures that arise from the changes outlined here. however, including those in this article takes it over 10,000 words, and in any case a static list of my own ideas is not exactly in keeping with the spirit of the article. instead i have posted them in a shared document so that readers can not only see the practical ideas i have, they can expand upon them, and share their own. so what are these big-picture shifts? let’s look at them in the two areas we’ve identified: organising and sharing. organising information on the digital network this is, of course, a colossal field of endeavour. metadata schemata and standards are subjects for someone much more qualified than me. but the challenge that has faced us since the first gloriously quixotic attempts to catalogue the internet is twofold. the first is coming up with a schema that is sufficiently flexible to allow adequate description of the tremendous and growing variety of material out there, both on the network itself, and made visible (and in some cases possible) by the network. i know enough to know a lot of amazing work has been done to achieve exactly this. the other is applying that necessarily subtle and complex framework to some portion of the torrents of new material created every day. the last estimate i heard – which was a couple of years ago now, and therefore too out-of-date to bother referencing – was that 3 days’ worth of video is uploaded to youtube every minute. and of course, that’s just one sharing site, and one with (if anything) slightly higher barriers to entry than many. so much is not worth our attention that it seems futile even assigning staff time to find the material that is. this second part, having been created by the network, is the part that the network can help us solve. for any individual library to take on a task like this is ludicrous. but there is no need to do this individually – we have networks now. we can share – and mutually filter and validate – the metadata we create. what’s more, there is nothing saying that the initial process of filtering and even broad subject sorting need to be undertaken solely by library staff. we’ve always relied on external parties – previously, publishers – to make the initial selection pass on the worth of works. why not involve the public? authority is an issue, but we have ways around that – for instance, we have a pretty good idea who has read a lot on any given topic – and once this process has gone on for a while we will have even more information about the trustworthiness of people’s selections and the accuracy of their descriptions. and of course, the problem of managing authority (authorisation and privilege) is not new to networked environments. this would be feasible even at the individual-library level, but the value of a tool like this scales exponentially as the pool of potential contributors increases – as does the perceived value, due to the network effect that makes such technology more useful the more people use it.1 once we have a useful record, whether it came from library staff or library patrons is useful but not decisive metadata, and either way it can be shared like any other. seemingly impossible tasks have already been tackled in these ways. one online games company has recently crowdsourced translation, and even google translate is designed to allow its users to suggest improvements to its engine. however, perhaps the most striking example of this is the guardian’s ingenious crowdsourcing of investigative journalism into mps’ misreporting of expenses. in brief: a successful foi request forced the uk government to reveal mps’ expense claim forms to the press, so they released the data as individual image scans, a format that made individual documents human-readable, but incredibly difficult for automated processes to read and summarise. so the guardian posted the archive online in a site which gave readers a chance to read and summarise one document at a time – including vetting documents already read – and most importantly, to see live updates on the progress of analysing the whole archive, with notable achievements and finds being shared with all participants. more closely relevant to libraries, the national library of australia’s trove digital newspaper archive is encouraging users to correct the ocr interpretation of the scanned text. and then, of course, there are collaborative cataloguing projects like worldcat and, even more so in terms of the openness of its crowdsourcing, open library. but both of these, in different ways, are limiting themselves to legacy conceptions of what constitutes library content: worldcat to items already discovered and collected by libraries, and open library to books. those limitations serve a valid and valuable purpose for those particular projects, but if we are attempting to examine the full field of possibility, shedding both preconceptions will dramatically expand our horizons. to be clear, i’m not claiming that libraries actually could collaborate to index the entire internet – or even that this is desirable; the value of a project like this would be in up-to-date curation and showcasing of resources and opportunities. (and really, the same is true on a smaller scale of literature, especially since the rise of the e-book – to say nothing of things that blur boundaries, everything from professional electronic-only journals to fan-written alternative novels to commentaries by authors. how many libraries of record even attempt to keep copies of these things?) but, again, we need partners similar to the role publishers played, people to filter through the available offerings and perform basic selection, sorting, initial tagging and then record maintenance. search engines are fine, but not without their problems, and leaving the business of helping our patrons navigate the internet entirely to search engines is like leaving the navigation of literature to amazon: they definitely play a positive role, but libraries’ commitment to the big picture regardless of profit means that we seek to add value that can never be a priority for them. further, a well-designed inter-library system would also help individual libraries to discover and curate content specifically for their local community, through (for instance) peer recommendations between similar services and similar users, as well as supply a general selection of the best online resources. this may seem like an impossible task – but in fact both the tools for this sort of co-ordination, and the public understanding that such activity is possible and potentially valuable, already exist. even if some reworking of both is required, we already have a head start on making it happen. sharing on the digital network sharing, of course, has quietly become one of the major economic and political issues of our time. though it rarely makes mainstream news, corporations have gone to incredible lengths at national and international levels to protect their projected (by them) profits, demanding and enacting extraordinary infringements of human rights: the rights to privacy, control of privately-owned property, access to information, legal review, freedom of speech and more are all being sidelined in the fundamentally futile attempt to prevent unauthorised copying over a network of computers.2 libraries should have been present at every stage of that conversation, since facilitating sharing with the public while protecting and promoting creators is a balance we have been juggling for over a century. furthermore, i can think of no other major social institution which is nominally outside the political sphere3 which even attempts to balance the sharing of culture and information – both of which are created to be shared – against the rights of creators, around which a great many large and powerful commercial institutions have formed. those institutions, the publishers and their successors in the newer media (movie studios, music and game publishers, etc), were initially formed and run by people who valued the cultural work that they enabled, and who explicitly risked financial failure in order to bring works that seemed important to the public eye. now, however, while it’s still the case that many such individual people are indubitably in publishing more for love than for money, a cursory look at the shifts in ownership, legal structure, reporting systems and activity among the big publishing companies in all media makes it clear that profit has become the primary objective, rather than simply a prudent requirement for sustainable operation. this is nowhere more evident than in the way the publishers and their representatives have framed the conversation (or perhaps the phrase is “prosecuted the argument”) around sharing. the assumption heavily pushed by corporate representatives is that every person who accesses a work for free is a lost sale; their sweeping statements about lost profits (often in the same period as historic amounts of profit are actually being made) depend on the assumption that every unauthorised copy made is money that the user of the unauthorised copy would absolutely have spent buying the work otherwise. that’s somewhat understandable from a corporate perspective, but libraries have always known that sharing doesn’t quite work like that. further, framing the debate in these highly adversarial terms – particularly, using the language of “piracy” indiscriminately to describe individuals sharing content on a non-profit basis and the industrial-scale unauthorised commercial copying that saw creators left in penury while others got rich from their work4 – has ignored the fact that most people instinctively understand that engaging with a creator’s work means entering into a relationship with them, and that like any relationship, mutual benefit is key. the problem of creators not having their rights in their creations recognised – and more pragmatically, not being rewarded for creating, and not being able to recruit collaborators on the expectation of having such rewards to share – would of course be a profoundly serious one. but in fact, sharing a creative work earns it, and its creator, exposure and builds their audience – the most important thing from an artistic point of view. once you have an audience’s attention, the basic logic of “we can’t make these works without the work-hours and resources5 to do so” is self-evident, and while some people are indubitably shortsighted and greedy, fan culture also shows that the public will invest tremendous energy, time and money in supporting and promoting the works they love. what’s more, i believe that libraries can and should play a significant role in encouraging the community to support the creators of works they value. so i’m not convinced that the collapse of the creative sectors is an inevitable result of unrestricted, unsurveilled copying; the existing business models may fail, but that does not mean all models will, nor that works published under the older business models can’t be brought into more open ones. (either way, it’s entirely another question whether creating a one-sided, unaccountable power structure and putting its controls largely in the hands of the existing hierarchies is a proportional response to that potential problem.) meanwhile, other voices are seeking to be heard over the inflamed rhetoric of the “anti-piracy” vs “free the information” argument: new possibilities are enabled by precisely that dramatic reduction in the overhead of publishing a work in the networked age. and some of those voices are in the communities libraries serve. which is where the two-way library comes in. two-way libraries (no, not library 2.0) some years back, at least here in australia, there was a lot of buzz around the phrase “library 2.0”. this consisted of libraries extending their outreach efforts onto web 2.0 social media, such as facebook, myspace, twitter, and similar services. the courses of that name were fantastic, and more generally these efforts were laudable in that they helped people engage with libraries and use our services more effectively.6 this makes sense. as we’ve established, one key feature of the network is that it requires the ability to transmit information both ways. unlike broadcast media, which unilaterally decide what to distribute based on their own priorities and information gained through other channels, the network allows a much more reciprocal – and potentially even mutual – relationship. it is not an accident that among the first user interfaces created for the proto-internet were precisely user interfaces, tools for users to interface with other users. bulletin boards, forums, chat rooms, muds: all these predate the modern web we see in our browsers today, which if anything tended to be a slightly retrograde step in terms of interactivity, redeemed only by how easy it was for new users to navigate others’ hypertext and to add their own. and even in the last decade, some of the most innovative tech has been directly peer-to-peer. (“web 2.0” is indirect, or mediated, peer-to-peer communication.) libraries, meanwhile, have largely operated on a one-way model: we acquire our collections from the outside world, usually from the big “broadcast” mass-publishers, and make them available for our communities. setting aside the past economic realities that have mandated this until relatively recently, there is, of course, tremendous value in this approach: unless a library service serves over half the population of the world, chances are that there will be more of interest coming from outside its community than inside it; and regardless, one of the roles of any good library service is precisely to help its community see beyond its own horizons. this basic model has continued to this day, making the term “library 2.0” somewhat misleading. the defining characteristic of “web 2.0” sites is that the operators of the sites don’t create the content that brings people there. rather, they act as facilitators, providing a framework that others fill. facebook, ebay, wordpress – none of these sites produce very much that is directly meaningful themselves, except to talk about their own operations. the interest of these sites lies entirely in the content produced by their users. the closest equivalent before the rise of the internet would be the letters page and classified ads of the old print media, but even those are an imprecise analogy, given the lag between submission and publication, and the necessity to exclude the vast majority of submissions purely on the basis of space constraints. (the closest library equivalent would be the old community noticeboards… but it’s striking how few libraries have implemented even an electronic equivalent of this basic functionality, let alone anything with the additional structure and utility afforded by electronic media.) however, another long-running thread in libraries’ work has worked in counterpoint to that trend: the local history services often delivered by libraries see libraries collecting and curating material produced by the local community. usually this takes the form of masses of official documentation, and again, this is for good reason: the records are important, they are sourced from institutions that already have relationships with libraries, and there is often nobody else who cares enough to keep them. increasingly, though, libraries are beginning to recognise that they can actually provide tremendous value to their community by acting as an institution of record not only for historical (especially official) material, but for the life of the community as a whole and as it happens. to put it another way: we can be libraries of our communities as well as libraries for our communities. we can act as gateways not only for our communities to access material published in and gathered from the wider world, but for the local community – and its individual members – to publish itself to the wider world, including to itself, by providing spaces, tools and communities (particularly including knowledgeable staff) that support these things, allowing our patrons to use the library both as a space to create new works and a channel through which to share them. in a world where the opportunities lie in the ability not only to learn, but to create novel ideas and works from that learning and get them out to find their audience, this is only going to become more important. it’s deeply heartening to see the focus on these possibilities from groups like beyond access and especially librii.7 but even this idea is limited by historical preconceptions: the library mediates between creator and audience, and content is assumed to be a finished work rather than a more ephemeral opportunity to engage with culture. some, possibly much, of what our patrons can offer each other and the wider world might be time-limited – or might be works other people have created which the patron for whatever reason is willing to share for free. to properly consider these questions in full, we need to think in fully networked terms: each part of the network may be a source, a destination, or a mediator. libraries on the digital network how can this translate to libraries? let’s consider. if the mission of the library is to gather and make accessible information, culture, and opportunities to access both those things, and to do so with an eye to quality, at first it doesn’t seem like there is much room for this sort of approach. even before the internet, there was far more being produced than libraries could reasonably store and include, and as we’ve seen, output has only increased. but that ignores the fact that much of what we can now offer comes with no need for us to store anything other than the metadata of where to get it, and a great deal of material can now be stored in purely electronic form, creating at most a requirement for a little hard disk space and network bandwidth, something that is generally within our ability to organise (since we have to have those things anyway). we are largely neglecting the tremendous opportunities for our patrons created by new publishing models such as creative commons, donationware, and a great many other innovations. libraries have begun to include links to the project gutenberg e-books in our catalogues… but what of the vast number of other creative works which are similarly available free of charge to our patrons? do we have policies for what constitutes “free” – freeware, donationware, some or all of the many models of shareware, other? do we insist on free as a condition for inclusion on our catalogue? cost aside, what of the many self-published e-book (and other e-artform) creators whose creations may well be worthy of inclusion in our libraries? what of archiving? although the default assumption is that only a reference location would be stored for most online works, individual works published in electronic form under a suitable license and of particular relevance to the library’s community, including whole sites if they were relatively static, could be archived on a library’s server to avoid the danger of link rot. even where the work is commercially published, of course, we could still potentially negotiate mirroring rights. similarly, what role should libraries play in the crowdfunding economy, where publishing platforms allow the audience of creative works to directly underwrite the creation of new works – and even, at the creator’s discretion, influence its development? should we be looking at having a crowdfunding component to our collections budget – and policies on what kinds of projects draw our support? few libraries have even raised the questions – and that’s understandable. as we’ve seen, library spaces and systems were built around storage and circulation of physical items, and it was similarly built into our acquisition processes to rely on publishers to be a first filter of quality: all, or almost all, books had to go through them in order to see publication, and we rarely had access to the works they rejected (and those we did see were still heavily reduced in number by the cost and difficulty of self-publishing in a pre-internet era). but neither of those is necessarily the case any longer. so on the one hand we have more options than ever to sift through, and on the other we have filters whose priorities are becoming a little too focused on the short-term and which moreover intrinsically exclude a great deal of valid work. what’s a library to do? well, why not recognise that for all of our considerable expertise in sharing and making things accessible, the wider group [our patrons + our staff] collectively knows more than any limited staff body possibly can? that they can help us filter, and gather, and even organise, those opportunities for access to culture and information? why not turn to the same crowd that made all this stuff, and is reading it all? we’ve already begun to do this for what is in many ways a core librarian activity: reviews and recommendation. as we’ve seen, availability is less the issue now than navigability; librarians’ key skill is supposed to be sorting the wheat from the chaff. yet most library catalogues now include public ratings and reviews, if not more active forms of recommendation. admittedly at that point the public is commenting on works that have already passed one selection process, but are we seriously arguing that our filters exclude all chaff – or should even attempt to do so? so where could we go from public reviews and ratings? let’s return to first principles. the object of the library is to gather, organise, and share relevant cultural works and information – or rather opportunities to access these, since we have already established that we are willing to direct our patrons to use third-party providers. what other opportunities might exist if we start to think of our patrons and our communities as sources and mediators, as well as users, of our sharing services? i have several practical suggestions, which as i mentioned before are posted in a separate document which is open for you to edit here (a reference copy of the original, only open for commenting, is available here). here is a quick summary of the topics discussed therein: proposals for public contributions to library work sharing spare copies of previously catalogued works sharing performances of, or related to, catalogued works sharing opportunities to connect and play creating community (with suggestions for particular tools) updating or clarifying catalogue records identifying online resources and communities sharing user-created works assisting users to publish their works pledgebanking for ticketing events problems and obstacles political policy logistical opportunities and benefits community engagement with the library more responsive collections and programs modelling inclusion and breaking down the notion of authority-as-barrier higher standards of online publishing yet further evidence of libraries being indispensable more opportunities for our communities these are of course just headings, and if any of them excite you – or for that matter give you the horrors – i invite you to click through and see whether the discussion makes sense of the idea. but before i conclude, let me stress what i am not doing in these ideas. i am not advocating giving library users an unrestricted, unmoderated ability to do as they choose with the catalogue and collections of the library. the imagination shudders at what the destructive few would do. qualified staff familiar with library policy and standards, and equipped with modern community management tools that allow us to observe and manage community contributions in bulk, would be a necessary part of this work. in fact, i believe libraries’ distinct blend of egalitarianism, inclusion and excellence could even make a significant contribution to the tools, techniques and assumptions available to the rest of the community-management world, and that the global public would be better for us doing so. nor am i saying that library staff should abandon their role as the primary collectors and curators of culture and information for the community, merely that we consider ourselves first among equals rather than the one and only, and part of the community’s own efforts rather than a sort of special silo. of course, libraries are special – extraordinary, in fact. but we are better the more that value is accessible to our communities. lastly, i am not suggesting that library staff abdicate their role as custodians of the processes by which the library’s collection and curation occur. sharing well is harder than most people imagine, and training and professional discipline will be more important, not less, in the environment these tools create. library staff may be bringing some new approaches to the work we do, but we will be every bit as necessary to doing it, if not more so. conclusion what i’m offering here is an idea before anything else: that our communities can be active partners in just about every part of our work of collecting, organising, and sharing culture and information. i hope that i have argued the case that this is not only possible but desirable, and even necessary and inevitable to some degree, if libraries are not to cede the business of organising and sharing culture to entities that do not share our fundamental values. if you are sceptical, i would ask that you consider the actual practical possibilities i have outlined in the accompanying shared document before deciding that this paper’s proposals are meritless. you may be surprised by some of the ways in which these shifts in assumptions play out to our patrons’ benefit. i very much look forward to hearing what this has sparked for others – hopefully it’s not too much hysterical laughter or devastatingly pragmatic rebuttal! but either way, i’ll have entertained if nothing else. i suspect there’ll be mileage in these ideas for at least some readers, and i look forward to seeing where you go with it. go! thanks and acknowledgments an early version of this paper (focusing more on the practical side) was first written in 2008 while i was working at port phillip library service, in melbourne, australia. kenneth harris, my manager there, who supported me then and has remained a good friend, was a reader on the first draft of this extended version. he was joined in this by erica findley of pacific university, oregon, and jamie larue of douglas county libraries, colorado, both of whom are involved in blazing some of the trails outlined here. to all three of you: i am very much obliged, for the improvements you suggested to the paper and for the encouragement and interest you offered, and i hope the many changes since that version haven’t given you reason to change your mind. hugh rundle, also a melbourne resident as well as member of the itlwtlp editorial board, commissioned the article after seeing a presentation on libraries, community and technology during which i touched on these ideas. his good-humoured editorial advice has been much appreciated, as has his understanding of why the blasted thing has been so hard to cut into something a little less unwieldy than it was: thanks, hugh, and i hope you’re happy with how it came out. it goes without saying that all these people deserve credit for the article being better than it could have been, while all blame for all remaining faults rests squarely with me. hopefully i’m right, or at least interesting, often enough to make it worthwhile. finally, alison katona of geelong regional library corporation and david dewane of librii both attempted to read and comment on the article, though both ran out of time. my gratitude to them both nonetheless. this looms large among the possibilities that emerge from the consensus mentioned previously. [↩] copying is fundamental to what any data processing device or telecommunications system does; even a telegraph created a copy of the message at the far end, rather than removing it from its original location and transporting it to its destination. [↩] of course, everything is in the political sphere to some degree, though i’d argue that commerce is much more inherently so than individual study and leisure. [↩] it’s worth noting that artists have also been known to levy similar complaints against publishing companies making authorised copies. [↩] and incentives… though the overall benefit of incentives external to the creation of a work its creators actually want to create is a fascinating discussion for another time. [↩] though it’s worth noting that the uncritical use of these services is problematic – do libraries really want to be adding to the network effect that keeps people on sites with little respect for privacy, an apparent reluctance to intervene in cases of gross hate speech, and questionably grabby terms of service that give them unlimited rights to anything ever submitted to them? “we need to go where our users are” is the same logic that keeps everyone else using those same services, creating a kind of complicit inertia. libraries, as public icons of intelligent engagement with the world of information, should surely be reluctant to lend their credibility to that. [↩] i can’t help but think that the fact that librii is starting its program in africa somewhat contemporaneously with the rollout of broadband to a much wider audience is going to completely transform popular understandings of the internet where librii is active as compared to those of places where broadband arrived before this paradigm. [↩] collaboration, copyright, networks, open publishing, public libraries, publishing, sharing a new polemic: libraries, moocs, and the pedagogical landscape rewards and recognition in librarianship 29 responses cece_wi 2013–09–11 at 7:31 am rt @libraryleadpipe: two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture | phil minchin brarian 2013–09–11 at 5:14 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture | phil minchin pingback : open garden brings wi-fi routers into its crowdsourced broadband mesh | whatsweb polargreenllc 2013–09–12 at 10:33 pm rt @phatlibrarian: “two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture” #innovation #future http://t.co/rdbtav9exi soshalconshense 2013–09–13 at 8:35 am two way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture http://t.co/vhdpxvblpa bradmatthies 2013–09–13 at 10:01 am two-way #libraries, open #catalogs and the future of sharing culture http://t.co/fg0woqvczg #librarianship hughrundle 2013–09–14 at 4:55 am tl;dr my week on twitter: read this: http://t.co/vjinqcvvgi apply for this: http://t.co/ovhlgl6sts #libraries annoula64 2013–09–14 at 4:47 pm rt @cilipinfo: two-way libraries, open catalogues & the future of sharing culture: http://t.co/k3afvouptg (via @libraryleadpipe) heyjudeonline 2013–09–14 at 8:08 pm “two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture” http://t.co/aa6xm9nmyy edufutures 2013–09–14 at 8:08 pm rt @heyjudeonline: “two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture” http://t.co/aa6xm9nmyy james3neal 2013–09–14 at 8:35 pm “@libraryleadpipe: two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture | phil minchin http://t.co/4puf6xmgnh” pamelasw 2013–09–14 at 8:44 pm rt @james3neal: “@libraryleadpipe: two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture | phil minchin http://t.co/4puf6xmg… penas 2013–09–14 at 8:44 pm isto:>>>rt @james3neal: “@libraryleadpipe: 2way libraries, open catalogues and the sharing culture | phil minchin http://t.co/w7dazf6pwq” hanmunn 2013–09–14 at 10:03 pm “@heyjudeonline: “two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture” http://t.co/tkblefvk6i” #coblspd aarontay 2013–09–15 at 12:50 am rt @james3neal: “@libraryleadpipe: two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture | phil minchin http://t.co/4puf6xmg… myleejoseph 2013–09–15 at 5:10 am rt @james3neal: “@libraryleadpipe: two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture | phil minchin http://t.co/4puf6xmg… dupuisj 2013–09–15 at 11:29 am rt @james3neal: “@libraryleadpipe: two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture | phil minchin http://t.co/4puf6xmg… margaret_heller 2013–09–17 at 10:18 am the “two way” nature of the library is something that the read/write library chicago has been exploring and building upon quite successfully since 2006. (http://readwritelibrary.org/). for more on our theoretical background, see http://ojsserv.dom.edu:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/134. cambodianbem 2013–09–18 at 2:18 am where was all the fruitful discussion?! this is a major topic. have you presented this 2-way-librarianship in any forum or event? phil minchin 2013–09–18 at 4:20 am hey @cambodianbem! i’ve been wondering the same thing. i think, ironically/aptly enough, there has been a problem with the commenting tools. i can see, but not approve, a comment which arrived before yours but which for some reason hasn’t made it up – from margaret heller of the read/write library of chicago (http://readwritelibrary.org) which points out that they’ve been exploring this territory for years too (since 2006 apparently, which makes it a little frustrating that i didn’t find out about them when writing the paper!). they’ve written up their theoretical background here: http://ojsserv.dom.edu:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/134. i haven’t read it yet, but i’m looking forward to it. however, given that i have also posted discussion papers of actual practical implementations of these ideas that are open for people to comments on and edit, and so far nobody else has done so, i think there’s something else going on too. if anyone has any ideas why, i’d love to hear them! honestly, i’m really not the person to judge the merits of my own ideas, but i was expecting a little more of a reaction to them even if i didn’t know what kind. to answer your second question, i briefly touched on this topic as part of a broader presentation on technology and communities (i also covered games and makerspaces – it was a crowded half-hour), which is where hugh (my editor) saw me and asked me to write this paper. other than that, no, but i’d love to. i’ve been talking and thinking about these ideas for a while now – i wrote my first proposal on it for the library i was working at at the end of 2008, a de-localised version of which i later posted on a currently-moribund personal blog at http://ftffg.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/library-2-0/ – and over the intervening years i’ve only grown more convinced that there’s a lot to explore here. if you’re interested in me doing so, please be in touch with invitations or suggestions. i’m only too happy to help people explore these ideas in the context of their specific institutions. cambodianbem 2013–10–02 at 10:30 pm phil, thanks for the huge reply. having only been involved with libraries for a short time (under five years), and being only a professional of theory (ie an mlis student), i feel like i’m limited in my activity at the moment, but my final project at uw will be with the aggreggative (sic) dpla in an online exhibition (unless there’s a catastrophe within the next few months) and the value (relative to your paper) is pretty obvious. open access week, an international “event,” is happening in a couple weeks. maybe there’s a way you can quickly sneak into “it” remotely? also, the open knowledge foundation and their conference could benefit from library models of the future. also, though, here’s something i’ve gotten aggravated by in this discipline: centralized discourse. i can talk about the many benefits of ala until the end of days, but what i’m fascinated by is the lack of any digital space where librarians such as yourself can share their ideas. while blogging allows a certain freedom of design and theme and speech, and while i value it, i think it isn’t the best discourse model. i’ve been to r/libraries on reddit and am fairly disappointed in the quality of discussion there. i know that those talking theory intellectually are out there, but why is communication so silo’d? is it the nature of libraries and specialization and the dreadful “categorization” (school, academic, public, “special”) of libraries that keeps everyone from desiring to come together and really drill down the ideas? again, i’m new to this universe so i apologize for ignorance and if i seem a bit . . . brash? but i’ve never gotten an answer from my peers or my advisers re: digital chat space. hugh rundle 2013–10–20 at 4:41 am there’s a combination of things here. there certainly is a problem with the way discourse is ‘specialised’ along with workflows/workplaces. silos are not just cause by people being stubborn or foolish, though. different types of library workplace have very different aims and create very different incentives – a young adult librarian from a suburban public library doesn’t have much incentive to parse the precise definition of ‘information’ as an academic, or even an academic librarian. likewise, a librarian in a law firm isn’t likely to be professionally interested in the ethical questions around what fiction tweens are allowed to read, and who decides. reddit is pretty boutique for most librarians, but there are many interesting academics and librarians on twitter, and a great deal of professional discussion bouncing between twitter and blogs and sometimes back again. for e.g. the post linked above was one of a pair in response to a twitter conversation sparked by a previous blog post. there’s no one place for all this, but then, is there for any worthwhile discussion in a large and disparate profession? amy smith 2013–09–18 at 5:42 am but then you also have to consider that it takes a lot of skill to organize that kind of stuff. *editors’ note: we realized after phil responded to this question that it was sent by a spammer. the question itself was worth answering, but we did not want to preserve the link to the spammer. therefore, we’ve kept the text of the question but removed the link supplied by the organization that submitted it. apologies to phil who could see the comment but not edit it.* phil minchin 2013–09–18 at 7:16 am absolutely! but many of the skills required are the same as, or evolutions of, the same skills already used in the work of most libraries, and of the remainder (community moderation and so on), many are skills that we are going to need whether we apply them in this sort of framework or in a more traditionally localised broadcast model. again, this is more about reframing the work that we already do or know we are going to have to do than changing its basic nature. phil minchin 2013–09–18 at 7:50 am new idea added in the open documents! “sharing experiences at other libraries” now appended to the ideas section. pingback : internship week 2: review (or: sensing out the position) | greg bem's cambodian library reflections pingback : welcome! | play, happiness, imagination, learning pingback : indonesian travel phil minchin 2014–06–11 at 4:33 am anyone interested in this topic would do well to check out http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/ this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct stepping on toes: the delicate art of talking to faculty about questionable assignments – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 18 mar ellie collier /19 comments stepping on toes: the delicate art of talking to faculty about questionable assignments photo by flickr user foreversouls c/o by ellie collier working in an academic environment, the majority of my student interactions are based around a specific assignment. every semester there is at least one assignment that comes across my reference desk that makes me throw my hands up in exasperation (such as: a scavenger hunt that was written before we moved much of our content online or the requirement that the student must have at least one print source, library databases and ebooks do not count). of course i put on a good face. i’ve been well trained. i don’t make disparaging remarks about the teacher or the assignment. i commiserate if appropriate. and most importantly, i am usually (though not always) able to fill both the underlying information need and the assignment’s specific requirements. in researching this piece i found that much has been written about librarian/faculty relationships. i found articles on working with faculty to build assignments and even whole courses from the ground up. i found articles on the importance of collaboration and establishing positive relationships. i will not be reiterating those well made arguments. instead, i will be asking (and answering): what do you do after that student walks in, assignment in hand that you know just isn’t fair to them? i’m writing not as a veteran, but as a new recruit, someone who, until a few months ago, never even considered the possibility of talking to faculty about their assignments. i had heard of librarians providing assistance in designing library related assignments, but never offering unsolicited feedback. i remember both the assignment that opened my eyes to this possibility and the one that was my personal tipping point. the eye opening experience occurred at my moonlighting gig at a four year institution. we kept getting students who had the same (admirable) weekly assignment: find and read a newspaper article covering the event they were studying that week. the article (or possibly other primary source document) had to have been written during the time of the event and from the perspective of the people involved. we had been doing fine helping them find historical and foreign papers as needed, until they came to the ottoman empire. and it didn’t stop there. the class was a survey of world history. they continued to have topics that simply might not have ever been documented by the people involved, unlikely in newspaper article form, certainly not in english, and may not have ever been translated into english if it did manage to get written down and preserved. african events were also particularly difficult. one of the other reference librarians called the teacher to explain that for many of these events it was going to be exceedingly difficult if not impossible for students to find the required articles. in the end, the faculty member agreed to allow the students to use international english language papers if necessary. this was a revelation to me. the moxie! the nerve! the courage! who was she to tell a faculty member there was a problem with her assignment? course assignments are the purview of the instructor. how did she have the self-assurance to consider it her place? how did she have the skill to affect change and the finesse to do so without offending? and yet when the librarians told me the assignment had been modified they said it as though this were an everyday occurrence, that they discuss assignments with faculty all the time and the faculty are usually responsive. this wasn’t covered in library school and it isn’t common practice at my day job, so i was struck in particular that the librarians did not think this was anything special. to me it seemed incredibly liberating to take action rather than be silently frustrated. the seed was planted. my personal tipping point happened when a student came in to me at my community college job and needed to have at least one print article. i started with my usual, “the library databases have the same articles and still totally count,” but she interrupted me. no, actually, her teacher had specifically said that those do not count. she had to physically touch the original source. at my college we have almost completely transitioned to online versions for our articles. luckily it turned out she just needed one print source, it didn’t have to be a journal article, so i was able to help her find a suitable encyclopedia article. i had encountered the “must have a print source” requirement before, but this was the first time i had a student tell me that the teacher had explicitly said the library databases did not count. my first thought was to assume the requirement was an attempt to force the students into the library. personally, i was more impressed that the student had already found a number of scholarly articles in our databases. but then i wondered whether this was another case of lumping everything “online” into one category of “to be avoided” and perhaps not realizing that it is the same article regardless of format. i sent out requests to my librarian friends and asked “how do you talk to teachers about their assignments?” read on to find out. i’ve amalgamated their responses and organized them around some of the typical problems i’ve encountered to provide you with readily adaptable scripts which you are welcome to use. (note: you will see some repeated sentiments as many of the arguments can and do overlap.) the scavenger hunt scavenger hunt assignments are frustrating for everyone. looking up trivia is not the same as conducting research and without a meaningful application of the process of using the library anything they learn through the scavenger hunt is less likely to stick. “resentment toward rather than appreciation of library research is the likely result of these assignments. library assignments are more meaningful if students use the information they find for an authentic task related to the topics covered in the course.”1 outdated scavenger hunt assignments are even worse. here’s one way to approach a faculty member with an outdated scavenger hunt assignment: we had some of your students in the library today working on your scavenger hunt assignment that familiarizes them with library resources. we are excited that you are giving out an assignment like that, but some of the activities in the assignment are a little dated, since the scavenger hunt seems to be from 2004. some of the paper handouts referred to in the assignment are now online. one of my librarians, [name], said she’d be very happy to get with you to help you update the assignment so it would be a bit more useful for your students. you might also want to look at the info game on the library web page. it’s something you could use as well. library services tries to get away from the scavenger hunt concept and i think [name] could help you come up with some excellent alternatives. she’s one of our most imaginative young librarians! you can reach [name] at [email] and [phone number]. we are very happy that you are using the library with your students! in the interest of full disclosure, that email did not get us a reply. being more comfortable with email myself, it tends to be my default communication method, but most likely a phone call or office visit is the better approach. however, i think the script is still worth sharing. the general tone and sentiment shows appreciation that the faculty member uses the library and lets her know that some of the questions are no longer applicable. it also offers assistance in the updating process. and as one of my respondents told me, “it doesn’t always work.” “no online sources” this is a nuanced declaration and a number of the headings below touch on some of the different aspects. setting aside online library resources for a moment: a flat ban on anything found online not only eliminates a large number of incredibly useful sources (census data, cdc info, loc historical documents, etc.), but it also discourages using and developing critical thinking skills. in college, we try to focus students on *critically thinking* about authority and appropriateness. we’ve found that limiting students to print resources hurts their ability to find the resources they need, and they are not able to support their research project as well as they could if they were able to use the best sources regardless of format. of course there is always the question of what exactly the faculty meant by “no online sources.” “the internet” vs. web based academic resources often the student, the faculty, or both don’t differentiate between the free web and resources that the library has purchased, but are available electronically. the argument above about the value of allowing use of the free web notwithstanding, it may be necessary to clarify the instructor’s definition of what constitutes an “online source” and to ask that faculty member to assure his or her students that the library’s electronic resources are allowed. i was helping one of your students recently who needed a print resource for an assignment and i thought there might have been a misunderstanding over the definition of what constitutes an “online source.” my understanding of the definition you’re using is that you exclude sources found in library subscription databases, not simply those found on web sites through google or another search engine. i’d like to assure you that the online articles and ebooks found through library databases are content that the library has purchased and are indeed the exact same content found in the print versions. as you may know, libraries are increasingly receiving journal subscriptions only electronically and discontinuing expensive print subscriptions. among the many reasons for the current trend towards receiving these articles digitally is that it provides a better value for our students – one purchase makes all of the content available at all of our campuses and extension sites, rather than having to purchase separate print subscriptions for each of them. we are also able to provide access to a vast number of resources that we wouldn’t have physical space to store. because of this, students will often find the full text of the article in the database but we will not have a current print subscription of the same periodical title. in addition, as students are learning to evaluate information and sources, they may be confused as to why a scholarly source in a subscription database does not meet the assignment requirements. finally, there is no easy way to lead students to print-only articles because our databases serve as indexes and many of them contain or link to full-text online. with all of this in mind, i wondered if you would be willing to expand your definition of an acceptable source to include sources found in library subscription databases. “i want to be sure they’re using the library” or “i just want them to have the experience” as more and more resources go online and as libraries push to create virtual branches and online portals, physically coming in to the library becomes less and less necessary to complete a research paper. while my knee jerk reaction is frustration towards holding on to nostalgic perceptions of library as place, in reality, these are exactly the faculty that i should most appreciate. they value libraries and want to pass that on to their students. they’re on our side! unfortunately, requiring a print source doesn’t necessarily achieve the intended goal. instead, it often just means grabbing a source, any source, as long as it’s print, after the paper has already been mostly written. we hear from many professors who are thankfully concerned that their students learn how to use a college library. if you want to be sure that your students use library resources, we have had a lot of success with students creating annotated bibliographies explaining why they chose each source, or alternately writing down the steps they took to find an article online through the library website and what qualities make the article appropriate for their paper for at least 1 of their sources. that way students are forced to think about process and quality of resources. or i am guessing that one reason for requiring print is to encourage students to visit the library in person. i completely understand that you want your students to learn how to use the library and critically think about authority and appropriateness. we do too! however, in many cases we’ve found that requiring a print resource can actually be counterproductive in this regard. students wind up not being forced to use the critical thinking skills we’re requiring of them. they may use something that doesn’t work very well just to fill the requirement and they aren’t forced to consider authority, appropriateness of content, etc. also, because most libraries are moving or have already moved to all online journals we’re concerned our students know what to expect now and in the future. we want them to leave here knowing how to use a library, including the subscription databases, and to have a clear understanding of the difference between articles found online through the library and those out on the open web. or it’s so important that students learn how to find authoritative journal articles. we want our students to be prepared for (grad school/work/4-year) and most (four year universities/schools with grad programs/corporations) have moved to all online journals. they may even be getting rid of their print archives and replacing them with online archives! we’re concerned our students know what to expect now and in the future. we want them to leave here knowing how to use a library. this is also the place to offer an in library instruction session or a specialized assignment to accomplish the goal of getting the students in to the library. we could also create a brief assignment which would require students to visit the library to find out about the resources and services available. sometimes the information just doesn’t exist. i’ve already mentioned the newspaper articles from the time of an event, from the country where the event took place, when it took place in the distant past and in a country with a different language. another example would be peer reviewed journal articles on an extremely recent event. in this situation you can ask the teacher whether they have specific resources in mind. it is always possible that they know of a source that you don’t. of course it is also possible that the library no longer has access to something the faculty member was accustomed to using in the past, or that a new faculty member simply isn’t familiar with your library’s particular collection yet and is making assumptions based on his or her former institution. this opens the door to discussing collection development and acquiring new resources to help support the curriculum. if neither of those are the case you can fall back on explaining types of information sources and why that information just isn’t readily available. one of the first things i ask students to do when beginning their research is to ask themselves who would have collected the information they’re looking for and how would they have then made it available. this is particularly helpful when trying to find statistics. but it is also helpful here in explaining why we’re not necessarily going to be able to find a newspaper article, in english, from the 1700’s in turkey talking about a specific war from a specific side. in the case of the peer reviewed journal article we can explain the peer review process, that it takes time, and that for this topic, perhaps newspaper articles from large papers or government publications could be considered authoritative. i want to leave you with a perspective that particularly struck me: “the berating of faculty for not being intuitively information literate, or for not taking the time to become information literate is a puzzling attitude – particularly given librarians’ professed mandate to guide users and provide instruction in the use of information resources. … the images of troublesome, arrogant faculty, who have little understanding of librarians’ roles, point to a problem at the core of the relationship issue; that until librarians embrace faculty as clients themselves, deserving of the same level of respect and support afforded undergraduate and graduate students, il librarians may continue to fight an uphill battle to bring faculty members onside. why do librarians, for example, assume that faculty should necessarily understand what they have not been taught, or necessarily understand how to use information systems that are not user-friendly? do librarians ask this of other users?”2 the further reading section contains a number of links to pages that various libraries have created to provide tips for instructors who want to create library related assignments. some of the wording could be a tad friendlier in places, but the content is good. there are also links to a best practices discussion and a model program. i hope that librarians who have been frustrated by what they felt was an unfair assignment feel both empowered to contact faculty and prepared with some tools to use. i hope that librarians who have been there and done that will share their stories of what to do and what to avoid in the comments. further reading: share your teaching tool kit: best practices in library instruction topic: teaching to a bad assignment (notes from acrl is discussion) mosley, pixey anne. “creating a library assignment workshop for university faculty.” journal of academic librarianship 24.1 (jan. 1998): 33-41. effective assignments using library and internet sources (from the university of california berkeley) creating effective research assignments (from the university of maryland) designing effective library assignments (from the university of north carolina wilmington) integrating library and information literacy into your assignment (from st. cloud state university) thanks to liane luckman and meghan sitar for sharing their strategies and to andrew shuping and emily ford for reviewing and editing. from the university of california at berkeley’s effective assignments using library and internet resources [↩] from julien, heidi and lisa m. given. “faculty-librarian relationships in the information literacy context: a content analysis of librarians’ expressed attitudes and experiences.” <u>the canadian journal of information and library science</u> 27.3 (2002/2003): 75-87. [↩] faculty, information literacy, instruction, librarian/faculty relationships, library assignments new schedule and a call for guest authors are you worth it? what return on investment can and can’t tell you about your library 19 responses olivia nellums 2009–03–18 at 7:49 am i’m also a librarian at at community college library, and i wanted to add another issue to the pile: many instructors are adjuncts, which means they may not be available for in-depth consultation with the librarian and/or may not even be around after one semester’s assignment. i’ve found that this seriously hinders outreach efforts to improve library-related assignments. (obviously this is not to put the blame on the adjuncts — it’s the system that encourages use of adjuncts rather than full-time faculty.) stevenb 2009–03–18 at 7:58 pm thanks for reminding us of these assignment challenges ellie. this sort of thing has been going on in academic libraries practically forever – way before the internet days – but things have certainly gotten more complicated. i’d add one more to your list (i’m sure there are others) that i would describe as “did you forget they are freshman?” i’m always amazed by assignments in freshman courses that appear to be the work of a newly minted phd who believes every student is prepared to research a complex assignment that involves the use of a higher level research product such as mla bibliography or jstor. meanwhile our information literacy outcomes for freshman concentrate on the most basic skills. it can be frustrating for us and the students. erika 2009–03–19 at 10:17 pm we have been known to use reference statistics as evidence. for instance, in analyzing the quarterly reference reports for our school of psych, we noticed that one course assignment was leading to almost 30% of the questions for that school. i mentioned this to the faculty member, and her team brought us into the course revision process, since the course re-design had just launched. it actually led to an embedded librarian pilot, ultimately, since it was a first course. laurel whisler 2009–03–20 at 9:10 am thanks for starting this helpful conversation. i have usually found the faculty appreciate knowing when there are difficulties with their assignment – they have the students’ best interests at heart. the “print only” and the “no internet resources” requirements are tricky. as students arrive at college with less background and context in “traditional” scholarly literature, it can be helpful for them to actually get their hands on print resources to become familiar with what the resource is. it can be difficult to understand differences between scholarly and popular sources when viewing online articles out of context. sometimes faculty may encourage the print sources to help establish context. i think this is an issue we need to help address – as we move more to online resources, how can we help our students understand the context. or, is that context meaningful only to scholars “of a certain age?” spencer 2009–03–20 at 11:06 am thank you for writing this very helpful post on communicating with campus faculty about library assignments. i particularly appreciate the possible responses that one could send to a faculty member; they are very diplomatic and respectful. our first year seminar program directors believe that a library scavenger hunt would be a great tool for introducing the freshmen to the campus library. i think that a well-crafted scavenger hunt might be a good experience for freshmen who have never entered a larger library in their lives. of course, capitalizing on what the library has would be optimal. for example, some students may not be aware of the student lounge, location/availability of study rooms, computer usage, how to find a book on the shelf, etc. my experience has been that students do not appreciate the library tour very much, so they might learn more from a scavenger hunt that they work on with a small group of their peers, especially peers they did not know previously. a first year seminar program ought to facilitate networking among students. perhaps i am digressing, but a (library) scavenger hunt done as a group could help new freshmen get to know someone they might not have. their instructors know who they pal up with in the class, so they can assign students to groups with individuals other than their pals. anyway, thank you for this discussion. i appreciate how you have mentioned why some library assignments are bad. sometimes i hear people disparage scavenger hunts in blanket statements, and it makes me hesitate to ask why, because they assume everyone knows why. if we can talk about the reasons why they are taboo/bad, then maybe we can find solutions for improving them. cindy 2009–03–20 at 11:40 am laurel brings up a good point regarding context. a while back i read an interesting article in college teaching (reference below) that talks about how not having the context that previous generations have can make it harder for millennials to understand the reasons for using databases, etc. now i always ask the students at the beginning of instruction sessions if they can explain why we want them to learn how to use the databases. if i don’t get a good answer, i ask if anyone can explain the difference between a search engine and a database. if they don’t understand the difference they resent having to learn this more complicated task. i also talk about the importance of knowing which tool is better for the information they need. sometimes google is better, sometimes a database or other tool is better; making that decision is part of the research process. and i bring in examples of periodicals and briefly explain the different types they will find in our databases so they know what they’re looking at. fortunately i don’t have any horror stories about faculty assignments. we’ve encountered some assignments that need tweaking because of something minor but nothing too bad. and faculty are receptive to hearing this information. the excerpt from the julien/given article at the end of this post is interesting. i haven’t encountered that attitude too much, so far anyway. i would never expect a faculty member to know everything about the library. if they knew it all, why would they need us to present instruction on library resources to their classes? i expect them to have some knowledge about the library from doing research in their field but it is not their area of expertise. that’s what librarians are for. we provide sessions for faculty individually and in groups just as we do for students. and many faculty have told me they learn something new every time they bring their classes in for instruction. jenson, jill d. “it’s the information age, so where’s the information?.” college teaching 52.3 (summer2004 2004): 107-112. emily ford 2009–03–20 at 11:45 am ellie, you bring up many great points. all of this is making me think about the following question that i haven’t seen asked yet: what can we do to educate professors and other instructors before they assign these difficult tasks to their students? is there a library instruction course anywhere geared explicitly to professors at the beginning of the school year? is there a mandatory “how to teach using the library’s resources” orientation for new grad students at big universities? i think that proactive courses and programs like this might really curtail some of these problems, and provide the needed information literacy skills to instructors. ellie 2009–03–26 at 1:39 pm olivia – excellent point! working with adjuncts certainly adds another layer of nuance to the process. steven – thanks. i agree. i definitely feel for the intro level students that are required to have a peer reviewed article. i remember how much i struggled with comprehending them in grad school! erika – what a fantastic example! thanks for sharing! do you always keep such detailed statistics, or did you switch it up based on observing a trend? most of the places i’ve worked have a pretty simple tick mark statistics sheet that wouldn’t track a specific assignment, but one place i work is trying a pilot of a more detail form. laurel – this is absolutely something i wonder about (but don’t have my answer yet). it seems to me that i should be able to give meaningful instruction for current information literacy without going into a history lesson. it’s easy to look at the cover of time and the journal of counseling psychology and have an idea of what you’re in for, but my students won’t have that cue in our databases, so why waste their time showing them an arbitrary artifact of a dying way of publishing? spencer – thanks so much for such a thoughtful response. i completely agree with you. i was thinking of the trivia based treasure hunts which tend towards frustrating searches with nothing to attach to, but questions more like, “find the student lounge, then find the reference librarian and ask what day and time you’ll find free donuts and coffee in there.” are excellent treasure hunt exercises. :) i particularly like adding in the student networking factor. at my small one room, 1/4 of a floor library, i can forget that getting acquainted with a full sized university library might be a bigger undertaking. thank you for the reminder and the excellent activity as an alternative to the traditional tour. cindy – thanks for the article. i really like that approach to asking them why they’re learning these things. i will have to incorporate that. as for the final quote, i know i have found myself having much higher expectations of faculty and the reminder that those expectations were perhaps unfounded was a good reminder that i wanted to share. emily – i see a potential post topic for you there emily ;) there are a bunch of really great articles out there covering some successful programs geared towards working with faculty – the mosley article in my further reading section being a particularly good one. renee 2009–03–31 at 7:12 pm you raise a good point, laurel about having students get their hands on print resources. when i do an instruction session, i bring in a few different scholarly journals so that the students can see what we are referring to when we talk about journals. i also explain that databases are made up of thousands of these journals – the concept of a database is also a fuzzy one. pingback : tuesday links « bib-laura-graphy andrew heiz 2009–04–07 at 2:49 pm this topic was also in acrls podcast http://www.acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/2008/05/09/acrl-podcast-eradicating-the-rogue-assignment/ one other impossible assignment that is mentioned is using the resource that no longer exists in the library. i ask for copies of assignments from students so i can contact the instructor with “helpful updates” rather than criticism of their assignments. ellie 2009–04–08 at 10:49 am andrew and renee – thanks so much for sharing! maura smale 2009–04–15 at 8:51 am this is a great post, ellie. i’ll never forget the first time i encountered a questionable assignment while i was interning at a college library during my time in library school (only a couple of years ago). the librarian i was working with at the time had a great attitude that i’ve tried to imitate in my own work: this sort of assignment provides a perfect opportunity for faculty outreach. crafting those emails to contact faculty can be tricky — thanks for the suggestions in your post. ellie 2009–04–15 at 10:11 am thanks so much maura! i’m glad you found it helpful. and i feel the same way about my first experience and trying to imitate her attitude :) mark 2009–04–16 at 7:13 pm i have a question about the example you give of an assignment requiring students to find a newspaper article or other contemporary source related to eighteenth-century conflicts involving the ottoman empire. what was the conflict? eighteenth-century british newspapers regularly covered military and political affairs involving the ottoman-habsburg conflicts in the balkans. they often reprinted letters purporting to be from merchants, sailors, etc. returning from the area as well as reprinting official (or allegedly official) government communications from other european courts involving those conflicts. digital surrogates of several such newspapers are available online for free, though learning how to search the interfaces can take a little work. but isn’t that the kind of thing you’re there to teach? what about, for example, the online version of the london gazette archives, found at http://www.gazettes-online.co.uk/search? (yes, i know, the london gazette was the official government paper at the time and maybe the professor wanted the students to find something from an opposition paper, but those sources are available too if one looks carefully.) or was the problem that the professor expected the students to find an eighteenth-century turkish newspaper? in any case, i wonder whether you chose a good example for an “impossible” assignment. it’s hard to tell given the limited information you provide about it in your post. i don’t mean to be disrespectful, but anyone with even a cursory knowledge of eighteenth-century newspapers would realize that foreign news and overseas war news formed an important part of the content of those early periodicals. ellie 2009–04–17 at 12:22 pm thanks for reading my article and thanks for your question. as i recall, this was an intro level survey course in which the assignment was repeated every week with a new topic (including a new country, language, time period, etc.). before the librarians spoke with the faculty member, no british newspapers would have been considered acceptable sources. so, in the instance i cited, only an eighteenth-century turkish newspaper would have satisfied the assignment’s requirements. pingback : wonderful world of blogs … « market intelligence for librarians polly m. poppers 2009–12–20 at 2:36 pm it might be worth bearing in mind that at some institutions, decisions are made to withdraw or alter library resources without the knowledge of relevant faculty. this can happen either because a librarian decides certain resources are not being used “enough” or because several disciplines use a single electronic resource (e.g. jstor) but only the department who fund the resource and decide to cease funding it are aware of the change. in an example of the first sort, the first the faculty knew of the decision to withdraw certain books due to “lack of use” was finding them on sale in oxfam. one of the faculty ended up buying back all the books from oxfam and returning them to the library, pointing out that in many cases the librarian had removed the only copy of a book available and that some of the books were more likely to be used for reference than borrowing (so lack of recent “check-outs” did not constitute evidence that the books were not being used). this occurred at a major university which certainly sees itself as playing in the major research league. in the second sort of case, it is now really common for electronic journals from various subjects to be bought in bundles. so if department x is buying a bundle which includes journals used by department y, it is easy for faculty in department y to be unaware that a journal is no longer available. even if department x keeps funding the bundle, the publishers sometimes alter the contents of different bundles so an electronic journal can “disappear” without warning. and it isn’t just adjuncts who may lack time to get to know library resources. the problem also affects visiting and temporary faculty, though perhaps to a lesser extent. if you teach at four different institutions in four years, for example, it can be something of a nightmare to check out all the relevant resources and adapt syllabi to ensure that they don’t require students to read articles which aren’t available in your current library. it also isn’t always as clear as it could be what’s available only from on-campus and what’s available off-campus and off-campus access methods seem to be different everywhere – and sometimes, they seem to different for different resources at the same institution, too. don’t misunderstand me. i don’t mean to suggest librarians are responsible for these problems (except in the case of the librarian who gave half the subject’s books to oxfam) but electronic resources have made life much more complicated for everybody, even if they have brought many advantages, too. many of these complications are the responsibility of the publishers, of course. crippling costs; bundling; closed-source, accessibility-hostile and proprietary formats; and user-hostile database interfaces seem to be par for the course. i apologise, but the name and email given will be fake. i don’t feel comfortable posting this in my own name but i also don’t wish to less than honest about that. if the site detects fakes, this comment will disappear into the ether – and perhaps that will not be altogether a bad thing. ellie 2009–12–20 at 9:54 pm thank you so much for your thoughtful comment. in an ideal world there would always be perfect communication between librarians and faculty. sadly for each faculty member who doesn’t reply to a librarian’s request for feedback about the collection, there is a librarian who doesn’t ask in the first place. in response to the visiting and temporary faculty syllabi situation, most librarians would be willing to – at the minimum – do a quick check to let the faculty member know whether their library has those specific articles. many would also be happy to help provide alternative suggestions and some even have departments to help obtain articles and set up course reserves. sadly you are all too right about the lack of clarity for access to online resources. if it’s any consolation, it frustrates us as much as it does you and we do our best to both clarify and work with vendors to simplify what we can. our comment policy only requires civility and topicality which you’ve done superbly. i do hope you stop back to see my reply and that you continue sharing alternative perspectives. we need them! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct call for social media editor – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 27 aug ellie collier and editorial board /9 comments call for social media editor by ellie collier and editorial board in the library with the lead pipe is seeking applications for a social media editor. this volunteer position will serve on the lead pipe editorial board for a two-year term of service. lead pipe is an open access, open peer reviewed journal founded and run by an international team of librarians working in various types of libraries. in addition to publishing articles and editorials by editorial board members, lead pipe publishes articles by authors representing diverse perspectives including educators, administrators, library support staff, technologists, and community members. lead pipe intends to help improve communities, libraries, and professional organizations. our goal is to explore new ideas and start conversations, to document our concerns and argue for solutions. the lead pipe editorial board is committed to collegiality and consensus decision-making. applicants should be prepared to participate in discussions that may be forthright and frank, but always respectful and solution-focused. for many of us, the work we do for lead pipe is among our most professionally rewarding, and even though we interact primarily via email and a monthly hangout, we have grown to treasure the relationships we’ve formed with each other. lead pipe currently has a social media presence on facebook, twitter, and google+ and seeks to improve its efficacy within these venues. the social media editor will be considered an equal member of the lead pipe editorial board and will be given the opportunity to engage in other lead pipe editorial board responsibilities, such as editing articles and recruiting authors. the expected time commitment is approximately 10-20 hours per month. responsibilities: manage lead pipe’s social media presence; ensure that new articles and other published content are highlighted on social media in a timely manner; interact with lead pipe readers via social media on the journal’s behalf (excluding comments to articles, as this is the responsibility of an article’s authors and editors); take a leading role in developing and enforcing lead pipe’s community management guidelines with the goal of creating a sustainable social media presence as well as providing for institutional memory; provide leadership in expanding lead pipe’s social media presence to new platforms as appropriate; attend and participate in lead pipe editorial board meetings (held online asynchronously via email as well as monthly via google hangouts). to be considered for this position, please send a statement of interest, along with your name and email address to ellie@leadpi.pe. your statement should be succinct and should describe your relevant experience as well as at least one idea for improving lead pipe‘s current social media presence. we want you to demonstrate that you’ve looked at our channels and thought critically about them, and that you have a coherent approach or philosophy regarding social media for organizations. in addition, if you have one, be sure to link to your online portfolio or any social media presence you manage. this position will remain open until filled with priority given to applications received prior to wednesday, september 24th, 2014. any questions may be directed to ellie@leadpi.pe. many thanks to nicole helregel from hack library school for reviewing! call for articles editorial: open for business – why in the library with the lead pipe is moving to cc-by licensing 9 responses mchris4duke 2014–08–27 at 1:36 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: call for social media editor: http://t.co/oepsflxv4z rita_vanduinen 2014–08–27 at 1:45 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: call for social media editor: http://t.co/oepsflxv4z hughrundle 2014–08–27 at 5:37 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: call for social media editor: http://t.co/oepsflxv4z jenniferaviva 2014–08–27 at 6:36 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: call for social media editor: http://t.co/oepsflxv4z stevelibrarian 2014–08–27 at 7:44 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: call for social media editor: http://t.co/oepsflxv4z elliehearts 2014–08–27 at 9:03 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: call for social media editor: http://t.co/oepsflxv4z inaljnaomi 2014–08–28 at 12:41 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: call for social media editor: http://t.co/oepsflxv4z kmapesy 2014–08–28 at 1:15 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: call for social media editor: http://t.co/oepsflxv4z inalj_pa 2014–08–28 at 6:44 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: call for social media editor: http://t.co/oepsflxv4z this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: open for business – why in the library with the lead pipe is moving to cc-by licensing – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 10 sep editorial board, brett bonfield, ellie collier, erin dorney and coral sheldon-hess /3 comments editorial: open for business – why in the library with the lead pipe is moving to cc-by licensing blown away, photo by flickr user felixtsao (cc by 2.0) in brief: lead pipe is changing our licensing from cc-by-nc to cc-by. here, we explain why. by editorial board, brett bonfield, ellie collier, erin dorney and coral sheldon-hess in the library with the lead pipe has, since we began publishing in 2008, been run by volunteers with a desire to spread ideas for positive change as widely as possible. for this reason, we have required that all articles are published under a creative commons attribution non-commercial (cc by-nc 3.0 us) license. publishing under a cc by-nc license has always been viewed by lead pipe as a way of balancing our commitment to authors (by ensuring they retain their own copyrights and are protected from unrecompensed commercial exploitation of their work) with our commitment to our readers (by ensuring our articles can be openly and freely accessed on our own site and distributed elsewhere for non-commercial purposes). in the first half of 2014, however, as we took time to reflect on what had changed in over five years of publishing, we began to debate the merits of moving to a more permissive license. why change? the central tension for any publisher is that of distribution versus control. the more effectively reading and publishing can be controlled, the less widely an article will be distributed and read. alternatively, if wide distribution is given preference, we must relinquish control over how and to whom it is distributed. there are all sorts of solutions to this problem, depending on the goals of the author and the publisher. as the lead pipe editorial board worked through our new documentation, we re-assessed our own mission. our about page states that: lead pipe intends to help improve communities, libraries, and professional organizations. our goal is to explore new ideas and start conversations, to document our concerns and argue for solutions. the question we began to discuss is whether our licensing matched this mission. implied in this mission is that the conversations we start include as many people as possible. that is, we should privilege wide distribution over control. the definition of ‘non commercial’ in cc by-nc licenses, however, is vague, and a recent court case indicates it may be much more narrowly applied than we anticipated. in this case, it was found that use of a cc-by-nc licensed photo on the website of the german national broadcaster breached copyright. the court found that ‘non-commercial’ use means ‘personal’ use, so use by a non-profit organisation on its advertising-free website still infringed. this case, and other legal opinions in germany and other countries, potentially make lead pipe articles unusable even by the people and organizations we hope to support, such as educators and public broadcasters. the discussion really kicked off in february when micah (then a member of the board) proposed an article co-authored by chealsye bowley, and suggested that (based on his research) we may need to re-assess our licensing. in march, hugh was contacted by mcgraw-hill, which sought to negotiate terms to republish one of his (cc-by-nc licensed) blog posts for use in school assessment software. both micah’s research and hugh’s experience resulted in a proposal to the lead pipe editorial board regarding a change to cc-by licensing. with open access mandates creeping closer to requiring cc-by, (especially in the uk, – for example the wellcome trust and rcuk), and all our authors writing for love rather than money, we reached consensus relatively easily. back to the future the aim of relicensing previously published articles is primarily to ensure that, to the greatest extent possible, our readers are able to understand what rights and obligations they have when re-using or re-publishing lead pipe articles. whilst we suspected it was unattainable when we began this process, our ultimate goal has been to ensure all articles published by lead pipe are licensed the same way to ensure clarity regarding license terms. since lead pipe does not hold the copyright in the articles we publish, we needed to ask each of our authors to change the licensing on their articles. not including (then) current editorial board members, this required us to contact 65 authors by email with an explanation of what we were asking, and why (the text of our initial email is included in the appendix below). we first did so on 13 july, and after a second nudge we gained agreement from 52 of our authors, with two authors declining to change their licensing. we have so far been unable to contact the remaining eleven authors, but continue our efforts to do so. where an author (including any co-author) has not clearly stated that they agree to re-license, the existing license is retained. it is important to note that this is a request we have made of our authors, but it is they who hold the copyright in, and decide how to license, their articles.  as we wrote in our initial email to authors: we recognize that if lead pipe required cc-by licensing at the time you wrote your article, you may have chosen another publication with which to publish, or chosen not to write it at all. essentially, we wrote to our authors stating that we had changed our minds about the most appropriate form of licensing for their articles. many were happy to change, some requested more information before making a decision, and some made an informed decision not to change their licensing. one of the lessons here is the value of retaining your own copyright as an author, and therefore retaining control over who can re-publish it and under what circumstances. more open, more access lead pipe has always aimed to be open, progressive, and a force for positive change. this requires us to go further than simply publishing provocative articles. we must be open to changing our own behaviour and procedures when evidence suggests they inhibit our goals. we have come to the view that changing the licensing of lead pipe articles will better align our practice with our goals. from today, all new articles, and most existing articles, will be published under a creative commons attribution international 4.0 (cc-by 4.0) license. where previously-published authors have requested that the existing license remain, or we have been unable to ascertain their wishes, we have noted the non-commercial licensing terms at the end of their articles. lead pipe would like to thank all of our authors for their positive and gracious responses to our relicensing process. we look forward to working with other amazing authors to explore new ideas and start conversations, and to helping spread those ideas even more widely. thanks to katrina mcalpine for editing and advice on this editorial. references and further reading daught, g, 25 march 2014. ‘i dropped the “nc” from my creative commons license’, alpha omega | open access. moody, g, 27 march 2014. ‘german court says creative commons ‘non-commercial’ licenses must be purely for personal use’, techdirt. nowviskie, b, 11 may 2011. ‘why oh why, cc-by?’ nowviskie.org research councils uk,  8 april 2013. rcuk policy on open access and supporting guidance,  http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/ rundle, h., 23 march 2014. ‘creative commons, open access, and hypocrisy’, www.hughrundle.net. rundle, h, 2 january 2013. ‘mission creep – a 3d printer will not save your library’, www.hughrundle.net. vandegrift, m & bowley, c, 23 april 2014. ‘librarian, heal thyself: a scholarly communications analysis of lis journals’, in the library with the lead pipe. wellcome trust, une 2014,. open access: cc-by licence required for all articles which incur an open access publication fee – faq, jhttp://www.wellcome.ac.uk/ appendix: text of email to authors note: any publication wishing to use this text for your own re-licensing process is encouraged to do so. dear [author] since 2008, in the library with the lead pipe has been publishing posts and articles that inspire, challenge and provoke librarians around the world. we are honoured to have had you as one of our authors. when lead pipe launched, we were determined not only to be inspiring and challenging to the profession, but also to be open. as a lead pipe author, we asked you to provide us with ‘first publisher’ attribution, and assign a creative commons attribution-non commercial (cc-by-nc) license to your article. after more than five years of publishing, we have recently taken time to consider our position as a publisher. lead pipe started as a peer-reviewed group blog, but we have now repositioned ourselves as an open access, open peer reviewed journal. as part of this process we have reconsidered our licensing, and will be moving to a more permissive creative commons attribution (cc-by) license. in making this decision, we have recognized that cc-by-nc licenses are surrounded by confusion and controversy. the definition of ‘non commercial’ is vague, and a recent court case indicates it may be applied much more narrowly than we anticipated, potentially making lead pipe articles unusable even by the people and organizations we hope to support, such as educators and public broadcasters. as an editorial board, we aim for all the work published in lead pipe to find a wide audience and for it to help change library practice for the better. by removing the ‘non commercial’ license provisions we feel that this aim will more easily be achieved. we would therefore like not only to license all future works cc-by, but also relicense all previously published articles from cc-by-nc to cc-by. as one of our existing authors, we ask that you agree to relicense your article to a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. our goal in relicensing all previously published articles is to provide clarity for our readers by ensuring our licensing is consistent throughout our website. if you would like to read more about cc-by versus cc-by-nc licensing, we recommend the following: lead pipe editorial board member hugh rundle’s blog post, creative commons, open access, and hypocrisy. bethany nowviskie’s blog post, why, oh why, cc–by? gary daught’s post, i dropped the “nc” from my creative commons license. if you are willing to agree to relicense your article, please reply to this email with the words:  “i agree to re-license all work published under my name in in the library with the lead pipe, to a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license”. whilst we would prefer for all authors to re-license their articles, we understand that you may prefer not to do so. we recognize that if lead pipe required cc-by licensing at the time you wrote your article, you may have chosen another publication with which to publish, or chosen not to write it at all. if you would prefer your article to remain cc-by-nc, we will ensure that its licensing is clearly indicated as such. if you are sure that you would prefer to keep the existing cc-by-nc license, please reply to this email with the words “please keep the licensing of my article as cc-by-nc”. if you have any questions about re-licensing your work, or would like more information, please let us know by emailing [email]. yours, brett bonfield ellie collier erin dorney emily ford gretchen kolderup hugh rundle coral sheldon-hess micah vandegrift open access, open publishing call for social media editor locating information literacy within institutional oppression 3 responses pingback : around the web: a creative commons guide to sharing your science and more – confessions of a science librarian pingback : around the web: a creative commons guide to sharing your science and more [confessions of a science librarian] | gaia gazette pingback : evolving conversations on open access: oysters and adventures at aaa | epic this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part i – the leap – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 18 jun robert schroeder /2 comments exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part i – the leap star jump, photo by flickr user stuart anthony ( cc-by-nc 2.0) in brief: librarians create collections of works grounded in many western academic forms of research and they conduct research using many of these qualitative and quantitative methodologies as well. but are there perhaps research methods around the margins, ones that might help us ask different questions or let our research serve different ends? in this, the first of two articles, i describe how i discovered critical and indigenous research methods and how my research became grounded in a digital community. by robert schroeder this is the email that started it all: hi bob, i really enjoyed your presentation today. your goofy sense of humor and passion for learning made the hour fly by. plus, it was great to learn more about advancing my research skills and taking advantage of technology in the research process. so i would like to make an appointment with you for next week to get your help in narrowing my research question and help in pointing me towards some key areas to start researching on my topic… my area of research is urban native american high schools students, their families, and the larger urban indian community in regards to education…what indigenous assessment methodologies are they using to determine student strengths, challenges, and learning style? are these culturally responsive methodologies more effective than what is being used at portland public schools? …are native american youth performing better academically at charter schools or alternative schools that are culturally responsive? these are very broad questions so i need some help narrowing them down. what research is going to be reasonable to accomplish in my mcnair time frame? what research will be most helpful to my community? what research has been done on these topics? who is researching this? at the end of the day i want my research to be helpful to my community. over the years much research has been done on our community (as native americans), yet little of it has actually helped our people and our tribal communities. i believe education in one of the most important tools we have in our tool box to address and start solving the complex and intergenerational problems we are facing as native peoples. so that’s a little bit about me and what questions i’m asking myself. (email to author, emphasis added) in january 2012, shilo george wrote me this email , requesting to meet for a research consultation. shilo, a mcnair scholar at portland state, was the catalyst for my current research project embodied in the article you are reading right now. as part of my library instruction work, i have been liaising with portland state’s mcnair scholars for the last seven years. this national program “… works with motivated and talented undergraduates who want to pursue phds. it introduces juniors and seniors who are first-generation and low-income, and/or members of under-represented groups to academic research and to effective strategies for getting into and graduating from phd programs.”1 the intent of this program is to increase these non-traditional students’ academic social capital, attempting to level the playing field with their more privileged peers. in my role with this program, i teach a library research session with a double focus. i support their current mcnair scholar’s research, which tends to be more complex than average undergraduate research, and i also focus on aspects of research most often associated with graduate or phd researchers. this includes helping students find key experts in their field; discover venues in which they might publish; set up rss feeds to keep current in their topics; and identify which graduate schools are researching in their areas of interest. ostensibly, i was teaching shilo and her fellow undergraduates to begin to think like doctoral-level researchers, but they were teaching me as well. in shilo’s email, i began to see not only a complex and authentic research topic evolving out of her lived-experiences, but also the first few notes of a theme that was to echo over the next year in my relationship with shilo and her research – that of a new way (to me) of research with and for a community. she recommend a book she was currently reading, research is ceremony: indigenous research methods by shawn wilson, and invited me to her graduation party. it was the first graduation party i attended where i didn’t bring a gift, but rather was treated to a public appreciation of my contribution to shilo’s research and given a gift as well. this is the first of two articles. here i sketch the path i took getting to this precarious place of exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community. the journey i describe shows how one librarian’s practice can, through reflection and the application of a dash of theory, turn into research and scholarship. lead pipe will publish the second article in fall 2014. it will report my findings on critical and indigenous research methods and their application to library and information science (lis), and investigate the process of researching with a community. in my normal research mode, i would have researched, written, and published only the second of these articles as the product of my research. but shilo’s research and shilo researching from her place in the center of a community has subtly, but profoundly moved me off my foundations. lately i have experienced a slow shift in my own methods. while i still relish engaging with theories, concepts, and other researchers’ ideas discovered through reading their scholarship, i have noticed that engaging with the people behind the research and the research process itself has become more a focus of my scholarship. this reflection in my research has taken a more self-reflexive turn, so that the process of research, the community in which the research is situated, and my place and role in it have become parts of my scholarly pursuits. i am reminded of shawn wilson, in research is ceremony, quoting terry tafoya, “stories go in circles. they don’t go in straight lines. it helps if you listen in circles because there are stories inside and between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. part of finding is getting lost, and when you are lost you start to open up and listen.”2 let’s get critical shilo and her examples of “research as community” piqued my interest in what these indigenous research methods entail, how they might differ from other research methods more commonly used in academe, and what they might mean to (lis). at the time that i met shilo i had started to research what i cavalierly call “critical theories” (such as the frankfurt school, feminism , critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonialism  and their relationships to lis. critical educators such as paolo freire argued that education needs to be more liberatory and transformative to the people involved, both those in the roles of “students”, and those in the roles of “teachers.” as he wrote in his pedagogy of the oppressed; “through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. they become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. in this process, arguments based on “authority” are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. people teach each other, mediated by the world…”3 this is surely what had been happening when shilo and i talked! i began to wonder if there were more “critical research methods” available to scholars — for all i knew i made up this term. freire discussed how the instructional aspects of education could become more liberatory, but i wondered if scholarly research might also work in transformative ways. one example, with which i became familiar while liaising with students in portland state’s graduate school of education, is participatory action research. davydd greenwood defines participatory action research (par) as: … research involving the collaboration between local communities, organizations, or coalitions with a legitimate personal interest in solving a problem that affects them directly and expert outside facilitators. together they define the problem, learn how to study it, design the research, analyze the outcomes, and design and execute the needed actions. par rests on a belief in the importance of local knowledge and the ability of people of all social conditions to take action on their own behalf to democratize the situations they live in.4 as i do the research for my second article, my goal is to ferret out more examples of similar research methods, ones that will be beneficial to librarians. finding (digital) community from my meeting with shilo and my exploratory reading of critical pedagogy, a new research project (the one you are currently reading) began to form. initial research questions developed in my mind, questions such as; are there existing research methods that might align themselves with critical theories? what exactly are indigenous research methods, and what makes them unique? what are the defining features of indigenous and critical research methods, and is there overlap between them? who uses these methods, and are there researchers in lis using them? how might librarians use these research methods and their knowledge of them in their practices? as i was preparing to research these questions, a voice from critical theory.5 sounded in my head, reminding me to not only critique the works of others, but my own work as well. i needed to inquire into my own unarticulated assumptions, at the very least to come clean with my own motivations. i realized that i was about to go off on another of my individualistic “marlboro man” research journeys, studying topics like native american ideas and the idea of research as community. the culture clash! the hubris! i realized i needed to more closely model this current research project on indigenous and critical methods, to the extent i could with my limited understanding. while i am not a member of an indigenous group, reading shawn wilson’s book led me to seek out a research community of my own. pondering how to make my research more community based, i stumbled upon the digital humanities project6 was using what they called mediacommons. one of its projects is the mediacommonspress (mcp). mcp publishes free, online works in the humanities — works that are often created by groups, and in which reviews of the works are open and continuous throughout the publication process. not only does mcp produce digital humanities texts in this novel manner, it also self-reflectively publishes on this new publishing model itself. titles include comment press: new (social) structures for new (networked) texts, media commons: scholarly publishing in the age of the internet,  and open review. while i was taken with the open review process used by mcp and the community participation it afforded, i realized that the costs associated with the software used, as well as overhead, would make this specific instance of open review prohibitive for many individual librarians with no budget. it was now clear to me that the community research project i was about to launch could be also be a pilot of “open review for the rest of us.” but i had not yet found my “us.” indigenous researchers are organically situated in their own communities, which allows them immediate connection to a group and intimate knowledge of the issues and problems they face. but who might i connect with; who might i be researching with and researching for? it struck me that, at least for this research project, my community might be other librarians with an interest in critical and indigenous research methods. granted this would be an ad hoc group, but one that i hoped would be willing to extend themselves by helping to inform the direction of this research, and, more importantly, critique and enrich my work through the feedback they could give as it progressed. weaving together i identified three strands for this research project – indigenous research methods, critical research methods, and researching as part of a digital community. to find a research community and to make my research more immediately responsive and relevant to a group, i created a survey of four open-ended questions: what would be interesting or important to know about critical research methods? what would be interesting or important to know about indigenous research methods? what issues specific to library and information science should be explored in regards to critical or indigenous research methods? what ideas, theories, or previous researchers’ ideas should be considered in doing this research? (you can name the names of researchers or texts for within or without of lis). the survey was sent to three listservs to which i belong – social responsibilities round table action council (srrtac-l), information literacy instruction discussion list (ili-l), and education and behavioral science section (ebss-l). i prefaced the survey with an invitation for both naïve and expert questions, and i introduced the idea that by helping to inform this research, participants would become part of my “research community.” at the end of the survey, i invited participants to leave their email addresses if they wished to continue as community members and be invited to comment on my research as it progressed. i left the survey open for two weeks and twenty-two people responded to my questions; twelve of these left email addresses so that i could contact them later for feedback. i have taken the community feedback and integrated it into my initial research questions below. community feedback is summarized in italics, and direct quotes are in quotation marks. are there research methods out there that might align themselves with critical theories? what does “critical” mean in this context? how related to social justice, marxist, or critical race theories? is this just a buzz word or does it mean anything? what exactly are indigenous research methods, and what makes them unique? define the term. why am i considering them in terms of lis? “how and why the use of such methods might be considered a form of appropriation and thus forced or inappropriate.” what are the defining features of indigenous and critical research methods, and is there overlap between them? what are their benefits and limitations? how can these methods validate individual and communal experience? who uses these methods, and are there researchers in lis using them? linda tuhiwai smith – decolonizing methodologies. critical race theory, feminist theory, post-colonialism, queer theory, and marxism. gramsci and mcluhan – “information as commodity, hegemony, message creation, propaganda.” l.f. lavallee, m. mendelson, m. evans. paulo freire. “um, do your own critical research, dude. there is a difference between giving you feedback and doing your job for you.” how might librarians use these research methods, and knowledge of them, in their practices? “how do we promote qualitative research in an increasingly quantitative world?” should the topic of research shape the methods of the research? what are the impacts of privilege on research – epistemological impacts, process barrier impacts, or research reception impacts? how can these methods be applied in higher education and in the digital age? “how does process and collaboration impact on the researchers’ direction of research?” how might librarians, uninformed of these methods or theories learn to incorporate them in their research? “provision of library services to diverse populations” “problematizing the western notions of objectivity and/or neutrality in regard to library collections.” “who creates and controls information? who creates the frames?” in instruction and collaboration with faculty. “unpacking our approaches to research and our relationships with existing research.” how is information defined, and who is considered an expert? power relationships within the library and with other parties like students, instructors, and vendors. many of the comments and suggestions confirmed my original ideas. this let me know i was on the right track and that the relatively naïve frame i would be constructing for this research might be appropriate for lis readers. as you can see for my community’s comments above, i was also given many new (for me) ways of looking at my questions. i was introduced to a number of new theorists — among them antonio gramsci, friedrich nietzsche, marshall mcluhan, as well as the canadian, australian, and new zealand researchers linda tuhiwai smith, lynn f. lavallee, michael mendelson, and michelle evans. these comments were helpful in broadening the base of my search even before it began. there were also some resistance raised that forced me to reflect on the totality of the project itself. some questioned if “critical research methods” was even a meaningful term and warned me to be aware of colonizing or appropriating indigenous methods in inappropriate ways. these were important points to internalize and make part of my continuing self-critique. one comment resonated particularly strongly with me: “um, do your own critical research, dude. there is a difference between giving you feedback and doing your job for you.” the jaunty and flippant tone of this comment grabbed my attention, and it was a nice envelope for a serious message. the comment was written in response to my asking for any leads or theorists to potentially investigate (question #4 above). i think i may have had a similar response if i had answered this question before i learned a bit about alternative, more community based methods. the western academic “marlboro man” type of research to which we have all been socialized by virtue of the years we have spent in academe is so tightly woven into the grand narrative of scholarship that it seems “natural,” and so we blindly defend it. the community member who offered up this comment seems to imply that i’m asking others to do my work for me — but with this community research pilot i am exploring a new cooperative model. it is true that in question #4 i do ask for any leads others may have, and that i will use this information to help jumpstart my research. if my community were an indigenous one, there would be a high probability that i would already know the issues that we as a group consider important because we share a long past together. but because my community has only coalesced just now around this one issue, by asking this question i am attempting to access our shared knowledge and sources on the subject at hand. the other part of the relationship between me and my new-found community is reflected in questions #1 to #3. there, i ask for issues that the community wants me to research. one way to view this exchange is that they will provide helpful information for me to begin my research and i will be researching for them. another way to see this is that we will be researching with each other. shawn wilson says, “research by and for indigenous peoples is a ceremony that brings relationships together.” (2008, p.8) i am hoping to take this ceremony we call academic research and use it to build relationships with my newfound community of researchers. the leap to recap, i am setting off on a project where i will research critical and indigenous research methodologies and what relevance they might have to librarians and the field of lis. i am engaging with a digital research community in the process of producing my scholarship, and this “researching with a community” process will be analyzed in my next article, along with my findings related to the questions above. i was drawn to publishing in lead pipe because it is open access, it is published in a blog format (with comments enabled), and it allows for continuous open review, albeit in a post-publication fashion. because the article will be in two parts, peer input is welcomed during the rest of my research and writing process. i invite any readers to offer suggestions you have for this research project by commenting on this blog below. or, if you would like to review the second article prior to its publication in the fall, please email me at schroedr@pdx.edu and i will add you to my community. to be continued… acknowledging my community: even getting to this place in my research i’ve been supported by many colleagues and friends. shilo george, of course, for being an amazing and dynamic catalyst. many colleagues at portland state university for giving me feedback on my survey and this projects development — swapna mukhopadhyay, claudia weston, and meredith farkas. my 22 anonymous community members who have helped direct this research, and carol terry, amy hofer, and editors of lead pipe who reviewed this piece. and of course the ever ebullient (even when enveloped in ennui), emily ford, for aiding and abetting me on this madcap adventure. photo credit: “star jump” https://www.flickr.com/photos/68134711@n00/3152875867/ bibliograhy freire, paulo. pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum, 2000. greenwood, davydd j. “participatory action research.” in encyclopedia of social science research methods, edited by michael s. lewis-beck, alan bryman and tim futing liao, 800-801. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc., 2004. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412950589.n693 mcnair scholars http://www.pdx.edu/mcnair-program/about portland state university. tafoya, terry. “finding harmony: balancing traditional values with western science in therapy.” canadian journal of native education 21 (1995): 7-27. wilson, shawn. research is ceremony: indigenous research methods. fernwood pub., 2008. ronald e. mcnair scholars program, portland state university, 5/29/14, http://www.pdx.edu/mcnair-program/ [↩] terry tafoya, “finding harmony: balancing traditional values with western science in therapy,” canadian journal of native education 21 ,supplement (2005) 12. [↩] paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed (new york: continuum, 2000), 80. [↩] greenwood, davydd j. “participatory action research.” in encyclopedia of social science research methods, edited by michael s. lewis-beck, alan bryman and tim futing liao (thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc., 2004), par. 1 . [↩] i’m not sure from where or who, just a vague recollection. perhaps a reader will recall a critical theorist somewhere mentioning the need for self-critique? [↩] very recently i also saw that harvard university, as part of their digital initiative project , published their first “crowd-sourced” article titled the capitalist’s dilemma.” [↩] ice ice baby: are librarian stereotypes freezing us out of instruction? making a new table: intersectional librarianship 2 responses julia haverstock-wagner 2014–06–19 at 7:36 pm wow. i am very excited about this article and with where your research might be going. i have just joined the official academic research circle (albeit temporarily and part-time) but have worked as a librarian in middle and high schools previously where i have wrestled with some of these issues without the indigenous lens. again, looking forward to having more to think about. pingback : cfparticipation: autoethnography learning community | info-fetishist this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct rewards and recognition in librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 25 sep micah vandegrift /9 comments rewards and recognition in librarianship image used under cc-by-nc-sa license from flickr user mayari. download this article as an epub for reading on mobile devices.   in brief this article explores the professional award structure (formal and informal) of librarianship. the goal in doing so is to discover what the field values in terms of bestowing honors at the individual level, and in which ways the awards system is perpetuating or progressing those values. broadly, the article inquires where librarian awards fit into the larger context that include nobel’s, guggenheim’s, etc. and ultimately asks the questions: what qualifies as prestige within our field, and how is that scale of prestige viewed from outside librarianship? my goal is to expand the conversation, to question our current rewarding structures and to inspire a collegial, professional competitive spirit. nb: the author would encourage readers to also read valerie forrestal’s the in crowd, or fear and loathing in library land, published last week in the journal of creative library practice, which comments on many of the same points addressed herein. by micah vandegrift introduction there is a push at my university to become one of the top 25 public universities. as one could imagine, this has come with a certain amount of reconsidering what initiatives or marks can push a school into that next level of competition. aside from the obvious (increase student graduation rates, substantial increase in research funding), a memo from the provost outlined a plan to monetarily reward faculty who achieve various levels of prestige, based on awards, recognitions and honors; a more prestigious faculty will equal a more prestigious university. the plan is based on the national research council’s two tier system: highly prestigious (nobel, neh, guggenheim, etc.) and prestigious (fulbright, nsf early career, etc.). the provost did leave room to reward honors that are comparable to these in fields not commonly represented in lists like this, for example library and information sciences; all of which lead me to ask, what are the awards, honors and recognitions that i should be aware of in librarianship? there are many layers of complexity when taking on a topic like this. first, how to write about it without it becoming a “librarianship is the red-headed step child of professional disciplines,” invoking a long-held inferiority complex, especially between working librarians and the lis professoriate. then, how to differentiate between service awards and professional achievement awards, which underline the ever-present discussion about the variety of specializations within the field (public/academic/special). finally, how can one approach this topic without at least acknowledging recent discussions of “tall poppy syndrome” related to popular recognitions (informal) rather than practical accomplishments (formal).1 taken together, these points sum up a majority of our field’s position on awards and honors: that it is often more complicated than it is worth. while i take these points into consideration, i plan to approach this study from a different angle; how can we as a field elevate the awarding structure we already have to meet public perception of value? and how can librarians step outside our disciplinary lines to apply for and nominate one another for existing awards that are already conferred with honor? in so doing, i hope to inspire others to prize collegiality and constructive professional competition, and slowly but surely change the conversation. before beginning, it’s necessary to acknowledge my biases. i am an early career academic librarian, and due to one good idea that was made possible by many people other than myself, my name is recognizable. i hold a point of view on reward structures that is slanted toward my own circumstances and experiences, and so the scope of this article will lean toward academic librarianship. i hope to move beyond that and address this topic as objectively as possible while encouraging others in other sub-disciplines to do the same. what is important to me about writing about prestige and awards in librarianship is to give credit where it is due, and encourage a culture of innovation that will continue to make librarianship a vital cog in the wheels of modern culture. the value of prestige institutions of higher learning point to prestige as the preeminent goal by which quality is assigned.  arbitrary as it may be, linking the professional work of academicians to reputation-building efforts is a way administrators can indicate competitiveness. we see this in the imposed “choice” of publication venue (journal a is worth more than journal b), name-currency of the school from which one received a degree, and criteria for promotion and tenure. the corollary in a different professional environment might be “power” or “status,” leaning toward a weberian definition, but the academy would shy away from endorsing “power” as a career strategy. exploring this idea a little, the sociological understandings of how and why groups organize into hierarchies must be addressed – why is it that we feel the need to praise one member over another? prestige carries notions of honor, status, respect, esteem and more, all related to the valuation of an individual within a group. pulling these various strains together, a useful summation of why any of this matters is that these qualities overlap with those prized in leadership, or the capability to lead. this is a no-brainer. those who are honored and respected often hold positions of leadership, figuratively or in practice. however, the underlying issue may not be “why prestige”, but “how is prestige attained?” vasiliki kantzara, a professor of sociology of education at pateion university in greece, points out an important distinction in the treatment of prestige through sociological literature, writing, in general terms, there are two avenues or modes of attaining prestige, called ascription and achievement (linton 1936: 115; ortner & whitehead 1981). ascription refers to traits that are usually considered inborn, such as gender, age, “race,” or ethnicity (also called status characteristics by berger; see berger & zelditch 1998). achievement refers to level of education, income, occupation, and skills. authors suggest that both modes are prevalent in a society and the question that arises is in what ways one mode is related to the other; and secondly how ascription may hinder or enhance achievement (kantzara, 2009). often in our professional circles, this separation between honor earned and honor granted, is part of the complexity of rewards that creates animosity within the ranks of peers; “so and so had one good year, won some award and then never did another good deed.” as weber and kantzara suggest, linking power – what we could call professional agency – with prestige, based on some level of accomplishment, introduces competition to a work environment. wrapping all this in the context of institutions such as universities or librarianship, which are founded on ideals of community-born free thought, makes for a very, very messy method of valuing our best and brightest. i propose that librarianship’s current system of professional valuation is based on recognitions rather than rewards, principles rather than prestige, which is why it is difficult to measure against similar award structures in other fields. librarianship, a field that is focused less than the individual professional and more on the object of our profession (patrons/users), is more apt than research-intensive disciplines to emphasize service awards than awards based on merit. not that the two cannot exist simultaneously, but when comparing the pinnacle achievements in lis to the fields medal or to a macarthur fellowship, the essence of “prestige” in each instance carries a different weight. as librarianship intersects with culture, society, science and the arts in a multitude of new ways there are many more awards and honors outside our field that we can and should be considering. the value system on which we base our current awards may not fully encompass the best ways to honor and promote those of us that represent the future of the profession. rockstars, emerging leaders, movers and shakers beginning with the easy targets, library journal’s movers and shakers (m&s) and ala’s emerging leaders (el) program seem to be librarianship’s most visible and broadly-known recognitions.2 these titles, given for different reasons, one reputation-based, the other project-based respectively,  have produced a multiplicity of blog posts, discussions and arguments about “library rockstarism.” for better or worse, the m&s list and ala’s el  participants have come to symbolize the future of the profession. these two award programs stand out because they are two of the few that recognize professionals from across the library sub-disciplines, including library-adjacent work in technology and more. i’d like to propose that el’s and m&s-ers represent one distinct, narrow aspect of rewarding – extraordinarily discipline-specific, popular recognition. the differences between the movers and shakers and emerging leaders are worth noting when thinking about them as reward structures. the movers and shaker program is initiated by nomination, vetted, culled and announced by library journal, a leading trade publication, and is intended to celebrate “up-and-coming individuals who are innovative, creative, and making a difference.”3 ala’s emerging leaders, on the other hand, is an application process handled by an ala committee, built around a team project with the goal of inculcating the el’s into ala’s governance and professional organization work. both recognize approximately 50 individuals annually, and sometimes there are crossover individuals who receive both recognitions, although not often in the same year. other fields and disciplines have similar programs to reward early career innovation, often with the expectation that that individual will go on to bigger and better things. the popularity contest that these types of recognitions become is perhaps a product of the desire for establishing oneself as a revolutionary thinker, especially early in the career. situating this type of recognition in the grander scheme of awards, positive press is more the effect than prestige. the “emergent leader” and mover/shaker is complicated for librarianship because we want to produce innovative individuals that fall in line, join the team and buckle down to do good work. the nature of work that we do, team-based, collaborative, can at times be at odds with individual-fueled enthusiasm, and ultimately the innovators either move just beyond librarianship proper, or find ways to crunch their ideas into how things are done. these are recognitions given for potential, but that potential, especially in regards to ala’s emerging leaders, is tagged with “… as long as you remain one of us.” returning briefly to the measuring stick that i began with, the national research council does recognize eight awards given by the american library association in their “prestigious” category (none in “highly prestigious”).4 interestingly/appallingly, these awards are predominantly “best book” types of awards. two of the eight are given for articles/essays in the field of library history, with one 2013 award going to a librarian. ala’s professional recognition awards range from lifetime achievement to advocacy, none of which appear to measure up to the standards of the national research council. ala/acrl’s academic/research librarian of the year may be the nearest in gravitas for my specific area of work. to be clear, the nrc is focused primarily on research-based awards, which represents only a small percentage of librarian works, but i include these points to contextualize the perception of prestige and as a point from which my inquiry in this topic began. the role of the professional organization in awards is at the crux of this exploration of prestige. as mentioned before, the emerging leaders and mover/shakers work well because the pool encompasses tech services, ya specialists, web developers and project managers. digging any deeper into library award structures means circumnavigating the round tables and aptly-titled “divisions” that comprise ala. blaise cronin, writing for library journal in 2001, articulates a salient point that our field, due to its breadth, has watered down the value of our own awards. he writes, when we turn to the homepage of the american library association (ala), it’s clear that we have moved into the big leagues. there are hundreds of awards, prizes, citations, and named scholarships. pay your dues, stay sober, keep your hand out of the till, and you should get some kind of ala award before the sun sets on your career… the proliferation of honors creates a variant of gresham’s law: trivial awards drive serious accomplishments out of sight… the commodification of awards diminishes and calls into disrepute the whole process of bestowing public honors and recognition (cronin, 2001). indeed, ala and other professional organizations help to define the measurement of value for librarians. however, since ala represents librarians as professionals and also libraries as our employers, their involvement is at the cost of “prestige,” making our award structures doubly insular.5 i point this out not to diminish the importance of the awards that are given, but to show that librarianship places more emphasis on the principles to which we cleave, many of which are embodied in “the book,” rather than on attaining some external standard of what it means to exude greatness. this clearly affects how our awards are understood and accepted outside our circles. these brief examples are barely representative of the many ways we honor one another, and rather than delving further into librarian awards i’d like to move to the second point: it is time for a librarian to be named a macarthur genius, or nobel prize winner, or receive popular acclaim and recognition that the greater world acknowledges as prestigious. homines novi the american dream, pull-oneself-up-by-thebootstrapism, self-madeness, from rags to riches archetype provides a useful point from which to continue. for all the talk of reinventing the profession, new roles for new times, librarian as jack of all trades, one would think we’ve about worn out our idiomatic expressions. however, the current reframing of the professional life can, and should, include a glance toward the potential we could reach in regards to public perception of our job. related to the sociological definition of prestige is the concept of occupational prestige, basically what jobs are thought of as the most important.6 i don’t think i need to point out that “information profession” is not high on the list. aside from the selfish reasons to be awarded and recognized, announcing our presence to the public from that platform may go a long way toward “communicating value.” every two years acrl’s research planning and review committee releases a report on the “top 10 trends in academic libraries.” the 2012 report’s opening point – communicating value – cites carol tenopir’s article in library management, stating, “librarians must be able to convert the general feelings of goodwill towards the library to effective communication to all stakeholders that clearly articulate its value to the academic community.”7 in light of the apparent lack of prestige in our current award system, i propose that librarians must assume the responsibility to articulate our value by working diligently prove our worth and earn awards that matter to our communities of service. several questions must be addressed at the outset: outside of the professional organization, how else might one be awarded or recognized? and, what are these “highly prestigious” awards given for? thanks to my university’s office of faculty recognition, there is a handy list of awards that influence university rankings.8 i’ll highlight just a few that have the potential to be awarded to a librarian, and hope to answer those questions in doing so. 1) the fulbright program: the fulbright program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the u.s. government and is designed to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the united states and the people of other countries.” with this goal as a starting point, the fulbright program has provided almost 310,000 participants — chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential — with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns. 2) macarthur foundation fellows: the macarthur fellows program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. there are three criteria for selection of fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. the macarthur fellows program is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. 3) woodrow wilson fellows: the woodrow wilson fellows and scholars program supports research in the social sciences and humanities. men and women from a wide variety of backgrounds, including government, the non-profit sector, the corporate world, and the professions, as well as academia, are eligible for appointment. through an international competition, it offers 9-month residential fellowships to academics, public officials, journalists, and business professionals. fellows conduct research and write in their areas of interest, while interacting with policymakers in washington and wilson center staff.  the glaring and obvious reason these awards are not often sought by professional librarians is what you “win” – these three fellowships grant the awardee funded release/research time, a luxury most librarians cannot often take. the type of work we do, especially those of us outside of academic libraries, doesn’t lend itself to taking six months off to research and engage with other colleagues and ideas. an opportunity that is perhaps unknown, that solves that exact issue, is the fulbright specialist program which grants awards for 2-6 week projects. they even go so far as to invite applicants from public, special and school libraries. if nothing else, there should be 1 librarian every year that earns this award. returning to the idea of occupational prestige, it’s obvious that scientists, doctors, lawmakers and ceo’s hold some cultural worth that we librarians don’t necessarily embody. the twining of expertise with prestige puts librarians at a disadvantage by nature of being generalists.9 but, aiming for awards like these (and many others not mentioned) has the potential to significantly affect our cultural worth, not only in the award itself but in the new and different type of work these would charge us to do. for example, a librarian could use a fulbright specialist grant to study and share information literacy programming ideas with a public library in the heart of cape town, south africa. a woodrow wilson fellowship could allow the advocates among us to spend time learning the ins-and-outs of public policy. there is obvious good that comes from involvement in programs like these, and communicating the value of the variety of work that we are involved in, from information access to promoting literacy and everything in between, is an ideal that should be recognized and rewarded in many more instances than it currently is. fulfilling much of what i hope for in this article, librarians are already earning these honors. the 2012-2013 fulbright cycle awarded two librarians.in “librarianship and the fulbright fellowship: challenges and opportunities for american librarians and polish libraries” maria anna jankowska, a 2002 mover and shaker, former guest scholar at the woodrow wilson international center and fulbright fellow, writes that between 2003 and 2006 eighteen librarians participated in the fulbright program, illustrating that it’s not that these highly prestigious awards are unattainable or unrealistic (jankowska, 2007). as a challenge, to use popular perception of prestige for our own goals of retelling the story of librarianship, i’d like to hear of a flood of library applicants for these programs. ultimately, i would hope that such honors would feed back into our professional organization’s rewards and recognition system. the “so what” prestige and what qualifies as meritorious work are difficult to nail down in librarianship because of the gaps in professional practices between different breeds of librarians. obviously, if one goes above and beyond they deserve recognition, but there is no easy standard by which to measure an archivist at a historical society against a school librarian in a rural district, and perhaps such a standard would be useless. what we do have is a shared sense of professional values, perhaps articulated to us from ala, or our library school program, but still it is on these values that we may be best able to honor one another. access to information is a right. spaces that are free and open to all. fighting for intellectual freedom and against censorship. these values are expressed in a variety of work ethics across our subfields, including service to the community, teaching, research and writing in formal and informal venues. many of the awards within our professional circles are born from these values, but i’d also posit that organizations, foundations and agencies outside our field hold these same values and that it would be of great worth for us to seek out those opportunities also. more so now than before collaboration outside of disciplines and building/making is being rewarded by organizations like the national endowment for the humanities. regardless of job titles, molding our professional values to meet the challenging perceptions of prestige opens the door for approaching our work in a new light. i am left with perhaps as many questions as i began, and no concrete answers. how do we understand excellence in library work, and in what ways should we celebrate with those colleagues? are informal recognitions as useful and productive as formal awards? in comparing ourselves to other fields (which might not be a useful practice either) do we function more like teachers and social workers than researchers and creative professionals? a goal for those reading might be to take these questions and apply them to our various fields of practice. there may be a better way to value our high achievers, and to promote that value to our communities. one thing is certain, that arguing over who won what why is not a productive stance. better to celebrate those who do well, and take it as a challenge to exceed our own professional aspirations. prestige builds over time, whereas quality, in our individual work and in our profession, is something we all contribute to. acknowledgements: a special thank you to external reviewer matthew ciszek, who inspired some of the thought process behind this article, and who is also working on a forthcoming article on awards and recognition. eternal gratitude to my colleagues on the editorial board, especially gretchen kolderup, emily ford and ellie collier for challenging my ideas and offering gentle reminders about how grammar and sentence structure is supposed to work. references and further readings billédi, i. (1989). the status and social prestige of library and information profession : an international survey. 55th ifla council and general conference paris, france 19-26 august 1989, 30–32. cronin, b. (2001). for whom the bell curve tolls. too many library awards drive serious accomplishments out of sight, 126(1), 70–70. dries, n., & verbruggen, m. (2012). fresh perspectives on the “new” career: introduction to the special section. journal of vocational behavior, 81(2), 269 – 270. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2011.11.001 kantzara, vasiliki. (2007). prestige. blackwell encyclopedia of sociology. ritzer, george (ed). blackwell publishing, 2007. accessible at http://www.academia.edu/2185008/prestige kuenn, s. (2012). ala award winners visionaries & innovators. american libraries, 43(9/10), 34–39. jankowska, maria anna. (2007). librarianship and the fulbright fellowship: challenges and opportunities for american librarians and polish libraries. electronic journal of academic and special librarianship, 8(2). retrieved from http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v08n02/jankowska_m01.html perkins, g. h., & slowik, a. j. w. (2013). the value of research in academic libraries. college & research libraries, 74(2), 143–157. the distribution of power within the community: classes, stande, parties by max weber. (2010). journal of classical sociology : jcs, 10(2), 137–152. doi:10.1177/1468795x10361546 see also http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1080/00049538908260088/abstract and http://stephenslighthouse.com/2012/11/28/personal-editorial-managing-high-potential-employees-in-libraries-the-rock-star-dillemma/ [↩] full disclosure: the author recently received recognition as a 2013 mover and shaker. [↩] library journal, http://lj.libraryjournal.com/awards/ [↩] view the entire list of nation research council vetted awards here – http://ofr.fsu.edu/award-application-information/nrc-awards [↩] this point was raised by matthew ciszek, the external reviewer of this article. he wrote, “other fields, like social work, make a distinction between professional organizations for social workers and those that represent the human services agencies in which social workers are employed.” [↩] a journal article, “socioeconomic indexes for occupations: a review, update and critique” offers some perspective on this idea: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/96-01.pdf. also, this harris interactive report fleshes out the concept: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/harris-interactive-poll-research-pres-occupations-2009-08.pdf. the wikipedia entry is useful as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/occupational_prestige [↩] 2012 top ten trends in academic libraries: a review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education. accessible at http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/6/311.full [↩] again, my exploration is filtered through my own circumstances working as an academic librarian, not to discount other measures and reasons for awards. [↩] another excellent point posed by matthew ciszek in the review of this piece. [↩] two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture the library as incubator project wants you to look at programming as collection development 9 responses jason martin 2013–09–25 at 1:14 pm excellent article. seems to me many of the awards in librarianship are “lifetime achievement” awards and honor skills that are no as relevant as they were 30 years ago. very recently the band godspeed you! black emperor (formerly godspeed you black emperor!) won a polaris music award for best canadian album. they donated the award money, refused the tour van that came with the award, and released a statement deriding awards. one of their statements was awards and award shows do not “serve the cause of righteous music at all.” maybe these awards, whatever level of “prestige” they may carry, do not serve the cause of righteous education or librarianship. micahvandegrift 2013–09–25 at 7:13 pm jason, i had thought the same, that our awards tend toward lifetime achievements, which is why i spent time on the movers/shakers and emerging leaders. both of those programs are “early career” type recognitions. i’d like to see or hear if there are more types of early-mid career awards. very interesting to hear about gybe turning down that award. it’d be interesting to hear if any of our peers and colleagues hold the same attitude toward recognitions for their work. do you think theres a self-righteous angle to turning down an award? or, is it a higher moral ground, upholding the “righteous cause,” for the good of the community as you point out? dan c. 2013–09–25 at 5:26 pm interesting topic. i think everyone loves accolades, but it is definitely in the academia that this sort of thing is touted and promoted to assist in rankings. and, as such, some of these awards, like the fulbright, require some sort of academic affiliation, so that’s rather limiting to larger librarian workforce. a lot of “subject specific” awards, with the possible exception of literature and the arts, tend towards that kind of affiliation. you rarely see “independent” scientists getting nsf or nih grants. i think perhaps, if we want to show that kind of winning accolade, why not focus on librarians who won huge imls grants? that would rank as prestigious. but also let’s not limit ourselves to just our field, award-wise. a library school classmate of mine, gregory leazer, won the presidential early career award for scientists and engineers (pecase) back in 1999 or so, the first and (as far as i know) only librarian to do so. it can happen, it just takes that ability to move beyond where we would normally think. however, again, this is really only a needed “cause” for academia. you’re right in that it shouldn’t matter. but it does for academia. that’s why cvs for academics are 5x as long as anyone else’s cv. they have to list all accolades! no one reads that. :) very thought provoking piece! micahvandegrift 2013–09–25 at 7:08 pm dan, to your point about the fulbright – that’s why i point out in the article that there is a fulbright specialist program, designed especially for professionals who are not affiliated with an academic institution. i agree that academia makes a bigger deal out of awards than others. i think also that perhaps non-academic librarians are honored at the local/regional level and that those accolades aren’t often noted beyond those boundaries. i’d just like to see more of us being recognized for how our work matters outside the field, exactly as you mention your friend was able to do. thanks for reading! dan c. 2013–09–25 at 9:18 pm micah, having spent most of my library career outside of academe, i never saw that intense striving for accolades as i do now among academic librarians. is it about tenure? the academic process? i don’t know, but it does permeate all of academia. i think we, as a profession, are so diverse in our subjects and our jobs, is it possible to have a “library” accolade? movers & shakers does sort of mix it up, but how is that seen outside out own circle? someone winning a macarthur or a pulitzer or a fields medal is recognized (as you point out) more universally. can we do that in a profession that’s ala vs sla vs mla vs otherla? do we need a more recognized centralized body? good topic when it leads me to so many questions! :) pingback : staying motivated | ila best practices pingback : banishing your impostor: metacognition and myths of self. | info-mational brita 2013–10–25 at 6:43 pm in her book transforming our image, building our brand, valerie gross includes winning the howard county educator of the year award as a prime example of how her library’s effort to communicate value attracted recognition beyond the library field. she had to request that they be considered as candidates, but once they were included, the victory came swiftly. pingback : the spookiest thing i saw on the internet this week | storytime underground this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 25 jan emily ford /15 comments consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries “occupy boston – process” photo by flickr user tim pierce (cc by 2.0) by emily ford introduction since occupy wall street finally started getting mainstream media coverage, the idea of consensus decision-making seems to have permeated our american psyche. for me, it was waking up to a story on npr’s morning edition that i couldn’t shake. the story featured a discussion of the group meetings and decision-making process occurring in zuccotti park, where protesters deliberated their need for sleeping bags (chace, 2011)⁠. despite the somewhat flip tone of the piece, it stuck with me. the occupy librarianship trope hit the blogs a few weeks later, and we at lead pipe chimed in with our group post occupy librarianship: 5 variations on a theme (bonfield, frierson, ford, leeder, & vrabel, 2011)⁠. consensus was also on my mind at work. we had recently begun a search for a new university librarian, so discussions about our visions for the library and qualities desired for incoming administrators had been abundant. (i even found myself wondering if we needed a human microphone in our public services meetings.) i began questioning what i thought i knew about consensus: in professional organizations and in the work places are we understanding and engaging in consensus decision-making in a way that is wholly democratic? do we understand consensus decision-making theory? what does it look like in praxis? what potential does this decision-making process—which, in contemporary society, has been left to be practiced mostly by community action and social action groups—have for libraries? in this piece i will discuss what i have learned about the praxis and theory of consensus decision-making; its benefits and pitfalls; and point to some examples. then i will discuss what i think libraries can use and apply from consensus decision-making models. what is consensus decision-making? consensus decision-making is not a new concept or practice. in fact, it has been used for hundreds of years by native american/first nation groups and quakers (hare, 1973; infoshop, n.d.; rifkin, m., 2005).⁠ more recently, it has been used by anarchists; housing and food cooperatives; and other social action groups. several publications have documented these group consensus processes, such as martha’s rules; building united judgment: a handbook for consensus decision making; on conflict and consensus: a handbook on formal consensus decisionmaking, and consensus decision making. while each of these resources points to slightly different versions of the group decision-making process, they all follow a common thread of democratic decision-making practices. peter kakol (1995) designates “equal access to political decision making for all” (para. 6) as the first of his ten anarchist principles. he continues, “all those who are affected by a particular decision should be able to participate in the making of that decision” (para. 6). this sounds like what we commonly practice and understand as democracy, but it isn’t exactly what we practice. sager and gastil (2006) point out that “democratic” majority rules decision-making is “…the most commonly used group decision rule in the united states” (p.2). yet, majority-rules democracy enforces hierarchical relationships, pits sides against each other, and imposes a “pressure to conform” (moscovici, & doise. 1992; trans. halls, 1994, p. 66). it creates winners and losers in each decision. moreover, discussions preceding voting and majority-rules decisions can be greatly influenced by individuals’ social capital and authority in a group, and are tied to individuals present to participate in the decision-making process. in other words, what we have been understanding as democratic, is subject to disenfranchising individuals and re-enforcing power structures. consensus decision-making attempts to rectify these problems. i contend that the most common misconception regarding consensus decision-making assumes that decisions are reached unanimously. in fact, sager and gastil (2006) point to a difference between “consensus outcome” which implies unanimous agreement, and the “consensus decision rule,” which refers to a consensus decision-making process. comparison of decision making processes process outcome majority rules discussion occurs and a vote is taken. votes fall on both or all sides of an issue. the majority wins. consensus outcome discussion occurs and a vote is taken, with all votes falling on one side of an issue. consensus is reached via voting; i.e. there is nothing to contend. consensus decision rule “…is a complex, time-consuming social process” (sager & gastil, 2006, p. 3). it involves discussion of individual concerns. no vote is taken until all are comfortable moving forward. all individuals can support the decision, based on discussions and concerns raised during the decision-making process. decisions reached via consensus decision-making are rarely unanimous. instead, consensus means that a group works toward a common goal that supports a group’s collective vision and mission. “of course, full consent does not mean that everyone must be completely satisfied with the final outcome—in fact, total satisfaction is rare. the decision must be acceptable enough, however, that all will agree to support the group in choosing it” (avery, auvine, streibel, & weiss, 1981, p. 1). ⁠similarly, in his book empowerment and democracy in the workplace, john dew (1997) posits “…at any time, every group member is at least 70% comfortable with each decision the group has made” (p. 118). the difference between unanimity and consensus is that unanimity supposes all individuals agree fully on the action taken, whereas consensus stresses an individual’s support of a collective mission or vision. even though and individual may not fully agree with the tactics taken to get there, she can support the decision. one of the dangers of group decision-making–as addressed in numerous scholarly publications from social psychology and communications—is the concept of groupthink. groupthink occurs when groups sacrifice dialog. individuals potentially suppress concerns and differences in order to avoid conflict and achieve harmonious consensus. this results in group decisions that are potentially contentious and not those that best support the group’s end goal or desired outcome (dew, 1997; mohammed, 2001; mok & morris, 2010; moscovici & doise, 1992/1994; solomon, 2006)⁠. consensus decision-making processes attempt to avoid negative consequences from groupthink, social capital, authority, and social hierarchies. to accomplish this, groups must work to build respect and trust. in a trusting and respectful environment, discussion and conflict can occur and groupthink can be avoided. in fact, consensus cannot exist nor can it be achieved without conflict. in conflict & consensus, moscovici and doise (1992/1994) point to numerous studies showing that the stronger the conflict and disagreement in a consensus decision-making process, the more sticking-power resulting decisions have. additionally, scholars have shown that the greater the conflict involved in problem-solving and decision-making, the more creative the solutions and decisions (mohammed, 2001; moscovici et al., 1992/1994; murrell, stewart, & engel, 1993; troyer & youngreen, 2009)⁠. those decisions made via consensus achieve more buy-in, and in the end result in greater success due to the collective support for decisions. there are two interrelated aspects of consensus decision-making that must exist and function well in order for the process to be successful. first, individual participation in the decision-making process must occur. second, conflict must arise and be resolved. without participation and its proportional resulting conflict, consensus decision-making would not be a successful form of decision-making; the process is key to its success. in consensus decision-making, like other decision-making processes, conflict is managed in the form of open discourse. participants are expected to engage in active listening and respect each individual’s contribution to discussion. moreover, consensus decision-making should center on solving problems faced by the collective, not the individual. “consensus decision making works best when the participants believe they belong to the group, and the group belongs to them. this group solidarity develops out of mutual trust and respect. as trust and respect grow within the group, members will feel free to express opinions and feelings, and to disagree without fear of consequences.” (avery et al., 1981, p. 85)⁠ if members of a consensus group are not working toward the same goal, or they do not feel ownership and accountability for the success and well-being of the group, consensus decision-making will not work. so what does a consensus decision-making process look like in praxis? as mentioned earlier, there are many different forms consensus decision-making can take. in my research i found the process outlined in building united judgment, (avery et al., 1981)⁠ to be the most thorough and appealing. the second chapter, “a step-by-step process for consensus” thoroughly outlines the process from preparation to final decision. like many group decision-making processes, it begins with agenda setting and identifying a facilitator for the process. agenda items should be clearly defined and should state decisions that need to be made. after agenda items are introduced, discussion occurs. discussion consists of individuals presenting ideas as a response to the issue at hand, concerns and opinions about the issue/proposal, and responses to what has already been said. it is the facilitator’s responsibility to keep discussion on topic, provide clarification and rephrasing of discussion, summarize points, and ensure that all voices are heard and understood by the group. after discussion, the facilitator will test for consensus, making sure to summarize what has been most positively discussed as a solution or action. at this point more concerns can be raised and discussed, and consensus may be met, even though it may not fully appease everyone at the table. however, “…it must be one that all group members are willing to live with” (avery et al., 1981, p. 13).⁠ in addition to the discussion process, any group member may choose to block an action or decision. “blocking is a statement of the great seriousness of someone’s objections to a decision. in practical terms, it is a strong indication that the group requires more time to reach consensus” (avery et al., 1981, p. 29). (for more on blocking, read laird schaub’s (2003) short piece: blocking made easy (or at least easier): taking a look at the dynamics of dissent and mary ann renz’s (2006) the meaning of consensus and blocking for cohousing groups.) my explanation of the process is certainly an oversimplification.there are many other aspects built into consensus groups, including group building, problem solving, and even evaluation or assessment of a group’s decision-making process. martha’s rules, which can be used as an alternative to robert’s rules of order, is another consensus-based process. it outlines a five-step process for decision-making featuring separate steps for a “sense vote” and a “vote vote.”  “the point of the sense vote is to discover how the group feels about a proposal” (minahan, 1986, p. 54)⁠. the sense vote asks: who likes the proposal, who can live with the proposal, and who is uncomfortable with the proposal. in contrast, a “vote vote” is to: “…find out what those who are “uncomfortable” are uncomfortable about and then find out whether the group as a whole wishe(s) to decide by majority rule. the facilitator asks those who (are) uncomfortable to state the reasons for their discomfort….after hearing the objections of those who are uncomfortable, a vote is taken. the question is, ‘should we implement this decision over the stated objections of the minority, when a majority of us feel it is workable?’” (p. 55) there are numerous other variations for consensus decision-making, from the quaker and native american traditions to processes developed and used by small social action groups for governing meetings and decisions. generally, consensus decision-making takes into account the reasons individuals may disagree, and embraces conflict resolution in discussions. it is more democratic and group-oriented than a majority rules process. groups using consensus decision-making have stronger collective ties and accountability for the success of their organizations. it can’t all be coming up roses, can it? photo used with permission of the artist, faulkner short chances are your work groups and teams already use some form of consensus to make decisions and govern the work of your library. consensus decision-making is a fantastic process when it works, but it certainly has its drawbacks. first, consensus decision-making takes a long time. for each individual in a group to voice her concerns and for group members to respond can be a lengthy process in small groups, and even lengthier for large groups. for small groups, such as lead pipe’s editorial board, consensus can work extremely well. the larger a group, however, the more likely the process is to break down into groupthink. what’s more, sometimes decisions need to happen quickly and simply cannot wait for a consensus process. who will make decisions that need to occur quickly? in this situation, one hopes that a decision-maker remains true to the group’s collective vision, and can respond on behalf of the group. another issue is that of participation and social dynamics. group members should feel safe to talk openly about their concerns, and each individual should actively participate by speaking and listening during the decision-making process. when individuals dominate meetings or do not engage in active listening, the consensus process breaks down. implicit in social dynamics are hierarchies, power, elitism, and privilege that can contribute to dysfunction and invisible power dynamics in consensus decision-making (freeman, j., n.d.). therefore, individuals need to be aware of these pitfalls, and be dedicated to creating an environment that enables consensus decision-making processes, even at times when decisions do not need to be made. what’s more, library culture is stereotypically conflict averse. being a service-oriented profession, library workers aim to help people, not disagree with them; so it makes sense that our culture might feel uncomfortable with conflict. individuals may be hesitant to participate in discussions, and in doing so, open up meetings and discussions to be dominated by those who are more vocal. due to this aversion, library groups attempting to engage in consensus decision-making are at great risk of running into groupthink. group composition can also hinder consensus decision-making. groups may be comprised of a mix of administrators and workers, which, for some individuals may stymie participation and feelings of safety. what’s more, consensus may break down if all individuals who will be affected by decisions are not involved in the decision-making process. libraries are not immune to this dilemma. how frequently do teams of administrators or professionals make decisions that impact classified staff, student workers, and others who weren’t part of the discussion or decision-making process? external factors challenging consensus decision-making in libraries are those organizational structure imposed on libraries by their governing bodies. cities, counties, corporations and universities—those bodies to which most libraries report—are typically structured hierarchically, with departments and committees reporting up the chain of command. frequently libraries in these organizations mirror this structure. this does not mean that consensus decision-making cannot occur, however, the process must co-exist and function within a larger structure that may not fully support the consensus decision-making process. it may be that your working group uses consensus to make decisions while the entire organization does not. it may happen that your team makes a decision, which is then reported up to administration. administration may either support, modify, or rescind the decision. this might feel disempowering and you might see it as an abrogation of your group’s value within the library. in this case, it would make sense to open dialog with administration to discuss this outcome. perhaps administration’s reasoning is strong enough, that if it were presented via a consensus process, your group’s decision may not have had the same outcome. despite these challenges, consensus decision-making seems to be a promising possibility for libraries. moving toward a consensus model libraries are institutions that have historically been dedicated to the free and open exchange of ideas. in their current form, they work collaboratively with their communities, establishing and maintaining consortial relationships, and providing a supportive space for dissent and discourse. it is only intuitive that libraries could operate with the same machinations of open discourse and decision-making processes, much like the collective in zuccotti park. for libraries consensus decision-making can create strong organizations that will encounter great future successes. in 2005 barbara fister and kathie martin presented their paper embracing the challenge of change through collegial decision-making (fister & martin, 2005)⁠ at acrl, which offers a different model for libraries. in it, they describe their library’s reorganization into a flat organizational structure. “rather than have a director we would elect a chair every three years as other departments did. the chair, as ‘first among equals,’ would add the tasks for coordinating the library’s efforts and liaison with the administration to his or her portfolio” (p. 4). fister & martin present a model in which their library is governed by consensus not only in faculty groups, but by classified staff as well. of their organizational chart they say, “this new chart, two overlapping circles of responsibilities…erased the old vestiges of hierarchy lodged in nominal supervisory roles given to librarians over paraprofessionals and showed the collegial conversation extended to the entire library staff” (p. 4). gustavus adolphus college’s library is certainly a creative example of how librarians and library workers have engaged in a consensus model. despite the challenges of implementing consensus decision-making in libraries, it should be well worth it. there are a number of things you could do to try to work toward improving consensus decision-making in your library: talk to your library director, your supervisor, your mentor, your colleagues about the idea of consensus decision-making and see what they think. evaluate your current decision-making model. does it work for your group? would group members be open a more consensus-based model? get training in good meeting facilitation practices for group members. you and your colleagues could learn active listening and other communication skills that contribute to successful consensus decision-making. try to work on embracing conflict and productive discussions in meetings. work toward creating a safe and respectful environment where each individual feels safe discussing her concerns in a group. try using martha’s rules next time you hold a meeting. libraries can be very siloed organizations. how often are public services staff involved in cataloging, acquisitions, and electronic resources management decisions, and vice versa? what will happen when catalogers are alongside instruction librarians thinking of new approaches to resource discovery? consensus can open opportunities by deconstructing silos and starting to create new models for library decision-making. libraries that successfully engage in consensus decision-making will see improvement in making decisions that best serve their patrons; more cohesion in staff and accountability; and are likely to experience more creativity in problem solving. individuals in these libraries will most likely become more dedicated to serving the organization and working towards its shared vision and mission. the reason these changes may occur, is that the decision-making and visioning is shared—individuals all contribute to the definition of and accomplishment of goals. individuals would begin creating and environment of respect and trust, enabling them to participate in a democratic decision-making process. what has been your experience with consensus? many thanks to barbara fister, robert schroeder, gretta siegel, and sarah ford for providing perspective and thoughtful comments on this piece. additional thanks to erin dorney, hilary davis and brett bonfield from in the library with the lead pipe for copyedits and even more thoughts. and finally, a shout out to faulkner short for letting me use his image in this post. he takes stunningly beautiful photographs. bibliography avery, m., auvine, b., streibel, b., & weiss, l. (1981). building united judgment: a handbook for consensus decision making. madison: the center for conflict resolution. also available at: http://www.archive.org/details/buildingunitedjudgmentahandbookforconsensusdecisionmaking bonfield, b., frierson, e., ford, e., leeder, k., & vrabel, l. a. (2011). occupy librarianship: 5 variations on a theme. in the library with the lead pipe, (october, 26). retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/occupy-librarianship/ chace, z. (2011). occupy wall street: where everybody has a say in everything : planet money : npr. morning edition. retrieved january 13, 2012, from http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/10/05/141048592/occupy-wall-street-where-everybody-has-a-say-in-everything dew, j. (1997). consensus decision making. in j. dew, empowerment and democracy in the workplace (109-122). westport: quorum books. fister, b., & martin, k. (2005). embracing the challenge of change through collegial decision-making. currents and convergence: navigating the rivers of change: proceedings of the twelfth national conference of the association of college and research libraries, 12, p. 1-7).retrieved from http://homepages.gac.edu/~fister/acrl2005paper.pdf freeman, j. (n.d.). the tyranny of structurelessness. retrieved january 20, 2012 from http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm hare, a. p. (1973). group decision by consensus: reaching unity in the society of friends. sociological inquiry, 43(1), 75–84. infoshop. (n.d.). consensus decision-making – infoshop openwiki. retrieved december 11, 2011, from http://wiki.infoshop.org/consensus_decision-making minahan, a. (1986). on the bias. affilia, 1(2), 53-56. mohammed, s. (2001). toward an understanding of cognitive consensus in a group decision-making context. the journal of applied behavioral science, 37(4), 408-425. doi:10.1177/0021886301374002 mok, a., & morris, m. w. (2010). an upside to bicultural identity conflict: resisting groupthink in cultural ingroups. journal of experimental social psychology, 46(6), 1114-1117. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.020 moscovici, s. & doise, w. (1994). conflict & consensus: a general theory of collective decisions. (w.d. halls, trans.). thousand oaks: sage publications. (original work published 1992). murrell, a. j., stewart, a. c., & engel, b. t. (1993). consensus versus devil’s advocacy: the influence of decision process and task structure on strategic decision making. journal of business communication, 30(4), 399-414. doi:10.1177/002194369303000402 renz, m. a. (2006). the meaning of consensus and blocking for cohousing groups. small group research, 37(4), 351-376. doi:10.1177/1046496406291184 rifkin, m. (2005). representing the cherokee nation: subaltern studies and native american sovereignty. boundary 2, 32(3), 55-86. sager, k. l., & gastil, j. (2006). the origins and consequences of consensus decision making : a test of the social consensus model. southern communication journal, 71(1), 1-24. schaub, l. (2003). blocking made easy (or at least easier): taking a look at the dynamics of dissent. communities, (119). solomon, m. (2006). groupthink versus the wisdom of crowds : the social epistemology of deliberation and dissent. the southern journal of philosophy, 44(s1), 28-42. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2006.tb00028.x troyer, l., & youngreen, r. (2009). conflict and creativity in groups. journal of social issues, 65(2), 409-427. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.2009.01606.x collective, consensus decision-making, decision-making, decisions, libraries, organizational structure perspective and doing good work q&a: lead pipe on professional development 15 responses pingback : consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries — library journal reviews michael 2012–01–26 at 3:25 am thanks for the interesting post and the interesting links! it’s always nice to see a different point of view put forward. i’ve been in different groups (left or green) that have practised consensus deliberately and a couple (non-political) that practice it, though the folks involved wouldn’t think of it as such. (by which i mean, though nominally decisions are taken by vote, if someone disagreed the group tried to fix the problems.) i’ve also been in too many meetings at work where i’m sure it could have been useful; though anything that makes meetings go for even longer… and i think that’s the biggest potential problem with consensus style. people already don’t like meetings, and anything that makes them longer is sure to be disliked. (also, i’d never heard of jesse shera before today. i’m a non-usa library student.) emily ford 2012–02–01 at 1:44 pm i think this is really interesting that people might be engaging in consensus, but aren’t thinking of it as such. i have also been in situations where i disagreed with the need for more meetings–where’s the compromise between consensus and efficiency? rebecca 2012–01–26 at 5:59 pm this is a really fantastic post – thank you for sharing it! i am one of many librarians with the audre lorde to howard zinn library of occupy boston, and it so happens that we recently created a reading/resource guide for the ob community on consensus-building and nonviolent communication. (available here: http://wiki.occupyboston.org/images/c/cd/consensusnonviolentcommunicationresourceguide.pdf). we had been asked by some members of the ob community to create it in anticipation of a “co-creating a safer community” forum. i just shared this post with the a-z library listserv, and i hope that it’ll help inform intentional communication within our own community as well as each of our interactions in the larger lis field. again, many thanks. emily ford 2012–02–01 at 1:10 pm you are most welcome. i’m glad to hear of the resources on nonviolent communication you’re making available to the community. in general, i think we can learn a lot about intentional communication in libraries and in every workplace. kim leeder 2012–01–27 at 11:45 am emily, you’re so amazing at presenting ideals in a way that makes me think, “i could do that!” as a new library director i’d really like to figure out how to build consensus decisionmaking into my new organization. i’ve been recently working on a future-thinking org chart, since my college is growing like crazy and we anticipate doing a lot of hiring in the next few years (er, forever). the trick, to me, is how do i build this idea of consensus into an org chart? who reports to whom? the flattest possible scenario means everyone in the whole place would report to me, and i’m not sure that’s workable once we get larger. or can we have multiple reporting layers but still make decisions in the same way? i’m just not sure about how this looks where the rubber meets road when we figure in the fact that everyone needs a supervisor to meet the requirements of our larger organizational structure. emily ford 2012–02–01 at 1:14 pm kim, this is a really interesting and exciting conundrum that you have. what would our organizations look like if we had the support to do re-org for future thinking? i think one of the things that you might think about is what the contracts between your administration and its reporting bodies say. i discovered, via a discussion with a colleague at mpow, that our union contract discusses faculty governance– but that in contract, our faculty body can make any recommendation it wants to administration, but administration has every right to completely ignore those recommendations. it’s almost like being in a right-to-work state. you might be able to talk to the folks over at gustavus adolphus and see how they are liking the re-org that they did to use collegial decision-making; they might have some tips for you as you consider your future thinking. kathleen 2012–02–01 at 8:14 am will be recommending to my classes. emily ford 2012–02–01 at 1:42 pm thanks, kathleen! juan 2012–02–01 at 12:35 pm i gotta admit, as wonderful as this all sounds, and as much as i’m all for democratic decision-making, i’ve rarely seen it work at my library. committee work here suffers from consensus decision-making. it drags out decision-making and is an inefficient use of staff time. the thing is, our director wants staff buy-in. as such, she pushes committee decision-making. committee membership reflects the diversity of the library by director design (i.e. she likes to assign persons from multiple departments rather than just those with hands-on knowledge). this means that a committee devoted to, for instance, redesign of the library website might include persons who have no knowledge of web design or the principles of site architecture. those who have a better grasp of design principles often end up locking horns with those who think it’s as simple as formatting a word document. i’m simplifying, but you get my point. did i mention that the decision-making process drags on when decisions are made in committee? so much wasted staff time, which means wasted taxpayer money. i would prefer that a very small group of people (2-3 people) with hands-on knowledge of the issue come up with recommendations that can be pitched to a larger group rather than making decisions within a larger group/committee. when i saw this post, i immediately thought of recent nytimes article that critiques group decision-making: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html worth a read. honestly, i prefer work-democracy (see wilhelm reich’s “the mass psychology of fascism”). in short, those who do the work make the decisions. people not directly involved in the work are not involved in the decision-making process. you can provide others with opportunities for input–and should–but it should never be about involving persons from disparate departments, etc simply to make people feel like they had a hand in the decision-making. and i hate it when admins use committees to create the illusion of consensus decision-making, but then toss aside committee recommendations if they don’t jive with the output they were looking for before committee membership was even delegated. emily ford 2012–02–01 at 1:41 pm i’m so glad that you took the time to comment, juan, and show the other side of what can happen in consensus processes. there are many arguments out there that point to consensus hindering democratic process. for instance, i was just sent a link to a piece by howard ryan called blocking progress: consensus decision making in the anti-nuclear movement. while i haven’t yet had the time to read it, i will be interested to see if this piece points to the privilege problem that jo freeman discusses. i agree that there are times when we just can’t get things done by consensus and things can break down. at this point, what can be borrow from consensus that will still enable us to have some collective decision-making, but that won’t block progress? also, how can we engage in these practices at work and collaborate with an administrative body that will respect this process, instead of ignore it? (see my previous comment in response to kim discussing the contract between my union and my university’s administration). i’m going to give that reich a read… juan 2012–02–01 at 3:12 pm if i might go somewhat off-topic and rant a bit more, i’d say that the main problem facing humanity and progress on any level is the fact that to greater and lesser degrees humans are–across the board–irrational. and since people in admin are merely human, they are bound to implement all sorts of irrational practices and make all manner of irrational decisions (and they do). luckily, those at the “to a lesser degree” end of the spectrum keep things moving in a generally positive direction most of the time; however, meaningful progress is an incredible lofty goal. in a sense, humanity has been making the same mistakes and such since the advent of opposable thumbs. we seem stymied in terms of our evolution as a species and choose to delude and content ourselves with the notion that advancements in the tools we use to kill each other, keep each other alive a little longer, communicate with each other, etc., reflect the continued evolution of our species. the reality is that building more powerful weapons, drugs, apps and whatnot is not progress; the reality is that we’re failing again and again to make meaningful philosophical leaps. as bill hicks put it, “evolution did not stop with the development of thumbs….it’s time to evolve ideas”. but humans are irrational and almost universally in denial of this fact. sorry to wax so cynical, but it’s getting to a point where the folks who are “to a greater degree” irrational are trashing the ecosystem to such an extent that all other considerations seem moot and i’m incredibly pessimistic about the future. to quote bill hicks again, “we’re a virus with shoes”. and the world will likely be a better place when we’re gone. regardless, i’m glad that these conversations are happening, that there are people looking at disparate points of view, thinking critically and all that, for this kind of exchange is truly the only way we’ll move forward. if only the majority of the people on this planet felt the same way. yeah, i’m extremely cynical, but maybe, just maybe, it’s not too late. john buschman 2012–03–15 at 1:06 pm emily & commenters, i’ve dragged my feet for a very long time responding & posting my response for a number of reasons. emily most certainly does not minimize the difficulties, nor oversell the benefits. and when i was not a manager or an administrator, i found this process useful to forge a community of interest to counter seriously bad (bad, not poor) administration. however: 1) like neighborhood watches, these kind of initiatives tend to get energy from problems or bad situations that need to be addressed (like my experience). most support/engagement melts away after the problem is solved – or it drags on a bit. library workers often “just want to come in and do their jobs.” consensus decision-making is best used selectively in my experience. 2) (channeling my inner juan here): people weasel on their commitments. simply put, you can’t collectively peer into one anothers’ souls to see if people are being up front. i’ve experienced this too: based on consensus, i’ve taken enormous political risks in the name of the group, only to realize just how alone i was in taking those risks. library workers tend to be risk averse, and in the end, someone has to take responsibility. 3) which leads me to: the role of leadership. this is tricky, because i don’t want to pull the “its lonely at the top” thing. but… institutions pay leaders more to take responsibility — but that also includes morale, institutional integrity, and so on. in the end, a good leader straddles that very thin line between opening things up and then seeing them through in a responsible, open, and communicative way — or explaining what ended up not getting done and why. 4) (inner juan again): there are snakes-in-the-grass. ulterior motives can and often masquerade as for the benefit of the whole (a specialized project, off-loading disliked work, or simply revenge). i actually had someone a number of months ago suggest that we not upgrade our computers and save the money (so he wouldn’t have to learn anything new on it). which brings me to a closely related point: some folks are simply unwilling or unable to think about a larger whole. it is simply beyond them intellectually or ethically. hence, the stable historical examples of consensus decision-making tend to be moral or ethnic communities with strong ties in place, and few opportunities for exit. and hence, consensus decision-making in other contemporary arenas (like occupy & some of the other examples noted) tend to be temporary contracts. i don’t know if its human nature (ala juan), but it definitely is part of western neoliberal culture. so, my take: consensus decision-making is highly, highly useful and productive for something very episodic like long-range or strategic planning for a library; it is probably the way a smaller unit (w/oversight to protect integrity and distribution of work) should do its business. that it can and does work, often when properly set up, obviates the “heroic leadership” nonsense we’re so often fed. but, lets not fool ourselves that libraries would be perfect if only the inmates ran … (never mind!). pingback : consensus decision-making and its possibilities in libraries | loomio pingback : weekly link rounduplone star librarian | lone star librarian this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct in the library with the lead pipe reader poll – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 17 apr editorial board /1 comments in the library with the lead pipe reader poll this poll is no longer being monitored, but we left it available in order to make the results article make sense. we’d still like to hear from you though. please get in touch with us via our contact form instead. by editorial board we at in the library with the lead pipe are taking the next two weeks to ask for reader feedback. we’re coming up on our fourth year of publishing and have lots of ideas of where we’d like to go from here, but we want to hear from you. please take a few minutes to let us know. about us, poll answering questions about library impact on student learning zen and the art of constructive criticism 1 response sanjeet mann 2012–04–23 at 8:06 pm good luck with your fourth year of publication, and thanks for asking us what we think! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct #hacklibschool – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 13 oct micah vandegrift /18 comments #hacklibschool in the library with the lead pipe welcomes guest poster micah vandegrift. micah is a graduate student in library and information studies at florida state university. he currently lives in brooklyn, ny, and is interning at the brooklyn public library. micah’s education has focused on 20th century american culture, digital media and the humanities and he hopes to work in an art library, museum or academic library in the near future (he’s also on the market, so contact him directly if interested!). he loves hanging out on the internet and can be found tweeting, blogging and chattering about web tech trends, libraries and music pretty regularly. contact micah at micahvandegrift@gmail.com or google voice # 347-687-2096. lead pipe is pleased to provide a venue for the hacklibschool project, and we hope you’ll join in! update february 2011: the hack library school initiative now has a blog! photo by flickr user micah vandegrift (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) the “what.” by micah vandegrift if you haven’t heard of hacking the academy, i’d strongly suggest you look into it. during the week of may 21-28th a group of academics, librarians and higher ed techies crowdsourced submissions for a born-digital book. they compiled a variety of articles and blog posts focused around the theme of shared professional development resources, questions and innovations, with the goal of taking these important adaptations from across the field and centralizing the conversations in a digital space outside the institution, thus ‘hacking’ the academy. what i admire most about the hacking the academy project (#hackacad on twitter) is the fact that this group took it upon themselves to engage professional development in higher education and, utilizing social media and other technologies, craft it to their specifications. call it diy, curation, hacking or what have you, the point is because of the ever-increasing sociality of the real-time web people are able to interact with one another on a whole new level. when this ability is applied to the professional sphere, the possibilities are bountiful. this post is equal part inquisition and proposition that it is time for the emerging library professionals (we students) to take an active role in what we learn, need to learn, didn’t learn, and wish we had learned in library school by curating our own hack. from what i know of librarianship thus far, as a student in florida state university’s masters in library and information studies program, this field is highly adaptive to new technologies, and there are more than a few cases where libraries really stand out for their technological implementations, e.g. the hub, darien library. yet, as i have been scanning the social web these past months, i have come across more than a few posts from my peers wondering if they missed something in school, or offering their own posts on “what i wished i’d learned…” regarding the practicalities of librarian life. is this indicative of blight in the system? maybe. is it perhaps a product gen-y’s increasing openness to use blogs for constructive criticism? possibly. is it worth a glance to see if library school is not lining up so well with the profession (a constant conversation in the field) in the eyes of recent, current students? absolutely.   the “why.” aside from having to actually find a job, the thought of being unprepared for the field is incredibly scary. entering the profession with a degree and discovering that there are some skills or core knowledge that you missed is not the way to begin a career. i think this point gets at the heart of one of library school’s broad themes, and one that may be confusing to students; is this a professional or theoretical degree? when i chose to pursue the mlis i did so under the assumption that i was going to gain some “practical skills” to enhance my previous m.a. in american studies. i had no idea that social science and information theory was going to be so much of the program. the concepts i’ve learned and the skills i’ve obtained will no doubt be useful, but i didn’t feel prepared at all for the coursework, and am now starting to wonder how all of this will transfer to my day-to-day life in the field. i am interning right now in the web applications department at the brooklyn public library, and despite being 75% of the way through my degree, i do not feel entirely confident talking about or working with the tools necessary to do the job. this is not to say that there are not plenty of students who begin the degree totally prepared and transition right into successful careers and do very well. but i can say with some confidence that these issues arise for more students than one might care to admit. opening up conversations on this kind through a library school hack could better prepare future students, and also provide tips, advice and encouragement to those struggling through. then, there is an issue of identity that remains a complication. are we “librarians”, “information professionals”, “knowledge managers”? both kim leeder and char booth have written on this topic recently, which inspired a lot of my thoughts for this post. if working librarians are having such identity crises, what of us still in school!? thankfully, one of my courses did introduce the idea that a spectrum of careers exist wherein the mlis will be useful, but i am still unsure how to market myself on a job market. i will hold a master of library and information studies, and would love a useful title or phrase to promote my skill set, which will be broader than many people’s understanding of “librarian.” i tend to lean toward “information professional” although that still leaves so many questions and is nebulous at best. if the profession is set on the precipice of some great, inevitable change in definition, how is my course on foundations of information professions going to be relevant next year when i am job searching? additionally, with the information landscape changing so rapidly, i find that textbooks, course syllabi and conference topics that are supposed to be authoritative are lacking valuable content related to current issues in the field and are behind the curve on engaging new ideas. for instance, i am intrigued by the concept of transliteracy, the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, a relevant and pressing topic in the field. i discovered transliteracy through following librarians on twitter, and have yet to see it addressed in a textbook. the speed at which professional life is evolving right now due to immersive social-technological layers is, in my opinion, far more effective in preparing me for work as an information professional than a textbook that is barely two years old, of no fault to authors and researchers. it is in this kind of a space that a dynamic, participatory text edited and updated in near real-time could function. to take this argument a step further, i would also argue the case that the professional organization(s) that we all participate in are no match for the relationships that are possible and the value that can be created through curating one’s own network via twitter, linkedin or facebook. to say it plainly, i am beginning to think that the staid traditions and topics of librarianship that are addressed in library school are outdated. if so, what can be done to keep this amazing profession on the cutting edge? finally, as a student inundated with articles, papers and conflicting theories to weed through, not to mention any hobbies or other interests i’d like to keep up with, i find it difficult and overwhelming to dig into a professional journal, or get more in touch with recently published research, which traditionally formed the cutting edge in a field. i understand that research is important, and i agree wholeheartedly that it may appease some of my desires for an accurate sense of relevancy for my degree, but as a gen-y reader and a former researcher myself, often my interest is just not piqued in academic publications. i like to say that two of the most important advancements of the recent social web are the comment box and the “share” button, both of which do not exist in the majority of academic publishing (kudos to plos one and shakespeare quarterly for some pioneering work there.) the paper to conference to journal model does not feel immediate or dynamic enough for my plugged-in sensibilities, although i recognize the value of the peer review process. i’d like to think that projects like hacking the academy are moving us toward content curation as a form of peer review and digital presentation as equal to analog publication. models like this excite me about my participation in a field open to evolving technological workspaces. the how. on oct. 24th, 2008 char booth guest posted a “library student bill of rights” on the popular tame the web blog. as a guiding document, i think this is a great example of a model for change. she stated, “in full recognition that it is far easier to tear down than to build up, i leave it up to the faculty and administrators of the library school world to do something about it.” however, i disagree with her on this point. two years have passed and the “rights to challenge, innovate, redefine” and more touted in this document are not, to my knowledge, being actively pursued or employed. i think ms. booth had the right idea, but placed responsibility on the wrong group. armed now with tools to organize and collaborate, it is the current and recent students and professionals who must “do something about it.” so, in alignment with my belief in the social web, crowdsourcing and user-curation, i propose that the body of library school students should become the change they wish to see enacted. thus the #hackacad connection; why isn’t there a collaborative, online text like that for library school? there are enough people writing prolifically about their experiences in school, and through transitions to the field, that it would be easy to gather posts on a variety of topics. in fact, as i was researching this post, i came across a post by bobbi newman titled “so you want to be a librarian? a guide for those considering an mls, current students & job seekers” that sets up a great starting framework for a #hacklibschool experiment. there is no shortage of content already floating around the web that would fit into a web-text like this. what i propose is that we (the students, the bloggers, the web 2.0ers) get active, curate this content, and centralize it. we are all familiar with the variety of tools that are available to make this happen, and the process for growing, contributing to and curating content will be open and adaptable to new ideas. great with coding? feel free to build a framework for the site. enjoy social media? spread the word. this is a chance to get creative, showcase your skills, and participate in something that will resonate in our field. practically: hacklibschool will begin as a google doc, open to all as of today, and eventually move to its own webspace. content should have a focus on library school, providing tips, insights, challenges, definitions or any other type of “hack” that a current or future student might benefit from. nominations and submissions will be welcomed for the remainder of the month of october. articles will be organized by relevant topics. all organization and editing of the document will be entirely crowdsourced, requiring participation, engagement and some level of commitment from involved parties. hacklibschool can and should be a meme that exists across many networks. it can and should be a wiki, a delicious tag, a twitter hashtag, a .com, a .org, a flickr group, an unconference, etc. other than that, hacklibschool has no other set parameters. i’d like this to truly be a group-owned project, and i only see my involvement as a progenitor. eventually, a team may need to be formed to keep the project focused and forward moving. living up to the dynamic, adaptive nature of the webtext, perhaps a quarterly review will be necessary. i shy away from nominating an editor, but that may be a future iteration of the project. i’m open to suggestions as to how to continue this project as a seminal document for our profession. i’d like to clear about my intentions behind this idea. this is not meant to subvert the education that library school provides, but to supplement it. not sure of the differences between an mlis and an mls? well, here are three perspectives from bloggers who wrote on that exact topic. can’t remember the top five articles that every library student should have read? here are two reviews and a delicious tag to follow. wondering what is happening right now in librarianship that can help you be better prepared for the field? here are the most comprehensive twitter lists, and two emerging scholars who blog regularly. i imagine this serving as a dynamic, adaptive document highlighting what one can expect from grad school, as well as some tips and ideas about the profession as a whole. (key words: dynamic and adaptive, living on the web and allowed to change and morph as the field does over time.) for those who skipped to the end for the summary – this is an invitation to participate in the redefinitions of library school, and the thus the field of librarianship, using the web as a collaborative space outside of any specific university or organization. this is an ambitious project, i know, but i have the sense that peers and colleagues are ready for this. imagine standards and foundations of the profession that we will create, decided upon by us, outside of the institutional framework. ideas like the democratization of the semantic web, crowdsourcing, and folksonomies allow this to exist and we should be taking advantage of it. what will the information professions be next year if we define it for ourselves today? if we had a voice in the development of curriculum, what would that degree entail? this is my challenge to you; participate or come up with a better idea. how would you hack library school? thank you to trevor dawes, ellie collier, emily ford, and kim leeder for reading an early draft. your comments were very insightful and made me remember the value of collaboration in academia. hacklibschool, librarianship, library school, social networking, technology articulating value in special collections: are we collecting data that matter? the desk setup 18 responses ellie 2010–10–19 at 9:19 am i’m excited to see the gdoc is getting good participation. thanks for thinking of us as a launching point! kim leeder 2010–10–20 at 9:11 am hey, thanks for pointing that out, ellie. and to think i was disappointed that there was no discussion in the comments! obviously everyone’s shooting right to the doc. cool! micah 2010–10–20 at 3:43 pm thanks for hosting it! it looks like there is some real potential for this project. fingers crossed! vanessa reyes 2011–01–19 at 9:34 am this is excellent! totally looking forward to contributing in the near future :) im in your info arch class by the way :) vb rodrigues 2011–02–16 at 5:42 pm this is amazing. i can’t remember ever feeling riled up by an article discussing course of study! it would suck to have to monetize this venture, but putting it on a ning or other platform might make a huge difference in the ability to organize and access the compiled information. the google doc is already a bit hard to read through. of course it would be wonderful if a web developer slash lis student came along and wanted to create something, too. :) pingback : >keeping the creativity alive | my blog pingback : hacklibschool and my future. « the infornado pingback : a thank you letter « hack library school pingback : new writers! « hack library school pingback : berufsethik in „hack library school“ « ethik von unten pingback : how i hacked library school – web apps! « hack library school pingback : a cool thing: hacklibschool « pingback : hack library school crossover week | gradhacker pingback : hack library school « somebody's autobiography pingback : chosen as a writer for hack library school! | christopher eaker's eportfolio pingback : crowdsourcing and collaboration: 20th century style! « librarian in a banana suit pingback : “where do i even begin?” or, a newcomer’s tour « hack library school pingback : collaboration and the library world | hack library school this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct disappearances – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 12 jan david morris /0 comments disappearances in the library with the lead pipe welcomes david b. morris. in between twenty years as a self-employed writer, morris held professorships at the university of iowa, at the university of virginia, and at stanford university. his wider understanding of books and lives owes much to his wife, ruth, a technical services librarian and library administrator, now retired and incurably ill, who holds a phd in library and information science from the university of michigan. this essay is written in her honor. photo by odd :-) (c/o) disappearances by david morris lost & un-lost in anne carson’s nox “the book is perhaps the most charged, cathected object in western civilization, representing, according to freud’s analysis of his own dream of the botanical monograph, the mother.”1 anne carson almost always eventually circles back to eros. her brilliantly inventive first book, eros the bittersweet, published in 1959, traced in classical greek philosophy and literature a triangular geometry of desire: lover, beloved, and the gap or obstacle or space that separates them. this triangle, she argues, is basic not only to the earliest erotic verse but also to the emergence of the modern psyche. nox, her latest book, if book is the right word for this unusual, resistant, boundary-crossing text, indirectly returns to eros in what is ostensibly an extended elegy or memorial or (as she once calls it) epitaph on the death of her brother. nox (latin for “night”) focuses on loss, but the death of carson’s canadian-born brother (in faraway copenhagen) is not the sole focus. almost half the text—on the left-hand or verso page—is given over to an extended glossary on every word (one word per page) in a famous elegy by the roman poet catullus on the death of his brother (in faraway asia). moreover, while nox follows these two parallel tracks, or parallel lost brothers, it also moves sideways to meditate on related issues, such as how writers or historians can ever truly understand a disappearing past. the collage-like fragments, in their poignant incompleteness, lend to nox a philosophical and poetic texture that invites a questioning or meditative response. they immerse us in a semantic night where clarities vanish and mysteries emerge. what does this single death have to do with questions about time, loss, desire, writing, and disappearance? above all, why does the book take such an unusual, cumbersome, and inconvenient material shape? for starters, nox arrives in a box. further, the box does not contain what you’d expect—a bound text—but the pages are printed as adjacent sides of one continuous accordion-folded sheet. right from the outset, then, without attributing intentions to carson, readers might wish to understand nox as a book that calls attention to its place in a history of books from which it conspicuously diverges. the history in fact is rapidly changing. it appears that printed books may soon survive mainly in niche or boutique markets, kept like classical scrolls in special collections or brought out like the torah for use on ceremonial occasions. as readers and librarians today can’t help knowing, digital publication is transforming both the social environment and the material process within which reading occurs. for example: amazon reports that its customers are buying bestsellers in e-book by a ratio of two to one over print. in the first nine months of 2010, it sold three times as many e-books as compared with the same period in 2009.2 the association of american publishers says that print sales in the five major trade segments from reporting companies fell 7.5% in the period from january through september 2010, while e-book sales rose 188.4%.3 nox—according to the meditative argument developed in what follows—is a book that in its material form stages an indirect but firm resistance to the disappearance of books. a resistance to the disappearance of books in nox coincides with the affirmation of what carson once described as an “erotics of reading.” the circling back to eros has already begun. but what, exactly, is eros? this logically prior question, which deserves a response, can’t be answered with logic. eros is the antagonist of logos. logic and reason are its sworn enemies. even when employed as a loose synonym for love or when merged with (its diminutive roman counterpart) cupid, eros entails a complex history that disrupts clear definitions. the early greek poet hesiod describes eros as the oldest of the gods: a primal cosmic creative force. in plato’s symposium several centuries later, eros has become a subject of debate—a debate interrupted, appropriately, when an uninvited, drunken lover breaks in looking for socrates. scholars today have reinvigorated the debate—after freud’s influential opposition between eros and thanatos—but hardly settled it.4 the chief modern theorist of eros—librarian, writer, and polymath georges bataille—offers what he acknowledges is not a definition when he describes eroticism as like a life force: “assenting to life up to the point of death.”5 eros—the center to anne carson’s wide circumference of multi-genre texts—is far easier to describe than to define, and bataille offers two additional descriptions especially useful in thinking about nox. first, he details how eros differs from animal sexuality in one crucial point: “it calls inner life into play.” it enlists consciousness, with its intricate deviations, in the service of libido. second, bataille exposes the dark and painful side of eros, where erotic pleasure and sexual passion, at their limits, make contact with various modes of destruction.6 “the whole business of eroticism,” he insists, “is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives.”7 from classical lyric to tragedy, eros disrupts the consciousness that it calls into play. it rips apart normal lives and uproots communities. not only is eros not identical with romantic love, but eros regularly shatters settled love relations with casual flings and disastrous betrayals. it persists in love’s absence or in the death of love. the authoritative epithet for eros that carson borrows from sappho translates literally as “sweet-bitter” (glukupikron). the bittersweetness of eros is, for carson, inseparable from her responses to a brother’s fatal disappearance. nox—a title just three letters short of disappearance—confronts loss without consolation. elegists traditionally counter loss with forms of solace, as when milton links the drowned shepherd lycidas with the natural cycle of setting and rising suns. lycidas (“sunk low, but mounted high”) rides the cycle of consolation to join the heavenly host who “wipe the tears forever from his eyes.” carson’s bleak title erases hope—recalling the line from a famous erotic poem by catullus in which the poet (pressing her to yield) invites his coy mistress to imagine the nothingness after death: soles occidere et redire possunt: nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. the most famous translation of these lines is a gorgeous seduction speech in ben jonson’s dark jacobean comedy volpone (1606): suns that set may rise again, but if once we lose this light ‘tis, with us, perpetual night. carson, as professor of classics, might forgive a small paroxysm of grammatical pedantry over a key word that disappears from jonson’s translation: dormienda. first-year latin students, listen up. future passive participles carry the sense of required action ahead: for example, agenda, from agere (= to set in motion, to do), means something that must be done. dormienda (from dormire = to sleep) means not just sleeping but a sleep ahead that must be slept. death for catullus is no gentle goodnight, no keatsian amorous embrace. it ends cycles. zero heavenly host and zero regeneration. death for catullus is an endless (perpetua) unbroken (una) night that must be slept all the way through. disappearance from the sunlit world (where to be is to appear) simply and utterly erases being. the enforced unending night thus permits no glimmer of hope or solace for survivors. nox is not a writer’s inspirational journey through loss and grief to recovery. it is an act of resistance. carson’s book, that is, takes a non-elegiac stand as a writer’s resistance to disappearance—disappearance of her brother, disappearance of books—in the form of a collage-like memorial built out of scraps and shards. nox resists disappearance not only in its collage-like compilation of semantic fragments but also, more important, in its material form. readers must deal with nox not only as a verbal text (signs woven into meanings) but also as a thing. “things are what we encounter,” writes modernist leo stein, as quoted by the contemporary inventor of “thing-theory,” bill brown, “ideas are what we project.”8 what readers encounter, as we struggle with the thingy boxed continuous accordion-folded sheet, is less the projection of ideas than a book that cannot be opened. you can open the box all right, but not the text. the text can only be unfolded, like a classical scroll, or perhaps like meanings that cannot find a consensus, or like an endless night. we scroll down computer screens or flip virtual pages on e-readers with newfound ease, but nothing is easy about nox. nox shapes the experience of reading as an inescapable and radical estrangement from the familiar, everyday, previously unquestioned world of codex-style hard cover and paperback books. the estrangement gets stranger as readers unfold the accordion-pleated text and encounter the facsimile of a scrapbook that carson put together presumably with her own hands. moreover, nox employs advanced photo-technology to create the uncanny visual illusion that what we are reading is less a two-dimensional facsimile than a weirdly three-dimensional copy of the original scrapbook. staples seem to poke up slightly above whatever material they affix. pasted-on typed fragments of paper appear lifted slightly above the plane of the scrapbook page, with borders that look torn and textured, shadowed black on one side, white opposite, as if thick enough to catch the light. the rare accordion format, however, simultaneously calls attention to the secondary status of nox as the cheap(ish) replica of a valuable absent original. round black spots identify holes left when the scrapbook was un-sewn for photo-reproduction. the presence of the replica reminds us that something crucial is absent: a brother. nox as a material object also conveys what philosophers might call an implicit ontological argument: it shakes up our familiar idea of what books are. it is almost automatic to think of books as printed sheets (called leafs) folded and cut into pages and then fastened between covers. we also value books because of what we tend to think they are or do. thus books often vouch for our good taste, knowledge, or skill. (lawyers invariably choose law books as the backdrop for tv commercials.) books provide self-help, religious truth, entertainment, whatever. nox through its resistant strangeness (such as faux pages that won’t turn) helps to focus attention on books as material presences somehow caught up in an ontological dance, where words too are the trace of something absent: an idea, a meaning, a life. the insistent materiality of nox includes vast blank grey stretches without print—a visual nothingness—that point toward disappearance, like the gaps in retouched soviet-era photographs indicating where disgraced officials once stood. nox in its imperfect material recovery of what is knowable about carson’s shifty brother immerses readers (as meanings recede and questions grow) in an experience akin to what happens in a detective novel. narrative threads emerge, vanish, reappear. images turn blurry. data is impossible to decipher. nothing is quite what it seems. it is easy to get lost in the dense materiality of the text. understanding becomes inescapably interruptive: a continuous process of negotiation with disappearances. carson is a connoisseur of disappearance. disappearance in fact is a state that she invests with almost philosophical significance, albeit rooted in everyday life. think of a lover watching the tail-lights disappear as his beloved slowly drives off into the darkness, forever. disappearance marks a transitional moment—a unit of time, fast or slow—when something passes from presence to absence. it is similar to the relatively static state that carson elsewhere calls “unlost.” unlost, for example, is the epithet that she applies to an ancient figure known only in a brief epitaph composed by the poet simonides of keos. “spinther,” as carson gives us his name, “would have vanished utterly save for a single simonidean line of verse.”9 the state of total vanishment—no trace whatever—is oblivion. disappearance, by contrast, remains just this side of nothingness: identified mainly by the traces it leaves behind. it can encompass both the static twilight survival of an unknown figure such as spinther (a name you can grow fond of) or the transitional movement as lovers drive away into the darkness, out of sight, out of memory, out of being. disappearance and its traces always traffic with the border of total vanishment and of unending night. what fate likely awaits carson’s undistinguished, semi-anonymous brother without a sister to slow his disappearance? disappearances in nox raise the stakes higher than a sisterly desire to mourn and to remember a lost brother. the scrappy details evoke larger, even mythic patterns of family drama. carson—writer, professor, international star—is the good child. her brother is the archetypal bad child. nox tells us that he fled abroad as a fugitive from canadian law and in the next twenty years spoke with his sister barely five times, by phone. she recalls, with something less than sibling affection, how he addressed her as pinhead and professor. which child—good daughter or prodigal son—did the mother love more? a scribbled note from her mother strongly suggests that carson as good child composes this memorial for the family bad sheep whom his mother, we infer, preferred. (sons and mothers.) here and elsewhere in her work, empathy is not the particular circle of eros that carson inhabits. her brother has been disappearing for years. death simply makes his disappearance official. it also loads his pinhead sister (a macarthur “genius” award recipient) with the familial or writerly obligation to save his memory from total darkness through a movement into the twilight realm of the unlost. the lost brother of catullus remains a total blank, as carson explains in nox, unknown except that catullus addresses him (as “brother”) in a memorable poem. through the poem, however, he is not utterly forgotten. unlost, in carson’s neologism. no, grief and family love aren’t strong presences in nox but rather notable absences. carson tellingly compares herself to historians or archaeologists, patiently patching together bits and pieces of a past that never yields full understanding. nox offers its extensive glossary of cognate latin passages illuminating every word—including et (“and”)—in catullus’s elegy on his brother almost as a substitute for absent emotion, as if to assert the counter-claims of knowledge, even if knowledge always falls short of full understanding. in nox, loss may be resisted but not overcome. despite her word-by-word glossary, carson makes it clear that knowledge and scholarship cannot convey the lost power of catullus’s elegy. she includes her own translation largely, as she indicates, as a testament to the losses that no english version can hope to escape. loss and disappearance extend to books as well as to poems and brothers. books are never directly addressed in nox, but carson’s text cannot escape its place within a landscape where the book as a historical, material invention linked to the gutenburg revolution now faces imminent disappearance with the rise of electronic publishing. arguably, nox mounts a complex resistance to the disappearance of books, in that it appears irreproducible in digital format. any future effort to reproduce nox as an e-book will necessarily alter its material form and reshape the experience of the reader, much as when sculpture is reproduced in photographs. readers of nox—which in its tactile, sculptural qualities might equally be described as text-based art—cannot simply process words and unpack meanings. nox exists only as a large accordion-folded sheet encased in a tomb-like box, creating an unwieldy, inconvenient presence that slows down and impedes understanding. is it significant that you cannot, for love or money, buy a copy of nox for your kindle or ipad? there is an unavoidable problem here, however. suppose that nox asserts an implicit or tacit claim for the indispensable presence of books in our lives. what significant purpose is served by a resistance to digital format? machine-printed hard-cover or paperback books belong to a receding past as surely as do broadside poems hand-lettered on parchment (although small presses still produce limited runs for special occasions, of course). the poems of catullus, which presumably circulated in the ancient world on scrolls, survive today only because someone transcribed them into a codex manuscript discovered in verona around 1305. (this single copy disappeared again, but not before spawning two additional copies—one preserved in the bodleian.) only the transformation from scroll to codex saved the poetry of catullus. moreover, new technologies for reproducing texts often expand readership, as the printing press once did. if nox stakes an implicit claim for books as material objects or presences, how is this claim much more than an expression of elitist nostalgia or luddite hostility? re-enter eros. the love of books is no platonic affair conducted purely on the plane of minds. books and lives go hand in hand. losses in one realm carry across the divide. what bibliophiles prize—rich paper, fine inks, colorful illustrations, artful dust jackets, hand-tooled leather—belongs securely to the realm of the senses. equally important, books are irreducible to containers for thought. the historical circulation of radical ideas depended on the materiality of books and on their power to generate new forms of knowledge, much as the encylopédie (with its alphabetic format, subversive cross-references, and defiance of state censorship) helped fuel the french revolution.10 contemporary poets have made the materiality of poems—as in sound poetry, concrete poetry, and so-called “found” poetry—integral to a new poetics.11 if philosophers seem very willing to disjoin meanings and arguments from materiality, carson—philosopher and poet—refuses to separate sense and meaning from the poetic materiality of books. the love of books as material objects, beyond any taste for fine bindings or costly first editions, includes for many people a feeling for their place as companions on the human journey: artifacts inseparable from their heft and feel, objects that follow us to each new residence, pushing us to buy or build cases to hold them like household lares and penates. gerald l. bruns argues, as he explores contemporary theories of poetry, that poems somehow address and enhance our connection to the world of things and indeed assert “an intimacy with mere things that defeats explanation.”12 books too, in their thingness. nox may well stimulate this intimacy. who hasn’t felt a mysterious pleasure at holding the exact edition of a book you read as a child. the little engine that could, say, in its 1930 red cloth cover with applied paper illustration by lois lenski. dog-eared corners, under-linings, marginal comments, forgotten bookmarks, even faded cash register receipts signify how books intersect our lives at particular moments. books as objects accompany us as we learn, change, and age. brittle yellowed pages, beyond exposing the cheap paper used at a particular moment in the mass-production of consumable texts, also reflects a process through which certain old books become old friends. some books we will never part with. in years gone by, the family bible was more than a sacred text. it was a local register, a moral anchor, an heirloom. resistance to the disappearance of books is the flip side of an erotic affirmation of everything (personal, social, historical) that books once stood for. fair enough. but e-publication holds significant and off-setting gains. the dutch are currently embarked on a project to digitalize every book published in dutch from 1470 to the present.13 no book published in dutch will go out of print—or disappear into oblivion. google books today are available online at the click of a mouse. college students like the convenience and lower cost of digital textbooks, updated regularly and shutting down the bone yards of obsolete prior editions. the facebook and twitter generations—natives of the photon—take to new media like virtual ducks to virtual water. adults fifty years hence may remember with fondness books they read late at night tapping the screen of their ipads. if the material, social history of the book helps account for the particular writing that, say, marcel proust and henry james regarded as possible, e-books create new conditions of possibilities for writing—and for reading—such as hypertext links or embedded programs (some already create textual changes each time we open the file). the future of reading will not cling to hard covers and cut pages but continue to change. something more crucial than historical forms is at stake. “every time a poet writes a poem,” as carson generalizes, “he is asking the question, do words hold good: and the answer has to be yes….”14 this statement is unclear about what it means to say that words “hold good.” it is legitimate to ask what specific values words might affirm when they hold good. what particular breakdowns occur when words fail? the goodness of poetic language certainly doesn’t inhere in its truth, not even in its postmodern, pluralized, contingent truths. few philosophers today would argue for a one-to-one correspondence between language and truth. the question do words hold good? remains an open-ended provocation to thought, not a query in search of a note. a response appropriate to carson might predictably circle back toward eros. “i would like to grasp,” carson wrote in a rare autobiographical moment amid the comp-lit erudition of eros the bittersweet, “why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. there is something like an electrification in them.”15 falling in love and coming to know. learning and love are for carson parallel and related experiences. what connects them is the erotic impulse that imparts a feeling of aliveness. words might hold good, in this context, when they make contact with eros and promote a feeling of aliveness. eros against thanatos. words hold good, in an erotic sense, in their opposition to death and to what coleridge called death-in-life. eros against nox. writer against disappearance. primal opponents. words that hold good would be inseparable from the electrifications of love and of knowledge. when words fail to hold good, they do nothing, perform no work, touch no one, or else play to everything that deadens us. when a writer’s words hold good, whatever else they do in carson’s multi-genre poetics, they promote aliveness and maintain a vital contact with eros. a love of reading inflects eros in a slightly different register than does the love of material books. reading, although we think of it as personal and subjective, has a rich social history, now rapidly changing under the pressure of e-books. the term “visual reader” tellingly transfers the term reader from the person who reads to the electronic device, and such devices absorb the reading of books into the same environment as video-games, internet apps, and communicative functions, from text messages to social networks. people seem to be reading more today, thanks in large part to blogs and to various interactive opportunities that link writers and readers. eros will doubtless inflect reading in new registers, as books lose their distinctive identity and swim or compete within a largely undifferentiated new sea of discourse. this sea, albeit still emergent, at least defines the fluid field against which nox contemplates both a brother’s death and larger cultural disappearances for which books serve as a recent and potent metaphor. science fiction has long imagined forms of instant communication far more certain and more erotic (in the power to convey feeling and to connect people) than reading. the speculation cannot be ruled out that reading too—a brain-based historical invention that is in fact neurologically distinct from it historical twin, writing—might one day disappear. disappearance, according to cultural theorist paul virilio, takes on special significance in modern societies characterized by a radical emphasis on speed. the extreme pace of change introduces not only specific new inventions but also a personal and cultural experience of continual vanishings.16 witness the rapid disappearance of land-line telephones, typewriters, letters home, virginity, drive-in theaters, diseases, nations…. the disappearance is not total or immediate. some phenomena (from the greek root meaning to appear) linger among the unlost, in museums or old movies, much like 1950s chevrolets cruising the streets of twenty-first century havana. virilio sees developed economies as creating what he calls an “epileptic consciousness”—a jolting experience of gaps and absences as things vanish before our eyes, not even waving goodbye. like carson’s brother. suddenly gone. this epileptic consciousness of vanishment, whatever its psychological costs and benefits, at least creates the conditions basic to what carson describes as the triangular geometry of desire. disappearances—like a lover’s absence—are custom-made for the appearance of eros. eros thrives on imagining what isn’t there, which is of course the entire project of nox. what is erotic about reading (or writing), as carson puts it, “is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge.”17 eros for carson is inseparable from desire, and desire always implies absence and lack. the literal absences and gaps in the text of nox keep firm or full knowledge always just beyond reach, while the resistant materiality of the book affirms its own paradoxical presence. presence, as hans ulrich gumbrecht writes, identifies a realm beyond meaning.18 in contrast to a postmodern focus on meanings and on cognitive indeterminacies, presence gestures toward a crucial dimension of embodied human experience that interposes a space between know-ers and the objects or knowledge. nox in effect calls forth an erotic play of imagination in the space that presence opens up—as in dance or music—where meanings are less important than their inadequacies. an erotics of reading may provide an effective description of the engagement with language in which words, for carson, ultimately hold good. words hold good, it appeared, when they make contact with eros and promote a feeling of aliveness. now it is possible to add, more specifically, that words hold good when they are sufficient to spark the electrifications that carson describes as falling in love and as coming to know. these particular electrifications, however, do not require material books in codex form. audiences fall in love with the electronic images of movie stars, just as lonely singles fall for attractive faces on match.com, where presence and absence take a different configuration than in books. the darkness of movie theaters has long constituted an erotic space that lovers enjoy as much as film buffs do, and of course the internet has as its most popular feature the uncensored access to online pornography. eros shifts and freewheels easily across media. arguably, john donne and wallace stevens lose nothing in meaning or power—and they may gain much from hypertext notes and online comments—when their poems appear on a screen instead of on a paper page. sappho is carson’s prime exemplar of the electrifications of falling in love, but the erotics of learning for carson finds its exemplary figure in socrates. it was socrates who famously claimed that eros was the only subject he knew anything about. plato’s symposium and phaderus are the dialogues in which socrates most fully develops his views on eros, and as carson works through the sometime paradoxical details in eros the bittersweet she emphasizes the socratic argument that eros and desire necessarily plunge lovers into the world of time and of matter. you cannot engage eros, despite the many fruitless attempts to do so, from a position of cool detachment. eros assures that you cannot avoid getting your hands dirty, your heart broken. count on it. there is no insurance policy to protect you—whether you are a world-famous writer or merely her unknown brother—against death and unending night. socrates is most relevant to a reading of nox, however, less for his specific arguments about eros than for his embodiment of what emerson called “man thinking.” it is his passion for thought—not his specific ideas—that for carson connect socrates with the electrifications of eros. as she pinpoints his erotic character: “he loved, that is, the process of coming to know.”19 how exactly does coming-to-know constitute an erotic activity? and what does coming–to-know as an erotic activity have to do with nox? “in any act of thinking,” carson writes, “the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. it is an erotic space.”20 thought electrified. electronic reproduction cannot convey exactly what the mind must encounter as we hold and peruse a copy of nox in its strange and resistant material form. true, an erotics of coming-to-know is already breaking new ground as words and images and sound combine on the screen in previously unimagined hybrid creations. yet, as twenty-first century minds reach across the new space opening between the book as we once knew it and a more rarefied new-media materiality of silicon and of electrons, elegiac voices remind us of the losses and seek ways to resist it. “please,” implores musician and memoirist patti smith on receiving a 2010 national book award, “no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”21 eros is notorious for its attraction to beauty. suddenly gone. against a backdrop of endless night, anne carson—through a book, if it is a book, that resists the disappearance of the printed book—is left to think the abrupt, irreversible disappearance of a brother who wasn’t, truly, much of a brother and whose memory is fading fast. will her words hold good? my deepest thanks for their help to brett bonfield, kate chieco, brian dietz, paula levine, christopher morris, kenneth reckford, and markus wust. gregory l. ulmer, applied grammatology: post(e-)pedagogy from jacques derrida to joseph beuys (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1985). p. 13. [↩] rachel deahl, “how e-book sales compare to print … so far,” publishers weekly, 1 november 2010, p. 4. [↩] jim milliot, “print declines offset digital gains,” publishers weekly, 15 november 2010, p. 11. [↩] for an exemplary collection, see erotikon: essays on eros, ancient and modern, ed. shadi bartsch and thomas bartscherer (chicago: university of chicago press, 2005). [↩] georges bataille, erotism: death and sensuality, trans. mary dalwood (san francisco: city lights books, 1986), p. 29. first published in french in 1957; the first english translation appeared under a different title in 1962. [↩] georges bataille, the tears of eros, trans. peter connor (san francisco: city lights books, 1989). first published in french in 1961. [↩] bataille, erotism, p. 17. [↩] leo stein, the a-b-c of aesthetics (1927), quoted in bill brown, “thing theory,” critical inquiry 28 (2001): 1-22. [↩] anne carson, the economy of the unlost (reading simonides of keos with paul celan) (princeton: princeton university press, 1999), p. 82. [↩] see philipp blom, enlightening the world: encyclopédie, the book that changed the course of history (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2005). [↩] see gerald l. bruns, the material of poetry: sketches for a philosophical poetics (athens: university of georgia press, 2005). [↩] bruns, the material of poetry, p. 9. [↩] robert darnton, “can we create a national digital library?”, new york review of books, 28 october 2010. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/28/can-we-create-national-digital-library. accessed 16 december 2010. [↩] carson, economy of the unlost, p. 121. [↩] anne carson, eros the bittersweet (1986; rpt. normal, il: dalkey archive press, 1998), p. 70. [↩] paul virilio, the aesthetics of disappearance, trans. philip beitchman (los angeles, ca: semiotext(3), 2009). first published in french in 1980. [↩] carson, eros the bittersweet, p. 109. [↩] hans ulrich gumbrecht, production of presence: what meaning cannot convey (stanford: stanford university press, 2004). [↩] carson, eros the bittersweet, p. 171. [↩] carson, eros the bittersweet, p. 171. [↩] quoted in julie bosman, “national book award for patti smith,” new york times, 17 november 2010. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/books/18awards.html?_r=1&ref=nationalbookawards. accessed 6 january 2011. [↩] anne carson, books, elegy, ereaders, eros, nox, publishing, reading editorial: the leaky pipe: lead pipers weigh in on wikileaks reconsidering facebook this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct open to what? a critical evaluation of oer efficacy studies – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 19 feb ian mcdermott /0 comments open to what? a critical evaluation of oer efficacy studies in brief this selective literature review evaluates open educational resources (oer) efficacy studies through the lens of critical pedagogy. oer have radical potential as transformative tools for critical pedagogy or they can serve as a cost-free version of the status quo, inclined toward propagating austerity. this review analyzes studies published since 2008 with regard to cost, access, pedagogy, commercialization, and labor. these criteria are used to make explicit subjects indirectly addressed, if not ignored completely, in the existing literature. typically, ample attention is paid to a study’s design and methodology but the underlying institutional infrastructure and decision-making process is unexamined. what emerges is an incomplete picture of how oer are adopted, developed, and sustained in higher education. measurables like student outcomes, while important, are too often foregrounded to appeal to administrators and funding organizations. the review concludes with suggestions for how to utilize critical pedagogy for future studies and grassroots oer initiatives. by ian mcdermott introduction open educational resources (oer) are misunderstood and underutilized in higher education (higher ed). in part, this situation can be traced to definitions. what are oer? in 2002, the united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization (unesco) coined the term oer (2002) and defined them as non-commercial learning materials. in 2012, unesco refined their definition to include “any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license” (unesco, 2012). these educational materials encompass everything from textbooks and curricula to lecture notes and animation. the william and flora hewlett foundation, a charitable foundation that supports oer initiatives, states oer are “high-quality teaching, learning, and research materials that are free for people everywhere to use and repurpose” (2018). david wiley, founder and chief academic officer at lumen learning, argues that it is flexible licensing and permissions in opposition to conventional, restrictive copyright that are central to oer. wiley cites the 5 rs of oer as the most important features: the ability to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute (hilton, wiley, stein & johnson, 2010; wiley, bliss & mcewen, 2014). these definitions, while useful, hint at the motivations of the organizations and individuals behind them. as an international, aspirational organization, unesco’s broad definition is inclusive and emphasizes the public domain and open licenses. the hewlett foundation’s definition signals an interesting shift, emphasizing “high quality” oer, which is not surprising since hewlett, as an oer funder, has a financial stake in oer development. in 2019 hewlett granted nearly $8 million to 18 oer initiatives at universities and organizations, including the university of california at berkeley, university of cape town, creative commons, and the wiki education foundation (hewlett foundation, grants). wiley’s 5 rs model is arguably the preeminent oer definition. it is clear and concise while articulating a broad set of practices. one critique points out that several of the 5 rs require access to technology and the requisite skills (lambert, 2018). like the hewlett foundation, wiley has a vested interest in the success of oer. lumen learning is a company that provides a suite of educational technology products that colleges and universities pay to use; lumen’s candela, waymaker and ohm provide the infrastructure for many instructors teaching with oer. while their products are often less expensive than commercial textbooks and platforms, some argue their business model betrays the ethos of open access initiatives (downes, 2017; see wiley, 2017, for counterpoint). critically, wiley’s initial definition of 2007 only included 4 rs (wiley, 2007). he added retain as the fifth r in 2014. as a practice, creators of any work should retain certain rights. coincidentally or not, the right to retain is critical to the lumen business model. it enables lumen to monetize oer materials by packaging them in a proprietary, fee-based system. these definitions vary enough to preclude a shared understanding of oer. in fact, a majority of college and university faculty are not familiar with oer (seaman & seaman, 2017, p. 16). current oer practice varies depending on the practitioner’s affiliation (e.g. professor at a public university, academic librarian, lumen employee, adjunct faculty member, student). beyond sharing resources, higher ed lacks a common oer practice and existing oer practices lack an explicit social justice mission. this situation presents an excellent opportunity to define, develop, implement, and advocate for oer in critical ways that address social justice issues facing higher ed: cost and access, pedagogical practice, and academic labor. studies that assess oer’s impact on higher ed tend to focus on efficacy and perceptions. when compared to commercial textbooks and learning materials, these studies measure whether oer are effective at producing positive student outcomes and if they are perceived favorably by students and instructors. to develop a social justice-oriented analysis of oer, i am going to use critical pedagogy as a theoretical lens to review oer efficacy studies. listed below are criteria and examples for evaluating these studies. this literature review examines oer efficacy case studies based on how they address the below criteria. subsequent studies should be judged for how well they remedy them. critical pedagogy criteria 1: cost & access oer adoption eliminates textbook costs and democratizes access; online books are available in multiple formats and accessible for all learners, including formats that do not rely on consistent internet access (e.g. pdf download); acknowledges that high priced textbooks are a barrier to learning because many students do not purchase expensive textbooks; cost and access to textbooks and learning materials are connected to students outcomes: course grade, enrollment intensity, withdrawal rates, etc. critical pedagogy criteria 2: pedagogical practice replacing commercial textbooks with oer is a pedagogical decision, beyond cost and access; details are provided about commercial textbooks and oer; faculty are making pedagogical decisions and are transparent about materials adopted, including relevant software (e.g. learning management software); open and critical pedagogy is used to involve and reflect students’ voices. critical pedagogy criteria 3: academic labor labor required for oer initiative is described, including work done by faculty, educational technologists, graduate assistants, librarians, undergraduate students, and others; price of academic labor and funding sources included. critical pedagogy critical pedagogy has been used to analyze and reimagine education for over 50 years. oer have this potential when put into critical pedagogy practice. for this review, i define critical pedagogy via two foundational texts: paulo freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed (1968) and bell hooks’s teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom (1994). brazilian educator and theorist freire (1968) argues for liberatory education, “[w]here knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful human inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (p. 72). teachers minimize their authoritative role through a reconciliation of the teacher-student contradiction, “so that both are simultaneously teachers and students” (freire, 1968, p. 72). this model of education combats what freire (1968) termed the banking concept of education, “in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor” (p. 72). for freire, education is one site in the struggle against larger forces of oppression. leveling hierarchy as much as possible in the student-teacher relationship is fundamental to the struggle. though his ideas have influenced educators throughout the world, freire’s early writings emerged from his experience teaching the illiterate poor in brazil how to read. in the united states, feminist educator and author bell hooks has explored critical pedagogy for decades in higher ed, as it intersects with race, gender, and class. in teaching to transgress hooks (1994) contrasts her ecstatic experience of education as “the practice of freedom” when she was a child in all-black schools in the south with the oppressive, racist schools she attended during integration that strove to “reinforce domination” (p. 4). for hooks, critical pedagogy means “creating [a] democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute” (1994, p. 39). this practice requires a desire to transgress, to empower the oppressed through critical pedagogy: students of color, queer students, poor students. more recently, classroom faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and others in higher education have examined oer with a critical pedagogy perspective (e.g. darder, torres, baltodano, 2017; accardi, drabinski, and kumbier, 2010). in her analysis of oer and the open access movement in libraries and higher education, crissinger warns “how openness, when disconnected from its political underpinnings, could become as exploitative as the traditional system it had replaced” (2015). in analyzing key texts of open educational practice (oep), lambert finds little explicit social justice (2018). critical pedagogy must be a part of oer practice. if students cannot afford a textbook, they are already oppressed. faced with this contradiction, how can we possibly create the “democratic setting” hooks strives for? replacing an expensive textbook with a free one is not critical pedagogy, because expensive textbooks are one symptom of higher ed’s disease. eliminating expensive textbooks is a first step toward confronting the contradictions students and faculty face in higher ed. for example, five publishers control 80% of the textbook market (senack and donoghue, 2016, p. 4) and over 70% of faculty members hold contingent positions (american association of university professors, n.d.). can the strategic use of oer effect the kind of change in higher education that places critical pedagogy at its center and eschews the austerity mindset that currently governs the field? background some broader context on the unaffordability of higher education is necessary to understand why oer are a pressing topic. first and foremost, the price of higher education continues to increase as the cost burden has been shifted to students and their families. according to the state higher education executive officers association (sheeo), 2017 was the first year a majority of states relied on tuition and fees more than state and local educational appropriations (sheeo, 2018, pp. 8-9) to fund public higher education. nationwide, spending per student by public higher educational institutions has decreased by 8% since 1992 while per student tuition has increased 96% (sheeo, 2018; brownstein, 2018). student debt now exceeds individual credit card debt (johnson, 2019). focusing on textbooks, the bureau of labor statistics (bls) reports that the price of college textbooks has increased 88% between 2006-2016, far outpacing tuition, fees and college housing during the same period (2016); a similar study by the u.s. government accountability office (gao) reached similar results (2013, p. 6). in some cases, the price of textbooks is greater than the price of tuition (fischer, hilton, robinson, & wiley, 2015, p. 160; goodwin, 2011, p. 15). 65% of surveyed students admitted high cost prevented them from buying a textbook (senack, 2014, p. 11). students specifically cite textbook prices as an impediment preventing them from passing, completing, or even enrolling in classes (florida virtual campus, 2019, pp. 31-32). therefore, reducing or eliminating the cost of textbooks is one step toward lowering the barriers to higher education. scope, methods, objectives this review is limited to oer efficacy studies in higher education published in north america between 2008 and 2019. books, news articles, reports issued by governmental and non-profit organizations, and blogs are included as secondary sources. the body of literature on oer efficacy is not voluminous, but it is growing. a comprehensive article-length review is not possible or desirable. as much as possible, the studies, reports, and articles selected for this review are published in open access journals and websites, though articles from the following databases and search engines were used: education resources information center (eric), library and information science source (ebscohost), education source (ebscohost), and google scholar. the open education group’s the review project is an indispensable resource, which “provides a summary of all known empirical research on the impacts of oer adoption (including our own)” (open education group, 2019). to date, this ongoing literature review includes 48 peer-reviewed articles, theses/dissertations, and white papers. the studies were chosen as a representative sample and for their ability to meet the criteria discussed above: cost and access, pedagogical practice, and academic labor. past and current literature reviews on oer efficacy (hilton iii, 2016; abri and dabbagh, 2018; hilton iii, 2019) emphasize quantitative and qualitative data and survey design. following crissinger’s (2015) and lambert’s (2018) analyses, the objective for this study is to search for evidence of critical pedagogy and social justice in oer efficacy studies. analysis and commentary this section organizes oer efficacy case studies into three subsections. these subsections are organized in descending order by the frequency with which they are addressed in the studies under review. 1. cost reduction, increased access, and student outcomes every study addresses how oer help reduce the cost of higher education and increases access to textbooks and learning materials. the studies measure student outcomes in classes using oer (test group) compared with classes using commercial textbooks (control group); student outcomes include a, b, c grades, d, f, withdrawal rates, enrollment intensity, final exam grades, and others. often, student outcomes are similar across the test and control groups, though some studies present a case for correlation between cost and access and improved student outcomes. 2. oer and pedagogy some studies provide details about the pedagogical decisions made with regard to oer adoption. for example, which oer textbook replaced the commercial option. but studies rarely name the commercial textbook. even fewer studies discuss how oer intersect with pedagogical theories or faculty/student/staff collaborations. 3. oer and academic labor rarest of all is the study that provides details about the academic labor required for oer initiatives. adopting an oer textbook may require a significant amount of work for a single professor teaching a single section. the number of people only increases for large, multi-section courses reliant on course management software. very few studies detail the personnel involved or the costs required. some studies are discussed in more than one subsection, though each subsection foregrounds one of the above topics. while i use critical pedagogy as a lens to analyze oer efficacy studies, i am not primarily concerned with how critical pedagogy is used in specific oer textbooks or learning materials. the below studies do not provide such granular detail. instead, i am analyzing these studies for evidence, or lack thereof, of critical approaches to oer adoption and survey design as it relates to cost and access, pedagogy, and academic labor. cost reduction, increased access, and student outcomes many oer studies identify cost reduction and increased access as the initial motivation for oer adoption. the authors and investigators then track student outcomes for test and control groups across a variety of metrics. in nearly all studies, student outcomes are the same or better in classes taught with oer. the university of california, davis (uc davis), created the stemwiki hyperlibrary to provide students with a no-cost replacement for existing commercial textbooks (allen, guzman-alvarez, molinaro, & larsen, 2015, p. 3). chemwiki (part of the hyperlibrary) was used as the exclusive textbook in seven chemistry classes at uc davis, purdue university, sacramento city college, and howard university. allen, et al. (2015) claim that chemwiki implementation saved students approximately $500,000 dollars in textbook expenditures (p. 3), though the commercial textbook replaced by chemwiki is not mentioned by name. it is not clear how the authors arrived at this figure; perhaps it is based on an estimate assuming all students purchased the commercial textbooks. all available research indicates many students do not purchase expensive textbooks. such opacity is not helpful. for oer to flourish, it is important to name the resources being replaced, and their cost. readers, especially those considering adopting oer, deserve to know these details to help them make informed decisions at their own institutions. the virginia state university school of business turned to oer in hopes of reducing inequality in the classroom and improving student outcomes. prior to this study, only 47% of vsu students purchased textbooks for their courses. students cited affordability as the primary barrier; many vsu students struggle financially and work at least one job in addition to their full-time courseload (feldstein, hilton iii, hudson, martin, & wiley, 2012, p. 1). vsu faculty investigated ebook alternatives in order to lower costs and ensure students would have ongoing access to course materials. they contracted flat world knowledge (fwk), then an oer provider, and paid for per-student seat licenses. vsu faculty purposely avoided commercial and proprietary platforms that would restrict access for students without regular internet access. therefore, students could read the textbooks online or download and retain all materials in several formats (feldstein, et al., 2012, pp. 1-2). however, working with commercial entities on oer initiatives has considerable drawbacks. one year after the vsu study, fwk “evolved from open education resources to fair pricing” according to their website. this means that the textbooks vsu faculty had hoped to make available for free were now subject to “fair pricing.” fwk and vsu students and faculty may have divergent ideas of what’s a fair price for a textbook. at the time of this writing, the fwk website lists most e-textbooks between $25-$30 and most print copies (ebook included) list for $55. this price is much lower than many commercial alternatives, but it is a lot more than free. the percentage of african american and latinx students that receive a bachelor’s degree or higher lags far behind white students. in a 2018 study at the university of georgia (uga), colvard, watson, and park sought to address the attainment gap through oer adoption in eight general education courses. the authors point to the connection between public disinvestment in higher education and rising costs for students. they argue that shifting the cost burden away from taxpayers and onto students exacerbates ethnic and racial disparities in educational attainment. students saved over 3 million dollars as a result of these oer adoptions. cleverly, this study disambiguated student data in order to determine if oer have a greater impact on students eligible for pell grants, part time students, and non-white students (colvard, watson, & park, 2018, p. 264). the results are promising as the percentage of students receiving grades a, a-, and b+ in oer test courses increased dramatically for all three populations (colvard, et al., 2018, pp. 269-271). the last study in this subsection presents a convincing argument for cost reduction as a contributor to student outcomes. fischer, hilton, robinson, and wiley designed the largest efficacy study upon its publication in 2015. it is a quasi-experimental study that analyzed efficacy results across four four-year colleges and six community colleges for approximately 16,000 students in fifteen undergraduate courses: approx. 5,000 in the test group and 11,000 in the control group (fischer, hilton, robinson, & wiley, 2015, p. 164). the study measured outcomes in four categories: course completion, passing courses with at least a cgrade, credit hours during the semester tested (enrollment intensity), and credit hours in the following semester. fischer, et al. claim that cost is more impactful on student outcomes than instructional design and mode of delivery (fischer, et al., 2015, p. 169). in this study and others like it, student outcomes are similar when using oer or commercial textbooks. however, the authors see a correlation between saving money on textbooks and enrollment intensity. the test group (those using oer) enrolled in more credits in the surveyed semester, and the following semester, than the control group (fischer, et al., 2015, pp. 167-168). their argument is that students use their savings to enroll in more classes. causation is impossible to prove but this hypothesis is provocative. the refrain that student outcomes are the same or better when using oer is increasingly common. this argument is used to encourage oer adoption. but oer need practitioners committed to critical pedagogy to move beyond a free version of the status quo. fischer, et al. (2015) admit that future studies should analyze textbook quality and teacher effects (p. 170). they do not provide any details about the learning materials used in their study. this omission is too common in oer efficacy studies. these issues are taken up in the following subsections. oer and pedagogy the fact that the vast majority of oer efficacy studies show that student outcomes are the same or better when using oer is promising. however, most studies lack an in-depth analysis of the pedagogical choices driving oer initiatives. this section examines case studies for evidence of critical pedagogy with regard to oer adoption. though never specifically mentioned, critical pedagogy is at the center of the uc davis, chemwiki study discussed above. allen, et al. stress the importance of faculty and student engagement in authoring and reviewing chemwiki teaching materials. as the name suggests, chemwiki utilizes a model similar to wikipedia, a comparison the authors embrace (allen, et al., 2015, p. 2). teaching modules are created by many instructors and can be hyperlinked within each course’s instance of chemwiki. in other words, labor is distributed horizontally in an effort to draw on collective expertise and avoid the centralization of expertise used in authoring traditional textbooks. colvard, et al. argue that their study, and oer by extension, addresses all three of the great challenges facing higher education: affordability; retention and completion; quality of student learning (colvard, et al., 2018, p. 273). quality of student learning is measured by academic performance, which improved in the test group. but the study reveals little about pedagogy. most of the classes adopted openstax textbooks, a major oer textbook publisher based out of rice university. uga’s center for teaching and learning assisted with some oer adoptions but no further details are provided. as a result, pedagogy and academic labor are hinted at but never discussed. one study cannot cover all topics and this one does a remarkable job of situating oer in a social justice context. perhaps a future study could widen the aperture of social justice to better account for pedagogy and the academic labor required to adopt oer at a large, public university. hendricks, reinsberg, and rieger acknowledge that most studies ignore pedagogy by providing, “a very specific description of how the open textbook used in the course we are studying has been adapted to fit into that course” (2017, p. 82). in this study at the university of british columbia (ubc), the authors adopted an openstax physics textbook and edited out sections of the textbook that were not relevant to the course (hendricks, reinsberg, & rieger, 2017, p. 90). professors also stopped using a commercial software package for homework. instead, they added the textbook’s review questions to the course website in an attempt to reduce cost, simplify administration, and simplify students’ experience (hendricks, et al., 2017, p. 83-84). in this instance, getting rid of the commercial homework system, rather than the textbook, generated the greatest savings. hendricks, et al. found that students’ problem-solving abilities were slightly negatively impacted by the new homework system. the previous commercial system provided hints and tutorials as students completed their homework, whereas the new system simply provided correct/incorrect feedback. however, their transparency demonstrates that moving away from commercial entities in higher education may not be painless. critical pedagogies are necessarily difficult because the intention is to leave behind pre-existing approaches. in this regard, the authors show that there is much more to student outcomes than “the same or better results.” critical approaches factored into the decision-making process in the virginia state university study. feldstein, et al. do not provide details on pedagogical methods used in the courses, but vsu business school faculty identified the value in adopting oer with creative commons licenses. this way, materials are relatively easy to revise and remix and their teaching materials can reflect current events and different points of view (feldstein, et al., 2012, pp. 1-2). as one professor put it, “since students now had permanent access to content, the value was in the information and not in the textbook as a commodity” (feldstein, et al., 2012, p. 8). pawlyshyn, braddlee, casper, and miller document oer adoption for ten high enrollment courses at seven institutions, part of the project kaleidoscope open course initiative (koci). their writing is reflective to an extent rarely found in oer efficacy studies. they dedicate just as much space to pedagogical decision-making as to costs and student outcomes. this fact may be connected to the project design. participants collaborated across institutions (and held weekly skype calls!), which surfaced important differences at the respective institutions. for example, student populations varied from remedial to college entry (pawlyshyn, braddlee, casper, & miller, 2013). consequently, faculty developed targets for their specific student populations. for oer initiatives to succeed, the authors make the following recommendation: “introduce and facilitate oer efforts through faculty initiative rather than making a top-down institutional directive. eventually, institutional policy must support emergent practice” (pawlyshyn, et al., 2013). even when documenting koci’s shortcomings, pawlyshyn et al. provide critical reflections. some faculty resisted koci based on perceived limitations to academic freedom and of “corporate interference” since koci used lumen learning and received funding from the bill and melinda gates foundation and the hewlett foundation (pawlyshyn, et al., 2013). the following section examines how decisions regarding academic labor, which can include collaborating with commercial vendors, is discussed in oer efficacy studies—when academic labor is discussed at all. oer and academic labor academic labor is rarely covered in these studies. this is understandable insofar as the focus of most studies is cost savings and student outcomes. however, academic labor is central to any oer initiative. who is doing the work? are they getting paid? is this work acknowledged for promotion and tenure? based on the available literature, it is difficult to answer these questions. calling attention to the matter will hopefully help remedy this glaring omission in the literature. hendricks, et al. (2017) acknowledge the costs of adopting oer: “the literature on open textbooks related to cost focuses on cost savings to students, but it’s important to keep in mind the possible costs for faculty and institutions in terms of time and support when using open textbooks” (p. 94). faculty and graduate assistants worked together during the summer months to prepare the course. the latter were paid with a teaching and learning grant of c$20,000 from university of british columbia. ensuring fair compensation for graduate assistants and contingent workers is crucial from a critical pedagogy perspective. however, there is no indication the grant covered the time and effort spent by faculty planning the project, securing funds, selecting materials, and learning new systems. are these tasks considered part of their job, were they paid a stipend for extra labor, or given course release time, to name a few payment options? transparency on the working conditions of all faculty and staff, contingent and full time, is necessary as we use critical pedagogy to implement and document just labor practices for oer initiatives. pawlyshyn, et al. directly address payment and incentives in a section called “motivations.” in addition to a small stipend, faculty participants received travel funds to attend oer conferences. the authors claim this was an even greater motivator than the stipend and they make explicit recommendations for other oer initiatives to allocate funds for conference attendance (pawlyshyn, et al., 2013). though the authors do not explain why professional development funds were so popular, the implication is that faculty relished the opportunity to share their work and learn from others in a community of practice. one shortcoming of their report is it does not include any information about how lumen learning was involved in koci, especially with regard to myopenmath (mom), a free, online course management system. it would be helpful to know if koci used the free version of mom or the lumen-supported version, lumen ohm. each option presents distinct cost and maintenance issues, namely vendor fees versus local maintenance expenses. allen, et al. contrast the commercial textbook publishing process–a small group of experts deciding on relevant content–with the horizontal crowdsourcing of chemwiki. the infrastructure of chemwiki is developed and maintained by professors, research assistants, and students who regularly review and update content for difficulty (allen, et al., 2015, p. 3). the authors do not discuss how, or if, in the case of students, this labor is compensated or otherwise supported. the final example in this subsection examines a study that looks to oer as an institutional cost saving measure. bowen, chingos, lack, and nygren (2012) examine an oer hybrid learning environment (a mix of in-person and online). published by ithaka s+r, a consulting non-profit, the study tested traditional and hybrid classes for a basic statistics course designed at carnegie mellon university and taught at six public universities. like most studies, bowen, et al. (2012) found the hybrid format produced the same or better results than traditional classroom instruction (pp. 18-21). unlike most oer studies, bowen, et al. also tested whether or not the oer/hybrid method can lower instructor costs. in their model, the hybrid course would be supervised by tenure-track faculty, with in-person sections led by “teaching assistants” and administrative work handled by a “part-time instructor” (bowen, et al., 2012, p. 25). admittedly, this is one line of inquiry in a lengthy report, but using oer as a way to lower operating costs is anathema to critical pedagogy and social justice. the authors estimate large scale implementation could reduce instructor costs 36%-57% (bowen, et al., 2012, p. 26). they do not include how they reach these numbers, likely because they would be perceived as controversial, if not incendiary. conclusion and future considerations oer efficacy studies are just as revealing for what they omit as for what they include. it is challenging to design a methodologically sound study, especially under tight timelines and tight(er) budgets. given this reality, oer efficacy studies tell the tidiest story: saving students money is good and oer may improve student learning. in this respect, these studies conform to the logics of funders and administrators, not students, faculty, librarians, and staff working at colleges and universities. but this story elides an inconvenient truth: if students are not buying expensive textbooks to begin with (florida virtual campus, 2019; feldstein, et al., 2012), are they saving money or are they not spending money they do not have in the first place? this is not to say that well-designed oer efficacy studies are irrelevant. the above studies are valuable for their analysis of and advocacy for oer initiatives. but the desire to quantify all aspects of higher ed is reflected in the literature. the statistics are given primacy over pedagogy. can an education committed to measuring “student success” ever be liberatory? critical pedagogy does not reduce students to their letter grades or how many dollars they saved. rather, students and faculty engage in dialog about defining academic success. in contrast to the above oer efficacy studies, qualitative approaches used in oer perception studies could be incorporated more often to center students’ voices. action research is another approach. according to sagor, action research, “is a disciplined process of inquiry conducted by and for those taking the action. the primary reason for engaging in action research is to assist the ‘actor’ in improving and/or refining his or her actions” (sagor, 2000). action research on oer initiatives would be a welcome addition to the literature, as the method aligns nicely with critical pedagogy. bowen, et al. (2012) seem to accept the divestment of public funds for higher education as a permanent reality, instead of an ongoing struggle (pp. 4-6). their solutions address the perspective of administration, not faculty or students. moreover, how are oer being commercialized? david wiley, a co-author on several above studies, and many others, is the chief academic officer at lumen learning. a deeper investigation into “open washing,” or proprietary practices disguised as open access/licensing, as defined by watters (2014), in oer initiatives is needed. alternative perspectives abound. brier and fabricant decry austerity and commercialization in their full-throated defense of public higher education, austerity blues: fighting for the soul of public higher education (2016). winn’s (2012) marxist analysis of oer in higher education cautions against administrators’ attempts to exploit oer for surplus value in the form of increased enrollment, lower teaching costs, and cultural prestige (pp. 143-144). farrow (2017) criticizes the austerity mindset, obsessed with efficiencies that “promote the idea that technological innovation can offer neat solutions to challenges faced by educational institutions” (p. 131). as the title of this article asks, open to what? a free version of the status quo? the above analysis shows that oer efficacy studies would benefit from greater transparency. this transparency applies to pedagogy, technology, and the financial and emotional costs for students, faculty, and staff. it is one thing to use critical pedagogy to diagnose the problem with the above studies. it is a far more important challenge to address higher ed’s contradictions and power struggles: teacher/student, faculty/administrator, proprietary/open access, banking education/open pedagogy. critical pedagogy opens the door. acknowledgements i would like to thank peer reviewers ryan randall and nicole williams for their insightful, critical, and encouraging comments. thank you to ian beilin for serving as publishing editor. a very special thank you to professor maria jerskey at laguardia community college, who runs the literacy brokers writing group. i never would have finished this article without her guidance, along with other laguardia colleagues who participate in the writing group. in particular, many thanks to professors dominique zino and derek stadler for their invaluable feedback on multiple drafts of this article. references abri, m.a., & dabbagh, n. 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(2012). interactive learning online at public universities: evidence from randomized trials. ithaka s+r. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.22464. brownstein, r. (2018, may 3). american higher education hits a dangerous milestone. the atlantic. retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/american-higher-education-hits-a-dangerous-milestone/559457/. bureau of labor statistics, u.s. department of labor. (2016, august 30). college tuition and fees increase 63 percent since january 2006. ted: the economics daily. retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/college-tuition-and-fees-increase-63-percent-since-january-2006.htm. colvard, n., watson, e. c., & hyojin, p. (2018). the impact of open educational resources on various student success metrics. international journal of teaching and learning in higher education 30(2), 262-276. retrieved from http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/ijtlhe3386.pdf. crissinger, s., (2015). a critical take on oer practices: interrogating commercialization, colonialism, and content. in the library with a lead pipe. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/a-critical-take-on-oer-practices-interrogating-commercialization-colonialism-and-content/. downes, j. (2017). if we talked about the internet like we talk about oer. half an hour. retrieved from https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2017/11/if-we-talked-about-internet-like-we.html. farrow, r. (2017). open education and critical pedagogy. learning, media and technology 42, 130-146. http://oro.open.ac.uk/id/eprint/46662. feldstein, a. martin, m., hudson, a., warren, k., hilton iii, j., & wiley, d. 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(2018). changing our (dis)course: a distinctive social justice aligned definition of open education. journal of learning for development 5(3), 225-244. retrieved from https://jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/290/334. paulsen, m. b., & st. john, e. p. (2002). social class and college costs: examining the financial nexus between college choice and persistence. the journal of higher education 73(2), 189–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2002.11777141. pawlyshyn, n., braddlee, d., casper, l., & miller, h. (2013, november 4). adopting oer: a case study of cross-institutional collaboration and innovation. educause review. retrieved from http://er.educause.edu/articles/2013/11/adopting-oer-a-case-study-of-crossinstitutional-collaboration-and-innovation. sagor, r. (2000). what is action research? in r. sagor (author), guiding school improvement with action research. retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/100047/chapters/what-is-action-research%c2%a2.aspx. senack, e. (2014). fixing the broken textbook market: how students respond to high textbook costs and demand alternatives. the student public interest research groups. retrieved from https://uspirg.org/reports/usp/fixing-broken-textbook-market. senack, e., & donoghue, r. (2016). covering the cost: why we can no longer afford to ignore high textbook prices. the student public interest research groups. retrieved from https://studentpirgs.org/2016/02/03/covering-cost/. state higher education executive officers association. (2018). state higher education finance (shef) fiscal year 2017. retrieved from https://sheeomain.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/sheeo_shef_fy2017_final-1.pdf. unesco. (2002). forum on the impact of open courseware for higher education in developing countries: final report. paris. retrieved from http://www.unesco.org:80/iiep/eng/focus/opensrc/pdf/oerforumfinalreport.pdf. unesco. (2012). 2012 paris oer declaration. retrieved from http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/multimedia/hq/ci/wpfd2009/english_declaration.html. u.s. government accountability office. (2013, june 6). college textbooks: students have greater access to textbook information (gao-13-368). retrieved from https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-368. watters, a. (2014, august 16). from “open” to justice. hack education. retrieved from http://hackeducation.com/2014/11/16/from-open-to-justice. wiley, david. (2007, august 8). open education license draft. iterating toward openness. retrieved from https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/355. wiley, d. (2017, november 8). if we talked about the internet like we talk about oer: the cost trap and inclusive access. iterating toward openness. retrieved from https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/5219. wiley, d. (2017, november 13). more on the cost trap and inclusive access. iterating toward openness. https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/5244. william and flora hewlett foundation. (2020). hewlett foundation: grants. retrieved from https://hewlett.org/grants/?sort=date&grant_strategies=31557&current_page=1. winn, j. (2012). open education: from the freedom of things to the freedom of people. in m. neary, h. stevenson, & l. bell, (eds.), towards teaching in public: reshaping the modern university (pp. 133-147). london: continuum international publishing group. teaching with care: a relational approach to individual research consultations communicating with information: creating inclusive learning environments for students with asd this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct becoming a writer-librarian – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 8 may emily ford /8 comments becoming a writer-librarian in brief: this article offers a reflection on my pursuit to become a writer-librarian. in addition to participating in a professional writing program at my institution, in november of 2012 i participated in academic writing month and digital writing month. through these immersive experiences i worked to figure out who is my writerly librarian self and discovered some tools and techniques to help me along the way. this article begins with an explanation of academic writing month and digital writing month, discusses writing in library and information science, and then offers more reflection on my discoveries as i tried to become a writer-librarian. among my discoveries, the most helpful were getting to know my writing barriers and making writing social. finally, this article offers advice to others who may wish to incorporate writing into their professional lives. photo by flickr user urbanworkbench (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by emily ford introduction i always tell people that if i hadn’t become a librarian i would have become a chef, but this is a lie. the truth is that i always wanted to be a writer. to be a manipulator of words and to caress them into meaning—this was the thing i wanted, and yet it is the thing that has taken me thirty-three years to publicly admit. when i had the opportunity to write in my professional life and work with in the library with the lead pipe, there was no decision to be made. over the past four years i have become immersed in the world of professional writing and editing as a lead pipe co-founder and editorial board member. writing, as i had always perceived and experienced it, was a lonely task. as a child and teenager i journaled alone. i wrote poems alone. writing papers throughout the course of my career in higher education as a student and professional had also always been a mostly lonesome task. being in a new tenure-track position i wanted to further engage in and improve my writing; so when i had the opportunity to join a writing program at my institution in in fall of 2012, i joined. in my flurry of writing excitement and in the hopes of further developing my writerly self, i also signed up for some new-to-me writing experiments: academic writing month (acwrimo) and digital writing month (digiwrimo). acwrimo and digiwrimo, both occurring simultaneously during the month of november, were writing challenges organized over social media that encourage participants to write 50,000 words. at the same time they were communities of practice. acwrimo was started in 2011 by charlotte frost, founder of phd2published, a blog and online community that serves as a resource for “academic publishing advice for first timers.” for frost, acwrimo was a way to kick into gear an academic writing project. using social media, participants announced their progress, supported other community members, gave advice, and generally participated in a virtual academic writing community. while the goal first posted by charlotte was to write 50,000 words, it could really be whatever goal you wanted to set for yourself. similarly, digiwrimo challenged participants to write 50,000 digital words between november 1st and 30th, but it also challenged participants to think about what it is to write digitally. more structured than acwrimo, digiwrimo offered weekly tweet chats and presented participants with opportunities to write creatively and collaboratively on projects. the month also featured a night of writing digitally, wherein its organizers hosted participants at marylhurst university for a night of writing individually, collaboratively, and yes, digitally. the goals i set for myself were pretty lofty. i set separate goals for both acwrimo and digiwrimo, but intentionally overlapped some of them. for acwrimo i would write an hour a day or seven hours a week, blog the process to the end goal of having a future lead pipe article about the experience, and complete a draft of an article i had been working on for eight months. for digiwrimo i would post once a day at my personal blog, tweet once a day, have drafts of two lead pipe articles complete, and have drafted an essay for a non-library publication. suffice it to say, i did not completely meet any of these goals. instead, the month became more about the writing process itself. i began to question. what is it to write? what is it to write digitally? what is it to write librarianly or to be a writerly librarian? as i completed pomodoros and blogged and tweeted, i wanted to know what it is to be a writer and a thinker in the field of lis. the rest of this article is my attempt to answer these questions. first i’ll investigate writing in lis and reflect on my experiences with writing in the field. then i will reflect on the writing activities i pursued in november. sharing my insights i will attempt to define what it is to be a writerly librarian and how to become one. writing in library and information science there is no paucity of literature discussing librarians and writing. blogs, columns, books, and general writing advice is easy to find. in fact, several librarian writers discuss what they see as the natural relationship between librarian-ing and writing. carol smallwood discusses her 2010 book, writing and publishing: the librarian’s handbook, in american libraries magazine. “librarians tend to be creative people, and what other profession than librarianship could be more encouraging for writers? we are surrounded by books, technology, and people, providing the opportunity not only to write for the profession but also to produce poetry, novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction for children and adults” (smallwood, 2009). indeed, there are numerous examples of librarians who author short stories, mystery and romance novels, poetry and more poetry, and even those who have authored biographies for an audience of juveniles. creative pursuits aside, there is also a vast realm of professional literature in librarianship. writing in professional literature is dominated by library school faculty and academic librarians (penta & mckenzie, 2013). even for these professionals writing can be a struggle. almost all of the existing articles and columns discussing writing librarians address the challenges of hectic and busy work lives. moreover, much of the writing activity in librarianship occurs outside of the normal working hours; it is treated as extracurricular. “writing is generally done outside the “normal” working day; frequently, they do not work in a culture where the dissemination of practice and research output is the norm; librarians may have a clear sense of identity of themselves as practitioners supporting the publishing efforts of their academic colleagues, rather than as active participants in generating scholarly output.” (p. 8, fallon, 2012) in their 2010 article, “beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions about research and practice in a professional field,” jane klobas and laurel clyde present lack of time as one of the most common barriers to writing for library practitioners. it is probably for this reason that many practicing librarians choose not to make writing a priority in their careers, especially if writing is not required in their jobs. however, writing does more for librarianship than take up spare time. in her 2008 editorial published in college &undergraduate libraries, inga barnello acknowledges a universal lack of writing time in librarianship, but argues that by sharing and disseminating our work, we librarians work to support one another: “we are all swamped. those who are writing do not have some bank of free time from which to withdraw extra hours in the day for writing. secondly, we have similar issues that we are grappling with. our projects revolve around common predicaments. we all benefit from the best practices of others” (p. 73). for barnello writing and disseminating our work means that others don’t have to reinvent the wheel. like barnello i see writing as an essential part of communicating with my colleagues. i also fall into the extracurricular “weekend writer” camp—these lead pipe articles don’t write themselves!—my writing activities extend far beyond my working hours. for someone like me, not writing is not an option; i am intellectually curious and attempt to engage in a reflective praxis of librarianship. writing manifests as an excellent tool to engage in my praxis. i’m no expert i may be a co-founder and editorial board member for lead pipe, but i am by no means an expert writer. i served a stint as a co-editor of rusa update, but most of my scholarship and professional writing experiences to date have been connected to this journal. this is not to say that lead pipe hasn’t been an incredible and educational experience. in fact, current and former lead pipe editorial board members are some of the best (and harshest!) editors i’ve ever had, and each author for lead pipe writes with her own panache. i think about our writing in lis, and i think about what we do and what we are required to do, and how we must be increasingly proficient with different writing modalities to be successful and good at our jobs. no one is born a writer. sure, individuals may show a certain aptitude for language and the written word, but no one automatically knows how to do it. like anything else it takes practice, time and dedication. still, how are we librarians trained to write? do librarians learn to write in library school? i didn’t. i started the process in 1st grade when my teacher insisted that we all keep journals. continuing throughout my k-12 education there were a handful of teachers who instilled in me good writing practices and skills. ms. moulden in the 1st grade—i still have my journals—mrs. baldwin in the 4th grade, mrs. walkiewicz throughout high school, dr. pancho savery in college—who taught me proper use of “that” and “which”—and dr. katja garloff, my senior thesis adviser. by the time i reached graduate school i had a solid writing foundation. luckily, i found a good editor in phil eskew, an adjunct professor who taught my first-ever library school class: issues in public library management. he asked that we write several two-page papers. two pages! as one who studied german literature in college i was accustomed to the twenty-page academic paper. two pages! obviously writing as a librarian would be incredibly different than my senior thesis, and it would pose unique challenges. i had to learn to write clearly and succinctly. as librarians we are asked to write daily. whether it’s email with students and faculty answering questions and explaining policies and procedures, or whether it’s short announcements about programs and services, we arguably communicate more today via the written word than ever before. moreover, our professional associations and recent practice in librarianship has moved toward the trend for us to “articulate our value.” (acrl’s value of academic libraries initiative, the nn/lm middle atlantic region study, and i love libraries’ library value calculator are a few good examples.) there is no better way to articulate value than to communicate it through words. the excessive amounts of data we gather is not enough. it is the compelling stories behind the data that we need to communicate—and with good writing this articulation becomes easier. writing is social a month prior to starting acwrimo and digiwrimo i began participating in a year-long writing program at my institution called jumpstart academic writing. the program, facilitated by dannelle d. stevens, phd, put participants into writing groups that were asked to meet weekly. the writing groups were intended to bring a social aspect to writing. group members announced to one another their weekly writing goals. in this group participants were individuals one could ask for help, or they could simply act as peer mentors who held one another accountable for their goals. each month the program hosted a larger group meeting facilitated by dr. stevens. in these meetings she led us in writing activities that encouraged us to become more familiar with our writing selves and the practice of academic writing and publishing. during november a typical writing day for me began while i drank my coffee and ate my breakfast. i caught up on #acwrimo and #digiwrimo tweets, blog posts and other social media items that had accumulated overnight and early in the morning from the east coasters, european and australian participants. after getting to work i would boot up my machine, make some tea, close my office door and sit down to complete one writing pomodoro.1 i wrote “offline”—no facebook, email, twitter or any other potential distraction. after my 30 minutes ended i would go about my work day, periodically checking in on the #acwrimo and #digiwrimo twitter streams. if it was a thursday, i would meet with my writing group at noon, where we would eat lunch and check in on each others’ progress. when 5:30 rolled around i would stop whatever i was doing, log out of email, and shut my office door. again opening one of my writing projects i would complete one more pomodoro before leaving work. after some downtime and dinner i returned to writing immersion. if there was a digiwrimo challenge, i would attempt to participate. evenings were also my designated time to reflect on writing successes and challenges (in blog form), and the time during which i attempted to craft words into sentences and paragraphs on my personal blog. before the night ended i would be sure to log the day’s productivity on the public academic writing accountability google doc. as a result of november and my participation in the jumpstart writing program [pdf] i realized that, in contrast to my previous reclusive writing behavior, my writing was becoming and should be social. i was better able to keep up with my seven hour a week goal when i tracked my progress on a public spreadsheet; i was better able to keep my writing time focused when i publicly declared goals to peers in my writing group; and i was able to get help and support for writing when i asked my community for it and when i saw others in my community struggling with similar writing obstacles. the main differences between the virtual writing months and the jumpstart writing program were a matter of intensity. in the jumpstart program participants focused on small, achievable goals—with the end goal that participants would build a sustainable writing practice to continue throughout their professional lives. in wild contrast, acwrimo and digiwrimo focused on grand plans and some rather insane goals, projects and schemes. as the folks over at profhacker stated, the first rule of acwrimo is to “set yourself some crazy goals.” similarly, digiwrimo encouraged participants to count every word written in emails, tweets, and facebook updates and comments. the digiwrimo about page declared: “digital writing month is a (somewhat) insane month-long writing challenge, a wild ride through the world of digital writing, wherein those daring enough to participate wield keyboard and cursor to create 50,000 words of digital writing in the thirty short days of november” (digital writing month, 2012). in fact, digiwrimo began november 1st with a challenge for participants to collaboratively write a novel in a day. i decided to participate in acwrimo and digiwrimo to immerse myself in writing and to think differently about writing. the in-person program in which i was participating was great, but i felt like i needed an intense writing boot camp to complete some projects. plus, the prospect of thinking about writing in new ways, as promised by digiwrimo, appealed to me. during this month i was going to be the lone wolf; the writer who holed herself up in her office pretending she wasn’t in the building during the first and last half hours of the day. when i would get home from work i would continue writing. yes, my goals were insane—of course i did not fully meet any of them—but i did not let that discourage me. what i did not expect to uncover during november was how social i was becoming in this writing process that had previously seemed a lonesome endeavor. digiwrimo, in particular, was structured to be collaborative and social. its organizers invited writers to create crowdsourced poems, novels, and other creative written works. during the night of writing digitally, an in person and virtual event, we wrote a poem, and the month ended with a beautiful twitter essay. (you can still read it, thanks to this storify by fellow digiwrimo participant, kevin hodgson. in fact, you can get a glimpse into digiwrimo at the digiwrimo scoop.it page.) using social media i was able to check in with my writing colleagues across the globe, offer encouragement to those who were struggling, and seek similar encouragement when i needed it. my contributions to the academic writing accountability google doc, too, were evidence of my social writing behavior. but it wasn’t just my behavior. these writing communities were inherently social. they were communities of practice with all of the necessary parts.2 i learned, engaged, and identified as an acwrimo-er and a digiwrimo-er, and i still do. reflecting on writing but it wasn’t just these programs that allowed me to discover my writerly self, on my own i began to read about writing. one of the books i had heard recommended by dr. stevens and fellow junior faculty members was paul silvia’s how to write a lot. certainly aimed at academics who need to try to incorporate writing into their daily routines, silvia’s book is startlingly easy to read, insightful, and humorous. of course it is a misconception that academic writing must be dry, nap-inducing, third-person reports of research written for journals whose editors will suck the life out of your work. and no one better communicates this than paul silvia. his short monograph allows readers to enter into his world—one of a prolific academic writer. he is a psychologist who constructs beautiful, engaging and witty sentences. on my acwrimo blog, seven hours a week, i wrote: “now halfway through this book, i’ve noticed that several chapter begins with unexpected similes, or at least witty and surprising statements. for instance, chapter two begins with, “writing is grim business, much like repairing a sewer or running a mortuary.” chapter four: “complaining is an academic’s birthright.” chapter six: “psychology journals are like the mean jocks and aloof rich girls in every 1980s high school movie–they reject all but the beautiful and persistent.” silvia’s discussions of grammar and punctuation utilize subtle and elegant examples, embedded almost secretly within the text; it is almost as if he is amusing himself. i congratulated myself on noticing this brilliant execution, and also found myself wondering if he intended to offer us that reward of self-gratification.” silvia inspired me to make the time to write. i had to face it, i was not going to be struck by a moment of passion in which i had to drop everything i was doing and write an article about librarianship. instead of allowing a looming deadline to inspire me, i took silvia’s advice and put aside the first and last half hour of my working day to write. one of the activities i completed in the jumpstart writing program was based on a book by robert boice, professors as writers. he created an instrument to allow academic writers to better know themselves—the blocking questionnaire. questions boice asks are those related to our inner thoughts and about writing and our writing habits. he breaks blocking down into seven components: work apprehension, procrastination, writing apprehension, dysphoria, impatience, perfectionism, and rules. from there he organizes these seven categories into three different measures: checklist for overt signs of blocking, checklist of cognition/emotion in blocking, and survey of social skills in writing. a writer can score herself in each of these measures, and then compute her mean blocking score and her mean component scores to see where are her blocks and what are her traits. based on the questionnaire i discovered that i am an impatient perfectionist – a writer full of contradiction. although these traits aren’t secret to me, the questionnaire allowed me recognized them in their brutal and ugly honesty. impatience is pretty straightforward and so is perfectionism. however, when reading the description of perfectionism i was taken aback. a few writers, in my experience, refuse to abandon their maladaptive styles of perfectionism, supposing that doing so is tantamount to abandoning civilized standards of excellence. in this regard, perfectionism resembles shyness in that its possessors tend to be nice people who are closet elitists. (p. 153) my inner dialog huffily reacted, “i am not an elitist!” a few moments later it resigned. “crap. i’ve been outed.” since i began my career i edited others’ works, received feedback on my writing, and wrote collaboratively. yet how is it that i was now a closet elitist? reflection and self-discovery were not foreign to me and i embraced any exercise that allowed me to acknowledge and better understand myself and my writing practice. simply by discovering my writing blocks, i took a step towards ameliorating them. it wasn’t all reflection even though i didn’t fully meet my goals, my acwrimo and digiwrimo 2012 were incredibly productive. during the month i completed, with my co-author carol bean, “open ethos publishing at code4lib journal and in the library with the lead pipe.” i had a draft of a research article completed, which i was then able to whip into shape and submit by mid-january. moreover, a co-author and i received revision requests for a book chapter during this month, which we were able to quickly turn around and resubmit to the editor. what i noticed about my technique, opening and ending my work day with a half hour pomodoro3 of writing time, is that it was a great way to get some of the nitty-gritty writing work out of the way. a half hour allowed me to freely write, and it allowed me to poke at revisions and edits. but i also sometimes felt that these half hours were lacking. at the end of some of these half hours i felt like i had just gotten started, and so i would extend my time by five or ten minutes, or even for another half hour. however, i frequently did not have the leeway in my schedule to do so, nor did i feel that i could ignore all of the other things that were piling up while i was spending time writing. despite my ability to set aside work-day time for writing, a lot of my acwrimo and digiwrimo writing activity occurred “off the clock.” it was on weekends when my co-author and i could connect via google+ hangouts, and when i had longer than half-hour chunks of quiet time to edit and revise my work. at the end of it all, i feel most proud of the lead pipe articles that were partially drafted during acwrimo and digiwrimo. for the most part, this is because i like the content and subjects of what i write for lead pipe. i also feel more free and confident when writing for lead pipe than for other venues. here i have a voice and here i have an established writing community of practice. all in all, november 2012 was a productive writing month for me. in addition to the self-reflection and self-discovery i began to produce a body of work that has culminated in works that have already been published or will be published in the future. find your writerly self and become a writer-librarian in the past my writing had always been a solitary activity. but as a result of my participation in acwrimo, digiwrimo, and in the jumpstart group, i have come to better know my writerly librarian self. i am an impatient perfectionist. i am prone to holing up in my home office on saturday mornings or spending $3.50 on a decaf rice milk latte and three hours producing sentences and paragraphs that hopefully mean something. but i also need to be part of a social writing community; my best writerly self emerges when i am part of a community of practice. keeping writing social allows me to set and attain goals and allows me to get necessary feedback earlier in the writing process. discovering these things was tough, but even though acknowledging my personal challenges was intimidating, the rewards have made it worth the effort. for you readers who would like to discover your writerly librarian selves, there are a few things i’ve gleaned from my immersive experience that i encourage you to do. first, get to know your librarian self. what do you value? what is your philosophy? what do you have to share? what do you want to share? then get to know your writerly self. what are your writing challenges and what are your writing behaviors? consider checking out boice’s book and take the blocking questionnaire. after you’ve identified your blocks, think about how you can work with them. what can you do to overcome the impatient perfectionist in you? knowing what are your challenges will enable you to better operate with them. for me, i am now trying to work well in advance of deadlines to tame the impatience (i can deal with a deadline), but also to allow myself enough time to polish my work before it gets published. after you’ve engaged in some writerly self-discovery, try to think about how you want to prioritize writing as part of your life. will it be on weekends? will it be every morning?  in essence, what will you sacrifice in order to write? as you begin to incorporate writing into your professional life, be sure that you allocate the time to do so. be aware that when you allocate time to write, you will be taking time away from other tasks. think about whether there is something on your plate that you don’t need to do, or you can do less frequently, or if it is something that can be delegated to someone else. when you’ve come to know yourself and when you’ve set aside the necessary time, next try to set some writing goals. set short-term goals—these can be weekly or daily—and set some long-term goals. your goals should be a mix of easily achievable and those that would be more challenging. and whatever goals you do set, go easy on yourself. it’s not whether you achieve them, it’s the ride you take to try and get there. finally, make writing social. find an existing writing community of practice like acwrimo and participate. you can even start tracking your progress on the publicly shared academic writing accountability spreadsheet. alternatively, you can form your own writing group. whatever you do, find or create a community—be it virtual or face-to-face—that challenges and supports you to become not only your writerly self, but a writer-librarian. many thanks to chris hollister and emily drabinski for their thoughtful comments and feedback. additional thanks to lead pipe editorial board members erin dorney and ellie collier for their comments and edits. references and further readings barnello, i.h. (2008). librarians as authors: take the plunge. college & undergraduate libraries, 7(1), 37–41. boice, r. (1990). professors as writers: a self-help guide to productive writing. stillwater, okla., u.s.a: new forums press. dermody, m. et al. (2012). riding the publishing roller coaster: practical strategies from research to writing. ala annual conference program, june 25. char booth’s slides: http://www.slideshare.net/charbooth/insert-clever-title-ala-pubilshing-panel-2012 and blog post: http://infomational.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/backlog-part-1-come-hell-or-high-water/ chepesiuk, r. (1991, november). in pursuit of the muse: librarians who write. american libraries, 988–991. digital writing month. (2012). what is digiwrimo? retrieved from http://www.digitalwritingmonth.com/what-is-digiwrimo/ duguid, p. (2003). communities of practice. in k. christensen, & d. levinson (eds.), encyclopedia of community: from the village to the virtual world. (pp. 234-237). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. fallon, h. (2009). a writing support programme for irish academic librarians. library review, 58(6), 414–422. fallon, h. (2012). using a blended group learning approach to increase librarians’ motivation and skills to publish. new review of academic librarianship, 18(1), 7–25. gordon, r.s. (2004). getting started in library publication. american libraries, 67–69. gregory, g. (2008). and you thought that you couldn’t publish a book ? and you thought that you couldn ‘ t publish a book ? college & undergraduate libraries, 14(1), 37–41. klobas, j.e., & clyde, l.a. (2010). beliefs, attitudes and perceptions about research and practice in a professional field. library & information science research, 32(4), 237–245. mcknight, m. (2009). professional publication: yes, you can! the journal of academic librarianship, 35(2), 115–116. morris, s. (2012). a novel in a day. retrieved from http://www.digitalwritingmonth.com/2012/11/01/a-novel-in-a-day/ penta, m., & mckenzie, p.j. (2012). the big gap remains the big gap remains : public librarians as authors in lis journals, 1999-2003. public library quarterly, 24(1), 37–41. silvia, p.j. (2007). how to write a lot: a practical guide to productive academic writing. washington, dc: american psychological association. smallwood, c. (2009). librarians as writers. american libraries, (june/july), 54–57. smallwood, c. (2010). writing and publishing: the librarian’s handbook. chicago: american library association. stommel, j. (2012). the twitter essay. hybrid pedagogy. january 5. retrieved from http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/files/twitter_and_the_student2point0.html tarrant, a. (2012). academic writing month and the social landscape of academic practice. the guardian. november 1. retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/nov/01/academic-writing-month-acwrimo-research toor, r. (2012). becoming a “stylish” writer – advice. the chronicle of higher education. retrieved november 4, 2012, from http://chronicle.com/article/becoming-a-stylish-writer/132677/ vance, j. (2012). librarians as authors, editors, and self-publishers: the information culture of the kentucky pack horse library scrapbooks (1936-1943). library & information history, 28(4), 289–308. williams, g. (2012). november is academic writing month. profhacker, october 24. retrevied from: http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/november-is-academic-writing-month/43608 during this time i was working on both a literature review article that will be forthcoming this summer provided the publisher and i get the author agreement worked out, and the article carol bean and i published in december: “open ethos publishing at code4lib journal and in the library with the lead pipe.” [↩] “the community of practice is, then, the group of practitioners with whom learners must engage and in whose activities they must be able to participate in order to learn. learning is, ultimately, the process of becoming (and becoming recognized as) a member of such a community. as such, learning involves much more than acquiring the explicit knowledge associated with a particular practice. it also requires developing the tacit understanding, inherent judgment, and shared identity that come with participation.” (duguid, 2003, p. 234) [↩] the pomodoro technique is a method of time management wherein one concentrates on a task, typically for twenty-five minutes, and then takes a five minute break. after four pomodoros, as these twenty-five minute chunks of time are popularly called, one takes a longer break. [↩] librarian, professional development, writer, writing the digital public library of america: details, the librarian response and the future. what i wish i’d known about building teen services from scratch 8 responses elise 2013–05–09 at 12:04 pm nice article! how long does it take to finish an article like this on average? emily ford 2013–05–09 at 8:39 pm thanks! i’m not really sure i know the answer to your question because i’ve never quantified it. usually i have spent a while fleshing out my ideas during my commute to and from work, while walking, etc. then i’ll try to wrangle with my argument or the article’s purpose. this all happens before i even get my fingers to the keyboard to write. my next step in the process is to try and create a sensible outline for an article. usually i share the outline–and frequently the prior thinking process about an article topic–with with colleagues and friends. (this is a great example of writing as a social activity.) when i get to the point where i am ready to write from an outline, i can draft an article fairly quickly–say, 3-4 hours of work–but sometimes it takes much longer if i am still grappling with my argument or ideas. then, of course, there is the editing process. typically i will edit first, then share with a colleague, and edit some more. then there is the peer-review process, more editing and revisions. i guess if you really want a ball park figure of how long it takes me to write one lead pipe article (as in, working at the keyboard) i’d say 10 hours? but that is so hard to quantify and really doesn’t mean anything. ideas sometimes float around in my brain for several months before i get to the point of even being able to talk to someone about them. in short, writing is not only about the time i spend at the keyboard, but on my personal reflections and the time i spend thinking about what i’m going to write and what i’m going to say. now that this article has been published i’ve already started thinking about what topic my next lead pipe article will tackle. sirmies 2013–05–10 at 10:30 am always drawn to pieces such as this. i don’t write but desperately want to. i think you accurately portray the level of commitment and effort involved in being/becoming a writer. and as for our profession i like to think it is essential that we make a commitment to this craft. also your absolutely correct that writing is an integral function of who we are and what we do, so it therefore behooves us practice this craft. this piece is very motivating and in time i hope to put some of your recommendations into practice. thanks for the thoughts pingback : on librarians writing | academic librarian pingback : writing is social | thinking outside the books celia 2013–05–19 at 11:30 pm emily, this is a great article, full of useful details and thoughtful reflection! when something like #digiwrimo is not running, where do you find the best community for this type of writing? emily ford 2013–05–22 at 11:53 am great question, celia! there are a few ways that i find community. first, i am in some writing groups at my job. one is still with the jumpstart academic writing program, where i have connected with some colleagues who can help me feel accountable for my writing goals. the other is organized within my library, but is really more of a research group. we talk about our research and writing and set bi-weekly goals. i’ll also say that just because it’s not november, does not mean that there isn’t a writing community on twitter. in fact, there is a hashtag for #acwri, which i follow. also, the public acwrimo spreadsheet is still active, even though it’s not november. it may take a little more legwork to find a community when it’s not a designated writing month, but they communities are there. pingback : on librarians writing | academic librarian this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct randall munroe’s what if as a test case for open access in popular culture – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 8 apr nancy foasberg /6 comments randall munroe’s what if as a test case for open access in popular culture photo by randall munroe, what if. cc-by-nc 2.5. retrieved from http://what-if.xkcd.com/127/   in brief: open access to scholarly research benefits not only the academic world but also the general public. questions have been raised about the popularity of academic materials for nonacademic readers. however, when scholarly materials are available, they are also available to popularizers who can recontextualize them in unexpected and more accessible ways. randall munroe’s blog/comic what if uses open access scholarly and governmental documents to answer bizarre hypothetical questions submitted by his readers. his work is engaging, informative, and reaches a large audience. while members of the public may not rush to read open access scientific journals, their availability to writers like munroe nevertheless contributes to better science education for the general public. popularizers outside of academia benefit significantly from open access; so do their readers. by nancy foasberg open access and the public good open access (oa) is a longstanding and important discussion within librarianship. as peter suber explains, the “basic idea of oa is simple: make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers.” for a good grounding in the basics of open access, i refer the interested reader to suber’s book open access; for a quick overview of open access, see this blog post by jill cirasella. open access has many benefits, both to academics and to the wider public. the benefits to academics are obvious: authors get wider distribution of their work, researchers at institutions with small budgets have better access to scholarly materials, and, for librarians, it represents a partial solution to the serials crisis. in this article, however, i will focus on the benefit of open access to the public. when scholarship is freely available on the web, it is available not only to scholars, but to anyone with an internet connection, the research skills to locate these materials, and the proficiency to read them. open access has the potential to support lifelong learning by making scholarship available to people without any current academic affiliation, whether they are professionals in a field that requires continuing education, or hobbyists fascinated by a particular subject, or just people who are interested in many things and want to keep learning. in the access principle: the case for open access to research and scholarship, john willinsky describes the value of scholarly information to several specific segments of the public, including medical patients, amateur astronomers, and amateur linguists. both suber and willinsky cite critics who argue that most members of the public are not interested in reading scholarly articles or books, that the public cannot understand this material, or even that the information could be harmful to them. suber criticizes the presumptuous attitudes of those who would make these claims, pointing out that the public’s demand for scholarly information cannot be determined until this information is made widely available. willinsky objects strongly to the presumptuous attitudes of those who question the ability of the public to benefit from open access: [p]roving that the public has sufficient interest in, or capacity to understand, the results of scholarly research is not the issue. the public’s right to access of this knowledge is not something that people have to earn. it is grounded in a basic right to know. willinsky’s argument for the public’s moral right to access scholarly research is both stirring and compelling. this is especially true for librarians, for whom access to information is a professional value. open access need not rely on any demonstration that the public has met some arbitrary threshold of interest and education. without believing in a need for such proofs, i would nevertheless like to present one case illustrating how open access can benefit the public. the public is, by its very nature, diverse. it includes the amateur and professional users of information cited above. the public also includes popularizers who can use open access scholarly literature in unexpected ways, not only to more widely distribute the fruits of scholarly research but also to create projects of their own. by looking at the role of one such popularizer, randall munroe, i will question two assumptions: first, that the public is so uniformly unsophisticated, and second, that they all need to read the open access literature in order to benefit from its wide availability. what if what if, a weekly blog that answers hypothetical questions using science and stick figure illustrations, is the work of randall munroe. munroe is a former national aeronautics and space administration (nasa) roboticist but is better known as a webcomic artist. his primary project is popular webcomic xkcd, which explains itself with a disclaimer: warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors). it would be fair to describe xkcd as a nerdy joke-a-day comic with stick figure art, but i should point out immediately that munroe has often used it to explain scientific concepts. notable comics include “lakes and oceans,” which illustrates the depth of the earth’s lakes and oceans in a way that gives a better idea of their scope, and “up goer five,” which uses the simplest possible vocabulary to explain how the saturn v rocket works. munroe’s science education agenda is thus visible even in xkcd. the connection to science education is clearer in what if, in which munroe uses real, scientific information to provide serious answers to ridiculous hypothetical questions posed by his readership, such as: what if everything was antimatter, except earth? (“antimatter”) what would happen if one person had all the world’s money? (“all the money”) at what speed would you have to drive for rain to shatter your windshield? (“windshield raindrops”) munroe answers these questions using math, science, humor, and art. he pitches his answers appropriately to a smart and curious, but not necessarily scientific, audience. in fact, several questions have been submitted by parents on behalf of their children. a good example is the first of the questions listed above: “what if everything was antimatter, except earth?” in about 500 words, munroe covers the proportion of matter to antimatter in the universe, the solar wind, earth’s magnetic field, the effect of space dust on the earth’s atmosphere, and the dangers of large asteroids. this sounds like a lot of information, but with monroe’s straightforward style and amusing illustrations, it is easy to read and understand. figure 1: an illustration from “antimatter.” cc-by-nc 2.5 retrieved from https://what-if.xkcd.com/114/   so, what if is humorous and silly, but the questions are taken seriously, and in fact provide real scientific information. having read this particular post, we know more not only about the prevalence of matter and antimatter, but also about the earth, asteroids, and more. what if is extremely popular. in 2014, munroe published a book including some of the questions he’d answered in the blog along with some others which he felt deserved fuller attention. the book, the #6 overall bestseller on amazon as of december 10, 2014, has been successful in reaching a large audience. while bestseller status is not necessarily an indicator of the book’s value, it does suggest that a high level of public awareness of this work. sourcing information for hypothetical questions as a guest on national public radio’s science friday, munroe explained that what if is driven partially by his own desire to know the answers to the questions that people send him. he likes hypothetical questions, partly because “they’re fun,” but also: a lot of the time it ends up taking you into exploring a bunch of weird questions or subjects in the real or practical science that you might not have thought about. (munroe, “interview”) through what if, munroe uses research to explore questions and information sources. munroe delves into many different types of sources in order to answer these questions. munroe’s sophistication as an information user manifests itself in his use of a wide variety of sources to answer many different kinds of questions. he uses wikipedia as a starting point and youtube as a useful source of visualizations, but he’s clearly familiar with a wide variety of ways to search the web and kinds of sources available there. he uses specialized web tools like wolfram alpha, a “knowledge engine” built to perform computations and provide controlled web searching. he takes advantage of online educational materials for the clarity with which they explain basic concepts and present mathematical formulae. he consults commercial catalogs to get the specifications on various products—unsurprising behavior for a former engineer! he consults blogs and enthusiast resources, such as amateur aviation and auto-repair sites, where there is a large and knowledgeable fan community. amid this landscape, academic sources certainly have a place. they provide detailed information and a look at ongoing research, as i’ll discuss further below. munroe’s frequent use of articles in researchgate and arxiv suggests that these repositories are also among his favorite sites. munroe’s teasing links to conspiracy sites also hint that he is well aware of the need to evaluate information for accuracy and confident in his ability to do so. he makes an effort to link to high-quality sites, although he has on one occasion (“all the money”) admitted defeat (when trying to find the angle of repose for coins) and resorted to linking to a message board posting. still, he carefully considers the information he uses; even when using a fairly standard resource like google maps, he looks carefully at the route it recommends. in “letter to mom,” he notes with surprise that google maps does not take advantage of the buffalo valley rail trail as a walking route and jokingly suggests it may be haunted. he also acknowledges other kinds of gaps in the information that’s available. his investigation into the amount of data storage available at google (“google’s datacenters on punch cards”) works around the fact that google does not disclose this information by looking into the cost of their data centers and the power that they consume. in short, throughout what if, munroe displays a high awareness of the information landscape and a strong ability to find, interpret, and appropriately deploy information, even though his information needs may be highly unorthodox. sources used in what if since links serve as citations in the world of the web, i have gone through the entire run of the blog, which included 120 posts as of december 10, 2014, and analyzed the links. this is an informal analysis; i examined and coded each entry but i have not done any validity tests on the categories. this chart is intended only to give an at-a-glance idea of the general types of sources munroe consults. figure 2: sources used in what if academic sources include scholarly journal articles, books, and online course-related materials such as textbooks and slides. news, blogs, and associations includes a wider variety of sources, but what they have in common is that they are written not for professionals or academics. rather, they address either the general public or a specialized, non-professional community. here i include news reports, blogs by experts, hobby sites, and so on. reference sources comprise popular online reference sources, mostly wikipedia but also the international movie database (imdb) and similar sources. government and commercial documents often present analysis and scientific or technical information. nasa is the biggest source here, with many documents written by engineers. data and images include charts, datasets, results from the online search engine/calculator wolfram alpha, videos, and so on. self citation links lead back to other what if posts, to xckd, or to munroe’s blog. other includes links to social networks, other webcomics, company front pages, and so on. sophisticated use of popular online information not all the sources munroe uses are scholarly in nature. of the source types listed above, three of them — academic sources, news sources (etc.), and government and commercial documents — might provide experimental or analytical information about the phenomenon of interest. this accounts for about half of munroe’s citations. the remainder serve other purposes, such as reference, demonstration, or humor. munroe’s use of sources, including nonscholarly sources, demonstrates his sophistication and understanding of the internet. “popular reference sources” is the largest category other than the three mentioned above; this category is dominated by wikipedia, the most commonly-cited source in what if. wikipedia is a commonly reviled source in academic contexts, but monroe uses it in an appropriate and knowledgeable way. munroe understands that wikipedia is a reference source, and generally points to it when introducing concepts with which his readers may not be familiar. in the antimatter example discussed above, munroe links to the pages on baryon asymmetry and cp symmetry when discussing the prevalence of matter and antimatter in the universe. by linking to these pages, he avoids unnecessarily introducing technical jargon into the main text of his article but still invites his readers to learn more about it. most of his uses of wikipedia are similarly definitional. occasionally, they are playful, as in “balloon car”, where he breaks the word “catenary” into two links, one to the entry for “cat” and the other for “domestic canary.” note that this moment communicates something about munroe’s expectations for his audience; they are of course perfectly capable of both recognizing the joke and searching wikipedia for the correct term (“catenary”) themselves. the links, then, are only a courtesy to readers. notably, wikipedia is not cited in the print book. in fact, munroe’s expectation that wikipedia is a major part of his readers’ information landscape is so strong that he occasionally inserts the wikipedia tag “[citation needed]” into his articles in an ironic, jokey way, when he takes for granted something that appears obvious. my personal favorite is in post “one-second day”,  in which he remarks that the earth rotates, inserts a “[citation needed]” tag and links to the famous conspiracy site, “time cube.” his use of other popular online sources is similar; a good example is youtube, to which he frequently links when he needs visual aids. in “extreme boating”, he links to several videos showing reactions with different substances through which he proposes rowing a boat. academic/analytical sources munroe is an information omnivore who constantly and intentionally mixes popular and scholarly, humorous and serious. although he uses wikipedia heavily for background information, he turns to deeper sources when more precise analysis is needed. his sources for this work include academic journal articles, and also government and commercial documents with scientific or technical content. however, the academic articles are of particular interest in a discussion of open access. the post about antimatter is a good example. in it, munroe’s links to wikipedia links to wikipedia are used to establish the basic concepts relevant to the question. later in the post, questions come up that scientists still disagree about; here is where books and articles begin to be cited. the antimatter question leads to a discussion of just how much antimatter is in the universe and whether, for instance, antimatter galaxies could exist; this question is addressed with one scientific article that shows this has not yet been observed and another that proposes a new telescope to further examine the question. in other posts, many other questions are examined using similar sources. “burning pollen” cites a chemistry paper explaining the reaction between diet coke and mentos in order to explain oxidation. “laser umbrella” cites several scientific articles about vaporizing liquids using lasers, as this question has often been studied. in “speed bump,” munroe is working on a question about the fastest speed at which one can survive going over a speed bump, so an article in a medical journal about spinal injuries from speed bumps is useful. as noted above, academic articles are not munroe’s only source of scientific information. articles from government agencies, particularly nasa, often serve a similar purpose. munroe also often links to books, either by linking to a book’s record in worldcat or amazon, or by using google books to link a specific page, often one with a diagram or graph. what if also includes a few links (specifically, twenty-five of them) to educational materials such as class sites, lecture slides, and online textbooks. for statistics and other kinds of quantitative information, munroe often turns to other sites. some of the government documents provide this sort of information, as do commercial entities such as rope manufacturers, cargo transporters, and so on. what if includes citations to data safety sheets and international standards, most notably in “lake tea,” which needs to cite standards for several different types of tea in order to answer a question about the strength of the brew made from dumping all the tea in the world into the great lakes. he uses wolfram alpha, the “computational knowledge engine” for calculations and conversions and google maps for locations and distances. contributions of amateurs and journalists finally, popular sources also have a place in what if. munroe often links to news, professional and hobby associations, and blogs, both those produced by passionate amateurs and those used by professionals to connect to a lay audience. these include the new york times and slate, but also the popular bad astronomy blog, a visualization blog known as data pointed, aviation history enthusiast sites, and a linguistics blog by scholars at the university of pennsylvania. in most cases, these are used because they provide specific, current information by knowledgeable people. thus, academic journals do not have a monopoly on useful scientific information. however, at 13% of all links, they comprise a substantial portion of munroe’s research. open access in what if munroe is aware of the open access movement; he has illustrated the available amount of open access literature (“the rise of open access”). as of december 10, 2014, munroe had referenced 100 academic articles in what if, and about 72 of them can be considered open access because their full text is freely available to the public in one way or another. within the open access movement, authors often refer to two ways to achieve open access—the “gold road” and the “green road.” gold open access is provided by open access publishers who make their content freely available rather than using paywalls and subscriptions. green open access is achieved when authors publicly archive their content online, with the permission of their publishers.1 figure 3: availability of academic articles cited in what if for the purposes of this pie chart, anything that munroe has linked from a repository or an author’s page is considered green open access, and anything linked from the journal’s website is considered gold open access. because i am attempting to capture the perspective of a reader interested in a particular article rather than that of a publisher or librarian, i am ignoring some nuances important to open access advocates. in particular, i am counting all open access articles that are available through the publishers’ sites as “gold,” even including those which are available via hybrid models the hybrid model, in which subscription journals make some articles available to the public, contingent on author fees, does not support all the goals of the open access movement. however, it does make content available to readers within the journal itself so from a reader’s point of view, it makes sense to classify these articles as gold open access. “gold” and “green” open access were used about equally in what if (34% and 38%, respectively). “gold” open access included some links to very well-known open access publications such as plos one, but also a wide variety of other journals and some conference proceedings.  the “green” open access links were to repositories; arxiv, the open access repository of physics papers, appeared frequently, as did academic social networks like researchgate and academia.edu, and of course, many university repositories and faculty websites. munroe occasionally links to articles that are not freely accessible, including some from major publishers such as nature, springer, and elsevier. for these articles, only the abstracts are available. these comprise 23% of the academic articles cited. this is a substantial proportion of all academic articles, but much smaller than the proportion of open access materials. why open access matters to what if although munroe occasionally links to an article that is not freely accessible, open access articles are preferable for obvious reasons. munroe is a professional cartoonist, not an academic, so his profession does not automatically grant him access to subscription resources. moreover, he cannot assume that his readers have access to any given closed-access resource. if munroe succeeds in inspiring in his readers the kind of curiosity about the world that characterizes his own work, they will need resources that they are actually able to access. open access is thus important to both the success and the quality of what if. what if is an example of what can be achieved when information, and scholarly information in particular, is made readily available outside of academia. while munroe depends on information from a variety of sources, the information he gleans from open access academic works is especially important because it connects him directly to the science. imagine a non-academic freelancer attempting to write a weekly column like what if in an environment in which all or most scholarly information is available only by subscription. without academic affiliation, it is very difficult to obtain scholarly material in the quantity in which it is used in what if. to pay the access fee for each article needed would soon become prohibitive. most current scholarly materials are not held in public libraries, many public libraries limit or charge for their interlibrary loans, and waiting for articles to arrive could affect the weekly publication schedule. under such circumstances, it is not surprising that popularizers in the past have tended to be either academics or journalists, two professions which grant their practitioners access to information. what if is driven by munroe’s wide-ranging curiosity and that of his readers. what if began with the questions that xkcd readers sent to him; he found he too was curious about the answers. because of the time he spent researching these questions, he decided to write them up and post them on his website. this is suggestive of the way that being an audience member sometimes works on the internet: munroe’s readers felt sufficiently connected to him to send him these questions, and he felt sufficiently interested in the questions to research and respond to them. the ability to answer the questions to his satisfaction depends on the availability to both munroe and to his readers of reliable information. the readership of what if munroe writes what if for a general audience. however, he believes that whether his audience is general or technical, “the principles of explaining things clearly are the same. the only real difference is which things you can assume they already know…” (“not so absurd”). munroe expresses skepticism toward assumptions about general knowledge: [r]eal people are complicated and busy, and don’t need me thinking of them as featureless objects and assigning them homework. not everyone needs to know calculus, python or how opinion polling works. maybe more of them should, but it feels a little condescending to assume i know who those people are. i just do my best to make the stuff i’m talking about interesting; the rest is up to them. (“not so absurd”) munroe resists the idea that his audience needs to learn how to do the things that he knows how to do, like using good estimation techniques to understand the size of a number. instead, he states that “the rest is up to them.” what if uses links according to this principle; anyone can understand the articles without reference to their sources, but the sources are nevertheless available for their reference. the nature of what if as a question-and-answer site ensures that munroe is always addressing at least one of his readers directly. linking his sources, then, becomes part of the answer. munroe does not simply dispense answers, rather, he encourages his readers to see where the information is coming from. occasionally, he even makes comments on the things that he links, for example: “a positively stunning firsthand account” (“visit every state”), “one of the worst scanned pdfs i’ve ever seen” (“enforced by radar”), “a wonderful chart” (“star sand”), and so on. in one case (“all the money”), he links to a book in google books and refers to a specific page so that a reader can find the information that he used. like any citation, these links make it possible for a reader to consult the author’s sources. to a non-academic audience, however, citations are a meaningless gesture if they are not to open access resources. thus, open access resources are important not only for munroe to access his sources, but also so that he can share them with his readers. this attitude–that readers should be able to access cited sources in a click–contrasts strongly with that of open access critics who claim there is little public interest in scholarly works. although in most cases it is not clear how many readers click through, youtube videos linked from what if do see increased views; many commenters on such videos indicate that they arrived via links from what if. why what if matters for open access why does it matter what resources are available to the author of a silly blog with stick figure illustrations? although what if contributes to ongoing science education, the stakes are lower than they are for some of the other things that can be accomplished with open access, such as providing education and medical information to rural, underfunded, or poor areas. i want to be clear that the purpose of open access is not only to benefit those who are highly educated, famous, and have a large platform of their own. i must also acknowledge that, as a white man on the internet, munroe’s path to popularizing scientific information is far smoother than that of others who do not share his privilege. however, i still think what if matters for open access, for several reasons. first, scholarly information is sneaking into popular culture. what if shows how scholarly information can be relevant to people in their daily lives, even if they only use it to amuse themselves by thinking about unlikely scenarios. this increases the reach of scholarly research and contributes to public science education. there is interest in this information beyond a scholarly or professional context. in the fields most of interest to munroe, mathematics, physics, astronomy and earth and environmental sciences, open access has increased faster than most other fields (bjork et al). munroe relies on open access in a way that many humanities popularizers like idea channel’s mike rugnetta do not. however, as open access in the humanities increases, i hope to see projects that make use of it in interesting ways. second, what if has a very large audience. as of december 10, 2014, the book based on the blog was the #6 bestselling title on amazon. although many readers may never consult the book’s sources, they still benefit from their availability through the existence of what if. munroe’s role here is that of a popularizer; he reads the scholarly literature that is relevant to his writing and produces something more accessible for the public. what if joins a host of science blogs in recontextualizing science for a different audience (luzón). popularizers have been writing since long before the beginning of the open access movement, but open access can make it much easier for popularizers to succeed, especially those who live outside of academia or journalism. additionally, although many readers might not click through the links in a what if entry to read the scholarly research that munroe cites, those who are interested have the ability and the access to do so. what if mediates the information with accessibility and clarity, but because it exists as a born-digital work and because most of the links are to open access materials, readers are invited to examine munroe’s sources. finally, munroe and his readership stand as an example of a sophisticated, curious, and playful public who, although they may not be members of the scholarly community, have a strong interest in the work that is produced there. conclusion to read what if requires the playfulness to put serious academic work to a silly purpose, the curiosity to learn about the universe in new and unusual contexts, and the sophistication to understand the larger information landscape from which all this proceeds. what if’s readers have the ability to understand the wikipedia jokes, to have a basic awareness of the existence of both highand low-quality information on the internet, and to integrate scholarly concepts into this larger landscape. one of the most intriguing aspects of what if is its repurposing of scholarly information in ways unlikely to occur to more traditional popularizers with an explicitly educational mission. what if is not the work of an academic trying to produce more accessible information for the public; rather, it is the work of one member of the public putting academic work to use in a way that is meaningful for his audience. munroe’s work draws on scholarly research, but it is markedly different from anything that we would expect to find in an academic context. given the success of what if, it is clear that there is a readership for unexpected reuses of scholarly information. without open access, what if could not exist. as open access expands and the public finds its way to materials it did not previously have available, what other intriguing projects might we see? thanks to hugh rundle and jill cirasella, who pushed me to think through the things that were messy and unfinished in this article, and who asked lots of good, difficult questions.  david williams helped me with the images and kelly blanchat answered a copyright question for me. thanks also to steven ovadia, for arranging the 2014 grace-ellen mccrann lectures, at which an early version of this paper was originally presented, and to everyone who encouraged me to turn that presentation into an article. references and further reading bjork, b. c., laakso, m. welling, p. & pateau, p. “anatomy of green open access.” journal of the american society for information science and technology. 64.2 (2014): 237-250. doi: 10.1002/asi.22963. web. preprint available at <http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc8/personal%20versiongreenoa.pdf> cirasella, jill. “open access to scholarly articles: the very basics.” open access @ cuny [blog]. may 18, 2011. web. <http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/about-open-access/> –. interview with ira flatow. science friday, npr. 5 sep. 2014. web. <http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/09/05/2014/randall-munroe-asks-what-if.html> –. “randall munroe of xkcd answers our (not so absurd) questions.” [interview by walt hickey.] five thirtyeight, september 2, 2014. web. <http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/xkcd-randall-munroe-qanda-what-if/> –. “the rise of open access.” science 342.6154 (2013): 58-59. web. doi: 10.1126/sciencef.342.6154.58 –. what if. web. <http://what-if.xkcd.com> –. xkcd. web. <http://xkcd.com> luzón, maría josé. “public communication of science in blogs: recontextualizing scientific discourse for a diversified audience.” written communication 30.4 (2013): 428-457. panitch, judith and sarah michalak. “the serials crisis: a white paper for the unc-chapel hill scholarly communications convocation.” scholarly communications in a digital world: a convocation. january 27-28, 2005. chapel hill, north carolina. web. <http://www.unc.edu/scholcomdig/whitepapers/panitch-michalak.html> suber, peter. open access. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2012. web. <http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access> willinksy, john. the access principle: the case for open access to research and scholarship. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2012. web. <http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/access-principle> many journals allow self-archiving by default, either immediately or after an embargo period. other journals may agree to allow self-archiving after negotiation with the author. in some cases, journals allow authors to keep their copyright, so their permission is not required. [↩] advocacy, information literacy, open access, popular culture, publishing a radical publishing collective: the journal of radical librarianship adopting the educator’s mindset: charting new paths in curriculum and assessment mapping 6 responses bill 2015–04–08 at 9:01 am for more stories of users, both general public and academic, who benefit from oa, see: http://dash.harvard.edu//stories bill 2015–04–08 at 9:03 am sorry, use this link instead: https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/dash/stories pingback : editor’s choice: randall munroe’s what if as a test case for open access in popular culture | digital humanities now pingback : latest library links 10th april 2015 | latest library links pingback : weekly web harvest (weekly) | pingback : open access week 2015: a roundup symplectic this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct why diversity matters: a roundtable discussion on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 29 jul juleah swanson, ione damasco, isabel gonzalez-smith, dracine hodges, todd honma and azusa tanaka /13 comments why diversity matters: a roundtable discussion on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship photo by flickr user webtreats (cc-by 2.0) in brief:  after presenting together at acrl 2015 to share research we conducted on race, identity, and diversity in academic librarianship, we reconvene panelists ione t. damasco, cataloger librarian at the university of dayton, isabel gonzalez-smith, undergraduate experience librarian at the university of illinois, chicago, dracine hodges, head of acquisitions at ohio state university, todd honma, assistant professor of asian american studies at pitzer college, juleah swanson, head of acquisition services at the university of colorado boulder, and azusa tanaka, japanese studies librarian at the university of washington in a virtual roundtable discussion. resuming the conversation that started at acrl, we discuss why diversity really matters to academic libraries, librarians, and the profession, and where to go from here. we conclude this article with a series of questions for readers to consider, share, and discuss among colleagues to continue and advance the conversation on diversity in libraries. by juleah swanson, ione damasco, isabel gonzalez-smith, dracine hodges, todd honma, and azusa tanaka introduction earlier this year, at the association of college and research libraries (acrl) 2015 conference, the authors of this article participated in a panel discussion entitled “from the individual to the institution: exploring the experiences of academic librarians of color”1 which covered research the panelists had conducted on institutional racism, structures of privilege and power, and racial and ethnic identity theory in academic libraries and among academic librarians. the hour-long, standing-room only session scraped the surface of conversations that are needed among academic librarians on issues of diversity, institutional racism, microaggressions, identity, and intersectionality. it was our intent with the acrl panel to plant the seeds for these conversations and for critical thought in these areas to further germinate. we saw these conversations begin to take shape during and after the panel discussion on twitter, and overheard in the halls of the oregon convention center. as pho and masland write in the final chapter of the librarian stereotype, “we are now at a point where discussions about the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in librarianship are happening among a wider audience . . . these difficult conversations about diversity are the first steps toward a plan of action” (2015, p. 277). these conversations must continue to grow. the discussion of racial and ethnic diversity in libraries is a subset of the larger discussion of race in the united states. for anyone participating in these discussions, the experience can be difficult and uncomfortable. such discussions can be academic in nature, but very often they are personal and subjective. in the united states, our long history of avoiding difficult and meaningful conversations about race has made it challenging for some people to perceive or comprehend disparities in representation and privilege. fear often plays a significant role as a barrier to engaging in these conversations. fear of the unknown, fear of rejection, fear of change, and the perceived possibility of losing control can complicate these discussions. participants in these conversations have to be willing to concede a certain amount of vulnerability in order to move the discussion forward, but vulnerability makes many people uncomfortable, which in turn makes it easy to just avoid the discussion altogether. what follows is a virtual roundtable discussion where we speak openly about why diversity really matters, what actions can be taken, and suggest questions for readers to consider, share, and discuss in honest and open conversations with colleagues. at times, authors reveal the very real struggle to articulate or grapple with the questions, just as one might encounter in a face-to-face conversation. but, ultimately, by continuing this conversation we work to advance our profession’s understanding of the complexity of race and ethnic diversity in librarianship, and to strive toward creating sustainable collaborations and lasting change in a profession that continues to face significant challenges in maintaining race and ethnic diversity. before launching into the roundtable discussion, we acknowledge that an additional challenge when talking about race is the use of terminology and language that intellectualizes some of the real-world experiences and feelings we face. terminology is useful due to its ability to create precision in meaning, but it also can alienate and turn away readers who use different language or terms to express similar experiences, feelings, or concepts. yet in order to have a critical discussion of race and diversity, it is important that we engage in the use of particular terms that help us to identify, explain, and analyze issues and experiences that will help us to advance the conversation in deeper and more meaningful ways. in this article we do use terms that draw from a common critical lexicon, and we have made an effort to define and/or footnote many of these terms for readers who might be unfamiliar with these terms. why does diversity matter? juleah: why does diversity matter? this question was posed to the audience at the end of our acrl panel (swanson, et al., 2015) , as something to reflect upon. for our virtual roundtable, i’m re-asking this question, because this question warrants meaningful discussion. let’s go around the “table” and start with ione. ione: when the question was first posed to us, i struggled with articulating a response that was more than just an intuitive reaction. my first thought was that diversity matters because we don’t live and work in a vacuum of homogeneity. but i realize that’s both a naïve and inaccurate answer, as there are many places where people still live in segregated areas in terms of race, and that there are work environments that for many reasons, tend to have a homogeneous pool of employees. it’s not enough to say that diversity matters because the world is diverse. isabel: ione’s initial comment about wanting to respond beyond her intuition reminds me of isabel espinal’s “a new vocabulary for inclusive librarianship: applying whiteness theory to our profession” piece where she discusses sensate theory, an anthropology framework in discussing whiteness. i agree with ione’s reaction of wanting to articulate why racial and ethnic diversity is important, how painful prejudice and discrimination can feel, and the need for acknowledgement of the disparities that exist in different communities’ experiences and history due to race/ethnicity. discovering espinal’s exploration of sensate theory was thrilling for me because she says that the theory emphasizes gut reactions – emotion and the senses (espinal, 145). librarians of color may react with “a very angry or very tearful reaction or both…the experience of encountering whiteness in the library setting is one that is felt in the body; it is more than an intellectual abstraction.” (145) this really resonated with me because i consider myself an intelligent, composed person but when my colleagues or i experience discrimination due to our race/ethnicity, i can’t help but feel an initial overwhelmingness. this is then immediately followed by a process of checking my emotions to find ways to articulate myself in an intellectual way as a means to be acknowledged and understood. as a person of color, this is what discussing the relevance and meaning behind diversity means to me – a struggle between gut reaction and articulation. dracine: this question is a challenge. nevertheless, most people who come into this profession want to be of service directly or indirectly to others. libraries of every variety exist to serve their respective constituents through access to information and spaces for collaboration. with that in mind, i think diversity matters in relation to the relevance of services being provided to meet practical and extraordinary needs. needs that are diverse not only because of ethnicity and race, but also because of religion, gender, socioeconomic status, physical ability, etc. with recent headlines related to racism and violence, it is easy to see the connectivity of libraries in the pursuit of social justice ideals. so much of the conversation we’ve been having pertains to administrative and cultural constructs that frustrate diversity. these are large and lofty issues in scope. i often think their enormity makes us dismissive of the tangible impacts of diversity in the commonplace work performed in libraries every day. i’ve heard many anecdotal stories from colleagues, both of color and white, who were able to customize or enhance instruction for an individual or group because of personal insights and experiences related to issues like english as a foreign language and format accessibility. perhaps mountains were not moved, but to the individuals who benefitted hills were climbed. isabel: dracine’s example of instructors tailoring their sessions for a particular class of students based on factors like language is a great example of how librarians are tuning into the identity aspect of the communities they serve. juleah, azusa, and i have been using identity theory to think about diversity initiatives from an angle that takes into account the individual experience at a more fundamental level. because identity is so dynamic and in constant flux, it is often constructed from the internal sense of self as well as the external, social level. consider it like the messages we internalize from what we see on tv, read in history books or who possesses roles of authority in our institutions, who sits at the reference desk. it makes sense that your colleagues customize their instruction because we intuitively sense that people respond positively to another person who is like themselves. that’s why the library ethnic caucuses are important – they establish a sense of community which provide some individuals with a sense of community and belonging. ethnic identity theory helps us understand this phenomenon. azusa: as dracine says above, diversity matters because the libraries must accommodate diverse user groups as well as librarian population. ione mentioned during our panel how the field of library and information science (lis) and higher education in general views diversity as a problem to be solved (swanson, et al., 2015). diversity, in race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, social background, and more, will bring power to the libraries where balanced views and all kinds of possibilities are inevitable for successful research and teaching. diversity is not a problem, but an asset for the institution. juleah: when we talk about diversity and why it matters in academic libraries, i think what we’re really trying to get at are two different concepts: 1) diversity in relation to the library profession’s role in social justice (morales, knowles, bourg, 2014) and 2) diversity in relation to organizational culture within libraries. to be honest, i think our profession, librarians as a whole, but more specifically academic librarians, are in the midst of a professional culture crisis. i think this stems from the homogeneity within our professional ranks. what we get to do as academic librarians today is incredible, from pushing our campuses into open access models for research output to being active participants in conversations about managing massive amounts of data. but are we proud of the homogeneity and the stagnant racial and ethnic diversity within the profession? i don’t think we are. i think diversity matters because, right now, it allows us the opportunity to reinvent our organizational and professional culture into something that is not reliant on homogeneity of people and ideas, but rather looks toward what we bring to the future of higher education. ione: juleah’s comment about diversity in academic libraries being two separate concepts are actually intertwined, and are worth exploring at the same time. i think her first point about libraries and social justice poses difficult questions for us as a profession—how far do we take social responsibility as academic libraries? as academic librarians? how do we reconcile social responsibility with the missions of our institutions, and what do we do when they are out of alignment? connecting these to her second point, internally, how far do we take a social justice concept of diversity in terms of our daily work as librarians? can we even agree upon a definition of social justice in terms of diversity? i think todd raised an important question during the panel (swanson, et al., 2015) when he said, “the question is, is diversity a social justice? is racial equity part of an institutional mission? if it isn’t, then we have to interrogate that.” if we think of our libraries as microcosms of the world around us, i don’t think we can ignore the fact that oppressive structures of power which exist in our culture are reproduced within the structures that exist in higher education, in our universities and colleges, and in our academic libraries, often unknowingly and sometimes with the best of intentions. numbers aren’t everything, but the lack of positive movement in terms of racial demographics in our field is a cause for concern. and just adding more people of “diverse” backgrounds does nothing to address structural problems with an institution. i think as we move as a society to undo oppression of marginalized identities, libraries, as places that serve larger communities, do bear a responsibility to undo their own oppressive structures and question why things have stayed the same over the years in our profession. isabel: you’re right, ione. like i said at our panel at acrl, you can’t just hire a person of color and call it diversity (swanson, et al., 2015). if we’re going to pursue diversity initiatives at the student and professional level, we need to identify what long-term success looks like for our field and what resonates with individuals. what juleah, azusa, and i found in our research was that racial and ethnic identity theory helps us understand why librarians of color may respond well to ethnic causes or liaisoning for students of color groups and how they may feel a sense of loneliness in a predominately white institution or perceive their race/ethnicity is used to pigeon-hole their professional responsibilities. diversity matters because we all play a part in the messages we disseminate, regardless of how we identify. librarians contribute towards the preservation and accessibility of information, representations of authority in the intellectual sphere, and advocating against censorship. what is the message that our collections, library staff representation, research, or programming gives to the communities we serve? and what are we doing to serve our patrons in ways that take into account their race and/or ethnicity? todd: to add to what isabel said about the librarian’s role in the preservation and accessibility of information, i think at a profound foundational level, libraries are involved in an epistemological project. in other words, as an institution that collects, preserves, and distributes information, libraries serve the function of helping to create and circulate knowledge in our society. how institutions construct and curate information, and how users access and synthesize that information, are not outside the realm of the political. especially in the case of academic libraries, which encompass a scholarly mission of furthering intellectual growth and scholarly communication, thinking carefully and deeply about the types of knowledge that is both included and excluded is crucial to the mission of the library and its relation to broader society. isabel: npr recently recently featured michelle obama’s commencement speech to the predominantly african-american class of martin luther king jr. preparatory high school in the south side of chicago where she mentions how the famous american author richard wright was not being allowed to check out books at the public library because he was black (obama, 2015). i instantly thought of todd’s point when i heard it on the radio – that the american library’s past was once a place of exclusion, and how it still remains political. the first lady’s point was to inspire the graduating class to persevere beyond their struggles towards achieving greatness – a message intended to resonate with the students because it was coming from an accomplished, powerful, fellow south sider of chicago. todd: that example also reminds me of how e.j. josey, writing in 1972, identified academic libraries as having a unique role to play in the black liberation movement. even today, as higher education continues to be a site of privilege for some and exclusion for others, diversity and educational equity is something that we still need to work on. thus, in relationship to libraries and higher education, diversity is important to consider in how we think about all aspects of the ‘life cycle of information,’ particularly when it comes to the ways in which historically underrepresented groups and historically underrepresented forms of knowledge and practices have not been included in – and at times, systematically excluded from – collection building and user services. ione: many of us who work in academic libraries have encountered “diversity training” at one point or another, and in the course of that training, we may have been presented with statistics from both business and higher education that demonstrate the value of diversity in specific ways. for example, many businesses highlight the importance of being able to work effectively in a global market, and higher education has followed that line of thinking in terms of promoting diversity as a way of building student competence in intercultural interactions as a key component of their college education. another reason diversity is often touted as a component of an effective workplace is that studies have shown that more often than not, more diverse work teams have proven to be highly productive. but i find these market-driven motivations for promoting diversity to be very superficial and highly problematic. todd: the approach to diversity that ione describes is part of a growing concern regarding the “neoliberalization of the library” (hill, 2010; pateman, 2003), including increased privatization, a shrinking public sphere, and a market-driven approach to issues like diversity. failure to think about how diverse communities have been and continue to be impacted by such trends, and along with it the perpetuation of the implicit race and class privileges, will only lead to the further homogenization and privatization of places, practices, and services. when considering issues of race and racial representation in the library, i think it’s important that we move beyond an additive model and think about the epistemological. people of color (as well as other disenfranchised groups) are more than just laboring bodies, more than just token representatives of a diverse workforce under the conditions of capitalism, but also possess, practice, and embody different ways of understanding and inhabiting the world, which as juleah points out, can help to reinvent the culture of the library, and higher education, more generally. it is this possibility of transformation that i think is why diversity matters. juleah: this has been a captivating discussion so far, addressing themes from homogeneity in the profession, organizational culture, race and identity, issues of social justice, and ultimately critically examining our role as librarians to the communities we serve. we could spend more time on this question, but similar to a time limit in a real world discussion, we have a word count. so, let’s move on to the next question. where do we go from here? juleah: often times, after engaging in critical discourse, when the conversation ends, we are left wondering what to do next. rather than leaving this for the reader to consider after finishing this article, let’s address this issue here. now that we have touched about why diversity matters, where do we go from here? ione: participating in the acrl panel really challenged me to think about my own approaches to researching diversity, which had previously been focused on understanding the experiences of individuals of color. however, as todd had pointed out during the panel (swanson, et al., 2015), i think we all need to be more versed in critical perspectives around identity (and intersectionality)2 in order to have more effective conversations about how racism and other forms of oppression continue to be produced and reproduced in our organizations. listening to the experiences of those who have been marginalized3 may motivate us to move towards a more socially just world, but developing critical competencies and deepening our knowledge base in critical theory can give us the tools to actually dismantle those structures that have marginalized them in the first place. dracine: during the panel, i made a comment regarding my own relief upon hearing my director say diversity was not my issue (swanson, et al., 2015). for me this was important because even as a librarian of color my professional expertise is not diversity. however, if you want to talk about getting arabic language books through u.s. customs, then sure, i might have some thoughts. i care about diversity for the very reasons that have been discussed and definitely want to leave the profession better than i found it. i think it’s important to acknowledge that how that happens may look different for each individual. the biggest takeaway for me was the obvious need for a reset or a refresh on the question of diversity in libraries. we’ve begun to have what feels like genuine conversations that will hopefully combat the diversity fatigue felt by both librarians of color and perhaps our white counterparts. ione: arm yourself with knowledge, and then have the courage to use that knowledge to start dialogues with your colleagues, administrators, faculty, and staff, not just in your library but across your campuses to examine existing policies and practices that have left far too much room for discrimination (both implicit and explicit) to occur. and i mention courage because these are not easy conversations to have, or even to initiate. it’s easy for defensiveness to arise in these conversations, and for emotions to get rather heated, but i think it is possible to move through those communication barriers and get to a place of actual growth. juleah: when talking about diversity in academic libraries with colleagues of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds, acknowledging that institutional racism4 does exist, regardless of intent and well-meaning, can, in fact, be very freeing in a conversation, because institutional racism is not about us-versus-them, or you-versus-me, but instead it’s a collective outcome to be analyzed and critiqued collectively by an organization. the question becomes not, “what are we doing wrong?” but instead, “how can we change our outcomes?” ione: another thing i would recommend is seeking out other campus partners with expertise in mediating these types of conversations. for example, a few years ago, our campus hosted a series of “dialogues on diversity” that brought together small cohorts of faculty and staff from different units to attend a series of dialogue sessions mediated by trained facilitators to try to build a better sense of community across differences. it was a very small step, and it did not transform our campus culture overall, but i do think it helped create a network of people across the university who obviously cared about bridging differences in order to improve our overall campus climate. through that program, i met people with whom i have since worked on initiatives and programs related to diversity. isabel: great suggestions ione. my institution did diversity dialogues in collaboration with campus partners and the sessions include the perspectives from people of different experiences and backgrounds. it’s a productive way to navigate through the uncomfortable tension between the personal and the systemic contributions towards diversity. i would also suggest that librarians, regardless of race/ethnicity or hierarchy in their institutions, pay attention to recent discussions in our profession regarding microaggressions, which are often unintentional comments “that convey rudeness, insensitivity and demeans a person’s’ racial heritage or identity” (sue et al, 2007). the lis microaggressions tumbr project reminds us that we are all capable of demeaning someone despite our best intentions, but we also have the opportunity to truly listen when we are being called out, being humbled by the experience, and learning from it. at a personal level, this one thing we can and must all do – listen. todd: one of the important points that was discussed at the panel and that we continue to discuss here is trying to come up with ways to transform both the profession and the various institutions that we work at. crucial to such a consideration is identifying where power lies. of course, we all exercise power in different ways. the key is to figure out how to exercise our power to make lasting, sustainable change at the structural level. and we can’t just be acting alone. we need to create movements and build alliances, and this often entails creative forms of coalition building. (although i suppose all forms of coalition are creative.) ruth wilson gilmore (2007) makes a point of stressing that we need to identify both likely and unlikely allies. we need to be better about doing that in the lis field. at the acrl panel, one of the audience members noted that ala is 98% white (swanson, et al., 2015). obviously, change in terms of the percentages of people of color in ala, or the lis field in general, is not going to happen overnight, so how do we work with that 98% so that we are creating coalitions with people who can be good allies. a helpful way of thinking about institutional alliances is what scott frickel (2011) calls “shadow mobilizations,” which entails creating informal networks of activism among diverse stakeholders within the constraints of the institution. i think such a strategy can be effective in building alliances within and between different constituent groups in the lis fields. one of the points that i raised in the acrl panel was that we need to recognize the complexity of people’s identity, how our positionalities encompass intersectional identities and affiliations that are not always immediately visible and legible (swanson, et al., 2015). so even though ala or the profession is predominantly white, that whiteness is not monolithic. it is inflected through categories such as class, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, etc. by understanding diversity, including racial diversity, through a framework that is sensitive to how it is always already constituted through these other intersections, we can forge multiple coalitions in ways that are complex, nuanced, and durable. ultimately, this would mean that we are constructing a movement based on a diversity politics that is founded on a quest for social justice and social transformation rather than token representation or inclusion. ione: in terms of higher education and academic libraries, i think we really need to question hiring practices, and tenure and promotion practices. as i mentioned during the acrl panel (swanson, et al., 2015) back in march, the idea of “organizational fit” is a problematic concept in terms of search committee discussions. while it is never an official criterion for an applicant, i think search committees reinforce the status quo when they use language to deny an applicant a position because of their perceived inability to fit the existing organizational culture. i think we also need to take a closer look at how we write our position descriptions, how we write our mission statements, essentially, what do we convey about ourselves as organizations to potential applicants? todd: this requires all of us to take a critical, self-reflexive look at our complicity in maintaining the status quo and our roles in facilitating the goals of social change. for example, we can take some lessons from those working in other fields—like the stem (science, technology, engineering, math) fields—that are also struggling to recruit and retain historically underrepresented groups. attention is being given to how to make stem more culturally relevant to people of color and other marginalized groups so that there are alternative pathways to pursue it in terms of scholarship and profession (basu & barton, 2007; lee & buxton, 2010; lyon, jafri, & st louis, 2012). as we continue to build on efforts to diversify the lis field, i think looking at other strategies, interrogating the current field and its practices, and asking questions such as how do we make lis more culturally relevant and what alternative pathways can be developed to increase recruitment and retention of people of color and other marginalized groups are important facets for us to consider. azusa: the acrl diversity committee’s diversity standards: cultural competency for academic libraries may be a good guide for some libraries to develop local approaches in diversifying populations and recruiting and maintaining a diverse library workforce. university of washington bothell and cascadia community college campus library diversity team was formed with the guidelines in the diversity standards and adapted some of the eleven standards in it to develop training sessions in cultural awareness and cross cultural communication (lazzaro, mills, garrard, ferguson, watson, & ellenwood, 2014). the outcome was quite positive, and their assessments indicates that structured opportunity to think and learn about diversity and cultural differences by sharing and hearing personal experiences from their colleagues, which can be odd otherwise, was particularly helpful. if your institution has staff members from different cultures, developing cultural awareness from each other is one good way to start. questions for our readers juleah: emphasized throughout this article, a continued conversation on diversity, particularly racial and ethnic diversity in the profession, is needed. as we conclude this roundtable discussion, what questions do you offer to reader that will carry this conversation forward? todd: as many people have noted, there is a very noticeable racial disparity in the lis profession, and this has been something that has been talked about for a while now (espinal, 2001; galvan, 2015; honma, 2005; peterson, 1996). i think a useful way of framing it so that we move beyond the “deficit model” that targets individuals or communities, is to flip the question and ask: is there a particular deficit in the lis profession itself that is not attractive to people of color to pursue? are there ways that the lis field (and all of us who work in that field, whether as librarians, faculty, administrators, etc.) promotes, intentionally or unintentionally, structures and cultures that may be deemed exclusionary to those who have been historically marginalized and underrepresented? how can we (as individuals, coalitions, institutions) create change? ione: we need to start asking some big questions in lis education and higher education in general. in terms of lis education: do current curricular offerings at ala-accredited library schools address critical theories of identity and how they intersect with theories of information and the practice of librarianship? how do we encourage faculty teaching in lis to develop coursework that addresses these issues? for lis students who plan to pursue academic librarianship as a career path, are tenure and promotion issues raised in their courses so that these new librarians come into their academic workplaces prepared to take on the challenges of earning tenure? in terms of higher education: if we truly value diversity in all its forms, are we doing everything we can to really show that? do we talk about valuing different leadership styles, different communication styles, or innovative ways of looking at existing practices? azusa: other questions i would like to ask the readers are: why diversity among lis matters particularly for academic library? how is it related to many academic libraries’ vision and mission—supporting the faculty and students’ teaching and learning? is it because diversity among librarians encourage the users to approach us? is it because diversity encourages the users to think out of box which is fundamental in researching, teaching, and learning? dracine: ever practical, i would ask readers to contemplate the context of their environment and remember the difficulty we all have with engaging this topic. discussions about diversity should be diverse. diversity urgencies may be different from one institution to the next. with that in mind, i think it is important to consider: what is the signal to noise ratio? a discussion about diversity could fill an ocean and after awhile it becomes white noise. however, a meaningful discussion should start by focusing on aspects that are critical and tangible to your specific community/organization. also, what are the rules of engagement? this seems like a mundane question, but it is a rather important one in terms of creating the space for real and penetrating dialogue. juleah: a great deal of what we’ve discussed are learned concepts, either through reading and research, or through lived experiences. yet, these concepts are complex and cannot simply be conveyed through a sound byte of information. what innovative ways can we educate and teach colleagues and students about complex issues like microaggressions, institutional racism, and privilege, reflecting both traditional means of teaching such as lectures and readings, and through learned experiences? isabel: evaluate the culture at your organization/institution. to what degree is the issue of diversity upheld at your institution and how does it differ to that of your library? if your institution’s mission actively values diversity, what is the campus or community doing about it? who are the key players and how can you partner with them? from your personal experience, what are the biggest stumbling blocks in the discussions pertaining to diversity? how does it impact how you are able (or not) to dialogue with someone of a different experience than yours? change can occur at every level – personal, institutional, and professional. as a librarian, where do you feel most empowered to enact change? where do you find the greatest obstacles? acknowledgements: thank you to our external reviewer frans albarillo, internal reviewers ellie collier and cecily walker and publishing editor annie pho. your insights and guidance helped us shape and reshape, and reshape some more, our article. works cited: basu, s. j., & barton, a. c. (2007). developing a sustained interest in science among urban minority youth. journal of research in science teaching, 44(3), 466–489. cohen, c. j. (1999). the boundaries of blackness: aids and the breakdown of black politics. chicago: university of chicago press. crenshaw, k. (1991). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, 43(6), 1241-1299. espinal, i. (2001). a new vocabulary for inclusive librarianship: applying whiteness theory to our profession. in l. castillo-speed, (ed.), the power of language/el poder de la palabra: selected papers from the second reforma national conference (pp. 131–49). englewood, co: libraries unlimited. frickel, s. (2011). who are the experts of environmental health justice? in g. ottinger & b. r. cohen (eds.), technoscience and environmental justice: expert cultures in a grassroots movement (pp. 21-40). cambridge, mass.: mit press. galvan, a. (2015). soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/soliciting-performance-hiding-bias-whiteness-and-librarianship/ garibay, j. c., (2014). diversity in the classroom. los angeles, ca: ucla diversity & faculty development. retrieved from https://faculty.diversity.ucla.edu/resources-for/teaching/diversity-in-the-classroom-booklet gilmore, r. w. (2007). in the shadow of the shadow state. in incite! women of color against violence (ed.), the revolution will not be funded: beyond the non-profit industrial complex (pp.41-52). cambridge, mass.: south end press. hill, d. (2010). class, capital and education in this neoliberal and neoconservative period. in s. macrine, p. maclaren, and d. hill (eds.), revolutionizing pedagogy: education for social justice within and beyond global neo-liberalism (pp. 119–144). new york: palgrave macmillan. honma, t. (2005). trippin’ over the color line: the invisibility of race in library and information studies. interactions: ucla journal of education and information studies, 1(2), 1-26. retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nj0w1mp.pdf institutional racism. (2014). in scott, j.(ed.), a dictionary of sociology. retrieved from http://0-www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199683581.001.0001/acref-9780199683581-e-1125. josey, e. j. (1972). libraries, reading, and the liberation of black people. the library scene, 1(1), 4-7. lazzaro, a. e., mills, s., garrard, t., ferguson, e., watson, m., & ellenwood, d. (2014). cultural competency on campus applying acrl’s diversity standards. college and research libraries news, 75, 6, 332-335. retrieved from http://crln.acrl.org/content/75/6/332.full lee, o., & buxton, c. a. (2010). diversity and equity in science education: research, policy, and practice. new york: teachers college press. lyon, g. h., jafri, j., & st. louis, k. (2012). beyond the pipeline: stem pathways for youth development. afterschool matters, 16, 48–57. morales, m., knowles, e. c., & bourg, c. (2014). diversity, social justice, and the future of libraries. portal: libraries and the academy, 14(3), 439-451. doi: 10.1353/pla.2014.0017 obama, m., (2015, june 9). remarks by the first lady at martin luther king jr. preparatory high school commencement address. speech presented at martin luther king jr. preparatory high school commencement, chicago, il. retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/06/09/remarks-first-lady-martin-luther-king-jr-preparatory-high-school-commenc pateman, j. (2003). libraries contribution to solidarity and social justice in a world of neo-liberal globalisation. information for social change, 18. retrieved from http://libr.org/isc/articles/18-pateman-2.html peterson, l. (1996). alternative perspectives in library and information science: issues of race. journal of education for library and information science, 37(2), 163–174. pho, a., & masland, t. (2014). the revolution will not be stereotyped: changing perceptions through diversity. in n. pagowsky & m. rigby (eds.), the librarian stereotype: deconstructing perceptions & presentations of information work (pp. 257-282). chicago: association of college and research libraries. retrieved from http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1164&context=ulib_fac ridley, c., & kelly, s. (2006). institutional racism. in y. jackson (ed.), encyclopedia of multicultural psychology. (pp. 256-258). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. doi: http://0-dx.doi.org.libraries.colorado.edu/10.4135/9781412952668.n131 solorzano, d., & huber, l. (2012). microaggressions, racial. in j. banks (ed.), encyclopedia of diversity in education. (pp. 1489-1492). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. retrieved from http://0-knowledge.sagepub.com/view/diversityineducation/n472.xml sue, d. w., capodilupo, c.m., torino, g.c., bucceri, j.m., holder, a.m.b., nadal, k.l., & esquilin, m. (2007). racial microaggressions in everyday life: implications for clinical practice. american psychologist, 62 (4), 271-286. swanson, j., tanaka, a., gonzalez-smith, i., damasco, i.t., hodges, d., honma, t., espinal, i., (2014, march 26). from the individual to the institution: exploring the experiences of academic librarians of color [audio recording]. retrieved from http://acrl.learningtimesevents.org/from-the-individual-to-the-institution-exploring-the-experiences-of-academic-librarians-of-color-2/ a recorded slidecast presentation, including full audio of the acrl 2015 panel discussion “from the individual to the institution: exploring the experiences of academic librarians of color” is freely available. users who do not already have access will need to establish an account in order to view this and other acrl 2015 recorded slide cast presentations. [↩] intersectionality is a concept developed by critical race scholar kimberle crenshaw (1991) that seeks to examine the “multiple grounds of identity” that shape our social world. this theory recognizes that categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. are not mutually exclusive but, rather, are interconnected and co-constituted and therefore cannot be examined independently of each other. it also recognizes the interconnectedness of systems of oppression that shape the structural, political, and representational aspects of identity. [↩] marginalization refers to the way in which the dominant group uses institutions, laws, ideologies, and cultural norms to disempower, control, and oppress minority groups (cohen, 1999). marginalization can occur in various realms, including but not limited to the political, economic, and social, and can include being excluded from decision-making processes and institutions, denied access to resources, segregation and stigmatization based on perceived identity. [↩] institutional racism is the sometimes intentional, but more often unintentional policies, practices, or customs, that prevent or exclude racial groups from equal participation in an institution (ridley & kelly, 2006; dictionary of sociology, 2014). [↩] academic libraries, diversity, identity, institutional racism, microaggressions, organizational culture, professional identity revising academic library governance handbooks new grads, meet new metrics: why early career librarians should care about altmetrics & research impact 13 responses pingback : am i too small-minded?: local vs. global missions | double jump librarian naomi 2015–07–30 at 5:38 pm i’ve noticed discussions in diversity matters happening at a university library level, but it ends at a discussion level. there is little curriculum or course implementation within the academic library setting. the weneeddiversebooks campaign is changing the environment in libraries for children and youth, but i see little being done within universities and colleges to promote diverse books, authors, and research. as a person of color and academic librarian i don’t feel like our profession understands the implications of diversity on campus. i asked a colleague why we don’t recruit and hire more students of color to work our service desks, and the answer was that we don’t get applications from them. the truth is that we hire in advance of the school year starting and don’t give every applicant a fair opportunity at interviewing because it is easiest for us to hire in the summer. i find it difficult to work in a library where there is no diversity in the population of staff and students. if only i could be a manager and change the environment and perspective of the institution. pingback : resource: why diversity matters: a roundtable discussion on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship ← dh+lib pingback : my thoughts on #radlib15 part 5 – facilitating a session and gender issues in librarianship | thischarmingmisanthropist pingback : weekly round-up | hls pingback : latest library links, 28th august 2015 | latest library links pingback : from the director – september 21, 2015 – why diversity matters | libraries news and information rodrigues 2015–09–22 at 11:18 am i sat on a hiring committee where a native american candidate was potentially not going to be considered because the job involved processing archives containing degrading representation of native american people by whites… the committee feared it would be a bad match because the candidate might be too sensitive to the content. i was appalled; as if diversity wasn’t already badly needed at our institution, here was a situation where someone could potentially bring an important perspective to the work, yet what was ultimately the racial discomfort of white people was a big consideration. i have more than once been the only hispanic female in a room of academics, even in a minority majority state. i don’t believe talking about diversity in libraries as a solution in itself. hiring practices need to include a conscious effort to seek out and hire diverse candidates. there should be no resting on the laurels of simply having these conversations about diversity without action toward changing the demographics of the field. it is important for the field, it is important for our communities, and it is important for our diverse students. rachel 2015–09–23 at 4:47 pm i don’t think we should kid ourselves here, i think most librarians in and out of the academy are far more comfortable and willing to limit diversity to conversations about it. i don’t believe the majority of academic librarians (or otherwise) not considered part of a racial or ethnic group that “diversifies” is particularly concerned with this issue. in fact, i think that unconsciously and just as often consciously people seek to maintain the status quo, if not by only hiring those who look like them or have similar backgrounds, but also by hiring those from other racial or ethnic groups who they think conform to similar ideas about who/what makes an academic librarian. i think that includes every thing from how an applicant looks and talks, to the schools the applicant has attended. that is where we get into the fairly insidious concept of “fit”and how search committees and institutions hide behind it when making decisions about who and which perspectives they will choose to include as members of faculty and staff. after all, larger numbers of people included from those “diverse” groups, and particularly racial (visible minorities, specifically) and ethnic mean less space for those who have traditionally occupied those positions. dismantling structural and institutional -isms requires team have to take a more than a few for team have not. are they really willing? pingback : 55 articles every librarian should read (updated) | heard around the stacks pingback : */that/* part of my brain! (pt. 2) | librariana pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » the intersection between cultural competence and whiteness in libraries henry quon 2015–12–07 at 7:38 pm as a canadian of chinese ancestry, i originally entered the library profession in 1988 after graduating with an mls degree and worked in that field for 4 years before deciding to give it up in 1992 in order to pursue a career change. the reasons i left the field were 2 fold: back then, institutional discrimination was a big problem that really limited the career growth opportunities of librarians who were not from the mainstream dominant anglo-canadian culture and the second one was the lack of a mentoring support system for ethnic librarians. when i left this field, i wrote letters both to the head of the library school that i had attended and also to one of my professors who i had treated as a confidant. both genuinely seemed surprised that i had encountered headwinds in my pursuit of this profession but i know it is hard for them to understand my experiences because it was something they did not have to go through themselves. looking back, i am still glad i did want to pursue this career initially after graduating from university but i did not realize that i would have to pay such a high cost. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct introducing library pipeline – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 20 nov brett bonfield /1 comments introducing library pipeline south coast pipe, photo by flickr user colm walsh (cc-by 2.0) in brief: we’re creating a nonprofit, library pipeline, that will operate independently from in the library with the lead pipe, but will have similar and complementary aims: increasing and diversifying professional development; improving strategies and collaboration; fostering more innovation and start-ups, and encouraging lis-related publishing and publications. in the library with the lead pipe is a platform for ideas; library pipeline is a platform for projects. by brett bonfield at in the library with the lead pipe, our goal has been to change libraries, and the world, for the better. it’s on our about page: we improve libraries, professional organizations, and their communities of practice by exploring new ideas, starting conversations, documenting our concerns, and arguing for solutions. those ideas, conversations, concerns, and solutions are meant to extend beyond libraries and into the societies that libraries serve. what we want to see is innovation–new ideas and new projects and collaborations. innovative libraries create better educated citizens and communities with stronger social ties. unfortunately, libraries’ current funding structures and the limited professional development options available to librarians make it difficult to introduce innovation at scale. as we started talking about a couple of years ago, in our reader survey and in a subsequent editorial marking our fourth anniversary, we need to extend into other areas, besides publication, in order to achieve our goals. so we’re creating a nonprofit, library pipeline, that will operate independently from in the library with the lead pipe, but will have similar and complementary aims. library pipeline is dedicated to supporting structural changes by providing opportunities, funding, and services that improve the library as an institution and librarianship as a profession. in the library with the lead pipe, the journal we started in 2008, is a platform for ideas; library pipeline is a platform for projects. although our mission is provisional until our founding advisory board completes its planning process, we have identified four areas in which modest funding, paired with guidance and collaboration, should lead to significant improvements. professional development a few initiatives, notably the american library association’s emerging leaders and spectrum scholars programs, increase diversity and provide development opportunities for younger librarians. we intend to expand on these programs by offering scholarships, fellowships, and travel assistance that enable librarians to participate in projects that shift the trajectory of their careers and the libraries where they work. collaboration organized, diverse groups can solve problems that appear intractable if participants have insufficient time, resources, perspective, or influence. we would support collaborations that last a day, following the hack or camp model, or a year or two, like task forces or working groups. start-ups we are inspired by incubators and accelerators, primarily ycombinator and sxsw’s accelerator. the library and information market, though mostly dormant, could support several dozen for-profit and nonprofit start-ups. the catalyst will be mitigating founders’ downside risk by funding six months of development, getting them quick feedback from representative users, and helping them gain customers or donors. publishing librarianship will be stronger when its practitioners have as much interest in documenting and serving our own field as we have in supporting the other disciplines and communities we serve. for that to happen, our professional literature must become more compelling, substantive, and easier to access. we would support existing open access journals as well as restricted journals that wish to become open access, and help promising writers and editors create new publications. these four areas overlap by design. for example, we envision an incubator for for-profit and nonprofit companies that want to serve libraries. in this example, we would provide funding for a diverse group of library students, professionals, and their partners who want to incorporate, and bring this cohort to a site where they can meet with seasoned librarians and entrepreneurs. after a period of time, perhaps six months, the start-ups would reconvene for a demo day attended by potential investors, partners, donors, and customers. founding advisory board we were inspired by the constellation model for our formation process, as adapted by the digital public library of america and the national digital preservation alliance (see: “using emergence to take social innovation to scale”). our first step was identifying a founding advisory board, whose members have agreed to serve a two-year term (july 2014-june 2016). at the end of which the board will be dissolved and replaced with a permanent governing board. during this period, the advisory board will formalize and ratify library pipeline’s governance and structure, establish its culture and business model, promote its mission, and define the organizational units that will succeed the advisory board, such as a permanent board of trustees and paid staff. the members of our founding advisory board are: brett bonfield (co-chair), director, collingswood (nj) public library; lauren pressley (co-chair), director of learning environments at virginia tech university libraries; mary abler, innovation leadership resident, los angeles public library; nicole cooke, assistant professor at gslis, the university of illinois; emily ford, urban & public affairs librarian, portland state university; rachel frick, director of business development at dpla; jim neal, vice president for information services and university librarian at columbia; kim leeder reed, director of library services, college of western idaho; pam smith, director, anythink (co) libraries; jessamyn west, librarian (vt). the board will coordinate activity among, and serve as liaisons to, the volunteers on what we anticipate will eventually be six subcommittees (similar to dpla’s workstreams). this is going to be a shared effort; the job is too big for ten people. those six subcommittees and their provisional charges are: professional development within lis (corresponding to our “professional development” area). provide professional development funding, in the form of scholarships, fellowships, or travel assistance, for librarians or others who are working in behalf of libraries or library organizations, with an emphasis on participation in cross-disciplinary projects or conferences that extend the field of librarianship in new directions and contribute to increased diversity among practitioners and the population we serve. strategies for lis (corresponding to “collaboration”). bring together librarians and others who are committed to supporting libraries or library-focused organizations. these gatherings could be in-person or online, could last a day or could take a year, and could be as basic as brainstorming solutions to a timely, significant issue or as directed as developing solutions to a specific problem. innovation within lis (corresponding to “start-ups”). fund and advise library-related for-profit or nonprofit startups that have the potential to help libraries better serve their communities and constituents. we believe this area will be our primary focus, at least initially. lis publications (corresponding with “publishing”). fund and advise lis publications, including in the library with the lead pipe. we could support existing open access journals or restricted journals that wish to become open access, and help promising writers and editors create new publications. governance. this may not need to be a permanent subcommittee, though in our formative stages it would be useful to work with people who understand how to create governance structures that provide a foundation that promotes stability and growth. sustainability. this would include fundraising, but it also seems to be the logical committee for creating the assessment metrics we need to have in place to ensure that we are fulfilling our commitment to libraries and the people who depend on them. how can you help? we’re looking for ideas, volunteers, and partners. contact brett or lauren if you want to get involved, or want to share a great idea with us. responsive acquisitions: a case study on improved workflow at a small academic library exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part ii – the landing 1 response pingback : library juice » lead pipe starts library pipeline this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct intersubjectivity and ghostly library labor – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 6 mar leo settoducato /6 comments intersubjectivity and ghostly library labor in brief libraries are haunted houses. as our patrons move through scenes and illusions that took years of labor to build and maintain, we workers are hidden, erasing ourselves in the hopes of providing a seamless user experience, in the hopes that these patrons will help defend libraries against claims of death or obsolescence. however, ‘death of libraries’ arguments that equate death with irrelevance are fundamentally mistaken. if we imagine that a collective fear has come true and libraries are dead, it stands to reason that library workers are ghosts. ghosts have considerable power and ubiquity in the popular imagination, making death a site of creative possibility. using the scholarly lens of haunting, i argue that we can experience time creatively, better positioning ourselves to resist the demands of neoliberalism by imagining and enacting positive futurities. thinkpieces on the death of libraries are abundant and have been for quite some time. in 2005, the mit technology review identified google books’ mass digitization effort as the driving force that “could reduce today’s libraries to musty archives.” despite some sensational language, the article is just saying that digitization will change the scope of library collections and services.  a controversial forbes article offered a less benign take, suggesting that amazon should replace public libraries. the piece was taken down shortly after its publication in summer 2018, in part because the author was writing outside the scope of their expertise. while the authors of death of libraries articles are usually not affiliated with libraries, library workers are quick to debunk and challenge death of libraries content. as a profession constantly asked to justify the existence of our institutions and quantify the value of our labor, defensive impulses are a normal response. in this article, however, i ask library workers to engage with a rather different stance: that being dead might not actually be a bad thing after all. mortician and educator, caitlin doughty, explains the sentiment well: do not be afraid to delight in death. of course i do not mean you are happy when someone dies, or happy to see someone in pain or mourning. but the vast majority of your life isn’t spent in mourning. it’s spent living. and while you’re living, it will not hurt you to have a fun, positive relationship with death. death is fascinating. chaotic and ordered at the same time. there are strange rituals and art to be explored. the never-ending cultural entertainment of what death does to people, to relationships, to society. i don’t just pretend to love death. i really do love death. i bet you would too if you got to know him (2011). in her advocacy for the death positive movement, doughty helps expose and unpack the extent to which fear — specifically the fear of death — informs the choices we make, including the way we care for (or delegate caring for) our dead. her advice to break a general sense of fear into specific concerns that can be addressed is a good approach for tackling any “nebula of unknown fear” (2017).  what are we really afraid of when we talk about the alleged death of libraries? claiming that libraries are dying as a matter of course overlooks the choices and structures that led to those circumstances in the first place. library workers must assert not only the value of our labor, but the very existence of it. i suggest that part of the underlying concern is not being seen, or being seen only to be replaced or forgotten.1 however, ‘death of libraries’ arguments that equate death with irrelevance are fundamentally mistaken. death is relevant as ever in 2019, occupying a prominent place in the popular imagination. the past decade has seen the proliferation of surrealist and nihilist memes that humorously embrace mortality and more recently, a resurgence of affection for cryptozoology and the occult. faced with a world that at best doesn’t make sense and at worst is violently oppressive, the desire to seek connection beyond ourselves and our circumstances is understandable. there is comfort to be found in aligning with creatures who thrive despite being misunderstood, dismissed as outsiders, or having their existence constantly called into question, and this is especially true for people who hold marginalized identities. for those who move through the world as outsiders, or who struggle to feel hope in a crushing capitalist ecosystem, it can be meaningful and positive to envision a world beyond the present, to think of future lives or afterlives. what could it look like to approach death and haunting from a place of openness and creativity; to demystify death by exploring the mystical? what if instead of nothingness, we imagine an afterlife where anything is possible? let’s embrace this moment and see where supernatural connections might take us. if we imagine that a collective fear has come true and libraries are dead, it stands to reason that library workers are ghosts. since ghosts have considerable power and ubiquity, this frees us to rethink our position in and beyond the neoliberal library and linear time. ghosts demand attention when there is “something-to-be-done;” which means “we will have to learn to talk to and listen to ghosts, rather than banish them, as the precondition for establishing our scientific and humanistic knowledge” (gordon 2008, 22). what insights might emerge from “ongoing conversation with ghosts, real or imagined, dead or very much alive,” whether we are haunted, haunting, or both? (ballif 2013, 139). the landscape of the academic library is shaped by and reproduces the conditions that persist in the academy and in society more broadly. thinking about the ways in which capitalism necessitates that bodies and labor be rendered invisible reveals additional layers of haunting, of which we are simultaneously subjects and objects. as avery gordon reminds us, “it is essential to see the things and the people who are primarily unseen and banished to the periphery of our social graciousness. at a minimum, it is essential because they see you and address you” (gordon 2008, 196). gordon’s provocative use of the second person assuages fears of not being seen while demanding accountability from readers. the ghost sees you, and it addresses you. you are here, so how will you remedy the “something-to-be-done?” in libraries, there is much to be done. library and information science (lis) scholarship has been invested in identifying and challenging stereotypes of living librarians in popular culture, but an exploration of death and libraries would be remiss not to include library ghosts. perhaps our concerns with the death of libraries are exacerbated by the rather limiting extant representations of library ghosts and haunted libraries in popular culture and professional literature. even trade publications like american libraries and school library journal  have profiled real libraries with haunted reputations. while there are certainly exceptions, many library ghosts seem to be women. the willard library, a public library in evansville, indiana, has a reputation as one of the more famous haunted libraries in the united states. their hallmark specter is “the grey lady,” an apparition of a woman first spotted in 1937 and last seen in 2010. the willard has a website of live camera feeds dedicated to recording her presence, which links out to local ghost-hunting resources. enthusiastic community members engage in ghost tours of the library each halloween, hoping to encounter the grey lady.  while the grey lady’s identity is not entirely agreed upon, she manifests in specific, recognizable ways: “moving books, adjusting lights, and turning faucets on and off” in order to “let the world know she is here.” (“willard library ghost cams,” n.d.) her presence seems to have reignited interest in local history, and in the library as a space full of possibilities and stories. not all library ghosts are so positive, however. the apparition in the 1984 film ghostbusters also exemplifies the trope of the library ghost, but in a more fearsome manner (reitman, 1984).  before morphing into a ghoulish entity who attacks the ghostbusters, she appears as an elderly woman in turn-of-the-century dress and is reading a book, reflecting a cultural stereotype of library workers that is stuck in the age of dewey. like the lady in grey, this ghost can levitate and move books: the disturbance of physical collections signals that a spirit is at work. images of female ghosts who haunt the stacks in order to safeguard or speak through their collections visually reinforce the connection between library workers, collections, and gendered (here, feminized) labor. in such examples, books are a necessary component of the aesthetic of librarianship, juxtaposing the material (books and physical space) with the immaterial (ghosts). juxtaposition is central to michel foucault’s concept of heterotopias, places he describes as “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (1984, 6). foucault identifies cemeteries, libraries, and museums among his examples of heterotopias, as they are linked by unique relationships to time and memory. cemeteries juxtapose life and death, loss (of life) and creation (of monuments), history and modernity as their grounds become increasingly populated. similarly, libraries and museums embody “a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place,” organizing and enclosing representations of memory and knowledge (foucault 1984, 7). disney’s haunted mansion ride is a particularly illustrative heterotopia, accumulating time and juxtaposing seemingly opposing concepts. visitors to the attraction explore the home of “999 happy haunts” from varied time periods and regions of the world. the dead are lively as they dance, sing, and joke. one of the first destinations within the haunted mansion ride is the library.2 there (as in the stacks at the willard library or in ghostbusters), books spontaneously fly from the shelves (surrell et al. 2015, 88). in a dissertation on modern gothic narratives (of which disney’s haunted mansion is one), katherine bailey notes that “books are portals into other worlds themselves,” further describing the library’s significance in the context of the ride’s narration where a mention of ghost writers “serves as an obvious reference to unseen hands at work” (2012, 92). while the “unseen hands” in the haunted mansion’s library are ostensibly those of a ghost, there is another layer of unseen hands: the hands of disney’s imagineers, the workers who crafted the mansion’s story, infrastructure, and illusions. reference to their existence are hidden in ‘easter eggs’ throughout the attraction: an inscription on a tombstone, a character’s likeness, etc. visitors’ attention is directed toward the mansion as an experience or singular magical entity rather than the creative work of many laborers. this directly parallels libraries, where doing one’s job successfully often requires the deliberate erasure of one’s existence. in popular culture, the haunted library is a space with books: it is an aesthetic constructed to represent a fantasy. as such, it is noteworthy that death of libraries discourse centers specifically on libraries as spaces and institutions. libraries become the haunted mansion, the singular magical entity inhabited by ghosts (library workers) who may or may not be visible. this privileging of the institution overlooks the reality of library workers, actual people whose material and emotional needs are denied or compromised in the service of neoliberal capitalism (cronk, 2019). silvia federici’s caliban and the witch presents a feminist historical analysis of how women–and in particular their bodies–have been subjugated and subject to violence within capitalist relations in europe. her analysis of witch hunts and efforts to “make visible hidden structures of domination and exploitation” are especially relevant to conversations about hidden, haunted labor within the feminized profession of libraries (2009, 13). gordon’s take on haunting in argentina also refers to “state-sponsored systems of disappearance” where ghosts help to reveal the structures and interests behind oppressive systems (2008, 67-70). there is a difference, however, between bringing to light the infrastructure of institutions and valuing the institution more than the workers who sustain it. persistent references to libraries instead of library workers are a manifestation of vocational awe, which fobazi ettarh describes as the notion that libraries are inherently good and therefore exempt from critique (2018). vocational awe is a foil to death of libraries discourse, vehemently asserting the permanence of libraries. rather than assuming inevitable death or irrelevance, this perspective insists that libraries will continue to exist simply because they are good and important and therefore must exist. such a mindset suggests that it is acceptable for administrators to make decisions that harm workers as long as those decisions will aid the presumed greater good of libraries and keep the institution ‘alive.’ lauren berlant might call this a relation of cruel optimism, “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” even when the attachment has damaging consequences” (2011, 24). the concept of haunted futurity can help us to better understand the troubling relationship between libraries and labor under neoliberalism. for debra ferreday and adi kuntsman, “the future may be both haunted and haunting: whether through the ways in which the past casts a shadow over (im)possible futures; or through horrors that are imagined as ‘inevitable’; or through our hopes and dreams for difference, for change” (2011, 6). haunted futurity invites us to think of haunting as potential; a collective experience and call to action in response to ghosts. listening to ghosts requires effort, just as haunting requires effort. as kevin seeber writes, “it’s not the heavens smiling on you when you browse the stacks and find a relevant item, it’s the labor of a bibliographer, a cataloger, and a shelver. this stuff ends up where it does because people are doing the work of putting it there” (2018). by that logic, books fly from the shelves of the haunted library because ghosts are doing the work of moving them. when these ghostly occurrences happen, living people have been conditioned to reshelve the books as quickly as possible: there is an organization scheme to follow, a workflow that has been interrupted, and an image of the library that must be restored. work under neoliberal capitalism has specific time-bound demands and prioritizes results (especially the accumulation of capital) above all else. by disrupting space and time, ghosts simultaneously reveal their presence and the presence of structures that are supposed to remain hidden. in an interview for jacobin, marxist scholar and anthropologist david harvey describes neoliberalism as a “political project” taken up by “the corporate capitalist class” lashing out against labor (2016). one way in which this manifests is the obfuscation of labor, as seen in the narratives of serendipity seeber critiques so well. the experience of finding the perfect book in the stacks becomes decidedly less magical when one considers the labor (and the material circumstances of laborers) behind the encounter. these slippages into visibility, however, can be an opportunity to learn. what might happen if we paused to ask the ghost what harm brought it to this place rather than immediately assessing whether the library’s materials were harmed during flight? avery gordon offers one suggestion: “if you let it, the ghost can lead you toward what has been missing, which is sometimes everything” (2008, 58). in this case, part of what has been missing is concern for humanity. considering human beings in particular rather than libraries generally will reveal structures and truths that may be hard to reckon with, but this work is necessary. neoliberalism emerged as a movement because of collective fear felt by the ruling class, and requires a single understanding and experience of time. privileging a white, western, cis-hetero-patriarchal viewpoint further marginalizes anyone who moves through the world differently. haunting offers meaningful opportunity to critique this dehumanizing rigidity by interrogating and experimenting with structures of time: “haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future” (gordon 2008, xvi). the idea that haunting changes how we experience and understand time is critical when brought into conversation with scholars whose creative theoretical interventions also challenge dominant constructs of time and labor. in academia (and by extension academic libraries), time is weaponized to extract as much labor as possible. adjunct, contract, and term-limited positions based on temporary funding force workers to perform at unsustainable levels while minimizing the financial expenditure required of the institution. even in an alleged best case scenario where one obtains a tenure-track position, the imposing tenure clock and the prospect of losing permanent, stable employment necessitate stress that is comparable to that of contingent work. as a result, commodification of time and valorization of overwork are particularly acute problems. given a future that is uncertain at best and threatening at worst, workers are simply trying to get by. riyad shahjahan compellingly argues that “time is a key coercive force in the neoliberal academy,” because colonial logics privilege frequent intellectual output over embodied knowledge which can look different or take more time (2015, 491). “amid deadlines and reviews,” he observes, “these non-productive parts of our bodies are rendered invisible” (2015, 494). federici also points to the changing role of the body under capitalism, where primitive accumulation “required the transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force” (2009, 63). thus, productivity is integral to job performance, workers are only of value if they produce specific, visible outputs in designated time-frames, and bodies are only of value in relation to their ability to maintain productivity. however, it does not have to be this way. david mitchell and sharon snyder also take up the questions of embodiment and productivity, examining through a disability studies lens the ways in which disabled people have historically been positioned as outside the laboring masses due to their “non-productive bodies” (2010, 186). they posit that this distinction transforms as the landscape of labor shifts toward digital and immaterial outputs from work in virtual or remote contexts, establishing the disabled body as a site of radical possibility. alison kafer’s crip time is similarly engaged in radical re-imagining, challenging the ways in which “‘the future’ has been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness” (2013, 26-27). that is, one’s ability to exist in the future, or live in a positive version of the future is informed by the precarity of their social position. the work of theorists like mitchell, snyder, and kafer is significant because it insists on a future in which disabled people not only exist, but also thrive despite the pressures of capitalism. death of libraries rhetoric instills fear because it threatens a future without libraries, which vocational awe would have us believe is no future at all. perhaps there is reassurance to be found in the connection between haunting and queer time. gordon’s claim that haunting “mediates between institution and person, creating the possibility of making a life, of becoming something else, in the present and for the future,” is reminiscent of the way jack halberstam theorizes queer time (gordon 2008, 142). there are many reasons why queer people do not or cannot conform to heteronormative temporal and familial expectations, thus queer time is a way of creating positive futurity where one is not expected, and resisting a sense of inevitability (2005).  in essence, queer time is about utilizing time differently to open oneself to new possible experiences whether or not those experiences conform to boundaries of linear time. while queerness and disability are states of being that necessitate different experiences of time, haunting and slowing down are useful frameworks because they offer ways to think about time that apply to all modes of embodiment. arguments for slow scholarship contend that “to enable slow motion is to open for a state of intense awareness: an intake of ‘more’– not of ‘the same’ at a slower pace” (juelskjær and rogowska-stangret 2017, 6).  haunting asks for the same kind of embodied response, for increased connection to one’s senses in receiving ghostly messages: “to be haunted is to be in a heightened state of awareness; the hairs on our neck stand up: being affected by haunting, our bodies become alert, sensitive” (ferreday and kuntsman 2011, 9). if we rethink what it means for someone to ‘look like they have seen a ghost,’ these physical responses do not have to result in fear; rather we can interpret them as reminders to pause, reflect, observe what we are feeling, and listen to what the ghost has to say. like slowing down, haunting is a way to experience time irrespective of normative productivity. becoming attuned to one’s senses and listening to ghosts can be transformative, enabling the creation and sharing of more, unique information. google books is at the intersection of information sharing, transforming labor, massive digital production, and ghostly hidden labor. moreover, academic libraries have been key players in the digitization and consumption of these books. the workers–primarily women of color–who digitize texts for google books occupy space at the intersection of digital work, (im)materiality, and ghostliness. in contrast to the intangible but visible apparition who floats through the stacks, these workers are physical beings who are often invisibilized or only partially corporeal: doing their job correctly requires eliminating evidence of their physical existence. we see traces of this disappearing process when fingers or hands appear in the scanned pages of text, “becoming spectral additions to the google books library and permanently altering the viewer’s perception of the content” if they slow down enough to notice and ponder (soulellis, 2013). sometimes a hand will obscure text in a book’s table of contents, changing a reader’s roadmap to the text. sometimes a modern-day hand will become part of the image of a book that is hundreds of years old, forming a juxtaposition of time and knowledge. sometimes all that is captured is the blur of fingers turning the next page to scan. in the introduction to her zine hand job, aliza elkin points out that google’s first logo was co-founder larry page’s hand: “perhaps there is some irony that google at its scale today is so invested in hiding the fingers and hands (and, following from that, the evidence of manual labor and human intervention) of its employees (or, more probably, contractors) in one of its best known products” (2018). works like andrew norman wilson’s scanops and paul soulellis’ apparition of a distance however near it may be also capture these slippages into visibility, revealing glimpses of the labor behind a massive system of organizing knowledge (wilson 2012 and soulellis 2013). found image art of google books pages contrast the sanitized or humorous depictions of haunting in pop culture. each hand or ring or painted fingernail is a reminder of the individuality and humanity of workers usually depicted as a monolith. each image is a reminder to look beyond the entity presented and ask what structures lie beneath, at what cost to laborers. libraries are haunted houses, constructed sites of possibility inhabited by ghosts. as our patrons move through scenes and illusions that took years of labor to build and maintain, we workers are hidden, erasing ourselves in the hopes of providing a seamless user experience, in the hopes that these patrons will help defend libraries when the time comes. but i ask that we think deeply about what it means for libraries to be under attack, and why the attachment to that narrative persists. institutions may or may not die, but all humans do. library workers at all levels, but especially those who have institutional power, must care for one another and prioritize community wellbeing. individual actions will not solve structural problems, but they can improve people’s immediate material conditions: that’s something to start with. haunting is a complex and rich lens through which we can explore what it might be like to be fearless, or to harness fear in a way that is creatively powerful. if we think like ghosts, we can experience time creatively and less urgently, better positioning ourselves to resist the demands of neoliberalism; to imagine and enact positive futurities. when a ghost speaks, those around it are compelled to listen. so then the question is, what kind of ghosts do we want to be?   acknowledgements the idea for this article began as a talk i gave at the 2018 gender & sexuality in information studies colloquium. i would like to thank my mentors and co-panelists leah richardson and dolsy smith for their support and for inspiring me with their own work. it is an exciting professional accomplishment to publish in in the library with the lead pipe. i am grateful to peer reviewer samantha alfrey, internal reviewer kellee warren, and publishing editor annie pho for their insights and for helping me through the editorial process. i would also like to thank my inimitable friend and colleague dianne n. brown for her encouragement, willingness to listen, and her feedback on drafts of this article. finally, i am beyond thankful to faith weis for her unwavering support in this and all things: she’s a true partner with a keen eye and a kind heart. references bailey, k. (2012). appropriations from the 19th century and the topic of death in modern gothic narratives: edward gorey, walt disney, and tim burton. proquest dissertations publishing. retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1034579944/?pq-origsite=primo ballif, m. (2013). historiography as hauntology: paranormal investigations into the history of rhetoric. in theorizing histories of rhetoric (pp. 139–153). carbondale, il: southern illinois university press. retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/book/22041 berlant, l. g. (2011). cruel optimism. durham: duke university press. retrieved from http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/external/abstractview/s9780822394716 cronk, l. (2019, january 24). i’ve been considering if the base issue of @alalibrary is what its name tells its membershipthat the org is about institutions rather than workers. imagine if we stopped defending the idea of libraries & started to defend one another/stand together. that’s my big #alamw19 mood. [tweet]. retrieved january 25, 2019, from https://twitter.com/linds_bot/status/1088570042390900736 doughty, c. (2011, august 28). on the fear of death. retrieved november 26, 2018, from http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/fear-of-death doughty, c. (2017). why are you afraid of death? retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ibsaides4m elkin, a. (2018). hand job [zine]. retrieved from http://alizaelk.in/digitize/ ettarh, f. (2018). vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves – in the library with the lead pipe. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ ferreday, d., & kuntsman, a. (2011). haunted futurities. borderlands, 10(2), 1–14. foucault, m. (1984). of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias. architecture /mouvement/ continuite. retrieved from https://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heterotopia.en/ gordon, a. (2008). ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination (new university of minnesota press ed.). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. retrieved from http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip086/2007049308.html gordon, a. (2011). some thoughts on haunting and futurity. borderlands, 10(2), 1–21. halberstam, j. (2005). in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. new york: new york university press. retrieved from http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0422/2004018151.html harvey, d. (2016). neoliberalism is a political project. retrieved from http://jacobinmag.com/2016/07/david-harvey-neoliberalism-capitalism-labor-crisis-resistance/ juelskjær, m., & rogowska-stangret, m. (2017). a pace of our own? becoming through speeds and slows – investigating living through temporal ontologies of the university. feminist encounters: a journal of critical studies in culture and politics, 1(1), 06. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc.201706 kafer, a. (2013). feminist, queer, crip. bloomington, indiana: indiana university press. laibman, d. (2006). caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation. science & society, 70(4), 576–579. https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2006.70.4.576 mitchell, d., & snyder, s. (2010). disability as multitude: re-working non-productive labor power. journal of literary & cultural disability studies, 4(2), 179–194. https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2010.14 reitman, i. (1984). ghostbusters. columbia pictures. seeber, k. (2018, june 12). amber. retrieved november 21, 2018, from http://kevinseeber.com/blog/amber/ shahjahan, r. a. (2015). being ‘lazy’ and slowing down: toward decolonizing time, our body, and pedagogy. educational philosophy and theory, 47(5), 488–501. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2014.880645 soulellis, p. (2013). apparition of a distance, however near it may be [digital color print-on-demand book]. retrieved from https://soulellis.com/work/apparition/index.html surrell, j., sklar, m., & fitzgerald, t. (2015). the haunted mansion: imagineering a disney classic (third edition.). los angeles: disney editions. retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1702/2016439000-b.html willard library ghost cams. (n.d.). retrieved november 19, 2018, from http://www.willardghost.com/ wilson, a. n. (2012). scanops. retrieved from http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/scanops.html there is also a very real fear of unemployment and financial insecurity looming over what is already a precarious situation for many. my goal in this article is not to oversimplify or ignore that reality; rather i hope to offer space for thinking creatively about our work, how it is complicit in systems of oppression, and what we might do differently. i recognize that being in a position to write this article is a place of relative privilege. [↩] each disney park has its own version of the attraction. though the haunted house premise remains the same, storylines, characters, and decor were adapted for tokyo disneyland’s haunted mansion, disneyland paris’ phantom manor, and hong kong disneyland’s mystic manor. all five mansions contain some version of a library. [↩] care, code, and digital libraries: embracing critical practice in digital library communities preparing early career librarians for leadership and management: a feminist critique 6 responses greg bem 2019–03–08 at 1:17 am this piece was fantastic to read! thank you. i was wondering what source includes the racial demographics of the workers who are digitizing books for google books (“the workers–primarily women of color–who digitize texts for google books occupy space at the intersection of digital work, (im)materiality, and ghostliness.”)? i’d love to have that bookmarked! liz settoducato 2019–03–08 at 9:20 am thanks for the positive feedback! andrew norman wilson gets at this, you might also want to check out the piece he wrote about his film “workers leaving the googleplex”–https://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59791/the-artist-leaving-the-googleplex/ liz settoducato 2019–03–08 at 9:22 am thanks for the positive feedback! andrew norman wilson gets at this, you might also want to check out the piece he wrote about his film “workers leaving the googleplex”–https://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59791/the-artist-leaving-the-googleplex/ lisa d 2019–03–14 at 7:42 pm i loved reading this so much. thank you, liz! pingback : haunted libraries, invisible labour, and the librarian as an instrument of surveillance – librarian of things pingback : intersections, objects, ethics, and emotions | queeries & clareification this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct interested in writing for lead pipe? we’re calling for submissions. – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 13 jun editorial board /1 comments interested in writing for lead pipe? we’re calling for submissions. do you have an idea, experience, or perspective that will contribute to library literature and conversations? if so, we want to hear from you. the editorial board of in the library with the lead pipe is actively seeking submissions from all library viewpoints for consideration for publication in this journal. lead pipe is an open access, open peer reviewed journal, and we strive to publish content spanning all aspects of librarianship. the majority of article proposals we receive tend to come from librarians in academic library contexts, but we want to widen our representation. therefore, we’d particularly like to invite library workers at any level with public, school, and special library perspectives, as well as folks who work in archives and other arenas beyond librarianship (such as galleries and museums), to consider proposing your article ideas for publication here. if you’d like more information about our submissions and publication process, check out our submissions guidelines. and if you’d like to chat about your ideas and lead pipe as a potential venue to share them, note that several of our editorial board members will be at the upcoming ala annual conference in new orleans. we’d love to hear what you’re thinking in terms of article proposals. you can tweet at us to find a time and place to meet up: ian beilin amy koester annie pho ryan randall denisse solis keep an eye on the lead pipe twitter feed to find out about times we’ll pop up to talk to potential authors. or look for our buttons with the lead pipe logo that we’ll be wearing throughout the conference. we look forward to hearing the great article ideas you’ve been considering! an academic librarian-mother in six stories “life-now”: james tiptree, joanna russ, and the queer meaning of archives 1 response itibari m. zulu 2018–06–21 at 10:56 pm i was wonder if there has been any discussion about public university systems that exclude the public from full access to its resources, although in theory the public is paying for the university via taxes? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct patron-driven subject access: how librarians can mitigate that “power to name” – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 15 nov jessica l. colbert /6 comments patron-driven subject access: how librarians can mitigate that “power to name” in brief information organization and access is one of the core goals of librarianship. however, as librarians, we have the power to control what language patrons must use when searching for items. this power often manifests itself by limiting access to materials by and/or about oppressed or otherwise marginalized groups, due to how we label those materials. many librarians, such as sanford berman, criticize this language and suggest better language for subject access. but does this “better language” match how patrons search? in this article, i stress the importance of not only an equitable subject access, but one that is driven by our patrons through human subjects research. i will also discuss some strategies for patron-driven subject access, such as tagging systems. finally, i will briefly discuss the methodology of a pilot study i conducted, which focuses on the language patrons use to search for lgbt topics. my research illustrates one potential method of patron-driven subject heading creation that i hope inspires librarians when doing subject access work. introduction “language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.”—angela carter when i was an undergraduate student doing interdisciplinary research about gender, i discovered the relationship between the words we use in libraries and power. i was taking a course about the socio-cultural influence on japanese anime, and i wanted to examine how gender was being forced on a character in a certain film; however, i had difficulty finding resources about gender or the lack thereof in japanese culture.. i wondered if other people had trouble doing research in certain subjects, especially those which center the marginalized, because of language. then my supervisor in the library told me about a librarian named sandy berman and about subject headings. i was confronted by not only the major challenges faced by the average patron encountering subject headings but also how these headings reflect the white male hegemony in subject description. these headings were not created with somebody like me in mind. the rest, they say, is history. that experience led me to my love of cataloging. i realized how crucial the description of materials is to the access and discovery of information. i made it my personal mission in life to make sure that any person could find the information they needed, no matter who they were or what that information was. but providing that sort of equitable access to information is more complicated than one might suspect, especially if one wants to do it with input from patrons. i was shocked that i could not  find a single peer-reviewed study that attempted to learn the language people actually used to search for lgbt materials when i was researching this very topic for a course. clearly, this is an area that is a womb of potentiality. in order to get patrons involved in the process of subject creation and access, we need to first envision what that involvement might look like. it will look different at every institution, but patron-driven subject access (pdsa) could be a way for libraries to begin the process of using our authority to empower the language of our users. once we decide how patrons could be involved, we need to find ways to make those connections and have their voices heard. to do this most effectively, we need to embrace human subjects research; otherwise, any data will be disconnected from the lived experiences of our patrons. in this article, i will describe my own method of conducting this type of research along with the tensions between patron language and controlled vocabularies i encountered while doing this pilot case study. i take equitable subject access as a given in cataloging and along with how that can and should happen in partnership with our patrons. when including our patrons in this process, we can help to limit the impact of the exploitative power we hold over how they access materials. there already exist strategies to implement this type of subject access, such as tagging systems, but they are limited and don’t foster relationships between library users and librarians. i will provide an example of how to get this kind of data by detailing the methodology of my original qualitative research, which employed semi-structured interviews. finally, i will address some of the potential problems when implementing this style of subject access. the importance of equitable subject access descriptive cataloging, particularly the practice of assigning subject headings to works, has played a crucial role in the way patrons access library materials. when card catalogs were in wide use, the subject of a work was one of the key access points, along with author and title, and collocated materials on similar subjects. however, in modern online catalogs, keyword searches have become the dominant and preferred way of accessing materials. to quote a 2009 oclc report, “keyword searching is king … end users want to be able to do a simple google-like search and get results that exactly match what they expect to find” (calhoun, cellentani, & oclc, 2009). but despite the popularity of keyword searches, subject headings are still vital for the access of information. the same oclc report found that users appreciated the ability to narrow down their searches through facets (including subject headings), which provide greater precision and recall when doing keyword searches. faceted searches are just one instance of the role subject headings play, however. keyword searches pull from indexed marc records. if the language patrons use to search are not in those records, those relevant items will not be pulled, and subject headings allow more language to be indexed for those searches (chercourt & marshall, 2013). for subject access to truly improve access to information, it must be equitable. an equitable subject access would center the information needs and information seeking behaviors of those whom our systems disenfranchise. the library of congress subject headings have historically centered the language of white men in power (berman, 1971). in power to name, hope a. olson (2002) discusses the power that catalogers have over the access to information, especially when it comes to those who are marginalized. to mitigate the abuse of that power, we must attempt to provide a more equitable subject access. since the 1970s, librarians have attempted to provide equitable subject access through updating controlled vocabularies and classification schemes, as well as sharing resources. berman got the metaphorical ball rolling with his key text prejudices and antipathies: a tract on the lc subject heads concerning people (2014, originally 1971), which examines then-existing lcsh and offered corrections. since its publication, not only have many of his changes been implemented (knowlton, 2005), but other catalogers and librarians have done similar work (see billey, 2017; brooks, hofer, & institute for sex research, 1976; capek & national council for research on women (u.s.), 1989; freedman, 2008; furner, 2007a; ganin, 2017; greenblatt, 1990; marshall, 1977; michel, 1985; michel & moore, 1990; moore & international gay and lesbian archives, 1985; staalduinen, brandhorst, homodok, & anna blaman huis, 1997). as librarians, we can still do more. instead of using our positions of power and privilege to decide what language should be used for subject access, we should be responsive to the needs of our communities to implement patron-driven subject access (pdsa). through pdsa, we can mitigate what hope a. olson refers to as our “power to name.” this patron-driven subject access has value even when the interests of the patron might not necessarily match the interests of the institution. in my opinion, the interest of the institution (including the cataloger) should include the interest of the patron. as catalogers, we create metadata for and describe resources so that all users can find them. even though the interest of a patron might include just labelling an object so that they can find it later (e.g. “to read”), or a label that rates the resource, these actions still have value because they provide access, even if just for unique situations. strategies for patron-driven subject access patron-driven subject access simply means facilitating the development of subject headings and other subject access points by and with our patrons. many library catalogs and discovery layers allow for this already in the form of tagging systems. but pdsa is not and should not be limited to tagging systems, as not every library catalog will have that ability. tagging also does not guarantee accurate or useful information, and could also exploit the free untrained labor of patrons. tagging systems tagging systems are a way for end-users of a catalog or database to label, or tag, an item in a way that makes sense to them. for instance, many people use tagging systems to label books according to genre, or even “to read.” because of their ability to reflect end-user language, librarians have been comparing the tagging systems of websites such as librarything to library of congress subject headings (adler, 2009; bates & rowley, 2011). with these comparisons, scholars have demonstrated differences in not only the language used, especially for identity, but also differences in syntax and semantics. librarything even gives libraries the option to incorporate librarything tags into their opacs and discovery layers, called librarything for libraries (voorbij, 2012). however, if a library cannot or does not want to use librarything metadata along with their own, many online public access catalogs (opacs), such as vufind, and discovery layers, such as primo, allow users to create tags on any resource they find. however, the success of these tags, in my experience, depends on how well they are searchable and how they are advertised. one 2007 article, which discusses a framework of system evaluation for tagging systems in libraries,the “success” of these systems proves to be problematic for several reasons, one being the different uses of the tags by each user and how they are integrated into the catalog (furner, 2007b). at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign, for instance, the vufind opac  has been set up to allow items to be tagged, but those tags are not keyword searchable, nor is there an option to search tags. in my experience, tags are most useful for the person who creates them, as they can access their tags within their account. at the university of utah, the usearch catalog uses a primo discovery layer. if a patron creates an account, they can add tags to any item via a tab under the resource that says “reviews & tags,” with an option to “sign in to add new tags.” although these tags are not yet keyword searchable, there is an option under advanced search to search user tags. when i spoke with my library’s systems team, they said that because tags are not integrated into the main record but instead are extensions, they are not keyword searchable; this separation is useful because some tags may need to be removed due to offensive content (j. colbert, personal communication, november 2, 2017). discovery layers at other libraries have a similar function, in my experience. probably one of the most famous examples of a library tagging system was that of penntags. penntags was a social bookmarking site created for users of the university of pennsylvania libraries and has been discussed thoroughly in library literature relating to tagging systems (see mcfadden & weidenbenner, 2010; peterson, 2008; steele, 2009). however, as of writing this article, it seems that penntags no longer functions, and their alma implementation does not seem to allow for user tags, instead allowing users to “bookmark” items to find later. perhaps the decline in tagging, especially this robust system, indicates the limits of relying only on tagging systems that rely on patron contributions, or the failure of libraries to advertise this resource and its potential. indeed, in the database “library & information science abstracts,” a search for “tagging” and “success” only gives 13 results, with the latest relevant entry being from 2012. culturally-responsive metadata i learned of “culturally-responsive metadata” through a presentation by hannah buckland at the american library association annual conference in 2017. hannah buckland is the director of library services at leech lake tribal college in north central minnesota. because leech lake tribal college has such a small staff and a budget entirely of grants, many people in the library share responsibilities; indeed, buckland uses this fact to stress how technical services is a form of public services, especially when done with the community that the library serves.  the leech lake tribal college library was inspired to work with their indigenous faculty, staff, students, and community when a professor requested students search for “indigenous poetry,” and discovered that this was not the language that the library of congress uses. but instead of telling these students to ignore the language of their professor in favor of language created by and for a white colonialist state, buckland and her colleagues began implementing local headings that were appropriate for this community. the library only implemented these changes locally (assumed as local headings) instead of submitting them for review at the national level. buckland frames this as a difference between “aboutness” and “fromness.” while librarians often think of subject headings as descriptive of the “aboutness” of an item, buckland argues the frame should instead be “fromness.” because language is tied to culture, and culture is tied to place, headings should address the place from which language emerges. that is, language will change depending on culture and place  addressing where language comes from is crucial. finally, for implementing this culturally-responsive metadata, buckland recommends a collaborative model of public impact, where libraries and cultural institutions work with the communities they serve as “stewards instead of an overbearing power,” making decisions about metadata with the community (buckland, 2017). when i spoke with buckland after her presentation, i asked if she planned to submit this community language to any controlled vocabularies. she stressed that this type of community implementation is only sustainable in small communities, thus forcing true culturally-responsive metadata (and possibly pdsa) to only work on a small scale. human subjects research in technical services with my methodology, i intend to stress the importance of performing human subjects research when trying to implement any form of pdsa. the scholarly literature contains countless articles which study the information seeking behavior of human subjects. these studies range from first-year students, to lesbians, to women’s studies professors, to disability scholars, and beyond (see hulseberg & twait, 2016; koford, 2014; sabbar & xie, 2016; westbrook, 2003; whitt, 1993). however, despite the fact that these studies might address how the participants interact with subject headings and how subject access affects their retrieval (see duncan & holtslander, 2012; koford, 2014), they usually come from a public services or reference services point of view, not the point of view of cataloging librarians or other technical services librarians. but occasionally studies involving human subjects to change collection development policies or website/opac design can be found. one study (koford, 2014) investigates the information seeking behaviors of disability scholars with particular interest in subject headings, defined in the study as any controlled vocabulary or index. the researchers use semi-structured interviews with transcription and coding to collect data. congruent with my own findings, scholars whose research is more interdisciplinary use subject headings less, as the imprecise and permeable nature of their work conflicts with the rigid controlled meaning of the vocabularies. scholars whose work is more scientific or legal use them liberally for the same reason: they need to be precise about their search. with this information, we could think about how to allow access to these intangible subjects while at the same time providing that same rigid, precise control over the more solid subjects. because this study can be found in cataloging and classification quarterly, it is a perfect example of how technical services librarians can use human subjects research in a similar way to our public services colleagues in order to improve our vocabularies and policies. an example methodology in the spring of 2017, i completed original research titled “comparing library of congress subject headings to keyword searches involving lgbt topics: a pilot study” (colbert, 2017). my research questions were: what is the language patrons use to search for lgbtq materials, and how does that language compare to the library of congress subject headings? this research was conducted using semi-structured interviews. i hoped to not only compare natural language with a controlled vocabulary but also to provide an example of how to gather this language. methodology this qualitative study used semi-structured interviews, in which i could ask participants to expand on answers to my questions in order to provide more clarity and context. i drew my research participants from the teaching and research faculty of gender and women’s studies at the university of illinois urbana-champaign. my reasoning for this was that, if scholars in this field used language that differed from controlled vocabulary, then surely those outside the field would as well. four professors agreed to be interviewed. my interviews included ten questions, but i frequently asked research participants to elaborate on certain points. i then transcribed and coded these interviews, drawing out language and reasons for why they use particular language so that i could analyze it within context. i chose semi-structured interviews as my research method in order to analyze my data within the context of the participants’ lived experiences. to quote irving seidman, “at the root of in-depth interviewing is an interest in understanding the lived experiences of other people and the meaning they make of that experience. … the way to meaning is to be able to put behavior in context” (2015, pp. 9–10). although i would have gathered more data through a quantitative method such as log analyses, the context within which the participants used language influenced how i analyzed the results. the data gathered through the questions were demographic data, information seeking behavior, the language used when searching for certain concepts, and subjects’ experience with and knowledge of controlled vocabulary. i designed my questions through a conceptual lens: i never asked “what word do you use to search for gay men,” instead asking the participants to describe the language they would use to search for concepts. the epistemology of my research was social constructionism, which states that “people jointly construct their understandings of the world…that meanings are developed in coordination with others rather than separately within each individual or in the world of things” (leeds-hurwitz, 2009). this informed my decision to ask questions about demographics and information seeking behaviors. although, of course, each individual participant has their own unique life experience, the way they have interacted with others, their backgrounds, and so many other factors can affect how they signify these concepts. for instance, while a white working class masculine lesbian might call herself a butch, a black masculine lesbian might use the word stud instead. the hardest part of the entire research process was setting up the interviews. if you or your library plan to use interviews as part of your research, i recommend being prepared to get few responses unless the participants are somehow compensated. although my call for participants was sent out to every faculty member within the gender and women’s studies department and i even sent out individual emails, only four professors responded to me. nonetheless, these small groups can give us value as to how and why we need to incorporate evidence-based practice into our cataloging and metadata work; every voice has value. when planning the interviews, i made sure to privilege and center the needs of the research participants. because interviews can be such an intimate and vulnerable activity, it is important to make sure that participants feel comfortable. therefore, i let my participants pick their preferred location, date and time, and even method of recording. my participants technically inhabited a place of power over me, as they were faculty members and i was only a graduate student. however, if you do interviews in your library, you will probably be interviewing your patron base, and as a librarian, you have some power over them in that setting. one of the perks of doing interviews is the ability to strive to equal the playing field. in order to do so, you might explore different approaches to interviewing which take this power imbalance into account. after gathering data through recorded interviews, i transcribed and coded those interviews. my coding process was to pull out the words the participants used to search, the reasons for those words, and any limitations or anything else i found significant. this is a form of in vivo coding, which creates qualitative codes based on the language of the interviewee. after i pulled out these significant words and phrases, however, i did assign them codes based on their significance, such as “termreason.” using semi-structured interviews to gather data about subject usage and conflict allows librarians to form relationships with patrons. just as reference librarians are privy to how different groups of patrons seek information, so too can technical services librarians be. even if the data gathered are not technically statistically significant, it proves valuable not only in that any amount of data gathered has meaning, but also in that it works to bridge the gap between librarians and patrons, showing them that we care about how we can make accessing information easier and more efficient for them. problems with patron-driven subject access as much as i advocate for my idealistic visions of a subject access that is primarily patron-driven, i recognize some inherent issues with this form of subject access. these include the problem of language variation, headings that are too local, and the right for a culture or community to have their information be inaccessible to outsiders. language variation is the concept that language is not a stable, fixed thing and indeed will have variation, including in grammar and dialect, across its speakers (wardhaugh, 2014, p. 6). in particular, sociolinguists note the variation in language that stems from gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, etc. (international l.a.u.d.-symposium, putz, reif-hülser, & robinson, 2013; mesthrie, asher, & credo reference, 2001). for controlled vocabulary, this variation is both its reason for being and the reason it has so many issues. there is nuance and variation based on discipline and individual search styles, for instance. when i analyzed the results of my study, i found that, although library of congress subject headings, and even the library of congress demographic group terms, had the most common terminology shared by all participants, their unique disciplines, areas of research, and lived experiences affected the terminology they used for more specificity and nuance (see colbert, 2017). if we are to base our subject headings on the language of our patrons, then we are privileging the language variation of those specific patrons, which necessarily marginalizes the language of those who do not participate. as stated from my conversation with buckland, another possible issue that builds off language variation is that it can only be implemented on a small scale. if language becomes “too local” to a certain place, then it has no value to or impedes access in other communities. some groups or cultures, such as indigenous tribes of the united states, might not want outsiders to be able to find their information. although this issue affects traditional subject access methods as well, we should be aware that the language a patron uses might not be language the general public should be able to use. even with local headings, unless you implement a system that denies the access to outsiders, the need to remain inaccessible is not fully met. a possible way to accommodate this need is by incorporating the mukurtu cms, a content management system designed with these needs in mind, in your library’s collections: “mukurtu is a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, narrate, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways” (“learn – mukurtu cms,” n.d.). the future of patron-driven subject access despite these issues, patron-driven subject access is a worthy goal for libraries to work towards. even by implementing simple tagging options in our opacs and discovery layers, we show an effort to include patrons in the metadata process. as we move more towards library catalogs that use linked open data, spontaneous opportunities for pdsa arise. in a linked open data environment, different subject or community vocabularies could be combined, allowing for subject description to accommodate different disciplines or even different ways of thinking. for instance, a controlled vocabulary about race could have a term that a controlled vocabulary about anthropology conceptualizes in a different way. when we decenter the idea that for every concept there is one controlled term to describe it, we allow the play of seemingly opposite ways of thinking. and through this play and collision, “new and meaningful pathways to discovery and navigation” are created (thorsen & pattuelli, 2016, p. 2). a linked open data catalog allows libraries to complement, replace, or even reject the standards that have been decided for us and our patrons. in order to create these varied subject vocabularies, subject librarians should do human subjects research with their faculty or patrons to populate the terms. because linked open data is, as expected, free and open, the problem of localizing could be erased, as institutions across the world would have access to these terms and their meanings. if a library so chooses, they could have a dedicated vocabulary for their institution if going to the subject level is not realistic. but even if a linked data catalog with shared vocabularies is not yet possible, the act of doing human subjects research and speaking directly to patrons to inform a patron-driven subject access is invaluable. i chose interviewing, and recommend it, as a methodology because of how personal it is and how it allows any data gathered to be placed within the context of a lived experience; indeed, the data exists only in this context. interviewing allows the technical services librarian to target specific populations that might currently be “problematic” within our current modes of subject access, or they could use the methodology as a way to view subject access from an information-seeking behavior perspective and collaborate with public services librarians to make changes in our systems as needed. if interviewing is not the appropriate methodology for your circumstances, other forms of human subjects research could be used to to replicate that experience, such as focus groups, surveys, and even research diaries. the method is not what is important. what is important is the move towards including patrons in our subject access decisions and processes, achieved through human subjects research. although patron-driven subject access is a possible tool to help improve equitable access to library materials, it is not a perfect solution. more human subjects research in the area of incorporating patron metadata and information seeking behaviors needs to be conducted in order to support this as a standard evidence-based practice. in this article, i have outlined one possible methodology so that fellow librarians have an example, but again, i stress that it is not the specific method that matters. if librarians can make an effort to center the needs of our patrons in every area of our work, we can begin to heal our long history of wielding power through language in ways that have harmed both our patrons and our institutions. acknowledgements thank you to reviewers emily drabinski and ian beilin for their astute insights, comments, and edits, as well as publishing editor annie pho. i also extend thanks to my supervisor, lorelei rutledge, and my partner for their comments and support. references adler, m. (2009). transcending library catalogs: a comparative study of controlled terms in library of congress subject headings and user-generated tags in librarything for transgender books. journal of web librarianship, 3(4), 309–331. https://doi.org/10.1080/19322900903341099 bates, j., & rowley, j. (2011). social reproduction and exclusion in subject indexing: a comparison of public library opacs and librarything folksonomy. journal of documentation, 67(3), 431–448. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220411111124532 berman, s. (2014). prejudices and antipathies: a tract on the lc subject heads concerning people. jefferson, n.c.: mcfarland and co. billey, a. (2017). amber billey, mlis » research. retrieved october 27, 2017, from http://www.amberbilley.info/research/ brooks, j., hofer, h. c., & institute for sex research. (1976). sexual nomenclature: a thesaurus. boston: g.k. hall. buckland, h. (2017). toward culturally responsive metadata. presented at the american library association annual conference, chicago, illinois. calhoun, k., cellentani, d., & oclc (eds.). (2009). online catalogs: what users and librarians want: an oclc report. dublin, ohio: oclc. capek, m. e. s., & national council for research on women (u.s.). (1989). a women’s thesaurus: an index of language used to describe and locate information by and about women. new york: harper & row. chercourt, m., & marshall, l. (2013). making keywords work: connecting patrons to resources through enhanced bibliographic records. technical services quarterly, 30, 285–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/07317131.2013.785786 colbert, j. l. (2017, april 25). comparing library of congress subject headings to keyword searches involving lgbt topics: a pilot study (master’s thesis). university of illinois at urbana-champaign, urbana, il. retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2142/97437 duncan, v., & holtslander, l. (2012). utilizing grounded theory to explore the information-seeking behavior of senior nursing students. journal of the medical library association; chicago, 100(1), 20–7. eldredge, j. (2006). evidence‐based librarianship: the ebl process. library hi tech, 24(3), 341–354. https://doi.org/10.1108/07378830610692118 freedman, j. (2008, september 18). academic page | lower east side librarian. retrieved october 27, 2017, from http://lowereastsidelibrarian.info/academic furner, j. (2007a). dewey deracialized: a critical race-theoretic perspective. knowledge organization, 34(3), 144–168. furner, j. (2007b). user tagging of library resources: toward a framework for system evaluation. international cataloguing and bibliographic control, 37, 47–51. ganin, n. (2017, september 30). queerlcsh. retrieved september 29, 2017, from http://www.netanelganin.com/projects/queerlcsh/queerlcsh.html greenblatt, e. (1990). homosexuality: the evolution of a concept in the library of congress subject headings. gay and lesbian library service, 75–101. hulseberg, a., & twait, m. (2016). sophomores speaking: an exploratory study of student research practices. college & undergraduate libraries; binghamton, 23(2), 130–150. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2014.981907 international l.a.u.d.-symposium, putz, m., reif-hülser, m., & robinson, j. a. (2013). variation in language and language use linguistic, socio-cultural and cognitive perspectives. frankfurt am main: peter lang. retrieved from http://site.ebrary.com/id/10722920 knowlton, s. a. (2005). three decades since prejudices and antipathies: a study of changes in the library of congress subject headings. cataloging & classification quarterly, 40(2), 123–145. koford, a. (2014). how disability studies scholars interact with subject headings. cataloging & classification quarterly, 52(4), 388–411. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2014.891288 learn – mukurtu cms. (n.d.). retrieved october 6, 2017, from http://mukurtu.org/learn/ leeds-hurwitz, w. (2009). social construction of reality. in encyclopedia of communication theory (vols. 1–2, pp. 892–894). thousand oaks: sage publications, inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412959384 marshall, j. k. (1977). on equal terms: a thesaurus for nonsexist indexing and cataloging. new york: neal-schuman. mcfadden, s., & weidenbenner, j. v. (2010). collaborative tagging: traditional cataloging meets the “wisdom of crowds.” the serials librarian, 58(1–4), 55–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/03615261003623021 mesthrie, r., asher, r. e., & credo reference. (2001). concise encyclopedia of sociolinguistics. amsterdam ; new york: elsevier. michel, d. (1985). gay studies thesaurus: a controlled vocabulary for indexing and accessing materials of relevance to gay culture, history, politics and psychology. princeton, nj: michel. michel, d., & moore, d. g. (1990). michel/moore classification scheme for books in lesbian/gay collections. place of publication not identified: publisher not identified. moore, d. g., & international gay and lesbian archives. (1985). international gay & lesbian archives classification system. place of publication not identified: publisher not identified. olson, h. a. (2002). the power to name: locating the limits of subject representation in libraries. springer, middletown, de. peterson, e. (2008). parallel systems: the coexistence of subject cataloging and folksonomy. library philosophy and practice, 179. sabbar, c., & xie, i. (2016). language in the information-seeking context: a study of us scholars using non-english sources. journal of documentation, 72(1), 103–126. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd-07-2014-0094 seidman, i. (2015). interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences. new york: teachers college press. staalduinen, k. van, brandhorst, h., homodok, & anna blaman huis. (1997). a queer thesaurus: an international thesaurus of gay and lesbian index terms. amsterdam: homodok. steele, t. (2009). the new cooperative cataloging. library hi tech, 27(1), 68–77. https://doi.org/10.1108/07378830910942928 thorson, h. k., & pattuelli, m. c. (2016). linked open data and the cultural heritage landscape. in e. jones & m. seikel (eds.), linked data for cultural heritage (1-22). chicago: ala editions, an imprint of the american library association. voorbij, h. (2012). the value of librarything tags for academic libraries. online information review, 36(2), 196–217. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521211229039 wardhaugh, r. (2014). an introduction to sociolinguistics (7th ed.). hoboken: wiley. westbrook, l. (2003). information needs and experiences of scholars in women’s studies: problems and solutions. college and research libraries, 64(3), 192–209. whitt, a. j. (1993). the information needs of lesbians. library & information science research, 15(3), 275–288. evidence-based practice, human subjects research, subject access socratic questioning: a teaching philosophy for the student research consultation accessibility for justice: accessibility as a tool for promoting justice in librarianship 6 responses violet fox 2017–11–16 at 9:49 am lots of interesting ideas here, jessica! i’m a little surprised not to see any discussion of how/why we’ve traditionally chosen the terms used as subject headings, literary warrant. do you see any value in privileging the terminology used by authors (e.g., queer authors) in our vocabularies? do you see patron-driven subject access as a replacement for or as a complement to literary warrant? jessica l. colbert 2017–11–16 at 10:31 pm hi, violet! very interesting question. i think that the two methods can be complementary, especially on the national scale. however, my issue with literary warrant is who gets to decide what literature warrants the term. we can recall the fiasco surrounding the proposed change of “illegal aliens” to “undocumented immigrants;” loc stated that the literary warrant is legal language. literary warrant causes these types of authority problems, as well as problems concerning similar concepts worded differently across disciplines. pingback : j willard marriott library resident librarian | project rotations and rotating projects pingback : project rotations and rotating projects newsletter pingback : hot off the press… – maggie rank pingback : five-and-a-half things that probably happened at #acoc18 – cataloguing the universe this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct an interview with steve roggenbuck – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 10 jul erin dorney /1 comments an interview with steve roggenbuck in brief: an interview with poet and blogger steve roggenbuck about publishing, social media, writing, and, of course, libraries. a poem from roggenbuck’s 2012 book crunk juice by erin dorney introduction how many poets do you know who have an entry on knowyourmeme.com? steve roggenbuck, a 25-year old poet and blogger from michigan, is one of them. boasting 9,801 twitter followers (for comparison, current us poet laureate natasha trethewey has 241), over 4,000 facebook page likes, and almost 700,000 views on youtube, roggenbuck is using the web to interact with his readers. he experiments with technology, is deeply engaged in building community, uses humor to resonate with his audience, and embraces many aspects of participatory culture. his newest book if u dont love the moon your an ass hole: poems and selfies was released in late june 2013, bringing his total book count up to 5: crunk juice; download helvetica for free.com; i am like october when i am dead; and i love music. i recently had the pleasure of conducting an email interview with roggenbuck for in the library with the lead pipe and we chatted about publishing, social media, writing, and, of course, libraries. roggenbuck also created a 10-minute video addressing his personal history with libraries and his vision for the future of libraries in the age of the internet and digital texts, which can be found embedded at the bottom of this article. can you tell us a little bit about your background? how did you get to this point in your writing career? roggenbuck: i started writing poetry a lot in 2006, i gradualy started publishing things in 2008, 2009, 2010. then in 2011 i realy started using the internet to self-publish and distribute my work agressively, and also to explore new forms that combine poetry with blogging, memes, and internet culture. my videos have caught on the most, and they have alowed me to reach more people than contemporary poets often do. i’ve had a couple moments of getting big press coverage (new york times, know your meme, i-d magazine..) but most of my following was built thru individually interacting with thousands of people online, and those people sharing my work to friends and family. 
what is lit 2.0 and who do you think has achieved this status? roggenbuck: i havent talkd about “lit 2.0” that much since 2011 realy.. i mentioned “lit 2.0” in an essay, suggesting that literature could become much more social and interactive than it has been in the past, in the same way that the internet has become “web 2.0” with the development of social media. in a typical day i respond to dozens or hundreds of people’s comments and messages online. “lit 2.0” is the literature that is created in back-and-forth comment threads, in posts that are sent “@” a single specific person–it’s when the writer is available to talk back, when there is active community, two-way conversation instead of one-way broadcasting, and there are new updates every day/hour, not once a year! 

i’ve noticed a few references to libraries and librarians in your poetry. what aspects of working in or with libraries were different from what you expected? roggenbuck: hehe.. i’ve done my work in libraries a lot. honestly though, i’ve recently identified that i work best in busy/active settings, so cafes or busy co-op houses are often a more ideal setting. i’ve actually had good experiences doing work at house parties haha, like when everyone around me is partying, that creates a good energy for me to get excited and work vigorously. i love the idea of libraries, so public and open and free, workin to spread literacy and critical thought and learning, such a benevolent force.. unfortunately i perceive libraries as usually having less funding to bring touring writers, compared to universities.. also i wonder if my “readings” would be too loud/inappropriate for library settings.. i would be interested to work with libraries more in the future! what are your thoughts on the future of writing as a profession, both for yourself and in general? roggenbuck: i’ve said that in the future, it may not matter as much what genre of art you mainly create, you will just be followed because you’re an interesting person, people will follow you as a person. i like this because it means i can talk about anything i want, i can share all my beliefs with my followers, and it allows an incredible amount of artistic freedom. i could release a novel or a rap album or a comic book–things i have never practiced or studied–and i could sell hundreds, probably thousands of copies. and people would enjoy the work, because they mainly follow me for my message and my energy, which are going to be present in anything i create. how do you manage your time—responding to your followers on social media, writing, filming and editing video, putting together your books, performing, and traveling seems like a lot to juggle. roggenbuck: it is a lot to juggle. usually i’m unsatisfied with how i manage my time, i don’t think i’m doing enough, i fall behind on important tasks.. people say that “80% of your results come from 20% of your actions,” and i think thats probably true for what i do, and this summer ive been tryin to focus more time on my videos, which spread my work the fastest.. but i also love interacting with ppl, it makes me happier than anything, and i need to make it all work financially too.. so its a constant struggle to balance it haha. how do you support yourself as a constantly touring writer? roggenbuck: i’ve started getting hired for readings at universities, and those can pay a lot. i would only need one of those each month to pay my rent, food, and debt payments. i’m also selling t-shirts and books on an ongoing basis through my website, occasionaly making pushes for sales. i’ve also done diy shows that can pay a little bit from door donations or pass-the-jar type of donations, and selling chapbooks at those events. in march i did a tour of ten diy shows, and i made enough to cover the month’s living expenses through that. can you talk about your process for putting together a book of poetry? roggenbuck: im constantly writing litle bits of text, short poems, tweets, lines for image macros, lines for videos.. the book-making process for me is mostly an act of compiling all that stuff, and filtering out the weaker stuff, so the book just repeatedly hits people with quick engaging bits of text. my books are like thousands of one-liners in a row haha.. often i try to start and end with particularly meaningful material, the stuff that feels like “thesis statement” stuff for me, and i want to keep it visual with enlarged text and/or images. i finally arrange a draft, and then i read it over and keep making small changes until im totally satisfied or i reach a final deadline !! 
in your essay raising poetry to the level of internet culture, you discuss the value of writing as determined by readers rather than editors, saying “this model shifts power, somewhat, from the few (editors, reviewers) to the many (all readers).” what future implications (for writing, art, sharing, publishing, etc) do you anticipate from this kind of change in power dynamic? roggenbuck: many people will complain about the loss of literary “quality”.. the new form of “approval” is not what editors want to share, its what masses of internet users want to share. so there may be writers who pander too much to what is retweetable or rebloggable. i have seen how this has affected my own writing, and i’m not sure i always like it. i’m tryin to stay conscious of it, and sometimes i reject it. the lines that are the funniest or most insightful or beautiful to you are not always the most retweetable. if i go and tweet “yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo yolo” right now, from my account, it will get 30+, probably 50+ retweets, which is considerable free exposure to new people.. but that tweet is not offering anything super beautiful or insightful haha, its kind of energizing maybe, it has some playful energy… anyway– it can be fun and intellectually stimulating to learn what “works” in these online forms, but in order to stay satisfied with yourself as an artist , it’s also important to stay aware of and vigilant about what you love, of what you want to be about. what made you decide to self-publish your books/art and put them into the public domain instead of pursuing a more “traditional” publisher/distributor? as more and more writers take similar courses of action, how might a library be able to contribute or support self-published authors? roggenbuck: i decided to self-publish because the kind of publishers i perceive as willing to publish my work–small poetry presses–don’t offer a ton of readership or financial support anyway, so i figured i could reach just as many people myself by self-publishing, with a higher profit margin and more artistic freedom. i think i have been correct about that. i’ve sold over 500 copies of my new book already, and the release date was less than two weeks ago. about half of what people pay ($10) goes directly to me as profit. i was able to include selfies in the book, which is very funny and exciting to me, and a page about veganism, which is very important to me. i think libraries may be able to help change the public perception of self-published work. especially in the poetry world, self-publishing is stigmatized, not “legit,” like it “doesn’t count” as being published, when in actuality you could be affecting just as many people. of course libraries can’t just stock every self-published book, at least not in print.. there is so much.. you still need some filter for quality. this is part of a bigger issue, but i would like if more libraries were producing content, like if one of the librarians reviewed books as part of their job, and kept a blog of these reviews. then there would be an opportunity to review some self-published books on an equal-footing with the traditionally published books; it would be exciting to see a reviewer treat the self-pub books with as much respect and consideration as traditionally published books. 

in your 2011 essay toward a more flowing culture: lit 2.0 + the online “total work” you mention an interest in “…creating an active, varied, and prolific source of culture…” through your live my lief website. how will you know when you have accomplished that? what other sources of culture are young people of this generation encountering through the open web?
 roggenbuck: my vision has evolved a bit since then. in 2011, i perceived my ultimate “form” to be the website, and my models were other high-traffic blogs like hipster runoff and even webcomics like pictures for sad children. but i realized by late 2011 and especially in 2012, my “form” had become the personal brand, more broadly. i’ve come to use platforms like twitter and facebook and vine and instagram more prolifically than the actual live my lief website. my total output on alll these sites combined, and even the private 1-on-1 interaction i do, and the shows i do on tour–all these contribute to the impact my personal brand has in peoples lives. my goal is not realy to get people to subscribe to live my lief anymore, the goal is just to get steve roggenbuck in their hearts, using any combination of platforms available to me. what can we expect to find in your new book, if u dont love the moon your an ass hole: poems and selfies? roggenbuck: thousands of funny and thought-provoking lines, and twenty-three truely hot selfies :) the goal of the book is to make you laugh and make you excited about life. i am proud of the book. it is easy to read, very much instant gratification. if you like my videos or my online output, the book is just a more sustained dose of that same energy 

is there anything else you want our readers to know that i didn’t ask? roggenbuck: everyeone should know that i love them :) and thank u for reading this !! video http://youtu.be/qbsv6zm9xfo acknowledgements thanks to steve roggenbuck for his thoughtful responses, and to tyler barton and lead pipe editors emily ford and brett bonfield for their helpful comments on interview questions and formatting. call for articles killing sir walter scott: a philosophical exploration of weeding 1 response emily ford 2013–07–13 at 6:32 pm !!! i loved this. i love steve’s energy, and i particularly love that he took the time to chat with you about his work. and i love that he confronts my compulsion for proper grammar and spelling. this all makes me think: what can we librarians do to better support poets and artists and writers and all other kinds of individuals who are creating and sharing content? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct librarianship at the crossroads of ice surveillance – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 13 nov sarah lamdan /5 comments librarianship at the crossroads of ice surveillance in brief information capitalism, the system where information, a historically, largely free and ubiquitous product of basic communication, is commodified by private owners for profit, is entrenched in our society. information brokers have consolidated and swallowed up huge amounts of data, in a system that leaves data purchase, consumption, and use largely unregulated and unchecked. this article focuses on librarian ethics in the era of information capitalism, focusing specifically on an especially insidious arena of data ownership: surveillance capitalism and big data policing. while librarians value privacy and intellectual freedom, librarians increasingly rely on products that sell personal data to law enforcement, including immigration and customs enforcement (ice). librarians should consider how buying and using these products in their libraries comports with our privacy practices and ethical standards. by sarah lamdan introduction as a fellow librarian, i’m here to warn you: ice is in your library stacks. whether directly or indirectly, some of the companies that sell your library research services also sell surveillance data to law enforcement, including ice (u.s. immigration and customs enforcement). companies like thomson reuters and relx group (formerly reed elsevier), are supplying billions of data points, bits of our personal information, updated in real time, to ice’s surveillance program.1 our data is being collected by library vendors and sold to the police, including immigration enforcement officers, for millions of dollars. this article examines the privacy ethics conundrum raised by contemporary publishing models, where the very services libraries depend upon to fill their collections endanger patron privacy. in the offline world of paper collections and library stacks, librarians adhere to privacy ethics and practices to ensure intellectual freedom and prevent censorship. but librarians are unprepared to apply those same ethical requirements to digital libraries. as our libraries transition to largely digital collections2, we must critically assess our privacy ethics for the digital era.3 where are the boundaries of privacy in libraries when several “data services”4 corporations that also broker personal data own the lion’s share of libraries’ holdings? after describing library vendors’ data selling practices and examining how those practices affect privacy in libraries, this article concludes by suggesting that library professionals organize beyond professional organizations. librarians can demand vendor accountability and insist that vendors be transparent about how they use, repackage, and profit from personal data. an overview of vendors’ data brokering work the consolidation of library vendors in the digital age has created a library services ecosystem where several vendors own the majority of databases and services upon which libraries rely.5 this puts libraries at the whim of publishing giants like elsevier, springer, and taylor and francis. this article uses thomson reuters and relx group, major publishing corporations that own westlaw and lexis6 , as case studies to demonstrate how information consolidation and the rise of big data impact library privacy. thomson reuters and relx group do not just duopolize the legal research market, they are powerful players in many library collections. they own a bevy of news sources and archives, academic collections including sciencedirect, scopus, and clinicalkey, and all of the reed elsevier journals.7 companies like thomson reuters and relx group are gradually buying up information collections that libraries and their patrons depend upon. in addition to selling research products, both thomson reuters and relx are data brokers, companies that sell personal data to marketing entities and law enforcement including ice.8 data brokering is fast becoming a billion dollar industry. personal information fuels the “big data economy,” a system that monetizes our data by running it through algorithm-based analyses to predict, measure, and govern peoples’ behavior.9 while data brokering for commercial gain (to predict peoples’ shopping habits and needs) is insidious, the sale of peoples’ data to law enforcement is even more dangerous. brokering data to law enforcement fuels a policing regime that tracks and detains people based not on human investigation, but on often erroneous pools of data traded between private corporations and sorted by discriminatory algorithms.10 big data policing disparately impacts minorities, creating surveillance dragnets in muslim communities, overpolicing in black communities, and sustaining biases inherent in the u.s. law enforcement system.11 in the immigration context, big data policing perpetuates problematic biases with little oversight12 , resulting in mass surveillance, detention, and deportation.13 ice pays relx group and thomson reuters millions of dollars for the personal data it needs to fuel its big data policing program.14 thomson reuters supplies the data used in palantir’s controversial falcon program, which fuses together a multitude of databases full of personal data to help ice officers track immigrant targets and locate them during raids.15 lexisnexis provides ice data that is “mission critical”16 to the agency’s program tracking immigrants and conducting raids at peoples’ homes and workplaces.17 information capitalism drives data brokering the new information economy is drastically changing vendors’ and libraries’ information acquisition, sales, and purchasing norms. for thomson reuters and relx group, data brokering diversifies profit sources as the companies transition their services from traditional publishing to become “information analytics” companies.18 these corporations are no longer the publishers that librarians are used to dealing with, the kind that focus on particular data types (academic journals, scientific data, government records, and other staples of academic, public, and specialized libraries). instead, the companies are data barons, sweeping up broad swaths of data to repackage and sell. libraries have observed drastic changes in vendor services over the last decade. new business models are imperative for publishing companies that must maintain profits in a changing information marketplace. they are competing to remain profitable enterprises in an era where their traditional print publishing methods are less lucrative. to stay afloat financially, publishers are becoming predictive data analytics corporations.19 publishers realize that the traditional publishing revenue streams from books and journals are unsustainable as those items become digital and open access.20 reed elsevier, one of the top five largest academic publishers has been “managing down” its print publishing services to focus on more lucrative online data analytics products.21 reed elsevier’s corporation rebranded itself relx group and morgan stanley recategorized relx group as a “business company” instead of a “media group.”22 for publishers, changing their business models is imperative to survive in a world where information access is changing dramatically and publishers are learning to maintain their market share in the new digital information regime.23 while print materials are less lucrative, publishers build technology labs, developing tools that stream and manipulate digital materials. publishers like thomson reuters and relx group are finding new opportunities to consolidate and sell digital materials.24 where information used to come in different shapes and sizes (papers, books, cassette tapes, photographs, paintings, newspapers, blueprints, and other disparate, irregular formats) it now flows in a single form, transmitted through fiber optic cables. thomson reuters and relx group are capitalizing on this new information form, buying up millions of published materials and storing them electronically to create digital data warehouses25 stored in servers. these new publishing enterprises are data hungry and do not discriminate between different types of data, be it academic, government, or personal. they want every data type, to compile as bundles of content to sell. today’s library vendors are less like local bookstores and more like costcos stocked with giant buckets of information.26 the new publishing company structure is a “big box” data store of library resources. libraries buy bundles of journals, databases, and ebooks, and other mass-packaged materials in “big deals.”27 the costco-ization of publishing drives publishers to collect tons of data, and to make systems that will slice and dice the data into new types of saleable bundles. thus, publishers morph into data analytics corporations, developing ai systems to parse through huge datasets to gather statistics (“how many times does ruth bader ginsburg say “social justice” in her supreme court opinions?”) and predict trends (“how many three pointers will stephen curry throw in 2019?”).28 as their vendors’ service models shift, librarians have also shifted from being information owners whose collection development focuses on purchasing materials to information borrowers that rent pre-curated data bundles shared through subscription databases. in 2019, roxanne shirazi, a librarian at cuny’s grad center, described the phenomenon of “borrowing” information from gigantic data corporations in a blog post titled the streaming library.29 shirazi compares the modern library to a collection of video subscription streaming services (hulu, netflix, amazon). libraries subscribe to online collections, “streaming” resources that live within various corporate data collections without owning them. “…libraries used to purchase materials for shared use […] those materials used to live on our shelves.” but libraries no longer own all of their research materials, they temporarily borrow subscribe to them. vendors can provide library resources, and make them disappear, at their whim.30 as lenders, library vendors do not end their relationships with libraries when they complete a sale. instead, as streaming content providers, vendors become embedded in libraries. they are able to follow library patrons’ research activities, storing data about how people are using their services. when companies like thomson reuters and relx group are simultaneously library service providers and data brokers they can access library patron data and repackage that data for profit.31 library vendors collect more and more patron data as they develop services to track patron preferences and make collection development decisions.32 librarians have long been concerned with the privacy implications of digital authentication features vendors put in products to help verify patron identities and track their use of online databases.33 when vendors that track library patrons also participate in data brokering, it is entirely possible that patron data is in the mix of personal data the companies sell as data brokers.34 neither thomson reuters or relx group has denied doing so.35 furthermore, in 2018, both thomson reuters and relx group modified their privacy statements to clarify that they use personal data across their platforms, with business partners, and with third party service providers.36 in the current information economy, librarians increasingly lack leverage to confront powerful corporate vendors like thomson reuters and relx group.37 information capitalism, the transition of industrialist capitalism to an economic system that assigns commercial value to knowledge, information, and data38, simultaneously intensifies privacy concerns in our libraries and empowers data corporations. as publishing conglomerates buy more and more data, libraries have little choice but to purchase their research products from these information monopolies. data brokering is an especially threatening form of information capitalism, but other manifestations of information capitalism have also seeped into librarianship. when information sellers limit access to online content, put up paywalls, and charge exorbitant article processing charges (apcs), they profit from our patrons’ information needs and our roles as information providers. we are beholden to information capitalism39, and our profession is captured by this new brand of digital warehouse-style publishing. if we want information, we must pay a premium to wealthy data barons. the power wielded by huge publishing companies makes it hard for librarians that negotiate contracts with the companies to demand accountability. librarians are in the awkward role of being, simultaneously, both “the biggest consumer of the materials [the corporations] sell as well as their biggest critics.”40 when librarians and their patrons try to bypass library vendors and provide open access to information, vendors have the power to stifle those demands. for instance, vendors sued the computer programmer who developed sci-hub, a website providing free access to scientific research and texts, forcing the website offline.41 librarians envision a world where information is free, but live in a reality where they are largely captive to giant publishing companies. because personal data is the “big data” empire’s most valuable currency, sought by companies like thomson reuters and relx group, librarians should be especially concerned about vendors’ gathering personal data in libraries. data brokering is a multi-billion dollar industry.42 data brokering capitalizes on lax software and online platform privacy policies43 , scraping and saving troves of personal data to analyze or repackage it for sale. thus, as publishers become data analytics firms, it is useful for libraries to consider whether they unwittingly fuel the data brokering industry. librarians’ roles in data brokering it is important to begin the discussion about librarians’ roles in patron privacy by drawing a line between privacy ethics and the “vocational awe” that pervades our profession.44 the idea that certain parts of librarians’ work and values are sacred and beyond critique45 is harmful to our profession. we are certainly not obligated to consider ourselves the lone fighters at the front lines of academic freedom or bold crusaders for a larger cause. much of what librarians have written about protecting patrons’ digital privacy focuses on librarians’ responsibilities, saddling the burden of privacy requirements and responsibilities on libraries and their staffs.46 library professional education programs teach librarians that they must protect their patrons from online research platforms (clearing caches, erasing patron profiles, logging out of online systems, and other custodial tasks) rather than demanding that corporations stop tracking and collecting data from library patrons. it is not a librarian’s responsibility to save patrons from digital surveillance, rather, it is incumbent upon software developers to protect user privacy in the research tools they create. rather than considering libraries the ultimate digital privacy saviors and library ethics as some glowing bastion that librarians are burdened with protecting, we can think of intellectual freedom and privacy ethics as one of many factors to consider when we choose which resources and tools to implement in our libraries. library ethics are points upon which we should hold our vendors accountable, not obligations to internalize and carry on our backs. while there may be no absolute, ideal privacy solution for our libraries, privacy is something to keep in mind and add to the list of concerns we have about the form and function of modern publishing and research. indeed, it is not the job of libraries, but the obligation of library vendors, to ensure that patrons are not surveilled by library products. beyond unfairly burdening librarians, post hoc efforts to contain invasive digital research tools in libraries are not as effective as preemptively incorporating privacy into library products. library’s digital hygiene activities are mere attempts to clean up after library vendors that breach patron privacy. when patrons use library vendors’ products, librarians follow behind, erasing profiles, clearing personal data from vendor systems, and trying to erase patrons’ digital footprints. we take on the work of cleaning up after our vendors. instead, our vendors should be proactively protecting our patrons’ privacy. privacy expert ann cavoukian coined the concept “privacy by design” for the knowledge economy, believing that in the age of information capitalism, information capitalists should build privacy measures into their products by default. cavoukian set out seven principles that have been adopted by law in other nations, including the european union (eu) in its general data protection regulation (gdpr).47 the principles require that online services, including research tools and resources, be designed to proactively protect privacy. according to the principles, research products should default to privacy. privacy should be embedded into research products’ design, with “end to end” privacy throughout the entire data lifecycle, from the moment data is created to its eventual disposal.48 these privacy measures should be transparent and clear to the end user. for instance, users should know where their data will end up, especially if their data may be packaged and resold in a data brokering scheme.49 while the eu has embraced privacy by design and required the companies doing business in its member nations to adhere to the seven principles, there is no privacy by design requirement for research services in the u.s. this leaves u.s. librarians in an ethically complicated role as major information technology users who adhere to patron privacy standards. librarians’ information access roles keep us at the forefront of technological advancement, as most information access occurs online.50 we are information technology’s early adopters51 , and we serve as gatekeepers to troves of online data collections. oftentimes our role makes us information technology’s first critics, sounding warnings about products and practices that are oppressive to our patrons and that violate our ethical duties to protect patron privacy and intellectual freedom.52 as technology critics, we tend to focus on technologies a la carte, on a product-by-product basis.53 by honing in on specific products, companies, and practices, we’ve been able to condemn specific problems. we speak out against subscription fees and paywalls54 and e-book publishers’ give and take of online book collections.55 but scrutinizing specific products ignores a holistic critique of library vendors. when we step back and view our vendors as a class, we can see a large-scale issue that foreshadows our profession: all of the world’s information is being consolidated by several gigantic data corporations. we must consider how vendors becoming “technology, content, and analytics” businesses56 threatens the daily work of libraries and the privacy of those we serve. even as library privacy is threatened by vendors, librarians’ abilities to influence vendors’ privacy practices are decreasing as publishing companies change their business models. publishing and data companies’ new data products and new, non-library-based data access points (including websites and apps) have created scores of new, non-library customers. our vendors depend less on library customers as they diversify their customer base and recognize that they can sell directly to researchers without relying on library gatekeepers. in the last decade, thomson reuters has been criticized for trying to work around law librarians. the company even issued a controversial ad saying that patrons on a first name basis with their librarians are “spending too much time at the library” when they should use westlaw from their offices instead.57 through anti-competitive pricing schemes and sales practices, lexis has similarly demonstrated its decreasing consideration of librarians in its marketing and sales plans.58 librarians and their needs are getting pushed towards the back of the customer service queue. declining library-vendor relations59 decrease librarians’ access to participate in vendor decision making. librarians cannot count on government intervention to protect library privacy in the digital age. while most states officially recognize and regulate library privacy60 , the information capitalism that incentivizes data brokering has gone largely unchecked. federal and state governments do little to regulate information capitalism. the federal trade commission has tried to break relx group’s monopoly on data brokering61 , but there is no comprehensive regulatory scheme in place to prevent the consolidation of information by several private entities or the unauthorized sale of personal data to law enforcement. without regulation, library professionals are left to deal with vendors who flout privacy best practices and threaten patron privacy. librarians should not be responsible for fixing vendor privacy practices. instead, they should condemn them. solutions: organizing against library surveillance while librarians’ relationships with their vendors may be changing, librarians still wield power as information consumers. librarians can organize to 1) demand accountability from our vendors, and 2) insist on transparency to ensure that vendors comply with our ethics. there are two major privacy issues raised by data brokers working as library vendors, and librarians can organize around both. the first issue is that the money libraries pay for products helps vendors develop surveillance products. the second issue is that the data that patrons provide vendors while using their products in libraries could be sold to law enforcement. these are two discrete problems that impact patron privacy, and vendors should be prepared to address both issues with librarians. the issues of libraries funding surveillance with subscription fees and library vendors including library patron data in their surveillance products are both major issues that could be the difference between library privacy and libraries as surveillance hubs. if library products sell our patron data to the government, we are essentially inviting surveillance in our libraries. when libraries pay data brokering publishing giants to enter their libraries and serve their patrons without ensuring that their patron data will not be included in data brokering products, the government does not even have to ask librarians to track researchers. government agencies can enter libraries electronically, inserting government surveillance in the trojan horse of online research tools. or they can buy the data collected by the information companies, like ice does with thomson reuters and relx group. if libraries are funding the research and development on surveillance products with our product subscription fees, libraries are spending money, often provided by patrons membership fees or taxes, on companies that use the income to build surveillance infrastructure that surveills various people and communities that may include library patrons. for instance, in law librarianship, law libraries collectively pay millions of dollars for lexis and westlaw each year. according to thomson reuters and relx group’s annual reports, that money is not kept in a separate pool of profits. it ostensibly funds their growing technology labs that create data analytics products and helps the companies afford scores of private data caches sold by smaller data brokering services. especially in the post-9/11 surveillance regime, information vendors have been fighting for spots in the booming surveillance data markets62 publishers like relx group are experts at cornering information markets. they’ve already bought the lion’s share of our academic publishing resources63 , from products where scholars incubate their research to the journals that publish the research after peer review, and even the post-publication “research evaluation” products and archives. the companies cash in at every step of academic research, profiting off of academics’ free labor.64 thomson reuters and reed elsevier are similarly cornering the legal information market. beyond owning legal research products, they’re selling the surveillance products that help law enforcement track, detain, and charge people with crimes. when those swept up in law enforcement surveillance inevitably need lawyers, the lawyers use westlaw and lexis to represent them. the publishing companies transform legal research profits into products that help law enforcement create more criminal and immigration law clients.65 librarians have the right to demand accountability from vendors about where patron data and subscription fees are being used. as major products customers, libraries can demand that the products they purchase maintain their ethical standards. libraries do not have to sacrifice ethics and privacy norms for corporations like relx group and other information capitalists. we can research and learn about our products and their corporate purveyors and consider our privacy and intellectual freedom principles in relation to the things we buy. we should be able to discover what information our products are collecting about out patrons and who, if anyone, is using that personal data. we should also be able to find out what types of products our subscription fees support. is the money we pay for library services supporting the research and development of police surveillance products? if it is, we should be able to make purchasing decisions with that surveillance relationship in mind. to facilitate informed purchasing decisions, libraries can demand information about vendors’ practices. requiring disclosures about our vendors’ research and product infrastructure should be part of doing business with data companies. with more transparency, librarians can assess which products are better at ensuring patron privacy and supporting intellectual freedom. the ethical conundrums raised by these products are multifaceted: are we risking privacy and breaking our own ethical code? are we funding unethical supply chains that harm people and violate ethics in the production of their products? if we are betraying the tenets of intellectual freedom, we must divest. some library patrons, including university of california san francisco faculty66 and thousands of mathematicians have already advocated for boycotting and divesting from companies like relx group over pricing practices.67 universities are beginning to drop their elevier contracts and thousands of scholars are protesting elsevier over the company’s “exorbitantly high prices.”68 activism around pricing suggests that, rather than relying on corporations with sketchy practices, librarians can support and talk more about alternate companies and startups or create our own resources, open access consortia, and search options as alternatives to companies involved in ice surveillance. when powerful academic institutions like the university of california divest from relx group’s elsevier products, it shows that large libraries can lead the way in pushing back against problematic vendor practices. importantly, holding vendors accountable should happen beyond the confines of library professional organizations, which are largely funded by the very vendors we need to hold accountable. organizations that usually serve as librarians’ organizing hubs depend so thoroughly on funding from corporate vendors that they are not the best venues for criticizing library products and the corporations that sell them. although the connections between research products and law enforcement surveillance unearth huge privacy concerns for libraries, professional library organizations are loath to discuss those concerns. fighting corporate privacy issues may look the same as fighting fbi or other government surveillance to library professionals in their daily work (surveillance is surveillance whether it’s being conducted by the fbi or through relx group), but our professional organizations treat corporate and government practices very differently. historically, library organizations have fought alongside librarians against government surveillance in libraries. the american library association (ala) has protested government surveillance in libraries, decrying the patriot act’s sections 215 and 505, provisions that give the federal government sweeping authority to surveil people and obtain peoples’ library records.69 in fact, ala and its members’ protests were so persistent that fbi agents called librarians “radical” and “militant,” and u.s. attorney general john ashcroft decried librarians as “hysterical.”70 ala pushed back, partnering with the american civil liberties union (aclu) to deploy anonymous browsing tools and other resources to protect library patrons’ privacy.71 library organizations’ reactions to corporate surveillance, so far, have been much different. a blog post about library privacy and research vendors’ participation in ice surveillance titled “lexisnexis’s role in ice surveillance and librarian ethics” was taken down from the american association of law libraries (aall) website within minutes of being posted, replaced by a message stating: “this post has been removed on the advice of aall general counsel.”72 while professional library organizations are comfortable standing up to the government when it threatens library patron privacy, the same organizations are not prepared to stand up to library vendors for the same privacy invasions. there are several reasons for the disparate ways library organizations react to government surveillance versus vendor surveillance. the main rationale offered by aall when it removed the blog post critiquing legal research vendors was that vendors are equal members in the organization and that the critique of their relationships with ice amounted to “collective member actions” that raise antitrust issues. this rationale is nonsensical, implying that librarians voicing concerns about thomson reuters and relx group ice contracts is akin to a group boycott designed to stifle competition among legal research vendors.73 this improbable excuse was likely a smokescreen designed to stop aall members from potentially upsetting the organizations’ key donors. aall relies on thomson reuters and relx group to sponsor their activities and scholarship programs. when library vendors are middlemen between library patrons and government surveillance, librarians may be prohibited from critiquing vendor practices in professional organizations’ forums. the next wave of privacy concerns will come from our vendors and information sources, and they will require librarians organizing resistance outside of their professional organizations. as we begin to do this organizing work, we should keep track of the ways our vendors are changing and what that means for our ethical standards. this article focuses on surveillance, but it’s not the only issue that arises when publishers become data corporations. librarians must either drop our privacy pretenses or create privacy policies that push back against information capitalism and data barons. privacy is a new supply chain ethics problem, and librarians are stuck in its wake as major information technology purchasers and providers, promoters and gatekeepers. privacy settings in digital products should be the default.74 unfortunately, privacy defaults are aspirational, and largely unimplemented. when dealing with information corporations hungry for data to put on its warehouse shelves, for bundling and selling to new customers, librarians can make it clear that the surveillance work these companies do is forbidden in our stacks. acknowledgements the author would like to thank kellee warren, scott young, and ian beilin for their thoughtful edits and for sagely shepherding this article through the peer review process. she would also like to thank yasmin sokkar harker, nicole dyszlewski, julie krishnaswami, rebecca fordon, and the many other law librarians who have offered feedback, advice, and support throughout this research process. the author also recognizes and applauds the critical work and purpose of in the library with the lead pipe. its role as an open access, peer reviewed library journal that supports creative solutions for major library issues makes the publication a vital part of our profession. the volunteer efforts of those who take on the challenge to “improve libraries, professional organizations, and their communities of practice by exploring new ideas, starting conversations, documenting our concerns, and arguing for solutions” are necessary for our sustenance and growth as information specialists and make discussions like the one in this article possible. references amin, kemi. 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(2019) “open access mythbusting: testing two prevailing assumptions about the effects of open access adoption.” learned publishing, 32: 7-12. posada, alejandro and george chen. (2017) “publishers are increasingly in control of scholarly infrastructure and why we should care: a case study of elsevier.” the knowledge g.a.p. http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/ resnick, brian and julia belluz. (2019) “the war to free science: how librarians, pirates, and funders are liberating the world’s academic research from paywalls.” vox (july 10, 2019), https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/3/18271538/open-access-elsevier-california-sci-hub-academic-paywalls. rips law librarian blog. (2017) “post removed.” (december 5, 2017) https://ripslawlibrarian.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/lexisnexiss-role-in-ice-surveillance-librarian-ethics/ roberts, sarah t. (2019) behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media. yale university press. routley, nick. (2018) “the multi-billion dollar industry that makes its living from your data.” visual capitalist (april 4, 2018), https://www.visualcapitalist.com/personal-data-ecosystem/ selbst, andrew d. (2017) “disparate impact in big data policing.” georgia law review 52:109, 109-195. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10074337 shirazi, roxanne. (2019) “the streaming library.” (august 27, 2019) https://roxanneshirazi.com/2019/08/27/the-streaming-library/ shirazi, roxanne (@roxanneshirazi). (2019) twitter (august 26, 2019, 7:08 pm), https://twitter.com/roxanneshirazi/status/1166125407961276418?s=21 sparc*. (n.d) “big deal cancellation tracking.” https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/ thomson reuters. (2015) “thomson reuters to launch data and innovation lab in waterloo ontario.” (september 16, 2015) https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2015/september/launch-data-and-innovation-lab-in-waterloo-canada.html thomson reuters. (2018) “privacy statement.” https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/privacy-statement.html#legitimate-interests van loon, ronald. “relx group: a transformation story, our stories.” relx.com https://www.relx.com/our-business/our-stories/transformation-to-analytics van loon, ronald. “the data driven lawyer: how relx is using ai to help transform the legal sector.” https://www.relx.com/our-business/our-stories/data-driven-lawyer yeh, chih-liang. (2018) “pursuing consumer empowerment in the age of big data: a comprehensive regulatory framework for data brokers.” telecommunications policy 42, 282–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2017.12.001 zhang, sarah. (2019)”the real cost of knowledge.” the atlantic (march 4, 2019), https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/uc-elsevier-publisher/583909/ sarah lamdan, when westlaw fuels ice surveillance: legal ethics in the era of big data policing, 43 nyu review of law & social change 255, 277 (2019), https://socialchangenyu.com/review/when-westlaw-fuels-ice-surveillance-legal-ethics-in-the-era-of-big-data-policing/. [↩] libraries are trending towards digitized collections. for instance, university of california’s merced campus transitioned to a 90% digital library according to its 2003 development plans. jim dooley, “university of california, merced: primarily an electronic library,” in academic e-books: publisher, librarians, and users 93-106 (suzanne m. ward, et al. eds. 2016). [↩] april lambert, et al., “library patron privacy in jeopardy an analysis of the privacy policies of digital content vendors,” proceedings of the association for information science and technology (february 24, 2016). [↩] alejandro posada & george chen, “publishers are increasingly in control of scholarly infrastructure and why we should care: a case study of elsevier,” the knowledge g.a.p. (september 20, 2017), http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/. [↩] the phenomenon of library services consolidation is not new, but it has increased as library services move to online platforms. see carolyn e. lipscomb, “mergers in the publishing industry,” bulletin of the medial library association (2001), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc34566/. consolidation among vendors has changed the way libraries approach collection development and acquisition, pushing librarians from an a la carte model, where librarians pick their collection based on specific needs and titles, to a “big deal” model, where librarians buy huge bundles of information from only several publishers that own the lions’ share of library materials and user platforms. see peggy johnson, fundamentals of collection development and management 10-11 (4th ed. 2018). [↩] westlaw and lexis are the go-to digital collections and research tools of law librarianship, barbara bintliff, et al., fundamentals of legal research, tenth edition (april 7, 2015). [↩] all elsevier digital solutions, https://www.elsevier.com/solutions [↩] federal trade commission, data brokers: a call for transparency and accountability (2014), https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/data-brokers-call-transparency-accountability-report-federal-trade-commission-may-2014/140527databrokerreport.pdf [↩] albert opher, et al,, the rise of the data economy: driving value through internet of things data monetization (2014), https://hosteddocs.ittoolbox.com/rise_data_econ.pdf; mike michael & deborah lupton, toward a manifesto for the ‘public understanding of big data’, public understanding of science (2015). [↩] andrew guthrie ferguson, the rise of big data policing: surveillance, race, and the future of law enforcement (2018). [↩] andrew d. selbst, disparate impact in big data policing, 52 georgia law review 109 (2017), https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10074337 [↩] safiya umoja noble, algorithms of oppression (2018). [↩] anil kalhan, immigration surveillance, 74 maryland law review 1, 6 (2014), https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=3646&context=mlr [↩] mckenzie funk, how ice picks its targets in the surveillance age, ny times (october 2, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/magazine/ice-surveillance-deportation.html [↩] george joseph, data company directly powers immigration raids in workplace, wnyc (july 16, 2019), https://www.wnyc.org/story/palantir-directly-powers-ice-workplace-raids-emails-show/ [↩] justification for other than full and open competition, solicitation no. hscecr-13-f-00032, https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=4e90a456155db39df108857eb970148d&tab=core&_cview=0 [↩] ice’s fugitive operations support center has contracted with lexisnexis for its accurint databases since 2013. government security news, ice will utilize lexisnexis databases to track down fugitive […] (september 11, 2013), https://www.gsnmagazine.com/article/33053/ice_will_utilize_lexisnexis_databases_track_down_f ice’s fugitive operations target and surveil immigrants, apprehending people in large sweeps. see cindy carcamo, for ice, business as usual is never business as usual in an era of trump, los angeles times (november 4, 2019), https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-04/on-a-ride-along-with-immigration-and-customs-enforcement-agents [↩] sarah lamdan, when westlaw fuels ice surveillance: legal ethics in the era of big data policing, 43 n.y.u. review of law and social change 255, 275 (2019). [↩] donald a. barclay, “academic print books are dying. what’s the future?,” the conversation (november 10, 2015), https://theconversation.com/academic-print-books-are-dying-whats-the-future-46248; dan cohen, “the books of college libraries are turning into wallpaper,” the atlantic (may 26, 2019), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/college-students-arent-checking-out-books/590305/ [↩] in 2016, the bureau of labor statistics reported on the bleak employment outlook in the traditional publishing industry, which showed that employment in the book, traditional news, and periodical industry declined since 1990, as employment in online and movie industries soared. bureau of labor statistics, employment trends in newspaper publishing and other media (2016), https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-trends-in-newspaper-publishing-and-other-media-1990-2016.htm meanwhile, open access becomes increasingly normalized part of our information ecosystem. see dan pollock & ann michael, “open access mythbusting: testing two prevailing assumptions about the effects of open access adoption,” the association of learned & professional society publishers (january 2019). [↩] ronald van loon, relx group: a transformation story, our stories, relx.com, https://www.relx.com/our-business/our-stories/transformation-to-analytics [↩] ibid. [↩] caroline davis, print cultures: a reader in theory and practice 267 (2019). [↩] in 2015, thomson reuters opened its data and innovation lab in ontario, canada to develop machine learning and ai products. see thomson reuters, thomson reuters to launch data and innovation lab in waterloo, ontario (september 16, 2015), https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2015/september/launch-data-and-innovation-lab-in-waterloo-canada.html similarly, relx group is developing laboratories to study and develop data analytics technologies. see, elsevier labs, https://labs.elsevier.com/. [↩] the concept of the “data warehouse” was originally conceived by computer scientist bill inmon, he envisioned data warehouses as centralized storage for large collections data integrated from various sources. bill inmon, building the data warehouse (4th ed. 2005). [↩] the national archives call large, aggregated datasets “big buckets.” nara records management key terms and acronyms, https://www.archives.gov/files/records-mgmt/rm-glossary-of-terms.pdf [↩] big deal purchasing began in the late 1990’s when large publishers began offering libraries deals on aggregated bundles of content that provided discounts compared to purchasing titles individuals. sparc*, big deal cancellation tracking, https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/ [↩] one example of the ways publishers are monetizing their collections via data analytics is news media’s use of data analytics to gauge and analyze readers’ emotional reactions to news articles and monitor which topics resonate most with readers to better target marketing campaigns. see patrick kulp, “here’s how publishers are opening their data toolkits to advertisers,” adweek (may 29, 2018), https://www.adweek.com/digital/heres-how-publishers-are-opening-their-data-science-toolkits-to-advertisers/ relx group describes its big data technology as leveraging user data to analyze its digital collections, creating commercially viable analyses for profit. see ronald van loon, the data driven lawyer: how relx is using ai to help transform the legal sector, https://www.relx.com/our-business/our-stories/data-driven-lawyer [↩] roxanne shirazi, “the streaming library” (august 27, 2019), https://roxanneshirazi.com/2019/08/27/the-streaming-library/ [↩] as libraries transition from paper collections to electronic collections, ebook vendors control collection access through pricing, limited time contracts, and other tactics made possible in a system where libraries do not own their materials but purchase licenses to stream materials from vendor databases. matt enis, publishers change ebook and audiobook models; libraries look for answers, library journal (july 17, 2019), https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailstory=publishers-change-ebook-and-audiobook-models-libraries-look-for-answers [↩] roxanne shirazi (@roxanneshirazi), twitter (august 26, 2019, 7:08 pm), https://twitter.com/roxanneshirazi/status/1166125407961276418?s=21 see also sarah lamdan, “when westlaw fuels ice surveillance: legal ethics in the era of big data policing,” 43 n.y.u. review of law and social change, volume 43, pp. 255, 290 (2019). [↩] lori bowen ayre, “protecting patron privacy: vendors, libraries, and patrons each have a role to play,” 9 collaborative librarianship 1 (march, 2017), https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1330&context=collaborativelibrarianship [↩] pam dixon, “ethical issues implicit in library authentication and access management: risks and best practices,” 47 journal of library administration 141 (2008). [↩] chih-liang yeh, “pursuing consumer empowerment in the age of big data: a comprehensive regulatory framework for data brokers,” 42 telecommunications policy 282–92 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2017.12.001 [↩] joe hodnicki, does wexis use legal research user data in their surveillance search platforms?, law librarian blog (july 16, 2018), https://llb2.com/2018/07/16/does-wexis-use-legal-search-user-data-in-their-surveillance-search-platforms [↩] thomson reuters privacy statement, https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/privacy-statement.html#legitimate-interests; lexisnexis privacy statement, https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/terms/privacy-policy.page [↩] matt dunie, “negotiating with content vendors: an art or a science?,” e-content in libraries, a marketplace perspective (sue polanka, ed.), library technology reports, ala. this writing describes how libraries struggle to cover rising cost of data bundles with decreasing budgets. libraries must pay for the collections that patrons require by decreasing spending in other categories, like personnel and even numbers of library branches. yet, the vendors have discovered that their content is so critical that, despite raising prices, libraries continue to acquire content at the same rate. the reliance of libraries on vendor content gives vendors the leverage to set prices ever higher. [↩] gabe ignatow, “information capitalism” (2017) [↩] tessa morris-suzuki describes the ways the growth of the “information economy” limits access to freely available information, placing once-accessible research and reporting behind paywalls and monetizing information that used to be considered a public good. morris-suzuki identifies libraries as the former hub for free information “paid for by society as a whole”, and describes how the commodification of information alters both the concept of librarians as spaces where information is not commodified, and also libraries’ access to information collections. tessa morris-suzuki, “capitalism in the computer age,” the new left review (1986), https://newleftreview.org/issues/i160/articles/tessa-morris-suzuki-capitalism-in-the-computer-age [↩] carolyn c. gardiner, “librarians find themselves caught between journal pirates and publishers,” chronicle of higher education (february 18, 2016), https://www.chronicle.com/article/librarians-find-themselves/235353 [↩] elsevier inc. et al v. sci-hub et al, no. 1:2015 cv 04282 (s.d.n.y. 2015). [↩] nick routley, “the multi-billion dollar industry that makes its living from your data,” visual capitalist (april 4, 2018), https://www.visualcapitalist.com/personal-data-ecosystem/ [↩] ann cavoukian, privacy by design: the 7 foundational principles, https://www.iab.org/wp-content/iab-uploads/2011/03/fred_carter.pdf [↩] fobazi ettarh, “vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves,” in the library with a lead pipe (january10, 2018), https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ [↩] ibid. [↩] see michael gressel, “are libraries doing enough to safeguard their patrons’ digital privacy?,” 67 the serials librarian 137 (2014). librarians are tasked with educating patrons about digital privacy hygeine and ensuring that every public access computer in their libraries be properly set up to protect patrons against software practices that violate privacy. however, it is not the responsibility of librarians to be masters of digital privacy, rather, corporations should be held accountable and made to design their products in a way that protects everyone, including library patrons. see sarah lamdan, “social media privacy: a rallying cry to librarians,” 85 the library quarterly (july 2015). [↩] eu general data protection regulation, https://eugdpr.org/. see also, ann cavoukian, privacy by design: the 7 foundational principles, https://iab.org/wp-content/iab-uploads/2011/03/fred_carter.pdf [↩] ibid. [↩] ibid. [↩] most modern information is born-digital, and librarians are pivoting from paper collections to online collection curation/building/digitization, john palfrey & urs gasser, born digital: understanding the first generation of digital natives (2010). [↩] joan c. durrance, competition or convergence? library and information science education at a critical crossroad, 28 advances in librarianship 171 (december 29, 2004), https://durrance.people.si.umich.edu/img/research/90/durrance_competition_advances_2004.pdf [↩] for instance, sofiya umoja noble warns about bias in search algorithms in her book, algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism, and sarah t. roberts writes about how social media moderation, behind the scenes, takes an emotional toll on its workers in behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media. [↩] we protest individual contracting schemes by various vendors but we do not examine information capitalism as its own structure. [↩] brian resnick & julia belluz, “the war to free science: how librarians, pirates, and funders are liberating the world’s academic research from paywalls”, vox (july 10, 2019), https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/3/18271538/open-access-elsevier-california-sci-hub-academic-paywalls [↩] for example librarians organized against macmillan’s e-book embargo in 2019. see shawnda hines, “ala launches national campaign against ebook embargo,” (september 11, 2019) http://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2019/09/ala-launches-national-campaign-against-e-book-embargo [↩] robert cookson, “reed elsevier to rename itself relx group,” financial times (februrary 26, 2015), https://www.ft.com/content/4be90dbe-bd97-11e4-9d09-00144feab7de [↩] brian p. craig, “law firm reference librarian, a dying breed?,” llagny law lines (summer 2009), https://www.llagny.org/assets/docs/law_lines/summer/ll_summer2009.pdf [↩] joe hodnicki, early coverage of aall-lexisnexis anticompetitive tying controversy, law librarian blog (june 15, 2018), https://llb2.com/2018/06/15/early-coverage-of-aall-lexisnexis-anticompetitive-tying-controversy/ [↩] in 2011, investment analyst claudio aspesi asked an elsevier ceo about “the deteriorating relationship with the libraries” and the ceo declined to respond about the relationship between the major publisher and its library customers. stephen buranyi, “is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?,” the guardian (june 27, 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science [↩] bruce m. kennedy, “confidentiality of library records: a survey of problems, policies, and laws,” 81 law library journal 733 (1989), https://works.bepress.com/aallcallforpapers/51/download/ [↩] in 2008, the federal trade commission ordered reed elsevier to divest part of its choicepoint aquisition to thomson reuters to ensure competition between the two data brokers, but no overarching law or particular action has broken up the data companies’ duopoly or significantly regulated privacy in the data broker industry. see federal trade commission, “ftc challenges reed elsevier’s proposed $4.1 billion acquisition of choicepoint, inc.” (september 16, 2008), https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2008/09/ftc-challenges-reed-elseviers-proposed-41-billion-acquisition [↩] mijente, “who’s behind ice: the tech and data companies fueling deportations” (2018), https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/who%e2%80%99s-behind-ice_-the-tech-and-data-companies-fueling-deportations-_v1.pdf [↩] david crotty, “welcome to the great acceleration,” the scholarly kitchen (january 2, 2019), https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/01/02/welcome-to-the-great-acceleration/ [↩] armin beverungin, et al., “the poverty of journal publishing,” 19 organization 929 (2012). [↩] this cycle of publishing and surveillance is described in sarah lamdan, “when westlaw fuels ice surveillance: legal ethics in the era of big data policing,” 43 n.y.u. review of law & social change 255 (2019), https://socialchangenyu.com/review/when-westlaw-fuels-ice-surveillance-legal-ethics-in-the-era-of-big-data-policing/ [↩] kemi amin, “ucsf faculty launch petition to boycott elsevier in support of open access,” ucsf library blog (march 11, 2019), https://www.library.ucsf.edu/news/ucsf-faculty-launch-petition-to-boycott-elsevier-in-support-of-open-access/ [↩] sarah zhang, “the real cost of knowledge,” the atlantic (march 4, 2019), https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/uc-elsevier-publisher/583909/ [↩] ibid. [↩] sarah lamdan, “social media privacy: a rallying cry to librarians,” 85 the library quarterly 5-6 (july 2015). [↩] ibid. [↩] andrea peterson, “librarians won’t stay quiet about government surveillance,” washington post (october 3, 2014), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/10/03/librarians-wont-stay-quiet-about-government-surveillance/ [↩] rips law librarian blog, “post removed” (december 5, 2017), https://ripslawlibrarian.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/lexisnexiss-role-in-ice-surveillance-librarian-ethics/. the post was shared by a law librarian on his personal blog. see joe hodnicki, “lexisnexis’s role in ice surveillance and librarian ethics,” law librarian blog (december 11, 2017), https://llb2.com/2017/12/11/ice/ [↩] federal trade commission, group boycotts, https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/dealings-competitors/group-boycotts [↩] ann cavoukian, privacy by designfoundational principles, https://www.iab.org/wp-content/iab-uploads/2011/03/fred_carter.pdf [↩] data privacy, law, library data, privacy, surveillance, vendor relationships, vendors consultants in canadian academic libraries: adding new voices to the story no holds barred: policing and security in the public library 5 responses kathleen mccook 2019–11–16 at 8:30 am thank you for this article. i am sharing with my public librarianship class. also posting at progressive librarian guild fb page., –kathleen de la peña mccook ulrich herb 2020–01–04 at 7:13 pm great content, perhaps this paper is of interest for you: steering science through output indicators & data capitalism, https://zenodo.org/record/3333395 if your intereted in doing some research abou it please catch up! pingback : uncoven issue #32 – hex rated pingback : “information has value”: the political economy of information capitalism | todays news and updates pingback : aspb workshop am 09. oktober 2020, 10 – 14 uhr: „wenn ihr buch sie liest: bibliotheksethische fragen zum data analytics business in der wissenschaftskommunikation“ mit dr. renke siems (universitätsbibliothek tübingen) – arbeitsge this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct on the internet, with the exploded text – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 9 mar jessamyn west /8 comments on the internet, with the exploded text looking at print books from a writer’s first-person perspective “i tend to scribble a lot” photo by flickr user nic mcphee (cc by-sa 2.0) by jessamyn west i wrote a book in 2009 and 2010. it’s getting published this year (2011) sometime. let me tell you about what it’s like writing a print book for a large trade publisher during the long leisurely sunset of print. it was different from what i thought it would be. i teach people how to use computers as one of my many jobs. while i mostly do this in a high school setting lately, the lessons i’ve learned are applicable to libraries. i do a little public speaking about this for libraries and librarians, giving tips and examples and suggestions. i’ve also maintained a library-oriented blog since 1999 and i’ve written for many of the major library publications. libraries unlimited, a division of abc-clio, asked me if i would consider writing a book, assembling some of my tech instruction suggestions with the research i’ve done into digital divide and library issues. i said yes. what’s a little more writing about a subject i’m passionate about? i’m happy to say that i’m still passionate about digital divide issues and now also passionate, in a somewhat different direction, about writing for print. here is my story. print? digital? i’ve been following the hand-wavey “is print dead?” discussions that have been going on online pretty much since there was an online. i’m a print fan myself, for no particular reason. i have an online job so i like getting offline to read a book in bed. i like having something on the plane that i can use during takeoff and landing. i like the fact that most of the books that i want to read are books that i can get through the library or paperbackswap.com and are free as in beer. i also like owning, not licensing, the books that i purchase. you like digital books, that’s fine with me, a lot of people do. ipads and kindles are making readers out of people who don’t otherwise read much, giving voracious readers one more platform for content, and starting new debates in the perennial “what is a book?” discussions that have plagued library schools since time immemorial. i am personally very interested in watching how libraries manage the shift to having more digital content in their collections. this is partly because i’m interested in how the world of content licensing and drm will shake itself out over time, but also because interacting with digital content is itself a digital divide issue. when i saw in my book’s publication data that it was “available on the world wide web as an ebook” i was curious. not just because of the terribly antiquated phrasing and capitalization of that phrase, but also because i had no idea what it meant. was it available for kindle? or in epub format? could i get a digital copy of it? would i have to pay for it? would my copy of my book expire? i’ve been looking for the tipping point, the point at which people in my personal peer group are interacting more with digital texts than print texts. i’m interested in the idea of “exploded texts,” the idea that when you take excerpts and blurbs and pullquotes from larger works and start zipping them around the internet, the individual sentences and phrases take on a life of their own. this fascinates me from a postmodern perspective, but i’m also concerned about the impact that it will have on research and how we look at the idea of a “work” and associated concepts like authority and citations. one of the things my editor required from me when i did this book was footnotes to the resources i mentioned (in addition to the bibliography) done up in full formal citations. i did some grousing about this at the time—i wanted to just include a list of urls since most of it was reports that were online—but was happy when i was finally done with the citation formatting. my work looked like research. it looked real. exploding and atomized texts there are some strong voices claiming that the “exploded text” construction so prevalent in twitter and facebook updates, the churning only-sometimes-cited reblogging encouraged by platforms such as tumblr, are doing a grand disservice to both our attention span and the nature of reference and research. michael gorman, former ala president, went on a bit of an anti-2.0 crusade a few years ago. his issue was not, in and of itself, about print vs. electronic texts. he stated: the difference is not, emphatically not, in the communication technology involved. print does not necessarily bestow authenticity, and an increasing number of digital resources do not, by themselves, reflect an increase in expertise. the task before us is to extend into the digital world the virtues of authenticity, expertise, and scholarly apparatus that have evolved over the 500 years of print, virtues often absent in the manuscript age that preceded print. his argument was that many if not most digital venues lacked the authenticity and gravitas that print bestowed almost automatically. personally, i think the more likely scenario is, similar to the ongoing expansion of what it means to be a library, we’re having to reconceptualize the idea of what it means to do research. i remember being in the u.s. post-9/11 and listening to people talking about the “research” they were doing online into what happened, or their particular interest area surrounding current events. i admit, my first response was, “doing exhaustive google searches isn’t research!” but then i eased into a more relaxed, “doing exhaustive google searches isn’t all there is to research.” i’m not threatened by other people getting good at searching google, though i like people to understand that the actual world of research is complex and sometimes means going somewhere where you have to find things with your eyes and not your keyboard. i recently went to visit a library in massachusetts that had an extensive genealogy section. i have some relatives from the 1800s who lived in massachusetts and i went poking around in some of the local history books. i was delighted to find an entry for my great-great-grandfather, with accompanying pithy quotations and information about his several wives. i was all set to make a photocopy and perhaps stick it in a folder somewhere in a filing cabinet when i realized that it was the same book that i’d accessed earlier in the year via heritage quest, and in fact i’d taken a screenshot of the same pages i was now holding in my hands and uploaded it to geni.com. while i was surrounded by many other print resources—cemetery listings, local phone books—that i’m sure were not in heritage quest, it was interesting for me to note that the most relevant document to me in the entire library was online and keyword searchable, if i knew where to look for it. which i did. and it’s this sort of thing that makes me unconcerned about the future of our profession. we know where to look. relatedly, i had put a few other old family photos and scans up on flickr. i received an email from a woman who was the great-granddaughter of my great-grandfather’s childhood friend. she had found my photo while doing a google keyword search for a place her family used to own and found a photo i’d uploaded using a relevant word in one of the tags. she emailed me a few photos of my great-grandfather when he was a boy, photos that no one in my family had ever seen before, photos that had never been published in any book, photos that i could upload and share with my family. so, this is a roundabout way of saying that i think there are benefits to the atomization of content and the googlization of everything, provided that we’re properly contextualizing everything. and we know what we’re doing. the ask & the nitty gritty back to the book. i thought long and hard about whether i wanted to write for print anymore. in the tech circles i travel in, people just don’t buy or read print books, especially textbook or non-fiction titles. heck, i suspect most people won’t even read this, and it’s 3% the length of my book. at the same time, the public libraries i work in are doing a brisk and growing business circulating all manner of print and digital media. more often during my computer drop-in time lately, i’ll be interacting with an adult student with a kindle or an mp3 player and a host of related questions that are tough to answer if you don’t know anyone else with a similar device. that said, the tech world changes rapidly and i was wary of spending a lot of time writing something that would be out of date by the time it was actually in print. this was not a totally out-there presumption. i was initially contacted about this book in april 2009. facebook wasn’t yet in the black and had just purchased friendfeed. the ipad was almost a year away from production. and yet, i figured novice users would still be novice users, librarians would still be helping them, and general information and encouragement would still be useful. also i was confident that someone wasn’t going to suddenly invent an email system that was free and easy for everyone to use. sure enough, they haven’t. here is the timeline for the project, so far. the publication date is estimated but approximate. april ’09: first contact & original table of contents created june–july ’09: contract negotiations august ’09: contract signed march ’10: marketing “book launch” june ’10:first draft submitted sep ’10: second draft submitted oct ’10: permissions wrangling dec ’10: book officially “in production” jan ’11: copyedits received feb ’11: page proofs received and corrected mar ’11: indexing done april ’11: book published? my last concern at this level was just motivation. i’m lucky in my choice of avocations. i’m well-paid and compensated. we all know that outside of a few best-selling authors, no one writes books to get paid. however you do still often write books to get tenure; i do not, however, need tenure. this month, march 2011, marks the first month since revolting librarians redux was printed in 2003 that i have not received some sort of a royalty check. that is, i received a note saying there would be no check this half-year cycle. i’ve made $2,371.65 writing that book, and we had a decent contract in my opinion. my current contract is fairly standard in the library world. nothing up front, a percentage of the cover price, oh and i have to either write my own index or pay to have someone do it. i was lucky with revolting librarians redux in that my co-editor was a handy indexer and he did our index himself. a good index costs in the $750 range and i feel somewhat guilty for getting a friend to do mine for cheap. guiltier as time went on and the pages got rearranged even after she was already at work on them. rights and responsibilities after i said yes and received the contract to sign, i did what any writer should do and had a lawyer friend look it over for me. i mentioned this to my publisher-to-be and they reminded me that “we are just a small professional publisher.” i found this amusing since, to my mind, they were the big corporation and i was the small independent writer. my lawyer said the contract was okay. i made a few changes such as refusing “derivative database rights” and disallowing republishing the work in “condensed or abridged” formats. i also secured the rights to use my own style guide for spelling and formatting of technology terms. i had spoken recently to a friend who had gone through a fairly troublesome time with her copyeditor who rewrote a lot of her text using some antiquated style guide which made all her technology writing appear stilted. it’s a tough position. style guides tend to reflect what’s been codified and yet especially with tech writing, the language is evolving more quickly than the guides. though we need some standards, don’t we? i’ve written recently for a major library publisher whose in-house style guide requires the use of http:// before web addresses that don’t start with www and no http:// before web addresses that begin with www. this makes list of urls look crazy. and, to my mind, unprofessional. i had been asked to do a book on a similar topic previously by another publisher, and the sticking point was that they could offer no guarantees that they’d be able to publish the words the way i wrote them. i appreciated their candor but i decided i needed somewhat more control. libraries unlimited offered to let me use my own stylesheet, as long as i used it consistently, and while they didn’t let me give final approval on the cover (revolting librarians redux almost had a cover designed by an intern described as “a really good drawer” before i stepped in and did it myself) they were nice about letting me know what they had in mind. i love the cover, as it turns out. the larger issue turned out to be, no surprise, a copyright one. even though my contract was crystal clear about my being responsible for any illegal thing my book did or suggested, i was still asked to get permissions for all of my screen shots. for those of you with a background in copyright issues, there’s this thing called fair use (pdf) that allows for this sort of thing in a fairly codified set of circumstances. that said, the only way to really be sure your use qualifies as fair use is for it to withstand a legal challenge. my publishers are, unsurprisingly, lawsuit-averse. i, on the other hand, am not. i am in fact waiting for the day when the mpaa sues a public library for putting the name of a movie they’re showing in the newspaper. that will be a nice pr circus. so my publisher and i had a bit of a stand-off when i asserted my screenshots were clearly fair use i was solely responsible for the fallout if someone decided to make a case out of it and i was okay with that. i went through the motions of trying to get permission for screenshots anyhow. someone at ala insisted, when asked, that i needed permission to publish a screenshot from their website. i went the “if mom says no, ask dad” route and found someone else at ala willing to allow me to use it as long as i gave proper credits. ultimately we were left with one contested screenshot: facebook. i went through facebook’s forms asking for permission. i got a note back a week later saying i hadn’t filled in the form correctly. i filled it in again and waited. my publisher wanted to hold off using the image until we heard from them. they asked if i’d just consider not using the image “to make things easier.” i said no, i’d wait. and we waited. and at some point they got tired of waiting and said okay (or didn’t say no) and the book went into production. i never heard back from facebook. at some point i also noticed that my contract had a typo and said i was supposed to deliver 250,000 words instead of the agreed-upon 90,000. i emailed a cautious query: this was wrong, right? my editor assured me it was a misprint and that i should just cross it out and write in the correct number. so my legally binding document was maybe a little suspect. the rest of it looked fine though… pretty sure. tech support issues the funny joke about all of this, really, was how many technical issues we ran up against in this process. i’m the computer lady and yet i was adrift in a sea of new technologies and expectations, often working with people who only knew the software well enough to use it, not explain it. i use a mac and my publisher appeared to be using a pc so their very specific instructions to me such as “click on the ‘comment’ button in the lower left” didn’t actually map to the version of the software that i was using. i suddenly realized why there were still authors who wrote in longhand: they could skip this whole process. i tried to be the most gracious tech novice that i knew how to be, but i was a little surprised that the main mode of sending manuscripts back and forth was as a set of documents—i’d sent in one long manuscript and get back eleven individual chapters at varying times—with “track changes” turned on. sometimes in addition to the track changes feature i’d get certain paragraphs highlighted in various colors. and additional notes in email. it was confusing but i was determined to soldier on. the publisher was also happy, as the process went on, to send me hard copies of the draft i was working on. i have always been a “paperless office” and “save the trees” sort of person, but by the time i was copyediting my second draft the only thing i wanted to do was get away from my computer. so i had my publishers send me my 300+ page manuscript, double-spaced. twice. i am not proud. photo by flickr user jessamyn west (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) i didn’t own a copy of ms word. i got one. i didn’t own a copy of adobe acrobat pro. i got one. i am aware of all the free and/or open source alternatives to these pieces of software but i didn’t know, and my publishers didn’t know, if they’d work exactly the same way, and we didn’t have a lot of time to experiment. so i learned, on the fly, how to use track changes and how to make comments on a pdf and how to politely inquire whether the notes i was making could, in fact, be read by the people i was sending them to. and there were some glitches. i firmly believe that we need to own tech support problems, that it helps no one to say “the computer has issues.” at some point between my second draft and my copyedited draft, my footnotes disappeared, reverted to an earlier version, and appeared at the end of each chapter instead of the end of the book. i had my suspicions about how this happened—something to do with the “by chapter” method of distributing the document—but ultimately what mattered was whether we could fix it. and in order to get the ball rolling, i needed to say, “this needs to be fixed,” and not wonder aloud, “i wonder what happened.” changes at this point in the game cost money. in fact, i was originally told that changes weren’t allowed, when in fact they were just strongly discouraged. takes money to make money but let’s talk about money for a bit. one of the other issues that affects the digital divide is money: lack of it, need for it, the power embedded in it. i’m aware that i was able to take the time to write a book because i didn’t have to scramble every day just to have a job to pay my rent. it’s a position of privilege to even have the time to get to tell other people what you think (here as well as in the book). i was also able to eat the costs of new software, postage, phone calls, and especially getting the index done once i’d determined that my doing it myself would be crazy. i did communications and corrections from my various on-the-road locations which, again, i was able to do thanks to ubiquitous wifi and the fact that i own a laptop. if i wanted a good index, people told me i’d need to pay a professional, not just give it my best shot. and so i did (amy ranger does top notch work) and then i paid her some more when it became clear that some of the pages were going to move around between the page proofs she got and the final page proofs. maybe not my fault. definitely my responsibility. royalties, when i see them, may show up by the end of 2011, if at all. maybe next time i’ll ask for an advance, but i don’t really see the library publishing market being really generous with the advances. i suspect that this book will, if i’m lucky, net me enough money to pay my indexer, pay for software, and maybe get me to ala to tell people why they might want it. and i became hyper-aware that i was doing this in order to help people who didn’t have this level of luck or access. the people who are still struggling for access, they have money concerns, too. they are concerned that they need to “know computers” to get a job, to file taxes or unemployment, to save money, to access goods and services that they can’t get at home. they are often unable to get high-speed internet access at home because it’s not cost-effective to service them and, ultimately, the government has left that decision up to the free market. outsourced! speaking of the free market, it’s worth mentioning that once my book officially went into production, it was handed off to a company, premediaglobal, with offices in the us and chennai, india. it was clear from the timestamps on the emails i received from my contact at pmg that i was working with the offices in chennai. i had reservations about this, mainly as a result of having had a lot of bad tech support interactions with outsourced it support. i was pleasantly surprised, for the most part. my contact at pmg was a great communicator, prompt, and all-business. the guidelines i received were clear and no-nonsense. the deadlines were adhered to strictly and professionally. due to the timezone thing, i’d send off emails at night and receive answers by the time i woke up. this worked great unless i actually needed something immediately, which was just flat-out impossible. sometimes this was better than sending a query and getting a hastily typed blackberried response which may or may not have answered my question. people who work in offices know that if you’re going to get some urgent action item on your desk, it’s going to appear on the friday before a three-day weekend and my project was no different. the week i was writing this article, i was also looking at my page proofs, which i would hopefully make small corrections to and then send back to be printed. in fact, i learned that thanks to some somewhat understandable miscommunication my book needed some attention. (i had asked for certain text to be set aside in boxes; the book designers read that as making it okay to reposition those boxes; i looked at my chapter with the paragraphs out of order and did this: o_o) at this point, i’d sent the proofs to the indexer who was furiously indexing away. and i realized, friday night after everyone had gone home, even in chennai, that despite their entreaties that “anything that affects page flow can not be altered” a few changes needed to be made. i’ve gotten better at turning my own personal panic attacks into constructive discussions that don’t make my emotional reactions into the crux of the problem. i adopted a “certainly these errors will be repaired before the final printing?” tone and wrote up a list of concerns: reordering the out-of-order paragraphs, placing the images on the pages with the text that describes them, making the font that was used for the urls in the webliography smaller so that most of them didn’t wrap to the next line (ala, i am looking in your direction here). and then i waited, nervously, realizing that if they said no, that i’d have to make a choice. in the work i do with ask metafilter, we get a lot of people asking relationship questions: how to deal with a partner who does this or that thing that you don’t like. and while people give a lot of constructive advice to help people work on prioritizing and better communication and that sort of thing, the last step is always considering, “is this problem a dealbreaker?” my position in the world makes it possible for me to walk away from almost any situation that i don’t like. as i said earlier, i don’t have to worry about tenure and my multiple-job situation means that no one job is mission-critical to my entire life. i am not a parent. i can be somewhat cavalier. that said, as i get older i try to only walk away from situations that are bad, not situations that are merely complicated. this was only complicated. while it is too early to tie this up in a bow—”and it was published. and it is lovely!”—all signs point to this whole thing working out at least decently, if not well. put one word in front of the other i’ve written the least about the actual writing part. i know that for many people just the idea of writing 100,000 words on anything sounds like something so impossible it’s better left unexplored. and i have to say that it stood before me as an unscalable wall for longer than i’d like to admit. long enough that i had to set myself a daily goal in order to make sure i met my deadline. i had a few solid months where my routine was to wake up and write until i’d met my daily quota and the goal was to get out of the house before the post office closed. there were days, possibly weeks, where my only motivation was just “if i don’t do this, who will? someone has to do this…” and so i kept chugging along. like exercise or other dreaded tasks that can be tough to complete, i knew being finished would feel terrific. i kept this poster taped above my monitor. i also had some nice friends who sent me some “attagirl!” emails that i printed out and stuck on my wall. i mention this not to be all “it was so hard” about the process, but to indicate that this sort of thing is difficult for everyone. the advice that most people gave me, “the best way to get started is to begin,” was the best advice. what can you do? i always told people that the reason i became a librarian is because i felt surrounded by people who, when faced with the unknown, would just conclude, “huh, i guess you just can’t know some things,” and they’d ruminate over the unknown. i was convinced you could know a whole lot of things, given the right application of effort and resources, and i think time has proven me right in some ways. however, there’s one other variable, and that’s time. things you knew a decade ago may no longer be true today. things in my book in june of last year—screenshots of websites, statistics from surveys—are likely dated, if not outright wrong. at some level i have to trust that the people who will be reading it are going to be able to do their own reality-checking. it’s easy to over-qualify your writing so that people can’t take issue with it, but then wind up not taking a strong stance on anything. as someone who comes from a perspective of having fairly strong advocacy positions on a number of topics, many of which i touched upon in this book, i was surprised at a few things: my publishers were okay letting me say more or less whatever i wanted. while i stopped short of calling anyone or any company names, i did outline what i thought were some very real problems facing tech instruction in 2011. if i wanted to advocate for fair use or eloquence in technology nomenclature, i was going to have to make a stand and do it myself. the contract is a living document. i still sometimes think i should have gone further in terms of requesting a creative commons license or a no-drm ebook, but decided to be pragmatic instead of a true believer about some of this. some of the publishing/editing rules are… sub-optimal, but they give us a common cultural understanding when working creatively. since everyone knows what a book is, it was simpler to work on a project together without defining everything at first principles, something that i think is still happening with other forms of content delivery such as webinars and even online databases. i was and am happy with my decision to write this book, and my editor was a joy to work with. all morning-after quarterbacking is just me being nitpicky after asking myself, “would i do this again?” since people have options in 2011—self-publishing is a viable alternative; blogs get a lot of attention; mainstream media is always starved for content—it seems somehow quaint to be writing for print. and yet, while this is my perspective with my heavily-online self, to the bulk of people in my town, getting published by a “real” publisher is the real deal, an impressive accomplishment. the concerns over atomized text still mostly exist in a small subset of internet-aware academics, bloggers, and writers. and this concern—what is real and what you need to know to be a citizen or a contributor to your culture—is at the heart of why we still and may always have a digital divide. stepping through the publishing hoops was ultimately a great way for me to see another side of this multifaceted issue, and from a different perspective than my usual one. ___ thanks very much to lauren pressley and brett bonfield for helping make this essay into a coherent whole. photo credits: pen photo by unhindered by talent, manuscript photo by me. this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. books, digitaldivide, internet, publishing, writing editorial: lead pipe debates the stealth librarianship manifesto filter this 8 responses caleb tr 2011–03–09 at 10:50 pm i really appreciate you sharing all this. how does your personal, unedited writing process on your regular blog and elsewhere compare with the process of writing a book? what about with the process for writing a post on this blog, which i think includes peer editing? i’m also interested to read that “self-publishing is a viable alternative”. did working with an editor/publisher make your work better? emily ford 2011–03–10 at 1:10 am thank you so much for talking about copyright negotiations with the publisher. it sounds like those were fruitful conversations and that you were able to get some of the more heinous items (like derivative database rights) taken out of your agreement. in my limited experience publishing in the library world, i have found that librarians, although aware of copyright and intellectual property issues, are generally too eager to publish and not sit and think about and act on copyright and contract negotiations that are more to their benefit. also, i don’t know that many people would talk to a lawyer! do you have any more thoughts about that process to share that you didn’t get to expand on in this piece? also, i’d like to hear more nitty gritty details about your style guide. jessamyn west 2011–03–10 at 5:44 am what about with the process for writing a post on this blog, which i think includes peer editing? it’s tough to say. i’d been asked to write here for a fairly long time and the deadline for this piece coincided with the worst of the page proof reviewing and arguing with my book designers so basically i just powered through it and thought of it more like a blog post [albeit one with reviewers] than as a book-style piece of writing. since my writing style can be fairly informal, a “this is what i did” piece of writing is easier than a “this is what you should do” sort of thing where people are more likely to argue or nitpick. one of the things i’ve learned writing for the web for over a decade is that people can be super picky over small stuff and so i have a “measure twice cut once” approach and try to proofread carefully or at least correct errors. i think an error on my blog is more likely to zip around the internet than an error in my book which is a little odd. i think working with my editor definitely improved my writing. she had great ideas about ordering the content that i found it hard to see, being on the inside of it. she managed to improve my writing without muting what i like to think of as “my voice” and was enthusiastic and supportive when i was flailing. that said, i’m not sure how much this is a necessary part of writing something that is more like a manual, i.e. would the book have been “good enough” without an editor and self-published in a situation where i’d be retaining more than 15% [or whatever it is, it may be 12] of the cover price, or could set a lower cover price? i’m not sure and it’s something i think about a lot, whether i could have had friends review/edit for a fixed price and then sold the book for half what this one is selling for and done more or less as well, popularitywise and incomewise. which, of course, comes back to “why do you write a book in 2011 anyhow?” which was what brought me to write this in the first place. even after writing down my thoughts and trying to untangle them here, i’m not totally sure what motivates me. and emily, yeah i think librarians often feel like the non-experts when it comes to publishing and that industry which may explain why we’re a little adrift in the ebook world lately. the style guide stuff was nothing major, mostly stuff like “i want to say email not ‘e-mail'” and use words like lower case internet and website as one word and not the ridiculous [to me] “web site” i know it’s all small stuff but it was really important to me to make a stand for sensible use of these words as people who actually work in tech use them. and my last little hill i decided to die on was, in the long list of web links at the end of the book, using a font that was small enough so most of the urls didn’t wrap. at some level if they’re long enough obviously that can’t be helped but i was surprised that this wasn’t something the book designers cared about, for whatever reason and in some cases the urls not only wrapped but in cases where they wrapped on a word that was an english word, the designers had inserted a hyphen? really strange stuff and i have no idea if this was just shoddy workmanship or if they have a style guide that, for some nutty reason, tells them to do this. kathleen 2011–03–10 at 7:45 am this is a post anyone writing a book today should read. i went through many of the experience recounted revising a book i had first worked on in 2002-2003. the changes in process were amazing. the need for copyright for screenshots was time-consuming and unexpected. something all authors should keep in mind. thank you for an insightful and thoughtful analysis of the process. jenny davidson 2011–03–10 at 6:48 pm interesting – thanks for sharing. i have done the indexing myself on both of the two non-fiction books i’ve published – i’ve never been trained, but i have a strong affinity with that sort of work, and was fairly certain that i could do it better myself than anyone i could afford to pay to do it. i had some good help with the second one, come to think of it – farmed out a very specific set of tasks to a highly skilled graduate student who i trusted to check quotations and check my draft index. steve brindza 2011–03–11 at 10:16 am very informative post. good to know that you acquired many of skills and found the fun open source goodies while teaching others. i’m a former editor-turned-librarian, but haven’t actually professionally edited anything in 20 years. still, i like to think i could possibly help some struggling writer. must look into this oppotunity to bolster the resume! brian herzog 2011–03–13 at 9:43 am i’m glad you were able to get your own way on a lot of the points you mentioned, especially the style guide for tech words. did you end up using an actual style guide that was just different from the publishers, or did you just consistently apply the best common conventions in use today? if the latter, did you have to codify that for the publisher? pingback : #hcod never dies. we’re still pissed about ebooks. | libpunk this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: occupy librarianship: 5 variations on a theme – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 26 oct kim leeder and editorial board /11 comments editorial: occupy librarianship: 5 variations on a theme photo by marion siegel (we think) by kim leeder and editorial board introduction over the past few months, several of us at lead pipe have been watching the occupy wall street movement with interest. how does one protest something that seems to be part of the foundation of a culture? and when a foundational institution benefits only a small subset of its members, how does one not protest? none of us at in the library with the lead pipe have ever seen, in the course of our lifetimes, such an amorphous yet focused, long-term, geographically distributed picket line in our own country. it is an inspiration to all those who feel that “business as usual” isn’t working for them. (not to mention the movement’s endlessly clever picket signs.) in the spirit of occupy wall street, we at lead pipe have been reflecting on some occupations of our own. we each asked ourselves, what should we be occupying to make a statement about a social, cultural, or economic problem in our field? what should cause librarians to strap on our walking shoes, raise picket signs, and craft pithy slogans? what would our occupation do, look like, and chant (literally or metaphorically)? what, in short, should we as librarians be protesting in our own culture? occupy the research and practice divide as a member of the association of college and research libraries (acrl), i get print copies of both college and research libraries, the association’s research journal, and college and research libraries news, its monthly magazine. usually, the research journal is tossed into a growing pile of to-reads and i take the magazine with me on the bus. i’ve found that the most useful articles that impact my day-to-day work come from c&rl news (see this gem on lending textbooks at ut san antonio – an important project, cost considerations, and results – and something i could see replicating on our campus). there’s a running joke with my colleagues at work that resurfaces with each new issue of college and research libraries; upon its arrival, we snort, “i won’t read anything by or for librarians!” we get a laugh out of it, but there’s truth there. most stuff written in lis research journals is difficult to read in the context of a busy work day, and as i become more familiar with the research process through my ph.d. program, i’m coming to realize that a lot of it lacks credibility. the first assignment i was given (along with the rest of my ph.d. cohort) was to identify a “good” research study and bring it to class – at which point, each of our selections was torn to shreds from a research perspective. on one hand, i have practitioner colleagues complaining about the irrelevance of lis research literature; on the other, i have lis faculty members lamenting the poor quality of the bulk of it. i’m occupying lis research literature. i’m indignant that its impact on practice is minimal, and i don’t believe it is only practitioners’ lack of application or researchers’ lack of skill – it’s a gap that both sides need to help fill. for practitioners, this may come in the form of a shift from relying on anecdotal information in making decisions about services and collections; for researchers, it could be a focus on how the results of a study are communicated. for example, the website for project information literacy (pil) has research findings, but also presents short video clips summarizing the project and its implications. already the results of the study are shaping decisions at my library as we design our physical spaces and services. this philosophy – of producing actionable writing – is at the core of the editorial decisions of this blog. to that end, please share your experiences translating research into practice at your library in the comments below. –eric occupy yourself: how to be a change agent all by your lonesome (at first) during my library school graduation ceremony one of my professors handed me a coffee mug, gave me a hug, and declared “you’re a real change agent! good luck to you!” despite having taken both management and marketing classes, i had no idea what on earth she was talking about. ergo, i simply smiled and nodded. nine years, and many struggles and sea changes in the landscape of library science later, i get what she was going for: being a change agent, troublemaker, or dissident in the library–pick the jargon with which you are most comfortable–can be both exhilarating and lonely. sometimes simultaneously. it’s the nature of a public service career. at some point, even if you don’t interact much with library patrons , you are going to get discouraged. very discouraged. quite possibly it’s already happened. maybe the thought of amazon going into publishing has pushed you over the edge, or perhaps library journal’s 2011 placements and salaries survey was the final straw. or maybe you’ve just finally reached the end of your patience with the glacial pace of library change compared to the faster-than-light speed of social and technological changes. whatever the cause may be, you know you have to do something. but what? what can you, one library worker, do to transform your institution? occupy yourself. change always begins with you, and not just because ghandi ostensibly said so.1 unless you hold an official leadership position within your organization, you probably don’t have much formal power, and even if you do have a measure of influence, its upper limit ends where the next level of management begins.2 therefore, the only thing you have 100% complete control of during your workday is how you choose to conduct yourself. and while this may seem unfair at times, it is also an opportunity to distinguish yourself as a librarian by modeling a different standard.3 no matter what type of library you work in, there are things you can do and ways you can conduct yourself so as to be a force for positive change. if you’re committed to your institution for the long haul, here are some suggestions for staying mentally strong and healthy while you fight the good fight. own your power you are far more powerful than you think you are. if that sentence prompted eye-rolling, derisive snorting, or helpless wailing, you may have already given away your personal power without realizing it.4 according to life coach shann vander leek, people give away their power when they engage in the following behaviors: doubting themselves trying to make everyone happy excessively seeking approval / validation forgetting that they know what they’re doing having poor boundaries allowing other people’s emotional chaos to control them failing to honor and share their truth be honest with yourself. are you truly powerless at work? or are you unwittingly contributing to the probiem? in his two–part examination of personal power at lifehacker, craig harper suggests that the desire for safety and comfort frequently trumps the desire to make positive, constructive change: all too often our desire to live a comfortable, painless, easy and safe existence (all things driven by fear) is the very thing that kills our potential, our productivity, our ability to develop and ultimately, our spirit. it is no coincidence that we (the society) have both (1) a widespread aversion to anything that makes us uncomfortable and (2) a high percentage of people who regularly feel frustrated, unfulfilled, lost and miserable. ironically, it is our aversion to working against resistance that stops us from growing, learning, evolving and adapting. sometimes (in the moment) we believe it’s simply easier to just “fit in”, to compromise and to bite our tongue. while this is understandable on occasion, over the long term this kind of behaviour and thinking will set us up for unhealthy relationships, stagnation, disconnection, frustration, desperation and misery. in order to take back your power you will need to be courageous (that’s a choice by the way), you will need to be prepared to get uncomfortable (that’s where you learn, grow and adapt) and you will need to do things that may piss other people off – perhaps the ones who previously pulled your strings for their own gain. are you prepared to experience discomfort for the sake of positive library change? in what ways have you given away your power? can you list one positive action you can take today to get it back? become a rhetorical ninja want to win hearts and minds for your grand plan to transform librarianship? brush up on your rhetoric. you can have the best ideas in the world, but if you can’t articulate them in a way that will appeal to your opponents, you’ll accomplish nothing. if that sounds too “nice” to be effective, you’ve probably never seen the principles of non-violent communication in action. non-violent communication5, or nvc, is a way of speaking and interacting with others based on respect and compassion. its four components–observations, feelings, needs and requests–provide a rhetorical framework for conversations that honestly air grievances without making your opponent feel attacked or disrespected. let’s say, for example, you feel your library’s food and drink policy is hopelessly behind the times. framing your complaint in the nvc model makes you sound professional and rational.6 observe: observation: “chief, i’ve noticed that the new food/drink policy restricts coffee to the ground floor of the library.” (clear statement of what you want to change) feelings: “i feel frustrated about this because it puts staff in the role of substitute parents rather than librarians.” (emotional honesty with clear reasoning) needs: “we need to concentrate on helping people find good information, not changing their food habits.” (stating your requirements for a successful outcome) requests: “can we look into modifying the policy to permit beverages with lids?” (statement of what you want / solution to the problem)7 using nvc doesn’t guarantee you will always get what you want, but if your current communication strategies aren’t working, what do you have to lose? experiment with the framework, and, as much as you can, preserve your own natural speech patterns. to learn more, click here to read the first chapter of marshall rosenberg’s nonviolent communication: a language of compassion. pick your battles i’m thinking about stitching this phrase in comic sans and hanging it over my desk, just to remind myself that not everything in librarianship is a life-or-death issue. in fact, you could argue that–for most of us, at any rate–hardly anything in librarianship is a true life-or-death issue. unless your workday routinely involves blood or fire, you are in a relatively privileged position, salary under-performance notwithstanding. this is not the same thing, however, as saying that nothing in librarianship is worth fighting for. there is much work to be done, and it needs done passionately, with fierce conviction. alas, being human, you have a finite amount of fierce conviction to spend at work. ergo, the ability to prioritize your campaigns becomes crucial to your professional success, to say nothing of your overall health and well-being. if your library has a strategic plan, half your work is done for you: examining the document carefully should give you an idea what your institution’s priorities are. if you see challenges or opportunities in those priorities, you’ve got fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of change and/or dissent. if your library does not have a plan, or is between plans, try to focus on bigger-picture issues that affect all patrons, as opposed to one-shot issues with minimal impact. business consultant pat lynch, president of business alignment strategies, inc., offers some sage advice about setting priorities for picking your battles: particularly in times of chaos or emergency, people seem to want ‘the’ answer to setting priorities in the form of a tool or method that they can apply to whatever situation they have to address at the moment. however, setting priorities is not something that is best done ‘in the moment,’ nor does it lend itself to a single or optimal method. while there are tools that can be used to assist, the fact remains that setting priorities requires you to develop a process that enables you to deploy your time and energy most effectively. such a process can be planned ahead of time and followed as the need arises. in other words, the time to figure out what you value, and will champion, in your library is now, before you’re aflame with outrage. there are a variety of worksheets and matrices you can use for goal-setting, so put your information professional skills to work and find one that suits your individual temperament. treat yourself to a tasty beverage in a quiet spot and spend some time thinking about, as my own supervisor puts it, “which hills you want to fight and die on.”8 the next time something happens at work that makes you see red, you’ll have rational, objective standards for helping you decide how to spend your energy effectively. there are other ways to occupy yourself that involve anger management, good self-care, and a host of strategies that extend beyond the scope of one short lead pipe protest. nor are they prescriptive: i have offered my view of where self-occupation might start, and i invite you to offer your own strategies, theories and practical tips in the comments section below. the only thing of which i am sure is that the more we can raise our own levels of self-awareness, the better equipped we will be to make the changes we long to see in our profession. notes (back to text) 1. there’s no proof that he did, which makes the sentiment no less lovely – just factually inaccurate, despite its internet popularity. a librarian’s’ self-occupation almost always involves a little myth-busting. (back to text) 2. even directors report to a board. (back to text) 3. notice that i do not say “higher” or “better.” everyone has a different vision of librarianship. one sure way to earn respect–if not consensus– for your own vision is to extend the same courtesy to others. (back to text) 4. sad to say, many issues with personal power and self-esteem still affect more women than men. as a woman in a predominately female profession, i find this troubling. (back to text) 5.while i am normally hesitant to link to wikipedia, the essay on nvc gives an excellent explanation of the technique’s strengths and weaknesses, which compensates for my personal bias toward its use. (back to text) 6. as opposed to, say, a whiny newbie upstart. (back to text) 7. bosses love solutions. if your request contains a solution, your chances of getting what you want increase. if your solution contains a flowchart or bullet points, even better. (back to text) 8. richard kaplan, frequent utterance. best boss ever. try not to be too jealous. –leigh anne occupy “make-do” how little do you need to run a library? wait, don’t answer that. yet. librarians as a group pride ourselves on our creative resourcefulness, particularly in the current economic environment. we are experts in making do with less. less funding, less staffing, less support from city councils, college administrations, or whoever makes budgetary decisions. libraries lose one, three, or a dozen positions and we still cobble together a facade that hides our pains from the patrons we serve. we reallocate resources madly, juggling all of our community’s varied needs, and work overtime, stretching ourselves to the breaking point. we are so passionate about serving our patrons that we just grit our teeth and smile through it. we pat ourselves on the back for how well we can continue to provide superior services when we feel like we’re being cut off at the knees. we believe that we have succeeded when no one notices (or complains) about the changes we’ve had to make. this is admirable, but profoundly unwise. why would anyone give us more money when we can make do with less? i’m not the first to suggest that there is a problem here. last week as i was working on this post, i discovered that andy woodworth was thinking along the very same lines, and that his post was sparked by another kindred post by superstarchivist laura botts. botts’ post attributes the problem to “good librarian syndrome” (or gls, to give it a nice medical acronym), an aptly diagnosed condition in which “[w]e can’t help helping. and we will help you until it kills us….we will ‘do more with less’ until we have nothing left to give to anyone.” this is truly a disease. if one of my family members was showing symptoms of gls, i would stage an intervention immediately. imagine if your sister were putting everyone else’s needs before her own. would you let her no-good husband run off with her life savings? would you let her kids walk all over her until she was a run-down, quivering wreck? heck, no! so why should we allow our sister (and brother) librarians to act this way? we shouldn’t. the truth is, doing more with less doesn’t help anyone. woodworth uses a pizza metaphor to visualize the situation: when others steal slices from the library’s pizza, all our patrons get smaller pieces, and everybody leaves hungry. so the question, then, is (in his words): …if you can do more with less, how much less do you need to maintain what you have now? and what were you doing with the “more” you had before? what would a budget restoration mean under this “doing more with less” concept? to answer woodworth’s last question, it means that there would be no budget restoration. none. zero. zip. there’s simply no reason to allocate more resources to an organization that is doing fine without. the better we make do, the more we justify the budget cuts and reductions in staff that were made by others despite our protests. we’re basically saying, “please take more of my money away. i don’t need much.” this is not the message we intend to communicate, but it’s coming through loud and clear all across the country as library budgets are being mercilessly reduced. let’s heed botts’ warning and stop the spread of this disease before it kills us all. the medication i’m prescribing is an active occupation: occupy “make-do.” so i call on all those who are doing more with less to cease and desist in your feverish struggles, and expose your shortcomings to the world! i call on you to do those things that librarians never, ever want to do, the things that make our patrons angry. have you lost staff? then it’s time to cut hours, cancel storytimes, and end book clubs. is collection funding down? then cancel valued database subscriptions and sell off materials to reveal our empty shelves. let them yell. let them get mad. let everyone see what “making do with less” really means. toss all that surplus goodness aside and get a little mean. carry a picket sign, even if it’s only in your mind. chant some clever slogans. something like: i’m in a battle for literacy; where’s my military funding? or… a librarian’s sanity is not worth your budget savings! or… you’ve pushed libraries to the edge of extinction, and now we’re pushing back. or… (insert slogan here) you get the idea. if we want those in power to allocate more resources to libraries, we should make it clear how much we’re hurting, and how much cuts are hurting our patrons. we should be transparent in our suffering so that everyone can see it. so let me rephrase my original question (it was a trick question anyway). what i really want to ask is: how much do you need to run a library? the correct answer is: as much as i can get. –kim occupy the faculty washington, dc — june 18, 2012 — the american association of university professors (aaup), following its annual conference on the state of higher education, has made a formal request that articles published in non-open access journals after january 1, 2015 receive no consideration in promotion and tenure decisions… several librarians have recently called for an occupation of scholarly communication, including barbara fister, john dupuis, andy woodworth, and steve lawson. we’ve also recently seen strongly worded posts from non-librarians on this issue, including one from peter murray-rust, at the university of cambridge’s department of chemistry (“closed access means people die”), and one from university of bristol paleontologist mike taylor providing perspective on the profitability of elsevier and springer. personally, i don’t blame elsevier or the american chemical society or any other publisher for increasing the price of their publications. this is what suppliers do: they try to maximize profits. and, though i expect better of us, i don’t blame libraries (all that much) for paying ever increasing prices, or even for agreeing to keep their vendor contracts private. well, mostly. i realize there is a lot of pressure on libraries to provide access to the highest impact literature in every relevant field, and that conducting vendor negotiations in public is likely to lead to reduced access or higher prices, at least in the short term. longer term, if every library conducted its negotiations in public, we would almost certainly see downward pressure on prices. which leads me back to aaup. for most faculty, research is the largest consideration in promotion and tenure decisions. teaching and service matter, but there is a reason that “publish or perish” has become a cliche. so faculty do everything they can to place their work in high impact, “a-list” journals: they volunteer as reviewers and editors, and not only provide articles for free (and sign over copyright), but they often pay to have their work considered. then they put pressure on the library to buy the publication, regardless of the price the publisher names for it, in order to ensure the health of the journal and its accessibility to colleagues. how do we break the cycle? i think the economics of scholarly publishing resembles the situation in the national hokey league when wearing helmets was optional. here is new yorker columnist james surowiecki’s description of the conflict and its resolution: back in the nineteen-seventies, an economist named thomas schelling, who later won the nobel prize, noticed something peculiar about the n.h.l. at the time, players were allowed, but not required, to wear helmets, and most players chose to go helmet-less, despite the risk of severe head trauma. but when they were asked in secret ballots most players also said that the league should require them to wear helmets. the reason for this conflict, schelling explained, was that not wearing a helmet conferred a slight advantage on the ice; crucially, it gave the player better peripheral vision, and it also made him look fearless. the players wanted to have their heads protected, but as individuals they couldn’t afford to jeopardize their effectiveness on the ice. making helmets compulsory eliminated the dilemma: the players could protect their heads without suffering a competitive disadvantage. without the rule, the players’ individually rational decisions added up to a collectively irrational result. with the rule, the outcome was closer to what players really wanted. (the original schelling studies are available in “hockey helmets, concealed weapons, and daylight savings: a study of binary choices with externalitie,” and micromotives and macrobehavior.) right now, the rational decision is for faculty members to publish their work in closed source journals. the universities pay the publication fees and libraries buy the journals; there is no line on faculty members’ paychecks reflecting the costs associated with the current model. and even if there were, the financial benefits of promotion and tenure more than offset these costs. but what if you ask faculty members if they like giving up copyright control over their own research? what if you ask them if they would like to have more complete access to relevant material through simpler interfaces? if appropriate incentives were in place, there is little doubt that faculty members would overwhelmingly choose to publish their work in open access publications. the aaup cannot make a unilateral decision to make this happen. it is not structured that way, it does not represent enough faculty members to change things immediately, and faculty members would still have to negotiate with their individual institutions. but an aaup endorsement, along with some model contracts and discussion points, could serve as a tipping point. as more and more universities are demonstrating, making their lectures and curricula available for free to the general public is good business. it seems unlikely that many administrations would object to their faculty members’ research assuming a more public place in scholarly discourse, nor to the likelihood of paying less to scholarly publishers. plus it would make it easier to comply with federal mandates requiring government funded research to be publicly accessible. when the nhl adopted rules that few players advocated publicly but the great majority privately desired, it made an important concession: it grandfathered in those players who were already in the nhl. any player could choose to wear a helmet, but only players who played their first game after the rule change were required to do so. the transition to considering only open access articles in promotion and tenure decisions could work much the same way. it would not prohibit any faculty members from publishing their work wherever they like; for the highest ranking faculty members, for whom promotion and tenure mean nothing, their incentive structure would be largely unaffected. nor would it affect monograph-length publications, at least for now. what it would do is level the playing field for faculty who are working toward promotion and tenure, and for journals that are competing for these scholars’ articles. –brett occupy in the library with the lead pipe like brett and the individuals he cites, i want to occupy scholarly communication, publishing paradigms, and “interest groups” like the american association of publishers, the authors guild, and others. but others have already argued so eloquently, that i dare not join in. instead, i‘d like to occupy an open access, peer-reviewed, creative-commons-licensed library blog: in the library with the lead pipe. the first post at in the library with the lead pipe was posted three years ago this month. in our three years we’ve had eight regular bloggers, thirty-two guest authors, and ten group posts. we started building a group vision after ala annual 2008 and have been what i would consider a regular and successful contributor to professional library discourse. we were nominated for the salem press library blog awards, were named in the librarian’s book of lists as one of the top ten library blogs, one of lisnews’s 10 librarian blogs to read in 2009 and are frequently cited in al direct and other professional publications. we’re grateful to our colleagues for this recognition, but we don’t measure our success by awards and citations. instead, we consider ourselves successful because we have occupied this space, this idea, this thing; and we’ve occupied it daily. we have occupied it actively and without bounds since it was merely a notion. the passion and energy that has gone into in the library with the lead pipe is plentiful and rich. as i have said many times over: this group of colleagues is the closest, most dynamic, most functional, and one of the most fulfilling professional groups to which i’ve had the pleasure of belonging. there have been disagreements. strong ones and plenty of them. but they have been professional and thoughtful. we are honest with one another and decisions are made by consensus. each individual’s voice is heard and considered. when someone has an idea, we say “make it so!” and “how can i help with that?” at three years old this is no time for us to get lazy or quit occupying this space. we have more growing to do, ideas to consider, and venues to occupy as in the library with the lead pipe. but we can’t accomplish any of this without readers, guest authors, new ideas, new takes. would you like to join us in this occupation? send us your ideas, feedback, submissions, questions. anything. tell us how we can involve you in our occupation. in solidarity. –emily     budgets, change, occupy wall street, protest (the universal interrogative participle)* is going on with the authors guild? stories of 2011: one person’s (my) adventures in growing a new academic library 11 responses bob schroeder 2011–10–26 at 12:10 pm lately in the library sessions i’m teaching i’ve been advocating for students to “occupy research!” i know it’s flashy but, at least for now, it gets their attention. where i’m coming from is my (cursory) reading of critical theorists like paolo freire – students should occupy their research – make it truly their research. when it is their research then questions of motivation and engagement and attention will melt away – they’ll be hungry to learn. tor mescaline 2011–10–27 at 1:24 pm i tremendously appreciate this thread and found leigh anne’s portion germane to my present workplace environment. a nextgen librarian (in the broadest sense), i want to share dell’s report, “the evolving workforce,” which addresses staff polarization, particularly with respect to change and innovation. i’d welcome feedback on it (here in the comments section). please see: http://slidesha.re/uuwvux pingback : funny and poignant « slim-oregon student chapter of the ala pingback : “occupy” and going back to the future | all these birds with teeth: this is not about science. pingback : weekly ed-tech roundup, from the barricades | hack education pingback : change agent librarians | information tyrannosaur pingback : notable – 11.4.11 | the digital immigrant oclc global council delegate 2011–11–22 at 7:22 pm occupy “world networks” supporting “world catalogs” that disenfranchise 80% of the world’s libraries through a pricing structure that is fit for a king (large university and urban public libraries) but not for the peasants (special, rural, 3rd world, small and medium-sized libraries) who cannot pay to play. to the barricades and off with their heads! pingback : “you’re my fireworks”, i.e. the edublog awards pingback : weekly link roundup | lone star librarian pingback : best of fall semester 2011 « hack library school this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct librarians leading short-term study abroad – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 14 jun kelly mcelroy and laurie bridges /2 comments librarians leading short-term study abroad in brief: study abroad is a well-established method for transformative learning, recognized by the american association of colleges and universities as a high-impact practice. over the past decade, short-term faculty-led study abroad—immersive academic courses lasting eight weeks or less—has quickly become the most popular type of international experience in the united states, comprising more than 62% of all study abroad (fast facts open doors, 2015). shorter and less expensive than traditional term or year-long experiences, these courses can potentially make study abroad more accessible to more students, in particular underrepresented populations. librarians are highly qualified educators, yet they rarely lead these types of programs. in summer 2016, as faculty librarians at oregon state university, we led a short-term study abroad course and have committed to leading the same course for the next four summers. in this article, we will describe the process of developing our study abroad course, in the hopes that you can replicate a similar course at your college or university. this type of study abroad is a natural fit for information literacy related topics. read the article abstract: les estades d’estudi a l’estranger són un mètode d’aprenentatge transformador ben establert, reconegut per l’american association of colleges and universities com una pràctica d’elevat impacte. al llarg de la darrera dècada, els estudis a l’estranger de curta durada liderats per professorat—cursos acadèmics immersius de vuit o menys setmanes de durada—han esdevingut ràpidament la tipologia més popular d’experiència internacional als estats units d’amèrica, representant més del 62% del total d’estades d’estudi a l’estranger (fast facts open doors, 2015). més curts y menys onerosos que les experiències tradicionals o d’altres d’un any de durada, aquests cursos poden fer l’experiència d’estudiar a l’estranger més accessible a un major nombre d’estudiants, en particular a grups de població de minories. els bibliotecaris són formadors altament qualificats, tot i que estranyament lideren aquest tipus de programes. a l’estiu de 2016, com a bibliotecaris acadèmics de l’oregon state university, vam liderar un curs que incloïa una estada d’estudis a l’estranger de curta durada i ens hem compromès a liderar el mateix curs pels propers quatre estius. en aquest article descrivim el procés de desenvolupament del nostre curs amb estada a l’estranger, amb la voluntat que aquell qui ho vulgui pugui replica-ho amb curs similar al seu centre o universitat. aquesta tipologia d’estudis a l’estranger encaixa de forma natural amb l’àmbit de l’alfabetisme informacional. llegeix l’article resumen: las estancias de estudio en el extranjero son un método de aprendizaje transformador bien establecido, reconocido por la american association of colleges and universities como una práctica de elevado impacto. a lo largo de la última década los estudios en el extranjero de corta duración liderados por profesorado universitario—cursos académicos immersivos de ocho o menos semanas de duración—se han convertido rápidamente en la tipología más popular de experiencia internacional en los estados unidos de amèrica, representando más del 62% del total de estancia de estudios en el extranjero (fast facts open doors, 2015).más cortos y menos caros que las experiencias tradicionales o que las de un año de duración, estos cursos pueden hacer la experiencia de estudiar en el extranjero más accesible a un mayor número de estudiantes, en particular a grupos de población que representan a minorías. los bibliotecarios son formadores altamente cualificados, a pesar que extrañamente lideran este tipo de programas. en el verano de 2016, en calidad de bibliotecarios académicos de la oregon state university, lideramos un curso con estancia de corta duración en el extranjero y nos comprometimos a liderar el mismo curso por los próximos cuatro veranos. en este artículo describimos el proceso de desarrollo de nuestro curso con estancia en el extranjero, esperando que se pueda replicar si su centro o universidad así lo desea. este tipo de estudios en el extranjero encaja de forma natural en el ámbito del alfabetismo informacional. lee el artículo sommario: gli stage di studio all’estero stanno diventando un metodo di apprendimento trasformativo ben consolidato, riconosciuta dall’american association of colleges and universities come esercizio d’alto impatto. nel percorso dell’ultimo decennio gli studi all’estero a corto termine guidati da professori universitari – corsi accademici immersivi d’otto settimane o meno – hanno diventato rapidamente il più popolare tipo di esperienza internazionale negli stati uniti d’america, che rappresentano oltre il 62% del totale degli stage di studio all’estero (fast facts open doors, 2015). più breve e meno costosi che l’esperienze tradizionali o quelle d’un anno, questi corsi possono rendere l’esperienza di studiare all’estero più accessibile ad un maggior numero di studenti, ed in particolare ai gruppi di popolazione che rappresentano le minoranze. i bibliotecari sono formatori altamente qualificati, anche se stranamente leader questo tipo di programma. nell’estate del 2016, come bibliotecari accademici presso l’oregon state university, conduciamo un corso con un breve stage all’estero e ci siamo impegnati a portare gli stessi corsi per i prossimi quattro estati. in questo articolo si descrive il processo di sviluppo del nostro corso di stage all’estero, sperando che possa essere replicato alla vostra scuola o l’università se si desidera. questo tipo di studio all’estero si inserisce naturalmente nel campo della cultura dell’informazione. leggi l’articolo   by kelly mcelroy and laurie m. bridges caption: magali sánchez, a student in our class who continued her travels to france and italy after our time in barcelona. screenshot used with permission by magali sánchez (cc by 4.0 international). introduction the benefits of study abroad for students are well-documented, and many colleges and universities have ambitious plans to expand the numbers of students who participate. librarians can absolutely be a part of these initiatives, although it may take some creative work to get you there. using our course, information and global social justice as a case study, this article will help you consider how to develop a librarian-led short-term study abroad at your university or college. we will take you through key steps in our process: making the case for faculty-led study abroad, investigating possible options, preparing a study abroad course proposal, promoting the course, through teaching your first study abroad course. the term “study abroad” may make you think of students spending a semester or full year in another country, perhaps enrolled in courses at a local university. however, over the last decade, faculty-led short-term study abroad has surpassed the longer, more traditional experience in popularity. in the 2014/2015 academic year, 63% of us students who studied abroad did so for durations of eight weeks or less (institute of international education, 2016). only 2.5% of us students who studied abroad during that same period did so for an academic or calendar year. although your institution may offer other ways to participate in study abroad, this article focuses on the process for developing and running a short-term study abroad course. even if you have other options, much of the following may still prove helpful. although these courses are developed and led by faculty from all disciplines, librarians rarely lead these programs, despite our qualifications as educators. when we tell faculty and librarians we lead a study abroad course, both groups seem equally mystified. reactions vary, but we have often heard things like, “you are the leaders? not the assistants?” that’s why, when you approach your supervisor or administration with a proposal to lead study abroad, you should go prepared with evidence about the positive outcomes of study abroad for students as well as its connection with information literacy and libraries. our course when we talk with other librarians about our study abroad course, information and global social justice, the initial response is generally one of two things. folks either say that their sole regret in college was not studying abroad…or they tell us that studying abroad changed their life. our own experiences reflect those two extremes. laurie wanted to study in australia, but didn’t due to family concerns. kelly studied for a full academic year in italy, which led her to other international educational experiences. given our backgrounds, when we saw the call for increased faculty-led course proposals at our institution in fall 2014, we both thought about the potential for developing and leading a course. we will discuss the process in greater detail below, but a general understanding of how we conceptualized and structured our course may help you begin to consider what would make sense for your institution. our course topic evolved as we developed our proposal. from the beginning, we wanted to focus on creating opportunities for first-time overseas travelers, and to highlight the opportunities for information literacy skill-building in all steps of international travel, from deciding what to pack to navigating a new city. given our shared personal and professional interest in social justice work, and growing coursework in this area on our campus, we decided to create a course that would introduce students to social justice and to a series of information literacy skills, within a cross-cultural frame. we created the course with the intention that it could be adapted to locations across the globe, depending on the librarians leading it each year. because we wanted to recruit first-time international travelers, we looked to the most popular locations to study abroad: given laurie’s experience and interest in spain and kelly’s in italy, it was natural to begin with those two locations. as a result, the course learning outcomes include the following: build your own self-awareness, particularly your cultural self-awareness. develop a deeper understanding of social justice in a global society. deconstruct assumptions, describe how assumptions are formed, and challenge assumptions through critical reflection and by considering new perspectives. locate and synthesize knowledge/information from a variety of sources to research a global social justice issue. analyze some key similarities/differences between us and spanish/italian cultures. based on study abroad best practices laurie learned about during a one-week immersive faculty seminar, “learning while leading: supporting intercultural development through study away,” we designed the course to begin with a week of classes on our home campus before departure. this classroom time allowed our group to build community and confidence, as well as building a foundation of course content. because the main assignment for the course is a comparative project looking at a social justice issue at home and in the host country, students also began considering potential topics during that week. we worked with a third-party provider, ciee, to coordinate our excursions to museums, libraries, non-profits, and other sites, and homestays for the duration of the trip. while some faculty choose to do all these logistics themselves, that means dealing with hotel cancellations or missed trains on top of teaching. working with a third-party provider allowed us to focus on our students throughout the entire course. in-country, the line between educational and recreational activities blurred together, in the sense that we were all constantly experiencing and learning new things. although we wrote up a rough lesson plan before we left for barcelona, we found ourselves revising nightly in order to incorporate unexpected new information. regardless, our two hours of classroom time always began with a short guided meditation, and a prompt for written reflection, to provide students time to gather and process their thoughts on everything they’d been experiencing. each day also included tours, workshops, and social activities. we built in a long weekend without scheduled activities or class time (friday-sunday) in the middle of the course, to give our students time to relax and explore on their own. after the end of our two weeks, we required students to meet with us two additional times to discuss their final projects, before submitting it at the end of the summer. we worked with a library intern to compile the final project as an e-book using the scalar platform. in order to make the course more accessible to students, we aggressively sought financial support. the college assistance migrant program (camp) at oregon state provided assistance to two students. our university librarian created a full scholarship for a current or former student worker in the library, funded by donors. we requested funding from the division of international programs for our pell-eligible students, ultimately arranging for $750 additional funding for each of them. we also worked with students individually to set up or support crowdfunding and other fundraising initiatives; one student raised nearly $1000 through a tamale sale. we also worked with ciee to identify ways to trim costs on the activities in-country. building the case for study abroad in order to develop a study abroad course at your institution, it is important to start with a strong understanding of the benefits of study abroad for students, as well as understanding what librarians are positioned to contribute. benefits to students of study abroad the positive impact of study abroad includes increased intercultural communication skills, language acquisition, and complex reasoning skills (williams 2005, hadis 2005). because the popularity of short-term study abroad has grown so quickly, many faculty and administrators remain uninformed of its benefits. research about the benefits of study abroad, including short-term study abroad, support the investments made by students, faculty, and institutions in developing study abroad experiences (redden, 2010; british council, 2015; donnelly-smith, 2009; paige, r.m., & et. al, 2009; paige, r.m., & et. al, 2014). faculty and administrators in universities and colleges in the us often use the american association of colleges and universities (aacu) high-impact practices (hips) when developing and implementing new programs including study abroad. hips are learning and teaching practices that have been shown to increase rates of engagement and retention (kuh, 2008). a carefully crafted study abroad course can incorporate a majority of the high-impact practices including common intellectual experiences, learning communities, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, and service and community learning. high-impact practices from the aacu (kuh, 2008) first-year experiences common intellectual experiences learning communities writing intensive courses collaborative assignments and projects undergraduate research diversity/global learning service learning, community-based learning internships capstone courses and projects short-term study abroad experiences appeal to students because they are less expensive than longer programs. a shorter timeline allows students who are enrolled in lockstep-sequence majors, like engineering and education, the opportunity to go abroad without extending their time to graduation. for students who work full time or have family commitments, a shorter course may be the only viable possibility. as librarians committed to social justice, we were especially interested in increasing the representation of students from communities historically underrepresented in study abroad. underrepresented is a term that is often used in higher education in the united states to describe students who are not members of the majority (white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied) and includes students who identify as lgbtqi, veterans, women, students of color, first-generation, lower income, and/or people with disabilities. the institute of international education, which produces the annual open doors report about international education related to the us, also gathers and reports race and ethnicity data. using the open doors 2016 “fast facts” report, we can see that approximately one quarter of those who studied abroad in 2014/2015 were students of color (table 1). table 1: percentages of students, by race/ethnicity, who were enrolled in u.s. universities and colleges compared to the percentages that studied abroad in the 2014/15 academic year. (national center for educational statistics, 2015; institute of international education, 2016) race/ethnicity % of all university and college students % of university and college students who studied abroad white 58.3 72.9 hispanic or latino(a)1 16.5 8.8 asian or pacific islander 6.6 8.1 black or african american 14.5 5.6 multiracial 3.3 4.1 american indian or alaska native .8 .5 when this percentage is compared to enrollment data provided by the national center for education statistics (ncee) we can see that students of color are studying abroad at a much lower rate than their white peers (table 1). as we developed our course, we made purposeful decisions to appeal to and support underrepresented students. besides the fundraising efforts noted above, we used our relationships with student affairs staff on campus to get the word out to students through the cultural resource centers and other units that work closely with particular communities of students. we chose a two-week period in-country to keep the costs down for students, as well as to be less intimidating to first-time international travelers. all students experience at least some trepidation when they begin investigating study abroad. concerns include being away from home, possibly increasing time to graduation, and affording the costs. however, students of color express specific concerns about racism and microaggressions in the host country, racism and microaggressions from their fellow students, and traveling to locations where locals may not have encountered people of their race before (picard, bernardino, & ehigiator, 2009). when talking with students of color, or any student from an underrepresented community, about your course, it is important that you are able to address their concerns while also informing them of the benefits. as the faculty, familiarize yourself with issues in the host country, and be purposeful with your goals and preparation. in addition to these broad reasons, consider your local context as well. your institution may have its own particular set of learning outcomes, or stated goals for increasing the number of students going abroad. in our case, at oregon state university, the provost stated a goal of tripling the number of students studying abroad within 3-5 years, as part of an initiative to internationalize the university. this push has included greatly expanding the number of faculty-led offerings. why librarians are well-suited to lead study abroad given the surprised reactions we often get from librarians and others in higher education when we speak about our class, we want to discuss the natural connections between information literacy and study abroad. although the specific topic of your study abroad course will depend on your areas of interest and expertise, there are several general ways in which study abroad is a natural fit for building information literacy. on the most basic level, being in a new country, surrounded by new signs, language, and culture, requires the ability to find, process, and use information quickly. a few examples from our class may demonstrate. in order to navigate the metro public transportation maps in barcelona, our students had to build a number of skills. although several students were native spanish speakers, nearly all of them had grown up in small towns in oregon with little public transportation, so they had to learn to read the map and discover the process of making payment, in addition to actually getting themselves around and arriving on time, and negotiating the cultural norms of being in crowded subway cars. as the instructors of the course we also learned a lot about the information-seeking behaviors of our students. all of our students were between the ages of 18 and 21, and their automatic practices searching for necessary information—whether something fun to do at night or where to find good mexican food—were naturally different from our own. one of our students routinely used tumblr to search for activities, and all the students who brought their smartphones shared real-time experiences with each other via snapchat. we all used whatsapp to communicate with one another and with our colleagues in barcelona, and over the final weekend we watched as our students discussed what to wear out that evening, sharing pictures of possible outfits followed by direct quotes from their host families, “my host mom’s daughter says….” these fun and sometimes silly exchanges also gave us opportunities to dig deeper into how they knew information was trustworthy or useful. in one class session, students raised questions about the authority of government information in context. we used an on-site computer lab to explore spanish and catalan government information websites. as we had seen catalan flags throughout the city and discussed the independence movement multiple times, students could consider these contesting government bodies in terms of seemingly neutral information. students discussed why they might choose to focus on the catalan or even barcelona statistics, rather than the spanish ones, depending on their topic and scope. experiential education provides immediate and real-life applications: our lesson about government information helped students understand why their host families identified as catalan, not spanish. although our library has not broadly adopted the association of college and research libraries framework for information literacy, we have found it fairly easy to map our class against its six frames or core concepts. this particular example certainly demonstrated how authority is constructed and contextual, and gave our students a direct connection between the political power dynamics they’d been learning about and the impact on the availability of information. the approach your institution takes to information literacy or library instruction should inform the case you make for your own course. in addition to the clear links between study abroad and information literacy, there are also professional benefits to leading study abroad courses. developing and teaching a study abroad course for undergraduates can raise the visibility of your library and the librarians among students, faculty, and staff while contributing to the overall mission of your university. faculty of all kinds generally speak about the connections they have built and maintained with international faculty (in our case with libraries and librarians). while in our host country we visited half a dozen libraries and had personal meetings with a number of librarians. we even gave a presentation to a gathering of librarians from around the region, which was then translated into catalan. broadening professional networks also builds the reputation of your university and library, and may serve institutional goals around internationalization. the planning process starting a study abroad course takes time. we originally began taking steps in fall 2014 for a course that ran for the first time in summer 2016. although the steps that follow are based on our experience at oregon state, we have attempted to describe a process that could be adapted to any institution. your timeline will vary, along with many other pieces of the puzzle, but you’ll notice that relationship-building and strategic advocacy are woven throughout. background preparation whatever the procedure is for developing a study abroad course, you will need to do a great deal of research before getting started. you will need to identify people to speak with, particularly from the office supporting study abroad, as well as other faculty who have led courses. you may also find it helpful to learn from other institutional handbooks: we found guides from the university of texas at austin, the university of kentucky, and washington state university to be especially useful. below are some questions we suggest asking your international office before you get started: how involved is the international office in planning, recruiting students, and executing the study abroad experience? if librarians are not faculty at your institution, are they still eligible to lead courses? (despite the name, other staff may also lead faculty-led courses.) does the international office have any recommendations about locations (for example, a popular city/country or a less well-travelled location)? do faculty leaders at your institution work with third-party providers in the host country? if so, do they have a list of approved providers? does your university provide funding for faculty to conduct a pre-trip to scope out the location? how are the costs of faculty travel covered during the study abroad? does your university offer any funding or scholarships for students on short-term study abroad? what costs, if any, would the library be responsible for covering? who else on campus does your international office recommend you connect with? making your proposal once you have a sense of the basic procedure, you’ll need to propose a course. in our case, before filling out the standard university procedure for developing a course, we had to propose the course internally to our university librarian, to ensure that we could take the time to teach the course and get funding to support our travel. regardless of the procedure at your institution, it is wise to be prepared to explain the benefits that the course will have both within the library and more broadly for the university. as you build your proposal, you might consider the following questions: what strengths do you bring, individually as instructors or as a unit? this might include language skills, subject expertise, or soft skills. what gaps exist in current study abroad offerings? how can you make your program sustainable over time? where does the course fit into the university’s curriculum? for example, can it fulfill any core course requirements? what makes your course appealing to students? how will the course benefit the library? the university? promoting your course once your course has been approved, you will need to connect with students. how much you will need to promote your course depends on the level of involvement of your international office, the academic home for your course, and the support at your institution for study abroad. your university may already centrally manage promotion of study abroad, or offer scholarships specific to study abroad. in our case, it was crucial to do ongoing study abroad, in part because study abroad on our campus is largely marketed within each college, to students within those majors. even if marketing is largely done for you, the following questions may help you connect with students: what marketing materials (e.g. a website, posters, handouts) can you develop to share information with students and their families? (you may use either of our sites to generate ideas or as a template: studybarcelona.weebly.com or osuitaly.weebly.com.) students in particular majors, courses, or programs might be particularly interested in your course—what are they, and how can you connect with them? what events (e.g. international fairs) and courses can you visit to connect with students? how can you connect one-on-one with students? consider regular office hours or ways to set up individual meetings with individual students. what financial support is available for students? how will you advocate for students getting this support? what particular concerns might students with marginalized identities have about the host country? how are you prepared to support students if they experience hostility based on their race, sexual orientation, or other identities? teaching and taking your students abroad leading a study abroad means many things for the instructors. as we’ve explained, we had to develop the curriculum, recruit for the course, work through the application process with students, help students with their travel arrangements – and that was before the course even began! as you prepare to finally teach your course, consider the following questions: what are your expectations for student behavior? what are their expectations for you? how will you build community in the classroom and outside? how will you accommodate unexpected developments? (for example, if a planned activity is canceled, a new topic of interest emerges.) how will you assess student learning, or the overall success of your program? what reporting is required by your institution? conclusions leading this course has been one of the most rewarding accomplishments either of us has had in our careers. it was exhausting, exhilarating, surprising, and humbling to learn alongside our seven students for these weeks. we returned with a fresh perspective on making information literacy vital and new hope for building meaningful relationships with our students. we met with each of them twice after returning to oregon, as students completed their final projects, but also to debrief their experiences. these meetings gave us a chance to hear how our students were synthesizing their learning as they returned to school and home. after compiling the students’ final projects, we created a final report for our library administration, outlining the process, challenges, successes, and making recommendations for the future of the course. because we had originally proposed it as an annual course, this was a chance for us to clarify what we wanted to build on. we also sent thank you notes to our donors, and began gearing up for the next time. as we write this, kelly is preparing for the second year of this class, headed to ferrara, italy. based on our experience in barcelona, students heading to italy have already begun to pick and research their topics for their final projects: everything from school lunch nutrition to the experiences of new immigrants to the impact of tourism on historical sites. she will be joined by another librarian, and in 2018 laurie will return to barcelona with yet another new librarian co-leader. we have arranged to do this through summer 2020 and then reevaluate the program. working with campus colleagues, we moved the course through the course approval system to obtain a permanent academic home, with other experiential learning courses. as a part of that process, we also worked with the new social justice minor to get the course approved to count toward that program. we built on existing relationships with faculty who run that program, and it was straight-forward to make the case for how the course fits into that program of study. interestingly, when we reached out to the college of engineering about marketing the course this year, they told us that it would count toward the humanitarian engineering minor, without us even asking. we hope to eventually find a home for it within the general education requirements. several of our students from last year and this year have worked with their academic advisors to apply the course toward specific requirements, but only on a case-by-case basis. their write-ups for these requests will serve us as we investigate how to make the course work for requirements for all students. we have connected with other faculty and staff on our campus to lobby for additional funding for underrepresented students to use to study abroad, coordinating efforts into a loose network of advocates. we have also stayed in touch with our students from last year. laurie has been a job reference for two of them: one has applied to teach english in spain after graduating, and another student got a job as a latinx community liaison at a public library. the former student who is now working in a library told us that visiting public libraries in barcelona gave her a sense of the potential of libraries as community spaces. while we don’t expect that each year’s class will inspire future library workers, these students have shared the impact that this class and their travels have had so far. thank you to our reviewers annie pho and romel espinel and publishing editor ryan randall for their time and assistance with this project, and thank you to pep torn for translating our abstract. thank you to faye chadwell, cheryl middleton, and anne-marie deitering at oregon state university libraries and press for supporting us in the development and implementation of our study abroad course. and, a final thank you to osu alumni and faculty who supported our students through scholarships and grant funding. works cited british council. (2015). broadening horizons: the value of overseas experience. retrieved from https://ei.britishcouncil.org/educationintelligence/broadening-horizons-2015-value-overseas-experience donnelly-smith, l. (2009). global learning through study abroad. peer review, 11:4. retrieved from https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/996 hadis, b. f. (2005). gauging the impact of study abroad: how to overcome the limitations of a single‐cell design. assessment & evaluation in higher education, 30(1), 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/0260293042003243869 institute of international education. (2016). open doors: international students in the us (2016 fast facts) (pp. 1–2). retrieved from https://www.iie.org/-/media/files/corporate/open-doors/fast-facts/fast-facts-2016.ashx?la=en&hash=9e918fd139768e1631e06a3c280d8a9f2f22bbe1 kuh, g. d. (2008). high-impact educational practices: what they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. washington, d.c.: association of college and research libraries. retrieved from http://provost.tufts.edu/celt/files/high-impact-ed-practices1.pdf national center for education statistics. (2015, october). total fall enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by level of enrollment, sex, attendance status, and race/ethnicity of student. retrieved april 3, 2017, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_306.10.asp?current=yes paige, r.m., fry, g.w., stallman, e., josic, j., & jon, j.e. (2009). study abroad for global engagement: the long-term impact of mobility experiences. intercultural education, 20 (sup1). retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232962244_study_abroad_for_global_engagement_the_long-term_impact_of_mobility_experiences paige, r.m., fry, g.w., jon, j.e., dillow, j., & nam, k.a. (2014). study abroad and its transformative power. occasional papers on international education exchange, edition 32. comparative and international development education program, department of organizational leadership, policy, and development, university of minnesota, twin cities. retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237606252_study_abroad_and_its_transformative_power picard, e., bernardino, f., & ehigiator, k. (2009). global citizenship for all: low minority student participation in study abroad—seeking strategies for success. in r. lewin (ed.), the handbook of practice and research in study abroad: higher education and the quest for global citizenship (pp. 321–345). new york, ny: routledge. redden, e. (2010). academic outcomes of study abroad. inside higher ed. retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/13/abroad williams, t.r. (2006) exploring the impact of study abroad on students’ intercultural communication skills: adaptability and sensitivity. journal of studies in international education, 9:4, 356–71. latinx is currently the preferred inclusive term that encompasses all genders. here, the authors retain “hispanic or latino(a)” as the terminology used by the institute of international education and “hispanic” as used by the us department of education. [↩] curriculum, faculty-led, high impact practices, information literacy, information literacy framework, instruction, international, short-term study abroad, social justice, study abroad from accidental to intentional library management: the risws approach neurodiversity in the library: one librarian’s experience 2 responses renate chancellor 2018–03–27 at 11:02 am good morning, i would like to have permission to use your table in an article that i publishing for another journal. i sent an email to your editor last thursday, but have not heard back from them. i’d appreciate it if you would permit me to use it in my work. thank you! laurie bridges 2018–06–04 at 5:27 pm yes, of course, we grant permission as long as we are cited as the source. thank you! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct it’s the collections that are special – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 11 feb lisa carter /16 comments it’s the collections that are special in the library with the lead pipe is pleased to welcome another guest author, lisa carter! lisa has just recently been appointed as visiting program officer to work with the association of research libraries special collections working group. read more to learn about her vision and thought-provoking ideas about the future of special collections… by lisa carter i’m beginning to think that what’s wrong with special collections and archives[1] today is that they are considered special.  they are set aside, revered and left as the last great mystery the library holds.  the collections themselves are special in that they are rare, unique, fantastic and archaic and they do need special handling and care.  however, our regard for these materials has enabled us to treat them so differently that they are not accessible. we have locked these materials up in our processes and our delivery services, which has kept them out of the mainstream of information available to knowledge seekers.  they are only rarely seen as part of the knowledge building conversation[2] and it is because of how we (as librarians and archivists) treat them and present them.  we treat them as special in the sense of “separate,” “extra,” “having special needs” instead of special in that they are what make our library special as “distinctive signifiers,” “our enduring core” and “our unique contribution to the world of knowledge.” as librarians and archivists redefine ourselves and better articulate how we add value, as we break down long established barriers in our processes, spaces and services, we need to include our most unique collections.  we regularly leverage quickly evolving trends in the information environment by refocusing on the needs and preferences of our users in the context of very real competition and economic difficulty.  in this framework, libraries can embrace their special collections and archives as a locus of distinction, experimentation and core value.  the time has come for libraries to integrate special collections into the flow in every aspect of our work. distinctive signifiers libraries and librarians are constantly increasing their coolness quotient. american libraries declares that “the bunheads are dead” and celebrates the diversity of backgrounds and work we all do to help people discover information. by adding learning/information commons and coffee bars, participating in social networks, or hiring technically oriented, experimental, responsive, and adaptable information professionals, libraries strive to stay relevant.  special collections areas and the librarians and archivists working in them are similarly adapting to change, focusing on users and experimenting with technology[3].  in many cases, however, they are going at it independently, because they are in separate departments with the special materials. today’s archivists and librarians aren’t just cool because we have mad technology skills, because our place has the best coffee and sweet comfy chairs or because we are über-helpful.  we also have the coolest stuff.  what is fundamental to our shared purpose, critical to our central mission, and key to our very identity is our ability to connect our communities to knowledge and the raw materials that inspire knowledge; and those resources exist concretely in our collections. “as we increasingly share a collective collection of books, it is the special collections that will distinguish our institutions.”[4] the rawest representations of human endeavor and the building blocks of new knowledge are the rare materials and primary sources in our special collections and archives.  these collections are often developed around niche interests and grounded in localized expertise.  they not only address the specific informational needs of their constituency, but also distinguish their institution in the larger research community.  african-american cookbooks are collected at the university of alabama; willa cather‘s manuscripts, letters, and photographs can be found at the university of nebraska-lincoln; video and audio records in the alwin nikolais and murray louis dance collection are hosted at ohio university; and digital assets of teaching and research are held by mit in dspace[5].  public and special libraries also hold collections unique to their communities that distinguish them around the world. the boston public library and the margaret herrick library of the academy of motion picture arts and sciences are just two high-profile examples.  these libraries stand out from their peers because of their particular collections.  as nicholas barker remarks in his introduction to celebrating research, “to be unique in some definable way, however recondite, makes [a library] the object of an attention that it would not otherwise attract.” connecting our users to information captured in our collective collections is the shared central challenge in our information-laden, dynamic, instant-gratification environment.  as professionals working in libraries with special collections and archives, exposing our singular collections is our unique contribution to the broader world of knowledge.  we must do this in the context of trends in the field, including enhancing teaching and learning, increasing efficiency and productivity in creating access, and seizing opportunities presented by technology. improving teaching and learning   information seeking is personal.  users can be motivated by the paper that is due the next day, a group with which they identify, or a personal experience or interest.  in her november 5, 2008 post on this blog, ellie collier discusses “sticky ideas” and the value of simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories.  special collections and archives contain locally relevant, unique materials and are a rich source for those kinds of stories.  in an academic library, the university archives holds materials from the past that reflect today’s student experience.  a public library can connect materials about the immigrants’ lives in the 1900s with the situation of modern-day migrant workers’ families in their community. primary sources and other research materials from special collections can get learners thinking critically about how a source relates to their own information seeking (and generating) behavior.  how is a pioneer’s diary about her experiences on the oregon trail like a student’s use of facebook to document her service trip to costa rica?  what is the difference between the actual text of jfk’s address at rice university on the nation’s space effort and your local newspaper accounts of it, and how does that compare to watching president obama’s inauguration speech on youtube and watching cnn’s analysis of it the next day?  by leveraging and analyzing special collection materials to enhance learning experiences, the context of information creation, analysis and transmission can become highly personalized. as you contemplate your next discussion with your users about “the many types of useful information [and] how and when to use them”[6] and engage them in an information source’s “back story,” consider using special collections materials to make your point.  librarians, faculty and archivists should collaborate on instructional opportunities to ensure that all kinds of information sources are considered during research.  integrating special collections into the classroom experience and at the reference desk can significantly enrich the library’s contribution to teaching and learning. streamlining the creation of access   in a time of tightening budgets and web-based information seeking, libraries are reenvisioning the role of and activities around resource description.  this shift could directly impact the availability of special collections and archival materials.  in karen calhoun’s 2006 report on the changing nature of the catalog and its integration with other discovery tools, she talks about strategies for keeping cataloging relevant including leading resource discovery by developing information systems that “surfac(e) research libraries’ rich collections in ways that will substantially enhance scholarly productivity worldwide.” on the record, a report from the library of congress working group on the future of bibliographic control, provides concrete recommendations for the library field.  these include redirecting resources to enable discovery of special collections; creating basic-level access to all unique materials; focusing on practicable, flexible and user-centered description; integrating special collections into discovery arenas; and sharing special collections’ metadata and authority records[7]. to me this is a clear call to action to redirect cataloging resources to expose hidden special collections and archives, and to integrate discovery of these materials alongside that of our other collections. while the broader library world considers directing more resources to exposing hidden collections, the archival community is also working to get more collections into the hands of the users more quickly.  in 2003, arl published the white paper hidden collections, scholarly barriers, which notes that “the cost to scholarship and society of having so much of our cultural record sitting on shelves, inaccessible to the public, represents an urgent need of the highest order to be addressed by arl and other libraries.”  mark greene and dennis meissner’s article “more product, less process” takes the archival community to task for the problem of hidden collections.  they suggest that archivists “give higher priority, in practice, to serving the perceived needs of our collections than to serving the demonstrable needs of our constituents.”  many in the archival community are refocusing their processing work to expedite access by undertaking only necessary arrangement, minimal preservation steps and sufficient description to promote use. this new focus has cut to the core of activity in special collections and archives. some special collections have focused on creating collection-level records for all collections, processed and unprocessed, for their library catalogs.  others are facing the challenges of providing access to minimally processed or unprocessed collections, such as materials security, researcher frustration and processing on-demand.  archivists are setting aside perfection and learning to embrace the inherent messiness of archival records in order to put access first.  this places the onus back on researchers to find specifics and meaning in massive collections.  we are redefining ourselves from gatekeepers and interpreters of history to facilitators of access[8]. if we could combine the transformation that is taking place in our cataloging departments with the transition in archival practice, libraries could create a revolution in access.  the result will be an explosion of unique descriptive information that could be used to discover distinctive collections worldwide.  the original cataloging skills (analytical and descriptive) that catalogers have honed on circulating library materials can be redeployed (with minimal retraining) to assist with the arrangement and description of significant amounts of unprocessed collections.  aptitude for manipulating, managing and reusing structured metadata can unlock the unrealized potential of our encoded archival description finding aids.  catalogers’ understanding of data normalization and metadata mapping can pull data out of home-grown archival description tools and deposit it in places where it can be manipulable and discoverable in user-friendly access systems.  by reenvisioning the work in cataloging and in archives, libraries will be able to offer greater discoverability for their most precious resources. web 2.0 enhanced discoverability can only be truly realized when libraries develop tools that expose the descriptive work of catalogers and archivists to the surface of the web.  this is where those tech-savvy information professionals come in.  many special collections librarians and archivists are trying to open online dialogs about their materials with users.  archives blogs are growing in number (check out the society of north carolina archivists’  blogroll for a sample from north carolina).  however, blogs’ reach still tends to be limited to existing users or those who seek out the archives and exposure is only on highlighted collections. the next generation finding aids research group at the university of michigan is exploring “new online collaborative technologies, such as filtering and recommender systems, [to] allow for new methods of interacting with and experiencing primary sources.”  statistics from their test bed, the polar bear expedition digital collections, demonstrate that even a project with a very limited (but passionate) user base can result in significant attention and engagement, particularly when it comes to users contributing descriptive information about materials.[9] meanwhile the triangle research library network (trln) in north carolina is investigating whether indexing encoded archival description metadata in its shared catalog can bring combined discoverability to archival collections as it has for circulating materials.  early challenges have exposed the differences that exist in archival descriptive practice that will need to be overcome to enable cross searching of archival finding aids. addressing the challenge from another direction, libraries are realizing increased access after two decades of digitizing their special collections and archives.  digital copies of selected items are available in a wide variety of institution-based digital repositories and content management systems.  many of these efforts have been “boutique” or highly focused projects to digitize cherry-picked items.  just as item-level preservation has been identified as an unsustainable practice in “more product, less process” (mplp), selective digitization projects have left “our vast collections represented by a relatively small number of gorgeous images, lovingly selected, described, and presented in deep web portals.”[10] if we are to truly explode access to special collections materials, we need to take a less discerning approach to digitizing. following on mplp, libraries are now beginning to test models for mass digitization of special collections materials.  shifting gears: gearing up to get into the flow, an essay reflecting on the digitization matters forum, encourages libraries to scan for access, scan on demand, scan whole collections or representative chunks, describe scanned items minimally, and focus on quantity and discoverability.  in addition, the authors suggest that “increasing access to special collections needs to be programmatically embedded across the enterprise.  continuing to give these activities ‘special project’ status implies that providing access is not mission-essential.”  the bottom line: exposing special collections is not a special collections problem; it is an enterprise-wide opportunity. a few institutions have taken on the challenge.  the smithsonian archives of american art received a terra foundation for american art grant to digitize entire collections “with equipment designed specifically for increased levels of production” and to describe materials in aggregations rather than at the item level. the university of wisconsin digital collections has developed a streamlined production model that has reduced their digitizing costs from $1.53 per page to $0.33 per page[11]; however, in usability testing they found that students “reported wanting more not less metadata.”[12] experiments with providing digitized images with minimal metadata embody the sacrifice made when choosing quantity over quality. the library of congress found that enlisting users in the description of materials may counteract the initial lack of rich item-level metadata.  as reported in for the common good the library made two collections of photographs available online in the flickr commons, inviting users to contribute enhanced descriptions.  according to the report, “7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique flickr accounts. ….  more than 500 prints and photographs online catalog (ppoc) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the flickr community.”  with engagement like that, why agonize over description and subject headings?  the ability of users to connect with collections on this personal level also increases their sense of ownership and relationship to history.  knowledge-building is borne out of this kind of personalized learning. additional archives-based efforts to expose unique collections in the web 2.0 environment are listed on the archivesnext blog.  to most effectively contribute their distinctive building blocks of knowledge to the broader research environment, however, libraries cannot relegate digitization and discovery innovation to special projects in special collections.  alongside realigning the description and data-structure expertise provided by catalogers, libraries must apply the technical, programming and development proficiency in their information technology departments to this challenge.  the expertise cultivated in reference, instructional, outreach, and collection-management staff is also critical to insuring that these efforts are relevant in addressing users’ needs.   convergence for libraries to contribute effectively to knowledge-building in their communities, the constructed partition that has set special collections aside as “special” must be dismantled.  it is time to integrate the selection, description, research service and technological activities in every library with those needed to connect users to our most distinctive, unique collections.  libraries must recognize that while the collections are special and even have special needs, the talents and skills needed to expose them are found library-wide.  additionally, many special collection materials are now born digital and do not require physical segregation in our traditional special collections units.  further, enterprise-wide effort is even more critical to born-digital collections’ exposure and survival.  users just want the best information for their task and they want it to be available all in the same place. the research library group outlines a continuum of collaboration in libraries, archives and museums (lams) that begins with contact between two entities, moves through cooperation and coordination to collaboration and eventually arrives at convergence.  as lams move through the continuum, they grow towards shared investment and risk, but realize more profound benefits.  when collaboration becomes convergence, shared activity becomes infrastructure.[13] in today’s libraries, we need convergence around special collections that erases our existing silos. special collections and archives may sense a loss of their unique identity during such a transformation.  partners in other library units may resist activity previously outside their purview. yet sharing responsibility for our distinctive, valued and unique collections will raise the profile of the whole library and, most importantly, benefit our users. special collections reflect our enduring identities by defining who we were, informing what we will become, and distinguishing our communities.  as critical components in the knowledge conversation, special collections must be integrated with other resources, and exposed in the same venues and pathways.  as collections that each library can uniquely contribute to the overall research and learning environment, they must be mainstreamed and acknowledged as mission-critical.  it is only the collections that are special in special collections, not the work of making them accessible and not our users.  for the sake of our users and our libraries we need to stop treating them separately. what you can do:   selectors, collection managers and branch librarians, talk to the curators in special collections and archives about how you can help with strategically targeted collection building efforts. what makes a relevant, distinctive collection in your community? catalogers and metadata experts, discuss the metadata generation, manipulation and transformation needs for special collections with lead processors. you’d be surprised at how much assistance you can provide but be prepared to face big challenges and quantities. access and delivery services, you can’t imagine the expertise you can share regarding collection maintenance, security and tracking until you have that cup of coffee with the reference staff in special collections. reference and information services, engage your special collections colleagues in your instruction activities. consider cross-training on the reference desks, offer to cover a reference shift in special collections. special collections and archives folks, rotate into service on the main reference desk. information technology, imagine the opportunities! there are databases, finding aids and home grown systems to integrate, improve and streamline. let special collections offer you a challenge that will make managing server space and device inventories look easy. digital initiatives, if you want content, we’ve got content. allow special collections to be your playground for implementing new, cool tools. we’ve got digital objects coming out of our ears. can you get them onto desktops, mobile devices and course management systems? special collections and archivist colleagues, share your most interesting challenges, be willing to let others muck around in your stuff, be articulate and practical about your needs and think creatively about what you have to offer your colleagues in return. thanks to josh ranger and bill landis for their ideas, feedback and careful reading of a draft of this piece and to hilary davis and kim leeder from itlwtlp for their encouragement, questions and suggestions for each version. thanks to hilary and brett bonfield for last minute technical assistance.  special thanks to ben carter who stayed home to provide technical support and thwart bad behavior plugins. [1] in the spirit of this piece, i try to distinguish between special collections, the collections, and special collections, the unit of the library, by capitalizing when i am referring to the unit.  special collections and archives can be departments in a library or institution; special collections belong to the whole institution. [2] for an interesting discussion on the knowledge building conversation and the library’s role in participatory networks, read the information institute of syracuse’s technology brief participatory networks: the library as conversation for ala.  not only do they envelop special collections as key aspects of the conversation but they also address the importance of innovating technology “at the core of the library.” [3] for more on reenvisioning archival identity, see mark green’s inaugural presidential address for saa “strengthening our identity, fighting our foibles.” [4] quoted from ricky erway’s “supply and demand:  special collections and digitisation” for liber quarterly, 2008.  many variations of this sentence have been appearing in various commentaries since the publication of arl’s anniversary publication celebrating research with nicholas barker’s persuasive introduction. [5] these collections (and more) were highlighted by their institutions as distinctive signifiers of their collections for arl’s celebrating research:  rare and special collections from the membership of the association of research libraries in celebration of the association’s 75th anniversary. [6] quoted from ellie collier’s “in praise of the internet: shifting focus and engaging critical thinking skills” in the library with the lead pipe, january 7, 2009. [7] found in recommendations 2.1.1-2.1.5 on pages 22 and 23 of the library of congress’s on the record. [8] the self identification of archivists as “gatekeepers of history” is interrogated by barbara l. craig, in “canadian archivists:  what types of people are they,”, ann pederson, “understanding ourselves & others:  australian archivists & temperament,” and charles r. schultz, “archivists:  what types of people are they?”  provenance 14: (1996). [9] for more on the polar bear expedition project, please refer to the article by magia ghetu krause and elizabeth yakel, “interaction in virtual archives: the polar bear expedition digital collections next generation finding aid” american archivist 70:2, fall – winter 2007, pages 282-314. [10] quoted from ricky erway and jennifer schaffner’s shifting gears:  gearing up to get into the flow from oclc programs and research, 2007. [11] which joshua ranger told us at the 2006 mac fall symposium. [12] reported at the saa meeting in 2008 and in a handout to oclc’s member’s council in february 2008. while the work at the the smithsonian archives of american art is groundbreaking in scope and methodology, ranger’s work explores how any library can make an effort towards quick and dirty digitization and the ramifications. [13] for more on the collaboration continuum see beyond the silos of the lams: collaboration among libraries, archives and museums by diane zorich, gunter waibel and ricky erway for oclc programs and research, 2008. archives, cataloging, collaboration, digital repositories, e-research, information literacy, librarianship, special collections, work my (our) abusive relationship with google and what we can do about it will the real emily please stand up 16 responses pingback : opening access to special collections and archives…02.11.09 « the proverbial lone wolf librarian’s weblog wilfred drew 2009–02–11 at 3:19 pm i have been involved in an ongoing conversation with the librarian in charge of our college archives here. it revolves around why the archives are only cataloged in our web opac at a very high level (box or set of boxes), not down to the individual item. i continually ask her how people are going to find what is in the archives if it is not cataloged in the same way as our books, videos, or serials. she keeps telling me that people who research archives do it in person. it tends to be a very circular argument. lisa 2009–02–11 at 10:20 pm wilfred, it’s great that you are having that dialog! one way to think about it is to compare the description of a collection to the cataloging of a book. items in collection (letters, photos, videos) could be seen as pages of a person’s life or an organization’s activity. the aggregate has meaning as a whole and sometimes we provide a table of contents (which we call series-level or folder-level inventory). but just as a cataloger would never catalog each page in a book, archivists try to avoid describing each item. the main reason for this (in addition to not having the resources to describe at the item-level) is that context is critical. as with pages, the materials around the item give it more meaning and the group of materials should be used together. the researchers gain more knowledge if they “read” the collection for themselves. further, we never know what a researcher will find most valuable about a collection. one person might have one use for a set of letters while another has a completely different use. trying to anticipate what is most valuable leads us to a granular level of description that is not helpful to the researcher and unsustainable as a practice. does this help? hilary davis 2009–02–12 at 1:57 pm hi lisa – thanks for sharing your vision for “special” collections! i’m wondering what your thoughts are as to the potential impact (if any) of the google books project (that was described last week in this blog) on the visibility/relevance of archives/”special” collections content? bill drew 2009–02–12 at 3:41 pm in reply to lisa, it makes sense. it is the sometimes provide a table of contents that bothers me. that table of contents is not searchable on our online catalog. in my mind it must be. lisa 2009–02–12 at 4:00 pm @wilfred – i agree with that. we are working on that challenge in our institution as well. @hilary – well, i hope the google books project means that as more books become accessible online through gbp, libraries will be able to turn more of their resources to working on special collections. it goes back to the idea that as the materials that libraries commonly hold (circulating books, journals, media) become more and more available online what will make a library distinctive is their local, unique, special collections. plus google is providing a demand situation that should make more libraries want to digitize more of their special collections so that they have something special to offer the conversation that they can claim as their own. kim leeder 2009–02–16 at 10:01 am lisa, thanks for the great post. i wonder if the increasing digitization of special collections will in large part solve the problems of cataloging those items. for a long time i’ve been watching the digital collections feature in al direct (the ala email newsletter) and the list of links i have at this point is really impressive! of course i expect that very few libraries will ever be able to digitize their entire archives, but if every library managed to get through their most notable collections — which seems to be what’s happening out there? — things are going to change dramatically. the next question in my mind is: do we rely on google to search and find all those disparate digital collections, or is there some worldcat equivalent we can create to search all of them? lisa 2009–02–16 at 12:33 pm kim, i hope so. i’m wondering if we digitize special collections, entering only the metadata necessary to get them online, can people describe them from the digital copy? lc has shown us that communities will rally to enhance metadata if we only provide limited. as for relying on google, i think we have to expose these collections through google. at the collection level, we can provide access through worldcat. also, rlg (now with oclc) has archivesgrid (http://archivegrid.org/web/index.jsp). there’s some buzz for doing a union catalog or census of collections, but some argue that we should spend our time exposing the collections where the users are: google, flickr, youtube, etc. me, i think that anywhere you can expose them, you should. christian dupont 2009–02–17 at 11:46 am lisa, i’m pleased to see that you’ve been handed a baton (albeit in the form of lead pipe!) to help raise awareness and critical knowledge about what makes special collections special – namely the collections themselves. what your post shows so clearly, in fact, is that the challenges that special collections librarians and archivists face in trying to make their collections more discoverable and accessible are in many ways the same challenges that librarians who manage general collections also face. increasingly, it is how collections are connected to online services at the network level that makes all the difference in who finds them and how they are used. for those of us who have spent most of our careers working in and around academic libraries, we have witnessed a shifting of responsibilities that points toward a shifting of mission that has not yet been fully appreciated, especially by our parent institutions. whereas research libraries previously existed and were managed to provide maximum benefit to the faculty and students of the parent institution, global networking systems have exposed them to the larger world, which can now claim them — rightly, i think — as common cultural (intellectual, scientific, literary, etc.) assets from which everyone ought to be able to benefit. and this goes for “general” collections as well as “special” collections, where the most valuable volume is generally the one you can get to quickest. it is the development of the global information economy that is the main responsible for this shift, even as research libraries have been shifting a lot of their resources into placing their collections in the networked information stream. yet for all their doings, it seems to me that research libraries have not yet managed to claim a viable stake in the evolving economy, one that will carry them forward with continuity into the future. ownership of physical collections is one asset, but ownership and control of information about those collections and ability to deliver it quickly and easily is arguably the greater asset. i’m all for exposing collections at the network level but i do have some concern that unless research libraries can find a more direct means of tapping into the information economy that their ability to do what they have done so well for so long will be diminished. the institutional budget crises that are being precipitated by the now global recession are likely to prove a real test in this regard. will the choices we make now in the face of economic hardship be creative ones that help us to thrive in the future or will they tend to force foreclosures of our options and opportunities we have to expand the mission of research libraries to the global level where they are demanded? i’d be curious to know if you or others who read your post also see the situation i am trying describe. lisa 2009–02–17 at 9:55 pm christianwell, that’s the trick isn’t it? are our institutions going to be able to identify what is mission-critical to moving forward and invest in dramatic change? or are they going to hunker down and protect “what we’ve always done” first? i guess a lot of it is how you define mission-critical and i think tapping into the info economy is key. i’m interested in your reference to “deliver it quickly and easily”, it means fundamentally changing from quality to quantity doesn’t it? lynne m. thomas 2009–02–19 at 9:23 am *nods vigorously* i couldn’t agree more with the bulk of this post. my one concern is that many of these goals are more easily achieved at larger institutions that have more institutional resources, both in terms of finances, and staff time and expertise. i’d *love* to have much more of my special collections online (50,000 public domain dime novels, anyone?), but the resources to digitize, mark up, and make available in bulk just aren’t there (yet). lisa 2009–02–19 at 9:32 am so lynne, does that mean you couldn’t engage your reference, circulation or cataloging staff in digitizing those dime novels? or do you not have enough of those resources either? i do agree with you that it’s easier to shift resources around at a larger institution. christ 2009–02–23 at 6:13 pm lisa, your advice to lynne (hi lynne!) points to what i was going to say in response to your comment on my posting about shifting emphasis from quality to quantity in order to tap into the information economy and provide broader access to our collections. at the heart of your suggestion to lynne to engage her reference, circulation or cataloging staff in digitizing dime novels is the principle of distributed workflows. certainly one impediment to getting more done in special collections is staffing. yet if we analyze what work actually needs to get done and then what skills and equipment are needed to do it, i think we’ll find that much of it does not necessarily need people with special collections and archival experience. nor does it necessarily need to be done in special collections secure areas. the problem comes precisely with engaging the commitment of other staff, as that is typically a managerial function beyond the control of the special collections department head. higher levels of administration are typically the areas need to be engaged to get this kind of collaboration to happen. but special collections librarians can do a lot to make the case and to offer proposals of new types of workflows that will help to ensure that backlogged collections get cataloged and processed, that images get scanned and metadata encoded, and that researchers are served. perhaps the new arl working group report on special collections will help administrators better understand the potential of special collections to serve their institutional missions and encourage them to allocate staffing in creative ways to better support them. ensuring that special collections “products” (e.g., information about collections and digital collections) get delivered quickly and easily means getting them into systems that operate at the network level with network-level efficiency. from there, we need to find ways to connect users and what they find with our institutions and knowledgeable staff. making that connection, which involves managing relationships with our users, is where the quality real comes in. quality cataloging and metadata description is important, but users really only need enough to find resources using the simplistic strategies they typically employ. users do not necessarily want to be trained in how to create more complex and more powerful searches that takes advantage of sophisticated and deep metadata encoding schemes; rather they want to be able to type a few words into a search box and quickly see results that they can start sorting through, comparing and using as the basis for refining or launching new searches. users also want to be able to ask questions of knowledgeable experts once they get into a search process. that’s where libraries need to be able to step in provide easy links to their services and staff. service quality is every bit as important as data quality in conditioning the user’s perception of quality and institutional trust. christian lisa 2009–02–26 at 3:15 pm christian – i like your observation that the quality in service/discoverability may be more important than granular metadata. a focus on service is exactly the point. but i’ve always had the question, how do we know how much is enough description for the users “to find resources using the simplistic strategies they typically employ”. how do we know what is “necessary”, “minimal” and “sufficient” (to reference mplp again)? –lisa christ 2009–02–27 at 10:35 am lisa, did you happen to receive terry belanger’s annual rare book school valentine thought poster? the quotation this year is “you never know what enough is until you know what is more than enough.” funny, but true, and maybe applicable here. it seems to me that one way to figure out what descriptive information is sufficient is to analyze user search behaviors to learn what information they are not taking advantage of. this can be done with qualitative methods, like focus groups and direct observations of individual search behaviors, but i expect it can be done more effectively with the quantitative analysis. think of how google and other search engines analyze your search behaviors and you get the idea. if we find that user searchers are not taking advantage of certain types of data, then maybe we don’t need to provide it, or provide it in every case by default. christ 2009–02–27 at 1:01 pm lisa, thanks for mentioning lorcan dempsey’s recent article in first monday: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2291/2070 a propos of our conversation here, i was struck by the following paragraph under “some issues for libraries”: “services. as a growing proportion of library use is network–based, the library becomes visible and usable through the network services provided. on the network, there are only services. so, the perception of quality of reference or of the value of particular collections, for example, will depend for many people on the quality of the network services which make them visible, and the extent to which they can be integrated into personal learning environments. increasingly, this requires us to emphasize the network as an integral design principle in library service development, rather than thinking of it as an add–on. the provision of rss feeds is a case in point. thinking about how something might appear on a mobile device is another.” this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a new polemic: libraries, moocs, and the pedagogical landscape – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 21 aug nora almeida /10 comments a new polemic: libraries, moocs, and the pedagogical landscape “i mooc” photo by flickr user ilonkatallina (cc-by-nc-sa 2.0) in brief: the massive open online course (mooc) has emerged in the past few years as the poster child of the online higher education revolution.  lauded and derided, moocs (depending on who you ask) represent the democratization of education on a global scale, an overblown trend, or the beginning of the end of the traditional academic institution. moocs have gained so much critical traction because they have succeeded in unmooring educational exchanges and setting them adrift in the sea of the internet.  although the mooc is a new and evolving platform, it has already upended facets of education in which librarians are heavily invested including intellectual property, digital preservation, and information delivery and curricular support models. consequently, to examine the mooc as a microcosm is also to explore how the scope of academic librarianship is changing and will continue to change. librarians and information professionals—who serve as bibliographers, purchasing managers, access advocates, copyright and preservation experts, and digital pioneers on many campuses—are uniquely situated to mediate this disruption and to use this opportunity to develop strategies for navigating an environment in flux. by nora almeida surely some revelation is at hand i just signed up for my first massive open online course (mooc)1, a class on “globalizing higher education and research for the knowledge economy,” co-taught by two university of wisconsin-madison faculty. the whole registration process took less than a minute and resembled countless other internet transactions i’ve conducted—i filled out a form with my name and email address, chose a password, checked a box indicating i agreed to their standard terms of service, and then clicked “sign up.”  i did not have to, as i did in graduate school, log on at 12:01am to ensure i could enroll in courses before they filled up, crossing my fingers as my browser refreshed. i did not have to worry about prerequisites, financial aid, or even when the course starts—they’ll send me an email reminder.  moocs are the latest incarnation of the online higher education revolution yet it is still too soon to tell whether they represent a real step towards the democratization of education, a fleeting phenomenon, or the dissolution of the academy as we know it.  what we do know is that the mooc—conceived in a perfect storm of open education, digital pedagogy, crowdsourcing, globalization cross-currents—is suddenly the centerpiece of discussions about the changing landscape of higher education. part of the fascination with moocs, for skeptics and champions alike, has to do with timing. although moocs have attracted millions of students and garnered unprecedented attention outside of higher education, jesse stommel (2012), digital humanist and founder of hybrid pedagogy, reminds us that the moocs phenomenon “didn’t appear last week, out of a void, vacuum-packed.” broad critical interest in moocs is partly due to a ricochet effect; education costs have peaked, enrollment numbers continue to grow, student loan debts are staggering, and the job market has been slow to rebound from a long recession (waldrop, 2013). while moocs are not a direct response or solution to these salient issues, they are part of the larger conversation that has emerged about the future of higher education; a future that almost certainly involves discussions about economics and changing relationships between technology, learning, and information. moocs2 are not so different from other historical pedagogical innovations.  in fact, “a mooc isn’t a thing at all, just a methodological approach [and arguably, an emerging business model], with no inherent value except insofar as it’s being used” (stommel, 2012). and moocs are being used as critical instruments by scholars, librarians, op-ed columnists, publishers, programmers, bloggers, teachers, and students.  a mooc polarizes precisely because it is nebulous, less ‘a thing’ than a massive open umbrella term. the ‘mooc’ brand has become synonymous with such an exhausting variety of pedagogical modes—as long as they are delivered in a ‘massive’ ‘open’ ‘online’ format—that virtually all moocs arguments start as definitional arguments.  those of us with a vested interest in how moocs are effecting higher education have a real stake in ensuring that the definition that sticks is one that we can stand behind. in practice, moocs can have vastly different pedagogical agendas, graphic design solutions, audiences, and objectives. moocs can be structured as traditional lectures, interactive discussions, or dynamic mixed-media environments.  there are remedial moocs, professional development moocs, and recreational moocs. there are niche moocs on special topics and moocs on classical subjects ranging from poetics to physics.  there are foundational moocs on the basics of academic writing and iterative moocs about pedagogical theory.  there are even moocs about moocs. in spite of the spectrum of perspectives, variety of mooc incarnations, and the fact that the legitimacy of a mooc (essentially a scalable curricular support tool) as a true transformative technological phenomenon is debatable, moocs still deserve another look. here’s why: the exploration of the mooc as catalyst for critical inquiry—a kind of operant—may offer some perspective on why higher education is changing and how librarians can play an active role in shaping what higher education becomes.  moocs as disruptive technology in a spring 2013 oclc research conference, “moocs and libraries: massive opportunity or overwhelming challenge?,” jim michalko used the phrase “disruptive technology” to capture the systemic changes that moocs introduce into the way that universities, and by extension, university libraries, work. the phrase, “disruptive technology,” was coined by clayton m. christensen in a 1995 harvard business review article to characterize the kind of game changing innovations that can throw markets into a tailspin.  these technologies3 are disruptive in two senses: 1) they are likely to catch on and change the direction of an industry fundamentally 2) they are difficult to integrate into established business models and are not immediately profitable (p.44).  moocs ‘disrupt’ existing practices in higher education in both of these senses and have the capacity to alter the way we think and talk about higher education.  moocs up-end a lot of foundational assumptions about what constitutes a ‘course’, what it means to be a ‘student’, and what constitutes an educational interaction. when basic, definitional precepts no longer apply, many institutional stakeholders left in the wake of disruption are wondering: where do we go from here? in the first place, we should recognize that the ‘mooc’ may be disruptive, but it is not unprecedented or isolated. this particular innovation is conceivable as both a technological outgrowth and as a product of american capitalistic dogma that tows adages about necessity and invention. as librarians, we have an opportunity to use this ‘crisis’ to reimagine our roles in the institutions and communities that are adopting moocs. we can begin by engaging with other institutional and community stakeholders and by building flexible infrastructures for information delivery, rights management, instruction, and curricular support that can withstand and even improve in the face of change. librarianship, which has undergone its fair share of ‘disruption’ in the past few decades, is a field that is (perhaps uniquely) primed for change. in the context of online instruction, librarians have new opportunities to expand the realm of their work. in practice, this may mean taking on more active roles as co-instructors and content creators, educating faculty about open access scholarship, authoring best practice guidelines for intellectual property management, facilitating intra and inter institutional networks, or developing a new controlled vocabularies and preservation protocols for archiving and repurposing moocs.    obstacles and implementation we must recognize that any true ‘disruption’ introduces obstacles alongside opportunities. the legal hurdles to “making educational content available to people unaffiliated with traditional educational institutions” (vogl et al., 2012, p.5) in partnership with businesses—namely, edx and coursera, currently the two leading platform providers—pose challenges for both institutional stakeholders and publishers. moocs also raise complex ethical questions about how partnerships with commercial entities may impact, complicate, or erode instructors’ intellectual property rights. logistically, providing an academic support infrastructure for students with different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds has proved to be a major hurdle if mooc retention rates are any indicator. these and other challenges are only compounded by the scale of moocs, which boast enrollment numbers in the tens (and sometimes hundreds) of thousands. implementation approaches so far have ranged from cautious to ambitious: penn state has been careful to differentiate between their five incubator moocs that “showcase faculty expertise and engage with prospective students from around the world” and their “online world campus,” where the focus is “helping traditional campus-based students to complete degree programs” (smutz, 2013); brown university’s instructional design team has involved “the university counsel’s office, media services, and the university library” in mooc implementation decisions (howard, 2013); stanford university’s center for legal informatics has developed a scalable intellectual property exchange (sipx) “copyright registry, marketplace and clearing engine,” in part to support open online instruction and which they incorporated in spring 2012 (vogl et al., 2012, p.9). most universities are approaching moocs with some trepidation and are not yet offering college credit or direct access to copyrighted resources.  there are some fledgling efforts to monetize moocs and offer accreditation options4, a trend that is only likely to continue as moocs gain cultural and academic legitimacy. the trajectory seems headed towards a freemium business model with some options for certification or college credit. there has been some push-back against these efforts from academics who warn that accrediting moocs will affect american scholarship in ways that haven’t yet been examined.  some open education advocates have also voiced concern over the monetization of a model that is largely defined by its ‘open-ness’. although most moocs are not (yet) accredited, moocs have ignited debates about current accreditation processes and whether they stifle “new education paradigms” (dennis, 2012, p.26) and should be reevaluated. for most universities, the focus is still on compiling data, analyzing the shifting software platforms and delivery protocols while simultaneously exploring possible implementation scenarios that weigh complex licensing, privacy, and cost facets. many universities, in recognition of the impact moocs have on different facets of education, are involving stakeholders from across campus and in some cases, are using cross-institutional partnerships to develop best practices beyond a specific implementation scenario: “librarians from all of the edx partner institutions have formed two working groups […] one group is looking into the issue of access to content; the other is talking about the research skills that moocs require and how librarians can help students develop those skills” (howard, 2013).  the association of research libraries weighed in on the topic in october 2012 with the release of “moocs legal and policy issues for research libraries” which outlines “strategic considerations for research libraries” (butler, 13).  authored by brandon butler, director of public policy initiatives, this arl issue brief falls short of a formal best practices guide and asserts that libraries, which already have established curricular support and copyright advisory roles on many campuses, can help shape “the way their parent and partner institutions approach the mooc phenomenon” (butler, 15). butler is conservative in his assessment of the potential impact that librarians may have on moocs and in turn, how innovations like moocs are affecting librarianship.  take for example, the recent announcement that syracuse ischool instructor, r. david lankes, will run a “new librarianship mooc” that addresses, a “vision for a new librarianship [that goes] beyond finding library-related uses for information technology and the internet” (ross, 2013).  if this course and the general move in librarianship towards a hybrid instruction model is any indicator, one of the ways that librarians can play a more active role in shaping how ‘institutions approach the mooc phenomenon’ is through direct participation as students, instructors, and content creators.  librarians can also build upon existing professional association infrastructures and create networks devoted to exploring online instruction and developing solutions to the problems introduced. librarians, who have more disciplinary autonomy that departmental faculty, can also reach out to institutional stakeholders to spearhead moocs planning initiatives on their own campuses. open access and the publishing racket moocs, because they are part of a larger cohort of open education initiatives, offer an opportunity for inter-institutional information exchange and implicitly make a case for open access publishing. library journal contributor meredith schwartz (2013) notes that moocs are “helping with open access advocacy, as professors [involved with moocs] see the need to make their own writings accessible” (p.3).  the trend towards open access that moocs promote by virtue of their open-ness has fittingly accelerated the pace of the critical dialogue about the mooc phenomenon itself; this recursive property demonstrates one of the ways moocs work to ‘disrupt’ publishing.  situating a conversation about open scholarship on platforms ranging from ted videos, academic blogs, and newspaper editorials to autonomously released academic white papers, professional organization briefs, and peer reviewed open access journals allows for a consolidation of different levels of discourse.  the moocs conversation has fostered collaborations in digital communications as scholars and bloggers are able to come together to collectively comment on developments in online instruction and on each other’s comments, ad infinitum. open access (oa) is not a new concept in higher education but significant resistance from academic publishers, faculty, and institutions entrenched in inflexible publishing and resource delivery models has made the practical transition to oa difficult.  in his book, open access (just released in an open access format after a one year embargo), peter suber (2012) credits “failure of imagination” (p.165) as the primary obstacle to oa adoption and notes that academics who “support oa in theory” often don’t “understand how to pay for it, how to support peer review, how to avoid copyright infringement, how to avoid violating academic freedom, or how to answer many other long-answered objections and misunderstandings” (p.164). academic librarians have long been oa advocates—in part because they have a better understanding of how much toll-access resources and licenses cost than many other departmental faculty do and because they are generally more aware of new oa initiatives and delivery platforms through exposure.  in the 2012 arl issue brief, butler indicates that the new pedagogical context of a mooc may prompt institutions to develop “a new strategy of adopting carefully crafted open access policies” (14).  librarians can be (and often are) the primary drivers behind institutional oa initiatives by providing platforms for oa publishing, funding for faculty who publish in oa journals5, educating faculty about oa resources in their fields, and by negotiating flexible license terms with toll-access publishers. beyond oa publications, moocs have also begun to disrupt the academic publishing status quo. mooc students (i.e. millions of consumers worldwide with vested interests in educational resources) have prompted academic publishers to rethink their own delivery strategies.  in may 2013, bookseller reported that several academic publishers—“cengage learning, macmillian higher education, oxford university press, sage, and wiley”—have begun “experimenting with offering coursera students versions of their e-textbooks” (page, 2013, p. 10). as with the moocs accreditation option, the option to access copyrighted resources (beyond authorized excerpts or previews) will likely develop into a freemium business model. the decision by select publishers to work with mooc platform providers and develop a delivery model that can work in a ‘massive’ ‘open’ context should not necessarily be viewed as a move towards oa, but rather an attempt by publishers to explore a (vast) new potential market.  however, it is encouraging that publishers are anticipating academic innovations and willing to rethink policies and delivery models. many academic libraries still accommodate restrictive licenses and expensive scholarship but rising access fees and shrinking acquisition budgets have prompted many libraries to look for sustainable alternatives. recent innovations in licensing models and oa peer review processes have already heralded major shifts on the information delivery horizon and this trend is only continuing.  as more publishers and content creators see oa as a viable alternative and as more rights holders develop creative solutions to provide affordable resources to new audiences in new contexts, content providers that refuse to adapt or join the conversation will likely be shut out of emerging markets. it has taken time and a shift in cultural attitudes towards oa publishing for many academics to stop equating cost and exclusivity with quality. however, oa advocates are optimistic that oa resources can increasingly “coexist” with “toll-access” publications (suber, 2012, p. 165). librarians can play an active role in this shift by engaging in faculty outreach, advocating for institutional adoptions of oa publishing and delivery infrastructures, and in extreme cases, boycotting ‘toll-access’ providers who refuse to negotiate reasonable rates. reimagining information and delivery aside from prompting a shift to oa resources and heralding developments in the commercial publishing sector, moocs may implicitly change information delivery processes in other subtle ways.  in a blog post on “moocs, distance education, and copyright,” kenneth crews (2012), director of the columbia copyright advisory office, indicates that within current copyright statutes there are creative solutions to copyright problems if we learn to ask the right questions. when it comes to information delivery options for copyrighted material, instructors should embrace flexibility and examine how some lesser used exemptions (like the teach act) might apply to moocs.  if we keep in mind that each mooc has a unique context and pedagogical methodology, it becomes clear that there is no blanket solution that can apply to every situation.  the importance of maintaining an open dialog about digital rights involving all stakeholders becomes paramount. kevin smith, the scholarly communications officer at duke university, underscores the importance of collaboration between librarians, “faculty and others on the production team to make sure that embedded materials are only what’s needed for the specific pedagogical purpose” (profitt, 2013). the advice smith offers here is relevant in terms of copyright compliance but also in terms of pedagogical culpability; shouldn’t course materials always have ‘a specific pedagogical purpose’?  if some of the obstacles presented by mooc platforms force a close evaluation of course content and instructional approach, the impact may extend to other (analog) educational contexts as well; this argument echoes sentiments that digital pedagogues have been advocating for years. whether we acknowledge it or not, the medium of the internet has changed the way that we interact with information and the sheer volume of text most of us sift through daily has changed how we read and absorb knowledge: “unlike a book […] a digital document exists in an electronic flux which is constantly being dissolved and reassembled for our consumption” (latham, 2004, p.416).  we have more control over texts and over digitally delivered instructional content which can be manipulated to accommodate different kinds of learners.  scholar and open education advocate, dave cormier (2008), argues that “[n]ew communication technologies and the speeds at which they allow the dissemination of information” have changed how we codify knowledge and “has encouraged us to take a critical look at where [knowledge] can be found and how it can be validated.” cormier (2008), who has co-facilitated several moocs and is a proponent of social constructivism, has also warned that some of the conversation we should be having about changes in pedagogy and knowledge construction has been overshadowed by “a flurry of discussion about intellectual property rights.” it’s not that intellectual property rights aren’t important, but they are, in some respects, beside the point. to ignore the possibilities for critical scholarship introduced by digital publishing is to also ignore the pedagogical possibilities introduced by new kinds of textual interpretation, research processes, and “new techniques of reading no longer beholden to traditional interpretive authority” (latham, 2004, p.417). many librarians find it difficult to reimagine information and its relationship to learning. however, such a reimagining will free us from reliance on outmoded information delivery processes that simply don’t work in online education environments.  as an academic librarian whose primary responsibility is to facilitate resource delivery to faculty and students, i believe that it is possible to facilitate information delivery to moocs students. librarians can do this through a combined effort to advocate for more flexible delivery models in our conversations with content providers, to educate faculty about fair use and its limitations, and most importantly, to revise our conception of what constitutes an academic resource.  this argument takes on new relevance when you consider that mooc students are not necessarily looking for a traditional education experience.  these students are interested enough in digital scholarship to enroll in an online course and may be best served by instructors who harness the inherent possibilities offered by the medium of the web, who can serve as curators of publicly accessible information, who can advocate for affordable copyrighted resources, and who can quickly and expertly offer a combination of open access materials, links, citations and minimal embedded pieces of scholarship to students all over the world for free. moocs as intellectual property an exploration of the relationships between intellectual property (ip) and moocs is further complicated by the fact that moocs are not just resource delivery vehicles, but are themselves generative and substantive resources.  a mooc is a unique copyrighted object that can be repurposed, licensed, and sold.  aside from the intellectual content of the course supplied by an instructor, there is also a huge amount of peripheral material including discussion board posts, student contributed content, and data that exists as a byproduct of a mooc.  taking this dimension of intellectual property into account, moocs have the potential to create a new pedagogical context that is part instructional forum, part web-publishing platform, part data-generator, part resource-aggregator, and part intellectual property object. instead of focusing exclusively on unilateral content ownership, columbia’s kenneth crews (2012) suggests that we acknowledge the many stakeholders involved in the production of a mooc and take a step back to “view the copyright in [and of] online courses not as a legal assertion, but as a set of rights to be shared and managed.”  librarians and digital archivists are in a unique position to advise faculty and administrators about the complex intellectual property issues that should be considered before jumping headlong into the fray.  in his arl whitepaper, brandon butler (2012) touches upon the importance of evaluating usage rights before signing a license agreement with a mooc platform provider.  institutional librarians and archivists, who are often responsible for the management of locally generated digital assets and for digital repository planning, can ensure that universities take the long view when it comes to negotiating flexible licenses that anticipate the reuse and repurposing of moocs course content as platforms, audiences, and formats develop. professional organizations (like the arl) can serve as an ideal forum for the creation and dissemination of comprehensive best practices guides for mooc ip management. academic librarians currently working with ip issues at their home institutions can collaborate to develop working ip standards that can be applied in a variety of online education contexts. such standards would be beneficial to librarians on the ground and more importantly, would prevent commercial platform providers from eroding rights that should belong to content creators. designating a mooc as a holistic, reusable, intellectual object also means that technical production and preservation protocols must also be considered.  much of the current literature on moocs and libraries overlooks the role that information professionals might play in authoring protocols for creating, preserving and managing digital content to ensure that moocs courses are reusable from a technical standpoint as well as a legal one. ideally, every mooc should come with its own digital preservation protocol that addresses version control, metadata, hosting and archiving recommendations.  this will ensure not only that intellectual objects are secure and reusable, but that the “evolution of the [moocs] form” (schwartz, 2013, p.4) and history of this educational phenomenon are recorded for future education scholars. as librarians, we should promote our bibliographic and preservation knowledge in terms of how we can help facilitate a multifaceted institutional digital management strategy for moocs.  additionally, we should devote more time and attention to another dimension of the intellectual property object conversation: technical support for the creation and maintenance of moocs.  in an increasingly saturated market the lifespan of any given mooc rests not only on its legality and digital stability, but also on its substantive and technical quality.  one of the salient points introduced at the oclc research conference was the necessity for universities to support faculty in the production of moocs in order to ensure that their courses are compelling and competitive.  the library—“often already providing instructional support and access to the same technology for students and for faculty who are experimenting with ‘flipping’ their in-person classrooms”(schwartz, 2013, p.3)—is the obvious locus for technical production support, which makes librarians the obvious candidates to serve as technical intermediaries between faculty (i.e. content creators) and mooc platform providers. in practice, this will mean that librarians will have to designate staff, equipment, and space to the technical production and support of moocs. for this reason, it is imperative that librarians involve themselves in moocs initiatives before institutional adoption so they can draft implementation and management workflows, advocate for new funding streams, and in some cases, redefine the mission and focus of library departments and redistribute staff to ensure that online educational initiatives are well supported. in terms of the importance of advocacy, butler (2012) argues that librarians also “have a more general stake where moocs are concerned, which is the continuing relevance of librarians and library collections to university teaching” (p.15). butler is correct in his assumption that contributions by librarians are often undervalued, however his defensive intimation that librarians need to advocate for their own relevance is short sighted. if librarians adopt active institutional roles and offer tangible solutions to problems that moocs introduce, they can demonstrate (rather than argue for) the importance of ‘librarians and library collections.’ moocs and the future in a chronicle of higher education article from 2012, media scholar and mooc skeptic siva viadhyanathan, (who likens the difference between a “real college course” and a mooc to the “difference between playing golf and watching golf”) concedes that the emergence and unprecedented popularity of the mooc is critically significant: “if we would all just take a breath and map out the distance between current moocs and real education, we might be able to chart a path towards some outstanding improvements in pedagogical techniques” (p.1). in an article on the rippling effect of online education in academic culture, nature contributor, marshall waldrop (2013), cites chris dede, a harvard educational technologist, who sees a similar opportunity for pedagogical culpability through technological innovation: “real gains in the productivity and effectiveness of learning will not come until universities radically reshape [existing educational] structures and practices to take full advantage of the technology” (p.8).  yes, the digital pedagogues say, because we’ve not only changed practices ‘to take advantage of the technology,’ the technology has already changed us and educational practices, irreparably, insidiously, and hopefully for the better.  for hybrid pedagogy contributors sean michael morris and jesse stommel (2012) there is no going back: “we need to worry for the entire enterprise of education, to be unnerved in order to uncover what’s going on now,” to “stop thinking of education as requiring stringent modes and constructs, and embrace it as invention, metamorphosis, deformation, and reinvention.” it is true that we have no choice to confront moocs, and we will, in the same way we’ve confronted and adapted to other ‘disruptive’ innovations that have transformed how we learn, interact, and access information. librarians are uniquely well situated to play an active role in how moocs are applied at the institutional level and also how moocs are ultimately defined by and within the larger context of the emergent ‘future’ of higher education. as audiences and objectives of moocs are evolving, so too are the roles and positions of power that competing stakeholders occupy. stakeholders—including universities, teachers, librarians as well as corporations, lawyers, and publishers—are grappling to define moocs in relation to their own priorities and visions of where higher education is headed. librarians should play an active role in defining moocs and reshaping the facets of higher education that it disrupts. we can start by participating in this conversation and by reimagining our own profession in light of the future. coda librarians have the capacity to become involved in mooc initiatives within their communities and institutions but the scope of the arena and the pace of developments can be overwhelming for individuals who want to contribute but don’t know where to begin. if you want to playing a role in defining moocs, the first thing you should do is sign up for a mooc to see how it really works. you can also engage in (or start) conversations at your home institution, community library, or local professional network through a listserv or special interest group. while you may not be able to create a moocs production studio, reassign library staff, or redefine the parameters of your own position overnight, there are smaller and achievable measures you can take depending on your position and institutional goals. whether you advocate or write a grant for oa publishing funds, create a lib guide to promote oa resources to faculty and students, work with institutional legal departments to draft a university ip policy, or collaborate with colleagues to create a digital preservation protocol, you can effectively impact your community and generate a progressive atmosphere. acknowledgements i’m very much indebted to the knowledgeable editors at in the library with the lead pipe and in particular to emily ford for her helpful insights and grammatical wizardry. much gratitude to silvia cho, my colleague at baruch college’s newman library, for enduring many iterations of this article, for her pragmatism and her ability to provide clarity amid chaos. references bower, j. l., & christensen, c. m. (1995). disruptive technologies: catching the wave. harvard business review 73(1), 43-53. butler, b. (2012, october 22). massive open online courses: legal and policy issues for research libraries. association of research libraries issue brief. retrieved from http://www.arl.org/ cormier, d. (2008). rhizomatic education: community as curriculum. innovate: journal of online education 4,5. retrieved from  http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol4_issue5/rhizomatic_education community_as_curriculum.pdf crews, k. (2012, november 9). moocs, distance education, and copyright: two wrong questions to ask. retrieved from http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/2012/11/09/moocs-distance-education-and-copyright-two-wrong-questions-to-ask/ dennis, m. j. (2012). the impact of moocs on higher education. college and university, 24-30. fain, p. (2012). gates, moocs and remediation. inside higher ed. retrieved from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/14/gates-foundationsolicits-remedial-moocs fyfe, p. (2011). digital pedagogy unplugged. digital humanities quarterly 5.3, 1-9. retrieved from          http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/3/000106/000106.html howard, j. (2013, march 25). for libraries, moocs bring uncertainty and opportunity [blog post]. wired campus. retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/for-libraries-moocs-bring-            uncertainty-and-opportunity/43111 koller, d. (2012). what we’re learning from online education [video file]. retrieved from         http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.html kolowich , s. (2012, september 7). moocing on site. inside higher ed. retrieved from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/07/site-based-testing-deals-strengthen-case-granting-credit-mooc-students latham, s. (2004) new age scholarship: the work of criticism in the age of digital reproduction. new literary history 35.3, 411-426. retrieved from muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/v035/35.3latham.html morris, s. m., & stommel, j. (2012, november 19). a mooc is not a thing: emergence, disruption, and higher education. hybrid pedagogy. retrieved from www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal page, b. (2013, may 10). publishers in moocs pilot. bookseller. retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com/ pappano, l. (2012, november 2). the year of the mooc. new york times.retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?smid=pl-share proffitt, m. (2013, april 16). moocs and libraries: new opportunities for librarians [blog post]. retrieved from http://hangingtogether.org/?p=2781 ross, j.d. (2013, june 11). registration open for new librarianship mooc. ischool news. retrieved from           http://ischool.syr.edu/newsroom/index.aspx?recid=1469 schwartz, m. (2013, may 10). massive open opportunity: supporting moocs in public and academic libraries. library journal. retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/05/library-services/massive-open-opportunity-supporting-moocs/#_ smutz, w. (2013, april 8). moocs are no education panacea, but here’s what can make them work. forbes leadership forum. retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2013/04/08/moocsare-no-education-panacea-but-heres-what-can-make-them-work/ stommel, j. (2012, july 23). the march of the moocs: monstrous open online courses. hybrid pedagogy. retrieved from www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal suber, p. (2012). future. in open access (pp. 163-68). cambridge, ma: mit press. vaidhyanathan, s. (2012, july 6). what’s the matter with moocs? [blog post]. the chronicle of higher education. retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/whats-the-matter-with-moocs/33289 vogl, r., lee, f., russell, m., & genesereth, m. (2012, june). sipx: addressing the copyright law barrier in higher education – access-to-clean-content technology in the 21st century. [whitepaper] stanford center for legal informatics. retrieved from http://mediax.stanford.edu/pdf/mxjune2012copyrightclearance.pdf waldrop, m. (2013, march 13). online learning: campus 2.0. nature. retrieved from http://www.nature.com/news/online-learning-campus-2-0-1.12590 what are moocs? according to an article published in nature earlier this year, they’re “internet-based teaching programmes designed to handle thousands of students simultaneously, in part using the tactics of social-networking websites” (waldrop, 2013). [↩] those interested in learning more about the origin of the mooc should watch daphne koller’s ted talk, “what we’re learning from online education.” koller, a stanford computer scientist and coursera co-founder. she talks about her goal to develop a platform for delivering high quality educational content to anyone with an internet connection and offers a range of examples to demonstrate how moocs work and what they look like. [↩] in the years since the publication of christensen’s original article, the term “innovation” has eclipsed and supplanted the term “technology,” importantly shifting the focus from the disruption itself to the systemic effect of the disruption. this semantic shift may also reflect the broad adoption of christensen’s ideas. [↩] “udacity is experimenting with charging $150 for courses that come with credit from sjsu […and] the american council on education, which advises college presidents on policy, recently endorsed five moocs from coursera for credit” (schwartz, 2013). [↩] many scholarly oa journals operate on a business model that requires contributors to pay a fee that serves to offset production costs. institutions and scholarly organizations are increasingly designating funding streams for oa publishing initiatives. [↩] copyright, future, instruction, librarianship, publishing, teaching, technology ending a harpercollins boycott (february 27, 2011-august 7, 2013) two-way libraries, open catalogues and the future of sharing culture 10 responses joe grobelny 2013–08–21 at 10:39 am thanks for bringing up the need for digital preservation in light of moocs: http://birdswithteeth.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/libraries-the-mooc-trois-on-disruption/ nora_almeida 2013–08–22 at 1:26 am thanks, joe grobelny. seems like the digital preservation component is lacking from a lot of discussions. staff and expertise required makes it worth thinking about from the get-go. barnaby hughes 2013–08–21 at 6:49 pm thanks for this timely piece. we definitely need to be proactive in defining what moocs are. it saddens me that so many groups and institutions, including the ala, are already abusing the designation by capping enrollments or charging fees. such courses might be online, but they are neither open nor massive. nora_almeida 2013–08–22 at 1:31 am thanks, barnaby hughes. it seems as thought the free-to-freemium model is the inevitable fate of many an “open” platform. taking the reigns to define what moocs are now and where they are headed is key. the future of our institutions and our profession at large is up for grabs. pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » a new polemic: libraries, moocs, and the pedagogical landscape | flexibility enables learning mark_mcguire 2013–08–24 at 5:15 am thanks for such a well researched and well referenced piece, nora. leaders at many universities seem prepared to ignore moocs if they don’t think they are an immediate threat to their current business model and strategic plan. they are only interested in innovations that maintain and strengthen the status quo — i.e. the non-disruptive kind. such a fortress mentality is self-serving and is designed to protect those who are already on the inside. if we were really interested in advancing teaching, learning and research, we would be taking advantages of innovations that enable us to connect to, and engage with, the wider world beyond the moat. pingback : feminism + mooc=docc | amber n. welch amy 2013–10–18 at 11:04 am i am looking to see if there is anyone interested in conducting a program on mooc’s at the utah library association’s annual conference on april 30th-may 2nd 2014. please let me know. pingback : the future of moocs oedb.org pingback : a tale of two moocs | querying libraries this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct training matters: student employment and learning in academic libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 22 jul liz vine /2 comments training matters: student employment and learning in academic libraries in brief conceiving of student employment in academic libraries as an educationally purposeful experience requires adopting a learner-centered pedagogical approach to student employee job training. adopting such an approach is triply beneficial: it makes that job training more effective; it identifies training as an opportunity to pursue learning goals that support the growth of students as information literate critical thinkers; and it emphasizes the distributed nature of teaching and learning in the library, pointing to the need to support supervisors of student employees as educators and learners themselves. focusing on the pedagogy of workplace training for student employees thus provides a point from which to redefine the community of learners the library supports, and disrupt hierarchical distinctions among the library’s many teachers and learners. by liz vine introduction teaching and learning happen in more ways, and in more places, in the academic library than we commonly assume. and one of the most obvious and overlooked arenas of teaching and learning in the academic library is student employee training. training and learning are frequently set at odds with one another. training is often devalued because it happens in the workplace rather than the classroom, and is perceived as having limited aims and scope, not necessarily being overseen by experts, and not prioritizing the needs of learners. but to view training and learning as separate domains elides the fact that, for both trainee and trainer, training is learning. if we say that our aim is to help a specific group of people “develop a set of key component skills, practice them to the point of automaticity, and know when and where to apply them appropriately,” are we describing workplace training or classroom learning?1 to separate or oppose them is to create a false dichotomy that obscures the rich educational opportunity presented by the seemingly mundane task of ensuring that student employees know how to do their job.  we can more fully realize that opportunity by approaching training with a learner-centered mindset, and utilizing evidence-based practices not just from the academic library literature, but the scholarship on teaching, the science of learning, and the fields of instructional and training design. in this article i argue that explicitly thinking of job training as learning, and approaching it from a pedagogical orientation, is imperative because it makes for more effective training, identifies a valuable opportunity for libraries to achieve their learning objectives and support student success, and can foster an organizational culture of care and learning that encompasses all staff. training is an unexplored site for expanding where, how, and for whom the library is a partner in learning. improving job performance the most immediate and, for busy supervisors, pragmatically compelling reason for conceiving of training as learning is to increase its effectiveness. reconceiving of training as learning emphasizes the need for thoughtful design of both form and content, and points to the benefits of training that is learner-centered and evidence-based—that is, grounded in proven approaches to learning. these are approaches that libraries use to support student learning in other contexts, and that in this instance might draw not just on the scholarship around teaching and learning, but also on workplace training and instructional design, which frequently overlap and intersect in their findings and recommendations. though their end goals might differ, there are practical commonalities aplenty between teaching with your mouth shut and telling ain’t training—between problemand inquiry-based approaches to classroom learning, and learner-centered approaches to workplace training, that both move away from the instructor as the principal conduit of enlightenment.2 having an effective learning-oriented training program sets student employees up for success in their job, to the obvious benefit of the library. attention to questions of retaining and transferring knowledge, to achieving what wiggins and mctighe identify as “understanding,”3 increases the likelihood of satisfactory job performance. it’s true that, even without formal training, student employees will learn on the job, will pick things up as they go along, and baldwin and barkley suggest that “that’s the danger.”4 is that really the only way we want them to learn? taking a learner-centered approach, we can recognize that no training program is fully comprehensive or sufficient unto itself, and that informal, on-the-job learning will happen, for good or ill, regardless. but supervisors can incorporate both modes of learning in intentional structures of reflection that encourage students to take a considered approach to both work and learning. we can provide opportunities to talk about how training does or does not match up with on-the-job reality; we can foster supported on-the-job learning through peer mentoring; we can give students means to record or track what they’re learning, no matter how they’re learning it; we can have more experienced employees lead a discussion on a topic such as “the most important things you need to know that aren’t addressed in training.” in these ways, formal learner-centered training can work with informal experiential learning to support student employee work performance, and improve the efficacy of our training programs.  a learner-centered, evidence-based approach to training that takes seriously student employees, their learning, and their jobs also has positive ramifications beyond how well they are able to do those jobs. an investment in training pays dividends not just in terms of performance, but also in reducing turnover of student employees, and increasing their engagement in and ownership of their work.5 as melilli and colleagues note, investing in student employees increases their investment in their work.6 training offers a tangible means of demonstrating that investment at the outset of a student’s work experience, creating a virtuous feedback loop of mutual reward that ultimately improves the consistency, efficiency, quality, and continuity of the work the library does.  designing effective training on proven learning principles, and gaining the benefits in terms of student employee competence, confidence, and commitment, also serves to mitigate many of the issues raised in the literature of complaint regarding student employees in academic libraries—a literature that extends from the early part of the twentieth century to the present day.7 framing training in terms of learning encourages supervisors to reflect on their own practices, rather than despairingly assume that employing students means tolerating high turnover, mediocre performance, and patchy attendance. successful college teachers don’t blame their students for difficulties they encounter in the classroom, and are willing to “confront their own weaknesses and failures.”8 likewise, it would behoove supervisors to reflect on their approaches to student employment before reflexively finding fault with student employees: “if librarians are not happy with the performance of their student staff, then the fault lies with the librarians.”9 to see whether we’re actively supporting the job success of our student employees, we might look first at the training we provide them.  the extensive body of literature that focuses on the specific details of managing and training students in academic libraries generally fails to connect training to learning at all, or does so in inconsistent or superficial ways. in fact, there often remains a sense in this and related work that training students is onerous and that it distracts and diverts librarians and library staff from more substantive and important work.10 one inevitable outcome of viewing training in this way is an approach to training design that is motivated as much by convenience as efficacy and by the misguided hope that student employees will teach themselves. though sometimes accompanied by pedagogically-inflected language around, for example, autonomous,  self-paced, or even active learning, these training approaches nevertheless feature a preponderance of passive learning via powerpoints, prezis, and in-person presentations, and share with the literature at large a marked and pervasive attachment to training student employees by having them read manuals or handbooks.11 evidence abounds as to the efficacy of classroom interventions that draw on research into how learning happens, and that utilize learner-centered approaches. brown and colleagues identify ways in which businesses such as jiffy lube have transferred these methods to workplace training with the effect of reducing staff turnover and improving customer satisfaction.12 given how infrequently such approaches are documented in the literature on training student employees in libraries, it’s not surprising that there is less evidence that points to their effectiveness in this specific context. there are a few examples, nevertheless, that indicate the rewards of deploying learner-centered, evidence-based training methods for both students and supervisors. surtees, for instance, “reduced lecture-style teaching of circulation and reference services in favor of a non-hierarchical peer-learning and active learning model,” and student employees have subsequently retained more information, are more confident and prepared, perform better on quizzes, and have a deeper understanding of the library.13 the literature also yields telling examples of training programs whose success is hampered by their failure to implement learner-centered principles, such as kohler’s conclusion that students found online training presentations unhelpful, didn’t learn enough to be able to answer quiz questions, and that this training method “did not solve the problems of student engagement and providing excellent training in patron service.”14 allied with the results of research from other learning contexts on and off campus, these examples demonstrate the value of learner-centered approaches to training, and of building assessment into training programs in order to be able to gauge whether and what student employees are in fact learning. there are undoubtedly logistical difficulties associated with training part-time, limited-term student employees, and these are certainly exacerbated by budgetary pressures and the many and varied demands on supervisors’ time. but foregrounding training as learning makes it clear that this is part of the educational work of the academic library. it’s an extension of one of its principal functions and reasons for being, and as such is not a distraction from the important work of the library, but a fundamental part of it (on which, more below). it also, however, points to ways in which supervisors can work smart, make adjustments to how they train that leverage what we know about retention and transfer, and utilize “methods that have seen success within other instructional venues.”15 these adjustments might take the form of large-scale overhauls of training programs, but they can also be made through focused, incremental changes, or what, in parallel to lang’s concept of “small teaching,” we might call “small training.”16 small training can provide achievable ways to move training plans that currently depend on passive consumption of content in more learner-centered and evidence-based directions. a handbook or manual can be deployed not as something to be read from cover to cover, but as a key, or one of a set of tools, that new employees use to solve realistic problems they may encounter on the job. existing presentations or tutorials can be revised to open with a question, problem, or puzzle that engages learners’ attention, and invites them to activate existing knowledge; other quick revisions might include building in brief opportunities for learners to summarize, reflect on, or respond to the content—variations, for example, on the “muddiest point” technique. those presentations or tutorials can be followed up a few days later with a short exercise that asks employees to retrieve and apply what they learned to a situation authentic to their job. other concrete small training practices might include: identifying specific learning objectives; chunking material in logical and digestible ways; designing tests, assessments, or knowledge checks that utilize the retrieval practice effect; providing opportunities to practice in contexts that resemble on-the-job reality and feature authentic scenarios and examples; using guideposts or touchstones that point us in the direction of effective, learner-centered training design, such as the empathetic question, “what is it like to be a person learning something?”17 these and many other interventions drawn from the literature on both classroom learning and workplace training are achievable through small-scale changes, and translate the recognition of training as learning into more effective job preparation for student employees.18 advancing student learning designing effective training invests in the job success of student employees. however, if we approach student employment itself as a structured learning experience—as an increasingly substantive cross-disciplinary body of work compellingly argues we should—then there is an additional imperative to conceive of training as learning. within the context of academic libraries, authors have emphasized the value of viewing student employment from a more holistic learning perspective, identifying it as an opportunity for libraries to make a meaningful contribution to student success.19 this integrative, learning-focused approach to student employment extends to aligning student employment with high-impact practices (hips)—educational practices that research shows have a particularly strong relationship with student engagement and retention.20 though not on the original list of recognized high-impact practices, student employment has since been identified as a possible hip both by student affairs and education researchers and by academic librarians.21 if we approach student employment as a whole as a learning experience, then every element of that experience should be viewed through a learning lens—including, and perhaps especially, the most obvious and direct scene of learning in any work experience: job training. however, the literature that advocates for student employment in libraries as a rich learning opportunity frequently either does not address training, or suggests that a broader focus on student learning is at odds with a reductive attention to training. bussell and hagman, for example, title their book chapter “from training to learning,” and suggest that “student employment is an opportunity for libraries to go beyond training and explicitly encourage learning,” setting training and learning apart, or at a distance from one another along a spectrum that has training at one end and “real” learning at the other.22 evanson suggests a tension between long-term learning objectives oriented to student employees as students and the more “employee-type skills” necessary for them to do their jobs.23 and while mcginniss recognizes the importance of continuing to think about job skills, he suggests that considering student development in only this way “impoverishes the library’s potential to challenge and grow its student staff,” again positing a value difference between “just” job training and additional forms of experiential development. thinking of student employment as an enriched learning experience, or as a hip, should not render the details of training obsolete. job training itself can be educationally purposeful as well as an integral part of student employment as a larger educational practice. job skills training cannot, indeed, be easily or usefully separated from the other, possibly more recognizable forms of learning that academic libraries can support through student employment. job training is, or should be, a feature of all student employee positions, whether or not those positions meet the criteria to be considered hips, and is thus an important location for advancing both specific job knowledge and broader learning goals for a wide range of student employees. it’s a place where we can work to “honor the essential learning outcomes while balancing the need for student employees to learn specific knowledge and behaviors that will enable them to perform their job responsibilities.”24 as scrogham and mcguire note, the clear relationship between training and learning makes training “an excellent opportunity for many seamless connections to students’ classroom learning, personal development, and citizenship.”25 the hybrid training method they identify as combining specific job tasks and skills with broader personal and professional development, from orientation onwards, provides a useful template that academic libraries might follow.26 however, to appreciate the potential deep learning value of job training requires dealing with training’s baggage. training has a connotation problem—training a dog, training for a marathon, potty training, basic training, hr-mandated training… it comes with some regimented and less-than-positive associations: “some people cringe at the word ‘training’: ‘training is what you do to monkeys; development is what you do to people.’”27 the very construct of “doing to” runs counter to what we know about best learning practices and how to nurture critical thinkers. it speaks to a perception of training as a unidirectional transfer of knowledge from experts to novices, designed for the benefit of the employer and very much aligned with paulo freire’s notion of the “banking” model of education, wherein knowledge is “bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.”28 baird finds evidence of this approach in relation to student employees in libraries, whose “training is often minimal and directed from the trainer (top-down), feeding them skills that serve the library’s need.”29 in this version, training often occurs in a limited timeframe and is concerned with standardization rather than individuation, organizational effectiveness rather than personal growth. it centers on the expertise and authority of the trainer and posits the trainee as a passive blank slate. it is, in this rendition, a narrow form of learning focused only on inculcating consistently reproducible behaviors. but we can think of training, and of those who train, in more expansive and nuanced ways—and in ways that identify and make the most of the very real connections between training student employees and the larger educational objectives of academic libraries. that might involve, at one level, deploying proven pedagogical practices to increase the effectiveness of training. but at another level it means recognizing that training can have a purpose larger than just effective job performance. mcclellan and colleagues identify training as a “structured learning opportunity.”30 but that structure doesn’t have to be characterized by hierarchical knowledge transmission, and that learning does not have to be restricted to the mechanics of accomplishing a specific task.  indeed, besides the fact that such decontextualized learning is less likely to be effective, it also represents a naive appraisal of what’s happening during job training. student employees are always inevitably learning more than “just” how to shelve, or discharge returned materials, or scan documents. we are always already conveying more than how to accomplish a task when we train. to that end, it’s worth considering what our student employees are learning about the library and the workplace when we don’t devote care and attention to training. but if we provide that care and attention, are intentional in how we frame training, and connect it to the organization’s key learning goals, then training student employees more obviously becomes an opportunity not just to improve their performance as employees, but to shape their thinking as students. and it’s an opportunity shared by all student employees, whether they’re in a position or program crafted to function as a hip or not. setting its connotative baggage aside, training then is simply a word that signals that we’re concerned with learning in a workplace context.31 training can combine both the short-term goal of enabling someone to independently do something required of them as part of their job, and broader aims around supporting the growth of critical and information-literate thinkers.  approaching training as learning prompts us not just to think about what student employees need to know or be able to do, but also about how we want them to approach problems, what questions we want them to be able to ask, and how we want them to reflect on their work and learning. learning, as stolovitch and keeps note, is change, and in training employees we’re concerned not simply with the transmission of information, but with changing people, with transforming learners.32 that change—which challenges, modifies, and extends the mental models of learners—can be informed by student learning outcomes that exceed job requirements and align with the stated educational goals of academic libraries and the colleges and universities they serve. mapping the alignment between training goals and institutional learning outcomes is beneficial on a number of levels. it provides a framework in which student employees can identify the educational value of their work, and connect it to and integrate it with other learning experiences; it provides objectives for supervisors to build training and employment experiences around, and avenues for reflecting on how to make those experiences educationally purposeful; it furnishes concepts that can be folded into an expanded approach to performance evaluation, and can be used in assessing the learning impact of training and employment programs; and it enables the library to discuss its support for student success in language shared across campus. starkel affords an example of what such goal alignment might look like in practice in her description of how student employment and training in butler university’s information commons program is aligned with the university’s values and its nine institutional learning outcomes.33 and grimm and harmeyer have recently mapped the tasks, knowledge, and skills required of student employees at purdue university archives and special collections against the acrl framework for information literacy for higher education, demonstrating that information professionals can create work environments “built to impart educational growth, critical-thinking, and problem-solving skills.”34 as grimm and harmeyer show, those skills are in fact required to successfully accomplish many of the jobs students hold in academic libraries, which makes incorporating them in job training imperative for student success at multiple scales. the framework “envisions information literacy as extending the arc of learning throughout students’ academic careers and as converging with other academic and social learning goals”35 — and it converges too with training competent student library employees.  that convergence can involve building out training to accomplish student learning outcomes through “a syllabus-like professional development program” mapped out over the course of a semester.36 but it can also mean looking at the ways in which we currently train, and making adjustments that recognize the wider learning potential of training, while improving that training’s efficacy. for instance, learning scientists have shown that successful learners put newly acquired knowledge into a larger context; they improve transfer by recognizing underlying principles, rules, and patterns in what they’re learning, create connections between new and existing knowledge, and organize those ideas in mental models.37 hawks and mestre and lecrone provide examples of what that might look like in a library training context—such as focusing on generalizable principles, or explaining why as well as how to do something, in order to improve transfer and the creation of mental models by making explicit the assumptions underlying a particular task, process, or approach. 38 while hawks doesn’t address student employment, and mestre and lecrone don’t frame their intervention explicitly in terms of learning, both suggest approaches to training that reflect learning research and workplace training literature, offering indications of how academic libraries might more intentionally and overtly incorporate those ideas within student employee training.   translating these ideas into concrete features of training can be as simple as remembering to provide learners with rationales that explain why a particular skill or task is important, and how it fits into the big picture of the employee’s job and library’s mission. it might also include, for example, creating brief twoor three-question reflection prompts, and providing a couple of minutes for students to respond to them at the end of a training session—prompts that ask them about what they’re learning, and how it connects to, adds to, or changes what they already know. it could involve learners practicing and applying what they’re learning in a range of different situations, or providing outlines or maps that student employees can fill out or create as they learn, in order to draw connections between and suggest a structure for what they’re learning. such interventions support student employees in successfully learning how to do their job, but they also support their learning about how to learn, and encourage them to make connections among the skills, concepts, and ideas they encounter across their academic and non-academic experiences. the result is training that both effectively deepens job learning and fosters metacognitive skills, integrated learning, and an awareness of how certain principles or approaches might apply across a multitude of scenarios. and these are features of educational practices—like hips—that strongly support student engagement and accomplishment.      we also know that learner-centered approaches are more effective—that they “promote a different, deeper, and better kind of learning […] a kind of learning that lasts” and that “enables higher education to achieve some of its broadest and highest goals.”39 recognizing that, and taking the constructivist approach that emphasizes learners’ active construction of knowledge also points to ways in which training can both be more effective and support learners in developing autonomy and problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. and, furthermore, it does so without reinforcing hierarchies of knowledge and authority that actually hinder learning. if effective teachers “think about what they do as stimulating construction, not ‘transmitting knowledge,’”40 then successful trainers too need to work with the idea that, as hawks notes, “engaged learners don’t just passively receive knowledge, they construct knowledge.”41 this approach makes training an exercise not in student employees “teaching themselves,” but one that can incorporate specific practices that encourage autonomy and foster higher-order thinking. we can create structured opportunities for learners to discover information about the library, explore the parts of a process, or investigate a database for themselves, perhaps even with the goal of having them share what they’ve learned with their peers. we can design training activities that ask student employees to make decisions, use their judgment, and grapple with the kinds of problems germane to their position. we can provide space for them to fail, reflect on what went wrong, and try again. in following this path, the trainer doesn’t abdicate responsibility or operate solely from a “hands-off” position, but provides guidance and structure within which student employees can exercise their autonomy and agency, and work with the trainer to build the skills necessary not just to their job but to their development as learners. a critically-informed training pedagogy also foregrounds the reciprocity of the teacher-learner relationship, emphasizing that those roles are fluid rather than fixed. throughout the term of a student’s employment, we can learn from their lived experiences, their perceptions of the library, and the knowledge they bring with them from other arenas of work and learning. in the context of job training specifically, we can learn from student employees about that training itself—about the experience of participating in it, its effectiveness, its ellisions or omissions, and how to do it better. both new and continuing student employees can and should be co-creators and critics of their work-learning experience at the library, including training. activating student employees’ existing expertise in the course of training, and having them contribute to rather than just receive that training, realizes the two-way learning opportunities that inhere in both student employment and job training. they point to student employment as a catalyst for change in the library, and student employee training as a learning moment that can exceed hierarchical models of knowledge transmission.   creating organizational change thinking of student employee training as learning reorients it from being a peripheral chore that gets in the way of the real and important work of the academic library, to something that is actually at the very heart of the academic library’s educational mission—directly connected to supporting student success not just in the very particular and local context of the job they’ve been hired to do, but in the broader arc of their college and life journey. and identifying the work of student employees, and of training student employees, as educationally purposeful redraws the boundaries of teaching and learning in the library. in particular, it highlights the importance of supervisors—many of whom are not librarians—to student learning, and the need in turn to support their learning. the fact that student employees are students is generating an increasing amount of thought about how to make their work experience educationally valuable. the fact that student employees are employees, however, might also create a route via which to think about the learning of other library employees, and develop continuities between the care taken with, and the practices and models used in, student and staff learning—which coincide at the point of the student employee and their supervisor. thinking about the learning of student staff might prompt us to consider further supporting the learning and success of all library staff, especially those who supervise student employees, and to recognize that the community whose learning the library supports is not just “out there.” as wilkinson and lewis note, “education is a core mission of all libraries. libraries should make the same commitment to educating their personnel that they have made to educating their users.”42 if training is learning, supervisors are themselves, of course, not just learners but also educators, a designation that disrupts typical demarcations around who in the library teaches. mcclellan and colleagues suggest that a good supervisor can operate like a good professor in creating “a positive and open atmosphere for learning.”43 however, markgraf notes there may be “hesitation among some staff to refer to themselves as educators, and […] resistance among faculty to cede any part of that role to colleagues outside of the classroom.”44 student employee training highlights, nevertheless, that clear distinctions between these terms and roles do not hold—supervisors “train, instruct, and educate […] one is not more important than the other. all three work together.”45 indeed, as reed and signorelli point out, “almost everyone within a library or non-profit organization is a trainer-teacher-learner.”46 our official titles and place within the library hierarchy don’t map in obvious and straightforward ways onto the work around learning that we actually do. thinking of supervisors as teachers might produce some dissonance and difficulties.47 but supervisors are already fulfilling that role and doing that work: “we spend more time with the student employees on average than any one professor, counselor, or advisor,” and spend that time “educating, training, helping to form students’ work ethics and habits.”48 burke and lawrence refer to this as “accidental mentorship,” but if we recognize the work of supervisors as directly contributing to student learning, then we can be more intentional about supporting them in this role, and untangling the “mixed signals” they receive “regarding the time that they spend training and managing student employees.”49 thinking about effective, pedagogically-informed student employee training requires conceiving of supervisors as both teachers and learners and seeing the learning of students, student employees, and full-time staff as interconnected and integral to the learning mission of the library.      through the lens of a learner-centered approach to training student employees, the academic library emerges as an organization whose support for learning isn’t restricted to instruction or public-facing services, and where responsibility for that support lies with both librarians and non-librarian staff. a distributed, shared attention to learning provides opportunities for groups within the library to gain from each other’s learning regardless of status and role, to the benefit of individuals and the organization as a whole. it might foster workplace learning programs like the one detailed by decker and townes, where librarians and non-librarian staff take turns sharing their knowledge with one another; this “vertically integrated” instruction model, with learning moving across hierarchical divisions within the library, aims to bridge the work divide between librarians and other library staff.50 that instruction model could easily extend to encompass student staff, and both baird and see and teetor provide accounts of training programs in which student and full-time staff participate together—a practice which, as baird notes, is “not commonly done,” but which can improve student employee motivation by creating stronger connections with the organization’s culture and objectives.51 why not, indeed, further recognize the distribution of knowledge and expertise throughout the library organization, and have student employees contribute to training new full-time staff, as mestre and lecrone recount?52 conclusion mcclellan et al. identify seven qualities that all student employment programs should have. one of them is meaningful relationships between student employees and their employers, focused on teaching and learning; another is that they “must have caring as an embedded and essential value.” caring, as they show, has a demonstrable impact on student success.53 investing in both initial and on-going training and development that is thoughtfully designed to support personal growth and broader learning goals manifests an affective orientation of care for student employees. paying attention to the quality and effectiveness of student employee job training, and to that job training as a specific and widely shared learning experience, grounds the supervisor-supervisee relationship in teaching and learning that moves in both directions. it also creates a bridge between the library’s often outward-oriented educational mission and nurturing an internal culture of learning and care for all library employees that can be integrated into our very operational fabric. reframing student employee training as a particular learning occasion within the broader work-learning experience, and insisting on the need for and benefits of approaching it with pedagogical care, in fact serves as a demonstration of what meulemans and matlin identify as “organizational care,” which supports change that benefits library workers “in an equitable, inclusive, and socially just fashion.”54 this article advocates incorporating not just student employment in general, but job training for student employees specifically, into academic libraries’ educational practices. such an argument points to a need for further research on and assessment of the relationship between student employment, training methods and programs, and student and supervisor learning. what support do supervisors need to effectively facilitate training as a learner-centered experience? how do we reconfigure the structure of our organizations to recognize supervisors as educators? how can we track the impact—on student employees, supervisors, and the work of the library—of adopting a learner-centered approach to work and training? answering those questions, and others, will work to shift hierarchized distinctions between types of learning within the library, and allow us to identify further overlooked educational opportunities and other arenas in which we might bring learner-centered approaches to bear to the benefit of library staff and users, as does looking anew at job training for student employees. reexamining student employee training from a learning perspective can not only improve job performance and advance key learning outcomes; it can also reconfigure assumptions about who “does” teaching and learning in the library, confound hierarchical distinctions that hinder organizational learning, and contribute to a reflective, learner-centered library, characterized by care, in which the learners are both patrons and staff. acknowledgements with many thanks to publishing editor jaena rae cabrera, internal reviewer ian beilin, and external reviewer cindy pierard for the many generous and insightful comments that have enriched my thought and writing on this topic; to paul moffett, for his time, support, encouragement, and getting excited about doing new stuff in access services; to michelle niemann, in-home writing coach and interlocutor par excellence; and to the student employees in access services at iupui university library, from whom i learn so much, and who make going to work a pleasure.   references ambrose, susan a. et al. how learning works: seven research-based principles for smart teaching. san francisco: jossey-bass, 2010. association for college and research libraries. framework for information literacy for higher education. chicago: association for college and research libraries, 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/infolit/framework1.pdf.  bain, ken. what the best college teachers do. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2004. baird, lynn n. “aloha to new learning: uniting student and career staff through training.” journal of access services 5, no. 1/2 (2007): 121-32. baldwin, david a., and daniel c. barkley. complete guide for supervisors of student employees in today’s academic libraries. westport, ct: libraries unlimited, 2007. becker-redd, kindra, kirsten lee, and caroline skelton. “training student workers for cross-departmental success in an academic library: a new model.” journal of library administration 58, no. 2 (2018): 153-65. black, elizabeth l. “library student employment and educational value beyond the paycheck.” in learning beyond the classroom: engaging students in information literacy through co-curricular activities, edited by silvia vong and manda vrlkjan, 57-73. chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2020. brown, peter c., henry l. roediger iii, and mark a. mcdaniel. make it stick: the science of successful learning. cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press, 2014. burke, kate and belinda lawrence. “the accidental mentorship: library managers’ roles in student employees’ academic professional lives.” college and research libraries news 72, no. 2 (2011): 99-103. bussell, h. and j. hagman. “from training to learning: developing student employees through experiential learning design.” in the experiential library: transforming academic and research libraries through the power of experiential learning, edited by pete mcdonnell, 147-59. cambridge, ma: chandos publishing, 2017. decker, e.n. and j.a. townes. “going vertical: enhancing staff training through vertically integrated instruction.” in the experiential library: transforming academic and research libraries through the power of experiential learning, edited by pete mcdonnell,135-46. cambridge, ma: chandos publishing, 2017. dirksen, julie. design for how people learn. 2nd ed. san francisco: new riders, 2016. drewitz, jessica m. “training student workers: a win-win.” aall spectrum (2013): 22-24. evanson, cara. “‘we aren’t just the kids that sit at the front’: rethinking student employee training.” college and research libraries news 76, no. 1 (2015): 30-33. farrell, sandy l. and carol driver. “tag, you’re it: hiring, training, and managing student assistants.” community and junior college libraries 16, no. 3 (2010): 185-191. finkel, donald l. teaching with your mouth shut (portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook, 2000). freire, paulo. pedagogy of the oppressed (1970). translated by myra bergman ramos. new york: continuum, 2005. gerlich, bella karr. “rethinking the contributions of student employees to library services.” library administration and management 16, no. 3 (2002): 146-50. gregory, david. “the evolving role of student employees in academic libraries.” journal of library administration 21, no. 3/4 (1995): 3-27. grimm, tracy and neal harmeyer. “on-the-job information literacy: a case study of student employees at purdue university archives and special collections.” in learning beyond the classroom: engaging students in information literacy through co-curricular activities, edited by silvia vong and manda vrlkjan, 75-88. chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2020. hawks, melanie. designing training. chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2013. hansen, sarah l. and beth a. hoag. “promoting learning, career readiness, and leadership in student employment.” new directions for student leadership no. 157 (2018): 85-99. hillyard, cinnamon and katharine a. whitson. “a multi-unit approach to interactive training of student employees.” library administration and management 22, no. 1 (2008): 37-41. hoag, beth and sarah sagmoen. “leading, learning, and earning: creating a meaningful student employment program.” in students lead the library: the importance of student contributions to the academic library, edited by sara arnold-garza and carissa tomlinson, 1-20. chicago: acrl, 2017. kathman, jane m. and michael d. kathman. “training student employees for quality service.” journal of academic librarianship 26, no. 3 (2000): 176-182. klipfel, kevin michael and dani brecher cook. learner-centered pedagogy: principles and practices. chicago: ala editions, 2017. kohler, jamie p.  “training engaged student employees: a small college library experience.” college and undergraduate libraries 23, no. 4 (2016): 363-380. kuh, george d. high-impact practices: what they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. washington, dc: american association of colleges and universities, 2008. kuh, george d. “maybe experience really can be the best teacher.” chronicle of higher education, november 21, 2010. https://www.chronicle.com/article/maybe-experience-really-can-be/125433 lang, james m. small teaching: everyday lessons from the science of learning. san francisco: jossey-bass, 2016. manley, laura and robert p. holley. “hiring and training work-study students: a case study.” college and undergraduate libraries 21, no. 1 (2014): 76-89. markgraf, jill. “unleash your library’s hipster: transforming student library jobs into high-impact practices.” proceedings of the acrl 2015 conference. portland, or, march 2015, 770-777. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2015/markgraf.pdf mcclellan, george s., kristina creager, and marianna savoca. a good job: campus employment as a high-impact practice. sterling, va: stylus, 2018. mcginniss, jeremy.  “working at learning: developing an integrated approach to student staff development.” in the library with the lead pipe, april 9, 2014. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/working-at-learning-developing-an-integrated-approach-to-student-staff-development/.    melilli, amanda, rosan mitola, and amy hunsaker. “contributing to the library student employee experience: perceptions of a student development program.” journal of academic librarianship 42, no. 4 (2016): 430-37. mestre, lori s. and jessica m. lecrone. “elevating the student assistant: an integrated development program for student library assistants,” college and undergraduate libraries 22, no. 1 (2015): 1-20. meulemans, yvonne nalani and talitha r. matlin. “are you being served? embracing servant leadership, trusting library staff, and engendering change.” library leadership and management 34, no. 1 (2020): 1-12. michael, joshua b. and jeremy mcginniss. “our student workers rock! investing in the student staff development process.” library faculty presentations 17 (2013). https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/library_presentations/17 mitola, rosan, erin rinto, and emily pattni,.“student employment as a high-impact practice in academic libraries: a systematic review.” journal of academic librarianship 44, no. 3 (2018): 352-373. moore, cathy. map it: the hands-on guide to strategic training design. united states: montesa press, 2017. perozzi, brett ed. enhancing student learning through college employment. bloomington, in: association of college unions international, 2009. reed, lori and paul signorelli. workplace learning and leadership: a handbook for library and nonprofit trainers. chicago: american library association, 2011. rinto, erin, rosan mitola, and kate otto. “reframing library student employment as a high-impact practice: implications from case studies.” college and undergraduate libraries 26, no. 4 (2019): 260-77. savoca, marianna and urszula zalewski. “the campus as a learning laboratory: transforming student employment.” nsea journal 1 (2016): 3-11. scrogham, eva and sara punsky mcguire, “orientation, training, and development.” in enhancing student learning through college employment, edited by brett perozzi, 199-220. bloomington, in: association of college unions international, 2009. see, andrew and travis stephen teetor. “effective e-training: using a course management system and e-learning tools to train library employees.” journal of access services 11, no. 2 (2014): 66-90. starkel, amanda d. “investing in student employees: training in butler university’s information commons program,” indiana libraries 33, no. 2 (2014): 83-86. stolovitch,  harold d. and erica j. keeps. telling ain’t training: updated, expanded, and enhanced. alexandria, va: astd press, 2011. surtees, laura. “training to learn: developing an interactive, collaborative circulation-reference training program for student workers.” proceedings of the acrl 2019 conference. cleveland, oh, april 2019, 814-815. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2019/trainingtolearn.pdf  vassady, lisa, alyssa archer, and eric ackermann. “read-ing our way to success: using the read scale to successfully train reference student assistants in the referral model.” journal of library administration 55, no. 7 (2015): 535-548. weimer, maryellen. learner-centered teaching: five key changes to practice. 2nd ed. san francisco: jossey-bass, 2013. wiggins, grant and jay mctighe. understanding by design. 2nd ed. alexandria, va: association for supervision and curriculum development, 2005. wilkinson, frances c. and linda k. lewis. “training programs in academic libraries: continuous learning in the information age.” college and research libraries news 67, no. 6 (2006): 356-65. william iii, james. “starting off on the right foot: a library new student employee orientation,” south carolina libraries 1, no. 2 (2015). http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/scl_journal/vol1/iss2/7 footnotes susan a. ambrose et al., how learning works: seven research-based principles for smart teaching (san francisco: jossey-bass, 2010), 95 [↩] donald l. finkel, teaching with your mouth shut (portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook, 2000); harold d. stolovitch and erica j. keeps, telling ain’t training: updated, expanded, and enhanced (alexandria, va: astd press, 2011). [↩] grant wiggins and jay mctighe, understanding by design, 2nd ed. (alexandria, va: association for supervision and curriculum development, 2005), 40. [↩] david a. baldwin and daniel c. barkley, complete guide for supervisors of student employees in today’s academic libraries (westport, ct: libraries unlimited, 2007), 161. [↩] james william iii, “starting off on the right foot: a library new student employee orientation,” south carolina libraries 1, no. 2 (2015): http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/scl_journal/vol1/iss2/7;george s. mcclellan, kristina creager, and marianna savoca, a good job: campus employment as a high-impact practice (sterling, va: stylus, 2018); cara evanson, “‘we aren’t just the kids that sit at the front’: rethinking student employee training,” college and research libraries news 76, no. 1 (2015): 30-33; beth hoag and sarah sagmoen, “leading, learning, and earning: creating a meaningful student employment program,” in students lead the library: the importance of student contributions to the academic library, ed. sara arnold-garza and carissa tomlinson (chicago: acrl, 2017), 1-20. [↩] amanda melilli, rosan mitola, and amy hunsaker, “contributing to the library student employee experience: perceptions of a student development program,” journal of academic librarianship 42, no. 4 (2016): 435. [↩] david gregory quotes a librarian in 1910 conceding that student employment might be “far less of an evil than it appeared” (5), and suggests that unenthusiastic “characterizations of student help […] will always be with us” (gregory, “the evolving role of student employees in academic libraries,” journal of library administration 21, no. 3/4 (1995): 21); those characterizations certainly persist in articles such as  bella karr gerlich, “rethinking the contributions of student employees to library services,” library administration and management 16, no. 3 (2002): 146-50, and laura manley and robert p. holley, “hiring and training work-study students: a case study,” college and undergraduate libraries 21, no. 1 (2014): 76-89. [↩] ken bain, what the best college teachers do (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2004), 19. [↩] jeremy mcginniss, “working at learning: developing an integrated approach to student staff development,” in the library with the lead pipe, april 9, 2014, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/working-at-learning-developing-an-integrated-approach-to-student-staff-development/ [↩] as even a quick scan of titles such as “retraining is draining,” “searching for solutions,” and “so many students, so little time” suggests. [↩] for training presentations see: kindra becker-redd, kirsten lee, and caroline skelton, “training student workers for cross-departmental success in an academic library: a new model,” journal of library administration 58, no. 2 (2018): 153-165; cinnamon hillyard and katharine a. whitson, “a multi-unit approach to interactive training of student employees,” library administration and management 22, no. 1 (2008): 37-41; manley and holley, “hiring and training,” 76-89; jamie p. kohler, “training engaged student employees: a small college library experience,” college and undergraduate libraries 23, no. 4 (2016): 363-380. for examples of the use of manuals and handbooks see: kohler, “training engaged student employees”; jane m. kathman and michael d. kathman, “training student employees for quality service,” journal of academic librarianship 26, no. 3 (2000): 176-182; sandy l. farrell and carol driver, “tag, you’re it: hiring, training, and managing student assistants,” community and junior college libraries 16, no. 3 (2010): 185-191; lisa vassady, alyssa archer, and eric ackermann, “read-ing our way to success: using the read scale to successfully train reference student assistants in the referral model,” journal of library administration 55, no. 7 (2015): 535-548; hoag and sagmoen, “leading, learning, and earning”; jessica m. drewitz, “training student workers: a win-win,” aall spectrum (2013): 22-24. [↩] peter c. brown, henry l. roediger iii, and mark a. mcdaniel, make it stick: the science of successful learning (cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press, 2014), 247. [↩] laura surtees, “training to learn: developing an interactive, collaborative circulation-reference training program for student workers,” proceedings of the acrl 2019 conference, cleveland, oh, april 2019, 814-815, http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2019/trainingtolearn.pdf [↩] kohler, “training engaged,” 377. [↩] amanda d. starkel, “investing in student employees: training in butler university’s information commons program,” indiana libraries 33, no. 2 (2014): 84. [↩] james m. lang, small teaching: everyday lessons from the science of learning (san francisco: jossey-bass, 2016). [↩] carl rogers, quoted in kevin michael klipfel and dani brecher cook, learner-centered pedagogy: principles and practices (chicago: ala editions, 2017), 8. [↩] overviews of effective practices, how to implement them, and why they work include: stolovitch and keeps, telling ain’t training; lang, small teaching; julie dirksen, design for how people learn 2nd ed. (san francisco: new riders, 2016); brown, roediger iii, and mcdaniel, make it stick; cathy moore, map it: the hands-on guide to strategic training design (montesa press, 2017); ambrose et al., how learning works. [↩] see: hoag and sagmoen, “leading, learning, and earning,” 11; melilli, mitola, and hunsaker, “library student employee experience,” 436; joshua b. michael and jeremy mcginniss, “our student workers rock! investing in the student staff development process,” library faculty presentations 17 (2013), https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/library_presentations/17   [↩] george d. kuh, high-impact practices: what they are, who has access to them, and why they matter (washington, dc: american association of colleges and universities, 2008), 14-16. [↩] see: george d. kuh, “maybe experience really can be the best teacher,” chronicle of higher education, november 21, 2010, https://www.chronicle.com/article/maybe-experience-really-can-be/125433; mcclellan, creager, and savoca, a good job; marianna savoca and urszula zalewski, “the campus as a learning laboratory: transforming student employment,” nsea journal 1 (2016): 3-11; brett perozzi,ed., enhancing student learning through college employment (bloomington, in: association of college unions international, 2009); sarah l. hansen and beth a. hoag, “promoting learning, career readiness, and leadership in student employment,” new directions for student leadership no. 157 (2018): 85-99; jill markgraf, “unleash your library’s hipster: transforming student library jobs into high-impact practices,” proceedings of the acrl 2015 conference, portland, or, march 2015, 770-777, http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2015/markgraf.pdf; rosan mitola, erin rinto, and emily pattni, “student employment as a high-impact practice in academic libraries: a systematic review,” journal of academic librarianship 44, no. 3 (2018): 352-373; erin rinto, rosan mitola, and kate otto, “reframing library student employment as a high-impact practice: implications from case studies,” college and undergraduate libraries 26, no. 4 (2019); elizabeth l. black, “library student employment and educational value beyond the paycheck,” in learning beyond the classroom: engaging students in information literacy through co-curricular activities, ed. silvia vong and manda vrlkjan (chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2020), 57-73. [↩] h. bussell and j. hagman, “from training to learning: developing student employees through experiential learning design” in pete mcdonnell, ed.,the experiential library: transforming academic and research libraries through the power of experiential learning (cambridge, ma: chandos, publishing, 2017), 147. [↩] evanson, “we aren’t just the kids,” 33. [↩] mcclellan, creager, and savoca, a good job, 96. [↩] eva scrogham and sara punsky mcguire, “orientation, training, and development” in brett perozzi, ed., enhancing student learning through college employment (bloomington, in: association of college unions international, 2009), 200. [↩] scrogham and mcguire, “orientation,” [↩] baldwin and barkley, complete guide, 161. [↩] paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed (1970), trans. myra bergman ramos (new york: continuum, 2005), 72. [↩] lynn n. baird, “aloha to new learning: uniting student and career staff through training, journal of access services 5, no. 1/2 (2007): 122. [↩] mcclellan, creager, and savoca, a good job, 143. [↩] stolovitch and keeps, telling ain’t training, 13. [↩] stolovitch and keeps, telling ain’t training, 13. [↩] starkel, “investing,” 83-84. [↩] tracy grimm and neal harmeyer, “on-the-job information literacy: a case study of student employees at purdue university archives and special collections” in learning beyond the classroom, 87. [↩] association for college and research libraries, framework for information literacy for higher education (chicago: association for college and research libraries, 2015): 8, http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/infolit/framework1.pdf [↩] mcclellan, creager, and savoca, a good job, 144. [↩] brown, roediger iii, and mcdaniel, make it stick, 4-6. [↩] for example: melanie hawks, designing training (chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2013), 44; lori s. mestre and jessica m. lecrone, “elevating the student assistant: an integrated development program for student library assistants,” college and undergraduate libraries 22, no. 1 (2015): 13. [↩] maryellen weimer, learner-centered teaching: five key changes to practice, 2nd ed. (san francisco: jossey-bass, 2013), 33. [↩] bain, best college teachers, 27. [↩] hawks, designing training, 34. [↩] frances c. wilkinson and linda k. lewis, “training programs in academic libraries: continuous learning in the information age,” college and research libraries news 67, no. 6 (2006): 365. [↩] mcclellan, creager, and savoca, a good job, 151. [↩] markgraf, “unleash,” 773. [↩] keeps and stolovitch, training ain’t telling, 12. [↩] lori reed and paul signorelli, workplace learning and leadership: a handbook for library and nonprofit trainers (chicago: american library association, 2011), 2. [↩] bussell and hagman point out, for example, that experiential learning requires that learners be able to challenge teachers, and as “tricky as it is to establish this level of trust between learner and teacher in a normal classroom, it can be even more difficult when the learner/teacher relationship is also an employee/supervisor relationship.” bussell and hagman, “training to learning,” 152. [↩] kate burke and belinda lawrence, “the accidental mentorship: library managers’ roles in student employees’ academic professional lives,” college and research libraries news 72, no. 2 (2011): 100. [↩] kathman and kathman, “quality service,” 177. [↩] e.n. decker and j.a. townes, “going vertical: enhancing staff training through vertically integrated instruction” in the experiential library, 139. [↩] baird, “aloha,” 122-3; andrew see and travis stephen teetor, “effective e-training: using a course management system and e-learning tools to train library employees,” journal of access services 11, no. 2 (2014): 66-90. [↩] mestre and lecrone, “elevating,” 13. [↩] mcclellan, creager, and savoca, a good job, 196-7. [↩] yvonne nalani meulemans and talitha r. matlin, “are you being served? embracing servant leadership, trusting library staff, and engendering change,” library leadership and management 34, no. 1 (2020): 3-4. [↩] librarian/faculty relationships, library instruction, library workplaces, student employment, training creating a library wide culture and environment to support mlis students of color: the diversity scholars program at oregon state university libraries “information has value”: the political economy of information capitalism 2 responses pingback : journal article: training matters: student employment and learning in academic libraries | lj infodocket pingback : day in review (july 20–24, 2020) association of research libraries this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct creating a library wide culture and environment to support mlis students of color: the diversity scholars program at oregon state university libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 24 jun natalia fernández and beth filar williams /1 comments creating a library wide culture and environment to support mlis students of color: the diversity scholars program at oregon state university libraries in brief the work of social justice, equity, and inclusion is not a short-term investment by a limited number of people; instead, it should be a part of every library’s and librarian’s work. at the oregon state university libraries (osul), we felt that in order to create a program dedicated to employing mlis students of color, it was essential to understand the systems and histories of oppression, as well as the culture of whiteness, within our state, our university, our library, and ourselves. while the bulk of this article is dedicated to an in-depth explanation of the development and implementation of our diversity scholars program (dsp) to support mlis students of color, we first share information about our local context, specifically the ongoing equity, diversity, and inclusion work within our library, as well as the professional literature that addresses these issues. the purpose of our case study is to provide a roadmap of our program, with lessons learned, for other academic libraries to consider creating a program like ours at their institution. we cover why and how the osul created the dsp, how the program functions, as well as current assessment practices used by the dsp committee to surface the already visible impacts of the program while we work towards the long-term goals of culture and systems change. within the article we have integrated the perspectives of the diversity scholars and the osul university librarian to create a more robust and thorough accounting of the work required to create and launch such a program. by natalia fernandez and beth filar williams introduction  master of library science students, particularly those getting online degrees, need experiences in libraries to better prepare them for their post-mlis careers. offering a concurrent opportunity to gain experience working in a library setting while earning an online degree provides this needed experience to not only obtain a holistic understanding of libraries, but also to focus and discover areas of interest. within the library and archives profession there are various programs and initiatives dedicated to supporting new generations of racially and ethnically diverse librarians and archivists, programs such as the association of research libraries (arl) kaleidoscope program, the arl/society of american archivists mosaic program, the american library association spectrum scholarship program, and the university of arizona knowledge river program. each of these programs, and other programs like these, offer mlis students of color scholarships or paid employment, mentoring, leadership and professional development opportunities, and career placement assistance. additionally, the association of college and research libraries (acrl) diversity alliance is a group of institutions with post-mlis residency programs also dedicated to supporting librarians and archivists of color to succeed and thrive within the profession. these programs exist as part of various equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives within the library and archives profession on the national level, through both the american library association and the society of american archivists, to address the whiteness of the profession, both in demographics and culture (strand, 2019). for these initiatives to fully develop and be impactful, institutions on the local level need to understand their culture and environment in order to consider implementation of a program that supports mlis students of color.   on the local level, at the oregon state university libraries (osul), we have hosted numerous mlis students over the years in paid positions, for credit internships, and practicums to offer a variety of work experiences, learning opportunities, and mentorship as they enter into the profession. in the mid-2010s, as part of the osul’s 2012-2017 strategic plan our institution recognized diversity as a core value with a goal to “sustain an intentional and inclusive organization” and an action item to “increase the diversity of the osu libraries and press workforce.” we recognized that our library had never proactively and systemically engaged in the recruitment, employment, and retention of mlis students of color. however, we also recognized that this was not a box to be checked, and that we needed to think holistically about our libraries’ environment and culture and how it would impact mlis students of color working with us, especially considering that our own library is a reflection of a majority white profession (ala diversity counts). we knew that we could not ignore the implicit and explicit systemic racism, the white supremacy narrative, and whiteness as a culture that exists within our library and is a reflection of our profession and our society.    the work of social justice, equity, and inclusion is not a short-term investment by a limited number of people; instead, it should be a part of every library and librarian’s work. though “it is clear that the information professions are now in the midst of a conversation about whiteness…not everyone is participating, and many remain unaware that the conversation is happening” (espinal et al., p. 149). we each need to do our part. hence, it was essential for the osu libraries, especially those of us involved in the process to create a program dedicated to employing mlis students of color, to understand the systems and histories of oppression, as well as the culture of whiteness, within our state, our university, our library, and ourselves. while the bulk of this article is dedicated to an in-depth explanation of the development and implementation of our diversity scholars program to support mlis students of color, we will first share information about our local context, specifically the ongoing equity, diversity, and inclusion work within our library, as well as the professional literature that addresses these issues.     who we are both the state of oregon and oregon state university have a dark history in their treatment of people of color as well as lgbtqia communities. past state and local laws excluded people of color from land ownership, prevented marriage between whites and those of other races and ethnic backgrounds, and discouraged immigration and permanent settlement by non-whites. (millner and thompson, 2019). however, in resistance to the societal and governmental racism endured, indigenous peoples and people of color in oregon formed community and organizational networks to retain and share their cultural heritage. within oregon, there are community archives, such as the portland chinatown museum and the gay and lesbian archives of the pacific northwest, as well as community led groups to research and share history, such as the oregon black pioneers. there are a number of advocacy groups including, but by no means limited to, the native american youth and family center, the urban league of portland, and pineros y campesinos unidos del noroeste. for us, it is essential to understand the history of our state, as well as the current community initiatives occurring in our state, because this is the environment in which our institution and our library exists. the history of and ongoing systemic injustices and white supremacy on the state level is deeply embedded and active on the local level. within the state’s context, osu is a pwi (a predominantly white institution is an institution of higher learning in which people who identify as white account for 50% or greater of the student enrollment or the institution is understood as historically white) within a predominantly white state. in the 2019 academic year, students of color accounted for just over 26% of the population of just over 31,000 students. this number mirrors oregon’s 2019 population estimate of 26% people of color living in the state. however, the faculty and staff from underrepresented groups is very low in comparison. as examples, of the tenure track, instructor, and research faculty, individuals from underrepresented groups range between 4.8-6.7% and of the professional faculty and classified staff, the range is only slightly higher at about 9%. (oregon state university strategic plan 4.0 metrics 2018-2019). the osu libraries on the main campus in corvallis—with two branch libraries, one on the coast and one in central oregon—employs about 90 faculty and staff, along with about 140 student employees. our library matches the university’s demographics in being a predominantly white identifying library staff, though we often have a majority of underrepresented groups in our student employees.  both the osu campus and the library have, and continue to be, engaged in actions to change the whiteness culture. one of the actions brook, ellenwood & lazzaro suggest libraries can take is to “provide library staff with ongoing opportunities to participate in trainings and other professional development activities that build knowledge of their own cultural backgrounds and assumptions, the racial and ethnic diversity of the campus community, and the history of oppression, power, and privilege experienced by various groups” (p. 276). in recent years, osu has been engaging with and revealing its history through educational initiatives, such as a building names evaluation and renaming process that renamed buildings originally named after individuals who were white supremacists, as well as the university’s social justice education initiative (sjei) that includes sjei workshops which examine of the existing systemic and institutionalized racism in oregon and at osu, and the workshops ask participants to understand “how did we get here, how do you locate yourself in this story, and why does social justice matter?” osu also has a search advocate program that trains individuals to participate in search committees to promote equity, validity, and diversity on osu searches. “the goals for diversity and inclusion in librarianship must be expanded to include recruitment, retention, and promotion” (espinal et al.,  p. 155) and hence why this search advocate program is critical to make changes holistically on our campus. in connection to the osu libraries, the special collections and archives research center was deeply involved in buildings evaluation and renaming process, our library director strongly encourages all library staff and faculty to participate in the sjei workshops as a part of their work, and though not required by the university, the osu libraries strives for all of its searches to have a search advocate and many librarians are search advocates. the continual offerings of social justice trainings, invited library speakers such as dr. safiya umoja noble, and the search advocate community of practice all help continual growth and learning as the majority in our library have participated. we often follow up with discussions at library meetings on how to apply what we learned, helping us to “work collectively to understand racial microaggressions and to mitigate their impact” (brook, et al., p. 276). we have also hosted numerous book groups to discuss and grow as espinal et al. states that we must educate our (white) selves through readings (p. 159). titles discussed have included waking up white by debby irving and white fragility by robin d’angelo. both book clubs have allowed us to discuss and be self reflective on our own whiteness and changes we could make in our institution and personal work. osu also knows that it has a lot more work to do and recently launched a campaign – we have work to do – pushing this messaging throughout campus, acknowledging there is not one solution or checkbox, but a need for constant reflective practice and concrete actions. additionally, the osu difference, power, and discrimination (dpd) program works with faculty across all fields and disciplines at osu to develop inclusive curricula that address institutionalized systems of power, privilege, and inequity in the united states. several osu librarians have completed this program as well as work collaboratively with professors who teach dpd courses. within the library, librarians on staff have been observant and intentional in making systematic changes within our library classification, working on adding local headings to change controversial and outdated and often racist subject headings. and, librarians have also been collaborating with community groups to host events such as wikipedia editathon: writing pacific northwest african american history into wikipedia – another way the library is attempting to make systematic changes to our inherent whiteness in libraries.  while these initiatives show ways the osu libraries is growing and working towards combating its whiteness, it is essential for the members of any group thinking of beginning a program to support mlis students of color, to not only participate in these initiatives, but to be very self-reflective in their own identities and privilege. before engaging in a process to research, develop, and implement our program, we had to make sure that we did the work to educate ourselves.       beth: as a young child growing up in the baltimore area, i recall my mom saying she was embarrassed to be white and how terrible it was to be black in this county, reflecting on the injustices people of color face daily, taking me to marches or protesting. she was getting her degree while teaching in a head start program in baltimore city schools, learning and being mentored there as one of only two white people in the school. i don’t remember ever not thinking about racism as a problem in america, but i was hopeful others were like me and my family, accepting people for who they are, not thinking about skin color, helping your community and those in need, and accepting that change was slowly happening. as i got older, i began to realize that racism was deeply embedded in all systems, including librarianship. i learned that it is unhelpful to be colorblind, ignoring the hidden systems of whiteness and racism, and instead, action is needed to speak up, call people out, and continually grow myself. as a white cisgendered female tenured administrator and head of the library experience and access department at oregon state university libraries since 2015, i have more power and influence to actually make inroads to changes in our systems. in my over 20 years in libraries i have worked in various places and positions, but mentoring students, especially mlis students, has been part of whatever job i had and is my passion. based on many experiences throughout my career, and especially during my time at the university of north carolina at greensboro with the diversity resident program, i was able to help create our diversity scholars program and continue on as a committee to mentor the scholars, grow the program, and advocate for both.  natalia: as a latinx cisgender woman interested in pursuing a career in librarianship, specifically within special collections and archives, i was overjoyed to learn that in my home area of southern arizona, the university of arizona knowledge river program specialized in educating information professionals regarding the needs of latinx and native american communities. my experiences as an mlis student in the knowledge river program, including the mentorship i received from both librarians of color and white allies, the paid job opportunities offered through the program, the professional development funds to attend conferences, and the overall experience of being in a cohort of supportive peers, all effectively prepared and empowered me to begin my post-mlis career. my primary job as the curator of the oregon multicultural archives and osu queer archives, a position i have held since late 2010, is to collaborate with lgbtqia and communities of color to empower them to preserve, share, and celebrate their stories. within my position, i have supervised numerous graduate students on various archival projects. in 2015, i co-founded the diversity scholars program committee, and i am the supervisor of the diversity scholars. in order to create an environment in which mlis graduate students can thrive, i use both the lessons learned from others within the profession via conference presentations and publications, as well as reflection upon my own experiences as a knowledge river scholar to inform the ways in which i shape the diversity scholars program. over the course of my life i have been both othered and experienced privilege, i have experienced microaggressions and have made mistakes myself. i actively engage in social justice trainings and conversations, as well as recognize that fully understanding my identities is a process and a life-long journey.        due to our previous professional experiences and personal passions, a significant role for both of us is to ensure that the next generation of librarians includes more people of color who are well supported as they start their careers. as there will always be more mlis students, we also see our role as ensuring that the diversity scholars program is holistically integrated into our library so that even if we moved on to other positions in our careers, the program would remain.   literature review there is a great deal of literature on programs similar to the dsp, as well as the need for the profession to recruit and support more librarians of color. while decades worth of literature exists, for the purposes of our review, we will focus on the publications that most inspired and helped shape our program, and we will specifically highlight a few key publications from within the last five years that we feel are must reads for those considering implementing a similar program.  in order to have a foundation of knowledge for ourselves and to effectively advocate for the need for the dsp, we read publications that addressed the profession’s overwhelming whiteness, not just in staffing demographics, but in the profession’s culture of whiteness and the various systems of oppression working in tandem that continue to perpetuate whiteness. as april hathcock aptly states, “it is no secret that librarianship has traditionally been and continues to be a profession dominated by whiteness.” (hathcock, 2015) additionally, to learn more and see statistics on this read any of the following: galvan, 2015; bourg, 2014; beilin, 2017; roy, et al., 2006; boyd, et al., 2017; pho & masland, 2017; mcelroy & diaz, 2015; chang, 2013. whiteness permeates numerous aspects of our profession. scholars such as angela galvan (2015) and april hathcock (2015) bring to light the myriad ways whiteness is embedded more implicitly within our profession through our recruitment and job application processes, and they offer excellent methods to interrogate and interrupt whiteness within those processes. jennifer vinopal (2016) builds upon their work by offering various methods for the profession to go “from awareness to action” as her article title notes.  she advocates for libraries, specifically library leaders, to take on action items such as, but not limited to, creating opportunities for meaningful conversations about equity, diversity, and inclusion; include diversity initiatives in strategic plans and ensure time and support for staff to accomplish them; and proactively recruit job candidates and then follow through with mentoring and professional development opportunities. all of these scholars reference how the race and ethnicity demographics of the profession do not match many of the communities we serve and the profession’s continued failure to address institutional cultures that maintain this dynamic. in response to the ongoing imbalance in our professional culture, boyd. et al. (2017) states, “deliberate and strategic action must be taken to recruit, mentor, and retain new librarians from diverse backgrounds to further increase these numbers in the profession.” (p. 474)  there are various publications detailing the “how tos” of designing residency programs and positions dedicated to recruiting, supporting, and retaining  people of color as part of diversity initiatives to change the demographics of the profession (boyd, blue, & im; mcelroy & diaz; brewer;  chang; pho &  masland; dewey & keally; cogell & gruwell and many more), so we highlight only a few key pieces. while beilin notes that even with the many diversity initiatives of the past and present “the demographics of librarianship have hardly shifted over the last generation,” he follows that statement by saying, “though their absence would presumably make things much worse.” (p. 78) however, it’s not just about doing it, it’s about doing it right, so that when we recruit and hire individuals for positions to specifically support people of color, we want to ensure their work environments are such that they can thrive and choose to remain within the profession. if you are going to read one book, the 2019 book developing a residency program (practical guides for librarians) is a go-to guide for practical advice on how to develop and manage a library residency program. the book covers the processes to successfully develop, build support for and structure a program; recruitment, hiring, and onboarding; and program assessment as well as ideas for post program support for individuals who continue on in their library careers (rutledge, colbert, chiu, and alston, 2019).     additionally, there are two must-read research studies that analyze the experiences of diversity residents using both qualitative and quantitative methods to determine overarching recommendations when developing programs like the dsp.  in the first piece “evaluation of academic library residency programs in the united states for librarians of color,” the authors, boyd, blue, and im, implemented two nationwide surveys, one for residents and the other for coordinators, to determine what aspects of their positions and programs were most helpful. the survey respondents included individuals who were currently residents as well as those who had participated in a residency program in decades past and were able to reflect how their experiences shaped their careers. based on the data gathered and analyzed, the authors state that the need for institutional buy-in, a structured and formal mentoring program, the use of cohorts to transfer knowledge, and the need to facilitate socialization for residents, especially to create a sense of belonging and value, are all essential program components. the authors state that it is “[t]hese components [that] benefit the residents in priming them for a career in academic libraries and all of the impending challenges librarians of color face.” (boyd, et al. 2017, p. 497) the second must-read publication is jason alston’s 2017 “causes of satisfaction and dissatisfaction for diversity resident librarians–a mixed methods study using herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory.” alston’s dissertation is a deep dive into what works and what doesn’t for a residency program that is post-mlis. alston poses eleven research questions about the quality of experience of the residency with the purpose of the study and results being so current or future residency programs can be improved. his results were similar to the previous study, stressing the need for buy-in from the institution by ensuring a knowledge of who the residents are, as well as what the program is and why it was established; appropriate guidance, support, and mentorship from coordinators, supervisors, and administrators; opportunities for individuals to perform meaningful, challenging, and innovative work that enables them to grow professionally, especially in preparation for future positions; and the need for assessment of the position and program. even though the dsp is not a post-mlis program, the results of both of these studies are still very much applicable to our program. a recurring theme in the literature is the need to create a professional culture and environment for people of color to thrive through mentorship and strong professional networks of support (hankins & juarez, 2015; boyd, et al., 2017; vinopal, 2016; pho & masland, 2014; mcelroy & diaz, 2015; dewey & kelly, 2008; black & leysen, 2020; brewer, 1997). mentoring can help with the “culture shock” (cogell & gruwell, 2001) and “otherness” (boyd, et al., p. 475) mlis students of color often feel and it helps them build bridges and connections (dewey & kelly, 2008). the chapters in the book where are all the librarians of color? the experiences of people of color in academia (2015) provide an amazing compilation of the shared experiences of academic librarians of color, but there are two chapters in particular, chapters 2 and 3, that address this need. in both chapters the authors stress the need for mentorship and continued support from professional networks so the profession can retain librarians of color who grow and succeed throughout their careers. since the dsp focuses of mlis students of color, we were especially moved by the words of loriene roy (2015) in the book’s preface when she states, “…little attention is given to the experiences of librarians of color as they transition from student to information professional” (vii) and notes that “[m]entorships are often offered as the best answer for facilitating a smooth adjustment into the workplace and further advancement within the field” (p. viii). while roy shares that “[t]here is no single route to changing the characteristics of the workforce” (p. vii), a program like the osul diversity scholars program is one of many routes that academic libraries can pursue as part of their various initiatives to change our professional culture of whiteness so it is more diverse and inclusive.      overview of the diversity scholars program (dsp) after much research and conversation, the oregon state university libraries (osul) decided to create a program to support a cohort of mlis students of color who were enrolled in an online degree program. the reasons for making this decision were context-dependent and informed through conversations within the larger academic librarian community, consulting the literature, and determining what was fiscally feasible. after nearly three years of research, committee meetings, and planning, the osul diversity scholars program started with its first scholar in january 2018, hosted its second scholar beginning in october of that same year, and is currently hosting its third scholar who began in october 2019.    established in 2015 and implemented in 2018, the diversity scholars program provides its diversity scholars with experiences in the librarianship areas of their choosing, along with opportunities for professional development, scholarship, and service within an academic library setting. the dsp at our academic library aims to contribute to creating a more diverse and inclusive library sciences field by providing mlis students of color career opportunities in academic and research libraries and archives. the dsp committee works to provide extensive support and mentorship for scholars who are pursuing their master of library and information science degree online while additionally providing paid, hands-on experience within the profession to broaden their professional opportunities after completion of their graduate degree. the diversity scholars are expected to engage in the primary assignment duties of an academic librarian. scholars are given the opportunity to experience the full scope of an academic library, working in all of our departments – from technological and public services to archives and meeting with administrators – to then be able to determine their area(s) of focus.   our scholars have engaged in a variety of experiences. they have worked with students in the library’s undergraduate research and writing studio, taught library information sessions and workshops, tabled at events such as student welcoming and oer faculty initiatives, worked the reference desk and online chat, compiled and analyzed library data, and participated in library-wide as well as relevant departmental and project meetings. as a part of developing their scholarship, the scholars have attended and presented at local oregon conferences, national ones like ala, and even an international conference. they have also served on a variety of library committees such as the library awards committee, search committees, and the library employee association. we make sure the scholars know that their mlis studies come first and they are strongly encouraged to use their work experiences for class projects. the flexibility in their schedules allows for support when and how they need it. as a conclusion to their position appointments, we mentor the scholars through the job search process. additionally, each scholar experiences the annual review process, which includes self-reflection and goal setting, and they are asked to assess their experience of the program itself.  we have strived to be mindful of isabel espinal’s statement that, in our case, the diversity scholars, “should not have to choose between technological focus [or any area of interest to them] and a diversity focus: both are future oriented and work well together. open access projects are a good example, as are digital/data curation roles and media/digital literacy efforts.” (p. 158). while encouraged, like all faculty and staff in our library, to participate in equity, diversity, and inclusivity projects, trainings, and initiatives, it is always the scholars’ specific interests that determine which projects they choose. there are cases in which their interests and this work overlap. for example, one scholar interested in the work of archivists asked to participate in the wikipedia edit-a-thons, and the other scholars interested in teaching and engagement were excited for the opportunity to participate in the university’s mi familia day for the latinx community. if the opportunities align with the scholars’ interests and project capacity, we support it, otherwise, they do not participate and are not asked to participate. it is essential for this to be communicated and emphasized by the supervisor. natalia, as their supervisor, shares her own personal experiences with the scholars to express that because of her job, she is often invited to participate in numerous initiatives, and though she appreciates being asked, she will sometimes choose to decline involvement – and that’s okay. however, it is important to recognize the vulnerable position an mlis student employee may be in, feeling like an invitation is a directive or wanting to get as much experience as possible, even when it is overwhelming. therefore, consistent and regular conversations are key to talk with scholars about their interests, especially as they change or focus over time, and it is imperative for the scholars to know that their supervisor is their advocate and can say “no” on their behalf if that is helpful.   a part of our program that is still in development, in part because it is still relatively new, is creating a robust cohort, one in which the scholars have opportunities to work together and act as peer mentors. in our particular experience so far, with only two scholars hired at one time, due to non-overlapping schedules and differing areas of professional interest, an active cohort has not yet come to fruition. additionally, in a recent remodel of the library, we decided – with input from the scholars – that instead of creating a shared workspace for the scholars to work together, they should receive individual cubicle spaces as do our other library faculty and staff. while we want the scholars to have flexibility in their schedules and agency in their own professional development, based on their feedback, we are considering ways to create a more formal structure, such as set regular group meetings and shared readings for discussion, in which collaborations and relationships can develop. notably, we do know that each new scholar contacted the previous scholar to chat with them about the program prior to applying.  the purpose of our case study is to provide a roadmap of our program, with lessons learned, for other academic libraries to consider creating a program like ours at their institution. our case study describes the research, program development, implementation, and future plans for the dsp. we will cover why and how the osul created the dsp, how the program functions, as well as current assessment practices used by the dsp committee to surface the already visible impacts of the program while we work towards the long-term goals of culture and systems change. within the article we have integrated the perspectives of the diversity scholars and the osul university librarian to create a more robust and thorough accounting of the work required to create and launch such a program.   charge & research, 2015 it is important to note that our program stemmed from the top down, as getting administration buy-in is one critical piece and we had an advocate in our leadership. in february 2020, we met with our library director, faye chadwell, donald and delpha campbell university librarian, and asked her to reflect upon her reasons for championing a program like the dsp five years ago. reflecting on the start of her own career in her first position as reference librarian in the late 1980s managing a mlis graduate fellowship for underrepresented groups at the university of south carolina, she noted that the issues are still existing today. over the years, chadwell continued to see the positive impacts of the usc fellows program, and other programs like it. when she became library director of the osu libraries in 2011, she finally had the power to implement a program to support students of color within the library profession, and she sought to do so. in the spring of 2015, our university librarian charged a team of three librarians with investigating the options that the library had to create a diversity resident librarian position. we sought to create a position to promote diversity within the profession, reflect the changing demographics among our students, and to increase opportunities for diverse candidates to explore academic librarianship. beth, a newly hired department head at osul, had come from an institution with an established diversity resident program and had worked with three different residents while there. her experience and connections at the university of north carolina at greensboro helped get the team going with researching the concept.  the team began with an environmental scan of diversity residency programs within academic libraries. luckily, through the gracious sharing of the acrl residency interest group who had already compiled a spreadsheet of academic library residencies, the team quickly got started. using the spreadsheet, we each dove into a section to research more information we needed from the list of schools and programs, both looking online as well as contacting librarians at those institutions directly. we noticed most residencies are post-mlis with a few exceptions, such as the university of arizona knowledge river program that focuses on current mlis students. we also discovered two interesting initiatives we could glean from: nufp and kaleidoscope. the nationwide student affairs program nufp (naspa’s undergraduate fellows program) states “by mentoring students from traditionally underrepresented and historically disenfranchised populations, this semi-structured program diversifies and broadens the pipeline of our profession.” established in 2000 as the arl initiative to recruit a diverse workforce, renamed arl kaleidoscope in 2019, its goal is “diversifying the library profession by providing generous funding for mlis education and a suite of related benefits, including mentoring, leadership and professional development, and career placement assistance.” the short term imls funded project ala ran in 2010-2013 called discovering librarianship selected early career librarians as field recruiters, to recruit ethnically diverse high school and college students to careers in libraries. we realized, recruitment must begin with underrepresented groups into an lis program (mcelroy & diaz, 2015, p. 645; pho & masland, 2014, p. 272). this research and these programs helped guide us in our research to think beyond a post-mlis position.  from our research, we realized that talking to current and former residents themselves about their experiences was crucial. having personal connections with former residents from uncg, beth reached out and set a few virtual conversations. the team also reached out to residents, as well as some residency coordinators. these conversations offered a variety of perspectives on barriers potential programs might face, and also helped illuminate ways the residents and institutions benefitted from the programs. many residency programs, alliances, and interest groups were examined to inform the team about the typical structure and components of such programs. we also read blog posts, book chapters, and articles written by former diversity residents to provide insight into the varied experiences of individuals who have participated in programs like these.   after our six months of research, and as part of our initial charge, the team wrote a short report for the university librarian and library administration management and planning group to share their findings and offer recommendations about what might work best for our library. although we offered two options—a post mlis diversity resident program and a concurrent mlis student diversity resident program—we recommended the latter based upon feedback from current and former resident scholars, along with the makeup of already existing opportunities within librarianship. the recommendation would work to both encourage osu undergraduates to consider an mlis degree as well as find and support local mlis students of color, not post-graduates, to apply. because oregon has no in-state library masters programs, we could offer a praxis opportunity for those locally getting an online master’s degree, and focus recruitment on our local community, especially within our own undergraduate library student employees. as roy said in the summary of spectrum scholars experience, “the single most predictive indicator for choosing to enter a lis program was prior experience working in a library.” (roy, et al., 2006) additionally, because the literature states, “solo library residents can find their residencies to be overwhelming and isolating experiences, especially in the case of diversity library residents” (boyd, et al., 2017, p. 478) and other scholars mention the need for cohorts rather than solo experiences as well (alston;  hankins & juarez; perez & gruwell; dewey & keally), we strongly recommended that the program be cohort based; and, if not more than one person could be hired at time, the hires’ appointments would at least overlap to offer opportunities for peer mentorship and collaboration. our library administration agreed, and a call went out to recruit volunteers for the next phase of the dsp creation process. by november 2015, a dsp committee had been formed; it consisted of two members from the original team that wrote the report, as well as three new members, including natalia.  as part of our recent interview with the university librarian we asked her the following two questions: what advice would you offer administrators who are unsure about starting a program like the dsp? what advice to librarians would you offer so they can advocate a program like the dsp to their administrators? based on our conversation, as well as our own experiences in the research phase, below are some lessons learned:  determine the library’s priorities regarding equity, diversity, and inclusion (edi) work:  a commitment to edi initiatives cannot be a box that is checked off or a one-off program or workshop; the work needs to be integrated into all departments with a systematic and cultural shift. with edi initiatives as a priority, then the entire library administration and staff need to dedicate resources and time to concrete action items to move those initiatives forward. administrators can charge and support a group to conduct research and offer options for what would work best in their institutional context to support mlis students of color.   if there is pushback from some within the library that ask why the entire library is spending so much time and energy on a few people who are not permanent, there needs to be administrative support and an overall library culture that understands and advocates for these positions because they are for the greater good of the institution and the profession.  do your research: seek out literature specifically written by scholars of color; and, beyond reading the literature, try reaching out to people who have been in residencies for advice. attend webinars or panels of residents/scholars and talk with library program coordinators. review the acrl diversity standards for cultural competencies for academic libraries. ask yourselves: what is happening in your campus community? what resources, partners, funding already exist? consider all possible options and potentially a phased approach if funding or buy-in is not completely there yet. don’t be afraid to pilot it or experiment.   seek administrative support as well as advocates within your library staff: whether you are library staff or an administrator, informally chat with colleagues about your research to gauge their interest and capacity, as well as plant the seeds for them to support future scholars. it is not a glorified internship; a scholar is to be treated as a colleague. getting advocates and buy-in from all departments is critical since not only are administrations involved in the decision making but library staff will be working with the scholars.  determine what motivates your administrator – is it data? is it values? what does it mean for the library, campus, community? administrators tend to be competitive; one approach can be to frame the creation of a program at your institution as the opportunity for them to be the “first” or a “model” for other institutions.     ask your administrator to talk to other library administrators about their approaches, what worked and what did not, for creating and funding these positions.  development, november 2015 – december 2017 during the research phase, we were especially inspired by april hathcock’s 2015 article “white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis” in which she explains how diversity programs, especially the application process, are coded to promote whiteness, and the need to mentor early career librarians in both navigating and dismantling whiteness within the profession. the full cycle of our program was critically important: our recruitment and application process to encourage people of color to pursue a career in librarianship, the program experience itself to include a strong mentorship competent, support in the job search for program participants, and continued support in the post-mlis experience. with this insight, the dsp committee officially launched in november 2015, with weekly meetings beginning in january 2016. the committee’s task was to pick up where the previous group’s work left off and develop a plan to make the proposal for a program a reality. the main “to dos” included brainstorming the program logistics, creating a position description, and planning recruitment strategies. committee members reviewed the previous group’s report, read key pieces of literature on residency programs, and reviewed a variety of existing residency program position descriptions. we also spoke with our university’s office of equity and inclusion and human resources department about the creation of this type of position, especially for someone who would have been enrolled in an out of state graduate program while employed for osu. we created a space on our library’s wiki to document the committee’s work. beyond the administrative aspects of the program, we also used time in meetings to allow for discussion, growth, understanding and sometimes emotional releases as we supported each other to unpack the systematic whiteness found embedded in so much we do.  together, we brainstormed the ways in which we could best frame and implement our program to address the issues hathcock addresses, both in the shortand long-term vision of the program. we asked ourselves “what would success look like for this program, in both the shortand in the long-term?” we knew that 10-15 years from now, we would still want the program to exist, for the program participants to be connected, and for the program to be so embedded in our library that it would outlive us in our positions.  in order to more fully develop our program ideas, the committee decided to develop a one-time paid 10-week undergraduate student internship during the summer of 2016. the internship experience served as a pilot for our proposed program and based on the questions raised and discussions we had, the dsp committee further developed the program structure and developed recruitment ideas. some initial insights included:  we learned that it would be ideal to have more than one scholar at a time. however, we knew that we would have to balance this desire with our budget and attempt at least some overlap in the position time periods.  we determined that if we wanted to hire mlis students, we could realistically only hire them to work 20 hours per week so they could also attend school full time if they chose to do so.  additionally, knowing that graduate students often want to take an internship, catch up on classes, or vacation in the summer, we did not want to have them locked into a 12-month position so we considered a shorter time frame with the ability to come back for a second year.  we settled on a position that would be a 9-month appointment, but only 30 weeks of work during that time period, that could be renewed for a second 9-month appointment for a total program length of 18 months, with the option for an extension. this year and a half could potentially have a 3-month break in between if scholars chose to do a summer internship elsewhere or potentially do a special project internship in our library. we aimed for flexible schedules for the varying needs of our scholars—and spoke with our university librarian to also be able to add an extra 3 months if needed to assist scholars until graduation. in addition to their salary and full health care benefits, they receive $2500 in professional development funds to attend conferences or other relevant activities.  the dsp committee also had a lengthy discussion about offering benefits with a half-time position. our university librarian gave us a set amount of funds for the positions using soft money that could be spent at her discretion. we had to consider that since benefits through the university would mean 33% of the salary, the take home pay we could offer the scholars would be lower than a position without full benefits. it was disappointing to lower the salary but offering benefits seemed the socially just thing to do; and the fact that our scholars would be taking online degree programs not within our state, they generally would not be offered health care benefits from their schools. the scholars are part time; if they were full time, they would make less than an entry level position within the osul. we hoped with added benefits of our program, it would outweigh the lower salary even though the cost of living in corvallis, oregon is fairly high. we also hoped once the program was running, we could get more permanent funds and offer a higher salary.  to develop the diversity scholar position description, we used the template for library faculty positions. the ds position description is formatted as it is for our tenure-track librarians; the scholars would have a “primary assignment” but also service and scholarship components, divided at 75%, 10%, and 15% respectively. the expectation was for them to attend library-wide and relevant departmental meetings, serve on library committees and searches, attend and present at conferences, and participate in other relevant professional development activities. we would offer the scholars adequate funds toward these professional development activities such as traveling to conferences or workshops. as diversity scholars, they would each have their own cubicle space and be treated as colleagues. the next portion of our program development, which was the most time consuming, was working with the university human resources team to determine what classification our scholars would be. over the course of the spring and summer of 2017, we researched classification options and spoke with various hr folks to ensure the classification we selected included health care coverage options, were paid via a stipend to offer scheduling flexibility, had a streamlined hiring and reappointment process, and could include additional money for professional development activities via the library.  we created an internal report with our new information and began sharing our idea of the program with library administration and other colleagues, to grow an understanding of the goals for the program, and to seek advice and ideas to strengthen the program. the goal was to have the majority of the departments in the library represented by members of the committee, who serve as advocates for the program, as well as mentors and personal contacts for the scholars. the committee would assist in recruiting potential scholars and send weekly updates to the library’s administrative group to keep them excited and updated about the program. we began attending library-wide administrative meetings and library management team meetings during the late fall. we especially sought the support of department heads to ensure communication to their departments and hear any concerns. with a finalized budget, we received approval from the university librarian in fall 2017 to move forward with the recruitment and hiring process for our first scholar.    we developed an application process that focused on relationship building with potential applicants and presented as few barriers as possible. rather than a competitive process, we wanted to cultivate mutual interest. we developed a pre-application requirement to have an in-person or video call meeting with a member of the diversity scholars program committee to share information about the program, answer any questions the potential applicant may have, offer our assistance with applications for mlis programs, and importantly, give the potential applicant an opportunity to get to know us. the application process requires a resume and cover letter with reference contact information, but no letters of recommendation since obtaining letters can be prohibitive for potential applicants and the committee preferred to have the opportunity to speak directly with references. references can be professors, employers, and/or community mentors, broadly defined.        all libraries conduct their budgeting differently; in our case we did not have a set budget for the program (other than the salary and professional development). because we devoted the time and energy to speaking with department heads one-on-one, presenting at faculty and staff gatherings, and updating the library management team to share information about the dsp before the program began, a significant amount of buy-in existed to support the program. therefore, when we made particular asks to use existing departmental budgets that aligned with what we needed, departments were willing and eager to be supportive. our emerging technologies and services department bought the scholars’ laptops and other equipment; our teaching and engagement department provided office supplies and cubicle space; our library administration covered the costs of printing promotional brochures; and our library experience and access department covered nametags and business cards. budgeting in this way adds to the buy-in for all departments—now the dsp is integrated into all departments.  promotion and recruitment were the next steps, and for us, that meant local. we started simply and inexpensively, using word-of-mouth marketing to recruit through the library staff, library student employees, campus partners who work with students of color, and reaching out to osu library alums, such as former student workers. we reached out to the emporia state university mlis hybrid program in portland to ask if there were any students coming into the program who would be a good match for the dsp and lived within a commutable to corvallis area. using an easily editable libguide from springshare as our dsp website, along with our current internal wiki space for the communication and documentation of the committee, we began our recruitment and promotion. we also began creating a brochure in-house with student designers. because we do not have the funds to assist with relocation costs, the committee felt it would be a disservice to ask someone to move to corvallis with no promise of assistance with moving costs. at least for the start of the dsp, we purposely refrained from advertising the program too broadly, and instead focused on geographically local promotion and recruitment. therefore, our recruits have been students who are already living in the corvallis commuter area. we wanted to start small, develop effective strategies and models for the first few years, with the plan to expand our recruitment as the program gr0ws, and more broadly promote the program through various networks such as the oregon library association and the reforma oregon chapter. another challenge to recruitment is that because there is no in-state mlis program in oregon, the students we are recruiting into the profession pay out-of-state tuition costs. therefore, it is essential for us as a committee to not only let students know of scholarship opportunities, but to actively help them in the application process—which we have done with some success. so far, the first two diversity scholars have been selected as ala spectrum scholars, and the third scholar has received several scholarships.  lessons learned  be prepared to have conversations with hr. the hr process on campus takes a long time—plan for it, including talking to multiple people in hr, doing your own research around campus for position types, and being creative! though the role of hr will vary at different institutions, this is as much a critical piece as other phases, as for a truly socially just position you must make sure you get the right category in your institution’s structure; and also stick to your values and push back when you need to and can.  connect with in-state library school masters programs for a potential collaborative partnership and help advertise your program when people are applying to their program; also learn how they recruit. if your state does not have an in-state library school master’s program, connect with online programs; determine if any of their students are local to your geographic region or if they can pass the word to their students directly.  consider your existing campus partnerships, especially those who work with undergraduate students of color, who can serve as advocates and recruiters for your program. your current and former library student employees are perfect for these conversations too.  benefits and professional development funding matters. be consistent with the edi values of the program so it does not seem like an exploitation; for us that meant not creating a part-time position with no benefits and no professional development funds. even if your administration is on board with the position, you might still have to push for these specifics.      implementation, january 2018 – present as we shifted into the implementation phase of the program in january 2018, we recruited our first scholar via word of mouth – she was a local, former osu student, and she was already accepted into an online library master’s degree program. we heard about our first scholar, marisol moreno ortiz, through a contact in the university’s educational opportunities program. we reached out to invite her to meet up and talk about this new program we were growing. knowing it was a program we were just developing and might need iterations, we were looking for our first scholar to take the plunge with us. having existing relationships and trust already established from marisol’s use of the library as an osu alum made it an easy transition for us all. she knew and loved our libraries and was excited for the opportunity to work with us as she learned and grew through her online program.  an essential part of the program implementation was to identify the point person for the program. it made sense for natalia, as the committee co-chair who was already tenured, to serve in the role. in preparation for the role, she attended manager and supervisor trainings offered by the university and had numerous conversations with colleagues who are supervisors to learn from them as well. as a tenure track faculty member, she participated in the library’s formal mentoring program as a mentee, and after being tenured, served as a mentor. she received a pay raise for supervisory work, and now helps facilitate the day to day details of the program like working with hr, facilitating committee meetings, and supervising the scholars. as program coordinator she also leads the way with the mentorship, meeting weekly with the scholar and helping guide them, pulling in the committee as needed. this mentorship takes time, with a lot of informal conversations to help the scholar navigate the system of a large library. since the overall goal of the program is to allow flexibility for the scholar while they get to sample the library as a whole, seeing all parts and pieces to help determine areas they are more interested in learning more about, developing departmental buy-in has been key to the success of this program. the program coordinator is also the key communicator and advocate. natalia keeps the library’s administration, including department heads, updated regularly on the program, and meets both formally and informally with them to ensure the projects and activities of the scholars in other departments are going well. she sometimes meets directly with the university librarian, which sometimes includes an “ask” for special funding or other changes.   the program is set up on a rotation for the first quarter through about six departments (instruction, public services, emerging technologies, acquisitions and cataloging, special collections and archives, and administration). as we are on a 10-week quarter system, we divide the first term for the scholars so that the first week or two the scholar starts their onboarding, and then they rotate through a department for either one or two weeks. the goal of these weeks is to soak in what each department does, how individual staff or units play a role, to observe and shadow, and to reflect and ask questions. as they get to know the departments and the staff, they inherently learn about projects, processes, tasks and activities of interest to them. then, throughout the rest of their appointment, the scholars have the autonomy to determine which projects, and in which departments, they would like to pursue. a scholar is not tied to one department or project for the rest of their time at osu, so while the initial rotation period may seem relatively short, they have adequate time to dive deep into various areas over their time at osu libraries. until their official email and calendar is set up, we use a google doc to create a schedule for the department heads to choose a week, and the staff to invite the scholar to meetings, appointments, visits, shadowing, q&a, observing, or events. we use the dsp committee to help advocate in our individual departments with support from the library leadership team. getting all department heads on board is critical. the scheduling begins before the scholar starts so we have many learning opportunities set up in advance. scholars typically meet one-on-one with staff and faculty within a department to learn more about what they do, as well as attend unit and departmental meetings.  after this first term of rotation, the scholars begin picking projects or areas they want to immerse more heavily into for future terms. the dsp supervisor chats with the scholar about their project preferences, as well as colleagues and department heads to determine capacity, and then facilitates conversations to ensure a mutually beneficial experience. for example, if the scholar wants instruction and outreach experience, we have conversations with the teaching and engagement department about opportunities that could match each scholar’s interest. because the scholar is on a 9-month appointment with the option for a reappointment, we discuss the timing of opportunities not only for projects, but for service and professional development as well.  while the program is structured to treat the scholars as colleagues of our academic librarians, the reality is they are not being paid at that level, so while we want them to have the same experiences as academic librarians, it is essential for us to not use them to cover the duties of someone at a much higher pay scale. we try to find the balance to this by making sure that the activities and projects the scholars take on are of their choosing and help them in building the resume they want that will benefit them in their future career. we discuss what types of positions they would like to have, look at job postings to determine what qualifications are required and preferred, and set out to develop opportunities to create relevant experiences for them. additionally, one of the main priorities of the dsp committee is to be their advocate while also empowering them to advocate for themselves. we have conversations with them about the politics of not only the inner workings of our library, but of the profession as a whole.  something that occurred with our first diversity scholar that we have begun to replicate, and intend to continue to do with future scholars, is to assist with the job search process. our first scholar graduated in the month of may and her appointment with the dsp was set to end in the month of june. together, we determined that the best use of the her time during her last 10 weeks in the program was to search for and apply for jobs. essentially, her job became to find a job. we discussed what types of jobs she desired, sent her postings, reviewed her resume and cover letters, prepped her for phone and on-campus interviews, and debriefed interview experiences. as their supervisor, natalia wrote letters of recommendation and served as a reference. she is currently employed at a community college library. our second scholar’s appointment ended several months prior to her graduation, but the same process applied. even after moving out of state, the dsp has kept in communication to support her job search process as she completes her mlis program later this year. the current diversity scholar will graduate in 2021. while there is the possibility of our scholars’ positions turning into permanent positions, the dsp committee has discussed how this could be accomplished in a more proactive matter. to date, we have had to balance the osul positions available at the time of the diversity scholars’ appointment end date and the interest of a diversity scholar in those positions.  assessing the dsp and measuring its success there are many ways to measure success. when we spoke with our university librarian about her view of success, she expressed that since our program is so new, we need time to truly assess its value and its effect on the multi-generations within our library setting; we need to ask ourselves if our library culture is shifting and growing along with the scholars. additionally, she posed questions such as: is success just a good experience in the program? is it a high number of interviews for a job? is it about quick job placement? is it whether or not they find employment in an area of their choosing? is it long-term retention in the profession? what about how the program impacts each individual scholar: how do they measure success for themselves? moreover, how does the program, specifically the scholars’ projects and accomplishments, add value to the library? is it all of these elements combined? because the systematic whiteness of our profession has been ongoing for so long, the difficulty in assessing the impact on the field of librarianship literally will just take time (alston, 2017, p. 212)  in order to document the many measures of success of our program we are continuously working on developing and implementing meaningful assessment. as of now, we ask the scholars to maintain reflective journals and write self-evaluations of their work, and as their supervisor, natalia seeks input from their peers. we survey the scholars’ project supervisors and department heads who observed or worked with the scholar while in their units, both about the program and about the scholar. the scholars also give a presentation at the end of their appointment to the entire library staff about their experiences in the program. we use all the feedback gathered to evolve and improve the program experience for our next scholars.  the dsp scholars and their perspectives on the program our first diversity scholar completed her 18-month appointment in the program in june of 2019, our second scholar wrapped up her appointment in march of 2019, and our third scholar started in october of 2019. at least 2 scholars overlap each other in their appointments. all three of the diversity scholars – marisol moreno ortiz, bridgette flamenco (née garcia), and valeria dávila gronros – are latinx women in their mid-to-late 20s, and two of the three scholars were library student employees and osu undergrads. a section of the dsp website titled “meet the osul diversity scholars” includes short biographies of each scholar. the first two scholars chose to focus on teaching and engagement, as well as public services activities, and our third scholar has an interest in archives, specifically audio/visual materials.  in mid-march of 2020, we conducted a focus group with the three scholars to assess the dsp, from their collective perspective. it was the first time all three were together to provide feedback about the dsp. while our third scholar was only six months into her appointment, the first scholar had already finished up the program and graduated and the second was ending her time with us in two weeks to relocate and wrap up her online degree. even though we had already asked them to reflect on the dsp as part of their individual self-reflections, we wanted an opportunity for the three of them to connect and have ideas flow between them while we listened first and then conversed together about their experiences. we explained that their collective responses would be used as part of this article. we asked them to share their thoughts on the positive aspects of the program, what could be improved, and what “success” looks like for the dsp. we took notes and compiled their collective responses.  it is essential for us to acknowledge that there was a power differential between us and the scholars that more than likely hindered their responses, especially any negative feedback they may have had but did not feel comfortable sharing. because of our roles, we are in a position to act as references and write letters of recommendation for them. while it may have worked better to have someone else conduct the focus group, the scholars would still know that what they expressed would be shared with us and due to their unique experiences within the dsp, their responses could still have been identifiable. while we wanted to include their perspectives as a part of this article and the focus group was the method we used, moving forward we will work on different approaches to gathering feedback. additionally, this is why it is so important for anyone who coordinates a program like the dsp or would like to start a program, to read the previous literature as well as qualitative and quantitative studies on a larger sample of scholars that does not identify them. by reading other perspectives outside of your institutions, you can gain a better understanding of the issues that may be impacting the people within programs like the dsp that for many reasons, may not be able to fully share their experiences and thoughts with their colleagues and supervisors.     for the focus group discussion, we asked three questions: what were some of your positive experiences about the program? what do you wish would have been different about the dsp and should be changed? what do you consider “success” for the dsp? below are their collective responses:  what were some of your positive experiences about the program? one scholar expressed her appreciation that the program is structured so that each department is willing and ready to support the scholars and the program: she recognized the buy-in from all of the departments and how willing people were to work with her and train her. she also appreciated the opportunity to meet with our university librarian, to be able to talk with her to receive career advice from someone in a high-level administrative position. two of the scholars agreed that the autonomy and scheduling flexibility offered by the program enabling them to choose and develop their own projects, and for colleagues to offer them projects, was a positive for them. to expand on this idea, one scholar noted how helpful it was to be able to connect her dsp work to her mlis courses and vice versa; both experiences were enriched. an unexpected positive was how they appreciated access to osul resources, interlibrary loan for example, that they were not able to obtain from the libraries connected to their online mlis programs. all of the scholars noted how invaluable the professional development opportunities were to them, especially the opportunity to travel to regional and national conferences, and in one case, an international conference. they indicated that they would not have had the resources to attend conferences without the funds provided by the dsp. they expressed how much they learned in terms of navigating professional conferences, networking, and experiencing new cities.      what do you wish would have been different about the dsp and should be changed?  all three scholars noted that the monthly stipend is low but did state that a paid position helped them cover the costs of their graduate programs. additionally, all three scholars had recommendations for improving the structure of the program including: a recommendation that the program be extended, perhaps to a 21-month appointment or even a full two years to coincide with the time it takes to complete their mlis degree; the request to be paired with an official mentor within a department of their choosing to receive more dedicated support in their areas of interest; the idea to create a visual timeline of a scholar’s appointment with expectations, goals, and outcomes, broken down showing the program as a whole.  it was pleasing to hear that some of the recommendations offered were already in place. for example, our first scholar noted that her first ten weeks were very overwhelming—something she expressed during her time in the program. for our next two scholars we took great care to ensure their onboarding period was much more manageable. our most recent scholar requested that we offer them more opportunities to not only attend conferences, but to present at them. our first two scholars indicated that the program does encourage this, but more so in the second year and that this was beneficial since by their second year, they had more experience and confidence.       before moving on to the final question, natalia stated that she and beth always envisioned the dsp being a cohort program, but that the focus group was the first time all three scholars were together. she stated that now that there are three dsp scholars who have completed or are currently in the program, and as the program continues to expand, we can create more of a cohort environment. she asked how they would like to see that accomplished. they offered a number of great suggestions including: developing more structured meeting opportunities, especially as part of the onboarding process; offering opportunities to connect with past scholars, via conference calls if in-person gatherings is not an option; and creating a mentorship program within the dsp itself so that each scholar mentors the scholar hired after them.  what do you consider “success” for the dsp? perhaps not surprisingly, all three scholars described success in relation to their employment: this includes mentorship for navigating the job search process, securing employment in their areas of interest, and long-term retention in the profession. one of the scholars expressed a part of the program’s success is how, through experience, the program gives the scholars an understanding of an academic work environment. additionally, she noted that the scholars enter the profession with an extensive network of individuals they can call upon when needed. and lastly, and perhaps most touching to us, one of the scholars shared that the program helped her build her professional library identity and helped her see herself as a librarian.  plans for the future  even in just a few years, more opportunities exist than when we started, for us as program coordinators and for our scholars to build community. the arl diversity alliance is in full swing and as members of that group, we are slowly learning the benefits (e.g. our scholars are now part of a slack channel just for current residents), and we have seen the residency interest group of acrl grow. the opportunity to connect with other resident coordinators was a big plus in august 2019, when natalia attended the first ever library diversity and residency studies (ldrs) conference in greensboro, north carolina. the conference focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion in libraries, including but not restricted to library diversity residency programs. the conference was hosted by unc greensboro in collaboration with the acrl diversity alliance and the association of southeastern research libraries (aserl). the ldrs brought together individuals from academic and public libraries, lis programs, and other interested groups. natalia gave a presentation on the dsp as part of the panel “best practices in establishing library diversity residency programs.” in the spring of 2020, the group that organized the conference published the first issue of the new journal the library diversity and residency studies journal which will no doubt become an excellent resource now and in the years to come.   our plan is to continue to support and mentor our past and current diversity scholars, and we look forward to seeing what comes next for them and are excited to begin recruitment for our fourth scholar. as more people participate in the program, we hope to build a strong network among our diversity scholars. notably, we—the two of us and the three diversity scholars—were accepted to write a chapter about the osul dsp for the upcoming book learning in action: designing successful graduate student work experiences in academic libraries. additionally, we are in conversation with our university librarian to secure permanent funding for the positions and raise the salary. we plan to work on ways to re-envision and expand the assessment of the program’s impact both for the library and for the scholars themselves. we also need to continue to practice as well as expand strategic and proactive recruitment; we have plans this year to connect with various groups on campus to speak directly with undergraduate students about the possibility of working in libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions as a potential career path. in order to ensure the program’s sustainability, we will not take our existing buy-in from colleagues for granted and will continue to advocate for the program. a long-term vision is to grow our program as a model that can be replicated in other academic libraries in oregon and the pnw, perhaps through the orbis cascade alliance, to form a much larger cohort. through poster presentations by our scholars and committee members at oregon and pacific northwest library conferences we are slowly increasing awareness.  conclusion as angela galvan powerfully states, “while recruiting initiatives and fellowships are reasonable starting points, they become meaningless gestures for institutions which screen on performing whiteness. these actions are further undermined by framing diversity as a problem to be solved rather than engaging in reflective work to dismantle institutional bias” (galvan, 2017). on its own, the dsp cannot not solve the larger problem of a culture of whiteness in the field—but it’s a contribution as part of our library and university’s various equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives that tie into the broader profession’s work. if your library is considering a program like this, you must look at the cultural environment of your institution and consider where your institution is with changing this culture of whiteness. the environment has to be such that equity, diversity, and inclusion work is encouraged and celebrated – and continuous. it is vital to remember that social justice, equity, and inclusion should be everyone’s work. it is not a one-time endeavor, a box to be checked, but a process of continual growth and reflection of the library and its campus community. as the dsp committee flows from inception to new iterations, with new scholars and new committee members, we reflect on what we did and why, rethinking, learning and growing as individuals and a committee, and hopefully an institution as well. the questioning along with enthusiasm of new members and new scholars helps us grow a better program and also make shifts while checking our own perceptions. and most importantly to our dsp, is that our scholars are getting the experiences they desire, in an environment where they can be themselves, and a culture that supports them. acknowledgements we would like to thank our two peer reviewers denisse solis and dr. latesha velez for their incredibly thoughtful suggestions, insights, and additions to reframe and strengthen our article. special thanks to our colleagues kelly mcelroy and anne-marie deitering for offering their feedback, to lindsay marlow who helped us get started with the article, and to our publishing editor ian beilin. and, a big thank you to the osu libraries diversity scholars so far marisol moreno ortiz, bridgette flamenco, and valeria dávila – this program is what it is because of you!  works cited alston, j. k.(2017). causes of satisfaction and dissatisfaction for diversity resident librarians – a mixed methods study using herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory. (doctoral dissertation). retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4080 boyd, a., blue, y., & im, s. (2017). evaluation of academic library residency programs in the united states for librarians of color. college & research libraries, 78(4), 472. https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16642/18088 beilin, ian. (2017). the academic research library’s white past and present. in gina schlesselman-tarango (ed),  topographies of whiteness: mapping whiteness in library and information science. black, w. k., & leysen, j. m. (2002). fostering success: the socialization of entry-level librarians in arl libraries. journal of library administration, 36(4), 3—27. doi:10.1300/j111v36n04_02 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/j111v36n04_0  bourg, chris (2014, march 3).the unbearable whiteness of librarianship. https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-librarianship/ brewer, j. (1997). post-master’s residency programs: enhancing the development of new professionals and minority recruitment in academic and research libraries. college & research libraries, 58(6), 528—537.  http://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/download/15247/16693  bridges, l. m., park, d., & edmunson-morton, t. k. (2019). writing african american history into wikipedia. oregon library association quarterly, 25(2), 16-21. https://doi.org/10.7710/1093-7374.1987 brook, f., ellenwood, d., & lazzaro, a. e. (2015). in pursuit of antiracist social justice: denaturalizing whiteness in the academic library. library trends, 64(2), 246–284. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2015.0048 chang, h. f. (2013). racial and ethnic librarianship in academic libraries: past, present and future. acrl 2013 conference proceedings. cogell, raquel v., & cindy a. gruwell, eds. diversity in libraries: academic residency programs. westport, ct: greenwood press, 2001. dewey, b., & keally, j. (2008). recruiting for diversity: strategies for twenty-first century research librarianship. library hi tech, 26(4), 622—629. https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=utk_libpub  espinal, i., sutherland, t., & roh, c. (2018). a holistic approach for inclusive librarianship: decentering whiteness in our profession. library trends, 67(1), 147–162. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2018.0030 galvan, angela. (2015). soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/soliciting-performance-hiding-bias-whiteness-and-librarianship/ hankins, r., & in juárez, m. (2015). where are all the librarians of color?: the experiences of people of color in academia. library juice press. hathcock, a. (2015). white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/lis-diversity/  mcelroy, kelly &  diaz, chris, (2015). residency programs and demonstrating commitment to diversity.  (46) faculty publications. https://digitalcommons.nl.edu/faculty_publications/46 millner, d. & thompson, c. (eds.). (2019). white supremacy & resistance [special issue]. oregon historical quarterly, 120(4). perez, m. z., & gruwell, c. a. (2011). the new graduate experience: post-mls residency programs and early career librarianship. santa barbara, calif: libraries unlimited. pho, a. & masland, t. (2014). the revolution will not be stereotyped: changing perceptions through diversity. in nicole pagowsky & miriam rigby, (eds), the librarian stereotype: deconstructing perceptions and presentations of information work. chicago, il: association of college & research libraries (pp. 257-282).  roy, loriene (2015). preface. in rebecca hankins & miguel juárez (eds), where are all the librarians of color?: the experiences of people of color in academia. (pp. vi-vii). library juice press. roy, loriene, et. al (2006).  bridging boundaries to create a new workforce: a survey of spectrum scholarship recipients, 1998-2003. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/sites/ala.org.advocacy/files/content/diversity/spectrum/bridgingboundaries.pdf rutledge, l., colbert, j. l., chiu, a., & alston, j. k. (2019). developing a residency program: a practical guide for librarians. rowman & littlefield. strand, karla, j. (2019). disrupting whiteness in libraries and librarianship: a reading list bibliographies in gender and women’s studies, (89)   https://www.library.wisc.edu/gwslibrarian/bibliographies/disrupting-whiteness-in-libraries/ vinopal, jennifer. (2016). the quest for diversity in library staffing: from awareness to action. in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2016/quest-for-diversity it’s not imposter syndrome: resisting self-doubt as normal for library workers training matters: student employment and learning in academic libraries 1 response pingback : journal article: “creating a library wide culture and environment to support mlis students of color: the diversity scholars program at oregon state university libraries” | lj infodocket this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the right to read: the how and why of supporting intellectual freedom for teens – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 8 oct emily calkins /6 comments the right to read: the how and why of supporting intellectual freedom for teens teen girl working in the library, photo by flickr user asheboro public library  (cc by-sa 2.0) in brief: intellectual freedom and equal access to information are central to libraries’ mission, but  libraries often fail to consider the intellectual freedom needs of teenage patrons, or lump teen patrons in with children in conversations of intellectual freedom. however, adolescence is developmentally distinct from childhood, and the freedom to access information of all kinds is vital for teen patrons. in this article, i outline the case for protecting intellectual freedom for young adults and provide practical steps libraries can take to do just that. by emily calkins introduction recently, my grandmother sent me an article by meghan cox gurdon called “the case for good taste in children’s books.” gurdon, the wall street times children’s books reviewer, has gained notoriety among young adult librarians, authors, educators, and readers for writing about (primarily decrying) the prevalence of serious, often unpleasant themes and topics in young adult literature. her 2011 article “darkness too visible” set off a firestorm in the ya world and led to the creation of #yasaves, an online movement where readers, authors, and librarians share the impact of “dark” literature on their lives. the newer article has much the same premise as the earlier one: contemporary young adult literature covers topics too lurid, too grim, and too graphic for young readers. in addition, “the case for good taste in children’s books” calls for authors, editors, and publishers to censor the contents of books for young people under the guise of quality and “good taste.” although i have plenty to say about gurdon’s arguments, this article is not a direct response to her. others have responded more eloquently than i could hope to (sherman alexie’s response, “why the best kids’ books are written in blood,” is my personal favorite). instead, this article is a call for libraries to actively and consciously defend the rights of teenager readers and library patrons, brought on by a discussion of “the case for good taste in children’s books.” while discussing gurdon’s article, i found myself repeating what i think of as the library party line on intellectual freedom for young people: parents and guardians have the right to decide what their children have access to, but they don’t have the right to decide what all children have access to. caregivers raise their children with a certain set of values. they have the right to introduce their children to materials that reflect those values and to discourage their children from accessing materials that contradict or challenge their values. whether or not we as librarians agree with those values is irrelevant; our responsibility is to provide access to a wide variety of materials representing many viewpoints and to help users find materials that fit their needs. while we remain neutral with regard to the content of library materials, libraries actively encourage caregivers to participate in their children’s intellectual lives in a variety of ways. collection development policies frequently include language that rests the responsibility for children’s library use in their guardians’ hands. early literacy programs for caregivers encourage them to read with and to their children. we also facilitate participation in more practical ways, like linking the accounts of children and their guardians. in an ideal world, creating the opportunity for guardians and their children to talk about reading together would set a precedent for conversations that continue through adolescence. it’s not that caregivers should stop being involved in their children’s’ library use and reading habits when their children reach adolescence. there may be times, however, when a young person wants or needs information to which her guardian might want to restrict access. because of the developmental needs of adolescence and libraries’ commitment to intellectual freedom, libraries should support the intellectual freedom for teenagers rather than the right of guardians to control their children’s intellectual lives. for teenagers the right to read—even materials with which adults in their lives may not be comfortable—is vitally important. literature and information are tools for teens who are developing a sense of self and beginning to explore and understand the world as individuals independent from the family in which they were raised. unfortunately, teens and teen materials are frequently targeted in efforts to censor information and restrict intellectual freedom. luckily, there are concrete steps that libraries and librarians can take to protect our adolescent patrons’ privacy and their right to intellectual freedom. access to information and adolescent development first, librarians should understand how teens and children are different and what makes intellectual freedom particularly important for adolescents. although definitions vary, adolescents are usually thought of as middle and high school students, roughly ages 12-18.1 teens and children are often lumped together in discussions of intellectual freedom. discussing “youth” as ages 0-18 fails to account for the different developmental needs of children and teenagers, and the failure to differentiate is detrimental to teens. adolescence is a time of vast neurological, physiological, emotional, and social change. teenage brains are primed for learning and more open to new experiences — more interested in novelty and new sensations — than human brains at any other point in our lifespan (for a more detailed discussion of the teen brain, see david dobb’s national geographic article). for example, only 2% of 12 year olds are sexually active, but by age 16, a third of teens have had sex, and by 18, the number grows to nearly two-thirds. developing sexuality, while notable, is just one of the many changes of adolescence. cognitive changes, including the ability to grapple with complex and abstract ideas, mean that adolescents are much more interested in questions of morality and personhood than younger children. (steinberg, p. 32). such rapid and all-encompassing change means that access to information is critical to young people. i’m using “information” in a broad sense; fictional narratives are as important as factual information for teens who are striving the understand the world around them and their place in it. establishing self-sufficiency and independence is one of the most significant outcomes of adolescence. challenging and questioning the beliefs of their family and their culture is a natural and important aspect of teens’ blossoming independence. blocking teens’ access to reading, viewing, and listening to materials stifles an opportunity for teenagers to explore viewpoints or experiences outside of the frame of influence created by their caregivers. in addition, the process of developing and asserting independence can be a difficult one for teens and guardians, and teens are often experimenting with behaviors and beliefs with which their caregivers are uncomfortable. adult discomfort is as much a part of adolescence as teen experimentation. our job as librarians is not to stand on one side or the other, but to provide access to information on a wide range of topics, depicting a wide range of experiences, so that teenagers who come to the library looking to broaden their horizons find the materials to do so. there’s an abundance of good reasons to let teenagers read about difficult and sensitive subjects. seeing their own difficult lives reflected back at them can give teens going through dark times a sense of hope and comfort. reading about lives that are different from their own can give teenagers a deeper understanding of others. studies have shown that reading literary fiction makes people empathetic. the thorniness of adolescent-guardian relationships and the importance of exploration and experimentation in adolescence means that it is not enough to establish that public libraries do not monitor or restrict what materials young people check out. public libraries should, as much as possible, treat adolescent patrons as adults with regard to their intellectual freedom and privacy. this is distinct from our treatment of young children, in that we encourage guardians to take an active role in the reading lives and their children and to monitor and censor where they deem appropriate. encouraging caregiver censorship for teens is a disservice to adolescents in a way that it is not to younger children, especially given the often-complicated relationships between young people and their guardians. knowing that teens have a developmental need for intellectual freedom, librarians should also be aware that young adults are vulnerable to attacks on their right to read and right to information. adult discomfort with the sudden maturity of teenagers means that challenges to young adult materials in public libraries, school libraries, and classroom curricula make up the vast majority of book challenges. from 1990-2009 (the most recent data available via ala’s office of intellectual freedom) the number of challenges in schools and school libraries was more than double the number of challenges in any other institution. in the same time period, “unsuited to age group” was the third most common reason given for book challenges. obviously both of these statistics include children’s as well as young adult materials. looking at frequently challenged titles lists gives a little more insight as to the breakdown of the challenges. on the 2013 list of most the ten frequently challenged titles, more than half are young adult novels (the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian, the hunger games, a bad boy can be good for a girl, looking for alaska, the perks of being a wallflower, and the bone series). two additional titles are frequently taught in high school classes or included on summer reading lists (the bluest eye and bless me ultima). the 2011 list is even heavier in young adult titles (the ttyl series, the color of the earth series, the hunger games trilogy, the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian, the alice series, what my mother doesn’t know, and the gossip girl series) with two additional titles that are classroom standards (brave new world and to kill a mockingbird). book challenges can result in lost opportunities beyond access to information and stories. rainbow rowell, whose ya novel eleanor and park was well-received by critics and teens alike, had an invitation to speak at a minnesota high school and public library rescinded after parents challenged the book. meg medina, author of  a novel about bullying called yaqui delgado wants to kick your ass, faced a similar situation in virginia. due to their minority age, relative lack of power, and the not-uncommon idea that they don’t know what’s good for them, teens are relatively powerless in the face of attacks on their intellectual freedom, although they often speak out in support of challenged books. public institutions may feel pressure to cave to the demands of tax-paying adults, but we are not serving teens’ best interests when we do so. in fact, libraries can and should be defenders of teens’ intellectual freedom. before i delve into the why and how of that assertion, i want to briefly acknowledge that i’m talking primarily about public libraries here. earlier i mentioned the standard line that guardians are responsible for the reading habits and materials of their own children, but do not have the right to dictate what other children can and can’t read. this policy is an extension of the common assertion that public libraries do not act in loco parentis, or in the role of a parent or guardian. while public libraries do not act in loco parentis, schools have a legal mandate to do exactly that. the history of schools and the doctrine is a long and complex one, and the intersection between in loco parentis and schools’ responsibility to protect the constitutional rights of students is still being negotiated. for more on this topic, see the article by richard peltz-steele included in the additional reading list at the end of the article. libraries, and particularly public libraries, occupy a space in teens’ lives that makes them uniquely suited to protect and defend teens’ intellectual freedom. teens and young people (ages 14-24) represent nearly a quarter of public library users, a larger percentage than any other age group. by the time they are middle and high school students, many teenagers are using the library independently. unlike the classroom, where topics and titles are governed by state and federal requirements, or are chosen unilaterally by the teacher, libraries offer information on virtually any topic of interest from lock-picking to the history of russian firearms (both real, non-school reference questions i’ve answered). in our collections, we have books that guardians and teachers might not provide, either because they are unaware of them or because they object to the content. the wealth and variety of resources available in libraries make them an ideal match for minds that are receptive to new ideas and primed for learning. a huge amount of information is available online, of course, but many teenagers either don’t have internet access at home or are sharing a computer and internet connection, which can make searching for potentially sensitive information riskier. additionally, our mandate to protect user privacy means that libraries are a safe space for teens to explore topics and read books that might be embarrassing or controversial. supporting intellectual freedom for teens in your library unfortunately, the theoretical side of intellectual freedom is often the easy part. by and large, librarians seem to agree that we are not parents or guardians and that we do not censor materials because they are controversial. implementing practices and policies that support our theoretical stance – walking the intellectual freedom walk, so to speak – can be more difficult than getting fired up about the right to read. what feels obvious in an abstract discussion of book bans and challenges and internet access can be complicated and daunting in the real world; turning theory into practice, especially in light of daily demands on our time and energy, is not always easy. so what can your library to do support intellectual freedom for teen patrons? below you’ll find some suggestions (most of which, as an added benefit, will support intellectual freedom for all of your patrons). begin by reviewing your library’s policies. this sounds obvious – most collection development policies have some kind of language absolving libraries from monitoring or restricting the materials checked out by minors (the previously discussed in loco parentis clause). if you’ve never seen your library’s collection development policy, or if it’s been a while, start there. while you’re checking the collection development policy, also look for language that outlines the process for challenges to materials so that you are ready with a response in case of unhappy community members. this is pretty basic library school stuff, but when you’re a working librarian, it’s easy to get wrapped up in daily tasks and set things like policy updates aside. while you’re checking and possibly updating your collection development policy, also look for a statement on diversity within the collection. most libraries are charged with meeting the needs and interests of their communities, but that does not mean catering only to the majority. in fact, a well-rounded collection should include voices and experiences that do not exist (or are not visible) in your community. review your collection as well. does it have materials for those young people who do not share the majority beliefs, views, and experiences of your community? if you work in a more conservative area, do you have books on sex and sexuality for teenagers? if you work in a liberal area, do you have materials by conservative writers? are a variety of religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and gender expressions represented in your fiction and nonfiction collections, particularly your young adult collections? while you’re reviewing policies, look at your cardholder policy. do you offer family cards (i.e., a single account that can be used and reviewed by all the members of a family)? while family cards are convenient, they make it nearly impossible to guarantee privacy for teen patrons. in cases where teens’ interests and caregivers’ values don’t align, privacy and intellectual freedom are nearly synonymous, so protecting teen’s privacy is a vital part of protecting their intellectual freedom. even if you don’t offer family cards, do caregivers have access to information about their teenaged children’s check-outs? for an example of the library system whose cardholder rules protect teenagers’ right to privacy, and with it their freedom to access any kind of materials, check out the seattle public library’s privacy policy. while you’re reviewing cardholder policy, also look at its implementation at your library. do librarians or circulation staff offer information such as the titles of overdue books on a teen’s card to other family members, even if policy is designed to protect this information? if so, consider offering training on intellectual freedom and privacy to staff. intellectual freedom is covered in library school, but often front-line staff aren’t librarians and may not have had the same depth of training on importance of privacy and equal access. an organizational culture that supports intellectual freedom is as important—perhaps more so—as policies that do the same. these suggestions aren’t world-shaking, but if it’s been a while since you did a policy or collection review, or since you reviewed the way that policy is put into practice at your institution, consider this a gentle reminder that policy, as rote as it may seem, can have real implications for young people. while policy, collection, and practice are great places to make changes that support your teen patrons’ freedom to read, there are additional things libraries and librarians can do to facilitate access to information, especially information that might be embarrassing to ask about or otherwise controversial. first, consider creating an honor system collection. the defining feature of an honor system collection is that the books in the collection can be borrowed from the library without a library card or any other method of check-out. the collection can be as informal as a basket of high-interest books or can be processed and cataloged like the rest of the collection, although security tags and other measures should be de-activated or left off during processing. the santa cruz public library has an honor system collection called the teen self help collection; titles are entered in to the catalog and the records are browsable by tags. honor system collections help protect teens’ privacy and remove intimidation and embarrassment, which can be particularly potent in adolescence, as barriers to access to information. these collections tend to focus on nonfiction titles, but could easily include popular fiction titles as well, especially those that frequently appear on banned and challenged lists – titles like speak, the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian, and the perks of being a wallflower. consider partnering with community organizations to promote intellectual freedom and access to information for teenagers. reach out to local organizations for information on mental health, sex and sexuality, healthy relationships, drugs and alcohol, and other topics that teens may need information on.  examples include religious groups (check your library’s policy on posting religious material first, and be sure that multiple religions are represented), planned parenthood and other health organizations, and institutions that work with homeless youth. many of these organizations have pamphlets or other information available. create a community resources area in your teen section that provides access to information that doesn’t have to be checked out or returned. set up a teen resources table at all teen programs, regardless of topic. players at video game tournaments may not express their interest in or need for health or housing resources, but if the information is available and visible, those who need it are more likely to find and utilize it. most of the policy and practice changes i’ve suggested are relatively simple from a librarian’s point of view, but they can make a huge difference to teens for whom intellectual freedom is both vital and tenuous. the right to access materials of all kinds on all topics is a developmental necessity for young people, who are undergoing rapid intellectual, psychological, and social change. as librarians, it’s rarely difficult to talk intellectual freedom; in theory, we all agree that banning books is wrong and access to information of all kinds is right. putting those ideas into practice, especially when faced with the possibility of controversial material, young people, and unhappy caregivers, can feel much more difficult, but changes like those i’ve suggested above can help bring the theoretical into practice, where it truly matters. thanks and acknowledgments thank you to ellie collier, erin dorney, and hugh randle of the in the library with the lead pipe editorial board for their insightful comments and grammatical finesse. in addition, i’m grateful to issac gilman and amy springer, who acted as external editors and provided helpful advice. thanks to my husband, who now knows more about intellectual freedom for teenagers than any software developer needs to. above all, thanks to the tireless gretchen kolderup, for her guidance, encouragement, and enthusiasm. citations and additional reading “adolescence.” encyclopædia britannica. encyclopædia britannica online library edition. encyclopædia britannica, inc., 2013. accessed december 4, 2013.  http://library.eb.com/eb/article-9003766.  alexie, sherman. “why the best kids’ books are written in blood.” the wall street journal: speakeasy, june 9, 2011. accessed november 20, 2013. http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/06/09/why-the-best-kids-books-are-written-in-blood/ becker, samantha et al. “opportunity for all: how library  policies and practices impact public internet access, report  no. imls-2011-res-010.” accessed may 18, 2014.  http://imls.gov/assets/1/assetmanager/opportunityforall.pdf “challenges by reason, initiator & institution for 1990-99 and 2000-09,” banned & challenged books. accessed november 20, 2013. http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/statistics. dobbs, david. “beautiful brains.” national geographic magazine, october 2011. accessed november 20, 2013. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/teenage-brains/dobbs-text. gurdon, megan cox. “the case for good taste in children’s books.” imprimis 42, no. 7/8 (july/august 2013). accessed november 20, 2013. http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/file/archives/pdf/2013_07_imprimis.pdf. gurdon, megan cox. “darkness too visible.” wall st. journal, june 4, 2011. accessed november  20, 2013. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/sb10001424052702303657404576357622592697038. guttmacher institute. “american teens’ sexual and reproductive health.” may 2014. accessed may 17, 2014. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb-atsrh.html. peltz-steele, richard j., pieces of pico: “saving intellectual freedom in the public school library,” brigham young university education and law journal, vol. 2005, p. 103, 2005. accessed january 10, 2014. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1669446. steinberg, laurence, and stephanie dionne sherk. “adolescence.” the gale encyclopedia of children’s health: infancy through adolescence. ed. kristine krapp and jeffrey wilson. vol. 1. detroit: gale, 2006. 32-36. accessed september 28, 2014. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=gale%7ccx3447200022&v=2.1&u=kcls&it=r&p=gvrl&sw=w&asid=76a025b1730a2fbcd9f4df3f3c92476a “talks cancelled for ya authors meg medina and rainbow rowell.” blogging censorship. national coalition against censorship. september 13, 2014. accessed september 28, 2014. http://ncacblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/talks-cancelled-for-ya-authors-meg-medina-and-rainbow-rowell/   a side note about ages: obviously, the transition from childhood to adulthood is an individual process, which every individual reaching milestones in different orders and at different times. creating policies that differentiate children from adolescents necessitates an arbitrary cutoff, although the process is, of course, a gradual one. many organizations that serve young people and youth service providers (including the search institute and yalsa, among others) seem to agree that 12 is an appropriate age for that arbitrary cut-off, but there is room for discussion and disagreement on this point. [↩] intellectual freedom, public libraries, teen services, teens locating the library in institutional oppression using animated gif images for library instruction 6 responses cerise 2014–10–10 at 1:21 pm i noticed earlier today that there’s a new book from ala called intellectual freedom for teens: a practical guide for young adult & school librarians. haven’t gotten an up-close look at it yet, though… http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?id=4036 emily calkins 2014–10–10 at 2:08 pm i haven’t had a chance to look at it up close either (this post was already almost done when it came out), but i’m excited to read it! the more conversations we’re having about teenagers and intellectual freedom, the better. dave 2014–10–10 at 3:31 pm this is an outstanding article skillfully addressing the very often complicated topic of intellectual freedom and our teen readers. as a service to our ya patrons, this should be suggested reading for every librarian and front-line staff member. emily calkins 2014–10–10 at 6:50 pm i’m glad you enjoyed it! i hope it will inspire library staff (librarian and otherwise) who work with teen patrons to think about the implications of services & policies. pingback : censorship of children and teen materials | data and dustbunnies pingback : yasaves (and so do librarians!) | m3 this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct my (our) abusive relationship with google and what we can do about it – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 4 feb emily ford /6 comments my (our) abusive relationship with google and what we can do about it photo by flickr user gynti_46 c/o by emily ford since october something has been weighing on my professional mind: my abusive relationship with google. i love google, i don’t ever want to leave my gmail, my gchat, my googledocs, my web searches, my google reader, but right now i wish i weren’t so dependent on it. the weight to which i am referring is the proposed google book search settlement agreement. google knows with whom i e-mail and chat, for what i search, what blogs i read, and on and on. with the proposed settlement google will take a further step in controlling my (and libraries’) information use and seeking behavior. google will know what books i read, what pages i read, how long i read them, what pages i print, and what passages i copy and paste. (if you don’t know what i’m talking about you should stop reading immediately and read the 2-page super simple summary on the google book search settlement agreement produced by the ala office of information technology policy (oitp). then, and only then, continue here at itlwtlp.) for those of you who aren’t going to go read this document, here’s my simple recap: the american association of publishers (aap) and the authors guild filed a class action lawsuit against google book search for copyright infringement. instead of going to trial, the parties have agreed to settle out-of-court. google has agreed to fund a rightsholder database called the book rights registry, which will be run by the rightsholders (authors and publishers). google will sell books to individual consumers, but rightsholders will have financial stakes in the product. libraries will be able to subscribe to gain full-text access to books via the google book search project, mimicking the same model as many other library products. the proposed settlement has far-reaching implications for use of digitized materials in libraries, the role of fair use, and the future digital market. unfortunately, many of the agreement’s facets are antithetical to the mission and purpose of libraries. in fact, some libraries, such as  harvard, immediately pulled out of participation with the google book search project. i won’t provide you with a more in depth analysis of the suit in this blog post. as i mentioned in my first sentence, this abusive relationship has been eating at my brain for many months and it’s just now beginning to solidify. what i do want to share is what i think we in the library community can do about the settlement. the stakes of the settlement are enormous, and neither the rightholders or google represent libraries in this process. but we, librarians and the library community at large, are an ornery bunch. aren’t we the community that took to court over the patriot act? aren’t we the community that instigated a public outcry when michael moore’s publisher pulled stupid white men for being too critical of former president bush? aren’t we “radical” and “militant?” because i don’t want libraries, information advocates, patrons, or anyone else to be trapped in an abusive relationship with google i would like to offer the following suggestions for what individuals and the professional community can do to protect and salvage what remains of our relationship with “the big g.” (and maybe even make this google book settlement agreement a bit more reasonable.) individuals educate yourself. knowledge is empowerment. read through blog posts, documents, and news articles about the proposed settlement agreement. the ala washington office is tracking most everything that’s out there and has made a nice little portal web site for you to use. particularly useful is also the guide to the perplexed: libraries and the google library project settlement. this longer document provides a broader view than the 2-page document. you might even consider checking out what google has to say about the “groundbreaking agreement.” because the settlement is so intrinsically tied to copyright law and fair use, this is an ideal time to refresh yourself on the basics. re-read kenny crews’s copyright law for librarians and educators and carrie russell’s complete copyright. subscribe to blogs that deal with copyright such as librarycopyright.net or karen coyle’s blog. ruminate. ask yourself and think about the tough questions. during the google book settlement: what’s in it for libraries? panel at ala midwinter, karen coyle posed the following questions: does the product serve my users? what will the collection be? what is the quality of the product? panelist laura quilter pushed the panel participants and audience to consider the privacy issues presented by the proposed model for accessing digital materials through google books. as librarians we have a responsibility to protect our users. mold and define your personal and professional values for privacy. this will be incredibly useful if you are put in a place to consider purchasing and implementing this subscription product in your library. be an advocate in your community. let’s face it. there are so many issues to follow in our profession, that chances are many of your colleagues might not know anything about this proposed settlement agreement. talk with your colleagues and share with them what you have learned. push your administrators to find out if any pre-emptive discussions regarding this product have occurred. what is the institutional stance on the settlement agreement and google books in general? by asking the hard questions of our supervisors and administrators, we are often able to generate institutional discourse. the community ask and discuss. ala has very bright and informed people working to understand the google book settlement agreement. librarians who specialize in information policy, entire offices and committees that deal with legislation and lobbying for ala interests. but this 300+ page legal document that is the agreement is confusing and still not fully understood by the library community. at the aforementioned midwinter panel discussion, many things came to light that we (or at least i) did not previously know about the settlement. for example, the settlement will not allow for a subscriber library’s users to login via remote access and access their library’s subscription to the google books database. users who are community members of a subscribing institution will only be able to access the resource “on campus.” another fine example is how google will serve public libraries with this product. google will allow public libraries one access station to the product. only one. we need more fora in which to engage to find out exactly what the settlement agreement means to us and our users. professional organizations, ala, sla, pla, arl and others should consider hosting more web-hosted seminars for their members on the subject. moreover, hosting other kinds of discussion fora to ask questions and commiserate within the library community such as bbs or wikis or even blogs will be helpful to those of use who struggle to understand the issues inherent with the settlement. it is also of import to note that during the panel at midwinter dan clancy, engineering director for the google book search project, said he would like to be able to be available to the library community for more discussion. state libraries, consortia, or other large groups should consider contacting dan and schedule a telecon about concerns. educate google. i would like to give google the benefit of the doubt. however, the fact remains that google is a business and will not implement policy or procedure based upon it being “the right things to do.” rather, google will make policy, and change procedure, as it is beneficial to business and the deep google pocketbook. that being said, i think google would attempt to take more responsibility for “doing the right thing” if the company were to realize that the proposed settlement model is not one upon which libraries will willingly spend their money. just because google will have a monopoly on the digitized books, does not mean that we should lower our standards for offering resources to patrons that are easy to use and ethically implemented. we, as a community, need to share with google the ethical principles and best practices that we have worked so hard to develop—of particular relevance, the principles for digital content, and the principles for a networked world. develop position statements, draft and pass resolutions, or take other governmental action. a unified voice of librarians can be a powerful thing. moreover, if professional organizations such as ala, whose membership is purported to be 65,000 (according to the ala annual report), use their position as the good stewards of knowledge and information, we have the ability to put up a good fight that might yield some positive results. currently the washington office is working to gather ala membership input so that it can issue a position statement or take other action on the settlement. (i don’t even know the proper channels to let ala where i stand on this issues. to this end, ala should consider creating a system that enables soliciting and gaining membership comment when warranted.) ala council should also consider passing a resolution regarding the google book search settlement agreement. it is not out of the question that this kind of political activity will help the organization to retain its integrity and ethics regarding privacy, information policy, and what best serves libraries and patrons. ala and other library organizations should consider future legal action. it seems to me that libraries would have a good case to bring forth their own class action lawsuit. this might be a last case resort, but i do not think we should not sit idly by if a large market-driven product were to threaten the library community’s ability to best serve the public. create support materials and documents for libraries to use. shortly after the court “okays” the google books settlement agreement, libraries will face a “purchase or not to purchase” question for the google books subscription product. navigating the ins and outs of the legalese in the settlement will be daunting for any library system, consortium, or lone library that chooses to buy the product. having faqs handy or even an ala toolkit on best implementation practices for google books would be a great service. it doesn’t have to be a waiting game. if we work now to understand what we can about the proposed settlement, if we start to evaluate the effect purchasing this product will have on our libraries and patrons, if we create a unified voice and foster discourse, then we will better be able to keep fires under control and perhaps keep our brains in our heads. google is a powerful company, but powerful, too, is the voice of libraries and librarians. i firmly believe that if we continue to put our efforts toward understanding everything encompassed by the google book settlement issue, then we will better be able to serve our communities, and perhaps inform positive changes that will let us sit in better peace with our friend and enemy. this is my call to you, colleagues, to engage, think, debate, and defend library values. take control and save yourself from this abusive relationship. google can be a reference librarian’s best friend, but right now, with the proposed settlement, it is looking as if we are subject to continued abuse. thanks to laura quilter for her editorial comments; todd hannon for a close read; and brett bonfield, ellie collier and hilary davis from itlwtlp for reading this post and offering feedback. ala, copyright, google, google books, settlement agreement narrating the “back story” through e-learning resources in libraries it’s the collections that are special 6 responses ellie 2009–02–04 at 11:03 am thanks emily! i hadn’t bothered to read over the settlement yet and didn’t know it included anything about a database subscription. i think an important distinction is that the books in this database are generally the in-copyright, not commercially available category. the concept of limiting this to a specific terminal definitely bothers me, but the fact that it doesn’t seem to impact the out of copyright books makes me happy. i’ve been reading free culture and am fascinated by the battle for “fair use.” i’m also glad that this seems to continue to allow the snippets feature in the freely searchable google books search, so that discovery option is not removed. i also wonder whether this will help fuel more print on demand projects with the scanned text more readily available. lots of interesting questions! kristin antelman 2009–02–04 at 2:04 pm i’d like to make a couple factual corrections to this post: google will not “know” what you read, copy, print, etc. at the ala session, clancy said that google intends (in fact, would have to) work with whatever authentication mechanisms libraries currently use to pass users through to content. that may be ezproxy now, but will be something like shibboleth in the future, where only a “token” is passed to the information provider saying person x is authorized to get the content. if our systems pass an ip address, and we are not happy with that, there are steps we can take to, in essence, anonymize that before the request hits google’s servers. but as we talk about the privacy of use data issue, i would hope that we aren’t setting ourselves up to look like hypocrites. do our libraries’ licenses for ejournals constrain what use data publishers can store? do they specify how quickly those logs are scrubbed, and what data the vendor is permitted to track and keep and to what purpose? and, if the publisher refuses these terms, do we refuse to buy their content? you say “harvard immediately pulled out of participation.” that is not true. darnton addressed this “rumor” in the nyt this week (““contrary to many reports, harvard has not rejected the settlement,” mr. darnton wrote in an e-mail message, […] “it is studying the situation as the proposed accord makes its way through the court.” nyt 2/2/09). google continues to scan out-of-copyright books from harvard, which is scope they’ve had from the beginning. you write, “the settlement will not allow for a subscriber library’s users to login via remote access.” this would obviously be an enormous concern to an academic library, but it is not the case. it is true that the proposed agreement doesn’t explicitly say off site uses are permitted for higher education institutions, but it *does* explicitly say they are prohibited without brr approval for 3 of the 6 categories institutional subscribers (k-12, government, public libraries). see p. 42 of the agreement. see also q 7 in the google settlement faq (http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/faq.html#q7): “the institutional subscription will allow users to search, read online (including through remote access) and print books made available through this agreement.” emily ford 2009–02–04 at 3:00 pm @ellie. yes, but there are issues. what if google thinks something is copyrighted but a library thinks it is in public domain? do we then get access to this book? do we have to pay for it? what is the process via which we can challenge the registry? these answers are unclear. @kristin. thanks so much for pointing these things out! i find all of the technicalities very cumbersome, and am glad that you have been able to clarify some of them. i am confused about the authentication process and what really is going to happen with this. i think we need more clarification. did clancy not point to the fact that they would have to look into remote access and try their best to not allow it? am i confusing this with something else? maybe i confused this with public libraries, where remote access will not be available, or with the cross-border issue. i also found that many of clancy’s answers were nebulous about this. in effect, i don’t think we or google yet know how exactly these things are going to be implemented. the fact that you and i got different messages listening to the panel points to the fact that we need more clarification on the matter. regarding privacy, i agree that this is a good time for us to review the agreements we already have. in terms of google, i am afraid that any data they keep might then reflect on the library. so if someone from such and such library was looking at such and such book and a subpoena comes for that data, what do we do? even though we have the ability to technically anonymize data, i wonder if every library will. what happens then? privacy, then, becomes a greater issue for the individual user who logs in and buys a book as an individual consumer. i think libraries can play a key role in educating the public about this model of private data storage. and on to harvard. the article to which i linked states that they aren’t participating in the digitization of in-copyright works. i should have been more clear, so thanks for pointing this out! the reason i use harvard as an example is that i think they have done us (libraries and librarians and the public) a great service by saying that they need more time to look at the agreement to see how they will continue to participate. other libraries did not do this, but it is discourse we need. hilary davis 2009–02–04 at 5:28 pm emily – thanks for tackling this tough and timely topic. what i’m learning from this post and following-up on the references that you point to is that there are many more questions than answers at this point. just this week, at my library we had a seminar on the google books product and it generated a lot of questions and very divergent perspectives. some additional points that people raised from the discussion at my library that i’m still ruminating over are (1) could this settlement could have an impact on ebook providers like ebrary and netlibrary (which i think could be bad for diversifying the marketplace); (2) google is making more content snippets available than are currently available (which i think it a good thing); (3) google may find this venture to not be profitable one day and shut down the service leaving libraries/info providers empty-handed (which i think would be a bad thing); (4) the future of library catalogs could drastically change in a world with google books serving up 7+ million books (i don’t know if this is good or bad); (5) the books rights registry is only proposed to be composed of industry people with no library representation (which i think is probably a bad thing); (6) it’s confusing as to what would happen to books or publishers interested in participating for content published after january 5, 2009. pingback : wednesday links « bib-laura-graphy pingback : google book settlement link dump awesomeness at pureinformation.org this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct neurodiversity in the library: one librarian’s experience – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 28 jun alice eng /2 comments neurodiversity in the library: one librarian’s experience in brief: the literature about neurodiversity and libraries is heavily skewed toward libraries accommodating neurodivergent patrons. there is little written about librarians who are neurodivergent and their professional experiences. in this interview, charlie remy, an academic librarian who has autism, discusses his autism, his professional experience, and what others can do to create a more inclusive neurodiverse profession. by alice eng diversity is a word frequently used in the library profession. the literature that currently exists typically focuses on gender, ethnic, cultural, and sexual diversities. one group rarely mentioned is the neurodivergent. according to the national symposium on neurodiversity at syracuse university, the neurodivergent “include those labeled with dyspraxia, dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyscalculia, autistic spectrum, tourette syndrome, and others.”1 the neurodivergent have always been a part of the community but are now formally recognized as a group of the u.s. population. a 2014 survey conducted by the centers for disease control and prevention suggests that 1 in 45 children, ages 3-17, have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.2 yet the neurodivergent are noticeably absent in the library workforce and literature. emily lawrence’s essay, “loud hands in the library: neurodiversity in lis theory & practices,” offers one theory as to why: an overall lack of diversity within librarianship itself.3 other reasons might include people not disclosing their autism or people not self-identifying as having autism. this prompted me to interview charlie remy.4  charlie is the electronic resources and serials librarian at the university of tennessee at chattanooga (utc) and happens to have autism. he was willing to share his professional experiences with me with the intention of bringing attention to this overlooked group. when were you diagnosed with autism? charlie: i was diagnosed at the age of 23 when i was in library school. several years earlier my parents suggested i read beyond the wall by stephen shore. it’s a memoir written by an adult on the spectrum. my parents immediately thought of me when they read it and i concurred with them! it described a lot of experiences similar to those in my childhood (intense special interests, social awkwardness, sensory sensitivities, etc.). by the time i received the diagnosis, it was just a confirmation of what i already knew. i just wanted to make it official in case i needed accommodations in the future. it also felt somewhat awkward to participate in autistic organizations without an actual diagnosis. learning about autism in my early 20s was comforting because i now understood the why for many things in my life. the dots were starting to connect. my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s occurred when there was limited knowledge in the medical community about “high functioning” autism. part of me was somewhat frustrated by finding out about this so late, but it’s not productive to focus on something which was out of my control. what drew you to the field of librarianship? charlie: i decided to become a librarian for 3 primary reasons: early childhood exposure to public libraries, an extremely positive undergraduate library experience, and my love for information in all formats. my parents took me to the public library at least once a week when i was a child. they exposed me to the many wonderful things libraries offer such as access to information, technology training, interesting people, a culture of lifelong learning, etc. i feel fortunate that my parents demonstrated the value of libraries to me as some kids have never set foot in libraries. back in 1995 i learned how to use the internet at my local public library. i participated in summer reading programs and enjoyed conducting research for school projects. i attended elon university in north carolina where i had an amazing undergraduate library experience. endearingly called “club belk” by students, belk library was my home base during college. i practically lived there. it had comfortable furniture and was inviting, innovative, and featured great print and electronic resources. i considered many of the librarians to be my mentors. being socially awkward with unique interests, i didn’t participate much in the collegiate social scene, so the library was where i did a lot of my socializing. elon invested a great deal of money into library acquisitions at the time since they had to reach a certain book volume count in order to meet phi beta kappa’s library requirement as part of the chapter application process. this resulted in me requesting many, many books (and even databases!), most of which were purchased. i feel like i had somewhat of an impact on that library collection. as an alumnus, i choose to earmark my donations to the library where they use the money to purchase spanish language materials (i was a spanish major). they send me a list of the titles they purchase so i know exactly how my money is used. finally, i love information in all formats. in particular, i’m a “news junkie” who obsessively consumes local, national, and international news, mostly in the form of online video (i love newspapers but, unfortunately, i don’t have the time to keep up with them). i entered college wanting to be a broadcast journalist but after taking a few introductory courses, i quickly realized that it wasn’t for me. too much of a focus on appearance, ratings, and profits and not enough on the public good. being a librarian lets me surround myself with information and satisfies my intellectual curiosity. it sounds like you had already decided to become a librarian before being diagnosed. after receiving a formal diagnosis, how did you decide to go forward with applying for jobs and interviewing? did you think this was something you wanted to disclose early in the process or not at all? charlie: yes, my decision to become a librarian wasn’t directly related to my autism diagnosis but i will say that libraries can be good places for autistic people to work! i usually disclose to people after i get to know them for a couple reasons: i want them to get to know all aspects of me and not just think of the diagnosis. autism is just one part of my identity. it doesn’t completely define who i am. i want to be sure they’re mature enough to “handle” this information. some people don’t seem to understand the significance of this diagnosis. sometimes it’s really not important that they know. especially in the case of acquaintances with whom i have more of a surface relationship. i did disclose my autism once during an on-campus interview at another library. the interview was going so well and i felt genuinely comfortable with the search committee, so i disclosed when a pertinent question came up (i think they were asking me about some of my autism-related [professional] scholarship on my cv). after disclosing, they remarked that there were likely many faculty on the spectrum at their university (whether diagnosed or not) which was probably true! i disclosed when i was offered my current job here at utc since i requested a special schedule accommodation (a compressed workweek of monday-thursday, 4 ten-hour days). this hadn’t been done before at my library and once i explained the reason for why i was requesting it they allowed me to have this schedule. a compressed schedule gives me an extra day to rest from work, both physically and emotionally. it really works well for me and i’m fortunate that they’ve been willing to accommodate this request. other than that, i don’t receive any formal accommodations. how did the interviewers telling you that they suspected many of their faculty to be on the spectrum make you feel? charlie: their response was validating. i felt a sense of acceptance for who i was and it was refreshing that i could be so open with them. i didn’t end up getting the job. the chair of the search committee personally contacted me and explained that they offered it to someone with more supervisory experience. i thought it was kind of them to tell me exactly why they chose someone else. i couldn’t offer them that part of what they were looking for. you mentioned people not understanding the significance of the diagnosis. can you tell me more about that? charlie: i’m on the “high functioning” end of the spectrum which means that i can easily blend in as neurotypical. it’s not that i purposefully try to hide my autism, but my characteristics are more subtle. once people get to know me they can start seeing my autistic quirks. therefore, sometimes when i tell people i’m on the spectrum, they might say “really? are you sure?” or “i never would’ve known!” i realize that they’re probably trying to be nice but it comes across as dismissive and patronizing and causes me to feel like i need to prove my diagnosis. it also makes for an awkward conversation because it’s hard to easily respond to those comments, especially if you don’t know the person well. autism can be very much misunderstood. many associate it with characteristics such as being completely non-verbal, of physically rocking back and forth or flapping hands, which don’t apply to me. can you describe the characteristics of your autism? i know some of the more wellknown characteristics include sensitivity to sound and touch, but obviously every person is different. charlie: yes—we like to say that when you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism. each person’s characteristics are different and of varying intensities. here are some characteristics that i have: linear, concrete thinking. it’s challenging for me to conceptualize abstract concepts or ambiguity. i can struggle to process complex information that i’m not familiar with and might need it explained multiple times. math was extremely challenging for me in school and to this day i prefer to avoid math if possible. sensitivity to sudden loud sounds that i’m not expecting (noisy motorcycles, sirens, dogs barking, phone suddenly ringing, etc.). high anxiety overall. easily overwhelmed; when i have a lot of things to accomplish, i get very overwhelmed because everything has the same sense of urgency to me. it’s challenging for me to prioritize sometimes. poor gross and fine motor skills. i received occupational therapy in middle school. obsessive compulsive/perfectionistic. i constantly check over the work i do to make sure there aren’t any mistakes. i check my alarm clock multiple times before i go to bed to make sure it’s set properly. transitions between tasks are challenging, especially if i’m not done with a task and need to move on to something else. i prefer to finish my current task and then move on to the next one. i often speak what’s on my mind and have trouble filtering my thoughts. it’s hard for me to adapt to expectations in certain social situations (you don’t say this that way to that person, etc.) since i tend to act the same way in all situations. i’m an open book and often state the obvious even if it’s considered rude. special interests. most people on the spectrum have intense interests where they become very knowledgeable on certain topics since they spend so much time researching and thinking about them. my special interests include television news and the media in general, current events, spanish language, and world travel. when i was a child i used to love to collect things like keychains, small flags of countries around the world, coffee mugs from tv stations across the country, etc. i’m a very intellectually curious person so i ask a lot of questions, some of which can be quite detail oriented. this can annoy others in a meeting or classroom environment. i’m detail oriented. i tend to focus on the minutiae and lose the forest for the trees. this can be an asset in librarianship where little details can be important. i think most people find interviewing to be overwhelming and sometimes stressful. how do you handle the interview process? charlie: interviewing in higher education settings can be very tiring and stressful, regardless of whether one is autistic or not. as i mentioned earlier, my autistic characteristics tend to be more subtle so interviews are tiring, but, other than that, not too bad. i’ve been told by several people that my phone interviews are strong which helps get me in the door. (when i was a child, my parents always made me make calls to other people and businesses myself instead of doing it for me, so i’m very comfortable on the phone.) i prepare, prepare, prepare ahead of the interview (looking at the website and taking notes on the library and parent institution, researching the presentation question and formulating my own thoughts/experience with the topic). the two most challenging aspects of interviews for me are: being scrutinized throughout the process (even if it’s during the more informal social gatherings—you’re still being judged on what you say/how you act so i need to be extra careful) and at the end when i’m waiting for a response about whether i’ve gotten the job or not. waiting is painful for me because i tend to obsess over the unknown, second guess myself after the interview, etc. it’s always a relief to finally be told whether i have a job offer or not. even if it’s not an offer, at least the waiting process and its uncertainty is over.5 are there things like library projects or professional development projects which you accomplished not knowing you could? charlie: i have a great deal of anxiety when it comes to numbers (math calculations, e-resource usage statistics, quantitative information in general). math has always been a weakness for me academically and i required a lot of tutoring in high school to get through it successfully. hard work, practice, and good tutors were essential. the least favorite part of my job has to do with numbers (such as usage statistics, cost per use, inflationary increases, etc.). when i started in the profession 6+ years ago, i hardly knew how to use microsoft excel. since then i have gradually developed skills and confidence with how to more effectively use this program and save myself time and effort. in my opinion, quantitative data often lacks context and can therefore offer limited insights. the reality is that libraries always need to prove their value proposition (as they don’t tend to generate revenue), especially in times of budgetary challenges, and numbers are an essential part of this. another area of challenge has been managing the work of others. last spring my library created a part-time position to help me manage our electronic resources. up until then, i was the only person managing the entire lifecycle of our e-resources (procurement, setup, maintenance, troubleshooting, assessment, etc.). we hired an awesome person who’s detail oriented, diligent, trustworthy, and efficient. in the time since, he’s gone to full-time—splitting time between e-resources and interlibrary loan. prior to this, i had never managed anyone on a regular basis so i’ve had quite a learning curve (not because of the person but rather myself simply learning how to manage others). i’ve noticed two challenges: assigning projects and providing him with clear instructions on what i need him to do. assigning tasks requires time and letting go. it requires planning and clear instructions so the person understands how to complete it in the way you want. on numerous occasions i’ve found myself being unclear with him (assuming that he knows something when i shouldn’t assume, not fully planning out the task and then realizing more parts need to be added to it which results in him having to go back and redo them, etc.). i get frustrated with myself but then acknowledge that i’m new at supervising others and i have to refine my skills in this area. the other challenge is that he’s so good at accurately completing projects in a short amount of time that i struggle to keep up with him! i find it difficult to balance all the work i myself have to get done while trying to maximize his position and delegate tasks to him. do you look for professional groups or organizations that specifically deal with librarians and neurodiversity? charlie: to my knowledge, no specific organizations of this type currently exist which is why i founded a facebook group called autistics in libraries and their allies last year. it currently has nearly 100 members but it’s not very active. i try to post relevant news articles a few times per month and occasionally others do so, but i haven’t yet figured out how to engage people on a deeper level. it can be challenging to get people’s attention these days with all the information that exists online. do you think groups devoted specifically to neurodiversity issues would be beneficial? charlie: yes, i think a structured organization would be helpful to advocate for our interests on a number of levels such as patrons and employees. i also think it would be important for an organization like this to be actually led by autistics. i love the autistic self advocacy network’s slogan “nothing about us without us.” for too long, autism-related organizations have tended to not include our voices in the discussion or in their leadership ranks. this needs to change since we’re capable and, i would argue, know the most accurate version of our triumphs and challenges since we live them every day. have you ever felt discriminated against in the workplace for disclosing your autism? charlie: not that i know of. nobody has commented anything to my face, but it’s possible that they might hold a certain set of assumptions due to my having disclosed. i’m hoping that my disclosure and openness about autism will help them better understand neurodiversity and the range of experiences of those on the spectrum. i’d rather be known for my contributions at work instead of a diagnostic label. why do you think there is so little literature about the neurodiversity of librarians? charlie: i think some of this has to do with the continued societal focus on children with autism, although this is slowly changing. autistic kids grow up and deserve meaningful employment opportunities. in addition, professional organizations such as the american library association should have diversity initiatives that include neurodiversity. many large research libraries have diversity residency programs for new graduates of library schools. i’d love to see a few neurodiverse residency programs at academic libraries. these could serve as a good professional entry point for those on the spectrum. finally, more librarians on the spectrum need to feel comfortable enough to disclose so these conversations can happen. what advice would you give to professionals with autism (librarians or students studying to be librarians) about finding success in the field? charlie: experience, experience, experience! whether it’s volunteering, working part-time, internship, etc., i cannot emphasize this enough. nearly all library jobs require some kind of experience regardless of whether someone has an mls. even many paraprofessional jobs require library experience. hopefully they’re attending library schools with autism support programs on their campuses that can help them prepare for the job search with mock interviews, career fairs, resume preparation, etc. sometimes a person’s valuable and, perhaps, unique skillset might be able to “compensate” for their social awkwardness during interviews. therefore, it’s important that they showcase their skillsets via a website, portfolio, multimedia, etc. what advice would you give to a manager who is hiring a librarian with autism? charlie: first, have an open mind and don’t define the person by their autism! autism is an important part of our identities but it’s only a part. some of the qualities i look for in a good boss are: ability to listen and provide reassurance when i doubt myself, patience with my quirks (such as asking endless questions), providing clear and detailed instructions, flexible and willing to make accommodations when necessary, and a clear and direct communicator who will regularly provide me with constructive feedback (especially when it comes to navigating office politics!). what professional goals do you have that you have not yet accomplished? charlie: i would eventually like to work at a small, private liberal arts college that’s closer to my aging parents in the northeast. i like the strong sense of community at these schools as well as their commitment to preparing students to be engaged global citizens who embrace lifelong learning. in many respects, higher education has become more focused on job preparation instead of liberal arts and sciences that provide students with a solid base (critical thinking, reasoning, writing, reading analytically, etc.) no matter what kind of career they choose. as the world of e-resources and library collections in general continues to evolve, it’s important that i develop my knowledge and skillset so they don’t become stagnant. this also means exploring new technologies. yes, i’m a millennial, but this doesn’t automatically make me a techy person. the older i get, the more flexible and open to new things i become. hopefully, this will serve me well as librarianship and higher education progress onward. acknowledgements thank you to charlie remy for allowing me to interview you and sharing your very personal experiences with readers. thank you to craig fansler for helping me find the right focus and the right outlet. finally, thank you to my reviewers bethany messersmith and robb waltner.   references lawrence, e. (2013). loud hands in the library: neurodiversity in lis theory & practice. progressive librarian, 41, 98–109. what is neurodiversity? (n.d.). retrieved april 7, 2017, from https://neurodiversitysymposium.wordpress.com/what-is-neurodiversity/ zablotsky, b., black, l. i., maenner, m. j., scheive, l. a., & blumberg, s. j. (2015). estimated prevalence of autism and other developmental disabilities following questionnaire changes in the 2014 national health interview survey (national health statistics reports no. 87). retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/92c2/2987bdb4397ef53b8e2b0b8a7bda432a0900.pdf what is neurodiversity? (n.d.). retrieved april 7, 2017, from https://neurodiversitysymposium.wordpress.com/what-is-neurodiversity/ [↩] zablotsky, b., black, l. i., maenner, m. j., scheive, l. a., & blumberg, s. j. (2015). estimated prevalence of autism and other developmental disabilities following questionnaire changes in the 2014 national health interview survey (national health statistics reports no. 87). retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/92c2/2987bdb4397ef53b8e2b0b8a7bda432a0900.pdf [↩] lawrence, e. (2013). loud hands in the library: neurodiversity in lis theory & practice. progressive librarian, 41, 98–109. [↩] this interview was conducted via email. any changes to the transcript for publication are minor and intended to improve clarity; the interviewee’s ideas and words have not been changed. [↩] i think many people identify with charlie’s reaction to the interview process regardless of his neurodivergence. [↩] autism, neurodiversity librarians leading short-term study abroad following the yik yak: using social media observations to understand student needs on college campuses 2 responses m 2017–07–17 at 4:55 pm thank you for this article! i’m in the pseudo-diagnosis area (therapists say it’s obvious but nothing on paper just yet) of my life and find myself looking for others like me working in library land. i’m always happy to read about how other folks on the spectrum are navigating their careers. pingback : guest post: graduate research intern, ada van tine, on libraries & neurodiversity | program on information science blog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct (the universal interrogative participle)* is going on with the authors guild? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 12 oct emily ford /10 comments (the universal interrogative participle)* is going on with the authors guild? * photo by flickr user marfis75 (cc by-sa 2.0) by emily ford the authors guild won’t give up. their settlement agreement with google books was rejected by judge chin on march 22nd and will now be going to trial. but that’s not enough for the authors guild. the organization seems bound and determined for copyright legislation to occur, and for that legislation to change copyright law to be much more conservative and restrictive for libraries. in concert with their australian and quebecois counterparts – the australian society of authors and the québec union of writers – the authors guild has filed a legal complaint against hathitrust, an organization of partner libraries that is collaboratively sharing and archiving millions of digitized works. the filed complaint cites hathitrust as making the “largest copyright infringements in history” (rosenthal, e. h. & goldman, j. s., 2011).   furthermore, the complaint argues: “rather than heeding the court’s words, and allowing congress, acting in the interest of all communities, to determine the requirements and safeguards that will govern the use of digital libraries and orphan works, defendants have instead proceeded on their own authority, ignoring the interests of copyright holders” (rosenthal, e. h. & goldman, j. s., 2011). it further claims that hathitrust has exploited works by surpassing the rights allowed of them in sections 107 and 108 of copyright law– fair use and preservation, respectively. james grimmelmann offers a nice, succinct explanation of the claims on his blog. “the complaint alleges that the universities and hathitrust are violating copyright owners’ rights by scanning, duplicating, and distributing their books. it doesn’t ask for damages, but it does request a declaration that what the defendants are doing violates the law. it also seeks an injunction to stop them from further scanning or displaying the books, and to “impound” the digital copies — i.e. have them held in escrow where the defendants can’t get at them.” (grimmelmann, 2011)⁠ essentially, the authors guild complaint is bringing to the fore the very aspects of copyright law that permit libraries to perform their day to day functions. i cannot claim to fully understand the nuances of copyright law, nor can i suppose that i understand everything about this case (i am not a lawyer).what i can claim to know is that events such as this shake up our profession and challenge how we think about the work we do in libraries everyday. it renders to the forefront of our minds questions such as: how we will be able to provide unfettered access to information that has yet to be created? will legal issues halt our work and at what cost to our patrons? at what cost to society as a whole? in light of this case and in the current copyright climate– which seems rife with tension between creators, content providers and libraries– the library community needs to be thoughtful about how to grow into an unknown copyright future. before i continue i’ll provide some brief background regarding the parties involved in the case. the parties hathitrust & universities hathitrust was born out of libraries’ collaboration with google to digitize books. those libraries who loaned google books received digital scan and metadata files from google. some of the libraries working with google had an agreement with the company that they could create a digital archive accessible to their communities. from this, hathitrust was created. begun and spearheaded by university of michigan libraries, hathitrust began with member libraries coming from committee on institutional cooperation (cic) institutions, university of california, and the university of virginia. since its inception in 2008,  hathitrust has grown to include over 50 library members. member libraries can contribute content to the digital library.  some collection highlights of hathitrust  include a collection of 19th century cookbooks and hebrew and yiddish public domain book titles held by stanford university. moreover hathitrust has recently come to agreements with discovery service vendors ebsco, serials solutions, and oclc to make full-text searching a part of these respective discovery service tools. works contained in the hathitrust digital library include orphan works, those in the public domain, and works still under copyright protection. hathitrust has measures in place for users from different institutions to authenticate and have permissions to view in copyright titles. guests or users from institutions that do not own a physical copy of a copyright protected title, do not have permission to view full text of those works. hathitrust had scheduled to make several hundred orphan works available to users on october 13th. university of michigan library has postponed their release of orphan works (which were to only be available to users whose home libraries own the physical item) due to flaws in their system of determining what works are orphans. for example: “in a post on its blog this week, authors guild representatives noted that author j.r. salamanca’s 1958 novel the lost country was on the list. librarians did not elaborate on how the book made the orphan list. a record search shows that the book was copyrighted in october, 1958, and was renewed in december 1986—seemingly a month late to keep the book’s 28-year copyright from lapsing. but, in one of many quirks in the complex copyright laws, books copyrighted between 1950 and 1963 have more time to renew, until december 31of the 28th year. the book has been long out of print.” (albanese, 2011) there have been other cases on the list of orphan works for which individuals were able to readily find copyright holders. one would surmise, however, that should hathitrust be notified that a copyrighted work had been made public, hathitrust would have processes in place to disable public access to that content. (hathitrust does have a take-down policy.) in addition to naming hathitrust as a defendant in the case, the lawsuit names five universities. they are: university of michigan, university of california, university of wisconsin, indiana university, and cornell university. grimmelmann points out in his blog post that “all of the named universities except for indiana have announced their plans to participate in hathitrust’s orphan works project. the other members of hathitrust, including universities that are participating in the project (e.g. johns hopkins and florida) but are not google books library partners, are not named as defendants” (grimmelmann, 2011)⁠. the authors guild the authors guild is an organization of writers whose mission is to provide copyright advocacy work on behalf of its members. in addition to suing google for the google books search, it has been a party in lawsuits against dialog, gale, and others. current authors guild president scott turow is featured as a library advocate on a poster produced and sold by ala. moreover, his editorial of february 15th this year decries budgets cuts to libraries. it is ironic that he is such an avid library supporter, and yet his organization is asking for hathitrust to cease its operations. in a letter to authors guild members, turow addresses the guild’s stance on copyright. his language borders on hysterical. “the digital millennium copyright act’s “safe harbor” for online service providers has turned out to be an exploitable gold mine for unscrupulous online enterprises. that safe harbor allows these rogue enterprises to profit from services that encourage and conceal the trafficking in stolen books, music and movies, while disclaiming responsibility for that illegal traffic. the dmca safe harbor has turned copyright’s incentives inside out, encouraging massive, global investment in piracy technologies and services.” (turow, 2011) what turow seems to be implying is that, in addition to allowing easier copyright infringement, the hathitrust system is encouraging online providers to take advantage and to make a profit, and then claim that they are not responsible. although in his letter he cites libraries as positive examples of how copyright can function. “our great research libraries, holding the carefully crafted thoughts, composed over billions of hours by many of our nation’s finest minds, are ample proof that copyright has succeeded brilliantly” (turow, 2011).  although turow is a self-professed library advocate, he does not seem to understand that, in practice, libraries and librarians make all attempts to respect and protect copyright. the lawsuit against hathitrust appears to lump libraries into this category that turow repeatedly refers to as “pirates.” hathitrust already has measures in place to protect copyrighted works via authentication. in general, libraries and librarians work hard to respect copyright law. usually authors and libraries are on the same side, wanting to ensure access to works, but also respecting copyright law. so where is the breakdown between the two? the authors in addition to the authors guild and other author associations, eight individual authors are named plaintiffs in the lawsuit against hathitrust. they are: pat cummings, a children’s book author; novelists angelo loukakis, roxana robinson, danièle simpson, and fay weldon; andré roy, a poet; james shapiro, columbia university professor and scholar; and  biographer t.j. stiles.” each of these authors except for fay weldon, are executive board members or are governmental representatives in their respective organizations. but there are two of these authors whose other associations are compelling to me when thinking about this particular lawsuit. james shapiro james shapiro is a professor at columbia who is a prominent scholar on shakespeare. he is a member of the authors guild board of directors and he is the only academic author named in the case. columbia is also home to dr. kenneth crews, columbia’s copyright advisory office director, and the columbia university library, which is a hathitrust member. columbia university libraries were one of the first institutions to join the hathitrust (aside from founding institutions university of california and cic institutions) in 2009. columbia’s copyright advisory office’s “central function is to address in an innovative, creative, and pragmatic manner the relationship between copyright law and the work of the university community” (columbia university copyright advisory office, 2011). shapiro has one work cited in this suit, oberammergau. in fact, the imprint of the book as seen in google books, shows him as copyright holder. the relationship between copyright law and university professionals is a complicated matter. many institutions have policies that indicate the university is sole copyright holder for many works created under the auspices of teaching and university related work. this is called “work for hire.” for other works, such as scholarly writing and contributions, most universities consider authors the copyright holders of those works. columbia is not an exception. “by longstanding custom, faculty members hold copyright for books, monographs, articles, and similar works as delineated in the policy statement, whether distributed in print or electronically. this pattern will not change. this copyright policy retains and reasserts those rights” (columbia university, 2000). it will be interesting to see how this tension between one of columbia’s prized faculty members and a hathitrust member institution plays out. has shapiro put himself at odds with his academic community via his ties to the authors guild and this lawsuit? this situation at columbia is a great opportunity for library outreach to authors, and to provide copyright education programming. it would be interesting to hear a panel debate regarding academic authors’ understanding of copyright, their views on the hathitrust lawsuit and the book publishing industry. since shapiro is a named author in the case, he is surely not able to engage in programming in this way. at the same time, other faculty may be open to participating and engaging, in consort with the library, the scholarly communication program and the copyright advisory office. other libraries may want to seize this opportunity to engage with academic authors and their communities. hosting a public debate between an academic author who sides with the authors guild and one who does not, might be of interest to a community. angelo loukakis angelo loukakis is the executive director of the australian society of authors, another of the plaintiffs in the suit. loukakis is also represented by harpercollins publishers in australia. yes, the same harpercollins that has instituted a 26 loan cap on ebook licenses. while loukakis probably has nothing to do with his publisher’s restriction of ebooks, i am speculating that in the publishing realm, the publishers’ and now the authors’ attitudes subscribe to the rhetoric of  pirates and piracy, as we saw in turow’s letter. bullying? i can’t help it but this whole thing is making me think of the it gets better campaign. the big dogs are bullying the little guys, and the little guys are just trying to be who they are and do what they do. i usually cheer on authors and other creators who actively pursue protecting their copyrights. it’s how we librarians work with academic authors, advising them to keep their copyrights when publishing in academic journals and negotiating with publishers for more favorable license agreements. (favorable license agreements allow authors to keep their copyrights, instead of transferring all copyrights to a publisher.) it’s what libraries do when they take on the publishing role as academic journal publishers or repository managers. a good example of this is pacific university, where several open access journals are hosted on the library’s repository infrastructure. it is in these ways that libraries work with authors to show respect for and assist in copyright issues. one of the main differences that i see between this kind of work and the lawsuit, however, is the distinct lack of academic or scholarly authors represented by the authors guild. here’s an example from outside the library world that makes me cheer on the creator. bijijoo (not everything on this site is safe for work), an artist and a friend of mine, is pursuing nbc for their repeated infringement of his copyrights. bijijoo is not in consort with a guild or an interest group. he is a humble artist attempting to pursue his rights. he just wants the recognition, and as his first letter states, he just wants to give tina fey a painting that depicts her holding a ham. oh, and he wants nbc to acknowledge their copyright infringement. bijijoo is a little dog who’s not afraid to stand up to the pack. in the hathitrust case, the authors guild is coming across as as a bully. an organization that represents authors’ monetary interests and an almost hysterical fear of piracy, is going after university libraries. to me this smells of a case of the big dogs going after the runts. this case is exemplary of a mindset regarding copyright that is becoming more widespread. publishers like harpercollins have locked down ebooks; amazon hasn’t yet published their ebooks in epub format (perlow, 2010); orchestras can’t perform shostakovich; and groups like the authors guild, the american association of publishers, and numerous others point to a fearful climate surrounding copyright. to this end, i wonder to what extent the authors guild (or any other representative organization) actually supports individual authors’ interests. siva vaidhyananathan commented on grimmelmann’s post: “james, thanks for this. but please don’t call the authors’ guild “the authors.” we authors have never and will never be represented by the authors’ guild. siva” it is unclear whether the authors guild as an organization, considers itself a big dog. certainly, as the preceding quote by vaidhyananathan indicates, authors alone do not. as with any large membership organization, the authors guild operates under the guidance of a board, executive director, and legal counsel. certainly within our own profession, our organizations have taken action or made statements with which we, as individuals, disagree. the question remains, to what extent does the authors guild represent members’ interests? have they gone too far and will there be a movement from membership to leave the organization? what actually happens in the hathitrust digital library? i wanted to see exactly what happened when a user of the hathitrust digital library looked at a record for a copyrighted book. i used an example by pat cummings (one of the plaintiffs and the author guild’s secretary). search results for pat cummings books in hathitrust record view of c.l.o.u.d.s. in hathitrust by pat cummings text search of c.l.o.u.d.s. by pat cummings in hathitrust as you can see from the screenshot above, a search of the text of c.l.o.u.d.s. does not show snippets of the book. see the snapshot from google as a comparison. c.l.o.u.d.s. in google books another example of hathitrust content is that of something in the public domain. just this week i helped a patron find a digital copy for the seven golden odes of pagan arabia in hathitrust digital library. the patron wanted to download and print the book, but we discovered that we did not have sufficient rights to download the entire digital copy, although we could view the entire text. these restrictions mirror what happens in physical libraries and with their borrowing policies. a patron unaffiliated with my institution is welcome to read through a book in the library building, but unless she pays to become a public patron of the library, she may not borrow materials. some discrepancies several of those who have already written about this new lawsuit, have pointed to a discrepancy in what the authors guild sees as the purpose of copyright law. in her editorial francine fialkoff points to this discrepancy. “it’s also a subversion of copyright law, which protects library fair use. despite the extensions of copyright protection over the past couple of decades, copyright was never meant to protect authors or inventors indefinitely. instead, as fister reminds us, it aims to promote the public good, “the progress of science and useful arts.” “what is more troubling to me,” she says, “is…that copyright is being read as a one-sided right: for authors…as a moral right, not as a balance of interests recognized by law”” (fialkoff, 2011). part of what is so frustrating about this lawsuit is that libraries and library collaboratives would not exist without the creative works produced by authors, musicians, and other creators. and likewise, many authors advocate for libraries.  just look at the authors for libraries partnership via ala.   librarians and the authors guild agree that copyright law does not address the multitude of uses or technologies prevalent in our societies. take, for example, the now classic ebook problem. a library purchases an ebook, but it has a limited number of loans. similarly, print books are loaned until they become too damaged by dog teeth, coffee spills, loss, or disasters. while physical books are by no means permanent, their tangible nature instill in us a comfort of the illusion of perpetuity. so, is buying an ebook and loaning it to patrons until irreparably damaged or lost (not via drm, mind you) a violation of copyright law? copyright law is, by its nature, subject to multiple and layered interpretations. the minute we legislate and create more distinct copyright rules, libraries will potentially be more restricted in how they are able to provide their services. does the authors guild really want to restrict libraries’ ability to provide good service and access to authors’ works? do authors want to engage their readers and create rich intellectual experiences? when will the bullying stop? the phrasing used by turow in his letter to members represents fears driven by money. it points to the effect of digital content on the market and authors’ purported monetary losses. “one is tempted to call it a vast underground economy, but there’s nothing underground about it: it operates in plain sight, as i will describe. money suffuses the system, paying for countless servers, vast amounts of online bandwidth, and specialized services that speed and cloak the transmission of stolen creative work. excluded from this flow of cash are the authors, musicians, songwriters and the publishers who invest in them.” (turow, 2011)⁠ turow’s letter concentrates on the evils of file sharing and the networked nature of information in a global age. in light of the hathitrust lawsuit, is the authors guild equating the libraries with bittorrent? so what are we to do? because of the nature of their work, libraries are those institutions that push copyright to its limit. the hathitrust lawsuit presents us with the opportunity to re-examine copyright in our daily work lives. what do you know about copyright? what is your institution’s policy? are you making use of fair use? individual librarians may feel ill-prepared to answer these questions, so it’s a perfect time to seek out your local scholarly communication librarian and access services librarian to refresh our memories. last year a copyright slider showed up in my inbox and every other librarian where i work received one as well. this seems to be an affordable way to show your employees that you expect them to be able to practice their craft. now is a good time for library schools to respond to libraries and the current copyright climate. library school students who learn about copyright law as applicable in library work, will be better prepared to address issues facing them in their professional lives. i’d be willing to bet that no ala accredited library school requires students to learn and show proficiency in understanding copyright in libraries. our profession would be better off if they were. when i was a student i took a  1.5 credit workshop on copyright– and it was a small class. you may not be passionate about understanding copyright, just like some are not passionate about cataloging, but anyone who wants to work in a library who claims to not want to know about copyright will be ill-prepared for her career in libraries. it’s like wanting to work in a library because you don’t want to work with computers and you want to work with books instead. understanding and teaching about copyright is part of what we do, and, on the whole, we do it poorly. usually there’s only one or two people in a library who feel comfortable answering questions in regards to copyright. in academic libraries those who work with course reserves usually know, but does anyone else? sometimes the extent of copyright education in libraries is the sign by the photocopier asking patrons to respect copyright. guess what? our patrons probably don’t even know what that really means. should we not be empowered to teach them? the library copyright alliance has stated that “the case has no merit, and completely disregards the rights of libraries and their users under the law, especially fair use” (band, 2011). this will be a long legal procedure, especially if the google book search suit is any indication. but that probably doesn’t ease the feeling of vulnerability and helplessness that you may be feeling in response to this suit. what if my library gets sued? what if it doesn’t? what if, ultimately, hathitrust prevails and large scale digitization projects become ubiquitous? we need to continue our good work with passion and vigor. we can continue to use fair use to its full extent to provide access to materials to our library patrons. we can continue to make copies of copyrighted works for preservation purposes. we can continue to improve our patrons’ access to works online. i am certain that the current copyright climate and the tension between authors, publishers, and libraries will change. i remain optimistic that the original intent of copyright, the public good, will prevail.   many thanks to jill emery for her thoughtful questions. thanks also to lead pipers hilary davis, leigh anne vrabel, and eric frierson for edits, comments, and thought provoking questions. and thanks to jake shivery, who, despite not understanding librarian-ese, provided final copy edits. references and further readings albanese, a. (2011). hathitrust suspends its orphan works release. publishers weekly. retrieved september 21, 2011, from http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/48722-hathitrust-suspends-its-orphan-works-release-.html aleo, c. (2011). three authors, three examples of the disruption in publishing. gigaom. retrieved from http://gigaom.com/2011/08/11/three-authors-three-examples-of-the-disruption-in-publishing/ australian society of publishers. (2011). staff – australian society of publishers. retrieved september 30, 2011, from http://www.asauthors.org/scripts/cgiip.exe/wservice=asp0016/ccms.r?pageid=10093 authors guild. (2011). the authors guild – authors guild, australian society of authors, quebec writers union sue five u.s. universities. retrieved september 30, 2011, from http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/authors-3.html band, j. (2011). lca statement on authors guild, inc. et al. v. hathitrust et al. library. band, s. j., band, jonathan, are, w., saying, t., & agreement, s. (2011). a guide for the perplexed part iv: the rejection of the google books settlement. library (pp. 1-20). retrieved from http://www.districtdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/guideiv-finalv3.pdf bosman, j. (2011, september 13). lawsuit seeks the removal of a digital book collection. new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/business/media/authors-sue-to-remove-books-from-digital-archive.html columbia university. (2000). columbia university copyright policy. retrieved october 2, 2011, from http://www.columbia.edu/cu/provost/docs/copyright.html columbia university libraries. (2009). columbia university libraries joins hathitrust. retrieved october 2, 2011, from http://library.columbia.edu/news/libraries/2009/20091216_hathi.html copyright advisory office (columbia university). (2011). about — columbia copyright advisory office. retrieved september 30, 2011, from http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/about/ courant, p. (2011). statement from paul courant, university librarian and dean of libraries. crews, k. (2011). authors, copyright, and hathitrust. retrieved from http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/2011/09/13/authors-copyright-and-hathitrust/ eberhart, g. (2011). ala meets with association of american publishers on e-books. retrieved from http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/inside-scoop/ala-meets-with-aap fialkoff, f. (2011). are you kidding? library journal. retrieved september 22, 2011, from http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/891900-264/are_you_kidding__editorial.html.csp grimmelmann, j. (2011). the orphan wars. retrieved from http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/09/12/the_orphan_wars grimmelmann, james. (2011). the laboratorium: the procedural swamp. retrieved september 30, 2011, from http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/09/26/the_procedural_swamp harpercollinsaustralia. (2010). angelo loukakis from harpercollins publishers australia. retrieved september 30, 2011, from http://www.harpercollins.com.au/authors/50020105/angelo_loukakis/index.aspx hathitrust. (2011). information about the authors guild lawsuit. hathitrust. (n.d.). hathitrust home | www.hathitrust.org. retrieved september 23, 2011, from http://www.hathitrust.org/ hathitrust. (n.d.). take-down policy | www.hathitrust.org. retrieved october 8, 2011, from http://www.hathitrust.org/take_down_policy herther, n. (2011). authors take libraries to court in face off on copyright issues. information today newsbreaks. retrieved september 22, 2011, from http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/authors-take-libraries-to-court-in-face-off-on-copyright-issues-77862.asp howard, j. (2011). in authors’ suit against libraries, an attempt to wrest back some control over digitized works. the chronicle of higher education. howard, jennifer. (2011). hathitrust case highlights authors’ fears about fate of their work online. the chronicle of higher education. retrieved october 7, 2011, from http://chronicle.com/article/hot-type-hathitrust-lawsuit/129241/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en kolowich, s. (2011). news: abuse of trust? – inside higher ed. inside higher ed. retrieved september 22, 2011, from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/19/michigan_admits_flaws_in_hathitrust_system_for_identifying_orphan_works university of michigan libraries (2011). u-m library statement on the orphan works project | mlibrary. retrieved september 30, 2011, from http://www.lib.umich.edu/news/u-m-library-statement-orphan-works-project parry, m. (2011). equal protection for shostakovich? justices question lawyers in copyright case. the chronicle of higher education. retrieved october 7, 2011, from http://chronicle.com/article/equal-protection-for/129287/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en perlow, j. (2010). epub: the final barrier for kindle adoption | zdnet. techbroiler. retrieved october 2, 2011, from http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/epub-the-final-barrier-for-kindle-adoption/13804 raughley, l. (u-m. l. (2011). u-m library orphan works project undaunted by lawsuit. retrieved september 29, 2011, from http://www.ur.umich.edu/update/archives/110926/owp reuters. (2011). google, publishers given 9 more months to settle “digital library” dispute – chicagotribune.com. chicago tribune. retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-google-publishers-given-9-more-months-to-settle-digital-library-dispute-20110915,0,4885219.story rosenthal, edward h. (frankfurt kurnit klein & selz, p. c. ), & goldman, jeremy s. (frankfurt kurnit klein & selz, p. c. ). (2011). authors v. hathitrust complaint. retrieved from http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/authors-3.attachment/authors-v-hathitrust-9834/authors v. hathitrust complaint.pdf turow, s. (2011). the authors guild – from the president. retrieved september 30, 2011, from http://www.authorsguild.org/publications/bulletin/from_the_president.html whittaker, z. (2011). writers guild suing u.s. universities: “give up your google books” | zdnet. zdnet. retrieved september 22, 2011, from http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/writers-guild-suing-us-universities-give-up-your-google-books/12764   authors guild, copyright, hathitrust, lawsuit is the united states training too many librarians or too few? (part 1) editorial: occupy librarianship: 5 variations on a theme 10 responses amy crow 2011–10–12 at 9:27 am thank you for such a detailed post about the situation with hathitrust. it is refreshing to find a post with citations such as this! one minor point — it is “indiana university,” not the “university of indiana.” emily ford 2011–10–12 at 10:12 am hi amy. thanks! and thanks for the correction. i’m mortified, since i’m iu is where i went to library school! in fact, i’m so mortified that i’m changing it right now. thanks for the correction. emily pingback : “in the library with the lead pipe” on the authors guild v. hathitrust emily ford 2011–10–12 at 7:05 pm and now the complaint has been expanded to include more authors! read more at publisher’s weekly. emily ford 2011–10–16 at 1:03 pm from the article, turow is quoted as going so far as to say libraries are engaging in piracy. what? scott turow, president of the authors guild, even accused the libraries of the p-word. “universities are important cultural bastions, valued by all of us,” he said, “in this case, university defendants are using their immunity from money damages to act as pirates, rather than custodians, of our literary heritage.” – publisher’s weekly caleb tr 2011–10–13 at 4:27 pm thank you for this overview emily, i feel much more informed, and interested. i’m curious to know how the authors’ guild suit against hathitrust compares with their suit against google. are they making the same basic case? my moral tarot tells me that google’s principal wrongdoing was to digitize works without getting prior consent from copyright holders. from what you are saying, it sounds like hathitrust includes works (many digitized by google) by default but copyright holders can opt out. is hathitrust making the same transgression as google? emily ford 2011–10–16 at 1:02 pm caleb, thanks for your comment. i do not think that hathitrust is making the same transgression as google. take a peek at the information provided here: providing general access to public domain works; where we have the explicit permission of the rights holder, providing general access to in-copyright works; providing access under limited circumstances to other in-copyright works in accordance with copyright law. limited circumstances include access to persons who have print disabilities, access to orphan works, and uses of materials (such as print replacement copies) that fall under section 108 of u.s. copyright law. access in these limited circumstances is provided under the following conditions… the suit against google asked for damages– the suit against hathitrust does not. it seeks an injunction. the google case got so confused by the settlement agreements that failed. we’ll see what happens next. does this answer your questions? caleb tr again 2011–10–18 at 12:05 am this is helpful thanks! amanda bird 2011–10–20 at 2:03 pm excellent, thought-provoking post! i am, unfortunately, an academic librarian who could certainly stand to know more about copyright…this is a great refresher/reminder/kick in the butt. :) pingback : my experience at the hathitrust uncamp « hack library school this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: lead pipe debates the stealth librarianship manifesto – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 23 feb editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield /4 comments editorial: lead pipe debates the stealth librarianship manifesto photo by flickr user litherland (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield a few weeks ago john dupuis, of confessions of a science librarian fame, posted his stealth librarianship manifesto. he begins: this particular edition of the manifesto applies to academic libraries. the principles of stealth librarianship apply to all branches of the profession, each in particular ways. other manifestos could exist for, say, public or corporate librarians. however the core is the same: to thrive and survive in a challenging environment, we must subtly and not-so-subtly insinuate ourselves into the lives of our patrons. we must concentrate on becoming part of their world, part of their landscape. and he ends by calling upon others to add their manifesto points. we at in the library with the lead pipe saw this as an opportunity to respond to his list and create our own. read on for our differing takes. emily scholarly communication librarian (assistant professor), oregon health & science university reference & instruction librarian, portland state university there are many things that i appreciated about dupuis’s manifesto. what particularly resonated with me is his take on publishing and professional literature. we must stop reading the formal library literature. that’s what librar* blogs are for. we must familiarize ourselves with the literature and scholarly communications ecosystems of our patron communities. we must stop writing the formal library literature. that’s what librar* blogs are for. we must make our case for the usefulness of what we do in the literature of our patron communities. what dupuis fails to mention here is that many academic librarians must publish in traditional, peer-reviewed library publications while striving to attain tenure. i am not personally in a tenure-track position, so i have the liberty of not fretting over where i publish. what i have found is that the online discourse via blogs is plentiful and satisfying for me to keep up with what’s happening in libraries.  blogging here at in the library with the lead pipe offers me the opportunity to write and think critically in an open peer-review and open publishing format; it is a rich experience that creates and advocates for open discourse among professionals. i’m not so sure what “stealth” has to do when it comes to creating open discourse. dupuis is contradicting himself. but dupuis’s push toward understanding “scholarly communication ecosystems” resonates with me. working as a scholarly communication librarian, i see the work that needs to be done within academic communities in this regard. i see the education that needs to happen with faculty to understand even what is a “scholarly communication ecosystem.” to me that ecosystem is one stymied by the tenure system and traditional publishing paradigms. but without familiarizing ourselves regarding that discipline-specific system, how are we to educate our patrons regarding changes? regarding open peer-review? regarding peer-reviewed open access journals? regarding using new measures like the eigenfactor over impact factors? and how are we going to make the case for changes in transparency and fairness of pricing from journal vendors if we don’t understand how a discipline-specific ecosystem works? dupuis’s call for discipline-level understanding of scholarly communications is crucial for academic librarians. despite my agreement with dupuis’s manifesto points regarding scholarly communication, there are some points that i contend. my lead pipe colleagues have done a much better job addressing those contentions so i’ll end my piece with an offering of my manifesto bullet points for my praxis of librarianship. i will not be stealth. i will proudly and loudly be a librarian. i will not teach library instruction sessions that do not incorporate critical thinking. (down with database demos!) i will not bend over backwards for my subject faculty, but i will engage with them and educate them about my profession, and in turn, learn about theirs. i will be open to new ideas. i will think critically about ideas and opportunities presented to myself and to my institution. i will acknowledge what i don’t know. i will continue to learn what i don’t know. kim librarian/assistant professor at boise state university i don’t think “a stealth librarianship manifesto” is about stealth at all. at least, not at its core. what dupuis’s post really is about is much simpler and more nefarious: it’s about language. it’s about the way human beings — and in this case, scientists — perceive words based less on what they really mean and based more on their own various preconceived or culturally embedded ideas about them. like “library.” what non-librarian doesn’t picture a quiet room full of overflowing bookshelves upon hearing the word “library”? there’s your problem, friends. don’t believe me? take another look at the manifesto. ignore all those sharp and provocative bullets and skip to the bottom section of the post that begins, “a couple of final points.” here’s where we get to the meat of the issue: and yes, i did really start thinking about this at science online 2011, with some ideas here and here. i also started germinating some of these thoughts after seeing how the library sessions at science online 2010 worked out, see here and here, noting how the session on reference managers was better attended and didn’t have “library” in the title. and looking further back, it’s a fairly common theme for my blogging, for example here and here. that’s a lot of casually tossed out “here”s: six, in fact. all that thinking and germinating, yet we readers don’t even get an abbreviated link title? let’s pull out our magnifying glass and take a closer look at what’s going on here, one sentence at a time. i’m adding link titles to the original text in brackets. first up: and yes, i did really start thinking about this at science online 2011, with some ideas here [“scienceonline 2011 debrief part 1: ebooks, blogs and stealthy librarians”] and here [“scienceonline 2011 debrief part 3: some session ideas for #scio12”]. these two links point to past blog posts by dupuis, both in response to the science online 2011 conference. “debrief part 1” is your basic conference debrief post, in which he comments on the fact that “science types” at this conference don’t attend sessions that have the word “library” in the title. apparently science online 2011 included a very successful library session on “data discoverability” that was well-attended thanks to its avoidance of the “l-word.” meanwhile, “debrief part 3” describes dupuis’s ideas for a future conference session he might organize to convince those science types that libraries really are great collaborators in educating students and advancing open science. of course they need convincing since they don’t already know that libraries actually care about these issues instead of just being busy dusting off our old books. why don’t they know that yet? because we’re libraries. onward: i also started germinating some of these thoughts after seeing how the library sessions at science online 2010 worked out, see here [“science online 2010: scientists and librarians”] and here [“reclaiming ground”], noting how the session on reference managers was better attended and didn’t have “library” in the title. these two links point to another blog, book of trogool, a scientopia science blog written by what i’m guessing are three academic librarians (they don’t seem to have filled out their bios quite yet, alas). in “science online 2010: scientists and librarians,” dorothea salo comes right out and starts battering away at the stereotype that forms the root of our language problem. “how,” she asks, “can science libraries persist when scientists haven’t the least notion that libraries or librarians are relevant to their work?” salo then launches into her own sort of anti-manifesto listing all the activities that aren’t going to solve the problem, a cascade of angst that clearly inspired dupuis to create his (more positive) manifesto. “reclaiming ground” addresses the same problem through the lens of steve koch, an experimental biophysicist at the university of new mexico. commenting on his past negative experiences at his undergraduate and graduate libraries, koch describes how, as a faculty member, he has been happy to avoid his library. essentially his advice comes down to two points: “educate current faculty” about what libraries really do, and be nicer to current students so they like us better. koch is getting at something behind the rhetorical theory i’m advancing, something at the very root of the library stereotype itself: libraries have a bad rap. libraries have the reputation of being rulemongers, fine-collecting penny-pinchers, cranky about helping students, and all-around holier-than-thou. we know this is how (some) people see us, but is all of this negativity that weighs down the word “library” deserved? koch’s experience would say “yes,” but i would contend that as a field librarianship largely attracts a different personality type these days that is less focused on institutional policy and more focused on customer service. don’t you agree? (you can read more on librarian personality types here, though i’ll acknowledge that it doesn’t exactly back me up on this). so in that case, we’re back to the main part of the problem being the associations that go along with the “l-word,” and not the libraries themselves. and looking further back, it’s a fairly common theme for my blogging, for example here [“science in the 21st century conference recap”] and here [“from the archives: my theory of conferences”]. as indicated, these two links go back to previous posts by dupuis that reflect both the originating concern of the manifesto and more context on one of  its statements. in “science in the 21st century,” depuis muses on another conference experience in which it was clear that science faculty did not have the library on their “radar.” this ties in cleanly with the other links described above. the second post, “from the archives,” provides some background to his manifesto statement, “we must stop going to librarian conferences and instead attend conferences where our patrons will be present.” as one outreach (sorry, “stealth”) tactic, going to disciplinary conferences makes perfect sense. however, it’s not going to solve the problem. if only we could surgically trim the eons of expectation and stereotype from the definition of “library” in the brains of our patrons and leave them with a refined, sharper sense of what a library means in 2011. but how? is it just a matter of, as dupuis suggests, dropping the use of the “l-word” in our work with those outside our field? what if we were to all consciously redefine our buildings and our jobs and our conference presentation titles to reflect the new work most of us do already? what if instead of saying i’m a “librarian” i could introduce myself as a “research consultant” or “information expert” or — who knows? i can already picture the very different response that would evoke from faculty in other disciplines, as well as students. on the institutional level it’s already happening at campuses around the country, where libraries are being replaced with “information commons” and “knowledge centers” and a whole array of other non-l-word names. perhaps it’s just time for us — as individuals and organizations — to completely redefine ourselves. that way, we can throw overboard the negative baggage our beloved libraries have been hauling around for all these years. ellie reference librarian (assistant professor), austin community college i think i may be anti-manifesto in general. or rather, perpetually and knee-jerkingly defender of whatever is under attack. i want to make it clear that i did read where dupuis states himself that the manifesto is “a series of provocative statements not a realistic plan of action” and i appreciate the overall sentiment. but since this is a reaction piece, i have to admit, there is much i disagree with. a number of the statements start with “we must stop” and then follow with what we should be doing instead. i agree with most of the ‘start doing’ items, but i don’t see these as either/or choices. there may be some aspect of “what are you able to give up to add in these new important things,” but i don’t think most of the items should actually be fully stopped by all librarians. i also see many of them as comparing apples to oranges. the things gained from librarian/librarian interactions are what we then use in our librarian/constituent interactions. they serve different purposes and they’re not interchangeable. for example, we can learn from our constituents what programs or services most interest them, but we can’t learn survey methodology from them. and what about all the times their personal interests conflict with our mission? we are in a profession where we have to sometimes ask, do we give them what they want, or what they need? a friend posted a quote on facebook from a student after an information literacy session, “you should just talk not ask so many questions.” it is our deeper interactions with fellow librarians through conferences, workshops and our literature that enrich our teaching pedagogy. twitter and facebook can supplement that, and can build wonderful connections, but they can’t substitute. much of the manifesto seemed to be based on an assumption of a large staff of librarian subject specialists, which is often the case at large research institutions, but may not be. if i’m in charge of all the purchasing for my small college, or only do instruction, or cataloging which single conference has my patrons? which scholarly publishing ecosystem do i need to learn? i would argue it’s the librarian conferences where we bring together these jack-of-all-trades elements. i do agree with the focus on faculty in academic institutions. study after study shows that faculty are among the first people students contact for help and libraries and librarians are at the end. we can certainly do more to work with faculty to help students. i also agree with a main sentiment, well phrased by bonnie in the comments to the manifesto, “our goal is to be where our patrons are (virtually and physically), using the language that they use, speaking to them on their terms…” my manifesto addition is: we must do away with “musts.” every situation is unique and we each need to evaluate our own community and resources. hopefully our decisions are informed by best practices (from the library community) and user studies, but ultimately there is no one right answer. for example, there was a time i would have agreed with emily’s statement “down with database demos.” but i will do an instruction session with no critical thinking component because at my institution the english as a second language professor wants to bring her developmental reading students in to show them how to find books in the library catalog and to introduce them to the expectations of an academic library. i will let them know they’re allowed to bring in drinks as long as they have a lid and that they can print 15 pages a day. we will search for books in the catalog and learn how to use an lc call number to find a book on the shelf. then we’ll walk over to the shelves together and over half the class will check out a book, leaving with something that will help them improve their reading skills and feeling more confident about their ability to do so in the future or at least more confident in approaching the friendly lady at that big desk. they come in looking like deer in headlights and leave smiling. and that has every bit as much value as working on critical thinking skills with students who are at that developmental and affective stage. eric library digital services manager – st. edward’s university – austin, texas last week, i participated in texas library association’s legislative day, a full day of visits with state legislators to talk about issues in libraries.  we visited the offices of every single state representative in the house and the senate. this year there’s a lot to talk about when it comes to libraries and the draft 2012-2013 biennium budget. long story short, state library programs including texshare (how we can afford databases like academic search complete), interlibrary loan, the k-12 database program, and a variety of others are completely obliterated.  we’re not talking about steep cuts – we’re talking about zero’ing out entire program budgets. the conversations we had with state legislators and their aides made it clear why programs that are so obviously vital to us are on the chopping block: legislators have no idea what libraries are or what we do. academic, public, school or otherwise. to illustrate how unclear legislators are about what a librarian is, take one of our talking points about school librarians: school libraries and certified school librarians are critical in supporting education and digital literacy. school librarians are teachers and should be recognized as teaching staff… school librarians are frontline teachers who instruct students everyday on curriculum requirements, such as how to research, locate, evaluate, cite, and use information effectively and ethically… certified school librarians must hold a master’s degree, pass a graduate level exam on library media functions and supporting school curricula, and have two full years of classroom teaching experience. time and time again, we ran into legislators who believed librarians were part of the non-instructional staff in k-12 schools, adding to the administrative bloat public schools carry. it’s no wonder libraries and librarians have taken a beating in the draft budget. our representatives don’t understand what we do. and here we are, at the eleventh hour, trying to plead for our interests and those of our patrons, with people who are far more interested in other state matters. the outlook is bleak for texas libraries. we did the best we could at legislative day, but it all seemed like it was too little, too late. as dupuis would have put it, we are not part of a legislator’s landscape. we’re barely a part of our user’s landscape. so – what can we do to find our way into the lives of our representatives?  the best suggestion came from edna butts, general counsel and senior policy advisor for state senator kirk watson.  she said that it was great that we showed up in such numbers to support libraries, but the important voices would be those of our users.  (i then pointed out the overflowing packet of letters from elementary school students supporting their library in senator watson’s information packet.) to this end, i would add the following to the manifesto: we must be better at articulating our own value, especially in non-library settings (the faculty meeting, the town hall, the capitol) we must inspire others to fight for us by aligning ourselves with our users, not each other this speaks to the spirit of the manifesto in that we must be “on the same side” or “of the same group” with our users.  we can’t be the “other” if we want people to stand up for what we do.  we must develop an environment where a threat to the library feels very much like a threat to its users. run a “what my library means to me” project. make your library their library. do it stealth. do it in the open, purposefully. the most important part is to do it, and share your results with a senator, a provost, a principal, a superintendent or a mayor. note: a big thank you to gloria meraz, director of communications for the texas library association, and all tla staff and volunteers who put together legislative day this year.  the message gloria composed for us to share was lucid, urgent, and timely. it gave us words for what we know to be important for our state. thank you! brett director, collingswood public library, and phd student at rutgers university is anyone trying to stealthily infiltrate the librarian community? i’m pretty sure the answer is no. why? in part, because far too many librarians think we should ignore what we’re good at (whatever that is, right?) in order to pretend we’re something else entirely. nursing isn’t what you turn to when you fail at getting into medical school. social work isn’t what you turn to when you fail at getting into a psychology program. education isn’t what you turn to when you drop out of a phd program. librarianship isn’t what you turn to when you want to stealthily sneak onto the faculty. these are professions and academic disciplines with a history all their own, each with a fascinating, useful, unique body of knowledge. if we can keep this idea in mind, maybe it will help us muster enough self-esteem to start reading (and talking about) our professional literature and to continue the work of making our professional organizations truly relevant. we have a lot of work to do, a lot of questions to answer, but that work can be made easier by paying attention to the librarians who have thought about these questions already and who have contributed their ideas and their research to our professional literature. our work can also be made easier by working with others in the profession and by bringing in people from related professions to help us along. i don’t work in an academic library, but i have in the past. in addition, as a part-time graduate student, i currently rely on academic libraries in order to get my work done. here’s my manifesto for academic libraries: figure out what the students and faculty need in order to do their work. give it to them. measure the results. repeat. this is just an educated guess on my part, but i’m pretty sure that figuring out what students and faculty want and giving it to them means putting every available resource into improving the library’s website. and by website, i don’t mean just the pages in www.library.yourinstitution.edu, i mean every resource and service students and faculty access through the library website or could conceivably access through the library website. do you want to do something stealthily that i, as a student, would find really useful? learn information architecture, learn to program, or figure out how to negotiate contracts with the content vendors that allow programmers and information architects to present information in a usable way. i don’t need to see you at my conferences or on my turf or collaborating with faculty members or in my “patron community” and i’d really rather you weren’t “in the social networking spaces where (we) live”: i just want the library website to work. as far as i’m concerned, any effort to go stealth is wasted. the problem isn’t with our public relations. the problem is with our product. leigh anne senior staff librarian, carnegie library of pittsburgh did someone say “public library manifesto”?  where to begin? dupuis is correct when he states that a manifesto for public library workers might look very different. many of the problems with which he takes issue are not relevant to public library workers because of the nature of our institutions. most public library workers, for example, do not gain any sort of professional favor for presenting at conferences or serving on committees. participation in these activities does not net us better wages, promotions, or tenure, and is not work that is routinely valued in the public library sphere, unless one currently occupies a management position or has self-identified as “management material.” in fact, it is all too frequently seen as busywork that takes reference librarians away from the day-to-day operations of the library. whether or not this is an acceptable state of affairs is for wiser, more experienced heads than mine to determine. however, given the current state of public librarianship, here are the revisions i would make to dupuis’s manifesto. may they initiate a spirited conversation about the professional work of the public librarian, and the best way to support it. public library workers must be selective about which conferences they attend and which professional associations they join, supporting only those that specifically support our particular needs and concerns. that being said, public library workers must make an honest attempt to reform unsatisfactory professional associations before giving up on them. public library workers must have an elevator speech for their job/institution and be willing not only to deliver it at the drop of a hat, but to tailor it on the fly based on the particular needs and interests of the audience. whenever possible, public library workers must collaborate with academic and special library workers to create interdisciplinary services for the community they collectively serve. public library workers must blog, using their real names, and with full support from their institutions. our unique voices and experiences are still, sadly, underrepresented. public library workers must re-imagine what professional literature could be, and actively seek out opportunities to write for publications, print and digital, that our patrons are reading. public library workers must make an honest effort to explore leadership and management opportunities before rejecting them as unsuitable. by the same token, public library workers must firmly reject any such roles and opportunities they have tried and found wanting/inappropriate, for whatever reason. while there are a great deal of factors over which we have no control, i reject out of hand any theory of public librarianship that smacks of self-pity or victim mentality.there is so much that we are already doing quite well. we routinely partner with non-library organizations in our communities to host programs, especially for children and seniors. we actively court teen clientele and try to understand their unique perspective. we use social media wisely, for the most part, and our reputation for defending the freedom to read is legendary. i refuse to believe we cannot apply the same spirit and fire to the cultivation and development of our collective professional identity. or, to put it another way, time to take the logs out of our own eyes before tackling the specks that trouble our patrons. at the very least, we should be conscious of those thoughts and behaviors that prevent us from constructing a solid professional identity, and initiate conversations on these matters, no matter how difficult that might seem in the context of our institutions as currently constructed. full disclosure, dear colleagues: i am writing my portion of this post on my own time, at an ungodly hour on the night before it is due. i do this not because i am a martyr, or because i hope someone influential will see the essay and be impressed by my dedication to our profession. i do it because i refuse to accept the tired old dichotomy that shunts scholars into one arena and practitioners into another. it is not enough to serve the public. we must have a theoretical-rhetorical model that serves our own best interests, and makes it easier to explain our value to a culture that delights in questioning it. we must have a body of professional literature that is meaningful and vibrant. and, above all, we must have library workers who actively and consciously explore their gifts and abilities, then select appropriate vehicles for expressing those abilities. public library workers of the world, unite and write! you have nothing to lose but your stereotypes. advocacy, faculty, group post, ideas, manifesto, public libraries, publishing struggling to juggle: part-time temporary work in libraries on the internet, with the exploded text 4 responses carlos ovalle 2011–02–23 at 9:01 pm i’ll copy my facebook comment here. ^_^ i agree with ellie; “musts” disturb me. it’s an intentionally provocative piece, though, so i’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. ^_^ it helped for me to read it as a list of suggestions for change in focus. i like the overall theme of int…egrating librarians into governance. that would be hard to do stealthily, though. i’m a bit more wary of dropping the “l” word from the profession. the term doesn’t just bring baggage, or maybe a better phrasing would be that not all of the baggage is negative. imho, much of the profession’s political and cultural power goes hand in hand with the evocation of “library,” and i think that aspect is overlooked a bit in some of these discussions. soi promise i’m not just saying this because i’m mostly an academic :pthe idea of ignoring formal library literature really, really disturbs me. in one of my own areas of focus, copyright and libraries, blogs aren’t sufficient. i read blogs and i write blogs, and the ones i read are *tremendously* helpful, but they’re not enough to understand the complexities of the issues involved. they’re not always enough to engage in informed conversation with people, particularly those outside of the profession. i use blog readers, google alerts, subject web sites, journal web sites, news/popular articles, books, facebook, twitter, and more just on this relatively tiny issue related to librarianship, and i’m still pretty sure it’s not sufficient. :p the library literature is part of that overall ecosystem, though. i’m *also* in favor of “understanding [the] scholarly communication ecosystems” of patrons. also, as far as library organizations, friendfeed and facebook aren’t going to lobby congress. well, not for us. ^_^ jeremy mcginniss 2011–02–24 at 12:56 pm this was an excellent post. if i may, i would like to comment on brett’s point, which i really appreciate, especially the following: “1.figure out what the students and faculty need in order to do their work. 2.give it to them. 3.measure the results. 4.repeat.” active and correct assessment of libraries is a deeply necessary step and more measures of roi need to be generated so that libraries, esp. non-research ones have quantifiable methods for demonstrating the investment that the institution or community is giving is worth it. because giving it to them, while easy to say, can be much harder to do based upon the amount of resources available. i work as a solo librarian, for a small college in upstate ny. the economic situation in the state and nationwide has directly affected my library budget where i can’t provide everything that students and faculty want, right now. but i think i can provide enough to maintain their faith in the library until, hopefully, the budget nonsense is resolved. one of my manifesto points is, especially for my library users, is working to develop and retain their trust that the library can provide the correct resources for the students,staff and faculty every single time. i’m not there yet. but it’s getting better because i go, physically/digitally, to the students and faculty and say what do you want, how can we get it and how are we using what we currently have? melissa 2011–02–25 at 3:54 pm as a public librarian, i so appreciate leigh anne’s section, particularly the end. “…i refuse to accept the tired old dichotomy that shunts scholars into one arena and practitioners into another. it is not enough to serve the public. we must have a theoretical-rhetorical model that serves our own best interests, and makes it easier to explain our value to a culture that delights in questioning it.” don’t have anything more intelligent to add at the moment, but i totally agree. pingback : » debating the stealth librarianship manifesto | in the library with the lead pipe rosemary k. j. davis this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct no holds barred: policing and security in the public library – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 11 dec ben robinson /6 comments no holds barred: policing and security in the public library in brief library and information studies (lis) has traditionally taken a conservative and uncritical approach to security and policing in libraries. the available literature usually adopts one of three frameworks: the liability framework emphasizing risk and its management, the security consultant framework featuring authors with private security or policing backgrounds, and the first amendment framework seeking to balance the rights of the individual with the rights of the majority as seen in kreimer v. morristown. despite some helpful recommendations from these contributions, they tend to encourage library staff to develop close relationships with local police and security guards without considering the negative effects this closeness can have on patrons who are black, indigenous or people of colour (bipoc), people experiencing mental illness, and people from other marginalized communities. research from outside of lis has documented the negative psychological effects of police presence on bipoc and has also established connections between the increased presence of police in libraries and the broader increase of police and security guards in public spaces. if libraries are to be safe places for patrons of all backgrounds, authors in lis, and library workers in general must incorporate insights from other disciplines into their practice and begin to meaningfully address the complicated roles of police and security guards in the public library. by ben robinson introduction while issues relating to library security tend to be the concern of a small group of academics within the field of library and information sciences (lis), some of the more disturbing accounts of violence in north american public libraries have recently been covered in the general news. in 2018 alone, two news stories about violence in canadian libraries were circulated widely, including one in which a patron kicked an elderly librarian in the chest at richmond public library in british columbia as well as another in which a librarian at a christian science reading room in ottawa was sexually assaulted and then murdered in the middle of the day (yogaretnam, 2018; ferreras, 2018). because of these well-documented incidents, there has also been greater news coverage of the increasing presence of police and security guards in north american public libraries. in february 2019, the main branch of the winnipeg public library (wpl) increased security measures by requiring patrons to go through bag checks and metal detection. ed cuddy, manager of library services at wpl, said the changes were made because of “violent incidents, incidents involving people that are intoxicated or using other substances, where there has been significant threats to staff and security” (caruk, 2019). similarly, in january 2019, yellowknife’s public library introduced security guards after seven fights broke out in 2018. the library also announced it would close earlier on those nights “when many municipal enforcement officers are in court, meaning they can’t respond to calls for assistance from library staff” (panza-beltrandi, 2019). accounts of violence against library workers and patrons have been accompanied by several stories of security and police overreach in libraries. in 2017 in lakewood, ohio, an off-duty police officer working a shift at the lakewood public library broke the jaw of a seventeen-year-old patron after he placed her in “a full-nelson-type hold” when she refused to leave the premises (mosby, 2017). at a branch of the district of columbia public library, a security guard demanded a patron remove her hijab if she wanted to remain in the building. the incident led to “protests and a widespread lack of trust on the part of patrons,” resulting in the officer being placed on night duty to avoid further interaction with the public (dixon, 2016). these stories highlight the complex power dynamics at play in interactions between library patrons, library staff, security guards, and police officers. though both staff and patrons were injured in the scenarios above, it is worth noting that while staff may be able to call on police or security guards if they feel unsafe, this is not always possible or even desirable for patrons. many library workers – particularly if they are white – also enjoy the protection that professionalism affords – of being seen not just as an individual but as part of a large government organization with the added legitimacy that provides – sometimes the same large government organization employing the police officers or security guards tasked with settling disputes. patrons, on the other hand, may not have anyone to vouch for them or legitimize their claims, leaving them on their own in these scenarios. further, “because libraries and their staff represent a particularly middle class and white worldview”, bipoc patrons do not have the luxury of starting from a neutral position when interacting with library staff but, from the outset, are more likely to be subject to discrimination (selman et al., 2019, p. 13). inversely, bipoc staff may also be susceptible to similar discrimination from patrons, co-workers and/or security staff. discussions surrounding these incidents of violence and the dynamics at play within them are all the more relevant in the context of the broader discussions about power, policing, and public space currently being led by groups like black lives matter and need to be given greater consideration by library workers moving forward. in writing this article, i want to acknowledge that my positionality as a white man affects my relationship to this topic. while i have witnessed incidents of violence, seen exclusion methods in action and spoken to patrons who have been discriminated against by security guards and police officers in libraries, i do not have personal experience and will never be able to fully understand the experiences of bipoc with regard to policing and security. though i can only make recommendations from my narrow understanding of the topic, the lack of existing literature on this topic motivated me to pursue it despite my limited perspective. i hope this article can serve as a basis for further study in this area by authors better situated to comment on how marginalized communities experience policing and security in libraries. in the following sections, i will analyze the scholarly literature since the turn of the 21st century to assess the range of responses to policing and security in north american public libraries. i will begin by exploring the more conservative perspectives in lis, starting with what i term “the liability framework,” which approaches patron and staff safety, network security and building security in a similar manner. then i will analyze “the security consultant framework,” paying particular attention to two books, the black belt librarian: real-world safety & security by warren graham, and library security: better communication, safer facilities by steve albrecht (2015; 2012). i will then examine “the first amendment framework” within the lis literature which focuses on balancing collective and individual rights, before concluding with a survey of relevant perspectives from outside lis. typically, lis scholars writing on security and policing in libraries have taken a conservative and uncritical approach. they tend to overemphasize the positive effects of police presence without giving much consideration to how increasing securitization adversely affects bipoc including both staff and patrons, people experiencing homelessness, people dealing with mental illness, and other marginalized groups. although disciplines such as psychology and justice studies have documented the disproportionately negative effects of police presence on marginalized communities, this perspective is notably absent from even the most progressive lis authors writing on policing and security. i will explore and critique the current lis literature on policing and security in north american public libraries by supplementing it with research from other disciplines relevant to the current discourse in lis, ultimately asking the question, “who gets the right to feel and be safe” in public libraries, and who does not (barry, 2015)? fire, flood and fist fights: the liability framework the liability framework tends to view safety and security as a holistic endeavour and often aims to address fire and flood prevention, theft, online privacy, and violent behaviour simultaneously (mcginty, 2008). the need for security infrastructure is stressed throughout and the articles often provide long lists of devices and alarms that can be installed to improve security (forrest, 2005; mcginty, 2008). in addition to technological solutions, forrest describes the “security ethos” which encourages library and security staff to monitor certain patron types who are deemed most likely to exhibit “suspicious activity” (2005, p. 91, 95). the focus on patron types is best captured in mcginty’s statement that “unfortunately, libraries also attract aberrant individuals, the homeless, and the mentally ill by having comfortable public space and tolerant staff” (2008, p. 117). rather than celebrating this comfort and tolerance, mcginty suggests this is a liability. the implicit logic is that if comfortable spaces and tolerant staff attract ‘aberrant’ individuals, then less comfortable spaces and less tolerant staff are needed to repel them. this model followed to its logical conclusion, would exclude “aberrant individuals” in the hopes of making the library environment as controlled as possible (p. 117). further, this reliance on patron types and ambiguous terminology like “aberrant individuals” is a thinly veiled application of stereotypes about what kinds of patrons staff believe are likely to cause problems in the library (p. 117). it is critical here to point out “that those most likely to have…been treated repeatedly as suspects are black, indigenous, poor, and gender non-conforming people” (selman et al., 2019, p. 31). the liability framework sometimes blurs the distinction between library staff and security staff, as at western kentucky university (wku) where student patrollers were hired to assist campus police (forrest, 2005). while their priority was monitoring patrons, the student patrollers were also free to answer reference questions if they were otherwise unengaged. forrest states that “other institutions have reported similar benefits from the addition of student patrollers to the library’s security force,” citing a program at southern illinois university at carbondale where “during the 18 months prior to the patrol’s assignment to the library, there was one criminal arrest, but there were ten arrests during the patrol’s 18-month presence in the library” (forrest, 2005, p. 92). again, we see exclusion methods being celebrated, and the implication that an increase in arrests in the library is desirable. the possibility that any of the arrests might have been unnecessary is not considered. this kind of “pragmatic” approach common to the liability framework ignores the effects that certain security measures have on bipoc, people experiencing mental illness, and other marginalized groups. in reality, the reliance on patron types within this framework serves to reinforce harmful stereotypes about marginalized communities. the primary flaw of the liability framework seems to be the authors’ unwillingness or at least failure to address the negative effects of the security measures they propose. countering the black belt librarian: the security consultant framework closely related to the liability framework is the security consultant framework, which relies on the expertise of external advisers. key texts which promote this approach are library security by steve albrecht, a former san diego police reserve sergeant, and the black belt librarian by warren graham, a former private-sector security director – both published by the american library association (ala) (2015; 2012). this literature tends toward practical recommendations including conflict management training for library and security staff, establishing clear codes of conduct, and designing library spaces with security in mind. the importance of establishing a good working relationship with other community organizations such as advocacy groups for people experiencing homelessness and community mental health services is also emphasized (albrecht, 2015, p.121-123). in addition to partnering with community organizations, both authors support police involvement in libraries. albrecht’s vision of this partnership is almost laughable as he suggests libraries should have “a place in the back office where [police officers] can sit and drink a cup of coffee” or “sit in your employees-only area just long enough to eat their lunch and finish a report before they have to go back out to face another barrage of radio calls” (2015, p. 119). while a cordial relationship with other municipal employees is certainly desirable, albrecht’s vision drifts into the realm of fantasy. though it is clear what police officers stand to gain from such a relationship, it is unclear how this would benefit library workers, not to mention the impression this increased closeness could have on patrons’ perceptions of intellectual freedom and privacy in libraries. albrecht’s only mention of police violence comes during a discussion of the different ways a patron might react to the police having been called, where he states “if the person is significantly mentally ill, he or she might believe that the cops will hurt or kill him or her when they arrive and take out their handcuffs” (2015, p. 74). despite examples of police and security guards harming library patrons such as the ones highlighted earlier, albrecht’s sole engagement with police violence frames it as a delusion of people with mental illnesses. by publishing authors like albrecht and graham, the ala, which is responsible for upholding and developing the professional values of librarians throughout the united states and beyond, has welcomed the ideologies of the police force and the private security firm into lis. albrecht and graham are unapologetic about how their values differ from their vision of librarianship, and though they do provide some helpful insights into library service, their “quasi-military approach” and desire for “customer closeness” with police are incompatible with ensuring that library spaces are safe and welcoming for all patrons (2015, p. 71, 119). in fact, both authors explicitly acknowledge they are not librarians, as albrecht states: …i’m perhaps less forgiving of the rude, angry, eccentric, entitled or threatening patron than you might be. what you are willing to tolerate, because of librarianship’s principles of access or simply because you see these same people day after day, may be different. (2015, p. xi-xii). statements like this in the introduction to library security should have been a warning sign to the editors that albrecht was not the ideal author to write a book on a topic of such importance. given that the available literature on security and policing in public libraries is quite limited, it is disconcerting that these two titles occupy such a prominent place. library leaders and organizations like the ala have not been confident enough in their expertise, opting to bring in “experts” from outside the profession, as we have seen with the introduction of ceos, professional managers, and professional marketing staff. kreimer v. morristown: the first amendment framework perhaps the most infamous incident involving police in a public library is outlined in richard r. kreimer v. bureau of police for the town of morristown. mr. richard kreimer, a patron of the morristown public library, in new jersey, was often the subject of patron complaints due to his body odour and tendency to stare. when these complaints occurred, mr. kreimer was asked to leave the library by staff and “if he refused, the police were called” (barber, 2012, p. 90). in 1991, after being removed from the premises by police on multiple occasions, mr. kreimer sued the morristown public library in a case which eventually ended up before the united states court of appeals (usca) resulting in a landmark decision cited throughout the literature (barber, 2012; wong, 2009). the usca ruled that the first amendment protects an individual’s right to receive information in an institution like the public library; however, the decision also stated libraries were limited public spaces and, as such, the library administration had the right to remove patrons from the library if they were violating a rule outlined in the code of conduct (barber, 2012). this first amendment framework seeks to balance the rights of the individual against the rights of the majority and is supported by a great deal of the lis literature on security and policing (dixon, 2016; trapskin, 2008; wong, 2009). wong frames the discussion as a balance between the needs of “majority users” and “special groups like the homeless” (2009). though labelling certain patron groups “special” is reductive, this language of the unnamed majority and various minority groups captures the way a great deal of the lis scholarship addresses these issues. trapskin suggests that the recent security issues in libraries are the result of a lack of public space in cities more generally and a shift in how library space is used from a quiet study space to a more social space (2008). this struggle to balance the needs of various patron groups is captured well by defaveri who explains that “for every person who finds the library safe and pleasant there is another person who feels uncomfortable and unwelcome” (2005, p. 1). similarly, just as there are patrons who would not enter a library if there were no security guards or police, there are patrons less likely to enter a library because there are security guards or police and both of these concerns need to be addressed. in addition to providing a theoretical framework for a first amendment approach to policing and security, these authors also offer practical recommendations including more traditional methods of library enforcement like banning mechanisms, library design, and the familiar suggestion that “library managers should work closely with their police departments” (dixon, 2016; trapskin, 2008, p. 76). beyond these suggestions, the authors offer some progressive responses including partnerships with public health nurses to address mental illness and addictions, de-escalation training for library staff and security guards, and library programming which allows staff to develop relationships with patrons to increase mutual understanding (dixon, 2016; trapskin, 2008). while many of the recommendations in this section provide excellent alternatives to involving security guards and police, the persistence of an uncritical approach to policing and security is notable. the most progressive vision of the relationship between library workers and police within the lis literature comes from chancellor’s 2017 article exploring two instances when american libraries opened their doors to the public amidst the unrest following the acquittal of police officers in the deaths of freddie gray and michael brown. the relationship between police violence and libraries in chancellor’s examples are somewhat different than the ones considered here in that the violence was taking place outside of the library and the library functioned as a space of refuge from violence, however, i believe they are still instructive. though chancellor’s article does not address the presence of police in libraries explicitly, it does argue that libraries must continue to “serve as safe havens in times of crisis” (2017, p. 2). because widespread “racial profiling…mass incarceration, and shootings by overzealous police officers of unarmed african americans are pervasive in today’s society,” ensuring libraries continues to be a safe space for all will require library workers to reassess their relationship with the police (chancellor, 2017, p. 6). while this does not mean vilifying all police and security and banning them from libraries, to ensure libraries are a safe space for all, library staff will need to consider the effect of police presence on all patrons as well as their own staff. in the following section, i will highlight some perspectives from outside of lis which extend chancellor’s arguments and are relevant to this discussion. beyond the bibliosphere: perspectives from outside of lis while albrecht and graham bring their perspectives from outside lis, having published with ala editions suggests the audience for their books is still largely within the realm of lis. because of this, it is helpful to consider the work of a wide-ranging group of researchers from outside lis entirely who have been studying issues surrounding policing and security in public spaces. one study of note, very much in line with albrecht and graham, found that “police presence can have a strong impact on public fear reduction” (zhao, schneider & thurman, 2002, p. 295). this is relatively unsurprising given that if police presence did not affect public fear whatsoever there would be no reason to have a police force in the first place. at issue here is not that police presence does not have an impact on fear reduction for a portion of the public, but rather that police presence does not reduce fear for the entire public. it is interesting to note that the same study suggested “police presence may not have an influence on making citizens satisfied with police services,” indicating the public wants the police to do more than simply be present (zhao et al., 2002, p. 295). in contrast, warner and swisher conducted a study documenting the effect of police presence on the health of people of colour (2015). the study explored the variations in self-assessed life expectancy for youth from different ethnic backgrounds and found that black, as well as foreign-born and second-generation mexican youth, were least likely to believe they would live past the age of thirty-five. the authors theorized that “the lower survival expectations of black youth…may also reflect unmeasured stressors associated with discrimination and concerns about increasing police surveillance, harassment, and violence” (warner & swisher, 2015, p. 13). thus, while police presence may have a calming effect on the public generally, their presence can also have negative health effects depending on a person’s race. in the last decade, several studies have been published in the united states documenting the increased presence of police in elementary and high schools and the effect of that presence on students. a 2016 report from the american civil liberties union investigating school-related arrests found that black, american indian, hawaiian/pacific islander, and latinx students were much more likely to be arrested at school than white students. notably, students with disabilities were also three times more likely to be subject to school-related arrest. students at schools where 80% of the students came from low-income families were also seven times more likely to be arrested than students at schools where 20% came from low-income families (nelson, leung & cobb, 2016, p. 3). similarly, weisburst’s study of police presence in texas schools found that the rate of suspensions and expulsions increased by 200% and disproportionately affected black and hispanic students (2019, p. 338). this was coupled with findings that schools receiving federal grants for police programs saw a 2.5% decrease in high school graduation and a 4% decrease in college enrolment, both disproportionately affecting low-income students. while public schools and public libraries are certainly not perfect analogues, their shared educational mandates and tendency to host diverse groups of people suggest lis researchers should consider these findings. alongside these findings about public perception of police presence are a host of studies detailing what is known as “the weapons effect”. these studies use a variety of methods to document the effect of an individual simply seeing a firearm. in the original study, participants were placed in a room with a shotgun and a handgun on the table which the researcher explained were left over from a past study (bushman, 2013). the control group in this scenario had a badminton racquet and a birdie on their table. the participants were then asked to decide how strong an electric shock to apply to the research assistant in the next room with the group who was exposed to firearms opting for stronger shocks than the control group. the original study has been replicated more than fifty times with the most surprising variation finding that even just hearing the name of a weapon can make participants more aggressive (bushman, 2013). these findings have significant implications for police presence in libraries as they run counter to albrecht’s belief that police “presence…simply calms things down” (2015, p. 73). while it may be true that police presence decreases public fear for a portion of society, paradoxically, the presence of weapons on these officers can also increase general aggression which in turn can escalate encounters with police. the changing nature of public space has also been studied extensively by scholars outside of lis. tilley suggests public spaces are becoming increasingly commercialized as their purpose shifts toward private consumption (2014). this emphasis on private consumption has resulted in the increased use of private security companies to manage public spaces like parks and plazas. of particular relevance to the discussion around police presence and ethnicity, tilley suggests policing practices in these spaces have shifted to deal not only with violent crimes but also with perceived threats. in a move that recalls mcginty’s statement about “aberrant individuals, the homeless and the mentally ill,” maintaining a sense of safety in public spaces has become “largely dependent on the exclusion of racialized bodies, the poor, and those who are deemed undesirable” (2008, p.117; tilley, 2014). these types of exclusion mechanisms and their effects have been documented extensively by journalists and scholars alike including desmond cole who reported on the disproportionate effects of police street checks or carding programs on young black men in toronto (2015). a 2017 report prepared for the toronto police services board by faculty from the university of toronto’s centre for criminology and sociolegal studies compiled the results of recent studies on carding and police street checks from around the world and concluded “between 19 and 24 of the 27 studies show effects supporting the conclusion that minorities are more likely to be arrested than whites” (doob & gartner, 2017, p. a13). even when youth involved in violent crime in the last year were removed from the equation, there was still a marked difference in involvement with police between white youth and youth of colour at 10.1% and 28.5% respectively (doob & gartner, 2017, p. a11). the critical point of application for library workers is that people “become less engaged with their communities if they are subject to what might be considered ‘unproductive’ police stops” (doob & gartner, 2017, p. a13). in light of this research, the increasing presence of police and security guards in libraries is a part of the broader trend toward the privatization of public space which adversely affects bipoc. if libraries are to remain safe and welcoming places for all people, library workers must be aware of and combat this shift in the way public space is used and managed. conclusion in order to ensure public libraries are safe for all patrons, library workers must move beyond reacting to the effects of systemic issues and begin to directly address the root causes through strategic partnerships. at least “24 public libraries in the united states currently incorporat[e] social services and social workers” as well as several more at canadian public libraries in “edmonton, winnipeg, kitchener, thunder bay, brantford, hamilton, and mississauga” (fraga, 2016: schweizer, 2018, p. 34). while social workers are becoming more common in library settings there is still remarkably little data about their effectiveness. this is an area in need of further study. halifax public libraries (hpl) also recently hired a social worker who has the unique role of overseeing the security staff at hpl (selman et al., 2019, p. 14). this kind of creative restructuring of traditional staff hierarchies is critical for libraries looking to move “from a culture of suspicion to one of empathy and welcome,” (p. 19). as well as introducing social workers, hpl received funding to be able “to offer a free hot beverage and healthy snack to customers twice/week,” an important step in beginning to address the inequality in their community (p. 15). while certainly not part of the traditional function of libraries, this hpl program is an excellent example of library workers taking concrete action to address systemic issues affecting their patrons and incorporates trapskin’s recommendation to develop “new programs and services that promote even more positive staff and user interaction” (2008, p. 74). if library workers are going to continue to have relationships with police and security professionals then the two parties must have equal say in decision-making regarding library security. to close the gap that albrecht describes between what library workers and police are “willing to tolerate,” library workers must have the means to provide meaningful oversight of library security and be free to uphold “librarianship’s principles of access” (2015, p. xi-xii). it is critical that library workers involve as many stakeholders as possible in these conversations, including other professionals partnered with libraries as well as patrons from a variety of diverse communities, especially those patrons most negatively impacted by policing and security methods. such systems are already in place at the thunder bay public library where, in response to patron concerns about not feeling safe in their libraries, they developed “a community action panel, youth advisory council and indigenous advisory council who give…guidance on safety matters” (selman et al., 2019, p. 19). though librarians and library workers may not be trained as social workers and at times may struggle with the increasingly social role of the profession, collaboration with mental health counsellors, public health nurses, social workers, and other resources in the community can help ease some of this tension. further research should identify and assess existing programs and examples of interprofessional collaboration which provide alternatives to security and policing. the increased use of video surveillance in libraries and its effect on patron privacy and safety, particularly for bipoc patrons, is also relevant here and worthy of further consideration for too long, the negative effects of police and security presence in libraries have been ignored or, at the very least, neglected. police officers and security guards should be used judiciously just as one would use any other security tool available to library workers. if libraries are to be “safe havens” for all patrons as chancellor describes, then the role of police and security guards must be reconsidered by library workers themselves (2017, p. 2). if we are to truly uphold the value of universal access to public libraries then we must continue to ask ourselves barry’s excellent question “who gets the right to feel and be safe” and who does not (2015)? acknowledgements i would like to thank my wonderful peer reviewers sunny kim and ian g. beilin as well as my wonderful itlwlp editor sofia leung; they were thoughtful, kind and deeply intelligent presences throughout the process. i would also like to thank dr. ajit pyati for guiding the individual study where this article began to take shape and mark standish for wise counsel during that process. references albrecht, s. (2015). library security: better communication, safer facilities. chicago: ala editions. barber, g. (2012). the legacy: kreimer v. bureau of police, twenty years later. library & archival security 25(1), 89-94. retrieved from https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/doi/full/10.1080/01960075.2012.657948 barry, d. (21 nov 2015). police don’t make everyone feel safe – not when you’re seen as the enemy. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/21/police-surveillance-safety-seen-as-the-enemy bushman, b.j. (2013). the weapons effect. jama pediatrics, 167(12): 1094–1095. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2013.3824 caruk, h. (26 feb 2019). metal detectors, bag searches greet library patrons as new security measures start. cbc news. retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/security-measures-implemented-library-1.5033830 chancellor, r. l. (2017). libraries as pivotal community spaces in times of crisis. urban library journal, 23(1). retrieved from http://academicworks.cuny.edu/ulj/vol23/iss1/2 clark, i. (24 aug 2016). public libraries, police and the normalisation of surveillance. retrieved from http://infoism.co.uk/2016/08/police-libraries/ cole, d. (21 apr 2015). the skin i’m in: i’ve been interrogated by police more than 50 times—all because i’m black. toronto life. retrieved from https://torontolife.com/city/life/skin-im-ive-interrogated-police-50-times-im-black/ defaveri, a. (2005). breaking barriers: libraries and socially excluded communities. information for social change. 21. retrieved from http://libr.org/isc/articles/21/9.pdf dixon, j. a. (2016). safety first. library journal, 141(9), 29-31. retrieved from https://lj.libraryjournal.com/2016/05/managing-libraries/safety-first-library-security/ doob, n. & gartner, r. (2017). understanding the impact of police stops: a report prepared for the toronto police services board. centre for criminology and sociolegal studies: university of toronto. retrieved from http://www.tpsb.ca/items-of-interest/send/ 29-items-of-interest/552-understanding-police-stops ferreras, j. (1 mar 2018). shocking video shows man kicking librarian at richmond community meeting. global news. retrieved from https://globalnews.ca/news/4057307/richmond-kick-librarian/ forrest, d. (2005). security at western kentucky university libraries. library & archival security 20(1-2), 89-97. retrieved from https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/doi/abs/10.1300/j114v20n01_05 fraga, j. (29 mar 2016). humanizing homelessness at the san francisco public library: a social worker connects at-risk library patrons with resources and a chance to give back. city lab.retrieved from http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2016/03/humanizinghomelessness -at-the-sanfrancisco-public-library/475740/ graham, w. (2012). the black belt librarian: real-world safety & security. chicago: ala editions. mcginty, j. (2008). enhancing building security: design considerations. library & archival security 21(2), 115-127. retrieved from https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/doi/full/10.1080/01960070802201474 mosby, c. (8 jun 2017). lakewood police officer sued for breaking girl’s jaw. lakewood patch. retrieved from https://patch.com/ohio/lakewood-oh/lakewood-police-officer-sued-breaking-girls-jaw nelson, l., leung, v. & cobb, j. (2016).the right to remain a student: how california school policies fail to protect and serve. aclu of california. retrieved from www.aclunc.org/ publications/right-remain-student-how-ca-school-policies-fail-protect-and-serve panza-beltrandi, g. (23 jan 2019). yellowknife librarian details incident that led to increased security. cbc news. retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/yellowknife-library-gets-security-guard-1.4989033 schweizer, e. (2018). social workers within canadian public libraries: a multicase study (unpublished master’s thesis). university of calgary, calgary, canada. retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/1880/106632/ucalgary_2018_schweizer_elizabeth.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y selman, b., curnow, j., dobchuk-land, b., cooper, s., samson, j. k., & kohan, a. (9 september 2019). millennium for all alternative report on public library security. doi: https://doi.org/10.31229/osf.io/vfu6h tilley, j. (3 mar 2014). social exclusion and public space. imagining justice. retrieved from http://uprootingcriminology.org/blogs/social-exclusion-public-space/ trapskin, b. (2008). a changing of the guard: emerging trends in public library security. library& archival security, 21(2), 69-76. retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01960070802201359?src=recsys&journalcode=wlas20 warner, t.d. & swisher, r.r. (2015). adolescent survival expectations: variations by race, ethnicity, and nativity. journal of health and social behavior, 1-17. doi: 10.1177/0022146515611730 weisburst, k. (2019). patrolling public schools: the impact of funding for school police on student discipline and long‐term education outcomes. journal of policy analysis and management 38(2), 338-365. doi: 10.1002/pam.22116 wong, y.l. (2009). homelessness in public libraries. journal of access services, 6(3), 396-410. retrieved from https://www-tandfonline.com.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/doi/full/10.108015367960902908599?src=recsys yogaretnam, h. (28 may 2018). police ask for public’s help after librarian sexually assaulted in city’s 13th homicide of 2018. ottawa citizen. retrieved from http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/police-ask-for-publics-help-after-librarian-sexually-assaulted-in-citys-13th-homicide-of-2018 zhao, j., schneider, m., & thurman, q. (2002). the effect of police presence on public fear reduction and satisfaction: a review of the literature. the justice professional, 15(3), 273-299. retrieved from https://journals-scholarsportal-info.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/ details/08884315/v15i0003/273_teopposarotl.xml   first amendment, library security, policing, public libraries librarianship at the crossroads of ice surveillance information privilege and first-year students: a case study from a first-year seminar course using access to information as a lens for exploring privilege 6 responses paula sequeiros 2019–12–15 at 5:29 am congratulations on this paper, thank you for you reflexions. beyond the good scientific research and solid the arguments, an orientation towards the principle of a non-exclusionary public library is transversal from your stance. both a difficult, but attainable, principle and concretization which are a fundamental requirement in democratic societies. j librarian 2019–12–16 at 4:38 pm your article makes many valid points, but without spending your working days in a library, you don’t really know the experience of living on edge with people who act out and get violent without warning. having law enforcement and security is key to acting quickly to take care of unsafe situations that happen on a weekly basis. i wish it wasn’t so, but without proper back-up, things go bad quickly. we have had many fights, chairs thrown, and people threaten library staff and other patrons. i’m sorry others feel bad about having a security guard or law enforcement presence, but to safeguard all, it is just a state of our area and society. until we get a handle on drug addiction treatment and untreated mental illness, this will not change. a black millennial sjw librarian 2020–06–18 at 3:12 pm @j librarian the author’s bio on this site clearly states, “ben robinson is a community youth librarian at hamilton public library.” he does “spend his working days in a library.” the paper also clearly says that law enforcement presence in libraries makes some (upper/middle-class white cisgender, housed) people feel comfortable, but have the opposite effect for nearly everyone else. “who gets to feel safe and who does not?” pingback : bibliotheken gegen rassismus (teil 1) – bibliothekarisch.de sleepless 2020–06–13 at 10:48 am this was easily accessible to read and understand, even without any training in lis! thank you for writing, this is an incredibly important point pingback : anti-racism resources book cart queens this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct killing sir walter scott: a philosophical exploration of weeding – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 24 jul laura raphael /24 comments killing sir walter scott: a philosophical exploration of weeding who would want to kill this dashing fellow, 19th century author of popular historical novels, plays, and poetry? not i. but i did find myself weeding many of his works in my library—and feeling horrible about it. this article is the result of a more serious examination of those horrible feelings. photo credit: “statue of sir walter scott, princes street, edinburgh,” by calotype46 (cc-nc-sa 2.0) in brief: weeding a library collection, while an absolutely essential part of collection management, is a much more complex issue than library literature—and library practitioners—would like to admit. it is not just an intellectual and physical process but an emotional one, wedded to deep psychological, cultural, and even metaphysical issues. this article explores some of the reasons why weeding can be so heartbreaking, difficult, and miserable. by laura raphael the promises of weeding i’m not a huge fan of gardening, but there is one green-thumb task i hate more than all others: yanking up the weeds, those nasty little suckers that seem to pop up overnight in the spring and summer. like washing dishes or making the bed or doing laundry, weeding is a task that is never finished, yet important to do, unless you want to live with squalor and filth and lawsuits from neighbors who are concerned about the forest in your front yard. you know where this is going, fellow librarians. “weeding” library collections, also known as deselection (in more formal circles) or “taking out the trash” (less so), is a task that is both dreaded and necessary. some might argue with the thesis that regularly weeding the collection is good for libraries, much as there are those who might argue that there are no signs of climate change. (one need only look at the recent outcry against weeding in the urbana free library system to see this idea in action.) despite this, the professional library (as opposed to general public, as in urbana) consensus and research and just plain common sense all agree that without weeding, our libraries would suffer. indeed, regular and judicious weeding all but guarantees shinier hair and higher gre scores: it increases circulation, saves space, makes readers happier, and improves staff efficiency (slote 1997). typical statements about weeding in the library literature affirm that “weeding is a fundamental activity that must be encouraged and embraced” (dilevko 2003, 93) and that “without an ongoing weeding program, a collection can quickly age and become difficult to use” (evans 2005, 295). despite this overwhelming evidence, librarians—including me, i freely admit—nevertheless gnash our teeth and rend our garments, metaphorically, when it is determined that weeding time is nigh. a tale of two weedings it’s not my first time at the weeding rodeo. when i started my current position at a large urban library, in 2006, i faced a fiction collection of about 40,000 items that had not been weeded in more than a decade. the shelvers were crying in the workroom because they had carts upon carts of homeless books. it took me nearly nine months of daily work (which i mostly hated) to complete that weeding. since then, i’ve been diligent about my annual collection evaluation and purging, and i am happy to report that shelvers rarely cry in the workroom, at least for fiction-related reasons. but last spring i was asked to weed a fiction collection i’d been explicitly told i could not touch: storage. unlike my usual yearly weeding, this prospect thrilled me. these were books that had not been evaluated for weeding, ever, or at least in the 25 years or so they’d been languishing in my library’s basement, and it showed. picture the most awful “awful library books” in the awful library books blog: stained covers, crumbly pages, with actual mold on the inside and dusty covers on the outside. according to my 347-page monstrosity of a not-circulated-in-three-years list, most of the books in storage had not been checked out in the 14 years since we implemented our new circulation system. sure, there were still tough calls to be made, and i wanted to get it right. for example, should i weed the pristine yet award-winning international literary title not circulated in five years? what about a minor work by balzac? wait, was it really minor, or was my knowledge of 19th-century french novelists just miserably lacking? was frank yerby, the mid-20th-century african-american author, considered important enough, either literarily or culturally, to merit this much storage space? and worst of all, did we really need all of sir walter scott’s approximately 50 million bazillion novels? his oeuvre took up nearly three feet of packed shelves, and choosing which items deserved to go to the chopping block and which should be preserved was not easy. the hollywood scenario in my head was that my library was the last library left on earth, and i was the librarian who had to decide what would stay and what would go. what a responsibility! of course, i knew i wasn’t literally the only person deciding what was worth keeping in the literary canon and what deserved to be culled, but i took my little piece of responsibility for what the public library goers of the tulsa, oklahoma area would see was worth keeping in a library very seriously. nevertheless, for each single should-i-weed-or-should-i-save book on my list, there were at least 99 more that were neither award-winning, by known authors, nor even mentioned in benet’s reader’s encyclopedia. (not to mention the stained covers, crumbly pages, etc.) in other words, i felt pretty safe in believing that the literary canon, or my tiny corner of responsibility for it, was safe. it should have been a snap. it should have been a party. unlike my earlier weeding periods, in which i grimly gritted my teeth and thought of england, i should have been riding a wave of elation every day as i tore through storage because i knew i was on the side of the angels. my cause was righteous, and i had the crew manual to prove it (larson 2008). yet something surprising happened as i started to weed, and didn’t stop until it was over: i was overwhelmed with all the usual negative feelings of yore. guilt. sorrow. regret, anguish, angst: you name it, i felt it. despite common sense, logical reasoning, moral authority, and practical necessity (our library is closing for renovation soon and our collections must be drastically reduced for the new space), i found the task heartbreaking, difficult, and mostly miserable. i felt like i was murdering the in-flesh sir walter scott, not just copies of his works. why was it so hard? you won’t find the answer in searching the library literature about deselection. (nicholson baker’s 2001 double fold is a notable exception, though he is writing more toward librarians than as a library insider. i’ll circle back to him at the very, very end.) sure, you’ll find quick mentions of the “considerably less fun jobs of continuous evaluation and deselection” (gregory 2011, 126) and the brief acknowledgement that “weeding is personally difficult for many librarians because of their innate love of books” (dilevko 2003, 93), but mostly you’ll find practical articles, web sites, manuals, and books that explain how to determine what to withdraw (larson 2008; disher 2007; roy 1990), who should weed, why weeding is necessary, when weeding should happen, how certain libraries handled weeding projects (banks 2002), and what to say to communities about weeding projects so there won’t be a backlash (mccormack 2008). i was temporarily fooled by the title of one article, “the dark side of collection management” (ward 2008), but it turned out that it never addressed the dark side i was especially interested in. the first time i tackled deselection in my library, merle jacob’s “weeding the fiction collection: or should i dump peyton place?” (2001) was particularly helpful because it was specifically about fiction in a public library. but even this terrific article, while addressing nearly every other aspect of withdrawing books, elides over the withdrawer, especially the very real emotional agony that many librarians experience as they complete this important yet odious task. oh, the feels! it is my contention that weeding a library collection, while an absolutely essential part of collection management, is a much more complex issue than library literature—and library practitioners—would like to admit. it is not just an intellectual and physical process but an emotional one, wedded to deep psychological, cultural, and even metaphysical issues. furthermore, the emotions involved are often messy, wild, contradictory, and mired in questions of identity, community, and morality. in other words, it’s the kind of issues library and information science researchers tend to shy away from because they don’t easily lend themselves to charts and numbers and the siren call of “objective” truth. but we must face the fact that weeding means more than we think it does. pretending that it’s only a matter of improving circulation statistics, even the loftier goals of making a collection more accessible to our users or preserving cultural artifacts for future generations, gives an incomplete picture of the process. furthermore, it can invalidate the very real feelings of those doing the weeding. this is an uncomfortable set of concepts for librarians to accept. we’re thinkers, not feelers! we work from our frontal lobes, thank you very much. the very suggestion that emotion plays a part in our decisions is anathema to our conception of ourselves as clearheaded, dispassionate professionals who use logic and statistics to evaluate our collections and determine the best materials for users. perhaps this does not describe you. perhaps you’re an english literature major like me with a penchant for old-school humanist psychologists like carl rogers, or you reject the worn out subjective-objective dichotomy i’ve set up. okay, you may be thinking: of course librarians are not unfeeling automatons; we can think and feel and do our jobs well, and weeding is both intellectual and emotional. so what? why explore the deeper reasons that weeding can be so difficult, then? i wish i could say it’s because i want to formulate an action plan to make weeding an easier process for librarians and take away some of the anguish and guilt. maybe one day i’ll get around to writing a self-help guide (“when librarians love too much: how to say goodbye to your book friends without tears”), complete with suggestions for a cleansing deselection ritual along the lines of a reality tv game show (“you have been checked out permanently; goodbye!”). but what i am more interested in doing right now is paying witness to what has only been fleetingly referred to in the official library record. i want to call attention to the deeper meanings of weeding, and recognize and legitimize why it can be so darned difficult. in other words: i want to dig into the real “dark side” of deselection so i won’t feel so bad about feeling bad when i weed. in the spirit of a philosophical rather than logical exploration, here are some of the emotional, metaphysical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical reasons i believe weeding is difficult for librarians: reason #1: we’re all hoarders at heart. (and by “we,” i mean human beings.) it is de rigueur to declare, “to be human is to [fill in the blank]”: laugh, wear funny hats, sing katy perry songs, think, mourn. but one way to complete that statement that appears to be indisputably, uniquely human is “own stuff.” indeed, jean paul sartre identified three major forms of human existence: to do, to be, and to have (my emphasis). (interestingly, the three states often get intermingled in unexpected ways—more on that later.) in 2010, after nearly 20 years of dedicated research into compulsive hoarding—including extensive interviews and therapeutic interventions with numerous patients—dr. randy frost and dr. gail steketee, professors of psychology and social work, respectively, wrote stuff: compulsive hoarding and the meaning of things (2010). long before the television show “hoarders,” dr. frost and dr. steketee were wrestling with why some people collected so many objects (and sometimes animals) that it ruined their lives. these hoarding behaviors made it impossible to work, have meaningful romantic and family relationships, or engage in other life-enriching activities. while the profiles of the hoarders they discuss show just how different these patients are from non-hoarders, the difference is mostly in degree, not in the basic desire to accumulate possessions. as they write, “the boundaries between normal and abnormal blur when it comes to hoarding. we all become attached to our possessions and save things other people wouldn’t. so we all share some of the hoarding orientation” (14). evidence for this assertion is found in junk drawers, overstuffed garages, and storage units across the country. now, a library’s collection of books is different in particulars from an individual’s household collection of newspapers, tin cans, shoes, and other objects. for one, a library collection is paid for and owned by an institution, not one person, while personal accumulations include a variety of objects, not just books or other information sources. but in broad strokes, both library collections and individual groups of possessions share the same common denominator of springing from the impulse to have. furthermore, the larger reasons libraries want to have are often eerily similar to the larger reasons individuals want to have. which takes us to the next reason deselection can be difficult… reason #2: we infuse objects (in this case, books) with deeper meanings, particularly with identity. who we are (or who we think we are, or, in an alice-in-wonderland kind of way, who we think we want others to think we are) is often shown through what we own. for example: i wear purple patterned tights to show my quirky personality and desire for nonconformity; the fellow sitting next to you at the stoplight drives a prius to let others see that he is both successful and green; my niece wears a treble-clef necklace and an “orch dork” t-shirt to show others she is a string musician with a bent for geek-ery. equating possessions with identity is not a new idea by any means, but it was first popularized by william james and further taken up by psychologists and cultural anthropologists to explain the relationship between inanimate objects and the deeper meanings humans attach to them. as james wrote, “it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. we feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves” (quoted in frost 2010, 48). more than a century later, in the meaning of things: domestic symbols and the self (1981), mihaly cziksentmihalyi and eugene rochberg-halton continued this exploration of the role of objects in a person’s definition of who they are, who they have been, and who they wish to become: “past memories, present experiences, and future dreams of each person are inextricably linked to the objects that comprise his or her environment” (ix) and can have a significant part in not just reflecting but creating the self. indeed, they go even further and conflate objects with the self, arguing that while it is easy to think of objects as expressions of the self, it is more difficult to admit that the things one uses are in fact part of one’s self; not in any mystical or metaphorical sense but in cold, concrete actuality. my old living-room chair with its worn velvet fabric, musty smell, creaking springs, and warm support has often shaped signs in my awareness. these signs are part of what organizes my consciousness, because my self is inseparable from the sign process that constitutes consciousness. that chair is as much part of my self as anything can possibly be (cziksentmihalyi and rochberg-halton 1981, 14). once again, equating an individual owning particular objects (purple tights, prius, treble-clef necklace) and a library owning particular books or information resources (neil gaiman’s american gods, schematics for an oil pipeline, city directories from 1906) may seem like a stretch—until you consider how each case of ownership attempts to express a deeper meaning of a particular identity. let’s back up. consider that librarians with collection development duties take this responsibility seriously. creating and maintaining a useful collection that fulfills the library’s and, in the case of academic libraries, the college or university’s, overarching mission is one of the pillars of librarianship. librarians want the collections they are stewarding to represent the best information in the best way for a particular population, the intended users. another way of explaining what collection librarians do is to say that they create an identity for their libraries through the objects that make up that collection. for example, taken as a whole, an “urban fiction” paperback collection at a public library has a very different identity than a topographical map collection at a technical college’s library. just as objects help define individuals, so particular books in a collection help define a library’s larger “self.” in stuff, one profiled hoarder, irene (who, interestingly enough, completed an mlis degree and was a well-respected cataloguer, though this position hastened her hoarding difficulties, as she often brought home old newspapers her library had weeded), illustrates the possessions-as-identity idea—as well as its ultimate conundrum when it comes to deselection (in her case, clearing her house of piles of old newspapers and other objects): “if i throw too much away, there’ll be nothing left of me” (99). no wonder weeding a library’s collection can often feel like cutting off one’s limbs! in some metaphysical or, at the very least, metaphorical way, it’s like carving off little bits of the institutional identity we’ve created and letting them die. the fear that doing so will kill that identity (so there’s “nothing left of me”) can be crippling. reason #3: we don’t want to squander possibility… or mess with history. hoarders are often pegged as lacking in some way (not having the ability to discern between treasure and trash, for example), but dr. frost and dr. steketee turn that around and argue that hoarders in fact have something others don’t: a unique ability to “look at [objects] and see limitless potential, limitless utility, and limitless waste” (15). in the case of irene, who was so concerned that getting rid of her objects would negate who she was, “things represented opportunity and a chance to experience all that life had to offer” (43). for example, she did not want to throw away a scrap of paper with an unknown phone number on it, even though she didn’t know what it was for, because it might be a number that would lead to something important for her. librarians who are hesitant to discard items often have the same impulse: if i eliminate this particular book about magic tricks out of the collection, will it mean that some child won’t learn the one special trick that might help her get interested in magic, which might then allow her to be accepted by other children? if i weed this book about catholic death rituals in 14th-century italy, will i be preventing some graduate student from completing his thesis research on time? these may seem like ridiculous scenarios, but that does not mean librarians don’t spin tales like this as they touch each book and decide whether it should stay or go. (i can’t be the only one who does this!) what fascinates me about this is that, for librarians, the hesitancy is all for the sake of others. we’re not the ones who want to learn the magic tricks or delve into 14th-century catholic rituals, but we want to preserve that possibility for people we might not ever meet. again, it is our professional responsibility as collection management librarians that compels us to consider the future (and current) interests of others. the other side of the idea that “the children are our future” is that the rich troves of knowledge from the past deserve passionate advocates willing to ensure their survival. we must save the books for the sake of posterity! there is nothing wrong with this aspiration. indeed, it’s a bedrock library value to preserve resources (particularly books) that represent the knowledge, culture, and history for those not yet born. it becomes a problem when that impulse is magnified and metastasized into the library version of “grey gardens,” either through perfectionism or an inability to discriminate between what posterity would like to keep and what best belongs in history’s dustbin. finally, some writers and philosophers identify the instinct for amassing collections (whether of paintings, tom cruise memorabilia, or, of course, books) as a way to lessen fear of death. by accumulating and curating a collection that will live on after you are gone, you are in some way transmitting part of yourself (remember: we conflate objects with our identity) to the future (frost and steketee 2010, 55). if this is so, is it really that far-fetched to see that weeding a library collection can feel like facing our own death? and can we honestly not understand that holding on to the items in the collection is a twisted (if unacknowledged) way to defy death? reason #4: the more books we have, the safer and more secure we feel. fear is a primal (some would say the primal) emotion deeply embedded into both human psyches and brains. neuroscientists have located the structures (the amygdalae) where fear is processed as right above the deepest and most primitive part of the brain—newer than the structures that control breathing and circulation, but evolutionarily ancient compared to the logical, thinking parts. there are numerous popular works that explain this; one of my favorites, despite the author’s recent professional difficulties, is jonah lehrer’s how we decide (2009). fear does not only occur as a response to an imminent threat such as a rattlesnake on the walking path in front of you. the opposite feeling of safety occurs for many because there are environmental signals—a smiling grandmother, dinner on the table—that assuages our fears. therefore, for many people, fear can also spring up when those safety signals are taken away. this is one explanation for why hoarders collect objects in the numbers that they do: the objects send safety signals that make the hoarders feel protected. in stuff, irene serves as another example of this principle. when having a difficult day or week, she just wants “to come home and gather my treasures around me” in order to feel better (frost and steketee 2010, 83-85). in the case of librarians and library collections, we, too, tend to feel safer when our collection numbers are robust, and for good reason. the “numbers game” has been identified as a barrier to deselection in libraries, though more for intellectual than emotional reasons. the quantity of books in a library’s collection is used as an indication of quality for external purposes. as gregory, summarizing slote, explains: “numbers of books and other items are time-honored criteria used in standards of accreditation as well as internal reports and decision making” (121). if a library reduces its numbers by weeding books, it can impact how the community and leaders view it, leading to less funding or loss of accreditation. the simple equation ends up being “more books = better library.” while this is an intellectual argument involving a “reliance on seemingly objective statistics and numbers” (gregory 2011, 121), the emotional component that supports accumulating high numbers of books is intriguing to consider. how much is preserving collection numbers a way to survive budget cuts and communicate quality, and how much is a matter of being able to “gather our treasures” around us? most librarians will admit that walking through one’s full (and neatly straightened) stacks can often produce a powerful feeling of satisfaction—one might even say safety. reason #5: we don’t want to waste resources. a final word about how cheap librarians are. (by which i mean: concerned about environmental sustainability and reducing waste, of course!) on the venn diagram of hoarders and most librarians, this is an area in which the circles overlap. just as hoarders are monumentally concerned about wasting items that might still have utility, librarians often feel that throwing away books is throwing away money. we might as well turn on all of our lights, trade in our prius for a gas-guzzling suv, and start a bonfire stoked by our new purchases! concluding emotions it’s been a year since i finished weeding my library’s storage collection of adult fiction. given all of the angst and guilt and regret i felt at the time, how do i feel now? pretty darn great, as it turns out. i’m not sure what lesson this provides exactly, though i do know the further i am away from the experience, the easier it is to concentrate on all of those shiny happy benefits of weeding that library literature promises. in fact, it feels a little bit like surviving a five-mile hike through a massive thunderstorm: i’m sure glad it’s over, and maybe next time i’ll remember to wear some rain gear. considering all of the emotional reasons why weeding can be fraught with difficulty is a kind of philosophical umbrella for me: it lets me feel my feelings (as the kindly television children’s host mr. rogers might have said) and then do my job anyway. it also helps to know that most, if not all, of the books i’ve weeded now go to better world books, an online organization that sells our cast-offs and gives my library a return on what is purchased. which means sir walter scott’s injury might have been a mere flesh wound. perhaps some other reader is enjoying his adventures and keeping him alive. a coda i completed this essay last december as the final paper for a graduate class in collection development for my mlis degree. my professor made a number of useful and cogent comments, including the suggestion that i bring in a description of nicholson baker’s double fold: libraries and the assault on paper, an impassioned plea for libraries not to discard collections, particularly newspapers and other periodicals. i had to laugh, because, the week after i completed the paper (but before i received my professor’s comments), i tackled an overdue personal weeding project: winnowing my own collection of way-too-many books. guess what book i decided i would probably not ever get around to reading and should donate to goodwill? if it weren’t so perfectly ironic, i’d be pretty emotional about that. acknowledgements an enormous thank you to dr. betsy van der veer “doc” martens of the university of oklahoma school of library and information studies, who was not only a direct and specific help for this particular article but has been a general and generous source of inspiration and support as i stagger toward the mlis finish line. brett bonfield offered sage advice and precise edits to the article that preserved my voice while weeding out (sorry) some of the rhetorical underbrush. a big oklahoma whoop of gratitude to him. works cited & consulted banks, julie. “weeding book collections in the age of the internet.” collection building 21 no.3  (2002): 113-119. cziksentmihalyi, mihali and eugene rochberg-halton. the meaning of things: domestic symbols and the self. new york: cambridge university press, 1981. dilevko, juris and lisa gottlieb. “weed to achieve: a fundamental part of the public library mission?” library collections, acquisitions, and technical services 27 no. 1 (2003): 73-96. disher, wayne. crash course in collection development. westport, ct: libraries unlimited, 2007. evans, g. edward and margaret saponaro. developing library and information center collections. westport, ct: libraries unlimited, 2005. frost, randy o. and gail steketee. stuff: compulsive hoarding and the meaning of things. new york: houghton mifflin harcourt, 2010. gregory, vicki l. collection development and management for 21st century library collections. new york: neal-schuman publishers, 2011. jacob, merle. “weeding the fiction collection: or should i dump peyton place?” reference & user services quarterly 40 no. 3 (2001): 234-239. larson, jeannette. crew: a weeding manual for modern libraries. 2012. http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ld/pubs/crew/index.html (accessed december 3, 2012). lehrer, jonah. how we decide. boston: houghton mifflin harcourt. 2009. mccormack, nancy. “when weeding hits the headlines: how to stop your library from making (that kind of) news.” feliciter (2008): 277-278. roy, loriene. “weeding without tears: objective and subjective criteria used in identifying books to be weeded in public library collections.” collection management (1990): 83-93. slote, stanley j. weeding library collections: library weeding methods. englewood, co: libraries unlimited, 1997. ward, suzanne m. and mary c. agaard. “the dark side of collection management: deselecting serials from a research library’s storage facility using worldcat collection analysis.” collection management 33 no. 4 (2008): 272-287. this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. crew manual, deselection, emotional issues in libraries, philosophical, public libraries, weeding an interview with steve roggenbuck ending a harpercollins boycott (february 27, 2011-august 7, 2013) 24 responses sirmies 2013–07–24 at 6:39 am killing sir walter scott: a philosophical exploration of weeding http://t.co/bcluugg8of via @feedly edorney 2013–07–24 at 8:20 am new article by laura raphael up at @libraryleadpipe http://t.co/lja9ahbryt #weeding #libraries #lis infopeep 2013–07–24 at 8:22 am in the library, with the lead pipe: killing sir walter scott: a philosophical exploration of weeding http://t.co/rttrnhi4b6 ecschlackman 2013–07–24 at 9:03 am many good points about weeding in this, though i think i lean towards a ruthless weeding style. :) http://t.co/npa3blj1yl dorothea salo 2013–07–24 at 10:28 am with respect, i think you missed some of the key drivers of the urbana free library situation: * the weeding undertaken at ufl was done strictly on basis of publication date, which standard practice considers an insufficient discriminant in the absence of other criteria. * librarians and library-school instructors joined the general public in protesting the indiscriminate weed. this was emphatically not a librarian-judgment-versus-patron-ignorance situation. * the library’s leadership consistently deflected blame and alienated staff librarians. this also was a significant issue. laura clapp raphael 2013–07–24 at 12:43 pm thank you, dorothea! i only mentioned the urbana situation briefly because it was a fairly recent instance of weeding in the news — and one that highlights how weeding is emotional for library users as well as librarians. i do not know enough about the particulars of urbana, but from what you say it certainly sounds like the original weeding was not handled well, or in accordance with accepted collection management best practices. only looking at publication date to determine what should be weeded is shortsighted! ian mccullough 2013–07–24 at 2:39 pm i used to buy used books and i nearly did a spit take when you mentioned frank yerby. yerby was a prolific author and very popular in his time but rarely read today. but yerby was also a frequent learning tool for learning how to buy books in that it was a nearly perfect example of what not to buy. meganjwatson 2013–07–24 at 3:16 pm reason #1 immediately made me think of george carlin’s hilarious and insightful riff on people and their “stuff” (probably nsfw due to language): http://youtu.be/mvgn5gculac laura clapp raphael 2013–07–26 at 10:04 pm ha! one of my favorite routines. pingback : internship log post 19 | library bob's ponderings pingback : the emotional side of weeding | libraries are for use elisa 2013–07–25 at 3:51 pm the crew online manual was updated to include ebooks last year. eleanor crumblehulme 2013–07–26 at 4:29 pm i’m a librarian with a literature background. i love books. i feel the odd, brief twinge over withdrawing certain books, but for the most part, i also love weeding. i find it both satisfying and comforting. if we infuse objects with identity, all the more reason to weed, i say. identity is fluid and ever evolving (and something of an illusion, anyway), and so should our collections be. great essay! laura clapp raphael 2013–07–26 at 10:03 pm eleanor, i love your take on identity — he not busy bein’ born is a-busy dyin’, as my favorite philosopher bob dylan sings, right? i’ll try to keep the fluidity (and illusory) of identity in mind when next i weed, whether my library collection or my winter clothes! carlshess 2013–07–28 at 2:38 pm i’m still a student, but i feel that whenever i face my first weeding project, i’ll have to work to get over reason three. partially, it has to do with previous weeding done in my own personal book collection. i took a bunch of catholic theology courses in college and amassed a small collection on the topic, but then with time grew uninterested, decided they were clogging my bookshelves, and donated/sold all of them. there have been a couple times since then i wished i still had them to reread or point to in a discussion. my collection of books on marxisim suffered a similar fate with similar regrets. pingback : eighth day | evielovesesoq cb 2013–08–03 at 4:57 pm great post! you capture the essence of weeding beautifully. i don’t think many people outside libraries get this part of the job (or even realize it’s there!). keep the faith in your studies. it’ll be worth it; i just finished my mlis in may and being finished rules!!! ellie collier 2013–08–07 at 9:26 am fantastic article. i have done all my weeding at community colleges and took great satisfaction on getting all that outdated junk off the shelves. i also personally can’t function well if surrounded by unkempt piles. i have a compulsion to tidy and organize and purge. this helped me relate better to my more typical colleagues. laura clapp raphael 2013–08–15 at 12:11 pm thank you, ellie! i wish i was as tidy as you are. :) and i’m i could help you understand your less-tidy colleagues. laura clapp raphael 2013–08–15 at 12:12 pm that mlis is so close i can taste it! weeding was such a difficult job to wrap my head around when i started. thank you for the kind words. katy 2013–08–15 at 11:49 am so is the basic premise here that librarians are hoarders? i’m not sure i buy that. the mother of one of my best friends was a hoarder. i helped my friend clean out the house after her mom died. the things she had, and her impulses for acquiring them and keeping them, resembled a library collection in no way i can think of. for one thing, her hoard was for herself only, and a library collects for its patrons. i think it’s wrong to identify one of the library’s basic missions (selection and deselection) with a pathological pattern of behavior that, frankly, ruins people’s lives. weeding should be thoughtful but not driven by emotions. i know that can be easier said than done, but i worry that hoarding comparisons do our profession a real disservice. laura clapp raphael 2013–08–15 at 12:09 pm thank you for your comment, katy. no, the premise of this article is definitely not to equate all librarians with hoarders, or even some librarians. it was to point out that there are many issues related to weeding that the professional library literature has not considered. as far as hoarding as a mental illness, i know of the horrors of this disease and you’re right, it can ruin people’s lives — not just the hoarders themselves, but their family members. i’m very, very sorry for your friend and her mother and the pain and heartbreak her hoarding brought. however, i believe that the hoarding impulse is a human one that we all share. for some, it’s as simple as not being able to throw out your high school prom dress, even if you won’t ever use it again or even look at it. for others, it’s much, much worse. (as you know.) it’s complicated in libraries with collections (which are objects that can convey meaning and identity, just as a prom dress or stacks of newspapers do for individuals) because there are so many professional connections to selection and deselection. it is often difficult to separate the professional from the personal. this article was my attempt as one librarian to go further into the topic and try to do that separating, in order to get a deeper view of my difficulties with weeding. i’m sorry you did not find it useful. pingback : veille hebdomadaire – 02.09.13 | biblio kams friday valentine 2013–10–16 at 3:22 pm at my library (medium/large community college) we’re evaluating the media collection which hasn’t been touched in over a decade. obsolete formats are easy, deciding to transform content is more difficult. i also fall into trap #3– it could be useful, somewhen. :-p this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct socratic questioning: a teaching philosophy for the student research consultation – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 1 nov shannon marie robinson /0 comments socratic questioning: a teaching philosophy for the student research consultation in brief socratic questioning, the act of asking questions in order to prompt critical thinking and reflection, expands the boundaries of librarianship by borrowing from the fields of philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology. when employed during the research consultation, socratic questioning establishes a cooperative relationship between librarian and student that empowers the student to take agency over the interaction. engaging learners not only academically but emotionally encourages them to become more deliberate and cognizant as they articulate their research need. this paper demonstrates how reference librarians can adjust interactions with students in order to encourage, empathize, and engage with these learners. by shannon robinson introduction socratic questioning is the process of asking questions to prompt critical thinking and reflection. the research consultation is an opportunity to integrate this practice into librarianship through learner-focused, engaged conversations with students. employing this method, the librarian relinquishes the role of expert or gatekeeper and uses deliberate verbal and visual language to establish a cooperative relationship that empowers students to take agency over the interaction. this technique involves learners academically and emotionally, encouraging them to become more deliberate in their research process. socratic questioning is especially helpful for students whose dominant learning styles include visual, kinesthetic, and interpersonal. these learners’ needs often go unmet in traditional reference encounters. this consultation model enables students to gain the confidence needed to independently formulate and navigate their research processes. in this article, i examine the research consultation through the vantage point of a socratic questioner. i provide an overview of how the method is used by clinical therapists and teachers and outline what this method looks like in the research consultation. with examples from my own practice as a liaison librarian, i offer concrete ideas for how reference librarians can adjust their interactions with students in order to encourage, empathize, and engage these learners. the student research consultation a consultation is defined as a meeting in which people discuss a problem or question (merriam-webster). a research consultation is pedagogically constructive because two experts cooperatively work to find solutions. the conversation is viewed as a dialogue “wherein the librarian assumes the more empowering role of partner as opposed to information guru” (doherty 107). dialogue differs from conversation in that it can unbalance one’s perceived understanding of a topic and drive one to further inquiry (chesters 13). dialogue during consultation inherently transforms the research process and thereby the outcome. understanding that collaborative learning is essential to student engagement, hooks considers dialogue integral to engaged pedagogy (43). students are able to actively monitor their learning process and recognize their ability to control that process (eckel 17). by framing the reference interaction as a consultation, academic librarians support students’ abilities to answer their own inquiries, rather than finding the answers for them (elmborg 459). in this student-centered model, the librarian and student approach the interaction as a team (tuai). through dialogue they “construct together a clearer picture” of the research need, a picture that could not have been singly created (nardi and o’day, emphasis theirs, 87). this approach to reference services encourages librarians to employ a cooperative learning model, acknowledging that while the librarian is an expert in search strategies and resource evaluation, the student is the master of the research need (mabry 43). the in-person research consultation is recognized as an optimal mode of one-on-one instruction that complements classroom-based information literacy practices (gale and evans 90). the reference and user services association (rusa) of the american library association (ala) acknowledged the significance of face-to-face interactions by revising their guidelines for behavioral performance of reference and information service providers to articulate the differences between in-person and remote reference services (weare et al.). rusa’s decision to distinguish between face-to-face and remote interactions should not be taken lightly. while there are now many forms of virtual research assistance, there is a valuable role to an in-person consultation, particularly for students who learn best when directly engaging with others (cardwell et al. 98). students appreciate face-to-face interactions because they allow for collaboration through focused, expert-guided dialogue (magi and mardeusz 612). merrill et al. call this “guided learning by doing,” an excellent description of student engagement encouraged through active learning (316). some students will independently request a research consultation while others are required by their faculty to meet with a librarian. often, students ask for a consultation after their own attempt to find and evaluate sources yielded little. they may arrive for the meeting feeling frustrated and concerned that their research topic is invalid. self-motivated students, when prompted, readily engage in dialogue while others, hoping for a quick resolution to their research problems, are caught off guard at the encouragement to actively participate. however, by engaging in dialogue throughout the reference encounter, all students learn that it is essential to the research process (dewdney and michell 62). the librarian encourages students to return to their point of initial inquiry that steered them to their topic. when students are driven by curiosity, learning will follow. socratic questioning it is implied through the philosopher plato’s writing that socrates would ask his pupils carefully crafted questions in an effort to get them closer to the truth through their own examination of a subject. in describing socratic education, woodruff affirms that “nothing is more important to this kind of education than the resources that learners bring to it” (14). a teacher asks questions with no clear implication of correct answers, encouraging students to process and critically think about the productive use of information and come to their own conclusions (hunkins 4). because the teacher’s questions prompt students’ observation of the complexity of knowledge, they recognize that the teacher is modeling good questioning techniques and that their responses to these questions help them articulate problems and consider different solutions. students embrace these solutions because they feel that the ideas are theirs, from conception to conclusion (woodruff 19). this metacognitive activity “enables students to be autonomous learners, empowering them to control their learning” (hunkins 19). socratic questioning is also used in psychotherapy, however there does not appear to be a unified approach to employing the method (carey and mullan). in cognitive therapy, socratic questions “are used to clarify meaning, elicit emotion and consequences, as well as to gradually create insight or explore alternative actions” (james et al. 85). overholser states that the contemporary application of systematic questioning in psychotherapy is “a cooperative exploration” that encourages clients to reconsider a point of view or suggest new approaches to a problem (“systematic questioning” 67). he states that socratic questioning is not only a method of gathering information, but encourages incorporation and analysis of many types of information (“systematic questioning” 69). socrates advocated for a one-to-one teaching encounter so that teachers engage students individually, making the research consultation an apt library service for employing this method (woodruff 36). additionally, because psychotherapy is often a one-on-one relationship, the use of socratic questioning in this setting may be examined for possible application to the research consultation. in cognitive therapy, this process of collaborative exploration is articulated by padesky as four stages of questioning: asking informational questions to which the person knows the answers; listening, particularly to hear emotions and unexpected answers; summarizing the dialogue and sharing knowledge as it is discovered; and synthesizing by applying the new information learned from questioning and listening (5-6). the connection between the psychological and pedagogical applications of socratic questioning is clearly demonstrated by comparing padesky’s four stages to graves’ six question types developed to assist students in their writing (107-117). while he does not refer to these questions as socratic, they are expressly within this methodology. graves recommends opening questions that are conversational and easily answered by the student (108). following questions enable the instructor to learn more about the student and writing topic, listening carefully and reflecting on the student’s answers (108). process questions and “questions that reveal development” are those that will help the instructor understand the student’s current progress and stumbling blocks (108-109). basic structure questions focus on the topic and developing context for that topic (112-114). lastly, for the student who is too confident in their research ability, the teacher can ask “questions that cause temporary loss of control” for the student (116). both padesky’s and graves’ series of questions fulfill mctighe and wiggins’ definition of essential questions. that is, they are open, “intellectually engaging,” require reasoning, move toward “transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines,” provoke further questioning, require rationalized answers, and may be recurring (3). these questions also align with rusa’s guidelines for behavioral performance of reference and information service providers, especially listening, continued open inquiry, and asking follow-up questions (weare et al). in particular, the use of open questioning is encouraged because it allows users some control of the conversation, “with the freedom to unfold their stories in a human way” (dervin and dewdney 509). the socratic philosophy of teaching is not without critics, but it is valuable as a tool to structure conversations between librarians and students. by using this method of questioning during consultations, students are encouraged to focus on how and why they are finding sources and then they begin to understand the research process, becoming more deliberate and cognizant in their search (schiller 47). socratic questioning requires students to challenge and disrupt preconceived notions, consider new information, and synthesize and analyze not only the information sources but their own information behaviors (hunkins 149). furthermore, it demonstrates the librarian’s role as non-expert, as facilitator and partner. the method exemplifies librarians’ desire to empower, encourage, empathize, and engage with students as novice researchers. it models a practice through which students confidently start independently planning, navigating, and managing their own research processes. empowerment socrates considered his students “partners in the search for knowledge,” not in an effort to belittle his own intellect, but to empower students to demonstrate and improve theirs (overholser, “disavowal” 289). this is addressed through an educational lens by stover who recognizes that knowledge and expertise are connected to power and authority (277). librarians collaborate with students to develop and execute information-seeking processes while also teaching them to independently discover and critically evaluate information sources. yet, to the student, librarians are seen as authorities, gatekeepers who provide access to necessary information. we must recognize hierarchy “while at the same time showing that difference in status need not lead to domination or any abuse of our power” (hooks 114). therefore, at the very beginning of the consultation, it is important to establish a cooperative agenda that recognizes librarian authority while empowering the student guide the interaction. an easy step to modify our greeting to be considerate of the whole student is to ask “how are you today?” in an interview discussing her life after the death of her husband, sheryl sandberg commented on the unintended harshness of “how are you?” because this seemingly simple question can overlook and undervalue a person’s true feelings (shontell). while sandberg was speaking directly about people’s concern for her after the loss of her husband, for reference librarians adding “today” to our greeting “how are you?” indicates to our students that we recognize their whole being and their life outside of the classroom. it also signals to them to reflect on where they are and why, in the present, bringing their attention to the time set aside for research and consultation. another common introductory question a reference librarian asks a student is, “how can i help you?” the intention is to express that availability, service, and interest are focused on the student, yet the question feels invasive and self-centered as the focus is on me and what i can do. i struggled with this linguistic problem until reading @feministajones’ august 2015 twitter thread regarding white “allies” reaching out to black activists of the black lives matter movement. when offering help, she suggests we ask “what kind of help do you need?” rather than “how can i help you?” outside the context of her twitter thread, this was a moment in the development of my own use of language with students. asking “what kind of help do you need?” places students in positions of power to determine how the research consultation will best support their needs. rather than telling students what the problem is, the librarian encourages students to articulate and fully understand the issues that prompted the consultation (leonard). since i began phrasing my opening questions as “how are you today?” and “what kind of help do you need?” i have found students are more reflective, pausing to consider why they requested the consultation and how an information specialist may be able to help. often without further prompting (or, if necessary, i ask probing or elaborating questions), students will answer this question by telling me about the assignment and how they chose their research topic. in articulating what help they need, students begin describing their feelings about the research process and what made them decide to reach out. the tone of the research dialogue is set by these initial, introductory questions. the socratic method relies on the student’s current understanding as a point of departure for discovery of new ideas (schiller 41). the librarian should begin the reference dialogue by asking the student to talk through what they already understand about their research topic and the research process. this builds the student’s confidence, allowing them to recognize the knowledge and authority they bring to the research consultation. taylor states that these answers “form the context of readiness” of the student (“the process of asking questions” 394). though these answers tend to be lengthy and nonlinear, they provide the necessary information to devise a search strategy and approach to the remainder of the consultation. encouragement socrates never considered himself a teacher because this indicates great knowledge (george 385). the socratic method in psychotherapy refers to this state of being as disavowal of knowledge and requires the therapist to disregard the role of expert (overholser, “disavowal” 284). that role falls to the client, who is experiencing the problem and therefore holds the necessary information to solve the problem. disavowal of knowledge has three parts: “intellectual modesty, a genuine desire for knowledge, and collaborative empiricism” (overholser, “disavowal” 288). from a teaching perspective, hooks asks us to be open minded and “willing to acknowledge what we do not know” (10). according to stover’s view of the non-expert, this is not denying our authority or knowledge; rather, as teachers, we seek to build relationships with students “based on mutual respect and a desire to learn through conversation” (277). in order to learn, one must first become aware of what one does not know and asking questions demonstrates awareness and initiative to learn (hunkins 44). how can an experienced reference librarian approach a consultation with intellectual modesty? while disavowal of knowledge can imply that teachers already know the answers to their questions, padesky admits that in cognitive therapy sessions good questions lead to “a million different individual answers” (4). working as a subject specialist, i hear the same research topic again and again. but the student is different so i may ask the same questions, but expect new answers. for librarians, elmborg states that “perhaps the hardest part of learning to teach is learning to ask questions rather than supply answers” (459). together, the librarian and the student begin to recognize that a simple question is not necessarily simple, nor does it have a singular answer (hunkins 32). to encourage a dialogue of questions and unexpected answers during the searching stage of the consultation, i describe what i am doing and why. in this way, i model a process of talking or wondering aloud, expressing areas of ignorance and intellectual curiosity. as an example, if i encounter unfamiliar disciplinary language during a search, i will admit to not knowing the terms and ask the student if they have encountered the terms in class. if they do not know terms, we look up definitions together. if they do, we move forward together with this new knowledge, using the terms as search keywords. hunkins suggests that when students see a teacher use their ideas in practice, this fosters “a feeling of joint inquiry, of cooperative learning” (214). because i do not assume that a student will connect their initial research need with my search process, wondering aloud makes the process explicit for them (beck and turner 87). even if i am well informed on a topic, i allow students to move through a phase of discovery, recognizing that not only will this help them learn but it impacts my own understanding by broadening my perspective to include novice scholars’ points of view. narrating my search strategy encourages students to also wonder aloud and ask pointed questions so they better understand the complexities of the search process. when a possible source is found, we examine it together and i ask for their thoughts, guiding them through an evaluation of the source. graves states that such conversation “provides the mirror” for the student who “needs to hear and see himself” in the research process (109). as i make my process known, step by step, i provide students with a concrete model that they may later independently employ. not unexpectedly, this process takes time. “for students to think, they need time to raise questions about what they encounter and then to query their questions so they recognize the question’s centrality to thinking, to make meaning” (hunkins 15). hunkins refers to mary budd rowe’s notion of wait time; if students are provided ample time to answer, their responses often demonstrate critical and variant thinking (208). however, it is unlikely that students will come to the research consultation in a slow-thinking mindset. this is because, as berg and seeber describe in the slow professor, “the corporatization of universities…has led to standardized learning and a sense of urgency” (8). coupled with feelings of anxiety and frustration from the research process, students welcome the opportunity to slow down, wonder aloud, and reflect on not only their research, but also on the classroom and other academic experiences. allowing the time and encouragement for students to reflect on the reasons they are engaging with a librarian demonstrates empathy and holistic support for students. empathy in replying to questions about their research inquiry, students will include in their answer how they are feeling about the topic and the research process as well as concerns about time management, outcomes, and grades. students not only consider their methods and progress but consider personal interests, values, and emotions (hunkins 36). hooks reminds us that even if we choose to ignore students’ (and our own) emotions, “it does not change the reality that the presence of emotional energy over-determines the conditions where learning can occur” (160). paying attention to emotions in this context is an example of “caring with” others, rather than “caring for” (chesters, emphasis hers, 134). caring with, chesters states, “motivates participants in a dialogue. this aspect of care thinking [leads to] care for others, and care for the topics that students deem worthy” (135). asking how a student is feeling about the research situation establishes motivation and temperament and provides the librarian with an answer to the “why” of the information need. understanding the student as a person, rather than as a reference inquiry, shapes the search strategy. in the past, during a reference dialogue i would ask “do you have any questions?” recognizing that students may be unable to articulate their needs as questions, i then shifted my question to ask, “how are you doing?” however, both questions can be answered in one word, usually “no” or “fine.” my intention is to understand how this meeting is going, how our practice of questioning, searching, and wondering aloud is affecting the student. now i ask what i actually want to know, “how are you feeling?” while this can be answered by a student with one word, it often is not. the student hears in this question an intention to know them fully, not just by their research topic. two answers i have received when asking about feelings demonstrate the effectiveness of this question. in the first example, after demonstrating a keyword search in a discovery catalog and sorting through results, i asked the student how she was feeling. she enthusiastically stated that she felt great. she saw the thousands of results seemingly related to her topic. then she noted that there are too many results and she was overwhelmed. the student wondered if she should entirely change her research topic. there is no question in this student’s response, yet reference librarians are able to pinpoint questions related to information overload, filtering results or redefining keywords, and evaluating sources. instead of asking the student to articulate questions about narrowing the scope of her research or determining the best sources for the topic, i asked her to describe her current emotive state and i used that descriptive answer to deduce the questions the student didn’t yet have the vocabulary to ask. in a research consultation with another student, my question regarding feelings received an honest answer. the student said he was actually a bit distracted from the task at hand, finding resources for his thesis. he had a job interview the next morning and was really nervous. he had not been very focused on the thesis, even though the literature review bibliography was due later that week. being a student is only one aspect of a very complicated person. in that moment, this student was trying to be present and engage with me but another part of his life took precedent. his answer was an opportunity for me to restructure our interaction to be more in line with his current situation. i empathized with him and said i would understand if, later in the week, he may not be able to recall information learned during our consultation. we wrapped up the consultation sooner than expected but having outlined next steps for when he was ready to revisit his thesis research. i provided means for getting in touch with me later in the week and encouraged him to contact me again. “by introducing the language of ‘feeling’ to the interaction, one can express both recognition and acceptance of the student’s feelings and the significant impact those feelings have” (anderson 1). often students will apologize to me for “ranting” about their research experience or how life seems to impede their academic success at every turn. many students will say “thank you for listening.” one of the reasons the face-to-face research consultation has not been fully replaced by virtual reference is the clear attention to and recognition of a student’s emotive behaviors. magi and mardeusz found numerous benefits cited in the literature of the in-person research consultation including the importance of visual cues and creating an environment for the librarian to express empathy and curiosity through collaborative dialogue (606). their research supports these benefits as they note that students who had just finished a consultation felt restored confidence and inspiration (613). the conversation with the librarian “helped relieve their anxiety and feelings of being overwhelmed” (614). inquiry into the student’s feelings throughout the consultation indicates a desire to build rapport and shows an interest in the student as a whole person. librarians should also share feelings during a consultation, establishing “the groundwork for forming an alliance with the patron” (quinn 189). taylor notes that one reference librarian trait important for successful consultations is empathy (“question-negotiation” 183). george also encourages reference librarians to talk with their students about their feelings regarding their research topic and, in doing so, inform the user of our own knowledge gaps, which aligns with disavowal of knowledge (385). but what is even more important than asking about feelings is listening to the answers. referring to stover’s position of non-expert, librarians must be “intuitive and reflective practitioners” (285). this requires careful listening and interpretation of verbal and nonverbal cues. he concludes, “perhaps expertise in reference librarianship is related more to ‘emotional intelligence’ than to traditional notions of intelligence” (286). extended engagement socratic questioning may leave a student with more questions and perspectives to consider, with many “inquiring journeys” ahead (hunkins 151). it is not merely solving problems but teaching others methods for autonomously doing so (padesky 4). as the reference consultation is coming to a close, the librarian must be confident that the student is capable of independently moving forward with the research process. it is likely that a student feels successful immediately after a research consultation, but how will they feel once they are on their own? ross and dewdney suggest that every reference transaction end with a clear follow-up question that implies the patron may return for further assistance (161). “what will you do next?” or “how will you reach out if you need additional help?” are deliberate questions that ask the student to reflect on the entire research process, rather than this one step, the consultation. graves considers these process questions; that is, they makes the student reflect on their research method and not just the outcome (109). within these questions is the acknowledgment that the research conversation doesn’t have to end with the current encounter. secondly, it recognizes that whatever hurdles the librarian and student jumped together, there will be more in the timeframe of this research project. asking a student at the end of an encounter, “how will you reach out if you need help?” requires them to consider next steps. in my subject specialty, art and design, i often take the next step with the student. because print books are one of the best sources in these disciplines, we continue our conversation in the stacks, pulling books by call number and serendipitous discovery. like thinking aloud during the search process, verbally articulating how i am finding and evaluating books provides an opportunity for modeling good research behavior (beck and turner 88). context reinstatement psychology is also useful here, as the physical activity in the stacks will help students later in recalling processes and conversations (moody and carter 390). the time in the stacks not only provides an opportunity to demonstrate how to browse and evaluate print material, but also evidence of a successful reference encounter for assessment purposes. as the research consultation comes to a close, student responses to my question “how will you reach out if you need help?” illustrate that they are reflecting on the process and provide me with verbal confirmation of what they learned. in one consultation, i sent an email to the student with links to the resources found together. when i asked about reaching out if she needed more assistance, the student said if she had any more questions she would reply to that email. another student remarked that my contact information was on the subject guide and that he could also see when i was on reference chat. a third undergraduate felt certain she would not need more assistance with her research for a particular project, but said she would contact me again soon to discuss another assignment with which she was struggling. a graduate student remarked that she was meeting with her thesis advisor the following week; she had learned so much new information during our consultation that she predicted she would need further assistance after meeting with the advisor and would likely get back in touch with me then. while none of these students would likely need a full research consultation again, they left the consultation recognizing that their work was not done and that they were welcome to reach out again. conclusion in clinical psychology, therapists using socratic questioning are considered “more empathic, more warm and friendly, more honest and sincere, and more collaborative” (overholser, “self improvement” 549). research in the educational field shows that teachers’ questioning increases student learning and impacts thinking processes (hunkins 18). in our discipline, stover reports that user satisfaction with reference inquiries center on interpersonal skills rather than right answers. factors including expressed interest, active listening, empathy, and collaboration are all reported by library users as signs of satisfactory service (stover 289). in particular for students, “they are not simply completing their homework; rather, they are becoming better students” (schiller 53). hunkins echoes this notion, confirming that, through questioning, students see how the inquiry process they are practicing connects to their lives outside of the classroom (5). since employing the method, i have found that my research consultations are longer because students are engaged, curious, and responding willingly to me listening and reflecting with them on the research process. socratic questioning encourages students to challenge their own thinking structures, to disrupt them, contemplate alternatives, and consider consequences to the alternatives. questioning makes students judge the worth of their positions and assess the value of new positions (hunkins 149). as a librarian, i am successful when students succeed; in the words of socrates: “some things i have said of which i am not altogether confident. but that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know; – that is a theme upon which i am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power” (plato). the socratic method stems from a passion for learning (woodruff 27). this passion, when modeled by the guide, can shift students’ perceptions of their learning. not only will they value the process, but delight in taking ownership of it. acknowledgements: thank you to sara macdonald and stephanie beene for early draft feedback. many thanks for the insight and support from reviewers eamon tewell and annie pho, and publishing editor sofia leung. references anderson, jewell. “over and out: effectively assessing the end of a reference interview.”georgia library quarterly vol. 50, no. 2, 2013, pp. 1. http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/glq/vol50/iss2/7. beck, susan e. and nancy b. turner. “on the fly bi: reaching and teaching from the reference desk.” the reference librarian vol 34, no. 72, 2001, pp. 83-96. doi: 10.1300/j120v34n72_08. berg, maggie and barbara k. seeber. the slow professor: challenging the culture of speed in the academy. university of toronto press, 2016. cardwell, catherine, et al. “my 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doherty, john j. “reference interview or reference dialogue?” internet reference services quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3, 2006, pp. 97-109. doi: 10.1300/j136v11n03_07. eckel, edward j. “fostering self-regulated learning at the reference desk.” reference & user services quarterly, vol. 47, no. 1, 2007, pp.16-20. scholarworks.wmich.edu/library_pubs/3/. elmborg, james k. “teaching at the desk: toward a reference pedagogy.” portal: libraries and the academy, vol. 2, no. 3, 2002, pp. 455-464. doi: 10.1353/pla.2002.0050. @feministajones. “when offering help, don’t ask ‘how can i help you?’ ask 1st ‘do you need help?’ then ‘what kind of help do you need?’ twitter, 9 august, 2015, 9:28pm,    https://twitter.com/feministajones/status/630551378230910976. —. “‘do you need help?’ shows respect for a person’s self-determination and willingness to be supportive of a person’s own efforts to achieve.” twitter, 9 august 2015, 9:32pm, https://twitter.com/feministajones/status/630552275430326272. gale, crystal d. and betty s. evans. “face-to-face: the implementation and analysis of a research consultation.” college & undergraduate libraries, vol. 14, no. 3, 2007, pp. 85-101. doi: 10.1300/j106v14n03_06. george, jessica. “socratic inquiry and the pedagogy of reference: serendipity in information seeking.” acrl twelfth national conference, 7-10 april, 2005, minneapolis, mn. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/pdf/george05.pdf. graves, donald h. writing: teachers and children at work. heinemann educational books, 1983. hooks, bell. teaching critical thinking: practical wisdom. routledge, 2010. hunkins, francis p. teaching thinking through effective questioning. christopher-gordon publishing, inc., 1989. james, ian a., et al. “the science and art of asking questions in cognitive therapy,” behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy, vol. 38, no. 1, 2010, pp. 83-93. leonard, irene. “the art of effective questioning: asking the right question for the desired result,” coaching for change, https://www.coachingforchange.com/pub10.html. magi, trina j. and patricia e. mardeusz. “why some students continue to value individual, face-to-face consultations in a technology-rich world.” college & research libraries, vol. 74, no. 6, 2013, pp. 605-618. doi: 10.5860/crl12-363. mabry, celia h. “the reference interview as partnership: an examination of librarian, library user, and social interaction.” the reference librarian, vol. 40, no. 83-84, 2004, pp. 41-56. doi: 10.1300/j120v40n83_05. mctighe, jay and grant wiggins. essential questions: opening doors to student understanding. ascd, 2013. merrill, douglas c., et al. “tutoring: guided learning by doing.” cognition and instruction, vol. 13, no. 3, 1995, pp. 315-372. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3233660. moody, janette and elizabeth carter. “application of the cognitive interview by the reference librarian.” reference & user services quarterly vol 38, no. 4, 1999, pp. 389-393. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20863618. nardi, bonnie a. and vicki l. o’day. information ecologies: using technology with heart. the mit press, 1999. overholser,  james c. “elements of the socratic method: i. systematic questioning.” psychotherapy: theory, research, practice, training, vol. 30, no. 1, 1993, pp. 67-74. doi: 10.1037/0033-3204.30.1.67. —. “elements of the socratic method: iv. disavowal of knowledge.” psychotherapy: theory, research, practice, training, vol. 32, no. 2, 1995, pp. 283-292. —. “elements of the socratic method: v. self-improvement.” psychotherapy: theory, research, practice, training, vol. 33, no. 4, 1996, pp. 549-559. padesky, christine a. “socratic questioning: changing minds or guiding discovery?” european congress of behavioural and cognitive therapies, 24 september 1993, london, england. keynote address. http://www.padesky.com/clinical-corner/publications/. plato. “meno.” the internet classics archive,  http://classics.mit.edu/plato/meno.html. quinn, brian. “how psychotherapists handle difficult clients: lessons for librarians.” reference librarian vol. 36, no. 75/76, 2002, pp. 181-196. doi: 10.1300/j120v36n75_17. ross, catherine sheldrick and patricia dewdney. “negative closure: strategies and counter-strategies in the reference transaction.” reference & user services quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 1998, pp. 151-163. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20863495. schiller, nicholas. “finding a socratic method for information literacy instruction.” college & undergraduate libraries. vol. 15, no. 1-2, 2008, pp. 39-56. doi: 10.1080/10691310802176798. shontell, alyson. “‘how are you?’ can actually be an insensitive question – here’s what you should say instead.” business insider, may 8, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandberg-common-question-asking-how-are-you-interview-option-b-book-grief-2017-5. stover, mark. “the reference librarian as non-expert: a postmodern approach to expertise.” the reference librarian vol. 42, no. 87/88, 2004, pp. 273-300. doi: 10.1300/j120v42n87_10. taylor, robert s. “question-negotiation and information seeking in libraries.” college & research libraries, vol. 29, no. 3, 1968, pp. 178-194. doi: 10.5860/crl_29_03_178. —. “the process of asking questions.” american documentation vol. 13, no. 4, 1962, pp. 391-396. doi: 10.1002/asi.5090130405. tuai, cameron k. “using the concept of teamwork to increase why-based questioning in the academic reference interview.” portal: libraries and the academy vol. 3, no. 4, 2003, pp. 663-670. doi: 10.1353/pla.2003.0097. weare, william h., et al. “guidelines for behavioral performance of reference and information service providers.” reference and user services association, http://www.ala.org/rusa/resources/guidelines/guidelinesbehavioral. woodruff, paul. “socratic education.” philosophers on education: historical perspectives, edited by amélie oksenberg rorty, london: routledge, 1998, pp. 14-31. reference services, research consultation, socratic method, student engagement the innovation fetish and slow librarianship: what librarians can learn from the juicero patron-driven subject access: how librarians can mitigate that “power to name” this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct an academic librarian-mother in six stories – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 30 may alexandra gallin-parisi /29 comments an academic librarian-mother in six stories in brief: the author found it curious and disappointing when she couldn’t find many published stories about the experiences of academic librarians who are also mothers. where were mother-librarians represented in the library and information science literature? using narrative and personal photographs, the author shares her stories of being a tenure-track librarian and a mother of two children. this article is an attempt to give mother-librarians the opportunity to see their lived experiences reflected in the literature, and, most importantly, to invite other mother-librarians to share their own stories. by alexandra gallin-parisi all photo credits: the author. introduction: loneliness seven years ago, when i began to seriously consider trying to get pregnant, i turned to our discipline’s literature for insight into what mixing motherhood and academic librarianship might look like. i had questions. perhaps naïvely, i expected a treasure trove of histories, narratives, studies, essays, opinion pieces, and advice columns detailing the insides and outsides of the academic librarian’s experience with balancing parenthood in general and motherhood in particular. spending years working in academic libraries before and during library school, i had become inured to the woes of our “feminized” or “gendered” profession1 ; i expected the library and information science literature to be overflowing with the personal and political stories of women, their lives, and their babies. since i graduated from library school within the past decade, i also consider my peers and i to be swimming in the waters of critical librarianship, attempts at inclusivity and equity, and concerns about social justice within libraryland. i assumed this terrain had been well-trodden in our journals. but i did not find answers in our literature. mothers were curiously and conspicuously absent. after i had my first baby in early 2013 and was preparing to return to work after my too-short leave, i re-checked the literature. there was no one around in my library who had adopted or given birth or even fathered a child while employed there for decades, so i didn’t have local knowledge about what i might expect. i desperately wanted information, but i also wanted stories. what were the policies i should be aware of? what sort of flexibility would there be when i returned? how open should i be about my needs? what would my needs even be? what should i expect of myself and of others? what would it feel like to be a mother at work in an academic library? as a cisgendered, educated, urban, able-bodied, (jewish)2 , middle-class, english-speaking woman born in the united states and married to a man, i admit that my many privileges allow me to take for granted that i will be represented in “the literature” almost regardless of what that literature is. so yes, i was dumbfounded when i could not find myself reflected in our professional scholarship. but i also didn’t find any black, latina, lesbian, rural, or disabled mother-librarians represented. where were the pregnant librarians? where were the mother-scholar-librarians? how was it possible that in a field bursting with women of all ages, mothers were nowhere to be seen? over the course of several years, i have dipped in and out of the relevant scholarship when i have been able. over the past twelve months, i have been actively wrestling with, grasping at, and brow-furrowing over the mother literature, trying to get a foothold for the perspective of academic mother-librarians. this article is just a taste of what i have been exploring. i do not think i have succeeded in telling the broad story here, nor do i think i alone possibly can. i do not think i have been nearly as theoretical nor as intersectional as i would like to be. i do think at this point in my career, on the brink of earning tenure, i am now ready to tell some small bits of my own story. i am ready to start sharing: as a way to selfishly quell my own loneliness but also as an invitation for you to share too. i think of this article as a conversation starter with you, my readers, rather than a finished product, and i hope you can see and accept that. when i started as a mother-librarian, i needed encouragement, support, reflections, advice, stories about real life, and i couldn’t find any. i wish for that not to be the case for the mother-librarians to come. my hope here is to give other mother-librarians a chance to see themselves in our literature in the way i would like to be seen. in the act of telling stories, in the gracious openness of hearing them and validating them, we can shape and remake the truth of what it is to be a feminist mother, a working mother on the tenure track, a flesh and blood representation instead of an empty signifier. – kecia driver mcbride (2008, 48) literature motherhood’s ubiquity in higher education literature luckily i found an enormous volume, depth, and density of scholarship and stories about non-library faculty parenthood. faculty mothers, fathers, grandparents of every stripe, sexuality, gender, race, and age were explored in that body of literature; tenured, untenured, probationary, and adjunct faculty as well as doctoral students were covered; faculty mothers in various disciplines were compared; historical examinations of combining professorship and family life were plentiful. i began to read and read and read.3 it warrants a quick explanation as to why the immense literature regarding non-library faculty wasn’t enough for me. i hold many of these publications very dear to my heart; these writings have honestly been my lighthouse, my anchor, and my rudders all at once while i travel the seas of mothering and work. but as i explain in an earlier article (gallin-parisi 2015), library faculty (and staff too) are different. our schedules, flexibility, demands, required hours on-campus, and autonomy are wholly distinct from our faculty colleagues outside the library. when i read about summers off with the kids or year-long sabbaticals or scheduling classes and office hours so as not to conflict with breastfeeding or school pick-up or swim classes or time to work on research and publications, i do not see my narrative reflected. where are the mother-librarians and their narratives? motherhood’s marginality in library and information science literature it isn’t that the library and information science (lis) literature never mentions motherhood, but rather that the mentions are so few and far-between and not exactly what i was looking for in my personal and professional time of need. there were important studies in the lis literature over the last twenty years, including papers published in college & research libraries (c&rl). mickey zemon and alice harrison bahr (2005) made significant strides in their quantitative study about female directors of academic libraries and whether or not they have been able to advance their careers while raising children. stephanie j. graves, jian anna xiong, and ji-hye park (2008) mapped the relationship between librarians’ tenure achievement and parenthood in “parenthood, professorship, and librarianship: are they mutually exclusive?”, which was published in the journal of academic librarianship. in 2013, ruth sara connell published an article in c&rl examining parental leave policies at academic libraries. she surveyed library and human resource administrators (and not the parent-librarians themselves). all of these studies, all published in our prestige journals, showed that there has been at least some interest in the topic. but in searching the lis literature, i was less interested in my chances of earning tenure (although this is surely on my mind) or becoming a library director (which has never been something i’ve wanted) than in finding the stories and reflections of women who had done this before me. the literature seemed detached and highly academic when i needed a mentor, an understanding colleague, or a rhetorical hug. i believed kecia driver mcbride when she wrote that “sharing stories from the trenches4 somehow made everything a little easier” (2008, 46) and i longed for those shared stories from librarians. while i got to work in 2015 writing my first article on the topic (“the joy of combining motherhood and librarianship”), code4lib published jaclyn bedoya, margaret heller, christina salazar, and may yan’s brief article presenting practical strategies for mother-librarians working in technical areas, which included a few first-person anecdotes. i felt a faint glimmer of hope that mothers were finally being seen where they had been all along. interestingly, “mothers” explicitly show up in some of the lis literature from the last decade or so, but these mothers are not actual mothers but rather the personification of the emotional performances of public services librarians. nancy fried foster memorably names the expectations of undergraduate students the “mommy model of service,” as they seek reassurance, care, and “access to the font of all good things” from the academic librarian (2007, 76). celia emmelhainz, erin pappas, and maura seale (2017) call back to the “mommy librarian,” as they examine how the american library association’s reference & user services association (rusa)’s guidelines for behavioral performance of reference and information service providers5 codifies the gendered nature of reference librarians’ emotional labor. they use the mommy librarian as the embodiment of arlie hochschild’s concept of emotional labor.6 while other scholars have deftly highlighted the emotional labor of reference and instruction librarians7 , it is significant to note that scholars can so easily use the figure of a mother/mommy as shorthand for that emotional work; in many ways, the librarian’s emotional labor is viewed as almost indistinguishable from the motherwork performed by actual mothers. motherhood as “un-writerly” in the middle of writing this article, i recalled reading two referential essays published online a couple years ago that i had read while nursing my second baby. after i read kim brooks’s essay, “the portrait of the artist as a young mom,” in the cut, i immediately scrolled back to the top and re-read it. twice. although i am not an artist or a writer, i knew precisely what she was writing about––because she was writing about me. brooks details the journey from her creative, relatively carefree, romantically struggling lifestyle as a young writer to her life as a domesticated, sentimental, exhausted mother who is burdened with the seemingly obligatory social rituals of motherhood. more than that, in her essay brooks highlights her “domestic ambivalence” in a particular way i had not read before. her essay is not especially new or perfectly executed, which she tacitly acknowledges when she tells about the time she drew up a list of elements of her maternal identity that are, essentially, comparing adrienne rich’s concepts of mothering versus motherhood8 , and her friend, who has three children of her own, laughs at the list and simply remarks, “old news.” but i enjoyed it so much because it is about me. inside, in the secret parts of me i prefer not to share, i feel that very ambivalence: wanting to be the best mother to my girls, a mother who is ready to play and read and run and tell stories and listen patiently while also being an economic provider who is out here in the world, thinking about information and higher education and research and power and societal problems. notably, brooks writes about how babies in the creative writing classroom are out of place, how the “parenting activities and affiliations” are symbols of the “un-writerly.” i am struck by this term. why are mother-librarians not represented in our professional and theoretical literature in library and information science? it may be that our scholarship eschews the topics of babies and children and the mothers who are raising them because those related activities, affiliations, and even people are in some way “un-librarianly.” mothers are somehow “un-librarianly”: even as we act the part of librarians, we run counter to the positivist, androcentric, orderly, clocklike, and standardized system of libraries. in their provocative “power, knowledge, and fear: feminism, foucault, and the stereotype of the female librarian,” marie l. radford and gary p. radford explore the stereotype of the female librarian in popular culture, and write: “the female librarian is presented as fearsome, but, beneath the stern exterior, there is nothing to fear: there is only a woman” (261). sharing the stories of parenting activities in our literature would reveal the messiness and humanity of the women who are mother-librarians; it would remove the facade of serious information gatekeepers. it would make explicit that we are, indeed, “just” women. in brooks’s essay she cites the other essay i read, laura miller’s “ladies of leisure: the resurgence of the housewife novel” in slate, which begins: unable to sleep, a woman sits at the kitchen table or walks her neighborhood by night. she is 37, maybe 36. she is a wife and mother, roles that seem to have taken over her identity. yet she looks down on women like that––most of whom, she can’t help but noticing, are better at being wives and mothers than she is. she used to dream of art or writing or some other creative endeavour. now, she takes pills. she’s bored. she’s anxious. she’s guilt-ridden. she’s exhausted and frustrated and probably depressed. it is all so confusing since i see myself in that character, but also not. as far back as i can remember, i have always wanted to be someone’s wife and someone’s mom. my twenties were full of heartbreak, brooklyn apartments, happy-hour beers and whiskeys neat, kissing other confused twenty-somethings, checking out countless library dvds of television shows with which to self-medicate, rooftop parties, book readings, working long hours at low-paying jobs, staying up late talking with friends. but i always wanted to get married and to have babies (by birth or by adoption, i didn’t care). and now, with a promising tenure-track job, a loving husband, two wonderfully wild daughters, i am not quite sure how i got here or how to navigate being my family’s breadwinner who wants to be a “good” librarian and a “good” mother, when those two identities so often seem irreconcilable. theories of motherhood there is neither space or time here to illuminate even half of the 20thand 21st-century scholarship on motherhood, mothering, and mothers. ever the librarian, i thrust myself down the rabbit hole of literature on these topics and yet was surprised that i just kept falling in deeper and deeper, following each reference, downloading each article, interlibrary loan requesting more book chapters, reading for pleasure and in desperation. i had to look up an embarrassing number of terms and concepts that authors (almost all women) assumed i, the educated reader, would be familiar with. suddenly, instead of writing a short article for in the library with the lead pipe, i was preparing to teach a course on multiple feminisms, marxism and consumption, the pathologizing of black children and their mothers, the embodiment of labor, and more.9 i followed the trail deeper and deeper, and, for the first time in a long time, i was intellectually entranced.10 who knew that there was so much to mothers besides all the (albeit very functionally important) parenting aspects? how had i never heard of the scholar andrea o’reilly, who is the founder and director of what is now the motherhood initiative for research and community involvement and who basically birthed the formal discipline around motherhood? how had i missed the fact that many of my intellectual idols––patricia hill collins, adrienne rich, kimberlé williams crenshaw, bell hooks––had turned their sharp minds specifically to the concepts surrounding mothers? once i dove into the bottomless sea of mother literature, i knew i was not going to be able to cover it all here. i wrote this article in those spurts of time between student research appointments, packing kid lunches and water bottles, feeding the cat, answering emails (or marking them “unread” and telling myself i will return to them soon), signing up for the daycare’s bake sale (actually signing up my husband since i don’t bake), picking up immunization forms for kindergarten registration, barely prepping for a library session, making eggs and pasta for dinner again, and, like in a banal sitcom, removing marker scribbles from the wall. while at this very moment i write on my phone’s tiny screen in an almost-dark room, rocking a long-legged two-year-old on my lap and humming a lullaby, kecia driver mcbride’s words from her superb chapter on parenting in academia run through my mind: i know that i am on borrowed time, and if i am able to finish this chapter at all it will be because i have compromised more than one precious commodity this week (gone without sleep, missed someone’s basketball game or piano lesson, skipped the deadline for that book review, rushed through tomorrow’s class prep) and settled also for the fact that i will never get the wording quite right, will never fully be able to articulate what is so clear to me in my own lived experience. (page 48) how reassuring is it to know that another mother-scholar out there understands me so well as to take my feelings sitting in this now-dark room and express them so exactly? this article represents some of my not-quite-right words on the chance that my stories reflect your experiences in some small way and help you feel seen. story 1: body standing up in front of a classroom as students get settled into their seats, i logged into the podium computer and adjusted the lights. when the course professor walked in, he did a double-take of me and exclaimed, “oh wow, you’re about to pop! please don’t have that baby during class!” he chuckled, the students looked at my body and smiled, and i did a fabulous impression of laughter. this, along with countless other unsolicited comments from faculty colleagues, students, staff, and visitors to the library, made it clear that (1) i was in no way in control of my body and (2) my pregnant body belonged to everyone. the feminist scholarship around the gendered embodiment of motherhood and the female body in the workplace is some of the richest and most interesting of the mother literature. reading it, i felt both the satisfaction of recognition as well as the white guilt of privilege. as privileged as i am in my non-pregnant life, the experience of having my body not belong to me during the visible part of my pregnancy felt piercing. my growing body was available for students and staff to touch to avoid the mal de ojo11 , for a professor to caress admiringly (but without permission), for another faculty member to compare to the size of his wife’s body when she was pregnant (again, without permission). i am an open and physical person with a very small personal bubble, however when i was pregnant, i already felt like my rounded, swollen body was foreign to me; having my body open to everyone’s gaze and touch rendered it additionally foreign, uncomfortable, disassociated. throughout my adulthood, i have enjoyed being able to play with my gendered presentation. i was born and identify as female. that said, before pregnancy, breastfeeding, and the accompanying weight gain, i was flat-chested, narrow-hipped, thin. at six feet tall, i am noticeably taller than most women. i liked that i could wear my hair long and curly and wear lipstick (though i rarely wore any makeup at all) or i could cut my hair short and dress only in button-down shirts, slim jeans, and sneakers and manspread my legs. as an educator on a relatively conservative college campus, i liked that my students couldn’t always pin down what was different about me; i think some potentially marginalized students were drawn to me and found me more approachable because of my distinct appearance. until my body drastically changed, i had never explicitly thought about this aspect of my identity. as my body became curvy and my breasts grew large, it became harder for me to present as a masculine woman. i was all-too-aware of my body as i stood in front of students. i was uncomfortable. i didn’t feel like me. kathryn haynes’s 2008 study about the gendered embodiment of female accounting professionals during and after pregnancy spoke to my experience and helped underscore the relationship i saw between my sense of my relationship with my body and my professional identity. firstly, haynes states, “pregnancy represents a particular embodied episode, during which a woman has little jurisdiction over her body’s appearance and demeanour, and which belies the modern western conviction that we possess our own bodies and are able to mould them accordingly” (337). secondly, she points out that controlling the outward appearance of one’s body helps female accounting professionals conform to the masculine norms of rationality, assertiveness, and competition in the accounting workplace (336). my newly overtly feminine body made me feel like i was performing my femininity in a way i didn’t like. i also felt like i was conforming to the feminine ideal in librarianship. not only did i retain “little jurisdiction” over my appearance, my appearance itself was in conflict with my personal and professional normal. curiously, until i was working on this article, i had not noticed some of my coping behaviors during and after both my pregnancies. i had tried to lean in to the aggressive femininity of my physical body during my first pregnancy: form-fitting dresses at work, flowing polka-dot blouses, hipster scrunchies in my curly hair, fabulous heels. even when i got too uncomfortable for anything but sweatpants and gap t-shirts, i still tried to look “feminine.” midway through my second pregnancy, on a very hot fourth of july, i decided to buzz off all my hair for the first time. i played with wearing feminine patterned dresses, painting my nails, and wearing high heels so that i would have the contrast of “masculine” and “feminine.” body-conscious dresses looked very different with a shaved head. almost every morning before work, i thought about how to present my outward self as a mixture of feminine and masculine. i tried wearing extra-large button-down shirts from the men’s section of the used clothing store, huge men’s white undershirts, bright red lipstick. i struggled with my new breasts, hips, thighs, rounded parts. i hated being on display in front of the classroom. it was emotionally taxing. navigating the emotional world of my changed body in pregnancy on top of the physical changes was not something i expected to be a part of this experience. (left) here i am in a library restroom at work, two days before giving birth to my first daughter, in january 2013. (right) and this one is at a conference in las vegas in october 2015, five weeks before giving birth to my second daughter. throughout both pregnancies, i struggled with having my body being so visibly “feminine;” i tried to counter-balance it by shaving my head the second time around. story 2: milk feeling uncertain about how i present myself in my office. desk full of photos of my kids. take them all down. now i seem professional. put up two favorite photos because i miss seeing their faces. then the two multiply and again, i have a desk full of photos. why should i hide my mother identity? what is my mother identity? do i mention that i can’t meet at that time because i’ll be pumping in my office or just that i have a conflicting “appointment”? maybe i should make a big deal that i am pumping so that people remember that that is a thing. i definitely should shove it in their faces: this is a thing! a thing mothers are told is the best thing! yes, dear colleagues, some women hook themselves up to funnel-looking things with tubes that attach to a motorized machine to extract milk out of their nipples multiple times a day. right next door to you at work. do the pumping mothers in your library have private offices? if not, is there a lactation room in the library or nearby on campus? if not, she might be hiding in a storage closet or an unused conference room, hoping no one walks in on her. or sitting on a toilet seat in the restroom with students in the stall next to her. or a restroom in a building across campus so that she can experience the aura of privacy. you can imagine how lovely it is to produce food for your baby while topless in a restroom, closet, conference room, or even in a private office with students knocking on the door needing scholarly sources for their papers. i pumped for each of my daughters until they reached one year old. i state this as a fact, not a competition, and also with full knowledge of my privilege as a middle-class, (jewish) woman and thus not nearly as burdened with all the additional baggage around breastfeeding forced upon women less privileged than i. all in all, i didn’t like pumping but it wasn’t the most terrible thing ever. sometimes it gave me a moment to take a break and think about my darling baby who couldn’t be at work with me. sometimes it gave me an excuse to stop working and zone out or browse the web. most often it was a hassle, an additional stressor, a potential sticky milky mess waiting to happen, and a time to check my work emails. i used a pumping bra that meant i could pump hands-free. before i got my own breast pump, i had never in my life seen one before, let alone seen someone use it. i think i’ve seen a pump twice on television. not breastfeeding; i’m talking about a pump, this little yellow-and-white plastic mechanical contraption. there is a tiny scene in friday night lights where the riggins brothers fumblingly try to figure out how to use tami taylor’s pump. and, with shockingly surprising realism, jane in jane the virgin has a pump and is shown constantly worrying about keeping up her supply, struggling with latch, needing time to pump (even when out at a nightclub). i had never seen a woman hooked up to one. from talking to other moms, it seems rare that anyone sees another woman hooked up to one. i didn’t even like my husband to see me using it. pumping in my office when my first-born was seven months old. once, when i was only about five months postpartum, i was listening to a student tell me about what a hard time he was having with school, his family back home, money, a breakup, life. he was truly struggling, and he needed someone to listen. after 90 minutes of opening up to me, he was visibly relieved. i had missed my pumping session, but listening to him took priority. i got teary as he thanked me for listening. he said that he felt like i was his “white mom” and how glad he was to have me in his life. (he is black, and he and i talk frequently about race, so this phrase wasn’t as odd as it sounds.) while he was sharing with me, i knew i needed to pump, but i sacrificed my body’s immediate needs for his need for connection in that moment. even he recognized that i was doing motherwork for him. i felt emotional and i was late to pump; i could feel my milk let down forcefully.12 i rushed a goodbye and was grateful when he closed the door behind him. when i first went back to work in 2013, my 12-week-old daughter wouldn’t take a bottle. my husband would drive her to the library several times a day and i would meet them in the parking lot and nurse her in the front seat of the car. my daughter refused to nurse if i was wearing a shirt, so i would take it off and hope no one would notice me. i am smiling here because after much struggling, she was finally nursing. story 3: depression “soft chimes” alarm woke me up this morning at 4:55am, an extra-early alarm because i fell asleep before i could make lunches and snacks last night. i was confused because i had been up rocking gertrude from 2:00 to 4:30am; it seemed like i had just returned to bed when the alarm went off. i stumble over to the yellow dresser and feel around in the dark for where my pill box sits on top of my glasses case. i keep the pills there so i remember to take my luvox each morning and night. with my glasses on, i can finally see and so don’t step on the mountain of laundry (dirty? clean?) lying on the floor by our bed. one month and one day after my first daughter was born, my husband called and made an emergency appointment for me at my obstetrician (ob). ironically, it was valentine’s day 2013. he didn’t tell me where we were going as he drove the three of us (a new father, a new mother, and a newborn baby) to the doctor, and as we arrived at the medical center, i pleaded with him over and over: “i’m totally ok. i don’t want to go. i don’t even need to go. i’m ok.” from the floor of the ob’s office, i cried to her that i didn’t want medication, that i didn’t need medication, that i couldn’t possibly take medication while i was breastfeeding my baby, that i had never used an antidepressant or anti-anxiety medication before, that the medication would make me not me, that she couldn’t force me take medication. i remember wailing, “you can’t make me take it!” five years later, i have tried talk therapy, zoloft (while breastfeeding both daughters), lexapro, and luvox. luvox works? i guess? maybe? it’s hard to tell? it makes me very sleepy, sleepy enough to fall asleep at my desk in between student research appointments and sleepy enough to not immediately hear my two year old call out from her crib at 2:00 am. a couple years ago, i decided i didn’t need or want drugs anymore, and i went off lexapro cold turkey and ended up on the floor of my office in the middle of a tuesday, lights off, in complete darkness, waiting for my coworker to come in and find me. she spoke to me in soft, gentle tones and told me i would be ok before calling my husband. now i know you really can’t mess around with withdrawal from ssris. (see also: this new york times article.) a different time, i went off lexapro slowly while i was pregnant with my second daughter. i didn’t believe the doctors and therapists who told me that it would be safe for the fetus. how awful would i feel if something were wrong with my baby? how would i feel for forcing someone whom i had never even met to be on drugs or suffer withdrawal? i would always blame myself. my pregnancy was even more physically uncomfortable and emotionally miserable the second time around. all the hormones rushed through me and brought out the worst in my personality. i was irritable (to put it mildly), quicker-than-usual to cry, always ready for a fight at home, and always ready to feel defeated at work. i cried in my office a lot. i barely had the energy to teach library sessions, let alone two sections of my own credit-bearing course or work on my scholarship. i dreamed i could be that glowing, energetic, light-filled, yoga-practicing, beautiful goddess of a pregnant woman. instead, i complained. i gained 70 pounds. i buzzed off all my hair. i stopped exercising. vulvar varicosities made it extremely painful to sit at my desk, stand in front of a classroom, walk to work or around campus, sit with my legs together “like a lady.” work clothes from my first pregnancy looked laughably small on me. i breathed audibly on the steps on my way to and from class. i flew to las vegas for a conference right before the airline’s cut-off date for pregnant flyers. i was so tired all the time but too large and too uncomfortable to sleep. i peed myself at night, at work, only once in front of a classroom of students. antepartum and postpartum depression grayed over the facts that i was healthy, my two babies were healthy, i had a loving, supportive partner, a salaried job with some leave benefits, caring local friendships, a reasonably low risk of danger to me or to my children. the anxiety and depression made it hard for me to feel how easy it all actually was. how lucky i was. i am perceived as a white woman, and i receive all the privileges (big and small) that come with that status: when i was pregnant, my doctors took my concerns seriously (as opposed to the often-ignored concerns of black women); store-owners were happy to let me use their restrooms on my walk home from work; students held the door open for me when i arrived at class; i had a salaried job that offered insurance benefits so that i could afford healthcare. my depression also made it so that, from time to time, i wished i could get into a small accident (nothing fatal or too gruesome) so that i could rest and recuperate in the hospital without having to go to work or take care of my kids, and i would get to eat ice cream all day and watch netflix and hulu and amazon prime and maybe read but mostly sleep with no one needing me to nurse them or make lunch or have sex or wear pants without elastic or write an article or answer an email or go to a committee meeting or advise them on which classes they should take or act interested in library furniture patterns or weed my part of the collection or make an engaging lesson plan or write a self-evaluation for my tenure file. no one would be horribly hurt in this accident, least of all my children. i didn’t like to talk to my therapist about this particular daydream of mine. i was scared of the words “suicidal ideation” and that they would take my kids away. eventually the thoughts went away even though the obligations stuck around. yesterday my daughters and i had a playdate with a new mom friend and her sons. she was not born in the united states, and still finds a lot of our culture around motherhood alien and needlessly stressful. i am an open person, and i shared that i have been on and off of medication since my older daughter was born. perplexed, she asked me if i still need the drugs, and whether the prescribing psychiatrist has talked to me about getting off of them. my doctor has laughingly told me that it is likely i will need the meds until my children are out of the house, that is, at least 16 more years. i am worried that i don’t know who i am anymore, with or without luvox. the “real me” who i remember was a me from a long time ago. story 4: children at work preschool dismissal is at 3:15 and there is no after-school program available until kindergarten. family friends pick up my daughter and drop her off with my husband or me and she plays or watches television until the end of the workday every day. i did not ask permission to bring my daughters to a library department meeting. school and daycare vacation days often do not line up with the university’s calendar. my daughter’s school was closed, but i had a calendar full of student research appointments. i met with students at the computers in the information commons outside my office while my daughter napped on the floor. story 5: mom voice of course the class he decided to sit in on was the class i completely bombed. the professor was not there, the students had not looked at the assignment before, the chemistry was off. the more resistant the students were to engage with my dog and pony show about databases, the harder i tried––all the time painfully aware of my supervisor sitting in the back of the classroom, taking it all in, in all its cringe-worthiness. i knew it was going badly; but instead of upping my game and rising to the challenge, i was flailing like one of those flapping, waving, balloon-guy things at one of the car dealerships lining a busy avenue. afterward, in my supervisor’s office, he and i had an understanding laugh about how poorly the class went. i admitted to being exhausted after yet another sleepless night. he agreed that i seemed tired. i acknowledged that once i knew it was going badly, i did not know how to climb out of the hole. he asked me when i knew it wasn’t working. i laughed that the students weren’t giving me anything to work with. he said that we’ve all been there before. and then: “at some point, you started to use your mom voice,” he said. “and the students really weren’t responding to it at all.” i felt a cry-ball forming in my throat; a tiny jab would nudge the ball from its resting place and release a flood of tears. “my mom voice?” i quivered. “yes, i don’t think you would have used that voice a few years ago. the students did not respond well to it and they totally shut down.” jab. jab jab jab. my tears ran down my hot, flushed cheeks. a student popped her head in the office door. the meeting was over. that evening my tears turned to rage and defensiveness and how could he. my husband was immediately on “my” side, though i knew that it was not a matter of sides, that my colleague likely did not realize how the use of my identity as a mother in his critique jabbed at a very particular, vulnerable soft spot. i texted a friend to check to see if i was being overly sensitive and to pour my heart out to someone. i frantically googled things like “what is a mom voice” and “using a mom voice in professional setting” and “mom voice sexist” and “mom voice discrimination.” i didn’t even know what “mom voice” meant! early the next morning, my colleague/supervisor wrote me a kind email. he wrote, “just as it’s hard to explain the magic that happens when thing goes really well, it’s just as hard to accurately determine why a class goes off.” it was a comfort and an encouragement as i headed into a new day of several library sessions. he didn’t mention the mom voice comment. i doubted he remembered that part of our conversation. my soft spot was still stinging, pulsing under my skin. as you can probably tell, it still is. story 6: comments once i started to write and submit articles about mother-librarians, i received a curious amount of implicit and explicit pushback from my peer and editorial reviewers that seemed to be a bit more values-driven than contentor style-driven. even to my proposal to this very publication, in the library with the lead pipe, the editorial board responded that they found it “disappointing,” as there was “an unquestioned assumption that mothers bear the primary responsibility for raising babies and small children.” time and again, my writing has been met with reviewers’ pushback that basically boils down to either “but what about father-librarians?” or “reading about motherhood makes me uncomfortable.” below, i quote directly from reviews i received of my previous article/proposal submissions related to motherhood. all of these came from library and information science journals. part of me would like to include all the reviewers’ comments of this nature to show just how often i received such feedback; instead, for the sake of brevity, i am choosing to share this non-exhaustive list. one reviewer was curious about why you decided to focus exclusively on mothers when there was the opportunity to focus on fathers or other forms of caregiving. the reviewer suggested that a more inclusive and interesting study could be done on librarian-parents rather than librarian-moms. are there areas to add gender-neutral language? two reviewers felt that the issue of librarian fathers/dads should be mentioned (even to point out that it is not the focus of this article). perhaps add some language about how these issues relate (or not) to fathers. our editorial team would be interested in a less gendered approach that allowed for mothers and fathers (and other caregivers) to be the focus, rather than reinforcing the trope of motherhood as inherently different from parenthood generally. can you address how managers can handle these accommodations to parents without adversely affecting non-parents or treating them unevenly? can you add language that might discuss how managers need to pay attention to the entire workforce so that everyone understand that these accommodations are not special treatment or favoritism? one reviewer did not like how your focus was on mothers at the expense of parents/caregivers who are not mothers. is there a way you could shift to discuss parenting as opposed to motherhood specifically? the author might include space for a larger critique of the gendering of parenting in our society. is it true that librarian-moms are doing more childcare and struggling more with having children then librarian-dads? it will be great to have this proposal accepted in the conference, however, i would prefer to see the presenter(s) discuss parenthood, instead of motherhood. it might be more inclusive & inviting to various attendees. i looked over the comments from the reviewers and i think the issue with the “managing pregnant women” is that this reviewer read this negatively – as though the implication is that pregnant women need managing. […] maybe a way to reword would be something like “numerous websites offer resources for library managers working with expectant mothers. while it’s refreshing to read a piece on the benefits of motherhood in our field, it feels repetitious and even perhaps unnecessary to highlight *mothers* as a special population worth examination. we have a lot of related literature about motherhood in the academe. haven’t we all read enough about mothers and work-life balance issues? maybe we should get back to the work of being scholars instead of considering the perceived plight of ‘librarian-moms’. are ‘librarian-moms’ really at a disadvantage in our library workplaces today? is there a way to highlight how mothers might actually be getting preferential treatment (in certain circumstances at certain institutions)? could the author make clear how (or even whether?) librarian-moms are penalized in academic libraries? we all know that taking reviewers’ comments can be difficult and that it is easy to take the comments personally. in the midst of receiving this feedback, i wrote an email to a personal friend (who is a professor at another institution) to try to explain to him how i felt about some of these comments. i wrote that i felt that the librarians who reviewed my work were playing “a game of who can be more woke,” pretending that academic libraries “are functioning in some utopian version of academia” where everyone is inclusive and all caregivers are the same, and that they were participating in a sort of reverse discrimination against women. looking at my email and the comments now, i am acutely aware of how often i “play a game of who can be more woke.” in a different context, i just as easily could have been the one writing those reviews of someone else’s work. i have read a great deal more about “reverse discrimination” (also, “positive discrimination” as it is known in britain), as well as about the equality–difference debate in feminism (see, for example, guerrina 2001). even though i casually referred to it in an email, i actually knew next to nothing about these concepts before researching it for the purposes of this article. after reading more about these topics, i also learned about the function of “genderblind” language in the workplace. janet smithson and elizabeth h. stokoe’s 2005 work on gender-neutral language and reverse discrimination examines what they call “genderblind” language. they specifically analyze the organizational use of the terms “flexible working,” “flexibility,” and “work-life balance,” and they find that “masking or minimizing gender differences within gender-neutral language does not, as a strategy, appear to be working as a means for advancing gender equality” (164). the british researchers found that “de-gendered” language in workplace policies and practice gave the impression that issues related to work-life balance or flexible working hours or childcare were an individual lifestyle choice, and that there was a de-gendered level playing field. however, that in no way reflected the reality in workplace cultures. there was often a “mommy track” and the persistent assumption (among men and women) that flexibility and parenting were the realms of women not men. that is not to say that these researchers or i promote using “woman-friendly” terminology. rather, i would like to point out that the reviewers’ comments showed the same affinity to carefully neutralizing the language. genderblind feels dangerously close to colorblind. yes, i believe that several reviewers wanted to de-gender the language as a placeholder for exploring the gendering of parenting. yet what i read in these comments was an adherence to the same old band-aid of using “parent” as a more palatable substitute for “mother.” in one way, it is absolutely delightful to be a faculty member with children on a college campus. at two and five years old, my daughters have no idea that their open access to a picturesque, groomed, tree-filled campus with a pool, a library, fountains, smooth sidewalks for running and riding a kick scooter, and fully air-conditioned buildings is a privilege in a city ruled by highways, cracked sidewalks, and 100-plus-degree heat. conclusion: borrowed time and motherwork there’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself––whether it’s black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.––because that’s the piece that they need to key in to. they want to dismiss everything else. but once you do that, then you’ve lost because then you become acquired or bought by that particular essence of yourself, and you’ve denied yourself all of the energy that it takes to keep all those others in jail. only by learning to live in harmony with all your contradictions can you keep it all afloat. -audre lorde, in conversations with audre lorde, 2004 today i have the luxury of staying after 5:00 pm since my husband doesn’t have school tonight and can pick up the girls and do dinner and bath and bedtime. one benefit of san antonio is that the weather is almost always good enough for me to walk home, saving us from getting a second car and allowing me some minutes alone to think or listen to podcasts. like in mcbride’s 2008 chapter, i have the keen sense of everything i am sacrificing at work and at home to write this essay instead: responding to faculty and student emails, preparing for this week’s library sessions, preparing my tenure file, making progress on a traditional library article, piles of laundry on my couch, time cuddling with or reading to my kids, taking my older daughter on a ride with her scooter, potty-training my younger daughter, filling out scholarship forms for daycare, having a complete conversation with my husband, sleep. but isn’t everyone, parents and non-parents, always compromising, sacrificing, choosing? and yet before children, i never felt the intense pressure of what mcbride calls “borrowed time.” she writes that “the pressures to live up to impossible ideals of motherhood” press upon mother-scholars from one end, “while on the other hand, if we have time for writing at all, we are pressured to be sure it is ‘serious’ work, the kind of writing that will be recognized and professionally rewarded” (48). i have spent the last seven years in this faculty position believing that a lot of the work i do is not the kind of work anyone will take seriously. it is motherwork. it is the paid motherwork i do with students that is difficult to fit into my tenure evaluation categories and the unpaid motherwork i do with my children that has no place in my tenure file. by luck of my birth, privilege of my status, and strength of my labors, i am fortunate to be able to share my story about feminist mothering on the librarian tenure track. maybe some new mother or seasoned mother or mother-to-be out there in libraryland will see herself here and not feel the loneliness i felt. or maybe she won’t see herself reflected here, and she will feel emboldened to share her own stories. i sincerely hope our profession makes room for more voices and more stories. this could be the beginning of something real. acknowledgements i am incredibly thankful to my reviewers donna witek and annie pho (who were thoughtful, encouraging, detailed, and open-hearted in their feedback), my itlwtlp editor ian beilin, my photo-“negotiator” ryan randall, benjamin harris, anne jumonville graf, jeff lacy, kristen and brian miceli (for making this year even possible), sarah bankston, and tamara townsend (and participants in our workshop at the library collective). and to my own mama, nancy gallin. there is no way i could have written this work without zelda ruth, gertrude holiday, and most of all david: the three of you are the loves of my life. references basten, c. (1997). a feminised profession: women in the teaching profession. educational studies, 23(1), 55-62. bedoya, j., heller, m., salazar, c., & yan, m. (2015). how to hack it as a working parent. the code4lib journal, 28. brooks, k. (2016, april). a portrait of the artist as a young mom: is domestic life the enemy of creative work? the cut. retrieved from https://www.thecut.com/2016/04/portrait-motherhood-creativity-c-v-r.html christiansen, l., stombler, m., & thaxton, l. (2004). a report on librarian-faculty relations from a sociological perspective. the journal of academic librarianship, 30(2), 116-121. collins, p. h. (2005). black women and motherhood. in motherhood and space (pp. 149-159). new york: palgrave macmillan. collins, p. h. (2000). mammies, matriarchs, and other controlling images. in black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (pp.69-96). new york: routledge. connell, r. s. (2013). maternity and paternity policies available to academic librarians. college & research libraries, 74(3), 262-271. dickinson, t. e. (2003). looking at the male librarian stereotype. the reference librarian, 37(78), 97-110. emmelhainz, c., pappas, e., & seale, m. (2017). behavioral expectations for the mommy librarian: the successful reference transaction as emotional labor. in m.t. accardi (ed.), the feminist reference desk: concepts, critiques, and conversations (pp. 27-45). sacramento, ca.: library juice press. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2mq851m0 foster, n.f. (2007). the mommy model of service. in n.f. foster & gibbons, s. l. (eds.). studying students: the undergraduate research project at the university of rochester (pp. 72-78). association of college & research libraries. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/publications/booksanddigitalresources/digital/foster-gibbons_cmpd.pdf gallin-parisi, a. (2015). the joy of combining librarianship and motherhood. the journal of academic librarianship, 41(6), 839-846. graves, s. j., xiong, j. a., & park, j. h. (2008). parenthood, professorship, and librarianship: are they mutually exclusive?. the journal of academic librarianship, 34(3), 202-210. guerrina, r. (2001). equality, difference and motherhood: the case for a feminist analysis of equal rights and maternity legislation. journal of gender studies, 10(1), 33-42. haynes, k. (2008). (re) figuring accounting and maternal bodies: the gendered embodiment of accounting professionals. accounting, organizations and society, 33(4-5), 328-348. ivy, b. a. (1985). identity, power, and hiring in a feminized profession. library trends 34, 291-307. retrieved from https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/7426/librarytrendsv34i2i_opt.pdf?sequence=1 lorde, a. (2004). conversations with audre lorde. jackson, miss.: university press of mississippi. maack, m. (1998). gender, culture, and the transformation of american librarianship, 1890-1920. libraries & culture, 33(1), 51-61. retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25548597 matteson, m. l., & miller, s. s. (2013). a study of emotional labor in librarianship. library & information science research, 35(1), 54-62. mcbride, k. d. (2008). no, i’m not catholic, and yes, they’re all mine. a. o’reilly (ed.), feminist mothering, 45-59. albany, ny: suny press. miller, l. (2016, january). ladies of leisure: the resurgence of the housewife novel. slate book review. retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/01/american_housewife_department_of_speculation_hausfrau_and_the_resurgence.html pagowsky, n., & defrain, e. (2014). ice ice baby: are librarian stereotypes freezing us out of instruction?. in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/ice-ice-baby-2/ radford, m. l., & radford, g. p. (1997). power, knowledge, and fear: feminism, foucault, and the stereotype of the female librarian. the library quarterly, 67(3), 250-266. rich, a. (1995). of woman born: motherhood as experience and institution. new york: ww norton & company. sallee, m. w. (2014). faculty fathers: toward a new ideal in the research university. albany, ny: suny press. sloniowski, l. (2016). affective labor, resistance, and the academic librarian. library trends, 64(4), 645-666. smithson, j., & stokoe, e. h. (2005). discourses of work–life balance: negotiating ‘genderblind’ terms in organizations. gender, work & organization, 12(2), 147-168. ward, k., & wolf-wendel, l. (2012). academic motherhood: how faculty manage work and family. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. young, a. (ed.). (2015). teacher, scholar, mother: re-envisioning motherhood in the academy. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. zemon, m., & bahr, a. h. (2005). career and/or children: do female academic librarians pay a price for motherhood?. college & research libraries, 66(5), 394-406. you can track librarianship as a “feminized profession” or “gendered work” through decades of scholarship, including but not limited to ivy 1985; basten 1997; maack 1998; dickinson 2003; christiansen, stombler, and thaxton 2004; and pagowsky and defrain 2014. [↩] i use the parentheses here to indicate my ambivalence about the privileges attributed to jews in the united states and europe in today’s political climate. is this aspect of my identity privileged or marginalized? are jews “white”? are jews afforded the same privileges? that said, i would like to fully acknowledge that i move through the world perceived by others as a white woman. i am able to choose to “pass” or to hide my jewishness in a way that a black woman would not necessarily be able to “pass” as white. [↩] i feel it is important to note that i read most or all of 43 books and many, many journal articles before writing this article, and i cannot possibly summarize all my findings here. but maybe you are looking for further reading ideas? at the moment, my top picks for reading about non-library faculty mixing work and parenthood are: kelly ward and lisa wolf-wendel’s academic motherhood: how faculty manage work and family; many of the chapters in teacher, scholar, mother: re-envisioning motherhood in the academy; margaret sallee’s faculty fathers: toward a new ideal in the research university; the seminal do babies matter?: gender and family in the ivory tower by mary ann mason, nicholas h. wolfinger, and marc goulden; and most definitely kecia driver mcbride’s essay “’no, i’m not catholic, and yes, they’re all mine’: the narratives of feminist mothering on the tenure track,” which has inspired me throughout this entire mother-scholar-librarian journey (and which i cited heavily in this article). [↩] thanks to one of my reviewers, i would like to call your attention to the consistent, inappropriate, and needless use of war metaphor in discussing education. and public service in libraries. and, for that matter, motherhood. my reviewer directed me to this blog post, which asks the reader to agree “that we will not use fatalistic and militaristic language when we talk about [public schools].” i had not thought about how ubiquitous our war metaphors are when it comes to these non-violent areas of our lives; i had used “in the trenches” in an earlier draft of this article. i thank my reviewer for bringing that to my attention, and i think the aforementioned blog post is worth sharing with you. [↩] http://www.ala.org/rusa/resources/guidelines/guidelinesbehavioral [↩] see arlie russell hochschild’s foundational text the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling (2012). the connections between her work and our professional training and behaviors are uncanny. [↩] for example, matteson and miller (2013); shuler and morgan (2013); and sloniowski (2016). [↩] see adrienne rich’s seminal 1976 work of woman born: motherhood as experience and institution. [↩] some of the topics i read about were: motherhood as the patriarchal institution versus mothering as a woman’s lived experience, maternal theory, intensive mothering, motherhood as oppression, feminist mothering, maternal activism, othermothering, the black matriarch stereotype, motherguilt, the deviant mother, the good mother versus the bad mother, feminist psychoanalysis about mothering and the accompanying object relations theory, anticipated maternal identity, mother blame, sequencing mothers, essential motherhood, maternal embodiment, cyclical time and the maternal past, maternal subjectivity, herethics, mothering and ambivalence, mother-daughter identification, the mommy gap and mommy penalty, maternal sacrifice, maternal privilege, the supermom fallacy, maternal mortality rates for american women of color, working mothers versus stay-at-home mothers, maternalism (and anti-maternalism), motherhood as toughest job in the world, motherhood as it’s-not-a-job, matrescence, child care and gendering of parenting… and don’t even get me started on the pop-culture obsession with bikini-ready mom bodies, parenting styles, or the sisyphean fantasy of work-life balance. [↩] but not everything has been intellectual. i just started reading kimberly harrington’s amateur hour: motherhood in essays and swear words, which includes both language and content nsfw and is definitely making me smile and pump my fist in recognition. [↩] mal de ojo or mal ojo refer to the evil eye in spanish. in the case of pregnancy (or with young babies), the belief/tradition/superstition is that when someone looks directly at a pregnant woman or her baby, and thinks about how cute or adorable or wonderful the pregnancy or child is, one must touch the pregnant belly or baby in order to ward off the evil eye that comes along with the envy or admiration. in san antonio, texas, where i live, as well as in many parts of mexico and latin america, this seems to be an understood action even amongst strangers and passersby. [↩] curious about what the let-down (or milk ejection) reflex is? here’s more from the texas department of state health services: http://www.breastmilkcounts.com/breastfeeding-101/the-let-down/ [↩] “it was information based”: student reasoning when distinguishing between scholarly and popular sources interested in writing for lead pipe? we’re calling for submissions. 29 responses samantha hines 2018–05–30 at 12:01 pm thank you so much for this beautiful article. i feel seen in a way that i hadn’t known i needed. i did write a book chapter called “more than just story time: how librarianship prepares you for parenting and vice versa.” i’ll have to try to see if i can get a prepub online, but here’s the link to the published version: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/b978008100063200003x mari cheney 2018–05–30 at 12:45 pm thank you for this. as a mother-librarian, this is the article i have been waiting for, not having the courage to write myself. thank you. marylin raisch 2018–05–30 at 12:56 pm this is a great article and to be honest i’ve not even finished reading it! i have literally been writing a similar article in my headbut without the photos since i am long past having my two children and dealing with the child care issues. however, i will be looking into statistics on female parenting in librarianship generally and my area, law librarianship, specifically. i may still write the article, as i think it also brings up the issue of parenting in academic life and also in the united states. the usual grief one gets is that well, we can’t privilege parents or women; we would have to give flexibility to other groups, etc. and my answer to that is yes, we will. care for the elderly, sabbaticals to recharge oneself: i can see it all if i ever dream and wake up to find we have become sweden. why have i not written the piece yet for my professional association newsletter? why am i reluctant to investigate possible discrimination against women who are parents in our profession? simple. i am afraid i will suffer some subtle retribution and may wait until i’m retired. which is a shame. looking for courage, erica 2018–05–30 at 5:08 pm these are the same reasons i’ve been stalling writing on a related topic myself! allison s. 2018–05–30 at 1:53 pm thank you, alexandra. we do need these stories represented in the literature. another librarian-mom 2018–05–30 at 2:33 pm thank you so much for this article. many of your experiences resonated with me as well. when i went on maternity leave for my first child, i was the first woman in my library to do so in about 10~ years. my aul (two management levels above me) expressed disbelief that i intended to take off the *entire* 12 weeks allowed under fmla. that was intimidating. i came back at 10 weeks. my colleagues were gracious, yet obviously perplexed by the whole situation. i could tell many other stories (pumping around a teaching/reference schedule, inappropriate questions/comments made by colleagues, and — hilariously in retrospect — getting a bout of morning sickness 30 minutes before presenting at a big library conference) but for now i’ll just offer solidarity. and while i think the reviewers comments are well-intentioned, they are…. “disappointing.” i’ll leave it at that. yet another librarian parent 2018–06–07 at 1:39 pm i was teased by my (female) director when i mentioned i was taking all of the time allowed under fmla. “what, are you having twins?!” i’m proud that i maintained enough composure to reply, “no, i’m taking the time because it’s available to me.” while no one else in my organization gave me any grief, pregnant colleagues in other areas of the library mentioned experiencing negative attitudes in part because family leave (paid or otherwise) hasn’t always been available in our library, and so it probably seems unfair to some that they had to scrape together time, while we’re having it just given to us. that resentment is reasonable; it’s also frustrating. i hope that the more the culture (in libraries and in this country) shifts in the direction of humane policies for dealing with complicated life stuff (like babies, aging parents, etc), the less we’ll experience these kinds of challenges and humiliations. erica 2018–05–30 at 5:11 pm thank you for writing this. i’m reading it just after some colleagues and i started working on a research project related to the issue of the baby penalty. some of those reviewer comments were appalling! i feel validated and motivated by your article. erica 2018–05–30 at 6:31 pm thank you so much for telling these stories and sharing your reflections. i remember being shocked, absolutely shocked, at how my previously equitable relationship with my husband shifted after our daughter was born. not because he wasn’t supportive and helpful and sympathetic, but because it was expected that i was responsible for all the mothering. i’ve been remembering how, after i first returned to work, i would get maybe 20 minutes to focus on a project before my phone rang and i had to run home (i had the car) to feed the baby because she wouldn’t take a bottle and the crying was too awful for my husband to tough out. once home i’d look at the rejected bottle full of precious breast milk that i’d carefully pumped and frozen (that would now end up being thrown out), and want to cry. but i couldn’t cry, because that would be acknowledging a problem. starting daycare was in many ways a relief, and i still feel conflicted about that. i also remember being disappointed, as a very young and new librarian, that my profession hadn’t figured out better ways to support moms. i’d thought somehow that librarianship being replete with women would make us better at this than other professions. i have to think that telling our stories is an important first step to maybe someday getting there. liz 2018–05–30 at 7:49 pm the reason you couldn’t find mentoring and a rhetorical hug in an academic journal is because they are academic journals, not mentors. i feel like this entire article, but particularly the abstract, is a product of entitlement. while this may be a collection of interesting observations to add to the discourse, it does not belong in an academic journal and is below the standards i have come to expect from reading in the library with the lead pipe (admittedly i’ve only read a small number). liz – librarianship student and mother of five. brh 2018–05–31 at 10:33 am see “the self as subject: autoethnographic research into identity, culture, and librarianship” (deitering, schroeder, stoddart) published in 2017. examinations of lived experiences of librarians, similar to what is described in the abstract, are part of a growing body of work that decenters common notions about standards. this approach to thinking about appropriate subjects for academic work probably will not be so strange in the near future. christie 2018–05–31 at 1:43 pm i have to agree with liz – interesting read but i do agree with some of the feedback that was given by the reviewers. motherhood absolutely changed my life but i don’t feel that it has impacted my career to the point that i need to see it represented in the academic literature. we all have responsibilities/challenges outside the workplace. just my thoughts. celia emmelhainz 2018–05–30 at 11:56 pm alexandra, thank you for having the courage to write this, and for sharing your memorable stories. it’s a good reminder for me to be more careful when conflating motherwork with gendered emotional labor. i’m sharing it with international colleagues who will likely be aghast at our short american maternity leaves… but may resonate with librarian-mother stories of their own. hana 2018–05–31 at 6:40 am thank you so much for devoting your time to putting your thoughts and reading and research on and around this topic, out there. i really appreciate it. i too have been wanting to research and interview on this topic for nearly two years, but have not had the courage to do so. erica, marylin and alexandra, i think we’re all on the same page. we have to harness this energy now, communicate and publish our thoughts! thank you for all the references and links for further reading. this will delay my research and interviewing celia 2018–05–31 at 11:23 am don’t delay the interviewing until you know it all! it’s these stories and perspectives we need to hear, just as much as any broad lit review. :-) susan ariew 2018–05–31 at 1:49 pm i remember skipping a very important meeting at my academic library in order to see my first grader performing as a turtle in his school play. i still have fond memories of that. when someone asked me why i put that as a higher priority i said, “nobody on his or her death bed will ever say that they regret not having gone to a meeting.” i have had a long and satisfying career as an academic research librarian, but as i raised my kids, i firmly kept family first and i have never regretted it. heather 2018–06–04 at 3:41 pm someone asked you this?! i mean, i guess i’m not terribly surprised. bob schroeder 2018–05–31 at 1:52 pm thank you alexandra! so much richness here – i hope they start using this article in lis classes – it would really open up the conversation! i think it would be great to use in library faculty meetings too for that matter. i’d love to see an edited book of articles, many autoethnographies, of mothers in libraries. i find this form you chose to be so powerful and transformative – maybe acrl or library juice? i have to confess that i’ve crossed the autoethnography threshold after co-editing the book that brh references above,”self as subject” – for anyone interested in pursuing ae as a valid and useful form, check out the companion website , which has many of the chapters + lots more, at https://exploringautoethnography.wordpress.com/ ellie 2018–06–09 at 8:53 am i just want to say that this is one of the most well-written and engaging pieces of professional literature that i’ve read. i am not a mom, and did not initially think i would read the entire article, as the subject relates to my interests only tangentially, but i read it in one sitting, start to finish. i look forward to reading more of your work! leonardo 2018–06–13 at 4:15 pm i’m a man who raised my daughter on my own while moving through my library career. i’m a bit confused as to the relevance of librarianship as a career to the challenges of motherhood or parenthood. been in academia over 20 years, grateful for the easy embrace of our humble profession, which allowed the flexibility and work-life balance to be a present and nurturing parent and have a fulfilling career of service to others. i hear hear ego issues here, not gender issues, but i guess i just don’t get it. erica 2018–08–22 at 5:17 pm i’m glad that you experienced an “easy embrace” that allowed for “flexibility work-life balance.” i think one of the points here is that not everyone has that kind of workplace james 2018–09–26 at 12:28 am i don’t think this guy really read the article. …or has ever expressed milk in a closet …or had his belly rubbed by a stranger …or had to leave a conference early because of acute mastitis. maybe i’m mistaken though naomi 2018–06–13 at 7:08 pm as a new mom librarian, this is a really great piece of literature. thanks for sharing your experiences. i went back to work 6 weeks after giving birth and pumped everyday for a year. i shared an office and didn’t mind other librarians walking in or watching me pump. i thankfully had a supportive supervisor that was also a mom and a partner that could stay home with our son. it’s been a really difficult 2 years trying to stay involved in professional organizations because travel is difficult, conferences are not family friendly, and expenses for memberships and registration are hard on a single income family. i have promoted virtual professional development opportunities and said no to a lot of things to prioritize my family. i appreciate the lis literature and community taking a critical look at how our profession can be actively changing the norms of librarianship. as a librarian of color it is also refreshing to see motherhood embraced and appreciated. all of our libraries and communities should honor moms and respect the work they do everyday for our children and youth. mb 2018–06–18 at 2:41 pm i appreciate your coherent argument about why mothering and parenting are not the same terms. i have always felt a strong resistance to being referred to as “a parent” rather than “a mother” for all the reasons you mention. now you have given me a way to articulate that objection. louise 2018–06–19 at 4:47 pm thanks for this. i had a baby a few months ago and i’ve been struggling with my return to work. everything you mentioned in your article, i can relate to. when i was nearing my due date, i had students comment on my size and winded breath during instruction sessions (one even offered to rub my feet to induce labor – what?! – and insisted that she had the ability to predict when a pregnant woman would go into labor). now that i’m back at work, i’m finding it really hard to continue – the everyday marathon of work and kid routine is just a nightmare. my university is very traditional – there is no opportunity for a flexible work schedule. here’s a funny story (maybe not haha-funny) – about a week ago the custodian keyed into my locked office and got a full view of my milking breasts in all their glory. he hasn’t returned to empty the garbage in my office since then. thank you for writing this article and lifting up the experiences of mom-librarians. it’s frankly disappointing, maybe not surprising, that our woke-ish profession ignores and devalues the experiences of their colleagues who are mothers. peanutbutter on my pants 2018–06–29 at 2:48 pm thank you for compiling your experiences in such and ordered and yet authentically-flavored way. i think the way the employing institution either accepts or rejects children in the workplace can have a profound effect on how mother-librarians experience this combination. in a previous workplace we were actively encouraged by policy to find other ways of obtaining childcare so that we never brought our children to work. when there were times i just had to bring my daughter to work, i had her hang out in the book drop room (which she experienced as a fun cubby to read her own books) because there could be retribution should she be found there. it’s a whole different story with my current institution, where not only can i bring my daughter when i need to, but she is welcomed and enjoyed by my co-workers. i am a divorced person who co-parents with her father, and so this extra support has meant the world to me. also, i love the picture of the kiddos drawing at the white board. mine (and other colleagues’) are covered in similar. all the best in your research. please keep going. jenny stout 2018–07–10 at 1:28 pm oh, alex, what a great article. the comments you included at the end felt especially potent to me: that even when you’re talking specifically about women (in a heavily female profession, no less), the “what about the men?” question inevitably rears its head. i don’t agree the comment about about “rhetorical hugs”–balancing motherhood and work is a huge deal and should absolutely be part of the literature. excellent work! alex 2018–10–22 at 9:14 am great article. i also wondered about other experiences but rather lacked the tenacity to seek out others. i struggled with taking time off after the birth and note the benefits of being apart of the faculty are often lost on librarians since we are usually have a 12-month contract. i do not have the pleasure of taking the summer to be with my kids but have to struggle to find sitters and others as when my kids were younger i worked in libraries that outright forbid my children being in the library with me. it was a hardship and expensive but my sacrifice allowed me the opportunity to move up to dean when many people my age are still in their ground level position. sometimes i wish i has chosen to be with my children and i wish i didn’t have to make that choice between career and family. my husband does a great job with the kids so i know they are taken care of. jessie 2018–10–25 at 4:35 pm i read this article over a couple of days while pumping at work. i cried a couple of times because i see so much of my experience and so many of the difficult spaces ahead that i’m still unsure how to navigate. as the mother of a daughter i keep asking myself how i can make things better for the time when she might choose this path and if she doesn’t, then the other girls who will. it’s hard to understand until you’ve living it and now i understand enough to resent society for their expectations and myself for taking them onto myself. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct unpacking and overcoming “edutainment” in library instruction – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 9 sep sarah polkinghorne /2 comments unpacking and overcoming “edutainment” in library instruction photo by flickr user jen kim (cc by 4.0) in brief within our field, and more widely, there is a way of thinking that equates effective teaching with effective entertaining. this way of thinking can be referred to as a “discourse of edutainment.” it underpins some of the publications and conversations that encourage librarians to make their teaching more entertaining, for example by playing improv games or adding humour. in this article, i examine the edutainment discourse in three ways. first, i identify and analyse it. next, i connect it to larger concerns, such as creating significant learning experiences and wrestling with public speaking fear. to conclude i describe several concepts from the performing arts that could better support librarians working to teach in ways that are as engaging, significant, and enjoyable as possible. by sarah polkinghorne introduction “entertainment value, as well as instructional efficacy, ought to be factored into assessment and design of instructional materials” (vossler and watts, 2011). “we have to compete! be more interesting, more compelling than anything else in the students’ vicinity. and change perspectives; they are not your students: they are your audience” (mason, 2009). “with your theatre background, you must love teaching! you just get up there and put on a show.”1 the above statements are fascinating. more precisely, it’s not these statements at face value that fascinate, nor similar ones peppered throughout library instruction publications and conversations. what strikes me are the ways of thinking embodied by these statements. why do some librarians encourage one another to focus on entertaining while teaching? why do some librarians publicly despair over a perceived lack of entertainment value in their instruction? there are no broad policies explicitly directing librarians to prioritize entertainment value. the imperative must have a different source; it must be furthered through other means. why does it continue, and what are its implications? with this article, i’ll identify what i refer to as the “edutainment discourse” and how it functions within our field.2 as a discourse, a specific way of thinking that underpins activity and language use, this one equates teaching well with providing entertainment value. identifying this discourse involves analyzing the understandings, assumptions, and power relationships within spoken and written texts. examining discourses enables us to uncover why and how such ideas, in textual forms such as conversations or conference programs, come to exist as they do. why are certain turns of phrase chosen, and not others? why do some people speak, and not others? through this questioning, we can observe how discourses “produce and transform social reality, and […] evaluate the practical consequences of different ways of approaching a particular phenomenon” (talja 1999, 461). in our case, the phenomenon is library instruction. there are two central reasons why the edutainment discourse deserves examination. first, like all discourses, this one shapes social practices (e.g., teaching and learning) and directly implicates power structures within our professions and institutions. changes to practices and structures first require awareness. second, in my opinion, this discourse undermines librarians’ development of sophisticated pedagogical approaches and genuine comfort with teaching. it does so in several ways, which i’ll describe shortly. in the later part of this article, i will describe some concepts with potential to challenge the influence of edutainment within our field. these are substantial concepts from the performing arts that, imported knowledgeably, can support library and information professionals who strive to improve their instructional practices. penny for your discourse to bring the discourse into focus, and to emphasize that it is not confined to our field, consider an episode of the hugely popular american sitcom, the big bang theory. in this episode, “the thespian catalyst,” physicist dr. sheldon cooper delivers a guest lecture marked by his renowned condescension. students receive the lecture with stony silence. “i was expecting applause,” sheldon says, “but i suppose stunned silence is equally appropriate.”3 this experience sparks newfound self-awareness, and sheldon resolves to become a better teacher. he knows just what to do. he goes next door and knocks three times. his neighbour, penny, an actor, gives him an acting lesson. one episode of a sitcom seems slight, but within this one functions the fascinating discourse that compelled me to write this article. in general, comedy relies on an implicit and ubiquitous cultural acceptance of shared knowledge, experience, or stereotypes. in this case, the episode’s narrative humour hinges upon our widely-shared acceptance that effective teaching means effective entertaining (in this case, through learning to act). it relies on a belief so pervasive that audiences are not expected to question it. as this example suggests, the edutainment discourse exists widely. visiting the guardian’s education section, for example, one can witness an ongoing debate over the relationship between entertainment and teaching, including resonant arguments for the importance of entertainment (e.g. beadle, 2009). librarian julia furay’s recent review of theatrically-derived pedagogical strategies summarizes existing edutainment-laden examples, such as “baiting the students with a peripheral stimuli [sic]” and “feigning mistakes” (2014, 212). within our field, we can observe that edutainment takes on some distinctive qualities. in particular, the edutainment discourse tangles with the teaching-related anxieties many librarians experience. our edutainment discourse the above examples illustrate the presence of the edutainment discourse in wider popular and scholarly cultures. similarly, the statements at the beginning of this article exemplify how this discourse commonly circulates within our field. there are additional examples from both informal and formal publications. for example, furay relays her own teaching experiences: “the sessions tend to be a barrage of information: library basics, catalog searching tips, database queries, lots of striking visuals and even a few corny jokes. this is library instruction as if it were a broadway show” (2014, 209). like all discourses, this one affects and is affected by us to varying extents. as individuals, we are not each equally shaped by it. judging by its status as a recurring motif at a conference such as loex, however, it’s safe to claim that edutainment is not a marginalized discourse.4 rather, as in its guest appearance in the big bang theory, it circulates casually, quite unchallenged. discourses have a positioning effect on both individuals and institutions. for example, the debate over what to call people who come to the library — “customers” or “users” or “patrons” — is driven by our recognition that these words signal different beliefs, and by extension, different positions for people and for the libraries they frequent. the edutainment discourse positions librarians as providers of entertainment. learners, whomever they may be, are positioned as passive, inattentive audience members, as recipients. further, learners are positioned as entertainment-needy: “they [students] are your audience. audiences demand entertainment” (mason, 2009). this assertion of neediness glosses over the fact that this is actually an assumption we have made, which in turn supports our acceptance of edutainment as a user-centred, responsive choice. libraries are positioned as sites wherein entertainment can be derived. now, for each of us as individuals, in any teaching instance (or service provision, or program planning), this discourse is only one of numerous discourses that could be at play. for example, a related discourse constructs information as a commodity, librarians as marketers, and students as customers and consumers (hoffman and polkinghorne, 2010). even drawing a casual equation between librarians and teachers, as i and many other instruction-invested librarians do, viewing our patrons primarily as learners: this a discursively-inflected choice. i mention this to highlight that discourses are not good or bad or monolithic in any easy sense. it’s not bad to think about the entertainment value of one’s instruction. however, we can ask: should entertainment be a predominant instructional concern? problematizing edutainment in library instruction in our daily practices, we make instructional choices based on our local contexts and constraints, and library instruction can feel filled with compromises. many of us are ambivalent about having to teach at all, as researchers heidi julien and jen (j.l.) pecoskie found in their study of librarians’ experiences of the teaching role (2009). questioning edutainment can help build a more amenable environment for active improvements to these circumstances. one way to undertake such questioning is to analyze edutainment to its implied conclusions. below is an example of a publication underpinned by the edutainment discourse. this is the abstract for a 2009 conference session, “beating the competition: librarian as performance artist.” it appeared in the program of loex, a long-running mainstream library instruction conference. i’ll quote the abstract in full. of his session, librarian marc mason writes: “libraries have to compete.” we hear it often enough: bookstores, google, coffee shops…there are many resources that draw the attention of our students (cell phones/text messaging, facebook/myspace, sleep), and we have to work harder to get them to come to us. but getting them to the library is just the beginning. so we have to compete! be more interesting, more compelling than anything else in the students’ vicinity. and change perspectives; they are not your students: they are your audience. audiences demand entertainment. it’s no longer enough to be a knowledgeable teacher with a strong instructional paradigm. you must also be a performer, captivating students with wit, creativity and charisma. join an arizona state university librarian as he shares instructional strategies that incorporate skills developed from stand-up and improv comedy to turn instruction sessions into entertaining workshops that keep student attention. and learn what happened when he began teaching “performance skills” workshops for librarians that are designed to encourage them to abandon traditional approaches to interacting with groups, tap their creativity, and rely more on their wits. if you’re looking for new ways to beat the competition, thinking about releasing your inhibitions and embracing your inner “theatre geek”, or want to polish your own performance skills, check out this exciting and hilarious session and go home with a grin! you’ll discover a new sense of fun, make your students laugh a little, and add some silliness to a profession that can take itself a bit too seriously. (2009) unpacked, this abstract reveals the implications of edutainment. when library instruction equals entertainment, it becomes difficult to evade comparisons with other sources of entertainment: bookstores, google. when librarians are asked to provide entertainment, this signals an assumed gap between how librarians are and how we should be. here, librarians possess multifaceted deficiencies. we are inhibited and overserious, but we need to be more interesting than anything else nearby. this abstract sounds encouraging and i assume it carries supportive intentions, but its subtext is gravely judgemental, reaffirming well-worn insecurities: “it’s no longer enough to be a knowledgeable teacher with a strong instructional paradigm.” when effective teaching equals providing entertainment value, particularly when this equation relies upon an unsophisticated understanding of performance, the resulting pedagogical recommendations are so deterministic as to be incompatible with the complexities of teaching. if we just add wit and charisma, then our instruction will be good. if we just add some “silliness,” then our instruction will be good. if we just . . . , then our instruction will be good. like other edutainment-influenced texts, there are two significant elements of teaching and learning that are noticeably deemphasized here: the content of our instruction and the students. the content frequently taught by librarians does not hold up well in the edutainment discourse. common examples of how this is expressed include reservations about whether library instruction can actually be interesting at all: “let’s face it, il [information literacy] holds interest to only a small circle of friends.”5 “if you have anything that makes talking about libraries less boring, i want to hear about it!”6 “let’s face it: library instruction can be boring to teach and boring to listen to. as librarians, we all know the value of library instruction and its importance to our students. however, we are kidding ourselves (no pun intended) if we think that most students will find the topic fascinating, or even mildly interesting” (trefts and blakselee 2000, 369). in statements such as these, content serves as a receptacle for broader concern about overall instructional effectiveness. edutainment frames our content as inherently boring, and in doing so, entrenches itself in our most basic insecurities. students are also deemphasized; focus dwells on us. the edutainment discourse, then, reinforces doubt about the interestingness of our teaching, while at the same time encouraging a specific conception of student need that happens to rationalise edutainment-driven teaching. reasons to reach beyond edutainment there are three main reasons why it’s important to consider instructional choices that reflect ways of thinking other than edutainment. first, the purpose of library instruction is to provide significant learning experiences. edutainment, in our discipline, diverts us from that primary goal. when our focus is directed toward entertainment value, when we prioritize a goal to be entertaining, this can pull us toward a different orbit. creating significant learning experiences is challenging. take assessment for example, a growing concern within libraries. when assessing the quality of an instruction session, it’s easier to measure whether students had an entertaining, attention-getting experience than it is to measure whether they had a significant learning experience. edutainment provides a diversion, not a shortcut. second, edutainment complicates our efforts to overcome a phobia that affects many of us: fear of public speaking. a variety of studies conducted over the past twenty years have established that fear of public speaking affects between 20% and 34% of the general population, making it “the single most commonly feared situation” (botella 2010, 407). additionally, many of us experience instruction-specific discomfort. when kaetrena davis studied teaching-related anxiety among subscribers to the information literacy instruction discussion list (ili-l), 63% of respondents reported such anxiety (2007; schulte 2009 provides an open-access summary). public speaking anxiety is a serious and complex phenomenon. edutainment can exacerbate it by adding yet more pressure — you’ve got to entertain! add jokes! practice improv! — that is tangential to evidence-based methods of addressing fear (cf. bodie, 2010). edutainment is at most a balm, not a cure. third, we have a responsibility to think critically about edutainment in relation to the ongoing marketization of education. the term “edutainment” comes to lis from education, where it originally described new technologies, such as educational software, sold to teachers with promises of increased student attention through fun features such as animations (okan 2009, 255). in conceiving of students as recipients to be entertained, edutainment contributes to a transactional environment where students expect a fun experience to consume. as such, the edutainment discourse is incompatible with the active, constructivist aspirations articulated by the authors of the association of college and research libraries’ new framework for information literacy for higher education. for librarians who focus on critical information literacy, aiming through their teaching to problematize library and information systems and to equip students to contribute to change in the world, edutainment is even more irreconcilable. other concepts of course we want to, and should, provide instruction that is engaging for learners. we know that engagement makes learning more significant; in fact, “student engagement is one of the most well-established predictors of achievement” (harbour et al. 2015, 5). there are many definitions of engagement, but among the most useful is the one articulated by education researchers jennifer a. fredricks, phyllis c. blumenfeld, and alison h. parks, who describe engagement as a “multidimensional concept” that combines three facets: behavioural (participation, involvement), cognitive (thoughtfulness, persistence), and emotional (positive and negative reactions, social ties) (2004, 60). in our field, we have left the complexities of fostering in-class engagement relatively unexamined, a gap that has given edutainment an opening. as a way to begin to fill this gap, it’s useful to acknowledge teaching as a performance, specifically as “a performance that unfolds and evolves over time to suit the needs of our students and our own needs as teaching librarians” (rae, 2015). indeed, many of us understand this instinctively. when i studied librarians’ in-the-moment experiences of teaching, i asked all participants whether, when they are teaching, they feel they are performing. each participant unhesitatingly said yes (2013). it is entirely possible to focus on performance without dwelling on how entertaining we are. by doing so, we can identify some valuable food for thought. i’m going to mention several concepts from the performing arts, specifically from the theatre. for anyone working to create more engaging learning experiences, these ideas are potentially meaningful. there is much more to each concept than could be captured in a single article, and i’m sure there are additional useful concepts as well. i would welcome an ongoing discussion in which these concepts and others can be brought into detailed conversation with our instruction practices. acting although i discuss acting in workshops and presentations, i would not argue that librarians should study acting.7 a key distinction that i will mention here, however, is that acting is not the same thing as performing. the two should not be conflated. we know when we are acting, and we know when we are performing but not acting. there are many situations, such as witnessing a eulogy, in which we watch others perform, but not act. further, we can detect when others are trying to act. there is no reason to assume that students do not possess the same instincts, a thought to keep in mind when experimenting with acting techniques in library instruction.  more important than importing ideas from acting is the fundamental task of becoming comfortable with one’s own physical presence — body and voice — which i discuss below. physicality “i found little physicalities in the role, and something always happened when i put those long, flowing robes on. that’s when i felt voldemort.”8 that’s british actor ralph fiennes speaking in an interview about his approach to a specific acting challenge. he crafted this performance by figuring it out from the outside in (from exterior to interior). he found voldemort’s physicality, then he found voldemort. physicality is a broad term encompassing the ways in which we communicate with our bodies, through our postures and movements, expressions and gestures. students of acting spend years studying physicality. my acting textbook from my first-year course is two-thirds finished before it mentions anything but physicality. the primary goal of these efforts, prerequisite to acting, is to become comfortable in our own bodies and voices so that we can best use them to communicate. our presence in the classroom is embodied. even webinars are embodied, because we use our voices to deliver them. comfort with our embodied presence is as fundamental to effective face-to-face teaching as it is to any performance. despite this, physicality — the role of the body and voice — is largely overlooked in the library instruction literature. this is a gap that deserves our attention. observing our own physicality can be a challenge, because it means confronting habits, insecurities, and the assumptions we hold about ourselves. for example, we may be leaning on long-held stylistic and mechanical techniques that have always “gotten us through” our teaching (e.g., pre-planned searches). however, attending to physicality can eventually enable us to reconnect with the core of what we’re trying to do, and further, to see “what kinds of gestures, movements, and vocal tone evolve organically out of [our] own enthusiasm and personality, and the content of [our] message” (glickstein 53). there are many resources describing ways to work toward this, but be heard now!, by public speaking luminary lee glickstein (1998), is a great place to start. attending to physicality also enables us to reach beyond solely cognitivist instructional strategies. performance anxiety provides an excellent example. we often try to cope with anxiety by applying impression management strategies, such as over-preparing and rehearsing repeatedly. researchers refer to these as “safety behaviors” whose purpose is to “prevent a person’s feared outcome;” they are primarily “self-concealment strategies designed to prevent one from having one’s perceived self-flaws exposed to evaluative others in social situations” (rowa et al. 2015, 306). glickstein calls these strategies “fear band-aids” (129). acknowledging that anxiety has a physical dimension (clammy palms, pulse racing, et cetera) enables us to regain some equilibrium and comfort physically, through something as basic as increasing circulation (many people find it helpful). attending to physicality is a complex, long-term project, but it contributes to our ability to engage with teaching, and in turn, to engage others in learning. people contend differently with physicality, partly by choice and partly not. performances are social, and there is the question of how others perceive us, which is never entirely within our control. very recently, for example, researchers ebony o. mcgee and lasana kazembe documented black faculty members’ experiences making academic presentations, including the expectations and perceptions they face when presenting to predominantly white audiences (2015). the research participants recounted “similar narratives about the anticipated entertainment value [they] were expected to offer and the skepticism they encountered about the academic value of their presentations” (3). mcgee and kazembe detail a variety of strategies, such as humour, used by black scholars to cope with racialized biases. these findings are among many that illuminate the complexities of physicality and remind us that no performance is isolated from the larger world and its inequalities. improv i include improv because i’ve met numerous librarians who are comfortable with presenting and lecturing, but whose fears flare up when they anticipate someone asking them a question requiring an extemporaneous, off-the-cuff reply. kaetrena davis’s study of library workers found that 40% of respondents worry about “being able to answer tough questions” (2007, 88). ideas from improv theatre can help, i believe. i say “ideas” because my claim is not that everyone should rush to sign up for improv classes.9 this isn’t necessary in order to ponder these ideas and persevere with them in everyday life. the best improvisers give highly intelligent, decisive performances. improv has nothing to do, necessarily, with being funny. its principles include the following. don’t block. say yes. blocking is a cardinal sin of improv. it involves dismissing, ignoring, or negating others’ ideas, or “offers.” saying yes is its opposite, which can be attempted in the classroom. a question from a student is an offer. for example, “why can’t there be one search box for all the information?” is a good question, and a frequent one. it can also trigger the blocking impulse. we might exhale and say that’s a really big question. i wish we had time for a lecture on the political economy of information. instead, try. take the challenge of providing the best answer or discussion you can in the time you have. that’s saying yes. make a choice. don’t wimp. teaching and improv are performances, and performances are made of choices. choices are a base unit of analysis when thinking about how we consciously create performances. teaching, like improv, is ephemeral; every time it happens it’s unique, and then it’s over, and it’s unreproducible. under these circumstances, there is no benefit to not making a choice, also known as wimping. for example, “why can i download some library ebooks but not others?” is a good question. we might think, as we exhale, well. that’s a question that could be answered in a few ways. then, considering the circumstances, we choose the best answer in the moment. in this way, we do something quite important: we accept that we may not provide a perfectly-formed, comprehensive answer, which is generally a fantasy anyhow. (“i don’t know, to be honest. but i know how we can find out!” is not a wimp answer.) listen. this same principle from reference training is central to both improv and teaching. one practice that interferes with listening is scripting, which i’ll discuss next, and suggest scoring as an alternative. rather than scripts, scores some librarians use scripts when they teach. julia furay is not the only librarian who could admit that “everything is scripted. my library instruction sessions are prepared down to the tiniest detail” (2014, 209). there can be an impulse to write a script, a detailed plan of what precisely to say and do, in order to ensure control within a class, to ameliorate performance anxiety, or to enforce a specific idea of consistency across numerous classes.10 sometimes there is a group of library workers teaching a large number of similar classes, such as first-year english, and a script can seem like a useful tool. using scripts in these ways introduces hazards that negate their presumed benefits. first, let’s take the case of the shared script ensuring consistency across instruction sessions. in this situation, a script may increase public speaking anxiety among those being made to use it. this is because scripts authored by other people force us to use words and ways of thinking that are not our own (wilder 1999). have you ever enjoyed seeing different actors play the same role? if performances were interchangeable because they use the same script, why would we bother making new ones? we could just watch kenneth branagh’s hamlet and call it a day. the answer is that a script is a fraction of a performance. actors, within the context of a production, contribute the rest. non-acting performers are in the same situation: even where there is a script, it could never be the totality of the performance, or enforce “consistency” across performances. engagement problems arise when the script is prioritized and the performer is overlooked. when it comes to scripts for teaching and presenting, lee glickstein gets to the heart of the issue: a script creates a barrier. usually, our fear is that the audience will sit in judgment of us. we forget that most people hope we won’t embarrass ourselves — as they’re afraid they would embarrass themselves if they were in our shoes — and they look at us with at least some degree of support and goodwill. that support is there for us to accept—or not. if a speaker doesn’t pause to take it in before he speaks […] it is as if he is holding a stop sign up to the group and saying, “no, thank you. i don’t need your support. i can do this myself.” this separates him from the audience, severely limits the rapport that he can establish with them — even if he does everything else right. the first thing he has said to the group is “stay away! don’t connect with me.” (1998, 76-77) rather than scripting our instruction, we could consider artists anna and lawrence halprin’s “scoring” as a way to provoke new ideas about how to map key moments in our teaching (1969). this is scoring not in the familiar musical sense but in a more abstract sense. while lesson plans are usually linear, emerging from learning goals, scores are freer. they are often expressed in symbols, rather than text, like a sports play being documented dynamically by a coach. scores “are meant to improve on an ongoing practice by breaking down unoriginal habits and hierarchies and spreading around the decision-making power” (nguyen and beard, 2013). in creating a teaching score, you can predetermine your goals and intentions, while also identifying how students will contribute important choices.11 for example, they might choose areas of emphasis and the order of the discussion. in this way, students are acknowledged as co-creators of each instruction session. this can help to create an environment where more engagement becomes possible. defining the situation this is a short point derived tangentially from the theatre by a social scientist. erving goffman was a canadian sociologist who formulated the idea that in everyday life we are all continuously performing. this doesn’t mean we’re false, or we’re pretending to be someone we’re not. it means that through our actions we constantly construct and alter our self-presentation depending on our circumstances (goffman 1959). one element of goffman’s dramaturgical theory of self-presentation is “defining the situation.” he argues that social interactions proceed best when everyone involved understands what’s going on. this is a concept whose potential benefit to librarians is obvious. unlike teachers and professors, who have ongoing interactions with students within institutional settings and power relationships that are familiar to all involved, librarians are often asked to just show up to class. we often have no pre-existing relationship with the group of students whom we’ve been tasked to teach. it’s our responsibility to define that situation. doing so can help to acknowledge and to address the fact that students, teaching faculty, and librarians often have diverse ideas about libraries and about what we teach. here are some things that i regularly choose whether or not and how to define for students in my instruction sessions: what the purpose of my presence is, who i am, what i do for students, what the library is, and what the library can do for students, if we’re reflecting honestly on how to convey this information and bring everyone in the classroom into shared common understanding, we will encounter the tension that exists between honesty and idealisation. this is what goffman, generally put, called “back stage” and “front stage” personae. for example, we may have critical opinions about a particular citation software. we will be conscious of how we choose to share these opinions in the classroom, because we may also bear an institutional imperative to promote this software as a library service. we are all constantly defining the situation, and with it, making the choices that construct both self-presentation and identity. conclusion in this article, i’ve written toward two main goals. i’ve identified and questioned the discourse of edutainment as it functions within our field. i’ve also described several concepts from the performing arts that can help us engage with learners and will serve us better than prioritizing entertainment value. the discourse of edutainment, in our field, involves our insecurities, and as such, it enables a magnetic sort of solipsism. but teaching is not all about us. it is about learners. the performing-arts concepts i’ve offered can enable us to engage in new, flexible ways both with teaching and with our teaching circumstances. this could have at least two benefits. first, we could focus more squarely on the social complexities of teaching, on learners and what it means for them to be genuinely engaged by our teaching. second, we could develop more skepticism toward techniques imported glibly from other disciplines. entertainment can be a feature of high-quality learning experiences. it emerges from planning, comfort, and enjoyment. entertainment is wonderful, but it is a by-product. acknowledgements huge thanks to external reviewer colleen quigley, internal reviewer lindsey rae, and publishing editor ellie collier for your thoughtful feedback throughout the lead pipe review process. many thanks as well to sandra m. nicholls, emily zheng, and thane chambers for your invaluable comments on early drafts of this paper. last, thank you to the colleagues who have listened to, and questioned, my ideas in other venues. references beadle, phil. 2009. “a good teacher is an entertainer as well as an educator.” the guardian. accessed july 28, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/education/mortarboard/2009/jan/05/teaching-schools bodie, graham d. 2010. “a racing heart, rattling knees, and ruminative thoughts: defining, explaining, and treating public speaking anxiety.” communication education. 59 (1): 407-421. accessed september 4, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03634520903443849 botella, c., m.j. gallego, a. garcia-palacios, v. guillen, r.m. baños, s. quero, and m. alcañiz. 2010. “an internet-based self-help treatment for fear of public speaking: a controlled trial.” cyberpsychology, behavior & social networking. 13 (4): 407-421. accessed september 4, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2009.0224 davis, kaetrena d. 2007. “the academic librarian as instructor: a study of teacher anxiety.” college & undergraduate libraries. 14 (2): 77-101. accessed september 4, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/j106v14n02_06 fredericks, jennifer a., phyllis c. blumenfeld, and alison h. paris. 2004. “school engagement: potential of the concept, state of the evidence.” review of educational research. 74 (1): 59-109. accessed september 4, 2015. http://www.isbe.net/learningsupports/pdfs/engagement-concept.pdf furay, julia. 2014. “stages of instruction: theatre, pedagogy and information literacy.” reference services review. 42 (2): 209-228. accessed september 4, 2015. http://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=kb_pubs glickstein, lee. 1998. be heard now! tap into your inner speaker and communicate with ease. new york: broadway books. goffman, erving. 1959. the presentation of self in everyday life. garden city, ny: doubleday. halprin, lawrence. 1969. the rsvp cycles: creative processes in the human environment. new york: g. braziller. harbour, kristin e., lauren l. evanovich, chris a. sweigart, and lindsay e. hughes. 2015. “a brief review of effective teaching practices that maximize student engagement.” preventing school failure: alternative education for children and youth. 59 (1): 5-13. accessed september 4, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1045988x.2014.919136 hoffman, cameron, and sarah polkinghorne (2010). “discourse, identity, practice: analyzing librarians’ conversations about information literacy and the social web.” conference proceedings, 2010 canadian association for information science. accessed july 28, 2015. http://www.cais-acsi.ca/ojs/index.php/cais/article/view/371/103 julien, heidi, and jen (j.l.) pecoskie. 2009. “librarians’ experiences of the teaching role: grounded in campus relationships.” library & information science research. 31: 149-54. accessed september 4, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2009.03.005 mason, marc. 2009. “beating the competition: librarian as performance artist.” library orientation exchange (loex) annual conference 2009. accessed july 28, 2015. http://www.loexconference.org/2009/program/sessions.html#mason mcgee, ebony o., and lasana kazembe. 2015. “entertainers or education researchers? the challenges associated with presenting while black.” race, ethnicity and education. accessed august 19, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2015.1069263 nguyen, betty, and dena beard. 2013. “anna halprin: choreographer who poetically investigates humanity.” la contemporary. accessed september 2, 2015. http://lacontemporary.org/annahalprin/ okan, zühal. 2003. “edutainment: is learning at risk?” british journal of educational technology. 34 (3): 255-264. accessed september 4, 2015. http://web.csulb.edu/~arezaei/etec444/discussion/edutainment.pdf polkinghorne, sarah. 2013. “chasing the ephemeral: studying librarians’ in-the-moment experiences performing information literacy instruction.” presented at information: interactions and impact 2013, robert gordon university, aberdeen. rae, lindsay. 2015. “the show must go on: using principles of dramatic acting to transform us into more intentional teachers.” workshop on instruction in library use (wilu) annual conference 2015. accessed july 28, 2015. https://wilu2015.wordpress.com/pre-conference-workshops/#rae rowa, karen, jeffrey r. paulitzki, maria d. ierullo, brenda chiang, martin m. antony, randi e. mccabe, and david a. moscovitch. 2015. “a false sense of security: safety behaviors erode objective speech performance in individuals with social anxiety disorder.” behavior therapy. 3: 304-314. accessed september 4, 2015. http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~dmosco/publications/rowa_etal_2015_bt_falsesensesecurity.pdf schulte, stephanie j. 2009. “more research needed on librarian teaching anxiety.” evidence based library and information practice. 4 (4): 74-77. accessed july 28, 2015: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/eblip/article/view/6690/0 talja, sanna. 1999. “analyzing qualitative interview data: the discourse analytic approach.” library & information science research. 21 (4): 459–477. accessed september 4, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0740-8188(99)00024-9 trefts, kristin, and sarah blakeslee. 2000. “did you hear the one about the boolean operators? incorporating comedy into library instruction.” reference services review. 28 (4): 369-378. accessed september 4, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00907320010359731 vossler, joshua, and john watts. 2011. “intentional edutainment: a pedagogically and theatrically sound approach to information literacy instruction.” loex annual conference 2011. accessed july 28, 2015. http://www.loexconference.org/2011/program/sessions.html wilder, lilyan. 1999. 7 steps to fearless speaking. new york: wiley. a perspective from a potential colleague during a job interview at the university of texas, austin, 2008. [↩] throughout this article i use “our” and “us” very generally when discussing library and information workers. in the same way, i use “our field” to refer to library and information work. [↩] season 4, episode 14. [↩] loex is a large american library instruction conference organized by the loex (library orientation exchange) organization. 2015 marked its 43rd annual conference. [↩] from an information literacy instruction discussion list (ili-l) listserv posting, february 15, 2008. [↩] from an ili-l listserv posting, january 14, 2014. [↩] unless you feel like it. [↩] voldemort is the central antagonist in the harry potter books and films. this quote is from a newsweek interview. [↩] unless you feel like it. [↩] nb: i’m speaking broadly, not ascribing these intentions to ms. furay specifically. [↩] i recommend betty nguyen and dena beard’s interview with anna halprin for more detail and examples. [↩] academic libraries, information literacy, instruction, instructional design archives alive!: librarian-faculty collaboration and an alternative to the five-page paper editorial: summer reading 2015 2 responses pingback : latest library links 11th september 2015 | latest library links pingback : metaphors we teach by | john, from the library this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct out of context: understanding student learning through museum studies – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 2 may melanie chu /0 comments out of context: understanding student learning through museum studies in brief: how can we maximize library spaces and displays to support information literacy and critical thinking? how can we re-envision student learning in the ways that museums facilitate experiential learning and measure visitor engagement? this case study uses a theoretical framework, falk and dierking’s contextual model of learning, to examine and analyze student responses to the context library series, a series of interdisciplinary art installations. at the intersection of information literacy and museum visitor studies, we see that the context in which students learn best is often in line with best practices of museums. we find these practices can be applied in and embraced by libraries in ways that are not limited to exhibits, to further support the experience, engagement, and learning of students. content analysis of student responses to the context library series at california state university san marcos serves as a model to understand how students learn outside the classroom and how to measure this learning in creative, nontraditional ways. by melanie chu introduction academic library programs and collections are often seen as peripheral, removed from the teaching and learning of a university, in the netherland somewhere between an instructional department and a student support service. similarly, artwork and exhibits occupy a liminal zone of libraries, aesthetically pleasing but often lacking real purpose or meaning beyond background decoration. and yet, libraries are uniquely situated as common learning spaces for self-directed inquiry tied to the curriculum; and librarians (“simultaneously insiders and outsiders of the classroom and of the academic disciplines in which they specialize”) are uniquely positioned to act as mediators of the curriculum.1 while close curricular ties are the basis for many collection development policies, those same imperatives are less apparent in the spaces, exhibits, and programs of an academic library. the context library series at california state university san marcos transforms a common learning space with experiential, curricularly-integrated art installations. a museum-based theoretical framework, falk and dierking’s contextual model of learning, is used to examine and analyze student responses to these exhibits. at the intersection of information literacy and museum visitor studies, we see that the context in which students learn best is often in line with best practices of museums. we find these practices can be applied in and embraced by libraries in ways that are not limited to exhibits, to further support the experience, engagement, and learning of students. the contextual model of learning provides a useful schema to address two questions: more broadly (1) what is the role of art and exhibit spaces in academic libraries? and more specifically (2) how do library exhibits impact student learning? this article aims to broaden and shift the conversation of student learning by applying ideas from the existing literature of museum studies, an incredibly relevant, yet underutilized, understanding of the learning that occurs in a museum setting. about california state university san marcos and the context library series california state university san marcos (csusm) is a mid-sized public institution that prides itself on accessible higher education, and its student demographics are representative of the region. as of fall 2014, nearly half of first-year students were the first in their families to attend college, and 44% of the 12,000 undergraduates were underrepresented minority students.2 for many csusm students, the library’s gallery may very well be their first encounter with a formal art installation. with nearly thirty exhibits to draw on from its fourteen-year history, the context library series (cls) provides a rich dataset to provide insight into the impact of library exhibits and common learning spaces on student learning. like the library’s physical and digital collections— the books, periodicals, databases, and media of the library — cls provides access to content that supplements and supports student learning and research. unmediated raw materials, both collections and artwork, have the potential to engage students. however, the curation of these materials elevates the library’s role in enhancing the learning process and “critical habits of mind” we seek to cultivate in students.3 analysis of student work within educational theory helps determine the mechanisms in which student learning takes place. (in)visible project (fall 2016) installation, exhibit-related activity, and panel discussion in csusm library’s lobby-turned-gallery. lest readers think a museum-quality space is required to implement a program like cls, this library gallery might otherwise be described as the lobby of an academic library. adjacent to the building’s stairwell and elevators, the main gallery is two stories tall with an approximate footprint of 775 square feet; its moveable walls can be reconfigured into various layouts. including the neighboring walls of the research help area, there is over 1000 square feet of surface area for installing artwork. the gallery’s centralized location, its high volume of foot traffic, and the limits of the gallery itself—limited financial resources and lack of security surveillance or climate control, for example—prohibit the collecting, displaying, and preserving of fine art objects like some museums. each exhibit is on display in the library for several months (e.g., february-may, september-december), serving as a visual and interdisciplinary representation of the curriculum for classes throughout the course of the semester. the extended display time frame serves a secondary goal of the series: it engages the local community with the campus by offering numerous programming opportunities such as artist talks, guided exhibition tours, and thematically-related lectures. the examples and assessments highlighted here can be adapted and implemented in a variety of libraries, particularly academic, school, and public settings with an educational mission. this case study is relevant to readers from all settings who are interested in challenging the notions of what can occur in a library, how outreach can be assessed, and how available spaces can be utilized. moreover, this piece shows how the library is part and parcel to curricular development and student experience, thus breaking down institutional walls, as well as creating a museum without walls. the literature and theoretical framework that follow draw from several fields outside library science, primarily museum visitor studies, as well as learning and educational theories. literature review exhibitions in libraries, and library as museum some of the earliest art collections were established within universities for the purpose of study, such as oxford’s ashmolean museum (est. 1683), supporting the “wider cultural role of the university in feeding the minds of students and staff far beyond the increasingly narrow limits of their studies and research.”4 over time, university art collections became more niche and accessible to limited groups of scholars. smaller exhibitions continued in libraries to serve as a teaching tool, simply “organizing materials around a theme as a self-learning experience.”5 today, most university libraries use displays only to highlight their own materials and special collections; in a survey of the association of research libraries, all but one of the 79 respondents reported they have exhibitions using their collections.6 library exhibits are an area of untapped potential. kam observes that in some ways, librarians are in a position to exhibit more freely than their colleagues in museums and galleries, and in doing so, “we exercise our role as key cultural players in society while also reinforcing our institutional identities.”7 even when libraries have artwork integrated into their spaces, librarians may not be curating exhibits the same way we curate curricularly relevant collections. why would artwork in a library be relegated to architectural and interior design when it serves a higher instructional purpose? given the prevalence of collection-specific library displays, there is a notable lack of research examining and assessing the utilization of displays in academic libraries. to understand the role and impact of cls, it is more helpful to characterize the library gallery as a (small) museum and to frame student learning within visitor studies. bitgood and shettel posit: “not only can visitor evaluation identify the cognitive and affective outcomes of an educational exhibit or program, but it provides the tools for improving these outcomes.”8 brown and power differentiate between libraries as concerned with information and museums as concerned with objects9, but this distinction is superficial and perhaps outdated. the library, like a museum, is situated as a public space, and “as such, constitutes a forum for meetings, dialogue, public debate, and discussion.”10 and museums, like libraries, face increasing pressure “from community stakeholders and from funders to develop a closer, more meaningful relationship within the community.”11 per worts, museums have the potential “to act as mirrors (both literal and symbolic) that engage us in processes of self-reflection and learning;”12 similarly, schwager remarks on “mirrors and memories” as ways in which libraries continually connect with the communities they serve.13 ritchart says, “in museums, students are interacting with and trying to make sense of new objects and experiences and must think to do so. specifically, they must: look closely; wonder and question; make interpretations and form hypotheses based on evidence; make connections to things they already know; consider different perspectives and viewpoints; delve below the surface to uncover complexity; and form conclusions.”14 leinhardt and knutson note that the sheer freedom of a museum experience allows learners to make “an ‘aha’ or ‘wow’ experience, or a successful experience might be one that provokes curiosity. these experiences may be memorable and they may form the foundation for events many years later.”15 again, we draw the connection between museums and libraries, each facilitating common learning spaces with room for deeply personal discovery as well as highly collaborative experiences. the parochial concept of museums as rarefied “repositories of the past,”16 elitist “white cubes,”17 or static displays of artwork (“the transmission-absorption model”18) has largely been disrupted by a movement to create accessible learning experiences for museum visitors. when one thinks of a museum today, a hands-on science exploratorium or an interactive family-friendly museum might come to mind, in addition to a more traditional fine art museum. the museum paradigm shift is also due in part to contemporary artwork incorporating increasingly more mixed-media formats. paul concludes: “new media art seems to call for a ‘ubiquitous museum’ or ‘museum without walls,’ a parallel, distributed, living information space that is open to artistic interference—a space for exchange, collaborative creation, and presentation that is transparent and flexible.”19 indeed, a “museum without walls” is an ideal analogy for the cls library gallery, an experiential learning space both for students walking through and for those choosing to visit. since the museum environment is fundamentally cultural and social in nature, value is placed not just on the acquisition of facts one “picks up” from an exhibit but on the facilitation and assessment of self-directed, experiential learning.20 teller calls for museums to facilitate “change in people’s thinking and feeling, even transcendence, if it [gives] visitors the means to change beliefs and attitudes, and/or take action.”21 furthermore, stromberg argues that college art museums are uniquely well-suited to develop the skill sets increasingly called for in liberal arts institutions and the professional landscapes for which we prepare students, demanding “a population of productive dreamers” who are innovative, creative, and responsive in the their problem solving and critical thinking.22 much like librarians, museum educators may not be explicitly teaching students these skills, but rather facilitating the learning opportunities which in turn nurture the dispositions or habits of mind. the instructional mission of cls reflects a global shift in museums away from object-centric towards visitor-centered, and calls for students to be active participants in their learning. museum learning and the contextual model of learning falk and dierking’s contextual model of learning is grounded in several overarching areas of educational theory, linking the personal, sociocultural, and physical facets of learning as fundamental to experiential museum learning. they frame learning as an iterative process of applying prior knowledge and experiences to new experiences; this process plays out within a physical context and is mediated by the actions of other individuals.23 as the process and product of the interactions between these three contexts, learning is not static nor separate. this section will illustrate falk and dierking’s personal, sociocultural, and physical schema with specific installation examples from, and student responses to, the context library series. personal context recognizes the power of prior knowledge, interests, and beliefs — the importance of each visitor’s own choices, motivations, and expectations— in making meaning.24 this draws upon constructivist theory in which learners, with all of their prior knowledge and experiences, engage with objects, concepts, or events to develop meaning and construct new knowledge.25 says bosma: “the way we look at art is defined by what we look for. it is defined by what we want it to be or think it to be. it is not necessary to understand a work of art, its background, maker, and art historical context in depth to appreciate it.”26 similar understanding can be drawn from reader-response theory: “the reader is a producer of meaning; what one reads out of a text is always a function of the prior experiences; ideological commitments; interpretive strategies; and cognitive, moral, psychological and political interests that one brings to the reading.”27 significance is not placed solely on the text (piece of art) or the reader (student, viewer), but on the dynamic relationship between the two. for the context library series, guided questions and activities prompt the students to situate themselves and their worldviews in response to each art installation. rather than imposing meaning, an emphasis is put on the student’s own interpretation of the installation. a class visit might begin with unstructured time for students to walk around the exhibit and find one or two pieces of artwork that resonate with them (i.e. “that you are drawn to for whatever reason, good or bad.”) students are then given open-ended prompts to respond to, such as these created in collaboration with professor kristin moss: before we learn more about the artist, briefly describe what you think this exhibit is about, based on your first impression. choose one piece from the exhibit to describe, interpret, and analyze. what colors, lines, shapes, textures, and text do you see? describe your reaction. what speaks to you about this particular piece? are there elements you think are impactful or effective, and why? one cls exhibition illustrates personal context and individualized meaning-making. “wounded hearts: a journey through grief” (fall 2011) documented artist colleen moss’ exhibit on the sudden loss of her husband and stages of grief, symbolized through paintings of broken, stitched, and transformed hearts, some imagined as “hung out to dry.” working with the artist, the author-librarian-curator conceived of an interactive component that would enable visitors to memorialize their own losses with paper hearts on a makeshift clothesline hanging in the exhibit space. during the semester, over 200 individual paper hearts were created for the exhibit, allowing a unique opportunity to share in the grieving process and normalize (in a public space) what can be an isolating and stigmatized experience. these hearts, along with other cls exhibits, have been digitized as part of the csusm institutional repository, scholarworks.28 additionally, as a result of the exhibit, a student-focused grief counseling group was formed in conjunction with counseling services and a local hospice. this highly personal, subjective, and potentially disruptive kind of learning acknowledges the inextricably linked learning experiences of the museum environment29, a shift away from museums (and libraries) as sterile white cubes. hundreds of paper hearts on the interactive memorial walls of “wounded hearts,” illustrative of the personal context in the contextual model of learning. in another example of falk and dierking’s personal context, for “the uterus flag project” (spring 2014), students joined “sit-and-stitch” workshops with artist terrilynn quick. these communal gatherings wove together the personal and the political. each flag told the story of one woman’s relationship to her body; strung together, the flags represented their conversations on gender inequities, health education, and access to healthcare. one student noted: “we all came from a uterus, we all have mothers, sisters, and girlfriends.” participants had the option of contributing their hand-stitched flags to be displayed with the project as it travels to other schools and communities. “sit-and-stitch” workshops at the library and campus gender equity center helped facilitate a sense of community and dialogue on women’s health issues. situating the personal within a larger perspective, falk and dierking’s sociocultural context is defined as “both who we perceive ourselves to be and how we perceive the world we inhabit.”30 learning is a participatory process, often mediated by others and requiring engagement in the broader social world. powerful learning opportunities can occur during a guided exhibit activity, one in which visitors (students, learners) participate productively within an installation, being able to articulate their personal interpretations of the artwork and being challenged by the viewpoints of others in a group. ritchart argues, “museums offer a setting in which cognition, affect, social context, and the environment are fully integrated, making them ideal places for thinking in the wild.”31 social cognitive theory, used in psychology, education, communication and other disciplines, holds that portions of an individual’s knowledge acquisition can be directly related to observing others within the context of social interactions, experiences, and outside media influences. additionally, leinhardt and knutson contend: “controversy and query are two of several ways to engage visitors in connections to the learning environment.”32 cls exhibit themes are certainly selected with the sociocultural context in mind, addressing issues as wide-ranging as veterans, immigration, globalization, hate crimes, migrant farm workers, the environment, and the prison industrial complex. a complete list of cls exhibits is available on the csusm library website. an example of falk and dierking sociocultural context can be seen in the exhibit “lynching in america” (fall 2004) by artist renee billingslee. the installation’s burned, tattered shirts, hand-stitched names of lynching victims, and patchwork quilt of authentic postcards—photos of white family picnics underneath hanging black bodies—confronted an ugly part of american history often minimized or denied in some curricula. professor sharon elise guided students from the intense discussion provoked by the exhibit to researching scholarly literature and what sociologists have written on racial violence.33 art exhibits exploring issues of social justice can provide relevant, thought-provoking opportunities for students to more deeply engage classroom-based curriculum. similarly, the “(in)visible project” (fall 2016) by photographer bear guerra engaged students in the critical sociocultural issue of homelessness. the installation’s powerful black and white photographs challenged the stigma surrounding homelessness and raised awareness of san diego’s homeless population, fourth largest in the united states. looping interview excerpts immersed visitors in a soundtrack voicing the dreams, happiest moments, and ideas of “home” of homeless individuals while an interactive component gave students space to answer those same questions, further connecting them to the faces and lives of the homeless portrayed in the portraits. the activity was created with questions printed on cardstock, a basket of markers, and several wall-mounted bulletin bars, an easy and affordable means of gathering student input in a library setting. a panel discussion shared regional resources and support services, including the opening of a campus food pantry, while contextualizing the local within the larger sociological forces behind housing displacement and food insecurity. a semester-long food drive, supported in part by a nearby middle school service-learning project, brought in hundreds of canned goods for a community program helping people in crisis stabilize and rebuild their lives. library staff packing and delivering hundreds of canned goods to local interfaith community services. the food drive was part of the cls “(in)visible project” exhibit. the third and final component of falk and dierking’s contextual model of learning is physical context: the organization, orientation, and design elements of an installation, and the reinforcing events and experiences around the museum content. learning and memory is very much place-dependent, inextricably bound to where the learning takes place.34 per lave and wegner, unlike a “teaching” curriculum in which the teacher determines what knowledge should be imparted, “a learning curriculum is essentially situated.”35 situated learning occurs relative to (sometimes, in spite of) the teaching environment as learners make their own meaning, productively participating within applied and immersive experiences. libraries and museums in particular are places in which situated, self-directed learning takes place. motivation is a key part of informal learning, and students and lifelong learners choose to be in these spaces. immersed in a physical context of one’s choosing, in a space they are not necessarily required to be, students are challenged to reflect on previously held knowledge and on the assumptions of other students. over years of various exhibit layouts, the author began to apply museum design to the library’s lobby-turned-gallery. how is the limited space maximized, augmented, delineated? how can the lighting, labels, angles of walls, and glimpses of artwork spur a sense of curiosity and wonder? are the spaces around the artwork sufficient for wheelchair access and collaborative group work? are there spaces to sit quietly, and spaces to gather? are the accompanying materials informative but not overly descriptive or prescriptive? collaborating with different artists helps to re-envision an installation space with fresh perspective each semester. time spent in an exhibit is one indicator of physical context on a visitor or learner. tracking and timing methods are used to unobtrusively observe movements within an exhibit, looking for patterns to document average “dwell rate” (how long viewers spent in an exhibit, or on any one component of an exhibit) and “sweep rate” (the speed at which visitors move through an exhibit, relative to its total square footage).36 serrell acknowledges: “while we do not have the tools to measure everything that happens to a visitor in an exhibition, we do know that attention is necessary and time is an important indicator of it.”37 tracking within the physical context can be seen in the cls exhibit “enlisting a nation: american propaganda of world war i,” featuring a special collection of original propaganda posters to commemorate the 100th anniversary of world war i. after a librarian-led discussion on propaganda techniques (bandwagon, name calling, generalities, and so on), students paired up and recorded their responses to exhibit prompts on their cell phones using a free educational app called socrative. photographs were taken discreetly from the balcony above the library gallery to document their time spent with this activity. groups of students respond to exhibit prompts on their cell phones during a guided class visit to “enlisting a nation” (fall 2014). one student noted: “while looking through the library exhibit ‘enlisting a nation,’ i was struck by how different, yet very similar, the discourses of world war i propaganda or biased information, and current war propaganda are. in the 1910’s there was no fox news or msnbc to help spin and advance political discourses, although there was definitely media trying to do as such. the greatest propagandists were, and to a degree still are, the united states government.” after the library exhibit field trip, students in professor kymber quinney’s history classes were then given an extra credit assignment to design what government-sponsored propaganda posters might look like today. the physical context in this case was an effective means of reinforcing and assessing student learning of the curriculum—an exhibit visit in which students worked together to describe, interpret, and evaluate the artwork on display; to compare and contrast the artwork on display with their own experiences and understanding of the world; and to apply relevant theoretical perspectives from class discussion to the exhibit. by close observation, asking questions, sharing constructive critiques, divergent thinking, and interpretations, a guided lesson within an exhibition can be an incredibly fruitful example of situational learning. discussion and findings a hallmark of the context library series is close collaboration between librarians, disciplinary faculty, and artists to construct evocative, interactive lessons and components around each exhibit. this section highlights two cls installations that exemplify the personal, sociocultural, and physical facets of falk and dierking’s museum-based contextual model of learning. the unveiling of a student-created educational poster project at the opening of the “beyond the stereotype” (spring 2015) exhibit. for the “beyond the stereotype” (spring 2015) exhibit, over two hundred attendees came to the opening reception to witness the unveiling of student-created, research-based posters on cultural appropriation. the poster project, created by the california indian culture and sovereignty center, featured csusm students ripping up stereotypical racial and ethnic costumes with the text, “there is more to me than what you see. beyond the stereotype, there is history.” as with many cls exhibits, participants were called to challenge their own beliefs and to take some sort of action. visitors to the exhibit were encouraged to sign a civility and diversity pledge, a commitment to examine their own biases and acknowledge the culture and humanity of others. the pledge was posted above a wall-mounted roll of butcher paper that ended up serving as a space for asynchronous dialogue on the themes of cultural appropriation. the conversation that evolved over the course of the semester included statements and responses (indicated with arrows) such as: “please realize that in the process of advocating going beyond the stereotype you are actually creating one. it’s great to push past stereotypes, but please address all of them rather than choosing to portray white people as the only ones stereotyping by dressing in bad taste. that is creating a stereotype.” “it’s called cultural appropriation, not defend your whiteness!” “while i agree with what you’re saying, you seem to be missing the bigger picture. this exhibit focuses on stereotypes in minorities, we aren’t saying white people are the ones to stereotype. take a step back and take another look.” a wall-mounted roll of butcher paper provided a space for students’ thoughts, comments, and questions related to the “beyond the stereotype” exhibit. the “beyond the stereotype” exhibit was accompanied by biographies of diverse historical and contemporary leaders to counter the negative racial and ethnic stereotypes portrayed in the posters. a series of “conversations that matter” workshops were organized for students, staff, and faculty on issues of cultural stereotypes, microaggressions, and bystander intervention. professor carolyn sawyer used twitter and storify to capture the discourse related to the workshop entitled “on bindis, black face, cholos, and cornrows.” guided questions and activities prompted learners to situate themselves and their worldviews in response to the art installation. one student remarked: “i believe it’s hard some people to understand why they are racist because they avoid the topic #conversationsthatmatter.” the impact of this particular cls exhibit continues as the posters and related materials are licensed by creative commons and available via scholarworks. overhead view of the cls “more than a fence” exhibit, an interactive art installation and collaboration of csusm professors, students, and community. the integration of library exhibits into the curriculum supports student research and learning in creative and compelling ways, as exemplified in the “more than a fence: (de)constructing mexico/us borders” (fall 2014) exhibit. this multimedia installation, anchored by professor kendra rivera’s visual ethnography and interviews with border patrol agents, explored the real and symbolic effects of the border and immigration policy. photographs and sculptural elements by community activists maria teresa fernandez and pam calore documented the border from both sides of the fence. students in professor david avalos’ introduction to sculpture class designed and constructed their own conceptions of the border wall: an open window next to a padlocked door; a colorful día de los muertos style skull adorned with flowers; a drone flying overhead, attached to wires above the library gallery. the interactive component for “more than a fence” was a salvaged piece of chain link fence where participants were invited to leave a thought, prayer, or inquiry. over the course of the semester, the chain link fence was woven with hundreds of slips of paper, evoking the feeling of roadside memorials found along the border. like “wounded hearts” mentioned above, these scraps of paper have been digitized in the csusm institutional repository. both sides of the border fence, as envisioned and created by introduction to sculpture students in an intensive group research project the semester prior to the “more than a fence” exhibit. content analysis of the exhibit-generated student responses to “more than a fence” reveals thoughtful engagement with a difficult and complex subject matter. indeed, the sheer volume of responses, the patterns of language, and rich dialogue that emerged over the course of the exhibit is indicative of critical thinking and student engagement. the personal, sociocultural, and physical contexts embodied in the “more than a fence” exhibit. a selection of student responses ranging from the personal to sociocultural and physical contexts: “i always asked myself if i ever had the courage to do the same as you to find a ‘better’ life.” “i’m undocumented. there shouldn’t be borders to reach your dreams!” “i am mexican, born in mexico. i represent myself legally in this country. it was not hard and it’s morally correct. you should all try it rather than be proud to be illegal.” “people come here but not to take away anybody’s jobs. they come to do what other others don’t like to do.” “yes, this world is not fair, look around. but this does not mean there is no right/wrong. the u.s. does not have the means to fix every problem.” “how can we expect any change to the borders on our land when we cannot remove the borders in our minds. every one of us is an immigrant… try to remember that.” “we are all humans. we all bleed the same color.” – csusm student “may the love of god be with the people of both sides of the fence.” “is this really the american dream?” student response to “more than a fence” (fall 2014), “este país es para todos. este país es un país de inmigrantes.” translated: “this country is for everyone. this country is a country of immigrants.” these findings demonstrate practical and compelling means of student experience, engagement, and learning by applying museum-based techniques. installations such as “beyond the stereotype” and “more than a fence” challenge traditional models of art in libraries, from the rarified collections of old, to the commonplace book displays and architectural aesthetics of today. conclusion as with museums, paying attention to the ways in which learning occurs in library exhibits and spaces is critical to understanding our role within in our larger educational institutions and communities. best practices in museum and visitor studies clearly align with the library’s work of engaging students as we cultivate the habits of mind of lifelong learners. both museums and libraries facilitate dynamic experiential learning by providing: spaces for personal reflection and meaning making, for self-directed exploration and guided class activities; opportunities for dialogue, debate, and connection; calls to action and productive participation; access to thought-provoking, relevant content and to multimedia, multimodal experiences; and more. the field of museum studies, in particular falk and dierking’s framework, gives librarians a new way to articulate and amplify the impact we have on student learning. by examining the context library series through the museum-based contextual model of learning, we see how academic libraries move from a peripheral role to one at the heart and intersection of the personal, sociocultural, and physical contexts of learning. illustrated with specific cls examples throughout this case study, we witness time and again the transformative impact of re-envisioning common learning spaces and re-interpreting curricularly driven displays. libraries provide context: the people, space, and resources that help students make sense of their world, that help them formulate questions and find answers, that support their inquiry and curiosity. librarians, as mediators of curriculum and curators of collections, can further adapt museum-based practices to transform our common learning spaces, exhibits, and instructionally related programs. acknowledgements i am forever grateful to my colleagues and mentors at the csusm library, for taking a chance on a librarian right out of grad school, for supporting my vision for the context library series, and for helping me literally move (exhibit) walls. thank you to the students and staff of the instructionally related activities committee who renewed cls grant funds year after year. to all the incredible artists and faculty collaborators i’ve had the honor of working with, too many to name here, thank you. shout out to kristin moss for being my guide through all things art; to kate crocker, for your brilliance and for holding me up (on ladders, and thru good times and bad); and to carmen mitchell, an exceptional librarian, friend, and the reason cls exhibits live on in scholarworks. lastly, my sincere thanks to peer-reviewers amy koester and stacy williams, publishing editor ian g. beilin, and web editor ryan randall, for their thoughtful feedback and recommendations on this article. references bitgood, steven, and harris h. shettel. “an overview of visitor studies.” journal of museum education 21, no. 3 (november 2015): 6-10. bosma, josephine. “art as experience: meet the active audience.” in network art: practices and positions. tom corby, ed. 24-39. new york: routledge, 2006. boylan, patrick j. “universities and museums: past, present and future.” museum management and curatorship 18, no. 1 (1999): 43-56. brown, mary e. and rebecca power. exhibits in libraries: a practical guide. jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 2006. buckley, patricia m. “exhibit examines ugly history of ‘lynching in america’.” san diego union tribune (san diego, ca). oct. 13, 2004. california state university san marcos. “wasc institutional report.” last modified sept. 9, 2015. http://www.csusm.edu/wasc/institutionalreport.html chi, michelene t.h., and rod d. roscoe. “the processes and challenges of conceptual change.” in reconsidering conceptual change: issues in theory and practice. margarita limon and lucia mason, eds. 3-27. netherlands: springer, 2007. debacker, free, jeltsen peeters, tine buffel, ankelien kindekens, veronique romero reina, willem elias, and koen lombaerts. “an integrative approach for visual arts mediation in museums.” procedia – social and behavioral sciences 143 (2014): 743-49. dutka, andrew, sherman hayes, and jerry parnell. “the surprise part of a librarian’s life: exhibition design and preparation course.” college & research library news 63, no. 1 (2002): 19-22. falk, john h., and lynn d. dierking. learning from museums: visitor experiences and the making of meaning. walnut creek, ca: altamira press, 2000. fletcher, jennifer. “critical habits of mind: exposing the process of development.” liberal education 99, no. 1 (winter 2013). kam, d. vanessa. “on collecting and exhibiting art objects in libraries, archives, and research institutes.” art documentation: bulletin of the art libraries society of north america 20, no. 2 (2001): 10-15. lave, jean, and etienne wenger. situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation (learning in doing). new york: cambridge university press, 1991. leinhardt, gaea and karen d. knutson. listening in on museum conversations. walnut creek, ca: altamira press, 2004. paul, christiane, ed. new media in the white cube and beyond: curatorial models for digital art. berkeley: university of california press, 2008. pinus, diana a. “look again! planning an exhibition with social interaction in mind.” journal of museum education 25, no. 1/2 (2000): 21-24. ritchart, ron. “cultivating a culture of thinking in museums.” journal of museum education 32, no. 2 (2007): 137-53. schwager, tim. “mirrors and memories: how libraries connect with their communities.” australian library journal 47, no. 1, 83-90. doi: 10.1080/00049670.1998.10755835 schweickart, patrocinio p., and elizabeth a. flynn, eds. reading sites: social difference and reader response. new york: modern language association of america, 2004. serrell, beverly. “the 51% research project: a meta-analysis of visitor time/use in museum exhibitions.” visitor behavior 10, no. 3 (1995): 5-9. serrell, beverly. paying attention: visitors and museum exhibitions. washington, dc: american association of museums, 1998. serrell, beverly. “paying more attention to paying attention.” informal science. last modified july 5, 2016. http://www.informalscience.org/sites/default/files/s%26a.pa2.finaldforcaise2016.pdf simmons, michelle h. “librarians as disciplinary discourse mediators: using genre theory to move toward critical information literacy.” portal: libraries and the academy 5, no. 3 (2005): 297-311. stromberg, john r. “creativity and the relevant museum: a proposal.” in a handbook for academic museums: exhibitions and education. stefanie s. jandl and mark s. gold, eds. 20-35. boston: museums etc, 2012. swanick, sean, sharon rankin, and melinda reinhart. “curating exhibitions in academic libraries: practical steps.” practical academic librarianship 5 (2015): 1-22. teller, alan. “assessing excellence in exhibitions: three approaches.” exhibitionist journal 26, no. 2 (fall 2007): 69-75. van deusen, jean d. “the school library media specialist as a member of the teaching team: ‘insider’ and ‘outsider.’” journal of curriculum & supervision 11, no. 3 (1996): 229-48. worts, douglas. “transformational encounters: reflections on cultural participation and ecomuseology.” canadian journal of communication 31, no. 1 (2006). see jean d. van deusen, “the school library media specialist as a member of the teaching team: ‘insider’ and ‘outsider,’” journal of curriculum & supervision 11, no. 3 (1996):231; michelle h. simmons, “librarians as disciplinary discourse mediators: using genre theory to move toward critical information literacy.” portal: libraries and the academy 5, no. 3 (2005): 298. [↩] california state university san marcos, “2015 institutional report,” in csusm western association of schools & colleges (wasc). http://www.csusm.edu/wasc/institutionalreport.html [↩] jennifer fletcher, “critical habits of mind: exposing the process of development,” liberal education 99, no. 1 (winter 2013). [↩] patrick j. boylan, “universities and museums: past, present and future,” museum management and curatorship 18, no. 1 (1999): 43. [↩] andrew dutka, sherman hayes, and jerry parnell, “the surprise part of a librarian’s life: exhibition design and preparation course,” college & research library news 63, no. 1 (2002): 19. [↩] sean swanick, sharon rankin, and melinda reinhart, “curating exhibitions in academic libraries: practical steps,” practical academic librarianship 5 (2015): 5. [↩] d. vanessa kam, “on collecting and exhibiting art objects in libraries, archives, and research institutes,” art documentation: bulletin of the art libraries society of north america 20, no. 2 (2001): 14. [↩] steven bitgood and harris h. shettel, “an overview of visitor studies,” journal of museum education 21, no. 3 (november 2015): 8. [↩] mary e. brown and rebecca power, exhibits in libraries: a practical guide (jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 2006), 15. [↩] diana a. pinus, “look again! planning an exhibition with social interaction in mind.” journal of museum education 25, no. 1/2 (2000): 21. [↩] carrie herrick, et al., “building responsive museums a discussion framework,” in the learning coalition (june 2009). https://members.museumsontario.ca/sites/default/files/members/buildingresponsivemuseumspolicyandplanning.pdf [↩] douglas worts, “transformational encounters: reflections on cultural participation and ecomuseology.” canadian journal of communication 31, no. 1 (2006). [↩] tim schwager, “mirrors and memories: how libraries connect with their communities.” the australian library journal 47, no. 1, 83-90. doi:10.1080/00049670.1998.10755835 [↩] ron ritchart, “cultivating a culture of thinking in museums,” journal of museum education 32, no. 2 (2007): 139. [↩] gaea leinhardt and karen d. knutson, listening in on museum conversations (walnut creek, ca: altamira press, 2004), 1-2. [↩] john r. stromberg, “creativity and the relevant museum: a proposal,” in a handbook for academic museums: exhibitions and education, edited by stefanie s. jandl and mark s. gold, (boston: museums etc, 2012), 21. [↩] christiane paul, ed., new media in the white cube and beyond: curatorial models for digital art (berkeley: university of california press, 2008), 53. [↩] free debacker, et al., “an integrative approach for visual arts mediation in museums,” procedia – social and behavioral sciences 143 (2014): 744. [↩] paul, new media in the white cube, 53. [↩] leinhardt and knutson, listening in, 5. [↩] alan teller, “assessing excellence in exhibitions: three approaches,” exhibitionist journal 26, no. 2 (fall 2007): 71. [↩] stromberg, “creativity and the relevant museum,” 21. [↩] john h. falk and lynn d. dierking, “school school field trips: assessing their long-term impact,” curator 40, no. 3 (september 1997): 216. [↩] falk and dierking, learning from museums, 137. [↩] michelene t.h. chi and rod d. roscoe, “the processes and challenges of conceptual change,” in reconsidering conceptual change: issues in theory and practice, edited by margarita limon and lucia mason (netherlands: springer, 2007), 74. [↩] josephine bosma, “art as experience: meet the active audience,” in network art: practices and positions, edited by tom corby (new york: routledge, 2006), 24. [↩] patrocinio p. schweickart and elizabeth a. flynn, eds., reading sites: social difference and reader response (new york: modern language association of america, 2004), 1-2. [↩] scholarworks @ csu san marcos, “context library exhibits” in university library collections. https://csusm-dspace.calstate.edu/handle/10211.8/116 [↩] leinhardt and knutson, listening in, 5. [↩] falk and dierking, learning from museums, 39. [↩] ritchart, “culture of thinking,” 139. [↩] leinhardt and knutson, listening in, 160. [↩] patricia m. buckley, “exhibit examines ugly history of ‘lynching in america’,” san diego union tribune (san diego, ca), oct. 13, 2004. [↩] falk and dierking, learning from museums, 57. [↩] jean lave and etienne wenger, situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation (learning in doing) (new york: cambridge university press, 1991), 97. [↩] see beverly serrell, paying attention: visitors and museum exhibitions (washington, dc: american association of museums, 1998); beverly serrell, “paying more attention to paying attention,” in informal science, last modified july 5, 2016. http://www.informalscience.org/sites/default/files/s%26a.pa2.finaldforcaise2016.pdf [↩] beverly serrell, “the 51% research project: a meta-analysis of visitor time/use in museum exhibitions,” visitor behavior 10, no. 3 (1995): 9. [↩] critical optimism: reimagining rural communities through libraries “it was information based”: student reasoning when distinguishing between scholarly and popular sources this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct new grads, meet new metrics: why early career librarians should care about altmetrics & research impact – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 12 aug robin chin roemer and rachel borchardt /3 comments new grads, meet new metrics: why early career librarians should care about altmetrics & research impact photo by flickr user peter taylor  (cc by-nc 2.0) in brief how do academic librarians measure their impact on the field of lis, particularly in light of eventual career goals related to reappointment, promotion, or tenure? the ambiguity surrounding how to define and measure impact is arguably one of the biggest frustrations that new librarians face, especially if they are interested in producing scholarship outside of traditional publication models. to help address this problem, we seek to introduce early career librarians and other readers to altmetrics, a relatively new concept within the academic landscape that considers web-based methods of sharing and analyzing scholarly information. by robin chin roemer and rachel borchardt introduction for new lis graduates with an eye toward higher education, landing that first job in an academic library is often the first and foremost priority. but what happens once you land the job? how do new librarians go about setting smart priorities for their early career decisions and directions, including the not-so-long term goals of reappointment, promotion, or tenure? while good advice is readily available for most librarians looking to advance “primary” responsibilities like teaching, collection development, and support for access services, advice on the subject of scholarship—a key requirement of many academic librarian positions—remains relatively neglected by lis programs across the country. newly hired librarians are therefore often surprised by the realities of their long term performance expectations, and can especially struggle to find evidence of their “impact” on the larger lis profession or field of research over time. these professional realizations prompt librarians to ask what it means to be impactful in the larger world of libraries. is a poster at a national conference more or less impactful than a presentation at a regional one? where can one find guidance on how to focus one’s efforts for greatest impact? finally, who decides what impact is for librarians, and how does one go about becoming a decision-maker? the ambiguity surrounding how to both define and measure impact quantitatively is a huge challenge for new librarians, particularly for those looking to contribute to the field beyond the publication of traditional works of scholarship. to help address this problem, this article introduces early career librarians and lis professionals to a concept within the landscape of academic impact measurement that is more typically directed at seasoned librarian professionals: altmetrics, or the creation and study of metrics based on the social web as a means for analyzing and informing scholarship1.  by focusing especially on the value of altmetrics to early career librarians (and vice versa) we argue that altmetrics can and should become a more prominent part of academic libraries’ toolkits at the beginning of their careers. our approach to this topic is shaped by our own early experiences with the nuances of lis scholarship, as well as by our fundamental interest in helping researchers who struggle with scholarly directions in their fields. what is altmetrics & why does it matter? altmetrics has become something of a buzzword within academia over the last five years. offering users a view of impact that looks beyond the world of citations championed by traditional metric makers, altmetrics has grown especially popular with researchers and professionals who ultimately seek to engage with the public—including many librarians and lis practitioners. robin, for instance, first learned of their existence in late 2011, when working as a library liaison to a school of communication that included many public-oriented faculty, including journalists, filmmakers, and pr specialists. one of the reasons for this growing popularity is the narrow definition of scholarly communication that tends to equate article citations with academia impact. traditional citation metrics like impact factor by nature take for granted the privileged position of academic journal articles, which are common enough in the sciences but less helpful in fields (like lis) that accept a broader range of outputs and audiences. for instance, when rachel was an early career librarian, she co-produced a library instruction podcast, which had a sizable audience of regular listeners, but was not something that could described in the same impact terms as an academic article. by contrast, altmetrics indicators tend to land at the level of individual researcher outputs—the number of times an article, presentation, or (in rachel’s case) podcast is viewed online, downloaded, etc. altmetrics also opens up the door to researchers who, as mentioned earlier, are engaged in online spaces and networks that include members beyond the academy. twitter is a common example of this, as are certain blogs, like those directly sponsored by scholarly associations or publishers. interested members of the general public, as well as professionals outside of academia, are thus acknowledged by altmetrics as potentially valuable audiences, audiences whose ability to access, share, and discuss research opens up new questions about societal engagement with certain types of scholarship. consider: what would it mean if rachel had discovered evidence that her regular podcast listeners included teachers as well as librarians? what if robin saw on twitter that a communication professor’s research was being discussed by federal policy makers? a good example of this from the broader lis world is the case of uk computer scientist steve pettifer, whose co-authored article “defrosting the digital library: bibliographic tools for the next generation web” was profiled in a 2013 nature article for the fact that it had been downloaded by public library of science (plos) users 53,000 times between 2008 and 2012, as “the most-accessed review ever to be published in any of the seven plos journals”2. by contrast, pettifer’s article had at that point in time generated about 80 citations, a number that, while far from insignificant, left uncaptured the degree of interest in his research from a larger online community. the fact that pettifer subsequently included this metric as part of a successful tenure package highlights one of the main attractions of altmetrics for researchers: the ability to supplement citation-based metrics, and to build a stronger case for evaluators seeking proof of a broad spectrum of impact. the potential of altmetrics to fill gaps for both audiences and outputs beyond traditional limits has also brought it to the crucial attention of funding agencies, the vast majority of which have missions that tie back to the public good. for instance, in a 2014 article in plos biology, the wellcome trust, the second-highest spending charitable foundation in the world, openly explained its interest in “exploring the potential value of [article level metrics]/altmetrics” to shape its future funding strategy3. among the article’s other arguments, it cites the potential for altmetrics to be “particularly beneficial to junior researchers, especially those who may not have had the opportunity to accrue a sufficient body of work to register competitive scores on traditional indicators, or those researchers whose particular specialisms seldom result in key author publications.” funders, in other words, acknowledge the challenges that (1) early career academics face in proving the potential impact of their ideas; and (2) researchers experience in disciplines that favor a high degree of specialization or collaboration. as librarians who work in public services, we have both witnessed these challenges in action many times—even in our own field of lis. take, for instance, the example of a librarian hoping to publish the results of an information literacy assessment in a high impact lis journal based on impact factor. according to the latest edition of journal citations reports4, the top journal for the category of “information science & library science” is management information systems quarterly, a venue that fits poorly with our librarian’s information literacy research. the next two ranked journals, journal of information technology and journal of the american medical informatics association, offer versions of the same conundrum; neither is appropriate for the scope of the librarian’s work. thus, the librarian is essentially locked out of the top three ranked journals in the field, not because his/her research is suspect, but because the research doesn’t match a popular lis speciality. scenarios like this are very common, and offer weight to the argument that lis is in need of alternative tools for communicating and contextualizing scholarly impact to external evaluators. non-librarians are of course also a key demographic within the lis field, and have their own set of practices for using metrics for evaluation and review. in fact, for many lis professionals outside of academia, the use of non-citation based metrics hardly merits a discussion, so accepted are they for tracking value and use. for instance, graduates in programming positions will undoubtedly recognize github, an online code repository and hosting service in which users are rewarded for the number of “forks,” watchers, and stars their projects generate over time. similarly, lis grads who work with social media may utilize klout scores —a web-based ranking that assigns influence scores to users based on data from sites like twitter, instagram, and wikipedia. the information industry has made great strides in flexing its definition of impact to include more social modes of communication, collaboration, and influence. however, as we have seen, academia continues to linger on the notion of citation-based metrics. this brings us back to the lure of altmetrics for librarians: namely, its potential to redefine, or at least broaden, how higher education thinks about impact, and how impact can be distinguished from additional evaluative notions like “quality.” our own experiences and observations have led us to believe strongly that this must be done, but also done with eyes open to the ongoing strengths and weaknesses of altmetrics. with this in mind, let us take a closer look at the field of altmetrics, including how it has developed as a movement. the organization of altmetrics one of the first key points to know about altmetrics is how it can be organized and understood. due to its online, entrepreneurial nature, altmetrics as a field can be incredibly quick-changing and dynamic—an issue and obstacle that we’ll return to a bit later. for now, however, let’s take a look a the categories of altmetrics as they currently stand in the literature. to date, several altmetrics providers have taken the initiative to create categories that are used within their tools. for instance, plumx, one of the major altmetrics tools, sorts metrics into five categories, including “social media” and “mentions”, both measures of the various likes, favorites, shares and comments that are common to many social media platforms. impactstory, another major altmetrics tool, divides its basic categories into “public” and “scholar” sections based on the audience that is most likely to be represented within a particular tool. to date, there is no best practice when it comes to categorizing these metrics. a full set of categories currently in use by different altmetrics toolmakers can be found in figure 1. figure 1. altmetrics categories in use by major altmetrics tools. one challenge to applying categories to altmetrics indicators is the ‘grass roots’ way in which the movement was built. rather than having a representative group of researchers get together and say  “let’s create tools to measure the ways in which scholarly research is being used/discussed/etc.”, the movement started with a more or less concurrent explosion of online tools that could be used for a variety of purposes, from social to academic. for example, when a conference presentation is recorded and uploaded to youtube, the resulting views, likes, shares, and comments are all arguably indications of interest in the presentation’s content, even though youtube is hardly designed to be an academic impact tool. a sample of similarly flexible tools from which we can collect data relevant to impact is detailed in figure 2. figure 2. examples of altmetrics data sources used by different toolmakers. around the mid-2000s5, people began to realize that online tools could offer valuable insights into the attention and impact of scholarship. toolmakers thus began to build aggregator resources that purposefully gather data from different social sites and try to present this data in ways that are meaningful to the academic community. however, as it turns out, each tool collects a slightly different set of metrics and has different ideas about how to sort its data, as we saw in table 1. the result is that there is no inherent rhyme or reason as to why altmetrics toolmakers track certain online tools and not others, nor to what the data they produce looks like. it’s a symptom of the fact that the tools upon which altmetrics are based were not originally created with altmetrics in mind. altmetrics tools let’s now take a look at some of the altmetrics tools that have proved to be of most use to librarians in pursuit of information about their impact and scope of influence. mendeley mendeley is a citation management tool, a category that also includes tools like endnote, zotero and refworks. these tools’ primary purpose is to help researchers organize citations, as well as to cite research quickly in a chosen style such as apa. mendeley takes these capabilities one step further by helping researchers discover research through its social networking platform, where users can browse through articles relevant to their interests or create/join a group where they can share research with other users.6 unique features: when registering for a mendeley account, a user must submit basic demographic information, including a primary research discipline. as researchers download papers into their mendeley library, this demographic information is tracked, so we can see overall interest for research articles in mendeley, along with a discipline-specific breakdown of readers, as shown in figure 3.7 figure 3. mendeley readership statistics from one of our articles. impactstory impactstory is an individual subscription service ($60/year as of writing) that creates a sort of ‘online cv’ supplement for researchers. it works by collecting and displaying altmetrics associated with the scholarly products entered by the researcher into their impactstory account. as alluded to before, one of the biggest innovations in the altmetrics realm in the past few years has been the creation of aggregator tools that collect altmetrics from a variety of sources and present metrics in a unified way. unique features: impactstory is an example of a product targeted specifically at authors, e.g. displaying altmetrics for items authored by just one person. it is of particular interest to many lis researchers because it can track products that aren’t necessarily journal articles. for example, it can track altmetrics associated with blogs, slideshare presentations, and youtube videos, all examples of ways in which many librarians like to communicate and share information relevant to librarianship. figure 4. the left-side navigation shows the different types of research products for one impactstory profile. plumx plumx is an altmetrics tool specifically designed for institutions. like impactstory, it collects scholarly products produced by an institution and then displays altmetrics for individuals, groups (like a lab or a department), and for the entire institution. unique features: since plumx’s parent company plum analytics is owned by ebsco, plumx is the only tool that incorporates article views and downloads from ebsco databases. plumx also includes a few sources that other tools don’t incorporate, such as goodreads ratings and worldcat library holdings (both metrics sources that work well for books). plumx products can be made publicly available, such as the one operated by the university of pittsburgh at http://plu.mx/pitt. altmetric altmetric is a company that offers a suite of products, all of which are built on the generation of altmetrics geared specifically at journal articles. their basic product, the altmetric bookmarklet, generates altmetrics data for journal articles with a doi8, with a visual ‘donut’ display that represents the different metrics found for the article (see figure 5). unique features: one product, altmetric explorer, is geared toward librarians and summarizes recent altmetrics activity for specific journals. this information can be used to gain more insight into a library’s journal holdings, which can be useful for making decisions about the library’s journal collection. figure 5. this altmetric donut shows altmetrics from several different online tools for one journal article. current issues & initiatives earlier, we mentioned that one of the primary characteristics of altmetrics is its lack of consistency over time. indeed, the field has already changed significantly since the word altmetrics first appeared in 2010. some major changes include: the abandonment of readermeter9, one of the earliest altmetrics tools; shifting funding models, including the acquisition of plumx by ebsco in january 2014 and the implementation of an impactstory subscription fee in july 2014; and the adoption of altmetrics into well-established scholarly tools and products such as scopus, nature journals, and most recently, thomson reuters10. one exciting initiative poised to bring additional clarity to the field is the niso (national information standards organization) altmetrics initiative. now in its final stage, the initiative has three working groups collaborating on a standard definition of altmetrics, use cases for altmetrics, and standards associated with the quality of altmetrics data and the way in which altmetrics are calculated. advocates of altmetrics (ourselves included) have expressed hope that the niso initiative will help bring more stability to this field, and answer confusion associated with the lack of altmetrics standardization. criticisms also make up a decent proportion of the conversation about altmetrics. one of the most well know is the possibility of ‘gaming’, or of users purposefully inflating altmetrics data. for example, a researcher could ‘spam’ twitter with links to their article, or could load the article’s url many times, which would both increase the metrics associated with their article. we’ve heard about such fears from users before, and they are definitely worth keeping in mind when evaluating altmetrics. however, it’s also fair to say that toolmakers are taking measures to counteract this worry—altmetric, for example, automatically eliminates tweets that appear auto-generated. still, more sophisticated methods for detecting and counteracting this kind of activity will eventually help build confidence and trust in altmetrics data. another criticism associated with altmetrics is one it shares with traditional citation-based metrics: the ability to accurately and fairly measure the scholarly impact of every discipline. as we’ve seen, many altmetrics tools still focus on journal articles as the primary scholarly output, but for some disciplines, articles are not the only way (or even the main way) in which researchers in that discipline are interacting. librarianship is a particularly good example of this disciplinary bias. since librarianship is a ‘discipline of practice’, so to speak, our day-to-day librarian responsibilities are often heavily influenced by online webinars, conference presentations, and even online exchanges via twitter, blogs, and other social media. some forms of online engagement can be captured with altmetrics, but many interactions are beyond the scope of what can be measured. for example, when the two of us present at conferences, we try our best to collect a few basic metrics: audience count; audience assessments; and twitter mentions associated with the presentation. we also upload presentation materials to the web when possible, to capture post-presentation metrics (e.g. presentation views on slideshare). in one case, we did a joint talk that was uploaded to youtube, which meant we could monitor video metrics over time. however, one of the most poignant impact indicators, evidence that a librarian has used the information presented in their own work, is still unlikely to be captured by any of these metrics. until researchers can say with some certainty that online engagement is an accurate reflection of disciplinary impact, these metrics will always be of limited use when trying to measure true impact. finally, there is a concern growing amongst academics regarding the motivations of those pushing the altmetrics movement forward—namely, a concern that the altmetrics toolmakers are the ‘loudest’ voice in the conversation, and are thus representing business concerns rather than the larger concerns of academia. this criticism is actually one that we think strongly speaks to the need for additional librarian involvement in altmetrics on behalf of academic stakeholders, to ensure that their needs are addressed. one good example of librarians representing academia is at the charleston conference, where vendors and librarians frequently present together and discuss future trends in the field. there are thus many uncertainties inherent to the current state of altmetrics. nevertheless, such concerns do not overshadow the real shift that altmetrics represents in the way that academia measures and evaluates scholarship. put in this perspective, it is little wonder that many researchers and librarians have found the question of how to improve and develop altmetrics over time to be ultimately worthwhile. role of lis graduates and librarians as mentioned at the beginning of this article, new academic librarians are in need of altmetrics for the same reasons as all early career faculty: to help track their influence and demonstrate the value of their diverse portfolios. however, the role of lis graduates relative to altmetrics is also a bit unique, in that many of us also shoulder a second responsibility, which may not be obvious at first to early career librarians. this responsibility goes back to the central role that librarians have played in the creation, development, and dissemination of research metrics since the earliest days of citation-based analysis. put simply: librarians are also in need of altmetrics in order to provide robust information and support to other researchers—researchers who, more often than not, lack lis graduates’ degree of training in knowledge organization, information systems, and scholarly communication. the idea that lis professionals can be on the front lines of support for impact measurement is nothing new to experienced academic librarians, particularly those in public services roles. according to a 2013 survey of 140 libraries at institutions across the uk, ireland, australia and new zealand, 78.6% of respondents indicated that they either offer or plan to offer, “bibliometric training” services to their constituents as part of their support for research11. dozens of librarian-authored guides on the subject of “research impact,” “bibliometrics,” and “altmetrics” can likewise be found through google searches. what’s more, academic libraries are increasingly stepping up as providers of alternative metrics. for example, many libraries collect and display usage statistics for objects in their institutional repositories. still, for early career librarians, the thought of jumping into the role of “metrics supporter” can be intimidating, especially if undertaken without a foundation of practical experience on the subject. this, again, is a reason that the investigation of altmetrics from a personal perspective is key for new lis graduates. not only does it help new librarians consider how different definitions of impact can shape their own careers, but it also prepares them down the line to become advocates for appropriate definitions of impact when applied to other vulnerable populations of researchers, academics, and colleagues. obstacles & opportunities admittedly, there are several obstacles for new librarians who are considering engaging with research metrics. one of the biggest obstacles is the lack of discourse in many lis programs concerning methods for measuring research impact. metrics are only one small piece of a much larger conversation concerning librarian status as academic institutions, and the impact that status has on scholarship expectations, so it’s not a shock that this is a subject that isn’t routinely covered by lis programs. regardless, it’s an area for which many librarians may feel underprepared. another barrier that can prevent new librarians from engaging with altmetrics is the hesitation to position oneself as an expert in the area when engaging with stakeholders, including researchers, vendors, and other librarians12. these kinds of mental barriers are nearly universal among professionals13 and are somewhere within the domains of nearly every institution14. at rachel’s institution, for example, the culture regarding impact metrics has been relatively conservative and dominated by impact factor, so she’s been cautious with introducing new impact-related ideas, serving more as a source of information for researchers who seek assistance rather than a constant activist for new metrics standards. luckily, for every barrier that new lis grads face in cultivating a professional relationship with altmetrics, there is almost always a balancing opportunity. for example, newly hired academic librarians almost inevitably find themselves in the position of being prized by colleagues for their “fresh perspective” on certain core issues, from technology to higher education culture15. during this unique phase of a job, newly-hired librarians may find it surprisingly comfortable—even easy!—to bring new ideas about research impact or support services to the attention of other librarians and local administrators. another advantage that some early career librarians have in pursuing and promoting altmetrics is position flexibility. librarians who are new to an institution tend to have the option to help shape their duties and roles over time. early career librarians are also generally expected by their libraries to devote a regular proportion of their time to the goal of professional development, an area for which the investigation of altmetrics fits nicely, both as a practical skill and a possible topic of institutional expertise. for those librarians who are relatively fresh out of a graduate program, relationships with former professors and classmates can also offer a powerful opportunity for collecting and sharing knowledge about altmetrics. lis cohorts have the advantage (outside of some job competition) of entering the field at more or less the same time, a fact that strengthens bonds between classmates, and can translate into a long term community of support and information sharing. lis teaching faculty may also be particularly interested in hearing from recent graduates about the skills and topics they value as they move through the first couple years of a job. communicating back to these populations is a great way to affect change across existing networks, as well as to prepare for the building of new networks around broad lis issues like impact. making plans to move forward finding the time to learn more about altmetrics can seem daunting as a new librarian, particularly how it relates to other “big picture” lis topics like scholarly communication, open access, bibliometrics, and data management. however, this cost acknowledged, altmetrics is a field that quickly rewards those who are willing to get practical with it. consequently, we recommend setting aside some time in your schedule to concentrate on three core steps for increasing your awareness and understanding of altmetrics. #1. pick a few key tools and start using them. a practical approach to altmetrics means, on a basic level, practicing with the tools. even librarians who have no desire to become power users of twitter can learn a lot about the tool by signing up for a free account and browsing different feeds and hashtags. likewise, librarians curious about what it’s like to accumulate web-based metrics can experiment with uploading one of their powerpoint presentations to slideshare, or a paper to an institutional repository. once you have started to accumulate an online professional identity through these methods, you can begin to track interactions by signing up for a trial of an altmetrics aggregation tool like impactstory, or a reader-oriented network like mendeley. watching how your different contributions do (or do not!) generate altmetrics over time will tell you a lot about the pros and cons of using altmetrics—and possibly about your own investment in specific activities. other recommended tools to start: see table one for more ideas. #2. look out for altmetrics at conferences and events. low stakes, opportunistic professional development is another excellent strategy for getting comfortable with altmetrics as an early career librarian. for example, whenever you find yourself at a conference sponsored by ala, acrl, sla, or another broad lis organization, take a few minutes to browse the schedule for any events that mention altmetrics or research impact. more and more, library and higher education conferences are offering attendees sessions related to altmetrics, whether theoretical or practical in nature. free webinars that touch on altmetrics are also frequently offered by technology-invested library sub-groups like lita. use the #altmetrics hashtag on twitter to help uncover some of these opportunities, or sign up for a email listserv and let them them come to you. #3. commit to reading a shortlist of altmetrics literature. not surprisingly, reading about altmetrics is one of the most effective things librarians can do to become better acquainted with the field. however, whether you choose to dive into altmetrics literature right away, or wait to do so until after you have experienced some fundamental tools or professional development events, the important thing to do is to give yourself time to read not one or two, but several reputable articles, posts, or chapters about altmetrics. the reason for doing this goes back to the set of key issues at stake in the future of altmetrics. exposure to multiple written works, ideally authored by different types of experts, will give librarians new to altmetrics a clearer, less biased sense of the worries and ambitions of various stakeholders. for example, we’ve found the society for scholarly publishing’s blog scholarly kitchen to be a great source of non-librarian higher education perspectives on impact measurement and altmetrics. posts on tool maker blogs, like those maintained by altmetric and impactstory, have likewise proved to be informative, as they tend to respond quickly to major controversies or innovations in the field. last but not least, scholarly articles on altmetrics are now widely available now—and can be easily discovered via online bibliographies or good old fashioned search engine sleuthing. as you can imagine, beginning to move forward with altmetrics can take as little as a few minutes—but becoming well-versed in the subject can take the better part of an academic year. in the end, the decision of how and when to proceed will probably shift with your local circumstances. however, making altmetrics part of your lis career path is an idea we hope you’ll consider, ideally sooner rather than later. conclusion over the last five years, altmetrics has emerged in both libraries and higher education as a means of tracing attention and impact; one that reflects the ways that many people, both inside and outside of academia, seek and make decisions about information every day. for this reason, this article has argued that librarians should consider the potential value of altmetrics to their careers as soon as possible (e.g. in their early careers), using a variety of web-based indicators and services to help inform them of their growing influence as lis professionals and scholars. indeed, altmetrics as a field is in a state of development not unlike that of an early career librarian. it’s future, for instance, is also marked by some questions and uncertainties—definitions that have yet to emerge, disciplines with which it has yet to engage, etc. and yet, despite these hurdles, both altmetrics and new academic librarians share the power over time to change the landscape of higher education in ways that have yet to be fully appreciated. it is this power and value that the reader should remember when it comes to altmetrics and their use. and so, new graduates, please meet altmetrics. we think the two of you are going to get along just fine. thanks to the in the library with the lead pipe team for their guidance and support in producing this article. specific thanks to our publishing editor, erin dorney, our internal peer reviewer, annie pho, and to our external reviewer, jennifer elder. you each provided thoughtful feedback and we couldn’t have done it without you. recommended resources altmetrics.org. http://altmetrics.org/ altmetrics conference. http://www.altmetricsconference.com/ altmetrics workshop. http://altmetrics.org/altmetrics15/ chin roemer, robin & borchardt, rachel. meaningful metrics: a 21st century librarian’s guide to bibliometrics, altmetrics, & research impact. acrl press, 2015. mendeley altmetrics group. https://www.mendeley.com/groups/586171/altmetrics/ niso altmetrics initiative. http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/   the scholarly kitchen. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/tag/altmetrics/ wustl becker medical library, “assessing the impact of research.” https://becker.wustl.edu/impact-assessment there are in fact many extant definitions of altmetrics (formerly alt-metrics). however, this definition is taken from one of the earliest sources on the topic, altmetrics.org.  [↩] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v500/n7463/full/nj7463-491a.html [↩] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002003 [↩] this ranking is according to the 2014 edition of journal citation reports, as filtered for the category “information science & library science.” there is no way to disambiguate this category into further specialty areas. [↩] while the first reference to “altmetrics” arose out of a 2010 tweet by jason priem, the idea behind the value of altmetrics was clearly present in the years leading up to the coining of the term. [↩] one such group in mendeley is the altmetrics group, with close to 1000 members as of july 2015. [↩] another feature that may be of interest to librarians undertaking a lit review – mendeley can often automatically extract metadata from an article pdf, and can even ‘watch’ a computer folder and automatically add any new pdfs from that folder into the mendeley library, making research organization relatively painless. [↩] the bookmarklet can be downloaded and installed here: http://www.altmetric.com/bookmarklet.php [↩] http://readermeter.org/ “it’s been a while… but we’re working to bring back readermeter” has been displayed for several years. [↩] thomson reuters is currently beta-testing inclusion of “item level usage counts” into web of science, similar to ebsco’s tracking of article views and downloads. more information on this feature can currently be found in the form of webinars and other events. [↩] sheila corrall. and mary anne kennan. and waseem afzal. “bibliometrics and research data management services: emerging trends in library support for research.” library trends 61.3 (2013): 636-674. project muse. web. 14 jul. 2015. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/v061/61.3.corrall02.html.  [↩] the authors can attest that, even after publishing a book on the topic, this is an obstacle that may never truly be overcome! [↩] one recent study found that 1 in 8 librarians had higher than average levels of imposter syndrome, a rate which increases amongst newer librarians.  [↩] an overview of one stakeholders’ perceptions of libraries and librarians, namely that of faculty members, is explored in the ithaka faculty survey. [↩] the value of new graduates’ “fresh perspective” well known anecdotally, but also well-evidenced by the proliferation of resident librarian positions at academic libraries across the country. [↩] academic libraries, altmetrics, professional development, publishing, research why diversity matters: a roundtable discussion on racial and ethnic diversity in librarianship archives alive!: librarian-faculty collaboration and an alternative to the five-page paper 3 responses pingback : new grads, meet new metrics: why early career librarians should care about altmetrics & research impact | bluesyemre pingback : latest library links, 28th august 2015 | latest library links pingback : “settling for a job” and “upward mobility”: today’s career paths for librarians | lita blog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct teaching with care: a relational approach to individual research consultations – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 5 feb symphony bruce /1 comments teaching with care: a relational approach to individual research consultations in brief although single-session instruction makes it difficult for librarians to build deep relationships with the students they teach, individual research consultations offer great opportunities for these connections to occur. transformational learning and teaching begins with positive, reciprocal student-teacher relationships. unfortunately, these interactions are often tainted by the hierarchical power structures that keep students from feeling empowered by their research, such as deficit-model thinking and sociocultural-interpersonal differences. this article will apply a conceptual framework of care ethics and relational-cultural theory to research consultations in an effort to proactively mitigate the oppressive structures of the traditional student-teacher relationship. furthermore, this piece will confront the erasure of people of color in these theories and reflect on ways in which care and relation might necessitate different practices for students of color than their white counterparts using critical race theory. in implementing these theories, librarians create a learning environment where students feel cared for and seen. in turn, librarians will actually get to know their students and be seen as authentic, autonomous educators who are working to diminish the pervasive disconnection felt on college campuses. by symphony bruce introduction a sense of belonging and the feeling of genuine connection with one’s peers, faculty, and campus life is a known predictor of success in college (strayhorn, 2012). students who feel a sense of connection with their college experience are more likely to see academic success, graduate on time, and view their time favorably. the feeling of a lack of belonging compels students to withdraw from classes, perform poorly, and delay finishing their degrees (o’keefe, 2013). as university and college students all over the nation commit to being tens of thousands of dollars in debt, it becomes a social justice issue that not only do they finish, but that they receive the best education possible. if students are to receive the education they deserve, institutions must do better to create environments where students are valued and find a sense of belonging. all schools and departments on campus are responsible for this work, including the library. students should feel welcomed and comfortable. they should never feel as though their presence or needs are a burden. students should be able to ask questions and request assistance and still be recognized for the knowledge they possess. in this way, librarians can and should play a vital role in creating a sense of belonging for our students. individual research consultations and reference desk interactions are often the most intimate of teaching opportunities for librarians. these moments can be harnessed to cultivate connection and relationship. because of the one-on-one nature of such interactions and the vulnerability required, librarians can either provide care or perpetuate the practices that lead to the disconnection a student may experience. in this paper, individual research consultations will be viewed through the theoretical lenses of care ethics, relational-cultural theory, and critical race theory. the use of these lenses will allow for a conceptual framework for providing care during one-on-one teaching moments that help foster a sense of belonging and connection. why individual research consultations academic librarians are unique educators in that they often work outside of the power structures of the traditional student-teacher relationship. while some teach credit-bearing courses, many are still teaching in single-session classes, at the reference desk, and in individual research consultations. instead of evaluating student work and assigning grades, librarians create lessons that facilitate the learning of information-seeking skills and information literacy thought processes. individual research consultations provide the most intimate situation for teaching in the library. usually conducted away from the reference desk and often in a librarian’s personal office or cubicle, these consultations require one-on-one time between librarian and student. individual consultations are an instructional method and provide a different and effective way of teaching outside of the full classroom setting. because these consultations are often referred to as research assistance, the pedagogical practices required get overlooked and allow us to forget that one-on-one teaching is still teaching. while individual research consultations are a common teaching method for academic librarians, little is written about how to conduct them. unlike classroom teaching and reference desk interactions which come with a robust body of literature, less has been written about what should happen during a one-on-one meeting. prior to the late nineties, individual research consultations were described as “term paper clinics” which were used to review a student’s selected resources and determine if they were enough to fulfill the research need, which is different than the act of instruction (gale & evans, 2008, p.87). in 2003, hua li found that several institutions provided individual research consultation services and noted the wide benefits of providing such a service, such as time for the librarian to prepare in advance, uninterrupted instructional time, personalized instruction to meet the information need, and the possibility for relationship building. now, the literature on individual research consultations focuses on the connection to information literacy skills, student achievement, and the changing nature of instructional methods in the digital age (gale & evans, 2008; magi & mardouz, 2013). increasingly, the literature is beginning to reflect the ways in which these reference consultations can be a conduit for relational care, community-building, and social justice work (forbes & bowers, 2018; arellano-douglas, 2018). because there is a constant push to create instructional materials that digitally cater to large audiences and preemptively assess patron needs, like the libguide, it might seem that individual consultations are opposite the current library teaching trends (nicholson, pagowsky, & seale 2019). the reality is that students feel the benefit of meeting with a librarian one-on-one, whether in person or via video conference. for example, magi and mardeusz (2013) found that before coming to their appointments, students felt frustration and afterwards, felt excited and prepared to continue their research. in the same study, students expressed “affective benefits including comfort, confidence building, inspiration, and building relationships” (magi & mardeusz, 2013, p. 612). one-on-one instruction clearly has the power to have a beneficial impact on student emotions, in addition to other benefits such as quick, clear dialogue and tapping into a librarian’s expertise. the potential for relationship-building in the individual research consultation cannot be overstated. in what other situation does a librarian receive lengthy one-on-one time with students (especially when not acting as their employer in work-study situations)? these appointments require that librarians not only evaluate the academic need, but often attend to the emotions of the student as well. the vulnerability required by students to admit to needing help, scheduling an appointment, and sharing with the librarian what it is they do not understand, is such that when done with care, powerful connection can be made. care ethics and teaching if a librarian prepares for a research consultation with only the academic need in mind, they miss an opportunity to create connection, as the research topic becomes centered instead of the student-librarian relationship (arellano-douglas, 2018). furthermore, when working to minimize the power structures of traditional teaching methods in individual research consultations, the librarian must be cognizant of the ways they relate to the student. these one-on-one sessions are not just about the exchange of information. instead, they are a moment which adds to a student’s sense of belonging and care with regards to their academic and personal selves. exploring feminist pedagoges can help frame the way librarians relate to students. maria t. accardi, in feminist pedagogy for library instruction (2013) cites an ethic of care as a important concern to the relationship between students and librarians. when librarians apply tenets from care ethics, they can better meet students’ needs. care ethics, or the ethics of care, is a feminist theory valuing relation in moral development. now applied to a variety of disciplines, care ethics outlines the importance and virtue of connection and reciprocity between the carer and the cared-for. nel noddings (2012) outlined that in educational settings, the teacher is usually the carer and the student, the cared-for. because the teacher-student relationship is naturally unequal, reciprocity is more difficult between the two, but not impossible. the teacher still learns and gains from the relationship with the student. unlike an interaction which expects students to follow the teacher’s lead, teaching as a practice of care requires that the teacher respond to a student’s expressed need. this switch from a very traditional teaching dynamic gives students’ needs power and weight within the relationship, thus working to shrink the hierarchical space between them. according to noddings (2012, p.772), a care-based interaction has three steps, which can be easily applied to the flow of a standard individual research consultation: 1. attending to the cared-for attending to the student requires attention to the student whether virtually or in-person. this may require time for preparation to the needs of that student before they arrive and uninterrupted attention to the student when they are present. during this time, the librarian should be mindful about what the student has expressed as their need, versus what the librarian wants them to know or thinks their knowledge gaps might be. the librarian must resist a deficit model of instruction which suggests that struggling students are to be fixed by their educators and instead, recognize the student’s knowledge (valencia, 1997; heinbach, fielder, mitola, & pattni, 2019). the librarian may need to continually ask for clarification to ensure they are not misinterpreting the needs of the student. mostly, this is a time of listening, which is a core action in nodding’s version of care. 2. developing a solution to the expressed need once the student’s expressed need has been identified and clarified, the librarian can offer solutions. these may be concrete solutions like the knowledge of how to use specific resources and search strategies, or more theoretical assistance like talking through potential topics, workshopping research questions, or working with the student to develop key terms. throughout this process, the librarian, as carer, is mindful of their ego and keeps the student’s needs at the forefront of their work together. 3. receiving reciprocated care finally, a caring interaction requires reciprocated care. noddings suggests that the cared-for must simply demonstrate “somehow that the caring has been received” (2012, p. 772) which does not necessarily mean gratitude. the student could show they have received this care through pursuing the agreed-upon solution, showing renewed interest, or any other form of response (noddings, 2012, p.772). because academic librarians may not have the same power dynamic as the traditional classroom teacher, we can take the idea of reciprocity further to make space for mutual teaching. when the librarian learns from the student, which they certainly should over the course of an hour, they have received care as well. it is important to note that noddings and her contemporaries have recieved criticism for their application of care ethics within the feminist framework. noddings’ work is primarily concerned with how to morally develop others. these steps for a caring relation were designed with the goal of teaching another person, in this case a student, to be a caring person themselves. but, the basis for this moral education is the perspective of the western white woman, which is a source of contention among care theorists who wish to approach care from an angle of intersectionality (hankivsky, 2014). furthermore, critics believe that noddings’ ideas are rooted in a false notion that care is innate to women, thus perpetuating a heteronormative narrative that leaves a woman “caught in the role of a subservient person” (hassan, 2008, 161; houston, 1990), ignores the other virtuous skills of women, and erases other gender identities (tronto, 1987; hines, 2007). these critiques are valid and useful in building a nuanced discussion of what care looks like in reference consultation work, while also acknowledging that despite these critiques, noddings work serves as a starting point when exploring care and teaching (accardi, 2013). care ethics have been well discussed in the library literature regarding reference and teaching. hoppe and jung (2017) note how working with students through the lens of care breaks down the view of the librarian as an unapproachable authoritarian figure and that sharing knowledge is a way of leveling power dynamics. ladenson (2017) makes the argument that an ethic of care creates space for students to engage in deep critical thinking. when exploring the gendered, one-way, mothering language of the reference and user services association (rusa) standards for reference interactions, emmelhainz, pappas, and seale (2017) remind us that “ethics of care emphasize that both the librarian and patron contribute to the success of the reference interaction… thus, the participants and their particular circumstances come to bear on each instance of the interaction, and are wholly interdependent” (p. 41). individual research consultations, as an extension of one-on-one reference desk teaching, cannot ignore the specialized knowledge of the librarian and the autonomy of their teaching practice. this idea that both librarian and student contribute to the relationship in the reference consultation matches the idea of mature care, an idea named by carol gilligan and developed by tove pettersen (pettersen & hem, 2011), who sees care idealized not as a one-way street but as a reciprocal, shared experience. pettersen recognizes that some relationships are inherently unequal. instead, mature care provides space for the cared-for to recognize the needs of the carer and respect those needs. in this space, reciprocity can occur and relationships can form. relational cultural theory and librarianship relational-cultural theory (rct) is a psychological model asserting that people grow through and towards connection with others. founded out of the feminist work of the women at the stone center at wellesley college, rct “strongly emphasizes the importance of the larger social context in shaping experience; thus, cultural forces of marginalization and disconnection are seen as having an enormous impact on people’s well-being and functioning” (jordan, 2011, p. 357-358). relational-cultural theory recognizes that disconnection can be caused by oppressive social structures “like racism, sexism, hetero-patriarchy, ableism, classism and their intersections” (arellano-douglas et al, 2019). in many ways, rct responds to the gaps in care ethics, acknowledging the reality that the ways in which we respond to and provide care are contingent upon our own life experiences and the social constructs that shape those experiences. mutuality and reciprocate care are important in rct, allowing the carer to be affected by the cared-for. when the cared-for discerns that their needs or pain is seen and felt by the carer, that person begins to realize that they matter (jordan, 2011). this sort of reciprocity resembles empathy in that it requires each person to be affected by the other. a relational-cultural construct of empathy moves further to suggest the transcendence of the disconnected self due to a flexible self boundary that allows one to identify with the other (jordan, 1991a). it is in this space that we feel connectedness. furthermore, rct recognizes that the carer can do harm to the cared-for and provides guidance on how to respond when this happens. when a carer fails to understand or respond to the needs of the cared-for, that pain should be acknowledged while remaining present and fully engaged. when a carer does this, the cared-for “experiences a significant sense of mattering and gains a feeling of relational competence” (jordan, 2011, p. 359). this level of reciprocity is what makes mutuality different from the empathy of library literature, moving beyond what is performative to real deep connection (arellano-douglas, 2018). librarians have long created disconnection with students and patrons while using librarian-centered language and instruction, arbitrary policies, and collections that do not reflect the users. librarians considering mutuality and rct in their reference consultations can begin to undo the disconnection experienced by students in their libraries. integrating rct in this way may work to create opportunities for social inclusion, the way empathy is discussed in the literature for public libraries (birdi, wilson, & cocker 2008). probably the largest distinction between care ethics and relational-cultural theory is the idea of intersubjective mutuality which calls for “an interest in, attunement to, and responsiveness to the subjective, inner experience of the other at both a cognitive and affective level…a process during which one’s self-boundaries undergo momentary alteration, which in itself allows for the possibility of change in the self” (jordan, 1991b, p. 82). intersubjective mutuality in relationships requires that each individual take a deep and real interest in the other while being vulnerable and open to personal change. veronica i. arellano-douglas (2018) argues that intersubjective mutuality allows for a relationship between librarian and student where both can be their full authentic selves. this allows for a radical change in the discussion of individual research consultations because the librarian does not have to act as if they are an “all-knowing researcher” (arellano-douglas, 2018, p. 235), making it easier for the student to express their needs openly and without fear of judgement. in her example of what intersubjective mutuality looks like in practice, arellano-douglas tells a story of a student who comes to her for research assistance close to the deadline of her paper. after taking a few moments to get to know the student, arellano-douglas learns that the student is carrying some shame for working at the last minute and instead of chiding her, arellano-douglas shares stories of how she did the same in school. this authenticity and vulnerability creates empathy between the two and makes space for the healing of shame to occur, before attention to the expressed need is provided. the authenticity allowed by a relational-cultural approach when applied to reference work has the power to build deep, healing relationships with students. critical race theory and anti-oppressive teaching while librarians should strive to be authentically caring and relational in their interactions with students, the interaction can do more harm than good if students have marginalizing and racist experiences. because of the overt power structures students navigate throughout their academic experience, students of color may be guarded or even less likely to seek assistance from librarians. for example, elteto, jackson, and lim (2008) found that while students of color are likely to spend a lot of time in the library, they are less likely to ask for help. before a caring relation is made, students come in with all sorts of anxieties about what they should and do not know or how they will be treated by a presumed authority figure. their interactions with librarians can either break down or reinforce these past experiences. learning to be empathetic, open, and vulnerable in one’s teaching practice can be a difficult shift if one is unused to it. when working with those different from us, learning to create safe, open space requires extra care. bell hooks notes that it is easy to create community and connection with little diversity in the room; it is much harder with a truly diverse group (1994, p. 41). the application of both care ethics and relational-cultural theory will not alone create space for belonging for students of color. quinn and grumbach (2015) believe that in order to reflect the needs of black women, for example, relational-cultural theory must be paired with concepts from critical race theory (crt). critical race theory “challenges three liberalist beliefs: (a) color blindness will eliminate racism, (b) racism is a matter of individuals, not systems, and (c) one can fight racism without paying attention to sexism, homophobia, economic exploitation, and other forms of oppression and injustice” (valdes, culp, & harris, 2002 as paraphrased by quinn & grumbach, 2015). well-meaning librarians will all too often believe they are relating well to students who are different from them because they hold the exact beliefs that critical race theory attempts to challenge. reference and instruction librarians may claim to not see race and therefore, erase the experiences and knowledge of students of color. they may believe that they themselves are not racist or that their institution does not perpetuate racist ideals. librarians may not understand the intersectional experiences of their students of color in relation to their identities. when students are in one-on-one research consultations, where they may dare to be open and vulnerable, they are keenly aware of the ways the librarian may be upholding systems of oppression. the process of creating an antiracist, caring, relational librarianship practice begins with understanding systemic racism, recognizing one’s own prejudices, and incorporating anti-oppressive teaching methods. a librarian working towards confronting their own oppressive practices in research consultations might begin to make a number of changes that level the power dynamic in the room. for example, the librarian would need to constantly work to develop their cultural competence, learning to understand the cultures of the students they are likely to work with. although culture and diversity have become regular conversations amongst library professionals, patricia montiel overall (2009), created a framework for developing cultural competence over ten years ago which can still be applied today. she describes that developing cultural competence is a dialectical process in which individuals examine their own mental representation of the world along with the mental representations of others. adjustments in preconceptions about others’ culture results in a readjustment of the place of culture in society. cultural competence is the ability to make the adjustment and to participate in making culture an important part of the ethos of an organization (2009, p.190). according to overall, this dialectical process happens in both a person’s inner, cognitive domain and a person’s outer, interpersonal domain, which eventually impact one’s environment. for instance, when a librarian is exploring their cognitive domain, they are developing cultural self-awareness by understanding the unexamined parts of their own culture and then building cultural knowledge to understand the cultures of others. as this process continues in the interpersonal domain, the librarian would begin to build appreciation for the others’ cultures, develop an ethic of caring, pursue personal and cultural interaction, while reflecting on their values (overall, 2009). hooks incorporates the idea of mutuality when she notes that “often, professors and students have to learn to accept different ways of knowing, new epistemologies, in the cultural setting” (1994, p. 41). thus, the librarian may need to evaluate the resources they share to determine if the perspectives represented only match their own cultural perspective. in the research consultation or at the reference desk, this practice might include knowing about non-academic sources of information or having a better understanding of how some cultures collect and share knowledge – and knowing that any of these methods are valid. it certainly requires that the librarian provide space for students to show their expertise and trust their research thus far. additionally, the librarian might consider the organization of their office and the way it might perpetuate messages of authority and hierarchy. for example, what literal, physical characteristics of the room serve as a barrier to connection-making? when jennifer arévalo ferretti, digital initiatives librarian at the maryland institute college of art (mica) rearranged her office, she explained that “the principal’s desk is no longer here furthering power inequities in the workplace/libraries. now i can have meetings with students, in particular, that removes me from a position of all knowing” (2018). the desk in many offices, like ferretti’s “principal’s desk” physically cuts off the space between the librarian and student. in a different arrangement, the librarian and student could sit side-by-side and actually work together. in the research consultation or at the research desk, sitting next to another person suggests a physical equality and allows for the equal exchange and flow of information between the two. it is not new to the study of libraries that the organization of space can relate to feelings of welcomeness. however, stewart, ju, and kendrick (2019) found that for black students, their experiences in the library as place made a statistically significant difference on whether or not they felt welcome. librarians should remember that their spaces can send messages and may impact the level of connectedness a student feels. most importantly, the librarian must learn to recognize their own oppressive and racist behaviors. students of color experience racial and cultural insensitivity, microaggressions, and full-fledged racism from perceived authoritative figures on college campuses (suarez-balcazar et al, 2003) and librarians are not immune to committing such offenses. suarez-balcazar et al found that students of color reported experiencing “denial of services, being ignored in class participation by the instructor, and being ignored by peers in a group situation. in addition, there were situations of students being denied access to a setting, enduring stereotypic remarks by others, being stereotyped in class and rejected by others in social gatherings” (2003, p. 432). while some of these situations occur between students or in the classroom, there are obvious offenses which could be committed by the librarian in the individual research consultation. interestingly, when surveying black students to gauge how welcome they feel in academic libraries stewart, ju, and kendrick (2019) found that interactions with library personnel did not make much of an impact on how welcome they felt. the authors inferred that this was due to the fact that black students are less likely to interact with library staff even though they tend to spend plenty of time in the library. however, jaena alabi (2015a, 2015b) found that librarians of color experience racist microagressions from their fellow librarians and administrators regularly. if librarians are harming their colleagues of color, it is not a stretch to believe they are doing so to students as well. furthermore, brook, ellenwood, and lazzaro (2015), noted that patrons of color may experience lesser quality of reference in both in-person and virtual interactions based upon the works of curry & copeman (2005), shachaf, oltmann, & horowitz (2008), and shachaf & horowitz (2006). the librarian must reflect on how they relate to students and in what ways they may be giving students of color differential treatment. but because critical race theory focuses on systems of racism, it is not enough for individuals to work on themselves. librarians must work to name and dismantle these systems of oppression within their libraries and larger institutions in a way that is transparent and visible for students to see. we must work to actively change the policies and practices of our libraries. we can attend student rallies, acknowledge and act upon their experiences, and propose and agree to changes. brook, ellenwood, and lazzaro (2015), when speaking from the perspective of three white librarians looking to develop an antiractist practice, note that “building upon an active notion of caring for patrons and critical pedagogy, antiracist reference services would ask librarians to be politically “bound up” with users’ struggles against racism through their assistance with research” (p. 274). these actions will be felt and sensed inside the walls of our offices as we interact one-on-one in individual research consultations. because racism and oppression cause disconnection between people (walker, 2004), they are a constant barrier to a sense of belonging for our students. i would argue that it is impossible to provide true relational care without actively addressing one’s implicit bias and prejudices. if students of color are to feel safe, valued, and as if they belong, they cannot endure harm within our libraries and from our librarians. emotional labor and the librarian as whole person like the valid critiques of noddings’ work which problematize a version of care where the cared-for is seemingly most important in the relation, a version of librarianship that centers the student at all costs will certainly be harmful to the librarian. the interaction between student and librarian must work toward equilibrium, where both parties are responsible for the success of the learning environment, in the ideal way that reciprocity and intersubjective mutuality provide. but when the librarian is fully giving, without receiving in return, they may be vulnerable to acts of verbal and emotional harm. an example of this sort of situation might involve a student who pictures the librarian as their personal research assistant or when the student is condescending or verbally abusive. librarians of color may find themselves microaggressed by students who do not believe they have the skills or expertise to assist them (hathcock & sendaula, 2017). while these situations are always unacceptable, the librarian may feel the need to continue to engage with the student in order to fulfill their duty as an educator and resist reacting in the moment. as emmelhainz, pappas, and seale (2017) acknowledge, the gendered expectation of librarians, as a profession that is largely female, require that women be “approachable, receptive, polite, supportive, encouraging, and attuned to patrons as well as social norms all [while requiring] the librarian to suppress her own emotions, needs, and evaluations of her environment, managing competing priorities with no evident strain or stress” (p. 37). it is unrealistic to expect the librarian to exhibit all of these behaviors at once, especially in harmful situations. women of color in librarianship may also experience additional labor when providing instruction services (bright, 2018). in her study on the emotional and invisible labor of reference and information services librarians, kawana bright found that women of color were often sought out by students who shared similar backgrounds. participants shared that students would spend days waiting for their preferred librarian to be on the reference desk instead of receiving assistance from the person working (bright, 2018). where a department might believe their instruction load is shared evenly amongst its members, women of color may see more students at the desk and have more students requesting additional appointments just to work with them. this creates a literal glut of work for librarians of color. when coupled with the sheer number of students coming to them because of their affective qualities, the librarians doing the teaching, caring, and relating must be supported by their colleagues. this workload can only be leveled if more are also culturally and relationally competent. conclusion individual research consultations are one of the most relationally rich opportunities for librarians to build meaningful connections with students. a librarian can create a learning environment that fosters a student’s sense of belonging during research consultations. incorporating an ethic of care reminds us that we can and should receive reciprocate care while paying close attention to the student’s expressed need. relational-cultural theory, when applied to individual consultations, gives us permission to be our authentic selves as librarians and to invest in a student’s life and circumstances. however, the integration of care ethics and rct into a librarian’s teaching practice will only further perpetuate disconnection if racism and oppression are allowed in our behaviors, policies, and institutions. exploring one’s teaching through a critical race perspective will begin to change the systemic disconnection our students of color experience. connections can also be made in the classroom, at the reference desk, and in other campus places where students, faculty, and staff all get together. research consultations, as a one-at-a-time style of making connections is admittedly slow and will not change the culture of the library all at once. our institutions still need to be responsive to students’ needs; individuals alone cannot fix the lack of belonging that students may feel. additionally, large amounts of student appointments may not be feasible for all instruction and reference librarians. as our duties continue to grow and resources continue to shrink, giving time to a single person for an extended period of time may seem impossible. but, we must remember that the relationships made with caring individuals can help mitigate the harm caused by these oppressive systems while we work to change the cultures of our libraries and institutions at large. acknowledgements i feel so grateful to have had veronica arellano-douglas as my external reviewer, kellee warren as my internal reviewer, and ian beilin as my publishing editor. thank you all so much for your thoroughness, thoughtfulness, patience, and care. much gratitude to my colleagues nikhat ghouse and hannah park, who let me talk through the ideas for this paper from the beginning and provided feedback on the proposal. finally, i am forever grateful to the high school students i taught who showed me the power of relationship building and for every college student who schedules a research consultation with me. i truly value our time. take care. references accardi, m. t. 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(2015). “critical race theory and the limits of relational theory in social work with women.” journal of ethnic and cultural diversity in social work, 24 (3), 202-218. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/15313204.2015.1062673 shachaf, p., & horowitz, s. (2006). “are virtual reference services color blind?” library and information science research, 28(4), 501–520. shachaf, p., oltmann, s., & horowitz, s. (2008). “service equality in virtual reference.” journal of the american society for information science and technology, 59(4), 535–550. strayhorn, t. l. (2012). college students’ sense of belonging: a key to educational success for all students. new york city, ny: routledge. suarez-balcazar, y., orellana-damacela, l., portillo, n., rowan, j.m., & andrews-guillen, c. (2003). “experiences of differential treatment among college students of color.” the journal of higher education, 74(4), 428-444, https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2003.11780855 tronto, j. c. (1987). “beyond gender difference to a theory of care.” signs: journal of women in culture and society, 12(4), 644–663. retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174207 valdes, f., culp, j.m., & harris, a.p. (2002). “battles waged, won, and lost: critical race theory at the turn of the millennium.” in f. valdes, j.m. culp, & a.p. harris (eds.), crossroads, directions, and a new critical race theory. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. valencia, r. r. (1997). the evolution of deficit thinking: educational thought and practice. bristol, pa: taylor & francis. walker, m. (2004). “race, self, and society: relational challenges in a culture of disconnection.” in j.v. jordan, m. walker, & l.m. harding (eds.), the complexity of connection: writings from the stone center’s jean baker miller training institute (pp. 90-102). new york city, ny: the guilford press. yi, h. (2003). “individual research consultation service: an important part of an information literacy program.” reference services review, 31(4), 342-350. retrieved from: doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320310505636 information privilege and first-year students: a case study from a first-year seminar course using access to information as a lens for exploring privilege open to what? a critical evaluation of oer efficacy studies 1 response naomi 2020–02–06 at 1:44 pm thank you for this article. this is something i have been thinking about for libraries. https://collegefund.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/creating-visibility-and-healthy-learning-environments-for-natives-in-higher-education_web.pdf this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct using animated gif images for library instruction – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 22 oct karl suhr /5 comments using animated gif images for library instruction   in brief this article discusses the changing nature of animated graphics interchange format images (gifs) as a form of visual communication on the web, and how that can be adapted for the purposes of information literacy and library instruction. gifs can be displayed simultaneously as a sequence of comic book like panels, allowing for a ‘birds eye view’ of all the steps of a process, viewing and reviewing steps as needed without having to rewind or replay an entire video. i discuss tools and practical considerations as well as limitations and constraints. by karl suhr introduction and background animated gifs are “a series of gif files saved as one large file. animated gifs…provide short animations that typically repeat as long as the gif is being displayed.” (high definition) animated gifs were at one point one of the few options available for adding video-like elements to a web page. as web design aesthetics matured and digital video recording, editing, playback and bandwidth became more affordable and feasible, the animated gif joined the blink tag and comic sans font as the gold, silver, and bronze medals for making a site look like it was ready to party like it’s 1999. even so, services like myspace and fresh waves of web neophytes establishing a personal online space allowed the animated gif to soldier on. typically used purely for decoration without any particular function, and sometimes funny at first, then less so each subsequent viewing (like bumper stickers) animated gifs ranged from benign to prodigiously distracting, best exemplified by that rococo entity: the sparkly unicorn:1                      to be fair, some sites used animated gifs with specific purposes, such as an early version of an american sign language site that used animated gifs to demonstrate signing of individual words.2 as the web continued to evolve and function began to catch up with form, the animated gif began to fade from the scene, especially with the advent of comparably fast-loading and high-resolution streaming video formats such as quicktime and realvideo. flash, in conjunction with the rise of youtube, established a de facto standard for video on the web for a time. in turn, with the ongoing adoption of html5 standards and the meteoric rise of mobile devices and their particular needs with regards to video formats, the web content landscape continues to develop and change. i had personally written off the animated gif as a footnote in early web history, until the last few years when i noticed them cropping up again with regularity. my initial reaction was ‘great, i’m officially old enough to see the first wave of web retro nostalgia’, but i began to notice some differences: instead of being images that simply waved their arms for attention, this new generation of animated gifs often sketched out some sort of narrative: telling a joke, or riffing on a meme, such as the following: this example combines an existing visual meme as a ‘punchline’ to clips from scenes in two different movies (everything is illuminated and lord of the rings) that pivots on two points of commonality: elijah wood and potatoes. i should note that when i first created this gif, it was in ‘stacked’ format, or one continuous gif to give the ‘punchline’ more impact, but i separated them here in keeping with the spirit of the article’s topic. in general, further thoughts and observations on the curious persistence and evolution of gifs as a popular culture entity is discussed in this 2013 wired article: the animated gif: still looping after all these years. concepts and rationale at some point, an idea coalesced that a similar approach could be applied to instructional videos, specifically those supporting information literacy. jokes and memes are, after all, stories of sorts, and information literacy instruction is too. one initial attraction to exploring the use of animated gifs was as an alternative to video. given a choice between a video, even a short one, and some other media such as a series of captioned images or simple text, in most cases i will opt for the latter, especially if the subject matter demonstrates or explains how to do something. some of this is merely personal preference, but i suspected others had the same inclination. in fact, a study by mestre that compared the effectiveness of video vs. static images used for library tutorials indicated that participants had a disinclination to take the time to view instruction in video form. one participant comment in particular was interesting: “i think that a video tutorial really is only needed if you want to teach the complex things, but if it’s to illustrate simple information you don’t need to do it. in this case, a regular web page with added images and multimedia is all you need” (266). furthermore, only five of twenty one participants indicated a preference for video over static image tutorials, and of those five, two “admitted that although they preferred the screencast tutorial, they would probably choose the static tutorial if they actually needed to figure out how to do something (270). not only did the study show that students prefer not to watch videos, but students with a variety of learning style preferences were better able to complete or replicate demonstrated tasks when tutorials used a sequence of static images as compared to screencast videos (260). some reflection on why yielded the following considerations. scope and scale: a group of pictures or block of text gives immediate feedback on how much information is being conveyed. the length of a video will give some indication of this, but at a greater level of abstraction. sequence: pictures and text have natural break points between steps of a process; the next picture, or a new paragraph or bullet point. this allows one to jump back to review an earlier step in the process, then move forward again in a way that is not disruptive to a train of thought. this is more difficult to do in video, especially if appropriate scene junctures are not built in with attendant navigation tools such as a click-able table of contents/scene list (i.e., you have to rewatch the video from the beginning to see step 3 again, or have a deft touch on the rewind/scrub bar). the mestre study suggested that being able to quickly jump back to or review prior steps was important to participants (265). seeing the forest and the trees: this involves the concept of closure as described by scott mccloud in understanding comics: “the…phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole”(63). judicious choice and arrangement of sequences can allow one to see both the individual steps of a process and get a sense of an overall concept in less physical and temporal space than either a video or a series of static images. the main challenge in applying this concept is determining natural breaking points in a process, analogous to structuring scenes and transitions in a video or deciding on panel layout and what happens ‘off-screen’ between panels. does the sequence of gifs need to be a video that is chopped into as many parts as there are steps, or are there logical groupings that can be combined in each gif? static and dynamic: this is where the animation factor comes into play. a series of animated gifs allows for incorporating both the sequencing and closure components described above, while retaining some of the dynamic element of video. the static component involves several gifs being displayed at once. this can be helpful for a multistep process where each step depends on properly executing the one before it, such as tying a bowtie. if you’re in the middle of one step, you can take in, at a glance, the previous or next step rather than waiting for the whole sequence to re-play. depending on the complexity of the task, the simplification afforded by using several images compared to one can be subtle, but an analogy might be that it can make a task like hopping into an already spinning jump rope more like stepping onto an escalator—both tasks are daunting, but the latter markedly less so. the dynamic component involves how long and how much movement each image should include. a single or too few images, and you might as well stick with a video. too many images and the process gets lost in a confusing array of too much information. using animated gifs can also leverage existing content or tutorials. a sequence of gifs can be generated from existing video tutorials. conversely, the process of producing an efficient series of gifs can also function as a storyboarding technique for making videos more concise and efficient or with appropriate annotation, selected individual frames of an animated gif can be adapted to a series of static images for online use or physical handouts. animated gifs might also be explored as an alternative instructional media where technological limitations are a consideration. for example, the area served by my library has a significant population that does not have access to broadband, and media that is downloaded and cached or saved locally might be more practical than streaming media. in terms of web technology, animated gifs have been around a long time, but by the same token, are stable and widely supported and can be employed without special plugins or browser extensions. once downloaded they may be viewed repeatedly without any further downloading or buffering times. applications, practical considerations, and tools in the section below i’ll discuss two specific examples i created of brief library tutorials using animated gifs. the raw materials for creating the gifs consisted of video footage recorded on an iphone, video screen capture, and still images. the first example of using this format is at http://www2.semo.edu/ksuhr/renew-examples.html. this page features four variants of instructions for renewing a book online. to some extent, the versions represent different approaches to implementing the concept, but probably more poignantly represent the process of trial and error in finding a workable approach. notice: if the ‘different cloned versions of ripley’ scene from alien resurrection3 disturbed you, you might want to proceed with caution (mostly kidding, mostly). i tried different sizes, arrangements and numbers of images. for the specific purpose here, three images seemed to strike a good balance between cramming too many steps into one segment and blinking visual overload. the second example, at: http://www2.semo.edu/ksuhr/renew-examples.html#findbook, sticks with the three image approach for demonstrating how to track a call number from the catalog to a physical shelf location. the images produced in this example were very large, as much as 6mb. it is possible to shrink the file size by reducing the overall image size or optimizing the animated gif. the optimized version is below the original. there is a distinct loss of image quality, but the critical information still seems to be retained; the text can still be read and the video is serviceable, although it has a certain ‘this is the scary part’ quality to it. creation of the two examples above revealed an assortment of practical considerations for and constraints of the animated gif format. animated gif file sizes aren’t inherently smaller than video, especially streaming video. one advantage the animated gif format has, as mentioned above, is that aside from not needing special plugins or extensions, they can be set to loop after downloading with no further user intervention or downloading of data. this facilitates the use of a series of moving images that illustrate steps that happen in sequence and can be parsed back and forth as necessary. this also helps in breaking up a single large video sequence into chunks of manageable size. depending on the task at hand, the usefulness of the animation factor can range from clarifying steps that might be difficult to grasp in one long sequence of static images (the bowtie example) to simply adding some visual interest or sense of forward propulsion to the demonstration of a process (the climbing the stairs example). for some topics, it’s a fine line judgement call as to whether animated gifs would add any clarity, or if a few thoughtfully-annotated screen shots would serve. while looking at non-library related examples, i found some demonstrations of variations on tying your shoe, both illustrated with static images or a single gif demonstrating all of the steps. i found one to be learnable with the static images, and i actually regularly now use that method and tie my shoes one or two times a day instead of ten or twenty. a second, more complex method, was harder for me to grasp; between the complexity of the task, the number of images needed to illustrate the steps (which were displayed vertically, requiring scrolling to see them all), and the fact that it’s hard to scroll through images while holding shoelaces, i gave up. i also found it difficult to keep track of the steps with the single animated gif. i can’t help but wonder if using several animated gifs instead one for the entire process might have tipped the balance there. in terms of tools, there is a variety of software that can get the task done. the examples above, including the mashup of everything is illuminated / lord of the rings, were done using camtasia studio versions 4 and 8 (a newer version became available to me whilst writing this article). the gif optimization was done with jasc animation shop v.2, which has been around at least fifteen years, but proved useful in reducing the file size of some of the example animated gifs by nearly half. camtasia studio is not terribly expensive, is available for mac and windows, and has some very useful annotation and production tools, but there are also freely-available programs that can be used to achieve similar results. a few windows examples that i have personally used/tried:4 screen capture: jing and hypercam. scene selection and excerpting: free video slicer. vlc is another option and is available on mac and linux as well. there is a lifehacker article that details how to record a section of video. video to gif conversion: free video to gif converter . captioning: windows movie maker the captioning in camtasia and movie maker is a nice feature, but it should be noted that conversion to gif removes any ada compliance functionality of closed captions. an alternative is to simply caption each animated gif with html text under each image. an inference can be drawn from the mestre study that a bit of daylight between the visual and the textual information might actually be beneficial (268). some cursory web searching indicates that there are a variety, yea—even a plethora, of additional tools available; web-based and standalone programs, freeware, shareware and commercial. discussion and where next the example information literacy gifs discussed above both deal with very straightforward processes that are very task oriented. initial impressions suggest that using animated gifs for instruction would have a fairly narrow scope for usefulness, but within those parameters it could be a good alternative, or even the most effective approach. areas for further exploration include using this approach for more abstract ideas, such as intellectual property issues, that could draw more upon the narrative power of sequential images. conversely animated gifs could serve to illuminate even more specific library-related processes and tasks (e.g.: how to use a photocopier or self checkout station.) another unknown aspect is assessment and effectiveness. since i assembled the examples used, i was naturally very familiar with the processes and it would be helpful to have data on whether this is a useful or effective method from an end user’s perspective. the mestre study made a fairly strong case that static images were more effective than video for instruction in basic tasks and the the sequentiality of the images was an important component of that (260, 265, 270). one aspect that warrants further investigation is whether the dynamic aspects of animated gifs would add to the advantage of a sequence of images, if the movement would detract from the effectiveness of purely static images, or if they would provide a ‘third way’ that would draw on the strengths of the other two approaches to be even more effective than either. conclusion in closing, i’d like to note that there is a peculiar gratification in finding a new application for a technology that’s been around at least as long as the web itself. in reflecting on how the idea took shape, i find it interesting that it wasn’t a case of looking for a new way to deliver library instruction, rather that observing the use of a technology for unrelated purposes led to recognition that it could be adapted to a particular library-related need. i suppose the main idea i’d really like to communicate here is, to put it simply: be open to old ideas surprising you with new possibilities. i would like to acknowledge the peer reviewers for this article: ellie collier and paul pival, and the publishing editor erin dorney for their kind support, invaluable insights, and unflagging assistance in transforming ideas, notes and thoughts and first drafts into a fully realized article. many thanks to you all! references “animated gif.” high definition: a-z guide to personal technology. boston: houghton mifflin, 2006. credo reference. web. 13 october 2014. mccloud, scott. understanding comics. new york: paradox press, 2000. print. mestre, lori s. “student preference for tutorial design: a usability study.” reference services review 40.2 (2012): 258-76. proquest. web. 26 sep. 2014.     source: http://www.picgifs.com/glitter-gifs/unicorn/ [↩] i was able to dig up the original site on archive.org, it seems to have moved on to use video clips, but i was able to find a web oubliette that still has examples of gifs used to animate asl signs. [↩] in one scene in alien resurrection, a cloned version of the main character discovers several ‘rough draft’ clones of herself, gruesomely malformed and existing in suffering [↩] as a side note, i’m simply listing them, rather than providing direct links, erring on the side of caution on security matters, but i have personally downloaded and used all of the above with no issues that i’m aware of. they are all also easily findable via a web search. [↩] graphics, information literacy, tutorials, visual learning the right to read: the how and why of supporting intellectual freedom for teens responsive acquisitions: a case study on improved workflow at a small academic library 5 responses michael greenlee 2014–10–22 at 4:16 pm i noticed a few months ago that google was using gifs this way. google’s is a good example of mccloud’s advice, and i love that you cite him here. tasks are first distilled to essential steps, expressed minimally in a sequence. it lends itself very nicely to the gif. https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-1hoxhjx6s20/u8a3ggydvii/aaaaaaaanpk/mehdaunjuqg/w426-h267/accessing-google-apps.gif karl suhr 2014–10–23 at 3:00 pm cool! thanks for sharing the link. tammy ivins 2014–10–25 at 2:56 pm the absolute best way that i have found to make a gif is gifcam, freeware from blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/ (beware of spamware imitators). because it records the selected part of your screen you can gif-ify videos without needing another piece of software for conversions. don’t forget to turn on “capture cursor” in order to record demos. pingback : the oplin 4cast » blog archive » oplin 4cast #409: serious gifs pingback : using gifs as a teaching tool | what's happening... this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct stories of 2011: one person’s (my) adventures in growing a new academic library – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 30 nov kim leeder /13 comments stories of 2011: one person’s (my) adventures in growing a new academic library photo by flickr user andrea campi (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by kim leeder it’s official: we’ve entered the holiday season. thanksgiving (and black friday) are safely behind us and the party invitations are beginning to roll in. it’s the time of year when we work perhaps a little less hard, reconnect with friends and family, indulge in good food and drink, and wait for the new year to arrive. believe it or not, 2012 is just around the corner with its champagne and midnight countdowns. we are invited to reflect on what the past year has brought us: the good, the bad, and occasionally, the ugly. we share our stories of the year. this post is my story of 2011. i hope you’ll consider sharing yours in the comments below. introduction in 2011 i left my beloved reference librarian position at a large, established university library in favor of a directorship at a brand-new community college library. i should have known what to expect when the outgoing library director asked, “have you ever worked in a startup before?” i had some sense of what starting a new library might mean, and i was aware that the place i was interviewing had only existed – both as library and as institution – for two brief years. i had worked in several different libraries in the past, including two university libraries, a public library branch and even a small college library, but all had been established long before i arrived. i knew a “startup” would be something else entirely, though i didn’t know exactly what. i expected it to be an adventure, and one i was ready to tackle. being aware of the facts of the situation and understanding what it would mean to live and breathe them on a daily basis, however, were two wildly different things. after the previous director referred to my new library as a “startup,” i did some literature and web searching to learn more about startup libraries, their issues and challenges. to my surprise, i found… nothing. i tried variations of search terms related to building a new academic library, but still… nothing. i did find a few things that were peripherally helpful, but didn’t apply specifically to academic libraries. for instance, ala’s fact sheet, “setting up a library: a resource guide,” has a section on academic libraries but the actual content doesn’t offer guidance to those creating a new library. public libraries have the public library start-up guide, and the special libraries association offers a resource list with some items of interest. sure, all libraries have qualities in common, but the details vary widely. where was my startup guide? it looked like i was on my own. i knew i would, at least in the beginning, be able to draw on the one-person library community, as i would at first be the only librarian in a place with one other full-time staff member. but my situation was unique, as my discussions with the college administration made clear, because my charge was to grow the library collection, services, staff, and space. i wasn’t coming on board at a typical one-person library; i was there to create and build a whole new organization. the opportunity i had accepted was something rare and special, and it came without training wheels. the institution i live in the treasure valley of southwestern idaho, a region inhabited by roughly half a million people who, until recently, never had a community college of their own. in 2007 voters approved a measure to create the new college of western idaho (cwi) and the first courses were offered in 2009. by the time i arrived in 2011, enrollment had leaped to approximately 5,500 fte, outgrowing all predictions and stretching the existing staff, faculty, and services to the maximum. it is clear that there was a great need for a community college in my area, and it is equally clear that the faculty and staff of this new institution have a serious but thrilling responsibility to take cwi from startup to full-fledged college. a major focus is gaining accreditation from the northwest commission on colleges and universities, a lengthy, intensive process that has only just begun. the library of which i am now director can best be described as a “one-room schoolhouse.” with only 4,000 print books and 17 computers, it fills what is essentially a large classroom in our main academic building. upon my arrival it possessed a single-page website that emphasized databases offered by our accreditation partner, the college of southern idaho, and our state consortium. while that list of resources is considerable, its online presentation concealed the depth of resources offered. furthermore, databases required either a login from the partner institution or a generic password students had to request by phone or email. to top it off, i am the first individual with an mls to be employed here. the prior director, who clearly worked hard to build what infrastructure we have, retired shortly before i arrived, leaving few notes or records to get me started. at present my library is neither impressive nor sufficient to support the needs of the college. this fact is vividly apparent to me, the students, the faculty, the college administration, and our accreditors. turning the situation around by drawing on all my creativity and resourcefulness to build a library that cwi and i can be proud of is my great challenge. in my first four months on the job i have been stretched as a person and a professional, in ways i never anticipated. i have found joy in this work, and have trudged through a variety of challenges. and yet the adventure has just begun. the joys i have often said that i love being a librarian because it is the first job i’ve ever had where i never get bored. prior to my switch to cwi, i worked for four years as a reference and instruction librarian at a mid-sized university library. this was my first professional position and i enjoyed learning the ins and outs of my job, building relationships across campus, and becoming an expert in my liaison areas. by the end of year four, however, the days sometimes slid by a little more slowly. i started to wonder whether there was more to being a librarian than continuing along the same (albeit pleasant) path. without realizing it at first, i was ready for more. i was itching for new responsibilities. i got my wish. without any previous administrative experience i was suddenly the expert and decisionmaker on everything library. in my first few weeks at cwi library i was variously asked for advice on copyright and course packets, requested to write a five-year strategic plan, offered the opportunity to hire students, temps, and a new librarian, invited to teach communications students about research, and faced with making sense out of a stack of invoices. i had to figure out how to unravel a dysfunctional ils, come up with a plan to address our time-consuming password problem, and advise college leadership on what a community college library for 5,000 students should look like. from coasting through a job that had become predictable and comfortable, i had launched into a world where my brain was whirring so energetically that it almost seemed possible that smoke might begin emanating from my ears. when friends asked how i liked my new job, i emphasized the joy of being in a role where i was again learning new things every day, if not every hour. along the same lines, perhaps the best thing about directing a small library – and a new library on top of that – is the fact that you have to be an all-around everything librarian and manager. you have to be ready and willing to embrace every aspect of the job, from cataloging to collection development to reference to budgeting and planning. there’s no room for specialization, and no time for it. while this is certainly not a situation that would appeal to everyone, for me it was as natural and as joyful as coming home. not only do i have variety in my work, i have v-a-r-i-e-t-y in all caps and with a few exclamation points thrown in at the end. (!!!). the days fly by like speeding jets and i have to remind myself to take breaks and to leave at a reasonable hour in the evening. while any small library offers the pleasures of variety and generalization, what they don’t all offer is the joy of building something brand new. there is not much that is more motivational than knowing you’re part of creating something of value, something glowing and important that will serve the educational needs of future generations. the word “legacy” comes up with some frequency among the staff and faculty at cwi, as we are all cognizant of the responsibility and privilege inherent in building a new college. i have never worked with a more passionate, energetic, or dedicated group of people. last but certainly not least is the joy of self-determination; switching roles from that of a cog in the machine to that of presiding mechanic. administration comes with a ream of heavy responsibilities, as others had warned me, but no one had ever told me how much fun it is to run a library. if my generation is known for its administrative-aversiveness, as i believe it is, then listen up all my fellow x’ers: don’t knock it ’til you try it! i’ve always daydreamed about someday starting my own business, but was never sure what business it should be. “if only one could start a new library the way people start a business,” i used to think. i figured that no one gets that chance in libraries, since any organization needing a library had one already. happily, i was wrong. the challenges making the switch to a small, startup library isn’t all rainbows and kittens, of course. while the work has its notable pleasures, i am also working harder than i ever have in my life. the pluses i described above each have their delta partners, though (rainbows again) i believe that they are all are manageable challenges and, ultimately, climbable obstacles. still, it took about three months before i could sleep through a night without waking in the wee hours to make “to do” lists, and i continue to frequently lose sleep while mentally wrestling with some problem i need to solve at work. admittedly, my greatest challenge as a new director is my lack of expertise. i have only been a librarian since 2006, and my knowledge is primarily public service-related. it is no small thing to suddenly be responsible for an entire library, and particularly one that needs to be grown in every direction. how does a new librarian learn enough quickly to take charge of budgeting, hiring, managing, whole-library collection development, selecting a new ils, negotiating database and journal contracts, and etc. etc.? the buck stops, as they say, with me, and there is no one to whom i can or should defer. it is, sometimes, entirely overwhelming. longtime small-library directors out there, i salute you. (and if you happen to have a support group, i would love an invitation). learning how to prioritize those substantial and growing “to do” lists has been another great challenge, made greater when it requires balancing tasks against each other that seem equally critical. what is more urgently needed: building the collection or facility planning? getting a usable ils or figuring out how to install ezproxy so students can actually log into resources from off-campus? budget planning or hiring a new librarian? there’s so much to do that taking one step forward on each project every week seems like a great accomplishment. to make things more complicated, space is an ongoing problem both in our library and in the college at large. my library’s two full-time staff, two part-time staff, and three work-study students all share office/staff/kitchen space that would more reasonably house two people. we work in very close quarters and are constantly (and unintentionally) interrupting and distracting each other from the tasks at hand. it can be challenging to get things done, though we are fortunate to have a wonderfully collegial team that makes the situation more bearable. one thing i didn’t anticipate in making the leap to a small library was the isolating effect of moving to a place with a very small staff. i had become accustomed to having a large, varied team of colleagues in my university library jobs, and losing the creative energy of that dynamic and the support it provided on a daily basis has been difficult. i am lucky to have developed a wonderful network of colleagues both locally and nationally, but i do miss the daily interaction and banter that i once enjoyed. i can’t conclude this section of the post without mentioning work/life balance. i’ll admit it, i’ve bragged a bit in the past, in previous jobs, about how well i have managed to maintain equilibrium between my personal and professional lives. call it kharma or just desserts, but my balance has tipped dramatically since my job title switched from “librarian” to “director.” i once became impatient with people who didn’t answer their email within a day, but now i struggle to keep up with my own inbox. i skip lunch, work late, hit the gym, and get home shortly before bedtime. i am wagging my own metaphorical finger at myself, vowing regularly to “work on it.” i will get better at this. conclusion: lessons learned (and learning) at a dinner party recently, i ran into an acquaintance, a faculty member who chairs her academic department. she politely asked how i liked my new job, and i gave my usual answer about how much i love it, though i am working harder than ever before. knowing she also had administrative duties, i added, “and i hope at some point i’ll be able to sleep through the night again.” to my surprise she entirely empathized, saying that it took her a long time before she got over the same late-night worrying and list-making that i had described. “it’s not just me then?” i asked, relieved. “not at all,” she responded quickly. “it took me a long time before i could accept that i simply can’t get everything done.” my first thought was, oh yes i can, but i pushed it aside long enough to recognize the wisdom in her words. she didn’t mean she wouldn’t try, but sometimes things would slip through the cracks or get finished after the deadline. and that was okay. in fact, it was entirely human. i’m a get-it-done personality type: when i see things that need to be accomplished my natural response is to put my head down and push through without stopping until i’m finished. that approach just won’t work here, as i have never before faced a challenge as substantial, complex, and long-term as building a library. this will require an approach more akin to that of a distance runner and less that of a sprinter, and after running three marathons i’d like to think i’m psychologically prepared for the shift in perspective. i will need good pacing, regular breaks, and ongoing training. but perhaps most important of all, i will need to be patient and persistent to arrive at this finish line in one piece and smiling. as 2012 arrives, i’ll still be running. many thanks to ellie collier, karen downing, and emily ford for their valuable feedback that helped shape this post. academic libraries, careers, community college, holidays, job changes, new libraries, one-person libraries, startup editorial: occupy librarianship: 5 variations on a theme csi(l) carleton: forensic librarians and reflective practices 13 responses mary beth sancomb-moran 2011–12–01 at 10:49 am great post! i couldn’t have said it better myself. i was hired as the first librarian for a new campus, and had very similar experiences. it’s fun and exhilarating and – sometimes – a bit scary. i wouldn’t trade it for any other job! kim leeder 2011–12–01 at 10:57 am mary beth, a kindred spirit! i’d love to hear more about your experience. ellie collier 2011–12–01 at 1:52 pm thanks for sharing this kim! and welcome to community colleges! i hope you love them as much as i do. your new college is closer in size to my current one and it’s definitely been a switch for me to come from 40k students to 6k and from 8 campuses to only 1. i look forward to swapping stories. hilary 2011–12–01 at 8:22 pm kim, thank you for your post. from your perspective so far as a new library director, what skills are absolutely necessary to start a new library? i’m also interested in hearing about the 5-year strategic plan that you developed for the library. what are the main themes of the plan and which groups at cwi did you work with to create it? juergen plieninger 2011–12–02 at 1:47 pm hello, the german commission for one-person librarians (of the professional association bib) recently published a “checklist” (see checklist no.32 http://www.bib-info.de/kommissionen/kopl/publikationen/checklisten.html). and there are also two helpful books: 1. kreizman, karen: establishing an information center : a practical guide. – london u.a. : bowker saur, 1999. (information services management series) isbn 1-85739-286-8. 2. bryson, jo: effective library and information centre management. – 2. aufl. – aldershot : gower, 1999. isbn 0-566-07691-8 best regards, juergen plieninger pingback : eine neue bibliothek einrichten … | service für one-person libraries erin dorney 2011–12–05 at 7:40 am hi kim – i really appreciate hearing about your experience. i, too, have daydreamed about how i would build a library if i was starting from the ground up – with no legacies or preexisting circumstances – but had assumed it was impossible. a lot of your points hit home – work/life balance, sleeplessness (and nightmares!), the joy of variety, and pining for a new challenge. i have no doubt that under your leadership, the cwi library will flourish as a valuable part of the community college experience. kenley neufeld 2011–12–12 at 1:39 pm thanks for posting and sharing some of your experience. the community college landscape is simply fantastic and in my six years as a library director in one, it’s been nothing but a startup adventure. ping me if you’d like to connect about anything related to these topics. dan newton 2011–12–12 at 1:48 pm thanks for sharing your story. i often mention how well i feel i’ve handled my work life balance, yet at the same time i day dream starting my own business. from the sounds of things you’ve got the perfect attitude to make it all work. maybe one day i’ll get a chance for an adventure like this. pingback : reflections on my experience in a one-person library and the importance of networking « crd of pala kristi brumley 2012–05–16 at 12:38 pm i really enjoyed this article! you have accomplished so much over the past year! congrats! i look forward to working on plans for the new cwi library with you! ken 2012–08–29 at 9:50 pm i too created a library with basically nothing (including a budget, or money, which are not the same thing!). doing pretty good now though! network member of the national library of medicine. 6x more resources than we had to start (donation drives for the win), and about to serve something digital to thirty-two other small libraries in fourteen states in the five year plan. pearl ly 2013–02–16 at 7:15 pm i am re-reading your post and it resonates with me much more after i recently became an interim administrator. i am also early in my library career with a public service background. it has been a challenging and fun experience. i wish you the best of luck and look forward to hearing more about your adventure. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct filter this – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 25 mar audrey barbakoff and ahniwa ferrari /22 comments filter this in the library with the lead pipe welcomes audrey barbakoff, a librarian at the milwaukee public library, and ahniwa ferrari, virtual experience manager at the pierce county library system in washington, for a point-counterpoint piece on filtering in libraries. the opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and are not endorsed by their employers.  we thank them for their time and energy in writing this piece! “untitled” by flickr user paul goyette (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) by audrey barbakoff and ahniwa ferrari audrey barbakoff banned books week sucked last year. i felt pretty hypocritical about last year’s banned books week. don’t get me wrong; i love banned books week. i adore it. without the reminder provided by events like this, it’s too easy to get drawn into the day-to-day concerns of library work and forget about the essential issues of intellectual freedom, battling censorship, and embracing the sharing of ideas even when they are unpopular or unpleasant. it’s because i find it so critically important, so essential to who we are as librarians, that i’m upset. because libraries are complicit in one of the most extensive censorship campaigns in history. even right under the nose of banned books week, we are censors. every single day, we prevent people from accessing content that makes us uncomfortable – online. we take the single greatest advance in the open dissemination of ideas since the printing press and slap filters on it. i just don’t understand how librarians can allow and encourage patrons to read books full of graphic sex and violence while simultaneously denying them the opportunity to access the same content online. think of a popular urban fiction author, like keith lee johnson. we’ll buy a kajillion copies of little black girl lost, we’ll display them in a place of prominence, we’ll replace them when they’re stolen, we’ll recommend them to patrons, including minors, who like wahida clark. but would our own computer filters let you see that exact same text on the screen? no way. so why do we let this happen? i think it’s because public librarians fail to talk about filtering in an ethically important way. even articles that address the controversy around filtering and intellectual freedom fall into the trap of dickering about smaller issues, such as how restrictive filters should be, how well they work, or which product is best1. it’s easy to do, and part of me wonders if we haven’t intentionally let the ethical issues slip into the shadows out of a little bit of shame over our print/digital double standard. perhaps we just find it easy to write off digital content because we’re format-ists. perhaps it’s because cipa or copa or whatever vowel they’re using these days has leveraged our funding to quash our resistance. perhaps we’ve just had filters for so long we’ve accepted them as necessary, or at least “grudgingly come to terms.”2 whatever the reason, we have to take our heads out of the e-sand if we’re going to offer our patrons the service and access that is their right. there are certainly serious concerns about the efficacy and cost of filtering which need to be addressed. however, these smaller decisions on how to filter must come out of a broader understanding of why we filter at all – and of what the higher-level effects and implications of that choice may be. basically, we need to have a frank, moral conversation to remind us what exactly we’re doing. only once we have a clear understanding of what it means to filter can we legitimately ask ourselves how we’re going to deal with them in the real world. in case you haven’t picked up on my rather overbearing personal opinion on this topic, i’ll lay it out – mandatory filters are censorship, big time. i’m too passionate about this to feel comfortable making a logical argument without letting you know about my bias up front. this doesn’t mean, however, that i don’t understand why many libraries can’t go without filters. some libraries need the funding; others have communities that demand them; some have bandwidth limitations; and some librarians believe filters protect children – and even adults3 – just as surely as i believe they don’t. so i’ll do my best to set my fervor aside and, rather than trying to justify the total eradication of all filters, i will challenge you to take a good, long look at the moral ramifications of filtering before making any decisions about how to do it at your library.  i will argue that mandatory filters (and by extension, filters that silently default to “on” and/or are difficult to turn off) are morally impermissible; however, there are ethically significant ways to avoid forcible filtering without violating the needs of your library and its patrons. first, a little background. for all of you who are not public librarians, or who are public librarians but are way too busy struggling to keep your library running with not enough budget, staff, or technology to waste time nitpicking over a bunch of obscure legal documents, here’s the quick and dirty background. the current federal legislation affecting filtering in public libraries is the children’s internet protection act, or cipa. implemented in early 2001, cipa does not actually require all public and school libraries to install filters. however, only libraries with mandatory filters are eligible for certain federal discounts on communications technology, including internet access.4 since few libraries can simply turn their collective noses up at funding, especially in the high-demand, high-expense area of technology, many smaller libraries have only the illusion of choice. the ala filed a lawsuit to overturn cipa in 2002, alleging that it violated users’ first amendment rights. a series of similar laws meant to control the dissemination of pornography online had already been repeatedly declared unconstitutional on these grounds.5 the eastern district of pennsylvania unanimously agreed with the ala, but the u.s. supreme court did not. on june 23, 2003, the court ruled 6-3 that cipa was constitutional.6 cipa was meant to apply only to children,7 but recently state legislation allowing constitutionally protected speech to be denied to adults has been gaining hold. in bradburn v. north central regional library, the washington supreme court allowed the library to refuse to disable a filter for an adult patron.8 (that’s pretty scary to me. i became a librarian to be a guide to an overwhelming world of information, not a stony-faced gatekeeper, judge and jury of what is acceptable.) the state argued that filtering is not censorship but a form of collection development; just as a library can choose not to buy a book, it can choose not to offer access to a website. however, that argument doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. it’s a spurious debate that gets us bickering over semantics rather than closely examining the impact of the action we are taking when we force filters on our patrons. after all, we’re doing the same thing no matter what we call it. a rose by any other name, and all that jazz. on that note, and with a sense of the increasing pressure on libraries to use filters to deny people of all ages access to constitutionally protected content, let’s drop the semantics and the politicking and take a look at just what exactly it means to our communities when we mandate filters. let’s get logical: what are we really debating? filtering is generally cast as the uneasy equilibrium between freedom and protection. we want to give our patrons maximum freedom while still protecting children. it sounds logical, right? however, it’s quite frankly ridiculous. consider what it really means, in practical terms, to “protect” somebody from information. it means systematic denial of access. it means that people from group x are barred from accessing information on topic y. we would never, ever consider systematically denying printed material – even “dangerous” material – to entire groups of people. would you designate whole categories of books on certain subjects unequivocally off-limits to muslims? to a particular political group? to women? of course not, and there’s no reason to start just because we’re dealing with e-content. now, you might argue that children are not like these other groups. after all, when it comes to children and even teens, most people will recognize that not everything is appropriate for every child of every age. that does not – i repeat, does not – make it ethically permissible for the library or the librarian to categorically deny all children access to any single subject, even a taboo one. just as with books, the librarian’s job is to offer access and guidance; the decision of what to actually utilize belongs solely to the individual child and his or her family. that choice must always be individual, never imposed by systematic discrimination based on age or any other external characteristic. this isn’t a radical position. in fact, it’s completely consistent with how we manage children’s intellectual freedom for printed materials. many libraries have formalized in their policies that it is the prerogative of the child and his or her guardians to make the individual choices appropriate for that particular child.  although a librarian might try to guide a child away from a resource that doesn’t seem developmentally appropriate, it’s still the choice of the child and his or her family whether or not to heed that advice.  in the absence of parental instructions, we won’t prevent children and teens from checking out pretty much any book in the library, regardless of where it’s shelved or what it’s about.  we recognize that this value is at the very core of our work, and i cannot believe that we would intentionally sacrifice this primary ethical mandate just because the information is on a screen. if not freedom v protection, what is the debate really about? it’s intellectual freedom as opposed to not offending anybody. offending people is a hassle. offended people stomp up to the desk and holler at some hapless librarian or clerk in the hearing range of every other patron in the room. they point brazenly at the poor sap who had the misfortune to be minding his own business (offensively!) in other people’s line of sight. they hang around for ten minutes filling out complaint forms and demanding to speak to whoever’s in charge. they leave a trail of paperwork and hastily-scheduled departmental meetings in their wake. letting patrons look at whatever information they choose results in loudly offended other people. infringing on people’s intellectual freedom, on the other hand, is easy. it’s silent. most things that get filtered are at least potentially embarrassing, so people will slink away rather than ask for the filter to be disabled. think the rape victim who can’t access the rape and incest hotline number (true story) will ask the librarian to come turn off the filter? will she file a formal complaint? probably not, and neither will a hundred other people looking for information on sexuality, health, gun rights, domestic violence …. no, taking away someone’s most basic right at the library is simple and quiet. making tradeoffs. ok, we’ve traded the rights of just a few people in a few select circumstances for a whole lot of peace and quiet. i have to ask, although i don’t want to: is that really such a bad thing? we have limited resources, especially now, and they could be used much more effectively than having librarians deal with angry people’s paperwork all day. and it is an important aspect of intellectual freedom that all patrons feel comfortable and safe in the library; if they are so offended they feel they can’t walk in the doors, their access is surely hampered.  in all seriousness and objectivity, i have to ask myself: is it so bad to trade a little freedom for a lot of calm? yes. yes, it is. because intellectual freedom is a moral imperative for libraries; avoiding offense is decidedly not. in fact, our moral code often intentionally offends. demonstrating to people that there is a worldview other than their own – and that it’s just as valid – is frequently offensive. and it’s darn important. most libraries acknowledge the importance of representing all viewpoints, regardless of personal preference, by having a balanced collection development policy; we collect materials on all sides of controversial issues and all along the political spectrum, even if our communities have a strong proclivity one way or the other. we’ve got something to offend everybody. in fact, we recognize that some things are valuable precisely because they offend people. (banned books week comes to mind again.) of course, it’s extremely important that we don’t offend selectively – that we aren’t actually biasing our collection toward or against any particular group or viewpoint. no, libraries are and should be equal opportunity offenders. so offending people now and then is ok, and probably proof that we’re doing our job right. but it’s still a hassle. let’s look at the other affected party – the person who doesn’t get information we consider “legitimate” because of over-blocking. let’s even assume the filter works pretty well (although many studies would disagree9), and that “most young patrons probably don’t care as much [about filtering] as we intellectual freedom advocates do; they are not there to access forbidden websites…mostly… they want to play games”10. in short, let’s even assume the relative rarity of a “legitimate” site being blocked. if just one person is denied the access promised to him the by library bill of rights, but a hundred complaints are obviated, is it worth the tradeoff? no. librarians serve the community by serving individuals. by giving each and every patron my full attention and care, regardless of his or her background or views, i am also doing my best to help the community as a whole. i am creating a safe space where any and all members of the community can come to access any kind of information. i am creating community gatekeepers11 who will go out into their social circles and teach others. although i don’t often hear library service discussed in exactly this way – serving the whole by serving the individual – i do think that the library profession generally agrees that this is effective. look at the way we structure our everyday service. the meat and potatoes of our work is helping patrons at the reference desk one at a time or in small groups, essentially as individuals. we don’t make them wait while we weigh the merits of their individual needs against what might be best for the community – we just do our best to help. furthermore, we embrace a library bill of rights, and human rights by definition are meant to apply to each and every individual. all of this means that when we allow a single individual to lose access, we are causing much, much greater harm than we realize. we negatively influence the entire community. not only have we made that person uncomfortable in the library, we have also adversely affected anybody he or she  tells about the experience. we have contributed to creating a restrictive, oppressive space for the whole neighborhood. if we serve the community best by serving the individual best, we’re just plain lowering the quality of our service. worst of all, we are violating somebody’s right. yikes. the library is frequently upheld as a shining symbol of democracy, a “cornerstone of the american dream,”12 and we are seriously compromising our symbolic purpose if we can’t even uphold the most basic rights we promise to all people. and that means all people – even kids, even teens, even people who smell bad and carry their stuff around in garbage bags, even people who want to look at something controversial. perhaps especially them, since the barriers they face to access are so high. is damaging the community, creating an unsafe space, and violating the public trust in our purpose worth a little (or even a lot) less hassle? no. no, it definitely is not. community values don’t exist. i’ve demonstrated that it’s immoral to impose filters on our communities. but some might argue that this leaves one possible loophole: a community with strong traditional values might decide as a whole to embrace filters for itself. could it be ethically permissible for the community to choose mandatory filters, for children or even for adults?  dean marney, director of the north central regional library (the library which blocks online constitutionally-protected speech from adults; see “first, a little background” for a refresher), thinks so. he argues that “we must be responsible to the communities we serve.”13 “community values” often seem to be the rallying cry for censorship, especially for children, and especially online. however, what we call “community values” are really only “majority values,” or sometimes even “loudest minority values.” making sweeping generalizations based on “community” values assumes that your community is perfectly homogenous. it’s not. no matter what the most vocal members of your community assert, no matter how small, how insular, or how traditional your area may be, it is full of sub-groups, dissenting opinions, and individual diversity. there will always be people who want to view the legal content you have blocked, even if they remain silent about it.  if a library believes in serving individuals, if it purports to value human rights, it cannot morally allow the preferences of the majority to trample on the rights of the minorities. that’s not to say we can’t take into consideration the majority opinion, and craft policies that will best serve its members. in fact, i believe strongly that libraries should be responsive to their patrons’ needs, and that’s why i don’t offer a one-size-fits-all filtering solution. within certain ethical boundaries, there are many ways to tailor your policies and services to your majority community. however, there is a moral line that must be drawn when majority-serving policies begin to infringe on the rights of other individuals. as we’ve long believed for print materials, which we collect even when they offend the political or social sensibilities of the majority, the tastes of 99% of your population do not override the rights of those remaining few. whether analog or digital, libraries have a moral obligation to represent the minority opinion as fairly as the majority one; we have a responsibility to serve the individual who disagrees as fervently as the one who conforms. if we make intellectual freedom a privilege for those who hold the predominant local viewpoints and values, we don’t really uphold intellectual freedom at all. as the great revolutionary and social philosopher rosa luxemburg wrote, “freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”14 oops, there’s real life again. hopefully i’ve convinced you that mandatory filtering in libraries is incompatible with our core values. now what are we supposed to do about parents who want their kids on filtered computers? how are we supposed to deal with a community that by and large clamors loudly in favor of filtering? how will we afford to provide sufficient computer and internet service when cipa will cut our already-meager funding if we don’t filter? in real life, some form of filtering is probably necessary in most cases. while i don’t personally agree with policies that restrict legal content, even pornography, i understand that in most communities patrons expect and want such restrictions. a filter may be a more practical solution than having librarians spend their entire day running around playing computer police.15 the option for a parent to enable a filter for his own child may make him feel that his child is safer on library computers. and most of us can’t afford to spit in the eye of federal funding. so how can we balance a practical need for some form of filtering with our moral responsibility to provide access? in filters and the public library: a legal and policy analysis16, mary minow details the many options for mandatory, optional, or lack of filtering and their implications for patrons’ rights. since i really can’t do a better or more succinct job, i’ll direct you to her for the nitty gritty details involved in selecting the right option for your library. her overarching conclusions are similar to mine: mandatory filtering is morally impermissible, but there are a variety of acceptable ways to make filters optional or remove them altogether. (she calls possibilities in which individuals can choose for themselves to enable a filter or work at a filtered machine “pro-choice”, which i love.) i’d like to use my little soapbox here to offer what she does not – some suggestions to help you respect the more conservative values of your community while implementing one of these less stringent filtering policies. there are some practical ways to make all patrons feel safe in the library, even with optional or no filters. these can be as simple as “turning computer screens away from foot traffic and installing privacy screens”17 so that no patron of any age will accidentally stumble upon what another is viewing. children’s computers can feature prominent links to preselected sites “such as the ala’s great web sites for kids … and search engines specially designed for children.”18 more important, however, is creating a use policy consistent with the library’s mission and its treatment of print materials. however liberal or restrictive your computer use policy (and the ethics of that is well beyond the scope of this piece), “viewing of inappropriate images [is] a behavioral issue… the best approach is to address the matter with the end user, rather than trying to make the material inaccessible.”19 clear rules and consistent, enforceable punishments for breaking those rules are already our primary tools for governing acceptable behavior in the library’s meatspace. done right, they should be just as effective (read: not perfect, but pretty good) in governing computer use. however, these small, practical measures are clearly not sufficient on their own. the best way to make public computers more useful and safe for all patrons, including but not limited to children, is education. as the national research council so eloquently states in youth, pornography, and the internet, “swimming pools can be dangerous for children. to protect them, one can install locks, put up fences, and deploy pool alarms. all these measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can do for one’s children is to teach them to swim.”20 by relying on an automated system to block content, we are missing a critical and valuable opportunity to teach children (and adults) to “swim” in an online world. when we deprive them of this opportunity to learn, we do them a disservice both in the library and when they are outside the reach of our computerized safety net. i recognize that trading an electronic band-aid for deep education is not easy. education is expensive and difficult to implement. as far as i know, there are no studies that document how effective various forms of education may be in improving appropriate behavior and safety on public computers, which means we have no roadmap. and all pro-education, anti-mandatory-filter options mean no e-rate funding. and yes, that stinks. i tried to think of an option that would be morally acceptable and let you keep the money. i really did. but, as happens so often, it’s your money or your soul. a good bargain is just not a morally weighty counterbalance to a violation of children’s rights and the core values of our profession. sorry. if your library absolutely cannot maintain public internet access at all without the discount … weeeelll, ok. while it’s difficult to embrace solutions with a high price tag, especially in a time of severe and widespread budget cuts, it is possible to take steps in the right direction. on the bright side, if we can free ourselves of dependence on strings-attached government funding, we can be a more objective and free institution in the long run. eliminating filters is possible, and some intrepid libraries are paving the way for the rest of us each day. the sonoma county library is an especially good example of a system that overcame the concerns of its community and even the objection of its own grand jury to implement a no-filter strategy that benefits all users. their fantastic response to the jury is one of the best pragmatic defenses of the power of a filter-free library out there.21 the san jose public library took an equally staunch, if somewhat less inspiringly documented, stance.22 of course, what works for them may not work for you. the best real-life solution for your library will be individual. your community’s majority values, its size, the physical constraints of your space, the condition of your budget, and many other factors will influence what the elimination of mandatory filters would look like in your library. i hope the few suggestions and examples i’ve offered have at least convinced you that this is both worthwhile and possible in your community. we all deal daily with practical concerns that make honoring the big-picture issue difficult and that require compromise. what matters is that we address these realities through an ethical lens; that rather than blithely accepting the status quo, we recognize that our decisions have serious moral implications for library service. and in conclusion (i.e., you probably could have just skipped to this part) the debate about filters is not really about two ethical issues, freedom and safety. it’s about the ethical issue of freedom pitted against the more practical issue of offending patrons. mandatory filters create a double-standard for intellectual freedom by denying users digital materials we would happily give them in print; they unfairly bias against open access for children and those looking up sensitive or controversial information; and they reduce the quality and value of the service we provide to all. in the real world, sometimes we have to bend a bit on principles in favor of practicality; but we must always recognize that this is what we are doing, and consider the damage we may cause. ahniwa ferrari audrey provides some excellent arguments against filtering, but if you ask me she’s a little gaga23. also, she’s wrong. okay, so not wrong in the sense that she isn’t right. but she is wrong in the sense that there’s no simple solution for filtering and, more importantly, we can’t say that filtering is bad. we can’t say it’s good, either, because filtering isn’t bad or good on a broad scale, but it’s something that needs to be looked at in every individual case to determine if it is, or is not, the appropriate tool for the job. and the job is a tough one. my job is tough, too. i’m supposed to provide the pro-filter argument in this little pro/con piece. i was asked to fill this role because i was vocally supportive of the decision to uphold filtering in the controversial superior court case here in washington involving the north central regional library. the problem is, though, i’m not pro-filter, and in that particular case, my argument was much less pro-filter and very much more pro-library. you see, library filtering is a lot like abortion. okay, not really, but a similar approach to the two issues is useful. for instance, nobody is actually pro-abortion. those people picketing outside the clinics are against abortion, and their opponents don’t fall on the opposite end of the spectrum – they hang out in the middle. similarly, those who choose to picket outside the library (usually on the interwebs) are not pro-filtering, they’re against it, and again their opposition isn’t on the other side of the spectrum, but in the middle. we’re not pro-abortion, and we’re not pro-filtering. we’re pro-choice. why are we pro-choice? because libraries operate in vastly different communities and each one, dealing with its own particular set of circumstances, must make the choice that it feels is appropriate. that there are two libraries in california who decided to take a stand against filtering and, by extension (if you take their and audrey’s word for it), censorship, is great. i’m glad that worked out for them, and i’m sure they did it because they felt it was in the best service to their communities. but every community is different, and what is right for one is not right for all. let’s take the north central regional library case as an example. demographically, there are 28 libraries in the ncrl system; 14 of them serve as the de facto school libraries for their school districts. 16 of them only have one computer in the building. most of them are very small libraries (the largest about 2000 sq ft), in very small communities. these libraries are essential to these small communities where people can’t afford broadband and where kids need a quiet place to study. i’ll repeat part of that, since it seems fairly important. half of the libraries in ncrl are also the de facto school library for their school district. yeah, they’re public libraries, but they aren’t public libraries like they have in sonoma county or in san josé. in terms of being a de facto school library, in being completely understaffed, in having only one single computer for public use – how can we judge filtering in a library like this unless we’ve been there? shouldn’t we trust that the librarian in charge of a particular library has the best knowledge of what is the right course of action for that library? i’m willing to do so when it comes to libraries making anti-filtering choices in california. i’m even willing to applaud them. but i think that the north central regional library system deserves applause, too, because it’s taking a very unpopular stance to do what it thinks is appropriate in terms of serving its community. jan walsh, washington state librarian at the time (now retired), stated her support of the decision24in terms i couldn’t agree with more. she said: i am pleased that our state supreme court  has handed down a strong, sensible ruling that gives our public libraries flexibility to reflect their community values as they adopt internet policies and use of filters on certain content. i know that the library community is divided over this issue and certainly as a veteran librarian i understand the points of view about unfettered access versus policies that protect our school children and others from pornography and other objectionable and potentially harmful material.  i believe this 6-3 supreme court ruling, and the federal ruling that we expect will follow, provides public libraries with permission to adopt a reasonable filter system if that fits the needs of their community. we support libraries listening to their patrons. if that value is to have no filter, then that’s fine. this is not a free speech issue, in my mind. it is about what your community needs. it is about the use of our taxpayers’ limited resources and our libraries’ limited resources. dean marney, director of the north central regional library, also provided a response25 that i feel is worth repeating here in full: ncrl is pleased with the supreme court’s decision validating our approach to internet filtering. we embrace the internet as a resource and encourage its use by all patrons. ncrl will continue to provide broad access to a wealth of rich and diverse online content consistent with our collection development policy and our mission to promote reading and lifelong learning. more generally, we are heartened by the court’s acknowledgement of the multi-faceted role many public libraries must perform today. in fulfilling its role, ncrl must balance many important interests, some borne of tradition and some arising as a consequence of an increasingly complex world. first and foremost, ncrl is a traditional, full service library serving chelan, douglas, grant, ferry, and okanogan counties. we must consider the diverse needs of all our patrons, adults and children alike, in shaping our print and online collections. we strive to offer resources of depth, breadth, and quality yet we must do so within ever-tightening budget constraints. we also provide vital support to public schools throughout the region, including services that in some instances children might go without were it not for ncrl. we also have important workplace and safety responsibilities to our staff and our patrons. we are gratified to know that the highest court in our state understands the context in which ncrl operates and the discretion we must exercise to perform our essential functions. it’s about choice. libraries make choices every day about how to best serve their communities. the libraries who do this best are the ones who don’t take a standard approach, but think about their communities, in particular, and their particular needs, and creates a policy that responds to those needs. sonoma county did this, and san josé did this, and north central did this too. all three libraries acted courageously and made tough decisions, but what is more courageous: acting in a way that draws accolade from your peers, or making the tough, unpopular decision because you feel it best serves your library’s community. filtering and censorship and collection development the supreme court decision was that filtering the internet is actually an application of collection development. this seems to me like a strange approach, one no doubt conceived by lawyers as well as (if not more so than) librarians, but let’s run with it. libraries have collection development policies that they use to determine which materials get added to their collections. these policies act as a filter, basically, through which our purchase of materials is made: item one, book on the holocaust written in a fair manner showing both sides – purchased; item two, book on the holocaust written by a known anti-semitic group which makes no attempt to be fair and distorts historical fact – rejected. while libraries will do their best to represent both sides fairly in any controversial topic, they must use their discretion to determine what “fair” means and reject items that don’t meet that standard. these decisions happen all the time, though they’re mostly invisible to the public, for whom items magically appear on the shelves. the fact is, librarians do their best at all times to provide the best information to their patrons while removing the information that they feel is of no value or harmful to the community. this is filtering, absolutely, but is it censorship? is the argument really that different when we talk about filtering practices on the internet as opposed to the filtering practices we incorporate into our purchase of physical materials? you may argue that buying books is opt-in while internet filtering is opt-out. in other words, in book purchasing we select items to buy, while with internet filtering we select items to keep out. there’s also a cost issue; we pay for each book we purchase, but we don’t pay for each website, they all come included as part of the great wide interwebs. these arguments have some merit, but they’re really just distractions when you remember the underlying purpose of collection development: to provide good content and filter out bad content. whether you opt in, out, or sideways, the idea is to not only provide the best books, but also the better websites, so that people can find quality information and avoid being fooled by sophistry and scam. human filtering vs. computer filtering more and more the filtering of physical materials is not a completely human process. our lovely vendors offer to do a lot of the filtering for us26, and it becomes very hard to tell what falls through the cracks. all the same, we’ll assume that there is much more human intervention in the selection of physical materials than there is in the filtering software that libraries use to select what internet sites are viewable. and we’ll even assume, as the librarian in black insists27, that all filtering software available to libraries is pretty much ineffective, both by block “good” websites and not blocking “bad” websites. at this point i should make a confession. i have a ten-year old at home, and i filter his web access. i’m not ashamed of this decision, being that it was born of a situation where he had searched for and found porn and had, at the end of the day, been so overwhelmed and ashamed at what he had seen that he literally burst into racking sobs when he told us about it a couple days later. it had obviously been eating away at him, and this in a house where we had never been anything less than honest and open in talking about sex and where everyone saw each other naked from time to time without it being a big deal. we talked to him about it, of course, to help him make sense of what he saw, to get over his shame, and to set his mind at ease. then we decided to create an environment where he wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. the filter we use at home is a very simple firefox add-on called procon latte28, and it just plain works. it has without exception blocked all objectionable sites, and while it has also blocked a handful of legitimate sites it was short work to make those sites accessible by adding them to a white list. maybe the web searching patterns of a ten-year old are not indicative of those of the general public, but my experience with filtering has been positive and i find it hard to believe that my completely free add-on filter is so much better than every other commercial paid filter that libraries can utilize. filters in a perfect world obviously, filters aren’t perfect, and most libraries’ filtering policies are probably not perfect either. in a perfect world, every library would have a filter that aligned perfectly with the needs of its community – for some that might mean only blocking the very worst of sites, for others it may mean blocking more. and in every case, should a user find their access blocked to a website that they feel should be accessible, there should be a way for them to access that site without the need for direct appeal to a librarian and without having to wait for the site to be reviewed by some committee. access should be immediate, and review should come afterwards to determine ongoing accessibility, without impacting that user at that time, and without causing them embarrassment in having to ask to have the filters turned off. lacking a perfect world, we’ll continue to do the best we can. for some libraries that may mean removing filters entirely. for others, that may mean forging ahead with whatever filters they have because they don’t see a better alternative. libraries serve their communities first, and one must assume that they’re doing so as effectively as they can. whatever high-minded ideals are involved, and the ideals are important, we must allow libraries to choose how to interpret them. it is a balancing act, to be sure, between issues of free speech and appropriate service to a specific community. it’s a choice that we as spectators should not presume to make, but one that each library must grapple and come to terms with. our job, as outsiders who claim to advocate for libraries, is to support those decisions, whatever they may be, within the communities in which they are made. references for audrey barbaroff’s post ala office for literacy & outreach services. (2010). the american dream starts @ your library. http://www.olos.ala.org/americandream/ american library association. (2010). cppa, copa, cipa: which is which? http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/ifissues/issuesrelatedlinks/cppacopacipa.cfm american library association. (2003). libraries, the internet and filtering. http://www.ala.org/template.cfm?section=litoolkit&template=/contentmanagement/contentdisplay.cfm&contentid=164201 american library association. (1996.) library bill of rights. http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/index.cfm federal communications commission. (2009). children’s internet protection act. http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cipa.html goldberg, beverly. (2009). on the line for the first amendment. american libraries. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/05272009/line-first-amendment goldberg, beverly. (2010) ruling: washington libraries can deny adults unfiltered internet. american libraries. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/05102010/ruling-washington-libraries-can-deny-adults-unfiltered-internet houghton-jan, sarah. (2008). internet filtering software tests: barracuda, cyberpatrol, filtergate, & websense. report to the san jose public library. http://www.sjlibrary.org/about/sjpl/commission/agen0208_report.pdf houghton-jan, sarah. (may 07, 2010). why internet filters don’t work and why libraries who filter are wrong. librarian in black. http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2010/05/filtering.html janes, joe. (october 6, 2009). censorship gets smart. the internet librarian. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/columns/internet-librarian/censorship-gets-smart luxemburg, r. (1961). the russian revolution, and leninism or marxism?. ann arbor: university of michigan press. marney, dean. (november 1, 2010). the internet is not all or nothing. library journal. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/communityopinion/887222-274/lj_backtalk_the_internet_is.html.csp metoyer-duran, c. (january 01, 1993). information gatekeepers. annual review of information science and technology (arist), 28, 111-50. nichols, s. (january 22, 2009). copa child-porn law killed. pc world. http://www.pcworld.com/article/158131/copa_childporn_law_killed.html   oder, n. (2007.) proposed state filter law would go beyond cipa. library journal. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/legislation/851065-270/story.csp oder, n. (2009.) after 18 months, san jose council says no to internet filters. library journal. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/legislation/854791-270/after_18_months_san_jose.html.csp oder, n. (2010). aclu still concerned about whether individual libraries overblock. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/intellectualfreedom/869102-269/rhode_island_pls_fix_filtering.html.csp plumer, d. (2001). literature review and analysis: internet filters and intellectual freedom. university of texas at austin graduate school of library and information science. http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~i380kdcp/sp04/plumer-research.pdf sobel, d. (2003). internet filters and public libraries. first amendment center: washington d.c. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/pdf/internetfilters.pdf sonoma county library commission. (2010). sonoma county library commission response to the 2009-2010 grand jury report. http://www.sonomalibrary.org/agenda/grand%20jury%20response/grand%20jury%20response%202010_final.pdf walter, v.a. (september 23, 2009). the children we serve. american libraries. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/09232009/children-we-serve references for ahniwa ferrari’s post “librarians do gaga.” youtube: athenasbanquet. may 27, 2010. <http://bit.ly/gyyxd1>. oder, norman. “updated: washington supreme court, 6-3, backs library system’s full filtering policy.” library journal. may 6, 2010. <http://bit.ly/ef9gdj>. marney, dean. “washington state supreme court opinion.” north central regional library. may 06, 2010. <http://bit.ly/i3qkxs>. houghton-jan, sarah. “why internet filters don’t work and why libraries who filter are wrong.” librarian in black. may 07, 2010. <http://bit.ly/h4odcn>. “procon latte.” add-ons for firefox: corvineum. july 17, 2009. <http://bit.ly/i0kfxc>. ___ many thanks to linda johns, ellie collier and eric frierson for reading earlier drafts of this post and for all of their helpful comments and suggestions. this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. for an example, see carr, 2010. despite the title’s implication, nearly half the article focuses on how well particular filtering technologies work. even judith krug, past director of ala’s office of intellectual freedom, spent much of the interview re-posted in goldberg, 2009 framing her discussion with the problems of a particular technology, surfwatch, rather than the issue of filtering as a whole. library journal is particularly guilty of focusing heavily on logistics with little to no real discussion of the underlying ethical issues. the san jose council’s decision to remove filters was reported as one almost purely of cost (oder, 2009). some articles (oder, 2007) highlight librarians’ resistance to filtering mandates or concerns, but fail to open discussion on why such struggle is warranted. others (oder, 2010) talk specifically about over or underblocked content, but never mention, much less debate, the impact on intellectual freedom as a whole. a search of lj’s site yields many similar examples [↩] janes, 2009 [↩] goldberg, 2010 [↩] fcc, 2009 [↩] for more information on the legality of cipa and its predecessors, see ala, 2010; sobel, 2003; and plumer, 2001 [↩] ala, 2010 [↩] ibid [↩] goldberg, 2010 [↩] ala, 2003; houghton-jan, 2010; houghton-jan, 2008 [↩] walter, 2009 [↩] metoyer, 1993 [↩] ala office for literacy & outreach services, 2010 [↩] marney, 2010 [↩] luxemborg, 1961 [↩] or it may not be. see houghton-jan, 2010. [↩] minow, 1997 [↩] minow, 1997 [↩] ala, 2003 [↩] sonoma county library commission, 2010 [↩] ala, 2003 [↩] ibid [↩] oder, 2009; houghton-jan, 2008. [↩] “librarians do gaga”, 2010. audrey has an acting role in the video. [↩] her statement can be found in oder, 2010. [↩] marney, 2010. [↩] the most common way this happens is through the use of approval plans. [↩] houghton-jan, 2010 [↩] “procon latte”, 2009 [↩] censorship, collection development, filters, internet, libraries, public libraries, technology on the internet, with the exploded text collaborating with faculty part 1: a five-step program 22 responses ahniwa 2011–03–29 at 2:56 pm i’m a bit flabbergasted that no-one has commented yet, considering the topic. perhaps there’s some self-censorship going on here? please share your thoughts. i think we can have an interesting conversation about this, here. betty 2011–03–29 at 2:59 pm i have a comment as a library patron. i live in a small town with one public library. there are six computers used for public internet access which are almost always in use, particularly by students after school. one afternoon i passed by one of the computers that was surrounded by a group of 11 or 12 year old boys who, as it turns out, were watching an animated whore spreading her legs and displaying her vagina. as a mother and an adult, i automatically spoke up. i reprimanded them in a loud voice, saying “i don’t think so”, and then telling them that they were better than that. they immediately turned it off, and in fact left the library a few minutes later. i mentioned the incident to the librarian, who said something soothing about different things being offensive to different people. i’m assuming that my library has a filter like the one ahniwa uses at home, and that this slipped by. i think, actually, that it was part of a computer game. i don’t regret reprimanding those boys, and would do it again. seeing and not commenting would have meant acceptance. libraries are, i think, always mindful of their mission to provide access to information while filtering what is harmful or devoid of value. perhaps we could say, filtering out what does not have integrity. internet access has sharpened the debate, but not changed the need to maintain that balance. balance is messy and dynamic, and requires thought. that’s one reason we need librarians. k 2011–03–30 at 12:31 am as a mother and an adult, i automatically spoke up but not their mother. i would suggest that it was not your place to act in loco parentis. ahniwa 2011–03–30 at 11:34 am thanks for your reply, k, but you’re not off the hook that easily. why should a community member avoid acting in loco parentis, exactly. i know that library staff are very careful about not being responsible for other people’s children – we don’t want to be baby-sitters and we want to make sure that everyone knows that if something goes wrong then it’s not our fault, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t step in when we notice these kinds of situations. what about the idea that it takes a village to raise a child? another phrase comes to mind, though it may seem exaggerated, that all it takes for evil to conquer is for good people to do nothing. why, exactly, should we do nothing? audrey 2011–03–30 at 11:54 am i like this debate! thanks for all the insightful comments. whether or not a community member should intervene with other people’s children seems like more of an issue for miss manners than for me. i’ll have to stick to what the librarian should do in this case – and it’s not necessarily “nothing.” if it’s against library policy for these boys to view that kind of material, then a librarian can certainly reprimand them. breaking library rules is something that can and should be addressed, whether it’s on the computer or in the flesh. if policy does not prohibit this behavior, then the librarian has a responsibility to uphold the boys’ right to view this content. gently reminding betty to respect those rights is also not “nothing.” either way, the librarian should uphold the policies the library has thoughtfully crafted. either way, he or she is defending something important and meaningful. that’s why i couldn’t agree more with betty’s statement: “balance is messy and dynamic, and requires thought. that’s one reason we need librarians.” absolutely! complex, emotional, meaningful situations like these are the reason we need human beings, not automated filters, to make the call. k 2011–03–30 at 1:34 pm why should a community member avoid acting in loco parentis, exactly. because she is not the parent. the child is in no physical danger. the perceived “moral danger” is in the eye of the passerby. injecting her moral perspective onto someone else’s children is neither her job nor her perogative. library staff…doesn’t mean that we can’t step in when we notice these kinds of situations. if it is a violation of the library policy, certainly. if it just personally offends your morals, then no. betty 2011–03–31 at 12:47 pm it’s true that i was not the parent of these boys. however, having seen what they were viewing, neutrality ceased to exist. not commenting would have been the same as approving. i would also speak up if i saw a child or young person shoplifting, or bullying someone, or getting drunk. this is another “messy” balance point. it’s not as simple as “parent” or “not my business”. k 2011–03–31 at 3:09 pm not commenting would have been the same as approving. no, it wouldn’t. i would also speak up if i saw a child or young person shoplifting illegal , or bullying someone, illegal or getting drunk. illegal viewing animated material that offends you doesn’t fall into the same category. antsy 2011–03–31 at 3:17 pm i hope the boys just got the message: adults think we shouldn’t be interested in sex, instead of: we are perverts. “better than that” indicates that having an interest in sex is *bad.* c’mon. i’m a girl, and even i was titillated by words and images about sex as a pre-teen. and what makes you call that the animated figure on the screen a “whore”? then you respond “all it takes for evil to conquer is for good people to do nothing.” evil? yes, if you see someone being harmed, forced, coerced, someone who wishes to be rescued, then sure, it is right to try to help. but in this case, no one was asking for help, not the virtual exhibitionist on the screen and not the boys. where is the evil? who are you to decide what is evil? it’s a great idea to have a “village” available for every child (and adult!) to offer advice and assistance, to teach trades, to keep each other company … but not to butt in and judge and condemn their activities. i sure wouldn’t want to live in that kind of village, and i wouldn’t want my kids living in one like that either. louise 2011–03–30 at 10:35 am thank you so much for sharing this piece. i’m an mlis student, and our group is currently working on a project involving this topic. though the ethics involved seem straight-forward, in practice it just seems like there’s so much gray area to deal with! pingback : oif blog » first amendment rodeo 3/9-3/28, 2011 cameron 2011–03–30 at 1:09 pm sorry if this is a bit scattered, but a few things have come to mind as a result of reading these two pieces. firstly, i think audrey doesn’t take her historical retrospective back quite far enough. it was only about 100 years ago that ala presidents and librarians were all for providing access to ‘good’ content rather than all content. not that there weren’t challenges, but it was relatively easy for the ala to stake out an intellectual freedom position when everything in the library had been selected by a librarian (and lets not forget mccarthyism and the general post-wwii environment). but even in this ala-in-support-of-intellectual-freedom era, as ahniwa notes, access to infinite funds would not necessarily lead to the acquisition of all newly published materials. collection development policies are designed to act as a break on certain acquisitions. secondly, i wonder if libraries have an obligation to provide access to computers for patrons to do with them what they will (are ‘library’ and ‘computer lab’ in fact becoming nothing more than synonyms)? if the answer is ‘yes’ then maybe we will be led to one answer about filtering in libraries while if it is ‘no’ it might lead to a different answer about the role of filters in libraries. in any event, i think it will be hard to avoid an evaluation of the role of libraries in contemporary society as these issues (and others) are really pushing this issue to the fore, particularly in a context of budgetary restrictions. thanks for the thought provoking statements. ahniwa 2011–03–31 at 1:11 pm there are other issues that haven’t been addressed, though some have been touched on. for one, i believe federal law has the legal age to view (purchase?) pornographic materials at 18. while this is ridiculously hard to enforce in an online environment, i still believe that (knowingly) allowing minors to view pornography may itself be a transgression of federal law. if we take the issue of minors out of the equation, we still have other things to consider. one is staff safety and the creation of a safe work environment. if a staff person literally feels unsafe in their work because of what / how a person is viewing porn in the library, what consideration should we take of their workplace rights? another issue is inadvertent viewing: if a library doesn’t have privacy screens or some way to keep computer screens private (either because of cost issues or simply the way the computers are laid out), what responsibility do they have to ensure that a child walking by doesn’t see a graphic sex scene on the way to the drinking fountain? as louise points out, this is a gray, gray, gray issue. which is a big part of the reason i strongly suggest that we empower libraries to make these calls at the local level, and that we support their decisions with whatever power we can muster, rather than trying to strike them down in the name of a larger ideal. audrey 2011–03–31 at 2:33 pm i’d like to address each of those points, but that would be an extraordinarily long comment! the one that i feel is truly worrisome, though, is your claim that exercising one’s constitutional right to participate in free and open speech creates a literally unsafe environment for the librarian. how could that possibly be? looking at material of a sexual nature is not the same as preying on others. i’m sure you believe that for books – you would never just assume that a person reading zane in the public library was a threat or a predator, despite the book’s graphic sexual content. i also doubt you believe this for other types of content. would you say that patrons should be banned from viewing all images of guns, weapons, or violence online, because doing so is the same as bringing live gun violence into the library? if a patron really does create an unsafe environment by his or her actions – by actually approaching or touching somebody inappropriately, by literal or threatened violence – then that absolutely must be dealt with. but looking at content, no matter how much you dislike it, is a world away from harassing somebody directly. you’re uncomfortable because of your personal morals and biases, but you are not unsafe. if a person’s discomfort is so strong that he or she is unable to follow the core ethics of public librarianship for personal reasons, that’s understandable – but that person must choose another career. let’s worry about the rights are stripping away from our users, rather than about pretended “rights” to never have to face the discomfort of a challenge to our personal biases. ahniwa 2011–03–31 at 4:32 pm http://abcnews.go.com/business/alabama-librarian-sues-employer-porn-workplace-computers/story?id=11587699 ahniwa 2011–03–31 at 4:35 pm i’m not saying that in this particular case the librarian is in the right or not, i’m just trying to point out that it’s not a pretend issue – also, working in a safe environment is a right. audrey 2011–03–31 at 5:27 pm a safe working environment is a right, yes. but other people viewing content you personally find objectionable isn’t an issue of safety. it might make you uncomfortable because of your own private values, but you are in no danger and nobody is intending to harm you. the librarian at the link you shared was in an unsafe worksplace because of physical behavioral issues, not because of online content. patrons who are inappropriately exposing or touching themselves or others are causing the danger. not everybody who looks at sexual content online will behave that way; conversely, people who want to behave that way will almost certainly do so even without online sexuality. censorship is not now and has never been the best way to stop a behavior. ahniwa 2011–04–01 at 6:27 pm i’ll reiterate the last paragraph in my recent comment: as louise points out, this is a gray, gray, gray issue. which is a big part of the reason i strongly suggest that we empower libraries to make these calls at the local level, and that we support their decisions with whatever power we can muster, rather than trying to strike them down in the name of a larger ideal. namely, that conditions vary from community to community and from library to library. i am not, in any way, against people exercising their constitutional rights. people have the right to yell, too, and speak loudly, but i still don’t want them to do that in a library, either. it’s not a matter of saying that they should not have the right, but that some consideration should be given to the environment in which they are seeking to express that right. it’s easy to hate censorship, but are you really not willing to admit that there are some situations where it’s a valid, and even the right, decision to make? kianelda 2011–04–16 at 2:21 pm i am currently a part-time library employee and mls student researching this very subject. speaking to those that don’t feel like pornography should be blocked, i invite you to take over the library janitorial service for a day at the section of our local academic library deemed “masterbation alley.” i also invite you to talk to a recently hired 20-year old library employee that was verbally and physically assualted by a young man after viewing questionable content on library computers. this same library had to call police to report an assault on a female patron by a male patron just this month. guess what, he wasn’t checking out books or reading, he was on the computers. people over 18 have the right to legally view anything they want on the internet, i just don’t think the library is the place to necessarily provide that service. also, incidents of assault in the library setting are real. the availability of porn and a large population of homeless (predominantly male) population does sometimes make for an uncomfortable and complicated work environment. anyone that believes otherwise is naive. this also detracts from the goal of the library and is not why i am working to obtaim my mls. i want to get back to the work of providing information access without providing peep show services. k 2011–04–16 at 3:42 pm i invite you to take over the library janitorial service for a day at the section of our local academic library deemed “masterbation [sic] alley.” this sounds to me to be an enforcement failure, not a constitutional issue. i also invite you to talk to a recently hired 20-year old library employee that was verbally and physically assualted [sic] by a young man after viewing questionable content on library computers. post hoc ergo propter hoc argument this same library had to call police to report an assault on a female patron by a male patron just this month. guess what, he wasn’t checking out books or reading, he was on the computers. post hoc ergo propter hoc argument pingback : best of semester one « hack library school moonflowerdragon 2011–04–26 at 9:02 am in relation to: “there’s also a cost issue; we pay for each book we purchase, but we don’t pay for each website, they all come included as part of the great wide interwebs” do you not have costs in relation to volume of internet content accessed? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct sparking curiosity – librarians’ role in encouraging exploration – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 22 feb anne-marie deitering and hannah gascho rempel /2 comments sparking curiosity – librarians’ role in encouraging exploration in brief students often struggle to approach research in an open-minded, exploratory way and instead rely on safe topics and strategies. traditional research assignments often emphasize and reward information-seeking behaviors that are highly prescribed and grounded in disciplinary practices new college students don’t yet have the skills to navigate. librarians understand that the barriers to research are multidimensional and usually involve affective, cognitive, and technical concerns. in this article we discuss how a deeper understanding of curiosity can inspire instructional strategies and classroom-based activities that provide learners with a new view of the research process. we share strategies we have implemented at oregon state university, and we propose that working with teaching faculty and instructors to advocate for different approaches to helping students solve information problems is a crucial role for librarians to embrace. by hannah gascho rempel and anne-marie deitering introduction every librarian who has helped a student develop an academic argument knows about those topics. every first-year composition or speech teacher knows them too. some instructors ban them outright; others are more subtle in their disapproval. while some instructors who ban topics because they are particularly polarizing or controversial, many of our colleagues who teach writing tell us they were driven to create a ban list for a different reason. they ban topics that are overdone, and that they don’t want to see again. when they see topics like “body image and the media” or “concussions in the nfl,” based on their past experiences with papers on these topics, they have learned that the final paper will rarely be provocative, innovative, or even interesting. if instructors don’t use ban lists, they see these same topics dozens of times a term. so why do students continue to gravitate to these topics? and what can we as librarians do about it? it is easy to look at the fifteenth marijuana legalization paper and think that students aren’t trying, aren’t engaged, or just don’t care about the course. and in some cases, those things may be true. students have a lot going on and sometimes a research assignment won’t be at the top of their list of priorities. but in this essay, we are going to examine this question from another perspective and discuss ways that providing space for curious exploration can reframe the research paper assignment. librarians and the exploratory research process the importance of open-minded exploration in the research process is evident from a basic review of seminal research on information literacy. carol kuhlthau’s highly-cited model of information seeking describes an exploratory, learning-focused research process.1 at oregon state (osu), we enjoy a well-established, creative and productive partnership with rhetoric and composition faculty. this partnership dates back almost twenty years and has focused on working with students in a first-year composition course. our partnership and the curricular choices for this course were deeply informed by kuhlthau’s interpretation of the academic research process. over the years, this course has evolved, but our goals remain consistent: to introduce students to an exploratory, open-minded, inquiry-driven research process.2 as librarians, we bring this focus on research as a complex learning process to our work with faculty, and we consider that process in all of its dimensions: affective, cognitive, and technical. here again, kuhlthau is influential in shaping our thinking. she highlights the fact that information-seeking is an inherently uncertain process, and she considers the emotional impact that this uncertainty can create for the learner (kuhlthau 1993). to understand how and why our students do what they do with research assignments, we need to consider the range of influences on their behaviors. our current thinking about students’ information seeking behaviors went in a new direction based on an assessment project we conducted in osu’s first-year composition courses. in 2013, we started reviewing a stack of ninety student essays to answer a fairly typical, yes or no question: can first-year composition students accurately identify their sources in order to apply the appropriate citation style? answering that question became much less important to us, as almost immediately, we found that the papers we were reviewing pointed to a much more complicated question: how does the topic a student selects affect their willingness or ability to engage in an exploratory research process? or, to approach this question from a different direction: can we teach an exploratory research process if we start after our students have already selected their topics? the first-year composition curriculum at that time featured three major writing assignments used in all sections. the second of these, a metacognitive narrative in which the students explicitly described their research process and the sources found, was the paper used for the assessment project. we already knew from our conversations with the graduate teaching assistants and faculty who taught first-year composition that this metacognitive assignment was difficult to teach, difficult to assess, and difficult for students to grasp. what we did not know, until we read these papers, was how boring and lifeless most of the papers were. we want to pause here to emphasize that we are not criticizing the effort, attention, or ability that students brought to these papers. papers that were carefully crafted and well thought-out were just as dull as those that were incomplete, rushed, or messy. the composition instructors confirmed to us these metacognitive papers were uniquely (and almost universally) difficult to read. we knew that many students had never been asked to produce a paper that included this level of self-reflection about the research process before, and that assignment design certainly accounted for some of the problems we observed. however, we did not think that the assignment itself explained all the issues we observed. we struggled with the question of why these papers were so lifeless, until hannah had an epiphany: while every one of these papers described a research process, almost none of students described learning anything new from their research. the processes described were almost completely devoid of curiosity. even though students were told to construct a narrative that described their thinking throughout the entire research process, the majority of papers started with a description of their first search in library databases. most students skipped topic selection entirely. a few started with a vague sentiment: “ever since i was a child i have loved the oceans.” and a few were brutally honest: “i chose this topic because i wrote my senior project on it last year.” the entire sample was dominated by overused topics familiar to any librarian or composition instructor: body image and the media; videogames and violence; marijuana legalization; or lowering the legal drinking age. research from project information literacy (http://www.projectinfolit.org/) helps us understand why students gravitate toward familiar, overused topics rather than exploring new topics. these old standbys make students feel safe as they navigate the inherent uncertainty of the research process. in their 2010 paper, alison head and michael eisenberg show that most students (85%) identify “getting started” as their biggest challenge in research writing. in their qualitative analysis head and eisenberg identify a metaphor that sheds some light on how students feel about topic selection: gambling. to students, committing to a research topic is like rolling the dice. when students choose an unfamiliar topic, they don’t know what they will find and they do not know if they can ultimately meet their instructor’s expectations. even worse, they must invest weeks and weeks of work into a project that may or may not pay out in the form of a good grade (head and eisenberg 2010). in this context, it is not surprising that students prefer topics they have used before, or that they know many other students have successfully used before. these topics represent safe choices. they know these topics will “work,” because they have worked in the past. students may not know exactly what they are being asked to do in their first “college-level research paper,” but with these topics, they know they are giving themselves a reasonable chance at success. however, the same qualities that make these topics feel safe for students make them problematic for instructors and librarians. we want students to start thinking about research as a learning process and as an opportunity to explore new things. we know that all students will not have this experience with every research assignment they complete. students have to juggle many competing demands on their time, and they will not connect with every assignment they have. as a result, instructors and librarians must create conditions where students feel motivated, capable, and safe enough to explore and learn in the research process. because of our reflections on the student paper assessment project, we realized that as instruction librarians we needed to enter the process earlier, at the topic selection stage, and that we needed to think more intentionally about how to create an environment that encourages curiosity. curiosity and exploration curiosity has been defined as “the drive-state for information” (kidd and hayden 2015: 450). in this sense, curiosity is a part of any academic research process, since all students will, at some point, need to find information they do not have. for example, finding a quotation to support a claim one has already made would require curiosity. in the context of our work as librarians with the first-year composition course, however, curiosity meant more than this. we were trying to introduce research as an opportunity to learn new things, to explore new perspectives, and to synthesize new ideas into an original argument. if students clung to topics they already knew a lot about, it seem unlikely that they could experience the research process in this new way. however, to test this assumption we needed to find out more about our students and more about curiosity. to learn more about our students, we designed a small qualitative study that allowed us to track five students’ experiences through the first-year composition course. we gave students a curiosity self-assessment test (discussed in more depth later in this article), interviewed each student twice during the term, and also analyzed each student’s graded work. in the interviews we asked students both implicitly and explicitly how curiosity impacted their behaviors. this project confirmed what we had learned in our assessment of previous student research papers and through reading the literature on students’ information seeking behaviors: when it comes to research assignments, even curious students will avoid topics they do not know anything about, and they will do so to avoid risking failure. curiosity and cognition to learn about curiosity, we turned to the research literature. a small body of work by cognitive psychologists attempting to define—and develop instruments to identify—different types of curiosity gave us a framework for understanding what sparks curiosity in the first place (collins et al. 2004; litman and jimerson 2004; loewenstein 1994; zuckerman and link 1968). however, these researchers are interested in identifying those aspects of curiosity that are context dependent and those that are inherent personality traits. our focus as instruction librarians was different; we wanted to know if there are aspects of curiosity that can enhance how we design and teach research assignments. the cognitive psychologists identified several different types of curiosity, and we selected three types we believe have particular value in the composition classroom based on our direct experiences with students: epistemic, perceptual, and interpersonal curiosity. epistemic curiosity is the drive for knowledge and the desire to seek information to enjoy the feeling of knowing things (litman et al. 2005). epistemic curiosity pushes people to figure out how things work; and it can be concrete (e.g., sparked by a desire to solve a puzzle, or take apart a machine) or abstract (e.g., sparked by a desire to understand theory or abstract concepts). before starting our own exploration of curiosity, we would have probably defined “curiosity” in the classroom setting solely as epistemic. we assumed that curiosity sparks people to ask questions when they encounter new information—in the classroom and in the world—and that students who are both curious and engaged can always find an interesting research topic in those questions. however, we were not seeing that behavior play out in many of our students’ research papers, and instructors confirmed that many students who were engaged and interested in learning were not always driven by this type of curiosity. perceptual curiosity is sparked by the drive to experience the world through the senses—to actually touch, hear, and smell things (collins et al. 2004). the desire to try new flavors or to touch interesting textures may be easy to relate to, but this kind of sensory experience rarely comes up in the traditional classroom. traditional research assignments require students to transfer their learning out of the classroom, but the classroom experience remains focused on the facts, figures, ideas, and theories found in texts and does not extend to embodied or physical experiences. this disconnect is unfortunate because the first encounter with something new is usually through the senses. perceptual curiosity, as a concept, immediately pushed us to think more expansively about how curiosity could connect to an academic research process. learning activities that ask students to engage their senses while in the lab or outside on a field trip could help spark students to seek different types of information to make sense of what they were hearing, smelling, or touching. curiosity sparked by the desire to know more about other people is interpersonal curiosity (litman and pezzo 2007). interpersonal curiosity has an element of snooping or spying in some situations. but this curiosity type also includes behaviors driven by empathy, or an interest in other people’s emotional states, and can be used to reduce uncertainty about how others are feeling or what they are doing. there are classroom assignments where students learn to conduct interviews or observations that can connect to this type of curiosity. similarly, learning activities that connect students to human experience—like guest speakers, interviews, documentaries, panel discussions, or ted talks—may be inspiring for students who are motivated to understand how other people connect to their topic at an emotional level. conceptualizing the cognitive aspects of curiosity in a more multi-faceted way prompted us to think about additional factors related to curiosity, and how we might tie these different approaches to being curious to the research process. curiosity and affect in an effort to generate interest in the research process, many instructors tell students to choose a topic they are “passionate” about, which can make the prospect of engaging for the first time with academic writing even more stressful. many of students hear “passion” and think of controversial topics where their minds are very firmly made up. on a cognitive level, it can be challenging for students to learn new things about these topics. but on an affective level, students who already see research projects as a time-intensive “gamble” can feel that this well-meaning directive has raised the stakes even higher. now they have to come up with a convincing argument—convincing to an audience they don’t really know much about—that expresses a point of view about which they feel deeply. the research on curiosity further emphasizes the importance of the affective domain (litman and silvia 2006). when learners are anxious, worried, or concerned that they cannot complete a task, they are less likely to make room for curiosity. the uncertainty inherent in choosing an unfamiliar topic can be too much to bear. in the context of a traditional research assignment, a student’s choice to play it safe, and avoid the gamble of an unfamiliar topic, is eminently sensible. years of experience with school have taught students that they will not be evaluated on their willingness to take risks, but on their ability to meet predetermined expectations. the risks inherent in taking a curiosity-driven approach to research may seem too great to overcome. opportunities for applying curiosity: experiences from osu to overcome these barriers, students must be convinced that the risks are worth it—and librarians cannot affect this change by themselves, particularly within the confines of a one-hour library instruction session. no matter how engaging or compelling librarians are, in our role as guest lecturers, we cannot expect to convince students to take risks that might threaten their ability to meet their (grading) instructors’ expectations. no matter how empathetic and approachable librarians are, we cannot expect students to trust relative strangers to help them navigate the anxiety and uncertainty that is inherent in a curiosity-driven research process. to build an environment for curiosity in the first-year composition classroom, librarians have to work collaboratively with the faculty designing the curriculum, the gtas teaching the sections, and the students doing the work. at osu, we have worked with our partners in the first-year composition program to try out a variety of approaches for creating spaces for curiosity in the classroom. some of these approaches include changing the language used to discuss the research process, recognizing the role affect plays on students’ research behaviors, building in multiple opportunities and rewards for broad exploration of ideas and sources, and providing prompts for students to reflect on how curiosity influences the way they think about research. these activities are discussed in more depth below so that other librarians might consider adopting the approaches that work well in their context. adopting the language of curiosity and exploration at osu, we built on our longstanding partnership with first-year composition faculty to incorporate curiosity into faculty development and gta trainings. a key focus of these trainings is on the importance of language. wendy holliday and jim rogers (2013) demonstrated that the language we use to discuss the research process matters. using discourse analysis in the first-year composition classroom, they found that students are more likely to engage in an exploratory research process when their instructors emphasize “learning about” a topic instead of “finding sources.” building on this research, we suggest that first-year composition instructors should also encourage students to choose topics they are “curious” about instead of “passionate” about. in addition, every year we share our findings about curiosity and learning with the first-year composition gtas in a required training session that takes place before fall term. we discuss the importance of the affective domain in research instruction and give new gtas a chance to experience research from their students’ perspectives. throughout the term, we help instructors actively reflect on the affective and cognitive challenges students face, and we provide repeated opportunities to practice using terms like “curiosity,” “exploration,” and “learning” to describe the research process. encouraging early exploration of different sources we also developed a variety of activities librarians could use to engage students with curiosity in the one-hour library instruction environment. to create opportunities for students to engage with their own curiosity, and to practice relying on their curiosity strengths in research, we used our library sessions to encourage browsing for a wider range of topics. but we also encouraged students to browse outside the journal literature, using sources that would help them place scholarly sources in a meaningful context. our students, like many first-year composition students, were required to use several source types in their final essays, including peer-reviewed journal articles. and our students, like many first-year composition students, frequently struggled with this requirement. research articles, written for experts, were an unfamiliar genre and most of our students did not have the skills or experience to break them down and identify the pieces most likely to be useful in a first-year composition paper. the vocabulary and concepts were often dense and could not be easily digested in one or two (or five or six) readings. even when an individual article was intellectually accessible, most first-year composition students did not know enough about the surrounding discourse to contextualize or evaluate the article as an expert would. if these were the only barriers we had to navigate—if all first-year composition students selected topics well-represented in the scholarly literature—we could develop strategies to deal with each one. we found that there was another, more deeply entrenched, barrier that was harder to overcome: because most of our first-year composition students did not know what they could expect to find in the scholarly literature, they could not devise queries or research questions that could be usefully explored in that literature. as a result, students sometimes chose topics that were not discussed in peer-reviewed journals. no matter how well we taught students to find, read, use, and cite scholarly articles, if their argument was about the lack of parking on the osu campus, they were going to find the scholarly article requirement frustrating and impossible to navigate. sometimes, their topic choice meant they could not see the value in the sources they did find. if they were looking for the kind of general overview they were used to in encyclopedias and textbooks, students were unimpressed with the narrow, focused information reported in peer-reviewed articles. to encourage students to follow their curiosity and set them up for success in their searches, we developed different ways for students to browse the scholarly literature before choosing paper topics. we developed activities that required students to browse press releases using the osu research channel (http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/) or aggregators like science daily (http://sciencedaily.com) or eurekalerts (https://www.eurekalert.org/). to create a visual framework students could use to contextualize that research, we developed a google map of our campus that combined information about researchers with snippets from press releases about their new discoveries (see figure 1).   google map of osu with researcher information points by rempel and deitering   we required students to identify a topic that sparked their curiosity in these sources, knowing they could build on that initial spark to explore effectively in the scholarly literature. in addition, the press release or news story usually provided some context to help students understand the significance of a study because these sources were written for general audiences. analyzing a press release or news article about a research study helped students understand what they could expect to find in different source types more organically than arbitrary requirements did, and it also helped them to understand the different types of original research scholars do. after students learned about a study in these general sources, we explored alternate ways to search the library’s web-scale discovery tool by teaching them to search for the researcher, not the study. learning more about the author(s)’ background provided another layer of context that the students could use to make sense of their article. as we revised and refined these activities, and observed students completing them, we identified some best practices for encouraging curiosity-driven research in the library instruction one-shot environment: encourage students to choose topics they know little or nothing about by creating or finding relevant browsing environments for them to explore. frame the goals for the session around curiosity and exploration instead of finding sources. create circumstances where students can be successful navigating assignment requirements by narrowing the scope of those browsing environments to focus on topics discussed in the scholarly journals they are required to use. expose students to resources that help them put their sources in context. and, most importantly, keep the stakes of the in-class activities low. we did not hide the fact that some students might find a research paper topic through these activities, but we made it clear that they would not be required to write their paper on the topic they used in the session. choosing a focus for their activities in the library session was a commitment of an hour, not a term. when students saw for themselves that a topic was viable, however, these temporary topics sometimes became more attractive. we also lowered the stakes for individual students by having them work in pairs or small groups to analyze unfamiliar sources and materials whenever possible. encouraging self reflection on curiosity opportunities to play with curiosity in the classroom are important, but it soon became clear that if we wanted students to transfer what they learned in the first-year composition classroom to other situations, they needed additional opportunities for reflection and metacognition. they needed to analyze and understand their own curiosity, think about its role in the academic research process, and figure out how curiosity might shape their thinking and learning more generally, beyond the first-year composition classroom. without metacognition, it is difficult to transfer learning from one domain to another, because for many students, this act of self-reflection does not come naturally (bowler 2010). one activity we developed to make the mental framework of curiosity types visible is a curiosity self-assessment. most of the work cognitive psychologists have done with the curiosity types is descriptive; we saw an opportunity to use the instruments developed by these researchers to help students reflect on their own curiosity preferences. we were guided by an important assumption as we worked with these instruments: that all humans are curious, at least at some level (kidd and hayden 2015). as a result, the curiosity self-assessment we constructed does not ask “are you curious?” and it does not promise to answer the question, “how curious am i?” instead, it asks, “how are you curious?” that guiding question works well for us in the research assignment context. even if some students feel sparks of curiosity less strongly than others, they all have research assignments to navigate. and they can all benefit from understanding different ways that other people can feel curious about some ideas or concepts. we created the curiosity self-assessment survey by integrating ten questions each from three different curiosity instruments: epistemic, perceptual, and interpersonal. the curiosity self-assessment has 30 likert-style questions and takes about 15 minutes to complete. see table 1 to get a sense of the types of questions that make up the self-assessment. find the full 30-question self-assessment here: http://info-fetishist.org/2014/02/06/onw2014/. table 1. example curiosity self-assessment instrument.  almost never  sometimes  often  almost always epistemic curiosity when i learn something new, i like to find out more i find it fascinating to learn new information. i enjoy exploring new ideas. perceptual curiosity i enjoy trying different foods. when i see new fabric, i want to touch and feel it. i like to discover new places to go. interpersonal curiosity i wonder what other people’s interests are. i like going into houses to see how people live. i figure out what others are feeling by looking at them. printable version here. this instrument has been a useful tool to introduce conversations about curiosity with both students and faculty, and we will discuss those applications in the rest of this section. first, however, we need to talk about its limits. we specifically developed the tool to use as a self-assessment exercise that would then be paired with classroom activities guiding individuals to reflect on the different ways in which they are curious. the likert scale used in the survey doesn’t reflect any inherent or objective value and as a result should not be used to give a curiosity “grade.” for more on the specifics of scoring this self-assessment, see this blog post: http://info-fetishist.org/2014/02/07/onw2014b/. the curiosity self-assessment can be used in the classroom environment to get students thinking about the role of curiosity in the research process and about the wide range of topics they might explore. while it is important to explain the nature and purpose of the assessment, this can be done quickly before assigning it as homework. in our experience, students find that the types are logical and easy to understand with just a little background explanation. in addition, it is unlikely that anyone will be upset or confused by what they find. discovering that you are “perceptually curious” (or “interpersonal” or “epistemic”) doesn’t feel as loaded as labels like “introvert” or “extrovert” might. and as is the case with all self-assessments, the process of taking this survey is itself an opportunity for learners to start thinking differently about curiosity. metacognitively reflecting on their learning behaviors promotes the ability to develop new behaviors and adapt what they have learned to new contexts. challenges and limitations in the years since we started working to embed curiosity in the first-year composition course, the curriculum for that course has undergone a significant change. instead of writing a traditional argument paper, with required source types all students must use, students now complete a scaffolded, multi-stage rhetorical analysis using sources appropriate for their specific rhetorical situation (see this video for an overview of the current approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwxrttws-f4). this shift has provided many opportunities to embed curiosity throughout the research process. students start by choosing a rhetorical artifact to analyze instead of “choosing a topic,” which provides an opportunity to build in activities that incorporate all of the curiosity types. additionally, the new rhetorical analysis paper is unfamiliar to many students, which makes it more difficult for them to use familiar topics, sources, and habits as they write it. however, there are significant challenges that will likely persist as long as we try to embed curiosity and exploration in the classroom context. the first of these comes from the fact that most students are not driven by an intrinsic or personal desire to learn simply because they have been assigned a research project. we are hoping to activate their curiosity and therefore spark that desire to learn, but we must recognize that when a student has a required paper to write, the initial motivation to go out and do research will almost always be external, imposed upon them by the first-year composition instructor. many students keep this external focus throughout and are motivated more by their desire to do well in class and to meet their teacher’s expectations than by an intrinsic need to learn the content (senko and miles 2008). to encourage curiosity in this context, we need to work even more closely with the faculty and gtas who teach first-year composition to develop ways to reward students for taking intellectual risks and engaging in exploratory research. the need for more structured, positive feedback to encourage exploratory behaviors relates to the second challenge: a curiosity-driven, exploratory research process cannot be taught as a standalone part of the first-year composition curriculum. students need to see curiosity modeled for them over and over. they need to hear the research process described in terms of learning and exploration at every stage. to make this change, we must give the people who are in the classroom every day the tools, vocabulary, and conceptual understanding they need to do this work. at osu, we now devote more (and more) of our time to teaching the teachers. at this point, we do not teach one-shot library sessions in first-year composition, but are instead embedded in the required seminar that all new first-year composition instructors must take. conclusion as librarians, we are usually asked to work with students to help them find sources. however, we also know that this part of the research process is not where many of our students struggle the most. think back to your own experience as a student. was there a research paper or project that was particularly meaningful? can you remember what you learned writing that paper? chances are good that at some point in that research process you were curious, you learned something new, and you created new meaning or new knowledge for yourself. instructors and librarians want students to have this type of experience, but it can be very challenging in a required course like first-year composition, and may be impossible when students have already committed to going through the motions with a tired, overused topic. as librarians, we need to advocate for our students to get the help they need from the very start. by shifting the discourse to focus on curiosity within the classroom, providing activities grounded in low-stakes exploration, and encouraging self-reflective behaviors focused on curiosity, we can provide opportunities for more students to create their own new knowledge. acknowledgments the authors would like to thank lori townsend (external peer reviewer) and amy koester (internal peer reviewer) for reviewing drafts of this article. we recognize that reviewing takes a lot of time, and we are thankful for their feedback. the authors would also like to thank our publishing editor, sofia leung. her efficiency and responsiveness were highly appreciated. finally, we would especially like to thank the many faculty and graduate students from the osu school of writing literature and film who are always willing to consider new ideas and new approaches to our shared work. we would especially like to acknowledge tim jensen, sara jameson, chad iwertz, and all of the composition assistants who have contributed to the wr 121 curriculum. references association of college and research libraries. 2016. “framework for information literacy for higher education.” http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. bowler, leanne. 2010. “the self-regulation of curiosity and interest during the information search process of adolescent students.” journal of the american society for information science & technology 61 (7): 1332–44. collins, robert p, jordan a litman, and charles d spielberger. 2004. “the measurement of perceptual curiosity.” personality and individual differences 36 (5): 1127–41. deitering, anne-marie, and sara jameson. 2008. “step by step through the scholarly conversation: a collaborative library/writing faculty project to embed information literacy and promote critical thinking in first year composition at oregon state university.” college & undergraduate libraries 15 (1–2): 57–79. head, alison j., and michael b. eisenberg. 2010. “truth be told: how college students evaluate and use information in the digital age.” available at ssrn 2281485. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2281485. holliday, wendy, and jim rogers. 2013. “talking about information literacy: the mediating role of discourse in a college writing classroom.” portal: libraries and the academy 13 (3): 257–271. kidd, celeste, and benjamin y. hayden. 2015. “the psychology and neuroscience of curiosity.” neuron 88 (3): 449–60. kuhlthau, carol c. 1991. “inside the search process: information seeking from the user’s perspective.” journal of the american society for information science 42 (5): 361–371. kuhlthau, carol c. 1993. “a principle of uncertainty for information seeking.” the journal of documentation. 49 (4): 339–55. litman, jordan a., tiffany l. hutchins, and ryan k. russon. 2005. “epistemic curiosity, feeling‐of‐knowing, and exploratory behaviour.” cognition & emotion 19 (4): 559–82. litman, jordan a., and tiffany l. jimerson. 2004. “the measurement of curiosity as a feeling of deprivation.” journal of personality assessment 82 (2): 147–57. litman, jordan a., and mark v. pezzo. 2007. “dimensionality of interpersonal curiosity.” personality and individual differences 43 (6): 1448–1459. litman, jordan a., and paul j. silvia. 2006. “the latent structure of trait curiosity: evidence for interest and deprivation curiosity dimensions.” journal of personality assessment 86 (3): 318–28. loewenstein, george. 1994. “the psychology of curiosity: a review and reinterpretation.” psychological bulletin 116 (1): 75-98. mcmillen, paula s., bryan miyagishima, and laurel s. maughan. 2002. “lessons learned about developing and coordinating an instruction program with freshman composition.” reference services review 30 (4): 288–299. senko, corwin, and kenneth m. miles. 2008. “pursuing their own learning agenda: how mastery-oriented students jeopardize their class performance.” contemporary educational psychology 33 (4): 561–83. zuckerman, marvin, and kathryn link. 1968. “construct validity for the sensation-seeking scale.” journal of consulting and clinical psychology 32 (4): 420-426. kulthau’s 1991 article in jasist, “inside the search process: information seeking from the user’s perspective” has been cited 609 times in web of science, most recently this month, and almost 2,300 times in google scholar. [↩] to trace this history of this collaboration, see mcmillen, miyagishima and maughan 2002; and deitering and jameson 2008. [↩] academic writing, curiosity, information literacy, teacher education updated submission guidelines for what we publish nothing tweetable: a conversation or how to “librarian” at the end of times 2 responses robin bergart 2017–02–27 at 11:37 am i really enjoyed reading this article. thank you. pingback : cultivating curiosity in libraries this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct from accidental to intentional library management: the risws approach – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 31 may rana salzmann and magda pecsenye /2 comments from accidental to intentional library management: the risws approach in brief: considering that just one of the two ala-accredited mlis programs in illinois requires completion of even a single management course, good management practice is often left to on-the-job happenstance. how do you manage the personnel and political dynamics of your team when you can’t stop the clock and go to a management seminar? how do you find out what’s making your people dread coming into work and find solutions that engage and empower them and benefit your library? this article describes the process and findings from a project, funded by a grant from consortium of academic and research libraries in illinois (carli) for the 2015-2016 academic year, to train a small cohort of academic librarians in a practical, hands-on management system called recording/interpreting/solving workflow solutions. risws involves a weekly reporting process that formalizes employees sharing information on both issues affecting their work and achievements they might not otherwise report to their managers. by rana salzmann and magda pecsenye introduction the title of rachel singer gordon’s 2005 book the accidental library manager says a lot. middle-management librarians assume leadership positions because they’re knowledgeable about the “stuff” of good librarianship, like creating compelling programming and serving as an effective liaison to faculty or management. but where did they learn to manage? by combining best practices in employee-focused management with daily observation, reporting, and analysis within our specific library contexts, this project demonstrates one approach to empowering the “accidental library manager.”1 the risws method during the 2015-2016 academic year, the consortium of academic and research libraries in illinois (carli) study team followed the reporting/interpreting/solving workflow solutions (risws) methodology.2  risws is a simple weekly process that gives managers data about how their employees experience work and allows managers to use this data to solve problems that inhibit their teams from performing optimally. risws works on the idea that transparency and information flow allows managers to solve problems for their employees and teach their employees to solve their own problems. employees can then focus on doing better work without institutional blocks and meta challenges, such as personality clashes and power struggles. risws operates from the assumption that managers already have the typical people skills to be great managers, and just need to have systems in place for using those typical people skills to facilitate excellence in their team members. if managers and staff don’t already come to the job in possession of basic customer service and interpersonal communication skills, additional training may be required to successfully implement the risws process or manage effectively in the first place. improving these basic skills was outside the scope of this project. the risws management process helps managers make data-driven policies and decisions for their teams by giving managers: a regular stream of data from their employees about how they are excelling and where they are struggling. the skills to interpret that data so they can remove their team members’ blocks to doing their best work. risws relies on a weekly reporting process that formalizes providing information on both issues affecting work and achievements employees might not feel comfortable reporting organically. risws is an “agnostic” methodology designed to create better management outcomes across organizational structures, work settings, and job functions, regardless of the size of an organization. it’s adaptable to a variety of success metrics. the authors believe this flexibility is a critical asset to applicability in the diverse institutions employing librarian managers, and the results of this project among different types of library situations suggest that the risws methodology could be applied successfully to other library sectors and environments. gathering feedback in risws at its core, the risws process was designed to be as simple as possible for employees to complete so that it isn’t another block or burden for them in their work, and so managers can get a high compliance rate from employees. every friday, a few hours before the end of the work day, each employee sends their manager a list of three things that prevented them from doing their best work this week and a list of three real accomplishments this week. the manager thanks the employee for sending the lists and gives “high-fives” for the accomplishments, then triages and looks for patterns in the challenges and makes a plan to solve them or empower the employee to solve them. risws training focuses on how managers can respond to this information in ways that create a problem-solving culture and greater trust from employee to manager to employee. the first few weeks of risws reporting can be distressing for employees and managers alike. employees have a real, justified fear of exposing problems they don’t have the ability to solve and admitting that they can’t do optimal work because of these problems. managers discover that there are deep, basic problems they had no idea about. as the cycle is established, however, employees begin to feel they’re listened to and taken seriously, and managers start to understand and get traction on solving the problems blocking their employees. supporting the practice of feedback in risws a critical aspect of the process is learning to present the practice of weekly feedback to employees so they don’t think they’re being “set up” to be called out on a problem they report, and so they know that the more honest they are in what they submit, the more help they’ll get from the manager in solving problems. to make the practice work, it’s important for managers to convince employees that these weekly reports are to benefit the managers, so they know what problems to solve. specifically asking employees what prevented their best efforts gives managers something they can actually control (or begin to change), instead of focusing on individual personality traits or professional shortcomings. when working in risws, managers specifically ask employees not to report things they did or didn’t do, unless the manager can help. in risws, employees are coached to report issues in a way that gives the manager information they can use. consider these examples of how the same issue might be reported: useless report: “i didn’t get all my cataloging done.” useful report: “the new carpet off-gassing gave me a migraine and i couldn’t work at my usual efficiency.” useless report: “i didn’t get the list of missing books completed.” useful report: “there are so many holes and missing records in the database that i had to vet each item through several methods, and it took three times as long to process each item as we’d anticipated.” the project team participants came from a cross-section of academic libraries in chicagoland. rana salzmann, the facilitator and project manager, completed risws training with magda pecsenye in early 2015 and shortly thereafter applied for the carli grant. rana has worked in management roles in libraries for nearly a decade. her first job out of library school was head of reference and electronic services at a small public library in the chicago suburbs. she then served in various supervisory library and it positions at the american planning association and now works as the director of library and it at meadville lombard theological school. for the majority of the project timeline, rana directly supervised one full-time archivist and one part-time library assistant and managed one part-time tech support position. magda pecsenye, trainer and consultant, developed risws in 2014 to address management problems she’d identified while consulting on business flow and value chain problems, including employee work issues that were disrupting work flow outside the context of a specific project. pecsenye used the universal design for learning (udl) model to create a process that was accessible to managers at all levels in all settings. together, rana and magda trained two chicago-area librarian managers. valerie neylon is full-time faculty librarian at richard j. daley college, one of the city colleges of chicago. she graduated from dominican university with an mlis in 2013. she supervised five library assistants, two work-study students, and seven library adjuncts throughout the span of the project. gabrielle toth is an associate professor and chair of library and instruction services at chicago state university. as faculty chair of the csu library, she supports a group of faculty who, as part of their profession, organize and manage information, processes, and people on a daily basis. at the beginning of the grant project, a total of 21 individuals directly or indirectly reported to her: seven tenured/tenure-track library faculty, two non-tenure-track library faculty, one administrator, and 11 civil service staff. discoveries: common management challenges risws quickly uncovered several common management challenges across the cohort. 1. we all have org chart confusion and problems locating authority. magda: the org charts in academic libraries are like escher drawings and the baseline lever isn’t money, so solving problems that block your employees is more complicated and requires strategy, nuance, and emotional intelligence. employees who were directly under the authority of the cohort managers were the first to understand that risws was a way to assign responsibility for problem-solving and bring actionable issues to light. in contrast, employees who weren’t subject to the manager’s direct authority initially refused to do any reports, particularly where union contracts came into play. one of our managers was told by her supervisor that implementing risws might violate the terms of the union contract, and one employee went so far as to complain to her union rep about being asked to report on what she was doing at work. this challenge reinforced for the cohort how complicated org charts and reporting relationships create confusion about who has authority over all aspects of work, including hiring and firing. this confusion stifles productivity and engagement; employees who don’t have a clear idea of how to succeed at work can’t engage with it fully. employees in all our study libraries identified problems that the manager had the responsibility, but not the authority, to solve. academic library managers report both formally and informally to a complicated array of vps, deans, chairs, and department heads, but it’s often unclear in daily practice who really does what and when they can or should do it. our managers wonder if and when it is appropriate to pull in the “big boss” to help solve a problem. if the manager takes the initiative to involve upper management, they can look like a great advocate for their team, but they also run the risk of appearing useless and ineffectual if the problems don’t get solved or get taken out of their hands. a complicated org chart is also a serious problem when it comes to scheduling. it may be the manager’s responsibility to make sure the public service desk is covered during open hours, but the manager is often working under conflicting rules about who they can schedule when, and they may lack the authority to approve existing employee overtime or hire temp staff. budget restrictions and the different pay categories of employees further complicate these scheduling decisions. another organization challenge highlighted by the project was the divide between professional librarians and clerical/civil service employees. professional librarians are generally classified as faculty in tenure-track positions and hold the mls degree. they’re evaluated in terms of teaching, service, and scholarship alongside subject matter faculty peers, and are encouraged to undertake research projects, find grant funding, and pursue intellectual passions that enrich their work. faculty librarians follow a prescribed path of evaluation leading to advancement and, ultimately, tenure. meanwhile, the staff they manage (often circulation desk or tech services staff) are evaluated through their union or another process entirely, experience less intellectual freedom, and get less support for professional development. 2. structure and transparency empowers success and helps create a culture of trust. early on, our managers started giving feedback to the employees who did turn in weekly reports, and those employees started seeing value in having a manager understand what was frustrating them (even if the manager couldn’t fix it yet). the managers found that people who were facing challenges in doing their jobs as well as they wanted to were hungry for the chance to simply tell someone and have their issue reports noted officially. employees knew that once they’d reported a problem it was in the official record. this meant that they had evidence that they’d tried to solve the problem, if it continued to affect their performance, which in turn allowed them to focus on what they could change. examples of this during the study included problems with missing and incomplete records in databases, limitations on physical space for collections, and communication blocks within the organization. the weekly reports also forced the cohort members to confront their own limitations as problem-solvers within their organizations, leading to sometimes uncomfortable conversations and opportunities for professional growth. their experiences in this project illustrated that it’s important for a manager to be transparent with their team about those limitations so that they know and trust that the manager is doing their best to work for greater organizational change. this situation came up repeatedly in the study with regard to the different categories of employees our managers supervised and how much authority the managers had over employees in these different categories. making differences in authority and expectations transparent eased tensions and increased morale for the managers and some of their employees. 3. collecting regular employee feedback supports performance management and helps managers promote their team’s achievements with leadership. in most corporate environments, the bottom line is king. while librarian managers do work within a budget, they aren’t always empowered to reallocate funding or change staffing levels, and they’re often evaluated not in terms of dollars but in the language of enrollment targets or “student satisfaction.” as such, the business results of using the risws process revealed themselves more slowly in this study than they often do in organizations where the manager’s actions have a clearer relationship to costs or revenue. nevertheless, the process of collecting and analyzing data about employee’s successes and challenges created real business value by exposing performance issues and creating a bank of evidence to help managers take leadership in sharing a complete picture of their team’s value. while the risws process is not designed to force employees to report their own weaknesses, the weekly structure and reporting format will expose employees who aren’t doing their own work as a matter of course. having no problems or accomplishments to report can suggest that the employee may not be doing enough work to encounter problems or accomplish anything. val: sometimes reports were turned in with no accomplishments. sometimes challenges would be “students needed to check out books.” sometimes accomplishments would be, “val printed spine labels so i didn’t have to” or “spring break ended and students came back to school.” comparing reports from employees in the same job function may reveal other performance issues. if an employee fails to report a problem reported by all of their colleagues, it could mean that they figured out a way to get around it, but it also may mean that they weren’t doing enough work to notice it. conversely, an employee who submits the exact three problems submitted by another employee may simply be copying from their colleague’s report, which raises flags about integrity in other employment responsibilities. our managers also found out that some of their employees were doing some cool things they hadn’t had any format to report in on before. val: as we progressed, staff members would say to me during the day, “hey! i found my accomplishment!” i cannot even begin to describe the change in attitude this was. these were staff members who seemed fully checked out, and now they were on board with accomplishments and being proud of what they did. one staff member even asked if they could start reporting accomplishments for co-workers, sort of a “giving a pat on the back” situation. this teamwork was new, and exciting. finally, when advocating for their libraries and teams to key stakeholders, managers often need a longer answer to the question, “what is the library staff doing this week?” risws data helped our managers in these moments when we were called upon to articulate library value and win support, enhancing the typical metrics of circulation stats, archive research requests, and database usage. 4. consistency creates confidence in uncertain times. no management methodology can solve state economic crises, generate record-breaking enrollment numbers, or heal rifts between union employees and management. but having a constant stream of employee-provided qualitative data can help managers allocate limited resources more confidently, and to argue more coherently for continued funding and institutional support. each of the members of the cohort found risws data helpful in adapting to change and uncertainty. as a public higher education institution, chicago state faced severe budget cuts, furloughs, and widespread layoffs during the project. by april 2016, after a major budget crisis, gabrielle’s staff was reduced to six tenured/tenure-track library faculty, one administrator, and one civil service staff member. while three additional civil service staff were called back to work by september 2016, the extra workload had to be done by gabrielle, or was deferred. gabrielle: my two regular librarian reporters worked in areas both outside of my bailiwick and areas easily missed by patrons, university administration, assessment types, and the like, so getting regular reports from them was a godsend. it helped me learn about what they did and it provided me information i can, and will, use as i prepare a formal annual report and which i’ve been able to deploy to argue for the protection/swift return of my staff and the maintenance of resources. while state budget cuts were less of a factor at richard j. daley college, val and her institution encountered major changes resulting from her promotion to department chair for the new semester. throughout these times of flux and a busy management holiday season, she found the consistency of the weekly reports to be a valuable management tool. at meadville lombard’s wiggin library, rana faced the challenge of onboarding staff while navigating the first phases of a long-term, intensive change management initiative during the study year. she added a temporary cataloguing employee and an archive assistant to the team, then had to help her team adapt when the assistant altered her shifts over the winter term so she could take on another job opportunity in lis. rana’s team filed weekly reports on a shared basecamp site where everyone could see everyone else’s lists of challenges and accomplishments. from day one, the new employees were asked to contribute. this practice provided transparency around where each new employee needed more guidance and training, and what “new hire” obstacles (e.g., information gaps, confusion about priorities, lack of proper equipment or software) continue to stand in their way. rana found that as the risws process became part of the regular workplace rhythm at meadville, it encouraged team-building by letting the seasoned employees jump in to help and troubleshoot where they could. 5. managers benefit from a learning cohort and a support system in order to do their best work. aside from the specific benefits of the risws process, this project demonstrated the value of the learning cohort. though the cohort managers all reported feeling often isolated inside the particular realities of their institutions, having the structure of a monthly phone check-in and information-sharing through the basecamp site helped the study participants to feel less alone. working together to implement a shared management practice could help break down the silos and boundaries among special, school, public, and academic librarianship. results ultimately, risws helped the cohort managers examine their environments and consider, with the help of continuous feedback:   what can i fix immediately? what do i have the authority and support to realistically fix soon? what seems impossible to address given current structural realities? the members of the cohort, including the creator of the risws methodology, made progress on several tracks during the project. untangling the org chart – the risws methodology made visible to each of the managers specific trouble spots within the libraries and team workflows. this process of uncovering authority gaps and untangling the org chart within a department can help managers start difficult conversations about how to realign job duties, rewrite job descriptions, and shift reporting lines to empower the entire staff to do its best work in the service of the institution. one of our managers inherited supervision of employees without completely understanding their area or job duties. the other manager needed remaining employees to pick up some extra duties after positions were cut. in both cases, the reports helped the cohort managers understand the employees’ priorities in their roles, and supported discussions to make sure those priorities were in sync with the managers’ goals. the risws data also made clear when library staff encounter challenges that are truly institutional, or bigger than the manager can handle on their own. our managers have used the data they gathered through the risws process to work within the org chart to address bigger problems with superiors and work for broader institutional change. being able to present hard data about how certain practices were costing money for little return gave our managers’ cases more weight. the main area in which this data provided support for change was in scheduling and allocation of resources and workload. recognizing excellence drives professional growth – our managers were pleasantly surprised by things their employees were reporting as accomplishments, and they were able to give employees more responsibilities and assignments in the areas in which they excelled. incorporating the mission into the mundane – the risws process allowed rana to see exactly what her library team was doing (and not doing) in support of their mission, and where the team was wasting time on inefficiencies. rana: in the next year, i hope to spend more time analyzing data from fy16 and working with my team to craft a plan for library service that can further big institutional goals and more clearly mirror our school’s priorities. then, i want to create a feedback loop that flows from my school’s mission statement and strategic plan into individual performance evaluations and employee goal-setting, to weave institutional aspirations and markers of school success into the job descriptions and expectations for my individual team members. building trust in management – the project helped val establish respect and trust with her team: “overall, i feel much more confident about my skill as a manager. i was promoted to department chair in the middle of the risws project, so that makes me feel that other people feel confident in my management style, as well. this project helped build trust between me and the staff who were very suspicious at the beginning. staff members now come to me with problems and we resolve them and they are much less hesitant to come to me with disagreements, when before they simply filed grievances. this management style certainly has benefited our library.” winning through to positive changes – while it wasn’t easy for her to institute the risws practice of regular feedback, gabrielle appreciated the changes she eventually saw: “suspicion, recalcitrance and generalized whining as i ‘peat and repeated why these reports were necessary, were important, and were really not that big of a deal ate away at my enthusiasm for learning a new management skill and reminded me of all that i loathed about being a manager. but that tide quickly turned once i recalled why i was a manager: my peers had chosen me, and they’d elected me to become our manager due to my skills of analysis and persuasion. “i deployed these to convince my people to craft and submit their reports. i realized that some of my staff were reluctant to put anything in writing, so i made a point to chat with them and keep mental track of challenges and accomplishments. once i learned about the nitty-gritty challenges facing my faculty and staff, challenges that could easily go unnoticed as they’re almost always surmounted in order to get the work done, i was in a position to address them. these minor fixes led to major boosts in morale and efficiency because my staff were no longer hobbled by them. “i am still working through the data i collected during the course of this project; it generated far more than i would have expected. over the summer i hope to develop a reporting system using springshare so that i can continue to collect data and share it with my faculty and staff.” conclusion rana: i have found that managing intentionally through the risws methodology helps build a culture of trust among my staff. by removing roadblocks to performance, i hope to inspire my employees to do their best work, engage with organizational objectives, and push the library forward. what’s next beyond the project team’s stated plans to continue with risws? if you’re intrigued about risws and want to read more about the year-long study, please see the project blog. consider signing up for the fall 2017 training session for in-depth instruction and a chance to build community and discuss complicated management issues in a small cohort setting. the authors would like to thank the following individuals: amy koester of the itlwtlp team for her feedback and assistance as we moved this article from proposal to manuscript to final publication; richard kong, director of the skokie, il public library, for his valuable comments as an external reviewer; and neal shankman for additional editorial support. finally, we could not have completed this project without the enthusiastic participation and insightful observations of our trainee managers, val and gabrielle. thank you so much! references gordon, rachel singer. 2005. the accidental library manager. information today, inc. pecsenye, magda. risws website. http://risws.com/ gordon, rachel singer. 2005. the accidental library manager. information today, inc. [↩] pecsenye, magda. risws website. http://risws.com/ [↩] management, risws preservation in practice: a survey of new york city digital humanities researchers librarians leading short-term study abroad 2 responses waweru kaka 2017–06–15 at 4:52 am thanks for sharing about reporting/interpreting/solving workflow solutions . this is a good program that libraries can employ in improving operations and services. pingback : 2018 risws cohort details announced! – risws working blog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct locating information literacy within institutional oppression – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 24 sep joshua beatty /4 comments locating information literacy within institutional oppression editor’s note: on july 16th, 2014 we published open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression, where we discussed nina de jesus’s outline for a paper i probably won’t write and called for authors to use her open source outline as the basis for an article of their own. we are pleased that nina herself and joshua beatty have both taken up the challenge. below is joshua beatty’s article  based on that outline. in a first for in the library with the lead pipe, we are also simultaneously publishing nina de jesus’s article based on the same outline. photo by flickr user bryce johnson (cc by 2.0) in brief: the acrl’s draft framework for information literacy in higher education represents a chance to undo the neoliberal assumptions of earlier information literacy standards. despite some positive changes, the language of the framework still reinforces existing structures of power. the framework relies on a rhetoric of crisis and on the metaphors “information marketplace” and “information ecosystem.” these metaphors naturalize information resources as a series of walled gardens that might instead have been part of a larger commons. by joshua beatty introduction in a january 2014 talk entitled “the neoliberal library: resistance is not futile,” chris bourg argued that “neoliberalism is toxic for higher education, but research libraries can & should be sites of resistance.” bourg gives as examples four areas of the research library affected by neoliberalism: instruction and reference, collection development, staffing models, and assessment. it seems to me that those areas are not exclusive to libraries at our largest research institutions. small college libraries perform all these functions, though the balance may differ. for example, i work at a self-defined “teaching library” at a four-year state college, a library which prioritizes instruction in information literacy over support for faculty research. if my library is to be a site of resistance to neoliberalism, that resistance must start in the area the library considers central to its mission. yet current formulations of information literacy make it difficult for any such library to resist neoliberalism. in this article i will follow maura seale’s analysis of the neoliberal underpinnings of existing information literacy standards to show that they also apply to the draft document soon to supercede them. i will concentrate on the rhetoric of the document, especially the way in which, to use bourg’s terms, “market language and metaphors” have colonized the framework. finally, i will show how uncritically using that language has led us to naturalize the current model of production, organization, and distribution of scholarly information that we take for granted in our libraries today. neoliberalism in her lecture, bourg follows daniel saunders in defining neoliberalism as “a varied collection of ideas, practices, policies and discursive representations … united by three broad beliefs: the benevolence of the free market, minimal state intervention and regulation of the economy, and the individual as a rational economic actor.” she continues: neoliberal thinking emphasizes individual competition, and places primary value on “employability” and therefore on an individual’s accumulation of human capital and marketable skills. a key feature of neoliberalism is the extension of market logic into previously non-economic realms – in particular into key social, political and cultural institutions. we can see this when political candidates promote their experience running a successful business as a reason to vote for them, and in the way market language and metaphors have seeped into so many social and cultural realms. for example, neoliberalism is what leads us to talk about things like “the knowledge economy”, where we start to think of knowledge not as a process but as a kind of capital that an individual can acquire so that she then can sell that value to the market. in short, neoliberalism pressures us to assume that markets and competition are an efficient way to distribute resources, to believe it necessary for individuals to self-fashion themselves as useful to the system, and to reduce all judgments of value to purely economic terms. these and similar examples play out every day in library instruction, promoted by the information-literacy standards that underlie our teaching. information literacy: the acrl’s standards and framework information literacy is probably taught in as many ways as there are libraries that teach it. though the association of college and research libraries (acrl) promotes its own information literacy competency standards for higher education, published in 2000, not all academic libraries follow those guidelines. but some follow them very closely. new york’s state university system, for example, has an “information management” competency in its system-wide general education requirements. the learning outcomes for the state university of new york’s (suny) general education program are very similar to the acrl’s standards, making it easier for individual colleges to adopt the details of the standards when drafting their school’s specific information literacy requirements.1 yet from the perspective of resistance to neoliberalism, any such institutional literacy program must be flawed from its beginning. maura seale has shown that the standards is an intimately neoliberal document. it emphasizes measurable learning outcomes, which lead to a commodification of education. it sets as its goal the creation of the “information-literate student,” a concept similar to the neoliberal homo oeconomus in that it erases all sociocultural context. the standards emphasize “authoritative” sources too easily equated with the productions of for-profit publishers. and the standards place an inordinate emphasis on the end result of gaining these skills as being merely job training.2 seale argues that the standards is merely the latest in a long line of information literacy documents that embrace neoliberal assumptions. she finds that the library profession has been unwilling to engage with critiques of neoliberalism from the fields of education and critical theory. information literacy discourse is a “closed system.” even when information literacy discourse does open to a new concept, it removes that concept from any outside context and folds it back into the closed system. an example in recent years has been information literacy’s embrace of transliteracy.3 the standards are likely irredeemable. but we are at a moment in which we might reclaim acrl’s information literacy guidelines from neoliberalism. this year the acrl has proposed a new set of guidelines to replace the standards: the framework for information literacy for higher education.4 this framework as presently constituted is not just a revision of the standards, but represents a new approach to teaching information literacy. information literacy is defined around six “frames.” these frames are titled “scholarship is a conversation,” “research as inquiry,” “authority is constructed and contextual,” “format as a process,” “searching as exploration,” and (added in the june draft) “information has value.” each frame combines a “threshold concept” with “knowledge practices / abilities and dispositions.” threshold concepts are defined as “those ideas in any discipline that are passageways or portals to enlarged understanding or ways of thinking and practicing within that discipline.” knowledge practices then demonstrate how learners increase their understanding, while dispositions define the values held by a learner who has passed the threshold. the six frames take up nine pages. but they are surrounded by another twenty-five pages of supporting material, including a cover letter outlining changes since the last draft, an introduction with suggestions on how to use the document, sample assignments, a glossary and bibliography, and three appendices. the appendices include an earlier introduction under the title “setting the context” and an “introduction for faculty and administrators.” the presence of this last suggests the framework is a political document, its ideas (if not the document itself) intended to be presented to other interest on campus as well as serve as a guide for librarians. it is no coincidence that the vision presented by the framework embeds information literacy within every aspect of the curriculum, as an “overarching set of abilities in which students are both consumers and creators of information in multiple formats.” from the perspective of the librarian attuned to critical information literacy issues, there are many ways in which the framework significantly improves on the standards. in the framework training the “information-literate student” is less important than creating habits of “lifelong learning,” and “learning outcomes” are paralleled by more flexible “abilities” and “dispositions.” learning outcomes themselves are left to the individual libraries to decide upon. these advances reflect and incorporate the critiques of critical information literacy practitioners.5 such librarians have acknowledged many aspects of the framework as improving on the standards but also expressed concern that these advances were insufficient. the framework, they argued, should also emphasize “social inclusion; cultural, historical, and socioeconomic contexts; access issues; critical awareness of the mechanisms of establishing authority, including academic authority; and civic and community engagement” as well as the growing critical information literacy movement itself. if incorporated, these recommendations will carve out small spaces of resistance to neoliberalism within the larger document.6 crisis rhetoric but a close reading of the framework suggests that this critique does not go far enough. key rhetorical measures deployed within the framework serve to reinforce neoliberal notions, and creating spaces for resistance within the document leaves those intact. these measures include the rhetoric of crisis, the metaphor of the “information ecosystem,” and the metaphor of the “information marketplace.” under neoliberalism elites feel justified in using — and even creating — uncertainty and crisis in order to amass power. david harvey has described how politicians and financiers take advantage of financial upheaval in order to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich — and sometimes have even created such crises on purpose. at universities and their libraries, administrators use the excuse of financial crises to demand reform, a process so common that it is called simply “austerity.” libraries lose resources, and that money is shifted upwards to fund administrators’ priorities (and salaries). so it is with suspicion that we should look upon invocations of crisis for any new or revamped program in our libraries.7 it is precisely this rhetoric of crisis and reform that characterizes the 2014 framework. on the very first page of the document, the authors explain that the framework is a response to a “rapidly changing higher education environment, along with the dynamic and often uncertain information ecosystem in which all of us work and live, [that] require new attention to foundational ideas about that ecosystem.” gilles deleuze has written of such rhetoric that “the administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons.”8 warnings of rapid change, dynamism, and uncertainty are thus meant to effect compliance from the subject rather than provoke critical thinking. this kind of language has been used to justify the acrl’s information literacy programs since their inception. the 2000 standards insist that information literacy is particularly important “in the contemporary environment of rapid technological change and proliferating information resources.” the 1998 progress report on information literacy justifies information literacy through the “amount and variety of information” available both digitally and in print. the volume of information is now “staggering … [and] has mushroomed beyond everyone’s wildest imagination.” and the 1989 presidential committee on information literacy: final report explains the need for information literacy thus: “information is expanding at an unprecedented rate, and enormously rapid strides are being made in the technology for storing, organizing, and accessing the ever growing tidal wave of information.” the acrl, then, for twenty-five years has periodically panicked about technological change to justify more comprehensive information literacy programs. randall munroe of xkcd provides us with one reasonable response: as with neoliberal politicians and businessmen, when librarians use this rhetoric it serves to inflate the proposal’s importance and to mask specific agendas under a guise of rational common-sense thinking, rather than identifying any truly disruptive historical moment.9 ecosystem rhetoric the opening paragraph of the 2014 framework, then, emphasizes change. but what is it that is changing? it is a “higher education environment” and an “information ecosystem in which we all work and live”; we must revise our “foundational ideas about that ecosystem.” the concept “information ecosystem” is the fulcrum of the framework; it is used fifteen times, while “information environment” occurs another six. the phrase “information ecosystem” seems innocuous enough at first glance. it evokes images of connections, of interdependence, of a landscape known in full and thus made harmless, even appealing. but the concept has a history that belies those images — a history that reveals the phrase’s origins in the business literature of the 1990s tech bubble. by using this ecological metaphor in the framework the authors thus reinforce the neoliberal ethos underlying that crisis. a google ngram shows that the phrase “information ecosystem” or “information ecology” saw a significant increase in use in the mid-1990s. to understand why the phrase appeared at that time — why librarians and others began to envision information with an environmental metaphor — we have to look at an article from 1993 that brought ecological imagery to the business world. that year james f. moore published “predator and prey: a new ecology of competition” in the harvard business review. the article won the hbr’s award for best article of the year, and the author expanded it into a book, the death of competition: leadership and strategy in the age of business ecosystems. moore argued that the old model of understanding competition between businesses, as a simple head-to-head fight for market share within an industry, was outmoded. instead, businesses should be thought of as parts of a “business ecosystem” that cuts across many industries. within this “business ecosystem, “companies co-evolve capabilities around a new innovation: they work cooperatively and competitively to support new products, satisfy customer needs, and eventually incorporate the next round of innovations.” at times, the ecosystems themselves might find themselves in competition. moore likened this to the border between a hardwood forest and a grassland.10 it is innovation that takes the place of evolutionary changes in moore’s business ecosystems. moore argues that we have to accept the collapse of business ecosystems as a fact of life instead of propping up old ecosystems, we should help those individuals affected make their way into newer, healthier ecosystems. the key to making this transition work is laissez-faire capitalism: “it’s only essential that competition among them is fierce and fair — and that the fittest survive.” this last phrase is a tell. “survival of the fittest” is a famous phrase coined by herbert spencer, and not charles darwin himself. spencer, a philosopher, took up darwinian ideas to argue for the application of evolutionary ideas to society and politics. “social darwinism,” as it later came to be called, was the intellectual justification for decades of foreign colonization and internal racial oppression in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. nor was darwin averse to the use of evolutionary ideas in this manner. gregory claeys has argued that both darwin and spencer were influenced by the victorian intellectual culture of their time, which viewed society through a lens crafted by the enlightenment thinker thomas malthus. according to claeys, malthus viewed society in terms of an organic metaphor in which similar laws governed both animal and human worlds. he strongly distinguished between people who benefitted society (as defined in terms of productivity) and those who did not, and he defined rights as derived solely from productivity, competition-as-natural-selection dictated the survival of the “fittest,” and the starvation of the less successful, unless other factors intervened. we do not, of course, have a theory of inherited characteristics in which this “fitness” is transmitted, but we do very nearly have the symbolic imagery, so suitable to an age that prized usefulness above all else, in which such a concept functioned not as science, but as social theory.11 our age, too, prizes “usefulness” above all else. evolutionary metaphors are everywhere in our culture. they’re so pervasive that in an article about the dark underpinnings of evolutionary metaphors claeys (to all appearances unwittingly) used one himself, referring to “intellectual historians concerned with how ideas themselves evolve.” for moore to use a fairly complex evolutionary metaphor to describe the world of business was no more than tycoons and corporate thinkers had been doing since the gilded age. but the ecological metaphor would itself become pervasive, creeping into the library world via the high-tech business press. moore’s particular interest was in these high-tech companies. the running narrative throughout the article was the rise of the personal computer industry. apple, ibm and tandy are discussed in great detail, while wal-mart and the automobile industry were relegated to sidebars. and the technology industry embraced moore’s analysis. quickly the tech press adopted moore’s terminology of ecologies that cut across industries. in 1997 another business thinker, thomas davenport, adapted moore’s ideas to corporate information systems. his book, information ecology: mastering the information and knowledge environment, was excerpted in cio magazine’s may 1997 issue. davenport’s “information ecology”: emphasizes an organization’s entire information environment. it addresses all of a firm’s values and beliefs about information (culture); how people actually use the information and what they do with it (behavior and work processes); the pitfalls that can interfere with information sharing (politics); and what information systems are already in place (yes, finally, technology). davenport’s information ecology focused on the machines behind the information as much as the information itself. so too did the articles in a 1998 special issue of cultural resource management newsletter, which marked the spot at which “information ecology” crossed over into the world of libraries and archives as the “information ecosystem.” diane vogt-o’connor’s introductory article “the information ecosystem” took davenport’s definition of “information ecology” as an epigraph. she echoed neoliberal crisis rhetoric, stating that the “cultural resource information ecosystem is imperiled by increasing costs, decreased budgets, fewer staff, more users, burgeoning information, increasingly unstable information formats, changing professional information standards and practices, revised laws on fair use and copyright, and institutional restructuring and instability.” vogt-o’connor put the journal’s core audience on notice that they were now squarely placed in the new economy. “at the end of the 20th century,” she wrote, “cultural resource managers have become knowledge workers.” richard pierce-moses, in an article on “the information ecology of archives,” echoed this sentiment, explaining that archivists must now work together with it staff — but in a workplace more like the it staffer’s than the archive: “i believe that in the evolving high-tech information ecosystem, a savvy manager will look at the strengths of these two disciplines and forge a new alliance between them.” what we can conclude from this history is that “ecosystem” or “ecology” is a near-infinitely malleable metaphor. that malleability has made it perfect for inserting into discussions of the unknown. from the mid-1990s on, it has been used as a way of signaling that, though there is a seemingly limitless amount of information, here is a way to think about that information as a whole. by describing information as within an ecosystem, we have defined its characteristics and its boundaries, and we understand the connections among its components. we don’t necessarily control all the aspects of the ecosystem — but we can model them. that acknowledgement that we don’t control the network has another implication: that there is change in the “information ecosystem,” change driven over time by evolutionary processes. the environmental conditions change, and a given organism either has the right traits to thrive in the new environment, or it does not, and dies. information, then, has a evolutionary value; higher-valued information survives at the cost of lower-valued. marketplace rhetoric perhaps not coincidentally, “information has value” is now a part of the 2014 framework, added for the second draft published in may. “information has value” is one the six frames around which the new model of information literacy is built. in this section, the phrase “information ecosystem” does not appear. instead, the metaphor used is “information marketplace.” the neoliberal connotations of the “information marketplace,” in a section titled “information has value,” are too obvious to require much discussion. neoliberal discourse tends to reduce everything to markets, and information is no exception. indeed, both “information marketplace” and “information ecosystem” work in very similar ways. both “marketplace” and “ecosystem” are vague metaphors suggesting an ability to model the interaction of its contents, if not see it all at once. both suggest that within that space interactions are continually taking place the result of which defines the value of the components interacting. in an “information marketplace,” information has value only to the point that the owner and the purchaser agree it does; moreover, that value is constantly compared to the value of other pieces of information. in an “information ecosystem” information has value only to the point that it is adapted to the current environmental conditions. in both, value is defined by comparison and equivalence; without those there is no way to define value. the compatibility of these two models — the environment and the marketplace — is well-documented in historical literature. for elites, the evolutionary model has served to retroactively justify the hierarchy of society — the wealthiest and the most successful must have been the most fit, while those in ranks below were progressively less fit. similarly, a marketplace rewards, impartially, the most valuable goods. these two models have popped up throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century whenever someone wanted to justify existing conditions as natural and proper. and even herbert spencer saw them as intimately connected, he believed that civilized societies eventually ceased to struggle through warfare and instead competed in the marketplace. the market was thus a natural outgrowth of evolutionary processes.12 such an uncritical approach to how we describe information thus serves to justify its current state. information today is largely a commodity. we have an internet that continually walls off portions: newspaper subscriptions, digital versions of books, and especially scholarly publications. the portions that are free we tell students to look upon with suspicion. consider this: an encyclopedia exists on the internet, free to access, free for anyone to correct or to comment upon, and in many different languages. we view it with suspicion precisely because it is open and free. suspicion of free sources extends beyond wikipedia. at an information literacy instruction workshop for teachers i attended this summer, the instructors wanted to discuss “authority” and how we teach it to students. they gave us two items about wind turbines: one the front page of a scholarly journal article, the other a printout of someone’s blog about the health effects they’d experienced from living near a wind farm. you didn’t need to read the text to just infer from the layout that it was the former which was “authoritative.” the blog’s design, in contrast, would be familiar to anyone who was on blogger circa 2008: blog title and description in a too-large rectangular box at the top of the page, fonts suitable for viewing on low-resolution devices like a budget mid-2000s pc monitor. read the blog. read a few posts from 2009 or so, when the author was posting regularly. put yourself in their shoes. some quick impressions: they live in the ontario countryside, they have a wind turbine near them and they don’t understand it. they try to communicate, not just through the blog but in other ways, but the very medium of their communication marks them as not to be taken seriously. consider just this post: a neighbor has written to the local government and “nik,” with the neighbor’s permission, reprints the piece. the neighbor writes at the end “please don’t get us wrong we are all for green energy anything to help the planet it has been damaged enough, but when do we say wait a minute our health and way of life comes first.” they understand the justification for the wind turbines, but they don’t have a voice beyond their neighbor’s blog and a letter that may or may not have been read by local officials. nik and his neighbor have run afoul of ideas we take for granted about the relative value of information. because the format and the context of their writing is irregular, the content is automatically discounted. scholarly articles have passed a competitive process of peer review. the precisely-formatted pages of the journal becomes, in theory, the outward sign of the article’s innate value. but in an ecosystem or a marketplace of information it is precisely the format and context that is valued. because something is on a free blog whose template hasn’t been changed since 2008 it is automatically of less worth than a paywalled academic article. “marketplaces” and “ecosystems” of information thus serve to justify existing inequalities of access, both to content and to publication.13 credentialism we know that by privileging design and credentials over content we obscure these power relations, and that reliance on appeals to “expertise” and “authority” is an important feature of neoliberal rhetoric. and yet, teaching students to identify the outward forms of reliable information is key to to the whole concept of information literacy. since students cannot yet judge the contents of a scholarly work without prior experience in that field, we show them how to first identify the credentials that indicate that a work is scholarly. the 2014 framework, like any other information literacy standards, must confront this paradox. the “authority is contextual and constructed” frame takes on the problem in the most direct way. it acknowledges credentialism to be only a substitute for expertise: “the novice researcher may need to rely on superficial indicators of authority such as type of publication or author credentials where experts recognize schools of thought or discipline-specific paradigms.” to equate expertise with “recognizing schools of thought or discipline-specific paradigms” is just to make it a slightly more sophisticated form of credentialism. to be sure, it’s a step towards expertise. real academic expertise is born from immersion in a subject to the point that the meanings of these labels break down. what this threshold concept offers is not expertise, but the credentialism of first-year graduate students establishing their internal pecking order over a pitcher of beer. together the six frames describe the signs by which we know that a student has passed from “novice” to “expert.” but “expert” is never defined. instead, each frame contains a brief description of how an expert understands information. among these descriptions are: “the expert understands that there may not be a single uncontested answer to a query and, hence, is inclined to seek out the many perspectives in a scholarly conversation, not merely the one with which the expert already agrees.” “experts see inquiry as a process that focuses on problems or questions in a discipline or between disciplines that are open or unresolved.” “experts understand that authority is the degree of trust that is bestowed and as such, authority is both contextual and constructed.” “the expert understands that the quality and usefulness of a given piece of information is determined by the processes that went into making it.” these descriptions represent improvement over how many incoming college students understand information. yet the “expert” described in the 2014 framework is really no more competent than the “information-literate student” that is the subject of the 2000 standards. the difference is in the verbs: the “expert” understands, the “information-literate student” merely does. the expertise offered by the framework is at best a first step. further, the framework still neglects the power relations that govern access to the resources necessary to take part in the process of becoming expert. seale’s argument about the standards holds true for the framework: without discussion of the causes of specific inequalities, the discussion slides towards a blame of the individual for not taking advantage of the opportunity to become information-literate. the framework and the walled garden this article has so far highlighted the continuities between the framework and earlier standards for information literacy. but there is one particular difference that i would like to explore. all the acrl’s information literacy documents since 1989 have invoked the threat of a looming crisis in order to spur action. in previous documents this crisis has been the a crisis of overabundance: the “proliferating information resources” of the standards or the “mushroom[ing] beyond everyone’s wildest imagination” of the 1998 progress report. the framework, in contrast, threatens us not with overwhelming information, but with merely a “rapidly changing higher education environment” and “dynamic and often uncertain information ecosystem.” this change in rhetoric likely results from the segregation of “reliable” resources from the rest of the internet over the past fifteen years. scholarly journals are hidden from public view within subscription databases. major newspapers put their archives in those same databases and their current articles behind paywalls. librarians make of these databases a virtue, telling students that by using them they will find only reliable sources. and when we do admit that reliable work can be found beyond our databases, we show them google scholar, itself designed to search only for scholarly sources. the framework thus not only assumes but is predicated upon the continuance of the current system of walled gardens. its conception of information literacy is about knowing not how but where to find gold untainted by dross. it redefines expertise as little more than knowing how to find one’s way around these walled gardens, and to identify when one has stepped outside. in short, the “information ecosystem” and “information marketplace” metaphors naturalize the enclosure of what might instead have been a commons. conclusion i was inspired to write this article by nina de jesus’s original outline for “locating the library within institutional oppression.” at the conclusion of that outline, de jesus argues that libraries are potentially key tools of oppression because they target the mind. i believe that relative to its overall place within the library, information literacy is of outsize importance as a potential tool of oppression. information literacy does not merely target the contents of the mind but consciously tries to change individuals’ cognitive processes. this is especially true of the 2014 framework, which hinges on “threshold concepts” — “those ideas in any discipline that are passageways or portals to enlarged understanding or ways of thinking and practicing within that discipline.” in this article i have tried to show why it is important for librarians to resist the neoliberal rhetoric of information literacy, and the particulars of that rhetoric deployed by the framework. the framework insists on its own necessity due to a supposed crisis. by describing information as embedded in an “ecosystem” or a “marketplace” it naturalizes the present condition of information scarcity. and it makes of that scarcity a virtue by using it as a credential of authority. the alternative is to resist, for ourselves and for our students, by insisting on the possibility of a true commons of information, and by denying the supposed inevitability of neoliberal values and neoliberal librarianship. the author gratefully acknowledges the efforts of publishing editor cecily walker, internal peer reviewer ellie collier, and external peer reviewers nate enright and maura seale. works cited american library association. “information literacy competency standards for higher education,” 2000. https://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/105645. association of college and research libraries. “a progress report on information literacy: an update on the american library association presidential committee on information literacy: final report,” march 1998. http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/progressreport. ———. “framework for information literacy for higher education (revised draft),” june 2014. ———. “presidential committee on information literacy: final report.” accessed september 19, 2014. http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/presidential. bourg, chris. “the neoliberal library: resistance is not futile.” feral librarian, january 16, 2014. http://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/the-neoliberal-library-resistance-is-not-futile/. claeys, gregory. “the ‘survival of the fittest’ and the origins of social darwinism.” journal of the history of ideas 61, no. 2 (april 2000): 223. doi:10.2307/3654026. cowan, susanna m. “information literacy: the battle we won that we lost?” portal: libraries and the academy 14, no. 1 (2014): 23–32. davenport, thomas h. “the bigger picture.” cio, may 15, 1997. davies, will, and tom mills. “neoliberalism and the end of politics.” new left project, august 22, 2014. http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/neoliberalism_and_the_end_of_politics. deleuze, gilles. “postscript on the societies of control.” october 59 (winter 1992): 3–7. fister, barbara. “the illogical complexity of the walled-garden library.” library babel fish, september 19, 2013. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/illogical-complexity-walled-garden-library. harvey, david. “neoliberalism as creative destruction.” the annals of the american academy of political and social science 610, no. 1 (march 1, 2007): 21–44. doi:10.1177/0002716206296780. hawkins, mike. social darwinism in european and american thought, 1860-1945: nature as model and nature as threat. new york: cambridge university press, 1997. jacobs, heidi l. m. “minding the gaps.” communications in information literacy 7, no. 2 (2013). moore, james f. “predators and prey: a new ecology of competition.” harvard business review 71, no. 3 (1993): 75–86. nik. “my next door neighbour is a wind turbine,” 2009-2013. http://mywinddiary.blogspot.com. “petition on the acrl framework,” 2014. https://co1.qualtrics.com/se/?sid=sv_3lwyiplypvmhgnp&q_jfe=0&q_skin=qualtrics%7cmq%7caccessible. pierce-moses, richard. “the information ecology of archives.” crm 21, no. 6 (1998): 29–33. saunders, daniel b. “neoliberal ideology and public higher education in the united states.” journal for critical education policy studies 8, no. 1 (2010): 41–77. seale, maura. “the neoliberal library.” in information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis, edited by lua gregory and shana higgins, 39–61. sacramento, calif.: library juice press, 2013. vogt-o’connor, diane. “the information ecosystem.” crm 21, no. 6 (1998): 3–6. as information literacy standards are added to general education and college accreditation requirements, librarians gain a voice on the committees that shape those standards. yet their very prominence also means that information literacy can come to define the library’s relationship with the larger institution. see susanna m. cowan, “information literacy: the battle we won that we lost?,” portal: libraries and the academy 14, no. 1 (2014): 23–32. thanks to maura seale for pointing out that not all academic library instruction programs are so tied to the acrl’s standards. [↩] maura seale, “the neoliberal library,” in information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis, ed. lua gregory and shana higgins (sacramento, calif.: library juice press, 2013), 51. homo oeconomus refers to the model humans used in many modern economic theories, always acting with rational disinterest to better their own state. seale draws on daniel b. saunders, “neoliberal ideology and public higher education in the united states,” journal for critical education policy studies 8, no. 1 (2010): 41–77. [↩] seale, “the neoliberal library,” 40-46. [↩] the framework is as of this writing (september 2014) still a work in progress. a first draft was released in february 2014, a second draft in june, and a third draft is scheduled to appear in november. [↩] in particular, heidi jacobs has advocated an information literacy that focuses not on outcomes but on “habits of mind,” parallels to which can be seen in the “dispositions” and “threshold concepts” of the framework. jacobs argues that teaching habits of mind is potentially democratizing. see heidi l. m. jacobs, “minding the gaps,” communications in information literacy 7, no. 2 (2013): 103. [↩] disclaimer: i have signed the petition linked in this paragraph. [↩] david harvey, “neoliberalism as creative destruction,” the annals of the american academy of political and social science 610, no. 1 (march 1, 2007): 37, doi:10.1177/0002716206296780. [↩] gilles deleuze, “postscript on the societies of control,” october 59 (winter 1992): 4. [↩] see also. [↩] james f. moore, “predators and prey: a new ecology of competition,” harvard business review 71, no. 3 (1993): 76, 79. [↩] gregory claeys, “the ‘survival of the fittest’ and the origins of social darwinism,” journal of the history of ideas 61, no. 2 (april 2000): 223, doi:10.2307/3654026. [↩] mike hawkins, social darwinism in european and american thought, 1860-1945: nature as model and nature as threat (new york: cambridge university press, 1997): 86. hawkins also notes (p.153) that karl marx, a rather well-known critic of the marketplace, rejected the possibility that biological laws could be fruitfully applied to the study of human societies. thanks to ellen adams for the reference. [↩] this also serves to explain the failure of institutional repositories to gain faculty support. many publishers only allow preprints or postprints to be uploaded. a word document in twelve-point double-spaced times new roman must be unconsciously undervalued by scholars compared to a traditionally-formatted journal article. (note: the author manages an institutional repository, and has had no more luck than anyone else in overcoming this bias). [↩] editorial: open for business – why in the library with the lead pipe is moving to cc-by licensing locating the library in institutional oppression 4 responses pingback : bulletin de veille de tribune ci | tribune compétences informationnelles alecto 2014–11–27 at 9:49 pm having finally found time to read this article, i love it. concepts i’m not completely familiar with but they resonate. how helpful would it be to teach this kind of critical thinking in library and information science cources?! it would enable us (or me) to resist the panic that intimations of crisis invoke and respond (or not) to developments in considered ways. pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » beyond the threshold: conformity, resistance, and the acrl information literacy framework for higher education pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » editorial: these are a few of our favorite things this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a librarian’s guide to 332.024 – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 21 jan brett bonfield /3 comments a librarian’s guide to 332.024 money grab by steve wampler / cc-by-nc by brett bonfield i want you to think rationally about money. that’s my goal for this article. after you read it, i want you to feel more in control. that sounds easy, but it’s hard to think clearly when it comes to money. daniel kahneman was awarded a nobel prize in 2002 for his work in documenting our irrationality, and ivy league professors have written bestsellers about it, including irrational exuberance, predictably irrational, and why smart people make big money mistakes. it’s tempting to bury our heads in the sand. “money,” we want to tell ourselves, and anyone who comes to the library in search of answers, “can’t buy happiness. plus, it’s the root of all evil. best not to think about it.” after all, it’s not like we went into librarianship in order to get rich. and if we were good at thinking about money and enjoyed it, we probably would have become accountants or bankers or entrepreneurs. i’m not suggesting that we’re innumerate, only that most of us prefer to think about other things. still, that doesn’t let librarians off the hook. about 80% of us are in the 25% tax bracket, which means we should have enough to save and invest, and not just in our retirement plans. we may not feel like saving money is an option for us, especially in this economy, but if you’re concerned about our economic future, the viability of social security, or outliving your savings, then you have a strong incentive to educate yourself about your money. it can be comforting, but also startling, to realize how well off we really are.1 we also owe it to our constituents: our neighbors, students, faculty members, and colleagues. there is a great deal of discussion about the economy, and there are good reasons to be concerned, but many people have a difficult time distinguishing between good reasons and bad reasons. they also have a tough time understanding the magnitude of these issues or what they, personally, can do about them. as librarians, we help people undermine fear and ignorance by providing them with the tools to educate themselves. unfortunately, we’re not doing quite as well as one might hope.2 i won’t be discussing economics in this article, but i will discuss personal finance. some of the topics i’ll discuss relate to the economy as a whole, though most will be about you and the people you see at the library, because we can do better for them and we can do better for ourselves. imagine if we went to the mall and paid cover price on all the books, movies, and music we purchased for our collections. that would be rational compared to the way many of handle financial decisions.3 disclaimer no one has certified that i know what i’m talking about when it comes to personal finance, investing, insurance, shopping, or anything else that involves spending or saving money. in other words, these are my opinions: agree with me at your own risk. that aside, it’s a topic that has interested me for some time, and my understanding of personal finance has enabled me to do things i wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. it hasn’t made me a lot of money—my small investments have served me reasonably well, but i don’t expect to retire young. however, unlike most people, i almost never worry about money. i’ve also helped family members and friends alleviate their own concerns. a few basic questions come up a lot when i talk to people about money. i’ve started with the ones that have short, easy answers—where should i start? what are the first things i should do? what do you recommend i read?—and then i move onto the longer ones that require a bit of explaining. books every library should own, and every librarian should be familiar with, the latest version of andrew tobias’s the only investment guide you’ll ever need and burton malkiel’s a random walk down wall street. all the rest is commentary. and there’s plenty of it, most of it overly simplistic, overly complicated, speculative, or easily refutable.4 tobias’s book, which was first published in 1978 and is now on its fourth edition, is especially easy for beginners. he doesn’t assume that you know anything in particular, he avoids charts and graphs, and he keeps things light and entertaining. malkiel’s book, which was first published in 1973 and is now in its ninth edition, is a bit more academic and focuses primarily on investing (as opposed to saving, insurance, and other aspects of personal finance), but it’s also a comfortable read, especially after tobias gives you the lay of the land. each of these books has sold well over a million copies. insurance a lot of people, when they think about personal finance, spend a lot of time on the best things that might happen: winning the lottery, finding the next google, inheriting millions from a long-lost relative, finding a kernel of useful investing advice in the mainstream business media. that’s human nature. we lead active fantasy lives. the reality is that it’s more rational to prepare for the worst things that can happen—an expensive illness, a disability that prevents you from working, your own death (if people you love depend on your income)—because they’re a lot more likely than the best things. if you’re alive, insure your health; if someone else depends on your income, buy (term) life insurance. if you own a car or a house, insure it. disability insurance is usually a good idea; long-term care insurance and an umbrella policy may make sense as well. if your job provides these benefits, so much the better, but make sure that you understand what you’re getting and that you have enough coverage to meet your needs. i’m not suggesting that you should buy more than you need—the goal is to buy just enough to cover your expenses—but you (and your employer) absolutely should buy insurance from a company with a strong financial rating and a good record for honoring its commitments. the point of insurance is for the insurer to give you money when you make a claim: if it goes belly up, or shirks its responsibility, you might as well have not even bothered. as far as honoring commitments, consumer reports regularly surveys its members about their insurers, and j.d. power conducts annual evaluations. unfortunately, guessing which insurers will be around long-term has gotten dicier lately, especially because the agencies who rate insurance companies’ stability have had their own credibility called into question, which is all the more reason to make sure your insurers are rated highly by a.m. best, fitch, moody’s (free registration required), standard & poor’s, and thestreet.com ratings (formerly weiss). yes, there’s a chance that all five could be wrong, but it seems less likely than one or two of them overestimating an insurer’s long-term viability. planning for many people, money and stress are like “jacknifed” and “tractor trailer”: they don’t think of one without thinking of the other. in my experience, there are a few things you can do to take a bit of the stress out of dealing with money. the first is education. my hope is that reading this article, and reading the articles i’ve linked to and books i’ve recommended, will make you feel more sure of yourself. it’s also important to have the discipline to spend less than you make. much less, if possible. one way to help control spending is by making a list of the things you want to buy. do you want a house, a car, fashionable clothing, vacations, cable television, presents for your friends, veterinary care for your pet, meals at nice restaurants? probably, and likely many other goodies as well. prioritize your list. figure out how much each thing will cost you. figure out how often and how long it makes sense to delay gratification. always remember that items on the list are more important than anything that isn’t on the list. if at all possible, it make sense to establish an emergency fund with at least three to six months of living expenses, perhaps more if you have children. put your rainy-day fund somewhere safe where your money will be working for you, such as a savings or money market account, and, as the name implies, don’t touch it except in an emergency. along with educating yourself, spending less than you make, and maintaining a rainy day fund, the other important way to minimize financial stress is to avoid bad debt. credit card debt, auto loans, consumer loans… these are not good debt: the interest rates tend to be high and you can’t deduct the interest like you can with a mortgage or a student loan. though even for tax advantaged loans like mortgages and education, make sure that you shop around for the lowest rates, learn about refinancing mortgages and consolidating student loans, and that you pay off even these debts as quickly as makes sense. wills, etc. in sweet and low, rich cohen does a great job of documenting how his family, the founders of the sweet’n low company, allowed money to drive a wedge between parents, children, siblings, and cousins. it happens all the time: to my mother (twice), to my father, to my best friend. as with the cohens, the money wasn’t really the issue, and anyway it wasn’t enough to justify a lawsuit. but that doesn’t diminish the pain of having your sibling manipulate you, of having your stepmother subvert your father’s wishes, of having your stepfather mishandle the modest estate your mother spent a lifetime carefully stewarding. in many ways, the fact that not all that much money is involved only magnifies the pain. there are ways to avoid these situations. not perfect solutions—in each of the above instances, there was a will involved—but having a will and other directives in place lessens the likelihood of your instructions being disregarded. nolo has a useful website, with a very good section on wills and estate planning that includes a clear explanation of nolo’s inexpensive, clearly written guides, and also includes a directory of wills, trusts, and estate lawyers. you may also want to familiarize yourself with the internet legal research group‘s legal forms archive and with findlaw, both of which offer forms online for free. ultimately, your goal is to have a will, a durable power of attorney, a healthcare proxy, and a letter of instruction. retirement plans you probably have access to a 403(b), a 457, or a 401(k). the first is for employees at nonprofits, including those who work at educational institutions, the second is for government employees (many public libraries fall into this category), and the third is for people who work at for-profit corporations. a retirement plan is a container, like a building. that building could house a library or it could house a wal-mart. so if you ask someone if they’re saving for retirement, and they tell you they have a 401(k) and leave it at that, they either don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re blowing you off. employers hire companies to handle their retirement plans for them. the ones you hope your employer has hired are vanguard and tiaa-cref5 because they’re huge and stable, they’re the lowest-cost providers in the industry, and they’re both essentially nonprofits.6 if your employer is using anyone but vanguard or tiaa-cref, ask them to switch if they can’t explain why their current provider is a better choice. this actually worked for me once.7 the only potential gotcha: depending on the number of people who participate in your employer’s retirement plan, you may be too small for vanguard or tiaa-cref. if that’s the case, encourage your employer to use employee fiduciary as a low-cost intermediary.8 if these are not options, or if you’re able to reserve additional funds for retirement savings, consider a roth or traditional ira. if possible, set it up so that money for retirement is automatically deducted from your paychecks. in that way, you get in the habit of paying yourself first. investing sometimes, instead of saying “i have an ira” or “i have a 401(k),” people say, “i’m in mutual funds.” once again, they’re either clueless or think you are. mutual funds are like libraries. just as libraries can house books, dvds, cds, and many other types of objects, depending on their charter mutual funds can invest in stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, or other assets. some of them only hold u.s. stocks, some of them only hold non-u.s. stocks. some of them hold whatever their manager thinks is appropriate. mutual funds’ holdings are owned by the people who invest in them. in general, it makes sense to determine what you should invest in—usually a mix of stock mutual funds, bond mutual funds, and real estate mutual funds—and put your money into those funds with the very lowest overhead (i.e vanguard or tiaa-cref). any investment company will help you determine the right mix for you, and they’ll do it for free, either in person, over the phone, or online. malkiel also does a good job of walking you through the process in his book. the idea behind this sort of asset allocation is that it helps you manage risk. in general, bonds carry less risk than stocks, which is why bonds typically have more consistent returns from year to year, but stocks have higher returns on average.9 for people who won’t need the money for a while and can wait out the bad stretches, it makes sense to invest mostly in mutual funds that focus on stocks. keep in mind that the bad stretches can last for a decade or more: japan’s stock market currently trades at 20% of the value it attained in 1990. for retirees who need the money for living expenses, or people approaching retirement, it makes sense to invest most of your money in mutual funds that focus on bonds. as you get closer to retirement, you change your target mix, gradually, from mostly stocks to mostly bonds. having a target mix—for instance, 60% stocks, 25% bonds, 10% real estate, and 5% cash—also helps you buy low and sell high. rather than trying to guess if stocks or bonds are going to do better, you automatically buy the funds in your asset mix. every year or so, you check to see if one of your asset classes is doing especially well or especially badly. for instance, maybe stocks have been going through such a bad stretch that, even though you’ve been putting 60% of your money into it, your stock mutual fund now represents only 45% of your holdings. having a target mix would help you have the discipline to sell enough of your bond and real estate mutual funds to get your stock fund back up to 60%. investors, in aggregate, do not have the discipline to sell high and buy low; in fact, as an often cited study called “quantitative analysis of investor behavior” reveals, most investors do the opposite: they buy just before bubbles burst and sell just before recoveries. you can automate your rebalancing by investing in vanguard’s target retirement funds or tiaa-cref’s lifecycle funds. you pick the year you expect to retire and the company does the allocation and rebalancing for you. indexing let’s say you had to run a library all by yourself and had almost no money with which to do it. you could install self-checkout machines, have all reference questions handled remotely, and set up standing orders for shelf-ready books, such as anything that made the best-seller list or was included in the appropriate core collection. that was the idea behind the first index fund, the vanguard 500, which started in 1976. rather than researching which stocks to buy, vanguard founder john bogle set up his mutual fund to buy everything in the standard & poor’s 500 index, a collection of 500 large companies whose aggregated stock prices are intended to mirror the u.s. stock market as a whole. by eliminating research and other overhead charges, bogle found that he could generate returns that did better than most other mutual funds, often much better. today, there are low-cost index funds that track most segments of the market. for many people, that’s the easiest way to get consistent returns in the asset classes it makes sense for them to hold. hiring an advisor if you aren’t investing directly in an index fund, you’re either picking your own stocks and bonds (which is almost always a bad idea, even for professionals) or you’re using an advisor to pick your investments for you. some people aren’t going to be satisfied with tobias or malkiel, or they don’t have the attention span to read about personal finance, or they feel so overwhelmed by money that it shorts out their ability to think rationally. for these folks, hiring an advisor probably makes sense (though if they haven’t read a book like tobias’s or malkiel’s, it’s going to be awfully difficult for them to know if their advisors are doing a good job). as i mentioned, vanguard and tiaa-cref (and pretty much every other investment company) will give you free advice if you use their services. you can also get very good advice at an online forum called bogleheads.org (formerly known as vanguard diehards). if you want to pay someone to manage your investments, and you have a pretty fair nest egg (minimum amounts vary), the low-cost advisors that seem to get a consensus of support at bogleheads.org are portfolio solutions, evanson asset management, and cardiff park advisors, roughly in that order. for those with a bit less money, bogleheads posters seem to like a new advisor called assetbuilder, which was co-founded by investment writer scott burns. for those with a bit more money, the posters also like buckingham asset management. if you don’t have enough money to meet these advisors’ minimums, or if you want to work with someone in person, you have two reasonable options. one would be to hire a local, fee-only advisor. rather than getting paid a percentage of your assets, or taking a commission each time you make a trade, fee-only advisors negotiate their fee up front. to find a fee-only advisor, go to the website for the national association of personal financial advisors and select “find an advisor.” the alternative would be to work with a more traditional broker who can help guide you into mutual funds that make sense for you. these brokers get a percentage of the money you invest each time you buy a mutual fund (or a high commission on your stock trades). as a rule, this isn’t a good deal for many investors because these brokers only get paid when you trade, so they tend to find excuses to move your money around. an exception to this rule is edward jones, whose brokers have a good record of encouraging investors to buy solid mutual funds and hold them long term. there’s one other avenue for hiring an advisor that may make sense. the alternative to indexing—investing in a mutual fund that mechanically buys the stocks or bond or other assets that make up its index—you can invest in a mutual fund in which managers use their judgment to decide what to buy. there are thousands of managed mutual funds to choose from—even vanguard offers them, and most tiaa-cref funds are managed as well. the key, as always, is to keep costs down and to limit risk as much as possible. for that reason, if you aren’t going to go with an index fund, choose a fund that has had the same manager (or management team) for a decade or more, ideally a manager who owns the company and whose record is considered legendary. martin whitman, who founded and manages the third avenue value fund, fits that description, as do the partners of tweedy, browne, who manage three mutual funds. if you’re thinking about investing with third avenue, read whitman’s books and his last several shareholder letters; if you’re thinking about tweedy, browne, read the material in the research and reports area of their website.10 if you’re unconvinced, confused, or bored to tears, stick to index funds. socially responsible investing i’ve been a vegetarian for twenty years, so it’s hard for me to get excited when mcdonald’s is helping to prop up the indexes. i have a good friend who’s a big linux advocate; he’d love to see microsoft go out of business. both mcdonald’s and microsoft are members of the dow, the s&p 500, and most other major indexes. what to do? a popular sub-industry known as socially responsible investing attempts to fill this breach. you can read up on social investing at socialfunds.com and the social investment forum. you might also want to check out the largest players in the field, calvert investments and domini social investments. for those people whose employers offer tiaa-cref 401(k), 403(b), or 457 plans, there’s the cref social choice account, which invests in a mix of stocks and bonds; for those who invest in tiaa-cref directly through mutual funds (or through a keogh or sep-ira), there’s social choice equity, which invests only in stocks. vanguard offers a social index fund that invests in a modified version of the ftse4good index series. one of the main problems with social investing is revealed by mark pilgrim’s joke about unicode: i was walking across a bridge one day, and i saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. so i ran over and said, “stop! don’t do it!” “i can’t help it,” he cried. “i’ve lost my will to live.” “what do you do for a living?” i asked. he said, “i create web services specifications.” “me too!” i said. “do you use rest web services or soap web services?” he said, “rest web services.” “me too!” i said. “do you use text-based xml or binary xml?” he said, “text-based xml.” “me too!” i said. “do you use xml 1.0 or xml 1.1?” he said, “xml 1.0.” “me too!” i said. “do you use utf-8 or utf-16?” he said, “utf-8.” “me too!” i said. “do you use unicode normalization form c or unicode normalization form kc?” he said, “unicode normalization form kc.” “die, heretic scum!” i shouted, and i pushed him over the edge. it’s tough, perhaps impossible, to find a set of screens that block out the companies you want blocked out (i’ve never seen a screen that blocks out microsoft, which my friend considers heresy) and also lets in enough companies to offer a diverse set of investments (and if you don’t have a diverse set of investments you’re taking on an awful lot of risk). in addition, it’s expensive to pay people to review pretty much everything about any company that might not pass social muster. as an investor, you pay those expenses. it might be worth it to you—i happen to be a big fan of the cref social choice account—but there’s a chance the fees you pay are hurting you long-term. finally, there’s no overwhelming evidence that social investing changes the world in ways that social investors want it changed—but then, i haven’t seen as much evidence as i’d like to see about libraries and librarians making the world a better place. some of us still think it’s worth doing, but that doesn’t mean people should feel bad about investing in regular indexes (or going to the bookstore or using netflix). one final thought on investing, specifically social investing: giving back is a great way to invest in our common future. i’ve worked most of my adult life in nonprofits, mostly as a fundraiser. i won’t make suggestions about which organizations are deserving of contributions, but i urge you to make donating to worthy organizations one of your priorities. i also suggest answering the following questions: does it make sense to give a little bit of money to a lot of different organizations or larger amounts to fewer organizations? does it make sense to give them money in cash, on a credit card, or through a stock transfer? could you do more good by setting up a personal foundation or donor-advised fund (it’s easier and requires less money than you might imagine)? ultimately, the key is to feel confident in all of your choices regarding money, to understand them and, ideally, to educate those around you. this is what we, as librarians, have to offer. thanks to jeff bonfield, w. keith mccoy, mike overholt, and bill white for reading an early draft of this article, and to my itlwtlp colleague, kim leeder, for helping me with its final version. in 2006, the most recent year for which data is readily available, for the 25% tax bracket the lower bound was $30,650 and the upper bound was $74,200. according to the bls, in 2006, “the lowest 10 percent (of librarians) earned less than $30,930, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $74,670.” so we’re within a rounding error of matching both boundaries of the 25% tax bracket. while we may not think of ourselves that way, the 25% bracket might well be considered rich. it certainly would be in a global sense: according to data available at the world bank’s povcalnet, a librarian making $30,930 would have a higher annual income than 99% of the people throughout the developing world (follow the link to povcal, select worldbank’s regional aggregation, select 2005 as the reference year, and select this librarian’s average monthly earnings, $2,577.50, as the poverty line). it could also be considered rich domestically: in 2006, 68% of the the population made less. note: for the sake of simplicity, and except for the world bank statistics, all number are from u.s. and refer to “unmarried individuals (other than surviving spouse and heads of households)” because we’re comparing tax brackets for individuals to individual (librarians’) incomes (for that reason, capital gains are also excluded). the 68% figure refers to the number of “unmarried individuals” who did not earn enough to qualify for the 25% tax bracket; among all tax payers, 64% were below 25%. [↩] for instance, warren buffett’s partner, charles munger, is one of the world’s most respected investors. his talks, lectures and public commentary have been collected in poor charlie’s almanack, which features a foreword by buffett. in his most recent letter to berkshire hathaway shareholders (february 2008), buffett wrote, “without any advertising or bookstore placement, charlie’s book has now remarkably sold nearly 50,000 copies.” it is held by 67 worldcat libraries, which isn’t bad, but we could be doing a lot better. (by way of comparison, the underground islamic punk novel, the taqwacores, was held by 64 worldcat libraries when last i checked.) [↩] just to be clear, i’m not picking on librarians. irrationality affects everyone, even the world’s best programmers. to combat it’s employees’ irrationality, google, when it was preparing to go public, did a sort of workplace wellness program, only instead of being about physical health its program was about personal finance. an article by mark dowie describing google’s personal finance education program is a nice primer on this topic. [↩] which isn’t to say that no one else has anything useful or interesting to say about money. among my favorite writers in this area are warren buffett, john bogle, and william bernstein—and those are just a few of the b’s. but most people will get most of what they need if they stick to the books i’ve recommended by tobias and malkiel. [↩] see “yale money whiz shares tips on growing a nest egg.” [↩] vanguard is mutually owned by the people who use vanguard to handle their investments; tiaa-cref lost its federal tax-exemption in 1998, but is still run by not-for-profit corporations and retains its nonprofit structure. [↩] dan otter, founder of the 403(b)wise and 457(b)wise websites, has additional recommendations. [↩] if your employer is too small to participate in a vanguard or tiaa-cref 401(k), 403(b), or 457, they may be eligible for a sep-ira or simple ira. in addition, in case you some day find yourself suggesting resources for someone who is self-employed, or if you’re thinking about starting your own business, be sure to investigate keogh and solo 401(k) plans as well as seps and simples. call the vanguard or tiaa-cref to explore these options. [↩] bonds are ious; when you buy them, you’re betting that a company will be able to pay you back. stocks are an ownership interest in a company. if a company is doing well, and making a lot of profit, it’s more valuable to own the company than to be owed money by the company. however, when a company isn’t doing well, especially if it looks like it may go bankrupt, you’re better off being owed money by the company because, if it needs to, it can sell its assets in order to pay a portion of its ious. [↩] in addition, if you go with third avenue or tweedy, browne, you might want to be begin thinking about a back-up plan: third avenue’s martin whitman is 84 years old, and the partners at tweedy, browne are approaching retirement age as well [↩] andrew tobias, burton malkiel, insurance, investing, money, personal finance, retirement, tiaa-cref, vanguard a look at recessions and their impact on librarianship narrating the “back story” through e-learning resources in libraries 3 responses emily ford 2009–01–21 at 10:58 am this post is really going to come in handy for me… thanks for such a thoughtful (and readable!) article. i especially like your comparison to libraries and librarianship to explain investments and other concepts. i think you’re right in that we librarians generally aren’t great with personal finance. at least, i haven’t seen much or heard much discussion of it in professional circles and publications. does it come back to the nature of our profession, to serve and assist others? in any case, kudos to you and thanks for kicking my butt in gear. ellie 2009–01–21 at 12:29 pm agreed, thanks for this, i’ll be forwarding this to our economics bibliographer too. carolyn wood 2009–01–22 at 6:41 pm thank you for the refresher! the importance of financial literacy in today’s economic climate is worthy of the profession’s time and talent in my opinion. programming partnerships may provide a cost-effective first step in public and academic libraries. i also visualize an opportunity to increase financial literacy for teen through some type of financial literacy portal. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct narrating the “back story” through e-learning resources in libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 28 jan hyun-duck chung and kim duckett /14 comments narrating the “back story” through e-learning resources in libraries we at in the library with the lead pipe are happy to welcome two guest authors to our blog! hyun-duck chung and kim duckett are two of our creative and inspiring colleagues at the north carolina state university libraries. read on to learn more… by hyun-duck chung and kim duckett lately we’ve been thinking a lot about the creation and re-use of online instructional content in libraries. to be more precise, we’ve been thinking about categories that might characterize the instructional intent behind some of this content creation. a casual survey of materials online suggests that much of the content focuses on how to use a tool, or how to follow a process. there seems to be less content that helps explain why the information landscape is organized the way it is. this background explanation, or “back story” can be useful in contextualizing how information is created, debated, vetted, and why we find information the way we do. in this way it also has the potential to help student researchers become more critical of their search for, and use of, information.  in this post we discuss our experience of providing the back story of peer review using an e-learning resource. but first, let’s take a brief look at the growing interest in e-learning resources in libraries today. e-learning resources in libraries “e-learning resources” is our shorthand for describing asynchronous, web-based instructional content. in other words, media that is hosted and disseminated online for the purpose of teaching and learning in the form of html tutorials, interactive video, flash animations, screen captured presentations, and the like. instructional designers may use the term “learning objects,” but we do not use it here as it has been criticized for being overly broad and therefore less than useful.1  bell and shank prefer the phrase “digital learning materials,” but their definition emphasizes “interactivity” as a key defining character.2  while interactivity is certainly a worthwhile goal, many useful e-learning resources in libraries simply don’t meet this criteria so we’ve opted to use our own more inclusive term. regardless of terminology, we’re basically referring to the notion of modular web-based instructional content that may be re-used across multiple courses, course sections, disciplines and even among various libraries. librarians have been creating e-learning resources for years, but the importance of this type of library or user instruction appears to be growing. this trend can be seen in frequent discussion about technologies for creating e-learning resources on library listservs and blogs;3 popularity in the use of  screencasting tools such as camtasia studio, adobe captivate, jing, and qarbon viewlet builder; organized ways to share e-learning resources through repositories  like a.n.t.s.4  and merlot;5 programs that review, highlight and promote high-quality e-learning resources, such as the acrl primo database;6 and the publication of books that focus on best practices for designing e-learning resources. susan sharpless smith’s web-based instruction: a guide for libraries (2nd edition) and bell and shank’s academic librarianship by design are two well-known examples. the trend seems to be undeniable, but is this a useful trend? extending our reach through e-learning resources the proliferation of e-learning resources can perhaps be attributed, at least in part, to the useful potential they offer for greatly expanding the reach of a single instructor or instruction session. the one-on-one instruction or consultation at the reference desk relies on reaching only one person at a time and only those that approach the reference desk or library staff. one to one workshops or classroom instruction expands that reach to “one-to-many”, connecting with students who may not (understandably) consult or even know about the expertise of librarians by their own initiative. e-learning resources have the potential (with good quality, relevance, and proper marketing) to expand the reach even farther to “one-to-many-more,” helping librarians find an audience otherwise inaccessible. one to many more categories of e-learning resources since interest in e-learning resources continues to grow, we thought we’d better start thinking about them in more detail. recently, we sat down with colleagues at the ncsu libraries to categorize the kinds of e-learning resources we have been developing locally and those we’ve seen elsewhere. though the discussion is ongoing, to date we’ve come up with three categories that enable us to think more strategically about both the purpose and uses of these resources. here’s a list of our categories with examples from various libraries: category 1. teach students how to use a tool. this category includes screencasts and tutorials that show users how to search a particular database, the library catalog, or a library website: mergent quick start video guide linked with other guides from hyun-duck’s business plan research guide (ncsu libraries) z. smith reynolds library toolkit is a suite of short screencasts teaching users how to use features of article databases, the library catalog, and library website — what a great concept! (wake forest university library) category 2. help students with a process. resources in this category help learners with processes such as evaluating websites, creating citations, identifying a scholarly article online: anatomy of a scholarly article is an interactive guide identifying various parts of a scholarly article (ncsu libraries) citing information tutorial (unc libraries) category 3. provide students with more context to understand a process or concept — the back story for how information is created, vetted, stored, accessed, and used. resources in this category address social issues surrounding information and other scholarly communication topics: journal costs is a “sticker shock” website that exposes the costs of journals that are so often hidden from users (vanderbilt university library) primary or secondary is an interactive site that teaches users about primary and secondary sources (university of washington libraries) there certainly may be more categories than these and none of the above may be mutually exclusive. for instance, large-scale information literacy tutorials are typically a blend of more than one category. we hope that by teasing out the themes and intentions of various resources, we can better design them for use in more than one instructional context. librarians should strive to have the greatest impact from all the work and energy currently being invested into creating them. more back story please! from a very rough survey of e-learning resources online, the landscape seems to be dominated by the first two types of categories. perhaps this is because librarians have traditionally played a role in teaching students how to use specific kinds of tools to find information or to offer strategies for evaluating sources. it might also be that since libraries make these information resources available, we see it as our responsibility to help our users make use of them. but consider how librarians are uniquely positioned to design and develop e-learning resources that provide students with the back story about sources of information. such concepts are rarely covered by faculty instructors within a given academic discipline, yet they fall squarely in the realm of librarian expertise. most importantly, they help to explain realities that might otherwise seem odd to students. for example, why is so much importance given to finding “peer-reviewed” articles for an assignment? or why does google scholar sometimes ask for money and what should you do to get around it? without some background on how information and publishing “work” on the web, students may be just going through the motions of “how-to” find information without critically reflecting on the process of solving their information problem. providing learners with the back story enhances understanding and use of information. consider the pairs of questions below: how do i identify a scholarly, peer-reviewed article? vs. what is peer review and why is it important? how can i use wikipedia in my research? vs. how did the information get created in wikipedia? how do i get started with my literature review? vs. what is the role of a literature review in research? the pairings go hand-in-hand, yet often library e-learning resources are limited to answering the first questions in each set. why don’t we cover the second questions in as much depth? could we be making e-learning resources that provide more context? after all, understanding the back stories that address the second questions are fundamental to information literacy, participation in scholarly communication (especially for those students who will become part of it in a few short years), and most importantly, lifelong learning. they are also topics that span across many different learning scenarios and across institutional boundaries. for instance, peer review in five minutes since this notion of providing a back story can be slippery, let’s look at a concrete example where we tried to incorporate some of the ideas we’ve raised above. our interest in the back story led to our recent development of an e-learning module – an animation on the role of peer review in scholarly research. click to play peer review in 5 minutes students often come to the service desk seeking peer-reviewed articles as part of a class assignment. at this point the student may need help with accomplishing a number of tasks. perhaps they need help identifying or verifying that the article has been peer-reviewed, searching in article databases, or understanding what a peer-reviewed article is in the first place and why it is so important in academia. since we found existing e-learning resources addressing the first two needs, we saw an opportunity in meeting the third need through a new e-learning resource. we came up with the concept of peer review in 5 minutes – an animated video that would initiate students into one of the key facets of academic culture. following the addie model7 often used in instructional design, we based our design decisions on early input from potential users. since faculty members are often the most influential factor in motivating students to pursue learning activities, we conducted informal interviews with faculty from various academic disciplines to test our assumptions on the usefulness of our idea. the response was very positive and our open discussions helped us tease out the various aspects of peer review as a topic as well as identify specific and different disciplinary needs. a significant challenge we faced early in the process of creating the resource was scoping the content. from the broad array of ideas that came out of our interviews, zeroing in on what to include and exclude in a five minute video required an iterative process of thinking and re-thinking the goals of the video and defining our target users and their needs. in the end we decided to focus on providing a general overview of peer review for undergraduate students. since this project was our first experiment in animation, we wanted it to serve as a proof-of-concept for reaching learners in a new way and in turn acquire departmental support for launching similar projects in the future. targeting a broad and general audience like the undergraduate population would 1) allow us to have the broadest impact for the time and energy committed to developing the resource, and 2) there was a greater likelihood of receiving feedback from the users. an additional challenge we faced was finding the right way to explain the back story. where do you begin to tell the story? where do you end it? how do you make it relevant to the student’s tasks? how do you make the content general enough to span across disciplines, yet relevant enough to each? tackling such questions required creative narration, visuals that went well beyond screenshots, plus fairly creative use of scripting and story-boarding. in doing so we went through numerous revisions in the development process. another challenge we faced was in designing truly reusable content that was also highly relevant to our institution. since we intended to create a resource for broad dissemination we also thought it would be strategic to have the video specifically point to our library’s subscription-based resources and reference services. this way the e-learning resource would not only serve instructional needs, but also market specific library services and resources to our students. our solution was to limit any institution specific aspect to a very small scene at the very end of the video. we then, as a service to the broader educational community, created an alternate ending for a second downloadable version that was not tied to our institution. we also made this version available under a creative commons license so that anyone could freely use it for non-commercial purposes. to get the video go to peer review in 5 minutes and click on download. despite the challenges we faced in developing this resource, the highly collaborative process of development offered a unique opportunity to connect with faculty, staff and students in departments within and outside of the library. the success of the project relied on recruiting the expertise and skills of various contributors. in addition to the faculty we interviewed, we worked closely with a graphic design intern who created the animation;8 a student from the libraries’ digital media lab who created an original sound track to the video;9 a couple of library colleagues who contributed their technical expertise in developing an effective web presence for the video online.10 we also consulted multimedia specialists in our distance education office about meeting accessibility requirements for creating audio-visual materials on the web.11 all of these interactions not only helped spread the word about the libraries’ embarking on an e-learning resources project but, perhaps more importantly, communicated the libraries’ ability, openness and willingness to collaborate as partners in instructional uses of technology. our experience has taught us that creating e-learning resources that tackle the back story of information is not without its own set of challenges. however, if you can work through the challenge of scoping the content and telling the story well, the greatest reward is having an end product that can be used to reach many more learners. please let us know how well we did for this particular resource. what’s your back story? we invite you to share your reactions to our three categories of e-learning resources. we’d also love to hear examples of how you’re engaging students with the back story as well as your ideas for what other back stories might be told through reusable, shareable, e-learning resources. special thanks derik badman from itlwtlp, steve mccann, sandy littletree, and scott warren for providing thoughtful feedback on drafts of this post. cindy levine and andreas orphanides for helping us think through the e-learning resources categories. last but not least hilary davis for introducing us to itlwtlp and inviting us as contributors. this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. see for example,  polsani, p.r. 2003. “use and abuse of reusable learning objects.” journal of digital information 3, no. 4 (february 19). [↩] bell, s. & shank, j. (2007). academic librarianship by design. chicago: american library association. [↩] oclc’s white paper “libraries and the enhancement of e-learning” (2003) provides a more in-depth discussion than we will offer here. [↩] the animated tutorial sharing project based in canada is an example of a collaborative project emphasizing the re-usability aspect of these resources. the a.n.t.s. project tries to coordinate development and re-use of modules beyond a single institution by tracking useful metadata (such as what modules are in the works) and hosting completed projects on a shared screencast server for anyone to use. [↩] the multimedia educational resource for learning and teaching is an online repository of peer reviewed digital learning materials. the collection spans across many disciplines and includes a “library and information services” category. [↩] primo is the peer reviewed information materials online” database. it focuses on promoting and setting best practices for implementing e-learning resources so that librarians can share ideas for creating them. at the time of writing, the database holds 191 records for materials that range from database specific modules to information literacy tutorials. [↩] addie — analysis, design, development, implement, and evaluate — is one of the most common instructional design models. bell and shank’s academic librarianship by design provides a wonderful overview. [↩] susan baker, then a senior student in the college of design, worked closely with us to create original graphics and animate them using afftereffects in adobe creative suite 3 [↩] we showed chris hill our video and some sample music online to offer a sense of what we were looking for and he created an original track using garageband [↩] jason walsh and andreas orphanides worked their magic to format the video for optimal viewing online through progressive downloading, and with the help of susan created the custom border around the video. [↩] we’ve used automatic sync for captioning. it’s fast and cheap! it cost us less than $10 per animation. [↩] digital learning materials, e-learning, instruction, instructional design, learning objects, peer review a librarian’s guide to 332.024 my (our) abusive relationship with google and what we can do about it 14 responses hilary davis 2009–01–28 at 1:39 pm kim and hyun-duck, excellent post! i think you’ve made some really good points about the need to fill in the back story/context for students who may not be getting this in their courses while also engaging with faculty to enhance student learning. the peer review video (which is incredibly well done), i think, would also be relevant to many first-year graduate students (not just undergrads). it’s very cool that the video is repurpose-able to other librarians and instructors. i know that kim has created some excellent presentations on the economics of information and would love to see that topic added to your portfolio of e-learning modules. another tricky topic would be copyright and fair use in education. for graduate students in the sciences, in particular, what do you think about the role of e-learning modules addressing concerns about grad students’ rights to the data that they generate as part of their theses/dissertations? bottom line – excellent work – can’t wait to see what y’all come up with next. pingback : wednesday a day in the life of a librarian « ellie <3 libraries brett bonfield 2009–01–28 at 11:19 pm i think what i like best about this wonderful article is that it not only promotes a worthwhile practice, it’s also an example of that practice: it provides a back story for providing back stories. kudos to you for giving the amazing isthisyourpaperonsingleservingsites.com a run for its money. like hilary, i’d love to see someone do “copyright in 5 minutes.” i’d also love to see “what happens when i hit the search button?” by understanding what gets included in search results and how items are ranked (and maybe even how it all works algorithmically), searchers could begin constructing better searches in the places most likely to deliver suitable results. kim duckett 2009–01–29 at 5:05 pm hilary and brett – thanks for the ideas and feedback on the post! good suggestions for more “back story” topics. i thought i’d also chime in that we’re currently working on several other “back stories” including… a video about the economics surrounding scholarly journals and open access literature reviews: an introduction for graduate students which focuses on “what is a literature review and its role in research.” wikipedia: beneath the surface which focuses on the social construction of information in wikipedia. databases in five minutes which covers “what is a database?” “what is an article database?” and what are the key features of databases?” (sort of the “gestalt” of databases) we hope to start rolling out these other projects later this spring. emily ford 2009–01–29 at 6:40 pm yes! i truly think that this model for instructing users is not just a matter of creating more competency and confidence in our users, but also a matter of catering to different learning styles. i, myself, am a visual learner who always asks why. why-askers really need these back stories to fully engage in discourse and interact with information. by providing this instructional model (and sharing it with your library colleagues) you are really doing a great service for tons of people out there. thanks! hyun-duck chung 2009–02–01 at 7:00 pm thanks emily for your supportive comments! your mention of the term ‘competency’ also reminded me of something we didn’t talk about in the post – that creating these videos (maybe) can play a role in communicating to those outside the lis profession that librarians’ expertise span across a broad array of information topics. i think this is something that many people in our profession – and have to admit sometimes i – have a hard time articulating clearly :) pingback : why recreate the wheel… « first conclusions pingback : riot exercise (?): information literacy and cognitive authority karrie peterson 2009–02–13 at 10:37 am this is a great subject – three cheers to the authors for their clear thinking and writing on this topic. i once heard someone i admire say that what we think of as “being smart” can also be described as “consistently making good choices.” this fits with my view of multiple intelligences — smart people do the right things with their time, say the right things to others, go about solving problems efficiently, etc. to me, making good choices requires having the right kind of back story, that’s what intelligent intuition comes from. another way to think of the back story is that we are helping students develop “systems thinking.” i never “get it” when people give me a lot of rules — first aid was taught to me that way when i was in highschool and it was a confusing maze. far more helpful would have been some understanding of physical systems, so that in coping with unique emergencies i would have intelligent intuitions about what to do. a closer-to-home example is observing the way people go about trying to solve it-related problems when they have no intuition about whether the sort of problem they are looking at is coming from their machine, their local network, or an external website. usually highly ineffective and frustrating! too often i have encountered students who are stumped or blocked because they have been taught tool use instead of the back story. the “get full text” button we use between our indexes and our fulltext subscriptions is a good example. it often does things that students don’t expect, and then they become stumped or confused, because they see it only as tool, and not as part of a system. it sounds to me like the comment above about understanding algorithmic search and “what happens when you hit the search button” is just the sort of thing i am talking about as systems thinking. another example i would offer is the way students are often taught to narrow or broaden their search when using article databases, and the justification for doing so is because they got “too much stuff” or “not enough stuff.” when addressing a research question or a problem, the task is to think of the facets or contours of your research question. how does my question fit into the scope of issues in the field? how have people answered my problem or others like it? are their more than one set of theories involved, with different schools of thought? we need to be teaching students to use our research resources as part of a research process, not just to get more or less stuff. i think students can become smarter –even without our intervention– once they have the overview of the systems they are using. systems thinking, or the back story, allows them to usefully reflect on their processes and use their critical thinking skills to formulate strategy. we will never get there only providing students with rules or checklists. recently i saw a tutorial about evaluating resources that asserted that resources found on an .edu or .gov website were generally reliable. as a former gov docs librarian, i would not have said that. i explained to students about how different branches of the govt were beholden to diff stakeholders — and let them decide how to evaluate and use the annual report from an executive branch agency, in which the agency head works at the pleasure of the president. providing the back story feels to me like our best value-add, and i think the authors have hit upon a very practical way to re-tool ourselves in that direction. derik badman 2009–02–20 at 1:11 pm hyun and kim, i’m late to rereading this, but i wanted to say you made great improvements over the draft i read. i appreciate the extra details about your tutorial creation process. your article is a great blending of theory and practice. extra kudos for putting a cc license on the tutorial. kim duckett 2009–02–27 at 12:00 pm thanks, karrie, for your thoughtful comment! thanks also, derik, for the kind words regarding our blog post. hyun-duck and i definitely valued your feedback. karrie and others: if you haven’t seen alison head and michael eisenberg’s recent study <a href=”what today’s college students say about conducting research in the digital age, please take a look. it’s a fascinate study of how students grapple with getting more “context” to understand their assignments. — kim duckett kim duckett 2009–02–27 at 12:00 pm since that link didn’t work here’s the url: http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/pil_progressreport_2_2009.pdf michele hayslett 2009–11–02 at 1:08 pm hi kim and hyun-duck. is there an update? have you finished other modules? another one that i think would be useful is plagiarism in 5. i’d also like to second the comment of others about how great it is that you’ve done this so others can use it, both in content and with the cc license. really terrific since many of us don’t have access to the kinds of student resources that you used! hdc 2009–11–12 at 12:59 pm good topic idea michele – we haven’t had a chance to work on any new modules since we’re trying to work on improving the presentation, promotion and assessment of the existing ones. you can subscribe to our youtube channel so when we do get around to new uploads you’ll be notified: http://www.youtube.com/user/libncsu thanks for posting! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct locating the library in institutional oppression – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 24 sep nina de jesus /12 comments locating the library in institutional oppression editor’s note: on july 16th, 2014 we published open source outline: locating the library within institutional oppression, where we discussed nina de jesus’s outline for a paper i probably won’t write and called for authors to use her open source outline as the basis for an article of their own. we are pleased that nina herself and joshua beatty have both taken up the challenge. below is nina de jesus’s article based on that outline. in a first for in the library with the lead pipe, we are also simultaneously publishing joshua beatty’s article based on the same outline. figure a: oppressive institution (source) in brief: an exploration into the relationship between libraries and institutional oppression. it begins with with an examination at how the enlightenment provides the ideological foundation and framework for public libraries and the historical processes that created the library as institution. it then examines this institution using the three logics of white supremacy: slavery, indigenous genocide, and orientalism. by nina de jesus locating the library in institutional oppression 1. introduction1 libraries are, in the hearts and minds of many people, a cherished and much beloved institution. beyond nurturing a love of reading, libraries also embody a certain set of values. popular author neil gaiman recently summarized a commonly held view of libraries: libraries are about freedom. freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. they are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.2 with libraries holding such a seemingly unassailable position within our cultural imagination, how do we begin to understand their place within institutional oppression? just as libraries represent notions of freedom, education, and a love of reading, we also exist within a society and culture of great disparity and oppression. in one very simplistic sense, the existence of libraries themselves attest to this reality, since freely available resources wouldn’t be necessary if it weren’t the case that not everyone has equal access to these resources. libraries themselves exist to address certain disparities within our society. this paper is an initial exploration of the ways that libraries, in attempting to address inequity, actually entrench oppression. however, this isn’t about the failures of libraries, rather it is about the way that certain values structure libraries such that they come to embody institutional oppression, rather than resist it. i discuss both how the enlightenment created the ideological underpinnings of the library as public institution as well as the historical processes that created the library as we know it today. next, i analyze the contemporary political location of libraries within our culture. lastly, i explore the implications of the library as institutionalized enlightenment ideology using the three logics of white supremacy as proposed by andrea smith3 as a way to demonstrate that libraries cannot be distinguished either from their historical roots nor from their contemporary context within a white supremacist settler state. 2. whence libraries? 2.1 the enlightenment4 as ideology in libraries and the enlightenment wayne bivens-tatum makes a compelling case for “the scientific and political principles of the enlightenment provid[ing] the philosophical foundation for american academic and public libraries.”5 the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy describes the enlightenment as “the period in the history of western thought and culture, stretching roughly from the mid-decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics.”6 for the sake of this discussion, i am largely considering the social and political aspects of enlightenment thought. i focus on the enlightenment and these parts of it because: the enduring legacy of the enlightenment lives on in politics as much as in science, especially in the united states of america, which in some ways is the country best embodying enlightenment principles.7 bivens-tatum further identifies the key themes of enlightenment8 political/social/ethical thought as “individual liberty, equal rights, religious toleration, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to education and political participation in a democracy.”9 in addressing the seeming contradiction between enlightenment ideologies and the slave-holding reality of many of its proponents (especially in the us), bivens-tatum claims that “their historical blindness to their own contradictions hardly negates the universal appeal of enlightened political thought.”10 however, bivens-tatum not only has no argument or evidence to support this claim but he also ignores the historical reality that, speaking only of the us, indigenous (and other) peoples have been resisting the settler values of enlightenment from the very beginning of its history. as already noted, he writes that the us “is the country best embodying enlightenment principles in theory if not always in practice” and traces this to the founding document of the us state, the “declaration of independence.”11 it is also the case that 1776 “initiated a land grab that drew to a close only after the united states had extended its border to the pacific ocean and nearly eliminated the native american land base” with the invasion of the cherokee just a few months after american independence.12 why was this violent genocide needed by a state founded on ideas with universal appeal? why are indigenous peoples in the us _still_ resisting this state grounded on ideas with universal appeal? one would think that hundreds of years later, with the values and politics of the enlightenment firmly entrenched, they might have come to understand the appeal of enlightenment values.13 bivens-tatum’s hand-waving about how the historical evils committed by the early ideological state as a failure to live up to stated principles doesn’t explain why resistance continues today, since it is fairly easy to argue that the us today does a much better job of living up to enlightenment ideals than it did in the past. putting his claim in proper historical and political context helps us understand the full hegemonic force of the claim: enlightened political thought does not have universal appeal. the us, the nation best embodying enlightenment ideals, is and was grounded on the (ongoing) genocide of indigenous peoples. where bivens-tatum and i largely diverge is that he characterizes criticism of the enlightenment via historical context as being derived by an apparent contradiction between ideal and reality. however, the source of my criticism is that there is no contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment and the harsh reality of the ongoing indigenous genocides, rather the two are inextricably linked within settler states. a key theme of this paper is that libraries do, in fact, embody enlightenment values, but/and that enlightenment values are themselves steeped in and reinforce white supremacist settler state ideologies. to the extent that libraries do embody enlightenment values, they likewise contribute to ongoing colonization and are thus reasonably seen as sites of violence and oppression. 2.2 the historical genesis of libraries in discussing the purpose of public libraries, bivens-tatum notes that: public libraries began as instruments of enlightenment, hoping to spread knowledge and culture broadly to the people, who as free citizens of a democratic republic required access to that knowledge and culture to live fuller lives and to become better citizens.14 it becomes clear that the primary purpose of libraries wasn’t education (as he erroneously concludes from a claim like this)15 but was political. education within this ideological statement is only a means to an end: creating better citizens. in this instance ‘better’ equals ‘better educated.’ almost nothing in this statement about the purpose of libraries is value-neutral and apolitical. and it would be difficult to unpack everything that is oppressive about this motivation to create libraries. in a context like this, many of the current real-world examples about how libraries are ‘failing’ marginalized people become clearly not a ‘failure’ but intentional. public libraries in america and canada were not designed for everyone; they are, as bivens-tatum says, intended for citizens. and their purpose is to create better citizens. this is not a politically neutral purpose. and, in anticipation of his arguments against ‘revisionist histories’ about the founding of public libraries,16 i note that i am, in fact, following his account of the historical motivations and ideology surrounding the formation of libraries. i do honestly think that they were motivated by enlightenment ideals. where we significantly depart is in statements like this, “we can have a reasonable pluralism in society, but only if everyone acknowledges the authority of the public democratic institutions.”1718 if we view libraries as embodying a particular political ideology (that of enlightenment and its support for democracy) and if we understand that libraries were created to make citizens better, then the role that libraries play, as an institution, in perpetuating settler states becomes clear. as noted in the previous paragraph, libraries have a limit to the (types of) knowledge they provide access to — they cannot significantly or effectively challenge the authority of democratic institutions. thus, libraries are implicated within institutional oppression in two ways: by having their genesis within the enlightenment ideology and by existing as a tool to perpetuate the state. 2.3 contemporary libraries and liberalism in my search for resources for this paper, the connection between liberal philosophy and the enlightenment was simply taken as fact rather than something that needed to be established. as such, i’m going to take this as a given: liberalism is the modern day embodiment of enlightenment values. it does need to be noted, though, that liberalism as political philosophy/ideology is not really at all connected to political parties as they currently exist in canada or the us. the type of liberal political ideology that was born out of the enlightenment fundamentally structures most contemporary political parties and organizations. this ideology broadly encapsulates the values of having a democratic state, freedom and inherent rights, etc. while current political parties debate about what counts as ‘freedom’ and how, exactly, the democratic state should be run, most of the larger, influential parties agree on these basic tenets.19 ala’s code of ethics asserts that: we significantly influence or control the selection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of information. in a political system grounded in an informed citizenry, we are members of a profession explicitly committed to intellectual freedom and the freedom of access to information. we have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations.20 it should be fairly easy to see the parallels of this statement to what bivens-tatum notes was the original motivation for the creation of public libraries, at least as far as the ‘political system grounded in an informed citizenry’ is concerned. as the annoyed librarian also notes: outside of a commitment to liberal democracy in general — which, by the way, is the only regime that supports the intellectual freedom of writers, artists, historians, philosophers, etc. — liberal institutions should take no substantive political position. a liberal library association would support intellectual freedom, access to information, and liberal democratic political institutions, but wouldn’t go on to make political statements irrelevant to libraries.21 while the annoyed librarian does think that ala (or at least parts of it) are failing this liberal standard, it doesn’t make a difference to the reality that, failing or not, liberalism (and thus enlightenment) is the fundamental political philosophy informing how (at the very least) libraries and librarians think of themselves. last, as i began exploring in the previous section, we can see that, yes, libraries are political institutions and, from this section, they are politically liberal institutions (in the classical understanding of liberalism). this also means that regardless of what the annoyed librarian and ala wish, the proposition that libraries (and librarians) be politically neutral is a self-defeating one. claiming that libraries ought to be liberal institutions that take ‘no substantive political position’ is a political position in and of itself. and it is not a neutral one (if such a thing is even possible). 3 libraries, democracy, and the logics of white supremacy in locating the library in institutional oppression i’ll be focusing on only one line of criticism — white supremacy and decolonization — because of how focused my earlier sections are on the role that public libraries play (or ought to play) in maintaining a democratic (settler) state. i’m also largely depending on andrea smith’s understanding of how white supremacy is constituted: we may wish to rearticulate our understanding of white supremacy by not assuming that it is enacted in a single fashion; rather, white supremacy is constituted by separate and distinct, but still interrelated, logics. i would argue that the three primary logics of white supremacy in the us context include: (1) slaveability/anti-black racism, which anchors capitalism; (2) genocide, which anchors colonialism; and (3) orientalism, which anchors war.22 her analytic framework provides a three lens way to view how the library, as institution, embodies and enforces one type of oppression, white supremacy. namely, that libraries, being liberal institutions, are not ‘neutral’ in the ways that many of the sources cited in this paper either want them to be or believe they are. rather, the explicit and expressed function of libraries, from their inception in the us and canadian political structures to their existence today, is to create an informed citizenry for the sake of democracy. this allows us to finally locate the library in institutional oppression. 3.1 the logic of slavery andrea smith writes: one pillar of white supremacy is the logic of slavery. this logic renders black people as inherently enslaveable—as nothing more than property…this logic is the anchor of capitalism. that is, the capitalist system ultimately commodifies all workers: one’s own person becomes a commodity that one must sell in the labour market while the profits of one’s work are taken by somebody else. to keep this capitalist system in place—which ultimately commodifies most people—the logic of slavery applies a racial hierarchy to this system.23 note one of the key claims in smith’s discussion of the logic of slavery, that it ‘anchors capitalism’. another way of understanding this is that the enslavability of black people is a necessary and foundational part of capitalism, such that slavery is not the result of capitalism, but rather that capitalism itself is structured around this logic: [t]he market did more than surround and detain black bodies — it also possessed them with logics of fungibility and accumulation. under the logic of the atlantic slave trade, the market’s arithmetic of accumulation was sutured to the flesh, inhabiting the bodies and lives it stripped down to the sum of their biological parts for sale within the freedom of the market. for the slave, economic rationality possessed every moment of life’s terror and death’s release. liberal distinctions between the public and private, and the economic, political, and social were fabrications for the slave, illusions that depended on their erasure from the realm of the human. this erasure made possible the alchemy of the market so that with its social, economic, and discursive racial mechanisms, the market could transform a human being into an object and test the limits of that object’s biological life. the fungibility of blackness meant that slaves were money, were animals, were gold, were cotton, were rum, and on and on.24 this fungibility of blackness also, for black people, makes notions of intellectual property a fabrication when it comes to black creative and intellectual work. a reality evidenced by the history of modern/contemporary music whereby every major movement in music over the past 100+ years has happened via a process of the exploitation of black creative labour with little benefit to their creators.25 however, because the logic of slavery structures the process of commodification within capitalism we also see that “the overall trend in intellectual property protection is broadly correlated with the rise of capitalism. in fact, some institutional features associated with capitalism had to exist prior to the full development of intellectual property rights.”26 while it is possible for intellectual property rights to exist outside of a capitalist framework, the system we current have exists within this framework. this means that our system of intellectual property, having arisen (at least in part) from capitalism, is necessarily structured by the logic of slavery. all of this creates a framework through which we can begin to understand how libraries institutionalize white supremacy. principle iv in the ala’s code of ethics states “we respect intellectual property rights.”27 of course, many people would counter this claim by saying that the manner by which libraries operate fundamentally contradicts this capitalist impulse by making ‘intellectual property’ freely accessible to the public. except this isn’t entirely true or, rather, it doesn’t represent the entire picture. when we look at the work of libraries, we begin to see that they actually play a significant role in not just ‘respecting intellectual property’ but in ensuring the stability of intellectual property itself. one mechanism through which libraries do this is through the creation of ‘authority records’: “an authority record is a tool used by librarians to establish forms of names (for persons, places, meetings, and organizations), titles, and subjects used on bibliographic records.”28 while the library of congress (loc) makes it clear that authority records are created with the intent to improve accessibility, the mechanism they use for this ensures that every creative work necessarily has an identifiable owner. this is necessary in a system of capital wherein everything and everyone can (and likely will be) reduced to a commodity. this is only one way that libraries come to be implicated via active participation in the logic of slavery, of capitalism, and of white supremacy. we can also see that libraries, regardless of their making ‘knowledge’ or ‘information’ accessible for free, do not actually challenge or resist this logic. rather, libraries are another institution necessary for maintaining a system of intellectual property within a larger context of white supremacy that depends on the inherent enslaveability of black people. 3.2 the logic of genocide according to andrea smith: this logic holds that indigenous peoples must disappear. in fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to enable non-indigenous peoples’ rightful claim to land. through this logic of genocide, non-native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous—land, resources, indigenous spirituality, and culture. genocide serves as the anchor of colonialism: it is what allows non-native peoples to feel they can rightfully own indigenous peoples’ land. it is acceptable exclusively to possess land that is the home of indigenous peoples because indigenous peoples have disappeared.29 in earlier sections it was noted that libraries were created and continue to be conceived as institutions designed for benefit of creating an informed citizenry for the sake of democracy. this can only be established as a value in a settler state like the us or canada if the indigenous peoples of this region have already disappeared. for ‘canada’ and the ‘united states’ to continue to exist as democratic states (or for them to even be conceived as such) requires either that we understand that the indigenous genocide is already complete or that we ensure that the genocide is ongoing. since it is a fact that the indigenous peoples of north america continue to exist, the ideal of libraries as liberal institutions existing to make democracy ‘better,’ thus stronger, is no less than an ideal wherein the genocide of indigenous peoples is finally completed (putting democracy in its strongest possible position). by and large, this is what is missing from bivens-tatum’s glowing account of libraries and the enlightenment. he is careful to distinguish the historical and material realities of the enlightenment from its ideas/philosophy. my argument is that the historical and material context of the enlightenment is not actually ‘historical’ at all. as we continue to grapple with the ideas of the enlightenment today, so do we grapple with the material conditions that both caused and are caused by the enlightenment (settler colonialism, white supremacy, etc). however, we cannot be surprised by this, since the logic of genocide is “that indigenous peoples must disappear,”30 so the absence of their struggle against settler colonialism in the us (and all other settler states) is necessary. this absence, of course, extends not only to their physical disappearance, but their disappearance from history and discourse. thus, having an ethical code “grounded in an informed citizenry” for librarians is fundamentally rooted in the ongoing indigenous genocides.31 to put it plainly, settler states, in order to lay claim to their statehood, require the genocide of native populations. libraries in supporting “a political system grounded in an informed citizenry” support the state and thus support genocide. 3.3 the logic of orientalism as andrea smith states: the logic of orientalism marks certain peoples or nations as inferior and deems them to be a constant threat to the wellbeing of empire… consequently, orientalism serves as the anchor of war, because it allows the united states to justify being in a constant state of war to protect itself from its enemies. orientalism allows the united states to defend the logics of slavery and genocide as these practices enable it to stay “strong enough” to fight these constant wars.32 smith doesn’t go into the details of orientalism, as it was developed by edward said,33 but libraries firmly belong to the discursive space identified by said as “a structured set of concepts, assumptions, and discursive practices that were used to produce, interpret, and evaluate knowledge about non-european peoples.”34 it is this knowledge that informs the logic of orientalism described by smith — the logic that allows the us to justify its ongoing wars. libraries disguise their orientalism by invoking the stance of neutrality: “we distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources.”35 however, it is pretty easy to see that libraries are far from neutral spaces. there are many examples in the literature about the ways that collection development,36 reference,37 cataloguing,38 and many other library functions reveal deep biases in how the library as an institution exists. more importantly, as bivens-tatum himself writes, “we can have a reasonable pluralism in society, but only if everyone acknowledges the authority of the public democratic institutions.”39 in such a situation, it is impossible for neutrality to exist. thus, if we look past this claim of neutrality and understand that it is an impossible position, we begin to understand how libraries come to articulate the logic of orientalism. part of what made said’s work so groundbreaking and influential is that he demonstrated the way that knowledge creation within the empire is not (and never has been) a neutral activity and so the knowledge itself cannot be neutral. one of the interesting distinctions often drawn in library literature is between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. information is understood as neutral facts and knowledge is created when we understand information (or something like that). it is a tidy distinction that allows ‘neutral’ librarians to feel like we are transmitting neutral facts, all unmediated by reality. most criticisms of library neutrality tend to focus on the librarians and/or institution, rather than the ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’ preserved, stored, communicated, and legitimized by libraries. said’s claims are, in part, explorations about the epistemology of empire, of colonial expansion, and of war but few criticisms of library neutrality have examined or focused on the role that libraries have within the empire and its epistemology. when we look into the collections, the actual ‘information’ contained in libraries and how it is organized, we can see that it (surely by accident) somehow manages to construct a reality wherein whiteness is default, normal, civilized and everything else is other. in so doing, libraries very much participate in a larger imperial project that justifies war. we see that libraries very happily fulfill this expectation of bivens-tatum: “we can have a reasonable pluralism in society, but only if everyone acknowledges the authority of the public democratic institutions,”40 since these ‘public democratic institutions’ he is discussing are constituent parts of the empire. seen from this light, is it at all surprising that library collections play their happy role in the orientalist project of creating the other? 4 conclusions looking back, now, at this paper and seeing what all i had to say during this excursion, one of the surprising themes (to me at least) is how often the concept of ‘neutrality’ came under fire, even though this was not intended. as i consider it now, it seems obvious to me that neutrality has been central to locating the library in institutional oppression. but it is a more complex concept of neutrality than is usually discussed within the literature, which tends to focus on the coherence of the neutrality of the individuals operating and working within libraries or on some of the processes and systems of libraries (like classification). the main notion of neutrality that i challenge within this article is that of institutional neutrality. regardless of many people’s feelings about the coherence of individual neutrality, many have taken it as axiomatic that libraries are neutral institutions and that any failure of libraries to be neutral is largely the fault of individuals failing to live up to the ideals or ethics of the profession, rather than understanding the library as institution as fundamentally non-neutral. libraries as institutions were created not only for a specific ideological purpose but for an ideology that is fundamentally oppressive in nature. as such, the failings of libraries can be re-interpreted not as libraries failing to live up to their ideals and values, but rather as symptoms and evidence of this foundational and oppressive ideology. in tying my line of criticism to that of colonialism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy (but as a reminder: there are many other lines of criticism that can and ought to be explored when situating the library in institutional oppression), i also have the seeds of solutions, for those who want such things. the clear solution is decolonization.41 of course, this is a difficult prospect for many within the field since it precludes any solution that is reformist in nature; no reform is possible if we understand libraries as fundamentally white supremacist institutions. for those who find this unpalatable, there is, perhaps, a worthwhile solution in decoupling libraries from their avowed goal in propping up and strengthening settler democracies. this could allow us to preserve the institution, but would require drastic and daring changes to the overall structure and organization of libraries. libraries, unlike other institutions of settler states (like the judicial system), have at least some emancipatory potential. realizing the emancipatory potential of the library as institution would require breaking and disrupting the system of intellectual property and other aspects of capitalism, especially the publishing industry. it would require disrupting the empire’s mechanisms for creating ‘knowledge’ by being more than a repository for imperial knowledge products. it would require supporting indigenous resistance to the settler state and working towards dismantling anti-blackness. in so doing, perhaps libraries could begin to live up to the ideal expressed by gaiman in the introduction. libraries really could come to represent and embody freedom. they could become focal points for the free exchange and access of ideas, knowledge, and imagination. thanks to chris bourg and ellie collier for being such ridiculously awesome reviewers and for making this paper about 100000000000x better. really. thank you so much.    5 works cited addams, suellen s., and kate pierce. “is there transgender canon?: information seeking and use in the transgender community,” 2006. http://www.cais-acsi.ca/proceedings/2006/adams_2006.pdf. annoyed librarian. “libraries as liberal institutions.” accessed august 3, 2014. http://annoyedlibrarian.blogspot.ca/2006/12/libraries-as-liberal-institutions.html. berman, sanford. “‘inside’ censorship.” de facto censorship implicit in collection decisions, no. 18 (july 15, 2001): 48–63. bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment. library juice press, 2012. bristow, william. “enlightenment.” edited by edward n. zalta. the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, 2011. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/enlightenment/. “code of ethics of the american library association.” accessed august 3, 2014. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics. curry, ann. “if i ask, will they answer?” reference & user services quarterly 45, no. 1 (fall 2005): 65–75. downey, jennifer. “public library collection development issues regarding the information needs of glbt patrons.” progressive librarian, no. 25 (summer 2005): 86–95. “frequently asked questions (library of congress authorities).” accessed august 3, 2014. http://authorities.loc.gov/help/auth-faq.htm#1. gaiman, neil. “why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming.” the guardian, october 15, 2013, sec. books. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming. king, tiffany. “labor’s aphasia: toward antiblackness as constitutive to settler colonialism.” decolonization. accessed august 9, 2014. http://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/labors-aphasia-toward-antiblackness-as-constitutive-to-settler-colonialism/.> klumpp, tilman, and paul h. rubin. “property rights and capitalism.” in the oxford handbook of capitalism, edited by dennis c. mueller. oxford: oxford university press, 2012. kohn, margaret. “colonialism.” edited by edward n. zalta. the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/colonialism/. “orphan works and mass digitization | u.s. copyright office.” accessed august 3, 2014. http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/. roberto, k. r., ed. radical cataloging: essays at the front. jefferson, n.c: mcfarland & co, 2008. said, edward w. orientalism. penguin classics. london: penguin, 2003. smith, andrea. “indigeneity, settler colonialism, white supremacy – centre for world dialogue.” global dialogue 12, no. 2 (2010). http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488. saunt, claudio. “1776: not just the revolution – the boston globe.” bostonglobe.com, july 6, 2014. https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/07/05/not-just-revolution/7nwjfee79vi7mxxle2zmvi/story.html. wolfson, matthew. “the origins of globalisation.” prospect magazine, may 14, 2013. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/david-armitage-foundations-of-modern-international-thought-review. a note about the research/citation methodology of this article: i’ve decided to make a principled stance about only citing open access resources. the exception within the paper is monographs, which haven’t been considered by the oa movement in the same way. but as far as articles and other scholarly resources are concerned, if i wasn’t able to find a non-paywalled copy, i haven’t cited or used it within this paper. there are obvious and unfortunate limitations when strictly adhering to such a principle, since much relevant research remains locked up behind publisher paywalls. [↩] gaiman, neil. “why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming.” the guardian, october 15, 2013, sec. books. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming. [↩] smith, andrea. “indigeneity, settler colonialism, white supremacy – centre for world dialogue.” global dialogue 12, no. 2 (2010). [↩] bivens-tatum is careful to note his bias towards the enlightenment on page 4 of his book when he writes “i will be discussing the principles of the enlightenment in a positive way.” in the same spirit, i’ll state outright that i think the enlightenment is and was evil because it is the ideology of colonialism. i don’t use the word ‘evil’ lightly, but i’m hard pressed to think of any other word to describe a set of philosophical and political ideas that directly led to the deaths of millions of people and the subjugation of pretty much the entire world under white colonial powers. [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 185. [↩] bristow, william. “enlightenment.” edited by edward n. zalta. the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, 2011. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/enlightenment/. [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 12. [↩] while it is commonplace to capitalize or treat the ‘enlightenment’ as a proper noun, my practice of not capitalizing the term is a small act of resistance to the mythology surrounding most discourse about the enlightenment. [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 23. [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 23. [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 12. [↩] saunt, claudio. “1776: not just the revolution – the boston globe.” bostonglobe.com, july 6, 2014. https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/07/05/not-just-revolution/7nwjfee79vi7mxxle2zmvi/story.html. [↩] the articles/posts on http://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com provide a great example of contemporary indigenous resistance to setter colonial states like the us. this is an ongoing struggle. [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 133. [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 133. [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 111. [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 112. [↩] so that my position is very clear: i don’t acknowledge the authority of public democratic institutions. this is exactly  why i’m writing a paper locating the library in institutional oppression. i’m not attempting to quibble about what is or isn’t the enlightenment or what did or did not motivate the creation of public libraries. part of my argument rests on the understanding that libraries, as an institution, are oppressive because of their relationship to a white supremacist, hetero-patriarchal settler state. and because of the exact reasons he describes: libraries are necessary for creating better citizens of a democratic state. this is one of the major reasons why, as they currently exist in canada and the us, libraries are a tool of oppression, rather than of liberation. [↩] in canada, for example, while the conservative party and the liberal party place a different emphasis on what they consider ‘freedom’ and have divergent views on economics, neither has any interest in pushing for a non-democratic canada. [↩] “code of ethics of the american library association.” accessed august 3, 2014. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics. [↩] annoyed librarian. “annoyed librarian: libraries as liberal institutions.” accessed august 3, 2014. http://annoyedlibrarian.blogspot.ca/2006/12/libraries-as-liberal-institutions.html. [↩] smith, andrea. “indigeneity, settler colonialism, white supremacy – centre for world dialogue.” global dialogue 12, no. 2 (2010). http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488. [↩] smith, andrea. “indigeneity, settler colonialism, white supremacy – centre for world dialogue.” global dialogue 12, no. 2 (2010). http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488. [↩] vitoria. “the fungibility of blackness.” acceptable society. accessed september 5, 2014. http://acceptablesociety.blogspot.ca/2012/04/fungibility-of-blackness.html. [↩] for a recent example, do an internet search on “miley cyrus twerking cultural appropriation.” see bowen, sesali. let’s get ratchet! check your privilege at the door.” racialicious – the intersection of race and pop culture.  accessed september 15, 2014. http://www.racialicious.com/2013/04/09/lets-get-ratchet-check-your-privilege-at-the-door/. [↩] klumpp, tilman, and paul h. rubin. “property rights and capitalism.” in the oxford handbook of capitalism, edited by dennis c. mueller. oxford: oxford university press, 2012, 11. preprint here: http://www.ualberta.ca/~klumpp/docs/propertyrightsfinal.pdf [↩] “code of ethics of the american library association.” accessed august 3, 2014. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics. [↩] “frequently asked questions (library of congress authorities).” accessed august 3, 2014. http://authorities.loc.gov/help/auth-faq.htm#1. [↩] smith, andrea. “indigeneity, settler colonialism, white supremacy – centre for world dialogue.” global dialogue 12, no. 2 (2010). http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488. [↩] smith, andrea. “indigeneity, settler colonialism, white supremacy – centre for world dialogue.” global dialogue 12, no. 2 (2010). http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488. [↩] “code of ethics of the american library association.” accessed august 3, 2014. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics. [↩] smith, andrea. “indigeneity, settler colonialism, white supremacy – centre for world dialogue.” global dialogue 12, no. 2 (2010). http://www.worlddialogue.org/content.php?id=488. [↩] said, edward w. orientalism. penguin classics. london: penguin, 2003. [↩] kohn, margaret. “colonialism.” edited by edward n. zalta. the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/colonialism/. [↩] “code of ethics of the american library association.” accessed august 3, 2014. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics. [↩] see downey, jennifer. “public library collection development issues regarding the information needs of glbt patrons.” progressive librarian, no. 25 (summer 2005): 86–95. [↩] see curry, ann. “if i ask, will they answer?” reference & user services quarterly 45, no. 1 (fall 2005): 65–75. http://pacificreference.pbworks.com/f/if+i+ask,+will+they+answer.pdf [↩] see “teaching the radical catalog.” in radical cataloging: essays at the front, ed. k.r. roberto. jefferson, n.c.: mcfarland, april 2008. http://www.emilydrabinski.com/teaching-the-radical-catalog/ [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 112. [↩] bivens-tatum, wayne. libraries and the enlightenment (library juice press, 2012), 112. [↩] refer to unsettling america, http://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com, for a starting point to understanding decolonization. [↩] institutional oppression, libraries, public libraries, the enlightenment locating information literacy within institutional oppression the right to read: the how and why of supporting intellectual freedom for teens 12 responses ellie 2014–09–24 at 3:22 pm thanks to @seergenius for pointing out additional scholarship: alternative perspectives in library and information science: issues of race by lorna peterson – http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40324271 unequal legacies: race and multiculturalism in the lis curriculum by christine pawley – http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/506955 ellie collier 2014–09–24 at 3:57 pm and as a result of conversations there, we now have a gdoc to create an extended bibliography – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b9dm66g1ruk-ecgkdewcugptx8ii5bpvbs5qvgebupw/edit?usp=sharing pingback : rockstar librarians coral sheldon-hess peter 2014–10–16 at 12:34 pm you short cut a bit around one of the enlightenment’s main historical contributions to andrea smith’s triad: enlightenment ethics sanctify ‘individual’ property rights. john locke made his freedoms very clear: life, liberty, property (a triad too crass for a literal inclusion in the declaration of independence). without such sanctity, capitalism could neither flourish nor exist. now, property rights thoroughly eclipse and replaced human rights and freedoms, including the notion of the being human itself. indigenous communal ownership and decision making needed elimination because, among other reasons, it was communal. colonialism is part and parcel of capitalism, and orientalism and its modern justification for war are the very manifestations of capitalism. indeed, the historical transition from feudal ethics to enlightenment ethics was necessary to support the transition from primitive accumulation to modern capitalism. alecto greenslade 2014–10–16 at 11:24 pm an example of the terribly convoluted space or function of libraries that comes to mind after reading this article, is the prison library. i have worked, briefly, in a prison library. while prisoners would say things like, “i feel free to be myself here [in the library]” and while some items in the collection offered potential for transformation because they offered a chance or a vision to do or be or reach for something different, the library was clearly integrally fitted into the prison system. access to it was controlled and people were controlled while in the library; and the rationale for it included the potential for “rehabilitation” so prison libraries are unarguably located in institutional oppression. i myself have decided that rehabilitation is a furphy in the prison context and a lot of prisoners lives: “rehabilitation” implies a state of health to which a person who has been wounded or ill can return – or be returned. a lot of prisoners don’t have lives which don’t include prison to which they can return or be returned, so they can’t be “rehabilitated”. i do think that prison libraries (and prisons) offer the opportunity for transformation, by which i mean the opportunity for doing something different or differently whether it’s becoming an artist or thinking clearly about getting married when you leave or resolving to pursue lapidary as a hobby, also when you leave, or anything that’s different. in such a constrained environment, it’s very hard to grasp that chance but it’s there, oddly and paradoxically enough. such transformations can entail leaving the life that got the prisoner into prison in the first place – which is what prison and prison education and prison industries etc are intended to do so such “transformations” fit the institution’s purpose, no question. maybe the nascent ‘transformations’ that i witnessed in the library, stuck less in my craw than the rehabilitation-lite efforts did because once chosen, the learning and the activity could be somewhat self-directed by the prisoner. it’s that funny thing of agency – people operate in worlds they have not constructed and would not construct if they had a choice but they/we find ways to be assert ourselves nevertheless, even if they are small expressions – now that is a feature of human nature that is very clearly demonstrated in prisons, enough. cheers. pingback : mirror, mirror, or, library reflections | kelly dagan pingback : the enlightenment and libraries: it’s not really that bad | sense & reference pingback : reflections on the dr. martin luther king jr holiday | information. games. pingback : questions & the library | academic research & the library pingback : since the last time i wrote about my class… | fieldnotes from the library pingback : what kind of license would you use? | professional wanderlust pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » locating information literacy within institutional oppression this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct what we talk about when we talk about brangelina – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 16 may anne helen petersen /17 comments what we talk about when we talk about brangelina brangelina by tshein / cc-by by anne helen petersen picture the person who comes into the library and heads straight for the magazines. she beelines for people, maybe spends some time with vanity fair. she may or may not tear a few pages from the copy when it suits her needs. she loves celebrities: she’ll read instyle if you have it, cosmopolitan if you don’t. picture another patron: he likes usa today. he reads the parade section of the sunday newspaper and frequently spends an hour with gq or esquire even though, at least by appearances, he doesn’t seem to be that interested in fashion. and then there’s the older woman who spends a lot of time chuckling at microfilm of old photoplay magazines in the basement. these descriptions might fit specific patrons that you recognize, or they might serve as stand-ins for a whole group of people who visit the library, read celebrity gossip, and leave. some might say that these people are misusing the library, or at least missing the point of libraries in general. but are they? the library, broadly defined, is a place where people of all ages can access information that, we hope, will make us more educated, engaged citizens of the world. we go to the library to look for comfort. we go to the library to look for a challenge. we seek greek cookbooks and jazz cds, poetry and hiking guides, newspapers and knitting magazines. by happy accident or librarian recommendation, we sometimes happen upon a text we didn’t even know we sought or wanted. and through this process we gain something: knowledge, understanding, texture, and nuance. celebrity gossip provides all of those things. in fact, the magazines that contain it may be some of the most valuable cultural artifacts currently housed in your library. stay with me here. i’d like to provide a history of gossip and celebrity, and their place in american culture—enough for you to reconsider your current valuation of people and its purpose within your collection. celebrity has a long history. as leo braudy argues in the frenzy of renown (1997), the phenomenon extends as far back as alexander the great. put simply, a celebrity is a public individual who becomes well known for an achievement (napoleon), misdeed (john wilkes booth), or by birth (prince william). the cult of celebrity strengthened with the expansion of the printing press, which allowed information about popular figures to circulate broadly and regularly. celebrity is a particularly modern phenomenon, symptomatic of a culture that attempts to “know” a person through mediated forms (the magazine, the newspaper, the newscast). stardom is a particularly potent form of celebrity. stardom first began to develop on the 19th century stage—think sarah bernhardt—but truly exploded with the expansion of the american film industry in the late 1910s and ‘20s.1 a star isn’t just someone who appears on screen. rather, a star is formed when audiences combine information about the star’s onscreen performances (the type of person she plays on screen; reese witherspoon, for example, is “america’s sweetheart”) with information about the star’s off-screen life (her romances, her children, and other gossip). put differently, a star = textual information + extra-textual information. each star’s “image” is the result of this alchemy. actors do not become stars because they are beautiful or talented. there are hundreds of beautiful and talented actors who appear on-screen every year, but only a select group get to become the tom cruises, will smiths, julia robertses, and angelina jolies of the world. these actors become superstars because their images—what they seem to represent, onand off-screen—embody something vital to contemporary american identity. it’s no accident that tom cruise’s brand of white, working class-turned-suave masculinity resonated in the 1980s, or that julia roberts’s postfeminist approach to sex and relationships gained traction in the early 1990s. as richard dyer suggests, “stars matter because they act out aspects of life that matter to us; and performers get to be stars when what they act out matters to enough people” (dyer, 17, 1984). looking at a star or celebrity as an ideological construct and unpacking that construct is the work of “star studies.” like hundreds of other scholars the world over, star studies is the bedrock of my research. we look at popular figures and try to figure out what their popularity indicates about a culture’s current understanding of race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, and a host of other issues.2 i publish star studies on my blog and as part of my scholarship, but other writers and journalists outside of academia do the same sort of work every day. chuck klosterman, david foster wallace, john jeremiah sullivan, molly lambert, and dozens of others have thoughtfully profiled stars, trying to get at the meat of who they are and why they matter (klosterman’s “bending spoons with britney spears” is a classic of the genre; sullivan’s piece on michael jackson, republished in this year’s pulphead, is a marvel). but i don’t need to make a case for you to acquire the books and magazines in which those type of essays appear for your library’s collection. pop culture criticism is an easy sell: the public consumes these texts, so it behooves the library to carry work that contextualizes that consumption. for instance, the library may not broadcast football games, but it does offer biographies of football players, guides on how to coach football, and histories of the game. the same idea applies to drugs: the library doesn’t offer heroin, but it does offer ways to think about heroin use. perhaps a shift in perspective is necessary here. instead of thinking of the library as a place where culture is accessed, we might also think of it was a place where culture is created: where the individual and information collide and meaning is made. that’s what happens when the library hosts an expert or invites a storyteller. that’s also what happens when you carry a magazine with pages of glossy photos of a celebrity, or columns detailing who wore what, appeared with whom, and left too late. these magazines and newspaper columns, and the discourse they foment, are the building blocks of the star image.3 i use the academic term “discourse” to describe what happens when someone sees a picture in a magazine, but you could also say that these magazines encourage gossip. gossip has a history even longer than celebrity. ever since there have been social formations—villages, schools, clubs, neighborhoods, secret societies, political parties—there has been gossip to structure them. by definition, gossip is characterized by “casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true.” we gossip about people we know and people we don’t know, about our co-workers and our family members and our closest friends. as countless sociologists and anthropologists have underlined, gossip is a means of social policing. in other words, we gossip about those who test the status quo: the man who wears too much pink or the mother who breastfeeds for “too long.” we talk about those who bend or break established societal rules, in part to discourage others from challenging what has been established as “the way things are.” of course, gossip can be destructive, and it is particularly noxious when it comes to the policing of women’s bodies. it can also be startlingly conservative, especially as it pertains to established sexual and social mores. just when you thought it was okay for young girls to be tomboys, the uproar over preschooler shiloh jolie-pitt’s cropped hair and “boy” clothes—and the belief that her parents (brad pitt and angelina jolie) are “turning her into a boy” —demonstrates that gender play is still fraught territory. this is gossip at its most regressive, a club wielded to keep others in line. but gossip can also be progressive, especially in the wake of scandal. actions that cause scandal are never de facto scandalous. rather, an action becomes scandalous when it ruptures the accepted standards of behavior—standards specific to time, class, race, and gender. when ingrid bergman became pregnant with roberto rossellini’s child in the late ‘40s, it wasn’t “being pregnant” that was scandalous, but the fact that she was married to another man. bergman transgressed rules for appropriate behavior on the part of a woman and a public figure. the resulting gossip was tsunami-like in strength, fueled by the vitriol of gossip columnists (louella parsons, hedda hopper) writing in major newspapers, as well as dozens of fan magazines (photoplay, modern screen, motion picture). bergman was even denounced on the floor of the united states senate, melodramatically deemed an “instrument of evil.” bergman fled to europe, where the expectations for female sexuality and behavior were somewhat less puritan. but what happened to bergman matters less than the conversations it helped start. some conversations were certainly focused on shaming bergman and reifying standards. but it also led to questions of context. why did bergman cheat? what was the relationship like between her and her husband? had she married too young and too quickly? as men and women attempted to make sense of how a woman like bergman could break a rule so flagrantly—her image up to that point had been that of the “nordic virgin”—they were also making sense of what happens when young women are forced into marriages with older men, and what can and should be excused of the behavior that follows. any time a major star challenges the status quo—by smoking marijuana (robert mitchum), by flouting the marriage contract (elizabeth taylor), by coming out as homosexual (rock hudson), by showing love by jumping on oprah’s couch (tom cruise), or by spewing racist epithets (mel gibson)—it starts a conversation. hudson’s example is particularly instructive, because it helped introduce words that had been theretofore unspeakable—gay, aids—into dinner conversation. again, not all of that conversation was positive, but it was a conversation nonetheless. as star scholar adrienne mclean points out, scandal does not simply “upset the status quo temporarily;” rather, it may function as “a wedge driver,” illuminating “the vulnerability of many ‘primary social frameworks’ that together make up what we so often refer to as dominant ideology” (cook and mclean, 2001, 5). making ideology and cultural expectations visible, even legible: that’s what celebrity gossip does best. celebrities can also serve as cultural reference points: conversational anchors that help us displace topics too intimate for discussion. “what we talk about when we talk about brangelina,” in other words, are our own perspectives on love, marriage, divorce, and the formation of family. celebrities are no less fictional than characters in novels. just as the divide between “team jacob” and “team edward” says a tremendous amount about how young women (and men) think of contemporary masculinity and romance, so too does a preference for justin bieber over justin timberlake. when we talk about celebrities with whom we want to be friends, we’re actually talking about the qualities we value in “real” friends. i want to be friends with tina fey because her image is that of an intelligent, self-deprecating, hilarious, multi-tasking woman—attributes i seek and value in myself and others. similarly, paul newman is my “eternal star boyfriend” not because he is handsome (although he is certainly that) but because his image is inflected with advocacy, charm, ruggedness, wit, and steadfastness, all of which are qualities i seek in a partner. which is all to say that celebrities, the texts that cover them, and the conversations they engender are important: they represent and produce culture. why, then, is there such opposition to taking these texts seriously? whether at libraries, in journalism, and even in academia, there is tremendous resistance to celebrity-oriented publications. put differently, why does us weekly remain a “bad object”? the reasons for this status are complex, but not altogether indecipherable: in academia, star and celebrity studies are ascendant. they’re a cool kid in an already cool discipline (cultural studies). more and more graduate students are doing work in celebrity studies and the adjacent fields of television studies, media industries, and new media. but celebrity is still a low-brow subject in a discipline that has historically been rooted in the study of the high-brow. while this has been gradually changing since the late ‘70s, it’s still thought of as a less “rigorous” object of study than, say, iranian film or avant garde feminist cinema. for journalists, celebrity is both necessary and nasty. with the new click-oriented metrics of online journalism, celebrity coverage is a sure-fire means to more hits and, by extension, more advertising dollars. as a result, “serious” coverage is enervated with “breaking news” on celebrities of all kinds. celebrity exacerbates our culture’s already short attention span, making it easy to subsist on a media diet composed of fashion and gossip reports—and little else. before you’d have to buy the entire newspaper in order to get at the gossip column, and would probably pick up some “real news” on the way. now, even serious, high-brow publications use celebrity hooks to snag readers. even pieces bemoaning the spread of celebrity culture exploit it: a recent article in slate, for example, asked “where did all the accomplished people go?”—yet used kim kardashian’s photo and name to promote the story (the link includes the words “kim_kardashian_why_does_she_fascinate_us”). but fascination with celebrity is a symptom, not the disease. it illuminates how journalism is currently struggling to make the transition to new, digital paradigms, but it’s not the problem. instead, it’s evidence that the system is broken. it’s also an easy target, as are the teeming, anonymous masses who opt for brief, easily consumable stories about celebrities over lengthy, complex pieces on international affairs. in libraries, the prejudice against celebrity materials is most likely the same as the prejudice held by society at large. these magazines are low-brow, glossy, and trashy. they’re all fluff, no substance. they’re junk food. they’re a waste of time. a guilty pleasure. they’re directed at a specific demographic that excludes large swaths of the population. you can pay for your own, but state-funded organizations shouldn’t pay for them for you. consider these assumptions: celebrity materials are “bad” because they’re popular, directed at women, and “low-class”. because they’re filled with images, they’re somehow bereft of ideas. because people want to consume them, they’re not as ideologically potent and, by extension, valuable as things that people don’t want to consume. because they’re gendered as “feminine pleasures,” they’re less valid than masculine pleasures like watching sports or, for that matter, reading sports illustrated. these are sexist, classist, and outdated assumptions that fail to account for the meaning made through gossip consumption, as evidenced above, as well as the varied audience for celebrity materials. while most of people’s readership is female, middle-aged, middle-class, and straight, its audience also includes those who are male, queer, teenaged, and elderly. if you stock the magazine shelves with gossip fodder, will you turn your library into a coffee klatch? into a hair salon in disguise? will it prompt heated discussions about whether stars have a right to privacy when it comes to their sex lives? would that be so wrong? libraries, at least in their current iteration, are more than depositories and archives: they’re cultural centers. just as many librarians took the success of twilight as an opportunity to organize discussions about the tradition of the vampire or encourage broader reading in the genre, you might likewise look at celebrity culture not as a pestilence, but as an opportunity. whether patrons access these texts at your library or at home, they’re not going away. just as i use the classroom as a means of helping students dissect, but not destroy, the meaning and pleasure they receive from popular texts, so too can the library. here’s how: put a book on the history of gossip in the court of louis xvi next to us weekly; pair the latest gq and its coverage of george clooney with tom payne’s fame: what the classics tell us about the cult of celebrity; feature a biography of georgiana, duchess of devonshire with one of princess di. place documentaries that historicize and explore celebrity—smash his camera, tabloid, teenage paparazzo—near to films that exploit it (the latest blockbuster pinned to a high-profile star). in the online record for, say, britney spears’ latest album, place a link to an online text that elaborates on her fame, such as the aforementioned “bending spoons with britney spears,” as well as the atlantic’s “shooting britney.” some of these pairings might take time to seek out, and who knows how many patrons will actually pursue additional material. but once in place, many will seek. i can’t tell you how many emails i’ve received from readers who happened upon my site via google image search for photos of robert pattinson. acquire accessible books on the history of stardom and celebrity and display them prominently. see the footnotes for examples.4 ask an academic or writer to come and talk about the way that celebrity works today. if you work at or near an institution that teaches cultural studies in any form, it is very likely that someone will be willing to come and speak. graduate students are desperate for speaking opportunities: take advantage of their ambition! to advertise these talks, fill each copy of a magazine that includes gossip with provocative inserts: “want to know why you’re enthralled by beyoncé’s pregnancy? celebrity gossip deciphered: tuesday, 7 pm.” find a “flavor” of celebrity gossip that you, yourself, can get behind—or at the very least, where you can understand its appeal. fashion mixed with humor? try go fug yourself. all positive, all the time? just jared. stars: they’re just like us? usweekly.com. feminist slant? jezebel. commentary and contextualization? lainey gossip. celebrity culture isn’t going anywhere. my suggestion, and what i’ve spent my academic career attempting to get people to do, is to stop wasting time decrying it. instead, use that energy to make sense of it. i hope this article has inspired you to think differently about your own relation to celebrity gossip, as well as the unstated assumptions that have formed and continue to structure that relationship. by extension, i hope it has encouraged you to think expansively about the potential relationship between celebrities, gossip about them, and the public, intellectual, cultural space of the library. many thanks to emily ford and sophie brookover for their insightful questions and suggestions on an early version of this piece. brett bonfield has been gracious, patient, and tremendously encouraging throughout the process, and helped persuade me that librarians would, indeed, like to read about celebrity. the development of stars is a fascinating and complicated process with much more nuance than is appropriate here; for more, see richard decordova’s excellent picture personalities (1990). [↩] some classic, accessible examples of star studies work in race, gender, sexuality, class, and politics include: mary c. beltran and camilla fojas, eds. mixed race hollywood richard dyer heavenly bodies christine gledhill, ed. stardom: industry of desire adrienne mclean being rita hayworth [↩] one of my reviewers asked, “are they really? i see it as a cycle: consumers of pop culture and celebrity gossip need the information, and the media makes them need more of it. it hard to to tell where one starts and the other stops. assigning all the power to the media doesn’t do it for me.” my response: i don’t at all see star formation as an entirely top-down process. but the fact remains that the starts are produced before they’re consumed, and the meaning is made somewhere in between. [↩] in addition to the works listed above, i recommend the following scholarly works: samantha barbas the first lady of hollywood: a biography of louella parsons and movie crazy: fans, stars, and the cult of celebrity david cook and adrienne mclean, eds. headline hollywood elizabeth currid starstruck: the business of celebrity jennifer frost hedda hopper’s hollywood: celebrity gossip and american conservatism neal gabler winchell: gossip, power, and the culture of celebrity joshua gamson claims to fame paul mcdonald the star system the entire routledge “star decades” series for less academic (less fully sourced) but nonetheless fascinating reads: e.j. fleming the fixers: eddie mannix, howard strickling, and the mgm publicity machine robert hofler the man who invented rock hudson sam kashner and jennifer macnair the bad and the beautiful: hollywood in the 1950s anthony slide inside the hollywood fan magazine [↩] celebrity, classism, cultural literacy, gossip, popular culture, sexism, social policing, star studies, stardom zen and the art of constructive criticism stop the snobbery! why you’re wrong about community colleges and don’t even know it 17 responses jay 2012–05–16 at 2:03 pm “whether at libraries, in journalism, and even in academia, there is tremendous resistance to celebrity-oriented publications.” “in libraries, the prejudice against celebrity materials…” i think i’d like some more context for these assertions. perhaps because i don’t work in a public library, i’m not familiar with the evidence for these claims. anne helen petersen 2012–05–16 at 3:49 pm good question. the largest and most explicit prejudice i see is against acquiring and preserving celebrity-oriented materials. as someone who relies heavily on celebrity texts for the bulk of my research, it’s nearly impossible to find circulating copies of fan magazines (that are not photoplay) from before 1980, and even after 1980, it’s mostly just people (which masks its “celebrity-ness” in the guise of “personality journalism,” but that’s another article). i’ve requested various research libraries to acquire and/or start archiving celebrity materials, but the move to collect, index, and archive old materials has been almost wholly on the part of scholars tired of buying copies off of ebay. now, you might wonder if “not acquiring and archiving” equates to “prejudice” — and no, not exactly. but us weekly (rarely acquired and archived) is just as vital a cultural object as ladies home journal (long acquired and archived) — one just has a stigma of the “popular” and the “trashy” attached to it. i’m happy to elaborate further if you’re curious. brett bonfield 2012–05–16 at 4:36 pm a bit of additional evidence (all links go to worldcat, so this is limited to larger, richer libraries): * libraries that subscribe to us weekly: 411 * libraries that subscribe to people: 1,115 * libraries that subscribe to ladies’ home journal: 2,411 * libraries that subscribe to sports illustrated: 3,795 lane wilkinson 2012–05–17 at 11:20 am i think you hint at part of the reason librarians are hesitant about pop tabloids: celebrity mags are simply terrible primary information sources. that is, the actual claims made by the celebrity mags (the propositional content of the gossip itself) are largely conjecture and the magazines are not reliable sources of knowledge. put simply, us weekly is probably not going to generate any real knowledge about brangelina or the kardashians. and since librarians have a duty to avoid spreading misinformation, they don’t want to get into the gossip mag business. however, as you argue, us weekly is a terrific source for those who want to understand contemporary culture. as sources of second-order cultural information (i.e., information about information), celebrity mags are invaluable artifacts, and your argument is that librarians should focus on the secondary, academic value of gossip journalism. i completely agree with you. the only problem is that when librarians are asked to consider the academic value of information sources at the meta-level (as you recommend), we end up having to collect everything because anything can be interpreted as a reflection of our culture and values. tabloids, newspaper inserts, spam e-mail, street signs, taco bell receipts…at a certain level everything becomes an information source. so, i guess what i’m saying is that librarians are in a bit of a bind. if we go “meta-” then we have no decision procedure for deciding what to purchase with our limited funds. if we stick to the primary level of information, we have a decision procedure (i.e., is it a reliable information source?) but then gossip mags are ruled out for most budgets. anyway, thanks for a cogent defense of the value of pop culture in the library. anne helen petersen 2012–05–22 at 8:24 am good point, lane. i would, however, say that unlike taco bell receipts, newspaper inserts, and spam e-mail, that gossip magazines offer distinct and discernable pleasure. lane wilkinson 2012–05–22 at 10:32 am you’re arguing that a text has merit in a library collection, if it (1) provides a means for understanding cultural norms and (2) offers distinct and discernible pleasure. you’re right that this should rule out taco bell receipts. but, the addition seems ad hoc: distinct and discernible pleasure is not generally a factor when we collect information sources (though it may be relevant when collecting fiction). so, while i agree that gossip mags may offer pleasure, i fail to see how that’s a relevant distinction. jean costello 2012–05–18 at 10:03 pm re: some might say that these people are misusing the library, or at least missing the point of libraries in general. rather than focus on the patron, i’d say library directors and librarians are missing the point and misusing libraries when they include celebrity gossip magazines as part of the collection. you have persuasively argued that gossip and celebrity have long-standing cultural prominence and merit scholarly consideration. i’m confident the texts you recommended are good sources on the topic and i’d endorse a library promoting these resources thematically by putting the works on display together, inviting an expert to speak, inserting a brief topic summary with references in a newsletter or on a website. this is so in keeping with a key purpose and timeless mission of libraries: to collect and contextualize quality materials with the goal of enriching people’s individual and/or collective engagement with the world — and to blaze a trail for further discovery and engagement. for some, merely seeing the display or reading the newsletter might cause someone to make a mental note the next time they’re in a supermarket checkout line surrounded by gossip magazines. for others reading one of the books or hearing a speaker may raise awareness of the class and gender issues you touched upon. for others, increased awareness and curiosity of a particular time period or artistic genre (e.g. film) might be ignited. the speaker events or conversations with library staff might catalyze discussions that would be unlikely to occur wherever else the materials might be present: retail outlets, hair salons, amazon. this is a library’s “special sauce”: discernment, organization and facilitation. it is what distinguishes libraries from a range of other public and private organizations. it is what distinguishes libraries from mere sites of information – which are virtually anywhere-and-everywhere today – to sites of knowledge conveyance and meaning-making. maintaining gossip magazines in the collection is ill-conceived for two reasons the first is these materials are readily available elsewhere, for low cost. there is no need for libraries to carry them. the second is that having them in the collection comes at a high cost. their direct cost means sacrificing materials that are more dear, such as the texts you recommended. the greater cost comes in staff time taken to acquire, manage (and let’s face it, read) them which takes time away from engaging with topic experts or colleagues to create more collections and programming. in essence, carrying this material means trading what is unique and special about libraries for what is common and unnecessary. it’s a trade that hurts libraries and patrons. anne helen petersen 2012–05–22 at 8:36 am i see your point, jean. but to follow your argument to its logical extension, the library should not subscribe to any popular periodicals. no sports illustrated, no ladies home journal, no cooking magazines, no knitting or hunting magazines. no poetry magazine, no feminist quarterlies, no vanity fair. the information covered in all of these publications is available in greater depth — and in more sophisticated form — in books. plus, all of these magazines are, like gossip magazines, available elsewhere, for low cost (as are romance and science fiction novels, but that’s another article). your conception of the library seems to be limited to that of a place for patrons to access high quality information that they cannot access for low-cost elsewhere. i agree that this is one function of the library, but said conception obviates the library’s potential as a place of “culture creation”…..and the library as a resource to those excavating culture. in other words, collecting now is collecting for the future — collecting for scholars, like myself, who look to the past to explain the present. jean costello 2012–06–21 at 10:17 am hi anne – sorry i missed your reply and am weighing in late. whenever i argue for discernment, library folks usually reject it. seems you have done so too by lumping together a variety of periodicals and types. they also dismiss my conceptions of library mission/purpose/practice by branding them elitist or reducing their scope to something narrow and indefensible. my notions of library go beyond what you characterized in your reply so i’m going to take another bite at the apple. in essence, i believe we support libraries to provide knowledge resources/services we cannot provide for ourselves. in the age of scarcity this might have meant access to a librarian who could read and write, when most of the general population could not. it might also have meant acquiring a full set of encyclopedias or newspapers from farway places – things that were beyond the reach (due to awareness and/or funding) for most individuals. public education and the internet have raised the bar and though the information landscape has changed dramatically since libraries took root in america, i believe the library mission is the same. if i were a library leader, i’d be asking “what knowledge and information services can libraries provide today that are not readily available elsewhere?” materials like people magazine and 50 shades of gray are readily available and receive widespread promotion. the same cannot be said for feminist quarterlies and some of the other materials you listed. discernment is also scarce. most other information distributors or sources (supermarkets, amazon, newspapers, tv talk shows, etc) are going to push whatever sells, and in a superficial way. imo, libraries should provide an alternative to this by curating a collection based on thoughtful standards. a curated collection is valuable, to be sure – but so is the selection process. i never fail to be educated and enriched when librarians engage the topic of collection development with me and we drill into various genres, criteria, dimensions and dilemmas. the knowledge, range of concerns and frankly integrity that librarians bring to these matters is what is scarce today. it is a key component of their unique value-add and it pains me when people in the library community say things like “we’re just giving people what they want” or “you can’t assess quality because one man’s trash is another’s treasure”. the other argument i often get is that there is no public appetite for discernment. i disagree based on the large audiences for public broadcasting, content like ted talks & blogs on special topics, etc. loads of people want to engage around civic issues & rich artistic and cultural content. most public libraries have positioned themselves differently and aren’t attracting patrons with those interests. it’s a mistake however to take this as a sign that the public interest isn’t there. in summary, i promote libraries providing what people cannot easily get elsewhere. the dialogue & insights you’ve offered about your research do this; people magazine as an uncontextualized artifact does not. similarly, selection and promotion of a psycho/sexual non-fiction work that is well-written, has strong plot & characters, extends the boundaries of the genre, is perhaps written by a promising author whose work has not received much attention do this. circulating 50 shades of gray and letting it drive so much conversation in the library world does not. the librarian with no name 2012–05–24 at 5:44 pm fun fact: reading a thoughtful article questioning the traditional prejudices of collection development is acceptable reference desk behavior. however, and this is important, having a second tab open with the title “britney spears gallery – sexy topless photos of britney spears” can lead to an awkward conversation with your manager. i’m just glad she knows who klosterman is. justin 2012–05–25 at 11:57 am one of the differences between magazines like us weekly and people and magazines like ladies home journal and even vanity fair is that the former profit from the direct invasion of real people’s lives–people that tolerate but on the whole do not ask for this treatment. you write that “celebrities are no less fictional than characters in novels,” and i know what you mean by that in its context, but the fact is that what an organ publishes about a celebrity has the potential to affect an actual human life, whereas a fictional character has no reality to damage. if there is a danger in all this, it is that the profits of periodicals like us weekly and people depend on highlighting, magnifying, and often enough distorting the personal lives of real people. this is harmful. ladies home journal does not harm to that extent. i’d argue that neither does sports illustrated. my point, i guess, is to suggest that there is an element of invasion, of profit at the expense of a real life, inherent to celebrity mags like us weekly and, to she extent, people. a library’s unqualified inclusion of these magazines might not represent an implicit endorsement of this kind of behavior, but it would seem to. anne beech 2012–05–27 at 12:05 am as a secondary teacher (currently studying for my masters in information management), i agree that popular culture and celebrity gossip magazines can be used alongside other information sources. these magazines are familiar to students and provide a contemporary context in which to approach issues in historical or literary texts. given the ‘cult of celebrity’ that seems to enthrall much of society, i think it is important that students are given the tools to become critically aware readers of these publications. it was not that long ago that comics (as they were once called) were considered to be not that significant. now, most libraries proudly promote their collection of ‘graphic novels’ and these texts are also finding a place in the curriculum. perhaps the gossip magazine will experience the same fate. pingback : someone else’s blog: in the libraty with the lead pipe « studiumlibrarios pingback : i made this for you! « these are the thoughts that fall out of my head pingback : loving kimye: an exploration (part i) « hiphopocracy pingback : loving kimye: an exploration (part ii) « hiphopocracy pingback : our s&m relationship with rihanna « hiphopocracy this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct nothing tweetable: a conversation or how to “librarian” at the end of times – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2017 8 mar joshua finnell and lareese hall /6 comments nothing tweetable: a conversation or how to “librarian” at the end of times in brief in 2015, joshua finnell (jf) was appointed data librarian at los alamos national laboratory. shortly thereafter, in 2016, lareese hall (lh) was appointed dean of libraries at the rhode island school of design. lareese and josh first met as newly appointed liaison librarians at denison university in 2009. since that time, they have remained friends and professional confidants. in early 2017, as they find themselves working on opposite sides of the arts and sciences spectrum, josh and lareese reflect on the perils, frustrations, hopes, and passions they still encounter and stoke in the library profession and in the off centered world in which we find ourselves. note:  we have taken the opportunity to add links to many topics, people, and resources throughout the text. these can be distracting:  “people who read text studded with links, the studies show, comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text,” said nicholas carr in an essay that asked “does the internet make you dumber?” (carr, 2010).  we do not want to make you dumber. we see these links as something to come back to, not something you need to click on immediately. proceed accordingly… lh: my first question to you is one that i come to again and again: why do we care about libraries? we complain and try, i think, to make each other laugh with the most ridiculous stories possible. jf: yeah, this is usually how we end our epic library-related conversations, so it is only fitting to start with this question. we complain because we care deeply about libraries. like most librarians, i am hopelessly in love with the multiple functions and possibilities a library provides: shelter, inspiration, self-improvement, discovery, community. there’s that kurt vonnegut quote from a man without a country, “so the america i loved still exists, if not in the white house or the supreme court or the senate or the house of representatives or the media. the america i love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries” (vonnegut, 2005, 103). that line resonates deeply with me in our current political climate. i suppose, like you, i complain about libraries because i see the unlimited potential and it never ceases to amaze me how much of it is squandered. jf: what tethers you to the library world? lh: i honestly don’t know. on one hand i believe in the work that i do and care deeply about the potential for information and knowledge to transform people’s lives, and on the other hand are the actual people. i believe in the possibilities, like you, do but i wonder sometimes if that isn’t just my ego.  who am i to say what is possible for someone else?  but it’s who i am and what i dream about. i have had heartbreaking professional experiences and they have often been the result of my unwavering idealism faced with the crushing reality of pedestrian things like indifference (other people’s), incompetence (other people’s and sometimes my own), budgets, and reality. and egos, again. libraries have always been a constant for me – they have always been the places where i was most comfortable dreaming. that dreaming has kept me sane and, to this day, is the thing i rely on when the world is too heavy. i don’t dream to retreat from the world, but to run towards it. and on some level, i suppose, i always want to be a part of creating spaces for dreamers.   lh: we are both dreamers (fools!). this quality fits pretty well (at least abstractly) within academic environments – but you are no longer working in an academic environment. has that changed you professionally in some way? has it had an effect on your relationship to the work you do and care about? jf: well, certainly moving from a small liberal arts college in ohio to one of the nation’s nuclear labs has been an adjustment. needless to say, this environment is narrower in scope and just a wee bit more restrictive. throughout my career, i have always thought of my current job or institution as an incubator, providing me with the tools and support necessary to explore my interest in the profession. if an idea or project doesn’t fit within the scope of my duties or institution, i tend to find the community or group where the idea can take root. as you can imagine, working on top of a mountain behind heavily secured fences can make one feel rather isolated from the larger library community. my current work with the santa fe public library, make santa fe, and library pipeline is certainly a direct result of needing to see, feel, and contribute to the larger community. and, obviously, i’m a humanities-trained librarian working in a nuclear physics lab who doesn’t get to wax philosophical about the digital humanities very often. i think, at least i hope, most academics chose their profession because they were in love with art history or spanish literature, not a particular institution in which those subjects are taught. i feel the same way about librarianship (broadly defined). though institutions have certainly impeded my day-to-day enjoyment of the profession, they rarely dim my pilot light.     jf: i know that you are also no stranger to working in, across, and between disciplines over the course of your career. your professional experience and research, from your role as the carnegie science center’s first manager of environmental education to your recent knight’s news challenge proposal to build a science library of visual metaphors, has seemingly always been bridging what c. p. snow referred to as the two cultures: sciences and the humanities. what attracts and inspires you about this collision of cultures (snow, 1959)? lh: it should be noted that i was the first (and last) environmental education person at the science center. in 2006, i was working full time (going to library school part time) while also working at what i thought was my dream job. my approach at the science center was about understanding environmental science in a creative and social/cultural context while rethinking organizational structures to support new ideas and experiments. i kept being told that what i was proposing (bringing artists into the conversation; building a living wall that treated water runoff as it then worked its way to our riverfront through a bioremediated landscape; eliminating styrofoam from our dining hall and creating a marketing campaign about waste; developing a composting system, i could go on…) wasn’t real “science” or even science adjacent. i discovered seed magazine (how i loved that magazine) and was convinced the direction we were headed in was the right one.  i was particularly inspired by an article titled “the future of science…is art?”.  at the same time, i took a course called “civic entrepreneurship in public institutions” with the late taylor willingham, and it was revelatory. this kind of collaborative and creative thinking in museums and science centers does happen, with spectacular results. by 2008 the bottom fell out of the economy, my job disappeared. i was furious, heartbroken, and yet felt a clarity.   i decided that i would never wear a suit again (this was silly, but it felt good to say). i decided that i would fully devote myself to becoming a librarian because libraries were, in my limited assessment, places for collaboration, experimentation, curiosity, and making. i wanted to work in places that were willing to take risks and try to change the world and i saw that possibility in academic environments. it was at this point that i first read the c. p. snow book.  the desire to categorize and name ideas and disciplines (“cultures”) and to keep them separate has never made sense to me. it is in the places of intersection that real change and magic happen. we create distinctions because it is easier to manage the uncertainty of our very human existence.  it is a kind of control. control is a mechanism for managing fear. how we define that fear is entirely our own, but having control is one way to manage the total weight of that reality.   libraries (and people who work in them) like to control things. we have to, on many levels, for the machine to work. control equates order and we use that word to describe what we do – controlled vocabularies, authority control – but we also limit ourselves as organizations by letting that control dictate our behavior. i see collaboration as a way to let go of control (and fear). i spend a good deal of time getting to know people wherever i work, and in those introductory conversations projects or ideas emerge. the science library of visual metaphors grew out of meeting and talking to the incredible and wonderful felice frankel (a photographer and research scientist) at mit. we have not given up on the project.   lh: bringing ideas to life is something we both love to do. when we were at denison, we librarians were tasked with developing digital projects with faculty (and i won’t talk about how we didn’t get stipends but faculty did). i started with an enormous project that took almost two years to complete. but you took the opportunity to develop multiple projects and they were all so wildly different and full of hope. we both wanted to do more, to take this opportunity to push beyond just digitizing and putting things online. looking back, how did that work shape the work you do now, if at all? was it worth it?    jf: oh, you didn’t get a stipend? kidding! i’ll try hard to not go off on a tangent about the compensation for, and value of, library work. if i remember correctly, you were the first to develop a digital project among the liaison librarians. lh: i always have a project (or two) ready to be developed.  it’s a good practice. jf: your project was inspiring not only in scale and scope but also its purposeful incompleteness – allowing the collection to grow in descriptive richness as each successive course or senior project enhanced the metadata over time. what struck me about your pedagogical approach was its, perhaps unconscious, comfort and ease with incompleteness and perceived failure. especially with grants, so much emphasis is placed on success. however, success is usually narrowly defined through the lens of completion (i.e. “did you complete the intended project?”). experimentation and growth, in contrast, are usually accompanied by incompleteness and failure. by disentangling the concept of failure from the perception of incompetence and lack of effort, and underscoring how an unfinished project can still be a success, you opened up a template for riskier project proposals. failure is illuminating. incompleteness can be powerful. as a matter of fact, there was a really great exhibition at the metropolitan museum of art in new york last year, unfinished: thoughts left visible, exploring the prowess of unfinished work.   in my experience, librarians are really uncomfortable with the concept of incompleteness, from serials to archives. a missing volume in a complete set represents a failure of our services to our patrons. i think that ethos, intentionally or not, framed the committee’s perception of how the library should approach digital projects. like you, i too wanted to enhance the narrative around failure and incompleteness in my digital projects. allison carr, in her great essay in support of failure writes, “failure reverberates. it expands. and it makes visible what we often take for granted. in causing notice, it helps us see that there are other ways of moving through the world, alternative ways of coming to know lived experience” (carr, 2013). my sincere hope is that my project focusing on campus scholarship inspired students to engage with issues of open access and spurred the library to ponder its role in content creation on campus. hopefully the homestead archive taught a generation of denison students about the inherent political power of archiving while also asking the library to consider its relationship to the community archives developed at the university. maybe the baptists in burma: midwestern missionaries at home and abroad sparked a conversation about using institutional history as a pedagogical tool across disciplines. to my knowledge, none of these projects are “done” or complete. however, their encased incompleteness signify thoughts left visible to future librarians at denison. in that sense, the effort and time put into these projects was not wasted. though my focus has shifted to building data repositories at a national lab, i still want experimentation and incompleteness to be part of the conversation. jf: at the 2015 acrl/ny symposium you described your librarian agenda as subversive, rebellious, and one that seeks to establish a critical consciousness about the existence and importance of art, design, and creative thinking. you also opened the session with the disclaimer that you don’t want to say anything “tweetable.” given how embedded the hashtag is in library conference culture, can you expand on your reasoning for this humorous caveat? lh: twitter is both wonderful and depressing, and at any given moment i hate and love it simultaneously. i recognize that people like to live-tweet at conferences. there are also real communities and revolutionary movements that have begun and been sustained by twitter. my comment wasn’t about any of that. i was not denouncing these things, but i find some of the live-tweeting and conference conversations, in particular, to be frustrating.   people should do whatever makes them happy with twitter (i mean, they will anyway) but i find it to be superficial at times. these “fluid spaces” (like twitter) can overwhelm us with so much information and chatter that it’s impossible to process it all. i think we seek comfort and community in these spaces that sometimes allows us to not really engage with our own vulnerability or stupidity or pain or even happiness.   you aren’t putting your thoughts on twitter because you want to come back to them later – at least i don’t. i now have over 1400 “likes” in my twitter profile – things i want to remember and go back to but probably never will. yet there they sit, liked. i am pretty sure i “like” things because i want the person who posted it to know that i appreciated their sharing it.   jf: all those likes sit at the library of congress too, where archivists are currently scratching their heads trying to figure out if twitter can fit inside the library of congress. lh: we should keep our fingers crossed that there remains a library of congress! imagine trying to figure out how to manage the digital archive of the current administration. i am grateful to twitter for keeping me informed, however haphazardly. i wrestle with the tension between the opportunities, freedom, and potential in higher education and the economic and social realities in which we find ourselves and our students find themselves. the world is on fire, and it always has been. twitter fuels the fire. it makes you feel like there is some order, that you have some sort of control.   when i am at a symposium or a conference i benefit the most by just listening – not even taking notes. i once had a boss who never took notes but always had a grasp of what was being discussed and always spoke with incredible accuracy and nuance. she told me that the secret to remembering and being engaged was to really listen to what was being said. my job was to understand and participate. it was liberating and it taught me a great deal about listening and allowed me to actually contribute to the conversation.   jf: i’ve actually forgotten what it’s like to attend a library-related conference that didn’t start by mentioning the “official” hashtag for a specific session. whenever i mention this phenomenon to my colleagues in other disciplines they tend look at me funny. that’s why your quote, the exact opposite of every opening statement at a library  conference, caught my eye. it’s refreshing to hear a librarian at a conference actually speak to the equal importance of presence over participation. in an article for inc. magazine entitled the art of listening well,” eugene raudsepp cautioned readers to use the speed of thought productively “because we usually think three to four times faster than we talk, we often get impatient with a speaker’s slow progress, and our minds wander. try using the extra time by silently reviewing and summarizing the speaker’s main points” (raudsepp, 1981). tweeting a fragmented quote often isn’t the best summary of an entire panel presentation. though, admittedly, sometimes it is. with that said, i do enjoy following the hashtags of conferences that i can’t attend for links to useful resources and projects. also, i do think the social network analysis performed on conference hashtags can help visualize the density of “conversations” happening among conference attendees, but i also think that this “network mapping” can sometimes be an abstraction away from the actual substance of what is being conveyed by the presenters, panelists, or keynotes. so much of communication is nonverbal (body language, attitude,    environment) that an aggregate of disassociated tweets runs the risk of losing context and specificity. it’s like alfred korzybski wrote, “a map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness” (korzybski, 1933, 751). of course, in the age of trump, twitter has become a confounding discourse on the meaning of authority, accuracy, and context. jf:  as you know, we certainly share a healthy distrust of authority. this attribute will serve us well over the next four years as will an ability to focus on both imagination and pragmatism simultaneously. in to have or to be, erich fromm made a distinction between rational authority, which is grounded in competence and aids a person in their development, and irrational authority, which is based on power and merely functions to subjugate and exploit (fromm, 1976).  all too often organizational hierarchy, whether in a library or fortune 500 company, breeds irrational authority with an emphasis on titles and roles over skills and passion. now that you are a library administrator, how do you envision enacting a library agenda based in rational authority within the traditional structures of library organizations? lh: it’s an impossible question to answer because the answer changes on a daily basis.  but it comes down simply to listening to people and understanding their skills and passion and having that inform their work and how the organization supports and grows from that work. leadership is an opportunity to create community. i have used myself as a case study in how to lead with kindness and rigor and, most importantly, love. i don’t care about tradition or the way things have always been. i respect history, i want to understand where we have been but i will not accept anyone telling me that there is just one way to go from point a to point b. i just won’t. so, i will enact a collaborative and flexible agenda based on the growth and development of everyone working to bring it to fruition. the work is always in the service of our mission and vision as an institution and as an organization within the institution but also to the betterment of the world. jf: isn’t it funny how much we, as librarians, espouse values of love, kindness, and rigor in our personal but not our professional lives? can you think of any library mission statement that contains the word love or kindness? lh: no, i can’t. libraries definitely edge towards nostalgic affection, but i wouldn’t say love. but love has strength, it can be radical. bell hooks has been writing and talking about love for some time. she says, “whenever anyone asks me how they can begin the practice of love i tell them giving is the place to start” (hooks, 2016). could it be that we complain about and fight what is basically our greatest love? that we make it complicated because it’s interconnected to everything we do and believe?  i truly love the concept of a library. big or small, academic or roadside, doesn’t matter. someone took the time to bring things together, to offer them to you.  someone wants you to see it and experience it. isn’t that a miracle? working in an art library completely shifted the way i thought about libraries and their structure and possibility. i saw/see art libraries as a creative landscape and a case study for curiosity and generosity in the manifestation of ideas. i sometimes say libraries are the liberal arts heart of an academic institution.  we have opportunities to make connections and be experimental in unusual ways and i wish more academic libraries took advantage of that. that potential is what i love the most.  as long as we provide our communities with the basic services (and do them exceptionally well) then we are free to be as wild as we want to be. lh: we often talk about working together and frequently slip into conversations about great conferences or inspirational people, projects, and work.  “who is doing work that inspires you?”, is a question i often get.  or, “what other library is doing this thing you’re talking about?”  i have my own list, but i want to hear yours first.   jf: oh, there are so many! admittedly, having grown up in a city between chicago and st. louis, my antenna is always tuned to initiatives in the windy city and the gateway to the west. i am really inspired by the work of all the librarians and volunteers who built and sustain the read/write library in chicago, formerly the chicago underground library. this is such an important resource for the city of chicago and the rest of the country, especially as a singular narrative focused solely on crime statistics is being peddled by our current president. i am truly in awe of the tremendous work of librarians, archivists, activists, and volunteers who created the documenting ferguson archive at washington university in st. louis. it is so important to see one of the city’s most powerful and elite universities amplify, and ally itself with, the voices of the ferguson community. also, the hard work of everyone at the ferguson municipal public library before, during, and after the fatal shooting of michael brown. a great reminder that the simple act of keeping the lights on in the library, and being open to the public, can be an act of radical love. shanika heyward’s work at the e. 38th street branch in indianapolis feeding neighborhood children and providing educational opportunities for adult learners reaffirms my belief in the transformative power of public libraries, big and small. also, the work of libraries without borders and philippe starck in designing and deploying the ideas box in syrian refugee camps and during the recent peace process in colombia brings me joy. a great reminder that a library, even when ephemeral, can have a tremendous impact.     jf: i know we share an affinity for design and community engagement, so i’m curious to hear your list. lh:  your list reminds me of how much inspiration i get from public libraries and nonprofits in terms of space design, programming, and community engagement.  these things are important in academic libraries too, of course, but can get buried. the l!brary initiative is a wonderful example of public/private partnerships working together to tackle systemic problems through design. i wrote a piece in 2015 about my bookshelf that pretty much sums up my inspiration and what i am seeking at any given time. the bookshelf always changes, of course. i have always been inspired by women who are content with being on the edge of things and who head out on their own paths: agnes martin, beatrice wood, corita kent, muriel cooper, iris apfel. lynda barry is in a class by herself, teaching and writing and drawing and always learning. james baldwin keeps a fire lit inside.   i am fortified and inspired by the work of the african american intellectual historical society and try to keep up with what is shared on their site (and i found them through twitter!).  maria popova’s brain pickings site is astounding. it inspires me to think more about how we shape discovery experiences for our users – through storytelling and making connections. culture type is another remarkable site that is a model for ways to share a library and create opportunities for discovery.   amos kennedy reminds me that every day is new and you can always reinvent yourself, especially if you are on the path of something you love. triple canopy (which i think you introduced me to?) has been a model for thinking about new ways of publishing, writing, and sharing information. rural studio and the work of sam mockbee inspired me to study architecture and to approach it as a way to make the world a better place and events like structures for inclusion continue to give me hope.  visiting the studios and campus at the cranbrook academy of art inspired me to leave architecture school and see where i landed.   the new york public library is a public research library and a standard for experimentation and delight.  i have a twitter feed (hah) called #librarymaybe where i keep track of spaces and ideas that can apply to libraries but aren’t where one would necessarily look. i see a library as a laboratory, an incubator, a place for experimentation, a place of creation. i am inspired by everything. everything relates.   jf: one of the first conversations we ever had was about sam mockbee and the rural studio. i still have an old architectural digest dedicated to his work. it has also been really neat to see triple canopy evolve over the last few years. everyone on your list can be considered a pioneer, articulating and discovering new possibilities within a defined set of circumstances or medium. recalling your first question, i think most of our frustrations within the library world occur when libraries reify societal norms, as opposed to creating new possibilities and ways of being in the world. shirley chisholm famously said, “you don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. you make progress by implementing ideas” (thomas, 2015). your own twitter background is emblazoned with the words, “nothing is a mistake. there’s no win and no fail. there’s only make. the only rule is work.” from where, what, or whom do you continue to derive your work ethic and drive to bring new ideas into the world? lh:  my work ethic is a healthy balance of wonder and stubbornness. i don’t compete against other people, just myself. i have often been my own coach, football team, and cheerleader. not all the time, but a good deal of the time. i believe in kindness. i like to work. i like to get lost in a project. i believe in the shine theory. i like to be spontaneous and i like rules (not to follow all the time, but as a compass). you only get to the good ideas by working your way through the bad ones and you cannot be afraid of the bad ones. you also have to be willing to make leaps but bring your team along with you on that journey. you should surround yourself with creative and interesting people who are just a little bit rebellious but still generous with their ideas and time. as i am hiring new staff, these are qualities that i look for in other people. work should be an inspiring space.   that quote on my twitter profile is from my absolute favorite list of rules by sister corita kent who was an artist (also one of my absolute favorites) and an activist (and at one time a nun). these rules are ones i come back to again and again.  they are simple, and they are true. rule 1: find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile. rule 2: general duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. rule 3: general duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students. rule 4: consider everything an experiment. rule 5: be self-disciplined. this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them.  to be disciplined is to follow in a good way. to be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way. rule 6: nothing is a mistake. there’s no win and no fail, there’s only make. rule 7: the only rule is work. if you work it will lead to something. it’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things. rule 8: don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. they’re different processes. rule 9: be happy whenever you can manage it. enjoy yourself. it’s lighter than you think. rule 10: “we’re breaking all the rules. even our own rules. and how do we do that? by leaving plenty of room for x quantities.” (john cage) hints: always be around. come or go to everything. always go to classes. read anything you can get your hands on. look at movies carefully, often. save everything – it might come in handy later.         jf: i think rule 9 is one to hold close in the coming years. any final thoughts on how to “librarian” going forward in our current political climate? lh:  with love. “i believe in living above the line.   above the line is happiness and love.” – agnes martin   the authors would like to thank michael denotto (external peer reviewer), annie pho + ian beilin (internal peer reviewer), and members of the editorial board for reviewing drafts of this article. the authors also wish to give a special note of thanks to shared cubicles, luxardo cherries, the inspiring work of libraries and librarians everywhere, and the magic of serendipity for making this conversation (and our friendship) possible.   references baldwin, j. (1985). the price of the ticket: collected nonfiction, 1948-1985. new york: st. martin’s press. capala, m. (2014). the art of #livetweeting. retrieved from https://medium.com/@searchdecoder/the-art-of-livetweeting-90e93db25e22#.cql6p3hp9. carr, a. (2013). in support of failure. composition forum 27, n.p. retrieved from http://compositionforum.com/issue/27/failure.php. carr, n. (2010). does the internet make you dumber? wall street journal. retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/sb10001424052748704025304575284981644790098. dibner, k.a. & snow, c.e., eds. (2016). science literacy: concepts, contexts, and consequences.  washington, d.c.: the national academies press.  free pdf: http://www.nap.edu/23595.   elsweiler, d., meier, f., wilson, m. (2014). more than liking and bookmarking? towards understanding twitter favouriting behaviour.  association for the advancement of artificial intelligence.  retrieved from http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszmw/pubs/icwsm2014-favouriting.pdf. fromm, e. (1976). to have or to be? new york: harper & row. gino, f. (2016). let your workers rebel (a series). harvard business review.  retrieved from https://hbr.org/cover-story/2016/10/let-your-workers-rebel. heravi, b. (2014). social network analysis and visualisation for #rdaplenary 3 | insight news lab. retrieved from http://newslab.insight-centre.org/rdaplenarysn/. hooks, b. (2016). toward a worldwide culture of love.  retrieved from https://www.lionsroar.com/toward-a-worldwide-culture-of-love/. koryzbski, a. (1933). a non-aristotelian system and its necessity for rigour in mathematics and physics,  a paper presented before the american mathematical society at the new orleans, louisiana, meeting of the american association for the advancement of science, december 28, 1931. science and sanity, 747–761. kranich, n., reid, m., & willingham, t. (2004). civic engagement in academic libraries: encouraging active citizenship, college & research libraries news, july/august 2004, 380-384.  retrieved from: http://crln.acrl.org/content/65/7/380.full.pdf.   lee, k. (2014).  the secret psychology of twitter: what makes us follow, fave, share and keep coming back? retrieved from https://blog.bufferapp.com/psychology-of-twitter. lehrer, j. (2008). the future of science…is art? seed magazine, n.p. retrieved from http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_future_of_science_is_art/. martin, a. (2005). agnes martin: writings. berlin: hatje cantz publishers. mcgill, a. (2016). can twitter fit inside the library of congress? the atlantic. retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-twitter-fit-inside-the-library-of-congress/494339/. ongiri, a. (2017). malcolm x, the lover.  retrieved from http://www.aaihs.org/malcolm-x-the-lover/. raudsepp, e.. (1981). the art of listening well. inc. magazine. retrieved from http://www.inc.com/magazine/19811001/33.html. science for the people (podcast). http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/. snow, c. p. (1959). the two cultures and the scientific revolution. new york: martino fine books. steinbeck, j. (1937). of mice and men. new york: modern library. thomas, g. (2015). quotes of love, life, and success: useful for every stage of life. new york: jonathan frejuste. vonnegut, k., & simon, d. (2005). a man without a country. new york: seven stories press. willingham, t. l. (2008). libraries as civic agents, public library quarterly, 27:2, 97-110.  retrieved from: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~donnab/lis610/willingham_libraries_civic_agents_2008.pdf. worrall, s. (2015). how 40,000 tons of cosmic dust falling to earth affects you and me. retrieved from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/01/150128-big-bang-universe-supernova-astrophysics-health-space-ngbooktalk/.           authority, creativity, engagement, failure, hierarchy, imagination, incompleteness, intentionality, invisibility, leadership, love, power, pragmatism, twitter, visibility sparking curiosity – librarians’ role in encouraging exploration recruiting and retaining lgbtq-identified staff in academic libraries through ordinary methods 6 responses becky schneider 2017–03–09 at 4:26 pm thanks so much for sharing your conversation. it was both the professional and spiritual nourishment i needed today. lareese hall 2017–03–27 at 9:07 pm thanks for thoughtful comment becky. we are glad you enjoyed it. megan brooks 2017–03–23 at 10:38 am echoing becky’s sentiment – many thanks for sharing your back-and-forth with the world. lareese hall 2017–03–27 at 9:09 pm we enjoyed sharing it. thanks for the kindness. julia thomas 2017–03–27 at 6:16 pm there was an interesting conversation with such depth and humor. i was a bit sad when i got to the end. you talked about many points and many of which resonated with me. the first was when you talked about listening. anyone can ‘listen’ but many do not ‘hear’ what is really being said. granted even what we ‘hear’ can be interpreted in various ways to support any number of arguments then how it was originally intended. a good or bad thing depending on your view. the other point was about ferguson. this was hard to read. i live near ferguson and yet i had no knowledge about what the library was doing. it is this lack of knowledge that truly humbled me. i did not ‘listen’ nor ‘hear’. rather, i chose to let this information pass me by. thank you for the opportunity to change this and for the links to read just what was happening in my neighboring community. thank you! lareese hall 2017–03–27 at 9:08 pm thank you julia! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct collaborating with faculty part 1: a five-step program – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 7 apr kim leeder /9 comments collaborating with faculty part 1: a five-step program this is the first in a two-part series on librarian collaboration with faculty. part 1 presents a five-step program for building collaborative relationships, while part 2, published on july 13, 2011, addresses specific examples and strategies for collaboration. by kim leeder introduction collaboration has become something of a buzzword of late, which puts us in danger of forgetting what it’s really about. at the very foundations of the concept, beyond the conference presentations, published articles, and tenure portfolios, is the critical, learnable skill of connecting with others on both a personal and professional level. collaboration is based on building relationships with others and finding mutual interests or goals that we can help each other accomplish. it requires shifting the ways we typically think about our jobs and being willing to embrace another’s vision of our work. it demands an open mind, a willingness to listen as well as discuss, and the ability to compromise and adjust our expectations based on feedback. it is not an easy task, but it is an extremely rewarding one. like many academic librarians, i spend a lot of time reaching out to and trying to build connections with faculty members in my liaison departments. i love this part of my work, but it can be extremely challenging. i bring a somewhat unusual perspective to this challenge as i happen to be married to a faculty member, which gives me the ability to see things from the faculty side as well as from my own perspective. interestingly, the book compatibility breeds success by marvin snider compares collaborative partnerships to marriages, so there’s a double point of relevance here.1 according to snider, these partnerships involve a long-term commitment, accountability for one another’s behavior, a commitment to resolving differences, a strong emotional commitment, and “are likely to have a major impact on each other even after the partnership ends.” instead of love and family, academic participants share a goal of improved teaching, expanded publishing opportunities, or the like. recently i’ve broken down my approach to relationship-building with faculty into identifiable steps in order to be more deliberate about my efforts in the future. those steps are the subject of this post. this program is a proposed set of goals i’ve built for myself, and which i share with the lead pipe readership in the hope that you’ll find it useful. for the record, this “program” is still in beta (so to speak), and i welcome your feedback and thoughts in the comments below. i presented a skeleton of this at acrl’s ideapower unconference in philadelphia last week. one dictionary2 defines collaboration as “traitorous cooperation with an enemy,” which is a humorous yet apt starting point for the conversation. it seems to me that many librarians have an uneasy relationship with our faculty for a whole variety of reasons, not least of which are the different letters that follow our names. fortunately, the anxiety that comes from our different backgrounds and job descriptions is based more in misunderstanding than substance, so we can learn to shed those feelings on the way to a new partnership. instead, let’s redefine collaboration and set our goal as an equal partnership between one or more non-librarian faculty members and ourselves. personally, i’m interested in the relationships that push the boundaries of the day-to-day working relationships that many of us already have with other faculty on campus. i recently attended a presentation at the acrl national conference in philadelphia entitled, engaging faculty, creating allies. i expected the presentation to inform this post and expand my ideas of what collaboration with faculty could look like. while the presentation was good, i was a little disappointed that the “engagement” of faculty described was largely through workshops or colloquia organized by librarians and to which faculty were invited (and, in some cases, paid to attend). while collaboration can happen at such events, i just don’t see that as putting us on the equal footing that is necessary for deep collaboration.  as jean s. caspers describes, we can look at librarian-faculty relationships as occurring along a continuum of  three stages: parallel work is the most basic sort of relationship in which we’re working alongside each other for similar goals; cooperative work involves basic coordination of efforts; and collaborative work is the deepest type of partnership (21).3 sometimes having parallel goals is enough, but collaborative work is more likely to yield the greatest benefits for student learning or research. that said, it’s time to discuss the five-step program. it begins with a little self-reflection.   step 1: be confident the major challenge to librarians when contemplating a collaborative relationship with faculty is finding equal footing upon which to build it. we need to start by addressing, head-on, the librarian insecurity complex. yes, we have an mls instead of a phd, as do many other academic professionals and faculty; we’re different. as peggy a. pritchard writes, “to be taken seriously by faculty members as potential partners…librarians need to view themselves as professional colleagues with important knowledge and expertise to contribute” (387).4 while this sounds easy, it can be a substantial hurdle for some librarians. the first and most critical step to becoming a collaborator with faculty is shaking off at least a century’s worth of history that makes us think, for no good reason, that we can’t function as equal colleagues. we don’t have the same scholarly training, nor the same number of years of study under our belts, but we have plenty to offer. we have different skills and talents than other faculty, and that’s what makes the potential for collaboration even more exciting. in a 1977 article, h. william axford commented on the librarian movement for faculty status, and the nervousness of some librarians about the shift. “part of the problem,” he wrote then, “can be attributed to the nature of library education which simply does not engender in students the attitudes necessary to feel at home within the traditional values of the academy, particularly its canons of scholarship.”5 not to pin the whole problem on library school, but the truth is that librarians are not initiated into our field in the same way that faculty are: by reading scholarship, identifying our own specific area(s) of specialization, presenting at conferences, and building a network of colleagues whose interests overlap our own. this is in part because library school students may go on to work at a whole variety of different organizations. and some of this happens in library school for more motivated students, but the vast majority probably do not have this set of experiences. the result is graduates who have been schooled as professionals but not as scholars. it’s a different way of looking at the world, and a different way of looking at a career. so our challenge is to adopt the scholar’s worldview once we’re actively in the field. it’s ours for the taking. in fact, a recent study of faculty attitudes found that faculty have a very favorable view of various aspects of collaboration with librarians (rated overall as a 3.98 out of 5).6 an earlier study fleshed out some of the differences in how librarians and faculty see each other, pointing to an awareness problem that has led to faculty being ignorant of the scope of librarians’ work.7 considering both of these studies together, it is clear that faculty are not deliberately disregarding librarian expertise, nor are they averse to collaborative opportunities. the door is open.   step 2: make the connection the first phase of any collaborative relationship—before we can even think about the idea of collaborating—is simply making a connection with another human being. the best collaborative relationships often include an element of friendship, or at least friendly collegiality, in addition to a solid professional working relationship. if we think of collaborative relationships as just that, relationships, we can more readily accept the fact that they take patience, cultivation, and work, like any relationship. for those of us who love our library jobs, it’s easy to see how the professional and personal can bleed together. it happens on a daily basis, particularly for those who live in smaller communities or work on smaller campuses. how do we make these connections with faculty? it starts just by reaching out. we can make connections at the reference desk or on a committee, but they’re more likely to happen when we get out of our comfort zones. getting involved in new faculty candidate interviews. coffee dates. going to after-hours socials, plays, exhibits, speakers, and more. attending campus events and breaking away from the same, comfortable group to meet new people. one librarian at the university of saskatchewan decided to methodically arrange in-person meetings with a subset of her liaison department and later surveyed them to see whether her personal attention had an effect. it did, with 92% of faculty reporting that their use of the library had increased after the meeting.8 as an example, i started my current position and was assigned as a liaison to several departments. for one of those departments i lacked any notable background in the field and wasn’t sure what to expect. still, with my new librarian enthusiasm, i contacted the department chair and got myself invited to a faculty meeting. they gave me five minutes, and while they were cordial, my reception was less than enthusiastic. i left that meeting feeling that i had failed in making the connection i’d hoped for. still i regrouped, and decided to focus my energy and time on the department’s faculty liaison to the library (let’s call her jane). i proposed that jane and i meet for coffee, and the two of us spent an hour awkwardly sipping hot drinks and trying to find common ground to discuss. it was a challenging conversation, but it was a start. from the very beginning, building collaborative relationships requires boldness. there’s no hiding behind a mask of introvertedness. the hard part, typically, is making conversation with strangers. fortunately for us, this is a learnable skill, not an inborn characteristic. since i was a child, i’ve watched my mother conduct long, effortless conversations with just about anybody who comes near her. over the years, i’ve discovered that what comes naturally to her—making connections with people—is not just a personality trait, but an attainable skill. the key is: ask them about themselves. sounds obvious, right? it is, sort of. and just to be clear, i’m not suggesting that you meet someone and then launch into twenty questions and interrogate them. the best conversations are a give-and-take between two people sharing information about themselves or their viewpoints. but of all the great things i’ve learned from my mother over the course of my lifetime, possibly the most valuable and useful on a daily basis is: people love to talk about themselves. not in an egotistical way, but in a very straightforward and human way. we all have our unique passions, and we all love to share them. if you can steer the conversation to some of a person’s interests, hobbies, family life, or other passions, you can usually have an effortless conversation for hours. this simple strategy is something we can all adopt in our everyday lives to make friends, network with colleagues, and yes, build collaborative relationships with faculty. be bold, be friendly, and be inquisitive: that’s all it really takes. don’t forget to be yourself, too, and share your own responses to questions they ask. be a whole person, just as they are. not everyone on campus will embrace spontaneous conversation with a librarian, but most of them will. and even if someone clearly doesn’t want to connect with you, don’t take it personally. it’s their loss.   step 3: reinforce the connection once you’ve made that desirable connection with a faculty member, don’t blow it! the next step is to follow up, make sure they have your contact information, and remind them that you’re out there. this could be as simple as an email message saying, “it was great to meet you!” with a couple of notes about something library-related that you had spoken about, and an open-ended invitation to meet again. this was my approach with jane. or the followup could be as elaborate as a tailored newsletter or flier with more details about various services you can offer. at this point, the most important thing is to connect with them on their level, not yours. don’t immediately set up a blog or libguide or start bundling rss feeds unless you know they’re tech-savvy enough to appreciate it. one of the biggest downfalls i see when librarians connect with faculty is an expectation that those faculty will be as technophoric as we are. don’t count on it. choose a platform that they’ll use and find comfortable, regardless of how much you love twitter. if you’re just dying to put your love of technology to work, you can harness rss feeds or email alerts to track the topics the faculty you know have mentioned as interests. newly released books or articles make great conversation topics, and you can drop a line when you see their work get published. it’s also important to be multi-dimensional and not sound like a library salesperson trying to make the sale. if you went from friendly and personal in the initial meeting and now bury them in library paraphernalia, you’re going to lose the personal nature of the connection that is so critical to relationship-building. i’m not suggesting sending them photos of your kids unless they’ve asked for them, but in whatever communication you send, mention something you discussed during that first meeting. even if it’s work-related, it reinforces the sense that you were listening (which you were, right?). be personal and professional. remind them that you are, indeed, a whole person.   step 4: build the relationship once you’ve reinforced that connection, it’s time to begin building the relationship. this requires regular, consistent effort and possibly even putting reminders on your calendar or to-do list. this process is sometimes described in business literature as “bonding.”9 make it a goal to connect with the faculty member biannually or yearly. ideally, those connections should be in person, by dropping by their office, setting up a coffee date, or attending a faculty meeting and chatting with them afterwards. if those in-person options aren’t possible, an email or blog/newsletter can probably do the job. the more tailored and personal, the better. and again, choose the platform based on their comfort level with technology, not yours. jane and i started meeting for lunch every semester, and i made a point of sending an invitation by email every time unless i heard from her first. as we got to know each other better our conversations got easier and we learned about each other’s jobs and families. we spent most of our time talking about the research classes she taught, and the ways that i might help, but we also talked about a whole array of other topics. our exchanges became friendlier, more comfortable, and much more fun for both of us. at this stage, you’re getting to know them as a person as well as a professional, too. continue to ask questions: how are they doing? how are classes? how is their research? how is whatever they might have mentioned from their personal life? even more importantly, listen to the answers and learn as much as you can. take notes afterwards, for future reference, especially if you have a less-than-stellar memory. it may sound mercenary, but taking the time to remember details about someone means you care, and that’s a good thing. hyun-duck chung from north carolina state university is a great example of a librarian who embraced a business librarianship role fully by putting herself in a position to learn about her liaison department from the inside out.10 chung notes, “genuine excitement about a common goal can help ignite the relationship-building process, but cultivating it requires sustained engagement with individuals over time, and being open to learning from each other” (165).   step 5: go collaborate here’s where all that effort pays off, if you’ve played your cards right. after all this relationship-building you know what your faculty member is working on, what classes they teach, what sort of research assignments they assign, and other aspects of their professional activities. now’s the time to identify areas of mutual interest where a collaboration might be fruitful to both of you. look at their class research projects and think about ways you might build more library involvement into it, to benefit the students. pay attention to calls for papers that are open to an interdisciplinary approach to a topic (many are). wrap your brain around what a collaborative project with this individual might look like, before proposing anything. once you can see the potential for collaboration, go ahead and talk to the individual. be sure to describe the project you have in mind as well as the benefits to both of you. ruth mccorkle concisely describes “four main components of research kinship: a willingness to share ideas and the ability to critique and respond to others’ ideas; the recognition of one another’s talents; the joint sharing of an idea and crafting of a hypothesis; and, the commitment of time and resources in a shared venture” (539).11 be willing to give and take, consider other directions, or change the project completely in response to their feedback and ideas. a professional collaboration is a negotiation, and you’ll have to be flexible to make it a success. jane and i talked about an idea i had to tier instruction for a series of courses she taught that required research papers. the same cohort of students moved through all these classes together, so i thought it would be worthwhile to introduce research skills to them gradually, building each semester on what they had learned last time. she liked the idea, so i reviewed all her syllabi and put together a proposal. she liked the proposal, made a few suggestions that i incorporated, and then we put it into action. i was happy to move from typical one-shots to a deeper way of working with her students, and jane was delighted to see the improvements in her students’ work at the end of the series. so the collaboration is on! after that, you just have to maintain your end of the deal: meet your deadlines, do your share of the work, and most crucial of all, keep in touch. communicate regularly to maintain the relationship. and if something changes in your relationship and you find that you have to work with someone new, don’t be discouraged. just start the process over again and give yourself time to get back to the same level.   sound easy? it’s not. but it’s an endlessly rewarding adventure that takes us in new directions as librarians, teachers, and scholars. cross-disciplinary collaboration empowers us to re-envision our work, gain new perspectives, and reach goals we wouldn’t have attained alone. at the same time, it reasserts our value as librarians on our campuses and among our faculty colleagues. it benefits us, it benefits them, and it benefits our campus community. what could be better than that?   further reading in addition to the more specific sources found in the notes, i suggest these broader works for an overview of the collaboration topic. mounce, m. (2010). working together: academic librarians and faculty collaborating to improve students’ information literacy skills: a literature review 2000-2009. reference librarian, 51(4), 300-320. doi:10.1080/02763877.2010.501420 raspa, r., & ward, d. (2000). the collaborative imperative: librarians and faculty working together in the information universe. chicago: association of college and research libraries.   notes 1 snider, m. (2003). compatibility breeds success: how to manage your relationship with your business partner. westport, conn: praeger. 2 knowles, e. (2000). the oxford dictionary of phrase and fable. oxford: oxford university press. 3 caspers, jean s. (2006). building strong relationships with faculty-librarian collaboration. in p. ragains, (ed.), information literacy instruction that works: a guide to teaching by discipline and student population (pp. 19-32). new york: neal-schuman publishers. 4 pritchard, p. a. (2010). the embedded science librarian: partner in curriculum design and delivery.journal of library administration, 50(4), 373-396. doi:10.1080/01930821003667054 5 axford, h. (1977). the three faces of eve: or the identity of academic librarianship a symposium.journal of academic librarianship, 2(6), 276-278. 6 yousef, a. (2010). faculty attitudes toward collaboration with librarians. library philosophy & practice, 12(2), 1-15. 7 christiansen, l., m. stombler, and l. thaxton. (2004). a report on librarian-faculty relations from a sociological perspective. journal of academic librarianship, 30, 116–21. 8 watson, e. m. (2010). taking the mountain to mohammed: the effect of librarian visits to faculty members on their use of the library. new review of academic librarianship, 16(2), 145-159. 9cynthia w. cann.  (1998). eight steps to building a business-to-business relationship. the journal of business & industrial marketing, 13(4/5), 393-405. 10 chung, h. (2010). relationship building in entrepreneurship liaison work: one business librarian’s experience at north carolina state university. journal of business & finance librarianship, 15(3/4), 161-170. doi:10.1080/08963568.2010.487432 11 mccorkle, r. (2011). interdisciplinary collaboration in the pursuit of science to improve psychosocial cancer care. psycho-oncology, 20(5), 538-543. doi:10.1002/pon.1766   acknowledgements many thanks to kristine alpi, ellie collier, hilary davis, and eric frierson for their feedback and help in shaping this unruly post. collaboration, faculty, networking, outreach, research filter this what are libraries for? 9 responses pingback : collaboration with faculty | collaborative librarianship news pingback : collaborating with faculty part i: a five-step program « desperately seeking truthbrarian pingback : with the lead pipe…. | collaborative librarianship news pingback : citations needed pingback : bookmarks for april 7th through april 18th | darkrepository pingback : linking the physical library space to the digital: a new game-changer for libraries | leo s. lo pingback : future things not for assignment « carmon thomas ellen cothran 2011–06–25 at 1:05 pm thank you for yet another beautifully written, thoughful, and practically useful essay. the beautifully written part is so important to me as a librarian and as a reader. i’m a librarian working on the last sections of my mlis and i am saddened by the lack of fluidity and elegance in so much of the librarian-generated writing i am assigned to read. so thank you for over and over again producing pieces that are a pleasure to read on so many levels. pingback : collaborating with faculty part 1: a five-step program | in the library with the lead pipe | nedquist this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct csi(l) carleton: forensic librarians and reflective practices – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 14 dec danya leebaw, heather tompkins and iris jastram /17 comments csi(l) carleton: forensic librarians and reflective practices in the library with the lead pipe is pleased to welcome guest authors iris jastram, danya leebaw, and heather tompkins.  they are reference and instruction librarians at carleton college, a small liberal arts college in minnesota. by danya leebaw, heather tompkins and iris jastram becoming forensic librarians photo by flickr user smwright (cc bync 2.0)  “wait, this is information literacy?” a rhetorician at our workshop exclaimed in excited surprise. “but this is so cool!” and we wanted to respond “yes!” not only from joyful pride but also out of recognition. after all, we too had had very similar reactions to our own work with information literacy, and not that long ago. we too had realized that information literacy could be different than we had originally thought (or that the acrl information literacy standards had led us to believe). information literacy could be more alive and integrated within the discourse of academic work. it could be more applicable across disciplines and genres and rhetorical goals. and these revelations remapped our practice. just two summers earlier we had pored over some sample papers pulled from carleton college’s sophomore writing portfolio submissions, debating whether we could see information literacy at work in those papers and if so, exactly what we could see. we couldn’t see the processes by which the students arrived at their final work or the assignments that prompted and guided them. all we had were the completed papers and a nagging sense of unease about what we could meaningfully say about information literacy in student writing based solely on samples of student writing. as the hours ticked by, though, realization began to dawn. we had always said that information literacy was more than a discrete set of research skills, but when it came right down to it we had nearly always taught a set of research skills (cf jacobs 2008, simmons 2005, or swanson 2004). we worked with students to help them develop researchable questions, formulate search strategies, evaluate what they find, and cite sources. we collaborated with faculty to help them design assignments that would lead students through these complex and iterative steps. these practices were good and valuable, but we now recognized them as only the beginning. reading the finished papers themselves, we realized not only that research skills were hard to observe with any consistency, but also that we could trace the far richer information literacy habits of mind. we could be forensic librarians reconstructing our students’ understanding of the ways sources function in academic work based on the often subtle patterns left woven through the finished writing. these patterns coalesced around three dimensions, attribution, evaluation, and communication, that we codified into a rubric and used to help us investigate our students’ habits of mind. attribution we were surprised to find that we couldn’t really assess how well students followed citation style guidelines (one of the things we originally thought would be especially easy to see) because there are just too many citation styles and because many professors tell their students that “it doesn’t really matter as long as you’re consistent.” however, we found that we could see how well students guided their readers through the distinctions between their own thoughts and the thoughts of others and how well they helped their readers understand the nature of their sources. it became clear that teaching attribution as a habit of mind rather than citation as a rote skill would not only improve our students’ writing, but would also help them understand how sources function in academic writing in the first place. so now when we teach, we help students understand citation as context. we emphasize that students can build contexts for themselves by paying attention to the contexts other scholars have built for them in the literature. then we talk about how it is the students’ job to build similar contexts for their readers, and that this can help them decide what sources and citations belong in their papers. they can decide whether something counts as “common knowledge” by putting themselves in their readers’ shoes and wondering whether their readers would like to have the option of knowing more about that topic, and if so, leave them a citation to use as a starting place. thinking of their own classmates as their “community of inquiry” we have them develop citation styles that would be instant context-building tools for their community, privileging information that matters to their classmates and leaving out extraneous identifiers. then we explain how the citation style for their discipline performs that same function. this shift toward concentrating on the uses and functions of attribution breathes life into an otherwise stultifying topic, but more importantly it places students in the role of helpful knowledge creators rather than information compilers and potential plagiarists. evaluation when we turned to the question of how students evaluate sources, the pattern emerged again. it turned out that we could tell very little about whether students had managed to uncover core resources or spread their wings beyond jstor. instead, what we could see was whether or not students made compelling cases for their sources being the right sources for their papers. what’s more, once we knew what we were seeing, we could trace these same intellectual habits through papers that only included primary sources since selecting those sources is also an intellectual choice that involves matching evidence and claim. this insight helped us shift our instruction yet again. suddenly we realized that we could work with professors who often prefer not to include a research paper but still want to include an information literacy component in their courses, and with this realization, whole expanses of the curriculum opened up to us in ways that had seemed impossible just months earlier. we could work more closely with our language and literature departments, which place great emphasis on reading and writing about literature and far less emphasis on research. in these “non-research” classes students can analyze secondary literature that makes claims using similar types of sources to see what aspects of those sources are important to skilled scholars. we teach students to explore sources that will help them understand their primary sources well enough to see what might constitute an interesting question to ask of the source. even with more traditional research-based assignments, we shifted our teaching after realizing that students had been understanding the research process as one of gathering “everything” related to their topics and reporting on what they had gathered. now we discuss bibliographies as representations of intellectual choice designed to present the most convincing claims possible, guiding the reader toward agreement with the claim by presenting the most convincing evidence possible. bibliographies are rhetorical tools, too, not simply lists. communication while all of the dimensions we identified have to do with communication, this dimension is distinct in that it focuses on how well students use the evidence that they’ve found instrumentally in the service of their own goals rather than ceding the main thrust of the paper to outside voices. in strong papers, students marshaled their evidence while maintaining their own voice and their own sense of purpose. in weaker papers, on the other hand, patch writing1 and excessive citation signaled fundamental confusion about the sources themselves and the purposes for drawing on the works of others in the first place. oddly, one of our most transformative findings felt the most obvious: students have to actually read and understand their source material, really integrate it into their thinking, before they can synthesize those sources into their own arguments effectively. of course, we aren’t content specialists. yet, this insight helps us continuously improve how we teach familiar topics, like literature reviews. we recognized that students don’t actually know what a “literature review” means and what it is, really, that they are being asked to do in their papers. backing up and deconstructing these as much as possible, we connect the notion of literature reviews with creativity, intellectual choice, and disciplinary conventions by showing an in-class video about originality, teaching students mindmapping, or having a class create research journals using google docs. students also get a laugh out of demonstrations of bad literature reviews as conversations in which one person simply mimics or paraphrases another person. acknowledging and summarizing previous points in a conversation is important but simply listing those points is socially and academically weak. looking toward the future reading papers and working with faculty and students in these new ways have opened up opportunities for more integrated and enlivened collaborations both with departments having deeply entrenched information literacy curricula and with departments that have not typically seen information literacy as highly relevant for their students. emphasizing a “habits of mind” approach rather than a skill set approach, we are remapping our practice in ways that resonate more strongly with faculty and students across disciplines and courses on our campus. information literacy is truly a “critical literacy” now, encompassing “the ability to read, interpret, and produce information valued in academia” (elmborg 2006). so yes, this is information literacy. and yes, information literacy is so cool.   many thanks to our colleagues in the carleton college gould library reference & instruction department who together created this rubric, the design of the information literacy in student writing study, and with whom we shaped the thoughts and practices discussed here. thanks also to lead pipers ellie collier and eric frierson and to steve lawson for helpful comments and edits.   works cited: elmborg, james. 2006. “critical information literacy: implications for instructional practice.” journal of academic librarianship 32 (2): 192-199. howard, rebecca moore. 1999. standing in the shadow of giants: plagiarists, authors, collaborators. stamford, ct: ablex publishers. ——, tricia serviss, and tanya k. rodrigue. 2010. “writing from sources, writing from sentences.” writing & pedagogy 2 (2): 177-192. jacobs, h. l. m. 2008. “information literacy and reflective pedagogical praxis.” the journal of academic librarianship 34 (3) (may): 256-262. simmons, michelle holschuh. 2005. “librarians as disciplinary discourse mediators: using genre theory to move toward critical information literacy.” portal: libraries and the academy 5 (3): 297-311. swanson, troy a. 2004. “a radical step: implementing a critical information literacy model.” portal: libraries and the academy 4 (2): 259-273. patch writing refers to the practice of gathering verbatim passages from various sources and then piecing them together, much like a patchwork quilt, with connecting words and sentences. the term was coined by rebecca moore howard in her 1999 work standing in the shadow of giants. [↩] information literacy, instruction, library assessment stories of 2011: one person’s (my) adventures in growing a new academic library editorial: favorite gift books 17 responses alex watkins 2011–12–15 at 9:44 am i grade a great deal of undergraduate papers and this is exactly the kind of knowledge that they need. i’m wondering if you could possibly share any lesson plans, as what you describe sounds great and i’d like to see how it’s put into practice. pingback : csi(l) carleton: forensic librarians and reflective practices iris 2011–12–15 at 12:30 pm hi alex, yes, we could share some lesson plans. what discipline(s) are you most interested in? we could match you up with some lesson plans that are most closely tied to what you do. ina 2011–12–15 at 12:42 pm thank you for sharing the insights you gained! it gives a positive impulse to critically think about one’s own practice. :) michael rollins 2011–12–15 at 6:40 pm hauzit, i’m a fycomp instructor for multilinguals (and coincidentally a carleton grad), and i too would be grateful to see how you put these principles into practice. i generally encourage students to work on papers with me that they are writing in other classes, though my own classes tend to involve critical interculturality. iris 2011–12–16 at 9:15 am we’ll see what we can pull together. one thing about our instruction program is that we create highly tailored sessions, so there isn’t really a standard lesson plan for any of these given module. it changes from term to term and course to course and professor to professor. (also, i write up sketches of lesson plans, the barest outlines, since i never really thought i’d be sharing them with anyone.) but others in our department may have more shareable examples that are more readily available. for myself, i’m thinking i may pick out a couple of examples, write them up on my blog, and then link them here in the comments within the next couple of days. pingback : some 100-level information literacy concepts in lesson plan form iris 2011–12–17 at 9:17 pm ok, i’ve written up two sketches of lessons, one dealing with a more inter-cultural class like the one you describe and one being an example of a session i’ve done for a non-research assignment. i’ve also linked to some of the other places i’ve written about these kinds of “in my classroom” topics for lower-level students. i hope this helps flesh out the concepts in a little more concrete detail for you! emily ford 2011–12–18 at 12:00 pm thanks for your post and sharing all of these resources. i’d love to hear more about your collective thoughts about how others can start integrating forensics into their communities. also, tell us more about mindmapping! what do you do? i’m intrigued. danya 2011–12–19 at 1:37 pm thanks to everyone for such thoughtful comments. i’ve used mindmaps to teach students in a senior seminar how to develop a researchable question, or to visualize the scholarly conversation, or in one-on-one consultations with senior students to brainstorm bodies of literature for their capstone projects.  my colleague kristin partlo created this mindmap for senior students that demonstrates to students in both form and content how mindmapping helps them to organize their research. one point we emphasize with students is that early stages of research can (and should be) messy, there are a lot of conversations they are tracking, it’s important to find ways to organize their thinking in order to be creative and figure out their own argument, and there are a lot of tools to help them do that.  pen and paper or a whiteboard are great too.  it’s less important how they map their thoughts than that they find a way that works for them.  mindmapping demonstrates to students, conceptually, how ideas connect in unexpected ways and students also learn a hands-on strategy for tackling big research projects. megan oakleaf 2011–12–21 at 9:25 am nice post, and some of your experiences mirror what some rails (www.railsontrack.info) institutions are observing as well! do consider adding your rubric to the site, if you want… kristen 2011–12–28 at 5:13 pm i was wondering if you could tell us what you use as “demonstrations of bad literature reviews?” do you use previous student examples, or ones that have been published? if published, could you point us towards a few? pingback : nachdenken über informationskompetenz … | hapke-weblog heather 2012–01–20 at 12:17 am @megan thanks so much for your interest and support of our project.  project rails is doing such great work, and we’d be pleased to submit our rubric!  we’ll be exploring in a more in-depth way the connections between our project, the library literature and information literacy rubrics in some of our upcoming work. @kristen great question!  faculty sometimes have examples of literature reviews from past students that they have permission to use.   danya shares a with her class that is based on the ideas from many librarians, including the asian institute of technology, which has some good examples common “traps” to avoid and also a problematic literature review. another idea is to show articles that do not have any sort of literature review because to do so would fall outside the scope of the goal of that particular piece.  this isn’t problematic as much as just emphasizing these works as points of comparison for articles that have literature reviews.  i’m thinking about book reviews that review only one book, any work that has a close analysis of an object only, or even opinion pieces. i’ll admit to finding some good examples out there by doing some open web searching for guides to literature reviews and adding phrases like “examples” or “problematic characteristics” or “common errors.”  there are likely more sophisticated ways of searching, but this is what i’ve found works fairly well. heather tompkins 2012–01–20 at 12:32 am @megan thanks so much for your interest and support of our project. project rails is doing such great work, and we’d be pleased to submit our rubric! we’ll be exploring in a more in-depth way the connections between our project, the library literature and information literacy rubrics in some of our upcoming work. @kristen great question! faculty sometimes have examples of literature reviews from past students that they have permission to use. danya shares a checklist with her class that is based on the ideas from many librarians, including the asian institute of technology, which has some good examples common “traps” to avoid and also a problematic literature review. another idea is to show articles that do not have any sort of literature review because to do so would fall outside the scope of the goal of that particular piece. this isn’t problematic as much as just emphasizing these works as points of comparison for articles that have literature reviews. i’m thinking about book reviews that review only one book, any work that has a close analysis of an object only, or even opinion pieces. i’ll admit to finding some good examples out there by doing some open web searching for guides to literature reviews and adding phrases like “examples” or “problematic characteristics” or “common errors.” there are likely more sophisticated ways of searching, but this is what i’ve found works fairly well. pingback : library literacy | pearltrees pingback : what do i teach, anyway? | pegasus librarian this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct ending a harpercollins boycott (february 27, 2011-august 7, 2013) – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2013 7 aug brett bonfield /10 comments ending a harpercollins boycott (february 27, 2011-august 7, 2013) boycott! photo by flickr user tom verre (cc-by 2.0) in brief: the harpercollins boycott, which was intended to demonstrate to the publisher that “self-destructing ebooks” was a bad idea, has not been successful. this article describes the intent behind the boycottharpercollins.com website, and also what the experience of boycotting harpercollins was like for a public library in new jersey. the goal of the article is to plant seeds for future activism, should the necessity arise. in particular, foia presents an opportunity for libraries to improve their ability to negotiate with publishers and other vendors. by brett bonfield on february 24, 2011, joe atzberger broke the news that harpercollins would begin distributing self-destructing ebooks through overdrive. this was not welcome news. at the time, if public libraries wanted to lend ebooks to the communities they served, signing a contract with overdrive was the only viable way for them to do it. the fact that overdrive agreed to this stipulation from harpercollins meant that libraries had no choice. any ebooks they licensed from harpercollins would become inoperable after 26 circulations. if libraries wished to continue to circulate these titles, they would have to pay for a license that granted them another 26 circulations. after reading atzberger’s post, bobbi newman wrote a post about harpercollins’ self-destructing ebooks on her widely read blog, librarian by day. over the next week, she updated her post, adding links to responses from overdrive president and chief executive officer, steve potash, as well as responses by dozens of librarians and non-librarians. one of the ideas people raised was a harpercollins boycott. the day after bobbi newman’s post, my friend gabriel farrell and i got together and created a website to let the world know that many people were going to boycott harpercollins until it changed its policies, and to explain why people were making this decision. i have written extensively about our reasons, both on the website itself and in “tangoing all the way: is everything negotiable?” and “the ebook cargo cult.” these reasons can be summarized in five points: we believed the policy would further weaken first sale and fair use. we believed the policy would undermine libraries’ core values, such as access and preservation. we believed the policy would force libraries to allocate their financial resources less efficiently. we believed the policy would establish a precedent, and that other publishers would adopt similar policies. we believed a boycott was our best chance to get harpercollins to change the policy it had announced through overdrive. we didn’t think we would get all that much attention, and even if we did get a fair amount of attention we didn’t think we were likely to persuade harpercollins to alter its plans, but the boycott seemed better than any of the other options available to those of us who thought self-destructing ebooks would be a net loss for readers, libraries, and publishers. although we still believe in those reasons, and even though harpercollins has not changed its policy, we think the time has come to end the boycott. we have made this decision for two reasons: 1) the boycott didn’t work and does not appear likely to succeed in achieving our aims, and 2) i don’t want to put my new colleagues in the american library association’s digital content working group into an uncomfortable position. our decision has nothing to do with pressure from our neighbors1 or harpercollins or the amount of work required (within the library itself) or the expense involved in boycotting a major publisher or any of the other reasons my peers at other libraries gave for not participating. if libraries appreciate how easy it is to participate in a boycott, i think they will be more likely to lend their support next time a boycott seems like the best way to bring about changes that would benefit readers. part of the motivation for this article is to explain what the boycott was like from the perspective of a participant. i hope our experience can serve as a useful case study. i also want to plant the seeds for the next boycott. participating in a boycott was far easier than we expected, but even less effective neither gabriel nor i wanted to organize a boycott. our plan was to create a website that reflected the fact that many libraries and readers were disappointed in harpercollins’ decision and planned not to buy any of its books until it changed its policy. neither of us is media savvy, but we’re savvy enough to recognize our own limitations. you’re not going to see either of us on a reality show and, while we’ve both worked hard to become competent public speakers and will give the occasional presentation, it’s not like we’re fixtures on the speaking circuit. gabriel is an excellent coder and a very good writer. i write consistently, and i have built websites for almost as long as there has been a world wide web. we’re comfortable working in text, especially when we can iterate and collaborate. and, personally, i prefer to iterate and collaborate for weeks, and to be given a few thousand words so as not to be misunderstood. having to persuade people in real time, in person or in an interview, is not playing to my strengths. our hope was that others would naturally emerge to provide leadership for the boycott and give it a public face and a voice that would inspire others to join. what we could do was document that a boycott was emerging, and we could document it in a public, accessible, understandable way. the front page of the website we created was intentionally basic. at the top was the question, “are we still boycotting harpercollins?” in the middle of the page was the answer to that question, in large letters. as long as harpercollins would only license self-destructing ebooks to libraries, the answer would read, “yes.” once it changed that policy, we would change the answer to “no.” the rest of the text read, “as of [that day’s date], harpercollins is still limiting the number of times an ebook can be borrowed from your library, so the boycott is on.” we then linked to a short explanation for the boycott, a sample letter that people could send to harpercollins, and a contact page to get in touch with us. original versions of the website didn’t have our names anywhere on it, but the people we showed it to as beta testers told us that we needed to let site visitors know who had created the website or it lacked credibility, so we added our names at the bottom of the explanation page. our testers also encouraged us to track who chose to participate in the boycott, though on that point we refused. we knew that, “who is participating?” would be one of the first questions that most people would ask, but we also knew that we would be seen as the organizers of the boycott if we tracked who participated, and we didn’t want to be seen as organizers. our idea was to let people know it was happening and, ideally, when it ended. we looked forward to the day when we could change the text at the bottom of the website to read, “as of [that day’s date], harpercollins is no longer limiting the number of times an ebook can be borrowed from your library, so the boycott is off.” the boycott got far more publicity outside of libraries than we anticipated: the new york times, abc news, atlantic monthly, usa today and dozens of others publications ran stories about it. change.org got in touch with us to see if we would let them host a petition, andy woodworth agreed to organize it, and over 70,000 people signed on to “tell harpercollins: limited checkouts on ebooks is wrong for libraries.” library journal did a great job of reporting on the harpercollins decision and its aftermath, and kept its own log of prominent libraries that publicly committed to join the boycott. gabriel and i kept our involvement minimal. we updated the website as infrequently as we could—we viewed the website as an app whose primary purpose was to answer a simple question, “are we still boycotting harpercollins?”—and did our best to guide reporters and others with inquiries to bobbi newman, andy woodworth, kate sheehan (whose post about the harpercollins situation we linked to from our website), and other librarians who could better explain the problems created for libraries when their only access to many popular ebooks was to license copies that had a limited number of checkouts. the one reporter to whom i granted an interview worked for the retrospect, a weekly newspaper that covers collingswood, the new jersey town where i live and work, as well as its neighboring communities. in the march 18, 2011 edition of the retrospect, the cover story read, “colls library director leading boycott against e-book publisher.” i expected a vocal minority of my neighbors to ask difficult questions about our decision, either in person or in letters to the editor. i prepared myself to respond to their concerns, to be as persuasive in real-time and in person as i like to believe i am in print. but not one person challenged me. this may have been because, despite the article in our local paper, we tried not to make a big deal about it. there were no signs in the library and no announcements on our website. if people wanted a harpercollins-published book, we would explain to them that we were having trouble with that vendor, but would do what we could to get it for them. it might take a while, and might not even be possible, but we would try. if they asked about the nature of the problem, we would explain about the self-destructing ebooks, that the only deal we were being offered was not in the library’s best interest or theirs. some of our neighbors were disappointed about a few of the titles we probably would not be able to help them access, but everyone expressed their understanding and support. failing to capitalize on this support was probably a mistake, especially if we could have provided a template for other libraries. our traditional goal for the collingswood public library has been in keeping with the idea of making it a third place. if i were to violate that tacit agreement, i thought we would be in danger of alienating even those who sided with us in the boycott, because i felt their allegiance to having a relatively apolitical space may exceed their allegiance to standing up for their rights as readers. in my imagination, they were trusting me to allocate their tax dollars in a way that best approximated their interests and supported their well being. they not only trusted me not to spend $500 on an item that seemed unlikely to get much use, they also trusted me not to tell them every time i made that decision. correctly or not, i told myself that was the appropriate analogy in the case of the harpercollins books we boycotted. perhaps for that reason, participating in the boycott was a lot easier than we ever would have expected. ultimately, we got national publicity and community support that exceeded our wildest dreams. however, had we known we would get so much publicity and support, we would have expected harpercollins to care more than it did. its president of sales published an open letter to librarians on the harpercollins marketing team’s blog, library love fest, and members of the marketing team had phone meetings with several librarians, but harpercollins stood firm publicly and, as far as i know, privately as well. the 75 books because no one was organizing the boycott, each library or individual participant interpreted the boycott somewhat differently. for instance, some libraries bought print books, but not ebooks. at collingswood, we were boycotting harpercollins and all of its imprints, which for us meant that none of the funds we directly controlled were spent on any print books, audio books, or ebooks it published. one way to understand the way the boycott affected our community is to look at a list of the titles we would have purchased if there had been no boycott. after the library’s board of trustees authorized the boycott, i asked our primary selector of adult fiction to create her shopping cart on our bookseller’s website without regard to the book’s publisher. before putting her order through, i pulled the harpercollins titles out of her cart and put them into a cart labeled “pending (harpercollins imprints)”. i also added any requests we received, either for fiction or nonfiction, to this “pending” cart, provided those requests were for books we would have added to the collection under normal circumstances. in other words, if a book made its way into this cart, we would have bought it; if it did not, we would have requested it via interlibrary loan even if there had been no boycott. the funds we would have spent on harpercollins titles were spent on other titles. we did not bank the funds or create an escrow account. all of the funding that was available to spend on books, we spent on books. between february 27, 2011 and july 27, 2013, we placed 75 books into our “pending” cart. their total cover price was $1,955.25, and our bookseller’s estimated discount price for them was about $1,140 as of july 27, 2013 (the price has been rounded slightly out of courtesy to the bookseller). although we were boycotting harpercollins, and no funds we directly controlled were spent on any of its products, we were not censoring our community. there were five ways that “boycotted” harpercollins books could be accessed through the library: donations: when we received donations of harpercollins books, we would add them to the circulating collection, just as we would for any other publisher. this did not happen a lot, and we do not solicit specific titles as donations, but it happened for four “boycotted” titles since february 27, 2011 and those books circulated 39 times. ebooks: since march 2011, we have participated in the south jersey regional library cooperative’s overdrive consortium, and the consortium did not join the boycott. even now, ebooks only represent about 3% of our circulation — about 175–275 items per month — and that percentage was smaller for most of the boycott. of the 3,812 overdrive checkouts by our cardholders, 28 were for “boycotted” harpercollins titles. we thought about leaving overdrive, and plan to do so as soon as we can offer a suitable alternative. overdrive’s complicity with harpercollins is one of the main reasons we recently signed a contract with its primary competitor, 3m, and it is also one of the reasons why we will never purchase any books directly through overdrive. there are other reasons as well, including its willingness to sacrifice user privacy in exchange for serving titles to kindles and its unwillingness to allow libraries to transfer titles they purchase through overdrive to other vendors’ ebook platforms if they ever choose to cancel their contract with overdrive. audiobooks: we belong to a multi-library audiobook consortium which bought a couple of the boycotted titles on compact disc. we circulate a subset of this audiobook collection for three months, then pass that subset onto the next library and add a different subset for three months. “boycotted” titles circulated six times during the course of the boycott. interlibrary loan: we put in interlibrary loan requests for any book our cardholders wish to read, including harpercollins titles. many of our cooperating libraries do not make their newest titles available via interlibrary loan, but if libraries were willing to share their books with our cardholders, we were willing to process those requests. during the course of the boycott, we put in 73 requests for “boycotted” titles and 54 were fulfilled. reciprocal borrowing: we have reciprocal borrowing arrangements with libraries in two nearby communities, gloucester city and haddon heights, neither of which joined the boycott, so collingswood library cardholders could have gone to these libraries and checked out harpercollins-published books. i do not know how many chose to do so. i have posted the complete list of “boycotted” harpercollins titles as a spreadsheet on google docs, along with documentation about which books my neighbors accessed through the library and how often. the fields in the spreadsheet are: title author cover price: out of courtesy to our bookseller, i have not shared our discounted price isbn release date: the book’s publication/release date, as reported by our book vendor ill canceled: the number of times we put in an ill request and it was canceled for any reason ill retried: the number of times an ill request had to be retried ill filled: the number of times we were able to fulfill one of our neighbors’ requests total ill requests: the sum of the previous three fields, included to make it easier to assess how much staff time was devoted to placing ill requests for books we might have otherwise owned added as donation (date): the date a book donation was added to our catalog book circs: the number of times a donated book circulated audiobook circs: the number of times an audiobook circulated (note that we only had each title for three months) ebook circs: the number of times the ebook circulated during the course of the boycott, collingswood public library helped its members access “boycotted” harpercollins books 127 times, perhaps a few more if they took their cards to the libraries with whom we have reciprocal borrowing arrangements. making sense of anecdotal evidence the primary way our cardholders could access harpercollins books during the boycott was to place an interlibrary loan request. for that reason, looking at our interlibrary loan data can be helpful in understanding how the boycott affected my neighbors and my colleagues.2 between february 27, 2011 and july 27, 2013, the staff of the collingswood public library placed 4,443 interlibrary loan requests. many of these had to be retried or cancelled, and many went unfilled, so a single borrower request could trigger multiple requests in our interlibrary loan system. of these 4,443 requests, the only ones that are relevant to this discussion were for books, specifically those books published between 2010 and 2013. we weren’t calling for a boycott of other rupert murdoch or news corp or 21st century fox-owned companies, so non-book requests are not relevant, and any book published prior to 2010 would have been an interlibrary loan request even if there were no boycott. books published since 2010 accounted for 1,109 interlibrary loan requests during the boycott. the 75 “boycotted” harpercollins titles were 73 of those 1,109, just over 6.5%. because our interlibrary loan responsibilities are shared among three of my colleagues, and because the volume of requests varies during the year, it is difficult to estimate how much time is spent on interlibrary loans, but it seems to be roughly one fte. it’s probably somewhat less, but the most conservative estimate i can make an argument for is one fte, so i have rounded up. we placed just over 150 interlibrary loan requests per month during the boycott (4,443 request ÷ 29 months of the boycott = 153 requests/month). we have data for the 15 months preceding the boycott, during which time we also placed about 150 interlibrary loan requests per month (1,830 ÷ 15 months preceding the boycott = 153 requests/month). participating in the boycott did not increase the number of interlibrary loan requests we were placing, relative to where we were before joining the boycott (although it is possible that it offset what would otherwise have been a slight decrease). we spend about as much time processing the interlibrary loan requests we receive as we spend making requests to other libraries, so the 73 requests we placed for the “boycotted” books cost us about a quarter of an fte’s month. with benefits calculated in, we spent about $1,100 on these interlibrary loans (and the libraries on the other end probably spent a roughly equivalent amount). based on this estimate, we spent about as much borrowing our 75 “boycotted” books from other libraries, and then sending them back, as we would have spent if we had bought them directly. we were left with no artifacts to represent our efforts, while the purchases would have resulted in 75 books that would have circulated a lot more than our 54 fulfilled interlibrary loan requests—likely, for the more popular titles, more than 26 times each. also, oranges generally have thicker peels than apples. the problem with comparing the individual circulation that results from a fulfilled interlibrary loan to an individual circulation that results from an item in the circulating collection is marginal cost. it’s expensive to have people working on interlibrary loans (and expensive for the new jersey state library to furnish libraries throughout the state with interlibrary loan software and delivery services), but each additional interlibrary loan request costs slightly less than the one before it. it’s almost certain that we spent less than $1,100 on the 73 interlibrary loan requests that resulted in 54 fulfillments, we just don’t know how much less. another problem with concluding that we would have had more to show for it if we had spent $1,100 buying these 75 books rather than borrowing a subset of them from other libraries is that we spent that $1,100 buying books, only we bought them from publishers other than harpercollins. ultimately, we owned the same number of books. what we don’t know is whether those books circulated more or less than the books we would have purchased from harpercollins, or if the absence of those books would have resulted in greater or fewer interlibrary loan requests. ultimately, we inconvenienced our cardholders more than we would have liked, but we face that situation together every day. that’s life at a small library with roughly average funding. with the exception of maybe five books per year, we only buy a single copy of each title, which means that for popular books there is almost always going to be a wait. and we buy many fewer titles than we would like, so for titles that seem less certain to circulate, there’s a good chance our cardholders will have to put in a request and wait for us either to buy it or borrow it. as i discussed above, we created extra work for my colleagues. that’s not ideal, but that’s also a function of life at a small library. over the 29 months of the boycott, they probably spent about 30-35 hours placing requests for these books, processing them when they arrived, and packaging them for their return. i wish they could have spent those 35 hours, spread out more or less evenly over the course of 29 months, on something more productive. but i’m not certain that we could have spent the extra 15 minutes per week on something more productive than standing up for first sale, fair use, and libraries’ core values, even if we were ultimately unsuccessful. even though we’re ending our participation in the boycott, i hope we’re able to continue to dedicate this kind to time to intellectual freedom. if every library were to designate one person to spend 15 minutes per week on “upholding the public’s right to a free and open information society,” we would make a life a lot easier for alan inouye, carrie russell, marijke visser, and larra clark, our amazing colleagues in ala’s office of information technology policy. the boycott also resulted in lost sales for the authors and for harpercollins. i feel bad for both. we disagreed with the harpercollins decision, enough that we refused to buy its books for 29 months, but we never took any satisfaction in directing less money to its editors, publicists, authors, marketing team, or anyone else in the company’s publishing division. we prefer to think of publishers as our allies. we wanted to send a clear message to harpercollins about its decision, but we hoped that message would result in a policy change, not in a less capable publisher. we believed, and still believe, that giving libraries a reasonably priced option to buy (rather than license) ebooks is in all parties’ best interest. why we are ending the boycott we’re ending the boycott because the boycott failed. we’re ending it because there really is no boycott left to end, and probably hasn’t been for some time. we’re ending the boycott in the same way we started it. we always believed it wasn’t ours to start, so we didn’t start it: we simply created a website that reflected the existence of a boycott. having a website that claims there is a boycott when that boycott no longer exists would be disingenuous. there are libraries that still are not buying books from harpercollins, and that will remain true for some time. there are people who still won’t buy gas from shell even though apartheid was abolished in 1994, ending the shell boycott with it. but a few rogue activists is not a boycott. of course, the shell boycott ended because south africa changed its policies. this analogy fails in the sense that harpercollins has not changed its policy, but the point remains valid: when a boycott is over, it’s over, even if a few people still choose not to spend their money on a given company’s products. perhaps a somewhat better example is nike, whose labor practices have been under scrutiny for decades. many people still will not buy nike products even though, according ethical consumer’s rob harrison, nike “has come a long way,” including building a compliance program that is accredited by the fair labor association. part of nike’s reforms may be attributable to activists and social pressure by the people it would like to have as customers. there are gray areas within consumer action, and victories and losses are sometimes difficult to categorize. in addition to the lack of widespread participation in the harpercollins boycott, we’re also ending it because i have been appointed to the digital content working group, a committee created by the american library association to help develop strategies for representing libraries’ needs to publishers and publishers’ needs to libraries. this committee didn’t exist when we joined the boycott, but the work it’s doing is moving the profession toward the boycott’s goals. the leaders of the committee meet with publishers, along with ala officers and staff who are working closely with the committee. these conversations seem to be helping to get more ebooks into libraries, perhaps under more favorable licensing arrangements than they otherwise might have been. publishing executives appear to be taking the committee’s work seriously when they make decisions. there are reasons to believe the days of harpercollins making a unilateral decision and announcing that decision through ovedrive are over. while it’s unlikely that i will ever meet with any executives from any publishers as part of my work in the digital content working group, other members of the committee probably will continue to have these meetings. i don’t want these colleague to have to answer for my decision to boycott a company. i would be happy to answer those questions if someone from harpercollins or any other publisher asked them to me. my answers are included in this article. but it’s unacceptable to me to create even a small chance that someone would have to answer the question, “why should i deal with your committee when you have someone on it who is boycotting my company?” it doesn’t seem collegial for me to create that possibility for them, and it seems irresponsible to engage in activities that could undermine our work. yes, there’s a very, very small chance of that happening and, yes, if publishers are aware of in the library with the lead pipe then this would be an instance of the streisand effect. i hope they do read this journal, because that would be cool, and because if they read my articles then they’ll realize that i have an issue with their decision, not with them as people or with their company as an entity. like the other members of the digital content working group, i want publishers to succeed, and i am committed to helping them develop ebook business models that will be better for them, for libraries, and for readers. what we should do differently next time… we chose to boycott harpercollins just after its policy was announced because we believed something needed to be done, and we believed by acting quickly we had a chance to get the publicity we needed in order to put pressure on harpercollins to change that policy. we knew, from our understanding of the ge boycott, which was responsible for the academy award-winning documentary, “deadly deception,” that targeting a big company with a well known brand could lead to success. we knew that if harpercollins made it permissible to offer libraries an even worse ebook deal than we were already getting, that subsequent deals would continue to push that boundary—that the deals we would get from publishers would continue to get worse and worse. we were right about all of those things, but we were wrong about a much larger point. we were wrong about what makes boycotts successful, and we were wrong about that because i didn’t approach my responsibilities the way i should have. i was a bad advocate because i was a bad librarian. i didn’t do my research. i failed at the one thing i was best qualified to do well. scholars and activists have produced a large, practical, and readable body of work about boycotts. among academics, i recommend starting with the following researchers: monroe friedman, emeritus professor of psychology at eastern michigan university, who wrote numerous papers on boycotts, as well as what many scholars still seem to think of as the seminal book on the subject, consumer boycotts: effecting change through the marketplace and the media; brayden king, associate professor of management and organizations at northwestern university’s kellogg school of management, whose work is summarized at his blog and through kellogginsight, and can be found online in full text through a search for the title of a paper he published in administrative science quarterly in 2008, “a political mediation model of corporate response to social movement activism.” paul sergius koku, marketing professor at florida atlantic university, who has published two papers that would have been helpful if they had been available before the boycott, “on boycotts organized through the internet” (2011) and “on the effectiveness of consumer boycotts organized through the internet: the market model” (2012). in retrospect, the lessons i should have learned from these researchers seem obvious: plan a strategy and get a core group together before announcing anything; organize the effort and give people a central place to compare notes and announce their support; get as much attention as possible in as many venues as possible for as long as possible; make sure the company is vulnerable and direct attention to the ways it seems most likely to change in order to meet its needs while addressing our concerns; focus more on the company’s desire to protect its reputation than preserve its short-term profitability; clearly define the desired outcome; make it clear that the people who are participating in the boycott are credible and that our desire for change is justified. in my opinion, the work available from activists is just as credible and useful as the work published by the academics. as king wrote in “how protests matter:” “…public intellectuals (tend) to cast contemporary activists as either ineffective amateurs or as old hippies who’ve never been much good anyway. my guess is that most critics of protestors (sic) have never met professional activists and so they have no idea of just how organized and savvy they can be.” for instance, jenette nagy contributed “organizing a boycott” as section 17 of chapter 33 in “the community toolbox (edited by phil rabinowitz and kate nagy),” a “service of the work group for community health and development at the university of kansas.” in addition to the lessons we could have learned from the academics, if we had read nagy first we would have known to “partner with other groups who share your point of view,” offer clear alternatives to the products we were boycotting, and notify harpercollins that they were about to have a boycott directed at them. it also would have been helpful to have read co-op america’s “boycott organizer’s guide” (pdf) by connie murtagh and carla lukehart. they suggest setting the time frame for the boycott at the outset, and making it a priority to get endorsements and form partnerships with associations, institutions, and other companies. they also encourage organizers to get celebrity endorsements, create videos and other easily accessible educational material, and sponsor in-person activities such as rallies that are likely to get attention from the media and potential participants. finally, they feel it is important to try to meet directly with the company. if we had known how much went into successful boycotts, we may not have tried anything at all, and maybe libraries would have been better off. attempting a boycott and failing may be demoralizing for libraries and further evidence, for our vendors, that we are incapable of standing up for our core values or the legislation we have long relied on as protection for our communities and ourselves. however, it’s also possible that, had we known what it took to be successful, we would have worked with others to increase the likelihood of the boycott’s success. we did a little bit of that when we reached out to bobbi newman and kate sheehan and other librarians to ask if we could put reporters in touch with them, and when we asked andy woodworth to lead the change.org petition. maybe we should have sent out a few more emails or made a few more phone calls. maybe we had to get our website up and running quickly before everyone moved on to the next story and the “harpercollins self-destructing ebooks” story became old news. or maybe we could have spent a week figuring out who was willing to get involved, and in what capacity, and been part of a more thoughtful, better organized campaign. our ultimate role may have been similar—we are more comfortable and effective behind the scenes—but perhaps others would have been comfortable guiding the other activities that are associated with successful consumer action. knowing what we know now, i wish we had tried. …because there probably will be a next time it can be difficult to recognize an economic or financial inflexion point while it’s happening, but libraries appear to be in the midst of one right now. our funding is fluctuating, and so are the prices demanded by our corporate partners as they react to changes in technology, labor and consumer markets, and the legal environment. the ebook pricing matter remains unresolved, and it is just one of many issues that will require us to balance our desire to be pragmatic against our long-term responsibilities to steward our culture’s resources and protect intellectual freedom. these issues include journal pricing and access, the ability to provide library members with web-based access to audio and video, the right to modify and extend the software we purchase, the ease with which we can transfer our data from one platform to another, and the privacy protections we can make available for our neighbors, faculty, students, and others in the communities we serve. in working toward agreements with our corporate partners, librarians who work in libraries would be wise to accept the likelihood that our colleagues who work for vendors are much, much better negotiators than we are: vendors know their product a lot better than their customers do. this gives them a much better sense of how much it is generally worth to libraries like ours. yes, there are libraries like ours. librarians overestimate the differences between the libraries where we work and the ones with which we are comparable. vendors can better calibrate our similarities because they work with a lot of libraries, while we just work at one. vendors have a lot more practice negotiating than library-based librarians. that’s what they do all day, every day, more or less. librarians who work at libraries negotiate a few times per year, if that. vendors have more resources than library-based librarians. if they need to talk to legal, they pick up the phone and talk or text with the person who wrote the contract. every time libraries have to call in a lawyer, the odds are against our making a good deal. vendors are hired for their negotiating skill and their career success depends on it. i have never seen a library job advertisement that emphasizes the ability to negotiate well with vendors, nor have i heard of any libraries that offer commissions or year-end bonuses based on their employees’ ability to secure good deals from vendors. the point of negotiation is not to be as mercenary as possible, but it is to secure the best long-term deal for our employers. vendors know this, and they do their jobs well, so libraries are always going to be pushed to come up with as much money as they possibly can for the services they feel they need to provide to their communities. as people, front-line librarians and library administrators are not generally going to have the skills to identify offers that damage our long-term sustainability, and we are not used to structuring counter offers that meet our needs while meeting our vendors’ needs as well. one consequence of vendors knowing how to negotiate better than libraries is they set the rules of the negotiation to play to their strengths. for instance, most vendors do not publish their prices, which means that libraries have insufficient knowledge of the market, including markets such as scholarly publishing and popular ebooks in which vendors operate as de facto monopolies or oligopolies. insufficient knowledge of the market is a big deal, a point illustrated recently in a story by nyc news about marijuana dealers moving from san francisco to new york because medical marijuana laws have led to greater transparency in pricing, leading to lower prices for consumers. as quoted in priceonomics, “chuck, a dealer who switched from selling weed in california to new york and quadrupled his income, told wnyc, ‘there’s plenty of weed in new york. there’s just an illusion of scarcity, which is part of what i’m capitalizing on. because this is a black market business, there’s insufficient information for customers.’” if a drug dealer’s self-reported quadrupled income is not sufficiently credible, consider the oklahoma hospital that posted its prices online in a successful attempt to start a bidding war for medical services. as reported by kfor-tv’s ali meyer, the surgery center of oklahoma’s prices were often one-fifth as high as those of its competitors. you’re paying 4x as much as you should for your library management system, and overpaying to access journal articles by a factor of 5. hth. the next big action on behalf of libraries may not be a boycott. instead, it may be an effort to get vendors to post their prices online. why would vendors choose to do this? because it could be made clear to them that they don’t really have a choice. public libraries and libraries associated with public colleges and universities can sign all the nondisclosure agreements they want, but their contracts and bills are all public information.3 with the development and increasingly widespread use of alaveteli, muckrock, and the foia machine, it’s just a matter of time until enough library contracts and bills are made public that vendor pricing will be available to anyone who cares to know it. i predict that vendors with sustainable, ethical practices and pricing models are going to start publishing their prices online in the near future in order to protect their market position and trade on their hard-earned reputations. in the meantime, anyone interested in creating foia4lib as a companion to code4lib, foss4lib, and web4lib? i can’t be the only one who wants to know how well alaveteli, muckrock, and foia machine work for people researching libraries. for libraries to successfully advocate for themselves, we need to develop the skills and willingness to serve as activist leaders and collaborate on activist projects. our experience participating in an unsuccessful harpercollins boycott may prove useful to libraries as they plan to participate in subsequent activities, such as a foia4lib or a boycott that occurs the next time a vendor institutes a policy that could permanently damage libraries, the people we serve, and the vendor itself. it may also encourage us to participate in more successful, better organized boycotts, such as the elsevier boycott, which can be followed and joined at the cost of knowledge. i’ve signed on in support. i hope you will as well. thanks to gabriel farrell, jenica rogers, and my in the library with the lead pipe colleague, hugh rundle, for their insightful comments on this article. rather than “patrons” or “customers,” i refer to the people we serve as “neighbors.” our neighbors who have library cards are referred to as “cardholders” or “members.” [↩] while it will be left as an exercise to the reader to apply collingswood’s experience boycotting a “big six” publisher to their own libraries, it seems reasonable that some information about us would be useful in making an educated guess. if libraries ever find themselves in a similar or worse position, and are deciding if a widespread boycott might be an appropriate response, we want them to have access to our data and the context in which they were gathered. collingswood public library is an independent, municipal library with a budget of about $550,000, has 8.5 ftes (including its director), and is open 65 hours per week. we have about 85,000 circulations per year. from its single location, the library serves the boroughs of collingswood and woodlynne. both towns share a border with camden, nj, but also with more affluent neighboring towns as well. the front door of the library is seven miles from the liberty bell in philadelphia. the library serves a total population of 16,904 people, according to the 2010 census, and we are a relatively diverse community. demographics of collingswood public library demographic percent american indian and alaska native alone 0.39% asian alone 3.53% black or african american alone 13.41% native hawaiian and other pacific native alone 0.02% some other race alone 7.38% two or more races 2.95% white alone 72.33% persons of hispanic or latino origin (of any race) 14.71% persons 0-17 years 21.33% persons 65 and older 12.20% according to american factfinder, the per capita income for the population we serve was $31,322 in 2010, and at that time an estimated 12.7% had incomes below the poverty line. [↩] the freedom of information act, foia, is not monolithic: it varies from country to country and, within the united states, it varies from state to state. the best resources for the us deal mainly with exemptions, and none of those exemptions include vendor contracts agreed to by a public library or publicly funded university. resources for individual states can be found in the reporters committee for freedom of the press’s open government guide, as well as in ala’s list of exemptions (mainly “personally identifiable uses of library materials”). another way to look at it, which is especially interesting for those who have followed the director of libraries at the state university of new york at potsdam, jenica rogers and her fight with the american chemical society over its journal prices: go to pennsylvania’s e-contracts library and then, under “search using other terms” → “contracting party(s)” type in “american chemical society”. or just go directly to the source: as of 2012, suny complies with new york state’s freedom of information law. note: jenica rogers is one of the reviewers for this article. [↩] activism, boycott, case studies, foia, harpercollins killing sir walter scott: a philosophical exploration of weeding a new polemic: libraries, moocs, and the pedagogical landscape 10 responses dan scott 2013–08–07 at 10:25 am typo: it’s “atzberger”, not “atzenberger”. brett bonfield 2013–08–07 at 10:30 am thanks, dan. sorry, joe. i’ve fixed my error. jonathan rochkind 2013–08–07 at 12:46 pm a side issue, but, i found this interesting: ‘based on this estimate, we spent about as much borrowing our 75 “boycotted” books from other libraries, and then sending them back, as we would have spent if we had bought them directly. ‘ that may be less about the boycott, then a general argument for always purchasing a book instead of ill’ing it, if it’s still in print. if it costs the same amount to buy a new book as to ill it, why would you ever ill it instead of just buying it? of course, there are two sides to the “we were left with no artifacts to represent our efforts” — when you are left with the artifact, there’s ongoing cost to storing it on your shelves (shelfspace is a limited resource). but in general, i think that calculation you made there says less about the economics of the boycott than it does about challenging the economics of ill in general, for in-print materials. brett bonfield 2013–08–12 at 3:58 pm good point. in general, i think most public libraries use ill for no-longer-in-pint-as-hardcovers or for expensive materials. this case very likely presents a distorted view of the economics of ill. it’s just that, in this instance, it was the best we could do for our cardholders who wanted to read certain books but didn’t want to buy them. liz burns 2013–08–08 at 11:48 am am i right in concluding that the boycott was adult titles only? not children’s or young adult? brett bonfield 2013–08–12 at 3:50 pm good observation. i should have made this clear in the article, or at least acknowledged it explicitly, but the thing was already so long and already contained so much self reflection and collingswood-specific minutia that i didn’t go into it. lame excuse. anyway, i was comfortable with our head of youth services deciding for herself whether it was worth joining the boycott, and she chose not to participate. in this instance (and in most other instances), i see it as my job to be persuasive, not autocratic. i wasn’t persuasive enough, which means i did my job poorly. maybe next time i’ll do better. pingback : reading about ereading this week august 19, 2013 | allegany county library system director's notes pingback : cecs 5200: harpercollins ebook controversy | eduvise shirley miller 2014–05–12 at 7:57 am i thought this was an excellent article, self-reflection included. thank you. i am interested from two points of view: until i retired i was director of leisure services in a uk east london borough whose services included public libraries, and in retirement am an avid reader of e-books borrowed from my local library service (well, not immediately local as they don’t offer e-books, so i had to join a second neighbouring service). in the latter context, through correspondence with the digital lending specialist at the library, i have recently become aware of the existence of publisher-imposed limits on ebook lending and the need for the library to rebuy the ebooks after a relatively small number of loans which is nothing short of scandalous. my library also uses overdrive – maybe all libraries over here do, but i was interested to see your comments about 3m and wondered if you know whether 3m offers services in the uk too? i also wondered whether you may be able to explain what you meant by ‘its willingness to sacrifice user privacy in exchange for serving titles to kindles ‘? i am interested to understand libraries’ relationship with amazon – over here it seems that libraries cannot offer formats suitable for kindle devices. anyway, aside from all of that, thanks again for your efforts with the boycott and for the article. brett bonfield 2014–05–12 at 2:09 pm thanks for your kind words. if you haven’t seen it already, you may be interested in a matrix, maintained by rob maier, of the big 5’s ebook lending terms (the matrix is linked at the end of the post). based on its cloud library website, it appears that 3m is only available in the us and canada right now. when library cardholders want to borrow a kindle-formatted (i.e., mobi) ebook via overdrive, they not only have to authenticate themselves via adobe (using their adobe id, which is necessary for all overdrive-based ebook checkouts), they also have to authenticate themselves with their amazon id. i defer to sarah houghton’s explanation about why this is a problem. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct information privilege and first-year students: a case study from a first-year seminar course using access to information as a lens for exploring privilege – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2020 22 jan charissa powell /2 comments information privilege and first-year students: a case study from a first-year seminar course using access to information as a lens for exploring privilege in brief this article explores the topic of information privilege and how this concept can be used with first-year students to teach about information literacy and privilege. it is building off the work of a credit-bearing first-year seminar that was taught on this topic and a survey that was conducted after the class was over. the purpose of this study was to identify what my students learned about information privilege and how they define this concept. this article makes recommendations for others wanting to incorporate a lens of information privilege to their library instruction. by charissa powell introduction this paper will share a case study of research data and best practices from my experience teaching a credit-bearing first-year seminar on the topic of information privilege. first described by char booth in 2014, the “concept of information privilege situates information literacy in a sociocultural context of justice and access” (booth, 2014). prior to encountering this concept, i wrote my personal statement for graduate school on my belief that information should be freely available and that access to information is a human right. my undergraduate degree is in women’s studies, and bringing this lens with me to my library science classes helped meld the two worlds together. bell hooks’ feminist theory: from margin to center is a book that i come back to repeatedly because of its intersectional approach to feminist theory that centers the experiences of black women, and it reminds me that even for large groups of people who are oppressed (for example, women), oppression is experienced differently based on intersectional characteristics (crenshaw, 1989) like race, class, or religion (hooks, 1984). an aspect of information privilege that particularly sparked my interest while in graduate school was the intersection of privileges that allow an individual to have internet access at home (pew research center, 2019). in the first year of my library science program, i went on a two-week study abroad trip to bangalore and mysore, india, to study library and information organizations. on this trip in 2013, i found out that about 10% of india had access to the internet at that time, and this inspired me to look into internet access and digital divide issues in my own country. now, as a teacher and a librarian, i carry that perspective with me into my classroom when i interact with students without expectations about what students know or don’t know how to search. first-year students1 typically enter college or university and experience a new level of access to information through taking courses and what the university libraries offer. while academic libraries and universities pay for access to journals and databases, students are privileged in being able to use these resources. this is also a level of access to information most people don’t have outside of a higher academic setting, and that students will cease to have when they leave the higher education context. investigating privilege through access to information helps students realize the myths they may have held depending on their background and perspective, such as thinking that everyone in the united states has access to the internet or that everyone has access to finding the health information they need. this article will go over how the class was taught, what topics were covered, and the assignments used. topics included access to information in archives and museums, health and financial information, as well as open access in general. i will close with suggestions for incorporating information privilege into other aspects of library teaching. literature review defining information privilege information privilege was first used in 2013, but later defined by char booth in 2014: the concept of information privilege situates information literacy in a sociocultural context of justice and access. information as the media and messages that underlie individual and collective awareness and knowledge building; privilege as the advantages, opportunities, rights, and affordances granted by status and positionality via class, race, gender, culture, sexuality, occupation, institutional affiliation, and political perspective (booth, 2014). this definition was the first one in the field of librarianship, and in naming it, booth gave the impetus to further investigate information privilege. the definition is powerful because it talks about information literacy in connection with justice explicitly and how the two are connected. talking about information access by itself ignores why individuals might not have access and why others might. the added lens of privilege is the key to furthering research and conversations about information access. sarah hare and cara evanson have also observed information privilege as “a term that carries assumptions about who has power, who does not, and what types of information are valuable” in their article about this work with undergraduate students (hare & evanson, 2018). in 2017, in writing about information literacy threshold concepts, johnson and smedley-lópez defined the concept another way with more examples: one type of privilege is information privilege, or unequal access to information due to paywalls, and this is a prevalent and persistent issue and injustice in our society, with paywalls blocking the general public from accessing potentially life-changing information (johnson & smedley-lópez, 2017). this third definition is different in the fact that it’s explicitly talking about information privilege in terms of open access to information and gives examples of this. these definitions are distinctive and bring different angles to understanding the term. booth explicitly breaks down the two words (information and privilege) and defines each of them to show the understanding of the words together. hare and evanson (2018) speak more to the world we live in that interacts with information, a world that is riddled with systemic inequity and commodification of information. johnson and smedley-lópez (2017) give examples of how access to information can be cut off or limited. because my class was designed to help students explore their own personal identities and privileges, i am most drawn to booth’s definition as it puts these two terms, information and privilege, in conjunction with each other. later in this article, i’ll share the personal definitions my students provided for information privilege. related concepts a prior and related concept that influences information privilege is information poverty. elfreda a. chatman articulated a theory of information poverty that includes six propositional statements. proposition two states class distinction correlates with information poverty and how “the condition of information poverty is influenced by outsiders who withhold privileged access to information” (chatman, 1996). the concepts of insiders and outsiders come from the field of sociology of knowledge (merton, 1972). if applying a lens of privilege, we can think about who are typically insiders (those with privilege) and who are outsiders (those who are marginalized) to information. in terms of open access, aaron swartz’s “guerilla open access manifesto” in 2008 calls for those with privileged access to information to use their privilege to help others who do not have access to the same information: those with access to these resources – students, librarians, scientists – you have been given a privilege. you get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. but you need not indeed, morally, you cannot – keep this privilege for yourselves. you have a duty to share it with the world (swartz, 2008). the manifesto has influenced the concept of information privilege because it defines clearly who has access (students, librarians, scientists) to information and their responsibility to share it. swartz also names those who are in the wrong in actively keeping information behind paywalls, such as large corporations and politicians (swartz, 2008). acrl framework for information literacy it is important to note that while the acrl framework for information literacy for higher education, published in 2016, mentions information privilege in the frame “information has value,” it is only mentioned once and gives no parameters about how to put this into practice in the field of information literacy, nor does it provide a definition. one of the opportunities that this gives the field is flexibility to set these parameters for ourselves. the term “privilege” pops up in three other places within this document. the frame “authority is constructed and contextual” reads: experts understand the need to determine the validity of the information created by different authorities and to acknowledge biases that privilege some sources of authority over others, especially in terms of others’ worldviews, gender, sexual orientation, and cultural orientations” (acrl, 2016). under the frame “scholarship as conversation,” privilege is mentioned twice: while novice learners and experts at all levels can take part in the conversation, established power and authority structures may influence their ability to participate and can privilege certain voices and information” (acrl, 2016). learners who are developing their information literate abilities…recognize that systems privilege authorities and that not having a fluency in the language and process of a discipline disempowers their ability to participate and engage” (acrl, 2016). the commonality in these examples is examining the ways privilege can affect both information literacy on a systematic level and also on an individual one. the lens of privilege can guide our field of librarianship in how we work with students by being cognizant of the power structures at play. laura saunders explores social justice and information literacy by proposing another frame for the acrl framework called “information social justice,” which more explicitly states different ways for information professionals to incorporate this lens into their information literacy practices (saunders, 2017). i found this proposed frame to be a missing piece from the acrl framework, especially since the acrl framework mentions information privilege a few times. background i work at the university of tennessee, knoxville (utk), a public university and the flagship campus in the university of tennessee system. in fall 2018, the semester i taught my class, there were 22,815 undergraduate students and 6,079 graduate students for a total enrollment of 28,894 (garnder & long, 2019). looking at first-time first-year student data, there were 5,215 students, and of those, 76.5% of the fall 2018 first-year students were tennessee residents, and a mere 43 of them were international students (gardner & long, 2019). in terms of race, utk is a predominantly white institution, with 78% of the fall 2018 first-year student class self-identified as white (garnder & long, 2019). in january of 2018, rankin & associates, consulting published their campus climate assessment project for the university of tennessee, knoxville. they found that 51.3% of undergraduate students in the study considered leaving the university because of a “lack of a sense of belonging” and that 31.8% considered leaving because the “climate was not welcoming” (rankin & associates, 2018). the study also found that students in “minority” groups (for example, sexual orientation, race, disability, religion) considered leaving the university at higher rates than those in “majority groups” (rankin & associates, 2018). this led me to propose a first-year seminar titled “information privilege” because i wanted an opportunity to hold conversations about privilege with first-year students over the course of a semester. first-year studies (fys) 129 – information privilege – fall 2018 utk has an office of first-year studies, which has an optional course, “first-year studies (fys) 129” which is a one-credit, pass/fail course (first-year studies, n.d.) the goal of offering these courses is to better allow for connections between first-year students and faculty members in a smaller class setting. this course can be taught by any tenure-track or tenured faculty member at utk. as a tenure-track faculty librarian, i saw this as an excellent opportunity to spend sixteen weeks with a group of first-year students talking about a topic that i find important: information privilege. my course proposal was approved, and by the time fall 2018 rolled around, i had the minimum amount of students for the course to take place: twelve students. course description and format my course description read as follows, and was used by students to determine whether or not to sign up for the course: information privilege: have you ever searched on google and hit a paywall for an article? have you ever been frustrated while searching for a particular piece of information? this seminar will explore the valuable impact access to information has on your quality of life and in your community. by the end of this class, you’ll be a more savvy and conscious searcher. reflecting on the description now, the course itself became much more than this, but i was struggling to think about how to write a course description that would entice students to sign up but not scare them away. the description doesn’t even mention the word privilege; it is only in the title. thinking back now, i was nervous as an instructor that no first-year student would want to sign up for a class that had them think and reflect on their own privilege. in so doing, i made certain assumptions about what kind of classes a first-year student might want to take. in further iterations of this class i plan on being more direct about the content of the course and not assuming what type of classes students do or don’t want to take. my course was discussion-based and built in time for reflection on both my and the student’s parts. we explored topics with the intersection of information privilege and internet access, archives, museums, open access, financial information, and health information. every week we either read an article or watched a video before coming to class and would then discuss it in class (appendix a). as this was a pass/no pass one-credit course, i wanted to select readings or videos that would not take as much time to read or watch and would promote discussion in class.2 my students seemed surprised, but also enjoyed the fact that i would assign wikipedia entries for them to skim before certain weeks. in preparing for a future iteration of this class, i would cut down on the broad topics to about four. i found that by the time we moved on to a new topic, there were always a few students who still weren’t sure about the prior concept, which showed up in terms of continued questions from the students and in a mid-semester evaluation. there were certain readings that were not entry-level enough for my students and would require in-class time, or an extra class period, to fully delve into that concept. one example of this was the topic of access to archival information. i discovered that none of my students had visited a physical archive before, but only after we had spent a whole class period talking about archives. this was a good reminder to me, as a teacher, to check in with students about their prior knowledge of course concepts and content so that students had a better idea of what we were talking about in class before moving on to larger concepts. students responded to weekly reflective discussion prompts about the reading or video before coming to class. reflection papers were private and only read by me, in hopes that students would be more forthcoming in their reflections than they might be on a discussion board read by the whole class. reflections were due before the in-person discussion of that week’s topic so that students could have time to read or watch the material for that week and have time to react to it on paper. because all topics included reflecting on a different aspect of privilege, this format gave students time to reflect and process information and feelings before coming to class. it also gave me a heads-up as to where the in-class discussion might go. for example, if i read that multiple students were having a difficult time processing that not everyone has access to the internet in the united states (pew research center, 2019) it allowed me to better facilitate a conversation on that topic. guest speakers in the fall 2018 iteration of this course, i brought in three guest speakers over the course of the semester, and we went on one field trip. for weeks that a guest speaker was coming to class, i would reach out to my guest and ask them what they would like students to read or watch as homework for that week. i also asked my guests if they had reflective prompts for my students to do before their week. this was a class full of brand new students to the university, and i wanted to introduce them to other experts on campus. lizeth zepeda, my colleague at the time, came in to talk about archives and who gets to “see themselves” in an archive (zepeda has a background in archives and is now a research instruction librarian at california state university, monterey bay). rachel caldwell gave a historical overview of how we came to have the publishing industry we have today. melanie allen came to speak about accessing health information. the museum on campus had a fantastic temporary exhibit during that semester, titled “for all the world to see: visual culture and the struggle for civil rights,” and we visited as a class with academic programs ga, sadie counts (mcclung museum of natural history & culture, n.d.). this enhanced the class by giving different voices and perspectives on this topic. in-class assessment assessment is an integral part of my teaching process, so there were weekly, informal, reflective assessments. at the end of every class period, i set aside two-three minutes for students to write down one thing that went well during that class, and one thing that was still confusing. this allowed me to check in on the pulse of the class and see where students were with the material after every class. if there were big pressing things that were still confusing, i would write a response in the learning management system to answer it for everyone. if it could wait until the next class period, i would make announcements at the beginning of class. methods at the end of the semester, i realized that i wanted to know more about what students got out of the class, the impact the class had on them, and what they thought about the term “information privilege.” since it was my first time teaching this class, and i wasn’t familiar with any other credit-bearing information privilege classes, i wanted to take this opportunity to capture and give voice to my students’ experiences with the class. i planned on teaching this class again and wanted to make evidence-based decisions in any changes i made to the course. to gather this data, i created a survey (appendix b). the survey consisted of five multiple-choice questions and two open-text questions. after approval from the institutional review board (irb), i emailed the survey to students after the semester was over and after final grades had been turned in so that students were not pressured or influenced to take the survey. before starting the survey, students were provided with an informed consent statement that explained why this research was being done and that participating was optional. the survey was hosted in qualtrics through my campus’s office of information technology. survey responses were collected anonymously, and students were not asked to supply any identifying information, including demographic data. multiple-choice survey questions were analyzed for areas where many students answered similarly on questions to look for themes. narrative questions were coded for similarities, as well. i allowed answers to the survey for one month, and after the survey was closed, i downloaded the data from qualtrics and put it in google sheets. i had a few expectations going into this survey. i was expecting maybe half of my class to fill the survey out, especially since the semester was over, and it was winter break. i also made all of the questions optional and wasn’t sure that students would take the time to fill out the two open-text questions. limitations the study population is limited to the students who took fys 129: information privilege in the fall 2018 semester. because there were only twelve students in my class, there is a small sample size. eleven students started the survey, and ten students completed the survey. all the students were over eighteen. no demographic data was collected due to the small sample size and wanting to protect the anonymity of students. discussion and analysis multiple choice questions the five multiple choice questions gave the respondents a statement and asked them to choose either “strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree” to say how they felt about each of those statements. figure 1. a bar chart visualizing the distribution of students who did not know about information privilege before taking this class. full text equivalent of this chart as a list. question one asks students to “strongly agree” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree” to the statement: “i had little or no prior knowledge of information privilege before taking this class.” 90% of students “strongly agree” with this statement, 10% of students “agree” with this statement, and 0% of the students “disagree” or “strongly disagree” with this statement. these answers reveal that none of the students had any prior understanding or knowledge of the term “information privilege” before taking the class, which surprised me. i had originally thought that students signed up thinking maybe that they knew a little bit about the topic or were interested in it, but this revealed that it was truly a new topic to the students. this is understandable, as it’s a term in the field of library science. the response provides a context for the rest of the survey questions by giving the lens that this was new information to students. figure 2. a bar chart visualizing the distribution of students who have or do not have a working knowledge of information privilege. full text equivalent of this chart as a list. question two asks students to “strongly agree” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree” to the statement: “after taking this class, i have the working knowledge of information privilege to explain the concept to someone else.” answers to question two show that 90% of the students agree or strongly agree that they could explain information privilege to someone else and that only 10% strongly disagree with this statement. i phrased the question this way because i was interested in how much of a grasp students felt they had of this concept at the end of the course. this shows that the course gave students more confidence in being able to dialogue about information privilege. figure 3. a bar chart visualizing visualizing the distribution of students agreeing or disagreeing with how this class helped them reflect on their own privilege. full text equivalent of this chart as a list. question three asks students to “strongly agree” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree” to the statement: “this class helped me reflect on my own privilege.” answers to question three demonstrate that 90% of students agree or strongly agree that this class helped them reflect on their own privilege. 10% of students disagreed and did not think that this class helped them reflect on their own privilege. i was interested in the answers to this question in particular since it was such a motivating factor for wanting to propose and teach the course. figure 4. a bar chart visualizing the distribution of students who agreed or disagreed that they have a better understanding of how information privilege impacts their own lives. full text equivalent of this chart as a list. question four asks students to “strongly agree” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree” to the statement: “after taking this class, i have a better understanding of how information privilege impacts my life.” 80% of students “strongly agree” with this statement and 20% of students “agree” with this statement. all of the students who took the survey found that the course helped them to have a better understanding of how information privilege impacts their own lives, which tells me that even for the one respondent in the above questions who did not believe that this course helped them reflect on their own privilege, they are aware of how access to information impacts their life. figure 5. a bar chart visualizing the distribution of students who agreed or disagreed that learning about information privilege was valuable to their lives. full text equivalent of this chart as a list. question five asks students to “strongly agree” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree” to the statement: “learning about information privilege was valuable to my life.” 80% of students thought that learning about information privilege was valuable to their lives, while 20% of students did not find this information valuable. i was a little surprised by the answers to this question in comparison to the above questions. while all students knew how information privilege impacted their lives, 20% of students did not find this information to be valuable. this could be for several different reasons, such as that the 20% of students who did not find this information valuable did not feel the negative impact of information privilege on their own lives. narrative responses there were two optional open-text questions for students to respond to, which were the questions i was most excited to delve into and read. i was interested to see how my students framed things in their own words. the first open-text questions asked students to define “information privilege.” after coding their definitions, i identified the following themes: access to information, status, individuals, groups, and inequity. this question was optional, and only eight of the ten students filled it out. because of the small sample size, some of these themes have as few as two respondents in that theme. access to information the theme of access to information is in 100% of the definitions. “a person’s access and understanding to information.” “the access to information i have on a daily basis” “the access you are born with or are given to information you need in your own life.” status “your access to information based on location, status, or technology.” “information privilege is idea that access to information is based on an individual’s status, affiliation, or power.” inequity “individuals’ ablities [sic] to access to information are not equal, and some have advantages over others” individuals vs groups “individuals’ ablities [sic] to access to information are not equal, and some have advantages over others” “information privilege is idea that access to information is based on an individual’s status, affiliation, or power.” “the idea that certain groups of people have access to more information than others and that this difference in access to information makes it difficult for those who don’t have access to move up in the world” two themes that stood out boldly are access and information. the two words appeared in all eight responses of the respondents who chose to define the term. the term “status” in two of these definitions is not a term we used in class, and it would be interesting to ask follow up questions about what students mean by “status.” while this question was not mandatory, i was impressed that eight of the ten students were able to create their own definition of a term that was unfamiliar to them sixteen weeks prior. this survey data informs how i will teach the course in the future: i need to spend more time defining the term in the first or second class period. the way students defined terms made me think about what i emphasized throughout the semester. i think that i personally relied on “access to information” as a way to describe information privilege, and this survey made me want to include terms like “inequity” more in my course readings and assignments. the second open text question was, “is there anything else you want to share?” and was a place for students to say anything else that might be on their minds. this question was not required, and only two students put down other comments: “i enjoyed the class and thought it was useful” “this class was very helpful as it related to my english classes and businesses class. it gave me a better understanding of how information barriers effect people.” i am glad i put this question in, because i did not ask any questions about how the class helped students think or relate to their other classes, but was valuable information to have from this student. moving forward i plan on doing a follow-up focus group study with this same group of students. i want to ask a question about what they thought the class was going to be about, or what they thought the term meant when signing up for the class. i want to explore further how first-year students interacted with the topic and find out how this class interacted with other classes that they took. in the survey, a question asked students if there was anything else they wanted to share. only two students used this form in the survey, but one student noted: “this class was very helpful as it related to my english classes and businesses class.” i am interested to know more about how what students learned in this class helped them in other classes. recommendations while the class was a credit-bearing, semester-long class, there are takeaways and implications for different instruction settings. using the lens of information privilege and privilege when teaching about information literacy allows for a deeper and more meaningful way of learning about these topics. information privilege and primary sources / archives there are opportunities to talk about information privilege if teaching a library instruction session where students are looking for primary or archival information. merely asking questions such as: “why do you think it is important to have access to archival materials?” or “what intersections of privilege would allow you to see or not see yourself reflected in an archive?” or “whose materials are often collected in archives?” can allow for discussion about privilege on this topic. i was lucky to have lizeth zepeda visit my classroom to talk about this subject and would recommend her article (zepeda, 2018). information privilege and open access using the open access model to talk about information privilege is an excellent way to incorporate this topic into a class in a small or large way. based on teaching my class, this is a topic students were engaged in discussing. a great example of how to include it in a session is jessea young’s assignment on projectcora titled, “open access: strategies and tools for life after college” (young, 2018). appendix a fall 2018 syllabus appendix b informed consent survey questions appendix c figure 1. a bar chart visualizing the distribution of students who did not know about information privilege before taking this class. participants responded to the question: “i had little or no prior knowledge of information privilege before taking this class.” strongly agree: 9 agree: 1 disagree: 0 strongly disagree: 0 return to figure 1 caption. figure 2. a bar chart visualizing the distribution of students who have or do not have a working knowledge of information privilege. participants responded to the question: “after taking this class, i have the working knowledge of information privilege to explain the concept to someone else.” strongly agree: 8 agree: 1 disagree: 0 strongly disagree: 1 return to figure 2 caption. figure 3. a bar chart visualizing the distribution of students agreeing or disagreeing with how this class helped them reflect on their own privilege. participants were asked to respond to the question: “this class helped me reflect on my own privilege.” strongly agree: 7 agree: 2 disagree: 1 strongly disagree: 0 return to figure 3 caption. figure 4. a bar chart visualizing the distribution of students who agreed or disagreed that they have a better understanding of how information privilege impacts their own lives. participants were asked to respond to the question: “after taking this class, i have a better understanding of how information privilege impacts my life.” strongly agree: 8 agree: 2 disagree: 0 strongly disagree: 0 return to figure 4 caption. figure 5. a bar chart visualizing the distribution of students who agreed or disagreed that learning about information privilege was valuable to their lives. participants were asked to respond to the following question: “learning about information privilege was valuable to my life.” strongly agree: 5 agree: 3 disagree: 0 strongly disagree: 2 return to figure 5 caption. acknowledgements i am thankful for the time, energy, and expertise of char booth, external reviewer, amy koester, internal reviewer, and ian beilin, publishing editor. thank you also to hailley fargo and suzy wilson, who read very rough first drafts of this article to help me work through the initial writing process. thank you to regina mays, who read over and gave me feedback on my survey questions before they went out to my students. lastly, i am deeply grateful to my students who came to class every day with an open mind for this topic. references acrl (2016). framework for information literacy for higher education. retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. booth, c. (2014). on information privilege. info-mational. retrieved from https://infomational.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/on-information-privilege/ chatman, e. a. (1996). the impoverished life-world of outsiders. journal of the american society for information science, 47(3), 193–206. crenshaw, k. (1989). demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. university of chicago legal forum 1989:139-167. first-year studies. (n.d.). fys 129: special topics seminar. retrieved from https://fys.utk.edu/fys129/. gardner, d., long, b. (2019). utk fact book 2018-19. office of institutional research and assessment. https://oira.utk.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/66/2019/10/2018-2019-fact-book.pdf hare, s., & c. evanson. (2018). information privilege outreach for undergraduate students. college & research libraries, 79(6), 726. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.6.726 hooks, b. (1984). feminist theory: from margin to center. boston, ma: south end press. johnson, h. r., & smedleylópez, a. c. (2017). information privilege in the context of community engagement in sociology. in godbey, s., wainscott, susan beth, & goodman, xan (eds.), disciplinary applications of information literacy threshold concepts (pp 123-134). mcclung museum of natural history & culture. (n.d.). for all the world to see: visual culture and the struggle for civil rights. retrieved from https://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/exhibitions/for-all-the-world-to-see/. merton, r. (1972). insiders and outsiders: a chapter in the sociology of knowledge. american journal of sociology, 78(1), 9–47. https://doi.org/10.1086/225294 pew research center. (2019, june 12). internet/broadband fact sheet. retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/. rankin & associates, consulting (2018). campus climate assessment project. university of tennessee – knoxville report. retrieved from: http://mycampus.tennessee.edu . saunders, l. (2017). connecting information literacy and social justice: why and how. communications in information literacy, 11(1), 55. doi:https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2017.11.1.47 young, j. (2018, october 18). open access: strategies and tools for life after college. retrieved from https://www.projectcora.org/assignment/open-access-strategies-and-tools-life-after-college. zepeda, l. (2018). queering the archive: transforming the archival process. disclosure: a journal of social theory, 27, 17. doi: https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.27.14 i use “first-year students” as a term for first-year, first-time students at a university or college. the author does not use this term interchangeably to indicate the age or experience of the student. [↩] i did ask my students halfway through the semester if they preferred readings or videos, and it was evenly split amongst the class. [↩] no holds barred: policing and security in the public library teaching with care: a relational approach to individual research consultations 2 responses shaune young 2020–01–25 at 11:01 am your findings were very interesting, and i am going to try and incorporate the concept of information privilege in my instruction sessions. thank you for doing this work! pingback : sunday reads misc-joy this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct archives alive!: librarian-faculty collaboration and an alternative to the five-page paper – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 26 aug tom keegan and kelly mcelroy /4 comments archives alive!: librarian-faculty collaboration and an alternative to the five-page paper image courtesy of florian klauer, (cc0 1.0) in brief: the short research paper is ubiquitous in undergraduate liberal arts education. but is this assignment type an effective way to assess student learning or writing skills? we argue that it rarely is, and instead serves as an artifact maintained out of instructor familiarity with and unnecessary allegiance to timeworn conceptions of “academia.” as an alternative, we detail the archives alive! assignment developed by librarians and faculty at the university of iowa and designed to bring rhetoric students into contact with archival collections and digital skills. we also discuss how librarians can collaborate with instructors on new assignment models that build meaningful skills for students, highlight library collections, and foster connections on campus and with the broader community. by tom keegan and kelly mcelroy introduction anyone who has spent much time working at an academic library reference desk has encountered students scrambling to find sources for research papers they have already written. these students just need to add a few quotes (preferably from 3–5 different sources) in support of their preformed arguments. and quickly, because the paper is due tomorrow…or perhaps in a couple of hours. anyone who has taught undergraduate rhetoric, composition, or english has likely slogged through grading those same papers: formulaic phrasing or overwrought syntax; patchwriting if not outright plagiarism; vagaries grounded in hyperbole such as, “since the dawn of time…” and of course, anyone who has ever written a five-page paper knows the score. on sites like yahoo answers, you can find helpful instructions for how long it takes to write such a paper, how many sources to include, and how to tweak the margins/fonts to require as little actual writing as possible. whether the page limit is five or fifteen, as an assignment format, the short research paper is pervasive, largely unloved by its participants, and deeply flawed. we — an instruction librarian and an english ph.d./rhetorician now a library department head — believe that another world is possible, where assignments can be deeply engaging for both students and instructors. we also believe that librarians can help make this change happen. we recently created the archives alive! assignment now used by many sections of a core required course at the university of iowa (ui). the story of the assignment’s development is a story of risk and collaboration. in particular, it highlights the benefits of librarians approaching instructors to create assignments where students produce work for public audiences, and where student work can contribute to projects beyond their classrooms. the prevalence and weakness of short research paper assignments the five-page (or n-page) paper lurks everywhere in academia. its form privileges quantity, outmuscling quality and utterly preoccupying students with concerns about numbers. although professors may intend these assignments to facilitate exploratory learning, students often focus on meeting the expectations of their professors.1 because assignments may be vague on the more qualitative aspects, students often fixate on the concrete word count or required number of references.2 it’s the mass of text that preoccupies these students. their arguments and the audiences for them are secondary considerations. this quantification of thought sends the absolute wrong message to students. good arguments are not necessarily quantifiable. we’re not suggesting that there’s categorically no difference between a one-page paper and a five-pager. tom has had enterprising or lazy students ask if it would be possible to write a successful one-page paper. it would, but that would be a hell of a paper. and that’s the thing: the impressive, succinct, artful one-page paper is not what we tend to teach students. we tell them that in order to tease out an argument, in order to excavate the multiple facets of the topic being addressed, we need a particular number of paragraphs and pages. in prescribing these numbers, we remain silent on what other possible forms might better serve their arguments. and in doing so, are we adequately modeling our own enthusiasm for the subject being taught? if we love rhetoric or composition, what is it that we love about it? are we, through our assignments, conveying that love? in a world where the relevant searches for “five-page paper” are expeditious rather than enlightening, we doubt it. in the run up to the 2013 annual meeting of the modern language association, tom and our colleague, matt gilchrist — a lecturer in the ui rhetoric department and director of iowa digital engagement and learning (ideal) — ran a call for papers for a panel titled “beyond the essay.” they were interested in what other kinds of assignments instructors were asking their students to undertake in service to their learning. we received a bunch of marvelous proposals that, to use the parlance of educational theory, described hybrid learning models. the panel drew interest from graduate students, non-tenure track lecturers, and the whole gamut of tenure track faculty. people read gardens as texts, mapped local narratives, created marketing campaigns for local non-profits. tom also received a email from an incredulous think tank member who asked, “do you really want to give this generation of college students relief from writing college essays?” years later, looking back on our work, we think: “yes, yes we do.” and “relief” is a fitting word. those essays are needlessly stressful, arid work — for both writer and reader. there’s no texture, no hook; nothing animates them. they serve as stock exercises in a form that as one colleague of ours has noted, is not replicated anywhere outside of academia. and that is where we are sending many (if not most) of these students — beyond the bounds of academia. so what are we preparing them for? and how are we preparing them for it? short essay assignments can still play a role but over-reliance on the form does not serve students or faculty best.3 why is this a librarian problem? although most librarians may not assign short research papers, we are often brought in to provide instruction or reference to assist students. as advocates for information literacy, we have a stake in whether these types of assignments help students build the skills we wish them to have. that is: does a short research paper help students learn to do research? in short, not necessarily. among the findings of the citation project, sophomore students often cite the first page of a work, and rarely cite any source more than once in a paper, suggesting cursory engagement with texts.4 the work of project information literacy around employer satisfaction with recent college graduates further suggests that students don’t always get the skills required in the workplace. as one of their employer-participants explained, “they do well as long as the what, when, why, and how is clear in advance.”5 although we are wary of focusing on the interests of employers, this statement also raises questions about how students will handle other research and critical thinking outside the classroom. whether making personal medical decisions, researching local ballot initiatives for an election, or flirting with a potential partner on an online dating site, an inquiry isn’t over simply because you found your three references or reached a word limit. unfortunately, librarians often find themselves simply reacting to assignments, rather than advocating for projects that will purposefully build student skills. the chapter titles of the popular one-shot library instruction survival guide allude to common problems of faculty non-collaboration: “they never told me this in library school,” “the teaching faculty won’t/don’t…” “but how will i cover everything?”6 despite lamentations of the one-shot, many librarians cling to it as the only scrap of contact they can get with students in the classroom. even embedded librarians well-integrated into a course may have very little role in assignment design.7 there may be a gap in perception between faculty and librarians. in an ethnographic study of faculty who were heavy users of library instruction, manuel et al. found that library advocates sometimes had opposing motivations to librarians, for example showing little interest in lifelong learning or critical thinking as goals for library instruction.8 as one of their informants explicitly stated, they bring students to the library because the research paper is “the basic goal of the course.”9 faculty may also assume that students will learn research skills simply by doing research, and leave out clear information literacy or research outcomes from assignments.10 the most successful librarian-faculty relationships occur when there are shared goals.11 however, as in the case below, the common ground may not be immediately visible. nalani meuleumans and carr describe a program targeting new faculty members, with clear aims to shape their expectations for library instruction.12 creative thinking on the part of the librarian can help unearth potential for greater collaboration, but it also requires willingness to be flexible and make active suggestions. combining clearly articulated learning needs with new and interesting library services can lead to fruitful adventures. what is the point? developing successful assignment types in our view, the most successful assignments meet two criteria. first, the assignment type fits the learning outcomes and skills being developed. although this may seem obvious, we believe that archaic assignment types are often selected by rote. a new graduate instructor or junior faculty member is handed a stock syllabus for an introductory level course and is encouraged to maintain the status quo with respect to assignments because the clock is ticking on time to degree or tenure. the pressure to reach professional objectives outside of teaching become reason to cling to the “tried and true” assignments of the 20th century. research paper assignments fit some learning outcomes and skills — for example, writing in an academic voice or learning a particular citation style — but certainly not all. second, successful assignments are placed within a context broader than the course. students, like anyone else, shape their work to fit their audience. although not every quickwrite or draft must be shared broadly, when students understand that their work contributes to a larger project or could be seen a wider audience, they tend to take it more seriously. at worst, it’s a vanity concern in which students don’t want to look bad; at best, it imbues them with a sense of relevance that extends beyond the bounds of the classroom. of course, there are research paper assignments that meet these two criteria. a research paper can be a part of a broader scholarly conversation on a topic, or at least a stepping stone to a student’s contribution to such scholarship. but few of our students will go on to become academics, and so the question arises: what do they get out of this “academic” practice? we found that the answer was little that cannot be replicated in assignment formats more relevant to students’ future professional lives. case study: archives alive! so that’s where we were in 2013: tired, bored with our assignments, suspicious that we were not fully delivering the course objectives, and worried that we were merely reinscribing old methods onto our students who were poised to be citizens of the 21st century and needed, badly, to be able to move nimbly amidst its various forms of communication. tom: i was a non-tenure track lecturer in the rhetoric department, and co-directing a provost-funded student success initiative with my friend and colleague matt gilchrist. called iowa digital engagement and learning (ideal), the program was designed, in part, to help instructors rethink existing assignments and make them more digitally and publicly-inclined. our thinking was that students needed to be honing digital composition and public engagement skills. part of the departmental mission was to train students in writing, public speaking, and research. kelly: the library’s crowdsourcing transcription project, diy history, had huge success with the broader public, thanks in part to a viral post on reddit. people from all over the world were transcribing digitized archival collections, but the materials weren’t necessarily getting used on campus, let alone in the classroom. my colleague jen wolfe approached me to see if i had ideas about departments that might be open to developing something new using the pioneer letters in diy history. rhetoric seemed like a natural fit because their assignments often involved analysis of a text, and because i had strong relationships with several of their lead instructors, including both tom and matt. it helped that the two of them were known to be open to quirky suggestions, so we asked if they wanted to pilot…something. tom: and of course, matt and i said yes. kelly: the first few planning meetings had an open-endedness that was both refreshing and intimidating. for the usual one-shot, it is very rare to have any say in what an assignment looks like, since the syllabus is generally set long before the librarian is asked to come in. i think library instruction is often brought in as the clean-up crew when an early assignment goes wrong — yikes, my students don’t know how to research, please help! tom: in my teaching at the time, research remained the last of the skills i introduced to my students. we grappled with reading, writing, public speaking, analysis….and research. and this after-the-fact approach irked me. research became a sort of window dressing for students rather than the foundation of their work. they were seeking sources to hang on their arguments, rather than building those arguments on the sources they had read and analyzed. for a long time, i had been thinking about ways to better thread these skills together. the letters in diy history presented a different way to engage students in research. the letters themselves were not necessarily making pre-formed arguments, and i chose not to introduce them with much more context than: let’s look at these intimate writings from other people in history. the approach relieved (or robbed) students of the impulse to tie their arguments to ready-made contexts. much of the curriculum at the time encouraged instructors to use controversies as a means of getting students to understand the complexity of making an argument, to recognize the myth of argumentative dichotomies, the need to evaluate sources, etc. i was prepared to set that approach aside in favor of simply letting students dig into primary sources that they might find engaging. i asked my students to do the following things: transcribe the letter. rhetorically analyze its content (why did the letter writers choose the words they did?) in a 400-word blog post. historically contextualize the letter (what historical content is present in the letter, or barring that: what was going on globally at the time) in the same blog post for another 400 words. the intent here was to locate this letter in a real moment and possibly juxtapose the local with the global. create a two minute or so “ken burns” style video that walked the viewer through any aspect of the letter that the student found interesting. live present their findings to the class using any visual medium they found appealing (powerpoint, prezi, etc.) but not simply show their videos. the intent was to get them conversant in rhetorical analysis, writing, research, public speaking, and digital composition – all in the same assignment (while also helping create a searchable index of these texts for scholars). kelly: during the very first pilot, my own assumptions about one-shots limited what we did. students had already looked at a few of the letters, and seemed really excited about the project. i had prepared a research guide for the assignment, and we used that to navigate to the finding aid for the archival collections the letters came from. it was a total buzzkill! students were confused by the format, and suddenly felt intimidated by the formality. we moved on to explore historical newspaper collections, and asked students to try to find an article from the date of the letter they were looking at, and their joy started to come back. tom: we should point out here that one of the reasons for the return of their joy was reading old newspaper advertisements. students were intrigued by the fact that people a hundred years earlier advertised and purchased things like hats. hats became a simple hook to the past. kelly: but, it was a good challenge to my assumption: did they really need to understand how to use the finding aid to complete the assignment? no, as much as my archival studies profs would hate to hear it, they really didn’t. the purpose of the assignment was to do a rhetorical  analysis of the letter, with very minor historical context. some students would come back and use the contextual information later, but it was secondary. overwhelming students with the arcane form of the finding aid did not serve them well. these weren’t history students, and our goal wasn’t to make them into historians — or even to make them feel like historians. tom: right. we wanted to use the primary source material to foreground the work of rhetorical analysis against the backdrop of historical research. after all, i was expected to be teaching them rhetoric — the art of persuasion. in many cases, analyzing the rhetoric of the letter also required researching contemporary idioms and terminology. i should also point out that the letters fostered remarkable collaboration. cursive, for example, brought out the cooperative spirit in them. we worked on transcription in class and when students had difficulty reading a word, we would put it to the class to essentially crowdsource an answer about what was written there. was this scribble an “s” or an “f”? i was impressed by the problem-solving groupthink that possessed them. kelly: by the second term we ran the assignment, we had expanded to three sections. that term, students in all sections looked at letters from a single scrapbook collection. this approach had a serendipitous peer-evaluation factor where several students in each section read letters from the same group of half a dozen american men serving in wwii. the students’ curiosity about filling in the gaps in these narratives or between references and words they understood and those they didn’t, led them to connect their work with that of their peers. tom: i will admit to being deeply suspicious about using such a small set of letter writers. i thought i’d be hearing the same names and the same stories and views over and over again. i was sure we were running the risk of replicating an assignment along the lines of asking students to weigh in with their views on the drinking age or the legalization of recreational marijuana use. i couldn’t have been more wrong. in class and during their final presentations students questioned one another about their shared letter writers. they asked things like: “when was that letter written?” or “had he already said this to evelyn?” as they pieced together a larger narrative. clarence clark letter, may 3, 1941, page 1. http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/transcribe/3197/77986 kelly: evelyn birkby, the woman who had donated the scrapbooks, ended up agreeing to do a phone call with one section, which i sat in on. it was truly an experience in rhetoric as these students carefully tried to ask this 94-year-old woman about the nature of her relationships with all these men 70-plus years ago. she later expressed to the curator of the iowa women’s archive that she was delighted to know that her materials were being used, not just sitting in storage somewhere. tom: these letters also introduce some content that is more immediately graspable for our students. the soldiers mention films, music, and plays. the students can relate to those things — but they often don’t know the works being referenced. so, boom: there’s a research question. and they love it. pop culture references, military lingo, idioms all become portals for analysis and with it: research. tellingly their blog posts (a form that i think produces a more compelling and earnest voice than formal papers which often encourage stilted language and overwrought syntax) improve. they care about what they are writing and about the people writing the letters. as one student commented, “this project taught me that when something interests you, it never really feels like research as much as it feels like learning more about an old friend or uncovering hidden, exciting secrets.” another student talked about wanting to read the letters of their deceased grandfather as “good bonding experience for us.” and while our students have chafed against the videos, they do admit to enjoying the sense of accomplishment upon seeing their arguments in documentary style. their presentations are also a delight to watch. they interrupt one another, they go over time with questions, they carry on conversations after class about the letters and evelyn’s connection to these men. they consider themselves (mild) experts on their letters. and they feel they have contributed to the scholarly enterprise. at the very least, they have transcribed letters for other scholars, making those handwritten texts searchable. i’ll note here that one question i often get when discussing this assignment is: “isn’t this just student labor?” to which i often reply that nothing is more laborious for students and instructors than the rote five-pager. and why adhere to an assignment model that pretends to include students in the experience (that dewey objective) of scholarly work, when we can use one that actually does? kelly: it definitely requires ongoing maintenance. once a collection is fully transcribed, it can’t be reused for the assignment. it has taken conversations each term with the library staff who really know the collections to identify good fits for the assignment, and then the assignment gets tweaked to fit as well. other examples lately, we in the ui libraries have been working on calling attention to little used or little seen collections. we’ve commenced a collections to courses initiative that tries to bring the holdings of the libraries into broader circulation in the classroom. for instance, like our colleagues at notre dame university and the university of pennsylvania, we are identifying and promoting public domain holdings that can be openly remixed by students. and, in turn, we are encouraging students to archive their remixes with the library for future remixing. we’re interested in creating intellectual feedback loops where students create knowledge that will be stored by the libraries and those works can in turn be used by other scholars (students and faculty alike). we’ve also begun archiving student works produced by the iowa narratives project in our institutional repository, iowa research online. that project asks students to work in groups and create eight-minute podcasts out of an interview with a local citizen. students must make audio recordings, edit them in the style of, say, storycorps or this american life or radiolab, take photographs, and write a brief paragraph of context for the interview. in our experience, students often compose essays in one take. it’s four in the morning, they’ve just tumbled a bunch of text onto the page and…damn, it’s perfect (in their exhausted eyes). by contrast, no students edit like the students asked to make an audio recording of themselves. we find that students do not readily edit their own writing in the same way they do their multimedia. students making audio recordings of their own voices, for example, will do multiple takes without any prompting — they know what sounds good. so what if we used assignments that highlight editing of multimedia as a gateway for helping them understand why and how to edit writing? the recipe (we think) for librarians to propose this kind of change for librarians interested in pursuing this kind of pedagogical change with instructors, we have some suggestions for successful collaborations. strategize. consider your target. are there faculty/instructors who are known to be willing to experiment? folks who are big advocates for the library? a course whose instructors are particularly grateful for help from instruction librarians? or perhaps there are courses whose regular assignments produce groans every term. at the university of iowa, all students are required to take a course titled “rhetoric,” which is meant to introduce students to the art of persuasion. in that course, many instructors, students, and librarians alike lamented the long-standing paper-about-a-controversy. those lamentations were an invitation for new ideas. by targeting shared frustrations and overlapping objectives, instructors and librarians were able to jointly remake the assignment in a way that better achieved their goals. if you can think of projects that both advance the library’s goals and instructor and student need, you’re likely to have a better chance of lasting success. archives alive! helped promote our digital collections in the classroom while hitting multiple course objectives tied to rhetoric. advocate. consider the possible motivations of the people you approach. will they see this as the solution to a perennial problem? an innovative feather in their teaching cap? a hassle this late in the term? an opportunity to give back to the library? however you package your suggestion, be clear about your intended role in the project. meulemans and carr recommend practicing answers to hard questions from faculty, so you are prepared to stand up for yourself in the moment.13 if you’re afraid of a tough interaction, roleplay with colleagues who might have helpful feedback. work backwards from your objective. if you’re going to rethink an assignment, think first about what it is supposed to do. not along the lines of “it’s supposed to generate a paper” — but rather along the lines of “what do you want your students to be able to do?” if you want your students to become better researchers, think about what that means to you. what is a better researcher able to do? once you have a sense of what it is you’d like as in end product (in terms of skills), work backwards towards the assignment prompt.14 ask yourself what steps the student will need to take to wind up at the desired end point. in the case of archives alive! we wanted to arrive at a live presentation on a topic of interest to the student that had been reasonably researched. and of course, “of interest” and “reasonably researched” don’t make that endpoint particularly easy to attain. working backwards also better allows you to anticipate the time needed to work through each step in the assignment process. unlike simply assigning a paper with draft and final due dates, our assignment included due dates for component parts of the assignment. this approach helped students lay the foundation for their eventual live presentation by completing one part of the assignment at a time. be honest. when you ask students to undertake new assignment models, be honest with them. tell them this hasn’t been done before. acknowledge that there will be bumps in the road. and tell them that they will be your troubleshooters. as they walk through the assignment, the problems they encounter will help the next semester’s students. this goes for interacting with faculty, too. there are costs associated with implementing new assignment forms; they take up time both in and out of class. so remain flexible when navigating a faculty member’s approach to the project, and find ways to be generous of your own time and resources. promote. once your students have crafted these engaging, enlightening, and entertaining works, share them. get them out of the classroom to present in a more public setting. at iowa, we have had tremendous success getting classes to share their work in our learning commons within the main library, an open space that gets a lot of foot traffic. and to the extent that the works are digital, circulate them on the internet. call attention to your hard work and that of your students, by inviting faculty and administrators to come listen to your students’ presentations. celebrate their effort by trusting that it is something the public will find interesting. take risks. let go of your assumptions of what library instruction means. for archives alive!, we went into it without really knowing what the assignment would look like. it took a lot of conversation to clarify the goals of the instructors and of the librarians, and to brainstorm about how to get all those goals met. for students to interact fully with the documents, we had to let them focus on deciphering the cursive, and let the finding aid wait for another time. reflect and repeat. examine how things went, make adjustments, and try it again. whether or not you can reuse the assignment as developed, it has certainly taught you something, and hopefully broadened your network of connections on campus. both of us have developed a reputation for willingness to experiment, which draws otherwise unexpected opportunities. conclusion ironically, the archives alive! assignment helped us bury the myth that the rhetoric course was where university of iowa students learn all their research skills. by intentionally designing an assignment where students engaged with primary source materials, we uncovered necessary scaffolding that was otherwise being left out. we also got students to better understand research as an engaging and ongoing endeavor rather than a set number of citations. this experience has given kelly more confidence to set limitations with faculty who expect a whirlwind one-shot to solve all research woes. it has also opened up collaborations within the library, as the folks who work with digital collections, special collections and archives have to communicate and brainstorm. and this partnership isn’t dependent on personal relationships: a host of collaborations have continued although both kelly and jen wolfe, the other librarian involved at the start of the project, have left the university of iowa. this work also led tom into the library, where he now heads the digital scholarship & publishing studio. each of us has also had misfires in suggesting new projects: assignment designs that bombed, instructors who balked at making changes. however, the process of proposing and brainstorming remains a necessary one. at its root, education is about curiosity and the experience of seeking out answers to our questions. for us, asking questions of our assignments and looking for new, innovative ways to shape the curriculum has been incredibly rewarding — and brought with it some much needed relief from the five-page paper and its host of dated, restrictive, and staid trappings. we encourage you to usher in a similar sense of curiosity and relief as you and your students explore what new forms the 21st century has to offer. many thanks to in the library with the lead pipe for inviting us to publish with them and for their wonderful guidance and support. we would like to particularly thank our publishing editor ellie collier, our internal reviewer annie pho, and our external reviewer kate rubick. your feedback and suggestions were indispensable.  works cited bowers, cecilia v. mcinnis, byron chew, michael r. bowers, charlotte e. ford, caroline smith, and christopher herrington. “interdisciplinary synergy: a partnership between business and library faculty and its effects on students’ information literacy.” journal of business & finance librarianship 14, no. 2 (june 2009): 110–27. buchanan, heidi e., and beth a. mcdonough. the one-shot library instruction survival guide. (2014). head, alison j., michele van hoeck, jordan eschler, and sean fullerton. “what information competencies matter in today’s workplace?” library and information research 37, no. 114 (2013): 74–104. head, alison j, and michael b eisenberg. “assigning inquiry: how handouts for research assignments guide today’s college students.” available at ssrn 2281494, 2010. jamieson, sandra. “reading and engaging sources: what students’ use of sources reveals about advanced reading skills.” across the disciplines 10, no. 4 (2013). manuel, kate, susan e beck, and molly molloy. “an ethnographic study of attitudes influencing faculty collaboration in library instruction.” the reference librarian 43, no. 89–90 (2005): 139–61. mcguinness, claire. “what faculty think–exploring the barriers to information literacy development in undergraduate education.” the journal of academic librarianship 32, no. 6 (november 2006): 573–82. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2006.06.002. nalani meulemans, yvonne, and allison carr. “not at your service: building genuine faculty-librarian partnerships.” reference services review 41, no. 1 (2013): 80–90. wiggins, grant p. & mctighe, j. (1998). chapter 1: what is backward design? understanding by design. alexandria, virginia: association for supervision and curriculum development. retrieved from https://fitnyc.edu/files/pdfs/backward_design.pdf valentine, barbara. “the legitimate effort in research papers: student commitment versus faculty expectations.” the journal of academic librarianship 27, no. 2 (2001): 107–15. valentine, “the legitimate effort in research papers: student commitment versus faculty expectations.” [↩] project information literacy found, for example, that ⅔ of the assignment handouts in their sample required some particular type of structure, and over half had a required number of citations. head and eisenberg, “assigning inquiry: how handouts for research assignments guide today’s college students,” 8. [↩] a 2010 project information literacy study on research assignment handouts found that 83% of the undergraduate research assignments in their study pool were plain old research papers. [↩] jamieson, “reading and engaging sources: what students’ use of sources reveals about advanced reading skills.” [↩] head et al., “what information competencies matter in today’s workplace?” 86. [↩] buchanan and mcdonough [↩] see for example gaspar and wetzel, “a case study in collaboration: assessing academic librarian/faculty partnerships,” 586. [↩] manuel, beck, and molloy, “an ethnographic study of attitudes influencing faculty collaboration in library instruction,” 47. [↩] ibid, 45. [↩] mcguinness, “what faculty think — exploring the barriers to information literacy development in undergraduate education.” [↩] bowers et al., “interdisciplinary synergy: a partnership between business and library faculty and its effects on students’ information literacy,” 113. [↩] nalani meulemans and carr, “not at your service: building genuine faculty-librarian partnerships.” [↩] ibid, 88. [↩] wiggins, grant p. & mctighe, j. (1998). chapter 1: what is backward design? understanding by design. alexandria, virginia: association for supervision and curriculum development. retrieved from https://fitnyc.edu/files/pdfs/backward_design.pdf. [↩] academic libraries, collaboration, college students, digital humanities, digital learning materials, faculty, information literacy, instructional design, librarianship, research, teaching new grads, meet new metrics: why early career librarians should care about altmetrics & research impact unpacking and overcoming “edutainment” in library instruction 4 responses anthony 2015–08–26 at 2:54 pm one of the best assignments i had during my ils course was when we were given a spreadsheet of library visitation statistics. we were then given the task to analyze the statistics, and write a report recommending when and how the library could open extra hours on the weekend, by reducing hours during the week. i believe the assignment itself had been passed onto the current lecturer from the previous lecturer. the assignment felt fully realised and time honed and tested.it was fun, difficult and i definitely learnt real world skills that i use to this day; and not a word count in sight! karenmca 2015–09–03 at 5:42 pm you people are brilliant! i too want collaboration between library and faculty. the more i get, the more i want it! in my case, i want to get students looking at historic materials in our conservatoire library, and indeed in other libraries, so that they interrogate the materials and ask themselves the questions that will make these sources come alive to them, and allow them to understand the context in which these scores (or playscripts, or whatever) were composed. i’ve saved your posting so i can read it slowly and thoughtfully at the first possible opportunity. good on you! pingback : minor musings « venn librarian pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » editorial: introductions all around this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct “it was information based”: student reasoning when distinguishing between scholarly and popular sources – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 16 may amy jankowski, alyssa russo and lori townsend /6 comments “it was information based”: student reasoning when distinguishing between scholarly and popular sources in brief: we asked students to find an article and answer the following questions: is this a popular or scholarly article? how can you tell? we analyzed student answers to better understand the reasoning used to distinguish between scholarly and popular sources. our results suggest that framing sources as “scholarly or popular” is confusing rather than clarifying for students. by amy jankowski, alyssa russo, lori townsend introduction scholarly and popular sources are a longstanding construct in library instruction. a quick google search brings up an abundance of libguides and tutorials on the subject. however, we have found that teaching students to identify and classify information sources using a rigid binary categorization is problematic. in an effort to better understand the ways students conceptualize and evaluate sources, we stepped back to ask: what kind of reasoning do students apply when distinguishing between scholarly and popular sources? scholarly and popular sources in information literacy instruction and assessment the information literacy competency standards for higher education (association of college & research libraries, 2000) specifically address scholarly and popular sources; one student learning outcome states that an information literate student, “identifies the purpose and audience of potential resources (e.g., popular vs. scholarly, current vs. historical)” (p. 8). the explicit inclusion of the ability to differentiate “popular vs. scholarly” sources reinforces the prominence of this binary paradigm. the subsequent framework for information literacy for higher education (american library association, 2015), however, does not specifically address scholarly and/or popular sources. instead, it presents complex core concepts that underlie information creation, accessibility, and broader context, with numerous threads to aspects of scholarly and popular sources. many information literacy studies include discussion of scholarly and popular sources, underscoring their prevalence in library instruction practice. in several studies, scholarly and popular sources are primarily presented to undergraduate students through discussion of specific, mutually exclusive characteristics, such as author qualifications, the presence of a bibliography, editorial or peer-review process, among others (chapman, pettway, & scheuler, 2002; ferrer‐vinent & carello, 2008; fleming-may, mays, & radom, 2015; knight, 2002; lowe, booth, tagge, & stone, 2014; shao & purpur, 2016). studies also suggest that students struggle with understanding and articulating what exactly a scholarly or popular source is (fleming-may et al., 2015; radom & gammons, 2014). kim and sin (2011), as well as list and alexander (2018), found that while students effectively articulate source evaluation criteria, they do not reliably use these criteria when selecting sources. relatedly, carter and aldridge (2016) examined the words that students use to explain their evaluation of sources and found that students tend to focus on content—primarily through vague or inaccurate terms and circular reasoning—which correlated with ineffective assessments. problematizing the way librarians talk about scholarly and popular sources studies by insua, lantz, and armstrong (2018) and fisher and seeber (2017) have discussed how the discrete scholarly and popular binary is problematic to students’ development of a more complex understanding of sources through in-depth evaluative engagement. seeber (2016) further problematizes the oppositional scholarly versus popular binary, in which he emphasizes that this framing, where scholarly sources are positioned as “better” than popular sources, centralizes the library and resultantly alienates students. he suggests making a deliberate change in phrasing from “scholarly versus popular” to “scholarly and popular and ___,” which eliminates competition, presents terms on equal footing, and brings other types of information sources into discussion. students overestimate their abilities gross and latham (2009, 2011) consistently found that students, particularly those with below-proficient information literacy skills, showed a tendency to overestimate their abilities. two additional studies suggest students overestimate their abilities to correctly identify information sources as scholarly or popular. bandyopadhyay (2013) found that while a majority of students were able to correctly identify a research article as such when it was presented as a single item, only 26.7% correctly identified two research articles when presented in a group of four articles. molteni and chan (2015) studied student confidence as it pertains to aspects of the research process and found that though 74% of students rated their confidence in differentiating between primary and secondary materials as “good” or higher, students were able to correctly identify a scholarly or popular source only 51% of the time. recognizing online information formats is difficult for students more broadly, studies suggest that students have difficulty recognizing information formats encountered online. buhler and cataldo (2016) investigated student perceptions of online information resources through a survey, which provided sample sources and asked respondents to identify the corresponding online format or source type. the authors found a high level of source misidentification across formats and respondent demographics. leeder (2016) tested students’ abilities to identify scholarly and non-scholarly sources in an online format, including blogs, trade journals, scholarly research articles, and book reviews. he found that students misidentified these formats 60% of the time. methods participants and setting the purpose of this qualitative analysis was to understand how first-year undergraduate students determined whether an article they found in a library database was popular or scholarly. the research population for this study consisted of students enrolled at the university of new mexico (unm) in english composition iii (engl 120). unm is a large, hispanic-serving institution and carnegie research university classified as highest research activity. engl 120 is an undergraduate course that most incoming first-year students take to fulfill unm core curriculum requirements. as part of a flipped classroom, many students were required to complete the online engl 120 library tutorial. we used a convenience sampling method focusing on the 1,745 students enrolled in engl 120 during the spring semester of 2016. from that population, a sample of 955 students was included in this study. all materials and procedures were approved by the unm office of the institutional review board. materials the online engl 120 library tutorial was developed using qualtrics, an online survey software. in one module students were asked to find an article about their research topic in a library database and answer the following questions about that article: “is this a popular or scholarly article? how can you tell?” responses were collected in qualtrics and later exported into spreadsheets and overview, an open-source document mining application, for analysis. procedure and data analysis each of the 955 student responses consisted of two basic elements: 1) citation information about a source the student found and an answer to the prompt: “is this a popular or scholarly article?” and 2) an answer to a second prompt “how can you tell?” we considered the two elements separately. first, we determined each student’s choice about whether their source was scholarly or popular, and then we made our own determination for comparison. we deleted responses that didn’t contain enough information for us to identify the source. the students were supposed to choose between scholarly and popular. however, we actually classified sources into scholarly, popular, and other. a fourth classification, unclear, was used when we couldn’t tell how a student was classifying the source they found. second, we developed codes based on student responses to the “how can you tell?” question. code labels are shorthand that describe meaning in the text of each student response. an initial batch of 100 student responses was analyzed to develop a set of emergent codes that would eventually be applied to the rest of the data. batch by batch, enough codes emerged to sufficiently describe all of the reasoning presented in student responses. the research team deliberated about the codes throughout this iterative process by adding, deleting, and modifying the list so that the code list was manageable, yet specific enough to capture interesting occurrences in the data. table 1 contains the final list of codes, with definitions and examples. table 1: codes1 code label code definition example (student responses) anatomy individual elements/parts of the article or their arrangement within the article—e.g., abstract, works cited, images, advertisements, volume info, length, etc.—or whether the article exists in print or online “it is a scholarly article, i can tell because the authors name is there along with the volume number along with page numbers.” audience mention of audience, who the article was written for “magazines are usually aimed at the general audience, which leans towards popular as opposed to scholarly.” authority who wrote/produced/published the article, credibility of the source, credentials, affiliations (“published by the ny times”) “i know this is what it is because it source seems pretty legit.” currency the time since publication, +/“it is quite old.” labeled an icon or written label indicates source type (scholarly, periodical, news, etc.) “it is a review. the page tells you before you click on the title” language anything about language, e.g., big words, writing style, tone “popular. the article is not written to sound eloquent or free of slang, it is written in a more laid back fashion.” multiple authors mentions that the article is written by more than one author “written by an epidemiologist and two professors…” named format type of publication—e.g.: encyclopedia, journal, academic journal, newspaper, magazine, etc., or an instance of that type of publication (newspaper article, academic journal article, blog post)—as justification for decision or part of reasoning (not just mentioned in passing) “i think it’s a popular article because it was published in a news magazine.” peer review mentions peer-review or the process of peer-review “scholarly article because of the wide amount of peer revision included in this article.” popularity actually popular—number of views, popularity of a topic, many views/shares/citations, ranking in search results “i dont’ think it is a popular article because it looks pretty unvisited.” purpose reason or aim for which an information source exists or was created “scholarly, beacuase this type of article is used for discoveries in the scientific community.” qualities something about the nature of the information in the article not covered by a more specific code. —e.g. viewpoint, importance, objectivity—or valuing the information in the article (credible, reliable, good, in-depth, etc.) “no. it’s not very informative, and it’s obviously not informational“ research presence or absence of research; response must indicate some understanding of research (experiments, investigation, talks about researchers), mention of outside research/evidence/sources and/or the methodology used to gather the information “scholarly, becasue it . . . describes the methods in which the data was gathered and what conclusions can be drawn from the data.” search searching for the article, how easy/hard it was to find, limiting the search, using specific keywords, anything to do with the search process, mention of search results, issues of access to article online “it is a scholarly article. i limited my search to where only scholarly journals were given.” title mentions specific publication title “popular because it’s in men’s health magizine, and it’s about bread.” topic describes subject or topic covered in chosen article, or mentions topic as part of reasoning “popular because batman is not a scholarly topic” third, we coded student responses. multiple codes were sometimes assigned to fully represent the meaning in each student response. for example, student response: “this is a scholarly article because it was written by an author who specializes in adolescent psychiatry. the article was peer reviewed a couple of times. the article was a little longer than a popular article. it also had a bibliography at the end of the reading.” codes assigned: authority, peer review, anatomy all responses were initially coded independently by at least two of the authors. both sets of independent coding were compared among the whole group, and any coding differences were discussed until consensus was reached. during this process, codes were further negotiated and refined, which sometimes resulted in the need to go back to re-code. eventually, all of the student responses and codes were combined into one master spreadsheet and uploaded into overview, a data mining application that allowed us to group responses by code or visualize data in a word cloud. these tools, as well as concept mapping applications, aided our thematic analysis. limitations using an online tutorial for our data collection came with a few limitations. the short-answer question format allowed students to be unclear in their scholarly or popular article determination. for example, several students began their answer with only a “yes” before giving their reasoning. further, we did not offer an “i’m not sure” option, so students were forced to make a choice, which might have led to hedging or uncertainty in some responses. additionally, many responses were ambiguous or extremely short; for this reason, 111 responses (11.6%) were excluded from our analysis. methods coda: defining scholarly, popular, and the “other” situation initially, we intended to determine when students were correct or incorrect in identifying sources as scholarly or popular, as well as determine what types of reasoning correlated with correct and incorrect responses. the dichotomy of scholarly and popular sources is generally considered common knowledge among reference and instruction librarians, but we struggled to articulate the precise meaning of or division between these categories. for example, is everything published in an academic journal scholarly? if not, how do we categorize a news brief, book review, or editorial published in an academic journal? what about an article that isn’t research-based but is specialized beyond a popular audience? is there one or more definable intermediary category of source types that falls outside of the scholarly and popular divide, and if so, where exactly do we delineate divisions? in pursuing these questions, we used a definition for scholarly from a university of illinois libguide titled “how do i… determine if a source is scholarly?” (n.d.) which states, “scholarly sources . . . are written by experts in a particular field and serve to keep others interested in that field up to date on the most recent research, findings, and news”. within this definition, editorials, book reviews, news reports, and other non-peer reviewed content published in journals may qualify as scholarly. we also established a very basic definition that describes popular sources as those that are intended to be read by a general audience. we drew a hard division in that scholarly content required a clear connection to original research, whereas non-research based information, trends, or innovations for a specific professional audience would be categorized as other. the commonality in each definition is not form or specific attributes, but instead the purpose for which sources exist in the world and the community for whom they are intended. through our effort to standardize definitions for scholarly and popular formats, and considering the relative frequency with which students selected a diversity of other formats, we realized that judging whether students were correct or incorrect in their identification of scholarly or popular sources was less interesting and meaningful than the reasoning that brought them to these decisions. we resultantly shifted our analytical focus away from correct and incorrect judgments and instead specifically toward students’ reasoning associated with students’ own scholarly or popular determinations. results the results of this study are based on two different sets of data. one set of data (dataset a) included all of the student responses where a source could be identified and reasoning was given, even those responses where it wasn’t clear whether the student classified the source as scholarly or popular. we used this data when analyzing student reasoning and generating codes and themes. dataset a consists of 844 student responses. the second set of data (dataset b) included only those student responses where it was clear how they classified the source, scholarly or popular. this second set of data was used in counting the number of scholarly/popular identified responses. dataset b consists of 637 student responses. while this is a qualitative study, we did use counts to identify codes that were more strongly associated with scholarly or popular classifications made by students. these distinctions are not statistically significant correlations. we used these counts in suggesting or inferring broad trends in the qualitative data. for each of the tables below, the dataset that is used will be noted. table 2 shows the number of times each code was used, which identifies the most and least common reasoning used by students in their responses. table 2 (dataset a) code number of times code used % of responses with this code authority 191 23% named format 152 18% research 130 15% qualities 127 15% popularity 113 13% anatomy 104 12% search 101 12% topic 90 11% labeled 79 9% title 67 8% audience 51 6% language 42 5% peer review 41 5% multiple authors 34 4% purpose 29 3% currency 19 2% table 3 shows how often students identified a source as scholarly or popular and which codes were most commonly used with each. table 3 (dataset b) count % of total most common codes scholarly 467 73% labeled, research popular 170 27% popularity, currency total 637 as this is a qualitative study, the bulk of our substantive results are documented in the discussion of themes that follows. table 4 shows the themes we identified in our analysis of the data and the codes that make up those themes. table 4 (dataset a) theme codes access/systems labeled, search authority authority, multiple authors, peer review, title content language, qualities, research, topic form anatomy, named format popularity popularity themes through qualitative coding and analysis, we were able to identify five broader themes in our data to further explore aspects of student reasoning. each theme represents an evident trend, which we discuss conceptually and through examples. access/systems one trend in reasoning related to how students were accessing information sources, primarily in terms of library systems or databases. the specific codes we identified related to this trend include search and labeled, which we grouped into the broader theme of access/systems. the access/systems codes indicate that students commonly rely on explicit indicators and faceted search capabilities within library systems or databases to help them make determinations about whether information sources qualify as scholarly or popular. looking at student reasoning classified using the labeled code, we frequently see students attribute specific labels to particular source types. labeled is used much more frequently when students identify a source as scholarly rather than popular, which we can potentially contribute to a gap in student understanding of which labels are associated with popular sources (e.g. periodical). access/systems, where students refer to a label or icon as an explicit indicator of source type: “icon to the left of the title says “academic journal,” therefore i assume it is a scholarly article.” “scholarly article (academic journal), because it says before the title of the article about what format this is.” “opinion popular, and i can tell because it states it on the document.” through the search code, we see students connecting aspects of database searching to source type determination as well, particularly in relation to faceted searching or filters, through which students indicate to the database what type of source they want to find. we also see students conflate top search results with popularity and popular source type, as discussed under the popularity theme. access/systems, where students refer to aspects of search—filters, keywords, faceted searching—as indicators of source type: “it is a scholarly article. i know this because in my choice of singling out i checked that i only wanted scholarly articles.” “scholarly article, because i checked off scholarly articles that are peer reviewed.” “yes because it can be found using a lot of key words.” access/systems, where students associate a specific database with a certain source type or authority: “scholarly. found it through unm libraries” “it is a scholarly article because i had to go to a specific search engine to find it.” “this is a popular article because of the ability to access it from a regular web search like on google.” in a small handful of instances, a student response is associated with some element of access/systems but fell under a different code beyond labeled and search. these responses refer to aspects of how an information resource is accessed or how it is made available to an audience, suggesting a trend in which students take into account a resource’s accessibility or (un)availability as a way to determine source type. access/systems, where students associate an element of accessibility with a particular source type: “scholarly, because sometimes the article isnt available” “i think it’s a popular article and not a scholarly article because it mentions it is peer reviewed and can be fully viewed online.” “it’s a scholarly article. i can tell because it’s listed as an academic journal. this isn’t something that someone would find in a everyday magazine.” under the access/systems theme, much of what students are relying on in these instances are information systems created by or for libraries. when students rely on library systems to make source type or quality determinations, the systems are in control over their success through resource labels and faceted search structure. this also suggests that the systems we create to make library materials accessible may work to impede students’ deeper analysis and understanding of sources. our library systems create categorical shortcuts for students unfamiliar with complex, discipline-based source formats, and the ways in which students interact with information sources are increasingly removed from the context of their broader geography—both the physical (i.e. neighboring books on a shelf or adjacent articles a daily newspaper) and digital (i.e. browsable collection of articles in a journal issue or on a magazine’s homepage). students may identify a source by recognizing a label, however, items in our systems are detached from their larger parent format, and the richness of context found in the whole information package or system is often lost. authority authority emerged as a theme encompassing discussion of the individuals and processes responsible for writing, producing, publishing, and providing access to articles. the specific codes we identified related to this trend include authority, multiple authors, peer review, and title. the authority code was most frequently applied to responses that mentioned author affiliation. descriptors like “well known,” “major journal,” or “research institute” were occasionally included to demonstrate the authority of the affiliate. students also attributed multiple authors to scholarly articles, although this shortcut could be misleading. authority, where students refer to author affiliation or multiple authors : “yes. it was published in a sports medicine journal by the division of orthopedic surgery at duke.” “this is a scholarly article as it is not associated with any popular entities, rather the entity listed is the international space station” “it is a scholarly article because of the many authors that helped create it.” “scholarly because there are many authors many are professors” author expertise and the importance of a review process emerged as additional aspects of authority. students pointed to the peer review status of their article, described other editorial processes, and also pointed out when review processes were missing. authority, where students reference author expertise or an article’s review process: “scholarly article because it was written by an author who specializes in adolescent psychiatry.” “. . . she seems to be a popular author with many articles published .” “this is a scholarly article it was wriiten by a professor and was peer reviewed” “the information has to be reviewed and edited in order to be allowed in the magazine.” some students discussed authority in terms of where they found their article online, such as mentioning website domains and scholarly search engines. most frequently, these types of responses expressed an appeal to the library’s authority. other comments indicated a limited understanding of information systems, mixing and matching terms like “website,” “search engine,” and “database.” authority, where students reference the library’s authority: “yes, its on unm’s website thing.” “scholarly article because it is on a database website. ” participants also expressed authority by naming specific publication titles as indicators of credibility. recognizable titles, such as the new york times or the wall street journal, were described in terms of being a “big company,” “popular news company,” “reliable source,” or “reputable source.” the problem is that students further connected credibility to scholarly articles, which can be misleading. authority, where publication title does not help students identify popular articles: “scholarly , it came from ny times, a very reliable source.” “this is a scholarly article as it is from a reputable source of the us news world report.” in addition to misleading students, the implication that credibility and scholarly articles are synonymous reinforces the false information dichotomy that associates scholarly information with better information. content the content theme concerns responses where student reasoning centers around the type of information an article contains, including how that information is communicated. the content theme focuses on the communication of the ideas contained in the source, which the students interact with through reading. content emerged throughout several codes: language, qualities, research, and topic. students sometimes used the presence of research or evidence as a basis for determining whether an article was scholarly or popular. this reasoning was more likely to be used by students when arguing that a source was scholarly. research, concerned with evidence or methodology: “scholarly; it used much more facts and figures than it did opinion. it was backed by hard research, not by opinion.” “i would say this atricle is popular becasue there is not data presented. it has a formal tone, but uses language not specific to the field of study, making it easier for a general audience to understand.” “scholarly article, because a commission board did extremely in depth research to produce this article.” research, where a study or research is referred to: “yes, because it is a study performed on mice. people are interested in that” “no. it is simply about a professional baseball player and how he became one of the best over time. there is no scientific experiments or data.” student reasoning around topic often asserted that certain topics are inherently more scholarly or popular than others, sometimes focusing on the approach taken to a particular topic as well. the topic code sometimes dovetailed with the popularity and currency codes when students used the perceived popularity or current nature of a topic to inform their choice. topic, where currency, popularity, or approach contributed to a determination of popular: “i believe this article is popular because it mainly focuses on racial discrimination and the obstacles that african-americans of all backgrounds had to overcome to become who they are today. this is a crucial, trending issue in today’s society, affecting many individuals.” “this is both a popular and scholarly article. it’s popular because it discusses a relevant media topic, such as star wars, and is scholarly because it discusses gender roles surrounding star wars.” topic, where the topic or approach to the topic was considered scholarly: “its a scholarly article because it was written about the national health service” “i would argue that it is a scholarly article because it discusses the u.s war on drugs and the legal aspects of it.” another common approach in the content theme was to argue that some characteristic of the information and language demonstrated whether the source was scholarly or popular. students taking this approach often described the language or content with adjectives—e.g., accurate, factual, in-depth, opinionated, reliable, informational, detailed, scientific, formal. students often used value-laden language to distinguish between the content in scholarly and popular sources. qualities, where students described or characterized content: “it is more of a popular artile than a scholarly one because it does not provide any information just helps you to think in a different way.” “scholarly, because the information is dry and too complicated to be directed toward a broad audience” “scholarly, it was information based” language, where students characterized the language used: “this is a scholarly article because in the first few sentences of the article, they use very large words such as stymied and oligarchs.” “it is a scholarly article because it is published in a research article and because it explains things using scientific language.” student responses often associated scholarly articles with unbiased or credible information and popular articles with opinionated, less credible information, and entertainment. the reasoning associated in particular with the qualities code was often vague or relatively meaningless. students were often unable to articulate reasoning that typified the information contained or written in their source accurately. the content theme highlights how students struggle to make logical and evidence-based assertions about the quality and purpose of sources based on the information contained in those sources and how that information is communicated. form the form theme emerged around student responses that used visual, structural, or other format related cues to make decisions about their sources. this theme consists of the anatomy and named format codes. students using this reasoning often referred to the types of characteristics librarians give in tables or lists that typify scholarly and popular sources. form, where student reasoning involved identifying specific elements: “scholarly, it has an abstract and hypothesis.“ “scholarly because it had different volumes.” “this is a popular article as it has no work cited page and seems to come from an old publication called new republic” “popular because they are on facebook and twitter and their are also comments at the end.” form, where students referred to a specific named format: “i believe this is a popular article because it is originally from a volume of futures for children which is a newletter/magazine type of publication.” “its a wall street journal so it could be counted as a scholarly journal, but it is a big news journal that people can trust to use for research.” “it is a scholarly article because it from an engineering website.” student reasoning in this theme illustrates how the use of these types of indicators may encourage a superficial interaction with sources. the named format code, in particular, was associated with somewhat circular reasoning, such as “scholarly because its from an academic journal.” though this reasoning is technically true, scholarly and academic are often used as near synonyms, so it’s a bit like saying it’s overcast because it’s cloudy. popularity a fundamental misunderstanding of the term popular in relation to information sources frequently appeared in students’ responses. many students’ discussion of popular articles was expressed in terms of popularity, that is, the idea of being well-liked by many people; popularity emerged as a code as well as an independent theme. when a student stated that they found a popular article, we assumed that they found a non-scholarly article. however, inserting the word “very” before indicating that their article was popular allowed for multiple interpretations. on one hand, the student may have meant that they found a very non-scholarly magazine article, but on the other hand, they may have meant that the source was well known and widely read. instances like these underscore the context sensitive nature of language and echo issues that carter and aldridge (2016) discussed, such as their observation that students rely on composition vocabulary to evaluate information, “despite explicit instructions to consider what they had learned from the librarian” (p. 27). popularity, where students conflate popular sources with popularity: “it was published in the new york times which is a very popular magazine with a wide variety of readers. [emphasis added]” “yes, because it was in a journal that is super popular. [emphasis added]” popularity was not limited to instances when students selected a popular article. popularity emerged in several cases where students were unclear in their determination of whether the article was popular or scholarly. in fact, some students asserted that their article was both scholarly and popular. popularity, where students do not clearly decide whether their source is scholarly or popular, however, popularity emerges in their response: “yes, it has a works cited page and is one of the first choices that pops up on the database. it is also peer-reviewed.” “it is not as popular as i thought it was going to be. there arent a whole lot of articles written on it.” “yes, i do feel as if this scholarly article is popular due to it being the first one that popped up on the list. as well as it being very information to the point where i feel as if many people have had the honor of reading it.” students most frequently indicated popularity by referring to their article’s ranking on the results page. subject matter, particularly if the article covered a trending topic, was a specific indicator that students cited when identifying popular articles. in a similar fashion, some students wrote about the relationship between their article and its audience as an indicator for identifying popular articles. participants commonly expressed that an article was popular because it appealed to everybody. alternatively, some students described this relationship by asserting that their article could only be popular to a specific audience. students also expressed the idea of popularity by commenting that their article had a lot of views, or that it had been used in other studies. popularity, where students refer to ranking in the search results, topic, and audience: “it is one of the first articles so it implies that it’s been view alot.” “popular, because recycling and paper waste has become a huge topic discussed.” “it might be popular for people who research about sea level rise.” “it gives you a percentage of how often it is referred to in other scholarly articles.” conclusion and a call to action in summary, we identified five themes in our data: access/systems, authority, content, form, and popularity. labels and faceted search tools featured in library information systems can mislead students’ deeper analysis and understanding of sources. students tended to associate scholarly articles with credibility and popular articles with less credible, subjective information. students also struggled to make evidence-based assertions about the quality and purpose of sources based on the content of those sources. finally, a fundamental misunderstanding of the term popular to mean popularity also misled students’ decisions. we believe that librarians can use these findings to inform our practice. first, we can admit that the way many of us have been teaching “scholarly vs. popular” relies on heuristics that are shorthand for what librarians already understand. heuristics can be described as mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that guide us through a decision-making process, meant to help make decisions quickly. but if students don’t understand the concepts upon which these heuristics are based, they can mislead students into relying on surface level clues and encourage a bias towards familiar or simple information. starting students with heuristics instead of a closer examination of the purpose of information formats may encourage misunderstandings. second, we can change the way we talk about information. in their study of how librarians and writing instructors talk about the research process and information literacy in the classroom, holliday and rogers (2013) found that “the words we use have consequences, some of them long-lasting” and adjusting our language “re-directs our own practice as teachers, especially in where we focus our instructional attention.” (p. 268) in our own teaching, we no longer talk about “scholarly vs. popular” when characterizing information sources. however, this begs the question of how do we talk about information? at unm, we have dubbed this issue the container conundrum.2 detailing the particulars of our developing approach is beyond the scope of this paper, but we can broadly state that it is based on a “format” threshold concept that is heavily informed by genre theory, from the field of rhetoric. we encourage students to examine three aspects of distinct information formats: purpose (why does this thing exist in the world and who made it), process (how is it created, both intellectually as well as physically, including quality control processes), and product (what typifies its final form, how do we recognize it, what elements are expected). we are also experimenting with techniques that conform more closely to the approach fact-checkers take in making accurate evaluations of sources rather than the deep reading techniques of the humanities or long librarian checklists like the craap test. we would encourage our readers to find alternative ways to help students make sense of information sources. situating sources in a broader evaluative framework that takes the nuances of audience, purpose, and other real-world context into account is likely to lead to more authentic understandings of the information landscape by students. thank you to our brilliant colleagues david hurley and jorge ricardo lópez-mcknight, who helped to initially envision and lay the groundwork for this project. thank you as well to mark emmons who consulted with us through our data analysis, and susanne clement, who helped with content review. and to kevin seeber, our external reviewer; kellee warren, our internal reviewer; and denisse solis, our publishing editor, we offer our enthusiastic thanks for your time and thoughtful insights through the peer-review, editorial, and publication process. references american library association. 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(2011). what’s skill got to do with it?: information literacy skills and self‐views of ability among first‐year college students. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 63(3), 574–583. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21681 holliday, w., & rogers, j. (2013). talking about information literacy: the mediating role of discourse in a college writing classroom. portal: libraries and the academy, 13(3), 257–271. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2013.0025 how do i… determine if a source is scholarly? (n.d.). retrieved april 2, 2018 from https://www.library.illinois.edu/ugl/howdoi/scholarly/ insua, g. m., lantz, c., & armstrong, a. (2018). in their own words: using first-year student research journals to guide information literacy instruction. portal: libraries and the academy, 18(1), 141–161. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2018.0007 kim, k.-s., & sin, s.-c. j. (2011). selecting quality sources: bridging the gap between the perception and use of information sources. journal of information science, 37(2), 178–188. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551511400958 knight, l. a. (2002). the role of assessment in library user education. reference services review, 30(1), 15–24. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320210416500 leeder, c. (2016). student misidentification of online genres. library & information science research, 38(2), 125–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2016.04.003 list, a., & alexander, p. a. (2018). corroborating students’ self-reports of source evaluation. behaviour & information technology, 37(3), 198–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929x.2018.1430849 lowe, m., booth, c., tagge, n., & stone, s. (2014). integrating an information literacy quiz into the learning management system. communications in information literacy, 8(1), 115–130. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2014.8.1.156 molteni, v. e., & chan, e. k. (2015). student confidence/overconfidence in the research process. the journal of academic librarianship, 41(1), 2–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.11.012 radom, r., & gammons, r. w. (2014). teaching information evaluation with the five ws: an elementary method, an instructional scaffold, and the effect on student recall and application. reference & user services quarterly, 53(4), 334–347. https://dx.doi.org/10.5860/rusq.53n4.334 seeber, k. p. (2016, february). it’s not a competition: questioning the rhetoric of “scholarly versus popular” in library instruction. presented at the critical librarianship & pedagogy symposium, the university of arizona. retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10150/607784 shao, x., & purpur, g. (2016). effects of information literacy skills on student writing and course performance. the journal of academic librarianship, 42(6), 670–678. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2016.08.006 all example student responses are quoted exactly as written by students. spelling and grammatical errors are not edited or noted with “[sic]” in an effort to authentically represent student comments while not drawing specific attention that highlights minor mistakes. [↩] we’ll be presenting on this topic at the 2018 library instruction west conference. [↩] college students, evaluation, information literacy, instruction, teaching out of context: understanding student learning through museum studies an academic librarian-mother in six stories 6 responses pingback : “it was information based”: student reasoning when distinguishing between scholarly and popular sources – stratelligence pingback : “it was information based”: student reasoning when distinguishing between scholarly and popular sources – site title viola 2019–01–24 at 11:27 pm interesting amy jankowski 2019–02–11 at 2:18 pm thanks, viola! feel free to let us know if you have thoughts or questions about our study. katherine montgomery 2019–02–07 at 2:59 pm i wonder whether it would be effective to instruct students to consider the popular or scholarly nature of a resource as part of a spectrum rather than an either/or scenario. sometimes resources do not fit a perfect definition of scholarly or popular but fall between, meeting some criteria and not others. is our intent really to get them to distinguish between scholarly and popular or to get them to recognize relevant and authoritative sources? amy jankowski 2019–02–11 at 2:20 pm we might question the effectiveness of using the scholarly popular construct — whether considered as a binary or a spectrum — in teaching about specific information sources. the designation of ‘scholarly’ over a rather motley collection of information formats does not convey the unique nature of original/primary research articles and scholarly monographs — as opposed to the other types of formats often encountered in the scholarly context, like news, review articles, book reviews, commentary, and so on. we see a similar dynamic with the popular designation. this is complicated by the fact that students will encounter many varieties of information used as evidence in academic research. we think it’s more useful to avoid characterizing sources as scholarly or popular, but instead teach about individual formats, their purposes, and how those formats can meet specific information needs in context. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 7 oct april hathcock /71 comments white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis image by flickr user katieblench (cc by 2.0) in brief: whiteness—an ideological practice that can extend beyond notions of racial supremacy to other areas of dominance—has permeated every aspect of librarianship, extending even to the initiatives we claim are committed to increasing diversity. this state of affairs, however, need not remain. this article examines the ways in which whiteness controls diversity initiatives in lis, particularly in light of the application requirements set upon candidates. i then suggest ways to correct for whiteness in lis diversity programs by providing mentorship to diverse applicants struggling to navigate the whiteness of the profession and concurrently working in solidarity to dismantle whiteness from within.1 by april hathcock failure of diversity initiatives in lis it is no secret that librarianship has traditionally been and continues to be a profession dominated by whiteness (bourg, 2014; branche, 2012; galvan, 2015; hall, 2012; honma, 2006), which is a theoretical concept that can extend beyond the realities of racial privilege to a wide range of dominant ideologies based on gender identity, sexual orientation, class, and other categories. in fact, recent years have seen lis professional organizations and institutions striving to provide increasing numbers of diversity initiatives to help members from underrepresented groups enter and remain in librarianship (gonzalez-smith, swanson, & tanaka, 2014). the association of research libraries (arl) and society of american archivists conduct the mosaic program to attract diverse students to careers in archiving; the american association of law libraries manages the george a. strait minority scholarship to help fund library school for college graduates interested in law librarianship; the american library association (ala) runs its spectrum scholars program to provide scholarships to diverse lis students and a corresponding spectrum leadership institute to help prepare these students for successful careers in the library field. examples abound of library organizations attempting to address the “problem of diversity” in the lis field. nevertheless, these efforts are not making any meaningful difference. as one of my colleagues has so accurately put it: “we’re bringing [people] from underrepresented identity groups into the profession at same rate they’re leaving. attrition [is] a problem” (vinopal, 2015). with minority librarians leaving the profession as soon as they are recruited, what can be done to render our abundance of diversity initiatives truly effective? why are these ambitious and numerous initiatives failing to have the desired effect? shortly after discussing this very issue with a colleague over lunch, i received an email regarding the approaching deadline for the arl career enhancement program, which is aimed at placing diverse, early career librarians in internships with member libraries. reading through the onerous application process, the realization hit me: our diversity programs do not work because they are themselves coded to promote whiteness as the norm in the profession and unduly burden those individuals they are most intended to help. whiteness in lis studying whiteness in lis has yet to hit the mainstream of library scholarship, but there have been a number of critical and radical library scholars who have taken up the challenge of interrogating and troubling the whiteness of the profession (bourg, 2014; espinal, 2000, 2001; galvan, 2015; hall, 2012; honma, 2006). these critical examinations highlight the many dimensions of any accurate definition of whiteness as an ideological practice. as galvan (2015) so succinctly puts it, “whiteness . . . means: white, heterosexual, capitalist, and middle class.” hall (2012) takes a different approach to defining the breadth of whiteness in lis by differentiating it from the “black bodies” of lis: “i would assert that [whiteness] is an issue, a question, that transcends race, ethnicity, any broad or limiting categorization and unites all librarians who identify or are identified as different” (p. 201). for these writers, whiteness refers not only to racial and ethnic categorizations but a complete system of exclusion based on hegemony. likewise, in this article, i use “whiteness” to refer not only to the socio-cultural differential of power and privilege that results from categories of race and ethnicity; it also stands as a marker for the privilege and power that acts to reinforce itself through hegemonic cultural practice that excludes all who are different. this system of exclusion functions primarily through the normativity of whiteness within librarian and larger societal culture. as branche (2012) notes, “whiteness and white normativity are embedded in u.s. library culture” (p. 205). the normativity of whiteness works insidiously, invisibly, to create binary categorizations of people as either acceptable to whiteness and therefore normal or different and therefore other. the invisible nature of whiteness is key to its power; when it is not named or interrogated, it can persist in creating a culture of exclusion behind the scenes of lis practice (espinal, 2000, 2001; galvan, 2015; honma, 2006). as yeo and jacobs (2006) note, “one must ask oneself if it would be possible to really achieve diversity without challenging our racist, homophobic and sexist consciousnesses that are so deeply imbedded that we don’t even recognize them?” for example, whiteness as hegemonic practice is at work when a librarian of color is mistaken for a library assistant by white colleagues at a professional conference. likewise, whiteness is at work when genderqueer librarians are forced to choose between binary gender groupings, neither of which apply to their identities, when using the restroom at work. finally, whiteness is at work when a librarian from a working-class background in search of employment is told by well-meaning colleagues, “just take a job anywhere and move,” when the unemployed librarian lacks the financial privilege to do so. this working of white normativity occurs without thought and intention but is still powerfully exclusionary and damaging to the profession. a major contributor to the invisible normativity of whiteness in librarianship has been the fact that whiteness has played such a fundamental role in the profession from the start. public libraries in the u.s. developed initially as sites of cultural assimilation and “americanization” of immigrants needing to learn the mores of white society (hall, 2012; honma, 2006). given the historical context, white normativity continues to be a hallmark of modern librarianship. white normativity in lis extends to the ways in which we discuss and address diversity in the profession. rather than being framed as a shared goal for the common good, diversity is approached as a problem that must be solved, with diverse librarians becoming the objectified pawns deployed to attack the problem. with this white-centered thinking at the fore, many lis diversity initiatives seem to focus primarily on increasing numbers and visibility without paying corresponding attention to retention and the lived experiences of underrepresented librarians surrounded by the whiteness of the profession (gonzalez-smith, swanson, & tanaka, 2014; honma, 2006; yeo & jacobs, 2006). focusing on numbers rather than the deeper issues of experience and structural discrimination allows the profession to take a self-congratulatory and complacent approach to the “problem of diversity” without ever overtly naming and addressing the issue of whiteness (espinal, 2000, 2001; honma, 2006). in many ways, this article serves as an extension of galvan’s (2015) examination of the practice of whiteness in lis hiring and job recruitment. she identifies culture, conspicuous leisure, and access to wealth as barriers to entry for members from diverse backgrounds (galvan, 2015). my research extends that framework to examine ways in which similar barriers come into play even before the hiring process—in diversity initiatives supposedly aimed at encouraging members of marginalized groups to pursue the education and training necessary for a career in librarianship. “white” diversity initiatives the profession is so imbued with whiteness, extending even to the ways in which we discuss and address diversity, it is no wonder that our myriad diversity initiatives are not working. when we recruit for whiteness, we will perpetuate whiteness in the profession, even when it comes in the form of a librarian with a diverse background. a look at the application requirements for a typical lis diversity initiative demonstrates this point. in order to qualify for an internship through the arl career enhancement program, for example, applicants must submit: a completed application form; a resume; a 500-word essay detailing their professional interests and goals; an official letter of acceptance to an ala-accredited mlis program; official transcripts; and two letters of recommendation, one of which must be from a professor or employer. each of these requirements assumes that applicants are situated in positions of white, middle-class, cisgender normativity that allow for the temporal, financial, and educational privilege that fulfilling these criteria would require. only an applicant with access to the privileges of whiteness would have the tools needed to engage in the requisite work and volunteer opportunities called for by the diversity program, have the high-level of educational achievement required, possess the close relationships with individuals of power needed for stellar recommendations, and be able to provide all the documentation necessary to complete their application through the online form. in many ways, this long list of requirements resembles the complex application processes of the most elite private institutions of higher education. many public institutions, including almost all community colleges, do not require such detailed paperwork for matriculation into their undergraduate programs (see e.g., st. petersburg college). these institutions take their public mission seriously to provide education to all members of the community. however, diversity initiatives in lis that are meant to benefit members of underrepresented groups require lengthy applications that many individuals from diverse backgrounds may not be equipped to complete. these applications are created particularly to recruit for whiteness and require the ability to play at whiteness in order to succeed. for example, applicants are required to submit resumes detailing their work experience, but an applicant from a working-class background may not have the requisite experience, either through work or volunteering, to place on a resume. building a relevant resume assumes the applicant has the white, middle-class background that allows for early career professional work or volunteerism, whereas many applicants do not have that privilege (galvan, 2015). it may also be the case that the applicant has plenty of work experience in low-wage jobs but is unaware of ways to frame that experience to reflect the transferable skills that relate to librarianship. without the white-normative experience of applying for professional opportunities, the applicant will not know how to frame their resume to meet the requirements for the application and, because of this lack of knowledge, may decide not to apply at all. another example can be seen in the requirement of official transcripts. a genderqueer applicant who has since changed names and gender identities may not know how to navigate the legal and bureaucratic labyrinth of transferring their personal information from one name and identity to another. because the transcripts must be official, the applicant will likely have to work with the educational institution, as well as the diversity program, to verify their identity. this process adds additional labor to the already onerous application process—labor that is not required of the white-normative, cisgender applicant—and could likely discourage the applicant from applying. in both cases, an application process rooted in whiteness can have a chilling effect on the types of applicants who actually apply, creating a self-selection process that further promotes whiteness in the profession. even for those applicants who successfully apply and are accepted into these diversity programs, playing at whiteness is still a requirement for career success. programs like the arl career enhancement program assume that successful applicants possess the privileged free time, financial backing, and familial circumstances to allow them to relocate for these internships, residencies, or ala-accredited library programs. moreover, these diversity initiatives not only require whiteness for the application process but they also require continued whiteness to succeed in the profession (galvan, 2015). thus, those applicants who find success in these diversity programs are those who can successfully replicate necessary whiteness. as espinal (2000, 2001) observes, “many librarians of color have commented that they are more accepted if and when they look and act white” (p. 144). this means the inverse is also true: those librarians not able to play successfully at whiteness will be continually excluded from the profession (satifice, 2015). this phenomenon is not unique to lis. writing about the technology sector, kẏra (2014) notes, “when we talk about diversity and inclusion, we necessarily position marginalized groups as naturally needing to assimilate into dominant ones, rather than to undermine said structures of domination.” jack (2015) makes a similar observation regarding elite undergraduate institutions matriculating underrepresented minority students—the “privileged poor”—from private high schools: “elite colleges effectively hedge their bets: they recruit those already familiar with the social and cultural norms that pervade their own campuses.” manipulating diversity programs to recruit for whiteness ensures that only those diverse candidates adept in whiteness will succeed. my own experience serves as a prime example. i am a cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class black woman, raised by two highly educated parents who taught me from a young age the importance of playing at whiteness to achieve. i can specifically remember my mother admonishing me to “play the game and do what you want later” throughout my life. i have grown very adept at playing at whiteness; it has allowed me to complete a number of post-graduate degrees, spend time practicing corporate law at an award-winning global firm, and successfully transfer careers to a rewarding position in academic librarianship. this playing at whiteness also allowed me to apply for and successfully obtain a position as an ala spectrum scholar in the 2012 cohort. knowing how to replicate whiteness has served me well. image by flickr user emilien etienne (cc by 2.0) “lifting as we climb” while my own ability to play at whiteness has served me in my career, it is a privilege that i know i cannot use selfishly. as my mother reminded me in a recent conversation about the issue of diversity in the professional world, “you play the game and give the white world what it wants just to get through the door. then, once you’re inside, you blast that door wide open for others to follow you” (b. evans hathcock, personal communication, august 18, 2015). just as the national association of colored women exhorted fellow middle-class blacks to do in their motto “lifting as we climb” (wormser, 2002), it is important that those of us in lis with privilege—be it the privilege of actual whiteness or the privilege of skill in playing whiteness—serve as effective allies to those who do not. we need to make space for our diverse colleagues to thrive within the profession. in short, we need to dismantle whiteness from within lis. we can best do that in two equally important ways: by modifying our diversity programs to attract truly diverse applicants and by mentoring early career librarians in both playing at and dismantling whiteness in lis. one of the first steps to washing away the blackface of white librarianship is to reframe diversity initiatives so that they attract and retain applicants from truly diverse backgrounds. when we recruit for whiteness, we will get whiteness; but when we recruit for diversity, we will truly achieve diversity. it is important to note that reworking application processes to accommodate applicants with different backgrounds and experiences in no way requires lowering standards. talented applicants from truly diverse backgrounds—that is, backgrounds not functionally equivalent to standards of successful whiteness—exist and can be recruited and retained for these programs. to identify and attract them, however, requires framing application questions and required material in ways that make sense for the applicants’ experiences. for example, instead of requiring that at least one or all letters of recommendation come from professors or former employers, it may be useful and more relevant to allow applicants to submit letters from community members or other acquaintances who can provide equally informed assessments of the applicant’s work and goals. assuming that an applicant has the necessary relationship with a professor or supervisor means assuming that applicant attends school or works in a white, middle-class, cis-male environment where closeness with professors or supervisors is the norm. a diverse applicant may not have the opportunity to form those kinds of school and work relationships. however, that same applicant may know a staff member at the local public library who is well aware of the applicant’s career goals and the work they have put toward achieving them. the local library staff member would not qualify as either a professor or former employer but can still provide valuable insight into the qualifications of that particular applicant. dismantling whiteness from the infrastructure of our diversity programs is key, but it will take time. in the meantime, there are diverse individuals out there who wish to become and remain successful librarians. thus, another important step in washing away the blackface of white librarianship involves teaching new librarians from diverse backgrounds how to navigate effectively the white system that we have. we also need to teach these new librarians how to dismantle whiteness’ stranglehold on the profession. being a nonwhite librarian playing at whiteness is an isolating and lonely practice, so it is essential that new librarians from diverse backgrounds get the support they need and have safe spaces to go in the midst of this work. fortunately, there are a number of communities of radical and critical librarians who are willing to provide support, guidance, and mentorship in bringing true diversity and anti-racist practice to the profession. one colleague and fellow beneficiary of lis diversity initiatives has created a mentorship group for students of color to help them navigate the realities of learning and working in a privileged space and to assist them in fulfilling the requirements of whiteness necessary to succeed (padilla, 2015). social media spaces, such as #critlib and #radlib on twitter, provide public spaces for librarians to vent frustrations and share strategies for combating whiteness—comprising a range of hegemonic statuses, as defined above—in lis. for those not comfortable with speaking out publicly, social media can also provide useful points of contact for more private, offline relationships and discussions aimed at combating whiteness in the profession. even within our professional organizations, a number of caucuses and interest groups, including the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender round table and the asian pacific american librarians association exist to help members of diverse identity groups find community in the midst of the whiteness of librarianship (espinal, 2000, 2001; gonzalez-smith, swanson, & tanaka, 2014). there are many ways for nonwhite librarians and library students to gain the support and knowledge they need to enter the doors of the profession and subsequently “blast them open.” likewise, there are many practical ways more experienced librarians—from all backgrounds and levels of privilege—can help to fight whiteness in our diversity initiatives: volunteer to serve on ala and workplace committees and working groups tasked with organizing lis diversity initiatives and speak up regarding ways those initiatives can be modified to embrace a more diverse applicant pool. offer to take part in formal mentoring programs through professional associations or within your institution. help library workers new to the profession to navigate the culture of whiteness in the profession at large and within your specific place of work. for example, the association of college and research libraries’ dr. e. j. josey spectrum scholar mentor program pairs academic librarians with current spectrum scholars interested in academic librarianship, and mentor applications are always welcome. participate in informal mentoring with nonwhite library workers and students. with social media, it is possible to serve as an effective resource and ally for someone, even from miles away. do what you can to let new colleagues from diverse backgrounds know that you are available as a resource for advice, to serve as a reference, etc. even if you are yourself new to the profession, you have a role to play. develop relationships with more seasoned librarians who have demonstrated a commitment to inclusivity and learn from their experiences in the struggle. if you have privilege, begin speaking up for those who do not and signal boost their messages. fighting whiteness is hard work that requires additional labor from everyone. as lumby and morrison (2010) note, “it is therefore in the interest of all to address inequities, and not just in the interest of the apparently disadvantaged” (p. 12, citing frankenburg, 1993). washing away the white librarianship in blackface whiteness has permeated every aspect of librarianship, extending even to the initiatives we commit to increasing diversity. we can, however, make meaningful and important changes. with continued critical study of whiteness and its effects on lis, it is possible to redirect our thinking about diversity from a problem to be solved to a goal worth achieving. moreover, we can and should develop real strategies for attaining that goal. the first step is to help diverse applicants navigate the whiteness of the profession and make a concerted effort to dismantle whiteness from within. in doing so, we can recreate the profession into one that truly embraces inclusivity. we can wash away our white librarianship in blackface. huge thank you to annie pho, jennifer vinopal, and erin dorney for reading, reviewing, and helping to revise this article. it is so much better having come across their desks. unending gratitude to betty evans and dewitt hathcock for teaching me how to play the game successfully and raising me to be the radical i am today. works cited branche, c. l. (2012). diversity in librarianship: is there a color line? in a. p. jackson, j. c. jefferson, jr., & a. s. nosakhere (eds.), the 21st-century black librarian in america (pp. 203-206). lanham, md: scarecrow press. bourg, c. (2014, march 3). the unbearable whiteness of librarianship. feral librarian. [blog post]. retrieved from https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-librarianship. espinal, i. (2000). a new vocabulary for inclusive librarianship: applying whiteness theory to our profession. paper presented at reforma national conference, tucson, arizona. espinal, i. (2001). a new vocabulary for inclusive librarianship: applying whiteness theory to our profession. in l. castillo-speed (ed.), the power of language/el poder de la palabra: selected papers from the second reforma national conference (pp. 131-149). englewood, co: libraries unlimited. frankenburg, r. (1993). white women. race matters. the social construction of whiteness. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. galvan, a. (2015). soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship. in the library with the lead pipe. retrieved from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/soliciting-performance-hiding-bias-whiteness-and-librarianship. gonzalez-smith, i., swanson, j., & tanaka, a. (2014) unpacking identity: racial, ethnic, and professional identity and academic librarians of color. in n. pagowsky & m. rigby (eds.), the librarian stereotype: deconstructing perceptions and presentations of information work (pp. 149-173). chicago, il: association of college and research libraries. hall, t. d. (2012). the black body at the reference desk: critical race theory and black librarianship. in a. p. jackson, j. c. jefferson, jr., & a. s. nosakhere (eds.), the 21st-century black librarian in america (pp. 197-202). lanham, md: scarecrow press. honma, t. (2006). trippin’ over the color line: the invisibility of race in library and information studies. interactions: ucla journal of education and information studies, 1(2). retrieved from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nj0w1mp. jack, a. a. (2015, september 12). what the privileged poor can teach us. the new york times. retrieved from http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opinion/sunday/what-the-privileged-poor-can-teach-us.html?_r=0. kẏra (2014, december 10). how to uphold white supremacy by focusing on diversity and inclusion. model view culture. retrieved from https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/how-to-uphold-white-supremacy-by-focusing-on-diversity-and-inclusion. lorde, a. (1984). sexism: an american disease in blackface. in sister outsider (pp. 60-65). trumansburg, ny: crossing press. lumby, j., & morrison, m. (2010). leadership and diversity: theory and research. school leadership & management: formerly school organisation, 30(1), 3-17. padilla, t. [@thomasgpadilla]. (2015, august 18). @aprilhathcock we started a students of color group, tried to mentor incoming groups to privileged realities, req. of entrance. [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/thomasgpadilla/status/633660350337019904. satifice. (2015, september 10). it’s time to get personal, dirty, and downright nasty [tumblr post]. retrieved from http://satifice.tumblr.com/post/128776550132/its-time-to-get-personal-dirty-and-downright. vinopal, j. [@jvinopal]. (2015, august 18). @aprilhathcock we’re bringing ppl from underrepresented identity groups into profession at same rate they are leaving. attrition a problem+. [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/jvinopal/status/633652864087404544. wormser, r. (2002). jim crow stories: national association of colored women. the rise and fall of jim crow. retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_org_nacw.html. yeo, s., & jacobs, j. r. (2006). diversity matters? rethinking diversity in libraries. counterpoise, 9(2). retrieved from http://freegovinfo.info/files/diversity_counterpoise.pdf. the title of this article is a variation on a quote by librarian, scholar, and activist audre lorde (1984): “black feminism is not white feminism in blackface.” in this article, i am arguing the opposite as it relates to diversity initiatives in lis in that i posit that diverse librarianship as we conceive of it is in fact white librarianship in blackface. [↩] editorial: summer reading 2015 a critical take on oer practices: interrogating commercialization, colonialism, and content 71 responses karl ericson 2015–10–07 at 10:48 am this article has given me much to think about and confront within myself. thank you for getting under my skin, helping to remind me of my need to confront my own comfort, find comfort in the uncomfortable, and arrive at new understandings from which to act. april hathcock 2015–10–08 at 8:54 am thanks, karl, i’m glad to hear it. these conversations are never comfortable, but nonetheless, so important. thanks for joining in. hanni nabahe 2015–10–07 at 12:11 pm your points are valid, although i feel that what you are calling for is happening already, particularly within arl’s cep. i am exactly the kind of diverse applicant you talk about in your article: returning to school after a 20 year gap, single mother, immigrant from mexico. not only did i find it fairly simple to navigate the process, i had an amazing experience with the librarians at my cep internship location, uc san diego, when it came to housing and relocation (they accommodated me bringing two of my children and set us up on an apartment on campus). the program opened a whole new world to me and i am on my way to help others take advantage of what i have learned. i do understand the frustration expressed here, particularly as it relates to letters of recommendation. last spring, i too had hoped to apply for the spectrum scholarship and the only reason i did not was that they required 3 letters of recommendation. i ended up applying to the arl/saa mosaic fellowship where the requirement was only 2 (beyond not having enough people that fit the faculty/supervisor requirement, some are just too busy and have already written enough of those for applicants like me). guess which program i am now a part of? i do feel that what’s missing here is testimony from current applicants, from people living this issue, not just from those observing it from on high. i wish you had more than circumstantial evidence and academic papers (yup, you sure played at whiteness right there) to back your arguments and truly strengthen your case. had you taken the time to go that extra step, you might have been pleasantly surprised. nina de jesus 2015–10–07 at 2:28 pm @hanni given that this is an academic article in a peer-reviewed journal, it isn’t really all that surprising that hathcock, you know, wrote this like an academic paper and used academic sources. that said, given that she also cited an email from her mother, i’m really not sure where you are getting this impression that she has her head stuck in the ivory tower or whatever. regarding the arl’s diversity initiative, i was one of their recipients of the scholarship for recruiting a diverse workforce initiative, something i think they no longer do. now, getting the scholarship was amazing and i had a great experience, overall, doing the various activities that were part of the reward. moreover, because i was attending school in canada, the scholarship paid for most of my mlis tuition, a real blessing. but i also know of someone in my same program who didn’t apply for the scholarship because he didn’t understand where south asians fit into the american 2010 census classifications for race. stuff like this? is a real barrier. moving on, though, i got the scholarship. and it was great. perhaps you might’ve noticed that i’m actually the person hathcock cites as an example of how the whiteness of lis doesn’t really care if i’m able to participate. i encourage you to read that post. because i ought to be a cautionary tale for any marginalized person entering the field. i did all the right things. i got a prestigious scholarship. i even published an article in this very journal. i’ve been attending conferences, given talks and such. and yet… i am still stuck in the same part-time position i got when i graduated three years ago. note how one of hathcock’s main points is that attrition is happening as fast as recruitment. i am one of the people who will be out of the field whenever i loose my current (contract) position. i’m too poor to keep persisting in a field that has made it very clear that there is little or no room for people like me. these changes? aren’t happening ‘now.’ if they were, my situation might be a little less bleak. you know i’m starting to research how i can maybe ‘safely’ do sex work if it becomes necessary? i’ve run out of time and options after bumping into pretty much every barrier that exists within this field. for your sake, i truly hope that everything stays as wonderful and rosy as the picture you are painting. you should talk to some of the people in my cohort. they’ll tell you i was probably one of the most consistently optimistic people in the program. so, yeah, i’m ‘living’ this issue but on the other end of where you are. a place where i truly hope that you never find yourself in. hanni nabahe 2015–10–07 at 2:55 pm arl does still have irdw around–it helps to keep up with one’s colleagues, and to stay involved. i am sorry about your situation, and since i am in still in school, not sure where i will be when all is said and done. that is besides the point, however–and the point is that there was simply no need for this article to single out one program, particularly one that is doing so much for students like myself, these diverse types whose plight the articles claims to address. for an academic paper, i find it simplistic and suspect–if this is such an issue out there (and, yes, it is with some programs, of course) then why not offer other examples? talk about a small sample size… i find the article makes vast generalizations, likely based on this twitter conversation you all had and to which, i’m willing to bet, not many of us “diverse” people were represented. when well-ran initiatives like arl’s get clumped with issues that may plague others out there, it doesn’t do anyone any favors. in a time when we must justify our value to continue receiving funding, this sort of articles are counterproductive. go ahead and critique, but do it constructively and, for goodness sake, talk to more than just your friends, who most likely will do nothing but reinforce whatever you believe. and, please, do keep in mind that those who are watching and could use your very words to justify less funding, less support. you paint quite the bleak picture, nina–are you sure we are all destined for the same? is that what you would like to see? articles like this are very unlikely to help either you or me. skeskali 2015–10–07 at 4:49 pm a person who has done “all of the right things” and still finds themselves on the outs in this profession is hardly beside the point, hanni. it is very much the point that regardless of how poc in this profession try to navigate and perform whiteness, as long as we aren’t the ones making hiring decisions and directing/shaping this profession, there will always be someone who will find our performance lacking. once that happens, one can rapidly find themselves on the outside. as a student, it would serve you well to be aware rather than casting doubt on people who have lived experience to the contrary. we’re not suggesting it will happen to you, only that it *could*. hanni nabahe 2015–10–07 at 8:10 pm oh, i have plenty life experience and i’m personally aware of the depths of what can happen even when you think you have it all figured out. that’s the thing with real diversity–you don’t always hear what you *think* you are going to hear. and, by the way, i was not disregarding nina’s experience in the least. i was trying to keep the argument focused on what i see as flaws in this article’s approach. if you are going to (rightly) exercise your right to critique those who try to advance a cause, put more thought into it, is what i’m saying here. to just pick one example and, because it fits, pound on it without checking your facts or a broader experience, can lose you credibility. and cause unintended harm. that was my point. yours, @ skeskali, seems to want to put me in my place and tell me what serves me well or not. nice try. satifice 2015–10–08 at 8:14 am o.o i see. i find it interesting that you claim to be staying focused on the academic merits of the article, accusing it of making ‘vast generalizations’ based on some alleged twitter conversation where “not many of us ‘diverse’ people were represented”. and then accusing me of only talking to my friends… lol. given that, no, i quite clearly said that not everyone is going to end up in my position (in fact, i hope no one does). but you are claiming to invalidate the generalizations of the article about the arl programs using your individual experience. what i did was confirm the generalizations based on my own experiences. the funny thing? it actually doesn’t matter what our individual experiences are because this article is talking about systemic, institutional problems. which is why examining the form and content of the program, rather than talking to individuals, is a perfectly sound way to approach this topic, especially since you confirm one of the ‘vast generalizations’ by pointing out that you couldn’t apply for the spectrum scholarship because you weren’t able to get three letters of reference. this is the *exact* thing that this article was intending to address. perhaps you may not want to attribute your inability to apply for a spectrum scholarship to an inadequate performance of whiteness. how you understand your own experiences is your business. also, i see that on nitpicking on a single point, you are missing out on the positive, substantive contributions this article is making. yes, it is being highly critical of specific programs. but did you miss the part where she offers possible suggestions for improvement and to reduce barriers? great, you think the arl programs are great. but does this mean they can’t get *better*. or do you really think they are perfect as is? how is an article that offers up concrete, actionable suggestions to improve the problems it highlights counterproductive? how is this not constructive criticism? did you stop reading after she mentioned the arl? april hathcock 2015–10–08 at 9:07 am thanks for your comments, hanni. i’m thrilled to learn that an lis diversity initiative has worked so well for you. but as others have already pointed out to you, there are so many others who have not been able to perform whiteness as successfully as you have. i accept your challenge to learn more about the lived experiences of others and encourage you to do the same. as someone new to the profession, you can greatly benefit from hearing from the folks who have engaged you in dialogue here, including nina and seskali. this article and it’s beginning twitter convo actually grew from conversations i had with several people i’d never met or interacted with. you point out my academic citations, but i also cite to nina’s tumblr, which i discovered while exploring this topic. there are also some blogs cited in my work, as well. the willingness of nina and these others to share their lived experiences candidly in such a public space has been eye-opening and inspiring. i chose arl cep as one of any number of programs to illustrate the point. i understand if that makes you feel uncomfortable as a recipient, but really the analysis is the same if you substitute any of the other programs. i mention this in the article and also talk candidly about spectrum, a program i successfully participated in. in all my research and conversations, i ultimately realized the truth of my mother’s wisdom, also cited (i chose itlwtlp because i knew they’d accept alternate forms of “scholarship”), that i needed to look beyond my own success story to the systemic oppressions operating against others. i had that responsibility. and you do, too, hanni. don’t get comfortable with the status quo. hanni nabahe 2015–10–09 at 4:26 pm i did not accuse you of only talking to your friends–i was saying that about the article, which does come across like a conversation had only with those on one side of the issue. your experience are as valid as mine. so if you can speak up and make yourself part of this conversation, so can i. we do have different ways to understand our particular experiences and you might be surprised how much we agree on things, if you would just engage openly and honestly, instead of being defensive and taking offense simply because i happen to experience or see certain things in a different way. i was not nitpicking on a point, i was focusing on the one aspect in which i did not agree with this article, the one area where i saw potential to invalidate what could otherwise be a good effort. we all want to make things better, at least i assume as much of those who come here. i don’t think anything or anyone is perfect, and we continue to evolve as the world around us does–either that or we don’t make it. perhaps i just like to give credit where credit is due, and not just pounce at anything that looks like the enemy out there. there are so few of us, we need to work together, to communicate and help each other out. singling one program out without basis (which is what i specifically point out with cep, since it is what i do know something about), that was my main concern here. any of this still funny? i’m sure you’ll tell me now mario macias 2015–10–16 at 1:25 am you make sharp points, hanni nabahe! thanks for expanding this conversation :) emily agunod 2015–10–13 at 6:18 pm @nina the arl initiative to recruit a diverse workforce is still in place despite constant threats from the government to reduce funding for imls. i’m an asian, a southeast asian to be exact and i never have a problem filling in the census. i just choose asian. that’s why the choice enumerates several asian types and then says “and so on.” so i don’t see why that can be a barrier. mario macias 2015–10–16 at 1:59 am how is being able to submit letters of recommendation an (successful?) act of “playing whiteness”? don’t most academic jobs ask for letters of rec, if not references? decoster 2015–10–07 at 3:08 pm thank you for taking on this difficult topic. i agree with your misgivings about some of these diversity initiatives. however, i can’t help but think the galvan definition of whiteness gives non-hetero identifying librarians (present company included) a bit of a pass, and i think this is terribly unhelpful. i have never witnessed a more gay-friendly work culture or have had a higher percentage of gay colleagues than in the 2 libraries i’ve worked (i almost think one could make an argument that the groovy lesbian librarian has replaced the stifled spinster librarian as the majority stereotype). yet whiteness *still* overwhelms the profession! in other words, the queering of librarianship does not dismantle whiteness. my biggest frustration with the whiteness of our profession stems from my students who never have the chance to see themselves mirrored in the person presenting information literacy and research. (i work in an urban, minority-serving institution with only white and asian librarians.) it makes research appear as a white undertaking of sorts, and honestly, it doesn’t matter if a marxist lesbian is presenting to them. it doesn’t matter that i am the first in my family to finish college. to the students, whiteness is, well . . . whiteness. (yes, we asked.) so although i agree with the importance of intersectionality, i think this expansive definition of whiteness muddies the conversation and obscures the actual problem. galvan_as 2015–10–07 at 4:55 pm my definition includes heterosexuality because of the intersection between whiteness and heteronormative expectations. although i too have worked for several libraries with many openly lbgti faculty and staff, i can’t help but notice a particular presentation of what it means to be gay–as you say, “groovy lesbian”–is acceptable. lbgti colleagues for example, do not guarantee their existence in leadership. my definition does not give non-hetero identifying librarians a pass, but is meant to emphasize the performative nature of gender as necessary for success during hiring. that so much anxiety surrounds interview clothing is a clear indicator of gender-as-performance for the comfort of others, not authenticity of the self. performing whiteness means performing gender, because whiteness conflates gender with sexual orientation. april hathcock 2015–10–08 at 9:13 am i echo, galvan. and just want to point out that i can’t imagine queer folks getting a “pass” at anything. intersectionality is essential if we’re to break down the system of oppression at work in our profession. decoster 2015–10–08 at 11:32 am i agree with the importance of intersectionality. yet i think we can be intersectional without conflating identities, and i maintain that adding heterosexuality to the definition of whiteness is unhelpful. can’t we be intersectional and discuss gender representation specifically? when feminists embrace intersectionality they do not lump racial or economic discrimination into their definition of sexism. they are able to consider these related concepts together without redefining words. i was thinking a lot last night about this, and i wonder if it is a matter of perspective. the student body at my institution is 30% black and 36% hispanic. librarianship is 88% percent white, and so are the librarians at my university. by your definition of whiteness, we are doing much better, but this is not true for my students. i couldn’t look them in the eye and maintain this definition. (i suppose it would be easier if i worked at a majority white institution.) there are intersections and there are definitions. by lumping heteronormative expectations (using the word “heterosexuality”) into a definition of whiteness, you not only obscure the whiteness of libraries, but you deny the heternormative pressures felt within communities of color. i don’t buy it. but i do really appreciate the dialog, and i understand the intention. as a side note, i would love to find statistics of lgbti representation in librarianship and within leadership positions. galvan_as 2015–10–09 at 1:16 pm heteronormative pressures felt within communities of color is a necessary discussion. it’s also beyond the thesis of my (or april’s) essay. given your enthusiasm for the discussion and unique perspective, i’d encourage you to submit your own essay to lead pipe. composedcitrine 2015–10–08 at 7:03 am as someone who has been active in advisory work for at least one of the diversity initiatives mentioned, an lis doc student conducting research in intersectionality, lis leadership and lived experience, an lis administrator and member of one the diverse groups these efforts target, this article reminds me that as a profession we must have some honest dialogue about the intent of these diversity initiatives. how is that intent carried out beyond graduation and into professional life? given the rate of retention, there is disconnect between stated goals and objectives of these initiatives and those of lis institutions. yet we persist with these initiatives as a primary strategy for an issue to which we have not applied a critical lens. i am again called to question the intent of these initiatives which drive processes and outcomes. this does not mean that i believe that we should abandon these initiatives. after years (in some instances decades), it is time that we engage is a deeper critique and examination of what we are really trying to achieve when it comes to diversity of all kinds in lis. april hathcock 2015–10–08 at 9:14 am yes! this has been a great discussion thus far. let’s keep it going. max macias 2015–10–08 at 10:22 am i love this and you are spot on. i would also say that the hierarchies that are used in committees, and other organizational structures have domination and oppression built into them. we need new social structures for organizations if we want to break out of the white-supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist shitstem. every group i have been involved in has taken that teaching poc how to ‘succeed’ in a white-supremacist culture is the outcome. i am a graduate of the emporia state diversity initiative. in the library where i worked (while in grad school), i was given edifying tasks like sorting the mail. i was called “unprofessional,” “angry,” and people said things like, “he hates white people!” about me–because i wasn’t the docile stereotype that they wished for. us culture is fundamentally white-supremacist–it is so ingrained in the national unconscious–i don’t see how we are going to shake it without our nation applying therapeutic treatments. however, i don’t see this happening anytime soon. i’ve come to the conclusion that, in order to have any chance at a fair shake, poc need separate institutions. thank you for writing this article. i was surprised to read it on this site. april hathcock 2015–10–08 at 1:45 pm thank you, max. and thank you for sharing your experiences. jy 2015–10–09 at 3:39 pm thanks for your comments max and for everyone else contributing to this discussion. i’m new to librarianship and your comment about teaching poc to ‘succeed’ in a white-supremacist culture had me thinking… if poc need to act white to succeed then how can we break down white supremacy? aren’t we just furthering it? i feel like we’re stuck in a bind. how can using “the master’s tools” “dismantle the master’s house”? april hathcock 2015–10–09 at 11:05 pm that’s the key, isn’t it, jy? in the article, i advocate for helping others succeed in the white environment while also working with them (once they’re in) to dismantle white supremacy in the profession. it certainly won’t be easy, but i believe it can and should be done. mario macias 2015–10–16 at 2:42 am you know what’s sad? when poc, in the same institution, don’t help each other out… i’ve seen this personally and it surprises me when there isn’t more solidarity among co-workers… sandra rios balderrama 2015–10–08 at 3:41 pm great read (thank you) including each one of the comments and replies. i recall in 1997-1998 (as first director for office for diversity at al) working on developing “non-traditional” criteria for applying for the spectrum initiative scholarship as well as criteria for using the scholarship. the intent was to allow applicants to express their story and interest in librarianship/info management etc.. in varied ways (as not all of us are strong in print), including by audio, by video etc…essay questions were also non-traditional having to do with life experience and volunteer/non-paid work, and others really challenged those that unconsciously played the game of whiteness by asking for experiences with any other groups, other than with the group(s) an applicant identified with/as. also we felt that some “winners” of the scholarship may need to use the finances in non-traditional ways due to individual situations e.g. gas to commute, childcare etc..i don’t know if the criteria was kept. i do remember that some applicants preferred to go the traditional route of application, perhaps based on reasons you state here in your piece. challenges about working-in-a-new-way were everywhere. people involved in that work of cultural/ethnic infusion included ken yamashita, khafre abif, lillian lewis, jose a aponte, and others. well, thank you for this piece and making me remember some spirited authentic work. april hathcock 2015–10–08 at 7:50 pm thank you, sandra! it’d be great to bring that important work back. i’ve read a lot of your work and it is so valuable to the profession. thank you. niomi dubose 2015–10–08 at 8:08 pm i find the following statement regarding the qualifications for the arl internship to be extremely stereotypical and it deeply saddens me that it basically implies that non-whites are poor and uneducated and could not possibly have had any opportunities to meet influential people to use as references. that is completely ridiculous and is the epitome of white privilege. “only an applicant with access to the privileges of whiteness would have the tools needed to engage in the requisite work and volunteer opportunities called for by the diversity program, have the high-level of educational achievement required, possess the close relationships with individuals of power needed for stellar recommendations, and be able to provide all the documentation necessary to complete their application through the online form.” april hathcock 2015–10–09 at 1:34 pm no, niomi, my overall argument is much more nuanced than that. it requires reading the entire article. it is white supremacy to assume those examples of excellence are the only means of finding exceptional non-white applicants. and as a non-white professional myself, i find that greatly troubling. hanni nabahe 2015–10–09 at 4:11 pm why automatically assume we did not read the article in its entirety? is it that only if we praise your efforts in their entirety we pass the literacy test, but if we don’t, it means we can’t or didn’t read? april, realize that one does not need to be buying into the status quo to critique someone’s perceptions or actions–you did just that yourself. yes, there are ways to make these programs better, no one is denying that. yes, there are changes that need to happen, mostly in the system, but sure, some of them have to take place in the initiatives themselves too. but just because we do not agree with you 100%, it does not mean we don’t understand your argument or that we side with the “white supremacist system”. i spoke up as a participant in these programs, not because i am already successful (as a student, it remains to be seen how far i get), but just to let the record note that not all is working against us out there, that there are actually people working for us, fighting the good fight. i stand not by this system you critique, but by those who are making a difference. i myself already do what i can to make a difference where i can, and realize we do have a long way to go. your mother may have encouraged you to look beyond your own success, but i highly doubt she would have been ok with your forgetting those who helped you get to where they are and or to skip giving credit where credit is do. that is all i am doing here. april hathcock 2015–10–09 at 11:18 pm when someone takes a single phrase of my work and interprets it out of context and in complete opposition to my stated meaning, then i assume they didn’t read my entire work. i’m not going to engage anymore because this conversation isn’t constructive. not because you disagree–i welcome disagreement and discussion–but because you keep misrepresenting my words. it’s a frustrating way to discuss anything with anyone. i will say this: my mother is incredibly proud of me and my work, including this article. i give due credit to those who have helped me, particularly in this very article, which you assure me you read in its entirety. so, please do not attempt to speak for my mother’s thoughts or feelings again. i wish you all the best in your new career, hanni. niomi dubose 2015–10–10 at 4:01 pm i see. i did actually read it in its entirety and did find that to be a dig but i understand why you said it so it’s no problem. i enjoyed the article. the statement that i referenced just stood out to me. basically, i feel like whatever stipulations that are required, non-whites can meet them. for persons of every race there are exceptions and instances where this is not the case which should be considered by internships such as arl. i have just run into people assuming that non-whites coming into the library profession are lacking in one way or another compared to white people. anyway, no need for us all to get rattled up. the article was good overall. mario macias 2015–10–16 at 2:47 am @niomi, what a great point! i was thinking the exact thing… how is it a “privilege of whiteness” the act of being able to submit a standard application? what would an anti-privilege-of-whiteness application look like? shaundra walker 2015–10–08 at 8:59 pm thank you for this piece. i agree wholeheartedly with the comments above from max macias. we need more honest, open critiques of lis diversity initiatives. the literature is full of reflections from individuals who have successfully progressed through the various programs. experiences of those who haven’t been as successful are lacking. knowing more about the barriers faced by such individuals would certainly help the profession to refine its approach. until multiple perspectives (positive and negative) are considered, we can convince ourselves that what we are doing is working, when in actuality our efforts could be improved. also, i appreciate the personal references in your article. too often the lis field has turned to quantitative data alone to assess its progress in diversifying the profession. more experiential reflections from marginalized individuals and groups would certainly help to refine and explain the quantitative findings. thanks again for a powerful piece of work. april hathcock 2015–10–09 at 1:35 pm thank you, shaundra. cynthia perez 2015–10–08 at 8:09 pm i was extremely excited to apply for the arlirdw program and i had the most difficult time trying to get my transcripts delivered to them. the person in charge contacted me, at almost 2pm east coast time indicating that if i couldn’t get the transcripts to them electronically by the end of the day, my application could not be considered. neither of the universities that i had attended offered that option. i was not able to communicate this because their office was already closed on the east coast. the very next day, i received a voicemail indicating they had received my transcripts and how would i like them returned to me. one day and she would not allow my application for consideration. extremely frustrating. april hathcock 2015–10–09 at 1:36 pm that is extremely frustrating, cynthia. i’m so sorry to hear about this. mario macias 2015–10–16 at 2:53 am that is unfair and frustrating, cynthia–they should have been flexible. indieblack 2015–10–09 at 3:31 pm thank you for this article. i am new to the profession and still consider myself an outsider. coming into librarianship from a different profession, i was shocked that diversity initiatives have been going on for so long, with little change. i’ve been on several interviews, and consider myself versed in playing whiteness, but have experienced hostility. i agree that the programs have been ineffective at retaining librarians of diverse backgrounds, but also agree with another poster that there needs to be diversity in human resource departments and in leadership. these are the two barriers that filter diverse applicants out. another point, the job climate still hasn’t fully recovered and some feel like “why should i hire this person of color/lgbtq/disabled person if i can simply hire the white person.” in short, it’s deliberate exclusion at this point. lastly, thank you for highlighting the recommendation letter. it’s very difficult to get more after you’ve exhausted the pool of people who can do it for you the first time. and it’s frustrating to see time and time again all of these applications requesting rec letters, and then have people say to you “just apply again.” it’s not that simple. april hathcock 2015–10–09 at 11:06 pm it is tough. but you are certainly not alone. please feel free to reach out to me and others as you struggle to get going in this profession. we need you! mario macias 2015–10–16 at 3:03 am asking for letters of recommendation was a hassle for me, too, because i wanted to apply to many things and i felt embarrassed/shy asking repeatedly for letters from the same handful of people… i felt it was exhausting for them too but i could only express to them that they were they only persons who could write me a relevant letter… bob holley 2015–10–09 at 3:42 pm i very much agree with what you say here, but i would add some additional consideration to the issue of classism. those who come from the working class or are poor face obstacles at times similar to those of race, ethnicity, and gender orientation. i wonder how many libraries would hire a candidate who spoke non-standard english whether because of race or class. i think that saying “he don’t” would be a strong negative on any interview no matter how intelligent the candidate was. i’ll agree that being white makes it easier to cross the divide, but learning middle class ways may be a requirement for all those who would become librarians with a working class background. my one final comment is that harvard university and perhaps other elite institutions have special funds for poor students to participate in activities that they otherwise could not afford even with full scholarships for tuition and board. the example i remember is getting a small grant to rent a tuxedo (i know this is a sexist case) to attend an important social function. april hathcock 2015–10–09 at 11:07 pm thanks for those insights, bob. micha 2015–10–11 at 9:15 pm april, thanks for getting this valuable conversation going. in reading the comments section, i have appreciated the addition of personal experiences and would like to share my own to the discussion. as a previous arl/saa mosaic recipient, the program granted me my first lis/archives experience outside of the classroom. for my application, i had my supervisor (i was working in a charter school) and a phd candidate at my school who i had connected with in local activist spaces write my recommendations. while this is likely out of the norm for most applicants, it does somewhat fold in your suggestions for community members to be a recommenders. i would also like to point out the requirements for the applications to these diversity initiatives are very similar (if not the same) requirements to the lis programs. (my program’s http://www.simmons.edu/admission-and-financial-aid/graduate-admission/dual-degree-archives-and-history-ma) although, i will admit i experienced self doubt around my application’s attractiveness as a mosaic candidate, and i greatly thank that phd candidate at my school (who is a poc) who encouraged me. you mentioned mentorship as a way to correct for whiteness in lis diversity programs, and i would also like to share that this is already a component of arl’s diversity programs. i agree, mentorship is crucial. in relation to my own personal attrition, speaking candidly with people about my observations and concerns as a black (and unapologetically pro-black), queer, gender non-confirming woman has been the near only sustaining factor at times. being a part of lis diversity initiatives has granted me access to a network of upcoming and seasoned professionals who have listened, validated, and sometimes even pushed my perspective. stephanie hardy 2015–10–12 at 11:49 am awareness of our attitudes and actions is beneficial, and i appreciate the reminder. but isn’t categorizing labeling, stereotyping, and shaming “white and middle-class” just as discriminatory as racism, sexism, or any other -ism? at some point, all of us have been sneered at by narrow minded snobs, overlooked because of our race, class, religion, or gender, or rejected because we weren’t a good fit. i’ve been turned down because i’m white and female and programs i’ve applied to wanted more “diversity.” i do not mean to belittle anyone’s struggles or challengesthey are real and they exist. on the average, library culture is one of the best professions for demonstrating respect for all individuals. increasing this and mentoring all who want to join in will help. but harping on the differences and creating a greater divide won’t help diversity. it will only set up a different set of exclusionary rules. as a library director, i have the opportunity to look at applications and believe me, i don’t disregard anyone’s experience! if someone has worked at macdonald’s then i know they understand customer service. i want the best librarians on our staff and i don’t care what shade they come in. but i do care about competence, attitude, and the ability to get along with others. those traits have nothing to do with race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. they are qualities found in a good human being. arldiversityscholar 2015–10–12 at 2:24 pm “each of these requirements assumes that applicants are situated in positions of white, middle-class, cisgender normativity that allow for the temporal, financial, and educational privilege that fulfilling these criteria would require. only an applicant with access to the privileges of whiteness would have the tools needed to engage in the requisite work and volunteer opportunities called for by the diversity program, have the high-level of educational achievement required, possess the close relationships with individuals of power needed for stellar recommendations, and be able to provide all the documentation necessary to complete their application through the online form.” i wonder if the author actually attempted to reach out to more than a few previous arl cep or diversity scholars? as a former arl diversity scholar and male poc librarian i find the characterizations made in this piece disappointing and exhausting. maybe the transcript requirements are needed for the program grant (my undergraduate grades were pretty poor btw) “for example, applicants are required to submit resumes detailing their work experience, but an applicant from a working-class background may not have the requisite experience, either through work or volunteering, to place on a resume. building a relevant resume assumes the applicant has the white, middle-class background that allows for early career professional work or volunteerism, whereas many applicants do not have that privilege…” so white privilege is now a requirement to volunteer or have work experience? this is just absurd…i’m sorry. you also need to submit a resume to work in fast-food…hegemony? oppression? fighting whiteness?…that’s a bit extra. if that’s been your library experience, i would leave the profession too. librarians and libraries have been the most supportive and generally progressive professional environments that i have ever experienced. if the arl application requirements are onerous and present a real burden and you feel so “oppressed” by the whiteness in librarianship, i fear for your journey in business, law, medicine, engineering (or practically any other professional environment). the author admits that she’s successful because she played “white”, so never mind i consciously used “whiteness” as a tool to become successful, but shame on you for using it too. this seems to almost send the message that being professional and having initiative is in a sense; whiteness. of course the author, and many other “conscious” and “radical” poc librarians shame (directly or indirectly) other poc librarians if we don’t align with their views–we’re sellouts and self-hating of course. it reminds me of being a kid in an all black and latino school, and because i did my homework, participated in class, respected the teacher, etc i was “acting white”. diversity discussions in lis have turned into shaming sessions. and now to pick on arl, who does more than any other lis organization, including ala–sigh. mario macias 2015–10–16 at 3:08 am wow you are right on point! @arldiversityscholar blkwolf 2015–10–12 at 11:05 pm thanks for this article! it got my juices flowing and thinking. i know there have been some very visceral reactions to it, but i needed to make this personal from my own perspective. i am an arl scholarship recipient and am delighted for the experience it offered me. but i’m always the one looking for ways to make it better. i was an older recipient than most of my young colleagues so i brought a certain angle to it along with the fact that i am black and gay and had about 8 years paraprofessional experience before pursuing the mlis. i guess the issues that left me sometimes discouraged were the fact that there was no mentor for me to be found. and it wasn’t only arl but another scholarship i received put me with someone that i felt we were about as awkward as virgins on prom night. i always felt age had something to do with it. don’t get me wrong he was kind. but as far as arl i felt like i got overlooked on some levels. i tried not to take it personally but being black gay and male in a sea of white females for the most part can be a bit disconcerting. i don’t need for white women to disappear. i just needed some point of likeness to say, “i see you.” i honestly reached out beyond arl to black women i knew in the field who i had never disclosed my sexuality to wanting to connect with another black gay male. i got responses that fizzled due to i believe some black men’s either homophobia or need to put me in some tribal matrix of them being the elder and me being the initiate. believe me i’m too old for anybody’s initiate. i’ve been around the block more times than i care to admit. still what i needed was a personal touch. i get all the mentoring jive and all. but i just needed somebody to call and say “i’m not quite sure i’m in the right field after 8 years.” you see even after i got the degree i was looking for other black gay men who might be in the field to bond to ala mother hen to chick if for no more than security sake in this academic sea of drama. i’ll never forget preparing to apply for a position at the academic library where i worked as a circ supervisor and a white female mentor reminding me of a sudden that i wasn’t the only one with degrees and experience and quickly named every white female in the building who she thought had like credentials and would be competing with me. my heart broke. i didn’t apply for the academic position. i got a call from virginia tech to come to their school for a diversity interview and couldn’t go because on my clerk salary i didn’t have the funds. they responded almost indignantly as if i’d slighted them. i handled it diplomatically by telling them i didn’t have the money up front. i felt humiliated. i got an offer from a public library (because academic libraries are slow as molasses in winter) which i really didn’t want hearing the mantra from well-meaning white folks and church going black folks to “take what you can get.” i took it as you’re not good enough to be an academic librarian. my heart broke again. well i got the public library position and i’m miserable handing out computer tickets and telling unruly kids whose parents have mistaken the library for a babysitting service to “stop…quit…and don’t do that.” they just wanted a black man! my doctors are talking about doubling my blood pressure medicine. it’s harrowing being black gay male and a librarian. regardless of what anyone says for or against what you wrote you got everybody’s ear. what i’ve seen are whites zealously preserving their own systemic privilege and blacks (especially gay ones) making sure they’re not judged by their sexuality over their ability to be librarians. i’ll be honest, at this rate, if a job offer came from another field today, i won’t say i wouldn’t take it dragging my $40,000 mlis degree along for a life time as a cautionary tale. mrs. jones 2015–10–13 at 8:46 am while i appreciate your insight, the problem doesn’t lie with the diversity initiatives. the issues of privilege and attrition are attributed to the high cost of graduate school and the abysmal salary range. mario macias 2015–10–16 at 1:18 am great point! graduate school debt (most times in addition to undergraduate debt) can wear one down not only financially but emotionally/psychologically… emily agunod 2015–10–13 at 7:28 pm @april kudos on your extensive research. i am a current cep fellow. with all due respect, i just want to make a few points. i agree that based on statistics, the librarianship is predominantly white. i am an asian and i know based on ala statistics show that barely 3% of my race group are librarians here in the u.s. you do have to take into consideration that these statistics will include people who entered the profession as far back as 50 years ago when diversity initiatives were not in place yet and people who had access to college were mostly white. i believe as the years go on that there will be a more equitable distribution of races in this profession. what we need to really achieve is not to eradicate whiteness but reach a point when race should not matter. culturally, as an asian, librarianship is not one of those “go-to” professions. in my experience, asian parents push their children to become doctors, lawyers, etc. becoming a librarian is a choice i made as a 48-year old woman after working in a library for 6 years. but even then, my siblings and former friends from college wonder why i chose to be one (which is none of their business). but this is a phenomena i associate with the asian value system. one only needs to observe and it will become apparent that certain races gravitate to certain careers. i noticed this as well when i was attending staff meetings during my fellowship at bethesda. all the computer scientists were asian. lastly, i didn’t feel that any of the requirements for the program is any indication that only white people can apply. in fact, these requirements are less than what i needed to get into graduate school. just to deconstruct your argument on this set of requirements: 1. a completed application form – (all scholarship requires an application form) 2. a resume – (it is fair to assume that someone who is an early career librarian has already built a resume; if you are old enough to be in grad school, you should some work experience) 3. a 500-word essay detailing their professional interests and goals – (any college student should be able to write a 500-word essay, especially if it is about him/herself) 4. an official letter of acceptance to an ala-accredited mlis program – (all colleges send letters of acceptance to students who are accepted) 5. official transcripts – (any student can request their transcript) 6. two letters of recommendation, one of which must be from a professor or employer – (this is also very attainable) as a mother of two grown children, when they were in high school i helped them scour for scholarships and even the ones for minority or under-privileged students require basically the same requirements. so i really don’t see what your basis is for saying: “each of these requirements assumes that applicants are situated in positions of white, middle-class, cisgender normativity that allow for the temporal, financial, and educational privilege that fulfilling these criteria would require.” statements like this imply that non-whites are incapable of fulfilling these requirements. another thing you pointed out was: “only an applicant with access to the privileges of whiteness would have the tools needed to engage in the requisite work and volunteer opportunities called for by the diversity program, have the high-level of educational achievement required, possess the close relationships with individuals of power needed for stellar recommendations, and be able to provide all the documentation necessary to complete their application through the online form.” even if a student doesn’t have a computer, there is always the public library. if someone really wanted to break so-called barriers, they can. professor are more than happy to help. volunteer work is not a requirement for the career enhancement program and neither are high grades. that is not to say that these are not things the scholarship judges look at. i can’t speak for other lis grad schools but my school, sjsu, encourages us to do keep a high gpa. i am an online student so i don’t have “close relationships” with the powers that be. i have worked for them online, but i haven’t even seen any of them in person, yet i am able to get letters of recommendation. again, this is a matter of preparation. someone who asks at the last minute probably won’t get it. i just want to say that my arl cep fellowship was a gratifying experience and i was lucky enough to be called for a job interview two days before my fellowship ended. the government contractor hired me on the spot. and he was a white guy – who looked like john kerry. i will be working at a federal library which hopefully is not “white-washed.” mario macias 2015–10–16 at 3:16 am thank you, emily, great points! :) @libgirl09 2015–10–13 at 11:48 pm you make good points about the need for continued support to help people of color remain successful in the librarian profession. however, i see no need to throw the arl and ala diversity initiatives under the bus in the process. they are doing great work in helping poc fund their education and get started in the field. is there room for improvement? always. should they be considered to be failing their mission because not everyone sticks it out? absolutely not. i don’t think they should bear the brunt of the responsibility for ensuring retention. it truly takes a village, and we all have a role to play. there is room for the initiatives to expand or strengthen the support they can provide, but i see no reason to disparage the good work they are already doing. the application requirements for arl, ala, and other diversity scholarship/fellowship opportunities are completely reasonable in my opinion. you use community college applications as comparison. but mls students are not fresh out of high school. we are talking about people who have completed high school and college, and are now pursuing an advanced degree. i would expect them to have some type of work experience (even if it’s not libraries), to be able to write 500 words, and to have a couple of professional references. the cep program (since you want to pick on that one) is for students who have completed a minimum of 12 credits towards the mls. i would expect someone halfway through their degree to be able to have at least one professor who can write a reference. i personally find it offensive to say that anyone who can accomplish these things is exhibiting “whiteness.” i would not want to see application criteria for graduate schools or graduate level scholarships/programs lowered for me just because i am a person of color. i don’t want less expected of me. i am an ala spectrum scholar, and an arl initiative to recruit a diverse workforce scholar (irdw). the scholarship money was appreciated, but the most valuable part to me is the mentoring and the connection to a network of other poc librarians i received through arl. as an irdw scholar i was matched with a mentor. i was fortunate to have a good mentor who took time to meet with me on a regular basis, give me professional advice, and kept in touch after i finished the program. i have kept in touch with several people from my cohort who in turn have introduced me to others in the field when we cross paths at conferences. so my network continues to grow and it feels good to have that support system. i feel very blessed to have benefitted from the hard work mark puente and others at arl put into their diversity initiatives. even though i disagree with some of the points in this article, it does remind me to continue to be available to provide the same support to others that was given to me. also to be more involved in diversity conversations/efforts. i’m still an “early career librarian” but if anyone wants to pick my brain for advice – specifically medical/academic librarianship, i’m always happy to chat. mario macias 2015–10–16 at 3:23 am yes, yes, yes @libgirl09 …especially on: ‘i personally find it offensive to say that anyone who can accomplish these things is exhibiting “whiteness.”’ also, librarian jobs (in my experience) at community colleges are the hardest to obtain and they sometimes ask for more documentation (like, an essay prompt on the spot)… jessica humphries 2015–10–14 at 12:19 am i hope this find you well, thank you for opening up this dialogue. my preference is conversation and not long winded text, but since that is not possible i hope i can achieve everything i want to in this piece. as a mixed raced urban indigenous black women who is educated, and benefited from the ala spectrum scholarship program, arl career enhancement program and arl initiative to recruit a diverse workforce. i have read this article a few times now finding myself in agreement with some parts and saddened by more. i agree that there needs to be more work put into the retention of diverse folks in the profession, and i think that most people in the field would agree that we are missing the mark on creating spaces that hold up indigenous and racialized librarians of colour instead of silencing their every move. however these programs that are cited are not only making education more financially accessible to racialized and indigenous students, but also supporting professional development, networking and mentoring opportunities. through these programs i have created a network of mentors, and colleagues who i have connected with constantly, relied on when facing institution racism in the field. i know that i can only speak for myself but these communities have supported my work, my struggles in the academy and held space for the fight. as part of these communities i have returned support by reviewing applications of my colleagues, supporting students entering my program and working on diversity initiatives within the school i attend. i wish that this article provided more personal experiences with people who have benefited from these programs. yes, like everything we must constantly re-evaluate our efforts, re-think our process and re-define the ways we approach things and i believe there is space to provide this feedback to program directors. this could be an opportunity to look at the criteria for applications. i would be personally interested in hearing some suggestions. how to we effectively connect with a variety of diverse populations while maintaining commitments to sponsors and institutions supporting these initiatives? how do we create a more accessible process while supporting people to be successful in their future endeavors, much of which will operate in these institutional practices? that being said, i cannot personally agree with the way in which whiteness is centered in the article and continues to be the framework to which we write upon. in order to dismantle these arch structures to which libraries are build on we must name these institutions and practices of colonization as such. furthermore, the way in which this article erases the indigenous and racialized identities but provocating this idea that “we play white” in order to achieve our goals deeply saddens me. yes, there are institutional practices that we must understand in order to achieve this idea of “success”, but to imbed that success, that fight and that journey into a process of whiteness is a permeation of colonial violence against the communities that we should be holding space for in the field. the struggle is real! we need to stop addressing our issues among our communities using colonial practices and tools, we need to open up collective dialogue and start truly listening to each other in order to change the professional practices. mario macias 2015–10–16 at 3:27 am omg yes @jessica: ‘furthermore, the way in which this article erases the indigenous and racialized identities but provocating this idea that “we play white” in order to achieve our goals deeply saddens me. yes, there are institutional practices that we must understand in order to achieve this idea of “success”, but to imbed that success, that fight and that journey into a process of whiteness is a permeation of colonial violence against the communities that we should be holding space for in the field.’ alecto 2015–10–14 at 8:33 pm hello all. what effect will initiatives designed to eliminate the problems outlined here, have on the capacity of us lis as a whole to serve diverse populations as well as achieve a diverse workforce as the norm? here is australia, the population is still so white (and the library workforce so small numerically as a proportion of the population) that i think it would be impossible to recruit enough people from different groups, even allowing for all the overlaps in identity that one person can have, to reflect the diversity in the population as a whole. the library workforce here, in my opinion, ought to be able to operate cross-culturally regardless of whiteness (which most of us are, as far as it’s been measured). optimally of course there would be more library staff from a myriad of backgrounds or identities; but i think the role whities have to play in making libraries places where people from other groups want to be, is pretty key too. i guess you’re not saying that white librarians don’t have a role; just that your focus is the experience of people of colour. pingback : latest library links 16th october 2015 | latest library links rolando milian 2015–10–20 at 10:42 pm the main issue of this opinion piece -which is by no means is a research articleis the poor definition of the variables and the assumption (without evidence) that one variable affects the other. here are the two: variable a= recruitment. variable= b retention. the author assumes that recruitment is wrong (no evidence shown) so retention fails. variable a= recruitment: diverse initiatives (including the arl career enhancement program) have been effective and successful in recruiting a huge number of librarians from diverse backgrounds. i recognize many of my colleagues from the references the author uses to support its arguments. many othersthank to the leadership component of these programshave been able to secure positions (even managerial ones) at very prestigious institutions that would be unimaginable before the implementation of such diversity initiatives that the author attack here. i am happy meet with many of my previous diversity fellows at professional events, workshops, etc. “each of these requirements [essay, resume, assumes that applicants are situated in positions of white, middle-class, cisgender normativity” this is an author’s not these program’s assumption. the author forgets that these initiatives are recruiting for a profession and that the number of applicants is bigger that the positions in the programsit has to be competitive. first, they have to demonstrate that they can do the job. for example, positions in medical and law librarianship will require candidates that will have to compete with applicants (from non-diverse background) with previous education in law and biomedical sciences. how come are you going to select candidates without a proper essays skills and education that will later fail to compete (with the non-diverse pool) for a position at an academic library? variable b= retention may or may not depend on the recruitment process. there is no evidence in this opinion piece (nor in any previous work to my knowledge) showing a relationship between recruitment of diverse background librarians and their retention. would it not be logical to think that what we need is to study, analyze and determine what are those variables negatively affecting retention? i hope someone comments on that out-of-context picture used to support the articlee.g. where was the picture taken, what is the person doing, why a b/w picture and not a color one? why not using a figure legend to provide the context? unfortunately, opinion pieces like this, far from creating the basis for a revolutionary transformation, destroy those that have already been the result of recruiting programs like the arl career enhancement program. rolando milian pingback : a difficult book | hls pingback : each one, teach one: diversifying the archival profession | snap roundtable pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » editorial: introductions all around pingback : in the library with the lead pipe » the quest for diversity in library staffing: from awareness to action pingback : what’s your normal?: “five generations of asian americans” by molly higgins | apala pingback : open but not equal: open scholarship for social justice | at the intersection comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct against medicine: constructing a queer-feminist community health informatics and librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 4 sep mary catherine lockmiller /1 comments against medicine: constructing a queer-feminist community health informatics and librarianship in brief community health informatics (chi) is rapidly developing as a field of library practice but remains constrained by unexamined definitions of “community”, “health”, and “informatics” as separate and unified terms. this is further complicated by a failure to situate libraries within a history of institutional oppression which continues to work itself out in the present. as a result, chi practices within libraries often perpetuate and reinforce adverse power structures. the following paper seeks to liberate library chi from its current constraints by deconstructing entrenched understandings of library community health informatics and re-envisioning them through a queer-feminist framework. the newly defined framework invites librarians to consider their own positionality, reorienting themselves and their institutions into sources of collective empowerment. a queer-feminist library chi necessitates an anti-neutral, care-minded approach to health information delivery for structurally disadvantaged communities.the author envisions what that might look like from the perspectives of gender diverse persons like herself. by catherine lockmiller introduction how best to conceptualize the library that is doing community health informatics (chi)? for that matter, how best to conceptualize what it even looks like, doing community health informatics? i ask because it could appear to mean doing everything, which as a result might also mean doing very little. consider each of these words (“community” or “health” or “informatics”), and ask what it means to do a single one of them. what, then, to do all three of them together?  considering the scale of the task, it is worth examining what it means for libraries to be involved in chi and the responsibility of positioning libraries at the intersection of these three phenomena, each of which is an immense, human-technological practice in its own right. in this paper, i explore the term chi and how it is involved in librarianship. being inextricably attached to this subject, i will also focus on my positionality as a transgender woman, a community organizer, and a health sciences librarian. in doing so, i conceptualize a way of doing library chi, both for myself and for librarians at large. coming toward a definition of community health informatics for librarians requires a deconstruction of the troika holding the term together while positioning libraries as central, operational figures at the core of chi. in the spirit of unfolding from the center (where i am positioned, both as a librarian, and as the queer product of a medical-industrial complex bent on dividing me from myself), i will begin with an analysis of the terms “community,” “health,” and “informatics.” afterwards, i will weave together the way that community health informatics has happened within american libraries. from there, i will construct a vision of library community health informatics as a practice of care. background community. there is no escaping the need to make community, the need to organize. which, in turn, establishes community-making as a political act. to paraphrase slavoj žižek, community is a series of “inner antagonisms” functioning in relation to an expansive field of universalizing/globalizing forces (2018, p. 61). in žižek’s analysis, communities are modes of survival “whose task is to obfuscate an underlying antagonism,” which is inscribed into them by a power structure (or, more precisely, a complex system of power structures) (2018, p. 61). what results is a political effort defined by boundaries that are porous and ill-defined, unruly, and easily shattered. žižek’s antagonistic community hurtles headfirst into the all-consuming neoliberal blob and fixes itself in opposition to it. in this way, it acts as a protective layer and a navigational force. however, because the blob will inevitably reassert itself, antagonist communities seeking liberation cannot exist in isolation. bell hooks makes a similar argument in her intersectional analysis of educational communities. in teaching community: a pedagogy of hope, hooks describes the joining together of black studies and women’s/gender studies in higher education and academic discourse. she makes clear that women’s studies programs have often ignored black feminism, and in doing so, perpetuated the white supremacist discourse that continues to assert itself in academia. however, through the efforts of feminists who are critically conscious of their shared goals, projects, and vulnerabilities as opponents of a conservative mainstream, women’s & gender studies programs have become antagonistic, shared spaces for a more inclusive and thoughtful intersectional feminism (hooks 2003). i have provided only an introductory insight into community-making as an oppositional and political act. it is a subject that demands a much deeper analysis; however, it is enough to help us understand what chi can look like: as an act of intersectional resistance. health. health is not just a product. it is a currency. health operates as a vast system of material forces that contain the body, lodge themselves within it, compel it to change. to be totally absent of health is to bankrupt the body, to reduce it to rubble. like power and privilege, health is a “positional good” that distributes, flows, empties, and ultimately is valued by who has it, who has lost it, and who goes without it (biss, 2014). to be healthy is a state of being, and so too, to be unhealthy. yes, “healthy” and “unhealthy” are spectral and shift erratically, but often, we construe them as solidly binary. arriving at these states, our bodies warp and become denizen to new worlds, which are inevitably inhabited by others like ourselves. to paraphrase eula biss, “immunity is a public space,” and it exists alongside the public spaces of injury and illness (2014). to arrive at health states, therefore, is to arrive at community, an argument that rebecca solnit makes in her treatise on crisis, a paradise built in hell: the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster. according to solnit, we concern ourselves with health as another factor in sustaining the myth of individualism, but in crisis we are propelled to a state where our bodies come together and where health and wellbeing mutate and become reconceptualized by the shock of a new reality (2010). community-making through crisis does not make disaster a “good” thing, but it does suggest that the fear of being exiled from what biss calls the “kingdom of the well” does not have to end in isolation or even devastation (2014). rather, arriving at ill luck means arriving in a community space where health-currency is reoriented, shared, and leveraged for liberation, emergence, and solidarity. from my own position as a transgender woman, i can attest to the community-making potential of a crisis. gender diverse people in the united states experience a ream of health disparities that arise from a medical-industrial complex which arranges itself around binary, heteronormative conceptualizations of gender. we are at near-universal risk of experiencing social exclusion, marginalization, physical violence, sexual violence, chronic illness, and mental illness, among other disparities (james, et al., 2016; zeeman, et al., 2017). studies consistently show that 35 – 48% of transgender young people attempt suicide at least once (zeeman, et al., 2017). it cannot be stressed enough that this is an exceedingly high number in a country where suicide is already a leading cause of death (drapeau & mcintosh, 2017). studies show that feelings of isolation, internal shame, and fear of being outed contribute to suicidal behavior among transgender youth, but at the same time, community-making has been shown to promote resilience and emotional well-being (zeeman, et al., 2017). consider the following exchange from zeeman, et al.’s 2017 study on resilience among transgender young people: t1: we all get along here. t3: yeh, everybody just accepts each other. t1: there’s no secrets or an air of mystery, we’re all very close like family in a sense, so we can trust each other. the participants in this study are restoring their agency within the medical-industrial complex. they are concerning themselves with new approximations of well-being, distributing health across each other’s bodies, and enacting collective solidarity. community-making in crisis has the potential to generate new health currencies, but without external influences, those health currencies are caught in a closed system. a community that operates in this way cannot move beyond crisis because it is not able to affect the systems that enact the crisis. rather, for a community to become healthy, there must be an assertion of inner antagonism powerful enough to penetrate and reorient the surrounding structures. in a sense, the affective, antagonistic community must learn to speak back at power. this is possible through informatics, but only when we recalibrate informatics as a mode of opposition. informatics the institute of medicine (iom) has defined informatics as “a field of study concerned with the effective use of information to answer scientific questions” (2013). this definition provides little insight into the term, since all scientific questions are answered using information. however, if we focus on the words effective and use, we can determine that a corporate definition of informatics is concerned with efficiency and totality. this is because the goal, clearly stated, is an answer, and not just an answer, but answers that compile one on top of the other such that answers happen more rapidly and on an increasingly large scale. a more succinct definition for informatics proposed in 2010 suggests that the goal is not simply to answer questions, but to take data (i.e., symbols) and contextualize it by producing meaning out of it (bernstam, smith, & johnson, 2010). meaning, like data, is a human artifact, which involves an intentional reinvention of the world, one that seeks to make sense of it, and in doing so, shapes reality around it (zlatev, 2018). queering informatics splicing together data and meaning is nothing new. information systems involve a mediation of reality and are deeply co-creative (botin, bertelsen, & nøhr, 2015). the newness lies in the rapidity of the splicing, the goals we have, and the end result of those goals. returning to the iom report, in the biomedical domain, totality (the answer) is an inherently neoliberal experiment. it is the unhinging of the individual body from the world and reproducing it as information, which then gets chunked with other information, and so on until all bodies are processed, stored, and retrievable. it is this practice of universalizing knowledge that i resist. following from foucault, universal, expansive growth of biomedical technologies cannot be disentangled from corporate power structures. left unchecked, the result is a “deeply rooted convergence between the requirements of political ideology and those of medical technology” (foucault, 1975). informatics as a totality rooted in efficiency produces meaning that retrenches the body, turning it into data for the purpose of making more data. this recalls foucault’s other concept of the docile body, that which is coerced, transformed, and made valuable to the systems of power which influence it. the creation of the docile body is a technological feat, resulting in “the celebrated automata” that reinforce the will of the state (foucault, 1995). foucault’s dialectic is one where agency is always already taken, where all bodies are subservient. as such, a foucauldian perspective allows little room for resistance and arguably presents informatics and library praxis as an exercise in corporate fatalism. in contrast to foucault, i contend that an ethical healthcare-oriented informatics and librarianship is possible; however, it must be undertaken with extreme care. for me, that means resisting the all-consuming, globular information framework that expands the neoliberal blob across the medical-industrial complex. the universal carries with it an abstractness that ignores the complexity, dynamism, and unknowability of bodies (eubanks, 2018). it constricts the agency of the individual body and reduces it to the clinical gaze of the professional or the scientist (botin et al., 2015). caring informatics especially in health-facing domains, a careful informatics is necessary. it is one which makes room for antagonistic community-making while also opposing singular definitions of health. it orients information technologies toward individual bodies. it is liberating, and produces agency. finally, it surrenders its own agency to individuals working within their own communities such that they are in a position to participate and negotiate their health alongside the professional (botin et al., 2015). to do this, i suggest an informatics that is both queer and feminist in its approach: queer by virtue of its resistance to uniformity and knowability, and feminist because it is deeply rooted in an ethics of care and autonomy. while foucault offers a path to queer resistance, a feminist community health informatics is enabling, capacity building, and participatory (peddle, powell, & shade, 2008). beyond that, it also recognizes that feminized disciplines which practice chi are consistently undervalued (peddle et al., 2008). nursing and librarianship, in particular, are construed as pink collar occupations, with practitioners receiving lower pay, less opportunity, and minimal decision-making capacity (monteiro, 2016; sloniowski, 2016). part of a resistant chi means collecting power such that the emotional labor of nurses and librarians is not only compensated, but recognized as an integral, visible component of chi practice. an ethical chi involves emotional laborers who are placed in key positions. these laborers function as capacity builders who focus-on and work-with communities targeted by systemic oppression. in doing so, we can enact digital pedagogies, critical community health practices, and homebrew technologies driven by the specific needs of the communities where we work. as an example, consider a 2017 study which focused on building health literacy among parents of children with complex medical needs. the study is constrained to small communities, focuses on invisible caregivers (parents), and perceives health literacy as a mode of agency sharing between individuals and professionals (armstrong-heimsoth et al., 2017). importantly, this particular study is not designed to meet the standards of big data collection. rather, it takes health concerns for localized populations and recognizes them as currencies which function within the bounds of that same population. again, this adherence to local spheres and antagonistic community-making is a key component to a careful chi. indeed, within librarianship, there are clear, detrimental effects to a global-scale chi. in the next section, i describe a short history of librarianship, and how a focus on globalizing, neoliberal applications of chi harms the health of disadvantaged persons rather than serving them. application to library praxis libraries are increasingly positioned as spaces where community health happens (morgan, et al., 2016; whiteman, et al., 2018; whitney, et al., 2017). however, the scope of what libraries can achieve in community health is less easily defined (again, this is partially due to the slippery quality of the term “community health,” as described above). from the most basic perspective, wherein chi is purely about the dissemination of medical information, america’s libraries have stored and circulated medical texts according to public need (connor, 2000). of course, “public need” historically has been defined by librarians and projected outwards into a proximal space where an ideal community was imagined to be. this in turn has situated libraries as sources of power that determine how and where knowledge is to occur. it has also meant librarians grossly misidentifying the communities within their spheres of influence, effectively ignoring the populations most likely to use their services. even when library services were made available, public librarians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were often concerned with leveraging health information for “improving the personal habits” of a cultural other, namely immigrants, persons of color, women, children, and the working class. the inevitable result was the propagation of cisheteronormative, white, middle class values (connor, 2000). these examples reveal several operational truths in the early history of america’s libraries: information is power and must therefore be closely guarded. what is “the public” gets defined by hegemonic structures, with the power to make a “public” visible or invisible as suits the structure itself. and finally, what the “public” that gets defined “needs” is not medical information; rather, the public needs to be medically informed by the appropriate authority (almost certainly a white, wealthy man, almost certainly a medical doctor), again defined within the context of existing power structures. historically, such constructions of power have not been relegated to public libraries, and in fact, public libraries were just as likely to be exempt from obtaining medical information as the populations they served. this is made clear in the early history of the medical library association (mla), which was organized to promote the free exchange of health science publications across the u.s. (connor 2000, 2011). however, for nearly a half century, the mla refused to allow public libraries (and medical libraries associated with hbcus) to join as member institutions (connor 2011). as with public libraries, this was not solely a matter of cost; rather, it was about the influence of a burgeoning medical complex which sought to contain “power over people’s bodies, their health, and their life and death” (foucault 1982). in doing so, community health informatics was defined early in the history of library practice as that which happens to communities and happens for the sake of solidifying the authority of the medical professions (and by lesser extent, the library profession). i do not want to give the impression that libraries have always acted as purely oppositional institutions. this would miss the point (or rather, points) from which power moves across/through systems. to paraphrase foucault, power is a practice, which is often esoteric and governed from a host of inputs and outputs (1982). there is no one place from which power flows. additionally, power is not a constant. it can be realized, and it can be dissipated. and so there is power in being in a situation where power happens, where it appears. libraries, as situations where information comes/goes, have always had this potential, as have the subjects within them. in some instances, that potential has been realized. take the example of the cleveland public library, which in a display of localized, caring, participatory activism held a community health campaign in 1912 that was designed to build awareness of tuberculosis not only through information sharing, but also through community events including vaccination, child care services, and a pop-up dental clinic (wiegand, 2015). throughout the 20th century, there have been chi library practices in the vein of the cleveland public library. for instance, chicago public library’s douglass branch made a strong push in 1970 to create a healthy community space for children and young adults which included the organization of a pop-up mental health clinic (wiegand, 2015). this was part of a multi-pronged process of building an intentional community for children in surrounding neighborhoods, most of whom lived in low-income, african american households (wiegand, 2015). both the stories of cleveland public and chicago douglass provide insight into the kind of community health informatics that i am seeking. this is a chi that recognizes the particular positionality of libraries as conduits within a greater information ecosystem. america’s librarians have historically understood this to be the case; however, it is rare to find a library that asserts itself in opposition to the power structures that prevent underserved populations from forming communities. that said, when libraries push back, they are committing to only part of the battle. the critically conscious library system must also build discourses within communities that bring about a willful resistance to what foucault brands le régime du savoir, “the regime of knowledge” (1982). in doing so, libraries construct a community capacity to reorganize and reinstitute the flow of power. the next section of this paper examines how that might look by focusing on the critical construction of a library chi for gender diverse communities. application we can now conceptualize a library-driven chi that is involved with antagonistic, intersectional community-making, solidarity in healthcare, and resistant, localized informatics—all of which come together to form a queer-feminist community health informatics that derives power through libraries as conduits. taken together, this provides us with a way of doing librarianship with underserved communities in mind. let us consider gender diverse populations as an example. as a transgender woman working with gender diverse populations, i have seen firsthand how a poorly implemented electronic health record (ehr) can harm an entire group of people. that ehrs have resulted in widespread transgender health disparities is not new knowledge. it has received attention everywhere from the u.s. health and human services office of it health to studies on surgical research, pathology, pediatrics, sexual health, and primary care (deutsch & buchholz, 2015; edmiston et al., 2016; imborek et al., 2017). all of this attention derives from the way ehrs have historically contextualized sex and gender such that both are exclusively binary interchangeable terms which only allow patients to be identified as male or female. in allowing for an informatics where the human body is forced into one of two possible categories, we construct a reality where transgender patients are 1) considered mentally unfit to understand themselves, 2) forced to perform in opposition to their own bodies, and 3) rendered invisible and therefore nonexistent. herein is an example for how a chi that overvalues efficiency and largeness can damage an entire community such that 23% refuse to seek medical care due to fear of being dehumanized (james et al., 2016). even now, when companies are finally beginning to take notice, gender-diverse patients remain wary and unlikely to disclose necessary health information (thompson, 2016). i am not suggesting that widely adopted ehrs should ignore gender-diverse identities; rather, i suggest that we subvert the primacy of technology-first methodologies which may allow implicit, cultural biases to encroach upon precision medicine and clinical decision making (machine learning is another example) (caliskan, bryson, & narayanan, 2017; eubanks, 2018). in doing so, we should reorient our focus back to material bodies participating in clinical space and recognize the shared corporeality, fluidity, and vulnerabilities those bodies present, especially when they are in opposition to externally constructed definitions of healthiness (aranda, 2017). for me, this means 1) recognizing and affirming the political status of gender diverse communities, 2) practicing solidarity within those communities, as a gender diverse person or as an ally, 3) recognizing and reorienting privilege to reinterpret what it means to be healthy from the position of individuals within a gender diverse community, and 4) proliferating power through shared information exchange. these goals are foundational to a queer-feminist library practice focused on transgender healthcare. working them out will involve a concerned and “adaptive tinkering of the material, emotional and relational” worlds of transgender people in the united states (aranda, 2017, p. 127). a possible area for concern is critical health literacy, a subcategory of health literacy, where the individual person is empowered to make systemic changes that radically affect the health of their larger community (nutbeam, 2008). critical health literacy provides a way of making chi into a political force, one that truly recognizes the antagonistic nature of a resilient community as well as that community’s capacity to contextualize health for itself. when librarians adopt critical health literacy as a chi practice, we can begin to imagine a library chi that does not define health for our “public.” as a result, we open ourselves to an inter-affective antagonism that pushes back against globalizing power structures. this is true when working with gender diverse communities to build more inclusive ehrs. it is also true when considering library information space and how it can be used to produce solidarity and community action. because of the spatial-structural positioning of transgender people in the united states, this is best achieved through an online or digital librarianship. due to low population size, lack of widespread density, and persistent transphobia,, transgender persons have a history of seeking community and information online (karami, webb, & kitzie, 2018; pohjanen & kortelainen, 2016; vargas et al., 2017). in a population where homelessness is a rampant social determinant, the internet becomes an online space where home is unbounded and bodies are fluid (erickson-schroth, 2014; james et al., 2016). transgender people give us insight into that digital materiality, and recognizing it is key to a librarianship that empowers gender-diverse communities. likewise, online information platforms should affirm trans narratives by allowing people direct communication with one another from a position of anonymity. because librarians and health professionals will be actively embedded in the platform, they will be able to provide insight into health information needs; however, professional status will not signal ultimate authority. rather, the goal is equitable information exchange. moreover, because online cyberbullying tactics have directly targeted transgender people in the past, an interactive online library space should be constructed from an information-neutral perspective (evans et al., 2017; fox & ralston, 2016). in doing so, it will be made clear that librarians are working with their communities and laboring to dismantle systemic oppression of transgender people. when librarians adopt a queer-feminist practice in this vein, they actively strive to construct safe spaces that reduce harm done by a healthcare system designed to perpetuate bodily stereotypes and attitudes, both to transgender populations and the wider population of all persons who inhabit gendered bodies. it’s here that we can begin to realize a community health informatics and librarianship that is rooted in queer resistance and feminist care. conclusion let us return to the original question. how best to conceptualize the library that is doing community health informatics (chi)? the answer depends on how we understand chi. if chi is a totalizing and neoliberal force, then libraries that do chi are doing a great deal to perpetuate systems of oppression, while doing very little to support communities of the oppressed. on the other hand, a library involved in a careful, resistant chi is positioning itself as an antagonist to the hegemonic power structures which harm disadvantaged populations. the library that adopts a queer-feminist chi also recognizes that it does not determine its public. the library is not even central to the health and well-being of its publics. communities are sources of survival that define and spread health internally and of their own volition. in response, libraries act as conduits for information flow and barriers against adversity. libraries do not solve the process of making healthy communities, but they do at times participate in it. this could mean doing very small things. care often does. acknowledgements the author extends her gratitude to her reviewer, dr. vanessa kitzie, for her keen attention to detail, and her kind (and constructive!) critiques. the author also wishes to thank the lead pipe team who assisted throughout this process: amy koester, ryan randall, and annie pho. references aranda, k. 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(2017). semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases. science, 356(6334), 183-186. doi:10.1126/science.aal4230 connor, j., & association, m. l. (2000). guardians of medical knowledge: the genesis of the medical library association. retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=mxsp1ofu8l4c connor, j. j. (2011). only for “purely scientific” institutions: the medical library association’s exchange, 1898-1950s. journal of the medical library association: jmla, 99(2), 118–126. https://doi.org/10.3163/1536-5050.99.2.003 deutsch, m., & buchholz, d. (2015). electronic health records and transgender patients—practical recommendations for the collection of gender identity data. journal of general internal medicine, 30(6), 843-847. doi:10.1007/s11606-014-3148-7 drapeau, c. w., & mcintosh, j. l. (for the american association of suicidology). 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(2010). a paradise built in hell: the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster. retrieved from http://ezproxy.library.arizona.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&an=1125767&site=ehost-live thompson, h. m. (2016). patient perspectives on gender identity data collection in electronic health records: an analysis of disclosure, privacy, and access to care. transgender health, 1(1), 25-215. doi:10.1089/trgh.2016.0007 vargas, c., ricci, j. a., lee, m., tobias, a., medalie, d., & lee, b. (2017). the accessibility, readability, and quality of online resources for gender affirming surgery. journal of surgical research, 217, 198-206. doi:10.1016/j.jss.2017.05.026 wiegand, w. a. (2015). part of our lives: a people’s history of the american public library. retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=p5fccgaaqbaj žižek, s. (2018). like a thief in broad daylight: power in the era of post-humanity. retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=bmxadwaaqbaj zeeman, l., aranda, k., sherriff, n., & cocking, c. (2017). promoting resilience and emotional well-being of transgender young people: research at the intersections of gender and sexuality. journal of youth studies, 20(3), 382–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2016.1232481 zlatev, j. (2018). meaning making from life to language: the semiotic hierarchy and phenomenology. cognitive semiotics, 11(1) doi:10.1515/cogsem-2018-0001 community health informatics, critical librarianship, gender diversity, health, informatics, queer theory sliding across the database divide with proactive chat help leading from the center: reimagining feedback conversations at an academic library 1 response pingback : in the spotlight: oct. 4, 2019 this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the collective approach: reinventing affordable, useful, and fun professional development – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 23 sep ashley maynor and corey halaychik /0 comments the collective approach: reinventing affordable, useful, and fun professional development in brief:  in 2014, a small group of librarians at the university of tennessee set out to redefine the library conference landscape. frustrated by the high cost and lack of tangible skills and takeaways at professional organization gatherings, they conceived of a low-cost, high-value symposium where academic librarians might learn, create, and collaborate together. the resulting event, the collective, first took place in february 2015 and is now an annual opportunity for librarians from around the us and the globe to redefine scholarly communication and professional development in a fun and creative platform. the collective model offers a practical and repeatable blueprint for other librarians or academics looking to further reinvent and revolutionize their continuing education and convocation. by ashley maynor and corey halaychik introduction in 2014, a small group of librarians at the university of tennessee set out to redefine the library conference landscape. frustrated by the high cost and lack of tangible skills and takeaways at professional organization gatherings, they conceived of a low-cost, high-value symposium where academic librarians might learn, create, and collaborate together. the resulting event, the collective, first took place in february 2015 and is now an annual opportunity for librarians from around the us and the globe to redefine scholarly communication and professional development in a fun and creative platform. the collective model offers a practical and repeatable blueprint for other librarians or academics looking to further reinvent and revolutionize their continuing education and convocation. current professional development landscape there are a number of professional organizations that service library professionals, many of which offer annual conferences where librarians come together to share knowledge, skills, and learn about new products. these gatherings, however, tend to be costly for participants, rely heavily on trade industry sponsorships (that may impact or influence programming decisions), and tend towards “show and tell” or “sage on a stage” presentations with little time dedicated towards audience interaction. few, if any, offer transparency in their review process (i.e. sharing reviewer names or qualifications, disclosing the procedure or nature of the review process, sharing feedback with submitters, etc.). there is also often a large span of time between the proposal process and conference itself; as just one example, the american library association solicits proposals fifteen months before the annual conference gathering. at their worst, the result is stale programming, bait and switch session descriptions, and undue corporate influence on panels and program content with a low return on the registration fee and cost of attendance for conference goers. discounts are often offered tiered or offered only to select individuals. it is common for conferences to offer “early bird” registrations and special rates for, presenters, organizers, or other privileged individuals. furthermore, many conferences highlight differences among attendees types using paraphernalia, such as ribbons, to designate organizers, presenters, sponsors, committee members, and the like as “special” attendees. the gatherings are often large (400+). the size combined with the typical presentation format often translates into an intimidating environment for connecting with new people. figure 1: 2015 registration and lodging costs and conferred benefits by conference. data taken from official conference websites. the collective mission & values the collective is designed as an alternative to these large, expensive, traditional professional gatherings that compose the professional development landscape. figure 1 above shows how the collective measures in terms of its costs and confered benefits compared to some of the most well-known conferences for academic librarians. its mission is to support learning, networking, and kick-starting new ideas among next-generation librarians and library stakeholders where the participants determine the content. the collective seeks to achieve the following goals: to dissolve the traditional conference divide between “presenters” and “attendees” by making everyone active participants. to make a low-cost event— where all participant costs are subsidized and everyone, even conference organizers, pay an equally low registration fee. we believe participants should receive more value than the registration fee paid, as opposed to the traditional profit-generating conference. to eliminate vendor expo areas and create an event climate where vendors are treated as colleagues who can learn and collaborate with us to better serve our users. we believe developing relationships is far more effective than hard sales and we think sessions should contain content, not sales pitches. to have a practitioner-oriented gathering—aimed at librarians on the front lines rather than highlighting administrators or those in positions of top-level leadership. to offer interactive sessions—no “sage on a stage,” with an emphasis on tangible takeaways, networking, conversation, hands-on activities, and collaboration. to offer transparency and fairness in the proposal review process. session content is solicited through a public forum (see figure 2) with a public voting process combined with a blind peer-review and committee review. we offer feedback on all submissions, including all non-accepted proposals.to help keep our content relevant, we shorten the lag between proposals and the event; ours is less than six months. to help librarians “learn, create and collaborate” as our tagline professes, we have carefully designed our programming process to support these goals. programming the quality of a conference and its utility to participants is often in correlation to the quality of its programming, so we sought to program the collective in a new way to ensure high quality content. the overall style of the collective draws on the best of conferences and un-conferences alike, including thatcamp and the conversation (a unique coming together in the film industry in 2008 and 2010). we hope to achieve a balance of the flexibility, surprise, and active participation of an unconference combined with the organization, programming rigor, and geographic diversity of a national or international conference. for the main program, conference organizers solicit session topics, ideas, and feedback through a transparent, inclusive three-step process. rather than create a niche conference to serve a limited type of librarians, we solicit ideas each year around a broad theme that encourages cross-pollination among attendee types/librarian roles. past themes include libraries as curators & creators (2015), adopt, adapt, evolve: reinvigorating & rejuvenating our libraries (2016), and make it beautiful, make it usable (2017). first, ideas for conference sessions are solicited through a public “session picker,” an online, public idea generation, commenting, and voting platform inspired by the sxsw interactive conference panelpicker (figure 2). first round submissions are quick and easy: all that’s required is a title, three-sentence description, and indication of session format. the formats encouraged include but are not limited to lightning talks, pecha kucha, dork shorts, interactive plenaries, interactive panels, roundtable discussions, hands-on workshops, q&a sessions, small group breakouts, skill-building workshops, make hack and play sessions. figure 2: a screenshot from the 2017 session picker. while some conferences include workshops for additional fees preor post conference, we aim to make every single session a worthwhile opportunity for hands-on learning, discussion, skill-building, and/or networking with no special fees or paid events. proposals are solicited through dozens of listservs, on the collective website, through social media the summer/fall before the gathering, and strategic partnerships. at this early proposal stage, all presenters in a session do not have to be known; in fact, we encourage prospective attendees to use the platform to network outside their known circle to find additional presenters to collaborate with. collective organizers will also assist with finding session collaborators via a call for participation. lastly, unlike many conferences, individuals are free to suggest sessions they might find interesting but they themselves won’t directly be involved in organizing. when the picker closes, a programming committee of academic librarians reviews the proposals for feasibility, diversity, interest (based in part on public votes), and quality. at this stage, some submitters might be encouraged to combine or collaborate on proposals if theirs are similar. most proposals are invited to round two – peer review. those that do not make it to the second round are rejected due to content overlap, lack of interactivity, or otherwise failing meet the spirit of the collective motto (i.e. “learn, create, collaborate”). in the second phase, invitations are sent to round one applicants who are asked to submit more detailed proposals, roughly 200-500 words, with special attention to the format and interactivity of their session. submitters are encouraged to outline any handouts/tip sheets, tangible takeaways or skills, or anticipated outcomes of their session. each of these proposals is then scored on a rubric (figure 3) and commented on by at least two (and usually three) outside reviewers. the review panel is constituted of a rotating combination of academic librarians, library product designers/vendors, and independent information professionals. while reviewers do not know the identity of the submitters, the reviewer names and qualifications are posted on the conference website. we also screen all submissions for any obvious conflicts of interest and assign reviews according to the topic of the session (as designated by the submitter) vis-à-vis a particular reviewer’s qualifications (figure 4). reviewers are asked to evaluate submissions on relevance to the upcoming collective’s theme, whether or not the topic is timely and current, the interest or novelty of the session’s approach, whether or not the presentation is conducive to participation, and evidence that the idea can and will be further developed before the actual event (figure 3). sessions are then ranked according to their public vote and peer review score before the final phase, program committee review. figure 3: a scoring rubric from the 2015 collective peer review. figure 4: topic areas for proposals for the 2016 collective and for reviewer expertise. the programming committee carefully examines each proposal, its ranking, and the balance among session types or focus for making final selections. regardless of whether or not a session is selected for inclusion, each submitter receives their rubric scores, vote tally, and anonymized comments from the peer review. often, non-accepted proposal submitters are invited to collaborate with accepted sessions or may reply to open calls for participation for accepted sessions. because of the emphasis on interactive sessions, the traditional hierarchy of presenter and non-presenter is subverted; even those not presenting will have much to gain from attending the collective. finally, the organizers of all accepted sessions are required to participate in a planning phone call with a member of the collective’s programming team. this phone call is used to assist in further development of interactive components, to discuss technical needs, decide on space requirements, and to troubleshoot any issues that session organizers are having. this personal, one-on-one contact helps ensure a smooth event, creates a personal connection before the occasion, and ensures that what is proposed on paper can be translated in person. we strive to treat programming as ongoing relationships with professionals in our field rather than a simple “submit and forget it” process. the programming committee endeavors to develop relationships of support that begin with the proposal submission, continue with the planning call, and extend beyond the gathering as a long-term network of peers. importantly, the collective’s programming is not limited to sessions from the open call. we also include two non-keynote plenary sessions. in the past, these have included an interactive discussion of library leadership and a board-game networking mashup. day one of the collective traditionally closes with the “failure confessions” – a series of lightning talks, followed by an open mic, where librarians share stories about spectacular failures we can all learn from. to encourage informal networking and collaboration, our meeting space also features various pop-up “unconference” spaces, which include the idealibrary, tinkerlab, and shhh room. the idealibrary (figure 5) is a space for impromptu brainstorming, networking, and discussion. we provide inspirational books on creativity, notepads, and other supplies to help participants kick-start conversations. the tinkerlab (figure 6) is a mobile makerspace with some simple tools and kits for hands-on exploration and demonstrations of gaming, conductivity and diy electronics, music-making, 3-d printing, and prototyping. past available equipment included creopop pens, ozobot robots, 3doodlers, makey-makeys, and littlebits electronic kits. the shhh room is a space free of cell phones and computers and dedicated to quiet reflection. the space is also equipped with yoga mats, seat cushions, and meditative coloring books. figure 5: books and a postcard mailing station in the 2016 idealibrary. figure 6: photos from the 2016 tinkerlab. because of the highly interactive hands-on nature of the sessions, we do not stream or record sessions. instead, we emphasize real-time, face-to-face interaction. instead, , to encourage that takeaways travel home with the attendees, we aim to document and share information from each year through community notetaking.. each session has a designated volunteer notetaker who takes notes in an open google document, which is open for editing and additions from all participants. documents, such as slides, handouts, and takeaways are shared through both sched, our online schedule manager, and through google docs post-conference. the conference closes with a door prize raffle—open to everyone who completes our conference feedback survey. immediately following the raffle, we host an open mic for sharing best conference lessons and feedback. the unedited, anonymous survey results are made public each year and are used for continuous re-thinking and improving of future events. networking & local connections a major focus of the collective is providing multiple opportunities for attendees to network with their peers. this is an important aspect of the collective which builds a sense of community among attendees and, more importantly, presents opportunities for future collaboration outside of the annual gathering. we believe that the best networking events are those that build camaraderie through informal, shared experiences. we also use our networking events as a way to introduce attendees to the city of knoxville as a great place to live and work by highlighting the best of knoxville’s local dining and entertainment scenes. professional gatherings often seem to take place in a vacuum, confined to the grounds of sterile conference centers. at the collective, however, we’ve made concerted efforts to emphasize the place of our gathering—knoxville, tennessee, and just minutes from the university of tennessee—and conduct the business of the meeting so as to benefit the community we call home. rather than host lunch or dinner at a hotel or conference center, we make it easy for participants to explore the city by locating our gathering a few minutes’ walk to downtown, providing custom maps of the city with recommended dining spots, and hosting our social events outside of the meeting space. our first social activity offering is optional dine-arounds the evening before the conference: dutch-style dinners at downtown restaurants arranged by local hosts. these small group dinners provide an easy way to dine well in knoxville and get to know attendees ahead of the main event. each group of diners is led by a local host that not only leads the group’s walk to and from dinner but also answers questions about knoxville attractions, what to expect at the collective, etc. we also partner with our local tourism board, visitknoxville, to use uncommon spaces for our complimentary reception and dinner for all attendees. in 2015, we hosted a blues and bbq night atop the iconic sunsphere, built for the 1982 world’s fair. in 2016, we organized a southern speakeasy at the standard event venue in downtown knoxville where the fifteen-piece streamliners jazz orchestra performed while participants had photos taken in our photo booth, and enjoyed cocktails, a catered dinner from locally owned rickard ridge barbeque, and nationally renowned mag-pies cakes. other community efforts include working with local artists to design artwork for our conference tote, hiring local musicians for our reception, sourcing branded swag from local suppliers, and using locally owned restaurants and bakers to cater our receptions. we’ve also scheduled our event during a typical low tourist season for our city. this scheduling not only provides a benefit to our community but also to our participants: hotels offer great room rates during this time of year to help our attendees maximize their travel budgets. finally, each closing night, we invite attendees to join in a“literary libations” pub crawl, organized in partnership with visitknoxville, our local tourism bureau. local establishments offer appetizer specials and literary-themed cocktails to entice collective attendees to come out and socialize; in 2016, the closing night outing wrapped up with an exclusive party collective attendee-only event at the oliver royale restaurant and bar. this self-directed socializing showcases our city and also helps to boost our local economy in the off-season, which makes it an attractive partnership opportunity for venues. incentives & partnerships in the same way we’re breaking the mold of how to host a gathering, we also seek to redefine how an organization works with event sponsors. first, we don’t exchange money for programming directly or implicitly. instead, we gladly work with vendors who wish to submit session proposals to move beyond the “show and tell” and sales demonstrations that are so common in the conference landscape. we require that vendor sessions adhere to the same standards of participation of other sessions and must not skew towards a sales pitch. rather than looking for one or two sponsors to foot the bill of the conference, we ask for small amounts of money from many different organizations. we keep it simple by offering sponsorship opportunities set at two funding levels. each level provides a package of benefits including registrations, sponsorship acknowledgment, and, in the case of the higher funding tier, opportunity to include marketing materials in the conference tote. we aim to foster interactions between vendor representatives and librarians who normally wouldn’t interact with one another, which helps to redefine vendors as not “other” than librarians but instead as thoughtful partners who share the same commitment to getting the right information to the right user at the right time. in this spirit, we do not provide a vendor expo area or marquee or sponsored programming sessions. this approach helps ensure that we don’t privilege one product or service over another and also means smaller businesses and start-ups have a chance to participate in our unique event, which we believe fosters meaningful and long-term relationships with librarians instead of elevator pitches as folks walk the conference floor. we keep our conference bag design free of any advertising and our commemorative drink bottle only displays the collective logo. furthermore, we highly encourage sponsoring organizations to send technical experts, product development managers, and user experience employees in the place of sales staff as a way to connect product users directly to those designing the products. additionally, we create opportunities for all sponsor representatives to participate as equals during the gathering. all attendees (regardless of status) are invited and encouraged to participate in any session they’d like to. by removing the sales-focused channels that frequently occur at conferences (expos, product demos, etc.) we believe this also removes the tension between vendors and librarians. because vendors aren’t tied up focusing on sales, they are free to participate in the sessions. both of these factors help create an environment of idea exchange where everyone has the ability to redefine the roll between vendor and librarian as adversarial to one of collaborative partnership. finally, the collective was started in large part to relieve discontent with the state of many contemporary conferences. while we are excited about what the collective provides, we believe the movement to change the landscape is more important than any one particular conference or “brand.” we therefore welcome organizers from other conferences to participate in the collective and willingly share our documentation and provide advice to anyone interested in starting their own non-profit, regional gatherings. logistics & funding the size, scheduling, and event overlap can greatly color the participant’s experience of a conference. so, while we encourage and receive registrations from more than 36 states and 140 organizations, we intentionally limit the size of the gathering (170 in 2015, 225 in 2016, 300 in 2017) and don’t plan to grow beyond an annual attendance of 350, so that attendees can easily meet new people and not feel intimidated by the environment. we use sched.org software to make our session schedule easy to use and have no more than four concurrent sessions happening at any one time. the programming committee takes great pains to distribute session content so that like-themed sessions are not competing in the same time slots and that there’s something for everyone during each session period. we also keep the pop-up spaces open for the duration of the gathering, so that there is always an informal unconference alternative to any planned session. the cost of any professional development can be significant and how funds are used equally shapes the conference goers’ experience. our smaller sponsorship level approach requires more entities to be contacted about funding, so we dedicate a significant amount of time to fundraising with the campaign typically starting around the time of ala annual (june/july preceding the collective) and continuing until the first day of the event. further complicating this funding challenge is our pledge to be an affordable alternative to large mega-conferences. the cost of attendance is heavily subsidized by sponsorship funds with the registration fees covering roughly half of the actual cost of the event per person, so we must raise more funds than the typical event since costs are not passed on to attendees. while the amount and source of funding received matters to us, equally important is how funds are used. the collective employs a number of strategies for being good stewards of sponsorship dollars so that we can do more with less. first, we use a mixed approach to procuring goods and services; when possible, we borrow material from other institutions, such as the university of tennessee, the university of dayton, or north carolina state university libraries, especially for our tinkerlab. borrowing materials such as laptop carts, additional microphones, etc., significantly cuts down on the expense of buying or renting overpriced av technology. we also think carefully about our food and beverage costs at the meeting venue. rather than pay exorbitant amounts for soft drinks (a canned cola at one venue was $4.00 per can consumed) or bottled water, we provide endless coffee and supply each attendee with a beautiful commemorative bottle for water, which has the added eco-friendly benefit. we also minimize the size of our printed program (to save paper and printing costs) and instead encourage attendees to use the free sched mobile app for our schedule. these simple savings free up funds to purchase supplies that directly support presenters, inspire creativity, and help off-set total costs. we also strive to purchase materials that can be used beyond the event as a way to demonstrate value to our institutional sponsor and promote the collective year-round. for example, many of the demo tools and equipment we purchase for the tinkerlab can be used by the university of tennessee libraries, our primary institutional sponsor, throughout the year for their studio and makerspaces. while it’s a hassle to store reception décor items, we’ve found that purchasing linens (and paying to have them laundered), purchasing reusable items such as led candles and the like is significantly lower than the rental cost for these supplies. our choice of host city is also key in keeping our costs down. we are able to leverage existing community relationships of the collective co-directors, resulting in discounts, cost-in-kind donations of goods and services, and unique experiences for attendees. as mentioned earlier, our making the collective a “knoxville event” allowed us to partner with the local, visitknoxville tourism office.  visitknoxville has assisted in negotiating conference and reception venues, resulting in lower room rates, discounted reception expenses, and free meeting venue space with a reasonable minimum food and beverage spend. we also strive to keep our marketing efforts affordable by using a combination of lowor no-cost marketing channels. low-cost efforts involve using printed marketing material sparingly and ensuring that material is not tied to a specific year so that it may be reused. we also take advantage of free modes of communication including social media and listservs to advertise both calls for proposals and to share registration updates. we rely on an energetic volunteer staff of individuals as passionate as we are about revolutionizing the professional development landscape. our collective, unpaid work means we can program, plan logistics, and maintain our website and marketing at no cost to the conference participant. building a community building a community requires an online presence and identity, social media and sharing, and year-round activities. when we created the collective, we spent many hours working with a group to develop an inspiring logo and website that represents our mission: to learn, create, and collaborate. as our logo’s venn diagram illustrates, we look for connections, overlap, and opportunities among seemingly disparate groups and ideas. during the event, we highly encourage the use of twitter, instagram, and facebook posts to share information and takeaways. additionally, our collaborative note-taking documents live on via our website for those unable to attend in person or those wishing to review the content of past gatherings. we also design our conference swag to provide year-round brand presence and awareness. our unique conference totes offer fun designs that are free of any marketing and sure to to conversation topics. our complimentary drink bottles are high-quality and branded only with the collective logo to help attendees remember their great experience throughout the year. while the collective’s unique approach to professional development offers plenty of opportunities for networking and collaboration during the gathering, we believe that the good work being born from it shouldn’t end when the event does. we therefore have focused on building a year-round community among our attendees: we use social media to both keep our alumni and future participants informed and as a way for them to connect once the annual event has concluded to promote the work of and celebrate the success of past attendees. social media is also used to advertise meetups between collective attendees at other conferences. finally, this article itself is an attempt to created documentation and share with like-minded individuals interested in hosting a similar event. the focus we have given to community building has paid off in terms of an increasing number of and increased involvement from attendees year after year. in our first year, we were surprised to have attendance from over 170 individuals from 31 states. (we would have been pleased with a regional gathering of 70!) in 2016, we moved to a larger venue and attendance between 2015 and 2016 increased by 40% with participants hailing from over 140 institutions. this diversity has been especially helpful in gaining wider points of view with regards to programing preferences and we are especially excited to see a growing range of geographic diversity with our first international participants from canada and sweden in 2016. takeaways with two successful gatherings completed and a third in planning, we believe we have found a recipe for organizing and executing a successful and useful professional development event. those wishing to revitalize or start their own event can employ the following tips to ensure their own success: there’s no substitute for excellent content. make programing the main focus of the event; aim to attract and offer sessions that allow for learning, creating, and collaboration. keep activities fresh, ensure participants walk away with tangible skills, and open the door to the sharing of ideas and future collaboration. we strongly suggest that traditional “sage on the stage” style conference presentations be eschewed and aim for hands-on or highly interactive sessions that make the participants the focus instead of the presenter. this interactivity brings more people into the conversation, opens the door for better discovery, higher interaction, and builds a stronger sense of community. make the event about everyday practitioners. administrators can certainly bring a wealth of knowledge, level of expertise, and unique point of view to sessions, but we believe that the ratio of administrators to practitioners at a conference should be reflective of the real-world landscape. this ensures that those individuals who are in the field have an opportunity to both share their experiences and learn from colleagues who face the same daily challenges. furthermore, all sessions should offer an opportunity for the free exchange of ideas to occur. no one should be harassed or put down for their ideas; while dissent is an important aspect of discussion it should be done in a respectful manner and in an atmosphere of openness. because librarians don’t work in a vacuum, we believe professional development shouldn’t either. conferences planned around a broad theme rather than a job specialization facilitates cross-pollination between various groups and stakeholders which can lead to better understanding of personal roles and creative solutions to common challenges. it also opens the door for broader collaboration between the multitude of specializations that exist in today’s universities. finally, work hard to keep costs down. professional development shouldn’t feel like tithing and participants will be more energized – and likely to return – if they feel the value to cost ratio is high. keeping registration rates affordable also lowers the entry threshold for librarians with small or non-existent travel budgets. this creates a broader range of experiences, opinions, and points of view during sessions which improves the overall quality of idea exchanges taking place. acknowledgements many thanks to the peer reviewers for this article, bethany messersmith and kathy hart, and publishing editor sofia leung for their contributions. thanks also to the many volunteers and attendees of the collective who have made our dream of better professional development a reality. works cited & further reading thatcamp – the humanities and technology camp – is “an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.” read more about this inexpensive unconference format here: http://thatcamp.org/about/. the conversation – this grass-roots gathering was “developed by a group of filmmakers, investors, entrepreneurs, journalists, and consultants interested in the new creative and business opportunities — and new ways of connecting with audiences.” it took place at a pivotal moment for film distribution in 2008 and 2010. see http://www.theconversationspot.com/goal.html for more information. sxsw festival panelpicker – south by southwest uses a three-part process to select content for its annual interactive conference that combines public votes, an advisory board, and staff. this format helped inspire our three-part programming process. read about it here: http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/news/2013/how-sxsw-panelpicker-selection-process-works. the collective – http://www.thelibrarycollective.org academic libraries, conferences, library 2.0, networking, professional development, vendor relationships pre-ils migration catalog cleanup project putting critical information literacy into context: how and why librarians adopt critical practices in their teaching this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct collaborating with faculty part 2: what our partnerships look like – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 13 jul kim leeder /4 comments collaborating with faculty part 2: what our partnerships look like this is the second in a two-part series on librarian collaboration with faculty. part 1, published on april 7, 2011, presents a five-step program for building collaborative relationships, while part 2 addresses specific examples and strategies for collaboration. photo by flickr user trace meek  (cc by 2.0) by kim leeder i. what we talk about when we talk about collaboration on april 7, 2011, i published “collaborating with faculty part 1: a five-step program,” a post that described my strategies for developing collaborative relationships with disciplinary faculty. to briefly summarize my “program,” i identified five steps to collaboration as: (1) be confident, (2) make the connection, (3) reinforce the connection, (4) build the relationship, and (5) go collaborate. these steps are admittedly simplified, but they do serve to remind us of the importance of cultivating relationships beyond email updates or visits to department meetings. in this article, part 2, i’ll share some of the most common and most innovative approaches to librarian-faculty collaboration that i’ve heard about or seen in the literature. as i was researching this post i created a spreadsheet of some of the notable projects i discovered in the literature of the past ten years that may be helpful to others. this is not intended to be comprehensive, and i invite you to review, comment, argue, and/or add to it, as you see fit (i’m drawing primarily from the published literature here, but descriptions of non-published projects are also welcome). it is my wish that these examples will help us reconsider our existing collaborative efforts, and will be useful for hopeful librarian collaborators in reassessing and expanding their own initiatives. partnering with faculty on projects, instruction, and other initiatives offers a whole array of rewards such as improved services, greater student learning, and the ability to grow as a professional. plus, working with others on campus allows us to extend our reach and achieve more of our goals than we could do alone. however, “collaboration” is a broad term that can be difficult to define. in thinking about librarian-faculty partnerships, i find it helpful to consider them on a spectrum of possibility. there are two models i think are useful for this. the first is pritchard’s (2010) scale to describe various levels of librarian-faculty partnerships on information literacy instruction. pritchard makes the following distinctions between different types of support that may be offered by librarians for information literacy instruction in coursework: supplemental, which happens outside the curriculum through workshops and instruction, reflecting no cooperation between librarian and faculty member. integrated, which involves librarian support for a course without input into the curriculum. embedded, which implies co-development of course curriculum and/or assignments while pritchard’s criteria are specific to teaching, we can extrapolate the same concepts to address collaboration more broadly. to expand these definitions to our discussion of librarian-faculty partnerships, we can identify parallel levels at which individuals may work together, as follows: communication: in which librarians and faculty members may notify each other of their activities and work with the same students, but without actually consulting one another, such as when a faculty member alerts a librarian to an existing assignment that will send students to the library, or a librarian sends a newsletter to faculty. cooperation: in which faculty and librarians work together on a project or initiative, with one partner supporting the other’s goals, such as through typical instruction sessions (where the librarian is asked to support an existing curriculum or assignment), or through faculty workshops offered by librarians to educate faculty about library resources. collaboration: in which librarians and faculty work together in an equal partnership that requires them to align their different perspectives on a project, such as curriculum design and co-teaching or co-writing an article or grant, develop common goals, and reach a new shared understanding. the second model i find useful was created by black, crest, volland (2001), who came up with a simple flowchart that presents a comparable scale of librarian-faculty partnership. the major difference is that they view partnerships as a progression instead of a spectrum, and assert that each step along the scale leads to the next. in their minds the process begins with relationship-building (librarian and faculty getting to know each other) and faculty development (librarian teaching faculty about library resources), leads to collaborative instructional design (both parties working together to achieve course goals), and results in tailored instruction for classes. the fact that both of these models provide similar “levels” of partnership reinforces the idea that collaboration can be achieved in a variety of ways. while all levels of partnership have intrinsic value, this post will focus primarily upon initiatives that embody the definitions of cooperation and collaboration as described above. ii. cooperative partnerships between librarians and faculty cooperation requires that the librarian and faculty member work together at some level to identify and achieve a common goal. this often involves a one-way direction of effort, as one partner becomes involved to support the other’s established goals. these partnerships are more in-depth than communication partnerships as there is some combined effort between the two participants, but the two individuals generally work independently of each other. for instance, at my institution i developed a tiered instructional plan to support a series of courses in my liaison department. the plan included a breakdown of the various research assignments that were required of students in the different courses, and described my strategy for building their skills throughout the series. while i consulted the faculty member who taught these courses and ensured that she was on board with my plan, my work did not have an influence on her course content. i created the plan to support her existing curriculum, assignments, and goals. cooperative partnerships come in several common formats, including: faculty training technology assistance collection development information literacy instruction i describe each of these in more depth in the following sections. faculty training faculty workshops typically involve librarians planning and executing sessions intended to teach and/or raise awareness among faculty about the resources and services offered at the library. these sessions usually involve one or both of the following goals: (i) encouraging faculty to use the library more, e.g. marketing, and/or (ii) “training the trainer,” with the purpose of empowering faculty to pass on deeper knowledge about the library to their students, e.g. instruction. for an example of faculty workshops in action, lucas (2011) provides a helpful case study of the faculty in-service approach at d’youville college in buffalo, new york. lucas defines the in-service as “the act of collaboratively introducing new and existing faculty to the library resources and services.” the article lays out the details of what they cover in their in-service sessions. faculty workshops may also be targeted to specific audiences such as distance faculty, as noted by miller et al. (2010). at the university of maryland university college, librarians have taken a slightly different approach to the in-service model by presenting asynchronous online workshops lasting seven to twelve days that introduce distance faculty to the library. these sessions are cofacilitated by a librarian and the academic director of a given department, but content is created solely by the library. miller et al.’s article includes detailed descriptions of the workshops that are likely to be useful for anyone considering a similar approach. cooperative faculty training occasionally goes beyond the typical workshop. take, for instance the work of librarians at jinwen university of science and technology (just) in taiwan. they serve as a example of a library that trains faculty to serve as stand-in librarians, or “library specialists,” for a semester at a time. yu (2009) explains how, to expand the library staff’s limited reach, they advanced a proposal to train one or two faculty representatives from each academic department as volunteer “library specialists.” these faculty members were required to attend special library skills training, as well as to serve two hours of reference a week and function as consultants for subject-specific reference questions. the faculty become stand-in librarians for the purposes of helping students, and acted as consultants to the library on collection development and subject-specific reference. this unique program enabled faculty to become intimately familiar with their library while expanding its ability to serve a growing student body. technology assistance in some cases librarians leverage their tech-savvy to raise their profile on campus beyond the scope of research, for instance by assisting them in creating websites or media. bailey, blunt, & magner (2011) describe how librarians can leverage technology skills, in this case video and multimedia creation, to support faculty goals, instruction, and conference presentations. this reasserts the importance of librarians on campus and may potentially build a foundation for greater partnerships. in addition to video creation, it is common for librarians to work with faculty in groups or one-on-one to assist them with new technologies such as blogs, mobile access, social media, and rss. collection development collection development is an area in which librarian-faculty partnerships have long been common, typically at the communication level but sometimes evolving into cooperative relationships with the intention of expanding a particular part of the collection to support relevant coursework. as one example, ratto & lynch (2011) describes an effort at the university of southern new hampshire to supplement traditional textbook access with a program to provide focused course content for a marketing course through the use of electronic textbooks. the texts were licensed and cataloged by the library in coordination with the faculty member. another example of cooperative relationships in collection development is the designation of specific funds either as “new faculty funds” or as internal grants. horava (2005) described a program at the university of ottawa to get new faculty more involved in working with librarians to expand the collection in their research areas through the use of designated funds in the amount of $2,000 per faculty member. the program met with some success in building bridges between librarians and faculty and increasing collection development in current research and teaching areas. information literacy instruction the most common cooperative efforts between librarians and faculty relate to il instruction in a wide variety of ways. the traditional “one-shot” instruction session is a classic example of this. there are also an array of variations on the “one-shot,” from a similar “two-shot” to strategies that many refer to as “embedded” librarianship, in which a librarian is present as some level throughout the entire course. kobzina (2010) describes a scenario at the university of california at berkeley in which librarians embed in a prominent environmental studies course, with multiple library sessions, access to the online course site, and the ability to respond to course content on an ongoing basis. the only thing separating this effort from collaboration as defined in the introduction to this post is the fact that they don’t contribute to the creation of the course curriculum or assignments. iii. collaborative partnerships between librarians and faculty before taking this discussion further, i’d like to restate my own belief that collaboration, as distinct from communication and cooperation, requires an equal partnership between librarian and faculty member. i make this assertion because collaboration, as i define it, requires both parties to acknowledge, understand, and even embrace the other’s viewpoint, with the result being a shared vision or product that is greater than the sum of its parts. this is not easy. more casual partnerships, in which participants align their goals but don’t blend them, often accomplish great things but don’t achieve the same shift in perception for those participating. i base this perspective on my own collaborative experiences with my institution’s first-year writing program faculty, which has entirely changed my perspective on teaching research to first-year students. by working together to build a shared curriculum for our co-requisite research and writing courses, we all become more fully cognizant of the differences between our two approaches and the natural ways we could bridge them. the effects of our work together have rippled outwards into the way our two units interact and understand each other’s work. thus, collaboration takes the initiatives described in the “cooperation” section above and stretches them further by adding a give-and-take element to the relationship between librarian and faculty member. in collaboration we are forced to consider the other person’s perspective, compromise, and often walk away with a new understanding of the project at hand. collaborative partnerships result in a product that reflects the contributions of both parties. these efforts may take the following forms: information literacy instruction professional (writing, research, presentation, grant, etc.) projects as i did above, i’ll now discuss each of these in more depth with some examples, though there are fewer examples of collaboration as i define it. information literacy instruction when it comes to teaching, collaboration often involves the librarian and faculty member partnering on curriculum design and development, and often extends into co-teaching. the literature of instructional collaboration is extensive, but mounce’s (2010) literature review covering articles published in 2000-2009 is helpful in gaining a big picture perspective. for instance, gaspar & wetzel (2009) describe a case study in which they participate in an institutionalized partnership for specific programs in which librarians and writing professors collaborate on curriculum and assignment development. the beautiful thing about this example is that the george washington university created a program requiring this collaboration and recognizing its benefits. as a result the program has central administrative support that makes it sustainable for the parties involved. there are also models of embedded librarianship that meet the same criteria without the co-teaching element. in addition to presenting the useful model of integrated instruction that i described in part i above, pritchard describes an embedded experience in a nanoscience course at the university of guelph in ontario, canada. students in the course write an article for a locally published academic journal for which the librarian serves as editor-in-chief, and partners with the faculty member and students to ensure that their research and articles are up to par. this unique example of embedded librarianship involves extensive collaboration with several individuals on campus. pritchard includes advice for collaborative-minded librarians at the end of her article, much of which echoes my part 1 lead pipe post. she says: entering into faculty–librarian partnerships is not a simple matter of introducing oneself to teaching faculty and announcing our plans for embedding il and al into their courses. it involves the careful cultivation of collegial relationships, the clear and consistent communication of the specialized knowledge and expertise we bring to the curriculum development process, and a sustained commitment to staying visible, available and involved (389). professional projects another project area that requires deep collaboration is the librarian-faculty co-written article, conference co-presentation, or co-administered grant project. cross-disciplinary professional contributions are challenging for any faculty, but the benefits to the collaborators and to the field can be substantial. fonseca & viator (2009) recommend that librarian faculty act more like faculty and cultivate multi-disciplinary expertise by entering into collaborative projects (writing, grant proposals) with non-library faculty, and by engaging in active service on campus, particularly in leadership roles. fonseca & viator’s highly readable article is a call to action for academic librarians around the nation. while it is common for librarians to serve on campus committees, i wonder how often we actually step up to the chair or president position to assert ourselves as professionals on our campuses. local leadership by librarians not only allows the individual librarian to increase his skill set but raises the library’s profile on campus by making it clear to faculty that the library is interested and engaged in campus issues at more than an administrative level. there are a few examples out there of librarians and faculty members co-presenting. as recently as march 2011 the acrl conference included a poster session by ratto (librarian) & lynch (marketing professor), entitled “collaboration unleashes e-book database potential for replacing traditional textbook options.” their poster describes the cooperative collection development described above. iv. final thoughts the variety of possible ways in which librarians and faculty can partner together, and the spectrum of what those partnerships might look like, far exceeds this post. for instance, though i did not find examples in the literature, i could envision many projects similar to those describe above that involve graduate students as future faculty. mylead pipe colleague hilary davis described a project at her institution in which her colleague worked with a graduate student association to plan workshops for their members. this program creates the opportunity not only to help graduate students build their research skills, but also to set a foundation for future collaboration when those individuals have moved on to faculty positions. overall i have attempted to capture a snapshot here of the wealth of opportunities at hand to remind and inspire us to extend beyond the limits of our buildings, our offices, and our daily interactions. it can be challenging  at times to find the space and the emotional energy to cultivate the relationships required for productive cooperation and collaboration. however, the benefits to students, to faculty, and to our own job satisfaction are guaranteed to make the effort worthwhile. notes for information about the references cited in this post, please view my spreadsheet. you are also welcome to add to it if you know of great collaborative models that might interest our readers. acknowledgements many thanks to brooke ratto, ellie collier, hilary davis, and emily ford for their feedback that helped to shape this post.     collaboration, cooperation, faculty, partnership, professionalism take action now! becoming a legislative advocate for libraries are you reading ya lit? you should be. 4 responses dana 2011–07–14 at 4:15 pm the “print this post” gives me an error 404. brett bonfield 2011–07–19 at 11:00 am thanks, dana. i didn’t realize our print function was generating errors. it’s now working properly. pingback : teaching carnival 4.11 profhacker the chronicle of higher education pingback : reading round-up: july – digitalist this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct [re]boot camp: share some. learn more. teach better. – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 28 oct ellie collier /0 comments [re]boot camp: share some. learn more. teach better. wordle cloud of participants’ goals by ellie collier setting the stage last fall, as a part of the texas library association’s “transforming” initiative, my library held its own transforming retreat. austin community college (acc) library services has gone through a hiring spurt recently, adding 10 new full time librarians in just the last three years. this retreat brought together all 23 of us from across our seven campuses. we were told to bring any and all wild creative ideas. as is so often the case, we also brought some fairly practical ones. one of these was a request for training on how to teach. this came both from new librarians with no formal training in instruction and from veteran librarians who were interested in learning the current theories and best practices. as a result, during the spring semester of this year our dean, dr. julie todaro, called a group of us together to begin planning an immersive teaching training program, aimed primarily at the newer librarians to get them comfortable and up to speed. after the initial brainstorming session (which was comprised mostly of the newest hires), a smaller group (with a higher ratio of more seasoned librarians) was designated as the planning team. this included three members of our teaching team, our public relations facilitator and myself (as the representative from the staff development team). this post will walk you through our process in the hopes that you will find both inspiration and information to help you create your own training programs. getting the team together the first step was assembling the planning team. while i wasn’t a part of this process, i can tell you some of the obvious considerations. do you have staff with relevant experience or expertise? two members of our planning team had been through acrl’s immersion program. does your library already have teams or committees that focus on certain areas? at acc we are one library spread across seven campuses and (with a few exceptions) all of us hold the title reference librarian. rather than having titled positions in charge of the various aspects of daily library life, each librarian is a member of at least one cross campus team. i am co-chair of the staff development team, which is charged with identifying professional development needs and providing access to appropriate training. our teaching team focuses on information literacy instruction. in addition to coordinating study guides and interaction with faculty, one of its many charges is to identify relevant information literacy training and development curriculum and coordinate librarians’ participation in these opportunities. our pr facilitator was also included in the planning team. her initial inclusion was based on her past participation in the acrl immersion program, but as i’ll discuss later, it was incredibly beneficial to have someone who was able to contribute experience in marketing and event planning. planning and decision making we started with some of the basics already assigned to us. for example, you will need to consider what you want your focus to be. we concentrated on pedagogy and theory. this was to be a grounding in the current understanding of teaching and learning and accompanying best practices. this was not the place for discussing our library’s programs and practices (although we did design a follow up forum for exactly that purpose). you will need to determine who should participate. ideas that floated around in our discussions included: making it completely voluntary, requiring applications, and making it mandatory for everyone. ours was open to all librarians but mandatory for the librarians who had been with the college for less than 5 years. for us, that turned out to be 12 participants plus two facilitators whose professional experience varied by decades – a good mix! with our focus and audience selected, the team met to begin brainstorming, breaking down topics and creating timelines. we contacted colleagues at other institutions to find out if they had done anything similar and what their process had been. we read through syllabi and handouts from workshops, seminars and new faculty orientations. we debated how much time we should devote to the program and settled on two days. we felt one day wasn’t enough time to cover everything we wanted to, but more than two days would be difficult for staffing and scheduling. we also struggled with when to hold the training. we had originally thought early august would be a good and relatively slow time, but realized some librarians would be off contract. however, if we postponed until the fall semester it would have a large effect on reference desk coverage. my campus, for example, had all three of our full time librarians in the required attendance category. based on those two factors, we decided that the first week of the librarians’ return from summer session, which is also the week before classes start for the fall semester, although not perfect, would be the best possible time available to us and allow the most librarians the chance to participate. our next decision point was where to hold the camp. we considered our state library association’s facilities, our business center’s training rooms, and campus activity rooms. a high priority was that the atmosphere should evoke a feeling of being ‘away from the library’ so as to encourage the immersion experience. my vote went to my favorite faculty lounge, the one with the wood panel walls, comfy chairs and great views. as a much more welcoming place to spend our time, this is where we ended up. presenter aj johnson moving from logistics into content, one thing that emerged fairly early was the idea of a culminating activity. we felt that it is important to provide an opportunity for the participants to immediately practice the skills they had learned. after various iterations we settled on a five minute presentation with an assigned topic. we brainstormed a list of typical class assignments. at the first day’s lunch break, the librarians would select their assignment out of a hat and a number from a second hat to provide the presentation order. they were welcome to draw again, trade, or modify their assignment if they didn’t like it. we prepared more topics than there were attendees to facilitate swapping. the idea was to give a starting point to make it easier, not to tie them down. they would have two hours at the end of the first day to prepare their presentation. they could work alone or in groups and we would provide computers. there would be an extended lunch/work session on the second day to incorporate what they’d learned that morning after which they would give a five minute presentation as though the rest of us were students and that was our assignment. they needed to address at least two learning styles (one was written on the assignment, the other was their choice) and decide what assessment they would use (they didn’t have to actually create or administer the assessment). the idea was to give participants a chance to practice designing an active learning exercise while considering a variety of learning styles and then share that exercise with the group. we also knew we wanted to assign some readings for people to go through before camp in order to get everyone on the same page and to spark conversation. we ended up selecting a few chapters from what the best college teachers do, a book that had been handed out at recent acc faculty orientations, and one that i cannot recommend highly enough. we also agreed that it would be worthwhile to have everyone read through the acrl definition of information literacy as well as an alternate definition, both of which were emailed to participants prior to camp. we recommended participants join acrl’s information literacy instruction list serv [ili-l], but didn’t require it. wordle cloud of participants’ teaching strengths the reboot schedule that we settled on included several opportunities for sharing perspectives, getting to know each other, and defining our context. to facilitate this we designed a pre-camp survey with a variety of ends in mind: to help us in planning, to get the participants thinking about teaching and learning and to create our icebreaker activity. to help in our planning we asked the participants about their prior teaching experience. to help get them geared up for camp we asked the participants  to describe their teaching philosophy and to set a camp goal for themselves. we also asked them to describe their strengths and weaknesses as a teacher and to share some of their favorite analogies to use when teaching. to create our icebreakers we turned the strengths and weaknesses into wordle clouds and posted the analogies around the room on large pads of paper for comment. after the icebreaker the facilitators (melinda townsel and red wassenich, with 18 and 25 years at acc, respectively) welcomed everyone, went over the schedule, the definitions of information literacy and the pre-survey responses. ellie collier leads a discussion on campus differences we felt it was important to begin by focusing on what we know about the students we would be teaching. our dean, dr. julie todaro, presented an overview of acc’s student population. we also watched some quick informal videos created by one of our facilitators, melinda townsel, asking acc students about their own research methods and a short documentary, private universe, which deals with the concepts we (wrongfully) assume students already know and explains how teaching methods can create those misconceptions. red wassenich, our other facilitator went over some recent acc information literacy assessment results and i led a discussion about campus differences with participants giving a summary of their campus population. for example, my campus has a higher proportion of students in english as a second language and developmental courses coming in to the library as well as a noticeable number of students who don’t have computers at home. the bulk of the camp focused on cognitive development, active learning, learning theory, learning styles, and assessment. we considered having the participants break up into groups, research the topics ahead of time and present to each other. we also brainstormed people and groups we thought might be willing and able to present on these topics. this included psychology and education faculty, trainers in the college’s professional development department as well as fellow librarians at neighboring institutions. in the end, we were lucky enough to have a great number of incredibly talented librarians in the austin area that were highly knowledgeable in the topics we wanted to cover and specifically how they apply to academic libraries. we also invited dorothy martinez, an acc faculty member who teaches developmental reading and teacher training. which brings us to another issue: budget. we were not given an explicit budget, but were given some guidelines. for example, we were told it would be very hard to justify any food expenses, but we could provide a copy of the “textbook” to all attendees. we wanted to keep the group together through the lunch break to ensure continuity and allow for more sharing of ideas and strategies but didn’t feel comfortable asking everyone to bring their own lunch both days. we debated a number of options, including doing a pot luck or providing pizza and asking everyone to chip in $5. in the end, our generous dean personally covered the lunch expenses as well as breakfast treats for the two days. a note from the pr facilitator: don’t underestimate the time it will take to make lunch arrangements! do a pre-event survey two weeks out, giving a few choices for box lunches (first day) and pizza toppings the second day. make decisions on the aggregate results for pizzas with veggies only or some with meat. if at all possible, find vendors that deliver. speakers are another potential expense. our speakers were all able to attend as part of their regular work duties, but funding would have been a consideration if we had gone with our initial learning styles idea, which included the respected but proprietary kolb inventory ($125 for 10 surveys plus the travel cost of a trained analyst). by choosing a free learning styles inventory we were able to invite our speakers to have lunch with us and provide them with a small thank you gift (we chose travel mugs with a positive teacher message from positive promotions). using local presenters provided much more than budget relief. a number of them stayed to see each other’s presentations and participate in discussion. it provided a wonderful connection between each of our institutions and inspired plans to collaborate more often. participants barbara jorge, adrian erb, molly dahlstrom, linda clement and steve self an issue that came up later in the process was that of partial participation. we had a few librarians that were interested in attending just for one or two topics, or wanted to come to all of it, but didn’t want to give the presentation at the end. we felt strongly that a fundamental part of the camp was that it was an immersion, where participants interact and collaborate intensely. i also felt that it would send a negative message to say that those who have been here longer get special treatment and don’t have to fully participate. in promoting the training camp we had tried hard to communicate that we truly wanted a mix of ‘new to acc’ librarians and veterans and that the presentation would be a wonderful opportunity for them to immediately practice what they had learned. we reassured the reluctant presenters that it would be a non-threatening environment with no grades or formal evaluation. ultimately, however, everyone who expressed reservations about fully participating chose not to attend. what’s in a name? one of the many important contributions of our pr facilitator was her explanation of the importance of a name for the training – in her words “a hook to hang everything from.” we threw out tons of options and debated their relative merits. we were particularly interested in making this a collaborative and participatory endeavor that would be equally stimulating for experienced and green librarians alike. our final choice “[re]boot camp: share some. learn more. teach better.” set the theme of learning as a group for the rest of our promotion. our flyer, which included our dean’s face merged with a pointing uncle sam, listed who had been drafted and encouraged veterans to re-enlist. one of the facilitators even wore fatigues. practice what you preach actions speak louder than words. the fact that all of our presenters used excellent pedagogy, including starting their presentations by stating their learning objectives, speaking to different learning styles, and using active learning, solidified those strategies far more than just having been instructed on their importance. a number of participants mentioned this aspect in particular in their evaluations. not only was the content valuable, we had role models for teaching excellence. since one of our focus areas was assessment, we made sure that we offered both the pre-camp survey and an opportunity for the participants to assess the camp. the teaching team and staff development team will use those results to help structure future trainings. provide recognition another consideration stressed by our pr facilitator is the importance of thanking both your presenters and your participants for their contributions and of providing a few moments to recognize each other. each of our presenters was thanked in front of the group and given a small gift. at the end of the camp we had a very casual graduation ceremony. each participant had his or her name called and was given a small gift (the same travel mug that the presenters were given) as well as their certificate signed by the planning team and the dean. in keeping with the boot camp theme the certificates (with a ‘stars and stripes’ motif in a cover with embossed gold stars) were awarded to “eagle squad” and “falcon squad” members depending on whether they had been with acc for more or less than five years. facilitator red wassenich and participant steve self keeping the momentum it was very important for me personally to ensure that the excitement we created at camp not quickly fade away as we disbursed back to our separate campuses. on our evaluation form we asked, “what can we do within acc library services to foster and maintain the ideas/tips/techniques we learned at camp?” we received excellent feedback and as a result we now have scheduled monthly discussion forums that provide an opportunity for our librarians as well as other library staff to come together to discuss procedures, best practices, tips and tricks, etc. we have brainstormed and voted on topics (not all teaching related) and i was thrilled to see our first forum, which focused on collection development, was impressively well attended. future forum topics include presentation skills, electronic resources, and our college’s student success initiative. loose ends and final thoughts i’d like to close by sharing some overall suggestions and reflections. have a plan b. you can’t plan for every possible curve ball, but thinking of as many as possible ahead of time, and how you might address them, can alleviate a lot of stress. we had two last minute issues come up with our location. the first, a previously unannounced fire drill set to happen about an hour into the program, ended up being rescheduled before we even decided how we would handle it. the second, the unforeseen closing of the library due to a/c maintenance, meant that we no longer had access to the computers and printers we had planned to use to have the participants fill out and score their learning styles questionnaires. this news came after we had already scheduled lunch arrangements with vendors close to our chosen location. after a minor panic, the planning team decided we could work around this by using the faculty computer center and the library laptops rather than move to a new location. be sympathetic. remember to extend the same courtesy to your colleagues that you do to your students. i am forever grateful to my reference instructor for ingraining in me the cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of the reference interview. i happen to be very comfortable speaking in public, to large groups or small, to friends or strangers, however, the presentation aspect of the camp was a looming issue for a number of our librarians. the idea of teaching to their peers was quite unnerving to some. i failed to give that issue due respect. it might have been better to provide the librarians with the full details of the assignment earlier in the process, to listen more sympathetically to their fears, and to respond with more empathy. another approach might be to provide a session on overcoming presentation anxiety prior to the camp, or making that topic a part of the camp. make time for reflective writing throughout the process. include guiding questions such as, “how will you use this in your next instruction session?” or “why is this important?” some of our presenters did this, and my notes and retention from their sections are far superior to the other sections where i either chose to just listen and rely on the handouts, or scribbled furious notes which have since lost their context. specifically focus on getting one-shot instruction sessions right. talk about working with faculty, especially those with no assignment or bad assignments, to create a valuable library experience. spend time discussing how much to realistically cover in one session. emphasize strategies for helping students get the basics. our cognitive development section touched on this when our presenter pointed out that most of the acrl information literacy standards are well above the developmental level of most of our entering students and it was a real eye opener. plan follow-up standalone workshops open to all staff. some examples we thought of include: using libguides as teaching tools for individual classes, profiles of community college students, presentation skills, and scheduling video taping or observations of teaching sessions. your turn have you planned or participated in something similar at your institution? what did you do differently? how did it work out? what would you like to get out of this kind of program? share your successes and frustrations in the comments. [re]boot camp resources schedule (.doc) invitation (google doc) pre camp survey (google form) information literacy definitions (.doc) learning styles inventory (website) presentation prompt (.pptx) post camp evaluation (google form) completion certificate (.png) textbook: bain, ken. what the best college teachers do. cambridge: harvard, 2004. thanks to my colleague and co-planner pam spooner and to itlwtlper hilary davis for their feedback and edits. many of our participants commented on how impressed they were with the presenters, so i’d like to also give many thanks to: a.j. johnson (university of texas at austin), barbara jorge (austin community college), liane luckman (texas state university), dorothy martinez (austin community college), meghan sitar (university of texas at austin), and dr. julie todaro (austin community college) and to our planning team: barbara jorge, pam spooner, melinda townsel and red wassenich. information literacy, instruction, instructional design, planning, teaching, training, workshop learning to teach through video not just another pretty picture this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct this is why we can’t have nice things: reclaim your inbox – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 31 oct erin dorney and lindsay sarin /10 comments this is why we can’t have nice things: reclaim your inbox in brief: in this article, co-authors lindsay sarin and erin dorney experiment with managing email (testing three existing systems), explore the idea of managing communication expectations, and consider the implications these strategies could have on our library communities. photo by wendy macnaughton. by erin dorney and lindsay sarin email everywhere email celebrated its 41st birthday this year. originally a technology reserved for the savviest of computer geeks, email first moved into the academic and corporate worlds, then into our homes, and today into our pockets. a 2011 report from the pew internet and american life projectfound that 92% of adults in the united states use email, with 49% of those surveyed checking their email on a daily basis (p. 2). the radicati group, a market research firm focused on the computer and telecommunications industry, reports that in 2011, “…the typical corporate email user sends and receives about 105 email messages per day” (p. 3). librarians have not been immune to this superabundance of messages. internally, we leverage email as an asynchronous tool to communicate with coworkers and professional colleagues. externally, we use email to reach out and respond to our communities. add in personal email to family and friends, and the amount of time spent communicating via email can be overwhelming. for this reason, some individuals and organizations have begun building guidelines for managing their email (discussed in more detail below). however, email itself—the software that runs on our computers and connects them—may not be the root of the communication problem. messages and inboxes are likely here to stay; they are even integrated into social media tools like facebook. yes, there is a lot of email and sometimes we feel overwhelmed with information, spam, and requests. but perhaps the problem is related to time management, task prioritization, and impulse control. maybe instead of trying to manage the number of emails in our inbox, we should instead try to manage expectations on both the individual and organizational level. in this lead pipe article, co-authors lindsay sarin (mls program coordinator at the university of maryland’s college of information studies) and erin dorney (outreach librarian at millersville university) experiment with managing email (testing three existing systems), explore the idea of managing communication expectations, and consider the implications these strategies could have on our library communities. productivity and stress in his 2009 harvard business review article, author paul kemp cites research revealing that it took people about 25 minutes to return to work after email “interruptions” (p. 83). that’s a long time to recover, especially when studies by human computer interaction researchers indicated that many feel that email is a task that they need to do continually throughout the day (czerwinski, m., horvitz, e., & wilhite, s, 2004; markus, 1994; as cited in hair, m., renaud, k.v., & ramsey, j., 2006, p.2792,). hair, et. al (2006), also state that certain personality types associated the pressures of email with a “lack of control over their work environment,” which increased the level of stress they felt at work (p.2800). a study by barley, s., meyerson, d.e., & grodal, s. (2011), faculty at stanford and boston universities, displayed a similar pattern; 45% of participants “associated the volume of email they received with loss of control” (p. 898). in particular, participants were afraid to fall behind in their work or miss out on information. the proliferation of smart phones only magnifies this issue, as it becomes easier to sync work email to a device carried almost constantly (even into the bathroom). feeling the need to check email constantly stresses us out. fulfilling that need by actually checking the email constantly then causes even more stress. the barley, s., meyerson, d.e., & grodal, s. (2011) study demonstrated that although email interruptions during the work day can make us less productive, we continue to respond in order to avoid the resulting guilt when we cannot answer or process emails quickly (p. 895). the same study revealed “…e-mail’s material properties entwined with social norms and interpretations in a way that led informants to single out e-mail as a cultural symbol of the overload they experience in their lives” (p.887). additional findings suggest email “diverts attention from tasks at hand” and “causes people to shift gears and add new tasks to their current stack” (p. 888). email both interrupts the ability to complete tasks and adds to workload stress. email management techniques between the interruptions and the stress, it’s no wonder that some have turned to the creation of email guidelines in order to work more efficiently and seek a better work/life balance. the most popular of these guidelines is the email charter, sparked by a 2011 blog post by ted curator, chris anderson, and ted scribe, jane wulf. according to the charter: “an email inbox has been aptly described as the to-do list that anyone in the world can add an item to. if you’re not careful, it can gobble up most of your working week. then you’ve become a reactive robot responding to other people’s requests, instead of a proactive agent addressing your own true priorities. this is not good.” the email charter offers 10 rules to reverse the email spiral, but it isn’t the only email management technique in common use. after reviewing the email charter and some other guidelines1, we decided to select three techniques and experiment with them, as part of our investigation into the role of email in our lives. we tested four.sentenc.es, inbox zero, and the email game. although there are some email management strategies that require users to purchase particular software, all of the methods tested for this article were free of monetary cost. before moving on, we thought it only fair to share some background in order to provide context for the trials. both of us began using email in the mid-nineties and currently manage between two and four email accounts. we have iphones synced with email, however, we do not use the automatic push feature. instead, we opt to practice self control and fetch email at times that are convenient to us. trial one: four.sentenc.es created in 2007 by mike davidson2, the premise of four.sentenc.es is that emails should be treated like text messages—written with the fewest number of characters possible. instead of counting letters or words, this method encourages users to limit their messages to a specified number of sentences. we elected to write and respond to emails using four sentences, but users can also select two.sentenc.es, three.sentenc.es, or five.sentenc.es based on how extreme they’d like to be. users are encouraged to include a note about the method (with a link) in the signature line of every email. four.sentence.es proved to be a challenging lesson in creating focused messages, forcing us to look closely at the assumptions we made about email content and length. this method put the onus on the email sender (us) to be mindful and identify the most critical pieces of information for inclusion. the tactic felt similar to crafting a tweet in less than 140 characters. we quickly found that attempting to cram a lot of information into a restricted space had a negative impact on grammar. we were also concerned with how a four-sentence email might be perceived by the recipients; one author felt like it was rude to respond to long emails in so few words. however, if anyone felt like we were being brusk during the course of our week-long experiment with four.sentenc.es, they didn’t say anything to us about it. this made us consider email etiquette and how communication seemed linked to the expectations (perceived or realistic) of others. in some circumstances, we felt justified (even vindicated) in replying to long messages with a short but thoughtful message. in others, such as email to family members or significant others, sending a short message felt a little bit awkward. trial two: inbox zero inbox zero was the brainchild of merlin mann3 and became highly popularized after a viral video of mann’s presentation at a 2007 google tech talk. the underlying philosophy of this method is that users should stop using their inboxes as to-do lists and keep them empty, thereby reducing stress and increasing productivity. mann offers strategies to do so, including productivity sprints, filters, and a simple list of actions. each time users check their email, they process every single message using one of these five actions: delete or archive; delegate; respond; defer; do. above all else, we found that this email management method required individuals to be ruthless in adhering to the rules. while it felt freeing to look at an empty inbox, this approach was heavily dependent on impulse control—carving out specific times to check for new mail throughout the day and processing every single email using one of the five actions. however, we did find that inbox zero allowed us to manage time efficiently and increase productivity. one of the authors set aside time to work on deferred items and didn’t feel distracted by the latest “fire” that came down the pike. she found that it was also much easier to go through and delete junk in one pass rather than when it arrived every few minutes (vendor emails, spam, university-wide notifications). trial three: the email game the email game applies game mechanics to quickly and purposefully engage users with their email. as each message is viewed, users see a countdown box with the number of seconds remaining for them to reply, skip, archive, or delete the message. although these actions are similar to those from inbox zero, the game interface makes it seem less like work and more like fun. users also have the option to “boomerang” the message, archiving it for now and bringing it back to their inbox when they choose (time ranges from 1 hour to 2 weeks). when all messages have been addressed, users receive points and badges that accumulate on a personal dashboard. we had a lot of fun testing this email management technique. it seemed to work best when a lot of emails had collected. because more emails resulted in more points, we exercised more impulse control in order to allow the number of emails build. one drawback was that the email game only works with gmail, while the other two methods we tested could be used with microsoft outlook or any other email client. additionally, using the email game interface requires users to share your google password and could potentially compromise email privacy. this was the only tactic that garnered feedback from those who received emails during our testing. a librarian colleague noted erin’s tagline automatically placed at the bottom of her message and replied: “i saw the email game link at the bottom of your message and checked it out. wow! this is exactly what i need! sometimes i get so overwhelmed by my email inbox that i just shut down and ignore it, and of course that only makes things worse! i also have a habit of starting to write an email, and then thinking of something else and opening another tab, and then before i know it, i’ve spent 25 minutes on wikipedia or youtube and have only two sentences of a reply written. i’m glad i’m not the only one that happens to! i’m going to try this out for a bit and see if i like it and if it helps me get things done. good recommendation!” the email game is the method that we have most consistently used since our testing phase. we’re especially inclined to use this technique when we’re feeling stressed by the number of emails in our inboxes. however, we still wish we could use it on our phones and with email services other than gmail. lessons learned overall, our trials revealed three deceptively simple lessons: depending on the situation, use multiple methods together. we had the best experience when combining our favorite aspects of all three techniques. management techniques are sometimes as taxing as normal email stress. we had to remember and follow self-imposed rules that didn’t fit into our normal routine; creating a new routine is stressful. even if you control your actions, you can’t control others. for example, with each of these methods we worked hard to respond concisely and in a timely manner, but those we communicated with were not beholden to those restrictions and did not adhere to the same expectations. managing communication expectations in libraries, we are used to doing more with less. we want to help and educate our users, which often requires us to respond quickly (and with a smile). however, in order to protect our limited time and avoid being sucked into a quagmire of anxiety about email, we need to consider managing our inboxes and our expectations. as a profession, we have moved some of our collaborative work away from email. the creation of ala connect allows the library community to collaborate through threaded discussion boards, groups, and online documents. grassroot collectives like the ala think tank and library society of the world are using existing social media (facebook and friendfeed) as an alternative to to traditional mailing lists. there are low-cost or free alternatives like google groups, basecamp, smartsheet, and action method, as well as internally-focused wikis and blogs. still, many internal and external collaborations take place through email, including committee work, brainstorming, and decision-making within our institutions. when expectations are not clearly defined, individuals may experience anxiety about communication and feel pressure to remain connected and responsive at all times. this anxiety is not imagined—the stanford and boston study also found that respondents who answer emails more quickly (within hours) are often viewed as more conscientious or caring, where as those who respond more slowly (generally beyond one day) were viewed as less so (p. 899). consider the following scenarios: external expectations: you’re an academic librarian. a colleague responds to email from students and faculty at all hours because messages are pushed to her phone. a faculty member emails you on friday after 5 pm and you respond by 11 am monday. in the meantime, the faculty member has emailed you two more times on saturday. when you do reply, the faculty member says that he emailed your colleague on saturday and received a response within 15 minutes. internal expectations: you are trying to be more productive by checking email only two times during the workday. when you check for new mail at 4 pm you see that there has been a 20-message conversation thread between librarians arranging to cover gaps in the reference desk scheduled for next week. by the time you read through the messages, all of the hours have been covered and someone even replied to all asking why you haven’t chimed in. both of the situations described above could be remedied with clearer communication about communication. librarians want to be helpful, but we cannot be tied to our desks or devices every second of the day. as we experimented with managing email, the most profound lesson we learned was that we must manage our own expectations about how we (and others) choose to respond or not respond, and how quickly. this can start with an open conversation. if you are feeling stressed about the amount of email you receive, tell your colleagues what management methods you’re trying so they won’t become frustrated when you respond to each request in less than four sentences or when you don’t respond on saturdays. if you’re working on a committee, discuss communication from the very beginning, so if someone is catching up on all of their committee work on sundays, you won’t be upset when they don’t reply to your email during the workweek. if there is a particular person who doesn’t follow what you view as good email etiquette (e.g. cc’s you on things that don’t involve you or takes weeks to respond to direct requests), then it’s time to have a frank conversation. some of us get anxious when faced with a potential conflict, but what’s worse: feeling stressed-out, guilty, and unproductive, or having a conversation in which you set up some ground rules? we’re voting for conversation, with a smile of course. we’re interested in hearing about your experiences with email and communication expectations. do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of email you receive? have you tried any of the methods described above, or other techniques to manage your email? what sort of expectations are at play at your place of work regarding communication (email or otherwise)? many thanks to our external peer reviewer tracy gold and lead pipers brett bonfield, ellie collier, and emily ford for their feedback on this article. references and further readings barley, s. r., meyerson, d. e., & grodal, s. (2011). e-mail as a source and symbol of stress. organization science, 22(4), 887-906. retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/group/wto/cgi-bin/uploads/2011%20email%20as%20a%20source%20and%20symbol%20of%20stress.pdf c. anderson. (2011, june 9). help create an email charter! retrieved from http://tedchris.posterous.com/help-create-an-email-charter chui, m., manyika, j., bughin, j., dobbs, r., roxburgh, c., sarrazin, h., sands, g., & westergren, m. (2012, july). the social economy: unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, mckinsey global institute. retrieved from http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/technology_and_innovation/the_social_economy duboff, j. (2012, march 8). iphone addiction is for real, says stanford study. the new york magazine. retrieved from http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/03/iphone_addiction_is_for_real_s.html gonzalez, v.m., & mark, g. (2004). constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness”: managing multiple working spheres. proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 113-120. retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=985707 hair, m., renaud, k.v., & ramsay, j. (2007). the influence of self-esteem and locus of control on perceived email-related stress. computers in human behavior, 23, 2791-2803. retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0747563206000756 hemp, p. (2009). death by information overload. harvard business review, 87(9), 82-89. retrieved from http://hbr.org/2009/09/death-by-information-overload/ar/1 m. davidson. (2007, july 17). a low-fi solution to e-mail overload: sentenc.es. retrieved from http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2007/07/fight-email-overload-with-sentences o’dell, j. (2011). the history of email [inforgraphic]. retrieved from http://mashable.com/2011/06/18/the-history-of-email-infographic/ pollet, t. v., roberts, s. b., & dunbar, r. m. (2011). use of social network sites and instant messaging does not lead to increased offline social network size, or to emotionally closer relationships with offline network members. cyberpsychology, behavior & social networking, 14(4), 253-258. doi:10.1089/cyber.2010.0161 psyblog. (2010). email’s dark side: 10 psychology studies. psyblog.com. retrieved from http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/09/emails-dark-side-10-psychology-studies.php purcell, k. (2011, august 9). search and email still top the list of most popular online activities. pew internet. retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/reports/2011/search-and-email.aspx radicati, s., & hoang, q. (2011, may). email statistics report, 2011-2015, the radicati group. retrieved from http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/email-statistics-report-2011-2015-executive-summary.pdf rosman, k. (2006, dec. 8). blackberry orphans. the wall street journal. retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/public/article/sb116553463083344032-szuholzamjgorwagoqtyx7h8ldm_20071208.html spencer, n. (2012, august 8). how to destroy your productivity at work. visual news. retrieved from http://www.visualnews.com/2012/08/04/how-to-destroy-your-productivity-at-work/ whittaker, s., matthews, t., cerruti, j., badenes, h., & tang, j. (2011). am i wasting my time organizing email? a study of email refinding. proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on human factors in computing systems (chi ’11), 3449-3458. retrieved from http://people.ucsc.edu/~swhittak/papers/chi2011_refinding_email_camera_ready.pdf examples include the better email manifesto from michael townsend williams at stillworks; email manifesto from marketing agency boston interactive; email manifesto by maria andersen at muskegon community college; email etiquette for the super-busy by jocelyn k. glei at 99u. [↩] mike davidson founded and was the creative director and ceo of newsvine, which was acquired by nbcnews, invented sifr, and currently works as the vice president for design at twitter. [↩] merlin mann is the creator of 43folders.com, co-host of three popular podcasts (you look nice today, back to work, roderick on the line), and a free-lance writer. [↩] communication, email, email etiquette, etact, information management, technology, web tools editorial: our philosophies of librarianship libraries: the next hundred years 10 responses gretel stock-kupperman 2012–10–31 at 11:36 am great article! i live by the gtd (getting things done) philosophy of “do, delegate or defer.” along with striving for inbox zero, i either do (complete the task if it takes less than two minutes), delegate (send it to someone who needs to handle it) or defer. defer in my case means attaching a time-based outlook task on the email so that it hits my electronic to-do list. this strategy is critical for me in handling the stress of every day email. oh, and i auto-forward listserv emails to a separate folder, which i can read at my leisure without having to see it in my inbox. very helpful. erin dorney 2012–10–31 at 1:13 pm hi gretel. forwarding listserv messages to a separate folder is a great strategy. thanks for sharing that tip ::going to set that up now:: :) john jackson 2012–10–31 at 4:41 pm “clearer communication about communication” is a key point and one that (ironically enough) came up during a customer service training class i was helping to teach this morning for library staff at mpow. there was general consent that some sort of “email training” would be beneficial for everyone: not just tips and tricks, but outlining expectations. i once heard (from a merlin man podcast) that every email is like a tiny pebble and those pebbles pile up over the course of a day. anytime we email a colleague, we have to be mindful of the fact that that person may have a pile full of pebbles on their desk so our request, however small, is only one of what may be a mountain of rocks. the biggest problem with email, imo, is that no matter how good my filters are, i can’t control the inflow in the same way that i can step away from my desk or refuse to pick up the phone if i’m trying to focus on a task. the pile of tiny pebbles will reach me eventually. i’ll admit that i once saw google wave (may it rest in peace) as a savior from email and i’m still sad that it didn’t succeed in changing the way we communicate in organizations (comment-like email formatting; inline doc collaboration; built-in im). chat and social media is beginning to help us rethink communication, but slowly (especially so in libraries). like you said, it’s here to stay… much to my dismay. until something better comes along, you’re more likely to see me calling a colleague than sending an email, if i can avoid it. :) lindsay sarin 2012–10–31 at 4:49 pm hear hear john! you make an important point that it’s important that we set your own rules and try to control the flow of emails that you send (lead by example). i’ve become a bit of the weirdo around the office, because i actually go to someone’s office to speak with them instead of sending an email. hopefully, you’ll get a chance to set-up some sort of email training formal or otherwise (and if you do please let us know how that goes). ellie 2012–11–07 at 12:47 pm interesting. i do go to someone’s office if email has proven to be a poor way to communicate with them, usually either due to tone issues or complexity of the topic. but overall i find someone stopping into my office to be much more disruptive to my workflow than an email. and for me, it’s much harder to retain information from a face to face interaction as opposed to being able to go back to something in writing. we actually have a standard line in my family if we’re talking on the phone and ask the other person to do something, “send me an email or i won’t remember.” emily ford 2012–10–31 at 9:02 pm i recently started using a method recommended to me by a friend called the secret weapon. it’s a combo between zero inbox and using evernote as a tool for task management. i love it. instead of using a convoluted system of colored stars (blue for collection development, yellow for deal with now, green for cool articles to read sent to me by colleagues) and gmails priority inbox, the secret weapon works. also, it’s on every darn device i have! pingback : facebook messages: where things go to die « library scenester ellie 2012–11–07 at 12:29 pm i was fascinated reading through drafts of this piece about the expectations in the authors’ work environments. i’ve worked in 4 different libraries: 1 university, 2 community colleges, and 1 small liberal arts college, and none of them have had those types of expectations or behaviors for immediate responses to emails. i was in fact chastised for responding too quickly at one of them. immediate replies implied you didn’t have enough work to do or hadn’t been thoughtful enough in your reply – expectations were more like within a few days there. i wonder what factors play into creating that type of environment. lindsay sarin 2012–11–13 at 12:22 pm *new tool!* baydin has created an add-on for chrome, firefox, and safari, that allows you to “boomerang” your messages from within the regular gmail inbox page. http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ pingback : post ideas « nicole helregel this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a useful amplification of records that are unavoidably needed anyway – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 19 nov brett bonfield /12 comments a useful amplification of records that are unavoidably needed anyway by brett bonfield depending on books can feel like relying on snail mail. “now that i’ve showed you how to find some articles,” i say to people at the reference desk, “i’ll show you how to use our website to find some books you might want to check out. and after that, wouldn’t it make your grandmother’s day if you wrote her a letter?” for anyone accustomed to the internet, books can lack the immediacy of articles or websites. books generally have slower developing narratives, and often have longer paragraphs, sentences, and words, which means they don’t lend themselves to skimming. compared to digital material, relevant passages can be hard to find, and even finding the right book can be challenging. although library websites are improving, keyword searching doesn’t work well at most libraries and faceted browsing—the links down the left side of the page on amazon—is still a rarity. more importantly, with one notable exception, there is a good chance that nothing on the shelf that is “printed on paper and constructed on the model of the codex” includes the exact information you have in mind. this is where universal catalogs come into play. if there’s nothing on the shelf that meets your needs, the next step is to figure out if such a book exists. there are five websites that provide relatively complete and easily accessible lists of books: amazon, google, librarything, worldcat, and open library. in order to make the best use of these websites, it can be useful to learn how each of them started, what keeps them going, and how their business models and practices affect the data they collect and and how they go about sharing it. amazon it’s tempting to think of amazon as a technology company. that’s how werner vogels sees it, which is understandable: he’s their chief technology officer, and he seems to have done a very good job of it, because amazon’s technological initiatives have taken a leap forward since amazon hired him away from cornell in 2004. over the last couple of years, amazon has made its mark as a service supplier, rewriting the rules for online hosting with its amazon web services; it has developed a successful consumer electronics product (the demand for its kindle e-book reader consistently exceeds supply, and it seems to be extraordinarily popular with publishers as well: they have made almost 200,000 titles available); and it has also made use of its infrastructure with offerings as diverse as its mechanical turk and fulfillment services. but if you look at its revenue stream, it’s pretty clear that amazon has very little in common with a traditional technology company, such as microsoft, its seattle-area neighbor. instead, amazon is probably most like a different neighbor: costco. amazon’s founder, jeffrey bezos, seems to have a firm grasp of three important aspects of retailing: look for items that can be sold in near limitless quantities (such as “books, music and videos”); figure out how to sell them profitably but with minimal markup (“he said he would ‘relentlessly slash prices,’ even if it cut into incremental profits, because he was convinced that it was the right thing to do”); and focus your energy on building customer loyalty (“satisfaction surveys show that amazon enjoys a golden reputation among most of its 49 million active customers”). similarly, costco’s founders, james sinegal and jeffrey brotman, stock their retail outlets to the rafters, refuse to mark up items more than 15%, and, in their most recent report to shareholders, they note, “this past year we also enjoyed the highest membership renewal rate in our history at 87%, attesting, we believe, to the high level of satisfaction our members have in our products and services.” think about the things you typically shop for at amazon: are they more like what you buy from microsoft or are they more like what you buy from costco? because of amazon’s size, breadth, and ubiquity, it can be easy to forget that its original business model was pretty basic: it resold books it bought from ingram and baker & taylor. as tim o’reilly points out in an apologia on web 2.0, amazon purchased a database of book information from r.r. bowker, put it on the still new world wide web, and encouraged its customers to share reviews, bibliographies, and even correct any mistakes or omissions in its data. two years later, when amazon went public, it carried more than 2.5 million titles, “including most of the estimated 1.5 million english-language books believed to be in print, more than one million out-of-print titles believed likely to be in circulation and a smaller number of cds, videotapes and audiotapes.” out-of-print titles were generally available within two to six months. amazon’s original formula hasn’t changed all that drastically. in 2007, books and other media accounted for 62% of its net sales, down from 66% in 2006 and 70% in 2005. the trend may be downward, but media sales are actually improving—it’s just that other sales are improving even faster. despite investments in other areas, amazon knows that it is still primarily a retailer of books and other media, and it continues to invest in complementary initiatives and businesses that fortify its ability to sell these items. its recent acquisitions, including audible, shelfari, and abebooks (which brings with it a 40% stake in librarything), join other amazon businesses, including the internet movie database (imdb), alexa, and booksurge. it also developed its own search subsidiary, a9, it was an important participant in creating onix, “the international standard for representing and communicating book industry product information in electronic form,” and it published a hugely successful api (now a part of its associates program) through which it makes book jackets and summaries available to affiliates (including libraries), and also shares a percentage of sales, inspiring creative programmers to develop websites like bigbooksearch and zoomii. amazon does all this so it can sell more goods and, in general, it seems to be working. consumers are getting deeper discounts on a broader range of books and other media than ever before, and they have an easy time finding the items they want thanks to amazon’s faceted browsing interface, its active user community, and its search engine which, in many cases, makes it easy to search within the text of published items. while amazon does everything it can to provide you with as much information as possible about the items it has in stock, there’s no motivation for it to share information about items it can’t sell in volume, such as out-of-print material. if the information you’re seeking is likely to be included in new, commercially available books, then amazon is an excellent resource. if not, you’re best served looking elsewhere. google amazon is one of two major corporate alternatives to libraries; google is the other. amazon followed one of the two traditional paths for forming a giant corporation: it was founded by an entrepreneur who had a good idea for a company and then hired talented people to build its technological infrastructure. google followed the other path: its founders, larry page and sergey brin, created something the world wanted and then hired people to turn their idea into a profitable corporation. while still graduate students at stanford, page and brin took eugene garfield’s work on citation indexing and adapted it for the world wide web. garfield, who marketed information products through his company, the institute for scientific information (now a thomson reuters subsidiary), records how often scholarly papers are cited by subsequent scholarly papers, which is useful because citation frequency is a reasonable proxy for importance. similarly, google’s pagerank algorithm is primarily a scheme for measuring and weighting links between web pages: the more links to a page or website, the more likely it is to be important, especially if those links come from other important sites. pagerank is intended to determine which web pages are likely to be perceived by google’s users as relevant. it was soon apparent that google worked—users found what they were looking for—but no one saw any money in it. page and brin tried to sell their technology for $1 million to the big players in the web market. after everyone turned them down, they decided to start their own company, focusing their attention on attracting as many users as possible. where amazon is a retailer that can be thought of as a virtual costco, google is an entertainment company like news corp or viacom—it generates 99% of its revenue from advertisements. just as amazon is primarily a reseller of products others make, google is primarily a portal into content others create. its mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” note the absence of the word “web” in that mission statement: google’s goal is to organize every bit of information. for instance, google created its free telephone directory assistance project, goog-411 in order to develop speech recognition software. in turning spoken words into text, google opens up the possibility of searching audio and video files through the same google search box that is currently used to search websites. though the web has become many people’s primary information source, a great deal of the world’s information is still found in books. in order to harvest that data, in december 2004, google announced that five libraries—the university of michigan, harvard. stanford, oxford, and the new york public library—had agreed to let google begin scanning their collections (and several more have since joined the project). multiple elements of this arrangement remained secret, including the terms of these agreements and the rate at which books were being scanned. it was also unclear how google would deal with potential copyright issues, especially after the association of american publishers and the authors guild almost immediately filed a joint lawsuit. this copyright lawsuit mirrors another: viacom’s suit against google acquisition youtube for copyright infringement. there was some speculation that google bought youtube specifically to make sure youtube didn’t lose its lawsuit, establishing a precedent that google would have to overcome if it were ever sued for hosting video files. when google reached a settlement in its book scanning lawsuit this past october, viacom saw a potential concession in its own suit. the book-scanning settlement has raised concerns about preservation and access for google-scanned materials. harvard has expressed its reservations publicly, and peter brantley has been doing an extraordinarily good job of identifying and summarizing the issues involved. how all this will affect people who want to read books online has yet to be determined. what does seem settled, at least for now, is that google has archived an unparalleled number of books (and also scholarly articles) whose entire text could be as easy to search as the web. with the success of google-411, it seems likely that google will soon be able to offer text-based searching within audio and video files as well. what’s not clear is whether advertising will make these ventures profitable or if google can successfully transition to alternative business models for subsets of its data. right now, it resells access to scholarly articles and newspaper stories for several publishers, and it appears that it will soon be selling access to the books it has digitally archived. it’s also not clear if google sees any point in developing an active user community around books. while google allows users to add reviews at its book website, user-contributed content is not a focus in the same way it is at amazon or at librarything. librarything founder tim spalding’s librarything is a new kind of internet-enabled organization, the small company that operates on a large scale. this method for doing business has been best documented by programmer, essayist, and venture capitalist paul graham, one of spalding’s inspirations, though librarything probably resembles craigslist more than it resembles any of the ycombinator companies graham has helped to shepherd into existence. like craigslist, librarything has an evangelical faith in its users, maintains a simple and easy to understand interface, is satisfied with steady and modest profitability, and competes for attention in a field with significantly larger entities (craigslist is often cited as a cause of the newspaper industry’s financial difficulties, even though it employs fewer than 30 people). librarything gets its data from amazon, from libraries that make their catalogs available through the z39.50 protocol, and from its users, who supplement the data by providing reviews, cataloging information, adding tags, and disambiguating records. these last two seem to be particularly successful even though they vary from standard library practice. the tagging concept, popularized by joshua shachter’s group bookmarking website, del.icio.us, allows users to catalog items using whatever keyword they wish. this enables works like bridget jones’s diary to be tagged “chicklit” or neuromancer to be tagged “cyberpunk,” subject terms that differ greatly from library of congress designations for these works by fielding and gibson. disambiguation allows users to clarify records by taking actions such as combining entries for works that are identical but released under different titles, or aggregating work under a single author heading even though that person has released work under multiple names. these can be difficult tasks when a small group of staff members attempt to take this on manually, and it has proved tricky to teach computers to disambiguate records programmatically. for instance, author cyril northcote parkinson’s name is subject to multiple permutations (c.n., cyril n., c. northcote, etc.), and his most famous work, parkinson’s law (which expands on his belief that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”), has been released with multiple title variations and in numerous editions. amazon struggles to make it clear which edition of parkinson’s law a potential customer might wish to purchase and google offers a few different options that are not readily distinguishable from one another. librarything, while representing more options than either of the other two, also makes it clear which title its users believe should be considered definitive. it’s worth noting that amazon, google, and librarything are not operating on a different scale when it comes to the number of books they’re cataloging. librarything, which launched on august 29, 2005, has catalog entries for over 32 million books. while open cataloging has its limitations, librarything’s website regularly demonstrates the power of crowdsourcing big tasks to a large, devoted community. that community is the key to librarything’s success. just as del.icio.us users socialize around shared bookmarks and tags, librarything users socialize around the books in their collections. users can add 200 books for free, but to add more they have to pay either $10 per year or spend $25 for a lifetime membership. that’s one way librarything makes money. the other is librarything for libraries, a service that allows libraries to integrate librarything’s tag database and, as of september 2008, its user reviews, into participating libraries’ websites. this service is offered on a sliding scale, with the smallest libraries paying $1,000 per year. while amazon’s business model does not target libraries in any discernible way (either as customers or competitors), and google appears to be interested only in the largest libraries as partners, librarything seems to be actively interested in selling its services to pretty much every kind of library—dozens have already signed up for librarything for libraries—and in digesting z39.50 feeds (or getting records in other formats) from any library willing to share. in a pinch, it appears that librarything will even take care of your cataloging. worldcat oclc is a nonprofit consortium that includes almost 70,000 libraries as members. it was founded in 1967 as the ohio college library consortium. in 1977, it began allowing libraries outside ohio to become members, and in 1981 it changed its name to the online computer library center. it has made multiple acquisitions as it has grown, including the dewey decimal classification system and its only competitor, the research libraries group, which operated from 1974 until 2006. this sort of activity, and oclc’s business model, led to its nonprofit status being investigated, but ultimately recognized. understandably, oclc uses its tax status to its advantage, just as some nonprofit hospitals take advantage of their status and ikea makes use of its unusual structure. oclc’s most widely visible product is an amazingly good website, worldcat.org, which provides free access to over 110 million library catalog records, most of which are for books: member libraries provide access to their entire collection, which includes articles, audio, and video. right now, worldcat.org is the best free website that lets visitors use keywords to conduct serious research across all media types, a feature which all on its own would make it valuable. on top of that, oclc has integrated its work on frbr and xisbn—projects that make it easier to find what you’re looking for—helping to turn worldcat.org into an invaluable resource. one of the two major problems with worldcat.org is what it doesn’t include: the long tail of library records. with 70,000 libraries contributing records, it’s tempting to assume that just about every book is included in the worldcat.org database, but that’s probably far from true. oclc’s karen calhoun has written about its efforts to position its pricing and services so smaller libraries can participate, and oclc is making inroads, but it still serves far fewer than half of the smaller libraries in the united states. this won’t affect most of the popular material—big libraries have just about every major work held by a smaller library, so the small libraries’ records are redundant in these instances—but it does mean that more obscure works collected by smaller libraries, representing local authors and regional historical resources, may not be included. this sort of limitation affects everyone from amateur genealogists to academic researchers. for instance, i have a friend who is writing her doctoral thesis on the history of illness in the counties surrounding philadelphia. almost none of the libraries, archives, and historical societies she is relying on have shared their catalogs with oclc. this means she must make use of each of these collections individually, usually in person, and spend time learning how each collection is organized. this is the research equivalent of using a manual typewriter instead of a macbook pro to type her dissertation, and represents a failure to make the best possible use of available technology. these collections’ records should be included in worldcat.org. this kind of wasted opportunity to assist researchers is one major disadvantage of worldcat.org’s omission of smaller libraries’ holdings. the other major problem arises when researchers try to make use of one worldcat.org’s signature features. when users search for an item in worldcat.org, they can select a tab labeled “libraries,” which takes them to a list of local libraries that have that item in their collection. however, only libraries that share their records with oclc are listed. for example, search for daemon: a novel by leinad zeraus and select the libraries tab. worldcat.org displays ten libraries where you can find this book, in descending order of proximity. it would be natural for worldcat.org visitors to infer that these are the ten closest libraries that have this book. unfortunately, that’s probably not the case. instead, worldcat.org is displaying the ten closest libraries that share their records with worldcat. users who believe that worldcat.org is helping them search their nearby libraries may be led to believe that their local libraries don’t have any books at all—or, at least, none of the books they’re hoping to find. of course, it’s possible that some libraries may not want their records included in worldcat.org. i’m not sure why they would feel that way, aside from the recent hullabaloo over licensing which appears to be getting increasingly heated. however, the library where i work very much wants its records in worldcat.org so that our neighbors in town can use it as an alternative way of looking for the books that are available in their local library. oclc markets worldcat and other services through a network of regional service providers. the provider for our area is palinet, so if we want to get our records into worldcat, we have to go through palinet. unfortunately, between oclc and palinet, a sort of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” pricing structure seems to have emerged for getting records included in worldcat.org. i don’t think this is anyone’s fault. everyone i’ve met at oclc and palinet is smart, dedicated, and helpful. my guess is that it’s more like kate sheehan’s post office story in which her attempt to pick up a package left her feeling “broken or inept.” that’s certainly how i felt after spending a month exchanging emails with palinet. at the end i was so confused that it just didn’t seem worth bothering to get an accurate price to take to my board, because the one thing about which i was relatively certain was that we didn’t have enough money to share our records on the worldcat.org website. the folks at oclc seem to be working hard to remedy this situation. i have faith that they’ll get there. but until they do, there will probably be a lot of libraries that would like to share their records in worldcat.org and either can’t afford it or can’t figure out if they can. that means researchers are going to have to keep working harder than necessary, worldcat.org users will keep being misled by its libraries tab, and frustrated libraries may find themselves looking for more accommodating partners. open library along with oclc’s worldcat.org, open library is one of two major nonprofit initiatives centered on creating a universal book catalog: its goal is a page for every book ever published, and to enable those pages to be updated by users, just as librarything or wikipedia pages are edited by site visitors. since its founding in july, 2007, it has added over 30 million records to its book database. for now, open library may be best known for its founder, brewster kahle, and its technical lead, aaron swartz. both are internet celebrities and serial entrepreneurs, though both specialize in nonprofit startups. kahle has sold companies to aol and amazon, but he is best known for his work on the internet archive, home of the wayback machine, which attempts to archive the entire web. swartz was a founder of reddit, which was sold to condé nast, and a developer of rss, which enables websites, most notably blogs, to deliver content directly to readers. open library is currently funded by the internet archive and the california state library and is committed to remaining entirely free, right down to the code that runs the site, which it makes available through an open source license. unlike our experience with oclc, sharing our records in open library was dead simple: i emailed aaron swartz and he replied that receiving our records “was cause for much rejoicing.” (i also emailed tim spalding at librarything to see if he might be interested in our records, and i found out he was as well.) open library is actively soliciting these contributions from libraries. however, it could, potentially, get these records directly from library websites. the technology involved is pretty simple and fairly well understood. for example, the library where i work recently introduced a new website that’s powered by casey bisson’s fantastic scriblio project. to import the collingswood library’s old records into our new website, we had scriblio visit the web page for each record in the old catalog and import its data into the scriblio database, turning blah into beautiful. we also use scrib_availability to show website visitors if the book is on the shelf. open library clearly has the technical knowledge to do something like this and, because just about every library has a web-based catalog, it could easily include every book from pretty much every library in its database, enabling site visitors to learn if their local library has the book they want. for now, open library’s book pages, librarything’s book records, and google’s about this book pages link to worldcat.org. (edit: i originally wrote that google’s about this book pages did not link to worldcat.org. in the future, i’ll try to remember to disable my firefox extensions before making such claims.) the issue isn’t technical; it’s legal and ethical. on behalf of the library where i work, i uploaded our records to archive.org, making it possible for open library to use them, and on behalf of my library i uploaded them into our scriblio-based website. it seems unlikely that libraries will have their records aggregated without their permission, at least in the near future. however, it wouldn’t be surprising if kahle or swartz, instead of asking for our records, began asking for our permission: what if they came to us and asked if they could automatically index our catalogs, creating for free a service that costs libraries thousands of dollars through oclc? even non-oclc libraries are used to sharing their records. why wouldn’t they accept open library’s offer to create a universal catalog? for most libraries, there’s no downside, but there’s an enormous upside: a single website where the world could see their records, and a free hub they could use for sharing records with each other. a useful amplification in his 1992 redesigning library services: a manifesto, michael buckland writes that, “(f)rom an operational perspective the library catalog can be seen as a useful amplification of records that are unavoidably needed anyway. the information in a catalog can be useful in a variety of ways to library staff and library users. the difference between modern library catalogs and those before the late nineteenth century is essentially that the modern catalogs have a much larger bibliographical superstructure added to the locational information than had previously been the case.” in a nutshell, buckland is saying, libraries decided that, since they had to keep a list of what they owned, they might as well describe each item and make sure they knew exactly where copies of it could be found. “with materials on paper, having copies stored locally is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for convenient access. with electronic materials, local storage may be desirable but is no longer necessary…. the answer is to shift from catalogs to union catalogs or linked catalogs…. arguably the present day catalog… is more a product of the limitations of nineteenth century library technology than of present day opportunities.” between amazon, google, librarything, worldcat, and open library, we’re getting ever closer to setting aside nineteenth century models and to more fully taking advantage of present day opportunities. there is no technological reason preventing us from building a universal catalog that contains information on every book in existence and locates that book in every library that has a copy available for use. we’re also closing in on having a digital scan of every book, making full-text searching possible, as well as concurrent, remote use of scarce resources (by which i mean, i can look at the text of a book on my screen while you’re looking at it on yours, a feature not available in a paper-based book, which is limited to being used in a single location and, generally, by a single user). it’s an exciting time to be a booklover, and it gives one hope that, with better resources available, books will begin to seem as accessible and vital as born-digital resources. i like the alternatives that amazon, google, librarything, worldcat, and open library make available. i think each has made the other better, and i like having alternatives in researching books just as i like having fedex, ups, dhl, and the united states postal service available when i’m trying to send a package. i don’t think researchers are generally lazy, and i don’t think they want fewer options. what they want are a few really good choices, and they have them. it’s exciting for all of us that these good choices seem intent on becoming great ones. thanks to tim spalding and aaron swartz for reading an early draft of this article, and to my itlwtlp colleague, hilary davis, for helping me with its final version. aaron swartz, amazon, catalog, cataloging, google, karen calhoun, librarything, oclc, open library, palinet, tim spalding, worldcat swings and roundabouts editorial: getting to know you 12 responses pingback : libology blog » a useful amplification hilary davis 2008–11–19 at 2:03 pm brett – thanks for your thorough analysis of these websites services that seem to have recognized the value of books and seized opportunities to capitalize on their value in a way that most libraries haven’t (even though libraries have been in the business for a very long time). why haven’t most libraries taken steps like these? is it because libraries aren’t necessarily accustomed to having competitors until the last 10-13 years or so? is it because libraries haven’t traditionally thought of their users as customers or clients? you point out that companies like costco and amazon enjoy a very high margin of customer loyalty – do libraries have user loyalty? how does the concept of loyalty play out in the framework of libraries as a public good (excepting that there are libraries that are private)? are libraries not positioned to be competitive in the current marketplace (or do they even need to be competitive)? it sounds like that what you’re saying is that these services are complementary to the portfolio of other services that libraries provide. so, why shouldn’t libraries harness the work that these services do to promote books and give users the information they seek from books, and leverage these services to point to the additional services that libraries offer (the worldcat.org model or the open library model)? are there any reasons not to move in this direction? pingback : amazon, google, librarything, worldcat, and open library…11.19.08 « the proverbial lone wolf librarian’s weblog tom cole 2008–11–25 at 8:37 am “are there any reasons not to move in this direction?” – well, it depends what direction you mean – universal catalog or universal access. open library and google books aspire to universal access – digitizing the content of books, thus ensuring their abailability to future generations. along the way they might produce universal catalogs, too. the other services come close to being universal catalogs, bringing together as many records as they can but not touching the content (though amazon has excerpts). what can libraries do? the public library where i am employed has used tags from librarything in its online catalog and makes worldcat available through its website. people usually want the book in hand, however, rather than the consolation of knowing that it’s out there somewhere or that they might like another book similar to the one they asked about. i think libraries could do more in using freely available digital texts as secondary resources. i’ve shown students project gutenberg, for instance, when the last copy of some classic text is checked out. (i see project gutenberg is now listed on the internet archive as one of its resources.) google books and open library could and should be used to broaden our available offerings. librarians fear, perhaps, that texts outside brick-and-mortar libraries are uncontrolled, unauthenticated, and evanescent. but they’re there and they fill a need. brett bonfield 2008–11–25 at 10:36 am why haven’t most libraries taken steps like these? is it because libraries aren’t necessarily accustomed to having competitors until the last 10-13 years or so? is it because libraries haven’t traditionally thought of their users as customers or clients? i live in a town in which everyone is willing to pool their resources for certain purchases. we know we want to have access to a broad range of items, so we agree to buy them collectively and take turns using the goods we purchase, which we generally get at a discount. we realize that, rather than buying these things individually, we can create one enormous budget and buy a lot more stuff. for the most part, we buy books and dvds and cds. operations are centralized through an institution we refer to as the library. libraries are really good at helping other people pool their resources, but we’re terrible at pooling our own. our various little consortia are great, as long as the alternative is going it alone, but they’re a drop in the bucket when the alternative is a centrally managed institution like google or oclc or amazon. we need to look at how much all libraries are spending on all inventory systems, catalogs, cataloging (including serials), scanning, etc. and then we need to make sensible use of our collective resources. it’s not like we have excess capacity–if anything, we need more catalogers and more programmers. but we need to get rid of all the duplication and waste (also known as vendor markup). you point out that companies like costco and amazon enjoy a very high margin of customer loyalty – do libraries have user loyalty? yes. how does the concept of loyalty play out in the framework of libraries as a public good (excepting that there are libraries that are private)? there’s this library at a state school in the american southeast. the folks there think the library can be one of their school’s competitive advantages. that is, they think having a great library can help them recruit students and retain faculty members. that’s one of my goals for the collingswood public library. i want it to be one of the first things local real estate agents talk about when they’re selling our town to potential residents. and i want it to be a reason that people choose to stay here after they retire. are libraries not positioned to be competitive in the current marketplace (or do they even need to be competitive)? our neighboring town appears poised to close its library in the next month or so. and we’re three miles away from philadelphia, which is closing a third of its branches. of course we need to be more competitive. it sounds like that what you’re saying is that these services are complementary to the portfolio of other services that libraries provide. so, why shouldn’t libraries harness the work that these services do to promote books and give users the information they seek from books, and leverage these services to point to the additional services that libraries offer (the worldcat.org model or the open library model)? are there any reasons not to move in this direction? i don’t think there are any legitimate reasons not to work as closely as possible with every service that gives people access to good information. the question is, what are we willing to offer these services in exchange for their assistance? hilary davis 2008–11–26 at 8:02 am brett – thanks for responding to my questions – most of which were asked simply to play devil’s advocate and solicit some alternate perspectives on these broader issues. however, i think you hit the nail on the head when you ask “what are we willing to offer these services in exchange for their assistance?” brett bonfield 2008–11–26 at 9:50 am i try never to leave a leading question unanswered. so… what should we be willing to offer these services in exchange for their assistance? ben abrahamse 2008–12–06 at 12:23 pm i enjoyed this article very much. one comment, you said about worldcat: one of the two major problems with worldcat.org is what it doesn’t include: the long tail of library records. at the same time oclc’s database doesn’t include a lot of uncommon works, it also includes duplicate records of many common ones, making it challenging to find things. their penchant for mass loading records willy nilly from non-english libraries doesn’t help either. bottom line, the database is so big that it is difficult to navigate, even with the interface tools like “faceted” browsing. i don’t work a reference desk, but my feeling as a “back room” librarian is that oclc is a great resource for locating “known items” but it’s not the greatest discovery tool out there. robert teeter 2008–12–09 at 6:10 pm instead, worldcat.org is displaying the ten closest libraries that share their records with worldcat. actually, it’s worse than that. a library could be a dues-paying member of oclc for years and years. it could contribute holdings data to oclc. it could contribute original records. it could participate in interlibrary loan. you could do all of this and your records still wouldn’t show up in the version of worldcat that the public sees on the open web. (they would show up in the version that your technical services staff pays to use, however.) this is because oclc demands that you subscribe to first search in order for your records to show up on the public worldcat. it doesn’t matter if your library doesn’t have the dollars or the need for first search. no first search, no public display of your holdings — that’s the rule. people have complained about this at membership meetings, and oclc officials just say they gotta pay for worldcat somehow. meanwhile lots of unique items at special, school, and small academic libraries show up on worldcat with few, or no holdings. heather mcleland-wieser 2009–01–18 at 3:31 pm great post and very thought provoking. one thing that disturbs me with digital books (and also online newspapers and magazines.) for most of my patrons the digital books interaction goes something like 1) find the very phrase you seek via a search engine 2) clip/save/print that page and that page alone 3) consider the source researched and cited the missing piece of this process is the context within the larger written work. i’ve seen instances where a patron has done this and in taking the page out of context has completely misrepresented that author’s point of view or argument. i love the idea of digital books but i worry about the unintended consequences brett bonfield 2009–01–19 at 7:43 pm in high school i had this, um, friend who would: 1) find the very term i, i mean he was seeking via a book’s index (or possibly reader’s guide) 2) photocopy that page and that page alone (and then i’d cut the context-less quote out of the photocopy and paste it onto a 3 x 5 card) 3) consider the source researched and cited not only did he… okay, i frequently misrepresent the author’s point of view, i enjoyed misrepresenting the author’s point of view. that was actually one of the only things i liked about the dead-boring research papers i was assigned in high school. for what it’s worth, at least in theory it’s now far easier for teachers to catch students doing the stuff i did. back then, they would have had to go to the library and find my sources. now it’s just a question of pulling up a url, which is much, much faster. and, while i’ve never heard of a teacher doing this (i’m not saying they don’t, just that i don’t get to interact that closely with teachers), i have noticed that in usenet discussions and in discussion forums, people have called bs on those folks who try to misrepresent an author, provided the source is available online. i haven’t seen anyone call bs when the source is only available on dead trees. not that having electronic resources instantly available is a panacea–i’ve seen the stuff you’ve seen, in which people abuse digital sources–but the old days weren’t any better, at least not as i remember them. will the future be any better? i think it will. ellie 2009–01–20 at 10:08 am thanks for that story brett – i was thinking the same thing. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct ice ice baby: are librarian stereotypes freezing us out of instruction? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 3 jun nicole pagowsky and erica defrain /15 comments ice ice baby: are librarian stereotypes freezing us out of instruction? “empty spaces iv” photo by flickr user vassilis galopoulos (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) in brief: why do librarians struggle so much with instruction? part of the problem is that we have so many facets to consider: pedagogy, campus culture, relationships with faculty, and effectiveness with students. research on student and faculty perceptions of librarians combined with sociological and psychological research on the magnitude of impression effects prompted us to more thoroughly examine how perceptions of instruction librarians impact successful teaching and learning. in this article, we look at theories of impression formation, the historical feminization of librarianship, and suggestions for next steps that we should take in order to take charge of our image and our instruction. by nicole pagowsky and erica defrain may we be honest with you, reader? at one point we were considering calling this article “wtf.” but we’re going to be a bit more descriptive. essentially, those three letters were inspired by what seems to be the mystery of successful instruction within librarianship. why does library instruction seem to be so difficult for us as a field? this is a question that has followed us for close to 50 years now. instruction is a more recent pursuit within librarianship, taking shape in the 1970s, where it had “emerged as an authentic movement” with bibliographic instruction (hardesty, 1995). throughout this time, librarians have been trying to determine best practices, theories, standards, and more nuanced issues regarding the role of teaching and pedagogy. some of this effort has centered on how we are perceived by students, faculty, campus, communities, and other stakeholders: specifically how others’ perceptions impact our teaching effectiveness with students and interactions with faculty. although there has been lis research exploring these concerns, we are still in a strange position regarding approach, as is evident by the ongoing efforts to transform the acrl standards, the field generally moving away from one-shot sessions, and the sustained emphasis on online learning. likewise, there continue to be gaps in teaching instruction within lis education where many graduates note that they feel incredibly unprepared for teaching, and the majority of instruction librarians indicating that on-the-job training is the primary means by which they learned to teach (julien & genui, 2011; walter, 2008; meulemans & brown, 2001; patterson & howell, 1990). there are a number of dimensions regarding perception that interested us–both being instruction librarians at research universities–and through doing our own research of the educational psychology literature on impression management (this means what it sounds like: managing others’ impressions), there seemed to be a strong tie-in with perceptions of librarians, i.e., our stereotypes. we wanted to examine how student impressions and expectations of instruction librarians impact successful teaching and student learning, and likewise, how faculty impressions of us impact our interactions with faculty and resulting effects in the classroom. other research in this area has looked at qualitative faculty impressions of academic librarians, student perceptions, and even librarians’ own thoughts about ourselves (christiansen, stombler, & thaxton, 2004; hardesty, 1995; freedman, 1979; wilson, 1979; leigh & sewny, 1960). however, in applying another field’s research to lis research, a lot of different working parts became apparent… that is, we started to realize how many conflicting perspectives are at play. let us provide a brief introduction to the relevant theories and concepts before we go into more depth: “warm” and “cold” are considered central traits that determine overall how individuals are perceived (through a halo effect), so projecting warmth is integral in being viewed positively in all other personality components, whereas being cold has deleterious effects (kelley, 1950; asch, 1946). educational psychology literature demonstrates that teachers who are “warm” have improved student learning and success in the classroom (olson & carter, 2014; williams & bargh, 2008; rosenthal, 1994). on one hand, our traditional librarian stereotypes are composed of descriptors that are arguably “cold,” (e.g. uptight, meticulous, introverted), so it seems like it would be clear that taking a “warm” approach in our teaching might possibly solve our problems and we could call it a day. but wait, because we are a feminized profession (at last count, 80-90% women, american library association, 2012) with expectations for female, or warm, traits in our profession, aren’t we then inherently presumed to be warm? faculty often view us as “helpers,” which, while friendly, is more subservient than collegial. could being “warm” hinder our progress as a profession if we remain pegged as caregivers? more recent research on impression management, outside of educational psychology, looks at the central traits of warmth and competence, not necessarily warm and cold. so rather than choosing warmth and avoiding its opposite, maybe we should instead strive to demonstrate both warmth and competence. but then, are warmth and competence mutually exclusive? what truly comes forward in our interactions in the classroom? if we are perceived as warm, are we not perceived as competent? do we have… warmth? competence? warmth and competence? neither warmth nor competence? wtf? should we even bother? are we even interested in this anymore? we’ve been kicking around this topic for years. one of us is in the process of finishing her phd dissertation in educational psychology, while the other is about to release a co-edited book on examining librarian stereotypes and how they play into societal discrimination and issues of social justice.1 as our field continues to explore, test, and establish sound pedagogical strategies for information literacy instruction, we didn’t want to give up (well we almost did, but we’re not going to!). as you’ll see in our examination of these topics, one of our major points is to highlight that we need more empirical research in this area, particularly in implementing or replicating studies from the social sciences and educational psychology into our framework; likewise, we urge, as still and wilkinson (2014) have stressed, that librarianship as a profession should be studied in greater depth in fields outside of librarianship, such as psychology and sociology. we therefore present this roller coaster ride of exploration into instructional strategies in order to encourage discussion, research, and self-examination. but stereotype exhaustion a couple of minutes after the dawn of librarianship two librarians started worrying about what other people thought of them. they were suffering from what might be called “reverse narcissism.” they did not so much want to dive into the pond as flee from the ugly sight it reflected (fisher, 1993). this quote came from a review of (yet another) study on librarian image published in 1993. fisher’s frustration reflects navel-gazing fatigue that has been widely echoed. while we have spent decades pondering this issue we haven’t done much in the way of offering tangible solutions; fisher and others’ exhaustion at least partially comes from publications reinforcing negative portrayals and providing little in the way of solutions beyond a “bootstrapping” model as conveyed by sable: the world literally has as yet no concept of its indebtedness to our field. after it realizes and appreciates our contribution to mankind’s progress now and throughout recorded history, the matter of “professional image” will present no problem (1983, p. 8). clearly, we won’t gain respect solely from just doing our jobs, because we haven’t: we remain where we have been over time, which is especially apparent considering we are still trying to figure out what impact our relationships with faculty have (erial project, 2012). additionally, stereotypes are still widely held, perceptions of the work we do are still skewed, and we continue to struggle with attracting and justly compensating a diverse workforce (majid & haider, 2008). likewise, although stereotypes are literally about us, stereotype existence is about the other: the one who is doing the perceiving. garrison speaks to this point by stating, “to call the public image of librarianship a stereotype does not make it an entirely erroneous concept for the popular image of librarians is a by-product of deeper social realities” (1972, p. 152). our stereotypes are not just annoying or humorous illustrations of us, they can seriously impact the work we do and the respect we are afforded. garrison continues to stress the importance of self-study, and “for this reason it is important that librarians assess the basic meaning of feminization and give precise attention to their early history, for the dominance of women is surely the prevailing factor in library education, the image of librarianship, and the professionalization of the field” (1972, p. 143). the more we examine and question our stereotypes, the better we can understand our constituents and improve our perceptions and status. this is an issue speaking to feminism’s strides toward equality and the importance of diversity in providing great benefit to the field. we argue here, and as is argued by pagowsky and rigby (2014), that those who feel they can ignore the stereotype are speaking from a position of privilege, and this is something we should all interrogate. redmond makes this case clear for minority professors: on one hand, we forget that white privilege gives certain groups (in particular, white males) immediate merit and authority. no one questions their authority or whether they deserve their status in the university—or anywhere else for that matter. on the other hand, we forget that minorities and women, especially minority women, are not granted authority even after earning a doctorate and being hired in a very competitive academic market. it is an uphill battle for authority; they must prove their merit. for women and minorities, it is a frustrating process, and feeling as if they don’t have the same status creates distance between them and their colleagues and their students (2014). for a feminized profession with over 80% women, these issues affect a great number of us — all of us to varying degrees, including even white cisgender men.2 if women have a hard time gaining professional respect, and if professors of color have a hard time gaining professional respect, then what are the implications for women instruction librarians of color, or additional combinations of intersectional other-ness? what is “warm” and “cold?” an individual’s perceived warmth (or lack thereof) has long been found to influence impression formation. asch (1946) determined this dichotomy is central, meaning perception of a person’s warmness versus coldness can systematically influence impressions of additional, peripheral traits. first impressions are crucial because they can influence how other traits are perceived and sustained, or in asch’s words, “subsequent observation may enrich or upset our first view, but we can no more prevent its rapid growth than we can avoid perceiving a given visual object or hearing a melody” (1946, p. 258). in a canonical study carried out by kelley (1950), expectations based on an instructor described as cold prompted students to participate in class less and ascribe negative reviews to the teacher. the reverse was true for warm-based expectations, where students participated more and provided more positive reviews. regardless of how the instructor actually engaged with students during class sessions following the pre-information, students’ perceptions stuck and colored impressions. kelley attributed this to the strength of first impressions, especially the more difficult to displace negative or hostile ones, stating, “the more incompatible the observer initially perceived the stimulus person to be, the less the observer initiated with him thereafter” (1950, p. 432). after examining 135 mediation studies, harris & rosenthal (1985) identified creating a “less negative climate” as one of sixteen central behaviors in mediating student expectancy effects. in other sociological and psychological studies, numerous researchers pinpoint the two central traits as warm and competent; this could perhaps be an update to the earlier, warm and cold variables (fiske, 2012; holoien & fiske, 2012; cuddy, glick, & beninger, 2011; brambilla, et al., 2010; kervyn, judd, & yzerbyt, 2008; fiske, cuddy, & glick, 2006). vinopal, in discussing research on perceptions of warmth versus competence states a valid concern: “the problem i have with the appeal to ‘kindness’ is that it tends to express itself in highly gendered (and other discriminatory) ways” (2014). cuddy, glick, and beninger (2011), as the main research study vinopal is referring to, describe implications of warmth versus competence traits, noting that mutual exclusivity really only affects women — an effect which is likely magnified in a women-dominated profession, and especially when considering intersectional identities. with this in mind, the researchers elucidate, “this effect illustrates a critical feature of warmth and competence judgments for members of social categories that have historically experienced discrimination — a double bind in which being judged as high on one dimension leads to lower judgments on the other” (2011, p. 77). later in the study they touch on stereotypes and discuss warmth and competence having a negative relationship regarding ambivalent stereotypes (p. 80). this activates paternalistic prejudice harmful to groups expected to be warm and incompetent, where occupational tasks involving social skills are imposed and general advancement is stunted (p. 81). librarianship being dominated by women and falling into an older demographic equates with two major identities that cuddy, glick, and beninger categorize as invoking pity, which involves “low-status, noncompetitive groups perceived as warm but incompetent” (p. 83). it is this configuration that elicits passive harm through neglect — passive harm that many instruction librarians regularly contend with on campus either from individual faculty members or entire departments. maybe we are cold? as the practices of the prison transform the person to the prisoner, so, too, do the practices of the library transform the person to the user (radford & radford, 2001, p. 304). in examining the librarian persona of the matron, which tends to be one of the most widespread librarian depictions, seale points to a variety of (cold trait) terms used to describe this image, including: shriveled prune, loveless frump, prim, introverted, repressed, mild, civil, and meek (2008). women currently and historically have occupied between 80 to 90% of professional librarian positions (dpe, 2013), and melville dewey set the tone by creating a precedent of hiring cheap, female labor, despite a conflicted history of contradictorily both being a champion of women and patronizing women in their work (garrison, 1972). although librarianship had been around well before dewey, it was during this time period that the stereotypes solidified. according to newmeyer, “melvil dewey’s interest in efficiency and scientific management created and perpetuated a submissive, dependent spinsterish librarian image of such strength and durability that it is now automatically assumed to have a real, not just mythological basis” (as cited in radford & radford, 1997, p. 253). as we are all well aware, librarians have been also depicted as sexy, and more recently, hip. both of these portrayals were initially used to reverse the prior stereotypes: mcreynolds describes how the 40s marked a clear effort to recruit “glamorous” women to be librarians, as well as generate these perceptions in the public eye in an effort to distance the profession as much as possible from the matron stereotype (1985, p. 29). in a sense, the long withstanding matron stereotype paired with the newer sexy stereotype could be thought of creating a virgin/whore dichotomy for women librarians, complicating perceptions even further. the hipster stereotype presents greater assumed cultural capital, and in present day, more technological savvy; however the library re-imagined as hip might more so be saying that the library is so uncool that it is actually cool through the lens of irony and nostalgia.3 although these depictions seem like they might perhaps work in librarians’ favor to some degree because they appear to be the opposite of the cold, negative imagery, they are just as detrimental by simply replacing old stereotypes with new ones while still focusing on the inherent feminization of librarianship. to varying degrees, all of the librarian stereotypes center on power or even sex appeal through patron fear of authority and the ability of the librarian to be a gatekeeper of information amidst an obscure organizational system (radford, 1998; radford & radford, 1997). radford and radford (1997) provide more insight into these stereotypes’ gendered underpinnings, where “the stereotype of the female librarian can be thought of as a strategy in which this fundamental fear can be managed, defused and disguised… the power of the librarian is the power of the woman: it is recognized as present but is afforded little respect” (1997, p. 261). navigating instruction as well as student and faculty relationships through or around these stereotypes makes our jobs even more difficult, particularly when trying to gain respect as professionals and educators. cold traits are introduced to faculty and students through this framing prior to interacting with instruction librarians and can determine expectations. numerous studies coalesce on the fact that faculty have tended to have negative, cold-trait-based impressions of librarians (miller and murillo, 2012; church, 2002; hardesty, 1995). negative opinions in this case promote lower expectations that can impact librarians’ performance and subsequent relationships with faculty. holbrook’s 1968 summary of english faculty at the university of kentucky describes librarians’ traits as overwhelmingly cold: (a) orderly, meticulous, and acquisitive; (b) conforming and conservative; (c) passive and submissive; (d) introspective, with non-social attitudes and behavior; and (e) anxious with lack of self-confidence (as cited in church, 2002, p. 11). these traits very closely align with the view of librarians as service providers by faculty, and potentially double in decreasing our status, one as librarians, and two as teachers: professions that both receive less respect. accordingly, faculty impressions can influence students’ expectations of librarians. miller and murillo point out that, “in the absence of an established structure ensuring that students build relationships with librarians throughout their college careers, professors play a critical role in brokering students’ relationships with librarians” (as cited in kolowich, 2011). solidifying cold-trait expectations through avoidance and assumptions can cause faculty or students to avoid the library on a grander scale, making it more difficult to reverse expectations. students specifically have more problematic issues resulting from misperceptions of librarians and libraries. fagan highlights the abundance of authors studying the problem of students’ incorrect perceptions of librarians as a major reason students avoid the library, resulting in a reduction in the amount of time students are willing to spend getting help, and their subsequent success in engaging in library research (2002, p. 141). this is also true for students experiencing library anxiety, which is still highly present, as project information literacy research demonstrates, with the top twelve adjectives students use to describe how they feel about research assignments being: fear, angst, tired, dread, excited, anxious, annoyed, stressed, disgusted, intrigued, confused, and overwhelmed (2012). these anxious feelings and attitudes can negatively impact student success even more so by students procrastinating or avoiding the library entirely. this can become a negative feedback loop where these feelings also strengthen negative perceptions of librarians, causing students to avoid librarians and getting help. ambady and gray (2002) found that mood can impact perceptions of others. they looked specifically at depressed individuals’ negative judgment of teachers, which coincided with mood. as this is one of many studies examining the impact of affect on social judgments (ashley & holtgraves, 2003; forgas, 2011; ikegami, 2002, as just a few examples), it seems likely that students with library anxiety would form or maintain even more negative impressions of librarians based on their negative feelings toward library research. the importance of librarians demonstrating warmth has been discussed in different modalities throughout the last few decades of research on librarian reference or teaching relationships with students and faculty (armstrong, 2012; fagan, 2002; land, 1988; mellon, 1988). this discussion of warmth is independent of the expectancy effects literature, though shows the strength of central trait expectations. armstrong specifically states that this warmer image can appeal to both faculty and students since faculty expectations of librarians’ roles include “mediator, complimentary voice, or expert” as well as “project[ing] a knowledgeable, encouraging, and approachable demeanor to students who are often overwhelmed and occasionally discouraged by the tasks involved with the research process” (2012, p. 37). this is clearly a more positive description than faculty in earlier studies have espoused, but still falls into some of the same trappings of de-professionalization and the caretaker role many women-dominated professions are assumed to have. maybe we are warm? [enduring] with grace the complaints of the most unreasonable patron. the ideal assistant was expected to emanate qualities of kindness, dignity, and selflessness. at the same time, she was told not to have high expectations of her patrons, yet to restrain any impulse to second-guess their needs. the pressure to attain this ideal was considerable for it was believed that the women who served the public would establish a library’s reputation, and subsequently, the image of the entire profession. in very little time, then, the image problem became the women’s problem (mcreynolds, 1985, p. 26). the role of service work is afforded a lower status than production work. faculty have historically viewed librarians as helpers and organizers, in contrast to their own position in creating and disseminating knowledge (christiansen, stombler, & thaxton, 2004; kraat, 2005; mcguinness, 2006; meulemans & brown, 2002; wilson, 1979). christiansen, stombler, and thaxton (2004) point out through sociological study how librarians are perceived by faculty: “they are expert servers, and to the degree that social prejudice about service operates in academic settings, viewing librarians as a different status group is reinforced” (p. 119). the role of service provider being of a lower status ties in to the feminized profession of librarianship. within faculty’s own work, particularly at research-focused universities, the teaching of undergraduates is not considered a “true profession” by professors (freedman et al., 1979, as cited in hardesty, 1995). because faculty work attains higher value when knowledge is expressed through research, grants, or publication, rather than helping others learn (hardesty, 1995), the latter feminized work receives less attention and status. this is problematic for a number of reasons, but pertinent to this conversation, it maps on to faculty impressions of librarians engaging in teaching. looking to stereotypes of instructors, morley points to shaw’s 1995 discussion of the feminization of pedagogy, “with the slippage from ‘good teacher’ to ‘good parent’ to ‘good mother’ increasing the scope for anxiety about teaching” (1997, p. 24). this expectation of mothering and giving of oneself even in a professional capacity — also discussed as emotional labor — does plague women more than men, however there are implications for all performing within feminized professions. morley further brings forward the challenge feminist pedagogy faces, which could implicitly apply to librarianship as well, being: “how to facilitate student development, without assuming the role of surrogate mother” (p. 23). the problem does not isolate itself at the individual level with the act of giving oneself, but is systemic within the ivory tower and society at large: emotional labor is not valued.4 bellas examined the reward structure for emotional labor of professors, noting that the work of teaching and service as considered culturally feminine was valued far less than the work of administration and research as considered culturally male: research demonstrates that gendered reward structures can arise when specific job tasks are valued more or less because of the gendered nature of the work. skills and responsibilities defined as feminine such as nurturance and face-to-face service to clients or customers (emotional labor), are typically unappreciated and unrewarded by employers and stigmatized even when male workers perform them (1999, p. 107). this is problematic for librarians who want to both be taken seriously on campus, facing the necessity of proving value, and yet who also endeavor to effectively reach students and show care. we seem to be in a paradox of demonstrating warmth through caring for students and reversing expectations from our cold stereotype, yet perhaps to some degree, warmth hinders us in striving for status, respect, and greater collaborations on campus. instruction librarians experience the work of emotional labor due to lack of agency and invisible outcomes, often finding ourselves taking on “organizational boundary roles,” wherein we are working in some capacity with constituents who we have little to no formal authority over, whether students or faculty (julien and genuis, 2009, p. 931). the notion of reward structures and gendered work is a big picture issue in academia and society at large that continues to generate attention, and could use greater research, particularly for how it affects library instruction and what can be done in efforts for demonstrating value at this point of conflict. can we be both? within the academy, [librarians] generally feel second-class, even librarians with faculty status, even librarians with ph.ds. what i really want from faculty is advocacy and solidarity, more than kisses… (freedman, 2014 in response to recent chronicle article, cheekily titled, “kiss a librarian”). are we then warm or cold? is the binary instead warm and competent? can we be both? instruction librarians are contending with two professional frameworks, and all of the perceptions, stereotypes, and barriers that go with them: librarians as librarians, and librarians as instructors. confusion and anxiety in this regard simultaneously stems from librarianship having a slippery identity. what does this mean for us as instructors and for how we are perceived? do we need to actively choose a central trait instead of having one chosen for us? we have traditionally been service providers, and so as we move into newer roles, such as educators, our philosophies and perceptions of ourselves must adapt. in addressing this issue, elmborg explains, “this shift, driven by demand, implies an evolution in what librarians do, and moving from service provider to active educator challenges librarians and library educators to develop new guiding philosophies” (2006, p. 192). elmborg is more so discussing the need for a shift to critical library instruction,5 and we add that our guiding philosophies should also be critical of our own status within academia and society. how we engage with faculty through collaboration and with students through instruction can have multi-directional influences. for example, swygart-hobaugh notes that “moreover, because academic librarians are often solicited by faculty members to do instruction that is solely skill-and resource-focused, and are seldom (if ever) asked to lead critical discussions about the broader social issues of information literacy and access, students are exposed to a limited view of our professional lives and principles” (2013, p. 223). looking specifically at instruction personas and impression management, wheeless and portoti (1989) reiterate the importance of warmth in effective teaching demonstrated throughout numerous studies. this seems to make sense in the context of information literacy instruction as warmth and caring would alleviate library anxiety for students experiencing reluctance in using the library or approaching a librarian. however, wheeless and portoti’s research reveals more for university-level instructors, where a combination of feminine and masculine-associated traits were beneficial to student learning and teacher success (regardless of the gender of the instructor): although feminine qualities (gentle, understanding, sensitive, and helpful) demonstrated the highest correlations with learning, it was the teacher who was able to combine these traits with dominance, forcefulness, and assertiveness – the androgynous teacher – who had the greatest impact on student attitudes toward learning (1989, p. 261). we stress the importance of this holistic view toward teaching personas. one step on the way to lessening potentially harmful assumptions toward feminine traits, such as warmth and caring, is to reduce classifying instruction personas as either warm/female or cold/male. instead of thinking of central traits as mutually exclusive, we should view how we present ourselves on a spectrum. unfortunately, our place on the spectrum is contingent, in part, on society as a whole changing its expectations. in the meantime, in working with faculty and students we need to take control of the fact that how we are perceived influences the work we do, and the work we do influences how we are perceived.   acknowledgments: we thank brett bonfield and lisa hinchliffe for providing great insight and feedback as we worked our way through this article, as well as invaluable writing advice.   references ambady, n., & gray, h. m. 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(1989). student assessment of teacher masculinity and femininity: a test of the sex role congruency hypothesis on student attitudes toward learning. journal of educational psychology, 81(2), 259-262. williams, l. e., & bargh, j. a. (2008). experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. science, 322(5901), 606-607. wilson, p. (1979). librarians as teachers: the study of an organization fiction. the library quarterly, 49(2), 146-162. the librarian stereotype: deconstructing perceptions and presentations of information work with acrl press, edited by nicole pagowsky and miriam rigby. read the first chapter and the foreword for free at http://www.acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/archives/8818 [↩] see numerous research articles by james v. carmichael, jr. on male librarian stereotypes and effects on this demographic from the feminization of librarianship [↩] for more about hipsters, autonomy, and the essence of “cool,” see warren & campbell, 2014 [↩] emotional labor can be described as conflicting inner feelings with outer expectations for countenance, particularly in a work environment, and particularly for women. this can also be thought of as “smile work,” (tierney & bensimon, 1996) where women especially are expected to smile and make others in the workplace feel comfortable regardless of their own true feelings, which are disregarded [↩] a necessity with which we concur and would love to discuss at greater length in this article but it would be too much ground to cover [↩] academic libraries, collaboration, college students, educational psychology, faculty, impression management, information literacy, instruction, outreach, pegagogy, perceptions, stereotypes, teaching who are you empowering? exploring critical and indigenous research methods with a research community: part i – the leap 15 responses timlepczyk 2014–06–05 at 10:50 am hi nicole and erica, i’ve been thinking about library instruction and faculty relationships and a couple thoughts came to mind. first, while librarians may feel ignored when it comes to instruction, what about the division between tenure-track, adjuncts, and graduate students? is that divide in the professoriate so great and pressing that librarians entering the teaching space seems secondary? instruction is already a class system. how does library instruction fit into that system? my other question is: how does instruction measure up to sustained teaching load? are librarians teaching a 3-4 credit course each week or sessions/workshops on topics related to course content and information retrieval? thanks! tim pumpedlibrarian 2014–06–05 at 2:51 pm hi tim, thanks for your comments. as we discuss, instruction as a class system is still highly gendered. while our focus in the article is on librarians because of our vantage point, it should be viewed as a broader conversation about gender and the academic workforce. check out these recent posts on the topic: http://chronicle.com/article/the-pyramid-problem/126614/ http://www.thenation.com/article/175214/academias-pink-collar-workforce# https://chroniclevitae.com/news/206-the-rise-of-the-lady-adjuncts as for your last question, we aren’t sure we fully understand what you’re asking, if you’d like to clarify. if you are asking what the teaching load of librarians is, that is not something we would be able to answer due to amounts varying depending on individual librarian, subject areas, institution, etc. you would find widely varied responses on that if you were to take a survey, for example. cheers, nicole timlepczyk 2014–06–06 at 9:48 am @pumpedlibrarian hi nicole, thanks for the response. in terms of my last question, i was thinking about one-off instruction sessions versus teaching a 3/3. are librarians that teach a for-credit course that’s not geared around how to use the library perceived more positively by faculty? maybe that’s the wrong word, perhaps, are librarians seen more as educators and teachers? erica defrain 2014–06–09 at 9:36 am thanks for clarifying, tim. we’re not aware of any studies specifically looking at this, but that would be an interesting area to explore further. thanks, erica pingback : librarian stereotypes: do they hurt our image as instructors? | azla college and university libraries division blog pingback : safety requires avoiding unnecessary linkspam (10 june 2014) | geek feminism blog pingback : hls weekly round-up | hls pingback : bibliolinks: on the hunger games salute and more | exbibliolibris pingback : around the apocalyptic web: 7 things librarians are tired of hearing and much, much more – confessions of a science librarian pingback : around the apocalyptic web: 7 things librarians are tired of hearing and much, much more [confessions of a science librarian] | gaia gazette pingback : step 3 worksheet–procedures for educative assessment | writing about learning pingback : mirror, mirror, or, library reflections | kelly dagan pingback : reflection blog #6: stereotypes of librarians | we're all stories, in the end... pingback : libraries and power | punctuated equilibrium: a librarian's view of public policy pingback : smash all the gates, part 2: professional silenc* | do-it-yourself library instruction this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct librarians as __________: shapeshifting at the periphery. – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 21 jul char booth /21 comments librarians as __________: shapeshifting at the periphery. when we first started introducing guest posts, char booth was a name mentioned by many of us at itlwtlp. as a blogger over at info-mational, char has introduced ideas that are uniquely critical and thoughtful. (a good example would be char’s guest post at tame the web about the library student bill of rights.) you may also remember ellie’s interview with char published here on itlwtlp. ellie got char to  publish a piece here on lead pipe, and we are all grateful to host another guest whose ideas are critical, timely, and, well, awesome! by char booth i admit it: i wrestled with this post for weeks. in the beginning, all i set out to do was ask and (sort-of) answer the familiar question, how do we redefine ourselves and stay relevant in this so-called “information age?” from the vantage point of the academic liaison librarian. i was drawn to this topic because i stare it in the face five out of every seven days i pass on this planet. moreover, i am far from alone: so epic is our shared struggle to build productive connections with students and faculty that the association of research libraries devoted an entire special report to liaison librarian roles not long ago. the need to diversify (if not redefine) is obvious: even a passing glance at the 2009 ithaka faculty perceptions report shows that our image is indeed changing, but not necessarily into the tech-involved pedagogical and research partners we might fancy ourselves. instead, we are becoming pinned down as e-stuffbuyers.(1) i am not the first person to ask the question in this particular way. faithful readers have no doubt realized that i am the fourth academic librarian in the past two months of itlwtlp alone to go navel-gazing out of a sense of bibliotic devotion: kim leeder asked, “what’s it all for?” in early june, ellie collier dug through the library history laundry a few weeks later, and emily ford has been searching for her mojo since at least july 7th. but before i lose all the non-university folks, let’s take a collective step back. the perennial identity/relevance issue is by no means unique to our corner of the building. librarians in general are entangled in self-examination and redefinition, on a search for professional identity that gets to the core of our collective self-worth. and where, you might well ask, is this leading us? extreme makeover across focus and specialization, i have observed a curious trend. no matter whence the identity question comes, inhabitants of libraryland tend to produce iterations of the same answer: our continued relevance depends on becoming more like something else entirely. not one something in particular, mind you, but any number of somethings. a few of the professional makeover suggestions i found, in no particular order: librarian as plumber librarian as researcher librarian as super hero librarian as mediator librarian as trainer librarian as unifier librarian as video game player librarian as folklorist librarian as social entrepreneur librarian as astronaut librarian as literary agent librarian as teacher librarian as publisher librarian as green champion librarian as cultural ambassador phew, librarian as exhausted. (or, perhaps… librarian as dilettante?) in my own writing i am terribly guilty of similizing the profession, and find that the “librarians as ______” trope is a rhetorically useful opener to any old “you should, you could” post. for instance, i once managed to almost smash “librarians as intellectual swiss army knife” and “librarians as pro bono nerds on retainer” into the same sentence. while writing the current post, i found myself so wrapped up in professional metaphors that i had started to elevate them to the far more dramatic analogy duel: not just librarians as _______, but librarians as this, or that? are we mediators, i chewed, or facilitators? consultants, or colleagues? sharks, or jets? the answer to each of these reductionist face-offs is (of course, by design) always going to be “neither, both, c, or all of the above,” based completely on the context in which they are considered. the more combative analogizing i engaged in, the more i started to realize that the way i was asking the perennial question intentionally deflected its answer. as individuals in unique organizations that contribute to specific user bases, all of us obviously take on different roles and use our own strategies. just because being a librarian plumber works for you, doesn’t mean that it’s going to work for me. in fact, if i walk into my classroom or department wearing an ill-fitting or poorly conceived costume, i might end up looking more like a librarian drainclot. shifting our (secret) identities our dashing attempts to redefine actually illustrate something rather critical. the reason why librarians are so eminently analogizable is that so many of us are busy taking on one important role in particular: shapeshifter.  when we thrive, it is because we embed, participate, and transform in response to our environments, but never because we do everything just like all the other librarian… whatevers. in other words: the future lies not in our apellatives, but in our affordances. when you cast yourself as a librarian pilot, sherpa, or podiatrist, you are (hopefully) expressing a creative interpretation of your productive capacity that makes the most sense based on (and to) the people you support, if and when they need that particular kind of support. this much is certain: whether innovative or traditional, the most successful strategies have everything to do with responsive specificity. emily drabinski, commenting on a draft of this post, called this kairos: “the ability to respond productively to the moment and its demands.” being a librarian in this modern age is all about getting in where you fit in (also known as situating). situating involves (a) becoming perceptive enough to tell astronaut from asinine based on where you stand, and (b) building targeted strategies that help you respond in a demonstrably useful way. this can happen organically, so long as you stay engaged with skill-building and don’t knock yourself off course by constantly telling your constituents that you just went all astronaut on them. “i’m a librarian rockstar!” and “i’m a librarian entrepreneur!” are relatively indigestible to the layperson, and are pronouncements best kept to the in-crowd (or maybe to yourself, you be the judge). if you pull your splits and space-moves with enough under-the-radar grace, they are far more likely to be recognized, appreciated, and folded into the librarian-as-something-worth-keeping-around typology (which is really what our search is all about). e-whatting what, now? the ability to fit requires serious “getting” on both sides. to illustrate what i mean, bear with me as i digress into my own specifics. i’m the e-learning librarian at uc berkeley. when a colleague of mine retired last november, i also took over as liaison and selector for the cal school of information, a graduate program that famously dropped its ala accreditation many years ago, becoming among the first and few programs to formally eschew (as opposed to hyphenate)  “library” (at least to a semantic extent) in pursuit of the information studies paradigm. at the time, the departure of one of the oldest mls-granters from the ranks added symbolic fuel to an already drawn-out library v. information disciplinary debate.(2) while this post is (mercifully) not about said debate nor its attending drama, both have implications for how i get and fit my disciplinary picture. liaising to a program that de-libraried itself some years ago some years ago is, needless to say, a fascinating opportunity for identity-spelunking. this is not my first foray into subject waters, mind you: as a bibliographer at ohio university i focused on communications, which i knew next to nothing about when i began (causing me no small amount of anxiety). i eventually overcame, but it was difficult during the first year to feel that i had any kind of handle on the discipline. now at cal, i have the luck of subject familiarity, and the luxury of abiding interest in my area. despite the obvious potential for chirping crickets when i come around, i have been blown away by the welcome i have received from the i school, and have run the gamut from traditional liaising – instruction, reference, consultation, and materials acquisition – to less personally charted territory such as moderating a panel at the next-generation teaching and learning symposium and working with a project team developing a browser extension for on-the-fly research in e-texts. hands down, supporting the i school has fast become one of the things i value most about doing my job. librarians as whack, or legit? not that exploring the boundaries of the librarian/ department relationship always comes off perfectly, mind you. on my own blog, info-mational, i wrote one piece about the difficulty of balancing divergent vocabularies to achieve shared aims; and another on the challenge of pitching the sometimes obscure affordances of librarianship to the more technically focused (this is the one with the nerd/swiss army knife references). inevitably, some of my moves have been hits, others misses. an example of each: in spring semester of 2010 i visited the my school’s doctoral colloquium twice – the first time to lead a rather ill-attended yet nominally useful research methods seminar (miss), the second to participate in the aptly named ‘castellathon’ – a group critique of writings spanning the career of foundational information theorist manuel castells, who first developed the “network society” concept (hit).(3) the latter event took a pecha kucha-ish approach. each participant was responsible for summarizing and critiquing key chapters of an information age volume or other castells book in under six minutes. i attended at the invitation of the instructor, paul duguid, with whom i had arranged the in-class research methods session earlier in the semester. in addition to gaining insight for collection development and general credibility purposes, the castellathon was an opportunity for me to try a different angle: instead of trying to interlope on their already expert community using the same research help pitch that fell flat the first time around, i would try joining in their reindeer games. the discussion was excellent, and i made good connections with a few students by showing an analytical chop or two. as-grabbing lave and wenger’s situated learning theory posits that individuals build knowledge by participating actively in communities of practice, engaging in a process of collective identity formation that facilitates their ongoing definition within and in relation to other members of the community.(4) expertise is gained through legitimate peripheral participation, the process of starting on the edge of a community and moving toward its center through insight and relationship building (i.e., situating). this negotiated continuum from beginner to novice to expert exists in organizations, disciplines, social groups, and skill areas almost without conceivable exception.(5) librarians’ ability to productively self-similize (e.g., find our own ases) occurs when we gain access to our communities not only by learning about them, but by demonstrating our knowledge and personalities to them. my participation in the castells event can be read as (and was in reality) a step away from tangential affiliation and towards a more legitimate form of participation. aware of my relatively recent introduction to their community, i was also conscious to remain somewhat apart – i did not critique a chapter as each of the students did, but read as much of the material as time permitted in preparation and joined the discussion when i felt i could contribute productively. in an interesting twist on the situating concept, i have discovered that part of my legitimacy as a liaison librarian depends on exactly this: remaining consciously peripheral as i participate. existing on the edge of the academy – a widely acknowledged and consistent complaint of the research librarian – is actually one of our most valuable strengths. let me explain: in academia, situated learning and collective identity formation are far from idyllic, and are subject to the same struggles and mitigating factors as any other social construct (particularly at the graduate level). dialectic is intentionally combative, there are power dynamics in any classroom or department, and the journey from academic edge to center can induce frustration, cronyism, and idea-jockeying. among those for whom knowledge is either leverage or capital (e.g., students and faculty), there may be significant vulnerability in admitting an insight gap of any kind, which can translate to plain old not seeking help when it is needed. thanks in large part to our nosebleed-section proximity to the academic horizon, not only can librarians provide a source of strategic insight into everything from evidence-based practice to open access publishing to ease the legitimate participation of our users, we create neutral spaces and services that are functionally external to the intellectual scrums happening in their disciplines. (in other words, librarian as referee, or base coach?) librarians as counselors, or confidants? my liaison experience underscores the importance of subject knowledge and situated participation, but expertise and authentic interest are only half of this picture. what, as a librarian, is the unique contribution i bring to my disciplinary learning community? i return to the idea of neutrality: much of why we fit in is because our ability to do so is limited by design. i have found no surer way to become a useful colleague and resource than to build human connections that demonstrate generalized expertise and critical objectivity. an historical affordance of librarianship is to remain central to the intellectual life of an institution or community while existing on its objective periphery. becoming closer to the heart and operation of a community and its output is important, but it is at the same time crucial to recognise that by virtue of existing outside the monkeyhouse, we provide a safety zone for the venting and/or triaging of academic insecurities and/or exploring ideas in a space relatively unfettered by the positioning so central to scholarly communication – professor duguid and i discussed this particular liaison role after the castellathon. this is not to say librarians cannot be radical, challenging, or intellectual, it simply highlights our unique position in the pedagogical and productivity picture of higher education. so often the challenge of being a librarian in the academy is being perceived as lacking expertise, yet so much of our worth lies in the informed generality and engaged neutrality we bring to it. i may not be expert in every topical nuance of what one of my graduate students is researching, but i have a broad disciplinary framework that recognizes subtle connections and semantic distinctions, and am aware of a host of tools, movements, and technologies that can supplement their work (and if i’m not, i know who is).  and here is where the librarian as ______ comes back into the narrative. when i am at my most successful in consultations and classes i am in part librarian as research therapist, someone to whom students, colleagues, and even faculty can let down their guard in order to expose the vulnerabilities in technology, methodology, or knowledge that can be addressed without judgment. like psychologists, consultants, or social workers, librarians have the value structure and information resources that position us to provide informed counsel to a host of information scenarios, no matter our specialization, without imposing a particular bent. because we have the opposite of topical tunnel vision, librarians are extremely good at exploring angles, talking through research problems, and translating information into to one form of academic success or another. our objectivity does not imply that we are non-critical, but we have to demonstrate that this is the case in order to remain viable. part of fitting in a disciplinary framework is talking its talk, and i have learned that it is productive to participate in co-learning and discourse to the extent that it is possible while remaining a semi-detached confidant, collaborator, counselor, and/or confessor. among my preternaturally technology-expert students and faculty (and despite my job title), this part of my work rarely involves leveraging very much “e”. in an almost ironic twist, it is the analog, informal, and invariably interdisciplinary conversations about technology and information that seem to have the most impact. another example: last semester i led a research methods session and a series of one-on-one consultations with students from a core class in the i school master’s track, info 203: social and organizational issues of information. each was tasked to write a 30-odd page paper on an issue of their choosing, almost all of which covered emergent technology topics about which little hard research had yet been produced (e.g., driver distraction as a result of real-time traffic apps and consequent impact on highway safety). every consultation/conversation was amazing, and all consisted of nothing more than two chairs, a web browser, and an enthusiastically open mind on my end. one of the most enjoyable of these exchanges fed into a masterful paper examining the concept of information overload from different subjective perspectives. in one of those it-makes-it-all-worth-it moments, the student in question forwarded his completed essay to me recently with this gem: “again, thanks for your help. apart from the tangible benefits on the outcome, our conversation also made the process itself a great deal more interesting and (dare i say it) fun.” (librarian as stoked.) as i read through his work i saw threads of our discussion emerge, ranging from educational theory to business to cognitive psychology. in this case, it was a mutual interest in exploring his topic in relation to its source bases that established the information need, and a shared willingness to humanize the interaction that built a more lasting connection. the author is in the process of submitting his paper for publication at my relentless urging [i will update this post with a link when it is available: this one will be required librarian reading]. librarians as don quixote, or sancho panza? situating in increasingly specialized communities and contexts is what makes the new librarian “normal” so incessantly flexible. liaison librarians may venture down countless outreach inroads, but we reach higher ground based on our ability to add value legitimately, appropriately, and productively. this can at times feel utterly quixotic: tilting at information windmills. some have argued in this time of consolidation and scarcity that the insight librarians bring into information organization is becoming more diffuse throughout the academy, and the intellectual connections we facilitate in our learning communities are  supplanted by social networking, digitization, and widespread technology adoption. this line of thinking has its supporters and detractors, but no matter your angle of examination the core issue is still one of perception and relevance. are we interpreting external perceptions of our own relevance accurately? is this struggle simply occurring inside of us about ourselves? how can we know if those we are trying to “save” from information peril see us as wielding an increasingly unnecessary (or ineffectual) lance? again, the answer is c: each of us must answer this question for ourselves in our own contexts. when you are a liaison you affiliate with a defined community of practice with characteristics that provide you with potential productive and social ins. you simply have to find the best way to positively influence the construction of your perceived identity. at the i school, i perceive that administrators and faculty do a masterful job of supporting community by both highlighting the successes of its members (take a quick look at their website to see what i mean) while merging the social with the academic. they recognize that they should neither overwhelm learners with an overabundance of activities nor divorce said activities from the work that defines the community in the first place. meg st. john, director of admission and student affairs, says that “the ‘problem’ with berkeley is always that there is too much opportunity, too many draws on your most precious resource: your time as a student here. we look for ways to create community building activities in synergy with other activities that are already on the books.” in all of that social and intellectual activity, there are more and less natural times for me (or any other librarian) to participate. not recognising that last point can risk a situation of diminishing outreach returns. we engage in communities of practice by supporting specific expertise with strategic insight, but we neither operate in vacuums nor run the place. institutional and individual legacies precede us, and a confluence of expertise, resources, and social character unique to each learning community dictates how (and if and when) a librarian will be perceived (and received) as a resource. “embedding” is a process that takes as much arm’s-length framework as it does fieldwork and footwork. sometimes – for reasons totally external to yourself – there might be little opportunity or reason to push past the arm’s length. even though i am enthusiastically welcomed, in addition to making myself understood, available, and enjoyable to work with, at times i need to make myself scarce. the most legitimate form of participation i have is in perceiving from the periphery where i can be of the most use. i am busy, they are busy, and sometimes our busies overlap and entertwine. assert myself too much or self-aggrandize my contribution, and i run the risk of becoming more nuisance than necessity. librarians as polaroid, or digital? in a world in which “library” threatens to become increasingly sepia-toned, “community” and “practice” are equally critical to our position in the digital picture. another metaphorical exploitation opportunity: for years, polaroid camera use declined precipitously. yet, when the film threatened to disappear entirely, die-hards hollered so loud that the impossible project saved the last production plant in order to make the film available again for a comparably unbelievably expensive price, and the original corporation hired lady gaga to huckster them a completely different image. for my money, we should be shooting between these two extremes. instead of (a) preserving a quaint legacy profession remembered wistfully by those old enough to have used a card catalog and/or fetishized by hipsters or (b) making ourselves into anything-but-librarians, we need to (c) keep doing what we’re doing, only at times a little more obviously: showing our patrons that we are, in fact, the strangers they can trust with whatever camera they happen to own to take their family picture without making a break for it. we know where the right button is, thank you very much, and we promise not to cut your head or legs off. users might care little about how librarians holistically self-define in order to appear more viable in the information age, but they care considerably if we make their working, producing, and learning lives easier. this is where librarian knowledge-sharing about local strategies that do and don’t work becomes extremely useful. when we adapt this collective insight into our own section of the academy (or wherever) and its internal machinations, external perceptions of libraries and librarians transform as a consequence of responsive service and real interpersonal connections, but not the other way around. the best way to bring this dynamic into productive focus in your own context is to literally (and please pardon my use of this tired idiom, it actually works in this case) think outside your institutional box: become interested and engaged in the work of the community with which you are associated, and find the most appropriate ways to support them based on a practical, critical, library-independent assessment of their productive and social output. in this and all things, avoid overzealousness or self-fixation: instead of being that weird jerk who won’t move out of the frame, find out what your community is taking pictures of and suss out what kind of tripod, memory card, flashbulb, etc. you can hand over when the time seems right. librarians as agent cooper, or log lady? i have stared into my own navel for so long that i have finally started to see light: enough with the manufactured duels. disc 1 of season two of twin peaks arrived in the mail a few days ago, neatly providing me with the professional analogy draw to end them all: librarians as agent cooper, or log lady? both characters are instrumental, plot-driving sages, both are somewhat cryptic, both exist on the periphery of the twin peaks community, both are keen environmental observers and information discoverers, and both participate (albeit in very different ways) over their beverage of choice. in my own context, i might be just as librarian-amazing showing up out of the blue every once in a while with wood chips on my cardigan as you are constantly hanging around leaving messages for diane on your handheld device. there is only one log lady, and there is only one agent cooper. as long as each of us materializes (virtually or literally) at opportune moments in our spectacles and/or g-men ties, we can remain true to what we always have been: modestly indispensable and precisely like no one else. remove either of us, and bob prevails.(6) with lynchian circuitousness i have arrived at the most important simile of all: librarians as librarians. we have always been professional chameleons, using different tools to play different roles for different patrons in different organizations in different states and so on, ad infinitum. the more we recommend to each other that we become the someone elses we see fit, the more we risk missing that the deceptively prescriptive identity/utility question is being answered descriptively. our new reality is like our old reality, only a little more adaptive and a lot more self-reflexive (or vice versa, you tell me). librarian as ________ analogies are useful in exploring our response to a critically transformative time in the trajectory of our profession, but their function as metaphor should not be overlooked lest we creep too far from our own (rather amazing) archetype. despite the ways we might recast ourselves as individuals, our collective identity can and should still revolve around a solid practical and conceptual core of “humor, verve, and grace,” to borrow a phrase from cory doctorow. under shifting shapes, librarians remain the singularly knowledgeable, radically neutral, and openly accessible mavens of the information world (bless our hearts). —– tremendous thanks to my favorite librarians-as-inconceivably-talented-editors: ellie collier, emily drabinski, susan edwards, emily ford, lia friedman, and jen waller. you made this post so much better. —– notes (1) not to imply that e-stuffbuying isn’t an essential and potentially powerful demonstration of relevancy among academic librarians. note the recent uc library/nature group journal pricing fight, in which faculty support and involvement has been extremely forthcoming. (2) see ostler, l. j. & dahlin, t. c. (1995). library education: setting or rising sun? american libraries, 26, (7), 683-685.; saracevic, t. (1994). closing of library schools in north america: what role accreditation? libri, 44, (3), 190-200.; stieg, m. f. (1992). change and challenge in library and information science education. chicago: american library association.; white, h. (1986). the future of library and information science education. journal of education for library and information science, 26, (3), 174-182.; white, h. (1995). library studies or information management – what’s in a name? library journal, 120, (7), 51-52. (3) information studies is interdisciplinary and young enough that it continues to define its core texts, and the search for canonical authors is a subject of ongoing interest among those identified with the field (not to mention a source of continual vexation for this developer of collections). castells is tacitly accepted as the one theorist every information studies scholar/student has at least skimmed. his information age trilogy argues that the network society derived from the confluence of technical innovation, globalizing markets, social radicalization, and political restructuring over the waning decades of the twentieth century. more recently, the prolific castells has has tackled the sociological implications of mobile connectivity and issues surrounding communication and power. (4) lave, jean, and etienne wenger. 1991. situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. learning in doing. cambridge [england]: cambridge university press. (5) i recommend professor duguid’s recent prologue to an oxford volume on communities of practice to anyone interested in its theoretical development (duguid, paul. the community of practice then and now. in ash amin and joanne roberts, eds., organizing for the creative economy: community, practice, and capitalism. oxford: oxford university press, 2008.) for more in a library context, my book coming out in fall addresses the importance of communities of practice in library instructor education: our lack of formal pedagogical training makes social and situated learning essential to instructional literacy. (6) for the as-yet twin peaks uninitiated, please take this opportunity to watch the series and find out what the hell i’m talking about. —– image credits sharks: http://www.timessquarenyc.org/film/images/westsidestory01.jpg astronaut: www.yunchtime.net/misc/astronaut.jpg confessional: http://behlerblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/confessional.jpg don quixote: zacsoomith.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/lyceum-don-quixote-print-c10029378.jpeg polaroid: www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/polaroid.jpg log lady: http://zembla.cementhorizon.com/archives/loglady.jpg agent cooper, astronaut, confessional, don quixote, librarian, log lady, polaroid, sharks tryin’ to get my mojo workin’ marketing search: an interview with pete bell of endeca and gabriel weinberg of duckduckgo 21 responses diane cordell 2010–07–21 at 8:31 am i would add: librarians as navigators, librarians as cartographers (librarians as frankensteins?) char 2010–07–21 at 5:21 pm hi, diane. librarian as frankenstein i’d like to see. angie 2010–07–21 at 8:36 am the twin peaks analogy totally synthesized it. thanks for the post! char 2010–07–21 at 5:28 pm my pleasure, angie… the librarians are not what they seem. h 2010–07–21 at 1:14 pm librarians as activists! professionally, i really appreciated this post a great deal. today was the day i needed this post. emily ford 2010–07–21 at 5:05 pm i agree! the activism inherent in librarianship is why i wanted to be a librarian in the first place! char 2010–07–21 at 5:24 pm agreed, emily. when i started looking into librarianship the activism/advocacy angle totally sold me. char 2010–07–21 at 5:23 pm i’m glad it hit home at an opportune moment… lynn 2010–07–21 at 4:22 pm as a newly-minted librarian, i thought this post was a fantastic intro to my new world! thanks for so gracefully stating what i haven’t seen elsewhere! i am a little confused though, isn’t the issue less one of librarian shapeshifting and more one of finding a way to *articulate* relevance? being an omni-present resource for every need and filling invisible gaps that others prefer to ignore are immensely valuable, however doesn’t being peripheral and dealing with the invisible put the perception of the profession in that scary place out on the edge of the org chart (as a wise professor once stated)? seems to me that the ‘librarian as ____’ grappling is more an attempt to make visible that otherwise sensitively subtle work?? maybe i am misunderstanding? i claim newbie ignorance :) char 2010–07–21 at 5:42 pm smart comment, lynn, and i totally agree that librarian as ______ analogizing is an important articulation strategy. i observe (and note here and there in the post) that this tends to occur mostly internally, as in how we describe the innovative work we are doing to each other rather than to our constituents. i used the situated participation analogy to advocate that much of external work of redefinition is done when we actually interact with our communities in innovative, value-added ways that help us discover/demonstrate new affordances, which we can then articulate/analogize to our hearts’ content in the professional discourse. i think that it is largely in this on-the-ground (or in-the-cloud) interaction that we make our peripheral support strategies more central… in my mind, peripheral by no means equals invisible, although i totally see where you’re coming from. ps – welcome to the fold! lynn 2010–07–23 at 10:37 pm thanks for the clarification, the distinction makes a lot of sense! my position is a new one, but rather than finding/making my place within the library, my biggest worry moving into the field is how i can clearly and positively represent my library to my campus. i took the position betting on both the internal and external perception of libraries to solidify and grow in a positive direction, so my fingers are crossed! it seems like such an important time, and an exciting one to be sure. thanks again! cindy 2010–07–22 at 8:34 am lyn…. you may be a newbie, but i think you are spot on! we have been talking about “reinventing” ourselves for as long as i have been in the profession (16 years). and yet i don’t believe that we will really change what we do. sure the facilities, technology and approach changes, that is a gimme…but what else? ultimately its how we sell ourselves. and what frustrates me most is we talk about it to death, but have yet to come to any firm conclusions. emily ford 2010–07–21 at 5:04 pm i really like the way that you broke down your point with the castellathon example, char. i think for many of us, (okay, for me, because who am i to be all or even many of us?) we are the knowledge-hungry, excited-to-participate, really wanting-to-be-in-the-in-crowd and not-an-interloper-but-participating-meaningfully is very difficult.where is our professional line between being a perpetual student and librarian? my urge with an event as awesome as the castellathon would be to participate wildly and deeply instead of ‘peripherally but still showing critical chops’ as you mentioned. maybe i just need a giant self-check. i need to embrace shape-shifting and periphery. they’re really hard hard for me. i am going to try to embrace the nebulous nature of librarian. thanks for a super duper post. char 2010–07–23 at 9:06 am hey again, emily – sorry for the delay on your sharp comment, super irritating eye infection has had me down, sigh. re: student v. librarian, god willing there will never be such a line! i definitely didn’t mean to suggest that headfirst participation isn’t a good strategy if that’s what moves you or that you should ever shoot for anything but deep and meaningful, just that the better you know a community the more strategically you can librarian to them. and that situated learning is definitely a process, which in my case started with some observational behavior. in the castellathon event, i was really just getting to know most of them as individuals and finding my productive footing by virtue of being comparatively new to the discipline, so was in natural semi-absorption mode. this orientation can/will change as i become more rooted in their community… in the ngtl panel, for example, i asserted myself in a more “wild/deep” (albeit moderatory) way. for me, negotiating the periphery is a rolling target based on the situation, if you know what i mean – emily d.’s kairos idea comes to mind, or plain old manners. shapeshifting doesn’t = hanging back, so no checking (necessarily) required! diane cordell 2010–07–21 at 7:23 pm hi, char! re. librarian as frankenstein: i was first thinking of a patchwork quilt, but that’s inorganic. visualize a new creature, composed of parts taken from all the professions we’ve mentioned…considered a monster by some but, by others, a new creature entirely! char 2010–07–23 at 9:08 am i love it, totally – although now i’m imagining us all with prosthetic bolts coming out of our temples… diane cordell 2010–07–23 at 9:17 am one man’s bolt is another man’s jewelry. pingback : librarians as __________: shapeshifting at the periphery. « alabama library expo pingback : what’s in a name? « reel librarians pingback : so, just what kind of scientist is a library scientist? « and/or pingback : why i’m not a teacher (thoughts on acrl immersion) « sense & reference this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: introduction – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 7 oct editorial board, brett bonfield and ellie collier /7 comments editorial: introduction six librarians, drawing by derik badman by editorial board, brett bonfield, and ellie collier welcome to in the library with the lead pipe, a new group blog founded by a team of energetic new librarians. to learn more about us, please read our “about” page and look through our “authors” pages. our current plan is to publish a new post every wednesday. each post will be peer-reviewed by at least one external and one internal reader. if things go well, we may step things up to twice a week, especially if we add new folks to our team or find a lot of guest writers whose work we want to publish. if you like what you see here and want to join in the fun, please let us know. what happens in the library… 7 responses stevenb 2008–10–08 at 9:47 am good luck with your new blog. looks like it will explore some interesting territory. i think the name is a bit longish – probably too late but something like “library leadpipe crew” could have shortened it up a bit. also, how about adding a descriptive blurb under the name that communicates the essence of your blog (recommended on a lot of those “tips for a great blog” posts). something like “six diverse librarians taking a lead pipe to your library assumptions” – or whatever you guys are mostly about – to your way of thinking. kudos on the design though. it’s clear that a lot of thought and effort went into it (not just another wordpress blog). derik’s touch is apparent. just some thoughts. congrats and good luck for a sustainable blog. i am probably your first bloglines subscriber. derik badman 2008–10–08 at 10:07 am thanks for the comments, steven. i did a lot of the design work, thus my touch. we’re working on a subtitle/description, somehow i overlooked that through all this. the title is long but also, we hope, memorable. latanya 2008–10–08 at 6:05 pm i actually like the title because of the visual it makes me think about. derik always does an amazing job with design and i look forward to seeing the visuals as much as the actual posts. thanks kim for letting me know about this amazing new blog. best wishes to you all…i know there’s a lot to take the “leadpipe” to in the libraries. bill drew 2008–10–08 at 9:10 pm nice design and a good start on content. i will mention your new blog on babyboomer librarian stevenb 2008–10–08 at 10:14 pm ok. your subtitle helps me to “get it” – the inspiration and design that is. it takes me a while sometimes. nate 2008–10–10 at 12:34 pm good luck with the blogthe design looks great and i’m going to enjoy following your posts! you can expect a shoutout on the pla blog soon… k.g. schneider 2008–10–11 at 6:31 pm don’t worry about the length of the title (for now). if you get popular people will just call you “lead pipe” or something like that. i like the graphics and the sketches of the authors — a nice start! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct what your donors (and would-be donors) wish you knew – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 12 may brett bonfield /5 comments what your donors (and would-be donors) wish you knew andrew carnegie by flickr use cliff1066 (cc by 2.0) by brett bonfield a few months back, someone emailed in the library with the lead pipe asking if we could recommend an online course that could give her an overview of library responsibilities. she was about to start working at a k-12 school and, though she had no library experience, part of her job included running the library. an aspect of librarians’ déformation professionnelle is the mistaken idea that people who don’t work in libraries realize there are library-specific degrees. those of us who have earned our degrees want the world to value them the way we do, especially if we’re still paying off student loans. wouldn’t you be just a little bit disappointed if all of your master’s degree coursework could be summarized in a single online course? and if it could, wouldn’t that make us sort of stupid for wasting all that time and money learning the art and science of librarianship?1 another part of our déformation professionnelle is that we make assumptions about other professions that are similar to the one our correspondent made about librarianship, especially professions that don’t typically involve degrees or licenses, such as fundraising. it isn’t that we don’t appreciate the importance of getting donations: since i started working as a librarian, the topic my colleagues in the profession have been most interested in having me teach them about is fundraising. i’ve spent much of my professional life in fundraising, so it’s a natural request. but what many people don’t seem to realize is that it’s just as difficult to summarize what fundraisers do as it is to summarize what librarians do. this article is not intended to be a complete summary of fundraising. instead, it’s meant to put you in the right frame of mind to help your organization raise more money. and it’s intended for everyone who works in libraries, not just the people whose job description usually includes fundraising. i hope we all agree that everyone who works in a library needs to work together if the library is going to function most effectively. for instance, everyone should be able to answer basic questions and communicate important policies. fundraising is the same way: it’s not going to work nearly as well if only one person in the organization, or one department, is solely responsible for cultivating and stewarding donations. there are multiple economies many people assume that nonprofits raise less money in bad economies. this isn’t necessarily the case; in fact, it’s possible that the opposite is true. g. douglas alexander, co-author of essential principles for fundraising success, wrote a 1991 article in which he pointed out that contributions increased during world war ii, the 1974 recession, and the 1982 recession. in a 2008 study, “fundraising in a cold climate,” dennis o’connor and deirdre hatch cited work by the center on philanthropy at indiana university and the association of fundraising professionals that found the same pattern: in most bad economies, nonprofits raised more money. there seem to be many reasons this happens. in part, we seem to band together during hard times. people, and even countries, with very little discretionary money will send aid to victims of earthquakes, tsunamis, and terrorist attacks. we’ve all heard of poor communities coming together to support one another: it’s become a hollywood cliché. in addition, while many states and municipalities are eviscerating library budgets, the stock market, though volatile, has enjoyed a significant recovery in the last year or so. on march 6, 2009, the dow jones industrial average descended all the way to 6,627; on april 23, it reached 11,204. along the way, many people made quite a bit of money. certainly not everyone: plenty of people sold low, and plenty of others lacked the funds or insight to invest during the recovery. but the idea in fundraising isn’t to raise an equal amount of money from everyone: it’s to raise sufficient funding from people who are interested in supporting your work. if people want to help you but don’t have money right now, make sure they still feel appreciated and informed and, if they’re interested, provide them with other meaningful ways to contribute. if people have money but aren’t interested, you’re not likely to change their minds. in general, it’s best to focus your fundraising efforts on people who have the ability and inclination to contribute. we like winners many people with enough discretionary money to make sizable financial contributions have accumulated their savings by working hard, making decisions that turned out well, and avoiding risk. as warren buffett likes to say, “the first rule of investing is don’t lose money; the second rule is don’t forget rule no. 1.” this is one of the ideas that people who are unfamiliar with fundraising often fail to appreciate: your desperation makes donors less likely to contribute. in the us alone, there are thousands of great causes and nonprofits. it simply doesn’t make sense to donate money to a desperate organization when you have so many stable organizations to choose from that are also doing great work. in addition, it’s awfully hard for a library to paint a bleak picture without coming off as disingenuous. if i didn’t believe libraries were important, i wouldn’t have gone to library school, but there’s no way the funding cuts we’re facing can compete with the world bank’s estimate that “1.4 billion people in developing countries are living in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day.” how can we justify supporting libraries when hundreds of millions of people go hungry each day? when preventable diseases are decimating whole populations? i happen to think andrew carnegie was right: libraries are a great way to support economies while also furthering democracy. and i think bill and melinda gates have analyzed the situation intelligently—an opinion shared by warren buffett, who donated the vast majority of his fortune to the gates foundation. for the most part, the bill and melinda gates foundation spends its money on health and poverty, primarily in developing countries. but in the us it supports libraries and education, and it supports libraries in europe and south america as well. this isn’t just a humanitarian decision, this is an economic decision. we want you to ask us for money one of the questions i’m asked most frequently by my neighbors in collingswood: “do you take donations?” they mostly mean books, but the principle applies to financial donations as well: unless you ask people to contribute, they don’t know that you need the money. it doesn’t have to be a hard sell. it can be as simple as, “have you ever thought about making a contribution to the library?” or asking them if they’re aware that a friend of theirs has included the library in her will—assuming that you’ve asked the friend if she’s comfortable with your disclosing this information. in general, people are happy to agree to this request. if they care enough to contribute, they generally care enough to want other people to contribute as well, and they’re very aware that their example can encourage others to support the library; if you ask them, you’re likely to find out that it was someone else’s contribution that inspired their donation. also, and this often surprises those who are new to fundraising, sometimes people are insulted if you don’t ask them for money, especially if their friends are supporting the library. even if they aren’t currently able to make a donation, they don’t want people to know it. what if you were walking through the exhibition hall at a library conference with two friends and tim spalding tried to interest both of your friends in librarything for libraries but completely ignored you? regardless of how interested you were in the product, wouldn’t you wonder why he didn’t think it was even worth asking you about it? two quick anecdotes about asking people for money: i started my fundraising career as a phone canvasser. back in the early 90’s, i was one of those people who would interrupt your dinner and ask you to renew your support. at the close of the conversation, after we’d agreed on how much you would give, donors would often ask if i was so insistent with everyone i called. “of course,” i’d say. their inevitable response: “good.” if they were giving the most they could, they wanted me to make sure that everyone else did the same. soon after i started my current job, i asked someone who has been connected to the library for years if there were any foundations or other potential donors who hadn’t yet supported the library, but who seemed like good prospects. yes, he said, the secretary for a small area foundation has an office in town. the foundation had been around for many years, but no one from the library had ever solicited a gift. a few of us wrote letters of interest to the foundation, and, after initially turning us down—our inquiry coincided with the stock market’s 2009 low point—we were surprised a couple of months later by a $5,000 check. and so was a neighboring library, one that hadn’t even asked for a contribution. as it turned out, all we had to do was ask. we really like to be thanked the way i learned it, the fundraising relationship with donors cycles through three stages: cultivation → solicitation → stewardship → cultivation → solicitation → stewardship, etc. cultivation is what you do before asking for money. preparation is everything. solicitation is the ask itself. a colleague of mine would refer to proposals—one form of solicitation—as the icing on the cake, but cultivation was the cake itself. she also likened proposals to contracts: they simply made official what the two parties involved in the transaction had already agreed on. stewardship was the majority of what i did, full-time, for five years. acknowledging gifts and maintaining correspondence with donors is important. it leads to cultivation, just as cultivation leads to solicitation, but it is distinct from either of them. most donors contribute because they believe in the work you do, but many of them will not contribute again if they are not acknowledged appropriately. once they have given, they feel connected to you in an emotional way. they feel hurt if you don’t appreciate the fact that they chose you over the thousands of other organizations they could have helped, and over the family members and friends they could have given gifts to instead. they want to feel like insiders not because they think they’ve bought their way in, but because they care so deeply about your work. a good rule of thumb: if you don’t have the time and resources to steward a gift properly, don’t ask for it in the first place. our sense of privacy is different from your sense of our privacy when i worked in stewardship at the university of pennsylvania, there was another department called research which consisted of about a dozen people whose sole task was to assess donors’ and prospects’ wealth so the people whose job it was to make individual solicitations knew how much to ask for: too much or too little and the potential donors could be insulted or, at the very least, end up making a gift that was much smaller than they were willing and able to give. no one is going to say, “you only want one million dollars to name that building after me? i was prepared to give you five million.” if you ask for one million, they’ll assume that’s all you need. the internet already existed at that point, but this was before google, let alone facebook: privacy was a lot easier to protect at the time. even then, the researchers had about twenty bookshelves of material to consult, along with numerous databases. our prospects knew they were being researched, but they didn’t mind then and people in similar situations don’t mind today: being marketed to is just part of what happens when a certain amount of money passes through your hands. in a smaller town, it doesn’t have to be all that much money. at a major university or hospital—organizations that do a lot of fundraising—it’s generally a bit more. not only professional fundraisers pay attention to these sorts of gifts, but other donors do as well, which is why one of the activities donors get involved in during the stewardship process is contributing information about their peers’ wealth. it’s one of the ways donors became insiders: who just bought a new house or yacht? who collects antique cars? who is becoming an angel investor or venture capitalist? who joined what board? did you see the new donor listing in this year’s opera program? so-and-so moved up to the highest support level! this isn’t to say that it’s acceptable to share any information without a donor’s permission. if anything, fundraisers are more aware of confidentiality than librarians. but if a donor wants her name connected to a gift or project, she usually wants people to see that connection everywhere. we don’t think like you do “fitzgerald’s preoccupation with money and those who have it was a far more complicated business than is often understood. whether he ever actually said that “the rich are different from the rest of us” is a subject of endless dispute, but if hemingway did say in rejoinder, “yes, they have more money,” then he missed the point. fitzgerald understood that the rich live in a bubble the rest of us cannot enter….” jonathan yardley librarians are frugal. i think part of it has to do with our salaries, which most of us don’t think qualifies us as rich. i think part of it also has to do with the fact that many of us can’t help but think about money in increments of how many books we could buy instead. pay out of my own pocket to attend two ala conferences a year? and spend over a hundred dollars in annual dues? do you know how many books i could buy with that money? most of us can’t imagine what it would be like to buy a book and think nothing of its expense, let alone imagine buying as many as we want without having to go without something else we care about. it doesn’t cross our minds to get on a plane and fly to another city and pay for a hotel and fly back again without thinking about the money involved. it’s a fundamentally different relationship with money than i’ve ever experienced or ever expect to experience. but there are plenty of people who live this way, and they don’t make all that much more than i do. once you have enough to meet your basic needs for housing and food and health care, once you can afford your clothing, and once you have enough in savings for retirement, everything else is play money. and there are plenty of people in that situation. they may not live in my town, but maybe they grew up near the library; if they’re well off now, there’s a pretty good chance they made use of the library when they were young and have positive feelings about it. maybe they want to help other kids growing up like they did have similarly positive experiences. what people with means don’t want is to have to justify their wealth, not any more than you want to have to justify yourself to someone living on less than $1.25 per day. but what plenty of them do want is something useful to do with their surplus money and, if they have it, their surplus time as well. during the cultivation process, when you’re communicating with donors, don’t try to justify their gifts in a way that would make sense to you. as much as you can, put yourself in their position. figure out what motivates them. perhaps, and this can work surprisingly well, by asking them. think of it as a reference transaction: “if you were to support the library, what would be a best case scenario for you? what would you want to see happen?” we don’t know what you know (and we don’t want to have to learn it) have you ever heard a teenager give a speech in public? they stare at the paper in their hands and read in a voice that’s somehow both choppy and sing-song, as if they learned to speak by listening to their gps read them dr. seuss stories. the same thing happened in an acting class i took one summer. for no apparent reason, we all transformed ourselves into joan crawford. acting! when we write proposals or other correspondence with donors, we often seem to do the same thing, and probably for the same reason: fear. we want so badly to be judged fund-worthy that we write awkward sentences. and we want so badly to be succinct that we use abbreviations that are unfamiliar to our readers, over-explain simple concepts, and under-explain important ones, such as how the money, if granted, will be spent by your library. sprinkle liberally with jargon and you’ve got yourself an unreadable mess. a quote ascribed to albert einstein’s is a useful one to keep in mind: “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” your job isn’t just to explain it simply, your job is to ensure your donors can explain it simply as well. i’ve had colleagues who would go to great lengths to keep things as simple as possible. one proposal writer, a former journalist, went so far as to advocate using words of anglo-saxon rather than latin origin because they tended to be shorter and more familiar. a more common practice among fundraisers: show everything to someone who is unfamiliar with the topic. if it doesn’t make sense to them, it probably won’t make sense to the donor. facts are boring clarity is useful, but it can be overdone. for instance, go to english literature powerpoints at world of teaching. pick a powerpoint for a book you like, perhaps to kill a mockingbird. imagine presenting this powerpoint to people who haven’t yet read the book. imagine how much coffee they would have to drink to stay awake during your presentation. i think most really effective fundraisers and fundraising organizations have learned to tell stories rather than list facts. one person who’s helped organizations where i’ve worked make the transition into storytelling is andy goodman, who provides an overview of the process on his website. he calls it, “storytelling as best practice.” for some fundraisers, and some donors, there’s a quicker path to getting past the facts. make everything personal. from dale carnegie’s summary of his influential book, how to win friends and influence people (1936): six ways to make people like you become genuinely interested in other people. smile. remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. be a good listener. encourage others to talk about themselves. talk in terms of the other person’s interests. make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.   if you can remember all six and make use of them, you’ll raise more money and be a better librarian. but if six rules are too many, you can summarize carnegie’s message in a single word, as fundraiser jeff brooks suggested in what may be my all-time favorite blog post on any subject, “the easy way to write a fundraising letter”: dear [name]: you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. yes, you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. sincerely, [signature] [name][title] p.s. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. you. it’s about relationships the standard way to segment donors is into three general categories: corporations and foundations individuals planned giving in every case, contributions come from people. when possible, you want to get to know the people who decide whether to support your library. there are steps to take in each case. in researching and cultivating corporate donations, ideally you get to know the people involved with making contributions, such as the owner of the company, the head of the division you’ll be working with (if that’s how the corporation is set up), and also the community relations person or team that coordinates grants and volunteers. corporations generally want a return on their investment, such as associating the company’s name with organizations that fit its charitable mission or team-building activities like volunteer activities for their service days. foundations generally have fewer employees than corporations, but may have just as many people involved in approving donations, so it’s really useful to get to know everyone who has a say in whether your solicitation is funded. foundations are usually guided closely by their mission, and they tend to be especially regimented in vetting the organizations they support. the grant process can be highly involved, and occasionally the reporting and other stewardship activities can be so much work you wonder if the grant was even worth it. foundations are this demanding for a reason: more than any other class of donors, they want to make sure they’re supporting a stable organization, one that will use their funds appropriately but will not grow to depend on them. foundations generally like to supply seed money or support for special projects, and they don’t want an organization or a project they’re funding to collapse once they shift their support to other organizations and projects. getting to know people who work for the foundation, or who sit on its board, is a useful way to make those assurances. so is coming up with projects that are likely to become self-sustaining. individual donors fall into subcategories: annual giving and major donors. people who are annual givers donate relatively small amounts more or less each year. it’s generally not a lot of work to keep them happy, just so long as you don’t break any unwritten rules of the contract: make them feel important and special by learning their names and interests, and by acknowledging their gifts effusively and appropriately. once people start giving annually, usually they keep giving about the same amount each year or maybe a little more. developing a stable base of annual support is within the reach of most libraries. most organizations solicit annual donations via letters, emails, brochures, newsletters, websites, or phone banks, which means the solicitation itself is often somewhat impersonal, or at least less personalized. major gifts—and each organization decides on its own what qualifies as a major gift—are the ones you solicit in person. some people are capable of making major gifts annually, but the typical major gift is unique, such as a large, one-time sponsorship of a program or a room. often, a lot of people are involved in cultivating this gift—remember, donors like to be insiders—but the solicitation itself should generally be made by whoever is at the top of the organizational hierarchy, perhaps accompanied by a peer or fellow donor. planned giving is the umbrella term for bequests, annuities, and trusts—all ways that people who don’t think of themselves as wealthy can make substantial contributions to organizations whose work they want to support. the one most of us know best is bequests, the practice of providing for an organization in your will. it seems like every few months we read about another person who lived frugally and gave no appearance of substantial savings, who surprises everyone by leaving millions to their local library. these are heartwarming stories, and also nice reminders not to make assumptions about who is capable of making major gifts and who is not. but they’re also lost opportunities. i want every library to say thank you to its donors while they’re still alive. if you’re able to foster a culture of planned giving at your library, perhaps by establishing a “society” or annual dinner for people who have provided for the library, you can acknowledge generosity in person and also encourage others to make similar provisions. other ways to get people involved in planned giving, such as encouraging them to establish charitable gift annuities, usually require libraries to partner with community foundations. for instance, donors who set up annuities are making a gift that pays them interest while they’re alive and leaves whatever principle isn’t spent during their lifetimes to an organization they wish to support. finding a community foundation or other partner to guarantee an annuity usually isn’t terribly difficult, and many donors like annuities as investments because the rates are reasonably competitive, especially when coupled with the tax advantages, and they get the satisfaction of knowing they’ve made a potentially large gift to something they care about. the main things holding back most organizations is a lack of knowledge about planned giving, a fear of acknowledging donors’ mortality, and a lack of patience with a fundraising method that, though clearly worthwhile in the long run, may not deliver immediate gratification. it doesn’t have to be all or nothing imagine you’re at the reference desk. a student approaches and says he needs ten authoritative sources for a paper he’s working on. you show him how to use the catalog and he finds two useful sources. “why bother?” he says. “i need ten sources.” undaunted, you show him how to use academic search premier. he finds four good sources. “that won’t work,” he says. “i need ten sources.” so you take him to the bookshelves. you pull the more recent of the two books off the shelf. you show him how to read its bibliography and make interlibrary loan requests for the books and articles that aren’t immediately available. “how long will that take?” he asks. you tell him it might take up to a week. he leaves, convinced that libraries and librarians are a waste of time. i’ve had conversations with librarians about fundraising that felt sort of like this scenario. i would like to tell people that starting a fundraising program today will close their budget gap by december 2010 and provide their community with a new library by may 2012. it might work that way, but that would be atypical. what’s more likely is your fundraising program will build slowly, and at first it may take a lot of time, and it may not be fun, and you might make a mistake or two. you will probably have someone decide not to fund something even though you’ve presented them with a compelling case: great cultivation and cogent solicitations tilt the odds in your favor, but in fundraising there are no guarantees. though in the long term i think it’s worth it. and in the short term, i think fundraising is a lot more fun if you set reasonable expectations for yourself. you are all individuals we all probably have internal lists of the libraries we most admire. some are in wealthy communities, where many people don’t really need the library but love and support it anyway. some are in less affluent communities, where many people wouldn’t have access to information without the library, and grantors do their part to make sure superb library services are available. some are in big cities. others are in small towns. some are independent libraries and some are part of a large system. there are plenty of reasons fundraising might not work at your library, or why you may not want to be part of your library’s fundraising efforts. but there’s probably someone out there with a library a lot like yours, who could have the same reasons you do, but who instead is helping to raise funds and make the library more successful than it would be otherwise. it may not seem worth it at first, but if you work at it steadily, if you refine your own story, you’ll develop your own set of donors and your own unique donor culture. we’re all different, but we’re not that different. if we celebrate those differences, if we give donors plenty of reasons to feel good about supporting us, they’ll respond. thanks to ka-msiyara corbett, and to my lead pipe colleagues derik badman, ellie collier, and emily ford for their helpful comments on this article. my response: that sounds like a very interesting job. here at in the library with the lead pipe, we’ve all become librarians the traditional way: we went to library school and got a masters in library science. that’s certainly not the only way to do it, nor is it a requirement—it just means that any advice we offer is based on a best guess, not on our own experience. here are some resources that might be useful to you: library journal’s recent article, “how to become a librarian” and http://www.becomealibrarian.org/ — both are traditional/get-a-library-degree focused, but both contain good resources for anyone interested in doing library work. sla’s solo librarians division. sla has a pretty good international membership base, and it has created a home for people in the situation you’ll be entering: solo librarianship. ask the question you just asked us on ask metafilter. the metafilter community excels at finding good answers to questions like yours. plus, metafilter is moderated by an unaffiliated librarian who just happens to be one of the smartest people in the field. [↩] cultivation, donations, donors, fundraising, proposals, solicitation, stewardship editorial: conference this! lead pipers compare conference experiences fantasy pricing – an interview with selden lamoureux 5 responses hilary davis 2010–05–14 at 7:38 am brett – excellent article! thanks for sharing your insights about donor relations. i’m passing this on to my colleagues to read as it has such broad appeal. kris alpi 2010–05–14 at 4:02 pm great article – and fun to compare with my current read which is less about every librarian’s involvement and more about library leadership: “more than a thank you note : academic library fundraising for the dean or director” by kimberly thompson. brian mathews 2010–05–17 at 6:49 pm thanks for this brett. great stuff. just passing along: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-great-library-in-the-sky-version-06/5079361 (free download.) but i like how you were very concise. i have such a patron focus, it is very helpful to get into the mind of the donor. brett bonfield 2010–05–18 at 11:35 am brian, thanks for the compliment and for mentioning adam’s book. we worked together at penn for several years, and he agreed to be one of the reviewers for a draft of this article. unfortunately, i had email issues at exactly the wrong time and wasn’t able to get the piece to him in time for him to review it. ellie 2010–05–19 at 6:57 pm thanks brett. i particularly like the student scenario about expectations. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct tryin’ to get my mojo workin’ – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 7 jul emily ford /14 comments tryin’ to get my mojo workin’ muddy waters, can you help me get my mojo working? by emily ford i have a problem. several months ago i realized i’d lost my librarian mojo and since that time i’ve been struggling to reclaim it. being the person that i am, i have been hyper-analyzing my mojo loss. i have been disenchanted at work, feeling weary and dissatisfied, and yet, it feels like it’s all out of my control. this (perhaps self-indulgent) post is a reflection on my personal struggle to understand what is my librarian mojo, and what can i do to keep it going and get it back when it appears to have gone missing. first, let me take a moment to describe what i mean by librarian mojo. mojo is pretty, clear, defined by the oxford english dictionary online as: “magical power, voodoo, the art of casting spells; a charm or talisman used in casting such spells. more generally, esp. in recent use: a power, force, or influence of any kind (often with sexual connotations). freq. attrib. and in to have (also get) one’s mojo working (chiefly fig. and allusive).” (accessed 6/21/10. thanks, multnomah county library!) thanks to popular culture we might immediately think of austin powers when we think of mojo, or maybe the book by marshall goldsmith that was published last year. (i heard it was decent, though haven’t had a chance to read it yet.) and of course there is an entry in the urban dictionary for mojo. but what does mojo have to do with being a librarian? think about it. librarians have bags of tricks or spells that we cast about. a trick might be our ability to find that book, in the way we are able to perform a reference interview, in the charm of checking out books to people and sharing information. we have the power to arm people with information and do so easily and quickly. we know how to think critically. we know how to teach, we are expert searchers, we have resilience and passion. so what happened that made me feel like i didn’t have my mojo, any more? i still had the same skills the same training, education and experience, but what had happened? there had been a course of events, some of which were beyond my control, that led to my dissatisfaction, frustration, and burnout at work. this loss of mojo was pretty startling for me. i am 30 years old and i have only held my mls for 3 years. if you do any research on the topic you will find a plethora of work written on burnout in libraries and job satisfaction. there’s also a wealth of work written about failure, mistakes, and job satisfaction outside our small world of libraries. i can’t tackle all the knowledge out there, but you’ll find some some articles listed below as further reading. just know that they’re only the tip of the iceberg. systems failure and mojo we are dependent on systems. we depend on systems as simple as work schedules to those as complicated as databases and other high-tech implementations. as technologies evolve our subsequent dependence on those technologies grows. our dependence on systems makes us more vulnerable to systems failure that is beyond our control and a potential subsequent loss of mojo. when i first started working at my current place of employ i was hired to work on a project called oregon health go local. i’d spent two years working on this project when the project sponsor, the national library of medicine, announced it would be phasing out all go local projects. (you may recall that part of this work inspired a previous post of mine about outreach.) this is a great example of a systems or tool failure. the fact that go local databases would no longer exist is the loss of a countless hours of work by libraries and librarians all over the united states. it was not that the nlm made a bad decision. in fact, the nlm made the right decision based on their extensive analysis of go local projects (imho), but it was a decision that affected me and numerous other individuals. a project to which i had dedicated a lot of work and energy failed. but projects end and i was surprisingly okay with the discontinuation of oregon health go local. even though i was okay with the end of the project, it still called into question my librarian mojo. power outages are another good example of a systems failure. without power you have no online tools, no lights to even read the red books (lcsh subject headings in print) or your call number cheat sheet, and maybe, as guy robertson (2004) points out in his article “lights out! dealing with power outages in your library,” the library emergency flashlight might have been misplaced. what librarian mojo do we have when we rely on technologies, even if it is the lights? think about this in a different context. who are librarians and what power do librarians have to help a patron find print material without the catalog? say i had a patron who was looking for a book about diabetic foot problems. without walking through the stacks, one aisle at a time, i would be at a loss to find this kind of item. why? because i rely on the electronic catalog to help me navigate subject headings. i rely on the tools of our profession to practice my librarian mojo. my charm is that i understand how to find out that books on diabetes are shelved with the other wk835 books, not that i know that books on diabetes are shelved there. i rely on tools that operate beyond my immediate control, to practice that librarian mojo. a lot of my mojo relies on the tools i use every day. (and what does this say about our librarian identities?) while a power outage or catalog downtime is certainly not the be all end all problem, i think it points to technology and tool dependence that can negatively effect librarian mojo. the fact is, my librarian mojo has come to be dependent on the tools i use, not the skills i have. it’s a lot harder to wield my mighty skills set without the tools. and when these tools fail, i feel like i’ve failed, and, my librarian mojo suffers. it’s not that every time a little problem occurs i experience a complete loss of mojo. librarians, by nature, are great problem solvers and find great work-arounds. it’s that all of the little failures and mistakes can build up, and after a time it can start affecting us negatively, if we let it. library and librarian tools that enable me to use my mojo are mostly proprietary. at work i rely on commercial software developers and commercial vendor products. i find it incredibly frustrating, that using proprietary tools like an ils, a collection development tool, or a research database can put my mojo out of my hands. try contacting a database vendor to ask why something is broken and to get it fixed? when it’s not working i can’t wield my mighty mojo to help patrons find that article or do that search, and my librarian mojo doesn’t allow me to fix the database myself or have a colleague do it. i think it would help if we were able to be some of these providers ourselves. we need to have library programmers on library staff to assist in being less dependent on commercial products that can hinder our librarian mojo. (brett wrote about this a while back.) we see this commercial dependence even more in collection development, purchasing and licensing. what happens to the mojo of librarians when libraries can no longer pay the rising costs of journal subscriptions and are possibly falling victim to unethical library vendors? for example, the university of california  is having trouble with the pricing of nature publishing group publications. due to these issues the university may conduct a boycott of the publisher, thereby not providing access to highly used titles. what’s going to happen to librarian mojo when libraries no longer have the money to buy the tools that enable us to do our jobs? meredith farkas makes the distinction that via consortia we might be able to fight for more ethical practices from our vendors. but i wonder if relying on vendors is really the end solution. can we not be tool creators and providers at the same time? certainly not with budgets that allocate for collections and tools over personnel. we need programmers and technologies that we don’t have. what excites me about librarianship is to advocate for people and groups who need advocates. i want to provide and make accessible as much information as possible, and commercial and tool dependence hinder me from doing as much as i want. because of libraries’ commercial dependence and shrinking budgets i can’t do as much i would like. i feel frustrated and disheartened by the behemoth issues that face libraries and that hinder me from doing my best. i didn’t become a librarian to overcome seemingly insurmountable barriers, i became a librarian to help people. despite all of these possible systems failures, personal frustrations, and mojo-loss inducing situations, failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. andy burkhardt thinks we’re experts at it. from failure we can learn to improve. in his recent article being wrong and learning from “partial success” walt crawford (2010) discusses failure. he points out that we hate to talk about them and admit to our failures. but talking about and studying failure is necessary. lisa german (2009) suggests in her piece about project management no one plans to fail, they fail to plan, that if you fail it’s because you didn’t plan well enough. i disagree. mostly. (bp’s recent gulf oil dilemma certainly points to a failure to plan.) i agree more with daniel chudnov (2008), who, in his article failure is always an option, argues that failure is normal and should be embraced. moreover, he stresses that we should plan on failing. for example, i could keep a call number cheat sheet at the reference desk for those times when the catalog is down or the power is out. i could download a flashlight app or worldcat app to my phone. i could also work on recognizing when my mojo is being affected and try to reign it back to the positive side. at some point we will make mistakes and we will fail at something. but when do we need to have contingency plans? that’s the whole concept behind disaster planning. but do we do it as much for our tools as we do for our buildings and physical materials? where i work we have a group that’s looking at contingency planning for access to e-resources in the event of a disaster. another example of small systems failure is when an e-book isn’t accessible. just this morning i assisted a patron in requesting a print copy of an e-book that wasn’t working via our library consortium. if this had failed i would have helped the patron fill out an interlibrary loan request. small failures like this are easy to work around. when we can problem solve and when we can have contingency plans in place we can diminish the blow of the failure. still, when added up small everyday systems failures can have great impact on our librarian mojo. that inner mojo and getting it back (or, a lot of it is in your head.) most of the time systems failure is out of our control, but how we react to those failures and our general inner mojo is not. a while back ellie wrote a terrific review of the book how we decide by jonah lehrer. in it she provides examples about lehrer’s insights regarding the balance between emotion and rationality. essentially, how we think about failure can have a lot to do with our mojo. in my case it wasn’t just the end of one project or one system failure that resulted in my mojo loss. as is often the case it was a number of things happening all at once. things at work were frustrating. i wasn’t liking my day to day work, i didn’t feel that any of my idealism about libraries and librarianship were being tapped or utilized. i didn’t feel like i was learning or affecting my community positively, the major project on which i had spent close to 2 years of my professional life had ended in failure, and this all culminated into a ball of the work blahs. i had lost my mojo. part of my blahs had to do with the disillusionment about libraries and professional work life in general. when i started working i was ready, fresh-faced, young, naive, excited, and full of ideas. after a few years of too many meetings, too much university bureaucracy, budget cuts, unstable temporary employment, and oregon health go local’s phase out i felt burned out and mojo-less. basically, i let it get to me. and come to find out anitra steele (2009) mentions that “new librarians are perhaps at a higher risk of burnout than veteran coworkers. one article states this is because idealistic expectations and practice do not often coincide.” but i love being a librarian and i don’t want to stop being one. i love that i have the education and skills that i mentioned at the beginning of this post (critical thinking, etc.). i just want my mojo back. and no one’s going to give it to me, so i’ve got to take ownership of my librarian mojo. i’ve got to start thinking differently. i’ve got to find pro-active solutions. so what have i done to attempt to reclaim it? first, i went on ala connect’s mentor connect (a portal within ala connect that lets mentors and mentees find each other) and requested some mentorship and advice. my mentor helped me think about what i want from librarianship, what kind of librarian i want to be, and helped me think about what actions i could take to work toward that goal. when i expressed an interest to pursue academic library work at a more general university or at a community college rather than at a health sciences institution, my mentor encouraged me to seek out professional development opportunities that would fulfill my professional needs in this area and make me an attractive job candidate for future opportunities. in this vein i decided to remain active in ala and cut back on my involvement in health sciences by not renewing memberships in health sciences library organizations when they are due. i’ve also been going through a subconscious ritual of daily affirmations at work. (i’m being serious.) i have taped to my computer monitor at work a note from a co-worker (written to me in a meeting when she knew i was losing my mojo). it says, “don’t worry–it’s not just you. we know how good you are!” i went on vacation during which i read books for pleasure, spent time with friends and my partner, and was even out of cell phone and e-mail range. i went to ala annual where i got inspired about librarianship by talking to inspiring people and gaining a more whole library perspective than my niche in a medical school setting. i was able to chat with librarians who work in public libraries, community college libraries, small private college libraries, and this year’s class of emerging leaders. i attended programs that were of interest to me such as the google book search settlement panel, and the open access debate. i attended library advocacy day and met with my state representatives to talk about issues facing libraries. these experiences re-energized me and reminded me why i became a librarian. and the biggest thing of all is that just the other day, (july 1st), i started a new job description and dropped my work hours to half-time. instead of working as a reference librarian, i am now scholarly communication librarian. i’ll be working with the research faculty and students to provide education about the nih public access policy, issues in open access, publishing, and author rights. these new duties will enable me to be more involved with why i wanted to be a librarian in the first place: to advocate for something about which i’m passionate– equitable and open access to information. i am lucky to have this luxury– to be able to afford to work half-time– and the leadership in my library supports this change. working half-time will enable me to re-discover hobbies like riding my bike, gardening, cooking, and learning book arts. it will enable me to come to work refreshed and be able to have that mojo that i need to do a good job. feeling like a whole person has a lot to do with my librarian mojo and this is going to be the best solution for me to get my mojo working again. my mojo’s not all the way back, but what i’m going to do from here on out is really celebrate my accomplishments like robert moran (2009) suggests in what a great place to work!. i will find the things that i find fulfilling about library work and concentrate on them. i’m going to frame my degrees and hang in them in my office at work to remind myself why i’m a librarian, and aim to work towards being what i want to be. i’m going to read books like how we decide, and mindset: the new psychology of success and learn about peter drucker’s work (whom kim mentioned a while back) to try to learn how to keep failures from affecting my mojo. finally, i’m going to concentrate on that feeling described by one of my pals as “the moment when you remember what it’s like to be you when you’re happy again.” so, dear readers. have you ever lost your librarian mojo? have you experienced burnout? what caused it and how did you handle it? extra special thanks to laura zeigen, ellie collier, and miriam rigby for providing thoughtful feedback on this post. citations and further readings: chudnov, d. (2008). failure is always an option. computers in libraries 28(10), 20-22. crawford, w. (2010). being wrong and learning from “partial success.” online 34(3), 57-59. dweck, c. s. (2006). mindset: the new psychology of success. new york: random house. german, l. (2009). no one plans to fail, they fail to plan: the importance of structured project planning. technicalities 29(3), 6-9. lehrer, j. (2009). how we decide. boston: houghton mifflin harcourt. leysen, j. & boydston, j. (2009). job satisfaction among academic cataloger librarians. college & research libraries 70(3), 273-97. moran, r. (2009). what a great place to work! library leadership and management 23(1), 47-48. reiter, m., & goldsmith, m. (2009). mojo: how to get it, how to keep it, how to get it back if you lose it. new york: hyperion. robertson. g. (2004). lights out! dealing with power outages in your library. feliciter 50(4), 156-158. steele, a. (2009). flying with the phoenixes: avoiding job burnout as a librarian and manager. children’s librarianship 7(3), 51-52. burnout, mojo, wellness, workplace wellness the fiske report librarians as __________: shapeshifting at the periphery. 14 responses derik badman 2010–07–07 at 7:32 am “try contacting a database vendor to ask why something is broken and to get it fixed?” as a (recent) member of the evil vendor side of the world, i’ll say that it doesn’t have to be as bad as it is with most vendors. most of them just seem to have lost (if they ever had it) a concept of service, which, in a world of open source options, is what they should be focusing. in my company, you contact us with an issue, and we’ll fix it, often in the same day. also, i always found it very helpful to have a certain conception outside of the tools. knowing the organization of if not all the subjects at least those of relevance to my work was very helpful. i don’t think i had time to lose my mojo. i unexpectedly (and positively) switched jobs before i really got to that point. it is interesting the thematic connections between this and kim’s recent post. are we having a collective crisis of identity? emily ford 2010–07–07 at 8:15 am i’ve heard wonderful things about where you work, derik. i agree that a lot of vendors don’t have a good service model but i certainly acknowledge that there are those that do. i think my point was that after a while all of these things can get me down-including trying to get our tools to workand a lot of it has to do with mindset, too. maybe my mindset should be to work toward pushing vendors to have service models that work for libraries. i guess it seems like such an issue that i feel helpless in tackling it. or i’m concentrating too much on the negatives. (always a possibility.) derik badman 2010–07–07 at 1:13 pm i think there’s a certain feeling of futility that librarian’s have in relation to vendors. yet, aren’t they the customers? the people sending money in? i think this came in a previous post (or maybe a few) how librarians need to demand certain things from the people they are sending money to. for many many libraries that’s going to be a more possible course of action than going open source or hiring their own programmers. this is probably something ala should be doing more of. wielding the collective consumer might of the librarians in the association. phil 2010–07–07 at 9:30 pm two things (to begin): if you don’t believe what you’re doing is worthwhile, then you’re going to lose your mojo. if you do believe that and you’re still losing your mojo, then you’re either working for people who under-appreciate you, working for people who appreciate you but don’t realize that you’d like for them to acknowledge it once in a while, or frustrated that the people you’re serving under-appreciate you or fail to see that you’d like a little recognition now and then. i’m burnt out, too. for me, it’s a multi-faceted thing: 1) i think management are mis-managing the library and that their priorities are way out of whack (i.e. obsession with cosmetic improvements and little concern for substance/quality), 2) i get little to no feedback from my superiors (and while some people don’t need that, i actually like a little bit of “keep up the good work” now and then), and 3) i’m frustrated with the way our society undervalues libraries (though if that’s anyone’s fault, it’s ours). the first issue i can’t do much about. the employees here have unionized to fight for our benefits and such, but we don’t really have a say in the day-to-day operations/non-wageand benefit-related policy-making/mission formulation, so what the fuck do i do? the second issue i can’t do much about beyond moaning about it in this here comment. the third i can do a little about, though i could do a lot more if i were admin or management. i work in a public library. i think we should be fostering social discourse, serving as a community space, showing the community how the library can be a hub of discourse and learning, where issues of relevance to the community (e.g. economic and political) can be discussed and debated, etc. we do make some efforts in that direction, but i’d love to see those efforts amped up a hell of a lot more. i mean, honestly, the onus is on us to convince all taxpayers of our value to the community and society at-large. if we fail to provide something for everyone beyond access to free popular dvds (and books) and services to the small portion of the population with children, then we’ve failed and have little grounds to complain when taxpayers at-large vote to cut our funding. anyway, just a bit of a rant that i share from time to time. yeah, i could continue to beat my head against the proverbial wall, but that just leads to more despair and diminished mojo. but, in all seriousness, if libraries don’t get their asses in gear, we’re going to continue to see our funding cut and worse. as such, i’m hoping people like you (and me) end up in positions of power sooner rather than later because far too many of the people in power are far too content with the status quo. emily ford 2010–07–08 at 11:28 am i agree that management issues can have a lot to do with mojo. maybe not being challenged by a manager or assisted in the ways that one needs assistance (acknowledgement, as you mention, or proper training, or the push to get out there and do good things) also has something to do with it? what you’re saying in the second part about making sure the public knows our worth and our resources a big yes! advocacy with legislators, but also informing our communities would help a lot. but it’s hard. what is effective? how do we get the word out? and, how can we work up the chain to make some pro-active changes into the management positions when we have no mojo to get there? jean costello 2010–07–13 at 6:31 am hi phil – i’m a patron library blogger and love your idea about public libraries becoming a hub of discourse. i so need it and would bet a lot of other citizens feel that way too. i wrote a post about it last week, in why i give a damn about public libraries. library director michael baldwin also called for it in 2002 in can libraries save democracy. phil 2010–07–18 at 9:31 pm thanks, jean. what i need to do is get off of my duff and write up something formal. maybe itlwtlp would have me? kim leeder 2010–07–21 at 4:29 pm hey, sure phil. all are welcome to submit a guest post! https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/submission-guidelines/ kat burlingame 2010–07–07 at 9:39 pm what an honest and insightful post, emily. i believe we graduated from school at the same time and i as well have felt my faith faltering a bit as of late. i’m in a slightly more dire position though, since my grant funding is running out and i’m back on the job market. nothing is more disillusioning than a dearth of jobs and the attendant swell of applicants…i almost feel at times that i’ve hitched my wagon to a dying star. i’m impressed and encouraged with how proactively you’ve dealt with your situation and your stalwart commitment to the library community. at the same time, would it be entirely heretical to urge for some clemency towards the failings of the commercial world? in between various official librarianship events last month, i attended a local idea sharing festival for technologists and media entrepreneurs. sure i was a bit out of place, but i was also inspired by the energy, creativity, and bravery of this community. i love the transparency and consensus driven, collaborative ethos of librarians but i also wish that didn’t have to come at the cost of innovation, speed, and guts. too often i feel as though the library community dismisses new ideas, systems, and products as “too sexy” only to reluctantly adopt them once they hit mainstream and become de rigueur in the user community. ultimately, i guess i just don’t like the “us” and “them” mentality. i agree with derik…all interests should be mutually beneficial in the end…ask (or demand) and ye shall receive. anyway, just thought i’d chime in. congratulations on your new job and so very sorry we didn’t get to meet up in dc! emily ford 2010–07–08 at 11:30 am thanks, kat. i have pondered whether i might be better suited working for a company, to tell you the truth. it seems like i’d actually be able to “git ‘er done” in that kind of environment rather than waiting for large bureaucratic beasts like academic libraries and ala to get the ball rolling on new ideas. and i do agree also, that companies, which create products for libraries, can be a good thing. i just think too often the model is skewed. there are good examples and good relationships out there. africker 2010–07–08 at 4:49 am i already knew the classmark for diabetic foot without the need for electronic support. readers love it when they mention a topic / title and you immediately know where it will be. at least that is what i tell myself – that shaking head may be of fear rather than of amazement. emily ford 2010–07–08 at 11:32 am that’s great that you knew that without electronic support. i haven’t been in the field long enough to have learned it, or had enough reference transactions to commit it to memory. do you have a cheat sheet? africker 2010–07–12 at 7:32 am we have a quick nlm guide stuck to the wall by the books though i doubt it would go down to diabetic foot level! there was a lovely sequence of strips in unshelved when the catalogue went down http://www.unshelved.com/2003-8-26 i am not this bad. rt 2010–07–19 at 2:07 am it’s never a bad idea to quote the wisdom of the philosopher mckinley morganfield. i work in a special library. i am the only librarian in my organization, so i sometimes need to explain to people what i do and why it’s valuable. not long after i read this article, i got a note from a top manager who is retiring. he said my work is valuable and that i am good at it. that’s always nice to hear and should keep me going for some months! such a little thing, but few managers do it. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct on the ala membership pyramid – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 15 oct emily ford /44 comments on the ala membership pyramid all gizah pyramids. photo by flickr user ricardo liberato c/o “…i [sic] only renew [my ala membership] out of a sense of professional obligation, and also because of the fear that i’ll [sic] put it on my resume and get busted as not being a member.” –c-dog by emily ford membership in the american library association means professionals are bound together by the tenets of librarianship. technically, this means we commit to these tenets in the form of dues payable to ala. being a recent library school graduate i am new to ala membership as well as organizational involvement. however, i find that the previous statement points to perils inherent within ala that could, if not addressed, lead to the organization’s downfall. this is not a problem that has gone unnoticed by many within the organization. this year, i was part of the ala emerging leaders program–a program intended to create more active ala members and participants. in this program six emerging leaders projects centered around membership recruitment and retention issues within ala and its various divisions. other membership and participation initiatives include current ala president jim rettig’s member participation initiative, not to mention the new members round table (nmrt). drawing on my emerging leaders experience, i would like to further examine ala membership structures and provide suggestions that will help to topple this perceived “professional obligation” of ala membership. we need to create an inspired and invested community of librarians and professionals who will feel proud to be an ala member and to serve their organization. in order to understand my suggestions, it’s important i provide some background on the current ala climate and membership. there seem to be three general categories of ala members, in the form of a pyramid. the base level, level 1, consists of those who pay dues and who have minimal investment in ala as a professional organization; the middle and smaller group of individuals, level 2, consists of those who pay dues, attend conferences and are nominally to marginally involved in the organization; and the tip of the pyramid, level 3, consists of those who pay dues, belong to divisions and serve on committees. as i understand it, the shape includes the largest amount of members in level 1 and the fewest amount of members in level 3. the basic problem with current membership and participation initiatives is that they do not target the largest population of ala members, level 1. members in level 1 are those who are most apt to say they are “professionally obligated” to pay their dues. instead of bringing the movement to members, initiatives like the emerging leaders program, jim rettig’s “craigslist of opportunities for members to get involved in ala”  and the nmrt are initiatives that pro-active, motivated individuals will seek out. if we were able to mobilize level 1 ala members by bringing community and participation to them, we could create a larger sense of community investment as a whole and dispel those attitudes of membership as “professional obligation.” over time, this model of community investment would lead to a flattening of the ala membership pyramid—changing the shape of ala membership into one that is a globe of overlapping and active communities. in order to create this membership model, ala, its members and leadership should investigate how to involve level 1 members in association activities and thereby create an organization comprised of a richer and more diverse professional community. the financial membership model of ala creates a certain attitude among members. their investment in the organization is only as important as the amount of their check. instead, ala might consider adopting another membership model that incorporates service to the organization as a stipulation of membership. this is the model of both the national honor society and beta club. requiring members to serve their professional community can only create a stronger community that better represents its largest constituent base. examples of this service might be acting as a guest editor for a portion of american libraries or other journals published by ala divisions, writing op-eds for journals, or otherwise serving ala in capacities, as they are able. changing the parameters of ala membership is something toward which we need to strive. while this service model may not be feasible to adopt for a good many years, there are other issues that we can address more directly. cost is a major deterrent for the increased involvement of many level 1 and level 2 members. paying membership dues to ala and its numerous divisions can be quite expensive. this deters individuals from serving on committees (one must be a member of a division to serve on a committee of that division) and contributing to ala’s general body of work (one must also pay conference registration and travel to serve on committees). new librarians struggle with student loan debt and as a result do not have room in their budgets for personal memberships. they may also work for libraries affected by slashed budgets and national policy decisions and funding practices. in response to these conditions many libraries are no longer able to support their employees’ professional membership costs. this means that individuals must use their personal funds to pay for membership in ala and its divisions. coupled with travel costs to conferences, it is simply financially unfeasible for library professionals to participate on a higher level than they do (even before recent economic collapse). a simple way to make conference attendance and professional development easier for those who cannot afford to travel is to create webcasts of conferences and workshops. we are in the age of virtual conferences and seminars, and they have proven successful. it should plain and simple be the standard that ala conference programs be made accessible virtually. if pricing is an issue, ala might consider creating a price structure for “virtual” attendance to ala conferences. members and their employers would be better able to afford this model of conference attendance and involvement. if ala were truly committed to including level 1 members, then it would create and implement ways for individuals to engage virtually by using a combination of videocasting, chat programs, message boards, and other participatory and collaborative applications. because of their ability to participate in professional programs and conference activities, virtual participants will feel as if they have more stake in ala than they did before. consequently, we will see these members begin to actively seek other avenues of participation with ala. the level 1 ala constituent is not the only constituent that ala should reach and better utilize to create an organization that reflects a community beyond “professional obligation.” there are level 2 participants who attend conferences. the next logical step would be for these members to engage in service opportunities such as sitting on a committee or hosting and presenting at professional programs. one way for ala to show its commitment to these level 2 members would be to mandate a seat on every ala committee for a new member or conference attendee. soliciting member service via ala governance and policy will show that the organization as a whole is committed to the needs of new members, member recruitment and member retention. however, once a member begins to serve ala as a committee member cost can still be an object. for level 2 members to become more engaged and sit on committees this object must be addressed. most ala committees require members to attend two conferences each year. instead of mandating in-person attendance for committee members at both midwinter and annual conferences, shouldn’t we be encouraging the use of those collaborative tools and technologies (chat, wikis, web sharing applications, online conferences, etc.) that we as professionals tout? if ala were to move to a model of mandatory in-person committee participation at one conference a year, costs would be cut in half for committee members, thereby enabling more new professionals to better afford conference attendance and committee participation. conferences themselves need to adopt new models to attract greater participation. in addition to the mix of meetings, presentations and workshops that comprise ala midwinter and annual meetings, hands-on professional service opportunities would enhance conference goers’ experiences. instead of passively sitting in a conference session, librarians and conference attendees could engage in service learning workshops or service challenges. a group of professionals would be tasked to create a body of work to serve the organization or create a professional development tool in one day. the service could be the creation of a new resource guide, a new web portal, or a new best practice statement. whatever the participants created, it would be a piece of professional work as well as enable professionals to network with others in their areas of interest. producing a body of work will be more professionally satisfying to some conference goers, and will give a diversity of participation and service opportunities that will appeal to a larger audience. new members will not be recruited nor will members remain active within ala unless the organization as a whole engages in dialog about how to remain a viable, interesting, and diverse professional community. we need to advocate for and attempt to implement membership model and policy changes within ala. these changes will encourage greater member investments in their organization and help to reshape the ala pyramid into a globally shaped membership that is dedicated to ala’s success. this will make our association a more diverse and stimulating organization of which we can all be proud. we need to think creatively and to create programs and workshops that embrace virtual participation. we need to break the mold of traditional ala membership. the next time you attend a conference or a committee meeting, bring up these issues and ask questions. propose and implement pilot service projects at a conference and publish your successes and challenges. help to create new models of participation and share them with your professional community. the more experimenting we do at a grassroots level the more we are able to best find the models of participation, service, and governance for a sustainable and successful ala. by continuing to adopt these changes in ala, the membership pyramid will eventually flatten and the globally shaped ala membership can form. thank you to kim leeder, jami haskell, and lori shmulewitz for reading several versions of this post. and thank you to my emerging leaders group members, kim leeder and nicole cavallaro; and my emerging leaders project mentors, joseph yue and mary pagliero popp for forcing me to think about these issues. ala, conferences, librarianship, membership, membership model what happens in the library… google, stupidity, and libraries 44 responses erin 2008–10–15 at 12:47 pm hello amy, and thank you for such an organized and valuable post on this topic. i find myself in a situation somewhat similar: a recent graduate struggling with loans as well as career drive. i have been accepted as an emerging leader and look forward to learning more about the inner-workings (for better or for worse) of ala. i would not be able to participate in this opportunity if i had not been selected for financial sponsorship by the pennsylvania library association. i think that local sponsorship is one of the more “grassroots” ways of encouraging affordable participation, although it also has its pros and cons. in particular, i think you hit on two major points in your post: 1. “…shouldn’t we be encouraging the use of those collaborative tools and technologies (chat, wikis, web sharing applications, online conferences, etc.) that we as professionals tout?” exactly! since i began library school, the benefits of these new, web-based technologies have been pounded into my brain. they are some of the things that will allow libraries to remain a relevant and valuable resource in our society. however, ala has not particularly embraced them wholeheartedly, as we can see by the lack of virtual participation avenues. how can we not practice what we preach? 2. “instead of passively sitting in a conference session, librarians and conference attendees could engage in service learning workshops or service challenges.” this would definitely be seen by many attendees as a benefit to attend a conference. more people might be willing to travel if they knew that they would be working on a tangible, sustainable project. a lot of focus is put on networking at conferences, and rightly so. however, meeting new people can only go so far, and may turn as many people off of attending as on. the opportunity to assist in a proactive way would be a clear improvement. again, thank you. i think we all need to be willing to participate in these sorts of discussions. -erin erin 2008–10–15 at 12:49 pm whoops – i meant emily, not amy. my apologies (no idea where i got amy from!). -erin camila alire 2008–10–15 at 3:25 pm hi emily and others — thanks for your posting concerning membership in ala. i would agree that the pyramid structure assessment is pretty accurate. having said that i want to concentrate my response on ala’s efforts to try to get more virtual involvement of the folks in levels 1 and 2. ala council commissioned a task force on e-participation. they have worked hard to address this issue. but, unfortunately, things move slowly within ala governance. the task force’s official report will be out soon. i don’t think there will be anything in it that we weren’t expecting. that is, giving us ways that we can at least maintain and involve our current membership thru more non-traditional, virtual ways as well as recruiting new members. nonetheless, we recognize that 1)we need to get more folks involved, especially the folks new to the profession; 2) we need to do it in ways that resonate with them (e.g. use of latest technology) 3)we need to be mindful of people’s economic situation that prohibits them from attending major conferences and address that; and the list could go on…. i want you all to know that the ala executive board has all of these concerns on our minds, also. but hear this — we hear you! we have heard your concerns from many other folks. we know that we have to stay relevant to folks coming in as new members and members for less than 5 or so years. we know we have to think/act out of the box. don’t give up on ala. we are working on it — but we are such a “process” organization that it is taking more time then we would like to admit. we are beginning to work on my presidential initiative which will concentrate on member-driven advocacy (personal and professional) with the primary intent of reaching out to members in levels 1 and 2 and involving them at their local level. this will take a lot of collaboration with ala state chapters (your state library associations). stay tuned… meanwhile, feel free to send me ideas beyond what was posted in the messages above. thanks for listening…. camila alire ala president-elect http://www.camilaalire.com camila alire 2008–10–15 at 3:46 pm [i am reposting for a better reading format] hi emily and others – thanks for your posting concerning membership in ala. i would agree that the pyramid structure assessment is pretty accurate. having said that i want to concentrate my response on ala’s efforts to try to get more virtual involvement of the folks in levels 1 and 2. ala council commissioned a task force on e-participation. they have worked hard to address this issue. but, unfortunately, things move slowly within ala governance. the task force’s official report will be out soon. i don’t think there will be anything in it that we weren’t expecting. that is, giving us ways that we can at least maintain and involve our current membership thru more non-traditional, virtual ways as well as recruiting new members. nonetheless, we recognize that 1)we need to get more folks involved, especially the folks new to the profession; 2) we need to do it in ways that resonate with them (e.g. use of latest technology) 3)we need to be mindful of people’s economic situation that prohibits them from attending major conferences and address that; and the list could go on…. i want you all to know that the ala executive board has all of these concerns on our minds, also. but hear this — we hear you! we have heard your concerns from many other folks. we know that we have to stay relevant to folks coming in as new members and members for less than 5 or so years. we know we have to think/act out of the box. don’t give up on ala. we are working on it — but we are such a “process” organization that it is taking more time then we would like to admit. we are beginning to work on my presidential initiative which will concentrate on member-driven advocacy (personal and professional) with the primary intent of reaching out to members in levels 1 and 2 and involving them at their local level. this will take a lot of collaboration with ala state chapters (your state library associations). stay tuned… meanwhile, feel free to send me ideas beyond what was posted in the messages above. thanks for listening…. camila alire ala president-elect http://www.camilaalire.com ryan johnson 2008–10–15 at 4:30 pm emily your comments have touched a nerve that has often caused me to climb up on a soap box and shout. i will attempt to avoid such polemics. over the past ten or so years that i have belonged to ala i have often felt that the organization operated for the benefit of the organization rather than that of the members. mandatory attendance at a business meeting (midwinter) may have been essential to the proper functioning of the organization in the past, but with modern communication technology it strikes me primarily as a source of organizational revenue rather than serving any functional purpose. my other primary pet peeve is mandatory membership in ala is participate in/belong to acrl, rusa, pla etc. i have belonged to the american historical association, the society of historians of american foreign relations, and the american association for history and computing off and on over the past two decades and at no time was my participation in one dependent on the other. ala’s membership structure increases organizational membership and revenue at the top while hampering the more specialized and, in my opinion, more professionally significant and interesting organizations from adding and developing younger members. i understand that ala leadership talks a good game, i unfortunately, am not a true believer. i am also not alone in my unbelief and i suspect that the number of heretics is growing. these are issues that must be addressed but i am afraid that they will continue to fall on deaf ears in the name of organizational inertia. megan hodge 2008–10–15 at 4:48 pm you wrote: “if pricing is an issue, ala might consider creating a price structure for “virtual” attendance to ala conferences.” i agree; as a library school student currently working in a paraprofessional position in a small academic library, i: 1) don’t receive funding from my library to attend since i am not in a professional position and 2) don’t have the funds myself to attend conferences on the other side of the country. arguably the demographic most in need of the networking offered at conferences is students–yet we are perhaps the ones least able to afford going! while presentations and poster sessions would transfer well to the virtual format, i don’t know about networking virtually on as large a scale as midwinter/annual. i will be interested to see how that plays out. you also state that, ideally, “over time, this model of community investment would lead to a flattening of the ala membership pyramid—changing the shape of ala membership into one that is a globe of overlapping and active communities.” i am curious as to how, logistically, getting level 1 ala members as involved as level 3 members would work, considering there are tens of thousands of librarians/library staff in ala (and even more who aren’t members) and only so many committees to be appointed to and library journals to edit/write for. you’ve raised a number of excellent points here and i look forward to attending my first virtual ala conference! laura z 2008–10–15 at 6:59 pm i like your ideas here, particularly the following, some of which others have already mentioned: 1. webcasts! yes, let’s use technology to lower costs and increase access. 2. lower costs! yes, even before the current economic downturn, but especially now. 3. projects! professional things we can sink our teeth into (and share on our cv’s). for this, i might actually tote my body to a physical conference. so, if the structure changes to something flatter does it go from being an ala pyramid to an ala pancake? derik badman 2008–10–15 at 7:39 pm i agree with a number of the comments in here, particular what ryan had to say about mandatory memberships and organizational revenue. a few other things: 1) i guess i’m in level 3 of your schema. i went to both conferences this year and i’m on two committees right now, but honestly, my alienation from ala has never been greater. my conference experience was one of fun socializing and a general sense of malaise at the wasted committee time and unengaging programs (maybe i picked the wrong ones). 2) the one committee i’m on, while having no official “virtual” members, did have unofficial ones. at both midwinter and annual different members skyped-in to our meeting via one of the committee head’s laptops. it worked decently, considering it was slightly ad hoc, though in the end, i’m not sure we did anything in person that a virtual group chat couldn’t have accomplished. 3) how useful would service projects be beyond making people feel like they are participating? project ideas would have to be carefully, thoughtfully, and creatively generated. to me, it seemed like a great number of the emerging leaders project this year (projects created by the various divisions and sections in ala) were often redundant (of each other and already existing projects either in ala or in the wider community) or useless, as if projects were created just to fill a quota to have enough for all the el group members to do. 4) often i get the feeling a lot of ala work is some kind of enclosed self-perpetuating machine, generating energy and reams of paper/websites solely for the purpose of generating more energy and reams of paper/websites. 5) if i take a moment to think, “what has ala done for me in the time i’ve been paying dues,” i can’t come up with a clear example other than the conferences serving as a social gathering to make new friends. maybe ala needs a promotional program to answer that question (that is, have members answer that question). emily ford 2008–10–15 at 9:31 pm there are so many things to respond to here! thanks to all who gave my post time, thought, and response. i want to first respond to megan’s comment about membership structure and flattening the pyramid. my idea for a globally shaped ala is, indeed, ideal. in fact, i don’t think a complete flattening of a membership pyramid is possible. (maybe an hour glass or column is a better shape to invoke?) in an organization as large as ala there will always be hierarchical power/membership structures wherein those at the top–level 3 in this paradigm– will dictate the organization’s governance and evolution. however, if one considers what it means to create a movement, or to mobilize a constituency, the power is in the greatest number. hence, my concentration on the level 1 folks. another reason i think we need to be concentrating on level 1 membership and participation initiatives is because this level, the disheartened, will challenge the ala far more than those who have already be active within the organization and have learned to navigate it. i think ala needs this challenge to move forward and start to break down some of the bureaucracy that helped created these attitudes in the first place. now. on to ryan. it strikes me primarily as a source of organizational revenue rather than serving any functional purpose. i agree. ala needs to come up with ways to remain financially viable. this is why i suggested a model of service to the organization as part of a membership package. yes, service might only be to sustain the organization, but it would be a better model than hiking up membership and conference registration costs. ala has become too big for its own good. and thank to you camila for taking the time to respond with a thoughtful comment! don’t give up on ala. we are working on it — but we are such a “process” organization that it is taking more time then we would like to admit. how can we examine and eradicate this “process” that seems to inhibit ala growth on a large scale? it seems to me that most of my disenchantment with ala stem from the bureaucracy and hierarchical power structures inherent within the organization. as a leader what do you think people like myself, who are involved and are on committees, can do to change these problems? and finally, derik. you have said many things that i thought and couldn’t get down, so thanks. 3) how useful would service projects be beyond making people feel like they are participating? project ideas would have to be carefully, thoughtfully, and creatively generated. to me, it seemed like a great number of the emerging leaders project this year (projects created by the various divisions and sections in ala) were often redundant (of each other and already existing projects either in ala or in the wider community) or useless, as if projects were created just to fill a quota to have enough for all the el group members to do. yes! a service model might take many different paths. one that i was considering was at conferences having a service challenge that directly affected the local community hosting the conference. for example, in anaheim could we have not done something to serve the libraries and community of southern california? just because we’re librarians doesn’t mean we can’t band together and help build a habitat house, or something of that nature. a service challenge might also be for a group to create curriculum, handouts, and other teaching tools for instruction librarians to use when they return home. this kind of service challenge would help to create something more hands on to participate in at conferences while still using a librarian’s skills, knowledge and abilities. 1) i guess i’m in level 3 of your schema. i went to both conferences this year and i’m on two committees right now, but honestly, my alienation from ala has never been greater. my conference experience was one of fun socializing and a general sense of malaise at the wasted committee time and unengaging programs (maybe i picked the wrong ones). i think i’m in level 3, too, and this scares me. after anaheim and having some very negative experiences (in our day long el workshop as well as trying to show up to a committee meeting to which i had been newly appointed and being the only one who showed) i feel incredibly alienated from the organization. something will have to change right quick for me to continue my involvement with ala. aaron the librarian 2008–10–16 at 9:46 am hooboy, there’s a lot of stuff to support and respond to in this post and its replies… i’m going to go bare-brained and on the fly to start in this reply, but this may take a series of posts on aaron the librarian to fully support/respond/expand on all this. 1. yay! another long, thoughtful post about how methods of ala participation need to change *and soon* 2. your three-tiered model of ala members may need a fourth (and possibly a fifth) tier: tier four — potential member-participants who are daunted/turned off by the monolithic appearance of “big ala” (the mothership as i think kgs (among others) has called it); and possibly tier five — people who have been completely turned off from ala (former members as well as people who would never consider joining, for whatever reason from resistance to “the establishment” to a complete dislike for bureaucracy. 3. effective “electronic participation” (as it is quaintly termed at the moment) is coming (no really, not kidding this time) it’s in final alpha or finally beta as i type this (i just requested having my user account activated as beta account in ala connect) see the ala itts update blog for more details. yep, this is getting long — i now have “write series of blog posts about this post” on my “to do today” list — so i’ll go organize & then write in support of many of emily’s points here and offer my observations of “what’s going on in ala” about several of them… but first, must go do my “day job” *sigh* :) -aaron the librarian ala gadabout & councilor at large and councilor at large candidate again in 2009! dan c 2008–10–16 at 4:20 pm first off, it’s not just new librarians who are struggling with student loans. we don’t exactly hop into jobs that immediately wipe us out of debt in this profession. i tend to be more sla focused than ala, as i find more that speaks to my actualy day-to-day job. sla does a good job with online learning intiatives, and, from what i can tell, many folks go to the conference mainly to network & schmooze as well as talk to the vendors. for many people, the presentations/committees are time consuming (often triple booked) and usually not worth it. if ala worked on making the conference experience more of a worthwhile community networking event (and less expensive as we’re then not paying for all the speakers and a/v eqiupment) i think more people might enjoy it. naive newbie 2008–10–16 at 10:01 pm notice: disenter in your midst! now, as a current grad student in the mlis program, i’m able to relate to the discourse regarding high prices limiting involvement in ala and it’s numerous divisions and committees. i tried desperately to be able to justify and fund a trip to yalsa’s first conference in tennessee, to no avail. needless to say, i’ll be staying at home that weekend. however, i am unable to completely agree or commit to several of your evaluations. 1. even if i am unable to attend the conferences, i still gain some significant benefits, including the e-mail newsletter american libraries direct, and the mailed monthly periodical. maybe that’s just because i’m still in school, and have other idealistic and naive classmates to share them with. i recognize that this could probably be seen as an argument towards the increasing feasibility of virtual membership, but i consider it justification for my membership dues. 2. second, i am however attending my state library association’s conference. while it hasn’t occurred yet, this is one of the highlights of my year, being able to network with professionals, meet librarians from all over the state, and gather ideas that i might be able to implement in the library where i am employed, either now or after i graduate. in a profession where we are constantly consumed with the idea that we don’t get to network enough, i doubt that becoming names on a screen will allow for that same opportunity. 3. i find it also a hinderance to encouraging involvement by limiting meetings to online interaction. yes, we are supposed to be at the forefront of technological advances. that’s not the case in every instance, and i feel it would be a penalty to not only those who do not have the training (i just learned what skype was a few months ago, and have still yet to use it), but also those loyal members who have been with the organization and the profession for years. 4. some of us just don’t have time to be involved in committee work or service projects at this time. some us are working full time and going to school full time. others of us have family obligations. there are only so many hours in the day. why should we be forced to participate in an organization that, whether we admit it or not, we might have joined for the benefits and recognition and the possibilities of opportunities that we know will be there when we’re ready and able to take advantage of them? i’d rather wait just another year or two when i feel confident in my contributions then just serving a committee to be able to fulfill a required obligation. 5. plus, when else would we have an excuse to do library book cart drill team events? i see the videos on youtube.com, and i want to see them in person, and maybe one day participate. when else would we get free stuff from vendors? and when else would we have an excuse to talk shop with other libraries? and, if we did away with physical meetings, how would your idea of service centered meetings be implemented? in essence, don’t take that away from me! these are my ever evolving thoughts. lisa kurt 2008–10–17 at 1:06 am i just wanted to say that i do agree with a lot of the points made regarding ala and why i am a membermostly for the basic membership. i think one point that could be drawn out slightly more is the fact that ala is so big and trying to be so many things to so many different people. i found in the past two ala annual conferences i went to that there were not enough relevant sessions for me. also many of the sessions i was interested in conflicted timewise. consider this, there are other organizations that are more specific to the area of librarianship that i work in. and in order for me to serve and get involved on committees with those organizations i need only to pay one membership fee and attend one conference – that’s it. most coordinating and organizing happens virtually via email and conference call. the upshot on top of that is i attend a conference that’s more targeted toward me and my work. i’m a relatively new librarian. that said, i need to learn as much as possible, find out best practices and practical information from other librarians in my specific field of librarianship. it’s really important to me that most of the sessions i attend – i will walk away with something to take away and bring back to my institution and/or in my job. the bottom line is, i don’t know that ala could do anything to make me change my mind– there are a lot of other conferences that are way more relevant to the work i do and yes i only get so much support from my institution so i have to choose wiselyi think we all do. i tend to choose organizations that not only i can contribute to but that by being part of that organizationit also benefits me in a very direct and focused manner. now i know that not everyone feels that way and some do feel like serving on an ala committee such as nmrt is directly relevant to their workunfortunately that kind of committee just doesn’t for me. again, i know that there may be other ala committees that might be more relevant but then i’m back having to pay more for the added divisions and in order to serve on a committeei’m stuck going to two conferences a year. lynda reynolds 2008–10–17 at 9:43 am emily, it’s great to hear your thoughts on ala and to see how well you are doing in your profession! congrats on being an emerging leader for ala. we are fortunate to have you in the profession! i attend only pla conferences for 2 reasons: 1) i only have to attend every other year-easier to convince the powers that be for funding; and 2) it is so much more relevant to my job as a public library director. in the past when i have attended ala (dallas and new orleans) i was overwhelmed and lost and not sure i got much of out it. the most recent pla conference in minneapolis had programs available virtually. while i attended the actual conference, several other librarians from stillwater paid to attend virtually and really enjoyed it. that is definitely the way to go for ala as well. derik badman 2008–10–19 at 4:32 pm newbie, a few quick replies to one of your comments: “in a profession where we are constantly consumed with the idea that we don’t get to network enough, i doubt that becoming names on a screen will allow for that same opportunity.” that’s a severe reduction of virtual interaction. i’ve got more to say on this in an upcoming post, but i think the nature of online/virtual interaction has changed drastically over the years. we are considerably more than names on a screen to each other when we interact through apps like facebook, twitter, second life, or even a good old fashioned message board. p.s. dissent is good. that spurs conversation. effinglibrarian 2008–10–19 at 7:55 pm i’m cheap, and i don’t have any plans to pay for anything including memberships, especially one that increases in cost the longer i belong. you talk about tiers: what about the “no money,” but “show support” tier? i’m an extremely (yes, extremely) important blogger and i would put a banner on my page that links to the ala site just as i link to amazon.com, taco bell and the nra. do they have that? i don’t see any way to support ala for free with something as simple as a banner to display on my blog. so create a tier for people who have no interest in joining anything, and i’d join that. (also, the “create a body of work” idea is really good) pingback : aaron the librarian » brainstorming about ala & lead pipes pingback : aaron the librarian » membership: what’s in it for me? pingback : aaron the librarian » membership: how to pitch it? aaron the librarian 2008–10–19 at 11:43 pm just to expand on the process sub-thread: and thank to you camila for taking the time to respond with a thoughtful comment! don’t give up on ala. we are working on it — but we are such a “process” organization that it is taking more time then we would like to admit. how can we examine and eradicate this “process” that seems to inhibit ala growth on a large scale? it seems to me that most of my disenchantment with ala stem from the bureaucracy and hierarchical power structures inherent within the organization. as a leader what do you think people like myself, who are involved and are on committees, can do to change these problems? yes, the hierarchy does get in the way (a lot, imho, though others disagree and/or argue it’s a necessary evul); the fundamental organizational motive power of the association is “evolution” which by its very nature is more additive of “stuff.” people who are involved, who are on committees, who have ideas for transformation, who can identify pieces-parts of the “process” which are superfluous or which no longer work can do the best service by highlighting those excesses and discussing how what needs to be done could be done more efficiently via a different process or via different channels or through new media. in the last year or so, i feel ala has turned the corner and is headed toward better processes and acceptance that the online medium will neither break policy nor destroy the association. this has been painfully slow to my “revolution, not evolution” tendencies. the process is grinding on, but i have hopes that several action items will finally be acted upon and the skids will be greased enough that 1. meaningful and needed change to association practices will be officially officialized and 2. all the working around old interpretations will no longer be necessary and 3. all the stuff which people have been told cannot happen a certain way will be encouraged to happen in the most efficient way the participants see fit and 4. the unicorns will come back. well, alright, #4 is a bit optimistic :) ps i’ve started on my long support and reply posts: brainstorming about ala & lead pipes membership: what’s in it for me? membership: how to pitch it? aaron the librarian 2008–10–19 at 11:49 pm @effinglibrarian thanks for pointing out another valuable tier for ala (heck, for any worthwhile non-profit) to include in their efforts. *makes note to self & emails comment link to membership peeps* jenny parsons 2008–10–20 at 10:17 am emily, what a good post! i’ve felt a similar sort of strain as a new ala member. i’m even on a round table discussion, and i still don’t feel like i participate as much as i’d like to! another thought for making memberships more financially feasible– why not let new members “work off” their membership fees at places like conventions or via doing administrative tasks? i don’t think this is feasible for everyone who needs it, but to organize a kind of “work study” program for new ala will encourage involvement, and through that, foster a sense of community. ellie 2008–10–20 at 2:02 pm jenny – i really like that “work off” idea! offering discounted membership to first time committee members for the term of their appointment might be another incentive… pingback : aaron the librarian » cogitating about conference costs poor librarian 2008–10–20 at 5:23 pm in general, i find that my membership in ala has no value. the only reason i belong is to have the opportunity to join acrl and rusa. as a result, i feel taken advantage of by the “parent” organization that offers little in the way of support or opportunities. ala is a bulky, ineffective, inefficient organization that often focuses on the wrong issues in terms of libraries and librarianship. there have been many times in the past few years when i’ve been ashamed to be even loosely associated with the organization. the leadership is generally useless and i’m tired of hearing excuses about why things aren’t getting done. isn’t it time they really start listening to the membership and start focusing on real issues? fortunately acrl and the other associations under the leaky ala umbrella do a better job. but it is wrong (no matter how you structure it) for ala to continue taking our limited money to do things that matter little to working librarians. comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: getting to know you – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 26 nov editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield /3 comments editorial: getting to know you as a holiday break, the six of us decided to answer three questions about ourselves. we’ll have a new “real” post next week from emily. photo by flickr user moqub (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) by editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield 1. if you could choose one thing to change about libraries, what would it be? emily: i would like to dismantle the notion that libraries and librarians are politically neutral. we, as individuals, professionals, and as a professional collective, have a vested stake in what happens to so many items of legislation, state and federal funding, intellectualism and ideas. mind you, i am not advocating to eliminate discourse from our communities–representing many view points–however, i think we do libraries and patrons a disservice when we claim to remain “neutral.” none of our decisions–what book vendor to use, which software to use or system to implement, what circulation and other policies to create and enact–are made without our personal influences and experiences. why are we so scared to claim our bias? isn’t our bias based in our experience and our mission to serve our patrons and communities? can’t our bias be that, which benefits all? ellie: i would change the speed. coming from a television background where we were setting up an office (location, furniture, computers, etc.), casting a show and breaking down (returning everything, archiving materials, etc.) in 3 to 6 months and 24 hours was far too long a turn around for most things, the speed of doing anything in libraries seems glacial. brett: i want a worldcat, only with open library’s license, for serials. i don’t mean volume-level information. what i want is to be able to find, instantly, all relevant information about every article in every journal, magazine, and newspaper. and i want libraries to collectively own, and freely license, the information that makes that search possible. hilary: from the birds-eye-view on down to a particular component, i would like to see libraries function in a world where it’s easy to get at the composition of materials in context with the use of resources, the volume of content and extrapolate out to see the rate of growth of continuing resources alongside the cost over time, the state of licenses and the history of decisions behind subscribing or canceling resources, etc.  and an ideal system would be able to show where and how our local constituents are interacting with our collections and services. it should be a lot easier than it is to get at some kinds of information about your collection to adequately serve collection intelligence needs for assistance in strategic collection decision-making. derik: i wish more libraries (historically) collected and cataloged comics. if i want to study most subjects i can get sources from libraries, in print and online. in studying comics, i have to rely on sources i buy myself. the public library i worked at had hundreds of harlequin romance novels, but no comics (except a few contemporary comic strip collections). kim: i would turn libraries into for-profit companies. not because i want to make lots of money, but because looking at our organizations as businesses instead of a public good might actually help us do a better job of using our resources effectively and better serving our “customers.” at the least it would force us to be more active and competitive among other information businesses (such as, dare i say, google?) 2. what would you be doing if you weren’t a librarian? derik: i’d stay home and make my recreational activities my professional activities. spending all day drawing comics and writing criticism would be my ideal job. i have few illusions about that happening (unless my wife becomes rich); librarian is a good second place. the times i work comics/art into my librarian life are extra special (like the drawings for this site). emily: i would either be working in development (money grubbing) wondering if that’s really what i should be doing, wondering if my work were soul-less and contemplating grad school, or being just another portlander who can’t stand to leave the west coast hippie utopian mothership city of bicycles, coffee, indie rock, diy culture, and microbrews. wait a minute…. ellie: when i was considering library school the other thing floating through my mind was marine biology (specifically the deep sea), but i can’t get past how many creatures you have to kill to learn about them, so i’d probably stick to the reading type of research, preferably for nature documentaries. brett: i’d probably have remained a fair-to-middling fundraiser, and i almost certainly would have been an even more frustrated novelist. if you write a book-length story but don’t show it to anyone in the publishing industry, is it still a novel? and if you write a second and won’t submit that one either, are you a novelist, a loser, or both? hilary: i started out as a botanist and ended up as a librarian, so somewhere in between with dirt firmly packed under my nails would be where i’d find myself if i were not a librarian. kim: i expect i would have gone back to school for a degree in a field related to animals, plants, or the environment. maybe i’d be a vet or a wildlife expert tracking herds of wild something-or-others around yellowstone. that would be good fun. 3. what did you do, before becoming a librarian, that did the most to prepare you for your current career? derik (realizing he missed the “most to prepare” part of this question, on that front it was all the time i spent shelf reading in the public library): i went to art school, a major part of which are “crits”: the class puts up work and critiques each other. in that situation you learn not to take criticism personally and how to think/look critically — helpful in many situations. i only wish others were able to not take criticism personally and apply a more critical eye to various ventures. emily: in college i learned how to think critically. so much about librarianship depends on our ability to make intelligent and informed decisions and to use creativity and thinking skills. ellie: i would say the research i had to do for the papers in my book history classes is what taught me how to really, fully use the library and my work in television prepped me for all the personalities i’ve run into on the administrative side of things. oh, and being born to a systems architect prepped me for the techy side :) brett: in my last year at college, and in my first year after i graduated, it was my job to interrupt people during dinner. you know those nonprofit workers who call you on the phone and ask you to give money to causes you would happily support if only you had more money? that was me. what i learned from that job was that it didn’t matter what i said, what towns i was calling, or how much people had given before. what mattered was my attitude. this became clear the night after my first date with the woman who sat in front of me in african-american literature of the 1960’s. aside from my wife, she had the most beautiful neck i’ve ever seen, and this early-90’s bob that brushed just along her nape. we just had pizza, but i was flying high the next day. donors couldn’t reach their visa cards fast enough. now, just seven months into my first job managing a library, i draw on that lesson daily. my neighbors, colleagues, board members, and friends are fantastic and want very much for the library to be great. it’s up to me, in every interaction, to reinforce their belief that the work they do to improve the collingswood library is energy well spent. hilary: convinced that i would never become a librarian, i worked in libraries through undergrad and initially during my first stint in grad school to help fund my development into being a plant systematist (a botanist who studies plant evolution and diversity).  it was doing research for other people and then doing research for myself that taught me how to make the most of information resources.  plus, there’s a decent amount of overlap in the way species are conceptualized and the way library resources are organized. kim: for my first master’s degree i wrote a thesis on a slightly obscure historical character whose memoirs, papers, and reports were not largely available. as part of my research i spent long hours reading and copying microfilm, took a road trip to review the bancroft’s collections, and dug, dug, dug, for anything else i could find. i sure did enjoy the search, and learned a lot about libraries in the process. about us, interview a useful amplification of records that are unavoidably needed anyway our librarian bodies. our librarian selves. 3 responses megan p. 2008–12–02 at 10:20 pm this is great. i really enjoy blogs that give their writers some personality. it makes the writers more accessible somehow. have y’all thought about posing these questions to the reader(s)? could be a good way to keep the dialogue going. just a thought. emily ford 2008–12–02 at 11:18 pm nice idea, megan. we’ll consider this with the next of such posts. pingback : getting to know you… even better | in the library with the lead pipe this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct libraries: the next hundred years – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 14 nov brett bonfield /4 comments libraries: the next hundred years space colony art from the 1970s: toroidal colonies, interior view (via nasa) by brett bonfield usually when we discuss the future of libraries, we’re talking about a year or two in the future, maybe up to ten. we look at forward-thinking libraries like nc state, or darien public library in connecticut, or maybe the initiative nate hill is helping to lead in chattanooga. but for this article, i’m interested in a much, much longer span of time: the next hundred years. one hundred years is not all that long of a span: one lifetime, or maybe two or three. when we try to think forward into the future, one hundred years can seem incomprehensible, a temporal illusion that makes it seem almost infinitely remote. but when we look backward, it can amaze us how quickly the time has passed. for that reason, i want to briefly cover the last hundred years in order to explore how much librarians in 1912 knew about us, and how they shaped where we are today. that exploration starts with dr. sarah k. vann. she died just a few months ago, at age 96, and i’m still shaken by her loss. i became a fan of her work soon after i began studying library history. as dr. vann wrote in her dissertation, which she completed at the graduate library school at chicago in 1958, the first modern era of library science education started with melvil dewey and lasted until the publication, in 1923, of a report that charles williamson prepared for the carnegie corporation. dr. vann is a direct link to charles williamson. one of her books was a study of the williamson reports, which ushered in the second modern era of library science, an era i believe we’re still in today. the williamson reports, which were underwritten by the carnegie corporation, helped lead to the accreditation process for library schools, and it also led directly to the creation and proliferation of modern library education, most notably at the university of chicago (whose library school was underwritten by the carnegie corporation). the graduate library school at chicago awarded the first ph.d. in library science in 1930 and “(f)or the next twenty years up through 1950 chicago was the sole awarder of the doctorate—at least one and as many as six per year during this period for a total of sixty-five degrees” (bobinski, 1986, p. 699; see also, richardson, 1982). while dr. vann was working on her dissertation, she met charles williamson, and he wrote her two letters. in those letters, we learn that one hundred years ago, in 1912, williamson had just been hired by the new york public library, which was working on a new grant from the carnegie corporation to set up its own library school. he helped provide assignments for the students and sometimes served as a lecturer. as he wrote to dr. vann, “i am afraid i always had a rather dim view of the nature and quality of the instruction in that school, including especially my own little part in it. later i found that the school at the new york public library had the reputation of being one of the best in the country” (vann, 1971, pp. 191-192). it’s clear from this passage that williamson, in 1912, was beginning to form a vision for library education. that vision turned into the education library schools are still providing today. in 1918, carnegie hired him to help with its americanization study. in 1919, it hired him to study library education. in 1921, he turned in that report. in 1923, a revised version of that report was published. a few years later, based in large part on williamson’s work, the carnegie corporation funded the graduate library school at chicago. dr. vann’s scholarship links us to williamson’s studies. many of dr. vann’s students are working in libraries today, and are also educating library students. so that’s roughly one hundred years in one or two or three lifetimes. but just because we can traverse one hundred years so quickly, is it practical to think about? i think so. in fact, i think it’s not only practical but necessary. why we should look 100 years into the future (part 1): “the hundred-year library” the first reason i think it’s necessary is based on an argument made by paul graham, a programmer, essayist, and probably the most influential venture capitalist in the world. one of his best essays is called, “the hundred-year language.” the idea is that we’ll still have computer programming languages in a hundred years, and programs written in these languages will provide the necessary code for all the cool futuristic stuff we don’t yet have, like cities in outer space and flying cars. so graham asks, can we imagine today how the programming language that’s used for flying cars might look? and if we could, would we want to start using it right now? graham answers both questions affirmatively. we can imagine the hundred-year language and we want to start using it as soon as possible. so graham sets out to design that language and put it to immediate use. the downside is the language might run slowly on today’s processors; the upside is, by not worrying about today’s limitations, it can be more elegant than contemporary languages, and it might also help inspire people to work even harder to develop faster processors. it might even bring about the existence of flying cars more quickly. it’s easy to adapt graham’s questions to libraries: can we imagine the hundred-year library today? and if we can, would the people who currently rely on your library want to start using it? would you want to work there? what’s keeping us from building it today? remember, if you read the williamson reports for the carnegie corporation, you’ll see that almost one hundred years ago charles williamson was able to draft the curriculum that’s still in use in library schools today. actually, in many ways the recommendations he drafted would be an improvement on the library training provided to most librarians working in libraries today. for instance, he calls for greater standardization within curricula, for certifying library workers (his umbrella term for anyone who works in a library), and for better use of distance education, especially for professional development (what he refers to as “training in service”). so just as williamson could imagine and design the library training we’re receiving today, i think we can imagine the hundred-year library and begin designing that library now. i think the people who rely on your library today would be thrilled if it suddenly transformed into the library of 2112. and i think you would love to work there. which is a good thing. because in 2112 you will still be alive and you will still be working. maybe at the library where you work today. why we should look 100 years into the future (part 2): aubrey de gray and warren buffett you can view the idea that you will still be working in 2112 as preposterous. or as a theoretical exercise. but at least one influential scientist, aubrey de gray, might see it as something of an understatement. de gray is a biomedical gerontologist and the chief science officer for the sens foundation, a california-based 501(c)(3) dedicated to combating the aging process. his bachelor’s, master’s, and ph.d. are from the university of cambridge and he has been interviewed on “60 minutes” and in the new york times, and he has presented “a roadmap to end aging” at ted. he believes the science already exists to delay or even reverse much of what we view as the aging process. the idea is to stay alive long enough for science to eradicate each of the conditions that kill us. admittedly, this seems far-fetched, the idea of living another hundred or five hundred or thousand years. but consider that we’ve already eradicated many of the diseases that killed our ancestors. and there’s no lack of motivation to eliminate heart disease, cancer, respiratory diseases, stroke, and the other leading causes of death. in the last few decades, we’ve made tremendous progress in diagnosing and treating all of them. why does the possibility that we will be alive in one hundred years matter? it follows the same reasoning as warren buffett’s well known advice about investing: “an investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it. with every investment decision his card is punched, and he has one fewer available for the rest of his life.” (warren buffett, quoted in mark hulbert, “be a tiger, not a hen,” forbes, may 25, 1992, p. 298) in other words, if you are personally invested in the long-term consequences of your actions, you make more rational decisions. it gets you away from the immediate gratification mindset and encourages you to think about first principles. which gets us to the central question of this essay: what will the library of 2112 look like? which of our first principles will still apply? i think the core tasks and principles that have helped to define libraries since their founding will remain relevant for at least another hundred years. libraries will continue to be about their users and their workers, about inquiry and intellectual freedom, about preserving the cultural record, about equalizing opportunity, and about cooperation. so the first point i want to make is that libraries will still be about people. in fact, they’re going to be a lot more about people than they are today. libraries = you another way of saying that is, the hundred-year library is about “you,” time magazine’s 2006 person of the year. yes, you. i first shared the thoughts in this article as a keynote at the fall 2012 tenn-share conference in nashville, tennessee. i could have done it via skype or in a google hangout. i could have presented it as a webinar. i could have recorded my presentation and the attendees could have watched it together and discussed it, just like a lot of libraries do with recordings of ted talks. they could have waited until i published this article and discussed it online. the point is, there were essentially no technical barriers to their having the same discussion in collective isolation, or at least without the attendees and i being physically present in the same room at the same time. except that it wouldn’t have been the same discussion. we are social animals. we need each other, and not just emotionally. on a cognitive level, we get more information, and better information, from being in each other’s presence. in-person, human interaction is still the highest bandwidth way for us to communicate. and that’s not going to change in the next hundred years. that’s not how biology works. so if this rather obvious point is correct, what are its practical implications? it means the hundred-year library, the library of 2112, is going to focus far more time, effort, and money on human interactions. right now, the idea of signing up to check out a person is kind of a novelty. but i think libraries that have instituted these programs have the right idea. libraries should serve as the focal point for meeting new people. when we meet new people, we learn something. and if those interactions can have an empathetic, well planned out structure behind them, libraries could do an even better job of providing people with information about their community, their world, and any topics they’re interested in studying. i’m not just talking about public libraries: i think every library can better fulfill its mission by fostering more direct, in-person interaction. the idea of high quality, high bandwidth, human interaction also argues that we might consider investing far, far more into what we currently think of as library programming. it would mean adapting our spaces to accommodate these changes. it would mean additional training for staff. it would mean learning more about what our neighbors and students and faculty want to know. the seeds are there, and a lot of libraries are already doing amazing work in this area. but what if we’re only just at the earliest stages of a movement? to continue this idea, there’s no reason libraries can’t become the first thing people think about when they’re looking within their community or on their campus for activities that involve storytelling, visual art, and music. as with library conferences, the ability to digitize stories, visual art, and music hasn’t diminished our desire to experiences these things in person. when i look at representations of art, i want to see the original. when i hear mp3s of a band i like, i want to attend a live performance. these impulses seem unlikely to change. if anything, we want more art, more scholarship, more experiences we can sample digitally and experience in person. the environment that fosters more art and scholarship is an environment that values and protects intellectual freedom, both for its producers and its consumers. libraries will remain an important element within that environment. libraries = intellectual freedom libraries are already one of the leaders in intellectual freedom. we work hard to ensure privacy and freedom from censorship. but we’re not there yet. exhibit a: our willingness to sacrifice our cardholders’ privacy in order to get the latest ebook bestsellers onto kindles. here’s what i see for the hundred-year library. there’s an open source software project called tor that allows people to surf the web anonymously, providing the highest level of intellectual freedom we can make readily available given the internet’s current structure. there are servers with tor installed on them all over the world. to make use of them, you install client software onto your computer. unfortunately, there aren’t all that many tor servers, they only have so much bandwidth, and anonymizing web surfing isn’t as fast as serving web pages the regular way. but there are an awful lot of libraries in this country and all over the world. they tend to be pretty well distributed geographically, and they tend to have a pretty fair amount of bandwidth. there’s no reason we couldn’t use that bandwidth for tor, or whatever solution succeeds it. and there’s no reason we couldn’t install tor software on our computers and teach library users to install the software on their computers. and because there’s no reason we can’t, and lots of good reasons we should, i figure there’s a pretty good chance it will happen. so we can provide anonymous web access to anyone who wants it. can we also provide internet access to everyone? one of the underappreciated aspects of the one laptop per child initiative was the idea that each laptop could be a node on a wireless mesh network, enabling internet access to daisychain wirelessly from laptop to laptop. mesh technology has come a long way since one laptop per child was first proposed. again, libraries tend to be pretty geographically dispersed. think about what we could do with our own network, which we could connect to the rest of the internet, but only if we wanted. it wouldn’t be that hard to do, and it’s getting easier all the time. finally, i see libraries helping people to publish anonymously. right now, it’s difficult to publish anonymously and it seems to be increasingly difficult to share our thoughts while also protecting our identity. anonymity can be a touchy, scary topic. i think the positives on this one outweigh the negatives. libraries = our culture, preserved as long as we’re talking about helping people to publish, we should also talk about our traditional role of helping to organize the cultural record. i think it’s pretty obvious that each year there are more books, articles, and posts published than at any time in human history. and also more images, audio, and video. libraries need to take a far more active role in helping to organize and preserve this material. in addition, we have a tremendous amount of material that’s yet to be digitized, and a tremendous amount that needs to be preserved. i give google credit for its ambition. we have a much better sense now about what’s involved in mass digitization efforts, and we have much better hardware and software, in part, as a result of the google books project. we also need to acknowledge that google plucked the low-hanging fruit. books are typeset. they’re generally well cataloged. a huge percentage of the material that remains to be digitized and still needs to be preserved is lacking either or both. i’m talking about diaries and blueprints and hand-written medical records. think about the area where you live. there’s probably an area nearby with really pretty, really old houses? about how old are those houses? when we look across the atlantic, i think we can get a pretty good indication that those houses are still likely to be used as homes one hundred years from now. maybe even five hundred years from now when you start to seriously consider retiring. the people who live in those houses five hundred years from now are going to be interested in learning about the people who lived in their homes before they did, the origin of their homes, and all the changes they’ve experienced along the way. we have a lot of that kind of material in the library where i work, and probably in the libraries where you work as well. it’s really difficult to digitize, to make accessible, and to archive. i expect we’ll figure it out in the next hundred years. libraries = ≈ just as it does today, the hundred-year library will continue to mitigate the effects of inequality. when i talk about the business that libraries are in, sometimes i say that we’re information coops. when i’m feeling a bit more frisky, i’ll say that we’re coops for low-cost, infrequently needed, durable goods. but when i’m feeling my best, i say we’re in the business of opportunity redistribution. fortunately for libraries, opportunity redistribution is in society’s collective best interest. we may want our kids to get in to the best school, but we want all the other kids to get in on their own merit. so how do libraries redistribute opportunities? helping to support education is obvious, and it’s going to continue to be important, but it’s not enough. think about the things we’re fortunate enough to take for granted, but are comparatively inaccessible for huge swaths of our campuses and communities. i’m talking about museum passes, tickets to cultural events outside the library like movies, concerts, fitness classes, and music lessons. these things can be shared. so can tools, seeds, grafts for trees. automobiles, even once they start driving themselves. even once they start flying. i’m interested in evidence of the most pressing needs, the ones where libraries can make the most difference. my guess is that it’s closely tied to students, especially younger students. as with universities as a whole, and like doctors and hospitals, my guess is that libraries can create their own successful alumni and philanthropists, their own grateful patrons. educating someone, saving their life, that’s it’s own reward. i don’t think colleges and universities or physicians do their work in order to collect donations later on. and i’m not suggesting libraries should, either. but i think if we help the people with the greatest need, if we change their lives, they’re going to succeed and they’re going to want to share that success with others by supporting the agencies that supported them. libraries = cooperation most of the ideas i’ve discussed for the hundred-year library require interlibrary coordination, and i think every one that doesn’t require cooperation would benefit from it. fortunately, cooperation is an area in which we excel. i’m pretty sure we could already use consortia for our consortia, and a hundred years from now, we’ll need consortia for our consortia of consortia. and i’m all for it. as others have pointed out, if we got rid of ala and started all over from scratch, what we’d create would look a whole lot like ala. the same goes for oclc. i figure what we really need, in addition to ala and oclc, is one or two or three more really big tent library organizations. maybe that will be the digital public library of america. i don’t know what organizations will emerge, but i do know that if we’re going to set up mesh networks and provide anonymous access to everyone and digitize all the things that need digitizing and take a really thoughtful, evidence-based approach to diversifying and redistributing opportunity, we’re going to have to work together to do it. strategies one strategy for helping us improve our ability to redistribute opportunity, and to operate more effectively in general, is to become more familiar with our history. dr. vann didn’t spend the 1950s studying the work of library education pioneers from dewey through williamson because their ideas seemed quaint or archaic. she studied them because she believed their ideas and experiences could help improve library education in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. we also need to think about the truly long-term, which means believing that decisions we make now will affect us and those around us for a long, long time. for me, it’s easier to take that leap if i can persuade myself that i’m going to be here to experience all of the outcomes of the decisions i make. and by “experience” i mean not just that i’ll be using libraries a hundred years from now, but i’ll have to accept credit or blame for my actions and inactions. aubrey de grey may not be right about our life expectancy, but i see only upside in acting as though he is. which is one way of explaining paul graham’s work on his hundred-year language, which he named arc. the project is ambitious, perhaps even megalomaniacal. which may be why it works equally well to interpret it as a project based in altruism or as a project bred from selfishness. whether his goal is to start a project that he’ll never himself get to finish or use in its realized form, or his goal is to use the best programming language on the planet even if he has to write it himself, his goal is to create something so spectacularly good that it will benefit everyone.  as is clear from his essays and other writing related to arc, he’s willing to fail, publicly, in its pursuit. i hope libraries are ready to do the same. i hope we’re ready to work individually and together to identify the hundred-year library for ourselves. and i hope we’re ready to work publicly and without fear of failure to bring it about in a span far shorter than a hundred years. references and further readings bobinski, g. s. (1986). doctoral programs in library and information science in the united states and canada. library trends, 34(4), 697-714. graham, p. arc. accessed november 14, 2012. richardson, j. v. (1982). the spirit of inquiry: the graduate library school at chicago, 1921-51. chicago: american library association. vann, s. k. (1971). the williamson reports: a study. metuchen, n.j: scarecrow press. williamson, c. c. (1971). the williamson reports of 1921 and 1923: including training for library work (1921) and training for library service (1923). metuchen, n.j: scarecrow press. this article is adapted from a keynote i delivered for tenn-share at the nashville public library on september 28, 2012. it was also influenced by a chapter i wrote for library 2025 (ala editions, 2013), edited by kim leeder and eric frierson. thanks to robert benson and kim leeder for their help in turning a speech into an article. future this is why we can’t have nice things: reclaim your inbox join us on the dark (social) side? 4 responses kathryn greenhill 2012–11–14 at 9:47 pm thanks for this brett. thought-provoking, and i think you have taken the key values of libraries (or what they should be valued for) and extrapolated them nicely into a future. you leave me with a question, that may be best answered by others, using your article as a jumping-off point. if those of us who teach in library schools are teaching for the 1912 library, then what do we need to be specifically teaching for the 2112 library? values, like those expressed in the article, we already do by the truckload through every unit we teach – if we are doing are job right. brett bonfield 2012–11–15 at 4:51 pm it would be great to see library educators publicly discuss their thoughts on training librarians to work in the library of 2112. as an apprentice library school educator (i’ve completed two years of phd course work and i taught a library school course two summers ago), what’s most striking to me is how little evidence we collect about the academic achievements of the students we recruit and their relative success after graduation. williamson recognized the importance of this data and did as much as he could to collect, analyze, and publish this information in his reports. sadly, almost 100 years later, we still don’t consistently publish information about standardized test scores for library school applicants or matriculates, their undergraduate gpas, our acceptance rates, students’ salaries before and after library school, or how long it takes graduates to find a job. we don’t have the sort of certification that williamson advocates, and we haven’t come up with an alternative way to assess the knowledge students acquire in the pursuit of their degree. we have no useful longitudinal studies about the career arcs of graduates. we have a truckload of values, but the lawyers and the mbas have actual data. until we have something resembling empirical evidence, it’s difficult to believe that we’ll make any rational reforms. even if we did, how would we know? that said, i think the library of 2112 is going to require far, far greater understanding of technology than we typically impart. it’s not just that new librarians should be able to look at the meadville public library in pennsylvania and think, “that’s cool, they’re using open source software.” the goal should be for new graduates to be able to critique their choices and contribute to even better software than meadville is currently using. i’ll know we’re headed in the right direction when the postings at jobs.code4lib.org are being filled by overqualified new library school graduates. mark robison 2013–01–10 at 1:05 pm this post was well organized, educational, terrifying and inspirational. now i’m curious what my library could be doing differently to prepare for 2113. i sincerely hope that, as our patrons’ lives became increasingly virtual, they will continue to be drawn to the library for a dose of old-fashioned, interpersonal togetherness; the rock concert illustration was fitting. thanks for this! pingback : in the library with the lead pipe | blog & twitter investigations this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct not just another pretty picture – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 11 nov hilary davis /7 comments not just another pretty picture not just another pretty picture treemap of mammals, photo by flickr user arenamontanus (cc by 2.0) by hilary davis introduction i’m a slave to spreadsheets. trying to decide between a stacked column bar chart and a 3-d area chart is par for the course in my work. microsoft excel© is great for many practical needs, but it doesn’t always support the need to create simple, compelling and interactive graphical data visualizations that are critical for libraries to best express value, communicate trends, and test assumptions about library services and collections. data visualization is the study of strategies and methods for conveying information, as captured by data, in an efficient, functional way that leads to insights about a process or system. good data visualization can drive home a point quickly and have lingering impact. data visualizations can help you see something that you hadn’t noticed before. these days, libraries can’t afford to not be wise and impactful with the data that is collected and conveyed about patrons, services and collections. many libraries are reporting declines in reference desk queries against the backdrop of massive surges in use of computers and other tech-related services. most libraries are undergoing comprehensive reviews of journal and database usage (among other metrics) with the aim to cut collections to comply with shrinking budgets. to express these kinds of trends, to seek support, or to simply try to assess library collections and services, many libraries fall back on the use of tables with a few pie charts and bar graphs thrown in for added measure. when i started having conversations with my library colleagues about data visualization tools and techniques, i was humbled by what i didn’t know and embarrassed that i hadn’t heard about, much less tested, some of the data visualization tools that are surfacing. so, i decided to start exploring what i’ve been missing while hiding behind the ubiquity of microsoft excel© graphs and charts. in this post, i present some examples using a few popular data visualization tools and i give an overview of some inspirational guides for creating compelling data graphics that may help you better express your own library metrics. first, let’s explore a little further why data visualization matters for libraries. library data in context libraries serve users at the reference desk, circulation desk, and special collections centers. library staff engage with constituents through committees and working groups, at the library security gate, and through online chat. librarians attempt to expose valuable services and collections via library catalogs, carefully-crafted subject guides, during bibliographic instruction sessions, and via long lists of databases and online journals. libraries assess usage and patrons needs via web statistics, gate counts, circulation transactions, libqual surveys, usage statistics, and feedback forums. why do we measure these experiences? to show value for money or time and to understand the uptake of our collections and services. library value has been a popular topic since at least the 1930s and libraries have gotten better at showing return on investment (roi). we’re not completely there yet, as the recent $1,000,000 imls sponsorship of “lib-value” grant suggests. libraries are pretty adept at measuring lots of different kinds of interactions, so how can we be so bad at demonstrating our worth and making our point? what if part of our problem in demonstrating value lies in how we attempt to showcase library value? libraries also want to make good, sound decisions in the context of their user communities. libraries collect a lot of data that encompass complex networks about how users navigate through online resources, which subjects circulate the most or the least, which resources are requested via interlibrary loan, visitation patterns over periods of time, reference queries, and usage statistics of online journals and databases. making sense of these complex networks of use and need isn’t easy. but the relationships between use and need patterns can help libraries make hard decisions (say, about which journals to cut) and creative decisions to improve user experiences, outreach, achieve efficiencies, and enhance alignment with organizational goals. not another library roi article, please! relax, this isn’t another post about how calculate library roi nor is it about how to collect data that show library worth. this post is an exploration of visualization techniques that can help libraries make a compelling case to stakeholders and get insight about how data visualization can help libraries make more informed decisions. disclaimers: i’m not an expert on visualization techniques; i’m part of the slew of librarians who need to know how to better illustrate what we do and learn how to better allocate resources. visualization strategies have made their debut at library conferences already (e.g., 2009 computers in libraries; 2008 computers in libraries; 2009 nasig conference). however, i haven’t seen a groundswell of examples indicating that libraries have taken these strategies and these conference presentations to heart. what i have experienced is a few really good ideas popping up in conversations with colleagues about how to make the case for libraries in simple, compelling, visual ways. i want to share what i’ve learned so far in my exploration and open the door to some more good ideas. data needs to be “humanized” during various conversations about how to represent library collections and expenditures data, one of my very smart colleagues, cory lown, introduced me to the work of john tukey and edward tufte. cory explained that tufte’s aim is to encourage the use of as much data as possible (“to clarify, add detail”) and to use visualization techniques that “fit” the data. “often bar charts and pie charts (which tend to have low data to ink density) obscure more nuanced and interesting data. it’s not just about new and interesting tools, but matching the data to the right visualization so we can make use of data we have.” (lown, 2009, pers. comm.) this isn’t a trivial process by any means due to the uniqueness of each set of data due to variation in methods for collection, data clean-up, analysis and so on. but, according to tufte’s principles, focusing on giving as much attention to the data in a chart, graph or image (aka “maximizing the data-ink ratio“) while reducing the “fluff” (aka “chartjunk“) (e.g., chart borders, text legends, background fill, decorations) can aid in getting the point across. in the spirit of the work of tukey and tufte, a recent book, aptly named beautiful data (2009, edited by toby segaran and jeff hammerbacher) brings together a great compilation of data visualization, data handling and data sense-making strategies. in one chapter, nathan yau, also author of a terrific blog called flowingdata (to which i’ll refer a little later in this post), describes the development of a simple, user-friendly tool to track and measure what he calls “personal data” (e.g., eating, sleeping, travel habits). yau is interested in creating tools for people to distill their personal data into stories that can help them understand patterns about their personal habits and eventually help relate people to the bigger picture about their impact on their environment and vice versa. this concept of creating a way for a person to relate to the bigger picture through data is an important lesson for libraries. “data has to be presented in a way that is relate-able; it has to be humanized.  oftentimes we get caught up in statistical charts and graphs, which are extremely useful, but at the same time we want to engage users so that they stay interested. . .users should understand that the data is about them and reflect the choices they make in their daily lives.” (yau, 2009) all of those interactions with patrons that libraries collect and track – circulations, journal usage statistics, cost/use metrics, etc. – are about the patron. however, most of the metrics that libraries present to make the case to patrons, aren’t presented in a way that relates the patron to the data. an example: academic libraries spend a lot of money on journals. in fact, the ncsu libraries spent around $6 million on journals during 2008-2009, but how many of our patrons know that when they download a journal article that it’s paid for by the ncsu libraries? that $6 million dollars doesn’t necessarily “translate” to a user when they download an article. we tell them how many articles were downloaded, but is there a better way to make the connection between the user and the cost of resources? for the most part, library metrics aren’t good at telling stories that keep our users interested and help them inform the choices that they make. we are in need of some great ideas and examples from the field. simple data visualization tools while several other visualization tools exist, i want to focus on three of the most popular tools and demonstrate what is possible using a few datasets that i’ve created using the kind of library metrics that you might be dealing with in your own library. after trying a few different types of library metric datasets in google gadgets for spreadsheets, manyeyes and swivel, my favorites are google gadgets and manyeyes because of their ease of use and diversity of visualization styles. google gadgets: first, i have to give props to cory lown for making me aware of google gadgets for spreadsheets. it’s really quite simple to use. if you have a google account (e.g., gmail), then you can use google gadgets. log into your google account, choose google documents, create new spreadsheet, then add your data (just as you would in excel). once your data is ready, go to the insert menu and choose gadget. as of the time of this writing, there are over 35 different visualizations you can choose from: everything from the standard bar charts to motion graphs to piles of money. the upside: you can experiment with the different visualizations and pick one that fits the point that you’re trying to make or the audience that you’re trying to reach. you can share your visualizations with a simple url that you plug into an email, or into your website or blog. the downside: you don’t have a lot of control over font size or positioning of elements on the charts. google gadget motion charts are excellent for showing change in values over time. they are the primary visualization mode for sites like gapminder to illustrate changes in global issues over time. below is an example using data that i collected from the data from the association of research libraries on research library expenditures plotted against university expenditures spanning from 1982 through 2006. try the motion chart with the default variables, then try changing them. you’re welcome to access the dataset itself to create your own data visualization. manyeyes: as part of the agreement to use manyeyes with your own data, any data you upload is made publicly and freely available for others to use. after signing up with an email address, the process is easy and straightforward. you can be up and running with several visualizations of your data within a few minutes and you can share your visualizations with links in emails, or embed them in your website or blog. the upside: the choice of visualizations is pretty extensive: word tree, phrase net, wordle, tag cloud, bar chart, block histogram, bubble chart, network diagram, scatterplot, matrix chart, treemap for comparisons, treemap, pie chart, country map, us county map, world map, stock graph, line graph, stack graph. the downside: if you want to compare more than two variables, you have limited options. the example that i’ve included here is data that i collected on the publication and citation patterns of ncsu scholars. researchers at an academic university will almost always have more citation activity than publication activity in a journal. but just how much more? this visualization illustrates the scale of citations for journals in which ncsu scholars publish 0 times, 2 times, 3 times, on up to 41 times. try the visualization below and experiment with the dataset to create other manyeyes visualizations. swivel: with swivel, you have a choice to let the data that you upload be freely available to others or to keep your data private. if you choose to keep your data private, be prepared to commit to a fee of $12/month. for most of us who use excel to prepare data for upload into a tool like swivel, an excel toolbar is available from the swivel confectionary. the upside: you have a little more control over things like font size and font face (compared to google gadgets for spreadsheets); it’s just as easy to share data and visualizations (email or embedding in websites or blogs); and if you want your audience to be able to interact with your charts, swivel makes that a trivial process. the downside: the choice of graphs is limited (bar, line, area, stacked bar, stacked area, scatter, and pie) and the site isn’t very responsive with larger sets of data (e.g., i tested it with a dataset of over 1900 rows and it had trouble switching between different types of graphs). in this example, i’ve uploaded a small dataset of usage of the major types of digital collections provided by the ncsu libraries. try interacting with the pie chart and download the dataset if you want to use it to experiment with your own visualizations (you’ll need to create an account before you can do much with the data in swivel). iframe    visualization inspiration there are some excellent resources that help provide some insight into what is considered good and bad data visualization practices. these sites are filled with examples of interesting data visualizations to inspire your own work and in some cases (e.g., gapminder) also offer datasets with which to experiment. flowingdata: the flowingdata blog is one of the most compelling, idea-filled blogs i’ve come across – ever. authored by nathan yau (ucla phd student in statistics focusing on data visualization), this blog highlights great examples of how to make a compelling point with data and visual creativity. flowingdata offers a great deal, but i want to point out 5 specific visualization categories: statistical visualization – strategies for visualizing different types of statistics infographics – examples of aesthetically pleasing and intellectually captivating modes for presenting data in graphical format mapping – examples of data mapped to geographic representations artistic visualization – examples of data as art network visualization – examples of visualizations showing networks or relationships between entities not only does yau collocate examples of how to display data to different audiences, but he also provides thoughtful analysis about why a visualization is effective (or not) and what could be improved about it. visualization ad infosthetics: authored by andrew vande moere (faculty member of architecture, design and planning at the university of sydney in australia), infosthetics acts much like the flowingdata blog, but tends to focus more on data as art. there’s overlap between infosthetics and flowingdata, but you’ll find a slightly different perspective in infosthetics – one that deals with data visualization from the design and interaction approach. visual complexity: manuel lima uses the visual complexity blog to bring together examples and ideas around the study of the visualization of complex networks such as data from library systems, the social web, biological systems, and transportation patterns. 3d dewey data visualization his aim is to analyze methods for conveying the adage, “the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.” currently a senior user experience designer at nokia’s nextgen software & services, lima provides an industry perspective on the utility of networks to display information. gapminder: gapminder is an organization that runs a website for displaying trends in global issues such as poverty plotted against inequality indices or oil consumption plotted against oil production. its main visualizations are based on google motion charts, and have been featured in the famous ted talks. information dashboards: information dashboards are user interfaces that serve the need of providing critical information at a glance. a book aptly named information dashboard design (2006, by stephen few) promises to teach readers how to use graphs discriminately to enhance communication. some excellent examples of information dashboards that might fit in library contexts are the indianapolis museum of art (ima) dashboard (thanks to adrienne lai for sharing this site with me) and the sprint now dashboard. indianapolis museum of art dashboard the ima dashboard presents simple, compelling data in a graphically aesthetic way. it tells a visitor things like how many plants are in the gardens, how many visitors are at the ima, how much energy is being consumed by the ima, and the number of active memberships. each widget window leads to a little more information about the ima, drawing the visitor in to learn more without overwhelming him/her with too many options or underwhelming with too few avenues to explore. the sprint now dashboard, on the other hand, creates a slightly different experience. there’s a lot going on that isn’t necessarily relevant here – from the creepy voice-over to the number of eggs being produced or the number of people stuck in elevators – but the concept of surfacing this kind of real-time information is compelling. the possibilities in libraries for these kinds of information dashboards are obvious. an external audience might find it helpful to know which books are being checked out (similar to seattle public library display of circulating materials), real-time locations of available computers, how many journal articles are being downloaded, how many e-books are being read, the number of devices (e.g., laptops, ipods, kindles) that are checked out, the latest articles by your campus researchers, upcoming community events, and maybe even an roi metric on the value of library services and collections per tuition dollar (or tax dollar) per hour. tack on a catalog search box, real-time webcam views of the coffee shop wait line and the info commons, and you’ve got a mode for making a case for the value of library services and collections while providing real-time information all in one view. an internal audience of library staff and decision makers might find it helpful to see in a dashboard view the “health” of the library budget, cost/use metrics based on circulation data or electronic journal or e-book usage statistics, hourly gate counts, keywords searched in the catalog, cataloging activity, and a current snapshot of the composition and use of the collection broken down by format or by material type plotted against community demographics (e.g., number of full-text journal downloads per graduate student in the chemical engineering department) among other things. other than the seattle public library, i am not aware of any libraries presenting this kind of (more or less) real-time, dynamic information dashboard to the public, but i suspect that any data displayed for public consumption would require that personally-identifying information be excluded. final thoughts the ultimate goal of libraries is to help patrons make smart decisions about the information they use and create. as an extension of that goal, jason casden, one of the reviewers of this article noted that data visualization techniques should be adopted to be part of a library’s organizational culture for assessment and justification to not only best serve patrons, but also to help guide the allocation of limited resources. investing in ways to leverage the data that libraries collect to show value, communicate trends, and test assumptions about library services and collections is part of the solution for making the library be all about the patron. try out some of the visualization tools and sample datasets used in this post or share your own data visualization creations via the comments. learn more few, stephen. 2006. information dashboard design: the effective visual communication of data. fichter, darlene. 2008. “data visualizations.” presented at computers in libraries 2008 conference. fichter, darlene and jeff wisniewski. “harnessing new data visualization tools: say it visually.” presentation at computers in libraries 2009 conference kurt, lisa and will kurt. 2009. “making usage data understandable with visual representation.” presented at the north american serials interest group 2009 conference. legrady, george. 2005. “making visible the invisible: seattle library data flow visualization.” presented at international cultural heritage meeting 2005. seattle public library data visualization: “making the visible invisible.” segaran, toby and jeff hammerbacher. 2009. beautiful data: the stories behind elegant data solutions. tenopir, carol. 2009. “value, outcomes, and return on investment of academic libraries (lib-value).” imls awards 3-year grant. tufte, edward. statistician and author of data visualization books such as “beautiful evidence,” “envisioning information,” and “visual display of quantitative information.” tukey, john. statistician and author of exploratory data analysis (1977). thanks thanks to the people who’ve opened my eyes to the possibilities and who reviewed this post and offered valuable feedback: cory lown, jason casden, brett bonfield, and kim leeder. about the patron, beautiful data, data-driven decision making, excel, flowingdata, gapminder, google motion charts, information dashboards, infosthetics, library assessment, library data, library metrics, manyeyes, spreadsheets, swivel, tufte, tukey, visual complexity, visualizations [re]boot camp: share some. learn more. teach better. so you want to write about libraries? 7 responses ellie 2009–11–11 at 1:45 pm thanks hilary! my library will be doing a big student library and technology use survey in the spring, so this is very timely for me. courtney lewis 2009–11–13 at 11:17 am i think this post has such relevance for not only librarians presenting their programs but also for the way we teach students about creating data images and presenting them for maximum effect. thank you for collating all these terrific sources! tom in raleigh 2010–03–01 at 10:59 pm great site! but i hope you’re kidding about the choosing to use a 3d area chart. 3d display of 2d data is a cute trick by mbas, but serious data display does not use this sort of fakery, as ed tufte often points out. hilary davis 2010–03–02 at 7:23 am hi tom – thanks for your feedback – i hope you read beyond the first few sentences of the article. in my lead-in to this article (“trying to decide between a stacked column bar chart and a 3-d area chart is par for the course in my work. microsoft excel© is great for many practical needs, but it doesn’t always support the need to create simple, compelling and interactive graphical data visualizations that are critical for libraries to best express value, communicate trends, and test assumptions about library services and collections.”), i was using that example as a way to describe how ineffectual my strategies as limited to excel and other standard visualization tools has been. the main points of the article were (1) that there are better, more effective ways to make your point with data as folks like tukey, tufte and others have elaborated on much more fully, and (2) to try out other tools beyond excel, and (3) to highlight some fun examples from libraryland and beyond that use good visualization strategies. pingback : pligg.com pingback : elliott hauser since 1983 hilary 2011–04–21 at 10:13 am note that swivel is no longer operating as of october 2010. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct sense of self: embracing your teacher identity – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 19 aug carrie donovan /22 comments sense of self: embracing your teacher identity welcome to another guest post at itlwtlp. this time we bring you thoughts from carrie donovan, an instruction librarian at indiana university bloomington. enjoy! #307: authenticity by flickr user assbach c/o by carrie donovan once upon a time in libraries, you could call yourself a good teacher if you spent more than 30 minutes planning a lesson, if you wowed students with your search savvy, or if nobody fell asleep during your presentation. with the growth of instructional initiatives and influence across libraries of all kinds, however, expectations for librarians to develop teaching expertise have heightened. librarians who teach now find themselves faced with the demand to connect with students, to make libraries and information literacy knowledge meaningful, and to create learning opportunities that are memorable and long-lasting. such a shift in expectations calls for teacher behavior that is purposeful, mindful, and rooted in the self. transformation of this sort does not come easy, nor does it happen magically. for those in search of a true teacher identity, authenticity will serve as the best guide. in order to create the dynamic and engaging environments that are becoming the norm among library instruction and information literacy programs, librarians rely on the participation and interest of their audience to co-construct learning. this type of dialogue requires an open and honest classroom environment in which the librarian is a facilitator and guide for learners as they discover the world of information. in asking students to be present and participatory, we must respond by bringing our own professional and personal wealth of knowledge and experience to the conversation. putting away the “persona” of teacher and disclosing more of the personal will allow for meaningful interactions with students, increased student involvement, and memorable classroom experiences. from roger schank (1990), we learn that keeping up our end of this dialogue means introducing our experience and our emotions into teaching opportunities in surprising and story-driven ways. based in real-world experiences, stories allow us to share with each other, while also making sense of the world around us as we interact with it. the schankian application of storytelling to create a direct connection to students’ dynamic memory can also be useful for teachers in the quest to become more personable and approachable to students. the paradox of teaching talking about bringing your real self into the classroom is one thing, doing it is another thing entirely. especially when one considers the following paradox: as teachers, we employ many of the techniques of actors, but in order to be most effective, our teaching must not be artificial. for anyone who teaches regularly, it’s easy to recognize the aspects of teaching that are similar to acting: the preparation, the practice, the warming-up of vocals, the nerves, the sweaty palms, and the vulnerability that comes with setting oneself up for approval or disapproval. in addition, teachers, like actors, often summon a charm or dynamism from within, in order to exude a presence and authority over the purpose and direction of the content for their audience. after library instruction, i’ve had students say to me, amazed, “gosh, you really *love* the library, don’t you?” okay, so maybe i’m a much more enthusiastic person when i teach than i am otherwise, but i’m hopeful that my teacherly self, while a slightly more dynamic version of myself, still comes from an authentic place. if i can surprise, intrigue, or engage students because i present the shiny side of myself when teaching, i’ll do it. becoming the most special and charming version of one’s self takes some preparation, of course, one cannot just go into the classroom cold. you have to warm up, just like actors and athletes. for example, i had a ritual with my former office-mate that entailed jazz hands and dance moves as a precursor to teaching. nowadays, my graduate assistant and i joke about putting on our “instruction face,” which usually involves eyebrows up and a big smile. the confidence and giddiness that comes with these warm-up activities can help quell the nerves and fears that sometimes haunt teachers. most librarians, even those of us who are devoted to teaching, will admit that many of the same challenges that actors face in terms of stage fright also plague teachers from time to time. after ten years of teaching in libraries, i almost always feel anxious and frightened prior to any type of instruction. to overcome my fear of public speaking as a novice teacher, i started using sarcasm as a coping mechanism. sarcasm, i have discovered, does not translate well to the classroom setting and put me in complete opposition with my authentic self. letting go of this crutch has not been easy, but it has been necessary to the successful development of my teacher identity. without that barrier between myself and the students, teaching and learning experiences have become more open and egalitarian, so that now we share in the vulnerability and the anxiety, as well as the benefits and opportunity that come with it. while i still rely a lot on sarcasm outside the classroom, i no longer use it to appear fearless. in fact, i think fearlessness among teachers is highly overrated. it’s the adrenaline that comes with my stage fright that is almost like a drug to me, it keeps me coming back into the classroom. having acknowledged that it will most likely always be a part of my teacher identity, i can now use the rush and the motivational force of my fear to become better at my craft. r.w. hanning (1984) compares the experience of stepping into the classroom (the start of the performance) to stepping over a threshold and in doing so, we must face our fears and meet the challenges that await us. although there are many elements of teaching that are similar to acting, that is not to say that we should seek to be entertainers. neil postman warns us about this in his book teaching as a conserving activity (1979) as he discusses the use of multimedia and technology in the classroom. while librarians have some of the best technology tools to teach and to aid in our teaching, we can be true to our teacher identities by relying on our primary instrument, ourselves. we should never be phony or rely too much on props or personas, but instead, we should strive to find the authentic place within from which to direct our teaching. that authenticity will evolve and change depending on the topic, audience, and situation of the day. as teachers, we should be willing to accept the risky nature of this activity and embrace the tension that exists between teaching from a place of authority, while also sharing of ourselves in such an authentic way that we become vulnerable. becoming authentic ok, so, how does one do this? can authenticity be learned? the answer is both yes and no. we’ve all had great teachers and memorable learning experiences that shape our construct of what good teaching should be and what it looks like. what makes authenticity in teaching so elusive and slippery is that we cannot simply adopt those approaches as our own and expect them to work just as well. instead, we must know ourselves well enough to identify our own personal qualities and wisdom and allow those to shape a unique approach to teaching that is true and relevant for us, that comes from a place within us that is real. teacher personality has been identified by several studies as a powerful component to effective teaching, more important even than intelligence, in some cases. when associated with personality traits, laursen (2005) measured authenticity by looking at the extent to which teachers view students as fellow human beings, whether or not the teacher hides behind a detached persona, and how often/much teachers view themselves, as well as students, with intentions, emotions, and interests that are uniquely their own. the difficult truth that must be acknowledged is that some teachers have a charisma and, as malcolm gladwell labels it, withitness, that is innate; thereby giving a natural spark to their teaching. for those of us who are accustomed to expecting results from hard work and practice rather than talent or personality, good teaching is also achievable, but it may not come as easily or inherently. but for those who want to try, the rewards are immeasurable. just watch any film about teaching to understand what i’m talking about. in his book, the courage to teach, parker palmer (1998) discusses identity as the evolution of all the forces that come together to form a person, including: background, culture, experience, and anything else that shapes the self. recognizing that we bring all of these aspects of ourselves to everything we do, including our instructional activities, is key to finding your teaching identity. librarians have pursued neutrality for a long time in their provision of organized and accessible information and knowledge, but this philosophy does not serve us well in the classroom. as teachers, we must acknowledge that neutrality is unrealistic and unattainable, and by seeking it we are only doing a disservice to our learners. if we define learning as the ability to think for oneself and information literacy as the knowledge and skills to be thoughtful consumers and creators of information, then we should embrace our teaching as an opportunity to help learners recognize, understand, and question perspectives and ideologies that they encounter in information seeking. critical theory, as described by powell, cantrell, and adams (2001), provides an excellent framework for integrating one’s teacherly identity into instruction in order to create opportunities for enhanced student learning and empowerment. letting go of the notion that information is neutral and that we should teach information literacy or library instruction from a neutral position will allow us to provide a context to our teaching based on experience, perception, and meaning. for teaching to be memorable and meaningful, it must come from the true self and from a willingness to share the beliefs, values, and perspectives that shape it. espousing this type of behavior in ourselves will encourage our learners to examine what shapes their identity, thereby creating opportunities for learning surrounding the questions and curiosities that arise as a result of self-disclosure, self-awareness, and self-examination. patricia cranton, author of becoming an authentic teacher in higher education (2001), presents strategies for understanding the “self” in order to arrive at a personal and professional identity that intersects at teaching. in addition to reminding us of all the attributes that are indicators of great teachers, cranton offers step-by-step approaches for identifying ways of discovering and disclosing your authentic self in the classroom and how to live with the benefits, as well as the fallout. some of these steps include: understanding values and experience, merging self and teacher, telling your story, connecting with students, and knowing your critics. i like cranton’s text as a complement to palmer’s, as it is less inspirational and more practical. sometimes librarians need that. sounds easy enough, right? to be authentic, just know yourself and be yourself! right! however, there are many ways that this can go wrong. students may not be accustomed to having teachers who are forthcoming with the personal aspects of themselves. they may misinterpret a teacher who is approachable as someone who is attempting to “be a friend”. successful teaching still depends a great deal on relationship-building and students may feel annoyed or alienated by teacher self-disclosure. as with any relationship, teachers and students must seek a balance through trust-building and negotiation that allows for a teacher’s identity and authority to co-exist with students’ learning expectations and goals. despite the dangers and difficulties, it has been my experience that most students are open to recognizing teachers as being whole people who possess knowledge, experience, and interests that extend beyond the realm of the academy. i was pleased to see this corroborated in two studies. in 1994, goldstein and benassi looked at in-class participation by students and the effect of teachers’ self-disclosure on it. upon examining students’ participation in class discussion, the number of questions asked, and the willingness to express opinions and feelings in class, the study concluded that teacher self-disclosure was positively correlated with the amount of class participation by students. similarly, a recent study conducted by mazer, murphy, and simonds (2009) looked at teacher self-disclosure in the social networking site, facebook. these researchers found that instructors who strategically share personal information (e.g. photos, interests, quotes, status, etc.) positively influenced their students’ perceptions of the teacher’s credibility, specifically competence and trustworthiness. allowing students the opportunity to recognize similarities between themselves and their teachers, in addition to seeing teachers as people, with lives beyond the classroom, could contribute to the creation of the types of open, honest environments that encourage dialogue, participation, sharing, and ultimately – learning. beyond teaching knowing and incorporating one’s authentic self into other areas of work can also result in great success. in leadership, librarians who stand for something and communicate their values demonstrate integrity and credibility. robert evans, in educational leadership (2007), describes the characteristics of authentic leaders as: vision, personal ethics, and belief in others. just as when you think of great teachers you’ve had, you can probably also think of great leaders you’ve worked with who not only have a strong sense of self and inner direction, but also share it openly with those around them. this awareness and disclosure of self establishes a culture of honesty, trust, and fairness that is central to creating a common vision and shared commitment in any organization. down to you authenticity. something that is so central to the success of one’s craft could take an entire career to cultivate, without ever truly reaching the pinnacle of achievement. but, librarians out there, if you’re anything like me, you revel in your teaching escapades because they are the one aspect of the job that is challenging beyond all expectation, shaking both body and soul, and making you all-around better and stronger. if it were easy, everybody would do it. but teaching, like so many things that are worthwhile, will break you down before it charges you up. it offers up the sweetest rewards for those who are willing to take the hardest hits. nobody could do it really well without the reality and rawness that comes with self-disclosure, which can be at times a breathtaking walk on a tightrope and, at others, a freefalling leap of faith. librarians who are bold enough to develop their inner teacher will connect more deeply with learners and participate more fully in the learning process. our authenticity will extend beyond classroom encounters to influence the teaching practices of our library colleagues and impact the instructional role of our libraries. with the potential to enhance student learning and increase the relevance of libraries to the teaching and learning continuum, authentic teachers have the opportunity to guide and lead our profession to new heights. as we pursue this path to teacherly identity, let’s be truthful, take risks, and follow our hearts. remembering all the while, of course, that teaching is not about us, it’s about our students and their learning, as well as our libraries and their future. if you’re a teacher who has sought out or achieved authenticity, please share your experiences, comments, failures, and successes. i look forward to hearing from you.   recommended/further readings: cranton, p. (2001). becoming an authentic teacher in higher education. malabar, fl: krieger publishing co. elmborg, j. (2006). critical information literacy: implications for instructional practice. journal of academic librarianship, 32(2): 192-199. evans, r. (2007). the authentic leader. in the jossey-bass reader on educational leadership (2nd ed.). (pp. 135-156). san francisco: jossey bass. gladwell, m. (2008, december 15). most likely to succeed: how do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job? the new yorker, 36. goldstein, g. & benassi, v. (1994). the relation between teacher self-disclosure and student classroom participation. teaching of psychology, 21(4): 212-217. hanning, r.w. (1984). the classroom as theater of self: some observations for beginning teachers. ade bulletin, 077, 33-37. laursen, p. (2005). the authentic teacher. in d. beijaard, p. meijer, g. morine-dershimer, & h. tillema. (eds.). teacher professional development in changing conditions. (pp. 199-212). new york: springer. mazer, j., murphy, r., & simonds, c. (2009). the effects of teacher self-disclosure via facebook on teacher credibility. learning, media and technology, 34(2): 175-183. palmer, p. (1998). the courage to teach. san francisco: jossey-bass. postman, n. (1979). teaching as a conserving activity. new york: delacorte press. powell, r., cantrell, s.c., & adams, s. (2001). saving black mountain: the promise of critical literacy in a multicultural democracy. the reading teacher, 54(8): 772-781. schank, r. (1990). tell me a story: a new look at real and artificial memory. new york: scribner. recommended viewing: dead poets society emperor’s club finding forrester the karate kid miracle worker school of rock spellbound i would like to thank emily ford for inviting me to reflect on my teaching identity in order to write this piece and for being an inspiration to radical librarians everywhere. also, thanks to randy hensley, who first challenged me to tap into my authentic self at acrl’s immersion program in 2003 and to my friends jennifer & april who have been my instructional support system (and cynical touchstones) ever since that time. special shout-out goes to all the iu-slis instruction assistants and students in s573, past and present, who make teaching and discussions surrounding teaching a pure joy (especially rachel slough for her endless enthusiasm and willingness to serve as my reviewer on this project). this post is dedicated to my mom, gloria donovan, the most authentic teacher i’ve ever known.   authenticity, identity, information literacy, instruction, leadership, librarians, librarianship, libraries, teaching we’re gonna geek this mother out outreach is (un)dead. 22 responses emily ford 2009–08–19 at 12:48 pm thanks for a great post, carrie! in reading this a few times now, i keep coming back to the question of library school education. we have to learn to be authentic, but we also have to, in library school, learn how to teach. this is something that i think can get lost in the process. these days librarians are teachers, even if we present no formal classes. but how do we learn to be such? during graduate school i noticed when i had classes taught by graduate students (my peers, mind you) that i was frustrated by lack of teaching ability. i wonder if you can offer some thoughts on educating librarians to be teachers? heather davis 2009–08–19 at 5:32 pm this brings about question of what should be combined with a traditional library education. i have heard various things such as, “i firmly believe today’s library degree needs to be combined with _____” (here you can enter masters in business administration, teaching, dual masters program, it, etc.). i have heard from teachers and faculty that not having an educational foundation in teaching is an impairment. i’m curious if a library degree can really be a stand alone degree anymore. carrie donovan 2009–08–26 at 11:54 am heather, i appreciate your comment. if you read malcolm gladwell’s new yorker article on “withitness”, i think you’ll find it relevant to our conversation. the article describes that the common element among successful teachers (or nfl quarterbacks) isn’t the training or experience they have, but it’s that certain something, that spark that really sets them apart from others in the profession. i do think having some foundational knowledge of educational theory and teaching practice that comes from coursework is important, but it’s not everything. i have a feeling we will see more opportunities for people to enter teaching (and possibly other professions?) without so many of the traditional requirements… simply because success in these fields does not always depend upon coursework alone. carrie donovan 2009–08–26 at 11:47 am emily, i think your concern is valid and there is much in the library literature to document the disconnect between professional expectations of the workplace and the education we receive in lis programs, especially when it comes to developing/understanding our role as teachers. i teach a course at iu’s school of library & information science called “education of information users” and i’ve received good feedback from students in the course regarding the usefulness of it, for their graduate studies and in finding/succeeding at that first job. like so many aspects of librarianship, there is nothing that compares with on-the-job training for instruction, but i do think a foundational course in pedagogy and teaching practice is essential for future librarians. saleem rana 2009–08–19 at 12:57 pm what a wonderful, uplifting post, carrie. i’m reminded of what jorge luis borges once said about paradise being some kind of library. it’s amazing how few people love to read books when the wisdom of the ages is at our fingertips. it was also a delightful surprise to see that your recommended viewing tips are actually some of my favorite movies. lindsay 2009–08–19 at 1:53 pm great post! you seem to be writing from an academic library perspective and i’m curious how public library instructors (for computer classes, etc.) might relate to this. students at a university tend to be of the same age group, all working towards a similar goal of getting their degree. but the diverse patrons that take a class at the public library might have completely different goals and expectations of the teacher. i feel like a public library instructor might have a different approach to authenticity in the classroom with respect to the many ethnicities/religions/ages/etc. that come with a public library. any instructors out there who have thoughts on this? lindsay_w 2009–08–19 at 7:53 pm great question lindsayi’ve taught in both an academic setting (currently) and a public library setting, and i’ve found that my students, be they 18 year old freshmen or baby boomers all appreciate an open, honest and approachable instructor, as well as someone who can break jargony library-speak, complicated opacs or intimidating technology down into manageable bits of information. being able to make connections for them between something they already know to something new is helpful as well. carrie really hit the nail on the head with this one! excellent work! molly 2009–08–19 at 7:36 pm what a timely post. with fall semester in full swing, this is a great piece to reflect upon before the onslaught of library orientations. in response to emily & heather’s thoughts on teaching and library school education, i have been teaching in libraries for seven years now, and everything i’ve learned about it has been on the job. that said, i’ve found that story telling is a great method for student engagement, as is asking and using people’s names during a class, and getting as much audience participation as possible. i get volunteers from the audience to be the ‘google jockey’ at the computer, so i can run around and point things out on the screen. giving students a choice at the start of class is another method: what do they want to learn about the library? (remote access? how to find a journal article?) and go from there. establishing a dialog, rather than a lecture, goes a long way in engagemed learning. (most of the time. sometimes you’ll just get stuck with a class full of zombies-usually it’s right after lunch.) linda 2009–09–08 at 8:53 pm i have been in a k-12 school for the last 10 years as their library media specialist. the first year it seemed as all i did was keep study hall. i was ready to leave as soon as the year was over. after that things got better. i still spent my time just checking in and out books when a teacher made them get one. i am working to change that as the years go by. i was in a room no bigger than the size of half of a reagular class room but now i have a new room and some computers. i am ready to change things up. i am going back to school to learn some more technology and hope to incorporate it in with the classes as they come in. this is a slow process for we do not have the equipemnt, time or schooling to do so. i am up for any suggestions to help get this library up to the point it needs to be in this day and age. michelle millet 2009–08–19 at 9:31 pm carrie, awesome piece! just in time for the start of the semester. kiyomi deards 2009–08–20 at 2:08 am i am currently in library school, but many years ago i was the general chemistry lab instructor at a major university. although i only taught for one school year i completely enjoyed the experience. i always found that being honest with the students, having a sense of humor, and being prepared made everyone’s experience more productive and pleasant. my students seemed to especially enjoy those times when i related how i had struggled with a concept, and how someone had helped me to understand it as i was helping them. because i was willing to admit problems and mistakes i had made, when appropriate, they seemed more comfortable admitting that they too had questions. julie zamostny 2009–08–20 at 7:57 am carrie, what a wonderful piece to start my thursday. i can really tell how influential the immersion program was for you and i am only beginning to realize how important and inspiring it was for me as well. one thing that i really took away from your reflection as well as from randy’s many lessons at immersion, was that if i practice authenticity in my daily life, it will become much easier to be authentic in the classroom. this is no easy task but it is something i am trying to practice each day and only time will tell how my role as a teacher will be affected. thanks so much for sharing this. carrie donovan 2009–08–26 at 11:56 am thanks to you, julie! virginia @ where you hang your hat 2009–08–20 at 9:30 am i’ve seen carrie teach and she’s as inspiring in person as in her article. authenticity is such an interesting topic, in and out of the classroom! shana 2009–08–20 at 12:41 pm thank you, carrie! i’ve struggled with the concept of being an “authentic teacher” since randy hensley introduced it at immersion ’08. your post has helped me “get it” better and feel more connected to the concept. i’ll be working on my authentic teacherly-self. now, if only i had a natural “shiny withitness!” carrie donovan 2009–08–26 at 12:20 pm i agree with you, shana. it is a struggle. parker palmer discusses the evolution of “self” and how important it is to be tuned-in enough to recognize the changes in you and your audience over time. looking at things this way, it makes “self” seem even more elusive. although, i do find it very calming to know that even a veteran teacher struggles with identity and that for pp, as well as the rest of us, authenticity seems to be always just beyond our reach. rachel 2009–08–26 at 10:35 pm i recently took a “literacy and learning” course from james elmborg at the university of iowa, and i agree that the relationship between teacher and student is so important for meaningful learning to take place. isn’t teaching ultimately about a self-actualized person who helps others on their quest to become self-actualized, too? for me, this all ties into being “thoughtful consumers and creators of information,” as you so eloquently put it! after reading your post, i’ve been thinking about my role as a library school *student*. the librarians who are teaching me are doing their best to present the “shiny side” of themselves, to be the “most special and charming version” of themselves — shouldn’t i offer them the same in return? i’ve realized that, as a student, i can often come across as defensive or argumentative. but your post has reminded me that my persona also affects the learning environment. from now on, i will be trying to show the “shiny side” of my student self! fred 2009–08–27 at 11:57 am i work for an organization that has often cited itself as “amongst the world’s greatest” – the nypl – the new york public library. they may once have adopted the nickname “the poor man’s university” to be politically correct & more accurate it really should have always been known as “the working man’s university” or now more accurately “the non-working man’s university”. i have worked here for 18 years mainly as ya librarian and i have always considered myself a teaching librarian. in the last 8 years nypl has departed much from it’s ideals. since september of 2001 a hiring freeze was declared. even though the city and the nypl administration had experienced mainly good financial times during these years. now instead of 7 or more librarian at a branch level 5 has been the quota but attrition has also been the rule so that many branchs now must function with only 3-4 librarians. nypl has increased the amount of computers with internet access as well as the amount of its dvd collection. they have weeded print collections including reference collections all this while reducing the amount of librarians, clerks, pages & other staff. something is wrong here. there is no one to teach or guide patrons because every one has expanded work loads even the free computer classes they offer have been scaled back. i now dream of retirement while back in 2001 i had look forward to 15 years more at nypl. sarah beaubien 2009–08–27 at 3:42 pm this is so inspiring! i agree that exposing the authentic self can improve teaching and learning, but i’ve never really thought about it in this way. thank you for expressing it so well. a couple of things i struggle with are 1) striking the right balance between teacher and “friend”, as you mentioned and 2) trying to accomplish making connections with students in a one-shot session. i’m happy to see karate kid on your viewing list – such a good example of scaffolding theory! pingback : t.s. eliot was dead wrong « lyndamk pingback : wonderful world of blogs … « market intelligence for librarians pingback : sense of self: embracing your teacher identity « amber welch this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct putting critical information literacy into context: how and why librarians adopt critical practices in their teaching – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 12 oct eamon tewell /3 comments putting critical information literacy into context: how and why librarians adopt critical practices in their teaching image by flickr user jakecaptive (cc-by-nc 2.0) in brief critical information literacy asks librarians to work with their patrons and communities to co-investigate the political, social, and economic dimensions of information, including its creation, access, and use. this approach to information literacy seeks to involve learners in better understanding systems of oppression while also identifying opportunities to take action upon them. an increasing number of librarians appear to be taking up critical information literacy ideas and practices in various ways, from cataloging to reference. but what does it mean to make critical information literacy part of one’s work? to learn more about how and why academic librarians incorporate critical information literacy into their classroom instruction, i interviewed thirteen librarians living in the united states. this article describes why and how these individuals take a critical approach to teaching about libraries and information, including the methods they use, the barriers they face, and the positive influences that keep them going. in these days of mass surveillance and the massive transfer of public goods into private hands, citizens need to know much more about how information works. they need to understand the moral, economic, and political context of knowledge. they need to know how to create their own, so that they make the world a better, more just place. – barbara fister, “practicing freedom in the digital library: reinventing libraries” (2013)   introduction like many other librarians who teach, i stumbled upon my newfound job duties having no formal training or experience as a teacher. i led the students brought in by their professor through a maze of databases, books, and services within the space of one hour as best i could, and students were often sympathetic but uninterested. even at this early stage in my career, while students quickly packed up their belongings and filed out of the library classroom, i couldn’t help but wonder if something crucial was missing. i realized i was having difficulty squaring the big reasons i became a librarian–to advocate for and widen people’s access to information, to find ways to contribute to the well-being of communities through a commitment to social responsibility, to fight as one of the last holdouts in a society where “sharing” and “free” are becoming endangered terms–with my primary responsibility as a teacher of, as one student put it, “how to do the library.” i eventually found what i was searching for, but it took some time. i started to learn about the work that had been taking place in critical information literacy, and critical librarianship more broadly, that had been occurring for decades. i looked into examples of radical librarianship and activism that were sometimes mentioned fleetingly in my mls program but more often absent altogether, like the efforts of sanford berman to identify and update or remove derogatory and harmful library of congress subject headings (1971), the radical reference collective (morrone & friedman 2009), and the progressive librarians guild (plg), founded in 1990. this long tradition of social justice work being done in and outside of libraries by all types of librarians led to my discovery of critical information literacy. i have briefly addressed some of the many inspirational books and articles of critical librarianship and critical information literacy (tewell 2015), but the most impactful works for me personally were by maria accardi, emily drabinski & alana kumbier (2010), james elmborg (2006), heidi jacobs (2008), maria accardi (2013), and robert schroeder (2014). many of these are from library juice press, a publisher specializing in library issues addressed from a critical perspective. critical information literacy aims to understand how libraries participate in systems of oppression and find ways for librarians and students to intervene upon these systems. to do so, it examines information, libraries, and the work of librarians using critical theories and most often the ideas of critical pedagogy. as stated by lua gregory and shana higgins, critical information literacy “takes into consideration the social, political, economic, and corporate systems that have power and influence over information production, dissemination, access, and consumption” (2013). inspired by the books and articles i had been reading, i started using different critical information literacy approaches in my classes. as i tried these methods i became increasingly interested in how other librarians made critical information literacy part of their teaching. having firsthand experience making critical information literacy “work” as a teacher and seeing students truly engaged with their learning and topics that matter to them was very transformative for me. seeing the change that critical information literacy can make, and the ways it deepened how i approached my interactions with students, led to me being passionate about its potential. i interviewed 13 librarians working in a variety of academic institutions, living in different regions within the united states, and with varied ages, ethnicities, genders, and ablednesses, to see how they practice critical information literacy within library instruction. i spoke with them by email and via skype, and asked questions about how their teaching is influenced by critical information literacy, what barriers they faced, what benefits they saw, and what factors allowed their teaching to continue or even flourish. in her recent book critical information literacy: foundations, inspiration, and ideas, annie downey argues, “critical information literacy looks beyond the strictly functional, competency-based role of information discovery and use, going deeper than the traditional conceptions of information literacy that focus almost wholly on mainstream sources and views” (2016). at its core, critical information literacy is an attempt to render visible the complex workings of information so that we may identify and act upon the power structures that shape our lives. how this may actually be done within our libraries is what i wished to investigate in this project. how librarians learned about critical information literacy critical information literacy has become better known due to the efforts of many that started writing and thinking about it years ago. this shift from the margins toward the center that critical approaches to librarianship have made is observed by librarian emily drabinski in a recent keynote (2016). the interviewees i spoke with learned about critical information literacy in a variety of ways. how you learn about something can in many ways shape how you come to understand it, so i wanted to address this first to set the stage for other questions. most interviewees learned of critical information literacy from a colleague either in their workplace or at another library, coupled with an article or book related to the subject. this is described by one librarian who was searching for readings that discussed the cultural aspects of information literacy. upon reading an article by cushla kapitztke recommended by a colleague, this librarian said, “the whole world stopped around me. and i just was just blown away, and i’d never read anything like it…it really spoke to me.” indicative of critical information literacy’s growing popularity, two interviewees learned about the topic at conferences and unconferences, such as the first #critlib unconference. though three interviewees discovered critical information literacy during their mlis programs only one did so through a formal class, while one was through a self-directed research paper and another was by preparing a bibliography while working as a graduate assistant. one librarian’s critical practice at her diverse public university was informed by her background in anthropology, and she identifies the ferguson uprising as the point where she began discussing social justice issues in relation to information in her classes. she soon after found that library workers were discussing these issues on twitter at the #critlib hashtag and “realized after the fact that what i was doing fit into this cil [critical information literacy] approach that was already in place.” coursework in areas other than librarianship was key for some interviewees, who learned about critical pedagogy or critical theory before finding an article or book related to critical information literacy. one librarian learned about critical information literacy while doing research for doctoral coursework after having read paulo freire and in particular myles horton, whose work with poor and undereducated people in rural tennessee caused her to draw connections with her own work with underprepared students: “importantly, the community (i.e. students) identified the skills they needed to learn. i began to see information literacy as one of those skills that is truly fundamental to living and working today. this idea really pushed me past what i had previously thought information literacy was.” other librarians related their educational backgrounds in english, women’s studies, and social studies as priming them for the ideas of critical pedagogy as applied to information literacy. a majority of interviewees learned about critical information literacy relatively recently, between 2011 and 2014. yet three librarians, at a community college, four year university, and liberal arts college, mentioned they had already been practicing these same types of ideas before learning about the term, showing that one may very well use critical information literacy approaches without being aware of the name: “cil felt like a natural extension of what i had already been doing, and i imagine i’d be practicing critical librarianship/il even if it weren’t something of an established subfield of information literacy.” how critical information literacy can be incorporated into classes to gather a sampling of ways these librarians brought critical information literacy into their teaching, i asked them about a time when they incorporated critical information literacy into a class. the interviewees shared a wealth of examples for single sessions and credit-bearing courses, and a few of my favorite examples follow, which i appreciate for their creativity, applicability to a variety of settings, and potential for involving learners with critical concepts. it is important to note that librarians’ identities shape the ways they are able to pursue their work. what one librarian with marginalized identities may be able to discuss in terms of politically-oriented topics with students or negotiate with course instructors in terms of class content will differ from librarians with privileged backgrounds. librarians with marginalized identities are more likely to face challenges in actualizing their critical information literacy practice. one interviewee at a regional public university campus described an activity that asks students to explore library databases and present them to the class. this easy-to-implement idea turns the tables on lecture-dominated library instruction, and asks students to not just be involved, but to share their knowledge. as this librarian described: when i do this activity, i don’t even turn on my projector to show [students] stuff on the screen to get them started–i just have them jump right in, even if they don’t really know what they’re doing. relinquishing control of the demonstration disrupts the teacher/learner hierarchy of power and places power in the learner’s hands…it shows [students] that they have knowledge that is worth sharing and that they, too, can have power to speak and guide and teach. their voice matters. the idea, of course, as it that this leaks out of the walls of the classroom and into their lives and worlds. another librarian at a small college discusses power with students in terms of viewpoints represented within a database. “i love to talk about the role of power in information structures with students. one of the best ways to do this is to talk about what and who is and is not represented and why.” this librarian continues, “one way i’ve done this is to do a pre-search in a database on a topic with a bit of controversy and see if i can get a results list that is eye-opening…i had students look at the results list and evaluate the first 3-5 results and then we discussed their evaluation process…we talked about how information is created and who does the creating, including looking at who was funding the research in the peer review journals and who had ads in the trade journals.” this idea uses a database and the sources within to generate conversation and dialogue, and relates the evaluation process to the students instead of an external checklist. one interviewee began a class discussion with a role-playing scenario: “instead of simply demo-ing a database, i facilitated a role-playing activity in which [students] assumed the roles of scholars, and we then had a discussion about who gets to be a scholar and thus who has a voice in the literature. this was all new to them, and i think they were able to both understand what ‘the literature’ is and problematize academia in ways they hadn’t before.” she further explained, “when i did show them how to use a database, i was able to bring to their attention to the ways in which information organization (subject headings) are also problematic, particularly when it comes to gender identity and sexuality…i think this one-shot was critical in that is not only allowed students to peek ‘behind the scenes’ (as far as how information is produced and organized in academia), but it also troubled these processes.” these ideas sometimes come in flashes of brilliance, but more often they are the result of trying something small, revising it, and trying again. one librarian at a large research university began by carefully considering the language she used and how she applied her authority as a teacher. she followed these reflective practices by asking discussion questions regarding whose voices are missing from discovery systems, whether google or a library catalog, and found that students responded to these questions with interest. this then led to the more intentional creation of instruction sessions centered around critical topics and discussions. several interviewees mentioned they had been unsure whether they were “allowed” to do this type of instruction, particularly those librarians who began thinking about critical information literacy a few years ago when literature and conversations regarding the topic were scarce. starting out small may help with these feelings of uncertainty, even though, as two interviewees pointed out by relating examples of when their classes did not go as planned, all teaching is difficult and critical information literacy instruction can be particularly demanding due to the emotional investment it often requires. how classroom methods are used to practice critical information literacy with an understanding of the ways critical librarians taught classes using a critical information literacy approach, i was curious whether they found that particular teaching methods were conducive for doing so. their responses revealed a number of commonalities as well as some unique ideas. looking over these different methods, they demonstrate that critical information literacy has the potential to uncover and question some very big issues and norms while simultaneously being something that is very do-able. creating opportunities for interaction between the librarian and students was a frequent goal. nine interviewees mentioned class discussions as their teaching method of choice. one librarian spends a great deal of effort fostering discussions, stating, “i spend more time now developing the questions i am going to ask than any other part of my planning because if you don’t ask the right questions, the conversation never reaches the level it needs to.” another librarian at a comprehensive public university carefully centers student questions: “one method i use when i teach many of my classes for graduate students or doctoral students is i base the class on their questions…i give them time to talk amongst themselves about what they want to know, then i ask them. i write their questions on the board and tell them i’ll base the class on these questions, and that they should ask more if they have them.” this method “shows the students i want to try to answer their questions – they are the most important. it also parallels the kind of work they will see the librarians do with them at the reference desk or in individual research consultations.” certain activities and teaching techniques were shared by interviewees, including the jigsaw method which one librarian has “experimented over the past several years…using small groups that then convene into a larger group to guide conversations about exploring databases and evaluating sources–and not just evaluating, but collaboratively developing criteria to evaluate,” and activities that range from “group work exploring a variety of sources surrounding the murder of trayvon martin to acting out a scholarly debate on the coming out process.” others had success using search examples to introduce critical ideas, such as prison abolition or black lives matter. “i always try to use a search example/keywords/ideas that, hopefully, will expose students to a set of results that gets them thinking about an important topic,” one interviewee stated. for example, in an online tutorial one librarian used the research question, “how does air quality affect women’s health?” which is relevant to their student population in terms of geography, health, and economic disparity, but also draws attention to the gendered dimensions of environmental racism. another method for teaching critical information literacy is adapted from paulo freire’s concept of problem-posing, wherein teachers and learners co-investigate an issue or question of importance to them. one librarian at a small college described a successful example of problem-posing in library instruction, noting that she has “started asking the faculty to help me think of a problem the class could work on together, which i think is the best thing to have happened for my teaching in a long time.” noting that it took her a great deal of time to reach the point where she is confident in asking faculty for something in exchange for helping their students, she describes an example: [we looked into] when a specific law was passed and who the primary players were in passing the law. this sounds simple, but there was misinformation all over the place about this law. the wikipedia entry was wrong and had been cited over and over so the wrong date was starting to appear as the “official date.” this was wonderful for our purposes because we had conversations about source type, government documents, how information gets perpetuated, sourcing and evaluation, etc. essentially, we are able to problematize information consumption and dissemination with this one little question. the students were very into it. a small but meaningful change to a common part of library instruction–an overview of the services a library provides–was described by one interviewee: “instead of telling students about the services that we have, i might actually have the students find one or two things that they didn’t know about the library, and share with each other.” this is a way to “change the expectation that i’m going to be the person standing there and telling them what they need to know. that they can also, you know, construct their own knowledge. and perhaps learn, with maybe my guidance, learn from each other.” more than a third of the librarians i spoke with found that reflection was key to their instruction. “allowing students time to reflect or posing questions that ask them to consider how/if the lesson is meaningful to them is an important part of the classroom experience for me,” one person affirmed. “ideally, it adds a small jolt to their experience and communicates to students that i’m here for them, that i want to be useful and a purposeful addition to their classroom, not some intruder with my own agenda.” the difference in critical approaches to il does not always relate to the method, and is instead more likely to be based upon the social and political orientation of one’s instructional aims: “my set of methods haven’t changed that much since i started to shift to a more critical focus, it’s the topics that we are discussing that have shifted.” one interviewee describes what worked and what they would like to further pursue in a credit-bearing course, which corresponds to the demographics of their institution: [a] discussion that went fairly well but that i would like to explore more next year revolved around the idea that publishing academic stuff is a mechanism for someone or a group to gain/earn authority or academic legitimacy. i had walked students through the peer review process, why it is important yet flawed, who engages in it and why, etc. then, because another course outcome dealt with understanding “the disciplines,” we moved to the history of chicano/a studies and its struggle for legitimacy in the academy. one of the ways in which it contributed to academic discussions/developed a canon and thus gained legitimacy in the world of higher education, was by establishing its own scholarly journals. my class discussed this a bit, but i’d really like to make this the focal point of my course next year. how theoretical understandings inform the practice of critical information literacy in order to better understand the various ways the librarians i interviewed thought of critical information literacy, i asked if there were theoretical or conceptual understandings that influenced their work. i clarified that these could be theories, ideas, or writings related to education, social justice, libraries, or other things meaningful to them. many interviewees conceived of their teaching aims in terms of critical pedagogy. as described by lauren smith, critical pedagogy argues that “learners can only truly learn to think critically if they are also able to challenge the problems within power and knowledge structures in their educational environment as well as the wider world” (2013, p. 19). for alana kumbier, “critical pedagogy offers tools we can use to denaturalize and evaluate phenomena that are often understood as inevitable, like economic or cultural globalization, or natural, like a binary sex/gender system, or just accepted, like the authority of an encyclopedia entry” (2014, p. 161). many interviewees cited readings that influenced how they thought about the goals and realities of formal education–what one person referred to as the “classics” of critical pedagogy. “while i was in grad school we read freire, and giroux, all those sort of classics. bell hooks, teaching to transgress, i loved too…if someone else were to say to me, ‘oh, i’m sort of interested in this critical pedagogy, what is this about?’ those would be the things i would pull off my shelf with excitement and say, ‘you have to read these!’” this same interviewee was also influenced by critical race theory, finding it extremely useful for ideas about building inclusive classroom environments. critical race theory was discussed by four interviewees, and the handbook of critical race theory in education (lynn and dixson, 2013) was mentioned as one key resource in this area. feminist pedagogy was another area of theory and practice that inspired critical librarians. “for critical pedagogy and theory, i really respond to freire, mezirow, shor, and hooks,” one interviewee replied. “and then feminist pedagogues who have problematized critical pedagogy like jennifer gore, elizabeth ellsworth, and patti lather. i like the critiques of critical pedagogy by these authors because they address the fact that it is really hard to pull critical pedagogy off in our institutions.” maria accardi’s 2013 book feminist pedagogy for library instruction was mentioned by four interviewees as directly informing their practice, particularly feminist pedagogy as an educational approach that “honors student experience and voice, has social justice aims, and is attentive to power dynamics in the classroom.” one librarian’s upbringing and personal sense of social justice fundamentally informs her work: “i think i am primarily motivated by a strong inner sense of social justice more than anything. i learned about paulo freire and the banking method and conscientização [critical consciousness] and all of that…which helped to align my already innate social justice framework with the educational environment. but that sense that i am here on this planet to help make it better was already inside of me…my social justice framework is profoundly informed by my catholic upbringing and education.” another interviewee found student rallies and local issues on their campus, such as the cutting of positions in the university’s ethnic studies department, to be impactful on a personal level. the academic disciplines interviewees studied as undergraduate or graduate students were also highly influential, whether literature, cultural studies, anthropology, or journalism. how critical information literacy is beneficial as bell hooks writes, because “our educational institutions are so deeply invested in a banking system, teachers are more rewarded when we do not teach against the grain” (1994, p. 203). why do librarians teaching against the grain choose to do so? what impact might this approach to teaching make? one question i asked interviewees was whether they find critical information literacy beneficial. the reasons they gave were largely related to the engagement they saw with students as well as their own newly discovered or rediscovered commitment to their work as librarians. brian kopp and kim olson-kopp argue that “the development of critical consciousness in a library setting depends first and foremost on humanizing, or putting a face on, research, and grounding it in the realities which shape it” (2010, p. 57). for the librarians i spoke with, having a basis in critical information literacy enabled them to be more engaged teachers who were able to bring their whole selves into the classroom. “i don’t think i’d still be doing what i’m doing if i hadn’t learned or figured out that i could use critical information literacy in the classroom, because i would be so burned out and bored by point-here-click-here teaching,” one interviewee states. another librarian found the demands of this type of teaching has made them a better instructor: “it forces me to be self-reflective and challenges me to go outside of my comfort zone of knowing exactly what to do in front of a class. i’m definitely uncomfortable when i don’t have a concrete plan, but i believe that it really does benefit students more when i’m not following a rote plan and can instead allow for diversions.” these benefits of critical information literacy for instruction librarians are related to those for students, in particular fostering a sense of purpose and meaning. critical information literacy’s “student-centered emphasis” was influential for one interviewee, which has “meant moving beyond simply discussion or inquiry-based learning, and really bringing the students’ needs or knowledge or perspective to the fore, as much as possible.” sincerely valuing student knowledge and the perspectives they bring, as well as finding ways to make this knowledge a meaningful part of classes, was discussed by several librarians. this focus on student-centeredness and its effects is described by one interviewee: when classes are conducted in critical ways i think students get to hear their own voice and hear their own experiences validated. they see themselves, their whole selves, as part of the academic enterprise, an enterprise that they can change for the better. they can realize that the questions that really matter to them, many of which relate to power, are valid academic questions. it can help them make sense of the strange new place (to many) called the university. annie downey notes that one “issue that arises from librarians’ lack of teacher training is that they struggle with finding ways to make their instruction meaningful to students. they often confront the problem of students being unaware to relate the information they are supposed to learn in library instruction sessions to what they may be doing in their classes or to their lives in any meaningful way” (2016). for critical librarians and their students alike, it appears that critical information literacy is one way to provide this meaningfulness. one unexpected finding was that critical information literacy’s associated ideas and approaches to teaching was a way for librarians to connect with faculty and course instructors in a wide range of institutional settings. many of these connections were related to shared pedagogical approaches or interests. one interviewee in a large research university said critical information literacy helped her “build a bridge” with teaching faculty and instructors in that these critical approaches to information act as “a shared language that we now have,” and as such, is a positive in developing collaborations such as alternative research assignments. for another librarian in a small liberal arts college, critical information literacy is a way to begin the conversation of going past the one-shot instruction model. “when someone comes to you and says, ‘i want you to come to my class and do a demo of jstor, can we have fifteen minutes of your time?’…i can comment back and say, ‘how about, if instead, we do this?’…critical information literacy is really helpful to open up that dialogue again in a more meaningful way. and talk about the goals of instruction, and not just sort of fall back to that familiar routine and model.” another interviewee found it a way to connect with faculty regarding shared interests in social justice issues: “as i’ve been exploring cil i’ve been continually amazed at how many other faculty on campus come from a critical or social justice background! cil helps me make immediate and deep connections with the faculty i relate to and with whom i work with as i teach il sessions.” one librarian at an urban public university observed how the campus setting impacted their teaching and the interests of students and faculty: “we’re a campus that’s really not far from the center of the city, where there are huge protests that happening downtown…even if i am not talking about those things, because…i don’t teach a class on my own, students might be thinking about these issues anyways in one their other classes, or maybe in the work that they do outside of class. so i think all of that makes it more easier for me to incorporate critical information literacy. because, i feel like they also get it…they understand.” she added that instructors at her institution also generally think about the same types of political issues happening, such as protests and social movements occurring both on-campus and off. another librarian in a different setting found inspiration for her classes at a small private college in a rural area through an event that transpired near their campus. the u.s. federal government conducted a raid of immigrant workers at a meatpacking plant, which was the largest at that point in time. in discussing this raid, the librarian asked students to gather materials from a variety of sources, including the college archives, that documented or addressed the raid and its implications, and to evaluate what arguments each source was making as well as how it might be useful to or not useful to students’ research. for these librarians, a great deal of inspiration was found in events that impacted their nearby community and were important to students. how barriers shape the practice of critical information literacy the challenges faced by critical information literacy practitioners are important to consider because they identify obstacles that may then be more easily recognized and addressed. to learn more about challenges critical librarians face, i asked about barriers they experienced in making critical information literacy part of their classroom practice. far and away, the one-shot instruction model and a lack of time were the primary barriers. this is due in part because critical information literacy requires a significant time investment: “it takes more time to enact critical information literacy instruction–time to plan, time to reflect. this is not the kind of teaching you can do on autopilot.” another interviewee makes an important distinction between finding time and making time: “i don’t think we ever ‘find’ the time, we can only make the time for things we think important. so making the time to make critical information literacy important is the key.” although prioritizing what one finds important in their work is important, a related challenge is that of the single instruction session that many academic librarians make do with. “obviously, if that’s the best you have to work with, i fully encourage anyone to do what they can,” one person says. “but it takes a certain degree of trust for students to take risks and challenge hegemonic assumptions – and showing up to one class session is not enough time to develop that trust.” five other interviewees made similar remarks about the limitations of this common teaching scenario. having the confidence or courage necessary for a critical approach to teaching as well as the support essential to do so was also discussed. this was sometimes scary for one librarian: “when you’re committing to a way of teaching and learning that is mostly outside the norm, or outside what you’re most familiar with, it can feel scary,” while another interviewee noted how colleagues’ perspectives and their newness to a job impacted their ability to practice critical information literacy: “i struggle to feel confident in my professional actions in general, particularly when they differ from what my co-workers are doing or from what i’ve done in the past. add to that the fact that i’m still new to my position…and that can lead to a lot of questioning and second-guessing on my part.” others described being the only one at their institution who teach using critical information literacy as lonely, since “people don’t always get what you’re trying to do, even if you try to explain it to them.” an interviewee at a large institution felt confident in her teaching practice but misunderstood by colleagues, explaining that they “think that i’m wasting my time, or that i’m just being a bit too much of like a warrior, and take myself too seriously.” critical librarians also faced resistance from students, for a variety of reasons. most often was because critical information literacy is not always comfortable or enjoyable for students who are accustomed to lectures and passive means of education: students don’t always recognize critical pedagogy as teaching, because it doesn’t look like most of the teaching they’ve experienced before. and maybe they don’t want to be actively engaged; maybe they just want to be lectured to, to be passive. similarly, the teaching faculty member also may not recognize or understand what you’re doing as real actual teaching and may try to interfere or undermine you while you’re in the middle of teaching. while interviewees typically found a few students in their classes willing to engage, getting all students on board and changing their expectations, especially within a 50 to 75-minute session, proved difficult. another concern was balancing critical information literacy topics and methods with immediate student needs and course instructors’ expectations: “this is a difficult balance because not only do i feel pressure to give the instructor and students what they want and expect (database demonstrations), i really need them to understand the practical use of this information and how to be engaged actors within their learning experience.” helping students succeed in their academic work so they can complete their assignments, receive their grades, and attain the degree they seek is by no means incompatible with the goals of critical information literacy, but requires attention of its own. in an article on the tension between neoliberal definitions of student success and critical library instruction, ian beilin notes the necessity of reconciling student preparation and the demands they must meet with teaching approaches that emphasize broader structural ideas: “especially for first-generation students, students of colour, and working-class students, librarians have a responsibility to teach skills, so many of which more-privileged students have already acquired” (2016, p. 17). one possibility for meeting this challenge is for library educators to “encourage alternative definitions of success while at the same time ensure success in the existing system,” which can be a necessary but difficult balance to strike (2016, p. 18). apart from some experiences with student resistance and pedagogical challenges, the librarians i spoke with also faced difficulties in terms of faculty expectations of what information literacy instruction is or could be. as noted by one interviewee: “i had an activity where the students were evaluating different sources and sharing, like going up to the front of the class and sharing what they found, and demoing the resource themselves…and the instructor just cut them off. because they wanted just the traditional librarian standing up there, telling them where to click.” several librarians stated the biggest barrier to critical information literacy was faculty and course instructor expectations. part of the reason for this lies in the power differentials between librarians and faculty, described by a librarian at a small liberal arts college: i move carefully with faculty because they are the ones holding the power. if i want to have them bring their classes in and send their students to me, i have to be very respectful of their wishes. i am even more careful with more established faculty. at a small college, especially, a wrong move with the faculty can seriously undermine your ability to do anything with a specific department or can appear to reflect badly on your performance in the eyes of supervisors in the library. related to the challenge of faculty expectations is that of course instructors impinging on librarians’ classroom decisions or interjecting themselves into discussions. one interviewee noted the raced and gendered dynamics among librarian teachers and faculty, and in particular the tendency for certain faculty to interrupt librarians when they are in the middle of teaching: “my supervisor who’s an older white woman…she can really command a class. she’s also an excellent teacher. but would an instructor tell her to stop doing what she’s doing? i don’t think so….someone like me, i look young, and am a woman of color.” this observation draws attention to the challenges that librarians with marginalized identities are likely to face in classroom environments. beyond student resistance and faculty expectations, the greater domain that education takes place within was discussed as a challenge. the increasing corporatization of higher education and expectations fueled by universities that students “invest” in an education in order to receive a “return” such as a high-paying job is one major factor at odds with the goals of critical information literacy: “though we get great support and have the enthusiastic backing of the administration, it’s impossible to ignore that there is an explicitly career-oriented education on offer here. this undermines efforts to make the student the subject of the learning process rather than the object and certainly cuts against any effort to liberate learning from creeping corporatization.” a related issue is the culture of assessment embraced by many universities. the values of assessment and reporting and the tension with critical education approaches is related by one interviewee: “i’ve chaired our campus academic assessment committee before; i fully understand the stakes of assessment in higher ed in a state-funded institution. assessment culture privileges ways of teaching and learning that are quantifiable. i can’t put ‘changed lives and enacted social change’ on a rubric, but i am pressured to report student learning findings in ways that are rubric-able.” how factors contribute positively to the practice of critical information literacy while critical librarians face significant challenges, it is important to also understand what factors enable their practice and help it to thrive. the librarians i interviewed identified several elements: seeing critical information literacy work–something that has been a big contributing factor in my own practice–having a community of librarians who are attempting similar things, having colleagues at their own workplace to talk and collaborate with, and online spaces for discussion such as #critlib on twitter. “when you know you’ve been successful, that you have had an impact on the student in some way, this reinforces the practice of this kind of teaching in a very positive, affirming way,” one librarian wrote. “knowing i’ve had an impact, for me, is more through informal observation and conversations, through the questions students ask, or what they write down on the 3-2-1 sheet i use a lot.” seeing critical information literacy work in their classes, and knowing firsthand the difference that this approach can make, was cited by several interviewees as being a major positive factor. as one person stated, “the biggest thing is my past experiences where it’s worked. where things have happened in a classroom and people have said things that i never, ever, ever, would have thought or said.” these opportunities for unexpected and authentic conversations inspired several critical librarians. in considering the challenges faced in her critical and feminist pedagogy, maria accardi writes, “what gave me hope, what kept me going, what helped me remember that feminist teaching is worth the effort and difficulty, was that even amongst all my failures and flops, there were shining moments of success” (2013, p. 3). librarians need to not just see that this approach to teaching works for them and their students, but to be supported in their efforts. for some librarians i spoke with, this meant finding a community of colleagues interested in critical librarianship. “being connected to a like-minded community who also cares about critical information literacy instruction is hugely important. without having anyone else to talk to about it, i don’t know if i’d have the fortitude to keep doing what i’m doing,” notes one interviewee. another librarian came to the same conclusion: “the biggest positive factor is talking to other librarians trying to do the same thing. this is wonderfully beneficial at conferences, but even better was when people at my institution got interested.” in a similar way that finding a community of librarians helped foster librarians’ critical practices, locating colleagues at one’s own institution, inside the library or out, was important for the same reasons. one interviewee identified this as building allies: “a big thing for me is when i can build allies. whether that’s with the course instructors, or in the library. so i tend to sort of, try to find people, try to find instructors who i know are engaged with women’s and gender studies, or some other kind of department that thinks about these kinds of things and uses these methods already.” five other interviewees noted that they made strong connections with faculty colleagues and this contributed positively to their critical information literacy efforts. in describing the experiences of critical librarians she interviewed, downey found a similar theme: “even having just one other person at their institution who is cognizant of and uses critical information literacy can make a big difference for librarians’ comfort level with critical approaches and content” (2016, p. 141). at the same time, downey makes a strong case for the necessity of librarians, solo or with others, working to change the direction of teaching at one’s institution, for “teachers inspire other teachers and trust other teachers” (2016, p. 145). one tool that interviewees used to connect with others was the “critlib” hashtag on twitter. short for “critical librarianship,” this hashtag is used for chats on a variety of topics as well as a way to converse with other librarians following the hashtag. one interviewee discusses the helpfulness of #critlib in establishing an online meeting place for critical librarians: “the #critlib community and artifacts they create (conferences, website, etc.) have been really helpful, not necessarily for things like lesson planning or creating activities, but for giving me content to think about that i can then integrate into the classroom…it’s also really nice to know there are people out there thinking and excited about the same things as me.” for one librarian at a liberal arts college, #critlib provided an umbrella for different theories and approaches that could later be applied: “i sort of fumbled my way through information literacy at first, and that’s why i find #critlib very helpful. the nice thing about #critlib is that it has help [sic] provide a (loose) framework for bringing together many different theories and approaches that could be considered critical.” conclusion the librarians i interviewed appreciated the fact that this approach to librarianship has been blooming. this shift was described by one librarian who has been interested in critical librarianship for several years: “the progressive librarians guild and library juice press have been going for some time, but criticality seems to be flowering these days. just a few years ago i was looking for a conference to go to actually talk to some live folks about critical pedagogy. i looked all over the web in all sorts of disciplines and countries and didn’t hardly find anything, and definitely nothing lis related.” but now there are many events, from those on critical librarianship specifically, such as the first #critlib unconference, events organized by the radical librarians collective in the uk, the 2016 critical librarianship and pedagogy symposium, and the critical information literacy unconference held prior to the european conference on information literacy, to the presence of critical sessions in large american conferences such as acrl and ala. in noting the increasing popularity of critical information literacy, one interviewee urged librarians to continue applying critical thought to other areas as well: “instruction doesn’t stop at the classroom door, and then this whole process of conscientization doesn’t just stop there as well.” critical information literacy is not limited to teaching, and thinking broadly about the implications of libraries can encourage positive changes. relatedly, critical librarianship must be informed by diverse perspectives. the issue of perceived barriers was brought up as one problem: “the biggest concern that i have…is that there are these perceived barriers, and that there is a price of admission. that you cannot be a critical librarian until you’ve read these six books, or have this degree, or this background. that really bugs me. just because it’s the antithesis of what critical pedagogy is supposed to be, which is valuing the experiences and understandings that everybody brings.” one thing these interviews clearly showed me was that every person’s background contributed immensely to their critical practice, and it was drawing upon their individual passions that made them the librarian they are. regarding future directions for critical information literacy, some interviewees responded that they wished for information literacy to become “something that by nature needs to be critical”: “my hope is that someday there will come a time when information literacy and critical information literacy are the same thing. and we don’t have to live with this older model of, you know, dealing with the tools kind of instruction.” in contrast to this hope that information literacy and critical approaches would become one in the same, another person made the point that, “i also don’t think that it has to be for everybody. we are all very different people and we don’t all have the same political views, and…we definitely don’t have the same philosophies when it comes to our approach to being librarians. so, at the same time, if you don’t feel like this is for you, that’s also fine.” whether or not one makes efforts to adopt a critical approach to librarianship through action, reflection, and theory, the relationships we develop with our communities and ways to meaningfully work towards creating a better world should be a central consideration. “the way we research, the way we teach, the way we practice our profession are all really building relationships with scholarly communities and with students that are becoming part of scholarly communities,” one interviewee wrote. “so one thing about getting into critical practices is that i’m connecting with a whole network of folks that think deeply and believe a better future is possible. librarians, scholars, and students.” as i finished one interview, the librarian i was in contact with shared several reflective questions, stating, “these are the things that i try to reflect on to distance myself from the daily grind and getting caught up in the monotony or frustrations of work. i thought you might enjoy them as well.” i would like to conclude with some of those questions that were offered, with the hope that readers might take them as an invitation to reflect intentionally upon their work and themselves. what are some existing forms of oppression our students engage with at the academy? how do librarians reinforce those systems of oppression in the classroom or inadvertently within library practices? how do our assumptions work their way into our teaching practices? what are some ways in which you design the classroom experience to be a democratic, collaborative, and transformative site? how do we balance the lived experiences of our students with “canonical” sets of knowledge and skills that they are required to learn? how do you view your role as an academic librarian and its relationship to social justice? a sincere thank you to the reviewers who contributed their insights and expertise to make this a better piece: lauren smith, sofia leung, and ryan randall. thank you to annie pho for serving as the publishing editor for this article and seeing it through the lead pipe publication process. the institute for research design in librarianship gave me the methodological footing i needed to begin this project and the camaraderie i needed to see it through. a special thanks to the 13 librarians i interviewed. it was a true pleasure to talk with them about critical information literacy and their work, and they left me inspired and hopeful that librarians and libraries can help create positive social change. works cited accardi, maria. (2013). feminist pedagogy for library instruction. sacramento, ca: library juice press. accardi, maria t., emily drabinski, and alana kumbier, eds. (2010). critical library instruction: theories and methods. duluth, mn: library juice press. beilin, ian. “student success and the neoliberal academic library.” canadian journal of academic librarianship 1, no. 1 (2016): 10-23. available at: http://www.cjal.ca/index.php/capal/article/view/24303 (retrieved 19 september 2016). berman, sanford. (1971). prejudices and antipathies: a tract on the lc subject heads concerning people. metuchen, nj: scarecrow press. downey, annie. (2016). critical information literacy: foundations, inspirations, and ideas. sacramento, ca: library juice press. drabinski, emily. “teaching the radical catalog.” in radical cataloging: essays at the front, edited by k.r. roberto, 198-205. jefferson, nc: mcfarland and company, 2008. available at: http://www.emilydrabinski.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/drabinski_radcat.pdf (retrieved 19 september 2016). drabinski, emily. “critical pedagogy in a time of compliance | information literacy keynote, emily drabinski.” youtube video, 01:09:36. posted by moraine valley community college library, may 3, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41ymjlltebo elmborg, james. (2006). “critical information literacy: implications for instructional practice.” journal of academic librarianship 32, no. 2: 192-199. available at: http://borg.slis.uiowa.edu/pubs/critical_information_literacy_implications.pdf (retrieved 19 september 2016). ettarh, fobazi. (2014). “making a new table: intersectional librarianship.” in the library with the lead pipe. available at: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/making-a-new-table-intersectional-librarianship-3/ (retrieved 19 september 2016). fister, barbara. “practicing freedom in the digital library.” library journal, 26 august 2013. available at: http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/08/future-of-libraries/practicing-freedom-in-the-digital-library-reinventing-libraries/ (retrieved 19 september 2016). gregory, lua, and shana higgins, eds. (2013). information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis. sacramento, ca: library juice press. bell hooks. (1994). teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york: routledge. jacobs, heidi l.m. “information literacy and reflective pedagogical praxis.” the journal of academic librarianship 34, no. 3 (2008): 256-262. available at: http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/leddylibrarypub/23/ (retrieved 19 september 2016). kopp, bryan m., and kim olson-kopp. “depositories of knowledge: library instruction and the development of critical consciousness.” in critical library instruction: theories and methods, edited by maria t. accardi, emily drabinski, and alana kumbier, 55-67. duluth, mn: library juice press, 2010. kumbier, alana. interview by robert schroeder in critical journeys: how 14 librarians came to embrace critical practice, 157-173. sacramento, ca: library juice press, 2014. lynn, marvin, and adrienne d. dixson, eds. (2013). handbook of critical race theory in education. new york: routledge. morrone, melissa, and lia friedman. “radical reference: socially responsible librarianship collaborating with community.” the reference librarian 50, no. 4 (2009): 371-396. available at: http://eprints.rclis.org/23443/ (retrieved 19 september 2016). schroeder, robert. (2014). critical journeys: how 14 librarians came to embrace critical practice. sacramento, ca: library juice press. smith, lauren. “towards a model of critical information literacy instruction for the development of political agency.” journal of information literacy 7, no. 2 (2013): 15-32. available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.11645/7.2.1809 (retrieved 19 september 2016). tewell, eamon. “a decade of critical information literacy: a review of the literature.” communications in information literacy 9, no. 1 (2015): 24-43. available at: http://www.comminfolit.org/index.php?journal=cil&page=article&op=view&path%5b%5d=v9i1p24 (retrieved 19 september 2016). critical information literacy, information literacy, library instruction the collective approach: reinventing affordable, useful, and fun professional development the information literacy of survey mark hunting: a dialogue 3 responses pingback : critical reflection: pre-chat materials | open book librarian pingback : was es heisst, informationskompetenz kritisch zu sehen | hapke-weblog pingback : putting critical information literacy into context: how and why librarians adopt critical practices in their teaching – in the library with the lead pipe | flamencalibrarian this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct change in publication schedule – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 24 feb editorial board /0 comments change in publication schedule by editorial board hello friends and readers! we’re writing to let you know about a change in our publication strategy, effective immediately. moving forward, we will be publishing articles on a rolling basis, instead of on every other wednesday. at the moment, fewer submissions are coming in, but we still think in the library with the lead pipe is an important dialogue space for our profession. keep sending us your proposals as you think of topics—we’ll just be sharing them as they come, instead of adhering to a regular publication schedule. each article will still get a minimum of two weeks on the front page of the site. you may recall that we made a change in our publication strategy last may as well. we think it’s important to be transparent as a journal about when and why we make decisions like this. thinking of submitting a proposal? check out what our editorial board members are most interested in from our most recent calls for articles: editorial: introductions all around call for articles news, publication schedule, update and we’re back! considering outreach assessment: strategies, sample scenarios, and a call to action this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a critical take on oer practices: interrogating commercialization, colonialism, and content – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 21 oct sarah crissinger /8 comments a critical take on oer practices: interrogating commercialization, colonialism, and content photo by flickr user arbyreed (cc by nc 2.0) in brief both open educational resources (oer) and open access (oa) are becoming more central to many librarians’ work and the core mission of librarianship, in part because of the perceived relationship between openness and social justice. however, in our excitement about the new opportunities afforded by open movements, we might overlook structural inequalities present within these movements. in this article, i utilize some of the useful critiques oa has generated to inform the discussion of oer creation and practice. i then hone in on the conversation around oer specifically to suggest starting points for how librarians and other lis professionals can construct more thoughtful oer practices. by sarah crissinger introduction this spring, the association of college and research libraries (acrl) held their 2015 biennial conference in portland. while i attended multiple sessions and poster presentations on open access (oa) and open educational resources (oer), heather joseph’s invited paper session, “open expansion: connecting the open access, open data and oer dots,” left the most lasting impression on me. joseph’s presentation focused on the different embodiments of openness and how collaboration between the efforts could be transformative. while explaining the open data front, joseph’s presentation stopped on a photo of an oil rig. a few slides later, she summarized politicians’ take on open data, explaining that while president obama had called data a “valuable national commodity,” dutch politician neelie kroes had gone a step further and named data “the new oil for the digital age” (joseph, 2015; kroes, 2012). joseph (2015) went on to explain that kroes’ assertion was that “national economies and national destinies [were] going to rise and fall on understanding how to get the most value from data.” right before i listened to kroes’ words, which seemed so profoundly nationalistic and exploitative to me in that moment, i saw the photo of the rig and thought about western conquest and our pursuit of other nations’ natural resources. this sparked a deep realization within me. i found that all of the discussions i had engaged in about openness—including joseph’s presentation—were about shared goals or shared politics. the shared risks were often left unaddressed. i started to consider how openness, when disconnected from its political underpinnings, could become as exploitative as the traditional system it had replaced. i began to reflect on the ways in which i had used, or experienced others’ use of, openness as a solution for poverty or development—often in a way that was disconnected from an understanding of systemic inequality. this article, which is an intentional critique of oer praxis, has given me the space to explore these questions. oer are digital learning objects that are shared under “an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.” under this definition, learning objects can mean almost anything used as educational material, including tutorials, videos, guides, lesson plans, and syllabi. the open education movement is different than the oa movement, which is focused on the free and unrestricted use of research materials and literature. however, like open education, oa works to enable deeper unrestricted analysis so that scholars can read articles but also “crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose” (chan, et. al, 2015, para 3). this article uses a critique of oer creation and practice as a proxy for the open movement in lis generally. thus, it utilizes some of the useful critiques oa has engendered to inform the discussion of oer, which is less developed. while the intention is not to conflate oa or critiques of oa with oer, it is worth noting that both evoke a similar rhetoric of openness and, as such, share similarities that enable us to apply lessons learned in one domain into the other. the first section will explore critiques of oer and openness in relation to commercialization, colonialism, and content. while not exhaustive, these critiques address issues of labor, the corporatization of higher education, oppressive learning formats, imperialism, and technocratic discourse around development and the information poor. this broad overview will provide a useful framework for understanding how openness generally—and open education specifically—can be improved. i will then offer tangible suggestions for how librarians and other lis professionals can construct more thoughtful oer practices. these include thinking critically about the language we use when engaging stakeholders; moving beyond cost and marketing for our institutions and focusing on open pedagogy and student-centered learning; using oer creation as an opportunity to talk to students about labor and knowledge production; and challenging whose knowledge matters globally. these are not meant to be “solutions” but instead starting points. i do not provide a suggestion for every critique but instead advocate for the use of open, critical pedagogy as a method for engaging with several of the critiques mentioned, as it can make our practices more deliberate and authentically engage students in issues of openness. i believe that oer have value. i believe that equitable access to research and the data that accompanies that research is imperative and a goal our profession should continue working toward. but i also believe that it is worth our time to be intentional, to be cognizant of our position within increasingly corporatized institutions and consider how we might be furthering the goals of those institutions, to think seriously about how we can be actively dismantling power structures instead of perpetuating them, and to remind ourselves why we think open is worth fighting for in the first place. in explaining the difference between critique and criticism, author and screenwriter balogun ojetade (2012) writes, “critique is not in service of a single ‘truth’…critique opens questioning and makes single-truths unstable so as to be more inclusive of difference” (para 5). our professional conversation around openness risks being in service of a single truth. my hope is that nuanced critique can help us move these conversations forward in a thoughtful way. critiques of oer & openness labor & the commercialization of higher education academic labor is currently structured around tenure. in other words, tenure-track faculty members do not have to rely solely on dividends from their research output because their institution compensates them for doing research. however, as higher education increasingly relies on adjunct labor, this model is compromised. in order to offer more classes for less money, adjuncts are compensated by the number of courses they teach instead of their research output. as money is taken away from educators, how is the relationship between openness and labor changed (drabinski, et. al, 2015)? or, in more pointed terms, how does openness exasperate labor issues? do institutions expect adjuncts to continue to create the same level of output a faculty member would, including oer creation? one of the major critiques oa has received is that it can make labor become more invisible (roh, drabinski, & inefuku, 2015). the invisibility of the labor required to do the actual work behind making a publication oa is often “distant” from the rhetoric behind why oa is important, creating a disconnect between values and practice (drabinski, et. al, 2015). further, less “academic” work that is fundamental to maintaining oa publications (metadata creation, for example) becomes devalued (roh, drabinski, & inefuku, 2015). matthew cheney (2015) argues that we do open systems, including oer, a great disservice if we do not talk about the labor and technology structures needed to make them possible. thus, there are two important labor issues related to oer creation. the first is that oer creation is not rewarded in the current tenure system. faculty members are often granted tenure because of their research impact, which might relate to oa but not oer. further, beyond compensation, tenure provides (or has historically provided) some level of protection to take professional risks. as the concept of tenure becomes compromised and the number of positions having tenure-level protection decreases in the united states, the incentive for faculty to devote time to exploring oer creation is also compromised. the second is that adjuncts might be expected to create learning objects and even deposit them as oer but the current system does not reward them monetarily for the extra labor involved in doing so. if both parties continue to create oer, their labor might become unrecognized and devalued. the way in which this academic labor is applied at an institutional level is also worth discussing. oa advocates have started to realize that oa, separated from its political underpinnings, can quickly become a governmental and commercial source of revenue (lawson, 2015; watters, 2014). in the case of oer creation specifically, openness can also become a source of branding and marketing for universities (huijser, bedford, & bull, 2008). librarians should continually question who benefits from supporting openness. we should then recognize that any open movement that happens within a neoliberal institution might further politics or initiatives that do not align with our values.   roxanne shirazi (2015) recently wrote about librarians’ relationships with their employers, particularly as boosters of their university’s brand. while her post is focused on scholarly communication, labor, and copyright more broadly, shirazi asserts that institutions are often more than willing to promote prestigious or interesting projects but “when it comes to financially and structurally supporting the sustained work of the individuals behind them” it is a different story (para 4). this applies to oer creation and application. institutions might be willing to publicize lower costs for their students but what steps are they taking to rectify the labor issues described above for adjuncts? oer projects also obviously require labor beyond the creation of the actual learning object. oer repositories have to be maintained and updated. oer have to be organized and assigned metadata for discovery to be effective. we must also continue to think about how this labor is funded. one funding model is a for-profit company to pursue this work. one example is lumen, which has worked closely with several colleges and universities to implement oer. another funding model is for a repository or institution to find donor support. mit is a leader in oer creation and the pioneer of opencourseware (ocw) production. d’oliveira and lerman found that mit received $1,836,000 in philanthropic funding and donations to support the ocw initiative in 2009 alone, which covered about 51 percent of that year’s annual operating costs (as cited in winn, 2012, p. 142). we should consider what it means for donors to underwrite the sustainability of our institutions’ projects (winn, 2012) and how making more sustainable change might be compromised by this funding model (kanwar, kodhandaraman, and umar, 2010). in short, we must recognize that the changing labor system and the continued commercialization of higher education are not disconnected from our work with oer. joss winn (2012) challenges open advocates to apply the marxist view of social wealth to openness, stressing that being open does not offer an alternative to “the capitalist form of social domination” (p. 134). he contends that oer, under capitalism, ensure that “employees are as productive as possible within the limits of time and space” by creating an object that can defy these constraints to create continuous institutional value and promotion (p. 141). we must think critically about whether our open work is doing the social justice, political work we envision it doing. if we fail to ask these questions, we risk endorsing programs that align more with profit than with access. colonialism & imperialistic practices in “beyond the ‘information rich and poor’: future understandings of inequality in globalising informational economies,” ingrid burkett (2000) identifies five assumptions that have been historically made about the role of information in international development: give the poor a computer and they will move from being information poor to information rich. information inequality is a north/south issue. access to more information enriches people’s lives. the ‘information society’ will be more democratic and participatory. given enough information we can solve all the world’s problems. (p. 680) burkett (2000) asserts that these five assumptions egregiously simplify both economic and social global inequality. every librarian should consider how any of these myths might be embodied in their current language around the need for openness. for example, in trying to explain why oa is important to stakeholders, i have sometimes defaulted to talking about the need to share information with developing nations. yet, understanding inequality through the lens of these narrow “truths” should give us pause. a dichotomy of superior/inferior ways of knowing has been established within these discourses and the assumptions that were made to employ this rhetoric. the first assumption is that the global south will remain ignorant and underdeveloped until it has access to the west’s knowledge, which is an idea that is historically grounded in presidential conceptions of development (haider & bawden, 2006). the second assumption is that the west should focus on the spread of its information instead of facilitating a true knowledge exchange, which illustrates what type of information is valued. burkett (2000) finds that even asserting that some are “information poor” overlooks the types of information that might be important to a specific community. she states, “people may be ‘poor’ in terms of the information they can retrieve from the internet but be rich in ways which could never be calculated in the western scientific paradigm—in terms of sustainability, social relationships, community and cultural traditions” (p. 690). the assumption that is most relevant to the discussion of oer here is that access to more information—which is different than access to knowledge (burkett, 2000)—will alter exploitative colonialist histories and deeply rooted structural oppression. we see these assumptions being made in conversations surrounding the digital divide (watters, 2015) and in the implementation of programs like one laptop per child1 where access to technology—often technology that is not sustainable or integrated into the lives of the people supposed to be using it in a meaningful way (burkett, 2000)—is seen as a viable opportunity for development and progress, often in a manner that is blind to an understanding of structural issues. unfortunately, some research has found that these beliefs are well represented in lis literature. in 2006, haider and bawden conducted an interpretive analysis of 35 english articles published between 1995 and 2005 in library and information science journals, found by searching “information poverty or poor.” they find that the “‘information poor’ are positioned as the legitimate target of professional practice” in lis (p. 373). many of the close readings they did identified language that connected a country or region’s educational inequality with a lack of professional librarians in that area, creating rhetoric that ignores the complexities of why inequality exists and positioning the librarian as savior (haider & bawden, 2006). oer has also been connected to development and is often cited in conversations about global rights, specifically the right to education.2 western universities sometimes use the need for global access to educational materials as an explanation for their commitment to oer creation.3 these explanations, while possibly well meaning, are destructive. they overestimate what oer can reasonably accomplish and use oer as a legitimate “solution” for larger inequalities. oer are only one piece of the solution and are not a substitute for an adequately funded and staffed education system (bates, 2015). when we consider who leads the open education movement, it is clear that these assumptions are in some ways also actively practiced within the movement. right now, many oer aggregators function as somewhere to “dump” content or lessons already created in the hope that someone somewhere will be able to use it (huijser, bedford, & bull, 2008). this is a problem because context is what makes an oer transferrable (huijser, bedford, & bull, 2008). it is also a problem because “content creation (including educational content) on the web is currently heavily dominated by the developed and english-speaking world” (huijser, bedford, & bull, 2008, para 9). for example, wiki educator’s “exemplary collection of open elearning content repositories,” which has been cited as an important list of repositories (atenas, 2012; watters, 2012), is composed of primarily american and european-based repositories. javiera atenas’ list, which includes data from oer research hub, contains more global oer initiatives; still, over half of the repositories listed are western. the creation of oer by western institutions is not in itself a bad thing. however, it becomes troubling when these institutions promise that their oer will be useful or applicable to all learners globally for educational purposes. it is also disconcerting when access to content is touted as the educational solution when in reality affordable, sustainable “access to programs leading to credentials” is the real barrier (bates, 2011, para 27). kim christen (2012), an anthropologist at washington state university, researches openness—specifically the openness of cultural heritage objects—and its connection to colonialism. she asserts that the “collecting history of western nations is comfortably forgotten in the celebration of freedom and openness” (p. 2876). her work rejects the argument that “information wants to be free” and instead asserts that information wants to be contextualized (christen, 2012). she has done important work to provide that context to cultural heritage objects by creating licenses and a cms that give power and autonomy back to indigenous communities. by using these tools, the community is able to decide if objects should be open, closed to the community, or open to a specific community or during a particular time based on the historical sharing of objects by season, status, or gender. i believe that her assertions create a valuable framework for understanding oer advocacy. a learning object with relevant context, an application that is not culture-specific, and the capacity to be truly localized and understood is more important than a learning object that is simply free. in addition, while moving beyond a north-south information flow and developing a mechanism for reciprocal sharing is the goal, librarians should be cognizant of what risks other nations face in sharing their educational materials. we might find that having a conversation about these risks and contexts is more important than complete openness. content, format, & audience in addition to how oer are used and discussed, the form of the oer itself has been critiqued. open educational resources (oer) can sometimes be used synonymously with textbooks or traditional learning objects like worksheets and lesson plans. however, oer, when defined broadly, can also include wikis, libguides, tutorials, syllabi, apps, and websites. this divide between what oer usually refer to and what it can include illustrates an important underlying assumption made about oer. we often think that oer are created in the academy for the academy. because oer are often presented as a response to the price of educational resources increasing exponentially, their potential use is sometimes stunted. oer can also be used outside of traditional academic settings for self-learning purposes. how, then, do oer continue to reproduce the academy, even if they are used for other purposes, both in format and in content? many scholars have critiqued textbooks as a stagnant, oppressive format. shaffer (2014) defines the traditional textbook as a “physically and legally fixed expression of ideas from a scholar outside [the class] learning community” (para 3). wiggins & mctighe (2005), the authors of understanding by design, state that textbooks “can easily hide from students (and teachers) the true nature of the subject and the world of scholarship. like an encyclopedia, few textbooks help students understand the inquiries, arguments, and judgments behind the summaries” (p. 230). drabinski, et al. (2015) find textbooks “historically contingent” and the reproduction of them unrevolutionary. why, then, are open textbooks often used as an example (if not the example) of oer? why are there such extensive efforts to create more open textbooks?4 further, how do textbooks, as the primary form of oer shared, limit self-learners outside of the academy? for example, when the goal is to present historically linear “truths” about a subject, more iterative and active forms of self-learning might be hindered. this applies to content as well as format. if self-learners or even other instructors are going to use content meaningfully, oer have to move past the content “dump” (huijser, bedford, & bull, 2008) toward context and an understanding of how and why the oer was made. audrey watters (2015) contends that ed-tech is coded with “[p]rivileges, ideologies, expectations, [and] values” (para 46). the same is true of oer. when learning objects are stripped of their environment, learning from them becomes more challenging (bates, 2011).  localization—going beyond simply translating an object and instead truly situating it in culture, values, and educational need (pullin, hassin, & mora, 2007)—is vital, particularly as a large amount of western oer continue to be created. librarians can start by teaching others the importance of metadata and documentation in order to make oer more localizable. suggestions for oer praxis the following section builds upon the previous critiques of openness to provide starting points for more thoughtful, intentional oer practices within librarianship. use realistic language after haider (2007) performed a close reading of international oa documents, including mission statements and declarations like the budapest open access initiative, she found that oa was discussed alongside concepts “such as humanity, poverty, cultural heritage, or equity, which are all highly charged notions entangled with strong connotations and related to various agendas” (p. 454). like oa, open education can sometimes be discussed in highly-charged terms. it is also often presented as a solution, not only for the rising costs of textbooks and other learning materials, but also for fixing education globally (see footnote ii). first and foremost, librarians need to be honest with stakeholders about what oer can accomplish. while sharing educational materials with other nations can foster learning, it is not that simple. oer should not be presented as the answer to structural inequality or used to disregard or replace serious funding issues in other nations’ higher education systems. librarians can situate oer within historical, economic, and cultural practices that make their capacity more clear. in other words, when we talk to stakeholders we can complicate access instead of simplifying it. we should continually stress that oers are “important in helping to widen access to learning opportunities, but ultimately…are enhancements rather than a replacement for a well-funded public education system, which remains the core foundation for enabling equal access to educational opportunities” (bates, 2015, key takeaway 6). interrogate whose knowledge matters globally when talking to stakeholders, librarians might also move beyond the rhetoric of access to discuss reciprocal sharing. even if it is free for “developing” nations to read papers (or access oer), it may still be too expensive for some scholars to publish these objects, further limiting the amount of reciprocal sharing happening and making research from other nations less visible (bonaccorso, et al., 2014; czerniewicz, 2013). librarians can use language that problematizes access as a value, making the idea of true “access” more complex than simply giving other nations the ability to view western content. move past dumping toward possible localization (or, do outreach beyond the learning object) librarians should assert that the paywall is just one obstacle of many that learners in other nations face when utilizing an oer. technology, language, and applicability are also important factors. what does it take for an oer to not just be translated but truly localized, truly applicable to others’ educational needs and prior understanding? we can start by focusing on teaching instructors and oer creators how to design oer that are “easily adaptable to local needs” and can be easily translated, situated, and expanded upon (huijser, bedford, & bull, 2008). thus, our outreach to faculty about oer creation is shortsighted if it only discusses the actual learning object. we should be proactive about teaching faculty how to create documentation and supply metadata that gives meaning to their oer and makes it more discoverable. we should also teach instructors about technical standards and technological infrastructure required for accessing oer, especially videos and other objects that require a high bandwidth to view, and how this might exclude specific audiences (pullin, hassin, & mora, 2007). move beyond cost librarians must acknowledge that while their institutions might be concerned with global education at some level, the marketization of oer might play a role in how oer work is funded, sustained, and prioritized. quite simply, oer and ocw create “potentially beneficial marketing opportunities for universities and, by extension, a potential supply of future fee-paying students” (huijser, bedford, & bull, 2008). this is not just a distraction but also a conflict of interest. the price of textbooks has increased 812 percent between 1978 and 2012 (moxley, 2013) and this phenomenon affects students’ ability to engage in class in very real ways. increasing access to educational materials, especially to students of lower socioeconomic status, is important work. still, david wiley (2013) has found that there are “much bigger victories to be won with openness” than cost (para 1). this is because we, as educators, can utilize oer in ways that are more meaningful than just making content free. robin derosa (2015) argues that there are a lot of ways that institutions could potentially save students money, including changing class sizes and closing facilities. she calls educators to advocate for oer use not because of “the health of the institution” but instead for “the empowerment of the learner” (derosa, 2015). when librarians advocate for oer creation and use, they should go beyond using rhetoric about cost or access and also explain how oer can be used to improve pedagogy. librarians should also continually consider their role in furthering the goals of their institution and if they could have a role in shaping their institution’s future goals. use open pedagogy giroux (2002) writes that higher education cannot be viewed “merely as [a site] of commercial investment” because it is a public good where students gain a public voice and come to terms with their own power and agency (p. 432). the previous section challenged librarians to think beyond oer’s value in saving students’ money and instead apply oer to student learning. there are at least two ways that this can happen. the first is by incorporating the tenets of open pedagogy into library instruction sessions. the second is by using student oer creation as a springboard for important conversations about knowledge production. librarians can also be active in helping other instructors, including faculty, learn how to do this in their classroom. david wiley (2015) has claimed that there is “nothing about oer adoption that forces innovative teaching practices on educators” (para 13). oer use becomes more meaningful in the classroom when it is combined with critical pedagogy, which fosters student agency and nurtures reflection and growth (stommel, 2014). robin derosa (2015) defines open pedagogy as instruction that: prioritizes community and collaboration instead of content connects the academy with the wider public is skeptical of end-points, final products, gatekeeping, and experts librarians can start by working toward instructional practices that embody these values. but it is naïve not to recognize that librarians face obstacles in doing so, particularly in having autonomy and power over what their instruction sessions will cover because of faculty members’ limited understanding of our work (accardi, 2015; wallis, 2015). thus, if faculty on campus are not integrating open pedagogy into their classroom, it can be difficult for librarians to do so as well. i would challenge us to think about our impact more broadly. while we might not have control over whether a class’ final research assignment is open or collaborative, we can start these conversations on campus. if we do outreach about openness or oer, it should cover the mechanics (like repositories and licensing) as well as how oer might be integrated into the classroom through open pedagogy. librarians that do instruction can also use these tenets in their sessions or for-credit classes. we can spark interest by presenting research as a continuous community endeavor for students. if there is an opportunity to teach a for-credit course, we should explore how students might become producers of oer and other open content. as an example, my institution is currently discussing how faculty might move away from assigning the traditional research paper and instead craft research assignments that empower students to create. any consultation my team has with instructors about their research assignments should not only discuss the potential use of oer but also oer creation as an option for giving students agency over their learning. these conversations should continue to define oer broadly to include public-facing, hackable, iterative learning objects like wikis and blogs, instead of focusing solely on just textbooks.   teach critical openness & labor as students engage with oer, how can librarians help them understand knowledge production, intellectual property, and the privacy issues inherent in their project? further, how can librarians leverage students’ experience creating oer as an opportunity to teach issues of labor as a response to the corporatization of higher education? as students develop understanding in an area and are asked to create an open research project, they should also develop an understanding of how complex information creation is. the goal is for them to grasp that information is a social, public process instead of a final product (lawson, sanders, and smith, 2015). first and foremost, students should be asked to reflect on this process. librarians should advocate for continued reflection so that students can meaningfully consider the challenges inherent in creating instead of merely focusing on what was created. one of the most important conversations librarians might have about knowledge production is about unseen labor. this conversation about labor can spark larger conversations about funding cuts, the adjunctification of higher education, and faculty reward systems. cheney (2015) recommends being transparent with students about how funding in the higher education system works so that oer can be created. he proposes that instructors explain how tuition dollars fund faculty salaries, which support faculty research and instructional activities (cheney, 2015). these funds, in addition to endowments or donations, enable faculty to create oer at no charge because they do not depend on revenue from oer for income. i would propose that we also push students by asking, “but what if the tenure track model is eliminated and faculty are suddenly supported by a wage that directly corresponds only with the number of classes they teach?” as students consider how much time it takes to complete their project and create an oer, librarians can facilitate these conversations. as a disclaimer, while asking students to create oer in order to explore these issues firsthand is a great first step, this practice can become coercive or uncomfortable for students. if we ask them to create oer we cannot do so in order to take advantage of free labor to create more useful learning objects. we must also remember that some open practices might be based on behaviors that students are not comfortable with (weller, 2014), including publishing their work in open, online venues. david wiley (2013) proposes that educators build a place of trust with students when adopting open pedagogy. this happens by being transparent about why each activity is useful for learning and giving tangible examples of what a successful open project might look like (wiley, 2013). this might also include asking students to think critically about whether or not they would like their project to be open, instead of requiring it to be. the conversation around why they might consider openness is much more valuable than simply making it a requirement. conclusion to borrow language from audrey watters (2015), i believe that oer do not “magically flatten hierarchies” (slide 9). they are produced, used, and shaped by important historical and cultural contexts. free and unrestricted access to oer is just one step in improving education, not the primary solution. librarians are apt to do the integral work of reframing and complicating the oer movement. our extensive understanding of copyright, instructional design, and discovery, combined with our interest in social justice, makes us natural leaders for helping others understand why open education matters. however, entertaining uncritical conceptions of development, the “information poor,” and the marketization of oer actually compromises our ability to do the work that we claim to value. the politics of our campuses or leadership can (and do) limit how loudly our voices carry within our institutions (accardi, 2015; wallis, 2015). still, our critical perspective is needed now more than ever.  acknowledgements many thanks to the in the library with the lead pipe team for guiding me through my first peer-review publication process! i’d like to specifically thank my internal reviewer, erin dorney, and my publishing editor, hugh rundle, for their guidance and support throughout this journey. a huge thank you to my external editor, robin derosa, who gave me the inspiration, confidence, and footing to write this article. thanks for making both my writing and my ideas stronger. thanks also to kyle shockey, heidi johnson, mattias darrow, and cara evanson for their valuable insights on earlier drafts of this article. i couldn’t have done it without you! thanks to sveta stoytcheva for convincing me that this idea was worth submitting and pushing me to stick with and trust this process. i so appreciate that even over 4,000 miles away, you’re still empowering me to be the best librarian i can be. finally, thanks to everyone who supported me during this project, either professionally or personally. references & further reading accardi, m. (2015, may 14). i do not think that the framework is our oxygen mask. retrieved from https://libraryinstructionburnout.wordpress.com/2015/05/14/i-do-not-think-that-the-framework-is-our-oxygen-mask/ anjiah, l. (2006). open access: is it a futile option for developing countries? proceedings from the coady international institute: the open access movement and information for development. retrieved from http://www.coady.stfx.ca/work/coady-publications/openaccess/ atenas, j. (2012, oct 22). directory of oer repositories. retrieved from https://oerqualityproject.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/directory-of-oer-repositories/ bates, t. (2015). the implications of ‘open’ for course and program design: towards a paradigm shift? retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/10-10-the-implications-of-open-for-course-and-program-design/ bates, t. (2011, feb 6). oers: the good, the bad and the ugly. retrieved from http://www.tonybates.ca/2011/02/06/oers-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ bonaccorso, e., et al. (2014). bottlenecks in the open-access system: voices from around the globe. journal of librarianship and scholarly communication 2(2): ep1126. http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1126 burkett, i. (2000). beyond the ‘information rich and poor’: future understandings of inequality in globalizing informational economies. futures, 32(7), 679-694. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0016-3287(00)00016-1 chan, l. & costa, s. (2005). participation in the global knowledge commons: challenges and opportunities for research dissemination in developing countries. new library world, 106(3/4), 141 – 163. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/03074800510587354 chan, et al. (2002). budapest open access initiative. retrieved from http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read cheney, m. (2015, july 10). gratis or libre, or, who pays for your bandwidth? retrieved from http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2015/07/gratis-libre-or-who-pays-for-your.html christen, k. (2012). does information really want to be free? indigenous knowledge systems and the question of openness. international journal of communication, 6, 2870-2893. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1618 czerniewicz, l. (2013, april 29). inequitable power dynamics of global knowledge production and exchange must be confronted head on. retrieved from http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/04/29/redrawing-the-map-from-access-to-participation/ d’oliveira, c. & lerman, s. (2009). opencourseware: working through financial challenges. retrieved from http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/221/d’oliveira_lerman.html derosa, r. (2015). beyond the buck: an expanded vision for open access. talk presented at the university system of new hampshire’s 2015 open educational resources unconference. retrieved from http://robinderosa.net/uncategorized/beyond-the-buck-an-expanded-vision-for-open-access-text-version/ derosa, r. (2015, may 28). the open syllabus: a practical guide to open pedagogy in your course. retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/orbitdog1/the-open-syllabus-a-practical-guide-to-open-pedagogy-in-your-course drabinski, e., et al. (2015, mar 25). notes from open access, labor, and knowledge production. retrieved from https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/b-hoffman giroux, h. (2002). neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: the university as a democratic public sphere. harvard educational review 72(4), 425-464. http://dx.doi.org/10.17763/haer.72.4.0515nr62324n71p1 haider, j. (2007). of the rich and the poor and other curious minds: on open access and ‘development’. aslib proceedings, 59 (4/5), 449-461. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00012530710817636 haider, j. & bawden, d. (2006). pairing information with poverty: traces of development discourse in lis. new library world, 107(9/10), 371-385. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/03074800610702570 huijser, h., bedford, t., & bull, d. (2008). opencourseware, global access and the right to education: real access or marketing ploy? the international review of research in open and distributed learning, 9(1). http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/446/1002. joseph, h. (2015, march). open expansion: connecting the open access, open data, and oer dots. invited talk presented at the meeting of the academic and research libraries (acrl) conference, portland, or. retrieved from http://acrl.learningtimesevents.org/invited-paper-open-expansion-connecting-the-open-access-open-data-and-oer-dots-2/ kansa, e. (2014, jan 27). it’s the neoliberalism, stupid: why instrumentalist arguments for open access, open data, and open science are not enough. retrieved from http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/01/27/its-the-neoliberalism-stupid-kansa/ kanwar, a., kodhandaraman, b. &, umar, a. (2010). toward sustainable open education resources: a perspective from the global south. american journal of distance education, 24(2), 65-80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08923641003696588 kember, s. (2014). opening out from open access: writing and publishing in response to neoliberalism. ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, 4. http://dx.doi.org/10.7264/n31c1v51 kraft, t. (2015). on labor, learning conditions, and affordable education. hybrid pedagogy. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/on-labor-learning-conditions-and-affordable-education/ kroes, n. (2012). digital agenda and open data. retrieved from http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_speech-12-149_en.htm lawson, s. (2015, june 15). financial transparency and the political influence of commercial publishing. retrieved from  http://dx.doi.org/10.15200/winn.143435.54519 lawson, s. (2015, oct 21). the politics of open access. retrieved from http://theinformed.org.uk/2013/10/the-politics-of-open-access/ lawson, s. (2015): the politics of open access. retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1494587 lawson, s., sanders, k., & smith, l. (2015). commodification of the information profession: a critique of higher education under neoliberalism. journal of librarianship and scholarly communication, 3(1), ep1182. http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309 moxley, j. (2013). open textbook publishing. retrieved from http://www.aaup.org/article/open-textbook-publishing#.vbfy8vlvhbc oblinger, d., & lombardi, m. (2008). common knowledge: openness in higher education. in t. iiyoshi and m.s. vijay kumar (eds.), opening up education the collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge, pp. 389–400. cambridge, ma: mit press. ojetade, b. (2012, march 6). a critic critiques criticism critically. retrieved from http://chroniclesofharriet.com/2012/03/06/a-critic-critiques-criticism-critically/ powell, a. (2015, may 21). availability does not equal access. scholarly kitchen. retrieved from http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/05/21/guest-post-inasps-anne-powell-on-availability-does-not-equal-access/ pullin, a., hassin, k. & mora, m. (2007, nov). conference report: open education 2007. retrieved from http://timreview.ca/article/59 roh, c., drabinski, e., & inefuku, h. (2015). scholarly communication as a tool for social justice and diversity. paper presented at the meeting of the academic and research libraries (acrl) conference, portland, or. retrieved from http://acrl.learningtimesevents.org/scholarly-communication-as-a-tool-for-social-justice-and-diversity-2/ reich, j. (2011). open educational resources expand educational inequalities. retrieved from http://edutechdebate.org/oer-and-digital-divide/open-educational-resources-expand-educational-inequalities/ rosen, j., & smale, m. (2015). open digital pedagogy=critical pedagogy. hybrid pedagogy. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/open-digital-pedagogy-critical-pedagogy/ salaita, s. (2015, oct 6). why i was fired. chronicle of higher education. retrieved from shar.es/17nqg3 shaffer, k. (2014). the critical textbook. hybrid pedagogy. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/critical-textbook/ shirazi, r. (2015, august 11). work for hire: library publishing, scholarly communication, and academic freedom. retrieved from http://roxanneshirazi.com/2015/08/11/work-for-hire-library-publishing-scholarly-communication-and-academic-freedom/ stommel, j. (2014). critical digital pedagogy: a definition. hybrid pedagogy. http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/critical-digital-pedagogy-definition/ vandegrift, m. (2014, june 2). the miseducation of scholarly communication: beyond binaries and toward a transparent, information-rich publishing system. retrieved from https://micahvandegrift.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/ssptalk/ wallis, l. (2015, may 12). smash all the gates, part 2: professional silenc*. retrieved from https://laurenwallis.wordpress.com/2015/05/12/smash-all-the-gates-part-2-professional-silenc/ watters, a. (2012, aug 22). oer repositories & directories. retrieved from http://hackeducation.com/2012/08/22/oer-repositories/ watters, a. (2014, nov 16). from “open” to justice #opencon2014. retrieved from http://hackeducation.com/2014/11/16/from-open-to-justice/ watters, a. (2015, april 8). ed-tech’s inequalities. retrieved from http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/08/inequalities/ weller, m. (2014). the battle for open: how openness won and why it doesn’t feel like a victory. london, uk: ubiquity press. wiggins, g. & mctighe, j. (2005). understanding by design (2nd ed.). alexandria, va: association for supervision and curriculum development. wiley, d. (2015, jan 31). open pedagogy: the importance of getting in the air. retrieved from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3761 wiley, d. (2013, oct 21). what is open pedagogy? retrieved from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221 winn, j. (2012). open education: from the freedom of things to the freedom of people. in l. bell, h. stevenson, & m. neary (eds.), towards teaching in public: reshaping the modern university (133-183). new york, ny: continuum international publishing group.   while burkett alludes to how technology can exasperate inequalities (p. 684), there are more tangible examples of how this discourse is specifically used with one laptop per child. in 2012, audrey watters summarized the failures of olpc initiative. within her summary, she maintains that nicholas negropont, the head of foundation, truly believes that “children can learn (and teach each other) on their own. children are naturally inquisitive; they are ingenious. access to an internet-enabled computing device is sufficient” (para 13). another example is a guardian article from 2005 were negropont states “poverty can only be eliminated through education” (para 6). this rhetoric, combined with inadequate teacher training and the failure of the program, illustrates how dropping technology into a community, without context or purpose, is not meaningful. [↩] the twenty-sixth article of the universal declaration of human rights states that “everyone has the right to education” and that education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among nations” (article 26). these ideas are often cited and developed in conversations around oer. one example is the cape town open education declaration, which states, “[oer] constitute a wise investment in teaching and learning for the 21st century… they will help teachers excel in their work and provide new opportunities for visibility and global impact. they will accelerate innovation in teaching. they will give more control over learning to the learners themselves. these are strategies that make sense for everyone” (para 10) and “we have an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world through freely available, high-quality, locally relevant educational and learning opportunities” (para 11). another document that employs this language is the 2012 paris oer declaration, which was created by unesco. it is important to note that the language that situates oer as a solution stems from rhetoric used about education as a solution more generally. one example includes remarks from us secretary of education, arne duncan: “[e]ducation is still the key to eliminating gender inequities, to reducing poverty, to creating a sustainable planet, and to fostering peace. and in a knowledge economy, education is the new currency by which nations maintain economic competitiveness and global prosperity…closing the achievement gap and closing the opportunity gap is the civil rights issue of our generation” (as cited in watters, 2015, para 2). [↩] this language is usually present on the institution’s repository or webpage. examples include mit’s ocw site, which states “educators improve courses and curricula, making their schools more effective; students find additional resources to help them succeed; and independent learners enrich their lives and use the content to tackle some of our world’s most difficult challenges, including sustainable development, climate change, and cancer eradication” (para 2) and open michigan’s site, which notes that the initiative will “dramatically [expand] the university’s global impact and influence and strengthening it as a point of reference for learning and teaching materials for educators and learners worldwide” (para 2). [↩] some current examples include the university of minnesota’s open textbook library, kansas state university’s open/ alternative textbook initiative, and portland state university’s open access textbook initiative. these are not necessarily examples of linear or oppressive learning objects but instead examples of how we continue to replicate textbooks in an open environment. [↩] colonization, inequality, learning objects, librarianship, open access, open educational resources, pedagogy white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis gendered expectations for leadership in libraries 8 responses pingback : post: a critical take on oer practices: interrogating commercialization, colonialism, and content ← dh+lib pingback : latest library links, 23rd october 2015 | latest library links pingback : november 2015 faculty and student scholarship, awards, service activities, news, and updates for academic affairs offices and departments | office of the provost and vice president for academic affairs plymouth state university pingback : the content paradox | rolin moe pingback : oer | pingback : open but not equal: open scholarship for social justice | at the intersection pingback : oer outreach for newbies, part i: what i would do differently | acrlog pingback : oer outreach for newbies, part ii: moving forward | acrlog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct pre-ils migration catalog cleanup project – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 19 aug robyn gleasner /0 comments pre-ils migration catalog cleanup project image by flickr user ashokboghani (cc by-nc 2.0) in brief: this article was written to describe the university of new mexico’s health sciences library and informatics center’s (hslic) catalog cleanup process prior to migrating to a new integrated library system (ils).  catalogers knew that existing catalog records would need to be cleaned up before the migration, but weren’t sure where to start.  rather than provide a general overall explanation of the project, this article will provide specific examples from hslic’s catalog cleanup process and will discuss specific steps to clean up records for a smooth transition to a new system. by robyn gleasner introduction in february 2014, the health sciences library and informatics center (hslic) at the university of new mexico (unm) made the decision to migrate to oclc’s worldshare management services (wms).  wms is an integrated library system that includes acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, analytics, as well as a license manager. the public interface/discovery tool called discovery is an open system that searches beyond items held by your library and extends to items available worldwide that can be requested via interlibrary loan.  we believed that discovery would meet current user expectations with a one-stop searching experience by offering a place where users could find both electronic resources and print resources rather than having to search two separate systems.  in addition to user experience, we liked that both wms and discovery are not static systems. oclc makes enhancements to the system as well as offers streamlined workflows for the staff. these functionalities, along with a lower price point, drew us to wms. this article will discuss hslic’s catalog cleanup process before migrating to oclc’s wms. before the decision was made, the library formed an ils migration committee consisting of members from technical services, circulation, and information technology (it) that met weekly. this group interviewed libraries that were already using wms as well as conducted literature searches and viewed recorded presentations from libraries using the system.  this research solidified the decision to migrate. hslic began the migration and implementation process in june 2014 and went live with wms and worldcat discovery in january 2015.  four months elapsed from the time the decision was made to the time the actual migration process began due to internal security reviews and contract negotiation.  catalogers knew that existing catalog records would need to be cleaned up before the migration, but weren’t sure where to start. because of this, the cleanup process was not started until the oclc cohort sessions began in june 2014.  these cohort sessions, led by an oclc implementation manager, were designed to assist in the migration process with carefully thought out steps and directions and provided specific training in how to prepare and clean up records for extraction, as well as showed what fields from the records would migrate. in addition to providing information about the migration, the oclc cohort sessions also provided information on the specific modules within wms including metadata/cataloging, acquisitions, circulation, interlibrary loan, analytics and reports, license manager, and discovery.  while the sessions were helpful, the cleanup of catalog records is a time-intensive process that could have been started during the waiting period. luckily, we were one of the last institutions in the cohort to migrate bibliographic records.  this allowed more time to consider oclc’s suggestions, make decisions, and then clean up records in our previous ils, innovative’s millennium, before sending them to oclc. literature review while there is extensive information in the professional literature regarding how to choose an ils and how to make a decision about whether or not to move to a cloud based system, there is little information about the steps needed to clean up catalog records in order to prepare for the actual migration process. dula, jacobson, et al. (2012) recommend thinking “of migration as spring-cleaning: it’s an opportunity to take stock, clear out the old, and prepare for what’s next.” they “used whiteboards to review and discuss issues that required staff action” and “made decisions on how to handle call number and volume entry in wms;” however, catalog record cleanup pre-migration was not discussed in detail. similarly, dula and ye (2013) stated that “[a] few key decisions helped to streamline the process.”  they “elected not to migrate historical circulation data or acquisitions data” and were well aware that they “could end up spending a lot of time trying to perfect the migration of a large amount of imperfect data” that the library no longer needed.  they planned on keeping reports of historical data to avoid this problem. hartman (2013) mentioned a number of questions and concerns for migrating to wms including whether or not to migrate historical data or to “start with a clean slate.” they decided that they “preferred the simpler two-tiered format of the oclc records” to their previous three-tiered hierarchy, but found some challenges including the fact that multi-volume sets did not appear in the system as expected. the cataloger chose to to view this as “an opportunity to clean up the records” and methodically modify records prior to migration.  hartman (2013) also discussed that the “missing” status listed in their previous ils system did not exist in wms and that they had to decide how or if they should migrate these records. while the questions and concerns that these authors mentioned helped us focus on changes to make in the catalog prior to migration, we found no literature that discussed the actual process of cleaning up the records.  from the research, it was obvious that a number of decisions would have to be made in the current ils before the migration would be possible. process in order to make those decisions, the ils migration committee met every other week to discuss what had been learned in the oclc cohort sessions as well as any questions and concerns.  it was important for catalogers to understand why certain cataloging decisions had been made over the years to determine how items should be cataloged in the new system.  our library’s cataloging manual and procedure documentation was read and questions were asked of members on the committee who had historical institutional knowledge. topics included copy numbers, shelving locations, and local subject headings.  notes and historical purchasing information were closely examined and their importance questioned.  material formats and statuses were also examined before determining what should be changed to meet the new system’s specifications. copy numbers oclc recommended taking a close look at copy numbers.  a few years ago a major weed of the media and the book collection was conducted.  unfortunately, when items were withdrawn, the copy numbers were not updated in the system.  in some cases, copy number 4 and 5 were kept while 1-3 were withdrawn and deleted from the system.  in the new system this would appear that the library had 5 copies of a title, while it really owned two.  we decided that the actual copy number of an item wasn’t important to our library users because we could rely on the barcode; however, it was important to determine the number of copies so that wms could  accurately identify when multiple copies of an item existed. in order to make these corrections, a list was run in millennium for items with copies greater than 1 and then item records were examined to discover how many copies existed in the catalog.  corrections were then made as needed.  this was a bigger job than anticipated, but it was a necessary step to avoid post-migration cleanup of the copy numbers in order to prevent errors in wms. shelving locations one of the first things we learned in the oclc cohort sessions was that many of the statuses that we used in millennium did not exist in wms.  some examples were: missing stolen billed cataloging repair on search because these statuses were no longer an option, we decided to create shelving locations that would reflect these statuses in wms.  some of these shelving locations aren’t necessarily physical locations in the library, but rather designations for staff to know where the item can be found. for example, items with a previous status of “repair” in millennium now have a shelving location of “repair” in wms. this alerts staff that the item is not available for checkout and is in repair in our processing room. we decided to delete items that had statuses of “stolen” and “missing” prior to migration to better reflect the holdings of our library. we also decided to delete a number of shelving locations as they were no longer being used or no longer needed. for example, some locations were merged and others were renamed to better reflect and clarify where the physical shelving locations were in the library as well as the type of material the locations held. local bibliographic data and subject headings wms uses oclc’s worldcat master records for its bibliographic records.  this means that wms libraries all use the same records and must include information that is specific to its library in a separate section called local bibliographic data (lbd).  after much discussion, we decided to keep the following fields: 590, 600, 610, 651, 655, 690, and 691.   we felt that keeping these fields would create a better record and provide multiple access points for our users. a number of records for special collections had local topical terms in the 690 field and local geographic names in the 691 and 651 fields.  for the most part, master records did not exist for these records as they were created locally for hslic’s use.  when these bibliographic records were sent to oclc for the migration, the worldcat master record was automatically created by oclc as part of the migration process.  it was important that these subject headings were migrated as part of the project, so that they were included with the record and not lost as an access point. we also decided that the local genre information in the 655 field was important to retain as it provided an access point on a local collection level.  for example, we wanted to make sure that “new mexico southwest collection” was not lost to our researchers who are familiar with that particular collection.  generally, a genre heading contained in the 655 field would be considered part of the worldcat master record that other libraries could use.  because our local information would not be useful to other libraries, we decided to transfer this information to a 590 local note so that it would only be visible to our library users. notes decisions regarding local notes that were specific to our institution, such as general notes in the 500 field and textual holdings notes in the 850 field had to be made.   we requested that innovative make the information in the 945 field visible to our catalogers.  this is the field that contains all of the local data including item information and is instrumental in the migration process. 500 general notes during the migration process, libraries have the option to load local bibliographic data to supplement the oclc master records.  this means that when oclc receives the library’s bibliographic records, as part of an automatic process the records are compared with oclc’s master records according to a translation table submitted by the library. the 500 field was closely examined to ensure that information wasn’t duplicated or deleted.   oclc master records usually contain a 500 note field, a general note that would be relevant to any library that holds the item. for example, some records contain “includes index” listed in the 500  note field. because this field already exists within the master record and is relevant for anyone holding the item, we wanted to keep the information in the master record.  however, we had a number of notes in this field that were relevant only to our library and we could not simply keep the notes in this field.  if we had migrated the 500 field, it would have resulted in two note fields containing the same information in the master record as the note would “supplement” the master record.  because of this, we chose not to migrate information in the 500 field in order to prevent duplicate information.  instead, a list was created in millennium mainly for special collection records that were created locally and not previously loaded into worldcat.  the information in the 500 field was then examined in these special collection records by catalogers to determine whether or not the information was local or general  and then manually changed one record at a time.  if the information in this field was considered local and only important to hslic; it was moved to a 590 field, so that it would be visible to our users in discovery and staff in wms, but not to any other libraries who might want to use the record. local holding records wms’s local holding record (lhr) incorporates information from millennium’s item record with the holding information from the bibliographic record. it includes information like the call number, chronology and enumeration, location, and price.  the lhr in wms was created using the information found in the 945 field and was included in the extracted bibliographic records we sent to oclc.  for the most part, migrating this information was simple except for a few unique cases for our library. 850 holding institution field the 850 holding institution field is part of the bibliographic record and was labeled in our instance of millennium as “hslic owns”.  this field was used to list coverage ranges or the dates and issues held by our library for journals, special collections material, and continuing resources. this information is usually cataloged in the 863 field within an item or local holdings record; however, hslic did not use this in millennium.  wms reserves the 850 field for oclc institution symbols with holdings on a particular title, which meant that we could not continue to use the 850 field as we had previously.  because wms coverage dates are generated from the enumeration listed in the lhr, we explored the possibility of migrating the 850 field from the bibliographic record to the 863 field in the local holding record. unfortunately, it was not possible to do a global update to cross from bibliographic record to an item record within millennium during the migration process. there were two options to create coverage statements in the migration process: 1. allow the statements to be newly generated in wms through the holdings statements generating tool or 2. move the current coverage statements to a 590 note. because there were so many notes that needed to be moved to the 590 field, a decision was made to delete the 850 holding institution fields from almost all of our records and use the automated summaries generated in wms. this left all serial records without coverage dates during the migration project in millennium; however, we believed it would make the migration process to wms easier. special collection records did not include item-level date and enumeration in the item records and were instead cataloged at a box or series level.  this eliminated the possibility of using wms automated summaries. because of this, coverage statements were moved to a 590 public note for all special collections records.  this way the information was retained in the system, while still creating an opportunity to change the formatting at a later date if needed. after the migration, it was discovered that the system generated coverage dates were not as complete or as easy to read in wms as they had been in millennium. it is an ongoing project to clean up and keep these summaries current in the new system.  below is a screenshot of how the coverage dates appeared on the staff side of millennium: this is how the coverage dates appear in wms: in hindsight, we should have migrated the 850 field to a 590 field to keep the information as local bibliographic data in addition to using the wms automated summary statement.  the coverage dates would then have appeared in a public note, which would have given our staff and users an additional place to look for the coverage dates.  it would also have given technical services staff a point of comparison when cleaning up the records post-migration. info/historical records in millennium, a local practice was developed to keep notes about subscriptions as an item record under the bibliographic record.  in wms, these could not be migrated as items because they were not real items that could be checked out, but rather purchasing notes that were only important to staff.  because of this, it was important that these notes not be visible to the public.  these notes were a constant topic of discussion among the implementation team members and with the oclc cohort leaders. one idea was to migrate them from an item to a bibliographic field by attaching the note as an 850 holdings institution field.  unfortunately, just as it was not possible to do a global update to cross from bibliographic record to item record, it was also not possible to to cross from item record to bibliographic record.  oclc tried to help with this, but could not find a solution for crossing between record types.  even if this were possible, the above mentioned issues with the 850 field would have been encountered and the information would have to be moved to a 590 field to retain it. because this seemed complicated, a list was created of all of the info/historical records in millennium and then exported to excel to create a backup file containing these notes.  soon after this was completed, oclc developers found a way to translate the information from the 850 field to the 852 non-public subfield x note in wms as part of the migration. historical purchasing information is now in a note that is only visible to staff in wms. continuing resources we have found continuing resources to be challenging in wms.  previously, we had used oclc’s connexion to create and manage bibliographic records and used material types that the system supplied.  while “continuing resource” is a material type in connexion, it is not a material type in wms.  because of this, an available material type in the new system was chosen and then records were changed in millennium to match the new system.  to do this, another list was created in millennium of items with “continuation” listed as the material type.  the list was then examined and a determination was made as to whether or not the materials were actually still purchased as a continuation.  most of the titles were no longer purchased in this way, so the migration presented an opportunity to make these corrections in the system. not every item listed as a “continuation” in millennium was a serial item.  in some cases the titles were part of a monographic series.  decisions then had to be made whether to use a serial record or a monograph record for items that had previously been considered continuing resources.  for items that had only an isbn, we chose the monograph record and for those with an issn, we chose the serial record; however, many items had both an isbn and an issn.  the decision was more difficult in these instances and continues to be difficult for these items because the format chosen affects how patrons can find the item in discovery.  this is addressed in more detail below. analytic records at the beginning of the migration process, oclc inquired about specific fields and data elements in our records to identify potential errors in the migration process which could be addressed before migrating. one question was whether the data contained linked records.   at first, we had no idea what this even meant, so we answered “no” on our initial migration questionnaire.  a few short weeks before the scheduled migration date, the linked records were discovered in the form of series analytic records. a series analytic record is basically a record that is cataloged as an overarching monographic series title that is then linked to individual titles within that series.  this means that the item record is linked to the overarching bibliographic record for the series as well as the bibliographic record for the individual title, which then links both bibliographic records.  unknown to those working on the migration project, previous catalogers had an ongoing project to unlink all of these analytic records when a monographic series subscription was no longer active.  notes were found on how to unlink the records, but no notes on what the titles were or where the previous catalogers left off in the project were found.  unfortunately, we had no way to identify linked records in millennium. we unlinked as many of the records as possible before the migration, but finally had to send the data to oclc knowing that many linked records still remained. these records migrated as two separate instances of the same barcode, which created two lhrs in wms, subsequently causing duplicate barcodes in wms.  after the migration, oclc provided a number of reports including a duplicate barcode report, so that these duplicate instances could be found. to correct these records, the item was pulled and examined to determine if the serial or the monograph record best represented it.   the local holdings record was corrected for the title and the lhr from the unchosen bibliographic record was deleted. in millennium, the choice between representing an item with a serial or monograph record had few implications for users. however, in wms, choosing a serial record could allow for article level holdings to be returned in discovery, while choosing a monograph record would not. conversely, choosing a serial record for an item which looks like a monograph might make the item more difficult to find if users narrow their search to “book.”   because of this, careful review of items and material types was necessary to help create the best user experience. for example, “the handbook of nonprescription drugs” looks like a book with a hard cover to most library users and even staff. in discovery,  if the format is limited to “journal,” the title is the first search result: if the search is limited to the format “book,” the title is not found on the first page of the search results. serials as was mentioned previously, oclc relies on the 945 field to view all item information.  for the most part, serials records contained the 850 hslic owns field that was discussed earlier. the 945 subfield a was used to list the following distinctions: current print subscription, current print and electronic subscription, and electronic subscription.  because the 945 subfield a also contained the volume dates, we chose to move this information to a 590 local note field. once those notes were moved, we found that enumeration and chronology was entered in various subfields within the 945 field.  the date was usually in subfield a, volume notes were found in subfield d, while the volume number was in subfield e.  the below example is taken from an extraction in millennium and shows the enumeration and chronology for volume 53 of the journal “diabetes” published in 2004. the first line shows an example of a note that this volume is a supplement, while the second line shows a more typical entry with volume number and coverage. 945 |c|e53|a2004|dsupplements| 945 |c|e53|a2004:july-2004:dec| the enumeration and chronology was constructed from these subfields where possible; however, if this information was repeated in a different subfield, it had to be cleaned up post-migration. electronic resources we decided not to migrate electronic resources cataloged in millennium to wms.  electronic resources are managed within collection manager, which is wms’ electronic resource manager.   it was specified in the translation table that any record with a location of electronic resource not be migrated to the new system.  unfortunately, many of the electronic resources records unintentionally migrated.  they may have been attached to a print record or perhaps did not have the location set as electronic resource.  holdings had to be removed from these records post-migration. before migration, we decided to delete records for freely available e-books from millennium.   most of these resources were provided for the public via government websites hosted by the center for disease control (cdc) and could easily be accessed through other means of searching.  these resources could be added to collection manager post-migration if deemed important. similarly, electronic records were not migrated directly from serial solutions, our previous electronic resource manager. instead, electronic resources were manually added to collection manager for a cleaner migration.  all electronic resources are shared with university libraries (ul), the main campus library, so close collaboration with ul was necessary in order to share and track these resources.  while all hslic resources were shared with ul and all ul resources shared with us, we decided to select only the resources that were relevant to the health sciences in collection manager.  this created a more health sciences focused electronic resources collection, so that titles relevant to these subjects are displayed at the top of the search. suppressed records one of oclc’s slogans is “because what is known must be shared,” so it makes sense that wms does not have the capability to suppress records. if an item has our holdings on it and has an lhr, then it is viewable to the public in discovery.  for the most part this concept worked for us.  there were two record types in millennium where this idea presented challenges: suppressed items and equipment records. suppressed items at the time of migration, there were around 1200 books that had been removed from the general collection and stored in offsite storage for future consideration for adding to special collections.   these records were suppressed in millennium, so that only staff could see them in the backend. adding these items back into the collection was considered, so that records would not be lost, but it was finally decided this would be far too time consuming in the middle of the migration and that many of the titles would probably be deleted later on. instead, another list was created in millennium containing items in offsite storage with a status of “suppressed”.  an excel spreadsheet was then created that contained the titles, oclc numbers, and even the call numbers of all of the formerly suppressed titles, allowing for easy reference to the items in storage.  we instructed oclc not to migrate any records with a status of suppressed. equipment records similarly, there were a number of equipment records that were only viewable and useful to staff at the circulation desk.  these records were for laptops, ipads, a variety of cables and adaptors, even some highlighters, and keys.  these items all had barcodes and could be checked out, but patrons had to know that they existed in order to ask for them.  while this never seemed to be a problem for users and it did seem strange to create bibliographic records for equipment items, it was decided to create brief records and then migrate them anyway in hope of promoting use. now users have the ability to see if a laptop is available for checkout before even asking.  while the idea of these records is a bit unorthodox from traditional cataloging, creating the records ultimately added to the service the library was already providing in addition to providing a way to circulate the equipment using wms. conclusion although there were a number of steps, a number of surprises, and a number of decisions that had to be made, the pre-migration cleanup process was definitely worth the work.  many errors were discovered post-migration, but without doing the initial clean up, there would have been even more problems. at hslic, we have one full time cataloger/ils manager and one full time electronic resources/serials librarian.  it took nearly 6 months to clean up catalog records before migrating to wms. starting the cleanup process earlier would have saved us a lot of work and resulted in cleaner records to migrate. we should have started looking for the linked series analytic records immediately.  this would have given us more time to identify the records, unlink them, and decide which record best represented the item before sending the records to oclc.  this would have prevented post-migration cleanup of duplicate barcodes and prevented circulation staff any confusion when trying to check these items out to users. five out of eight members of hslic’s ils migration committee had worked at hslic less than a year before we began the  migration process. this provided a balance between historical institutional knowledge with new perspectives.  it helped us look at the catalog with fresh eyes and allowed us to ask “why” whenever the answer was,“that is the way we have always done things.” if “why” couldn’t be answered or no longer seemed relevant, we considered making a change. the catalog should reflect what is on the shelf and what is accessible electronically.  the online catalog is the window to the library itself and should accurately represent what the library holds. because of electronic access to ebooks and ejournals, some of our users won’t ever step into the physical library, which makes the accuracy of the online catalog or discovery layer even more important. even if your library isn’t moving to a new ils, it is important for catalogers and technical services staff to ask, “what is in the library’s catalog?” and then ask “why?”  as we discovered at hslic, keeping notes and shelving locations just because “that is what had always been done” in some cases was no longer compatible with the new system and in other cases was no longer efficient or comprehensible. sometimes change is exactly what is needed to keep the catalog relevant to library users. acknowledgements thank you to the peer reviewers, violet fox and annie pho, for helping me focus and clarify my ideas and experiences in this article.  you both made the peer review process an interesting and enjoyable experience.  thank you to sofia leung, publishing editor, for guiding me through the process.  i would also like to thank all of the members on the hslic ils migration committee who made the migration possible.  i would especially like to thank victoria rodrigues for her hard work on cleaning up the serial records and adding our electronic resources to the new system. works cited dula, m., jacobsen, l., ferguson, t., and ross, r. (2012). implementing a new cloud computing library management service. computers in libraries, 32(1), 6-40. dula, m., and ye, g. (2013). case study: pepperdine university libraries’ migration to oclc’s worldshare. journal of web librarianship, 6(2),125–132. doi: 10.1080/19322909.2012.677296 hartman, r. (2013). life in the cloud: a worldshare management services case study. journal of web librarianship, 6(3),176-185. doi: 10.1080/19322909.2012.702612 oclc. (2015) accessed january 14, 2016, from https://www.oclc.org/en-us/share/home.html     cataloging, integrated library systems, migration inclusivity, gestalt principles, and plain language in document design the collective approach: reinventing affordable, useful, and fun professional development this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct sliding across the database divide with proactive chat help – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 21 aug adrienne warner /4 comments sliding across the database divide with proactive chat help in brief proactive chat help has gained attention in academic libraries for increasing the number of questions from online users. librarians have reported a significant increase in chat traffic, particularly related to research. so far, library websites have been the primary target of proactive chat implementation efforts, leaving subscription databases largely untouched and their users without help. this article describes how librarians at the university of new mexico collaborated with vendors to embed proactive chat in databases, detailing the process, technical glitches, and use trends. with this project, librarians have pushed the boundary of chat help into territory rich with opportunity to directly support online scholars at their point of need. insights outlined here would be useful to librarians considering expanding their chat reference service to subscription databases and those interested in connecting help services to online users. by adrienne warner introduction across the united states, reference librarians use instant messaging tools to connect synchronously with researchers, and chat service is a staple across many academic institutions. at the university of new mexico, a research 1, hispanic-serving institution, reference librarians serve a community of 20,244 fte (office of the vice president for research, n.d.). at the university libraries (“the library”), the reference landscape has changed in step with national trends of the last decade, particularly as face-to-face interactions have declined and online chat interactions have increased. since the library’s adoption in 2008, chat reference has grown to become an integral component of the suite of reference services offered (aguilar et al., 2011). staff provide in-house chat help to users who initiate conversations from chat boxes sprinkled across library web pages. until recently, all chat boxes and links have been stationary, user-initiated, and placed within the web content management software accessible to and maintained by library employees. in 2016, the library migrated to springshare’s libanswers software platform, which offered three styles of chat boxes, each with customization options. (springshare has since created a fourth style, the floating widget.) two of the style options provided the ability to make the box actively solicit a chat interaction with a user, whether by sliding out from a tab at the side or by popping up into the middle of the screen. these newly available features represented an increasingly interesting prospect. the software also offered improved transcript access. in reviewing logged chat conversations, the reference team observed many interactions where users needed help finding appropriate research databases, or had recently been in a database and could not find the material they needed. as the reference team discussed this trend, we realized that even though librarians and professors advised students to use databases for their research, there was no librarian help embedded in those same databases. if students realized a need for live, online librarian assistance, and knew that chat help was available somewhere, they had two options. one route was to click the back arrow to find a library page with a chat widget, potentially losing their place in the database. the second choice was to open a new page or tab, navigate to the library website, and locate a chat widget. we decided that in addition to placing chat widgets into databases, we would make them proactive. we hoped that the proactivity of the widget would signal to confident database users that librarian chat had newly arrived in those platforms, while also actively offering help to inexperienced users. we ruled out passive chat boxes because they required users to be aware of their need for help before initiating conversations. alternately, the proactivity of the widget could help users assess whether they needed librarian support. with a clear intention to expand chat service to databases, we added ourselves to the ranks of other academic institutions who adopted this technology. proactive chat efforts in academic libraries chat service in many academic libraries is now a standard offering, and the development of the option to make chat boxes automatically offer librarian help has created buzz. since the first documented implementation of proactive chat in an academic library in 2014, several libraries have implemented proactive chat service and written about their experiences (epstein 2018; fan, fought & gahn 2017; hockey 2016; kemp, ellis & maloney 2015; pyburn 2019; rich & lux 2018; zhang & mayer 2014). while most have focused on placing proactive chat widgets in library website pages, some institutions have also placed them in discovery tool results pages. two articles documented interest in extending proactive chat to database platforms (rich & lux 2018; and epstein 2018), and two describe successful deployment of proactive chat within databases (hockey 2016; pyburn 2019). several articles discuss increased chat transactions following the implementation of proactive chat (zhang & mayer 2014; kemp, ellis, & maloney 2015; epstein 2018; rich & lux 2018;). in their webinar, “transforming online reference with a proactive chat system,” jan kemp and marjorie warner reported that their venture was so successful that their institutions hired additional staff to accommodate the increase in chat volume (2016). in several cases, proactive chat mitigated decreases in reference traffic and even catalyzed expanded reference service. perceptions of proactivity perceptions of the proactive nature have varied, with users and librarians expressing a wide range of opinions. in the first documented exploration of proactive chat in 2011, academic librarians conducted interviews with users to determine how a proactive, pop-up chat box on their library website might be regarded. when asked whether they found the offer to be positive or negative, four out of the six interviewees thought the pop-up was intrusive, perhaps because the chat box only initiated as a response to catalog searches that returned zero results. the authors hypothesized, “the negative feelings seemed to stem from the users’ association of a pop-up window with bad experiences on the internet with pop-up web advertisements and electronic viruses” (mu et al. 2011, 127). they recognized that users’ broader internet experiences provided context for their perceptions of proactive chat. the negative perception affected some librarians, as well. one dismissed proactivity in chat as an “undesirable feature,” and concluded “…in most cases – and maybe you can relate – proactive chat tends to be annoying or distracting” (schofield 2016, 32). in several instances, however, the potential benefits of proactive chat outweighed negative associations, and experimentation with this new twist on an existing service continued. nuanced approaches intended to mitigate potential negative connotations revolved around placement and wording. two reports documented the targeting of strategic pages in which to place proactive chat, rather than a blanket treatment (kemp, ellis & maloney 2015; hockey 2016). librarians at bowling green state university examined locations within the pages themselves, and chose to put the chat widget in the unobtrusive lower right corner. they also used welcoming language intended to put users at ease (rich & lux 2018). changes in users’ perceptions since 2011 have been documented with positive feedback. kemp, ellis, and maloney analyzed user comments in their library’s 2015 libqual survey, and found that only five out of 38 comments mentioned chat proactivity in a negative light (2015, 768). rich and lux did not receive any negative comments from students on their proactive chat efforts, though their colleagues did lodge complaints (2018). librarians at penn state university conducted a usability study on proactive chat and found that users would welcome a pop-up chat widget on the library website, and described the widget as “easy to use,” “approachable,” and “useful” (imler, garcia, & clements 2016, 287). in this study 93% of the participants said the proactive chat widget on ebsco’s psycinfo database search page was helpful. only one user out of 30 associated the pop-up chat widget with negative terms (2016, 287). these positive experiences with proactive chat may be informed by the rapidly evolving web landscape. fewer involuntary pop-up advertisements invade browsing sessions, and the proliferation of instant and social messaging platforms are more integrated into users’ internet experiences. proactive chat implementation at the library laying the foundation after viewing kemp and warner’s webinar at the library, we garnered enough institutional buy-in to put together a small project team to explore placing proactive chat in subscription databases. as exciting as the prospect of duplicating other libraries’ success was, the project team knew that the existing chat service model would not be able to accommodate the marked increase in chat volume reported elsewhere. we did not want to overburden staff providing face-to-face help by asking them to field potentially concurrent chat sessions. relocating staff to offices to answer chat inquiries was not an option either, as staff members at the reference desk were also expected to supervise student employees and maintain building safety and security. budgetary constraints ruled out the possibility of hiring additional staff to handle potentially large increases in chat volume. in addition to chat volume, other unknowns existed. the project team needed to verify proof of concept. while some database vendors allowed links to the ask a librarian help page, the project team was unaware of any vendor allowing proactive chat widgets to be embedded in their platforms. with a modest project scope in mind, the project team decided to target four large database vendors: proquest, clarivate analytics, gale cengage, and ebsco. the vendors’ responses to our exploratory requests for collaboration varied. proquest responded that the company could not accommodate our request, citing an existing option of a stationary chat link placed at the bottom of the database search page. clarivate analytics deferred because the company was in the midst of changing ownership and invited possible future collaboration. two vendors, gale cengage and ebsco, welcomed the venture and referred our inquiry to their in-house tech teams. building the widget with two vendors on board, the project team needed to build the chat widget. we began by choosing the slide-out widget style, preferring its ability to remain visually present at the side of the screen as the user navigated. conversations could exist alongside database searching. next, we customized the widget’s behavior and wording. after discussion and beta testing, the team chose a 30-second interval for proactive behavior. this meant that the user would encounter the widget if they navigated to a subscription database page and lingered there for 30 seconds. at that point, the tab on the right side of the screen would slide to the left 3 inches, revealing a box that said “we’re here to help! unm librarians… your shortcut to better results.” with this language, we wanted to welcome the user and also signal that a librarian could be summoned if they chose to chat. we did not want the user to feel as though they were automatically thrust into a human interaction as soon as the box deployed, signified by a first-person direct question such as, “hi! can i help you find an article?” we thought it could be less intrusive if the user knew they would not be rejecting a person if they chose not to chat. instead they would just be dismissing a tech object. after the welcome message, the user would have the option to choose “chat now” or “no thanks” (figure 1). if the user clicked “chat now,” a free text field appeared for the user to type an initial question. after the user submitted their question, the libchat software notified reference staff of an incoming chat inquiry. after deciding the interval and language, we customized the color palette. we chose to incorporate the cherry red color of university branding to further reinforce librarian help, visually differentiating it from the ebsco and gale color branding and their customer service options. the presence of the cherry red chat tab across the two vendors’ sites further distinguished the service’s brand. figure 1. proactive, slide-out widget in ebsco’s academic search ultimate database. this screenshot shows the slide-out chat widget deployed and extended and hovering above the search homepage of the ebscohost database academic search premier. the chat widget is accented with red and gray, and contrasts with the blue, green, and white lettering of the database’s palette.”. testing once the team built the widget, we tested its functionality by placing it in live websites. because we did not have access to editing sandboxes in gale or ebsco platforms, we created a series of private libguides to test the widget’s behavior and were pleased with how a chat conversation started in one guide was auto-populated into the widget on another guide. we were confident this behavior would be replicated in the databases, and users would be able to navigate from page to page without losing the chat conversation. because we were not able to test the widget inside the databases before going live, the project team decided to implement proactive chat the second-to-last week of the spring 2017 semester. this had traditionally been a slow period in the library’s chat reference load, so staff would not be overwhelmed while also allowing a modest amount of users to encounter the widget. additionally, the project team could use the slow summer period to resolve possible technical issues before the busy fall semester. vendor tech teams agreed with the proposed timetable and placed the chat widget in each of their databases, including the introductory search page, the results page, and the item detail page on may 3, 2017.1 technical hitches reports of technical difficulties with proactive chat at other institutions have revolved around software code incompatibility. one institution could not insert the chat widget onto its homepage because of conflicting features in the content management software of the library site (fan, fought & gahn 2017). attempts at placing the widget into ebsco and proquest databases returned errors for database users at another institution, although eventually they were smoothed out in the proquest platform (pyburn 2019). another report discussed the inability of the widget to remember when a user had clicked, “no thanks,” an experience we would later have with our chat widget (epstein 2018). each of these articles had yet to be written when we decided to implement proactive chat at the library, however, so we went into the process not knowing what could go wrong. thanks but no thanks three logistical issues came up during the course of the project, and the team discovered the first problem a few weeks after going live with proactive chat. during some browsing sessions, the chat box refused to take the hint and remain stationary after the user clicked “no thanks.” this issue did not crop up during the project team’s beta testing, perhaps because the team tested the widgets on libguides, another springshare application. in the live database environment, however, sometimes a single user would be met with multiple chat requests. we tried to duplicate the problem on staff and library classroom computers, on different browsers, and off-campus. eventually, the team realized that browser cookie settings could interfere with the chat software’s ability to track the “no thanks” click history. because users controlled their browser, we needed an easy way to explain the issue and offer instructions to both users and reference staff fielding chats. we created a frequently asked questions entry that explained the need to allow third-party cookies on users’ browsers with links to directions to adjust the settings in major browsers. for some users, this worked. but cookie settings only accounted for a portion of the disregarding behavior, however, and the issue persisted. the project team continued to troubleshoot but could not identify a clear set of circumstances in which the chat box would ignore users’ preference. because the team could not consistently reproduce the pattern and did not have access to database software code, further troubleshooting by the project team was not possible. in some cases, this technical annoyance interrupted library instruction sessions, causing librarians to have to explain it to a classroom of students. for some colleagues, the interruption offered a chance to promote the availability of the service and it only offered disruption for others. despite the occasional unpredictable widget behavior, the project team determined that the issue did not happen frequently enough or was not a significant user deterrent to warrant complete cessation of the proactive chat service. non-transferrable conversation back in the widget formation stage, the project team chose the slide-out widget style in part because the chat conversation embedded in the originating page followed the user as they navigated across pages. this behavior enabled the user to maintain a stable connection to the chat agent and allowed the conversation to partially overlay the active page. however, in september 2017, several months after going live, the behavior of the chat boxes changed, so that chat conversations in progress did not automatically populate onto new pages. when users discovered that the new webpage did not contain their in-progress chat, they were left to search for the conversation or start another. some users navigated backward to the page in which the chat began. if it took longer than 30 seconds for the user to find the correct page and add another comment to the chat, the software treated the conversation as dormant and ended the chat. when this happened, the user would find that the text box no longer accepted messages and instead displayed the end-of-chat survey or a fresh chat box. on the librarian’s side, the chat box turned red and no further comments could be added. this unanticipated behavior change caused a great deal of confusion for users, and left staff scrambling to make sense of what was happening. as with the “no thanks” issue, impromptu troubleshooting sessions with users took place when they alerted reference staff to the issue. reference staff had to juggle problem-solving efforts while also assisting users with their information needs. the remote location of chat users further complicated problem solving efforts because staff could not see which steps resulted in the disconnects for the user. several days of increased disconnections and frantic reconnections during a busy time of the semester occurred before we understood that the behavior of the widget had changed. even though we now knew what the problem was, there was little the library could do to solve it. troubleshooting sessions were difficult, since we could not view or edit proprietary chat or database software code. recreating user click-history and device behavior was impossible. we contacted the vendors, however triangulation with the software companies and the library created an indistinct responsibility zone that proved difficult to navigate. resolution efforts over several months were ultimately ineffective. the project team decided to change the widget to the pop-up style, which allowed the chat conversation to take place in a new browser window and remain unaffected by user navigation in the other windows. although an improvement in sustaining conversations, this widget style required users to toggle between windows each time they wanted to add a new comment to the conversation. additionally, the user was not notified with a visual or auditory cue when the librarian added a comment, so users sometimes missed comments. we requested that springshare adjust the chat code to add a visual ping of the minimized window so users could see the librarians were talking, however this did not happen. vendor control while the library appreciated gale cengage and ebsco’s willingness to work with us, these collaborations made us even more dependent on them. there was no formal documentation of this collaborative agreement, and the continuation of proactive chat service was dependent on the vendors. in february 2018, we discovered that our chat widgets no longer appeared in the gale cengage suite of databases. after asking our vendor contact, we learned that the company’s refreshed platform no longer supported our widget and subsequent requests for reinstatement were unsuccessful. the removal of proactive chat boxes from gale cengage databases reduced by half the number of databases in which the proactive chat widget appeared. ebsco continued to support proactive chat boxes in their databases. an idea to address the hitches by march 2018, proactive chat had been in the databases for almost a year, and the technical issues had become apparent. we wanted to resolve each of the hitches: the disregard of the user’s choice of “no thanks,” the non-transferability of the conversations across web pages, and the susceptibility of service elimination by vendors. we formed a larger team of library colleagues to evaluate options, including the library information technology program analysts, web librarian, and electronic resources expert. one person suggested that we try placing proactive chat boxes on the proxy server, the interface that authenticates users’ credentials prior to subscription database access. if successful, this adaptation could give the library more autonomy in that we could overlay any or all of the subscription database platforms and would not have to rely on each vendor for initial implementation and sustained collaboration. with supplemental assistance from the springshare tech team, and a newly available proquest sandbox for testing, preliminary gains gave us hope. we added custom code to the proxy server content management software, placing an additional timer that would begin after the user clicked “no thanks,” and override subsequent offers to chat within a half hour timeframe. this seemed to cut down on the number of offers to chat, but did not resolve the issue completely. the original behavioral inconsistencies arose with this proxy layer solution, especially when we tested moving from one proquest database to another. the persistence of behavior issues seemed to confirm that the problem lay with the interaction of the chat widget code and the database code. despite initial optimism, ultimately the team decided that without access to the proprietary code, the library’s creative work-arounds would not adequately reduce the original technical issues, and shelved further development of this idea. gauging usage we knew the widgets were not behaving as expected, but it was not clear whether these hitches were affecting use. to understand usage, we analyzed transaction data recorded by the libanswers software. although it collected robust metadata, the software did not track whether the chat was started by the user after the proactive widget slid out on its own, or as a result of the user clicking the stationary chat tab before the 30-second proactivity trigger. because this was unknown, we could not draw direct conclusions about user and chat box interaction resulting from widget proactivity. the following data sets use the term “in-database proactive” to describe the originating widget, not the stage of widget activity when the user interacted with it. use by widget the library implemented live, proactive chat on may 3, 2017, and as of this writing (may 24, 2019) has received a total of 5,503 chats across all ul widgets. of that total, 27.4% (n=1,511) originated in the proactive database chat widget, making it the top producing chat widget. this number may be inflated due to patrons attempting to reconnect after an interrupted interaction as described previously, and additional research is needed to understand the exact number of disconnected and restarted interactions. despite this possible inflation, that some users were willing to restart a chat conversation indicated their interest in using the service. whether they responded to the proactive offer or clicked on the stationary tab to initiate an interaction, users chose to chat when they were in the databases, and did so at a relatively high rate (figure 2). users have likely encountered the technical issues, yet their usage of the in-database chat widget suggests that the issues have not significantly deterred them. figure 2. top five performing chat widgets since proactive chat implementation.. this chart shows the number of chats fielded over a 2 year period. full description of figure 2 as a list. workload initially, we limited the project scope to avoid overwhelming reference capacity and needed to determine if that decision was supported. to gauge overall impact of the additional proactive chats in relation to existing chat traffic, it was valuable to compare the number of chat transactions that took place in subscription databases with all other chat transactions. the library migrated to libanswers libchat software in july 2016. ten months later, in may 2017, proactive chat boxes in databases became available to patrons. from july 1, 2016, to may 2, 2017, the period before proactive chat was implemented in the databases, there were a total of 2,254 chat interactions. from july 1, 2017, to may 2, 2018, after proactive chat was introduced, the number of chat interactions jumped to 2,848, an increase of 26.4%. in the last period measured, period c, chat transactions in both stationary and proactive widgets decreased from period b. this total is reduced from period a, before proactive chat was introduced (figure 3). figure 3. chat transactions originating from stationary widgets and in-database proactive widget.. this chart shows that after the infusion of proactive chat transactions in period b, the number declined in period c to below period a levels. full description of figure 3 as a list. the introduction of proactive chat into the databases initially increased the overall chat load. over time, however, all chat interactions fell, and initial gains provided by the introduction of proactive chat have been subsumed in the decline. in-database proactive chat load has not overwhelmed agents and the initial project scope was deemed appropriate. in-database proactive chat from period b to c fell by 57%, and several factors may have contributed to this reduction. during fall 2017, approximately 20% of in-database proactive chat transactions originated from the gale cengage databases, and the elimination of the widget from that vendor’s 50 databases at the end of 2017 could account for part of the decrease seen in period c. also in fall 2017, the slide-out widget behavior changed, preventing some chat conversations from following the user. because some users chose to start new chats to regain connections with reference staff, and the system records each conversation as a unique instance, some interactions were likely logged twice. although it is impossible to know the exact number of disconnects due to widget behavior failure, review of chat transcripts suggests this occurrence was more common in period b. we changed the slide-out style to the pop-up style in period c, so it is possible this change reduced the disconnects, thereby reducing users’ need to restart chats. additional analyses will be possible as more data is collected in the coming semesters. several factors may be contributing to the overall decline of chat interactions at the library. when taken as a whole, reference transactions via all modes (face-to-face, chat, email, sms text, and phone) have decreased when measured from july 1, 2016 to may 2, 2019. when parsed by period, chat, email, and sms text follow the same pattern, peaking in period b. the number of views of the frequently asked questions have risen each year, perhaps answering questions otherwise fielded by staff. library instruction initiatives, both face-to-face and online, may also impact the number of questions asked by chat or other reference mode. another possible reason for decreased library reference transactions is that instructors may be accepting a wider range of resources found outside the library’s online resources. although enrollment at unm has declined each year since 2014, the number of chat interactions per full-time equivalent has increased slightly (office of institutional analytics, n.d.). 2017 saw the highest chat rate per student in recent years, a number perhaps influenced by the additional chats taking place within the databases (figure 4). figure 4: chat interactions per full time equivalent (fte) student enrollment metric.. the trendline shows a slight increase in the number of chats per student since 2013. full description of figure 4 as a list. user ratings from post-chat surveys usage statistics were helpful to understand how users were interacting with the in-database proactive widget, and we wanted to investigate users’ views of the quality of interaction that took place within it. we looked at data collected via the post-chat survey, which included a 1 to 4 rating scale: 1 was bad, 2 was so-so, 3 was good, and 4 was excellent. users could rate any part of the chat interaction, including but not limited to the proactivity or non-proactivity of the chat box. the number of ratings the top five most-used widgets received followed the pattern of overall usage. the in-database proactive chat widget was the most used, and also received the most ratings (n=238), and had an average rating of 3.71 (figure 5). the second-highest used chat box (ask a librarian) received the second-highest number of ratings (n=224), and had a slightly increased rating average of 3.77. the widget with the highest average rating was the wms discovery chat box (n=3.83). although the average rating for the in-database proactive widget was 3.71, which tied for last place, it was 0.12 behind the first place widget. users rated chats occurring in the in-database “excellent” 79% of the time. additionally, chat conversations rated within all of the widgets are well above a “good” (3) rating. this consistent rating average suggests users did not associate the in-database proactive chat technical issues to negative chat ratings. figure 5. user ratings by chat widget from may 2017 to may 2019. average rating number of ratings % excellent % good % so-so % bad wms discovery 3.83 87 91 2 6 1 ask a librarian page 3.77 224 85 10 2 3 ebsco discovery service 3.73 195 82 11 4 3 in-database proactive 3.71 238 79 15 4 2 homepage 3.71 164 78 18 2 2 the top five most-used widgets had comparable average ratings, commonly receiving the “excellent” rating. future directions although we encountered technical hitches with this project, the project team counted this endeavor a success. over a quarter of library chat conversations came from inside database platforms, spaces previously devoid of librarian help. users rated their interactions as overwhelmingly excellent. as we continue to assess this project, we would like to explore expanding proactive chat to more databases and the discovery tool, and reach out to previously unavailable vendors. we have plans to conduct usability tests with in-database proactive chat users to further investigate widget behavior and users’ perceptions. a deep dive into the types of questions arising within the proactive chat widget is in development. additional opportunities to research proactive chat exist, especially in the realm of accessibility. patrons who use screen readers and users who access proactive chat on their mobile devices may encounter technical glitches beyond those outlined here. licensing negotiation is another avenue of potential interest, and affirmations for chat widget support could provide clarity in vendor collaboration. as libraries across the united states work to reach users at their point of need through proactive chat help, momentum builds for deeper collaborations. librarians, content providers, and library software companies may be able to make this highly-used service seamless, and bridge the database divide. acknowledgements i would like to thank brett nafziger for his influential work on this project during its formative stages. david hurley has offered immense support for the project and throughout the writing process. inga barnello, glenn koelling, and jeremiah paschke-wood provided thoughtful comments on an early bird draft, transforming this study from nestling to fledgling. article reviewers paula dempsey and ryan randall offered keen insights with kind words. thank you. publishing editor ian beilin shepherded this piece through the publication process. finally, i thank my university of new mexico chat service colleagues whose expertise continues to propel users on their research journeys. references aguilar, paulita, kathleen keating, suzanne schadl, and johann van reenen. “reference as outreach: meeting users where they are.” journal of library administration 51, no. 4 (2011): 343-358. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2011.556958 epstein, michael. “that thing is so annoying: how proactive chat helps us reach more users.” college & research libraries news 79, no. 8 (2018): 436. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.79.8.436 fan, suhua caroline, rick l. fought, and paul c. gahn. “adding a feature: can a pop-up chat box enhance virtual reference services?.” medical reference services quarterly 36, no. 3 (2017): 220-228. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2017.1332143 hockey, julie michelle. “transforming library enquiry services: anywhere, anytime, any device.” library management 37, no. 3 (2016): 125-135. https://doi.org/10.1108/lm-04-2016-0021 imler, bonnie brubaker, kathryn rebecca garcia, and nina clements. “are reference pop-up widgets welcome or annoying? a usability study.” reference services review 44, no. 3 (2016): 282-291. https://doi.org/10.1108/rsr-11-2015-0049 kemp, jan h., carolyn l. ellis, and krisellen maloney. “standing by to help: transforming online reference with a proactive chat system.” the journal of academic librarianship 41, no. 6 (2015): 764-770. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2015.08.018 kemp, jan. h. and marjorie warner. “transforming online reference with a proactive chat system.” reference and user services association webinar: may 19, 2016. mu, xiangming, alexandra dimitroff, jeanette jordan, and natalie burclaff. “a survey and empirical study of virtual reference service in academic libraries.” the journal of academic librarianship 37, no. 2 (2011): 120-129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2011.02.003 office of institutional analytics. “official enrollment reports.” university of new mexico. accessed july 31, 2019: http://oia.unm.edu/facts-and-figures/official-enrollment-reports.html office of the vice president for research. “welcome from the ovpr.” university of new mexico. accessed june 21, 2019: https://research.unm.edu/welcome pyburn, lydia l. “implementing a proactive chat widget in an academic library.” journal of library & information services in distance learning 13, no. 1-2 (2019): 115-128. http://doi.org/10.1080/1533290x.2018.1499245 rich, linda, and vera lux. “reaching additional users with proactive chat.” the reference librarian 59, no. 1 (2018): 23-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763877.2017.1352556 schofield, michael. “applying the kano model to improve ux.” computers in libraries 36, no. 8 (2016): 28-32. springshare. “springshare privacy policy.” accessed august 14, 2019: https://springshare.com/privacy.html springshare.”gdpr compliance.” accessed august 14, 2019: https://www.springshare.com/gdpr.html zhang, jie, and nevin mayer. “proactive chat reference: getting in the users’ space.” college & research libraries news 75, no. 4 (2014): 202-205. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.75.4.9107 appendix full description of figure 2. top five performing chat widgets since proactive chat implementation. the five widgets that produced the most chats during the period of may 2017 to may 2019, in descending order are: in-database proactive, which had 1511 chats, accounting for 27.4% of all chat interactions ask a librarian page, which had 1103 chats, accounting for 20.0% of all chat interactions eds discovery, which had 803 chats, accounting for 14.6% of all chat interactions homepage, which had 795 chats, accounting for 14.4% of all chat interactions wms discovery, which had 624 chats, accounting for 11.3% of all chat interactions return to figure 2 caption. full description of figure 3. chat transactions originating from stationary widgets and in-database proactive widget. period a (july 1, 2016 – may 2, 2017) 2254 from the stationary widgets 0 from the in-database proactive chat widget 2254 total chat transactions period b (july 1, 2017 – may 2, 2018) 1856 from the stationary widgets 992 from the in-database proactive chat widget 2848 total chat transactions period c (july 1, 2018 – may 2, 2019) 1677 from the stationary widgets 425 from the in-database proactive chat widget 2102 total chat interactions return to figure 3 caption. full description of figure 4. chat interactions for the full time equivalent (fte) student enrollment metric by year. chat interactions for the full time equivalent (fte) student enrollment metric by year: 2013 is 0.108 2014 is 0.115 2015 is 0.121 2016 is 0.11 2017 is 0.129 2018 is 0.119 return to figure 4 caption. while a thorough investigation about the intersection of patron privacy with the data collection practices of chat and database software vendors is outside the scope of this article, it is worth noting that increased access to users’ information by the database vendors seems unlikely. the ebsco and gale cengage tech teams received a snippet of widget code to embed in their pages, not the access key to the library’s springshare libanswers instance. any additional patron data collected from in-database chat sessions would likely reside with springshare, rather than ebsco and gale cengage. libanswers records the referring url that could include search terms entered by patrons using databases, such as in this string: https://web-b-ebscohost-com.libproxy.unm.edu/ehost/resultsadvanced?vid=17&sid=790eefd2-4a20-4947-a0fc-ffba4598916a%40pdc-v-sessmgr05&bquery=(experimental+and+study+and+design)&bdata=jmripxbzewgmy2xpmd1gvczjbhywpvkmy2xpmt1svizjbhyxpv these search terms could be linked to personal information, such as user name, email or ip address. springshare’s privacy policy does not list chat interactions and the associated referring url as “customer data,” however it may be argued that the category customer data also includes search terms. search terms are much less sensitive than other types of data they collect from chat widgets regardless of database involvement. springshare posts their stance on patron privacy via their privacy policy and statement of compliance with the general data protection regulation law. these documents state the company’s refusal to share or sell customers’ data. while the risk of personal data exposure through in-database chat sessions is low, experts in software interface communication may be able to more conclusively state the level of risk. privacy audits taking place in many academic libraries in the united states could include further investigation of these intersections. [↩] “all i did was get this golden ticket”: negative emotions, cruel optimisms, and the library job search against medicine: constructing a queer-feminist community health informatics and librarianship 4 responses anita ondrusek 2020–04–20 at 2:46 pm in looking for recent research on embedding technological apps into platforms found in special libraries, i was delighted to find this article. i will be citing it in a book i’m writing in the chapter on “what special librarians do” as an example of technologies that information professionals in settings such as business, law, and medical libraries will need to explore and, possibly, implement. your research reinforces what is emphasized time and again in special library services – bringing the service to the client. i love the term “proactive chat.” thanks for getting this out to the library community. adrienne warner 2020–04–21 at 1:29 pm thank you for taking the time to comment, anita! i’m glad you find this article helpful in thinking about your book and some of the ways we try to reach library users. sandy m 2020–04–29 at 4:09 pm thank you for sharing your research. i have our chat widget in ebsco databases but how did you add the slide out option? did you use the code for the slide out widget in ebsco ? adrienne warner 2020–06–18 at 12:56 pm hi sandy! thanks so much for your question. yes, once we selected the slide-out widget within springshare, we added the code for it into the ebsco platform via the ebsco admin account. please let me know if i can provide more detail! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct all dressed up with nowhere to go: a survey of ala emerging leaders – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 27 may kim leeder /36 comments all dressed up with nowhere to go: a survey of ala emerging leaders photo by flickr user grewlike (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) by kim leeder if you want to start a passionate conversation, ask a past emerging leader (el) about their experience in the ala emerging leaders program. created by former ala president leslie burger as one of her presidential initiatives in 2007, emerging leaders was initiated to put new librarians “on the fast track to ala and professional leadership” (learn more on the wiki). if you talk to any of the roughly three hundred participants in emerging leaders so far, you are likely to find that they have a powerful opinion on the subject. some loved it, some hated it, and some express profoundly mixed feelings. a very few are neutral. in this blog post i will be exploring those differing responses from past emerging leaders as part of a critique of the high-profile program. emerging leaders is intended to recognize and train approximately one hundred outstanding new librarians each year and guide them toward becoming leaders within ala and the profession. participants are selected in part by their accomplishments and leadership potential, and in part by the desire to have a geographically and culturally diverse class. the program involves a one-year commitment and requires attendance at that year’s midwinter and annual conferences (a full day workshop takes place at each), plus unmeasured time working on a group project in the interim. els spend the six months between conferences working in small groups on an ala-related project. the el projects vary widely and are introduced into the program by individuals or committees from across ala. disclaimer and admission of bias: i was an el in 2008 so my experience serves as the impetus for and subtle bias of this post. i’m writing from a blend of personal experience, anecdotal evidence, and survey data. though i strive in this post to maintain an objective distance, my own emerging leaders experience is best described as a roller coaster ride full of high points and deep frustrations. i applaud the program’s goals but i believe that there is a significant gap between the inspiring, boundless encouragement given to els to reenvision ala and the reality of how change might actually happen within the organization. i am proud to have been an emerging leader and i hope that this post may be the start of some small movement to improve what is, at its heart, a truly impressive initiative. literature review while the talented new librarians you will meet in emerging leaders are generally very willing to say what they think, i was unable to locate even one written critique — either positive or negative — of the program by a participant (if you know of any, please post them in the comments below). very few have written about their experiences except to post the occasional non-evaluative summary of the program events and workshops. in fact, other than a tongue-in-cheek blog post by the annoyed librarian (who has not been an el) and a well-rounded slideshow report by rachel vacek, there is little in any published medium other than pr and related announcements. from this we may draw one of several conclusions: (1) past els don’t have any opinions about the program one way or the other; (2) past els don’t write much or aren’t interested in writing about the program; or (3) past els are, for some reason, uncomfortable about critiquing their experience in the program. based upon a variety of personal email exchanges and in-person conversations, i am going to immediately rule out the first possibility. i have met els from every year of the program and all have been vocal about what they see as its strengths and weaknesses. in truth, their energetic praise and criticism played a large part in my decision to tackle this topic in a blog post. as for the second possibility above, a few quick searches will show that many past els are prolific writers and bloggers. while it is possible that they simply don’t have any interest in discussing their el experiences in their writing, i find that unlikely. i find the third possibility above to be the most plausible, and offer my own feelings as evidence here. first of all, this is a high-profile program that is quite attractive on resumes and cvs, and the library world is very small. writing a critique about emerging leaders, and being willing to accept any potential negative feedback from such a critique, takes courage. on the other hand, among those i know who have been through the program, i have heard more than one admit to feeling too emotional about the experience to put their thoughts on paper. personally it took me nearly a year to gain the distance and perspective required to approach this post, and even after much encouragement and feedback from others, i still offer it with some hesitation. survey of past emerging leaders in order to write about the emerging leaders program with some authority, i gathered feedback and opinions from as many past els as possible. accordingly, this post is based not merely upon my own experience, but upon the insights of nearly fifty past els who took the time to complete a survey about their experiences in the program. admittedly this is a self-selected sample, and it is likely that els who had strong feelings about the program were more likely to respond. i conducted the survey in google forms and distributed it to the listservs for the 2007 and 2008 els, a pool of approximately 220 librarians. i omitted 2009 els from the survey because they have not yet completed their program. the survey was composed of eleven questions, six of which were open-ended with a box for unlimited text responses. the remaining questions were multiple choice or ratings (see appendix below for the list of questions). none of the questions in the survey were required, and respondents were encouraged to pick and choose those they preferred to answer. results summary there were 46 respondents, divided roughly by year with 57% of respondents identifying as members of the 2008 emerging leaders class, and 43% from the 2007 class. overall, the results to the ratings questions were positive. when asked to rate the value of their experience on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being highest, 60% of respondents rated the program as a 4 or 5. when rating their experience based upon how much they enjoyed it the ratings were slightly lower, with 43% rating the program as a 4 or 5. however, an additional 41% rated the program at the midpoint level of 3. as an additional indicator of the perceived overall value of the program, 61% of respondents indicated that they would recommend emerging leaders to others. 78% (36 respondents) felt that the program made a difference in the trajectory of their career and/or ala involvement. the great majority described a positive impact; only 3 of those respondents indicated a negative impact in that the program discouraged them from continuing in ala. the responses to the open-ended questions were far more mixed, and will be described in the following sections of this post. worthwhile aspects overwhelmingly, survey respondents pointed to networking as the most rewarding part of their emerging leaders experience. out of 38 who answered the question, “what aspects of the program did you find worthwhile, if any?,” twenty-five referred to “networking,” “making new friends,” and/or “meeting people” as a positive result of their participation. one respondent described “meeting other enthusiastic librarians” as a worthwhile part of their experience. another simply answered, “networking, networking, networking.” similarly, an additional seven respondents pointed to their group work, in terms of having the opportunity to work with and get to know a small group of people, as a worthwhile aspect of the program. one respondent explained it this way: “working in small groups was a real plus. i probably would never have met my groupmates through any other channel, and it is great to see them at conferences and catch up.” eleven respondents indicated that the most worthwhile part of emerging leaders was the doors the program opened for them in terms of committee work, recognition, and resulting presentation and publication opportunities. in the words of one respondent, “the recognition i received from other conference attendees because of my el ribbon on my name badge was surprising to me…. just wearing the ribbon served as a conversation starter and the networking opportunities are there for the taking. the opportunity to continue working at the national level upon the completion of the program is the greatest benefit.” another respondent commented that it was “a great way to become more involved when getting your foot in the door seems intimidating.” i agree strongly with these assessments. being handed the opportunity to meet so many like-minded librarians who share my passion and desire to make positive contributions to the field was a stunning experience. granted not every el was quite that driven — i do know that a few dropped out along the way — but the vast majority of the librarians i met through emerging leaders are impressive individuals, and i have continued to stay in touch with many of them through email, facebook, and this blog. i cannot overstate the value of the emerging leaders networking experience. disappointments out of 39 who responded to the question, “what aspects of the program did you find disappointing, if any?,” eighteen indicated some aspect of the conference workshops, and another fourteen pointed to their group projects. specific comments about the workshops varied, although many expressed the wish that there had been less lecture, more interactive sessions, and more advanced leadership training. “really expected to have more ‘leadership’ training,” said one respondent, “similar to arl’s leadership workshops, with in-depth discussion and activities around aspects of leadership in a library organization. found that it was little more than ‘here are 5 qualities of good leaders.’” others described the content of the leadership training workshops as “rudimentary,” “weak,” or “trite.” additionally, several respondents felt that those facilitating the workshops were not responsive to their ideas and feedback. as one respondent explained, “the ala leadership that spoke to us regarding what can ala do to enhance or encourage more participation by newer librarians – when we provided feedback and comments in an open forum – i got the distinct impression that there was not an interest in new ideas. rather they were looking for confirmation that what steps they were already taking were satisfactory. there wasn’t an opportunity for a free exchange of ideas between the old guard and the new guard.” another observed, “you have a room full of folks who are energized and the energy didn’t go anywhere.” this sentiment was repeated throughout the survey responses. a large number of respondents felt that their group projects were “busy work” and did not see that their efforts were providing any results. “emerging leaders participants do a lot of good work for the projects,” said one respondent. “i was disappointed that the work was not used more within the ala system. while doing the project for project’s sake provides good training experience, the outcomes can be useful for the organization.” others compared the projects to “another library school assignment” or evaluated them as “not all that engaging or useful.” overall, my own greatest disappointment in the program was being encouraged to offer creative ideas and feedback in the interests of effecting change within ala, and then watching the bubble burst over and over again. whether it was a conversation about how to make ala more responsive to new librarians, or the “world cafe” events in which we brainstormed what the ideal organization would look like, our collective vision was praised, collected, and (i imagine) filed away at the end of the session, with no opportunities to further develop or pursue it. alternative visions in response to the question, “if you were asked to take over the emerging leaders program, or to create a new program to foster leadership among new librarians, what would it look like?,” past els had a variety of relevant ideas and suggestions. regarding the content of emerging leaders workshops, respondent comments generally focused on three primary issues they would address. first, they would emphasize interactive leadership training as the program’s primary goal and reduce the emphasis on generating greater ala participation. as one respondent stated, “it would have a larger goal than putting participants ‘on the fast track to ala leadership.’ i think it should focus on helping participants attain their personal and professional best and how ala can help them get there.” second, respondents disliked the current lecture-based format and many indicated that they would incorporate active learning exercises and guided small group discussions moderated by experienced ala members. third, many would add a variety of inspirational and “mover and shaker”-type guest speakers from within and outside of ala whose experiences and knowledge would be relevant to els. several suggested creating venues to facilitate free and open discussion among and between emerging leaders and those at various levels of ala leadership. one respondent had a clear vision of a potential format they would institute: “instead of posing organizational change questions to the group as a whole i would offer issues discussion tables, letting participants choose the issues most important to them and to which they feel they can offer definite courses for change. issues tables might include: ala structure, ala student chapter solutions, virtual membership, etc. a 1.5 hour session with a mentor/moderator could provide real, progressive ideas.” in terms of program format, many respondents would develop intensive training programs that included week-long retreats or a year-long, involved program with multiple meetings at each conference and ongoing virtual participation. one respondent summed it up, “it would have to be more involved. more than just 2 meetings. more virtual participation, discussion.” many respondents thought an ideal class size for a leadership program would be small (one suggested a class size of 50 participants). consistent with this, many felt that such a program should be highly selective, accepting only candidates with the clearest leadership potential. some respondents favored incorporating a mentoring program, possibly by having past els mentor subsequent participants or groups, or by holding “tours” of high-level ala meetings for participants. many emphasized the need for communication and community building activities among el participants and alumni, such as an online community and/or regional meetups for els (or projects assigned by region) that provide networking and development benefits without required conference attendance. among those who would include group projects, respondents indicated that those projects would be designed to have clear relevance, impact, and purpose within ala, and provide room for innovation. “i’d give the young/new librarians more room to innovate in their projects instead of assigning them grunt work from the various divisions,” said one respondent. some suggested models in which els identify and design their own projects, are fully integrated into existing committees, or are employed as interns at high levels of ala structure. others believed that group work interfered with the leadership training goals, and could be omitted altogether in favor of other activities. an alternative vision proposed that differed somewhat from the others was stated thus, “why have the program if the only benefit is to get a committee appointment? just have a program to get people on committees.” others mentioned bigwig and an unspecified aasl program (perhaps the collaborative leadership institute?) as models they would draw on. from my experience in the program, i can attest that there was quite a bit of grumbling amongst the els during the full-day sessions at each conference. the majority of els are borderline or full-fledged millennials, and being “talked at” is not a way we effectively learn. and while we can learn through lecture if we must, the content in our sessions assumed that we knew very little about leadership or interpersonal skills in general, which was largely untrue. a higher level of content and more skill-based activities would have greatly enriched the sessions for many of us. discussion clearly emerging leaders is generating widely differing reactions among participants. some of the responses are extremely positive, and many past els express gratitude and pleasure for having had the opportunity to participate. one respondent asserted, “being an el has changed my life…. it was a great way for me to get involved in a career that i truly love.” others made similarly glowing statements. meanwhile, other past els say they have become “embittered” and describe the program as “a waste of time.” my personal response to the experience was mixed; as a whole i found the experience rewarding but like many others i was frustrated by some of the elements of the program that didn’t fulfill my hopes for what it could be. at its root, much of my own and the survey respondents’ frustration with emerging leaders may derive from a discrepancy between our expectations and the reality of the program. comments from many of the respondents indicate that they began the program with the hope of making a difference by bringing their new ideas and energy to ala, but felt that they were not offered an effective venue to do so. one respondent acknowledged that discrepancy, saying, “i would recommend the program with a huge qualification regarding expectations and outcomes.” implicit in this comment is an indication that their expectations for the program were too high, at least compared to the reality of the experience. from what i have seen, there is a direct connection between those individuals who are most passionate about making a positive difference in libraries and those who are most frustrated by the emerging leaders program. the frustration is a product of feeling that their el experience was something akin to standing in a doorway, enjoying a spectacular vision of the future, and having the door slammed in their faces. said one respondent, “i felt a great disconnect with the leadership of ala and have concerns for the professional organization and what current leadership is doing to pave the way for new ideas.” another respondent echoed those concerns and took a step further: “i am not sure…that we are making much of a difference within ala. we had many ideas, but nothing has been done with them. perhaps we need to extend the program to a post piece that deals with the ideas that we’ve come up with and creating a strategic plan on how to implement them.” if one were to make change to the emerging leaders program based upon this feedback, there are two potential paths that could lead to a more satisfying experience for participants. the first is to simply remove the elements of the program that give participants the impression that their creative ideas for remaking ala are welcome and to focus on the skills specific to leadership instead. discussions and brainstorming sessions about how to improve the organization could be removed from the program in favor of an increased focus on leadership overall. this approach would eliminate the disappointment caused by els feeling that their creative ideas were invited and then discarded. the alternative path is far more complex but arguably more exciting. it would require the organizers of emerging leaders, and the els by extension, to become more aggressive in seeking out opportunities in which els might share their creative ideas with those in ala who are best positioned to consider and respond to them. it might involve having a group of els write a proposal to ala council on some pressing issue. it could tie certain els to current ala presidential initiatives, or other high-level committees and task forces. or perhaps at the end of each program year, it would involve els presenting a list of ideas and/or proposals to representatives of current ala leadership. perhaps els could work on more meaningful, longer-term projects they would hand off each year to the next group of participants. above all, it demands enabling els to begin putting into motion some of the creative ideas they are generating in workshop sessions. there are many potential ways to offer els the sort of exposure and feedback that survey respondents indicate they are seeking; the point is to start building those bridges. what do you think? i invite my fellow els to add your insights and comments below. in this post i am only beginning to dig toward the root of the issue, and maybe with your help we can bring it out into the light. perhaps the true movement toward change that comes out of emerging leaders doesn’t have anything to do with the program at all — perhaps it is made by those of us who have come together out of the program inspired, furious, motivated, and passionate with a network of colleagues who feel the same way. after all, that is the spirit behind in the library with the lead pipe; it is not a coincidence that five members of our blogging team are past els. and as we move forward in our careers we carry with us that nearly religious belief in change, and the knowledge we need to make it happen. perhaps, in the end, we are the change we wish to see. appendix: survey questions what year were you an emerging leader? (multiple choice) please describe your overall experience in the emerging leaders program. (open-ended) please rate your experience in the program, in terms of how valuable it was to you. (rating, 1-5) please rate your experience in the program, in terms of how enjoyable you found it to be. (rating, 1-5) what aspects of the program did you find worthwhile, if any? (open-ended) what aspects of the program did you find disappointing, if any? (open-ended) has the emerging leaders program made a difference in the trajectory of your ala participation and/or your career? (multiple choice) if you answered “yes” to the previous question, how has it made a difference? (open-ended) if you were asked to take over the emerging leaders program, or to create a new program to foster leadership among new librarians, what would it look like? (open-ended) how likely are you to recommend the emerging leaders program to others? (rating, 1-5) is there anything else you’d like to share regarding your experience as an emerging leader? (open-ended) many thanks to everyone on itlwtlp for help in crafting the survey and drafting this post, to the many els who took the time to respond to the survey, to latanya jenkins for her thoughtful feedback on a draft, and to derik badman for reviewing multiple drafts and providing me with some small (but needed) kicks in the butt. ala, emerging leaders why we should adopt alaconnect: a brief review and rumination on ala’s new online community a conversation with char booth 36 responses pingback : l1brar1an › survey of ala emerging leaders derik badman 2009–05–27 at 1:22 pm thanks for putting all the work into doing this, kim. i know it’s been one of those issues floating around since we started itlwtlp. i can’t say i was surprised to discover my responses to your survey were on the negative side of average, but i am in wholehearted agreement with the networking as positive aspect. i’d almost just vote to make it the emerging leaders social club (sounds exclusive and snooty, though). i’ll also admit to being one of the people who said that the program negatively affected my desire to participate in ala. the hard sell at times during the program was a real turn-off (like going to the timeshare lecture to get a free vacation), as well as the oft-noted lack of real response to much of our work or comments. i have no idea what become of the group project i worked on. i literally have heard nothing about it since that friday at annual. not even a “thanks for the effort” from the appropriate organizational group. the “get on committees” bonus of el has also not aided my desire to participate, as i’ve gotten on some committees that apparently do nothing. another line for the c.v. and nothing more, which, so far, (with the exception of meeting a few great people) holds true for the el program. emily ford 2009–05–27 at 1:34 pm congratulations, kim, for being able to remain (relatively) unemotional about the el experience. i remain highly emotional and frustrated by a lot of my el experiences. when i was put on a committee because i was an el, i tried to attend that committee’s meeting at annual prior to my official start as a member (as scheduled in the conference planner) and no one was there. the meeting had been canceled and i didn’t know it. another of the issues is that borne out of the work of my el group project a task force was created and i was happy to be a part of that task force, but for some reason the task force got disbanded (i still don’t know why) and our work and report stored away somewhere. i do have to say that i was lucky to be in a group that had excellent group project mentors. it’s just too bad the project and all of our energy went seemingly nowhere. another issue that still burns me is that i took the effort after our last workshop to speak with one of the workshop organizers and discuss what i thought might make the workshops more fruitful. i suggested making a leadership challenge of the workshop day. or a group challenge, something interactive. speaking with participants of the following year’s el group, none of those suggestions had been implemented. i felt like i was doing a good thing by offering my feedback in person. i didn’t want the next class to have such a negative experience in the workshop times as i had. jessamyn 2009–05–27 at 1:58 pm thanks for doing such a great job getting some data while also feeling okay expressing your feelings. while ala is definitely not as much of a kool-aid drinking place as other library vendors can be, i still get the feeling that they’ve learned how to talk to the talk of openness without really being able to walk the walk. whether this is due to structure, individual people, or their bogged down org structure, i’m not totally sure, but i also felt when i was on council [maybe i need to do a post about that…] that people wantd to say they had younger people with new ideas on council but they really didn’t want to use that in any way shape or form and there was so much talk about “paying dues” and free speech meaning that people got to abuse other people on the mailing list, that i decided to work more locally to effect real, if smaller, changes. lori reed 2009–05–27 at 2:09 pm i wrote about emerging leaders during the application process last year–almost exactly a year ago. at the time i was critical of the entire organization for the way non mls library workers who are also dues paying ala members are excluded from opportunities like el. as a first year ala member i was ready to cut the cord with ala. i am so thankful for the wonderful advice and coaching given to me by pete bromberg who suggested that rather than complain or protest ala policies that i actually get involved. so much has happened within a year. thanks to many, many people who supported the cause emerging leaders will be expanding the requirements for application this year to include those without an mls, those still in school, and even those between jobs. my point here in a round about way is if people have ideas to improve things within ala (or anywhere else) they need to speak up – like you are doing here kim. things cannot change if people are not willing to stand up and be part of making the change happen. i know from my own personal experience that everyone involved in el would be open to any constructive feedback about the program. i think that every program should strive to improve and i hope to see el continue to grow and expand and provide meaningful opportunities for people to get involved with ala. derik badman 2009–05–27 at 2:44 pm my memory fails me after all this time… was there ever an active attempt to get feedback from el members? i think i remember such, but… can anyone confirm/deny this? emily 2009–05–27 at 3:04 pm seems like a pretty new program–only three classes so far, including the current one? i would think a project like this would take a lot of work to get off the ground, and that failing in the first few go-rounds would be pretty much par for the course. then again, in order for failure to be productive, you have to be willing to acknowledge and learn and change from it. it’s disturbing to hear that feedback is neither sought nor much used. but in my experience, institutions move glacially if at all, so perhaps this is something that will change with time? my only cringer thing here is the idea that emerging leaders are all people chosen for emerging leaders. in order to participate at all you have to pay dues to ala and then pay to attend two conferences. that means only the rich kids can play, right? maria 2009–05–27 at 3:26 pm thanks for a thoughtful and interesting post. i am in the el class of 2009 and i can relate to many of the issues raised here. my team has been charged with developing a robust community for past and present els. you can read about our team charge here: http://wikis.ala.org/emergingleaders/index.php/project_v_(2009). our response to our group charge is to propose el interest group within the ala structure. one function of the interest group will be to provide a feedback loop between els and the program administrators. we also hope that the interest group will have some sort of role in project and liaison selection. we are hopeful that our proposed interest group will address some of the issues many els are reporting. i also want to note that our team was provided with results from a survey administered to els, and we carefully reviewed the survey feedback and considered it when thinking about how to approach our group’s project. maria 2009–05–27 at 3:28 pm sorry, try this for the link. team v, class of 2009. peter bromberg 2009–05–27 at 3:30 pm kim, thanks for all of your time and effort in putting this blog post together. i’d like to offer my comments as someone who has been involved with the planning and execution of the emerging leaders program. i’m speaking only for myself, not the el planning committee. first, the data you’ve generated and thoughts that you’ve expressed mirror the feedback that we’ve gotten from our surveys of the emerging leaders. (derik, i have 2008 survey data–i think there is 2007 data also, but i don’t have it, so i don’t know for sure.) i am in agreement with many of the points, and have advocated (and will continue to advocate and do what i can to see implemented) with these points in particular: 1) that the program would benefit from more online contact (i.e. webinars) between january and july. these webinars would give the el’s a chance to meet and network, and they could be organized around specific leadership topics, and led by noted library leaders. 2) that the projects are problematic, and this model needs to be rethought and refined to avoid, at all costs, busywork. if the projects can be designed to be useful to the el’s and ala, great. if not, they need to go… 3) that there is a disconnect between what the el’s expect and what the program provides. i think the program has tried to clarify the expectations each year. i think the program needs to not just clarify, but actually *shift* in the direction of meeting the needs/desires/expectations of the participants. if this happens, the payoff for ala will be tenfold. 4) that there needs to be more opportunity for el’s to connect with each other. to this end i proposed a project for one of this year’s groups to ” to create a robust community of emerging leaders graduates that facilitates ongoing contact, networking, learning, sharing, and development around issues of leadership in the association and in the broader profession”. this project was accepted and is being brought to life (http://wikis.ala.org/emergingleaders/index.php/project_v_(2009) and mentored by an emerging leader from 2007, michelle boule. file this next bit under, “not to make excuses, but…” the emerging leaders program is a huge undertaking, and it is run by a few people of good will who also have day jobs and (and i can’t stress this point enough) are up against the *very same challenges* that the emerging leader participants are up against in trying to run the program in an effective and efficient manner that meets the needs of the oh-so-many-stakeholders. it is, as most things are, an exercise in the art of the possible. i love ala. but let’s face it, it’s a big, slow-moving, sometimes not-very-responsive organization. those of us who work at planning, creating, and executing the program are often up against the same constraints that you are. so my question is, what can we do together to make this program work better? it’s an easy question to ask, it’s a harder question to answer. lori reed (in her comment) mentions that i called her up a year or so ago and in her words, “suggested that rather than complain or protest ala policies that i actually get involved”. my recollection of what i said is what i will now repeat to you kim, and any other emerging leaders who want to make a difference: what outcome would you like to see, and what specific, concrete steps can you take to move things in the right direction? what actions can you take, to make it more likely rather than less likely that the emerging leaders program will become what you want it to be–what it could be–what it should be? asking and answering those questions is the heart of strategic thinking and strategic action. it is the heart of leadership. i understand the frustration–believe me, i understand it. but the frustration has to be the beginning, not the end. the frustration is the tension, the creative energy, we feel when there is a gap between what we see and experience and what we know we could see and experience. so if you’re feeling that frustration, i ask you to please use it as a launching pad, and harness it to help make the emerging leaders program better. the survey and the blog post are a great start. but if it ends here–well, then wouldn’t that just be re-creating a similar situation to the “world café”, where your opinions were solicited but then you felt that nothing was *done* with them? well, you’ve generated some data here. now what are you going to do with it? my hope is that your blog post will generate enough attention and energy that it will lead to more of a creative partnership between you, other emerging leaders, and the emerging leaders committee, and will result in a more informed program that better meets the needs of former, current, and future participants. thanks again for taking the time to put this post together, and for (yes) your courage in candidly sharing your views. diane chen 2009–05–27 at 7:56 pm i appreciate reading your post and everyone’s comments. as a member of the exec board, i sometimes hear that an el group is working on a project and i know i’ve been pleased to anticipate the results. yet, i can’t say that i’ve seen the results of any projects. i’m not sure where all the projects go but your conversation here has raised my level of questioning and i’ll be finding out soon. i’ve been to the wikis and various project pages, but i don’t see the final projects. how are these coordinated? who in leadership is everyone referring? i would like to learn more. thanks for working so hard on the post. diane chen rebecca 2009–05–27 at 9:57 pm the 2009 els will be presenting posters about the projects they have been working on over the past year at ala in chicago. the poster session is open to the public: friday, july 10, 2009 3:00pm – 5:00pm mccormick place west – room w-185 camila alire 2009–05–28 at 7:46 am kim — i don’t know where to begin. maybe first with thanks for your post and for the work you did to get there. i don’t want to dissect what you wrote and respond accordingly because i don’t know enough about the el program to do so (either as a participant or as a planner). what i will do is respond to 2 thoughts that stuck in my mind during and after reading your post. (identifying the 2 thoughts doesn’t mean that other ideas/comments in your post were not important.) those 2 thoughts were “expectations” (a negative)and “networking (a positive).” i understand that there might be nothing more frustrating about something – a program, a process,etc. – than when it appears the “expectations” have not been met for whatever reasons. what i read was that some els felt that what they understood about the intent of the program (expectations)was not what they experienced (frustrations). i am hoping that your post will be read by folks involved in the planning of the el program (and thanks, peter b., for posting your comments). not being involved in the el program, i am only sharing my observations here solely based on your post and the comments. the other thought is networking. let’s not underestimate the importance of networking as a leadership skill. to do successful networking is to help one’s career. but with successful networking comes developing a strong/solid reputation (such as: the person contributes, follows through, does quality work, is reliable, brings integrity, works well with others, etc etc etc) i write this because reputation can either make or break a successful network. as i read your post, it appears to me that one of the most positive outcomes of the el program was the networking. i challenge el graduates to continue to build a strong network and not just with folks who think like you but also with folks who make you think. let me just end my post 1) with how excited i was when i first heard about the el program, and how envious i was that i didn’t have something like that early on in my ala “life;” and 2) with a comment you made early on that struck me — “…there is a significant gap between the inspiring, boundless encouragement given to els to reenvision ala and the reality of how change might actually happen within the organization. i am proud to have been an emerging leader and i hope that this post may be the start of some small movement to improve what is, at its heart, a truly impressive initiative.” good for you! kim, your survey (as you mentioned, not a random sample) is at least a start where we are dealing with more than anecdotal information. i wish you and the other els all the best and again, hope/encourage you all to work (however big or however small)with ala. brett bonfield 2009–05–28 at 9:43 am well, you’ve generated some data here. now what are you going to do with it? i’m uncomfortable with the idea that a well researched and presented critique, like kim’s, is accompanied by additional requirements. as pete wrote above, “what can we do together to make this program work better” is “an easy question to ask,” and it’s an appropriate response for the personally delivered suggestions emily ford described in her comment. it’s a shame that whoever listened to emily’s suggestions didn’t ask her to help implement them, and that emily was surprised and disappointed to learn, a year later, that her suggestions hadn’t resulted in the changes she believed she had inspired. kim’s situation is different. in researching and writing this article, kim’s done her part. sure, it would be very cool if kim’s willing to help further, and i suspect that she is, but when someone does what kim’s done here we need to be grateful, full stop. gratitude is hard. especially when we’re working our tails off for ala, mostly on our own time, and people tell us we should be doing more or doing things differently. working for ala isn’t easy: ala is huge and chaotic, it underfunds ambitious projects, it relies on volunteers, etc. this probably isn’t ala’s fault; it’s likely inevitable given the economics of librarianship. despite these limitations, i think there are things we can do, especially when we’re helping to represent ala: 1. we can focus on operating more transparently. if you have data, share as much of it as you possibly can. when it doubt, err on the side of sharing. 2. we can solicit and implement suggestions. when you start a new project, build a feedback mechanism into it. one of the many things ala can learn from code4lib is voting; code4lib participants vote on everything. 3. we can offer unqualified gratitude to anyone who provides us with well researched and presented critiques, even though it’s really, really hard. for inspiration, i like to think of a story by richard dawkins: i have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the zoology department at oxford when i was an undergraduate. for years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the golgi apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artifact, an illusion. every monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. one monday, the visitor was an american cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the golgi apparatus was real. at the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the american by the hand and said – with passion – ‘my dear fellow, i wish to thank you. i have been wrong these fifteen years.’ we clapped our hands red. derik badman 2009–05–28 at 10:11 am emily: i don’t think anyone else has addressed your comment so i guess will. my only cringer thing here is the idea that emerging leaders are all people chosen for emerging leaders. in order to participate at all you have to pay dues to ala and then pay to attend two conferences. that means only the rich kids can play, right? the idea is that “emerging leaders” are all people chosen for emerging leaders. i don’t think there’s any claim of exhausting the potential/emerging leaders out there. also, there were a number (large?) of els whose conference attendence was partially (wholely?) funded by different parts of ala. and i’d imagine many of the rest of us where also partially (wholely?) funded by our institutions. so, not necessarily all rich kids. i’d imagine/hope that the ala sponsoring groups looked at financial need as one criterion for who they funded. miranda rodriguez 2009–05–28 at 3:46 pm glad maria posted about team v’s project. i, too, am an el 09 (group g ). kim: thank you for such a well crafted post–hilary and i briefly discussed the need for one at midwinter. it resonated on. many. levels. miranda rodriguez 2009–05–28 at 3:49 pm glad maria posted about team v’s project. i, too, am in the el class of 2009 (group g). hilary and i briefly discussed the need for an honest, well crafted post at midwinter, thanks for making it happen! it resonated on. so. many. levels. ellie 2009–05–28 at 9:11 pm emily/derik – i remember my year we were told they were accepting 120 people, 60 would be sponsored (via a $1000 stipend from various specific subgroups) and 60 would not. i was lucky enough to receive one of the sponsorships (mine was from acrl’s cjcls). sponsored els were then assigned to the project of their sponsoring organization. you could make your case for sponsorship both in your application and separately to organizations you knew to be involved in sponsorships. my home library then supplemented that sponsorship to help defray more (but not all) of the costs. there were also some el’s whose home libraries covered some or all of their expenses and others who did have to pay for everything out of their own pocket. i don’t have a sense for how those percentages would break down. so i would say it’s not limited to the rich kids, but that you still very much have a point in that it probably does trend towards including more people who are willing to make the effort to obtain funding (either through sponsorships, their home institution, or their own pockets) to pay dues and attend 2 conferences yearly (not just their el year). since one of the stated goals is to get people more involved in ala at higher levels, it would make sense that they want to recruit potential leaders who can commit to the current 2 conference a year structure. however, i hope that they are reevaluating that structure, acknowledging what a financial burden that is to many of us (especially as libraries cut their travel budgets) and looking for more ways to allow for virtual participation. i was very pleased that both of the committees that i was appointed to after being an el still accepted me when my reply was that i would be willing to come to annual, but could not afford to also attend midwinter. ellie 2009–05–28 at 9:29 pm brett – thank you very much for that well said reply. and thank you kim for this wonderful article and the underlying research. hilary 2009–05–29 at 7:18 am kim – you have done an outstanding job of describing the emerging leaders program! your careful evaluation brings to light many issues that any library association should take to heart. you provided thoughtful suggestions for restructuring the program and you should be commended for your work. as you wrote and as the comments confirmed, just about the only positive outcome (in my experience of being in the 2009 class) was meeting other emerging leaders and talking to them about issues that transcend ala. this was what i expected the program to be about, and yet, these meaningful experiences happened outside of the program itself. the project that i was assigned was one that fell in the class of busywork that an undergrad/high school student could have done. it took not much longer than 40 hours to complete from start to finish and did not lend itself to group/team work. fwiw, the final report of the project is on the 2009 el wiki. it’s going to be up to the mentoring division to carry it forward, however, it is my impression that the division that proposed this project has already carried out and accomplished the goals it set forth prior to this project being taken on by our group. i fully support the suggestions that the el program should be smaller and more immersive (20-30 participants/year) with a focus on enabling els to engage in high-impact, strategic initiatives. there are many fellowship programs on which to model a successful program (the ncsu libraries fellows program being one). ala should ensure funding for all els and could be better positioned to do so by capping out the number of participants at 20-30. while i don’t doubt that the organizers are doing their best to juggle their own jobs, personal lives, and want to make the el program meaningful, it’s my impression that ala isn’t providing the support necessary to make the program significant for “growing the profession” and developing leadership skills. thus, the fallback position of the program attempting to be a matchmaker for ala committees and new-ish library professionals. it’s an easy way out for what appears on the surface to be an under-supported program. one of the most striking comments that was made at the january 2009 el session was from one of the speakers who introduced us to the program by sharing stories about ala’s massive bureaucracy and the tremendous difficulty in making things happen. she suggested that taking a break from ala was one of the strategies that worked for her. “there have been times when i couldn’t stand to come to these conferences.” it’s possible that some els will (and have) followed her advice already. emily ford 2009–05–29 at 6:42 pm re the money issue. the el program isn’t for “rich kids.” yes, there are inequities about it. i was not sponsored by a division to be an emerging leader the year i participated. in fact, i was unemployed when i was accepted into the program. attending both conferences without institutional support (i got a job before the first conference) i put myself into (further) credit card debt to go. all-in-all i think that this choice led me to be more disappointed in the program; after all, i did spend around $4000 in one year to attend conferences and be a part of the program. this choice gets at a great point kim made: our expectations of the program. i think my expectations were higher for the program because i had to shell out so much cash to be a part of it. so why did i make the choice? a few reasons. first, the job market for librarians in my town is pretty bad. it’s saturated by students graduating from distance cohorts hosted here. i wanted the edge to get a job. second, i though the program was going to be worthwhile. and it wasn’t $4000 worthwhile. hence, the emotional aspect. kim leeder 2009–05–30 at 2:36 pm what a flood of feedback! thanks, everyone, for your thoughtful and sincere responses to the post, and to the many who emailed me as well. it’s clear that a lot of people have a lot of investment in emerging leaders. i think that’s an important place to start as it’s the common ground we all share, no matter what our role in the program. the fact that we feel so strongly about el is a sign that we want the program to succeed. i am starting to wonder if the root issue may be, at least in part, a basic gap in communication between those involved in el at different levels. as emily points out in her comment, the program is brand new, and we should all be willing to endure some growing pains. of course, if those who plan and execute the program are aware of the pains, shouldn’t the program be improving and evolving each year? and if there is an effort to improve the program, shouldn’t past els be involved, or at least informed? we might even be able to help. perhaps there is also the generation gap factor, as jessamyn referred to above in describing her experience on council. do we need to put our time in before we can have a voice? i don’t think it needs to be that way, and nor do many of the established ala’ers i know. still, i think we all know those in in ala who are comfortable with the status quo. change can’t happen overnight, granted, but many of us — like lori reed — are starting to make a difference. an el interest group, suggested above by maria, could help, and i hope it will be closely integrated with the activities of those who plan the el program each year. otherwise it runs the risk of becoming just another silo of exciting but unproductive activity. so we have opened the door to positive change in emerging leaders, and now we must see it through! i want to thank those from the planning side of el who have responded in the comments above and emailed me. apparently the planning task force will meet in an open meeting at annual on sunday at 1:30pm (i am told it will be at mccormick place, room w175a). i, for one, am planning to be there, and i hope other past els who are able to be in chicago will be there too. your continued comments on this post are welcome. this is a discussion that is going somewhere, i think… laura zeigen 2009–06–01 at 11:14 am interesting post. i appreciate that you surveyed your fellow el participants to obtain a broader perspective. although i have not participated in the el program, i think you hit on a core issue that affects more than just ala when you said “…there is a significant gap between the inspiring, boundless encouragement given…to re-envision…and the reality of how change might actually happen within the organization.” i liked your suggestion to have ala focus more on general leadership skills, etc., if they really didn’t want feedback. perhaps the larger library community could consider this concept as well. it is very frustrating to have energy and ideas and continually have them not be put to any fruitful use. eventually the ideas and energy (or at least the desire to contribute them) will cease, which technically is the opposite of what ala (or libraries in general) say that they want. i find the tension in this dynamic interesting, but frustrating. thanks for bringing light to it and for your thoughtful observations. carolyn wood 2009–06–01 at 12:46 pm kim has a new idea, kim shows initiative, kim conducts research, kim reports findings, kim shares her information with others. kim is getting buried under the weight of this thread. laura z. make a good observation i am interested to learn more about the perceived tension in the dynamic. gina 2009–06–02 at 2:28 pm i, too, would like to respond specifically to the following statement, “…i believe that there is a significant gap between the inspiring, boundless encouragement given to els to reenvision ala and the reality of how change might actually happen within the organization.” it’s really something i picked up on throughout the article, but i think this statement really captures my own frustrations. it’s not specific to the emerging leaders program, but rather a frustration i feel as a newer member of ala council. there is such energy and passion for wanting to assist in positive change for the organization, but it often feels like we encounter roadblock after roadblock in the journey to do so. it is right to encourage patience, but the suggestion wears thin after a time and the cry for patience starts to feel like an excuse to resist moving ahead. i don’t know what creates it as there are times i see a real desire to move the organization forward, but alongside that desire are some very piercing cries against the movement. i find it difficult and painful to keep my energy positive in that kind of environment, and i worry that, as a result, newer leaders in ala will burn out far quicker than ala is used to. i passed a link along elsewhere urging those interested in ala’s future and leadership to read this article. while the topic at hand here is the el program, i think it speaks to a much larger issue facing ala these days. thanks, kim, for writing this and inspiring such thoughtful conversation for us all. comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct how do you say no? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 16 dec emily ford /24 comments how do you say no? image from the national archives and records administration archival research catalog by emily ford have you ever found yourself thinking: “i know i said yes to this, but now i wish i’d said no. that’s what i wanted to say in the first place”? chances are you said yes because you were afraid to say no or you didn’t know how, or you don’t like saying no. if you were afraid to say no maybe you felt that you would be looked on as being difficult to work with, or that you would receive a poor job performance review. maybe you feel that if you say no now, you won’t be asked again. maybe you even feel guilty because if you can’t do a project then your co-worker will have to do it; or the project doesn’t get done at all. how do you say no? how can we frame “no” in a way that avoids negative consequences and enables us to be effective and healthy librarians? maintaining the right work/life balance can be tricky. for example, if your partner or child has an important event that conflicts with a meeting, what will you choose to attend? some people might go to their meeting or show up late to her child’s piano recital or her partner’s awards ceremony. i have heard the phrase “rotating neglect” to describe these kinds of conflicts within work and personal lives. essentially, we make choices to either neglect work or neglect ourselves and family. one of the ways we can counteract this is to begin by saying no to opportunities for service or projects that will upset the work/life balance we have. the ability to say no to taking on a new project at work or another committee appointment is directly related to mental wellness and a healthy work/life balance. many of us have a hard time saying no and can accumulate too much work and responsibility. the quandary remains that if you’re good at what you do you’ll be asked to take on projects and commitments. as a result the quality of our work and personal lives can suffer. in order to remain happy at work and in our personal lives, it is crucial that we find balance between them so that we feel mentally able to handle the tasks handed us at work, as well as the extracurricular activities in which we choose to engage. service on national or local committees can be demanding and time intensive; frequently on time that is your own, and not our employer’s. in order to maintain balance, we need to learn how to say no. say no when we cannot take on another commitment because our wellness is at stake. and that takes a tremendous amount of emotional intelligence, leadership, and let’s face it, guts. william ury’s the power of a positive no argues that a positive “no” is one that first affirms your values, then clearly says “no” to the current request, but ends with a possible yes to future positive work together. the construct ury uses for this positive no is: “yes! no. yes?” for example, if you’re saying no to a colleague who asked if you would switch your late night reference shift, chances are you are saying “yes!” to spending time with your family, keeping your tickets to the big game, or your valued personal time. following the “yes!” you must clearly communicate “no.” “no, john, i cannot take your shift.” the final “yes?” is a yes that is a proposition to an alternative to which you can both agree. an example of this might be, “i am spending tonight with my family. no, i cannot take your shift. maybe in the future i’ll be able to.” while my example certainly does not do ury’s book justice, it shows the construction of a positive no. a positive no is one that is intentional and thoughtful, and in the end, carries more meaning and demands more respect than a reactive “no” or a meek “yes.” sometimes we just say yes because we fear the consequences, but if we can frame our “nos” positively as ury suggests, we will find many of these fears ill-founded, and we will say no without feelings of guilt. saying no in this positive way will feel good. i recently remembered an act of self-advocacy displayed at a former job. when i was working as an elementary school library assistant, the principal asked if i would be interested in planning and hosting an after school book discussion group with students. my response is paraphrased as follows. “what a great idea. i think the kids could really benefit from something like this. i would not be able to do this on my free time. can we work it out so that i may work more hours and be paid to do this?” you can see that my response follows the positive no construction. first, i say “yes!” affirming that i think the kids at the school could benefit from the program and i would enjoy doing it. then i say “no” to doing the work as a volunteer. finally, i say “yes?” to working on the project provided i get financially compensated. the principal and i were able to come to agreement and i started an after school book club for 4th and 5th graders. “’there are moments when people have to say no…and that no needs to be said with the same sincerity, the same honesty, and in the same tone of voice that people say yes.”” luiz inacio lula da silva as quoted by ury, p. 132 just as the quote above indicates, “nos” and “yeses” that are communicated without thought will be ineffective. before you can effectively say no you have to know yourself. you have to know your values and strengths, and you have to know your professional and personal goals. you have to be a leader. how? discover your values first. try using elizabeth burnette’s outline that answers “how can you tap into your full leadership potential?” from a workshop she conducted at the ncsu libraries called personal leadership & balancing competing priorities. personal leadership & balancing competing priorities by elizabeth s. burnette how can you tap into your full leadership potential? 1. determine your values, personal vision, and leadership vision: identify your values, determine what’s incongruent between what you believe, what you say, and what you do, accommodate changes to your values over time – they do change, and address conflicts between values, career, and life. 2. understand your leadership ability. this is the sum of your skills, energy, time, and focus at a point in time. influence can impact your ability to lead well in the present. present roles can impact your ability to lead in future roles. 3. consider how leadership fits into your world: periodically assess your goals and aspirations, review your personal and professional agendas, and analyze past leadership roles for lessons learned. 4. strive for balance between leadership and the other parts of your life. balance is not about perfection. changing demands can create imbalances in your life. be fluid and look to minimize clashes between life and leadership. mary pergander discussed another technique last october in american libraries. take a mini-retreat to reflect on your priorities and values. (october 2008). make an outline and while on your retreat reflect on what is important to you. some examples from the field because i was so curious about this topic i decided to informally ask my colleagues and peers how they approach saying no. i e-mailed librarians who i know and posed the following questions: how do you decide to say “yes” to a project/committee appointment, etc when you are asked to take on a task? have you ever said “no” to taking on a project at work? if so, how did you decide to say no, and what were the key components of that decision? when you have said no at work, how have you communicated the “no”? have you ever felt that saying “no” at work has resulted in negative outcomes? please explain the nature of those outcomes (as you are comfortable). have you ever wanted to say no but didn’t feel that you were able due to its ramifications? if so, please explain the situation (as you are comfortable) and its outcomes. a total of 16 people responded. my favorite response is quoted below in its entirety. “i apologize for not replying sooner. these past few weeks have been very busy for me both at work and at home. i’ve given your request some thought and i am sorry to say that i cannot participate in your informal information gathering. i know that lots of other librarians will be happy to share their experiences with you, and i hope you will think of me the next time something like this comes up.” in addition to making my day, this is a thoughtful and well executed no. in the style of ury’s positive “no” it affirms the “yes!” that his time is precious. it clearly states that the answer is no, and it opens the “yes?” to working together in the future. perhaps the most telling result of asking for this feedback was that of the 16 respondents, two (12.5%) pointed to their mental health having been compromised as a result of having said yes, when they really should have said no. two people (12.5%) also point to having a career or job changed based on their decisions to say no. one said “no” to overwork and stress by deciding to change jobs. the other person’s no (to working on a new project) resulted in a poor performance review and later a hostile work environment when the person who originally asked for help became her boss! this eventually led to her finding a new job and in the long run, ended positively. another theme that appears in respondents’ answers is that saying yes or no depends on who is doing the asking. several people noted that they can’t say no to their boss or the library director. others noted that if the person who asks is someone they respect and admire they are more likely to say yes, noting that personal requests garner more attention. sometimes you just aren’t able to say no without jeopardizing your job or your performance review. what was surprising to me, although it shouldn’t be, is that several people mentioned difficulty with saying no in their first “librarian” job. “i learned through my experience at that first librarian job that you have to start saying no early on because once you’ve shown you can do the work, no one is going to take work away from you…when i came to my new job, i immediately started setting boundaries.” saying no can be political. for professionals who are in a position where they must attempt to get tenure, it can mean hindering their ability to either continue employment or attain tenure status. in these instances we are trapped in “not having a choice” to say no. it’s not a “yes” because you can’t resist the opportunity, but you fear the consequences of a “no.” in his book ury similarly discusses tough situations and advises you that you must always have a plan b. a plan b is not a compromise, rather it is a plan with which you feel comfortable and are able to execute if your “no” is not accepted. if your plan b is to find a new job or even quit your current one, you must be prepared to take that step. the final theme i noted is that there are major differences between saying no at work and saying no to joining another ala committee (or something similar). one of my colleagues said precisely because ala commitments are not part of her job expectations, she is very picky about what she does do. in order to say yes to an appointment she must feel passionately about that particular service or task. let’s talk praxis. how do you do it? “saying no is essential in life. every living cell has a membrane that allows certain needed nutrients to pass through and repels others. every living organism needs such boundaries to protect itself. to survive and thrive, every human being and every organization need to be able to say no to anything that threatens their safety, dignity, and integrity.” the power of a positive no p. 125 so what are some tactics that we can use to decide if we’re going to give a yes or no answer? the following are synthesized suggestions by respondents; and even some of their direct suggestions. review your workload with your supervisor and come upon mutual agreement to whether your answer will be a “yes” or “no” can be helpful both in the way you frame your response, but also in alleviating any political ramifications or consequences your “no” may cause. think about whether the project is of value to you, your job, or your patrons. also consider whether it’s a task about which you are passionate, something that will be a lot of fun to do, or add to your skills set. consider who is doing the asking. think about whether the person asking is asking for a favor or a personal request. always weigh whether or not you have the time. one respondent offered a calculation you could use to figure your time commitment at work. “…keeping a calculation of your standard work week responsibilities in time-consumption (i.e. weeding=2hours/per/week, desk time=15 hours/per/week, etc.) once you have that worked out, you’ll know if you can afford another x-amount of hours to dedicate to the project.” decide whether you think you will have something to contribute to the project/committee. weigh the consequences. if you are going to say “yes” to this project you might have to say “no” to something else. figure out which is more important to you. discuss the issue with your friends, partner and family. if your commitments will affect them you should consult them. chances are you will get some good advice. if saying no, always recommend someone else who might be good at that position or would have interest in serving. (share the love!) let’s face it, sometimes even after answering all of these questions we have to say no. but if we’ve thoughtfully examined our values and the situation at hand, chances are we can communicate our “no” positively, intentionally, and with respect. several respondents forwarded examples of how to say no. see the one quoted below (names have been changed to protect the innocent). hi sue, seeing that you have a nice group of interested people and feeling like i’ve jumped on a few too many projects for this spring, i’d like to respectfully bow out of the second life group. you’re welcome to keep me on the email list for input, but i’d rather not commit to regular meetings and additional training. thanks, sam it’s not just a positive “no,” it’s also an intentional and thoughtful “yes.” image from the national archives and records admin­is­tra­tion archival research catalog as i end this article i want to stress that while i have concentrated on the “no,” by learning to frame and understand our “nos,” we are also learning how to understand and frame our “yes.” we should approach situations, opportunities and the whole of our work with thoughtfulness and intent. thoughtful yeses and thoughtful nos will be more respected by your colleagues and carry more meaning. moreover, you will feel better in your work and personal life when you can strike the balance, and say your “nos” without fear and guilt, but with a positive affirmation of your values. if we can start balancing our work and personal lives and integrate positive “nos” when we need them, we’ll be healthier and happier librarians now it’s time to hear from readers. how do decide on your yes and on your no? how do you say it? have you had to say no to preserve your wellness? further reading goleman, d. (1995). emotional intelligence. new york: bantam books. hernon, p., & rossiter, n. (2006). emotional intelligence: which traits are most prized? college & research libraries, 67(3), 260-275. kreitz, p. (2009). leadership and emotional intelligence: a study of university library directors and their senior management teams. college & research libraries, 70(6), 531-554. macmillan, k. (2005). generating goodwill: turning no into yes. american libraries, 36(10), 48-49. pergander, m. (2008). retreat! retreat! american libraries, 39(9), 69. promis, p. (2008). are employers asking for the right competencies? a case for emotional intelligence. library administration & management, 22(1), 24-30. richter, l. (2006). emotional intelligence at work: an interview with daniel goleman.(1), 24-28. schachter, d. (2005). work and personal life balance. information outlook, 9(10), 10-11. schachter, d. (2009). developing and applying emotional intelligence. information outlook, 13(5), 49-50. ury, w. (2007). the power of a positive no: how to say no and still get to yes. new york: bantam books. thank yous a heartfelt thank you to elizabeth burnette and katherine o’clair for providing thoughtful feedback on this post. additional thanks to my colleague laura zeigen and lead pipers ellie collier, derik badman, brett bonfield, and hilary davis for their editorial comments. health, no, wellness, workplace wellness so you want to write about libraries? editorial: all i want for 2010 24 responses laura zeigen 2009–12–16 at 10:48 am “every living organism needs boundaries to protect itself”. we need to set up a collection develop policy for our time. no library in its right mind would say “yes” to every item offered for its collection, so it is a wonder that we think it’s ok for us to do this with ourselves. emily ford 2009–12–17 at 8:41 pm i love this, laura, a collection development policy for our workload! ellie 2009–12–19 at 10:01 pm me too! great concept. ann wilberton 2009–12–16 at 11:18 am hey, great post. when we spread ourselves too thin, nothing gets done well. i heard a talk given by a buddhist teacher a while back and she was talking about how people sometimes take care of everyone else and feel selfish if they take care of themselves. she re-framed it by reminding us of the safety procedures on airplanes. you are instructed to put your own air mask on first and then help your child or someone else who may need help. this image has stuck with me whenever i think about taking on something that might greatly impact my quality of life or the balance required to be healthy and happy. when i am at my best, when i am taking care of myself, this is when i do my best work and when i have the most patience for customers and a flexible and creative mind for brainstorming solutions. we can’t do our jobs well if we are out of balance. thanks for tackling this important topic. emily ford 2009–12–17 at 8:46 pm ann, what a lovely analogy you’ve shared! i think that this thought not only goes to taking on too much, but taking care of our bodies to be healthy. if we are unhealthy mentally because we work too hard, if our work stations are un-ergonomic, or if we simply aren’t feeling well and have a cold we should be aware that we can’t provide the best service to our patrons. we all need to support ourselves emotionally, and if that means not doing a project, so be it! if it means getting an ergonomic consult about our workstation, do it. and if it means that you call in sick because you have the sniffles, even though you might miss an important meeting, call in. ellie 2009–12–19 at 10:03 pm that airplane analogy is one of my favorites. thanks for the reminder. infomavensdesktop 2009–12–16 at 1:16 pm thanks for this wonderful post. as a librarian in her first librarian position, and without any kids, i find it hard to ever say no even though (between 3 part-time gigs) i work between fifty and sixty hours a week. this makes me feel better about the few times i have had to say no. emily ford 2009–12–17 at 8:49 pm i think you raise a really interesting point here. i also don’t have kids or a “traditional” family. i think sometimes people like us, who don’t have the traditional personal commitments might feel guilty about saying no or might have a harder time because we can’t say, “sorry, i have to get my child from the baby sitter.” the reality is, everyone, regardless of what shape their personal lives take, need to advocate for themselves by giving respectful, thoughtful, and intentional yeses and nos. kim leeder 2009–12–16 at 3:33 pm emily, thanks so much for this important post. finding a healthy life/work balance is so challenging, particularly to those of us new to walking that line. for me the most difficult part of saying no is that i just don’t want to! i’m excited and enthusiastic about so many different ideas and projects, and i really *want* to say yes to everything and help make it all successful. but as i’m now in year 3 of my first full-time librarian job, i’m seeing how that can circle around and bite us in the butt! instead of putting thoughtful energy into a few prioritized top projects, we end up putting distracted, incomplete attention into all of them. i think saying no sometimes is doing the other person a favor, as well as sparing ourselves. our energy and time are finite resources. it takes thoughtfulness and experience to learn how to prioritize and focus on those projects that have the most promise and/or interest us most. i wish all of us luck in navigating this complex issue! we can help each other, too, by being understanding when others say no to us. emily ford 2009–12–17 at 8:51 pm i think that’s the hardest part about saying no, kim. is having to say it when we really want to say yes! that’s my problem a lot of the times, that i want to do it all, and i need to realize that it’s just not humanly possible. anne 2009–12–16 at 4:01 pm fabulous and important post. and frankly, i would rather have someone say “no” to me right away than get halfway into a project and have them stop showing up for meetings because they just don’t have time! i’ve shared this with others and one response (from a teacher, not a librarian; this has some universal appeal) was: finally: an article that explains how to say “no” effectively, rather than asserting that one should say “no!” emily ford 2009–12–17 at 8:52 pm i agree, anne. it can be frustrating when people are so over-committed that they can’t be fully present for projects. however, i hope that we can help them out, as kim suggested, and be a little more understanding. peter bromberg 2009–12–16 at 4:25 pm i’d like to ditto what ann expressed: thank you for raising this issue and exploring it so thoroughly. i’d also like to thank ann for sharing the metaphor of putting on our own oxygen masks first. sometimes i also need to be reminded that if i want to be of service to others i need to take care of myself first. mary pergander 2009–12–17 at 7:17 am this is a terrific essay and i look forward to sharing it with friends. knowing and focusing on what i do want has always helped me say no to the maybes or the might bes. in practice it can be harder to execute, but worth it! that is how we make room for the priorities in our lives. emily ford 2009–12–17 at 8:54 pm thanks, mary! one of my personal goals for my upcoming holiday is to make a list of personal goals. and i just might take your suggestion about the mini-retreat of a hike with a pad of paper. sanjeet mann 2009–12–17 at 8:51 pm emily, thanks for your thoughtful article. i really resonated with kim’s comment about the frustration that comes from getting a little done on a lot of projects, instead of accomplishing a lot on a few focused goals. it’s reassuring to know this is a common problem in our profession. perhaps as several of you have suggested, prioritizing, and then communicating to our colleagues why what we’ve chosen to push for is high priority, is part of the answer. emily ford 2009–12–17 at 8:58 pm hear hear! communication about our priorities seems to be key. also, i wonder if there are any time management classes or books out there that might be helpful to us, too…. maura smale 2009–12–19 at 9:32 pm excellent post, emily, and great timing too — it’s good food for thought as i take stock of this semester and prepare for next. i once read some advice that i’ve found helpful, though (of course) i can’t remember where i read it. the author suggested making a list of all of your time commitments and posting it near your desk. the list serves two purposes: 1) it reminds you of all of the projects you’re currently working on, and 2) it’s visible to anyone who comes to your office/cubicle, which can help remind colleagues that you may not have time to take on additional projects. i divide my list into columns for librarianship, service, and research, which is a nice visual reminder to strive for balance in my job as well as for work/life balance. emily ford 2009–12–30 at 6:43 pm thanks for sharing this, maura. i am going to start doing this. kevin 2009–12–22 at 9:05 am i say “yes” quite a bit at work, but i almost always proved the consequences of my “yes”, especially when the request is coming from a supervisor. “sure i’ll do that, but then i won’t be able to do this.” or – and this one is much tougher for my supervisors to deal with – “sure, i’ll do that, and what would you like for me to stop doing.” i guess i say “yes” to whatever is my supervisor’s latest crisis, but “no” to making my life frantic, or overworked. emily ford 2009–12–30 at 6:44 pm kevin, this is a great tactic. thanks for sharing. pingback : pligg.com pingback : wholestyle on the web: week of 12/18/2009 | bonne vie pingback : links and a latte 1.7 | northeast kansas library system this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct why isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 16 sep kristine alpi /12 comments why isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? in the library with the lead pipe is pleased to welcome another guest author, kristine alpi! kris is the director of the william rand kenan, jr. library of veterinary medicine at north carolina state university libraries. why do document delivery technologies limit information transfer? modified from the original — permission for the use of this derivative work has been requested from the publisher of histology and histopathology. by kristine alpi the technologies that libraries use for interlibrary loan and document delivery frequently reduce the value of the information available to be delivered.  in the past, color was used sparingly by publishers concerned with printing costs, and readers could assume that most images were not available in color unless dealing with visual arts publications.  although entire books have been written about the value of color as communication, color has always been a special request for interlibrary loan copies. now, color is much more common: in situations where color is crucial and in cases, such as graphs, where well-presented shades of gray could convey the message.  in 2001, the journal of histochemistry and cytochemistry began offering one full page of color figures per article at no cost to authors since the majority of their content required color images [1]. scholarly disciplines that need color to convey meaning are not having their needs met by interlibrary loan/document delivery (ill/dd).  growth in the frequency and quality of image reproduction in pathology, molecular biology, microsurgery, and other highly visual aspects of science has changed the amount of content for which color is absolutely essential to shared understanding.  the 275,000+ papers on the subject of gene expression covered by pubmed provide just one example. standards? neither color nor image quality is mentioned in the american library association interlibrary loan code for the united states (revised 2008, http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/resources/guidelines/interlibrary.cfm) nor the sample ala interlibrary loan request forms.  most standard library forms and processes assume that a readable black and white scan (b&w) is sufficient to meet user needs.  library staff in academic, public and special libraries, large and small,  have suggested to me that the images don’t matter because users just skip over the pictures or data in favor of the text; that doesn’t fit with the browsing patterns of many users who go straight for the data tables or images.  i would argue that the reason readers might undervalue images in their interlibrary loan articles is because the image quality has typically not been able to convey the message from the original publication.  warner (2004) compared the quality of print original journals, custom supply photocopies from the canada institute for scientific and technical information (cisti), and the online and printed quality of ariel transmitted files and found the arieled copies lacking [2].  ariel has gone through several upgrades since his 2003 exercise, but it is not clear how many libraries have upgraded their ariel software or how the upgrades of the ariel technology centered around tiff file transmission have attempted to take advantage of global improvements in non-library imaging devices and software.  the corporate website (http://corporate.infotrieve.com/ariel) positively comparing its transmission to fax quality suggests a need to aim higher. why aren’t we pushing the envelope to provide a more accurate and usable facsimile of the original article? if pushing our ill/dd partners to scan in color or grayscale isn’t feasible, purchasing the original article is a viable option from some publishers.  image and data technologies have made tremendous advances, but if you ask document delivery staff why color is not more widely supplied, the answer will almost always come back to the technology as a limitation. file size challenges, difficulty with email attachments and file transfer software, old versions of scanning software, or the scanners themselves are cited as the barriers.  lack of color printing in the borrowing library was often a concern back when all articles were printed and mailed or faxed. now, the borrowing library does not need to offer color printing of the final document received in order for the acquisition of a document in color to be useful.  if the item is to be delivered electronically, the user can view it in color or may have affordable access to color printing at home or elsewhere.  also, a black and white printout of a color scan will have more contrast and distinction than printing a b&w scanned document. even when the color technologies are available, our ill/dd requesting systems do not facilitate color requests. the requesting library staff may not have time to consider whether the material carries content in color based on the citation, but requesters probably have some idea after reading the abstract. users could use the notes field to make this request, as many have, but asking the question about color up front could save the time of the user and library staff and allow the color request to be made in an automated fashion.    it would be better to ask for and use this information on the initial request, than to acquire a b&w copy and then hear from the requester that what was received is unsatisfactory.  one of our anatomic pathology trainees is learning the hard way to request color or grayscale after having to wait on replacement color copies for several poor quality b/w documents received via ariel. automating the ordering of color increases its usage. the national library of medicine’s docline interlibrary loan request system added color copy requesting in december 2003 due to user demands for biomedical literature which features images that need to be seen in color for the reader to fully understand the message.   the number of color requests has grown as a percentage of the overall docline requests from .02% of the overall requests in fy2004 to .14% of the 1.5+ million total requests in fy2009. while 2,217 color requests may seem paltry, this data reflects only requests for which library staff indicate a color request using the system select box, not those that use the comments field.  because so few lending libraries indicate that they provide color copies, some borrowers will not select the color request checkbox, but will add a comment to the lender indicating they prefer color if available and at no extra charge. in these cases, getting the article content is more important than getting that article in color. docline is primarily a tool of biomedical libraries.  what about academic basic scientists and clinicians using public libraries who rely on oclc resource sharing? do these users realize that color is a choice either when ordering direct via worldcat or using library forms?  how are we limiting the range of possibilities and why?  is it accidental or intentional?  right now, a borrowing library asking for a color copy in oclc must entertain several possible steps of additional effort—you can pre-identify lenders that provide color and route requests to them or you can make it a note for the lending library staff to receive and respond—where the resulting conditionals can add time to the request.  some libraries warn users that color copies can take longer: color copies are available through minitex for articles with color charts and graphs. if you need a color copy please make a note of that in the “comment” field when sending your request. color copy can take up to two days longer to obtain.  http://www.morris.umn.edu/library/ill.php asking for color shouldn’t have to slow down the process, but it does when the request forms and shared systems don’t match the right user need with sufficiently detailed information about the lending libraries.   warning users creates more realistic expectations, but it can also dissuade users from requesting color if they need the article in a timely fashion.  in a system like docline where color capacity and requesting is automated, the turnaround times for color are frequently the same as b/w. users may also be hesitant if they aren’t sure whether an article is actually in color, especially if there are color-associated charges.  if not able to fill in color, should the lending library share the information about the pages in color with the requesting library as a conditional response so that the library or user can make a fully informed request? what about document delivery? how do libraries providing document delivery handle images for their own clients?  cisti offers custom supply service to meet the needs of researchers who require high-quality color or grayscale images. in warner’s report, these documents were supplied as high-quality photocopies—there is no information about this service on the cisti website that i can find. the british library articles direct request form does not ask about color—the requester will need to complete either the “additional details” or “specify special requirements.”  a naive user might assume that color articles come in color and that articles with images will be scanned with the best available photo imaging technology and never realize whether the original article was in color or not.  the linda hall library addresses this issue in their email delivery frequently asked questions: although the typical file size delivered will be less than 2mb, grayscale and color images will create files of a far greater size. linda hall library will not scan in color for electronic delivery unless specifically requested to do so. please do not request color scanning for electronic delivery unless your email is able to accept files of at least 10mb. asking for color isn’t all rosy. the fill rate for color requests is lower.  per the institution records in docline, only 243 libraries report providing color copies with 32 of those libraries charging extra for those color copies.  for example, the national library of medicine charges $2.00 more per item in color and the linda hall library charges an additional $1.00 per page for color copies.  what would our users say about the value of color or grayscale images if we asked—would they pay differential rates?  why should they?  why do libraries charge more for color when it is now mostly scanning? it could be that they only have one color price option in the software and still need to deliver paper copies. it is true that a paper copy in color costs more in toner—though that difference in cost is decreasing.  but what is it in the case of scanning—is it a matter of staff time spent since it takes a few seconds longer with many scanners to acquire a page of images in color or grayscale?  it may also reflect trying to spread out the cost of more expensive color scanning equipment.  while low volume flatbed scanners are inexpensive and offer b&w, color, and grayscale, there are significant price differences between color and b&w versions of the large overhead scanners used for tightly bound and duplex page scanning.  are libraries who pay for ill/dd trying to avoid the extra cost for color?  more likely it is just that they haven’t revisited these options as their technology and workload has changed. providing color can create the blues as well. at the william rand kenan, jr. library of veterinary medicine, we want to provide the most informative materials possible. we often scan color plates in color or detailed images in grayscale, but we run into all kinds of problems in delivering these large files to other libraries and directly to our users. our processing choices result in very different file sizes and image quality, though the readability of the text remains about the same.  below is a table showing the five possibilities available in the veterinary medicine library’s operation.  our example was a selection of three pages (613-5) from the paper “the notch pathway: hair graying and pigment cell homeostasis” in the journal histology and histopathology [3]. we accessed the article online in the original pdf, as well as scanning the print file in all the available options using ariel 4.1.1.99 with our two scanners—a black and white minolta ps 7000 overhead scanner and a color hp scanjet 8290.  we also looked at printing an online article to a tiff file using the microsoft document image writer which turns the color images to grayscale and pixelates the images, a loss of image data quality.  the image quality is still much better than all of the b&w scans, and this is our only option to securely deliver online-only content without printing and rescanning.  the opening image in this article shows a side-by-side comparison of an original image in the online pdf article with the output from b&w text scanning. the results of our scanning experiment with 3 pages of an article with many images. the size limit for an email attachment at north carolina state university is 15 mb including the encoding, which increases the file size by about 30%.  this is a fairly typical limit with many organizations being restricted to even smaller attachments. it is clear from the email delivery addresses used by many interlibrary loan departments in docline that they have created free email accounts on external services in order to send and receive materials. the file attachment size limits of 25 megabytes per message for gmail.com and yahoo.com are more generous than university or hospital it policies.  other strategies that have been espoused on discussion lists are using the free levels of services such as yousendit™ (http://www.yousendit.com/).   in order to deliver to non-ariel libraries and individuals with these email limitations, we have posted their scanned documents online and emailed them the url for download.  in some cases however, people still have trouble opening, viewing, downloading, and printing the files from their computers, and it is very difficult to help troubleshoot these issues remotely during the very busy workflow of the interlibrary services function.  other ill departments have reported that they cannot receive and therefore disseminate color documents electronically via their version of ariel software because it is attached to a b&w scanner which is not something the lending library can tell from the sending end. odyssey software has been reported to work with black and white, grayscale, color, or any combination of these scanned formats, albeit slowly. perhaps its widespread dissemination will address some of these file size transmission issues as more libraries have delivery software.  it is clear from the ill/dd community discussion list questions that a great deal more improvements to speed and functionality are needed in all of these products. breaking the color barrier library procedures and technology really shouldn’t be a barrier to sharing color information.  all partners in the borrowing and lending chain have a role in providing the highest quality information. ideally color scanning of color images at no additional charge would be the default practice. absent that sea change, borrowing libraries should get users thinking about whether color is needed and explicitly ask them on request forms whether color is preferred. lending libraries should indicate whether they provide color or grayscale scanning or copying services and any associated charges. lenders can also look out for materials where the typical scan doesn’t provide sufficient information and use the options in the technology at their disposal to optimize the images.  resource sharing systems should provide an automated way to match the user’s request for color materials with lending libraries’ capacities for filling requests in color.  resource sharing software should provide options to deliver better compressed versions of files that reduce the file size burdens for file transfer.  institutional information technology departments should be more flexible in allowing large file size attachments or providing easy-to-use, secure file transfer services.  lastly, funding agencies can work with libraries to help them obtain faster and more effective scanning technologies and software as prices and functionality improve. acknowledgements thanks to maria collins, national library of medicine, for providing data about color requesting in docline and to beth westcott of the national network of libraries of medicine, southeastern/atlantic region for discussing this article proposal with me.   discussions with james harper, librarian for interlibrary and document delivery services at north carolina state university, greatly affected this piece and broadened my point of view.  thanks to lead pipe reviewer derik badman for his comments and edits and to kimberly burke sweetman at new york university for her review and thoughtful questions.  lastly, the ill/dd staff at ncsu deserve recognition for the care they give to the images in each item they provide. references 1. baskin dg. free color pages. journal of histochemistry and cytochemistry. 2001; 49:551-2. 2. warner p. cisti source and journal use at memorial university of newfoundland. interlending and document supply. 2004;32(4):215-8. 3. schouwey k, beermann f. the notch pathway: hair graying and pigment cell homeostasis. histology and histopathology. 2008;23(5):609-19. ala, ariel, docline, document delivery, ftp, ill, ill/dd, interlibrary loan, interlibrary services, national library of medicine, odyssey, researchers, scanners, scanning, science, worldcat outreach is (un)dead. an inflection point for american public libraries 12 responses tracy gabridge 2009–09–16 at 7:52 am i’m so glad to see an article about this. i work at an academic research institution and have several faculty that lament about the poor quality of ill scanned copies. article delivery services are seriously behind the times and the service risks becoming irrelevant if we can’t provide high quality documents. kris alpi 2009–09–17 at 8:06 am thanks for the encouragement. i think we’ve worked really hard to improve ill/dd speed and now quality is the next frontier! lu harper 2009–09–17 at 7:54 am color images are also useful for the visual arts…art & art history, studio arts, museums… kris alpi 2009–09–17 at 8:05 am as someone with a history of art degree, i completely agree with you about the utility of color. art researchers that i have known tend to address their need for color when making requests. i assume that art libraries have high-quality color scanning technologies available for their users, but i am not sure whether that carries over into their ill/dd services. brian miller 2009–09–17 at 8:20 am do you have any best-practices you can share in regard to what scanner settings to use when providing color copies? do you recommend decreasing the dpi when using color to help limit file size? do you know what the maximum file size is for sending via ariel or odyssey and approximately how many color pages it takes before that maximum is reached? some practical advice based on your experiences would be great! kris alpi 2009–09–17 at 12:39 pm the ill/dd community is definitely home to the practical advice for dealing with the systems we have today. i hope this will launch a discussion about color that leads to best practices for today and the future. i don’t have an answer for your specific questions, but hopefully the ariel and odyssey developers are reading and can respond. experimenting with your scanning technology and version of the software, as well as incorporating other file reduction strategies can help you reach a happy medium on what is useful to users but distributable to the average library. we have seen that trying to reduce dpi to make color files smaller can make the text hard to read–be sure to take care for the text as well as the images. good luck! barbara fister 2009–09–19 at 10:50 am one issue is that some publishers we love to hate won’t let a library with an electronic subscription loan an article unless they print it out and then rescan it. degraded quality guaranteed, but more by order of the publisher than by the library. this is likely to be a growing point of friction as more and more journals are online only (but still incredibly expensive). open access week, here we come! kris alpi 2009–09–21 at 7:53 am publishers are certainly part of this equation. while many libraries have color scanning capacity, many do not have the ability to print in color and then re-scan. and as you say the time to do so and the quality are another barrier. this is where publishers need to offer reasonably priced and convenient direct article purchase models so that libraries will be able to purchase the original content for less than the transactional cost of an ill request. valinda carroll 2009–09–21 at 8:50 am even when requesting image-heavy art history articles, i still receive horrible black and white copies. i can see how color may be cost prohibitive, but decent grey scale images would work better than the illegible images in ill articles. i suspect that many of these older publications were digitized from microfilm copies. the microfilm has a pretty lousy tonal range, so the resultant image is virtually useless before it gets compressed even further by scanning and ariel. kris alpi 2009–09–28 at 9:55 am i’m a big fan of decent greyscale images, and in many cases those will do the trick at a more manageable filesize. greyscale options are available in ariel and odyssey and i’d like to see them used more often as a default as well. barbara fister 2009–09–26 at 11:09 am we’ve considered buying articles for individuals as opposed to ill but libraries like ours are having to budget tens of thousands of dollars to fund such programs (which benefit people one on one, can’t be used by anyone else) – we don’t have that kind of money. it also is an abandonment of the idea of fair use. i have very mixed feelings about the pay per view library, but since i have no money for it anyway, i don’t yet have to confront them head-on. kris alpi 2009–09–28 at 9:54 am the main reason i mention pay per use is that sometimes our users need the type of image quality and flexibility to manipulate that can only be provided by the original image. depending on their intended use of the image that requires that sort of quality, it might be more appropriate that they purchase the item directly from the publisher. all publishers with online content should be encouraged to have a reasonably pricing per per view option. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct who are you empowering? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 21 may hugh rundle /22 comments who are you empowering? “darth vader is watching you” photo by flickr user stefan (cc-by-nc-sa 2.0) in brief: as librarians we continue to grapple with our role in a world of digital information. the case has been made for an enthusiastic embrace of cutting edge technologies and the development of a ‘startup culture,’ and a role as ‘gap filler’ supporting faster take-up of new technologies. rather than blindly supporting a market-driven technology industry, librarians should ensure the privacy and autonomy of library users is protected. when considering how we can use technology, librarians must remember our core values, and our mission of empowering an informed and free citizenry. by hugh rundle at the vala 2014 conference joe murphy delivered the closing keynote address – library as future. in it, he stated that one of the important roles of libraries1 in the present and future is that of ‘gap filler.’ whilst he was careful to state that his suggestion was ‘somewhat amorphous’, ultimately murphy’s vision is of public libraries assisting our communities in using the technology created and marketed by silicon valley and its imitators. we are to pay attention to tech industry trends like the oculus rift, smart watches, and bitcoin, and act as a facilitator within our communities to assist the uptake of these technologies. murphy couldn’t be more wrong. murphy’s ‘gap filling’ proposal was pre-empted by david lankes in 2012, when he wrote: if libraries continue to be remedial organizations, focused solely on the problems and deficits of our communities the communities themselves will find libraries obsolete. the main problem with murphy’s vision of libraries as a ‘gap filler’ is the question of who determines where the gap lies, and who determines how it is to be filled. murphy, for example, noted approvingly that amazon had been part of the drive to allow mobile devices to be used in-flight during commercial air travel because it enabled ‘20 minutes extra consumption time.’ he went on to ask , “how come libraries don’t think like that?” the ‘gap’ here, is the inability to buy or consume more stuff, heroically now filled with a change in safety regulations. consideration of filling the gap in our ability to interact with the strangers with whom we are about to share a flight appears not to have been considered. ingrained misogyny,brutal factory conditions and disregard for the privacy of customers are tech industry standards. commercial academic journal publishers make obscene profits selling the fruits of their customers’ labor back to them. ‘gap filling’ by providing pathways for our communities to become lifelong customers of these companies is a depressing vision. are we to simply act as the agents of such entities like a library version of vichy france? the tension at the heart of libraries is that they require cooperative action to exist, but primarily their role and effect is to enhance personal autonomy. by enabling individuals to access information and ideas to which they would not otherwise have access in such abundance, libraries increase the options of each user. use of a library might provide better understanding of a health condition, improve the chances of completing a qualification, or simply broaden one’s understanding of what is possible in life. this is why roy tennant, writing in the digital shift in january, stated that “the mission of librarians is to empower.” if we are thinking about empowerment, however, we must also think about disempowerment and power itself. when librarians spend hard earned institutional dollars helping library members to sign up to facebook or gmail, who benefits the most? when a library director signs a contract with a vendor agreeing that any copyright infringements by patrons will allow the vendor to sue her library, is she empowering local citizens and taxpayers, or merely making it easier and more publicly acceptable for the record industry to punish infringements of its monopolies? statistician and data manager erin jonaitis got to the heart of the matter last july on twitter, when she noted: if knowledge is power, then a key part of professional ethics for info professionals should be: who are you empowering? a refusal to engage with these questions leads to vacuous concepts and strategic culs-de-sac. for example, the idea of books as content that can be simply transferred to any desired ‘container’ without consequences. in this vision, libraries are simply there to move the content to people and pay the copyright owner on their behalf. uncritical acceptance of this idea ignores two extremely important consequences of moving creative works from one format to another. first, the container determines what content is both possible and optimal to that format. second, the container determines how the content can be used. as joseph esposito puts it, “the problem with getting books out of their containers is that books are their containers.” it is the economics of printing and the psychology of book buyers that determines the page count of most novels and popular non-fiction books, rather than some amazing coincidence that all great stories are roughly the same length. paper books don’t need batteries, don’t use drm and can easily be lent, sold or donated. there is no technical reason an ebook can not be copied infinitely with perfect fidelity at a fraction of a cent per copy, but publishers sell a license to read rather than selling copies. these differences matter profoundly. thinking we could switch containers without affecting the way content is controlled caused the serials crisis and, more recently, the ebook crisis. in both cases, moving to a new format resulted in a new ownership model and a change in power dynamics away from librarians and their communities and towards publishers. on the other hand, the creation of the world wide web enabled open access publishing models, previously limited by the economics of hard copy distribution. so the question is not just what technologies are available, but what technologies align with our values and purpose as librarians. that is, what technologies allow us to empower our library members? a key consideration for librarians has always been how we provide access to information and cultural works. late stage capitalism is no time to give up this tradition. libraries need technology, but we must recognise that the values driving ‘startup culture’ and most technology companies are radically different from the values librarians have held and defended for decades. librarians value preservation, privacy, and sharing. startups and tech corporates value growth, extracting and profiting from personal data and, quite literally, selling out. the idea that technology will supplant the need for the traditional work and values of librarians, whilst not new, has certainly gained traction in the last decade. the motivation for such arguments varies, but the reasoning is based on a reality that needs to be acknowledged. librarians exist because they provide a solution to collective action problems. such a problem exists where the benefit of a particular collective action to everyone in the group is high, but the cost of attempting the action as an individual is also prohibitively high. the rational response to such problems is to pool resources and act as a group. the solving of collective action problems with regard to information pretty much defines us as librarians. amassing a large and diverse collection of information and cultural works in hardcopy is a very expensive and time consuming task. cooperative action in the form of a professionally managed library reduces the overall cost to the whole group. this is the idea that is now perceived as anachronistic, with the rise of the internet, the web, and digital storage. questions regarding copyright aside, the practical business of sharing and accessing information and two-dimensional cultural works at prices too cheap to meter is a solved problem. ironically, it was in the very same venue in which joe murphy spoke that, two years earlier, kathryn greenhill and constance wiebrands delivered a paper pointing out some of the consequences of attempting to ‘gap fill’ commercial digital content. greenhill and wiebrands’ research was restricted to ebooks and journal articles, but their insights are more broadly relevant. they pointed out that the value proposition of libraries as “providers of free and easy content to their communities” is challenged in the new paradigm of digital content. putting it bluntly, greenhill and wiebrands state that: a future challenge for libraries is to prove their worth as content providers in a world where, due to a requirement to work within outdated laws and content models, libraries provide content less conveniently than illegal sources. greenhill and wiebrands have essentially provided us with the conference paper equivalent of matthew inman’s famous oatmeal comic, i tried to watch game of thrones and this is what happened. a role as ‘gap filler’ puts libraries in the precarious position of being always second best. the death spiral will then kick in, as we become gradually less relevant to average community members’ lives and eventually merely a charity service for those with no other options. there is, however, a second collective action problem that is not so easily solved. librarians have also historically worked to facilitate co-operative action to achieve things that can’t be achieved through individual or market action alone. for example, the national library of australia collects political ephemera relating to every federal election. australians are asked to save election material they receive from candidates and parties, and post it reply-paid to the national library to add to their collection. such a collection would be virtually impossible to amass through a market mechanism, or even by a keen individual, and has no real market value. it is, however, an invaluable record of australia’s democratic history. this second role is increasingly important. it is not the things we do better but the things we do exclusively that matter. these are the things that often upset polite middle class sensibilities. public libraries, for example, are really the only public space that encourages people to loiter. vagrancy and ‘move on’ laws enable and encourage police officers to prevent citizens from simply hanging out in parks and streets if their presence makes more powerful people uncomfortable. department stores and casinos have many devices for encouraging people to stay longer, but if you are obviously not there to spend money you will quickly be shown the door. the mozilla foundation’s web literacy lead doug belshaw recently wrote about similar “private public spaces” online, stating, “almost every space in which we interact with other people online is a private public space.” belshaw is pointing out that the spaces we often think of as ‘public’ – social media platforms, free blogging hosts and online forums – are actually privately owned and controlled. whilst silicon valley boosters like to talk about disrupting old monopolies and empowering consumers, (and occasionally both at the same time) the control of seemingly public spaces by private corporations is highly problematic. when every action and communication is logged and tracked, every website visit is recorded, and every relationship added to the ‘social graph’, life online is in fact deeply disempowering. this pervasive sense of disempowerment within ‘private public spaces’ has created “the biggest lie on the internet.” we tell this lie every time we click or tap on the button that states, “i have read and agree to these terms of service.” overwhelmed by the complex legalese of these ‘agreements’, often from a jurisdiction other than our own, we simply click the ‘agree’ button and hope for the best. as professionals tasked with helping people to find and use information, librarians have a responsibility to provide tools, advice and usable information services in a way that protects and respects the privacy of those we serve. the american library association (ala) has a large number of statements and policies regarding privacy. they point out that, “lack of privacy and confidentiality chills users’ choices, thereby suppressing access to ideas” and “for libraries to flourish as centers for uninhibited access to information, librarians must stand behind their users’ right to privacy and freedom of inquiry.” the australian library and information association (alia) also has privacy guidelines. the detail in these statements and policies, however, is focused on how librarians deal with the private information held by our own organisations. software developer and technology writer jon udell recently wrote that 3d printing isn’t the digital literacy that libraries most need to teach, asking why librarians are not more interested in teaching digital skills like web coding, data management and publishing. udell is right, but even more important than understanding how to manipulate data is understanding how data is manipulating you. in a world of facebook, radiumone, and prism it is no longer enough for librarians to simply protect privacy of records we hold. now that most of the population are effectively cyborgs, libraries need to be pro-active about teaching patrons the consequences of using various tools and services. privacy and data security also need to be high on the list of considerations when deciding what resources we make available, and how. this is not a nice-to-have additional service; this is core business. there have been increasing cries for the education of citizens and library users on these matters. the ala has responded, and runs ‘choose privacy week’ in may each year. choose privacy week is a genuine attempt to “start a national conversation” about online privacy. it includes marketing and promotional material for librarians to help educate their patrons, as well as training and lectures for librarians. the ala is not alone in trying to educate citizens about privacy. projects like terms of service;didn’t read and actual facebook graph searches attempt to educate us either by simplifying legal documents or showing how easy it is to find compromising information from social networking profiles. organisations like the tor project, owncloud, freedombox and unhosted have gone further and are building tools that allow internet users to better protect and control their data. but is this enough? as the mozilla foundation’s doug belshaw points out in his blog post about ‘private public spaces’, simply informing people of the privacy and security problems of their chosen service and suggesting alternatives does not affect behaviour on a mass scale. education is a powerful force, but awareness of facts alone does not necessarily change behaviour. one only has to consider how many people have taken up or continued smoking tobacco, decades after its deadly effects became widely known and accepted. the limitation of choose privacy week is right there in the name. a relatively tech-savvy and financially comfortable person like me can understand and use more privacy-friendly options. i can pay for a webhost or personal server and install owncloud myself. i have time to check terms of service:didn’t read and understand (mostly) how an ‘unhosted’ app might work. but most people are not as fortunate as i. it is not because people are stupid or lazy that they do things that threaten their privacy. it is because realistic alternatives are limited and rely on the choices of others. if the only choice available to a hungry person is between chocolate cake or potato chips, providing information about the nutritional value of green leafy vegetables is not particularly helpful. likewise, educating library users about privacy and personal data protection is of no help to citizens reliant on libraries for web access when our own services use proprietary software, tracked and filtered internet, and third-party services with vague or dubious privacy policies. telling people to choose more wisely assumes that they have any choice at all. if librarians are serious about empowering citizens and protecting their privacy, we need to provide them not just with the motivation but also the means to protect their own privacy and empower. this will inevitably involve some uncomfortable discussions and controversial decisions. as librarians we must become more pro-active about citizen privacy and empowerment. this year, in a webinar presented by eric stroshane of north dakota state library, choose privacy week included tips on improving privacy on public pcs. this is where librarians need to focus more of our energies. there are many simple steps we can take in our own libraries to reset the defaults towards privacy and choice, some of which i list below. not all of the options i present here will be suitable for every library, and many require cooperation from it departments and senior managers, but they should all be at least considered. open source software for users a simple measure that improves privacy and security and saves money is to use open source software instead of proprietary software on public pcs. most libraries run the classic combination of microsoft windows with microsoft office, with the occasional apple mac. the vast majority of patrons in public libraries, however, use our pcs for web services or simple word processing. a pc running one of the many linux packages with libreoffice and firefox easily and simply provides for the same needs as the microsoft package. the advantage of open source from a security point of view is that it is much harder for governments or corporations to insert a secret ‘backdoor’ into open source software, and security flaws tend to be fixed faster, because the code is available to anyone who wants to look at it. online anonymity by default by far the easiest thing librarians can do to help protect our patrons’ online privacy is to configure our web browsers to ensure users are anonymous by default. browsers can easily be set to block third party cookies. plugins like flash can be disabled. the electronic frontiers foundation’s tool https everywhere can be installed. this does what it says on the tin – if there is a secure option for any given webpage, users will automatically be redirected. the invisible tracking of users as they visit sites can also be minimised by installing software like ghostery, which blocks tracking cookies and known tracking scripts. these measures, particularly https everywhere and ghostery, can mostly be taken without your patrons even being aware you have done it. a more protective measure would be the installation of tor browser on library pcs. the tor project has developed tor browser based on technology originally invented by the us navy. tor works by bouncing users through a series of relays across the internet, meaning their true location is masked from sites they visit, and their browsing is masked from someone tracking their ip address. the tor browser bundle implements all of the strategies above by default, as well as a number of other protective measures. tor is a powerful system, and is looking for partners to increase the user base and help improve the service. the cost of using tor, however, is that some functionality we have come to expect from websites is disabled. because it works by running users through a series of proxies tor browser also provides a significantly slower web experience than a standard browser. for these reasons, i would not make tor browser the only option for library users. clear and pro-active notices about what third-party applications and services can see the best option when utilising third party services like overdrive, freegal, and ebsco journal databases would be to ensure those services are designed in a way that they can’t track user behaviour. boycotting them until their privacy practices are ideal, however, is an option that most librarians and libraries simply do not have. what we can do is learn from terms of service;didn’t read and provide our own members with very clear information about the consequences of using these products and services. if your journal or ebook service tracks user actions over time, tell you members clearly with a splash page or information box at the point at which they sign in. librarians should not hide behind ‘click here for terms and conditions’ or weasel words like “may share some data”. you either do share specific data, or you do not. tell your members. all library user data in-house is your patron data safe and secure? do you share it with companies without any safeguards or confidentiality agreements? are you sure? if you use google analytics or another analytics service to track website visits, you are potentially sharing far more member data than you imagine. there are alternatives. piwik is a very useable alternative for tracking web visits, including search term usage. piwik is an open source program designed to be installed on your own server. this allows you to track your users without compromising their privacy by sharing all that data with google and friends. consider what else you are allowing to track your members. if you have a ‘like us on facebook’ button on your website, facebook can use it to track users across the web, even when they are logged out. every ‘hosted’ service to which you subscribe also needs to be scrutinised. they may well be as secure and privacy-friendly as using your own server rack, but that is not a given. library-hosted cloud for members speaking of cloud services, librarians in institutions with the means and know-how might consider providing your own hosting for patrons. universities often already do this, but public libraries do not. using a service like owncloud, public libraries could provide patrons with the convenience of a service like dropbox or google drive, without forcing them to compromise their privacy. as an added bonus, you will no longer have to store all those old usb thumb drives in lost property. encouraging funders to tie grants to the use of privacy and autonomy boosting technologies. governments, particularly when conservative parties are in control, have frequently achieved particular policy outcomes by tying grant money to certain conditions. the most obvious and relevant example is the children’s internet protection act. this act prevents libraries and schools from receiving discounts through the us federal government’s ‘e-rate’ program unless they install filtering software on all pcs available for use by children. it is, as amateur curmudgeon and ‘librarian extraordinaire’ andy woodworth recently noted, ‘a tax on poor library districts.’ moral panic is not the only end to which such strategies can be used, however. individual librarians, even managers and directors, may have trouble convincing organisational leaders to implement strategies that enhance member privacy and security. these strategies are potentially costly both financially and politically. individual librarians and our professional organisations can, however, speak with existing and potential donors and grant providers. perhaps they would consider tying their grants to enhanced privacy technologies and practices? and perhaps, one day, your local congresswoman or member of parliament will introduce the children’s internet freedom act. if we are to take the next steps towards real privacy and citizen empowerment, librarians must utilise the strategies articulated by digital humanist bethany nowviskie in her 2012 code4lib keynote on lazy consensus. nowviskie argues that when everyone has to agree in order for something to change, the system tends towards conservatism. decision making systems that assume the answer is ‘yes’ unless someone speaks up tend towards change. as nowviskie points out, if the default decision is ‘i agree’ then a majority must act in order to stop a decision (or business model, as the case may be). this cuts both ways. currently, too many of our systems and services default towards breaching our members’ privacy. as cass sunstein has shown with his work on ‘libertarian paternalism’, by simply changing the default, we can provide people with choice whilst ensuring that if they do not exercise that choice they will be protected from themselves. this sort of work is challenging, difficult and complex. i have not yet done all, or even most, of the things described above either in my workplace or even in my personal life. but librarians can not have it both ways. if we truly believe in empowering our members and protecting their privacy, we need to take real action to ensure this happens. the murphy strategy of ‘gap filling’ denies this responsibility. far from leading innovation and helping our societies to progress, we simply act as collaborators in whatever market forces direct, and miss out on what they obscure. understanding and using new information technologies is vital to our mission. no serious librarian questions that. information, after all, is power, and the mission of librarians is to empower. jonaitis reminds us that an important question sits behind this mission statement. when you dress for work each morning and look in the mirror, remember to ask yourself that important question. who are you empowering?   thanks to my lead pipe colleagues erin dorney, emily ford and gretchen kolderup for their invaluable edits, suggestions, encouragements and provocations. references and further reading references american library association. vision. chooseprivacyweek.org. american library association. privacy and confidentiality. ala.org. american library association, (2014). ebooks and copyright issues. state of america’s libraries 2014. american library association (2014). registration now open for choose privacy week 2014 webinar, ‘defense against the digital dark arts’. ala news, 22 april 2014. australian library and information association (2005). libraries and privacy guidelines. alia.org campbell, d (1999). how nsa access was built into windows. telepolis, 4 september 1999. esposito, j (2011). e-books and their containers: a bestiary of the evolving book. the scholarly kitchen. 18 january 2011. ferranti, m (2014). trust issue looms large for tech companies capitalizing on personal data. cmo, 6 march 2014. greenhill, k, & wiebrands, c (2012). no library required: the free and easy backwaters of online content sharing. vala 2012 proceedings. henry, a (2011). facebook is tracking your every move on the web; here’s how to stop it. lifehacker, 26 september 2011. houghton, j (2002). the crisis in scholarly communication: an economic analysis. vala 2002 proceedings. inman, m. (2013). i tried to watch game of thrones and this is what happened. the oatmeal. jonaitis, e (emjonaitis).  “if knowledge is power, then a key part of professional ethics for info professionals should be: who are you empowering?” 9 july 2013, 9:32 p.m. tweet. lankes, d (2012). beyond the bullet points: libraries are obsolete. virtual dave, real blog, 20 april 2012. lawrence, d (2014). the inside story of tor, the best internet anonymity tool the government ever built. bloomberg business week, 23 january 2014. lubman, s (2012). working conditions: the persistence of problems in china’s factories. wall street journal: china real time, 25 september 2012. manollu, a (2013). we are all cyborgs now. tedx vienna.at, 7 july 2013. marwick, a (2013). donglegate: why the tech community hates feminists. wired, 29 march 2013. mathiue, m (2013). unilever’s marc mathieu on empowering comsumers. campaign, 1 april 2013. morris, c (2012), top 10 disruptors empowering consumers. cnbc.com, 18 october 2012. morrison, h (2011). chapter two: scholarly communication in crisis. freedom for scholarship in the internet age. phd dissertation (in progress). murphy, j (2014). library as future. vala 2014 proceedings. nowviskie, b (2012). lazy consensus. bethany nowviskie (nowviskie.org), 10 march 2012. rundle, h (2012). a failure of imagination – the problem with format neutrality. hugh rundle: information flaneur (hughrundle.net). 28 may 2012. shulevitz, j (2013). don’t you dare say ‘disruptive’ : it’s the most pernicious cliche of our time. new republic, 15 august 2013. state library of victoria (2012). internet and pc usage in victorian public libraries: technical report. sunstein, c. r., & thaler, r. h. (2003). libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron. the university of chicago law review, 1159-1202. tennant, r (2014). the mission of librarians is to empower. the digital shift. 15 january 2014. udell, j (2014). 3d printing isn’t the digital literacy that libraries most need to teach. jon udell: strategies for internet citizens. 7 january 2014. woodworth, a (wawoodworth). “i never thought of the e-rate filtering requirement as a tax on poor library districts until today @efflive @oif @thelib #404day” 5 april 2014 6:52 a.m. tweet. wyatt, l (2013). wanted: your election material! national library of australia: behind the scenes. 21 august 2013. further reading terms of service:didn’t read – http://tosdr.org electronic frontiers foundation – https://www.eff.org electronic frontiers australia – https://www.efa.org.au lankes, d (2013). power and empowerment. beyond the bulletpoints. murphy was speaking particularly of public libraries [↩] conferences, future, information literacy, librarianship, open source, privacy, public libraries, social justice, technology, values how well are you doing your job? you don’t know. no one does. ice ice baby: are librarian stereotypes freezing us out of instruction? 22 responses bobbi newman 2014–05–21 at 5:28 pm great post! i agree with all of it but this bit – “when librarians spend hard earned institutional dollars helping library members to sign up to facebook or gmail, who benefits the most?” and that makes me nervous for two reasons, first the answer is – the patrons. these two services differ significantly from the others you list and you fail to acknowledge the important, sometimes life saving & changing roles they play (finding jobs, keeping in touch with family & friends, connecting with other human beings) second, it smacks of judgement gmail and facebook are valuable services for connecting with other people. there are many reasons people use them, and not just for playing candy crush saga. setting aside your personal feelings about the services, it is important to acknowledge that human connections are important and these two tools fill an important role in those connections. i do not think google or facebook are without problems, i’ve written about both many times, but neither are they without merit. throwing them out fliply reminds me of the days when libraries kicked people off the computers for using “fun” services to allow others to work on their resumes. please don’t make me dig out my presentations from 2008 to fight that old myth. hugh rundle 2014–05–21 at 6:06 pm you’re right, bobbi, i should have taken the time to parse that out a little more. my main concern here is the disconnect between the high level of concern and care generally taken by librarians around patron privacy when it comes to our own records, and what i see as an unwillingness to truly engage on privacy matters when it comes to third party services. it may well be that using gmail and facebook literally saves many people’s lives by helping them connect to supportive friends or find a job. that is undeniably true. it may also be that they are perfectly aware of the trade-off, and have worked out that they gain more than they lose. the question is – are there ways we can help our communities either to use these services in a safer way, or to discover other tools that are just as convenient and useful, but have less trade-offs? i see that as absolutely connected to our values and mission, but it still seems to be seen by many librarians as a sideshow or just too hard. on a personal note, whilst i made the decision to part ways with facebook over a year ago, i’m deep in the google and gmail fold. i’m just as guilty as anyone else. but i’d like to see less guilt in our profession, and more steely resolve. bobbi newman 2014–05–23 at 11:22 am thank you for the clarification hugh, it makes me feel better. like you, i’ve made some trade offs – i chose a kindle for my ereader, i have an iphone, i tried to move away from gmail but failed to find a viable alternative (for me). my (newer) larger concern after seeing this post shared all over twitter & tumblr is how librarians approach this task (and i am not saying they should not) but the communication skills of libraries and librarians often leaves something to be desired. we have terrible marketing skills. our messages often insult our would be users ( you’re not information literate, you’re not digitally literate) and now you know nothing about privacy. i don’t want libraries to be come a place for fear-mongering or judgement. the population makes trade off on privacy everyday – amazon, netflix, apple, google, etc, they don’t come to libraries for judgement and lecturing they come for help, and support, and entertainment, and connection. i hope any efforts to promote this agenda are well thought out and conscious of the effects it may have. stevenb 2014–05–22 at 3:56 pm not having heard joe murphy’s talk, i can only respond to the term concept of library as “gap filler” based on your interpretation as presented in this post. you attach a negative interpretation to his use of the phrase because it referred mostly to the library fulfilling a role as technology sherpa for the community – which to me sounds rather narrow. i just wanted to suggest that readers not attach a purely negative connotation to the phrase “gap filler”. if you look at the library as a grassroots leader within the community, filling a gap can mean identifying a need based on observation or ethnographic research – understanding what the community members want but which no one is providing – and then taking the initiative to fill that gap. i am looking at it more from an instructional design perspective where we first identify a problem, then assess it, then develop appropriate solutions based on community research. from that perspective, the library as “gap filler” seems to me to be a worthy cause for libraries to take on in their communities. for example, to use an academic case, we know that students are in need of alternatives to expensive textbooks. faculty and bookstores are not always motivated to respond to that need so a gap between what students want and what they have exists on many campuses. that’s an opportunity for the library to take a grassroots leadership role and offer open educational resource solutions to the community. for me, that’s the type of gap filling we need to offer to our communities – and it need not be purely technological. thanks for a thought provoking essay. hugh rundle 2014–05–22 at 6:44 pm thanks steven this may simply be a definitional disagreement. replacing the limitations of expensive textbooks is a great example of the sort of thing librarians should spend time thinking about and acting upon. i don’t see this as gap filling, however. if we think about what lankes was saying, the ‘gap filler’ approach to the textbook problem would be to find a way for students who can’t afford textbooks to gain access to them, either by buying a bulk set in hardcopy or subscribing to an expensive license to provide copies locked with drm. what you are suggesting is a much more sophisticated and ambitious approach, which is to question why textbooks have to be expensive, and then why students need textbooks at all. rather than filling a gap, i’d argue this is building a whole new solution by redefining the problem. that’s why i wrote in my article that it is important to note who defines the problem – commercial publishers are not going to define it in such a way that the solution causes them to go out of business, even if that might be the best thing for education. thanks for your thoughts! karl ericson 2014–05–22 at 5:44 pm extremely thought provoking piece. this has got my thinking about my own complicity in giving away my privacy rights to those only interested in using my data to track, sell, and analyze for questionable other reasons. that said, i think it’s a stretch to imagine this line of thinking taking root within the librarian ranks. don’t get me wrong, i’d love it to take root, receive support, and hopefully influence user behavior, but to what extent have the disempowered held on to any sense that they should have it any other way? hugh rundle 2014–05–22 at 6:51 pm without privacy there can be no freedom. if librarians don’t take action to protect their patrons’ privacy then we should stop calling it a profession. if people don’t understand that their autonomy and freedom has been taken away, that’s a whole bunch of work ahead of us, not a signal to give up. we don’t give up on poor illiterate kids just because they don’t have a sense that they should be able to read. pingback : ebooks a priority with the american library association sean h. 2014–05–23 at 9:08 am this was a very interesting post. as an elementary school librarian, i often think about the newest apps and how to get my students invested in technology. my goal is to have them be comfortable as digital learners but i must admit that i don’t always think about the “empowerment” issue. i teach students basic online privacy skills and how to be safe online but that is not the same thing as personal privacy and rights. there is a definite difference between privacy and online safety and these unfortunately get lumped together with elementary technology. this was a very thought provoking, brain exploding, piece. pingback : “food for thought”: my first keynote | agnostic, maybe pingback : what are you reading? may 27th edition ← dh+lib tim c 2014–05–27 at 5:29 pm thank you very much for this post. adding to your list of concerns around 3rd-party services, i would remind librarians that discovery services are potentially much more pernicious than any single database (e.g., ebsco). i am genuinely concerned that, by herding so much patron searching toward a hosted 3rd-party service, we are essentially abdicating our responsibility to guard the right of free people to read freely. this isn’t to say we should avoid discovery solutions outright. but having evaluated several and negotiated the selection of one discovery solution, i felt practically powerless to shape the terms on behalf of my patrons. the entire process by which libraries struggle to negotiate terms with e-content and technology vendors is a major part of this present dilemma. you rightly recognize an outright boycott is off the table. so what else you got? one advocate i see, perhaps even more effective than granting agencies, is a powerful standards body. yet i find it disappointing that niso’s open discovery initiative (odi) failed to identify the patron among the odi’s stakeholders (http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/document.php?document_id=8129). i appreciate niso and their work on behalf of libraries very much. but i argue that establishing baseline patron privacy standards warrants as much attention as ensuring relevancy ranking is fair and free of market manipulation. in this instance, who is niso empowering? also, recognizing that not all library patrons are [u.s.] students, i can’t fail to mention the work that senator markey is attempting as it concerns data collection and student privacy. library leaderships should be tracking these legislative efforts and developments very carefully while seeking some beneficial corollary. again, thank you. hugh rundle 2014–05–28 at 6:00 am i think you answered your own question there, tim :-) a unified position via a standards body is probably the only realistic solution. personally i think setting and enforcing those standards is the role of a professional body like ala or alia. as a sidenote, that is one of the reasons i think allowing institutional memberships of professional bodies, as alia does, is highly problematic. but if you set standards, you have to enforce those standards somehow. other than naming and shaming libraries that don’t meet the privacy standards, there are limited options on that front, and for obvious reasons it’s controversial. vendors ultimately will respect market pressure above any moral pressure re standards, so the trick is to set up some accreditation system for libraries that checks whether the products/systems they use meet the standards. pingback : the coolest thing i saw on the often sexist internet (this week) | storytime underground pingback : imprintedness: shifting from a service to partnership mindset the ubiquitous librarian the chronicle of higher education pingback : how your local library can help you resist the surveillance state | rinf: alternative news & alternative media | breaking independent news pingback : how your local library can help you resist the surveillance state waking times pingback : worried about online surveillance? your librarian can help | tales from the conspiratum pingback : how your local library can help you resist the surveillance state pingback : worried about online surveillance? your librarian can help prn.fm prn.fm pingback : why i feel like an open source failure | jennie rose halperin pingback : the answer to “who are you empowering?” better be “our patrons” | librarian by day this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct swings and roundabouts – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 12 nov hilary davis /9 comments swings and roundabouts flying high – image by flickr member dezz by hilary davis “if where our scientists are and how they work is fundamentally changing, doesn’t that fundamentally change how we support them?” (luce, 2008 – audio | slides) a major change to our profession is afoot. well, more than afoot – the “e-science” ship has sailed and has some major momentum behind it, but are we on board? if you’re one of the librarians still standing on the dock wondering what “e-science” is, you’re not alone. in simple terms, e-science is international, collaborative, technology-driven science that brings together data, research, and people around the world. the joint task force on library support for e-science describes it as an “interand multi-disciplinary” enterprise “with significant dependence on computation and computer science;” and as a data-intensive approach to scholarship that is focused on team-based research composed of scholars spread across the globe. some examples of team-based, cross-disciplinary research with people and computers connected within a “grid” of networks across the world: climateprediction.net which leverages the underused computer processor power of home computers to study climate change models; the southern california earthquake center which has over 600 collaborators from tokyo to woods hole, massachusetts working on ways to understand earthquake behavior in order to minimize the damages of earthquakes; and the biomedical informatics network which has pooled together biomedical researchers and computer scientists from sites spanning the uk and the us to share data and research insights to enhance diagnosis and treatment of diseases.  this is science that rises above place, institution, and even country, science that shatters the boundaries upon which our libraries are traditionally built. stepping back a bit to take in a wider view, an ever broader term, e-research, is defined as “the development of, and the support for, advanced information and computational technologies to enhance all phases of research processes” (luce, 2008). what this all comes down to is supporting research on the broadest scale, with added layers of depth that include high performance computing, both human and non-human consumers of information, and an utterly complex world of data types and data quantities. add in the diverse expectations of not only the scientists conducting the work, but also their funding sources, and their network of existing and potential colleagues, and you start to get the picture (see nature’s big data issue (september 3, 2008), for a nice sampling of where things are headed). while scholarly communication and open access were the big issues of library conferences a few years ago, expect to see e-science take its place in prominence. as a case in point, i recently attended the arl/cni fall forum on “reinventing science librarianship.” with e-science as the main spotlight, the conference speakers delved into themes surrounding data curation, transforming libraries to support the needs of researchers, support for virtual organizations, developing cyberinfrastructure, and training for librarians in the e-science landscape (see the proceedings for more details). the theme from this conference that i want to focus on in this post is what elements could be holding our profession back from being able to become major players in the e-science landscape and what elements are going to give us a leg-up in enabling us to become credible, respected participants in shaping the future of e-science/e-research.as a profession, we are at a point where the successes of what we have done traditionally act both as limitations and advantages to our ability to play a major role in e-science (aka, “what one loses on the swings one gains on the roundabouts”) – currently, the balance is weighted more heavily by our limitations.i’ll outline some of the limitations and counterbalance those with the aspects of our profession, that if they become more fully fleshed out, would shift the balance. to begin with, e-science is global while libraries (for the most part) are not globally-oriented. in the e-science landscape, our users are no longer identified by institution nor are they even necessarily human – our e-science users are also networks of computers. however, the home institutions of libraries are our comfort zones and we are bound to them in many ways, but most importantly, we need them to be fiscally afloat. how do we break free of the mentality that we can only support our institutional users when, in an e-science landscape, our users cross all kinds of institutional boundaries? even the licenses that we negotiate and sign reinforce the restrictive behaviors of libraries in terms of defining who and where our user communities are. the other major issue is that we are dealing with a very fast event horizon when it comes to e-science. as james mullins noted at the arl/cni fall forum, our profession has had over 100 years to develop best practices for managing, organizing, and curating print objects – books, journals, manuscripts, etc. but because of the rampant pace at which researchers are generating data that they need to share, re-use, and preserve “what took us 100 years to do for print, we now have to do in ten years for digital data” (mullins, 2008). while our profession’s goal for e-science does and will include traditional roles like collecting, storing, organizing, and making information useful, we need to be able to perform these roles with datasets that are diverse and multi-dimensional in the sense that data lends itself to constantly being built upon by students and scholars. we’re going to need to help researchers by connecting datasets with articles, scholars, computer programs, and networks that aren’t necessarily easily identified/pigeonholed into a particular discipline or a single geographic area. many disciplines are already embarking on their own collaborative research solutions (astrophysics, for example),but lack some of the standards and archival considerations that are distinctive of the library discipline; in essence, they are creating their own virtual research networks because libraries, for the most part, have not yet taken steps to meet these needs. despite this limitation of our profession to jump on board, many are ready to reconceptualize and reposition ours jobs to address the needs of e-science. because e-science is institution-agnostic, this re-envisioning of the librarian process must involve crossing institutional boundaries, but we are so closely tied to our institutional identities and support structures that this is going to be a major hurdle. we will need to look to unique partnerships so that we can hybridize our organizations with other organizations that will enable us to build expertise and support beyond our institutional boundaries. these kinds of partnerships would need to be positioned to enable the active development of technologies for sharing, managing and curating massive quantities of diverse datasets while growing a workforce of data savvy librarians and information scientists. partnerships like the data intensive cyber environments research group (dice) with a new arm at the university of north carolina at chapel hill and the san diego supercomputing center + university of california, san diego partnership are a few great examples of these kinds of partnerships for big scientific research agendas. what about not-so-big research? it has been noted that while “small science” (research not necessarily backed by lots of grant dollars) is most in need of an e-science solution, it is most overlooked in terms of funding and support. libraries at small schools without research grant support won’t be able to get resources to support e-science even if they’d like to. to this end, library and other academic consortia alongside professional organizations like the arl are likely going to have to take the lead to make any headway at all. as touched on in the following sections, some potential areas for progress include training for librarians, reconceptualizing the benchmarks for what make our libraries successful, and building relationships with publishers and grant funding agencies that focus on defining standards and best practices for data sharing, re-use and curation. the lack of e-science training opportunities for librarians has been brought to the fore as a major limitation. swan and brown (2008) offer many recommendations and reflections on “skilling up” for e-science. not only do mls/mlis programs need to develop courses in data curation, data management and data infrastructure, but libraries need staff who are skilled enough to be involved at every stage of data generation, collection, analysis, interpretation, synthesis, preservation, storage, and re-use. existing librarians will need to take part in practical, hands-on, career-long training for the whole data life cycle. exemplars include data curation courses such as those offered by the specialization in data curation and the summer institute in data curation at the university of illinois.these courses are sought after by both bench scientists as well as librarians.some have even postulated that the necessity of holding an mls/mlis degree is an antiquated notion in this new context.libraries who are already dabbling at the cutting edge are positioning themselves to get in on the act by creating jobs to support e-science that don’t require an mls/mlis.they are turning library services on their head and hiring people who can collaborate with scientists at the lab bench, in the grant proposal process and in the classroom. the ways in which we’ve defined our libraries based on our collections and services raise several questions that our institutions will need to come to terms with: what is unique about our research library content and services? think about things like the published and unpublished output of the researchers at your institution – how is the library showcasing that content to the global community? what percent of our budget resources support unique services? in our drive to be competitive, we find ourselves duplicating collections that are already available at flagship universities while neglecting the truly unique content on our campuses. libraries could begin to build collections using scholarship generated “‘at the source’—that is, collect, organize, and host data sets generated by researchers at their own institutions. in doing so, libraries have the potential to exert influence over the emerging data sets market rather than waiting for commercial vendors to harvest and package the data for later re-sale” (davis and vickery, 2007). some research communities are already taking the lead on connecting datasets to publications (something libraries have been partially successful at with institutional repositories) – examples include dryad (a database of evolutionary biology and ecology research articles and datasets) and the angiosperm phylogeny website (a compilation of all known research on the systematics of flowering plants). why aren’t libraries more fully involved in these efforts? there are increasing expectations for scientists to save their research data and document the research process. beyond being ethically responsible researchers, they are increasingly becoming responsible for complying with federal and institutional regulations, protecting their intellectual property rights, maintaining a record-keeping plan and an audit trail, and managing data files so they can be accessed into the future. funding sources are increasingly mandating that researchers make their data accessible (e.g., nih) and more and more publishers require deposit of datasets as a prerequisite for publication. these are very complex issues for anyone to deal with, but many of these are issues that libraries have deep knowledge about. within the e-science landscape, libraries are going to be expected to evolve to act “as a catalyst for an interdisciplinary community…the role of the library moves from manager of scholarly products to that of participant in the scholarly communication process” (lougee, 2002). we have expertise in intellectual property and copyright and we’ve got a healthy respect for openness (open data/open science) balanced with ownership issues that impact promotion and tenure.we have expertise in standards and in developing and applying metadata in ways that support the management and curation that drive future reuse and repurposing of digital content.educating researchers on these issues and even stepping in to help manage these issues is an important role for librarians to continue to build upon. information has dimension – it can exist in many different contexts and serve many different needs– as library professionals and lifelong students, we have an obligation to recognize and seize opportunities that enhance the dimensionalityof information and help information seekers tap into, evaluate and fully exploit this dimensional quality of scholarship.we’ve planted our profession at the nexus of many different disciplines and organizationally we have broad knowledge across all of those disciplines.by making our depth within those disciplines go a little deeper with proper training for librarians, by helping researchers make useful connections across disciplines, by educating and collaborating with researchers on how to cultivate their data in such a way that it can be shared, re-used and preserved over space and time, we can have significant impact in shaping the future of e-science/e-research. scientists are often hard to pin down and their research process is often hard to isolate into discrete, recognizable stages that librarians can develop relationships with and solutions for, but it’s our responsibility to become relevant within the process.if libraries can pull together, re-envision our roles, and build the sort of support networks required by the international collaborations inherent in e-science, the rewards will exceed all expectations. these opportunities for libraries to be key players in team-based, cross-disciplinary research are opportunities that our profession and the scientific enterprise cannot afford to miss. time to hear from you – a few question to spur your comments: 1. what does e-science mean to you? 2. what does an e-science librarian look like? 3. do you think our profession is ready to support researchers in an e-science landscape? further reading: e-science talking points for arl deans and directors data audit framework development project agenda for developing e-science in research libraries the institutional challenges of cyberinfrastructure and e-research much appreciation to kim and derik from itlwtlp for their invaluable editing skills, and to annette day, honora eskridge, and marcus helfrich for providing thoughtful feedback on drafts of this post. e-research, e-science, team-based science sticking it to instruction a useful amplification of records that are unavoidably needed anyway 9 responses nate 2008–11–12 at 10:56 am fascinating post. i’m trying to decide what the public library looks like in an e-science landscape, or would you say this is about academia? hilary davis 2008–11–12 at 12:31 pm hi nate – thanks for your question and for reading the post. my sense is that e-science seems more closely tied to academic libraries right now since that is where those researchers are situated (for the most part), but the tie-in to public libraries and school libraries is at the point where members of the wider community become participants in research (in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, etc.), see the return on investment of their tax dollars in scientific progress that impacts our daily lives, and enhancing educational opportunities. much of scientific research depends on federal grant dollars which are generated from taxpayers. the costs of generating the data that leads to progress are enormous, therefore finding ways to preserve that data and make it accessible to others to learn from and build upon becomes paramount. the public education system is one area that benefits from these kinds of data. hands-on learning with students and members of the community taking an active role in contributing to and adding to research (“citizen science”) is a great instance where taxpayers can see a return on their investment. a couple of examples of where citizen science has been used to advance research: galaxy zoo led by four major research universities is a project where citizens can help classify galaxies; and ebird which is a project initiated by cornell univ and the national audubon society where anyone can help study changes in how birds are distributed in north and central america. just search your favorite search engine for “citizen science” for other examples. jenny parsons 2008–11–12 at 12:35 pm @nate: it would practically have to be academic– or at least outside the realm of public libraries. public libraries by definition serve their communities and need to specialize themselves to those communities’ needs– most of which are not going to include high-level research projects. nate 2008–11–12 at 5:32 pm @jenny yep, i hear you. would be kind of neat if the public pcs could be used for some kind of distributed computing project at night while the public library is closed though… ellie 2008–11–13 at 12:31 pm @nate: i love that idea! nate 2008–11–14 at 11:47 am @ellie thanksprobably near impossible in big urban library systems but i bet quite doable in smaller libraries, right? @hilary citizen science… this is fascinating stuff. i just wrote a post connecting a friend at the exploratorium w/ some public librarians doing interesting programming. i wonder if citizen science programming might be a good way for the exploratorium to reach the 18-35 demographic. it sounds sensible to me… brett bonfield 2008–11–17 at 2:35 pm here’s a question i ask myself almost daily: “if we started from scratch, but knowing what we know and with the amount of funding and the same workers we already have, would libraries look anything like they do now?” the answer is obvious. personally, i think we would operate far more cooperatively. every item we catalog would be processed once and we would catalog significantly more material in house, especially serials and data sets. we would collect far more information and make it available with less limiting restrictions. the fact that we aren’t presently doing these things inhibits our ability to further e-science, which is a great example of why all libraries need to start asking tough questions. what’s clear from hilary’s article is that we’re trapped by our assumptions about institutional boundaries and money, and by our understanding of the requests we hear from those we serve. what people want is accurate information they can readily assimilate, and they’re willing to pay a premium for it, though they prefer to buying in bulk (currently through tax and tuition dollars). the thing is, they don’t care who provides their information, so long as they get it quickly and it’s sufficiently trustworthy. as for public libraries and e-science: of course we should support it. for one thing, it’s intrinsically interesting. as librarians we can help our neighbors find out about the studies that may affect their lives or could enrich their understanding of the world. public libraries could also serve as an ideal gateway for scientists to reach a large, valuable, and diverse group of volunteers. citizen science is a great example; i think positive deviance is another. certainly, there are multiple possibilities. but that’s a small part of a larger point. the distance between where we are and where we should be is huge. to cross that divide, to support contemporary uses for information, we’re going to have to be willing to change. camila alire 2008–11–18 at 6:58 pm hilary — enjoyed reading your article. as an academic library administrator, i always wanted us to make it easy for folks to use our resources — particularly “in their jammies” at 2:00a.m. or whenever they needed the material. e-resources were and still are in demand. but with that came the commitment that our librarians were adequately trained to work with those resources and to help folks use those resources. additionally, these e-resources are not cheap, but i maintain that they do allow us to be more effective and efficient in serving our users. e-science appears to be another excellent resource to help us serve those users and not just in academic libraries. nate 2008–12–04 at 3:48 pm just ran into a post on the nytimes bits blog that pointed me at the public data sets amazon now offers access to. http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/ thought it seemed relevant to this article. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct what happens in the library… – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 8 oct brett bonfield /4 comments what happens in the library… “scenes from the moma: sometaithurts” photo by flickr user larimdame (cc by-nc 2.0) by brett bonfield in 1968, robert venturi and denise scott brown, a couple of newlywed architects, had the humility to laugh with las vegas rather than at it. a few years earlier, tom wolfe had written, las vegas has become, just as bugsy siegel dreamed, the american monte carlo-without any of the inevitable upper-class baggage of the casinos… at monte carlo there are still wrong forks, deficient accents, poor tailoring, gauche displays, nouveau richeness, cultural aridity-concepts unknown in las vegas. for the grand debut of monte carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect charles garnier designed an opera house for the place du casino; and sarah bernhardt read a symbolic poem. for the debut of las vegas as a resort in 1946 bugsy siegel hired abbot and costello, and there, in a way, you have it all. for wolfe, this was neither a good nor a bad thing, but many architects found las vegas and what it represented (such as route 66’s commercial strips and the emergence of suburban levittowns) less than inspiring. venturi and scott brown thought architects should “suspend judgment on it in order to learn and, by learning, to make subsequent judgment more sensitive.” though relatively young—venturi was 43, scott brown, 37—they were established and confident. influenced as much by pop artists as by rome’s piazzas, they believed las vegas could help their peers “learn a new receptivity to the tastes and values of other people and a new modesty.” for them, the charm of las vegas was inextricable from its neon-steepled wedding chapels (“credit cards accepted”) and reproductions of venus and david with “slight anatomical exaggerations;” they described the exaggeratedly phallic sign at the dunes as “an erection 22 stories high that pulsates at night,” yet still declared it “more chaste” than the sign for the aladdin. they saw in las vegas an architecture that acknowledged americans’ desire for pleasure and catered to their taste. venturi and scott brown first published their thoughts on las vegas in the march 1968 issue of architectural forum. a few months later they turned their article into a graduate studio course at yale: for the fall semester, thirteen students and three instructors—venturi, scott brown, and their partner, steven izenour—“spent three weeks in the library, four days in los angeles, and ten days in las vegas,” followed by ten weeks back in new haven. in 1972, venturi, scott brown, and izenour documented their article and course, and detailed their philosophy of pop-influenced architecture, in learning from las vegas, “a collage of passages, short essays, maps and diagrams… meant to evoke the lived experience of the strip (and) challenge traditional two-dimensional modes of representation.” the book included frames from a movie, tourist brochures, and their students’ studio notes. like learning from las vegas, sophie brookover and elizabeth burns’s pop goes the library is part textbook and part manifesto. instead of growing out of an article and a studio, it grew out of a blog, also called pop goes the library, that brookover founded in 2004 and has since expanded to include eight regular contributors, including her co-author, burns. in place of studio notes, pop goes the library has survey responses from librarians—they call these “voices from the field”—that read very much like comments on a blog post. and, as venturi, scott brown, and izenour did in learning from las vegas, brookover and burns in pop goes the library argue that understanding, anticipating, and accommodating popular taste is a professional responsibility: you don’t have to like pop culture to embrace its importance in your library. you read that right: you can be uninterested in pop culture, or even harbor a bit of antipathy toward at least some aspects of it, and still put it to use in your library’s collections, services, and programming. so take a deep breath—if you don’t watch american idol, have no interest in anime, or think most top 40 music is unlistenable—it’s okay. obviously, we encourage you to enjoy a varied media diet and to experiment with your listening, viewing, and reading habits—after all, having access to your library’s holdings is one of the small luxuries of working there, right? but we recognize that not every pop culture trend is going to float everyone’s boat. that’s reality, and it’s perfectly fine. what’s not fine is dismissing pop culture as something that’s of interest only to teens (or any other demographic group) to rationalize its perceived unimportance. brookover, the library media specialist at eastern regional high school in voorhees, new jersey, and burns, the head of youth services for the new jersey state library for the blind and handicapped, have written a book “about identifying and harvesting the power of your community’s pop culture… about your library, your community, and how to build better and stronger relationships between the two using pop culture,” which they define as “whatever people in your community are talking, thinking, and reading about”—an intentionally broad definition. anything and everything can be pop; readers are taught how to identify what pops in their community, as well as how to make it as accessible as possible for their neighbors. the book is itself as accessible as possible. where learning from las vegas is occasionally tongue—in-cheek-like warhol’s soup cans it is a high art appreciation of low art—pop goes the library is written like the well crafted blog entries that brookover and burns and their blogging collaborators produce, in general, a few times each week. imagine an articulate, pragmatic how to article in a glossy magazine or a great email from a friend, useful yet chatty, full of rhetorical questions and exclamation points. for instance, here’s a typical passage, taken from its chapter on advocacy, marketing, public relations, and outreach: “since outreach is about going where you patrons are, don’t forget the patron at home. we don’t mean instituting door-to-door outreach projects! just don’t forget the person sitting in front of his or her computer. knowing that your website reaches a sizeable portion of your audience, why not view it as an outreach opportunity?” there is a message, and that message is important, but brookover and burns have decided not to dress that message up in theory or historical context. instead, they focus on combining practical advice with serious fun: melanie griffith’s character in working girl provides an example of applied research; angelina jolie’s transformation from wild child into latter day mia farrow illustrates good public relations; and johnny cash, david bowie, martinis, and ipods are listed as celebrities and trends that are cool (kenny chesney, kc & the sunshine band, cosmopolitans, and zunes are not cool). if you’re not interested in pop culture, it may be tempting to dismiss the importance of this book’s message or to overlook its ambitiousness. that would be a mistake: brookover and burns cover most of the important lessons on librarianship that can be taught in a book: creating a niche; building a collection; using technology; and developing crowd-pleasing programming, among others. as an added bonus, their writing style is as much fun to read as michael buckland, s.r. ranganathan, jesse shera, or elaine svenonius. (speaking of pop culture: does anyone know if elaine is related to ian?) like learning from las vegas, pop goes the library is meant as an example of the ideas it is promoting. in addition to its pop-inflected, chatty tone and “voices from the field,” it includes interviews and guest essays as sidebars, an extensive list of links and other resources, a calendar of events for pop-related programming, and it features a companion wiki. some of this works marvelously—think martha stewart meets jesse shera—and some of it seems less effective. as with learning from las vegas, there may be a need to publish a revised edition before this book reaches its full potential. the first edition of learning from las vegas was expensive, included pieces that were not central to its thesis, and suffered from some design flaws. it still deserved the attention it got, and would likely have remained influential had its authors not released a smaller, more tightly edited, and less expensive revised edition, but it’s likely the work they put into their revisions helped their book remain a generalist classic. if brookover and burns decide to produce a revised edition, they might consider: making the sidebars into traditional sidebars, with text adjacent to the narrative. right now, the text is periodically interrupted, a guest writer takes over for a couple of pages, and then the narrative resumes. because adjacent sidebars are tough to include in a small paperback, it may have made more sense to include these pieces at the end of chapters or in the appendix. another option: go larger. edward tufte’s beautifully designed and manufactured, full color, hard back books on information design have about the same retail price as pop goes the library. it would be fun to see what brookover and burns would do with added space and color, and with better print quality; deleting anonymous responses from “voices from the field.” it didn’t seem like the anonymous responses were needed, since none of the responses seemed to require anonymity, and dozens of respondents to this survey identified themselves and were comfortable with attribution. it is also useful to know what type of library the respondent is referring to, as well as its location; making “voices from the field” easier to read. the responses are presented in a tiny typeface against a grey background, which is not a reader-friendly combination; focusing as much attention on recipes as ingredients: that is, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of exceptionally good ideas, but little explanation of how to assign those ideas a priority or sequence; providing a conclusion. the book just sort of ends after the chapter on pop programming year-round. it’s worth mentioning that sophie brookover lives in a neighboring town and she gave me my copy of pop goes the library. however, we’ve only met once and i’ve enjoyed her writing for a number of years. her generosity was certainly welcome and appreciated, but not enough to compromise my objectivity. the fact is, i very much like this book’s execution and i strongly agree with its message: we’re going to remain relevant by acquiring and marketing materials, and by providing programs, that appeal to the people whose libraries we steward. you don’t have to like every popular item in the collection, you just have to make sure it’s available. as denise scott brown wrote a year before the publication of learning from las vegas,  “…liking the whole of pop culture is as irrational as hating the whole of it, and it calls forth the vision of a general and indiscriminate hopping on the pop bandwagon, where everything is good and judgment is abandoned rather than deferred. yet artists, architects, actors, must judge, albeit, one hopes, with a sigh. after a decent interval, suitable criteria must grow out of the new source. judgment is merely deferred to make subsequent judgments more sensitive.” scott brown and her co-authors succeeded, not just in deferring judgment about architecture, but in making sensitive subsequent judgments about their own work. brookover and burns excel at figuring out what people want and delivering it to them, so they’re certainly capable of doing the same. they’ve already done a wonderful job of creating a book that everyone who cares about libraries should read. and they may well have a book, in this version or a revision, that attracts a far greater audience to the sort of questions we ask ourselves on a regular basis. reaching a general audience is a tall order. few fields have a stephen jay gould, paul krugman, or atul gawande, serious practitioners who document the major issues of their field in popular essays that are collected in bestselling books. in pop goes the library, we have an encouraging sign that librarianship might someday produce its own bestselling scholar. thanks to meredith farkas, ellie collier, beth filla, and sophie brookover for reading drafts of this article. i was told that asking sophie to read it was weird, but it felt like the right thing to do, and i’m glad she agreed to it, because her comments made this article better. book review, elizabeth burns, librarianship, marketing, pop, pop goes the library, review, sophie brookover editorial: introduction on the ala membership pyramid 4 responses emily ford 2008–10–08 at 6:29 pm thanks for a great review, brett. i’m adding this book to my library hold list. pop culture is an excellent lens for us to view our patrons and our communities. has there been any backlash that you have followed to this kind of scholarship? what are the arguments against using pop culture to examine library services? brett bonfield 2008–10–16 at 7:39 am it all depends on how you define backlash, not to mention what you mean by “this kind of scholarship.” it’s tempting to offer a very librarian answer, so that’s where i’ll start. using only freely available resources, worldcat has two related subjects for pop goes the library (the book), libraries — special collections — popular culture (20 hits) and libraries and community (1,988 hits, though you should further refine these results based on your definition of backlash and scholarship). library, information science & technology abstracts (lista) is available for free through ebsco. the descriptor “popular culture” returns 120 results. as far as an argument against, as with most things it seems to come down to a question of time and money. for most of us, using one method or collecting one type of material necessarily means not using some other method or collecting some other type of resource. of course, most libraries have and will continue to have varied collections, and most of us will continue to use multiple methods for assessing those collections. but someone who would like for us to use their method of collection development, or who would like us to have something in our collection that we don’t have, will argue that using and collecting popular culture and materials is a bad decision. sophie brookover 2008–11–03 at 1:51 pm brett, thank you so much for this wonderful review. i am *still* bowled over by the comparison to scott brown & venturi, and if a 2nd edition is in our future, we’ll take your suggested improvements to heart! to what you say here, i say yes and no: but someone who would like for us to use their method of collection development, or who would like us to have something in our collection that we don’t have, will argue that using and collecting popular culture and materials is a bad decision. i hope we made it clear in the book that we don’t view collecting & promoting pop cultural materials as all or nothing, or as a black & white proposition in any way. we’re not advocating getting rid of the classics, or proposing zero wiggle room in a materials budget for something new & interesting (or old & interesting) that might have cult, but not mass, appeal. while we recognize that we sometimes have to make tough choices with regard to getting the materials our patrons want, we don’t believe in framing these questions as dichotomies. brett bonfield 2008–11–03 at 2:47 pm i’m glad sophie chimed in on this discussion. pop goes the library is really good about… well, about making the point that sophie makes above. i was trying to address emily’s question about arguments against using pop culture. maybe it’s all the political advertisements i’ve been seeing, but i seem to have internalized the idea that people making arguments against something rarely address the arguments people are making for it. i don’t see a rational argument against what pop goes the library proposes. but i can imagine an irrational argument, which is what i was referring to above: “you don’t have this thing i want you to have, and you do have this thing i don’t want you to have, therefore the method you’re using in developing your collection is wrong, wrong, wrong.” does anyone have a better answer for emily? what’s the best case you’ve seen someone make against using pop culture to examine library services? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct marketing search: an interview with pete bell of endeca and gabriel weinberg of duckduckgo – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 4 aug brett bonfield /7 comments marketing search: an interview with pete bell of endeca and gabriel weinberg of duckduckgo the yahoo! search team by flickr user yodel anecdotal (explored on sep 16, 2009) (cc by 2.0) by when bing will begin providing yahoo’s search results (though some testing has already started). combined, microsoft and yahoo! provide about 30% of the search results in the united states, but only roughly 10% of the search results overall; google, at 63% u.s. and 85% overall pretty much owns search. google’s dominance is one of the reasons many people get excited about alternative search engines. choice is important, especially in something as important as access to web-based information, and so is competition, which often leads to innovation. there’s often excitement leading up to the introduction of well funded and reputedly innovative search engines, such as powerset (quickly acquired by microsoft) and cuil, both of which debuted in 2008, and blekko, which is currently in closed private beta, but earned a positive review from michael arrington at the influential techcrunch. innovation in search is a good thing for many reasons, not least of which is the issue paul ford recently called, “the barnes & noble problem”: until i was about 26 almost everything i wanted to read was in barnes & noble. eventually they had less and less of what i wanted. now b&n’s a place i go before a movie, and i get my books anywhere else. i’m increasingly having b&n moments with full text search ala google. it’s just not doing the job; you have to search, then search, then search again, often within the sites themselves. the web is just too big, and google really only can handle a small part of it. it’s not anybody’s fault. it’s a hard, hard problem. it’s possible that many ways exist to avoid the barnes & noble problem in web search, but the two ways most companies seem to be trying at the moment are represented exceptionally well by endeca and duckduckgo. endeca, which provides search for borders, walmart, home depot, and many other large corporations and institutions (as well as north carolina state university libraries), will “guide users through asking and answering any question;” duckduckgo tries to out-google google by adding features people want, removing annoyances, and finding out what’s working by engaging its users in a fun, ongoing conversation about their interests. i recently had a chance to interview endeca co-founder, pete bell, and duckduckgo founder gabriel weinberg about their companies and their thoughts on search. both of your companies provide search for specialized collections. do you believe that people want a single, universal interface that will work everywhere or do they want an interface that’s been built to suit the collection they’re using? gabriel: i think that vertical search engines can work if they are compelling enough, e.g. kayak, which aggregates prices on airline tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals, and helps people find good deals on travel. however, there are only so many verticals where they can be compelling due to business model, i.e. high transaction value. in general, i believe people want the “single, universal interface that will work everywhere.” at duckduckgo, i have a longer term goal to help people navigate towards vertical engines that may be better for them. i’m doing this currently in a completely self-selected basis via !bang syntax. if you look at each vertical, there is usually a search engine out there that produces better results than google for that vertical. but no one is going to go to each of these hundreds of sites in specific situations. pete: good experiences are always designed around tasks—around specific users searching for specific content. and i’m using the word “search” to mean much more than the search box—i’m talking about all the navigation, visualizations, and content that helps people find what they need. now, if you ask people what they want, they’ll say they just want a google box. but if you test that against a task-built experience—say, image search at jupiter images—they’ll overwhelmingly pick the latter. marti hearst tested a great example of this as part of her flamenco search interface project on faceted search user interfaces (uis). is it important for search interfaces to match the way people think or will people adjust their thinking to suit search interfaces? pete: there’s a difference between zero-training and easy-to-use. zero-training means it has to match the way people think, and for any popular public-facing website, it has to be fluid. on the other hand, there can be easy-to-use sites that take a few minutes to learn. they better become fluid after those few minutes though. for example, we’ve built some search applications for manufacturers that give their design engineers thousands of facets. they’re willing to spend a couple of minutes to orient themselves to get power-user features. first time i switched from a pc to a mac, i was surprised that there was still a learning period, but it faded fast. gabriel: if you want fast, low-cost adoption, i believe the interface should be as fluid and simple as possible. however, sites like amazon have proved that you can push through user experience (ux) with enough money. by which i mean basically what pete said, in that if you are allowed to train people for a few minutes then you can end up with a better ux overall. amazon has done it essentially via brute force, i.e. push through by simply being around long enough that people end up spending those few minutes over time. how do you weigh precision versus recall? has your thinking changed along the way? gabriel: i’ve been pretty much about precision from the beginning, in part because i rely on external apis for the long-tail; that is, for less popular searchers, i rely mostly on the raw search results i get from bing api 2.0 and yahoo! “build your own search service”. i think my value-add for those types of queries is in added precision. but more generally, there are just so many web pages out there and people don’t look at many of them (they choose from just the top few results), so precision is most important for general search. for specialized search i think it can reverse depending on the vertical. an example of a vertical in this context would be searching for bug reports. there are usually very few pages out there that have the exact output of your bug report, and if they exist, you want to find them. for things like that, we rely on yahoo & microsoft to have crawled those pages. for less specific queries we layer on top of those apis some neuro-linguistic programming (nlp) stuff that, among other things, tries to extract the concepts/entities in the query and gives you pages more associated with them. for other queries where we know a vertical engine will give you better info, e.g. weather or complicated math, we will automatically query an api and display the better results—i think this is another form of recall. pete: you can cheat the precision vs. recall trade-off. at endeca, we’ve become disciples of the human computer information retrieval school, and all that gary marchionini and daniel tunkelang have done to popularize the hcir model. when we started, it was orthodoxy that there was a trade-off between precision and recall. that assumes people make a query into a black box, get back a ranked list of results, and then either accept one of those top results or recompose their query. it’s the trec evaluation model. but ranking is dubious—it conflates many dimensions of relevancy into a single score. with hcir, there is no strict trade-off between recall and relevancy. instead, you engage the user in a multi-step “conversation” with the data, as in a faceted search. you start with a probe query that returns a set of results. and then the system characterizes the set—it tells you the attributes and facets associated with that set. that helps you refine to a subset, then lather, rinse, repeat. the trick is to treat search as a set retrieval problem instead of a ranked list retrieval problem. for example, if your task were to find a photo of dogs with kids to illustrate a book jacket, and all you had was a classic search box, you’d probably maximize for recall with some searches like “dogs kids jpg” or “dogs children photos” and then eyeball the results. but with hcir, the system has a chance to teach you about the results. back to jupiter image search, we could search for “dogs,” and then discover facets about ages, concepts, and image technique, and use those to whittle down. you’re returning a set of results, and then learning about subsets. the effect is that you get unexpected results that you could never hope to discover with keywords. what usability testing methods do you find most informative? pete: agile testing is best. make mistakes often and learn from them quickly. i’m with jared spool—you can learn a lot, inexpensively, by testing a small set of people and iterating. gabriel: i find natural feedback coming through the site to be most informative. often this kind of feedback comes from users who have put in a lot of thought. i’ve also found reddit comments from ads to be particularly informative, especially for first impressions. finally, i’ve gotten use out of pickfu. i have plans to investigate usertesting.com and feedbackarmy.com as well, but haven’t done so yet. can you expand on “natural feedback”? and how you’ve used reddit and pickfu? gabriel: by natural feedback i mean feedback that flows from real users using your site. on duckduckgo, there is a feedback button on every search result page (in the lower right corner). most of our feedback comes through there and is in a “natural” context of searching for something particular. i posted a pickfu review on my blog. basically, it is good way to get quick opinions on two choices. people vote which one they like better, but more importantly they give you their take on why, which provides some insight into what people were thinking. reddit is more straight advertising, but with each ad there is also a comment thread. reddit users are known to actually check out things and report back in comments, and they luckily do this for reddit’s ads as well. but that’s not all, because you can actually engage with reddit users as well, and have conversations about your product. all in all, it is a great feedback experience. guest question for gabriel (courtesy of andrew nagy1): “how are you positioning duckduckgo differently from google in terms of user interface and user experience? what sort of new ui concepts are you evaluating that google is not already doing?” gabriel: on a feature level, our about page attempts to answer this question directly: but at a higher level, i’m trying to make duckduckgo results pages more readable and understandable. a lot of the features are in this vein. for example, i put zero-click info on top, which is readable topic summaries (sometimes full paragraphs) from crowd-sourced sources like wikipedia and crunchbase. other examples are labeled official sites, human-edited link titles and descriptions (also from crowd-sourced sources), disambiguation pages, and fewer useless sites in our results pages. another angle is discovery. i provide related topics (as opposed to related searches) and category pages, which are groupings of topics of a similar theme. how closely do you think profitability aligns with quality? in evaluating your competition, do you get the sense that it’s the better engineered search products or the better run businesses that are succeeding? pete: just to set the context for endeca, in our market, our customers want to customize a search experience for their specific users and content. there’s a healthy market for one-size-fits all sites generated by inexpensive appliances, but that’s not our market. ncsu, walmart.com, and espn have different experiences from each other. we call these search applications. there are a few ways to go about that. you could invest many, many, many millions on in-house developers, like amazon and ebay did. but our customers choose the platform route—they’re buying endeca’s “legos,” and partnering with our services team to design their site. now, that’s a complex project. it brings together teams from two companies that haven’t worked together before. and it mixes a lot of specialties—user experience, application development, information architecture—that might not understand a lot about each other. my friend joseph busch does high-end taxonomy and document management projects, and he likes to joke that he’s 5% a library scientist, 95% a social worker. people tend to focus on technology when they’re planning a new site. but with projects like these, business process, user experience, support, professional services, education, and so on all matter, too. so to answer your question, in the search applications market, technology is part of it, but execution matters just as much. gabriel: i think it is product for the most part, at least for general search and with a few caveats. google’s share just kept climbing and climbing, and i think that is largely due to its product. recently, bing canceled their cashback program after tons of money because it presumably didn’t yield new customers. that’s more evidence of product dominance. the first caveat is distribution deals. a lot of people use what is in front of them, and sometimes have no choice. it’s very hard (if not impossible) for a startup to capture those distribution deals since microsoft and google have so much money behind them. the second caveat is, without distribution it is very hard to get people to switch search engines. all the recently well-funded search startups who failed are evidence of this fact. i think they didn’t wow people enough in the product, however. but the bar is pretty high. the third caveat is brand. google did a study comparing its results with its competitors’ and found a huge implicit trust from using the google logo at the top. they earned that, but that is additionally hard to overcome for a startup (or even for microsoft). what are your thoughts on expert search features, such as specialized syntax or regular expressions? gabriel: i’ve been trying to “walk the line” in this arena, by offering specialized syntax that i think could get mainstream support from power users. i think regular expressions are a bit out there for the normal user although i did already incorporate them in some capacity already (though probably not what you meant): http://duckduckgo.com/?q=regexp+/(.*%3f)+(.*%3f)+(.*)/+duck+duck+go. something i think more walks that line is the !bang syntax i created where you input !amazon x in the search box and it searches for x in amazon. i think that’s easy to grasp and it is useful. additionally, i think it can help market to specific groups of users, e.g. i also added hex color codes and unicode query responses. pete: you know the rule of thumb that 90-odd percent of users never change the defaults. whatever the number is, it’s increasing. that said, it’s not fair to round down to zero and say that the few people that do use expert features don’t count. they tend to be some of the most valuable users. we’ve got extensive xquery hooks into our engine that make it possible to build up some great queries. what do you think of wolfram alpha? gabriel: as a collection of cool data that gets aggregated usefully in response to queries, i love it! as a standalone product, however, i worry that it will die for lack of a business model. i think a lot of what they’ve done would be great in a search engine, and i’ve tried to integrate it as much as possible into duck duck go (see duck duck goodies). pete: there’s a continuum of search tasks that range from fact finding on one end to discovery on the other. (fact finding: who wrote ulysses? discovery: which irish writer should i read on the beach this afternoon?) wolfram alpha is really cool for fact finding, and lousy for discovery. you can’t have discovery without human input—hcir. what do you think of worldcat.org? gabriel: i had not heard of it until this moment, so this is a first impression. i’m not the target customer since i haven’t checked out something from a library since college :). but i imagine this could be really useful for people who do check stuff out from libraries, i.e. students, researchers, etc. the implementation seems a bit cluttered and i’m not sure how big that market is. i suppose the business model is clicking through to amazon or whatever; it’s an empirical question on how much that actually converts. pete: i enjoy worldcat. they’ve done an impressive job on their primary mission. that’s sincere—i’m not damning them with faint praise. but if you want me to focus on search and give constructive criticism, there’s a lot more they could do. if you hold up some great sites as the bar, you’ll see ideas worldcat should adopt on user experience, relevancy, text mining, and visualizations. just to name a couple of sites, ieee explore and food network both have ideas that could improve worldcat. and if you expect oclc to take a leadership role, they should push the bar on searching digital collections: full text, images, multi-media. we’ve been working with the jfk presidential archive on their next generation site to search their digital archives. that’s given me a real appreciation for how big the challenges are on searching digital collections. there’s a lot of work to do, and it would be good to see oclc start experimenting. if you’re interested in hearing more from pete bell, i recommend his always interesting contributions to endeca’s excellent search facets blog as well as a very good interview with him conducted by steve arnold. for more on gabriel weinberg, i recommend his superb blog, book (still a work in progress, but we get to follow its development online), and the duckduckgo community for educators and librarians. thanks to pete bell and gabriel weinberg for participating in the interview, to andrew nagy for his question and his assistance with the article, and to my lead pipe colleague, ellie collier, for her comments. andrew nagy, an open source evangelist and library technologist, joined serials solutions in late 2008 where he has been an evangelist for discovery services and seminal in the development of [summon] (http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon/). prior to joining, he was the technology development specialist for the falvey memorial library at villanova university where he was responsible for developing many innovations, including vufind , an internationally adopted open-source library discovery solution. [↩] bing, duckduckgo, endeca, gabriel weinberg, google, pete bell, search, ui, ux, yahoo librarians as __________: shapeshifting at the periphery. our blog is your blog 7 responses caleb tr 2010–08–04 at 1:43 pm librarians compete with google? can you explain that with more than a flip remark? brett bonfield 2010–08–04 at 4:04 pm thanks for your questions. i’d be happy to talk about librarians competing with google, though based on your questions i’m not sure which aspects interest you or how detailed you want my response to be. i guess it’s safe to assume the information available on these websites doesn’t meet your information needs. not to get all reference interview on you, but what kind of response from me would make you happy? caleb tr 2010–08–05 at 2:01 am sorry, i realize that i was being a bit flip myself, and i apologize. i read your post, and i understand that you are discussing the kinds of things that libraries can learn from search engines, that google isn’t the only option. it is a great conversation to have, and kudos to you. your lead sentence, “as it turns out, librarians aren’t the only ones competing with google” sets off alarms because you are stating something as fact that needs to be weighed and discussed. so please respond in whatever way you feel is appropriate, given the context, but i hope that you, or someone else, can give a reasoned explanation for why you think what you say is true. “librarians compete with google”. i think this simple statement is empty, as evinced by your link to a google search for ‘librarians “compete with google”‘. very few of the links in the first few pages come close to addressing my question, and the fact that you posted the link at all suggests a deep lack of understanding of the difference between the work that librarians do and what companies like google do. but that doesn’t seem likely, so i’m guessing you were responding to me as a potential troll. what do we mean by ‘compete’? do we mean that libraries, as non-profits and government agencies vie for the revenues and markets that for-profit corporations like google do? i’m as cynical as anyone, and there are definitely corporations that want to end all taxes (at least on themselves – there are no subsidies without taxes), but i don’t think that is what we are talking about here. do we mean that libraries and search engines, as providers of information, are essentially providing the same services, and therefore, “compete”? your biography on this site says you are a public library director, and i find it hard to believe that anyone would put early literacy efforts, providing study space or access to the internet in the category of things google does. the idea that people go to libraries for information is a myth. people go to libraries for the information they think can be found in libraries. for most of us, it is a pretty narrow scope. george needham wrote in the oclc blog it’s all good in january 2006 comparing a 1947 report on public library use with oclc’s perceptions… report from 2005, “the biggest consistency has been in people failing to see libraries as a primary information source” (http://scanblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/public-use-of-library-and-other.html). but you might also mean something a little deeper, that there is a perception that with google, people don’t need libraries. or with amazon.com, people don’t need libraries. and so, libraries must “compete” to prove their relevance. i’m paranoid enough too hear some of those voices saying these things, so i can get behind this definition. but i still don’t agree that that search engines actually do the things that libraries do, or that they will, or that we should pretend to “compete” with them in one of the above senses. no, instead, we should look to set ourselves apart. vivienne waller, in an article for firstmonday argues that google and public libraries have fundamentally different missions (http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2477/2279). she argues that the drive for profit competes (if you will) with the drive for public good. libraries are not here to make money. our goals are to help our communities thrive, to give citizens and scholars vital tools to make our world better. sometimes i wonder what an algorithm for ranking search results would look like if it were designed to help people be free instead of to make money. i think also that business-speak is dangerous. it is often helpful to understand how businesses operate and the innovations they produce, but in the end they are not a good model for the public sector. seeing ourselves as competitors blinds us to the real possibilities and potential for libraries. you asked one of your interviewees to look at worldcat.org, and he says, “i suppose the business model is clicking through to amazon or whatever”. why should worldcat.org need a business model? is the idea of a non-profit technology company so unfathomable? is it that from a business perspective, resource sharing doesn’t make any sense at all? i love waller’s closing paragraph and will resist quoting the whole thing. most of all, i want to point out that she suggests that “there should be endless and difficult debates”. thanks for the opportunity. brett bonfield 2010–08–05 at 8:53 pm thanks for your follow-up response. discussions like this one are one of my favorite aspects of the lead pipe. and i’m particularly pleased that you brought another non-librarian into the discussion. i like it when non-librarians share their knowledge with us and i like it when we pay attention to their ideas. as for your questions and critiques, i think much of our disagreement may be semantic. before i was hired to work at my local public library, i worked at temple university. to get from my home in south jersey to temple’s north philadelphia campus, i could drive myself in a car or i could carpool or hire a taxi or take various forms of public transportation (rail and buses) offered by two different organizations (one based in new jersey and the other based in pennsylvania) or ride a bicycle or run or walk. there are various additional decisions implied by the above: which bridge to take, what kind of car to use, which car pool, what kind of bicycle, what kind of running shoe, running shoes versus running barefoot, and on and on. i have no idea if my commuting options (or, rather, the people who work for and champion the institutions behind these options) believe they’re competing with each other or if they believe they can “set themselves apart,” take their ball and go home, and distance themselves from the choices i make regarding the money, time, and loyalty i will invest in the method or methods i choose for getting to work. while i don’t know what they believe, i know what i believe: the word that describes the relationship between these institutions is “competition,” and that they are “competing.” i also believe that what you’re suggesting librarians do to distinguish our services from google’s is called branding. using the philosophy and methods involved in a branding-based business strategy might be a useful way for librarians to “set themselves apart,” which i’ll define as competing more successfully with google, as well as companies like amazon and barnes & noble and netflix and audible and starbucks, to provide goods and services that people who rely on us find valuable. i agree that “business-speak is dangerous” when it is used by people who aren’t interested in the lessons business has to offer, just as sports analogies probably shouldn’t be used by people who don’t like sports. there’s nothing wrong with disliking business or sports, but i think it’s important to recognize that some people have developed pretty sophisticated ways of describing how they work, and if you don’t understand the vernacular or the ideas then statements you make about them might not make a lot of sense to people who do. unfortunately, even though the author of the article you cite above, vivienne waller, seems to have very little interest in business, this doesn’t stop her from occasionally trying to play business analyst while writing about google. for instance, she concludes one of the longer sections of her article with the following sentence: “whether one thinks that google is more likely to end up having a monopoly on information or is more likely to go broke, the issue is one of the lack of public control over a private company.” 1. so is google going to take over the world or go out of business? because if what actually happens is anywhere between those two extremes then her concerns don’t make much sense. and if both scenarios seem equally likely her concerns don’t make much sense, either. 2. there is public control over google. corporations deal with a significant amount of regulation, especially in google’s home country. 3. google is not a private company. it went public more than five years before waller’s article was published; in addition to its regulators and its customers, google has to answer to its shareholders. i won’t address every point in your response–i realize this response is already far too long–but i want to address some of your final points. in reverse order: * “is the idea of a non-profit technology company so unfathomable?” are we talking about oclc? sorry, that was flip. leaving oclc out of it for the moment, my last job before going to library school was with a non-profit technology company. we had a business model. every non-profit has one, even if they haven’t drafted one and none of their employees believe they do. * “why should worldcat.org need a business model?” because it needs to appeal to people and because oclc’s servers and programmers and other expenses don’t pay for themselves. * there’s nothing to stop anyone from making a pagerank competitor “designed to help people be free instead of to make money.” there are open source alternatives for just about every major piece of consumer-focused software. here’s my theory: it wouldn’t look all that different from google’s algorithm. i believe google is interested in meeting people’s needs rather than dictating what their users want. true, google is now popular enough that there’s no longer much of a control group. but google’s business model does not seem to be predicated on dictating people’s happiness with their search product. which is why duckduckgo and endeca are so interesting to me: their business models are also centered on meeting people’s needs. * i’m not sure what public libraries’ goals are and i’m growing more and more certain that no one does. i see a lot of statements like, “our goals are to help our communities thrive, to give citizens and scholars vital tools to make our world better,” as you wrote above, and, as waller writes, “public libraries aim to provide access to information in order to strengthen democracy.” personally, i think these are the truly empty statements. what do these statements actually mean? where’s the testable hypothesis? where’s the data? where’s the accountability? ultimately, that’s what interests me about acknowledging our competition with google and other companies, and that’s what i hope we can learn from people like gabriel and pete. i think entrepreneurs generally know if they’re doing a good job. as the director of a public library, i have nothing trustworthy to use in determining whether i am. caleb tr last time i promise 2010–08–07 at 1:31 am semantics, yes, i think it is important. it is the study of meaning! i think your transportation analogy illustrates my point perfectly. the corollary to librarians might be bus drivers, and the corollary to google might be general motors. one provides a professional service and another is a company that makes several products that perform similar, but fundamentally different services. one tries to help a community thrive, the other seeks to profit. they serve entirely different needs and play entirely different roles in meeting them. “as it turns out, bus drivers aren’t the only ones who compete with general motors.” but i see also with a really broad field of vision, yes, they are in the same category (ie, the 380s?). but really, not to harp. this is fun stuff to think about. i contend it is damaging to libraries to frame ourselves in the rhetoric of the private sector. when we use their language and systems of evaluation – competition, branding, return-on-investment, business model – we de-emphasize that libraries provide a completely different way of understanding and bettering the world. ellie 2010–08–09 at 11:20 am as someone who really hates business speak, i see both (maybe even more) sides here. it’s important to be able to speak to our funders in a language they understand. business speak is just one of many languages with annoying buzzwords. education has its own annoying buzzwords. (i’ve seen eyes glaze over when the word pedagogy comes out.) annoying buzzwords shouldn’t stop us from pulling out whatever valuable information lies beneath them. i’m lucky to be in an academic institution where the currency is primarily student success (which sometimes draws its own eye rolls) rather than dollars and i’m lucky to not be in a position where it is one of my main responsibilities to be able to justify the library or our funding to higher ups, but i’ve seen some of those conversations in action and it’s important to be able to talk the talk if you want to be able to fund whatever items and activities you are planning to help your community thrive. and it’s a very very different talk depending on who you’re asking for money as brett explained in his talking to donors article. (https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/what-your-donors-and-would-be-donors-wish-you-knew/) the other aspect that i think is important is that the business sector has been studying and publishing on these topics and has valuable research that we can learn from. as much as i might instinctively dislike terms like branding, marketing, and pr, the fact remains there are better and worse ways to interact with your patrons and if people are hiding those better ways under terms i don’t like, i’m the only one who loses by ignoring them. that said, i also agree you can lose your staff if you switch over to using the same annoying buzzwords with them. i signed up for a certain type of job which was distinctly not business focused and am much more likely to be motivated by language and systems of evaluation that play to my beliefs in what a library is and should be. there will always be articles and books saying how we all need to do x, and taking on a more profit sector approach has had its turn as x. i think it’s that “we all need to” approach that turns normal words into those annoying buzzwords. i hope in general, you won’t find those “you must” admonitions here. we tend to fall into, “is there anything we can learn from x and apply to libraries?” i’ll call back to char’s recent post about librarian as shapeshifter. (https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/librarians-as-__________-shapeshifting-at-the-periphery/) i think it’s valuable to be able to understand as many approaches to a situation and motivators of people as possible so we can be more informed about what is likely to give us the results we want. broadly speaking, in order for these two entrepreneurs to succeed, they need to have a product that people use (that would be true whether they’re for profit or not). so their discussion of user behavior in terms of information seeking is interesting to me. in particular i like the idea of making user feedback at the point of the problem (on our website in particular) a simpler process. i just looked, and once you’re in my library’s catalog there is no button to ask a librarian or provide feedback. providing search may be only one of the many things we do, but it is something we do and i’m happy to see how others approach it and what i can learn from them. now i need the next article to be on working with committees to implement the cool things we learn…. (great recent shelf check on this – http://www.toondoo.com/cartoon/1998046) so caleb, i’m with you that i don’t think it’s the only way we should frame ourselves, but i do think that we shouldn’t ignore good research that we can use. thanks brett for the interesting questions and gabriel and pete for taking the time to answer them. i’ve already sent the article, highlighting the natural feedback section to our web team. on a more personal geeky level, i love the precision v. recall discussion. thanks again. brett bonfield 2010–08–12 at 9:45 pm thanks, ellie. i agree with everything you wrote, and wish my response had been as clear and nonconfrontational as yours. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct our blog is your blog – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 18 aug editorial board /7 comments our blog is your blog by editorial board this issue of in the library with the lead pipe is devoted to you, dear reader: your requests, suggestions, and questions for the six of us blogging under the lead pipe banner. since we began this blog nearly two years ago, we have collaborated every few months on a group post to which we all contribute. so far the topics of these posts have been ours, but we’d much rather have them come from you. for our next group post and, we hope, for subsequent group posts, we’d like you to ask the questions. what burning questions or concerns do you have about libraries, librarianship, and librarians? for us to address for us to investigate or that you’d like to toss out to the lead pipe readership we’re also interested in hearing your ideas for any of our future posts: what topics would you like to see in future articles? what are we doing well? what would you change? is there anyone you would like to see publish a guest post? who would you nominate as a new regular lead pipe blogger? we’re strong believers in the power of constructive criticism, so don’t be easy on us — be honest. chide us, challenge us! please send your questions, suggestions, and any other thoughts to us by wednesday, september 1, and we’ll have our responses for you in our september 15 post. feel free to use any of these venues to talk back to us: comment on this post tweet it – http://twitter.com/libraryleadpipe facebook us – http://www.facebook.com/pages/in-the-library-with-the-lead-pipe/88022844848 use the contact  form – https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/contact-us/ contact any of us directly. our contact information is in our bios, which are linked at the right of the screen and on the authors page. we look forward to hearing from you! blogs, feedback, group post, ideas marketing search: an interview with pete bell of endeca and gabriel weinberg of duckduckgo a view from the neutral zone 7 responses lauren 2010–08–18 at 9:13 pm i would love to see a blog post that addresses both the attitude of librarians who really do not want to move forward and how that’s detrimental to the communities they serve. maybe also something about the growth of library science as a program but the lack of jobs when students graduate. anonylib 2010–08–18 at 11:05 pm something about how newish librarians moving into management and managing librarians who have been in their positions for decades. lisa 2010–08–20 at 7:09 pm how about a series of articles discussing local special libraries and their issues? also, i’d like to nominate the author of this blog as a guest (or perhaps regular) blogger: http://deweysnotdead.blogspot.com/ virginia 2010–08–27 at 8:23 am as a neither newish nor youngish librarian, i really enjoy reading your blog. however your color scheme is hard on aging eyes. there simply isn’t enough contrast on the link colors. (it probably doesn’t help that my monitor is also neither newish nor youngish.) other than that, keep up the good work! derik badman 2010–08–27 at 9:29 am hi virginia, an excellent point. my firefox accessibilty extension does note the contrast is too low on most of our links. when i designed the site i hadn’t learned much about web accessibility issues (i’ve learned a lot lately for my work). i’ll put it on my todo list to see if i can come up with better contrasting link colors. kathleen 2010–08–27 at 2:53 pm i’d like to see a post on planning for upward mobility in the library world… training to schedule, additional education, how to find a mentor, etc. thanks! danna 2010–08–30 at 5:17 pm i agree with kathleen – a post on upward mobility in the library world would be interesting and informative. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct fantasy pricing – an interview with selden lamoureux – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 26 may selden lamoureux and hilary davis /3 comments fantasy pricing – an interview with selden lamoureux photo by flickr user daviddmuir (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by selden lamoureux and hilary davis when i asked selden lamoureux, electronic serials librarian at the north carolina state university libraries, “what are the most challenging issues for electronic serials librarians today?” we launched into a fascinating conversation about a topic that hits at the core of what it means to work in library acquisitions these days. selden’s response was: “the list is long and ranges from things that are the natural consequences of a dramatically altered publishing landscape (such as the need for new management tools), to problems largely of our own making. it’s within this second category that i find one of the more insidious problems for large academic libraries: fantasy pricing.” over the course of many weeks, the following interview-style q&a unfolded. selden is one of those people who have spent years cultivating intelligent and cooperative relationships between libraries and publishers. she is one of the founders of seru (shared e-resource understanding), a framework for eliminating the need for extensive and sometimes painful license negotiation for electronic resources such as e-journals, e-books and databases. her invaluable contributions to librarianship have been recognized by her peers via awards such as the coutts award for innovation in electronic resources management and the john merriman award to support attendance at the uk serials group annual conference in edinburgh, scotland in april 2010 (volcanic ash cloud, included). selden is an active leader in nasig (north american serials interest group) and ala’s alcts (association for library collections and technical services). the opinions and statements that follow are based on selden’s experiences and come from the perspective of an acquisitions librarian working in the context of a large academic research library. her insights may not reflect the experience of acquisitions librarians in other kinds of libraries, but hopefully give you a flavor of the state of serials acquisitions in the broad scale. please share your thoughts, opinions and questions in the comments section that follows this post. question: what is “fantasy pricing”? answer: fantasy pricing is the practice of establishing a journal’s subscription price that, for the most part, appears largely divorced from production and distribution costs. in the print environment, journals had production and delivery costs that determined a minimum price. electronic journal pricing is almost always based on the price of the print, but for electronic journals, the cost of delivering the content is cheap and there is little relationship between what it costs to produce and deliver the electronic journal and the asking price for its subscription. how do i know this? when a publisher can claim its collection of journals is worth more than $2 million, and also claim that the average price a library pays for all that content is less than 15% of the value of its titles, then something is amiss in the way that publisher values its titles! [note: what selden is saying here is that it doesn’t make sense that a publisher would claim that their journal collection is worth $2 million while also stating that libraries only pay 15% of that cost – why would a publisher sell their journal collection at such a loss if the value they claim is so much higher? either the collection isn’t worth $2 million or the publisher is really desperate to make a sell.] question: why is there such a difference in the stated value of the journal collection vs. the cost to libraries? answer: when pricing for online content is based on a library’s print subscription spending commitment, large research libraries, with their historically large number of print subscriptions, pay a disproportionate amount for electronic journal content. if all libraries shared in the savings, i wouldn’t object. but what happens in practice is that libraries wind up paying wildly different prices for the same content, pricing that is all out of proportion to differences among their institutions. an especially egregious example: one publisher offered a library consortium access to their complete collection of journals online. the consortium contained library members that ranged in size from large arl (association of research libraries) libraries to small institutions of under 5,000 students. the difference in price for the exact same content was 32 times at its most extreme. in terms of actual dollars, it meant one institution was asked to pay $1.5 million, while another paid $47,000 for identical content. if the value of the content is truly $2 million (let’s say, in this case, it is purported to be valued at around $2 million), then both libraries are getting a bargain; but if the value of the content is closer to the average cost (15%, or $345,000) then the larger library is paying too much and the smaller library too little. the publisher could never have offered the smaller libraries this same access to print journals, because the cost of printing and delivering the journal would have been prohibitive. clearly, the negligible cost of distributing electronic journals is what makes this possible. [note: our reviewers pointed out that if patrons of the larger libraries use journals 32 times more than smaller libraries, then it might be somewhat justified that the larger libraries should pay 32 times more for the same content. we haven’t seen statistics to back this up consistently, but it is an interesting perspective to note. additional cost for supporting higher capacity usage doesn’t necessarily kick in until there is a very large number of uses and a publisher needs to invest in additional server infrastructure. there is still no good metric for identifying the value of a “use.” ] question: what is the impact of this pricing disparity on larger libraries? answer: one problem is that these business models lock in historic spending commitments of libraries at the same time that they disallow or severely limit libraries’ ability to cancel subscriptions. when library budgets are flat, the only way to subscribe to new journals is to cancel previous subscriptions. if, however, a library’s spending level for a given publisher’s journals is fixed, and the annual increase is fixed, and the ability to cancel is restricted, then the library budget equilibrium is broken. another problem exists in the inherent inequality of having no “real” price for a journal. there is a tradition, established long before there were electronic journals, of asking larger libraries, with their larger budgets and more extensive research needs, to pay more for content than smaller institutions (e.g., the carnegie classification was often used to establish tiered pricing for content). in those days, however, the disparity between costs paid by large research libraries vs. small academic libraries was never as disproportionate as it is now. [note: selden isn’t suggesting that tiered pricing models are disagreeable; just that the growing disparity is much more difficult to justify.] these days, the ambiguity of how to value (and therefore charge for) electronic subscriptions not only compounds the pricing disparity between large universities and small colleges, but also between institutions of relative parity where there are different historic spending patterns. in the same consortial example cited previously, there happened to be two large universities with very similar student populations and phd programs. one was an up-and-coming university that had grown rapidly in the last few years; the other was the flagship university with a long, storied tradition. in this example, where the two institutions were nearly identical in their current academic profiles, the flagship university was charged nearly 2.3 times the cost for the same content, since pricing was based primarily on historic spending commitments. noblesse oblige cannot begin to explain this pricing disequilibrium. question: how did this kind of business model come about? what are the advantages for publishers? answer: this is a model that is often referred to as the “big deal,” and it’s not hard to see what its advantages are. for publishers, there were (and still are) real costs associated with the transition from print to electronic publishing: a web presence had to be established, a journal delivery platform created, and people had to be hired who had the necessary skills to build the new access and delivery system. once those costs were met, other costs came into the picture such as the cost of maintaining online access (unlike print, where the commitment stops once an issue is delivered), managing complex access levels, providing extra user services (e.g., table of contents alert services), customer service for authors, libraries and patrons, and reporting of metrics such as usage statistics. for publishers, there was a lot of risk and uncertainty. [note: there is considerable debate about the actual cost of electronic production of articles within the scholarly communication marketplace. the costs of electronic production are not what are being brought to light here – rather, it’s the disparity in what is charged to one library versus another library for the same content and the contradiction of average charges to libraries vs. the stated value of a publisher’s electronic journal portfolio.] one strategy that minimizes the risk to publishers’ bottom lines is to lock in library spending at historic print spending levels, lock in an annual inflation cap (i.e., an annual price increase), and limit the ability to cancel subscriptions. that way, a publisher guarantees a predictable annual income and predictable revenue growth. under this model, since large university libraries were often the biggest consumers of print journals, they are the customers who now provide the biggest online revenue. the revenue from smaller college libraries which have not traditionally been able to afford (or necessarily have much interest in) the journals then becomes bonus income because the base line cost for the content has already been covered by the large libraries, and distribution costs (after covering the costs of technical infrastructure for production and maintenance with a core customer base of large academic libraries) become relatively small. question: what were the advantages for libraries? answer: just as publishers were experimenting with electronic journals, so were libraries. a decade ago, we didn’t know how library users would react to electronic journals. this model offered us access to a lot of content for a price that was within range of what we were already spending. the carrot was that we would lock in our spending commitment and receive access to hundreds of new titles (of course, the stick was if we canceled, we’d lose access to all those new titles; there was very little middle ground). in addition, there was the promise of electronic journals eventually becoming cheaper than print, and we were willing to experiment with new business models in the short term as we all figured out the shape of the future. question: why is fantasy pricing such a problem now? answer: if library budgets did nothing but grow, just as the price of journals do, i suppose there wouldn’t be a problem. but that’s not the case, and has never been the case. in addition to publishers minimizing risk by locking in library spending, there is a trend for more and more publisher mergers. when i follow the trajectory of the past several years, what i see is a future with a handful of publishers, delivering the same online content to every library, at a price that absorbs each library’s entire budget. simple. we all get the same content, and we each pay all our budgets to have it, whether my budget is $100,000 or $10 million. if all library needs were the same, that might be a desirable model despite its bizarre pricing scheme, but libraries needs are not uniform, and libraries need the ability to customize their content. if pricing were more in line with actual production, distribution and support costs for the library market, i would bet that my library would see considerable cost reductions for commercial journal content. question: and what would the smaller academic libraries do if pricing were more in line with actual production and distribution costs? wouldn’t their costs increase? answer: perhaps costs to smaller academic libraries would increase. but, maybe they could rely on previous methods of sharing resources, and use inter-library lending (ill) for the content their budgets cannot afford to cover. that’s what we’ve all done in the print environment; that’s what we continue to do now. perhaps it’s one of the strategies for sharing information that ought to survive in the electronic environment. question: what’s the future of scholarly journal pricing models? answer: there are a lot of things happening in the production and dissemination of scholarly content that are competing with the commercial publishers (e.g., institutional repositories, open access initiatives, non-journal publication venues), so i expect there will be many solutions – eventually. for now, however, libraries are still investing large percentages of their budgets in commercially produced content. what i’m hoping for is a short term solution. and because my perspective is that of someone at a large academic library, i’m most interested in changes that alleviate their problems first! i would like to see publishers redistribute the cost of their big deals; shift their pricing models toward a model that is closer to the actual cost of the journal; and pass some of the savings realized by low distribution costs to the large academic libraries which have been their best customers for years. another offer they can make, while prices are inching closer to costs, is to offer the large research libraries something they value which smaller institutions traditionally don’t care about: ownership of the content (perpetual access to the digital content even if the subscription is canceled) rather than leased access (whereby access is lost if the subscription is canceled). question: what do you think are the chances that publishers will move away from fantasy pricing? answer: it won’t be easy! if there had been a pricing model at hand that was clear, fair, and low risk publishers would be using it already. this is not an easy problem to solve. there’s the added difficulty that most publishers still have print production costs as well as electronic format costs. what i’ve seen recently that makes me think we may be about to turn a corner, however, are a few publishers who are candid that their interest is in keeping library spending levels stable, and they are not so tied to which particular journal titles are delivered. i think this has been true for a long time; they are just now more comfortable in expressing this. if, in fact, we move away from the all or nothing big deal to a more nuanced exchange of dollars for value, some of the equilibrium will have been restored. [note: publishers and libraries alike are still trying to figure out next steps. we don’t know the true impact on journal value of things like web publishing platform enhancements, server maintenance, expanding online customer service, electronic article submission and editorial processing systems, electronic resource management systems (erms), access verification tools, etc. the road ahead isn’t totally clear, but there are some things coming into focus as a result of good faith collaborative negotiations between libraries and publishers.] question: any final thoughts? answer: i find myself caught in the tension between my impulse to provide a service (access to information) to as wide an audience as possible, and my desire to be a good steward of my institution’s financial resources. i don’t want to see small institutions lose access to commercially produced online journals, but i don’t want my institution to underwrite the bulk of the cost for that access. a difference of 3,000% between what libraries are asked to pay is absurd. large academic research libraries are paying too much for electronic content. pricing needs to move out of the fantasy realm and anchor itself closer to production and delivery costs appropriate for the academic library market. [note: selden and i didn’t discuss open access publishing models in any depth in the framework of these interviews. open access publishing has played a significant role in the many debates about journal pricing; however, as long as scholarly communication continues to rely on traditional publishing being coordinated through external publishing organizations and corporations, libraries will continue to deal with the consequences of journal valuation models and disproportionate pricing tiers.] acknowledgments: many thanks to ellie collier (in the library with the lead pipe and austin community college) and victor lao (springer) for their thoughtful review and feedback on previous drafts of this article. their comments/feedback on the content in this article represents their personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employers. this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. what your donors (and would-be donors) wish you knew my maverick bar: a search for identity and the “real work” of librarianship 3 responses ellie 2010–05–26 at 3:42 pm thank you selden and hilary. i was very interested to read about this from a large academic library’s perspective (vs. my large community college library). i was aware there was disparity in pricing, but was unaware of the magnitude. it’s so easy to only know your side and forget about all the other factors. i hope this interview generates a lot of discussion. i’d love to hear what other libraries/librarians focus on. i know i personally wish it were easier to purchase individual titles rather than bundles. mp65reader 2010–06–10 at 11:04 am interesting article. consider differences between cost, value and price. commodities typically have prices that are only marginally above costs. non-commodities, such as scholarly content, are priced on value rather than cost. software is a useful example. cost to produce initial version is low, distribution costs have shrunk, value depends on usage, price is typically higher for large institutions than small. what selden appears to be asking for is redistribution of the pricing rather than overall reduction–does that mean it is a zero sum game? i sympathize with libraries’ budget constraints, but fully expect publishers to continue to price on value and let our market system decide which publications thrive and which disappear. perhaps there is a parallel to fantasy pricing in fantasy collection development? penny ciancanelli 2010–11–06 at 8:45 am what i find striking is the way in which this issue is sidelined by central administrators at larger universities. by imposing a limit on overall library expenditures, they delegate the problem to those who have limited ability to address the problem. by this i mean the financial managers of the university cannot ‘see’ the cost drivers in the core input into the production of new knowledge. such managers blithely subcontract catering, increase the food purchasing options of undergraduates, make suppliers of paper clips compete for custom and so forth. maybe they save 10% over a couple of years in spending on what is some distance from relevant to the university’s core mission. how do we explain this? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct sticking it to instruction – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 5 nov ellie collier /10 comments sticking it to instruction made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die by chip heath & dan heath photo by flickr user houseofsims c/o by ellie collier i always feel the need to preface my praise for this book with a little background. i’ve read a slew of best sellers on behavior. i started when a friend was raving about malcolm gladwell. i picked up blink and the tipping point and read through them to join in the discussion. i was generally entertained but not particularly blown away. then i read predictably irrational in preparation for a panel with dr. ariely at ala last year. the reviews compared it to freakonomics, so i read that one too. figuring i was on a roll, i ran into sway and added it to my list. they were all quick, easy, and entertaining reads. but made to stick was the first to truly inspire me. i had to stop every couple of pages and share a passage with someone or make a note to myself about how i could apply a concept to my work. i’m not claiming that made to stick is full of revolutionary ideas. it’s not. it’s also not a librarianship book. it’s not even a teaching book. it’s a marketing book, and yet page after page i found ideas to apply in my information literacy classes and to other areas of librarianship. what made to stick does have are excellent examples across various disciplines. (it also has a nice sized font and a conversational tone that make for easy gym reading.) i would like to share some of the insights that stuck with me, and, in the process, encourage you to read outside your typical areas and think of how you can apply what you learn to your work. right now, in my personal practice, i’m focusing on my teaching and how to make my one shot presentations more effective, both with my students in the library and at conferences. the examples that dealt with teaching and the possible applications that struck me while reading are the ones that stuck with me, but there’s so much more to mine here, especially in terms of management and marketing. the heaths “wrote this book to help you make your ideas stick. by ‘stick,’ we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact – they change your audience’s opinions or behavior.” with that in mind they organized the book (and titled the chapters) around 6 major qualities of sticky ideas: simplicity unexpectedness concreteness credibility emotions stories again, none of this is revolutionary, but the examples (concreteness) and the idea clinics (sidebar thought exercises) in each chapter bring home the points. the acronym of success was a little cheesy for my taste, but as one of my reviewers pointed out, librarians love acronyms and people remember mnemonics. so if it helps you, use it. simple in the chapter on “simple” there is an excellent detailed explanation of military strategy and the importance of the commander’s intent. the commander’s intent is the one line summary of the main objective, written at the top of the document that spells out the full strategy. there follows a detailed plan for how to achieve this, but there’s also a saying, “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” the message here is to find the core of the idea. the corollary is, “no lesson plan survives contact with teenagers,” something that i can relate to in my instruction. in fact, the majority of my sessions to coworkers begin with my asking them what they hope to get out of the class. i then sketch out the details of the lesson plan on-the-fly based on their answers. i have my commander’s intent in the form of the topic of the session, but am free to rearrange the actual class time based on the learners’ needs. i am still working on how to pull this method into my one shot classes, where the students are much less likely to be there of their own volition and therefore less likely to have personal objectives for the class. made to stick stresses that making an idea simple is “about elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down.” i’ve been struggling to determine how much information to cover in my one shot sessions. my main objective that i repeat throughout my presentation is, “i don’t expect you to remember how to do all of this. i want you to remember that the librarians know it and you can always come to us with questions.” likewise when i cover evaluating web sites, i’ve cut it down to “ask yourself ‘who wrote this?'” yes, there’s much more to it, but not much more that can be covered and absorbed in such a short period of time. “people are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.” i think so many of us struggle against this curse of knowledge – having difficulty seeing what we’re trying to teach through the eyes of someone who doesn’t already know it. “as a result, we become lousy communicators.” working to make our ideas simple is probably the most challenging idea covered in the book, but certainly worth the effort. unexpected the nordstrom’s customer service training teams use a list of unexpected examples to drive home the importance of outstanding customer service. some stories of outstanding “nordies” include the salesperson who warmed the customer’s car while he finished shopping, the one who ironed a customer’s shirt so he could wear it later that day and the one who refunded a set of tire chains – even though nordstrom’s doesn’t sell tire chains. telling people something unexpected shakes them out of their standard assumptions. most people would presume to know what good customer service is, but the unexpected story of warming a customer’s car causes them to reevaluate the meaning of outstanding. this brings up another common problem in my classes: battling over-confidence. if my students assume they already know everything they need to know about doing research, why would they want to listen to me? both made to stick and one of my colleagues have suggested the same solution: engage people by having them vote publicly and commit to an answer. made to stick tells of a study of 5th and 6th graders who were assigned to interact on a topic. they were broken into two groups. one group’s conversation was lead to foster disagreement, the other group’s conversation was steered towards consensus. the group whose discussion had more disagreements was more likely to skip recess to watch a video on the topic. they were more engaged than the group that quickly came to consensus. as i reviewed this section i was reminded of a recent discussion over iclickers. one of my coworkers said that she has the students vote on whether a particular site is appropriate for college level research. after they vote she has them find someone with the opposite point of view and try to persuade them. she has them vote again after their discussion and finds that the majority have come around the the right conclusion. concrete “world class customer service” is abstract. a nordie ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete. simple and unexpected are hard and take effort. being concrete just takes remembering to do it and not slipping into the curse of knowledge. there are a number of great uses of concreteness in terms of marketing in this section. in one example the people behind hamburger helper took the abstract idea of their users and nonusers and made them into concrete detailed pictures of individuals. the hamburger helper product team had multiple binders full of data on their customers, so much that it was overwhelming. they put the binders aside and sent small groups into homes where they saw that mothers valued predictability in flavor and convenience to make. seeing the mother searching for her child’s old familiar flavor on the shelf amongst a slew of new alternatives and then preparing dinner with a child on her hip made the idea of convenience concrete. hamburger helper ended up simplifying the product line and, subsquently, increasing sales. creating a concrete, detailed description of your library’s users sounds like an excellent exercise for an all staff day or, even better, an outcome of a full blown user study. at my community college we would likely create three: the transitioning-to-a-4-year-university student, the two-year-certificate/workforce student, and the continuing education student. credible authority and celebrity are two ways to boost your credibility, but thankfully this chapter spends more time on options that are readily available to the average person. one such option is the anti-authority. take pam laffin – the 29 year old who started smoking at age 10, developed emphysema by 24, and suffered a failed lung transplant. pam became an anti-smoking spokesperson appearing in ads on mtv and dawson’s creek. using these kinds of vivid concrete details and putting things on a human scale are two alternative ways to evoke credibility. to show just how powerful details can be, the authors tell the story of a study in which jurors were deciding a custody case. the jurors were more likely to believe the defendant was a good mother if her testimony included the specific description that the boy used a darth vader toothbrush while she ensured that he brushed his teeth at night. this little detail of the type of toothbrush lent significant credibility to her testimony. one of my coworkers tells a cautionary story of the student who waited to the last minute and tried to find everything online and the one who followed the steps she was about to teach them for good research. what other ways can we bring instruction out of the abstract, into the specific and human? one of the most applicable ideas in this section is that of testable credentials. the book gives two great examples of this. first is ronald reagan asking the american public in his 1980 presidential debate, “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” the second example is taken from a workshop held by the positive coaching alliance. the trainers “use the analogy of an ‘emotional tank’ to get coaches to think about the right ratio of praise, support and critical feedback.” they ask the coaches to say something to drain a player’s tank after he has flubbed a key play. the coaches excel at this. when they are asked to fill the tank the room goes silent. “observing their own behavior, the coaches learn the lesson – how they found it easier to criticize than to support, to think of ten clever insults rather than a single consolation. [they] found a way to transform [their] point into a testable credential, something the coaches could experience for themselves.” i know that my instruction could benefit from relying less on the authority and lecture angle. it’s a hard habit to break, especially since the lecture style is my personal preferred learning method, but i also see the need to foster increased critical thinking skills, allowing students to reason through more lessons on their own. emotional this was my favorite chapter. getting people to believe you is only one step in changing minds. to take action, they have to care. there are a number of incredibly compelling stories in this chapter. there’s the effectiveness of charity on a human scale (sponsoring a child rather than giving to the general cause) summed up by the quote from mother teresa, “if i look at the mass, i will never act. if i look at the one, i will.” and there’s the success of the truth cigarette campaign, which tapped into anti authoritarianism. the authors also remind us not to overlook self interest – what’s in it for you? they discuss maslow’s pyramid and comment that most self interest appeals invoke the physical, security, and esteem layers. we need to come out of maslow’s basement. the shining example of this is the military mess hall operator who deemed himself in charge of morale (transendence on maslow’s pyramid). he has soldiers that commute in from the well-protected americanized areas just for sunday dinner. we tend to realize higher level appeals work on us, but then assume we need to appeal to the base needs of others. this chapter also has an excellent idea clinic on the need for algebra. it begins with the question “why study algebra?” and a typical conference answer suffering from the curse of knowledge which includes gems like “algebra provides procedures for manipulating symbols to allow for understanding the world around us.” the following slightly better example has things like, you need it to get your diploma, it will help you with reasoning skills, etc. but then the winner: “this is a response from a high school algebra teacher, dean sherman, to an internet discussion of this topic among high school teachers: my grade 9 students have difficulty appreciating the usefulness of the standard form of the equation of a line, prompting them to ask, “when are we ever going to need this?” this question used to really bother me, and i would look, as a result, for justification for everything i taught. now i say, “never. you will never use this.” i then go on to remind them that people don’t lift weights so that they will be prepared should, one day, [someone] knock them over on the street and lay a barbell across their chests. you lift weights so that you can knock over a defensive lineman, or carry your groceries or lift your grandchildren without being sore the next day. you do math exercises so that you can improve your ability to think logically, so that you can be a better lawyer, doctor, architect, prison warden or parent. math is mental weight training. it is a means to an end (for most people), and not an end in itself.” stories stories “provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). note that both benefits, simulation and inspiration, are geared towards generating action … we’ve seen that a credible idea makes people believe. an emotional idea makes people care …the right stories make people act.” there are a number of great stories in this section, but the most important aspect for me was the emphasis on the art of spotting – not making up – these stories. we encounter inspiring stories all the time. i know that a number of libraries collect these stories from their patrons and put them on their web sites. this section has ideas on how to spot ones that are most likely to inspire others to action. i will be looking for ways to incorporate more stories into my instruction, but i think the real strength here would be in promoting libraries to our communities at large. i hope that i’ve inspired you to pick up a copy of made to stick, read through it yourself and look for ways to apply some of the ideas it explains. the ideas from made to stick are also a good example of how reading outside the library literature can help us expand our practice without reinventing the wheel. there are so many options. you can start with the straight one to one correlation. interested in marketing in your library? read general marketing content. same goes for management, teaching, presenting, etc. also consider going to primary sources. watch good presentations and think about what was good about them. swap out “presentations” for “managers” or “teachers” and do it again. i’m also including a list of suggestions for further reading, mostly on presenting, that i’ve found inspiring recently. if you have suggestions to add to the list that have inspired you or ways you’ve incorporated some of these ideas, please let me know in the comments. suggestions for further reading: authors@google: garr reynolds – “encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations” financial crisis simplified (a whiteboard presentation) – an example of a great concrete analogy book recommendation: letting go of the words – a book on designing for web content, useful for our websites, but also for presentations ted talks – a collection of amazing and inspiring speakers many thanks to derik badman, char booth, and gretchen keer for their feedback and edits. book review, information literacy, instruction, made to stick pro-con-ference swings and roundabouts 10 responses emily 2008–11–05 at 4:19 pm interesting thoughts! me, i’m totally pro-reading outside the literature. right now i’m reading a lot of basic writing literature. did you know (i say in a tone of self-mocking incredulity) that there’s a whole universe of critically engaged theory and practical guidance about how to teach concrete writing skills to basic writers? and that some of that theory/practice applies to my research skills instruction to that same subset of students? the added advantage of reading this kind of stuff is that it gives me some credibility when i talk to faculty. i’m reading what they read and write, and that helps make me legible to them as part of the same instructional community. which means, i hope, in the long run, that they’ll bring some classes in. also! speaking of credibilty! i find it helps me look like a credible ‘fellow scholar’ (which is how i try to cast myself and my students in the classroom) to take seriously the way these beginning scholars do their own research. they google first. frankly, so do i. and admitting that upfront actually seems to capture their attention. maybe i’m relevant after all, i think they think! red wassenich 2008–11–06 at 12:42 pm very nice, ellie. i echo the importance of looking outside library lit. (who can stand to read most of it in the first place?) i know it’s hard to do financially but attending nonlibrarian academic conferences has helped me. one on critical thinking radically changed me. http://www.criticalthinking.org/conference/index.cfm also the league for innovation in the community college conferences were all good. they emphasis techie stuff more than teaching but it was a bunch of smart people doing interesting things. http://www.league.org/ ellie 2008–11–10 at 1:30 pm thanks guys. and thanks red for pointing out those conferences. i just went to a psychology conference this weekend and it was a very interesting experience, and definitely gave me insight into early childhood development (one of my collection areas). brett bonfield 2008–11–10 at 4:31 pm i decided a few days ago to read made to stick before commenting on this piece. actually, i decided to read made to stick even before i read ellie’s review. last week was a busy one at my place of work–a small, independent library in a boxy, brick, 70’s building. we got approval to buy 12 new computers and we had to move half our collection to make space for them. have you ever moved a few thousand books in two days? remember the bruised thumbs, numb biceps, and constant sneezing? so that’s why i decided, after reading ellie’s opening paragraph, to put off reading her piece until the weekend–i was just too busy last week even to read a short book review. and then, on friday, i decided that, before reading her review, i would read the book first. why, if i was too busy to read a 15-paragraph review, would i decide to read a 300-page book? think about that. have you ever made that kind of decision? “i’m not exercising at all. why don’t i run a marathon next fall?” personally, i made this decision for six reasons: 1. kim’s piece had a simple but profound message: we should be familiar with a topic before we comment on it. 2. i unexpectedly happened on the book while i was moving our nonfiction section. kismet! 3. ellie’s image for the piece–that duct-tape man–must have established a concrete image in my mind, because when i moved an orange book that appeared to have duct tape stuck to it, i knew immediately that i’d found made to stick. 4. everyone involved dan ariely’s presentation was great, but she was the one who came up with questions for him that the rest of us, as her fellow panelists, ended up borrowing from her. that’s credibility. 5. okay, i’ll admit it: emotionally, i have an overwhelming desire to be the kind of person who reads books before commenting on reviews of that book. i’ve come to think of that desire as my inner librarian. 6. ellie’s story in the opening paragraph stuck with me, in that i got sucked into the same books in much the same way. if i hadn’t unexpectedly run across the book in our collection i may have finished reading her review before i read the book, but a) i suspect that i still wouldn’t have commented on her review without reading the book first, and b) coming across the book, and having identified with her story, i knew i had to read the book prior to finishing the review. so that’s how ellie’s opening paragraph helped spur me into action. it made me want to read the book, and it prepared me to comment on her review–which, i think, was excellent: she skillfully conveys the authors’ message and accompanying anecdotes. reading her review isn’t the same thing as reading the book, but it’s the next best thing. thanks, ellie, for the review, recommendation, and reminder to read outside the field. pingback : out of maslow’s basement « ce buzz pingback : duct tape: a light side and a dark side, and it binds the galaxy together « librarians with class robert l. 2008–12–09 at 10:30 am great review, thanks. i’ll use some of this in my classes and look up the book as well. pingback : it’s the collections that are special | in the library with the lead pipe pingback : ala 2009 – closing the gap: making information literacy seamless across k-16 « ellie <3 libraries dean 2011–11–20 at 8:11 pm thanks for the shout-out! (that) dean sherman this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct how well are you doing your job? you don’t know. no one does. – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 7 may brett bonfield /8 comments how well are you doing your job? you don’t know. no one does. “unsorted books make librarians sad” photo by flickr user quinn dombrowski (cc-by-sa 2.0) in brief: the outputs librarians are measuring are not directly associated with specific practices that lead to improved lives for the people we serve. if we cannot make that connection, we have no way of knowing how well we are doing our jobs. this article suggests four measurable outcomes that libraries and librarians could use to make sure their activities are improving their constituents’ well-being, and also use in comparing their effectiveness with each other, allowing less effective libraries to learn from libraries that are achieving greater levels of success. by brett bonfield how well are you, as a librarian, doing your job? that’s what i ask myself every day. but to answer that question, we have to answer another one first, “what is a library?” i think of a library as a cooperative for infrequently needed, relatively inexpensive, durable goods. this description captures the traditional view of libraries. for most people, an individual item like a library book, dvd, or cd is infrequently needed and relatively inexpensive to replace if it’s lost or broken. these items are also durable, in the sense that dozens of your neighbors, students, faculty, or colleagues can make use of them before they wear out. facts or other pieces of information we acquire the right to access, organize, and teach others to find and use are also infrequently needed, relatively inexpensive, and durable. the same applies to ebooks and individual sessions at a shared computer, so in my opinion bibliotech, the “library without books” in san antonio that’s been grabbing headlines, is a traditional library. as are libraries that lend seeds, cake pans, and tools. the book remains libraries’ best known brand, and as brands go it’s a wonderful object with which to be associated, but libraries are more than book warehouses. like many cooperatives, libraries employ people whose job it is to make sure its operations run smoothly and its members receive high quality service. and, like other cooperatives, programming and education are central to what libraries do: the international co-operative alliance includes “education, training and information” among its seven principles. libraries and other cooperatives don’t just provide less expensive access to goods or services, we also provide programs that enable people to understand how to use those goods or services, place them into context, enjoy them more, and interact with others who share similar interests. the international co-operative alliance’s other six principles apply to us as well: we have voluntary and open membership; we are accountable to our members; our members contribute equitably to our capital; we are autonomous; libraries cooperate with each other; and we  work for the sustainable development of our communities. that’s what a library is. what should it do? improving our constituents’ well-being libraries are responsible, like every publicly funded agency, for increasing our constituents’ overall well-being. even if the library where you work receives no public funding, you still, like those of us in the public sector, have a moral and fiduciary responsibility to your colleagues, students, or anyone else who funds your ongoing employment and who relies on you to provide services that have the potential to make their life better, their studies richer, or their time at work more productive. it’s our job to complement other public and private services by making experiences and opportunities available that are more difficult or expensive to access in other ways. it’s our job to improve our constituents’ well-being in ways that make sense economically. to this point in the article, i’ve discussed libraries in general. from this point forward, i’ll only discuss libraries and other agencies in the united states, and i’ll mostly discuss public libraries. the principles i’ll discuss are borrowed from agencies other than libraries, and much as i adapt these principles to american public libraries, i think it’s possible for readers to adapt these processes and suggestions to other types of american libraries, or to any type of library anywhere in the world. though i would like to make more specific suggestions, some factors, such as funding models or cultural expectations, vary enough that accounting for everything is impossible for any single author: the data takes so long to gather and analyze that it changes before the process can be completed. but i think the general ideas i discuss in this article are universal. measuring our success it’s librarians’ job to improve our constituents’ well-being. the report by the commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress defines “well-being” across eight dimensions that “should be considered simultaneously”: material living standards (income, consumption and wealth); health; education; personal activities including work; political voice and governance; social connections and relationships; environment (present and future conditions); insecurity, of an economic as well as a physical nature. (stiglitz, sen, & fitoussi, 2009, pp. 14-15) as is stated in its name, this 292-page report discusses the reasons for measuring well-being, both objective and subjective (p. 15), as well as methods that researchers can use to accomplish these tasks. an alternative way to describe this general concept, within the library context, is “impact”. an iso standard released on april 10, 2014, information and documentation—methods and procedures for assessing the impact of libraries, defines impact as “difference or change in an individual or group resulting from the contact with library services,” and notes that “(t)he change can be tangible or intangible” (iso 16439:2014). examples of impact on individuals could include “changes in skills and competences; changes in attitudes and behaviour; higher success in research, study or career; and increase of individual well-being” by which they seem to mean subjective well-being, while examples of impact on society could include “social inclusion; free access to information; options of education and life-long learning; local culture and identity; and better health care” (poll, 2012, pp. 124-125). i prefer the term “well-being” because (1) i value its association with the report by the commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress and other complementary scholarship, (2) it has more clearly articulated metrics associated with its measurement, (3) i think it’s more elegant to combine individuals and society when establishing appropriate metrics for libraries, and (4) i prefer to write that “our goal is improving or increasing our constituents’ well being” to writing that “our goal is to have a greater impact on our constituents.”1 though regardless of how we state it, this seems like a worthwhile goal. the more important questions deal with how we should measure our success. libraries currently measure the outputs required by imls or arl, such as library visits, the number of items that get checked out or accessed in other ways, the number of people who attend our programs, the number of people a library employs (and how much it pays them), or the amount a library spends on acquisitions. these are important to know, as are other, more sophisticated outputs, such as user satisfaction (as measured by projects such as libqual+), public perception (as reported by organizations like pew and oclc), or observational studies on how people actually use the library, such as a study conducted by the public library of cincinnati and hamilton county. these are all outputs, measures of the stuff we do, buy, or produce, including the subjective reactions we elicit or the behaviors we encourage. they are not outcomes, which are objective measures of the the difference we make in our constituents’ lives.2 as the philosopher john rawls wrote in 1971, “it is irrational to advance one end rather than another simply because it can be more accurately estimated.” but that is exactly what libraries are doing. we measure the number of people who walk into the building and the number of books they take with them when they leave, rather than the difference the library and the books are making in their lives. we measure how many sessions we teach or how satisfied our students are with our services, rather than our contributions to who they become after graduation. of course we need to continue to measure our outputs; if we were not doing it already, this article would be about the need to start. my point is not that we should stop measuring our outputs, but that we should begin measuring our outcomes and adjust our priorities accordingly. comparing ourselves to other public agencies the difference between outputs and outcomes, and the process and value of measuring outcomes, can be easier to appreciate if we look at other types of agencies. for instance, in healthcare, we see measures of quality of care or of overall community or population health replacing tallies of the number of operations performed or the percentage of hospital beds occupied. medicare’s hospital compare program includes measures of readmissions, complications, and deaths, as well as pain, addressing four of the most important patient outcomes. accountable care organizations, which are reported to serve 17% of americans, “get paid more for keeping their patients healthy and out of the hospital.” similarly, in evaluating police practices, we see measures of effectiveness that reflect a reduction in criminal behavior, rather than an output, such as an increase in the number of patrol hours or arrests. and in k-12 education, rather than relying solely on outputs like graduation rates, a blueprint for reform: the reauthorization of the elementary and secondary education act proposes to “support the development and use of a new generation of assessments that are aligned with collegeand career-ready standards, to better determine whether students have acquired the skills they need for success.” in other words, “a blueprint for reform,” suggests that it is possible to create a definition or definitions for success, work backward from that definition to identify the skills that lead to it, and then create assessments that measure those skills. even studies on pre-k programs are linked to outcomes, such as studies on the brookline early education project (beep), the carolina abecedarian project, and the perry preschool program in which longitudinal studies demonstrate measurable improvements in well-being. as one report states, “why did urban beepers surpass their peers in educational achievement and income as well as in physical and mental health? the executive skills participants had acquired in their earliest years of schooling … were applicable to non-school tasks and gave these young adults distinct advantages when they became responsible for their own lives….” (carnegie, 2006, p. 11). these other publicly funded agencies establish goals whose outcomes result in increases in our overall health, our safety, our success, or our life choices. they create measures that seem likely to be associated with these goals, conduct studies to assess their hypotheses, and use the information they collect to change their practices in ways that seem likely to improve their constituents’ well-being. i believe libraries could do the same thing. there are numerous studies about libraries that discuss outcomes: the output vs. outcome distinction is too important for librarians to have missed. unfortunately, these studies do not acknowledge that individual librarians or even individual libraries make choices that differ from those of their peers, and that these decisions cause some librarians and libraries to outperform their peers in specific ways and lag them in others. they create a fictional world in which we are the same, when we are actually autonomous agencies that vary a great deal. by promulgating this fiction, we lose the ability to identify the most effective practices within our profession, which denies the least effective among us the opportunity to follow their lead. the case for aggregating our results, aside from the fact that it is easier to accomplish, is that it creates a simpler narrative when we discuss the intrinsic value of a library or librarian, or wish to argue that more funding for libraries is associated with desirable outcomes. this is a trait the reports on aggregated outcome measures share with the reports on return on investment (roi) that have been collected on the ala website. these roi reports were assembled by consultants and intended for lobbyists to use in meeting with politicians: their implicit assumption is that every library is like a citizen of lake wobegon: strong, good looking, and above average. we can believe in libraries and in the work we do, and still acknowledge that all of us are comparatively strong in some areas and comparatively weak in others. practitioners of other publicly funded professions have accepted this fact and it has led to improved efficiency and more desirable outcomes as the practices that produce better results are identified and disseminated. “you mean, what do we tell other people?” in addition to conducting solitary research, i also consistently ask these questions in discussions with other librarians: “what’s the best way to measure how you’re making your constituents’ lives better? or, in other words, how do you know how well you’re doing your job?” the taiga forum, an assembly of associate university librarians, has open meetings at ala conferences. i like to attend these meetings, and follow taiga’s work, because they are fond of asking difficult or controversial questions. because i am not an aul, i have always kept quiet at taiga meetings, but at ala midwinter in january 2014, i asked them my question: “how do you know you’re doing your job well?” “you mean, what do we tell other people?” asked one of taiga’s conveners. “or do you mean, what do we tell ourselves at night when we’re sitting quietly with our thoughts?” the taiga members discussed this question, but no one had a particularly satisfying response they could use to reassure themselves when they were sitting quietly with their thoughts. there was general consensus that the university of minnesota libraries seemed to be on the right track with its library data and student success project, as well as some enthusiasm for megan oakleaf’s report for acrl, value of academic libraries.3 i agree that um’s libraries appear to be on the right track, but i also think there’s a big difference between its scope and initial inquiries, including measures of pass/fail rates, grades, gpa, retention, and library use, and the kinds of outcomes that are used as goals in health care, public safety, k-12 education, and preschool. i have similar optimism, but also similar reservations, about two new bill and melinda gates foundation-funded projects, the edge initiative and the impact survey. neither appears likely to produce immediate answers, but both appear to be potentially useful tools in enabling outcomes-based assessment by collecting data that could be used to test hypotheses and adjust our decisions and practices accordingly. four responses to the question: why aren’t libraries already measuring outcomes? the same question arises every time i bring up this topic with my colleagues in other libraries: “how could libraries ever know we’re increasing well-being?” once again, it’s useful to answer another question first: “why aren’t libraries already measuring outcomes?” because if you want to start doing something, it’s useful to know why it isn’t happening already. i have encountered four answers to this question, and i want to address each of them individually: (1) we are measuring outcomes, though with very little precision; (2) it’s too expensive to conduct the kinds of studies that are taking place in health care and education; (3) we would study outcomes if anyone other than libraries cared; (4) it’s impossible to measure libraries’ outcomes. 1. we are i agree that libraries likely are doing some very limited, unscientific planning based on the well-being we help to promote for our constituents. librarians are smart, educated, hard-working people who have elected to work in a service profession. i think we pay attention to the feedback we get from interacting with and observing the people who use the library, and we react to the needs we perceive within the communities we serve. but the cultural shifts within a profession and the evolution of its practices can be inexact and are often misguided. librarians are prone to all of the same cognitive biases as other people. over time, we’re likely trending toward optimizing libraries to enhance well-being among the people who rely on our services, but that’s not science, and it’s not a satisfactory way to fulfill our obligations. 2. it’s expensive of course, science is expensive. healthcare has plenty of money to spend on assessment: the us spends almost 18% of its gross domestic product on healthcare. education also has greater capacity to spend money, since that’s where over 5% of us gdp is spent. public libraries have significantly less money than either: the equivalent of about 2% of the amount of money that federal, state, and municipal governments allocate to k-12 public schools in the us is spent on public libraries.4 the fact that so little is spent on libraries, compared to other public agencies, tends to reduce the amount of scrutiny for libraries. the amount of work necessary to cut library funding for any given dollar figure may not create enough incentive for elected officials to deal with the political or social backlash, given that an equivalent amount of savings might be realized by reducing other public services’ budgets by a much lower percentage. 3. no one cares this does not mean that no one cares, or that libraries will forever be relatively insulated from the level of scrutiny and the types of questions that other publicly funded services have encountered. the government and insurers have been significant factors in forcing healthcare providers to focus on outcomes, and the government has also forced educators to focus on outcomes, despite their objections. at this point, libraries may be the largest recipient of public funding that has yet to identify relevant outcomes, or develop coherent models and methods for assessing our efficiency in improving our constituents’ well-being. i believe we’re next, that it’s just a matter of time, and if we don’t do this work ourselves that it will be done for us by people who don’t appreciate our mission and our work as much as we do. 4. it’s impossible i do not think assessing our performance in enhancing our constituents’ well-being is impossible, nor do i think it has to be particularly expensive, especially if libraries work together. as hugh rundle points out in “what we talk about when we talk about public libraries,” “there is no incentive to produce research and no sanction for failing to do so…. “ this leads to a “positive feedback loop” in which the absence of useful research on public libraries provides little incentive for librarians who work at public libraries to read or contribute to our professional literature. it becomes easier not to question what we think is best when we are rarely, if ever, confronted with those questions. one of the issues educators faced during the recent widespread introduction of standardized testing that accompanied “no child left behind” was the insistence by many teachers that it was impossible to evaluate their performance. they stated, correctly, that every situation is different. what i think many failed to appreciate is that statisticians can correct for these differences, and can do it with a great deal of precision, if they have relevant, accurate data. the national education association’s official position supports collecting relevant, accurate data —”we must replace the cheap, flawed standardized tests now used with second-generation assessment systems that (1) provide students with multiple ways to show what they have learned over time and (2) provide educators with valid data to improve instruction and enhance support for students.”— but it doesn’t offer a specific, affordable, better alternative than those cheap, flawed tests. educators found themselves in a defensive position, in part, because they were forced to issue critiques, rather than alternatives, when they failed to anticipate us politicians’ willingness to enact standards, whether the teachers supported them or not. i don’t want to see this happen to libraries as well. measurable ways of assessing libraries’ contributions to our constituents’ well-being i’ve identified the reasons we are not yet measuring outcomes, and i think the reasons are honest, but they are not valid excuses. that’s an important distinction: honest reasons vs. valid excuses. you can have perfectly honest reasons for not doing something and still fail to have a valid excuse for not taking an important action. here’s an example: the media and the political polling organizations had reasons for not predicting elections accurately, but, as nate silver demonstrated, their reasons were not valid excuses. the data was there, it just had to be associated with the outcome that best served our overall well-being: accurate forecasts. speaking of voting… voting part of andrew carnegie’s motivation for providing the seed funding that brought public libraries to thousands of towns and cities in america and around the world was, as characterized recently by the carnegie corporation, “to promote democracy through access to knowledge.” libraries often invoke this idea, but i have never seen it measured, even though measuring participation in democracy, at least in a relatively crude form, is simple. are the people in the area your library serves voting? that’s the basic form of the research question. and the basic form of the question leads naturally to somewhat more sophisticated versions of the question: are people voting more than we would expect them to based on the demographic or other factors that contribute to how frequently people typically vote? how frequently are they voting in different types of elections, such as local, state, or national? are they voting more or less in your service area than they are in comparable areas? taking this to the next level, libraries could research what motivates people to vote and how they feel after they do. are there emotional factors that go into the decision to vote? are people who are more educated on the issues more likely to vote? do they vote if they know more about the candidates? do they vote more if they know more of the people in their community? finally, libraries can investigate what they can do to promote participation in democracy. maybe people with library cards are more likely to vote. or people who attend programs at the library, regardless of the topic. or if they know at least one librarian by name, or if at least one librarian knows their name, because that makes them feel more connected to the services they receive.5 maybe people who belong to community groups that meet at the library are more likely to vote. there are dozens of reasonable hypotheses. we could associate our practices with the many polls conducted to determine how informed voters are about various issues. or measure grassroots involvement or other ways in which people get involved in politics or political issues. if we decide we want to find evidence that libraries are capable of literally “promoting democracy,” we can do it. and if we want to increase participation in democracy by finding ways that our services can increase the elements of well-being that are associated with voting, i believe we’re capable of doing that as well. literacies we already know that improving people’s literacy is associated with both objective and subjective improvements in well-being. libraries, because of their association with books and reading are already associated with literacy as well. what i have not yet seen are the kinds of objective measures for literacy rates that i’m proposing for voting rates. we say all the time that libraries promote literacy, and it appears to be true, but by how much? which libraries are doing it best? and how can the rest of us learn from them? measuring literacy is expensive, but the cost is hardly prohibitive, especially if we work together to fund baseline testing. nces has already worked, if somewhat erratically, at estimating literacy at the state and county level. we can gather more accurate, more granular data, and then we can begin to assess and adjust our programs accordingly. we can also use our data to make accurate connections between our services and advances in well-being within the communities we serve. while we’re at it, we should also evaluate our contributions to other kinds of literacies, such as numeracy, information literacy, health literacy, and cultural literacy. we can evaluate how increases in different kinds of literacy affect people’s lives, and also test for improvements. some of these tests already exist, such as the ets iskills test. purchasing this specific test for widespread assessment may not be feasible, either at the scale we would need or based on the price ets may demand, but the fact that this test exists proves that it’s possible to evaluate an enormous number of people within a short amount of time. and the fact that it’s possible, and that it would help guide our decisions toward producing demonstrably meaningful outcomes for our constituents, leads me to hope we will start using this kind of method in the near future. perhaps one path toward that future is los angeles public library’s career online high school program. this program seems likely to increase well-being among lapl’s constituents by increasing multiple literacies. it is also a technology that could be used, in the future, to measure the improvements in their well-being that accompany those literacies. employment employment figures are both difficult to measure and in widespread use. the bureau of labor statistics releases monthly unemployment figures for the entire usa. what libraries need is a way to come up with similar estimates for the constituencies we serve. we then need to figure out what we can do to reduce our figures, by demonstrating either that libraries are capable of introducing specific programs or that doing a particularly good job at existing library programs will lead directly to reduced unemployment. again, the key is differentiating library services not only from similar services offered by other agencies, but differentiating one library’s expected and actual performance from comparable libraries’ performance. we also want to provide similar evidence for our ability to reduce under-employment, or improving income trajectories, or reducing the duration of unemployment when people are laid off, or helping people find jobs they like, or helping people start their own companies. there are dozens of ways for libraries to demonstrate their value to people who wish to find jobs. we need an understanding of where the people in our community are, where they would be expected to be, and the effect our services have on improving their objective and subjective well-being. social capital if i could only pick one area for libraries to research, social capital would be it. numerous disciplines are researching social capital—it’s “hot”—which is a good thing, because it means there’s funding out there for advancing knowledge of social capital, and there are also plenty of opportunities out there for collaborations, i.e., learning what we need to know without having to do all the research or acquire all the necessary funding on our own. though i’m most excited about social capital because i think it’s the best fit i have encountered for explaining the value of all libraries everywhere. the idea behind social capital is that interpersonal contacts affect our objective and subjective well-being. for the duration of our existence, libraries have helped increase the number and quality of our constituents’ contacts, and in our “bowling alone” contemporary culture, the need for libraries to play this role appears to be increasing. library programs can improve social capital directly by creating opportunities for people to get to know their neighbors.6 we can also improve social capital by helping people learn more about the topics that others are discussing. when people who don’t have high-speed internet connections at home or who aren’t comfortable enough to use computers without assistance come to the library, they learn about the things their neighbors are discussing. when they play the latest game or watch the latest movie or read the latest book or listen to songs they might not hear otherwise, they can become part of the conversation.7 once again, there are dozens of ways we can demonstrate our contributions to increasing social capital. perhaps, in this instance, hundreds or thousands. it’s an enormous, rich area for research, and some scholars who are interested in both social capital and libraries have begun making connections between the two. my hope is to see them create testable hypotheses, determine which libraries are providing demonstrably greater value to our constituents, isolate the practices that are producing the best results, and help us share our most successful techniques with each other. conclusion: we can do this the easier way… the examples i’ve given are not intended to be comprehensive. i feel certain the good ideas i have not identified far outnumber the ideas i’ve described. could the many libraries that participate in the united states department of agriculture’s summer food service program pair it with other library-based programs to produce dramatically life-changing results? could we welcome the homeless into libraries in ways that produce measurable improvements in the well-being of some of the most vulnerable members of our community? the point i’m trying to make is that what you measure tends to drive what you focus on improving. right now, what we are measuring is not directly associated with specific practices that lead to improved lives for the people we serve, and if we cannot make that connection scientifically, we have no way of knowing how well we are doing our jobs, or even if we’re doing our jobs well at all. the international co-operative alliance defines a cooperative as “an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.” many us public libraries were brought into being by a vote, can only be dissolved by a vote, and rely on voters, either directly or indirectly, for their funding and their governance. these voters (along with their non-voting children, parents, and neighbors) trust us to help them meet their economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations. we owe it to them to know how well we are doing. i am heartened that librarians are creating conferences about assessment, writing articles about evidence-based library practices, and, most notably at the public library of cincinnati and hamilton county, using data collection and analysis as the basis for all of their strategic thinking. what i haven’t yet seen is libraries deciding which aspects of well-being they wish to promote, and then working backwards from those goals to figure out how they should allocate their resources. fortunately, there seems to be some willingness within libraries to begin catching up to our colleagues in other public services. the president of the public library association, carolyn anthony, has written about the importance of “new measures for a new era” and created a three-year charge for a performance measurement task force. i hope they will spend those three years identifying appropriate outcomes to which we could make a meaningful contribution and to measuring our degree of participation in helping our constituents achieve them. i’m optimistic because i like what carolyn anthony has written and the composition of the task force she has appointed. i’m also pleased that the gates foundation appears to be interested in funding the kinds of outcome-based studies on libraries that it has funded in other areas, most notably global health.8 and, despite my misgivings about some of its terminology, i am excited about the possibility that iso 11639:2014—methods and procedures for assessing the impact of libraries could establish useful ways for similar libraries to compare their “impact.” but i’m also fearful, because we may be racing against the clock. if we don’t agree on outcomes and ways to measure them, and we don’t quickly and voluntarily begin working together, i suspect that others will mandate assessment measures for us, even if those measures do not represent our values or our understanding of how we might best serve our constituents. thanks to paula brehm-heeger and to my in the library with the lead pipe colleague, gretchen kolderup, for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. thanks, too, to all the librarians and non-librarians who have discussed this topic with me in person or online. in particular, i want to thank the lis faculty members at rutgers university whose classes advanced my understanding of library research in general, and this topic in particular: marie radford, marija dalbello, dan o’connor, ross todd, and betty turock and gus friedrich. references and further reading braun, l.w., hartman, m.l., hughes-hassell, s., kumasi, k., and yoke, b. (2014). the future of library services for and with teens: a call to action. national forum on teens & libraries. accessed from  http://www.ala.org/yaforum/sites/ala.org.yaforum/files/content/yalsa_nationalforum_final.pdf carnegie corporation of new york. (2006). why preschool pays off: a breakthrough study links early education to better life choices. carnegie results, summer. accessed from http://carnegie.org/fileadmin/media/publications/pdf/summer_06_results.pdf durrance, j. c., & fisher-pettigrew, k. e. (2002). toward developing measures of the impact of library and information services. reference & user services quarterly, 42(1), 43. gawande, a. (june 1, 2009). the cost conundrum. the new yorker, 36. accessed from http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande?currentpage=all holt, g. e., & elliott, d. (2003). measuring outcomes: applying cost-benefit analysis to middle-sized and smaller public libraries. library trends, 51(3), 424. holt, l. (2007). how to succeed at public library service: using outcome planning. public library quarterly, 26(3/4), 109-118. doi:10.1300/jll8v26n03_06 huysmans, f., & oomes, m. (2013). measuring the public library’s societal value: a methodological research program. ifla journal, 39(2), 168-177. doi:10.1177/0340035213486412 institute of museum and library services. (n.d.). lib-value: value, outcome and return on investment of academic libraries. accessed from: http://libvalue.cci.utk.edu/ iso (2014). iso 16439:2014—information and documentation—methods and procedures for assessing the impact of libraries. geneva: iso. johnson, c. a. (2010). do public libraries contribute to social capital: a preliminary investigation into the relationship. library & information science research, 32(2), 147-155. doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2009.12.006 kennedy, d. m. (2009). deterrence and crime prevention: reconsidering the prospect of sanction. new york: routledge. kyrillidou, m. (2002). from input and output measures to quality and outcome measures, or, from the user in the life of the library to the library in the life of the user. journal of academic librarianship, 28(1/2), 42. library research service. (n.d.). school libraries impact studies. retrieved from: http://www.lrs.org/data-tools/school-libraries/impact-studies/ lown, c., & davis, h. (2009). are you worth it? what return on investment can and can’t tell you about your library. in the library with the lead pipe. accessed from:  https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/are-you-worth-it-what-return-on-investment/ organisation for economic co-operation and development. (2013). oecd guidelines on measuring subjective well-being. paris: oecd. poll, r. (2003). impact/outcome measures for libraries. liber quarterly: the journal of european research libraries, 13(1-4), 329-342. poll, r. (2012). can we quantify the library’s influence? creating an iso standard for impact assessment. performance measurement and metrics, 13(2), 121-130. poll, r., & boekhorst, p. (2007). measuring quality: performance measurement in libraries. münchen: k.g. saur. rankin, c. (2012). the potential of generic social outcomes in promoting the positive impact of the public library: evidence from the national year of reading in yorkshire. evidence based library and information practice, 7(1), 7-21. retrieved from https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/eblip/article/view/11727/13685 rawls, j. (1971). a theory of justice. cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press. rooney-browne, c. (2011). methods for demonstrating the value of public libraries in the uk: a literature review. library & information research, 35(109), 3-39. spinks, a. (2009). library media programs and student achievement. accessed from: http://www.cobbk12.org/librarymedia/proof/research.pdf stiglitz, j. e., sen, a., & fitoussi, j.-p. (2009). report by the commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress. paris: the commission. swan, d. w., miller, k. a., craig, t., dorinski, s., freeman, m., isaac, n., … , jennifer scotto, j. (2011). public libraries in the united states: fiscal year 2009. washington, dc: institute of museum and library services. available from: https://harvester.census.gov/imls/pubs/pls/pub_detail.asp?id=140 u.s. census bureau. (2011a). public education finances:2009. washington, dc. accessed      from: http://www.census.gov/govs/school/ u.s. census bureau. (2011b). state and local government finances summary: 2009. washington, dc. accessed from: http://www2.census.gov/govs/estimate/09_summary_report.pdf vårheim, a. (2008). theoretical approaches on public libraries as places creating social capital. ifla conference proceedings, 1-13. weil, s. e., rudd, p. d., & institute of museum and library services (u.s.). (2000). perspectives on outcome based evaluation for libraries and museums. washington, dc: institute of museum and library services. having “an impact on” people seems to put them into a passive position, and seems to imply the violence of condescension as well as physical threat. [↩] not all outcomes are positive; there can be negative outcomes. and while there may be positive outcomes that would not be considered improvements in well-being, i am not aware of them. [↩] edit: thanks to megan oakleaf for pointing out the public libraries section in this report. she does a very good job of summarizing several different approaches to valuing public libraries. [↩] us government expenditures: public libraries & public schools (k-12) libraries schools percentage federal exp. 46,868,000(1) 55,900,112,000(2)** 0.08% state exp. 481,579,000(3)* 276,153,850,000(2)** 0.17% local exp. 10,896,002,000(3)* 258,893,617,000(2)** 4.21% total exp. 11,424,593,261 590,994,447,000 1.93% * u.s. census bureau, 2011b. the institute of museum and library services (imls) collects self-reported data from libraries. in 2009, the imls reports that libraries received $873,327,000 in state funding and $9,757,162,000 in local funding. ** data is from u.s. census bureau, 2011a, which includes data for federal, state, and local expenditures. u.s. census bureau, 2011b, reports $9,876,299,000 in state expenditures and $637,062,012,000 in local expenditures; these latter figures include capital outlays, which account for 16% of state expenditures and 11% of local expenditures. sources: swan et al., 2011 (1); u.s. census bureau, 2011a (2) and 2011b (3). [↩] i’m using the term “librarian” in the vernacular, to connote anyone who works in a library. as i wrote previously, i “use the word to describe anyone who works in a library, anyone who works specifically or primarily for the benefit of libraries, or anyone who has a degree in librarianship. many of the best librarians i’ve met don’t (or don’t yet) have library degrees, don’t work solely for libraries, or aren’t employed by libraries directly. librarians are people whose work benefits library users, and i think of the best librarians as the people whose work provides these users with the greatest benefit.” [↩] see also: my suggestion in the section on voting about knowing one another’s names [↩] see also, “what happens in the library…” and “what we talk about when we talk about brangelina“ [↩] edit: bad timing on my part: the gates foundation announced a few hours after i published this article that it will end its global libraries program over the next 3-5 years. [↩] assessment, effectiveness, evaluation, impact, measurement, outcomes, outputs, performance, public libraries, roi, value librarian, heal thyself: a scholarly communication analysis of lis journals who are you empowering? 8 responses paula brehm heeger 2014–05–07 at 10:11 am as usual, lots of great food for thought from brett. i hope other professionals will take up the call for finding ways to measure and codify public libraries impact through outcome measurement. looking forward to reading more on this subject. brett bonfield 2014–05–09 at 11:12 am thanks, paula, for this comment and for making the article much better than it would have been without your critique and recommendations. in this article, i link to the award-winning article that paula co-authored with her colleague, greg edwards. i encourage anyone who has any interest in this topic to read it: http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2013/05/remaking-one-of-the-nations-busiest-main-libraries/ veronica arellano douglas 2014–05–07 at 10:47 am “we can believe in libraries and in the work we do, and still acknowledge that all of us are comparatively strong in some areas and comparatively weak in others. practitioners of other publicly funded professions have accepted this fact and it has led to improved efficiency and more desirable outcomes as the practices that produce better results are identified and disseminated.” fear is a great motivator to do nothing. i can’t speak for public libraries, having never worked in one, but in academic libraries we’re frequently on the defensive, competing for funding, personnel lines, and (in some cases) status (as in faculty or not) with our colleagues in traditional faculty roles. i think that academic librarians are often afraid to ask the question posed by the title of your article because the answer might very well be no. we have this narrative that the academic library is the heart of the college and librarians are vital to student learning but we have no mechanism for supporting that claim other than my gate counts and instructional stats (as in how many classes/students we teach). i’m wrapping up an assessment project that in some ways shows that a piece of our instructional program is not effective. my first reaction upon running the statistical analysis that revealed this was–oh crap, how can i spin this? which is just plain wrong. after recovering from that moment, i changed the question to: what are we doing wrong? we need to not be afraid to show and share our weaknesses if we are to have any hope of improving what we do. thank you so much for this article. i read it at the time when i needed it most!!! brett bonfield 2014–05–09 at 11:25 am thanks, veronica. it feels great to know that you found this article useful. i agree with everything you’ve written about about fear, and i think almost all of it applies to almost all librarians — and to many, many non-librarians as well. in the article, i used positive examples of people in peer professions who are asking the kinds of questions i hope we’ll ask, but there are at least as many examples of people who seem to be as afraid to ask those questions as we appear to be. i hope you’re able to fix the piece of your instruction program that isn’t working the way you’d like, but whether you do or not, it would be interesting to read about what went wrong and the steps you’re taking to fix things. authors and journals appear to have a bias against publishing negative results, but i often find them fascinating, regardless of whether the author is able to follow up on the negative results with a “how we done good” story. alyson 2014–05–08 at 8:36 am thanks for a very interesting indepth article. i’ll follow up on some of those links. whilst not from america, you, and your readers, may be interested in the new set of welsh public library standards launched on 1st may 2014, and which include outcome and impact measures for the first time. more about them available here in a blog post http://libalyson.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/new-standards-for-welsh-public-libraries/ including links to the document. the main outcomes measured are things like skills, wellbeing, making a difference, community, support for development. there are input indicators as well, for a holistic approach. i’ll be updating my blog post with a link to your article. brett bonfield 2014–05–09 at 12:03 pm thanks for sharing this report. the full report (28 pages) is thoughtful, clearly explained, and beautifully designed… and then you created a six-page summary report as well, entitled “how good is your public library service?” i hope other libraries and library consortia around the world will steal not only your methods, but also the idea of publishing your framework in such an inviting way. while i wrote primarily about american public libraries, at least to the extent that some of what i wrote was prescriptive (part of itlwtlp’s mission is to “argue for solutions”), much of my thinking was shaped by non-us libraries or international agencies, as well as other types of libraries in the us, especially school and academic libraries. though i would like to have made more generic recommendations, even the differences among american public libraries make it almost impossible to suggest broadly applicable metrics. that said, i believe strongly that our constituents will be best served if librarians who work in very different kinds of libraries are diligent about sharing our activities with each other. again, i’m grateful to you for sharing your great work with me and with other lead pipe readers. pingback : new standards for welsh public libraries | alyson's welsh libraries blog pingback : veille hebdomadaire – 11.05.14 | biblio kams this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct outreach is (un)dead. – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 2 sep emily ford /26 comments outreach is (un)dead. photo by flickr user laura padgett c/o by emily ford outreach is dead. it’s time we put its body in a coffin, say our collective prayers and move on. you see, for most of the summer i undertook a long series of “outreach” trips to promote and educate the public at large about a grant-funded project i’d been working on for the past year. i drove all over the state of oregon, to the desert in the east, the rolling mountains in the south, up and down the rocky coast, and through the farm and ranch land in western and central oregon. during these long trips (imagine expanses of high desert for 200 miles before you hit a rest stop or gas station) i had a lingering feeling that what i was doing was definitely not outreach. instead, i was promoting and marketing a service and tool that, for the past year, i had been helping to build at my place of employ. what is outreach in libraries today? it became my mission to discover a succinct working definition of what we do that so many of us consider outreach, yet my conclusion remained embedded in that same violent phrase: outreach is dead. when this thought first occurred to me my brain immediately began singing the lyrics to bauhaus’s hit goth rock song bela lugosi’s dead. (“…bela lugosi’s dead/ undead undead undead/oh, bela/bela’s undead…) we need to lay rest to outreach’s physical body–that separate entity that comprises library departments and ancillary programs. as well we need to lay to rest the word “outreach,” whose separate existence inhibits and deters us from doing what we as libraries, librarians, and information professionals should be doing. instead of integrating library promotion, advocacy, and community-specific targeted services, we have left “outreach” outside of the inclusive library whole to be an afterthought, a department more likely to get cut, or work function of only a few, such as your subject librarians. if we kill this notion, if we consider the word and the separate entity of outreach as dead, we are more likely to be able to embrace and participate in activities formerly known as outreach and incorporate this essential part of our jobs into our daily work routine. definitions before i came to the conclusion that outreach is dead, i attempted to re-define outreach as such: outreach is marketing. if the people who you’re attempting to reach seek services from you (rather than you reaching them) it is not outreach. the agenda behind library outreach should be to offer services without monetary gain, and to identify and fill service voids for people who are not looking for them. unsatisfied with my definition i asked my dad. his response was “i let the nsf [national science foundation] define that for me.” (my dad is an organic chemistry professor.) i was not convinced that a funding agency should have the ultimate say in what “outreach” activities should be or include; particularly in libraries. it was then that i decided to turn to my colleagues and professional literature to seek a good definition. scott pointon (public libraries, 2009) refers to the following definition: “draw a circle around the central or main library building–every library service, program, or library-related endeavor taking place outside that circle is outreach.” (5-6).  likewise, in her introduction to the extraordinary outreach section of public libraries last winter, nann hilyard points to the random house webster’s college dictionary definition of outreach, “noun: the act of extending community services to a wider section of the population. transitive verb: to reach beyond, exceed” (20). unsatisfied with both of these definitions i turned to the oxford english dictionary (oed) online (thanks, multnomah county library, for my remote access to this!) i found: outreach. noun.  b. spec. the activity of an organization in making contact and fostering relations with people unconnected with it, esp. for the purpose of support or education and for increasing awareness of the organization’s aims or message; the fact or extent of this activity. none of these definitions are satisfactory to me. and none of us define outreach in the same way. pointon’s definition is great, but it pulls into play the struggle libraries are having with “library as place,” an issue recently addressed in the journal of academic librarianship by sennyey et al., 2009. current library services transcend the physical boundaries of a library building. many collections and services offered by public and academic libraries are used remotely. users access library services from home, in their offices, and even via mobile devices. “…the bond between users and the physical library will change and if poorly managed the “library as place” will become just another campus building” (sennyey, et al., 2009). in this way, defining outreach by physical boundaries (a body) does not reflect the wealth of services that libraries provide and undermine our community-centered work. the oed definition is great, but to me this definition gets back to my first instinct: this is marketing, not outreach. in fact, i looked at the oed definition of marketing, and felt that the two, for our intent, are almost interchangeable. marketing  b. the action or business of bringing or sending a product or commodity to market; (now chiefly, business) the action, business, or process of promoting and selling a product, etc., including market research, advertising, and distribution. our product is our service. to many librarians marketing can be a dirty word and outreach almost saintly. but in so many articles about outreach authors seem to refer to library service promotion as marketing anyway.  (see  dawn bussey’s getting the word out, eugene jeffers’s electronic outreach and our internet patrons, and rebecca donnelly’s the misguided relationship.) i think we should embrace marketing for what it is, and let outreach diffuse into our daily routine. moreover, the first use of the word outreach in this way was over 100 years ago, in 1899 according to the oed. since libraries have changed so much over the past 100 years isn’t it time we find a new way to express and incorporate community-centered work? the oed definition reminds me of a picture i snapped while on my outreach excursions. the sign to st. mary’s outreach in pendleton, or. the paint is peeling. obviously its current physical manifestation could use some help. likewise, when we use the term “outreach” we typically refer to an older and more traditional notion of what the word means. for us to move beyond this idea, we just might have to start using different words and detach current assumptions about “outreach” to discuss our “outreach” activities. differences between academic and public libraries in academic libraries outreach seems to mean one of a few things. first, you have to reach your constituents. some libraries have a facebook page and some libraries tweet. you might also provide orientations to new student cohorts or you might offer satellite library services in a different building such as a dorm or a student center. other examples could be creating relationships with faculty to provide services that support teaching as well as to their students to support course-specific learning. these examples seem to encompass much of what academic “outreach” focused activities include. to me, all of these services should not be contained within a separate body, department, or undertaken by just the “outreach librarian.” instead, they are part in parcel what we do. as professionals we should all be talking about the library in our communities and fostering relationships. we should be offering satellite services and, yes, we should all have down pat our 30 second “why the library is important” elevator speech. these are essential aspects of a library and of any librarian’s job. they are not separate nor should they be contained in a different or a sole unit or entity. unlike academic libraries, public library outreach programs seem much more identified by space and place. bookmobile services, library services provided to those in jail, services at senior centers and in schools are all examples of what would fall under the “outreach” umbrella. dawn bussey discusses the various things that the glen ellyn public library has done in their community and outside the library’s walls (public libraries, 2009). but let’s face it, these services and the community-based nature of public libraries are essential to what today’s library is. it is not extra, it is mandatory and we should all be engaged and providing targeted, community-based services to our constituents. community engagement and marketing are essential the nature of libraries has changed enormously. the physical building is less important. books are less important. due to these changes libraries will become obsolete in today’s current market where information needs are created and fulfilled by (my favorite “frenemies”) google and facebook. people purchase books from amazon, they read blogs, wikis and other online commercial (and non-commercial) information sources. but libraries have what they don’t and we need to let our users know this. we have the ability to be in our communities, to engage them and offer specific targeted services. our engagement with our communities can be the defining aspect of what a library is to any given community—and that sounds a whole lot like what one “outreach librarian” was doing or one “outreach department” does in the old “outreach” paradigm. i am not trying to undermine the importance of marketing, advocacy, or library services. traditional “outreach” services should be an integrated part of what we do, not an aside, a tacked on item. problems we face in death just because libraries need to change and have changed does not mean that the politics of our respective institutions and governing bodies have. many institutions, such as my own, have “outreach” outlined in their missions. institutions might use “outreach” to exemplify their worth for grant or other funding sources, which frequently require “outreach” activities be incorporated into funded projects. (much like my dad’s example and my recent travel around the state of oregon.)  we need for our city governments and our library and university administrations to advocate for libraries and library services in the manner i have described.  when crucial administrative decisions get made, for example to open a new campus, build a new building, or to add a new degree program at a college or university, libraries and their services need to be represented. if we have successfully advocated for our constituents by providing them with quality targeted, community-centered services, they will advocate for us. in the end, we might be able to provide those essential library services without being restricted by traditional “outreach” departments or initiatives. another issue facing libraries and library staff is training. how are we going to train library staff to provide those 30 second elevator speeches? who will take the lead to ensure that circulation staff, reference staff, and others know how to engage in the services we’ve been calling outreach? if we expect everyone to engage in this work, staff need to have the skills and knowledge to be able to do so. finally, outreach is usually considered a separate department, when marketing and promotion of outreach activities within institutions get delegated to separate “marketing,” “communications,” or “public relations” departments. wouldn’t it be best if the two were integrated? these departments often produce and distribute printed and written materials such as press releases, brochures and flyers, or craft an organizational mission statement. this kind of community engagement remains essential. we must learn to embrace marketing and collaborate with our marketing and communications departments for our community-centered services to achieve their potential. the undead kill your notion of outreach. we should demolish the body of outreach, but keep outreach activities alive. we should disallow outreach a separate body, but fold its spirit into our daily work and activities, for it is this spirit of work that is the very kernel of what makes a library. let’s use different words to talk about what we do. (please, if you have a suggestion on a new term to replace “outreach” leave a comment!) let’s work to engage our administrators and our institutions in changing the attitude and political structure surrounding “outreach.” let’s bridge the divide by collaborating with community and institutional partners to create and promote services. let’s make sure library staff has the training to be able to give an elevator speech about why the library is important to community. finally, let’s reshape our attitude and view community-based library services as essential; as the core of what keeps libraries strong and relevant to our communities. thanks to gail kouame for providing her thoughtful feedback to this post. also thanks to lead pipe colleagues derik badman, ellie collier, and hilary davis for their edits and feedback. additionally, thanks to my office-mate, andrew hamilton, who is a great springboard for ideas. references and further reading adams, t. m., & sean evans, r. (2004). educating the educators: outreach to the college of education distance faculty and native american students. journal of library administration, 41(1), 3-18. aguilar, p., & keating, k. (2009). satellite outreach services program to under-represented students: being in their space, not on myspace. the reference librarian, 50(1), 14-28. bussey, d. (2009). getting the word out. public libraries, 48(1), 20-21. connell, r. s. (2009). academic libraries, facebook and myspace, and student outreach: a survey of student opinion. portal: libraries & the academy, 9(1), 25-36. donnelly, r. (2009). the misguided relationship: learning from outreach experiences. public libraries, 48(1), 24-25. hilyard, n. b. (2009). cultivating support for library advocacy. public libraries, 48(3), 16-19. jeffers, e. j. (2009). electronic outreach and our internet patrons. public libraries, 48(1), 21-23. pointon, s. e. (2009). library outreach is the future! public libraries, 48(2), 2-5, 24. sennyey, p., ross, l., & mills, c. (2009). exploring the future of academic libraries: a definitional approach. the journal of academic librarianship, 35(3), 252-259. librarianship, marketing, outreach sense of self: embracing your teacher identity why isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? 26 responses jennifer parsons 2009–09–02 at 8:53 am i love being able to start my day with bauhaus. emily, thank you for making a very vital point: library outreach does not translate into library use. while pious phrases about library “communities” and “missions” sound helpful, none of it furthers the method of drawing said community to said library for it to be used. the proactive and assertive practices of marketing are much more successful at that sort of thing. it’s time to set aside librarian revulsion of the m-word unless libraries want to become more marginalized than before. another observation: the “outreach” attitude and approach– at least in my experience of it– implies that there is some sort of disconnect between a library and its patrons. worse, it doesn’t leave an option open for patrons to give feedback. that hardly goes towards fostering any kind of workable community. outreach is only part of the process of marketing– it gets information about libraries out, and it stakes a claim for libraries in the community. but if that library community is going to thrive, libraries can’t just stop at outreach. jeff scott 2009–09–02 at 10:51 am you could call it community engagement. a public library needs to reach the level of community or individual engagement. when we do outreach, we just say, “hey lookie here, we have books and computers.” that’s not an individual message. i like the example between academic and public libraries in the engagement process. academic libraries have a bit more of a captive audience (you know where the students are), libraries often don’t know where their patrons are (without being engaged or using gis). i know when i have done outreach to specific demographics, i search for the leaders of the community and work my way down on an individual level. it’s one of the few ways to demonstrate that you are paying attention and creating action based on that feedback. emily ford 2009–09–08 at 2:05 pm i like the term “community engagement,” jeff. i think this really captures what we should be doing. also, out of community engagement comes more ideas and ideas for services that better serves the needs of our users. i agree with you that looking for community leaders is a key way to find just where users are and start a dialogue about what users need and want from us. kathleen houlihan 2009–09–02 at 9:00 pm how about equity of access? check out outreach as equity… the preface talks a lot about rethinking our ideas of outreach. very interesting stuff. — kathleen houlihan, youth outreach librarian…austin, tx emily ford 2009–09–08 at 2:05 pm thanks for the suggestion, kathleen, i have requested this through my library! kathleen houlihan 2009–09–02 at 9:03 pm i meant, from outreach to equity…sorry for the mangled title! sarah 2009–09–03 at 9:24 am my initial reaction to this post was immediately defensive, being that i am an outreach librarian in an academic library and i want to keep my job. but once i calmed down and read your post, you make some very valid points. my biggest issue is that outreach positions in academic libraries have seen a tremendous increase in recent years (my own position is brand-new) and yet, there are no professional standards or guidelines for those positions. your point that everyone defines outreach differently is very true. people always ask me “so, what do you actually do?” and honestly, there is no simple answer to that question. the job descriptions are notoriously fuzzy and it is up to each institution to define them. but because “outreach” is a great buzz word and academic administrators seem to love it, i don’t think that we will see a decrease in these positions. i completely agree that outreach, marketing and promotion are all sides of the same coin and should be a part of what every librarian and library staffer take part in on a daily basis. but what you suggest – essentially a cultural change in which everyone buys in to the need for marketing, promotion and outreach and takes at least partial responsibility for it – is, if not impossible, certainly going to take some time. so in the meantime, having designated individuals or departments to coordinate these efforts is still a necessity. i think that ultimately, that is what outreach librarians should do: be the coordinators of outreach, marketing and promotion and not the sole participants in the efforts. if anyone is interested in collaborating and working on some standards or a better working definition for academic library outreach positions, let me know. i’d be into it. emily ford 2009–09–08 at 2:10 pm sarah, thank you so much for posting a comment! i think you are right. what i’m thinking here is definitely a culture shift. and not only is that shift needed in libraries, but also at the academic institutional level, and the city or county level (depending on the kind of institution we’re speaking of). i would hope to be able to engage administrators and show them that “outreach” does not capture what we should be doing because what we should be doing is so much more. i really like your idea of having a designated individual in a library to coordinate community engagement services or other activities that we would typically consider “outreach.” i think this might be a first step. the people in these positions might also become the champions for the redefinition of our work into different words and leading the way with cultural change. this person could also be the one to help train library staff for their elevator speeches, etc. i’m going to look into this at my place of employ. ellie 2009–09–04 at 1:35 pm as one of the reviewers for this particular post, emily already knows that i am completely with her on the importance of having “outreach” integrated into everyone’s responsibilities, but not completely sold on the need for a vocabulary switch. to me outreach means reaching out – which incorporates finding out what people want, while advertising or marketing (though still incredibly important) implies much less user input. i can get behind the reasoning behind terms like community engagement and equity of access, but my knee jerk reaction to them is that they feel corporate and pr spun while outreach feels straight forwards and utilitarian. i am also probably biased in not having encountered much of the type of segregation at mpow that emily describes. i can think of 1 or 2 exceptions (in technical services), but basically all of our approximately 25 librarians have the same job description – we all do reference, collection development/management (including department/faculty liaison responsibilities), classroom instruction, design/create study guides and tutorials, and are heavily encouraged to serve on campus-wide committees. we have a pr facilitator that we can go to for help with phrasing, tactics, etc, but honestly i think we could use an outreach coordinator like sarah discusses to make sure that we cover all our bases and who could dedicate more of her time specifically to determining user needs and coordinating larger initiatives. for example – every semester student life does a big welcome to campus event at each of our 7 campuses. typically a librarian from each campus will decide to participate and come up with something, but a focused and coordinated effort would probably have more impressive results. but no matter what we call it and whether or not we have someone in a titled position coordinating our efforts, i completely agree that it shouldn’t be left to one person or department, rather “we should all be engaged and providing targeted, community-based services to our constituents.” alison 2009–09–05 at 10:12 pm i work for a library network, and part of what we do is provide funding for outreach projects. we’ve generally defined outreach as the extension of library service beyond the library’s defined patron base (we’re talking academic and special libraries here, mostly). feedback from some of our potential fundees has been that it’s enough of a challenge to get the defined patron base to understand the value of the library, so who has time for outreach? now we talk about “outreach” and “inreach,” but both are really community engagement, and both are really marketing. my favorite line from your post is this: “if we have successfully advocated for our constituents by providing them with quality targeted, community-centered services, they will advocate for us.” outreach, community engagement, marketing, advocacy… maybe the differences are more than semantic because there’s a logical chronological order. librarian d.o.a. 2009–09–07 at 7:43 am you must be in an alternate universe. the only reason our librarians are thought worthy of existence is to do outreach. all else is worthless. emily ford 2009–09–08 at 2:13 pm can you tell me more? i thought my point was clear, that we all should be doing what we traditionally call “outreach” but i don’t think the term fits anymore. we cannot afford to corner this work and have it be the work of a few select people. in fact, it is what our worth is. i think we agree, but i’d like to hear more about what we do that is considered “worthless.” jennifer parsons 2009–09–08 at 9:27 am @alison: i think that’s what the author was getting at– marketing begins with outreach, but outreach alone is not necessarily effective. it’s not enough to inform people of what libraries can do; we have to make it easy for them to give back to us, to use our resources, to advocate for us. i worry that libraries fall short on outreach programs because of their dread of the m word. they’re happy to make twitter feeds and facebook pages, and then don’t do anything with drawing the public to them, or making them interactive, or useful. listening to what patrons want is all fine and good. but marketing– opening up a dialogue with patrons– a dialogue that means that the library is going to consider what the patrons want, and deliver results because they know it’s crucial to their survival– that’s taking it further. it’s necessary, and it isn’t evil. that said, i think this is getting into a semantic roundabout, where nothing gets done. this doesn’t have to be a controversy, though i appreciate how emily ford has used a provocative article like this to get people to talk. point of fact: we need to listen to patrons, we need to give them what they want, and we need to invite and encourage their interaction, because interaction translates to advocacy. i don’t think anyone will argue with that. sarah 2009–09–08 at 12:01 pm jennifer, i agree with you about the fear of the “m” word. in my experience, people are interested in trying new things, initiating new services, etc. but fall completely short when it come to promoting said services, which usually then die a slow death because no one is aware of their existence. trouble is, marketing library services is a full-time job, and is probably the thing that falls by the wayside when people get busy with the other aspects of their jobs. it takes effort, creativity, and most importantly, persistence – you don’t just do it once and finish. it is ongoing. it is daunting and often discouraging. so with that ringing endorsement, how do we convince people it is indeed worthy of their time and that it will pay off down the road? jennifer parsons 2009–09–08 at 3:30 pm sarah, i wonder if this is because some of the things people try have– gulp– no marketable value. i mean, i love facebook pages, but if a college library with a facebook page doesn’t reach out to students by requesting to friend them…well, all that hard work will be wasted. no one will look at that page. on the other hand, a library that posts its twitter feed on its website as a way of easily notifying its public of things like severe weather closures, holidays, and upcoming events can easily see the value of such a venture. part of marketing is figuring out whether a certain venture is worth the library’s time, staff, and money to undertake. sarah 2009–09–08 at 4:48 pm you know, i couldn’t agree more. trouble is, if you don’t even give something a fighting chance to succeed in a pilot, then how will you ever know? and unless some sort of organized effort is put in to deciding what to market and to whom, then everything is more or less destined to fail at some point, if not immediately. juan tomás lee 2009–09–09 at 8:04 pm sarah, thank you for your thought-provoking article. two quotes that helped me realize that library outreach is not just having a table with booklists at the local “5 de mayo” celebration: outreach = (social services) “provision of services to those unable to seek them.” (webster’s encyclopedic dictionary of the english language, 1989) “in order to meet the changing and growing needs of our communities, it is becoming a basic service to reach out beyond our walls and make library services not only accessible but also relevant… this means service that goes beyond the traditional realm of what we have offered in the past, and far beyond the clientele to whom we have offered it.” marcia trotta, managing library outreach programs: a how-to-do-it manual for librarians (new york: neal-schuman publishers, 1993). radical patron 2009–09–09 at 9:13 pm hi – i’m a patron who thinks a lot about public library advocacy. one thing that is desperately needed, i believe, is an organized national campaign to save and nurture our public libraries. this would be in addition to the personalized, community outreach that libraries do in their local communities. there are so many people doing good things throughout the country and i dream of collaborating around our shared purpose rather than working extraordinarily hard at strictly local levels. by combining our voices, we’d have a better chance of focusing the public’s attention on the national treasure that is our public library system. by actively curating a centralized advocacy center, we could provide high quality resources to library friends and staff, and information to the public and the media. through this center, we could facilitate a vibrant exchange among these various constituencies, to expand upon the dialogue (for example) among librarian bloggers and citizens responding to stories from prominent news outlets (see the recent boston globe article with 465 responses). i believe there is pent-up public demand for civil discourse, trusted information and re-affirmation of values such as community, personal dignity and appreciation for diversity, respect for privacy and intellectual freedom. i know of no better institution to meet these needs than public libraries. folks just need a reminder that they’re out there … and that support goes both ways; libraries need it in order to provide it. i have a proof-of-concept developed for a campaign and resource center and am seeking contributors. please contact me if you’re interested — i’d love to hear your ideas and share mine. jean pingback : » what is outreach? moviebuffkt jennifer m. 2009–09–24 at 10:43 am umass started a university without walls in the ’70s. your article made me remember that, and wonder if we could use a similar reference, maybe not as a defining phrase to replace outreach, but at least as a phrase we could use on our web page to direct users to a variety of services “beyond our walls”. pingback : connecting librarian » blog archive » the m word in focus kathy dempsey 2009–10–14 at 12:30 pm there is so much going on in this post and its comments that i’ve been thinking hard about how to respond to all of it. sorry that’s made me late to the party. first, i notice several people referring to “marketing” as “the m word” so i feel compelled to point out that i contribute to a library marketing blog called “the m word.” (http://themwordblog.blogspot.com/) my blog partner nancy dowd and i are fighting to make “marketing” less of a dirty word to librarians! second, some of these thoughts do relate to semantics, but they are important ones. most librarians do not know the difference between these words, which is why i always start my conference sessions and workshops by defining them. briefly, marketing is the top-tier activity; everything else you’re talking about falls under that. advocacy, outreach, promotion, advertising, are all part of marketing. as to know how and why to do all of these activities and make them work: this points out the need for every library to have a unified marketing plan (which should fall under its strategic plan). and, in my dreamworld, every library system would have a full-time position that coordinates all of this. technically, that position should have “marketing” in the title, since all related activities (inc “outreach”) fall under that umbrella term. yes, what is necessary to make all of this work is a major shift in thinking and in organizational culture. i’ve been waiting a decade to see this happen and i’m still disappointed. all talk, little action. i agree w/ what jennifer parsons says. she gets it. her back & forth w/ sarah hits on important points. what i think they are missing (most libs are missing) is actually understanding, and implementing, the set steps of what i call true marketing. (see explanatory chart on my website: http://www.librariesareessential.com/library-marketing-resources/cycle-of-true-marketing/) people in libraries do bits & pieces of marketing, then wonder why their efforts fail. tired of watching this happen, i poured all of my knowledge from editing the marketing library serivces newsletter for 15 years into a book. it came out in july, and it’s called the accidental library marketer. it answers many of the questions that are being discussed in this post. one other thought: yes, outreach, promotion, elevator speeches, etc should all be part of every librarian’s responsibility. but that requires training and practice. one reason that outreach itself is insuffient is that it has only people in those positions only reaching outside library walls. library schools have not prepared staffers to do any sort of outreach or marketing. (another reason i wrote the book.) so people in these positions need to also view fellow staffers as target audiences for their messages. so my main thought on emily’s orginal premise is this: i don’t think we need to kill outreach positions; they should be part of marketing positions. i don’t feel that killing the word will help make the activity part of everyone’s work. i think that librarians desperately need to be trained to reach out, to promote their work, and to shout about their own professional value. but there does need to be a position that coordinates all of this — just asking everyone to do “outreach” w/o direction and coordination leads to what we have now — lots of enthusiasm, very little serious success, and almost no way to measure (and therefore prove) that success and value. it gets depressing when you really think about it, doesn’t it? we have a very long way to go. kathleen houlihan 2009–10–22 at 1:35 pm i didn’t mention this in my earlier response, but i’ve been thinking about this a lot (particularly as my department has instructed me to come up with a new title without the word “outreach”). some of the things i do certainly fall under marketing (which i took in grad school…thank goodness!), but many of my other duties have to do with providing access to library services & materials to those who can’t come into a library — the incarcerated for example, or children in childcare centers with working parents. this is a separate definition of “outreach”… but i’ll admit i’m at a loss as far as what else to call myself if i’m not an “outreach librarian”… what else encompasses everything i do? access librarian sounds so… unappealing. emily ford 2009–11–12 at 8:13 pm i really love the marketing plan. i wonder how common this is in libraries? it seems so “business-y” i wonder if it’s adopted much. do you have a sense, kathy, of how common these plans are? i think also in previous comments someone mentioned the need for a coordinator for marketing and outreach type activities and i couldn’t agree more. the problem might be making the argument for boards/institutions to fund such a thing for the library… victoria 2010–01–19 at 2:46 pm thank-you! i am an outreach intern at a large church. i have argued, unsuccessfully that outreach is not an activity for one group of people but is an important function of the institution and all who represent it. i’ve also been trying to banish the word “outreach” and call it “community ministry”. when someone complained that this doesn’t describe outreach because “lots of different groups in the church do this” it made me chuckle. i love your examples to explain “what is outreach” and will credit your comments to your site. blessings! victoria emily ford 2010–01–20 at 7:42 pm thanks so much for your comment, victoria. i think you’ve shown that this topic is not just isolated to the professional library world. i agree with you that incorporating the word “community” into a definition or term to describe what we do makes more sense– and does contribute to the point, that we all need to be involved. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct so you want to write about libraries? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 2 dec brett bonfield /6 comments so you want to write about libraries? double octuple newspaper web perfecting press, 1903 by brett bonfield in the library with the lead pipe is a little over a year old now. we published our first article on october 8, 2008, and we’ve now published thirty-five in all, along with five group posts. by most measures, we’re still a new publication, but we’ve also been pretty successful. about 2,250 people subscribe to our feed, we were one of the lisnews blogs to read in 2009, we’re indexed in lista, and many of our favorite writers and librarians have contributed articles or read drafts of our work, mentioned us on their blogs, left comments, or encouraged us in person. in this article, i do my best to explain why we think we’ve been able to reach people. although it’s hard to avoid talking about ourselves in an article that describes our experience writing, editing, and publishing in the library with the lead pipe, our motivation is to encourage our readers to produce their own experiments, not to encourage them to adopt our model. when we created in the library with the lead pipe, we had to figure out a lot of things for ourselves. because we love reading good writing about libraries, we’re sharing what we know in the hope of bringing more good library writing into the world. assemble a team treadwell’s wooden-frame bed and power press, 1822 writing, at least writing that’s intended for publication, is an odd mix of the solitary and the social. you spend time alone, reading and thinking, working through your ideas and trying to present them in a way that resonates for other people. and then you share a draft of your work, ideally with someone you trust, and that person edits your text, refines it, makes suggestions, helps bring out the best in you. our writing is only as good as our relationship with our readers, both the editors who help us turn our drafts into publications and the readers who spend time with our thoughts after they’ve been published, just as you’re doing now. we publish most of our work at in the library with the lead pipe over solo bylines, but all of our posts are group efforts. we usually bounce ideas off of each other before we get heavily involved in any research, and we rely on each other’s differing perspectives and skill sets as we refine our articles and prepare them for publication. we divide the tasks involved in keeping a blog/journal on schedule and have learned together what’s involved in this kind of undertaking. there are probably more small compromises involved for us than there are for people who publish solo, but none of us compromise on the things we care most about, such as open access and productive collaboration. we all feel comfortable disagreeing with the group and suggesting alternatives, and we all value unanimity when possible (or absolutely necessary), but are fine with simple majorities most of the time. we also enjoy co-authoring group posts, such as “what not to do when applying for library jobs,” because they allow us to collaborate even more fully than we can in our solo posts, enabling us to include multiple perspectives in a single article. the team behind in the library with the lead pipe was assembled at the 2008 ala annual in anaheim. over lunch, kim leeder and i were talking about how much we would miss being first-year academic library bloggers at acrlog. she was also eager to create an outlet for the enthusiastic, creative, and occasionally revolutionary voices she had been hearing as a participant in the 2008 ala emerging leaders program. kim suggested that we put together a group of librarians and start our own publication. our goal was to find other people who seemed likely to bring out the best in each other, like the groups who publish acrlog, library garden, and pop goes the library. kim had worked with emily ford on an ala emerging leaders project. i had worked with their fellow emerging leaders derik badman at temple university and ellie collier on an acrl panel. being a north carolina state university libraries fanboy, i approached andrew pace for a recommendation from ncsu and he encouraged us to recruit hilary davis. it’s frightening to ask people to commit to a new project that may take up a lot of their time, especially when you don’t know them well, but know enough to know how busy they are. fortunately, everyone agreed almost immediately even though we knew we were entering an area of the publication market that often seems saturated. find your niche modern delivery van for grocers, druggists, etc. as walt crawford has documented, at any given point there are approximately 500 active, fairly widely read library blogs. additionally, there are dozens of non-blog library publications, such as public libraries or library resources & technical services. the world certainly didn’t need another new library publication last year any more than it needs one this year, but we figured we would be all right if we created the kind of publication that would hold our interest as readers. what librarian isn’t always on the look out for a good new read? our initial idea, our elevator speech, was simple: “we want to be the npr or new yorker of library blogs. we want to combine the intellectual rigor of an academic publication with the readability of the new yorker or the storytelling of npr.” this was a huge improvement over my initial attempt to get this idea across, which i’d written about in a piece for acrlog with embarrassing results. the useful thing about mentioning npr and the new yorker is the mystique they carry. npr is known for its personalities, its tendency to make you care about topics you don’t find intrinsically interesting, and its driveway moments—its ability to make you sit in your car and listen to the end of the story even after you’ve reached your destination. the new yorker is known for its writers—even people who, like garrison keillor, have written for the new yorker, write novels in which they fantasize about writing for the new yorker—and also for its credibility: no one takes copyediting and fact-checking more seriously. if we can make in the library with the lead pipe into a publication people look forward to reading and good writers want to write for, if we can be compelling and accurate, we’ll be happy with what we’ve created. our elevator speech itself, though compelling enough for our needs, wasn’t strictly accurate. publications like library journal and american libraries probably have more in common with npr or the new yorker than we ever will, but our intention is different from theirs. for one thing, like the stories on npr and the articles in the new yorker, we want our posts to be as compelling for people in other fields as they are for librarians. i regularly read articles or listen to podcasts by people discussing economics, philosophy, medicine, and software start-ups, in part because i’ve developed an interest in these topics, but mostly because i like how they think; i consistently get ideas from these writers and broadcasters that apply directly to my library work. what these publications have in common is, like meredith farkas’s information wants to be free and wayne bivens-tatum’s academic librarian, they take on broad ideas that benefit from being explored at length. i can imagine economists, philosophers, medical practitioners, and start-up founders developing an interest in libraries, and those who do would probably enjoy learning about our field by reading meredith’s and wayne’s long form posts. for us, writing long form posts—limiting ourselves exclusively to articles and essays whose lengths vary between about 2,000 and 5,000 words—made sense because we thought it could broaden our appeal. long form work also lends itself to intellectual rigor. we were inspired by open access journals like evidence based librarianship, first monday, and especially the code4lib journal, whose modified peer-review model we further modified. in our version of peer review, each piece is read before publication by at least one external reviewer and at least one lead piper. we encourage writers to choose reviewers with high standards, people who will reject substandard or unclear ideas or phrases. i think of our process as being more like a thesis review committee than like blind review, especially because we’ve never had a completed article rejected. from a scholarly publishing perspective, it feels a bit more like a compressed thesis/dissertation process. initially, we propose ideas to each other. some ideas are rejected before they’re turned into articles, others are encouraged. after writing what we believe are polished drafts, we share our articles with outside reviewers. sophie brookover could have scuttled my review of her book; she didn’t, but she did make significant changes to portions of it, as did meredith farkas, my other outside reader for that piece. i got the same sort of editorial guidance from tim spalding and aaron swartz, who agreed to read my second piece. either one of them could have objected strongly enough to elements of my article that the entire thing would have had to be rewritten or abandoned, and both made important suggestions the led to significant modifications. after incorporating ideas from our external reviewers, we show our revised drafts to each other. again, in most cases this leads to significant changes to our articles before they’re published. a key element in our philosophy is that articles which offer criticisms also offer constructive solutions. that first part is important to us—we place a high value on identifying problems in the status quo, we intentionally try to shake things up a bit, and we’re comfortable with a bit of irreverence and humor—but we won’t publish any critiques that aren’t accompanied by what we consider a useful solution. thus, our name: in the library with the lead pipe, which was inspired by the game, clue, as was our tagline, “the murder victim? your library assumptions. suspects? it could have been any of us.” the peer review process isn’t limited just to the lead pipe team: like acrlog, which gave me an opportunity to post an article as a guest author before i was brought on board as a first-year blogger, we encourage people to submit their work for consideration, and also make it a point to recruit articles by people whose work we know and like. having guest authors lets us cover areas we care about but don’t have the expertise to write about on our own, and it gives us a chance to work with a broader range of writers and include other perspectives. it also gives our guests a platform without requiring them to take on the editorial and other responsibilities required to keep in the library with the lead pipe on course. guest authors still need to recruit external and internal reviewers, they still need to learn their way around our publishing platform, and they are required to submit a short bio along with their article. the idea is that submitting an article shouldn’t be any harder or easier for our guests than it is for us. in finding our niche and developing our processes, we did our best to find the things we liked and admired in other publications, and we adapted them to suit our skills and personalities. i don’t think the world needs another in the library with the lead pipe, but i’d love to read a new publication whose writers go through a similar process of picking and choosing their favorite elements from the publications they enjoy reading. build a sound foundation accurate measurements are essential to correct time keeping i recently read an interesting explanation of the request that van halen included in its legendary backstage concert rider: “m & m’s (warning: absolutely no brown ones).” according to the smoking gun: while the underlined rider entry has often been described as an example of rock excess, the outlandish demand of multimillionaires, the group has said the m&m provision was included to make sure that promoters had actually read its lengthy rider. if brown m&m’s were in the backstage candy bowl, van halen surmised that more important aspects of a performance—lighting, staging, security, ticketing–may have been botched by an inattentive promoter. i think the same idea applies to publications. there’s no direct correspondence between good writing and either registering your own domain name or creating a unique layout, but at this point i almost always skip past writers who haven’t bothered to take control of their identity. purchasing a domain, such as inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org is simple, and you can own one for less than $10 per year. it’s a good idea to register your domain with an icann-accredited registrar: i recommend namecheap or gandi. registering a domain is not the same as self-hosting your publishing software. all of the interesting hosted platforms allow you to associate your own domain with their servers. however, even though google’s blogger, wordpress.com, tumblr, and posterous are reliable, usable, and free, i still recommend that you sign up for a web host and run your own software. again, it’s about making your site better for your users and, though there’s an initial learning curve, you’re able to get a lot more done with a lot less hassle. selecting a web host can seem daunting because there are thousands to choose from and most appear to be fairly indistinguishable from one another. my recommendation would be to go with an inexpensive plan from blue host, dreamhost, nearlyfreespeech.net, or a small orange, four of the hosts featured in lifehacker’s january 2009 survey of the most popular reliable and affordable web hosts, or with lishost. this is a somewhat larger commitment than registering a domain. there’s more involved, and the price will vary between approximately $25 and $120 per year, depending on your needs. i feel strongly that your time, and your readers’ time, is more than worth it. one of the primary advantages of using a web host is that it gives you control over the software you run on your website. for us, the decision to use wordpress to publish in the library with the lead pipe was an easy one. we were already familiar with it, it’s stable, it’s regularly updated and easy to upgrade, and it’s very good at reducing spam. it also has an extensive range of sophisticated plugins; though we actively weed any we aren’t using, we currently depend on twenty-nine plugins to help us present information, manage our data, and collect statistics. that last part, statistical measurement, is especially important: while google’s analytics and feedburner can be useful, it’s nice not to be reliant on third-party vendors for something so important. we’ve used analytics from the beginning, but we’ve chosen not to use feedburner to measure our feed statistics. instead, we use wordpress plugins feed statistics and statpress reloaded. neither plugin has been updated in a while, but both still seem to be working fine. wordpress also made it fairly simple for derik to create a unique website design. by modifying an existing template and adding in his art, derik gave us some of the best staging in online library publishing. when you visit a website for the first time and see original art, it immediately signals to you that the site’s creators care about your experience. six librarians, drawing by derik badman go to your audience sectional view of a telephone building: a typical american central office building, showing the efficient arrangement of the various departments in addition to making sure our site’s appearance made our content more appealing, we wanted to make sure our site’s content license was appealing as well. we wanted a license that was permissive enough to make our content as usable as possible, but we didn’t want it to be so permissive that it would be hard for us to attract guest authors: creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 seems to strike the right balance. as a measure of thanks for creative commons for creating this license, any royalties we make as part of our arrangement with ebsco to appear in lista, though likely to be modest, will go directly to creative commons. our license and modified peer review policy also qualify us as open access, which helped us get a nice boost in readership early on when peter suber’s sparc open access newsletter linked to us. the other decision we made early on that’s helped us was the choice to apply for an issn. unlike isbns, which cost about $125 for one and $275 for a block of ten, you can request an issn for free and you can start the application process before you publish your first issue. an issn is the major requirement for appearing in indexes, which was one of our goals. we aren’t going to change our policies in any major ways in order to get indexed—we’re happy with our version of peer review, and we don’t plan to divide our content into volumes and issues—but we still want people searching for articles in academic databases, such as those offered by h.w. wilson or proquest, to find our articles in their search results. i found it surprisingly difficult to figure out the relevant indexes’ collection policies or what we needed to do in order to submit our work for consideration. here’s a short guide for others who might want to go this route. i recognize that it seems mundane, but a guide like this one would have saved me ten or twenty hours and a great deal of frustration: directory of open access journals (doaj). we felt that we met doaj’s selection criteria, so we submitted our application online on december 9, 2008. the next day, we received a very nice rejection note from a reviewer in sweden who had been a subscriber nearly from day one. as she explained, “for a journal to be included in doaj, the content of each issue, have to be at least 1/3 original research. translated into blog publishing, i would say that means one issue = one month. so if you publish four posts in one month, at least two have to be original research… we are a bit traditional in the sense that we typically expect scholarly journals to have an abstract, a purpose of the paper clearly stated, references etc etc. please do suggest the journal again if you feel that the content has shifted in this direction.” eric. we realized this was a stretch, but we felt we were close enough to meeting eric’s criteria that we emailed our information to ericpub@csc.com on december 9, 2008. we received a nice confirmation on december 15, 2008 from a content development assistant, but haven’t heard anything since. google scholar. when we first submitted in the library for google scholar’s consideration, the process involved sending an email to scholar-publisher@google.com, which we did, but we never received a response. the process has since been updated and a new request was submitted on november 22, 2009. informed librarian (subscription required). we submitted our request to be included in informed librarian on december 26, 2008, were notified of our acceptance on january 7, 2009, and received a note on june 4, 2009 that coverage had commenced. inspec (subscription required). we couldn’t find information on inspec’s website regarding submission contacts or collection policies, so we sent a message to its publishing contact on december 9, 2008. the message wasn’t confirmed and we have never been contacted by inspec. isi (subscription required). another stretch, but we thought people searching the social sciences citation index might find value in our work. after reading isi’s guidelines (in six short paragraphs, we get the following friendly reminder four times: “a journal that is rejected for any reason (including timeliness) cannot be reevaluated for 2 years… please do not resubmit a journal for evaluation if it has been rejected within the last 2 years. a reevaluation cannot be initiated until 2 years after the date of the rejection… if the journal is publishing on time and has not been rejected within the last 2 years, the evaluation will be initiated with the receipt of the first issue.”) and receiving the advice from a friend at thomson to “make sure you use old fashioned snail mail in addition to submitting using the online form,” we decided to hold off for a bit. library literature (subscription required). we submitted our request to be included in library literature on december 9, 2008 and the next day we got a very nice request for more information from a contact with library literature’s publisher, h.w. wilson. we responded immediately, and wrote back again on august 24, 2009 to let our contact know that our work would soon be appearing in one of its competitors’ databases, but we have not heard back from them since we received their initial response. lisa: library and information science abstracts (subscription required). we initially submitted our request for inclusion on december 9, 2008. at the time, a person’s name was listed and we emailed our request directly to her, but never received a response. proquest has since modified its process, so we resubmitted our request on november 22, 2009. lista (library, information science & technology abstracts) (free version available at libraryresearch.com). we wrote to ebsco’s director of content licensing on december 9, 2008, got a confirmation on december 10, 2008, and have nothing but good things to say about paige larkin, the ebsco publishing representative who has shepherded us through the process. she knows her stuff, she’s patient and responsive, and she’s done a wonderful job of addressing our concerns. ulrich’s (subscription required). we emailed the microsoft word version of the submission form found on the ulrich’s website to them on december 9, 2008 and were informed less than a week later that we had been added to their database. worldcat (subscription version available). we asked a few catalogers at oclc libraries to include us in their catalogs, but no one has ever stepped forward to receive credit for having cataloged us, and the citation itself doesn’t indicate which library chose to include us in its collection. whoever you are, thank you for giving us a presence in worldcat. we also submitted our work to several other resources that aren’t specifically dedicated to scholarly research, including search engines google, yahoo!, msn (now bing), and ask (all via the google xml sitemaps wordpress plugin, as well as alexa and technorati; dmoz and the yahoo! directory; library-centric search engines libworm and liszen, and librarian-created indexes librarians’ internet index, internet public library, and liswiki; and we requested an article at wikipedia. there’s no reason not to submit your work to these resources. depending on your goals, it may make sense to pursue them even more actively than we did. be fearless the first missile: the cave man of prehistoric times unconsciously invented arms and ammunition it’s time-consuming to submit forms, edit wikis, or send email messages to people you’ve never met or can’t identify. it’s a lot more challenging, at least if you fear rejection, to send a personal message to people you’ve met professionally asking them to read your publication, review a draft of an article before it’s published, or submit a guest article. of all the tasks i’ve taken on as part of in the library, that’s probably my least favorite, but we all do it and it’s worked: getting other people involved has made our writing better and helped us develop an audience. it’s tempting to start naming names and giving thanks to the people who have helped us, but that would likely come off as showing a lack of humility and may also encourage even more unsolicited email than these folks deal with already. still, it would be almost deceitful not to mention the two writers whose links to our work put us on the map. i wrote to lisnews’s blake carver the day before we went live. his response, “hurray, just what the world needed, a new blog ;-) i’ll take a look tomorrow.” he did, and he linked to us, and that resulted in the lion’s share of our incoming traffic the first couple of weeks (an effect not limited just to new blogs; the well established pegasus librarian recently experienced a similar spike in traffic after a link from lisnews). three months later, blake included us in his list of “10 library blogs to read in 2009,” which resulted in our second highest traffic and subscription increase ever. so far, more people reach us from lisnews than from any other authored website. our biggest leap happened the first time jessamyn west gave us a write up on her blog, librarian.net, on december 9, 2008. we got another big subscription increase when she linked to ross singer’s guest post back in august. detail from our google analytics traffic analysis detail from google analytics: traffic spiked the first time jessamyn west linked to us experiment the laboratory we haven’t yet found a substitute for spending twenty-five or more hours writing and editing what some of us still think of as a blog post, but we recognize that’s only half the assignment: we need to keep looking for more ways to ensure that posts reach people. we’ve had some success with twitter and facebook, and considerably less success with lead pipe news, our attempt to create a proggit/hacker news/stack overflow for the library community. we’ve also experimented with deadlines. we thought it made sense to publish weekly, but found that our writing was suffering, we were struggling to manage our time, and many of our readers couldn’t keep up with our output—our articles regularly exceed 5,000 words, plus our average post generates fourteen comments. so we scaled back to every other week and things seem to be better for all concerned. this is one of the ways we differ from most blogs: as a rule, bloggers don’t seem to publish at specific intervals, while traditional print publications (or publications produced by publishers who are grounded in print-based models), generally distribute their work on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly schedule. i’m not sure that either model is better, but publishing every other wednesday works well for us. publishing online allows us to edit up to the last minute when we need to, either because our personal schedule necessitates it or information we’re discussing in the article is changing, and our regular publication schedule enables us to plan our own articles and line up guest authors several months in advance. in addition to deadlines, we’ve experimented with our internal communication. at first, we started with a wiki, a private google group, and a series of chats on meebo: the google group has been our mainstay, while the chats and wiki, though initially useful, proved less important once we got up and running. what we haven’t needed to do is meet face-to-face or via phone. scheduling meetings is hard because, for the most part, we don’t live anywhere near each other or even share a time zone: emily’s in oregon, kim’s in idaho, ellie’s in texas, hilary’s in north carolina, derik’s in pennsylvania, and i’m in new jersey. we’ve also grown to rely on google docs, both as an archive and as a way to collaborate asynchronously. virtual participation is a huge and somewhat divisive topic in the field, and i often find myself wanting to argue both sides. it can be helpful to get together in person—in the library started, in part, because many of us attended the same meeting—but, in our experience, almost all of our work gets done virtually. granted, we’re a small and non-hierarchical group with a fairly simple focus, we’re making our own rules, and we’re beholden only to our readers, reviewers, and each other. but it isn’t because of technophilia or any other ideology that we’ve arrived at our working style. we’re simply trying to do something people value, devoting as much of ourselves to this work as we can without throwing the rest of our lives out of balance. i don’t know exactly what conclusions others will draw from this, but my hope is that i’ll be able to bring what i’ve learned from in the library to the other committees on which i serve. it‘s rewarding to work so happily and productively on something as successful as in the library. i’d like to share that experience with others. all images except for derik badman’s drawing of the in the library with the lead pipe team and the screen captures of our statistics are from the standard reference work: for the home, school and library, volume 8, edited by harold melvin stanford and published in 1921 by the standard education society. an original of this work, part of the collection at columbia university, was digitized on june 9, 2009. i downloaded these images from google scholar. thanks to derik badman, blake carver, ellie collier, hilary davis, and jodi schneider for commenting on a working draft of this arti­cle, and to hilary davis, emily ford, and kim leeder for help­ing me with its final version. about us, library databases, long form, publishing not just another pretty picture how do you say no? 6 responses jean costello 2009–12–02 at 7:27 pm brett – congrats to you and the team; in the library is terrific. it’s one of the finer examples (from any industry) of the value of ‘new media’ — and has my vote for best library blog. thanks for sharing the ‘behind the scenes’ processes with us in this article. with so much written about the technical aspects of blogging, it’s really nice to gain insight into the range of other things involved in delivering such high quality work. for me, you folks are the future of librarianship and a real inspiration. best, jean michele 2009–12–03 at 6:01 am congratulations! the success you’ve achieved is well-deserved! leigh anne vrabel 2009–12–03 at 1:45 pm lead pipe is one of the few library blogs i make time to read these days, because it’s consistently excellent. congratulations on your success, and thanks for the detailed explication of your group process. leigh anne sanjeet mann 2009–12–07 at 9:58 pm congratulations on reaching your first anniversary! your articles are consistently thought-provoking, and as a newer librarian i learn something every time i visit. i especially appreciate your thorough documentation of the processes you’ve developed to collaboratively write, host and index your blog. here’s hoping it inspires more energetic librarians to give it a try! hana 2010–01–22 at 5:04 pm kia ora koutou i can’t even remember how i came across your site today, as i was working on some web-design, doing precisely what you talk about here – building a site from the ground up and not using blog software. i have heard of in the library before, referenced on at least a handful of library blogs, twitter and lis wiki’s and such. i agree totally that it is really refreshing to read a “post” on the non-technical aspects of writing and the processes you go through. and also, i had a conversation with a customer at work (the library) yesterday about how to get into the publishing industry and editing. timely. very timely read. thank you and congratulations!!! yay one year old! pingback : pligg.com this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct why we should adopt alaconnect: a brief review and rumination on ala’s new online community – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 13 may emily ford /16 comments why we should adopt alaconnect: a brief review and rumination on ala’s new online community alaconnect’s home page © ala by emily ford so ala has joined the ranks of two point oh. last month it rolled out alaconnect, a service influenced by ning, linkedin, facebook, google docs, and other online networking platforms and shared work spaces. despite the hoopla about the system i hadn’t even heard of it until one of my working groups was asked to use it. being an online networking junkie i was intrigued and decided to log in and, consequently, to write this post. after my first look around the site i was a bit pessimistic, but after taking a deeper look, i have come to hope that alaconnect will be able to reach individuals who haven’t been able to attend conferences and engage with their colleagues about ala-centric issues. if alaconnect can draw this constituency to use it, then the tool might mean some real changes for ala. currently, alaconnect, which aims “…to engage in ala business and network with other members around issues and interests relevant to the profession” (ala, 2009) is in phase 1 of its launch. this means that not all functionality has been implemented and future enhancements are planned for the site by the end of 2009. these include an advanced search for members and a mentoring network. (check out the alaconnect roadmap for more details.) at first glance the system seems to have tools that we librarians have been using for a while from many different places and systems. it offers the ability to create and modify shared documents, host chats, and sponsor polls and votes all in one space! in many ways this fills a very real need for ala committees that have been struggling to work virtually. instead of chatting in a meebo room, on gchat in your gmail, aim, and using google docs or e-mailing documents back and forth, these groups now have the opportunity to conduct work in one community space. before i begin to discuss the social context and implications alaconnect has on ala politics and the organization’s evolution, i’d like to discuss some of the more apparent and concrete issues surrounding this technological implementation. usability as with any system, some basic usability problems are apparent in alaconnect. most of the issues i point out have something to do with the structure of the system in place, in this case, drupal. some of these issues will be fixed in time with future drupal releases, but right now they pose some usability issues. one of the first things i attempted to do in alaconnect was build my social network. i quickly discovered that it takes too many clicks to add a new friend. after you have found a friend to add and successfully add that friend, the system returns you to your profile instead of the “my network” page. next, i tried to do some searches to find relevant communities to join. being the librarian i am, i clicked on “advanced search” but was confused that this did not take me directly to the advanced search interface. instead, i had to click a few more times to get there. another seemingly simple usability issue that i noticed is that in the left navigation toolbar, the drop-down arrow next to menu items isn’t functional. while it does tell you that there are more items to view under that navigational category, it does not work to drop down the structure. instead, you have to physically click on the link and load a new page to see the sub-navigation levels. again, these problems will likely be addressed as ala gets more feedback or as drupal’s developers make further improvements to the software. either way, these are basic usability issues that, in the future, might be improved. privacy privacy seems to be another issue with the system. in fact, jessamyn west was one of the first to comment on it. (you’ll notice from the comments in that blog post that ala staff was quick to respond and fix the issue!) i get the feeling that they are getting a lot of privacy based questions because of the existence of the privacy faq page and the many posts in the forum related to privacy. there are some pretty robust features for privacy in alaconnect, but it’s hard to figure out what’s what without doing your research. you can choose to keep your membership in communities private, but your official ala work will display to members. you also have options to control your privacy for each community you join. see the faq for more information about these details. the first thing i saw on my profile, shockingly, was my (personal) phone number. why? well, the answer is simple. first, my personal phone number is the phone number with which i joined ala. (being an unemployed librarian at that point it was the only number i could give and i haven’t yet updated my information with ala.) second, this piece of contact information was imported with other membership information when creating alaconnect. (why we need a phone number to display in an online social networking tool is beyond me.) upon further investigation i discovered that phone numbers display only to people you call contacts, but this overlooks two simple questions: who is going to call me when they could shoot me an email, and why was this piece of data even imported into alaconnect? alaconnect’s online now box ©ala more disconcerting to me, however is that alaconnect displays who recently logged in on its homepage, even to the public. at first i thought i had the ability to opt out of this, but it turns out i don’t. going into my profile i disabled the ability for people see my online status in my user preferences, but this status only relates to im and chat gadgets embedded in your profile, not the entire portal. while displaying whether i’m online might be inconsequential, it still gives me the heebie jeebies to know that anyone can find out that i’m at a computer logged in to alaconnect. furthermore, what utility does this function add? how will the information that i’m online be used by other members? there is no internal im function (except for chats in member communities and groups) to which it can link. i’d be more forgiving if there were some utility to this part of the interface, but there doesn’t appear to be any. alaconnect privacy options for im © ala functionality unlike usability, functionality is one of those things that is harder to change after a system has been implemented. while i think the functionality of alaconnect is quite rich, i did have some basic questions and frustrations about it. for instance, when creating my profile i wanted to include all of my schooling, not just one school. alaconnect profile education display ©ala i would also like to be able to show that i have two master’s degrees, and i know there are many many people out there who are in the same boat. moreover, i would like to be able to connect with people who are alums of my same college, which seems to be a logical way to network. for example, i belong to a group on facebook called reedie librarians, which is a way for me to connect with reed college graduates who are also in the library profession. (this functionality has been marked in the alaconnect roadmap as a future improvement.) there are some additional items in alaconnect that might prove to be useful. using tagging and being able to “favorite” a post or group is really helpful, if you use this functionality. though if you’re anything like me, you might never look at your favorites again. alaconnect also boasts the ability to create rss feeds to read content of interest. (i did not try to create an rss feed so i cannot say if this is easy to do.) additionally, the system embraces some other, but not all, social networking sites such as flickr and delicious. these sites will show up as gadgets on your profile if you include them. the following image is of aaron dobbs’s public profile. user profile on alaconnect with flickr and delicious gadgets ©ala even though users can embed some gadgets in their profiles, some might want better interoperability between alaconnect and their other networking tools. itlwtlp blogger derik says, “my big issue is that i want interoperability with my other social networks. if ala connect would connect up with facebook, twitter, friendfeed, etc., maybe i could see a use. that interoperability is where we get into opensocial, facebook connect, and google friend connect, all different ongoing projects to make the social network portable.” i have a feeling that many people agree with derik. why would i join another networking site if isn’t interoperable with the other things that i’ve been using for online networking and work? the problem here is that alaconnect is not supposed to be a social networking site. rather, it is intended to be a professional networking site. this is an important distinction to note, but i wonder if it is a distinction that users will make. finally, one of the best features and functional pieces of alaconnect is its ability to host user-generated content. users can create groups, join groups, post comments, etc. this kind of content is one that i feel has been lacking within the ala structure, and creating this functionality may open the doors to increased organizational participation and meaningful online discourse about professional issues. i’m sure there are other functional things within alaconnect that i haven’t yet been able to explore. if you know of any, please comment on this blog post! the social context i’d like to move from the concrete portion of this review to looking at the social context of alaconnect. as was ingrained in my brain in graduate school, no technological implementation exists in a vacuum. in fact, the social context surrounding a technological implementation will most likely determine how well the system is adopted and used. (see kling, rosenbaum, and sawyer’s 2005 book, understanding and communicating social informatics for an easy to read summary.) alaconnect might be able to offer ala members the networking and virtual space to engage in discourse and other community-based activity that has been taking place in other virtual spaces. there is no doubt that online networking and use of webapps are part of a computerization movement which is particularly useful for information professionals and librarians. (for more about computerization movements, read a piece by susan iacono and rob kling in yates and van maanen’s 2001 book, information technology and organizational transformation.) the question is: for ala members who feel disenfranchised and disenchanted, can alaconnect be a democratizing factor? can a social movement form in this virtual space to give ala members what they need from the organization? i think it’s possible, but whether this happens will be determined by the system’s users. browsing alaconnect ©ala there are a few things in the alaconnect interface and system that show its surrounding social context. you will notice that alaconnect’s structure is based on ala’s scary, unwieldy, and seemingly unnavigable political structure. notice in the following screenshot that to browse alaconnect you immediately have to understand the structure of ala. this is not all that helpful to those who don’t quite understand it. one the one hand, this system must reflect that structure. on the other hand, this could prevent many users from joining and using the system, simply based on its parent structure. i tried to look at how to create a group (see the screenshot below), and was left wondering what the “alaconnect” subject headings had to do with the group i was going to create. for instance, we are asked right away to place our user-generated content into an organizational hierarchy (ala’s) that is hard to use. however, like any classification, this function will help to make groups more findable. you can also request to add a new subject heading, which is a great service.  (see the member chair faq for more details.) this model isn’t ideal, but it seems to address the issue of how different users might find the groups they’re looking for. creating a group on alaconnect ©ala it is impossible for a system like alaconnect to be devoid of social context. the real issue here is the tension between the “networking” part of the system and the part that is tied to offcial ala committees and structure. the verdict despite some of the criticisms i’ve discussed in this article, i think it is a tremendous resource with great potential. content, including communities and discussions, can be user-generated. structures and conversations can center around an issue, not around a division, something that ala desperately needs in order to be able to involve a larger community, to make the ala structure more open, and to make the association’s work more relevant to today’s librarians. the fact that the system is part of the ala structure may dissuade some users, but there is a growing online community of non-ala members who have created alaconnect accounts and are using the resource. alaconnect offers everyone in libraryland (not just ala members) a way to get involved in professional discourse, to engage in professional networking, and to create their own professional communities online. what we need to do is to join alaconnect en masse, create groups, engage in communities, and make ala what we need it to be. alaconnect is just a starting point, but i honestly think that if we start there, the sky is the limit. it’s up to us to make sure we use the system in a way that is meaningful to us. thanks to aaron dobbs for his thoughtful comments on this post. additional thanks to jenny levine of alaconnect for answering some last minute questions and providing thoughts and her expertise about the system, and to derik badman of itlwtlp for his comments. ala, alaconnect, membership a conversation with kristin antelman all dressed up with nowhere to go: a survey of ala emerging leaders 16 responses derik badman 2009–05–13 at 8:03 am sadly, the alaconnect roadmap isn’t working. i get a zero k file. in re: the rss feeds: getting feeds is a bit complicated. each user has a key that they need to add to feeds to get them to work. unfortunately, that is not clear if you are just clicking on rss feed links or trying to add them through your browser’s auto-detect function. you have to go into your profile to find the key, save it, and then manually add it to feed urls. aargh. i can understand the desire to make feeds private and there is no consistently used “secure” feed method, but it’s still a pain. jenny levine 2009–05–13 at 8:39 am thanks for this in-depth review, emily. i’m going to take a little time to read through it again to make sure i cover the bases in my response. in the meantime, though, i wanted to respond to derik’s comment (the one above mine, not the one that’s embedded in the post). derik, can you try downloading the roadmap again? i had updated the file on the itts blog but forgot to change the link on connect itself. i just tested it, and both are working right now. also, regarding rss, there are regular rss feeds of public content for every group in the system. just navigate to the group’s home page and your browser shoudl auto-discover it. alternatively, there’s an rss icon towards the bottom of the page. so to track *any* group’s public content in the system via rss, you don’t have to jump through any hoops to get the feed and it’s not different than subscribing to any other site. this makes it really easy to track (or re-display) the public output of a specific working group or community in connect, especially if you don’t want to clutter up your email with their content. the process you mention above is strictly for secure feeds for private content from groups you’re already a member of. so if your committee is posting protected content that only committee members can see, you’ll need to go through that “secure rss” process to get a feed for that content. and of course, you’ll have to use an aggregator that supports authentication, but as you noted, that’s a problem across the web and it’s out of our control. i have a long list of help documents to create, and how to track a secure rss feed from connect is one of them. as this is an advanced user/early adopter type of feature, though, there are some other ones i need to do first to explain some of the more mundane problems (like a few of the usability issues emily encountered). derik, if the public rss feeds *don’t* work for you just as easily as they do elsewhere, please let me know right away and we’ll start troubleshooting the issue. more to come, but thank you to both of you for your comments. jenny derik badman 2009–05–13 at 10:03 am thanks, jenny. roadmap worked this time. on the rss, i guess i was trying the wrong feeds. ellie 2009–05–13 at 11:21 am thanks for this review emily. i was asked a few months ago to set up my account and test things out and i haven’t done much with it since. i hope that my committees do use it as a central storage and communication locale rather than email. my biggest gripe when i signed up was that i couldn’t change my display name except by changing my name within my main ala membership information. i’d like to be able to keep my full name in my offical membership info and have my nickname display in alaconnect. pingback : ala marginalia » blog archive » increasing usage of ala connect shinylib 2009–05–13 at 11:32 am that pretty much sums up my commentary on ala connect. i’m really excited about the idea of not needing to be an ala member to use connect but… yesterday i noticed that non-members cannot be added to your network. i presume that means they don’t get to create networks, period. that seems a bit…odd. kim leeder 2009–05–13 at 11:48 am emily, thanks for breaking down ala connect for those of us who haven’t really explored it yet. i just wanted to add that one of the things i’ve been most surprised — and rather impressed — by is the option to create member communities that exist completely outside of ala’s organizational structure. to me this opens up all sorts of opportunities that haven’t existed before in ala where we can make connections across sections, divisions, etc., based on issues and topics instead of by unit. we should be doing that more overall, and this is a great step forward. steve lawson 2009–05–13 at 9:58 pm between my own very limited use of ala connect and this review, i’m thinking that the site will be very useful to people who are already involved in ala. were i active in an ala section/division/round table/whatever, i’d be glad my group had a central location all set for our work, and willing to give it a good try. but i’m having a hard time reconciling the last paragraph of the post with the rest of the review. from the review, i get the impression that the site mostly works, but is kind of clunky, confusing, and duplicates what we can find in other sites. but the last paragraph encourages us to all go adopt it right away. happily, i don’t think that will happen. i’d prefer to see our communities grow more organically, finding the channels and tools that suit them on their own, rather than depending on ala to deliver everything. i can understand why ala offers more services and functions to members than non-members, but that simple fact will keep most non-members (such as myself) from being very excited about trying to build communities on ala’s turf. emily ford 2009–05–15 at 12:12 am @steve. you’re right. there is very much a tension between the “networking” part of the site and the functionality and service to ala affiliated committees and divisions. this is where i am a bit troubled, but i also can see potential in the site. i think one of the main points i was trying to get across is that alaconnect’s success is going to depend on how the service is adopted by users, both ala members and non-members. the thing that i do like is that the site doesn’t have commercial interest like many other networking sites, which is always a good thing. would you rather have a corporate news entity own or know your data or a reasonably responsible professional organization? i think that it also provides a service that is built for library issues, and that customization and “personalization” towards our professional needs might turn out to be something that we aren’t getting somewhere else. if you are in the library and information profession, chances are a large portion of your colleagues do belong to ala, so even if you aren’t a member, being able to interact with these colleagues on alaconnect will be a good thing. generally, i would like to encourage users to try alaconnect because i think ala is trying to do a service for its members and the general library community. if the organization is offering a space in which users can become more involved, even if they aren’t members, that they might be more apt to join ala and become involved on that level. yes, it might seem somewhat self sustaining, but the fact is, ala provides a lot of advocacy work on behalf of libraries and librarians on a scale that other smaller professional organizations aren’t able to accomplish. in regards to the “clunkiness” i think that some of these issues are going to be alleviated by future drupal upgrades. jenny can address this more in depth. furthermore, the more use alaconnect gets, the more impetus ala has to fund it to implement the upgrades and improvements that will benefit the site to make it less clunky and more usable. ala staff are very responsive and without the support of alaconnect’s constituents, it cannot grow to become what i think it has the potential to be. this all being said, it is hard to reconcile the non-member vs. member issues, and i think that we need to hear from more non-members about how the site works for them. thanks for commenting, steve. ellie 2009–05–15 at 1:27 pm having just gotten my 2nd “friend” request, i’ll add that the networking choices are awkward. or maybe i’m just awkward. but having to decide whether someone is my coworker, colleague, frequent collaborator, or friend is too many options for me. (there’s also vendor, client, classmate, and contact.) and i was honestly a little sad when the first person requested me as a “friend” and my second requested me as a “frequent collaborator.” like i said, maybe i’m just awkward, but that adds a layer of social stumbling blocks i’d rather not deal with. i’m testing whether i can add them in more than one category, but i can’t select multiple at once and i hope it will list both categories by one name rather than list the person twice… emily ford 2009–05–19 at 6:14 pm @ellie. yes, i found this very confusing as well. aren’t we all colleagues since we’re all librarians? it is socially awkward to know how to add someone to your network in this context. i know you through this blog, i know others because they have been co-workers. what it comes down to is whose mental model does the definition of these defined contacts reflect? also, what utility will those distinctions have in the system? as far as i can tell, nothing, so why not call them all contacts and flatten the database a little? this would also ease the social awkwardness of trying to figure out how to define the context of how we know people. diane chen 2009–05–27 at 6:05 pm thanks for posting the review. i love the possibilities of ala connect and really appreciate jenny’s creating this. if a product was perfect first round, it would take forever to be activated. i like that fact that everyone can contribute to making it better. has anyone created a community called “how we can improve ala connect?” i want more people to contribute because any social community needs a balance of people and contributions. you’ll note that i’ve tried posting a few starters and am still waiting for responses. i’m not giving up because i know that most members won’t even grasp what ala connect is until seeing and hearing about it at ala annual. as far as members having a few more privileges, i’m not as bothered because i really want everyone to be a member of ala. i especially want rebels and people like me that want to fix things to join. the way to make it better is to participate. just my 2 cents today. jenny levine 2009–06–11 at 11:43 am i’m really sorry it’s taken me so long to jump back in here, so let’s get right to some answers to various questions from emily’s post first. usability ——— 1. i also have all of those complaints on a list (plus a few others), and i’m hoping we can address at least some of them in the forthcoming upgrade to drupal 6. if you know drupal at all, you can tell that we’ve already hacked core to address a variety of interface problems, so we’re trying to find a good balance between hacks (which cost $) and usability. keep telling us what isn’t working for you, as those items will get a higher priority. privacy ——2. i can certainly appreciate that you don’t call folks much (i don’t either), but if you put your phone number in your ala profile, you thought it had some value at the association level and it’s been displaying in the member directory all along. connect actually gives you a greater level of privacy, because only folks in your network see it, not all ala members. plus, it’s an optional field, so you can always remove it. overall, at the association level, we don’t discriminate against any contact method. whatever you put in your profile is what we display, so we’re trying to give you more granular control in connect. also, i want to point out that connect wasn’t built to be a social networking tool. it’s a *professional* networking tool designed to help you leverage ala to improve your career, so one of our goals is to help you network in any medium, not just online. that’s why the future conference event planner will help facilitate f2f networking. 3. we display names of people who have logged in during the last half-hour, and even then it’s only a random selection of 15 of them. this is where it gets difficult to balance competing interests, because i’ve actually watched people look at this list, see someone they know, exclaim with delight, go to the person’s profile, and shoot them an email to say hi. that said, i’ll add the ability to cloak yourself to the list of potential enhancements, although i can’t promise when we’d have the resources to add that feature. we’d probably still default it to display publicly since no personal information is displayed to non-members, but your concern is officially noted. thanks for highlighting it. functionality ————4. as you noted, there are plans to add the functionality that’s missing. we’re coding as fast as we can, and we have a lot of big, awesome things we’re adding to the site. interoperability —————5. several people have asked the same questions as you and derik – how will connect integrate with existing external sites. while i understand that desire (and that’s why we’ve made sure everything has rss in and out of the system), i’m not sure what other functionality you’re looking for, so i’m hoping you can expand on that. i have a couple of ideas but overall, i’m not convinced that members want their social lives mashed up with their professional ones. for example, if we import facebook info into connect, i don’t think we can offer a granular method for displaying information only from your “professional” groups or only your “safe” status updates. if we were to display that complaint you posted about work, a colleague, or your affiliation with the “i love popcorn” group on your connect profile, how are you going to feel when your colleagues see that on your professional presence? honestly, though, i’d love to be wrong and make connect live everywhere and vice-versa. let’s talk this (and other issues) through. you and diane inspired me to create an “improve ala connect” community on connect. go to http://connect.ala.org/node/75799 and click on the “join” button in the right-hand sidebar to keep the discussion going. thanks again, emily. speaking up can make a difference, and i hope everyone does give connect a try, because you’re right that there are some new opportunities there. if we take advantage of them. jenny levine 2009–06–11 at 11:57 am one last reply to the networking options concern. i know it seems awkward compared to social networking sites, but i believe we need distinctions in a professional networking tool. i’m willing to be wrong about this, and admittedly, some of this is based on my own experiences (not the boss part! :-p )but here’s my reasoning. 1. not everyone wants to call their boss their “friend,” so this gives you a way out of that. “co-worker” or “colleague” them first, before they can “friend” you. 2. if you’re at all well-known, people you don’t really know will “friend” you, and you may want a way to distinguish them from your real friends. 3. because in the future, we’re hoping to give you more control over who can see what. for example, when we implement the new conference event planner, i’m hoping to give you the option of displaying where you’ll be when to specific groups. many folks will want to display this information only to their friends, not to everyone on their network. 4. there’s no one good term we’re all going to agree on. we could go with “colleague,” but are you going to want to be able to identify the people who are more than that? originally we had “contact” to cover this category, but someone requested we add “colleague” because it better described the folks on her board. that said, we may still pare down the options. maybe we’ll take a vote in the new connect group. :) derik badman 2009–06–11 at 12:55 pm thanks for all the replies, jenny. in re fb integration, first thing i would ask for is importing friends. like when you join twitter and it lets you import friends from other sites or from email contacts. it’d be nice to be able to friend a large bunch of people at once who are in my “library” friends list on fb. jenny levine 2009–06–11 at 1:34 pm thanks, derik. i’ll put that on the list for a future phase. we’re booked solid through 2009 with the upgrade to drupal 6, the mentoring network, the opportunities exchange, improved search, and the new conference event planner, but i’ll watch for an opportunity to slip this in. it may also depend on whether there’s a drupal module available, as we’re already expending major funds to create new modules for those services. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct “all i did was get this golden ticket”: negative emotions, cruel optimisms, and the library job search – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 7 aug dylan burns and hailley fargo /3 comments “all i did was get this golden ticket”: negative emotions, cruel optimisms, and the library job search in brief drawing from survey results and interviews with recent job seekers, this article investigates the effect behind defeatist attitudes, anxieties, resiliency narratives, and intimacies that are central to librarian successes and failures. connecting these narratives with lauren berlant’s cruel optimism, we explore the dangerous attachment lis job seekers have with the field. while library schools and library associations promise a good life with financial stability and the possibility of upward mobility, it is often out of reach for nearly a third of lis graduates. to explore job seekers’ emotional experiences during the lis job search, the authors looked specifically at the first job search from the perspective of graduate students as well as from those already in positions. our survey yielded over 900 participants and we conducted 18 in-depth interviews. the results provide both confirmation for themes already discussed in librarianship, as well as new insights for work to be done to support new colleagues entering the field. by dylan burns and hailley fargo introduction for those finishing graduate work in library and information science (lis), being on the job search can be a scary and yet necessary result of the degree. the expectation is a job at the end of the library degree, and this, as most of us in the field know, is not always the outcome. the difficult job search has become a rite of passage and depending on the library job we want, the location(s) we are willing to relocate to, and the positions available in the field, our searches can last a few months, or stretch beyond a year. in the end, the longer the job search goes, the more difficult it can be to “keep our chins up” or practice resilience. throughout our searches, we expend emotional energy to find job postings, write personalized cover letters, prepare for phone interviews, and save up funds to travel to on-site interviews, all with the hope of employment in a library at the end. this article aims to explore job seekers’ emotional experiences during the lis job search. we wanted to look specifically at the first job search, both from the perspective of graduate students, as well as from those who had been in positions for a period of time. from the emotions throughout the job search, we wanted to know about the implications those feelings had on our thoughts around the field of librarianship as a whole. the job search, while stressful, is a process intertwined with possibility and hope in equal amounts to the desperation we often see when seekers cannot find employment. for job seekers, even the successful ones, the search is an attachment to a field that is perceived to be dying by the public, with fewer new jobs than new graduates, and an unstable future. the paper that follows explores the survey and in-depth interviews we conducted throughout 2018 and suggests directions for the field to take moving forward. job market optimisms and pessimisms the lis job market in the current political and economic climate is fraught and full of peril for many new professionals. when attempting to tackle anxiety in the job search it is important to understand the historical and political underpinnings of this specific moment for the field of librarianship. there has been research exploring the reliance on “fit” as a criterion for job selection (farkas 2019 and 2015; cunningham et al 2019), diversity and the lis job market (morgan et al 2009; berg et al 2009; kim and sin 2008; vinopal 2016; hathcock 2015; galvan 2015), the precariousness of the future of libraries for job searching (grady 2009), the role of mentorship in successful job searches (lacy and copeland 2013), and the need for technological training and job experience outside of coursework for success in searching (eckard el al 2014; roy et al 2010). yet missing from this picture of the job search is an exploration of anxiety and emotions felt by new graduates and job seekers in this precarious market.[3] in the fall 2017, library journal (lj) published its annual placements & salaries report on graduating library students. it found that 4,223 new lis graduates finished their degrees during 2016-2017. lj conducted a survey of recent graduates (n=1,426), and found that overwhelmingly these respondents were employed full time (80%). however, only 67% of those employed were working full-time in libraries. of 67% employed full-time within libraries, an additional 17% of those participants held part-time status in libraries, many holding several jobs to make ends meet with an average of 1.6 part-time jobs per library school graduate. while the report cited the rise in wages for new graduates, it hinted at deep dissatisfaction in the community. the report’s authors state: overwhelmingly, unhappy graduates point to under­employment issues, including low wages; lack of benefits; having to settle for part-time, temporary, or nonprofessional positions; or having to piece together two or three part-time positions to support themselves. several report being frustrated about carrying student debt for their lis degree without being able to use the degree in their current positions (library journal placements and salaries 2017). while we do not wish to get into potential issues with library journal’s approach, it is hard to see this sampling (33% of the total 4,223 graduates) as representative of the whole. it is possible that lj is oversampling successful job seekers, as those with difficulties finding employment may not contribute to this sampling. did libraries create enough jobs for the 4,223 graduates that year? according to the bureau of labor statistics (bls) (2019), the field is only projected to create 12,000 new jobs in the next ten years, and have a replacement rate per year of 14,500 over the next ten years. within that 14,500 number, 7,900 are retirements and 5,400 are librarians leaving for other fields, with an estimation of 1,200 new jobs created. it is difficult to imagine that many of these 7,900 jobs will represent open entry-level positions. this is, of course, speculation on continuing trends, and economic trends are always hazy to begin with. investigating just the academic librarian job market, eamon tewell (2012) found that only 21% of advertised jobs between september 2010 and september 2011 counted as “entry level,” requiring less than a year of experience. furthermore, even for jobs with expectations of less than a year of experience, 76% were being filled with candidates who did not meet the criteria as entry-level (meaning they had more than one year of experience in libraries) (tewell, 2012). unfortunately, these datasets only exist for academic librarian openings, mainly due to tenure and promotion requirements within this sphere of librarianship. the field has not seen a systematic exploration of opening and entry-level positions across the different types of librarianship. the survey and interview data we collected suggest that there are more graduates than entry-level positions across all subsets of librarianship. we saw in our research that hope and luck are necessary parts of the library search, and library students have often had fears calmed by ongoing promises of better markets in the near future, post-recession and post-retirement. cruel optimism, hope, and challenging job markets in order to fully understand how emotion and anxiety specifically impact lis job seekers, our research project relied heavily on frameworks developed by literary critic lauren berlant. berlant terms the growing societal and cultural anxiety stemming from neo-liberal dissatisfaction “cruel optimism.” for berlant, “cruel optimism” terms an attachment “when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (berlant 2011, 1). attachment for berlant is always inherently optimistic, and the futures imagined through attachment are based on fantasy in a somewhat neutral sense. yet the fantasies that drive students and job seekers are becoming more and more frayed (berlant 2011, 3). this is particularly poignant in promises of “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality” which berlant explains are “the set of dissolving assurances [that] also includes meritocracy, the sense that liberal-capitalist society will reliably provide opportunities for individuals to carve out relations of reciprocity that seem fair and that foster life as a project of adding up to something…” (berlant 2011, 3). for lis students the degree is an investment of time, money, and emotions, often with a stated goal of a professional library job. for librarians, a “good life” could mean many things. it may mean a tenure track job at an r1 institution, a secure position at a public library, or recognition in the field. a student graduating in the next few years is promised, in many ways, “a good life,” yet that attachment, however optimistic, is strikingly bleak when countered with the difficult road that many job seekers must walk for selfand jobsatisfaction. whatever a “good life” entails is individual, yet, as berlant and many others have pointed to, it is ingrained in the american experience. berlant writes that some might “call the fragilities and unpredictability of living the good-life fantasy and its systemic failures ‘bad luck’ amid the general pattern of upward mobility, reliable intimacy, and political satisfaction that has graced liberal political/economic worlds since the end of the second world war” (berlant 2011, 10). many of our respondents pointed to luck as a factor in job search success and failures. one, a full-time librarian who spent 8-9 months searching for a full-time position, responded that: i’m still friends with a bunch of people that i did the masters program with, and it’s almost two years since we graduated. and it’s just now that some of them are finally getting a full-time librarian position. so, that is another, there’s a few others that have just finally gotten them. so, seeing that wow, i feel really lucky that i was able to get a full-time position shortly after finishing. furthermore, because of the interlinkage between jobs and upward mobility, a central component of the “american dream,” the recent recession has hit confidence and outlooks especially hard. aronson found that students identified new value in post-secondary education in the wake of the recession, with many of the interviewed subjects citing the job market as a driving force for graduate or professional degrees (aronson 2017, 51). on the other hand, aronson concluded that the lack of prospects after graduation may lead to a larger erosion in the “confidence in educational and work institutions.” (aronson 2017, 55) graduates often felt their professors, programs, and universities were out of touch with the current economic environment and fears of malemployment and unemployment were not to be assuaged by institutional support (aronson 2017, 55). this is a theme that appears in our research as well. the cruel optimism framework has been used quite successfully to explore the effect of job searching within fields like education, which, like librarianship, experience constant change, threat, and murky futures. moore and clark argue that teachers are cruelly optimistic not only because of the painful ramifications of “good life” affects, but that they are engaged doubly in the creation of good lives for their students and for the public good. furthermore, the authors explain that teachers “may need to convince themselves of the possibility of helping to bring about the better world they embrace in spite of the fact that its translation/mutations into the terms and conditions of neo-liberal policy…may be working against the realisation of that vision” (moore and clarke 2015, 671-672). specifically, moore and clarke are referring to educational policy which inhibits the change that teachers may go into their field hoping to encourage. we can see parallels in the way in which librarians butt up against counterintuitive restrictions on how public service is performed in this neo-liberal system. passions and intimacies on the cruel market for job searching in public service fields, especially those where jobs are limited, a tremendous amount of emotional labor is necessary for the application and interview process. in an article aptly titled “it’s like writing yourself into a codependent relationship with someone who doesn’t even want you,” jennifer sano-franchini writes about the complex relationship formed between the applicant and the search committee, through the pretext of intimacy in the “tailored cover letter” to the meetings and meals between interviewees and interviewers, or the showing of “passion,” “loyalty,” or “commitment” to institutions they’ve just met (2016, 101, 108). the attachment here is cruel in that the high level of competition as well as the emotional energy required to perform interviewing tasks will, for most candidates, be for nothing, and as jobs are perceived as scarcer and scarcer they will continue to elucidate these “cruel optimistic” feelings. it requires an intimacy that is expected and often impossible to the point where the feigned knowledge of the institution becomes a sought-after trait for job seekers. the rejection letters for jobs, described by sano-franchini as bad break-ups and the common “it’s not you, it’s me” letters,” bring out this attachment that is fleeting and hard to reconcile. sano-franchini (2016) concludes: there is a problem with the system when these sorts of experiences are widely felt, yet normalized and accepted as part of the process. there is a problem when, instead of critiquing our institutional practices, the quick fix seems to be to provide hoards of advice, directives, and tips for candidates to navigate—indeed, to survive—the job search, and the problems of the job market are dismissed as the result of larger political and economic issues. (119) the expectation of a long and difficult search, combined with the grin and bear it attitude, comes up often in the interviews with lis job seekers below and illuminates the compassion with which our field must come to terms if it doesn’t want to purely exist in cruel contexts. methods our project revolves around two research questions: in what ways do negative perceptions about the future of libraries impact the emotions of job searching? what are common feelings and concerns about the librarian job market and how do those impact the anxieties of first-time library job seekers? in order to discover the answers, we employed a mixed methods approach. we started by creating a survey that we sent out internationally, with respondents primarily from the united states, canada, and australia. this survey was meant to capture feelings around participants’ first job searches, how they felt about the future of libraries, and also to find respondents who wanted to discuss their job searches further through in-depth interviews. our survey was open from the end of february to the end of march 2018. participants were recruited via twitter and listservs. at the end of the survey, respondents could indicate if they were interested in a follow-up in-depth interview. over 200 people indicated interest in the interview. from that group, we had another screening survey in order to make sure we had a representative sample for our interviews. we chose to do in-depth interviews with no more than 25 participants. from our transcribed interviews, we analyzed the data and created codes based on the themes that emerged throughout. in-depth interviews our selected interview participants talked to either author — in-person or over the phone — between april and july 2018. these interviews lasted anywhere between 30-60 minutes and were later transcribed in order to identify themes. in the end, we interviewed 18 people. of our participants, 9 were in academic library positions, 3 were public librarians, 1 was a school librarian, 2 worked in special libraries, and 3 were graduate students on the job search. we created a set of nine questions that we wanted to ask. the full set of interview questions can be found in appendix a. as we coded for themes, we began to see the cruel optimism framework, especially for those still on the job search. these interviews helped to expand our perspective on the job search and demonstrated the ways that the lis job search is frustrating, long, exhaustive, and time consuming. limitations our project has a few limitations. first, because we sought out our population through social media and listservs, we do not know our response rate. all we can say about this population is how they responded to the survey and the in-depth interviews we conducted. while these findings cannot be generalized to all lis job seekers, we do think our findings indicate an interest in this topic and will help to start conversations within the field about the job search. once the survey went live and we began our interviews, we discovered a few questions that were not asked or were interpreted differently than we had intended. we did not include a question about the type of library the respondent was currently employed by or where they hoped to be employed. we also asked a question about where in the job search process the respondent was. our choices were: have been job searching for under 6 months have been job searching for 7-12 months have been job searching for more than 12 months employed for 1-11 months employed for 12-36 years (1-3 years) employed for 3-5 years employed 6 or more years out of the job search originally, we thought this question would get us the information we wanted, but during the interview process, we realized that reality can be more complicated. this was especially true for respondents who were getting their mlis degrees, respondents who were currently working in libraries and finishing their degrees at the same time, and those who had been on the job market consistently for a longer period of time. these gray areas made it difficult for respondents to easily choose an answer. additionally, we did not ask in the survey for information around the respondent’s race, gender, or ability. these issues came up during some of our interviews and would be a place to expand this research in the future. we acknowledge that people with marginalized identities are more likely to find themselves in crueler job markets with more limited geographical parameters and more expectations for resiliency throughout their search. results we had 1,047 respondents start the survey and used the 907 completed surveys for our analysis. from those 907 responses, we had over 200 people indicate interest in an in-depth survey and 145 who filled out our secondary screening survey. all secondary survey results were reviewed and interview participants were selected according to status (graduate student) or library type (academic, public/school, special, and other). survey the surveyed population cut across many lines of the librarianship job searching spectrum. the majority of participants reported that they held their job for at least a year. many were in the process of searching for under 6 months (17%), searching for 7-12 months (6%), and searching for more than 12 months (7%), and a final 3% indicated they were out of the job search completely and were not looking for a library job. there were also respondents who had been employed for under a year (21%), employed for 1-3 years (19%), and employed for 3+ years (27%). when it came to whether or not respondents felt anxiety during the search, we found overwhelmingly that they did. three hundred participants responded with “a great deal” when asked to rate their anxiety levels during the search, and over 200 rated it “a lot.” only 7 respondents stated they felt no anxiety during the search (figure 1). we did not formally define anxiety in this survey, so participants were able to choose their own definitions for this word. this means that multiple definitions exist, and this influences the findings in figure 1. figure 1: survey participants in response to: “how much anxiety did you feel during the job search?”. full description of figure 1. when asked about the future of libraries the response was overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of respondents holding “positive” or “strongly positive” viewpoints (figure 2). however, when divided amongst those who were employed and those on the job market, the percentages of negative views on the future of librarianship rose for those who were unsuccessful in their search; 12% of unemployed respondents responded negatively compared to 7% of the employed respondents. figure 2: survey participants’ responses to their feelings about the future of the library field. full description of figure 2. one of the most curious trends in the results above is that despite these narratives of uncertainty and change in libraries, future and current librarians are still hopeful about the future of libraries. seventy one percent (71%) of respondents reported either “positive feelings about the future of librarianship” or “strongly positive feelings about the future of librarianship” as opposed to only 10% responding in the negative. consider these numbers when placed within the context of 15% of total respondents having been underemployed and unemployed, searching for a job, or out of the job search. furthermore, for respondents for whom the job search ended without placement, 54% still held positive views on the future of libraries, which was consistent with the opinions above on the “death of libraries” (figure 3). figure 3: survey participants’ thoughts on whether librarianship is dying. full description of figure 3. finally, the question on the survey that yielded particularly interesting results was, “what are three words you would use to describe your job search?” using nvivo, we were able to find the words used most frequently (figure 4). frustration (and all roots) was the top word used by 177 respondents. stressful (and all roots) was a close second, with 164 mentions. long (87), exhaustive (62), and time (59) were the top five words chosen. figure 4: a visualization created from the free-response of the three words used to describe the job search. full description of figure 4. in-depth interviews several important themes permeated our in-depth interviews. some focused on well-known and well-trodden library research ideas such as resilience in libraries, but others approached ideas around passions and the future of librarianship. one of the themes that has not been talked about much in library research is an intimacy between the job seeker and interviewers and the resulting feelings of rejection afterwards. each of these confront vulnerable job seekers in striking ways and paint an uncomfortable portrait of what it means to become a librarian post-library school. “i don’t have to be a librarian” resilience and failure in job searching. one of the important themes present in our interviews and among our data, was the underlying concept of “resilience” in the face of dwindling odds for facing the competitive job market. one of our respondents, who while a paraprofessional had been on the market for many months for a more stable position, commented that: …one of the things that i think about a lot, in a lot of talks that i go to, are about resilience. kind of resilience in libraries, and that’s the kind [of] thing that the word i wish we didn’t have to use as much….. but it takes a lot of fortitude sometimes to get through [the job search]. and if you are new and fresh out of library school… i wish there were more conversations about resilience in that way, as like, ‘yes. we don’t want you to have to deal with this, but the chances you will are pretty good. pretty good.’ yet, because the market is so stressful, we are forced to talk about resilience on the way. added to this is the expectation that soon job prospects will improve. in fact, one of the persistent myths in librarianship (and indeed most of contemporary employment) is the idea that mass retirements will open the doors to new graduates. one of our interviewees commented: i always worry that library budgets are being cut, and, you know, people are retiring, which everybody says, ‘oh everyone, all these librarians are gonna retire and there’s gonna be a million jobs,’ but a lot of those positions aren’t being filled…they’re just sort of being done away with…they have a smaller staff. some have attributed this myth to the american library association (hardenbrook 2013; hiring librarians blog 2014) which told students to not be swayed by the dismal employment numbers because retirements were on the way. when these retirements do not materialize, because americans work longer before retiring, or their positions are replaced by part-time jobs or not replaced at all, the optimism of the graduating student falls. what persons invested in optimism engage with is an expectation of stability. what we have seen in the recent history of libraries is the exact opposite. this has encouraged many librarians to think of ways to be resilient against inevitable change. one example, from in the library with the lead pipe, explores this in terms of ecological sustainability. munro writes: …resilience acknowledges that we live in a state of constant change, in systems that are larger, more complex, and more interrelated than we know. when we try to control change in one part of the system—to optimize it for our current needs—we often create effects that we can’t predict (2011, 2). for libraries, this comes to the changing formats in collections, the reduction of budgets, and the overall uncertainty that plagues the field’s future (munro 2011). resilience is a response to the perpetual uncertainty that confronts libraries, and can, in munro’s feeling, be overcome with radical cooperation and thoughtful adaptive solutions. yet this approach does not get at the core of where the resilience narratives harm vulnerable populations. in recent years, resilience narratives have been pushed back upon. berg et al. (2018) explain that “demanding resilience in libraries and other contexts helps to conceal larger problems by transferring blame to the individual, resulting in a vicious cycle of the workers in the most precarious positions doing the most work to keep services and collections functioning”. echoing this sentiment, meredith farkas (2017), in a piece for american libraries, commented that “resilience narratives paint workers who feel burned out or frustrated as failures who couldn’t overcome adversity.” specifically, these writers are approaching librarian resilience for those who are already within the field, showing the “doing more with less” approaches as difficult for individuals to bear within organizations. yet, how do resiliency narratives affect those on the job market and those who have given up hope because of the constant uncertainty surrounding librarian futures? this issue is perhaps exacerbated by the degree itself, and professionalism inherent in its distribution.1 the library degree has been painted as the only way into the field. while libraries do not have licensure or certification, the degree itself is one designed for employment purposes and as such is accredited by our associations. when this promise is unfulfilled it is on job seekers to perform the emotional labor of resiliency. one interviewee, a current graduate student on the job search, mentioned their frustration with the mlis program: “as i’m applying and as i finished my program i was really frustrated with the fact that it felt like all i did was get this golden ticket that meant that i could get some jobs that i had already the skill set for.” even with this “golden ticket” you are not promised a job that fits your skill set. another interviewee, who has years of experience in libraries, spoke to the discounting of pre-degree experiences: so, it was kind of like i needed that degree, but all of the extensive experiences that i had, i 100% feel like that was discounted. many people have told me, ‘well, you have to start early career. that’s what you are.’ i was like, ‘that’s not what i am. i’m on year 19 of progressive responsibilities.’ the degree is perceived as essential to permanent stability and the “good life,” and is often sold to students as a “golden ticket” to librarian prosperity. yet, we know this isn’t true. factors like experience or geography often interfere with the opportunities presented by the degree. passions, callings, and co-dependencies overwhelmingly, the respondents, even those for whom the job search had ended without a job, were positive about the prospects of the future of the library and of librarianship. many would still suggest librarianship to students or colleagues as an employment path. for library job seekers who were not successful, this kind of positive attachment is incredibly telling about the cruel state of affairs our field finds itself in. those who have been promised the librarian “good life” and have yet to achieve it are left in a precarious mental space and are engaged very clearly in a cruel attachment to this field. in some ways, it is partially a result of the ways in which we talk about the sanctity of the library as a space and as a calling, a concept termed “vocational awe” by fobazi ettarh (2018). noting the religious undertones of vocational thinking, ettarh comments that librarianship is often talked about as a “calling” and that “the physical space of a library, like its work, has also been seen as a sacred” (2018, 4, 5). the sacred mission of the library and the holiness of its spaces run against our emotional and physical wellbeing as ettarh poignantly states, “in the face of grand missions of literacy and freedom, advocating for your full lunch break feels petty. and tasked with the responsibility of sustaining democracy and intellectual freedom, taking a mental health day feels shameful” (2018, 11). perhaps the same is true for job seekers. when called to the profession that holds these high values, it is petty to advocate for the “good life.” in the same way, a person “called” to librarianship, who is attached to librarianship in an optimistic way, and does not reach the “good life,” oftentimes internalizes their failure as not living up to the ideals of the library rather than the cruelty of a vastly diminishing field. the promises and call of librarianship, while noble, are dangerous for the emotional wellbeing of job seekers. this is, of course, not limited to libraries. on the culture of despair in higher education pamela aronson shows that practicality and hireability are a commonality amongst graduates of all stripes, where students are career focused often dropping majors or programs that are passions but not “practical” (aronson 2018, 395). aronson’s study found that: …uncertain plans mirrored the difficult objective work circumstances of recent graduates. although some interviewees selected what they thought would be ‘recession proof’ majors and/or were able to secure jobs in their field of study after college, about 60 percent were experiencing unemployment, underemployment or malemployment at the time of the interview (2018, 396). for many, librarianship was a practical approach to a “recession proof” job. a number of our interviewees pointed to practicality as an essential part of a good library program and essential to the job hunt. when interviewees were prompted about the future of librarianship the conversation quickly turned to “passions” and “excitement” despite the pessimistic undertones of many of the interviews. one interviewee, geographically limited but employed after a six-month search, commented that: you know, of course, anyone outside of our profession, there’s quite a range of opinions on whether libraries are still useful or not, but if you’re going into this field, hopefully you’re optimistic about it. i can’t imagine going into this field thinking, ‘oh, yeah, there’s not gonna be anything for me.’ if i had thought that, i would not have continued my program, and i think it definitely, knowing all the cool things that different libraries are doing all the new services that are being offered while there is things you can check out other than books, whether it’s kits, little science kits and things or what the different classes that they’re offering …it made me more excited to be entering the field… for this interviewee, they had to believe libraries would continue to flourish and provide job opportunities, otherwise it would not have made sense to invest time in gaining the necessary credentials. yet there is an acknowledgement of the “range of opinions” on the usefulness of libraries in the 21st century. this internal optimism about libraries was not shared among all participants, such as this currently employed librarian working in a special library, stating “i don’t think the library is dead, by any means…. i don’t think it’s necessarily a really solid career choice. and i don’t know if i would have gone and done my mlis if i had had a clearer picture going in.” some of our interviewees felt the pressure from those around them. another interviewee, a recent graduate who was working part-time at a library while searching for full-time employment, was aware of the articles around the death of libraries, commenting, “[an article about the death of libraries] does not make me feel more optimistic. yeah, i know that’s what my mom was going for when she sends me these and that’s not how i feel…” others, who had stable positions, have difficulty encouraging others to follow the same path into librarianship. one interviewee commented that: when i do hear that another person applied for the library…wants to be a librarian, like, i’m happy they’re choosing that field. but i’m also thinking, like, there are not enough jobs. and then the jobs that are available usually have, like, 50 applicants for one position. and i can’t be, like, discouraging, obviously. and that’s not to say that i don’t want people to go to library school. but there’s a lot of, like, challenges that come with trying to find a permanent position. “weird rejections,” auditioning yourself, and break ups these responses show a deep dedication to and passion for the field of librarianship despite the shifting sands of positivity in the librarianship landscape. yet, they also illuminate cruel intimacies that play out in the job search process. we return to the work by sano-franchini where she comments that …the concept of cruel optimism can shed light on the ways in which normative ways of desiring on the job search are not only historically and institutionally informed but also function as motivation that enables candidates to persist in a system wherein employment is not always available for all” (emphasis ours) (2016, 104) essential here is a deep intimacy within librarianship and job searching which in turn leads to this attachment despite limited hopes of employment. throughout our interviews, we saw that within these resilience narratives of applying for job after job, our interviewees also spoke to the intimacy of the job applications they submitted. the reason for this close connection came from advice that your job application materials have to “fit” the job posting, show your knowledge of the field, and your understanding of the institution seeking an employee. as one currently employed academic librarian said about this process: i feel like you basically have to audition yourself to even get your application looked at. i mean, that’s not really anything new. but i think i definitely felt the pressure of…to make everything perfect…like, for my application, to even…follow-up e-mails. that’s like… and it takes a lot of time, i think, to spend on any other efforts. i mean, you have to do a lot of research on the institution you’re applying for. so, that takes time. this effort to tailor each application can be intensified as a lis student, juggling coursework, work, and job applications. one of our interviewees, a graduate student seeking academic librarianship jobs, mentioned this about the application process: and definitely how rigorous the application process or the job application process has become, definitely has caused me some burnout. there are some weeks where i know that i should be trying for these things, but if i’ve already filled out 20 applications and 20 cover letters, i’m tired. recall, from above, conversations surrounding “fit” in library job searches, fit is itself a performance of intimacy on the part of the employer investigating whether or not the person interviewing fits into the narrow spectrum of the library without truly understanding the complexities of individuals and institutions. a “tailored cover letter,” for instance, is a “performance of intimacy that is oftentimes desired, if not expected, by institutional agents (search committees)” (sano-franchini 2016, 108). not only is intimacy required by institutions, intimacies appear within our interviews in terms of cohorts, mentors, or schools. so, what does this mean for the job search and anxiety? any kind of intimacy is an attachment, and the attachment here is to the difficult field of librarianship. it relies in some ways on the calling aspects of vocational awe. for those who do not make it into the field after a year or two of searching, failure might not, as our data shows, change their opinion of librarianship as a whole but it does harm to their ability to see themselves as anything other than failures. pushing the metaphor of intimacy into the realm of romantic relationships, rejection feels to job searchers like a breakup and their repeated attempts at new connections feel like desperation because they feel “punished when they reach out and the beloved is curt” (sano-franchini 2016, 116). one of our interviewees, a part-time librarian seeking full-time employment, stated: i’ve had a lot of really weird rejections, or unofficial rejections, where they just never respond after a phone interview, or a skype interview. and not responding to a paper application, i mean that’s not great, but it’s par for the course. but not responding… not officially rejecting someone after you’ve actually talked to them feels really rude to me. we often would not think of large institutions as being capable of rudeness, but the job search relies on an intimacy that allows rudeness to be “par for the course.” this respondent felt intimacy through the interview process, through the materials they specifically created and the connections formed through the interview. when they did not receive a response or were not selected, they felt unfairly treated. these breakups go so badly that pure frustration makes some librarian hopefuls leave librarianship. as one interviewee, currently in a temporary library position after a year and a half of searching, said: and i, i need a little more focus or help to get to see what else is out there. because i, i have skills i want to use. i really like being a librarian. but i don’t have to have, to be a librarian, you know? i want to do something i’m excited about. and i want to do something that matters and pays the bills. but, i’m, i’m pretty open-minded too. the field has asked resilience for this particular candidate who wants to be a librarian, likes librarianship, and has skills and a passion to share. mls degree holders are sometimes forced to move on with their lives, similar to the individual who comes to the end of a romantic relationship. conclusion and a call to action for those who have been successful in the job search, many point to luck as a factor because success feels so fleeting in our field. while we acknowledge the difficulties surrounding the search and the prospects for new job seekers, it is difficult to offer real solutions to this ongoing situation. the attachments we form to librarianship are inherently cruel as long as we, as a field, as lis programs, ala, and as employers of librarians, continue to promise a job at the end of graduation and cannot fulfill that promise. for those under or precariously employed or unemployed colleagues it means very little to ask for resilience in this time. job seekers are expected to be dedicated to and passionate about the field, while also intimately aware of individual libraries and systems. we encourage them to consider it a calling more than a simple job to assuage fears that they might not be lucky enough to find stable employment. it is not our intention to demonize the system in which we are deeply embedded, but our hope is that our study can provide some illumination of the difficulties for new job seekers in librarianship. what we learned throughout this research is that more work needs to be done around the lis job search. this project was a small step in uncovering the various ways our newest colleagues seek out employment. as one of our academic librarian interviewees said, “just acknowledging that searching for jobs can really suck” can be important. while we were fortunate, it is essential that we remember that many of our friends were and are not. so, what can be done? we believe that it is essential that library programs, librarians and administrators involved in hiring, and future library students be aware of the difficult emotions surrounding the job search. those of us with secure employment must work to lift those without up as best we can. this support can come through mentorship (both formal and informal), in advocacy, and in the ways in which we conduct hiring. it is also the responsibility of library schools to provide the necessary tools and experiences for job placement at graduation. is the mls degree enough, in its current state, enough for gainful employment? for those respondents and colleagues who are struggling to find the good life, the answer is no. there is an implicit (and oftentimes explicit) promise that the mls will lead to a library job at the end of the program. if this is not the case, as we learned from our data, there needs to be a change in the way that programs are marketed, administered, and the support given to graduating students and new graduates. when a student leaves library school it becomes the responsibility of the library community as a whole to guide these new colleagues onto the path of gainful employment. neoliberalism, which fosters ongoing austerity movements in the public sector and the systematic defunding and devaluing of libraries, pits us against each other and help is not often in its vocabulary. as a result, the community has, oftentimes, failed in this regard for these job seekers and we must as a whole do better. acknowledgements we would like to thank everyone who filled out survey, those we interviewed, and those who have talked to us about their job search while we have worked on this project. without your perspectives, this paper would not exist. we would also like to thank our in the library with the lead pipe collaborators — ian beilin and bethany radcliffe — as well as our external reviewer, eamon tewell. your insight and comments have helped to make this a stronger paper. works cited allard, suzie. 2017. “placements & salaries 2017: librarians everywhere.” library journal placements & salaries. library journal. https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailstory=librarians-everywhere. anonymous. 2014. “don’t believe the myth about the large number of librarians retiring and the impending librarian shortage.” hiring librarians. december 2014. https://hiringlibrarians.com/2014/12/28/dont-believe-the-myth-about-the-large-number-of-librarians-retiring-and-the-impending-librarian-shortage/. aronson, pamela. 2017. “contradictions in the american dream: high educational and perceptions of deteriorating institutional.” international journal of psychology 52 (1): 49–57. ———. 2018. “‘i’ve learned to love what’s to pay me’: a culture of despair in higher education during a time of insecurity.” critical sociology 43 (3): 389–403. berg, jacob, angela galvan, and eamon tewell. 2018. “responding to and reimagining resilience in academic libraries.” the journal of new librarianship 3 (1): 1–4. berlant, lauren. 2011. cruel optimism. durham: duke university press. cunningham, sojourna, samantha guss, and jennifer stout. 2019. “challenging the ‘good fit’ narrative: creating inclusive recruitment in academic libraries.” in recasting the narrative: the proceedings of the acrl 2019 conference. cleveland, ohio. eckard, max, ashley rosener, and lindy scripps-hoekstra. 2014. “factors that increase the probability of a successful academic library job search.” the journal of academic librarianship 40 (2): 107–15. ettarh, fobazi. 2018. “vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves.” in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ farkas, meredith. 2015. “the insidious nature of ‘fit’ in hiring and the workplace.” information wants to be free. 2015. https://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2015/09/28/the-insidious-nature-of-fit-in-hiring/. ———. 2017. “less is not more resilience narratives for library workers.” american libraries, 2017. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2017/11/01/resilience-less-is-not-more/. ———. 2019. “is ‘fit’ a bad fit?” american libraries, june 3, 2019. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2019/06/03/cultural-fit-bad-fit/. galvan, angela. 2015. “soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship.” in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/soliciting-performance-hiding-bias-whiteness-and-librarianship/. grady, jenifer. 2009. “answering the calls of ‘what’s next’ and ‘library workers cannot live by love alone’ through certification and salary research.” library trends 58 (2): 229–45. hardenbrook, joe. 2013. “the librarian shortage myth & blaming library school.” mr. library dude. july 2013. https://mrlibrarydude.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/the-librarian-shortage-myth-blaming-library-school/. hathcock, april. 2015. “white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis.” in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/lis-diversity/. kim, kyung-sun, and sei-ching joanna sin. 2008. “increasing ethnic diversity in lis: strategies suggested by librarians of color.” the library quarterly 78 (2): 153–77. lacy, megan, and andrea j. copeland. 2013. “the role of mentorship programs in lis education and in professional development.” journal of education for library and information science 54 (2): 135–46. moore, alex, and matthew clarke. 2016. “‘cruel optimism’: teacher attachment to professionalism in an era of performativity.” journal of education policy 31 (5): 666–77. morgan, jennifer craft, brandy farrar, and irene owens. 2009. “documenting diversity among working lis graduates.” library trends 58 (2): 192–214. munro, karen. 2011. “resilience vs. sustainability: the future of libraries.” in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/resilience-vs-sustainability-the-future-of-libraries/. “occupational outlook handbook, librarians.” 2016. washington d.c: bureau of labor statistics, united states department of labor. roy, loriene, trina bolfing, and bonnie bzozowski. 2010. “computer classes for job seekers: lis students team with public librarians to extend public services.” public library quarterly 29 (3): 193–209. sano-franchini, jennifer. 2016. “‘it’s like writing yourself into a codependent with someone who doesn’t want you!’ emotional labor, intimacy, and the academic job market in rhetoric and composition.” college composition and communication 68 (1): 98–124. tewell, eamon. 2012. “employment opportunities for new academic librarians: assessing the availability of entry level jobs.” portal: libraries and the academy 12 (4): 407–423. vinopal, jennifer. 2016. “the quest for diversity in library staffing: from awareness to action.” in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2016/quest-for-diversity. appendix a: in-depth interview questions for your most recent job search, how long were you on the job search market? can you describe how you went about finding a job? what resources (materials or people) did you rely on? did you come up with any strategies or borrow from others? what did you feel were your biggest challenges during the search? what were some defining moments during your search? how do you feel about the future of the library field, and did that influence your job search? do you believe your mls program prepared you for the job search? why or why not? in what ways do you feel your mls program prepared you (or did not prepare you) for the job search? did any of your relationships or friendships with your peers/colleagues change during the job search? if they did change, why do you think that happened? is there any advice you’d give prospective applicants on their job search? is there anything else about your job search you’d like to share with us today? appendix b: figure descriptions full description of figure 1 survey participants in response to: “how much anxiety did you feel during the job search?” level of anxiety, number of respondents a great deal, 305 a lot, 217 a moderate amount, 201 a little, 59 none at all, 7 return to figure 1 caption. full description of figure 2 survey participants’ responses to their feelings about the future of the library field feelings, number of respondents strongly positive feelings towards the future of libraries, 120 positive feelings towards the future of libraries, 441 neutral, 140 negative feelings towards the future of libraries, 79 strongly negative feelings towards the future of libraries, 10 return to figure 2 caption. full description of figure 3 survey participants’ thoughts on whether librarianship is dying feelings, number of respondents definitely no, 325 probably not, 112 might or might not, 302 probably yes, 47 definitely yes, 10 return to figure 3 caption. full description of figure 4 list of the 100 most frequent free-response words used by survey respondents to describe their job search word, number of responses frustrating, 172 stressful, 163 long, 87 exhausting, 59 time, 58 consuming, 51 exciting, 43 difficult, 36 slow, 34 demoralizing, 31 tedious, 31 hopeful, 30 tiring, 28 depressing, 27 anxious, 26 discouraging, 26 successful, 25 disheartening, 24 overwhelming, 21 scary, 21 anxiety, 20 competitive, 18 confusing, 18 disappointing, 18 hard, 18 uncertain, 17 limited, 16 hopeless, 15 lucky, 14 targeted, 14 draining, 13 intimidating, 13 lengthy, 13 challenging, 11 nerve, 11 painful, 11 quick, 11 wracking, 11 annoying, 10 intense, 10 interesting, 10 repetitive, 9 futile, 8 sad, 8 arduous, 7 constant, 7 daunting, 7 emotional, 7 extensive, 7 fruitless, 7 networking, 7 persistent, 7 unsure, 7 complex, 6 defeating, 6 desperate, 6 educational, 6 focused, 6 inducing, 6 ongoing, 6 serendipitous, 6 surprising, 6 thorough, 6 uncertainty, 6 determined, 5 drawn, 5 easy, 5 fast, 5 fortunate, 5 frightening, 5 impossible, 5 job, 5 library, 5 local, 5 methodical, 5 nervous, 5 optimistic, 5 organized, 5 pessimistic, 5 position, 5 scarce, 5 selective, 5 self, 5 wide, 5 arbitrary, 4 brief, 4 casual, 4 complicated, 4 ending, 4 expensive, 4 full, 4 intensive, 4 intermittent, 4 luck, 4 monotonous, 4 never, 4 patience, 4 positive, 4 prolonged, 4 short, 4 return to figure 4 caption. acrl identifies the mls as the professional terminal degree required for librarians. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/statementterminal [↩] cruel optimism, future of libraries, job searching, lis students, resilience shifting the balance of power: asking questions about the comics-questions curriculum sliding across the database divide with proactive chat help 3 responses pingback : happenings – vreps max macias 2020–05–14 at 4:24 pm i’m glad i have a job in it. pingback : lita job board analysis report – laura costello (chair, assessment & research) lita assessment & research and diversity & inclusion committees – lita blog this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct inclusivity, gestalt principles, and plain language in document design – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 29 jun jennifer turner and jessica schomberg /3 comments inclusivity, gestalt principles, and plain language in document design in brief: good design makes documents easier to use, helps documents stand out from other pieces of information, and lends credibility to document creators. librarians across library types and departments provide instruction and training materials to co-workers and library users. for these materials to be readable and accessible, they must follow guidelines for usable document design. improving document usability requires a basic understanding of accessibility and universal design for learning, plus a few simple tips found in gestalt and plain language principles. using gestalt principles helps connect concepts within the document in a coherent way. plain language principles emphasize clarity in writing. this includes evaluating linguistic complexity and readers’ comprehension of the text. keeping the needs of people with visual, motor, and cognitive impairments in mind when creating a document can also improve readability for all users. the authors will demonstrate how adhering to these principles will improve accessibility and functionality of library documentation for everyone who uses them. they will also direct readers to resources to help librarians create usable documentation for library processes and procedures. by jennifer turner and jessica schomberg introduction documents, in the sense we use them here, include external resources such as teaching handouts and library websites as well as internal documents like training guides and policies. as a profession, we should be mindful of the impact of intentionally incorporating usability and accessibility in our practices. librarians can adopt a document design approach that proactively considers accessibility needs when creating documentation, rather than performing retroactive modifications upon request by a user. (kumbier and starkey, 2016; guest pryal, 2016) after reading this article, librarians will have tools to make sustainable improvements to their document design processes. document accessibility accessibility is not accommodation. accessibility is the deliberate provision of access through a thoughtful awareness of the multiple ways in which our users might need to interact with our resources. accommodation puts the burden on our users. accommodation requires people to request mediation from “a gatekeeper, to ask for something extra, and often to prove that she deserves accommodation in the first place” (guest pryal, 2016). when we design resources without considering different abilities or resources that are inaccessible to whole segments of our population, we exclude some of our users from full participation in library services (williams, 2012; copeland, 2011). the report of the association of research libraries joint task force on services to patrons with print disabilities states that “research libraries have a responsibility to make library collections and services universally accessible to patrons” (arl 2012, p. 4). as defined in this report, print disabilities are inclusive of visual, physical, perceptual, developmental, cognitive, or learning impairments that hinder people’s ability to process textual information. text-based library services include discovery tools, subject guides, electronic resources and documentation about how to use these services. if we as a profession do not design our resources to be inclusive of as many people as possible, we may be creating barriers to learning instead of offering pathways. it’s not just patrons who need to use library documentation. library employees also need to be considered. while specific accommodations are negotiated with local human resources offices in compliance with the americans with disabilities act (ada), this again puts the burden on the person with disabilities to self-disclose and to go through the bureaucratic accommodations process. imagine how much easier things would be on everyone if we designed documents with inclusivity in mind. ethics the ada states that “[p]ublic entities are not required to take actions that would result in undue financial and administrative burdens” nor make modifications that “fundamentally alter the nature of the service, program, or activity being provided.” (doj, 2009) however, we advocate approaching our work as though these exceptions do not exist. making utilitarian or rule-based ethical evaluations of accessibility are unnecessarily limiting. while a number of library patrons’ and employees’ disabilities are visible, any number of our users might experience hidden or undiagnosed disabilities. also, due to stereotypes of people with disabilities, individuals may be hesitant to declare an accessibility need. (brune and wilson, 2013) as we cannot assume to know everyone’s specific situation, we should aim beyond meeting the letter of the law. we should proactively create tools and resources to benefit the widest community of users possible. this includes both internal and external documentation. universal design for learning universal design for learning (udl) is a curriculum development method that strives to proactively provide inclusive opportunities for the widest range of learners possible through multiple avenues of representation, expression, and engagement. practitioners of udl are advised to ask two questions about design choices as they create instructional materials: how does the design choice help learners meet the goals of the learning situation? how does the design account for learner variability? (cast, 2014). udl co-exists with accessibility. neither practice requires us to develop more content. instead, they ask us to be intentional about the content we produce and seek to identify the multiple ways content users might approach the materials. throughout this article, we will make a case for asking these questions during the document design process to ensure design choices are purposeful and accessible. as edyburn states, “[t]o meet the needs of some, udl is committed to giving the tools to everyone” (2010, 39). gestalt theory and documentation in this section, we will present design recommendations that come out of gestalt theory. these principles help us understand how people make sense of visual information, which can guide our display decisions. in keeping with the principles of accessibility and udl, visual displays of information should make a document easier to understand. follow udl’s overarching theme of providing options to learners (cast, 2014) by providing alternative ways to accesses information. make these alternatives available to all potential users, not just those who request accommodations. principles of gestalt and relation to design gestalt theory was developed in the early twentieth century by german psychologists max wertheimer, wolfgang kohler, and kurt koffka. as opposed to the structuralist concept of breaking wholes into component parts, a gestalt is a complete structure whose parts must be understood in relation to each other. a basic understanding of each gestalt component in relation to document design will aid document creators in identifying and developing effective documentation. we will also reference related w3c guidelines, as they are becoming the emerging legal standard for disability access in web design. figure 1. visual gestalt this work, “visual gestalt,” is a derivative of “7 laws of gestalt” by valessio used under cc by 4.0, via wikimedia commons. “visual gestalt” is licensed under cc by 4.0 by jennifer turner. figure-ground segregation figure-ground segregation advises that type and essential design elements be distinctly separated from the background image or coloring. this aspect of gestalt theory is supported by web content accessibility guidelines principle 1.4, which instructs designers in how to make content distinguishable (w3c 2008). in the “visual gestalt” image, we can read the word “gestalt” with relative ease. in part, this is because it is black text on white background. use contrast to ensure readers can clearly identify and read the information. in figure 2, the text in the first box is difficult to read, because it is dark text on a dark background. the second box is slightly better, because a light gradient has been applied to the background. however, it still lacks the contrast that would make it easier to read. the third box demonstrates improved figure-ground segregation. the black text is clearly segregated from the white background. note that while most people are aided by strong black-white contrast, some people with dyslexia prefer lower color contrast such as black-crème (rello and baeza-yates, 2012). figure 2. figure ground segregation closure closure identifies our need to fill in gaps to create complete concepts and images. in the design world, closure advises us to clearly identify and separate different parts of a text. wcag guideline 1.3.2, which describes creating meaningful sequences, is related to this concept (w3c 2008). we can tell the first letter in figure 1 is a “g,” because our minds fill in the gaps created by the white line through the letter. unclear closure can make reading documents complicated. in documents lacking closure, images or insets may blend into the surrounding text. this is especially true if these insets are text-heavy. in figure 3, the table may be difficult for some users to differentiate from the surrounding text. adding a standard table template from microsoft word allows readers to more easily see this information as an inset. the use of shading and lines between table rows also aids readers in following lines of information across gaps. readers can more easily identify that 337 people asked about the bathroom, while 328 people asked for office supplies. figure 3. closure proximity proximity provides information about how to group content. in figure 1, we know the little boxes form the letter “e” because they are close to each other. when information is clearly grouped, we can easily identify conceptual relationships between document parts. in figure 4, it is difficult to attach the labels for the reference and check out desks to the appropriate map feature. placing the text in closer proximity to the associated object makes it more clear that the check out desk is the circular structure and the reference desk is the curved structure to its right. figure 4. proximity continuity continuity occurs because our brains continue shapes and forms past their actual stopping points. although not a perfect example of continuity, the “s” in figure 1 is recognizable because we naturally assume the curves of this letter continue behind the rod running through it. continuity is especially important when designing informative tables. we need to continue lines of information and make sure information at the bottom of a table is clearly associated with information at the top of the table, especially when page breaks are involved. in figure 5, continuity is interrupted in the first table through the use of lines between information for different semesters. removing these lines, as demonstrated in the second table, makes it more clear that the information in the last rows of the table still refers to weekly circulation totals. if this example were longer and divided between pages, it would also be important to repeat the column headers and, possibly, the table title across the top of the table on each page to encourage understanding through continuity. figure 5. continuity similarity the principle of similarity reminds us our minds group things that resemble each other. although separated by two letters, the letters “t” in figure 1 are similar in shape and texture. as a result, our minds cannot help but see them as related. this element of gestalt reminds us to use font changes deliberately. in figure 6, the first box demonstrates how fonts and colors encourage us to seek connections that may not really exist or neglect to connect related information. for example, our minds want to see a relationship between the words “click” and “chat, email, or phone.” however, these pieces of information are unrelated. conversely, “class and subject guides” and “ask a librarian” are both links on a page, but this is not clear, because different fonts and colors are used for each link. the second box removes the confusing relationship, while clarifying the desired relationship between the links. figure 6. similarity past experience past experience saves us time by allowing us to interpret designs based on preexisting knowledge. the “al” in the “visual gestalt” image might be difficult for newer readers of latin script. however, past experiences allow experienced readers to interpret the connected angular images as an “a” and an “l.” on the other hand, experienced readers of english who have dyslexia may still struggle with this particular example because of the unfamiliar font style in the image. (rello and baeza-yates, 2013) past experience can also help users navigate cultural aspects of document design. for example, documentation about finding books may tell library users to write down an item’s call number. however, users may have difficulty identifying a call number in the catalog, if this information is not clearly labeled. for new academic library users in the united states searching for between the world and me by ta-nehisi coates, e185.615 .c6335 2015 might not look like a call number for the book. instead, past experiences in public or school libraries might tell them to look for something like 305.8009 coates to find this item on the shelf. udl advises us to “provide options for comprehension” by “activating or supplying background knowledge” (cast, 2014). when possible, refer to prior knowledge, but also enable those without this knowledge to gain it. symmetry/equilibrium although not always included in articles discussing gestalt theory, symmetry or equilibrium allow readers to clearly identify starting and ending points for a document. figure 1 was created for an english-speaking audience. while experience tells us to begin reading from the left, visual clues of symmetry tell us the entire image is contained in the outline. we know that this image is not a direct part of the surrounding text. symmetry and equilibrium also allow readers to feel at ease while consuming a document. when symmetry and equilibrium are used in keeping with udl’s advice to enable users to monitor their progress (cast, 2014), readers do not need to struggle to figure out if there is more information hidden somewhere or if they started reading the document in the correct place. in figure 7, poor symmetry is demonstrated through the use of a page number without surrounding contextual information. think of an online survey without a progress bar. the second image demonstrates improved symmetry by placing the page number in context. instead of simply knowing they are on page seven, they now know they are about halfway through the document. figure 7. symmetry/equilibrium for additional information about and examples of each of these gestalt elements as applied to design, see moore and fitz (1993). appropriate image and design use even a well-designed image must be used carefully. it can be tempting to include images throughout your documentation. technology allows us to create images, change fonts, add color, or otherwise modify our work quite easily. however, we need to clearly identify the purpose of any image or design choice. if the image adds meaning the text alone cannot convey, include it. if it does not add meaning to the surrounding content, carefully consider it. question whether it distracts users from important content or if it might be confusing to readers. in addition to making sure images and designs are purposeful, it is essential to make sure users with visual impairments can understand the concepts without visually seeing the image or design. use alt-tags to describe visual images. it is important to make sure these tags are adequately descriptive. ensure document text is comprehensible when read in plain text format. keep in mind that screen readers and other reading aids may not navigate a website or document in the same way a sighted individual navigates the content. this isn’t to say you should stay away from images or special formatting for fear of excluding a segment of the document’s users. while people with visual impairments may find images to be less useful than text, people with cognitive impairments like dyslexia may be helped by supporting images, diagrams, and visual representations that clarify written material (currier, 2015). as with all design choices, be mindful of the varied ways users will consume a document and look to create a flexible, usable document for these variations. plain language and documentation this section will present recommendations about language use. these principles help us understand how people make sense of textual information, which can guide our writing decisions. the primary principle of plain language is to use language that is clear to readers. words “logic (in the popular, rather than the logician’s sense of the word) which is the basis of rhetoric, is evolved out of a culture; it is not universal.” (kaplan, 1966, p. 2) english speakers expect information to be presented in a linear way, with topic statements and topic subdivisions representing either inductive or deductive logical ordering. many of the following guidelines are based on western rhetorical preferences, adapted to library contexts from information provided on plainlanguage.gov and in the us securities and exchange commission’s [pdf] a plain english handbook. context in keeping with the gestalt principle of past experience and udl’s guidance to supply background knowledge, present context before going into details. if you need to use library jargon or an acronym, explain what it means each time it’s used. this is especially important for external documentation and documentation intended for new employees. however, don’t assume that all members of your staff are capable of the cognitive load required to have all library jargon utterly memorized at all times. for example, when drafting instructions for using the tagging feature in libguides, provide information about what these tags do and when they should be added to a library guide. although this information is not essential to performing the desired task, it will help new or less familiar guide creators in processing and applying the information. headers use descriptive headers and sub-headers. this is consistent with wcag guideline 2.4, which describes how to make content navigable. use questions instead of noun phrases. be consistent with heading levels. these actions lower a reader’s cognitive load and enable them to more easily navigate a document. additionally, using official headers will assist screen reader users in navigating the document, by allowing them to skip from header to header, rather than reading through an entire document to find relevant sections. sentences use short sentences and active voice. use subject-verb-object order. avoid embedded clauses and parenthetical statements. use positive phrasing instead of using “not.” if you can use both visual and textual cues, do so. generally speaking, don’t post images of text. if you must do so, remember to use alternative text on the images so they are readable by a screen reader. compare library cards can be used to check out books. (passive) you can use a library card to check out books. (active) compare children must be accompanied by adults. (object-verb-subject, also passive) adults must accompany children. (subject-verb-object, also active) compare these are the resources you cannot use. (negative) these are the resources you can use. (positive) compare if you find a damp or wet book in the library collection, and it’s during regular business hours, please bring it to the preservation department immediately; if it is on the weekend or in the evening, place the book in the freezer, and contact the preservation department. (complex sentence with embedded clause) if you find a damp or wet book in the library collection, contact the preservation department. if no one is available to help, leave a message. then, place the book in the freezer. (shorter sentences with no embedded clauses) words use everyday words. documentation does not need to be written in highly academic, obfuscatory language. documentation needs to be written using words that are understood by your audience. if your audience is multilingual, try to find the resources to offer documentation in multiple languages. however, don’t just copy and paste text into google translate and call it good. even if you use your clearly written english version as the basis of a non-english draft, you need to hire an expert speaker to edit and proofread it for you (wallwork, 2014). using a succinct, clear, and active voice directly supports udl’s guidance to use clear vocabularies and structures (cast, 2014). this practice also supports access for multilingual learners, who may have more limited vocabularies in their non-native tongues. typeface you may want to choose a different font type for headings versus the body of a document to help your reader quickly understand the content organization. in keeping with the gestalt principle of similarity, be consistent in your font choice within those categories. to make documents more readable for people with dyslexia, researchers recommend using common fonts that people are used to seeing. rello and baeza-yates (2013) studied the readability of different fonts for people with dyslexia. they found that sans serif, monospaced, and roman font styles were much more readable than serif, proportional, and italic font styles. they recommend using helvetica, courier, arial, verdana, or computer modern unicode. spacing when making spacing decisions, keep in mind the gestalt theories of closure, proximity, past experience, and symmetry/equilibrium. for western audiences, left-justified text is easier to read than centered or fully-justified text because the spacing is more consistent. inconsistent spacing is often unnecessary information that adds to the cognitive load. additionally, spacing should be used to clearly group pieces of information together. although white space adds length to a document, don’t be afraid of using it to help clarify concepts and simplify the reader’s journey through the material. assuring usable, accessible documentation “great text + weak design and weak text + great design will both have the same effect: a document that doesn’t achieve its goals” (bush and zuidema, 2011, p. 87). one of the primary recommendations from copeland’s study of the needs of library users with disabilities is a reminder that ada compliance “does not always ensure usability” (2011, p. 236). actively seek the voices and input of your community, including those with disabilities. usability testing usability testing does not need to be an arduous process. if you’ve followed accessibility recommendations, you are already well on your way to creating a usable document. even informal usability tests can help maximize a document’s effectiveness. depending on your needs, there are a variety of user tests you can conduct. make sure your study group has diverse members of your user population, including people with disabilities. try to build time into your design process to do multiple iterations, so you can modify your documentation and test it again. if your testing is based on prior knowledge, you could conduct interviews, focus groups, card sorts, participatory envisioning, story boarding, or surveys with users to ask what parts of existing documentation they found easy or hard to understand. if your testing is not based on prior knowledge, you could have users try to use your documentation. ask them whether they were able to successfully complete their task. ask them if they have ideas about how to make the documentation better. conduct paraphrase testing, where you ask users to explain what the documentation said in their own words. this is helpful for finding comprehension problems. before, during, and after usability testing, there are several additional actions we can take to ensure usable, accessible documentation. usability testing should assist document creators in working through each of these factors and help clarify which document choices are most appropriate for a given document situation. for more inclusive usability testing ideas, see langdon et al., 2014. editing in addition to testing, careful editing helps streamline documentation to the essential pieces, making the document more usable. when editing for content, ask questions like: what is missing? what is unneeded? does this make sense to me? will it make sense to other people? can people navigate the document easily to find relevant documentation and use it to accomplish specific goals? is jargon explained? it’s not always easy to edit your own work. usability testing or an outside editor is great for this. text-to-speech functions can help identify confusing pieces of information or awkward phrases. this software is standard on many modern computers. checking accessibility just as technology assists people with diverse needs, it can also help identify accessibility issues in your documentation. some tools are freely available online or come standard in frequently used software. microsoft word accessibility checker many recent versions of microsoft office include an accessibility checker. document creators can use this tool to identify potential issues that may make it difficult or impossible for some people to consume a document, along with tips for fixing the issues. unfortunately, accessibility checkers are not universally available in all word processing platforms. this functionality is not yet available on microsoft office for mac. however, there is some movement among software developers to enable software users to create accessible documentation. while not a default feature of libreoffice, it offers an extension allowing users of this software to check their documents for accessibility. google docs also lacks an accessibility checker, but offers a checklist writers can use to develop more usable documents. online color blindness simulators color blindness can be difficult to describe and understand. thankfully, online color blindness simulators exist to assist in making documents accessible to these users. some allow you to upload your own images to check for accessibility for different types of color blindness. others run entire websites through simulators to give an idea of how color choices may impact users’ interaction with content. figure 9. color blindness simulation image simulation source: coblis—color blindness simulator other resources in addition to using freely available accessibility checkers and simulators, software may be available through an associated office in your school, university or corporate campus. if none of these options is sufficient, libraries should consider purchasing access to accessibility tools such as jaws screen reader or openbook. these tools will help you learn how your patrons interact with your documentation. patrons will also benefit from access to both the tools and library staff with knowledge of tool functionality. if a library cannot afford a large investment in accessibility aids, some may be accessed on a trial basis or at a lower cost for a temporary period. this may be of use when updating, testing, or creating large quantities of materials. beyond using tools to help ensure accessibility, the web content accessibility guidelines provide information about making web content more accessible to people with visual impairments, hearing disabilities, cognitive and mobility limitations, and photosensitivity. these guidelines cover topics including contrast ratios for readability of text and providing text alternatives for image and audio content so it can be changed into usable formats (w3c, 2008). for assistance creating accessible documentation beyond the web, many colleges, universities, and other educational organizations often provide guidance for meeting the needs of diverse learners in the classroom. this includes how to create accessible handouts and other materials. turner’s five laws of document design ranganathan’s five laws of library science have provided a foundation for library work since their original publication in 1931. these simple guidelines allow librarians to assess library practices and make decisions. we propose a second set of five laws, turner’s five laws of document design, to help guide librarians in developing usable and accessible documentation. design is for use. consider your users. what will make the document more useable for them? fonts, screenshots, and colors should be considered with the intended user or users in mind. every document its design. what format is best for the task at hand? task-oriented activities might be well-suited for a list format, while complicated concepts might require lengthier explanations. additionally, consider multimodal documentation. videos may help document users understand the text and vice versa. every design its purpose. just because a design or format choice is possible, doesn’t mean it is the correct choice for a given document. a fancy font or video should be employed to achieve specific means. return to the first law of document design and consider the needs of potential users over your own needs. colored paper may make it easier for you to organize handouts, but document users with vision impairments may benefit from high contrast black-on-white printing. save the time of the user. what are the document’s end users looking for in the material? how will they use it? do they want or need to consume the entire document or would it be better to divide the content into smaller pieces for point-of-need reference? documents are changeable organisms. documents should be continuously updated to reflect feedback from users, changes in conditions, and new information about document design best practices. the final law, “documents are changeable organisms” reminds us not to wed ourselves to any of our document design choices. instead, we should be willing to modify our documents to meet newly identified needs. principles in action we have used these principles to revise a printed document we distribute to newcomers to the university. the resulting document relies heavily on the gestalt principles of proximity, continuity, and closure, while also taking into account plain language and native speaker translations for the spanish version. we also did usability testing to streamline content, so we could make the document a single-sheet multilingual handout. linked are examples of library quick sheets old handout (pre-redesign) new handout (using gestalt and plain language principles) new handout (spanish version using translation by native speakers) conclusion in this article, we discussed the social value of accessible document design. we presented theories and principles to help librarians make visual and textual decisions. we also discussed specific populations that are particularly affected by some of those visual and textual decisions. document design is not necessarily an arduous and mysterious process. using turner’s five laws of document design will allow us to be intentional with our design decisions. by thinking about how users will interact with our documentation, we create a more welcoming library environment. it might take more time upfront to design usable, accessible materials, but by being proactive, we can save ourselves time spent retrofitting materials to meet accessibility demands while also meeting the needs of individuals with unstated needs. acknowledgements many thanks to the peer reviewers for this article, bethany messersmith, brett currier, and dorothea salo, and publishing editor ellie collier for their work to polish and improve our ramblings. thanks also to the attendees at our october 2015 presentation on this topic who provided us the encouragement necessary to form our thoughts into a written document. works cited association of research libraries. (2012). report of the arl joint task force on services to patrons with print disabilities. retrieved from: http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/print-disabilities-tfreport02nov12.pdf brune, j. a., & wilson, d. j. (2013). disability and passing: blurring the lines of identity. philadelphia: temple university press. bush, j. & zuidema, l. a. (2011). professional writing in the english classroom: beyond language: the grammar of document design. the english journal 100(4), 86-89. cast national center on universal design for learning (2014). udl guidelines—version 2.0: examples and guidelines. retrieved from http://www.udlcenter.org/implementation/examples. copeland, c. a. (2011). library and information center accessibility: the differently-able patron’s perspective. technical services quarterly, 28(2), 223–241. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07317131.2011.546281 currier, b. (2015). comparing dyslexia and visual impairments under w3c’s wcag: a legal standard for web design? retrieved from: https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record/uuid:ee495eb0-6971-4038-81be-d393d41d4c73 edyburn, d. l. (2010, winter). would you recognize universal design for learning if you saw it? ten propositions for new directions for the second decade of udl. learning disability quarterly, 33(1), 33-41. guest pryal, k. r. (2016, april 12). can you tell the difference between accommodation and accessibility? [web log post]. retrieved from: https://medium.com/disability-stories/can-you-tell-the-difference-between-accommodation-and-accessibility-7a7afd9dacd7#.j6l3o5gpf kaplan, r. (1966). cultural thought patterns in intercultural education. language learning 16(1), 1-20. kumbier, a., & starkey, j. (2016). access is not problem solving: disability justice and libraries. library trends, 64(3), 468-491. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/613919 langdon, p., lázár, j., heylighen, a., & dong, h. (2014). inclusive designing: joining usability, accessibility, and inclusion. new york : springer. moore, p., & fitz, c. (1993). using gestalt theory to teach document design and graphics. technical communication quarterly, 2(4), 389. plain language and information network (plain). plainlanguage.gov : improving communication from the federal government to the public. retrieved from: http://www.plainlanguage.gov/ ranganathan, s. r. (1931). the five laws of library science. madras: madras library association. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b99721 rello, l. and baeza-yates, r. (2012 november 19). optimal colors to improve readability for people with dyslexia. text customization for readability online symposium. retrieved from: https://www.w3.org/wai/rd/2012/text-customization/r11 rello, l. and baeza-yates, r. (2013). good fonts for dyslexia. assets 2013. retrieved from: http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/sites/default/files/good_fonts_for_dyslexia_study.pdf us department of justice, civil rights division, disability rights section. (2009). a guide to disability rights law. retrieved from: http://www.ada.gov/cguide.htm#anchor62335 us department of securities and exchange commission. (1998). a plain english handbook: how to create clear sec disclosure documents. retrieved from: http://www.sec.gov/news/extra/handbook.htm w3c. (2008). web content accessibility guidelines 2.0. retrieved from: https://www.w3.org/tr/wcag20/ wallwork, a. (2014). user guides, manuals, and technical writing: a guide to professional english. new york: springer. williams, g. h. (2012). disability, universal design, and the digital humanities. in, ed. m. k. gold, debates in the digital humanities. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 202-212. accessibility, document design, documentation, udl/universal design for learning, usability beta spaces as a model for recontextualizing reference services in libraries pre-ils migration catalog cleanup project 3 responses pingback : plain language and inclusive document design – profhacker blogs the chronicle of higher education pingback : what i’m reading 1 jul 2016 through 2 jul 2016 | morgan's log pingback : creating accessible and inclusive handouts – instructionally speaking this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the information literacy of survey mark hunting: a dialogue – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 9 nov jennifer galas and donna witek /0 comments the information literacy of survey mark hunting: a dialogue usgs bench mark k 10 in bar harbor, maine in brief: this article makes connections between the acrl framework for information literacy for higher education and the activity of survey mark hunting. after a brief review of the literature related to geographic information systems (gis), information literacy, and gamification of learning, the authors enter into a dialogue in which they discover and describe the various ways information literacy is both required by and developed through the recreational activity of survey mark hunting. through their dialogue they found that the activity of survey mark hunting relies on the construction of both information and its authority in ways contextualized within the communities that participate; that survey mark hunting is a conversation that builds on the past, where lived experience counts as evidence; and, that survey mark hunting is both a metaphor and embodied enactment of information literacy. the authors’ goal is for readers to increase their understanding of the framework and to become inspired to connect the framework’s concepts to other diverse contexts meaningful to them. by jennifer galas and donna witek “at base there is something more than merely metaphoric about maps and theories; they share a common characteristic which is the very condition for the possibility of knowledge or experience-connectivity.”1 —maps are territories: science is an atlas, a book by david turnbull, with a contribution by helen watson with the yolngu community at yirrkala introduction understanding, developing, and enacting information literacy is a central concern of information professionals. the acrl framework for information literacy for higher education2 (hereafter framework) aims to facilitate this engagement with information literacy in the higher education context. and yet, by design the framework is abstract, anchored by “interconnected core concepts”3 about information and grounded in learning theories of varying complexity. the question of how to make the framework’s concepts visible and embodied so that they may be better understood and taught, becoming “the very condition for the possibility of knowledge or experience-connectivity,”4 was the genesis of the article you are reading. we are a systems librarian (jennifer) and an information literacy librarian (donna) working in the university of scranton weinberg memorial library. jennifer is also a survey mark hunter.5 through a conversation in which jennifer shared with donna her latest survey mark recovery, we discovered together the extent to which information literacy is required and developed in survey mark hunting. the framework’s concepts are especially applicable when considering the information literacy of survey mark hunting, and so in the spirit of schroeder’s critical journeys 6, we entered into a dialogue to develop these connections further. related literature jennifer provides a description of survey marks and survey mark hunting in the dialogue that follows. we’ve added citations where appropriate so the reader can seek out further information about the history and practice of establishing survey monuments. survey mark hunting relies on geolocational data which is made available through geographic information systems (gis). nazari and webber have made conceptual connections between information literacy and “geo/spatial information,”7 and miller, keller, and yore have developed “geographic information literacy” in the k-12 curricular context.8 nazari also examines information literacy within gis as a discipline (geographic information science/systems), and found gis assignments are typically “geospatial, technology mediated, subject free, and unique in requirements.”9 and bishop and johnston consider the importance of geospatial thinking to the work of librarians and information professionals in their decision making and ability to assist patrons with their geospatial needs.10 the conceptual connections between the geolocating activity of survey mark hunting and information literacy that we offer here complement this body of work. our dialogue also addresses the relationship between the puzzling, game-like aspects of survey mark hunting and motivation for learning and practicing information literacy. nicholson defines “meaningful gamification” as “the use of gameful and playful layers to help a user find personal connections that motivate engagement with a specific context for long-term change.”11 kim’s summary of gamification as a trend in libraries and higher education12 is a useful complement to smale’s detailed exploration of the value and uses of games-based learning in information literacy instruction.13 and deterding provides a roundup of the perspectives of experts on gamification’s relationship to motivation in design.14 however, nothing to date has been published connecting games-based learning to the framework, whose lists of dispositions describe motivation, persistence, and curiosity as integral to information literacy learning,15 though mcgonigal does articulate these dispositions as shared between and valuable to both games and learning.16 nor have the conceptual and pedagogical connections between gis-related activities and information literacy been reconsidered in light of the framework. our dialogue makes a unique contribution to the literature that bridges these areas of interest and practice, bringing past work in conversation with the framework. methodology and findings we conducted the dialogue in a collaborative google document over the course of two months, following a period of planning in which we developed an outline of broad questions we aimed to address together. the precise questions donna asked were not known to jennifer prior to the dialogue. after we composed the dialogue to address our planned outline, we edited it into the version that follows. our findings through this process can be summarized as follows: the activity of survey mark hunting relies on the construction of both information and its authority in ways contextualized within the communities that participate; survey mark hunting is a conversation that builds on the past, where lived experience counts as evidence; and, survey mark hunting is both a metaphor and embodied enactment of information literacy.17 our goal is to inspire readers to make their own connections between the framework’s concepts and the contexts that matter to them, and through the process make sense of the framework and the world with which it is in conversation. in the classroom these kinds of connections are essential to engaging learners in developing information literacy from and through their own lived experiences and contexts, making the dialogue that follows an example of this pedagogical approach in action. the dialogue survey marks as information donna: can you tell us a little about survey mark hunting as a recreational activity—also sometimes referred to as benchmarking or benchmark hunting—how long you’ve been a participant, and its connection to the more popularly known activity of geocaching? jennifer: i found my first survey mark in 2002; i began geocaching a bit earlier, in the summer of 2001. geocaching is the activity in which participants hide a container holding a logbook and small trinkets in an interesting location. they then post the geographic coordinates of the container on a website and other participants use gps (global positioning system) units to locate the container, sign the logbook, and optionally trade trinkets and write up, or “log,” their adventures on websites like geocaching.com. geocaching itself has very little to do with survey mark hunting, but it was through the geocaching.com website that survey mark hunting as a recreational activity developed and evolved. in 2000, the database for the national spatial reference system (nsrs), the primary database of survey marks in the united states, was downloaded with the goal of making the survey marks’ data available on geocaching.com. each survey mark was posted to the website as an object that could be searched for and logged, much like geocaches. the intent was simply to provide gps enthusiasts with another seek-and-find activity they might find interesting. jennifer uses gps to find a survey mark in the desert near tucson, arizona however, some of us decided to take our interest further and a community developed around survey mark hunting. we learned together, through research and discussions with professional surveyors; we shared our successes, failures, and adventures; and we developed guidelines for those who wish to search for marks and report their findings for inclusion into the nsrs database. this database forms the basis for most recreational survey mark hunting because it is freely available on the internet for anyone to search. when we find, or “recover,” a mark, we ensure that we have identified the correct mark by checking that its designation and description are consistent with what we expect to see. we do not take or disturb the mark in any way. we document the mark’s condition and make note of any updates to the description and geographic coordinates that we think are needed. then, when applicable, we submit our report to the database. if it’s accepted—typically because it adds new, pertinent information and conforms to basic standards—our update will appear in the database within a few weeks. donna: before we discuss the practices and processes involved in survey mark hunting, let’s talk about the survey marks themselves, the coveted objects of the “hunt” in survey mark hunting. when i think of survey marks, they bring to mind infrastructure. are they themselves a kind of infrastructure, or rather, would you say they’re what enables infrastructure, in a physical sense? what are survey marks? jennifer: surveying is the profession concerned with making accurate measurements of the earth’s surface, on a variety of scales. surveys are conducted for different purposes, but most surveys result in a series of useful points. once these points are determined by a survey, they are permanently marked in some way to record and preserve certain information about that point.18 the most common type of survey mark has been in use for over a century. these are brass or bronze disks, typically 9 centimeters in diameter, that are embedded in bedrock, concrete, or other stable materials. each mark is stamped with identifying information that, taken together with the history of observed data at that point, indicates a point on the earth whose horizontal position (latitude/longitude) or elevation—or both—are known to a specific degree of precision. standard ngs triangulation station disk a disk set into a square concrete monument the nsrs is a nationwide network containing many of the survey marks in this country. the national geodetic survey (ngs) is the agency that maintains the nsrs database; you will also hear it referred to as the “ngs database.” if we define infrastructure as “the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities . . . needed for the operation of a society or enterprise,”19 it is clear that the nsrs is both an infrastructure, and an important part of the underlying framework upon which the facilities we typically consider “infrastructure” (highways, utilities, communication networks) depend. donna: so, on the one hand survey marks as physical monuments depend for meaning on the information about them that is measured, collected, and stored in the nsrs database; but on the other hand, the use and value of that stored data is quite literally grounded in the physical survey marks themselves, as reference points on the earth. which leads me to wonder: how do we know where survey marks are? a survey mark’s datasheet provides the information needed to search for the mark. jennifer: this question is less straightforward than it may seem in the era of gps. datasheets for marks in the nsrs include geographic coordinates, but for marks that have been surveyed only for a precise elevation, the coordinates have been approximated from a map. in such cases, finding a mark requires more information. sometimes diagrams and, more recently, links to photographs accompany a datasheet. but by far the most useful and interesting information is in the series of narrative notes that describe each mark’s installation, environment, and nearby reference objects. unintentionally embedded in these narratives is a history of the area surrounding the mark, as recorded by surveyors that have used the mark over time. the nsrs now also accepts the reports of amateurs—those who have no training in surveying but search (or hunt!) for survey marks and report, to the best of their ability, on the condition of the marks. to find a survey mark, we rely on past surveyors speaking to us through the datasheet narratives. we hope they identified enough stable points of reference that have indeed stood the test of time, and that they described them in enough detail to find whatever evidence remains. survey mark hunting provides a lens into the past of the area surrounding the mark. when i locate and identify a survey mark, i’ve found a piece of infrastructure that had a direct role in building the past and therefore the present. i can continue its narrative into the future by contributing to the nsrs database. mapping history and its conversations donna: when you describe past surveyors as “speaking to you through the datasheet narratives” i see this as a metaphor for “scholarship as conversation,” in which communities engage in the exchange of ideas and information “with new insights and discoveries occurring over time as a result of varied perspectives and interpretations.”20 i love the way you connect your process as a survey mark hunter to the past, present, and future of that point on the earth, in which you are in conversation with past contributors to each datasheet. this also reflects the “information creation as a process” frame in how survey mark hunters participate in distinct conceptual and technical processes that result in their reports appearing on the nsrs datasheets.21 these two information literacy concepts inevitably converge on a third, “authority is constructed and contextual,” which states that “information resources reflect their creators’ expertise and credibility, and are evaluated based on the information need and the context in which the information will be used.”22 in the case of the nsrs datasheet, the creation of the information is a collaborative yet situated act, in which many contributors over time construct the narrative log for that survey mark, and yet there is a communally shared understanding of which contributions are likely to be more reliable and hold more authority within the community that uses the database, which includes professional surveyors as well as recreational survey mark hunters. can you share a little about the different characteristics and genres of reports surveyors and amateur survey mark hunters submit to the ngs for inclusion in the database? how do you know what information is reliable when looking for a survey mark? jennifer: the primary basis for reliability comes from what we know, or can deduce, about the contributors based on their recovery notes. different groups of people contribute to the database. each group tends to write with a slightly different voice reflecting their priorities. property surveyors’ or engineers’ reports might consist almost entirely of numeric data, data that amateurs can’t provide because we lack the equipment or training to take those measurements. geodetic surveyors may be involved in large-scale scientific projects and are careful to ensure that they’ve described points of lasting significance and stability. recreational survey mark hunters search primarily for fun and enrichment, and learn and develop best practices iteratively over time. each recovery is tagged with a user code, which is keyed to a surveying or engineering firm, a recreational organization, or individual contributors. optionally contributors may enter their initials. excerpt of datasheet with report submitted by jennifer, showing her user code and contributor initials the depth of detail and precision of measurements is one indicator of quality, since it is a view into the mindset of the person who made the recovery. i consider it a red flag if the report contains typos, misspellings, or measurements that are obviously wildly inaccurate, or if it otherwise seems carelessly written. the information isn’t necessarily useless, but we would approach it with caution. this kind of judgment takes time and experience to develop, but i know that when i see recoveries submitted under particular user codes, i’m careful to double check their information. there is one organization whose members earn “brownie points” for survey mark recoveries and as this recognition is the primary motivation for some of their members, in some cases they conduct quick and careless recoveries, or may visit so many in a day that they mix up their notes and log a recovery for the wrong mark. conversely, there are user code-initial combinations that are consistently accurate, clearly written, and provide useful information for the next person to seek the mark. i also trust recovery notes that conform to ngs standards. recoveries by large scientific and government entities like ngs are highly regarded because their employees are typically well trained and experienced. donna: you describe here characteristics which construct authority in different ways for the information conveyed. the content of each report reflects the author’s purpose for completing the survey mark recovery; this aspect of reading the datasheets is rhetorical, considering author, text, audience, and purpose. information evaluation, as a process that contributes to information literacy, is concerned with these same things. you also mentioned indicators of reliability that are shared across many information genres, such as typos and misspellings, and described how a user code-initial combination can build authority over time through the accuracy and reliability of the submitter’s cumulative body of reports. i had to laugh when you described how certain organizations set up incentives for survey mark recoveries and their reports; this reminds me of the incentives for faculty research productivity in the neoliberal academy today, and it can be argued the outcomes of such incentives are potentially similar: sloppy and rushed work of mediocre quality! your description of the judgment that develops over time through detailed engagement with the different kinds of information in the reports of past survey mark hunters—whatever their role or profession—sounds like the same kind of judgment i am hoping students will develop through their focused engagement with information, in a multitude of formats, both in and out of their academic programs of study. it sounds like the judgment i aim to develop in my own professional research work. it sounds like information literacy. hearing you describe the meaning-making that happens in conversation with the nsrs datasheets and the information they convey, i am wondering if you can speak more about survey mark hunting through the lens (or frame!) of “scholarship as conversation.” how are survey marks and their documentation history a conversation that builds on the past? jennifer: when we add new information to a datasheet, we’re expected to respond to and update (or correct) the information in earlier database entries. keep in mind that recovery notes are never edited, even if the information contained in them is incorrect, or changes at a later date. so while the most recent recovery note contains the most up-to-date information, to get a sense of the history of the mark you need to read all of the notes from the beginning. every time i refer to a datasheet, i get the sense that the contributors are speaking directly to me through time, that i’m interacting with real people and viewing the scene through their eyes, not simply viewing and interpreting data points. even if the previous contributor has long since passed on, i enjoy finding evidence of the details they mentioned and take pride in continuing the story of that particular point on the earth. one of my favorite examples is mount desert reset, in acadia national park, maine. on its datasheet (viewable at that link) we see a series of highly narrative, first-person notes from a surveyor who visited the station once a year for three years, beginning in 1931. the original 1856 description was lost, so this surveyor tries to make sense of what he finds at the site. he refines his measurements and hypotheses at each visit to ensure he has found the station that was measured in 1856. he marks the station, originally a hole drilled in bedrock, with a standard disk to communicate the station’s position to those who come later. the notes from the years that follow document changes to the area and threats to the marks, like a new road and parking area. newer technology is highlighted in the 2010 recovery when a link to digital photos of the site was added to the datasheet. other sources of data exist that aren’t as readily available as the nsrs database: for example, datasheets from the u.s. geological survey (usgs), or local surveyors’ datasheets. sometimes a surveyor or an amateur hunter will discover information about a mark in these other sources, and will add it to their recovery note in the nsrs database. this cross-documentation can help fill in the holes in the conversation by bringing previously “lost” information from the past into the present nsrs datasheet. example 367 nybe+a: amateur survey mark hunter provides cross-documentation in this example (367 nybe+a), the contributor does three useful things. he alerts readers to the current (as of 2006) conditions in the area that may affect access to the mark; he corrects the date that the mark was established; and he adds a reference to a primary source documenting the original 1909 survey. it’s exciting to recognize that we’re adding to an ongoing conversation, recording what we see today for use in the future! the information literacy of survey mark hunters donna: this analysis for gaps in information, which are identifiable by virtue of the researcher being immersed in the various sources of information for the field of practice in question, is very closely tied to the information literacy frames “scholarship as conversation” and “research as inquiry.” the first knowledge practice for “research as inquiry” is relevant to what you just shared: “learners that are developing their information literate abilities: formulate questions for research based on information gaps or on reexamination of existing, possibly conflicting, information.”23 looking at this knowledge practice as well as the others in “research as inquiry,” can you share briefly how these practices play out in your process of survey mark hunting? jennifer: the discrete nature of the recovery notes on the datasheets means that often much has changed in the years between recoveries. i usually compare information from different sources (say, topographic maps, current and historical aerial imagery, data from local surveyors and even logs from geocachers) to form a picture of what i might find when i visit the site. this research can generate more questions than answers. i might discover that a mark i thought was on public land is actually on private land, and then i’ll have to use different research methods to track down the landowner and contact them for permission. i might find a discrepancy between an official recovery note that indicates a mark is gone, while a geocacher has just published a recent photo showing the mark intact. my search for a particular survey mark in new york city’s central park correlates closely with the “research as inquiry” knowledge practices. while browsing online digital archives, i happened to find a map of the commissioners’ plan of 1811,24 which laid out the original plan for manhattan’s now-familiar grid of streets and avenues. after developing the plan, new york surveyor john randel, jr. and his men spent the better part of a decade establishing survey monuments at each planned intersection. over 1,600 monuments were set, with the intention of being removed (or covered over) when the streets were built. so then the question became, might some of these monuments remain to this day? the scope of my physical investigation was limited to those areas that have not been developed in the intervening years. the map of the commissioners’ plan of 1811 indicated that the land now encompassed by central park was, at the time of the survey, intended to be separated into orderly city blocks just like the rest of the city.25 this made central park a likely candidate for finding an original survey bolt, should any still exist. using google maps, my husband and i identified a few promising locations in central park by working out where the streets and avenues would have intersected had the grid been imposed as planned, and then narrowing down our list to the areas that had exposed bedrock. then we took a trip to manhattan to test our idea. the first location didn’t look as we expected it to and we found nothing. but at the second location, protruding about four inches from the bedrock outcrop was a weathered iron bolt! an iron bolt in bedrock in new york city’s central park how could we be sure we had found one of the original bolts? we weren’t 100% certain at the time, but the one inch square bolt with a cross cut in the top matched the description of the bolts set by the randel survey, and its coordinates matched the expected location of the intersection. in the years since a few of us independently worked out its location, the bolt has seen a lot of interest and discussion in online articles and a few books sparked by interest in the grid.26 anyone searching now for this bolt will have an easy time of it. this particular mark was one of my favorite finds because it encompasses so much of what we’ve been talking about: the importance of infrastructure, the decisions throughout history that formed the landscape we see today, and the use of these fun historical “puzzles” to help develop our research skills and judgment over time! donna: as you describe all of this, i am seeing several of the example dispositions for “research as inquiry” in action: you “. . . value intellectual curiosity in developing questions and learning new investigative methods; . . . value persistence, adaptability, and flexibility and recognize that ambiguity can benefit the research process; . . . [and] follow ethical and legal guidelines in gathering and using information.”27 it seems as though for a challenging recovery like this one, the ability and desire to explore many sources of information through varied methods, and to do so with a sense of respect and responsibility for how you interact with these physical sites and digital/digitized sources, are paramount to the recovery’s success. your new york city recovery is also a case study in the close relationship between the “research as inquiry” frame and “searching as strategic exploration” frame, where the latter states that “searching for information is often nonlinear and iterative, requiring the evaluation of a range of information sources and the mental flexibility to pursue alternate avenues as new understanding develops.”28 looking at the “searching as strategic exploration” frame in particular, are there other connections between survey mark hunting and information literacy that you became aware of as you read the framework for our conversation here? in what other ways do you use and develop your own information literacy when you embark on a survey mark recovery? jennifer: given its emphasis on iterative exploration and discovery, with a dash of serendipity, “searching as strategic exploration” struck me as the frame most concretely connected to the steps i take when investigating survey marks. i often browse maps and datasheets for fun, just to see what interesting survey marks might be in a given area, and it may not be until months later that i have the opportunity to search for them. assuming i’m planning a physical search, first i identify a target mark. the initial scope might be the area where i’m going to be vacationing. then i narrow the scope depending on a specific goal or restriction: maybe i’m looking for a mark of particular historical relevance, or one that would be most useful to modern surveyors working on an upcoming highway project. or i might be looking for an especially challenging mark or a very easy and quick one, depending on how much time i can devote to the search. these categories overlap; very often the marks that are more historically interesting haven’t been recovered in 50 years and are buried beneath decades of accumulated forest debris, while the ones that are more likely to be used in modern highway projects are in easy-to-access public right-of-way along the road shoulder. the key is to be flexible, and to accumulate useful sources as your experience grows. the nsrs database is the standard starting point, but i always check additional sources, like usgs datasheets (which are only available in paper form) or survey mark logs on geocaching.com. next, i’ll plug the mark’s coordinates into google maps or google earth and have a virtual look around. if a street view is available, it gives me a relatively recent first-person view of the area—often helpful for determining parking locations or property access. the datasheet description might refer to old roads or railroad tracks that no longer exist. in those cases, i would refer to historical aerial imagery and old topographic maps, also available online or in local archives. at this point, my goal is to have a general idea of a safe place to leave my vehicle, a reasonable approach to the survey mark site, and an estimate of any trouble i might encounter along the way. once i’m at the site, however, regardless of preparation, the situation can look drastically different than expected. i’ve had experiences where i had to turn away immediately because of uncooperative landowners, and other experiences where i searched for an hour without finding any sign of the survey mark. i’ve had to return to some sites multiple times armed with new information or new tools before ultimately finding the mark, say, moved from its intended location or buried beneath six inches of dried mud. still, the more i know about the area and the mark’s history, the more i’m likely to correctly interpret the physical features i see before me. a theme i noticed running through each frame is the synthesis of critical and creative thinking. we’ve talked in depth about the information that survey marks represent and how it is produced, how both amateurs and professionals are part of the community of people who use and value that information, and of course the importance of creative, iterative searching and discovery. i’m confident in saying that the activity of survey mark hunting both requires and develops information literacy. donna: your process of search and discovery reminds me of an academic researcher mapping their search route through clues found in footnotes and works cited lists, leading them to information located in collections at another site from their current location—right down to researching in advance where to put their vehicle once they get there, if they’re visiting an off site collection! even including issues of access—“will i have permission to access (physically/electronically/socially) the site/collection? what permissions and data points do i need to obtain in advance in order to have a successful search once i arrive?”—these processes are so similar. their similarity also raises some important questions about privilege and its attendant access to not only information, but the rich learning experiences that develop information literacy as well. for instance, what are the physical, social, and political barriers to information literacy experiences (like survey mark hunting or opportunities to engage in academic research) for those with marginalized identities related to race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability? the framework acknowledges these barriers to a degree in the “scholarship as conversation” and “information has value” frames,29 but could go farther in articulating ways to mitigate them as critical educators. you also alluded to the idea that, the more a researcher learns about their subject, the better able they will be to “interpret the […] features” in information sources and discourses that treat on that subject. the importance to information literacy of this constant process of preparation for reading and interpretation cannot be overstated; in fact, the framework incorporates this idea in its mention of “expertise” throughout the document.30 you mentioned the synthesis between creative and critical thinking that happens through this activity. as a way to sum up our dialogue, could you describe the effects your participation has had on the way you see and understand the world around you? jennifer: there is a real motivational thrill to discovering something previously unknown, at least to myself. i’ve become fluent in the use of so many different types of maps, websites, and databases, and familiar with old technologies and architecture and infrastructure—subject areas that i might never have set out to learn in such depth. but when i’m trying to find that elusive bronze disk that no one has seen in decades i always want to check one more source, learn about one more layer of the history of the place i’m researching. as survey mark hunters, we learn how to determine and how to become authoritative sources of information to others, developing our expertise through the process; how to recognize problems and propose hypotheses; how to test them and try again when we fail; and how to contribute back to the discussion. seeing the world through different people’s eyes, through the language they use that reflects the material world and philosophies of their times, has naturally impacted the way i see the world. i appreciate the challenge, sometimes futile, of finding a supposedly stable, permanent mark in a constantly changing world. set and described with the best intentions of permanence, survey marks may still become victims of progress in far less than a human lifespan. if i’ve learned anything from this activity, above all it’s that everything is temporary, and i’ll enjoy the world around me while i can. donna: from accessing, evaluating, using, and contributing to the nsrs survey mark datasheets, to the holistic process involved in exploring multiple sources of data, information, and history about specific survey marks, it is clear that survey mark hunting offers a material embodiment of information literacy in practice. add to this the fact that it is situated within various overlapping communities of participants and professionals, and the information literacy of survey mark hunting is evident. jennifer, thank you so much for contributing your time and expertise by participating in this dialogue. in addition to gaining an in-depth understanding of an activity i knew little about, having this conversation with you has led me to a more concrete understanding of information literacy as articulated by the framework. jennifer: thank you, donna, for the chance to share my enthusiasm for survey mark hunting, and to learn so much about the framework! like you, i’ve gained a deeper understanding of information literacy by examining my own behaviors and thought processes in the context of the framework. i hope our conversation inspires others to do the same! acknowledgments: thank you to our reviewers: nancy foasberg, whose knowledge of the network of conversations surrounding the topics addressed in this piece was indispensable and enriched the article greatly; and ian beilin, whose critical yet generous reading invited us to make this article more inclusive (and thus better) than it would have been otherwise. thank you also to our publishing editor, ellie collier, for shepherding us through the publication process with competence and care, and to the lead pipe editorial board for believing in our article idea early in the process. we are also grateful to richard galas for his photographs documenting some outstanding survey mark hunting adventures! bibliography “about survey mark hunting.” zhanna’s surveystation. jennifer galas/surveystation, 2016. https://thesurveystation.com/about-survey-mark-hunting/. bishop, bradley wade, and melissa p. johnston. “geospatial thinking of information professionals.” journal of education for library and information science 54.1 (2013): 15-21. eric. ed ej1074098. deterding, sebastian. “gamification: designing for motivation.” interactions 19.4 (2012): 14-17. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2212877.2212883. framework for information literacy for higher education. association of college and research libraries, 2015, 2016. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. holloway, marguerite. the measure of manhattan: the tumultuous career and surprising legacy of john randel, jr., cartographer, surveyor, inventor. w.w. norton & company, 2013. “infrastructure.” oxford dictionaries. oxford university press, 2016. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/infrastructure. kim, bohyun. “keeping up with… gamification.” keeping up with…. association of college and research libraries, may 2013. http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/gamification. leigh, george e. “bottles, pots, & pans? – marking the surveys of the u.s. coast & geodetic survey and noaa.” national geodetic survey: history. n.d. http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/web/about_ngs/history/survey_mark_art.pdf. lionel pincus and princess firyal map division, the new york public library. “map of the city of new york and island of manhattan as laid out by the commissioners appointed by the legislature, april 3, 1807.” new york public library digital collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-f4dd-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. lloyd, annemaree. “informed bodies: does the corporeal experience matter to information literacy practice?” in information experience: approaches to theory and practice, edited by christine bruce, kate davis, hilary hughes, helen partridge, and ian stoodley, 85-99. emerald group publishing limited, 2014. doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/s1876-056220140000010003. mcgonigal, jane. reality is broken: why games make us better and how they can change the world. the penguin press, 2011. miller, jason, c. peter keller, and larry d. yore. “suggested geographic information literacy for k-12.” international research in geographical and environmental education 14.4 (2005): 243-250. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382040508668358. national oceanic and atmospheric administration. “survey mark hunting.” national ocean service. n.d. http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/for_fun/surveymarkhunting.pdf. nazari, maryam. “the actuality of determining information need in geographic information systems and science (gis): a context-to-concept approach.” library & information science research 38.2 (2016): 133-147. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2016.04.005. nazari, maryam, and sheila webber. “what do the conceptions of geo/spatial information tell us about information literacy?” journal of documentation 67.2 (2011): 334-354. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00220411111109502. nicholson, scott. “a recipe for meaningful gamification.” in gamification in education and business, edited by torsten reiners and lincoln c. wood, 1-20. springer international publishing, 2015. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10208-5_1. richard g. “randel survey markers in new york city parks.” papa bear’s beyond central park. feb. 2016, http://beyondcentralpark.com/bcpmarkersinnycparks.php#. rose-redwood, reuben skye. “rationalizing the landscape: superimposing the grid upon the island of manhattan.” master’s thesis, the pennsylvania state university, 2002. rushing, rhonda l., and angus w. stocking. lasting impressions: a glimpse into the legacy of surveying. berntsen international, 2006. schroeder, robert. critical journeys: how 14 librarians came to embrace critical practice. library juice press, 2014. smale, maura a. “learning through quests and contests: games in information literacy instruction.” journal of library innovation 2.2 (2011): 36-55. http://www.libraryinnovation.org/article/view/148/238. turnbull, david, helen watson, and the yolngu community at yirrkala. maps are territories: science is an atlas: a portfolio of exhibits. inventive labs, 2008. http://territories.indigenousknowledge.org/home/contents. u.s. coast and geodetic survey. the preservation of triangulation station marks. u.s. govt. print. off., 1941. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/record/001483918. weissman, cale. “the hidden bolts that drive manhattan’s infrastructure nerds nuts.” atlas obscura. 28 sept. 2015. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-hidden-bolts-that-drive-manhattans-infrastructure-nerds-nuts. “exhibit 11: maps and theories concluded,” maps are territories: science is an atlas: a portfolio of exhibits, by david turnbull, with a contribution by helen watson with the yolngu community at yirrkala, 2008, http://territories.indigenousknowledge.org/exhibit-11, accessed 7 oct. 2016. [↩] framework for information literacy for higher education, association of college and research libraries, 2015, 2016, http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework, accessed 7 oct. 2016. [↩] ibid. [↩] “exhibit 11: maps and theories concluded,” maps are territories. [↩] “about survey mark hunting,” zhanna’s surveystation, jennifer galas/surveystation, 2016, https://thesurveystation.com/about-survey-mark-hunting/, accessed 7 oct. 2016. national oceanic and atmospheric administration, “survey mark hunting,” national ocean service, n.d., http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/for_fun/surveymarkhunting.pdf, accessed 7, oct. 2016. [↩] robert schroeder, critical journeys: how 14 librarians came to embrace critical practice, library juice press, 2014. [↩] maryam nazari and sheila webber, “what do the conceptions of geo/spatial information tell us about information literacy?,” journal of documentation 67.2 (2011): 334-354, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00220411111109502. [↩] jason miller, c. peter keller, and larry d. yore, “suggested geographic information literacy for k-12,” international research in geographical and environmental education 14.4 (2005): 243-250, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382040508668358. [↩] maryam nazari, “the actuality of determining information need in geographic information systems and science (gis): a context-to-concept approach,” library & information science research 38.2 (2016): 133-147, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2016.04.005. [↩] bradley wade bishop and melissa p. johnston, “geospatial thinking of information professionals,” journal of education for library and information science 54.1 (2013): 15-21, eric, ed ej1074098. [↩] scott nicholson, “a recipe for meaningful gamification,” in gamification in education and business, eds. torsten reiners and lincoln c. wood, springer international publishing, 2015, 1-20, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10208-5_1. [↩] bohyun kim, “keeping up with… gamification,” keeping up with…, association of college and research libraries, may 2013, http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/gamification, accessed 7 oct. 2016. [↩] maura a. smale, “learning through quests and contests: games in information literacy instruction,” journal of library innovation 2.2 (2011): 36-55, available at http://www.libraryinnovation.org/article/view/148/238, accessed 7 oct. 2016. [↩] sebastian deterding, “gamification: designing for motivation,” interactions 19.4 (2012): 14-17, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2212877.2212883. [↩] framework, 2015, 2016. [↩] jane mcgonigal, reality is broken: why games make us better and how they can change the world, the penguin press, 2011. [↩] lloyd theorizes the importance of the body and embodied experience to knowing, learning, and information experience, with a focus on the workplace settings and information experiences of emergency services personnel and nurses, arguing that “disassociating the body from research into people’s experience of information literacy effectively limits our understanding of the nature of this experience and has implications for accounts of learning” (lloyd, 2014, 86). for more see annemaree lloyd, “informed bodies: does the corporeal experience matter to information literacy practice?,” in information experience: approaches to theory and practice, eds. christine bruce et al., emerald group publishing limited, 2014, 85-99, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/s1876-056220140000010003. [↩] for more on the history of survey marks in the united states see u.s. coast and geodetic survey, the preservation of triangulation station marks, u.s. govt. print. off., 1941, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/record/001483918, accessed 7 oct. 2016, and, george e. leigh, “bottles, pots, & pans? – marking the surveys of the u.s. coast & geodetic survey and noaa,” national geodetic survey: history, n.d., http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/web/about_ngs/history/survey_mark_art.pdf, accessed 7 oct. 2016. [↩] “infrastructure,” oxford dictionaries, oxford university press, 2016, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/infrastructure, accessed 7 oct. 2016. [↩] framework, 2015, 2016. [↩] ibid. [↩] ibid. [↩] ibid. [↩] lionel pincus and princess firyal map division, the new york public library, “map of the city of new york and island of manhattan as laid out by the commissioners appointed by the legislature, april 3, 1807,” new york public library digital collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-f4dd-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, accessed 7 oct. 2016. [↩] for a critical reading of the new york city randel survey, weissman highlights rose-redwood’s master’s thesis exploring the “politics of mapping” that the randel survey represents: in it rose-redwood “focuse[s] on the environmental history of new york city, and the changes the grid brought to the city and its inhabitants. to him, these bolts represent the ‘politics of mapping.’ that is, their physical presence meant both a new modern city to randel and other officials as well as assured destruction to landowners” (weissman, 2015) as well as other residents. for more see reuben skye rose-redwood, “rationalizing the landscape: superimposing the grid upon the island of manhattan” (master’s thesis, the pennsylvania state university, 2002), and, cale weissman, “the hidden bolts that drive manhattan’s infrastructure nerds nuts,” atlas obscura, 28 sept. 2015, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-hidden-bolts-that-drive-manhattans-infrastructure-nerds-nuts, accessed 7 oct. 2016. for more of rose-redwood’s related work, see his google scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-mziotmaaaaj&hl=en. [↩] weissman, “the hidden bolts.” richard g., “randel survey markers in new york city parks,” papa bear’s beyond central park, feb. 2016, http://beyondcentralpark.com/bcpmarkersinnycparks.php#, accessed 7 oct. 2016. rhonda l. rushing and angus w. stocking, lasting impressions: a glimpse into the legacy of surveying, berntsen international, 2006. marguerite holloway, the measure of manhattan: the tumultuous career and surprising legacy of john randel, jr., cartographer, surveyor, inventor, w.w. norton & company, 2013. [↩] framework, 2015, 2016. [↩] ibid. [↩] ibid. [↩] ibid. [↩] acrl framework, dialogue, games-based learning, geographic information systems (gis), information literacy, survey mark hunting, survey marks putting critical information literacy into context: how and why librarians adopt critical practices in their teaching library lockdown: an escape room by kids for the community this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct normalize negotiation! learning to negotiate salaries and improve compensation outcomes to transform library culture – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 22 may aliqae geraci and shannon l. farrell /1 comments normalize negotiation! learning to negotiate salaries and improve compensation outcomes to transform library culture in brief this article explores academic librarians’ experiences with compensation negotiation, using a combination of survey and interview data. specifically, we focus on where librarians learned how to negotiate, where they sought or found advice, where they wished they had received information, and what factors would help them negotiate and improve their outcomes in the future. we also discuss the impact of representation or membership in a labor union on negotiation behavior. we share this information to help facilitate a larger cultural shift in libraries: to normalize negotiation through more and better training, increased self-advocacy in the hiring and promotion process, and more transparency in the sharing of experiences and compensation information. by aliqae geraci and shannon l. farrell introduction there is a widespread belief – communicated1 and in whispers, in professional venues and behind closed doors – that librarians do not need or want good wages and do not negotiate. we know otherwise. salary negotiation in libraries has been a topic of interest of ours for close to a decade. as members and subsequent chairs of the american library association-allied professional association (ala-apa) standing committee on the salaries and status of library workers, we organized educational and informational resources on library compensation topics and individual and collective negotiation trainings (dorning et. al, 2014). through this work, we identified an absence of library and information science (lis)-specific literature on negotiation and compensation, and spoke with hundreds of library workers about negotiating salary in libraries. in response, we designed a study in 2014 that would capture librarians’ perception of and experience with compensation negotiation in the library workplace, distributing a survey in 2015 and conducting interviews from 2016-2017. during this time, we also continued our ala and ala-apa work, and in 2019, were certified as american association of university women (aauw) salary negotiation training facilitators2 . as our expertise and involvement grew, we spoke to more library workers at all levels of experience, authority, and across all library types about negotiating. we fielded questions and requests for help that touched upon a range of emotions related to negotiating in a library context: fear, frustration, resentment, and unsureness. in organizing and leading negotiation training sessions at ala annual conferences and in sponsored webinars, we observed high attendance and enthusiasm, coupled with participants’ urgent requests for privacy, based in their fear of being recorded and/or observed by supervisors. we also witnessed discouraging behavior from more experienced librarians and managers, telling interested participants to reduce expectations or not bother trying to negotiate. luckily, we are in a moment of broader cultural change, led by workers and workers’ movements, that is carrying libraries and library workers along with it. after decades of trade union decline in the u.s., we are now experiencing a resurgence of strike action overall (bureau of labor statistics, 2019), and in organizing and strikes in k-12 and higher education (french, 2019; tolley, 2018; herbert, van der naald, & cadambi daniel, 2019). coinciding with #metoo and a resurgence in interest and activity around the gender wage gap, private sector initiatives, mostly in tech, have been created by workers to disclose salaries, share experiences, and provide support and information to women in companies and industries (maclellan, 2018). similar efforts in lis have emerged in social media discussions and through collaborative documentation of shared salary data (kayt emily, 2018; “library salaries inequityresources,” 2018; tewell, 2019). these concurrent and sometimes intersecting movements to improve wages and working conditions across industries, occupations, and worksites engage individual and collective negotiation as vehicles and strategies to improve wages and working conditions. our overall goal in conducting this research and sharing this information is to normalize negotiation in librarianship, as one pathway to improving library worker compensation. we are interested in how people acquire the skill sets that produce and enhance successful negotiation, how negotiation impacts salary and compensation outcomes, and how industries and occupations can facilitate training in this area. academic libraries are a rich site of inquiry, as they span public and private sectors, states, institutional sizes, and staff statuses within universities. we are heartened by the recent growth in interest in individual and collective negotiation in libraries, and seek to fill the gap in research about how librarians learn and acquire training to negotiate. it is not enough to encourage the act of negotiation; we must also understand what is at stake, what works best, and what can be won through strategic action, individually and collectively. literature review bruce patton (co-author of the seminal negotiation text getting to yes) defined negotiation as “back-and-forth communication designed to reach an agreement between two or more parties with some interests that are shared and others that may conflict or simply be different” (2005). extensive research across disciplines has generated much insight into negotiation in the workplace. we know that negotiation generally results in better outcomes (gerhart and rynes, 1991; o’shea and bush, 2002; marks and harold, 2011), that employer offers and behavior during the negotiation process can alter the job’s perceived attractiveness (porter et. al, 2004), and that gender differentials exist in negotiation behavior (bowles et al., 2007; dittrich et al., 2014) and role-associated outcomes (dittrich et al., 2014). much research assessing negotiation frequency, practices, or outcomes is simulation-based (porter et. al, 2004; stevens et. al, 1993; bowles et. al, 2007, dittrich et al, 2014), inhibiting direct comparison with survey-based studies3 . while pay secrecy/transparency is closely associated with salary negotiation, the research encompasses a broader organizational scope beyond the hiring or negotiation process. bamberger and belagolovsky (2010) captured pay secrecy’s negative impact on employee performance. workers tend to assume salary inequities in the face of secrecy, underestimating management compensation and overestimating peer compensation (collela et al., 2007), and worker perceptions of fair pay are closely associated with pay transparency (day, 2012). in the absence of pay transparency, workers prefer that the mechanisms for determining compensation be clearly articulated (hartmann & slapnicar, 2012). researchers have also identified best practices for teaching and learning negotiation. nadler et. al’s (2003) review of negotiation training literature identified four main learning methods: didactic (learning about the theories), learning via “information revelation” (receiving additional information), analogical learning (reading case studies and comparing), and observational learning. in testing the methods in combination with experience, and comparing to a baseline of only experience, they found that analogic and observational learning methods resulted in better performance, as well as outcomes for both parties. however, the observational group were less able to articulate the methods or strategies they had applied to the process. participants within the information revelation group demonstrated a very strong understanding of the bargaining interests and positions of the other party, but this did not result in significant improvement in their performance. researchers concluded that experience alone was ineffective in helping a negotiator conceptualize the task or derive meaning from the experience, and that analogic training helps participants to better develop awareness of the process and improve outcomes. the adding of observational and information revelation methods enhanced negotiation performance and understanding, respectively. the nuanced value of analogic training methods in improving knowledge transfer and negotiation practices had been captured by loewenstein et. al (1999), who observed that analogic training resulted in better strategic proposals, and that  those drawing an analogy from two negotiation scenarios were three times more likely to apply the strategy than those receiving cases separately. movius (2008) concluded that negotiation training impacts real-world outcomes, that the learning process environment can impact comprehension and performance, that using multiple case studies during training is superior than a single case, that using case studies and observation produce better negotiation practices than just lecture and information revelation, and that negotiators who perceive greater agency or control over outcomes (self-efficacy) might benefit more with training4 . after observing gender disparities in negotiation outcomes following a training program, stevens et. al (1993) successfully mitigated the difference by augmenting content training with goal-setting training. there has been minimal research conducted about salary negotiation and the field of librarianship. however, in recent years, there have been some studies conducted around academic librarians’ experiences with salary negotiation (reed et al., 2015; lo and reed, 2016; reed and lo, 2016; silva and galbraith, 2018). reed et al. (2015) interviewed and surveyed entry-level academic librarians on their job search experiences, while lo and reed (2016) surveyed a broader swath of academic librarians and discovered that almost half of their respondents were not comfortable negotiating, and that younger people were more likely to negotiate their first professional job offer. reed and lo (2016) investigated how library hiring managers perceived and acted in negotiations, finding that employers expect job seekers to negotiate. silva and galbraith (2018) reported on gender-based salary negotiation patterns among academic librarians employed by association of research libraries member libraries, and discovered that women negotiated less frequently and were less successful when they did negotiate. however, higher frequencies of negotiation were discovered in managers/administrators and those with longer tenure in a position. in 2017, we published the results of a survey about general librarians’ experience with compensation negotiation in the library workplace (farrell and geraci, 2017). over 1500 librarians participated in the survey, across numerous library types. this study illustrated that almost half of respondents (46%) negotiated in their most recent position. the majority of those who did negotiate (n=656) received positive outcomes, including salary increases (62%) or better compensation packages (36%). negative outcomes were minimally reported (2%). this study also examined information that informed negotiation strategy, with the majority of respondents indicating prior work experience or education (58%) and previous salary (54%) as being important. fewer respondents noted salary data (41%), advice from mentors/colleagues/supervisors (32%), or negotiation literature (30%). only 7% stated that they drew upon prior negotiation training. beyond these studies, the majority of negotiation articles in the library literature focus on providing advice about strategies to use to negotiate salary (adelman, 2004; baron, 2013; dalby, 2006; havens, 2013; holcomb, 2007; kessler, 2015; kolb and schaffner, 2001; martin, 2004; niemeier and junghahn, 2011; topper, 2004; wilson, 2013), or what to expect during the negotiation process (franks et al., 2017). bell (2014) discusses how to avoid having an offer rescinded, while zumalt (2007) focuses on finding salary data to build the best case. most articles are written for general library workers, but some are geared toward managers or administrators (cottrell, 2011; white, 1991). many of these articles discuss librarianship as a predominantly female occupation, and urge women to negotiate to combat low salaries (adelman, 2004; galloway and archuleta, 1978; kolb and schaffner, 2001), and decrease the gap between women and men who negotiate (kessler, 2015). however, some articles discuss the need to keep expectations in check, noting small towns (martin, 2004) or markets flooded with recent graduates (adelman, 2004) may yield lower salaries. the common trope of librarians “not being in it for the money” appears in the literature with dalby (2006) declaring “in the library world, salaries are generally low. most of us are here for the job, not the salary,” and kolb and schaffner (2001) ascribing low salaries in librarianship to the fact it is a “service profession” and librarians do not prioritize “monetary compensation.” research on the impact of collective negotiation on library worker compensation is limited, but potential frameworks for analyzing individual and collective outcomes could be drawn from feld’s (2000) exploration of union representation’s impact on library pay and mudge’s (1987) analysis of canadian library collective bargaining agreements by outcomes that encompass compensation structures, benefits, and other work arrangements. methods this article reports on part of a multiphase study investigating librarians’ experience with and perspective on compensation and benefits negotiation in the library workplace5 . we employed interviews with academic library participants to augment baseline survey findings with more detail, greater nuance and complexity, and to explore individual experiences and extended responses, than what could be derived from a survey instrument alone. in phase one of the study, we deployed a survey of 50 questions. we solicited participants with an invitation that sought to capture the experiences and perspectives of librarians on negotiating for compensation and benefits in the library hiring process. the terms “librarian” and “negotiation” were intentionally undefined, allowing participants to self-identify for participation. respondents who did not indicate current or past employment in a library were routed out of the survey. questions were a mix of open, closed, and multiple-choice, and focused on generating educational and employment information from participants: education level; years of experience working in libraries; current employment status; position type; type, status, and geographic location of library where they work; size of library community that they serve; representation by a labor union; negotiation experience (i.e. if they negotiated and with whom they negotiated); negotiation outcome; information used to negotiate; and demographics. we administered the survey via qualtrics survey software, and distributed it across a range of library-themed listservs and social media channels in november 2015 – december 2015 (see farrell and geraci, 2017). the survey gathered over 1500 respondents and also solicited contact information from participants who would be willing to participate in subsequent interviews. we generated survey reports and cross-tabulations within qualtrics, with select additional analysis completed within excel. in phase two, we invited academic librarians to participate in interviews by randomly selecting phase one survey respondents with “.edu” email addresses. 29 people responded to the invite. we conducted interviews between december 2016 – march 2017. the interviews were semi-structured, including questions that encompassed broad themes regarding negotiation experience, training, perceived responses by negotiating employers, desired support, and factors that would facilitate or inhibit future negotiation. audio recordings of the interviews were transcribed and imported into atlas.ti. we individually read the transcripts to identify and agree on broad themes. once themes were identified separately, we applied the codes collaboratively, discussing areas of disagreement and reaching consensus before applying final codes in atlas.ti. we generated co-occurrence tables to capture top code frequencies within question responses, and ran code co-occurrence reports to identify coded text. utilizing both the survey and interview data, this article focuses on academic librarians’ experiences with compensation negotiation, and where they learned how to negotiate, where they sought or found advice, where they wished they had received information, and what factors would help them negotiate and improve their outcomes in the future. we also explore the impact of representation or membership in a labor union on negotiation. appendices include related questions from the survey (appendix a), interviews (appendix b), and codes generated by analyzing interviews (appendix c). results survey results as reported in farrell and geraci (2017), 46% of 1,466 respondents reported negotiating salary or other compensation for their most recent library position6 . academic library workers reported negotiating for their most recent position at a higher rate (53%) than those working in public or k-12 libraries (31% and 24%, respectively), and roughly equal to those working in special libraries (56%). 25% of survey respondents indicated membership or representation (see figure 1) in a labor union7 , aligning with macpherson and hirsch’s (2018) most recent analysis of current population survey data that estimates a 26.2% union membership rate amongst librarians. figure 1. number of survey respondents who indicated they were a member of or represented by a labor union (n = 1466).   we have observed and engaged in extensive conversations within formal and informal lis circles regarding potential differences in negotiation strategies across union/non-union contexts, regardless of library type. further analysis of study data demonstrated that union member respondents reported significantly lower negotiation rates overall, with 35% of 354 negotiating salary or compensation for current positions, compared to half of non-union respondents negotiating for most recent positions (see table 1). table 1. survey respondent union status and reported negotiation for most recent position (n = 1466) are you a member of, or represented by, a labor union? yes % no % i don’t know or i’m not sure % total did you negotiate salary or compensation for your most recent position? yes 124 35% 542 50% 8 35% 674 no 230 65% 547 50% 15 65% 792 total 354 1089 23 146 however, in reviewing union member respondents by library type, those working in academic libraries once again reported negotiating for their most recent position at a significantly higher rate than the overall group, as well as greater rates than those working in public or k-12 libraries (see table 2). table 2. survey respondent union representation, reported negotiation for most recent position, and library type (n = 354) what type of library do you work for? public % academic % school (k-12) % special other total % did you negotiate salary or compensation for your most recent position? yes 25 19% 83 52% 9 22% 0 7 124 35% no 105 81% 76 48% 32 78% 8 9 230 65% total 130 159 41 8 16 354 an initial analysis of survey data in farrell and geraci (2017) reported that the elements negotiated by all respondents revealed the top six (descending) as salary, professional development support, housing/relocation assistance, position step/rank, time off/leave, and scheduling. respondents had the option of selecting all. analyzing survey responses by respondents’ library type and union status revealed differences in what elements are most frequent in negotiation. all demonstrated greatest negotiation for salary. union member responses revealed position step/rank as second, while academic respondents reported negotiating housing or relocation assistance second after salary. academic union respondents, who are likely negotiating across an up-or-out academic rank system as well as a collectively negotiated compensation structure that ties pay to rank and seniority, aligned more closely with overall union responses, ranking position/step as second along with professional development funding (see table 3). table 3. survey respondent union status, elements negotiated, and library type (n = 1223) elements negotiated all (n = 1223) academic, all (n = 767) union, all (n = 240) academic, union (n = 163) salary 607 387 104 76 professional development 156 101 31 25 housing or relocation assistance 154 126 24 22 position step or rank 135 82 47 25 time off or leave 92 30 18 7 scheduling 79 41 16 8 respondents overall, within academic libraries, and across union statuses, identified prior salary/compensation, prior work experience/education, and publicly-available salary information as the top three information sources informing their negotiation strategy. respondents were informed to lesser and different degrees by negotiation literature, and the advice of a mentor, colleague, or supervisor. respondents that negotiated rarely reported formal negotiation training (see table 4). table 4. survey respondent union status, information informing negotiation strategy, and library type (n = 1523) information informing negotiation strategy all (n=1523) academic, all (n=293) union, all (n=280) non-union, all (n=1198) academic, union, all (n=206) previous salary or compensation 367 81 65 290 45 previous work experience or education 385 80 77 302 54 consulted publicly-available salary data 284 43 47 221 36 negotiation advice or literature 199 39 45 154 37 negotiation training 48 5 8 40 7 mentor, colleague, or supervisor 218 43 34 174 24 i’m not sure 22 2 4 17 3 in reporting negotiation outcomes, respondents most frequently secured an increase in salary beyond the initial offer, across all categories (see table 5). threats to rescind and rescinded offers occurred in low frequencies across all library types. table 5. survey respondent union status, outcome of negotiation, and library type (n = 776) negotiation outcome all (n=776) academic, all (n=496) union, all (n=139) academic, union (n=97) increase in initial salary offered 405 268 69 49 increase or improvement in total package offered 238 150 38 30 no change in initial offer 122 73 28 17 threat to rescind offer 10 5 4 1 offer rescinded 1 — — — interviews interviews with academic librarians yielded rich data about how participants learned how to negotiate, where they sought or found advice about negotiation, what resources they wished they had access to, along with what they believe would have enabled them to negotiate more effectively.  main themes associated with each topic are shared with illustrative quotes, edited for clarity. how librarians learned to negotiate when asked how participants learned to negotiate, three main themes emerged: 1) utilizing negotiation literature; 2) talking to their peers; or 3) applying experience they had gained from their workplaces. some noted that reading articles helped them figure out a negotiating strategy: there is so much stuff online everywhere about how important it is to negotiate … it was something that i should really think about and be prepared to do. so i read some various articles online about how best to do that and how to approach it. others discussed learning about negotiation from reading articles about women in the workplace. these articles discussed gender differences in negotiation, and urged readers to negotiate for improved compensation and career success. i did a lot of online reading about women in the workplace and needing to be direct. … that’s where i learned that i should come prepared with the facts like degree, and experience, and responsibilities, and to frame it not as the institution doing me a favor. … what the reading did for me was remove the sense that it was the institution doing me a favor, and instead it was a response to a factual presentation. that these are the facts of the situation and this is how i’m asking you to respond to it. many reported informally talking to peers (librarians and other academics) to solicit information about the negotiation process, including the nature of the offer, appropriate counter-offers, and best strategies. one participant noted: i did consult with one of my colleagues who is not a librarian .. but we had been on [negotiation] teams together and i bounced ideas off of him for what he thought my counter should be and the approach i should take … he might have looked at my email draft before i sent it in, that sort of thing. another stated: i always try to talk to other people and ask, ‘what do you think about this? is it reasonable?’ some noted that their peers strongly encouraged them to negotiate, and the importance of addressing the gender gap with negotiation, stating it was their “feminist duty” to do so. many discussed how other on-the-job experiences had prepared them to negotiate salary; such as advocating for staff within a managerial role; observing negotiations from the vantage point of search committees; or in negotiating with colleagues, clients, or vendors as part of their job. a former it professional described the impact of past experience working with clients: they have … grand ideas and then there is what you can actually do. there are always negotiations that have to happen. another described prior sales experience: i did door-to-door company sales and a lot of that was negotiating: ‘i like your product but i can only afford this much.” and mine would be “you can really afford this if you — this is how useful this product is” and we would just go back and forth about money. another discussed their role in vendor negotiations: one of my primary responsibilities was to negotiate. i was trying to reinforce license agreements for the library. i got a lot of experience with the language of negotiation. it was a lot easier to negotiate on behalf of an organization than to negotiate on your own behalf. how librarians sought / found advice about negotiation we observed similar emergent themes in asking participants where they sought/found advice about negotiation: 1) using literature about negotiation to prepare to negotiate; 2) relying on data to determine appropriate salary ranges or numbers; or 3) consulting their peers. interviewees frequently reported relying on literature for negotiation advice, particularly for participants seeking scripts to use in the negotiation process. one person stated that reading about particular phrases to use was necessary due to how “nervous” they were. another participant sought specific phrasing to avoid offending the employer: for the actual negotiation i really just did my homework, might have read a couple of articles on how to phrase things, because i wasn’t sure if librarian culture is different from the culture i came from. i have worked on sounding more librarianish. i didn’t want to offend anyone, but i wanted to ask because i knew that once i got hired,asking becomes much more difficult at that point. in discussing their use of articles for guidance, many observed the lack of library-specific literature on negotiation, instead relying on content largely oriented toward the private sector or corporate context. some believed that this guidance was not at all relevant to their experience as a librarian: i see job advice columns in newspapers and magazines. i often don’t tend to regard those as very relevant to my situation. maybe this is erroneous, but my impression is that compensation is not as flexible in academia as it is in the private sector.they are geared toward people who are involved in sales or things where they have really solid metrics that are in their control to a certain degree. because they say something like, bring up how much revenue you’ve brought into the company or something like that, or how much business you’ve made. librarians don’t quite think in those terms of generating business so to speak. we are trying to get people to use our services — but not in such a — when i get evaluated each year, they don’t ask me how many more hours of research time did you get from professors or something. participants used data to augment literature, and discussed a range of data sources consulted, including online cost of living calculators, public salary data, salary surveys from various professional organizations (e.g., ala-apa, aall, aahsl8), as well as salary numbers and ranges listed in current job postings. in one case, a participant noted that using this data caused them to withdraw their job application: i ended up withdrawing because i looked at other people’s salaries at a couple institutions and i was like there’s no way that i’m going to accept what these other people are making so i don’t even want to go through this process. finding completely analogous situations was described as a kind of art, rather than a science, where participants shared their research strategies in arriving at appropriate salary ranges that correspond to their background and experience: i have to find somebody that’s sort of similar to me in terms of experience, right? so i do the really nitty-gritty looking at people’s individual profiles. i get, when did they graduate? what kind of experience do they have? participants sought out peers to learn more about the negotiation process and what to expect, as well as soliciting feedback on whether the offers were reasonable. one participant discussed knowing the person who had previously held the job and how valuable that was: i knew the person in the previous position. he told me exactly how much money he made and he said that i would be silly to accept anything less and he even told me exactly what management would do. he said they’d walk away from the table, they’d wait a day, and then they’d give you what you wanted and that is exactly how it happened. another talked about turning to a network of colleagues to identify a person who used to work at the institution they were applying to: i happened to have a pretty good network from grad school and one of my colleagues that used to work at the institution that i’m currently working at, i talked to her a little bit about what to expect. she said they pay generously. i had a little more confidence in asking for a bit more. where do librarians wish they had received advice or guidance on negotiation interviewees identified two main entities that they wished had provided negotiation advice during their careers: library schools and professional associations. some noted they received career services support in preparing applications and attending job interviews in library school, but did not receive similar assistance around negotiation: i think it would have been useful in library school. we had a couple of sessions here and there about how to create a good resume, what the interview process is like; but nobody ever talked about the negotiation process, how to research salary, how to analyze the benefits package, how to talk about those things before you accept the job. some thought that this kind of instruction would be appropriate for either an introductory class, or as part of a management class. i wish my library school had — in the management class we had, that would have been super helpful. when they’re teaching you management, you’re on both sides, so you can be on both sides of the equation. one participant stated they would have appreciated negotiation training in library school: i think that sometime during library school would be good, particularly because i think you feel very vulnerable as an entry level person. what you need does really seem to change the more experience you get or the more your career morphs. participants also pointed to professional associations like the american library association as a logical place for salary negotiation training, as they already provide professional development programming. suggestions ranged from conference or webinar programming, to one-on-one mentoring. some discussed the importance of library associations providing library-specific negotiation training. as a law librarian stated: i think it would be great if aall [american association of law libraries] offered something like that. the reason the aall salary survey is helpful is because it is so specific to our line of work. i would be more interested in some sort of either a workshop or seminar or some sort of educational opportunity targeted to law libraries. so, to the extent that they are more reputable but more authoritative coming from a group like aall. in general, many participants believed that professional associations would be the best place to provide training and discussion opportunities, and facilitate a broader cultural change within lis industry and occupational communities regarding salary negotiation. what would help librarians negotiate when asked what would help them negotiate in the future, participants pointed to greater access to data, an enhanced understanding the perspective of those on the other side of the “table”, and sharing information about negotiation among a community of librarians. the majority of participants stated that pay transparency in salaries would be extraordinarily helpful. while general access to average salaries (e.g., survey data) was good, it did not help all that much in crafting an ask9 or understanding what is appropriate on an institutional level. they wanted more specificity: i think having fairly granular data about salaries, with years of experience and responsibilities broken out in different kinds of library roles, and being able to compare apples to apples in terms of library roles. so if somebody is a library liaison for example, then what are other people at other universities and then cost of living, being able to factor that in also. starting salaries would be good to know for different institutions around the country. one person discussed how having access to data is what made their negotiation successful: more data is always better. …having the information about people in similar situations is really helpful for me; my successful negotiation came from my ability to distinguish myself from the data. related to this, some participants also requested more transparency in crafting salary expectations. for instance, having salary ranges listed on job postings. many participants applauded that salary data is available from public institutions but wanted that same information from private institutions. additionally, many participants sought more explicit signaling from human resources or administration that negotiation was expected and accepted, and what was up for discussion. they wanted assurance that if they opened a conversation about salary, that they would not insult anyone or lose the offer. i think it would be helpful if you have, just more information in general about what’s going on in that institution because how do you know if you’re being bold or not if you don’t know what other people in similar situations are making. even more explicitly, one person stated they “would like a crystal ball to know exactly what i could say to get what i want.” finally, some participants expressed that sharing information and experiences among librarians about salary negotiation would be incredibly helpful. particularly, there were opinions that sharing more information would change the perspective that talking about money “is a dirty thing”. further, talking more about experiences negotiating salary would aid people in seeing that there is, as one participant put it, “really nothing to lose and only something to gain from it.” what would help librarians receive better negotiation outcomes when participants were asked what would help them achieve better outcomes from negotiating, they reiterated the need to have more transparency from administration and human resources, as well as understanding the process, or strategy, of negotiating better, and actually practicing negotiating. participants once again wanted to know, at the beginning of the negotiation process, where the hiring organization would have “flexibility.” they wanted honesty about “what the possibilities are and what’s realistic” to ask for in a negotiation. they also wanted more information about their own personal leverage: am i their first choice by a mile or am i just one in a pack of very qualified people and they just happen to like me a little bit more? trying to read that would make a big difference in terms of what i would feel like doing. some participants also discussed wanting more familiarity with the process of negotiating, i.e., understanding the back-and-forth dialogue that goes along with negotiating salary: knowing they might say no, or they might say, ‘well, we’re not going to give you everything, but here’s our offer’. and just being comfortable with the — ‘okay, well i’ll take your offer and review this’ and just getting more experience and more comfortable with what’s a reasonable comeback for whatever they give you, at whatever stage you’re at. related to this topic, participants stressed the need for practice to help them overcome anxiety that they feel about negotiating: having an opportunity to do a role play, or have somebody help you work on casting that language, and how to respond to pushback. how to actually be in that moment and do the give and take of it. several people specifically wanted to be able to role play with others who are very experienced in negotiating: something like role playing, actually practicing things, having the conversation with somebody who does it all the time, and who’s trained to be like a little more on the pushy side about what they want. labor unions respondents that were members of or represented by labor unions discussed the intersection of the collective and individual negotiations experience, acknowledging that the presence of a collective bargaining contract provided a known formula to guide their expectations and asks. as one respondent said: they had already exceeded [the number i had in mind] and also it’s a union position. so i knew that they calculated that based on my experience and based on my education etc. i knew the formula that went into it. while understanding the terms and conditions baked into a contract can provide a known formula for prospective negotiators, they can only leverage them to their benefit if the formula or framework is known or shared: specifically back to when i was hired for this job, there was information on the union website that would have been really good to have and i was not pointed towards that and i didn’t have enough knowledge about the union to look at it. so now when i am in a position, like i’m on a screening committee, i tell candidates to go look at it. that was great so far they’re informed about what the pay grades are and where they would be sitting on those pay grades so that they can advocate for themselves more effectively. similarly, incoming employees may be unaware of how collectively negotiated terms and conditions are interpreted on the ground. a lack of awareness or misunderstanding of the full scope of parameters and possibilities within the contract can potentially inhibit allowable negotiation, leading to lower lifetime earnings: when i came to [university], they gave me a copy of the contract and in the contract it spells out for every level, and i accepted and went merrily along and was here probably for about five to seven years when i found out that, no actually that’s the minimum level. and that incoming faculty can negotiate to start at a higher level. i don’t know that i was really in that much of a position of strength that i would have wanted to push back too much, but in either case it’s kind of moot for me because i didn’t say anything except ‘great, where do i sign’. in the absence of insider information, incoming employees reported feeling like they still benefited from the presence of contract-provided minimums, and that they observed that subsequent steps or negotiated increases balanced their failure to negotiate incoming salary. my first [position] was when i was a brand new librarian and i did not negotiate at all. and so i had a terrible starting salary which only got better because i was at an institution that had a strong faculty union that i would be part of and basically i got bumped up to a new minimum that was reasonable as a result of that. engaging in the collective bargaining process as a rank-and-file activist or elected representative can provide a fertile training ground for negotiation skills, building comfort and familiarity with the process, dynamics, and stakes at hand, that can translate to enhanced individual negotiation practice. when i moved to my second position i did negotiate and one of the reasons that i probably was more comfortable, well, first of all i was older, but one of the reasons that i was probably more comfortable is that during the time that i was at my first institution, i had become extremely engaged in the union and had been a chief negotiator multiple times for faculty contracts.to say where i learned to negotiate, i would say that it was because of that. also that’s where it became, if it wasn’t already highly evident, but there was a difference between where you’d end up at the end of your career whether you negotiated or didn’t when you first accepted your position and the real understanding that everything hinges on that initial salary. by participating in the labor relations process, union member respondents acquired a broader perspective that demystifies and contextualizes the tensions and rituals of the back-and-forth: i was in union bargaining teams, so negotiating means a lot of different things, because that’s an official process where you put pressure on people generally but then you have a formalized process in a room. discussion our research investigated academic librarians’ experiences with compensation negotiation. facets explored included where they learned how to negotiate, where they sought or found advice, where they wished they had received information, and what factors would help them negotiate and improve their outcomes in the future. we confirmed that many academic librarians negotiate10, and discovered that they are negotiating at higher rates than librarians in other settings. around half of participants surveyed negotiated for salary or other elements of compensation for their most recent position. further, those that negotiated their salaries, across the board, received increases. while that is good news, it also means that around half of librarians are not negotiating. we discovered that academic librarians rarely received formal negotiation training or engaged with library-specific guidance on how to negotiate, and craved access to data and support structures to assist them in negotiating more, with greater skill, and to achieve better outcomes. we also investigated how a collective bargaining agreement or union representation impacts negotiation perceptions or behavior. despite misconceptions that you cannot negotiate salary in a union environment, our research indicated that librarians still did negotiate individually in addition to negotiating collectively. participants indicated that unions can be a training ground for learning how to negotiate, that a contract impacts the parameters of what can be asked or obtained, and that the process may vary from those reported by non-represented librarians (potentially indicating a more formal process required). the differing structural aspects of positions covered by collective bargaining agreements and/or within academic libraries likely account for differing prioritization of various negotiation elements. while most librarians negotiated for salary, academics also prioritized housing and professional development support, while union members prioritized negotiating position/rank. academic union respondents aligned more closely with the overall union responses in identifying prioritized negotiation elements11. the presence of a union or contract shifts the scope of librarian negotiations, elevating rank or position type as a more likely element of the ask, due to the financial implications of a higher rank or title. however, we also observed significantly lower rates of negotiation by union member respondents, potentially due to misconceptions as to whether individual negotiation is allowable within a collective bargaining context, or a lack of awareness of contract parameters to negotiate within and across. those surveyed pointed to previous work experience or education and their previous salary as the information sources that they relied on in negotiation, with very few academic librarians (2%) indicating formal training as a source. through interviews, we aimed to gain a fuller understanding of how librarians learn to negotiate, as opposed to what information sources were used during the process. while interviews confirmed a strong reliance on textual resources (unsurprising for librarians!), we also discovered that this overreliance compensated for a lack of formal negotiation training, insufficient information sharing across lis communities, and rampant pay secrecy by library employers12. regardless of union affiliation, the majority of librarians surveyed and interviewed stated that they did not receive formal, structured training. most interviewees learned how to negotiate from either reading literature, talking to other people in their networks (peers, spouses), and from the repeated practice of negotiating on-the-job. as many of our interviewees pointed out, increased access to formal negotiation training could improve their confidence and skill in attempting to negotiate compensation, and thereby increase the frequency of negotiation in library workplaces, and improve outcomes. training, however, is not a one-size-fits all solution, and pedagogical design impacts negotiation skill and outcomes. our interviewees pointed to practice or coaching as a welcome assist, but we know that structured negotiation trainings should be carefully designed to align with evidence-based best practices to increase negotiation frequency and efficacy13. practice alone does not make perfect. interviewees repeatedly stated that improved access to institutional or position salary data would aid them in negotiation, but we know from the literature that having the data alone is insufficient for negotiation training and improvement purposes14. receiving additional information during the process (“information revelation”) can enhance one’s understanding of the other party’s position, but the method does not impact overall strategy, performance, or outcomes. we fully support full compensation transparency for all positions and institutions in addition to evidence-based negotiation training opportunities. our research indicated that negotiation skills acquisition for academic librarians is currently informal, self-initiated, and network-bound rather than formally present in lis curriculum or professional development training, which interviewees expressed would be desired. this lack of formal training could mean that even if people are negotiating, they may be unaware of the scope of possible asks and/or effective tactics to deploy during the negotiation process, and are likely leaving money on the table. if the goal is to have more people negotiating to raise the compensation bar for everyone in the library, people will need to receive better training in order to negotiate. although our survey was widely distributed across the lis discipline and represents librarians from a variety of library types, interviews were limited to a small number of academic librarians and represent only their experiences. we hope to expand on this work by conducting more interviews with librarians in other library settings. survey findings demonstrating differences across library types raises additional questions, such as: why are academic librarians negotiating at higher levels than other librarians? how do aspects of library employment practices and workplaces impact negotiation practices? do conditions of the library workplace mediate the effect of union membership on salary negotiation outcomes? other variables that we did not address in detail here, but came up as themes in the interviews, such as gender, length of time in librarianship, supervisory status, size of institution, and institutional funding structure, could also impact these findings, and we aim to examine these topics at a later date. recommendations for individuals: all library workers should negotiate on principle, and be open to sharing experiences and outcomes with peers. that means that librarians with racial, gender, socioeconomic and/or positional power should use their privilege to change institutional and occupational cultures around negotiation by negotiating themselves, sharing experiences and numbers openly, and creating and holding space for discussion and mutual aid. for managers (supervisors, hiring managers): expect candidates and employees to negotiate. managers can normalize negotiation by using their position to advocate for higher salaries in general and for prospective candidates when participating in the negotiation process as an employer representative. those seeking to infuse social justice, feminism, and equity, diversity, and inclusion in their managerial and supervisory practices should consider how their approach to the negotiation process speaks to their commitment to economic justice. those negotiating for themselves should be similarly receptive in a hiring context. for employers (libraries as institutions or as part of larger institutions): share position salary ranges when posting jobs. commit to salary transparency on an organizational level. base offers on transparent salary schedules or scales, not a candidate’s past compensation. perform regular pay equity audits. for academic libraries with institutional policies restricting pay transparency in the hiring process, advocate for change organizationally, and aim to share this information with candidates as soon as possible as the search progresses. for unions: ensure that salary schedules and collective bargaining agreements are publicly available to prospective and current employees. if not included on the employer website, place in a central location on the union website that is not walled off from non-members. for library schools: incorporate formal salary negotiation training in career services support as well as into professional development curriculums. for library associations: commit to negotiation training and sharing salary survey data as an individual member benefit. articulate minimum salaries and best practices for wages. ala’s commitment to hosting aauw salary negotiation trainings for members is a great start. for all library workers and lis stakeholders: advocate for yourself, for your colleagues, not just the library and libraries. and when you do, share your experiences and strategies with colleagues. championing a culture shift within libraries and librarianship around compensation requires individual and collective negotiation and action. when colleagues ask for your support, engage in solidarity actions like salary disclosure, attending rallies, and signing petitions. it is time to embrace economic justice as a core value of librarianship. if democracy, diversity, intellectual freedom, professionalism, and social responsibility are “core values of librarianship” (ala council, 2004), then surely we can incorporate the recognition that we work for pay and are entitled to dignity and the ability to support ourselves and our families. conclusion when we began working on salary negotiation issues in lis, we repeatedly encountered the sentiments “but i can’t negotiate”, “librarians don’t negotiate”, and “we don’t do this for the money”. simultaneously, we heard about the difficulties that nascent, new, and experienced library workers face in supporting their families, paying off student loan debt from mls programs, and in contemplating lifelong careers in modestly compensated positions. in recruiting new librarians and promoting librarianship and library work as a viable career path, those of us in the field now must work to ensure that this work is good work in an economic sense – that it is well compensated and can support families. benchmarking library compensation levels by looking to librarian salaries alone is insufficient, as librarians may be one of the more well-compensated employee groups in the library. raising salary thresholds for all workers in the library, especially the lowest-compensated occupations, is essential. our overall goal in sharing this information is to normalize negotiation in librarianship, as one pathway to improving library worker compensation. our research reveals that talking about money and sharing experiences about negotiation is still a “closed-door” topic among colleagues. it is time to throw open the doors and speak freely. library workers should feel comfortable negotiating, have access to evidence-based training, and openly share strategies and experiences with others in the field without fear of retaliation or shaming. we hope that more and better training, increased transparency with the sharing of experiences and with compensation information, will facilitate greater frequency of negotiation and increased self-advocacy in the hiring and promotion process, in a manner that complements and augments the gains to be won through union organizing and collective bargaining. ultimately, we hope this will facilitate a larger cultural shift in libraries that shatters the well-worn trope that library workers do not and should not care about getting paid, and replaces it with a shared vision of library workers with individual and collective agency that expect and ask for more. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank the many survey and interview participants for sharing their experiences and feedback, curtis lyons and claire stewart for funding the transcription of interviews, ian beilin and leo lo for their thorough and thoughtful review, and sofia leung for guiding the article to completion. references adelman, e. g. 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(2019, january 9). if you’re asking for a raise (hello annual evaluation time) or negotiating salary, check out this library salaries inequities resource list. either way, add your salary anonymously to share with other library workers: https://goo.gl/jcvyjy  via @teach_research [tweet]. retrieved april 10, 2019, from @eamontewell website: https://twitter.com/eamontewell/status/1083052312359260160 tolley, k. (ed.). (2018). professors in the gig economy: unionizing adjunct faculty in america. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. topper, e. f. (2004). salary negotiation 101. american libraries, 35(2), 58–58. retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lii&an=502923291&site=ehost-live white, h. s. (1991). the tragic cost of being “reasonable.” library journal, 116(3), 166–167. retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lxh&an=9103043172&site=ehost-live wilson, c. (2013). the hardest button to button: closing the deal. retrieved from inalj website: http://inalj.com/?p=46710 work smart aims to train 10 million in salary negotiation by 2022. (2018, december 18). retrieved april 10, 2019, from aauw.org website: https://www.aauw.org/article/work-smart-aims-to-train/ zumalt, j. r. (2007). what can i expect to earn: information sources for library salary negotiations [data set]. retrieved from https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/3483 appendices appendix a. selected survey questions are you currently employed in a library? yes, full-time (permanent) yes, full-time (temporary or contract) yes, part-time (permanent) yes, part-time (temporary or contract) no what type of library do you work for? public library academic library (postsecondary) school library (k-12) special library other are you a member of, or represented by, a labor union? yes no i don’t know or i’m not sure did you negotiate salary or compensation for your most recent position? yes no what compensation elements did you negotiate for? (check all that apply) salary step or rank benefits for self or family (examples include medical/dental coverage, retirement contributions, disability or life insurance, flexible or health spending accounts) housing or relocation assistance scheduling (examples include flexible scheduling, a specific schedule, or telecommuting) time off or leave (examples include vacation or family leave, or paid time off) professional development (examples include time off or funding for conference attendance or classes/coursework, subsidy of professional memberships) i don’t remember other   ________________________________________________ outcome (check all that apply) increase in initial salary offered increase or improvement in total package offered no change in initial offer threat to rescind offer offer rescinded if you negotiated, what information informed your strategy? (check all that apply) previous salary previous work experience or education consulted publicly-available salary data negotiation advice or literature negotiation training mentor, colleague, or supervisor advice i’m not sure other   ________________________________________________ appendix b. selected interview questions tell me about your experiences negotiating salary or compensation in libraries. where did you learn how to negotiate? where did you seek/find advice? is there a person or program that you wish had advised you on negotiation? what would help you to negotiate in the future? what would help you [be better, have better outcome, etc.]?   appendix c. interview codes* interview codes broad theme definition data includes all forms of data, such as institutional data, occupational data, cost of living data, salary data disposition attributing negotiation skill or talent as innate to one’s disposition, personality, or innate talent don’t know unsure ed: lis library school or lis program information sharing sharing data, information or experiences about positions, employers, or negotiations, between people or a community of practice job market discussion of the relative strength or weakness of the lis market for employment, in relation to an individual’s leverage within negotiations job postings employment advertisements that may include position descriptions and salary information leverage an individual negotiator’s strength or position within the negotiation process, in relation to their skillset, marketability, and the desirability of the employer’s offer literature (books, articles, online) books, articles, or online resources (lis or non-lis) mentor or professor or supervisor (current or former) an experienced, non-peer advice provider within a field, workplace, or educational program. not a friend or family member. negotiation process indicating an element or the dynamics of the back-and-forth process of negotiating salary in an individual employment context no/none no answer or response ed:non-lis non-lis training or educational program on the job experience indicating experience derived in a former position (lis and non-lis), encompassing any element of negotiation as an employee, employer, or in representing the library in vendor relations peer friends or colleagues, of equal or similar status in the workplace or the field practice referring to repeated or cumulative experience in negotiation, as well as mock negotiation exercises professional association referring to a formal professional association, lis or non-lis signal scope verbal or non-verbal communication from the other party that indicates the allowable scope of negotiation spouse/family encompassing family or relatives training formal educational experience, outside or beyond a degree program union labor or trade union question codes question code definition learn where learned to negotiate seek/find where sought/found advice on negotiation wish person or organization they wished had advised them on negotiation helpneg what would help you negotiate helpbet what would help you be better *question codes were applied to interview text to uncover themes across question responses.   examples in lis literature include dalby (2006) and kolb and schaffner (2001). we received multiple direct communications when recruiting for a survey of librarians on salary negotiation, insisting that librarians could not negotiate, and observed these sentiments repeatedly as individuals in the field and in leading related committees and programming within ala. [↩] ala has expanded programming, offering aauw start smart trainings as part of the placement center. through the start smart and work smart initiative, aauw has committed to train ten million women to negotiate salaries by 2022, with the goal of closing the wage gap. (“work smart aims to train 10 million in salary negotiation by 2022,” 2018 [↩] studies relying on survey and interview methodologies often focus on communities of commonality, such as women university administrators (compton and bierlein palmer, 2009) or school psychology staff (crothers et al., 2010 a,b), mba graduates (curhan et al, 2009), newly hired employees (marks and harold, 2011), and recent college graduates (o’shea and bush, 2002). [↩] most training literature evaluates the efficacy of various methods on in-person negotiation scenarios. in recognizing the challenges inherent to electronic negotiation (missing voice tone, body language or other nonverbal cues), researchers have developed automated training modules to augment traditional in-person negotiation training methods (melzer, reiser, & schoop, 2012). however, further research is needed to determine the impact of this training delivery method on negotiation outcomes. [↩] in both phases of the research, measures were taken to ensure participants’ anonymity. these procedures were approved by the university of minnesota institutional review board for the protection of human subjects in research on october 29, 2015 and the cornell university institutional review board for human participants on november 9, 2015. [↩] as reported in farrell and geraci 2017, we were contacted by multiple individuals during the data collection phase, claiming that it was impossible to negotiate in libraries. [↩] for the purpose of this article, we will use union membership and representation interchangeably, despite the difference in meaning. [↩] american library association-allied professional association, american association of law libraries, and association of academic health sciences libraries. [↩] “ask” is a term commonly used in negotiation training and literature to describe the requests or demands of a party during the negotiation process. we intentionally use “ask” to describe a current or prospective employee’s requests or demands during the hiring process, as it allows us to consistently use a neutral descriptive term that sidesteps judgment or framing activities or affect that we have not actually observed. [↩] study findings indicated a lower rate (53%) than lo and reed’s rate of 68%, but surveyed a larger population. [↩] we see overlap across the two groups in negotiating across an up-or-out academic rank system as well as a collectively negotiated compensation structure that ties pay to rank and seniority. [↩] informally, we can say that through our organizational work and event facilitation experience, we have heard that library employers are reluctant to participate in formal salary surveys, that association job list administrators have difficulty requiring organizations to post salaries, that managers and supervisors would like to post jobs with salary ranges but that their institutions will not let them, but that alternately, that posting ranges reduces their “flexibility” in hiring. [↩] as per nadler et. al (2003), practice is best accompanied by analogical and didactive elements, to provide a theoretical and comparative foundation to augment otherwise decontextualized role-playing or observation. [↩] as per bamberger and belogolovsky, 2010; collela et al., 2007; day, 2012, pay secrecy negatively impacts employee performance and perceptions of fairness and justice within an organization. [↩] compensation, negotiation, salary, training no results found: a review of biographical information about award-winning children’s book authors in subscription and free resources new hampshire public library services for survivors of domestic and sexual violence 1 response pingback : happenings – vreps this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct social proof: a tool for determining authority – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 15 apr steve mccann /8 comments social proof: a tool for determining authority in the library with the lead pipe is pleased to welcome another guest author, steve mccann! steve is a digital projects librarian specializing in information architecture, usability studies, and data analysis. by steve mccann in 2008, when i was visiting anaheim, ca, for the ala annual conference, i had a rather unpleasant experience renting a car. i had a reservation for the least expensive vehicle available (gas at that time was priced around $4 a gallon), but the salesman was insisting i upgrade to something larger. what sticks out in my memory was the tactic he was using, an influence technique called social proof which i had been reading about. his gambit was to point to an suv on his pictorial list of available cars and emphatically state that “this is what everyone is renting here in los angeles.” this put me in an awkward position, since the idea that 100% of car rentals in la were oversized suvs was something i simply hadn’t considered previously. i found myself in a state of insufficient information and was suspicious that he was trying to take advantage of this. in fact, he was claiming authority on the subject of correct la car rental procedures, and i could either accept his authority or go against “everyone” and rent a subcompact. it was a strange situation for a librarian to find himself, since i am, in general, much more likely to be navigating a state of “information overload.” if i had thought of it, i could have consulted my internet friends via my cell phone and gotten a plethora of advice, but, in the end, i knew the whole idea was silly so i declined. undeterred, he said his piece again, only this time much more loudly as if i couldn’t hear him. after declining a second time, i received a remarkable look of disgust, reminding me strongly of someone biting into a lemon. i bring up this story because of the visceral power of this type of coercion. for me, it was patently obvious that he could not back up the claims he was making so, in a sense, i had it easy. his assertion lacked credibility at a gut level, and i really didn’t need to consult with anyone else. reflecting on the situation, however, it became apparent that standing at the rental counter surrounded by unfamiliar people and asking for a vehicle was, in a way, analogous to the experience a patron has when visiting a reference desk for the first time. they obviously have an information problem and are looking for an authority of some kind. the main difference is that a reference librarian is trained to help patrons locate credible authorities in spite of a thicket of federated searches, library of congress call numbers, subject terms, and the spectrum of “article – journal – database” resources, among countless other difficulties. the librarian is an authority in her own right on the subject of research and generally recognized as such. the question this article seeks to ask is: to what extent can the library website framework, with all of its catalogs, vendors, guides, etc., become recognized as an authority in the subject of research? the assumption i am making is that library websites are not automatically deemed authorities by patrons in the same way that librarians themselves are. first, many of our patrons consult with more recognized authorities in the form of google services, the home pages of journal titles, or even, maybe especially, other patrons. in this article i propose that what library websites are missing is evidence of “social proof.” i will then introduce a commercial service that is taking steps in this direction with regard to weblogs and finally brainstorm the type of changes that would be required to supply this evidence. how we recognize authority “what we’re dealing with now isn’t information overload […] it really is a filtering problem rather than an information [problem].” (shirky, 2008) “one of the criteria we use to filter information is credibility, or believability.” (wathen, 2002) patrick wilson (1983), in his book second hand knowledge, makes the distinction between two types of authority, administrative and cognitive. the first has power to command, but the second has power to influence one’s thoughts. thinking back on the earlier example of the rental car salesman, the reason i wasn’t influenced was because he simply wasn’t credible. as it turns out, credibility is a major component of cognitive authority along with trustworthiness, reliability, scholarliness, “officialness,” and authoritativeness (rieh, 2002). if a person, entity, or idea can achieve an impression of quality in any of these six areas, then that entity can act as a cognitive authority. the important point is that credibility and authority are both perceptions: a recognition of a quality which, once made, will allow a person to place her trust in a figure of perceived authority.  once placed, that recognition labels a person or idea as someone who “knows something we do not know” and who “knows what they are talking about” (wilson, 1983). the question then becomes what factors influence this perception of cognitive authority? in the following list, wathen and burkell (2002) summarize the variables related to perception into five factors affecting credibility: source material expertise / knowledge trustworthiness credentials attractiveness similarity likeability / goodwill / dynamism receiver of material relevance motivation prior knowledge involvement values / beliefs / situation stereotypes about source or topic “social location” message topic / content internal validity / consistency plausibility of arguments supported by data or examples framing (loss or gain) repetition / familiarity ordering medium of the material organization usability presentation vividness context of the information distraction / “noise” time since message encountered degree of need what is striking about this list is that it is an awfully large number of judgments for a student to make. working on the reference desk, it’s not uncommon for a student to say he or she has a paper due that day and needs three authoritative sources. the student in this situation is not going to conduct a systematic search but rather resort to a more primitive form of decision making, social proof. the power of social proof “the individual can be conceptualized as a social actor, and information-seeking activities take place within a social community whose knowledge, characteristics, expectations, and norms are internalized within the individual. this may be especially relevant for young people, whose information seeking and learning is inherently social given the importance of social ties and networks during adolescence and early adulthood” (rieh, 2008). in cialdini’s (1988) influence: the psychology of persuasion, he talks about the enormous power of social proof. here’s the cartoon version found on page 120 (it may remind you strongly of how digg, delicious, and other social tagging systems work): figure 1: the powerful affect of similar others on our behavior (cialdini, 1988) according to cialdini (1988), what’s going on in the image above is the “awesome influence of the behavior of similar others.”  in other words, one important tool we use to decide how to act in a given situation is to look at what other people are doing. it may be that this is an evolutionary byproduct. for example, if someone stands up calmly in a crowded library computer lab and yells “fire!” and then sits down again, the chances are good that you will work your way through a checklist of credibility factors. is the source credible? is the information relevant to me? is the message plausible? was the presentation convincing? isn’t this just juvenile noise? if the student who yelled goes back to work, then his credibility is suspect and evacuation is unlikely. however, if the two factors of uncertainty and similarity are at play, then credibility is judged very quickly. uncertainty can be described as the state “when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous[.] when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct” (cialdini, 1988).  are people starting to leave the computer lab? if yes, then the perception of credibility just got a big boost. this perception is especially strong if the other people in the lab are viewed as similar to ourselves. this behavior transfers quite well to the web. for example, in eye-tracking studies of marketing materials it is consistently shown that people look where other people are looking. the following heatmap images from a eye-tracking study shows this quite clearly (breeze, 2009): figure 2: the effects of social proof in advertising “here’s the same 106 people looking at the second image for the same amount of time […] notice how many more people are actually reading the text that the baby is looking at in the above image? not to mention the increased attention on the brand!” the reason this behavior is significant is because studies have shown people will read, at most, 28% of the words on a web page (nielsen, 2008). the author of the above eye tracking study is saying that people are actually reading the text, but it’s clear that they are not reading the entire text. they are just skimming and keying in on certain keywords such as “chlorine-free” and “clinically.” in an eye-tracking heatmap like the one above, the more concentrated the colors over a text, the more time is being spent looking at that area of the screen. in short, marketers are able to manipulate the effects of social proof to force people to stop and read their copy. but let’s return to the subject of library websites. how can we convince users to pay attention to factors of credibility? library interfaces are largely text based. take a look at most opacs, and it’s clear that this type of short-circuiting of credibility judgments is not happening. instead, libraries are relying on the users taking a laborious and systematic approach by judging between multiple credibility factors. in a sense this is wholly correct; librarians are invested in supplying the user with texts that are not only gratifying but also appropriate. librarians are also invested in teaching the careful evaluation of the credibility factors of those sources. on the other hand, in the image above the marketer asserts the text the baby is looking at is the right text; the brand being presented is the right brand to satisfy the consumer’s information need.  librarians would not make such a claim because we recognize more than most the immense number of contextual variables involved. in this way library websites are largely designed around a contradiction: on the one hand we assert that a solution to an information need can be found within our domains; but on the other hand we refuse to make any judgments regarding the credibility of texts for our users. the question then becomes is this attitude a mistake? is it not possible that some form of visual credibility ranking could be found to bridge this gap? the postrank model one company is combining the principles of social proof along with a more formalized approach to the ranking of credibility. the way they are doing it is instructive for librarians, even if the amount of data processing involved is daunting. as of this writing they are currently ranking the social proof for nearly 900,000 rss feeds. the total number of individual weblog postings comes to approximately 1.6 million per day. for each of these feeds, they then track the social performance of each post relative to other posts within the same rss feed. the social metrics used to calculate this performance they are calling the “five c’s of engagement:” creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. the theory behind this is one of social proof: the more an individual weblog post is interacted with socially, the more attention it probably warrants. figure 3 is an example of the postrank score for recent articles published in smashing magazine, a usability and design weblog. notice that low-scoring posts are grayed out, the good-scoring post is light orange (score = 5.6), and the best-scoring post is a dark orange. “credibility” is immediately recognizable in the second post which scored a 7.3. figure 3: smashing magazine articles filtered to show only “good” postings. when the user hovers over this score they are presented with a visual breakdown of the component factors that go into this credibility ranking (figure 4). each factor represents a social activity score from postrank’s “5 c’s of engagement.” figure 4: breakdown of component factors that combined to create the postrank score. the implementation of postrank scores is highly volatile, which has caused some to question its usefulness. for example, after checking the three postrank scores 24 hours following the image capture of figures 1 & 2, the scores had already changed. the company uses a moving temporal window in which all posts are calculated one against the other. an example of the effect this causes is if your weblog publishes a single post that is then “slashdotted” (i.e., suddenly wildly popular because of a mention in a high-traffic website) then all other posts in that temporal window will suddenly score extremely low because of the difference in social activity between the postings. this scoring discrepancy will remain until the temporal window passes the high-performing post, or until the low-performing posts themselves are supplanted by a new higher standard of performance. while this may or may not make sense from a business standpoint, from the user’s point of view rankings that jump around frequently affects the perceived “trustworthiness” of the ranking system. elements of social proof for library websites if library websites were able to develop such a tool with which to rank the credibility / cognitive authority of all the intellectual content within their domains, what would it look like? because of the librarian’s calling to provide access to, but not judgment of, the individual texts, it would have to take into account the credibility factors identified above. to work in the highly social environment of the web, the library website would also need to put the power of social proof into play. the website would need to be designed in a way as to allow patrons to quickly and visually identify the attention of “similar others.” in other words,the true cognitive authorities within any given subject. to meet these conflicting demands, the tool would need to provide feedback in the two areas where social proof is strongest: uncertainty and similarity. to combat a user’s “uncertainty” when navigating between multiple source materials, our tool would need to show elements that assist in snap judgments. this would involve data that is superficial to the content of a work, or, according to tseng & fogg elements of presumed credibility and surface credibility (tseng, 1999). uncertainty data elements citation counts and/or incoming links to a work number of times a work was checked out or read number of works an author has published in her career number of comments attached to a work the attractiveness, likeability, and/or usability of the work’s format to determine “similarity,” our tool would need to show elements that assist the user to make a judgment as to the cognitive authority of a work. this would involve source labels such as “phd,” the title of the journal, the name of the publishing company, etc. other similarity scores might include the experience other scholars had with the work or even personal ratings like what is seen in goodreads. according to tseng & fogg, these elements would be composed of reputed credibility and experienced credibility factors. similarity data elements source impact factors of a title or journal source rejection rate of a journal title or publisher whether or not the work is refereed the total number of critical reviews the calculated quality of works citing the work in question the library of congress subject terms associated with the work temporal groupings; an example might be a 10 year, 100 year, or adjustable window that affects all element calculations total number of syllabi listings total number of subscribers to a periodical title or holdings calculation for other works a user generated “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” ranking the series of calculations involved for each title in the above factors could then be represented within a library opac or a periodicals database in a way similar to that of postrank’s system. if it was built correctly it could be used to quickly and easily “drill down” to relevant cognitive authorities within any given research context. of course there is a potential downside. the first is the immense amount of data that would have to be managed on an ongoing basis. the second, and perhaps more pressing, would be the problem of unintended consequences. just because a piece of information is socially dynamic, doesn’t mean that it is correct or even helpful. a cautionary tale from the world of finance involves the below chart highlighting the financial bubble which peaked in 2006/2007. in figure 5, the analyst barry ritholtz (lower left) recognized early on that the fundamentals of the economy did not support the high valuation of stocks. he was proven correct, but not until the market collapsed in 2008/2009. figure 5: herd mentality shown among analysts this type of herd mentality is a hallmark of social proof. to make matters worse, there is no proof that the elements i’ve selected above would be the correct ones for the researcher’s information needs. it is uncertain whether such a credibility ranking system would lead to more harm than good. conclusion in this article, i’ve attempted to brainstorm a method for raising the profile of library websites to the level of authority that individual librarians enjoy. to do this, multiple credibility factors will need to be addressed and social proof feedback will need to be implemented in some way. despite its flaws, the postrank model may provide guidance on how this could be accomplished. it would be calculation intensive and require iterative research to make sure it was not skewing patron’s sense of credibility within subject areas. but regardless of the difficulties, it may be helpful to remember what a statistics professor has said about relying upon models for guidance: all models are wrong, but some models are useful. thanks to derik badman, jennie burroughs, ellie collier, donna mccrea, and sue samson for their assistance in reviewing and editing this article. special thanks to kim duckett whose feedback on my earlier work on social proof and authority led me to write this article.   bibliography breeze, james. you look where they look | usableworld – james breeze’s blog. 3/16/2009 [cited 4/9/2009 2009]. available from http://usableworld.com.au/2009/03/16/you-look-where-they-look/. cialdini, r. 2004. the science of persuasion. scientific american mind. cialdini, robert b. 1988. influence : science and practice. glenview, ill. scott, foresman. cope, william w., and mary kalantzis. 2009. signs of epistemic disruption: transformations in the knowledge system of the academic journal. first monday; volume 14, number 4 – 6 april 2009. available from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2309/2163. eastin, matthew s. 2007. toward a cognitive developmental approach to youth perceptions of credibility. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning -, 29-47. eysenbach, gunther. 2007. credibility of health information and digital media: new perspectives and implications for youth. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning -, 123-154. flanagin, andrew j., and miriam j. metzger. 2007. digital media and youth: unparalleled opportunity and unprecedented responsibility. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning -, 5-27. harris, frances j. 2007. challenges to teaching credibility assessment in contemporary schooling. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning -, 155-179. ito, mizuko, et al. 2007. foreword. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning -, vii-ix. jadad, a. r., and a. gagliardi. 1998. rating health information on the internet navigating to knowledge or to babel? jama 279, no. 8:611-614. lankes, r. d. 2007. trusting the internet: new approaches to credibility tools. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning -, 101-121. metzger, miriam j., and andrew j. flanagin. 2007. introduction. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning -, 1-4. nielsen, jakob. how little do users read? (jakob nielsen’s alertbox). in useit.com [database online]. may 6, 2008 [cited 4/9/2009 2009]. available from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html. rieh, s. y., and n. j. belkin. 1998. understanding judgment of information quality and cognitive authority in the www. journal of the american society for information science 35, 279-289. rieh, soo y., and brian hilligoss. 2007. college students’ credibility judgments in the information-seeking process. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning -, 49-71. ritholtz, barry. cult of the bear, part 1. in thestreet.com. 2006 [cited april 14 2009]. available from http://www.thestreet.com/_tscana/markets/marketfeatures/10260096.html. savolainen, r. media credibility and cognitive authority. the case of seeking orienting information. information research: an international electronic journal 12. shirky, clay. 2008. it’s not information overload. it’s filter failure. web 2.0 expo 2008. new york, ny ed.o’reilly media, inc. and techweb. available from http://www.web2expo.com/webexny2008/public/schedule/detail/4817 sundar, s. s. 2007. the main model: a heuristic approach to understanding technology effects on credibility. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning -, 73-100. wathen, c. n., and j. burkell. 2002. believe it or not: factors influencing credibility on the web. journal of the american society for information science and technology 53, no. 2:134-144. weingarten, fred w. 2007. credibility, politics, and public policy. the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning -, 181-202. wilson, p. 1983. second-hand knowledge: an inquiry into cognitive authority. greenwood pub group. workman, m. 2008. wisecrackers: a theory-grounded investigation of phishing and pretext social engineering threats to information security. journal of the american society for information science and technology 59, no. 4. this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. authority, library websites, postrank, social proof are you worth it? what return on investment can and can’t tell you about your library a conversation with kristin antelman 8 responses peter murray 2009–04–15 at 8:37 am you missed the citation for shirky’s information filtering quote in the bibliography. i was wondering if it was his “it’s not information overload. it’s filter failure” talk at the web 2.0 expo last year. i wrote about that in my own blog. i’m asking because i’m interested to see if he developed this notion further than he took it in that presentation. steve mccann 2009–04–15 at 9:07 am thanks peter, you’re right that is where i found the quote. we’ll try to get the post updated, but in the meantime here’s the citation: shirky, clay. 2008. it’s not information overload. it’s filter failure. web 2.0 expo 2008. new york, ny ed.o’reilly media, inc. and techweb. available from http://www.web2expo.com/webexny2008/public/schedule/detail/4817 it’s a great notion and i’m surprised he hasn’t published it anywhere (as far as i can tell). melanie baker 2009–04–17 at 1:48 pm hi steve, what an engaging read — my compliments (and thank you for including postrank). :) particularly interesting to me since, as you can imagine, we spend a lot of time talking among ourselves and with the user community about the nature of authority, influence, and engagement. fascinating to be involved in an environment while we’re trying to write definitions for things we’re immersed in daily. a couple of clarifications about how postrank works. postrank scores change quickly because the metrics are gathered/analyzed in real-time. so when a post is just published, no one’s engaged with it yet, so it’ll score a 1.0. but as soon as people start engaging with it — comments, bookmarks, tweets, etc. — its score starts to rise (compared with the performance of other recent posts on the site). if the scoring didn’t change with the metrics, the scores wouldn’t be accurate or very useful. and if they didn’t change very fast they wouldn’t be very useful to those who must regularly monitor. not to mention the fact that ~50% of posts’ engagement happens within the first 50 minutes post-publishing, and you can’t engage with your audience while the conversations are going on if you don’t know where and when. of course, at the same time, we don’t continue to check for metrics indefinitely, but have calculated an engagement curve to determine typical engagement velocity of posts. secondly, we’re definitely aware of the digg/slashdot/re-tweet/insert-your-own-viral-experience effect, and so have made sure to weight for it in our algorithms. if we didn’t, as you noted, it would torpedo the rankings of posts in a similar time frame and would make the rankings about as balanced as me comparing my blog’s engagement to techcrunch’s. (which is why we don’t compare to other sites, either, in determining a site’s posts’ metrics.) hope that helps. if any of that isn’t clear, or you have any questions, feel free to let me know. l. d. mitchell 2009–04–24 at 11:52 am this might help explain the continuing disconnect between library usage and library funding, as reported in the ala’s most recent state of america’s libraries report…. james breeze 2009–05–09 at 7:01 am thanks for the reference! you present an interesting and complex perspective. i am keen to do some more thinking about this in order to create a set of guidelines on creating social media. from the social perspective, it would seem that the perceived credibility of a person on twitter, for example, strongly affects the likelihood that they would be followed. ‘following’ someone is a judgement based on the follower/followed ratio, user profile text, presence of a profile link, the graphics of the twitter profile page and content of the tweets visible on a the page at the time it is seen. not to mention the fact that someone is well known then they are likely to get a lot of followers. it is also interesting to note with twitter, the herd mentality is not as simple as it seems. if you have a lot of followers/following then a judgement must be made on why this is so? are you simply marketing or are you actually popular? pingback : social proof: a tool for determining authority — cafedave.net emily ford 2009–05–15 at 3:00 pm i’m coming to your post a month late now, but i just wanted to say a big thank you for this article! the whole idea is fascinating to me. do you have examples of library web sites/systems that are implementing any form of social proof at this point? has anything been shown or are there any case studies that have been done for library sites or opacs that have “favorites” or reviews enabled within the system? this also reminds me of the ebay example of social proof. how do we choose from which vendor to purchase? well, we choose those who have the best user ratings. i understand you’re talking here about a more technological model of social proof, but the idea comes from the same place. great post! steve mccann 2009–05–15 at 4:59 pm thanks emily, i think you’re right about the ebay model of user ratings helping us decide levels of satisfaction. that’s social proof at it’s most elemental, imho. i don’t know of any libraries that are doing it with data, but with images many are (or should be). a quick google image search brings up the following examples of cialdini’s “powerful influence of similar others”: smiling subject matter something to pay attention to physical research library website research busy public library busy academic library library as place really good “library as place” this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct understanding library impacts on student learning – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 15 jun derek rodriguez /12 comments understanding library impacts on student learning in the library with the lead pipe is pleased to welcome guest author derek rodriguez. derek serves as a program officer with the triangle research libraries network where he supports collaborative technology initiatives within the consortium and is project manager for the trln endeca project. he is a doctoral candidate at the school of information and library science at the university of north carolina at chapel hill, and is the principal investigator of the understanding library impacts project. by derek rodriguez value for money in higher education these are challenging times for colleges and universities. every week it seems a new article or book is published expressing concerns about college costs,[1] low graduation rates, and what students are learning.[2] we also don’t have to look very hard to find reports computing the economic benefits of a college education to individuals.[3] clearly, u.s. colleges and universities are under pressure to demonstrate that the value of an undergraduate education is worth its cost. graduation rates are important measures.  personal income is  certainly a measure that hits home for most of us during these difficult economic times. however, stakeholders in higher education have had their eyes on a different set of metrics for many years: student learning outcomes. a recent example is a test of leadership, better known perhaps as the spellings commission report in which the u.s. department of education raised concerns about the quality of undergraduate student learning. the report called for measuring student learning and releasing “the results of student learning assessments, including value-added measurements that indicate how students’ skills have improved over time.” [4] in recent years, higher education has responded with new tools to assess and communicate student learning such as the voluntary system of accountability.[5] as colleges and universities grapple with this challenge, academic libraries are also seeking ways to communicate their contributions to student learning. the recently revised draft standards for libraries in higher education from the association of college and research libraries (acrl) signals the importance of this issue for academic libraries.[6] the first principle in the revised standards, institutional effectiveness, states that: “libraries define, develop, and measure outcomes that contribute to institutional effectiveness and apply findings for purposes of continuous improvement.”[7] and an accompanying performance indicator reads: “libraries articulate how they contribute to student learning, collect evidence, document successes, share results, and make improvements.”[8] while libraries have made significant progress in user-oriented evaluation in recent decades, libraries still lack effective methods for demonstrating library contributions to student learning. unless we develop adequate instruments (and generate compelling evidence) libraries will be left out of important campus conversations. in this post i review current approaches to this problem and suggest new methods for addressing this challenge. i close by introducing the ‘understanding library impacts’ protocol, a new suite of instruments that i designed to fill this gap in our assessment toolbox. the challenge of linking library use to student learning demonstrating connections between library use and undergraduate student achievement has proven a difficult task through the years.  several authors have suggested outcomes to which academic libraries contribute such as:  retention, grade point average, and information literacy outcomes.[9] i review a few of these efforts below. retention retention is a measure of the percentage of college students who continue in school and do not ‘drop out.’ a handful of studies have investigated relationships between library use and retention. lloyd and martha kramer found a positive relationship between library use and persistence as students who borrowed books from the library dropped out 40% less often than non-borrowers.[10] elizabeth mezick explored the impact of library expenditures and staffing levels on retention and found a moderate relationship between expenditures and retention.[11] several authors report a different ‘library effect’ on retention: holding a job in the library.[12] this finding is supported by evidence that holding a campus job, especially in an organization that supports the academic mission, is related with “higher levels of [student] effort and involvement”[13] in the life of the university and should logically lead to increased retention. those of us who have worked in academic libraries have probably observed this mechanism at work with students we have known. however, i believe relying exclusively on this measure is problematic. first, numerous factors influence retention and it can be difficult to isolate library impact on retention without extensive statistical controls. second, retention is an aggregate student outcome; it is not a student learning outcome. retention is an important metric in higher education and we should seek connections between library use and this measure, but it does not satisfy our need to know how libraries contribute to student learning. grade point average several authors have attempted to correlate student use of the library with grade point averages (gpa). charles harrell studied many independent variables and found that gpa was not a significant predictor of library use.[14] jane hiscock, james self, and karin de jager, among others switched the dependent and independent variables in their studies and found limited positive correlation between library use and gpa.[15] shun han rebekah wong and t.d. webb reported on a large-scale study with a sample of over 8,700 students grouped by major and level of study. in sixty-five percent of the groups, they found a positive relationship between use of books and a/v materials borrowed from the library and gpa.[16] however, gpa-based studies have their problems. as wong and webb note, studies that use correlation as a statistical method cannot assure causal relationships between variables; they can only show an association between library use measures and gpa. as the old adage goes, ‘correlation does not imply causation.’ do students achieve higher gpas because they are frequent users of the library? or do students who make better grades tend to use the library more? without adequate statistical controls it is impossible to conclude library use had an impact on gpa. also, as noted by wong and webb, it can be difficult to gain access to student grades to carry out this type of study. information literacy outcomes information literacy outcomes assessment is the most fully developed approach we have for demonstrating library contributions to undergraduate achievement. broadly speaking, information literacy skills encompass competencies in locating and evaluating information sources and using information in an ethical manner. instruction in these skills is a core offering in academic libraries and findings from project information literacy suggest there is still plenty of work to do![17] acrl has also created a suite of information literacy outcomes[18] to guide the design and evaluation of library instruction programs. numerous methods have been used to assess information literacy skills including fixed-choice tests, analysis of student work, and rubrics.[19] it is tempting to rely solely on student achievement of information literacy skills to demonstrate library contributions to student learning. however, a recent review of regional accreditation standards for four-year institutions suggests there is uneven support for doing so. laura saunders found three of six regional accreditation agencies specifically name information literacy as a desired outcome and assert the library’s prominent role in information literacy instruction and assessment of related skills. [20] others rarely use the term “information literacy” in their standards. instead, competencies such as “evaluating and using information ethically” appear in these standards as general education outcomes to be taught and assessed throughout the college curriculum. in part, i think this reaffirms for us that many in higher education associate information literacy outcomes with general education outcomes such as critical thinking. while it may be encouraging for information literacy outcomes to be integrated into the college curriculum, i think this poses real difficulties when we attempt to isolate library contributions to these outcomes. if information literacy and critical thinking skills are inter-related, how are we to assess one set of skills, but not the other?  heather davis thoughtfully explored this issue in her post “critical literacy? information!” finding that these competencies are intricately related and it is extremely difficult to teach (and assess) them independent of one another. if information literacy skills are taught across the curriculum, when, where, and by whom should they be assessed?  where does faculty influence stop and library influence begin? information literacy outcomes are integral to undergraduate education, but these are not the only learning outcomes that stakeholders are interested in. and information literacy is not the library’s sole contribution to student learning. i believe we need to shift course in our assessment practices and tackle ‘head on’ the challenge of connecting library use in all its forms with learning outcomes defined and assessed in courses and programs on college and university campuses. we should also link our efforts to the learning outcomes frameworks used in the broader academic enterprise. broadening our perspective will provide a better return on our assessment dollar. where to begin we can improve our ability to detect library impact on important student learning outcomes by carefully choosing our units of observation. fortunately we can look to the literature of higher education assessment for clues.[21] my conclusion is that a one-size-fits-all approach to assessment is not likely to work for higher education or for library impact. instead, our instruments should respect differences in students’ experiences. we should focus on the ‘high-impact’ activities in which faculty expect students to demonstrate their best work. capstone experiences and upper level coursework within the academic major seem to fit the bill for four year institutions. the academic major students majoring in the arts and humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences acquire different bodies of knowledge and learn different analytical techniques. we also know that learning activities, reward structures, and norming influences vary by discipline. this suggests the academic major plays a significant role in shaping expectations for student learning outcomes and the pathways by which they are achieved.[22] shouldn’t student information behaviors vary by academic major as well? our assessment tools should be sensitive to these differences. the capstone experience and upper level coursework capstone courses are culminating experiences for undergraduate students in which they complete a project “that integrates and applies what they’ve learned.”[23] i think we should be studying information use during these important times for several reasons. first, there is ample evidence that the time and energy students devote to college is directly related to achieving desired learning outcomes.[24] students who work hard learn more. furthermore, students exposed to high-impact practices such as capstone experiences are more likely to engage in higher order, integrative, and reflective thinking activities.[25] finally, there is strong evidence that student learning is best detected later in the academic career.[26] if faculty expectations are at their highest and student effort is at its peak during the capstone experience and in upper-level coursework, shouldn’t studying student information behaviors during these times yield valuable data about library impact? speaking the language of learning outcomes assessing information use during upper-level and capstone coursework in the academic major is only part of the puzzle. we also need to link library use to student learning outcomes that are meaningful to administrators and policy-makers. i’d like to share two frameworks for student learning outcomes which i think hold great promise. the essential learning outcomes and the value rubrics the association of american colleges & university’s (aac&u) liberal education and america’s promise (leap) project[27] defined fifteen ‘essential learning outcomes’ needed by 21st century college graduates such as critical and creative thinking, information literacy, inquiry and analysis, written and oral communication, problem solving, quantitative literacy, and teamwork. these outcomes are applicable in all fields and highly valued by potential employers. a companion aac&u project called value (‘valid assessment of learning in undergraduate education’) generated rubrics that describe benchmark, milestone, and capstone performance expectations for each outcome. these rubrics are intended to serve as a “set of common expectations and criteria for [student] performance” to guide authentic assessment of student work and communicate student achievement to stakeholders.[28] tuning some student learning outcomes are discipline-specific. for instance, one would expect students majoring in chemistry, music, or economics to acquire different skills and competencies. a process called tuning is intended to generate a common language for communicating these discipline-specific outcomes.[29] first developed as a component of the bologna process of higher education reform in europe,[30] tuning is a process in which teaching faculty consult with recent graduates and employers to develop common reference points for academic degrees so that student credentials are comparable within and across higher education institutions.[31] expectations are set for associate, bachelor, and master degree levels. generic second cycle or bachelor degree level learning expectations as defined by the european tuning process are noted below. recent work funded by the lumina foundation has replicated this work in three states to test its feasibility in the u.s.[32] subject-specific learning expectations for second cycle graduates[33] within a specialized field in the discipline, demonstrates knowledge of current and leading theories, interpretations, methods and techniques; can follow critically and interpret the latest developments in theory and practice in the field; demonstrates competence in the techniques of independent research, and interprets research results at an advanced level; makes an original, though limited, contribution within the canon and appropriate to the practice of a discipline, e.g. thesis, project, performance, composition, exhibit, etc.; and evidences creativity within the various contexts of the discipline. the value rubrics are currently being evaluated in several studies[34] and colleges and universities have begun using them internally to articulate and assess student learning outcomes.[35] while the tuning process hasn’t yet ‘taken off’ in the u.s., the western association of schools and colleges recently announced a new initiative to create a common framework for student learning expectations among its member institutions.[36] as colleges and universities experiment with and adopt these frameworks, we should incorporate them into our library assessment tools.[37] new tools for generating convincing evidence of library impact as part of my doctoral research i created the understanding library impacts (uli) protocol, a new suite of instruments for detecting and communicating library impact on student learning outcomes. the protocol consists of a student survey and a curriculum mapping process for connecting library use to locally defined learning outcomes and the value and tuning frameworks discussed above. initially developed using qualitative methods[38] the protocol has been converted to survey form and is undergoing testing during 2011. i illustrate how it works with a few results from a recent study. a pilot project was conducted during the spring of 2011 with undergraduate history majors at two institutions in the u.s., a liberal arts college and a liberal arts university. faculty members provided syllabi and rubrics regarding learning objectives associated with researching and writing a research paper in upper-level and capstone history courses. history majors completed the online uli survey after completing their papers. first, students identified the types of library resources, services, and facilities they used during work on their research papers, including: electronic resources, such as the library catalog, e-resources and databases, digitized primary sources, and research guides. traditional resources, such as books, archives, and micro-formats. services, such as reference, instruction, research consultations, and interlibrary loan. facilities and equipment, such as individual and group study space, computers, and printers. the forty-one students who participated in the pilot project collectively reported 590 types of library use during their capstone projects ranging from e-journals, digitized primary sources, books, archives, research consultations, and study space. electronic resource use dominated, but traditional resources, services, and facilities made a strong showing. students then identified the most important e-resource, traditional resource, service, and library facility for their projects and when each was found most useful.  at one study site over 60% of students said library-provided e-resources were important when developing a thesis statement.  and 90% of students said both library-provided e-resources and traditional resources were important when gathering evidence to support their thesis.  over 80% of this cohort reported library services were important during the gathering stage.  these services included asking reference questions, library instruction, research consultations, and interlibrary loan.  these data help link library use to learning outcomes associated with capstone assignments and to the value and tuning frameworks. students reported next on helpful or problematic aspects of library use. for instance, students at both study sites extolled the convenience of electronic resources and the virtues of interlibrary loan, while several complained of inadequate quiet study space and library hours. information overload and ‘feeling overwhelmed’ were also frequent problems. time savings and ‘learning about sources for my project’ were mentioned often in regard to library services. a series of open-ended questions ask about a challenge the students faced during the project. almost fifty percent of the student-reported challenges were related to finding and evaluating sources and almost as many were related to managing the scope of the paper and issues with writing. faculty and librarians can ‘drill down’ into these rich comments to understand challenges students face and shape collaboration faculty-librarian collaboration to meet the needs of future student cohorts. open ended questions also elicit powerful stories of impact. when asked what she would have done without jstor, one student replied: “i honestly have no idea. i may have been able to get by with just the books i checked out and google searching, but those databases, jstor specifically, really helped me.” i hope these glimpses of recent pilot study results demonstrate the value of focusing our attention on important and memorable academic activities in students’ lives. using both quantitative and qualitative methods helps us understand how and why libraries support students when the stakes are highest. authentic user stories coupled with links between library use and student learning outcomes serve as rich evidence of library impact to support both advocacy efforts and internal improvements. future uses the understanding library impacts protocol is not designed to assess student learning; teaching faculty and assessment professionals fulfill this role. the protocol is intended to link library use with existing assessment frameworks. uli results can then be used in concert with other assessment data enabling new partnerships with teaching faculty and assessment professionals. for example: the aac&u essential learning outcomes map well to general education outcomes at many colleges and universities.  the protocol’s use of the value rubrics creates a natural vehicle for articulating library contributions to these outcomes. understanding library impacts results may also integrate with third-party assessment management systems (ams). as megan oakleaf noted in the value of academic libraries report, integrating library assessment data with amss allows the library to aggregate data from multiple assessments gathered across the library and generate reports linking library use to a variety of outcomes important to the parent institution.[39] it is critical to find ways to connect library use in all its forms with learning outcomes important to faculty, students, and stakeholders. doing so will bring the library into campus-wide conversations about support for student learning. thanks to ellie collier, hilary davis, and diane harvey for their comments and suggestions that helped shape and improve this post.  thanks also to hilary and brett bonfield for their help preparing the post for publication. i also want to thank the librarians, faculty members, and students at the study sites for their support and participation in this pilot study. 1 the costs of attending college continue to outpace standard cost of living indices.  from 2000 to 2009, published tuition and fees at public 4-year colleges and universities increased at an annual average rate of 4.9% according to the college board, exceeding 2.8% annual average increases in the consumer price index over the same period.  college board. trends in college pricing (2009), http://www.trends-collegeboard.com 2 see for instance, arum, richard, and josipa roksa. academically adrift: limited learning on college campuses. chicago: university of chicago press, 2011. 3 see for instance, carnevale, anthony p., jeff strohl, and michelle melton. what’s it worth? the economic value of college majors. georgetown university. center on education and the workforce, 2011, “the new math: college return on investment.” bloomburg businessweek, april 7, 2011, http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/special_reports/20110407college_return_on_investment.htm, and “is college worth it? college presidents, public assess, value, quality and mission of higher education” pew research center, may 16, 2011, http://pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/05/higher-ed-report.pdf. 4 u.s. department of education.  a test of leadership: charting the future of u.s. higher education. washington, d.c., 2006, 24. http://www2.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/final-report.pdf. 5 the voluntary system of accountability (vsa) was developed by the national association of state universities and land-grant colleges (nasulgc) and the american association of state colleges and universities (nasulgc, 2010a).  created to respond to demands for transparency about student learning outcomes from the spellings commission, participating vsa institutions agree to use standard assessments and produce a publicly available college portrait which provides data in three areas: 1) consumer information, 2) student perceptions, and 3) value-added gains in student learning.  see association of public and land-grant universities. voluntary system of accountability, 2011, http://www.voluntarysystem.org/ and margaret a. miller, the voluntary system of accountability: origins and purposes, an interview with george mehaffy and david schulenberger. change july/august (2008): 8-13. 6 american library association. association of college and research libraries. draft standards for libraries in higher education, 2011. http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/standards_libraries_.pdf 7 ibid, p. 5 8 ibid, p. 6 9 see for instance powell, r.r. “impact assessment of university libraries: a consideration of issues and research methodologies.” library and information science research, 14 no. 3 (1992): 245-257 and joseph r.  matthews, library assessment in higher education. westport, conn.: libraries unlimited, 2007. 10 kramer, lloyd a. and martha b. kramer, the college library and the drop-out.  college and research libraries 29 no. 4, 310-312, 1968. 11 mezick, elizabeth m. “return on investment: libraries and student retention.” journal of academic librarianship 33, no. 5 (2007): 561-566. 12 rushing, darla & deborah poole. ‘‘the role of the library in student retention,’’ in making the grade: academic libraries and student success, edited by maurie caitlin kelly and andrea kross (chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2002), 91–101; stanley wilder, ‘‘library jobs and student retention,’’ college & research libraries news 51 no. 11 (1990): 1035–1038. 13 aper, j.p. “an investigation of the relationship between student work experience and student outcomes.” paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association (new orleans, la, april 1994). eric document number, ed375750. 14 harrell, charles b. the use of an academic library by university students. ph.d. dissertation. university of north texas, 1989. 15 hiscock, jane e. “does library usage affect academic performance? a study of the relationship between academic performance and usage of libraries at the underdale site of the south australian college of advanced education”. australian academic and research libraries, 17(4), 207-214, 1986; self, james. “reserve readings and student grades: analysis of a case study.” library and information science research. v. 9 (1), 29-40, 1987; de jager, karin. “impacts & outcomes: searching for the most elusive indicators of academic library performance.” proceedings of the northumbria international conference on performance measurement in libraries and information services: “meaningful measures for emerging realities” (pittsburgh, pennsylvania, august 12-16, 2001). 16 wong, shun han rebekah and t.d. webb. “uncovering meaningful correlation between student academic performance and library material usage.” college and research libraries (in press). 17 head, allison. j. & michael b. eisenberg. “finding context: what today’s college students say about conducting research in the digital age,” project information literacy progress report, the information school, university of washington, 2009. http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/pil_progressreport_2_2009.pdf 18 american library association. association of college and research libraries. “information literacy outcomes” american library association.  association for college and research libraries. “information competency standards for higher education,” 2000. http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency.cfm 19 oakleaf, megan. “dangers and opportunities: a conceptual map of information literacy assessment tools.”  portal: libraries and the academy, 8 no. 3 (2008): 233-253. 20 saunders, laura. “regional accreditation organizations’ treatment of information literacy: definitions, outcomes and assessment.”  journal of academic librarianship, 33 no. 3 (2007): 317-326, 324. 21 see for instance ernest t. pascarella and patrick t. terenzini, how college affects students: a third decade of research. san francisco: jossey-bass, 2005. 22 see for instance, chatman, steve. “institutional versus academic discipline measures of student experience: a matter of relative validity.” research & occasional paper series: cshe.8.07. berkeley, ca: center for studies in higher education (2007). 23 kuh, george d. high-impact educational practices: what are they, who has access to them, and why they matter. washington, dc: american association of colleges and universities, 2008, p. 11 24 pace, c. robert. the undergraduates: a report of their activities and progress in college in the 1980’s los angeles, ca: center for the study of evaluation, university of california, los angeles, 1990; pascarella and terenzini, 2005. 25 kuh, 2008, p. 25. 26 see, for instance, astin, alexander w. what matters in college? four critical years revisited. san francisco: jossey-bass, 1993; pascarella & terenzini, 2005. 27 association of american colleges and universities, college learning for the new century a report from the national leadership council for liberal education and america’s promise, washington, dc: aac&u, (2007) http://www.aacu.org/leap/index.cfm; association of american colleges and universities. the value rubrics, 2010. http://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics; rhodes, terrel, ed. 2010. assessing outcomes and improving achievement: tips and tools for using rubrics. washington, dc: association of american colleges and universities. 28 rhodes, terell l. “value: valid assessment of learning in undergraduate education.” new directions in institutional research. assessment supplement 2007, (2008): 59-70, p. 67. 29 gonzalez, julia and robert wagenaar, eds. tuning educational structures in europe ii. bilbao, es: university of deusto, 2005 30 see adelman, clif. the bologna process for u.s. eyes: re-learning higher education in the age of convergence. washington, dc: institute for higher education policy, 2009 for an overview. the bologna process refers to an ongoing educational reform initiative in european higher education begun in 1999 as a commitment to align higher education on many levels.  clif adelman writes that the purpose of this initiative is to “bring down educational borders” and to create a “’zone of mutual trust’ that permits recognition of credentials across borders and significant international mobility for their students” (p. viii).  a current, yet incomplete, bologna initiative is the creation of three levels of qualification frameworks for the purpose of assuring students’ college credentials from one country are understandable in another.  the tuning process is the narrowest of the three frameworks focused on specific disciplines.  a similar process is underway in latin america. 31 adelman, 2009. 32 see for instance, indiana commission for higher education. tuning usa final report: the 2009 indiana pilot, 2010. http://www.in.gov/che/files/updated_final_report_for_june_submission.pdf 33 adelman, 2009, 52. 34 collaborative for authentic assessment and learning. american association of colleges and universities,http://www.aacu.org/caal/spring2011caalpilot.cfm and value rubric reliability project. american association of colleges and universities, http://www.aacu.org/value/reliability.cfm 35 rhodes, terrel l., personal communication, may 2011. 36 western association of schools and colleges. “wasc receives $1.5 million grant from lumina foundation”, may 18, 2011, http://www.wascsenior.org/announce/lumina 37 oakleaf, megan. the value of academic libraries: a comprehensive research review and report. chicago: association of college and research libraries, 2010. http://www.acrl.ala.org/value/ 38 rodriguez, derek a. “how digital library services contribute to undergraduate learning: an evaluation of the ‘understanding library impacts’ protocol”. in strauch, katina, steinle, kim, bernhardt, beth r. and daniels, tim, eds. proceedings 26th annual charleston conference, charleston (us). http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00008576/ (2006); rodriguez, derek a. investigating academic library contributions to undergraduate learning: a field trial of the ‘understanding library impacts’ protocol. (2007). http://www.unc.edu/~darodrig/uli/rodriguez-uli-field-trial-2007-brief.pdf; 39 oakleaf, value, 95. college students, information literacy, learning outcomes, library assessment, library impact, research, teaching, value tangoing all the way: is everything negotiable? take action now! becoming a legislative advocate for libraries 12 responses megan oakleaf 2011–06–15 at 6:50 pm nice post, derek! derek rodriguez 2011–06–15 at 9:39 pm thanks megan, derek jennifer meyer 2011–06–16 at 10:09 am i work in a small private career college and this article just hits the nail on the head. these challenges are going to continue to come into the library and unless we are able to effectively communicate with stakeholders we will become what some fear, obsolete. great article – thank you for the insight. derek rodriguez 2011–06–16 at 11:21 am thank you jennifer, these are challenging times and there is a lot of interesting work to be done. derek sarah clark 2011–06–16 at 10:25 am great post! i’m actually just settling into my ph.d program in educational leadership at oklahoma state university (this summer is my third semester), and contemplating a somewhat similar dissertation. i’m planning to email you later today to share notes and ask some other questions, but i did want to raise a question here. you mention that the capstone and upper-division classes are the best place to assess student learning, citing astin (who i need to read), and pascarella & terenzini (who i have read). my day job is access services & distance learning librarian at a small regional public university that serves a largely working class and ‘nontraditional’ population. i would argue that these are the types of students who could be helped the most by increased student learning, and yet, less than half of them graduate or transfer out within 6 years. how does the library best intervene in student learning before they give up, and how do we assess that intervention? derek rodriguez 2011–06–16 at 11:27 am hi sarah, thank you for your note and great question. i would approach this first, by getting involved with local initiatives. the library should be engaging with faculty, the student life office, academic advising, coordinators of general ed programs to become an active part of the campuses’ intervention strategy. as you note students can’t benefit from college if they do not return. measuring the impact is a different challenge. when approaching a problem like this i recommend that the library adopt metrics already in place within the institution. if the institution has a major initiative underway to increase retention, then the library should seek connections with that measure. if the institution has general education goals and assessment regimes in place, then i would try to link the library assessment program into those initiatives. in this case, the library needs to be ready to answer the question: “how did our involvement in the xyz intervention program help achieve the goals of our parent institution?” this is hard work but staff in institutional research or assessment offices may already be trying to answer these questions. so again, partnering with other units on campus can help bring expertise to the library assessment program. this effort will simultaneously bring the library into conversations about an issue of critical importance to the campus. i can also recommend a paper presented by craig gibson and christopher dixon regarding measuring academic library engagement that you may find helpful http://bit.ly/kcwqfc. lastly, i am happy to hear about your interest in working on challenges faced by non-traditional students. in one of my pilot studies i found that non-traditional students face unique challenges and value library support tremendously. i’ve implemented a non-traditional student scale in my protocol so i can explore in my dataset the challenges non-traditional students face, differences in their preferences, and ways the library helps them. i think we need more research on what really matters to this growing population to help us shape library services to meet their needs. this is one of our big opportunities, in my opinion. good luck in your work. derek pingback : ninth level ireland » blog archive » understanding library impacts on student learning libby 2011–06–19 at 3:28 pm this is great, derek–i like focusing on the way the library works with capstone students, although sarah raises a good point about first generation college students and non-trad college students. very interesting! derek rodriguez 2011–06–19 at 10:45 pm thanks for your note libby, i’ve been thinking about sarah’s question over the weekend as well. so why the capstone experience? the current study deployed the uli protocol to detect links between library use and student learning outcomes that are highly valued by stakeholders in our 4-year institutions: the broad abilities and discipline-specific competencies expected of college graduates. as our library assessment resources are finite, the capstone form’ of the uli protocol focuses on specific ‘high-impact’ experiences — in this case upper-level and capstone coursework — where stakeholder expectations, student effort, and faculty assessment of student work converge. for these reasons, i believe a focus on these experiences provides an excellent opportunity to detect credible and authentic evidence of library contributions to these learning outcomes. however, the capstone experience is only one of several ‘high-impact’ practices linked to higher levels of retention and engagement as reported by george kuh, cited in footnote 23 above, and listed at (see http://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm). other high-impact practices include first-year experiences, writing intensive courses, undergraduate research, and service learning to name a few. many of our campuses engage in ‘high-impact practices’ and run other programs which are intended to support a variety of student outcomes and learning outcomes such as those mentioned by sarah. it seems to me that focusing on student experiences in these programs should be fruitful for detecting library impact on associated outcomes. i think the uli protocol and other tools could be appropriate methods depending on the context and the outcomes in question. derek pingback : reading round-up: june – digitalist susan ariew 2011–12–12 at 5:14 pm dear derek, thanks for a throught-provoking post about library instruction and impact. question: are you doing more studies as a follow up to your initial study? are you willing to share your new suite of instruments with other institutions? derek rodriguez 2011–12–12 at 8:14 pm hi susan, you are welcome. i appreciate your interest and comment. i am glad you asked about next steps for the protocol. i do intend for the instruments to be of practical use to libraries. i am still working on the details of how that will be done. i am finishing data collection for the 2011 projects this week and planning new projects for the coming year. those projects are just taking shape but will likely involve repeat studies in history, extending the protocol to other disciplines, and/or experimenting with ways to link uli data with assessment results. again, thank you for your post. derek this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct the ebook cargo cult – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 11 jul brett bonfield /24 comments the ebook cargo cult john frum ‘cargo cult’ and their ceremonial flag raising by charmaine tham / cc-by by brett bonfield libraries created the present crisis in scholarly publishing, and we are creating a similar crisis now with our approach to ebooks. we created the crisis in scholarly publishing by ceding control of an intrinsic library function, abstracting and indexing, a decision with inevitable consequences. consequences like the present need to boycott elsevier for its predatory practices. consequences like libraries spending as much money as we can muster on only just minimally justifiable user experiences: bundled interfaces that are confusing individually and often unusable collectively, which is why many libraries spend even more on federating services like summon in order to offer search to our users in a way that makes sense to them. hiring abstracting and indexing firms at the beginning of the 20th century was an understandable decision. when abstracting and indexing services were first established, libraries’ reach exceeded their grasp. late-19th and early-20th century libraries knew they wanted to collect everything they could, and to make those collections accessible to as many people as possible, but there was not enough funding or infrastructure for them to do it collaboratively: there were fewer libraries and librarians, less specialization, and library training was still in its infancy. in addition, libraries had not yet reached the kinds of cooperative agreements that would have made it possible to divide the abstracting, indexing, and archiving of serials into manageable tasks and then share the results. what we had was an inefficient system, one in which a lot of libraries were putting redundant effort into the same core works, and few or no libraries were able to adequately cover that era’s smaller or more niche publications. when there are inefficiencies in a system, entrepreneurship and private enterprise are generally the best ways to create efficiencies. informed librarians, acting individually but uniformly, made a calculated risk, choosing to select and store serials themselves, and hire abstracting and indexing companies to catalog this material. within our hierarchy of values, we placed immediacy above ownership, and convenience above preservation. and so, when it comes to serials, the library’s inherent character is compromised: the core values we apply in our other activities, most notably our work with books, are not applied to serials. to date, the decision to hire firms to provide abstracts and indexes for our serials is the largest mistake libraries have ever made, leading inexorably toward the indexing and eventually the archiving of newspapers, magazines, and journals being controlled by a small group of commercial enterprises. creating the same sort of problem for ourselves with ebooks cannot be justified. while there were a few wealthy, sophisticated libraries at the time, collectively we did not have the funds, expertise, or consortial structures in place to handle cooperative abstracting and indexing 125 years ago. now, with ebooks, we have the resources we need to avoid repeating our greatest error. the question is whether we have the will to maintain our values rather than simply preserve our role, or at least what we have come to think of as our role. cargo cult (library) science in a now famous speech, his 1974 commencement address for the california institute of technology, physicist richard feynman popularized the idea of “cargo cult science”: in the south seas there is a cargo cult of people. during the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. so they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. they’re doing everything right. the form is perfect. it looks exactly the way it looked before. but it doesn’t work. no airplanes land. so i call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land. this is how i characterize the cargo cult thinking i keep hearing around ebooks: “we’re librarians. it’s our job to pay for access to books and then share them with our community.” these are our apparent forms and precepts. for instance, at the 2012 public library association conference in philadelphia this past spring, i attended a discussion on ebooks that was so popular we ran out of chairs and had to turn people away to keep from violating the convention center’s fire codes. during a small group discussion that took place during the session, one of the presenters told me that by boycotting harpercollins, and by making plans to leave overdrive, the only vendor that supports amazon kindles, i am making the library irrelevant for my neighbors—that i was in danger of losing a whole generation of users. when we reconvened as a full group, another participant, to general agreement within the room, said that she was looking forward to being able to offer access to ebooks the way we offer access to journal articles. the presenters even suggested that harpercollins may be “one of the good guys” because they are among the few big publishers currently willing to sell their ebooks to libraries (despite the fact that they self-destruct after 26 uses). i have begun hearing this phrase in connection with harpercollins more and more since that session, including a recent interview with a 2012 library journal mover & shaker on the circulating ideas podcast. when we think this way, we are still “waiting for the airplanes to land,” going through the same motions as though nothing has changed while undermining the intent of those activities and compromising the core values of our profession. what we have done throughout the modern history of libraries is rely on and uphold fair use and first sale. we have fostered and protected intellectual freedom. we have helped to preserve our culture. if there is a science unique to library science, these are its tenets and its bulwarks. when we throw away privacy and ownership in order to distribute ebooks onto kindles via overdrive, when we abandon first sale and fair use in order to purchase ebooks from harpercollins, when we tacitly endorse our partners’ use of digital rights management (drm), we are abandoning the principles that have made libraries valuable to our communities. when we sign contracts that ignore our first principles, we are abandoning our moral and financial obligations to the people whose library collections and intellectual opportunities we are supposed to be stewarding. we are “paying for stuff” and we are “sharing it with our community,” but unlike before, we are not actually buying anything. when we stop buying authorized copies, when the people who have hired us no longer own the material we are purchasing with their money, we are ceding control. and when we cede control, someone else seizes it away from our neighbors, colleagues, and students—the people who entrust us not to let that happen. this not only drives up costs for libraries, but puts access to knowledge in a tenuous position: by relying solely on commercial enterprises, such as amazon or netflix or spotify, to preserve works and make metadata about those works accessible on an ongoing basis, we increase the likelihood that materials could become more difficult to locate and analyze, and create the possibility of that information becoming permanently inaccessible. if these works or their attendant metadata are not seen as sufficiently profitable, or if the company that controls that information is unable or unwilling to share it, this material is likely to vanish. individuals who choose amazon or netflix or spotify for their personal use are taking an understandable risk, since the cost-benefit ratio may well work in their favor, even if their access is ephemeral or otherwise limited. but if libraries, collectively, elect to ignore society’s long term needs for preservation, and immediate need for intellectual freedom, we are making a decision whose consequences seem likely to work against everyone’s interests. information tends to spread: if even one entity is preserving and sharing it, it tends to make itself widely available. this lowers the barrier to entry for businesses (e.g. amazon and librarything, as discussed in “a useful amplification of records that are unavoidably needed anyway“) and lessens the need for individuals to maintain their own archives, as well as bolstering libraries’ case that our core values remain relevant in an increasingly digital world. implementing a sensible, long-term plan for acquiring ebooks may be the most pressing issue in american libraries today. according to the often quoted january 23, 2012 report by the pew internet and american life project, “the number of americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in december to 29% in january.” and serving smartphone users is just as important, or soon will be, given that the reading and listening experience on a phone is likely to continue to improve until the difference between reading on a phone and reading on an ereader is akin to the difference between reading a mass market paperback and a hardback. if we as librarians wish to provide the greatest possible access and highest level of service to people who own these devices while also upholding the core values that best serve readers, we need to develop ebook practices and software that complement one another. to do that, we need to ensure that the negotiations with our vendors maintain the balance of control that has traditionally served everyone’s best interests, helping publishers and other vendors maintain their profitability and promulgate reading, supporting libraries’ mission (e.g., intellectual freedom and preservation), and giving readers the greatest possible variety of choices in what to read and how to access it, while also protecting their privacy and confidentiality. learning from the crisis in scholarly publishing the present crisis in scholarly publishing is the inevitable consequence of the decision to privatize serials cataloging and archiving. together, libraries and vendors created an oligopoly, a hydra with multiple heads and an unappeasable craving for library budgets. resources that not only have to be bought, but have to be bought from a single source (or just a few sources acting more or less in concert with one another), are generally going to be produce steady, predictable profits for the companies that own these resources. warren buffett refers to this as a moat that protects companies from their competitors, and he seeks out companies that have this kind of moat, such as recent purchases burlington northern railroad, which has few or no competitors along many of its rail lines, and newspapers that are the only paper in the towns and cities they serve. examples within libraries include the most prestigious journals in a field of research and the latest bestsellers. oligopoly pricing, especially unregulated oligopoly pricing, leads to unbalanced negotiations, which in turn leads to significant, ongoing profits. and those profits are often best spent expanding the oligopoly into complementary markets. this is why the abstracting and indexing companies bought up journal distribution, and eventually the journals themselves. think of google branching into hosting content (by purchasing youtube, blogger, and the usenet archive through its deja news acquisition, as well as partnering with libraries to scan books) and providing internet access (through the fiber project in kansas city, as well as its open spectrum purchase). amazon regularly purchases complementary businesses as well. when you have a monopoly, or you are part of an oligopoly, you have a lot more control over what you charge than you do when you compete with other enterprises in a more free-flowing marketplace. this is the reason that the random house executive who authorized higher ebook prices for libraries should probably be fired. not for tripling ebook prices, but for not doing it sooner. or for not quintupling them instead. it seems safe to assume that libraries have continued to purchase enough random house titles to increase the publisher’s profits, because random house has not reverted back to its previous prices. which means that random house was giving away money to which it had an obvious claim, and is likely doing so even now. in addition, despite what would seem to be a great opportunity for libraries to demand more in return for higher ebook prices, i am not aware of any libraries having negotiated features like greater privacy or accessibility on behalf of our users, or any other features that represent libraries’ core values. do we have any good options? the only ebook options that uphold libraries’ core values either provide libraries with ownership rights for the authorized copies we purchase and circulate or are free of drm software, ideally both. libraries need to retain ownership of authorized copies in order to perform key library operations, including acquisition, organization, dissemination, and preservation.1 in the united states, the legal basis for libraries has been the combined effect of two copyright exemptions, fair use and first sale (which was recognized as a doctrine in 1908 and became law in 1976). fair use allows library users to make use of library materials for research and education, and allows libraries to archive these materials. first sale gives libraries the privileges of ownership, including the right to lend materials to library members, and even the right to sell materials from their collections should we choose. the digital millennium copyright act (dmca) compromises libraries’ ability to serve our communities, in part by weakening first sale, but the law went into effect in 2000 and libraries have managed to continue to serve the public in spite of its limitations.2 from the perspective of intellectual freedom, dmca was a terrible law and the american library association has worked hard to fight against it. but it took harpercollins, and complicit libraries, to demonstrate our apparent willingness to move to a post-first sale world in which libraries license the books we circulate rather than own them. as ala reports on its website under the heading, digital rights management (drm) & libraries, “the purpose of drm technology is to control access to, track and limit uses of digital works.” this hinders our ability to disseminate materials, hurting usability, and also increases the likelihood of obsolescence, hindering our ability to preserve materials in a way that guarantees our ability to access them in the future. more chillingly, drm undermines intellectual freedom, as described in “the right to read” (1997) and “the digital imprimatur” (2003). though drm is an inherently flawed technology, there is a possibility that it could be replaced by creating better software. at the 2012 ala annual in anaheim, peter brantley referred to the possibility of replacing our existing drm technologies with “tenable protection measures,” and the international digital publishing forum has released an “initial statement of requirements for a potential ‘lightweight content protection’ technology.” i think we are more likely to replace drm by developing business models and agreements that enable libraries to acquire ebooks while also helping to ensure that authors, editors, and others involved in publishing get paid for their work. rather than focus on the materials that are not presently available with ownership privileges or without drm, it is more useful to focus on the many options that are. there are currently eleven viable ways for libraries to offer ebooks to our communities while still maintaining our professional commitment to our core values.3 as summarized in the table that accompanies this article, the available options are: open library open source/drm hybrid model unlimited content license model portability model publisher hosting model unglue.it library license sneakernet model diy model steampunk model state redistribution model this is a partial screen capture from a table of viable ebook options that accompanies this article. the table summarizes every currently available ebook option that either provides libraries with ownership privileges or is free of digital rights management (drm) software. by analyzing every existing model that either involves ownership or is drm-free, libraries and people who are interested in libraries can develop a consensus around realistic and efficient models, and can create and adapt software, licensing, and other practices to support the models that are described below. some of these models are intended to be self-contained solutions to the ebook situation, most notably the state redistribution model. other models can be combined with one another, as noted in their descriptions. open library open library, which has been endorsed by all fifty state librarians in the chief officers of state library agencies (cosla), partners with libraries to create a nationwide, shared ebook collection. participating libraries contribute at least one print-based book to the shared collection, which open library digitizes and then locks away in long-term storage, so the print-based copy of the book cannot circulate. instead, open library circulates the digital copy of the item. in return for contributing a book to the open library collection, participating libraries’ cardholders are given access to all of the ebooks in that collection (open library retains ownership of the authorized copies of ebooks on behalf of the participating libraries.). access is much like it is in many consortia, in which a single item circulates to one person at a time within the consortium. one-borrower-at-a-time is enforced by a drm-enabled server that uses the same underlying technology as overdrive, 3m, ingram, and baker & taylor—adobe content server. open library has also experimented with purchasing new, original content, though with limited success, and this material is currently a tiny portion of the overall collection. in addition, open library mimics a feature that is familiar to nook owners who have taken their nooks to a barnes & noble store and taken advantage of the bookstore’s “read in store” service, which provides free, unfettered access to the nook catalog of ebooks and digital magazines for up to one hour per day. like barnes & noble, open library partner libraries offer greater access to people who are using open library from within the physical structure of a member library, though they do not limit access to one hour per day. open source/drm hybrid model perhaps the most promising and fastest growing model is the open source/drm hybrid model pioneered at douglas county libraries in colorado. the model is for libraries to deal directly with copyright holders, have them sign a simple common understanding license, and host the ebooks either on an open source server if the rightsholder is willing to allow for more liberal circulation of their ebooks or, if the rightsholder wants more restrictions, douglas county also hosts ebooks on its own adobe content server. the open source/drm hybrid model’s most visible advocate is the library’s director, jamie larue, who writes about it frequently, including in the recent “all hat, no cattle: a call for libraries to transform before it’s too late.” one sign that this model is viable: in addition to being copied by other libraries, the system is also being adapted by a commercial entity, bibliotheca, which three weeks ago announced that it had hired douglas county libraries’ it director, monique sendze. unlimited content license model in the unlimited content license model, which was created by ann arbor district library, publishers agree to allow the library to distribute unlimited, unencrypted copies to their cardholders, and libraries agree to pay the publishers a flat annual fee. if the library chooses not to renew its payment, it must remove the files from its servers when the term is up. additionally, the publisher makes explicit its “reps and warranties” that the content is theirs to license, and indemnifies the library against infringement claims if they made a mistake. finally, the publisher agrees that the library’s users can make copies and derivative works for their personal use. the most notable example of this model is ann arbor’s agreement with magnatune to license the music label’s audio file collection, though there is no reason this model could not work for ebooks as well. portability model this model is perhaps best associated with the state librarian in kansas, jo budler. when kansas signed its first contract with overdrive, it negotiated the right to transfer the titles it bought through overdrive to another vendor should it so choose, a right that overdrive sought to eliminate after the first contract expired. budler refused to sign away that right and overdrive refused to include a portability option in the second contract: all titles purchased through overdrive would not be allowed to leave the overdrive platform, including titles that had been purchased during the first contract. budler had to find a vendor that would not insist on locking her into its platform, and she and her colleagues also had to write to each of the publishers whose books they had purchased through overdrive to affirm that the publishers would not seek to block kansas from transferring its authorized copies to another host. all but two or three publishers agreed to the transfer, and kansas eventually signed a contract with 3m. it is my understanding that king county, which is working with baker & taylor’s axis360, has similar rights to portability for the authorized copies it purchases. publisher hosting model this model is most prevalent in contracts between academic libraries and scholarly publishers, though this is more a matter of convention, and of large libraries’ buying power, than a reflection of anything intrinsic to the ebooks being sold. for instance, cornell university library, which will not enter into vendor contracts that require nondisclosure of pricing information or other information that does not constitute a trade secret, focuses its attention on contracts that call for either perpetual or archival access (the language for these contracts is based on the northeast research libraries licensing guidelines and model license). perpetual access is when a library’s cardholders have access to the ebooks a library has purchased even if the library does not have a subscription to the vendor’s ebook platform. archival access, which is similar to the portability model, is when a library retains the right to transfer an authorized copy to its own servers or to another vendor. unglue.it unglue.it uses a kickstarter-like crowdfunding model, but focuses solely on working with rightsholders to set prices for “ungluing” their books: that is, releasing ebook versions of their work under a creative commons license. the rightsholders set a price, and unglue.it helps them get it. ownership of authorized copies of ebooks in the unglue.it model is universal, so libraries do not have any special rights or privileges, but there is also no reason for libraries not to add successfully relicensed ebooks to our collections, and we are free to contribute whatever we can afford toward the campaigns to make currently inaccessible works universally available. unglue.it has also built a large catalog of books that are candidates to be relicensed; for libraries that are interested in gaining unrestricted access to out-of-print material, or who have a strong interest in having a particular title relicensed under creative commons, the unglue.it community is a useful place to let that be known and to find others who share that interest. library license library license, proposed by jeff goldenson of the harvard library innovation laboratory, is similar to creative commons, but it is directed solely at authors who want their work to have a special, companion license that allows libraries to own and circulate their work. the initial draft calls for three possibilities: an embargo. for instance, libraries could have the work for free, but only after it has been commercially available for, say, five years; an institutional “carve-out” in which, for example, harvard library can have this work for free the moment is it published, and circulate the work to everyone who has a harvard library card, but everyone else has to acquire it through standard, commercial means; a performance-based clause, sort of like kickstarter or unglue.it: once the publication makes a certain amount of money in sales, libraries will be able to add it to their collections for free. unfortunately, any progress that has been happening since this proposal was introduced has been pretty quiet, though harvard was involved in the creation of creative commons, so it was proposed by someone at the right institution. as goldenson writes, “this is a young project, working itself out as we speak. if you are interested in exploring it further, visit librarylicense.org and reach out.” sneakernet model a seeming step back, but perhaps the most practical way to wait out the technological, financial, and legal changes taking place within the ebook market. using the sneakernet model, libraries would buy ebooks just like any other purchaser and place our authorized copy on a read-only flash drive. we could then circulate the drive like any other physical object we circulate, such as books, dvds, and cds, using our existing software (we could even use bar codes). making use of a flash drive with an ereader or phone would require that borrowers purchase an extra adapter or dongle, but the added price is less than the cost of two or three ebooks, and the inconvenience would be fairly minimal, if clearly less than ideal. when a new server technology emerges (or an existing model, such a the open source/drm hybrid model, becomes simple and inexpensive enough for even the smallest libraries to implement), we could transfer our ebook files to a server and erase them from our read-only flash drives. diy model diy, which stands for “do it yourself” is an homage to the members of the indie/punk music scene of the 80’s and 90’s, who believed bands could and should avoid major record labels, and even published guides/zines describing how to put out your own records. specifically, the diy model uses open library’s model as a precedent and gives individual libraries control of their own authorized copies. open library’s interpretation of copyright is that libraries, when they purchase an item, also purchase the right to circulate one copy of that item at a time, even if the library elects to transform that item into another format. so far, most of the items in the open library collection are either public domain or are unlikely to be challenged by a presumptive copyright holder. however, it is not clear that the model would only work in these instances. what if a library were to digitize a copy of a print-based book by a publisher that does not sell to libraries, then lock away the print version and circulate only the ebook it had created? or what if the library did the same thing with a still-in-copyright item that is not available digitally? the library would own the item, it would only be circulating one copy at a time, and it could be argued that the library is circulating the item in the only way it can, and that it is causing no harm, or de minimis harm, to the copyright holder. options for circulating diy ebooks include the open source/drm hybrid model and the sneakernet model. steampunk model like the sneakernet model, the steampunk model is another technological step back (in this case from digital back to print), but potentially worthwhile because there are many solely digital works that some libraries might want to circulate in print. one example: download the universe reviews science ebooks, most of which are not available in print. given the limitation of print, authors may agree to “gluing” their books for a modest fee, or to the print-only equivalent of a common understanding license or a library license. don’t you want your grandfather to be able to read your book? or the person on the other side of town who doesn’t have internet access at home? and wouldn’t it be cool to see your local library add a print copy of your book to its circulating collection? libraries know what to do with print-based books, and our members know to look for them when they visit us. the key is to work directly with rightsholders who like libraries or who see us as a useful market for increasing their sales and promoting their work, especially if they would not otherwise consider printing their books at all. the state redistribution model this is the least viable plan, in that it involves significant changes to current laws. richard stallman of the free software foundation proposed the idea, originally in a letter to the brazilian government. under stallman’s proposal, the author or publisher would retain ownership of the authorized copies copyright, but sharing them noncommercially copying and redistributing authorized copies would be legal and authors would be reimbursed based on the popularity of their work. popularity would be measured not by counting downloads or monitoring use of the work in other ways, but by responses to voluntary surveys in which readers would report what they have read. rightsholders authors and artists would be paid from a pool of funds set aside by the government to pay authors for their work. (note: thanks to richard stallman for correcting a couple of errors in my original summary of his proposal. in addition, though sharing would be legal in the state redistribution model, people would remain free to purchase the books directly. in that case, the purchaser would own the authorized copy. as stallman wrote, “i think that if you buy a book, you should own what you bought.”) what happens next? i wrote about ebooks in a previous lead pipe article, “tangoing all the way: is everything negotiable?” what was different when that article was posted, just over a year ago, is how many fewer options i could identify. at the time, instead of buying harpercollins books through overdrive, i was in favor of buying books through overdrive from other publishers. now that overdrive has revealed its insistence on vendor lock-in and its willingness to allow amazon to violate library members’ privacy, i am in favor of writing off our overdrive purchases as a sunk cost and of moving on to other options. constructive engagement has its place, as evidenced by the readersfirst movement (though i prefer the north carolina state university libraries “value statement for the scholarly ebook marketplace,” which is currently hosted on the triangle research libraries: beyond print website). but often the most sensible response to a bad option is to ignore it, cut it out of our budgets as quickly as possible, and focus instead on those options that offer greater promise. while the eleven viable ebook options described above are promising, they are not yet ideal. they will take work. the open question is our willingness to appreciate the important features these options make available rather than the features we wish they had. are we willing to do what is best for the people we serve in the long term, while perhaps disappointing them in the short term? unfortunately, we do not have much choice: even if you work at one of the two new york libraries that have access to penguin’s ebooks, you still can only offer popular materials from three of the “big six” publishers; for the rest of us in public libraries, we can only offer ebooks from two, and even those include the significant issues i have discussed above regarding harpercollins and random house. for academic librarians, i can only imagine the pain involved in watching a student trying to figure out how to make use of some of the ebooks in the university collection before they give up in frustration. i am currently a student myself, and i know that frustration well. when we remind ourselves about our core values, the answer is obvious, at least the answer about what not to do. if we keep pretending that all of our vendor relationships are serving our cardholders’ best interests, the airplanes will never land. when we cede power, we know where that leads. we have also seen what happens when libraries meet adversity with innovation. the state library of kansas helped establish the portability model. ann arbor district library created the unlimited content license model. douglas county libraries created the open source/drm hybrid model. previously, the georgia public library service created evergreen and north carolina state university introduced faceting to library catalogs with its endeca project (which villanova university helped to perpetuate with its open source vufind project). single agencies, and even statewide consortia, can be nimble, creative, and powerful, though it seems clear that even broader collaboration will be necessary in order to bring our handling of ebooks into line with our core values. right now, it looks as though the open source/drm hybrid model, like evergreen and open source faceted catalog interfaces before it, is following the growth pattern established by some of libraries’ most successful cooperative projects, such as the marc bibliographic standard, interlibrary loan technologies and agreements, the worldcat union catalog, the z39.50 protocol, and the library bill of rights. but even if none of the presently viable ebook models ultimately enjoy widespread adoption, it is heartening to see how much progress we have made in just one year. not all that long ago, we had no options that honored libraries’ core values. now we have several. the next step is to work together, to vet and develop the current options, and to help create new ones if necessary. recommended reading the publication standards project (along with a two-part issue of a list apart on digital publication standards) andromeda yelton’s talk at the 2012 computers in libraries conference discusses ebooks within the context of libraries’ core values “the ebook user’s bill of rights,” which was co-created by sarah houghton and andy woodworth “purchasing e-books for your library,” a presentation by no shelf required’s sue polanka, particularly her “ebook access levels” graphic pew internet & american life project’s “libraries, patrons, and e-books” michael buckland’s redesigning library services: a manifesto (1992) thanks to michael bills, jo budler, tim coates, shea crow, marin foster, jeff goldenson, amber kiepe, jesse koennecke, jamie larue, robert miller, mary minow, eli neiburger, michael porter, john saylor, karen schneider, monique sendze, ari shanok, kate sheehan, richard stallman, katy white, and andromeda yelton for their help with my research. i have done my best to include information as it was presented to me, though any opinions or mistakes included in this article are solely my own. in addition, thanks to emily clasper, john jackson, and my lead pipe colleague, kim leeder, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. as jesse shera wrote in the foundations of education for librarianship: “the processes of selecting, acquiring, and making available for use the contents of graphic records comprise the operational aspects of librarianship. librarianship is a trinity of acquisition, organization, and dissemination, in which acquisition relates to the selection and accumulation of materials, organization to their preparation for efficient use, and dissemination to the processes of making the contents of graphic records available to the user” (shera, 1972, p. 193). libraries have since greatly expanded their work into non-graphic records (such as audio, video, and games), but acquisition, organization, and dissemination remain a good characterization of what we do. along with shera’s list, it seems sensible to include preservation, privacy, and, increasingly, production: acquisition libraries play an important role in helping to identify the books that people can trust, or are especially likely to enjoy in their leisure time. organization metadata created and preserved by libraries is a public resource, as are the standards libraries develop to organize this metadata. dissemination making materials available remains relevant, even when these materials are digital: just because people can afford ereaders does not mean they can afford ebooks. in many libraries, including the one where i work, video games and dvds have the highest per-copy circulation even though the equipment required to make use of video games and dvds is far more expensive than an ereader. preservation hathitrust is an important component of the digitization efforts that have taken place to date, as is the internet archive, but these efforts apply primarily to preservation and access for works that were initially released in print. libraries need to make different arrangements for work that exists only in electronic form. as david m. levy wrote (about the early history of the web) in “digital libraries and the problem of purpose” (2000), “…we have been rushing to put materials online with no thought to (and no idea of how to) preserve them. one consequence is that, almost certainly, there will be a hole in history….” given that libraries’ relationship with serials, especially electronic journals, can be seen as a lesson in how not to work with commercial interests, it is worth noting the recent report by the university libraries at columbia and cornell which finds that only “15-20% of the e-journal titles in the libraries’ collections are currently preserved” by libraries’ two leading digital preservation initiatives, lockss and portico. one way for libraries to avoid these kinds of difficulties is to find ways now, while ebooks are still relatively new, to begin preserving copies of ebooks in ways that will ensure their continued availability. privacy this also includes confidentiality and intellectual freedom. from the ala core values of librarianship, “protecting user privacy and confidentiality is necessary for intellectual freedom and fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship…. we uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.” production libraries can help authors publish, and not just in the traditional sense of library-as-place, e.g., marx in the reading room of the british museum, surrounded by documents and given a quiet place to work (for a more contemporary example, listen for the chicago public library’s role in “what gave you that idea?,” a recent episode of the 99% invisible podcast). though it remains an important library function, library-as-place is less central to users’ interactions with ebooks, which are generally downloaded and read outside of libraries. however, with relatively modest cooperative investments in technology and training, the connection between libraries and the publication of ebooks could be far more practical: helping authors turn their manuscripts into ebooks, and helping them find their audience (see nate hill’s “a two part plan to make your library a local publisher”). [↩] in part because every three years the library of congress can determine exemptions for certain activities. [↩] the following companies and models are not considered viable ebook options either because they do not provide for the sale of authorized copies to libraries and because the ebooks they license to libraries are drm-encoded, or because there is not yet enough known about them to describe their business model or how libraries would make use of their services: bilbary, an ebook store that went live in march 2012 and plans to eventually feature titles from almost every major publisher, has been working with chief officers of state library agencies (cosla) to find a way to support libraries. the most likely arrangement would allow for libraries to benefit from an affiliate program for sales referrals, one that could eventually include co-branding. another possibility would be for bilbary to facilitate short-term rentals, sort of like a cloud-based, ebook version of mcnaughton subscription service, though libraries would be charged per transaction rather than paying a monthly access charge. all titles would include drm and no authorized copies would be owned directly by the library; instead, libraries would subsidize or underwrite cardholders’ rental costs. freading (by the company that offers freegal) provides pay-per-download, drm-encoded ebooks. ingram’s myilibrary allows publisher to decide how they want to handle drm, and at least one myilibrary customer, rosen publishing, says that its ebooks are sold without drm. it is not clear if purchases are transferable to another vendor or server. library renewal, a project led by michael porter, is currently planning a groundbreaking system that would eliminate inefficiencies and unnecessary expenses in the ebook market, and offer transparent pricing for publishers, rightsholders, and libraries. overdrive does not provide drm-free downloads and changed the provision in its contracts that supported library ownership of the copies that libraries purchase through overdrive. safari has a consumer product that allows for drm-free downloads, but access to the titles in safari’s library product is online-only. safari was started by o’reilly media, whose founder, tim o’reilly, proudly states that his company’s books are sold without drm. except, it seems, to libraries. [↩] copyright, core vales, ebooks, fair use, first sale, manifesto, scholarly publishing what is digital humanities and what’s it doing in the library? dynamic duo: the web developer and the public services librarian 24 responses barry dworak 2012–07–11 at 12:53 pm great article! there is another very important role that the library once played, in the market for academic periodicals, especially in the sciences. libraries once helped limit the impact of the “moat” on the journal publishing market, by offering an alternative. it was once quite common for science professors with a research focus to subscribe to paper journals. office walls were often lined with them. however, the library offered the same journals. the scientists just found that the benefit of having their own copies, in front of them at all times, outweighed the cost, at least for some journals. publishers had a clear market incentive to keep prices down to the point that they could sell multiple subscriptions. there was good money in selling more subscriptions, but if they raised the price too high, individuals or labs with subscriptions would, en masse, just say, “screw it! we’ll just look at the copy in the library, for that money.” with the shift to electronic journals, these incentives were turned around, completely. instead of acting as an alternative source for information that would encourage price consciousness in a journal’s many customers, the library began to act as a layer of abstraction between the consumer of the good and the supplier, which means the consumer is insulated from the price, and just wants the good. the supplier loves this, because it’s a lot easier to sell something when price is not even discussed. this is the classic “third-party payer” problem in today’s market for medical services — the patient receives the services from a doctor or other provider, but the insurance company pays. the patient has no personal interest in the price, and my experience has been that hospitals won’t even quote prices to a patient (something that would be illegal in most businesses, but i digress). as with medicine, prices of journals in the sciences have gone up at multiples of the rate of inflation. the scientists need them, accreditation might even require them, but the library foots the bill. where once the presence of a copy in the library helped keep costs down, today, a library subscription helps vendors charge far more than the market would bear, if actual consumers had to weigh their individual costs and benefits. in a tragedy of the commons scenario, universities and, if they are public, taxpayers, ended up getting screwed by the unintended consequences of libraries’ direction. in the rush to embrace an obviously superior new technology, i don’t think anyone really considered that this would be the result. there is a real danger that e-books will follow the same path. libraries are in a position, right now, to take a stand to see that they don’t make the same mistake, again. liz jardine 2012–07–11 at 1:45 pm great thoughts on the ebook issue, but i’d like to comment on your statement “to date, the decision to hire firms to provide abstracts and indexes for our serials is the largest mistake libraries have ever made, leading inexorably toward the indexing and eventually the archiving of newspapers, magazines, and journals being controlled by a small group of commercial enterprises.” perhaps it’s not too late to begin, if not to completely correct the mistake, to amend it. as libraries move into a greater involvement with university presses, institutional repositories, and other forms of scholarly communication, libraries should insist on taking control of the metadata (seizing it by force, if necessary). we know they can do a fine job with it, but they also need to get the metadata out there so the publications can be found without the aid of an a&i service. get it into the catalogs and on the web. make it easier to find than the other guy’s stuff. maybe this kind of action by libraries could generate enough momentum to pay for itself in saved subscription costs to indexing services. or maybe there’s something glaringly obvious i’m missing as i try to write this on what’s left of my lunch hour. either way i enjoy reading your blog. congratulations on your award! brett bonfield 2012–07–13 at 4:32 pm thanks, liz. i agree that it’s not too late to correct our mistake. thanks for pointing that out, and for discussing some really encouraging ways that’s starting to happen. steve casburn 2012–07–16 at 1:10 am what if librarians started the take-back of indexing and abstracting by taking back our own literature? imagine a cooperative effort to index and abstract lis literature. maintain it in a wiki, with each article having its own page. a template would guide reviewers in entering structured information about the article. non-reviewers could comment on and ask questions about the article and vote on whether they would recommend it. the wiki could have author pages, with each page having links to all of the author’s abstracted articles, and registered user pages, with each page having links to all of the user’s contributions to the wiki. if the idea works–if a critical mass of library practitioners read and contribute to the wiki–then it could eventually evolve into something more: a place for authors to publish their work, bypassing the journal process altogether. a place for a community of readers and writers of lis research to form, connect, and grow. and a training and testing ground for the larger project of re-taking indexing and abstracting. brett bonfield 2012–07–16 at 10:14 am i love this idea. a few years ago, gabriel sean farrell and i played around with a project we called lisinfo, and we hoped it might some day include the information you’ve described above. unfortunately, we never got the project even to an initial release. i hope you get farther with it than we did. please let me know if there’s anything i can do to help. elizabeth jardine 2012–07–19 at 1:03 pm reply to both brett and steve: well, thanks to you brett for bringing up the indexing issue in the first place. ever since, i’ve been thinking a lot about this and have even more ideas. i’m so excited i may even write a blog post about it. too bad your project didn’t get off the ground but timing is, as they say, everything. and i think now may be the time. steve, that’s an interesting idea, using a wiki. to tell the truth, that never entered my mind, but all possibilities should be examined! lori ayre 2012–07–11 at 2:23 pm brilliant. you had me at “to date, the decision to hire firms to provide abstracts and indexes for our serials is the largest mistake libraries have ever made, leading inexorably toward the indexing and eventually the archiving of newspapers, magazines, and journals being controlled by a small group of commercial enterprises. creating the same sort of problem for ourselves with ebooks cannot be justified.” i agree completely with your assessment and it makes me sick to see libraries continue to play the fools in this ebooks game. i also appreciated your reference to our core values. i think it is high time we all step back and look at those core values and rethink what it means to stand up for those core values in the 21st century. pingback : truthberry pickings « desperately seeking truthbrarian nicholas schiller 2012–07–11 at 4:53 pm “the only ebook options that uphold libraries’ core values either provide libraries with ownership rights for the authorized copies we purchase and circulate or are free of drm software, ideally both.” ah, so in other words: in order to be considered a librarian with values, one must accept your core assumptions prima facia. this is a bit of rhetorical grandstanding that neatly places all dissenters into two camps: people who are not librarians or librarians with faulty values. this moral grandstanding and unnecessary scolding tone greatly reduces the impact of an otherwise astute and well-researched argument. i consider myself a librarian with a solid core of professional values, but i reject the unstated assumption that a library must always be, by definition, an organization that purchases content from publishers and distributes that content to our patrons. that is print thinking, pure and simple. if libraries insist on defining our services on print terms (see also: first sale doctrine), we will become irrelevant sooner rather than later. digital media are different from physical media. there are, of course, better and worse deals we can make with big content, but a shift from an ownership model of librarianship to an access model is taking place. if our profession, by sheer force of will, insists on holding to a service model based on the affordances of printed materials, there will be no role for us in a digital world. carl 2012–07–11 at 7:32 pm while in general i agree that concerns with ownership is “print thinking,” as long as publishers (and amazon) continue to treat their digital content as if it were print, with drm and the like, trying we will need to engage in print thinking to give our patrons access to the materials they desire. at some point, the publishers’/amazon’s ability to treat digital content like print content will be undermined. yet until that moment comes (and at the moment is seems far off, though one can never tell), choosing access over ownership frankly just seems to be giving publishers the right to toy with us and prevent us from providing sustainable access (or even any access) for our patrons. library’s reliance on the first sale doctrine will only be irrelevant when there is another way to ensure that we are able to give out patrons access to material. nicholas schiller 2012–07–12 at 10:40 am yes, from a context of providing services in the here and now, this (and the original post) is clear practical thinking. my objection is that i cannot imagine a future of libraries where circulation is still our primary task. thus, if the future is providing access without ownership, efforts to enforce the ownership/distribution model appear to me as conservative actions intent on reinforcing the status quo. reading the op again, it reads less like grandstanding, but it still insists that library values require an ownership/distribution model. i can’t seem room for that in any future, other than as a niche role and not in the mainstream. ebooks are not books. that is to say, electronic texts are not codices. this post is a highly developed argument on the ethics of distributing codices. brett bonfield 2012–07–13 at 4:38 pm nicholas, thanks for the critique. i’m working on a couple of essays, one about libraries in 2025 and another about libraries in 2112, so i’ve been thinking a lot about the future of libraries. what do you see as our future? rory litwin 2012–07–13 at 10:23 am in response to nicholas, i think that the concern for ownership is not primarily an attachment to “print thinking” but something that stems from our sense of responsibility for the preservation of the cultural record. it doesn’t seem that any other societal institution has a sense of that responsibility, so it’s natural for us to want control of usable files (ownership amounts to control) in order to preserve them. i don’t pretend that the library or the archival profession has digital preservation all sewn up, but it does seem to be our responsibility. in response to the article, i would only take issue with brett’s claim for the function of fair use exemptions in library lending. i don’t think that is the part of copyright that we actually rely on in lending books or in making copies for preservation purposes. section 108 and other parts of the copyright act are more important to what libraries do. i think our interest in fair use has more to do with occasional needs of library users. brett bonfield 2012–07–13 at 4:40 pm rory, thanks for clarifying this for me. every time i think i have an understanding of how copyright works in practice…. rory litwin 2012–07–13 at 10:51 am also for nicholas… another reason for libraries’ interest in ownership is also not based on an attachment to print, but rather on the idea of universal access. if vendors maintain ownership of the files they sell, it is more complicated and not necessarily possible to provide universal access. rights holders may succeed in charging end users a per-use fee, which sacrifices the thing that makes libraries different from bookstores. i think that in the end, librarians don’t have as much power to shape the next stable situation of publishing and distribution of texts as brett thinks we do. but i think we will manage to negotiate some arrangement that provides limited free access to ebooks to members of communities, paid for by communities on a subscription basis. i think publishers will end up going for that if it is workable for them financially. drm of some kind will be a part of that picture, unavoidably, imo. pingback : to own or to license? | edreach andromeda 2012–07–15 at 10:23 am fwiw (just found this out) safari doesn’t run its library platform itself — contracts out for that. which may or may not change your calculus with respect to footnote 6 :) but i totally respect if their cost/benefit analysis or development resources don’t make developing an in-house library platform feasible (i’m sort of keenly aware these days of how one cannot develop all the desirable things), and it may be that third-party options don’t provide drm-free library distribution platforms (& they don’t have the negotiating leverage to make that happen). brett bonfield 2012–07–15 at 1:35 pm i really like o’reilly media and want to use library funds to buy their books, so when i first started researching this article i was excited to learn that safari offers drm-free downloads. when i emailed safari to ask for information about drm, ownership of authorized copies, and pricing, i was informed that libraries can only buy o’reilly publications with the restrictions i mentioned. the footnote itself is meant to be a brief summary of that email exchange, along with a bit of context. pingback : curiouser and curiouser: what caught our eyes online this week | chasing reference pingback : ebooks choices and the soul of librarianship — the digital shift pingback : libraries and the cargo cult mentality « st. kate's mlis reorganization discussion pingback : digital public library of america » blog archive » digital library digest: august 3, 2012 pingback : open access … open a&i? thoughts and questions | librarian squared pingback : o que os bibliotecários precisam saber sobre ebooks? | moreno barros this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct state of the pipe – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 12 mar editorial board /0 comments state of the pipe open access week, 2013 photo by flickr user slubdresden (cc by 2.0) in brief: in the library with the lead pipe announces two new milestones and a call for feedback. by editorial board as in the library with the lead pipe continues to grow, we sometimes take a pause from our regular articles to share milestones and solicit reader input. we’d like to share two milestones: in the library with the lead pipe is now indexed in doaj and we are listed as peer reviewed in ebsco. also, as part of our ongoing efforts towards transparency and practicing what we preach in terms of open access, we are sharing the following draft documents for comments: so you want to write for lead pipe?: includes how to propose an article and our framework questions lead pipe publication process: an overview of the whole process, includes peer review guidelines submission form lead pipe style guide: includes tone, grammar, and formatting for the web we hope these new documents help make our process more clear. these will replace the documents currently linked to from our submissions guidelines page. article proposals instructions for authors and editors peer review guidelines the new documents are google documents with the permission setting “anyone who has the link can comment.” we will keep comments open for the next month (deadline: 4/12/14). we will then review our documents, based on the comments we receive, and will implement our new process. we look forward to your feedback. did our process documents spark your interest? consider submitting! need ideas? see our most recent call for articles. me and you and everything we know: information behavior in library workplaces books behind bars: a volunteer-run prison library service in winnipeg, manitoba this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct our librarian bodies. our librarian selves. – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 3 dec emily ford /19 comments our librarian bodies. our librarian selves. photo by flickr user inju (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) (exercising in national library singapore) by emily ford librarians are great at taking care of their patrons. we will conduct searches for our patrons and provide them with the resources they need, we contribute to the public good and offer ongoing educational opportunities, and we provide community space in the name of discourse and community building. we also testify in and lobby congress in support of legislation that affects our work—all in the name of taking care of our patrons. but to what extent do we take care of ourselves? i’m talking about workplace wellness. this is an issue that seems largely ignored in library land, an issue that may cause eye-rolling and cause some of our lead pipe readers to stop right here and move along to the next post in their feed reader.  but workplace wellness is an issue that seems to be largely ignored by libraries, librarians, and library organizations. literature searches in library and information science databases return very few relevant articles on the subject. why? before i attempt to answer this question i’d like to propose a working definition of workplace wellness.  wellness in the workplace refers to an employee’s mental and physical health. many businesses and organizations have implemented workplace wellness. examples include the facilitation of lunchtime walking groups, providing on site massage appointments, and offering classes and lectures regarding wellness. also included would be programs supporting employee health; providing free flu shots and health screenings, providing ergonomic work stations, having healthy snacks available, or even allowing workers flexible schedules to take care of their physical and emotional health as needed. according to this loose working definition it’s likely that every library has some sort of wellness program, but it seems to me individual and organizational buy-in aren’t that widespread in the library community. i assume that the reason workplace wellness hasn’t caught on in libraries is a combination of the following reasons. first, wellness programs that do exist usually happen within a broader institutional context. since most libraries are part of an academic institution, county or city government, or some other larger bureaucratic model, wellness initiatives seem to occur at a higher institutional level, and, as such they haven’t become top priorities for many libraries. second, librarians are hard working dedicated people, who may not feel they have the time or even the desire to participate in a wellness initiative. third, wellness programs haven’t been heavily marketed to libraries and librarians, either by their institutions or by profession-wide initiatives. fourth, wellness programs cost, and most libraries are already run on tight budgets. finally, wellness may not be part of a library’s organizational culture, or it might not even been an organizational value. it is this fifth factor that is perhaps the most prohibitive to the overall wellness of library employees. a healthy and well library staff will provide better services to its patrons. providing for and assisting employees in this regard will mean that they can work more efficiently and effectively. of concern to many administrators should be the fact that wellness initiatives will save the institution money in health care costs when workers have fewer physical and mental health problems. one of the best examples that support this is ergonomics. wellness in the workplace constitutes a web of factors that can determine the status quo level of health and wellness experienced by employees at your library. many of these factors may seem irrelevant when considered on their own; however, when placed in conjunction with others, they work collectively to either create or hinder employees’ well being. the first two factors affecting workplace wellness are simple—your library’s physical space and physical location. how the inside of your workplace is designed affects how much you move at work. (e.g. is there an elevator, how far do you have to walk to place something in the recycling?) the library’s physical location can also affect workplace wellness. (is there a tempting restaurant nearby or are you close to a park with walking trails?) the third factor isn’t as cut and dry—organizational culture and values. these can greatly impact wellness at work. for example, many librarians work hard and long hours, which can lead to skipping breaks, even skipping lunch or eating at our desks in front of a project. these habits do not contribute to having a healthy workplace. for one, it reinforces the sedentary nature of library work, and second, it doesn’t allow an individual the mental break that one needs to best achieve work efficiently. food is also a large part of culture at many libraries. at one library where i used to work, there was a “chocolate drawer” behind the reference desk. whenever we had a particularly trying interaction with a patron we would medicate ourselves with chocolate. other libraries might have a tradition of pastries at department meetings, or social events, which usually include food. however, changing an organization’s culture is not an easy thing. and if there’s anything that organizations are not quick to do, changing the culture and our values are it. so how are we to tackle this issue? how do we even frame an argument for starting wellness initiatives within our workplaces? first, we have to work to create wellness as a value within the workplace. at institutions where a wellness program already exists, but is not culturally adopted by the library, how do you get the library to do so? i’d like to offer some suggestions as to how we can begin to tackle the organizational culture and values regarding wellness issue in the places of our employ. conduct an informal evaluation of your workplace to find supporting factors and hindrances to a healthy work place. ask for institutional support based upon your informal evaluation or observations. paired with the physical activity guidelines for americans, this might be a convincing argument that your supervisor can send up the management chain. start a wellness committee and task yourself with developing a wellness plan for your library. but what if your place of work/administration is not understanding of your plight? be aware of your habits at work. wear a pedometer; take a walk during your lunch break (and invite your colleagues to join you), consider ergonomics, etc. investigate whether your larger organization (city, county, institution) has a wellness program and participate in that as an individual. then try to market it to your fellow staff. if you create community programs in your library or conduct outreach work, try to plan and implement programming about health and wellness. there are some resources and initiatives that do exist regarding wellness in libraries. most notably, ala past president loriene roy created the circle of wellness as one of her presidential initiatives. this web site offers resources for individuals to use to assess wellness attitudes in their library, as well as track their personal wellness goals. these resources offer a good starting place for you if you are interested in investigating wellness at your library. the healthiest work places already have an organizational culture of wellness and value health as an institution. if this is not the case in your library, establishing a culture of wellness will happen very slowly. it takes quite a bit of energy and work to change and shape organizational values and change begins with the action of one or two motivated and dedicated individuals. it’s time we take care of ourselves and take the steps to create healthier work places. in the long run, our health and wellness serves our well-being and also our ability to provide the best services to our patrons. see the following articles on organizational culture: shepstone, c. & currie, l. (2008). transforming the academic library: creating an organizational culture that fosters staff success. journal of academic librarianship, 34(4), 358-368. sannwald, w. (2000). understanding organizational culture. library administration & management, 14(1), 8-14. many thanks to phil eskew (one of the best instructors i had in library school), and miriam rigby for offering feedback on this post. thanks also go to fellow lead piper derik for reading this prior to posting. health, organizational culture, wellness, work, workplace, workplace wellness editorial: getting to know you social networking with a brain: a critical review of academic sites 19 responses laura z 2008–12–03 at 10:31 am i think you hit the proverbial nail on the head when you said “it is this fifth factor (organizational culture) that is perhaps the most prohibitive to the overall wellness of library employees.” as you identified, this is the hardest to change, but often at the root of why otherwise valiant healthy workplace efforts do not take off. i would include in this an organization’s need to look at its collective mental and emotional as well as physical health. people work themselves to the bone if they are feeling competitive with others or if they perceive the organization will let them go at a moment’s notice or if someone doesn’t have their back and is waiting for them to mess up in any way. i know we can’t force people to go to therapy, but doing this might also go a long way in promoting overall healthy workplace culture. janet 2008–12–03 at 10:43 am good post. for me, physical and emotional health are inextricably linked. having an emotionally healthy workplace in which people are treated well and the workload and expectations are reasonable allows me to sleep better and feel comfortable leaving my desk for lunch or a break. but not everyone feels that way. what’s also missing is a sense of camaraderie built around more than food. i’d love to see a library walking group, and i’ve even tried a time or two to form one. but people were always too busy to take 30 minutes a couple days a week to walk. i wonder how much more productive we would have been if we had done so. r 2008–12–03 at 11:10 am good post–physical and emotional health should be encouraged in the workplace. but not by eliminating the chocolate drawer and pastries at meetings! i assume emily is suggesting offering alternative healthy snacks along with the chocolate and pastries. to try and eliminate comfort food would be a dictatorial morale-killer. sorry to pick on that one little thing in a really helpful post, but you pressed a button with me when you brought up junk food! matthew 2008–12–03 at 11:18 am wellness programs appear (from management perspective) to have associated costs, though it need not be so. they also provide benefits – lower insurance costs, fewer missed days (both physical ailments/injuries and mental health days, including lower rates of depression). i agree – this is a huge issue, not just in libraries, but in every workplace in the fattest, most out of shape culture in the world. lori 2008–12–03 at 12:19 pm one thing that bothers me a bit in this post is “second, librarians are hard working dedicated people”. the irksome part of this assertion is that place with less hardworking and dedicated staff will have less issues with providing a healthy workplace. why is this so irksome? because i think it’s a global belief: if you are dedicated to your job you will slave away at your desk, barely move, and compartmentalize your workday away from the rest of your needs and life. workplace wellness is an issue across the board in a variety of circumstances. my main concern, in the land of libraries, would be the intellectual component: namely focus on the brain and not the body further enables this workplace culture to devalue the effect physical health as on mental acuity. as already mentioned, until it is made clear that workplace wellness ultimately saves the company money (less sick days, better insurance premiums) and increases productivity, it will be viewed as a drain… lisa 2008–12–03 at 3:49 pm in case you think the image that led off this article represents an idea foreign to us libraries, (and for those of you with access to the chronicle), i listened to this recently which talks about libraries as space (and library space changing because of culture). the new library space used to start the discussion is at goucher college and will feature exercise opportunities. although it’s student culture that’s focused on (both in the article and in the building), it goes to emily’s point that we provide for our patrons’ needs. but maybe changing the space for them will provide opportunities or reinforcement of a changing culture that will benefit library staff wellness as well. lisa 2008–12–03 at 3:52 pm sorry, the links i meant to include were: tech therapy: the library building http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3481/tech-therapy-the-library-building?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en and goucher college http://www.goucher.edu/x17081.xml emily ford 2008–12–03 at 3:52 pm i think that all points so far are quite true. in particular, lori’s comment makes me think that workplace wellness extends far beyond organizational culture and into our “american” (should it be capitalist?) social culture that values the hard worker. even in the manner i included this fleeting comment in my post shows that i am not immune to cultural influence (society’s/capitalist culture’s). furthermore, i think lori is pinpointing the particular thing about libraries that makes it an even bigger issue for the profession: intellectual work vs. other forms of work. @r. right now i am eating lunch at my desk, responding to comments on my blog post over my lunch break. oh, and i am eating a bar of chocolate. of all the people who shouldn’t be deprived of junk food, i am one. i just think that we need to create a better general organizational culture of wellness. janet’s point is also well taken, we need to find a way to create community that does not center around food. emily ford 2008–12–03 at 3:56 pm @lisa. i listened to that and it is fascinating. i was trying to find a way to work it into this post. alas, i had already written so much! the issue with the goucher college thing, again, is that the idea is the library space will provide for patrons and community. i wonder at what level this kind of providing for patrons will translate to the library having an organizational culture in which wellness and health play a large role. here’s the link to the tech therapy web page. the episode is number 36. r 2008–12–03 at 5:55 pm thanks, emily, for the admission of chocolate-bar guilt. :-) it seems that almost any library should be able to draw on resources/experts from the wider community to host small staff-development events centered on wellness. an academic library could have someone from the campus health center do a workshop on stress reduction; a public library could have a local yoga instructor come in for a short session. h. krishna 2008–12–05 at 4:22 pm good post. my mls program had a whole class on yoga and libraries called “downward-facing dewey.” maybe libraries could add some gyms to the cyber cafes, thus energizing both the mind, the body, and the infoshpere. the red librarian 2008–12–05 at 4:34 pm in gulag library we have mandatory calisthenics. dogs bite at our heels if we do not do pushup. wellness committee say my friend not good and they throw him in snow naked. bears eat him. we well though, committee say we must. sara piasecki 2008–12–08 at 2:07 pm is it up to our workplaces to ensure our wellness? or is it up to us as individuals? if my coworkers like chocolate, but i am a chocoholic, must they put away their candy for my sake? do we have lives outside of libraries? if so, who ensures our wellness there? or is that where wellness begins? just tossing out thoughts here… jenny 2008–12–09 at 12:23 pm penn college has teamed up with blue cross of northeastern pa to start a wellness program across campus. stage 1 was to get bloodwork, bmi, ht, wt, measurements. also, if you did this and filled out a survey, you were granted a $100 gift card at target. stage 2 is a walking program. all participants were issued a pedometer and walking journal for six weeks. at the end of the 6 weeks, a drawing will be held for another prize. meanwhile, bc representatives contacted staff to set their own goals. mine is weight loss. i am working with a nutritionist to lose 20 lbs in 6 months. she has counseled me on many things and continues to keep in touch. it is a great plan and it is free through our college’s plan. librarian lucy 2008–12–09 at 4:33 pm a part of the organisational culture is how we deal with customers too – i’ve heard of managers who force staff to stay on the phone with creepy people (i.e. guys ringing to get you to read out the name of sexuality titles) or constantly deal with creepy/offensive customers. luckily enough my library is in the same building as the gym and pool and the council does a weight watchers thing. the bit that helps the most with wellness is the expectation that if we’re sick we stay home. if we’re a bit iffy (headachy/morning sickness/just a bit off colour) we can stay in the back room and work from there wherever possible. if a customer is offensive, abusive or creepy, it is okay to ask another staff member to either assist or take over, or refuse to serve them in some cases. oh, and we take our mandated breaks and lunch hours, not cut them short. emily ford 2008–12–09 at 8:06 pm to reply to sara’s comment: sara piasecki: is it up to our workplaces to ensure our wellness? or is it up to us as individuals? if my coworkers like chocolate, but i am a chocoholic, must they put away their candy for my sake? do we have lives outside of libraries? if so, who ensures our wellness there? or is that where wellness begins? just tossing out thoughts here… i would respond yes and no. i think workplaces should have a stake in the wellness of their employees, but it is definitely not wholly an employer’s responsibility for the entirety of an individuals wellness choices and habits. i think you are right, at least what i think you are alluding to, that wellness does begin in personal lives outside of work, but i think that some semblance of wellness and health need to be translated into the workplace. this could even be as simple as providing ergonomic work stations, valuing breaks for our eyes and brains after sitting in front of a computer for too long, etc. it doesn’t all have to center around the chocolate bowl. emily ford 2008–12–09 at 8:09 pm the initiatives that you, lucy and jenny are mentioning are good examples of what i mean. where i work they have a bike to work program. for each day that i bike to work i get a punch on a card. after 30 punches, i get an incentive. this incentive is: credit toward my pre-tax dollars bus pass, parking permit, or if i don’t have either of those, a small monetary incentive. it’s great for people like me who: a) mainly commute by bike and b) use public transportation a lot, and c) those who just need a something little extra to get them using alternative transportation. derik badman 2008–12–10 at 9:46 am i’m late in commenting, but: 1) i’d stress the ergonomic work stations again. i’d suspect a lot of library furniture has not been optimized for computer use, either through time, money, or lack of interest/care. the more time i spend at my computer on a desk build for doing paper work, the more i become concerned about carpal tunnel and back/neck issues. i can’t be the only one, 2) work-based social events can be a good mental health aid. a chance to socialize informally with colleageues can not only allow for venting but also builds social bonds that can make work less isolating (and improve interoffice/library/department service by increasing knowledge of each other’s people/issues/etc). i recommend happy hours, but your taste may vary. sylvia 2008–12–19 at 4:49 pm mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body) – this ancient latin proverb also shows how important is keeping our body fit. this being even more important for people who do their daily work sitting in front of the computer; results that having opportunity of wellness activities is very important to librarians even at their workplace. in my opinion having ergonomic work stations is – elementary not only for librarian, but for every employee in order to have their work done well. congrats for making publicity for this theme. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: conference this! lead pipers compare conference experiences – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 28 apr editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield /14 comments editorial: conference this! lead pipers compare conference experiences as library travel budgets are increasingly slashed around the country, it’s a tough time for conference-going. in this group post, we compare notes about the conferences we’ve attended, which have been our favorites, and why. we hope this will generate creative ideas on good conferences (online or in-person) to look forward to, and maybe offer the additional benefit of making us more educated conference consumers. please join us by sharing your experiences in the comments below. http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnk57/ / cc by-nc-sa 2.0 by editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield ellie collier i’m the one who suggested the topic and i probably have the least to contribute on account of it. i’m really very interested in reading all the responses and hope many of you take the time to leave your favorite conferences (and why) in the comments. i’ve always had a good time at ala and typically walked away with new friends and new ideas, but i’m looking to try a smaller (and hopefully more cost-effective) conference next year. i had a really fantastic time a our first annual library instruction round table (lirt) regional summit. it was free and included lunch. and i’m not even a member of lirt! (i did offer to head a table talk topic, so i was kinda/sorta a speaker.) one nice thing about the lirt conference was that it was all local librarians. i either knew, or knew someone who knew nearly everyone there. i have also been going to the texas library association annual conference regularly for the past four years (as long as i’ve been a professional librarian). i’ve spoken at the last three tla conferences and i know that has definitely made it a more interesting, engaging, and rewarding experience for me. conferences i’ve attended: ala annual (3) ala midwinter tla (texas library association) (4) library instruction round table regional summit conferences i’m considering: acrl cil loex tccta (texas community college teachers association) code4lib (but i don’t think i’m quite tech savvy enough) hilary davis i’ve had the opportunity to attend a decent array of library conferences over the past six years, some as an mls student, but most as a new-ish librarian. i’ll highlight a few conferences that have had strong influence on my development as a librarian and that i would recommend to other librarians. my first library conference was either the federal depository library council meeting or the lita forum—i can’t remember which came first. i was still getting my mls out of the way when both of these came to town (st. louis, mo) and i wanted to take the opportunity to find out what they were like compared to the botany and evolution conferences that i had attended as a biology grad student (aka, life before librarianship). for the federal depository meeting, i was joined by a few fellow mls students and faculty who tucked us under their wings and gave us the inside scoop on what the big issues were, how to read between the lines and introduced us to their librarian colleagues. their insights made it much more interesting than it might have been to our untrained eyes. as such, the federal depository meeting has been the most contentious conference that i’ve been to in the 5-6 years that i’ve been going to library conferences. those government docs librarians really know how to get into a debate! so, if you’re looking for some intense discussion, i’d suggest adding a federal depository library council meeting to your conference plan in the near future. the lita forum was completely different. i didn’t know anyone at this conference—none of my fellow mls students attended and if any other faculty in my program attended, i didn’t see them there. while i didn’t get to benefit from the insights of a steadfast lita member, i did participate in an unusual way. in exchange for helping out with the sessions, i got a reduced registration rate. i was one of those people who collected session evaluations and reported a/v problems to the facility staff. while i couldn’t always devote my full attention and let everything just sink in, the sessions that i got to attend were all new to me and as such, were pretty foundational to my entry into librarianship. i remember attending one of the early sessions by nancy fried foster (the anthropologist who collaborates with susan gibbons at the university of rochester on studying how students work) where i took the opportunity to meet cliff lynch, one of my libraryland heroes. this lita forum was also where i attended my first dine-around (i don’t think we had dine-arounds at the botany and evolution conferences) and as luck would have it, ended up splitting pitchers of beer with my future colleagues at the ncsu libraries—andrew pace, steve meyer and steve mccann (none of whom are still at the ncsu libraries). it was a fortuitous conference. i would most certainly attend another lita conference in the future; it’s just that my particular focus has shifted from an open playing field (in 2004) to collection management and collection assessment and it’s not always easy to justify attending conferences outside my specific area. the lita forum i attended was a smaller affair—the venue was easy to navigate (all in one spot) and the number of attendees wasn’t overwhelming. it was easy to rub elbows/beer steins with smart, inventive librarians and library visionaries. my conference/professional organization of choice has been the special libraries association (sla). as a student, i joined the local chapter of sla (st. louis metro area chapter) and met some super helpful mentors who i’ve continued to keep in touch with through the years. whereas other organizations wouldn’t give me the time of day as an mls student (namely, ala), sla saw me as a positive asset to their organization and began grooming me immediately. so, naturally, i’ve been a loyal sla annual conference attendee since 2005 (toronto) and am now the lead in planning for the science-technology division (of the sla) sessions at the upcoming sla annual conference in new orleans in june. don’t be mistaken in thinking that sla annual conferences only focus on corporate librarianship. sla is one of the most diverse organizations and includes academic, public, and government, as well as corporate and solo librarians. when they get together to carry off a conference, good things can happen. yes, i’ve been to some mediocre conference sessions at sla, but i’ve also been to some astounding sessions. i always bring back a notebook of new ideas and new ways of seeing things. sla annual conferences have been my way of filling in the gaps of what my mls program omitted and of keeping my professional training up to snuff. sla offers loads of pre-conference training programs (some half-day, some whole-day) and while they do cost an arm and a leg ($300-400 average each), sla has a healthy set of travel awards and stipends to help offset the cost burden. mls students and new librarians should, in particular, pay attention to these funding opportunities as there are many to apply for. i can’t say the same great things for the sla leadership summits that i’ve attended. the sla leadership summit events are open to all sla members, but are mostly meant for sla leaders (i.e., division/chapter chairs and presidents, secretaries, treasurers, chair-elects, etc.). some of the programs aren’t very compelling (they usually bring in a motivational speaker who has no idea what librarians do to talk to us about things like loyalty and persuasion—a little too much tipping of the kool-aid for my tastes) and make some days seem to last into infinity. the upside is that the networking and individual division/chapter planning opportunities are excellent. again, another chance to rub elbows/beer steins with creative people, renew friendships, and meet new colleagues. so, my advice is to include some sla annual conferences in your future. they’re not nearly as big and overwhelming as ala annual and are much easier to navigate and run into people who you want to build professional relationships with (and there are no book cart drill team competitions). the other conference i want to highlight is the charleston conference (next one is november 3-6, 2010). this is an excellent, intimate conference for those who have any deep or fleeting interest in collections, acquisitions, and scholarly communication. unlike any other conference i’ve been to, the charleston conference has a truly unique and distinct personality. it always occurs in charleston, sc, and is planned by the same (at least some of the same) inventive folks. this is the only conference that i’ve been to that has skits between the consecutive keynote sessions in the mornings. while it’s a little weird at first, it’s kind of refreshing. i love the themes of the charleston conference as well—”anything goes!” for 2010, “what tangled webs we weave” for 2007, for example. this conference is smaller than sla annual and is always in the same venue (the francis marion and the embassy suites across the courtyard), so if you’re a repeat attendee, it’s easy to plan for lodging and dining (of which there are some amazing options in charleston). this conference is also one of the rare instances where library product vendors/publishers truly participate in the conversation. rather than just exhibiting their wares, you can find vendors/publishers presenting on the same topics as librarians, having the same debates and struggling with the same issues—just from their perspective. i’ve found this to be really enlightening and helpful in my career as a librarian. so, by all means, put the charleston conference at the front of your wishlist of conferences to attend. speaking of wishlists—there are many other conferences within libraryland that i’d like to attend (and haven’t yet had the opportunity to attend). the library assessment conference is one that i’m really looking forward to attending one day. my job is pushing me to learn new ways to assess the use, access, and composition of our collections and my sense is that this conference could help offer some helpful strategies. i’d also love to attend computers in libraries one day. i’ve heard so many great things about this conference. there’s an interesting-looking intimate conference taking place in june (abutting the sla annual conference this year) that i’d love to be able to attend: the science bootcamp 2010 in lowell, ma. this year, the topic is on e-science and preparing librarians to help researchers who work in an e-science landscape. outside of libraryland, i’d like to one day attend an emerging technologies conference (emtech) sponsored by mit as one of those conferences that cut across disciplines to showcase what’s coming in terms of tech trends. conferences i’ve attended: acrl acs (american chemical society) national conference ala annual ala/acrl institute of scholarly communication ala midwinter arl/cni fall forum asis&t annual conference charleston conference (2) daser (digital archives in science & engineering resources) summit federal depository library council meeting launc-ch (librarians association unc-chapel hill) research forum lita north carolina serials conference sla annual (5) sla leadership summit (2) trln (triangle research libraries network) annual conference (5) numerous webinars, local workshops/seminars conferences i’m considering library assessment conference computers in libraries science bootcamp 2010 emerging technologies conference (emtech) brett bonfield i really love ala annual. it’s the one time i feel like i get to be a no-modifier librarian. not a public librarian or a library director or a library techie or whatever: for those few days, i feel like a capital l, librarian. or maybe it’s more accurate to say that i feel like a multi-modifier librarian—whatever i want to learn about is available. some examples: i’m crazy about association for library collections and technical services (alcts) programming. no matter the room size, their presentations are always efficiently run, with well prepared and informative speakers. annual is the one time i get to see alcts presenters doing their thing. i always try to drop in on small or smallish committees and discussion groups. i just pick out an interesting-sounding group or discussion topic and play fly-on-the-wall while they talk shop. watching ala council deliberate is fascinating. though, of course, the best thing about annual is seeing people i only get to see once or twice a year and meeting people for the first time, especially people whose work has influenced my thinking about how i do my job. my other favorite conference is code4lib, which is sort of the anti-ala annual. it’s single-track, which means everyone is in the same room most of the time. it’s small, it’s cheap, it’s specialized, and the presentations are short—just twenty minutes for the more formal-ish presentations, with plenty of time for five-minute lightning talks as well. during presentations, everyone in the room has a laptop in front of them and chats about what the speaker is saying, so just about everyone is participating most of the time, even if there’s disarmingly little eye contact. for me, the most notable thing about code4lib is that it’s amazingly democratic: code4libbers vote on everything. prior to the conference they vote on the keynote speaker, presenters and presentations, and where the conference will be. during the conference, they vote on things like which groups should get the larger rooms during break-out sessions. it’s really wonderful to see people treat each other that way. and, despite the fact that many of them are friends who only see each other once or twice a year, they work very, very hard not to be cliquish. of course, as with other library conferences, the participants are amazing librarians (even if many of them don’t have library degrees and a good portion don’t work in libraries) and the presentations are interesting and useful. more than any other conference i’ve attended, code4lib made me want to learn well enough to keep up with everyone else—to have something useful to contribute to every project that anyone discussed, because all of them were fascinating. it probably won’t ever happen, but the prospect of knowing enough to present at code4lib is a constant source of inspiration. though i no longer belong to sla or go to the conference—while there are many public librarians who belong to sla, i think ala and pla provide more to me in my current role—i believe strongly that sla annual is the one conference every library school student should attend. to quote hilary, “sla saw me as a positive asset to their organization and began grooming me immediately.” no matter what area of librarianship you think you want to go into, no matter where in the world you think you’ll work, sla has something to offer. that is, it’s big enough to be comprehensive but small and efficient enough to feel as though people know who you are and what you’re capable of contributing. in addition, i think it’s smart of sla to bundle membership in the national association with membership in your local chapter. conferences i’ve attended: acrl ala annual (3) ala midwinter (3) code4lib new jersey library association (2) pla pres4lib sla annual virtual academic library conference of new jersey conferences i’m considering: access american communication association charleston conference computers in libraries library history round table lita forum national communication association national diversity in libraries conference sxsw various tedx conferences various user conferences (especially if we end up using evergreen to manage our inventory) emily ford even though i’m pretty active with some ala committee appointments and have attended ala a few times, the conferences that i’ve found most useful and engaging are not ala. they are online northwest and the oregon virtual reference summit. both of these are more local or regional conferences, and presentations and panels are generally creative, doable, and foster future collaborations in one’s locality without the mess of the ala bureaucracy to get in the way. plus, they both have the ability to attract some great keynote speakers. (full disclosure: i’m on the planning team for this year’s virtual reference summit.) the oregon public health association annual conference is a good conference in one of my library liaison subject areas. the first time i attended (during election season two years ago) the conference had a very deep political bent and wasn’t crouched with speak of “neutrality” (as we often do in our professional library communities). during lunch speakers told us how to vote on local ballot measures. i didn’t agree with all of the choices, but i was glad to hear what the organization officially thought. in fact, it made me even more want to attend the conference in the future. in the future i’d really like to attend a hastac (humanities, arts, science and technology advanced collaboratory) conference. this group does some innovative deep (and critical) thinking about technology and learning; and hastac attracts professionals, academics and students from all disciplines. the problem is always finding and making the time to engage. on the whole, i’m hoping to find more regional conferences that are more participatory and enable me to take action with my new ideas when i get back to work. derik badman i must really love computers in libraries (cil) as i’ve been there every year since i became a librarian except the first. though, honestly, i mostly end up going because i present there (the most recent three times i’ve been there) and so they pay the registration. plus, it’s in dc, so its drivable for me (i’m not much of a traveler). cil is hit or miss for me from a learning view point. it’s often too simplistic for my techie tastes. but, because it’s fairly small and has a lot of repeat attendees, it’s great for socializing and networking. i always go to it excited to see friends again, and i always come back from it with new friends. the more i go to conferences, the more they are a social event rather than an educational experience. most conference presentations are not the most efficient (or enjoyable) way to access the information being offered (exception, of course, for excellent and skilled speakers or for sessions that take advantage of the room of participants), so the real draw is just hanging out with other people in the field. and those connections lead places, be it personally or professionally. that was my general impression of the one ala annual i attended. the socializing was rewarding, but the presentations and meetings themselves felt much less worthwhile. pres4lib, an unconference about presenting that was held at princeton public library in nj, was a really positive experience. the very small size (we could all fit in one room) and the focused theme helped increase the social interaction and the informational content, as did the participatory pre-conference scheduling (attendees suggested topics ahead of time on a wiki). i’d like to go to more events like it, where everyone is encouraged to participate and everyone is there because the specific theme is of interest to them. too many conferences are so broadly planned as to offer only sporadic interest, though, on the other hand, the serendipitous discover is less likely in a focused theme. library camp east was also an unconference, but it had no theme and thus, i thought, floundered a bit more in deciding what would be the focus of discussion. i have the feeling i’ll need to find more local conferences to attend, as the travel costs of doing elsewhere are hard to take. though, now that i’m not officially a librarian (or working in a library), maybe i won’t be attending conferences at all. time will tell. conferences i’ve attended: ala annual ala midwinter acrl (2) computers in libraries (5) library camp east pres4lib conferences i’m considering: i’d really like to get to code4lib, especially now that i’m actually working as a programmer. kim leeder i have to admit that i’m feeling a little intimidated by those lists above! although i’ve been attending ala midwinter and annual regularly since about 2005, that’s pretty much all i’ve attended on the national level during my career thus far. i haven’t even — gasp! — been to an acrl conference. it’s not due to a lack of desire, that’s for sure. it comes down to geography: unlike my fellow lead pipers i’ve been living in rather remote areas of the country where traveling is just more time-consuming and more expensive. try booking a flight to boise, idaho, and you’ll see what i mean. in the end i just can’t make a good argument for spending either my library’s or my own money on more than the two ala conferences in a year, especially in these times. i did have the opportunity to participate in last year’s acrl virtual conference, which was better than nothing. if that is anything like other virtual conferences, though, i think they have a long way to go before they can compare to the real thing. i’ve attended the state library associations’ conferences in the places i’ve lived as a library student and librarian: two conferences convened by the arizona library association in the mid-2000’s, and two idaho library association conferences annually since 2007 (idaho is a big state so each year they hold a state-wide conference and a variety of smaller conferences for regions in the state). i like being part of my state association; it makes me feel more connected locally. i particularly enjoy networking with others in my area and i appreciate the fact that every type of librarian and library staffer is gathered in the same room to share their unique areas of knowledge with each other. i learn a lot about what school and public and special librarians do at the state conferences, which keeps me tuned in to the larger issues that affect us all. i also appreciate the opportunity to give presentations, an opportunity that can be difficult to come by on the national level. i’m not going to list my “conferences i’ve attended” and those i’m considering, since the first list would be woefully short and the second would be woefully long. i accept the fact that living in the wide open spaces of the interior west means i have fewer opportunities to attend conferences, and as a result i seek out other ways to participate in the field. my committee work fills the void, as does the opportunity to connect virtually through this blog, through facebook, and through a variety of webinars. please join the conversation by sharing your conference experiences (or coping mechanisms) below in the comments. conferences, networking, professional development, travel making connections: yaan as a paper blog? what your donors (and would-be donors) wish you knew 14 responses meghan sitar 2010–04–28 at 7:08 pm this is such a great post! i noticed no one mentioned any of the educause conferences. i attended educause eli for the first time this year and walked away from the experience with more new ideas and feeling more inspired than i usually feel leaving a conference. as an instruction librarian, i felt like the mix of instructional technologists, faculty, administrators, it staff, and librarians generated a lot of interesting conversations that helped me better understand the landscape of higher education. in particular, it was inspiring to join a community that was so focused on student learning and the role that they could play in improving the student experience. just thought i’d throw that one out there as a possibility. derik badman 2010–04–28 at 7:43 pm ah, i attended one day of a local educause conference (midatlantic) a couple years back. i have no memory of it, so i don’t think it was particularly exciting. angie 2010–04–29 at 7:49 am my experiences at the oklahoma conference is similar to how hilary describes charleston in that it is in the same location every year, has great topics and speakers, and publishers/vendor participating in a real way. i have not yet been to charleston and would like to. like kim, my travel has mostly been to ala. i have also attended nasig (north american serials interest group conference). as i understand it nasig was formed in response to ala’s lack of venue for specific serials issues. as lines between serials and electronic resoureces and acquistions and collection development have become so intertwined you are seeing more relevant sessions at ala. but nasig does provide a focused and lively forum specifically for the serials environment. the other gem about nasig is its conference locations (palm springs this year and rumors of a canadian venue soon). while the expense has prohibited me from going this year, there are scholarship opportunities for a variety of new and seasoned librarians. hilary davis 2010–04–29 at 10:53 am angie – you mentioned scholarship opportunities for nasig…that’s one conference that i’d love to attend one day as well. charleston conference has at least three scholarship/travel stipend awards that i’m aware of. the round for 2010 is likely coming up soon. check out the 2009 scholarships (and winners) to get a sense of these opportunities: http://www.katina.info/conference/scholarships.php sanjeet mann 2010–05–24 at 12:46 pm i want to echo the positive things angie and hilary have said about nasig. it’s a small conference with a strong sense of community, bringing together vendors and librarians to discuss practical challenges as well as the “vision” of what is coming up over the horizon. the scholarship and first-timer mentoring programs can help library school students or new professionals get a panoramic sense of the complexities of print or online serials/e-resources management. if you’re thinking about attending in the future, looking over back issues of conference proceedings (published stand-alone and in the serials librarian) can help you get a feel for what it is like. lisa perez 2010–04–29 at 10:16 am consider attending iste 2010. the iste media specialists sig (sigms) has a slate of activities planned for librarians including a breakfast session with david warlick on “cracking the native”, a forum “smackdown” led by joyce valenza and gwyneth jones, a 21st century media center playground, a birds-of-a-feather session, and a sig fair display. we will also have a lot of back-channel ways to participate. watch for upcoming information and consider joining our ning group at http://www.iste-community.org/group/sigms whether you are a current iste member or not. lisa perez chicago public schools dept of libraries sigms chair walt lessun 2010–04–29 at 10:52 am all ala conferences held in new orleans, all the old ohio library association conferences and all the aect conferences (cheaper than educause; often held simultaneously with educause and i could always get a very inexpensive exhibit floor pass for educause). these conferences were all beneficial for the same reason: i could get roaring drunk and so could everyone else. hilary davis 2010–04–30 at 8:16 am i neglected to mention another conference that i would love to attend: science online, right here in research triangle park, nc. my colleague, josh wilson, attended and was impressed by the experience. i’m definitely adding this one to my wishlist. jean costello 2010–05–03 at 6:01 am hi everyone – you’ve pushed the boundaries once again with this new way of sharing conference info. as a patron, a few follow-on posts would help enrich my understanding: – what it means to be a “capital l” librarian. this was such an intriguing comment and i’d love to hear more. – analysis of 1 or 2 of the key ideas coming out of the conferences. were any of the ideas on the future of libraries particularly insightful or feasible? did any seem likely to engage the public in a dialogue about libraries? thanks, jean (the radical patron) derik badman 2010–05–03 at 8:15 am i didn’t make the “capital l” comment, but i’ve thought lately about the moniker “librarian”. i don’t work in a library anymore, nor do i do general librarian stuff anymore (reference, collection development, instruction, cataloging, etc.) am i now not a librarian? is it just a job title? or there is it more to it than that… maybe that’s a subject for another group roundtable. hilary davis 2010–05–09 at 2:46 am derik – i’ve wondered the same thing. for librarians who make the leap to work for product vendors (for profit or non-profit), i’m curious about how this impacts their perception of themselves as librarians. is this really just a gray area or is there a distinction that has an impact on future career choices? great idea for a group post or article by/about one of those folks who has made that leap (maybe you, derik?). derik badman 2010–05–09 at 5:23 pm hmm. i’ll give it some thought and see if i have anything substantial to say about that. alex chappell 2010–05–03 at 6:46 pm i just got back from loex and i’d have to say that if i could only attend one conference this would be it (with internet librarian being a close second). it is small, focused, friendly, short (day and a half), and relatively economical (meals are included in the registration fee). this is my third time and i always learn a lot and come back to work energized and inspired to reinvent my instruction. loex of the west is run by a different group on the same model and is equally good. cecilia 2010–06–01 at 8:40 am i’m about to graduate ( in less than two weeks! ) and have recently attended a few symposiums that i thought were quite good. in philadelphia, as a student, you can volunteer and that can help off set some costs of conference fees. in particular i always learned something new at nfais. i also recently attended a healthcare informatics symposium sponsored by chop in philadelphia. here in boston i’ve started to get involved with mahslin. as for future conferences i’d love to check out infocamp, computers in libraries, science bootcamp and a few others! and last but not least attending sla last year helped me get my new position here! so you never know! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: our philosophies of librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 17 oct editorial board and brett bonfield /5 comments editorial: our philosophies of librarianship in brief: members of the lead pipe editorial board reflect on their own personal philosophies of librarianship in response to emily ford’s recent article. what is your librarian philosophy? let us know in the comments. 365::153 – what’s next? photo by flickr user sarah reid (cc by 2.0) by editorial board and brett bonfield introduction in her august 2012 article, “what do we do and why do we do it?,” emily ford addressed the need for the library community to come up with a united, universal philosophy of librarianship, but acknowledged that “librarianship is so vast that one unified philosophy couldn’t possibly capture the enormity of impact we bring our communities.” this is certainly true, and her focus on cultivating a reflective practice in our daily work has led the editorial board to ask ourselves how we would answer, individually, the question posed in the title of her article. as a result, we would like to use this editorial to share our own personal philosophies of librarianship. as librarians at public libraries, universities, colleges, and community colleges, our philosophies are distinct yet overlapping in ways that may shed further light on what a single philosophy of librarianship might look like. it is a common, often annual practice for teaching faculty to write individual teaching philosophies that encourage reflection and reconsideration of their perspectives on teaching and learning. as librarians, we can gain better understanding of our professional selves by writing and revisiting our philosophies of librarianship. we’re not the first to suggest this, as there are already wonderful philosophical statements out there from other thoughtful colleagues. for instance, here are a few highlights from librarians in three different library types: academic librarian rudy leon reflects, “i believe the library is the beating heart of campus, by which i mean that at its most perfect, the library is the nexus of student learning and research, of faculty research for scholarship and teaching.” school librarian ryn lewis states, “more than any other facility or program in the school, the library functions as a place to extend student education beyond the required curriculum.” public librarian chris “six foot” says, “my professional philosophy…is summed up in two words: intellectual freedom. for our nation to remain ‘wealthy’ it is imperative that our citizens have unfettered access to information.” in reading statements of librarianship philosophy from librarians who serve in different capacities and work in different types of libraries, there are common themes that arise, most frequently instruction, access, and intellectual freedom. however, there is so much value and variety in the work librarians do on a daily basis, it can be challenging to boil it down and pinpoint exactly what, at its heart, gives our work meaning. of course, lead pipe’s editors have never been ones to turn down a challenge! emily when deciding to become a librarian there were several themes swirling in my head and also in the american consciousness. at the time, i was trying to save the world by serving as an americorps*vista volunteer, running a book and reading program for elementary school students. but more importantly, my local public library, multnomah county library, was working with the aclu, taking the federal government to court over the illegal aspects of the children’s internet protection act (cipa). being a fairly recent college graduate consumed by naive idealism, i became starry-eyed. what chutzpah! librarians were after my heart. i knew it then: i was of their ilk. i came to realize that libraries were the one institution in american society where people are treated as equals, where access to knowledge is open and welcoming, and where people are not afraid to call out and oppose injustice. while i am no longer as naive or as starry-eyed, i frequently bring myself back to this feeling: the idealism of positive change that benefits all. realizing that true change happens in measures of millimeters and inches, i’ve had to reign in it. my role as a librarian is to share with others my idealism; to educate people about our great need for information access, equity, and social justice; and to advocate for positive changes in my communities. this role spans from the daily minutiae of checking email to grander tasks such as strategic planning and futures thinking. i liken the work of advocating for change in scholarly communication and publishing processes to social justice. in fact, i explained open access to a faculty member as “social justice of the publishing world.” she immediately understood. but it’s certainly not easy to maintain this idealism. i can and do get stuck in the daily grind. (i’ve even been known to lose my mojo.) in order to remain true to my idealism and belief in positive change, i maintain a practice of reflection and intention. for example, prior to teaching i set an intention for my class session. how will i be today? what do i want to work on and practice during this class? following the class, i reflect. was i true to my intention? was i able to be who i wanted and how i wanted? if not, what happened and why? what can i do differently next time? bringing reflection and intention into collection development tasks or other library work is not as easy as with teaching and reference. since i feel committed to equity and social justice, there is another concept that i use to help guide my work, one that complements intention and reflection: love. i write and think specifically about the version of love presented and argued by feminist scholar and cultural critic, bell hooks. hooks approaches feminism and her daily work as a teacher and human as a work of love. she sees love as an equalizer.1  for me, love is a means to an end that allows me to be a partner in a community of equals. the idea of approaching librarianship with love is abstract. yet, when coupled with a daily practice of intention and reflection, i find that i am able to remain (mostly) true to my philosophy of love. reflection and intention serve not only to keep me grounded in love, but also in my quest to further social equity. love is my guiding philosophy, and reflection and intention are my practice. together these three things allow me to work toward my goals: to foster and create information equity, access, and social justice; and to advocate for positive changes in my communities. brett as librarians, our foremost responsibility is to increase well being as much as possible and for as many people as possible. my standard answer about why i became a librarian applies to this situation: if i could help end deaths and suffering associated with hiv, if i thought i had the ability to further medical research or reduce harm, that’s what i would be doing. but medical research and harm reduction are not areas in which i am particularly talented. assuming that librarians are capable of increasing well being in a meaningful way, then being a good librarian seems to be the way in which i am most likely to increase well being, both for the community that employs me and for everyone who could conceivably benefit from better libraries. the definition of well being for hiv researchers is fairly clear: an increase in the number of people living longer, healthier, happier lives. by contrast, it’s difficult to define the elements of well being that can be increased by librarians, and to measure the increase in these elements that result from our work. what librarians can do is borrow from other fields of practice, and apply the literature within our discipline, to figure out how a library-inspired increase in well being might be sensibly identified and empirically measured. we can also use logic and precedent to identify activities that are unlikely to lead to a widespread increase in well being. the core values of librarianship, adopted by ala in 2004, is a reasonable, comprehensive definition of librarians’ goals: access confidentiality/privacy democracy diversity education and lifelong learning intellectual freedom preservation the public good professionalism service social responsibility if librarians make decisions that fortify these values, it seems likely that we will increase well being significantly for many, and measurably for everyone, at least in the long term. in the short term, there are people and firms that would benefit if we were to compromise our core values. for instance, a publisher might only agree to sell its books to libraries that are willing to ignore the precedents established by first sale and fair use. or a professional society may demand that, in order for a university to maintain its accreditation for a given program, its library must spend so much of its budget on the society’s journals that the library can no longer afford to meet the scholarly needs of faculty and students who are not part of that program. in addition, this professional society may believe that its well being would be diminished if the library were to publicize the professional society’s refusal to offer a sustainable pricing model. echoing immanuel kant, libraries increase overall well being by asking, “what would happen if everyone acted this way?” jenica rogers increased overall well being not only by standing up to the american chemical society, but by doing so publicly; cornell university library increased overall well being by refusing to deal with vendors that require non-disclosure agreements; the mit libraries, working in partnership with mit’s faculty, increased overall well being by helping to create a university-wide open access policy for all faculty research and by making “compliance with the policy as convenient for the faculty as possible”; the state library of kansas increased overall well being by exercising its right to maintain ownership of the ebooks it had purchased from overdrive; the state library of georgia increased overall well being by creating a statewide integrated library system and releasing the code for that system with an open source license; villanova university, which started vufind, and the university of virginia, which started blacklight, made similar contributions; douglas county library and ann arbor district library increased overall well being by creating and publicizing new ways for libraries to build their digital collections. you don’t have to be a manager at a big library to increase well being for everyone. the small library where i work was one of the first to use scriblio and one of the first to declare that harpercollins titles are not worth purchasing as long as their ebooks self-destruct after 26 uses. you don’t even have to employed by a library to make these commitments. library school students started hack library school to increase well being for their fellow students; the library as incubator project, which highlights the way artists and libraries can work together, was started by three students at the university of wisconsin-madison program. you can also do work on behalf of libraries that complements the work you’re employed to do. for example, lauren pressley published so you want to be a librarian to help current and potential librarians, and now she and her publisher, library juice, are offering to release it with a creative commons license via unglue.it. librarians help to educate people, we help them understand as much as possible about their own culture and others, and we help to redistribute opportunity by operating coops for relatively inexpensive, relatively infrequently needed, relatively durable physical and information objects. when, in the process of performing our duties, we consider what would happen if every other librarian followed our course of action, we increase the likelihood that our activities will increase overall well being, in the long term, for everyone. kim education is my great passion: i believe that the more we individually learn about the world and about those who share it with us, the more constructive and cooperative our society becomes. research has reinforced this over and over again, from documenting the inverse correlation between educational level and criminal behavior to showing how higher levels of education increase political and social tolerance and lead to lower rates of unemployment and better-paying jobs. education, in all its forms, allows us to grow and expand as individuals. librarians are here to support that effort by providing access to varied materials, guidance in how to navigate and understand it, and an environment that cultivates learning. this is what drew me to librarianship, which i see as being defined — at its heart — by its educational role. speaking as an academic librarian and community college library director, you might suppose that i am biased based upon my own career path. that may be true. still, i believe that all libraries are alike in this, regardless of user base or community. of all the things we do, the most enduring, the most timeless, and the thing that will give us meaning and purpose long into the future — no matter what new technologies may come our way — is our teaching. in the provision and stewardship of information, we will always have competitors we can’t keep up with. google, wikipedia, our vendors, and their future counterparts will always provide information to our patrons in more constructive and creative ways than we will. let’s face it: when it comes to providing access to information, they outpaced us at least a decade ago. it’s just too late to catch up. instead, let’s focus on what we already do better than them. i acknowledge that libraries as an institution have a broader purpose, but in every library, librarians exist to teach people how to access and use information. our role as educators and teachers is what makes us unique. in short, i see the heart and soul of libraries in information literacy. i also believe that librarianship is about people, both on the public services side and on the management side. i prioritize people over systems, reminding myself daily that computers are tools that serve us and not the other way around. if our systems don’t function as they should, if they freeze or break down, then we should set them aside and find other ways to accomplish our goals. when it comes to patrons, their needs are the most important of all, and i will shortcut processes and rules to answer those needs to the best of my ability. i encourage my team to do the same. when it comes to the internal environment at my library, i cultivate the positive. i treat people with respect; i don’t yell, criticize, or blame. i live by the “feedback sandwich.” if something goes wrong, we focus on how to fix it without worrying about who might be at fault. i want everyone who works with me to feel empowered and trusted to do their jobs with the greatest amount of freedom possible. to accomplish our educational goals and support our internal and external communities, i believe it is critically important for librarians to be friendly, flexible, enthusiastic, accommodating, change-loving, and more than little technology-obsessed. the days of gatekeeping are gone; we have evolved from guards to guides and must adopt the demeanor to fit this new role. in my own teaching, i focus on the students: their needs, their assignment at-hand, and how i can point them in the right direction to get it done. when i’m in front of a class i will do what it takes to get and keep their attention: i’ll be energetic, conversational, and even silly. above all, i will be human in the hopes that they will respond, in-kind, with their own humanity. once that connection is made, they will not hesitate to come to me later — whether later in the semester or later in their educational career — when they need help. people at my college frequently tell me that i’m not a typical librarian. my unwavering response is always “thank you.” micah i became a librarian because there was nothing else to do. i had no undying love of “the book” or commitment to the ideals of access for all and the greater good of knowledge. in fact, i will admit that i never really considered a career in librarianship as the end of my degree; it was merely a stepping stone toward the phd that i swore i would go on to. now as a brand new librarian, and the most junior member of the the lead pipe team, it would be easiest for me to reflect on a philosophy of librarianship that flows directly from my experiences in library school, but i don’t think that’d be very constructive either [see: hack library school]. how then would an unprincipled, pseudo-librarian, with barely a year of work experience express an answer to what i do, and why i do it? i am still very much in process in my understanding of what it means to do this work. i know that it is important, and that access to information has incredible potential to affect society, culture, life-as-we-know-it, but i don’t know that i could say why i feel that way. transitioning from a student to a professional, i have been very clear that everything that “the job” has entailed for me thus far (in a very new, non-traditional area of librarianship) has been uncomfortable and that i’ve constantly felt underprepared and less than competent. but, aside from my own insecurities, the one thing that makes the most sense to me when considering the question at hand is the very simple truth that you, my colleagues and peers, believe wholeheartedly that librarianship matters. i have been fortunate to be surrounded by people i look up to for their conviction, professional ethics, and passionate spirit. the writers that worked with me to build and found hack library school are the bravest and proudest people i’ve had the honor to work with, and that makes me want to do what i do. the editorial team of the lead pipe, a group i revered early on for their wit, grit, and talent, still surprise me with the breadth of their understanding of this field that we share and how it fits in this wide world. those who have been working in the areas of scholarly communications and open access for years — ada emmett, kevin smith, peter suber, heather joseph — are constant reminders that this work is good work, necessary work, useful work. were i to construct a philosophy of librarianship now, as an early career librarian, it would be no more than a list of names, those that i respect and look up to who have welcomed me to the ranks and take the time to say hello and ask my opinions. i’m a big fan of mentorship, and yet couldn’t say that i have a mentor to point to. i’d like to think that a lot of what i’ve done as a n00brarian is prompted by the fact that i want to inspire that mentee who hasn’t discovered a direct connection with a mentor either. the gladdest day of my professional life will be when a colleague says that they chose to be a librarian because my convictions and commitments to access and knowledge were utterly convincing. ask me my philosophy of librarianship on that day, and i’d wager it’ll be more fully realized. until then, i have a long list of names to explain what i do and why i do it. your name is probably on that list, too. for a brief introduction to these ideas, this blog post from ms. magazine will help. also, read bell hooks’s primer on feminism, feminism is for everybody: passionate politics. [↩] librarianship, libraries, philosophy editorial: have we changed the world yet? (oh, just wait) this is why we can’t have nice things: reclaim your inbox 5 responses martin nord 2012–10–18 at 7:51 pm i think the point about the difference between a united, universal philosophy of librarianship and personal philosophies of librarianship needs to be explored a bit more. i know that the individual views presented here don’t preclude the idea of that universal philosophy that emily originally sought. but it would be really great, maybe in a coming article, to place some of these individual ideas in dialogue. none of the authors really disagrees with any of the others, but in stopping with the personal, i feel like we aren’t getting any closer to the universal, and i remain very interested in that. and there are some really good points here that could easily apply to an overarching idea of librarianship. i especially like how emily touches on the concept of love. she’s right that it’s an abstract concept. nebulous too. (there’s a reason the greeks had three words for love). but love is simultaneously a universal conception and also applicable to libraries. just think about how the concept of conversations is currently applied in library literature and practice. conversation leads me directly to relationships, and from there it’s not too far to love. that’s the kind of thing we could use as a foundation for this philosophy. pingback : curiouser and curiouser: what caught our eyes online this week | chasing reference sab 2012–10–19 at 4:29 pm i find micah’s philosophy-in-progress to be really refreshing. when i was in library school, i found the incredibly idealistic champions of the library-types to be overwhelming, and honestly, i couldn’t help but feel badly about my lack of a well-formed philosophy sometimes. i’m a new librarian too, so it’s reassuring to hear that finding your philosophy is a work-in-progress. micah vandegrift 2012–10–21 at 3:53 pm thanks for the support sab. i’ve found that my ideas are evolving ever more quickly after being “on the job,” so i think its perfectly reasonable to expect our understandings of the work to grow as we do. we can be idealistic and high-achievers without necessarily having a library-centric worldview, and i think that it part of what makes this profession great – the vastness of experience that can be had. pingback : librarian blogs: a peek into the career | slm508mav this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct articulating value in special collections: are we collecting data that matter? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 29 sep genya o'gara, emily walters and cate putirskis /0 comments articulating value in special collections: are we collecting data that matter? as librarians, we invest a great deal of time and effort instructing researchers on how to use our materials. this is especially true for special collections librarians, as we attempt to familiarize researchers with our unique resources and intricate collection arrangements. at the end of that instruction investment, we often wonder if we have been effective and what our students have truly learned. have we taught them lasting research skills? if so, how do we illustrate the value of this service to cost-cutting administrators? how do we quantify the skills gained from working with our materials? most importantly—how do we know if our instruction is making a difference for the researcher? university archives photograph collection, ncsu special collections research center by genya o’gara, emily walters and cate putirskis last year, we had the opportunity to collaborate with the association of research libraries (arl) in the production of spec kit 317: special collections engagement. spec kits, produced annually, survey the 124 arl member institutions and collect data on current practices and policies of libraries. we surveyed member institutions about the ways special collections are engaging students, faculty, and researchers through exhibits, events, and curricular involvement, and found that over 95% of respondents are involved in these activities (berenbak et al., 2010, 16). a core component of many of these outreach efforts was instructional engagement in the use of special collections materials. as we began the work of analyzing the survey results, a recurrent theme surfaced: the inconsistency of instructional engagement assessment. we began to ask ourselves questions about the concepts of evaluation and assessment of instruction, and how those terms are articulated and understood in the context of special collections. for example, when conducting a one-time instruction session, should evaluation focus on the librarian’s presentation skills, the use of archival collections by participants after a session, or the number of participating students or classes? although special collections are attempting to assess their instruction in a variety of ways, these efforts are not consistent, not standardized, and often not driven by a “need for information that fosters targeted change” (ariew, 2007, 508). many special collections would like to move assessment beyond use counts and anecdotal feedback, but the majority of arl special collections have no plan or policy for outreach or engagement, and few have dedicated outreach staff (berenbak et al, 2010).[1] under these circumstances, how do special collections conceptualize what success looks like, or what measurements will convey when success has been achieved? what is being assessed? university archives photograph collection, ncsu special collections research center currently, most research libraries contribute annual statistics to government agencies and organizations such as the association of research libraries (arl).[2] these statistics include the size of each library’s collections, circulation, staff. additionally, arl asks libraries to describe instructional engagement efforts, reporting on the number of presentations that are given to groups, the number of participants in those groups, and the number of reference transactions. arl provides the following definitions for its categories: presentations to groups. report the total number of sessions during the year of presentations made as part of formal bibliographic instruction programs and through other planned class presentations, orientation sessions, and tours . . . presentations to groups may be for either bibliographic instruction, cultural, recreational, or educational purposes . . . the purpose of this question is to capture information about the services the library provides for its clientele. (kyrillidou, & bland, 2009, 100, emphasis added) participants in group presentations. report the total number of participants in the presentations. for multi-session classes with a constant enrollment, count each person only once. personal, one-to-one instruction in the use of sources should be counted as reference transactions (kyrillidou, & bland, 2009, 100). reference transactions. a reference transaction is an information contact that involves the knowledge, use, recommendations, interpretation, or instruction in the use of one or more information sources by a member of the library staff. the term includes information and referral service. information sources include (a) printed and nonprinted material; (b) machine-readable databases (including computer-assisted instruction); (c) the library’s own catalogs and other holdings records; (d) other libraries and institutions through communication or referral; and (e) persons both inside and outside the library . . . . (kyrillidou, & bland, 2009, 100). special collections departments are asked to contribute their numbers to their library’s general pool; arl does not differentiate between general library instruction and the instructional efforts of special collections departments, a practice that makes the compiled statistics less useful for both arl and the responding institutions. it is clear from the results of our spec kit findings that few institutions are doing any assessment of instructional engagement beyond what is required by arl. most responding institutions do not have formal evaluative measures. [3] instead, these institutions tend to rely heavily on feedback and conversations with students, faculty, and researchers (berenbak et al, 2010, 78, 79,91,92). [4] special collections tend to either quantify the usefulness of their instruction when patrons mention they “learned” or “got something” from the instruction, or when they count how many items were checked out to patrons. and while counting items is arguably important for certain kinds of assessment, without measuring against a desired and stated outcome, what does a number like this really tell a special collections about its practices? we know that very few special collections departments have any sort of formalized planning or policies guiding their instructional programming (berenbak et al, 2010, 15). different circumstances in each special collections contribute to this situation. in some cases, staff are short on the time and energy to devote to this activity (or, more commonly, staff tasked with this activity are a luxury most special collections cannot afford). in others, the responsibility of instruction is delegated at the time of need to the staff person whose background most closely aligns with the subject area of the instruction, limiting the consistency of the instruction. sometimes the institution simply has not considered or not yet formally developed a plan for instructional engagement that fits into the overall activities of that special collections. whatever the circumstances, the results of our survey showed that most (80%) special collections are engaging in instructional sessions on a steady basis, and will likely continue to do so in the future — perhaps at an even greater frequency than their current rates (berenbak et. al, 2010, 13).[5] if special collections are going to direct more focused efforts at planning their instructional engagement, they will need articulated and useful assessment metrics. after all, we cannot know if our engagement planning is a worthwhile investment if we are not assessing the outcomes of that engagement. though we recognize a need for better assessment, we are struggling to respond to this need. determining which metrics will provide useful information about instruction is a conundrum that is keeping many special collections frustrated or hesitant to try assessment at all. a few institutions provide evidence that assessment is not daunting for everyone — one special collections, for example, looks for citations of materials from their holdings in student papers as an indication of the success of their instruction; some look for any citations of primary source materials; and some have undertaken short surveys and faculty interviews. [6] but by and large, most special collections seem uncertain as to what to collect or how to collect it. what are we teaching? university archives photograph collection, ncsu special collections research center when we do an instruction session with patrons in special collections, what are our objectives? aware that specific objectives will vary from one session to another — informed by the needs, topics, or other parameters that may frame a session — there are still general objectives that we, as instructors, are always hoping to meet. helping patrons find exactly what they need is possibly the most successful outcome we can achieve, but the many steps along the path to discovery are the components of instruction that perhaps most need to be measured in order to gauge the effectiveness of our instruction. before patrons can find exactly what they are looking for, they first have to learn how to find it. from our perspective as instructors, a successful journey is more indicative of our instructional impact than arrival at the destination. why is the journey so important in special collections? elizabeth yakel, in her article “listening to users,” describes archives as a tabula rasa for researchers (yakel, 2002, 122). she makes the important point that, unlike libraries where the “paradigm for assistance, access tools, and rules” has been learned by users from childhood at their public and school libraries, archives are considered a great unknown (yakel, 2002, 122). the intricacies of the different rules, different materials, and different access tools often stump even the most experienced library user or researcher. some archivists have correctly compared a successful special collections instruction session to an “archaeological dig” (schmiesing & hollis, 2002). since the majority of special collections materials are not reflected on an item-by-item basis in either the library catalog or a finding aid, researchers must “dig” through boxes of materials, digital images, or artifacts. because of the nature of this type of research, and because materials are not individually pre-selected for consumption, users must constantly reformulate their queries as they discover new materials. this often necessitates close collaboration with the special collections staff throughout the research process. unfortunately, this type of instruction is not accurately reflected in our measurements. certainly limited head counts and use statistics do not paint an accurate picture of this work, nor do brief reactionary evaluations. [7] these evaluations are important and necessary, especially when reporting to organizations outside the library, but they fail to assess whether or not learning objectives are being met. what’s out there now? academic libraries recognize that the reactionary evaluation of instruction often falls short, and have developed tools to help libraries make sure students and users are meeting learning objectives. these include guidelines such as acrl’s “information literacy competency standards for higher education,” “standards for proficiencies for instruction librarians and coordinators: a practical guide,” and skills tests such as project sails. these guidelines give a framework for conducting meaningful evaluation for instruction librarians. and although there is no shortage of literature to be found on the subject of library instruction and assessment, we are only beginning to see similar literature and tools dealing with evaluating instruction in archives and special collections. a good example of this emerging interest can be found in michelle mccoy’s article, “the manuscript as question: teaching primary sources in the archives – the china missions project.” mccoy details methods for the planning, instruction, and innovative assessment of a collaborative effort between the special collections and archives department at depaul university and professor warren schultz’s undergraduate history 199 historical concepts and methods class. arguably the most important current project appearing in the assessment literature for archives and special collections is the mellon-funded archival metrics project, which includes models for assessing instruction (discussed at length below). in addition to the products themselves, archival metrics investigators have produced papers detailing initial studies for the project such as duff and cherry’s “archival orientation for undergraduate students: an exploratory study of impact.“ although we appear to be making progress, current assessment practices of efforts to instruct patrons on the use of special collections resources — both the materials themselves and the many discovery tools we’ve created (finding aids, databases, and subject guides) — would probably not receive a passing grade. measuring and quantifying the journey is a daunting task. while we should not stop collecting the statistics that are needed by arl, the general library community — and especially special collections — should have a clear understanding of what these numbers actually represent. any instruction or reference librarian will tell you that a headcount for their curricular sessions or a tally mark for a reference transaction does not adequately measure what they do or the instruction they provide. especially when tally sheets obscure the difference between a quick question lookup and an hour-long research consultation at the desk. we face a number of difficulties in achieving the goal of both establishing and collecting useful assessment metrics. in addition to a lack of policies or plans regarding curricular outreach and engagement, special collections often do not have positions designated to conduct instructional outreach. as discussed earlier, these duties often fall to the person in the department with the greatest subject knowledge, or the most available time.[8] it will be difficult to take on additional duties — especially when there are no easy answers and many special collections are short on staff and funding — but we offer some suggestions for ways that special collections might start. assessing the journey university archives photograph collections, ncsu special collections research center first, we must share. some special collections are reaching students and evaluating their work with them in innovative ways, and the success of these efforts needs to be promoted. some of these innovations include: making early contact with graduate student instructors so that they have experience working with special collections before they enter faculty positions; working with subject librarians to incorporate relevant material into their teaching efforts; giving awards to undergraduate research projects that make extensive use of the collections; working with students to create virtual and physical exhibits highlighting materials used in special collections. assessment examples include: monitoring use statistics of particular collections after an instruction session; asking classes to donate copies of student papers to review the citations as a tool for better understanding the effectiveness of instruction; using student focus groups to evaluate video tutorials; monitoring books and articles published, performances given, and theses written; tracking number and value of grants received; examining web server statistics; feedback forms and surveys; monitoring number of graduate and practicum students using the collections; soliciting and compiling one-on-one feedback from professors and students. [9] the assessment practices that generate the most useful results are multipronged in their approach. the china missions project, for example, was organized in such a way that the students included a self-assessment of their experience using archival materials and research methods as part of their class research papers (mccoy, 2010, 55). copies of these papers were deposited with the university archives, and then staff conducted a qualitative survey of the papers to assess their responses. recognizing that self-assessment in a graded paper might encourage students to write positive responses regardless of actual understanding, staff further scrutinized the papers’ citations. “students who used a total of four citations or fewer or relied heavily on wikipedia or other web sources whose reliability cannot be verified were moved to a neutral position and not included in the positive total” (mccoy, 2010, 55). this approach—as well as other methods listed above—have plusses and minuses, but becoming aware of what other special collections are trying gives the rest of us a jumping off point. a variety of special collections have noted their relationships with outreach and subject liaison librarians. developing these close relationships can be beneficial for everyone involved. understanding the holdings in a special collections, and illustrating how those materials might be incorporated into the curriculum, creates a great opportunity for instructing students in the value of primary sources. drawing on the skills and backgrounds of subject specialists and instruction librarians can help special collections staff (often untrained in these areas) to develop sound instruction techniques. additionally, our colleagues in outreach and instruction have done an extraordinary amount of work related to best practices for evaluating instruction. in a 2007 article, ariew and lener state that one of the main insights gained in their study “evaluating instruction: developing a program that supports the teaching librarian” was that teaching evaluation forms should be “tailored to specific classes, objectives and learning outcomes.” most importantly, the group learned that “effective assessment requires a variety of assessment procedures be used” (ariew, & lener, 2007, 512). from teaching portfolios to 3-2-1 cards to surveys, the literature yields a great deal of information about what works and what doesn’t for each type of instruction. although not all of these practices can be used to evaluate special collections instructional engagement practices, they provide guideposts to start from. fortunately, some people are starting to address the problem of how to assess the engagement work being done by special collections departments. the archival metrics toolkits[10], for example, attempt to standardize evaluation in archives. this work recognizes that the “administration and use of primary sources are sufficiently different from libraries that they deserve tools that appropriately measure service to users” (yakel, & tibbo, 2010, 221). this creation of a standardized survey tool for archives could relieve a large part of the assessment burden, which is particularly important for archives with small staff. it also begins to answer the call for standardized evaluation that was so apparent in the results of our spec kit survey. the archival metrics toolkit is particularly useful in laying out a set of standard questions about archives use, and they provide clear instructions on how to gather, compile, and analyze the data from the surveys. this information provides a basis for making comparisons across institutions, and could give special collections a better chance of identifying best practices and trends. however, even the best of surveys have drawbacks such as rate of completion (particularly difficult in archives due to small numbers)[11], survey fatigue, and a focus on perceptions. supplementing surveys by seeking evidence of skills mastered, such as citation analysis or testing, seems a more well rounded method to determining “what students have learned as opposed to how they feel about what they have learned” (barclay, 1993, 198). special collections must clearly state engagement goals in order for any type of evaluation to be meaningful. good practice in evaluating instructional engagement starts “with the learning objectives of the instructor” (or the department), and uses those to shape the tools being applied for evaluation (areiw, & lener, 2007, 512). as the libraries at virginia tech discovered, evaluation, when possible, should be unique to specific classes and desired student and faculty outcomes and will likely require that a variety of assessment procedures be used (ariew, 2007, 512). conclusions today more than ever, library administrators are being asked to describe in a quantifiable way the value of their academic libraries and their practices. therefore, special collections must be able to articulate to administrators why current evaluation methods are insufficient. simple forms, tally marks, and baseline arl statistics will never be able to get at the information we need to improve our practices. specials collections need to make the case for developing more appropriate evaluation methods — even though this will require a commitment of valuable staff resources — and then make the commitment to using the results of these evaluations to enhance services. ultimately, more meaningful data will help us provide better service to the students, faculty, and researchers who rely on special collections, and it will better equip us to tell their story and our own. university archives photograph collection, ncsu special collections research center huge thanks to our editors and advisors: kathy brown, hyun-duck chung and brett bonfield. your thoughtful comments have made this a much better post,` and sparked ideas for future avenues of exploration. and of course, thank you so much to all of our spec kit co-authors, adam berenbak, claire ruswick, danica cullinan and judy allen-dodson. [1] adam berenbak et. al, special collections engagement spec kit 317, (washington d.c.: association of research libraries), p. 14-16. of respondents to spec survey 317, 87% of have no formal plan or policy for outreach and engagement (p. 14) and approximately half of the institutions cite their primary engagement barrier as insufficient staffing, in particular “lack of dedicated outreach staff” (p. 15). also most institutions “rely on patron or item counts and anecdotal feedback to assess the effectiveness of their outreach” (p. 16). at the same time, many special collections “clearly expressed a desire to move beyond this to a more systematic approach” (p. 16). [2] the arl states that these data “describe collections, staffing, expenditures, and service activities” of the 114 university libraries and 10 public, governmental, and nonprofit research libraries that collectively form arl (association of research libraries, 2008). [3] this is not to imply that no one is attempting to assess instruction, but it is not standardized, and based on the survey responses, in general, it is fairly ad-hoc (berenbak et al., 2010, 78, 79, 90, 91). [4] question 35 in the arl spec kit did not specifically ask about the evaluation of instructional engagement but more broadly inquired, “what measure(s) have been used to evaluate special collections engagement with faculty/scholars/researchers who are affiliated with your institutions.” many of the responses were similar to the more directed question 28 “what measure(s) are used to evaluate student use of unique materials in research projects.” the following types of statements made up the bulk of the responses: “no evaluation,” “much to few [sic],” “no particular measures have been used,” “nothing systematic,” “little evaluation has been done,” and “none to date.” [5] the number of respondents actively working to engage students for curricular purposes is even higher at 99% (berenbak et. al, 2010, 62). [6] these examples are taken from the responses to the question “what measure(s) are used to evaluate student use of unique materials in research projects?” responses include examining the “extent and breadth of primary resources and collections in any format,” a “learning outcomes survey,” and “discussion with faculty of results” (berenbak et. al., 2010, 78, 79 and 80). [7] reactionary refers to a short survey after a presentation that often focuses on a students’ perception of the presentation rather than on whether or not new skills have been developed. [8] when respondents were asked who had primary responsibility for coordinating curricular engagement, 15% had one individual who held primary responsibility, 15% said one individual leads a team or staff, 31% stated that all (or most) special collections staff shared the responsibility, and 39% noted that it varied depending on the project (berenbak et al, 2010, 64). [9] these examples are drawn from the responses to questions 28 and 35 of the arl spec kit 317 “what measure(s) are used to evaluate student use of unique materials in research projects” and “what measure(s) have been used to evaluate special collections engagement with faculty/scholars/researchers who are affiliated with your institution”(berenbak et. al, 2010 78, 79, 80, 91). the respondent’s institutions are kept anonymous in spec kit publications, so although these are specific examples, we are unable to point out specific schools for the purposes of this post. [10]the toolkit includes sections for “researchers” (a user-based evaluation tool for on-site researchers to evaluate the quality of services, facilities, and finding aids in university archives and special collections), “online finding aids” (a user-based evaluation tool for visitors to evaluate the quality and usability of online finding aids in university archives and special collections), “websites” (a user-based evaluation tool for visitors to evaluate the quality and usability of websites in university archives and special collections), ”student researchers”(a user based evaluation tool for students use the archives or special collections as part of a class and participate in archival orientations), and a “teaching support” section (a user-based evaluation tool for instructors who have used the university archives and special collections to evaluate its services.) [11] small numbers can make it difficult to obtain an appropriate sample size. resources ariew, s., & lener, e. (2007). evaluating instruction: developing a program that supports the teaching librarian. research strategies, 20. retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/b6w60-4mwxt97-2/2/e3d2a22ec51f17a15bc53a77240d49e7 doi: 10.1016/j.resstr.2006.12.020 association of research libraries, (2010). association of research libraries: spec kits. retrieved sep. 15, 2010, from http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/spec/index.shtml. association of research libraries. (2008, february 4). association of research libraries: annual surveys. retrieved from http://www.arl.org/stats/annualsurveys/index.shtml barclay, d (1993). evaluating library instruction: doing the best you can with what you have, rq 33 (2), pp. 195–202. berenbak, adam, putirskis, cate, o’gara, genya, ruswick, claire, cullinan, danica, dodson, judy allen, walters, emily, & brown, kathy (2010). spec kit 317 special collections engagement. washington, dc: association of research libraries. knight, l. (2002). the role of assessment in library user education. reference services review, 30(1), retrieved from http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=861677&show=html kyrillidou, marth, & bland, les. (2009). arl statistics 2007-2008 washington, dc: association of research libraries. retrieved from http://www.arl.org/stats/annualsurveys/arlstats/arlstats08.shtml mccoy, m. (2010). the manuscript as question: teaching primary sources in the archives – the china missions project. college and research libraries, 71(1), retrieved from http://crl.acrl.org/content/71/1/49.full.pdf+html schmiesing , ann, & hollis, deborah. (2002). the role of special collections departments in humanities undergraduate and graduate teaching: a case study libraries and the academy, 2(3), retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v002/2.3schmiesing.html yakel, e. (2002). listening to users. archival issues, 26(2), 111-127. yakel, e., & tibbo, h. (2010). standardized survey tools for assessment in archives and special collections. performance measurements and metrics, 11(2), retrieved from http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1871188&show=abstract doi: 10.1108/14678041011064115 this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 united states license. copyright remains with the author/s. evaluation, library assessment, library instruction, outreach, special collections editorial: rising through the ranks: on upward mobility in librarianship #hacklibschool this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct making connections: yaan as a paper blog? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 14 apr cindy welch /12 comments making connections: yaan as a paper blog? fdr hs hallway 4 students 1976 a by whiskeygonebad by flickr user anthony catalano (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) by cindy welch brooke shields is a descendant of louis xiv; emmett smith is seven percent native american; and matthew broderick’s ancestor fought at gettysburg. we learn these things courtesy of a new television show called “who do you think you are?,” which follows the rich and famous as they trace their family trees. for me, one of the most interesting aspects of the show is how each celebrity reacts to revelations about familial connections. it fascinates me that people who are believed to have everything consistently indicate that some dimension of their lives is incomplete and that learning their family history adds something invaluable to their identity. this is what history does; it gives us more of ourselves and we know and understand how we came to be who we are today. everything has antecedents, even blogs. in this article you’ll meet one of in the library with the lead pipe’s second cousins, twice removed, an adolescent known as the young adult alternative newsletter (yaan), published from 1973-1979. what familial traits does yaan share with in the library with the lead pipe (or blogs in general)? the essence of blogging – the need to be heard, to connect, to share and communicate – is something that has deep roots. other characteristics include humble beginnings, a desire to challenge the status quo while inspiring the growth of the field, and the need to make connections with people of shared interests. in the library with the lead pipe’s stated mission, “to explore new ideas and start conversations; to document our concerns and argue for solutions,” also works as an elegant summary of yaan’s purpose, as stated in volume 1, number 1: this is the first in a series of newsletters to get ya librarians in touch with each other, learn what’s going on around the country, and (hopefully!!) be a motivating factor to increase ya services, local and national (push, push, push)—climb on the bandwagon, here goes … (starr, 1973, p. 1). yaan was created, lived, and ceased in the 1970s, before blogs—or even widespread access to or interest in personal computers—existed. the internet was known as arpanet and was used by a limited number of military units and higher educational institutions, and the world wide web still waited to be born. professional development for librarians consisted of twice yearly ala conferences (which people may or may not have had the funds to attend—sound familiar?), perhaps a state or regional conference, professional reading, and for really pressing needs, the telephone or letter, delivered by the u.s. postal service. like its cousin in the library with the lead pipe (bonfield, 2009), yaan was born at a conference when a group of young adult librarians at the 1973 american library association midwinter meeting in washington d.c. sat late into the night discussing their work. this conversation was priceless since many of them were isolated in their home libraries by the unique (and mostly unappreciated) nature of their clients (teens), and a professional environment in which “developmental opportunities” were limited to picking through mainstream publications such as school library journal and wilson library bulletin for the few articles and stray columns dedicated to work with young adults (yas). according to author and former ya librarian patty campbell, it was a “very lonesome business” working with teenagers in public libraries (p. campbell, personal communication, may 25, 2009). carol starr, at that time the teen librarian from menomonee falls, wisconsin, was so excited by the conference conversations that, upon returning home, she powered up her ibm selectric typewriter and wrote three pages of single-spaced text about conference news, ya programs, and membership in the young adult services division (yasd). a few short weeks later, she mailed the first issue of the young adult alternative newsletter (yaan) to approximately 300 teen librarians in “any city of any major size whatsoever” (c. starr, personal communication, january 22, 2005). starr’s passion for serving teens and connecting her fellow ya librarians resulted in a publication that was a veritable buffet of ya programs, free materials, success stories, and affirmation. over the years yaan’s content evolved from bite-sized news bits to longer feature articles and guest editorials. every issue included reports of or ideas for programming, updates on yasd (which would later become yalsa) division news, recommended professional resources, and free materials that could be sent for or shared between readers. in contrast to most youth publications of the time, there was evidence of starr’s decidedly feminist political leanings – and the occasional curse word. according to mary k. chelton, noted ya services expert, top of the news and school library journal and everything—they simply weren’t specific enough and personal enough. there was an idiosyncrasy to yaan that gave it a personality all its own. you didn’t have to write in a box, there wasn’t a style manual necessarily, and as long as you weren’t screaming obscenities you could say anything you pleased … you felt like you were talking over the back fence to people (m.k. chelton, personal communication, june 4, 2009). that openness and inclusiveness, much like blogs, was pronounced and deliberate. starr wanted to mirror the radical practitioner approach to ya services. “rather than go through ala and have it run by people in their 40s, entrenched in their ways, we wanted to have more control … we could publish it ourselves and we owned it” (c. starr, personal communication, january 22, 2005).  like blogs, which build on the interaction between the creators and readers, original material came from library front lines, energizing and affirming practitioners who discovered they had valuable information to share. yaan served as a catalyst for creating a large, reflective community of practice, and much of the material in yaan is an exchange of “here’s how i did it, how did you do it” correspondence. many contributors were leaders—or later became leaders—in the field. julia losinski, dorothy broderick, regina minudri, mary k. chelton, and patty campbell, all winners of the distinguished scholastic library publishing award (formerly the grolier award) for outstanding contributions to work with children and young adults, all were contributors to yaan. yaan had approximately a thousand subscribers across the united states and canada and chelton declared that, “until [starr] started the young adult alternative newsletter, i never realized what a national community of practitioners would mean intellectually or politically … [she created] a vehicle for an entire generation of ya librarians to communicate with each other” (chelton, 2007, p. 32). starr produced yaan with a little help from her friends. she typed and mailed the first three issues herself from wisconsin, but when she moved to a new ya position with alameda county public library in california, she was able to get a bit of institutional support. starr paid her secretary, marilyn mansouria, to type the newsletter and, while she was at it, mansouria added embellishments and dividers that made yaan at once more decorative but also easier to read. supervisor regina minudri allowed starr to use library facilities to print it; don nunes and carol yuen were briefly credited with help on design and production; and mike smith, a family friend, was given credit for original artwork. other artwork came from forest grove (california) nursery and elementary schools. paper, printing, and postage costs for yaan were also offset by subscriber fees, which were $3.00 per year in 1973 and rose to $5.00 ($6.00 if billed) by 1979, but yaan was mostly a labor of love. any extra money generated by yaan subscriptions was used, according to starr, to help other fledgling newsletters such as inside/outside, and women library workers, which became starr’s next project. she remained yaan’s sole “employee.” in the same way that blogs reflect the immediacy of the times in which we live, yaan was very much a publication of its time. the 1970s were a dynamic and dramatic period in the development of young adult services in public libraries. federal funding initiatives from the 1960s created opportunities for new buildings and collections, and the social upheaval that continued into the 1970s encouraged libraries to expand or create new services—among them more specific services and collections for teens. this funding and increased social awareness coincided with the first young adult literature “golden age,” when books such as a hero ain’t nothin’ but a sandwich (childress, 1973), the chocolate war (cormier, 1974), and forever (blume, 1975) made their appearance. there was strong motivation to be socially conscious and public libraries, ever rooted in their communities and society at large, developed outreach services and collections that reflected a broader spectrum of the general population. experimentation and reform was particularly welcome among young adult librarians, whose client group was actively pushing for change. according to patty campbell, teen librarians “were in sync with what was happening that decade. we were ‘with it,’ and we were looking at the kids to find that out” (p. campbell, personal communication, may 25, 2009). miriam braverman, in her 1979 book, youth, society and the public library, indicated that ya librarians became “sensitive to the culture and concerns of youth, broke through the constraints of the ‘conventional wisdom’ in young adult work, and developed exciting and original programs and services” (p. ix). ya librarians scandalized fellow staff members by collecting films such as about sex and ninety-nine bottles of beer, (starr, 1975, p. 4) and circulating educational comic books about sexually transmitted diseases. innovative programming from across the country included opportunities for teens to make films, discuss rock music, and learn about health issues (vd, acne, diet) and drug abuse. when i interviewed former ya librarian and noted booktalking expert joni bodart, she recalled conflict at her california library over water “couches”—they weren’t allowed to call them water ”beds” – in the teen rooms. as blogs have had to do, ya librarians also had to earn credibility while they celebrated their divergence from the mainstream. bodart crowed, we started in the 60s, and in the 70s we were all outrageous and it was hard to convince average librarians that we were worth something … we were very proud of the fact that we were unconventional, that we were different, free (j. bodart, personal communication, may 25, 2009). mary k. chelton noted that [t]hose of us who had not come out of children’s services … were desperate to free ourselves of the sort of hidebound excessive deference kind of crap you got in children’s … [they] wouldn’t know a real kid if they fell over them.  they loved children’s literature and that was it, and it drove us crazy. no matter what we did we were always seen as irreverent non-deferential outcasts (m.k, chelton, personal communication, june 4, 2009). yaan’s publication was greeted with a swift and affirmative response. editor starr noted that the first issue generated an additional 300 names for her mailing list. san diego ya librarian nathalie gushikuma gushed, “isn’t it nice someone knows i exist?” she appreciated yaan’s informal appearance and liked that “others have the same questions i do about ya work and are trying to get answers that we can all see” (gushikuma, 1973, p. 7). its message was heralded by reviews and recommendations in professional journals, both alternative and mainstream. in the 1976 joint issue of booklegger magazine and emergency librarian that focused on library education, carole leita listed yaan among titles of the “library free press … a network of free-speaking library periodicals which you can use to keep in touch with reality—and hope.” readers were encouraged to “take a walk on the wild side” (leita, 1976, 24). emergency librarian, in another issue that same year, called yaan “irresistible to those struggling in an attempt to serve yas” (“small mags,” 1976, p. 24). wilson library bulletin, a mainstream journal, called yaan a “lively alternative … [a] peppy informative newsletter … written in good socko style” (“librarians monthly,” 1974, p. 356). even top of the news, the official journal of the young adult services division of ala, whose job it was to publicize and support youth services, indicated that yaan had already done more to generate ideas and reinvigorate the mutual supportiveness which has always characterized the ya field. it has also raised the expectations of many librarians who have felt the need for the newsletter on ya services, and who now hope that yaan will not only continue to meet this need, but that it will also expand and become a forum for the debate of issues as well (varlejs, 1974, p. 437). yaan continued to inspire a new generation of ya librarians throughout its seven-year run. mary k. chelton used it as a resource in her ya service classes at rutgers, and as a model for an internal newsletter in her day job with the westchester county (new york) library system. yasd included yaan in a 1976 packet of basic materials it marketed as the yasd survival kit. professor larry amey, who along with his students created the canadian publication, young adult hot line, declared that the young adult alternative newsletter (yaan) pointed the way toward a new model for youth service … the yellow-colored, long-format newsletter was packed with descriptions of exemplary and original ya programs, tips for practicing librarians, and avant-garde advocacy for teens. yaan was outspoken, hard-hitting, and committed. it was practically the only publication available in the field at the time, and it was eagerly read by subscribers across north america. yaan provided the model for the newsletter i created … (amey, 2002, p. x). yaan was arguably one of the most important professional education tools in a young adult librarian’s arsenal. diane tuccillo calls yaan a predecessor to modern blogs and web sites, saying it was “one of the earliest forms of networking … a real foundation for what we ended up with now” (d. tuccillo, personal communication, may 22, 2009). its content was fresh and contemporary, timely and specific for a particular audience. like today’s blogs, it was able to target a particular user group and successfully engage and motivate that group. in fact, one 1978 article identified yaan readers as “the vanguard in young adult services” (kingsbury, 1978, p. 22). according to joni bodart, “yaan was ‘us’; all the others were ‘them’ … if something came up in yaan, somebody was speaking the ‘real’ truth, he or she ‘knew where it was at’” (j. bodart, personal communication, may 25, 2009). yaan ceased publication on november 15, 1979, primarily because of a change in the editor’s interests. while starr was doing yaan, she also co-edited the women library workers newsletter with carol leita, and as we sometimes see in the blogosphere, she left her first ‘child’ – “with some sad feelings and a sense of needing a ‘new challenge’” (starr, 1979, p. 1) – to focus on expanding her second. another factor in her decision was her commitment to battling proposition 13, which dealt a major blow to libraries in california in 1978. (for a quick snapshot of the effects of this tax law on libraries, check the california state library’s assessment, done in 1979, which appears as an eric opinion paper.) starr, who had moved from ya services to directing her own library, felt that from all of my young adult work, things that i’d been preaching about to my young adult librarians about going out and getting involved in the community … it was like, well, here was a different local thing and i needed to work on that (starr, personal communication, january 22, 2005). she didn’t desert ya librarians, instead directing them to voice of youth advocates (voya), created by dorothy broderick and mary k. chelton in 1978, noting that its appearance meant “the ya librarian will continue to have a publication devoted solely to ya needs” (starr, 1979, p.1). teen librarians practicing today are largely unaware of yaan, in spite of the fact that much of the model of programming and services practiced today finds its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, and its energy in the pages of this publication. part of the issue is that yaan is difficult to find. according to worldcat there are about twenty libraries in the world that admit having copies of yaan, some of them probably only partial runs. i came across it in 2004 and was fortunate enough to interview carol starr in 2005. out of the kindness of her heart she sent me the first five issues and i was hooked. there is some scholarly interest in it, so hopefully it will find its way into the digital world, where everyone can experience, in 1970s parlance, the ‘real thing.’ starr, herself, is alive and well and still living in california, having retired from library work in 2007. as in the case of shields, smith, and broderick, we may not know what is missing until it is shown to us. that’s my hope: that by exploring the history of the development of teen services in public libraries, and writing about it for all sorts of audiences, i can add value to the good work being done today. i also hope that by making connections between the past and present —as in the case of yaan and its newer shinier cousin in the library with the lead pipe—i’m helping to keep the history alive, demonstrating its relevance to today, and inspiring future generations of librarians to be the next history we write.   this essay contains content previously published as “dare to disturb the universe: pushing ya books and library services—with a mimeograph machine,” in the winter 2010 issue of the alan review, and is reused with permission of ncte, the publisher of the alan review. thanks to my on-site reviewer, dr. rachel fleming-may, assistant professor at the university of tennessee school of information sciences, and to brett bonfield for his initial interest and insightful reading of a draft of this article. references amey, l. (2002). foreword, hot, hotter, hottest: the best of the ya hotline reprint v. howard (ed.). lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2002. bonfield, b. (2009). so you want to write about libraries. [weblog entry.] in the library with the lead pipe. december 2, 2009. (www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/so-you-want-to-write-about-libraries/) accessed april 4, 2010. braverman, m. (1979). youth, society, and the public library. chicago: american library association. blume, j. (1975). forever. new york: bradbury press. chelton, m. k. (2007). remembering yalsa: the view of “the oldest living ya librarian.” young adult library services 6(1), fall 2007, 32-4. childress, a. (1973). a hero ain’t nothin but a sandwich. new york: coward, mccann & geoghegan. 1973. cormier, r. (1974). the chocolate war. new york: knopf books for young readers. gushikuma, n. (1973). letter to the editor, young adult alternative newsletter, april 1, 1973, 7. kingsbury, m. e. (1978). those who do … & those who teach. school library journal, 25(3), november 1978, 22-5. leita, c. (1976). liberated fronts. booklegger magazine 3(13), january/february 1976, and emergency librarian, 3(3), january/february 1976, 24-5. (joint publication) small mags. (1976). [column] emergency librarian 4(2), november/december 1976, 24. starr, c. (1973). young adult alterative newsletter 1(1). 1973: 1. starr, c. (1975). selected films for young adults 1975. young adult alternative newsletter 3(2), march 15, 1975: 4. starr, c. (1979). young adult alternative newsletter 7(4). 1979: 1. varlejs, j. (1974). young adult alternative newsletter. top of the news 30(4), june 1974, 436-7. young adult services division. (1977). directions for library service to young adults. chicago: american library association, 1977. blogs, history, newsletters, publishing, teens, ya, yaan, zines making it their idea: the learning cycle in library instruction editorial: conference this! lead pipers compare conference experiences 12 responses sara ryan 2010–04–14 at 5:48 pm cindy, this is fascinating! clearly, somebody needs to scan yaan. :) cindy welch 2010–04–15 at 12:33 pm wouldn’t that be wonderful! i’ll keep trying to get in touch with carol, or see if perhaps there is someone else who has access and would be willing to do it. i think you’d love the look of the thing, too, sara! cynthia 2010–04–14 at 7:36 pm thank you for this. i am not a youth librarian but having 2 boys and one of them started out going to a amime program at our local library and after graduating hs is now one of her helpers. i will be directing her to this history. cindy welch 2010–04–15 at 12:34 pm thanks, cynthia; this is only a drop in the bucket that is full of ways librarians have connected with and to youth over time, but i’m glad to see the interest. and i’m glad your kids had positive experiences – that’ll help as they get to be voters! dawn rutherford 2010–04–15 at 11:12 am very cool! i would love to see some of these :) cindy welch 2010–04–15 at 12:37 pm i’m glad to see my yalsa buddies. as i said to sara, i think you two would get as much of a kick from the format as the content. jean costello 2010–04–17 at 8:00 pm cindy -it may be the conceit of every generation to think we’re doing something new when in truth we’re standing on the shoulders of people that have come before. your article is a wonderful reminder and was so beautifully written that i read it a second time simply for the sheer enjoyment of it. let’s hope a complete archive of yaan can be assembled soon. cindy welch 2010–04–18 at 8:23 am thanks, jean. one of the things i enjoy most about uncovering history is discovering the linkages across time and, conversely, one of the saddest is that more people (with more knowledge and experience than i) aren’t making these connections more explicit. we talk a lot about relevance and pertinence related to searches, so why not address them (via history)when it comes to services and collections? jean costello 2010–04–19 at 4:09 pm here – here; this is such a winning proposition for libraries, the communities they serve and the ages. there are folks all across america doing amazing things that go unnoticed while we let ourselves be distracted many things i’m convinced most people will find little value in a decade from now. our libraries are uniquely positioned to curate, cultivate and promote this richness through collections and services. how many yaans are out there? how many connections could be made if we built upon modest studies like yours to go a teeny bit broader and deeper, broader and deeper? it’s an aspect of the vision i hold for our libraries and (for me) the potential is incredibly exciting and hopeful. derik badman 2010–04–18 at 9:11 am it’s interesting that the word “zine” never comes up in the article (though i see it there as a tag). i’d think the naturally connection between the self-published newspapers of the 60s-70s and the blogs of today are the zines of the 80s-90s. were there library zines? i’ve never come across any, but i’ve never looked… cindy welch 2010–04–30 at 11:51 am honestly, i don’t know, derik. seems likely, and in its own way yaan could be considered a ‘zine. more history to investigate! ellie 2010–04–22 at 1:51 pm thanks for this! i see a real need for more of an understanding of where we’ve come from and what we’ve gone through. this article is both an excellent addition and a motivator to me for future article ideas. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct social networking with a brain: a critical review of academic sites – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 10 dec kim leeder /17 comments social networking with a brain: a critical review of academic sites by kim leeder social networking may have started out as a way for students to keep track of their friends, but it has expanded in just about every direction. these days, you can find at least one related social networking site on just about any general topic, including music, photography, television, books, shopping, and bookmarking. but it isn’t all fun games. job sites like monster and linkedin began the evolution from social networking to professional networking, and academia has joined the fray as a number of networking sites specifically for academics have popped up in recent years. now we can add “research” to the list above. the impetus for this blog post was an email that has been making the rounds, originating from dr. richard price of oxford university, that reads as follows: i recently finished my ph.d on the philosophy of perception from oxford. with a team of people from stanford and cambridge, i’ve just launched a website, www.academia.edu, which does two things: – it shows academics around the world structured in a ‘tree’ format, displayed according to their departmental and institutional affiliations. – it enables academics to see news on the latest research in their area – the latest people, papers and talks. we are hoping that academia.edu will eventually list every academic in the world — faculty members, post-docs, graduate students, and independent researchers. academics can add their departments, and themselves, to the tree by clicking on the boxes. the message concludes with the names of a few notables who have joined (or been added) to the site, and a request to assist dr. price and friends in their efforts by further circulating the announcement. call me a sucker, but i got that message and immediately joined up, forwarded it to my colleagues, and started envisioning the possibilities. what intrigues me is academia.edu’s combination of a professional networking site with a digital repository. could this take the place of our nascent institutional repository or save my fellow librarians from having to put together an institutional bibliography each year? a screen shot of academia.edu’s homepage. the networking-repository hybrid model was new to me, though i learned later that academia.edu is not the first to do this. nor is it the only virtual platform where researchers can create a profile and search for others with similar research interests. a lot of people in academia already use facebook and linkedin to connect with their colleagues and friends, but academia.edu and its competitors are different because they were specifically created to serve the needs of academics, in terms of research, professional networking, listing citations, and file sharing. try some of those activities on facebook, and you’ll soon agree that it falls far short of an academic’s networking needs. here’s an overview of the major academic networking sites and their features (if you know of others i overlooked, please comment below). all allow you to create a profile and search for other academics by research interest, so i’ve omitted those features in the table. in addition to the characteristics above, these are the qualities that make each site unique. academia.edu: networking for academics in all fields. offers unique visual format with organization by institution. features facebook connect. bibapp: must be hosted on your server for campus-specific organization of faculty experts and research. functions more like a catalog of faculty than a networking site, but could be used either way. epernicus: networking targeted for scientists. features “benchqs,” which is like yahoo! answers for science. graduate junction: networking for graduate students that professes to be less intimidating than professional sites. offers a conference diary & job listings. labmeeting: networking for scientists in the biomedical and related sciences. offers features to assist in organizing and sharing information in lab settings. also includes strong privacy protection. pronetos: networking for academics in all fields. organization by discipline, and offers discussion forums for each discipline. i’m going to use the remainder of this post to critically review these academic networking sites, looking at the benefits, limitations, and possible future outlook. the good there are two major benefits offered by participation in most of the sites i’m looked at, especially academia.edu and pronetos: the ability to locate other scholars with similar research interests. the power to upload papers, articles, and even books to contribute to a worldwide digital repository. as far as #1, the networking aspect goes, it would be natural to ask why any of these sites are an improvement over the ubiquitous facebook. who needs another social network, for goodness sake? vivek murthy, one of the founders of epernicus, addressed the question in a post on the epernicus blog: “mikhail and i started epernicus because we realized that the social networks to which we belonged weren’t able to serve our needs as scientists. the profiles didn’t capture what was important to scientists. and equally as important, we couldn’t use these networks to help us find expertise in real world scientific networks.” if they had a question or issue unique to their research that no one they knew personally could address, they wanted a way to find others out there who might know more. this is not what facebook was built for. in theory, the opportunity to share research interests and connect with other scholars sounds idyllic. finally, the chance to find out who’s walking the same path and reading the same articles. it’s like eharmony for the brain instead of the heart. if there is a need and a demand for such a thing, it could really take off. personally, i get more excited about #2, the digital repository side of this project. the sites that actually host files, especially academia.edu and pronetos, are contributing to the open access movement in ways they may not even realize. although those of us in libraries already know that faculty usually don’t want to take the additional time to post their papers to our repositories, these two sites could be different because (a) they’re easier to use than any library repository i’ve ever seen, (b) they’re prettier, and (c) they make it clear that the papers uploaded will be shared with others instead of stored in a dusty server room, never to be heard from again. the bad first, any social networking site, whether personal or professional, is only as good as its membership. with that in mind, i would say that all of these sites have a long way to go in soliciting members. academia.edu appears to be the largest, at about 20,000, but this is still a small percentage of academics worldwide. graduatejunction may have the greatest potential in this arena due to its specific target audience (graduate students) and the fact that it boasts more “useful” (job and conference) features than the other sites in this review. second, although i initially found it entertaining to search for others with similar research interests to mine, once i found a few i realized that i just didn’t know what to do with them. i could add them as contacts and review their publications. what then? if i were extremely motivated perhaps i would email them and say a few words in our unique research interest language (“speaking geek,” i think they call it). but how often would such contact lead to something constructive? the more i searched, the more skeptical i became. third, academic networking sites are facing big challenges in finding an effective way to ensure that only legitimate academics participate. the uk times higher education expressed concern about academia.edu because “anyone can pass themselves off as an academic…and scholars could be misled into putting their details on it because it occupies the generic top-level domain ‘.edu,’ which is normally reserved for universities.” on the other hand, some sites are so careful to screen members that they seem almost impossible to join. despite repeated attempts, i was unable to join labmeeting or pronetos due to their screening standards. pronetos sent me an activation message that somehow disappeared into cyberspace (and no, it wasn’t in my spam folder), while labmeeting did not recognize my university email address as being from a legitimate academic domain (my university president would take issue with that!). the ugly all in all, social networks of any variety are a curious tradeoff. how much time are you willing to put into them in order to expand your web of connections? in writing this blog post, i spent 8-10 hours crawling around on the various sites mentioned here, creating profiles, exploring group and research interests, checking to see if i knew anyone (or wanted to know anyone) on any of the sites. i found many of the sites appealing at first, and enjoyed some of my wanderings. but now that i’ve had some exposure to these platforms, returning to facebook feels kind of like going home. true, i can’t search for other scholars based on my research interests. but considering how many other avenues i have to find them — from publications to blogs to conferences — do i really need a new one? as jeffrey r. young noted in “new social network hopes to catalog all researchers and their interests,”an article in the september 16 issue of the chronicle of higher education, “it’s too soon to tell whether any of these sites will catch on, and it seems that the services will only become valuable if a critical mass of researchers join in. the final winner may be facebook itself.” so, are these new-kid-on-the-block academic networking sites worth your time? based upon my admittedly limited experience on these sites, probably not. but if you have some free time, go for it. create your profile and see who else is out there. you might get lucky. – many thanks to brett bonfield and ellie dworak for taking the time to offer feedback on the draft of this post, and to brett for his coding kindnesses. academia, academia.edu, academis, faculty, networking, social networking our librarian bodies. our librarian selves. presentation = speech + slides 17 responses derik badman 2008–12–10 at 9:40 am i’m interested to see you mention facebook connect in connection to academia.edu, though i don’t see a facebook login option on the site. the inclusion of fb connect might address the issue with “i’ve found colleagues, now what?” issue which was my first response after signing up for the site. if i could find those colleagues and then easily (ie automatically) friend them in fb, then the social aspect could be increased. seeing articles that have been put into the archive in academia.edu then appear in my fb news feed would also be a by-product that might encourage archiving. that’s a good way to promote your work to colleagues. these cross-site options (also see google’s friend connect, released for public use the same day as fb connect) are where the real action will be happening. by connection our niche networks to the greater networks, we can, hopefully, have the best of both worlds. i’m excited by these options because i’ve reached the overload point on social networks, logins, separate friends, and all that. the danger, of course, being the further entrenchment of power by fb and/or google (though in google’s defense their are at least using open standards like openid and oauth). jan 2008–12–10 at 4:26 pm dear kim, thanks for this post. i would like to add mendeley (www.mendeley.com, i’m a co-founder). mendeley is two things: free academic desktop software (available for windows, mac and linux) for managing & sharing research papers, and a website where you can back up and access your research papers, discover research trends, and connect to like-minded researchers. mendeley went into public beta in august 2008 and is funded by former key personnel from last.fm, skype, and academics at cambridge and johns hopkins university. our vision is to become a “last.fm for research”. along these lines, i fully agree with you that the combination of social network for scientists and digital repository offers a lot of potential. a short demo about what we envision: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uzjbra9ey7a i hope you find that interesting. if you want, you can add further ideas or comments in our feedback forum: htto://feedback.mendeley.com. thanks jan emily ford 2008–12–11 at 9:04 pm i’m having trouble keeping up with social networking sites. recently i deleted my myspace account, my friendster account, and i should probably go delete my tribe account if i can remember what the login is. while i know that new sites with a professional twist are supposed to help in our world, i fear that the same thing will happen with these sites. one will take over (like facebook has) probably because it has the most user-centered interface. plus, when we get into the world of web-hosted systems that are not our own (on our institution’s server) for scholarly communication, repositories, etc, we run into copyright and intellectual property issues. did you look into what these two sites have when it comes to policies? just how aware will researchers and academicians who use such sites be when it comes to these issues? i remain skeptical… maxine 2008–12–14 at 4:59 am you might also like to have a look at nature network, the platform of nature publishing group (disclaimer: i work for the same company as an editor at the journal nature, but do not work for nature network). this is a social website that lets scientists (or anyone, but the accent is on science) join for free and create a profile of their publications and other informal material. people can form groups and there are about 50-100 scientists who blog there. there are events listings, and other aspects. http://network.nature.com. karen downing 2008–12–17 at 1:02 pm hi kim, nice post! this is a bit of a different animal, but there are also fee-based academic networking sites such as cos (community of science). proquest bought cos & csa and has big plans to integrate it’s expertise database (where scholars load their own profiles, and where proquest will be loading researched profiles) with it’s article indices, funding opportunities, and conference calls all into one suite of products. so one could find collaborators online, see what they have published (or see who is publishing in an area and then visit their profile), and then find funding opportunities and calls for papers all in one search. pingback : social networks and academia…12.24.08 « the proverbial lone wolf librarian’s weblog chris blanchard ceo, pronetos, inc. 2008–12–26 at 2:55 pm kim: thanks for blogging about our site, pronetos. we hope it is a useful addition to the scholarly world. we created the site because we heard plenty of scholars say that they did not want to use fb and myspace because they weren’t professional oriented. so we created a site that is exclusive to academics. we think it is a great way for people to create their own easy to maintain home page on the web. it is also sorted by community so that you can find others in your field. in our opinion fb and myspace are fairly difficult to navigate to find other people with like interests. the site is still being built out and we are adding new communication tools (improving the e-mail) and adding more security measures like captcha. i also want to quickly address the comment made by emily ford. the pronetos social networking or community site is designed for researchers and scholars to share grey literature. we clearly state on our home page that all the content on the site is covered under the creative commons attribution 3.0 license. so, author should not post items there where they do not control the u.s. copyright. our terms of use policy at the site also states that very clearly. we are also beta testing an oai-pmh compliant repository called the global research archive. that site serves as a traditional repository which serves all disciplines. we worked very closely with the developers of that software to insure that we had the most complete set of policies of any repository host out there. there are few repositories listed in open doar that have their policies as well articulated as does the global research archive. for scholars we know that content is currency, thus we take the ownership issue very seriously. we are also firmly committed to the open access and open source communities. so, we hope that scholars the world around who see eye-to-eye on these issues will help support us. as always, we are easy to get in touch with and we always strive to be responsive to the needs of the communities we serve. thanks again for posting about us! ismael 2008–12–31 at 12:52 pm hi, thanks for the post: this is something i’ve also been thinking about in the last months. just wanted to share my own list, now updated with the references of yours, jan and maxine. best, i. ismael 2008–12–31 at 12:53 pm ooops, my list: http://ictlogy.net/wiki/index.php?title=social_networking_sites_for_scientists thomas 2009–01–02 at 6:50 am i have recently stumbled upon http://www.ulurn.com judging by the version number it seems that it is in early stages but having a short play with it really seems a one stop shop for the whole academic journey. though it is not 100% academic targeted it still has a dedicated section to that. it even acts as a publication repository. will watch it with interest. pingback : un avis sur les réseaux sociaux académiques | mediatheque2010.fr prospectives joyd 2009–10–21 at 6:28 am great information pingback : pligg.com drazen 2010–05–18 at 7:29 am thanks a lot for the list, this is exactly what i was looking for. you should also check sciyo – http://sciyo.com – it’s an open access scientific platform with over 10 000 users, all of them have their own profile, can add each other as colleagues, share their videos, documents and other works. adam 2010–07–21 at 10:01 pm quartzy (http://www.quartzy.com) is based on a network for scientists, but it actually helps you with day-to-day life in the lab. very cool site. adam 2010–10–02 at 6:07 pm hey, i am the co-founder of a start-up, quartzy (https://www.quartzy.com) that you and your readers might find useful. basically quartzy is a network of scientists and the things that they love: chemicals, reagents, protocols, and facilities!:) think of it as a three-way network. scientists upload their inventories and network them with their lab-mates to create a lab inventory on the fly. they can now share chemicals, comments for the chemicals that they use, place orders with their lab manager, see who has ordered what in the past and more! the software is all online so there is nothing to install. quartzy has been up for more than a year and has thousands of scientists logging to manage their inventories, schedule appointments on shared facilities and more. i would be happy to talk to you more about quartzy if you find it interesting! best wishes adam pingback : alcts job search resources « hack library school this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct books behind bars: a volunteer-run prison library service in winnipeg, manitoba – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 26 mar kim parry /10 comments books behind bars: a volunteer-run prison library service in winnipeg, manitoba manitoba library association prison library committee in brief: beginning the summer of 2012, a group canadian librarians in winnipeg came together to discuss the lack of library services in the prison system in the province of manitoba. the newly formed prison library committee started a weekly drop-in library service at the winnipeg remand centre (wrc) located in winnipeg, manitoba. this article will explore the importance of prison library services in the current context of prisons in canada through our grassroots voluntary prison library service. by kim parry introduction as i sit down to write this article my mind floats back to a conference i recently attended on the topic of literacy and incarcerated youth. the focus was on increasing awareness of low literacy levels among “at-risk youth” in canada and what changes would support these youth in developing literacy skills. a panel of people in executive positions in justice and non-profit organizations lamented the lack of communication between organizations, the lack of funding, the startling numbers of aboriginal and new immigrant youth being incarcerated in canada, and the enormous costs. while i left that panel without any solutions, it did provide me with insight into the types of discussions that are happening at high levels. what is being talked about by many people is the need for change in the canadian justice system.  the prison library project explained in this article is not an answer to these big questions.  it is simply a response to the fact that there was no library service in a prison located in downtown winnipeg. this article will explore our grassroots prison library project and touch on some of the complex issues surrounding working with people who are serving time. prison libraries in canada i would like to provide some context around the prison system in canada and who is being incarcerated in our society. statistics from the office of the correctional investigator state that a third of inmates have a need for mental health treatment and three out of four have substance abuse issues. according to the report by sapers, aboriginal people make up 22% of the federal prison population but make up only about 4% of the general population. aboriginal women make up 33.6% of federally sentenced women (office of the correctional investigator, 2013). in addition, the number of aboriginal people in canadian federal prisons has gone up by more than 40% over the last 10 years, are over-represented in solitary confinement, and are kept behind bars for longer periods than non-aboriginal inmates (2013). an inquiry into this unjust situation was conducted in 1999 (led by justice murray sinclair) but 15 years later the number of aboriginal people in prison has continued to increase, suggesting that the structural racism of the system has not changed. in 2001, a national survey of libraries in federal prisons was undertaken by ann curry of university of british columbia and colleagues kris wolf, sandra boutilier, and helen chan. the survey found that overall, prison libraries were meeting the needs of people in prison, however there was a great deal of variation among the sample and all of the libraries could use more resources and funding (2003). since this survey, funding for libraries and for the staff to run them has been slashed. despite the common perception that prisons have fully functioning libraries, many in canada do not. many prisons do have a room with books in it or a small collection of books but do not have an information professional working there. this is often due to budget cuts or assigning the library work to a teacher who is already working in the institution. there is a directive by correctional services of canada for the institution to provide library services which reflect the services provided in the community including computer resources (2007). in the news we hear of prison libraries closing and anecdotes from other librarians that demonstrate that this directive is not being adhered to. when our committee first approached the remand centre in winnipeg, there was no library in the building and just a few copies of books floating around brought in by prison staff members and from outside prisoner support organizations such as john howard society and elizabeth fry society. winnipeg remand centre open library project every day on my way to work in a downtown public library i walk by the winnipeg remand centre. every day thousands of downtown workers pass by the remand. it is a tall building with dark windows which reflect the sky. many of us don’t think about the hundreds of people inside. the remand centre is a maximum security prison built in 1992 to hold approximately 290 people. the remand has been consistently over-capacity for year and the average number of people serving time there has risen from 329 in 2005 to 406 in 2012 (cbc, 2012). this increase in numbers is disturbing. overcrowding is a real issue for those who are incarcerated. effective library services within this institution would provide some distractions from the very difficult situation people are being forced to live in. a small but eager group of librarians and library technicians (public, academic and special) decided not to ignore those people in the remand. for two hours every saturday evening we turn the room usually reserved for people to meet with their lawyers into an ‘open library.’ we open up two cupboards full of books organized by genre and bring in a large cupboard on wheels which is also stocked with books. we pull out a sign that says “welcome to the wrc library,” tape it up on the wall, and rearrange tables and chairs. we use the tables to create book displays depending on what books are in stock. once we are all set up, we let the guard know they can bring groups down. the remand divides people into men’s and women’s units and then into units based on gang affiliation to keep tensions lower. the unit the guards refer to as ‘trustees’ are those who get the privileges of doing work such as helping prepare meals, do laundry, and clean. we never see those who are in solitary but sometimes are asked to send a book or two up to them. the different groups cycle down based on a schedule. sometimes the guards will come back and tell us no one feels like coming or there are family visits happening at the same time. sometimes we will get up to 4 groups of 10 people in a row-half an hour per group. when the patrons come into our open library they browse the displays, sit around and chat with us or each other, and choose three or four books each. we don’t track anything being taken—people can simply take the books with them. even if they end up leaving or moving to a different institution, we tell them they can take the book if they aren’t finished with it. otherwise, they can send it back to the library. it is a very basic service and has the primary goal of connecting readers with books they will enjoy. within the grind of prison life this has the possibility to be a powerful connection. collections our collection is made up of items that were weeded from the public library’s collection, brand new or used books bought with donations from individuals and a small grant from the manitoba library association, and books donated by supportive community members. led by a dedicated collection development volunteer who is an experienced public librarian, we come together to sort by genre and label the books with a series of coloured dots to represent popular fiction categories such as mystery, science fiction, and romance. we base our collection development on the requests of our patrons tempered with the restrictions placed on us by the remand. we scour used book sales to find copies of in search of april raintree by beatrice culleton mosionier, our most requested book. biographies, mysteries, and thrillers are very popular with patrons, as are works relating to self-help and addiction. as librarians, we work to get these books into our patron’s hands and constantly bring in new books in good condition. one of the barriers prison librarians face is censorship. longtime prison librarian and author brenda vogel terms collection development in prison libraries as a “collision with the absurd” (p. 42). there are many items which are not allowed into prisons and these restrictions are often based on antiquated ideas of what books those serving time “should” be reading. we have never been shown a guide to which books aren’t allowed past the remand doors, but staff go through the books as they arrive in their weekly delivery. we base the collection on what we have been told during our orientation: there are no magazines allowed at remand and no hardcovers. as a rule, books that fall into the true crime genre are not allowed, despite the fact that these books are often told from the perspective of victims of crime and may actually be insightful. generally, our collection development volunteers follow a user-driven collection model. we take suggestions from our patrons at every open library and build off of these to create a collection that is appealing to them within this structured environment. many of our patrons have a love for reading, some are looking to learn new skills, and some are just bored. many of the members of the committee have a love for reading and have had that magical experience of the right book at the right time—that book that you can identify with and takes you away or allows you to more fully investigate your own life. this is what we seek to provide for inmates through our collection. creating space the purpose of this article is to describe the library service i and other volunteers have worked on. this project, however, cannot be taken out of the context of historical and contemporary colonial trauma collectively experienced by aboriginal people in canada and systemic racism and the myriad forms of resistance. the justice system, as was shown in the aboriginal justice report and by many other prison activists, is working against aboriginal and racialized people in canada. this can be seen on a global level as well—justice is not blind. in the past year, we have started to use our two hour time slots for author talks and writing workshops, the first of which involved niigaanwewidam sinclair – a local anishinaabe (ojibway) academic and activist. for this event, sinclair chose to read an excerpt from the book “manitowapow: aboriginal writings from the land of water,” a collection of writings from indigenous people across manitoba. over the course of an evening, the book was discussed with two groups of patrons, many of whom knew some of the contributors within the book, creating a personal connection within the context of the session. sinclair made known to those in attendance that these stories were their stories—a potentially life changing thing to hear while incarcerated. for our patrons at the remand, this brought a new and exciting dynamic to the open library experience, and because of the success of this session, we are looking to continue to host writers and speakers as we develop this project. still, i am not tragic not even in my addicted moments a needle hanging from the vein of my creased arm i was not tragic even as i jump from a boat in a vain attempt to join my ancestors i am not tragic even in my disconnection from song, from dance, i am not tragic even in seeing you as privileged, as an occupier of my homeland in my homeless state even as men abduct as i hitchhike along these new highways to disappear along this lonely colonial road i refuse to be tragic i have included an excerpt of indigenous writer lee maracle’s poem blind justice. i strongly encourage you to click through for the full piece. maracle’s words point to the difficult relationship we can encounter as a volunteer in the prison system.  on a basic level, our committee opens a couple of cupboards filled with books and we wait for people to take them out and talk about the books with them. prison librarian brenda vogel writes about the possibility to make a difference: “you are guaranteed to make a difference in the life of anyone who lives in a prison or jail by opening the door to a room filled with books or by distributing free reading material to someone sitting in a cell or lying on a bunk in a housing dorm” (vogel, 175).  niigaanwewidam sinclair referred to our committee as a group of “brave librarians” who provide this library service in the prison. i appreciate this, as i think he meant it in the sense that we brave the often complicated and bureaucratic system in order to provide books to people who are seeking a connection, whether it is to a story or a conversation, or both. being involved in the prison library project has provided many insights for volunteers and we have received many gifts from working with people serving time. for those of us who are white and able bodied, we experience being inside of the prison in particular ways. many of us are identifiable as “helpers” coming in and we would never be mistaken for inmates. it is easy to get stuck on thinking only about our successes and see our project as something that is “better than nothing.” we are offering a very limited service using volunteers for something that prison librarians should be funded to do. this is the nature of the system we are working in. the underlying power dynamic is always present but sometimes we can fool ourselves into thinking we are all equal. but we aren’t, some of us in the room aren’t able to leave. however, as maracle so beautifully says “still, i am not tragic” and to see the people we are working with as tragic is to accept the dominant narratives around those in prison. it has also been an incredible gift to work with some of the people who are inside who are so resilient and are survivors of things many of us can’t even imagine. looking ahead currently the prison library committee is working on building a library service at the women’s correctional institution in headingley, manitoba which is about a half hour drive from downtown winnipeg. this facility will require a different model to get the books to the women. there is a library space, however, we are not allowed to have the women come up to the space to check books out due to some internal issues within the prison. instead, we will have bi-weekly book talks, with volunteers bringing books to classrooms for women to choose from. we also plan to offer author talks in this institution. in addition to our volunteer projects in the prisons, a number of librarians from across canada are part of a newly formed network under the canadian library association. we will be communicating and sharing information about our challenges and successes through an email list-serve. in a time of “tough on crime” legislation, increasingly harsh sentences for property crimes and drug offenses, and the stripping down of services to the incarcerated, librarians such as ourselves need to be speaking out about these realities. our volunteer run open library is something, but it is not enough. for more information on the winnipeg-based prison library committee: http://www.mla.mb.ca/content/prison-library-committee disclaimer: not everyone on the prison library committee may share the same views expressed in this article. many thanks to sarah clark whose work this article is based on. thanks to ellie collier as my in the library with the lead pipe editor for her dedication and expert editing to help me create this article and to kathleen houlihan for her thought provoking and insightful comments as an external editor. thanks to the prison library committee for enabling me to explore this project through writing and to syrus ware for inspiration. references: cbc news (2012, feb 7). winnipeg remand centre well over capacity. retrieved from: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-remand-centre-well-over-capacity-1.1224048 correctional service canada (2007). education programs and services for offenders. retrieved from: http://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/text/plcy/cdshtm/720-cde-eng.shtml curry, a., wolf, k., boutilier, s., & chan, h. (2003). canadian federal prison libraries: a national survey.  journal of librarianship and information science, 35(3), 141-152. maracle, l. (2013). blind justice. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 2(1), 134-136. office of the correctional investigator (2013). annual report of the office of the correctional investigator: 2012-2013. retrieved from: http://www.oci-bec.gc.ca/cnt/rpt/pdf/annrpt/annrpt20122013-eng.pdf vogel, b. (2009).the prison library primer: a program for the twenty-first century. lanham, maryland: scarecrow press. prison library, social justice, volunteer state of the pipe working at learning: developing an integrated approach to student staff development 10 responses kearneycath 2014–03–26 at 2:38 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: books behind bars: a volunteer-run prison library service in winnipeg, manitoba: manitoba library associa… http://t.… inalj_nh 2014–03–26 at 3:14 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: books behind bars: a volunteer-run prison library service in winnipeg, manitoba: manitoba library associa… http://t.… wpglibrary 2014–03–26 at 3:15 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: books behind bars: a volunteer-run prison library service in winnipeg, manitoba: manitoba library associa… http://t.… simmstoomey 2014–03–26 at 3:53 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: books behind bars: a volunteer-run prison library service in winnipeg, manitoba: manitoba library associa… http://t.… aliciaa_july 2014–03–27 at 10:28 pm rt @libraryleadpipe: books behind bars: a volunteer-run prison library service in winnipeg, manitoba: manitoba library associa… http://t.… pingback : pro bono librarianing | hack library school pingback : ted books, mentors, and more | exbibliolibris christi kari 2014–06–22 at 11:02 am i am an author, and i would like to donate copies of one of my books to prison library across america and canada. can you help me accomplish this, and how do i go about it? pingback : prison librarianship | pratt silssa pingback : librarian in training this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct dynamic duo: the web developer and the public services librarian – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2012 25 jul eric frierson /1 comments dynamic duo: the web developer and the public services librarian by eric frierson when i undertook my first library website redesign a few years ago, i stumbled upon an ongoing culture clash in web-based industries between the developer and the designer. developers are programmers – they have coding skills and speak languages like php, jquery, and ajax. for them, cake isn’t something you eat – it’s a development framework. they use these tools to make technology do what they want. designers, on the other hand, are artists. they work with clients to understand their needs, sketch potential designs using tools like photoshop® or pencil and paper. they deal with the frustrations of the client relationship (e.g., telling the client pictures of his cat shouldn’t go on his website). designer vs developer from anistar sung on vimeo. here’s the rub: many designers can’t code and can’t make the websites they draw. some designers wield css well enough to set the visuals of a website, but they don’t know how to get search boxes, dropdown menus, and interactive elements to do what they want. conversely, most developers don’t understand the relationship with the client or have training in visual design. they believe they know best when it comes to a website that works, and as a result, don’t work well with fickle clients. relationships between designers and developers range from antagonistic to cooperative, and the best of these relationships embody the complimentary nature of the two roles. however, some designer/developer relationships devolve into name-calling and contempt. at the heart of these kinds of relationships is a lack of understanding and respect for one another. in libraries, there is an obvious parallel: the library’s web developer[1] and the public services librarian[2]. the web developers spend the day making library websites and systems work, rarely taking shifts at public service points. they work within the constraints of proprietary systems they can’t change and grapple with the web environments of larger systems in which they work (e.g., a city or university’s web infrastructure). public services librarians put out a lot of fires. they teaches people how to navigate library systems that for some reason never seem as good as google. because of their constant contact with users, they understand the heartbeat of the community. they focus on developing relationships with users and stakeholders. sometimes, these two clash in the same way designers and developers do, each clamoring for respect. having occupied both sides of the divide, i find myself in a unique position to understand how both sides may perceive the relationship. for example, i understand the frustrations public services librarians feel when they work with end users on systems that are deficient. these librarians are the eyes and ears of our organization, and yet, they are often powerless to do anything about it except to bemoan the inefficiencies of these systems to their web developers, who don’t seem to understand the community’s needs. i also understand that web developers are frequently hamstrung by inflexible interfaces and conflicting opinions of how the systems should be optimized. some librarians clamor for more controlled search features, while others request simpler search options that provide “good enough” results. some librarians come armed with research studies from the literature supporting their position, and others call upon anecdotes from their interactions with users. the demands of their colleagues may even contradict their own expert opinion. the frustrations web developers and public services librarians feel sometimes boil over into animosity: “the web developer doesn’t understand what our users need! why can’t she just fix the problem?” “the public services librarian brings me these anecdotes, but no evidence! does he expect me to change the whole website based on one story?” resolving this disconnect requests a deeper understanding of each other’s territory. in addition, new tools and skills are required for both types of librarians to become better partners in a web developer/public services relationship. these include the use of apis to break free of the out-of-the-box interfaces our vendors provide and ethnographic research skills that provide insight into the needs of our users. a systems and services team it’s clear that public services librarians can’t do it alone: they don’t have the capability to change the systems that users interact with. similarly, web developers can’t do it alone either: guessing at user needs without interacting with actual end users is a losing battle. the answer is developing a team with shared goals and an attitude that lends itself to collaboration and learning. first, you’ll need to identify the right people for the team. in small libraries, you may not have a choice if you only have one web developer. in good to great, jim collins (2001) wrote that excellent “teams consist of people who debate vigorously in search of the best answers, yet who unify behind decisions, regardless of parochial interests” (p. 63). this means both the web development and public services staff must be committed to users, not their respective departments. a positive, optimistic attitude also contributes to team success, especially in newly formed teams (west, patera, & carsten, 2009). someone with a sour attitude who is only interested in protecting ‘their domain’ will not be a good candidate for the kind of collaborative work this team will be doing. but what if the attitudes are not there? collins (2001) notes that some employees join companies because they like the job and the direction the organization is going. this becomes a problem when the organization shifts direction and jobs begin to change; those same employees become discontent and start putting on the brakes. collins (2001) would recommend that library directors confront bad attitudes directly by stating plainly what the new directions of the organization are, and inviting employees to commit or quit. he quotes david maxwell, who focused his first years as ceo of fannie mae finding the right people to work at the organization and getting the wrong people to leave. maxwell would say, “look, this is going to be a very hard challenge. i want you to think about how demanding this is going to be. if you don’t think you’re going to like it, that’s fine. nobody’s going to hate you” (collins, 2001, p. 45). several fannie mae employees left the company, but on amicable terms, and maxwell was able to hire people who came to fannie mae because of its mission and the people who worked there, not because of the nature of the job. in a down economy and with tenure systems in place, getting the wrong employees to leave is almost impossible, but there may still be hope for developing the type of culture needed for a successful systems and services team, but it will be extremely difficult without gaining buy in from the curmudgeons. if your organization doesn’t have the right attitude, the systems and services team may not be a good fit for you. new tools: ethnographic research and api once the team is assembled, there’s another element to making it work: new tools. anecdotes are not enough, and out-of-the-box systems are inadequate. public services needs new ways to gather data and web developers need better ways to change the interfaces users encounter. ethnographic research if web developers have anything to complain about the kind of feedback they get from public services librarians, it’s that the feedback is entirely anecdotal. users that come to the physical services desk in tears because they can’t figure out how to use the website leave a lasting, significant impression on the public services librarians that try to help them. however, to a web developer, one person is not enough to merit changing an entire site. in this situation, neither the public services nor the web developer has a clear view of how the vast majority of people use the website. one distraught user cannot dictate the design of the site; conversely, web analytics don’t tell the “why” of the paths people take through the site. ethnographic research provides a way to improve upon anecdote and analytics by examining “the context in which activities occur, usually involving a researcher working with participants as they go about their daily lives. ethnographers typically describe a particular situation or process by asking multiple people about it, and by analyzing multiple types of data, such as interviews, direct observation…” (duke & asher, 2012, p. 24). ethnography isn’t new in libraries. a good first step might be to learn from what previous ethnographies of libraries have discovered, and consider what opportunities you already have to introduce change based on their findings. ethnographic research solves the dilemma of the anecdote by providing an analysis of situations that go beyond the surface; in other words, we’ll know why our users interact with our sites in the way that they do, and we’ll be able to identify patterns in user behavior. in an era of fewer and fewer reference demands, ethnography presents an interesting new role for public services librarians. in a sense, they become not only the eyes and ears of the library, but they also contribute a deep understanding of users based on qualitative research. for a web developer, having access to this kind of analysis of user behavior is invaluable. apis and web services for some time, librarians have recognized that library instructional content must come at the point of need (stevens, 2009). digital learning objects, online tutorials, and guides relegated to a remote corner of the website do not get traffic – they must be embedded in places where students struggle. the problem with most libraries’ current set of tools is the inflexibility of the systems that students interact with. as we have recognized at st. edward’s university, the library website is little more than a pass-through site for ebsco discovery service (eds). most of our users land on our page and then immediately leave via the search box to enter eds. unfortunately, when users get to eds, we have little control over the user experience. we can toggle certain elements on our page, re-label some of the facets, and add a little bit of branding to the page, but little else. we are constrained by the administrative controls of ebscohost, and as a result, most of users time in library resources only vaguely resembles the library site at all: deeper problems happen with the folder feature. many of our students access eds from off-campus. as a result, they explicitly log in to our library’s proxy server in order to conduct searches and access full-text. they assume that when they add items to the “folder,” those items will be associated with their login. instead, they discover days later that all of their folder items are lost, because they did not log into ebscohost in addition to the library’s proxy server. while ebsco will likely find a way to tie folders to university authentication in the future, we are stuck waiting for that to happen. even if this were solved, the folder of items still lives on ebscohost, disconnected from where students are using those items. the solution lies with an api (application programming interface). ebsco provides programmers with tools to use eds metadata, its search algorithm, and facets and filters without having to use ebscohost as the user interface. this allows web developers to create a search interface from scratch, including a folder system that ties into university authentication. google, worldcat, facebook, and twitter all provide apis that could be used to enhance the digital experience for users. for example, previews of library books can be displayed in an opac using google books previews. the ability to “like” and “share” library web pages and materials via facebook also ties use of the library to the user’s social circles – something public library users may be inclined to do. apis free us from the constraints of out-of-the-box interfaces, and there are a lot of them to select from. they require a different set of programming skills than typical web development. bullets to cannonballs ethnography and apis represent an incredible opportunity, but at what costs? is it worth reinventing the whole discovery search interface using an api? how likely is it that an inexperienced public services staff of one person can add a comprehensive ethnographic research study to their “to do” list? a reasonable answer comes once again from business author jim collins and co-author morten t. hansen, who recommend that organizations try new initiatives in small doses before investing significant resources (collins & hansen, 2010). they use the metaphor of a ship at sea engaged in a fight: “picture yourself at sea, a hostile ship bearing down on you. you have a limited amount of gunpowder. you take all your gunpowder and use it to fire a big cannonball. the cannonball flies out over the ocean…and misses the target, off by 40 degrees. you turn to your stockpile and discover that you’re out of gunpowder. you die” (p. 78). the moral of this story is that new initiatives are inherently risky; a misfire could result in lost profits, lost time, and ultimately may sink a company altogether. a better strategy is to fire bullets – ventures that require less “gunpowder” – until one hits a target, then fire your cannonball. for us, this means starting slow. a fully fleshed out ethnographic research study could take years of data gathering using sophisticated research techniques. however, you could start as we have as st. edward’s university with focus groups that try to get at the context of library research. rather than directing questions at the use of library resources, the focus group should be about the whole research experience, from topic selection to completed paper. for public libraries, questions might be addressed to local business owners in order to determine what information they need to run a successful business and where they find that information. a small focus group may not get you the same level of understanding as a full ethnographic study would, but it will uncover some aspects of the context in which library users interact with our resources and services. the focus group would require far less time, staff, and expertise to carry out. if the focus group results in ideas to improve services or systems, library directors might be more willing to provide resources to expand ethnographic studies of library users. andrew asher and susan miller provide a practical guide to ethnographic research in academic libraries as a toolkit for libraries to begin a more in-depth study. for apis, perhaps the bullet is in smaller projects that add value to the site, not an entire site redesign. for example, our website makes use of an api to dynamically pull the number of computers that are available in our lab. other apis, such as those provided from worldcat.org, can pull apa or mla citations into a catalog based on an item’s isbn or oclc number. valuable entry-level projects like this can be used to gauge the time and effort working with apis might require, along with experience that helps us consider possibilities apis introduce. for example, an api-driven discovery interface can position libraries to integrate deeply into campus portals (instead of just linking to the library, users can search and mark library materials they want to use right from their library management system), solve usability issues in out-of-the-box interfaces, and embed context-sensitive links and resources into the search experience (e.g., video tutorials on search strategies when a user gets no results; or ‘help’ messages that pop up the first time a user logs in, but not during subsequent visits). jason clark offers an online lita workshop designed to get library web developers using apis, and code4lib provides articles and conferences that are worthwhile investments for library directors looking to fire bullets at apis before asking their web developers to commit to bigger projects. ethnography and apis are tools that not many people in libraries can use, and it will take a serious commitment of time, money, and reorganization of job duties in order to make the fullest use of them. small investments and pilot projects like these provide ways to fire a few bullets before deciding if it’s time to fire a cannonball. managing the team and making the time even if small pilot projects are successful, library directors and librarians themselves may have difficulty committing to a new set of responsibilities. how can ethnography and api programming be added to job duties when librarians and web developers are already spread thin? the answer is a commitment to learning and growth. for example, 3m has been recognized as one of the most innovative companies for several decades (kretkowski, 1998; nelson & quick, 2011). business analysts credit the company’s innovative culture to the “15 percent” rule, which gives professional employees permission to use up to fifteen percent of their work time on personal projects and constructive daydreaming. fifteen percent might seem like a lot to sacrifice, especially if librarians are already busy enough maintaining current levels of service. however, in how the mighty fall, jim collins (2009) notes that companies that succeed in turbulent times are the ones that invest in research and development and growth, not in maintaining the status quo. a close examination of what legacy services should be dropped may free up the room for employees to explore, learn, and grow the library in new directions. the right employees will relish this opportunity. buckingham and coffman (1999) point out that managers who put employees in positions where they have to learn a new skill are more satisfied with their work, because they are growing as a result of it. speaking from experience, there has not been a more satisfying project at my own workplace than learning how to use apis to do more with our discovery service. it is a new skill i’ve picked up as a result of the project and i am energized by the opportunity to grow as an individual. but what should we drop if we allocate our time elsewhere? at our library, we didn’t drop anything – we hired. having second employee in our systems unit has increased our capacity to maintain library systems and expand into new areas of web development. the funding for this position came from recently vacated positions in technical services, administration, and acquisitions. for public services, slow hours at the desk were converted to office time for our reference staff. there are many months of the year where traffic at our desk does not merit having professional staff waiting for questions, and this time can be recouped for projects like focus groups and ethnography. gaining respect public services librarians will garner more respect from their web development colleagues when they present findings from studies that illustrate real, measured, and significant user needs. unlike an anecdote from the reference desk, ethnographic study comes with legitimacy. recommendations seem less like complaints about the systems, and more like steps to take to meeting a shared goal of improved user experience. conversely, the web developer equipped with the skills to design a system that addresses identified needs gets more respect as well. instead of blaming inflexible interfaces for bad user experience, web developers can invent solutions and fix problems. gaining momentum usability tests are the perfect introduction to developing a deeper public services and systems partnership. it isn’t ethnography and it requires no technical training, and lightweight usability methods are easy to adopt and use. it exposes public services libraries to the work of designing websites, and it exposes web developers to working closely with end users trying to accomplish specific goals. pick up steve krug’s book, rocket surgery made easy. krug explains how to conduct a low-effort, high-reward usability test that pulls upon the talents of many people in the organization and produces an actionable list of fixes for a site. the process is as follows: 1. develop some goals for the usability test: what part of the site do you want to improve? we’ve done tests on ebook access, front-page design, and ebsco discovery service among others. 2. identify one person to conduct the usability test, and write the script for the test. krug provides tips on how to develop the script and even provides templates on his site to use to take care of the privacy and permissions aspects of working with end users. 3. conduct only three short tests, with the idea being that 3 users will capture 80% of the problems on the site. it will also not require a huge time commitment. 4. screencast[3] the usability test to a room where people interested in improving the site can watch the test and record notes. this allows the tester to focus on conducting the test, not on taking notes. it also provides the opportunity for varied perspectives on the user’s behavior. 5. when testing is over, immediately conduct a debriefing with everyone who watched the test. use this time to identify the top three or five things to fix on the website. krug provides guidelines on what kind of fixes deserve priority, and which ones can wait. a well-executed usability study following krug’s guidelines results in action and productive change. it sets the tone for teams to engage in more time-intensive projects like ethnographic research studies and api-based web development. the usability test may uncover some deficiencies in systems that only api development can fix, or it may lead to questions about the users that a simple usability test cannot answer. more than anything, it will start discussions that are user-centric between people that may not ordinarily come into contact. onward, library! every aspect of the library profession is retooling. catalogers are working with batch loads of records more than they do original cataloging. collection development librarians are working with patron-driven acquisition models more than approval plans or firm orders. archivists are deriving new value from their digitized collections with text mining techniques. public services are spending less time at the reference desk, and ethnography might be their new tool for learning about users. apis are the newest tools of web developers. we are vastly different than we were a few short years ago. our libraries need to be able to grow and change as the world around us does. there is little room for silos and the status quo, and no room for those who are unwilling to grow and learn the new skills required to thrive. collaboration is about gaining new skills and gaining respect for one another. it is about finding a way for us to apply our talents to achieve success together. finally, we need to recognize that not all libraries need to do original coding or ethnographic research. code can be shared, and ethnographic studies already exist. libraries unable to commit the resources needed to do local work can use the work of others. what may seem like unique situations and circumstances are actually commonplace from library to library. if your library engages in work that provides insight into user behavior or develops code that enhances the user experience, share it! i cannot thank the smashing editing work and candor of ellie collier and erin dorney enough – they are my editing heroes!  similar kudos and thanks to pongracz sennyey, director of the library at st. edward’s university, and reviewer for this post.  his contributions of ideas and directions for this post were invaluable! references asher, a. d., & duke, l. m. (2012). a practical guide to ethnographic research in academic libraries. retrieved from http://www.erialproject.org/publications/toolkit/ booth, c. (2009). informing innovation: tracking student interest in emerging library technologies at ohio university. chicago: association of college and research libraries, american library association. buckingham, m., & coffman, c. (1999). first, break all the rules: what the world’s greatest managers do differently. new york, ny: simon & schuster. collins, j. c. (2001). good to great: why some companies make the leap–and others don’t. new york, ny: harperbusiness. collins, j. c. (2009). how the mighty fall: and why some companies never give in. new york: harpercollins. collins, j., & hansen, m. t. (2011). great by choice: uncertainty, chaos, and luck : why some thrive despite them all. new york, ny: harpercollins publishers. duke, l. m., & asher, a. d. (2012). college libraries and student culture: what we now know. chicago: american library association. foster, n. f., & gibbons, s. (2007). studying students: the undergraduate research project at the university of rochester. chicago: association of college and research libraries. krug, s. (2010). rocket surgery made easy: the do-it-yourself guide to finding and fixing usability problems. berkeley, calif: new riders. mcdaniel, c. (2011). two cats in a sack: designer-developer discord. smashing magazine. retrieved from http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/05/13/two-cats-in-a-sack-designer-developer-discord/ nelson, d. l., & quick, j. c. (2011). organizational behavior: science, the real world and you. australia: south-western cengage learning. stevens, m. (2009). being at the point of need. tame the web [blog]. retrieved from http://tametheweb.com/2009/09/20/being-at-the-point-of-need/   [1] the developer may or may not be a librarian, or even employed by the library in the case of public libraries that rely upon the city’s webmaster.  this role may be in-house in positions like “systems librarian,” or there may be a dedicated web librarian that handles the website. [2] the public services librarians are those who work with the library’s users directly, including reference, instruction, and circulation staff. [3] i’ve found that http://join.me/ is a great tool for this sort of screencasting. it requires no additional software on the viewing station, and only a tiny java application on the ‘broadcasting’ station.   the ebook cargo cult what do we do and why do we do it? 1 response pingback : dynamic duo: the web developer and the public services librarian webdevelopmentdelhi.in this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct take action now! becoming a legislative advocate for libraries – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 29 jun emily ford /6 comments take action now! becoming a legislative advocate for libraries photo by flickr user library_mistress  (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by emily ford introduction if you work in a library, chances are you’ve seen or heard calls for you to become a library legislative advocate. you may have seen e-mails asking you to fill out a web form asking legislators to continue funding lsta, or you may have recently seen e-mails about usa patriot act reforms. but why should librarians and library workers engage in legislative advocacy efforts? while i am by no means an expert on the topic of legislative advocacy, i have been moderately involved in advocacy work at the state and national level and it seems that i have some experience to impart to the library community. many library colleagues have told me that they think advocacy work is difficult, or that they are intimidated by getting involved. i am also commonly asked whether advocacy efforts really make a difference. the combination of the political climate after 9/11, librarians’ bold public actions to defend privacy and intellectual freedom rights, and some thoughtful mentoring from a colleague convinced me to become a librarian. in 2002, my public library system, multnomah county library, filed a lawsuit against the united states of america on the basis that cipa (children’s internet protection act) “…induces public libraries to violate their patrons’ first amendment rights…and (2) it requires libraries to relinquish their first amendment rights as a condition on the receipt of federal funds and is therefore impermissible under the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions” (p. 407). a year later an fbi agent blamed “radical militant librarians” for his/her inability to use the usa patriot act to its full potential, which was big news in 2005 when this e-mail was released to the public. ross and ciada (2005) describe library organizations’ reactions to the post 9/11 political climate: “to deal with the new informational and political landscapes, these organizations need both to inform their members and the community at large, as well as become more involved in the political and legislative processes that are responsible for enacting laws that could affect library services in the name of national security” (p. 108). they continue: “it is important, nevertheless, that the members of the library community in these difficult times have some sense of leadership and solidarity. in becoming active and involved, organizations such as the ala are at the very least helping themselves to define and solidify their place and role in society” (p. 108). today’s libraries are founded on tenets of equity, freedom of information, and defending and advocating for the public’s rights and the public good. the library workers that uphold these everyday are my heroes. many kinds of public action articulate the value of libraries. advocacy is defined as: “public support for a course of action or way of doing things.” (longman dictionary). due to its loose definition, library advocacy is therefore interpreted and practiced in a variety of ways. numerous initiatives in the library world use the word advocacy to describe what they are doing and trying to accomplish. at our recently convened ala annual conference, i saw a poster session by emerging leader groups that focused on teen services advocacy with local communities and libraries build communities. another example includes ala president molly raphael’s advocacy initiative focused on empowering communities, and the list goes on. legislative advocacy demonstrates our library/librarian values to lawmakers. this kind of advocacy usually includes communicating with elected officials via phone calls, in person visits, e-mails, and online action forms. here i aim to outline how to do it, why you should, and discuss some personal stories that i hope will help those who haven’t yet engaged in legislative advocacy. after you read this post i hope that you will include legislative advocacy in your professional routine. how to do it? a dummy’s guide to library legislative advocacy picture this: you receive an e-mail from one of your subscribed listservs asking you to take action now! to save the statistical compendia branch of the us census bureau. you want to help, but you don’t know how, or you feel like you don’t know enough about the issue, or you don’t feel like you have time, or you might feel like taking action now! might not really amount to anything. well guess what? it’s a lot easier and than you think and your action can be meaningful. you don’t have to be an expert in an issue, and you don’t even have to know who your representatives and legislators are to make a difference the first step is to read the e-mail or announcement and see what it says. if it’s an e-mail crafted by the ala washington office it usually contains a concise summary of the issue, easy to read talking points that highlight library interest in the issue, and a link. you may not feel like this is not enough information to get involved and take that action. but it is enough. if you work in libraries you already know more about libraries than legislators. similarly, legislators will know more about legislature than you will. next, you want to click on the link. it will take you to a web page with more information about the issue, and a space for your zip code. read through the information given on this page, which usually provides another summary of the issue. you’ll see on that page a place for you to enter your zip code. click on go! and the system will automatically forward your message to your representative. you’ll see in the screenshot below that your state representative’s name is filled in based on your zip code, as is a message about the statistical compendia branch. you are free to modify the message, but you are also free to trust that the ala washington office is representing library interests based on the information you read in your e-mail. next you’ll need to fill in your name and address information and click send. that’s all there is to it. you have just advocated for libraries. of course there are some variations on this practice. sometimes your action alert will ask you to call your legislators. usually this is because action is needed in a very timely manner in congress. e-mails take a while to filter through the system and make it to a congress person’s legislative aide. calls are more effective on issues that are happening that day. calls can be more intimidating if you’ve never done conducted an advocacy phone call before. but you are prepared. you have read your action alert and the web page should provide you instructions on what to say. but what if i call and they ask a question i can’t answer? simple. say you don’t know, offer to find out, and ask what is the best way to follow-up with a response. when you call you will talk to an intern at the reception desk of the legislator’s office. they will usually just make a tick mark on a sheet that tracks consitutents’ calls and legislative issues. you may ask to speak to the staff person in charge of education or telecommunications or whatever your issue concerns. usually you will get their voice mail. you may also choose to call after 3 pm pacific time and you will usually just get the voicemail – a simple way to make that call but not have to worry about feeling intimidated. there are also other ways to participate in legislative advocacy for libraries. you can participate in organized days where you visit your local legislators or participate in national library legislative day (nlld). organized events are a great way to get your feet wet advocating for libraries. typically these days have briefing sessions that help prepare you for conversations with your representatives. moreover, you can visit with a legislator or a legislative aide with more than one person. for these situations it is good for representatives to see more than one face, and having your friends beside you might ease any anxiety that you might be feeling. it is also perfectly okay for you to tell a representative or an aide that you have never made an office visit before; they will most likely understand and help you with the process. one thing that may help you feel more comfortable is that universally nobody hates libraries. during national library legislative day 2011 briefings, this was stressed not only by ala washington office staff, but also by panelists who have previously worked as congressional staff. to read a bit more about the information in the briefings and my office visits at this year’s nlld, check out the blog post i wrote for the oregon chapter of acrl. does legislative advocacy work? a question i’ve heard numerous times when i’ve been asked about legislative advocacy is: how do i know that my efforts work? is it worth my time and effort? in my experience, yes. as part of the oregon delegation for nlld, we met with our representatives, senators, and/or their staffers. during our meeting with representative earl blumenauer’s (d-or, district 3) legislative aide, we asked that representative blumenauer sign onto a dear colleague letter showing his support for lsta funding. a few days later we received an e-mail from his legislative aide indicating that he had signed the letter. signing a dear colleague letter is an official proclamation of a representative’s intention to support and vote a certain way when it comes to congress. these letters are official documentation, and are part of the congressional record. in addition to the letters formalizing a person’s support of a piece of legislation, they are also used as peer pressure tools. (if your friends jumped off of a cliff, would you do it too?) but what about those web forms? in my experience, each time i’ve used a web form from an action alert or contacted a legislator online, i have received an e-mail response a few weeks later. take, for instance, the following letter i received from ron wyden, an oregon senator: another recent experience was at oregon’s library legislative day at the state capitol in salem, or. i met with my senator, who indicated to me that he was “happy to be meeting with a constituent.” he mentioned that he rarely meets people in his office from his district and that he had spent the past few days speaking only with lobbyists. he was glad i was there. to me this was an eye-opening experience. representatives in our state and federal legislatures want to hear from us, but how often do they really get a chance to hear from us? this one passing comment will stick with me for the rest of my life as i work as a library legislative advocate. i know that by showing my face, using my one voice (or my e-mail), i can impact and work to improve support for libraries and legislation at the state and federal level that effect libraries. one of the issues we were discussing with oregon legislators this year, was to retain oregon libraries as exempt from mandatory sharing of certain public records (such as patron records). this law went under review as sb 41 (.doc), and this same legislator was on the committee that was hearing the bill! because he was on this committee, he asked if he could contact me if he needed more information in a timely manner to make a case for libraries. fortunately, libraries had a lot of support around the issue, and he did not need to find out more information to make a strong argument to his colleagues. this situation made me feel like i did have expertise to share with my senator, and that he was willing to listen to my perspective and what was important to me as a professional and as an individual. there are so many issue bombarding our legislative representatives, that it is really easy to miss issues that impact libraries. we can’t assume that even though our representatives might be library friendly, that they will know what is important to us. we have to tell them. more than once. advocacy hacks a large part of being a successful advocate is being informed. be informed about what is hot on capitol hill, and what is happening in your state. you are already a library expert because you work in one. but how do you keep track all of knowing when to call? who to call? there’s an app for that. the sunlight foundation has developed iphone and android apps that help you track the activity in congress. these apps let you look up representatives and clearly list that representative’s committee appointments. these apps will also let you know what public hearings are scheduled and what committee will be hearing them. moreover, the sunlight foundation has numerous projects and labs that may help you with legislative advocacy work. there are also numerous other tools. the ala washington office publishes the district dispatch blog, which, with timely posts and e-mails, lets us know when the time is right. the washington office also recently announced a twitter feed that will help broadcast issues as they are happening. you might also consider following web sites such ask govtrack.us or the national conference of state legislatures to help you find out what is happening legislatively. in addition to information about what is happening and when, you need something else. you need a good story backed with solid evidence. when it comes to advocacy your expert library knowledge–combined with good, relevant stories– is power. for example, in oregon we are dealing with an abysmal number of school librarians. they are quite rare. but i’m an academic librarian. what is my story when i talk to legislators about how important it is to have school librarians in k-12 education? i talk about the transliteracy skills i see in students when i teach and when i help them at the reference desk. it is always apparent to me when new university students have had a librarian in their schooling and when they haven’t. according to the school library data compiled by the oregon state library, of the over 1300 public schools in oregon, the state only has 304 fte school librarians. this is inadequate and it is dooming students to struggle when they reach college. everyday i encounter students who don’t have basic library and research skills. i can talk about these basic skills, such as using an index and creating citations, and the message really hits home with legislators. if you’re running advocacy for a group, you can use capwiz, a piece of software that makes embedding an advocacy widget easy. you can customize the widget with a message that you want your group to send to representatives, and it enables individuals to target their own state representatives. the oregon library association’s library legislative and development committee uses this tool. advocacy toolkits are another source that will help you run advocacy initiatives in your community, and/or will provide information about how to be a successful legislative advocate. the advocating in a tough economy toolkit includes a section on working with legislators, and the ala washington office offers free webcasts and trainings on advocacy a few times a year. what’s in it for me? first and foremost, if you advocate for libraries to be better funded, you will have better chances of keeping your job, your program, your building, your office, an increase in salary, etc. if you show the good work you can accomplish, you’ll get to do more of it. in fact, ala executive director, keith michael fiels, referred to the capwiz advocacy tool as a major accomplishment for ala. during an ala executive board meeting last friday (6/24/2011), he lauded capwiz for being the tool that has saved libraries so much money (in that congress hears us and keeps us funded) that we have saved 15,000 jobs. that is, library advocates using the capwiz tool via action alerts, have saved 15,000 jobs. how? by using advocacy techniques the library community was able to continue funding libraries through lsta. congress and the public fund services that they feel are valuable. if you can work to articulate the value of libraries in a meaningful way to congress, your city or county government officials, and your service community, you will have more support. i should also note that advocacy is an iterative process. a continual advocacy dialog is needed in order to fertilize and grow support for libraries in your community. advocacy is the ultimate big picture work these days we get so inundated with the day-to-day practicalities of our jobs, that we are in danger of losing the big picture. everyday librarians and library workers create and implement programs, write book reviews, teach library instruction sessions, provide reference services and access points, etc. engaging in advocacy is a way to step back from these practicalities and to think about the larger role that libraries play in our communities and our society. for me it is very fulfilling to know that i’m part of the bigger picture, that i’m part of the system that continues to provide equity in society, that my work contributes to the public good, and that my job and my position as a librarian is still relevant to why i entered the profession. a plug for representative government a representative government does not and will not work without public input. as my experience at the state legislature in oregon shows, not enough people participate. it is big loud and visible public action that gets things done. it is what librarians like fellow lead piper brett is trying to achieve by boycotting harper collins. it is what happened when there was a bus strike in the south during rosa parks’ and marin luther king junior’s time. without collective public action, without the many tens of thousands of voices our chances of being heard are small. ala alone has over 60,000 members, and that is not every librarian or library worker out there. what could over 60,000 people accomplish for libraries if everyone participated? that is why you should do it. if you don’t, it’s like saying you don’t believe in representative democracy. so really, what can you do? as i’ve discussed in this post, legislative advocacy for libraries by library workers is important, and doesn’t happen enough. however, there are numerous things that you can do to get involved in legislative advocacy for libraries. start reading advocacy messages you receive via e-mail, or facebook, or twitter and contact your legislators. if you’re a member of state or regional organization that performs advocacy work, get involved with your local committee. see if your organization can make use of capwiz by partnering with ala. download an app to your smart phone, or visit a web site that tracks legislative issues to educate yourself about what’s happening that might affect libraries. and finally, encourage all of your colleagues to join us in advocating in libraries. the more advocates we have, the more successful our libraries and profession becomes. a big thank you to kim leeder who sat with me to brainstorm this post during a bout of writer’s block at ala annual, to hilary davis and leigh anne vrabel for contributing editorial remarks, and to janet webster, oregon’s number one library advocate, for feedback on this post. citations and resources for legislative advocacy 2011 emerging leaders project p abramson, l. (2005). the secret court of terror investigations. advocating in a tough economy toolkit ala’s lsta talking points ala washington office ala washington office trainings american library association inc. v. united states, et al; multnomah county public library, et al v. united states of america, et al. nos. civ.a. 01-1303, civ.a. 01-1322. 201 f. supp. 2d 401 (e.d. penn. may 31, 2002). retrieved 6/21/2011 from http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17607118420466359814 capwiz congress for android congress for iphone dear colleague letter district dispatch ford, e. (2011). report on national library legislative day. acrl oregon/ola academic division blog. june 1, 2011. access june 24, 2011 from http://acrloregon.org/2011/06/01/report-on-national-library-legislative-day-2011/ govtrack.us harper collins boycott issue brief for oregon sb 41 (.doc) mclane, m. (2011). library advocacy and the college librarian. college & undergraduate libraries, 18(1), 128-131. national conference of state legislatures national library legislative day (nlld)oregon library association development and legislative committee capwiz site oregon’s library legislative day oregon school library data oregon state library ross, a. & ciada, n. (2005). action and reaction: libraries in the post 9/11 environment. library and information science research, 27. 97-114. usa patriot act and intellectual freedom webster, j. ed. (1997). political action. ola quarterly 2(4). retrieved june 24, 2011 from http://data.memberclicks.com/site/ola/olaq_2no4.pdf wood, d. (2011). 2011 emerging leaders develop national libraries build communities program. american libraries ala student membership blog. advocacy, legislation, legislative advocacy understanding library impacts on student learning collaborating with faculty part 2: what our partnerships look like 6 responses john burgess 2011–06–29 at 3:35 pm what a helpful post. i’ll pass it along. emily ford 2011–06–29 at 8:46 pm glad you liked it. if you have a story about advocacy, please share in the comments! pingback : weekend reading: summer cocktails edition profhacker the chronicle of higher education diedre conkling 2011–07–01 at 4:52 pm this is a very nice piece. i am going to share it with others, including the ala committee on legislation grassroots subcommittee. emily ford 2011–07–04 at 10:56 am thanks, diedre! i’d be glad to hear any more thoughts or enhancements from the col grassroots subcommittee… pingback : blogging about library blogs « kristininprogress this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a conversation with kristin antelman – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 29 apr brett bonfield /7 comments a conversation with kristin antelman “teapots in a tempest” phot by flickr user gaijinseb  (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) by brett bonfield only a few information technology organizations predict the future by inventing it.1 one of the canonical examples is xerox parc, which in the early 1970’s produced the first mouse, pioneered graphical user interfaces, invented ethernet, and developed the first laser printer, along with dozens of other innovations. among contemporary organizations, the inheritor of this lineage appears to be google. the graduate library school at the university of chicago during its early years is probably the most widely accepted xerox parc analog within librarianship. if libraries have a google equivalent, a contemporary organization that is both synthesizing the best work in the field and shaping its future, it’s north carolina state university libraries. under susan nutter’s directorship, ncsu libraries became the first university library to win the association of college and research libraries’ excellence in academic libraries award and received the american library association’s library of the future award; susan nutter was library journal‘s librarian of the year in 2005; and it places someone in lj‘s movers & shakers list pretty much every year. observe ncsu libraries from afar and you can’t help but be impressed. study it up close, as i did two years ago this week, and you get a sense of what it must have been like to work at xerox parc or, i expect, what it’s like to work at google. two years ago, i was a library school student enrolled in steven bell’s academic librarianship course at drexel university. the major assignment for the class was to conduct a field report on a library, and susan nutter allowed me to spend a day interviewing her management team, mostly individually or in small groups. one of the major themes i noticed was how fortunate they felt to work with each other. they believed they were working more hours than their colleagues at peer institutions, but they also believed they were having more fun (in my experience, both beliefs seem to be accurate). as complimentary as they were toward all of their colleagues, when they began listing the colleagues who they most admired, who drove them the hardest, who made them feel like what they were doing was important–and just about every member of the management team cited just about everyone else by name–inevitably they started that list with kristin antelman. the sense i got of kristin, in part from our conversation, but mostly from hearing her colleagues talk about her, was captured by steve yegge, a programmer at google, in a post entitled done, and get things smart: “at first it’s entirely non-obvious who’s responsible for google’s culture of engineering discipline: the design docs, audited code reviews, early design reviews, readability reviews, resisting introduction of new languages, unit testing and code coverage, profiling and performance testing, etc. you know. the whole gamut of processes and tools that quality engineering organizations use to ensure that code is open, readable, documented, and generally non-shoddy work. but if you keep an eye on the emails that go out to google’s engineering staff, over time a pattern emerges: there’s one superheroic dude who’s keeping us all in line.”2 the trait kristin shares with yegge’s coworker at google is that she excels at understanding how decisions made today—or left unmade today—can impact the future. and she insists on looking at reality as it is and seems likely to be, not as people might wish for it to be. as ncsu’s associate director for the digital library, one of her major initiatives over the past few years was to lead the group that first introduced faceted browsing to library catalogs, using the endeca software that was previously used only on commercial websites like home depot’s. after rolling out the catalog at ncsu libraries, she and her colleagues worked with their peers in the triangle research library network to create an endeca-powered union catalog (in addition to ncsu, the network comprises the university of north carolina at chapel hill, duke university, and north carolina central university). in an article for the april 2009 issue of college & research libraries news she co-authored with trln’s mona couts, they emphasize the ambiguity inherent in the project: “trln librarians were in agreement that our catalogs were bad, and that what ncsu had in its endeca catalog was, if not the answer, at least an improvement. the harder challenge is that the very concept of the catalog is in transition. implementing a “next-generation” catalog doesn’t answer the question, what should a library catalog be anymore?” when i learned that a group of assistant/associate university librarians and assistant/associate directors (aul/ad) in academic libraries, known as the taiga forum, issued a series of provocative statements on the future of libraries, it was no surprise to me that kristin antelman was on the steering committee that helped create the document. and when i read the statements themselves, i was sure i detected some of her ideas. over the past few weeks, i had the good fortune to interview kristin about taiga, the statements, and the future of libraries. although during the course of our conversation we chose not to dissect the taiga forum members’ creation or discussion of each statement individually,3 we encourage you to use the comments section that follows this article to share your thoughts on the statements themselves as well as the other ideas kristin shared. why did you agree to join the taiga steering committee and to moderate a session? what was it about taiga that appealed to you? i got involved with organizing taiga 4 because i had attended the first three taigas and found them to be great meetings. they were unlike any professional meetings i had been to; we spent a whole day talking honestly about big and difficult challenges facing academic libraries. at the end of taiga 3, i felt i wanted to have some input in how the next one was done. the taiga meetings were conceived as a venue for people at the associate university librarian/associate director level in academic libraries to get together and discuss common challenges. we tend to have few peers in our home institutions and, sometimes, in smaller institutions, none at all. the premise of taiga was that, while directors had venues to talk amongst themselves, there was no such venue for administrators below the level of director to talk frankly about issues across functional lines and with colleagues from other institutions. the first year saw the development of ten provocative statements. those statements ended up serving as the basis for lively conversations not only at the first taiga meeting itself, but in academic libraries across the country for years afterward. i think they struck a chord because they dared to express fears and forebodings about our collective future that many of us were feeling but that we may not have had the courage (at that time anyway) to speak freely about. taigas 2 and 3, very successfully in my opinion, employed the “open space” approach to participant-defined meetings. you could even say we were ahead of the curve on the “unconference.” the aspect of taiga 4 that has received the most attention was its revised “provocative statements” document. what was its purpose? for taiga 4, which was held this past january before ala in denver, the steering group had the idea to revisit which (if any) of the original provocative statements were still valid, and then to add to them. the new statements would be focused around the theme of this year’s meeting, “organizational change: professional identity and personal commitment.” we asked the taiga community for feedback and took those responses into account when we wrote the new statements. as it happened, we did not carry forward any of the original statements, but incorporated a lot of the same themes in the new ones. the statements were written by a subgroup of the steering committee over several phone calls and wiki work. they were then commented on and edited by the full steering committee, and were distributed to the people who signed up to attend the meeting. we then asked for volunteers to do “lightning talks” on the statements at the taiga 4 meeting. those talks were each followed by 10 or so minutes of discussion, which planted many seeds for conversation for the rest of the day. at the end of the meeting, we reviewed how we felt about the statements. that recap resulted in minor changes, including deleting statement #3 (about the dominance of google) as not very provocative. one of the misconceptions about the statements has been that the taiga meeting participants believe that these things will happen, or, more interestingly, should happen. actually, their purpose is largely rhetorical. we hoped the statements would inspire conversation—and resistance!—at our meeting. we very intentionally meant to say that we feel that research libraries are facing serious challenges to core areas of what we do and that we want to talk about these challenges without presuming any answers. i would also add (and here i’m speaking for myself and not the group) that i think the statements also explicitly confront superficial optimism about how academic libraries—and librarians—will transition into new roles. the subtext of many of the statements is the as-yet-unknown impact of a potentially prolonged period of tough budget times, which was just becoming evident when these were written. how libraries build collections and are staffed now is a product of many decades of pretty robust growth. it remains to be seen what path libraries will take when budgets are shrinking, but ideas like realizing we cannot support a hybrid print/electronic model indefinitely, or cannot continue to work around underperforming employees, are a couple responses to these pressures that we explored. are the reactions you’ve seen—the ones that respond to the content rather than the context—in any way satisfying, even if their writers appear to be dismissive of the ideas expressed within the statements? do these librarians’ strong reactions mean the statements are doing what they’re supposed to do? any reaction means the statements have had an impact. response to the statements’ content and their context have been quite intertwined, however. having made the decision to send the statements out into the world, we made a mistake in distributing them in a static way, with a lack of transparency about their context (who did this? what was the purpose?). we were rightly criticized for that.4 apparently, the darien statements might be a response to taiga, although they don’t claim that.5 aside from being both being list-like and appearing around the same time, i don’t see too many commonalities. except, that is, in the section called “as librarians, we must…”, where the darien statements have quite a bit in common with the spirit of taiga, including their own expression of some of the points made in the provocative statements. one aspect of the responses that does concern me is that there seems to be a pervasive, and enthusiastically embraced, gap of trust with administrators. while maybe that’s just something that always has been and always will be, it concerns me because these divisions weaken us. those of us who are currently auls or ads are not mba-types dropped into libraries; we have spent most of our careers working in various non-administrative librarian jobs. in fact, my impression is that a significant number of aul/ads attend taiga soon after arriving in their positions. another criticism i’ve seen is that we’re too negative, that we don’t propose answers. it’s worth noting that, while most of the statements themselves don’t propose answers, the discussion at the meeting did very much address answers. how libraries address the challenges facing us often gets back to organizational culture. acknowledging the need, and then adjusting what we do and who does it, sometimes in significant ways, is not an easy task for any of us, whether you are a front-line library worker, a manager, or an administrator. a couple colleagues and i have been working on a project to find out more about what future library leaders are thinking. this dovetailed with the taiga 4 theme, so we prepared a little video of interviews with some of these librarians that we showed at the beginning of the meeting. will there be a taiga 5? since taiga is not a formal organization, we see where it takes us year to year. thanks to the continued generosity of our sponsors, innovative interfaces and r2 consulting, a taiga 5 meeting will be possible, but what form it will take remains to be seen. time for some non-taiga questions. what do you think library schools should be emphasizing? requiring? or, put another way, what are the abilities you consider most important in potential ncsu fellows? library school programs are becoming increasingly differentiated it seems to me; and they have to in order to survive. distance education will make it possible for prospective students to find the program that best meets their needs. these are both positive developments. i think that internships are even more critical than ever. every recent mls we hire tells us that they learned more in those experiences than they did from their educational program. separating the masters coursework from learning library practice would also help address the theory/practice identity crisis characteristic of mls programs. in terms of skills, i like to see librarians who have the ability to think through problems in a systematic way, who can learn independently, who are fearless and enthusiastic about technology. it’s critical that they be able to communicate effectively, including in writing, and that they show leadership qualities. they should be focused on the big picture and be pointed toward the future, thinking about what libraries are for, not what we do, because what we do is changing very quickly. i’m very encouraged by the graduates i’ve seen in recent years. the applicants to our fellows program just seem to get stronger every year. what are the most useful things ala can do for us as a profession? i think ala is most effective when it works as an advocate for public libraries, promoting the contribution that public libraries make to communities across the country. our public libraries are a tremendous achievement of this society, really unique in the world, and yet one that we cannot take for granted will always be there, especially as local governments are hard hit economically. ala and its divisions also serve as a valuable professional development opportunity, where people can find leadership and other opportunities even if their jobs do not offer them the chance to develop in that way. are there any other professional associations or consortia that are more important to you than ala? actually, ala is pretty important to me. lita is my primary home in ala, and i try to stay involved with lita committees, etc. closer to home, the triangle research libraries network is an important professional connection. trln is very active both in developing shared services and sponsoring information sharing and professional development events for staff at the trln libraries. the digital library federation (recently folded into clir) and the coalition for networked information have been important associations for me as well. both organizations hold semi-annual meetings where members can share ongoing work. what data do you wish you had available to you in figuring out how well the library is meeting its constituency’s needs? data about fast-changing areas, such as discovery, would be useful to have. i’m concerned that we understand only in a sketchy way how our different users are finding the information they need, and where and when that leads them to library collections or to library-provided tools. two or three years from now, what will be the minimum requirements for a really good library website/catalog? what will its users expect it to be able to do? i anticipate users will expect to have to interact with the library website or catalog much less, or hardly ever at all—which, i note, is hardly a provocative statement! the library website will continue to lead our users to information about our spaces and services, but our goal should be to make its footprint as minimal as possible in our users’ lives. the resources they can get to by virtue of their institutional affiliation should be seamlessly linkable from course sites and search engines. for this to happen, linking technologies, like openurl, will have to work even better than they do now. but we also will have to make this vision a priority—from negotiations with information providers to how we make local investments of our staff time and development resources. do you foresee anything changing the dynamic between libraries and information providers? one frustration for me is that we have not had much success in buying/licensing just data; providers will only offer data in the context of their products, their interfaces. had libraries been able to buy metadata for scholarly articles, for instance, we could have conceivably developed reasonable metasearch solutions. but that time is passed, now, with google scholar. good data to support reference linking services is still hard to get, and it hurts our services. quality metadata to drive openurl-based services for ebooks is also an area where the information ecosystem has a ways to go. ebooks themselves have all kinds of platform restrictions that create challenges for libraries. but whether libraries have now, or will ever have, the leverage to get access to more open content is debatable. as the market consolidates around google and a handful of major publishers, we will likely increasingly be at their mercy, in terms of apis into their content and services. even if that’s the case, though, there’s much that can be done with those tools; i think libraries by and large underutilize those opportunities to develop integrated services that are already made available to us. what could we be doing to better utilize the available tools? just looking at the catalog, there’s no reason that any library should be running a last-generation ils opac interface. there are open source and relatively low-cost commercial options that can give your library a current, faceted interface with good relevancy in keyword searching. there are also a range of apis from google, oclc, librarything, etc. that should be employed to make searching the catalog a richer experience, better integrated with the larger information environment. is there anything we could do to that would keep us from being at the mercy of google and the major publishers? i’m much more concerned about being at the mercy of publishers than google. google has advanced access to information worldwide far more than libraries ever could dream of doing; where they encroach on our area they are changing the paradigm for the better (for example, full text-based rather than metadata-based discovery of books). scholarly publishers, operating in an increasingly consolidated market, will continue to raise prices beyond inflation and restrict libraries through complex big deal licenses. they do have us at their mercy. open access may be the eventual solution (and i think it is) but, in the interim, the detrimental impacts of their dominance (smaller market for monographs, for instance) will continue to be significant. one thing libraries can do—and many have done—is never again enter into big deals, where flexibility is traded for cost savings. another thing libraries can do is to be less fixated on collecting for posterity. scholarly work is increasingly preserved beyond our walls: a significant percentage of the best articles are already openly available on the web (and this segment is growing), while another significant percentage is made openly available by publishers after an embargo period. libraries, collectively, will have to be less dogmatic about licensing (and replicating) complete and official versions of the stm (scientific/technical/medical) literature. at risk are two dimensions of our mission that have historically (and justifiably) defined us as research libraries: developing collections of significant breadth to meet the needs of all our constituents and maintaining the capacity to invest in new services. if a large library had to make big cuts, what are the first expenses that should go? what are the programs/positions, etc. it should absolutely protect? this is very much a local decision and depends on where the library has already had to cut back and where its strengths lie. while downsizing is an opportunity to be strategic about positioning our organizations for the future, i don’t think we’re yet in a climate where our parent institutions will tolerate unbalanced cuts, i.e., cuts that too disproportionately affect either collections or services. one of the provocative statements (or perhaps two) addresses the need to reduce speculative spending;6 i think that will have to come to pass, and sooner rather than later. i also think we’ll have to get out of the local catalog business within a couple years, and that has significant implications for our technical services staff. digital library development is still starved in most institutions, resulting in the poor discovery tools and websites that we see now. how each library faces these challenges, both the process they take and the outcome, will reveal much about the character of an organization and its leadership. i also see that libraries will have to focus somewhat less on serving the broader library community and community of future scholars, and much more on their mission within their own organization. for libraries with limited resources, there’s often a tension between serving the broader scholarly community and meeting local needs. how do you see this playing out? this question gets at what i think is a big challenge for us. our special collections may be where we are unique, and can make the greatest contribution to the cultural heritage community at large, but they will never be where we will make the greatest contribution locally. and the path forward (digitization) is expensive. so the question arises, why would—or should—our universities fund that work? one of the taiga statements mentioned that these efforts would be privately funded, and i think that will have to be the case, although this will result in organizational inefficiencies and relatively slow progress overall. but special collections are not the future for most academic libraries. the future that we all share is becoming much better integrated into campus life, and closer to teaching and learning (there’s a taiga statement about that, too, the “blended librarian” idea). let’s finish on a positive note. what have been some of your most pleasant surprises over the last five years? what’s happened for you professionally, for ncsu libraries, or for the profession as a whole that’s far exceeded your expectations? as far as ncsu libraries goes, the biggest surprise has been that the state legislature funded a new library for nc state university. the $126 million library, the james b. hunt jr. library, is currently completing the design phase and is scheduled to open in 2012. librarians who have lived through retrofits and add-ons to existing buildings know how constraining that can be in terms of creating new spaces for users. the opportunity to participate in the design of new learning, collaborative, and research spaces, rich in technology and good design, has been a huge thrill for me. if we do this right, it will serve as a model for what an academic library can be going forward. in terms of the profession as a whole, i would return to the topic of the new graduates that our library schools are producing. i would say that, without question, the graduates of the last five years are more well-rounded, smarter, and better prepared to make immediate contributions than at any time since i’ve been a librarian. these people are, by definition, our future. it’s up to us to give them the tools they need and the latitude to realize their potential within our organizations. if we can do that, libraries will have a bright future. thanks to kristin antelman for her thoughtful responses and her generosity, and to stephanie atkins, beth picknally camden, claire stewart, and hilary davis for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. the full quote by alan kay: “don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do… the best way to predict the future is to invent it. really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of newton’s laws!” he said it during an early meeting of parc members and xerox planners. [↩] yegge writes later in the essay: “incidentally, they hired plenty of other brilliant seed engineers who were equally responsible for google’s great technical infrastructure. i’m just using this one guy as an illustrative example.” i’m doing the same. a lot of people are responsible for making ncsu, in my opinion, the best library in existence. but i got the sense, from my conversations that day, that they credited kristin with keeping them all in line. [↩] as kristin noted, “i’m uncomfortable speaking for the group in that way, i.e., interpreting the meaning behind the statements or characterizing the discussions of the day (i couldn’t even accurately recall such, even if we didn’t tell people they were confidential).” i think this makes a great deal of sense, especially once you understand how taiga works and the reason the statements were drafted. [↩] some of the writers who have been involved in the conversation inspired by the 2009 provocative statements include: steven bell (acrlog); john dupuis (confessions of a science librarian); meredith farkas (information wants to be free); steve lawson (see also…); dorothea salo (caveat lector); and roy tennant (library journal digital libraries). [↩] the official version of the darien statements on the library and librarians is hosted at john blyberg’s blyberg.net. for more on the darien statements, see posts by cindi trainor at citegeist and kathryn greenhill at librarians matter. [↩] statements 2 and 7, which read as follows: 2. in five years collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron-initiated. ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. the only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives. 7. in five years libraries will have abandoned the hybrid model to focus exclusively on electronic collections, with limited investments in managing shared print archives. local unique collections will be funded only by donor contributions. [↩] ala, collection development, darien statements, google, kristin antelman, ncsu, provocative statements, taiga forum social proof: a tool for determining authority why we should adopt alaconnect: a brief review and rumination on ala’s new online community 7 responses steve lawson 2009–04–29 at 12:31 pm thanks for this very interesting (should i say “provocative?”) interview. i wanted to respond to the idea that some of the negative response to the taiga statements comes from a general distrust or dislike of library administrators. i’m not sure i see that, even in the admittedly harsh or hostile statements from john dupuis, dorothea salo, and myself. (it might be worth pointing out that john blyberg, one of the authors of the darien statements, is himself an ad, though of a public library. while there have certainly been some negative reactions to the darien statements, i don’t think they have directed at blyberg’s job title.) i think the response is to the content of the statements and to the lack of context and transparency that antelman acknowledges to be a problem. the taiga participants apparently had a very lively, open discussion with each other, but it so far it has seemed like they aren’t really all that interested in having such an exchange about the statements with the outside world (with the notable exception of steven bell). when people are “provocative” on the internet without engaging with their audience in good faith, we call that “trolling.” this interview is very different, with antelman providing context, opinions, questions and answers of her own. i’d rather read ten such revealing interviews with ads or auls than read ten more provocative statements. derik badman 2009–04–29 at 1:26 pm i’d hazard a guess that some of the response might be a combination of the lack of context/transparency and the origin of the statements from library administrators. as has been noted in some other posts on the statements, there is a “smoke-filled room” aspect to the document that be too analogous to relationships between administrators and the “rank and file” librarians. this type of published conversation with one of those administrators is/would-be a much more effective way to be provocative and engage discussion. kristin’s statements certainly add context to some of the taiga statements. thorn 2009–04–29 at 2:11 pm this interview, and the taiga 4 ‘provocative statements’ raise some larger questions in my mind. – higher education as a whole is changing, too. how will libraries and higher ed as a whole affect each other? – who will have access to all of this information? in the past and present, the quality of library resources and access has been, and is a ‘selling’ point for each institution to attract the highest-quality students, graduate students and faculty. in the future, will that continue to be ‘siloed’ as it is now? – what is to become of individuals’ access to current information to keep their knowledge and skills up to date once they’re ‘out in the world’, given that only a small minority of university graduates end up working in academia? will this improve over time, remain much as it is, or will it get worse? and, given that failing to remain informed is the surest path to rapid obsolescence of the human resource, what about use? just thinking. pingback : trying to understand twibes « liblearn’s blog kim leeder 2009–05–05 at 4:50 pm to bring up something a little different from the post, i’m interested in exploring the “gap of trust” in administrators kristin mentions. one theory on the matter is that the shift from librarian to administrator is akin to the shift from library school student to librarian, or from grad student to professor, in that the preparation is woefully unequal to the task! where our leaders stumble, i think, is in lack of management training, not a lack of good intentions. and where libraries differ from other academic units is that (in most places) we are not empowered to select our leaders. a lack of involvement in the process of hiring our administrators translates as a lack of investment in the result. then, above all, it is much easier to criticize than to take the time to understand. dalea 2009–05–06 at 6:38 am quoting antelman: “…linking technologies, like openurl, will have to work even better than they do now.” can’t agree more with this statement. the greatest problem in this area is not the technology, however, but our lack of human investment in the technology. most libraries woefully understaff their link resolvers, and think that by licensing some vendor kb that it can be managed in a few hours per week. as she notes later, digital library development is generally starved, and this is one of its key manifestations in the realm of direct user services. going beyond this issue, there’s also the issue that a fair percentage of academic librarians (yes, even those fresh from library school) couldn’t explain how a link resolver works nor contribute in any useful way to its maintenance, even if their contribution were only occasional feedback informed by just a bit of knowledge and understanding. derik badman 2009–05–07 at 12:26 pm kim: that’s a great point about administration and training. i’d be curious to see some kind of data on administrators, training, and the criteria for which they were chosen for their position. obviously, not the kind of data one could get. but i wonder if administrators are often chosen for a) previous administrative experience and b) performance/accomplishments at non-administrative level, with b preceding a in a career path. i would suspect there is a perceived correlation in minds between performance at a non-admin job and potential for an admin job (i.e. i’m do great as a reference librarian so i should do great as an administrative librarian). a correlation that is, probably, often, not necessarily true. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct new hampshire public library services for survivors of domestic and sexual violence – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 12 jun miranda dube /1 comments new hampshire public library services for survivors of domestic and sexual violence in brief domestic violence and sexual assault survivors experience unique information needs that can be answered through formal avenues such as a crisis center or police/court proceedings, but many survivors do not take a formal route to recovery. this survey seeks to identify what services and policies guide new hampshire public libraries in providing services to survivors to assist them in navigating the experience and recovery from domestic or sexual violence. by miranda dube new hampshire, photo credit wanda dube introduction ongoing and widespread discussion within our culture is shedding light on the issue of sexual assault and domestic violence. sexual assault and domestic violence do not discriminate and can impact anyone of any race, gender, ability, age, or sexual orientation. in the state of new hampshire, roughly one in four women and one in twenty men have been sexually assaulted (nhcadsv, n.d.), which means there is the potential for almost 200,000 sexual assault survivors in the state, making up 15% of the population (united states census bureau, n.d.). concrete statistics on domestic violence in new hampshire are difficult to find, but would undoubtedly increase the number of survivors of violence. according to the new hampshire coalition against domestic and sexual violence, 13,505 adults and children who experienced domestic or sexual violence in 2016 received formal services from one of the thirteen member programs in the state (nhcadsv, n.d.). there is a large difference between how many people the crisis centers serve in a year and the total number of survivors in our state, but it is an important discrepancy to discuss in order to understand the role public libraries could play in providing services and information to survivors of domestic and sexual violence1 throughout the recovery process. it is likely that the people seeking formal services from the crisis centers are either currently or have recently experienced violence, making the desire for crisis center support such as court advocates, hospital accompaniment, relocation, support services, and safety planning a current need. survivors who are not currently experiencing violence still need supportive services, but their needs may not align with the services offered by formal organizations. dr. judith herman’s (1992) book trauma and recovery outlines three stages that survivors of trauma experience, beginning with safety and stabilization, followed by remembrance and mourning, and concluding with reconnection and integration. not every survivor will go through formal channels, such as the police or crisis center, to assist them in the recovery process, so what options are left for survivors? research purpose and questions this research uses qualitative and quantitative data from new hampshire public libraries to identify what services are offered to survivors of domestic and sexual violence in order to theorize on potential barriers and improvements that could be made. while the study focuses on new hampshire public libraries, the barriers and services discussed henceforth could be applied to any library implementing similar programming, policies, and attitudes. this study seeks to answer: how do public libraries in the state of new hampshire provide information for survivors of domestic and sexual violence? what are the potential barriers to information seeking at public libraries for survivors of domestic and sexual violence? it is difficult to answer these questions without survivor input, for they are the experts on what they may want or need from the library. the original study design consisted of an additional survey for survivors of domestic and sexual violence who reside in the state of new hampshire, with the hopes that information from both groups could be compared against one another. however, the response rate was extremely low (n=3) and that part of the study was closed. in place of first-hand knowledge of what survivors want or need from their library, information on survivors’ process of recovery and barriers to library access for a myriad of marginalized groups has been used to hypothesize on potential problems and solutions. research design a survey consisting of 34 questions was sent to 203 public libraries in new hampshire. while 231 public libraries were identified, 28 of them lacked a website, email address, phone number, or a combination of these communication methods, creating a barrier to delivering the electronic survey. where possible, emails were sent to the director of the library, but if no email was provided for the director, the library’s general email was utilized. of the 203 emails sent, 29 were returned, for a response rate of 14%. results and discussion the survey asked respondents to report information in six categories: collection development, staff training/awareness, library policy, safety concerns, library programming, and assistance in the five information seeking stages of survivors. the importance and implications of each section are discussed with the data. collection development participants were asked to provide information about their collections, all data collected used the dewey decimal system as a reference point. during survey distribution, four libraries responded that they would be unable to participate due to not having an automated system, and one library responded that they did not use dewey decimal and the process of translating their collection system to dewey would put undue stress on the librarian’s time. while it is unfortunate that the survey design prevented these five libraries from participating, it was imperative to have consistency in the reporting of information and to maintain a low level of impact on survey responders. participants were asked to report information in the broad categories of the call numbers 364 and 362, which house the majority of materials on sexual assault and domestic violence respectively. it is important to note that other subjects are held within these call numbers as well, so the reported numbers are not in direct relation to domestic and sexual violence materials, but they do provide a baseline for how domestic and sexual violence materials are used in the library. the participating libraries housed a range of 0-569 books in the call number 364, with an average of 86 materials. these materials have an average publication date range of 1984-2017, and an average circulation range of 0-22 was reported (average circulation statistics were calculated based on how many times the material circulated for the length of time the library owned the item, not for a specified date range of circulations). when averaging out the reported data, the average publication date of materials in call number 364 is 2006, and the materials circulate an average of 6.5 times. call number 362 housed a range of 0-536 books, with an average of 49 materials. these materials have an average publication date range of 2000-2015, and an average circulation range of 0-29 was reported. when averaging out the reported data, the average publication date of materials in call number 362 is 2006, and the materials circulate an average of 6.37 times. without analyzing each library’s holdings on the subjects, it is impossible to hypothesize on why some materials circulate more than others, if certain publication dates are preferable, or if the collection should house more materials on the subject. however, utilizing crew: a weeding manual for modern libraries (2012) we can identify what criteria should go into maintaining these collections. according to the manual, materials housed in the call number range of 360-369 should be weeded based on age and popularity, and care should be taken to watch for “social welfare topics that are changing rapidly” (larson, 2012, p. 67). the conversation around sexual assault evolved rapidly through social networks in 2017 when actress alyssa milano sent a tweet that would soon go viral, even though the phrase “me too” had been coined in 2006 by the grassroots efforts of tarana burke (alyssa_milano, 2017; me too, 2018). with the heightened awareness on sexual assault, new books such as chessy prout’s memoir i have the right to were published, yet the average publication date for the respondents is 2006, long before many of the conversations we are having today took place. similarly, terminology surrounding domestic violence has shifted from “battered woman syndrome” which was largely popular in the 1990’s to more inclusive language such as “intimate partner violence.” this change in terminology is another suggested criteria for weeding listed in the crew manual (larson, 2012, p. 67). developing collections that house appropriate and culturally relevant materials on these subjects may not only help circulation statistics, but they may also assist survivors in locating applicable and timely material that is free from bias and judgement, and full of accurate resources. participants also reported the content of the physical books held in their collections. the categories included materials on empowerment (20%), information about abuse geared towards children/teens (16%), overview materials on domestic and sexual violence (11%), personal memoirs/biographies of survivors (27%), legal resources (24%), and fiction (1%). with a quarter of holdings on domestic violence and sexual assault relating to legal resources, it is even more imperative that the materials be current in order for survivors to make life-altering decisions with the best information. in addition to physical books, participants reported the following materials as available in their libraries, listed in order of most to least reported: audiobooks, ebooks, dvds, posters/pamphlets, and online journal articles. nine libraries reported that they do not offer any other sources of information on domestic and sexual violence besides physical books. further research with survivors would be necessary to determine if alternative methods of information delivery would be preferable. staff training/awareness participants were asked to rate statements regarding how often upper management conducts training with their staff that specifically discusses domestic and sexual violence on a scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” when asked to rate “upper management conducts training with newly hired staff and volunteers” specific to domestic and sexual violence,” 69% (n=20) of participants responded “disagree” or “strongly disagree,” 3% (n=1) responded “agree,” and 27% (n=8) responded with “neutral.” additionally, participants were asked to rate the following statement: “upper management conducts training with staff and volunteers that specifically discusses domestic and sexual violence survivors yearly,” which was aimed at discovering other professional development training that may occur at the library post-employment. 65% (n=19) of participants responded “disagree” or “strongly disagree,” 3% (n=1) responded “agree,” and 31% (n=9) responded with “neutral.” in order to provide services to special populations such as survivors, there must be some component of training provided by upper-management, which would also require upper-management to be aware of the unique needs of the population. this will be further explored at the end of the paper. the researchers also sought to identify librarians’ knowledge of services in their area, hopeful that even without training, staff may know how to locate the resources individually. participants were asked to report if all, most, some, or none of their staff members were aware of where the local crisis center is that serves their area. 55% (n=16) of libraries felt that less than half their staff knew this information. when asked how many staff members they felt could locate information about where the local crisis center was, 27% (n=8) felt that less than half of their staff could not locate this information, and 44% (n=13) felt that all their staff members could locate this information if needed. while it is great that staff could locate the information if necessary, evans and feder (2016) point out that informal disclosures to informal networks, such as a library staff member, only result in formal support if the person receiving the disclosure has prior knowledge or experience with domestic violence (p. 62). therefore, it is necessary for all library staff to know this information prior to a disclosure or help-seeking question in order to be most successful in assisting the patron with locating formal resources. another important area of training in relation to domestic and sexual violence survivors is restraining orders. when asked if staff are trained on how to handle restraining orders, 76% (n=22) of participants responded “no,” 10% (n=3) did not respond, 3% (n=1) have met and talked amongst themselves, 3% (n=1) work directly with law enforcement, 6% (n=2) are unsure, and 3% (n=1) reported that restraining orders are not applicable at their library. training on how to handle restraining orders as well as interacting with an abuser are imperative to survivor and library staff safety, as fleeing an abusive relationship results in a 500 times more likely chance of increased violence, including homicide (mitchell, 2017). library policy as mentioned previously, some survivors of violence will seek formal services, such as safe shelter to live in, which may be at a homeless or crisis center, both of which present unique barriers to library card access. while not all survivors of domestic and sexual violence live in shelter, this study sought to identify barriers survivors may face, which includes barriers caused from living in shelter. participants were asked to report a variety of library policies that relate to obtaining access to library materials for those residing in shelter. proof of residence was required by 79% (n=23) libraries, 7% (n=2) did not provide an answer, 3% (n=1) have no requirement, and 10% (n=3) provided answers that were uncategorizable. even though survivors may be living in a shelter similar to those experiencing homelessness, crisis centers are unique in not providing their address, which would provide safety issues for not only the person seeking the library card but everyone who lives or will live in the building. the researchers asked participants if there were any special rules or regulations that apply to survivors living in shelter who wish to obtain a library card. 24% (n=7) report not having a town shelter, 20% (n=6) require a letter from the shelter, 14% (n=4) require an id with a town address, 10% (n=3) require verbally informing staff, 10% (n=3) reported no special rules or regulations, 17% (n=5) provided no answer or had no idea about special requirements, and 3% (n=1) would try to confirm residency by phone. while there is no ideal way for libraries to confirm residency for survivors living in shelter, as almost all would require a public disclosure, requiring an id with a town address would require survivors to wait a longer period of time to obtain the card, and confirming residency by phone is only possible if the survivor gives consent, as residents’ names are never given for any reason (anonymous, personal communication, december 28, 2018). safety concerns participants were asked to report how sensitive information is monitored and kept safe within the library in regards to domestic and sexual violence survivors. when asked whether or not “staff is trained to never reveal the details of a patron’s account, especially to a spouse, as they could be a potential abuser,” 90% (n=26) of participants said yes, they were trained to follow the law regarding privacy, 3% (n=1) responded no, and 6% (n=2) did not answer. an area of concern is the additional responses from libraries that answered “yes” to this question. additional information provided by the participants showcased ideologies that are not only of concern to survivors but the general public. two participants expanded their answer of “yes” by adding the following statements: “never is a strong word, there are occasions when it is appropriate to reveal a book title to a family member but generally speaking we respect privacy,” and “we abide by the law to the best of our ability.” in our profession, patron privacy is of the utmost importance and is one of the pillars of the public library and people’s freedom to read. the fact that some libraries do not feel compelled to uphold this, or to only uphold the law to the best of their ability (it is unclear where that line is drawn), creates a significant safety issue not only for survivors but for anyone utilizing those libraries. only one participant responded with specific information about privacy training and intra-family privacy concerns, which include domestic and sexual violence. it is possible that if upper-management of libraries develop an understanding of the unique power and manipulation tactics used by abusers, it could shed light on and inform library training on patron privacy to reinforce how necessary this practice is. an additional area of concern is sharing patron information amongst staff. while many libraries require survivors living in shelter to disclose their status, only 10% of the respondents train staff to not share this information with other staff members. sharing this information with all staff members may provide minimal benefit to the patron, such as if an abuser were to show up at the library; however this outweighs the safety issues of a staff member sharing this information publicly and retraumatizing the victim through disclosing their story without their permission. some potential solutions may be to develop a reporting plan in individual libraries that provides strict guidelines about whom information can be shared with, and what to do when shelter residents obtain a library card. additionally, protocol must be developed for how letters from shelters providing proof of address are stored, if they are stored at all. ideally, library staff would confirm residence through the letter and return the letter to the patron so there is no concern with the library holding such important and potentially deadly information. library programming/services in addition to the questions on collection development, safety concerns, library card policies, and staff training, participants responded to questions regarding programming and services that relate to domestic and sexual violence survivors. one such service is a meeting space for a survivor to meet with a crisis center advocate. by creating space in a library for these meetings to take place, libraries allow for a safe and neutral place for survivors to meet with advocates who may not have otherwise had the opportunity due to safety issues with going to a crisis center office. over half (55%, or n=16) of the participants stated they do provide meeting space for this purpose, 28% (n=8) could provide the service if needed, and 17% (n=5) do not or could not offer this service due to space constrictions. one thing that is unclear from this survey question is whether or not these libraries actively share that these rooms are available with their local crisis center, or if the space is just generally available. there is a possibility for community partnership if libraries share their available space opportunities with their local crisis center, and an opportunity for more active learning about domestic and sexual violence. participants were also asked about passive and active programming offered at their library. the majority of programming offered at new hampshire libraries is passive, consisting of book displays, posters with crisis center information, and fact sheets about domestic and sexual violence. in comparison, only five participants reported active programming which consisted of a workshop on personal protection, a support group, a presentation from a local crisis center, and two partnerships with a local crisis center, although it is unclear what active programming came out of the latter. this research does not seek to tell survivors what they do or do not need from their library in terms of services, so it is unwise to recommend types of programming that should be offered without input from survivors themselves. however, with that said, individual libraries could begin to branch out their programming options for survivors and do internal program evaluations to determine what offerings appear to be fulfilling a community need. doing so eliminates the lengthy and challenging process of receiving survey feedback from survivors, and if done correctly could positively impact the survivors in the library’s area exponentially. information seeking stages of survivors in 2009, lynn westbrook published “crisis information concerns: information needs of domestic violence survivors.” in this study, westbrook identified six main stages of information seeking that domestic violence survivors may experience. the six stages are as follows: initial consideration of a life change; during shelter and/or criminal justice engagement; post-shelter/post-police planning; legal concerns in making a life change; immigration-related information needs; and lastly, overlapping information needs from the previous five stages, which may occur at the same time (westbrook, 2009, p. 104-109). participants in the study were asked to rank all but the last stage (overlapping needs) on a scale of “1-do not provide information” to “5-provide above average information” on this information need. the breakdown for each information seeking stage is below: table 1. initial consideration of a life change rank percentage 1 – do not provide information 14% (n=4) 2 31% (n=9) 3 45% (n=13) 4 10% (n=3) 5 – provide above average information 0% table 2. during shelter and/or criminal justice engagement rank percentage 1 – do not provide information 14% (n=4) 2 41% (n=12) 3 38% (n=11) 4 6% (n=2) 5 – provide above average information 0% table 3. post-shelter, post-police planning rank percentage 1 – do not provide information 38% (n=11) 2 31% (n=9) 3 27% (n=8) 4 10% (n=3) 5 – provide above average information 0% table 4. legal concerns in making a life change rank percentage 1 – do not provide information 21% (n=6) 2 27% (n=8) 3 34% (n=10) 4 17% (n=5) 5 – provide above average information 0% table 5. immigration-related information needs rank percentage 1 – do not provide information 34% (n=10) 2 28% (n=11) 3 24% (n=7) 4 10% (n=3) 5 – provide above average information 0% while westbrooks’ information seeking stages of survivors of domestic violence is not a formal evaluative tool, applying it in this context allows for a starting point in seeing what, if any, gaps exist in a library collection. from the responses of the new hampshire participants it is clear that immigration-related information needs must be curated, and both post-police/post-shelter planning and during shelter and/or criminal engagement could use review and additions. even though new hampshire is 93% white, 6% of the state’s residents are immigrants, and welcoming new hampshire, a community building and bridging initiative for refugees, has office locations in four of the state’s cities (united states census bureau, n.d.; american immigration council, 2017; welcoming new hampshire, 2018). the cultural differences and language barriers faced by immigrants and refugees create extreme challenges for those facing domestic and sexual violence and their ability to navigate formal networks such as the police and court systems. furthermore, disclosing or seeking help provides challenges based on english proficiency, the formal support networks’ language options, knowledge of policies, laws, resources, and larger cultural structures such as institutional racism (lockhart & danis, 2010, p. 161). lastly, participants were asked to use the space provided to inform the researchers of any other information they thought was pertinent to the study. four comments were made explaining their community and the positive services they provided, five comments were made that express concern with the study format/questions, three comments were made that support the ideology that this is a problem for another organization to solve, and two comments were made informing the researchers that this is not a problem in their town. this means that at least 4% of new hampshire public libraries are confident in sharing their lack of desire to bettering services for survivors. these comments are a significant area for concern since the respondents of the survey were mainly library directors. if the overarching attitude of those in the highest position of power is to dismiss and discredit survivors or the research being done to improve services to them, it will continue to shape how those libraries provide services and directly impact survivors in their area. areas for future research as stated previously, researching library services to survivors without survivor input will have extremely limited impact. a nationwide survey for survivors of domestic and sexual violence specific to library services would shed light on where and how libraries can progress from where we are today. conducting a nationwide survey could also allow for analysis of different geographic regions’ services to survivors, may allow for identification of areas where services to survivors are more successful than others, and could provide a road map for improvements. additionally, this type of roadmap could be obtained by identifying libraries within the united states that offer explicit services to survivors of domestic and sexual violence and analyzing their challenges, successes, and community feedback. furthermore, research into training, safety issues, collection development, and institutional bias in regards to survivors could provide more concrete answers to the questions that have risen from the current research. conclusion while only a survey of one state, this research has allowed for a beginning exploration of what it may mean for libraries to provide great services to survivors of domestic and sexual violence. those in charge of developing library collections should focus on increasing the appropriateness of materials relating to domestic and sexual violence, as well as expanding collections beyond physical books to include ebooks, dvd’s, and more. training staff on domestic and sexual violence survivors’ needs can assist in bettering the library, including having the ability to refer informal disclosures to formal networks and increase library safety for everyone involved. while most survivors living in shelter are able to obtain a local library card, libraries should look for a non-disclosure method to obtain a card, increasing patrons’ and crisis centers’ safety. the largest barrier to success in offering services to survivors lies within the implicit assumptions held by library workers, which trickles down through the organization creating an environment of barriers and lack of support. although a difficult topic to discuss, domestic and sexual violence is one area librarians cannot afford to ignore, as the problem may never go away, and ignorance will only cause our patrons who have survived such violence more discomfort. acknowledgements my deepest gratitude goes out to christina mendez, external reviewer, bethany messersmith, internal reviewer, and amy koester, publishing editor, for their labor and time. what started as a graduate school independent study is finally being published, and i would not have been able to do that without them. i also want to thank dr. melissa villa-nicholas for supervising my independent study, and carrie, karina, and emily for reviewing early drafts of this work. i thank you all for reminding me every step of the way how necessary and important this research is. references adamovich, s. g. (ed.). (1989). the road taken: the new hampshire library association 1889-1989. west kennebunk, me: phoenix publishing. alyssa_milano. (2017, october 15).if you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet. [twitter post]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/alyssa_milano/status/919659438700670976?lang=en american immigration council. (2017, october 13). immigrants in new hampshire. retrieved from https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-in-new-hampshire evans, m. a., & feder, g. s. (2016). help-seeking amongst women survivors of domestic violence: a qualitative study of pathways towards formal and informal support. health expectations, 19(1), p. 62-73. doi: 10.111/hex.12330 herman, j. (1992). trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violencefrom domestic abuse to political terror. new york, ny; basic books. larson, j. (2012). crew: a weeding manual for modern libraries. available from https://www.tsl.texas.gov/sites/default/files/public/tslac/ld/ld/pubs/crew/crewmethod12.pdf lockhart, l.l., & danis, f. s. (2010). domestic violence: intersectionality and culturally competent practice. new york, ny: columbia university press. me too. (2018). about. retrieved from https://metoomvmt.org/about/#history mitchell, j. (2017, january 28).most dangerous time for battered women? when they leave. clarion-ledger. retrieved from https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2017/01/28/most-dangerous-time-for-battered-women-is-when-they-leave-jerry-mitchell/96955552/ nhcadsv. (n.d.). statistics & research. retrieved from https://www.nhcadsv.org/statistics-and-research.html public libraries. (2019). new hampshire public libraries. retrieved from https://publiclibraries.com/state/new-hampshire/ 2018 publiclibraries.com united states census bureau. (n.d.). quickfacts new hampshire. retrieved from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/nh welcoming new hampshire. (2018). welcoming new hampshire: weaving cultures, building communities. retrieved from https://welcomingnh.org/ throughout this article i have used the term “domestic and sexual violence survivor” as an umbrella term for any person who has experienced domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking (including cyber), and intimate partner violence (ipv). my deepest apologies go out to anyone who identifies with other terminology and feels unrepresented. i promise i see you, and your experience and voice matter. [↩] collection development, domestic and sexual violence, information behavior, library programming, public libraries, public services, safety, training normalize negotiation! learning to negotiate salaries and improve compensation outcomes to transform library culture all carrots, no sticks: relational practice and library instruction coordination 1 response pingback : info 200 blog #5: teaching and learning in the ipv survivors information community | library and information sciences this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct library lockdown: an escape room by kids for the community – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 23 nov jennifer thoegersen and rasmus thoegersen /1 comments library lockdown: an escape room by kids for the community in brief hoping to bring the unexpected to nebraska city, the morton-james public library applied for an ala association for library service to children curiosity creates grant to undertake an ambitious project: build an escape room. in a library storage room. with children. the hope was  by trying something completely different, we could increase interest in the library throughout the community and build a sense of ownership in the participants, while encouraging creativity and having a lot of fun. library lockdown was a four-month program that brought several dozen kids together—age 8 to 13—to build a fully-functioning escape room. their creation, the lab of dr. morton mcbrains, is now open for business. introduction it all began with a “what if?” and a “why not?” well, really it started with a large storage room and a grant solicitation. the result was a transformation of not only a space in the library, but in the library’s space in the community. in the spring of 2016, we guided a group of kids in building an escape room in the morton-james public library. it was an extraordinarily fun (and time consuming!) project; and while our goals were mainly focused on what the participants and what the community would take away from it, we were the ones who probably learned the most. we shared some of our reflections in a short library journal article (thoegersen & thoegersen, 2016), but wanted to share our experiences in more depth. our hope is that, after reading this, you will be inspired to create your own flavor of library lockdown in your own library. but first, a little exposition. the place aerial view of morton-james public library, morton-james public library (cc-by 4.0) morton-james public library serves the community of nebraska city, in southeast nebraska. nebraska city has a population of 7,289 (u.s. census bureau, 2014). the population is predominately white (91.5%) and is 10.9% hispanic/latino. the percentage of people with income below the poverty level was 15.1%, which is higher than the percentage for the state of nebraska (12.9%), but comparable to the united states as a whole (15.6%). built in 1897 (with additions in 1933 and 2002), the public library building is beautiful and historic; it’s listed on the national register of historic places (nebraska state historical society, 2012). it can also seem a bit of a maze and has lots of nooks and crannies. one such nook was a rather large storage room full of used books, holiday decorations, and a miscellany of craft supplies. this room also had some water damage and moldy carpet that needed to be replaced. it was clearly in need of some love and perhaps a new purpose, as well. the project in august 2015, we became aware of the curiosity creates grants administered  by the association for library service to children (alsc) division of the american library association (ala). thanks to a donation from disney, over seventy $7,500 grants were to be awarded to libraries in order “to promote exploration and discovery for children ages 6 to 14” through programming that promotes creativity (american library association, 2015). the grant could be used to grow an existing library program or to develop completely new programming. grant recipients were notified in october 2015, and they were expected to implement their project and complete a project report by may 31, 2016. inspired by the availability and purpose of this grant, the recent popularity of escape rooms around the world, and the breakoutedu movement, rasmus hit upon an intriguing idea: what if we turned this neglected storage room into an escape room? and why not give kids a chance to build it themselves? interlude: so, what is an escape room? the escape room concept was created by 35-year-old takao kato in kyoto, japan in 2007 as a way to have a real-life adventure like those he encountered in literature as a child (corkill, 2009). escape rooms are like a real-life video game, where you and your friends are “locked”*1 in a room and must search for clues and solve puzzles to determine how to get out. “in order to escape the room the player must be observant of his/her surroundings and use their critical thinking skills as well as elements in the room to aid in their escape” (the escape game nashville, 2015). escape rooms come in many shapes and sizes but generally include the following: a story puzzles, clues, and riddles a time limit a lot of fun library lockdown thus the idea of library lockdown was born. the plan was for the program to run during the spring of 2016. the group of kids would meet at the library weekly, first learning about escape rooms and puzzles, and then creating the story, decorations, and puzzles for one of their own. after being awarded the alsc grant in october 2015, library staff went to work clearing out the storage room. the carpet was replaced with the help of a separate, local grant. library lockdown was advertised in person by circulation staff, in the local paper, and in local schools. potential participants were asked to fill out a registration form and a photo waiver. based on the registration forms received, saturdays were selected as the weekly meeting time. the first meeting was february 13th, and two dozen kids showed up. we had meetings every saturday until the grand opening on may 25th.2 the number of kids attending each meeting varied from ten to nearly 30; with usually around fifteen present. nearly three dozen kids participated in at least one meeting, but there was a core group of about ten that attended the majority of the meetings. this provided continuity from week to week. the format for the meetings was generally five to ten minutes of introducing the day’s activities and forty-five to sixty  minutes of work, followed by lunch (paid by the grant). the first few weeks were focused on having the kids solve puzzles on a theme (appropriately, the first week’s theme was valentine’s day). during week three, the kids selected the theme for the room (zombies), and also decided they wanted to make a zombie movie that would play before and during an escape room run. then, they began making puzzles themselves and creating different parts of the room. for every subsequent week (except the week we filmed the movie), we planned for at least four separate groups, each supervised by an adult. these groups initially started out very broad: the tech group was provided with old electronics, a laptop, a couple of makey makey kits and a squishy circuits kit to use as the basis of a puzzle. the storytellers brainstormed about the backstory for the room, as well as the screenplay for the zombie movie. the puzzle group was tasked with coming up with ideas for puzzles. the “zombiemakers” were given costume makeup and old clothes to practice zombie makeup and create zombie clothes for the movie. as the weeks progressed, group work became far more specific; they would have a specific task related to a specific piece of the room, e.g. a particular puzzle or props for the room.the final meetings involved pulling everything together and setting up and testing the room. creating decorations for the lab of dr. morton mcbrains; morton-james public library (cc-by 4.0) the grand opening event was on wednesday, may 25th. the families of all of the participants were invited, along with members of the community. the nebraska city tourism and commerce organization held a ribbon cutting, which was covered by the local paper and radio station (partsch, 2016; hannah & swanson, 2016). the city’s mayor and his family were the official first group to attempt to escape the room, and, while they were “locked” in solving puzzles, everyone else was in the library gallery having a pizza party and solving puzzle boxes that were on their tables. over 100 people attended the grand opening event, including twenty-two of the library lockdown participants. every participant received their own lock and a family pass to the commercial escape room, escape this, which opened in nebraska city just as library lockdown wrapped up. the library lockdown escape room is now open for business and is free for anyone to play, though donations are accepted. groups must book the room in advance by calling the library. the room can be booked any day the library is open from thirty minutes after opening to an hour and a half before close. generally, only one group may play the room per day, ensuring that there is time to reset the room for the next group and that it isn’t taking up too much staff time. since its opening, twenty-five groups have played the room (over 150 individuals), and there are currently eight reservations through december 2016. the groups have been families, work groups, school classes, scouting troops, and groups of friends. the escape room will likely remain open until there is a new, interesting idea for how to repurpose the room once again. fostering creativity “although creativity is a complex and multifaceted construct, for which there is no agreed-upon definition, it is viewed as a critical process involved in the generation of new ideas, the solution of problems, or the self-actualization of individuals…” (esquivel, 1995, p. 186) when we discussed what we wanted kids to take away from their participation in library lockdown, we relied heavily on a white paper by hadani & jaeger (2015) highlighted by alsc and published by the center for childhood creativity. this paper introduces seven components of creativity:imagination & originality, flexibility, decision making, communication & self-expression, motivation, collaboration, and action & movement. for each component, the authors present a body of research explaining its role in fostering creativity and provide strategies and examples for incorporating each component into projects. as part of the grant application, we were asked to identify which of the seven components were most critical for the project. we chose to focus on two: imagination & originality, and collaboration. while all of the components played a role in the project, we felt these two were the most vital to success and used the strategies suggested by hadani & jaeger for these components as a guide when planning library lockdown meetings. imagination was key because the kids were starting with an empty room and no story. they had to consider many possibilities and visualize the details of the escape room. hadani & jaeger provided five strategies for promoting imagination, which we found to be some of the most valuable guidance, especially during the early weeks of the project. generate ideas by building on other ideas: this was how we approached puzzle making in the beginning. we created dozens of puzzles for the kids to try out (some thought up by ourselves, many modified from those found through amazing resources like breakoutedu). we would then ask the kids to build a similar, but new, puzzle. this didn’t always lead to the creation of functional puzzles, but it did help put kids in the mindset of creating their own puzzles. generate lots of ideas: we used this strategy for determining the theme and story for the room. at the third session, after spending a few weeks having the kids solve and modify puzzles, we had the kids pick a theme for the room. they split into groups and, guided by an adult, wrote down as many possible themes as they could think of. they came up with some pretty awesome themes–like candyland, haunted library, and star wars–before selecting “zombie” by voting for their favorites. drafts of the story for the library lockdown escape room; morton-james public library (cc-by 4.0) plenty of imaginary play and unstructured time: though we often provided very structured tasks for the kids to work on during meetings, we also included several opportunities for freer, less structured activities. this included giving groups a room full of craft and other materials and puzzle books, and letting them spend the entire time attempting to make puzzles. this time did not result in many strong, functional puzzles, but allowed the kids to experiment and play. library lockdown participants working together to create a puzzle with play-dough; morton-james public library (cc-by 4.0) encourage new ideas and building on others’ ideas: we generally had kids work in groups of three to six, each led by an adult, which allowed us to guide conversations and ensure each kid was able to share their ideas in a positive environment. given the time constraints and the variety of tasks involved, the kids had to collaborate and rely on each other to ensure that the puzzles, props, and story formed a cohesive whole. one of hadani and jaeger’s suggested strategies for promoting collaboration was providing “project-based opportunities that are structured to avoid merely splitting of tasks in favor of sharing and co-creating.” given the number of participants and the amount and variety of work that needed to be accomplished, logistically, we had to split participants into multiple groups, each with a different purpose or task. however, each group had to work together to achieve their individual objectives, and all of the groups fed into the same shared goal. a good example was a puzzle that involved a robot maze. using grant money, we purchased dash and dot, a set of programmable robots. the group working on the puzzle first worked together to program the robots so that by pushing buttons on dot, dash would move. at subsequent meetings, they determined how wide the maze paths had to be for dash to be able to move easily, designed several iterations of the maze on paper, measured out and colored in where the walls would be, and painted the maze. at every step, they worked on these tasks together. sometimes this was out of necessity (it’s pretty hard to use a chalk line alone), but mostly they were doing tasks together that they could have done individually. this allowed them to problem solve, share ideas, and create something better together. psychological ownership a major outcome we were interested in fostering was a sense of ownership of the library among the community, especially the youth participating in library lockdown. pierce et al. (2003) define psychological ownership as “that state where an individual feels as though the target of ownership or a piece of that target is ‘theirs’ (i.e., it is mine!)” the project was embarked upon with the hope that creating a physical space would instill a sense of accomplishment and pride, and the children would develop a sense of ownership over the library. though we did not attempt to measure the participants’ feelings of ownership in any formal way, many of the participants started referring to the escape room as “their room,” and those who played the room with their family or school groups pointed out the puzzles they helped make and enjoyed watching their teammates attempt to solve them. from being on a first name basis with the library director, to having access to a room off limits to everyone else, to keeping secrets about the project from family and friends (can’t give away clues or answers to the puzzles!), we noticed participants definitely had an increased level of comfort in the library space and were clearly very proud of what they had accomplished. engaging the community working with groups and individuals in the community proved to be both easy and rewarding. from planning to opening, we sought to involve a variety of groups in the project. initially, we approached principals and teachers at local schools to advertise and help recruit students to participate. this also led to a few teachers volunteering to help. when the group decided to make a zombie movie, we approached an acquaintance at the local radio station, who volunteered to direct, film, and edit the movie for free. the city police chief also agreed to be interviewed about the zombie invasion. the city mayor and his family readily agreed to be the first official group to try out the escape room. this drummed up publicity and provided a final, grand opening event for the group to celebrate their accomplishment. though no one declined the invitation to participate, we had a couple of people who offered to help, but had to back out for various personal reasons.    nebraska city chief of police being interviewed about the zombie apocalypse; morton-james public library (cc-by 4.0) gameplay and game mechanics the entire project was a clear case of ‘process’ over ‘product’. as we explained above, our main goals involved engaging the kids and inspiring them to be creative. having an escape room was the secondary goal, and, in order to ensure that the room worked well as an experience for the community, we had to make sure the gameplay was there. whether you enjoy a game or not, is closely related the flow of the experience (sweetser & wyeth, 2005). gameplay hinges on both variety and functioning mechanics. variety means that you aren’t simply solving riffs on the same word-replacement puzzle. functioning mechanics is that the puzzle can be solved, but more importantly it relates to balance. when explaining the importance of a balanced experience to the kids, we kept coming back to the video-game metaphor. imagine a race game. if the track you are racing on is a straight line, he best car always wins and no skill is required. on the other end of the spectrum the track can curve so much and beat even the most skilled driver. neither of those experiences will be a lot of fun. the first one will be boring and the second one frustrating. we ran a puzzle in which they had to find a key to a lock. then we tasked them with creating a similar experience for another group. the first thing we heard was a gleeful ‘they will never find it’. then you remind them of the video game and the racetrack. we want them to find the key. impossible isn’t fun. structuring creativity going into the project, we had intended to give a lot of freedom to the participants. we would create the framework and ensure that the project was progressing according to the timeline, but creative choices would be made by the children. the stories and the puzzles would be their own. however, as the project progressed, we realized we needed to put some limits on where they could express their creativity. too much freedom resulted in several problems, including paralysis (uncertainty of how to proceed),unfeasible or impractical ideas, and a disregard for time constraints. we realized that, given our short timeframe and the logistics involved, we would need to create a bit more structure around the creativity. there were two main ways we approached this. the first was what we were already trying to do: give them a wide breadth for creativity, then funnel their ideas into a realistic plan. but this creative brainstorming was more effective for items like story and decorations, less so for puzzle making. we allowed the kids to express wild ideas, and then we took these ideas and adapted them into a realistic plan that we could implement. for example, once a zombie theme had been selected, many kids expressed a strong desire to actually dress up as zombies. of course, this wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense as part of an escape room that would be open for months. instead, we made the zombie movie to provide the backstory and ambience for the room and give the kids their chance to zombies for a day. the second approach become essential in the last weeks of the project: providing a realistic frame that had a creative component. we would present the basics of a puzzle and have specific ways that they could make decisions, be creative and contribute. one puzzle involved mathematical equations on a whiteboard and several zombie head cutouts. we explained the puzzle to the kids. they colored and laminated the zombie heads (the laminator was definitely a favorite!). using examples from math books, they helped fill the white board with equations. they had a blast doing this  (and slipping their names in there, too). “beauty is in the eye of the zombie-holder”, one of the puzzles created as part of library lockdown; morton-james public library (cc-by 4.0) our kids responded to having a clear goal in mind that was smaller and more manageable than the room as a whole, but still allowed them to play and infuse their ideas into the project. building repeatability, building modularity as we worked on the project, we thought about its adaptability. how could this concept translate into a variety of contexts, especially considering most libraries would not have $7,500 to spend on similar projects or such a large space and/or staff time to devote to it? in addition, we grew concerned about how best to tie the room and the various puzzles together, as well as how we might make the room enjoyable for a variety of skill levels. we were also conscientious of the time it might take to reset the room and ensure that it was reset correctly. the solution for all of these concerns was simple: modularity. when initially considering the escape room, we imagined the puzzles would be linear and tie into each other. imagine, you find a key early on and it does seemingly nothing. your team struggles on, finds more clues and solves more puzzles until the very end, when someone remembers that key from the beginning, and it all makes sense. while the temptation to tie every puzzle into a sequence and the bigger narrative certainly was compelling, we learned that a clear division between individual puzzles makes sense for project like this. the end result was ten puzzles separated conceptually, as well as physically. each puzzle corresponded with a locked box. each box contained a code to be typed into a computer terminal. once any eight of the codes had been entered, the terminal provided the code to the safe (which, of course, held the antidote to the zombie apocalypse). ambitious/completionist players could attempt to solve the final two puzzles for bragging rights if they still had time remaining. this approach provided benefits both during the creation of the escape room and after it opened as well: having distinct puzzles simplified the planning process, which was a boon given our time constraints and the age of the kids working on the room (most of whom were nine or ten). since all of the puzzles are self-contained, it is very easy for staff to quickly check if each puzzle is ready to go when resetting the room for a new group. we are able to raise and lower the difficulty of the room by changing the number of solved puzzles required to win, by changing a number in the computer program where players enter the codes. we can remix the gameplay to accommodate groups of different sizes and skill levels. recently, the local middle school asked to bring their students totry the room. the groups had about a dozen students and only thirty minutes. we had them ignore the overall goal of the room, divided them into smaller teams, and instructed them to work on one puzzle at a time. once they solved a puzzle, we helped them to reset it, so another group could attempt it, and they moved on to another puzzle. other libraries can use the same basic format and modify it to fit their time, budgetary, and space limitations.   feedback participants that attended the grand opening event (22 of the 35 total participants) were asked to complete a short survey about their experience in library lockdown. they were asked three likert-scale questions (“how much fun did you have?”, “would you do it again?”, “is the library fun?”) to which they provided generally positive responses (average of 4.5, 4.5, and 4.3, respectively). they were also asked what they liked best about library lockdown. three of the answers were very broad (“the whole thing”, “everything”, “building it”); eight answers mentioned making or solving puzzles; and nine mentioned unique, specific items: computers working with locks the story making watching movie the mayor trying to get out build lego sets the people making play-dough shapes eating our interpretation of these responses is that the group really enjoyed the puzzle-based structure of library lockdown, but many of the kids responded to vastly different aspects of project. we also did informal interviews with parents during and after the project and got some very positive feedback from them on both the project and the final result. in addition, the program was effective overall for creating hype/awareness of library and reminding our community that we are still very much around. the head of the local radio/television station mentioned how the library seemed to have changed recently, stating “you guys are doing all this stuff now.” most of the library’s programming outside of library lockdown during the preceding months was not new at all, but having a flagship event like this seems to have raised our visibility in our community. final thoughts this was a gratifying project, and we really enjoyed working on it. we also learned a great deal along the way. it was a massive time commitment. the group met for ninety minutes every saturday from february until may. we also spent a combined ten to fifteen hours per week planning, preparing, and cleaning up.  enthusiasm for the project, for kids, and for puzzles was a requirement. anywhere from ten to almost thirty kids would attend each session. this made planning and logistics a challenge: how much space and food do we need? how many volunteers or staff members need to be present? how many activities do we need to have ready? during the later weeks, how are we going to bring this all together?! by the final weeks, we got very good at being prepared. we had structured activities and backup plans. we also ensured we had enough staff and volunteers to have a high staff to kid ratio (1:4), which allowed us to be more flexible when something different happened than expected (or if more kids showed up than expected). we wanted this project to bring in a diverse group of kids, and in many ways, it did. there was a near 50-50 split of boys and girls, and, though nebraska city is predominantly white, multiple cultural backgrounds were represented in our group. there were a few areas we wish we had been more successful in.though we advertised outside the library in hopes of attracting non-library users, we had few participants who weren’t already library users. we also advertised directly to the hispanic and home school populations in our city. though several returned the registration forms, none ultimately attended any of the sessions. in future projects, we will attempt to communicate more closely with potential participants in these groups to better understand what kept them from attending. though not a major issue for us, it was important to consider any laws that may be applicable to the room itself. we asked the local fire marshal to review the room for any potential issues, and he approved of the use, as long as the door remained unlocked and unobstructed. the library lockdown room is wheelchair accessible and navigable. all of the puzzles can be solved by someone with physical limitations or who is deaf or hard of hearing with little or no assistance. the instructions for the room are written and are also spoken aloud. in addition, reservations are scheduled to allow for a staff person to be present in the room and provide assistance as needed. we were aware that not every puzzle would work out, so we chose to err on the side of having too many. that way, if something broke – which happened – a back-up puzzle was ready to go. we ended up having ten puzzles in the final room. you will want to do some beta-testing before having the general public go through the room. we first invited some of our volunteers who had not been involved in the project to try it. this gave us a sense of what worked and what didn’t work. it also instilled some confidence in the project as a whole, as they all seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves. we built the room with the intention of not having an employee/volunteer staffing it. but we found that having someone along to guide the participants and explain the rules made a difference. hints are totally ok. good-natured teasing as well. the typical group will make it out of the room with 5-10 minutes left on the clock, which is ideal. though we were lucky enough to receive a generous award, which allowed us to purchase many materials for library lockdown, we certainly could have undertaken  a similar project on a smaller budget. we took advantage of the resources on breakoutedu, used easily accessible craft supplies, repurposed items that were already at the library (including various things hiding in the storage room before it was cleaned out), and received donations of food from local restaurants. these are strategies that other libraries can take advantage of if interested in building an escape room of their own. library lockdown was a unique opportunity for morton-james public library to bring something different to nebraska city. instead of a one-off program, it brought kids into the library weekly to work together on a major project. based on informal comments and survey responses, the participants enjoyed the puzzle-based nature and variety of activities that library lockdown provided. local press coverage kept the community interested, and the resultant fully-functioning escape room allows the project to continue to engage (hannah, 2016a; hannah, 2016b; mancini, 2015). it is something that made an impression on these kids and our community, and we most certainly will not forget the wonderful things that can be made by asking the simple question: what if? acknowledgements many thanks to alsc and disney for the generous grant that funded this project. thank you to our reviewers, lauren bradley and ian beilin for helping us revise and improve this article. references american library association (2015, august 25). “$7,500 curiosity creates grant from alsc.” alanews. last accessed november 2, 2016 from http://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2015/08/7500-curiosity-creates-grant-alsc browndorf, m. (2014). “student library ownership and building the communicative commons”, journal of library administration, 54(2), 77-93, doi: 10.1080/01930826.2014.903364 corkill, e. (2009, december 20). “real escape game brings its creator’s wonderment to life.” the japan times. last accessed october 31, 2016 at http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2009/12/20/to-be-sorted/real-escape-game-brings-its-creators-wonderment-to-life the escape game nashville (2015, may 4). “the history of escape games.” last accessed october 31, 2016 at https://nashvilleescapegame.com/2015/05/04/the-history-of-escape-games esquivel, g.b. (1995). “toward an educational psychology of creativity, part 1.” educational psychology review, 7(2), pp. 185-202. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23359326. hadani, h. & jaeger, g. (2015). inspiring a generation to create: 7 critical components of creativity in children [white paper]. retrieved october 16, 2016, from researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277301842_inspiring_a_generation_to_create_7_critical_components_of_creativity_in_children hannah, j. (2016a, march 7). “morton james public library to film zombie movie with new escape room.” news channel nebraska. last accessed october 31, 2016 at http://kwbe.com/local-news/morton-james-public-library-to-film-zombie-movie-with-new-escape-room/ hannah, j. (2016b, april 9). “zombies run wild in nebraska city.” news channel nebraska. last accessed october 31, 2016 at http://ncn21.com/local-news/zombies-run-wild-in-nebraska-city/ hannah, j. & swanson, d. (2016, may 25). “bequettes solve escape room puzzles to save nebraska city.” news channel nebraska. last accessed october 31, 2016 at http://ncn21.com/local-news/bequettes-solve-escape-room-puzzles-to-save-nebraska-city/ mancini, j. (2015, november 25). “morton-james receives grant for ‘escape room.’” nebraska city news press. last accessed november 3, 2016 at http://www.ncnewspress.com/article/20151125/news/151129931 nebraska state historical society (2012). “nebraska national register sites in otoe county”. last accessed october 31, 2016 at http://www.nebraskahistory.org/histpres/nebraska/otoe.htm partsch, t. (2016, june 2). “mayor’s family emerge victorious from library escape room” nebraska city news-press. last accessed october 31, 2016 at http://www.ncnewspress.com/news/20160602/mayors-family-emerge-victorious-from-library-escape-room pierce, j.l., kostova, t. & k.t. dirks (2003). “the state of psychological ownership: integrating and extending a century of research.” review of general psychology, 7(1), 84-107, doi: 10.1037/1089-2680.7.1.84 sweetser, p., & wyeth, p. (2005). gameflow: a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games. computers in entertainment (cie), 3(3), 3-3. thoegersen, r. & thoegersen, j. (2016). “pure escapism.” library journal, 141(12), pg 24. http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2016/07/opinion/programs-that-pop/pure-escapism-progams-that-pop u.s. census bureau (2014). “2010-2014 american community survey 5-year estimates.” last accessed november 4, 2016 at http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/acs/14_5yr/dp03/1600000us3133705 not really, since the fire marshal would not approve [↩] except for arbor day weekend, that is. nebraska city is “home of arbor day”, and most of the kids were participating in the annual arbor day parade. [↩] ala grants, children's librarianship, creativity, esacpe rooms, library lock down rooms, public libraries the information literacy of survey mark hunting: a dialogue critical pedagogy, critical conversations: expanding dialogue about critical library instruction through the lens of composition and rhetoric 1 response pingback : engaging youth in their local library | fall 2016 information technologies this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct shifting the balance of power: asking questions about the comics-questions curriculum – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 24 jul sarah laleman ward, mason brown and stephanie margolin /1 comments shifting the balance of power: asking questions about the comics-questions curriculum in brief we shift the balance of power in this paper by discussing a particular library lesson, the comics-questions curriculum, with some of the students who participated in it, several years after they completed the workshop. by interviewing students and including them as co-authors of this paper, we re-center students in our analysis of this curriculum. in the process of reflecting on our work with the students and each other, we begin to see ways to engage in more meaningful, longer-term assessment of our classroom work while involving student voices in the process. we share our experiences here in order to take an honest look at our sometimes messy, unclear process, in the hope that others may reflect on, critique, and build on our work. by sarah laleman ward, mason brown, stephanie margolin, amisha rana, shazib naseer, and shahzod musayev introduction “[critical information literacy is] using your personal skills and experiences in order to improve social life and change the world.” — shahzod musayev “[students] combin[e] their academic experience to their personal experience and kind of just …[bring] that here. but at the same time the librarian’s job is hearing what the students have to say because it all ties into the whole empowering part. and as students when we learn, it’s like we ‘know the information,’ but sometimes we kind of have self-doubt. it’s like, ‘alright i do know this, but i’m kind of iffy about it.’ but when you hear an expert confirm your thoughts and say, ‘oh it’s okay, we’ll work through this step by step’.” — amisha rana shahzod’s comment above was in response to our description of critical information literacy (cil) that discussed empowering learners by building on existing skills, knowledge, and lived experience in order to foster social change. his words provide a strong introduction to the themes of our essay, as they connect principles that were important to us as we developed the comics-questions curriculum (cqc) even before we connected it to the larger themes of critical pedagogy. we use shahzod’s words here to set the stage for the dialogue we had with former students, through semi-structured interviews, to better understand how they interpreted and were able to make use of the lessons of the cqc in their first few years as college students. amisha’s words address two foundational elements of the cqc that relate to freire’s (2000) ideas about the theory and practice of “problem-posing education.” first, that problem-posing education “take[s] the people’s historicity as their starting point” and “affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming” as opposed to the “banking” model of education where students are viewed as empty vessels into which content is deposited (84). second, the idea that librarians are there in a learning partnership as “critical co-investigators” alongside students, shifting the traditional teacher-student dynamic so that “[t]he teacher is no longer merely the one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. they become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (80). too often, when student-centered pedagogies are reflected upon in the literature, the views of the student participants have been omitted. with this essay, we hope to re-center some of our students, creating a model for how other teachers might include the voices of their students in such conversations. while we, the three instruction librarian co-authors and curriculum developers (ward, brown, and margolin), set the scope of this paper and determined its themes, we shared the task of describing the curriculum and its influence with students who participated in its implementation. in this essay, then, we strive to incorporate important themes we used in the development of the cqc (eg. the power of asking questions, student-centered and student-driven classrooms) with discussions from our students about how the cqc was received by them and the effect it had on their lives, academic and otherwise, while drawing after-the-fact connections between our work and cil. the student authors are all members of the seek program, a higher education opportunity program, at hunter college. hunter is one of the senior colleges in the public city university of new york (cuny) system, and all the senior colleges have their own seek programs. among the eligibility criteria, admission to the seek program is based on family income, and seek in turn provides “comprehensive academic, financial, and social supports to assist capable students who otherwise might not be able to attend college due to their educational and financial circumstances” (cuny office of academic affairs. n.d. “seek and college discovery programs”). according to the 2017 hunter college factbook (the most recent year available at publication), 85% of our undergraduate students reside within the five boroughs of new york city, and 97% of the seek students attended nyc public high schools. additionally, 89% of seek students are people of color, compared with 68% of the general undergraduate population at hunter. the summer bridge is a mandatory, multi-week intensive program for incoming seek freshman and consists of non-credit introductory academic courses as well as skilland community-building workshops and events (hunter seek program. n.d. “seek summer bridge program”).  amisha rana and shazib naseer participated in the cqc during the 2016 summer bridge, and shahzod musayev participated in 2017. we interviewed amisha twice individually, and shazib and shazod each individually, then together, in may of 2018. we believe that good library instruction practices center on the student experience. our shared classroom activities were designed to put students in charge of their own learning by empowering them to ask questions and work together to drive the discussions. bringing students into this later conversation about the work, then, continues to shift the balance of power outside the classroom by ensuring that the students’ voices are present in scholarship about them and their experiences. in doing so, students have the opportunity to reflect, comment on, and critique this shared work several years after their in-class experiences, thus reinforcing their own learning. at the same time, through the lived experiences of our former students, we librarian-instructors in turn are able to gain a new perspective on our work, which we will explore in more detail in later sections, the long game and what’s next. as three white, middle-aged, middle-class librarians we acknowledge that our positions in the academy, and specifically at hunter college, come with a certain amount of privilege and power. it was important to us as we developed the cqc that we de-center the role of the librarian and “shift the locus of control in the classroom from the teacher to the students” by encouraging and empowering student voices, and this paper is an attempt to bring that work into our scholarship (margolin, brown, and ward 2018; peterson 2009, 75; ward, brown, and margolin 2017). background and radical honesty to be completely honest, this paper has been hard to write. there is always a challenge in documenting–and finding meaning in–a lesson or curricula, but this time our problems felt even bigger. on occasion, we dealt with imposter syndrome, as we examined our cqc, described below, through the lens of cil. we felt disingenuous trying to retroactively apply theory to our work, as it was developed outside of any particular theoretical framework and based solely on our instructional experiences. although we now see connections between our work and constructivism, critical information literacy, feminist pedagogy, and critical pedagogy more broadly, these theories are not at all where we started. we are fervent believers in the long game in terms of information literacy, fully aware that it may take years for the students to make use of or even to see the pay-off of this work.  however, our only assessment tool for this project was observation: we three did not always teach the cqc but instead trained and observed our colleagues and the students as they proceeded through the lessons. we wondered if and how this work was valued by the cohorts of students who participated in our project over the last four years, the librarians who taught it, and the administrators who enlisted our participation. we previously surveyed our colleagues who taught the cqc in the past,1 so for this paper, we engaged in conversations with our student co-authors as they identified ways they valued and applied the work (or lessons) from the cqc classrooms. indeed, having this discussion with the students has been the most rewarding part of the process. we arrived at question-asking early in the development of our curriculum, having asked ourselves the fundamental questions: “what do we wish students knew when they started college?” and “how can we build on existing skills, knowledge, and experience?” question-asking fit the bill for both, and thus is central to our curriculum, and to this paper. it is a singular example of an extant skill for college students that merits further development and context. what’s more, it is an empowering skill, valuable even beyond students’ college-level work, and thus deserves our attention as librarians and teachers. while question-asking was central to the development of our first-generation cqc (summer 2015), our question-related work flourished in new and important directions after reading make just one change and adapting the question formulation technique (qft) for our second iteration in 2016, where it remained through 2018 (rothstein and santana 2011).2 qft provides a structure where students first brainstorm questions (while following four rules for asking questions), then analyze them as openor closed-ended questions, and then improve their questions, as they consider how to make open-ended questions closed, and the reverse. it is worth noting that we developed this curriculum without a directive to address question-asking. rather, when we first partnered with the seek program administrators we were given a somewhat open mandate to provide information literacy instruction for their summer bridge program in four one-hour sessions, over a two week period. we were given great freedom in developing our curriculum; seek administrators had no requirements for the learning outcomes or materials used in the library lessons, other than adherence to the summer bridge program goals which included preparing students for college-level work, connecting them with campus resources, and enhancing their critical thinking skills. we debuted the cqc in 2015 with these learning goals, which have not significantly varied since: at the end of the four sessions, students will be able to generate questions based on materials given in class, and identify open-ended and researchable questions. methodology we wanted to bring an authentic, student-focused approach to writing this paper by engaging our students as co-authors, rather than as the subjects of study. we reached out to the director of the seek program in spring 2018 in order to recruit students who were interested in participating in this writing project with us, which is how we connected with amisha, shazib, and shahzod. we described the writing project we were starting and asked each of them if they were willing to participate as co-authors, meaning that we would use the things they wrote and said to us in the body of the paper, and that they would be able to review and make edits to their work as they saw fit. the students’ voices lend a valuable perspective on the work and will help to better illuminate what this curriculum has meant to each of them in their individual academic experiences. as a first step to get the students thinking about the topic we were writing about, we emailed them a few open-ended questions about their experiences with the seek program thus far, and more specifically their work in the library classrooms during their respective summer bridges.3 as a follow-up, we invited each of them in to talk with us about their experiences, and we recorded and transcribed these conversations. one limitation of this approach is that we spoke to only three self-selected participants who certainly do not represent the breadth of student experiences with the cqc. we admit that this process has been murky all along, as this is our first foray into engaging students in our research and writing in this way. we explore this idea more in the section titled the long game. while we relished the opportunity to work with students as co-authors and to include their voices in this paper, from the outset, we knew that, due to their time constraints, they would not be equal co-authors. what’s more, we structured this paper around what we, as the curriculum developers, think is important about this project. we formulated questions for the students, and then edited their comments in order to fit into the structure we created. we fully acknowledge this imbalance of power in the writing process, and struggle with this tension in a piece that is attempting to be a student-centered work. we recognize that we are all still learning, and perhaps other researchers can build on or learn from what we have done, both good and bad, in the process. we find we are left with more questions about how we can better engage our students as true collaborators moving forward. participating in the cqc “…it was actually pretty cool because we were taking classes together and coming to the library was one of the more interesting parts. because i personally enjoy comics and then we were able to sit down together and actually just talk…i feel like it was supposed to be a teaching moment also but it was also a good way to socialize at the same time. so it was actually pretty fun.” — shazib naseer shazib helps outline how the cqc incorporates seek’s goal of community building. the cqc employs images from comic books as the focus for small groups of three or four students to ask questions, first about a single panel, then a page, and finally a scholarly article about comics (margolin et al. 2018, 63-64). we believed that both question-asking and comics would be relatable, and thus comfortable and familiar, giving students the confidence that they had the knowledge and skills to tackle the cqc. the cqc is delivered in small sections (roughly thirty students each) led by two teaching librarians. each summer, we trained that year’s pool of instructors on how we wanted them to approach the cqc. from the beginning, we envisioned the librarians as facilitators who guided students’ work in small groups, rather than as lecturers (ward et al. 2017). shazib also describes the partnerships and friendships that develop within a cohort, supporting learning but also socializing, and most importantly, having fun. the seek summer bridge program is intentional about community building among each cohort of students. the program seems to bridge the divide between what harris distinguishes as “communities of practice” and “learning communities” by being both a “found” community of students who meet each other and bond during the program, but one that is also “constructed” by and accountable to a larger guiding entity (harris 2008, 250). our work with these students, then, is a means to reinforce the larger messages and purposes of the seek program and the college overall, helping to “make [information literacy] embodied, situated and social for our diverse student body” by encouraging them to work in collaboration with each other and with us (jacobs 2008, 259). there is intellectual as well as social value for the students in our classroom communities, emphasized by shazib’s comment above, particularly around making meaning of non-traditional sources of information with each other as “. . . people produce, read, and interpret texts in communities, not in isolation. communities reach consensus about interpretation, sometimes easily and sometimes contentiously” (elmborg 2006, 195). “no question asked is a wrong question.” –amisha rana in making the above statement, amisha demonstrates the impact of our shared classroom space where students felt empowered to ask any and all questions. it was important to us, and fundamental to the cqc, that the teaching librarians, the perceived authority figures in the classroom, were explicit about suspending judgement. we further clarified this point, for the instructors, the students, and ourselves, when we adopted the qft model, where the second rule of asking questions is “do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any question” (rothstein and santana 2011, 44, emphasis ours). this student-centered classroom is one where new learning is based on students’ prior experiences (specifically, asking questions), and where we learn alongside our students as facilitators and partners, together “[embracing] the centrality of questioning in any educative process” (cope 2009, 24-25). we specified during the librarian-instructors’ training for the cqc that when students shared questions and ideas we should respond with “thank you” rather than “good” or “yes,” modeling for the students the nonjudgmental way we intended for them to approach the process. by freeing the classroom from the judgement of right and wrong, good and bad, we strive for “. . . the broader goal of integrating questions into our lives, holding them close without jumping to closure. by doing so, we enter into wonder, possibility, and imagination. . . . it is a way of being that comes from living the question” (ward 2006, 399). “the librarian, . . . before he had gone over the stuff was like ‘no, we want you guys to figure it out and then we’ll come to a consensus after as a class.’ so it was thinking up on our own two feet and i like that . . . . we were actually really dissecting it, piece by piece, and asking how many ever possible questions we had.” — amisha rana by beginning from common knowledge already held by students we can, in turn, expect students to take a larger role in shaping their own learning. here amisha makes connections between her cqc experiences and that self-direction. as mentioned earlier, we designed the cqc with the librarians acting as facilitators; guide on the side, rather than sage on the stage. both our librarian colleagues and–at times–the students struggled with this unfamiliar and possibly uncomfortable format. bucy, devereux, kramer, and powers (2016, 50) discuss the reluctance students can have to assume authority over their own work, reminding us it is our job as teachers to nurture this in our students. one of the reasons we focus on question-asking is its connection to students’ acquired knowledge. from an early age, humans ask questions to make meaning of the events that occur around us. this question-asking, until others might shape or suppress it, is a literal example of student-centered learning. by the time we are young adults, “asking a question can be an act of courage and nothing will as quickly prevent that person from ever taking the risk a second time as a snap judgment.” (rothstein and santana 2011, 47). in our students’ liminal state between high school and college, there is value in revisiting question-asking skills, which can help students make sense of the experiences of college and beyond. amisha noted that she came in to our classroom already knowing “the whole five w’s [of question-asking] and the how” which allowed her to feel a degree of mastery as we began our work together. as peterson (2009) notes, building on students’ acquired knowledge “says to the student: what you know and what you have experienced is relevant and important. acknowledging this prior experience is a profound act of respect in the classroom“(74). through the lessons of the cqc, we observe students not only re-engaging with their question-asking skills, but also beginning to consider how those skills might be useful to them in college. these experiences are just the start of much longer learning processes, and will not be completed in the four contact-hours that we have with students in this program, nor in subsequent one-shot instruction sessions. it is our hope that the students begin to see that they, too, have a place here at the college and can question, criticize, and actively participate in the shaping of institutions and their roles within by “interrogating the social world and developing their own capacity for informed questioning” (cope 2009, 24-25; elmborg 2006). every iteration of the cqc focuses on asking questions, but our incorporation of rothstein and santana’s (2011) question formulation technique (qft) for the second iteration in summer 2016 provided a stronger framework. while in our first year, we also worked with students on the kinds of questions they were asking, the structures provided by qft gave each lesson more focus and clarity. these structures, specifically the rules for asking questions, and the “improving” of questions for different purposes, helped us further center the students, when, as amisha describes above, they collaboratively defined the terms openand closed-ended questions, and then worked together to see the strengths and weaknesses of each type for different purposes (rothstein and santana 2011). shahzod recalls “[o]pen ended was more broad and big picture. it was much easier for me to ask broad question[s] instead of close ended questions.” shazib found that this work, “makes you think a bit more about how you should ask questions.” the open/closed dichotomy was also useful in introducing ambiguity to students; questions are not always clearly open or closed. all of these lessons were possible because we were building on the students’ earlier knowledge, and because the students were working together to generate new knowledge rather than relying on the librarians in the room to provide them with the “correct” information. maria accardi (2010) echoes our thoughts about the value of these collaborative activities, in that “activities that require students to interact with each other … may sometimes face resistance from students who prefer to work alone, but i make them do it anyway, because i believe that learning how to communicate in an educational setting helps students learn from each other and about themselves” (42). we work with the students to actively shape their own learning by critically questioning the content before them, and we encourage them to reflect on how all of this might be connected to other themes, ideas, and questions. we elected to work with comics to ease students into critically examining and asking questions about information sources without introducing traditional academic sources at the start. “so when i was listening, i was like oh okay, i’m pretty sure i know some of this. but the way you started asking us certain questions and you started relating it to the comic books it was pretty interesting. [w]here we’re getting our information from and what we’re getting out of it, connecting it to comic books, the fact that we’re able to ask questions about comic books and piece things together from that is pretty interesting. because [comics] can be interpreted as a children’s book or even for everyone, and the fact that we were able to ask questions so specifically about it is pretty interesting to me.” — shazib naseer “before the class, i thought comics is something not important and not serious. after taking the . . . library class, i think i’m more interested in it. and you can find very viable information in an easier way then just reading the long text and long chapters and it’s much easier because there’s pictures and you can visualize.” — shahzod musayev shahzod and shazib each had different reactions when they first encountered the comics in our classrooms, but eventually both came around to engaging with them over the course of the four class sessions. although comics are traditionally thought of as “disposable,” and as “popular culture detritus,” our students’ engagement with them demonstrates the value of using less intimidating media in place of traditional scholarly sources (duffy 2010, 199). every comic image is made up of multiple visual components: the characters, the backgrounds, the action, the colors, the lettering, the panel borders, the spaces between the panels, and more. the creators of these works make conscious choices as to which elements to include, and which elements to leave out. reading comics involves thinking about these multiple visual elements simultaneously, and these elements, or the elements that have been left out, can “literally help make visible networks of power and power structures, aspects of our world that can often be difficult to discern through alphabetic text alone” (vie and deterle 2016, 3). as doherty (2007, 2-3) points out, the academy at large, and academic libraries by virtue of their role within it, privilege certain kinds of information as more legitimate than others for academic work. the creators and themes of these privileged works (e.g. academic journals, scholarly books) may be obscured or seem irrelevant and disconnected from the students’ own lives and experiences. doherty (2007, 2-3) suggests that this privileging sneaks into information literacy instruction when we teach source evaluation, as all types of sources are evaluated in the same fashion, on procedural rather than critical terms. by introducing comics into the information literacy classroom and asking students to examine and ask questions about them, we build on familiar tasks and materials to introduce skills and concepts that are new and relevant to college. in selecting the specific comic pages for each year’s cqc, we were conscious that the experience of reading comics “can challenge or perpetuate power differences in society” and therefore chose a broad cast of characters, steering clear of the traditional white-men-in-capes superhero protagonists (vie and dieterle 2016, 3).4 fortunately, our focus on inclusivity and representation coincided with a shift in the comics industry toward more diversity in both the characters on the page and their creators. for example, more and more mainstream books are being written and/or drawn by women and this increased representation also broadens the experiences being represented (hanley n.d.). the long game interviewing former students has provided a new perspective on the work we (the developers) have done with the cqc over the last five years. “[question asking] didn’t come back to me until english 220 because english 120 [freshman composition], i found it very simple … but it really helped.” — shazib naseer shazib summarizes what we meant, earlier in this essay, when we stated our belief in the long game in terms of students’ information literacy. as he illustrates, the lessons from the cqc resurfaced in his second or third semester of college, where he had the opportunity to apply his new skills. one of the challenges of information literacy assessment is that internalizing or integrating any new skills into one’s process requires time for practice (practical application) and reinforcement. this delayed application makes it difficult for us, as teachers and curriculum developers who only see students for a limited amount of time, to assess our own work. we hoped that the students were learning and utilizing the question asking skills we were teaching, but we had no immediate way of knowing if this was true. they seemed engaged in the process, as observed by the active discussions in each classroom. all three of our student co-authors remembered our in-class discussions about openand closed-ended questions, which was gratifying. we feel that this speaks to the value in this kind of long-term evaluation process, which bell hooks (1994) echoes in discussing her own challenges with evaluating the classroom experience, stating “…students…are being asked to shift their ways of thinking to consider new perspectives … it may be six months or a year, even two years later, that they realize the importance of what they have learned” (154). however, we are still unclear how to make use of this type of assessment/evaluation given the time and effort it takes. we see at least two areas for further research. first, what is the best way to evaluate students on their developing information literacy, in light of the time that it takes for the concepts to develop and be applied? as more institutions are requiring assessment measures and seeking ways to improve student engagement and retention, what is the role of the academic instruction librarian in this call for increased assessment/accountability? how can we show that our work has value without conforming to the quick or immediate, but perhaps less meaningful assessments of students’ learning in the il classroom? an exit survey at the end of each session would not have captured the long-term application of these concepts. the banking system of education introduces an artificial construct that sets up the expectation that at the end of the semester or class everyone will feel good about the teacher and about what they learned, and that it is all tied up neatly, when in reality that is rarely the case with authentic learning (hooks 154). second, how can we efficiently and responsibly talk to students about how they are applying the things they are learning? are there better ways to center student voices and experiences in our scholarship? in the future, we would like to establish a better methodology so that we could more effectively utilize the voices of more of our students. in the course of working with amisha, shazib, and shahzod, we found in-person conversations to be richer than those conducted via email, though the latter had initially seemed more time-efficient, especially because we had to transcribe the recorded audio from these in-person conversations. based on these experiences, two of the librarian co-authors (ward and margolin) will be embarking on an ethnographic study of students’ research habits more generally, as we continue to pursue this question. we are just starting to explore critical assessment as a means to engage in more meaningful assessment of our work, and we hope that our experiences will inspire others to continue to pursue and perfect this methodology. what’s next? in collaborating with former students to draft this article, we are gratified to see where our work together shaped, and continues to shape, their approach to college. while their specific recollections may have dimmed with the interceding year or two, this additional distance allows students time for “[g]rowth in reflection and self-knowledge” which ward asserts “is just as important as critical thinking to the development of information literacy. the two sides complement each other and are inextricably linked” (ward 2006, 396). writing this article, and considering connections between our work and that of cil, has also allowed us the space to engage in critical reflection of our own experiences. while we were in the process of writing this paper, we learned that we would not be working with students in the seek summer bridge program this year. while this was a disappointment to us, it did offer us the opportunity to think about our motivations for creating and sustaining the cqc. we connect with jacobs’ idea that, “by modeling that we too are learning and ‘living the questions,’ we can help students learn and live questions as well” (jacobs 2008, 261). this raises new questions for our own practice about ideas like the balance of power in the classroom and how we model the behaviors and processes we want to encourage in our students. we must consider what we, as teachers and instructional designers, choose to do with our perceived authority. do we, for example, “guide” students to certain conclusions about the meaning of college-level research? do we privilege certain questions or question types as better than others? do we present comics or other “nontraditional” (meaning not typically used in academic research) sources as less valuable than other traditionally scholarly sources? do we slip into judgment of students’ questions and ideas? the cqc already has a life outside of the seek summer bridge classrooms. we have adopted and adapted some of the individual lessons in our one-shot classrooms, and the freshman composition classes (english 120) we work with each semester now focus on asking questions as the driving force behind the research process. we shared the cqc with colleagues across cuny, and by depositing our lesson plans in our institutional repository (2015; 2016; 2017; 2018) we offer them up for adaptation to other contexts. finally, we are early in the process of exploring ways to bring this four-lesson curriculum to area high schools, as we believe these lessons can help bridge the gap between high school and college research. perhaps of greatest value to we three instruction librarians as we write this article has been the opportunity to further shape our thoughts about the cqc and its potential beyond the program it was originally designed for. acknowledgements we appreciate the participation and contributions of amisha rana, shazib naseer, and shahzod musayev, our student co-authors for this piece. the authors would like to thank our reviewers, marisa mendez-brady and bethany messersmith, for their thoughtful comments and suggestions during the review process, and our editor, sofia leung, for her work and attention throughout. references accardi, maria t. 2010. feminist pedagogy for library instruction. duluth, mn: library juice press. brown, mason, stephanie margolin, and sarah ward. 2018. “seek summer bridge program in the hunter college (cuny) libraries 2018.” open educational resources.  https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_oers/7/. ——— 2017. “seek summer bridge program in the hunter college (cuny) libraries 2017.” open educational resources. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_oers/6/. ——— 2016. “seek summer bridge program in the hunter college (cuny) libraries 2016.” open educational resources. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_oers/5/. ——— 2015. “seek summer bridge program in the hunter college (cuny) libraries 2015.” open educational resources. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_oers/4/. bucy, rosalind, gillian devereux, maric kramer, and jenne powers. (2016). “giving voice to students: a rhetorical analysis of the frameworks.” in rewired: research-writing partnerships within the frameworks, edited by randall mcclure, 43-64. chicago: acrl, 2016. retrieved from http://bir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/34050. cope, jonathan. 2009. “information literacy and social power.” in critical library instruction: theories & methods, edited by maria t. accardi, emily drabinski, and alana kumbier, 13-25. duluth, mn: library juice press. doherty, john j. 2007. “no shhing: giving voice to the silenced: an essay in support of critical information literacy.” library philosophy and practice (june 2007): 1-8. retrieved from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/133. duffy, damian. 2010. “out of the margins . . . into the panels: toward a theory of comics as a medium of critical pedagogy in library instruction.” in critical library instruction: theories and methods, edited by maria t. accardi, emily drabinski, and alana kumbier, 199-219. duluth, minn: library juice press. elmborg, james. 2006. “critical information literacy, implications for instructional practice.” the journal of academic librarianship 32, no. 2: 192-199. freire, paolo. 2000. pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. hanley, tim. n.d. straitened circumstances: tim hanley on wonder woman and women in comics. accessed june 6, 2018. https://thanley.wordpress.com/. harris, benjamin r. 2008. “communities as necessity in information literacy development: challenging the standards.” the journal of academic librarianship 34, no. 3: 248-255. hooks, bell. 1994. “building a teaching community: a dialogue.” in teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york: routledge. hunter college percy ellis sutton seek program. n.d. “program overview.” accessed june 5, 2018. http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/seek/about-us/program-overview. ———n.d. “seek summer bridge program. ” accessed june 5, 2018. http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/seek/copy_of_summer-bridge-program/incoming-freshmen/seek-summer-bridge-program. jacobs, heidi l. m. 2008. “information literacy and reflective pedagogical praxis.” the journal of academic librarianship 34, no. 3: 256-262. margolin, stephanie, mason brown, and sarah ward. 2018. “comics, questions, action! engaging students and instruction librarians with the comics-questions curriculum.” journal of information literacy, 12 no. 2: 60-75. doi: https://doi.org/10.11645/12.2.2467. peterson, elizabeth. “problem-based learning as teaching strategy.” in critical library instruction: theories & methods, edited by maria t. accardi, emily drabinski, and alana kumbier, 71-78. duluth, mn: library juice press. rothstein, dan and luz santana. 2011. make just one change: teach students to ask their own questions. cambridge, ma: harvard education press. vie, stephanie, and brandy dieterle. 2016. “minding the gap: comics as scaffolding for critical literacy skills in the classroom.” composition forum 33 (spring): n.p. ward, dane. 2006. “revisioning information literacy for lifelong meaning.” the journal of academic librarianship 32, no. 4: 396-402. ward, sarah laleman, mason brown, and stephanie margolin. 2017. “action-packed action research: how comic books, questions, and reflections can transform information literacy instruction.” paper presented at the association of college and research libraries national conference, baltimore, md. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2017/action-packedactionresearch.pdf.   appendix: interview questions name:   year you participated in seek summer bridge:   email address:   phone number:   think back on your experiences during the seek summer bridge program – what stands out to you as an experience that you found valuable and why? what connections, if any, are you able to make now between the work you did during summer bridge to your current academic work? your current personal or work life? what continues to be challenging as you conduct research? what are your strengths as a student? how did you develop these strengths?   critical information literacy/critical librarianship (cil) is an emerging area of study in our field. the basic ideas of cil are: questioning power structures and authority, particularly with regard to information and whose voices are privileged in academic settings empowering learners by building on existing skills, knowledge and lived experience in order to foster social change.   write down some questions or thoughts you have about this.   do you see any aspects of this reflected in your experiences at hunter thus far? please describe.     see ward, brown, and margolin 2017. [↩] all iterations of the cqc lesson plans are available in cuny academic works repository and listed as brown, margolin, and ward in the references at the end of this paper. [↩] see appendix for full list of questions. [↩] for a full description of our selection process see margolin, brown, and ward (2018), “comics, questions, action!” [↩] college students, comics, information literacy, question-asking, student centered all carrots, no sticks: relational practice and library instruction coordination “all i did was get this golden ticket”: negative emotions, cruel optimisms, and the library job search 1 response pingback : mina rees library scholarship | part ii this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: summer reading 2015 – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2015 23 sep editorial board, hugh rundle, ellie collier, annie pho, erin dorney, bethany radcliffe, lindsey rae and ian beilin /0 comments editorial: summer reading 2015 photo by flickr user moyan_brenn of moyan brenn photography (cc by 2.0) editors from in the library with the lead pipe are taking a break from our regular schedule to share our summer reading favs. tell us what you’ve been reading these last few months in the comments! by editorial board, hugh rundle, ellie collier, annie pho, erin dorney, bethany messersmith, lindsey rae, and ian beilin hugh it is, of course, winter where i live. this makes it a great time to curl up with a nice big fat tome, and i have been spending the long winter nights reading peter watson’s the great divide: history and human nature in the old world and the new. watson takes the reader on a journey from 15,000bc through the great flood, following the first humans across eurasia and through the rise and fall of empires until the conquistadors appeared. he explains how, according to our best guesses, humans came to be in the americas, when it happened, and why the new world they found there led the americans in such a different direction to the ‘old world’ of eurasia. this is a fascinating book in many ways. covering archaeology, religion, botany, geology and very ancient history, watson attempts to explain why the pre-columban americas had such comparatively short-lived civilisations, bloody religions, and localised cultures. ellie i’ve recently joined a mini book club with my brother and a few of our friends who are also marvel unlimited subscribers. our rough plan is to choose arcs that are completed in 6 issues. several of us have a tendency to spiral off though. so far we’ve done longshot saves the marvel universe (2013), rogue (2004), young avengers (2005), and deathlok (2014). young avengers in particular spiraled off into the whole 12 issue run as well as truth: red, white & black (2003) which linked up nicely but came from a separate twitter recommendation. i’ve also nostalgically torn through everything rogue and gambit, which lead to meeting pete wisdom and exploring new excalibur (2005). and i’m devouring the recent spate of female leads: captain marvel (2014), ms marvel (2014), thor (2014), and the unbeatable squirrel girl (2015). the metadata in marvel unlimited is awkward and the coverage can be spotty, which leads to lots of online searching to figure out what to read next. i’m grateful for friends who can share tips such as, “for further reading i suggest avengers children’s crusade which is basically issues 13+. issue 4 has its own separate entry on marvel unlimited for no reason, and avengers children’s crusade young avengers is by the same author and comes between issues 4 and 5.” annie the summer here has flown by pretty quickly. i’m beginning a research project for an upcoming book, the feminist reference desk, edited by maria accardi, so i’ve been doing a lot of reading to prep for that. the article that i’d really recommend everyone read is  library feminism and library women’s history: activism and scholarship, equity and culture by suzanne hildenbrand. it’s really insightful and explains how gender roles impact our profession. for more light reading, i have been reading modern romance the new book by aziz ansari and eric klinenberg. the research is interesting and aziz is pretty funny. last, i totally judged a book by it’s cover and started reading the woman destroyed by simone de beauvoir. so far i’ve only read the first story, but i’m not sure how i feel about it. i hope everyone had a good summer! bethany this summer i haven’t done my due diligence in the reading department. i always have a mental list of books to read based on people’s recommendations, but there are never enough hours in the day to get through everyone’s great suggestions! during my road trip to indiana university libraries information literacy colloquium in august, i listened to a book on cd, which is my absolute favorite way to read. it was jodi picoult’s gripping novel change of heart. always exploring controversial topics through fiction, things unravel at the beginning of picoult’s novel when a woman’s husband and child are brutally murdered. the plot thickens as the death row inmate who committed the murders seeks to bequeath his heart to a little girl in need of a heart transplant. not just any girl, but the biological daughter and sister of the victims murdered. the novel forced me to consider a new twist on an already uncomfortable subject. erin for the first time since i was a kid, i’m using the public library to borrow books again. i know that’s such a bad librarian thing to admit, but since i worked in academic libraries, i got everything i needed through the school. using my public library has been… interesting. it’s fascinating to see things from the strictly-patron side again (and that’s a whollllle different lead pipe article)! i’ve been devouring books lately. some of my favorites have been miguel street by v.s. naipaul, all my puny sorrows by miriam toews, and geek love by katharine dunn. i flew through the paris wife by paula mclain (yeah, i’m a couple years late on that one) and i was totally surprised/disturbed by sarah waters’ fingersmith. i’m in the middle of ca conrad’s ecodeviance and i’m about to start emily gould’s friendship. i’ve also been reading some books about minnesota history/culture and rocks/minerals specific to lake superior, since that’s where i’m living now! ian discussing summer reading makes me a little nervous. since i joined twitter about a year and half ago my book reading markedly declined. at the same time my eyesight deteriorated and my child became a toddler. whatever combination of factors may have prompted it, the fact is that i read fewer books than ever before. my overall reading, however, has not been reduced, principally because twitter (for me this means mainly ‘library twitter’) is directing me daily to various news articles, journal articles, blog posts, websites, and other shorter-form writing that absorbs most of my reading time on any given day. yet i did find the time for at least one book this summer! i am working on a project tracing the careers of german academic librarians through the turbulent decades of the mid-20th century. for this research i read a book of essays about austrian women librarians who confronted persecution under the nazis and were either forced into emigration, imprisoned, persecuted, tortured, or even murdered. entitled “austrian women librarians on the run: persecuted, suppressed, forgotten?” [ilse korotin, ed., österreichische bibliothekarinnen auf der flucht: vefolgt, verdrängt, vergessen? wien: praesens verlag, 2007.], this small book contains a rich trove of remarkable and often harrowing stories of women librarians who found themselves forced out of their jobs and their homes before and during world war ii. of particular interest to me was how the political commitments of many women were strengthened by the experiences of persecution, expulsion, and exile. many of those who survived the war and the holocaust saw librarianship as an integral part of their struggles against racism and sexism, and their commitments to social justice. lindsey over the last couple of years, i’ve gotten back into reading real-life books, and it has been wonderful. some distant friends started a sci-fi/fantasy book club, and it’s gotten me back into reading. we used to meet monthly via google hangouts from our varying locations (the power of technology!), and i’ve recently joined up with another book club that’s in-the-flesh. in the meantime, i’ve been enjoying some easy escapist reading. most recently, i finished the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by mark haddon. finding his neighbor’s dog dead in the front yard (and this is how the book opens, y’all), young chris decides to do some detecting in order to find out whodunnit. mayhem ensues, of course. my favorite book of the summer though has definitely been magonia by maria dahvana headly. i became obsessed with the unique, otherworldliness of this book. reading sci-fi and fantasy, i sometimes find it difficult to escape recurring themes and common tropes. what i liked most about this one was that it blew all of that out of the water. i’d never experienced a world like magonia before, and i loved that. unpacking and overcoming “edutainment” in library instruction white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct bridging the relationship gap: using social network theories to inform library services for graduate students – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 3 oct hannah gascho rempel and mary markland /0 comments bridging the relationship gap: using social network theories to inform library services for graduate students in brief graduate school is a transformative time for many students. for some students, this is an exciting adventure that allows them to explore new ideas and more fully express themselves. however, many graduate students experience feelings of anxiety, frustration, and exclusion because they don’t feel like they belong to this academic community. socially-based struggles frequently lead to reduced levels of retention among graduate students. because librarians typically work outside departmental or graduate school hierarchies, we often strive to act as information brokers for graduate students as they navigate their learning communities. in this paper, we critically reflect on two theories—social capital and information poverty—to provide a lens for examining graduate students’ existing social networks. we use a graduate student persona to illustrate what it might look like to apply these theories to our practice. because of the different experiences of historically marginalized and underserved students, we also explore how the social capital model might impact them in unique ways. finally, we provide practical relationship-driven options for increasing librarians’ engagement with graduate students. by hannah gascho rempel and mary j. markland introduction because of the time-intensive and individualistic nature of graduate school, graduate students frequently experience a relationship gap: between themselves and their advisors, their families and friends, and the university services available to them. the graduate school experience often highlights and rewards individual work. as a result, graduate students’ approach to the individualistic tasks of research and studying can be in conflict with their ability to seek out supports via social networks. at the same time, graduate student advisors often assume that because graduate students have previous experience navigating the academic environment, they are equipped to independently figure out how to be successful in graduate school. as a result, fewer supports are typically offered to graduate students as compared to undergraduate students. tensions and problems arise as a result. for example, when students are faced with heavy reading and writing loads or an unfamiliar research task, they may feel like they need to solve those problems on their own. if graduate students are trying to appear competent in all of their educational pursuits, they may be less likely to admit when they don’t understand how to do something or to ask for help. in this paper we will examine two theories related to information seeking and social network development, information poverty and social capital, as a means to better understand the intersection of social pressures on graduate students’ information seeking behaviors. methods for establishing and maintaining library services are highly context-dependent. each librarian understands the intersection of services for graduate students and librarianship differently depending on their personal backgrounds and local institutional practices. using theories as a basis for discussion provides a way to have a shared conversation while allowing us to critically examine our own contexts and to apply relevant ideas from these theories to local needs. another way to develop a shared basis for reflection and conversation is through the use of personas, or hypothetical user archetypes (head, 2003). in this paper, we will also walk through a brief case study using a persona in combination with the social network theories to illustrate how looking at individuals as part of a larger social structure can inform the work we do with graduate students. the purpose of this article is to elicit ideas for providing library services for graduate students that recognize the difficulties graduate students face in building up a social network within an academic hierarchy, as well as to encourage librarians to use their strengths as information relationship builders. assumptions about our services for graduate students as librarians, we each work at different institutions with different graduate student populations. as a result, the options we have for working and creating relationships with graduate students varies based on these cultural factors. also, our different personal histories and job responsibilities influence how we do outreach, how we connect with graduate students, and how we visualize their needs. to illustrate some of these differences, we describe our own backgrounds to explain the context in which we approach issues related to graduate students and library services. oregon state university main campus hannah works at oregon state university (osu), which had an enrollment of 30,000 students in 2018 (oregon state university, 2018); of that total enrollment 4,300 were graduate students and 600 were professional students. more than a quarter of the graduate students at osu are in the college of engineering; the college of science and the college of agricultural sciences enroll the second and third highest amounts of graduate students at osu, respectively. hannah works in the main library on the main osu campus. as a result, she experiences the benefits of being where most of the campus services are located. she is geographically close to librarian colleagues and other campus collaborators. she is also physically closer to many graduate students. before receiving her mlis, hannah graduated with a master’s degree in horticulture. consequently, her personal perceptions of research tend to center on workflows and processes involving laboratory or field work. while intellectually she understands that research can take many different forms, including textual research or observational research with humans, her direct experiences as a graduate student are rooted in field and lab-based research. oregon state university hatfield marine science center (branch campus) mary works at the hatfield marine science center (hmsc), a branch campus of osu located about one hour’s drive from the main campus. the distance to campus creates more of a barrier than one might think. a mountainous road and bad winter weather mean that everyone avoids the drive as much as possible. this leads to a sense of isolation and an us vs. them atmosphere at times. the branch library is staffed by a librarian, two library technicians and a student employee. our connections to the main campus are primarily via virtual meetings. typically, there are 15-20 graduate students at hmsc. a majority of the graduate students at hmsc are affiliated with the department of fisheries and wildlife or the department of integrative biology. some graduate students work with osu faculty; some work with state or federal agency scientists. some of the graduate students are there full-time; others commute back and forth to the main campus. there are no university services like health care, administrative offices, or recreational facilities at the branch campus. mary has an undergraduate degree in biology, a lifelong interest in marine biology, an mls, and 30 years of experience as a science librarian. but up until the past few years, most of that career was spent in medical libraries. as a result of our personal histories and work contexts, we all approach our work with a certain set of assumptions. the context for this article is how we work with graduate students as academic librarians. brookfield (2011) asserts that to think critically about a question or a problem, you must hunt assumptions, check those assumptions, practice seeing issues from a different viewpoint, and then take informed action based on the new information you now have. we use brookfield’s conceptualization of assumptions—that assumptions are neither right nor wrong—they are contextually appropriate and informed by past experiences, including lived experiences and accumulated expertise. here is an inventory of some of the assumptions we, the authors, recognize that we bring to this work. these assumptions are a consequence of our personal experiences and our research on graduate student behaviors. services are available on campus for graduate students but are unequally distributed and accessed. this is especially the case for students who are not on the main campus (rempel, hussong-christian, & mellinger, 2011). graduate students’ experiences are shaped more by their departments than by their experience of the larger university as a whole (white & nonnamaker, 2008). libraries can be useful as a space, but graduate students prefer departmental offices if they are well equipped and quiet (rempel et al., 2011). libraries (and librarians) view themselves as safe spaces (or allies) for students to bring their concerns (saunders, 2015). in comparison to their other research tasks (e.g., defining a research question, identifying subjects or field sites, analyzing the data, etc.), exploring the literature is not graduate students’ highest research concern. graduate students prefer to learn non-course content from their peers (anderson & swazey, 1998; george et al., 2006). graduate students are pragmatic learners due to the many competing demands on their time (macauley & green, 2009). graduate students are not necessarily the primary focus of faculty and sometimes feel ignored (austin, 2002). this list of assumptions isn’t meant to be exhaustive, but rather to reveal the basis for how we conceptualize our interactions with graduate students, what gaps we surfaced in how graduate services are currently discussed in the literature, and how we are planning to move forward in our roles as librarians who serve graduate students. background literature relationship gaps and difficulties establishing and using social networks have very real consequences for graduate students’ success in graduate school. one of the most common measures of success in graduate school is whether or not students complete their program of study, and if they do so in an appropriate time frame. reports about graduate students’ departure from their programs vary based on the metrics used and the demographics analyzed. for example, one study examined six-year completion rates by discipline and found percent completion rates varied from 50% for agriculture and engineering students, to 37% for social science students. thirty-seven percent of humanities doctoral students finished in eight years (ostriker, kuh, & voytuk, 2011). another study found that 56% of white stem (science, technology, engineering, and math) students complete their doctoral degree in ten years, compared with 43% of black stem students (sowell, allum, & okahana, 2015). common reasons for departure from graduate programs without completing the degree include personal problems, departmental issues, and because the program was not a good fit (gardner, 2009). in a national study surveying more than 5,000 doctoral programs, fewer than 40% of graduate students who responded were satisfied with the social interaction opportunities sponsored by their program (ostriker et al., 2011). similarly, the council of graduate schools commissioned the phd completion project to learn more about the root causes of graduate students’ ability to succeed (or not) in graduate school. one of the top six recommendations from this project for improving graduate students’ experiences was for the program environment to provide “social interaction conducive to adopting a professional identity in the discipline, networking, and community building” (sinady, floyd, & mulder, 2009, p. 222). lack of social connections and opportunities for making those connections are real issues in graduate students’ lives. what do we do with this knowledge in our varied roles as librarians? the approach we chose to start with was to examine the relationship gap as an information problem. past studies on graduate students’ information seeking behaviors found that graduate students do not use library services due to a lack of knowledge about these services (george et al., 2006; rempel et al., 2011), and that better promotion of these services (i.e., more information) might lead to increased use (jankowska, hertel, & young, 2006; kuruppu & gruber, 2006). however, we wondered if simply knowing about services might not be the only issue at the root of this information problem. based on our assumptions (grounded in our personal experiences, the expertise we have gained from working with graduate students, and the research literature) about how graduate students receive and act on information, we began to explore how social networks could impact information exchange. information poverty our exploration of how relationship gaps might hinder graduate students’ information seeking abilities and their subsequent ability to act on the information they gathered, was initially informed by elfreda chatman’s work on information poverty. chatman created and applied theories that describe how groups sought out and shared information (chatman 1986; chatman 1991; chatman 1992; chatman 1996; chatman 1999). in particular, she looked at marginalized populations such as people living in poverty, single mothers, the elderly, female inmates, and janitors. the groups she worked with all lived in what she described as a world of insiders and outsiders. when operating as insiders, group members did not seek information from groups or people considered to be outside of their group. the insiders were highly concerned with conforming to group norms. as a result, they preferred to make use of information generated within the group rather than take the risk of seeking outside information. to fit into the group norms, people in the insider group often concealed their real state of need and engaged in secrecy, deception, risk avoidance, and self-protective behaviors. these actions limited their access to any knowledge outside their lived experience. chatman described this phenomenon as living in a world of information poverty (chatman 1996). one example of how information poverty is enacted is illustrated by chatman’s work with elderly women in an assisted living facility (chatman 1992; chatman 1996). it could be assumed that it is beneficial for elderly people to be in assisted living with other people like them so they can develop supportive relationships and share information related to the aging process. but chatman found that being a part of that particular insider group was only beneficial to a certain point. these elderly women engaged in multiple information poverty actions including secrecy and deception. they chose to keep their actual health status hidden from other residents for fear they might be removed from their current environment and placed in more advanced care with more restrictions. not only did residents keep their health status a secret, but they actively gave false or misleading information about their health to maintain the appearance of normalcy. the residents took these actions intending to protect themselves from perceived risks, but this had the downside of limiting how much information residents shared with each other about health services or symptoms common to the group as a whole. chatman (1991/1996) noted that information sharing can be dictated by situational relevance. she suggested that people in precarious situations do not see a value in the resources provided by outsiders—even if they think those resources might be useful. if an information-seeking action might trigger the risk of appearing different from the rest of the insider community, the individual will avoid seeking more information. in other words, it can feel safer to remain ignorant than to appear ignorant (or different) from peers or fellow insiders. we suggest that the theory of information poverty describes several behaviors graduate students can exhibit. graduate students sometimes limit themselves to only drawing on insider knowledge, e.g., not looking beyond their academic department for resources. at times, graduate students remain quiet or secretive about what they don’t know, e.g., how to conduct a literature review, how to find funding, or how to deal with a difficult advisor, in order to appear normal within their group. of course, the extent to which individual graduate students exhibit characteristics of information poverty varies. however, using the theory of information poverty as a lens provided us with some alternative ways to consider the library’s place in relation to graduate students’ social networks. graduate students may perceive libraries and librarians as part of the university hierarchy (an outside group), and so may not want to admit ignorance. an overview of social capital chatman was an information sciences researcher, but her ideas and research on information poverty have many connections to a long-standing body of work in sociology and philosophy on social capital. pierre bourdieu (1986/2008), a french sociologist and philosopher, described social capital as the benefit of membership in a particular group. sometimes group memberships are formally recognized, and sometimes these memberships are less formal, but the benefits gained from being part of this group can give group members credit, or capital, to leverage both in their groups and beyond. a key feature of social capital is that it has both an individual and a collective aspect. putnam (2000), an american political scientist who studies individual and group behaviors, notes that individuals form connections that benefit their own interests. but those interests can also combine to positively affect a larger group. three main components contribute to the theory of social capital (putnam, 2000). the first component is the social networks or groups of people with whom an individual interacts. the second component is the shared norms and values of each group. and the third component is the degree to which trust or reciprocal sharing takes place in those relationships (see figure 1). figure 1. social capital model (adapted from putnam, 2000). typically, people have multiple social capital networks in their lives. networks may be based on school, work, family, hobbies, or other extracurricular activities. however, not all social networks operate in the same way. sometimes the connections in those social capital networks are stronger and sometimes they are weaker. interestingly though, especially in terms of thinking about information sharing, some scholars (levin & cross, 2004) have suggested that weak ties provide access to non-redundant information. in other words, social connections with people outside of a particular insider group help provide exposure to new ideas. theorists have named two different connection types (temple, 2009). bonding relationships are connections made with similar people (insider connections). bridging relationships are connections made among diverse groups (outsider connections). a concern is that social capital may be most readily developed when people are similar to each other or where connections are easy, and as a result only bonding relationships are developed. a danger of only developing bonding relationships is that opportunities for exploring new sources of information may be lost (temple, 2009). before moving forward with how the social capital framework was helpful for guiding our thinking as librarians, we want to pause and note some issues that the theory of social capital highlights. one issue is that the construction of social networks and the power that can go along with the structures created by those networks has long favored dominant groups. within the united states’ higher education system, this has been particularly true for dominant groups in the categories of race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability (to name a few) (bancroft, 2013). we hope that by becoming more aware, as well as more critically reflective, of the social structures that are in place, we can imagine and create new and different structures that are more inclusive, while not forgetting the history and privileges afforded by many existing social structures. another issue is that other, similar and yet in many ways radically different, models have been in place in indigenous communities for a long time. loyer (2018), a cree-métis librarian in canada, describes the nêhiyaw and michif concept of wâhkôhtowin, “a model for building kinship, which provides a structure for reciprocal accountability through relationship” (p. 151). this system of kinship relies on developing social networks that are the basis for shared cultural work and responsibilities – a framework that can sound very similar to social capital. however, loyer describes the desired outcome of this kinship building as an ethic of care. an approach based on kinship rather than capital is an important shift. the literature we reference primarily draws on the euro-centric concepts of social capital, and more work needs to be done to learn how the ideas of kinship can integrate with or substitute for the social capital model as a framework for understanding relationship-centered practice. social capital, information poverty, and librarians social capital can describe many types of social structures and behaviors, but how could the theory of social capital inform our work as librarians? we were drawn to the theory of social capital initially because of the way it confirmed ideas from information poverty theory about sharing information, especially the barriers to sharing information. but what researchers within higher education suggest is that social capital can also facilitate information flow (temple, 2009). information flow can include not only person-to-person information exchange, but also more structured information exchange activities like workshops or classroom-based learning. what researchers have found is that when there are existing networks of trust based on shared norms and values, learning can happen more readily with less resistance. this finding begs the question of whether or not the opposite premise is true: is information flow weakened when social capital ties are weak? in many cases, a librarian’s ties to graduate students might be described as weak. for example, in many of hannah’s interactions with graduate students, often her primary points of connection are stand-alone, non-recurring reference consultations or workshops in which few shared norms and values can be established, only a minimal level of trust is developed, and weak social network ties are created. however, graduate student relationships with librarians vary greatly based on the institutional context. for example, mary works at a smaller branch campus, which houses a much smaller graduate student population, and frequently sees the same graduate students several times a week, thereby building stronger connections within this social network. the narrower scope of her branch campus leads to more opportunities for creating shared norms and values, and trust begins to develop based on repeated demonstrations of reliability. situating our relationships as librarians serving graduate students within these social network theories gave us ways to more clearly surface context-based differences in our graduate student service patterns. it also provided a way to think about how library services might be perceived differently based on students’ social networks. social network theories in action theories often feel overly abstract, and finding ways to incorporate principles from those theories into our practice as librarians can feel elusive. using personas is a way to create a shared point of reference from which to have a conversation about these abstract ideas. personas are developed by crafting a realistic composite of a person in order to generate ideas for serving a particular user community. personas are commonly used in web design, but have also been used in library research to inform how services are provided to a range of user groups, e.g., undergraduate students (colon-aguirre & fleming, 2012; denison & montgomery 2012). personas can be constructed in a variety of ways, including through research on a targeted population and through sustained personal expertise with a particular user group. in this case, our personas were constructed through our own accumulated expertise working with and researching graduate students in a variety of settings for many years. we developed four graduate student personas representing a range of disciplinary backgrounds, different experiences with their graduate student cohorts, a variety of prior educational and library research experiences, and several hurdles they faced in their graduate school journey. we drew on information poverty theory to help shape the description of the socially-based struggles the personas faced. for our primary discussion, we chose to feature a persona who is completing her education degree online because education master’s degree students make up the second highest number of master’s degree students (national center for education statistics, 2016), and because distance graduate education programs are increasing at our own institution. next, we used the three elements of social capital theory—social networks, shared norms and values, and trust and reciprocity—to determine how that model can guide our work as academic librarians with an individual persona. the work we do as librarians is sometimes directly with students, but often our work happens behind the scenes and involves setting up structures to help create better systems or interfaces for students. as a result, we walk through one persona and the ways that we as librarians could use the social capital framework to both directly and indirectly address some of the issues she faces. the remainder of the personas can be found in the appendix. we invite readers to explore these additional personas and think about how the combination of the social capital framework and their own library and university context might generate new ways of providing supports for graduate students. ellen – 2nd year masters of education student educational background: ellen is 45 years old. she has worked as a high school science teacher covering a variety of science courses. she is working on her m.ed. so she can move into an administrative role. she has enrolled in an online program offered by a university in a nearby state. there is a cohort model for her program so she has some continuity with her online classmates. many of the faculty members are also located at a distance from the main campus. ellen did some library research when she got her education degree 20 years ago. she used the online catalog system and an online tool to find journal articles. she is unfamiliar with bibliographic management tools. her online program has an orientation course for all new students that introduces them to research methods. this course includes one session with the librarian who is assigned to handle outreach to all the distance-education students. the librarian offers office hours via skype or webex. struggles: ellen wants to complete this degree as fast as possible due to the expense and her family’s needs. she does most of her schoolwork at night to minimize the impact of her educational pursuits on her children. however, this approach has resulted in decreased opportunities for her to get together with friends who have previously acted as a sounding board for other frustrations and worries. ellen’s schedule is very tightly coordinated, and she is frustrated that research for her papers and upcoming thesis takes so long. she has tried using the local community college library, but their collection doesn’t always have what she needs. ellen is concerned about her upcoming thesis project and how she will keep it organized. ellen struggles at times with her advisor and other professors. she is limited to skype meetings, and they can be difficult to schedule. in addition, she doesn’t feel her advisor values her real world experiences and practical viewpoint. ellen is also frustrated with the frequent group projects that are assigned. most of the students in the program also work full-time. they are spread over different time zones and most of their contact is through the learning management system (lms) discussion boards, making it difficult to generate coherent discussions. ellen has been able to make some connections with a few of her fellow graduate students, but their conversations have mostly centered on complaints about their advisors. she has not shared her struggles with finding information for her research project or narrowing her focus. application of the social capital model direct approaches: ellen (like many distance education students) feels disconnected from her student peers, instructors, and campus support services. based on the application of the social capital framework, our practical suggestions focus on providing more proactive and accessible communication methods; actively sharing messages about resources for her scholarly community via a variety of outlets; and emphasizing a culture of service that demonstrates the library’s responsiveness and willingness to adapt to her learning context. below is a list of some concrete ways academic librarians could act on the three components of social capital in ellen’s situation. creating social networks: 1. use mail merge to send a personalized email at the beginning of each term to all students in the online education program letting them know a librarian is available to work with them. in this email include asynchronous options like email for contacting the librarian, as well as synchronous options such as phone, skype, or google hangouts. 2. hold office hours one or two nights a week, via skype or google hangouts. 3. offer training on online group productivity tools (e.g., zotero, google drive, or box) for program cohorts. offer the trainings synchronously (if desired and possible) for each cohort, leaving time for discussion and application and practice of what they’ve learned, but also record the training for those who were not able to attend. creating shared norms and values: 1. develop an online student-focused website or libguide and feature not only tools and services, but successes of past online students, e.g., award winners, or completed theses or projects. 2. place bookmarks in all outgoing books sent to online students promoting research tools and services targeted to the student’s field, e.g., apa citation help, education databases, or archived online workshops for graduate students. 3. publicize awards opportunities, e.g., library research awards recognizing excellent research projects, to the online campus community. creating trust and reciprocity: 1. pay for shipping costs (both ways) for books online students use via interlibrary loan. 2. respond quickly to online students’ requests, and if they want to interact synchronously, ask them for their preferred availability. 3. ask departmental faculty for a list of students who are working on research intensive projects, e.g., that require an irb or that use educational datasets, and then proactively reach out to those students and suggest specific search tools, organizational strategies, or assistance with making their final product openly discoverable. indirect approaches: improving ellen’s individual experience is very important. but understanding the larger educational community she operates in and creating connections to that community is also important for creating longer term supports for education graduate students in this distance program. again, we used the three components of the social capital framework to generate ideas for building relationships that may only indirectly benefit ellen, but which could have longer term impacts on the broader graduate student community. these practical ideas focus on developing relationships with faculty and (if feasible) with a broader network of libraries, including public libraries. the power balance between librarians and instruction faculty and librarians at other institutions is different than the relationship between librarians and graduate students. as a result, this list of actions focuses on learning about classroom context and tools, educating instruction faculty about library options and concerns, and advocacy for library values. creating social networks: 1. meet with departmental faculty either in person or online to understand the required projects and class expectations. 2. provide adjunct faculty with information on library resources and possible limitations or differences compared to their primary campuses or previous experiences. 3. reach out through email to the local public libraries in communities that have a lot of distance students and share and solicit ideas for serving these students. creating shared norms and values: 1. meet with faculty to learn about typical areas of student weaknesses. based on this information include targeted help via libguides or recorded webinars. 2. advocate with faculty for scaffolded instruction (via webinars or tutorials) beyond introductory library resources or research topics. 3. become aware of, and as much as possible an expert in, campus resources that are relevant for distance graduate students, for example lms (learning management system) training, resources for video conferencing, online outreach services from the graduate school, and writing center services for off-campus students so that conversations with graduate students are based on a shared understanding of these services. creating trust and reciprocity: 1. become familiar with what types of resources might be available in the students’ local libraries and give them some tips for accessing non-academic libraries. 2. sign up for student listservs or get embedded in the class lms. mostly pay attention to the tenor of the conversations, and judiciously find information to share. 3. prioritize listening over talking. barriers and opportunities revealed by social network theories barriers in considering how the two social network theories we explored might influence librarians’ work with graduate students, it is important to recognize that the social network theories illustrate many barriers graduate students can face in their educational process. for example, factors from the students’ local environment, unrelated to their topics of study, can have an outsized impact on the development of social capital. many students are studying far away from their families, and so a family-based social structure (which may have previously been very important) cannot be as readily relied on in day-to-day interactions. in addition, a major factor shaping graduate students’ social interactions is the student’s department or discipline (austin, 2002; white & nonnamaker, 2008). different disciplinary areas have implicit and explicit cultural expectations of their students: that students will work independently, that they will work long hours in the lab, or that they will follow formulaic guidelines for their thesis. local culture can also present barriers for graduate students’ ability to develop social structures outside of school. for example, small college towns can be places in which to develop friendships outside of school. language can also be a barrier, particularly for students who are non-native english speakers studying in the united states. as librarians and other university administrators in positions of structural power become more aware of the impact of these barriers, they can make decisions that work to reduce these barriers. a common barrier in the graduate education experience we want to emphasize is that the work is often intended to be self-directed and individualistic (dyckman, 2005; gardner, 2008). there is certainly disciplinary variation, but ultimately graduate students must submit their own thesis, dissertation, or portfolio at the end of their graduate school tenure. the result of the individualistic nature of this work can be the emergence of self-protective behaviors as described by chatman’s information poverty theory and illustrated by the residents in the senior living facility. graduate students’ approaches to these individualistic tasks can be in conflict with their ability to seek out supports via their social networks. tensions and problems arise as a result. the more support a department can provide to help navigate both explicit and implicit expectations, the higher likelihood of a successful degree completion (gardner, 2010). while social or relationship concerns impact all graduate students, historically marginalized groups deal with the additional disparities created by institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. the social capital framework recognizes that people have multiple networks and that these networks combine to influence relationships across networks. however, the dominant culture of graduate school has often encouraged students to believe the academic context is the only set of norms, values, and relationships that matters—or even exists—in graduate students’ lives. this approach is in stark contrast to how members of many historically marginalized communities think of their relationships (bancroft, 2013). as a result, dissonance can develop between the norms of the academic department and students’ social identities. education researchers have explored how much of their identities or communities that historically marginalized graduate students leave behind when they enter graduate school (levin, jaeger, & haley, 2013; winkle-wagner & mccoy, 2016). the level of dissonance for students from these groups can be even greater than those from historically dominant groups (goodarzi, 2018). they might be the first in their family to attend graduate school and as a result can lack knowledge or full support for their academic pursuits from their families. insider vocabulary may be used that makes them feel like outsiders. they may experience additional financial strains because of the long-term financial advantages denied to their communities. plus, the new academic community might not be welcoming to perceived outsiders. opportunities for developing services these two social network theories also raise many questions about the purpose of graduate studies, how learning is conducted in these relationships, and how information may be shared with and among graduate students. the lens of social capital introduces a new way to examine service provision and communication issues, and can help librarians re-conceptualize services for graduate students to account for some of the frustrations and barriers in their relationship ecosystem. researchers have found that certain service designs encourage the social interactions, participation, and sense of belonging that lie at the heart of the social capital framework (temple, 2009). this finding suggests that improvements in social capital aren’t permanently fixed, but instead can be constructed and changed. when we reviewed the literature on graduate students, and particularly graduate students from historically marginalized communities, with the social capital framework in mind, we encountered several examples of services that could either be developed in the library, or (depending on the institutional context) that librarians could work on in partnership with other campus groups to affect change. the first suggestion comes from elfreda chatman (1987). based on her work she notes the importance of collecting practical books that are relevant sources of information based on the community’s actual needs. the communities she worked with primarily used resources via their public library. however, in addition to collecting information sources important to their disciplinary work, academic libraries can also make an effort to collect information resources related to graduate students’ practical needs of financing their education and finding jobs after they graduate. another suggestion is based on winkle-wagner and mccoy’s (2016) recognition of the importance of summer institutes (especially for historically marginalized minorities) to give students an extra boost before the beginning of the school year. inviting (and potentially financing) graduate students to attend a hands-on institute on library research practices prior to the start of the school year could establish a foundation of shared norms for doing research as well as a social connection with librarians that could be a basis for the rest of their education. several libraries already participate in mcnair post baccalaureate programs as one way to address this issue (palumbo, 2018). to help graduate students see themselves as connected to the work of a common goal, either on a disciplinary or institutional basis, librarians leading workshops, orientation sessions, or other instructional sessions for graduate students could make explicit connections between the published literature and the people conducting that literature. winkle-wagner and mccoy (2016) note that cultural capital can be gained by learning about authors and the language of a discipline, while social capital can be gained by developing networks of scholars. when illustrating concepts like citation networks, librarians could use information from authors’ websites to show the human scale of research and how authors can be connected by education, mentorship, or interest. in instruction sessions, librarians could also showcase examples from their own institutions—purposefully highlighting research from other departments—to help graduate students better visualize the work currently in process on their campus. students could brainstorm potential cross-disciplinary projects and practice their searching and finding skills by looking for examples or options available on their campus. developing a sense of belonging is a key component of creating social networks based on trust. wynn (2017) suggests that one way to create a shift away from long-standing notions of belonging that only included students from the dominant culture is to explicitly, and repeatedly, broadcast a message of belonging. libraries can create their own “you belong” messaging through posters, banners, or other signage that signals to all students that they are welcome to study, research, and collaborate in library spaces (and hopefully elsewhere on campus). partnering with other campus entities could broaden this message of belonging. a solution that would reach beyond the library is the recognition of the importance of family for many students, particularly those from historically marginalized groups (levin et al., 2013). some libraries, like our own (http://familyresources.oregonstate.edu/olv-library), host daycare facilities in their library to give students childcare support while they are studying. while not all libraries may be able to provide childcare, libraries could be part of a larger shift to a more family-friendly culture, where it is considered acceptable to bring children or parents into the library when attending instructional sessions or conducting research. librarians could also consider starting conversations on their campus about what a family-friendly culture might look like in their context. one aspect of librarianship that the theory of social capital surfaces is that librarians are part of the institutional establishment. while librarians frequently prefer to downplay our role as part of the institutional hierarchy and instead focus on our characteristics as neutral and safe people to bring concerns to, recognizing the inherent power differential that comes with being part of that establishment can encourage us to more realistically approach our relationships with graduate students. the onus is on us to look for ways to reach out to graduate students, rather than expecting them to come to us. reaching out to graduate students is one way to increase a sense of belonging and to begin to develop shared networks in which to share information. wall, mcnie, and garfin (2017) note that “creating social capital usually requires the use of ‘soft skills,’ such as listening, communicating, mediating, negotiating, and sharing” (p. 556). the development of soft skills creates services at a personal relationship level. as illustrated in our application of the social capital model to the problems ellen’s persona faced, a service improvement we are suggesting is to recognize the value of the individual relationship. as seasoned librarians, we are familiar with the need to create sustainable programs to provide access to information and services to the large numbers of students on our campuses. we discussed some options for creating sustained structural supports in the indirect applications of the social network framework to the issues raised by ellen’s persona. however, we also believe that small, high-touch relationship building actions should be encouraged and valued in our structures. since creating the personas and using the two social network theories to guide our reflective practice, we have seen this in our attempts to build relationships in our local contexts. here are some recent examples of ways that we have attempted to build relationships in our local contexts. during graduate student appreciation week, mary brought donuts to her library for the graduate students. this small gesture was much appreciated and has made other faculty and staff at her campus think about what they could do to appreciate graduate students. hannah has hosted office hours in the graduate student success center (which is not located in the library), as a way of going to a space where graduate students may feel more comfortable, rather than always expecting graduate students to come to her. creating time and space in our schedules to recognize graduate students’ needs may not always feel like a big innovation at a programmatic level. it may also feel like an additional burden to some librarians depending on their background and assumptions about the purpose and nature of the work they do. but in our context, we are finding that thoughtfully taking time for librarians to develop social capital with students can have impacts that reach students who need support the most. conclusion exploring the services that libraries provide for graduate students through the lens of social capital and information poverty reveals several new approaches and emphasizes some well-established values of librarianship. a key implication in connecting the work on information poverty to graduate students’ experiences is that graduate students’ social capital networks can impact their willingness to make use of library and university services. sometimes graduate students don’t use these services because they don’t know about them. but often, that is not the only reason for lack of use. as new members of an academic community, graduate students may feel the need to hide their lack of knowledge from their immediate peers. librarians’ response to these expressions of information poverty can include work on a personal level. this work can include taking the time to see things on a small scale and recognizing that developing individual relationships is worthwhile, perhaps especially with graduate students from historically marginalized groups, as a way to rebalance longstanding power and trust dynamics in academia. while librarians may not be able to serve all graduate students in this relational way, selecting targeted ways to connect with graduate students should be valued. making a graduate student feel like a worthwhile individual instead of just a number in a class can be very powerful. we may not always be able to quantify how much a small act such as running interference on an interlibrary loan request, returning an email quickly, or making a requested book purchase, matters to them, but that interaction may have made their life easier, and can contribute to their overall sense of belonging. librarians can also design efforts on a larger scale to create a better balance of social capital. through concerted efforts to increase equitable access to opportunities for incoming graduate students, emphasis on the human scale of research in our instruction, and the creation of family-oriented study options, we can demonstrate that we value including graduate students in our campus social networks. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank jennifer sharkey (external peer reviewer) and bethany messersmith (internal peer reviewer) for reviewing drafts of this article. we recognize that reviewing takes a lot of time, and we are thankful for their feedback. the authors would also like to thank our publishing editor, ian beilin. we are thankful for our fellow librarian colleagues who serve graduate students. your conversational input has been invaluable. finally, we are thankful for the graduate students with whom we get to interact with every day. we learn so much from you. references anderson, m. s., & swazey, j. p. 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(2017, december 6). odd one out: on being a graduate student of color. retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/odd-one-out appendix additional graduate student personas with which to explore the social capital framework. abby – 1st year masters of public health student educational background: abby is 29 and works as an rn at a local hospital. she went to a community college and then transferred to her local mid-sized university to get her bsn. she is now enrolled in a new mph program at her local university. the program combines in-person night and weekend courses along with online courses. abby’s past research experiences were primarily focused on clinical case reports and care plans. she knows about cinahl and pubmed but prefers google because it is faster. abby has identified outreach and services for lgbtq students as her area of interest. abby is in the first cohort of students to enter the mph program. there are five full-time faculty including the department head. there are also many adjunct instructors who have been pulled from the local community and state medical school. the current nursing librarian has been assigned to the mph department. the librarian is participating in the research methods course required for all first-year mph students. struggles: abby feels like her research skills are at a proficient level. however, she is frustrated that she is struggling with finding materials for her classes. abby enjoys her advisor and feels supported despite both of their busy schedules. however, abby has been surprised at the hoops she has to jump through with the university, their policies, and the irb in order to do research with students. she is also frustrated that it is harder to find campus collaborators for her project than she expected. in past work relationships, she has quickly been able to figure out who to ask to facilitate the projects she wants to take on, but the academic bureaucracy at this institution is stymying her. her cohort of students is a combination of younger students going straight to the mph from their undergraduate degree and older students like herself. the older students cover a wide range of ages and life experiences. her department is trying to develop a community with a variety of social events. they are having mixed success due to the variety of ages, life experiences, and work schedules of the students in the cohort. preeda – 2nd-year master’s student in botany educational background: preeda is 23 years old. she is an international student from thailand. her undergraduate degree is in genetics from one of the top science-focused universities in thailand. she was awarded a full scholarship by the government of thailand to attend graduate school at a major land grant institution in the united states. she has joined a lab focused on using molecular techniques to better understand diseases in rice. preeda reads english well, but her english speaking skills still need more practice. preeda is unfamiliar with finding literature sources on her own. as an undergraduate, relevant articles were given to her by her professors, and she used google when she needed to find information about a molecular technique. her advisor requires all of her new graduate students to take a research seminar class during their first semester. preeda floundered in this class, and the instructor suggested she meet with her subject librarian. the librarian introduced preeda to two key subject databases in her field and some techniques for searching and accessing the literature. preeda has since had two follow-up meetings with the librarian to get clarifications on citation styles and to look for more specific research literature. struggles: one of the stipulations of preeda’s scholarship is that she will work in a university back in thailand for twice as many years as she studies in the u.s. preeda feels a lot of pressure to do well in her program. however, because of her struggles with english, she is concerned that her master’s program will take longer than two years. her thesis advisor has a long history of hosting international students in her lab. however, she spends much of her time writing grants and leaves the day-to-day mentoring and running of her lab in the hands of her research technician and her two postdocs. preeda is not comfortable sharing concerns or asking questions of her advisor and doesn’t know how to advocate for extra supports she might need. she feels pressure to work 40-50 hours a week in the lab on top of her coursework and spends many evenings and most weekends there. other graduate students spend a similar amount of time in the lab, and while all of them feel overworked, they all assume this schedule is part of the process of becoming a researcher in their field. preeda skypes with her family every week. she still feels very homesick at times, but she has been making friends with other thai students. this group provides her with options for socializing in a language she is comfortable in. jonah – 1st-year phd student in history educational background: jonah is 24 years old. his previous degrees are in computing science, history, and us history with a digital humanities focus. he recently moved across the country to work on a phd with a world-renowned faculty member at a prestigious school. jonah is self-taught in most of the technology tools he uses. he primarily relies on google books, google scholar, and jstor to search for secondary sources, but he is also familiar with several history databases that were introduced to him by his master’s degree advisor. for his phd project, he will need to use the extensive physical archival collection available at his university. he had a brief introduction to archival research by the archivist at his master’s institution but recognizes he will need more information to successfully find primary sources at his new institution. struggles: jonah’s partner has not made the move across the country with him yet. this is a point of contention between them, and the effort to maintain a long-distance relationship is increasingly frustrating. jonah is struggling to meet new people at his new university both because he isn’t completely sure about his current relationship, but also because the department he is housed in seems to have a lot of pre-established cliques. no cohesive group exists to plan events for graduate students, and the implicit expectation is that each new student will find their own way. jonah is having difficulty connecting with his phd advisor. while an expert in his field, jonah’s advisor does not prioritize mentoring graduate students. he is frequently out of the office giving talks around the world. jonah isn’t sure if he should look for another advisor, or if he will be able to figure out his project and the graduate school system on his own. beyond saints, spies and salespeople: new analogies for library liaison programmes towards a critical assessment practice this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct tangoing all the way: is everything negotiable? – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 1 jun brett bonfield /19 comments tangoing all the way: is everything negotiable? tango by the noun project (cc-by 3.0) by brett bonfield “negotiation seems like dancing the tango, two steps forward, two steps back and suddenly three surprising steps forward.” — margot wallström smart, well-intentioned people often have good reasons for saying stupid things. who hasn’t been swept up in an election, worried that there will be terrible consequences if we put the wrong person in the white house? in our passion to make sure we elect a president we don’t find repugnant, we occasionally say something stupid, either in favor of our chosen candidate or in opposition to the candidate we despise. in order to bolster a political or economic or moral position, we make accusations we cannot rationally defend, we misrepresent facts, we dissemble. this doesn’t make us bad people. we’re doing what normal, smart, well-intentioned people often do when something we care about is at stake. sometimes the stakes are global, other times they’re professional. for us, especially lately, it seems as if there have been an awful lot of issues related to libraries that have been both emotional and divisive. for me, over the past few months, in public interactions with library vendors, i feel as though i have been one of the many librarians on the receiving end of accusations, misrepresented facts, and dissembling. and i worry that i have contributed to our vendors feeling the same way. my public tangoing with vendors has centered around two topics. in january, at the american library association midwinter meeting in san diego, i was the sole public librarian at a private, library journal-hosted round table discussion on the future of integrated library systems. much of this discussion, which was moderated by david rapp, was published in library journal on april 1. in february, after overdrive announced harpercollins’ decision to have ebooks it licenses to libraries “self-destruct” after twenty-six uses, my friend gabriel farrell and i made a website that makes it easy to find out whether harpercollins has reverted back to its original ebook agreement with libraries. it also lets people who are boycotting harpercollins because of its self-destructing ebook policy know when the boycott is over. the driving factor underlying our relationships with library vendors, including ils vendors and harpercollins, is intellectual freedom and the copyright limitations that enable it to function: fair use and first sale. without the ability to offer information to our neighbors, students, or faculty members, a library’s value is irreparably compromised. if we negotiate away our constituents’ opportunities for intellectual freedom, if we do not control our own data, if we are not stewards of our constituents’ information, we are abdicating our responsibility. i don’t know if i’m capable of thinking or writing about intellectual freedom without seeming didactic and sentimental. which may make me a more passionate librarian, but if that passion goes unchecked it can inhibit my ability to think or negotiate rationally—and it’s no fun to negotiate with a zealot. for me, the key is to step back from any zealotry welling inside me and remember who it is we’re working with, what their incentives are, and what intermediate steps are likely to result in an ultimate outcome that provides the greatest overall benefit. vendors as people when i started library school, i believed everyone wanted the same jobs i did. i figured the most talented librarians would cluster around the best libraries, which i assumed would be the large research libraries that either were themselves famous institutions, like new york public library or the library of congress, or were affiliated with rich, prestigious institutions, like harvard or princeton. if i couldn’t get a job at what i soon learned to think of as a top-ranked research (arl) library, i wanted to work at a lower ranked arl or an elite smaller university or college library. after that, i hoped i might find a job at a prestigious public library, or a major corporation or elite law firm’s library. last on my list was working for a vendor. i assumed that was where the students who couldn’t get real library jobs ended up. once i learned what really happens, how the activities of librarianship are actually accomplished, i had to adjust my thinking, both about how library talent distributes itself and about the word “librarian.” first, the word “librarian.” personally, i now use the word to describe anyone who works in a library, anyone who works specifically or primarily for the benefit of libraries, or anyone who has a degree in librarianship. many of the best librarians i’ve met don’t (or don’t yet) have library degrees, don’t work solely for libraries, or aren’t employed by libraries directly.1 librarians are people whose work benefits library users, and i think of the best librarians as the people whose work provides these users with the greatest benefit. a lot of the best librarians work for vendors, which stands to reason: often that’s where the most money is, both for compensation and for innovation. in addition, because most vendors are not limited geographically, these librarians are able to do work that benefits more users than any individual library. of course, even for librarians who work at what we traditionally think of as libraries, it’s foolish to assume the name of the employer tells you much about the librarian. it becomes obvious when talking to librarians that many of us are not particularly motivated by personal compensation or overall library budgets. but even when we are, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much: salaries are pretty compressed—the highs aren’t all that high and the lows aren’t all that low—and there seems to be an awful lot of variation even within that relatively narrow band. the best librarians seem to keep moving through employers until they find a place where they feel comfortable and useful. and when they stop feeling that way, or when another place seems likely to provide greater comfort or more interesting or exciting ways to benefit library users, they move on. tl;dr: there’s no us and no them. in general, library-based librarians should assume the vendors they’re negotiating with are every bit as good at librarianship as they are, and very possibly a lot better. also, assume that you’re both motivated by the same thing: figuring out the best way to serve library users. vendors as companies vendors do a lot of good for library users, and in ways individual libraries usually cannot manage without assistance. they enable libraries to outsource many of their technology needs, pooling their resources to come up with better software than just about any library is capable of writing on its own. the same is true for abstracting and indexing serials, cataloging monographs, managing collections and acquisitions, and many other core library activities. these firms, operating in a market economy, allow librarians to use pricing and profit incentives to allocate resources in ways that balance the often divergent needs of the vast and heterogeneous population of library users. as librarians, we have access to a second economic model as well, and for some tasks the centrally managed planning provided by cooperatives seems to be the most efficient way to to allocate resources. we are fortunate to have both options. vendors also enable libraries to engage in activities that might be difficult to undertake without their existence. for instance, vendors play a major role in underwriting the expenses associated with hosting conferences and supporting professional associations, offsetting publishing costs for many library-related publications, making leading writers and thinkers available to interact personally with librarians, providing scholarships and travel grants, and sponsoring library awards. without implying any quid pro quo or ulterior motives, if we simply follow the flow of funds, we see that libraries pay vendors for goods or services, and a portion of those payments end up benefiting librarians professionally. these are professional benefits, not personal benefits; while it is possible that some of these benefits may help some librarians earn more money or obtain greater job security, the overwhelming benefit seems to be to the profession as a whole, helping us to communicate more effectively, allocate our resources more efficiently, and better serve library users. the vendors benefit from this arrangement as well; by exposing potential customers to their products, they gain advantages within their markets. the reason markets function, the reason vendors are useful to libraries, is that firms compete. their goal is to maximize profit, both short term and long term. this requires a balance. they want to charge as much as they can get, but they also need to make sure they don’t charge so much that they bankrupt their customers or force them to go without the product. they want to keep their expenses as low as they can, but not so low that their product is perceived as less valuable. they want to assume control of their competitors or put them out of business, but they also don’t want to minimize the perceived value of their product or stifle innovation within their markets. vendors understand that they operate in an ecosystem. they may not agree with you, or with each other, about the best way to steward that ecosystem—and a policy or situation that is good for firm a and bad for firm b now may be bad for firm a and good for firm b a year from now—but it is generally safe to assume that library vendors want what’s best for library users and libraries, both for moral and economic reasons. tl;dr: in general, the firms that market to libraries succeed when libraries are perceived as more valuable and therefore more worth funding. the vendors know those funds will expand the market, creating a situation in which everyone benefits. they will compete with each other for a greater share of those funds, and sell as many of their products and services as they can for as much as libraries can pay, but they know that it’s bad for business if they charge unsustainable prices. vendors as negotiating partners here’s where we really torture the tango metaphor. what we need to keep in mind when libraries negotiate with vendors is that vendors are going to kick hard and fast, turn quickly, and libraries need to kick just as hard and fast, and turn just as quickly, or everything collapses.2 we should also keep in mind that it’s not clear to either of us, at least when we start the dance, exactly who it is that’s leading. vendors have more money than libraries do, for the most part, and vendors generally have more potential customers than libraries have potential vendors. vendors are also better negotiators than libraries because they do it more often. and, when necessary, vendors are more likely to have the funds to hire specialist lawyers or public relations firms to help them, whether they’re negotiating privately or in public. vendors also, like everyone else, can get so close to a position that it’s hard for them to step back and see how what they say or do might be perceived by their negotiating partners. or they may say or do things just to see if anyone objects; maybe the objection they’ve been anticipating won’t materialize, meaning they’ve been limiting their own profits unnecessarily. or maybe they’re just throwing wide the overton window, taking advantage of anchoring to move the negotiations farther along in the direction that most benefits them.3 i believe this is how smart people with good intentions end up saying stupid things, how oclc creates an “all your bases are belong to us” records policy that draws near universal ire from its members or a library outsourcing company chief executive provides a quote for the new york times in which he says, “you can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement.” it isn’t difficult to imagine how smart people with good intentions would say or do these things. frank pezzanite, now executive chairman at library systems & services (l.s.s.i.), founded the company in 1981 with his wife, judy, who holds an mls from the university of maryland. they’ve been working in and with libraries for decades, and in that time it would be surprising if they didn’t encounter librarians who seemed to be biding their time until they could retire. every profession has a few people who seem not to realize that workdays go faster and are more enjoyable when they’re filled with meaningful work. and perhaps frank pezzanite perceives even more of that attitude that most because his business first involved automation and later progressed to outsourced management, two areas that librarians may find threatening or worthy of resistance. there’s no reason to believe he sees himself as doing anything other than providing value to libraries and library users. but there’s also no reason to believe he’s right or that his quote helped anyone, including l.s.s.i. tl;dr: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” (robert j. hanlon). “never ascribe to stupidity that which is adequately explained by smart people with good intentions whose incentives are different from yours.” (brett j. bonfield) which brings us to the stupid statements i hope we can eliminate from libraries’ negotiations with vendors: “you just want everything for free,” and “it will cost you more when you factor in the total cost of ownership.” you just want everything for free this seems to come up a lot when i talk to vendors. it came up at the library journal round table discussion in connection with open source software. it’s come up in discussions about the harpercollins decision to have ebooks self destruct. i’m told i just want everything for free. the thing is, i don’t want everything for free. i mean, it’s true in the sense that i really would like to win the lottery, but it’s both stupid and false in the sense that i’ve never bought a lottery ticket. there’s nothing about my behavior to indicate that i want to win the lottery. and there’s nothing about my behavior that should lead anyone to conclude i want library vendors’ products and services for free. what i am willing to do is stop paying. i’m willing to go without. and in so doing, i’m willing to take the money i’m spending on harpercollins material and spend it instead on other publishers’ material. i’m not saving anything at all by not buying from harpercollins. and i’m certainly not waiting around for any publishers to start giving away their work for free. i’m going to spend everything in my acquisitions budget every single year, and i’m going to do everything i can to increase that budget. what i’m not going to do is waste any of that budget on materials that don’t provide for intellectual freedom, that undermine fair use or the first sale doctrine. harpercollins has more money to spend trying to figure out how its policies should work than i have, and it has more motivation to find an answer. harpercollins has a lot more customers than i have vendors; even with the hundreds of libraries that are choosing not to buy harpercollins materials, even with the tens of thousands of readers who have signed the tell harpercollins: limited checkouts on ebooks is wrong for libraries petition at change.org, harpercollins still has thousands of potential library customers and billions of potential individual customers. harpercollins employs people who can negotiate circles around me, and can bring in outside specialists lawyers or public relations firms just in case. what libraries can do is choose not to dance. in a library journal article by michael kelly about the harpercollins change.org petition posted on may 5, erin crum, vice president for corporate communications was quoted as saying, “we invite librarians to continue to discuss their concerns with us, to actually use the model and to give us constructive feedback.” assuming she is quoted correctly, and assuming she believes what she said, the point she’s missing is that libraries that are not buying from harpercollins are using the model, just not in the way that harpercollins would like. and we’re giving harpercollins incredibly constructive, unambiguous feedback. we’re saying no, and we’re saying no very precisely, to a single, clearly identifiable factor. i wish everyone who chooses not to use the library where i work would give me such constructive feedback. about half the people who are eligible for a library card at collingswood public library have an active, recently used card, but about half don’t. i wish there were a single thing i could do that would get them to sign up for library cards and start using them. if there were a change i could make, or a policy i could undo, and it would get them into the library—presumably back into the library, since most people have visited a library at least once in their lives—i’d like to know what that change is. sometimes when we choose not to dance we’re accused of wanting everything for free or of not using models. other times we’re accused of being bad at arithmetic. it will cost you more when you factor in the total cost of ownership like many people, i first encountered the concept of tco, total cost of ownership, when i was evaluating the possibility of moving from proprietary, closed source software to open source alternatives. the idea behind tco is to figure out which software option costs less after every factor has been accounted for, or at least guestimated. karen schneider is probably best known for expressing this as “free beer versus free kittens”, conveying the idea that some open source software is every bit as free (in terms of cost) as free closed source software (think firefox or chrome versus internet explorer or safari), while other open source software could, potentially, cost more to operate and support than an expensive-to-purchase but fixed-cost-to-maintain closed source, propriety competitor. the thing is, i have yet to meet a librarian who wasn’t aware that it generally costs a lot of money to operate and support open source library software like evergreen or koha or sopac. the libraries that initiated these projects and have underwritten their development were aware of these costs as were all the libraries that have hired developers, either on staff or as consultants, to support their operation. and the libraries that have contributed to the development of the kuali/ole are certainly aware that they’re undertaking a tremendously expensive open source project. perhaps their decision is best summarized by the faq answer on the evergreen website that discusses the reason the georgia public library service (gpls) chose to write its own software for pines rather than license software from an existing vendor: “gpls decided that instead of pointing fingers at vendors or complaining about the limitations of legacy software, their developers would write the kind of system we want our users to experience.” ultimately, i think that’s what libraries care about. not total cost. they care about ownership. and that’s something most commercial software vendors won’t really sell you. if you want to own the code, you have to buy the company. if that’s your only alternative, generally it’s cheaper to write your own software. so sometimes libraries just need control in order to ensure they provide library users with services that meet their immediate needs and also provide for their intellectual freedom. other times libraries are willing to spend more now with the expectation they’ll realize cost savings long term. that seems to be the thinking behind many of the libraries who adopt open source software after some of the early development costs have been assumed by better funded libraries. it also seems to be the thinking behind prince edward island university’s efforts to replace web of science with an open source alternative. what now? saying no is useful up to a point, though it’s hard to know what will happen with the harpercollins boycott, in part because it seems to be unprecedented; i’m not aware of libraries’ having said no quite so publicly in the past, or of a situation in which so many libraries decided not to purchase products or services from a specific vendor. there are many possible outcomes, both immediate and long term. libraries are testing their economic strength, as well as public sentiment. whether we can support the pillars of intellectual freedom is an open question. in addition to saying no, choosing a new partner can also be useful. we can even start from scratch by teaching a non-dancer how to dance, effectively creating a new dance partner where none existed before. the more efficient financial operations made possible by open source may make it the long term solution to many software needs, though it’s also possible that having only open source software to choose from would stifle innovation. the equivalent for authors and publishers—the way libraries could have a more direct role in deciding which books are published and what restrictions accompany those books—is probably a variation on the kickstarter or indiegogo paradigm; in its first two years of existence, kickstarter has already generated nearly $3 million in pledges for books and other written works. perhaps gluejar, which focuses on publishing creative commons-licensed ebooks, will eventually fill that need, or perhaps it will be unbound and its crowdfunded books by brand name authors. i see a lot of promise here, though i think it’s unlikely that we’ll get more and better books if this is the only way that books (or, perhaps more accurately, book-length works) are published. we can also make our negotiations more public. vendors know what all of their customers are paying for their products, but we often can’t or don’t share those prices with each other, nor do we share our experiences with the products themselves. in sarah houghton-jan’s candid post about freegal, she identifies three reasons for librarians’ silence: as a profession, we’re generally nice people and don’t like to talk smack about anyone. this is generally a wonderful trait, but when we’re talking about allocating our scarce resources it can be extremely detrimental. librarians are afraid of repercussions at work, including being disciplined, yelled at, or just plain fired. librarians are afraid of the vendors, who they think might give them worse prices and support if they bad-mouth the product. i think sarah nails it. the one time i publicly documented my frustrating interactions with a vendor, i was told by the vendor that i should have understood that our negotiations were meant to be private. i’m also aware of one vendor whose reputation, both for preventing libraries from accessing their data and for aggressively intimidating librarians who complain about these policies, makes its product the one ils that no library-based programmer i know wants to support. i brought this up at the library journal round table and mentioned the vendor by name, but it didn’t make it into final version of the story. i realize i may be contributing to the problem with my coyness, but all of my stories are second hand; the decision whether or not to share them is not and should not be mine. my guess is that they’ll come out sooner or later. and i think it won’t just be individuals sharing their vendor experiences and the details of their contracts, i think it will be entire libraries. one of the most encouraging events i’ve seen recently is cornell university library’s announcement that it will no longer sign contracts with publishers that include confidentiality agreements. at least in the short term, cornell is probably going to have to pay more for products and services if it follows through on its promise to deal openly with vendors, because vendors are either going to make cornell pay for that privilege or they are going to refuse to deal with cornell, meaning it will have a smaller group of vendors from which it can make purchases. and fewer suppliers means less competition, which generally means higher prices. what cornell is doing will likely increase its total cost, perhaps for the next several years, but it will also increase its ownership of the bidding process, and not just its own, but every library’s. we’ll all have cornell to use as a benchmark. my hope is that other libraries will join cornell. i believe it will happen. as librarians, we know how important it is for information to be available to those who need it. thanks to kate sheehan for reading an early draft of this article, and to my itlwtlp colleagues, hilary davis and eric frierson, for helping me with its final version. using just people i’ve collaborated with on in the library with the lead pipe as examples, some librarians who either don’t have library degrees, don’t work solely for libraries, or aren’t employed by libraries directly include derik badman, casey bisson, clayton copeland, birkin james diana, ryan eby, clifford lynch, eli neiburger, carlos ovalle, jodi schneider, dan scott, ross singer, tim spalding, aaron swartz. cindy welch, and alex wright. if we count cooperatives as “vendors” rather than “libraries,” that list also includes sophie brookover and kate sheehan. [↩] sorry. everything i know about tango i learned from a pretty forgettable sally potter film and from an essay by pinboard creator, maciej ceglowski. i’m sure that anyone who knows anything at all about tango is aghast. my only defense: you should see the metaphors i rejected. [↩] for more on vendor negotiations and pricing models, see “fantasy pricing—an interview with selden lamoureux“ [↩] boycott, first sale, harpercollins, ils, intellectual freedom, librarian, negotiations, open source, vendors a short distance correctly: 13 ways of (not) writing (contrarian) librarianship understanding library impacts on student learning 19 responses derik badman 2011–06–01 at 6:02 pm glad to know i’m a person too. ;) brett bonfield 2011–06–02 at 10:14 am not just a person, but a person who reads footnotes. a+. andromeda 2011–06–03 at 4:05 pm i met sophie brookover at tedx on wednesday! we have a great conversation. seriously, your state has a gift for accumulating amazing librarians. also, thanks for mentioning gluejar. as we’re only a few weeks old we’re still hammering out the details of our model and we really want it to be a model that works for libraries — something that makes available the content you want to be available, that makes it easy for you to get it into your catalogs & discoverable, that’s appealing for libraries to support. so librarians’ feedback at this stage can make a big difference, and i actively want to hear everyone’s thoughts. i hope everyone who has an opinion will email me (andromeda@gluejar). thanks! brett bonfield 2011–06–04 at 10:21 pm how did i not know that gluejar hired andromeda? that’s very exciting news. it makes me happy that startups take an interest in libraries, and it makes me especially happy when startups hire great people and let them do cool stuff. it gives me that, “anything is possible” kind of feeling. andromeda 2011–06–06 at 8:54 am because you’re not on twitter, and we forget that non-twitter news channels also matter? ;) it’s pretty recent news, though — just started a few weeks ago. but yes, we are interested in libraries. and anything is possible :). and thanks for your kind words. andromeda 2011–06–03 at 9:16 pm oh, and have you heard of hallin’s spheres? can’t remember where i first heard of them (recently) but they’re covered also in brooke gladstone (of on the media fame)’s new book, the influencing machine…your mention of the overton window (new to me; thanks!) reminded me of this. per hallin, there are 3 spheres (this is my paraphrase and i haven’t read the original, fair warning): * consensus: things perceived as being in this sphere are not worth debating. journalists accept them as fact and do not feel the need to present opposing views. * sphere of legitimate controversy: this is where journalism and politics happen, basically. * sphere of deviance: things here are seen as clearly false, yucky, or otherwise not worthy of debate. of course some people dispute items in the sphere of consensus, or subscribe to views within the sphere of deviance, and they’re pretty much stuck with feeling alienated and having people yell at them if they talk about it. (this is the phenomenon in play, for instance, when some people say they’re uninspired by voting because there’s no difference between the candidates, and others are absolutely shocked they could think that.) and also of course, different cultures — and subcultures — place the borders between spheres at different places. the overton window strikes me as getting at the same phenomenon; shifting the window also shifts the boundaries of the spheres. brett bonfield 2011–06–04 at 10:30 pm i wasn’t familiar with hallin’s spheres, but this seems like an elegant description of the idea. in my post, i linked to the wikipedia page on the overton window, but i probably should have linked to the post by mark pilgrim where i first encountered the concept. it’s always interesting to read how people try to influence each other. jean costello 2011–06–09 at 8:26 am hi brett – here’s how i see the dilemma. the current value-chain evolved because it was “good enough” for the various stakeholders. for patrons, libraries were a leading source of materials. for libraries, there were sufficient funds to purchase materials. for suppliers, the library market was strong enough to support their businesses. there have been incremental challenges to the chain for many years and those challenges have finally become overwhelming and corrosive for libraries and suppliers. patrons now have a range of convenient, high-quality, reasonably priced sources for materials. library funding is level or decreasing. suppliers cannot maintain their revenues via traditional terms of sale with traditional customers. patrons are meeting their needs elsewhere and for libraries and suppliers, the tango has become 3 steps back and 2 forward. what’s needed is a fresh, start-from-a-blank-slate examination of the value-chain. i believe our public libraries can play a vital role in a re-imagined chain that does not leave them struggling to remain relevant but actually makes them more valuable to patrons and suppliers alike. i’d be happy to submit a post on this if your readers would be interested. jean brett bonfield 2011–06–09 at 10:35 am i see where you’re coming from, but i have a different understanding of library economics. i think libraries have pretty much always been co-ops. in general, we’ve been kind of highfalutin co-ops, at least in our own minds, worrying about preserving culture and fostering democracy rather than more quotidian activities like, you know, feeding people or providing them with shelter or keeping them warm in winter. but libraries are basically taxor tuition-supported shopping clubs that offer access to durable, infrequently needed, mid-priced goods (e.g. specific books or video games or restrictively licensed “information”). at our best, much like home depot or lowe’s or nordstrom or apple’s geniuses, we assist our constituents in making use of the materials in which we specialize. we fill two related needs: 1. access for the disadvantaged, and 2. a less-convenient-but-low-priced option for those with more advantages. i don’t see those needs going away, nor do i see a clearly better way to meet those needs. which is why voters consistently support libraries, and why many libraries have recently seen increased foot traffic and circulation. almost all taxand tuition-funded institutions experience decreased funding during difficult economic times, but it doesn’t appear to me that libraries are being targeted more than most other public institutions. and i don’t see libraries struggling to remain relevant. i think we’re doing what we’ve always done: using the funds we have available and serving our communities by adapting to their needs. i worry about libraries because that’s my job, but when i step back and look at things objectively i’m pretty confident that libraries will be fine. i’m also pretty confident that most library suppliers will be fine. though i don’t think their success has all that much to do with their library customers because i don’t think libraries-as-purchasers are all that crucial to many businesses’ revenues. for harpercollins and most other publishers—including music and video publishers—libraries are a loss leader or promotional outlet. for other suppliers, we’re generally a small part of their revenue. some companies that libraries think of as “library suppliers” will thrive, others will go out of business, but that’s how it is in every market. colleen 2011–06–09 at 10:32 pm i would have agreed with this a year ago: “tl;dr: there’s no us and no them. in general, library-based librarians should assume the vendors they’re negotiating with are every bit as good at librarianship as they are, and very possibly a lot better. also, assume that you’re both motivated by the same thing: figuring out the best way to serve library users.” but i can’t anymore. having been more involved with talking with vendors about the design of services and software – and hoping that the fact that some of the folks we were talking to used to be librarians – i have been baffled at what they failed to consider at all, failed to take librarians seriously about in terms of what we need in order to properly function, and what they did not think about in terms of how our users use the systems. the “i used to be a librarian” and “we’re here to serve your users” from vendors are not going to cut any more slack with me until i see it demonstrated. and even if “a lot of the best librarians work for vendors,” it does not necessarily follow that their goals and motivations as a vendor employee are the same as mine as a librarian. steve lawson 2011–06–09 at 11:13 pm and even if “a lot of the best librarians work for vendors,” it does not necessarily follow that their goals and motivations as a vendor employee are the same as mine as a librarian. agreed. especially when it comes to the publishers dorothea salo has memorably called the big pigs, they seem quite intent on killing the golden goose. sure the individuals who work for vendors can be admirable in many ways, but i find that it always helps to remember their profit motive when trying to understand what they do, and what they value. brett bonfield 2011–06–10 at 10:31 am it always helps to remember their profit motive when trying to understand what they do, and what they value selling things their customers will buy? ideally repeatedly? and maybe like enough to recommend to peers? of course there are librarians who work at vendors who aren’t all that interested in long-term relationships, or who simply don’t get it. the same is true for librarians who work at libraries. maybe the statement i made above (the one colleen quoted) should carry the caveat that i always try to assume the best about people. with the additional caveat that it’s working really well for me. here’s the thing about profit motives. while there are plenty of products marketed to libraries i wouldn’t consider purchasing because they either don’t fit our needs, are accompanied by overly restrictive use policies, or because their price/value is a bad match for our “needs/budget,” the decision not to purchase these products is rarely complex or time-consuming. yet many of these products continue to be available year after year, often in much the same form. so libraries are buying them. probably many libraries. if they weren’t, the vendors’ profit motive would force them to alter their marketing. personally, i think libraries are too shy about voting with their wallets, and far too shy about doing so publicly. the folks colleen is talking with about the design of services and software… if they aren’t making sales, at least one of three things is going to happen: 1) they’re going to be replaced; 2) their employer is going to change its products; or 3) their employer is going to go out of business. if libraries are buying “bad” products or getting poor customer service, they’re delaying those three outcomes, perhaps indefinitely. which, in my view, makes libraries even more culpable than their vendors. colleen 2011–06–10 at 10:45 am i absolutely agree with “personally, i think libraries are too shy about voting with their wallets, and far too shy about doing so publicly.” on the other hand, as vendors become more monopolistic, libraries feel (perhaps erroneously) that they have little choice and *must* purchase the product. in those cases, there’s not a lot of room for negotiation or pushing a vendor out of business. my concern isn’t that “librarians who work at vendors who aren’t all that interested in long-term relationships” – i’m sure they are. but when we’re unhappy with them – how do we divorce, say, oclc? we can’t; not effectively. ariel and odyssey are clunky and terrible; but we can’t walk away from them because that’s what ill requires. ils systems are more alike than different, and requesting fixes or customizations are routinely denied or delayed, causing libraries to create time consuming and inefficient workarounds. i don’t mind assuming the best of people, i just don’t think that assuming the librarians who work with vendors are nice people leads to a logical conclusion that vendors are nice/useful/sympathetic entities. brett bonfield 2011–06–10 at 11:39 am not perhaps erroneously. absolutely erroneously. unquestionably erroneously. otherwise libraries are doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. walking away from “the big o” or a “big pig” or an ils isn’t easy. if it were easy, these products would be better and cheaper. but we can, and we can do it effectively. libraries do it all the time: in general, the products and services being marketed to libraries today replaced inferior products and services libraries walked away from in the past. in addition, better or cheaper or more open products are being developed and introduced pretty consistently. supporting these products sometimes means supporting two products at once, as kuali ole libraries are doing, or as any library must do when transitioning from one ils to another. or sometimes it means educating faculty about open access, which is a lot of effort and can be expensive if it requires additional staffing, but oa is working so well in so many different situations that it’s hard to argue that it can’t be done. which isn’t to say that going without or boycotting or refusing to sign confidentiality agreements or going with open source or educating faculty about open access is a universal answer, but these kind of efforts give us room for negotiation. and if we don’t create room for negotiation we get… well, we get what we deserve. i never meant to suggest librarians who work for vendors are nice people or that vendors are nice, useful, or sympathetic (or that they aren’t). but they’re frequently as good at librarianship as library-based librarians are, and very possibly a lot better. and they’re often just as keen to figure out the best way to serve library users. but if libraries keep buying their products, they really have no way of knowing how to weigh feature x vs. feature y, so they’re going to trust their own judgement. steve lawson 2011–06–10 at 12:23 pm i think we are mostly violently in agreement. i am perhaps thinking about your comments on the competence and motivation of vendor employees in light of what librarians say every time a vendor does something which seems counter-productive from the library-centric point of view: “why would they do this? can’t they see it’s bad for libraries?” usually trying to look at the situation from the corporate vendor’s point of view (not the point of view of their excellent and lovely employees) helps me understand why harpercollins or ebsco or elsevier thought something would be a good idea. brett bonfield 2011–06–10 at 2:17 pm +1, both for your ideas and for “violently in agreement.” i’ll add: libraries should want vendors to think this way. if they didn’t, the overall situation for library users would likely be worse. the solution to problems, when they arise, is not for corporations to be more empathetic or less motivated by profit. the solution is for libraries to kick harder. to which i’ll add: the corporations should want libraries to think this way. the smart ones do. emily ford 2011–06–11 at 11:44 am thank you, brett! admittedly, i haven’t made it through all of the comments yet so apologies if this is a repeat of what someone else has said. i’m not aware of libraries’ having said no quite so publicly in the past, or of a situation in which so many libraries decided not to purchase products or services from a specific vendor. yeah, this is a problem. libraries can be reticent, too reticent. when we say no we need to do it as consortia, because like you mentioned, vendors have more customers and more clout that one library does. it’s the collective that will have the most impact. recently in oregon, newsbank just announced that it has aquired exclusive license for archives to the oregonian, one of our major newspapers. the price for these archives has increased, and now libraries are either paying more for the product or dropping it. there may very well be only one library in oregon that can afford this online archival access. and this model will continue. it’s going to take a lot of discussion and collaboration and very public action to get more favorable terms (in general). thank you for expressing this so eloquently. brett bonfield 2011–06–14 at 5:23 pm thanks, emily. i love discussion and collaboration, but right now i’m most excited about seeing public action. pingback : vendors v. librarians as false dichotomy « this liaison life this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct are you worth it? what return on investment can and can’t tell you about your library – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 1 apr cory lown and hilary davis /12 comments are you worth it? what return on investment can and can’t tell you about your library photo by flickr user cambodia4kidsorg (cc by 2.0) “the indicators that served as benchmarks in the past, such as number of volumes and number of journal subscriptions, are no longer sufficient because of the more expansive role that the contemporary library has assumed” (weiner, 2005). “the measurement of quality will come back to the questions of who are the users, what are the inputs, what are the outputs, do we produce the outputs in a way that meets the needs of the users, and what do those outputs contribute to the productivity and accomplishments of those users?” (pritchard, 1996). by cory lown and hilary davis it’s almost a sure bet that your friends, family and colleagues are looking at ways to save money and, in general, are tightening the purse strings a little more these days. the post on january 14, 2009 in this blog reviewed the state of libraries during recessions and pointed out the growing news pieces that remark at the huge surge in library usage. people are realizing real savings by relying more and more on libraries. ask yourself how much do you spend at bookstores and music shops such as amazon and barnes and noble each year? magazine subscriptions? internet service? entertainment like movies and concerts? if you had to go without one or more of those services, think about how much you could save by relying on your local library to provide access to those services and content streams. at the same time, libraries of all types are faced with the inevitability of budget cuts due to the recession and must justify the use of existing funds for programming, staff, services and collections. take a second and google ‘return on investment and libraries’ to get a sense of the importance of demonstrating library value. in order to have the financial ability to continue providing those services and content streams, libraries need to prove to their funding sources, whether tax-payers, private donors, universities, governments, schools, or corporate parents, that those services, programs and collections are meeting users’ needs. moreover, libraries must prove without a doubt that the funds provided to libraries to develop those services, programs and collections provide a good return on investment. while there are many metrics for assessing library value (e.g., libqual, circulation trends, gate counts, usage statistics trends, arl annual statistics, etc.), this article aims to explore the return on investment (roi) approach used by libraries to demonstrate value. what is return on investment (roi) and how is it used by libraries? return on investment (roi) is how much you get back for what you put into something. strictly speaking, roi is based on dollars and cents. so, you need to be able to quantify how much money was invested in something and then you need to compare how much money is gained or lost as a result of how the investment was handled. there are two kinds of questions that roi is good at answering. one is: how much money will be gained by investing in a particular financial asset? the other is: will putting resources into a project or service yield a measurable benefit? let’s take a look at a quick example using a baseball card. if you bought a baseball card in 2000 for $50 and now in 2009, it’s worth $500, what is your return on investment? in libraries, roi is measured in many different ways. roi can be used to measure the costs (investment) and the outcomes (the return on investment) from the perspective of library users, the parent organization, or from the perspective of the library itself. costs are typically dollars spent on a service or resource and/or time spent to provide or access a service or to acquire or use a resource. the returns on an investment can be either outputs (the result of a service or resource such as expanded journal collection), uses (how the service or resources are used), or outcomes (indirect results of the output or the use such as time saved) (jose-marie griffiths, 2007). motivations for using roi in libraries roi can be an integral part of the process for evaluating a library’s services, collections, staffing levels, planning for new services and resources, or measuring how valuable your library is to your community and stakeholders. for example, for libraries supported with public tax dollars, one way to use roi is to measure tax dollars (the investment) against the benefits (savings by not having to pay elsewhere for the use of library materials and services). library roi studies consistently suggest that public libraries give a high return on investment, providing anywhere from $2 to $10 in return for every tax dollar received. in florida: for every $1.00 of taxpayer dollars spent on public libraries, income (wages) increases by $12.66 in south carolina: in return for an investment of $77.5 million, public libraries pump $347 million into the state’s economy can you say your library users derive more than $4.00 in benefits for every $1.00 spent of taxpayer money? st. louis public library can! [from trustee blog: library roi – what’s your community rating] strategies for measuring roi in libraries calculating a return on investment may seem straightforward until one considers the kinds of costs and returns associated with libraries. measuring returns first requires that the organization have a clear sense of its mission and objectives. it is not possible to measure benefits unless one can identify the value an organization aims to provide. there are several classes of returns, direct and indirect, and individual and collective. in general, direct, individual benefits are easier to measure and quantify than indirect and collective benefits. this poses a challenge for libraries, as many of the benefits libraries provides are indirect and collective, such as the value of having a better-educated citizenry. jose-marie griffiths has conducted several return on investment studies in public and special libraries. in a presentation at the special library association annual conference (2007), griffiths outlined a method for calculating roi in special libraries that demonstrates the kinds of factors that should be taken into consideration. costs are generally straightforward, and include overhead and the costs of the users’ time associated with utilizing the library, but returns are trickier. griffiths argues that libraries should use contingent valuation for assessing benefits. contingent valuation is a method for evaluating goods and services that are not priced. it involves assessing the effect of taking the service away. this could mean attempting to calculate the costs that would be borne by users if they could not use the library. griffiths also notes that changes in productivity and information needs that would go unanswered should also be considered. using roi, libraries can try to place a value on the services they provide and the collections that they make accessible. for instance, many roi studies compare the cost associated with borrowing an item from the library versus individuals having to purchase that item on their own. consider the costs associated with the library providing a dvd that is worth $20 that circulates 50 times in a year. if each library user had to purchase that item, the collective cost would have been $1,000. of course, there are additional costs borne by the library for providing the dvd than just the $20 investment, including staffing, storage, and preservation. photo by flickr user allaboutgeorge (cc by 2.0) libraries can also be valued in terms of savings of entertainment costs to a community—public film viewings, author readings, and workshops are freely offered services provided by libraries. many libraries also offer classes, which can be viewed as a cost savings to the community as well. classes on microsoft office programs, general computing, financial planning, and job hunting strategies are often offered for free at libraries. libraries are also valuable to communities as employers of citizens and as contributors to the local economy. examples from different library contexts public libraries most roi studies in libraries have focused on public libraries. a fantastic inventory and review of value-demonstration methods and metrics is available from the americans for libraries council: worth their weight: an assessment of the evolving field of library valuation (2007). we will highlight a few examples here. the “public library benefits valuation study” conducted by the st. louis public library in 1999-2001 used cost-benefit analysis techniques. first, they calculated a comparison between local taxes invested in library services and direct benefits provided to users. across the five urban, public libraries included in the study, for each $1 of annual taxes invested in the library, library users received between $1.30 and $10 in benefits. this varied widely among the libraries in the study. second, the study looked at returns in terms of capital investment. this compares the total investment in a library’s capital (buildings, vehicles, furniture, and other assets) with the benefits received by users. annual returns on capital investments ranged from 5% to 150%, again varying widely among the public libraries in the study. the state library and archives of florida conducted a taxpayer return on investment study of florida public libraries. overall, the study found that for every $1 invested in the library at least $6.54 is returned. other findings show that for every $1 invested in the library the gross regional product increases by $9.08 and wages increase by $12.66. they also estimate that for every $6,488 invested in the library, one job is created. statewide, the study estimates that the gross regional product is increased by $4 billion as a result of taxpayer investment in florida public libraries. many other public libraries have reported return on investment information, including new york public libraries, pennsylvania public libraries, south carolina public libraries, and wisconsin public libraries, among others. return on investment results from these studies ranged from $2.38 in indiana to $5.50 in pennsylvania. among the five states with published roi studies, indiana, pennsylvania, south carolina, vermont, wisconsin, and florida, the average roi is $4.99 for every $1 invested. another approach some libraries have taken is to provide calculators on their websites that let users estimate how much value they are getting from the library based on their own use of its services (e.g., rhode island). a potential hazard of roi studies is that they produce what appears at face value to be a simple metric that can be compared across libraries. photo by flickr user msmail (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) it is critical to reiterate that the roi studies that we use as examples specifically state caveats that those roi metrics are estimates that are based on surveys of their own local users combined with metrics that are relevant to their own budget systems. any attempt to compare roi metrics across these boundaries doesn’t make sense and is not relevant. the new lj index, while not specifically roi-focused, attempts to correct the problem of peer comparison by removing the metrics that are specific to local contexts. instead the lj index focuses only on measurable outputs such as circulation per capita, visits per capita, program attendance per capita, and internet use per capita. the lj index is one of several models for ranking public library quality, and is unique in that it enables statistically valid comparison across libraries. however, it removes the context-sensitive framework that enables libraries to show a return on investment of money and resources. for roi library metrics, the point isn’t that putting more and more money into libraries will yield ever increasing returns. the point is to show that libraries are providing value for the money that is invested in them. those investments should be commensurate with the needs of the communities they serve. academic libraries university libraries have fewer models to emulate. in 1996, sarah pritchard described the problems associated with assessing the value of academic libraries. she claims that the lack of standards and repeatable methods for demonstrating value (such as support of accreditation reviews, educational assessment and outcomes, ranking of graduate programs, success of job attainment after graduation, success in attracting donors, and faculty research productivity as measured by grants and publications) makes it impossible to conduct studies that compare library value across institutions. a recent study (luther, 2008) at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign addresses some of pritchard’s concerns about demonstrating roi in academic libraries. unlike public libraries, which focus on the value of services, the illinois study examines the library’s contribution to revenue-generating activities of faculty by examining the role of library-sourced citations in grant applications. the model for the study is that the library’s investment in materials increases researchers’ productivity. this increase in productivity produces a measurable increase in grant receipts due to increased citations, as well as recruitment and retention of productive faculty. to calculate the dollar value returned to the university of illinois in the form of grants due to investment in the library, the faculty was surveyed to determine the importance of citations in securing grants, the percentage of faculty who use citations in grant applications, and the percentage of citations obtained through library-subscribed resources. the model also accounts for the proportion of grants that are funded. the study found that for every $1 invested in the library, $4.38 in grant income is generated for the university. this model purposefully avoids attempting to measure the social value or increases in productivity attributable to outcomes from use of the library resources. special libraries special libraries such as those found primarily in the government and corporate sectors tend to focus their roi metrics on time saved for employees by using library resources and expertise, increases in revenues, decreases in research and development expenses, productivity gains, and cost savings. roger strouse, director of outsell, inc., writes extensively about the value and application of roi studies for special libraries. outsell conducts studies of market trends in the publishing, education, and information industries. in its 2007 study on corporate, government, and medical libraries, outsell found that the average time saved for users was 9 hours per library visit/interaction. they also reported that not only do corporate libraries save $3,107 per use of library resources and services, but also that $6,570 worth of revenues were generated with the aid of library resources and services. “being good at what you do and at the services you provide is no longer good enough. very good information centres will be cut, and may be outsourced or offshored, not because of their inability to provide good services, but because of their inability to demonstrate an roi or provide evidence of the impact they make on their organizations” (boyd hendriks and ian wooler, 2006). outsourcing remains a serious threat to many special libraries. integrating and aligning the work of special libraries with the risks associated with the parent organization is one of the key recommendations of corporate library strategists. collaborating on the reduction of risk, delays, and workplace injuries is seen as a way to position a library as a value-added partner and a key component in the success of an organization. strouse (2003) provides an example survey for special libraries to use in measuring roi that includes questions about types of projects for which library services and resources were used such as patents, new technologies, new product acquisitions, and changes in marketing strategies. the special libraries association maintains a summary of articles and presentations on roi metrics and value-demonstration strategies (the full bibliography is available to sla members). a few caveats there are some reasons why roi might not be the best tool for demonstrating library value. in some cases, a strict roi metric may demonstrate that a library is not providing a good return on investment. elliott, et al. (2007) describe the pros and cons of conducting an roi or cost-benefit analysis. many of the benefits they describe are covered earlier in this article. however, one of the disadvantages of roi or cost-benefit analyses described by elliott, et al. is that these metrics cannot be used for peer-comparison. the metrics are created using value systems and context-sensitive data that pertain to individual libraries. pritchard (1996) echoes this problem in the realm of measuring academic library quality and effectiveness: “the difficulty lies in trying to find a single model or set of simple indicators that can be used by different institutions, and that will compare something across large groups that is by definition only locally applicable—i.e., how well a library meets the needs of its institution.” elliot, et al. (2007) also warn against applying these kinds of metrics to small libraries: “efficient operating costs do not appear to rise proportionally with cardholder population and collection size. thus, benefit-cost ratios for well-managed larger libraries tend to be higher, in general, than those for well-managed smaller libraries. larger libraries also are more likely to be able to accommodate the expense and technological requirements associated with a cba [cost-benefit analysis] study.” there are more subtle reasons to not rely on roi metrics alone, and to be careful about interpreting roi. organizations need resources to survive. not-for-profit organizations, whose missions are based on soft values or moral ideas rather than monetary profit, must be supported by private donations, government, or by the organizations that they support. the values of the library—ubiquitous access, preservation, and organization of information—are prone to differing interpretations of importance. put bluntly, the library must show that the internet has not rendered it obsolete. libraries will be stronger if they can demonstrate their value in terms which those that provide its funding understand. in the culture and time in which we live, “value” is understood most readily in monetary, economic terms. making it even more difficult for academic libraries to demonstrate their worth, the mission of the library is tied to the mission of the university at large. academic libraries must demonstrate their contributions to the mission of the organization of which they a part. and they must also attempt to make a long-term argument about preservation of information and investment in human capital to an audience that is focused on the present bottom line. can we articulate the importance of what we do in terms that non-librarians can understand? if we cannot articulate what we are doing then we must first go back and redefine what our mission and purpose is, clearly and succinctly, before we can attempt to measure our effectiveness and value. it is, however, essential to remember that there is a reason why libraries do not operate for a profit (with the possible exception of libraries that charge back to users for services), and that they came into being for reasons other than generating monetary wealth. there are also good reasons to be skeptical of measurements of library quality, performance, and relevance presented in purely economic terms. discussing the role of non-profit organizations in general, eikenberry claims: because of their inherent value, it is extremely important for nonprofit organizations to focus on their organizational missions…they are more than just tools for achieving the most efficient and effective mode of service delivery; they are also important vehicles for creating and maintaining a strong civil society. (eikenberry) libraries must strike a balance between focusing on their mission and on their desire to prove worth in terms of high performance and roi. for many libraries, roi simply doesn’t measure the indirect benefits they provide. librarians must be particularly creative in the ways that they think about how their libraries perform and what they contribute to the populations they serve. for example, does having an appealing library make a university more appealing to potential students? one study suggests that libraries have a significant influence on students’ decisions to go to a particular university—53%—second only to “facilities for major” (e.g., labs, studios, etc.) at 73%. u.s news and world report’s rankings of colleges and universities, has transformed the way students select schools. traditional roi studies do not account for a library’s impact on the reputation of its university or college as a whole, but a study by weiner in 2009 makes a case for the library’s contribution to the reputation of the university it serves. the study finds that library expenditures are a significant predictor of institutional reputation. weiner argues that this finding means that, in fact, “the disintermediation caused by the rapid increase in online access to information does not seem to have displaced the library. these results suggest that libraries in the doctoral institutions included in the study may have adjusted and found solutions to unprecedented external pressures.” weiner sees the libraries’ position as one of “boundary spanning,” meaning that it brings together researchers and students from across the campus in ways that no other organization on the campus can. studies such as this one are vital for libraries, as they give evidence that libraries contribute to their parent organizations in unexpected ways. by contributing to an institution’s overall reputation, libraries also impact real economic outcomes from that reputation: such as attracting better students, retaining top-notch faculty, and attracting donors. being able to articulate this kind of impact may help university administrators listen a little more closely. it is vital that libraries demonstrate both the monetary value and as well as the social value of their services. roi is one part of a suite of tools librarians can use to demonstrate performance and value. relying on roi alone to communicate and demonstrate the value of libraries may very well undermine the core purposes libraries serve and the indirect benefits they bring. libraries undertake many tasks that are invisible to the casual user. they handle licensing of journals, negotiating with vendors and publishers for access to content, selecting resources. libraries also contribute to the prestige of the institutions they serve by helping to attract top researchers, faculty, and students. academic libraries and public libraries, especially, serve as unique third places within their communities, where people who would otherwise not interact come to work and learn in the same space. it’s up to us to convince our users and our sources of funding that we’re worth it. roi studies aside, one of the best things we can do to show our worth is to provide great services that help our users work more effectively. we hope this post will generate some lively discussion about the role of roi in libraries, and also generate ideas about what libraries can measure to demonstrate their value. what has your library done to measure its value? thanks especially to brett bonfield, greg raschke and katie wheeler for their comments and for reviewing and editing various drafts of this article. conferences, seminars, upcoming events on roi and libraries computers in libraries – track e (planning and managing): what’s the return on investment for your library? april 1, 2009 ala annual conference surviving in a tough economy – an advocacy institute workshop july 10, 2009 further reading abram, stephen. 2007. the value of our libraries: impact, recognition, and influencing funders: http://www.sirsidynix.com/resources/pdfs/company/abram/arkansasla_value.pdf ala. 2009. articles and studies related to library value (return on investment): http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/ors/reports/roi.cfm cain, david and gary l. reynolds. 2006. the impact of facilities on recruitment and retention of students. facilities manager, march/april: http://www.appa.org/files/fmarticles/fm030406_f7_impact.pdf eikenberry, a.m. and j.d. kluver. the marketization of the nonprofit sector: civil society at risk? public administration review, vol. 64 (2): 132-140. elliott, donald s., glen e. holt, sterling w. hayden, leslie edmonds holt. 2007. measuring your library’s value: how to do a cost-benefit analysis for your public library. ala editions (978-0-8389-0923-2) hendriks, boyd and ian wooler, 2006. establishing the return on investment for information and knowledge services: a practical approach to show added value for information and knowledge centres, corporate libraries and documentation centres. business information review, v. 23 (1): 13-25. holt, glen e., donald s. elliott, leslie e. holt, anne watts. 2001. public library benefits valuation study (st. louis public library): http://www.slpl.lib.mo.us/libsrc/valuationc.htm imholz, s. and arns, j.w. 2007. worth their weight: an assessment of the evolving field of library valuation. americans for libraries council: http://www.bibliotheksportal.de/fileadmin/0themen/management/dokumente/worththeirweight.pdf lance, keith curry and ray lyons. 2008. the new lj index: why these measures matter. library journal, http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/ca6566452.html luther, judy. 2008. university investment in the library: what’s the return? a case study at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign: http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcn/0601/lcn060103.html o’hanlon, nancy. 2007. information literacy in the university curriculum: challenges for outcomes assessment. portal: libraries and the academy 7, no. 2: 169-89. pritchard, sarah m. 1996. determining quality in academic libraries. library trends, vol. 44 (3): 572-594. sla. 2009. additional value resources: http://www.sla.org/content/learn/members/ipvalue/additionalvalue.cfm strouse, roger. 2003. demonstrating value and return on investment: the ongoing imperative. information outlook, v. 7 (3): 15-19. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0fwe/is_3_7/ai_99011610 strouse, roger. 2007. roi for libraries remains high: http://www.outsellinc.com/store/insights/3538 weiner, sharon gray. 2005. library quality and impact: is there a relationship between new measures and traditional measures? journal of academic librarianship, 31(5):432-7. weiner, sharon. 2009. the contribution of the library to the reputation of a university. journal of academic librarianship, vol. 35 (1): 3-13. yackle, anna. 2007. what is your library’s roi? (nsls): http://www.nsls.info/articles/detail.aspx?articleid=137 grants, metrics, outputs, return on investment, roi, value stepping on toes: the delicate art of talking to faculty about questionable assignments social proof: a tool for determining authority 12 responses gerrit 2009–04–01 at 10:59 am this is a really insightful and timely post, considering the economic climate we find ourselves in. thank you! hilary davis 2009–04–02 at 10:56 am another opportunity of interest: niso forum on assessment and performance measurement, june 1, 2009 in baltimore, md (http://www.niso.org/news/events/2009/assess09/) laura k. jackson 2009–04–03 at 9:37 am i think you both did an excellent job of not only explaining rois, but also of applying the term and its use to libraries in particular. all of these issues are pertinent to libraries today. this article will open up much needed discussion on these issues. thank you both! :) brett bonfield 2009–04–05 at 5:12 pm i’m the director of a small public library in new jersey. i understand that demonstrating value is important, so last week i began interviewing consultants to conduct an roi study on the library. the first candidate came in and sat down. “what’s two plus two?” i asked. the consultant leaned across my desk and whispered conspiratorially, “what do you want it to be?” sorry about the old joke. still… look at the list of references: 1. every study was conducted by a librarian or library consultant. 2. none of the studies on roi can be replicated (that is, they’re non-transferable). 3. all of the studies mentioned, especially the new lj index (sponsored by baker & taylor’s bibliostat), seem to choose their measures based on how easy they are to compile rather than on whether they’re actually measuring libraries’ worth relative to each other or, more importantly, to other uses for municipal, institutional, or corporate funds. while i think the roi results themselves should be taken with a pillar of salt, the article itself is a good introduction to an important metric; librarians need to understand roi. the current batch of roi studies provide some creative ways to begin looking at what we do and how well we do it, but they’re best viewed as ideas we can use in formulating real questions and rigorous studies, not as answers that any of us should cite as fact. keith curry lance 2009–04–08 at 5:31 pm co also did a public library roi study. for links to that and other recent roi studies of public libraries, interactive roi tools, and other resources needed to do an roi study on a shoestring budget, visit the library research service (lrs) website: http://www.lrs.org. also, fwiw, i did a well-received, multi-stop ‘roadshow’ of workshops on this topic in ne last year. hdc 2009–04–09 at 1:17 pm this is a great article – your treatment of the various kinds of libraries and consideration of roi and its relevance to libraries is critical but clearly communicated. one aspect that i could add to the discussion is the use of technology in libraries and the roi related to it. karen coyle’s article talks a little bit about this, though i think mostly in relation to public libraries. not sure if you came across any others in preparing this post? hilary davis 2009–04–09 at 2:57 pm @ gerrit and laura – thanks for your comments! glad to hear that the content is useful and informative for you. @ brett – your comments and concerns are well-taken. the roi studies we encountered in prepping this article don’t profess to be comparable or transferable from one library to another library. one of the major downfalls of these studies is that they are context-specific, and those seeking to do cross-library comparisons, cannot rely on these kinds of roi studies to do that. this was part of the rationale for the lj index. the folks who designed the lj index wanted to get around the problem of not being able to compare peer libraries. but the result is that the lj index doesn’t really provide the sense of a return on investment, which is what the roi studies intend to do. i’d love to hear about libraries or non-profit organizations that have designed rigorous roi studies. i think the illinois study that focuses on roi for grant dollars is a step in that direction. if folks know of others, please post them or email us. @ keith – thanks for sharing the lrs.org set of resources and links on roi. for those interested in following-up with keith on his “roadshow” of roi workshops, his website is http://www.keithcurrylance.com/ @ hyun-duck – thanks for the link to karen coyle’s article on return on investment for new/evolving technology adoption. i don’t think we came across other articles/work in that flavor, but it’s possible that they exist for the it realm in general. if i find something that clicks, i’ll post it here. sally sue 2009–04–13 at 2:18 pm http://www.hcpl.org/library/value.html brigitte doellgast 2009–04–20 at 2:15 pm this was an extremely interesting contribution in an extremely interesting blog. i am huge fan :) i am actually writing a german/american library blog myself, and condensed plus translated the general outline of your blog entry there, to bring these ideas into the discussion in germany. pingback : wert von informationsarbeit: nützlicher hinweis zur messung des roi von bibliotheken | lis in potsdam laura guiney 2009–05–12 at 1:56 pm as a part-time employee of a smaller library (2 branches), i feel that the roi of our facilities has improved tremendously in the past year. economic difficulties, as well as weather-related catastrophies, forced members of the community to turn to their local library for help. the services we provide to each patron enable him/her to communicate with others via the internet, attend classes to improve job search techniques, experience the lastes in “tech trends”, and apply for passports, to name just a few. many people who visit our library for the first time have one regret–that they didn’t take advantage of all we have to offer sooner. getting the community involved plays a key roll in a library’s roi. our community is very statified with all that they get for their investment. pingback : librarytrax » roi – return on investment for libraries has never been higher this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: getting to know you… even better – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 24 dec editorial board, brett bonfield and ellie collier /7 comments editorial: getting to know you… even better photo by flickr user “muffet” (cc by 2.0) by editorial board, brett bonfield and ellie collier happy holidays from in the library with the lead pipe! we had so much fun putting together our november 26 post, “getting to know you,” that we’ve decided to do it again! in the spirit of vacation and merrymaking, we’ve put together another trio of semi-personal questions selected and answered by yours truly. 1. what is your professional new year’s resolution? brett: it’s sort of a meta-resolution, but i plan to: make a list of the projects i’m working on (or that i’m thinking about working on); figure out which ones seem most likely to succeed in ways that are important to me; determine which ones seem likely to benefit the most from my participation; identify what i hope each one can achieve in 2009; specify what i’m going to do to help them get there. emily: simple and completely unglamorous—to find another job for when my grant funding runs out. derik: to think more carefully about what i get myself involved in (no, not an allusion to this blog) and how much i get involved in it (i don’t want to dilute my efforts in quantity). learn more programming. learn more about learning and instructional design. start my posts for this blog earlier. hilary: i’d like to diversify my professional reading, take a little more time to investigate online tools such as sproutbuilder.com, leverage our library system’s collection intelligence tools to programmatically manage data about our collections and use that information to do targeted marketing of our collections. kim: as we tighten our belts i resolve to more fully appreciate what i have: a great job with lovable colleagues, lots of variety, independence, and the freedom (if not the funding) to travel, explore the latest technologies, and try new approaches to my work. heck, i’ve got one of the best careers for 2009 according to us news & world report! life is good. ellie: to incorporate more of the research i’ve been doing on instruction into my actual practice. 2. what are your three favorite novels? brett: infinite jest (david foster wallace), middlesex (jeffrey eugenides), and cockfighter (charles willeford). i wouldn’t argue that they’re the best novels i’ve ever read (that is, the three novels i think other people should read) or the three i most wish i’d written or anything like that, but if i had to spend the rest of my life re-reading three novels i’ve read at least once, i think these are the three i’d choose. emily: i’m no good with favorite novels (my favorite book is non-fiction–feminism is for everybody by bell hooks–but that doesn’t follow the rules). i’m not apt to re-read much of anything that is fiction. that being said, the fiction i am liable to strongly recommend are as follows: doris: an anthology 1991-2001 by cindy crabb (i find her narrative voice deeply moving), the miracle life of edgar mint by brady udall (sad, hilarious, and gross all at once), and a novel by an acquaintance recently published that is on my to read list– couch by benjamin parzybok. derik: 1) the recognitions by william gaddis: 900 pages of art, religion, 50s new york parties, fakers, and fun. 2) this is not a novel by david markson: 100 pages of unattributed quotes, famous deaths, odd facts about artists, and more. 3) le chiendent (translated either as “witch grass” or “bark tree”) by raymond queneau: philosophy as fiction, funny and deep, chaotic yet highly structured. (i didn’t even have to think about this one.) hilary: honestly i don’t have a lot of time for pleasure reading now, but at one time i did. so, a few random titles: five hundred years of printing by s.h. steinberg; the new york trilogy by paul auster, anything by richard brautigan. kim: i’m ridiculously all over the place when it comes to reading fiction. so i’m going to go with 1) anna karenina by leo tolstoy for sheer moving tragic power; 2) desert solitaire by edward abbey as a book that changed the course of my life; and as for 3) yes i’ll admit it, the lord of the rings trilogy by jrr tolkien as the biggest, fattest, funnest book i’ve read every few years since i was a kid and enjoyed it immensely every time. ellie: only 3, so hard. i’ll go with a childhood favorite that stuck with me – the ruby in the smoke by philip pullman, a high school favorite that got me bragging rights on an important final paper – david copperfield by charles dickens, and a recent favorite that i recommend to everyone – anathem by neal stephenson. 3. what three computer or web applications can’t you live without? brett: firefox (w/can’t-live-without-’em-extensions adblock plus, customizegoogle, linkification, no squint, and scrollbar anywhere), dropbox, and rss2email. emily: tab mix plus (the best firefox extension to exist), firefox, and i hate to say it, all of those lovely webapps owned by google: google reader, google talk, google mail, google docs, google calendar. these might give me a bit of a guilty conscience, but they are so good with interfaces that i have just acquiesced. derik: 1) tinderbox:  a wonderfully versatile application that i use to store my note and records for work, for planning presentations, and for plotting my comic, as well as the occasional html export. 2) wordpress: it runs this blog, my own blog, and my comic’s site. 3) itunes: where would i be without my music, podcasts, and online listening to npr? hilary: google stuff, spreadsheet programs (stuck with excel for now), starting to get into basecamp for managing team projects at work. kim: chalk me up as another google addict. and i’m pretty sure i’d fall apart with delicious + firefox’s delicious add-on. clicking that button to pull up the whole list of my bookmarks in a sidebar in my browser… it’s sheer organizational beauty. last on my list, as a more recent addiction, is the musical brilliance of pandora. ellie: another google and firefox disciple here, the imperative extension being better gmail 2. i run all my email through one main account thanks to the included folders4gmail and gmail’s account option to “send mail as.” we’d like to get to know you, too! what are your answers to the three questions above? please post them in the comments below. about us, interview presentation = speech + slides in praise of the internet: shifting focus and engaging critical thinking skills 7 responses empress jeneya 2008–12–24 at 8:07 am 1. what is your professional new year’s resolution? take the gre’s and get into an msls with gender studies program. double masters program, i must be insane. 2. what are your three favorite novels? how about i give you authors… edward gorey, dorothy parker, egdar allen poe, bell hooks, langston hughes, etc. 3. what three computer or web applications can’t you live without? anything created be google (gmail, google reader, google calender, igoogle, picasa, etc.) hulu.com is great for a for movies and tv. why pay for cable when you can get most of it online. pandora has great music. sylvie szafranski 2008–12–24 at 8:19 am 1. what is your professional new year’s resolution? same as my personal one, become a better listener. 2. what are your three favorite novels? lamb (christopher moore), the perfume (patrick suskin), double whammy (carl hiaasen) but i could go on and on and on… 3. what three computer or web applications can’t you live without? flickr, hotmail, bloglines rqwyrzjf 2011–04–22 at 10:30 pm hoh8de edmvawbkmsls linda 2008–12–26 at 2:58 am 1. what is your professional new year’s resolution? well a mixture of personal and professional, publish, continue to learn more, finding a full time position, be more active in the online blogging scene. 2. what are your three favorite novels? jane eyre, charlie and the chocolate factory, memoirs of a geisha 3. what three computer or web applications can’t you live without? agreeing with people on this one.. google selected products, wordpress that houses three of my blogs, twitter jeremy mcginniss 2008–12–27 at 11:04 pm 1. what is your professional new year’s resolution? 1.to continue to help the users of my library realize what tools are available even in our small library and develop better research practices. 2. finish my master’s degree;one semester left. 2. what are your three favorite novels? the tin drum gunter grass. hands down this is awesome. i’m blown away by this book every time and it can be re-read over and over again. generation x douglass coupland. again another book that can be read over and over again. a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again david foster wallace. admittedly, this book is not a novel but a collection of essays. however, it is brilliant, witty and remarkably perceptive without emanating ivory-tower vibes. 3. what three computer or web applications can’t you live without? firefox with zotero, scribefire and foxmarks. i also use gmail, google reader and am loving on the itunes. sam 2009–01–04 at 9:56 pm 1. professional new years res: significantly improve my presentation skills. 2. three of my favorite novels at the moment: cryptonomicon, by neal stephenson hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world, by haruki murakami love burns, by edna mazya 3. web apps i can’t live without: googledocs jing bloglines although i have to say the the term “application” is a little bit fuzzy for me – i would normally think of an application as a specific tool added on to a larger site or piece of software to make it work in a way that is more to my liking – like firefox extensions, for example. on the other hand, many people seem to use ‘application’ to describe any social media tool/site they use online, large or small, specific or general. gerry 2009–01–05 at 6:45 pm 1. what is your professional new year’s resolution? the same as my nonprofessional resolution: to be more patient with and less unconstructively critical of other people. and with/of myself. 2. what are your three favorite novels? these are the books i reread often, so i guess they are my favorites: sirens of titan/galapogos/cat’s cradle/mother night by kurt vonnegut; brave new world by aldous huxley; animal farm by george orwell. 3. what three computer or web applications can’t you live without? whatever powers my ipod and my dvr, and firefox. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct librarian, heal thyself: a scholarly communication analysis of lis journals – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 23 apr micah vandegrift and chealsye bowley /19 comments librarian, heal thyself: a scholarly communication analysis of lis journals in brief this article presents an analysis of 111 library and information science journals based on measurements of “openness” including copyright policies, open access self-archiving policies and open access publishing options. we propose a new metric to rank journals, the j.o.i. factor (journal openness index), based on measures of openness rather than perceived rank or citation impact. finally, the article calls for librarians and researchers in lis to examine our scholarly literature and hold it to the principles and standards that we are asking of other disciplines. [also available as an epub for reading on mobile devices, or as a pdf.] image by flickr user micahvandegrift (cc by 2.0) by micah vandegrift and chealsye bowley introduction january 2014 saw the launch of sponsoring consortium for open access publishing in particle physics (scoap3), which was the first major disciplinary or field-specific shift toward open access. considerable numbers of journals and publishers are moving to embrace open access, exploring a variety of business models, but scoap3 represents a significant and new partnership between libraries, publishers and researchers.1 simply, 10 journals under the scoap3 program were converted to open access overnight and are being supported financially by libraries paying article processing charges through a consortium rather than purchasing subscriptions. the physics field has been at the forefront of open access for more than 20 years, beginning with the foundation of arxiv.org and followed by their premier society, american physical society (aps), actively evolving their publications to provide efficient open access options for authors. there has yet to be any such movement in the professional literature of library and information sciences (lis), despite the fact that the library world is inextricably linked to “open access” both in principle and in practice. the authors note this disciplinary discrepancy, and through an analysis of lis journals and professional literature hope to inspire those researching and publishing in the lis field to take control of our professional research practices. we conducted this analysis by grading 111 select lis journals using a metric we propose to call the “j.o.i factor” (journal openness index), judging “how open is it?” based on a simplified version of the open access spectrum proposed by public library of science (plos), the scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition (sparc), and the open access scholarly publishers association (oaspa). it is our hope that doing so will lead to the shifts in the scholarly communication system that libraries are necessarily pursuing.2 background scholarly publishing is evolving in many ways, as anyone connected to academia knows. discussions about publishing often center on the potential that digital technology offers to disseminate the results of scholarly research, a role traditionally filled by scholarly associations, societies, university presses, and commercial publishers. scholars and researchers at institutions ranging from ivy league universities to state colleges are raising questions about how non-traditional “digital” scholarship will be evaluated, what criteria and credence should be given to new, openly accessible online journals, and what role open access repositories have in disseminating and preserving the scholarly record. reaching even into public policy, the office of science and technology policy (ostp) convened a scholarly publishing roundtable in 2009. that group’s final report offered the recommendation that each federal research agency (national science foundation, national endowment for the humanities, etc.) should expeditiously develop and implement public access policies, offering free access to results of federally funded research. 2013 saw ostp revisit that recommendation and, in response to an overwhelming petition, issue a directive to all federal funding agencies with more than $100 million in r&d funding to develop and implement open access policies, similar to the national institute of health’s public access policy, in effect since may 2, 2005. popular media are also taking up the question of how scholarly publishing will evolve. the guardian regularly features pieces in its higher education network calling for redefinition of the publishing cycle that earns large publishing companies significant financial gains off of the gift economy of intellectual content and peer-reviewing in which faculty participate. one opinion piece went so far to say, “academic publishers make murdoch look like a socialist… down with the knowledge monopoly racketeers.” the economist coined the term “academic spring” in a february 2012 piece, referring to faculty’s rising discontent with the current system. they cite the example of timothy gowers, an award winning cambridge mathematician who called for a boycott of elsevier, a large stem publisher, for its unsatisfactory business practices. as of april 22nd, 2014 that boycott, thecostofknowledge.com, had 14,602 signatories. finally, us news and world report published a piece in july 2012 that opened with harvard university’s faculty advisory council stating “many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment financially unsustainable and academically restrictive.” responding to these “tectonic shifts in publishing,” university libraries and academic librarians are undergirding a system that is shaky at best. budgets remain flat, while subscription costs continue to rise; all the while many libraries are investing in staff and infrastructure in the area of scholarly communication, supporting open access initiatives, or moving directly into publishing themselves.3 while the primary push for adapting this system has been working through disciplinary faculty to change research culture, academic librarians are slowly engaging the idea that publishing practices within our own journals and professional writing could be an effective way to mold the future of academic publishing. the scope of this article is to engage our own community, librarians who publish in professional or academic literature, and target pressure points in our subset of academic publishing that could be capitalized upon to push the whole system forward. we are approaching this topic with the goal of plainly sketching out what lis publishing looks like currently, in terms of scholarly communication practices like copyright assignment, journal policies for open access self-archiving and open access publishing. literature review studies of this magnitude have been conducted in the recent past, although they have primarily focused on the attitudes of individual librarian authors toward publishing practices more than analyzing the publishing practices and policies journals themselves. elaine peterson, in 2006, produced an exploration of “librarian publishing preferences and open-access electronic journals”, in which she conducts a brief survey. the results show that academic librarians often consider open access journals as a means of sharing their research but hold the same reservations about them as many other disciplines, i.e. concerns about peer review and valuation by administration in terms of promotion and tenure.4 this line of thought is continued in snyder, imre and carter’s 2007 study, which focused more specifically on intellectual property concerns of academic librarian authors and allowable self-archiving practices. they quote peter suber, author of open access and director of harvard’s open access project, writing, “‘there is a serious problem [serials pricing and permission crisis], known best to librarians, and a beautiful solution [open access] within the reach of scholars.’ one can draw the conclusion from suber’s statement that librarians as authors should be the most prominent supporters of open access and that, as scholars, they would practice self-archiving.”5  this study in particular lays a unsettling foundation that 50% of respondents cared mostly about publication without considering the copyright policies of the journals in which they published and that only 16% had exercised the right to self-archive in an institutional repository.((ibid)) these and other similar studies highlight the simple fact that concerns about changing publishing habits are the same within librarianship as they are in many other disciplines. college and research libraries (c&rl), a well-regarded journal for academic librarianship, published four articles between 2009 and 2013 that studied the publishing practices of academic librarians through surveys.6 each has contributed valuable insights while reaching very similar conclusions across the board. palmer, dill and christie conclude that in attitude, “librarians are in favor of seeing their profession take some actions toward open access […] yet this survey found that agreement with various open access–related concepts does not constitute actual action.”7 mercer, focused on the publishing and archiving behaviors rather than attitudes of academic librarians, highlights the substantial differences between the dual role many academic librarians inhabit; library professional first and academic researcher second. she writes, “…librarians may be risk takers in their professional roles, where they are actively encouraging changes in the system of scholarly communication and adoption of new technologies but are risk-averse as faculty in their roles as researchers and authors.”8 taken together, the research could lead one to think that academic librarians are invested in changes to the scholarly publishing system about as little as disciplinary faculty and are just as cautious about evolving their own publishing habits. many academic authors write and publish out of passion for their research and to contribute to the progression of knowledge in society. unfortunately, because of the system of measurement in which academia is mired, credentials, merit and perception can also play a substantial role in the publishing decisions of faculty. without delving too deep into the discussion of tenure for librarians, the expectations for publishing in certain journals, or at all, are slightly different for librarians than other university faculty. both the h-index and journal impact factor are measurements of supposed “impact,” based on the citations an article receives, which have in turn been equated with quality.9 the h-index is an impact measure for an individual, whereas impact factor applies to the journal level. two recent studies follow mercer’s line of argument and look at the journals in the lis field, rather than the authors, using these two traditional measures of “impact.” jingfeng xia conducted a fascinating study proposing that the h-index of authors published in a journal, as opposed to that journal’s impact factor, could provide an efficient method of ranking lis journals, especially those that are open access and not listed in journal citation reports. xia’s article also underscores some of the complications that arise when lumping together all journals in the library and information science field; library and information science research (lisr), a researcher-focused journal published by elsevier (h-index = 21, impact factor = 1.4, not open access) is judged alongside d-lib magazine published by the corporation for national research initiatives (h-index = 33, impact factor = 0.7, open access), a journal aimed at the practice of digital librarianship. lisr’s impact factor (1.4) is high for lis journals (median 0.74), but when compared to the h-index of d-lib’s authors lisr seems to have less “impact.” xia’s employment of the h-index as a measurement, illustrated in this example, shows the breadth and depth that alternate matrices may introduce, the complications of judging journal quality based on citations, and the potential inversion of perceived impact depending on how one looks at it. expanding on the idea that acknowledging the perceived quality of journals is a valuable practice within librarianship, judith nixon’s “core journals in library and information science: developing a methodology for ranking lis journals” was published in 2013 by c&rl. she proposes, based on successful practices at purdue university libraries, that “top lis journals can be identified and ranked into tiers by compiling journals that are peer-reviewed and highly rated by the experts, have low acceptance rates and high circulation rates, are journals that local faculty publish in, and have strong citation ratings as indicated by an isi impact factor and a high h-index using google scholar data.”10 the production of a ranked list like this aligns perfectly with the type of study we performed, and our conclusions will highlight some similarities and differences between nixon’s list and our findings, pitting the journal openness index (j.o.i) factor against the top tier journals she presents. whereas some of these studies in lis publishing focused on the “people” angle, studying librarians and their attitudes and practices around publishing, we chose to follow more recent research and widen the lens to look at the journals in which librarians might publish. a challenge presents itself when broadening to this scale: there is the ever-present blurred line between the publishing habits of working librarians and those of teaching/research faculty in library schools and academic departments — library and information science research vs. d-lib magazine for example. there are obvious differences between these groups, so pairing analysis on the specific journals where professional librarians typically publish with the more specific studies on that same group’s publishing habits will present the most accurate portrait of the scholarly communication landscape as it has been studied to date. we leave the extension of this research for future study. methodology our live dataset is viewable on this google spreadsheet. downloadable and citable data are accessible on figshare. journal selection the journals that we began with came from an internal list compiled as part of a professional development initiative at florida state university libraries. a student worker in the assessment department compiled the original list of 74 journals, and then the co-authors of this piece expanded that list to 111 after consulting the lis publications wiki. the journals were ingested into a spreadsheet with columns for impact factor, scope, instructions for authors, indexing information and other common details. our first task was to add columns for copyright policy, open access archiving policy, and open access publishing options. our journal list includes an extraordinarily broad range of journals including research focused journals and those in subfields of librarianship like archives and technical services. this decision was made so as to gather data from the broadest possible representation of lis scholarship. data collection after compiling and organizing the journal list, we collected each journal’s standard policies on copyright assignment, open access self-archiving (“green open access”), and open access publishing (“gold open access”). we began gathering these data by searching the sherpa/romeo database for commercial journals and the directory of open access journals (doaj) for open access journals. after searching these databases, we double checked policies and open access options on the journal and/or publisher’s website using the following workflow: locate the policies section of the website, which is commonly labeled “policies,” “policies and guidelines,” “author’s rights,” or “author’s guidelines”; identify the copyright policy of the journal; identify the open access self-archiving policy or “green open access” options that the journal permits; identify the open access publishing or “gold open access options” of the journal, which may be listed in the policies section or a specific “open access options” section; and finally view the copyright transfer agreement or other author agreement, if available. all details were inputted to the spreadsheet and coded for consistency. j.o.i factor (journal openness index) grading journals based on how “open” they are, as opposed to citation impact or h-index, is a novel approach, and one that had not been applied to lis literature to our knowledge. in fact, it is not clear that this measurement has been used extensively in any field or practice aside from the production of the spectrum and some supporting documentation by plos, sparc, and oaspa. potentially then, as further research is done using the j.o.i factor, the grades we apply to journals herein may be different based on how many measures of openness are used and how they are counted. our proposed enumeration of the j.o.i factor is indicated on the image below, superimposed over the “how open is it?” scale produced by sparc/plos. the application of j.o.i factors to specific journals is contained to our conclusion section for purposes of clarity and emphasis. our proposed journal openness index, adding numerical values to plos/sparc’s how open is it spectrum. the original spectrum breaks openness down to six categories, three of which overlap neatly with the criteria we used in our analysis: 1) copyrights, 2) reuse rights, and 3) author posting rights. the remaining categories, reader rights, automatic posting, and machine readability were mostly ancillary to our focus, and so the j.o.i factor numbers that we apply only account for the three criteria we researched. the “reader rights” category does include some details about embargoes but typically refers to embargoes on the final published pdf released after that term expires by the publisher. our use of the embargo data point was in terms of author posting rights, so we chose not to include reader rights as a category in our j.o.i factor calculations. also, the spectrum lumps open access publishing options, another of our data points, in with reader rights as “immediate access to some, but not all, articles (including the ‘hybrid’ model” — “hybrid” meaning the business model where articles can be made open access on a one-by-one basis for a fee. we decided to add a “-” for journals that offer open access publishing for a fee, illustrating the negative connotation that might have for authors. journals that are fully open access without any publishing fees will have a j.o.i number and a “+” illustrating positive connotations. information technology and libraries, for example, published by library and information technology association/ala, would have a j.o.i factor of 12+; four points for author retention of copyrights, four points for broad reuse rights (cc-by), four points for the author being allowed to post any version of the article in a repository and “+” for the journal being fully open access without imposing any publication fees. we hope that the application of the j.o.i factor in this article serves merely as a proof of concept, and we invite colleagues to use our data, apply j.o.i factors to all the journals we listed there, and extend this work to account for the full range of possible factors of openness. data analysis the most common major publishers from our sample were taylor & francis (25 journals), emerald (12 journals), and elsevier (8 journals). society and association publishers followed closely with 23 journals, and universities and university presses had 18. the remainder were either unknown, other types of organizations, smaller publishing houses or “self-affiliated.” the three clearly self-affiliated journals, first monday, code4lib and in the library with the lead pipe are all fully open access but have a range of difference in their copyright policies, illustrating the variety of publishing options within the lis field.11 each journal was assigned a corresponding code for its copyright, open access archiving, and open access publication policies. these codes were used primarily for organizing the information in our spreadsheet, and are not conflated with our proposed j.o.i factors which are applied after all data were collected, organized, and analyzed. the codes represent the range of possible options under each category, based on the variety of options we identified in the journals we reviewed. for example, the copyright field could range from (1) required full transfer of copyright to (4) copyright jointly shared between author and publisher. self-archiving policies ranged from not permitted (0) to allowing the final published pdf (6), with a range of embargo periods for each category in between. (see table 1 for all codes) table 1: journal policy codes as applied to our data. copyright policies despite librarianship’s ongoing waltz with copyright complications, 43 of the lis journals we reviewed still require the author to transfer all copyrights to the publisher, “during the full term of copyright and any extensions or renewals… including but not limited to the right to publish, republish, transmit, sell, distribute and otherwise use the [article] in whole or in part… in derivative works throughout the world, in all languages and in all media of expression now known or later developed” (emphasis our own).12 however, leaning toward a more expansive rights agreement, 61 journals allow the author to retain copyright, 38 of which require a license to publish be granted to the publisher.13 21 of the 38 that require a license granted to the publisher are taylor & francis journals, which fall under their new author rights for lis journals. taylor and francis shows leadership in adapting their rights agreements for lis journals, although one co-author of this article sought to push them further, with success. the remaining 23 journals that allow the author to retain copyright also offer the article to be published under a creative commons (cc) license, ranging from attribution-non-commercial-no derivatives (collaborative librarianship) to public domain (first monday). the boldest and most progressive copyright policy goes to first monday, which offers total author choice, from copyright transfer (©), through every possible creative commons license, to releasing the work in the public domain (cc0). snapshot: 38% of the journals require full transfer of copyright; 54% of the journals allow authors to retain copyright; 5.4% had a choice between full copyright transfer and retaining some rights; 2.7% were unknown and 0.9% had joint copyright between the author and publisher. open access self-archiving policies (green open access) this category provided the broadest range of possibilities, mostly due to the fact that different publishers assign different terms of embargo for self-archiving. assuming that well-informed lis authors who submit to these journals desire the simplest and broadest open access options, 24 journals allow the pre-print (submitted version), post-print (accepted version) and final published pdf to be archived in an open access institutional repository, with no stated embargoes. 22 of these 24 are fully open access journals, and they are all published by societies, associations, universities or self-affiliated groups. common thought in academic publishing tends to say that society/association publishers lose the most when going open access; it is heartening to see this is absolutely untrue in lis literature. the strictest embargo on self-archiving in an institutional repository is 18 months for 10 of the taylor and francis journals. university of texas press and university of chicago press both allow archiving after 12 months, while ironically, given the topic of the journal, the journal of scholarly publishing published by toronto university press only allows archiving of the pre-print with no policies for post-prints. an important point to consider when discussing self-archiving policies is the farce that they truly are. kevin smith, duke university’s scholarly communication officer stated it most plainly in his february 5 blog post titled it’s the content, not the version! he writes, …this notion of versions is, at least in part, an artificial construction that publishers use to assert control while also giving the appearance of generosity in their licensing back to authors of very limited rights to use earlier versions.  the versions are artificially based on steps in the publication permission process (before submission, peer-review, submission, publication), not on anything intrinsic to the work itself that would justify a change in copyright status.14 the practice of self-archiving is totally dependent on copyright transfer agreements, and based on the representative sample of lis journals we reviewed, all but 8% had direct or implied policies regarding what the author is allowed to do with specific versions of the same work. the author’s false sense of control over their work and the publisher’s exploitation of that sense deserves a study unto its own. suffice it to say that if the field of library and information studies considers a green open access policy a good deal, there is much work to be done. snapshot: 45% allow pre-print and post-print archiving; 13% allow pre-print and post-print archiving after 12-18 months; 21% allow pre-print, post-print, and publisher’s pdf to be archived; 4.5% have unclear policies and 2.7% are unknown. open access publishing policies (gold open access) a common misconception about achieving open access is that it always requires a fee on the part of the author. while this mostly true for traditional commercial publishers attempting to retain their income stream while “acquiescing” to the desires of their authors, it is a falsity broadly, which is proven in our analysis. 56 journals offer open access on an article-by-article basis and require an article processing charge (apc) ranging from $300 to $3,000. 52 of these are published by commercial publishers (elsevier, sage, springer, wiley, taylor and francis, and emerald). in stark contrast, 35 journals on our list are fully open access and all articles are published without a fee. a significant number, 20 journals, either do not offer a “gold open access” publication option or do not publicize it. a number of the 20 journals that do not offer or publicize a paid open access business model are university presses (6), and association/society journals (7). snapshot: 32% of journals are already open access and publish without a fee, 50% offer open access publication options through an article processing charge, and 18% of journals offer no gold option or do not publicize it. open access lis journals as noted above, within these lis journals there is considerable diversity in policies. we wanted to further explore that depth of difference by looking specifically at the fully open access journals in our sample. this section reiterates some of the analyses from previous sections, but we thought it still important to enumerate the complexities of publishing within this subset of a subset. 38 of the 111 journals that we looked at are open access, and only two (the international journal of library science and ifla journal) have a publication charge, $300 and $1500 respectively. while two of the 38 open access journals require a full copyright transfer (international journal of library science and student research journal) a little more than half of them (21) allow the author to keep copyright and attach a creative commons license to the work.15 27 of these fully open access journals allow the author to deposit the final published pdf in a repository, meaning that 11 fully open access journals either place some restrictions on the reuse of open access content or have poorly defined reuse policies. even though these are open access journals, the data suggests that what qualifies as “open access” even within our own field is still loosely defined, a point we attempt to illustrate by applying the j.o.i. factor at the close of this article. some might make the argument that any restriction of authors’ rights (copyright) and readers’ rights (reuse via licenses) toes the line of not achieving pure open access. emily drabinski, a reviewer of this article, made the salient point that the policies we discuss as needing to change are under the purview of journal editorial boards who are often in the complicated position of being between authors (colleagues) and publishers. to that end, we encourage journal editors as well as authors to lead by taking action. regardless, as the measures of openness are more effectively discussed within our communities of practice, the lis field is making slow progress toward public access (readability) and open access (re-usability), a trend we expect to broaden and deepen. conclusions this article illustrates something with which every researcher in the field of library and information studies must contend. a significant percentage of our professional literature is still owned and controlled by commercial publishers whose role in scholarly communication is to maintain “the scholarly record,” yes, but also to generate profits at the expense of library budgets by selling our intellectual property back to us. conversely, there is much to be proud of, including the many association, society and university-sponsored journals that are well-respected and proving important points about the viability of open access as a business model, a dissemination mechanism, and a principle to which librarians hold — our “free to all” heritage. it is our hope that this article inspires the activism that the earlier articles from our review of the literature pointed out as a disturbing discrepancy in our professional practice. simply, this is our call for librarians to practice what we preach, regardless of, or even in the face of, tenure and promotion “requirements,” long-held professional norms, and the unnecessary fear, uncertainty and doubt that control academic publishing. we already have models for activism on the collections side of our work; we call our colleagues to echo those impulses on the production side of scholarship, as editors, authors, bloggers, library publishers, and consumers of research. there are three practical means of seeding this change; 1) exercise the right to self-archive every piece of scholarship published in lis journals, or better yet never give those rights away in the first place; 2) move the “prestige” to open access, meaning offering the best work to journals that are invested in a more benevolent scholarly communication system; and 3) as editors, work diligently to adapt the policies and procedures for the journals we control to align with our professional principles of access, expansive understanding of copyrights, fair use, and broad reusability. returning to “nixon’s list,” which proposed a possible ranking system for lis journals, it is interesting to grade her list in terms of the “openness” criteria we’ve employed in this article, and in light of the practical actions we propose. nixon’s findings present 18 journals that were determined to be the “tier one” journals, based on the criteria she and her colleagues developed.16 11 of those 18 were also identified as top lis journals from her literature review. table 2 shows those 11 “prestige” journals, as graded by our applied j.o.i factor. table 2: tier one lis journals graded by j.o.i factor the results are striking. college and research libraries, widely regarded as a top journal for practicing librarians, received a j.o.i factor of 9+, whereas information technology and libraries (ital) measures at 12+, all because of ital’s generous reuse rights policy (cc-by). jasist is tied for last place (j.o.i factor 2-) with elsevier and emerald journals because of copyright transfer requirements, no reuse rights and middling author posting allowances. library trends and library quarterly (university press journals) sit solidly in the middle, entirely due to their author posting policies which allow posting the publisher’s pdf. based on this, in closing, we submit these final questions to the lis research community: are these the journals we want on a top tier list, and what measure of openness will we define as acceptable for our prestigious journals? further, how long will we tolerate measurements like impact factor and h-index guiding our criteria for advancement, while accounting for very little that matters to how we principle ourselves and our work? finally, has the time come and gone for lis to lead the shifts in scholarly communication? it is our hope that this article prompts furious and fair debate, but mostly that it produces real, substantive evolution within our profession, how we research, how we assign value to scholarship, and how we share the products of our intellectual work. our thanks and gratitude go to emily drabinski for her thoughtful, helpful and engaging comments as the external reviewer of this article. thanks also to lead pipe colleagues and editors, ellie, erin, and hugh, for challenging our ideas, correcting our bad grammar and making this lump of coal into a diamond. most of all, thanks to brett for proposing the term “journal openness index” to replace our not creative and weird-sounding original concept. bibliography peterson, e. (2006) librarian publishing preferences and open-access electronic journals. electronic journal of academic and special librarianship, 7(2). accessible at http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v07n02/peterson_e01.htm carter, h., carolyn snyder, and andrea imre. (2007) “library faculty publishing and self-archiving: a survey of attitudes and awareness.” portal: libraries and the academy, 7(1). open access version at http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/morris_articles/1/ palmer, k., emily dill, and charlene christie. (2009) “where there’s a will there’s a way?: survey of academic librarian attitudes about open access.” college and research libraries, 70. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/70/4/315.full.pdf+html mercer, h. (2011) almost halfway there: an analysis of the open access behaviors of academic librarians. college and research libraries, 72. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/72/5/443.full.pdf+html nixon, j. (2014) core journals in library and information science: developing a methodology for ranking lis journals. college and research libraries, 75. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/75/1/66.full.pdf+html smith, k. (2014) its the content, not the version! scholarly communications @ duke [blog], posted on february 5. accessible at http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2014/02/05/its-the-content-not-the-version/ data vandegrift, micah; bowley, chealsye (2014): lis journals measured for “openness.” http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.994258   other readings malenfant, k. j. (2010) leading change in the system of scholarly communication: a case study of engaging liaison librarians for outreach to faculty. college & research libraries, 71. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/71/1/63.full.pdf+html sugimoto, c. r., tsou, a., naslund, s., hauser, a., brandon, m., winter, d., … finlay, s. c. (2012) beyond gatekeepers of knowledge: scholarly communication practices of academic librarians and archivists at arl institutions. college & research libraries, 75. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/75/2/145.full.pdf+html xia, j. (2012) positioning open access journals in a lis journal ranking. college & research libraries, 73. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/73/2/134.full.pdf+html henry, d. and tina m. neville. (2004)  research, publication, and service patterns of florida academic librarians. the journal of academic librarianship, 30. open access version at http://hdl.handle.net/10806/200. published version at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2004.07.006 joswick, k. (1999) article publication patterns of academic librarians: an illinois case study. college & research libraries, 60. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/60/4/340.full.pdf+html hart, r. (1999) scholarly publication by university librarians: a study at penn state. college & research libraries, 60. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/60/5/454.full.pdf+html wiberley, jr., s. julie m. hurd, and ann c. weller (2006) publication patterns of u.s. academic librarians from 1998 to 2002. college & research libraries, 67. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/67/3/205.full.pdf+html harley, d.; acord, sophia krzys; earl-novell, sarah; lawrence, shannon; & king, c. judson. (2010). assessing the future landscape of scholarly communication: an exploration of faculty values and needs in seven disciplines. uc berkeley: center for studies in higher education. accessible at  http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/15x7385g frass, w. jo cross, and victoria gardener (2013) taylor and francis open access survey – supplement 1-8 data breakdown by subject area. accessible at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/openaccess/opensurvey priego, e. (2012) fieldwork: mentions of library science journals online. accessible at http://www.altmetric.com/blog/fieldwork-mentions-library-journals-online/ the price of information (feb. 2012) http://www.economist.com/node/21545974 a (free) roundup of content on the academic spring (april 2012) http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/apr/12/blogs-on-the-academic-spring academic publishers make murdoch look like a socialist (aug. 2011) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist is the academic publishing industry on the verge of disruption? (july 2012) http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/07/23/is-the-academic-publishing-industry-on-the-verge-of-disruption   see open access directory “journals that converted from toll access to open access.” accessible at http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/journals_that_converted_from_ta_to_oa [↩] bolick, j. (2014). “we need a scale to measure the #scholcomm friendliness of a journal: based on @sparc_na and @plos #howopenisit: hoii factor?” tweet available at https://twitter.com/joshbolick/status/453586422004744193 [↩] information pulled from library journal’s annual periodicals price survey, accessible at http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/04/publishing/the-winds-of-change-periodicals-price-survey-2013/ [↩] peterson, e. (2006) librarian publishing preferences and open-access electronic journals. electronic journal of academic and special librarianship, 7(2). accessible at http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v07n02/peterson_e01.htm [↩] carter, h., carolyn snyder, and andrea imre. (2007) “library faculty publishing and self-archiving: a survey of attitudes and awareness.” portal: libraries and the academy, 7(1). open access version at http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/morris_articles/1/ [↩] additionally, its partner newsletter, college and research libraries news, has run a column dedicated to scholarly communication since 2000. [↩] palmer, k., emily dill, and charlene christie. (2009) “where there’s a will there’s a way?: survey of academic librarian attitudes about open access.” college and research libraries, 70. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/70/4/315.full.pdf+html [↩] mercer, h. (2011) almost halfway there: an analysis of the open access behaviors of academic librarians. college and research libraries, 72. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/72/5/443.full.pdf+html [↩] for more on the issues associated with impact factor, see this editorial from nature – http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/05/scientists-join-journal-editors-to-fight-impact-factor-abuse.html a response to these issues is the recent push toward altmetrics (alternative metrics), measuring many other forms of impact beyond simply citations – http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/. [↩] nixon, j. (2014) core journals in library and information science: developing a methodology for ranking lis journals. college and research libraries, 75. accessible at http://crl.acrl.org/content/75/1/66.full.pdf+html [↩] our use of “fully open access” throughout this article means published online, freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection, with broad copyright and reuse options for authors and readers respectively. [↩] language pulled from a standard wiley agreement, although only one lis journal we reviewed is published by wiley. elsevier would be a better example agreement, but curiously elsevier’s copyright transfer agreements are nearly impossible to find on the web anymore. [↩] further study should be dedicated to determining if these “licenses to publish” are exclusive, non-exclusive or have other clauses that render them less effective than they seem. [↩] smith, k. (2014) its the content, not the version! scholarly communications @ duke [blog], posted on february 5. accessible at http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2014/02/05/its-the-content-not-the-version/ [↩] cc-by is the most common license for these 21 open access journals. [↩] “top lis journals can be identified and ranked into tiers by compiling journals that are peer-reviewed and highly rated by the experts, have low acceptance rates and high circulation rates, are journals that local faculty publish in, and have strong citation ratings as indicated by an isi impact factor and a high h-index using google scholar data.” nixon, j. (2013), http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2012/07/23/crl12-387.full.pdf [↩] working at learning: developing an integrated approach to student staff development how well are you doing your job? you don’t know. no one does. 19 responses scott walter 2014–04–23 at 12:10 pm thanks for mentioning the work that authors in college & research libraries have published in recent years regarding open access and its adoption by scholars in lis and other fields. c&rl has been invested in open access issues, not just as a trend in the research in our field, but in its own practice, as we have made a complete transition in the journal from a traditional subscription model to a fully oa model (and one that includes equally free and open access to our entire, 75-year backfile). essays accepted for publication in c&rl are openly available to all, for free, throughout their lifecycle from pre-print to fully-formatted and published article. i did want to point out one discrepancy in your analysis of c&rl’s openness, however, and that has to do with “re-use rights”: all articles published in c&rl include a cc-by-nc license, which you can see noted on both the abstract page and the full-text versions of any of our current articles, e.g., the aptly-titled “beyond gatekeepers of knowledge: scholarly communication practices of academic librarians and archivists at arl institutions” (march 2014), available at http://crl.acrl.org/content/75/2/145.full.pdf+html. with this data point updated, i hope our “j.o.i. factor” may even increase! micahvandegrift 2014–04–29 at 8:52 am hi scott – thanks for the clarification. we did a lot of the data analysis over the past year, and were sure there would be things we overlooked, or that had changed. i am a big fan of the work over at c&rl for all the reasons you mention, so i hope you’ll forgive the oversight. one suggestion, if i may be so bold – the cc-by-nc license is buried a pdf. is there any reason it couldn’t be clearly indicated on the “instructions for authors” page, or plastered on the front webpage of the journal? aside from our argument for greater openness, we also want to push lis literature to be transparent and clear. using the easily recognizable creative commons logo would go a long way too. and, since i have your ear, why the decision to impose a cc-by-nc on c&rl authors? why not follow the lead of first monday and allow full author choice? what does the nc actually practically accomplish? why is c&rl still enforcing standards that are hangovers from print publication (ultra prescriptive reference and citation rules, assignment of page numbers)? and, my biggest beef with c&rl, why the pre-print bottleneck? if the article is accepted, and your platform is digital, why not release it as “published” and do away with the constrictions of volume and issue, which don’t matter anyways except for the legacy of a print publication? i am a supporter of everything you all are doing over there, just want to make sure you know i think there is plenty of room to grow. if c&rl truly embraced open access and digital publication, i believe it should look more like plos with first monday’s rights/reuse structure. scott walter 2014–04–29 at 11:04 am micah – you are correct that the “instruction for authors” page needs to be updated, not just for the item you note, but also to highlight our support for links to open data, etc., that are now possible. maybe even to acknowledge the possibility of an open peer review option (depending on how that experiment goes with one of your lead pipe colleagues). such an update is on my “to do” list for the year. not on my list, though, are the changes you suggest regarding formatting and the continued release of specific issues of the journal. the reason these changes are not on my list, valid options though they are, is because they are not currently supported by the broader community of c&rl readers and authors. in reader surveys and focus groups conducted as we planned for the transition, the retention of these legacy markers of quality of content were specifically noted as important to continue. by increasing the number of articles included in each issue, we are on target to shrink the time to publication significantly over the next year, but to do so in a manner that retains important characteristics of our print heritage that readers and authors told us were important for the continued vitality of the journal. we’ll continue to engage our community in the coming years on issues like this, and i am sure the journal will continue to grow in the right direction for a top-tier, peer-reviewed, oa journal in lis. micahvandegrift 2014–04–29 at 1:46 pm glad to hear, and i understand the many layers of complexity in moving something like this along. i’d be really interested in conducting that survey of c&rl readers and authors now, as scholcomm seems to have developed so drastically in the 3 years i’ve been a librarian. i’d wager that the results might be different. if it ever comes to a vote, mine will be surely on the side of eschewing those “legacy markers of quality” since i believe nostalgia for legacy impairs innovation. all that said to say, i’m on your team! do great things! innovate! lets lead scholarly publishing rather than react! pingback : academics investigate big deals | bibliographic wilderness pingback : declaration on open access for lis authors | semantic rain pingback : twitter open access report – 29 apr 2014 | pingback : editor’s choice: in the library, with the lead pipe: librarian, heal thyself: a scholarly communication analysis of lis journals | digital humanities now pingback : infobib » open access im bibliothekswesen pingback : new librarian, heal thyself: a scholarly communication analysis of lis journals – stephen's lighthouse new silvia cho 2014–05–08 at 4:02 pm thank you so much for this very valuable work. i’m wondering how you feel about electronic journal license terms on allowing or prohibiting interlibrary loan as another measure of journal openness. often, electronic journal licensing terms are restrictive or unclear, expressly prohibiting or simply deterring libraries from sharing electronic journal articles with other libraries. with print materials, we have fair use best practices to rely upon; with electronic journals, we additionally have to contend with restrictive licensing terms in addition to copyright matters. this is a frequent barrier we have to contend with in resource sharing as we seek to connect users to resources they need. micahvandegrift 2014–05–13 at 2:33 pm hi silvia – i think you’re absolutely right on the money that ill-ability is another incredibly important measure of openness. in fact, after publishing this i came across this liblicense project that hopes to deal with exactly that issue. my ultimate hope would be, that if a journal is fully open access there would be little to no restrictions on re-usability, including interlibrary loans. an issue that we will have to contend with, that this article might hint at, is that many of these complications come from the fact that academic publishing is currently controlled by publishing companies. they have every interest in restricting the access and usability of the content because it is their business model. we are hoping and seeing that initiatives like library publishing are altering this system a bit, and it would make sense then that publishing would be more in the interest of information access than restriction. i’m hopeful that the system will evolve so that concerns like yours simply won’t exist anymore. thanks for reading, and for the comment! pingback : declaration on open access for lis authors | informed pingback : open access update may 2014 | australian open access support group pingback : atg article of the week: librarian, heal thyself: a scholarly communication analysis of lis journals | against-the-grain.com pingback : atg article of the week: librarian, heal thyself: a scholarly communication analysis of lis journals | against the grain pingback : librarians need to “walk the talk” on oa publishing | open access @ uofs library pingback : open access student publishing | hls pingback : the life and death of an open access journal: q&a with librarian marcus banks – by richard poynder | against the grain this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct dismantling the evaluation framework – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2021 21 jul alaina c. bull, margy macmillan and alison head /6 comments dismantling the evaluation framework (atharva tulsi, unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/rvpcatjhyua) by alaina c. bull, margy macmillan, and alison j. head in brief for almost 20 years, instruction librarians have relied on variations of two models, the craap test and sift, to teach students how to evaluate printed and web-based materials. dramatic changes to the information ecosystem, however, present new challenges amid a flood of misinformation where algorithms lie beneath the surface of popular and library platforms collecting clicks and shaping content. when applied to increasingly connected networks, these existing evaluation heuristics have limited value. drawing on our combined experience at community colleges and universities in the u.s. and canada, and with project information literacy (pil), a national research institute studying college students’ information practices for the past decade, this paper presents a new evaluative approach for teaching students to see information as the agent, rather than themselves. opportunities and strategies are identified for evaluating the veracity of sources, first as students, leveraging the expertise they bring with them into the classroom, and then as lifelong learners in search of information they can trust and rely on. 1. introduction arriving at deeply considered answers to important questions is an increasingly difficult task. it often requires time, effort, discernment, and a willingness to dig below the surface of google-ready answers. careful investigation of content is needed more than ever in a world where information is in limitless supply but often tainted by misinformation, while insidious algorithms track and shape content that users see on their screens. teaching college students evaluative strategies essential for academic success and in their daily lives is one of the greatest challenges of information literacy instruction today. in the last decade, information evaluation — the ability to ferret out the reliability, validity, or accuracy of sources — has changed substantively in both teaching practice and meaning. the halcyon days of teaching students the craap test1, a handy checklist for determining the credibility of digital resources, are over2; and, in many cases, sift3, another reputation heuristic, is now in use on numerous campuses. at the same time, evaluative strategies have become more nuanced and complex as librarians continue to debate how to best teach these critically important skills in changing times.4  in this article, we introduce the idea of proactivity as an approach that instruction librarians can use for re-imagining evaluation. we explore new ways of encouraging students to question how information works, how information finds them, and how they can draw on their own strengths and experiences to develop skills for determining credibility, usefulness, and trust of sources in response to an information ecosystem rife with deception and misinformation. ultimately, we discuss how a proactive approach empowers students to become experts in their own right as they search for reliable information they can trust. 2. a short history of two models for teaching evaluation mention “information literacy instruction” and most academic librarians and faculty think of evaluation frameworks or heuristics that have been used and adapted for nearly two decades. the most widely known are the craap method, and more recently, sift, both designed to determine the validity and reliability of claims and sources. craap debuted in 20045 when several academic librarians developed an easy to use assessment framework for helping students and instructors evaluate information for academic papers. craap, a catchy acronym for currency, relevancy, accuracy, authority, purpose, walks students through the criteria for assessing found content. for librarians, this approach to evaluation is a manifestation of the information literacy competency standards for higher education developed by the acrl and especially an outcome of standard 3.2: “examines and compares information from various sources in order to evaluate reliability, validity, accuracy, authority, timeliness, and point of view or bias.”6 when the craap method was first deployed nearly 20 years ago, the world was still making the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0. most online content was meant to be consumed, not interacted with, altered, changed, and shared. craap was developed in a time when you found information, before the dramatic shift to information finding you. as monolithic players like google and facebook began using tracking software on their platforms in 2008 and selling access to this information in 2012, web evaluation became a very different process. in a role reversal, media and retail platforms, such as amazon, had begun to evaluate their users to determine what information they should receive, rather than users evaluating what information they found. since 2015, criticism has mounted about the craap test, despite its continued and widespread use on campuses. checklists like craap are meant to reduce cognitive overload, but they can actually increase it, leading students to make poor decisions about the credibility of sources, especially in densely interconnected networks.7 as one critic has summed it up: “craap isn’t about critical thinking – it’s about oversimplified binaries.”8 we agree: craap was designed for a fairly narrow range of situations, where students might have little background knowledge to assist in judging claims and often had to apply constraints of format, date, or other instructor-imposed requirements; but these bore little resemblance to everyday interactions with information, even then. when mike caulfield published the sift model in 2019, it gave instruction librarians a  progressive alternative to the craap test. caulfield described his evaluation methods as a “networked reputation heuristic,”9 developed in response to the spread of misinformation and disinformation in the post-truth era. the four “moves” he identified — stop, investigate, find, trace — are meant to help people recontextualize information through placing a particular work and its claims within the larger realm of content about a topic. sift offers major improvements over craap in speed, simplicity, and applicability to a wider scope of print and online publications, platforms, and purposes. recently, researchers have identified the benefits of using this approach,10 and, in particular, the lateral reading strategies it incorporates. sift encourages students to base evaluation on cues that go beyond the intrinsic qualities of the article and to use comparisons across media sources to understand the trustworthiness of an article. this is what justin reich,11 director of the mit teaching systems lab, noted in a 2020 project information literacy (pil) interview, calling sift a useful “first step,” since it may assist students in acquiring the background knowledge they need to evaluate the next piece of information they encounter on the topic.  crucially, sift also includes the context of the information needed as part of evaluation – some situations require a higher level of verification than others. the actions sift recommends are more closely aligned with the kind of checking students are already using to detect bias12 and decide what to believe and how researchers themselves judge the quality of information.13 and while it is much better suited to today’s context, where misinformation abounds and algorithms proliferate, sift is still based on students encountering individual information objects, without necessarily understanding them as part of a system.  our proposed next step, what we call proactive evaluation, would allow them not only to evaluate what they’re seeing but consider why they’re seeing what they do and what might be missing. sift, like craap, is based on a reactive approach: the individual is an agent, acting upon information objects they find. in today’s information landscape, we think it is more useful to invert this relationship and consider the information object as the agent that is acting on the individual it finds.  3.  information with agency thinking of information as having agency allows us to re-examine the information environment we think we know. by the time they get to college, today’s students are embedded in the information infrastructure: a social phenomenon of interconnected sources, creators, processes, filters, stories, formats, platforms, motivations, channels, and audiences. their profiles and behaviors affect not only what they see and share but also the relative prominence of stories, images, and articles in others’ feeds and search results. information enters, flows through, and ricochets around the systems they inhabit – fueled, funded, and filtered by data gathered from every interaction. research from pil,14 and elsewhere,15 indicates that students who see algorithmic personalization at work in their everyday information activities already perceive information as having agency, specifically, the  ability to find them, follow them across platforms, and keep them in filter bubbles. they understand the bargain they are required to make with corporations like amazon, alphabet, and facebook where they exchange personal data for participation in communities, transactions, or search efficiency. when pil interviewed 103 undergraduates at eight u.s. colleges and universities in 2019 for the algorithm study, one student at a liberal arts college described worries we heard from others about the broader social impact of these systems: “i’m more concerned about the large-scale trend of predicting what we want, but then also predicting what we want in ways that push a lot of people towards the same cultural and political endpoint.”16 this student’s concern relates to the effects of algorithmic personalization and highlights student awareness of deliberate efforts to affect and, in many cases, infect the system.17 subverting the flow of information for fun and profit has become all too common practice for trolls, governments, corporations, and other interest groups.18 the tactics we’ve taught students for evaluating items one at a time provide slim defenses against the networked efforts of organizations that flood feeds, timelines, and search results. while sift at least considers information as part of an ecosystem, we still need to help students go beyond evaluating individual information objects and understand the systems that intervene during the search processes, sending results with the agency to nudge, if not shove, users in certain directions.  that is why it is time to consider a new approach to the teaching of source evaluation in order to keep up with the volatile information ecosystem. allowing for information to have agency, i.e. acknowledging information as active, targeted, and capable of influencing action, fundamentally alters the position of the student in the act of evaluation and demands a different approach from instruction librarians. we call this approach proactive evaluation. 4. proactive evaluation what happens if we shift our paradigm from assuming that students are agents in the information-student interaction to assuming that the information source is the agent? this change in perspective will dramatically reframe our instruction in important ways. this perspective may initially seem to disempower the information literacy student and instructor, but given widespread disinformation in this post-truth era, this reversal might keep us, as instructors, grounded in our understanding of information literacy. once we shift the understanding of who is acting upon whom, we can shift our approaches and techniques to reflect this perspective. this change in thinking allows us to move from reactive evaluation, that is, “here is what i found, what do i think of it?” to proactive evaluation, “because i understand where this information came from and why i’m seeing it, i can trust it for this kind of information, and for this purpose.” what does a proactive approach look like? table 1 presents comparisons between reactive and proactive approaches to information literacy as a starting point for thinking about this shift in thinking. this typology acknowledges that college and university students come into our classrooms with a deep and wide knowledge of the information landscapes in which they exist.   a model for transitioning from reactive to proactive evaluation reactive proactive understanding of information individual objects you find → networked objects that find you understanding of evaluation intrinsic (to the object) → contextual (within the network) user is the agent information is the agent→ both the user and the information have agency in a dynamic relationship how/what we teach closed yes/no questions with defined answers → open questions binaries (good/bad, scholarly/popular) → contextual continua (useful for topic x in circumstance y if complemented by z) student as perpetual novice (evaluates from scratch every time) → student as developing expert with existing knowledge, who brings expertise about information, subject, sources, processes evaluate individual objects with novice tools and surface heuristics → evaluate based on network context and connections, and build networks of trusted knowledge/sources craap sift→ into the unknown as this typology suggests, our thinking rejects the “banking model of education” where students are empty vessels that educators must fill.19 to illustrate this point, pil’s 2020 algorithm study has confirmed what we have long suspected: many students are already using evasive strategies to circumvent algorithmic tracking and bias. their tactics, learned from friends and family, not their instructors, range from creating throwaway email accounts to using vpns and ad-blocking apps to guard their personal data from algorithms.20 students know that information is constantly trying to find them, identify them, label them, and sway them. and they may know this better than the faculty that teach them.21 applying this to information literacy instruction means acknowledging that students approach information skeptically, and at least some students arrive in the classroom with defensive practices for safeguarding their privacy and mitigating invasive, biased information as they navigate the web and search for information. to build on this premise, we should be asking students to apply their defensive strategies to classroom-based tasks. “if this information showed up in your news stream, what tactics would you use to decide if you wanted to pass it along?” “what do you look for to know if this is valid or useful information?” “instead of asking yes/no questions, e.g., ‘is it written by an expert?’” “is it current?” in particular, we should shift our assessment questions to an open-ended inquiry with students.  an example of how this could work would be asking the class what they do when they encounter a new piece of information in their own information landscape, such as a news story. how would students go about deciding if they would reshare it?  what are their motivations for sharing a news story? in pil’s news study, for instance, more than half of the almost 6,000 students surveyed (52%) said their reason for sharing news on social media was to let friends and followers know about something they should be aware of, while more than two fifths (44%) said sharing news gives them a voice about a larger political or social cause.22 does the same drive hold true for students in this classroom example?  for librarians using a proactive approach like this one, they could have a classroom discussion to see if their students also see themselves as stewards of what is important to know, while having a voice about larger causes in the world. a proactive approach also allows students to bring their prior networked knowledge into the discussion, rather than looking at a single point of information in isolation when directed by an instruction librarian. asking students to make their tacit processes more explicit will also help them see the information networks they have already built more clearly. they may be using other factors in their decision-making, like who recommended a source or the context in which the information will be used. these evaluation points are also used by researchers when assessing the credibility of information.23 providing opportunities for students to reflect on and articulate their interactions with information in the subject areas where they feel confident may allow them to transfer skills more easily to new, less familiar, academic domains. students sharing these kinds of spontaneous reflections can leverage the social aspect of information skills. pil studies have shown repeatedly that students lean on each other when they evaluate content for academic, employment, and everyday purposes; when necessary they also look to experts, including their instructors, to suggest or validate resources. evaluation is fundamentally a social practice, but the existing heuristics don’t approach it this way. reliance on other people as part of trusted information networks is rarely even acknowledged, let alone explicitly taught in formal instruction, as we tend to focus on the stereotype of the solitary scholar. gaining understanding of their own information networks, students can learn to see the operations of other networks, within disciplines, news, and other commercial media. if they are aware of the interconnectedness of information, they can use those connections to evaluate content and develop their mental rolodexes of trusted sources.24 understanding which sources are trustworthy for which kinds of information in which contexts is foundational knowledge for both academic work and civic engagement. building on sift strategies, it’s possible for students to accumulate knowledge about sources by validating them with tools like wikipedia. comparing and corroborating may illuminate the impact of algorithms and other systems that make up the information infrastructure.25 developing this kind of map of their network of trusted sources can help them search and verify more strategically within that network, whether they’re in school or not. as they come to understand themselves as part of the information infrastructure, students may be able to reclaim some agency from the platforms that constrain and control the information they see. while they may not ever be able to fully escape mass personalization, looking more closely at its effects may increase awareness of when and how search results and news feeds are being manipulated. students need to understand why they see the information that streams at them, the news that comes into their social media feeds, the results that show up at the top of a search, and what they can do to balance out the agency equation and regain some control. admittedly, this form of instruction is clearly more difficult to implement than turnkey checklists and frameworks. it is much harder to fit into the precious time of a one-shot. it requires trust in the students, trust in their prior knowledge, and trust in their sense-making skills. this change in perspective about how we teach evaluation is not a magic bullet for fixing our flawed instruction practices. but we see proactive evaluation as an important step for moving our profession forward in teaching students how to navigate an ever-changing information landscape. this proactive model can be used in conjunction with, or independent of, sift to create a more complex information literacy. reactive evaluation considers found information objects in isolation, based on intrinsic qualities, regardless of the user or intended use. in a proactive approach, the user considers the source while evaluating information contextually, through its relationships to other sources and to the user. over time, a user can construct their own matrix of trusted sources. it’s similar to getting to know a new city; a newcomer’s mental map gradually develops overlays of shortcuts, the safe and not-so-safe zones, and the likely places to find what they need in a given situation. eventually, they learn where to go for what, a critical thinking skill they can take with them through the rest of their education and everyday lives and apply with confidence long after graduation. 5. into the unknown reactive approaches to evaluation are not sufficient to equip students to navigate the current and evolving information landscape. what we have proposed in this paper is an alternative, what we call a proactive approach, to information evaluation that moves away from finite and simple source evaluation questions to open-ended and networked questions. while a proactive approach may feel unfamiliar and overwhelming at first, it moves away from the known to the unknown to create a more information-literate generation of students and lifelong learners.   but what if this approach is actually not as unfamiliar as it may seem? the current acrl framework paints a picture of the “information-literate student” that speaks to a pedagogy that cultivates a complex and nuanced understanding of the information creation process and landscape. for example, in the “scholarship as conversation” frame, these dispositions include “recognize that scholarly conversations take place in various venues,” and “value user-generated content and evaluate contributions made by others.”26  both dispositions require a nuanced understanding of the socialness of scholarship and imply evaluation within a social context. and while heuristics that rely on finite and binary responses are easy to teach, they create more problems than they solve. focusing on the network processes that deliver the information in front of us, instead of focusing on these finite questions, allows for a different kind of knowing.  the next question for instructors to tackle is what this proactive approach looks like in the classroom. in our field, discussions of “guide on the side” and “sage on the stage” are popular, but what we are actually advocating in this article isn’t a guide or a sage, as both assume a power structure and expertise that is incomplete and outdated. in the classroom, we advocate a shift from guiding or lecturing to conversation. we do not have a set of desired answers that we are hoping to coax out of the students: which of these sources is valid? who authored this source, and are they an expert? rather, a proactive approach encourages students to engage and interact with their ideas and previous experiences around information agency, the socialness of the information, and how they evaluate non-academic sources. this will allow students to bring their deep expertise into the classroom. we have alluded to open-ended questions as part of the proactive approach, but this is more accurately described as an open dialogue. this type of instruction is difficult in the one-shot structure, as it relies on trust. an unsuccessful session looks like your worst instruction experience, with the students staring blankly at you and not engaging, leaving lots of empty space and the strong desire to revert to lecturing on database structures. a successful session will feel like an intellectual conversation where you as the “teacher” learn as much as you impart, and the conversation with students is free-flowing and engaging.  returning to the earlier example of asking how a student would chose whether or not to reshare a news story, this type of dialogue could include conversations about what they already know about the news source, what they know about the person or account that initially shared it, how they might go about reading laterally, what their instincts say, how this does or does not fit with their prior knowledge on the subject, and their related reactions. during the course of the discussion, it will lead to what areas of information literacy and assessment need more dialogue and what areas the students are already skilled and comfortable in.  the kind of information literacy instruction that assumes agency rests solely with the user, who finds and then evaluates individual information objects, is no longer valid now that information seeks out the user through networked connections. this reversal of the power dynamic underlies many of the gaps between how evaluation is taught in academic settings and how it occurs in everyday life. the approach we advocate balances out these extremes and helps students recognize and regain some of their agency. by understanding how information infrastructures work and their roles within them, students can adapt the tactics that many of them are already using to become more conscious actors. 6. looking ahead  in this article, we have discussed an alternative to current evaluation approaches that is closely tied to the issue of trust: trusting our students to bring their own experiences and expertise to the information literacy classroom. but our work doesn’t end there. our approach also requires us to trust ourselves as instructors. we will need to trust that we do in fact understand the continuously changing information landscape well enough to engage with open-ended, complex questions, rather than a prescribed step-by-step model. we must continue to inform ourselves and reevaluate information systems — the architectures, infrastructures, and fundamental belief systems — so we can determine what is trustworthy. we have to let go of simple solutions to teach about researching complex, messy problems. for college students in america today, knowing how to evaluate news and information is not only essential for academic success but urgently needed for making sound choices during tumultuous times. we must embrace that instruction, and information evaluation, are going to be ugly, hard, and confusing for us to tackle but worth it in the end to remain relevant and useful to the students we teach.  acknowledgements we are grateful to barbara fister, contributing editor of the “pil provocation series” at project information literacy (pil) for making incisive suggestions for improving this paper, and steven braun, senior researcher in information design at pil, for designing table 1. the article has greatly benefited from the reviewers assigned by in the library with the lead pipe: ian beilin, ikumi crocoll, and jessica kiebler. references  “framework for information literacy for higher education.” 2016. association of college and research libraries. january 16. https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. “information literacy competency standards for higher education.” 2000. association of college and research libraries. january 18. http://www.acrl.org/ ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/standards.pdf. bengani, priyanjana. “as election looms, a network of mysterious ‘pink slime’ local news outlets nearly triples in size.” columbia journalism review, august 4, 2020. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/as-election-looms-a-network-of-mysterious-pink-slime-local-news-outlets-nearly-triples-in-size.php. blakeslee, sarah. “the craap test.” loex quarterly 31, no. 3 (2004). https://commons.emich.edu/loexquarterly/vol31/iss3/4. breakstone, joel, mark smith, priscilla connors, teresa ortega, darby kerr, and sam wineburg. “lateral reading: college students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course.” the harvard kennedy school misinformation review 2, no. 1 (2021): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-56. brodsky, jessica e., patricia j. brooks, donna scimeca, ralitsa todorova, peter galati, michael batson, robert grosso, michael matthews, victor miller, and michael caulfield. “improving college students’ fact-checking strategies through lateral reading instruction in a general education civics course.” cognitive research: principles and implications 6 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00291-4. caulfield, mike. “a short history of craap.” blog. hapgood (blog), september 14, 2018. https://hapgood.us/2018/09/14/a-short-history-of-craap/. ———. truth is in the network. email, may 31, 2019. https://projectinfolit.org/smart-talk-interviews/truth-is-in-the-network/. ———. web literacy for student fact-checkers, 2017. https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/. dubé, jacob. “no escape: the neverending online threats to female journalists.” ryerson review of journalism, no. spring 2018 (may 28, 2018). https://rrj.ca/no-escape-the-neverending-online-threats-to-female-journalists/. fister, barbara. “the information literacy standards/framework debate.” inside higher ed, library babel fish, january 22, 2015. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/information-literacy-standardsframework-debate. foster, nancy fried. “the librarian-student-faculty triangle: conflicting research strategies?” library assessment conference, 2010. https://urresearch.rochester.edu/researcherfiledownload.action?researcherfileid=71. freire, paulo. “the banking model of education.” in critical issues in education: an anthology of readings, 105–17. sage, 1970. haider, jutta, and olof sundin. “information literacy challenges in digital culture: conflicting engagements of trust and doubt.” information, communication and society, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1851389. head, alison j., barbara fister, and margy macmillan. “information literacy in the age of algorithms.” project information literacy research institute, january 15, 2020. https://projectinfolit.org/publications/algorithm-study. head, alison j., john wihbey, p. takis metaxas, margy macmillan, and dan cohen. “how students engage with news: five takeaways for educators, journalists, and librarians.” project information literacy research institute, october 16, 2018. https://projectinfolit.org/pubs/news-study/pil_news-study_2018-10-16.pdf. maass, dave, aaron mackey, and camille fischer. “the follies 2018.” electronic frontier foundation, march 11, 2018. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/foilies-2018. meola, marc. “chucking the checklist: a contextual approach to teaching undergraduates web-site evaluation.” libraries and the academy 4, no. 3 (2004): 331–44. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2004.0055. reich, justin. tinkering toward networked learning: what tech can and can’t do for education. december 2020. https://projectinfolit.org/smart-talk-interviews/tinkering-toward-networked-learning-what-tech-can-and-cant-do-for-education/. seeber, kevin. “wiretaps and craap.” blog. kevin seeber (blog), march 18, 2017. http://kevinseeber.com/blog/wiretaps-and-craap/. the craap test (currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, purpose) is a reliability heuristic designed by sarah blakeslee and her librarian colleagues at chico state university. see: sarah blakeslee, “the craap test,” loex quarterly 31 no. 3 (2004): https://commons.emich.edu/loexquarterly/vol31/iss3/4 [↩] kevin seeber, “wiretaps and craap,” kevin seeber [blog], (march 18, 2017): http://kevinseeber.com/blog/wiretaps-and-craap/ [↩] mike caulfield, “the truth is in the network” [email interview by barbara fister], project information literacy, smart talk interview, no. 31, (december 1, 2020)https://projectinfolit.org/smart-talk-interviews/truth-is-in-the-network/ [↩] barbara fister, “the information literacy standards/framework debate,” library babel fish column, inside higher education, (january 22, 2015): https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/information-literacy-standardsframework-debate [↩] sarah blakeslee, “the craap test,” op. cit. https://commons.emich.edu/loexquarterly/vol31/iss3/4 [↩] association of college and research libraries, information literacy competency standards for higher education, (2000), https://alair.ala.org/handle/11213/7668  note: these standards were rescinded in 2016. [↩] mike caulfield, “a short history of craap,” hapgood, (june 14, 2018): https://hapgood.us/2018/09/14/a-short-history-of-craap/ [↩] kevin seeber (march 18, 2017), “wiretaps and craap,” op. cit. [↩] mike caulfield, “the truth is in the network,” op. cit. caulfield developed sift from earlier version of this heuristic, “four moves and a habit,” described in his 2017 oer book web literacy for student fact-checkers, (december 1, 2020) https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com [↩] jessica e. brodsky, patricia j. brooks, donna scimeca, ralitsa todorova, peter galati, michael batson, robert grosso, michael matthews, victor miller, and michael caulfield , “improving college students’ fact-checking strategies through lateral reading instruction in a general education civics course,” cognitive research: principles and implications, 6(1) (2021), 1-18, https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00291-4; joel breakstone, mark smith, priscilla connors, teresa ortega, darby kerr, and sam wineburg, “lateral reading: college students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course,” the harvard kennedy school misinformation review, 2(1), (2021) 1-17, https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-56 [↩] justin reich, “tinkering toward networked learning: what tech can and can’t do for education” [email interview by barbara fister], project information literacy, smart talk interview, no. 33, (december 2020): https://projectinfolit.org/smart-talk-interviews/tinkering-toward-networked-learning-what-tech-can-and-cant-do-for-education/ [↩] alison j. head, john wihbey, p. takis metaxas, margy macmillan, and dan cohen, how students engage with news: five takeaways for educators, journalists, and librarians, project information literacy research institute, (october 16, 2018), pp. 24-28, https://projectinfolit.org/pubs/news-study/pil_news-study_2018-10-16.pdf  [↩] nancy fried foster , “the librarian‐student‐faculty triangle: conflicting research strategies?.” 2010 library assessment conference,(2010): https://urresearch.rochester.edu/researcherfiledownload.action?researcherfileid=71 [↩] alison j. head, barbara fister, and margy macmillan, information literacy in the age of algorithms, project information literacy research institute, (january 15, 2020):https://projectinfolit.org/publications/algorithm-study [↩] jutta haider and olof sundin (2020), “information literacy challenges in digital culture: conflicting engagements of trust and doubt,” information, communication and society, ahead-of-print, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2020.1851389 [↩] alison j. head, barbara fister, and margy macmillan (january 15, 2020), op. cit. [↩] alison j. head, barbara fister, and margy macmillan, (january 15, 2020), op. cit., 5-8. [↩] see for example, dave mass, aaron mackey, and camille fischer, “the foilies, 2018,” electronic frontier foundation,(march 11, 2018): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/foilies-2018; jacob dubé, “no escape: the neverending online threats to female journalists,” ryerson review of journalism, (may 28, 2018): https://rrj.ca/no-escape-the-neverending-online-threats-to-female-journalists/; priyanjana bengani, “as election looms, a network of mysterious ‘pink slime’ local news outlets nearly triples in size,” columbia journalism review,(august 4, 2020): https://www.cjr.org/analysis/as-election-looms-a-network-of-mysterious-pink-slime-local-news-outlets-nearly-triples-in-size.php  [↩] paulo freire, “the banking model of education,” in provenzo, eugene f. (ed.). critical issues in education: an anthology of readings, sage, (1970), 105-117. [↩] alison j. head, barbara fister, and margy macmillan (january 15, 2020), op.cit., 16-19. [↩] alison j. head, barbara fister, and margy macmillan (january 15, 2020), op.cit., 22-25. [↩] alison j. head, john wihbey, p. takis metaxas, margy macmillan, and dan cohen (october 16, 2018), op.cit., 20 [↩] nancy fried foster (2010), op. cit. [↩] barbara fister, “lizard people in the libraries,” pil provocation series, no. 1, project information literacy research institute,(february 3, 2021):  https://projectinfolit.org/pubs/provocation-series/essays/lizard-people-in-the-library.html  [↩] marc meola , “chucking the checklist: a contextual approach to teaching undergraduates web-site evaluation,” portal: libraries and the academy 4, no.3 (2004): 331-344, https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2004.0055, p.338 [↩] association of college and research libraries , framework for information literacy for higher education (2016) http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework [↩] information behavior, information evaluation, information literacy, instruction service ceiling: the high cost of professional development for academic librarians reflections on active collecting during difficult times 6 responses dora sales 2021–07–21 at 3:49 pm reply highly inspiring, many thanks! stacy 2021–07–21 at 7:23 pm reply this is such a vital conversation, and there’s a lot i like about this model that captures work that’s already happening and some next places to go. i do wish the authors had cited any of dr. nicole cooke’s writings on misinformation here. it feels like a foundational chunk is missing of the discourse this model is trying to engage with and build on. elizabeth 2021–07–27 at 1:53 am reply thanks for writing this really interesting piece. i love the connection with a students ‘sense-making skills” as this forms part of fosil (framework of skills for inquiry learning)https://fosil.org.uk/ which i am an advocate of. i recently presented at cilip slg scotland on this topic. librarians as teachers of sense-making skills and your article really resonates with me. here is a link to my talk https://fosil.org.uk/forums/topic/slg-scotland-2021-librarians-as-teachers-of-sense-making-skills/ rowena 2021–08–02 at 8:33 pm reply hi, i think the metaphor you are after is erica mcwilliams “meddler in the middle” referring to a teacher actively engaged in genuine enquiry with students, not the expert, not providing the answers, rather providing a container for the conversation (my interpretation). that aside, i am a health librarian who co-moderates a community facebook group currently infested with antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists. i am planning an online information evaluation session for the group as some days the mods can’t block and mute fast enough. my goal would be to have more people in the group seeing the misinformation for what it is and understanding how easy it is to get trapped in an information bubble. your idea of information having agency will be a powerful and relatable theme for this session. thanks. marybeth gill 2021–08–10 at 1:00 pm reply i wonder how such information literacy education practices in a higher-ed setting can be applied to k-12 education. vertical collaboration would allow us to provide better instruction, especially in collaboration with k-12 curriculum designers, teachers, and media center/school librarians. i appreciate the urgency expressed here with regard to the importance of helping students develop understanding and skill sets to navigate information they encounter outside of academia as well as within it. sam wineburg 2021–09–29 at 2:58 pm reply i find the distinction btw “reactive” and “proactive evaluation” very helpful, and it reflects what we are seeing in our data with students who are (and aren’t) successful. thank you leave a reply cancel reply save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a view from the neutral zone – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 1 sep markus wust /0 comments a view from the neutral zone in the library with the lead pipe is pleased to welcome another guest author, markus wust! markus is the digital collections and preservation librarian at north carolina state university libraries and works on exciting projects such as wolfwalk (mobile app for exploring nc state using special collections images and geolocation data) and nc architects (database covering 300 years of north carolina architects and builders). photo by flickr user the dangler  (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) by markus wust as a librarian working in a large academic library who once considered a career as an academic researcher and whose friends are mostly academics, i always find dinner conversations between my wife and my father-in-law particularly interesting, even—or rather, especially—when the topic is work. over the course of several years of graduate school, i became familiar with the academic environment in several disciplines and still have a particular fondness for the humanities.   now, however, i consider myself more of a neutral observer of academia and try to use these observations to figure out how best to help the researchers and teachers that we are working with. the conversations provide ample inspiration for my work: both my wife and her father are academics, although they seem in many ways to be positioned at opposite ends of a spectrum. she is working in the united states an assistant professor, teaching and researching in french applied linguistics and teacher education, and currently working towards tenure. her father is an established researcher in organic chemistry who recently retired as a full professor at a canadian university. so when they discuss their professional activities, i am sometimes reminded of communications between people from different countries who are speaking a common language: they can communicate with each other, but there are enough semantic and cultural differences to occasionally cause misunderstandings or communication breakdowns. in their case, they are familiar with academic vocabulary but sometimes a term might have a different meaning or carry certain nuances depending on whether he uses it in the canadian context or she talks about it from an american perspective. he has taken the last major step in an academic’s career—retirement—whereas she still has to take one of the first—getting tenure. finally, there is the main problem: the divide between him, the scientist, and her, the social scientist/humanist. i am not talking about problems caused by the subject matter each of them is working on; since neither one of them can discuss variations in protein structures with the same ease as differences between theories of second language acquisition, a conversation of that sort between them is not possible. however, even the differences in research and publishing traditions between their respective disciplines are large enough to cause a lack of understanding of each other’s situation, such as during discussions about scholarly productivity. for example, while my father-in-law can rely on the collaboration within his research team and on the quick review and publishing cycle of his discipline’s research outlets to ensure a high research output, my wife is still publishing primarily as a single author and has to contend with long waiting times during the peer review process. so, while he can publish many more papers in any given period, this does not mean that she is any less productive in her research; it just takes much longer to gather and analyze the necessary data before disseminating her findings. such divergent viewpoints and evaluations of scholarly productivity and rigor can arise even among practitioners of disciplines that are drawing on similar research methodologies and publishing practices. a friend, who is a sociolinguist, once told us about a conversation she had with her father, a prominent political scientist. when she mentioned that, for her current study, she was collecting interview data from twenty participants, he offered little more than a weak smile and pointed out that in his field, he would routinely draw on data from over 50,000 respondents, not taking into account the qualitative differences between his short telephone surveys and the in-depth interviews necessary in her field of work. let us return to the previously mentioned dinner conversations. the occasional professional communication problems between my wife and her father bring to mind a phrase coined by british chemist and writer c.p. snow. in his 1959 rede lecture at cambridge university titled “the two cultures and the scientific revolution,” snow described a growing chasm between the humanities and the sciences, which would make it increasingly difficult for the two groups to work together to address the social, political, and cultural problems of the time: literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. they have a curious distorted image of each other. their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground. […] the non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. on the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential movement. and so on. anyone with a mild talent for invective could produce plenty of this kind of subterranean back-chat. on each side there is some of it which is not entirely baseless. it is all destructive. much of it rests on misinterpretations which are dangerous. (snow, 4-5) according to stefan collini’s introduction to the 1993 edition of the two cultures, snow was far from being the first to express concern about the split between the two streams of scholarly inquiry. he describes an 1880 lecture by t.h. huxley at mason college in birmingham, england, during which huxley called into doubt the value of a traditional classical education and promoted a greater focus on the sciences in the british educational system: science, [huxley] affirmed, formed part of culture and offered a rigorous mental training, as well as making an indispensable contribution to national well-being. in tones that were to become familiar in the subsequent century, he denounced the resistance to the claims of scientific education by the defenders of the traditional classical curriculum as, therefore, both unjustified and short-sighted. (xiv) matthew arnold—poet, cultural critic and professor of poetry at oxford university—responded to huxley during his 1882 rede lecture with a defense of a humanities-based education: above all, [arnold] insisted that a training in the natural sciences might produce a practically valuable specialist, but it could not turn out an ‘educated’ man: for this, literature, especially the literatures of antiquity, remained indispensable. (xv) while the exchange between huxley and arnold was described as amicable, snow would face fierce criticism, the most ferocious of which came from literary critic f. r. leavis during a lecture in 1962. mooney describes the public impression of leavis’—partially personal—attacks on snow as follows: as one ringside observer put it, leavis “threw sir charles snow over his shoulder several times and then jumped on him…the whole thing left one with a sense of comradely sympathy for sir charles, as it might be for a man who had been involved in a serious motor accident.” the eminent critic lionel trilling added that while he had problems with snow’s argument, there could be “no two opinions” about leavis’s breach of decorum: “it is a bad tone, an impermissible tone.” by reacting in this manner, leavis might have actually given further support to snow’s argument, at least as far as the lack of mutual understanding between scientists and humanists was concerned. as collini explains, snow’s point of view was in part determined by the particular circumstances of the academic and educational environment of great britain in the post-world war ii period. besides associating a humanistic education with a higher social status, the british educational system of that time was designed with an emphasis on specialization by pushing “academically gifted children to start concentrating wholly upon science subjects or humanities subjects from as early as fourteen years old, to study only three of these subjects between sixteen and eighteen, and then to concentrate exclusively upon one while at university” (xvi). of course, specialization is a necessary factor in the development of every discipline. given the growth of knowledge, no single individual can hope to keep up-to-date with every discussion or discovery in his or her broader area of study; the renaissance generalists who could make groundbreaking contributions in a multitude of fields seem to be a thing of the past. this need for specialization also means that the aforementioned communication problems do not exist only between the sciences and humanities, but can also affect sub-disciplines within each of these broader categories: but all these fields or sub-fields have increasingly developed their own concerns, methods, and vocabularies to the point where no one division is obviously more significant than all others. the theoretical economist and the critic of french poetry are as mutually incomprehensible in their professional work as ever ‘scientists’ and ‘humanists’ were supposed to be. (collini, lv) now, what can be done to help reduce these communication barriers between the various fields? one important step for members of the academic and research community would be to view their work not only as contributions to their respective disciplines, but as an integral part of the larger academic enterprise: rather, we need to encourage the growth of the intellectual equivalent of bilingualism, a capacity not only to exercise the language of our respective specialisms, but also to attend to, learn from, and eventually contribute to, wider cultural conversations. obviously, it may help if one’s education, has not been too specialized too early, and snow’s warning remains pertinent here. but more important still will be the nurturing within the ethos of the various academic specialisms not only of some understanding of how their activities fit into a larger cultural whole, but also of a recognition that attending to these larger questions is not some kind of off-duty voluntary work, but is an integral and properly rewarded part of professional achievement in the given field. (collini, lvii-lviii) one interesting example of what can happen when researchers from different parts of the academic spectrum decide to collaborate and find innovative approaches to furthering each other’s disciplines is study by timothy stinson, an english professor at my institution, north carolina state university, and his brother michael, a biologist at southside virginia community college. in order to be able to more precisely date early medieval manuscripts, they decided to extract dna from the parchment of manuscripts of known dates and add the genetic information to a reference database. this would then allow future researchers to not only date texts more easily, but even determine which herd served as the source for a specific piece of parchment. so why am i writing about this on a blog dedicated to libraries and librarians? i think that there are two areas in which this topic affects us as librarians and the way we interact with our patrons. the bilingualism that collini refers to in his quote requires an openness and curiosity towards other academic and professional traditions. as hilary davis discussed in a post on in the library with a lead pipe (“déformation professionnelle,” march 17, 2010), this is something that we as librarians should keep in mind. she points out the value of leaving your professional comfort zone—e.g., by attending professional events outside of your field of specialization—in order to get a different view on problems you are dealing with or finding out about problems of which you have not been aware. even more importantly, libraries have the potential to improve both collaboration and communication between the various academic disciplines and help overcome at least some of the chasm that snow and others have described. librarians are well positioned to serve as people connectors on campus. through their work as collection managers or library instructors, many librarians have, over the years, formed close relationships with faculty members in many different departments and colleges and are usually more or less familiar with each individual’s work. they are therefore in a better position than many faculty members to see similarities in research and teaching interests across departmental boundaries and could therefore connect possible future collaborators and, in the process, point out the benefits of involving the library in their projects. this broader involvement in the intellectual campus life is one of many things i enjoy about working in a large academic library: in general, we are not dedicated to any single part of the institution, but the library exists to serve the entire campus community: faculty, students and staff representing every unit of the university. although we have several branch libraries that specialize for more narrowly-defined user populations, the library as a whole is seen as a place that provides help and resources to every person on campus. in a sense, the library seems like a neutral zone where everybody can come together and get equal access to work and collaboration spaces, collections, and recreational services. it is in our best interest to expand on this aspect of our role within the campus community, even (perhaps especially) in the face of the frozen or reduced budgets many of us are facing. by establishing ourselves not just as a resource and service provider, but a collaborator in the production and dissemination of research, we can justify our existence in an age where an abundance of seemingly free external electronic resources might cause some to question the continued financial investment in our collections and services. libraries (of course again depending on the availability of funds) could establish collaborative workspaces that are not governed by specific departments or colleges and thus make it easier for faculty with diverse disciplinary affiliations to work together on an equal footing. instead of assuming that “if you build it, they will come,” we should, from early on, engage our target audience in the planning of these spaces in order to make them as relevant and, at the same time, as flexible as possible. the facilities and infrastructure should be combined with qualified staff to provide the project management and technical development support necessary to support the collaborative projects, similar to what is already being done at the university of virginia library’s scholars’ lab, which was initially established to promote innovative work in the humanities and social sciences. librarians seem to be well suited for this task. when i was a student in the humanities computing program at the university of alberta, a professor mentioned that he envisioned the program’s graduates as mediators, or translators, in digital humanities projects between academic researchers—the subject specialists—and the technical support who would be responsible for the implementation of a project’s technical aspects. given the diverse professional and academic experience as well as technical and management skills many librarians have accumulated even before entering the library world, it seems that they would be well-suited to play a similar role when it comes to connecting faculty from different parts of the academic community and encouraging them to exchange ideas. besides being connectors and mediators, they could also provide vital support during the final stage of a collaborative research project, i.e., its dissemination. the more diverse the academic disciplines are that are represented in any given project, chances are that the participants’ ideas with regards to the most appropriate publishing strategies are equally as disparate. again, librarians might be able to provide valuable support and advice on the best course of action. although it is illusionary to claim that we can really overcome the increasing compartmentalization of academic disciplines and the resulting communication barriers between many fields, i think that as librarians, we do not just have the opportunity, but also the obligation to encourage and enable more collaboration between different academic disciplines and cultures, such as the sciences and humanities. not only will it make for better understanding between a father and a daughter, but it will also provide our libraries with a stronger foundation for the future and our society with a better understanding of itself. i would like to thank hilary davis (inthelibrarywiththe leadpipe) and babi hammond (ncsu libraries) for their valuable feedback on the first draft and my wife valerie for her help in editing this article. references: “about us: scholar’s lab.” http://www.scholarslab.org/about/. accessed august 29, 2010. davis, hilary. “déformation professionnelle.” https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/deformation-professionnelle/. accessed august 14, 2010. mooney, chris. “the science lover and the snob.” http://www.scienceprogress.org/2009/04/the-science-lover-and-the-snob/. accessed august 12, 2010. snow, c.p. the two cultures. cambridge up, 1993. thompson, andrea. “dna may reveal origins of medieval manuscripts” http://www.livescience.com/history/090210-dna-manuscripts.html.  accessed august 29, 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/matthew_arnold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/thomas_huxley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/c_p_snow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/f._r._leavis collaboration, humanities, librarianship, libraries, sciences, two cultures our blog is your blog editorial: rising through the ranks: on upward mobility in librarianship this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct déformation professionnelle – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 17 mar hilary davis /17 comments déformation professionnelle by hilary davis déformation professionnelle is a french phrase, meaning a tendency to look at things from the point of view of one’s own profession and forget a broader perspective. it is a pun on the expression “formation professionnelle,” meaning “professional training.” the implication is that all (or most) professional training results to some extent in a distortion of the way the professional views the world. – wikipedia sometimes it’s hard to step outside of your own mental model to achieve transformative thinking. writers get “writer’s block,” software programmers experience “anti-pattern,” and we all find ourselves thinking “i’m in a rut” every now and then. in fact, it’s easy to get stuck in seeing the world only through the eyes of your profession: “i suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail,” (maslow, 1966). librarians are certainly not immune to this way of thinking – even with all of the resources for inspiration at our fingertips, we fall prey to routine, to thinking about our problems from the perspective of a librarian. stepping out of the mental models of our profession to achieve transformation and to come up with new ways to solve problems is difficult. how do we overcome these trapped ways of thinking? a great way to revitalize is to try new things such as attending conferences outside of your own discipline or comfort zone. i was a virtual attendee of a conference that is completely outside of my comfort zone: the 8th annual blender conference held in amsterdam (oct 23-25, 2009). blender itself is a collection of open source software tools for 3d application development. how did i hear about this conference? my neighbor happens to be the proud father of one of the presenters who was attending his first professional conference, delivering his first conference presentation and making his first trip overseas. he did a pretty good job (click on the presentation by wray bowling about digital puppetry). the sessions were streamed live and have also been posted online for asynchronous viewing. at the blender conference, i saw real-world applications of augmented reality created using blender along with other software tools. i’m not a programmer or anything close, but what i learned from the conference is that augmented reality is being employed by people who aren’t necessarily high-level programmers and that the techniques are being used to develop tools for mobile phones. this technology is already being employed in marketing tv shows, selling real estate, and beyond. in libraries, we’re struggling to find ways to expose and deliver our collections and services to users wherever they may find themselves and within whatever technologies they may be using. there are a few examples of augmented reality being developed for library book-finding use cases, but they’re pretty crude. the concept is clear though – these are examples of applications that could be translated to libraries in use cases such as making it easier to find content on the shelf, find the expert librarian who can help you with your literature review, find the bathroom locations on each floor of in the library, the current open study rooms, etc. through attending the blender conference via streaming video, i also learned that this open source software is being used in modeling road safety conditions, guiding robots during medical procedures, improving fire safety in buildings, engaging chemical engineering students with 3d animation, and in creating digital puppets that act in real-time using common video game controllers. could libraries potentially benefit from being able to model moving whole collections, staff and service points between buildings, studying use patterns of physical spaces layered on use of virtual space? while i am not a programmer and i don’t have the skills to apply ideas from this particular non-librarian conference to my local setting, i see possibilities that could be tapped to solve some of our problems and generate innovation in our work. attending conferences outside of library-land also shows us how other disciplinary cultures work – how they run their professional gatherings, how they engage in training, how they organize networking events. for example, at the blender conference, they play cool music between sessions (when is the last time you heard cool music between sessions at ala or sla?). they developed great camera angles for simultaneously displaying the speaker, their slides, the audience, and any gadgets they brought with them to demo. how often have you been frustrated by the lack of visuals when reviewing videos from conference presentations either in real-time or after the fact? perhaps getting ideas from other conference cultures can give us some ideas about how to help minimize déformation professionnelle within our own conference experiences. attending non-library conferences could also give us some insight into how non-librarians conceive of the role of libraries, how they interact with information, how they approach research, what they think about copyright, etc. – all of the things that we care about in terms of connecting our users with what they need/want – straight from the source. another option for minimizing déformation professionnelle is to participate in unconferences. many unconferences were established to counter the routine of conventional conferences. remove the traditional sponsored sessions, eliminate registration fees, collect people interested in discussing shared interests, and you’re left with good ideas generated out of good conversation. “at traditional conferences, the most productive moments often occur in the corridor between meetings; at unconferences, attendees like to say, it’s all corridor” (craig, 2006). library-land has seen its fair share of unconferences as well. derik badman wrote about attending library camps – experiences that are in the spirit of stepping away from the traditional meat and potatoes library conferences. “the unconference offers an agility not found in a formal conference. attendees make the decisions of what the discussion topics will be, allowing for not only a greater sense of participation (how very 2.0) but also a greater chance of currency” (badman, 2008). library-centric unconferences might get you closer to getting away from the trap of déformation professionnelle because the lack of structure can open up opportunities for exploring issues or ideas that might have otherwise fallen through the cracks of pre-established session themes and schedules. a colleague recently described his experience attending a camp with a broader perspective than just the library scope. thatcamp is a digital humanities unconference attracting everyone from scholars to educational technologists to artists and granting agencies. he described a memorable experience from thatcamp that was based on a 3-minute lightening talk by a student who used 3-d software to simulate how light fell on an ancient roman mosaic over 2000 years ago. this idea alone could be translated to creating applications for students to interact with the unique special collections held by our libraries and museums. the next time you find yourself in a professional rut, whether self-imposed or brought on by your local library or the profession overall, consider attending a conference outside library-land. other ways to broaden your scope and breathe new life into your work could include stretching your professional reading regimen a little via listservs, blogs and published literature. i’m an on-again/off-again subscriber to a listserv about plant and animal taxonomy where they have been discussing issues related to open access publishing and intellectual property rights. through this listserv, i get an insider’s perspective on how these issues impact this particular group of researchers and scholars. a colleague of mine subscribes to a commercial publication called “cpu” which focuses on trends and intersections between computer science, computer engineering and cognitive science. he gets insights from the computer science field in terms of how they consider the impact of computers on e-books, and where their visionaries see the profession and the computing industry headed. much of these insights can give fodder for good ideas on how to shape the future of our profession as well. take time to invest in broadening your perspectives and open yourself up to possibilities of learning something that you didn’t already know. start by keeping up with the conferences, events and reports that the visionaries (e.g., clifford lynch, stephen abram, joan lippincott, andrew pace, taiga forum members, david lankes are some that come to my mind) stay up-to-date with and follow the trail. what’s the risk? you might learn something new and you might be able to inject a new idea or tool into your own library setting and, perhaps even in the profession. what ways have worked for you in keeping your professional mind open? please share your strategies below in the comments section. some conference examples to try: ted talks past blender conferences (2009 videos – scroll down to find the videos from october 2009) online news association emtech/emerging technologies conference – offers some complimentary videos from the 2009 conference free culture conference (already occurred, but look for free online streaming of sessions next year) paidcontent 2010 (already occurred, but look for free online streaming of sessions next year) thatcamp thanks to markus wust (ncsu libraries) and ellie collier (inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe) for their helpful edits and feedback of earlier drafts of this article. references craig, kathleen. 2006. “why ‘unconferences’ are fun.” business2.0 magazine. maslow, abraham. 1966. the psychology of science: a reconnaissance. harper and rowe, 168 pp. conferences, deformation professionnelle the importance of thinking about thinking making it their idea: the learning cycle in library instruction 17 responses stevenb 2010–03–17 at 8:31 pm this is similar to the advice i gave 10 years ago in my first article about “keeping up” that appeared in c&rl news. see http://bit.ly/b27vqv it is still good advice. many advocates of innovation and creativity point to the important to immerse oneself in totally unfamiliar situations and environments to gain completely different perspectives and free your mind from the old pattern of thinking. i’ve explored these ideas more recently in this from the bell tower column: http://bit.ly/75iog0 hilary davis 2010–03–31 at 8:19 am hi steven – thanks for pointing out your work on this topic! jean costello 2010–03–17 at 9:01 pm hi hilary – i heartily recommend the scholarly kitchen blog from the society for scholarly publishing. it’s a terrific multi-author blog, covers many issues of interest to libraries and provides valuable insights from leaders in an industry that is also experiencing significant disruption. i also maintain a twitter surveillance stream to info outside the library industry that your readers might find worthwhile.http://twitter.com/radicalpatron hilary davis 2010–03–18 at 8:52 pm jean – thanks for your feedback and for pointing to the scholarly kitchen. i love the idea of a “surveillance stream to info outside the library industry”! thanks for sharing your strategies. simone yree 2010–03–18 at 11:51 am hilary i want to thank you for such an interesting and refreshing take on how to move the profession forward. ideas are the life bread of a profession based on information. finding ways to spark innovative thinking and the intermingling of disciplines is what will keep libraries and librarians relevant. good luck to us all. hilary davis 2010–03–18 at 8:55 pm simone – thanks for sharing your comments! partnering with professions outside of librarianship is a logical way forward for much of our work. brett bonfield 2010–03–18 at 1:16 pm thanks for reminding me to keep practicing one of my most important mental exercises. lately, especially with what’s going on in with budgets proposals for new jersey libraries, i’ve caught myself thinking, “how can they think that about libraries? why would they think that’s a good idea?” instead, i should be asking myself, “why don’t i know they think that about libraries? why am i surprised they’d propose that idea?” stepping outside the boundaries of my professional experience is really hard, though when i don’t do it as well as i’d like, the reminders can be awfully harsh. on a more positive note, i want to share two of my own blender conference-like experiences. i followed pycon a bit online (it’s a conference about the python programing language) and learned about wireless networking at conferences. how nice would it be to go to a library conference and have wireless just work? and how cool would it have been if it were a professional library association that had published the piece about making networking work? i went to see edward tufte talk about information design (back when i designed websites for a living) and learned about making presentations. hilary davis 2010–03–18 at 8:57 pm brett – thanks for sharing these great examples! ellie 2010–03–18 at 6:04 pm it looks like you and kenley have been thinking along the same lines – http://networkedblogs.com/p29821508 hilary davis 2010–03–18 at 9:08 pm ellie – thanks for pointing to kenley’s post. lots of great ideas that seem so obviously useful – love the idea of photos to help match names with faces at conferences and the interactive conference scheduling tool where you can see who else is planning on attending a particular session, get notifications for changes in an event, send your schedule to google calendar, etc. sooooo much better compared to the current online conference planner that sla is running for the upcoming sla conference in new orleans in june. miranda 2010–03–25 at 11:48 am especially relevant post since some of my colleagues just got back from #sxsw. so jealous. however, it’s too bad this post wasn’t published a couple days earlier, as readers would have been able to snag the thatcamp deadline. (looks like i’ll have to postpone to a future year.) thanks though for pointing us in a new professional direction. hilary davis 2010–03–26 at 7:07 am hi miranda – thanks for your comments! i realize that some of the alternate conference opportunities may have missed deadlines for this year, however in some cases there are videos of sessions posted online (or there will be soon). if i come across other similar opportunities, i’ll add them to the comments for this post. likewise, if you or others come across upcoming opportunities that sound intriguing, feel free to post them here too. veronica 2010–03–25 at 5:26 pm nice post. librarians tend to be a pretty insular bunch easily caught up in library-land trends and issues. thanks for not only urging us to gain some perspective, but for giving us some practical suggestions and resources on how to do so. hana 2010–03–28 at 4:25 pm i keep my professional mind open by conversing with people who don’t work in libraries, by following people who don’t work in libraries on twitter, and trying to think outside the square more often. keeping an open mind to the possibilities is so important in any field of discipline, otherwise it’s like you’re talking to yourself in the dark… in a room full of mirrors… hilary davis 2010–03–31 at 8:26 am thanks for your comments, hana! you reminded me of another source that i use to keep up with things outside of library-land: boy genius report. it’s great for keeping up with the latest improvements, critiques and rumors of the mobile tech landscape (e.g., they reported on monday that verizon will be getting the iphone) including kindles and other devices that libraries have started integrating into their loan and collection programs. emily ford 2010–03–31 at 1:37 pm thanks so much for a great post, hilary! i was thinking about what you wrote and i wonder how much people are able to attend completely different professional development opportunities. for example, if a professional is employed by a large bureaucratic system that only allows professional development to happen within their field, how can one make the case to have to support to reach outside of what they know? i am guessing this kind of situation would happen more in public libraries, but i don’t know. how can we urge for this kind development in seemingly inflexible environments? while i’m sure you might not have the answer, i hope that someone could comment about it… what have the experiences been? hilary davis 2010–04–01 at 5:43 am good point, emily. it’s an uncomfortable thought, but my sense is that much of our professional development is going to be borne by ourselves. most of us have already experienced the aftermath of reduced budgets and rejected travel support requests. just yesterday, a bunch of us where i work pitched in our own funds to support a webinar that our library couldn’t fund on our behalf. i think that creative justification for seeking funds to attend non-library conferences (in person or virtual), seeking external funding (conference scholarships/grants) and out-of-pocket expenses are what we’re looking at. the 2009 taiga forum predicts this fate as well (see statement #1). this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct making it their idea: the learning cycle in library instruction – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 31 mar eric frierson /7 comments making it their idea: the learning cycle in library instruction by eric frierson librarians are always struggling to convince someone of something: convincing voters to say ‘yes’ to a library bond; persuading a library director to invest in a text-messaging reference tool; trying to get students to use library resources instead of google. one of the most effective ways to be successful is to learn the art of “making it their idea.” in his book, the education of an accidental ceo, david novak (2009) illustrates a crucial idea in advertising a product: you can tell people to go out and buy something, but that doesn’t make them do it. but if you appeal to both the head and the heart in a compelling and relevant way, then people will come up with the idea to buy of their own accord (p. 44). novak goes on to describe how nike uses minimal language in its commercials, never telling viewers to buy their shoes. instead, they fill the screen with images of professional athletes performing amazing feats in their products. the idea is to let the customer come to the conclusion that nike shoes will help them accomplish their athletic goals. in fact, very few advertisements tell people explicitly to do anything. they present information that leads customers to come up with the idea of buying their product on their own. convincing people by “making it their idea” isn’t unique to marketing. in throwing the elephant: zen and the art of managing up (bing, 2003), there’s a chapter devoted to “convincing the elephant that it was the elephant’s idea” (followed by “getting drunk with the elephant” and “frightening the elephant with mice”). though done with a little more tongue-in-cheek panache, this book highlights the usefulness of the concept in leadership and management. why does this approach work so well? business people might argue that “making it their idea” is an ego boost managers need in order to act on something. however, educators have long understood the value in letting people come to their own conclusions, and it has less to do with ego than it does with the way the brain learns. people feel a rush of pride when they come up with ideas, solutions and concepts for themselves and see the value in what they have just learned much more clearly than if they had simply been told a good idea. when it comes to seeing the value in libraries and their resources, we need to leverage a mode of teaching that allows students to experience information literacy concepts in this way. the learning cycle in the learning cycle, ann cavallo and edmond marek (1997) describe a teaching technique used in science education that presents students with deliberately confusing or confounding situations. with minimal instruction, students try to make sense of these situations based on prior knowledge, observation, and experimentation. at its core, the learning cycle method embodies the nature of science and helps students develop critical thinking skills. cavallo (2008) describes an example of the learning cycle, illustrating how it works. in an activity called “the new society,” a small subset of a class is sent outside while the instructor tells the remaining students that they are a new society with three simple rules: they can only say the words ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ they only respond to people of the same gender and ignore those of opposite gender. regardless of the question, they always respond ‘yes’ if the questioner is smiling and always respond ‘no’ if the questioner is not smiling. the students sent outside (called ‘the anthropologists’) are asked to find out as much information as they can about this new society that has recently been discovered on a remote island. as the anthropologists move about the classroom, they are confronted with confounding answers. they quickly discover the first rule through their initial observations. the second rule takes more time – often students will develop hypotheses and test them on students leading to the discovery of the second rule. the third rule is much more difficult to figure out. students feel frustration, anxiety and impatience. proclamations of “they’re lying!” and “they answer randomly!” are flung about until they finally figure out the third rule. throughout this process, the teacher simply provides guiding questions when people get stuck, on occasion reminding them how scientists find things out by making hypotheses and testing them out. two results of this lesson for students: utter joy or relief from solving a frustrating problem and experience working in a confusing environment but inventing a solution to a problem themselves (without the instructor providing the answer).  the joy or relief is what builds a love of learning into the experience, and the act of inventing a solution is critical thinking in action. how people learn while many of us have been told that active learning and critical thinking are vital for our information literacy programs, very few of us understand the ‘how’ and even fewer the ‘why.’ active learning is important because it more closely models the way that humans learn. experiments carried out by piaget (1973) and other noted educational psychologists (renner & marek, 1988; inhelder & piaget, 1969) indicate that all learning begins with data collection (called assimilation in renner & marek, 1990). this assimilation can be the observation of a phenomenon or reading of new materials. in many cases, the new data is incongruous with the learner’s current view of the world, and they can’t make sense of it. the next step in learning is trying to make sense of the new information (called accommodation in renner & marek, 1990). critical thinking skills are developed during this phase as learners make sense of the new information by inventing rules, testing hypotheses, and changing their world view in light of this new data. in this stage, they are no longer just memorizing information or learning a series of clicks; rather, they are actively inventing new ways of understanding the world and taking ownership of the knowledge they’re creating. the final step is called organization (renner & marek, 1990), and this is when they use their newly created knowledge and skills to solve other problems, and figuring out where else their new knowledge can be applied. the learning cycle instructional method – giving students a new situation, asking them to make sense of it, and serving merely as a guide in their process – models the way people learn, and as a result, generates authentic, meaningful learning experiences for students. compared to lectures or demonstrations where students are told what the answers are and then perform exercises that verify that what they are told is correct, they are making the new knowledge out of their own ideas. library instruction as science? modeling instructional activities after the way people learn is vital for making learning experiences that ‘stick.’ typical library instruction involves copious amounts of “click here, then click here, and once you’re there, click here.” there’s little discovery or invention of core information literacy concepts. students are told how to use information resources, told how to use citation styles, and told the consequences of unethical use of information. how can we make discovery of information literacy concepts more… scientific? can students invent information literacy concepts on their own, given a scenario and a librarian as a guide? let’s take peer reviewed journals as an example. at its worst, library instruction on this topic is equivalent to “check this box for peer reviewed articles in your results. it’s what your professors want.” this kind of instruction not only goes against the way people learn new ideas, but also undermines the importance of the peer review process by reducing it to “because your professor wants it.” active learning can be used to get students to explore issues of peer reviewed journals and have them compare them to magazine or popular literature. while this introduces the element of discovery and active learning, it’s only discovering the difference between the two types of publications, not the importance of the peer review process. if a librarian in this class room tells them why peer review is important, even after this activity, it’s still telling, not students discovering. instead, i develop learning cycles that reflect how people learn. in this instance, i give students a situation where they don’t have an answer but must work together to solve a problem. i tell students they have decided to start a magazine and they want to publish the best, newest research done in educational psychology (or whatever field they’re majoring in). unlike time or newsweek, their articles should be useful for researchers who are pushing the boundaries of knowledge in their field. they plan on sending out a call across the internet asking for people to send in their best papers for the magazine. i then ask the students to come up with a method for judging how good a paper they receive is and let them go to it. as they come up with criteria (e.g., “it has to be undiscovered knowledge” and “it must be based on sound evidence”), i ask how they, as college students, will be able to tell what’s good and what’s not. who is qualified to answer those questions? how will they, as the editors, use these people? as they work to create this new publication, they will be inventing peer review. peer review will be an idea that they came up with themselves. they may call it something else, but the core purposes of peer review will be in their responses. as a library instructor, my goal is to guide them with questions that challenge their thoughts, and finally, give it the label of ‘peer reviewed’ once they’ve established the concept. this lesson models how the mind actually works. there isn’t time! learning cycles, like the one described above, take lots more time. it would have taken at most two or three minutes to explain peer review and have students tell you why it is an important feature of scholarly research. however, if students don’t invent it, it’s much less likely to stick. the learning cycle on the other hand would take twenty or thirty minutes. librarians don’t have the luxury of time! there are some solutions. in an article for the texas library journal, jeremy donald suggests a model of library instruction that offloads most of the technical details to online tutorials and learning modules (see “step 6” in donald, 2010). this enables library instruction to devote needed time to the learning cycle. donald’s model requires librarians to think about the instructional needs of student in a different way. rather than think linearly about what skills and knowledge students need to have, think about the tasks they need to do in order of difficulty or complexity. what parts of the lesson will be most confusing and most important? identify one or two concepts, and plan on spending at least half of your time on those topics, including time students explore new tools and ideas independently and running learning cycle-style lessons. the rest of the time is devoted to brief introductions and answering questions. this type of model not only creates the time needed to run meaningful, engaging lessons on key topics, it forces library instructors to identify what those core topics are, the first step in developing good learning cycle lesson plans. developing learning cycles with that said, the first step in developing a learning cycle lesson plan is to identify those core concepts students should learn. for example, for a lesson on plagiarism, some of the topics that may come up are: what is plagiarism? what are the penalties for academic dishonesty? how do you effectively use quotes or paraphrasing? how do you cite articles using a specific citation style? of these, i see the second (academic dishonesty policies) and the fourth (mechanics of citation) as topics that could easily be off-loaded to online tutorials or even printed brochures. there’s no need to spend time in class covering these topics, short of connecting students with resources to learn more about them and their importance. the other two are great topics for learning cycles. i usually approach these topics from a personal perspective: how did i come to understand these concepts myself? what’s important about them? how can i create situations or activities that will lead students to invent the concepts on their own? at its core, avoiding plagiarism means giving credit for someone else’s work. how can i get students to come to understand this concept without simply telling it to them? before i tell students what the class is about, i ask them to take out a sheet of paper and be prepared to write down the first word or phrase that comes to mind after i say a secret word. when students are ready, i shout, “plagiarism!” they scribble words and phrases down then i ask them to hold up their papers. words associated with malicious cheating usually crop up: stealing, dishonest, and sometimes lazy. i then ask them to take on the role of summer school teacher with an imaginary group of low-performing students in an english class. they are told they’ve received a paper from a student written fairly poorly, but right in the middle, a sentence or two of pure academic gold. what happened? when they say “plagiarism!” i ask them to describe the actual events and student actions that led up to this. i ask them to think about student motivation and behavior, and i prompt them with questions like, “what was going through the student’s mind when they pulled in these sentences into this document?” what results is astounding. students describe quite innocent situations: perhaps the student didn’t know that copy-and-pasting information without quotes was wrong; maybe they couldn’t find an author on the website and assumed you didn’t need to cite anonymous sources; or perhaps it was malicious cheating. usually students don’t view this situation as the latter. instead, they’re forced to revise their own definitions of plagiarism based on the critical examination of the scenario they were presented with. plagiarism is no longer cheating or stealing… so what is it? again, these discussions take time, but they’re valuable experiences that students will be able to apply in more situations.  in these scenarios, students are employing critical thinking skills – they are working through problems by discussing them with peers, proposing potential solutions, and evaluating their own and others’ responses. there’s more to a learning cycle than rote memorization of the concepts the instructor intends to teach; instead, it’s problem solving. conclusion library instructors should develop a “less is more” philosophy. there is real value in spending time on learning cycles because it does more than just pay lip service to active learning and critical thinking – it helps students develop them. faculty members and students alike may be anxious if they don’t get the step-by-step instructions they’re used to from the library session. combating this expectation is our challenge. donald (2010) also addresses buy-in and collaboration as a way of preparing faculty members for these kinds of drastic changes to the typical library session. appropriately, donald says, “they are likely to wait to hear your ideas before introducing their own, and they may re-state an idea of yours as one of their own. this is to be encouraged, as it signals their investment in the collaboration and its outcome” (2010, 129). how’s that for “making it their idea?” for a visual representation of jeremy donald’s instructional design model, see his slides from a recent texas library association webinar, titled “technology & information literacy instruction: a model for active learning environments” at http://bit.ly/cpt6on. thanks to michelle millet, ellie collier, and kim leeder for their feedback on this post. references bing, s. (2002). throwing the elephant: zen and the art of managing up. new york: harperbusiness. cavallo, a. m. l. (2008). experiencing the nature of science: an interactive, beginning-of-semester activity. journal of college science teaching, 37(5), 12-15. donald, j. (2010). using technology to support faculty and enhance coursework at academic institutions. texas library journal, 85(4), 129-131. retrieved from http://www.txla.org/ce/collaboration/donald.pdf. inhelder, b. & piaget, j. (1969). the psychology of the child. new york: basic books, inc. marek, e. a. & cavallo, a. m. l. (1997). the learning cycle: elementary school science and beyond. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. novak, d. (2009). the education of an accidental ceo: lessons learned from the trailer park to the corner office. new york: three rivers press. piaget, j. (1973). psychology of intelligence. totowa, nj: littlefield, adams and co. renner, j.w. & marek, e.a. (1988). the learning cycle and elementary school science teaching. portsmouth, nh: heinemann educational books. renner, j.w. & marek, e.a. (1990). an educational theory base for science teaching. journal of research in science teaching, 27(3), 241-246. college students, information literacy, instruction, learning cycle, teaching déformation professionnelle making connections: yaan as a paper blog? 7 responses emily ford 2010–03–31 at 1:42 pm what a great post, eric! i was wondering how this might affect my teaching in a medical school, where complicated searches with not so user-friendly search interfaces (yes, i’m talking about ovid’s medline interface) take the most of our teaching time. i can spend an hour teaching a group of students where to click, how to look for applicable mesh terms, and how to create boolean searches– but i fear that the opportunity to engage in learning cycles in this environment is really limited– much less trying to get more time integrated into the rigorous medial and nursing school curricula. i’m going to have to seriously sit down and think about what are the goals of my instruction sessions, and flesh out how to make it a learning cycle… fiona grady 2010–03–31 at 2:07 pm i really enjoyed this eric, especially your method of teaching the concept of peer-review. lori townsend, korey brunetti and amy hofer gave a really good presentation at loex last year on using threshold concepts to teach information literacy that referenced work by meyer & land. you might be interested since it’s a similar concept. information is available at http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/thresholds.html. thanks for the post. eric frierson 2010–03–31 at 4:14 pm thanks for the comments! fiona: i went to that presentation and really enjoyed it! i think that the learning cycle of lesson planning provides us with a practical approach to helping our students accomodate threshold concepts into their world view. identifying them for information literacy topics (as the loex presenters did) is a great way to identify topics to develop learning cycles for! e ellie 2010–03–31 at 9:24 pm i agree so strongly with the less is more approach. i’ve been working more and more to teach fewer and fewer concepts, with my current focus typically being two areas – (1) a better understanding of choosing keywords and (2) on thinking about how to approach looking for information – asking students to think about who cares about their topic and why, and how they share their opinions and research. i actually have never been asked to cover plagiarism and am only asked to cover peer review maybe 1/3 of the time. most of my sessions are an introduction to databases or library basics. thanks for the great explanation and food for thought. i’ll be looking for more ways to make it their idea more often. laura westmoreland 2010–04–28 at 7:31 am this was a really interesting post — thanks for taking the time to share. i was particularly interested in incorporating the learning cycle to help students better understand plagiarism. at my institution, our research and instructional services department is working on overhauling a program we’ve had in the past called “writing with integrity.” generally, this instructional module was used as an educational rather than punitive action following an honor code violation related to plagiarism. it has also been used to introduce undergraduate researchers to the idea of plagiarism. it allows us as instructors a full hour to focus on plagiarism and related issues, and i can really see great possibilities in utilizing the learning cycle in that setting. as you acknowledge, time constraints and faculty expectations for real deliverables in library instruction sessions make it difficult to get away from the “click here, then here, then here” model. but i imagine there are ways to incorporate learning cycles even in smaller chunks: perhaps just approaching each learning objective from the problem-based learning approach instead of the “tell them” approach. thanks again for the food for thought! karen 2010–04–30 at 12:40 pm eric, great post. my colleague miriam rigby pointed this out to me, and i’m so glad she did. i mainly teach research methods to graduate students, and i’m still sort of casting about to find the best way to do this–but this is great encouragement to keep casting! michelle costello 2011–02–26 at 4:27 pm thanks for this post eric! the real life examples are great and reinforce the notion that “less is more”. it can be a struggle to give up parts of our lesson plan but knowing that students can learn some of what we want to teach them using online tutorials and web guides is reassuring! this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: rising through the ranks: on upward mobility in librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2010 15 sep editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield /10 comments editorial: rising through the ranks: on upward mobility in librarianship photo by flickr user mark stosberg (cc by-nc-sa 2.0) by editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield a few weeks ago we asked you for your suggestions on what you’d like us to cover in future posts. two comments asked us to talk about upward mobility. kathleen says: i’d like to see a post on planning for upward mobility in the library world… training to schedule, additional education, how to find a mentor, etc. thanks! danna says: i agree with kathleen – a post on upward mobility in the library world would be interesting and informative. this one actually provoked a fair amount of internal debate. some of us took a literal approach to the topic and had knee jerk negative reactions born from a strong aversion to management, some of us jumped in with practical advice, and some twisted the topic a little to discuss personal and professional growth without a focus on promotion. we figured since we had such strong and differing opinions, you might too. read on to see some of our thoughts on upward mobility and please share yours in the comments: introductions & institutional differences some of us felt particularly influenced by our personal circumstances and wanted to share those up front. ellie (reference librarian, austin community college): just as an introduction, i’m approaching this more from a personal growth and leadership perspective rather than a strictly ‘moving up the ranks’ perspective. at my institution we have a fairly flat structure. each of our eight campuses has a head librarian and nearly all the rest of us are reference librarians. (there is also an e-resources librarian and a library system administrator.) head librarians trade in some of their reference desk hours and collection development responsibilities to take on more managerial tasks as well as a bigger role in system wide decisions, but we are all on the same set faculty salary scale which is based on level of education and years of experience. there are a number of opportunities to lead committees and other projects and my institution is very supportive in providing professional development. kim (reference and instruction librarian, boise state university): i don’t feel that i know much about upward mobility, nor that i really want to. the term just conjures up images in my mind of pants suits and power lunches, both of which i have some aversion to! it’s true that i’m aiming for tenure and promotion at my university, but of course that’s also my only alternative to finding a new job in a couple of years (no tenure = end of contract). of course i try to do my job well and perhaps i foster ambitions of “someday” being a dean or director, but i think of that in a very abstract, it-would-be-good-to-be-the-boss sort of way. would i want to give up the opportunity to work individually with students and see their a-ha moments, to instead spend that time balancing budgets and meeting with potential donors? i’m really not sure. i haven’t sought out any leadership roles or mentorship programs, though i’ve been lucky to have mentors who have encouraged me to do things like apply for emerging leaders and run for chair of acrl’s university libraries section. i’m happy to take charge when the need is there, but my true nature is more of a backstage type. i’ve never thought of myself as un-ambitious, but when you toss around terms like “upward mobility” i just can’t garner much enthusiasm. i aspire to participate in our field and make a difference on my campus, but i just don’t know if i would ever want to run the show. i’ve read that it’s a characteristic of my generation to be averse to taking on management roles, though i wonder if that’s because we — let’s say generations x and y here — have a different perspective on how management should work. derik (web developer, springshare inc.): upward mobility is something i never looked for either. no desire to manage or lead. i don’t even like delegating work (i’d rather just do it myself, which was problematic when i supervised student workers). but, i did start as a student worker, became a “para-professional”, then an actual librarian, and now i’m a web developer. it’s been upward in the sense of increasing enjoyment of the work, freedom, and pay. for the most part, i achieved all this mobility through two means: volunteering and self-education. more on those below. emily (scholarly communication librarian, oregon health & science university): well i don’t feel upwardly mobile at all, even though, unlike derik, i do have a desire to manage and lead. i just accepted my 5th temporary librarian position since august 2007, when i earned my mls; and just hope that there’s another job out there down the line when my current contracts end. working temporary job after temporary job is frustrating and challenging, as made evident by my mojo post. i work hard to remain positive about these challenges and i hope to form them into opportunities for future growth in the profession. what i experience now will inform where and how i grow. even though my positions aren’t propelling me into an official leadership role, i am growing professionally in each temporary contract position. hilary (assistant head of collection management for engineering and e-science, north carolina state university): being upwardly mobile doesn’t necessarily mean that you manage other people – you could be faced with event management (e.g., welcome back week for students), project management (e.g., acting as a project leader or project contributor), or team management (e.g., acting as a coordinator for a group of people who have no formal accountability over each other). serving on committees or task forces within professional library organizations (e.g., sla, ala) are great ways to build experience with event, team, or project management. even if you’re not leading the project, event or team, while you’re participating, pay attention that what seems to work and what doesn’t seem to work. learning management skills by watching others is a great way to soak up both good practices and to lean away from not so good practices. brett (director, collingswood (nj) public library): i think there are elements of upward mobility that appeal to all of us. i don’t think i’ve met anyone in the field who isn’t interested in any of the following, but i’m pretty sure i haven’t met anyone who’s interested in all of them, either. job security promotion higher pay management responsibility greater operational responsibility greater autonomy opportunities to teach, select material, work with interesting technology, etc. do more good for the people you’re already working with do more good for more people already in your general constituency do more good for the profession work at a more appealing employer work with people you like and admire for me, the thing that motivates me the most is doing more work for people already in my general constituency. it drives me crazy that there are people who live in my town who don’t have library cards, even though they’re free (or, more precisely, they’ve already paid for them). i feel as though i’m failing them. this particular motivator might not always be closely associated with upward mobility in many librarians’ minds, but i see a very clear connection. in order to reach my neighbors who aren’t using the library, i need to have a higher profile with more people and with the right people. i need to be invited to the right events, raise more money, and make sure the library is more visible. i need to gain a greater understanding of what they want and find ways to deliver it. for instance, we may need a new building or to acquire a parking lot. i’m not sure we’ll manage it, but these are the kinds of things upwardly mobile librarians accomplish. as near as i can tell, accomplishing them pretty much by definition makes you upwardly mobile in other librarians’ opinion. i’m also motivated to teach (mls students, which is why i’m working on my phd), to do more good for the profession (i want librarians to have a greater depth and breadth of skills, especially in technology and fundraising, and i want us to take more interest in the history of librarianship), and i want to work on cool projects with people i like and admire. i think this last piece is too often overlooked: one of my favorite reasons to get up each day is the possibility of working with colleagues, both at mpow and across the country. mentorship ellie: when i started at acc i was assigned a mentor. this was a reference librarian who had been with the college many years. i was very lucky that he was (and is) incredibly kind, intelligent, generous with his time and knowledge, and fast to reply. however i also paid attention to who else seemed particularly successful in our system and frequently turned to them for advice as well. i also had a chance to be assigned as a mentor to a new hire and the experience has been just as rewarding. i definitely learned at least as much from my mentee as she did from me and that bond has continued. as we both grow professionally we continue to share what we’re learning with each other. lastly, i have been lucky enough to have the support to travel to a few national conferences, where i found mentors from outside my institution, mostly through attending social functions and through friends of friends. and mostly from thinking someone seemed cool and smart and starting a conversation with them. emily: i used to be anti-mentor–mostly because of my perception of traditional mentor/mentee relationships. i have always perceived traditional or formal mentoring as entrenched in power structures of which i’d like to not be part. seeing formal mentoring as pairing people in positions of high power with people who had relatively little to none. this made (and still makes) me uncomfortable and i never sought out a mentor relationship in this vein. however, i decided to try it out when ala connect unveiled it’s mentoring network, mentor connect. now i’ve established relationships with three people via that tool, one mentor and two mentees. my mentor is someone who has merely acted as a sounding board, asking leading questions and helping me remain accountable for my personal goals. my mentees are two library science students (well, one recently graduated) who have sought guidance in choices for school and their future careers. i’ve tried to emulate the positive model and experience i’ve had with my mentor, asking reflexive questions, and just enabling my mentees to have an ear when they need it. i have other informal mentor relationships with former supervisors, colleagues, friends, parents, my massage therapist, and numerous other people whose opinions and advice i respect and admire. i think unlike the traditional model of mentor and mentee relationships, i rely on my vast network of people who have diverse experiences and backgrounds to assist with particular situations and advice as i need it. (just-in-time mentoring?) hilary: sla also has various mentoring programs within its divisions (groups of members focused on a particular facet of librarianship, such as the science-technology division) and chapters (groups of members brought together in a common geographic area, such as the north carolina chapter of sla). when i first joined sla, i signed up to be a mentee within the physics-astronomy-math (pam) division. i had an enjoyable, yet very informal experience working with a librarian and sla member who helped me get my bearings with collection management and collection building for the physical sciences. photo by flickr user kool_skatkat (cc by-nc-nd 2.0) training/education/gaining experience hilary: some of the ways one can gain some training/prof development to either prepare for upward mobility or to give one some good perspective of what it’s like for managers is to partake of opportunities such ala’s library leadership and management association (llama) group offered last year. a series of webinars led by pat wagner covered topics such as as techniques to guide decision-making, empowering library staff and library managers without the use of micromanagement, and how to develop and implement strategic planning. when i was working as a library assistant, i would jot down notes about “what not do to” when/if i ever got into the role of managing others. we’re all human and humans sometimes act without thinking things through completely. looking back on my experience as a library assistant (as someone who now manages other professionals), i always have this fear that i am not providing the kind of leadership and guidance that i wish would just come naturally. as a new manager, i expect my approach to management will change over time and will improve with experience. most of the folks who i formally supervise have been librarians far longer than i and are completely competent at what they do. my current approach is to make sure that i communicate as best as i can with them about what projects or initiatives are coming down the pike that will impact their work or to anticipate how their expertise and experience could benefit a new project or initiative. i try to model my actions/intentions off of the more experienced librarian experts/colleagues to help guide my decision-making, communication skills and ways to empower others around me. i expect that i’ll always strive to be a better manager throughout my career, no matter what stage i’m at. ellie: i think the number one thing you can do is let people know what you want to be doing. i was very lucky in that i was continually asked this. i started part time with my college doing very basic website cleanup. my supervisor took the time to ask me what my goals were and i told her i wanted to work as a reference librarian. a new campus was opening soon and needed hourly reference librarians and my supervisor suggested me. if you’re hoping to move up within your own institution, your supervisors will be the best people to help you figure out what trainings are available that will gain you the skills they want you to have. if you’re hoping to move up outside of your institution, i would probably start by reading job descriptions that appeal to you and see what you’re missing and look for opportunities to fill those gaps. many higher positions require a certain number of years experience with increasing responsibilities or a certain number of years experience managing. are there opportunities in your current position for you to lead a committee or supervise interns or student workers? the ideal situation is to have support from within your organization to help you, but if that is lacking, i think hilary and emily pointed to some excellent ala resources for a more self directed approach. derik: i volunteered for committees and projects a lot at my previous jobs. this gave me the opportunity to learn and become more knowledgeable in the workings of the library. i ended up doing instruction sessions while still in library school because i volunteered to help out when my library was short-staffed. and the more active you are on (on diverse projects) the better your resume will look when you do job searching. even more so, taking on projects that forced me to learn new skills, is what lead me to my current job. from building my own website to doing some heavy customizations on an open source ticketing system, i learned tons (in these cases, html/css/javascript/php/mysql) by having a project and then learning my way to a solution. you can learn a lot by reading, but unless you really put it to a directed goal, you’re not likely to get as much from the experience. kim: the thing that troubles me most about upward mobility in our field (any many fields, i’m sure) is that success by traditional definition is always going to involve a tradeoff. in order to move up the ranks you have to be willing to give other things up: like the ability to spend time with family, or to live in a certain location. does more responsibility have to mean more hours at work? it shouldn’t. or if you’re dedicated to living in a certain place — and i think this applies to emily’s frustration above — it’s going to be much harder to find that full-time position and move up the ranks than if you’re willing to toss all your belongings in a truck on a regular basis. in libraryland, moving up usually means moving around to a variety of institutions in a variety of places as you step up the ladder. how much are we willing to give up to move up? these are the questions we have to ask ourselves. of course, it doesn’t always work that way, right? there are people who manage to advance their careers in their desired locations and still maintain their life/work balance. there are people — like brett — who manage to find the seemingly perfect position in the perfect location for them. perhaps we need those people to offer us some insight into that true kind of upward mobility, the kind that allows you to rise in both your personal life and career, simultaneously. if you’re one of those (possibly mythical) people, please be sure to comment below. education, mentors, mentorship, professional development, training, upward mobility a view from the neutral zone articulating value in special collections: are we collecting data that matter? 10 responses kathleen 2010–09–15 at 8:04 pm this was my question, and i admit that the different interpretations of it made me smile! i don’t really remember exactly which definition i meant! i think i was interested in hearing about each of your experiences advancing through the library world. i love direct service, but i do feel a desire to lead, and wanted to prepare accordingly. i wanted to hear which trainings or programs were worthwhile, and which were a waste of time? how did you find mentors (i was indeed curious if anyone had used ala connect!) and how did that relationship work. whether there were any resources for management skills you recommend (i’m particularly fond of the the chronicle of philanthropy’s career advice section, which has a lot more in common with libraries than you might think). i also wanted advice on managing a work-life balance and the need to travel to advance… how to reconcile those things? overall, i think your responses are a good place to start! emily ford 2010–09–16 at 6:24 pm kathleen, i feel very strongly about work life balance, and being healthy at work. i wrote about this way back when in december 2008. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2008/our-librarian-bodies-our-librarian-selves/ in terms of traveling to advance, kim pointed out that one of the reasons i might be frustrated is that i am unwilling to relocate for a professional opportunity. to me it was a decision in being happy in my life (e.g. in the city i love) and to possibly sacrifice opportunity. that being said, my experiences, albeit temporary, have all been very rich. i’d be happy to continue dialog with you about this (divulging more personal detail if it helps)over e-mail if you want. -emily ellie 2010–09–17 at 9:40 am i’m big on work/life balance too. i forgot to mention that in the post as another difference between reference librarians and head librarians at my college. once you’re a head librarian, you’re always on call. i’m not tied to my location like emily is, but i am tied to my free time being my free time and work to make sure i get my work done in my 40 hour week and have it encroach minimally into the rest of my life. i love my job and my profession, so it’s not a perfect separation, i’ll read blogs, talk to colleagues, and discuss issues with friends off the clock. but i won’t take home work and i try not to check email. and if something requires extra time, i make sure to get extra time off later to make up for it. i couldn’t tell you whether it’s a personal choice or an expectation, but i can say that very few of our head librarians only work 40 hours and very few don’t work from home in addition to their regular work week. i don’t believe it’s impossible to find that balance, but it does seem that people who take on higher level responsibilities tend to be more willing to accept the hours that tend to go along with it rather than fight to keep work and the rest of their life separate. veronica 2010–09–16 at 10:57 am i really appreciated ellie’s last comment: “i think the number one thing you can do is let people know what you want to be doing.” it’s easy for your co-workers, supervisors, and even friends to think that you are content in your job or have no desire to try something new. i think that letting people know that you have interests in areas outside your regular job duties and aspirations to achieve something more will help them keep you in mind when new opportunities arise. also, in response to kathleen’s comment, the llama mentoring program within ala is excellent if you’re interested in leadership and management. the acrl instruction section mentoring program is also a good fit for librarians who want to grow and progress as teachers. kathleen 2010–09–16 at 2:39 pm thanks veronica! i will definitely be checking some of these resources out :) jean costello 2010–09–17 at 6:34 am hi – i was also thinking about professional mobility in public libraries. from my patron’s perspective, “i believe we have an incredible untapped labor pool in our nation’s librarians. it’s time to tap into it. here’s a link to the post, thinking ’bout library professionalism karl ericson 2010–09–23 at 4:01 pm i often think about how i would “run” the library if i were “king” of the library. but, i also know that my director has to deal with tons of institutional flack, in terms of dealing with deans and other administrators. i don’t see a lot of opportunity for “moving up”. there is only the slim prospect of a full time job. the reality is that i will continue to be used by my institution as, relatively high-wage labor, but infinitely cheaper than a full-timer who has “benefits”. i don’t blame the institution. they are working within the confines of a broken system that works to benefit corporations and profits instead of the needs of humans regardless of their status. oops! kinda ranted along there. take care! john jewell 2010–09–24 at 7:37 pm if one is focused on how do i get promoted or have a higher ranking position, that leads more to looking at the organizational chart, job classifications, career paths, etc. another approach, that i found much more interesting and satisfying, has been to find projects that i think are interesting and that benefit the library. that way i continue to grow mentally and professionally whether the library formally recognizes that growth or not. through the years (yes, i am an old-timer), interesting projects seem to grow and need teams to be done successfully. that in turn led to needing to understand working with people, team-building, group dynamics, and project management as well as more technical aspects of library and information science – whether community information databases and outreach, selective dissemination of information, enterprise web sites, digital preservation, or currently enterprise digital accessibility. that also meant having bosses who were willing to allow me to undertake those projects and who saw the benefits they provided. i offer no guarantees, but beginning by looking at the needs of the library and one’s own professional interests can be a great way to develop – possibly providing upward mobility in the process. pingback : best of semester one « hack library school pingback : grasping at a grasp of project management | the girl works this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct service ceiling: the high cost of professional development for academic librarians – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2021 9 jun bridgette comanda, jaci wilkinson, faith bradham, amanda koziura and maura seale /1 comments service ceiling: the high cost of professional development for academic librarians by bridgette comanda, jaci wilkinson, faith bradham, amanda koziura, and maura seale in brief academic librarian salaries are shrinking, but conferences and professional membership fees are increasing. how is this impacting our field and our colleagues? during early 2020, we fielded a national survey of academic librarians about their professional development and service costs that gathered over 600 responses. the results of this survey reveal the inequitable landscape of professional development funding for academic librarians in the united states prior to the covid-19 pandemic, which has likely served to exacerbate those inequities. in this paper, we describe the results of the survey, and the various inequities the survey responses reveal. we illustrate how the cost of professional development and service is a “service ceiling”, a barrier to inclusion for many in our field, and the implications of this exclusion. about us the members of this research team are all academic librarians in a wide range of roles. we are all white women. this scholarship is a strategic act to leverage our privilege as white women to reveal and challenge the stark racial and economic inequities in librarianship, specifically those around professional development and service. we take to heart megan watson’s (2017) argument that white women librarians have the opportunity and obligation to examine both whiteness in librarianship and our complicity in maintaining and reproducing it. she calls for white librarians to “unflinchingly deconstruct the inequitable foundations upon which our work is built. in short, we must transform our culture, not simply our demographics, if we wish to become truly inclusive organizations” (159). in this spirit, we aim to open the dialogue about financial realities and how they shape our field through the group we founded; librarians for equitable professional development (lepd). for more information about lepd, including salary disclosures, please visit the librarians for equitable professional development website. introduction gathered around a display case at the rock n’ roll hall of fame, drinking complementary alcohol, the association of college & research libraries’s (acrl) 2019 all-conference reception struck us as…over the top. we had each spent over $1,000 to attend, but mused that much of acrl felt bloated, generic, and irrelevant to us despite its reputation as the most important conference in academic librarianship. we felt, and still feel, obligated to attend and to submit to present at acrl. the counterweight to this professional obligation? low salaries and hefty student loan payments. did anyone else feel this financial strain and professional pressure to attend the biggest, and most expensive, conferences in our field? two months later, we received a very public “yes” to that question as an anonymous open letter about financial inequalities at academic conferences circulated widely on social media. in it, the writer censures the decision by library conferences to not waive registration fees for presenters. they write, “by ‘saving’ money in not reducing or waiving conference fees for presenters, presenting and attendance at the conference is only for those peers who can afford it” (anonymous, 2019). financial inequities of salary or institutional benefits cut our field off from new ideas and reinforce lines of exclusion. besides creating this “service ceiling”, no remuneration for the labor of creating presentations or chairing committees is, as the anonymous writer (2019) puts it, “a purely loathsome sentiment” that devalues the labor and scholarship of academic librarians.   the american library association, of which acrl is a division, is the parent organization to the largest and most expensive conferences and provides access to much service work in academic librarianship, yet there is a distinct lack of meaningful analysis and reflection, internally or externally, about the cost of these activities and how it impacts academic librarians and librarianship. professional development and service are frequently tied to promotion and tenure, leading us to ask: how much does it cost, out-of-pocket, for a faculty librarian to gain tenure and promotion? for an academic librarian who is not classified as faculty (and thus whose institution might not necessarily provide support), what impact does this high price tag to participation in professional development and service have? and finally, if presenting at and attending the premiere professional development opportunities in our field is increasingly out of reach due to a high price tag, whose voices are left out of the conversation? to answer these questions, we formed librarians for equitable professional development, an informal organization dedicated to the study and advocacy of more equitable professional development in libraries.  from february-may 2020, we conducted a survey that asked academic librarians in the united states to share how much they spend on service and professional development, and if/how their institutions pay for these obligations. we received 626 responses. using descriptive and qualitative analysis, we’ve compiled a snapshot into how academic librarians think and make decisions about service and professional development activities, as well as what sort of financial support they receive from their institutions. while the survey was open, covid-19 grew into a global pandemic. as higher education grapples with the impact of covid-19 on budgets, we feel that this survey will provide a meaningful look into the “pre-pandemic” professional development and service financial landscape for academic librarians. we acknowledge that as covid-19 pandemic-related budget shortfalls loom (if they aren’t already affecting us), the conversation around affordability in professional development and service will become even more relevant. literature review the (lack of) research on financial inequity in academic librarianship we begin by exploring the limited research on our topic, and then examine salary, student loan debt, and the cost of professional association memberships and conferences to provide context to our analysis. we then look more broadly at how academia’s investment in white supremacy, capitalism and the patriarchy reinforces silence around affordability and financial equity in academic librarianship. this is made evident by the lack of scholarship, conversation, and transparency around the financial realities of professional development.   although there is much research around the status and professional identities of academic librarians, there is little work on financial inequities in academic librarians’ professional development. we self-published our own analysis of the change in conference and membership costs related to ala and acrl from 1999-2020; results show during a period when academic librarian wages were stagnant, some conferences have raised prices significantly (wilkinson, et al. 2021). mr. library dude wrote several extensively researched, and entertainingly irritated, blog posts in 2015 about ala membership costs (hardenbrook, 2015). blessinger and kelly (2011) considered the effect of the 2008 recession on funding for professional development for tenure track librarians at association of research libraries (arl) member libraries, and found that they experienced a reduction in funding for professional development but no corresponding decrease in tenure requirements. smigielski, laning, and daniels (2014) found that professional development funding played a role in the promotion and tenure of arl librarians, but did not investigate levels of funding. the most detailed research we found, vilz and dahl poremski (2015), investigated support structures for tenure including professional development funding for tenure track librarians broadly, and found that while 97% received at least some funding for various activities, only 48% were satisfied with the amount. the authors do note, however, that with low levels of funding, “tenure criteria are essentially an unfunded de facto mandate” (p. 162). ala’s “guidelines for appointment, promotion, and tenure of academic librarians” (2010) includes the need for professional development, while the ala-apa advocating for better salaries toolkit (dorning et al., 2014) suggests advocating for faculty status, but neither identify a need for financial support for professional development. not all academic librarians have faculty status or opportunities for promotion, however, and might not have explicit professional development and service expectations. leebaw and logsdon (2020)’s recent survey found that 60% of academic librarians identified as “faculty or faculty-like.” moreover, faculty status for librarians is declining (walters, 2016). finally, we note that understandings of “professionalism” within librarianship are inextricably connected to socioeconomics, but this topic is outside the scope of this essay.   the economics of becoming an academic librarian, briefly at $64,750, the median yearly salaries for academic librarians are greater than for other categories of librarians (bureau of labor statistics (bls), 2020c), and salaries have remained static when accounting for inflation over the past twenty years. however, related macroeconomic factors weigh heavily on librarians who have graduated in the past twenty years. graduate student debt has increased dramatically since 2000; then, graduate degree seekers borrowed an average of $27,800. in 2016, the average amount increased to $37,270 (webber & burns, 2020). graduate students also may have cumulative debt from their undergraduate education (webber & burns, 2020).  and the cost of gaining an undergraduate degree has also increased: the published in-state tuition and fee price at the average public four-year institution has increased 278% in the past thirty years; at private nonprofit four-year and public two-year institutions, average tuition and fees have doubled (ma et al.,2020). the 2017 student loan debt and housing report found that the median total debt for borrowers between the ages of 22-35 was $41,200. in a 2016 study of librarians, 30.6% had over $25,000 of library school debt, and 52.7% from that group had received no financial aid (halperin, 2018). beginning librarians with an mls working in an academic library made an average salary of $53,953 in 2019; in 2006 (the earliest data available from the ala-apa salary database) librarians in the same category made $40,761, or $52,625 in 2019 dollars (ala, 2020a). current salaries have kept up with inflation, but have grown only marginally. this means a third of academic librarians begin their careers with debt the equivalent of half or more of their annual salary. the debt associated with obtaining the required degrees has risen over recent years, but salaries have not kept pace. the economics of white supremacy the persistence of whiteness in librarianship has been a source of concern for lis scholars for decades (see, for example, this extensive and ever-expanding bibliography (strand, 2019)). the latest bureau of labor statistics (2019) data describe the librarian workforce as 79.9% women and 87.8% white. black people represent between 6-10%, asian americans 3-5%, and latinx 9.8-10% of library workers, depending on the data source (department for professional employees, 2020; household data national averages, 2019). ala’s most recent demographic data from 2012 reveals that academic librarianship is also overwhelmingly white, (ala 2020b).  there is no data that breaks down academic librarianship salaries by race and gender but wage and net worth gaps between people who identify as white, black, and latinx in the united states are well documented and intersectional (parker et al., 2016). current median weekly earnings for white women, regardless of occupation, are 81.5% of those of white men (bls, 2019). black women earn 69.9 cents and latinas earn 63.8 cents on the dollar compared to white men (bls, 2019). jennifer vinopal has argued that these gaps are crucial: “the library staffing pipeline is rooted in the discrepancies in socioeconomic status based on race and ethnicity, discrepancies which are inherited generationally” (2016). although academic librarians are likely to have one or more graduate degrees, educational attainment does not guarantee upward mobility for black people and “the benefits of schooling often flow in unequal measure to blacks relative to whites” (parker et al., 2016). black and latinx people are more likely to have to borrow money to pursue graduate education (webber & burns, 2020). the covid-19 pandemic has further exacerbated racial inequities in the workplace; data shows black and latinx people are more likely to have experienced loss of employment or a wage cut due to covid-19 (parker et al., 2020). academic librarians experience rising student loan debt and stagnant salaries, but for systematically marginalized library workers, this is compounded by these broader financial inequities, which impact their ability to not only participate in the development of lis, but also their ability to enter it in the first place.  the intersection of economic inequities, race, and vocational awe academic librarianship does not sit outside of the social inequities mentioned above, but academic librarians frequently refuse to acknowledge them. this is reflected in the lack of salary information in job postings, the precarious “diversity” residency, the lack of meaningful salary data by race, and the absence of both data and research around funding for professional development in academic libraries. these gaps can be tied directly to the interlocking influences of vocational awe and white supremacy in academic librarianship. jones and okun (2001) identify “fear of open conflict,” “individualism,” and “right to comfort” as characteristics of organizational white supremacy. organizational white supremacy scorns any critique of the status quo as complaint, but particularly that which is expressed by workers from marginalized groups, and shuts down open conflict, in order to preserve the comfort of the powerful, while promoting competition among staff. promoting competition among workers fosters distrust (often especially toward marginalized workers) and makes it difficult for workers to challenge inequities. drawing on the work of diane gusa, nataraj, hampton, matlin, and meulemans (2020) identify “white institutional presence” in common academic library practices and norms, including, we suggest, silence regarding economic inequities in the workplace. vocational awe, as theorized by ettarh (2018), similarly leads librarians to avoid conflict by turning work into a calling and obfuscating issues of low salaries and burnout. vocational awe binds librarians to “absolute obedience to a prescribed set of rules and behaviors, regardless of any negative effect on librarians’ own lives” (ettarh, 2018) and is foundational to the profession (nataraj et al., 2020; stahl, 2020). drawing on victor ray’s (2019) work, which argues that organizations are inherently racialized, jennifer ferretti (2020) has recently articulated the need to bring the insights of critical librarianship to bear on the power dynamics, culture, and organizational structures of our workplaces. economic transparency, she argues, is a key element of more equitable and antiracist workplaces. in her 1984 book sister outsider, audre lorde uses the academic conference as the exemplar of privilege. white women fought for the right to be included in these gatherings while ignoring intersectional factors that left out women of color: “if white american feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of color?” ([1984] 2007, p. 112) a similar lack of understanding plagues academic librarianship. intertwining inequalities work together to create a powerful barrier that blocks marginalized groups from becoming or advancing in their careers as academic librarians, a few of which we’ve highlighted in this literature review. the high price to participate in professional organizations and attend conferences, the scarcity of adequately funded professional positions (tenured or not), the pay gap between white men and all others experienced across all types of work in the united states, and the expense of obtaining graduate degrees cumulate to form a significant negative financial impact for academic librarians from systematically marginalized communities. this paper seeks to begin a conversation about financial barriers to academic librarians’ participation in professional development and service. with this focus, we hope to begin to explicate how these financial barriers serve as gatekeepers for a majority white and largely homogeneous field. methods our survey sought information about academic librarians in the united states: their participation in professional development and service, the level of institutional support they received, and what barriers to participating they had encountered. the survey asked respondents to focus on the past five years at their current institution and was approved by the indiana university institutional review board (protocol # 2001988850). the complete survey is available in appendix a.  we primarily recruited participants through email and social media. we posted the recruitment letter and a link to the survey via email within relevant, national professional organizations and interest group listservs. additionally, the researchers recruited participants via their personal social media and groups specific to librarianship. the survey sample was not meant to be a representative sample of academic librarians in the united states but was rather a convenience sample, and through social media, a snowball sample as the link was shared and retweeted. by focusing on recruitment through organizational listservs, recruited participants are likely to be active in professional development and service, which is the focus of the survey. however, there were some pitfalls in our recruitment strategy. we were limited to distributing our survey to listservs to which we had access, which meant that the listservs we focused on were more heavily related to certain subgroups of academic librarians.  as all of us are white, middle-class women; we are not members of any spaces for marginalized groups within librarianship, and we did not intentionally distribute our survey to these spaces (with the caveat that our tweets about the survey may have been shared within such spaces). however, this limitation is not an excuse for not working harder to reach marginalized groups within librarianship with our survey. we do not recommend this approach to recruitment. for future projects, we will use an equity lens in our recruitment process and pursue the intentional inclusion of the experiences of marginalized groups. we also plan to broaden the perspective of our research group as a whole through the addition of new member(s) who identify as marginalized. qualitative data the survey included three optional open-ended questions. using an inductive and grounded theory approach, two researchers read through the responses to each of the three questions and engaged in initial coding of the responses. the two researchers then discussed, refined, and created definitions, resulting in a codebook for each question. the two researchers then returned to the questions and selectively coded each response; each response could have between one and three codes, and codes were generally applied in the order they appeared in the responses. a few responses were not coded, because they were unclear or seemed to be responses to a different question. we used spss to check inter-rater reliability on the codes, and most were in substantial agreement (see appendix b). our analysis relies on primary codes and secondary codes if they are in substantial agreement. because responses could receive multiple codes, our analysis will discuss response codes rather than number (or percentage) of respondents. results descriptive analysis overall funding the total number of survey respondents was 626. 80% of our respondents identified as women, and 85% as white, which corresponds nearly exactly to the gender and racial breakdown for librarians as reported by the bureau of labor statistics (household data national averages, 2019). of the 15% of respondents who did not identify as white, 1.7% were black, 3.8% were asian american, 5.3% were latinx. american indian/alaskan native and native hawaiian/pacific islander each constituted less than a percentage point of our respondents. respondents were then asked a series of questions about their institution and role. most respondents were at large, urban, public research institutions, about half were early career librarians, and about half supervise others. in addition, 40% of respondents were classified as tenure-track faculty, 23% were non-tenure track faculty, and 28% were classified as staff. 61% of respondents work at institutions with a promotion system for librarians, and of those, 89% stated that their promotion was contingent on professional development or service (figure a). is librarian promotion contingent upon professional development or service? figure a we asked participants to disclose the amount of funding received per year for professional development and service. 6% of participants received no institutional funding, 13% received less than $500, 61% received $500-$2000, and 20% received over $2000 per year. when receiving funding, 27% are reimbursed by their institutions following the event, while 64% receive a combination of pre-payment in advance by their institution and reimbursement. to get a sense of what costs are covered, we asked respondents to report how frequently their institutions defrayed some portion of the costs for common expenses (table a). notably, 76% of respondents said that their institutions never cover the cost of association membership dues, while 15% reported sometimes, and only 8% reported that they were covered. 66% of respondents said that their institutions always defrayed conference registration and 33% reported that registration costs were sometimes defrayed.   what costs does your institutional funding defray? cost always sometimes never total conference registration 67% (371) 33% (186) 0.2% (1) 558 training/workshop/webinar (in-person or virtual) 47% (260) 50% (275) 3% (17) 552 professional organization membership dues 8% (46) 15% (84) 76% (419) 549 travel 54% (299) 46% (254) 0.5% (3) 556 accommodations 54% (300) 45% (253) 0.7% (4) 557 meals 40% (224) 52% (289) 8% (42) 555 other 27% (12) 47% (21) 27% (12) 45 table a nearly 38% of our participants reported that they face barriers in accessing their institutional funding (figure b). a full 81% have self-funded professional development or service within the past 5 years (figure c). of these, 84% have spent up to $1000 on self-funding, while 14% have self-funded over $1000. interestingly, women were more likely to report self-funding than men: 84% of women versus 72% of men. finally, 86% of our respondents stated that they have abstained from professional development and service opportunities due to the cost (figure d).  figure b figure c figure d funding by position, institution type, and institution size our survey included three options for position type: staff, non-tenure-track faculty, and tenure-track faculty. as seen in table b, 9.1% of staff receive no funding for professional development and service, which is about double the number of faculty-status librarians with no funding. 38.7% of tenure-track faculty receive $1000 or less. how much funding do you receive per year from your institution? (position) no funding $1-$500 $501-$1000 $1001-2000 $2001-3000 $3000+ tenure track 5% 14% 24% 37% 12% 7% non-tenure track 4% 9% 21% 45% 16% 5% staff 9% 14% 18% 37% 13% 8% table b we grouped institutions into four categories: 4-year undergraduate colleges, community colleges, comprehensive colleges (undergraduate and master’s programs), and research universities. 14.6% of community college librarians receive no funding, while 5.3% of comprehensive college and 4.2% of research university librarians receive no funding; the overall percentage of respondents receiving no funding is 6% (table c). community college librarians receive the least funding overall, with 61.8% of community college librarians receiving $1000 or less per year from their institution. in contrast, 66.2% of research university librarians receive $1001-$3000 in funding per year, with an additional 10.4% of these receiving over $3000 per year.  how much funding do you receive per year from your institution? (institution type) no funding $1-$500 $501-$1000 $1001-2000 $2001-$3000 $3000+ 4 year undergraduate college 0% 20% 21% 39% 18% 2% community college 15% 36% 26% 18% 3% 3% comprehensive college 5% 16% 28% 41% 5% 5% research university 4% 2% 17% 46% 20% 10% table c our survey asked participants to categorize their institution as large, medium, small, or very small, according to the carnegie classification for higher education (n.d.). there were too few responses in the “very small” category to ensure anonymity, so those numbers are not reported here. however, as seen in table d, librarians at large and medium institutions received more funding than those at small institutions. 54.3% of librarians at small institutions receive $1000 or less annually, compared to 26.1% at large and 23.9% at medium institutions who receive $1000 or less. how much funding do you receive per year from your institution? (institution size) no funding $1-$500 $501-$1000 $1001-$2000 $2001-$3000 $3000+ large 4% 5% 22% 46% 16% 8% medium 4% 9% 15% 45% 16% 11% small 3% 26% 21% 35% 10% 5% table d these numbers are similar when looking at self-funding. 80.8% of all respondents reported self-funding occasionally, with an additional 1.9% responsible for self-funding all of professional development (for a total of 82.7% respondents funding some or all of their professional development). table e breaks this down by institution type. 93% of librarians at 4 year undergraduate colleges either self-fund occasionally or entirely, followed by 85.1% at community colleges, 83.6% at comprehensives, and 81.3% at research universities. nearly 8% of community college librarians are entirely or mostly self-funded, compared to 1.9% of all respondents.  have you ever had to self-fund? (institution type) yes entirely self-funded no 4 year undergraduate college 91% 2% 7% community college 77% 8% 15% comprehensive college 84% 0 16% research university 81% 0.3% 19% table e qualitative analysis funding decisions the first open-ended question was a follow up to the survey question, “how is funding made available to you by your institution?” if respondents answered “it depends,” we asked them to use the text box to explain further. many respondents clarified in the text box that despite having a set amount each year, they still had to apply for funding. the most common codes we assigned to this question are in table f, which includes our definitions and representative responses. the coding for this question includes both primary and secondary codes, both of which were in substantial agreement. code codebook definition representative response admin decides library administration determines whether or not to fund something. “my dean provides a set amount to each librarian that changes wildly from year to year and isn’t based on rank or the individual opportunities” amount based the library funds a set amount of the request based on costs, role (e.g. presenter v. attendee), job description, rank, tenure status, performance evaluation, etc. “amount varies depending on requirements to participate (such as committee membership), presentations, applicability to essential job functions–all at the discretion of the dean.” set amount determined annually a set amount of money determined annually regardless of process. this can include annual caps amounts based on annual projected needs. this often requires an application and/or approval process. “i receive a set amount every year, but can submit requests for funding for individual opportunities if particular things come up that would put me over my set amount.” ad hoc additional funds when people are granted amounts of money on a case by case basis beyond their usual yearly allotment. this often includes an application process for approval.  “set amount budgeted every year, with extra absorbed into general library budget if individual librarians don’t use. also options to seek extra funding if we can justify it is good for our library to be represented at an event.” table f while policies for accessing funding are varied, most response codes (69%) described their institution as having an annual set amount earmarked for professional development by the department or library that may have to be applied for. some said the amount was inconsistent from year to year, or was such a low amount that it did not meaningfully contribute. almost 10% of the response codes reported that their administration decided whether or not to fund on a case-by-case basis. some respondents who described an annually set amount included that additional funds beyond this amount were available on an ad hoc basis. amount-based and percentage-based funding policies were mentioned by some participants, where the amount or percentage funded was determined by the type of cost (50% of lodging might be covered, e.g, or the role of the staff member requesting (presenting at a conference would receive more funding, e.g.).  barriers to funding we also asked: “please describe any barriers that prevent you from accessing institutional funding for professional development or service activities.” the most common primary codes were: code codebook definition representative response austerity not enough money overall, if there is any at all. this can include campus austerity measures and rotating who is eligible for funding at any one time. “limited budget. i am one of six new library faculty (some positions are new) and it seems that the budget for pd has not increased accordingly.” low funding limits on the amount of money provided that often preclude all but the least expensive offerings from being fully covered. these include low funding caps. “if the event goes a single penny over we are required to pay for it out of pocket. it means that not everything gets covered and we have to often pay for things out of pocket. i have to pay out of pocket for something i’m required to go to, to keep my job. it’s insane.” reimbursement can be hard to cover funds upfront. reimbursement processes are lengthy (to the point to accumulating interest on credit cards), difficult, delayed, or otherwise burdensome. reimbursement systems are hard to use and not flexible. “our state reimbursement process is ludicrous. up until last year, we were required to submit itemized receipts for every single meal. hotels *must* be the conference hotel or you can’t go over the state rate — even if the hotel you are choosing is cheaper than conference hotel. i use my funds for membership dues, conference registration fees, and plane tickets.  and for that last, i’ve had to write paragraphs explaining why i won’t take a flight with a connection that will put me in transit for 12 hours when a direct flight costing $25 more will get me there in 3. i just pay for food/hotel myself.” unclear, inconsistent, burdensome logistics includes opaque, inconsistent, or burdensome processes, unclear, inconsistent, or burdensome criteria, general lack of transparency, lack of financial office/personnel, and general difficulty in applying and/or getting approval. “the largest barrier is the lack of transparency.  on any [sic] given year we don’t know how much money will be granted or available and it is often disbursed somewhat arbitrarily, or at least that’s how it feels since the librarians are left out of the process entirely. some librarians don’t apply for funding because they don’t think it’s worth their time given how it’s distributed.” table g unclear, inconsistent, and burdensome logistics for accessing funding was the most frequently cited barrier. 18% of response codes identified austerity-related barriers, meaning that there was little to no funding available, while other respondents reported low caps on funding. reimbursement issues, such as an inability to pay for costs upfront and lengthy reimbursement processes after, also appeared as barriers. finally, some of our respondents stated that their position itself was a barrier to accessing funding, with their institutions funding some but not others, as one respondent described: “the funding isn’t equitable across departments; our department is told we’ll be reimbursed for one national conference per fiscal year, while others have no such restrictions. still, if you ask the right person and they’re in a good mood, they might approve your travel for a second conference.” some respondents said that funding was claimed too quickly for them to access it. other barriers to accessing funding brought up by our respondents included internal and external competition for funding; lack of staffing for coverage; and internal inequities within the library. lost opportunities and missing voices the final open-ended question asked respondents to “please describe the types of professional development and service opportunities you’ve chosen not to pursue due to their cost.” many respondents gave specific examples of conferences, organizational memberships, and learning opportunities that they had not pursued. the most common codes were: code codebook definition representative response attending conferences  includes international conferences, distant/national, not local conferences, and multiple conferences in one year. “a lot of my conferences i like to attend happen every other year or less frequently than that. sometimes, all of these conferences fall in the same fiscal year. to make these more affordable for me, i can’t attend three conferences that require flights and hotels. i avoid most ala and acrl committees because i can’t afford to attend every year/every conference.” memberships paid memberships in professional organizations, both within librarianship and outside “also, i have chosen to not join national professional associations as the yearly dues are also a little more than my budget can handle right now.” online learning webinars, online courses, certificates, seminars, continuing education “courses, webinars, seminars, conferences basically anything that costs more than $50.” training vendor trainings, technical training, bootcamps, workshops  “i chose not to pursue attending the national user group conference for our ils (part of my job is to support this system). i chose not to attend any training beyond that which is free from vendors. i chose not to pursue training related to our ils, which would have aided in implementing new system features.” table h when asked to describe opportunities they’ve chosen to not pursue due to costs, our respondents frequently reported foregoing conferences at the national, international, and, for some, even at the local level. leadership and training institutes, such as acrl’s immersion program and association memberships were also named as opportunities not taken by our participants. twenty-seven respondents walked away from presentation opportunities due to the costs involved, even after their proposals had been accepted or they’d received a scholarship or award. as one respondent described, “i was selected to attend as a scholarship recipient and because the hotel and flight were outside of my price range, i was unable to attend… i would love to be a member of more organizations but i physically can’t be.” service and leadership opportunities were also foregone by some respondents due to cost. discussion in many cases, academic librarians who wish to retain their jobs cannot choose whether or not to engage in professional development and service. 89% of survey respondents said promotion was based in some part on it, but their participation is not supported. 85% have at some point chosen not to pursue a professional development opportunity due to cost. in this section, we consider the implications of the high cost of academic librarians’ professional development. in her essay on critical approaches to quantitative research, selinda berg (2018) suggests that we also examine the outliers, underrepresented, and statistical minorities in order to develop a more holistic understanding. we agree emphatically with berg when she states that “outliers are no less important despite their smaller numbers” (p. 231). although some of the responses referenced here were not representative, we wish to draw attention to them, as they reflect broader societal inequities.  true costs while ala membership fees have remained stagnant over the past twenty years (wilkinson et al., 2021), data from our survey leads us to believe that affording membership fees is difficult for some academic librarians. 76% of respondents reported that their funding could not be used to pay membership fees; perhaps not coincidentally, ala membership has dropped 11% in the past decade. one survey respondent wrote that they had given up their ala membership: “since my institution doesn’t cover membership costs, i would have to pay my own dues…the tiers, the additional costs for interest groups, then paying even more for access to professional development resources, the costs simply aren’t worth the return.”  members also receive lower conference registration rates, and while registration rates for acrl haven’t increased more than inflation over the past 20 years, registration for ala conferences have (ala annual’s cost has increased 30% and ala midwinter 40%) (wilkinson et al., 2021). survey respondents often talked about their inability to attend major conferences, which affected their decision to pursue professional service: “i elected to not pursue higher level service within acrl to avoid having to attend ala… i can’t save for retirement, pay off my student loans, and defray my medical expenses and spend a lot of time or money to engage beyond what i do now.” other respondents directly connected their inability to pay for professional opportunities with other economic stressors in their lives, such as a high cost of living (notably, the presence of academic institutions often directly affects the cost of housing; see this chart for selected librarian salaries and cost of living): “the main barrier is that there is no institutional funding for faculty, except through grants that won’t cover librarian-specific professional development (but may cover sending a cohort to a particular conference focused on teaching, for example)… given the very high cost of living in my area, i have decided that i simply cannot afford to spend thousands of dollars of my own money traveling to conferences such as ala, acrl, or even the carl conference in california anymore. instead, beginning this year, i’ve decided to rely on free online webinars.” the cost to attend a conference extends beyond registration. one respondent described barriers related to travel “the primary barrier is travel costs – coming from a rural college, the closest airports are 2 hours away, and most destinations require more than one flight to transfer. this typically requires an additional travel day with an additional night of lodging.” additionally, many ancillary costs, such as gas and lodging, have risen in the past twenty years (wilkinson et al., 2021). hidden costs exist for librarians with physical disabilities attending in-person conferences. one survey respondent explained, “i have a disability which sometimes requires that i pay for things like rental mobility devices (if not supplied by the conference), or more expensive transportation options. these extra costs are not accounted for so sometimes i have to skip opportunities because the out of pocket costs would be too much for me to eat.” women are more likely than men to be unpaid primary caregivers (cdc, 2018) and family care was mentioned multiple times as an additional cost: “given my salary and my family obligations, i cannot afford anything more than a couple hours from home, and i cannot stay overnight ever. so if it isn’t local, i don’t go.” financial norms around professional development assume a certain type of academic librarian: middle-class or wealthy, abled, without caregiving responsibilities, partnered or married, and living in an easily accessible metro area. given the systemic financial inequities experienced by library workers from the marginalized groups we described earlier, we suggest that these norms also assume white librarians.  inequitable structures laborious, complicated, or opaque practices and policies to obtain funding or reimbursement was a key theme in our survey results. these opaque processes are part and parcel of a system that privileges and reinforces white, middle-class values, as a. s. galvan (2015) points out. this creates a closed and biased system in which funding is reserved for those who know how to navigate these processes — namely, those who are white and financially secure — and shuts out everyone else. it is essentially the hidden curriculum of academic bureaucracy. one respondent explains: “we have a percentage-based reimbursement model (e.g., 30% of conference registration covered) that is applied inconsistently and capriciously across staff. the overall effect is discouraging…”  another describes how reimbursement after the event acts as a barrier: “the mental gymnastics of planning is a barrier. it’s difficult to plan conference/event expenses when i most [sic] expenses will not be reimbursed until after the conference/event. i try to save money by booking accommodations and travel in advance, but often times [sic] this means i am on the hook for interest accrued on my credit card for 2-3 months…” the practice of reimbursement instead of direct payment emerged as a key barrier in our survey. only 9% reported that their institution paid all costs up front. for the remaining 91%, this means possibly accruing credit card interest, yet another cost and burdensome for librarians experiencing financial precarity. this model also assumes an open line of credit or extra cash on hand. but this isn’t the case for all academic librarians: “i do not have a credit card that can float thousands of dollars at a time while i wait to be reimbursed. i have been told to get a credit card or ask family for money to pay for professional development opportunities.” macroeconomic factors such as student loan debt and the racialized and gendered financial inequities that pervade u.s. society also affect academic librarians. but our policies and systems around professional development and service fail to acknowledge this, instead assuming an ideal academic librarian that doesn’t exist.   ultimately, our survey and subsequent analysis found that levels of institutional support are often insufficient when coupled with the economic constraints faced by many academic librarians. this is often a formidable obstacle for those who need or want to participate in professional development and service, particularly early-career librarians or those facing a tenure/promotion process. covid-19 is already affecting academic libraries, as budgets are preemptively cut to address revenue loss and anticipated enrollment drops (friga, 2020) and will likely exacerbate the inequities we’ve described.  gaps and next steps this paper relies on descriptive statistics and qualitative coding, as we experienced some issues in accessing spss remotely during the pandemic; a next step might include a more complex statistical analysis. we also hoped to be able to analyze the survey results through the lens of racial equity, but realized that we did not have enough data from librarians of marginalized groups to draw meaningful conclusions without compromising the anonymity of the respondents, although our survey sample is representative of the profession in terms of race and gender (bureau of labor statistics, 2019). we do feel this question is incredibly important, however, and hope to work with librarian colleagues from marginalized groups in the future.  conclusion “i find it really ironic and disheartening that a profession so supposedly devoted to equality enforces such financially restrictive and exclusionary practices. attending expensive conferences all but insures [sic] greater recognition and faster advancement for those in more comfortable financial positions.”   we, too, are disheartened and disappointed. the results of our survey are clear: there are significant barriers for librarians to participate in professional development and service. the impact of these barriers? a service ceiling that promotes homogeneity (specifically, whiteness, economic security, and ableism) and suppresses diversity. how many librarians are priced out of contributing to our field due to a lack of financial support from their institutions, the high costs of participation in associations, and an overall bleak economic landscape? we fear that without structural  change, the privilege of working to shape our field through professional development and service will continue to be only available to a small, elite subsection of our colleagues. indeed, librarianship continues to fail in recruiting and retaining workers who are from systematically marginalized communities. this, and the inequities we’ve identified in funding for professional development, narrows both the discussions within and future visions of academic librarianship. we do not hear from so many colleagues, including those who work at community colleges, in rural areas, at institutions that serve marginalized groups, or at under-resourced institutions, and so our initiatives and outcomes often leave them out. acrl 2021 is an apt example. acrl announced in fall 2020 that their biennial conference, recognized as the most prestigious event for us-based academic librarians, would be held exclusively online in april 2021. in december 2020, accepted presenters discovered that the speaker agreement forms required them to register for the conference at the $289 early bird rate. acrl adapted their conference format in acknowledgment of the global pandemic, yet their pricing structure reflects a refusal to acknowledge that the finances of their constituents may have been impacted by the same pandemic. this inconsiderate approach was emphasized by the responses of disappointment to this news on social media (figure e) and by acrl-new jersey’s letter to acrl. our research tells us, with resounding clarity, that those in our field desire to participate in professional development and service, but employers and professional associations deny us this opportunity.  figure e yet, we see promising avenues in our work and elsewhere to combat the service ceiling. to start this process, we must reckon with the ways that white supremacy is embedded in our profession’s professional development and service norms. we erect barriers that (often indirectly) prevent women, academic librarians from marginalized groups, and less well-resourced colleagues from participating in professional development and service opportunities, which in turn negatively impacts their ability to gain promotion or tenure. white supremacy creates a professional culture that silences conversations about financial equity that might shed light on the issues presented in our research. an important step in removing the silence around finances in our field is insisting on financial transparency and accountability at the professional association level–the ala midwinter 2020 budget fiasco particularly highlights the need for transparency by organizations that continually raise prices without disclosing how those costs are distributed across the organization (schwartz, 2020). sliding scale pricing, reparations-aligned pricing, simplified membership fees, virtual participation, and incentives in the form of reduced or comped registration and/or membership for service or participation would all go a long way to making professional development in our field more accessible and equitable. at the personal level, creating a more transparent atmosphere about our individual financial realities can help reduce the implicit pressure to self-fund. we’re taking a small step in this direction by making our salaries public, and encourage our colleagues to be similarly open about their financial privilege and struggles.  because financial inequity in lis professional development and service is linked so heavily to systems of oppression, we recognize the need for this conversation to continue in multiple directions. our group, librarians for equitable professional development, hopes to build on this exploratory research, moving from a single project to a collection of strategic endeavors. more research on this topic needs to be undertaken with marginalized communities in lis; lepd would like to partner with these communities and collect data about their professional development and service experiences. another example of future work we envision taking on is advocating for our major professional organizations to “open their books” to allow us, or other researchers, to audit how membership and conference fees are spent. the end goal isn’t just questioning the fiscal soundness of elaborate receptions at acrl. ultimately, we need our workplaces and professional organizations in librarianship to recognize and dismantle their oppressive, inequitable professional development and service practices. failure to eliminate the service ceiling is racist, ableist, and propagates a scholarly environment of homogeneity and mediocrity. our entire field suffers because of these exclusionary practices. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank our reviewers, lalitha nataraj and kellee warren, and ian beilin for preparing the article for publication. we would also like to thank craig smith, the assessment specialist at the university of michigan library, for his help with drafting and revising the survey. references american library association (2020a). ala-apa library salary database. https://www.ala.org/cfapps/salarysurvey/login/login.cfm american library association. (2020b). ala personal membership: benefits & types. http://www.ala.org/membership/ala-personal-membership-benefits-types  american library association (2010). a guideline for the appointment, promotion and tenure of academic librarians. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/promotiontenure#tenure  anonymous. (2019, may 2). open letter about financial inequalities at academic conferences. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qpd2bhw6md6-kpw70dgqj7dfqw2odh6s8tyfic4yfdk/edit?usp=sharing  berg, s. (2018). quantitative researchers, critical librarians: potential allies in pursuit of a socially just praxis. in k. p. nicholson & m. seale (eds.), the politics of theory and the practice of critical librarianship (pp. 225-235). library juice press. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/leddylibrarypub/52 blessinger, k., & costello, g. (2011). the effect of economic recession on institutional support for tenure-track librarians in arl institutions. the journal of academic librarianship, 37(4), 307–311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2011.04.004 bureau of labor statistics. (2019). household data annual averages: median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by selected characteristics. u.s. department of labor. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat37.pdf bureau of labor statistics. (2020, november 11). occupational outlook handbook, librarians and library media specialists. u.s. department of labor. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/librarians.htm carnegie classification of institutions of higher education. (n.d.) basic classification description. https://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/classification_descriptions/basic.php department for professional employees. (2020) library professionals: facts & figures. afl-cio. https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/library-professionals-facts-and-figures#_edn16  dorning, j., dunderdale, t., farrell, s. l., geraci, a., rubin, r., & storrs, j. (2014). advocating for better salaries toolkit.  american library association. https://ala-apa.org/files/2014/05/2014-ala-apa-better-salaries-toolkit-2.pdf  ettarh, f. (2018). vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves. in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/  executive board of acrl-nj. (2021). new jersey librarians response to acrl 2021 conference fees. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cckbjzfeapgguf8pbski7pttydig9jufldosojx7cog/edit#heading=h.rvjvsq7s7qx7. ferretti, j. (2020). building a critical culture: how critical librarianship falls short in the workplace. communications in information literacy, 14(1), 134-152. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2020.14.1.10 galvan, a. (2015). soliciting performance, hiding bias: whiteness and librarianship. in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/soliciting-performance-hiding-bias-whiteness-and-librarianship/ halperin, j. r. (2018). a contract you have to take: debt, sacrifice, and the library degree. in j. percell, l. c. sarin, p. t. jaeger, & j. carlo bertot (eds.), re-envisioning the mls: perspectives on the future of library and information science education (vol. 44a, pp. 25–43). emerald publishing limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/s0065-28302018000044a003 hardenbrook, j. (2015, february 15).  ala: the membership cost is too damn high? mr. library dude. https://mrlibrarydude.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/ala-the-membership-cost-is-too-damn-high/ jones, k. & okun, t. (2001). the characteristics of white supremacy culture from dismantling racism: a workbook for social change groups. showing up for racial justice. https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html  leebaw, d., & lodsgon, a. (2020). power and status (and lack thereof) in academe: academic freedom and academic librarians. in the library with a lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2020/power-and-status-and-lack-thereof-in-academe/ lourde, a. (2007) sister outsider: essays and speeches. rev. ed. crossing press. ma, j., pender, m., & libassi, cj. (2020). trends in college pricing and student aid, 2020. trends in higher education series. college board. https://research.collegeboard.org/pdf/trends-college-pricing-student-aid-2020.pdf nataraj, l., hampton, h., matlin, t. r., & meulemans, y. n. (2020). “nice white meetings”: unpacking absurd library bureaucracy through a critical race theory lens. canadian journal of academic librarianship, 6, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.33137/cjal-rcbu.v6.34340. parker, k., horowitz, j.m,. & brown, a. (2020, april 21). about half of lower-income americans report household job or wage loss due to covid-19. pew research. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/04/21/about-half-of-lower-income-americans-report-household-job-or-wage-loss-due-to-covid-19/  pew research center. (2016, june 27). on views of race and inequality, blacks and whites are worlds apart. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/06/st_2016.06.27_race-inequality-final.pdf ray, v. (2019). a theory of racialized organizations. american sociological review, 84 (1), 26–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122418822335 schwartz, m. (2020, february 14). american library association’s $2 million shortfall prompts demands for transparency, reform: ala midwinter 2020. library journal. https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailstory=american-library-associations-2-million-shortfall-prompts-demands-for-transparency-reform-ala-midwinter-2020  stahl, l. (2020, october 23). librarian, read thyself. the rambling. https://the-rambling.com/2020/10/23/issue10-stahl/  smigielski, e. m., laning, m. a., & daniels, c. m. (2014). funding, time, and mentoring: a study of research and publication support practices of arl member libraries. journal of library administration, 54(4), 261–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.924309 strand, k. j. (2019). disrupting whiteness in libraries and librarianship: a reading list. university of wisconsin-madison libraries., office of the gender and women’s studies librarian. https://www.library.wisc.edu/gwslibrarian/bibliographies/disrupting-whiteness-in-libraries/ sundstrom, p, & sokoloff, j. (2021). librarian salaries adjusted for local cost of living. https://public.tableau.com/profile/jason.sokoloff#!/vizhome/librariansalarieslocalcostofliving/slopechart. vilz, a. j., & poremski, m. d. (2015). perceptions of support systems for tenure-track librarians, college & undergraduate libraries, 22(2) 149-166. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2014.924845  vinopal, j. (2016). the quest for diversity in library staffing: from awareness to action. in the library with the lead pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2016/quest-for-diversity/  watson, m. (2017). white feminism and distributions of power in academic libraries. in  g. schlesselman-tarango (ed.) topographies of whiteness: mapping whiteness in library and information science (p. 143-174). library juice press. walters, w. h. (2016). faculty status of librarians at u.s. research universities. the journal of academic librarianship, 42(2), 161–171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2015.11.002 webber, k. l., & burns, r. (2020). increases in graduate student debt in the us: 2000 to 2016. research in higher education, 1-24. wilkinson, j., bradham, f., comanda, b., koziura, a., & seale, m. (2021, january 22). lis conference & membership costs 1999-2020. librarians for equitable professional development. https://sites.google.com/view/lepd/projects-news/conference-membership-cost-analysis. appendix a academic librarian professional development and service costs informed consent statement for research protocol # 2001988850, indiana university  about  you are invited to participate in an online survey on the financial costs  related to academic librarian professional development and service in the united states. this  survey’s purpose is to investigate financial equity in lis academic libraries professional  development. professional development includes conference attendance, professional service  and its ties to tenure/promotion, and presenting at conferences & meetings. read the full  recruitment letter. participation  your participation in this survey is voluntary. you may  refuse to take part in the research or exit the survey at any time without penalty.  why is this study being done  the purpose of this study is to investigate financial equity in lis  academic libraries professional development. this research project is conducted by: jaci  wilkinson, head, discovery and user experience, indiana university (principal  investigator)  how many people will take part?  we are hoping to collect responses  from approximately fifty participants but we are not capping the number of responses.  what  will happen during the study?  you will be asked to take a survey asking about your  professional development costs and your position. it should take approximately 10 minutes to  complete.  risks  the possible risks or discomforts of the study are minimal. this survey  asks questions about the support available for librarians’ professional development at your  institution, which may cause you to feel a little uncomfortable answering these more sensitive  survey questions. benefits  you will receive no direct benefits from participating in this  research study. however, your responses will help us learn more about financial equity for  professional development across a wide range of academic libraries, which is currently very  underrepresented in lis research. will my information be protected?  your survey  answers are confidential. no identifying information will be asked of you. as such, no names or  other identifying information would be included in any publications or presentations based on  these data.  will i be paid for participation  you will not be paid for participating in  this study.  will it cost me anything to participate  there is no cost to you for  taking part in this study.  contact  if you have questions at any time about the study or the  procedures, you may contact the principal investigator, jaci wilkinson, at wilkinj@iu.edu . for questions about your rights as a research participant, to discuss problems, complaints, or  concerns about a research study, or to obtain information or to offer input, please contact the iu  human subjects office at 800-696-2949 or at irb@iu.edu . consent  you may print a  copy of this form for your records. clicking the next button in the survey indicates that you have  read the above information, you are 18 years of age or older, and you voluntarily agree to  participate in this study   q2 demographics q30 are you employed as a librarian at an academic institution in the united states? o yes (1)   o no (3)   skip to: end of survey if are you employed as a librarian at an academic institution in the united states?  = no  q3 how long have you been at your current institution?  o0-5 years (1)   o6-10 years (2)   o11+ years (3)   q4 are you in a supervisory role at your current institution?  o yes: supervising mostly staff/faculty (1)   o yes: supervising mostly students (2)   o no (3) q5 what best describes the institution where you currently work?  o community college (1)   o4-year undergraduate college (2)   o comprehensive college (undergraduate and master’s programs) (3)  o research university (4)   o other (5) ________________________________________________  display this question:  if what best describes the institution where you currently work? != community college  q9 what is the estimated size of your current institution? (from the carnegie classification  description for size and setting: four-year category.)  o very small (fewer than 1,000 enrolled) (1)   o small (1,000 – 3,000 enrolled) (2)   o medium (3,001 – 9,999 enrolled) (3)   o large (at least 10,000 enrolled) (4)   display this question:  if what best describes the institution where you currently work? = community college page 4 of 15  q33 what is the estimated size of your institution? (from the carnegie classification description  for size and setting: two-year category.)  o very small (fewer than 500 enrolled) (1)   o small (500 – 1,999 enrolled) (2)   o medium (2,000 – 4,999 enrolled) (3)   olarge (5,000 – 9,999 enrolled) (4)   o very large (at least 10,000 enrolled) (5)   q6 select the description which best describes your institution:  o public (1)   o private (2)   o for-profit (3)   q8 what setting best describes your institution?  o rural (1)   o suburban (2)   o urban (3) q10 how is your current position classified?  o staff (1)   o tenure track faculty (2)   o non-tenure track faculty (4)   o other (3) ________________________________________________  display this question:  if how is your current position classified? != tenure track faculty  q26 does your institution have a promotion system for librarians? o yes (1)   o no (2)   o not sure (3)   display this question:  if how is your current position classified? = tenure track faculty  or does your institution have a promotion system for librarians? = yes  q27 is librarian promotion contingent upon professional development or service? o yes (1)   o no (2)   o not sure (3) q11 are you a member of any library or subject-area professional associations? select all that  apply below and list any additional organizations in the “other” area.  ▢ ala (1)   ▢ acrl (2)   ▢ aasl (3)   ▢ a state library association (4)   ▢ aacu (5)   ▢ sla (6)   ▢ other (7) ________________________________________________ q12 how do you identify?   this question is being asked to identify any potential association between gender identity and  professional development or service funding.  ▢ woman (1)   ▢ man (2)   ▢ transgender (3)   ▢ gender non-conforming (4)   ▢ genderqueer (6)   ▢ non-binary (7)   ▢ prefer to self-describe: (5)   ________________________________________________  ▢ prefer not to say (8) q31 select one or more racial/ethnic categories to describe yourself:  this question is being asked to identify any potential association between race/ethnicity and  professional development or service funding.  ▢ white (1)   ▢ black or african american (2)   ▢ american indian or alaska native (3)   ▢ asian (4)   ▢ native hawaiian or other pacific islander (5)   ▢ hispanic or latinx origin (a person of cuban, mexican, puerto rican, south or  central american descent, or other spanish culture or origin, regardless of race) (8)   ▢ prefer to self-describe: (7)   ________________________________________________  ▢ prefer not to say (6)   q13 professional development and service support   this section of the survey asks about your experience with institutionally-provided financial  support for professional development and service opportunities from the past five years or your most current position (in case you’ve been in your current position less than five years). q15 how does your institution provide professional development funding? oinstitution directly pays (4)   o reimbursement in advance (2)   o reimbursement after the the professional service or service event/opportunity occurs  (1)   o a combination of reimbursement and payment in advance (3)   q16 how much funding for professional development and service do you receive from your  institution annually, on average?  o no funding (1)   o$1 – $250 (2)   o$251 – $500 (3)   o$501 – $1,000 (4)   o$1,001 – $2,000 (5)   o$2,001 – $3,000 (6)   o more than $3,000 (7)   skip to: q18 if how much funding for professional development and service do you receive from your  institution an… = no funding q17 how is funding made available to you by your institution?  oi receive a set amount every year. (1)   oi submit requests for funding for individual opportunities. (2)   oit depends (use text area to explain further). (3)   ________________________________________________  o not sure (4)   q29 what costs does your institutional funding defray?  always (1) sometimes (2) never (3)  conference registration (6) o o o training/workshop/webinar   (in-person or virtual) (7) o o o professional organization   membership dues (8) o o o travel (1) o o o accommodations (2) o o o meals (4) o o o other (5) o o o q18 are there any barriers that prevent you from accessing institutional funding for professional  development or service activities?  o yes (1)   o no (2)   display this question:  if are there any barriers that prevent you from accessing institutional funding for professional dev… =  yes  q19 please describe any barriers that prevent you from accessing institutional funding for  professional development or service activities.  _______________________________________________________________ q20 self-funded professional development and service   this section of the survey asks about your experience with self-funding for professional  development and service opportunities from the past five years or your most current  position (in case you’ve been in your current position less than five years). q21 have you ever had to self-fund a professional development activity or service? please  consider any time you have self-funded, even those beyond a 5-year time frame.       o no (1)   o yes, on occasion. (2)   o yes, my professional development and service is completely self-funded. (3)   skip to: q24 if have you ever had to self-fund a professional development activity or service? please  consider a… = no  q22 which activities have you self-funded? (select all options below that apply). ▢ conference (presenting + attending) (1)  ▢ conference (just attending) (2)   ▢ in-person training (3)   ▢ distance training (e.g. webinar) (4)   ▢ professional membership dues (5)   ▢ other (6) ________________________________________________ q23 how much have you spent of your own money on professional development and service  activities in the past year?  o$0 – $250 (2)   o$250 – $500 (3)   o$501 – $1,000 (4)   o$1,001 – $2,000 (5)   o$2,001 – $3,000 (6)   o more than $3,000 (7)   q24 are there professional development and service opportunities you’ve chosen not to pursue  due to their cost?  o yes (1)   o no (2)   o not sure (3)   display this question:  if are there professional development and service opportunities you’ve chosen not to pursue due to  t… = yes  q25 please describe the types of professional development and service opportunities you’ve  chosen not to pursue due to their cost.  _______________________________________________________________ appendix b q17 · primary code: .702 (substantial agreement) · secondary code: .619 (substantial agreement) q19 · primary code: .778 (substantial agreement) · secondary code: .571 (moderate agreement) q25 · primary code: .931 (almost perfect agreement) · secondary code: .631 (substantial agreement) conferences, funding, labor, professional development, promotion, salary equitable but not diverse: universal design for learning is not enough dismantling the evaluation framework 1 response kathleen mccook 2021–10–31 at 3:11 pm reply another aspect–for lepd– how much have people spent in time and treasure on grassroots involvement with reforma, bcala, aila, apala, cala? attended conferences, participated in panels, contributed to scholarships? both bcala & reforma have virtual celebrations of 50 years in 2021. leave a reply cancel reply save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct working at learning: developing an integrated approach to student staff development – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2014 9 apr jeremy mcginniss /2 comments working at learning: developing an integrated approach to student staff development in brief: in recent years, student staff have become essential to the success of library operations, particularly within higher education. student library employment offers a unique opportunity for students to integrate library-specific knowledge and skills with their academic and personal development. this article will discuss the importance of developing an integrated student staff development approach. by jeremy mcginniss introduction there is an old peanuts cartoon in which lucy derisively comments on linus’s desire to become a doctor, focusing particularly on the fact that linus could never be a doctor because he doesn’t love mankind. in the last panel, linus yells in protest, “i love mankind, it’s just the people i can’t stand.” in april 2012, a colleague and i attended a local consortia meeting. during a post-lunch panel of various academic librarians, the discussion turned to student staff. a particular librarian commented negatively on the abilities of their library’s student staff, indicating that only the librarians were doing real library work. this feeling seemed to be shared, to some degree, by other librarians in the room. while this did not sit right with my colleague or me, to our own failing neither of us responded. on the drive home we began to flesh out what exactly bothered us about the comment as well as our own lack of response. we concluded that if librarians are not happy with the performance of their student staff, then the fault lies with the librarians. this conversation drove us to re-work our entire student staff approach. it is quite easy to take linus’s response and tweak it to fit attitudes that we as librarians can hold: “i love mankind, it’s just the patrons, or this patron, i can’t stand.” “i love mankind, it’s just the volunteer staff i can’t stand.” “i love mankind, it’s just the student staff i can’t stand.” whether these sentiments are stated aloud in a consortia meeting or kept locked in one’s thoughts, they are going to impact the ways in which we as library staff relate to student staff. the foundational impact of student staff on the day-to-day functioning of the library can not be underestimated.  “without the student workers the library could not remain open as long; costs for staffing the circulation desk would increase; document delivery and interlibrary loan services would take too long; materials would not be re-shelved in a timely manner; and processing new books would be slowed.”1 recognizing these tasks are essential for library success is to also recognize reliance on student staff performing those tasks. recognizing the role of student staff reliance on student staff has significantly increased in recent years. consider that in the 1950s, professional librarians comprised 50 to 90 percent of the staff in college and university libraries. by the late 1980s, student staff members outnumbered librarians by a ratio of two to one.2  during the 1990s, libraries passed the point where students were viewed merely as a “…labor reserve for the monotonous and repetitive tasks that are necessary for successful library operation.”3 this is particularly true in higher education, where the library is often perceived as a desirable place to work. the increased number of student staff in conjunction with the learning environment engendered by a collegiate atmosphere provides a unique opportunity; namely, “…library employment would seem to provide students with the opportunity to apply what they learn on the job to their academic studies.”4 the library as an employer is uniquely poised to help student staff synthesize a variety of skills due to the eclectic skill set that library work can require. “it is professional staff members’ responsibility to provide student employees with an opportunity for involvement that is both meaningful and educational while assisting them in becoming successful members of an increasingly global society.”5 what does it mean to provide involvement that is meaningful and educational? for student staff, working in the library should not be disconnected from other areas of life and study. library employment is another avenue to support students as they work to integrate academic, professional and personal skill sets. in order to support this integration, the library must create developmental and assessment processes that will deliberately engage the student staff members recognizing “…work that is more firmly linked to academically purposeful behaviors and conditions would presumably have greater positive effects for the students.”6 in order to hire and train student staff effectively, libraries need to establish comprehensive and structured hiring and training processes. the specifics of these processes are outside of this article’s focus. however, there are many resources in library scholarship and trade publications which can provide assistance in developing robust hiring and training procedures.7 as college and universities work to develop successful and well-rounded students, there is particular focus on deliberately linking the student’s learning in the classroom with their experience outside of it. one of the areas highlighted to help students realize success is that of on-campus employment. if  the academic library should be leading higher education change, academic librarians should be working to develop processes that incorporate student development as part of the broader learning experience. to an extent, libraries and librarians are already doing this. i have had two opportunities over the last year to teach an online continuing education unit on student staff development. in those units i have interacted with librarians across the country who are actively thinking, working, and wrestling with the development and assessment of their student staff. the mutual benefit of these interactions came through the discussions and exchanges of meaningful and educational ways to improve how we are working with our student staff. as a profession we must be more deliberately active in our approach to these areas of student staff development and assessment. this article will argue for an integrated approach to student staff training that works to tie student staff development to other areas of students’ growth and development during their time as undergraduates. examples from the library literature and my own library will be examined. in the conclusion i will provide what i think are some good beginning steps to this process of integration. development many of the articles or books dealing with supervising student staff deal with development in one of two categories: professional staff development or developing student staff skills as related to library positions.8 focus on both of these areas is essential and should continue. typically “development training usually refers to long-term growth: training to improve performance…for student employees development training is usually limited to preparing them for supervisory duties within the department…”9 there’s nothing wrong with this. it is part of our job as professional librarians to improve our libraries. but to view development solely in this light impoverishes the library’s potential  to challenge and grow its student staff. developmental training should be intentionally designed with particular opportunities and planned tasks that allow student staff to practice and work on their own problem-solving, evaluatory, and critical thinking skills. several examples of how i’ve tried to realize this in my library will be discussed below. assessment an essential part of development is regular assessment. “a library that recognizes the need for and benefits of assessment of performance and service presents rewarding opportunities for staff to become more engaged in their work and to identify more strongly with the library’s mission and goals.”10 the goal of assessment is simple: holding student staff accountable to the work they are supposed to be doing, with the expectation of a particular level of quality. in order for assessment to succeed, clearly communicated expectations and requirements must be in place to communicate what successful work in the library looks like. much of the assessment writing on libraries focuses on how the library is performing within the institution. this focus does not necessarily include how specific subsets of the library staff are helping the library meet institutional goals.  “student employment is an important service provided by libraries and it should be included in library assessment plans.”11  some practical examples of assessment of student staff will be provided later in this article. development requires care practically speaking, how does the library become a place that provides space for students to exercise their skills in their roles in the library? as librarians we need to care about all of our staff, student or otherwise. linus reaches an important truth in his response as it is much easier to care for mankind in the abstract then the messy day-to-day negotiations of human relationships. it is impossible to develop your student staff if you don’t care about them. wendell berry sums this up nicely, “i think that the ideal of loving your neighbor has to take on the possibility that he may be somebody you’re going to have great difficulty loving or liking or even tolerating.”12 this is not to say that there are not consequences for mistakes or that students should not ever be fired or released from library employment. rather the library’s approach to its student staff should recognize that students are in process of maturation and growth. by employing them, the library has the opportunity to positively participate in those processes. students in general are a pretty fascinating bunch. cultivating care for your staff gives you the opportunity to get to know them at an individual level. getting to know your staff requires spending consistent amounts of time with them, using that time (staff meetings, periodic evaluations, interactions during shifts) to learn more about their strengths and how students might bring those strengths to bear on their staff roles. for example, this past fall my library implemented libguides and was in the process of trying to figure out ways of highlighting the library’s curriculum manipulatives.13 the morning shift supervisor at the time was a graduate student who had some experience with photography. we had talked about her various photo shoots and efforts to start a website, so her interest in photography was something we chatted about semi-regularly. i do not exactly remember how the idea came up, but through our conversation about how to best use libguides we came up with the idea of holding a photo-shoot for the curriculum manipulatives.  we improvised a backdrop and she artistically arranged the different elements of the manipulatives to highlight their usage. she then uploaded the images to the libguide, along with the item’s description, to allow library users to see exactly what the manipulatives look like. she and i had to work through some issues of communication and expectation together, but the end product turned out well. this type of project is meaningful and provided a significant contribution to the library. caring about student staff is the first step to planning and allowing for meaningful work that contributes to the library’s ability to provide information resources to the campus community. development requires flexibility and time in addition to caring, flexibility and time are needed to avoid a linus-like response to disliking people due to spending time with them. for example, i have found it to be extremely helpful to view student staff training as ongoing and not as a one-time or first semester approach. training is an iterative process that may have to occur in the middle of whatever work that i’m doing requiring me to be flexible and responsive to student staff needs. “training does not end with instructions. it must include the supervisor’s setting an example of the work ethic encouraged by the library culture, and of the sense of fair play, encompassing both positive and negative feedback, that each library promotes for its employees.”14  without time to invest there will be no student staff development. there needs to be time to plan, time to prepare, and time to spend with your student staff as well as time to show that you care. this needs to be planned into your schedule. otherwise, unplanned expenditures of time with your student staff are going to seem like interruptions and hassles. there should also be time given, within reason, for student staff to develop into their roles. students are not sea monkeys where they hit the water and start swimming and growing. my library currently has student staff in their second or third year of library employment who had rough beginnings but are now some of the library’s most valued employees. a particular senior student, early in her library employment, often missed meetings, was flustered easily by patron questions, and lacked confidence in her library role. she was given time to develop in her library position and has taken on leadership roles within the library. i can confidently assign her complex tasks with basic instructions, being sure that she will proceed as far as she is able, attempt some problem-solving, and contact me with any questions. as she is majoring in communications, she took ownership of updating the student staff handbook, allowing her to utilize skills and knowledge gleaned from her major to benefit her library role. practically applying assessment the library staff responsible for supervising students need to communicate a shared standard of what a successful staff member looks like. assessment is an integral part of this communication process. there are two levels on which assessment should occur. assessment serves to examine quality of the job performed as well as the individual performing it. one of the articles that was particularly helpful to the overhaul of my library’s student staff development process was the article gone fishing by carol anne chouteau and mary heinzman, in which they narrate the process by which they wanted to motivate as well as assess student shelving.15 the authors used paper fish to help motivate, train, and track student staff as they shelved books. we derived our own approach from this article. instead of fish, we use approximately 250 8” tall die-cut owls, cut out of bright yellow paper and laminated. these owls reside in a box at the circulation desk. when books are returned, the student staff member writes their initials on an owl with a dry erase marker and after shelving the book places an owl to the left of that book. i (or the library’s part-time staff member) will, throughout the day, review the stacks to pull the owls. we keep track of the total number of owls shelved as well as mistakes. as a result, the precision of student staff shelving has improved. this process also highlights any consistent shelving issues and allows us to meet directly with the student to address them. the student staff member and i can walk back to the shelf, examine the issue, and they can fix it. this provides direct evaluation and ownership of the shelving process and gives opportunity for praise and recognition of students who are doing exemplary work. assessment should also focus on the individual. if working in the library is to contribute to student development, then individual assessment is necessary to communicate that how a student can grow in character areas as well as in skills areas. in my library we have adopted a rubric-based approach taken from linda lemery’s article “student assistant management: using an evaluation rubric”.16 the hardest aspect i’ve found in the rubric-based approach is to present it to the student staff in a way that they can retain the categories and expectations without causing the rubric to be perceived as onerous. the rubric is used to clearly state what is expected from the student staff and staff supervisors.17 in order to set a baseline of expectations, i meet with each student at the beginning of the year to set goals for the year. we discuss the strengths that they bring to the library and some areas of growth that they can focus on for the upcoming year. we also meet at the end of the year to review their progress. at that point the possibility of continued library employment is also considered. we also conduct regular staff meetings, typically occurring once a month throughout the semester. this helps to keep staff on the same page and offers an opportunity to address any questions or staff-wide trainings that need to be accomplished. student schedules can pose some difficulty. i will follow up directly with students who miss the meetings, using doodle to help in the scheduling process. in our staff meetings, because not all of the students work together, we play a modified version of cranium, breaking up the students into teams. having students hum, draw, or act while trying to beat the clock or the other teams has been one of the most helpful aspects of establishing the feeling of a team and sense of cohesion and unity. that being said, a recent reduction in my library from two professional librarians to one has added a layer of difficulty. there is less time to spend with student staff, the extent of training has suffered, and team meetings have been sporadically scheduled. example 1: building stacks what does the application of integrated student development look like in real life? i have two examples that illustrate ways of helping student staff connect their learning outside of the library with the successful completion of library tasks. we recently updated the layout of our curriculum lab which required book shifting and stack adjustment. there are two particular staff who share two evening shifts during the week. i took this opportunity to hand the specific project of adjusting the stacks to these two student staff individuals. before the stacks could be built, the shelves had to be emptied of books and removed. the two students did a good job of removing the books in such a way as to allow them to still be largely usable while they completed the stack adjustment project. granted, they missed a few things in the shelf re-building process that we had to go back and fix together. i might have been able to bypass this but i wanted to give them an opportunity to practice some of the mechanical and problem-solving skills i had observed. i had a fair amount of confidence in their abilities but wanted to confirm that they could work together, problem-solve effectively, and inform me of any issues. library employment should offer students the opportunity to experiment with solutions to various issues. the development process is not clear-cut or a step-by-step program to success. evaluating and assessing are not in place just to tell the student staff whether or not they hitting the mark, but to also highlight accomplished work so that the value of that work can be recognized. “student success is promoted by setting and holding students to standards that stretch them to perform at high levels, inside and outside the classroom.”18 example two: video project a second example of how a library can work to develop its student staff can be found in projects that are not explicitly related to library employment. this semester a student staff member and i are working together on a series of short videos featuring professors from around the school talking about books they enjoy. the video series was the student’s idea. we tossed the idea back and forth, developed a loose script, emailed a handful of professors and dove into the project. as the project continues, i contact the professors, the student staff member oversees the shooting and editing, and we collaborate together on the other details of the project. this takes time. time i could be spending doing other library work. however, a project like this not only benefits the library but also gives this student a chance to hone his interests, abilities, and skills as a filmmaker to craft some great short videos. he is also working with our campus videographer in regards to light, graphics, and layout, so there is a level of interdepartmental interaction and support. i deliberately try to make sure i’m not taking over the project. as questions about direction, shot angles, time limits, etc. come up, i consciously make the effort to push those questions back to him so that he is responsible for the final decision. the idea for this video series developed because this student works in the library. if he had not been hired, we would not have crossed paths. while the planning, shooting and editing of the videos are outside of his regular library employment, the library has provided a platform from which he can grow this particular skill set. additionally, these videos will serve as helpful marketing tools for the library. creating the videos has also been very fun. it has provided interaction with professors on another level, helping them to remember the value of the library for students in their classes and their particular discipline. transition one of the hardest parts of student staff development, in my mind, is transition. student staff are eventually going to leave. they graduate, transfer, or find other employment. there needs to be mental preparation for this because, whether you realize it or not, you most likely have an expectation for the work that was done and now need to communicate that expectation to the individual who is going to fill the departed student’s staff shoes. for example, this fall my library had to hire for a maintenance position. this student staff member is responsible for emptying trash, filling the printers, changing light bulbs, etc. the student in that position and i work together to address the physical plant issues in the library. the previous student was fantastic. i relied on his responsibility and initiative. he was extremely consistent and followed through with each task. he graduated and thus a replacement needed to be hired. about two weeks into the semester there were tasks going unfinished and i realized that i had communicated the requirements of the job but not the expectations. i sat down with the new hire and he and i worked out a schedule and set expectations for how and when he was going to get his work done. it is very easy to expect new workers to simply be clones of previous excellent workers. instead, student staff need to be held to an objective set of requirements that is clearly presented to them. this is why using a rubric-based approach is especially helpful, so that students are aware of our expectations. conclusion i am not writing this article because i believe my library has the best student staff development approach. if you ever visited you would find a competent and effective staff but we are not without issues. student staff development is not about creating a perfect student staff but rather helping students to develop an integrated, holistic view of their work and education, so that they are better equipped for whatever they end up doing post-college. however “…while the vision and potential of collaborative learning are enticing, the reality of implementation is much more challenging.”19 realizing student staff development as collaborating with student learning is hard work and there is no silver bullet to ensure success. however, i do believe that “supervising student staff is an amazing, exhausting and exhilarating experience.”20 i strive to operate with the assumption that my student staff are fantastic and i try to demonstrate that through my interactions with them, the tasks that are given, and the way that the hiring, training, developing and assessment processes are conducted. this article is not meant to be merely illustrative of what one library is doing. as a profession we need to add the topic of student staff development to the conversations we are already having about the library’s future role in academia and public life. we need to recognize the value that student staff bring to their library positions. recognizing that value will change how we talk about our student staff and how we talk with them. what are your student staff majoring in? what are they good at? what do they enjoy doing? how does what makes your student staff members interesting and unique contribute to the library’s impact on campus?  let’s collectively evaluate our current student staff development processes to determine the level of integration with students’ learning outside of library employment.  if a library does not have concrete and evaluatory processes for student staff in place, those need to be established. we need to consider student staff development as something that not only improves our libraries but is significant in the holistic development of the library’s student staff. by making the effort to take these steps, we will realize the value of our student staff, the value of the work they do, and, ultimately, the value of the library. some of these conversations and discussion are already happening but on a limited scale. i understand that this can be a sensitive area for a librarian to discuss. in sharing what you are doing with your student staff you may feel as though you are stating “i have arrived and my student staff are flawless!” we should not wait for our student staff to reach perfection before we start sharing our processes and ideas with each other. the comment section of this article is a great place to start. i look forward to the discussion.  my deep and sincere thanks to the eminently capable lead pipe editors-erin, ellie, emily and hugh-who gave copious insight and detailed feedback to direct and guide this article. my thanks as well to josh michael as external editor for his erudite input and our time together as colleagues. further reading choutea, carol anne; mary heinzman. “gone fishing; using the fish! business model to motivate student workers”. technical services quarterly vol. no. 3 2007. pp. 41-49. jacobson, heather a., shuyler, kristen s. “student perceptions of academic and social effects of working in a university library”. reference services review vol. 41 no. 3, 2013. kuh, george d., jillian kinzie, et al. student success in college: creating conditions that matter. jossey-bass, san francisco. 2005. lemery, linda d. “student assistant management: using an evaluation rubric”. college & undergraduate libaries, vol. 15 (4), 2008. pp. 451-462. perozzi, brett. enhancing student learning through college employment dog ear publishing. bloomington, in, 2009. slagell, jeff; langendorfer, jeanne m. “don’t tread on me: the art of supervising student assistants” the serials librarian vol. 44, nos 3-4, 2003. pp. 279-284. p. 148. maxey-harris, charlene;  cross, jeanne; mcfarland, thomas. “student workers: the untapped resource for library professions.” library trends 59, nos. 1-2, 2010. [↩] p. 635 stanfield, andrea g. and russell l. palmer, “peer-ing into the information commons: making the most of student assistants in new library spaces.” reference services review vol. 38, no. 4, 2011. [↩] p. 87 clark, charlene k. “motivating and rewarding student workers” journal of library administration  21, no. 3/4 1995. [↩] p. 547. jacobson, heather a., shuyler, kristen s. “student perceptions of academic and social effects of working in a university library.” reference services review 41, no. 3 2013. [↩] p. 199. scrogham, eve; mcguire, sara punksy. “orientation training and development” in perozzi, brian (ed.) enhancing student learning through college employment. dog ear publishing.  bloomington, in. 2009. [↩] p. 549.  jacobson, heather a., shuyler, kristen s. “student perceptions of academic and social effects of working in a university library.” reference services review 41, no. 3, 2013. [↩] for a brief list please see richard mckay’s “inspired hiring: tools for success in interviewing and hiring student staff.” library administration & management 20, no. 3, 2006: 128-134. see also the beginning of nora murphy’s “when the resources are human:managing staff, students, and ourselves.” journal of archival organization 7, no. 1-2, 66-73. see also david baldwin, and daniel barkley’s supervisors of student employees in today’s academic libraries. libraries unlimited, 2007. [↩] for professional staff development see as example elaine z. jennerich’s “the long-term view of library staff development.” college and research library news  67, no. 10. 2006: 612-614. [↩] p. 170 baldwin, david; barkley, daniel . supervisors of student employees in today’s academic libraries. libraries unlimited, 2007. [↩] p. 156. oltmanns, gail v. “organization and staff renewal using assessment.” library trends 53, no. 1, summer 2004. [↩] p. 560  jacobson, heather a., shuyler, kristen s. “student perceptions of academic and social effects of working in a university library.” reference services review 41, no. 3, 2013 [↩] p.10 williamson, bruce. the plowboy interview” in grubbs, morris allen (ed.) conversations with wendell berry. university press of mississippi. 2007. [↩] curriculum manipulatives are hands-on items that are focused on kindergarten through elementary age students to teach particular concepts. for example if you were teaching a class on currency or mathematics  you could check out out a bunch of cardboard coins. if you were teaching a class on counting, proportions or weight, you could check out brass weights, several different kinds of scales, etc. [↩] p. 83. burrows, janice h. “training student workers in academic libraries: how and why.” journal of library administration 21, no.3/4, 1995. [↩] see carol anne choutea; mary heinzman. “gone fishing; using the fish! business model to motivate student workers”. technical services quarterly 24, no. 3, 2007. pp. 41-49. [↩] see linda d. lemery’s “student assistant management: using an evaluation rubric”. college & undergraduate libaries 15, no. 4, 2008. pp. 451-462. [↩] for a particularly helpful article on rubric use and writing see megan oakleaf’s “using rubrics to collect evidence for decision-making: what do librarians need to learn?” evidence based library and information practice 2, no. 3, 2007. pp. 27-42. [↩] p. 269 kuh, george d., jillian kinzie, et al. student success in college: creating conditions that matter. jossey-bass, san francisco. 2005. [↩] p. 101. arum, richard; josipa roksa. academically adrift: limited learning on college campuses. university of chicago press, chicago. 2011. [↩] p. 218. scrogham, eve; mcguire, sara punksy. “orientation training and development” in perozzi, brian (ed.) enhancing student learning through college employment. dog ear publishing. bloomington, in. 2009. [↩] books behind bars: a volunteer-run prison library service in winnipeg, manitoba librarian, heal thyself: a scholarly communication analysis of lis journals 2 responses pingback : nothing to do with theology | outside my door hannah chapman 2014–04–15 at 6:16 pm this is a fantastic and thought provoking article. having the experience of working at the campus library during my undergraduate career and now working in the access services department of another academic library, i can see the value in holding students to a higher standard. i am very grateful for my formative experiences during my undergraduate employment. how can we seek provide those meaningful experiences for student workers at large institutions, or to change the culture associated with being a student worker at a particular library? this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct presentation = speech + slides – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2008 17 dec derik badman /17 comments presentation = speech + slides by derik badman back in october, aaron schmidt posted “howto give a good presentation” to his blog walking paper. his second bullet point of “thoughts” on good presentations is: please don’t fill your slides with words. find some relevant and pretty pictures to support what you’re saying. you can use the pictures to remind yourself what you’re going to say next… your presentation should be *very* incomplete without your narration. this is something i have been working on since i started giving presentations professionally. i sat through a lot of bad presentations in the past few years, and, while some of them were bad just because the content was poor or uninteresting, many of them were just poorly formatted. in the comments on aaron’s post, kevin driedger added: …my thoughts on slides – they should illustrate the talk, like a nice illustrated book… (comment #10) this lead me to a subject my thoughts often settle on: comics. in this case the equation: presentation = slides + speech [1] comics = image + text earlier this year i started using hand drawn images in my slides (see this pdf for an example), instead of bulleted lists or photographs, but i hadn’t yet given much thought to the factor that is common to both presentations and comics: image-text interaction. a number of definitions of comics emphasize this factor, going all the way back to rodolphe topffer, the father of the comics form, who, in 1837 describing one of his histoires en estampes, wrote: this book is of a mixed nature. it is composed of a series of line drawings. each of these drawings is accompanied by one or two lines of text. the drawings, without this text, would only have an obscure significance; the text, without the drawings, would signify nothing. [2] this interdependence between image and text is at the core of the form of comics, and the same concept can be easily applied to presentations. not all presentations necessarily require slides (or words for that matter), as a lecture without slides or a silent slideshow also form a presentation. in that interim place between all slides and all speech, i preliminarily posit some types of slide-speech interaction [3]: 1. slides and speech are redundant: this is the classic boring presentation. a slide shows a list of bulleted items while the speaker reads them off or even worse reads whole sentences and paragraphs off the slides. this redundancy of two information channels is disengaging. most attendees will read the list for themselves more quickly than the speaker can say them. the redundancy of text and image does not provide any space for friction, thought, or curiosity. in many cases, where the speaker is not significantly elaborating on the slides’ text, the speaker becomes peripheral and even unnecessary. old comics are great for this sort of tedious redundancy: from sheena, queen of the jungle 11 (spring 1951): 9. 2. slides and speech are independent: this is veering into performance, but i can imagine a presentation where the speech and the slides tell separate narratives. this is not to say that the two narratives are completely unrelated; often the point is to draw on the conflict or similarities between the two. a library conference is probably not the place to be experimenting with such things though, unless you have something really well done and interesting planned. even comics examples of this tactic are extremely rare, the most popular example being a short story by chris ware called “i guess” [4]. panels from chris ware’s “i guess” 3. speech carries presentation: at some point people stopped just talking and started using slides and other media. i can’t think of many examples of straight-up speeches that i’ve seen at conferences, other than some keynotes (by non-librarians) at acrl. more common is a cursory use of slides that tend to be brief, visually dull, and do little to add anything to the speech. i used to make a lot of slides that would fall into this category, for instance: one of my boring slides from 2006. these slides were accompanied by lots of talking. the slides act as little more than placeholders, a visual signifier to back-up the speech and add a small portion of emphasis. this type of presentation is not necessarily bad, but it does require a speaker who is dynamic and engaging. depending on the presentation’s content, this format may leave something to be desired in its ability to convey information in a complete manner. if i am speaking about a web application, having a number of screenshots in the slides can aid greatly in comprehension for the audience. this type of speech and slide combination is rather popular, getting praise for guy kawasaki (who uses 10 slides with short words or phrases on them) or the “takahashi method” (using very large words). another example of this is lawrence lessig’s well-regarded style. he uses a lot of slides with a small amount of text or simple images, but he displays them at a rapid rhythm. i find the visuals in the few presentations of his i’ve looked at online to be mostly superfluous, seeming to serve primarily as a visual attention grabber (give the audience something to look at) than as an additional channel of new information. though, i shouldn’t ignore the utility of slides as attention grabber; it is a valid use. 4. slides carry presentation: this type of presentation is rarely seen at conferences. it belongs more to the classic vacation slideshow (“and this is the little cafe in paris we went to on our first morning”) or, in current times, watching a slideshow from a flickr photo set than to what someone would expect from a professional presentation. this may be the appropriate style for certain types of presentations, but one would need a good sense of design and visual narrative to pull off something like this successfully. information that is process or space oriented might be the best candidates for visually driven slides that require little added speech. reader participation bonus section: find me a good example of this in a presentation. 5. slides and speech share duties in conveying a point: i believe this is the ideal mode for most speech + slides presentations. when visually appealing slides complement the speech, the presenter can engage multiple senses of the audience members. the conjunction of the multiple channels of words and image (sound and image) can create a synthesized effect that is greater than each individual’s. this “wow,” sit-up-and-take-notice factor is one of the joys of comics. even in the most basic of comics, something like a new yorker single panel, the humor and the pleasure of reading comes from the picture and the text creating something that does not exist in either one independently. a similar sense of pleasure and creation can come from the well planned slide/speech conjunction, often through contrast, metaphor, or unexpected juxtaposition. the following comic, for instance, would not have the same effect if the text or image were viewed separately: peter arno from the new yorker 12 apr 1930 for brevity’s sake, i must here ignore numerous other complications that arise from considering the interaction between speech, text on a slide, and image on a slide. i will also leave out much discussion of how the rhythm with which the slides are changed can effect the presentation. the simplest of slides can be effective if they are quickly moved through, while more detailed slides could retain interest for long periods of time as speech is used to elaborate on the visuals (the classic example i can think of is an art history lecture where a single work is shown and discussed at length, though even this can be improved with detail views.). as i noted above, lawrence lessig’s slides are often not very interesting in themselves (a word or two), but he moves through them quickly enough that the viewer’s interest can be maintained. many people seem to think slides need lots of text so the audience can have something to take home and re-visit or so people who didn’t make the presentation can take advantage of the presenter’s information. slides with little or no text would be mostly opaque on subsequent viewings. i would offer a few responses to this concern. a presentation is made for the audience, the people who show up to listen. a presentation done well should not be easily boiled down to a mass of text (else, why not just write an article or a blog post). it should take advantage of its particular form/media. the best method for re-visiting the presentation or archiving for those unable to attend is a recording. cheap options are available to make multimedia presentations available online. when i presented in second life a few months ago (which i talked a bit about in my previous post to this publication), i followed up by creating a recording of my voice over the slides. in this case i re-created the presentation, recording a new version of my speech–rather than recording the original live–and then syncing it over the slides. in this way, an interested party could watch my presentation in a form closer to the actual event than a simple deck of slides. if you want to have a take away for the audience, printing out your slides is a cop-out. there are better options. i’ve previously handed out (posted) my speaking notes as a complement to slides, allowing for viewers to at least get the main points i spoke about to accompany the slides. a simple sheet (half-sheet if you want to conserve paper) of main points and, if appropriate, urls or citations can act as a reminder and reference for attendees when they get back from the event. creating a presentation that utilizes an interesting combination of speech and slide does take more time and effort than a bulleted list. besides the conceptual effort, the actual creation of the slides can become time consuming. you can create your own images (drawing, photography, etc.), but even for those without such skills, plenty of options are available to take advantage of other’s artistic work. free photos are available through various creative commons sites (like flickr’s) and there are numerous options for clip art–good clip art (check out the many options from dover books) not that clip art that comes with ms office [5]. the presentation of information should be important to our profession. after all, the fourth of the acrl information literacy standards includes: 3. the information literate student communicates the product or performance effectively to others. outcomes include: a. chooses a communication medium and format that best supports the purposes of the product or performance and the intended audience b. uses a range of information technology applications in creating the product or performance c. incorporates principles of design and communication d. communicates clearly and with a style that supports the purposes of the intended audience i’m not sure how directly practical all of the above is, but i hope it at least gets people thinking about the topic. presentations can be interesting for many different reasons, and one of them is the form. i realize some of the forms above might be too “arty” for most presentations, but i don’t think it is outside the realm of reason to add more art to our conferences. art can convey information as well (if not better) than dry technical work. creativity should never be overlooked in our work. next time you are making a presentation, set aside extra time to work on your slides, not just to make them but to think about them and how they will interact with what you will say. if we challenge ourselves and our audiences, we will not only have more interesting presentations, but we will all get our brains working a little more. further reading: there are tons of books and websites about slides and presentations and the dreaded powerpoint. there are also hundreds of books on design. you can also learn a lot from just looking at art and design and examples of great presentations. you might start with: presentation zen. thanks to aaron schmidt, kim leeder, and ellie collier for comments on the content and lianne hartman for editing. image credits: “sheena” image is in the public domain. drawing by robert webb. “i guess” image copyright chris ware. arno comic copyright the new yorker. notes: [1] i’ll admit that we could consider a speaker’s movements and body language a third factor, but that’s a whole other topic, one that is rarely put to use in librarian presentations i’ve seen. this is a channel of information that is particularly missing in the webinar format. [2] quoted from: kunzle, david. history of the comic strip vol. 2: the nineteenth century. berkeley, ca: university of california press, 1990. 46. [3] borrowing a bit from scott mccloud’s understand comics where he describes and names a number of image-text interactions. [4] from raw 2.3 (1991). [5] i’m told there is a good collection in word from istock photos. it’s not on my mac, so i haven’t seen it. comics, design, presentations, slides social networking with a brain: a critical review of academic sites editorial: getting to know you… even better 17 responses derik badman 2008–12–17 at 10:00 am austin kleon reminded me of this post at his blog about powerpoint and comics: http://www.austinkleon.com/2008/05/13/for-successful-powerpoint-presentations-look-to-cartoonists/ i wish i would have remembered that while working on my post. derik badman 2008–12–17 at 10:04 am austin links to a talk with scott mccloud about powerpoint and comics. great quote: ca: what sort of pacing works for you? sm: i really like to keep up with the speed of thought. i would much rather my audience be a half-second behind than five minutes ahead. powerpoint gives me that ability if i want to really load that visual carousel and zap through them as fast as i can. when you have those text heavy slides and you are reading them aloud, the audience is five minutes ahead. jenny 2008–12–17 at 10:42 am a major pet peeve of mine is the powerpoint printout that accompanies a presentation. wouldn’t an outline get the job done just as well, and take up less paper? just yesterday i went to a workshop that had this, along with a huge amount of supplemental handouts. the result was a large sheaf of papers that was cumbersome and time-consuming when it came to navigation. austin kleon 2008–12–17 at 10:49 am i highly recommend nancy duarte’s new book, slide:ology. not only is it the best book on slide presentations i’ve ever read, it’s also a crash course in design, with great sections on color and composition. check it out! walt crawford 2008–12–17 at 11:31 am some of us do still do speeches without ppt…unless the topic absolutely, 100% requires visuals. but then, half of my speeches over the last decades have been keynotes, and i’m not really speaking much any more. so maybe your semi-dismissal of the non-ppt approach is appropriate. as for ppt printouts: can’t we at least “green” conferences enough to skip those and let people look at them on the web? talk about waste paper… walt crawford 2008–12–17 at 12:28 pm another quick note: your article is so good that i’ve excerpted it (very brief excerpts) as a new section in the palinet leadership network article “presentations.” derik badman 2008–12–17 at 12:33 pm jenny: i have to agree. and it’s not very green either. austin: my library has slide:ology on order, i look forward to reading it. walt: thanks for the linking/quotation. trista 2008–12–17 at 12:38 pm what a fresh way to look at slide presentations! i have read so much lately about how to improve your presentations, but felt that much of it has been said before. tying in comic books to illustrate your argument is brilliant and makes the information stick so much better. i’m looking forward to using these ideas in my next ppt. thanks brett bonfield 2008–12–17 at 12:44 pm as far as an example of #4 goes, this may be cheating, but what about david heinemeier hansson’s first ruby on rails video? it’s still available at http://www.rubyonrails.com/screencasts — just look for the screencast for ruby on rails 0.5. in my mind, this presentation, ca. 2004 or 2005, was probably the landmark moment for ruby, rails, and screencasting. it’s funny, though: watching it now is a bit like watching the original star wars. i remembered an audio track in the rails video, but i guess i was wrong, because there isn’t one. it’s just dhh installing rails and creating an app. back to your point: this presentation is process-oriented, as you noted in discussing “slides carry presentation,” and it’s also not a deck of slides, it’s a screencast. but it’s also a nice reminder that sometimes the best thing a presenter can do is eliminate commentary and let a process or space speak for itself. ann wilberton 2008–12–17 at 4:25 pm i loved this post. it provided an interesting take on art of the slide presentation. i’ve been away from librarianship for 3 years and recently returned. i have been surprised by the number of folks who post their presentations online. this practice would be informative except that frequently there is no accompanying notes or audio. slides with one or two words or just a picture are great live while you are there to hear the speaker. but, later, as an online resource, they are basically useless. it has become a frustrating result when searching for current thought on library issues. i encourage folks to add notes or audio to make them truly useful for folks who did not attend their original presentation. stevenb 2008–12–17 at 9:48 pm nice job on your post derik – a good way to think about different approaches to presenting. you may want to watch a video of a seth godin presentation. based on your categorizations it may be his is of the lessig type. but it’s a rapid fire series of slides – mostly all images that are timed to fit near precisely with his text – so you are constantly subjected to new images – a number of which are pretty amusing – and his discussion of the topics. the images don’t always match the text but most will. it’s clearly a well choreographed presentation – beyond the time most librarians can put into presentation preparation. but he really engages the audience. what about video in presentations? i have been trying it. it gives me a short break to regroup and it can set up a discussion within the presentation. most presentations exclude the attendees. what style might be best to engage them in the presentation as participants? derik badman 2008–12–18 at 10:30 am thanks, steven. i found this recent presentation by godin, and based on that one, he is using his speech and slides in an complimentary way more so than what i’ve seen of lessig’s presentation. he’s not changing too rapidly in that example, but he is often using images that are relevant to his speech but not in a direct word for word correlation. i really don’t have an opinion about videos in presentations. haven’t seen it happen very often. a lot would depend on how much the video is appropriate. is it just filling time or is it really adding something. i think the more the slide-speech interaction is getting the audience to make connections and to think, the more they are engaged. but that’s not in isolation of just plain old interesting and engaging topics (which, if lacking, makes all of these styles pointless). laura z 2008–12–18 at 10:06 pm i like the concept of having the handout be its own take-home thing separate from what/how you may be presenting. this seems so obvious and yet is a big “duh” to me. i also liked that you said “the presentation of information should be important to our profession.” i think it actually would behoove information professionals to take acting lessons and communications classes. i’m just saying. ellie 2008–12–23 at 2:15 pm thanks for this derik. the majority of my presentations end up going live to the software i’m talking about, or using screen shots if i’ve planned that far ahead. this does make for very little to give to people as take-aways or for them to see when i post my presentation later. recording the audio track will go on my future to do lists. kathryn greenhill 2008–12–24 at 5:52 am hi derik. nice article. thank you. just fyi, i have created a very video-heavy presentation. i was talking to a mob of art librarians about second life, and wanted to keep the presentation tight. i made separate machinima and interspersed it throughout my talk… 1) a flying tour of info island. 2) a tour through an art garllery on info island two and then a tour through the museum of music to show how good interactive design can be used in second life exhibits 3) an avatar walking through and interacting with an art installation funded with a $20k australia council grant. … i spoke over these bits, so neither the talking or visual part of the presentation would have worked in isolation. i also included lots and lots of screenshots that i used to illustrate my points as i talked. the night before most of my presentations, i open up audacity, slip on a headset and record my talk exactly as i intend to do it. i can then quickly make a slidecast if i have time. i think of that as my handout. it also means that if someone asks me months and months later to give the same or similar talk, i understand what all the slides mean … i never write a text outline of what i am going to say… caleb 2009–01–08 at 5:48 pm i loved this post, thanks a lot. some of the best presentations i’ve been to assume that the audience is smart, and can make a few leaps between what’s on the screen and what the speaker is saying. from the exception-that-proves-the-rule department, when you are giving a presentation at an international conference (and i recommend this highly), many people in the audience may not be native speakers of the conference lingua franca and it is a good idea to summarize your talk in bullet points on slides so that everyone can follow what you are saying. good communication is full of nuance, and it sucks to not understand what someone is saying just because they think bullet points in powerpoint are evil. and um yeah, i was the guy who did it wrong. derik badman 2009–01–09 at 11:54 am caleb: in a multilingual situation, i might, instead of putting summaries on the slides, make sure handouts are available of notes/summaries for people to follow along, that way i could still use interesting slides without negatively affecting some of the audiences comprehension. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct editorial: all i want for 2010 – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2009 30 dec editorial board, ellie collier and brett bonfield /3 comments editorial: all i want for 2010 all i want for 2010: brief notes about practical or totally pie-in-the-sky ideas for things we’d like to see happen in our libraries, in libraries in general, or in the profession we thought the new year would be a good time for us to get together and do another group post; what do we want for 2010? comment on this post and tell us: what do you want for 2010 in your library, in libraries in gen eral, or in the profession? by editorial board, ellie collier, and brett bonfield ellie on a purely personal level, i’d like to get a fantastic response rate on the environmental scan my library will be performing this spring semester. on a broader level i’d love to see more libraries performing their own user studies and publicizing their results. for pie-in-the-sky i want catalogs magically fixed. emily i’d love to see a radical expansion of public access policies (like the nih public access policy) that are responsible to researchers, archivists, librarians, and the public. as a matter of fact, the office of science and technology policy is currently taking public comment regarding expansion of public access policies. if we can give good feedback to inform the shape of future public access, then maybe we can have a public access model that works for everyone involved: researchers who want to disseminate their work, librarians who help people find that work, libraries that can consult on creating repositories, publishers that remain important in the peer-review model, and the public that funds the very research at stake. brett i want to see some amazon libraries. to me, the idea seems so obvious i can’t believe it hasn’t yet happened: a full partnership between amazon and a subset of public libraries–maybe a group of independent municipal libraries, or perhaps entire library systems. the legal arrangements would take some doing, but i think it would be worth it for amazon. fedex purchased kinko’s, and ups purchased mail boxes etc., in order to have a large, trusted network of brick-and-mortar retail outlets. amazon could benefit from a similar arrangement by appealing to in-person, impulse, and last-minute shoppers, and it could also reduce its warehousing and last mile expenses. for example, it could begin offering free shipping on any purchase for customers willing to pick up their items at a local library, a common practice among retailers such as rei and nordstrom. amazon could then raise the minimum for free home delivery from its current limit of $25. i don’t think a new minimum of $50 or even $100 would be unreasonable–after all, if these customer want their purchases shipped for free all they have to do is visit their local public library. as beneficial as this arrangement could be for amazon, i think it could be even more of a boon to participating libraries: amazon’s website is more usable than any library website i’ve ever seen; library operations, especially our collection development activities, are inefficient and expensive–and we still don’t have useful predictive statistics, which can cause long waits for popular items and encourages us to rely heavily on ill; library cataloging is very good, but it’s frequently slow, and we almost always duplicate effort. by partnering with amazon, libraries could outsource many of these activities to an organization that is among the world leaders in each area. amazon would manage its partner libraries’ technical infrastructure and material-related operations; in exchange, libraries would handle all in-person transactions and customer service. depending on availability, cardholders would have the option to borrow or buy popular items–and could still rely on their libraries to offer reference services, training and programming, and other activities library users have come to expect. the cost savings for participating libraries, plus the revenue they could earn by selling some items instead of just lending them, would help these libraries become far more solvent. the only obvious danger would be to privacy, but that could be handled by storing circulation records on-site and purging any personally identifying data before it is uploaded to amazon. that is, assuming people want to maintain their anonymity. for those who don’t–that is, for those who want to use their amazon login in place of a library card–they could enjoy amazon’s tailored shopping experience at the library they know and love. hilary pie-in-the-sky for libraries in general:  i’d like to see augmented reality apps (demo using layar) to be developed for use in libraries to expose collections and services.  the ncsu libraries is nearly there with its wolfwalk application. as a practical application for libraries in 2010, i hope to see the implementation of a more effective way to manage collections, especially licensed content like journals and databases, alongside things like usage patterns and return on investment analytics.  keep an eye on the ambitious efforts from oclc (have some spare time? check out this video presentation) and the ole project to see who gets there first. related to the profession, i hope that sla can recover from its name change initiative (identity crisis perhaps?) and continue to advocate for its members in an intentional, strategic, valued, and thoughtful way.  in an historic vote to change the name or keep the name, the process made members think about what it means to be a member of a professional organization – defining expectations, questioning sla’s motivations – and it fractured the member pool soon after the organization reached its 100 year-old birthday.  sla has been my professional organization of choice, and i hope that 2010 is a year of renewal and momentum in the right direction for sla. kim well, since you asked… all i personally want for 2010 is to be granted tenure: magically, early, and without all the hassle! (just kidding.) just as pie-in-the-sky, though, here’s my wish: all i want for 2010 is a national referendum requiring that true research skills be taught as part of the k-12 school curriculum, including lessons on how to distinguish different types of online and print resources, how to find authoritative research, and how to be a critical information consumer. i would like to see students in my classes who understand that not all information is good information. i would also like to see colleges and universities embrace the national movement in research instruction (that i just invented) and apply it to the higher education curriculum so that all college students learn advanced research skills as they broaden and advance their educations. i would like to see us raise a new generation of information savvy american citizens who think critically about the information they receive as they move through our diverse, opinionated, and complex world. if i may be granted a second wish, i wish for the american library association to find its way in reinventing itself as an association, and as a set of associations, that might better support and inspire librarians and libraries around the country. 2010, ala, amazon, augmented reality, environmental scan, group post, ideas, ncsu, new year, public access policies, sla, wishes how do you say no? vision and visionaries: a whole bunch of questions to start off 2010 (as if you didn’t have enough of those already) 3 responses andrew klein 2010–01–06 at 1:18 pm where’s derik? slacker. ;) i was just thinking to myself over the holidays about how augmented reality could be useful in libraries. nice to see i’m not the only one with that on my mind. derik badman 2010–01–06 at 3:23 pm my brain wasn’t working last week. i was sick. pingback : pligg.com this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct a short distance correctly: 13 ways of (not) writing (contrarian) librarianship – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2011 18 may leigh anne vrabel /52 comments a short distance correctly: 13 ways of (not) writing (contrarian) librarianship by leigh anne vrabel “it’s one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way in order to come back a short distance correctly.” –edward albee, the zoo story i it’s all fun and games until somebody gets locked in her office. by “somebody” i mean “me,” and by “locked in” i mean the deadbolt committed suicide so quietly that until i tried to take my dinner break, nobody realized what had happened. as captivities went, it was a cushy one: landline, cell phone, computer with t-1 connection, snacks, water, something to read. on top of that, the walls of my office stop about three feet short of the ceiling, an architectural development that guarantees i will be shushed at least once a week by a patron who does not find my indoor voice charming. barring the threat of fire or incontinence, i was sitting pretty. so i did what any sensible information professional would do: called for help, then logged into facebook to leave a witty status update about my predicament. after i reassured my supervisor several hundred times that i had not simply locked myself in, the security and custodial staff were summoned to jailbreak me like an iphone. it must have been a slow day in reference, for they were soon joined by a clucking, fussing cluster of librarians, some of whom were wringing their hands and muttering dire imprecations about my impending doom.1  it is possible, however, that they were slightly less concerned about my health and well-being as they were about their purses and wallets, which i silently vowed to fling over the wall if need be. ladders were brought and a repairman nimbly climbed down to begin work on the broken doorknob. after silently panicking over the length of my skirt—professional, but sub-optimal should climbing become necessary—i realized two things: 1) this would make a hilarious episode of the library-based hbo2 dramedy i fully intend to write someday, and 2) i could probably blog about it, but nobody would pay attention because i wasn’t singing the praises of ebooks or twitter. or would they? ii in david auburn’s pulitzer prize-winning play, proof, catherine, a brilliant mathematician, writes the play’s titular document despite having very little formal education. the possibility that catherine has inherited her father’s mental illness makes her struggle to be heard and believed even more poignant, for the odds are against her: who would believe that a comparatively unschooled, possibly fragile young woman in her mid-twenties could produce, on her own, a scholarly document to humble the nation’s brightest mathematicians? i ponder catherine’s dilemma as i scroll through my newsreader. print is dying. ebooks are the future. qr codes will save us all. fire the librarians, hire the geeks. drink the kool-aid, brothers and sisters, for our time is short! for the first time since i earned my mlis i wonder, with a touch of dread, if the other voices i hear in the library profession are not simply figments of my imagination, as opposed to the soulful songs in which i have always sincerely believed, the ones that sing of ethics, social justice, intellectual freedom, physical artifacts, access to government information. perhaps, like catherine, i have inherited a madness that will only consume me if i dare to pursue it. every day i feel a little more uncertain about my professional identity, a little bit more of an outsider, an imposter because i, for one, do not welcome our new digital overlords. perhaps, instead of struggling to make myself heard, i should quietly extend my arm, accept a shot of thorazine, and go gently into that good night, so that some young mover and shaker can take my place at the reference desk.3 i wonder if all the silken, shining threads that led me to the library profession in the first place—print books, high ideals, enduring values, the best of western culture, the notion of the public good—have meaning and value in a professional discourse seemingly hell-bent on stripping every ounce of soul out of our careers. an evil voice in my head chuckles, “silly girl. should’ve joined the yalsa set while you could. but now it’s…..too late.” soul, it would seem, is the province of youth services librarians, who still booktalk print novels and pass out bookmarks in the schools, with the understanding that when their patrons become men and women, they will set aside childish things. iii elsewhere in matters theatrical, i spent the forty days of lent 2011 writing one-page plays, one per day through holy saturday. although i left the catholic church long ago, she has never really left me, much in the same way that grapevines never grow far from their trellis, no matter how frequently the grapes themselves fall to the ground. i got the idea from suzan-lori parks’s collection, 365 days, 365 plays, a collection of one-page plays written over the course of a year. because the glamorous lifestyle of a “famous” librarian is exhausting, i decide forty will be more than enough, and draft two writer-theatrical friends to play along with me. we gather a list of scene suggestions from our friends and relatives and use a random number generator to select the daily scenario. by virtue of the fact that my co-writers are not librarians, this is, technically, non-library writing. i find, however, as i write through the days—stubbornly, with notebook and pen, transcribing to facebook notes only later, during the editing process—that the library is in every word of dialogue i write, regardless of who my characters are or where the scene takes place. i have learned much about the human condition while sitting behind the reference desk, observed people at their best and worst, been exposed to a hundred different gestures, postures, speech patterns, situations, relationships. like a parisian café, the reference room is a never-ending stream of color and sound, mirth and madness, anger and wonder, mystery and discovery. i write the library. the library writes me. it is difficult to determine where one process ends and the other begins, if, indeed, said processes can ever be separated. i am a better writer because i am a librarian, and i am a better librarian because i am a writer. never make me choose. iv “this is leigh anne,” my colleague says, introducing me to her latest intern. “she’s our famous librarian. she writes for library blogs.” instantly i recoil, as if kicked. “no. no i’m not. i just…have opinions. and sometimes i share them.” ah, what a silver-tongued devil am i. no wonder i’m constantly asked to give presentations at my alma mater. and of course i am mentally kicking myself for the double fail: insulting a co-worker who was trying to be nice, and dropping the ball on next-gen mentoring. but i can also feel my hackles rising, the knee-jerk inner rebellion at the notion that i might be somebody worth emulating. for god’s sake, can’t they see that i’m making it up as i go along? that i’m frightened, every day, about where the profession is going and whether or not i can keep up with it? that i worry about one of our patrons snapping, coming in here with a bazooka, and blowing us all to smithereens? that the only wisdom i could possibly give would sound ridiculous if i said it out loud? breathe. maintain a joyful mind and an open heart. be compassionate with everyone who crosses your path. live in this moment. all you need is now. but most importantly, don’t try to be a librarian like me, or—heaven help us—any “famous” librarian. figure out what kind of librarian you are, and then be her as best you can, for she is all you ever can be. i take a deep breath and smile. “welcome to the team. i’m sure you’ll learn a lot while you’re here.” v the scheme was brilliant in its simplicity: assemble a team of library workers and hit the pittsburgh bar trivia circuit. in a plot twist worthy of a john hughes movie, said caper resulted in a road trip to atlantic city and $2,000 in cold, hard cash.4 truth being stranger than fiction, it doesn’t surprise me at all that we were able to profit from our storehouse of useless knowledge. what astonishes me, however, is that everyone else in the bar hasn’t quit or tried to beat us up by now. where is the pleasure for the non-library person in being defeated week after week by people who organize, classify and retrieve knowledge for a living? perhaps it is the hope of one day beating the know-it-alls, or maybe it’s as simple as this: we define ourselves by those things against which we struggle. in a world where information is both cheap and plentiful, the value of said information rises in direct proportion to its difficulty to organize, classify, and retrieve. vi julia cameron’s the artist’s way offers a plethora of exercises for getting unstuck and enhancing creativity. one exercise suggests you compose a list of ten alternate careers you would like to have. i find this both delightful and, considering the current state of the library job market, quite practical. in the event that i really am too old and unhip to be an effective librarian anymore, i have crafted a plan b in which i set myself up as a library consultant, or, as i prefer to think of it, a tough-love library life coach. my franchise, “oh honey, no,” will be available to other disillusioned library workers, with special discount pricing for anyone who has successfully coped with a patron’s heroin overdose in a public library restroom. under my expert tutelage, tough-love library life coaches will learn how to call shenanigans once a committee meeting has dragged on to its third hour and stage “girlfriend, please” interventions with colleagues who refuse to learn how to use a flash drive. much like mary kay, there will be a structured series of incentives, so that you, too may, someday, finally earn that goat farm in montana as a reward for your willingness to speak truth to power.5 vii another way in which i’m professionally strange is that i would much rather fetch my own reference books than have a clerk go to the stacks for me. given that reference librarianship involves a great deal of sitting, and sitting kills, is it any wonder i seize any opportunity to scamper about the stacks like a hoyden? with my skirts swooshing about as i dance up and down the stairs, i feel like atalanta chasing golden apples, or perhaps artemis, running wild and free in the forest of books and papers that is my home. viii “you helped me one time.” i’m washing my hands, and at first i don’t realize that the woman is actually talking to me and not to herself. do not judge. quietly, stubbornly, she repeats herself. “you helped me. one time.” irritated, i turn my head, customer service smile pasted to my lips. “i’m sorry? i didn’t hear you.” her answering smile is beatific. “you helped me this one time, and now i’m gonna graduate. i got a good job, too. thank you.” her eyes blaze like coals. she is queenly, serene. she came back to say thank you. i am simultaneously overjoyed and profoundly ashamed of myself. be kind to everyone you meet, for you may be entertaining angels unawares.  and never forget that you, too, are an angel, perhaps especially when you least feel like one. ix you cannot write the library without writing the librarian. because the personal is political, we carry our whole selves to work with us every day. although we repress certain portions of our psyche and call this “professional behavior,” we are, no matter what kind of librarian we are or what sort of institution we work for, a seething mass of contradictions: joyful, angry, frustrated, fearful, arrogant, delighted, compassionate, nerdy. at present, there is no room in our professional discourse for creative expression beyond a certain number of limited outlets, unless we christen ourselves library mofos or adopt an annoyed pseudonymous posture of detached superiority. bad satire and anonymous ranting aside, we have no voice for the collective library shadow. we have no vehicle for expressing that which is unacceptable, no crucible for transforming our imperfections into works of art that might heal our wounds. i deem this unwise, and declare open season on the culture of library science by inviting its poets, artists and madwomen in the attic to bring forth that which is within them, before it destroys them. x although i have little use for theory, it occasionally proves helpful. jacques derrida, for example, did the world a favor by pointing out that what is not said in a text can be as meaningful and significant as the text’s explicit content. thanks to deconstruction, we are free to create a new librarianship by examining all that we have steadfastly refused to say, and all the ways we have not explored to say—or not say—it. water finds its own level; i am here, i have decided, to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. my role in librarianship is akin to the one i played in high school: to sit in the back of the metaphorical classroom and ask uncomfortable questions in the hopes of someday getting an answer. why are we in such a hurry to embrace a clinical, digital future in which technologies become our gods instead of our tools? why do we insist that the future lies in e-readers when census data indicate that, as of 2009, 43 million people lived in poverty?  why do some academic librarians behave as if public librarians are brainless half-wits, and why do public librarians let them get away with it? why on earth aren’t more of us unionized? why does seth godin get to dictate what the future of the library should be? what the hell is going on in california, and why isn’t somebody doing something to protect the school librarians from hostile lawyers? have we all collectively lost our professional minds? i don’t expect answers. just don’t expect me to stop asking questions. i hereby declare library science a deconstruction party, and you are all invited. xi exhibit a: unlike those in my office, the walls of the telephone reference room go all the way up the ceiling, and are further safeguarded by a sturdy, locked door.  ergo, anything that happens in the telephone reference room generally stays in the telephone reference room. the rest is silence. xii the greatest joy of librarianship is this: after all these years, print books still sing to me. e-books do not sing, or, if they do, sing at a pitch i cannot hear, much like the high-frequency whistles that appeal only to dogs. yea, though i walk through the valley of the digital shadow, i fear no evil. my peers may regard me with horror, much as prospero and his visitors looked upon caliban with disgust and disdain. and yet, as i travel through the stacks on my daily rounds: sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices that, if i then had waked after long sleep, will make me sleep again. and then, in dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me, that when i waked i cried to dream again. william shakespeare, the tempest, act iii, scene ii. 125-131 who, then, is monstrous? think carefully before you answer. xiii at the end of the day, what i really want to do is run through the streets, bellowing, a la charlton heston in soylent green, “librarianship is made out of people!” given that public displays of strong emotion frequently prove unsettling to one’s peers–to say nothing of the poor, unsuspecting muggles outside library walls–i have so far refrained. i do not know, however, how much longer i can hold out. librarianship has, as far as i’m concerned, walked a long way out of its way in a sad, desperate attempt to become something else, something hip, edgy, and shiny that will, ultimately, appeal only to the privileged few who can afford to enjoy it when the for-profit model prevails. it is long past time to come back a short distance correctly, to become, once again, the repository of myth and magic, the sacred shrine of story, the domain of democracy, the labyrinth of legend. who’s with me? suggested readings for your contrarian journey the artist’s way and the artist’s way at work, julia cameron. first have something to say: writing for the library profession, walt crawford. free for all: oddballs, geeks and gangstas in the public library, don borchert. making a literary life: advice for writers and other dreamers, carolyn see. girl in a library: on women writers and the writing life, kelly cherry. the librarian’s guide to writing for publication, rachel singer gordon. the portable mfa in creative writing, the new york writers’ workshop. quiet please: dispatches from a public librarian, scott douglas. writing and publishing: the librarian’s handbook, carol smallwood, ed. unintellectual freedoms: opinions of a public librarian, will manley notes 1 the rest were too busy “liking” and commenting on the aforementioned facebook status update. 2 it has to be hbo, or another premium channel, due to the language choices and sexual content. 3 or, as hilary pointed out during the editing process, eliminate it altogether 4 don’t hate us because we thought of it first. go thou and do likewise. 5 oh, quit that laughing. you’re just jealous because you didn’t think of it first. but fret not: if you hurry, you can get in on the ground floor of my next brilliant idea, library job-hunting boot camp. leigh anne would like to thank renée alberts, don wentworth and sally rosen kindred for their continued support of her creative writing and librarianship.  she would also like to thank hilary and eric for serving as lead editors on this piece. revisiting the ala membership pyramid tangoing all the way: is everything negotiable? 52 responses cathy 2011–05–18 at 8:59 am my walls are about 10′ from the ceiling-we have an open/industrial floor plan. it’s nice to know i’m not the only librarian who’s had patrons shush her in her own office. leigh anne 2011–05–18 at 9:08 am cathy, i think it’s more common than we know. library architecture had some interesting moments; price we pay for those high ceilings, i suppose… lav pingback : library blogs | go with your love to the fields julie 2011–05–18 at 10:10 am beautifully put in every way. my favorite sections were viii and xii. leigh anne 2011–05–18 at 10:54 am thanks kindly, julie! much appreciated. lav joe grobelny 2011–05–18 at 11:08 am section x kills it. fight the good fight. leigh anne 2011–05–18 at 11:39 am joe, thanks kindly, and right back at you. lav steve lawson 2011–05–18 at 11:10 am i deem this unwise, and declare open season on the culture of library science by inviting its poets, artists and madwomen in the attic to bring forth that which is within them, before it destroys them. wonderful–i suggest a visit to the library society of the world. i have even used your soylent green reference before: lsw is people! regardless, thanks for the thougtful, inspirational post. leigh anne 2011–05–18 at 4:48 pm yeah, verily, there is nothing new under the sun! thanks, steve – i will definitely stop by. :) lav barbara fister 2011–05–18 at 12:00 pm this is beautiful. thank you. (and yeah, i’m with you.) leigh anne 2011–05–18 at 12:14 pm thank you barbara! stay strong. :) shana 2011–05–18 at 12:17 pm lovely. i’m with you. (section x “kills it” for me as well.) leigh anne 2011–05–18 at 12:47 pm thank you, shana!! marianne 2011–05–18 at 12:36 pm i i loved this. i always love what you write. ii some of the things that irritate you because of their hip/shiny/privileged aspects are things i care about because i don’t want the value in them to belong only to the hip, shiny, and privileged. i was a poor kid, by several measures, and once the internet came along, it was as much a sanctuary and exploratorium for me as libraries were. coded things sing to me much as codices do; i don’t believe ebooks are the (only) future, but i do believe in a future where anyone can read any ebook. if we don’t want libraries to become puppets, we have to make a stand in the places where large multinationals are threatening to turn them into just that. iii when you asked “who’s with me?” my impulsive answer was “most librarians.” to which i expect your response would be “see section x.” duly noted. leigh anne 2011–05–18 at 12:55 pm marianne, thank you for such an eloquent comment. let me see if i can do it justice… i love part ii here – it’s amazing to me how we can all respond so differently to the same situations – as one former poor kid to another (and i sometimes forget i am not poor anymore), let me give you mad props for finding a song that could elevate you. and thank you for being the first ebook person, ever, to respond to my frustrations with something compassionate and reasonable. i think part of the reason i get so strident sometimes is that the e-discourse has devolved into “anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.” i find this maddening, but i think we can do both differently and better. :) i would love a future where anybody could read any ebook and not have to pay $100 for an ereader (which, in some cases, might force a decision between buying food / paying some bills that month, or entertainment). nothing would make me happier than to be wrong on that point, believe me…i just don’t like where it’s going… this is good. this is getting us somewhere. thank you again for commenting!! dan 2011–05–18 at 1:48 pm as someone who loves print, and is hoping to join the profession (while wondering if he will find a position in the same), i thoroughly enjoyed this. leigh anne 2011–05–18 at 2:39 pm thank you, dan! librarianship is well worth all the effort, if you are willing to fight hard for your pov and carve out your own niche. and we need more people like that, i’m thinking…best of luck to you! lav rebekah 2011–05–18 at 3:47 pm well said. let’s go get ’em! every voice is important. leigh anne 2011–05–18 at 4:04 pm thank you rebekah! here’s hoping more and more voices will come to the table. we need all of us, and all of our gifts, if we are to survive and thrive… alyssa 2011–05–18 at 5:30 pm as an mls student about to round the corner on her first year, this post had me screaming “yes! yes!” at my computer. there are many times where i wonder why we’re blindly rushing toward our entirely digital future and cursing ourselves along the way for not getting there sooner. bad, behind-the-times librarians! thank you for writing this and reminding me that e-books and social media aren’t our only professional saviors. leigh anne 2011–05–18 at 6:02 pm you’re quite welcome, alyssa – i’m glad you found it encouraging/helpful! best of luck wtih the rest of your mls. lav penny 2011–05–18 at 6:51 pm beautiful. i almost cried. even while i welcome digital stuff, what you’re saying resonates with me. leigh anne 2011–05–19 at 1:50 pm penny, thank you. it’s not even so much that i hate digital stuff – i really don’t, and i know how to use it, and teach the patrons who want it how to use it. what i’m fed up with is the notion that librarianship must be all one way, and that there’s no room for dissenting voices or viewpoints. i’m sick of having “technology 4eva!” shoved down my throat. i’m sick of hearing that everything i love doesn’t matter in our brave new digital world. it’s time to bring some soul and humanity back to the library. oh, and dance parties. we need more dance parties. can’t do that in a virtual library, that’s for sure… walt crawford 2011–05–30 at 1:00 pm “what i’m fed up with is the notion that librarianship must be all one way, and that there’s no room for dissenting voices or viewpoints.” haven’t been back to read the comments, but what you said–not just about librarianship, but about the future, about media, about… tracey thompson 2011–06–21 at 2:44 pm “oh, and dance parties. we need more dance parties. can’t do that in a virtual library, that’s for sure…” actually you can have a dance party in a virtual library. i have been to dance parties in our second life library. while i am one to which code sings, i can emphathize with those who feel technology is being shoved down their throat. at the same time, please don’t yank me by the chain and choke me when i try to delve into it. steve casburn 2011–05–19 at 1:33 am leigh anne, thank you for writing this beautiful post. i hope i do not seem churlish by this response to section x: 1) we cannot “create a new librarianship by examining all that all that we have steadfastly refused to say”, nor can we do it simply be asking uncomfortable questions, though each of these actions can be valuable in its own right. we create a new librarianship by learning, reflecting, sharing, experimenting, and then, finally and essentially, doing. only that last step truly creates. the new librarianship that we imagine in our minds is but a wisp in the wind until we convert it into effective action. 2) i embrace a clinical, digital future to the extent to which it is superior to the messy, analog past. in those ways in which it is superior–and in other ways it is inferior!–can we expect our patrons to accept a lesser good because we happen to be fond of it? 3) poor people often do have cell phones. they need them for survival. the percentage of cell phones able to double as an e-reader (i am reading boswell’s _life of johnson_ on my iphone) is only increasing. there might come a time — maybe that time has already come — when we would be providing better service to poor people by allowing them to read library books on their cell phones rather than making them have to protect and return a physical object as they lead their often chaotic lives. 4) academic librarians treat public librarians as academic faculty and administrators treat academic librarians. i feel sad for many of them. 5) seth godin does not get to dictate the future of libraries. but his ideas–many of which are excellent–do get to enter the debate. people who disagree with his ideas also get to enter the debate. the world that will be is not the world that has been. librarianship has its technical foundations (the ddc, the lcsh, marc) and much of the thinking built on those foundations firmly anchored in a world that is now gone and will never return: the world of card catalogs, print-only resources, mainframe computers, and patrons expecting to have to come to the library for service. we do have to re-think from the ground up, we do have to change. the challenge our generation faces is to keep the best of librarianship with us as we adapt ourselves and our libraries to technologies and patron expectations vastly different than those of 1876 (ddc), 1902 (lcsh), and 1968 (marc). and the path there is to learn, reflect, share, experiment, and then do. leigh anne 2011–05–19 at 1:46 pm steve – thank you for taking the time to write such a deatiled response, and for giving me time to think about what i wanted to say before i answered it. 1) i disagree that only the doing truly creates. you seem to imply that all the thinking that should take place beforehand has no value. i would argue that far too many librarians thesse days blindly leap into the next shiny trend without thinking about the long-term implications. thinking and doing should both be valuable parts of the process. obviously one cannot think forever – eventually, one must act. however, i’m a little dismayed by what i perceive as the blind rush to throw away everything from the past and leap forward into the future without much thought. 2. humanity is messy. period. full stop. if you are rushing toward the digital future in the hopes that it will somehow tame humankind from its messy state into a more manageable one, you may have a long wait. gadgets won’t stop people from being people. they are tools only. in fact, there are plenty of ways in which they create more mess and drama: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37986320/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/facebook-divorce-lawyers-new-best-friend/ so, good luck with that. 3. nobody needs a cell phone. ever. what did we do before cell phones? we used land lines. just because everybody’s doing something doesn’t make it a need. and i shudder to think about needy families droping a bundle on an iphone and a data plan, just to keep up with the digital jonses, when their moneys could be spent far more effectively. i would argue that we have built ourselves a culture of white privilege luxury where wants have suddently morphed into needs simply because “everybody’s doing it.” i frequently go on social media fasts to remind myself that i survived before this period of our lives, and i’ll handle it much better than mos people once the zombie apocalypse / rapture / great power failure kicks in, too. 4. what you seem to be saying here is that everybody suffers, so i should stay silent about the suffering of public librarians. i would respectfully disagree. you can’t measure pain, and the fact that academic librarians are themselves poorly treated does not give them license to pick on their public peers. that’s like asking for pity for the bully because s/he comes from a broken home. sad, surely, but doesn’t excuse her/his actions. that being said, the academic librarians who speak poorly of their public peers are in the minority, and i’m proud to know many fine academic librarians. all the bullies are anonymous/pseudonymous anyway… 5. seth’s ideas certainly have a place at the table. the problem is, his ideas are taking up too much room at the table because certain flocks of self-designated hip librarians hear a new godin idea and scream “this is the way it must be!” anyone with an opposing / alternative viewpoint is looked down on, pitied, or written off as regressive. we have become a discourse of one shiny voice only: be part of the technorati, or you’re useless. if i sound a little bitter, it’s because i resent being treated like a child who doesn’t know what’s good for her, especially when every day i have experiences that belie the notion that you are are right and i am wrong…and based on much of the feedback i’m getting on this post, i’ve touched a nerve with a fair number of people. the world will be what we decide it is. i vote for the compassionate, humane, messy world where people use, but are not slaves to, their gadgets. for the record, i use our digital library quite well, and frequently walk people through borrowing ebooks and using online services. that’s a part of my job now, and i’m more than happy to learn. but to say that this is where the future lies only, that there is no need for books, or anything else except gadgets and technology…that is, i fear, where i simply cannot abide. one final point – not all our patrons will demand these things. a small, privileged group of them will. not, however, i suspect, the poor and underserved, the persons with disabilities and other special challenges, the small children and their parents (baby’s first e-reader? quelle horreur!), the current crop of senior citizens (who are decidedly not dead yet), or the thousands upon thousands of people who like gadgets, but don’t want to be forced to give up print either. if we could find some middle path where both of us could get what we want without negating the other, that would be awesome. the problem is, i see precious little of that in the library discourse these days. i’m tired of being told that people like me are backwards, wrong and regressive. i will learn and grow, certainly, but i will constantly question and fight for the interests of all patrons – not just the digerati. steve casburn 2011–05–20 at 1:45 am leigh anne, your reply leads me to think that you are confusing me with someone else. i hold none of the extreme positions you attribute to me, and am baffled as to how you arrived at most of those conclusions based on what i wrote. because i don’t know where (or why) to start, my only response is to note that a major part of the white privilege you reference is that a white middle-class professional can go through life oblivious to the fact that poor people of color have their own societies, their own ways of thinking, and their own perceptions of the best uses for the money they have. our white privilege allows us to imagine that we can extrapolate from our own experiences and our own values to understand their lives, their choices, and how they deal with daily challenges that we have never and will never face ourselves; and allows us to in some ways *determine their choices for them* based on how that extrapolation tells us that they should behave, without our having to know or understand that certain signifiers can differ in what they signify and that we would do well to defer judgment about the meaning or worth of a sign until we see it subjected to other interpretations. leigh anne 2011–05–20 at 3:49 pm i find it interesting, steve, that instead of responding to what i actually said, you make the assumption that i must have misunderstood, and that my views must be extreme. if that is your perception, well, you are certainly enttiled to it. i stand by everything i said, however. as for white privilege: while it is entirely possible to mistakenly extrapolate, as you say, middle-class professionals who were, at one point in their lives, blue-collar children have a decided advantage in this regard. the intersection of race and class is a funny thing, especially since we americans aren’t all that keen on admitting we have a class system, or that it still matters…but we do, and it does. it is not perfect, but it is a place from which to begin understanding privilege. steve casburn 2011–05–20 at 5:50 pm leigh anne, i did not write that your views must be extreme. i wrote that you attributed *to me* views that are extreme, and that there was little or no basis in what i wrote for those attributions. leigh anne 2011–05–23 at 10:21 am clearly steve and i will just have to agree to disagree… lisa 2011–05–20 at 1:45 am i did find this beautiful, and i did cry. i just started classes for my mlis two weeks ago, and i feel like a ping-pong ball between despair for the future of physical libraries and books, and exhilaration at the possibilities of the new digital information world. for me, it’s about the words and language, whether i read them on a printed page or on my laptop. the written (typed?) word transcends its container and leaps from the page (screen?) and into my soul when it moves me, the same as words always have. e-readers can’t steal their power, and neither will the digital overlords. if you were writing this twenty years ago, how many people would read it versus how many people can read it now? you say, “we have no vehicle for expressing that which is unacceptable, no crucible for transforming our imperfections into works of art that might heal our wounds”, yet here you are, creating children of your ideas of which you know naught. i guess what i’m trying to say is thanks. leigh anne 2011–05–20 at 4:29 pm lisa, what a lovely comment, thank you. and you’re right – we do have more vehicles for expression now. i suppose the difference would be, twenty years ago, nobody except my close friends would have to listen to me rant. i’m very grateful for what technology can do. i just don’t think it can save us… i started reading michael gorman’s the enduring library yesterday, and it’s got me feeling a little bit better…if you haven’t seen it, take a peek. he reminds us, right out of the gate, that all the confusion and frustration some of us are feeling right now have all happened before, and will happen again. perspective is always a good thing… i would still like to see a more organized vehicle of dissent for those of us who don’t want the singularity to happen. i wonder how we could do that? hmm… sue 2011–05–21 at 10:24 am as a newly minted public librarian i just want to thank you so much for writing this. i agree with a lot of it and it’s finely stated guidance :) leigh anne 2011–05–23 at 10:22 am thanks kindly sue! good luck to you on your public library journey – it’s never boring, that’s for certain. ;) david matthews 2011–05–22 at 11:59 am leigh anne, i hadn’t read any long essays from you until this one. i’d made the right choice: “a short distance correctly” amazed me with its thoroughness, its honesty, its humanity, and its footnotes (but then, footnotes always amaze me–dfw lives!). you wrote that print media sing to you; in my case, they caress me. ever since childhood, when i would visit the library just to read in peace, away from the intellectual dullness of my neighborhood, i have liked the tactile feel of books; they have a solidity that flash drives and cd-roms will never have. books, due to their size and materials, make you aware of their existence, thus making you aware of their content (or their lack of content–e.g., bill o’reilly). even the worst books, the most obscure books, will survive long after the shiny digital toys you write about have disappeared. and i definitely agree with your assertion that the technological industry wants to foist shiny digital toys (such as iphones) upon us, no matter what damage they do to people’s finances or intellects. the tech industry, consciously or not, serves the interest of the republicratic status quo by distracting society, by moving citizens away from a respect for the written word, and for thinking, in favor of digital brainwashing. who needs the past with its annoying literary history? i bought a cell phone last fall due to certain bureaucratic matters, but i very rarely use it, and when i do, i feel embarrassed, due to the lousy reception (does any american cell phone have good reception?)and due to my having to shout in public over the electronic crackle to make myself heard. cell phones have made people used to not having any privacy, making them more susceptible to governmental intrusions, particularly in the first-amendment area. leigh anne 2011–05–23 at 10:25 am david, thank you for your kind words and thoughtful comments on the magic of print. while i don’t think formats are necessarily aligned with a particular political party, it’s nice to know that there are people who still feel as i do. in fact, i think there are more of us than one might think. case in point: amazon was all up in the crowing over the weekend about selling “more” ebooks than print now. in reality, what happened is that, starting in april 2011, they sold 105 digital books for every 100 print books. hardly a landslide, that. and yet they were trumpeting it to the world as if it were a significant victory. of course, they are out to make money with their products, so there you go. i love technology, but let us use it wisely and well. and hell yes to your privacy reminder, something else technology can strip us of, if we do not use it wisely and well… ashlee 2011–05–24 at 1:33 pm first off – leigh anne – i love your writing style. i am fascinated by the start of a discourse between steve and leigh anne, and must admit that i am disappointed that it stopped there. because i think some interesting things could come out of this. what appears to have happened to me, as an outside reader, is that steve decided to respond to a few points of the post with alternate ways of seeing things and his seems to come from a place of frustration. and leigh anne responds with her own frustration. so now steve and leigh anne are frustrated and can’t hear anything the other is saying. so they stop talking. i think because blog posts are so personal and there are personal feelings attached to them, when the least bit of conflict arises on a post, all hell breaks loose. it happens with our famous librarian bloggers all the time. and then others write blog posts on it then it is just exhausting. how about when you read comment threads and the poster hasn’t done anything for 8 hours because they keep responding, getting more and more convinced that they are right and clutching tightly to that notion? why not just step back and think it through a bit more? leigh anne, i’ve been reading you in some form or another for a long time now, and i very much believe that you have a much better, graceful, insightful response. hopefully you’ve realized that you just need to get there and will respond in due time. and steve, even though i think you missed the point of leigh anne’s blog post a bit, i would invite you to come on back and do the same. continue this dialog and see where it gets us. because if librarianship is about service and people, it continues to amaze me how not-so-nice us librarians can be to one another. leigh anne 2011–05–24 at 4:38 pm on the bright side, at least we’re all using our real names… gallows humor. gotta love it. thank you for your comment, ashlee, which is both perceptive and gracious. i think, on a practical level, there comes a time when you just have to walk away. i know i do. i have a feeling steve and i will never share a worldview. and you know what? that’s okay. it would be an awfully boring world if we all felt the same, or looked at things the same way. we took a stab at it, and weren’t able to speak each other’s languages. sometimes the point of having an argument isn’t to reach consensus, but simply to be heard. i learned a lot from this conversation too. some of it validates what i already believed, and some of it has given me fodder for further thought. none of it, however, comes attached to any ill will. there’s a price for speaking one’s mind, and part of that price is upsetting people, and being misunderstood. i’m more than happy to pay it. i’m hoping it will encourage other people to say what’s on their minds, too, now that we know nobody dies and nothing catches fire… at any rate, thank you for trying to foster peace in our time. you are a class act, and i’m sure your peers and patrons appreciate that. :) pingback : after the alchemy, the laundry? « library alchemy ashlee 2011–05–25 at 8:20 am ah, leigh anne, you wonderful thing you. thanks. your last comment was much needed. all is right in my world now :) leigh anne 2011–05–25 at 11:31 am oh good! glad i could facilitate that. ;) seriously. life’s too short. and besides, i need all my energies for the random flame war i seem to have been drawn into on goodreads. sigh. an information maven’s work is never done…;) shush! 2011–05–26 at 7:29 pm i’m afraid someone in australia already beat you to the punch in writing a dramedy about librarianship. it’s called, interestingly enough, “the librarians” and it airs on abc (the aussie version of hbo). http://www.abc.net.au/tv/librarians/#/front-desk lav 2011–05–27 at 11:15 am heard of it – thanks! i think there’s room on tv for another show, esp. one with an american slant. i’m thinking something like aaron sorkin’s sports night, with more cussing and sex. rt 2011–05–30 at 11:41 am the best thing i’ve read in librarianship in a long time. if you haven’t already done so, you may want to read walt crawford’s articles “writing about reading” in the april and may issues of cites & insights. he writes about the mix of print and e-books and the either-or thinking that dominates library writing these days. he critiques that thinking on practical/sensible grounds — which is a helpful antidote. your essay, on the other hand, injects a needed dose of compassion and political consciousness (that sounds so old fashioned, but i don’t know what else to call it right now). ellie 2011–06–01 at 11:23 pm first, i want to say that this is a beautiful post. most of my thoughts on it are not direct replies to your content, but more to your experience of the overall feelings of the profession, in particular because they do not match mine and i’m interested in that difference in experience. i was discussing it with my partner on our drive to dinner before having read the comments. i was saying how i felt that the technology fervor had died down some and that i wondered how much of that was an actual change in the field as a whole and how much of it was a broadening (or maybe narrowing) of my reading and my social circle. i feel in my personal news stream (facebook, rss, etc.) i encounter primarily more reasoned, “here is this neat new thing and some of the ways you could use it if you are so inclined” and far less, “oh my god, we must all immediately do x!” whereas when i was new to the field i felt very much that the latter sentiment is primarily what i encountered and combated (and sometimes admittedly, joined in). i also wonder how much influence there is in the fact that people who are stronger proponents of technology are more likely to use technology to spread their views. thus the blogs all say x, not because most people think x, but because people who think y are less likely to blog (or tweet, or friendfeed, or whathaveyou). another thought occurs to me – i have thoroughly ensconced myself in academic librarianship, and more specifically community colleges. i wonder how much that is skewing my perception about what librarians believe. have academic libraries embraced the idea of admitting publicly when their technologies have failed them in a way that hasn’t caught on with public libraries? or is my head just buried in one corner of the academic world and the prevailing rhetoric is still, ‘jump on the new shiny’ if i would just look up long enough to notice? i like to call myself a technophile luddite. i’ll admit that physical books don’t call or sing to me the way that hypertext does. but i’m not interested in doing away with books either. i worked at a community college where students primarily rejected my offerings of ebooks and online articles, preferring a physical book they could take home. sometimes it was because they didn’t have a computer at home, sometimes they just didn’t want to stare at a screen any longer, sometimes they were uncomfortable with the technology, sometimes they had already found most of the information they needed, but still had to fill the teacher’s requirement of x number of print resources. regardless of their reasons, it pushed me to remain a heel dragger against moving too much of our content online. at the same time, we did a user study and found 96% of our respondents had cell phones and a generally high interest in access to a mobile library website. so overall, i’m interested in providing what my users want as opposed to what an outsider says i need to be doing. while i don’t always personally turn to paper, i think i hear the same music as you, “singing of ethics, social justice, intellectual freedom, physical artifacts, access to government information” and the importance of people. pingback : smorgasbord | walking identity crisis pingback : in the library with the lead pipe; digital divide « low tech librarian comment navigation newer comments → this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct beyond saints, spies and salespeople: new analogies for library liaison programmes – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2018 19 sep peter barr and anthea tucker /3 comments beyond saints, spies and salespeople: new analogies for library liaison programmes in brief academic libraries in the uk are placing an increased emphasis on engagement and partnership building with academics. attempts to articulate what is meant by this engagement rely on analogies from the commercial world, notably from salesdriven environments. this language can prove counteractive to true faculty engagement. it retains a focus on a transactional approach to the detriment of partnership and often alienates academics (and librarians) reacting against their increasingly marketised and managerialised institutions. therefore, we argue that it is necessary to abandon the technical vocabulary of sales and customer relations and develop better analogies to describe library liaison work. by peter barr & anthea tucker introduction academic libraries are seeking organisational structures that reflect how they work. the trend in many united kingdom (uk) higher education (he) libraries is to adopt structures based around functional specialisms aimed at highlighting expanding support for research and learning & teaching. this expansion often involves the reduction, restructuring, or outright removal of subject-focused teams who, within the library, have traditionally carried out liaison programmes. a functional – or hybrid-functional – library structure, therefore, raises the question of who should be responsible for faculty liaison, with the implication being that this organisational change requires a re-conceptualisation of liaison work. whether libraries have specialist customer relationship management (crm) —1 — teams, or rely on subject or functional specialist teams to undertake the work, library leaders are looking for library-faculty engagement to demonstrates its value to the library and the wider institution. nevertheless, it is notable that very few library documents made available publically via their websites have explicitly defined what is meant by this engagement (corrall 2015). attempts to articulate the requirements of liaison work can be problematic, and met with resistance. library leaders will try to map this work onto commercial examples relying on comparisons with corporate sales forces and business consultancies. librarians asked to undertake work under this paradigm will resist because commercialism clashes with their self-image of what they believe librarianship represents (king & solis 2017). a response to this is to demand that librarians either develop these new selling  and crm skills or to appoint people who are more comfortable with commercial analogies to engagement roles. however, while some resistance is likely curmudgeonliness, there is a legitimate concern that underpins this. managerial language, and corporate ways of thinking, damage the kind of lasting partnerships that liaison programmes are trying to develop. as craig brandist (2016) noted when surveying the alienating nature of the uk he landscape as a whole, “the encroachment of the managerial logic… leads to the erosion of fundamental features that escape audit: professional integrity and collegiality”. this article will look at existing conceptions of liaison work, and a project undertaken at the university of sheffield to better articulate it in a language that is understandable within the library and that enables rather than inhibits existing relationships. we will then draw upon reflections from the recent relationship management in he libraries conference, and the views of commentators, to propose more useful ways of analogising library engagement for the future. our argument is that sales and managerial language is counter-productive to the aims of faculty engagement. firstly, because it is alienating to academic staff who are already alienated within the marketised university. secondly, because the language of sales and management is contrived and unsuitable for the kind of conversations that are the basis of good relationships. therefore, we propose a less formal approach, using ordinary language and conceived of with different analogies that better describe library-faculty liaison work. faculty engagement team: information mapping project the university of sheffield library, like many institutions, has been through several iterations of the subject versus functional library liaison structure. in 2016, a hybrid structure was developed which retained subject liaison librarians (the faculty engagement team) whilst creating specialist research and learning & teaching library teams. in this new environment, excellent communication was needed across teams to ensure that outward engagement and specialist knowledge were joined up and work seamlessly together to deliver the library’s strategic objectives and build partnerships. a project was undertaken by members of the faculty engagement team to assess communication channels, and to look at how strong partnerships could be built not only externally with academic staff and students, but internally within the whole library. during part of this project, the need to articulate the role of the faculty engagement team to other library staff became apparent. while members of the team outwardly still held the same roles and job titles, the focus of their work and responsibilities has evolved over time. for other library staff this evolution hadn’t always been immediately obvious. as functional specialisms were drawn away from the faculty engagement team, their day-to-day interactions with other library teams lessened. this had the effect of creating a perceived distance between different sections of the library. as part of the project, interviews were conducted with representatives from each distinct team in the library to discuss how library staff saw the faculty engagement team’s role within the overall library structure and importantly how this related to their work and areas of expertise. a training session was also delivered to all library staff (as part of the regular staff training hour) to present on the work of the faculty engagement team. during this training session, the team sought analogies to articulate the scope and purpose of liaison work by grounding them in practical examples of what engagement and relationship management looks like in the library environment. existing analogies for library liaison programmes the necessity to analogise liaison work within academic libraries probably stems from the failure to explicitly articulate it within publically-available policy documents (corrall 2015). it is also work that does not rely on a technical specialism of librarianship and can usefully draw on examples from other professions. liaison programmes vary in scope and focus across different institutions, but certain analogies seem to predominate. salespeople… the idea that librarians – specifically liaison librarians – should ‘sell’ the library has been contentious. jaguszewski and williams (2013) conceive of this ‘sales force’ role as being one of advocacy and ambassadorship. the contention appears to arise out of the language rather than the practice. sell (2018) can mean both “to sell for a price” or “to convince of the worth of”. perhaps because they fixate on the commercial definition, librarians largely do not to like to be told they are selling (king & solis 2017). while library directors often appreciate this approach as giving a businesslike quality to library services that plays well with wider institutional leadership, it can be problematic in building relationships with faculty. academics do not like being sold to as much as librarians do not like selling. an overtly commercial approach is equated with marketisation which is a trend that alienates academics (hall 2018). similarly, the notion that liaison programmes are ‘selling’ the library produces an expectation in specialist library teams that some kind of ‘sale’ will be made. this encourages a transactional conception of engagement work that is unrealistic. chung (2010) noted that little could be done in liaison work to control the arrival of engagement opportunities, and that the nature of the work is opportunistic. libraries need to be in a position to take advantage of these opportunities by establishing deep relationships with faculty. this needs to be achieved on a human level and using natural language. there is a debate to be had elsewhere about the deep ideological impact of marketisation on uk he but our experience at the university of sheffield has taught us that explicit reference to this is not the answer. doctrinal discussions about neoliberalism also rely on specialist language that can alienate. good faculty engagement is an informal thing. it is more complicated than a rejection of commercialism, and much more complicated than going out and selling a particular project, service or, initiative. spies… academic libraries are also increasingly interested in the notion of customer relationship management. again, with the notion that the ideas and practices developed in commercial businesses can be applied within he. developing and managing relationships has always been an implied part of the liaison role within libraries, but the desire now appears to be for a more systematic approach to allow for the creation of strategic alliances within the university (robertson 2018). however, the terminology here, arising again from the private sector, is also troublesome for the stated objective. crm conceives of library users as customers. this conception necessarily makes the customer external to library rather than part of its community. faculty do not want to be thought of as customers and where academic libraries have been looking to establish effective partnerships they have found it prudent not to refer to library-faculty interactions as crm (ashmore, mckeating & young 2017). not only is the language alienating but the practices of crm also need to be considered.  this is especially relevant for libraries where ethical standards around information and data are essential. if described badly, the practice of collecting ‘intelligence’ on faculty can sound sinister. attendees at the october 2017 relationship management in higher education libraries conference reacted to the commercial idea of “strategic intelligence” by equating the language to that of government intelligence agencies. the tweets shown below highlight that if the terminology used to consider faculty engagement cannot be taken seriously then it has passed its usefulness. figure 1 figure 2 caption for figures 1 & 2: gemma smith (university of manchester) and kevin wilson (london school of economics) produce the spy analogy in reaction to the idea of strategic intelligence in academic libraries at 2nd annual relationship management in higher education libraries conference. tweets included with authors’ permissions. overly systematic approaches can make interactions overly transactional and have the potential to undermine the human-to-human interaction that forms the basis of any relationship between the library and faculty. similarly, where crm becomes a functional specialism of a distinct library team there is the potential for them to become devalued as professionals. at its worst, such teams function as a mere go-between faculty and the specialist teams that provide services. this has been analogised as librarians acting as ‘middleware’ that is required for one system to work with another, but again this is not necessarily an appealing metaphor (whatley 2009). for liaison work to be effective it needs to include a proactive element. this includes, what anne kenney (2015) terms, “looking upstream” to predict new trends and identify opportunities where libraries can engage. examples of this would be the expansion of research data management within many academic libraries, or the growing offer of library services around student and researcher wellbeing. proactivity also includes engaging to understand and — if necessary — change faculty behaviour to prepare for oncoming changes. saints… commercial language is rejected when it clashes with the professional self-image of librarians. however, the entirely altruistic, ‘saintly’ conception of librarianship can also present difficulties in the context of library-faculty liaison. this is the idea that libraries have a pseudo-sacred duty that they execute for higher purposes than praise or reward. inherent in this is a meekness to seek this praise because to do so would lessen the virtue of librarianship. fobazi ettarh (2018) has written persuasively about the problems that arise from vocational awe, but the particular problem is that meekness damages the ability to build relationships. simply expressed the problem is: “how can we advocate for [the library], when the successful interaction… has the patron believing that they’ve done it all by themselves?” (emmelhainz, seale & pappas 2017). therefore, there is a need for a more proactive approach, which is seen as not being encompassed by traditional librarianship. perhaps this explains why there is a reliance on analogies from the more aggressive, proactive world of sales. however, the benevolent aspect of librarianship cannot be lost if “library liaisons [are to] play a key role in revitalizing human-to-human interactions [at their institutions]” (kenney 2015). specialists… the changing role of subject librarians has affected liaison work. the move to functional structures is largely motivated by operational concerns, but implied is the idea that subjectfocused teams are not developing the relationships required for a modern academic library (cooper & schonfeld 2017). a study of the subject to functional shift in uk he libraries found that it was principally motivated by the problem of subject librarians fighting for departmental interests to the detriment of wider library strategy and that a functional library structure is equated with innovation and the desired consistency of service (hoodless & pinfield 2016). the issue raised by this approach, in relation to liaison work, is that it relies on organisational structure rather than individuals, which undermines the ability for deep engagement through personal relationships. uk he libraries that have kept subject teams have done so to maintain this personal connection with departments (hoodless & pinfield 2016). it also implies that management does not trust its liaison librarians to act in the library’s best interest. this implication is necessarily pernicious. while library managers increasingly seem to value functional specialists, it appears not to be a view predominantly shared by faculty. the loss of subject-specific knowledge in librarians is often equated – by academics – with a reduction in quality of the service (doskatsch 2007).  equally, the specialisms that academic libraries have promoted are not those most valued by faculty. anne kenney (2015) has argued that “the role of library liaisons appears to be growing, but the emphasis is tightly coupled with teaching and learning rather than research,” and implies that this development is because teaching support is what academics value most about their relationship with the library. however, library services are seeking to move the conversation beyond this as they develop support for “research data management practices, bibliometrics, data repositories, digital humanities and digital rights management” (robertson 2018). the ability to understand disciplinary issues is bound up with the idea of subject librarianship and is where faculty assume this knowledge lies. they do not consider overt crm to be a separate specialism that the library should invest in (brown et al. 2017). there is then an evolutionary development of liaison work required within the context of changing library structures. it does not follow that this requires a new conception of librarianship when so many aspects of the subject specialist role are highly regarded by academics. sheffield analogies while many of the analogies above provided a useful starting point for articulating the work of sheffield’s faculty engagement team, the discussion shows that each came with  limitations and no single analogy satisfactorily captured the variety of human interaction implicit in liaison activity. for an internal staff training event, they also focused too much on grand theories of how libraries should be structured, rather than the reality of what librarians are doing on the ground. we therefore presented multiple analogies to describe the work we did as the faculty engagement team, including some of the well-used examples above but also more personal analogies on how we engaged with faculties and the rest of the library. crucially, each analogy articulated not just successful, one-size-fits-all engagement but also challenges and sometimes divergence amongst disciplines and individual staff members. the anthropologist similar to the concept of ‘spies’ explored above, the anthropologist suggests a slightly less sinister approach to understanding the academic and organizational cultures of different disciplines and departments. an understanding of these cultures is essential in order to design library services that meet the needs of the institution and this is best done by subject librarians working alongside academics, as integrated members of the departments. recent library research, particularly around user experience, has focused on ethnography as an explicit methodology rather than a descriptive analogy (priestner & borg 2016). this is too formal and it is the nuance of the anthropologist analogy that is sought. however, the image of an embedded anthropologist can be used pejoratively to warn of the risk of subject librarians becoming too attached to their disciplines and putting academic interests ahead of the library’s wider business strategy. as discussed, this fear ignores the professionalism most librarians exhibit and also presumes a fundamental clash between the library and academic interests. in reality, libraries and departments are continually acting in partnership with one another and any examples of subject librarians becoming estranged from the rest of the library team can be seen as much as a breakdown in internal communication and engagement rather than as a failure of external library liaison. the playmaker while the salesman analogy provides a simple way to describe how faculty engagement can be used to ‘sell’ the services and expertise of the library, it can be an alienating concept for both librarians and academic departments. encouraging discussion amongst library staff should be encouraged not just within liaison teams but also with all teams. this allows for a more nuanced view on what this aspect of engagement means and how far it should go. in sheffield, the analogy was also contrasted with the analogy of the playmaker in football (soccer). here, the focus is on setting up partnership opportunities (goals) for other specialist library teams. this suggests a more collaborative approach of beneficial engagement. the sale is the end of the process in retail. the library ‘sale’ in faculty engagement terms is the creation of an opportunity, which is what the playmaker attempts to achieve for his, her, or their teammates in football. the peacemaker those involved in liaison activities are often essentially acting as the face of the library. particularly for academic staff, their subject librarian is their first point of contact and liaison librarians represent the library at departmental and faculty meetings. this involves promoting the library services but also at times acting as a peacemaker to resolve negative experiences or frustrations that academics or students may have. this is where the human element of liaison work really comes into its own. as large organisations, he libraries need to maintain a fine balance between competing interests in order to deliver effective service.to an outsider unaware of the broader context or complexities, some aspects of the library’s service may at times seem bewildering. being able to engage with a single trusted individual who can demystify bureaucratic processes and structures goes a long way in solving difficulties. the advisor as a personalised point of contact liaison librarians can also offer support that goes beyond what staff or students may experience from a wider more impersonal library service. for example, in sheffield, the faculty engagement team is responsible for providing one-on-one information skills support for students and researchers, allowing relationships to be built with our faculties at a very individual level. often providing reassurance as much as anything else, one-on-one appointments with students and researchers are not about selling or furthering strategic objectives but doing what academic libraries do best; giving friendly and professional advice for those engaged in scholarship. in the same way, the liaison librarian’s role when out and about in academic departments flourishes by our ability to offer trusted impartial advice and to be supportive of the teaching and research activities in the department. recommendations analogies of liaison librarianship can be very useful but care needs to be taken around which analogies are chosen. it is important that they are kept in context, that they are seen as ways of describing the work not as models of practice. faculty engagement is based around human relationships and therefore — as articulated by the scope of analogies in this article — requires a variety of approaches. perhaps the desire to analogise the work of the liaison librarians (and librarianship as a whole) stems from a lack of confidence. it is assumed that the library’s contribution is not understood, and will not be understood, because of the difficulty in fully articulating it. this would explain the attachment to saintly analogy as an internalisation of this lack of confidence: librarians must work furtively to understand their users and suffer a mild (ongoing) professional martyrdom as they complete their misunderstood work. attempts to develop new conceptions of library liaison programmes begin from a premise that they are failing. there is an idea that they are not achieving what library directors require of them. attitudinally, this is the wrong way to consider it. for the most part, the work of liaison librarians is highly appreciated. it is appreciated both, by functional teams who do not have the skills or time to build individual relationships, and by academics. faculty want to build relationships with people in the library, as they do with their academic colleagues, not with a crm system or a sales force. it is in this regard that the established analogies can become damaging. the fractious nature of the relationship between libraries and publishing companies’ sales teams should be illustrative in this regard. the sales analogy stems from the notion of the library as an unequal partner trying to offer value-added services, rather than an integral part of research and learning within a university. the behaviour of aggressive sales representatives is not trusted or seen in the best interest of the library. customers have a very different relationship with salespeople than partnerships built on genuine mutual interest. while our research is not comprehensive, it is not necessary to conceive of a universal model for liaison programmes. this may be uncomfortable for library managers but relationship building is based upon opportunistic and intuitive approaches. our experience tells us that what people value most about librarians is their professional ethos, their expertise, and the time they make to understand problems in context. while analogies are useful, arguably librarians do not have to conceive of themselves as anything other than librarians. a desire to create complicated processes, reporting structures, or to explain the work in terms other than that of library work could stem from this lack of cultural self-confidence. it is people, not organisational structures that will build meaningful relationships with academics. this is achieved through a variety of messy, opportunistic means that cannot be usefully captured by changing what librarians are called or how they are described to users. academic libraries need to be confident enough to trust that this engagement is occurring. they should definitely have internal means of sharing and analysing this knowledge, but they need to have a more nuanced way of how they present this back to their users. there is one conversation to be had at official level where – especially in managerialised uk he – business and commercial analogies may be useful, but the conversations with academics need to occur at a personal level and require a different vocabulary. it is with academics as people – not as producers of research output or mere operatives within the academic machine – that a library’s success depends. to achieve this, liaison librarians need to build a greater depth of feeling than a salesperson has with a customer. liaison work encompasses caring aspects, intuitive aspects, explorative aspects underpinned by authentic communication and professional expertise. these, as we have demonstrated, should be explained in less commercially analogous ways. they should also be confidently expressed from a position that understands the value libraries and librarians add to the he environment. this confidence, properly situated, does not underplay the worth of library liaison work with saintly and fatalistic analogies. it is not necessary for librarians to conceive of themselves as salespeople, or relationship managers, but to understand the qualities these analogies seek to articulate. librarians have always ‘sold’ library services to academics, and have always ‘managed’ their relationships with faculties, but they have done so within the wider holistic identity of the profession. libraries require a more complex vocabulary than businesses for articulating their work. acknowledgements thank you to our amazing colleagues in the faculty engagement team at the university of sheffield whose work underpins this article.  also, thank you to the attendees at the relationship management in he libraries conference whose comments and feedback shaped the development of our thinking beyond the initial project at sheffield.  specifics thanks to kevin wilson and gemma smith for allowing the inclusion of their tweets. we would also like to thank our editorial team (peer reviewers jennifer garrett and kellee warren, and editor sofia leung) for keeping the article coherent and bringing it to publication. reference list ashmore, a., mckeating, s. & young, h. (2017). deepening engagement: developing a new library partnership model at loughborough university. presentation at relationship management in he libraries conference 2017: https://www.slideshare.net/relationship-management/alison-asmore-steph-mc-keating-helen-young-deepening-engagement-at-loughborough brandist, c. (2016) the risks of soviet-style managerialism in uk universities. times higher education supplement, 5 may 2016: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/the-risks-of-soviet-style-managerialism-in-united-kingdom-universities brown, r. e., cyrus, j., lubker, i, gau, k., opoku, j., wright b & hurst, e. j. (2017) seeing the big picture: sustaining success in liaison services. medical reference services quarterly, 36(3), pp. 240–52, doi:10.1080/02763869.2017.1332148. chung, h. d. (2010). relationship building in entrepreneurship liaison work: one business librarian’s experience at north carolina state university. journal of business & finance librarianship, 15(3-4), pp. 161–70, doi:10.1080/08963568.2010.487432. cooper, d. & schonfeld, r.c. (2017) rethinking liaison programs for the humanities. ithaka s+r:http://www.sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/sr_issue_brief_reorganizing_subejct_expertise_07262017.pdf. corrall, s. (2015) capturing the contribution of subject librarians. library management. 36(3), pp. 223–34, doi:10.1108/lm-09-2014-0101. doskatsch, i. (2007) from flying solo to playing as a team. library management 28(8-9), pp.460–473. emmelhainz, c., seale, m. & pappas, e. (2017) behavioral expectations for the mommy librarian: the successful reference transaction as emotional labor. in: accardi, m.t. (ed.) the feminist reference desk: concepts, critiques and conversations, sacramento, ca: library juice press, pp27-45: escholarship.org/uc/item/2mq851m0 ettarh, f. (2018) vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves. in the library with the lead pipe: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ hall, r. (2018) on the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality. richard hall’s space: http://www.richard-hall.org/2018/01/29/on-the-alienation-of-academic-labour-and-the-possibilities-for-mass-intellectuality-2/ hoodless, c. & pinfield, s. (2016) subject vs. functional: should subject librarians be replaced by functional specialists in academic libraries? journal of librarianship and information science: doi:10.1177/0961000616653647. jaguszewski, j. m. & williams, k. (2013) new roles for new times: transforming liaison roles in research libraries. washington, dc: association of research libraries: http://www.arl.org/component/content/article/6/2893 . kenney, a. r. (2015) from engaging liaison librarians to engaging communities. college & research libraries, 76(3), pp. 386–91, doi:10.5860/crl.76.3.386. king, n. & solis, j. (2017) liaisons as sales force: using sales techniques to engage academic library users. in the library with the lead pipe: https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/liaisons/ priestner, a, & borg, m. (eds.) (2016) user experience in libraries: applying ethnography and human-centred design. london: routledge robertson, s. (2018). exploring the efficacy of training and development for liaison librarians at deakin university, australia. journal of higher education policy and management, 40(2), pp. 107–20, doi:10.1080/1360080x.2018.1426370. “sell, n.1” (2018). oed online. oxford: oxford university press. http://www.oed.com/view/entry/175502?rskey=gq7vbu&result=1&isadvanced=false (accessed july 27, 2018). whatley, k. (2009) new roles of liaison librarians: a liaison’s perspective. research library issues, august 2009, pp29-32: http://old.arl.org/bm~doc/rli-265-whatley.pdf crm is a term taken from business, referring to the underlying system and the team that manages it.  this has been adopted by some uk he libraries (eg manchester). [↩] academic libraries, liaisons, librarian/faculty relationships racing to the crossroads of scholarly communication and democracy: but who are we leaving behind? bridging the relationship gap: using social network theories to inform library services for graduate students 3 responses ronan 2018–09–21 at 9:17 am dear peter and anthea, i found your piece extremely interesting and it certainly provides much to consider. while i agree that librarians need to develop various methods of engagement with faculty, i am less reluctant to accept your argument that ‘sales and managerial language is counter-productive to the aims of faculty engagement’ and that the ‘language of sales and management is contrived and unsuitable for the kind of conversations that are the basis of good relationships’. i currently work as a business subject librarian in a public university library where the traditional subject-focused team is still in place. acting as the sole point of contact with the business school is a large part of my day-to-day role. prior to this, i spent six years working in an academic library within the private sector. i am certainly of the opinion that my time spent in the private sector has wholly informed my approach toward faculty within the university business school. my normal ‘operating mode’ is to use a business language where appropriate and to be direct in my correspondence with faculty. for example, if i arrange an appointment with a faculty member, normal practice would be to include an agenda. in my opinion, this provides structure and reassurance for both the faculty member and myself. perhaps, upon reflection, i am trying to balance the dual roles of traditional subject librarian and specialist customer relationship management consultant. to my mind, this is a necessary evolution and one, which brings with it the need to employ certain strategies or techniques. at no point would i consider my use of language to be contrived or unsuitable. given the breadth of my role and responsibility, i find the ability to speak my mind and be direct in my approach affords the opportunity to perform well in my role but also opens up other opportunities in terms of research collaboration. i can point to several examples of the latter. i have a particular interest in marketing. last year, i wrote a piece on strategic marketing for libraries. the aim of such was to promote the idea that marketing does not necessarily need to have negative connotations when associated with libraries. marketing has become a completely necessary part of how academic libraries operate and fundamental when trying to position academic libraries within the university as a whole. you mentioned several existing analogies within your piece and two stood out above the rest, ‘salespeople’ and ‘saints’. using marketing as an example, if all academic libraries adopted the approach of ‘saints’, there may well be no marketing and therefore no strategic positioning. marketing is selling, and i believe that all librarians are ‘salespeople’ to some extent. however, this is not a negative! our ability to promote the best of what libraries have to offer, not only enables us to retain our resources in a time of budgetary constraint, it allows us to increase our visibility within the university and opens the door to further opportunities outside of the library walls. therefore, as i mentioned earlier, in my position, the ability to move between traditional subject librarian and ‘consultant’ contributes to my value proposition as the business librarian and promotes the depth of my knowledge. both require different approaches and personas. however, once done well and with consideration, it can be very effective. in summation, perhaps the suitability of sales and managerial language to faculty engagement is more relevant to a business librarian. however, i do not think the concept of strategic thinking and a commercial approach to other disciplines should be dismissed or considered a negative. i welcome your work as it provides a forum to discuss a subject that seems to be appearing on a more frequent basis and has implications on a much wider level for how academic libraries evolve. peter barr 2018–10–08 at 10:30 am thanks for your comment ronan. we were not trying to propose a universal analogy for faculty liaison, just to widen the debate. fundamentally, the pursuit is contextual and the language and techniques you use are entirely dependent on who you are dealing with. therefore, i absolutely accept that a commercial approach may be most effective in your circumstances. however it is interesting to see some of the things you naturally equate with being business like – meeting agendas, strategic thinking, marketing. it is possible – i would argue – to do all these things in a less overtly commercial way. we do. our experiences (grounded in our context) told us that academics don’t conceive of themselves as our customers. markus schnalke 2018–10–25 at 3:00 am thanks a lot for the text. i think it had high value. analogies need to be questioned if they truly are matching to the situation at hand or the situation aimed for. “customer” and “partner”, for instance, describe very different relations. you cannot use the former term and want the latter relation. language must reflect the situation. thanks again. this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct critical pedagogy, critical conversations: expanding dialogue about critical library instruction through the lens of composition and rhetoric – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2016 7 dec andrea baer /2 comments critical pedagogy, critical conversations: expanding dialogue about critical library instruction through the lens of composition and rhetoric image “prism” by flickr user britt reints (cc by 2.0). no changes made to original image. in brief: as interest among academic librarians in critical pedagogy has grown, discussions about this concept and its implications for librarianship have been richly expanding our ways of conceiving of library instruction and of our (librarians’) instructional roles. at the same time, this concept is still a relatively new one for our field. we may thus benefit from further exploring debates about critical pedagogy that have occurred outside of librarianship. in this article i explore salient themes in debates about and critiques of critical pedagogy– particularly those evident in the field of composition and rhetoric–as a means of opening further inquiry into and dialogue about the possibilities and the challenges of critical pedagogy and, more specifically, critical information literacy instruction. with an appreciation of the value of inquiry and problem posing, i view my goal with this writing as not to suggest definitive answers about how librarians do or ought to teach, but rather to invite further thought, questions, and dialogue about how we teach and how we relate to students and fellow educators within our unique instructional contexts. by andrea baer introduction as interest among academic librarians in critical pedagogy has grown, discussions about this concept and its implications for librarianship have been richly expanding our (librarians’) ways of conceiving of library instruction and of our instructional roles. this expanding interest is evident in the growing use of the term “critical information literacy,” which librarians lua gregory and shana higgins (2013) describe as “taking into consideration the social, political, economic, and corporate systems that have power and influence over information production, dissemination, access, and consumption” (4). a critical approach to information literacy instruction invites individuals to explore these highly contextual information practices and processes and how they engage with them, both as individuals and as members of various communities. at the same time that discussions about “critical information literacy” and “critical pedagogy” have increased exponentially among librarians in recent years, this concept is still a relatively new one for our field. we may thus benefit from further exploring debates about critical pedagogy that have occurred outside of librarianship. as librarian annie downey recently noted in an interview about her recently published book critical information literacy: foundations, inspiration, and ideas, a productive new step for librarians interested in critical information literacy is “to look at, work with, and respond to the critiques of critical pedagogy” (downey 2016a; downey 2016b). this ability to explore such critiques, downey comments, is a means of “remak[ing] critical pedagogy for our situations and contexts,” a process that critical pedagogist paulo freire described as essential to critical teaching (downey 2016b). debates about critical pedagogy from the field of composition and rhetoric may prove particularly useful for instruction librarians, given the strong links between writing and information literacy instruction, both of which center largely on inquiry, knowledge creation, and critical engagement with information sources. writing and information literacy education thus often overlap and complement one another, as many compositionists and librarians have been increasingly recognizing. these connections are apparent in a notable amount of library literature on critical information literacy that acknowledges composition and rhetoric’s extended engagement in discussions about critical pedagogy (a topic that became of particular interest to many compositionists around the late 1980s). critical pedagogy’s resonance for writing and library educators alike might be explained largely by the fact that both writing and information practices are inextricable from the social and political dimensions of language, discourse, and information creation and circulation. as this suggests, critical approaches to writing and library instruction ideally encourage students to consider how discourse and information sources reflect and are shaped by social, political, and structural contexts and conditions. information science professor james elmborg (2003, 2012) and librarian heidi l.m. jacobs (2008, 2013) have done significant work to demonstrate how writing pedagogy may help to inform critical information literacy. however, little attention has been given to debates in composition and rhetoric about critical pedagogy and how they may help to inform librarians’ instructional work. in this article i explore salient themes in debates about and critiques of critical pedagogy– particularly those evident in the field of composition and rhetoric–as a means of opening further inquiry into and dialogue about the possibilities and the challenges of critical pedagogy and, more specifically, critical information literacy instruction. given the cross-disciplinary relevance of much of critical pedagogy discourse, some of the literature considered in this article originates from other fields, namely education and gender and cultural studies. all of this work has, however, played a significant role in composition and rhetoric’s more discipline-specific discussions of critical pedagogy. with an appreciation of the value of inquiry and problem posing, i view my goal with this writing as not to suggest definitive answers about how we, as librarians, do or ought to teach, but rather to invite further thought, questions, and dialogue about how we teach and how we relate to students and fellow educators within our unique contexts. i begin with a brief discussion of critical pedagogy as a concept and identify ideas and characteristics commonly associated with it. i then provide an overview of the general context in which debates about critical pedagogy emerged within the field of composition and rhetoric. this background serves as a foundation for exploring varying conceptions of and debates about critical pedagogy that have occurred within–and sometimes beyond–composition and rhetoric. given the scope and focus of this article, i have not included a fuller discussion of critical pedagogy within the context of librarianship. helpful introductions to this topic include james elmborg’s “critical information literacy: definitions and challenges” (2012) and eamon tewell’s “a decade of critical information literacy” (2015).1 what is critical pedagogy? while impossible to reduce to any single definition, critical pedagogy might be briefly described as a pedagogical philosophy that challenges the traditional content-centered “banking” model of education. critical pedagogy instead favors a more democratic classroom in which the teacher and students interact and construct new knowledge as co-learners.2 in the critical classroom, individuals engage in reflection, dialogue, and “problem posing” in order to collectively explore “real-world” problems that have a personal relevance to students and to the larger social, political, and structural contexts in which they live. the ultimate goal of critical pedagogy, according to most critical pedagogists, is cultivating social awareness and a desire to work toward social justice (often referred to as “critical consciousness”). critical pedagogy has its roots in the social critical theories of the frankfurt school, as well as in educator paulo freire’s work, in particular his book pedagogy of the oppressed (1984) (which is commonly viewed as this educational approach’s beginning).3 while the general characteristics described above are commonly associated with the term critical pedagogy, people’s varying understandings of the concept and of what it looks like in the classroom make clear that critical pedagogy has no single, universal definition. differing conceptions of critical pedagogy are reflected in debates about it, including those that developed out of the field of composition and rhetoric. critical pedagogy discourse and debates within composition & rhetoric interest in critical pedagogy among composition and rhetoric scholars began to grow significantly in the late 1980s and became a prominent topic of discussion and debate by the 1990s. the enthusiasm for critical pedagogy among many in this field is perhaps unsurprising, given that many if not most compositionists have long appreciated inquiry-based learning, as well as the ways in which language and discourse are greatly shaped by social, political, and structural contexts and conditions. while critical pedagogy prompted writing instructors to rethink their teaching approaches in fresh ways, many also found some students to be resistant to it. such resistance is generally described in the writing studies literature in relation to two main themes: 1) students’ own learning goals, which are often described as more skills-focused and “instrumentalist” (particularly in the cases of many working class students who come to college with the hopes of better positioning themselves for great employment opportunities and social mobility) and 2) student pushback against course content that examines social privilege and related issues such as class, race, and gender (content that some students react to defensively or may perceive of as pushing a political agenda).4 such student resistance served largely as a catalyst for debates about critical pedagogy in the writing classroom. common themes of these discussions that are explored in this article include: the central purpose(s) of writing instruction: to what extent should teaching focus on skills vs. on social and political issues? to what degree do these different instructional foci intersect or diverge? questions of definition: what is “critical pedagogy,” and how does critical pedagogy discourse construct and use abstract and utopian terms like “empowerment” and “liberation”? conceptions of teacher “authority”: what is the teacher’s role in a classroom that is intended to decenter authority and to function democratically? how might teachers reconcile the tension between their simultaneous roles as teachers and co-learners with students? the role of politics, political ideology, and democracy in the classroom: is critical pedagogy’s goal of “critical consciousness” potentially coercive, or does it offer a needed alternative to dominant and hegemonic ideologies that might appear “natural” but that reinforce oppressive social conditions? can such teaching be truly democratic and dialogical? to what extent can critical pedagogy welcome varying perspectives, dialogue, and dissensus? the role of critical reflection and reflective practice in teaching: how can critical pedagogists work to be cognizant of their own assumptions and biases? how might teachers bring confidence and expertise to their teaching, while also recognizing that they themselves may inadvertently reinforce dominant ideologies and structures that do not serve students? how can critical pedagogists resist an apparent tendency of some critical pedagogy discourse to imply a singular, “correct” approach to teaching? though questions about critical pedagogy like those listed above reflect critiques of critical pedagogy, many who have raised such questions have also been supportive of critical teaching approaches. certainly some individuals involved in debates about critical pedagogy have expressed more reservation about it than others, but the themes above reflect less of a clear divide between individuals who are either “for” or “against” critical pedagogy than complex debates about the challenges of critical pedagogy and of reflective teaching more generally. all of the scholarship discussed in this review of the critical pedagogy literature has played a significant role in composition and rhetoric’s more discipline-specific discussions of critical pedagogy, and most of the work i discuss is authored by compositionists. it is worth noting, however, that some of this literature originates from individuals’ related fields like education and gender and cultural studies. this reflects that critical pedagogy discourse, much like writing and information literacy instruction, has significant cross-disciplinary relevance. the purpose(s) of writing instruction chief among the debates in composition and rhetoric about critical pedagogy has been the question of writing instruction’s central purpose(s) (an issue particularly relevant, though not limited, to first-year writing programs). to what extent should the composition classroom be about teaching writing, to what degree should it be about critical thinking and awareness of social and political issues, and in what ways do the aims of teaching writing, critical thinking, and social awareness intersect or diverge? most compositionists engaged with critical pedagogy would likely argue that writing instruction ideally helps to make visible how language and rhetoric are inevitably social, political, and ideological. from this perspective, critical thinking and writing require awareness of the larger social, political, and cultural contexts in which discourse occurs. critical pedagogy thus would seem a valuable means of approaching composition. at the same time, classes that concentrate foremost on teaching about ideologies and social issues could potentially neglect learning about and engaging with the writing process. the view that critical pedagogy neglects the central purpose of writing instruction has been strongly expressed by maxine hairston (1992). in a reaction against composition and rhetoric’s “critical turn,” hairston argues that critical pedagogy places politics and ideology over the teaching of writing and thus does a disservice to students. from her perspective, critical pedagogy’s prevalence in the field is a step backward, a return to the false notion that writing instruction is not in and of itself a worthwhile pursuit. in hairston’s view, the new critical model of teaching “envisions required writing courses as vehicles for social reform rather than as student-centered workshops designed to build students’ confidence and competence as writers” (hairston 1992, 180). hairston’s argument calls attention to the fact that the field of composition and rhetoric has often struggled for recognition within academia, as writing instruction has frequently been perceived of as a “service” done in the name of preparing students for the “real” academic work they will do in other disciplines. college writing instructors have worked to challenge the notion that writing is a mechanical skill and that composition instruction is remedial and basic. (this situation may sound very familiar to many librarians who similarly struggle to communicate to other educators that information literacy cannot be reduced to point-and-click skills.) responses to hairston’s much discussed essay make apparent that many found her argument reactionary and unbalanced, though some in the field also expressed agreement with hairston that critique of critical pedagogy had been thus far largely absent and needed (trimbur et al. 1993). hairston’s essay, while perhaps reactionary, sparked more critical discussions about critical pedagogy, as it drew more attention to challenging questions that critical pedagogy has presented for writing instruction and for teaching more generally. in contrast to hairston, compositionist gwen gorzelsky (1998) articulates a more middle-of-the-road approach. she advocates for balancing different learning goals and priorities–namely, students’ goals and interests (which she describes as often more skills-focused or instrumentalist) and those of the instructor (which for critical pedagogists tend to center more on social issues). gorzelsky’s emphasis on negotiation of students’ and instructors’ goals implies that a balance can be struck between the need for developing both practical writing skills and critical awareness of the social and political dimensions of language and discourse. moreover, students’ and critical teachers’ goals need not be mutually exclusive, as is evident in the interconnections between developing writing abilities and building understandings of language as socially and politically situated. questions of definition both gorzelsky’s and hairston’s work point to a fundamental question about what critical pedagogy is and what it looks like in the writing classroom. but despite the varied conceptions of and debates about critical pedagogy, it has often been spoken of–both within and beyond writing studies–as if it is a singular, unified concept. as education professor and philosopher ilan gur-ze’ev (1998) notes, “‘[c]ritical pedagogy’ has many versions today” (463). these varying understandings of critical pedagogy (as well as of critical theory) make it difficult to generalize about the possibilities and the problems that critical teaching presents. relatedly, the varying conceptions of critical pedagogy reflect many of the questions and debates that have arisen about its possibilities and limitations. related to the varied conceptions of critical pedagogy is the challenge of defining terms frequently used in discourse about it. on the surface descriptions of education as democratic, liberating, and empowering can sound inspiring and may seem difficult to take issue with. compositionist heather thomas-bunn (2014), drawing from the work of douglas walton (2001), points out that these “persuasive definitions” of critical pedagogy (as defined by walton) evoke feelings and attitudes that few would want to challenge. this may contribute to a reluctance to have critical conversations about critical pedagogy, as was the case for thomas-bunn while teaching as a graduate student. she reflects that at that time she and her peers, new to teaching writing, were particularly unlikely “to reject—or even question—something defined as ‘emancipatory,’ egalitarian, and ‘liberating.’ to do so would be to risk looking foolish, naïve, or unfeeling” (2014). this hesitation to express both sympathy for and critique of critical pedagogy is not unique to graduate students, as is suggested by other scholars like robert durst (1999) and elizabeth ellsworth (1989), who similarly discuss the challenges of questioning critical pedagogy’s idealism. a number of scholars within and outside of composition and rhetoric have, however, called into question utopian and universalist language that characterizes some critical pedagogy discourse. jennifer gore, a feminist education professor, asks teachers who generally appreciate critical and feminist pedagogical approaches to examine critically the rhetoric of those pedagogies. in her 2003 article gore gives particular attention to terms like “empowerment.” from her perspective, the term “empowerment” is often constructed in critical pedagogy discourse in ways that, despite good intentions, “might serve as instruments of domination” in a number of ways (331). for example, the term “empowerment” often presents the teacher as the agent of change, while students are described in more passive terms that imply that the teacher is the primary individual with the ability to “empower.” gore furthermore argues that the universalist and utopian rhetoric of “empowerment” often results in neglect of the specific historical, social, cultural, and structural contexts in which particular individuals or social groups might affect social change. she quotes the work of jana sawicki (1988), who asserts that “no discourse is inherently liberating or oppressive…. the liberatory status of any discourse is a matter of historical inquiry, not theoretical pronouncement” (sawicki 166; gore 337). an additional limitation of “empowerment” rhetoric that gore considers is a tendency to give limited attention to the importance of teacher self-reflexivity–that is, self-reflection on how educators may inadvertently reinforce dominant power structures and dynamics that run counter to the ideals of critical pedagogy. related to this is the tendency in much of critical pedagogy discourse to imply that the teacher will help students arrive at universal “truth.” this stands in contrast to a view of truth as contextual and varied, open for interpretation, and varying for different individuals and social groups. in gore’s words, [a]s part of academic discourses, the constructions of empowerment…often reveal a “will to knowledge,” characteristic of much of intellectual work, that is so strong that the need, desire or willingness to question one’s own work is lost in the desire to believe that one has found “truth,” that one is “right.” (343) this impulse in much of academic work is evident as “a tendency to present the discourses in a fixed, final, ‘founded’ form which protects them from rethinking and change” (343). instead, gore believes “critical and feminist pedagogy need to pay much closer attention to the contexts in which they aim to empower” (345). gore’s work reflects an appreciation for how context is essential to reflecting on both teaching and on language. teacher authority gore’s discussion of the terms and rhetoric of critical pedagogy discourse reflects other questions frequently raised about the role of teacher authority. what role should the teacher as a subject expert and as an authority figure play in such a classroom? what do teacher authority, dialogue, and democracy look like in a critical classroom? how are decisions made about a class’s curriculum, assignments, logistics, and general structure? can teachers facilitate a truly egalitarian environment when in most institutions they are still expected to give grades and to evaluate student learning according to certain standards? these questions have been notable points of debate in the broader discourse about critical pedagogy, as well as in discussions focused particularly on the teaching of writing and rhetoric. english and composition professor patricia bizzell (1991) explores such issues in her essay “power, authority, and critical pedagogy.” she points to more relativist conceptions of classroom authority that acknowledge the value of teacher authority and that have been expressed by many critical pedagogists, including freire. as bizzell notes, freire’s descriptions in pedagogy of the oppressed of a democratic classroom and teacher authority have often been interpreted without a full understanding of the historical and pedagogical context in which that text was written (that is, a class of brazilian peasants working under a feudal system) (66). bizzell challenges the idea that teacher authority has no place in the critical classroom and calls for more complex conceptions of teacher authority that acknowledge the teacher’s subject expertise and leadership role while also valuing student agency and voice. compositionists david l. wallace and helen rothschild ewald (2000) give particular attention to the tension between teacher authority and student agency in their book mutuality in the rhetoric and composition classroom. they propose an “alternative pedagogy” that shares critical pedagogy’s co-existing commitments to teach about social issues and to support student agency through a democratic and dialogic classroom. as wallace and ewald contend, classroom mutuality involves “teachers and students sharing the potential to adopt a range of subject positions and to establish reciprocal discourse relations as they negotiate meaning in the classroom” (3). from their perspective, “resistance to the dominant culture” should not be “the only option open to students” (5), for “privileging resistance can in itself become an expression of a teacher’s absolute authority if it, too, is not up for negotiation” (21). the authors thereby complicate freire’s idea of “critical consciousness” as the ultimate goal of teaching. through this approach, wallace and ewald seek to reconcile the tension between critical pedagogy’s insistence on egalitarian dialogue, on one hand, and, on the other, any imperative that students adopt certain ideological stances or take certain political or social actions. wallace and ewald furthermore argue that classroom mutuality is inseparable from teaching writing and rhetoric, for language reflects and offers particular ways of relating to others. more specifically, they note that “classroom speech genres,” which shape much of classroom discourse and interactions, reflect the relationship between language and power that is so significant to writing studies (7). teachers, they believe, can foster greater mutuality in the classroom through 1) employing more dialogic speech genres (which diverge from the traditional question-response structure of much of classroom discourse), 2) designing course assignments and curricula to open more room for student choice, and 3) regarding students’ “interpretive agency” (that is, students’ current and developing views, which may or may not reflect the teacher’s view of “critical consciousness”) (6). english professor jennifer trainor (2002) similarly emphasizes the importance of “the rhetorical frames our pedagogies provide for students as they structure identity,” particularly as students are asked to engage in conversations about social issues (647). this approach offers students models for developing their own ways of speaking about their personal and social experiences and identities. gwen gorzelsky (2009), interpreting and agreeing with trainor’s perspective, states that without drawing from such rhetorical frames writing teachers “risk mobilizing an explicitly angry, racist consciousness among those white students who see no way to examine their privilege from a rhetorical position that allows them a sense of integrity rather than guilt or self-hatred” (65). in other words, she points to the potential for students whose political views differ from those of the instructor to feel alienated and to respond in reactive or even hostile ways, a dynamic that is likely to exacerbate rather than to alleviate divisiveness. (these concerns seem particularly important, given the intense polarization evident in much of public and political discourse in 2016.)5 gorzelsky seeks to address the potential for students to respond in reactionary ways to critical pedagogy when she proposes that writing teachers “must help students find rhetorical stances that allow them to undertake such work while constructing a viable identity for themselves” (65). reflecting on her observations of an intermediate writing course in which the instructor “used rhetorical moves that consistently encouraged students to thoughtfully evaluate their own and others’ views,” gorzelsky concludes that students do engage constructively in issues key to critical pedagogy “when the classroom ethos strongly supports their agency–their ownership of their developing ideas and texts” (66). in such an environment, “students manage their personal and intellectual boundaries” while the instructors’ “rhetorical moves support[] those boundaries” (66). in the context of the course she observed, such an approach encouraged reflection and engagement that contrasted the defensiveness that many instructors have seen from students when confronted with issues of social privilege.6 politics, political ideology, and democracy in the classroom the tension between teacher authority and student agency intersects with one of the most salient questions of concern about critical pedagogy: the degree to which it is truly democratic and dialogic and whether such teaching might mask attempts to promote a particular political agenda or ideology. media studies professor elizabeth ellsworth (1989) has argued, for example, that “[s]trategies such as student empowerment and dialogue give the illusion of equality while in fact leaving the authoritarian nature of the teacher/student relationship intact” (306). similarly, english professors gregory jay and gerald graff (1995) contend that “the proper outcome of critical pedagogy is already predetermined” (203). analyzing freire’s explanations of critical pedagogy in pedagogy of the oppressed, jay and graff assert, however much freire may insist on teaching “problem-posing” rather than top-down solutions, the goal of teaching for freire is to move the student toward “a critical perception of the world,” and this critical perception “implies a correct method of approaching reality” (103). … [t]he teacher in this scenario is positioned as the knower of truth who will bring their students into the light. (jay and graff 1995, 203; freire 1984, 103) this notion of the teacher as the owner of truth, of course, is incompatible with freire’s other descriptions of student agency and collective knowledge building through open dialogue. jay and graff point to inconsistencies in freire’s various descriptions of critical pedagogy as dialogic, emancipatory, and as consciousness-raising. english professor richard e. miller (1998) offers a similar critique of freirian rhetoric. miller identifies a “tension between the freirian insistence on a collaborative methodology…and a practice that, almost magically, produces people who know exactly what to think about injustice and how it should be redressed.” according to miller’s analysis, those who resist freire’s pedagogy are deemed by freire to be “lost to ‘false consciousness’” (14). such a rhetoric of critical pedagogy constructs what english and education professor lil brannon (1993) describes as a “masculine heroic narrative…the teacher as critical warrior” (460). this construction of the teacher exists in tension with the emphasis in much of critical pedagogy discourse (including freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed) on the teacher’s ongoing reflection on their simultaneous and sometimes conflicting roles as co-learner and authority figure. critical reflection, reflective practice, and teaching the inconsistencies in freire’s representations of the teacher as on one hand critically reflective and on the other seemingly enlightened raises questions about the role of reflective practice in critical pedagogy discourse. through reflective practice, educators ideally negotiate their positions as co-learner and teacher, as they seek to remain cognizant of their own limitations as educators. as compositionist robert yagelski (1999) writes, critical pedagogy requires “a delicate balancing act between acknowledging and using one’s legitimate authority as a teacher on the one hand and, on the other, taking appropriate measures to undercut that same authority so that it does not inhibit the effort to foster critical consciousness in students” (41). this paradox presents a tremendous challenge for teachers, one that has no straightforward answers. as yagelski notes, the contradictions in freire’s writing reflect the difficulty of balancing the positions of teacher as authority and as co-learner. reading pedagogy of the oppressed, yagelski observes that on one hand freire thoughtfully explores the “student-teacher contradiction”–that is, the way that a teacher’s authority can work against a student’s development of “critical consciousness.” these textual moments, however, exist alongside others in which freire constructs the narrative of the “teacher-as-hero” [as described by lil brannon (1993)]. freire’s descriptions of critical pedagogy ([both in earlier works like pedagogy of the oppressed (1984) and in later ones like pedagogy of hope (1994)] indicate that “freire’s own position as teacher, his own identity as liberatory educator, is much more conflicted and complex than he seems to let on” (yagelski 1999, 42). the reinforced narrative of “teacher-as-hero” that is present in much of the literature on critical pedagogy runs counter to the kind of honest self-reflection that is often described as essential to critical pedagogy. the image of the heroic teacher may contribute to a dualistic image of “good” and “bad” teachers that, according to k. hyoejin yoon (2005), characterizes much critical pedagogy literature. in “discipline and punish: a model pedagogy” yoon argues that often this professional discourse “tend[s] to trivialize and even demonize the experiences of teachers whose efforts at decentering power did not leave them feeling self-satisfied and magnanimous but, instead, grasping for control, respect, and authority.” this rhetoric “invites the reader to identify with the speaker and conspire in disparaging the ‘bad teacher’” (728). binary conceptions of teachers and their teaching as good/bad are clearly not helpful. fortunately, such punitive rhetoric appears, based on my reading of the literature, less prevalent than constructive ways of discussing critical educational practices. yagelski’s work is one example of a more encouraging discourse about critical teaching. drawing from the zen concept of non-dualism, which contrasts dualist conceptions of the self, yagelski (1999) offers an alternative to the “teacher-as-hero” narrative. while some critical pedagogy discourse may encourage teachers to identify strongly with their positions as teachers, and while such identification can to some extent be a source for meaningful teaching, yagelski sees a need to remember that “good teaching is not about the teacher” (italics in the original text). rather, teaching is foremost about students’ learning. thus, “the teacher’s agenda must ultimately become secondary to the student’s needs even as the teacher’s identity remains a central part of the student’s education” (43). by embracing such a perspective, yagelski believes that writing instructors might be better able to “avoid the dogmatism that characterizes too much of our scholarly and public discussions about teaching writing.” in so doing, “we accept the uncertainty that comes with acknowledging that we, the teachers, may not know exactly what is right for all our students all the time—or even most of them some of the time” (46). though yagelski’s audience is writing teachers, his conclusions are relevant to educators across disciplines. he describes what, to me, is the kind of reflection and open-mindedness that fosters learning in all human beings, in our varied experiences as both teachers and learners. it is also a reminder of how challenging teaching can be, particularly when engaging with critical pedagogies and reflective practices that present valuable–but sometimes uncomfortable–opportunities for teachers to examine self-doubts and questions that can often arise when teaching. conclusion the debates about critical pedagogy that have been considered here have relevance across disciplinary and professional lines. at the same time, such work in composition and rhetoric is particularly relevant to information literacy instruction, which shares common roots in literacy education. because writing instruction has historically had a more central role in college curricula in the united states than has information literacy instruction, it may be unsurprising that compositionists have engaged over a longer time period in discussions about critical pedagogy. debates about critical pedagogy over the past three decades, especially those occurring in composition and rhetoric, may help librarians to think more deeply about the possibilities and challenges of critical teaching approaches in general, as well as in the more specific context of library and information literacy instruction. because the questions that have arisen about critical pedagogy’s possibilities and limitations have no single or easy answers and will vary considerably in different teaching and institutional contexts, we (librarians) need opportunities through which to explore these complexities more fully with one another. being aware of the critiques of critical pedagogy can help us as individual teachers and as a professional community to continually reflect critically and constructively on how we engage with students and with other teachers. given the context-dependent nature of teaching, as well as the reality that teaching is uniquely personal for any individual educator, i have not attempted to offer particular answers to the questions raised in the debates that have been explored here. however, i would like to suggest some general considerations that we, as librarians, might bring to reflection on our teaching. perhaps one of the most valuable principles that critical pedagogy offers to information literacy instruction is an emphasis on context. as christine pawley (2003) writes in “information literacy: a contradictory coupling,” “information never stands alone—it is always produced and used in ways that represent social relationships. and these representations and relationships are not merely a matter of chance or individual choice but reflect the underlying patterns that structure society” (433). however, as pawley also observes, “the conceiving of information as a thing—the ‘reification’ of information—has permitted us to treat it as a commodity” (425). in recognizing and exploring information and information practices as inextricable from social, political, historical, and structural contexts, we can engage along with students and fellow educators in information literacy instruction that extends far beyond mechanical skills. such an approach can actually work in tandem with teaching about tasks that may initially appear purely procedural. for example, while many teachers and students perceive of database searching as merely perfunctory, a critical and context-centered approach to database searching can emphasize how information systems reflect and often privilege certain conversations and voices. relatedly, students and teachers might explore how various information and retrieval systems are reflections of intersecting and diverging discourse communities and the discursive practices, language, and systems through which they exchange and develop knowledge. at the same time that the contextual nature of information and information practices can be explored both within and beyond stand-alone library sessions, a continued challenge is how we engage more fully in teaching information literacy from a critical perspective, given the unusual position we often occupy as educators (that is, as class visitors who are usually not the instructor of record). because stand-alone library sessions limit the depth with which librarians can engage with students in more complex and conceptual aspects of information literacy (though such instruction also does not preclude this), the rich potentials of critical pedagogy reflect a need for examining librarians’ instructional and institutional roles both within and beyond the one-shot model. librarians’ expanding instructional roles and approaches have already illustrated great potential for continuing to extend and to deepen critical approaches to information literacy within and beyond the library classroom, as our pedagogical work extends beyond individual library sessions and as we communicate the significance of information literacy to higher education. michelle holschuh simmons (2005) and nora almeida (2015) have made compelling arguments that our odd insider/outsider role has a power that often goes unrecognized. our unique cross-disciplinary perspectives and the fact that we do not usually assign grades may enable us to engage more fully with students as co-learners engaged in a process of inquiry. yvonne nalani meulemans and allison carr (2013) have moreover argued for the need to value and to assert our expertise and our roles as equal partners with disciplinary faculty as we build more meaningful and collaborative relationships with them. at the same time, our profession continues to struggle with the widespread view of library instruction as mechanical and of librarians as guest lecturers. here again we may find it useful to look at compositionists’ similar efforts to challenge misconceptions of writing as remedial and of the writing teacher’s work as perfunctory [see, for example, mike rose’s “the language of exclusion” (1985)]. much of our own professional literature also encourages us to reconsider our traditional teaching roles in relation to the institutional structures and cultures in which we work. [see, for example, christiansen, stombler, and thaxton (2004); julien and pecoskie (2009); and meulemans and carr (2013).] we can give such scholarship increased attention, as we consider the interconnections between our professional positions, the relationships we have with students and with fellow educators, and the structural and institutional conditions of our workplaces. while reflection on structural conditions can be frustrating, such dialogue can also help us to examine what assumptions we may be bringing to our pedagogical work and to explore new possibilities that are available to us but that might not otherwise come into view.7 conversations about critical pedagogy within the context of literacy education are also reminders of the power of language to both reflect and to shape the ways we experience and perceive the world and the ways we relate to others. this includes how librarians, other teachers, and students talk about and approach information literacy. the relevance of language to our instructional approaches can be extended to how we discuss critical teaching approaches. given that there is no singular definition for “critical pedagogy,” just as there is no singular way to engage (or not to engage) with it, perhaps it is more accurate to talk about “critical pedagogies.” the plural form of this work might help us in exploring how our pedagogical philosophies and approaches are situated within our particular teaching contexts. in other words, we might dialogue further about our varying conceptions of critical pedagogies, how these conceptions help to inform our teaching practices, and the tensions and challenges we experience in relation to critical pedagogical praxes. in speaking of critical pedagogies, we might further grow critical and inclusive conversations about critical pedagogies. we can hereby affirm how our individual teaching praxes are enriched by both our varied and unique individual experiences and perspectives, as well as by our collective community and the conversations and efforts that emerge from it. postscript reflection on the issues raised by critical pedagogy debates is especially important at this historical moment, given how social and ideological divisions in the united states have become increasingly apparent in public and political discourse, particularly since the beginning of the 2016 u.s. presidential campaign and election. now more than ever we need open, respectful dialogue, conversations through which people listen and in which everyone’s human dignity and worth is respected and affirmed. as i was writing this article, one of the most divisive presidential campaigns in u.s. history was coming to a close. tensions and injustices that have been present in the united states for centuries now seem much harder to ignore. the hurts and divisions in the united states that have become painfully apparent this presidential election cycle are also increasingly palpable in many classrooms and on many campuses, including mine. it is often easy for me to feel paralyzed by the current political climate, and i know i am not alone in that experience. at the same time i see a growing number of efforts being made within and beyond higher education to foster more open dialogue, listening, and reflection. such processes are vital to cultivating deep learning, cultural sensitivity, and civic engagement. debates about critical pedagogy can help us explore how critical teaching can encourage true dialogue. relatedly, considering these debates may help us prevent the potential for students to experience critical teaching as indoctrination, intimidation, or silencing, all of which might become unintended catalysts for reactionary and oppressive ideologies. while i have not suggested easy answers to the many questions that critical pedagogy discourse raises about teaching, i do wish to affirm the value of critical pedagogy’s emphasis on reflection and dialogue, which is especially crucial to encouraging the deep listening and thinking that is especially needed in our country now. the questions raised through critical pedagogy debates have no simple answers; instead they invite us to approach our teaching as a process of open inquiry. hopefully we will continue such exploration as long as we are librarians, teachers, and world citizens. i believe we can do a great deal of meaningful and needed work, as individuals and as community members, and within and beyond our local institutions. for me engaging in that work means pushing past my sense of paralysis. it means remaining hopeful. my warm thanks to the reviewers of this article, patrick williams (librarian for literature, rhetoric, and digital humanities research and scholarship at syracuse university) and sofia leung and bethany messersmith of the itlwtlp editorial board. their thoughtful feedback has helped to make this piece more inclusive, coherent, and relevant to both the immediate and future historical moments. thank you also to the entire itlwtlp board for the interest and energy they gave to considering and publishing this article. references almeida, nora. 2015. “librarian as outsider.” hybrid pedagogy lab, july 7. http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/librarian-as-outsider. beech, jennifer. 2004. “redneck and hillbilly discourse in the writing classroom: classifying critical pedagogies of whiteness.” college english 67 (2): 172–86. doi:10.2307/4140716. bizzell, patricia. 1991. “power, authority, and critical pedagogy.” journal of basic writing, 54–70. brannon, lil. 1993. “[m]other: lives on the outside.” written communication 10 (3): 457–65. center for research on learning and teaching, university of michigan. 2016. “guidelines for discussing difficult or controversial topics.” center for research on learning and teaching, accessed november 30, 2016. http://www.crlt.umich.edu/publinks/generalguidelines. christiansen, lars, mindy stombler, and lyn thaxton. 2004. “a report on librarian-faculty relations from a sociological perspective.” the journal of academic librarianship 30 (2): 116–21. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2004.01.003. downey, annie. 2016a. library juice press: critical information literacy: foundations, inspiration, and ideas. sacramento, ca: library juice press. http://libraryjuicepress.com/downey.php. ———. 2016b. interview with annie downey about her new book, critical information literacy. accessed november 15, 2016. http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=5350. durst, russel k. 1999. collision course: conflict, negotiation, and learning in college composition. urbana, illinois: national council of teachers. ellsworth, elizabeth. 1989. “why doesn’t this feel empowering? working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy.” harvard educational review 59 (3): 297–325. elmborg, james. 2012. “critical information literacy: definitions and challenges.” in transforming information literacy programs: intersecting frontiers of self, library culture, and campus community, edited by carroll wetzel wilkinson and courtney bruch, 64:75–95. chicago: association of college and research libraries. elmborg, james. 2006. “critical information literacy: implications for instructional practice.” journal of academic librarianship 32 (2): 192–99. elmborg, james k. 2003. “information literacy and writing across the curriculum: sharing the vision.” reference user services quarterly 31 (1): 68–80. freire, paulo. 1994. pedagogy of hope. new york: continuum. —. 1984. pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. gore, jennifer. 2003. “what we can do for you! what can ‘we’ do for ‘you’?: struggling over empowerment in critical and feminist pedagogy.” in the critical pedagogy reader, edited by antonia darder, marta baltodano, and rodolfo d. torres, 331–348. gorzelsky, gwen. 2009. “working boundaries: from student resistance to student agency.” college composition and communication 61 (1): 64–84. gregory, lua, and shana higgins, eds. 2013. information literacy and social justice: radical professional praxis. sacramento, ca: library juice press. gur-ze’ev, ilan. 1998. “toward a nonrepressive critical pedagogy.” educational theory 48 (4): 463–86. doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1998.00463.x. hairston, maxine. 1992. “diversity, ideology, and teaching writing.” college composition and communication 43 (2): 179–193. jacobs, heidi l. m. 2008. “information literacy and reflective pedagogical praxis.” journal of academic librarianship 34 (3): 256–62. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2008.03.009. jacobs, heidi l. m. (2013). “minding the gaps.” communications in information literacy 7 (2): 128–38. jay, gregory, and gerald graff. 1995. “a critique of critical pedagogy.” in higher education under fire: politics, economics, and the crisis of the humanities, edited by michael berube and cary nelson, 201–213. new york: routledge. julien, heidi, and jen (j. l.) pecoskie. 2009. “librarians’ experiences of the teaching role: grounded in campus relationships.” library & information science research 31 (3): 149–54. doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2009.03.005. meulemans, yvonne nalani, and allison carr. 2013. “not at your service: building genuine faculty-librarian partnerships.” reference services review 41 (1): 80–90. pawley, christine. 2003. “information literacy: a contradictory coupling.” the library quarterly 73 (4): 422–52. rose, mike. 1985. “the language of exclusion: writing instruction at the university.” college english 47 (4): 341–59. sawicki, jana. 1988. “feminism and the power of foucauldian discourse.” in after foucault: humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges, edited by jonathan arac, 161–178. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. simmons, michelle holschuh. (2005). “librarians as disciplinary discourse mediators: using genre theory to move toward critical information literacy.” portal: libraries and the academy 5 (3): 297–311. doi:10.1353/pla.2005.0041. smith, jeff. 1997. “students’ goals, gatekeeping, and some questions of ethics.” college english 59 (3): 299–320. doi:10.2307/378379. tewell, eamon. 2015. “a decade of critical information literacy: a review of the literature.” communications in information literacy 9 (1): 24–43. doi:10.7548/cil.v9i1.315. thomson-bunn, heather. 2014. “are they empowered yet?: opening up definitions of critical pedagogy.” composition forum 29 (spring 2014). http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1021997. tinberg, howard. 2001. “are we good enough? critical literacy and the working class.” college english 63 (3): 353–60. doi:10.2307/378998. trainor, jennifer seibel. 2002. “critical pedagogy’s ‘other’: constructions of whiteness in education for social change.” college composition and communication 53 (4): 631–650. trimbur, john, robert g. wood, ron strickland, william h. thelin, william j. rouster, toni mester, and maxine hairston. 1993. “responses to maxine hairston, ‘diversity, ideology, and teaching writing’ and reply.” college composition and communication 44 (2): 248–256. wallace, david l., and helen rothschild ewald. 2000. mutuality in the rhetoric and composition classroom. carbondale: southern illinois university press. walton, douglas. 2001. “persuasive definitions and public policy arguments.” argumentation and advocacy 37 (3): 117. yagelski, robert p. 1999. “the ambivalence of reflection: critical pedagogies, identity, and the writing teacher.” college composition and communication 51 (1): 32–50. yoon, k. hyoejin. 2005. “affecting the transformative intellectual: questioning ‘noble’ sentiments in critical pedagogy and composition.” jac 25: 717–759. elmborg (2012) acknowledges the difficulty of defining terms like “information literacy” and suggests that it might be viewed “as a complicated set of interwoven practices” and as something that “exists in relationships between people and information rather than as an identifiable thing in its own right” (77). tewell (2015), reviewing the library literature on critical information literacy over the past decade, gives particular attention to limitations of mechanical and skills-based conceptions of information literacy. he similarly advocates for alternative ways of understanding information literacy as contextual and socially situated. many of the themes explored in elmborg’s and tewell’s articles–namely elmborg’s emphasis on literacy education and elmborg and tewell’s challenge to procedural approaches to information literacy–are evident in composition and rhetoric discussions on writing pedagogy in general and on critical pedagogy in particular. [↩] in the “banking” model of education that paulo freire describes in pedagogy of the oppressed, the teacher “deposits” knowledge into students’ brains. within this “banking” model the teacher is considered the all-knowing authority and purveyor of truth. [↩] the frankfurt school’s philosophers and theorists held the view that human liberation and social change are possible through a process of enlightenment that involves identifying and questioning dominant and oppressive ideologies that function to uphold the status quo while marginalizing those who present a challenge to it. according to this critical social theory, it is largely through uncovering hegemonic conditions and structures commonly perceived of as “natural” that social change and liberation become possible. [↩] see, for example, smith (1997), durst (1999), tinberg (2001), and beech (2004). [↩] the potential for a polarized classroom environment that gorzelsky describes seems to parallel much of what is occurring in the broader political discourse in the u.s. right now, as many whose economic hardships have been largely ignored and who have felt marginalized by the political establishment have responded affirmatively to divisive and often hateful rhetoric toward that which is perceived as “other.” [↩] i would add to gorzelsky’s points that establishing class ground rules is an important part of cultivating such learning environments: all participants will likely benefit from committing to treating one another with respect and dignity and knowing that others are expected to do the same. a useful resource on establishing ground rules and engaging in difficult classroom discussions is the university of michigan center for research on learning and teaching’s “guidelines for discussing difficult or controversial topics.” [↩] the fact that our professional community is still predominantly white, female, and middle class suggests that this process of identifying and challenging hidden assumptions may be especially valuable, as our profession works to be more inclusive. [↩] academic libraries, composition and rhetoric, critical information literacy, critical pedagogy, information literacy library lockdown: an escape room by kids for the community liaisons as sales force: using sales techniques to engage academic library users 2 responses maureen perry 2017–01–05 at 1:27 pm hello! i had to include this post in the year-end wrapup on my library’s blog. you can read the shout-out here http://www.usmconnected.org/my-2016-favorites-part-1/ i don’t give a lengthy writeup, but the piece was worth including. thank you very much! pingback : ndla 2017: critical information literacy in a north dakota context | al bernardo this work is licensed under a cc attribution 4.0 license. issn 1944-6195. about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct all carrots, no sticks: relational practice and library instruction coordination – in the library with the lead pipe skip to main content open menu home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search home about awards & good words contact editorial board denisse solis ian beilin ikumi crocoll jaena rae cabrera kellee warren nicole cooke ryan randall emeritus announcements authors archives conduct submission guidelines lead pipe publication process style guide search 2019 10 jul veronica arellano douglas and joanna gadsby /1 comments all carrots, no sticks: relational practice and library instruction coordination in brief: this article explores the relational practices that comprise the feminized work of instruction coordinators in academic libraries. it is a continuation of research originally presented at the 2017 association of college and research libraries conference. through the lens of relational-cultural theory and social constructions of work, this expanded research analysis names the specific relational practices instruction coordinators adopt in the workplace, examines their relationship to supervision and authority, and investigates their impact on the well-being of instruction coordinators. this article makes recommendations not only for improving the structure of this specific job role, but as a first step towards reimagining library work in a way that values relational activity and practice as highly skilled work. introduction the skills and labor involved in library instruction coordinator work–developing pedagogical training, coordinating information literacy (il) curricular integration and assessment, and training teaching librarians–includes an intense investment in the quality of relationships with others (association of college and research libraries, 2011). maintaining these relationships takes tremendous effort, largely invisible in our organizations yet crucial to our programs, and these efforts exact a real toll. as library instruction coordinators ourselves, we started this project due to a sense of incompatibility regarding the work we were doing and the way library instruction coordinator positions are described and understood. in january 2017 we conducted an exploratory study into the emotional and affective labor involved in the mentoring, supporting, and collaboration work that are central to building and sustaining a library instruction program. through this qualitative research we learned that this type of work was relational in nature, coded as feminine in a gendered workplace, and therefore undervalued (arellano douglas and gadsby, 2017). after this initial study, we wanted to further explore the relational practices that comprised the feminized work of instruction coordinators in academic libraries. our initial analysis identified evidence of relational belief systems within this position: instruction coordinators engaged in activities that centered relationships as the means for getting work done.  but was this done intentionally, or was it a consequence of the role’s lack of supervisory authority ( i.e. instruction coordinators supervise programs, not people), greater structural issues, or some combination of both? we continued this research through additional interviews with instruction coordinators in the united states and a secondary analysis of previous interview transcripts. with this expansion of our study we seek to name the specific relational practices instruction coordinators adopt in the workplace, investigate the impact of supervisory positions on the role ambiguity felt by coordinators, and determine whether relational practice at work impacts the well-being of instruction coordinators. we will use this evidence to not only make recommendations for improving the structure of this specific job role, but as a first step towards reimagining library work in a way that values relational activity and practice as highly skilled work. theoretical context relational cultural-theory our study of instruction coordinator work and relational practice exists within the framework of relational-cultural theory. relational theory, first described in the 1970s by feminist psychologists at the stone center at wellesley college, reconceptualized the psychology of women as one rooted in the primacy of relationships, and posited that growth and development will occur best in a context of connection (jbmti, 2019). this framework later evolved into relational-cultural theory in order to move beyond the dominant narratives of white, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied women and to acknowledge the context of oppressive systems and the impact of social values. relational-cultural theory allows us to give voice and priority to stereotypically feminine attributes that prioritize the connection and relationships between people, such as mutuality, empathy, and sensitivity to emotional contexts (jbmti, 2019). to be relationally competent means creating and fostering connection with others, moving others toward growth, empowering others, and valuing service to the community (jordan, 2004). gender and culture at work the workplace is not exempt from gendered and cultural expectations and stereotypes, and our organizations are shaped by the inequalities that accompany such (risman, 2004; brody, rubin, & maume, 2014; anantachai & chesley, 2018). these social constructions of work take their cues from constructions of gender and race/ethnicity. the gendered dichotomy of the public and private sphere splits the world into public or work life, which is associated with men and idealized masculinity, and domestic or private life, which is associated with women and idealized femininity (fletcher, 2004). the main tenets of relational theory prioritize the characteristics more common to the private sphere, such as interdependence and collectivity, and move away from those associated with the public sphere, such as individuation and autonomy (jordan, kaplan, miller, et al, 1991). these stereotypes not only allow the workplace to assign different levels of value and rewards to behaviors coded as masculine, such as rationality, and feminine, such as displaying emotional or nurturing behaviors, but decides the level of appropriateness for the behaviors in work and home life. in addition, workplace structures that devalue the attributes designated as feminine or private also hamper our ability to enact a feminist organizational culture. silencing the feminine has not allowed us to fully examine what could be possible, what could be theorized (fletcher, 2004). yet it is not possible to talk about gender at work without talking about race, ethnicity, and culture, and the ways in which these identities intersect and complicate the workplace experience. the patriarchal systems that impact gender expectations and performance at work are white patriarchal systems, which make them exponentially harmful for women of color. as hooks states, “sexist norms…[can] be mediated by racial bonding,” which can make white women complicit in upholding gendered constructions of work that are harmful to women of color and themselves (hooks, 1994, p. 95). additionally, conversations around workplace cultural fit “play a huge role in keeping many industries homogenous and preventing people who do not match the dominant culture from climbing the career ladder” and in libraries, the dominant culture is white (farkas, 2019, para. 2; bourg, 2014). this creates a workplace rooted in white masculine norms, where women of color are forced to either “shrink” themselves at work to fit in, or “cope” with actively pushing against these expectations (brown & leung, 2018, p. 340). relational-cultural theory seeks to call out the differences in experience for women of color, create space for conversations and growthful conflict about race and racism through relational practice, and ultimately allow individuals to fully represent their authentic selves (walker, 2004, p. 91-99). defining relational practice at work our definition of relational practice at work comes from the research of joyce fletcher, whose four-year long study of women at work at a technology company in the northeastern united states created a framework for identifying relational behavior characteristics, assumptions, beliefs, and values in an organizational setting (fletcher, 1998, p. 168). by drawing on relational-cultural theory (at the time of her writing, it was only relational theory), social constructions of work, and a poststructural feminist analysis of the gendered nature of work, fletcher identified four categories of relational practice: preserving: actions that “preserve the life and well-being of the project;” typically task oriented (fletcher, 2004, p. 272). mutual empowering: activities that “enable and empower others” to contribute to the project (fletcher, 1998, p. 169). achieving: self-initiated actions that use “relational skills to increase one’s own effectiveness and professional growth” (fletcher, 2004, p. 272). creating team: “activities associated with building a collective” that create a sense of team where work can flourish (fletcher, 1998, p. 169). fletcher argues that these practices stem from a fundamentally “different belief system about what leads to growth and effectiveness” in life and at work (fletcher, 2004, p. 270). this belief system centers connection and relationships over independent heroics and lone efforts, and is typically associated with women or feminine ways of being. by naming these practices, fletcher sought to detail the intricate, intentional, relational work women carried out in the workplace (fletcher, 2004). examining relational practice in instruction coordination work research questions building on fletcher’s work, we wanted to extend the examination of relational practice from a masculinized workplace–a technology company–to a typically feminized one: the academic library. within the academic librarianship, teaching, or as it is more commonly referred to, instruction librarianship, is a highly feminized subfield within our already female-intensive and feminine-coded profession (fox & olson, 2013). with that in mind, and with our previous analysis of instruction coordinator interviews revealing coordinator work was indeed relational, our continuation of this research project focused on four main questions: what specific relational practices do instruction coordinators adopt in the workplace? do instruction coordinators who supervise other librarians still adopt these practices or does their managerial status prevent the need for this kind of behavior? how does relational practice impact the well-being of instruction coordinators at work? what structural/organizational changes would help improve the working conditions of instruction coordinators? methods we pursued a qualitative method of study, the semi-structured interview, to answer these questions and capture the thoughts, feelings, and lived experiences of librarians in instruction coordinator roles. for our first round of interviews, we identified an opportunity network of 19 potential participants at 17 different higher education institutions in maryland. each of those potential participants performed the work of instruction coordination even if their titles did not explicitly reflect this role. from this opportunity network, 8 instruction coordinators were interviewed via skype. after this initial round of interviews, additional instruction coordinators outside maryland were solicited for interviews using the instruction coordinator slack channel, an online community created for and by instruction coordinators in academic libraries. an additional 7 instruction coordinators were interviewed via zoom for a total of 15 coordinator interviews to analyze. of these 15 interviews, 13 were recorded and transcribed. the recording mechanism failed during 2 of the interviews, so interviewer notes were used in our analysis of those conversations. through the course of interviewing one participant, we discovered that this individual was not actually doing to the work of an instruction coordinator. this interview was eliminated from our set, leaving us with a total of 12 interviews and 2 interviewer notes to analyse for our study. two of these participants were librarians of color (one woman, one man), and 12 participants were women. this representation is a very typical slice of librarian demographics (overwhelmingly white women). we pulled participants from two existing groups (our maryland professional network and instruction coordinator slack channel), rather than being more intentional about a diverse group of participants, which is an unfortunate limitation of our study. each participant was asked about their official and unofficial job titles, duties, and responsibilities; day-to-day work; challenges and opportunities in their job role; perceptions of teaching within their library and larger academic institution; attitudes towards teaching librarians on the part of librarian colleagues and faculty; perceived value to their colleagues and organization; and suggestions for improving the working conditions of library instruction coordinators. although we followed a script of questions, we allowed room for follow-up questions and related conversations as a means of capturing the whole experiences of instruction coordinators and the information they wanted to share with us. interviews ranged in time from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours. as we reflected on our methods during our analysis, we realized that we did not ask specific questions about the impact of participants’ identities (race, culture, sexual orientation, etc.) on their work. because of the context of relational-cultural theory in which we are working, we should have intentionally incorporated this into our interviews and created space for this kind of discussion. this is, again, a limitation of our study. coding practice transcripts and interview notes were first coded using a modified version of fletcher’s categories of relational practice, which were adapted to the library workplace based on our previous study: preserving: this describes the practice of taking on administrative tasks, doing the library housework (arellano douglas & gadsby, 2017, p. 270), and picking up slack in project work. this work is done for the good of the instruction program overall. mutual empowering – this describes emotional support of fellow teaching librarians and library school students or interns (if applicable). this practice helps colleagues feel good about themselves for the good of the work, because the instruction coordinator recognizes that individual efforts and motivation contribute to the instruction program’s effectiveness. emotional strategizing – this was adapted from the “achieving” behavior described by fletcher. these actions include building and sustaining relationships so that the coordinator can do their job effectively. this involves being relationally aware and on high alert to other’s emotions and actions to “keep the peace” and maintain connections needed for the health of the library’s instruction program. creating team – these are actions that creating an open door policy and safe space for teaching librarians, library school students, and/or interns, where their feelings are validated. through these behaviors, instruction coordinators cultivate a sense of team in tone and feeling. because fletcher’s site of inquiry was a technology company, much of the language used in her descriptions of relational practice focuses on the project team as a central organizational unit. we recognize that not all libraries operate on a team-based structure, however, we still see value in fletcher’s characterizations of relational practice as they apply to organizations like libraries that also operate within gendered constructions of work (sloniowski, 2016). in addition, our first study of instruction coordinators revealed that a team-based structure is very much present in instruction work in libraries, where teaching librarians are often a subset of the library’s overall workforce (arellano douglas & gadsby, 2017). transcripts and interview notes were then coded a second time using elaborative coding, or codes generated from our first study through initial coding (saldana, 2016, p. 256). these codes included: workload: mentions of overwhelming, heavy, or unsustainable amount of work in their role as instruction coordinator. role ambiguity: a lack of clear, consistent information regarding rights, duties, and responsibilities of the instruction coordinator’s position. staffing challenges: mentions of understaffing in the library or expression of the need for more teaching staff. negative power dynamics: instances of power negotiations between coordinator and librarians or coordinator and faculty that emphasize the ambiguity and inequality of these relationships and produce negative feelings. dismissiveness: instances of colleagues both in and out of the library demonstrating a lack of understanding of the instruction coordinator’s work, its value, and the amount of effort that goes into that work. in addition to two rounds of coding, all transcripts and interview notes were assigned descriptors that indicated whether or not the interview participant was an instruction program manager, subject liaison, and/or supervisor; as well as a descriptor that characterized each participant’s teaching load as low, medium, or high. findings & discussion relational practice everywhere as expected based on our previous study, evidence of relational practice appears in every participant interview. emotional strategizing was an integral component of all instruction coordinator’s practice in the workplace. all but one participant described enacting mutual empowerment practices in their day-to-day job, 85% engaged in preserving activities (n=12), and 78% exhibited behaviors associated with creating team (n=11). yet how these activities appear in practice and how frequently they are enacted differs based on the coordinator’s supervisory status (or lack thereof), relationships with colleagues in the library, perception of librarians and teaching outside the library, and structure of the library’s teaching program. we’ll take some time to examine each practice and their relationship to these factors. emotional strategizing emotional strategizing, whereby instruction coordinators maintain relational awareness to build and sustain connections advantageous to advancing the instruction program, was the most frequently applied code to all participant interviews. instruction coordinators exhibit a heightened sense of interpersonal dynamics, maintaining an awareness of not only their relationships to colleagues in and out of the library, but of their colleagues relationships to one another and their work. one participant described facilitating frequent instruction-related discussions among teaching librarian colleagues to “discern how…colleagues, librarians, feel about how we are viewed” by faculty in an effort to develop interpersonal interventions to solve instruction-related problems. this participant recognized the importance of feelings in relationships and how they contribute to the ability to carry out the collaborative work of teaching librarianship. instruction coordinators wanted to figure out “how to connect with one another through conversation or facilitation” in order to set goals and direction for the library’s teaching program. this particular relational practice was the behavior of choice for instruction coordinators who did not hold supervisory positions. instances of emotional strategizing appeared more frequently in their descriptions of work practices, in large part, because, as one participant noted, “i don’t supervise anyone, so i have to get buy-in. i have to do things thoroughly and sort of persuasively in a way that those who are going to see it through to conclusion [are brought] on board.” the intralibrary politics of instruction coordination without supervisory authority are tricky, and variations on “i don’t want to step on anyone’s toes” were noted throughout the interviews of non-supervising instruction coordinators. of particular difficulty was the task of effecting change in the teaching practices of people whom the instruction coordinator did not supervise. one participant discussed facilitating a training series after being tasked to create an instruction program:  “one of the things people have felt very harassed about is being told you’re not doing enough, or you’re not good enough, or your teaching isn’t good enough…[which leads to] this very defensive posture…so i’m framing it as…opportunities to talk more about your teaching.” on the surface it seems simple enough–rename “training” to “conversations,”–but what this action emphasizes is the coordinator’s a) awareness of their colleagues feelings and attitudes; b) intentional practice of emotional strategizing; and c) conscious effort to improve the instruction program. this kind of strategic, intentional thought process and action was seen again and again in descriptions of work by non-supervising coordinators. at least two participants described cultivating a strong, positive working relationship with their supervisor and how that relationship was leveraged to influence teaching colleagues. those in non-supervisory coordinator roles were keenly aware of the lack of traditional power at their disposal–one participant described it as “baked goods and goodwill,” another as “all carrots, no sticks”–so they relied on the connections and relationships at hand to make programmatic improvements and positive change. not surprisingly, instances of this relational practice most frequently co-occurred with descriptions of role ambiguity. when instruction coordinators felt unsure of their authority and place within the organization, they frequently relied on emotional strategizing to do their work. for coordinators in supervisory roles, emotional strategizing was more about facilitating connections (between librarians, between librarians and faculty) and then delegating the work associated with those connections. one supervising coordinator noted, “i see myself as starting those relationships and then figuring out well, who fits where for those relationships.” there was a noticeable lack of negotiation in their emotional strategizing activities. although all coordinators viewed relationships and interpersonal connections as essential to doing good work, those who supervised were in a better position to effect change among teaching librarians and within the program itself without engaging in what many instruction coordinators described as “deals,” i.e. if you teach these two classes i’ll take 5 next week. preserving in our original study, we characterized much of instruction coordinators’ administrative tasks as “doing the library ‘housework,’” (arellano douglas & gadsby, 2017, p. 270), drawing from the literature on women’s tendency to take on the responsibilities of administrative assistants in workplace situations, regardless of their actual job role (grant & sandberg, 2015; kark & waismel-manor, 2005; williams, 2014), which also impacts women of color in the workplace more frequently (williams & multhaup, 2018). preserving behaviors are an extension of this idea, in that they also involve taking on additional work and responsibilities for the good of a project, or in our case, the good of the library’s instruction program overall. like emotional strategizing, preserving behavior was more often enacted by instruction coordinators who did not supervise the people in their programs. “i think a good and bad thing is that i’m often known for getting things done, and so, a lot of my job is making sure things get done,” stated one participant. what exactly does “getting things done” look like? how is preserving expressed by instruction coordinators? in describing their responsibilities and actions, participants all described day-to-day tasks like scheduling classes, which include numerous emails between faculty and librarians; mediating library instruction requests that come in via online forms; compiling instruction statistics; scheduling and facilitating teaching team meetings; and maintaining classroom spaces. this is the kind of work that, as one participant put it, “creates an infrastructure for the rest of the stuff to happen,” and it’s the kind of work that can take a toll on the instruction coordinator. “i feel like i haven’t done anything. i’ll look up at the clock and realize that it’s 11:00am and i’ve been here since 8:30am, and i haven’t done anything except email people and build out numbers on a spreadsheet. even though i know it’s important and i’ve been working non-stop, i feel like i haven’t done anything.” beyond these administrative tasks, preserving also takes shape in instruction coordinators taking on the work that no one else wants to do. as one participant stated, “there’s this expectation that if random, wild professor so and so can’t be ‘tamed’ by any other librarian, the coordinator will take that on.” there was an unwritten expectation that instruction coordinators who did not supervise were there to either a) do the lion’s share of the teaching; b) teach the classes no one else wanted to teach, which were frequently lower-division or first-year level courses; or c) do the hard work of lesson planning and assessment for not with their colleagues. in fact, almost all of the coordinators with “high” instruction loads were those who did not supervise other librarians. in addition to taking on greater teaching responsibilities, several participants described the extra burden of thinking about teaching for others. “i feel like many of my colleagues expect me to come up with lesson plans or activities for them to just drop into their own instruction,” lamented one coordinator. other participants described how colleagues deemed them “experts” in the same breath that they then asked for the coordinators to do their assessments for them. these were prime examples of dismissiveness on the part of the coordinators’ librarian colleagues, who didn’t seem to understand the amount of work needed to create teaching materials–lesson plans, activities, and assessments–from scratch. or, in the words of one participant, “in some ways, if you’re a good coordinator, then your work should be invisible..it’s only when things go wrong that you’re noticed.” this echoes roxanne shirazi’s concept of “shadow labor,” whereby librarians reproduce the academy without acknowledgement for their work (2014) as well as the idea of “frictionless service” introduced by mirza and seale (2017). instruction coordinators, through preserving behaviors, facilitate the work of others but are often dismissed, ignored, or, in the case of one participant, characterized as “nagging.” mutual empowering actions encompassed by the idea of mutual empowering depend heavily on the concept of mutuality introduced in relational-cultural theory. “mutuality involves profound mutual respect and mutual openness to change and responsiveness” (jordan, hartling, & walker, 2004, p. 3). in providing emotional and professional support of their fellow teaching librarians, or students, or interns, instruction coordinators are able to improve their program’s effectiveness. this practice differs from simple mentoring, in that it assumes reciprocity; by helping others feel good about themselves one will also feel good. everyone will gain a better sense of connection to each other and the work and feel validated. mutual empowering is intentional and strategic, and in our interviews we saw it used by both supervising and non-supervising coordinators alike. supervising coordinators were slightly more likely to engage in these behaviors, particularly when working with early career teaching librarians or graduate students. one coordinator expressed how they were “trying to build expertise and confidence” in their colleagues so that they could “position [themselves] as teachers.” for many participants, this took shape as not only creating professional development and learning opportunities, but spending significant amount of  time in conversation with those they supervised. in their job descriptions, coordinators will often see words like, “mentor” or “facilitate professional development,” but as one supervising coordinator put it: “‘will mentor grad students’ is a bullet point but in real life, it’s a lot.  it’s hard to quantify those things when you’re writing an annual review. i spend a million hours talking to grad students about their feelings.” again, this work is done for the health and well-being of others, but also for the good of the supervising coordinator who is also responsible for the health and well-being of the instruction program. coordinators who didn’t supervise also engaged in mutual empowering out of both concern for colleagues and the program. one participant stated, “i’m careful about what i’m asking everyone to do because…i’m obsessed with not burning us out…i want this to be a socially just program, internally. externally, too.” instruction coordinators are intimately familiar with the demands of teaching, and recognize the need to “build up” colleagues so that the program can flourish in a sustainable way. this is achieved by, as one participant described their work, “being a cheerleader for a lot of ideas that other people have,” spending hours in observation of others teaching and being observed teaching, and creating opportunities to improve as instructors,  again, this is not purely selfless, altruistic behavior. mutual empowering, like all relational practice at work, is an intentional behavior rooted in the belief that “growth, development, and achievement occur in the context of connection” (fletcher, 2004, p. 277). as one non-supervising coordinator put it, “now that i’m a coordinator, it’s not just individual relationships that matter. it’s the relationship between me and my team of librarians, both individually and as a program, to other programs and other teachers on campus.” but what happens when the expectation of mutuality breaks down? this tends to be expressed in terms of negative power dynamics, where instead of respect and appreciation, coordinators’ attempts at mutual empowerment are met with dismissal or hostility. one coordinator describes serving on a campus-wide curriculum-related committee to help further the university’s educational mission and the work of the teaching librarians, only to be introduced at the first committee meeting as “one of the library girls.” “that offhand remark is demeaning and disrespectful in such a complex, concise way. it highlights the coordinator’s femininity, equates it with the library, and dismisses her work…as unimportant and not real work” (arellano douglas, 2019). it moves beyond interpersonal negative power dynamics into one that takes on the trappings of sexism, gendering the work and disappearing it, and ageism, reducing the coordinator’s experience and expertise. for women of color, this kind of marginalization is easily compounded by racism (subtle or otherwise), lending an even more toxic slant to potential negative power dynamics. other participants shared stories of being asked to help colleagues improve their teaching practice, only to be met with resistance or outright hostility. one participant was told “i don’t want any feedback on learning outcomes, any advice. what i’m doing has worked for so long…so i don’t want anyone to observe me in my class.” there is no possibility for mutual empowerment in situations such as these, which were shared by multiple respondents. without an openness to change or expressions of respect, mutuality cannot occur, leaving the instruction coordinator unable to do their job effectively. yes, they will often revert to emotional strategizing to circumvent this kind of negative power dynamic, but this results in even greater emotional labor on the part of the instruction coordinator. creating team many instruction coordinators are tasked with creating instruction teams where none previously existed. for several of our participants, their positions were created to meet the needs of increasing library instructional efforts that required coordination. in order to cultivate a sense of team tone and feeling, instruction coordinators encouraged sharing and information exchange. “i have so many emails of people sharing, ‘oh! i just read this interesting article,’ or ‘oh! i just tried this new assignment!’ i think that’s really good,” stated one participant whose team thrived on this kind of back-and-forth. other instruction coordinators devoted regular meeting time to discussing instructional efforts, issues, and plans but also recognized that their colleagues often needed one-on-one conversations as well. “i have an open door policy,” shared one participant, “so they come and sit in my office and we talk about whatever.” collaboration was the goal for the instruction coordinators we interviewed, who all wanted to create a team that would not only share ideas but create new teaching materials and initiate new teaching efforts together. supervising coordinators were concerned with how to “make it easier on all of [their] staff to work collaboratively.” their expressions of creating team involved creating a strategic vision, handling the day-to-day work of managing people, and setting a unified direction for their team to pursue. non-supervisory coordinators recognized the need to create team in order to elicit buy-in for their instructional program goals and also to facilitate the work of the instruction within their library. one coordinator honestly stated, “the kind of coordinator work i’m doing, i need my faculty librarians to do with me. and i don’t want to supervise them. i want them to be colleagues who are on the team and are happy to do it.” building that kind of dynamic takes time, a high degree of relational awareness, and a keen understanding of group dynamics. a dysfunctional team is difficult to ignore, but one that works well together doesn’t demand as much attention or intervention. thus the instruction coordinator’s work at creating team is often taken for granted or ignored, as is much of the relational work already mentioned. workload & staffing challenges when work is not characterized as work, as is the case with relational practice, instruction coordinators are left in a precarious position. all but one of the instruction coordinators we interviewed expressed concern over their workload, which was often exacerbated by challenges in staffing (librarians leaving, positions not being refilled, not enough people available/able to teach). all of the coordinators we interviewed were managers of instruction programs, and in addition to that work, 75% reported a moderate to high teaching load, 64% maintained liaison responsibilities, and 57% continued to do reference work at their libraries. one coordinator expressed feelings of burnout after doing half of all of their library’s teaching in one semester, and 3 others stated that they were liaisons to departments with high teaching loads. the work of liaising with faculty, teaching, and reference is the work of an instruction librarian, but many of the instruction coordinators we interviewed did that work as well as the work of building and sustaining both an instruction team and an instruction program. one participant described their job as being three jobs in one: “the instruction part is one, the assessment part is one…and now supervising,” while another expressed a desire to “cut back on my liaison assignment so that i have time to do this other stuff.” coordinators were in agreement that “to think long term, and strategically, and really build a program, i have to have uninterrupted blocks of time, and that’s not something i really have.” they felt pulled in various directions–teaching, liaising, doing reference work–and unable to devote the time and care necessary to do the work on instruction coordination well. this is further complicated for instruction coordinators in faculty positions, who must also find time to engage in the scholarship needed for promotion. in short, the work of the average instruction coordinator without supervisory responsibilities is the work of 2-3 people. conclusion & recommendations library instruction coordinators spend a tremendous amount of time engaged in intentional relational practice, specifically categorized here as emotional strategizing, preserving, mutual empowerment, and creating team. what does this mean for their work, and for their organizations, particularly when these practices are not named or recognized for the intense labor they require? miller (1976) described the ways that many women are carrying the burden of holding up and maintaining their organizations through invisible relational work, making it look as though this work is not actually needed. we find this is true of much of the work library instruction coordinators are doing, making the program appear seamless (higgins, 2017; mirza and seale, 2017), which creates a need for further emotional labor on their part.much of this work is not only unrecognized or undervalued, but is often also exploited or misunderstood. relational ways of working can be mischaracterized as a person’s individual attributes, like being “nice” or “helpful”, rather than intentional competencies designed to enable, empathize with, and empower others (fletcher, 1999). these behaviors line up with gendered expectations of the private sphere, which reflects idealized femininity, and therefore are expected of women without reward or recognition. despite the likelihood that the application of a relational belief system would be actively discouraged by an organization, and disappeared by traditional evaluation and metrics, this way of working can provide alternatives for moving beyond the hierarchical, masculine workplace (fletcher, 2004). the power of naming this work relational work, related to mutual growth and connection and often coded as feminine labor, receives less attention and is actively devalued or suppressed in organizational definitions of work (fletcher, 1998). these practices are neither intuitive nor easy to learn; it involves highly skilled work, and should be named specifically as desired qualifications in job descriptions, and described fully as evidence of a well-managed program in annual and promotional reviews. fletcher (1999) describes ways to name relational practice by using a “language of competence” as well as the intended outcomes. in order to claim the power and intended effectiveness in the relational activity inherent to library instruction coordinator work, we should describe the work of collaboration and relationship maintenance on a regular, ongoing basis. by doing this, we move beyond the idea that this work is related to personal attributes, and ascribe it to cultivated competencies. we hope that by naming and describing these strategies as necessary for the job, we can push for practical rewards such as additional compensation, relief of additional duties, and career advancement. many library instruction coordinators take on these responsibilities in addition to the work they are already doing without a raise in pay, falling into a coordinator trap that is responsible to multiple stakeholders, but has little to no authority, budget, nor infrastructure (gavia libraria, 2011). as our analysis showed, even those who are hired into this position still do the work of two to three people by maintaining instruction, reference, assessment, and collection development duties as well as the coordination work. doing invisible work impacts career progression negatively (fletcher, 2004; neigel, 2015), and while relational skills would be especially valuable for administrative and supervisory work,  instruction coordinators rarely advance into this kind of role. while supervisory status doesn’t negate the need for relational practice, we did observe less of a need for emotional strategizing and negotiating if the coordinator supervises librarians on their team. adding in the authority of a supervisory position doesn’t resolve all of the issues coordinators face, but it does help to delineate clearer job responsibilities. the problem of role ambiguity permeates coordinator work, causing emotional exhaustion and burnout. in university libraries where people can’t supervise due to flat structures or rules in the faculty contract, then the role of the coordinator needs to be explicitly spelled out by library administration. many of the participants in our study indicated that they didn’t necessarily want to supervise, but they wanted their roles to be made more clear within their organization. changing the structures the structures and behaviors in a white masculine workplace, which many of our libraries and universities embody, are incompatible with the idea of forming growth and connection. they prioritize independence and autonomy, uphold stratified systems, and prevent open conversation and growthful conflict (fletcher, 2004; walker, 2004). when library instruction coordinators are purposefully engaged in behaviors that reflect a relational belief system, they are actively subverting racist, patriarchal power structures. they are engaging in what fletcher calls “an active although unobtrusive exercise of power” (1998, p. 164). during baharak yousefi’s keynote at capal 2019, she discussed how a trauma-informed approach can help us shift away from a narrow focus on efficiency and accountability to our employers, and toward intentional slowness, and collective responsibility toward one another and our communities. changing workplace structures to highlight, value, and reward relational practice at work is a slow, but necessary process, and one that could eventually shift our accountability to ourselves, our colleagues, and our patrons instead of institutions that are hostile to this work. individuals need to experience mutuality in order to successfully work relationally, and they cannot do this without a supporting structure. relational leadership ascribes value to those who foster connection, which needs to occur at all levels of an organization for change to happen. this would mean a big change in organizational norms, which can be started in small groups and built outward in a collective manner. instead of focusing on the big, attention-getting projects that are more easily quantified and submitted in a report, we start to build our power by and through connection and reciprocal relationships. moving toward authentic connections and reciprocal relationships requires increased vulnerability and mutual empathy. however, without recognition of pervasive systems of oppression, such as institutional and individual racism, these connections will fail and growthful relationships will not thrive. if people at work are to experience connection that leads to mutual empowerment, they must first acknowledge the discrimination that stands in the way of successful empathy and mutuality (tatum, 1993). our collective histories impede the process of moving beyond the power differential without acknowledging and ultimately working through it. we need to be intentional about facilitating relational practice and recognize that it is an ongoing process requiring commitment, persistence, and supportive organizational and interpersonal structures (coll, 1993). with this research we hope to bring further attention to relational practice as performed by library instruction coordinators in order to show its inherent value as an alternative way of working within librarianship. like fletcher, we are not merely interested in highlighting feminine or relational values in the existing hierarchical structure of the library and the university, but in challenging the structure itself to reassess what it values. organizations like universities and libraries are often eager to discuss adopting change for the future, but they actively disappear behaviors that are involved in making this change happen (fletcher, 1999). to create change in our organizations we need to actively prioritize and reward actions that create supportive structures in our work. relational practice is the force that moves individuals and institutions forward. good work is rooted in good relationships at work, and to make this happen, we need organizations where individuals are emboldened to focus on relational awareness, mutual empowerment, and meaningful connection. acknowledgements we would like to thank everyone who agreed 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